In Praise Of Privilege - The Indelible Role Of The Best And The Brightest

Armand Fellowes had grown up a child of privilege.  His parents, descended on his father's side from the the Earl of Northumberland and his Bostonian descendants who helped found the Massachusetts Bay Colony and were thanks to inherited and earned wealth became scions of New England society.  His mother's family was descended from Walter Raleigh and the English Cavaliers and were instrumental in the growth of Jamestown, Albemarle Bay, and Tidewater Virginia. 

Armand was educated at Andover and Yale, joined his uncle's Wall Street investment banking firm, and was a multi-millionaire before he was thirty.  His privileged background, parental authority and influence, and his premier education were the foundations for economic and social success.  He married well, to a woman of similar fortunes, moved into a Fifth Avenue penthouse and a summer home on Nantucket, and became quickly one of America's best and brightest 

He was bemused at today's insistence on 'intellectual plurality' a thinning of the ranks of the cadres of brilliance that had characterized great societies ever since the first human settlements.  The courts of Louis XIV, the palaces of Emperors, shoguns, and shahs did not come from the peasantry but from the hereditary elites who had been brought up in an ethos of civilized pursuits. 

The teacher-philosopher Cato the Elder developed an instructional program for the future leaders of Rome, one which taught the importance of honesty, responsibility, understanding, compassion, and respect as well as the more traditional elements of governance.  Those under his tutelage were already educated by their families in the principles of noblesse oblige - the obligation of the privileged to lead and lead wisely. Cato's program was a supplement to this fundamental education. 

There was no questioning about the nature of leadership and the nature of the ruled.  Human society had always been divided by birth, privilege, duty, and responsibility.  Those who governed had one set of rules, those who were governed had another. 

Of course history is filled with revolutions, civil wars and political strife - that, too, is an endemic feature of human society.  Rome had its Caesar Augustus and Caligula.  Some Persian shahs were sun kings in their own right while others arrogated authority and turned into senseless marauders.  Yet none of these expected, natural ups and downs ever were enough to reverse the millennia-old social structures.  Soviet Communism was a mere historical blip.  The democratic Age of Cromwell was as short-lived, and the English quickly restored the monarchy. 

 

The United States which had tossed the ideas of inherited privilege, the divine right of kings, and the monarchical nature of rule, was never a flat democracy, a communal populism with socialist overtones. It was and has always been a society like all others, a stratified one, one of privilege and peasantry.  For all the talk about diversity and inclusivity; and for all the attempts of progressivism to equalize the social character of the Republic, privilege and elitism will remain just as they always have. 

The United States is currently going through a Communist-style period of 'revolutionary justice', an effort to dismantle the foundations of so-called white, privileged rule, and to replace it with an eclectic mix of multicultural identities.  Ability, intelligence, or the Cato-inspired ethos of enlightened leadership have been shelved in favor of racial, ethnic, and gender identity.  Every segment of society, every social stratum, every public and private institution must be diversified accordingly.  The idea of a universal, central, shared ethos of principle and the importance of high intellectual leadership are gone. 

How did this philosophy - one that ascribes the same socio-economic and cultural value to the migrant farm worker and the assembly line worker as to the investment banker, the CEO, the cyber-startup genius, and the Frank Lloyd Wright - ever gain traction and currency?  And most importantly where did this profoundly revisionist view of history ever come from? 

America is no different from the elite, privileged rules of Europe and Asia but without their royal trappings, crowns and mantels, swords and scepters.  America has always been run by an elite - industrialists, financiers, bankers and landowners which form a cadre of power, limited in theory by elected government, but wielding almost restricted influence.  There may not be a king and his court, but its modern equivalent.  Cadres, not courtiers rule.

Their permanence is granted not only through heredity but also an institutional environment which encourages, fosters, and supports privilege.  The Ivy League, no longer the redoubt of the Anglo-Saxon New England aristocracy of the past, is still the breeding place for excellence; and the businesses which graduates join - Wall Street, K Street, Silicon Valley East and West, and the boardrooms of multinational business - are the loci of high-energy, high-creativity enterprise. 

The trajectory is clear - class, breeding, and aristocratic upbringing, followed by the best secondary schools, followed in turn by Harvard, Yale, and Princeton; the best law and business schools.  The middle ranks of middle managers, white collar associates, and support staff are filled commensurately - public colleges and universities take up the slack and help fill out the organizations led by the elite. 

There was not a scintilla of doubt as to the wisdom, reality, and historical record of elite rule; and the attempts to deny the bell curve of ability were just politically-motivated chimeras.  The underclasses should be educated to perform the modest tasks for which they are suited, skilled in being maximally productive in the lower-echelon tiers and socially responsible citizens. 

