Who's Your Daddy? - He's Everywhere, Nowhere, The Law Of Nature And The Inner City

Much has been made of absent fatherhood in the inner city.  Black men, critics say, are irresponsible sexual brigands, iterant wanderers with no sense of family, society, or community.  Single mothers are the rule in the ghetto, grandmothers, single mothers themselves, are drawn into child care.  Boys without a male role model drift from here to there, emotional vagrants, picked up by the crewe, the gang, the street. Girls assume that fathers are drop-in features of their lives, of no interest, no importance, and no reality. 

While all this may well be true, it is hard to fault black man for his irrepressible male sexuality, and carrying out nature's obsession - procreation.  Men were not built for a sedentary life by hearth and home, but for a hunter's life on the veldt, tracking the wildebeest, elephant, or lion and spreading his seed far and wide.  While he had a nominal 'home', a fire, and a place to sleep, he had many such homes.  His 'family' was made up of all women, his children, everyone's children.  

This is what God intended said the Reverend Alonso Evans from the pulpit of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Anacostia, Washington DC's deep inner city. 

God the Almighty hath created a world of bounty, splendor, and miracles; and we (here he extended his hand over the heads of the congregation) are the beneficiaries of such treasures.  We are his children, his anointed, his family, men and women carrying out his will, his divine goodness, and his plan.

Which is what? (Here he paused, looking for some sign of understanding, but finding none, continued) Procreation, reproduction, productivity.  We are here to populate and repopulate the land, and our brothers are the emissaries of God, those chosen to go and be fertile to impregnate again and again, to spread the vital, inimitable human seed of life far and wide

'Amen', said the congregation in unison, waiting in anticipation for the pastor to continue. 

Our black men are the salt of the earth, riding high above the Colossus, giants of mankind,  keepers of the flock, royal stock of the forest.

 This was what the congregation, in fact the entire community, was waiting to hear - a defiant 'No' to the white, patronizing, patriarchal plantation bosses across the river, sitting pretty on Capitol Hill, Georgetown, and Spring Valley.  Let them have their tea and crumpets with little children in frilly frocks tended to by Swiss nannies.  Let them lead dry, confined, cold, and tepid, predictable, sexual lives while the real world that God intended was right her in Anacostia, in the projects, on the stoops, and on the streets of the inner city. 

 

In a white neighborhood, the protests to such misogyny would be heard for blocks.  An outrage! An absolute deformation of Biblical injunction, a slap in the face of hardworking, dutiful mothers; but not here in the Ebenezer Baptist church where both men and women nodded their approval and gave out with hallelujahs and amens at ever pause. 

The women were not the victims that white people assumed. They had no idea who the fathers of their children were, and were as sexually active as the men who came calling.  What was the big deal, anyway? said these women who understood men's need to roam and women's need to bear and nurture children.  Anacostia was a microcosm of the world of Adam and Eve, the primal world, the world as God intended it, not the salons of Beacon Hill, Fifth Avenue, and the Main Line. 

Felicia Washington was a black woman of fundamentalist Protestant faith, an evangelist, a social reformer, and a person committed to the social reconfiguration of the black neighborhood, to make it moral-abiding, fair and equitable to women and children, and a model of higher cultural values. 

Felicia had escaped the inner city thanks to a foster family who adopted her.  The Washingtons were God-fearing, Bible-reading, prophetic white evangelists whose only purpose in life was to preach the gospel.  They had a secular life - her father was a loan officer at Riggs Bank and his wife, was a teacher at Brighton Elementary - but their real existence was divine, and it was with this religious zeal that they brought up the waif from Anacostia and made her into a faithful believer. 

'Give back to the Lord what he hath given you' said her father quoting liberally from Luke, and before she was much out of her school uniform did she listen to her calling, and began what was to be a long, difficult, but spiritually fulfilling journey to the ghetto. 

On her first visit to Anacostia as a young woman, member of her church's evangelical mission, she was shocked and appalled. After all, this trash-strewn, stinking, drug-addled place was her home, her native place.  As she looked up at the hundreds of windows in the Frederick Douglass Homes projects, she realized where she came from.  

