"I want each of us to do his utmost to destroy our enemies ..."

In the early dark of a cloudy June morning, the officers and men of Squadron VT-8 received an attack plan. Attached to it was a letter from their leader, Lieutenant Commander John C. Waldron.

Just a word to let you know that I feel we are ready. We have had a very short time to train and we have worked under the most severe difficulties. But we have truly done the best humanly possible. I actually believe that under these conditions we are the best in the world. My greatest hope is that we will encounter a favorable tactical situation, but if we don’t, and the worst comes to worst, I want each of us to do his utmost to destroy our enemies. If there is only one plane left to make a final run in, I want that man to go in and get a hit. May God be with all of us. Good luck, happy landings and GIVE ‘EM HELL.

“I want each of us to do his utmost to destroy our enemies.” Imagine that phrase resonating down the hyper-sensitive nerve bundle that our modern Conventional Wisdom uses for a spine. Imagine the spluttering editorials from The Los Angeles Times.

But that morning, The Los Angeles Times was hundreds of miles away, and lucky for them. For steaming in the general direction of The Los Angeles Times, and millions of other helpless and easily frightened people, were John C. Waldron’s enemies: The Combined Midway and Aleutian Invasion Force, the mightiest naval armada ever assembled, commanded by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. Like all Japanese warriors, Yamamoto was a poet. Not a great poet, but a straight-forward one:

I am still the sword
Of my Emperor
I will not be sheathed
Until I die.

If Yamamoto’s verse failed to impress people, the sprawling mega-task force he had amassed was more worthy of notice. Two hundred ships, including eight aircraft carriers (among them the Kaga, the largest aircraft carrier in the world), eleven battleships (among them Yamamoto’s flagship Yamato, the largest battleship in the world), twenty-two of Japan’s superb cruisers, sixty-five destroyers, twenty-one submarines, and more than seven hundred aircraft.

Yamamoto was currently bound for Midway Island, and had big plans after that. The men under his command were fanatically devoted to the utter destruction of the United States, and supremely confident that they could accomplish it. They had reason to be confident. In the Russo-Japanese War, Japan became the first non-European nation to defeat a major world power, a war that included a stunning naval victory against the Russian fleet at Tsushima. Now Japan was taking on the mightiest country on earth, and as of that June morning, Japan was winning.

The Los Angeles Times building (relocated after union terrorists blew it up in 1910) might have made a suitable location for Yamamoto’s West Coast headquarters. It was, after all, the largest newspaper building in the western United States (Yamamoto being accustomed to having the biggest stuff) and had nice murals that might have pleased him.

But it was the intention of men like John C. Waldron that The Los Angeles Times building should not be used to compose and print more of Yamamoto’s poetry. So it was that the USS Hornet turned into the wind at 7:00 AM, and the fifteen torpedo bombers of VT-8 took off, with LCDR Waldron in the lead.

“I want each of us to do his utmost to destroy our enemies.” These were no idle words coming from a man like John C. Waldron. He was no naïve rookie. Waldron, born in Fort Pierre, South Dakota, was proud of his Sioux Indian heritage, and he was proud of his achievements in the Navy, in which he had served his country since 1927. His aerial instincts and battle intuition, he liked to say, came from his Sioux blood.

His weapons, unfortunately, came from the imperfect arsenal of the United States Navy. The Sioux warrior with his horse and his .44 caliber Henry rifle was a very well-equipped individual. But VT-8 was equipped with the obsolete Douglas TBD-1 Devastator torpedo bomber. The 1200 pound Mark 13 torpedo that it carried was a scandal. Compared to the excellent Japanese torpedoes, the Mark 13 was feeble and had a very short reach. It had a tendency to flip over like a playful dolphin and go in the wrong direction, sometimes sinking the submarine that had just fired it. Dropping the damn thing from an aircraft did not improve its performance. Its proximity trigger, designed to be detonated by a ship’s magnetic field, was considered very high-tech. It would have worked great if a ship’s magnetic field surrounded the ship like a bubble, as was believed at the time. But a warship’s magnetic field is inconveniently shaped like an hourglass, extending above and below the vessel, so the Mark 13 sometimes scored a direct hit on a ship without exploding. Then the torpedo would just sink like a rock, which is the one thing the Mark 13 was good at.