Armand had given up on his crowd.  Many born to privilege and the noblesse oblige which it implied, had denied their birthright and joined the progressive movement, an ill-considered enterprise to reform society and to make it a more tolerant, inclusive, and collaborative place. Essentiality - life's inherent, innate competitive nature - is ignored under the assumption that it can be corralled and harnessed for good. 

It was not a matter of principle, but a matter of fact - privilege and elitism had been an essential, ineluctable, permanent aspect of human society since its first settlements. Human communities from the most remote Amazon tribe to Imperial Russia have been divided by ability and the power and influence which that confers. 

 

Armand had not one apology, regret, or bit of remorse or guilt for his status, wealth, privilege, and social influence.  There had always been men like him and always would be . 

Life's A Circus, So Enjoy The Donald Trump Show While You Can - A Tale Of Untethered Hilarity

The past years of American electoral politics and the first few months of the second Trump presidency have been the most fun ever.  Nothing like the Donald Trump Show with its beautiful women, braggadocio, outsized personalities, glitz, glamour, wealth, and hucksterism has ever come to town, and now it is back and here to stay for awhile. 

The Left sees nothing funny in Trump’s fast and loose way with the facts, his shameless promises, his big tent revivalist hoopla, and now especially his scorched earth bureaucratic pogroms.  The issues facing America – civil injustice, a warming climate, the unequal distribution of wealth, and the concentration of power in the hands of the few – are too many to spare a a laugh or two.  Jesus never laughed, progressives often comment, because his mission was too important and too sacred for humor.  There is nothing at all funny about the desperation of the inner city, the abuse of women, or the destruction of the environment.



Trump supporters, on the other hand, laugh all the time.  Trump’s one-liners, caricatures, imitations, and zingers are better than those of Milton Berle, Sid  Caesar, Rodney Dangerfield, Joey Bishop, and Jackie Mason all put together.  Trump is a one-man vaudeville show, a three-ring circus, Borscht Belt comic, and evangelical revivalist all rolled into one.  

Every putsch of Elon Musk is cheered with hoopla.  Every slash and burn, every humiliation of a bloated, arrogant, and self-absorbed government agency is cheered around the bonfire.  Lion tamers, bear-baiting, and vaudevillian slapstick are back.  The old ways - considered, thoughtful, patient reflection - are done and gone.  The golden chain saw, gift of the equally wild and wooly Javier Milei of Argentina, is the weapon of choice. 

The sanctimony, righteousness, and moral rectitude of the Left are now open targets, exposed for what they have always been - vaporous fictions.  Safe spaces, verboten Halloween costumes, politically pure speech, conservative disinvites, re-segregated dorms and cafeterias; and LGBTQ+ trannies teaching Milton are now caricatures of the humiliated, discredited, laughable Left. 

Images of nuclear Armageddon, burnt lands turned to desert, cascades of polluted water, and the mass extermination of birds and bees are perfect for campy B-movie posters. Images of sweet young gay couples at the altar with no idea what they have in store after ten years of marriage; tired Mexican field hands, faces burned by the California sun turned upward in longsuffering patience and dignity; children of multiple intelligences expressing their diversity are now all fodder for hilarious caricature.  

The insanity of gender reassignment, historical censure, and the uppity, adulating placing of the black man atop the human pyramid, is shown for the bald, febrile notion that it has always been. 

The ghoulish portraits of Wall Street investors, no different from the Nazi and Jap caricatures of World War II – demonic, bloodthirsty, rapists -  are dismissed as hyperactive comic book minds.

However, the Left gets all this hyperbole honestly.  Let’s face it.  America is one big circus.  How can anyone take Black Friday seriously?  The most hysterical expression of American materialism ever conjured up. Or Las Vegas, an entire city of bad taste?  Or bum culture in San Francisco; bling, spinners, and pimp-walks; cowboy hats and hand-tooled boots; debutante ball revivals, Barbie, and cheap $100k weddings?  Muscle beaches, muscle cars, conventions, Bible study, and locavores? Or even Nantucket topsider chic, Vineyard faux intellectual chic, McMansions and the Mar-el-Lagos of Palm Beach. 

No one is exempt.  Rickety old people, bubbly girly-girl teenagers, real estate agents, Latino leaf-blowers.  Our enterprise, ambition, and unparalleled individuality are serious enough; but it is the greed of Enron, Bernie Madoff, the Seven Dwarves of Phillip Morris, Lorillard, et. al.; the barefaced lies of philandering John Edwards, Newt Gingrich, Bill Clinton, and Mark Sanford that keep us glued to the television. 

