A White Man Wants To Be Black And Father A Hundred Children - The Irresistible Allure Of Black Machismo

Harvey Stillson was an ordinary man living an ordinary life.  In it there was no drama, no outbursts, no recriminations.  It was a patiently constructed life, one of habit, order, and simple expectations. Yet Harvey was a profoundly unhappy man.  As he was approaching an age where more years were behind him than ahead, he had become restive, nervous, and jittery. 

'What on earth is wrong with you?, his wife asked, less out of concern for her husband than for upsetting the settled nature of the marriage - one which brooked no disruption, let alone random questioning of purpose, affection, or concern.  Besides, it was women who were supposed to keep their feelings to themselves, rarely confessional and hectored by badgering husbands not the reverse.  In short, this mopey, unresponsive man had become a problem. 

Harvey came by this resolved character naturally.  The son of a pharmacist and a homemaker in a socially respectable, complaisant family happy enough, economically secure enough, and healthy enough to steady the course, make no waves, keep to the shipping lanes, and always have a hold full of cargo. 

'A good boy', said Father Brophy, 'a very good boy', suggesting a vocation, the priesthood or a monastic life.  The Catholic Church always needed boys like Harvey, serious boys of sincere calling. 

His teachers were equally fond of the Stillson boy.  Such a patient, responsible student, a boy always to color between the lines, write neatly, and to come to school prepared.  'A promising future', they all agreed. 

And so it was that Harvey even before he left elementary school, had been fully formed.  Somehow and quite remarkably his moral compass already pointed to true north, his principles as foundational of those in the American Constitution, and his mind, body, and spirit in perfect alignment.

Not surprisingly his adult life followed the straight and narrow.  He was built for duty, responsibility, and patriotism and little could sway or deter him.  He chose a modest profession, a modestly attractive and intelligent wife, and a life of security.  Whether in his personal life, his financial investments, his job, or his leisure he was firmly located.  No one, especially he, ever wondered about Harvey Stillson. 

Which was why this unsettled, scratchy period was a surprise to his wife who had gotten used to his regularity and reassuring sameness.  Harvey himself didn't know exactly what was wrong except that nothing seemed right. There was nothing that teased him away, the tickled him, that even vaguely tempted him.  He felt like a silhouette, a stick figure, an imaginary number.  

The polite after-work highball turned into double martinis and Wild Turkey.  His work became addled and imprecise and his attentiveness to his wife, the garden, and his children's wellbeing went missing. He shambled. 

Now at the time American popular culture had gone black.  Thanks to diversity, equity, and inclusion, black faces were everywhere, selling dentifrice, Doritos, Toyotas, and Schwab.  They were a race apart on the hardwood floor and the gridiron.  They were in every television serial, every major Hollywood movie.  

They were all bling, machismo, randy sexuality, and in-and-out fatherhood - all of which was lionized by white people who saw this culture as particularly expressive and human, far more than white culture which had always been prim and prissy, all Chippendale, Townsend, and Revere or bass boat and gunrack. There was no soul to white culture, no exuberance, no....joy. 

The black man had come from the primal forests of Africa to America attuned to nature and the primitive callings of physicality, sexuality, and male dominance.  Yes, he had come to America as a slave, but that did nothing to suppress his native masculinity - something the white man had never had. 

Wilt Chamberlain, the former professional basketball player said that he had had sex with over a thousand women, at which confession he winked.  Of course it was more than that, and there were far too many children borne of those relationships that he could count.  He was exuberantly male, unapologetic, in his sexual prime and a model for all men. 

Of course he was reviled by the white community.  The cult of blackness had not yet come to the fore, and such sexuality had yet to become the expression of black identity that it was in Harvey's day. In fact such sexuality was considered a threat.  Why should black men confine their sexual ambitions to the ghetto, and wasn't the white woman the prize of all prizes? 

This sexual deviance was borne of tribal primitivism and encouraged by slave owners who were happy to see their stable of slaves increase. Sexual abandon was good for business, so it was no wonder than in a ghettoized society, insular, ingrown, and still rooted in African soil, Wilt Chamberlains abounded. 