The Douglas Devastator’s cruising speed, when loaded down with this comical torpedo, was a leisurely and suicidal 120 miles per hour, more or less. Probably less. Each aircraft in VT-8 had a single .30 caliber machine gun mounted in the rear - which was not even useful for a sense of false security - and a forward firing .50 caliber that was nothing but extra weight, as the Devastator could not maneuver to fire it effectively. Children of the Plains Indian tribes proved their courage by “counting coup” on grizzly bears with a stick. Waldron’s VT-8 was going out – slowly - to count coup on the Imperial Japanese Navy. They might as well have had sticks.

The Japanese had to be found first, of course, and Waldron was the only one from the Hornet to find them:

“Waldron led his torpedo men along the prescribed course just so far. Then, at exactly the right moment, with an amazing intuitive understanding of the enemy, he turned off and swung in a shallow arc west-northwest. ‘We went just as straight to the Jap Fleet as if he’d had a string tied to them,’ recalled Lieutenant George H. Gay.’” Gordon Prange, Miracle at Midway

The other squadrons had groped around before turning back, so Waldron would attack alone. By the time he attacked, VT-8 no longer had enough fuel to return to the Hornet. They lined up on the nearest carrier, eight miles distant, and dropped down to a few yards above the waves. Long before they got within the Mark 13 torpedo’s meager range, they were attacked by fifty Zeros.

The Mitsubishi Zero was an amazing thing. It was a purely Japanese thing: agile as a dancer, poetic and deadly. As they slashed down on Waldron’s men at 9:18 AM, they must have looked like fifty terrible swift swords. Evasion was impossible. The best the Devastator could do was a lazy fishtail, and Waldron’s pilots knew better than to do that. It only cuts your airspeed and makes you an even easier target. They concentrated on the impossible torpedo run instead.

Both of Waldron’s wingmen went down, and Waldron pressed on alone. Ensign George Gay, the sole survivor of VT-8, saw Waldron die. Before Waldron’s Devastator could crawl to the release point, one of Yamamoto’s samurai raked him head-on, bursting a fuel tank. Waldron opened his canopy and stood up. He was standing when his craft hit the Pacific and exploded.

When John C. Waldron gave his life, we were losing the war with Japan. One hour after he died, we won it. At about 10:20 AM, Wade McClusky’s Dauntless dive bombers found an almost empty sky over the Japanese fleet. The Zeros were down on the deck, where they had gone to kill Waldron and two successive Devastator attacks launched by the Enterprise and the Yorktown. With nothing in their way, the Dauntlesses dived and in six minutes they destroyed three Japanese fleet carriers, broke the back of Yamamoto’s armada, and turned the tide of the Pacific War. The sacrifice of Waldron and his fellow torpedo men, attempting the impossible, had made total victory possible.

Not senseless, not in vain.

The Los Angeles Times building was saved. They were probably grateful, for a day or two at least.

“I want each of us to do his utmost to destroy our enemies.” And he did. No idle words, coming from a man like John Charles Waldron: Sioux Brave, American, Naval Aviator, winner of the Navy Cross ... martyr and immortal hero.

Goodbye, Amnesty International

Years ago I was a member of Amnesty International. I bought bookfuls of airmail stamps. I wrote letters to prison wardens in Poland, Peru, and Cuba. They were very nice letters, and I spent hours working on them. I hope the US Postal Inspectors enjoyed them very much.

There was definite focus to AI. The focus was on the prevention of torture and imprisonment for non-crimes. Members did not address letters to their own governments. The point was objective devotion to simple common principles, and politics was right out of it. In fact, AI still claims "A.I. is carefully impartial. It does not support or oppose any government or political system." Only now it's a pathetic lie.

The rot set in the Eighties, and the first indication I had of the calamity was this: Suddenly, every dirtstick Rock Star on the planet was in Amnesty International. This was a fatal and irreversible development. AI might have survived an influx of Bulgarian KGB agents or Cthulhu worshippers, but not the likes of Jackson Browne.

