The Political Saga Of Fanny Farmer - How Victimhood Became Drollery, Alexander Hamilton, And The Unwashed

'I am so sick and tired of these Podunks', Fanny said to Claude, her partner for the night and fellow activist in town for a meeting of Scientists for Social Justice, the progressive lobby group to which they both belonged. 

Claude was not her love nor anything close, but she was old enough to remember the 'love the one you're with' posters on her mother's bedroom wall, and having inherited enough of her Sixties love thing to be unconcerned about incidental affairs, she rolled over.  Besides, Claude was a good worker, a good colleague, and a good traveling companion.  They had gone to Cleveland together to protest ICE storm troopers; to Lewisburg for a No Kings rally; and to Atlanta for an abortion rights demonstration. 

'I'm too old for all this travel'.  It was not time to hang 'em up, but ready for a more suitable desk job in Washington.  'I know that sounds bad', she said to Claude, taking the bogarted joint from him, kicking him to attention, 'but I haven't enough steam'. 

'There are no desk jobs in our business', said Claude.  'Its barricades or nothing'. 

What about Bob, she said, referring to Robert Muzelle, Managing Director of the organization, as happy and satisfied as could be, resting on his laurels, sit-ins, freedom rides, Bull Connor and the Pettus Bridge 'with Ralph and Martin', fat windbag, full of himself, never once getting out of his chair except for a a tribute to himself, an honorary title for his meritorious and tireless commitment to progressivism.  'He has a desk job'. 

'I'm getting on in years', Fanny said.  True enough but certainly not over the hill.  Just enough years to give her second thoughts.  Not whether it all had been worth it - activism was what had always counted - but was that all there was?  Was there no Act II?

It was the ten-dollar bill that did it, or at least that was the epiphanic moment of truth.  Alexander Hamilton, reviled patrician lord of the Old White Guy Constitutionalists who argued with Thomas Jefferson about the fickleness and cow shed ignorance of the majority, and insisted on an intermediary legislative body to protect the commonwealth from the tribalism and venal interests of the mob, suddenly made sense. 

All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well born; the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second.

God forbid such a conversion, she said, blessing herself, making the sign of the cross, a reflexive gesture learned as a child and never gotten rid of despite her adopted secularism and radical progressivism.  Even granting Hamilton the benefit of the doubt - Shakespeare was neither the first nor the last to pillory the mob for its gullibility and capriciousness - was apostasy, a heretical venture away from the moral plumb line of her political faith. 

Yet, there he was - a handsome, chisel-jawed man of wealth, status, and influence expressing his anti-democratic sentiments to proto-liberal Jefferson, the man who understood not only the tenets of democracy but its ethos, its moral center, and its enduring legacy, and winning the argument. 

Fanny had spent months in fetid homeless shelters, on squirrely food lines, in nasty public housing gulags, beside in clinics with new transgender women, at the barricades with fierce lesbians, and it was beginning to show.  These were not America's best  and brightest, the Musks, Brins, Huangs, Bezos, and Zuckerbergs, at the top of the phylogenetic pyramid, a genius cluster never before seen, but on the lowest rung. 

And the masses she and her fellow activists were promoting so aggressively?  The foul, crime-ridden, endemically dysfunctional 'inner city'?  Pimps, ho's, Fentanyl dopers, crack-smoking losers? What was she thinking?

Again she blessed herself and again said, 'God forbid'; and yet these niggling, insidious, traitorous thoughts kept piling on, all because of one, fleeting, desultory, accidental glance at the ten dollar bill and the engraving of Alexander Hamilton. 

'Who's going to Anacostia tomorrow?', asked one of the assembled group.  Fanny groaned at the thought.  Another trip across the river in a caravan of three armored Chevrolet Suburbans bought second hand at a Defense Department auction, to meet with 'the community', local women demanding reparations for the city's indifference to the squalor and violence of the streets.  Anacostia, Brentwood, and any number of other communities in the blighted black wards of the city had done nothing but accept walkin' around money, entitlements, and a free pass and sit in their sinkholes waiting for more. 

