We Are The World - Realpolitik And The Fantasy Of Peace, Cooperation, And Good Will

Charles M'bele, longstanding President of a central African republic, sat back on the south verandah of the palace and looked out over the river, across the thousands of miles of forest to the ocean.  'Africa', he said, to a foreign visitor, 'is the future'. 

The visitor smiled, in country on a humanitarian mission and hopeful that the President would turn his attention to the starvation, pestilence, and economic misery of his people.  So far, no such luck, as M'bele had visions of a grand African renaissance, one to challenge the West and the white race for global authority. 

'We Africans', he said, 'are inheritors of Lucy's legacy', referring to the discovery of the first human being in the Olduvai Gorge, 'and we will inherit the earth'.  

He poured the visitor another glass of bonded 30 year single malt, lit a Cuban cigar, and watched the smoke drift languidly over the balcony, across the formal gardens he had fashioned after Versailles, and disappear into the mist over the river. 

M'bele had been in power since a violent coup in which his militias and South African and Israeli mercenaries toppled an elected president of the opposing party, a party of 'devilish intent, endemic corruption, and venal ambition.' 

Following his ascent to power, he built an impregnable empire assured by a loyal army, a brutal secret police, and a system of imprisonments and generous gifts which kept partisans guessing, loyalists firm, and those wavering in prison. 

'The world is in a flurry', said the President, and went on to cite the many international efforts at peace, cooperation, and reconciliation. 'Folly, hysteria, foolishness', he said, walking over to the balcony at the sound of distant gunfire. 

'Our neighbors', he commented to his concerned visitor, 'who have not learned our lessons of peace and security. 

The President was right, of course.  Dictatorships are good for one thing at least - peace and national security.  The regimes of the Duvaliers in Haiti made the country an idyll for foreign visitors.  The Olaffson was filled with writers, artists, and dancers, French restaurants served Michelin-starred meals from the harbor to Kenscoff.  Iran under the Shah was a modern day Persepolis - elegant, majestic, and safe thanks to Pahlavi and Sevak, his notorious Secret Police. 

 

The civil uprisings across the river from M’bele’s palace were the result of weak-minded, soggy, addled puppets who never learned how to rule.  'Don't worry', the President went on as heavy artillery fire was heard echoing in the forest.  'They won't come here'. 

The President picked up the phone by his side, spoke a few words, smiled, and announced that the interview was over - important business awaited him. 

Now, as much as Western democracies criticized M'bele and his authoritarian rule, his refusal to join any international agency, and his anti-democratic sense of imperial justice, he was the rule rather than the exception. 

Machiavelli writing in the 16th century understood human nature - man's ineluctable aggressiveness, territorial ambition, self-defensiveness, and survivalism.  Rather than suggest ways to a more considerate, compassionate, and unified world, he stated that peace was the result of stalemate or conquest, nothing in between.  Wars will always be fought, but should be engaged only to establish and secure national interests. 

 

The world order today is exactly as the Prince predicted.  Russia, China, and now, finally the United States are forcefully and unapologetically promoting their national interests and using every means to secure them.  Putin, Xi, and Trump are members of a new world order - a Machiavellian one where power is exercised and parity is sought.  

The force of arms, as Clausewitz famously noted, is diplomacy by other means.  The armies and arsenals of each of the three nations is impressive to say the least; but the lessons of the Cold War are resonant.  With thousands of megatons of nuclear explosives aimed at each other neither the Soviet Union nor the United States was tempted to pull the trigger. 

M'bele of course would never be invited to join this powerful triumvirate.  His nation was an impoverished, fifth-rate country with just enough mineral wealth to interest foreign donors; but he considered himself of the same ilk.

‘How do you say', he once said to a group of supporters, 'namby-pamby?' and with a guffaw and toothy smile to his attendants, he claimed his place as a member of the militant elite of the world. 

One Worlders have been around for decades, promoting international peace and harmony, demilitarization, healthy compromise, good will, and understanding. Yet they have been no more important or influential than streetcorner preachers, idealists with an abiding faith but no grounding in history, human nature, or geopolitical reality. 

American progressives are no different, challenging the Machiavellian Trump to stop his military incursions and withdrawal from international consortia and join hands with allies in a common front of good intentions.  NATO, the G7, the EU colloquies on transatlantic cooperation, the United Nations General Assembly, says Trump, are all hopelessly weak, flaccid, indeterminate organizations, taking up space and taxpayer dollars. 

Diplomacy, a la Clausewitz, is showing off American military might and defying any country to challenge it.  Former President Truman authorized the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to send a message to the Soviet Union. Look what we've got, and we're not afraid to use it. 

'Harry Truman, my kind of man', said M'bele, a student of American history who knew that with the election of Donald Trump, Truman was back.  

Of course, M'bele could have reached back a lot farther in history to conclude what he did.  The Hundred Years War, The War of the Roses, the countless bloody conflicts in the rest of Europe, China, Persia, Turkey, Japan; the tribal conflicts throughout Africa, the civil strife, uprisings, revolutions, and beheadings par for the course for millennia were evidence enough of the permanence of territorial conflict and the irrelevance of conversation. 

'I am a man of peace', he said, and he was correct as far as that goes.  For decades under his authoritarian rule, no shots had been fired in anger or revolt.  Of course in the early days after the coup, he was merciless in his search-and-destroy missions, burning entire villages suspected of disloyalty, beheading dissidents and impaling their heads on spikes leading in and out of questionable towns; but once security was established, peace reigned. 

Africa is the mirror of the political environment of the developed world.  Big Men, authoritarian dictators rule on all points of the compass.  All have loyal armies, insatiable secret police, and arsenals full and ready for deployment.  Whether internal or external, any threat to power must be met with overwhelming force. 

