Trumped! Our Very Own Berlusconi

If Donald Trump never does another good thing for his country, at least he managed to thwart one of the most malicious sleaze balls in his quest for the presidency. Listening to Mr. Cruz's concession speech tonight was the ultimate reminder of the great service the Donald has done his country by ending the ordeal of having to listen to the stomach turning Mr. Cruz any longer.

Running against Trump will be a challenge for Hillary Clinton. Like most lawyers, like anyone who has been in government, Hillary thinks in terms of policies, and programs,  but Trump does none of this.  Do you apply the principle of punishing an accomplice to murder by prosecuting a woman who has an abortion? Yeah, sure, why not?  No, wait.  Hell, I don't care.  Who thinks about stuff like that anyway?  Hey, we're gonna make America great again: that's what I'm talking about!  

How do you debate a ten year old who will stand on the stage and make faces and thumb his nose at you and called you names?  

Mr. Trump joins that pantheon of rich men who seek public office by sheer audacity and exuberance and succeed, for a time. He will have to step up his game to compete with  Silvio Berlusconi, the former Italian premier,  who was fond of appointing former lovers to government offices. He appointed Marla Carfagna, a former bedmate,  as his Minister of the Ministry of Equal Opportunity--taking the name of that ministry quite literally--if this woman was willing to go to bed with me, why should she not have equal opportunity to serve in public office?

Who would not want equal opportunity with her?

Perhaps Hillary's best option would be to send Bernie to the debates with the Donald. She could say, "When the Republicans nominate an adult, I'll debate. Until then I'll send my Vice Principal to deal with the Infant Terrible." 

The Donald should be studying the game films of Mr. Berlusconi in action.  This is  how an infantile billionaire can frame the discussion among world leaders when considering important questions like what to do with the Syrian refugees flooding into Europe or how to handle the Greek default. 

Who needs adults ,when we can have such fun?

We all have to admit, it will be interesting to see what the composition of America really is. Will the Donald appeal to only the 32% who voted for him in the early primaries or will more and more Americans catch the fun train?   Are we more like Germany or Italy?  Germany, after all, elected a decent, if frumpy lady whose instincts have been magnanimous and conciliatory, while Italy preferred Mr.  Berlusconi, who was way more fun, who threw parties with a ready supply of young women (teenagers, actually)  to bed for all his rich friends, while running a tabloid news and real estate empire. 

Now this is the way to govern

I may have to start watching reality TV.  How about "Survivor?" 

Nicole Minetti

Both billionaires seem to have a taste for a certain look of woman. In the case of Nicole Minetti, who procured the teenagers for Mr. Berlusconi's "parties" the look was lean and angular. At least, one might say, he had a certain standard he maintained.  Mr. Trump, apparently, has similar tastes.  And he's an internationalist. He likes Miss Universe contestants. And as was true of Mr. Berlusconi, the women seem to find something to like in the Donald. Might be the hair. Might be the money.  Something works for these guys.

I may have some young ladies for you

Stay tuned.

I Dig  Donald

The Game is Rigged: The Deadly Delusion of Meritocracy

Thomas Frank has made a career analyzing how liberals lost the  struggle for the soul of bottom 80% of the American electorate, which is to say the lower and middle classes, such as we actually still have a "middle class."

His big idea is encapsulated in the remark he cites from Lawrence Summers, an effete snob who never quite recovered from his rejection as an undergraduate from Harvard and who made a career of bullying his way into sinecure positions like President of Harvard and chief economist of the World Bank, who said, "One of the reasons that inequality has probably gone up in our society is that people are being treated closer to the way that they're supposed to be treated." 

This is something of a corollary to the remark he made which cost him his job as Harvard President, when he observed that women haven't established much of a presence in math and science because they aren't as talented as men in math in science. He was alluding to test scores which have suggested as much, but it was politically incorrect to say it.  

What he was really saying is that the successful deserve to be successful and the losers are what they are, losers.

This is  the idea that we have ways of measuring "talent" and worthiness and we should reward those on whom God has bestowed superior genes and brains and we should not feel too sorry for those less competitive, less worthy, less" talented," less intelligent individuals who comprised the lower 90% and who could never "qualify" to get into Harvard.

