But when they do achieve total political victory, they find that their businesses, their economy, their cultural and social problems, even their national success and prestige still do not improve–in fact, they deteriorate at ever-increasing rates due to their self-serving mismanagement.

AS Brother Dave Gardner used to say (in another context, of course); “What will the preachers do when the Devil is saved?”

And they didn’t even do it for money… they did it just because it would piss off liberals…

What do you call someone that whores their ethics and values for such a ‘payoff’?

But if this was not a commercial transaction, then what was it all about? Certainly, it wasn’t about sexual attraction (at least, not on her part), not when you consider an old, out-of-shape man and a beautiful young woman. There is no hint of coercion or violence here, all the evidence leads us to believe it was entirely consensual.

So what’s left? The inexplicable attraction some women have to men of importance, influence and power? It’s what Henry Kissinger meant when he said “power is the best aphrodisiac”. Its what guarantees athletes, movie stars, rock musicians, and gangsters can always get laid.

Sexual attraction is all about evolutionary imperatives. We are wired that way, its all about maximizing reproductive success. Men remain virile for decades, and can potentially reproduce every single day of their lives. They seek out young and healthy women (what we call “beautiful”) and as many of them as possible, because that maximizes their chances of preserving and transmitting their DNA. Sure, we may devise cultural controls, like marriage customs, to manage and channel these urges, or we may adopt moral and ethical guidelines to direct our psychological behavior, but its the underlying biology that drives us.

Women, on the other hand, have only a handful of opportunities during their youth to bear offspring, and they occur at least 9 months apart. Where a man has the potential of fathering hundreds of children, women have, at best, less than a score of opportunities.

Evolution has dealt the female of the species a different hand. Many female animals evaluate the genetic viability of their mates during courtship, but we are social creatures and in order to maximize the nurturing and survival of her offspring, she must seek out older, respected partners, men who have power and influence in the community. Regardless of how sexually attracted she may be to a young and healthy male, it is the celebrity status of that male that often determines whether her DNA will be sheltered and protected to adulthood. She optimizes her sexual strategy to select for the best social provider, not the superior biological origin, of her mate. The system isn’t foolproof, and sometimes its fooled, but we have evolved this behavior because most of the time it has worked.

As a species, we walk upright so our hands our free to carry things. We rely on large skulls, intelligence, not instinct, to survive. These parameters force us to configure the pelvic girdle a certain way which has reproductive consequences, and that forces our children to have very long and helpless childhoods that force a division of labor on the sexes. These physical constraints lead to behavioral specialization.

But we are no longer wandering the savannah. Relatively recently in our history, we settled down in fixed communities, and these sexual strategies became more of a hindrance than a help. We developed cultures to enforce behaviors, we traded our natural sexual activity for social cohesion. Now that technology and civilization has made many of these cultural constraints obsolete, unnecessary, and even counter-productive, they persist, almost as stubbornly as our biological heritage. We are basically a schizophrenic species. Our strongest behavioral drive is at odds with the day-to-day realities of our lives, and our outdated cultural baggage confuses us even further.

I read Desmond Morris’ “The Naked Ape” when I was in college. It was required reading, my teachers realized how important recognizing the external influences in our lives were to living a successful and meaningful existence. It was only one of many treatises we were assigned to read, each dealing with different factors that had a role in molding our societies and our individual personalities. This required reading was not meant to reinforce a world view based on the academic fashions of the mid-twentieth century, much of that material may be obsolete now, or perhaps not even remembered! But we retained the concept that we are the way we are because of things that have happened in the past, to both us as individuals, but as part of our history as a nation, a civilization, and a species. Maybe Morris (or Weiner, McCluhan, Heilbroner, Horney, Harrington, Fanon, Orwell, Mead–or any of the others) got it all wrong, but at least we were aware people had thought long and hard about these things and some of them MIGHT have had valid insights. Even if we disagreed, at least we had to think about them too. There are reasons why we do the things we do, and sometimes they aren’t very good reasons, or they were at one time but not any more.

The universe is neither meticulously planned nor randomly chaotic, it is something in between. We are influenced by geographical, historical, economic, social, cultural and psychological factors–and our biology. There may be little we can do to change our biological heritage and our history and culture. But if we are not even aware of these factors, we are doomed to a life of helpless domination by forces outside our control or even our understanding. We are neither helpless pawns nor totally free agents, but something in between. That is the purpose of education, to let us identify and appreciate those forces acting on us that normally we might mistake as God, blind chance, “common sense”, “the way its always been”, or “the way it must always be”.

There is pattern, but no order. Things always happen for a reason, but they never happen for a purpose. Things don’t always make sense, but they really don’t have to, do they?. Knowing this doesn’t give you any guarantee of power, or success or domination or even survival. But NOT knowing it will almost certainly lead to your impoverishment and destruction.

THAT’s why Karen was upset when Donald offered to pay her.