Once In The White House President Harris Sheds Her Blackness - 'I'm Really White, You Know'

Kamala Harris narrowly defeated Donald Trump in the Presidential election of 2024, and did so, as one Republican politician observed, by being Oprah Winfrey, Mother Teresa, and Gandhi all rolled into one.  She played every possible card in the deck, avoiding the issues - they would come later once she was in the White House, and besides, as she admitted to a close friend, the American public was as befuddled as she was about debt ceilings, interest rates, and balance of payments.  

The election would be about women and black people with a touch of compassion, personality, and human concern.  Her presence, her very being would embody the very goodness, kindness, and generosity that her opponent lacked.  This image of graciousness would win the day. 

Of course she would emphasize her blackness - the first black woman to rise to the highest office of the land, a combination of African American style, culture, and creds and feminist power.  Of course the blackness was a bit of a stretch, for her father was Jamaican and famous one at that, economic advisor to the President and later Professor of Economics at Stanford, basically as white as you can get while still being black; but no one on the campaign trail cared about such details.  

It was enough for her to say she was black, and that was enough.  The public didn't have to know that her father hobnobbed with white people all his life, was far more comfortable with Paul Krugman than  Snoop Dog.  She was black, and that was all there was to it. 

Of course she was half Asian - her mother was a full-blooded Indian - but speaking electorally that didn't amount to much.  In fact she downplayed the Indian angle because most Indians were big money Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, billionaires who played the market, invested in Wall Street instruments, and sat on top of a financial pyramid.  Let the Republicans have that one - up by the bootstraps, individualism, their brand of multiculturalism.  For her, the black thang was her ticket to the White House. 

Of course she couldn't go black preacher.  Not only wouldn't she know how, given her father and all, but it would be unseemly.  It would be enough to talk about the ghetto, to show sympathy and empathy from afar.  Far be it from her to actually visit the inner city.  Those ghetto mamas would see through her in a minute.  

'You ain't no black woman, honey', one woman yelled at her when she was asked by President Biden to do a walking around tour of Anacostia, Washington, DC's deep inner city. 'Get yo' ass up outta here'.

So on the campaign trail she referred to inclusivity and reminded voters that she was a prime example.  Of what, many asked? She was at best a hodge-podge, a half-black woman whose black side had a lot of white in it, and a half Asian woman, that side being pure Aryan-origin, descended from Mohenjo-Daro.  

But she hammered on about diversity, 'Take me, for example', and then she went on to confabulate and invent, giving the impression that her father was a doobie smoking Rasta man with dreads; but the public wasn't having any of it, so she turned down the volume and upped the stage lights on her female side, 

'I am a proud woman', she said, leaving off the black part.  Give it a rest, her inner circle advised her.  There are more women out there than black people, they said; so at every opportunity she talked of the historic opportunity that awaited America. A woman at the helm of the ship of state.  Imagine! So she channeled Hillary Clinton, but mindful of Hillary's overconfidence and assurance that the historical woman thing would be enough, Kamala sweetened the pot with her more practical credentials.

She had been a virtual pit bull as a prosecutor in California, a take-no-prisoners Hecuba who was relentlessly brutal in the courtroom and who showed the same badgering pursuit in her cross-examination of Brett Kavanagh as a Supreme Court nominee.  Let them see that side of me, she thought, and they will be afraid.  Very afraid, but on second thought the image of a castrating vixen was not what she wanted to sell.  Better stay on the compassionate, generous, concerned path. 

 

It worked. She was President of the United States. 'A sucker is born every minute, you can fool everyone all the time, a fool is easily parted from his money, etc. etc.', caviled the losers, nonplussed that so many Americans fell for this cackling, empty-headed clown; but there she was installed in the Oval Office, surrounded by her cabal of insiders. 

To everyone's surprise there were almost no black faces on her staff or in the Cabinet.  Those few that were there could have passed for white, or close to it, some coffee-mahogany toned upper class blends. 'I am a President for all the people', she said in her Inaugural Address and time and again as she vetted high-level appointments; 'and I am definitely not black', this last bit said to herself in the newly refinished, very feminine boudoir of the Presidential bedroom. 