Now, Fanny would never have thought that way before her epiphany - that startling revelation produced by one incidental look at the first Secretary of the Treasury. Before that, she would have gone across the river willingly and happily to join with the community in condemning racism and white privilege, marching with them to demand equal rights and justice.  Pharoah Jones, the self-anointed King of Anacostia, would have been her hero, the Black Odysseus of the ghetto; but now he was little more than a caricature, all fitted out with bling, grilled teeth, ermine coat, and snakeskin boots. 

Was all of this hatred, meanness, and vile assumptions always there, brewing and festering inside her, tamped down by her own idealism, her sunken costs, her Skinner-esque behavioral training?  Had she been a hypocrite all along?  Or like all epiphanies, did the truth simply sing out and she heard its chords?

'The latter, I hope', she said to herself as she demurred, claiming a conflict.  Anacostia would have to wait. 

Hamilton, as Secretary of the Treasury would never have agreed to or even considered such entitlement cash poured out in unaccountable sums on the basis of victimhood alone - a financial travesty, a consummate waste of valuable taxpayer monies, money that could be used to facilitate individual opportunity, create the infrastructure for wealth creation, and pave the way for private enterprise. 

Her advocacy group Scientists for Social Responsibility shamelessly took money from donors and earmarked federal funds and gave it away without a second thought given to accountability, performance, or positive outcomes. A virtual open sluice gate of dollars which would never be seen again in cash or in kind, misused, diverted, lost. 

When her masters shouted 'redistribution of wealth...Occupy Wall Street...from the haves to the have nots...to each according to his needs...' she had always raised her arms in solidarity.  The American economy was built on the backs of the poor and only the one percent benefited.  Now, thanks to that Augenblick of Alexander Hamilton on the ten dollar bill she had been about to use for a tuna sandwich and a diet Coke, she could only shake her head at her mindless credulousness.  How could she have?

An apocryphal tale, baldly untrue, said those in her former camaraderie who couldn't believe that a social justice warrior of Fanny's reputation, credential, and red badges of courage could be such a turncoat, a traitor.  But they were the blindered ones who had never had Fanny's revitalizing vision.  They were the ones still stuck in the mud, floundering but thinking it was only exuberance.  

Fanny had made her bones and her public image as a progressive, a liberal activist, and a professional harbinger.  Now that she was out of that particularly limelight, it was hard for the camera to pick her up.  By now in any case she is probably retired someplace warm with both her early life and her conservative reincarnation long recessed.  When sitting on a balcony in South Beach overlooking the Atlantic on a bright January day, nothing really matters anyway.   

Bodybuilders, Tarts, And Walkin' Around Money - Beating Trump At His Own Game

Arnold Schwarzenegger started off his career as a bodybuilder, then Hollywood actor, then two-time Governor of California.  There was something virile and queer about the idea of a Venice Beach muscle man that appealed to liberal Democrats.  Two-in-one, they said when thinking of the future, consolidate the gay contingent and appeal to young straight men. 

 

So they tapped Marcelo Fenn, one of the regulars on the beach for a starring role in a campaign ad aimed at consolidating a Democratic majority in the House.  No bodybuilder on Venice beach was straight, and anyone passing by would know at a glance. Queer as can be, all bulging glistening muscles, tight little bikini, and cute spotters.  The word 'muscle' comes from the Latin for 'mouse', for the Ancient Romans thought that a he-man's twitching biceps looked like a wriggling mouse.  How gay!

In any case Marcelo claimed he was straight but that was for commercial purposes, for he had the former California governor in mind as he did his sets on the beach.  Yes, being that kind of buff was an insular thing, a gay thing, not like in the old days when kids looked at Conan the Barbarian and Hercules in New York as just great action flicks.  No, Venice beach was one thing and one thing only, so if Marcelo was to pursue his political ambitions, he would have to lose the thong and the Coppertone and dress the part. 

