A White House State Dinner - A Food Fight Over Fatback, Catfish, And Cherokee Squirrel Meat

‘Help me, Jill', said the President to his wife when he learned that he was to host a formal dinner for the President of France.  Joe had been intimidated by French cooking ever since he labored over his plate of corned beef and cabbage and first heard of Julia Child.  

He of course had never come even close to a dish of frogs legs or escargots, and had eaten the same watery Irish stew, colcannon, and boxty every night. The memories of the potato famine were still very much in his mother's mind when she prepared dinner, and there was always some kind of potatoes on his plate, great mounds of the stuff, tasteless, gooey, and unappetizing. 

'Eat up, Joey', his mother said when she saw him pick at his food.  'It’ll put some meat on those bones, it will' and with that, grace, and a special thanks to St. Patrick and the Virgin Mary, the family tucked into the same miserable fare night after night. 

The cafeteria at the University of Delaware offered nothing much different from the lumpy, tasteless Irish food Joe ate at home.  A low-end public university, it had no strawberry endowments like Yale did, or the Harvard lobster tails provided by F. Farnsworth Hobby, financier, seafood lover, and generous supporter of the school. 

Hobby reported that the first time he had a lobster roll, filled with succulent meat, and drenched in butter, he was hooked.  His summers on the Cape were banquets of steamed lobster, stuffed lobster tails, lobster bisque, and of course lobster rolls. 

 

So Joe ate the university's fare - just as bland and spiritless as what his mother cooked - chicken pot pie, chicken a la king, meat loaf, and spotted lamb, all greasy, tough, floury, inedible concoctions prepared by, ironically, Irish women in the kitchen.  

During his early adult years Joe never ventured beyond this American cuisine.  In Delaware no one knew or cared about anything beyond meat and potatoes, and so political dinners never offered anything more.  Washington was different.  It had not yet evolved into the foodie heaven it now is, and catered to the cattleman and rancher crowd - big slabs of meat,  hefty baked potato, and an iceberg salad slathered with dressing.  

Joe had never seen beef of such size and to be honest, he had trouble swallowing this fatty, bloody, gory thing. At least the lamb bits in his mother's Irish stew were cooked to nuggets and when mixed in with all the rest were indistinguishable as meat; but these great cuts of beef which fell off the plate and left no room for the potato, so served on the side, were disgusting. 

The White House had what was considered an accomplished chef when Joe was in residence.  Thanks to Obama, an eater of surprisingly sophisticated tastes for a black man - or at least half a black man. His mother was a white hippy who served him grains and root vegetables, nothing even close to the French and Italian dishes he ordered from the White House kitchen.  

'Probably Harvard did it to him', Joe mused, still resentful of the snobs who went to Harvard and Yale while he soldiered on at a fourth rate school than nobody outside Delaware would ever even consider. 

As President, Joe had to open up, try new things, expand his horizons - not for his nightly meals with Jill, for that was not much more than his childhood favorites of chipped beef on toast, turkey casserole, and bangers and mash - but for state dinners which because of his progressive mental inabilities were very few.  

His handlers did not want to expose him to embarrassment and ridicule before la creme de la creme of American and foreign society.  He could easily forget who was sitting next to him at the head table, so the staff prepared oversized, large-font place-cards for all guests to help him out.

So, the state dinner for the President of France was to be a truly royal affair, and he told the kitchen staff to pull out all the stops, share no effort or expense to give the honored guest a truly sumptuous American meal. 

'And what might that be?', asked the head chef. 

Now, Joe Biden was not the person to ask since all he knew was corned beef and cabbage, pot pie, and potatoes, so he gave the man carte blanche.  'Whatever', said the President, already on to other more important business. 

This open-ended assignment, however, was not as easy as it sounded, for when the chef presented his suggested menu to LaShonda Jackson, the White House Assistant charged with overseeing the menu, she frowned, smiled, and said, 'Try again'.  

She, a black woman from rural Mississippi, brought up on collards, cornmeal, and fatback, wanted Mr. Ooo-La-La to taste real American cooking, not these fancy-dancy inedible mini-portions loved by the California crowd.

Billy Porter was also a Mississippian but a white one with a bass boat and a gun rack, a man used to noodling for catfish and frying them up in his backyard cooker in Eupora with his  buddies. 'Buds and buds', he used to say at these fish frys, toasting his good ol' boys with a Bud Light. 

How Billy ever made it to the White House was on everyone's minds.  He was not White House material, but then again neither was LaShonda Jackson, an affirmative action hire to fit the bill - Southern, black, and female, basta. Billy had been proposed by the Congressman from his district who had gone fishing with him in Arkansas and liked his simple ways and good sense right from the start.  If a man could haul in bass like Billy, he belonged in Washington. 

