Foxes in the henhouse

“On every side the wicked prowl, as vileness is exalted among the children of men” (Psalm 12:8).

From here on in, we steer a fine line between two verses: “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them” (Ephesians 5:11) and “For it is shameful even to speak of the things that they do in secret” (Ephesians 5:12).

There were 313.9 million people in the United States as of 2012. Out of these possible candidates, President Barack Obama has chosen as his new deputy director for the federal agency responsible for running government intelligence activities a woman about whom Cosmopolitan writes:

“Finally, a deputy director of the CIA we can really get behind. Avril Danica Haines, President Obama’s pick to serve as number-two at the nation’s top intelligence agency, is an awesomely kinky dominatrix who would put Christian Grey to shame. … Critics are already slamming her lack of intelligence experience, but what about her sexual intelligence experience?”

Haines is not, in fact, a dominatrix but merely a former bookstore owner who hosted “erotica nights” at her Baltimore shop, where she read erotica novels aloud. But one has to wonder at the apparent diminishing quality of leadership in the academies and government, reminiscent of C.S. Lewis’ gallery of waxworks in the ruins that Polly and Digory stumbled upon in The Magician’s Nephew. There is nothing strictly illegal, of course, with having near the head of the nation’s top spy agency a woman who is low on criminal-gathering expertise and high on sexual perversion expertise. But one worries about what it all means:

“Woe to you, O land, when your king is a child, and your princes feast in the morning! Happy are you, O land, when your king is the son of the nobility, and your princes feast at the proper time, for strength, and not for drunkenness!” (Ecclesiastes 10:16-17)

Last year my daughter and I drove to Purchase, N.Y., to visit the SUNY Purchase campus and read the names on the doors of the English department. Later I learned the credentials of one of the college’s former teachers. Melissa Febos, author of Whip Smart,brandishes on her resume the accomplishment of professional dominatrix. For those of you ignorant of the de rigueur qualifications for teaching writing in upper level universities nowadays, a “dominatrix” is a woman who assumes the dominant role in BDSM sex play. B=bondage, D=discipline (in the sexual-fetish sense), SM=sadomasochism.

There is a saying in the winemaking business that “a wine is made in the vineyard.” Start off with bad grapes and you get bad wine. In genetics the fourth or fifth generation of a cell strain is only as good as the original strain. If the quality at the helm of our top institutions is already the dregs of society, what fruit will they produce in the porous soils of their disciples?