The progressive Left in Europe is on the run.  Their accommodating, politically naive policies have led to millions of unwanted, illegal immigrants who vow to Islamize the continent, an erosion of traditional European, Christian, Greco-Roman values, and impending chaos.   The Right is resurgent in Italy, France, Britain, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Poland and Hungary among others.  A reemergence of nationalism and regional identity. 

'Stay for the parade', M'bele told another foreign visitor.  'You will like it'. 

The parade in honor of the thirtieth year of M'bele's rule will match anything the Soviet Union managed on May Day, he said. 'Tanks, artillery, ranks of disciplined soldiers, martial music, and triumph!' 

The visitor of course demurred.  He was as anxious to get out of the country as quickly as he could, such a nasty, horrible place; but he smiled graciously, accepted a generous present from the President, was escorted to the airport by a phalanx of armored limousines, helped on the plane by welcoming airline staff, and never returned. 

Sex And The Liberal Woman - Rutting, Pillow Talk, And Other Irrelevancies In A Desperately Serious World

Bennington Pease (Bennie) grew up like every other well-heeled, privileged girl - cotillions, Christmas balls, country club dances, the occasional flirtation in class, and  summer vacations on the Vineyard with the likes of Parker Harrington and Cabot Phillips, boys from Groton and St. Paul's on their way to Yale. 

Sexual interest, desire, and promise was part of the package. Bennie would be married soon after Wellesley or perhaps after a year or two after Harvard, probably to one of the boys she grew up with on the North Shore.  They would move to New York, probably on the East Side, have three children, two homes, three cars, and the vibrant social life that only Manhattan can offer. 

'The best laid plans of mice and men'  the old saw that always seems right around the corner would never apply to Bennie, for such is the essence of privilege - there is little that can either shake its roots or move it from its assigned path. Yet, it did, and somewhere between Junior and Senior years her head was turned. The life she had taken for granted might not be all-inclusively right.  Her patrician forbears, as historically relevant as she knew them to be, came under harsh scrutiny from the emerging liberal Left in academia. 

The Putnams, her direct ancestors, had been among the first English settlers in the New World, went on to establish the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and with John Davenport built the new conservative Puritan settlement of New Haven.   

   

The other side or the family, the Potters, were judges at the Salem trials, influential clerics, respected thinkers, and perhaps most importantly, investors in the burgeoning transatlantic trade.  As shipbuilders, owners, and investors, the Potters made a fortune and built Boston as a worthy competitor to New York. 

So Bennie was shocked when told by her liberal classmates that this all meant nothing and that these men were responsible for the concentration of wealth that distorted the very fundamental principles of the new Republic, were the patriarchal fathers of generations of insular, white privileged males, and their investments were instrumental in perpetuating slavery (The Three Cornered Trade, the slave routes from which the Putnams had profited), propagating an ethos of aristocratic Louis XVI - Marie Antoinette 'let them eat cake' royalty, and creating a cabal of wealthy subterfuge. 

Bennie's weakness - that was the only explanation offered by her family - led her astray and before she graduated she had turned against family, legacy, and tradition, and had become one of 'them', the pious, Left. 

One would have thought that her life of discipline, enforced rectitude, and an unshakeable code of honor would have made her strong.  On the contrary, her life was so predicted, so constructed, so inviolable that she was never was allowed to think on her own; so when she was forced to rely on her wits, her intelligence, and her logic, she could not and was easily and quickly subsumed within The Movement. 

Now, the liberal woman of today is not Eleanor Roosevelt, a woman of honor and patrician pride who espoused her husband's social liberalism and spoke out in favor of labor, the working man, and the irrevocable principles of popular democracy. 

 

She is a harridan, a succubus, a vixenish howler for revolutionary change.  No gentle, compromised, accommodating change, but absolute, immediate, and brutal reform.  The black man is no longer the subject of Uncle Tom Martin Luther King's righteous cause, but the new American, the inheritor of forest wisdom and environmental insight to be raised to the top of the pinnacle of society. The disappearance and death of the white race should be accelerated to make room for black power. 

Heterosexuality, a legacy of a medieval reproductive past should also be expunged from American society to be replaced by a myriad of genders, a cornucopia of sexual choices, and halcyon years of sexual liberation.  The capitalist system, responsible for racial oppression and climate Armageddon, must be dismantled and replaced by socialism, a generous, compassionate, inclusive form of government. 

Given this agenda and its existential importance, liberal women have no time for anything less than serious pursuits.  Moreover, the privileged white lifestyle of conservatives - blonde, vacuous, ignoramuses more interested in mousse and Potomac mansions than social justice - is itself anathema.  Not only do liberal women have no time for St. Tropez or Cannes, they see the vapid lifestyle as counter-revolutionary, signifying the hopeless emptiness of the bourgeoisie. 

Sex for the conservative is nothing but wanton pleasure, trysts amidst darkness, self-gratifying pleasure while others were struggling to survive.  Sexual orgasm is nothing more than the bourgeois sentiment, the sought -after Holy Grail of political turpitude.  Camaraderie, fellowship, comrades in arms, solidarity, communalism, and bonding are the only sensible, reasonable, and logical relationships in a troubled world. 

Not only that but the liberal woman is conflicted about her own sexuality, challenged as she was to rid herself of the outmoded, antediluvian heterosexuality, to be liberated, and invested in the new sexuality of the day.  

For heterosexual woman, this is truly a conundrum.  The whole idea of likker-licenses, S&M street fairs, dildo buggering, and pussy cum is revolting, yet these new liberal phalanxes are not deterred, and in basement apartments everywhere, they put up with clit-pierces and tongue studs, fingering, and faux orgasms in a show of political solidarity. 

Most demurred - better speak out in favor of the gender spectrum than wallow in it - so sex in liberal quarters was a bottom drawer issue. 