Yet, this realization only galvanized her faith and her purpose.  She was here to bring the light of Jesus Christ and his wisdom to these heathens.  A woman's body was sacred, she believed, a vessel of the Lord to be cared for, guarded, and reserved.  Childbearing was an honor, a privilege, and a duty and the creation of a stable family its natural expression.  What she knew of the inner city - an unholy place of unaccounted for children and sexual libertines. 

 

'Whatchoo doin' up in here, girl?', asked Pharoah Jones from his stoop overlooking MLK Avenue.  She, as black as any young women on the street, had that look and feel of whiteness about her, a hesitancy, a reserve that set off gongs in every black man's head.  Of course, being a sister, she was given a bye by Jones. Let the pretty young thing preach her gospel, and then let's see who converts whom. 

She retired to her small room in the rectory of her missionary church, unpacked her suitcase, and lay down on the bed, but the screams, gunshots, screeching cars, and drunken shouts kept her awake. What had she gotten herself into, she wondered, and got on her knees to pray. 

Now, the two cultures - her adopted, prayerful, obedient, traditional white one; and the sexually chaotic place where she was to preach - were as different as could be. Why, as she walked down the street to the church she was whistled at, propositioned, and accosted.  Where was the feminist propriety she had left?  Men quietly minding their own business, respecting women, adoring them, but reserving their love for marriage. 

The hooting and howling continued every day after that, a gantlet of whistling, enjoining men lining the street, Colt 45s in hand, smoking marijuana, with nothing to do but pander, verbally abuse, and address her. 

 

'Honey, let me set you straight about something', said LaShonda Evans, a congregant, midwife, and savvy ghetto priestess. 'You ain't goin' get nothin' from the brothers except a big black cock up yo' ass; so don't be goin' up in there.  It's Lagos, sweetheart', the teeming half-slum African city where no law, let alone white, European law, prevailed.  Where sexual abandon was the rule not the exception, intact families were remnants, bits a pieces of a colonial legacy.  'You don't belong here'. 

'Banging a square peg into a round hole' said a white church colleague back in Arlington where she went on weekends for a rest, support, and solace.

'What do you expect?  That the black man should have automatically turned white the minute his enslaved foot touched American soil, ignoring his Dahomey roots?'  The black man is the most human, the closest to God's original creation, free from white, Puritanical, maniacal vision there is.  His sexuality hasn't changed from Eden, so how can he be faulted for that purity? White imposition of a faux morality is what it is.  Go back to the neighborhood and preach Jesus's true message - love and forgiveness - and let the sexual thing go.'

Yet what about all these half-naked children running up and down the stinking stairways of the projects? the thousands on welfare, food stamps, aid to dependent children, a drain on society, a deformation of what is proper, right, and reasonable. 

'White' is what you mean, said her colleague. 'No such thing as ebony and ivory'. 

And so it was that after a few more months of being accosted, propositioned, challenged, treated like a common prostitute, not a woman of God, she returned to the suburbs and devoted her life to mending the mildly wayward ways of good Americans who still despite their solid moral center, needed Christ's love. 

She married a white boy - see, she thought, there is ebony and ivory - but by the time she had reached the altar she was as white as they come despite the color of her skin.  Her foster parents' upbringing, the moral purpose and righteousness of her pastor, and her brief foray to the inner city, made her a proper white woman.  And so it should be. 

What Ever Happened To Black Lives Matter ? - Irrelevant, Jailed, Gone With The Wind Like It Never Happened

'What ever happened to Black Lives Matter?', a colleague asked Marfa Phelps a frontline worker for the black man, the climate, gays, and women.  'You don't hear much about them these days'. 

The colleague was right.  Not more than a year ago every house in St. Thomas Park, a leafy residential neighborhood in Northwest Washington was festooned with BLM banners, oversized placards and stickers on all the windows. 