Time passed, white opprobrium became adulation.  The black man was now recognized as the natural successor to the white man.  African tribalism and its profound link to the environment, the Earth, and humanity itself was to be realized for the determining factor in human society.  

While there were some who said that fatherless families were signs of social dysfunction, that single motherhood was not a social paradigm like any other, and that catch-as-catch-can civility was antithetical to a national ethos of responsibility, most white people embraced the idea of diversity in all its forms. 

Perhaps Harvey Stillson took the black thing too far when he said that he wanted to sleep with a thousand women and father hundreds of children; but he couldn't help himself.  Every cossetted nun, every admonishing priest, every hectoring, badgering teacher was his enemy.  They were the ones that put him into this sexual straightjacket, whittled his soul down to nothing, left him an emotional beggar, a shadow of a man. 

Of course opening up to a black sexuality is not as easy as it sounds.  White feminism had put a lid on sexual adventurism.  No Means No had become the ethos, intercourse became a reading of road signs, license and registration checked at stops along the way.  Serial partners or worse multiple contemporaneous partners was ipso facto condemning.  Men who had such primitive desires, ignoring women for who they were not just as sexual objects, should be tarred, feathered, and castrated. 

Only black men got away with this awful opprobrium.  The long knives stayed away from the ghetto, residents there were living their own, respected cultural identity.  White censure, rule, and slavery were things of the past. 

It is a tough thing to wake up in the morning realizing that you have been a eunuch all your life, whipped and collared by women, forced into sexual sedation, and now exile.  

Despite everything - the violence, rapes, murders, incivility, and dysfunction of the ghetto, Harvey still wanted to be black, to be left to his own sexual devices, to love as and when he wished, trapped and warned by no woman.  He wanted to strut, pimp walk, macho it up like a ghetto prince. 

Bad luck of the draw.  He was white, as white as white bread, milk, and flour.  He could be nothing but a clerk in a minor accounting firm, doing people's taxes, correcting balance sheets, straightening out accounts and deposits, BLTs for lunch, a ride on the N6 home, feet up on the ottoman, an early dinner. 

And all the while black men in the inner city were having a grand old time, smoking a spliff, drinking malt liquor on the stoop, and having sex with women in a different block of the projects every night of the week. 

'Shape up', said his wife now more than irritated at her slovenly husband who had come loose from his moorings, and God only knew what he would do next. 

Nothing of course.  The die had been cast decades ago when he was a boy growing up in New Brighton, set in stone from an early age, given no chance whatsoever to be black, stuck in perennial whiteness and fidelity.  He couldn't even get up the gumption to invite Amanda from HR for a drink.  

Coaching, Inner Counseling, Emotional Healing - American Snake Oil Salesmanship At Its Very Best

Harpers Notch, Illinois a small town on the Mississippi River, Huckleberry Finn country. It was nowhere in particular and of no special note, just Grovers Corners kind of place - a town not unlike Thornton Wilders where good people lived ordinary lives. It had its share of tourism - readers of Twain's book wanted a look at the venue where Huck, Jim, and Tom Sawyer lived, but it was never a tourist attraction like Graceland or even Tupelo where Elvis Presley was born. 

The downtown was just like that of any other small town - Dot's kitchen which opened early for the bargemen who worked river, local police on early morning duty, and night shift workers at the 24-hour emergency health clinic. 

Employment was seasonal and intermittent.  Most people held two jobs - the towheads in the river always needed parting,  part-time haulers and axle-jacks always had a place at the depot, and a turn in the kitchen of Rivers Madness, the new age startup hoping to upgrade the farmland.   Few people had steady employment, were recently laid off, or had always cobbled together wispy jobs to make a living.  The law offices of Parker, James & Early did a desultory business.  Parker and James had long gone back east, leaving Early to handle the few cases of civil law that crossed his desk. 

There was the suit that Heidi Simmons brought against the Illinois Central for 'dereliction of duty', an odd codicil in Illinois labor law that offered protection and damages to anyone unduly inconvenienced by the railroad's operations. Heidi travelled from Harpers Notch to the western spur of the railroad, a whistle stop along the way north, little more than a place for minor repairs, water, and realignment.  Heidi decided she could lay claim to her rights under the arcane provisions of the law, and finally get out of debt and leave her miserably poor and uninteresting life. 