Bennie, however had always been a woman with a strong heterosexual desire. She never considered Biblical injunction, biological imperative, family values, or other such covers for her native instincts.  She simply wanted to be taken, penetrated, and released - and not by some plastic robotic insert held by a big-titted, overweight bull dyke.

And what was this political conflation all about ?  Who said that sexual inclusivity had to be the menu du jour?  Who ever came up with the idea in the first place?  How in God's name did a tiny, outlying demographic become the zeitgeist of the liberal movement?  It was one thing for two men to do unspeakable things in bathhouses, but to raise that level of peculiar satisfaction to the national agenda?

Ironically, this sexual abstemiousness must have been what it was like back in Salem - a Puritanical obsession with celibacy, necessary sexual ritual, and the co-existence of evil with female sexual desire. Of course there were women like Bennie then, demoiselles who had their pleasure in the bushes or the barn, but it was a censorious, brutally ascetic time. 

Bennie quickly saw the errors of her ways.  It turned out that she was not so much the wilting flower that her family had assumed, but a woman who only needed a wake-up call - the supreme arrogance of these ponderous, hoarse, ugly women to send her packing.  Liberalism might have some redeeming values, some raison d'etre, but the whole thing had gotten so baroque, so rococo in fact, that there was no aging in place.  It was time to go, and go she did back to her roots, her old Nantucket summer friends, Grandma Putnam and Grandfather Potter, and eyes on the prize - a handsome, successful Wall Street banker with charm and promise...or something like that. 

At this point leaving the big tent of social causes, the bloody sanctimony and sexual perversion was enough so that even Bob from Accounting looked good to her. 

Of course she reverted to form and married well, had the expected three children, and lived a happy, expansive, prurient (yes, she and her husband were not beneath that) life. 

Liberal women? In the rear view mirror where they belonged. 

'If The Rule You Followed Led You To This...' When Conviction Grows As Stale As Week-Old Bread

Vicki Pastor had given the best years of her life to social justice.  She had marched with Martin and Ralph across the Pettis bridge, joined Freedom Riders in Montgomery, braved the ax handles and dogs of Bull Connor, and had come back to Washington to continue the struggle for equality and fairness.

She had put up with Ronald Reagan and the Bushes – conservative politicians of reasonably good will but misinformed intentions.  You couldn’t help but like Reagan, a jolly old soul with a self-deprecating sense of humor. George Bush I was a patriot, whose noblesse oblige was memorable – WWII combat airman, long service in government, patient and dutiful Vice President, and finally Chief Executive.  

His son, George II was a bit of a cowboy but within reason, and took 9/11 with  proper stolid American commitment; but the man now in the White House, Donald J Trump was another Republican altogether.

He was a bully, a racist, and a warmonger in bed with his Wall Street cronies and New York real estate mogul, a self-satisfied criminal who had avoided the law for himself but went on to abuse and distort it for ordinary Americans.

Vicki hated him with a visceral passion, an unrestrained, immoderate, bilious hatred; and although she was not proud of such unchristian behavior, she felt that such animus was called for.  The more hatred for this hateful man, the better.

It wasn’t just his politics that was so upsetting, but his lack of culture.  The man was a crass, bourgeois caricature of America’s worst instincts. His yachts, his Mar-a-Lago, his glitz, faux glamour, and arm candy were revolting examples of his excess.  His gross superficiality, his disdain for high culture and intellectual sophistication, his defiance of reasonable social norms and outright determination to create a cheap, tinsel-and-sequin Washington were disgusting.

Yet here Vicki was in her later years, widowed, children in San Francisco and Paris, rarely invited out, disconsolate and feeling hopeless, with nothing but memories and Trump hatrcd to support her growing despair.  ‘I need to do something’, she said; but the climate conferences, rallies on the National Mall, letters to the editor, and speaking at college reunions were not enough.

She thought of Coleman Silk, the Phillip Roth character in his The Human Stain who takes a much younger woman as lover in his later years.  ‘She’s not my first love nor my last’, he says to a censorious friend, ‘but she certainly is my last. Doesn’t that count for something?’

Men, Vicki knew, had it in them to take young lovers even at seventy; yet here she was a shriveled up old prune whom no man wanted any more, let alone a younger one.  Men were the lucky ones.  Only a nice bank account and a flat stomach – and not even that – could assure a December-May affair while she languished alone, tending her petunias and hating Donald J Trump.

It was at the poetry reading she had arranged at her home, an event to celebrate the works of a local artist whose verses had been overlooked for the many decades she had been writing them, that she had an epiphany, a conversion, a bright light of possibility.

The poet stood up before the gathering and began to read from her works – one treacly, predictable, crushingly adolescent poem after another. The guests smiled at a simile, shook their heads at a painful metaphor and took the whole brutal recital as though it were the Second  Coming.

The theme, of course, was social justice.  ‘Oh, what these eyes have seen’, she read, ‘and wept tears of love and warm embrace’ and from there went on to speak of the black man, ‘the sentient soul of the forest’, the inheritor of God’s first graces, noble creature maligned, dismissed, and damned. 

This was only the beginning, for she went on and on until even the adoring crowd began to grow restive;  but their love for the poet, her poetry, and her heartfelt emotion was stirring, and they kept their attention.

But Vicki was shaken.  The poetry was so awful, so irremediably bad, so self-assured in its miserable sentiments, that she had to leave the room, down three shots of chilled Stoli, and turn the oven to high.  In a fit of pique and resentment at her own idiocy, and with a hateful desire to be done with the whole disgusting mess – the horrible poetry, the black man, the insufferable toadying of her friends – she would burn the canapés to a crisp, serve them on a silver tray, and watch her guests eat them, swallow the bitter bits and thank her profusely.

‘No mas!’, she shouted as she drank another shot. ‘Basta’, and with the last remaining reserves of patience let the old bitch finish her recital, sit down, and be feted.  What was she thinking?  How could she have let her sympathies go so far afield?  She and the event she had arranged were caricatures, horrible reminders of the penitential years spent promoting old chestnuts, goodness, promise, halcyon years to come.