Which brings to mind the man Thomas Frank quoted in his book, "What's the Matter with Kansas," a guy who complains that his son, who could rewire his house, rebuild the tractor's motor, read the defense from the line of scrimmage before burning it for a forty yard touch down pass,  hunt and shoot a wild boar, kayak a class four rapid and sink a basket from 35 feet would never get into Harvard, because his college board scores are not high enough.

What the man from Kansas was saying is you have your ideas of what constitutes "talent," Mr. Summers, and I have mine. And in my world, your kid, with his perfect scores and perfect grades and his resume filled with made-for-college-application extra curricula activities,  is an empty suit, whose greatest virtue is knowing how to kiss up to adults.

That "talented" student, destined to garner the glittering prizes, is the Lt. Dick, of the Band of Brothers, a Yale graduate, who was never seen when the lead started flying, a dreadful failure as a leader of men, who is ultimately removed from command of Easy Company, only to wind up on the staff of the General who commands the whole regiment, the classic case of a fortunate feckless son,  kicked upstairs. 

Frank assails the "well graduated" cohort of smug collegians who have been told they are the select, the elect and they will rule the world and they graduate to join Mackenzie Consulting and, sure enough, they find themselves writing reports telling men twice their age how to manufacture widgets more profitably, having mastered the problem of profitable widget making in a blitzkrieg of studying the factory and it's place in the economy.

Of course,  those who have a more enlightened perspective  will tell you they got high board scores because their parents could afford to send them to Kaplan courses and tutors which ramped up their scores.

On the other hand, when one actually lives and works among the hoi polloi, one discovers they are not all brilliant, hard working people who were simply born into poor families. Many do come from families  with six brothers and four sisters and parents who worked two jobs and had no time to read to kids at night. College for them was never an option. But  whatever their talents and intelligence, many of these folks struggle putting pen to paper to simply fill out a questionnaire.  

It's not that people who dropped out of high school were unintelligent, but their lives took arches predictable from their circumstances and the marketplace has no patience and no intention of  bringing them up to speed.

But the rage that fuels the crowds at Donald Trump rallies is a rage at a dimly perceived injustice, buried in early childhood experience and reinforced throughout adolescence that meritocracy is a fraud, the system is rigged and the wrong people rewarded.

Plastic Bag Pollution: No Excuses

Garbage the size of Texas: Click on Image

You can question global warming, if you want to be perverse and you can believe President Obama was born in Kenya and raised on Mars, but it is hard to deny the persistent pestilence of plastic bags and bottles in the oceans of the planet, or, if you don't want to believe photos of the ocean, which, it must be admitted might have been photo shopped in the same studio where they faked all those moon landings, but you can simply walk around New York City and even Hampton, and see plastic bags in the trees, and on the beaches.


It is true, plastic bags and detritus on Hampton beaches are relatively minimal scourges compared to beaches in places like Barbados and other places where currents concentrate the garbage.

But, the thing is, with  minimal effort even someone as unorganized as I can manage to keep a few cloth bags in my car to be used at Market Basket and Hannafords and Walgreens and Home Depot. I can do it.  How much effort does it take to take a small step to save the planet and some struggling fish and sea turtles?

Jacques Cousteau saw it first

The article in this week's New Yorker about Jennie Romer, the New York City lawyer who is trying to get a law passed to impose a 5 cent charge for plastic bags at all New York City stores is a reminder we, each of us, can do more to save the planet. 

Jennie Romer, Esq

It turns out plastic bags are simply not recyclable, in the real world. They are not put through machines except in a very few places, like San Francisco. They break down into deadly blobs and float around the ocean. Or they wash up on beaches. Their fellow travelers are plastic bottles, which are even more obnoxious, if less numerous. 

In Hannaford's today, I saw the ubiquitous plastic bags at every cash register, as they are at every other store, from Walgreens to the Dollar Store.  It seems counter intuitive that by simply adding a 5 cent charge for the bag could possibly undo all this plastic bag infrastructure, but, apparently, it's worked in San Francisco. But the other thing is San Francisco has invested in the hardware to actually destroy the plastic bags. Hard to imagine New Hampshire being willing to spend money on this. 

In Italy, I saw women walking home from the markets carrying food in net bags--no automobiles, no plastic bags, in Italy.  

We always brag about how superior we are here in the United States of America. Why can't we do what the Italians do, every day, to be less destructive of our planet?

