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.

When Harry Met Sally - The Spy Scandal That Rocked Washington

Harry Perkins was an ordinary man - ordinary parentage, ordinary education, ordinary profession, and a very ordinary life; so when he found himself in Langley, Virginia he was as surprised as anyone. 

You see, Harry had no grand expectations, no special ambitions, and no desire to stand out among the crowd.  His ethos was one of quiet rectitude, simplicity, and keeping the straight and narrow; and it was for just these reasons that he was recruited by the CIA as the kind of unremarkable, silent man who would escape notice and recognition as an operative. 

He had been recruited in his senior year at Miami Of Ohio University - a quiet, second-rate but serious enough school which did not expect great things from its alumni but good ones.  It had not turned out statesmen, industrialists, or thinkers, but class after class of solid, well-prepared Americans. Miami had had no student riots, no campus shutdowns, no press.  It was a model of the kind of place that gave one a modest education for a modest price. 

In the old days the CIA recruited from the Ivy League, especially Yale.  It was looking for gentlemen of a certain pedigree, patriotic with a sense of noblesse oblige, and with no qualms about the lies, deceit, and trickery necessary for espionage.  More than anything, young men were recruited for their sexual confidence - men who did not need love or emotional complications to seduce and sexually engage random women. 

 

In the new days, recruitment became more subtle, more democratic, and less ambitious.  The company wanted men who would fly under the radar, undetected as they collected information, recruited foreign agents, and did the untasteful tasks of subterfuge required of them. 

The problem with this new ethos of modest ability was vulnerability.  No matter how much a recruit might be trained in spycraft, there was no undoing of his character.  In the case of Harry Perkins, he was more suited to a Do No Harm profession than one which demanded treachery and a whatever works philosophy. 

Yet, the young man's remarkable calmness - one bred of limited ambition but calmness nonetheless - was what attracted Langley recruiters.  The company needed men who would never, under no circumstances, get flummoxed. They were not looking for James Bond, but young men with a small town banker's mentality.  Solid as a rock and steady as she goes. 

 

As a matter of fact, small town banker was Harry's cover for his Langley connection, and he was instructed to tell friends, family, and neighbor that he had been working in the Federal Savings and Loan of Chillicothe, and was in Washington an assistant manager at one of the city's independent banks.

His real job was to penetrate the new Iron Curtain - the cadre of Russian allies in Eastern Europe, most notably Belarus, whose president had been just as antipathetic to the West as Putin, but whose security network was far less sophisticated. Information about Russian intent would be far more forthcoming in this second-rate ally than in the mother country. 

Now, Minsk is not exactly a delightful place; but then again, Harry had not been recruited as a playboy, rockstar spy but as a quiet, dutiful, and persistent one.  He was there in Minsk not in any official American capacity, of course, but as a member of the East-West Partnership Association, a non-governmental organization whose charter expressly took no sides in international debates, but worked to promote understanding and cooperation.  

 

Given CIA backing, it was engineered to tilt eastward - its representatives would be in 'difficult' Eastern European countries to show them how some Americans at least were not hostile to Russia or its allies.  The world was one, its logo impressively stated, and its members universalists. 

Vetted and cleared by Belarussian authorities, Perkins was welcomed as an emissary of peace and understanding and one who could influence Congress.  Part of the CIA's confectionary talent was to give a shell organization political influence, a smoke-and-mirrors, deft arrangement that might not fool the Russians, but could pull the wool over the eyes of lesser states. 

All was well and good, at least in Minsk where Harry was in his element - a modest man in a grey, flat, unexceptional country - but no one was prepared for the events at home. While Harry spent a good deal of time in Minsk, he had plenty of work to do at home, and he was increasingly brought in to high-level top secret meetings on Russia at which he met many Moscow agents and shared intelligence with them. 

The Moscow-Minsk axis was an important one, not because President Lukashenko was a bigtime player in the Great Game, but because of his alliance with Russia, his close friendship with Putin, and his public support of everything the man said and did, it was important to twin them geopolitically. 

As such Harry was privy to classified information which under normal circumstances would not have been shared with someone of his rank, but considered essential within the new 'axis' paradigm. 

Again, all well and good, except that no CIA training had prepared him adequately for counterespionage.  There were many Russian agents in the United States performing the same tasks that Harry and his Langley colleagues were; but there were some whose job was to learn about American espionage in Russia, and if possible to out the names of CIA operatives there. 