‘Fuck ‘em’, she said, now drunk beyond control but relieved of the Sisyphean burden of doing good once and for all.  Like the Coleman Silk character, it was time to give it up, clear the decks for running, and be done with it.

Her friends and colleagues could not believe the transformation.   Every last trace of her fidelity, obedience to and respect for social justice was gone.  What was left was a pissy, dismissive bitch of a woman who had finally come into her own. 

She was off to parts unknown, drawing down on her private income, so long hidden from the censorious view of her progressive colleagues, and finally happy. Joyous actually, as only anyone who has finally given a last goodbye to the sodden past can feel.

‘Fuck ‘em’, she said as she drove past the White House for the last time, waving to the beautiful blonde young things along Pennsylvania Avenue.

The Poetry Reading – Treacle, Bad Bunny, And Latino Housepainters

‘I paint houses, says the Robert Di Niro character in the Martin Scorsese movie, ‘The Irishman’, a euphemism for being a hit man; and Linda Chavez Porter, the poet, chose that ironic beginning for ‘Hollow Men, A Reprise’ her featured work.  Latinos, her group, were indeed housepainters, leaf-blowers, and lawn-mowers and she, a poet of tongue-in-cheek positivism and ethnic solidarity wanted to praise Caesar, not bury him.

Linda was not a poet in the published, recognized sense; but an amateur versifier that Vicki Chalmers had chosen as her political pet.  Women poets, said Vicki, especially those of color, never got their due in a white, privileged world.  Yes, there was Emily Dickenson, she noted, but she was history; and today was today, the era of the new woman, the confident woman, the champion, the spokesperson for civil rights, honor, and justice.

‘Think Guernica’, Vicki told her friends. ‘Now that’s what I’m talking about’ – a painting of powerful political import within a framework of modernism and artistic genius.  ‘Linda is of the same ilk’.

Of course she was nothing of the sort.  At best she was good at rhymes and had a way of pronouncing the cadence of her lines with a melodramatic flourish which made audiences sit up and pay attention to what was, despite Vicki’s praise, rather treacly, childish stuff.

I paint houses, said the man

A distant uncle in a faraway land

With death in his heart, and a gun in his hand

He dealt with the mob to beat the band

The group of matrons and their husbands gathered in the living room of Vicki’s suburban rambler all smiled at the irony, and familiar with Linda’s work, knew what was coming and what they had gathered together for – a screed in verse against Donald Trump, usurper of the American dream, unconscionable liar and intellectual thief, a moral brigand and fool.

Vicki was a multiculturalist, a woman with una gota of Spanish blood which gave her currency in the progressive world of inclusion and diversity.  The drop of blood had been diluted over the years, mixed with enough Palestinian bits to give her even more political credibility, but she clung to the legacy of her forbear who had demonstrated in the streets of Madrid to protest the bloody reign of Isabella and demand peasant rights for which he was guillotined in the public square, his head thrown to the dogs.

Suarez in fact was not even a footnote to Spanish history let alone a peasant hero.  Records kept in the Alhambra library cite him as ‘a man without a brain who would soon lose his head’ (un hombre sin cerebro que pronto perderia la cabeza); but Vicki never got that far – myth and popular scuttlebutt were enough for a woman whose ideas about universal social justice had been fixed since her first year at Wellesley where a young firebrand from the South Bronx had been invited to speak.  

Vicki had been taken with the Puerto Rican’s politics and, as it turned out, her powerful sexual allure and took a leave of absence from school to live with her charismatic lover in New York.

Be that as it may, Vicki was naturally drawn to the poetry of Linda Chavez and gave her every opportunity to shine, such was her defiant refusal to see the woman’s puerile verse for what it was and claim it to be the ‘new voice of Latina womanhood’.

It so happened that Bad Bunny, a Puerto Rican rapper and Latino icon was to headline the Super Bowl halftime ceremony.  The NFL had been criticized for its choice because Bad Bunny was known more for his cross-dressing and anti-ICE sentiments than for his talent.  Nevertheless, Bad Bunny went on stage, in a toned-down white suit, said ‘We are all Americans’ or some compromising nod to white people, and the show went on.

Vicki loved him for all his Latino looks, salsa, an unashamed piragua, a fancy, zoot-suited icon and hero of immigrants.  This is what white America needed – a jolt, a shot in the arm, a wakeup call heralding the arrival of diversity.  In a few short decades white people would be in the minority and in a few more wiped from the face of the earth.

All this because of a Spanish man without a brain, a South Bronx Puerto Rican lover, and some flimsy indoctrination by The Young Progressives at Wellesley but that’s what the whole diversity thing has amounted to in the first place, so Vicki was just one of those who fell in line. 

‘I am a proud Latina’, she said to the group at her poetry reading, and went on to give her by then familiar disquisition on the native beauty of the Latin woman, body and soul.  She gave Chavez, the poet, a warm embrace and sat down as she began to read.

‘We must do this again’, said one guest about to leave after the empanadas and pupusas; but as soon as she got out the door, turned to her husband and said, ‘I’m glad that’s over’, a wasted evening if there ever was one, subjected to irrelevance – and bad irrelevance at that – and the only recompense soggy Mexican food.

Vicki beamed as she embraced each one of her departing guests.  As far as she was concerned, the event had been a smashing success, one of her best; and she was indeed planning the next in what would become a series. 

She didn’t want to clean up, rearrange the furniture, or even turn off the lights, so ebullient did she feel about the evening.  She wanted to remember it as it was, a happy, engaging, fulfilling time; so she went to bed tired but happy, impatient to start the next day.

