Everyone Has A Pull-By Date - Most Ignore It And Go Rancid, The Particularly Sorry Fate Of The Idealist

Bob Frampton ignored pull-by dates.  They were nothing more than marketing ploys to get consumers to buy more.  And what if a few months or even a year or two were added to shelf life?  Nothing dire would happen, botulism would not suddenly multiply in the canned corn.  Perhaps there would be fewer suds in the shampoo, the frozen peas might be a bit frosty, and the Cheerios a tad stale; but the savvy consumer ignored such blandishments and was proud of it. 

 

Bob had been a sexually vigorous younger man and as he edged into late middle age, wondered when women would stop noticing him - the jowls, turkey wattle, thinning hair, and increasing girth could certainly not match the six-pack abs, rich, luxuriant hair, and energetic good fortune of the young male.  Yet he was convinced he had something which endured as an attractive quality - sensitivity.  Women, always tossed about, given the bum's rush, desired for their looks and sex appeal and far less often for their brains, appreciated men who took them seriously, ignored the superficial, and went straight to the core. 

If older men were alert to these probability curves of mating, they would find that profitable niche where young women were nudging towards their pull-by date and needed special handling and when men's physical decline was overlooked for their caring interest.  It was a narrow window of opportunity, but one which would be satisfying for the woman and transformative for the man. 

The December-May relationship is a thing of marvel - a man thinking that his days of sexual revelry and fulfillment are over, meets a young woman who finds him attractive.  His maturity, savoir faire, experience, and sexual know-how are winners in this particular arena, and although when the affair is over he is more existentially worn out than he was before, he will never regret the experience. 

Not so with more pedestrian affairs - job, business, politics - which are more hard and fast when it comes to relevance and desirability.  Although one might think that a political philosophy maintains its rigor and justification over the decades, nothing could be farther from the truth.  

The 1920s progressivism of LaFollette, Brandeis, Debs, and Gompers while still fundamentally sound - the integrity of the worker, the rights of the poor, the evils of rampant capitalism - has radically been transformed and is now characterized by the ethos of inclusivity and diversity.  Factories have become automated, unions disbanded, and social guarantees for the poor in place - so idealism must find a different playground. 

Race has been front and center for progressives since the Sixties, but attitudes between black and whites have changed significantly.  Gone are the days of conciliatory men like Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King, men of integration, peaceful protest, and racial harmony.  Gone too are the Black Panthers, militant, armed revolutionaries and their brand of violent protest, replaced by 'black marketing', the campaign that focusses on the inherent superiority of the black man, his sentient African forest roots, the mystical evolutionary side to his tribalism and animism.  

The movement is now placed under the big umbrella of diversity, an attempt to radicalize democracy and use race as its pivotal focus.  America should not be an integrated society which, like all societies, sorts out differences in ability, talent, promise, and ambition, but one engineered to reverse 'white supremacy' and replace it with 'colored supremacy'. 

All of which is to say that Bob, despite his long and passionate avowal of progressivism, had simply become, through no fault of his own, supernumerary.  While progressive principles had not changed, form, format, and content had.  His ideas, still tied to the old integrative ways of the past, were no longer of any use.  Civil rights was a young person's game, a black person's game. 

The same was true for his fidelity to feminism and the cause of women. In his younger days he had stood arm in arm with women who demanded equality and equal opportunity, but now he was lost in the gender transformation of the times.  It wasn't women so much as their permutations that needed support, promotion, and alliance.

While his views were in consonance with the progressive majority on certain issues - global warming and immigration among them - the seminal issues of race and gender which defined today's progressives were simply beyond him, too remote for his old fashioned sense of social harmony.

As much as he tried, he could not take Letitia Williams, aka Larry Williams, seriously.  To him she was a distortion, a gross exaggeration, a niche piece of American life, a denizen of the Cages Aux Folles clubs of Miami who should have stayed in boa feathers and high heels in South Beach rather than come to Washington.  Every time she flounced and pranced her way through the corridors of his K  Street offices, he winced, thinking only of the stinky man underneath.  

In short, Bob had long passed his political pull-by date and didn't know it.  He ignored the diminishing requests for his once popular, rousing speeches; and his infrequent invitations to conferences and seminars.  He hadn't had a paper published in months whereas in the past he was a regular contributor to America's top journals. 

Now, most people retire easily and gracefully.  A job is only a job after all, of which one might be proud, but not some irreplaceable piece of life.  Yet for idealists like Bob for whom changing the world had been his be-all and end-all, pull-by date meant psychic death, moral and spiritual anonymity, erasure.

He looked at his conservative Yale classmates and wondered at the ease of their elision from Wall Street to Palm beach, boardrooms to golf courses and sailing.  That was the rub - belief in progress, Utopia, and progressive change - was a trap, a No Exit room.  Bob would be saddled with guilt over the oppression of the black man till the end, would be as angered  as ever over the predation of the one percent, would shake his fist and global warming naysayers until the day he died.  There was no possible rest for anyone who truly believed. 

 

And so it was that he kept his Emeritus cubbyhole in an office downtown, wrote endless white papers on injustice, reform, and the demonic influence of the resurgent Right, and died in his traces, found one evening by the Salvadoran cleaning ladies

 Because the progressive landscape had so radically changed since his beginnings, his death was given scant notice.  Bob who? was the best that the movement could muster; and that was the fate of the true believer.  A life of unremitting purpose cannot end up well.  A few old friends attended his funeral, and nice things were said about him, but he was soon forgotten.