Sea Otters

Having written this screed, I began to notice just how ubiquitous plastic is, starting with my refrigerator. Everything from milk, to yogurt, to water is contained by plastic throw aways. Clothes from the laundry is wrapped in plastic. Every tool in the hardware store comes wrapped in plastic, as do all electric devices from ear phones to I pods.  Even if we eliminated plastic bags, we would be awash in plastic. Of course, the bags are particularly nasty because they are so light, they blow in the wind into trees and lakes and oceans, but it strikes me, we ought to really be talking about doing what San Francisco has done--invested in the big machines which really do melt this stuff down into some less toxic form.  Solutions likely will prove more complicated, but expense should not be a problem--the people who made glass bottles once had to pay for the collection of these items. No reason the people who make plastic things should not bear the cost of disposing of them.

The So Called War on Drugs

It must be frustrating to be Kurt Schmoke.  The man was born and raised in Baltimore, led his high school football teams to state championships and got sucked up by Yale, from which he graduated to a Rhodes scholarship, then to Harvard Law and then Mayor of Baltimore.  All that glitzy resume stuff and  still nobody listens to him.

Today, the New York Times editors have run an editorial suggesting that maybe we ought to do something different in the war on drugs. 

Mr. Schmoke must have read this and said, "You think?"

It took "The Wire" to actually lay out in detail why the current approach to criminalization of drug sales is worse than useless. In that fictional paragon, the implications of Mayor Schmoke's idea of legalization are spelled out, as a rogue police major, Howard Colvin, walls off a part of the city where drug sales and use is legal. The impact on the rest of the city is immediate and dramatic, as neighborhoods ravaged by violence surrounding the trade emerge as if from a bombing siege.  

Howard Colvin

 But the reality in the zone, called "Hamsterdam" by the druggies, is unpleasant.  Deaths from overdoses ensue, and the sidewalks and streets are filled with drugged out, staggering addicts. What has been happening under ground, out of sight, is now visible to genteel eyes. The rodents have emerged into the sunlight.

Of course, it's the politicians and police who run for cover.  Doing the right thing is unbearable. As T.S. Eliot remarked:  "Humankind cannot bear too much reality."

Humankind could not bear watching "The Wire." Can you imagine what humankind would do when confronted with the reality of drug legalization?  

People whose disease caused them to hide underground would now emerge for upright citizens to gaze upon. 

Heroin dispensed at the corner drug store along with clean needles.  Cocaine, too. There will, presumably, always be some drugs which are just too combustible to be made available, but take those two out of the mix and stop jailing people for marijuana and the economy and the culture of the inner city would change radically. 

There will still be crime, but at least we would have wrested a public health problem from the underground and lanced one abscess.

Kurt Schmoke

Freedom to Wander

Ken Ilgunas

Staying on point is something I've never been good at.  One of the great efforts I learned I had to make when writing anything is to stay on the topic and not to digress or wander off into interesting but unrelated topics.

Which is why Ken Ilgunas's lovely article in today's New York Times struck such a chord with me.  At first glance, I thought it was an article about the Keystone XL pipeline.  It carried a picture of the pipeline from its origin in Alberta to the terminus in Port Arthur, Texas, but it turned out to be not so much about the pipeline, or a description of the lands and vistas it would cross as it is an article about the adventure and rewards of actually trying to walk the entire length of the thing, which took Ilgunas 136 days.   The whole journey brought him face to face with the strictures in America which thwart those who love to go a wandering.

The real subject of the article, if it can be said to have a single subject, is the idea that in the United States you cannot just wander, by foot along much of the continent because so much of our land is owned as private property.  When Woody Guthrie sang, "This Land is Your Land. This Land is My Land," he could not have been speaking of America, because this land is apt to belong to someone else.

The only public land in America is, most often, the roads. 

For years, I practiced medicine in Washington, D.C. and my practice had a high proportion of Europeans and I always asked them what they found different about living in America and, almost to a man or woman they replied, "You Americans, you DRIVE everywhere. Go to the 7-11 down the block, half a kilometer away: You drive!"

The other thing they noticed is how fat Americans are.  

One thing I noticed was how thin Americans returning from extended stays in Europe had become. One twenty something returned to Washington after 3 years posted to a news outlet in Italy,  and I hardly recognized him. He had lost 30 pounds. In Italy! How had he done this?  "Well," he said. "I wasn't trying to lose weight. It just happened. For one thing, you eat only fresh food, but mostly I just walked a lot."