There was to be no series as Vicki had hoped.  The awful, brutally stupid poetry of the evening had sealed her fate.  Her friends who had always been loyal to her, patient beyond expectation with her growing reflexive progressivism and airy-fairy political cheeriness, had had enough.  There were limits after all.  

At their age, a chaise lounge in Tampa was more their style regardless of Donald Trump and so while Vicki was still whirling like a Turkish dervish, let their rooms be cleaned by Salvadoran maids, and be done with it.   

The Devil Made Me Do It - A Life Of Good Is As Boring As Can Be

Ivan Karamazov’s Devil is a vaudevillian.  ‘Imagine how dull life would be, church every day of the week, fidelity, obedience, what have you without me.  I am here to make life livable.’

The allure of the bad in a good world – as familiar as dew on a rose petal since the dawn of time. Humanity, the devil’s workshop, the playground for happy hookers, philanderers, and bookies.  We might all have been born innocent and pure, but it doesn’t take long for the itch to begin, for the lure of the bad boy, the mark, the dirty tricks to percolate up and start to feel good, far better than Holy Communion, straight A’s, and an orderly room.

Yet some people make a life out of doing good and simply can’t help themselves – they are obliged to help others, change the world, give selflessly, and refuse temptation.  Doing good was not just a part of an ethos, a subscription to Christian values, or a political commitment; it was identity.  It was a permanently defining quality that dimmed all others.  Doing good was worn proudly, a moral suit of clothes never taken off, stiff collar and all.

Bob Muzelle had been a particularly happy youngster, all smiles and coos, a little boy to make any mother full of joy.  As he grew older, none of that sweetness and pretty innocence disappeared, and he was a model child, obedient, faithful, and good natured to others.  ‘Mother, may I’ was his signature, and he never strayed from that particularly  beautiful intimacy.

Even as a teenager when all norms of patience and propriety were thrown to the wind in a fuck you, jack off stupid orgy, Bob paid attention to his parents, teachers, and priests.  It seemed as though this boyish piety was there to stay.

‘Just you wait’, said Marge Helander to Mrs. Muzelle; but that curse never took.  Bob stayed on the straight and narrow and never missed a step.  He took a lot of shit in college – the frat boys were a pack of dogs and the bitches merciless – but he held his own, joined the right groups, started early on the road to social justice, did the right thing, demonstrated, argued, defended and showed his true colors with insistence and purpose.  He had a mission, a goal, and a raison d’etre of a higher order.

He never got drunk, never got laid, and never said a bad word about anyone except as groups – conservatives were befouling the country with their lies and distortions and should be strung up, beheaded, and their heads impaled on spikes up and down Pennsylvania Avenue.  As horrible as that may sound, it was in keeping with Bob’s holy mission and his innate rectitude.  Hatred for a sworn enemy was part and parcel of doing good.

 

The cracks began to show during the days of black power redux – the Black Lives Matter movement which defiantly protested the abuse and oppression of the white majority.  Slavery, Jim Crow, segregation did not disappear with the Civil Rights Bill.  It only picked up steam in a fury of white resentment and anger.  It was time to off whitey once and for all.

LaShonda Williams, head of the Washington chapter of BLM was a pushy, uppity black woman without an ounce of charm, complaisance, or good will.  She was a bitch, a nasty cunt who had her hand in the till from day one, but thanks to her bloody invective and riling, blasphemous speeches calling for the end of the white race, she was a hero.

‘Whatchoo doin’ up in here, white boy?’ she yelled at Bob as he came into BLM headquarters to offer his services to the movement. ‘The days of Uncle Tom are over, dead, and buried’, she said, ‘so take your Doctor King i-dol-a-try and go back to the ‘burbs, boy.’

‘I just want to help’, Bob stumbled, shuffling his feet like a black minstrel, cap in hand, ‘Yes, Massa’ out of his mouth before he could help it; but LaShonda was having none of it.  ‘Fuck off’, she said, showing him the door.

Where was the solidarity he had known with Martin and Ralph?  Where were the heady days of integration, not this pissy go-home separatism.  Black people have never been able to do anything on their own, he knew, so she had no business…

Here Bob stopped himself in mid-thought.  What was happening to his proud rectitude and temperance? Of course black people were capable of real independence, intelligence, and promise.  What was he thinking?

But this summary rejection hurt.  It shook his resolve.  The whole progressive thing was supposed to be a happy, congenial affair, good people in solidarity with good.  Could he have misjudged others and badly overestimated his own sense or right?

Well, the progressive tent was a big top, he knew, and there was room for all, so why not shift gears and go up another hill.  Climate change, for example.  Now, that was an issue everyone could agree upon, hands down.

However a succession of brutally cold winters had broken the ranks, and the movement had become desultory at best.  The central idea – that the world faced climate Armageddon – was being dismissed as presumptive evidence, much of it cooked by climate zealots, was outed. The whole thing was being shown up as a charade, another hobby horse, a wacko theory that somehow gained currency until the weather turned Arctic.  Too late to board that bus, thought Bob.

And so it went from blacks to climate change to transgenders.  ‘They stole my youth’ said Bob melodramatically.  ‘Never had a fun day in my life.  That’s about to change’.

Epiphanies usually are from bad to good.  People see the light of their wayward ways and find good; but in Bob’s case it was the reverse.  The very thought of that harridan cunt LaShonda turned his head.

But how?  Decades of being a goody two shoes had crimped his style.  Dishonesty, seduction, infidelity, chicanery, disregard for consequences were not in his portfolio; but since it was high time, he would learn how.

Every time he slapped on his aftershave, adjusted the knot on his tie, and polished his shoes, he hated himself.  A dowdy, frumpy, politically buggered choirboy at his age!  A life down the tubes.

‘I’m outta here’, he said to his wire Corinne one evening.

‘Where are you going, dear?’, she replied.

