Ghetto Dreams - Time We Got Ours, Racial Politics And The Moral Bankruptcy Of Municipal Government

The Mayor-Elect of Washington, DC, a self-described Democratic Socialist who followed the example of her New York City counterpart, Zorhan Mamdani, vowed to open the doors to the municipal treasury, raise the floodgates, and turn on the spigots to send uncountable millions down the sluice to the inner city.

'Black folk done suffer enough', she said, standing by a wall-sized graph showing how DC wealth will be redistributed through a steady flow from the white wards of the city to the all black ones. 'We goin' take what's ours', she said, and in that one defiant, historic, and defiant statement exposed the blatant racism endemic in DC government. 

 

The cornerstone of the new punitive, redistributive policy is a wealth tax - a tax of individual and corporate wealth that cannot be sheltered.  No matter how creative the financial instruments, no matter how many trusts, no matter how many layered investments, and no matter how many loopholes, and complex configurations, wealth will be taxed. 

'You think you can hide yo' money', said the Mayor Elect, 'ain't no where to hide it in my administration, honey'. 

Pharoah Jones, the King of Anacostia, the heart of Washington's inner city neighborhoods was invited to the Mayor Elect's administration headquarters to discuss just how to cover the money ready to flow down the Anacostia River. There was no shilly-shallying between friends (Jones had delivered Ward 8 with a plurality that any politician would envy) - the money was his to distribute as he saw fit. 

The Mayor was an astute political observer, and she had watched the Somali fraud with interest.  The City of Minneapolis had siphoned tens of millions of dollars into the hands of Somali Bernie Madoffs without giving the gift a second thought.  The politicians deemed the poor, immigrant communities deserving of unquestionable generosity and therefore authorized liberal grants for self-improvement.  Daycare centers would provide a needed institutional home for children whose mothers worked and at the same time give them a solid pre-school education.  Looking any further than the signatures on the contract would be intrusive, racist, and presumptuous. 

'What can we learn from them?', the Mayor Elect asked Jones who had been a master of turning Mayor-for-Life Marion Barry's walkin' around money - chicken feed compared to what was now coming - into a bonanza for his people.  No show jobs, earnest money, and investment in the lucrative 'underground economy' were all hallmarks of Pharoah Jones' canny management of municipal funds. 

'Democratic Socialism is my cover, sweetheart', told Pharoah Jones, 'you figure out something blacker than black on your end'; and so a deal was struck.  The Mayor Elect put the final touches on her inaugural speech announcing her radical new plan for income redistribution ('The wealthiest in our city will pay their fair share; and those who are deserving will get theirs') and Jones returned across the river to set up a financial shell game worthy of Jeffrey Skilling of Enron and Bear Stearns, let alone Mohammed Bari recently of Mogadishu. 

And so it was that finally and at long last there was a real, remunerative contract between the governed and the governing.  Mayor Barry could only dream of such genius.  Imagine! A Socialist Mayor with the support of her progressive shills in Congress who in the name of diversity and inclusivity believed in the moral righteousness of robbing the rich to pay the poor. What could be more ideal?

'I want to meet with the President', the Mayor Elect said, 'with the big white man who goin' pay me some respect. 'R-E-S-P-C-T, y'all'. I'll show that muthafucka who de boss in Washington.' 

'Mamdani ain't got nothin' on me', she added remembering the Oval Office lovefest when the Democratic Socialist Mayor Elect of New York City was invited to the White House. 

Residents of white Ward 3 saw this coming but had little choice.  There was no space between the candidates in the Democratic primary, the dc facto mayoral race - they were all far-left politicians who promised the same 'fairness', the same obsession with equity, and the same redistributive passion as the new mayor.   

Yet these same residents were uniformly progressive, inveterate Trump-haters who endorsed every item in the canon - climate change, open borders, DEI, world peace, environmental sanity and all the rest. As such they were supportive of every municipal administration's attempts to help rescue the black man from white oppression. 

These liberals put up with the worst of Mayor Barry's dismissiveness, and even with his famous trifecta of fuck-you to white Washington - 'It'll melt', referring to his indifference to plowing the white wards that voted against him; 'Get over it', referring to his yet-again overwhelming electoral victory without white support; and 'The bitch set me up', a reference to his arrest in an FBI sting - they stuck by his Chocolate City initiatives. 

This was different.  White residents with two-million dollar homes, an EV Lexus in the garage and two children in private school, now faced with an insupportable tax bill, were at sixes and sevens. Despite their liberal convictions, they had sheltered their income so that the District would not get a penny; but now this wealth tax would wipe them out.  For the first time in decades, they began to complain. 

'Fuck 'em', said the Mayor Elect. 'Our brothers and sisters in Congress goin' open up the treasury for us black folk', and right she was. Those Democrats, most of whom favored if not endorsed Democratic Socialism, would be quite willing to give the white man the comeuppance he for so long deserved and raise the black man to the pinnacle of society where he belonged.  The new Mayor would have nothing at all to worry about if the white man left the city. 

The Mayor Elect was delighted at the blue wave rout of the Republicans in the recent midterm elections and an insurmountable Democratic majority in both House and Senate.  Pharoah Jones didn't agree.  He loved Donald Trump.  Fuck Obama, Trump was the first black president with his love of bling, booty, and street sense.  

National allegiance was irrelevant, however, and money was to be made right here and now in Anacostia, the District of Columbia. 