We are all sexual infidels of one kind or another; greedy in some way; unethically competitive in others.  We all share the American ethos; and if looked at from the ISS, we are not just eager, determined, and purposeful; but circus performers playing out the same, predictable, outrageously exaggerated roles.

One should have sympathy for the seriously mentally ill; but the antics of the partially deranged are something else entirely. Betty Parsons was the head of the Hospital Auxiliary and the reference librarian at the New Brighton Public Library.  She was quiet and proper, but anyone who paid attention could see the hinges on her tightly-closed emotional doors start to come loose.  Jimmy, the smoke shop oracle, said that in November she started to look at the girly magazines in the back of his store, usually the redoubt of the town’s old men.  She always politely thanked him, Jimmy said, and paid for her copy of Cunt! in exact change. 

“I wasted a lot of good paper bags on that lady”, Jimmy complained.  Most of the men who came into his shop couldn’t care less who saw their copies of Slut and Come, but Mrs. Parsons insisted on brown paper bags.  She carefully place her magazine deep into the well of her handbag and covered it with her sweater, scarf, and hanky.

Mrs. Prentice Lee, a distant but recognized relative of the great Southern general, who shoved her husband down three flights of stairs in their elegant antebellum home because of what we would now recognize as a chemical disorder, but in those days was the result of a fevered, jealous mind.  Prentice Lee was a known philanderer and abusive husband, but for some unknown reason his wife loved him desperately and despaired when he went tomcatting in Jackson.  When she found him buggering the downstairs maid in the pantry, something in her snapped.  She calmly picked up a slice of pound cake, quietly shut the door, and the next day sent poor Prentice tumbling down the elegant staircase to his death. 


Everyone in Drake, Alabama, it seems, has some kind of chemical imbalance. No one simply gets married, has children, and goes quietly and serenely into old age.  There has to be a ruckus.  Lois Ames, for example, tossed her drunken husband onto South Street at midnight and he ended up by getting doused by the street cleaners at 6 AM. Logan Roper, an Assistant Manager at the Wells Fargo bank, stockpiled more guns than the State armory and liked shooting squirrels from his porch swing with one of his prized possessions, an AK-47 used in the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. 

The neighbors were not at all surprised at Roper shooting squirrels, for they all did it, but thanks to his big-caliber gun he was obliterating them in a bloody spray, and the bits and pieces of squirrel that were scattered on the sidewalk made it difficult to walk.  Even the old-time police chief who thought he had seen everything, was surprised at the cache in Roper’s basement.  The man had everything from .22 plinkers to grenade launchers, bazookas, and 50mm cannons. 

The  moral of the story is that there is far more craziness around than any of us are willing to admit.  Wheels get wobbly and come off at an alarming rate regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, or demography; and the Trump show, having a riotous go at the bilious, impossibly sanctimonious Left is a sight to behold.  Every possible American weirdo, nutcase, insane asylum freak show has been rolled into one.  What could be a more perfect target for Donald Trump's Wild West shoot-'em-up than this diddling group of Congressional progressives?

Each of us is twitchy, hangdog, perky, purposeful, down-at-the-heels, or morose. Our eyes flutter or squint.  We grimace, hard smile for the camera, bouncing along or drag our feet.  We are the perfect audience for this, The Greatest Show on Earth

So, recognize your loose screws, get them tightened, talk proudly about your survival, and continue to have a good laugh at the craziness of others.  There may never be such a torturous, hilarious inversion of reality as the kindergarten images of the Left; and there certainly will never be another President like Donald Trump, a bombastic tummler, a Borscht Belt comedian, a Las Vegas showman, and a latter day Genghis Khan.  It is time, for the first time after many dull, dreary, sanctimonious years, to have a good time. 

Nature-Nurture And The Superiority Of The Brightest And Most Beautiful - You Can't Fix Ugly

Elvira Brand had gotten every one of her family's crooked genes. Uncle Charlie's hook nose, Aunt Bertha's warts, and Grandpa Dooley's tics.  Not one strand of beauty, brains, or allure got passed on.  Her genetic soup was a tasteless, unappealing mess.  'Why did God do this to me?' she shouted. 

Of course God had nothing to do with it.  Darwin did, and the luck of the draw was all there was - minor, incremental changes which assured better mates, better territory, and better adaptability.  The Elvira Brands of the world were the victims, to be culled, left on the curb, their defective DNA left to fade, wither, and disappear.  

Unless of course the remarkable happened and she met a young man who would add beauty and brains to the mix; some Boston Brahman with Lancasters and Yorks in his family tree, money a birthright, tanned from summers on the Vineyard and winters in St. Bart's, a perfect product of careful breeding.  Then their children would have a good chance of inheriting something positive.