‘None of your business’, Bob snapped back and headed down to the Blarney Stone for a shot and a beer like any other red blooded male; but neither the Wild Turkey nor the young hooker at the end of the bar were his cup of tea.  So seedy, so uncomely for a Yale man.

Which is where we must leave Bob to his own devices and hope that he can defy inertia and do a volte face.  After all, he deserves some compassion.

‘Attention must be paid’, Willy Loman’s wife says to her sons in Miller’s The Death of A Salesman. Some recognition for a human being who has given his whole life for an idea and ended up with nothing.

Ivan Karamazov’s Devil, however, would have laughed at Bob's dogged, soggy purpose. 

Africa, The Ghetto, And La Cage Aux Folles – Diversity's Bill Of Goods, The Scam Of The Century

Vicki Chalmers sat patiently as the last poet read her verses, this time about Africa, ‘heart and soul of diversity’, the primeval forest, home to sentience, pride, dignity, and the essentiality the future. 

Vicki fussed a bit, fidgeted, and squirmed in her chair. ‘Thank God’, she whispered, peeking at her program and seeing that this would be the end of the readings for the night.  She had sat through ‘Swish And Flounce’, the story of gay romance with ‘a taste of modernity’, a sexual metaphor based on the wine promotions of Napa Valley – ‘a touch of dark chocolate, hints of peppermint and orange’.

The gay men, Richard and Paul, ‘were as sweet as grapes on the vine, full, succulent, and ready to be picked’ and the wine made from their love was more beautiful than that of Romeo and Juliet – fragrant, silken, and complex.

She patiently sat on her hands as another woman read her poem about the ghetto, ‘that place of raw power, vitality, and promise’ and went on to create a Disneyland of pimps, whores, tricked out Caddies, and ermine coats. 

‘Anacostia is like a Milan runway’, she read, ‘glamorous, glorious, and golden’.  The gunshots ‘ringing out like beats of a tympanum’, the cries echoing ‘in the dark canyons of the projects’, and the ‘redolent incense of weed’ rang in ‘the halcyon days of the black man’.

It was then that Vicki decided to stop the nonsense – the fanciful, ordained, canonical verses, and the impossibly childish impressions of reality dreamed up in front of a suburban bay window.

Africa was certainly the primal forest of humankind, the home of proto-humanity, attuned to the environment, sensitive to the subtlety of birdsong and flowing streams; but not as imagined by the likes of Hortense Adams who had taken the words of progressive black millennialists and turned them into treacly, fanciful images of her own making.

The ghetto might well be still mired in dysfunction, but there would be a more potent reality, a much more salient, meaningful existence there than her poet’s Hollywood version.

And the gay experience would certainly not be that La Cage Aux Folles musical comedy painted by yet another Bethesda matron.  It would be mature, socially responsible, and well-integrated within the straight world.

Vicki would have to find out for herself, go to the source, see the world the way it really was.

The first leg of her journey was to Africa – not the Africa of gazelles and wildebeests that tourists sought, but the countries that were the source of the diaspora, the tribal homes of the American black.

Despite warnings from her World Bank friends all of whom had No Nigeria clauses in their contracts, Vicki was determined to visit the mother lode, and set off for Lagos as soon as she could book a ticket.

Let it be said that the city lived up to its World Bank reputation – a foul, crime-ridden, loud, uncivilized place choked with traffic, touts, and beggars all intent on taking her money.  From the moment she stepped off  the plane, she was accosted badgered, heckled, and robbed and only thanks to a visiting American diplomat was she saved from the streets.

‘It was God awful’, she said on her return.  ‘Pitiful, dangerous, miserable.  What was I thinking?’

She reassembled herself, took an advance from the consulate with warnings and good advice, but never got farther than a pestilential slum, shacks along a foul waterway choked with trash, feces, and dead bodies.  It was supposed to be a vibrant suburb, or so she was told, but it was nothing of the kind.  Standing on the banks of this cesspool, all she could see was horrific nastiness.

‘Give it more time’, the Vice-Consul said. ‘Nigeria really has a lot to offer. Have you tried the manioc?’ and with that, bedraggled, broke, and disillusioned, she returned home.

Leg two of her odyssey would be to South Beach Miami where she would meet gay boys who would be delighted to show her around, introduce her to the clubs, and exhibit the gay pride of which she so often had heard.

Yet, like Lagos, the reality did not match the illusion.  Beneath the Art Deco, the beaches, and the palms was this ragged gay underground, bathhouses, hustlers, made-up, garishly painted things, streetwalkers, horribly misshapen drag queens and their acned butch pimps, crack queers, and bums. 

‘Give it some space’, said one underground gay tour counselor. ‘Miami Beach has Glamour’  but none was to be seen.  The whole gay scene was a circus freak show, Barnum & Bailey at their very best.

Vicki hesitated before embarking on the third and last leg of her odyssey.

Maybe the whole idea was fiction and she best remain in the ‘codicils of justice’, the a priori assumptions of racial justice; but LaShonda Evans, a co-worker at her non-profit agency insisted and said that she would show Vicki ‘some real homeboys’

Now, no white person in his right mind would ever visit Anacostia, Washington’s inner city, a crime-ridden hell hole as bad as any on the East Coast, guide or not; but Vicki agreed.

It was worse than she could possibly have imagined – needles and syringes scattered on sidewalks, two-bit hookers on every corner, men smoking dope and drinking malt liquor on door stoops, and horrific sounds of screams and gunfire echoing down the cement and steel stairwells of the projects.

She never got to meet Pharoah Jones, the godfather of Anacostia, nor took the tour planned for her by LaShonda. A trip down MLK Avenue was more than enough.

‘Well, that’s over with’, Vicki said, clearing her calendar of all poetry readings, Black Lives Matter rallies, Progressives for Gender Reform colloquies, and marches for democratic reform on the National Mall.