In Sweden and Scotland and many other European countries, you can walk across private land and that right is guaranteed by "freedom to roam" laws.  You do not have to stay on roads, as you do in the USA.  Of course, as Ilgunas notes, if we tried to pass such laws here, allowing people to roam across your lawn or fields, we'd run up against the Fifth Amendment, which forbids government taking of private property.  While "eminent domain" has been invoked for the building of highways or other such use, we are pretty skittish about allowing the government to trespass or to allow the public to trespass on private property.

Except, when we are not.

We are not so skittish, it turns out, in some places in America, namely New Hampshire, if that trespass involves a person carrying a gun.  

One day I was entering the Urban Forest in Portsmouth, and as I did a stream of rather panicky looking parents and children and dogs came at me along the path from the woods, making a bee line for the parking lot behind me.  Behind them I could hear thunderclaps and I thought, "Oh, a local squall." But no, one of the mothers told me, "Somebody's shooting out there."

I proceeded onward along and was joined by  an off duty policeman, who was there with his dog, and we followed the sound of the gunshots to the water's edge. The Urban Forest runs down to salt marshes which run under Route 1 and out to the sea.  About thirty yards off shore two men with shot guns were shooting toward the sky at some birds.

"They may be within their rights," the off duty cop said, but he still phoned the police department to come out and investigate. 

It turned out the hunters were hunting legally, within the city limits, within spitting distance of Route 1 and within the Urban Forest. 

I wrote the Mayor of Portsmouth, who replied with a copy of the applicable law enclosed in the envelop.  It turned out two separate legal protections covered these hunters.  The first was in the will which bequeathed the land for the Urban Forest to Portsmouth, guaranteeing that hunting would be allowed there. 

The second was a law, which was more interesting.  In the State of New Hampshire it turns out:
1. It is legal to shoot your gun while hunting beyond 300 feet (the length of a football field) of an occupied building, within 15 feet of a road and within 1,000 feet of a school. (Think about that next time your kid goes out for dodge ball at recess.)
2. It is illegal to walk across private property UNLESS you are carrying a gun, hunting, unless the owner has clearly posted "No Hunting" signs. So, the acre of woods behind my house is open to anyone with a gun, unless I nail the signs to trees.  Furthermore, it is legal to shoot at a deer across any road in New Hampshire with 9 exceptions, and those exceptions spell out Route 95, Route 101, Rte 93,  and a bunch of other multi lane highways which it is hard to imagine anyone in his right mind would try to shoot across.

Such is the respect for hunting in New Hampshire. Hunting trumps private property rights. This is still, in parts, a rural state, or was once. Only 1.3 million people live here and most are concentrated along the Western border with Massachusetts, in Manchester or along the 18 mile Seacoast.  Most of the territory is still farmland or forest or mountain or lake. Loons live here, which says something.

When I was in high school, I read Thoreau.  He spent a week on the Concord and Merrimack rivers and it sounded idyllic.  But I now cross the Merrimack 12 times a week commuting to work across the bridges which traverse it as it meanders past Methuen and Haverhill, Massachusetts. Long ago, the shoe factories polluted the Merrimack thoroughly, and although efforts to clean it up are longstanding, the muddy bottom still stores chemicals from that legacy.

Today, I'll go out on my bicycle along the road from Hampton through Kingston to Exeter, New Hampshire.  Those are public roads and automobiles roar past me, some trucks pull trailers carrying mowers and tractors behind, and those are the vehicles I fear most because they veer and swerve behind the trucks towing them.  It would be nice to be able to walk through the woods and fields along the road, but this is America, not Europe.  Of course, this is New Hampshire, so if I carried a AK-15 assault rifle, I'd be perfectly within my rights to walk across that privately owned land.

During the Fall hunting season, one of the best times to walk through town and state parks, I have to wrap my yellow lab in an orange vest and I wear an orange hat, because you can hear the deep throated rumble of gun fire from unseen places off in the woods.  We live free up here, and, occasionally, owing to hunting accidents, we do die.

Boston Globe: If This Be Elite, What is Mediocre?