She won the suit, thanks to John Early's persuasive lawyering in Carbondale, moved to Beau Rivage trailer park, left her job as a janitorial aide at Billings Feed and Copper Wire, took a lover - a telephone lineman on temporary assignment from Rock Island- and engaged Roman Archer, therapist, psychological coach, and organic healer. 

Roman had recently hung out his shingle, advertised widely, and promoted his innovative, 'inner rooms' therapy.  This is how he described it in his online website:

Everyone has inner rooms, those private, intimate, personal sanctuaries of the heart and soul.  Inside these rooms are the keys to being, the pathways to becoming, the vibrations of one's true nature, and the bright light of happiness. Let me help you open those doors, free your spirit, and give wings to your soul

'Why not give it a try?, thought Heidi who had for the first time in her life a few dollars to spend and why not on herself.  Her life so far had been nothing but dreary, years of cleaning, scraping, unclogging, washing whatever in this dysfunctional, forgotten, crunchingly boring existence; and here was the chance to be unfettered, sailing in a ketch across the broad reaches of glittering ocean, climbing Himalayan heights. 

Roman Archer was an attractive man - not a drop of pretention, posturing, posing, or supposition.  He believed in what he was doing and felt that he could actually open the doors to the inner rooms of the most recondite and repressed individual.  

His basic training was a stitched together program of Sixties otherworldliness, Carlos Castaneda Mexican shamanic healing, New Age self-awareness, and a strand here and there from Carl Jung and B.F. Skinner.  The program's sponsors, benefactors, and advisors were dismissive of classical psychology - attempts to steal one's soul rather than rescue it - and felt that alternate mental therapy was the way of Old Testament prophets, African griots, and the medicine men of the Amazon. 

The residents of Harpers Notch had not a clue about any of this.  This New Age, shamanism, Gaia One Earth residency, and soul emerging energy was all an unknown, a mystery, and at best an import from Baltimore; but somehow it captured Heidi's imagination and curiosity and her new 'Why Not?' philosophy. 

Roman's offices were clean, nicely arranged, simple, and with portraits of  Jesus, Mohammed, the Buddha, Mother Teresa, Shiva, and Joan of Arc among others represented the highest evolution of the human spirit.  So strongly did Roman feel their emanations that he expressly designed 'A Gantlet of Holiness' whereby the newcomer to his practice would walk past the images of these spiritual greats and already be prepared for his therapy. 

During the first session Heidi was asked to dream. Roman was not interested in Freudian recreations of childhood trauma, sexual inhibitions, or psychological impediments.  He wanted to hear her 'other being' speak, the voice closeted in her inner rooms waiting to be let out. 

Heidi had no dreams or fantasies.  'I can tell you about my year at the Walmart in Little Rock', she said, 'Or mule skinning down Grand Canyon.  Two pissers of jobs, if you want to know the truth.  Took them only to pay for Baby Luke's hare lip and Rodney's engine chop on his beater '77...'

'Beautiful', said Roman. 'Peaceful, harmonious, and interwoven. '

A tough nut to crack, he thought as she rattled on about the toilets at Harper Notch city hall.  'You'd think that politicians would know how to shit right', she said and went on about the gross graffiti on the walls of the men's bathroom, the Tampax clogging the women's toilet and the gross leavings on the sinks.

'Wonderful', complimented Roman, anxious to get on to the associations with the Buddha who meditated at Nalanda, the first Buddhist monastery in India, a marvel of modern-style sanitation, the proto-idea of mens sana in corpore sano; but Heidi kept rattling on with insignificant irrelevancies.  The trip to her inner rooms would be a difficult one. 

'Let me tell you a story', Roman said, and recounted a story from the Ramayana where a great battle between Hanuman's army and that of the evil Sri Lankan emperor ensued.  Sturm und Drang and all the excitement that could to wake Heidi's dormant spirit. 