Sally Barker (real name Sasha Belenkaya) was one of Putin's handpicked agents.  She was his former mistress, a stunning beauty from the Caucasus, a mathematician, and the most subtle, engaging, seductive woman the President had ever met.  Paid a king's ransom, she was sent to America to penetrate the sanctum sanctorum of Langley. 

Sasha (Sally) was also an intuitive actor and could assume character, personality, comportment, attitude with little effort; and so it was that she became the cornflower blue-eyed, blonde Iowa farm girl that American men dream about.  She became demure, retiring, engaging, and respectful with a certain Midwestern smiling gaiety that made her even more appealing.

 

How she learned of Harry Perkins and designated him as her mark is a state secret - the Americans were tightlipped after the scandal was made public.  The humiliation of having been so easily betrayed was bad enough, but giving away how the awful episode ever happened was too much to bear. 

In any case, the two met, and the naive, lonely, and unschooled Harry was smitten. He was not the kind of man who attracted women like this.  Wallflowers were his beat, the drab, unhappy virgins that were the last to be picked and delighted when they were; not the likes of Sally who could have any man she wanted. 

At the same time, she was not the kind of brash, forceful woman that often came with Hollywood looks - just the opposite.  Sally was a simple, fresh, lovely young thing that would be quite at home on his family's farm. 

As much as Harry's handlers had trained him in the subtle arts of foreign espionage, they had never thought to alert him to the overtures of counterespionage agents.  He was simply too ordinary, too simple, and too straightforward to ever attract attention; and Belarus? Who cared? but of course that was exactly what the FSB (former KGB) intended when they uncovered - discovered - him.  They knew that the sweet kisses and warm embraces of Sasha, he would reveal far more than he should; and were quite well aware of the important intelligence 'axis' of the CIA. 

 

The only good thing that came out of the scandal was that Harry had a whopping good time with Sasha, the relationship with whom lasted a good long time indeed.  She was everything he had ever dreamed of and simply couldn't believe his good fortune.  Anything, absolutely anything was hers for the asking.

When the well had run dry and she had gotten what she had come for - the names of CIA agents in Moscow - she departed on a Lufthansa flight to Frankfort, leaving a tearful, snookered, and soon to be drawn and quartered Harry Perkins at the gate.  

Langley did its best to quiet the affair - Harry was not exactly Aldrich Ames or Robert Hanssen after all - but heads rolled and the agency was long afterwards in doubt and turmoil.  

'How could we have?', asked one CIA man. 'He was such a dweeb, a complete nerd, a fucking Ohio goatfucker'; but be that as it may, it simply goes to show that the agency should have stuck with Yale men. 

Ice Returns To Antarctica - When The Climate Change Spoof Has To Be Reset

Pally Minnick was a longtime social justice advocate who earned his spurs in the civil rights movement, graduated to women's and gay rights, and finally turned to global warming or, as he and his colleagues preferred, climate change. 

He had become as passionate and determined a soldier in the war against the warming of the planet as he had against racism and white privilege, homophobia, and the continued oppression of women. Climate change was the existential crisis that spelled planetary doom, an event from which there was no recovery, the end of the human race. 

It wasn't that he forgot the black man, just that others had rightly picked up the cudgel.  Blackness was a black affair, and he knew that eventually the movement would turn 'for the ghetto' to 'from the ghetto'. 

'Uncle Toms', shouted LaShonda Evans, co-founder of BLM, apostasy to older liberals like Pally who had revered Martin and Ralph; but he was included in her rage. 'No Whites Need Apply' was the sign pasted in large letters over the doorway to BLM organizational headquarters, a ratty building far east of Florida Avenue guarded by two shaved-headed, blinged, and pimped out brothers.  Pally knew when he was not wanted, but continued to defend the black man nonetheless. 

This excerpt from a speech at Duke University in 2023 perhaps best expresses Pally's advocacy:

The black man, native of the primeval forest, attuned to far more subtle rhythms than the white man ever could, direct descendent of Lucy, the mother of the human race, anointed future of the world, and the harbinger of halcyon times, would soon be replaced at the top of the human pyramid where he belongs

 

Despite the corruption and miasmic poverty, disease, and tribalism of Africa; and despite the persistent drug-addled, crime-ridden, pestilential dysfunction of the inner city, Pally never lost his faith in the black man.  That beneficent, simple faith was an inspiration even to those progressive colleagues who had given up on the black man.  If sixty years of civil rights, bending over backwards, affirmative action and DEI had done nothing to positively affect the ghetto, they said, then it was time to pull the plug. Only Pally's passion kept them from doing so. 

