Doing Good - The Flimsiest Excuse Of Them All For Wasting Time

Imelda Markham wanted to do good.  She had what a college guidance counselor called 'a service motive', and he advised her to visit a graduate school of social work which turned out to be a dismal place, a horrible, dispiriting, hopeless place especially for someone who had just graduated from a prestigious university with a Summa Cum Laude degree. 

That should have been enough to send a message or at least to veer her towards Wall Street, K Street, or Silicon Valley, but she persisted.  Caring, duty, responsibility to the less fortunate, the disadvantaged, the marginalized were more important guideposts for her own moral development than litigation, software, or leveraged buy-outs. 

'What on earth were you thinking?, asked her grandfather, Boston Brahmin, scion of New England shipbuilding, trade, and industry, patriarch of a family whose history dated back to the Fourth Earl of Northumberland and his descendants who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the first cavalier settlements on Albemarle Sound. 

 

This service motive thing was a confabulation, concocted by fools, he said, and began composing in his head a letter to the university Office of Career Placement objecting to such ignorance. 'It is your duty, kind sirs, to dissuade intelligent, ambitious, and talented young women like my daughter from such tomfoolery...'

Old Hiram Markham often got carried away when it came to liberalism - a faded, outmoded, discredited philosophy which had only led to fifty years of Soviet communism, European socialism, and American neo-progressivism.  The infection was viral and insidious, showing up even in the former redoubts of conservatism.  What was Yale all about if it wasn't preserving, protecting, and promoting America's foundational values? 

With great dismay he watched the university's sad decline into the morass of social idealism.  What had been the home of the captains of industry, the scions of Wall Street, and the great jurists and educators of the country had become a flaccid, temporal, directionless place.  Palestine! Imagine, Markham thought. Of all the improbable causes of a great university.  A territory of backward, medieval Islamic murderers, anti-Semitic exterminators getting top billing at Yale?  Transgenderism? The most absurd idea since homunculi or she-devils.  A brain-dead concoction....

 
Here Markham was snapped out of his reverie by his granddaughter.  'But Grandfather' the young woman insisted, 'doing good is the right thing to do' at which the old gentleman sniffed and snorted, stomped to the library, pulled out a copy of Aristotle's Metaphysics, flipped through the pages until he found what he was looking for.  

'Aha', he said, waving the book over his head. 'I told you so' and went on to read the philosopher's thoughts on goodness, the acquisitive, natural ambition of man, and the irreconcilable search for individual truth. 

'You see', shouted Markham.  'The individual, the center of the universe, the fulcrum of God's creation, not the diaspora of the ill-conceived and the bumbling'. 

Imelda had heard all this before, or some version of it; so she smiled and waited patiently until the familiar storm had passed.  In any case she was adamant.  She would follow her instincts.  Doing good was a profession like any other requiring attention, perseverance, and commitment. 

Where and how was the question.  If social work was not the answer (her trips to the projects cured her of that notion), then from which quarter of life would fulfillment come?

Her visit to Anacostia, Washington, DC's most pestilential slum, had been organized by Graduates For Social Reform, a non-profit organization founded and run by Robert Muzelle, a Yale graduate who had been on the front lines with 'Martin' and 'Ralph', a veteran of Freedom Rides and civil rights and who had never given up the ship.  Tours of Anacostia were standard fare for those Ivy League graduates who despite their patrician heritage, wanted to help others.  

 

'What the fuck are you doin' up in here?', shouted Pharoah Jones from the stoop of his row house on Martin Luther King Avenue.  'I told y'all we don't want no white muthafuckas around here. Get yo' asses back to Whiteville, you cunts', and with that Imelda rolled up the window, locked the doors, and told Muzelle she had seen enough. 

Of course the black man is still deserving, Imelda thought on her way back to Georgetown, and he needed only time, patience, and the good offices of those who had made their way up and out for his dreams to be realized. 

Nothing could have been farther from the truth - Pharoah Jones was quite happy being king of the hill, pimp, 'medication entrepreneur', street hustler and financial conman supreme with money aplenty to finance his new Cadillac Brougham retro ride and his home in Bimini.  He needed no DC help whatsoever but skimmed off the top of the entitlement money that kept pouring in thanks to LaShonda Jefferson, councilwoman from Ward 8, a whiz at budget creativity and a progressive firebrand in her third term. 