But all she could do was look at her watch, adjust her flip-flops, glance at the pictures on the Gantlet of Holiness and say, 'What's that got to do with Rodney, the toilets at City Hall, my fingering, buggering stepfather, and being broke from sunup to sundown?' 

'Everything in the world', replied Roman caught deep in an inescapable morass.  Nothing in his training had prepared him for this ignorant woman.  

As soon as these thoughts crossed his mind, he hated himself.  The problem was his not hers, and it was his job, his duty to help her, to find her way to her inner rooms.

Needless to say, a case of Bud Light, a rack of ribs, and a good screwing by Rodney did more for her lagging spirits than anything  Roman Archer could concoct. 

Roman never gave up.  The rivermen, farmers, and day-laborers who were his potential clients would eventually come and he would figure out ways to penetrate their resistance and locked tight inner rooms.  It would take time, patience, and practice, but he was ready. 

Of course he made no headway whatsoever.  Maybe if he moved his practice to Portland, he might find a more congenial, open, and needy clientele, but he already had two kids with one on the way, so made the trip to the Walmart/Target shopping center twenty miles out of town and sold hammers and saws in the Home Improvement Centers of both. 

It wasn't exactly that Heidi and the residents of Harpers Notch were all well-adjusted and not in need of psychological help.  Far from it.  Everyone has their moments.  It was just that Roman's impossibly fantastical ideas were the wrong fit. He would be better off in some Idaho panhandle commune, some throwback to the Sixties, but not here in Harpers Notch, definitely not here. 

The heartland of America, of course, is a sensible place, one where much is made out of little, where travails never become more than sticky patches, where misfortune is a given, family a blessing, and oddity rare. 

Sherwood Anderson wrote Winesburg, Ohio about 'grotesques' - misfits in the prescribed order of things, brilliant in their own way, desperate for an understanding audience, but slated for nothing more than far corners, a remoteness from the town, unsure of stepping out. 

Tennessee Williams wrote of Laura in The Glass Menagerie and Alma in Summer and Smoke, young women of irrepressible sexuality but locked within - and here Roman Archer was on target - their inner rooms. 

Archer was not up to the task.  He was far removed from the inner workings of the minds of people like Laura and Alma or any of Anderson's characters.  He adopted a template as rigid and prescriptive as anything Freud or Adler had come up with; and there was no way that he could even fathom the anomie of Heidi Simmons.  It was too subtle, too cultural, too indefinable for any of his New Age nostrums. 

Did Heidi really need coaching? Or was it comic book fantasy, for what Roman was offering was indeed something out of Marvel or Japanese manga?

Roman Archer was supernumerary, an incidental bit of popular culture, a social vagabond, a hobo jumping freight trains, a flash in the pan, if anything a channeling of the dreamy Sixties, at best a good listener. 

Some critics claim that the rise of coaching has something to do with America itself - the nastiness, divisiveness, chaotic blackness, and social foundering demand a focus on the inner self.  Others say that it indeed has something to do with America - its long history of snake oil salesmen, con artists, and shell game masters. 

Heidi did fine, used her money to far better purposes; and Roman managed to right his ship. Nothing to write home about, but this is a tale of dull people. 

 

Lying - AIDS, COVID, Climate Change, Balderdash, And Cheating On Your Wife, The Currency Of America

The Devil in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov asks, 'What would life be without me?', and quickly answers, 'It would be holy, but tedious'.

So against the grain I serve to produce events and do what's irrational because I am commanded to. For all their indisputable intelligence, men take this farce as something serious, and that is their tragedy. They suffer, of course ... but then they live, they live a real life, not a fantastic one, for suffering is life. Without suffering what would be the pleasure of it? It would be transformed into an endless church service; it would be holy, but tedious 

Everybody lies, and if there were only the truth, life would be, as the Devil knows, a thudding bore.  Husbands cheat on their wives and come up with the most transparent lies - 'working late at the office' no longer has currency and much more elaborate lies must take its place.  

Children are lied to to keep them quiet, women lie about orgasms to get off their backs, teachers want to maintain order.  

