The Political Saga Of Fanny Farmer - How Victimhood Became Drollery, Alexander Hamilton, And The Unwashed

'I am so sick and tired of these Podunks', Fanny said to Claude, her partner for the night and fellow activist in town for a meeting of Scientists for Social Justice, the progressive lobby group to which they both belonged. 

Claude was not her love nor anything close, but she was old enough to remember the 'love the one you're with' posters on her mother's bedroom wall, and having inherited enough of her Sixties love thing to be unconcerned about incidental affairs, she rolled over.  Besides, Claude was a good worker, a good colleague, and a good traveling companion.  They had gone to Cleveland together to protest ICE storm troopers; to Lewisburg for a No Kings rally; and to Atlanta for an abortion rights demonstration. 

'I'm too old for all this travel'.  It was not time to hang 'em up, but ready for a more suitable desk job in Washington.  'I know that sounds bad', she said to Claude, taking the bogarted joint from him, kicking him to attention, 'but I haven't enough steam'. 

'There are no desk jobs in our business', said Claude.  'Its barricades or nothing'. 

What about Bob, she said, referring to Robert Muzelle, Managing Director of the organization, as happy and satisfied as could be, resting on his laurels, sit-ins, freedom rides, Bull Connor and the Pettus Bridge 'with Ralph and Martin', fat windbag, full of himself, never once getting out of his chair except for a a tribute to himself, an honorary title for his meritorious and tireless commitment to progressivism.  'He has a desk job'. 

'I'm getting on in years', Fanny said.  True enough but certainly not over the hill.  Just enough years to give her second thoughts.  Not whether it all had been worth it - activism was what had always counted - but was that all there was?  Was there no Act II?

It was the ten-dollar bill that did it, or at least that was the epiphanic moment of truth.  Alexander Hamilton, reviled patrician lord of the Old White Guy Constitutionalists who argued with Thomas Jefferson about the fickleness and cow shed ignorance of the majority, and insisted on an intermediary legislative body to protect the commonwealth from the tribalism and venal interests of the mob, suddenly made sense. 

All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well born; the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second.

God forbid such a conversion, she said, blessing herself, making the sign of the cross, a reflexive gesture learned as a child and never gotten rid of despite her adopted secularism and radical progressivism.  Even granting Hamilton the benefit of the doubt - Shakespeare was neither the first nor the last to pillory the mob for its gullibility and capriciousness - was apostasy, a heretical venture away from the moral plumb line of her political faith. 

Yet, there he was - a handsome, chisel-jawed man of wealth, status, and influence expressing his anti-democratic sentiments to proto-liberal Jefferson, the man who understood not only the tenets of democracy but its ethos, its moral center, and its enduring legacy, and winning the argument. 

Fanny had spent months in fetid homeless shelters, on squirrely food lines, in nasty public housing gulags, beside in clinics with new transgender women, at the barricades with fierce lesbians, and it was beginning to show.  These were not America's best  and brightest, the Musks, Brins, Huangs, Bezos, and Zuckerbergs, at the top of the phylogenetic pyramid, a genius cluster never before seen, but on the lowest rung. 

And the masses she and her fellow activists were promoting so aggressively?  The foul, crime-ridden, endemically dysfunctional 'inner city'?  Pimps, ho's, Fentanyl dopers, crack-smoking losers? What was she thinking?

Again she blessed herself and again said, 'God forbid'; and yet these niggling, insidious, traitorous thoughts kept piling on, all because of one, fleeting, desultory, accidental glance at the ten dollar bill and the engraving of Alexander Hamilton. 

'Who's going to Anacostia tomorrow?', asked one of the assembled group.  Fanny groaned at the thought.  Another trip across the river in a caravan of three armored Chevrolet Suburbans bought second hand at a Defense Department auction, to meet with 'the community', local women demanding reparations for the city's indifference to the squalor and violence of the streets.  Anacostia, Brentwood, and any number of other communities in the blighted black wards of the city had done nothing but accept walkin' around money, entitlements, and a free pass and sit in their sinkholes waiting for more. 

Now, Fanny would never have thought that way before her epiphany - that startling revelation produced by one incidental look at the first Secretary of the Treasury. Before that, she would have gone across the river willingly and happily to join with the community in condemning racism and white privilege, marching with them to demand equal rights and justice.  Pharoah Jones, the self-anointed King of Anacostia, would have been her hero, the Black Odysseus of the ghetto; but now he was little more than a caricature, all fitted out with bling, grilled teeth, ermine coat, and snakeskin boots. 

Was all of this hatred, meanness, and vile assumptions always there, brewing and festering inside her, tamped down by her own idealism, her sunken costs, her Skinner-esque behavioral training?  Had she been a hypocrite all along?  Or like all epiphanies, did the truth simply sing out and she heard its chords?

'The latter, I hope', she said to herself as she demurred, claiming a conflict.  Anacostia would have to wait. 

Hamilton, as Secretary of the Treasury would never have agreed to or even considered such entitlement cash poured out in unaccountable sums on the basis of victimhood alone - a financial travesty, a consummate waste of valuable taxpayer monies, money that could be used to facilitate individual opportunity, create the infrastructure for wealth creation, and pave the way for private enterprise. 

Her advocacy group Scientists for Social Responsibility shamelessly took money from donors and earmarked federal funds and gave it away without a second thought given to accountability, performance, or positive outcomes. A virtual open sluice gate of dollars which would never be seen again in cash or in kind, misused, diverted, lost. 

When her masters shouted 'redistribution of wealth...Occupy Wall Street...from the haves to the have nots...to each according to his needs...' she had always raised her arms in solidarity.  The American economy was built on the backs of the poor and only the one percent benefited.  Now, thanks to that Augenblick of Alexander Hamilton on the ten dollar bill she had been about to use for a tuna sandwich and a diet Coke, she could only shake her head at her mindless credulousness.  How could she have?

An apocryphal tale, baldly untrue, said those in her former camaraderie who couldn't believe that a social justice warrior of Fanny's reputation, credential, and red badges of courage could be such a turncoat, a traitor.  But they were the blindered ones who had never had Fanny's revitalizing vision.  They were the ones still stuck in the mud, floundering but thinking it was only exuberance.  

Fanny had made her bones and her public image as a progressive, a liberal activist, and a professional harbinger.  Now that she was out of that particularly limelight, it was hard for the camera to pick her up.  By now in any case she is probably retired someplace warm with both her early life and her conservative reincarnation long recessed.  When sitting on a balcony in South Beach overlooking the Atlantic on a bright January day, nothing really matters anyway.