the Brett v Blasey Blowup

This is a bad situation.

It is probably true that many many men have been getting away with rape in days gone by. And it is certainly true that politics and trouble have polarized and spun out of social control as many many victimized women who are mad as hell about the arrogance with which men flaunt their libido and leverage their blahblah white male privilege and so it is indeed possible that all hell is breaking loose in America.

And it is true that a couple of those rad feminists caught Jeff Flake while he was trying to get on or off an elevator, and those two feisty women delivered a tongue-lashing that would intimidate any uppity male member into limp impotence and politically correct compliance.

And it is true that Jeff Flake threw a curve at his fellow Republicans by trying to do the right thing and provide a forum for all this raw rage to be aired out. Maybe he did all of us Americans a favor by in effect slowing down the runaway train of GOP nomination fever, for the sake of casting our eyes for a week or so on the extreme danger that is inflicted on Americans by so many men walking around in hyped-up sexual frustration. 

But the possibility that any of these issues will be resolved in the next week, as the FBI investigates Blasey Ford’s accusations—is about as probable as the New Ladies’ Temperance Union imposing mandatory burka coverage upon the live skin of all those millions of young women of America who so delight in flaunting their provocative features, even as they revel in denying lecherous men access to the partaking thereof.

And so, while this started out as a bad situation last Friday, what we know for sure is that by next Friday it will be a worse situation.

But my strategy concerning such bad situations as this is: Write a song about it.

So I did.

I wrote a song about what happened in the Senate Judiciary Committee meeting last Friday, around 1:30 Congressional time. I borrowed the melody from Mamas and Papas old tune, Creeque Alley.

You can find the tune sung at http://www.careyrowland.com, at pretty much the top of the page:

The Ballad of Brett v. Blasey

The Perfect Curve

If you depart the city of Charlotte driving northward on I-77 toward Virginia, you will, about an hour later, cross over US highway 421. The traffic interchange there consists of a typical cloverleaf-type interstate-highway overpass with a looping exit ramp on which your vehicle descends from the overpassing I-77 down to the underpassing perpendicular US 421.

As I am a frequent sojourner between Charlotte and my Blue Ridge mountain home, I have performed this little maneuver many, many times over the last 39 years or so. Possibly hundreds of times.

Over the years, there is something very special I have noticed about this exit ramp, by which I steer the Subaru, veering slightly rightward and onward down the ramp, decelerating slightly and moving in a steady arc along a quasi-circular path to the destination highway below, on which I have then been redirected westward (although the sign says US 421 N) toward my domicile in the mountain town of Boone.

I say I have noticed “something very special” about this exit ramp, although this unique speciality is probably common to most every overpassing intersection that we’ve ever crossed o’er; and it is this:

As I turn the steering wheel for exiting onto the ramp, there is a point to which I can—less than halfway through the turn— adjust the wheel and cease its turning, having set the steering mechanism to a precise degree. This adjustment is sufficient to complete the onward arcing of the vehicle’s path as it egresses with no further turning of the steering wheel, until the turning maneuver is completed as I have redirected the Subaru, now on a westward vector instead of the northward one we had previously sped.

Recently on one of my trips homeward, I realized that the reason this maneuver can be performed so smoothly is this:  some engineer designed the exit ramp on what appears to be a perfectly constant curve. Cool! The perfect curve, thought I.

So now I take back everything bad I ever said about freeways and modern vehicular transportation systems.

My new theory is that there is probably no curve on earth more perfect than that one.

Except for one— the curve of my wife’s hip, which I noticed while we were dating many and many a year ago, when I  first visited her family in Charlotte.

Now that’s what ahm talkin’ about! The Perfect Curve.

King of Soul

Consummation to Coitus to Coercion

I was born in 1951 and so I have seen a few changes in my lifetime. One major change is the difference between how we thought about sex back in those rose-colored 1950’s and how we think about it nowadays.