Far be it from Pally to pull any progressive plug.  He still had indomitable faith in instrumental justice, and this one particular aspect of the agenda might have failed only due to white indifference, systemic racism, and a lack of racial polity.  

When the leaders of BLM were all hauled into court on charges of fraud, embezzlement, and tax evasion, the meme around conservative and even some progressive quarters was 'I told you so', but not ones to disparage anything black, progressives held their tongues and pretended ignorance. 'They meant well', said Pally, 'but only lost their bearings'. 

Since women had long ago broken through the glass ceiling, and gay boys from the Castro now ruled the roost, there was only one cause left to fight for - climate change.  Not only was it dangerously imminent, but by its very nature was bigger than any racial or ethnic group; and so, ipso facto, it was the cause of causes. 

 

There was nothing incidental about climate change.  Every tropical storm, every hurricane, every tornado, every New England thunderstorm was a harbinger of worse things to come; and when winters turned cold, Pally and his associates leveled charges against the polluters, the carbon mavens, the foolish millions keeping the lights on and the thermostat turned up.  

'The melting of the polar ice caps', Pally said, 'a result of the warming planet, has caused the amount of cold water to increase in the Atlantic, thereby dropping air temperatures in New England'.  When blizzards blanketed Colorado with unheard of amounts of snow and temperatures dropped to lows never before recorded, Pally was quick to point out that high-level disturbances over the Southern Cone, caused by increased carbon admissions in Santiago and Buenos Aires, were at fault, altering the jet stream, and pulling arctic air from Canada. 

 

The whole kit and kaboodle was due to climate change, and capitalism was the root of it all.  'There, I said it', Pally thought.  It's now out in the open, the true, fundamental reason why disaster is at our doorstep. Wall Street, greedy money brokers, shysters, conmen, and corporate thieves are all colluding to destroy the planet. 

Yet it was hard to convince the fat, happy, complaisant, ignorant voters who simply went on their pedestrian business.  After decades of predicting doom and gloom, nothing much had happened.  A few hot spells here and there, nothing more than a steamy Washington summer.  A few cold snaps, but Boston had suffered far worse.  The Atlantic was lapping up on Florida beaches pretty much like before, and the hurricane season in the last few years had been as benign as it had ever been. 

The more Pally and his colleagues hammered on about climate change, the more Americans snickered at the folly and happily went back to brats-and-beer on the patio. Coastal cities like New York and Miami drew up plans for anticipated naturally-occurring, cyclical changes in sea levels - Venice-like canals, extended wetlands, stilted skyscrapers, and solar-powered central air.  The architectural and city planning designs were so appealing, that municipal officials looked forward to an increase in 'tropical tourism'. 

 

Farmers, by now used to genetically modified crops and, given their productivity, dismissed No GMO criticisms and pursued the new Green Revolution.  If cyclical weather changes increased temperatures, they were ready.  No need to move from the Sacramento Valley to Saskatchewan. 

The same genetic engineering would enable human beings to adapt to whatever cyclical changes might occur.  The race had always been adaptable, ingenious, and responsive. 

'Adaptability', Pally noted. 'We never considered that'; but that was the fly in the ointment. However, if he started hammering away at the flighty notions of 'Venice in New York', it might pique interest, deter the movement from its founding principles. 'Disaster no matter what...unless', had been the catchy phrase thought up by the admen at Bernstein, Abbot, and Parker, and it still had salience.  Why change a horse in midstream?

Then came the news that Antarctic ice had increased by millions of tons in the past year, and scientific projections indicated the likely continuation of the trend.  Of course scientists firmly embedded in the Armageddon camp dismissed this as 'a temporary phenomenon', and that the heating of the planet would quickly return to unsustainably high levels; but the news was disturbing if only from a public relations point of view.  No contrary news was good news, and it must be countered and countered immediately. 