Jeff Jacoby

Don't you just wonder why sometimes?  I know I wonder why the Boston Globe, one of the two big circulation papers in that Athens of America, Boston, carries as a columnist this guy, Jeff Jacoby.

It's not as though even the Globe should print only columnists with the insight of Walter Lippmann or the zippy zing of George F. Will or the curiosity of David Brooks or the sheer exuberance and satiric power of Gail Collins, but you would think the Globe would have some...standards.  Like Fox News.

Serious Journalism in America Today

We have stopped having the paper version of  New York Times or the Globe home delivered--save the trees and all the reclycing-- and truth be told, it's just fine reading a daily paper on line. 

But on Sundays, we get the paper and lug it home and the Globe sits around all week and eventually I get around to reading the opinion pages and there he is, that lumpen concentration of confident mediocrity, Jeff Jacoby.

April 17th's piece "analyzing" President Obama's "disaster" which he calls the "Obama Doctrine," is a case in point. 

Here it is, boiled down: 
Re: Libya:  "America in effect washed its hands of responsibility for the country's fate. Not surprisingly, that fate has been ghastly."  
Now, I'm just a humble citizen living in a New Hampshire shire, but, excuse me, did I miss something?  Since when did America have the power to control the fate of Libya, or any nation engaged in a sectarian civil war? As if!

"It may seen astonishing that Obama, who so harshly condemned his predecessor's blunders in Iraq, would wind up repeating the gravest of those blunders in Libya--namely not being ready for the instability and insurgency that would follow."

Actually, it does not astonish me one bit.  Having seen the stupidity of sending American troops into a quagmire, President Obama decided to not repeat that mistake by sending troops into Libya. How could he or any President or any Western head of state have been "ready" to deal with the instability which followed?
Perhaps Mr. Jacoby would have had Mr. Obama supply Mr. Netanyahu with an aircraft carrier and a few American divisions to invade Libya?

"The lesson he takes away from the Iraq war was that the United States has no business intervening militarily in the Middle East--an that the greater the intervention, the greater the resulting fiasco. The facts haven't borne out that conclusion."

Uh, actually, I would have drawn that very conclusion myself, although I have no way of knowing if President Obama has drawn that conclusion. Perhaps Mr. Jacoby has sat around with a few beers and the President and he knows the President's mind, but I suspect Mr. Jacoby has simply been listening to too many talking heads on TV, most especially, Fox News.

Oh, we had Al Qaeda on the Ropes, but who are these guys?

Mr. Jacoby suggests we had AlQaeda "crippled, attacks were down 90 percent and Iraq was being governed by democratically elected politicians."  Well, now that is news, known only by Mr. Jacoby and perhaps a few Fox News analysts who had a direct line to Iraq.  From the distance of the East Coast of the United States, it looked to me as if AlQaeda was beside the point. AlQaeda goes down and some other band of crazies, e.g. the Islamic State,  pops up out of the Middle Eastern deserts like whack a moles.  And as for Iraq qualifying as  a thriving democracy--in what alternative universe does Mr. Jacoby spend most of his time?

Nor did Mr. Obama "heed warnings that the swift disappearance of tens of thousands of American peacekeepers would leave a catastrophic vacuum that the regions deadliest forces would rush to exploit."  Oh, those poor American soldiers with the targets painted on their backs were "peacekeepers?"  And how long would any American army be able to keep the peace?  Just as soon as they were withdrawn, everything was destined to collapse, don't you think?  So there we are with the John McCain insight--we have to keep American armies in the field over there for 100 years. Pax Americana.

Now this guy knew how to use military might

"Yet even now, Obama cannot see that a doctrine premised on avoiding American involvement in the world's conflicts is bound to fail."

Uh, actually, from the peep hole in New Hampshire, what looks bound to fail is sending boys and girls from New Hampshire and Iowa and California humping around the Arabian peninsula, trying to figure out those fractious people, and everyone with improvised explosive devices, grenade launchers and other implements of death, not to mention suicide belts.

This is the sort of blather which one would have thought has long since been dismissed.  Listening to Bernie Sanders during the last debate, one finally heard some fresh thinking:  We cannot simply do what we have always done in the Middle East. Whatever we've done has not worked.  And when we do decide to say something, we have to be Americans first, not Jews first, not Republicans or Democrats first, but citizens of these United States. And if it looks as if Israel over reacted in Gaza, we have to say that.  And if we think we know enough to say that Israel digging in more settlements in areas where Palestinians are apt to take offense, then we might at least be willing to ask, "Is this a good idea, if you are really trying to achieve peace?"