The BBC reported on ‘instrumental lying’ – tactical untruths to get children to behave:

The study, published in the International Journal of Psychology, examined the use of "instrumental lying" - and found that such tactically-deployed falsehoods were used by an overwhelming majority of parents in both the United States and China - based on interviews with about 200 families.

The most frequent example was parents threatening to leave children alone in public unless they behaved. Persuasion ranged from invoking the support of the tooth fairy to telling children they would go blind unless they ate particular vegetables.

Apparently parents resort to very twisted lies to control their children. The most frequent example was parents threatening to leave children alone in public unless they behaved. The BBC report went on:

There were "untrue statements related to misbehavior", which included: ''If you don't behave, I will call the police," and: "If you don't quiet down and start behaving, the lady over there will be angry with you.''

Under the category of "Untrue statements related to leaving or staying" a parent was recorded as saying: "If you don't follow me, a kidnapper will come to kidnap you while I'm gone." (BBC)

 Lying is not just common, it is an industry, a virtual Hollywood of unimaginable fantasy, unreality, and impossibility. 

Politics is based on the plausible lie, and since government has no bottom line, funds from the public treasury are spent without question.  If it seems good, and if resources are given in the spirit of good will, generosity, and the interest of the people, it has to be good.  

Trillions have been spent on climate change, received wisdom, absolute certainty; and since Al Gore wrote his now infamous book, An Inconvenient Truth which predicted climate Armageddon in our lifetimes, and after one dire prediction after another, the seas are still not rising, ice is growing in Antarctica, and temperatures are fluctuating within the normal ranges of geological time. 

The idea of climate disaster seemed like a plausible one, and politicians, always quick on the trigger when justifying trillions of dollars of public expenditures, piled it on, all to the benefit of government which arrogated to itself the role of caretaker in a fragile age. 

Government officials were delighted at the spread of COVID, 'the big one', the virus that would put AIDS, Ebola, and the Spanish Flu to shame.  Regardless of flimsy evidence but increased authority and civil control in the offing, Anthony Fauci, the White House's lead scientist in the fight against the existential threat went on a tear - schools were closed, small businesses shut down, neighbors informed on each other, masks became the new normal while mortality figures barely budged.  Cancer, heart disease, and traffic accidents still killed more Americans than COVID.  

In 1968 a far more infectious and serious disease - the Hong Kong flu - came and went with people getting sick, most recovering, some dying, but with the country rolling on like it always had. 

Well, not lies exactly say defenders of Al Gore and Anthony Fauci.  They thought they were on the right track, science is always evolving, and better to take action just in case.  If there is any doubt, they said - and there certainly was in the case of COVID's morbidity, mortality, and modes of infection - better take action just in case. However, stating something as fact when there is reason to conclude that it isn't is lying. 

 

'AIDS is everyone's problem' was the mantra in the fright years of HIV.  Of course it was not.  It was a gay disease, borne and bred in the bathhouses of San Francisco in the halcyon years when licentiousness was a sign of pride; and yet because of politics, the investment of the powerful gay lobby, and the pernicious ethos of diversity, equity, and inclusivity, AIDS was claimed to be random, universal, and endemic. A blatant lie, and one which caused irreparable harm. 

Lying is common among American public figures.  A few years ago a NBC News Anchor admitted to making up a story about taking enemy fire while in Iraq; but when recently exposed, he said that he had ‘conflated’ his helicopter which did not take fire and the helicopter in front of him which did.  An unfortunate error in judgment for which he apologized. 

Investigation into his reporting on Hurricane Katrina from New Orleans suggested that he made stories up there, too. His reports of suicides that didn’t happen, bodies falling from the top of buildings which never flew, and other distortions, misrepresentations, and flat-out inventions had to be scrutinized for ‘veracity’.

The ‘conflation’ issue is inexcusable; for not only does it damage the cause of investigative reporting and honest journalism, it makes a joke of the men and women who do come under enemy fire.   It is scandalous.

The melodrama of John Edwards who had betrayed his dying wife, fathered a child whom he denied, and asked a subordinate to take the fall for him and lied through it all was a disgusting spectacle. Mark Sanford, Senator from North Carolina lied through his teeth about his Argentine lover and to cover up a tryst with her in Buenos Aires told his constituents that he had been hiking on the Appalachian Trail. 