No, reflected Imelda, not for me; and turned her sights abroad.  Foreign assistance had not yet been dismantled, so that doing good in the benighted countries of the world was still a marvelous opportunity.  She got on the first boat to Africa, a signed, sealed, and delivered, Save the Children consultant to ______, one of Africa's poorest nations. 

The country, ruled by long-standing President for Life Alphonse M'bele was in the words of a disaffected World Bank project officer, 'a shithole with oil', and that was being generous.  Despite sitting on billions in oil reserves and newly-discovered rare earths, the essential components of cell phones and computers, the country was one of Africa's poorest.  

The United States and Europe, anxious to secure these resources for themselves and to keep them out of the hands of the Chinese, were generous to a fault when it came to M'bele's friendship.  Although they could not pay him directly for his favors, they provided him with 'development' grants and soft loans with which he could do as he pleased.  Ostensibly for the uplift of the population whose poverty, malnutrition, and disease burden were among the continent's highest, the money was quickly siphoned off to offshore bank accounts. 

M'bele was a most accommodating host, lodging foreign development bankers and consultants in the Independence, a five-star hotel with Carrera marble, gilt Venetian sconces, an Olympic pool, and a nine-hole golf course.  The kitchen was staffed by French, Japanese, and Italian chefs and the service was impeccable.  Eager to please and happy to be pleased foreigners conveniently overlooked the irony of this plenty amidst such abject poverty, but such was the development business - an enterprise of paradox. 

Before traveling Imelda was unaware of any of this, so besotted was she by the idea of doing good for the world's most miserable; but on her first visit to Merveilleville, the sprawling slum on the outskirts of the city, one that beggared the imagination, one far worse than anything that Haiti or Lagos could conjure up. A warren of rutted, potholed, streets lined with windowless, cracked, and broken buildings; emaciated children watching burning tires, gangs in pickups shooting at vultures....The whole scene was nightmarish, horrific, terrible. 

'This is what I came for', said Imelda to a colleague.  'I just didn't realize how difficult it would be'. 

An understatement of historic proportions.  No amount of work or well-meaning help would budge M'bele to change his ways.  Corruption, chicanery, downright international trickery was endemic to Africa. 

Because of Imelda's persistent belief in doing good, she fretted a lot and couldn't enjoy the delights of the Hotel Independence.  While her colleagues had long passed the point of no return and lived in a world of happy indifference ('Yes, it's a sorry situation, but one can one do?), she kept trying, took field trips to Merveilleville, visited miserable, blood-stained health clinics and schools without windows, desks, or electricity, and was accosted by street toughs who wanted sex with her ('A man gotta have white pussy, at least once in his life, bitch'). 

'Perhaps I shouldn't have begun with such a challenge', she thought, working in this most awful of countries; but in the course of one year during which she accepted consultancies in both West and East Africa, she saw that the miasma of rot was universal. It didn't matter where you went. 

'What did I tell you?', asked her grandfather when she drove up to see him after returning from one particularly nasty mission.  'Cut bait', the old man said. 'Pull out every last cent of walkin' around money, let the black shysters go begging'.  

It was the old conservative argument.  If the likes of M'bele had no more entitlement money, no more easy loans and generous grants, he would have to go on the capital markets which would demand reform, repayment, and on time delivery.  Failing that he would jump ship, take his ill gotten gains and retire to the south of France, leaving the mess to someone else.  In any case he was not worth one more dime of American money. 

In other words the blush was off the bloom of the rose, and Imelda was now disillusioned to the point of disgust.  'How could I have been so stupid?', she asked herself as she redid her resume to focus more on her Yale economics summa.  It wasn't too late to head to Wall Street where her grandfather would be more than happy to find her a place. 

Doing good isn't what it's cracked up to be.  Moreover, it's a bad excuse for pussyfooting around the way things are.  The world evolves, a la Darwin, thanks to the survival of the fittest, Jack London's law of claw and fang.  As the clutter is cleared, the weak and impotent are replaced by the able and the strong, everyone benefits.  The world becomes a more uniformly determined place. 

As of this writing Imelda was made partner at Elks, Bayless & Finch, Investment Bankers LLC and is making a fortune buying failing businesses, restructuring them, and selling them at a profit.  Good accomplished in another way.