Back in the day, a man and a women would marry and and try to make a go of it— a lifetime of extreme one-on-one intimacy and— if they were good at it and lucky enough— parenthood.

Nowadays, not so much.

Seems now everybody’s hung up on the sex part of it. Who’s screwing whom, whether he was raping her, who’s consenting, or not, to whom. And who’s coercing whom into sexual acts. Socialmedia world is all about what he did to her, or he did to him. Whereas it used to be about mama and daddy retiring to the same bed every night, then something mystical happening between them, which would result in a new human  entering into this wonderful life.

But now that long-lost world of lifetime love and fidelity is going the way of the buffalo— which is to say. . . near extinction.

Mom and Pop are hardly even a part of it any more. The public obsession that’s been drummed up is all about what Harvey whoever did to so-and-so how many times on his studio couch, or about Roy’s groping the girls, or Kevin’s coercing the boys or even Prez pants-down Bill’s spurting on a blue dress in the very shadow of his privileged oval office hegemony.

Now some of us ole geezers are wondering how the hell did we get here. What happened? Funny thing happened on our way to the millennium, we lost something along the way.

We lost some healthy constraint somewhere; we forsook some beneficial bonds on our way to tearing down all those old taboos, pushed the envelope beyond beneficence.

It seems we Boomers overdid it in our campaign for Free Love.

As it turns out, free love is not much more than cheap lust.

And mere rape, be it sardonic, sadistic, or sodomic.

I think it’s time we blaze a path back to where we were before we lost our way in the wilderness of wantonness.

King of Soul 

Covered Women

I was a Catholic kid growing up in the 1950's. During that era, the Church schools were administered by nuns whose habits included keeping themselves covered by black and white cloth.

But during my lifetime, now extending into 65 years, all that nunnery garb has gone the way of the buffalo. You don't hardly see old-style nuns walking around in public any more.

On the other hand, there appears to be a worldwide movement by some religious people to keep their women covered. More about that in a moment.

Another thing that was going on back in the day, when I was a youngster, was the growth of viewership in playboy magazine, a publication that was eagerly snapped by pubescents like myself and many others, for the sake of looking at naked women.

Generally, us good Catholic boys preferred to train our eyes onto the girls in the magazine, instead of the nuns who were teaching us at school.

That infamous magazine was not the only one, as you probably know. There were many others, such as penthouse and hustler. As the years rolled by, those rags just got raunchier and raunchier. Then along came the X-rated movie houses, peep house, topless bars and ultimately the worldwide web on which any female genitalia and mammary-triggered acting out can be fantasized. At various times I sampled them all before God got a hold of me and got me straightened out on a few things.

Now I notice, ubiquitously, we inhabit an hyper-stimulating post-religious world where many women who court the public spotlight compete with each other for male gawks by flaunting outfits that take exposure, instead of fashion, to the max.

This is very titillating, and at times seems pleasant and quite alluring, but it doesn't solve any problems. In fact, as a certified old geezer now I am starting to think this whole hefneresque uncoverage trend has generated more trouble than its worth.

All these sexy women sauntering around in the world can actually make a man's life much harder--not easier--to bear.

My personal experience uncovers this truth: when you get right down to it, there is nothing better for a man in this world than a real, live woman who loves him, and there is nothing better for a woman than a real, live man who loves her.

But now we have millions of horny men walking around in the post-modern, post-religion, post-playboy, post-marriage, post-internet world being constantly tormented by all these uncovered women.

And so along cometh the Muslims imams, raising their hajibual judgements against our licentious western ways.

As a Christian, I cannot deny they have a point.

They want to keep the women covered. Western women see this as oppression. Maybe it is, but there are some western men who discreetly understand why it is that the Muslims want to cover their women with hijab and niqab. My born-again assessment of this conundrum is that Law (of covering women, or anything else) is no salvation--and no solution--for delivering us over-stimulated males from our sexual obsessions. We each have our own frustrations to deal with, and that is an issue between each man and his God. And his woman, if he is fortunate enough to have one.