Of course this was a vain hope. Take the Harrison Potters, for example, who did everything to assure a successful pairing of their son Harlan. 'Keep the old line moving', said Bigby Potter, patriarch of the clan as he engineered his son's genetic future. His job was to protect his family's legacy and to ensure that it grew exponentially.  Only the best matches were good enough for his son.  

There was Holly Davenport of the Boston Davenports, heiress to the family fortune but more importantly as smart as a whip and as beautiful as starlet.  Her ancestors like his had made sure that purity, grace, beauty, and brains would be favored and enhanced through the generations.

Nature-nurture was a very simple calculus in the Potter and Davenport families - you might be a product of your genes, but careful husbandry and proper outlook could make things even better.  

'Nazis!', yelled the Leftists at Harvard, on their high horses about legacy admissions and the persistent matriculation of the best, the brightest, and the wealthiest; and condemning the corrosive inbreeding of the high-class families of the East.  By manipulating the system - generating the money to preserve their position and social status, and using it to arrange marriages to promote, preserve, and continue privilege - these legacy families were preventing diversity, the long hoped-for progressive mix of peoples. 

Of course they were right in pinpointing the modus operandi but quite wrong to call out the privileged for perverse eugenics.  Families up and down the social scale have practiced this genetic triage since the first human settlements - marry up, marry smart, and marry beautiful. 

So it was the destiny of the Elvira Brands of the world to try to hook a Potter or Davenport, to dilute the ugliness and add some patrician good looks and ability to the sorry genetic mix, so not surprisingly she spent a fortune on cosmetics, cosmetic surgery, and fashion in her quest.  That was of course just whistlin' Dixie, for the patrician well-heeled knew an upstart when they saw one, saw through the batted eyelashes and puckered lips to the unsatisfactory core; and even good manners and the presumption of breeding never did the trick.  As much as Elvira tried to mimic the rich and well-to-do, she failed miserably. 

Sex was the only avenue open to her, and men being the irremediable 'put-a-flag-over-her-head-and-fuck-for-Old-Glory' indiscriminate dolts they were, her disadvantages might be overlooked, and pregnancy always being the woman's choice and prerogative, once these johns were in bed, who knew what might happen?

Trolling the watering holes of the beautiful people was never her thing, and these days there was far too much democratic mixing at singles bars to pick out the true-bloods from the faux; so she was left at sixes and sevens - what's a woman to do? A blind rich man?

Her mother and father fawned over her out of love and affection but also out of guilt for having contributed, if only indirectly, to her misfortune.  It wasn't exactly their fault that some of the worst DNA in their combined past got tangled up with the best and somehow pushed its way to the fore.  She could have had Great Grandmother's smile and fetching figure. But she didn't, and her life was now her own, come what may. 

 

They, resolutely religious people, were concerned about their daughter's libertinage - a bit too 'outgoing' for a good Catholic girl and increasingly seen in the wrong places, but 'a girl's got to do what she's got to do', said Elvira's mother who had not exactly been pursued by football heroes and prom kings, found a complaisant and rather ordinary man who would be a good provider and buy her things.

What could Mrs. Brand have expected given her rather sketchy genetic profile - non-descript immigrants from places like Montenegro and Bohemia who never made the adjustment to life in America and who were on the dole from day one.  There was one - Nikola Lukic who had worked himself off the factory floor of New Brighton Tool and Die to foreman but who had fallen to his death from a New York, New Haven & Hartford trestle as he tried not to get hit by the 3:42 from Bridgeport.  A candidate for the Darwin Awards, so a little nucleic acid boost did absolutely nothing for him. 

All communities do what the Brands, the Potters, and the Davenports do - sexual vetting - but the social system in which they operate is closed.  The less genetically gifted tend to marry those with the same genetic profile, maintain a stasis of quality at best, and with never a chance to refresh the gene pool, are consigned to the same intellectual penury and physical questionability. 

The more gifted are no different except that they are not confined to Beacon Hill, Park Avenue, or Georgetown.  They choose to graze there, and when they find the right mate, go on to produce brilliant, beautiful offspring. 

Now, of course there are always glitches in the grand scheme of things.  A diamond in the rough can be found in Anacostia and a real dummy on Beacon Hill is always possible - genes have a way of combining in the strangest of ways - and that is why parents are always on a wait-and-see watch after their children are born.  But all in all, things generally work out well, nature does its thing and beauty is allowed to do as beauty does. 

 

There really is no nature-nurture debate except in academia.  Most parents accept nature - the luck of the genetic draw - and do what they can to enhance whatever version comes out.  However, society being what it is, always favoring the most beautiful and the most intelligent, even the stone ugly never take their fate quietly; and this is what Darwin would have expected.