AI had always been based on the power of the ordinary citizen - appealing to reason, not celebrity. It was ordinary people speaking out for ordinary people. Mrs. Myrtle Simpson knows what you're doing to Omar Zamani in your Iranian prison, and Mrs. Myrtle Simpson cares. After all, there but for the Grace of God goes Mrs. Myrtle Simpson. And if she knows and cares, imagine how many other people do.

Now that Brian Damage and the Putrifaction Blisters were running the show, a few changes were going to be made. First of all, the political impartiality was over with. Apart from money and a few guitar chords, the only thing a Rock Star understands is one-note idiotarian politics. (Actually, they no longer bother with knowledge of guitar chords.) Dispensing with politics, therefore, was horribly unfair to our new masters, Rover and Prick. Prince and Sting, I mean. It was like not having a wheelchair ramp. It was like not having a handicapped parking space. Where was Dave Matthews supposed to park his thirty-ton f--king tour bus?

In no time at all my organization was all over the news, along with its new agenda: Human rights are best served by imposing every Rock Star's lame understanding of Socialism on everybody - or at least, on everybody but Rock Stars. Thus spoke Bruce Springsteen - whom, we were told, was to be addressed as "The Boss". This was especially hard on me, because in those youthful years I had Bruce Springsteen mixed up with Rick Springfield. I couldn't understand why I was suddenly taking orders from a David Cassidy marketing clone.

Reduced to being the lowly tool of teeny-bopper bait, I became less religious about wearing my little Amnesty pin. I did not have a silk-screened Bay City Rollers t-shirt to wear it on. I did not even own a Bryan Adams album. All I had was Joy Division, which was all wrong somehow. Suddenly, I was a worthless poser. My girlfriend rubbed it in by getting a crush on Jackson Browne, which she naturally described to me in detail. I could imagine some poor bastard in Uganda being tortured in exactly that fashion, with no one but Carlos Santana to save him now.

I soldiered on for a while before I stopped writing my letters. I know that many good and honest people still soldier on in that organization, underneath the racket. Wasn't it silly and selfish of me to feel betrayed? Wasn't it petty to quit out of distaste? Does "We Are the World" suck so much that it sucks all meaning out of existence? Did I ever care?

On reflection, I would have to admit that maybe Rover and Prick have a point. Maybe their mega-million-dollar concerts do much more good than all the Glen Wishards and Mrs. Myrtle Simpsons in the world. Maybe, underneath all their noise and nonsense, something gets through to somebody. Maybe that's true of the Beautiful People in general. Empty as they seem, they make things happen. I should know - I lost my very first girlfriend to a Leif Garrett cult. With any luck, she's suing the creep for child support.

If all of this is true, then the entire premise of Amnesty International was fundamentally flawed from the start. Let's face it, the fabled grassroots citizen is a creature of limited utility. If a bunch of rich, blow-dried falsetto freaks in stretch pants stole Amnesty International and took it for a joyride, then at least somebody got some use out of it. And because of this, somebody probably wrote a fat check that I never could have convinced them to write, and maybe the check did somebody some good. So what do they need me for?

Of course, I might note that Rover and Prick could have started their own Human Rights organization - they could have started sixty Human Rights organizations - instead of trashing mine like it was a Motel 6. I'm sure the Universe (that infinite space of eternal silence) will duly note my complaint.

Since my unnoticed exodus, Rover and Prick have been supplemented by other bits of left-liberal detritus, like the current Secretary General Irene Khan, who amuses herself and her Harvard classmates by comparing George Bush to Pol Pot. That really cracks up the Beautiful People at Georgetown cocktail parties. ("AI does not support or oppose any government", except when it comes to supporting Saddam Hussein's personal ownership of Iraq, and opposing the regime of Darth Bushitler.) Such sophistication is lost on the little Red-State proles, the Glen Wishards and the Mrs. Myrtle Simpsons, those obsolete tools of yesteryear. Whatever happened to those funny little people?

