Emily Yoffe: White House Procopius

Now David Plotz will never accept a future piece from me, though this does not deter my brain from its Slate bracket file (and much as anything, my Slate byline aspirations need fieldwork), but I shall raise my voice, gently, on the moderate left rollback of the Petraeus imbroglio: If the neo-Eisenhower moderates, a species with no political home to call their own, exhibit character flaws, journalists like Yoffe roll out the tape measure and say let's be adults. Eh. Not so simple. People get hurt, and even if sex that violates commitments to monogamy is no longer criminalized, the state still has an interest in containing adultery. My fling was inconsequential. All of them were, but that does not mean I could not have gotten killed, and I did immerse myself in a pathological marriage between a draft dodger and his wife, unwittingly. Young and stupid, I wanted the thrill of romance, and married men, I discovered, were not afraid of me, and if I was not florid, cranky, and breast fallen, I'd do it all again, but more coolly, smarter. There is a huge difference between the thrill of forbidden pleasure, however, and illicit affairs that damage employment and productivity. And my former supervisor traumatized me, even if she did not mean to do so, by throwing me off my guard, in an email, about her orgasm intensity, and this in spite of the fact that I sought her confidence. I concede that. I enjoyed her company and was lonely and needed work again, but putting all that together became combustible. I did ask her things I feared asking my mother, and that was my mistake, because Linda is an alpha, and like any alpha, her dominance took over, and I became anxious, and the rest is history. That damage will never go away, and I doubt it will for Holly Petraeus either, and her grief is more salient than mine.

Men with power seem to need that urgency inherent in the impetus to spread their seed. We get that, but Petraeus and Broadwell were military officers. The Bush Administration did a great deal of damage creating Homeland Security, adding additional layers to a security apparatus that may not have made us any safer. Obama will not roll it back, but he is more visionary, and as president he should care that intelligence vital to the nation is well managed; it damages his legacy otherwise, carrying over bad ideas from a corrupt and inefficient administration, like Holder being out to lunch with Fast and Furious. Petraeus and Broadwell are human, and Paula was not nuts. She was enamored, and intense, but neither she nor the general are children, and Emily, perhaps Milbank as well, in a more nuanced fashion, treat them as if they were. We joke about the CIA, but we sober up real fast if, say, China takes North Korea off the leash and Seoul finds itself hit with a warhead, si? To serve within the top echelons of power is a privilege, and that should come with certain restrictions on indulgence. Unlike my former boss, Petraeus did take responsibility for his behavior, and then hired a lawyer, which is seemingly at odds with the idea that there are no extraneous legality issues remaining.

Rehabilitating his reputation is one thing, but whisking him back into executive authority is foolhardy, especially if he could not see the implications of having something necessary to conceal before he and Broadwell became lovers.

We tend to believe our republic does a bit more than mirror that Politburo in the east, but what Petraeus and Broadwell did is equivalent to the Communist Party corruption that makes the west feel so superior.

Here We Go

Dick Wolf's Law & Order series was ahead of Slate contributor Jennifer Bleyer by 15, 20 years, at least, that the dark side of identity politics was going to lead us down this inextricable, and really ugly path. I am not like Jennifer's inter-source critic, Reisman, and will not say that executing pedophiles is the answer, though I have stated that Sandusky should receive the death penalty, but again, I am asking progressives, at what point are any of you going to say enough is enough? I can never go back to monotheism, but I have no problem tying my atheism to my own moral values, and we have to stop using biology as an excuse for relativism. I did push too hard yesterday, I had little choice, and so I am expanding and revising this after a lengthy rest, but at the rate we are going, we're losing any pragmatic sense of our own humanity. Violence, and aggression do actually have a function within evolutionary theory. Dominant males in many mammalian species kill to eliminate the faulty wiring that Jennifer suggests should be met with empathy, gunning very hard to put us in the pedophile's place-- not here.

Compassion is not going to keep our species in the best shape. Survival is brutal but that is how things work, and I know this will shock some of you, but when my dad got drunk in 05 and said he did not force my mother to abort me, well, maybe he should have. Not that systemic culling should result in mayhem like this, or even like this. Erin Moran clearly has not adapted to the fact that her fifteen minutes has expired, but what about those of us who haven't spiraled out of control? I suffered until my late twenties, and my life came to a halt pretty much by the age of 42. It is eight years of punishment later, and my body is breaking down. How can I move on if I cannot change my circumstances, no longer capable of sustaining the commute and punishment field work inflicted?

The disability movement shuts this down, saying take pride, be empowered, yep, they empowered me to nearly the edge of suicide, and will never take responsibility for it. I will not be around long enough to see the nightmare that is coming your way, and it is a consolation.

Jesse Bering and the Progressive Left

As a content aggregate, if this is the best way to categorize what Slate Magazine is, an extension of  floundering corporate media enterprise, it likes trends that I do not care for, or, I am not affluent enough to enjoy. Poverty accentuates vulnerability, indeed. Susanna Daniel successfully caught Slate's tempo as a long delayed first time suburban novelist, and I have yet to penetrate the site on the strength of rapidly aging bylines. I do not think its Jewish contributors offer the best philosophical analysis, and their political illuminations are no better, no worse, than David Brooks in his climb through the ranks. Much of its woman's interest coverage is dull, and they virtually ignore the disability activism of which I'm often critical, although their journalists were kind enough to respond when I gave them a capsule of the hostile environment, long in the making, that exists between me and my disability center (the picture of the lovable minority spastic in his chair is so adorable that it only reinforces your perception that my judgment is impaired; am I assessing your sentiment accurately, mmm?) They also enjoy catering to homosexual identity and ceding the field of human pair bonding deconstruction to columnists like Bering.

For anyone who has been following me since I started blogging, whether you've responded or not, whether you are sympathetic or not, I imagine you say to yourself that I cheapen my intellectual capacity through reactionary trash talk. Fair enough, as the charge stands. I could be forgiving of Jimmi Shrode's significant mental, emotional limitations, and for a couple of early years, he was my friend, as was every other named individual I have discussed in my disabled culture past, and, do I actually care about him and Erik as a couple, where Shrode's penis goes? No, but they disgust me. Is that fair? I have written things about myself that might disgust normal comedic and presumably Protestant happy women like Susanna. It may not be fair, but this is what I have to say in response to Bering's censure of homophobia: disgust is not an invalid response to the sheer squalor of the human body, nor is emotional pain in response to sexual exploitation, whether it can be graded as abuse or not. I have been denigrated by whites and blacks alike, hurt in very bad ways by boths straights and gays, and this is why I see progressive sexual equality, and progressive sexual liberalism, as dangerous, at the end of the day, as we keep pushing the boundary. How horrific does the human condition have to become before liberals are willing to recognize that social difference, and sometimes caste, have a legitimate function for cohesion and survival?

Whatsoever we imagine, is Finite. Therefore there is no Idea, or conception of anything we call Infinite. No man can have in his mind an image of infinite magnitude.


Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan