Love In Miserable Places - How A Savvy Man Turned Poverty Into Seduction

Roland Fields was a consultant for the World Bank, international development's premier institution for the alleviation of poverty in the Third World, and it routinely made grants and soft loans to African countries in need of water, pest control, improved health and education facilities, and programs of social welfare. 

 

At its inception the Bank was the lender of last resort, the agency to which countries with legitimate needs but bad credit turned after being rejected by the capital markets. Later it expanded its reach and began funding its own infrastructure projects, capital improvements which would provide the foundation for private investment.  

Only later under the stewardship of Robert McNamara, Lyndon Johnson's hardline Vietnam era Secretary of Defense, a man racked with guilt over the bombing of the North and the millions of lives lost in an unnecessary, self-serving war, did the Bank start giving money away. 

It wasn't roads, bridges, and airports that African countries needed, but caring, compassionate, understanding programs to improve the general welfare. Overnight McNamara turned the Bank from a banker's institution to a social worker's welfare office. 

The Big Men of Africa salivated over the prospect of such limitless soft money over which there would be little oversight or review. Africa was to be trusted, said McNamara after his epiphany.  Brown and black people needed special consideration, a kind of universal reparation for the horrific damage and death in Vietnam. 

 

So, under the new aegis and moral philosophy, billions of dollars went missing as corrupt dictators simply siphoned the money to their offshore accounts while Bank-financed projects went nowhere. The Bank always demurred, restructuring the loans and adding more significant dates for repayment, but because the Big Men knew that the Bank wanted to lend money more than they wanted or needed it, they paid no attention to repayment schedules, continued round after round of refinancing, and became fabulously wealthy. 

The United States was no different, and poured hundred of millions of no-accountability money into the coffers of the continent's most corrupt countries.  Anything to keep them friendly and congenial to American interests, and to assure access to the vast energy and mineral resources underground. 

As part of this immense charade were cadres of young, inspired, idealistic aid workers who offered their services for very little to help the black man, to redress the wrongs of slavery, and to do the right, Christian thing.  They went willingly to the worst shitholes of the world, countries which thanks to the pillage and indifference of a succession of venal politicians, remained poor, backward, and economically retarded.

Polly Flanders was one of these enthusiastic volunteers who was hired by Children Are Precious, a Washington non-profit organization specializing in child health and welfare and favored recipient of USAID financing.  After training she was assigned to perhaps the most corrupt, miserable place on the continent for a two-year assignment. 

She welcomed the challenge, and even when installed in her mosquito-ridden, lockless, roach infested hotel room, her spirits did not flag. She was there to help, after all, not have a good time. 

Now, the President of the country knew that he had to provide sumptuous lodging for those high-level officials in the country to negotiate loans and grants and those mining companies bidding on gas and oil exploration leases.  The Independence was a five-star hotel overlooking the river with two Olympic size pools, three restaurants curated by French chefs, and marvelous, European-style service; and it was there that Roland Fields stayed. 

 

Yet he spent most of his time at the St. Louis, the awful hotel where Polly and her American colleagues stayed, for he knew that after some months in-country, the blush would be off the bloom of the rose, and she would have become if not despondent, then needy and lost.  She was a faded rose worth picking, Fields thought, and as he had in the past, would, thanks to his affection and commiseration, have any one of these young girls for the asking. 

Everything in life is a quid pro quo, Fields said, and love was no different.  His seduction of a lonely, desperate girl would benefit them both.  By the time he made his first overture, Polly had been shuffled back and forth by the Ministry of Health, posted to bloodstained, needle-strewn rural dispensaries, quartered in abandoned barracks and prisons, and left to rot in malarial dens.  

'You look unhappy', Roland said to her at the bar of the St. Louis, and for the first time in many months she looked into a handsome, untroubled, interested face - the face of a man who might take care of her. 

Of course these were adolescent fairy tale dreams - she had only just met the man - but such romantic imaginings had completely taken over her mind.  The misery of Africa had overwhelmed her - not so much the suffering of Africans, but the absolute, gross, horrific rot, filth, and refuse everywhere.  No one had told her of the unremitting awfulness of the place, the sense of desperation, isolation, and social impotence. 

 

And there was Roland Fields, fresh from his swim in the Independence pool, sitting next to her, offering to buy her a beer, a man obviously interested in her as a person, not only as a woman. The President's son had built a hunting lodge in the forest, a half-day's trip upcountry, and thanks to Roland's solicitude and promise of fair financial treatment, he was allowed to use it, and Roland invited Polly to join him there over the weekend.  

It was a simple yet well-appointed and well-managed affair with servants, fresh capitaine from the river, soft, canopied, netted beds, and the silence of the forest.  Bed tea on the verandah, a sumptuous breakfast, and hours of sitting idly and happily on the deck high in the canopy above. 

Polly immediately accepted and as he expected, they began their affair.  What could be more perfect - the 'real' Africa, not the pestilential slums of the capital, the rude and indifferent government officials.  This is what she had signed up for - the romance of the interior, the primitive simplicity, the magnificence of the jungle and the love of a wonderful man. 

It was the oldest game in the world - flowers, a box of candy, remembering her birthday, their anniversary - and the weekend at the hunting lodge changed Polly completely. She went back to the St. Louis with renewed vigor, patience, and fortitude.  After all she would see Roland often, and her life would change.  When he left to return to Washington, she suffered.  She hoped she wasn't falling in love with him, and waited anxiously for his return.

 

The affair lasted three months, although he visited the country only twice during that period. His beat included other African countries all mired in the same pestilential swamps of corruption, indifference, tribal nepotism, payback and greed.  The pickin's there would be just as congenial for romance and seduction. 

There was something about these awful places that attracted young American women - the chance to get away from routine, to take risks, to have adventure and the unknown in their lives, to be independent and forthcoming, to be taken seriously. But there was always a familiar letdown, a feeling of utter aloneness and remove.  The worse the place, the more abysmal the country, the farther the fall from idealism to moroseness; and it was in the breech that Roland was most at home. 

No one was hurt by all this.  Well, sure, the young women were disconsolate for a while after Roland left, but got over it, managed well, and went home proud of their accomplishments and their tour of duty.  As for Roland, the life suited him to a tee and he happily continued until it was time to return to wife and family and play that game for a while. 

Vacancy - Why The Vaporous Ideas Of Social Reform Have Such Appeal

After four years of harping, hectoring, and whingeing, the Left, badly defeated in an electoral rout to Donald Trump and the Republicans, are still at it, singing the same tune, banging the same drum, and still marching to Zion. 

  

Why is that? Why despite the radical turnaround of the country is the Left still so tiresome and banal?  The case for the black man has been made, examined, and made again; that for gender fluidity, transgenders, and the gender spectrum hawked and flogged without a rest; and that for climate change hollered, banged, and hammered to beat the band - and yet these issues to most of the country are of marginal interest, matters of indifference and irrelevance. 

The inner cities are still hellholes of violence, drugs, and social dysfunction.  The idea of a multi-faceted, fungible human sexuality has been rejected out of hand for its febrile assumptions; and concern for a fiery climate Armageddon dismissed in the expectation of rational human adaptation and ingenuity. 

 

America, say progressives, is worse than the worst African shithole - a corrupt, venal, oppressive, hateful, parochial place unconcerned about the planet, social dignity, and genuine human generosity.  It is a place which deliberately and persistently marginalizes the poor, demonizes life in the middle, and pursues the almighty dollar at all costs. 

Only a few, they say, have the foresight, the intelligence, and the commitment to revive and revitalize what few democratic sentiments still exist; to educate the ignorant swamp dwellers, crackers, and Mississippi coonhound, gunrack, bass boat racists.

 

These prophets of doom and self-appointed evangelists of mercy are so shuttered, cloistered, and immured in their own apocalyptic nightmares and as wild-eyed and crazed as the most unhinged streetcorner preacher that no one is listening.

The freak show and circus acts of the 'upenders', the born-again social reformers for whom only a brave new world of vision, compassion, and righteousness is the answer are history.  They have not just been demoted and removed from office, but relegated to some nasty gulag, some horrible reservation in North Dakota, isolated and forgotten. 

'La lucha continua!', shouted Bob Arthur, longtime social justice warrior, veteran of freedom rides, barricades, the Pettis bridge, attack dogs, and ax handles. Stalwart supporter of women, gays, the poor and disadvantaged; and resolute enemy of the entitled rich.  He was a liberal's liberal, a man without blemish, without error, and without a doubt.  

He was at once the champion of the now routed Left and an example of why it has so lost favor.  His absolute fidelity to progressivism was his political myopia.  His devotion to the canon and his irreproachably unquestioning acceptance of its principles made him the poster boy for political hysteria.  

There is no doubt that progressivism is a religion, secular but with all the trappings of true belief.  It has its credo, its doctrine and liturgy; its saints, priests, and acolytes; and its book, altar, and cross. That can be the only explanation for a progressive faith without proof, a collection of unproved assumptions which if recited enough become part of the holy order.  

Someone who looks reality in the face and rejects it in favor of some kind of beautiful illusion is ipso facto religious. The reality of America - prosperous, land of opportunity, practical, enterprising, and patriotic - is replaced by a miasmic vision of hell and notions of salvation. 

 

Bob had been so indoctrinated, so completely coopted by The Movement that he could no longer think for himself.  Taking a shit could only remind him of the shambling outhouses of slave quarters; making periodic love to his wife made him think only of le droit du seigneur and the sexual advantage taken by plantation grandees and their overseers. Eating was never a pleasure but a reminder of plenty amidst want.  He was a painfully insistent man and an intolerable bore. 

The poor, the black, the marginalized fit into every discussion, every backyard barbecue, every Christmas dinner.  Bob hammered away at the shibboleths of the Right with unremitting passion, undaunted by their solidity and resistance.  Right and good would always prevail. 

If this wasn't enough, Bob met with his support group every Thursday night, men and women for whom the ascendancy of Donald Trump was not just an electoral victory, but the beginning of the End of Days. 

These weekly sessions were the only emotional outlet for Bob and his colleagues.  Every other hour of the week was consumed with political activism, battlefield operations, and theatre strategy.  The group offered solace and tears - it was OK to cry here, every shoulder was there to shed a tear on. It was as weepy as women at a wedding or disconsolate over the loss of a lover.  

‘Oh, God', wailed Bob, bawling like a baby, embraced by his friends but unrelieved of the horrible existential pain of defeat. 

The whole progressive kit-and-kaboodle was being tossed aside by the MAGA Trumpers - not one pillar of the carefully constructed liberal architecture would remain standing and the whole edifice would collapse on itself in one final, devastating crash.  

What would they do? Where would they go?  No one wanted them anymore, but they all still had fire in the belly, and an absolute faith in the rightness of their cause.  'Impaled on the horns of a dilemma' Bob remembered his old Yale professor Vincent Scully saying about the mountains of Cnossos and the goddesses of Crete and the conundrums of life. 

Irony and sad humor aside, where indeed would Bob go?  Now at the very fag end of his career, he was hoarse with decades of rebellious defiance, a bit saggy and lined from years in the trenches and on bad beds, sallow and grey from too many hours in moldy basement hideouts, and mentally agitated and confused after so many varied causes.  

'Time to retire, dear', said his wife Agnes, herself an indefatigable advocate for peace and justice, but far more sensible than her husband. Yet the thought of life on a chaise lounge on a Florida beach was anathema to him.  He would rather die in his traces, the death of a hero. 

Retirement came to him, he did mot choose it. Fewer and fewer organizations wanted him and his antiquated notions of integration and communitarianism, so his engagements were few and far between.  Now that he and his colleagues had been routed and were heading for the exits, there would be no podiums, daises, and platforms; so why not buy that condo in Sarasota?

Even with that consoling thought Bob could not give up thinking of the black man, the inner city pestilence in which he was forced to live and the white supremacy which kept him there.  He tossed and turned with alternating images of pina coladas and steel-grilled, pimp-walking street dons. 

Ninety percent of life is just showing up said Groucho or Woody Allen, and so it was that showing up on the balcony of his condo in Naples, sipping a sundowner, and reading a trashy novel was part of the ebb and flow of life.  Now, most of his younger colleagues thought it strange that a man of such political commitment and religious fervor could vegetate like that, a turnip, a beet; but Bob had met with his maker and they agreed that his dues had been paid and a few years time off before heaven was certainly OK.

Love With An Older Gentleman - The Happy Ending To The Life Of A Privileged Man

Prentiss Hetherington was a descendant of the Northumberland Hetheringtons, the first member of which was knighted by Henry II - the Duke of Hampshire - and later descendants paid tribute by Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II. 

 

Prentiss was an American of patrician roots - a close relative of both Cabots and Lodges in Boston and direct descendant of John Davenport, member of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, founder of New Haven and scion of the Newport, New Bedford, and Nantucket whaling and Three-Cornered slave trade families.

The Hetheringtons had long divested their holdings in the Prentiss Holding Company, LLC, the original Wall Street-backed financial institution responsible for the millions of dollars in transatlantic and Caribbean trade, but were principal shareholders in the company's offspring, the Hetherington Trust, an investment fund worth billions. 

Prentiss went to Groton and then to Yale, Class of 19___, and then took up his family's seat on the New York stock exchange as well as continuing to manage it's extensive wealth portfolio.  He had homes in Beacon Hill, Portofino, Gstaad, and Palm Beach, and remained married to Clementine Adderley, a woman of equal social status, recognition and wealth whom he had met at Wellesley and carried on a famously outrageous affair in Boston and New Haven before marrying to bells, ushers, bouquets, and champagne on Nantucket. 