Nevertheless there he was and a member of the advance menu team.  The Chief of Staff wanted a food diversity as diverse as the nation itself, so instructed LaShonda to be inclusive.  Despite her better judgement and natural suspicion of this bass-fishing cracker, she had to consider his opinion, and of course it was fried catfish, biscuits, hush puppies, and peach cobbler. 

Jose Alvarez felt it important at this point to jump in and promote his culture's contribution to American cuisine.  He had grown up on cheap Tex-Mex border food.  His mother had never been farther south than a few miles from the border, had no idea of the sophisticated cuisine of Oaxaca, and had flipped her own tortillas over an open fire, roasted some goat meat for stuffing, and chopped hot chilis and tomatoes from her small patch of a dusty parcel in a dope-running neighborhood of Tijuana.  This is what should be on the menu, not greasy catfish and collard greens. 

Singing Wolf Adair, a full-blooded Cherokee had been added to the White House staff to complete what the President thought was the most diverse staff in American history, so he suggested offerings of elk, bison, and especially squirrel.  He knew that squirrel was a Southern thing but his tribe prepared it wrapped in sage and sorrel, buried it in a hot firepit, and ate it with a mix of wild berries and nuts. 

And on it went.  The gay men from San Francisco wanted their cuisine - the sophisticated, foraged, elegantly prepared grouse and sea urchin platters made famous by of their own, Barney Bradford of Chez Francois of Potrero Hill.  The lesbians from Bernal Heights wanted their jackboot-and-flannel specialties; and the.....well, not hard to guess where this was going. 

Biden had indeed created a hodge-podge, mishmash, ethno-racial potpourri at 1700 and everyone wanted their say.  Food was a cultural marker, an iconic tribute to ethnic and racial history, and the French president should be treated to - exposed to - as much of it as possible. 

As a result the meal was as inchoate, impossibly mixed-and-matched as the various sponsors of it. Who ever ate tacos with foraged sea grass?  Or marinated squirrel with pork butt?  The written menu itself, indicating and explaining every item read like a drug disclaimer, three pages to be exact of cultural apocrypha and foodie history. 

The wine was good Californian - here the President wanted to beat the froggies at their own game, so a magnificent Flowers Pinot Noir was chosen along with the bourbon and Tennessee mash. 

Joe noticed that his counterpart was picking at his food just like he did as a boy, but distracted by Taylor Swift who had generously agreed to sing at the dinner and sat next to the President, breaking all protocol, he quickly forgot the French president.   

Powerful Men - Big Cojones, Genghis Khan, And Absolute Will, So Where Is Little Joe Biden?

Joe Biden is no match for Putin, Xi, Erdogan, or the Ayatollahs, men who understand power, know how to increase, extend, and keep it; and who are Machiavellian amoralists. They are inheritors of the legacy of Genghis Khan who led his Mongol-Turkic armies out of the steppes to conquer the world from Europe to the Far East. He did it with political savvy, battlefield genius, savagery, and absolute will.  He was feared, admired, and glorified. 

There was never a doubt in his mind as he and fifty thousand men galloped across the high plateau to wreak devastation and destruction on the peoples below. He had no thoughts of accommodation, compromise, or good will.  Heads were severed, spiked and displayed on the roads leading into and out of the towns he had conquered.  He left terrified, fearful, and obedient towns in his wake.  

No one had seen such conquest, such brutality, and such absolute desire for dominion; and no one was to see it thereafter.  Dictators came and went of varying severity and barbarity but none had the breadth of ambition and almost satanic drive of Khan

Genghis Khan was a man of absolute will and power, a frightening presence of power and vengeance.  He was a horseman of the Apocalypse.



There have been many successful armies in the world.  Julius Caesar, Scipio Africanus, Pompey the Great, and Marcus Agrippa were as brilliant generals as Genghis Khan, and brought Roman organization, discipline, and management to the battle.  They won because of superior ability, armaments, and military thinking; yet it was Genghis Khan who, with an almost untamed savagery, conquered the world.  At its height the Mongol Empire extended from far eastern China to the Danube, the biggest empire the world has ever seen. 

Genghis Khan was a brilliant strategist, canny politician who through tact, intimidation, and offers of great spoils, enticed the warlike Turkic tribes to join his armies, nearly doubling their strength.  However, it was not only the might of his imposing armies, nor his ability to manage, discipline, and control such a large and diverse military force; nor even his tactical acumen and understanding of calculated risk which assured victory.  It was his indomitable, absolute, unalloyed will. 

Khan had no qualms, moral reservations, or ethical hesitancy.  Wars were for winning, civilians were complicit enemies, and total annihilation of any opposition was his modus belli. Not only would defeated populations be without the wherewithal to mount a resistance or counterattack, they would never dare to incite the bloody, murderous, savage wrath of the conqueror.

