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Betsey Wright, with her banal postmodern psychobabble, has explained a bit more than she obviously intended.... Not only does she inadvertently, if inferentially, confirm the clinton-rape subtext, i.e., she implies the clinton acts were all about power, she provides additional rationale for the clintons' posthumous misappropriation of Jefferson's presidential alleles....
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Mia T, THE OTHER NIXON Yesterday, Daniel Patrick Moynihan died. Today, the clintons are arrogating his soul. Hardly surprising. In 1999, the clintons were not at all shy about seizing his still-warm senate seat. One has merely to recall the Thomas Jefferson double-helix hoax to understand that posthumous misappropriation is, for the obvious reason, the clintons' preferred method of legacy inflation…. Standard-Issue clintonism If misappropriation of Jefferson's alleles hinged on a broken line of descent, misappropriation of Moynihan's endorsement depends on a broken line of dissent. Like Sally Hemmings' progeny, Moynihan's later acquiescence is of dubious lineage Mia T, Moynihan Myths |
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By ERICA GOODE Rape is primarily a crime of violence and power, not sex. Or so a generation of social scientists and feminist scholars have argued. But in a forthcoming book, two evolutionary scientists say this view is born of ideology, not science, and is "based on empirically erroneous, even mythological, ideas about human development, behavior and psychology." In fact, they assert in "A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion," that rape "is in its very essence a sexual act" and that the practice may have evolved because it confers an evolutionary advantage <snip> |
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Biologists suggest President Clinton has followed the genetic program handed down by human evolution: have as much sex with as many females as possible in the Darwinian quest for hereditary survival. Michael Ruse (probably Canada's leading Darwinian philosopher) and Richard Dawkins (certainly England's most articulate evolutionist, as promotes this concept. "What Darwin says is that the most dominant male gets the first crack at the women," said Michael Ruse, . . . Darwinism has argued that survival is the main goal of organisms, and part of that quest is to produce as many offspring as possible. This evolution-driven impulse is working against the current concern of liberalism about the supposed population explosion and also over the AIDS epidemic generated by such sexual promiscuity. Nevertheless, these evolution-based lusts are quite natural, they say. The Times article then quotes from an article by Richard Dawkins in the London Observer, as follows: We lust because our ancestors' lust just helped pass their lustful genes on to us--What else does a man become a great chieftain for? Since such behavior is part of our evolutionary genetics, they argue that we must not legislate against it, even though it is producing too much population. The remedy, they say, is not to return to Biblical morality, but to promote "safe sex" and abortion (perhaps also infanticide and euthanasia), and even homosexuality. These practices are said to be common in the animal world, so are part of acceptable evolutionary philosophy. Washington Times, March 1999, p. 5. |
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the contingency principle by Mia T A trait or strategy that is successful at one time may be unsuccessful at another. Evolution is not progress. Populations are simply adapting to their current surroundings. Populations do not necessarily become better in any absolute sense over time. Take RAPE. It may have been an evolutionary imperative for Homo erectus in the Pleistocene Epoch, but one can hardly argue that it is adaptive behavior for Homo sapiens in the year 2000, Boy Rapist-President notwithstanding. This contingency principle was demonstrated experimentally with a yeast culture that was maintained for many generations. Occasionally, a mutant strain would arise that increased reproductive success. These mutant strains would crowd out the formerly dominant strains. Samples of the most successful strains from the culture were taken across time. In later competition experiments, each strain would outcompete the immediately previously dominant type in a culture. However, some earlier isolates could outcompete strains that arose late in the experiment. (Would that we could put clinton in the Jefferson petri dish.) Competitive ability of a strain was always better than its previous type, but competitiveness in a general sense was not increasing. Any organism's success depends on the behavior of its contemporaries. (If you doubt this, just ask David Schippers.) For most traits or behaviors, there is likely no optimal design or strategy, only contingent ones. |