In other news, it has been reported that some great historian said somewhere that what goes around comes around.

I could say that, in my lifetime, the notion of women being modestly dressed has incrementally disappeared; maybe it went around the dark side of the moon or somewhere to be disposed of forever. Religious people are criticized for being old-fashioned, puritanical, repressed, blahblahblah, for their antiquated ideas about keeping women covered.

Now the idea of modesty comes back around, but this time from a different source--a different religion--not the old Catholic one, not the old Puritan one, not the old Calvinist one, but the new/old Muslim one that comes slouching from the east.

And this old guy wonders if now we really get what's coming to us. Nebuchadnezzer is not just mouthing empty fatwahs.

Maybe it's time to take cover.


Glass half-Full

The Problem with Women

The problem with women is that men desire them so much.

Excuse me--that's not "the" problem. It's just one of many.

And of course there are many problems with men too. Maybe I should restate the problem:

The problem with men is that they desire women so much.

The reason I bring this up is this: the sexual desire problem is bigger than it used to be. Back in the day, when religions were a formative influence on public morality, the various religions distributed specific, benevolently voluntary restraints on men's desires for women. This made for a fairly well-disciplined society.

But nowadays, with religious disciplines waning, the benefits of God-inspired morality--which is to say marriage, fidelity, vigilant raising of children, etc--these benefits are diminishing among Western populations.

For my generation, the Baby Boomers, the whole situation took a turn for the worse back in the '50s, when the Hefner doctrine came into fashion.

This ideology, promulgated in Hefner's playboy magazine, says a man can do anything he wants with his private parts, and insert them anywhere he wants. This ribald world-view, later popularized through LIFE magazine's promotion of mini-skirts, bunnies, drug experiences etc, exacerbated--or should I say masturbated--the problem.

By the mid '60s, men were walking around in libidinous disorientation so severe that it led to terrible societal problems, such as: ubiquitously irresponsible sex, which implanted a new plethora of children without fathers, and provoked frequently rampant hookups among rootless humans, and sometimes porno-dependent behavioral patterns fixated on mammary obsessions, and even rape, with occasionally millions of jilted lovers hardening their hearts to true love, simultaneously with a pandemic of drunken sex, ultimately accompanied by STDs, and in certain locales a plague of AIDs-ridden bath houses.

It was a wild time for sex. For true love and familial development--not so much.

But now religion is trying to make a comeback.

It's not the old religion you knew about back in the day. It's not that old worn-out hypocritical ritualistic type of religious practice that went hand-in-hand for millennia with Catholic catechism, or Protestant doctrine, or Judaic Torah. It's not even the fundamentalist bible-thumpers' holy-rollin' sanctification, nor the new-agers' spacy universalism, nor the scientology celebritive hoohah. No, none of these are facilitating the big Religion comeback.

It's the new kid on the block, Sharia.

The Sharia-promulgators have an effective solution for our sexual problem.

Keep 'em covered! Keep those women veiled, dammit!

It's the opposite of the Hefner doctrine, which required women to be more and more uncovered while in public places. The Hefner doctrine has, you see, run its playful, toss-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater course. The deleterious effects of the 1960's sexual revolution will soon be neutralized! Maybe even neuterized, if the transies have their way.

And so the new religious Sharia movement, soon to go viral as a revolution, may take control. This development is enabled because of the continuing historical operation of the Hegelian dialectic. The Great Struggle between Thesis ( Western Judeo-Christian tradition) being opposed by the Antithesis (Enlightened godless secularism), will be resolved through the new Synthesis: Sharia Law. It's the Hegelian dialectic, as applied to public morality instead of old fuddy-duddy academic ideologies.

Sharia-think will strive to obliterate the contemporary hot raving dominatrix godless hookup obsessive decadence of the West, which has, in its advanced stages, lately degenerated into a gov.campaign to make men desire men instead of women, and vice-versa. But that won't work in the human race writ large.