'Stargazing', said Pally to a large group of Duke students gathered for Climate Day - A Day of Protest' organized by his associates. 'Fanciful, dreamy, storybook notions', he went on as images of dry, cracked cornfields, smokestacks, lakebeds, and wilted wheat flashed on the screen behind him. 'Don't be fooled by the febrile, deep state ignorance of Donald Trump'.  This was the hole card, the one that always won the trick.  If nothing else worked to reenergize climate supporters, this would. 

'You don't believe that 'scientists'...Here Pally snickered at the idea of Trump's faux researchers...'actually discovered new evidence of global cooling, do you?  You know who was behind the charade, the fake news, the cooked books, the lies and misinformation, don't you?'.  The crowd got to their feet and jeered and booed at the thought of their arrogant, dismissive President. 

But the damage was done.  These were independent NASA satellite images that were unchallenged as to veracity, resolution, and accuracy.  Whaling away at Trump might not cut the mustard this time. 

Thanks to Pally's now ingrained, inherent, permanent belief in progressivism, no evidence, no scientific finding, no meteorological data, no presumptions, inferences or conclusions countering received wisdom were given any thought let alone credence.

But the news kept coming, the variability of climate effects were repeatedly highlighted, the likelihood of long-term natural cyclical events was increasing in probability, and the ability of human beings to ingeniously adapt to these variations more than ever recognized. 

Pally, however, kept up his harangues, the increasing claims of doom, and the virulent hostility to anyone who disagreed with his vision of a dismal future. He became obsessed with 'the truth', saw himself as a Cassandra, a voice crying in the wilderness, a latter day prophet, a savior. 

It was then that his wife Polly - an unfortunate name, given Pally's - suggested that they retire and move to Florida, a distasteful, horrific thought.  Not only was it run by a fascist governor and his SS thugs, but it meant giving up the ship when it was foundering and most needed his captaincy. No, Pally said.  Not now, not ever. 

But it wasn't long that such a fevered, hysterical life began to take its toll.  He was becoming confused, inarticulate, so much so that all that remained was a wild look in his eyes.  

This is what happens to true believers, old Yale classmates said, especially when they tread in swampy waters - an apt metaphor when they thought of Pally in retirement getting bitten by a water moccasin or eaten by an alligator in globally warming Florida waters.  

Happiness May Be A Warm Puppy - But Nastiness Rules Politics, Families, And Human Nature

'All happy families are the same; and all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way', observed Tolstoy in his opening to Anna Karenina, and true to his word, the Karenin, Levin, and Oblansky families are indeed unique in their particular struggles. In fact Tolstoy's true meaning is that family unhappiness is so common, so diverse, and so ubiquitous, that the premise of a happy family is an oxymoron.

Literature since the Greeks has chronicled dysfunctional, murderous, duplicitous, and treacherous families.  The Oedipus cycle and the Oresteia have all to do with suspicion, deviousness, hubris, and insensitivity, all of which lead to exile, vengeance, and murder.  Clytemnestra, enraged at her husband Agamemnon's sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigenia for the sake of favorable winds in a questionable war, plots with her lover to kill him; and after she does, she exiles her son and imprisons her daughter, sealing the fate of the family in the pursuit of the satisfaction of her own ambitions. 

Shakespeare's plays are all about the jealousy, envy, ambition, and amorality of every family.  There is not much good to say about the families of Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, Cleopatra, Titus, Dionyza, and Lear.  Heroes of magnanimity and rectitude like Pericles, his daughter Marina, and Isabella show up from time to time but the course of family history is sadly the same throughout. 

The Shakespeare critic Jan Kott has said that if all of Shakespeare's Histories were laid end to chronological end, the very same dramas would play out again and again - only the uniqueness of the way the plotting and murders take place would be of interest.  Shakespeare like the Greeks understood that aggressiveness, self-interest, ambition, territorial will, and unstoppable, self-serving pride are innate, absolute, and irrepressible. 

It is with some surprise, therefore, that any observer can possibly say that we are living in the worst of times, that we are particularly given to venality, greed, untoward ambition, and territorial hegemony.  Although history repeats itself and the record of predictable wars, civil strife, ethnic rivalries, and predatory ambition is unmistakably clear, liberal critics see only linear movement.  Progressivism is based on the premise that the world is in the worst trouble it has ever been in, but that through dedication, principle, and hard work the dream of a compassionate, verdant, harmonious society is indeed possible. 