The list is endless. Everyone in power – or so it seems – lies to cover up indiscretions whether financial, marital, or sexual.  The confessional apologies are worse than the escapades, and it is painful to watch dutiful wives and children stand up on the stage with the sinner quietly forgiving and forgetting. 

Preachers like Sinclair Lewis' Elmer Gantry are masters of the collection basket - what could be a better, more pleasant and easy con than the unproveable, but a deception with so much promise, hope, and glorious rewards than salvation at the feet of Our Lord?  Jim Bakker, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and a hundred other televangelists raked in millions thanks to their blatantly outrageous promises. God himself would look favorable upon those who gave money for the Lord's work. 

What better con could there be? The proof in the pudding is realized only after death, and 'Dead men tell no tales'.  Government scams and religious cons go hand in hand - when there is no accountability, it is a free-for-all. 

America was home to the greatest con man of the century, Bernie Madoff who bilked his wealthy Jewish friends out of millions in an elaborate Ponzi scheme.  Not only did the scheme not make the money Madoff promised, there was absolute none to return once he was found out and convicted.  Jeffery Skilling and Enron were almost as canny with their creative investments, innovative instruments, and bald-face lies.  Rudy Kurniawan  conned millions out of supposed wine connoisseurs by selling them fake wine. 

 

Con men, scams, Ponzi schemes, shell games have been part and parcel of America since the days of the Founding Fathers.  Lying, cheating, and stealing are not just an American thing, but the Wild West, anything goes, a sucker is born every minute mentality is truly a feature of the American ethos.   

Yale Medical School professor Dr. Diane Komp in her book Anatomy of a Lie raises an interesting explanation to the now common phenomenon of lying in America.  Perhaps it is not the lying star figures who influence us, but we who influence them:

"I began to wonder about the possibility that my own seemingly harmless white lies had an impact on the world, that maybe, instead of there being a trickle-down effect when people in exalted positions or in public life lie, there is a trickle-up effect," Komp explained in a recent interview. "In other words, maybe the cultural trend in lying begins with those of us who are not in positions of power, rather than the other way around. Maybe the 'trivial' lies that most of us tell without any real pricks on our conscience do matter." 

A silver tongue - glibness, charm, a show of modesty and innocence, and a show of respect and concern for others - will get you everywhere in America. 

Women seem to be particularly gullible, and savvy men know exactly how to turn that hopeful credulousness into sex and the bride's treasury.  Women want to be taken seriously.  They want men to reach beyond the superficial, to explore their inner rooms, to discover who they really are.  Most of these inner rooms are empty, of course, and female assumptions otherwise is just whistlin' Dixie; so it isn't hard for the canny man to open the doors and pretend there is something there. 

There are plenty of bitches, harridans, vixens, and succubae out there.  Goneril, Regan, Dionyza, Volumnia and a host of Shakespearean heroines are just fictional representations of the truly scary and determined women.  A whole genre - Film Noir - is based on female lies. What better example of female duplicity than Double Indemnity or Body Heat? 

Yet these powerful, insistent women are beggared by the millions who are simply looking for Mr. Right and will fall for the most cockamamie stories in looking for him; and will put up with his cheating, lies, and outright deception just to keep him. 

Nobody believes half of what Donald Trump says, but he was elected not for the truth but for his magnificent, oversized, braggadocio. A vaudevillian, a huckster, a marvelously hilarious and outrageous clone of Henny Youngman, Jackie Mason, and Rodney Dangerfield.  All one needs to know is in the five principles of conservatism from which he has never varied; the rest is Barnum & Bailey.  Not lying as the Left insists, but a Broadway comedy, a Borscht Belt routine. 

Lying is only lying if people are deceived, and Donald Trump's supporters and admirers are not. 'Lying' - Trump's outrageous mud in the eye of his progressive critics - is his way of driving them around the bend and showing the nation their sanctimony and absurdity. 

Lying may not be just an American thing, but it sure seems so; so better enjoy the show, the wicked tricks of Ivan's Devil, and the silver tongue of the good ol' snake oil salesman.