Although she never admitted it until just now, she had always wanted to be white - really white, not milky black, not Caucasoid Asian white, not mongrel white, but white, pure white.  Being President meant that fungibility was now an option.  A little skin tone lightener here and there, fewer and fewer references to Dr. King, cucumber sandwiches and tea with the DAR ladies from Potomac, and the transformation would be complete. 

 

Mind you, she kept her progressive commitment and backed any and all initiatives to take from the rich and give to the poor black folk in the ghetto; she just didn't need to be black to do it.  Keep them at arms length she believed was good for the country. No favoritism, faux democracy, and this whole pinnacle thing - because of the high spiritual nature of the tribal African and his environmental sensitivity, the black man should be given his proper place atop the pinnacle of human society - had to go.  She ruled over a majority white country and so be it, all proportionality considered. 

No matter how many racial adjustments of America's demography, it would always be a white country - Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, and Washington were white; England was white, the intellectuals of the Enlightenment and Reformation were white, the pioneers were white, and every successive generation regardless of race bought into, embraced, incorporated the white values of previous generations.  Being the President for all the people mean exactly this - ethos.  

Now, President Harris, no intellectual, did not come to this conclusion through any critical historical analysis or philosophical consideration.  It was simply a good, easy justification for her lifelong desire to shed this faux blackness and ridiculous racial-ethnic charade and become a real American, a white American. 

This was definitely what the progressive Left was expecting, but then history has always shown that the office makes the man, not the other way 'round.  Being President of the United States gave her license - permission to be herself, her own person, and goddamn it, she was going to enjoy being the new me. 

The Prickly Irrelevance Of An Academic - How Lester Fine Parsed Himself Into Obscurity

Lester Fine sat atop the university's new Department Of Cross-Cultural Literariness, dean of a long-awaited locus of neo-deconstructionism, a new and exciting way of parsing literature and giving it meaning in a challenging world of diversity.  His dissertation had been this: 'Criticizing Criticism - A Textual Analysis Of Literary Exegesis'.  

Lester had been educated in the New Criticism. 'Read the text, and all will become apparent' - but fed up with the facile, metaphor-ridden imagery of the discipline, turned to Deconstruction where he found an immediate home.  There the emphasis was also on text but Derrida and Lacan insisted there was no point in fooling around with metaphor, simile and poetic license. Any meaning - if one could ever say legitimately that there ever was any anywhere - could only be perceived through the lens of historicism.  

 

There was no mystery or genius in Shakespeare, no room for Bardolotry or bowing and scraping at the altar at the Globe.  It was all a matter of race, gender, ethnicity and the historical imperatives of the time.  Queen Elizabeth and King James were what mattered, not some unique inspiration of a random individual.

As an Assistant Professor Lester was a whiz at adapting French Deconstructionists to the American genre of literary criticism.  He never backed off from their core principals, but felt he could - should - add something of the American idiom, and so was born the idea of The Criticism of Criticism, a novel approach to literature which would take Deconstructionism to its roots.  It was one thing to analyze texts from a perspective of exogenous influences; another thing altogether to deconstruct criticism itself.  

 

Harold Bloom had been one of the New Criticism's darlings and his textual analysis was virtuosity itself.  Parsing Blake's Tyger over three classes, adding Biblical, mythological, and literary references and blending them together in a marvelously complex but compelling whole, he was at the very top of his game. 

A PhD student wrote a dissertation on Bloom's approach to literature, but in so doing began to dismantle the very pillars of the New Criticism and open the way to Deconstruction. 'Parsing Synergy: The Faultline Of Positive Negativity' took Bloom to task for slavish idolatry.  Shelley, Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge per se weren't worth a spit in the wind, and Bloom's faux intellectualism was the last straw.  On the basis of that doctoral work, the student was accepted at Duke and went on to a not insignificant career. 

 

Lester, although impressed with the student's scholarship, thought he didn't go far enough.  'Criticism of Criticism' meant taking the critic to task, not for his unearthing of poetic meaning (of which there was none) but his facile use of critical tools applying them in a carousel of sound and light but without rigor.