For decades progressives have warned that the sky is falling, Armageddon is nigh, and the end of days is upon us; and as predictable as sunrise, the howling increases to a shriek whenever the winds shift and the nation becomes more embracing of originalist values, individualism, and private initiative.  It is bad enough to ignore the predictable cyclical nature of history, another thing altogether to insist that it can be resisted, changed, and reversed. 

 

The divisions in American society are not because of politics but political philosophy.  Progressives believe that each generation is immutably unequal, oppressive, and unenlightened; but with vision and effort a new, better world can emerge.  Conservatives, like Aeschylus and Shakespeare, understand that as long as human nature remains the same, there will be only repeats of ignorant ambition, ferocious jealousy, and inhuman conduct.  The goal is mitigation, not elimination. 

These same progressives devolve the case to families which too are riven by the same socio-cultural divisions as higher-order institutions; but which can be made more cooperative and community minded in order to participate in the Utopian journey. 

So, language is monitored and restricted, 'bullying' is condemned, excellence is discouraged in the name of equity and self-esteem, cooperation is engineered and individuality marginalized.  A false, idealistic, unreal world of aspiration replaces the real one - the one governed by human nature; the Darwinian one which is the only way the human race can change. 

 

Politics is simply human nature writ large.  The same ambition, aggression, self-interest, and territorial claims of siblings is played out on the national and international stage. There should be no surprises.  As Shakespeare well knew and Jan Kott pointed out, politics is a product of human nature, history is therefore cyclical and repetitive, but that each iteration will be different. 

Nothing Donald Trump has done defies historical imperative.  He has been no more aggressive in his attempts to reset the political course of America than what Augustus did in Rome, Laozi in China, Louis XIV in France or Vittorio Emanuele II in Italy. In fact his attempts to reverse the debilitating measures of progressivism to counter the very determined, imperial ambitions of Russia and China - purposeful, aggressive, and uncompromising - are very much within a familiar historical perspective. 

Perspective - that is what the Left has none of.  The unannounced entries of DOGE (Department Of Government Efficiency) into federal buildings were not Soviet pogroms or the forced removal of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto, nor Kristallnacht, nor the trains to the camps; nor were they Maoist forced marches or Soviet exiles to Siberia.  All were predictable expressions of the same innate, universal desire for power, authority, and dominance - horrific and exaggerated but human nonetheless. 

To conflate one with the other, despite their nativist roots, is false and anti-historical; but to acknowledge the perpetual repetition of ambitious aggression, the consolidation of power, and the tendency to autocratic rule is realistic and historical. 

'Democracy is the worst form of government in the world', said Winston Churchill, 'except for all the rest', and yet two of the three world superpowers today - Russia and China - are anything but democratic.  In fact Communist China has raised hundreds of millions out of abject poverty, has built a strong, powerful economy, has retained a profound respect for traditional Confucian values, and leads the world in in finance, development, and social equity. 

 

The political historian Francis Fukuyama once wrote about 'the end of history', with the fall of the Belin Wall, the victory of the West over Communism and the beginning of a new, harmonious, peaceful world order.  Of course he was wrong.  No sooner was the Soviet hegemony over its various republics ended than they began to vie for influence and power. 

Once Communist Yugoslavia was disbanded, long-hidden ethnic rivalries surfaced and bloody civil wars ensued.  The increase in democratic inclusivity and tolerance led the way for Islamic terrorism and intimations of a Muslim caliphate.  The world is far more divided and troubled now than it was in the Cold War days. 

The lessons of history assure us that this current disorder will end in reformulation, new axes of power, new rivalries, new forms of government and governance, new alignments, alliances, and enemies.  Transition will be just as nasty as any before, and the new sectoral arrangement will be just as tensely confrontational. 

Will the reign of democracy end?  Will the world revert to what it was before this brief period since the French and American Revolutions? Imperial powers, China-like capitalist communalism, some other socio-cultural configuration?

Certainly and absolutely. As Buddhists say, 'There is nothing certain in the world but change', and as long as human nature remains as is - that is, without the distinct possibility of transformative genetic engineering - history will continue to be a round of contentious, hostile, confrontational episodes. 

Playwrights and authors will still have their unhappy families to write about - they too will remain unchanged, no matter how many reformist movements attempt to improve their lot. Siblings will continue to fight for parental recognition, husbands and wives will seek sexual solace elsewhere, wills will be debated and fought over, and temporary peace will be all that can be hoped for. 

A desperately pessimistic vision? Hardly.  Simply a dispassionate look at history. 