To keep bread on the table, he continued his job as Master Trainer at Pietro's Gym in Redondo, but worked his way up the political ladder, first as a willing and tireless volunteer for Alderman Harlan Oates, then mayoral candidate, Bettina Robes, then for Patterson Ilk, aspiring Congressman from California's Thirty-Third district.  Finally, noticed by Harlan Adams, the Democratic party's outreach managers to the gay community charged with assembling an 'alternative' campaign nucleus, Marcelo was tapped to be an important Democratic operative, a 'swing' campaigner, reaching out to both sides of the gender aisle. 

The second most important and unlikely member of the newly-formed outreach team, was Wanda Fobbs, an octoroon pole dancer from Louisiana who was famous for her provocative, tarty, low-brow routines that had great appeal among the white dock workers at the Port of New Orleans.  Her sultry looks, her sinuous, raw sexuality, and almost irresistible appeal, made her one of the Quarter's biggest attractions. 

Wanda (nee Betty Barnes) was, like Marcelo, ambitious.  Turning pole dancing into higher office was not a routine affair, but someone with her brains, seductive charm, and easy companionship were made for politics, and, again like Marcelo, decided to make her way in the electoral arena.  First ward heeler, then alderman's aide, then mayoral campaign liaison to the North Ward, and finally in the train of her Congressman running for re-election, she was realizing her dream.

The reason for the success of both Marcelo and Wanda was not their sharp political insights or their agile intelligence, but their low-end personas.  They were at home in the seediest, tackiest, most disreputable places.  Venice Beach was a tourist attraction exactly because of its sideshow appeal.  These beefy queer guys in thongs and barbells were not real, they were Barnum & Bailey inventions, tarted up and tricked out for paying customers; but no one could doubt their presence.  It was hard not to look at these grotesque creatures, tiny heads on swollen, impossibly muscled bodies; and they knew it. Marcelo was a crowd pleaser par excellence. 

The clubs were Wanda appeared had the same appeal.  Wanda couldn't possibly be real, slithering up and down the pole, pussy hard by, eyes closed in ecstasy.  She had to be an invention, but what a creation! It was this innate sense of crowd appeal which lent her imagination to politics, and she was as right as rain.  

Harlan Adams knew right off that Wanda was exactly the right person to appeal to dockers, longshoremen, long-haul truckers, pipe fitters, mechanics, and crane operators.  The working class, the unvarnished, unpretentious, down the line rutters and solid Democrats who, under the DEI, race-gender-ethnicity progressive things, began to doubt their allegiance 

The final member of the select Democrat campaign team was Pharoah Jones, otherwise known as The King of Anacostia, Washington, DC's most blighted, crime-ridden, drug-addled inner city neighborhood.  Jones was a pimp, a drug dealer, a numbers runner, and a fixer.  He was smart, able, opportunistic, and without an iota of moral compunction.  He was up for anything. 

As such he attracted the attention of DC politicians who needed an operative in Ward 8, someone who could spread the generous walkin' around money they had in their personal treasuries.  Jones could buy votes like nobody's business.  He exacted promises for a generous 'emolument' but was there as an enforcer if the returns were not commensurate with his payouts. 

The black inner city community was infamous for its indifference to the vote.  Residents were happy enough to live and let live, or better put, their off-the-grid livelihoods were more than enough.  Dismissed by the white people of Ward 3, Upper Northwest's patrician elite who wished that everything in  Washington east of the Anacostia River would suddenly hive off and drift out to sea, black men could do without them, forge their own destiny. 

It was not surprising, then, that Pharoah Jones came to the attention of Harlan Adams.  He was exactly the man he was looking for - a smart, street savvy, opportunistic, ambitious black man who could work wonders with the inner city for the Democrat party. 

Now, there were many important Democrat constituencies that Harlan needed to serve, the lesbian and transgender communities to name just two; but with Marcelo, Wanda, and Pharoah he felt he had the hard core around which a truly diverse, influential team could be built. 

This would show that homophobic, racist bigot Trump! and beat him at his own game.  He was one for identity politics - what with his white, blonde air-heads, his yachts, mansions, Mar-a-Lago, golf courses and ditzy, bourgeois ballrooms and arches.  He played gutter politics and made it seem like high-class noblesse oblige.  