By the time Lester had completed his submission to the Harvard University Press, the had added layer upon layer of critical exegesis, displaying his own virtuosity in displaying the existential meaning of critical literary analysis, the seminal meaning of tools and implements. 

The Harvard Press turned him down.  In their reply they dismissed his theory as hogwash, an intellectual Ponzi scheme, a lot of promise but no beef, a pseudo-intellectual shell game.  They wrote:

Dear Dr. Fine, We are in receipt of your book (title here) and were a bit confused about your thesis, your academic intent, and your critical purpose.  What indeed was your chapter 'Co-significant Unpacking - the Sorcery of Meaning' all about in the first place?  Your failure to offer even a scintilla of opportunity for the serious academic who, by the way is fed up and finished with the faux, pseudo literary criticism of the past, its arcane, self-important nonsense and gobbledygook gibberish of the old chestnuts of Deconstructionism, alone disqualifies your book from consideration. 

Get with the program, Doctor, get out of the weeds.  What on earth is The Criticism of Criticism anyway? A self-referential portrait of a tangled intellectualism.....

The author of this intemperate screed was reprimanded by Harvard which, however, took no exception to its content, only its form and diction.  Please apologize to the good doctor for your intemperance, they said. 

Despite this cruel rebuff, the Department of Cross-Cultural Literariness continued on for some time, but because of the obscurantism of the place, the narrow definition of being, and especially the talk-to-each other Ponzi scheme fol-de-rol that was called academic literary criticism but was nothing but procedural nonsense, the Department collapsed on itself and disappeared. 

What happened? said Professor Fine who never knew what hit him.  He had done everything right. He had dotted all the I's and crossed all the T's of university academic protocol.  He was an academic's academic, deep into the arcane apocrypha of literary criticism and academic critical analysis.  He had given obeisance, sought counsel, tipped his hat and been the revolutionary the university had always sought, and yet here he was, cashiered, left on the curb, dangling from the loose cord of tenure where he was left to dangle until he dropped. 

He watched from the sidelines as his department was dismantled and replaced, God forbid!, but something which resembled New Criticism, a throwback to the discredited notions of 'inspiration, personality, and creativity.  How could they?  Once again Jesus would feature and so would Nature, and so would poetic ingenuity and spirituality.  

It amounted to a de-intellectualization of the discipline,  The beauty of critical complexity, synergistic linguistics, was being rejected by reactionary simpletons who thought that Mt. Blanc was beautiful!! That Shakespeare's villains were one-off Nietzschean heroes, not the historical postulates that any fool could see them to be.   

 

Gripe, cavil, and harp though he might, his time had come and gone.  What next, a colleague asked, but Lester, shocked and befuddled, the cradle of academia no longer rocking, no blankie to sleep with, said he didn't know.  

Kamala Harris And The Parody Of Race, Gender, And Ethnicity - The Misshapen Absurdity Of Identity

Everybody knew it from the beginning - Kamala Harris would bide her time until it was the right moment to throw her boss under the bus.   She knew that time was now.  In public solidly behind her man, Joe's the one for the future, he's the one to unite the country, blah, blah, but in private she was ready either to keep him in office until he did not know on which side his toast was buttered or be sure that she was the Democratic Presidential candidate in November.  It was a win-win situation and if she played her cards right come January 2025 she would be sitting right where that old man was sitting now. 

 

The problem was that his parody of a politician made no more sense that the President; and she simply could not keep her big mouth shut, weaving the most impossibly fantastical messes, and unable to stop the randomly associated, meaningless phrases from continuing, 

They taught us that we could do anything and should never be burdened by the limitations of other people to be able or not be able to see what can be. And this is that community who understands and can see what is possible unburdened by what has been.

 

Accompanied by cackling, lunatic laughter, Harris created in herself a parody of a leader.  Somehow imagining herself eloquent, a Winston Churchill, a John F Kennedy - a poet stateswoman, a clear, incisive thinker with philosophical overtones - she turned into a weird marionette whose strings got crossed and whose wooden mouth kept yapping away, the puppeteer tangled and lost, yanking and pulling until Pinocchio stopped itself. 