No amount of hopeful, wishful thinking, moral enterprise, or righteousness will purge, expunge, and relegate these human energies.  The only time in recorded human history that peace ruled the world was during the Pax Romana, a two hundred year period during which no serious armed threat was mounted against the Roman Empire. 

Of course this empire, extending impressively from east to west, although only half the size of conquered Mongol territories, was secured through military victory.  Compliance with Roman rule – the key to peace – was assured through brilliant civilian leadership, canny threat-and-reward diplomacy, and impressive administration and management.

For the rest of our 10,000 years, violence, brutality, conquest, and bloody empire have been the rule; and the acquisition, maintenance, and extension of power at all levels of human society is still our modus operandi.

Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were no anomalies, no steps out of historical line.  They were the inheritors of Genghis Khan and his impressive modern exponents.  It is only vanity, historical ignorance, and incredible idealism which closes the blinds on the Twentieth Century.  It is inevitable that men like these will return.

The US had absolutely no compunction about destroying Dresden, Berlin, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Tokyo along with the populations that lived there.  Wars are for winning, American Presidents and generals agreed, and nothing would stop the assault until the war was won.

William Tecumseh Sherman understood this principle well, and rode through South Carolina, the first state to secede from the union and fire the first shots against the North, intent on destroying every building, every crop, every monument, and every byway of the state to teach it an unforgettable lesson – the South will never rise again.

A century later Israeli Defense Forces followed the lessons of Sherman and Genghis Khan.  Attacks on the State of Israel would be met not only with reprisal, but with the full might of its military power.  It’s retaliation would  be complete, disproportionate, and annihilating.  The integrity and survival of the State of Israel would never, ever be compromised, and any action to assure its safety would be justified.

So where does American feel-good, love-thy-neighbor, let's all reason together optimism come from. Why on earth can there be any doubt in the current Biden Administration's mind that Israel must destroy Hamas at any price. This genocidal, hateful, murderous regime and its Muslim allies have called for the destruction of the Jewish state and the Jewish people for decades.  Should there be any question about a scorched earth, Sherman- and Genghis Khan-esque assault?

Some historians have suggested that American political liberalism is the stepchild of the Oneida colony and the Utopian, naturalist movement of the 19th century and the influence of Rousseau and American naturalists.  Utopianism of course had earlier European roots and the works of Francis Bacon and Sir Thomas More were influential in suggesting that idealism was not fantasy, but an actionable notion.   Most other historians conclude that the liberal fascination with socialism as the fairest, kindest, most compassionate political system is behind today’s progressivism.  A belief in idealism is itself idealistic, but progressives never admit to being caught in a tautology.

Conservatives on the other hand, accept human nature for what it is and do not shy away from its competitive aggressiveness which, they say, is the real engine of progress. Competitive, free enterprise, has created wealth, opportunity, and distinction not only in America but in China and India, two formerly impoverished nations which, once they had jettisoned old Soviet-style command economies quickly became world economic players.

Yes, conservatives say, this aggressive, territorial, self-interested human nature will be the cause of future armed conflict between interest groups, regions, and nations; but that is as it has always been.  Arming rather than disarming is the only reasonable, historical move in a hostile world.  Wars will inevitably happen, and victory should always be the goal.

Conservatives are content with the legacy of Genghis Khan and have no issue with the Crusades, the Persian Empire, the Seleucids, or Gao.  Europe, China, Japan, and India were at constant war for centuries, and while there were winners and losers, there was no moral consequence.  History was simply reconfigured. 

All of which is to explain conservatives’ bemusement at progressive utopianism, an ill-conceived, ahistorical, idealistic political philosophy.  There is no doubt, these conservatives conclude, that the current reformist hysteria will die down, progressivism will go the way of socialism and communism, and America will return unabashedly and unashamedly to its Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian principles.

The End Of Diversity - How A Faux Pimp In Drag Stopped Harris, Jones & Parker In Their Tracks

'Diversity this, diversity that', shouted Phelps Woolsey, 'I've had enough', but he was swimming against a strong tide.  No matter how much storied family legacy, no matter his Princeton education, and no matter his unshakeable principles, he was tossed ashore with all the rest of the sea's trash.

Take Cleopatra Jackson, foisted on him as an Administrative Assistant with nothing to recommend her, dressed like a floozy, décolleté down to two enormous breasts, weight-lifter's thighs, and a shelf as high as the Andes.  A recently transitioned man, internship at a South Beach Cage Aux Folles, and recently straightened out for a high five figure sinecure at a Washington firm, she was as badass as they come. 