In contrast to Harlan's engagement of prime Democrat constituencies with respect, Trump pandered, threw red meat to his MAGA wingnuts, and made it all look like passionate leadership. Two could play that game, but Harlan's was honorable. 

It wasn't long before the triad of Marcelo, Wanda, and Pharoah began to bicker.  That's what happens when you get newly entitled bitches together, said Harlan; but he had a hard time separating them, and election time was coming up.  He needed them out their hustling, not sitting here on Capitol Hill in a cat fight. 

It didn't work of course - the diversity cabal, that is.  The Trump legions were everywhere and routing Democrat candidates who still hung on to transgender surgery, up-to-the-last-minute abortion, jungle tom-toms everywhere, the primacy of the undocumented, and all the rest. 

Harlan was undaunted.  'I did my best'.  It was just that he underestimated the feistiness of the diverse and the food fights that they seemed always to have.  

'Better luck next time', said one of Trump's advance men who was a collegial adversary of Harlan who was already planning an even more aggressive outreach into Maine of all places. 

S.E.T.I. Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence - Nonplussed In Crown Heights, Orthodox Jews Say We Could Use Some

'I knew it', said Abe Finkelstein to his lifelong friend Shmuel. 'I always said we needed it', referring to a headline stating that the first messages from an extraterrestrial intelligence had been received. 

Abe and Shmuel had joked for years about the dumbing down of America, and how they would welcome an alien intelligence which might up things up a bit.  They both lived in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, the most Orthodox Jewish neighborhood outside of Jerusalem, a place of faith, learning, and modest living. 

 

Abe owned a small clothing store on Flatbush Avenue, catered to the old yentas of the neighborhood who still made their own clothes, as severe as Iranian burqas, but with none of that Islamic panache.  

At least those Iranian women wore their drapes in style - the finest gabardine and silk, tailored to perfection, the line impeccable, the cut magnificent - and Abe offered advice to Mrs. Pinkus and Mrs. David to look, just look at what could be done with the severe clothes they were expected to wear. 

 

'You're a beautiful woman', Abe said to Sadie Pinkus, 'and with all due respect to you and your husband, please look, just look at what I can do for you'.  Abe Finkelstein was not only a clothier but a tailor who had learned his trade on Seventh Avenue, cutting fabric for Lowenstein & Markus in an industrial loft but the magic of his scissors, how he turned a bolt of cloth into something the Queen of Sheba herself would wear, became the talk of the trade.  

When he decided to buy his own shop in Crown Heights, Lowenstein himself took him aside and said, 'Money is no object', but of course money was always the object for the old Jew who had made more than a king's ransom thanks to pinching pennies and squeezing the cutters.  No, Abe said, thanking his patron, I want to go on my own. 

Shmuel was a rabbi, a Talmudic scholar, one of the few Jews in Crown Heights who had memorized the entire Pentateuch in the original ancient Hebrew, could quote chapter and verse with ease and always with exact and pertinent reference.  He was proud to be one of the People of the Book, a caretaker not only of the Bible, but of Jewish history, the Semitic tribes of the Arabian desert, the Babylonian exile, the Kingdoms of David and Saul.  It was all one, universal whole.  Every time he read Exodus he thought of his own travels from Egypt to Jericho, reliving the hegira of Moses. 

Shmuel wished that his friend Abe would return to the book, not just sit seder every once and a while, or go to temple on Yom Kippur and Purim,; but travel to Israel, pray at the Wailing Wall, and reconfigure his life to resemble Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. 

But Abe had no patience for such Biblical academia. The world needed only so many rabbis but how many tailors of his genius and clothiers of his canny business sense were there?  Ok, many, but that was beside the point.  Life was to be led, enjoyed as far as tradition, culture, and society permitted, and to die a prosperous man. 

What the two men shared was an incredulousness about the state of the nation.  Morons on every streetcorner, standards lowered to let anyone with racial sob story into Harvard, jungle music, pimps, tarts, hookers all breeding and interbreeding until New York was seething with addicts, delinquents and criminals.  'Another flood', said Shmuel, 'even if it involves us.' 