But the big question I have to ask is this:  The Globe has only so many printed pages. It gives the podium, the microphone and the spotlight to only a handful of people. Would you not think the powers that be at the Globe would want to pick somebody who is capable of thinking critically, of fresh insight, of new ideas?  Why put this latter day Archie Bunker on stage?  

Trump and Bathroom Politics

The Donald has weighed in, quite sensibly, on the North Carolina bathroom law. He said, in essence, this is a solution looking for a problem. There hasn't been a problem with sexual predators masquerading as trans sexuals so why have a law?

Mad Dog has exasperated his twenty five readers by bringing up this issue repeatedly, but it has legs in Mad Dog's eyes for several reasons:

1/ It is a prime example of reflexive response on the part of well meaning people of the liberal persuasion and it does demonstrate that some of what the Right says about "political correctness" on the part of "knee jerk liberals" has some basis in fact. The problem being that those who expostulate against this law have:

A/ Never actually read the law, but are fulminating against what they think or have been told is in the law without actually examining the facts and they have flown off the handle without actually taking the time to examine the details.

B/ Conflated the real harm done to homosexuals by intolerant individuals  with the actual effects of this law.  
Some of this confusion can be forgiven and attributed to the bone headed comments by some of its supporters who were Republican state legislators who claimed they were voting for it to protect children in bathrooms against those vile, transgender predators who would surely be skulking about just hoping to get their hands on children. 

C/ Never actually met or have had any experience with a trans sexual or a transgender (not exactly the same thing) individual and believe any attempts to treat this class of person differently is of the same cloth as prejudice against homosexuals.

As Mad Dog has labored to point out:  Gay men and lesbian women are not transgenders or trans sexuals and transgenders are not typically gay.  Listening to reporters and lawyers from the ACLU talking about this on TV has frustrated Mad Dog because you have "experts" who clearly have no idea what they are talking about.  The confusion is compounded by the alliance under the LGBT banner: We have very different types of people coalescing under a single banner because they all feel threatened, demeaned and harmed by intolerance aimed at  their own sexual choices and preferences, but in this case in trying to offer comfort to trans sexuals some gays have ceased to be able to listen to the other side, which is not entirely composed of homophobic haters and intolerant right wingers. 

Here's what the law actually says:

1. Does the new bill limit or prohibit private sector companies from adopting their own nondiscrimination policies or practices?

• Answer: No. Businesses are not limited by this bill. Private individuals, companies and universities can adopt new or keep existing nondiscrimination policies.

2. Does this bill take away existing protections for individuals in North Carolina?

• Answer: No. In fact, for the first time in state history, this law establishes a statewide anti-discrimination policy in North Carolina which is tougher than the federal government’s. This also means that the law in North Carolina is not different when you go city to city.

3. Can businesses and private facilities still offer reasonable accommodations for transgender people, like single occupancy bathrooms for instance?

• Answer: Yes. This bill allows and does nothing to prevent businesses, and public or private facilities from providing single use bathrooms.

4. Can private businesses, if they choose, continue to allow transgender individuals to use the bathroom, locker room or other facilities of the gender they identify with, or provide other accommodations? 

• Answer: Yes. That is the prerogative of private businesses under this new law. For instance, if a privately-owned sporting facility wants allow attendees of sporting events to use the restroom of their choice, or install unisex bathrooms, they can. The law neither requires nor prohibits them from doing so.

5. Does this law prohibit towns, cities or counties in North Carolina from setting their own nondiscrimination policies in employment that go beyond state law?

• Answer: No. Town, cities and counties in North Carolina are still allowed to set stricter non-discrimination policies for their own employees if they choose.

6. Does this bill mean transgender people will always have to use the restroom of the sex of their birth, even if they have undergone a sex change? 

• Answer: No. This law simply says people must use the bathroom of the sex listed on their birth certificate. Anyone who has undergone a sex change can change their sex on their birth certificate.

7. I’m worried about how this new law affects transgender children or students in North Carolina. Does this bill allow bullying against transgender children in schools?

• Answer: Absolutely not. North Carolina law specifically prohibits bullying and harassing behavior against children on the basis of sexual identity.