Expressing one of my occasional flights of fancy how about going from First Lady to President? And I mean our present First Lady. In considering Laura Bush as President several things come to mind, not the least of titillating prospects is a presidential campaign pitting Laura Bush against Hillary Clinton, the ultimate “cat fight.” Who wouldn’t agree this would make for the most interesting presidential campaign America has ever experienced? Why, the choice of running mates alone would fill the vast wasteland of TV with mountains of speculation!

For those who might be a tad too quick to discount this, consider Paint Your Wagon. When the idea of auctioning off Jean Seberg to one of the miners is raised her Mormon husband cautions her she doesn’t know what she might be getting, to which she replies, “No, but I know what I’ve had.” Folks, we know what we’ve had and it may be high time a woman took over the Oval Office! Of course, Laura would have to banish her husband to Crawford for the sake of any campaign; and probably thereafter if she should win. As for Hillary, God only knows!

Well certainly it’s fanciful on my part; but hey, who wouldn’t be lining up for tickets to such an event! It would make the Oscars and every TV show pale by comparison. But fanciful or not, I hereby claim the book and film rights to the idea.

It was while entertaining this whimsical thought something Emerson wrote came to mind: “Beauty is the form under which the intellect prefers to study the world.”

Now I would be the last to fail to recognize it is women in their best estate who not only exercise a civilizing influence upon men, but also provide the inspiration for men as poets, composers and artists. After all, men don’t send other men flowers or sing songs of praise to their “beauty” as men. But the ugly fact remains that men make wars and women make homes. As ugly the indictment and condemnatory of our species, the truth of this cannot be legitimately denied.

In the meanest of circumstances, a “woman’s touch” may be found in the humblest surroundings. It may be only a single flower or a patch of colored material, but the civilizing attempt at some beauty in life announces the touch of a woman. It is this that credits the real intellect of women as opposed to that of men. Why, then, should women take exception to the comments by those like Harvard’s L. H. Summers? Because he put the difference between men and women regarding intellect in too narrow a perspective; and I doubt he was capable of doing otherwise. To put his comments in proper perspective Summers would have had to acquiesce to the judgment of the intellect: “Beauty is the form under which the intellect prefers to study the world,” and men make wars and women make homes.

Given the truth of this, when children are immersed in ugliness it is vain to expect them to exercise their intellect. And what is true of children is no less true of adults. A field of flowers, rather than asphalt and concrete encourages the intellect; beautiful music and literature rather than ugliness under the pretense and guise of “reality” attempting to supplant beauty.

When the universities of America began to substitute a perversion of “reality” for beauty, our nation began to lose its way. Thoreau was close to the truth of the matter commenting on “goodness tainted” being “divine carrion,” the example in the Bible being the fall of Satan through ego. Were he alive today Henry would doubtless have been of my mind that war in the heavens between deities brought to earth resulted in the ongoing struggle between Good and Evil, the struggle of the intellect to follow in the path of beauty as the evil continues on a path of corruption of beauty denying the intellect the opportunity to study the world.

Jesus pointed to the lilies of the field, which he declared put Solomon in all his glory to shame. The Apostle Paul in the first chapter of Romans described the marring of beauty by the corruption of idol worship and sexual perversion. It is the perversions of ego, the lust of the flesh, the lust for power and wealth that together denies the intellect the opportunity to study the world, perversion in its various forms being the enemy of truth and beauty.

In this lies the danger of humankind destroying itself by nuclear annihilation. Were the intellect in power pursuing its proper course of beauty, rather than perversion, there would be no danger. The intellect pursues beauty, but the beast of perversion pursues destruction.

The fine manners so exquisitely put forth by Sir Walter Scott and others, the courtly manners of the antebellum South became “quaint” and “anachronistic” by those supplanting beauty with the corruption of civilized manners, increasingly encouraging things ugly and antithetical to beauty. As a consequence, true intellectualism began to suffer and decline, and those who attempted to defend beauty began to be the objects of ridicule and ostracism. Our nation’s heritage of great literature began to be supplanted by trash, and Hollywood followed suit, TV now bearing the imprimatur of corruption flaunting ugliness of every description, desecrating beauty and denying the intellect.

It really is as simple as Jesus would have it, that no one can serve two masters. You will serve beauty or you will serve ugliness, you will nourish the intellect or you will feed the brute.

But is it only a flight of fancy on my part to envision a White House under Laura Bush in which the “woman’s touch” might prove to be the kind of needed intellectualism by which Beauty in its proper form would be the paradigm for studying the world?

Of a certainty the harsh reality of men being “war lovers” would remain. However, could a woman as President be essential to America in order to bring the needed intellectual sanity of a woman’s touch and appreciation of Beauty to an otherwise barren and increasingly failing political landscape?