The community was one in solidarity with black people and BLM, a movement reminiscent of the great marches and protests of the Sixties, the heady days of Martin, Ralph, and Jesse, moments of hopefulness, joy, and jubilation.  

No one who was on the Mall when King gave his 'I have a dream' speech will ever forget it, and as elderly as the St Thomas women now were, they made it out to Pennsylvania Avenue to join the BLM procession to the White House. 

The event felt different - much more angry, ragged, and violent than any of those in years past; and white people were certainly not welcome.  Although a few busloads from Bethesda and Arlington drove to the assembly place downtown, the white women passengers were ignored and even shunted aside by the black bodyguards who formed a cordon around LaShonda Jackson, First Lieutenant of the DC chapter of BLM, event organizer, and head of the radical deep cover cadre linked to Weathermen and Black Panther-like extremism. 

Jackson stood in the middle of the gathering crowd, and spoke:

Ya'll here for the black man and his sisters, but we here for the white man, the white devil, Simon Legree, the overseer, the plantation owner, the slave driver, the oppressor. Not for the white man, but out to get the muthafucka...

The crowd whooped and hollered, raising their fists in solidarity.  Marfa and her white sisters moved slowly back to the path leading to the National Gallery at the far edge of the assembly, but could still hear LaShonda who was just getting warmed up

The ofay, the white man has promised us everything but has given us jack shit - sent us off to fight his wars, paid us off with a few food stamps and walkin' around money while he sits his white ass in mansions and Mar-a-Lago, fucks the sistahs who suck white dicks for a buck then head home on the crosstown bus.

This was not what Marfa was used to.  Martin had spoken with eloquence, propriety, respect, and passion and she had come to expect this from the black man.  Yes, there was H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael in the old black rabble-rousing days, Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammed, and race-bating ambulance-chaser Reverend Al Sharpton, but they were anomalies. 

Black people were more like the Southern marchers across the Pettis Bridge, not the rock-throwing thugs trashing the inner cities. Where was interracial harmony, ebony and ivory, hands linked facing the ax-wielding Bull Connors and their attack dogs?

 

'Let's burn some shit', she heard from somewhere in the crowd surrounding Evans, and a group of young black men broke off from the rest and headed up Fourteenth Street joined by a few hundred more head-banded, balaclava-wearing, marchers.  Along the way they smashed car windows, overturned a van, and threw rocks at storefront windows.  

The DC police, under orders of restraint (the City Council had defunded the police, given them George Floyd cease and desist instructions) simply stood by as the cluster passed. Word spread, and before long the line of rioters was in the many hundreds.  It was reminiscent of the 14th Street riots of the Sixties, racial mayhem, destruction, fire, and rubble.  

In the days of the Sixties race riots in Watts, Newark, DC, and Detroit, white people took notice - not of the black anger against racism, Jim Crow, and continuing discrimination, but of the seeming endemic violent character of black people and the perennial expression of dysfunctionality and social incompetence. 

 

While politicians wrung their hands in a collective mea culpa, white Americans got out of town, as far away from the steaming, pestilential inner city as possible. 'White flight' was hardly the word for it. 

But things had changed, Marfa thought before heading to the Mall. The inchoate violence and racial hatred of the Sixties was no longer. She and her progressive colleagues had made sure of that, what with affirmative action, generous social welfare, and public visibility (on every commercial, and in every television series and Hollywood movie there were black faces), so why the violence, the racial hatred, and the virulent enmity?

Because BLM was a cash cow for LaShonda and every one of the leaders of the movement, that’s why. The cons, scams, and schemes devised by BLM operatives were Enron/Bernie Madoff worthy.  They escaped the notice of law enforcement because the FBI had been told by the Biden Administration, 'Hands off.  These are good people'.  

What a financial jamboree.  Money was skimmed off the top of social programs, donations were routinely 'edited' and monies sent to offshore bank accounts, and in the most brazen show of defiance, thousands of dollars worth of wigs, extensions, and home improvements were bought. 