Consoling thought: Somewhere there's a Tanzanian prison guard who really misses reading my letters. "Whatever happened to that guy who was always writing to us?" he muses. "I used to get such a kick out of him. I wonder if he ever learned how to use a semi-colon? Oh wow, somebody just uploaded the new U2 album ..."

And a couple of lessons have been learned: The old saw that "Organizations which are not explicitly conservative tend to become liberal over time" and "The number of human rights complaints against a country is inversely proportional to the number of abuses they actually commit" (Moynihan's Law). Also, you just can't compete with Rover and Prick. Prince and Sting, I mean.

UPDATE 5/29: A lonely voice crying out in the wilderness? Not your humble narrator, no way in Hell.

David Nishimura at Cronaca:

It’s painful to see what has happened to an organisation once held in almost unanimous esteem ... If Amnesty’s obsession with indicting the USA has led it to trivialise the worst crimes of the 20th century, we shouldn’t be surprised to see it similarly diverted from giving due weight to the worst of the 21st.

In Spring, a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of Phase-Conjugate Mirrors and Mutually Incoherent Beam Couplers ...

Unless you're a Star Wars fan, in which case you're satisfied with watching hordes of people in plastic armor cut down by silly arcade-game laser bolts. Of course, this was "A Long Time Ago", before they figured out that lasers are horribly inefficient weapons in an atmospheric environment. And it was "In a Galaxy Far, Far Away" - too far away to ship them some decent Steyr AUG assault rifles.

Lasers work much better in a vacuum, of course. Unfortunately there is no vacuum in the Star Wars galaxy. Their space is full of some kind of gas, otherwise the Death Star would have expired silently instead of going KER-BLAMMO. So their space weapons suck, too, which is why they have to get so close to shoot at each other.

If the science is something problematic, the politics of Star Wars is even more arcane. For an explanation, one must turn to the drug-soaked and clap-ridden European intelligentsia:

AP CANNES, France- Cannes audiences made blunt comparisons between "Revenge of the Sith" - the story of Anakin Skywalker's fall to the dark side and the rise of an emperor through warmongering - to President Bush's war on terrorism and the invasion of Iraq.

If they have French film festivals in the Star Wars galaxy, it might account for that galaxy's saturation of flatulent gas, which conducts sound waves and allows the wings on an "X-wing" starfighter to function.

AP INEXPLICABLE FLOATING CITY, Planet of the Gerbils - Imperial film critic Ennui Cheese-eater made blunt comparisons between "Fahrenheit 911" and the administration's mishandling of the Death Star disaster, including recent revelations about Darth Vader's ties to the royal family of Alderaan ....

And in news elsewhere:

AP MINAS TIRITH, Gondor - Addressing protesters at a "No Blood for Jewelry" rally, Grima Wormtongue made blunt comparisons between the Terri Schiavo case and Gandalf's recent efforts to prevent Denethor from easing the suffering of his son Faramir, who has been in a persistent vegetative state since Page 168. "A clear cut case of the abuse of power," Wormtongue said. "Do we really want that neocon wizard poking around in everybody's bedroom?"

AP EMERALD CITY, Oz - Accepting a T.E. Wogglebug Award for Documentary Filmmaking, Michael Moore made blunt comparisons between "Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith" and Glinda the Good's recent attempt to meddle in the war between the Skeezers and the Flatheads ...

Moral Exhaustion in the Face of the Enemy

Vodkapundit almost (but not quite) despairs over the jelly-spines of his fellow Libertarians when it comes to the War on Terror; discussion by Joe Katzman at Winds of Change. (Also at WoC: Another interesting exchange on Hiroshima, Dresden, and Just Warfare.)

My comment at Woc:

So he wants to know where the Libertarians are? In the same place the Democrats and the paleocons are: Waiting for all of this to go away somehow so that they can get back to the things they want to talk about.

The problem with Libertarianism - which has so many good things going for it - is that in practice it's too barren and dispassionate to serve as a complete belief system. It tends to be all head with no heart and no guts. It has formulas where its moral fiber should be.