It was not that overnight she became a conservative – that takes time – but by the time she was ready to retire to a condo in Tampa, she had turned the corner, voted Republican and became an outspoken critic of the progressive agenda.  ‘

More Catholic than the Pope’ said one of her newfound political colleagues, admiring the intensity and passion of this new convert.

‘Better late than never’, replied Vicki, for given enough time, most progressives become conservatives. 

We Were All Slaves - The Going Business Of The World’s Oldest Institution

David Brion Davis, writing in the New York Review of Books has written a review of Seymour Drescher’s book Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery.  The book argues that contrary to current popular opinion, slavery would not have collapsed on itself,  and only the various social, religious, political, and economic movements against it, ending in cataclysmic Civil War, could have stopped it.

Slavery, the institution that perhaps most defines American history, that precipitated a catastrophic Civil War,  and whose legacy lives on today, was not an American one and was well known long before its establishment in the New World.

In view of the gradual disappearance of slavery and serfdom in Western Europe in the late Middle Ages, it is easy to forget that free labor was virtually unknown in the rest of the world during most of human history.

In the preceding three centuries [prior to 1492), slavery in the Christian Mediterranean had been identified with so-called Slavs, many of them from Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia, who had been purchased by Italian merchants and sold in both Christian and Muslim markets (and the Western European words for “slave”—esclavo, escravo, Sklave, esclave, schiavo—stem from the Latin for Slav, sclavus). 

In 1670 or 1710, an Englishman would almost certainly have referred to fellow white countrymen who had been seized on the English coast or on ships by Barbary corsairs and transported to Muslim North Africa for heavy labor or sometimes ransom. For some three centuries Muslim raiders, often aided by European renegades, enslaved English, Irish, Scottish, French, Iberian, American, and even Scandinavian and Icelander captives, who joined other slaves from Russia, Italy, the Balkans, and sub-Saharan Africa in the Maghreb. From 1600 to 1750 at least 20,000 British and Irish were held as slaves in North Africa.

 

Regardless of its longevity or acceptability as an economic system, there is no way to underestimate its corrosive consequences.  As early Americans soon found out, there was no way to simply free the slaves.  The formal abolition of slavery in 1865 through the Thirteenth Amendment was only the first official step to functional abolition, and the country had to wait a hundred years until the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1965 for a true dismantling of the institution to begin.

In the hundred years between the two important dates, blacks in the South were little better than slaves, working as tenant farmers at best under a strict apartheid-style system of segregation.  

Reconstruction, initiated in principle to restore the defeated South and to make it fit for re-inclusion into the Union, only resulted in the further alienation of the region; the ultimate establishment of a de facto system of modified slavery – segregation; and a the creation of a determined, entrenched, and politically powerful elite that perpetuated hatred of the North, and a passionate defense of its own ‘way of life’. 

The legacy of slavery is with us today; and to travel through an inner-city neighborhood – black, segregated, poor, and dysfunctional – can only remind us of our past.   

It is perhaps because of this living legacy that our vision of slavery has become one-dimensional - a deprivation of human rights, the mistreatment of the enslaved, and the degradation of the individual.  

While this is no doubt true, it overlooks one of the most important aspect of American slavery - the economics of the ‘peculiar institution’ and the fact that it was a strong, productive, and viable system.  

The slave represented both labor and capital, and thus had to be managed in a way that would produce the greatest return on investment.  Records taken from antebellum plantation homes show that many, if not most slave owners carefully managed their investment, assuring that slaves would be strong, healthy, and reproductive.  

Given the above-mentioned legacy, it is hard for most Americans to accept that slave owners were business men and had more to gain by treating slaves well than poorly.  This Slavery was a going business, a successful economic model.

This long-dominant mythology seemed to draw some confirmation from the fact that slavery was often associated with soil exhaustion, indebtedness, and low levels of literacy, urban growth, industry, and immigration. 

Drawing on Adam Smith’s arguments on the superiority of free labor, or on Marxist concepts of alleged irreversible material progress, or on racist views that American slavery, while an anachronism, helped civilize so-called African savages and would have soon died out on its own without a needless Civil War, countless historians, novelists, politicians, and others misrepresented an institution that served as the crucial basis for New World settlement and expansion for over three centuries. 

It was a system, moreover, that anticipated the efficiency and productivity of factory assembly lines while also leading the way to the first stage of a globalized economy. 

As the croplands of the Deep South opened up and the demand for labor increased, plantation owners were even more interested in assuring the fertility and reproductive health of their slaves.  

Thomas Jefferson among other slave owners understood the economics of the institution as well as anyone else, and although he was morally and philosophically opposed to slavery, he knew that his wealth increased with the growing demand for his slaves. 

Drescher – like Fogel and Engerman in Time on the Cross– conclude that because slavery was indeed a productive and profitable system and that it would not have collapsed upon itself, it was only because of the anti-slavery and abolitionist movements which drew their argument from philosophy (the Enlightenment’s concept of free labor and the rights of Man), religion (in particular the Quakers but later the Methodists), and economic competition (the industrialized North vs. the agricultural South) that created the pressure to go to war against an equally determined South, convinced of its own rights and ready to fight to defend them.  

What makes the success of that movement especially amazing is the extraordinary strength, vitality, productivity, profitability, and transferability of racial slavery in the New World. By the late 1600s the sugar-producing Caribbean colonies had created the most profitable economy, per capita, in the world. 

Their exports were worth two and a half times those of the partly free-labor economies of North America, and colonists with the highest incomes now lived in the West Indies. And despite the emergence of liberal and radical ideologies in the Age of Revolution, despite the rise of antislavery organizations in Britain, America, and France, despite the disruptions of the American, French, and Haitian revolutions, the African slave trade reached its peak between 1783 and 1793 and could hardly have been more vigorous and profitable when outlawed in 1807 by Britain and the United States.

