So we were all sitting around Julie’s London flat, listening while she stretched out on the floor and read aloud from Time magazine denouncing the fracas in Vietnam. That’s when the phone rang. Turned out that Julie had to meet her friend at the tube station and help get her over to the eye doctor. Wouldn’t take long, she promised, then added: “Would anyone like some hash?” Seems there was some dynamite Lebanese blond going around.

☞   A New York city girl who looked more like she walked off the streets of Dublin— red hair, blue eyes, milk white skin dazzled with freckles— Julie went on to explain that her friend had recently married a man who brought his British bride home to his native village. To the expectations of husband, family, and villagers, this British woman was expected to wear a head covering that only allowed a single eye hole. Allowed only that single peep hole to scope the universe caused over time a debilitating case of double vision. Julie’s friend was forced to return to London for medical treatment. Thus, seeing-eye Julie had to help her pal get around busy London streets and not stray into the path of a black Mariah taxi.

☞   What seemed odd at the time was Julie’s attitude. Curious, that is, in a woman as liberated as Julie in an era advertised as pioneer female liberation: Jackie Kennedy Onassis had just anointed the wearing of blue-jeans for all occasions. Julie seemed to find the horror of her friend’s experience amusing, her pretty freckled face wrinkled up giggling about it. And there she was, a model of new woman a la mode. Living independently in her Earl’s Court flat among Australian expatriates, talking about hitch-hiking around the world, she could make one feel like an old lady by comparison. If her friend was anything like her, and decided to marry a podunk middle easterner, then there might be something more in play.

☞   Distracted by first time in London, not to mention Lebanese hash, further details have been lost to memory. To which country was the young lady ensconced? Which sect?  How long ago? But what sticks most was the double vision. Somehow that goes some ways in illustrating the predilection wherein a healthy educated British woman could wind up peeking into another world quite different from her own, signing on, and then things getting all blurry.

☞   Likely that mating was tuned to the notion of  opposite attraction. Or maybe something more akin to self-hatred. When you spurn partners similar to yourself, it might be something about not liking yourself. Might also be further proof of a general state of anomie, the psyche in disrepair. Double vision speaks loudly about the attraction western women exhibit for middle eastern men. It does call forth that heartiest of cliches: opposites attract.

☞   When living in Tokyo, my wife questioned why western men put up with the expectations of their Japanese women that they wouldn’t with an American mate.

      Our French friend, married to a Japanese woman, simply replied: “L’exotique.”

☞   The lure of the exotic speaks volumes. Couples throughout history endured persecution for their forbidden attraction. In ancient Rome a foreigner coupling with a Roman woman could find them both sewed up together inside a sack with poisonous snakes or vicious animals and thrown into the Tiber River. Perhaps opposite attraction occurs on the molecular level, a genetic drive to stir up the gene pool. But on a social level, things can get a bit dicey. When firebrand individualistic western  women (friend of liberated Julie) feel attracted to men who believe that their women (emphasis on their) should be covered completely— save for a single eye hole— there has to be something more.

☞   But curiosity ranges all over the subject, especially these days, when our Muslim neighbors intrude themselves so completely into western lives. I recall first contact with middle eastern guys in junior college. Saudis, I believe. (This was in the last century before oil rich middles easterners bought universities, Harvard among them.) These were in a California junior college denouncing America with loud fervor. Enough to put patriots in a huff, sputtering something to become an old favorite: “ If they don’t like it here…”.

☞   But most curious were the “chicks” who went for “camel jockeys” who sounded so full of it. The gals seemed clinging to some exotic essence. But these women weren’t the contemporary Harvard-educated. That was in ancient times before this century. These girls were central valley California extracts from Oklahoma and Arkansas. What was on display before my unschooled eyes then were worlds in collision, the existential movie now playing daily on the news.

☞   More curious is that one eye hole. Was there a conference of Imams deciding the eye question? Is it really in the Koran? Since a woman is believed to be a naturally lascivious invitation to sin, it seems to follow by that logic that she necessarily be covered. So it must follow even further that if one eye represents a half measure of temptation, two eye balls exposed and you’re done for. Elizabethan poets wrote of the eyes as portals to the soul, and imams seem to agree, at least tangentially. If they believe a man can be tempted by the sight of only one eye, then they are true to their convictions. Or maybe those imams could consider a cover of both eyes if the aim is total social control.

☞   Probably more than one western male feels uncomfortable about seeing his wife cavort on the beach in a string bikini, and yet at the same time feeling pride when others leer at her. Whatever the feeling, she has the option. American wives are not only “allowed” to drive, but also to buy big ticket items like cars. Not only allowed, but it happens with legal courtesy.  Somehow this system of government and morality, universally hated by murderous gangs of jihaders, allow for all to enjoy personal liberty. Not only allowed, but for women it’s nurtured, since freedom for women to participate in the system is up to the point that more of them are now employed than men, and run the show as well. And not one required to cover her head at a board meeting.

☞   An article in The Epoch Times reports on the “Grooming Gangs of the UK.” [Jan 2025] For over two decades young girls have been taken for less than honorable purposes throughout the British Midlands, thousands through networks of “Pakistani heritage men.” That seems to be the administrative code word— Pakistani heritage men– used by officials in order to narrow classification on the perps, not that any great alarm has been sounded from Westminster. But it’s rather noteworthy here that Julie’s pal was a forerunner. She pioneered what seems a nation within a nation of women, enticed by Pakistani heritage men, and now enslaved.

☞   The Times report has “thousands of such crimes being committed in South Yorkshire each year… and offenders were identified to police but not prosecuted.” [italics added] Saddest are the names of towns and cities reporting such sexual violence. They read in kind like something out of a Thomas Hardy or Jane Austen novel: Rochdale, Telford, Oxford, Newcastle, Bradford, etc. In other words, the heart of old England’s blossom.

☞   Supreme patriarchal control has no doubt played a role in western history, but so far it hasn’t been prevalent on local American streets. Not a lot of women reported banging into walls from double vision because the local poobah restricted the use of two eyes. But then again, some women might not be using either one.

☞   Eye slammers further proclaim that they will conquer America through the wombs of their women. Welfare helps immensely, allowing Sharia wives housed separately by courtesy of the state and local welfare. Also, given the cockamamy reading of the fourteenth amendment— actually a retread of the fourth— the anchor baby license definitely forms a spearhead. But conquest might also be working through the processed Marxist minds of native women, like the gaggles of addled anti-Israel college protesters.

☞   Or like Julie’s pal… You have to wonder if her sight ever improved. After groping the streets of London for a while, far from the muddy reek of goat scented alleys, did her sight ever sharpen? And most curious, did she ever buy a return ticket?

JoCo, 2026