I agree with Libertarians about a whole host of things, and I generally like and respect Libertarians. Even the Libertarians for whom "Libertarianism" is obviously just an elaboration of "Legalize Pot", and who write like they just ate a whole pan of Special Brownies.

However, I hesitate to trust Libertarian purists. Even the ones who are not drunk on chocolate and THC. The Libertarian Muse is an advisor and a critic, not a burning-bush moral authority or a solid guide to practical reasoning. Low taxes and limited government are essential ideas (though not confined to 'Tarians). Schemes to privatize city traffic lights are fun. But when it comes to abolishing the FBI, the CIA, and the Marine Corps, you might as well be working for the enemy.

But who is the enemy? Like leftists, Libertarians tend to have faulty IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) systems. The statist liberal who lives across the street seems more dangerous than all the Nazis, Commies, and terrorists who ever lived. Likewise the Christian conservative who lives next door to the liberal - and why not? They're probably all in cahoots.

Of course, the Nazi-Commie-Terrorists are off in foreign lands, where they belong. The Libertarian is not overly concerned with the Stuff Across the Puddle. A Libertarian globe has three geographic features: Hong Kong, Zurich, and the United States. Everything else is grayed-out and labelled NONE OF OUR BUSINESS. Consulting the gazetteer, you learn that the people who live there are PROBABLY FUCKED, but this is NOT OUR FAULT.

Glen's Golden Treasury of Women (Part One)

INTRODUCTION

By Gloria Steinem

I highly recommend this erudite study as an important advance in chauvinist pig-think, which belongs on the shelf beside the Ayatollah Khomeini's Introduction to Feminine Hygiene. As we undertake a new century of human evolution, we are still struggling to communicate across the great gulf that is fixed between our socially-defined gender environments. I applaud all efforts - however demented - to bridge this gap.

For, as I have often said: A man without a woman is like a Jeep Cherokee without the optional passenger-side airbag.

Actually, that's not quite what I said. What the f--k did I say? A man without a woman ... something about a fish. Screw it, you know what I mean.


Glen's Golden Treasury of Women

Chapter One - The Difference Between Men and Women

The difference between men and women is that women have opinions. This is the key distinction, apart from our accidental biological natures.

The immediate objection will be that men have opinions, too. Technically, of course, this is correct. But this is like saying that men also have breasts. Technically correct, but who the hell cares?

The average man has two "breasts" and about six "opinions": 1) Fords or Chevys, 2) his favorite sport, 3-6) about four other things peculiar to his individual culture and background. It's true that some men have thousands of "opinions" and are even "opinionated" in some sense. But the average guy has about six, of which at least four are perfectly expendable.

Women, on the other hand, have opinions about EVERYTHING. Women have opinions about which way the paper towel roll goes into the paper towel dispenser, and about what color paper clips should be.

This is the key to understanding women. When a woman states an opinion, she does so in dead earnest. The opinions of women are not to be trifled with. The worst mistake a man can make is to assume that women are not serious, and to get into disputes with them just for the hell of it. To men, such disputes are fun, but women interpret them as attacks. So don't do it. What the hell do you care which end of the paper towel roll goes into the dispenser? And if she does care, how does that hurt you?

Men's "opinions" are mostly things that they toss out into the world to assert themselves in some fashion. They are used to show how smart you are, and to let everybody know what kind of crap you won't put up with. Opinions are tools, and occasionally, expendable rounds of ammunition.

For a woman, though, opinions are a vital psychic survival technique. Opinions are used to define and organize their environment, in minute detail. They are the mental and emotional equivalent of the neatly organized physical environment that women desire. Taking cheap potshots at female opinion is like smashing a china hutch for no good reason at all. Leave the damn hutch alone. You don't understand or respect the hutch, so you have no business messing with it.

Women tend to be moderate in their opinions, yet firm --- they make good zealots, but unimpressive radicals. Radical opinion is intended to disrupt, and so it achieves the opposite effect from what women desire. Women don't like chaos; they want things safe, sanitary, and organized, then covered over with six inches of armor plate. Radicalism is strictly a male behavior pattern, like vandalism.