She somehow managed to get her thoughts together once when she savaged Brett Kavanagh, nominee for the Supreme Court.  Those hysterical moments of high soap opera was especially noted, given the longwinded, self-serving, boisterous questioning of the Judiciary Committee. It was de rigeur, par for the course to badger, interrupt, hector, and humiliate the nominee; but Kamala Harris outdid herself and her colleagues when she lit into Kavanagh.  Her invective was vile and her approach hostile.  She was a demon, a succubus, a shrewish, clawing thing. 

 

Now, however, told by her handlers to shut up and talk about abortion rights and the path to a better future, she must reign in her dripping ambition and make nice.  Actually all it takes is for her to remind voters that she is how God intended us to be - a perfect trifecta of race, gender, and ethnicity all rolled up into one  Not only do you get a woman, she told an adoring crowd - a proud, independent, fiercely determined feminist - but a black woman of a race that is destined to regain its place atop the human pyramid, borne of tribal wisdom and environmental harmony, enslaved and dismissed, but which is now ascendant, etc. etc.; and a woman of proud ethnicity 

On this last gate of the trifecta, ethnicity, she had to watch her step because rarely if ever did she pull out her Indian heritage.  The political meme these days was black this, black that, and better to ride that horse to the white house than bring up Indians, usually at the very top of the ethnic ladder, hi-tech geek millionaires running Silicon Valley, elite capitalists.  Better keep the references chapattis, dhal, and curry.  Besides, the Vice Presidential candidate on the other side was a bona fide Indian, a beautiful one at that plus a Yale graduate with an impressive resume, so keep the Indian thing under wraps. 

All she has to do is just hammer away at her triple identity and go on about 'It's about time', in the shoes of Obama, the pants suits of Hillary, and the overalls of Jose the painter rather than go into detail about anything.  

Which is why Trump and Vance will out this parody, this manufactured faux icon of diversity as the bullying thug that she is. Biden may not have had a thought in his head, but Harris' is a tangle of nonsense. Once Trump has at this imposter, the end will come soon. 

Most politicians in this woke age might stay away from any suggestions of affirmative action - Harris' rise thanks only to the trifecta of race, gender, and ethnicity - or lighten up on criticism for fear of being called misogynist, or avoid Indian head-wagging stereotypes, but not Donald Trump.  Harris is fair game just like Pocahontas Warren or Hillary Clinton, and no kid gloves will be used in the campaign.  Every one of Harris' appeals to her diverse heritage will be met with the same parody she made for herself.  

 

The progressive Left who will vote for a black, a gay, a transgender, an ethnic minority no matter what, is not the problem.  Trump has pissed them off for years. His appeal will be to his supporters and those in the middle who have had enough cant about diversity, who want finally to see through the sham of sex, color, and birth and get down to the business of the country. 

Harris' advisors are encouraging her to go after the Trump ticket on abortion.  They she has already said, are retrograde misogynists who want to once again confine women to the kitchen, to the nursery, and to the bedroom.  Of course none of this is true.  Not only has Trump never suggested a nationwide ban on abortion, choosing to follow the free market decision of the Supreme Court; but he has taken the moral high ground.  

Expediency, he has said, echoing Catholic Popes since John Paul II is the sin behind the sin.  Abortion has become a convenience when it is existential.  This message resonates at least as much with his supporters as the abortion at will, scraping a bit of phlegm from where it doesn't belong policies of the Harris people. 

It will not be enough for Harris to rely on identity politics, the woke agenda of race, gender, and ethnicity to win the election.  The American electorate, save for those clustered on the coasts for whom diversity is the Holy Grail, is tired of diversity, inclusivity, and the constant, tiresome badgering about the plight of black people, gender fluidity, and ethnic pride. 

 

If she is to win she must focus on more substantial issues; but because of the Democratic party's persistence of focus on the woke agenda, there are few to mention.  The more obvious traditional concerns - immigration, energy, foreign affairs, the economy - are in enough of a mess thanks to Biden that Harris would be wise to stay away from them; but without identity and political substance, she is what everyone expected in the first place - an ambitious, self-promoting, cipher.