'We've got to hire her', said the Managing Director, 'or the feds will be on us like a bad suit; and our numbers are not looking good." He had hired Fatima N'diaye, a Senegalese Sorbonne graduate, hoping she would put government monitors off the trail, but since the District had clamped down on this 'racial trickery' - using African PhDs instead of inner city mommas - and were monitoring the firm carefully to assure compliance, the firm had to comply. 

'In fact', he went on, 'she is worth ten straight black women.  All diversity boxes can be checked in one fell swoop'. 

Cleopatra came highly recommended - that is, she was a cousin of City Council Member Pharoah Jones, representative from Ward 8, Marion (The Bitch Set Me Up) Barry's old ward, 100 percent black, ghetto-poor, and restive.  Walkin' around money was nothing but chicken feed to the pimps and drug posses of the neighborhood. 

 

So along with no-show hires, entitlement cash, and infrastructure renewal, the neighborhood wanted some in-your-face hustling of the white man.  Although the macho community could care less about who fucked who and thought the whole idea of transgenderism was dick-cutting nonsense, sending the bitch to white, straight, rich Washington would be just the thing. 

Harris, Jones & Parker was picked because the chief partner had fallen under the spell of President Biden's Assistant For Diversity Affairs, a drop-dead beautiful octoroon from St. Barthelemy who, the K Street scuttlebutt had it, was the mistress of Congressman X, an influential member of the House Ways and Means Committee who had promoted her for the White House job. 

Now, the Biden woman, no celibate, one-man kind of girl, saw opportunity and profit at Harris, Jones & Parker and the nose-open, black-loving, dreamer Harris as an easy mark, and settled into an affair with him. 

Lucretia, as beautiful as she was, was no rich girl.  She was from the slums of St. Bart's, had angled her way from bed to bed to get up and out of the island and to El Norte and was not beyond a little mischief.  Cleopatra was her little secret. She in fact, reminded her of her pimp and lover in the islands, Francois, macho man, supreme lover and benefactor, a resemblance not surprising because Cleopatra, before she became a woman was indeed an Anacostia pimp, Cadillac, bling, spinners, mink et al. 

Meanwhile poor Phelps had to watch helplessly as Cleopatra rolled her eyes at him, sashayed from cubicle to conference room, painted her nails and fixed her lipstick all day long, while his inbox piled up with the bad leads, offers, and policy papers that he intended to turn over to a real administrative assistant. 

'Cleopatra', he asked politely and quite deferentially, 'might you do one or two things for me, light lifting really, a bit of triage and vetting, nothing that can't wait, but if it were possible and if you were willing, might you please have a look at my emails?'

'Why honey, I'd love to, but I have an appointment with Mr. Andrews on the 5th floor, but I'll be back in a jif', she answered. 

Sterling Andrews was a closeted gay man who picked away at his lunch like a bird, dreamed of Mr. Right all day, but was a wizard with spreadsheets and therefore coddled by the firm.  When Cleopatra showed him some attention, he saw right through her disguise and got a hard-on just thinking about the man underneath.  Those thighs!

Of course when Cleopatra returned from the 5th floor she had no intention of working, but Phelps, taught by the firm's DEI Officer to respect and understand the different cultures and environments from which new, alternate hires had come - or face immediate censure, loss of pay, and possible dismissal - demurred and did the scut work himself. 

At the end of his rope, angry and increasingly hostile, he kept dreaming about the awful things he would do to Cleopatra and how he would drop an H-bomb on everything east of the Anacostia River.  He was agitated and sleepless, but the pay was good and aside from Cleopatra, he liked his job.  

Not in a 'it's either her or me' position, he would have to work out an emotional compromise; but there she would always be, painting her toenails, pasting on a new set of eyelashes, topping up her lipstick and listening to Drake and Yeat not quietly but on a bloody loud Sonos mini. 

But surprise, surprise! Rumblings began over martinis at Old Ebbitt Grill. Everyone from Accounting to Contracts was sick and tired of Cleopatra Jackson and the firm's entire DEI horseshit, gay men and black women sashaying and clicking their heels, every facilitator a person of color, every meeting, workshop, seminar, or conference headlined by some race or gender hero.  Enough is enough. 

The rumblings were heard in the boardroom, and the directors met in a special session to review the firm's now questioned DEI policy.  The board, stacked with race- and gender-conscious advocates, was not an easy sell; but there were enough older, conservative members to at least shake the timbers of the old girl, and the CEO agreed to begin to dismantle the DEI program, starting, thank God, with Cleopatra Jackson who received a generous severance package and sterling recommendations. 

She of course was quite happy with it all.  She had never intended or expected to be long at Harris, Jones & Parker, so took the money and went back to Anacostia where her brothers and sisters greeted her warmly.  After she distributed half of the severance pay to the community, and settled in to her duplex on Carolina Avenue, she decided that this whole transition thing had been a really, really good idea.