The Demise Of USAID - Why It Was Time To End The Charade of 'Doing Good'

Prentiss White had worked for a variety of international development agencies for years - The World Bank, the United Nations, USAID, and the African and Asian Development Banks. 'A good ride', he was fond of saying. 'Marvelous times.'

   

He had been treated well, emissary as he was from a rich country to the world's poorest, bringing millions of dollars in grants and soft loans, mostly free cash with no strings attached.  Accountability was the least concern of foreign donors anxious to curry favor with politically strategic, resource-rich nations.  

This largesse began during the Cold War when the United States and the Soviet Union vied for influence.  Washington's money kept flowing as long as countries hewed to the American line, no questions asked, no justification needed as the number of Soviet pins on the State Department's war board kept multiplying. 

When the Cold War had thawed, the United States kept the aid spigots open.  There was mineral and energy wealth to be had, and if America didn't get its hands on it first, China and renascent Russia would.  And so it was that a network of client states was established, all ruled by African 'Big Men', dictators for life, autocratic rulers with secret police, mansions, and little concern for those they ruled.  

 

Throughout the Sub-Sahara to South Africa, east and west, corrupt leaders were kept in power.  The money flowed from Washington through their hands directly into offshore bank accounts. The business of 'development' was simply a charade, a convenient cover for this financial jamboree, while the credulous American taxpayer needed only to know that his government was using his money to make the world a kinder, more compassionate, and better place. 

And so it was that Prentiss White travelled to Africa to 'do good'.  His first class flights and five star hotels were not perks but necessities, aid agencies reasoned, since working in the most pestilential, forgotten corners of the world demanded respite.  A chilled, air-conditioned hotel with plentiful buffets and first class room service were the consultant's refuge after day's work in the slums or in baking remote villages. 

The stories of how the Big Men suckered the foreign donor were legion.  There was President Deby of Chad who snookered the World Bank into giving him millions in exchange for international oversight of his uranium which he promised to sell at premium prices to the Soviet Union.  Deby promised, the World Bank paid up, and Deby welcomed the Soviet Ambassador to sign a mutually beneficial bilateral uranium pact. 

Or Kagame of Rwanda who took the United States for hundreds of millions, shaming President Clinton for his desultory, dilatory approach to the genocide.  Kagame, the hero of the West, took the money and became one of the longest-ruling dictators ln the continent, fueling resource wars in the Congo and ruling his country with a Soviet-style iron hand. 

 

Or Mobuto of Zaire, the leopard of the forest, the savior of Africa whose billions in copper, rare earth metals, and more made him the most sought after ruler on the continent.  Thanks to the United States and Europe, Mobutu became a fabulously wealthy man. His neighbor Bokassa of the Central African Republic, a good friend of former French President Giscard d'Estaing, became another African Croesus, awash in European wealth and patronage. Or Mugabe of Zimbabwe, murderer of whites, corrupt, incorrigible imposter. The list goes on. 

Prentiss had worked in international development for long enough to understand how the game was played - how health, welfare, and social programs would never get implemented and how hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on American consultants who simply turned a wheel which revolved in circles with no traction whatsoever.  

A marvelous shadow play where US political interests were served, American consulting firms made millions, consultants enjoyed the good life, the bank accounts of Big Men were filled to overflowing, and the American public was happy that their country was helping to solve the problem of world poverty. 

This charade not only siphoned billions into the pockets of the most undeserving, it set back real development by decades.  Stopping foreign aid would have been a godsend to the people of Africa, forcing dictators to look to capital market to borrow for only the loans they needed to build the country; but no.  The sluice gates remained open and the continent has budged an economic inch since independence sixty years ago. 

As Prentiss checked in to his five-star hotel in the capital of 'his' country, the one to which he went on various missions to supervise the generous grant given by USAID, the beautiful Fulani desk clerk smiled broadly.  'Welcome back, Mr. White.  I hope you had a good trip' and with that he was escorted to his penthouse suite overlooking the river and the jungle beyond. 

 

In the week to follow he paid desultory visits to a school lunch program, rural dispensaries, training sessions, and health education sessions.  He was always greeted with a warm welcome, hundreds of school children garlanded him with hibiscus and jacaranda, music played and feasts were served. As for the rest, the purpose of his mission? A few random books on the shelf, 'shortages' of donated food, empty dispensary cabinets, all explained by 'logistical problems', staff illness, and heavy rain. 