So the more BLM acted up, made a fuss, and made the 6 o'clock news, the more money from progressives like Marfa poured in. They had been so well trained to believe than any black miscreance was nothing more than a natural, justifiable response to racism, and that financial support was necessary to consolidate and strengthen the movement for justice and a more equitable piece of the American dream, white money poured into BLM coffers, then out the door. 

The charade couldn't last and BLM leaders, members, and operatives were charged with fraud and financial finagling. It was a good ride while it lasted, lots of financial gain, good times, fame, and political glory; but like any great bamboozling con game, it had to come to an end. BLM was in the best American tradition of Ponzi schemes, shell games, credit swaps, and insider trading, and should be given credit. 

 

They knew there comeuppance was coming, and with some deft wizardry hid millions from even the best federal sleuths; but they finally got caught, and just like that BLM disappeared from view. Of course a few lawn signs in St. Thomas Park still remain - partisans simply cannot believe what they consider conservative white-engineered fake news - but all in all BLM is gone, a blot of ink, a smudge if that. 

Now that Donald Trump was in the White House and conservatism was ascendant, there were fewer causes for Marfa to join - or perhaps better said, the causes were still there, but progressives had been so badly beaten, disoriented, and scattered by the Trump victory and aftermath that there was no oomph to them. 

As the BLM scandals became public, George Floyd dismissed as a minor criminal, and blackness itself relegated to a back room, Marfa was increasingly disconsolate and at loose ends.  There must be something I can do, she thought; but a Florida retirement kept sneaking into her head, a chaise lounge on a beach in Tampa, some pina coladas.  Even progressives have retirement accounts, so perhaps it was indeed time to cash hers in.

What Happened To Climate Change? - The Disappearance Of Armageddon

Bob Muzelle had been one of the biggest fretters about climate change.  He had been on the front lines of the movement since the reported first thawing of the polar ice caps, the catastrophic loss of the Ross Ice Shelf, the disruption of the Humboldt current, the erratic Gulf Stream's patterns, the mass extinction of sea birds, the inundation of the Atlantic coast, sunspots, the choking new levels of carbon dioxide in the air and the continuing pollution of the environment. 

'The climate will so radically warm', Bob said to a group of Scientists for Social Action, his Washington lobby group, 'that in a decade crops will wither, insects will swarm, baking heat will kill thousands of the elderly, the demand for electricity will outstrip demand and the power generating systems of the Northeast and the West will collapse'. 

A polite round of applause rippled through the audience, far from the rousing cheers that Bob got a decade or more ago when he was one of the first to clamor for dramatic action against this existential threat. Half the seats were empty and many had rudely left before he had finished his speech. Those that remained were so old that they probably were not aware that he had finished talking, so zoned out they were, travelling in some godforsaken place sure to be Bob's next stop. 

'Nobody gives a shit anymore, Bobby' said a close friend as they both walked out onto Pennsylvania Avenue, crowded with blonde young things making their way to and from the White House to which Bob shook his head, wrung his hands, sputtered and choked, but could manage nothing. 

 'That....that...that...' Words failed him when it came to describing the President.  Over the past decade of Trump's rise and fall and rise again, Bob had called him every name under the sun, and now when it really mattered, he felt the store shelves were empty, the armory bare, and the inventory down to zero. 

He looked around him and saw people simply going about their business as if there were no climate problem at all - ignoramuses who froze their feet in January and laughed at the idea of global warming; fools who were too stupid to look at the climatological charts to see discernable changes in Bering Sea temperatures or fluctuations in the South Pacific current; too credulous and intellectually sedentary to look at the barometer, the seismometer, the thermometer, and astronomical data. 

Bob had happily paid his heating bill this winter, higher than it had ever been; for melting polar ice had chilled ocean waters and caused a temporary, cautionary cooling, that was all.  The more global effects of a changing, warming climate were more dynamic, more profound, and although at times unnoticed, were taking their toll little by little. 