The value of British West Indian exports to England and of imports in the West Indies from England increased sharply from the early 1780s to the end of the eighteenth century. Drescher also demonstrated that the British West Indies’ share of the total British overseas trade rose to high peaks in the early nineteenth century and did not begin a long-range decline until well after Parliament deprived the colonies of fresh supplies of African labor.

After assessing the profitability of the slave trade, which brought rewards of around 10 percent on investment, and the increasing value of the British West Indies, Drescher contended that the British slave system was expanding, not declining, at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Much of Drescher’s book, then, focuses on the factors which led to abolition.  Since slavery was an economically productive system, both for Britain and the United States, and there was no economic self-interest in destroying it, it was left to the non-economic forces of society to demand its cessation.

No theme in Drescher’s book is more striking than the extraordinary success of abolitionism in mobilizing public opinion in Britain and then in the northern United States (with a very different outcome), as well as the failure of such efforts on the Continent.

He convincingly underscores the importance of representative government and the tradition of public petitioning as well as the fact that newspapers, pamphlets, sermons, voluntary societies and associations, and a common-law tradition created in Anglo-American societies a degree of public participation unmatched in the rest of the world. He also briefly notes that by the 1780s, British culture had long been saturated with appalling descriptions of the cruelties of the African slave trade.

British abolitionists’ [enjoyed] extraordinary success in mobilizing public opinion and influencing government policies. In 1787, when reformers in London founded the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, a separate society emerged in the industrial center of Manchester with 68 women among its 302 subscribers. 

From the very start women had a prominent part in the British movement as writers, public speakers, leaders of campaigns to boycott slave-grown sugar, and by the 1820s as signers of petitions and influential advocates of “immediate,” as opposed to gradual, slave emancipation.

Although Drescher underestimates the central force of evangelical religion in motivating Anglo-American abolitionism, he convincingly underscores the importance of representative government and the tradition of public petitioning as well as the fact that newspapers, pamphlets, sermons, voluntary societies and associations, and a common-law tradition created in Anglo-American societies a degree of public participation unmatched in the rest of the world. He also briefly notes that by the 1780s, British culture had long been saturated with appalling descriptions of the cruelties of the African slave trade. 

There are many additional factors which influenced the course of events in the United States.  The defense of ‘free labor’ – a philosophical principle derived from the Enlightenment and enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution – was made even more compelling because of our colonial history.  

Americans were slaves of a sort to their colonial masters, unable to profit from their own labor, and therefore philosophy grew practical, political teeth.  The fact that the concept of ‘free labor’ as a strictly economic system was flawed did not matter.  It had such strong philosophical and nationalistic roots, that it persisted despite the evidence:

Abolitionists were encouraged by the prevailing conviction regarding the economic superiority of free labor and the belief, shared even by many New World slaveholders, that slavery, like medieval serfdom, was destined by history to be extinguished. Yet they were forced to deal with the repeated limitations and failures of free-labor ideology, for example the discovery that freed plantation workers were not as productive as slaves, even after periods of “educational” coerced apprenticeship.

The role of religion in America was even more important in abolishing slavery for the same reasons.  Disaffected and subjugated members of religious minorities in England fled their imperial masters and were passionately committed to any kind of freedom.  

Not surprisingly religions proliferated in America, and in the South Methodists in particular were responsible for slave literacy (to be able to read the Bible) and inclusion in religious worship.  Although these religious groups were not directly or necessarily contributing to the demise of slavery, they nevertheless were important actors in the movement.

America, as a new nation, was feeling its muscle early and often.  America was expansionist and industrializing early in the 19th century.  The cotton gin revolutionized Southern agriculture and made a productive crop even more so; but at the same time threatened the economic interests of the North.  

As anti-slavery movements gained momentum in the North, the South turned increasingly to Britain as the major buyer of cotton – enriching a former enemy and a potential new one.

In short, although slavery was indeed a viable and productive economic system, it could not withstand the onslaught of what was becoming a perfect storm, a confluence of factors which precipitated its demise.  

Because the South had its own perfect storm – an economic model which produced wealth; a plantation society based on the old English Cavalier tradition and one prized for its ‘higher values’ of social grace and propriety; and a growing defiance of ‘foreign intervention’ (the precursor to ‘states’ rights’.  War was inevitable.

It is not surprising that even in defeat the South was determined to salvage as much of its own legacy as possible.  The successful fight to reject Radical Republicanism, to establish Jim Crow, to create an economic system of tenant farming which was little different from slavery, and to coalesce political forces into a strong political force, made the South once again an enemy, but this time within the Union.   

Given the North’s many justifications for war and the destruction of the South’s economic and social structure, the continuing antipathy towards it was also not surprising. 

Lincoln of course, as a consummate politician trying desperately to save the Union, found the Abolitionists more of a problem than an ally.  He knew that compromises would have to be made to ensure that the South would not secede, and he felt that their harsh and inflexible positions would make this difficult.  

The more Lincoln resisted complete abolition and emancipation, the louder their cries became and the more determined the South became.

In conclusion, slavery was a successful, productive, and viable system which for centuries had produced great returns and it would not have collapsed on its own.  It was not the universally brutal and exploitative regime portrayed by the Abolitionists and modern day ‘Progressives’.  

It was a business to be managed like any other.  The fact that it was so unique, combining labor and capital in each slave, slave owners’ attention to individual productivity (economic and reproductive) was paramount.

As the development of the Old Southwest continued apace and new cotton lands were developed, the value of slaves rose, as did the desire to protect investments.  Because it was viable, growing, and expanding, it took a concerted effort from the North to eliminate it.  

Unfortunately war was inevitable and Lincoln was assassinated.  Had he lived, Reconstruction would certainly not have been so draconian and unreasonable, the integration of former slaves into American society accomplished more easily, and a more perfect re-Union realized.