'Did you read the paper?', Abe asked Shmuel one afternoon when they met at Rapaport's for mushroom barley soup.

'Why?', said Shmuel. 'What did I miss?

'Only the biggest story this side of Pearl Harbor', said his friend. 'We have been visited', and went on to tell the story of the coherent, constant, repeated algorithmic signals coming from outer space.  For the first time since S.E.T.I, the agency in charge of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, was formed, its parabolic antennae pointed towards Alpha Centauri and beyond, and information concerning life on Planet Earth was sent, was there a response.  

 

In a guarded public announcement, the Defense Secretary simply said that 'We're working on it' and deferred questions of a coming alien presence on earth.  Yet, of course there was no way to gloss over the bare fact that an intelligible, intelligent, highly complex series of mathematical equations were being sent from an unknown extraterrestrial source. 

'What else is new?', said Shmuel, 'God is infinite, and I'm still hungry'.  The soup and sesame rolls were never enough but Abe never wanted to go the extra block to Katz's ('I've gotta watch my heart') and so they ate light.  

'Don't be so nonplussed', said Abe, incredulous at his friend's nonchalance. 'This will change everything'; but Shmuel was unmoved.  A few equations didn't mean the end of the world, and maybe they could help.  

'As I said' replied Shmuel, 'if they're so smart, we could use a little of it. '

Not everyone took the news so calmly. Across town in Tenafly, a meeting of the Baptist Ecumenical Ministry was hastily called to discuss the meaning of this astounding news. 

The pastors fought like cats and dogs.  One said that Earth was specially created by God and the sin committed on Earth would affect the rest of creation. The Bible makes it clear that Adam's sin affected the whole universe. This means that any aliens would also be affected by Adam's sin, but because they are not Adam's descendants, they can't have salvation. Christ's work of salvation can only apply to humans as the descendants of Adam. 

Another took the floor and insisted that although God’s dominion extends to all beings in the universe, if  an extraterrestrial lacks a spiritual aspect, an eternal soul to save, then it does not need saving.

A third contested the others and said that  perhaps extraterrestrials aren't sinners, like humans, and therefore aren't in need of saving.  But given the fact that all known intelligent beings (human beings) are sinners, it is likely that all other intelligent life in the universe would also be. 

Assuming that the latter argument is true – all intelligent life must sin – than God may have incarnated himself multiple times according to the particular configurations of sin and intelligence on other planets.  Noted Baptist theologian clotured the argument with this:

Another possibility is that God incarnated multiple times, sending a version of himself down to save each inhabited planet separately. However, based on the best guesses of how many civilizations we might expect to exist in the universe, and how long planets and civilizations are expected to survive, God's incarnations would have had to be in about 250 places simultaneously at any given time, assuming each incarnation took about 30 years. 

'That's what resurrection will do for you', commented Shmuel. 'No wonder why Christians are upset'.  That was the thing about Judaism - no frills, no cannibalism, just a majestic universalism. 'Whoever sent those messages we could invite for seder'. 

Now, Jews have crackpots too and Jewish mysticism, the Kabbalah, is home to many of them.  They are convinced that each letter of the Torah has a numerical equivalent and the sum total adds up to the Fibonacci sequence or the Golden Mean, God's word, universal. 

'There's a Kabbalah in Red Hook', said Shmuel. 'They'll give an arm and a leg for those alien number sequences'. 

'And do what with them?'

'A ticket to ride.  There has to be someone at the head of the line on the spaceship'. 

'Don't be so Jewish', said Abe.  It's not a wedding. 

It turned out to be nothing.   A Chinese kid from East Orange hacked into the S.E.T.I. computer and fed it quadratic equations from his cousin's math book, set them on a timer for regular intervals, and went off to help his parents at the restaurant.  When the Defense Department finally figured out that they had been had, and not only that could not trace the hacker, the quickly covered their tracks, issued a non-committal statement of 'dysfunctionality' at the central New Mexico parabolic site, and let it go at that. 

'Too bad', said Shmuel when the hack became public. 'Kids today can't add 2+2, so we all could use a boost'.