Now, it must be noted that Bob was a progressive's progressive.  There had not been one progressive cause that he had not espoused.  He was on the front lines to restore the black man to the top of the human pyramid as evolution's expression of high native intelligence, sentience, and emotional genius.  He marched for women's right to their bodies and the absolute right to eliminate the phlegm that was audaciously called 'life'.  

He cavorted with gay men in the Castro, waved to onlookers from a float in the Bay to Breakers gay parade.  He downed oyster shooters with the bull dykes of Bernal Heights, and was on the dais at the anti-capitalist rallies in Chicago.  

 

Progressivism was part of his identity, his persona, his soul.  There could be no other way to look at the world than through the lens of race, gender, and ethnicity.  History had been deformed by racist colonialism, the perpetual enslavement of Africans, the occupation of land for no other reason than conquest. Israel was but the last of the exterminating, territorially obsessed nations of the world. 

There were deniers. The idea of a black pinnacle was total nonsense.  The reality was in the stinking, dysfunction slums of the inner city.  Gay pride was nothing more than a convenient, happy cover for buggery and perversion.  Women were not vessels of goodness, compassion, and righteousness but aggressive comers pricked by ambition, greed, and male envy.  And climate change was one big, outrageous, scam. 

Bob dismissed deniers and their ignorant notions out of hand.  'Pants first, shoes next' was the characterizing meme of these idiots who didn't know shit from Shinola and who had lawn parties and barbecues while the climate raged and the black man suffered. 

Progressivism was so ingrained, so deeply rooted, so immured within Bob's very soul that there was no way that he could wonder whether it was right.  That would have been tantamount to denying the sunrise or the phases of the moon.  There were such things as absolutes, said Bob, and it is our duty to recognize them. 

But all it took was a change of administrations, and all of a sudden climate change was off the front pages and there wasn't a black face in every commercial, every television series, and every Hollywood film. Gay men were back in the closet or at least in a back room.  The reformist programs set in place by President Biden - the distribution of wealth, the dismantling of free enterprise in favor of unencumbered public benefits, the rolling back of private sector initiatives in favor of government dirigisme - had disappeared overnight as though they had never existed. 

Yet, what if?  Bob could never consciously admitted that there might be some sense to the criticisms of race, gender, ethnicity, climate, and social equity; but every so often some niggling, irritating thought crept into his head, and no matter how hard he tried to shake it loose, it stayed damnably long. 

The Ross Ice Shelf was regaining ice, the climate had moderated, new forensic climatological evidence from the Paleolithic forward demonstrated almost predictable cycles of cooling and warming.  Black men were responsible for more than half the violent crimes in the country and represented barely ten percent of the population.  He himself would never set foot in the Anacostia inner city for fear of his life.  Transgender women, all big thighs, hairy chests, thick ankles, and gravelly voices reading fairy tales to kindergarteners was ridiculous, and the weather was certainly pleasant. 

What if it really all was bullshit? Bob wondered.  Then what? Would his life be erased? A kind of political Alzheimer's or a radical historical revisionism?  His whole life, save for an innocent childhood had been devoted to doing the right thing.  What if reality was really Poland - a country decidedly and defiantly white, Christian, capitalist, and European and not the trash-strewn, discordant, brutally antisocial Islamist suburbs of Paris?  Was the resurgent Right in Poland, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, and the UK the future?

God forbid, he said, but was quickly ashamed of himself since he had become a confirmed atheist long ago. Religion was an obstacle to utopian, progressive, secular reform; but ideas of God were becoming just as insistent, irritating, and niggling as the possibility of no climate change.  What was happening to him?

Nobody cared, actually, since Bob without noticing it had become supernumerary, irrelevant, and a bother.  Let him do his windy preaching on some streetcorner and cadge a few nickels from the crowd.  Just not here in official Washington which was changing as fast as a chameleon's colors.  

As such, Bob was a metaphor for progressivism, a political movement which had finally had its day.  There will always be minor eruptions, burps from the radical underground, young idealists in need of a cause, but when all is said and done, the vapid, hollow, impossibly hopeful beliefs of the Left are finished.