Prentiss carried on as if nothing were wrong - this is the way development aid worked.  Money was given, money never arrived, nothing happened, and more was allocated.  A shell game, an elaborate Ponzi scheme. Brilliant! 

Back at the hotel, Prentiss dressed for dinner with his elegant Moorish companion, a woman with the pedigree of a pasha, the beauty of a Moroccan princess, and the grace and charm of Fifth Avenue.  She was costly, but worth every penny.  The delights of foreign assistance were many. 

He smiled at the young aid workers assembled for a journey upcountry.  This was the other axis of foreign assistance - the legions of young, enthusiastic Americans who felt good about doing good, about actually being with black people, interacting with them, helping them.  They eagerly ate with their hands out of a common bowl, suffered bouts of dysentery and malaria stoically, endured intolerable heat, mosquitoes and interminable rides into the bush, and asked no questions about why or wherefore.  Doing good, regardless of the reason or outcome was simply good. 

Everyone benefits from international development, explained Prentiss to family and friends back home - leaders of needy countries, the United States and its allies, private consultants like himself, international banks, young Peace Corps volunteers, a nexus of enterprise. 

He let his audience thank him for his services to the poor, and he demurred.  They, the credulous American public was the unseen, complicit fourth actor in the charade.  Without them and their unquestioning support, there would be no program. Their marvelous idealism kept him in business. 

And so it was that when Donald Trump abolished USAID, Prentiss said, 'It's about time'.  His well-paid, perk-filled, untroubled times might be over, but he was ready to retire; and looking back on the good times he would miss his Moorish consort, his candle-lit dinners overlooking the river, and the generosity and friendship of his African colleagues.  That was 'development' after all, a good and wise job choice.

The Journey Of A Courtesan Of Color From Bedroom To Boardroom - What A Great Country!

Adalina Sanchez was a stunning Puerto Rican beauty - a rarity, for the mix of Taino Indian, white, and black usually comes out smudged, short, and bulky; but the gods had smiled on Ada and gave her the looks of a Hollywood diva, the body of a Greek goddess, and the spirt of Cleopatra.

Before she left the island for New York she was an apprentice seamstress, working on odd jobs at Odalisque, an offshore factory for the Rubinstein brothers of Seventh Avenue whose family had operated sweatshops since the early 1900s, and had turned to Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic for cheap labor once Samuel Gompers and the Ladies Garment Workers Union began to make inroads. 

Offshore sweatshops were out of sight, out of mind of the federal regulators, the quality control was assured thanks to Saul Finkel who had a good eye for missed stiches, and was as honest as the day was long. 

Saul who had an eye for the women as well as for the errant stitch, immediately noticed Adalina, the young beauty from Aguada, a lovely, demure-looking figure of burnished copper, a girl who had inherited all the best genes from the Spaniards, Dutch traders, English merchant marines, and Portuguese slave traders who had visited or had business with the island for three hundred years. 

Somehow her bloodline was never darkened by those slaves who worked the sugar cane and sisal in the hills - somehow her family had always found ways to seduce the conqueror not the conquered and the results were a family of remarkable beauty.

Adalina was also a good worker, highly efficient and productive whose garments were sewn to order perfectly each and every time. When Mr. Finkel came over to her station to supervise her work, she smiled broadly, giving the old Jew something to think about and moreover something to want.  

And so it was that contrary to company policy and against the unwritten rules of proper corporate behavior, he became her suitor and her lover - in a commercial transaction of course, beneficial for Ada who saw the affair as a paid way to New York, and equally favorable for Saul who had to return to his sour-smelling, warty wife Esther whom he was not about to leave for a Puerto Rican chippie, no matter how alluring. 

Figuring to curry favor with his New York bosses and tired with what had turned out to be a sexually diffident and financially expensive affair, he encouraged Ada to go to New York, work for the Rubinsteins, and make her way in America.  The idea of a whole cold, blowy, dingy factory full of Jews like Finkel was distasteful and gross; but she was confident that with her growing commercial savvy and continuing feminine allure, she would bide her time until some rich, white, Anglo-Saxon businessman noticed her and made her his princess. 