 

All went along swimmingly in the life of the Hetheringtons - a life led with taste, virtue, and good causes - until Prentiss began to feel that familiar male scratchiness that sets in in late male middle age - that unnamed, improvident, but persistent sexual desire for youthful encounters common to all men. 

Now, Prentiss had had his affairs - Usha, the lovely Palestinian princess with whom he had spent his Thousand and One Nights in Jerusalem; Berthe, the Ice Queen, the Icelandic beauty who, out of an exuberant desire to help others travelled to the same remote outpost in Africa where Prentiss was overseeing his family's investments in diamonds, emeralds, and rare earths; and Monica, the tennis player from Serbia who, beaten badly in the Prague finals, was looking for solace at the bar of the St. Regis hotel.

 

For many years Prentiss remained faithful to his long-suffering wife, and it was with surprise and renewed energy that another woman had come so late into his life.  She, an ordinary working girl with few ambitions other than Branch Manager, with little interest in older men as she entered her thirties, and beginning to accept the long slide to spinsterhood and a single life, was not primed for Prentiss Hetherington, not by a long shot. 

Yet there she was at the Mayflower bar, drinking Stoli martinis and picking at the mixed nuts, when Prentiss struck up a conversation.  They had little in common. She was a working girl from Gaithersburg, he the scion of one of America's finest families; but difference makes no difference at Happy Hour, and all that mattered to Lisa Marvis was attentive company, and all that mattered to Prentiss Hetherington was the interest of a young woman thirty years his junior. 

If young women like her can be interested in older men like him, then sex never dies, essential responses being forever alive and well. Whether she shuffled papers, filled out forms, or filed claims mattered little. For him, nearing the last decades of his life, such incidentals were of no concern; and for her, a lonely, alone, but still vitally sexual young woman, age did not matter in the least. 

And so it was that they became known as the odd couple - for despite their attempts to keep the affair quiet, Washington being the porous, gossipy town that it is, their romance became the thing, the affair that affirmed love itself.  The two were not predictable caricatures - gold-digging working girl lands fabulously wealthy Boston patrician; older rich man buys his way to sexual satisfaction - but a cute couple imagined in a romantic fairy tale.  The knight in shining armor woos diamond in the rough, Mr. Right finds his true love in the ashes. 

The Coleman Silk character in Phillip Roth's novel, The Human Stain, an older man, a college dean, having an affair with a young janitor says to a reproachful colleague, 'Granted she's not my first love; and granted she's not my best love, but goddamn it, she's my last love. Doesn't that count for something?'; and of course it does for any older man, married for decades to the same tired, sour-smelling wife and with the same virility and male desire he was born with.  

Konstantin Levin, a principal character in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina reflects on God's supreme irony - having created Man, a supremely intelligent, creative, insightful, humorous being, and after granting him a spare, scant few decades on earth, consigns him for all eternity in the cold, hard ground of the steppes. 

The corollary to that irony is that God created men with a lifelong desire for women, but granted them only a few decades to satisfy it; and Prentiss had been feeling that irony and that awful consignment until he met Lisa Marvis from HR. 

Their weekends in her one-bedroom walk-up in Adams Morgan were inexplicable - no foresight or romantic imagination could have predicted such a happy, unregulated, free and easy sexual affair.  Their partings became more tearful as they planned their life together, each ignoring reality. He could never divorce his wife for a child of Iowa farmers, a young women with potential but without ability; and she could not possibly care for a man approaching doddering old age. 

All this, the best of all possible December-May affairs, was what made the end of Prentiss' life bearable. Like thousands of older men before him, he would die in the arms of a young lover, and he looked forward to the moment. 

It was a male moment - a man relieved of husbandly duty, responsibility, and fidelity; his own man, the pasha of a formerly unremarkable, ordinary life, an Übermensch, the Man. 

'There is no dignity in rutting', a Yale classmate arrogantly said to him upon finding out about his dalliances with an office girl; but Prentiss was unmoved and uncontrite. There was no patrician lodging, no family legacy, no prescribed duty that trumped this - the final, uncompromised statement of a man. 

The affair of course did not last.  Lisa went back to Iowa, and Prentiss returned to his wife, turned over management of his estate to his sons, and retired to his beachfront villa in St. Bart's. 

It is often said that a December-May affair, while firing the sexual jets for one last time, leaves the older male lover devastated that he must live out his life in dismally celibate years.  Yet Prentiss looked at it another way - the affair was seminal, worth far more than the hundreds he had had as a young man, a prize, an early Christmas present. 

As he moved to advanced old age, he remembered many things - wife, parents, children and more - but on his deathbed he thought only of Lisa from HR.  Not God, not eternity, not loss; but the renovating, immeasurably happy life at the end.