To buttress this philosophically: Men tend to see themselves as autonomous forces, which act upon the world around them. Women tend to see themselves as objects, upon which external forces act. Thus the ordering of the female environment (mental and physical) into a well-defined defensive zone is vitally important. Men, on the other hand, do not see their environment as something that protects them, but as a collection of mostly dispensable stuff that they can tinker around with, break, and fix. Their mental lives are perfectly analogous.

In biological terms: Women nest. Men go out and hunt, mess around with things, and occasionally get themselves killed to make the Natural Selection thing-a-mabob work. Again, their respective mental lives are perfectly analogous, which is why women cherish their opinions and men don't.*

Respecting women's opinions is therefore key to understanding and getting along with women. How do women understand and get along with men? Who cares? That's their problem.

* Human societies are often, if not always, feminine or masculine, with analogous social behavior. This is one of those gut things that primitive peoples really DO understand better than we do. The Sioux regarded themselves as a very manly bunch, being hunters and nomads. They looked on fixed agricultural tribes like the Arikara and Mandans as a bunch of sissy women, ripe for the picking. Thus the great fun they had, chasing off the enemy "warriors" and trashing their silly cornfields. This belief was a savage belief, but absolutely goddamned right all the same. A Lakota girl I once knew summed it up this way: "Men fight and steal horses, women run off into the brush."

Chapter Two - What Women Want

Everything they can get, neatly organized and covered over with six inches of armor plate. To be loved, and appreciated. PLUS a couple of other things ---- and that's where it gets complicated.

Because the other stuff they want is intangible, inexpressible in words, and maybe non-existent. Never mind that ... they want it all the same. They seem to think men have it. We're hiding it, or we lost it somewhere, or we're sitting on it and we're too lazy to get up and look for it.

So what is it? Is it an action that you can perform? Is it an object that you can run out and get? What does it look like? WHAT IS IT, HONEY? The male imagination immediately turns to deeds of prowess, or quests of acquisition. She wants you to do something that she can't do for herself. She wants you to get something for her --- some Grail-like THING no doubt perfectly worthless to you, but highly valuable to her. But this is a futile attempt to understand it from your point of view, not hers.

Men already know most of what women want. Women want things, and a place to keep the things. They want you to either get things for them, or help them to get things for themselves, or at the very least not screw up the whole thing-acquisition process. That's easy. That's Basic Remedial Intro to Women for Dummies 101.

The Intermediate Lesson is not much harder to understand. Women see themselves as objects, in a world filled with other objects. (Feminists complain about men "reducing women to objects". This is another example of Feminists blaming men for deliberately doing something that we didn't do at all, even by mistake. It also goes to show that Feminists don't have Clue Number One about women, even if they happen to BE women. Any fool can master Marxism and Deconstructionism and other such tripe: figuring out women is considerably more challenging, and apparently BEING a woman doesn't make it much easier). As objects, women expect certain kinds of care and maintenance from men. First of all, they need to be loved.

Secondly, they need to be appreciated precisely AS OBJECTS. Depending on their stage of life, this means either A) sexual appreciation or B) respect.

A) is no problem: you learned it in the third grade. All you need to do is focus it, and not scatter it all over the landscape. B) is harder to define --- it is not "respect" in the ordinary sense of the word, but a kind of aesthetic appreciation, an appreciation of an object, only in a different sense than as an object of sexual desire. If you know mythology and understand the difference between Aphrodite and Hera, you've almost got it nailed. Definitional problems aside, it's something any civilized man learns to do.

Every woman, at some latter stage of life, must make the transition from expectation A) to expectation B). The corresponding male experience (loss of physical attractiveness) so pales by comparison as to be insignificant. Men think of themselves as forces, not as objects, so what bothers them about aging is not the impact on their looks but on their ability to do things.

But all of this is basic; all of this is stuff you already know. If you're not providing 1) the stuff, 2) the love, and 3) the appropriate aesthetic appreciation, you already know how you're screwing up, even if you can't admit it. But what if you're dishing all of this out in spades, and she's still glaring at you while you're trying to eat breakfast?

What else does she want?

Of course you don't know. If you knew, you'd be a woman yourself. The best you can do is take a crack at piecing together a workable theory.