The South Bronx apartment which she shared with five other girls from the island was a cold water walk-up on East 130th Street in Spanish Harlem. Except for the brutally cold winters and the tenements, it could have been any barrio in Puerto Rico. Ada's double life - shithole in the Bronx, hellhole on Seventh Avenue, coming and going by subway, had to change.  She didn't come all the way to New York for this. 

Getting noticed was part of Ada's fortune.  She had to do nothing to attract the attention of men who found her tempting.  This meant hands all over her in the elevator to and from the fourteenth floor, and whistles and clicks from the homeboys on the streetcorner; but it also meant favors from the butcher, the handyman, and the police sergeant at the precinct; so little by little but most assuredly, she parlayed those favors into something bigger than the barrio and its tatted-up gangbangers. 

'I'm tired of being a spic', she said to Isabella, another restive visitor from the island, and with that her plan to get up and out of the 'hood and into silk sheets and Lamborghinis began.  She was reminded of the movie Maid in Manhattan where a beautiful Puerto Rican maid is noticed by a political candidate, they fall in love, and her dream of white America becomes real.  'I am Jennifer Lopez', Ada thought, but she was not about to wait for a dreamy Ralph Fiennes to discover her.  Proactivity was to be her MO. 

Yet there is virtually nothing that a poorly paid seamstress in a Seventh Avenue sweatshop can possibly do to act on the American dream.  Forced cultural isolation, forced imprisonment in the leaky, drafty, unwelcoming shithole of the South Bronx, and forced labor at the hands of the Jews downtown was her nightmare. 

Where there's a will, there's a way, and Alderman Ricardo Gonzalez hailing from her home town of Aguada, noticed her, propositioned her, and called for her in a tricked out limo that escaped the New York City fleet rules, thanks to one colleague's passionate advocacy for Latino 'street culture'.  Ada was unimpressed and undeterred.  Let this greaseball have his way and I'll be on mine.  The idiot Gonzalez liked to show off his women, and made her his aide-de-camp who accompanied him to City Hall and meetings of the City Council. 

His mistake was that he badly underestimating the appeal of Ada and overestimated his own sexual influence; and so it was that Langford Alling Harper, representative from the Silk Stocking district of the city noticed her.  Now, Harper, a handsome, well-to-do patrician whose family had been early settlers in Manhattan, wealthy Wall Street bankers, and one of New York society's perennial favorites, needed no paid comfort.  

He had mistresses up and down Park Avenue; but like all men who are never sexually satisfied and are always on the lookout for new adventures and conquests, when he saw this beauty of copper and gold and burnished mahogany, he couldn't resist. He, like all men of a certain station, immured in a very staid and predictable life, wanted to taste life on the wild side.

Never having had to resort to commercial sex, the smarmy business of actually paying for it, he was rather naive when it came to Ada who knew him and what he was about from the very beginning.  She would work on his side of the street first - flowers, simple jewelry, a touch of finery - then walk on hers. Cash payments, small bills, every month; and then to his side again, Vanguard account, offshore holdings, real estate deeds. 

Harper, like Alderman Gonzalez before him, couldn't resist the temptation to bring Ada as his aide-de-camp to the yearly family financial roundup, bringing the New York Harpers, the cousins from Hawaii and the the distant aunts and uncles from Beacon Hill one of whom, Badger Farnsworth of Farnsworth & Farnsworth ship builders and international merchants who made their money from the Three-Cornered Trade (molasses, rum, and slaves) who took a particular shine to Ada.

'Give her a chair on the Board', said old Badger, 'give it some color'; and so it was that Ada became a member who sat quietly and respectfully at first, but who thanks to a canny but surprising insight into business affairs especially a recognition of the offshore potential of her recently devastated island of Puerto Rico (there is always money to be made from disaster), she became less of a pretty burnished mahogany face and more of a contributor, the rewards for which were significant. 

Had anyone bothered to look, they might have been surprised at just how easy it had been for this barrio seamstress to have risen to high so quickly; but keeping their own counsel, they preferred not to know and take the lovely Miss Sanchez at face value.  The older members wondered if she might backslide for a night or two and comfort them, but by then the circle had been closed, and there was no room for anything but money and the furthering of the interests of the family. 

'What a great country', Ada remarked to a friend she hosted at the Russian Tea House; but the friend, diffident and unimpressed thanks to her breeding and longstanding renown as a daughter of one of New York's first families, only smiled.  Ada knew the look and smiled back.  The door to the magnificent life of America was easy to open if you knew the right combination.