So the Sharia-propagators are sure they can take over in a big way, and rest assured of this: the women will be covered.

This is revolutionary! Are you ready for it? Men, all your sexual frustration will be over! Plus, the women will be yours for the taking with your right hand. And the women will be doing all the work by covering themselves discreetly so that you'll be spared the crisis of unbridled desire.

The impending Sharia prescription, however, does come with a warning label:

Warning: Repeated use could provoke adverse side effects such as dogmatic repression and fascist behavior.

This could negatively impact your freedom and everybody else's too.

So I propose a simpler, safer solution to our problem. Let's just go back to the sixth commandment given to Moses. We'll all be more satisfied, and it will be good for the kids.



Glass half-Full

True Love

If a man chooses a woman as his wife, he should stay with her. He should be faithful to her, because when he is old, who will care for him? And she should remain faithful to him, because when she is old, who will care about her?

This is not easy, although in the long run, in the big picture of life, it is the best way. And when you get right down to it, during the time of approaching old age, it is not only the best way, it is in fact, the easiest way.

The way of fidelity is the best and easiest because, although the man gets old, and his functions diminish, and maybe he takes the little blue pills to help him and his wife along, the old triggers of youth remain. They do not go away. The old visual stimuli that motivated him as a youth and cornered him into tight places of desire and release do not just disappear.

So this is something that the man and wife deal with in their latter years. And it is better that they address the issues of waning masculinity and withering femininity together, because that is better than being alone.

Of course, ultimately every man is alone at the very end, and he must deal with it--a matter between himself and his Creator. Same for the woman, though her worries and fears are, I believe, different. There is a difference, you know, between the man and the woman.

But insofar as it is possible, a man and woman who have committed themselves to each other should remain committed for life. In the long run, this is the best for both of them. Trust me, from my beach perspective here on the island of Maui, I can see a multitude of directions that a man could pursue, but where would they lead him?

My fading memory of such libidinous pursuit in the early days tells me that those random paths of desire would lead, after perhaps some momentary release, to frustration and disappointment. So it is better that the man remain faithful to his woman, and she to him.

The Creator has designed life this way. By the time a man is old, he is cornered by God, bound by his own diminishing prowess. He has no truly viable choice but to remain faithful to that woman who has stayed with him all along the unpredictable twists and turns of this life's journey. The same is true for the woman, I suppose. Or at least I hope so.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

We're up ship creek

In the unlikely development that Republicans' diversion of public money from the public sector to the corporate sector actually turns our zombie economy around, who will get the credit? Our Democratic President, or our Republican lawmakers? If their fiscal buckarooing falls flat and appears to be a fizzle two years from now, who will get the blame-- the braying asses or the blubbering elephants?

The House Republicans have now gotten themselves into a highly visible position of public responsibility. If their corporate coffering blows up in their faces, and we still have a sputtering wannabe recovery instead of a new morning in America when its time to vote again, they will have a difficult task in pointing the finger at the man whose re-election they so direly oppose.

In the great money-grubbin' tug of war between unionists and corporatists--in that fierce tussle between our two growling, grunting special-interest-spewing bully teams as they contend for guv'ment greenbacks to mainline one side's funds instead of t'other's--whadaya say we call it a draw, and split the honkin' budget down the middle!

Let the dems build public rights-of-way and rails, while the repubs invest in sleek state-of-the-art market-powered maglevs and modern locos to glide and roll on innovated thorofares of improved travel. Put the two together and we'll have a transportation system worthy of 21st century excellence--an impressive phase three of our earlier stage-one iron-horse stagecoach intercontinental railways and our 50s-era phase-two Eisenhower-inspired gasoline-fed, overcrowded inefficient interstate highway system.

And if our armed forces don't fall into disgrace under the voyeured influence of journalists digging up stories of wild sex on aircraft carriers instead of documenting the once-noble defense of a freedom-loving nation, we'll be able to get around this wide continent without payin' an arm and a leg for it.

Glass half-Full