Chapter Three - What Women Really Want: Some Theories


PROLEGOMENA TO ANY POSSIBLE THEORY OF WHAT WOMEN WANT

There's something you have to get out of the way right off the bat.

You can't afford to get continually bogged down by this: Why do women have to want so much? And the sub-question: Why can't women EXPLAIN what they want?

Recognize first of all that these are useless questions, like "Why do badgers have to dig those goddamned holes?" or "Why do objects thrown from moving vehicles have to travel in parabolas?" Recognize secondly that these are not questions at all, but self-pitying rhetorical bitches. What you're really trying to say is that she seems to demand everything while you ask for hardly anything, and that's not fair. "That's not fair" is the deadliest phrase ever uttered --- it's the fundamental predicate of Nazism, Communism, Feminism, High School shooting-sprees, and all manner of criminality.

THE SKEPTICAL THEORY

There really isn't a mysterious "other thing" that women want. They just want the basics, described in the preceding chapter. You're not giving it to them, even if they insist that you are.

Get it straight: if male-female relationships had anything to do with Contract Law, all your lawyer friends wouldn't be divorced. Just because she says she's happy with your material, emotional, and sexual output doesn't make it so. Don't think that you can seize on some verbal declaration of "everything's okay" (even in front of witnesses) and appeal to it later.

Little known fact: women don't always tell the truth. Some women even regard the whole idea of objective truth as an oppressive phallocentric construct of the Gigantic Penis Conspiracy. Besides, lots of honest people (men and women both) who would never lie to strangers will gladly lie to the people they're close to. And because people lie to their loved ones, the person they're most likely to lie to is themselves.

This theory requires you to face some hard facts about human nature. We can't help wanting things, and we can't we can't help being selfish. It wouldn't be nice if she was unhappy with you because you were not successful enough, but ... Likewise: it wouldn't be nice of her to reject you because you weren't a good enough lover, but ...

Of course, if you're running around with other women and otherwise doing as you please, then you have no business trying to figure women because you obviously don't give a damn. Don't ever overlook the possibility that you're just a worthless jerk and she's too polite to say so.


THE PESSIMISTIC THEORY

Women are a permanently disgruntled breed. They like being pissed off. Even if you could give a woman everything she could ever want, she would out-invent Edison and De Vinci in figuring out new things to be deprived of BY YOU.


THE SOCIOBIOLOGICAL THEORY

Face it, in the Grand Scheme of Things you serve two basic functions: impregnating women and protecting women. That's it. If a woman already has children and protection, or doesn't need either of those things at the moment, then what the hell are YOU good for? Nothing plus dick, that's what.

Religion, ethics, and the conventions of civility try to repress such animal calculation, but at some subconscious level we all understand it. Modern society has supplanted you as the primary protector of women, so once you have reproduced your sorry self you've pretty much outlived your usefulness. Don't let the door hit you in the ass.

You might be retained for purely recreational purposes, though, if you're of a suitably recreational quality. Think of this as the "George Clooney Rule", then go pack your crap and get out.


THE TELEOLOGICAL THEORY

God figured it out this way, so just shut up and soldier, soldier.

Think of it this way: maybe the primary motivation behind the advancement of the human race is the need to appease women who are pissed off about something or other. "Socrates, why don't you go do your dialogue thing? I'm sick of you hanging around the house." "Napoleon, what are your PLANS for today, hmm?"


THE CONSPIRACY THEORY

This is all the work of a fiendish assortment of embittered man-hating divorcees, militant lesbians, and sexually frustrated feminists. Each woman who enters into a happy relationship with a man is immediately assigned a case officer who goes right to work on her. "Nights out with the girls" feature workshops on the evils of monogamy and the bourgeois institution of marriage. Bachelorette parties are staged for group readings of Susan Brownmiller, Shulasmith Firestone, and stuff like "Neo-Colonialism and Your Vagina".

Before you know it she's Stalin with enormous earrings, and you're her Trotsky.

These are just a few samples to get you going. Develop a theory that works for you, in the light of your own experience.