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On April 25, 1978, in the Camelot Hotel in Little Rock, Ark., a nursing-home supervisor named Juanita Broaddrick was, she says, bitten and raped by the attorney general of Arkansas. As Joe Eszterhas describes it in ''American Rhapsody'': ''Finished, he got off the bed and put his pants back on. She was in shock, sobbing. He went to the door. He put his sunglasses on. He turned back and he looked at her. 'You better put some ice on that,' he said, and was gone.'' The alleged perp is now the president of these United States, and it's pretty clear that Joe Eszterhas thinks the story is true. (He says Broaddrick was ''as believable as anyone I'd ever seen on television,'' which is high praise in his idiom.) But, as he adds: ''It didn't matter. We were a tired people, tired of pornographic imagery on the evening news, tired of feeling we were mired in filth. This was the worst . . . and we didn't want to hear it.'' It all depends, here, on what the meaning of ''we'' is. For a start, who is Joe Eszterhas and how come he's our moral tutor in this fear-and-loathing tour of the Clinton sex scandals? If you've ever left a movie theater muttering to yourself, ''How'd that sucker ever get made?'' then you are probably familiar with Eszterhas's work. (I speak of ''Sliver,'' ''Showgirls,'' ''Jade'' and other insults.) Then again, if you've ever left a movie theater having had a slightly better time than you expected (''Music Box,'' ''F.I.S.T.''), then you have this hard-driving screenwriter to thank. Admit it, though, you probably know him from ''Basic Instinct.'' But since Hollywood's studio leadership has always been a reliable part of the pro-Clinton phalanx, you won't be seeing much of the Starr report on the silver screen. So when Eszterhas found himself consumed by the need to make sense of it all, his only recourse was a fact-based, ranting, rocking-and-rolling screed with none of the full-frontal scissored out. The ''we,'' it turns out, is the Who -- at least in the sense of ''My Generation.'' Eszterhas feels betrayed by Clinton, precisely because he once believed in him. Believed in him, that is, as the dope-smoking, draft-dodging adulterer of Mary Matalin's encapsulation. The boy-prince of the Rolling Stone set. ''One of us,'' in Jann Wenner's own unashamed words. So this is a long yell of protest from a professional hedonist who, faced with the ugliness of professionalized hedonism in the White House, doesn't care for the refraction of the mirror ... There are two or three chapters that rise above this, however, and that illustrate Eszterhas's hit-or-miss talent. He has acquired a real feel for the vulnerable, endearing, needy, hopeless character of Monica Lewinsky; the fat girl who was used and abused and who was only a fleck of evidence away from being denounced as a stalker and a mythomane. He fashions a near-brilliant evocation of the qualities of Vernon Jordan, the stoic and phlegmatic ally who knew exactly what he was doing, and who did it for a friend whose moral character was infinitely inferior to his own. And he is extremely funny about the shrink defenses that the first lady and other amateurs have proposed: ''A modern president, Bill Clinton was allegedly the victim of incest, pedophilia, child abuse, erotomania, sexual addiction, gambling addiction, alcohol addiction, rage addiction, wife beating, husband beating, grandfather beating, low self-esteem, jealousy and poverty. . . . There he was on television, this victim in chief, asking to be forgiven for something he wouldn't admit to having done.'' Finally -- and I curse myself for not noticing this at the time -- Eszterhas grabs the ironic coincidence of Richard Nixon's Monica. That's Monica Crowley, the trusting young intern and amanuensis who shared so much private time with the sage of Saddle River, N.J., and won his lonely, self-pitying and self-aggrandizing confidences only to make a book out of them. But at least Tricky Dick never told her that she might also share his life after Pat was gone... The book begins with a puzzle: How did the flower children fall for such a self-evident thug and opportunist? And it offers a possible hypothetical answer, which is that ''the Night Creature'' -- Nixon -- and his heirs and assigns could not ever possibly be allowed to be right about anything. When Eszterhas writes about Nixon, and his admirers like Lucianne Goldberg, he hits an overdrive button and summons the bat cave of purest evil. He hasn't read as much recent history as he thinks he has, or he would know that his forebears were mesmerized in precisely the same way to believe that Alger Hiss was framed. Thus does Nixon inherit an undeserved and posthumous victory. If by chance we ever elect a bent and unscrupulous Republican president, he or she will have a whole new thesaurus of excuses, public and ''private,'' with which to fend off impeachment. These ''bipartisan'' excuses will have been partly furnished by the ''nonjudgmental'' love generation. If Eszterhas had had the guts to face this fact, he could have written a book more like ''F.I.S.T.'' instead of ''Sliver.'' Meanwhile, and almost but not quite unbelievably, we await the president's comment on Juanita Broaddrick's allegation. Christopher Hitchens (on American Rhapsody), Basic Instinct
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