Can Open Marriages Ever Work? No, Women Are Too Corralling And Men Need To Know If The Child Is Theirs

Randall and Margot Thompson had an open marriage.  It didn't happen by contract, conscious decision, or some socio-political belief.  It evolved, happened over time - matured as Margot said - and before too many years had gone by, they both were involved with other people.

At first it was the missing dinners, the Saturday office meetings; then the business trips to New York, and finally St. Bart's and Eleuthera. 

Although some open marriages are ideal - Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson were two very independent people with wide-ranging interests, sharp intellects, social ambition, and intelligence - most are idealistic fantasies and never survive suspicion, jealousy, and infidelity. 

 

There was a mutual respect between the couple - neither one took lovers out of their milieu.  It was important for both to maintain an air of superiority, an insouciance, and most of all a disregard for bourgeois sentiments, and this assumption provided a context for their affairs. Vita was known for her literary work, her celebrated garden at Sissinghurst, and her friendship with Virginia Woolf, and Sir Harold was a successful diplomat and scholar, so both were beyond innuendo. 

In other words neither Vita nor Harold were promiscuous, but selective  It was a 'Would Harold/Vita approve?' libertinage, never anything seedy or uncomely. They both took lovers the other would approve of, who would fit into their social circle, be at home with literature from their library, the art collection, and their music. 

Romantic love, ever since the 14th century and the ghastly, longing poems of Petrarch to his lover, Laura has been persistent.  Most ordinary people willingly accepted the ties that bind, the adoration, the flowers, the ceremonial respect, birthdays, anniversaries, dinners together; but Vita and Harold were insistent that they would never fall into that bourgeois, discredited role. 

They both defied traditional sexual norms nd both took both male and female lovers - that eclectic sexuality added to their cachet and social prominence.  The Sackville-West-Nicholsons were a model couple for the intelligentsia and the aristocratic crowd of Europe - above the fray and the common man. 

Perhaps most importantly, they both had money, and neither one was dependent upon the other.  Most women of Sackville-West's era were dutifully bound to their husbands, dependent on them for everything.  Vida's sexual independence lay on a foundation of wealth. 

It is not surprising therefore that such a marriage could exist, let alone remain stable throughout the years.  Vida and Harold did not love each other in any traditional way, so the one basic, permanent rule of marriage - fidelity - was never an issue.

Jealousy is standard fare for all societies. A woman’s infidelity, never certain and always suspect, can lead to illegitimate birth, questions of lineage and heritage for the well-to-do and questions of economics for the hoi polloi. Why should a man, hard pressed to survive in a marginal environment, invest anything in a child who is not his? Issues of misogyny, machismo, patriarchy, and sexual abuse all derive from male uncertainty. It is a matter of security, let alone male ego and pride, to know paternity.

As much as one can accuse men of hateful misogyny - a fair assessment if one reads Shakespeare's Cymbeline, Othello, and A Winter's Tale, jealousy is standard fare for all societies. A woman’s infidelity, never certain and always suspect, can lead to illegitimate birth, questions of lineage and heritage for the well-to-do and questions of economics for the hoi polloi. Why should a man, hard pressed to survive in a marginal environment, invest anything in a child who is not his? Issues of misogyny, machismo, patriarchy, and sexual abuse all derive from male uncertainty. It is a matter of security, let alone male ego and pride, to know paternity.

Some bio-ethicists such as Megan Doe have suggested that jealousy provided an evolutionary adaptation for males to assure paternity and to avoid spending resources on other males’ offspring and led females to guarantee protection and support for her offspring by having a steady partner. Men need to be sure that their children are theirs; and women, once having secured an economically viable mate, need to be sure that he doesn’t stray.

Whether hardwired or a social construct, jealousy is the one common trait of all traditional marriages. One might expect that after decades of feminism, women's liberation, and constitutionally assured women's rights that female jealousy would have disappeared.  A wayward husband? Get rid of him with no consequences and a generous settlement. 

Yet women are still as jealous as ever, almost as if they lived in a Victorian era.  No matter how professionally successful, how independent, and how financially secure, women still want faithful husbands.  If there is something hardwired in the female psyche or even deeper in some yet undetected genetic strand, it is jealousy.  Women don't need men but once they have them, they want them all for themselves. 

Men are no different, and they behave no differently that Shakespeare's cad Posthumus who believes that his wife is unfaithful to him, and like Othello will stop at nothing to rid him and all men of such treacherous, deceiving women.  The centuries have not changed the calculus - men do not want their wives to bear other men's children, and will do anything to prevent it. 

The fulcrum in all this is romantic love.  Men and women still marry for love, and that is the predicate and sine qua non for jealousy. A man wants the woman he marries and vice-versa.  They are desirable, ideal, prizes to be kept, protected, and preserved. If there is no love, there is no jealousy, and that is why the Sackville-West-Nicholson marriage prospered. 

Shakespeare’s Sonnets to his young man express a jealousy which is romantic and purely felt.  The poet expresses no anger, no hostility, or no vengeful thoughts. It is simply love which demands an emotional fidelity to be returned and requited:

Sin of self love possesseth all mine eye/And all my soul, and all my every part;/And for this sin there is no remedy/It is so grounded in my heart…

Their marriage was a kind of imagined idyll for the aristocratic set - having everything with no consequences, an easy ride through life which for ordinary people is short and brutish. 

 Marcel Proust was perhaps the most eloquent about jealousy:

It is not even necessary for that person to have attracted us, up till then, more than or even as much as others. All that was needed was that our predilection should become exclusive. And that condition is fulfilled when – in this moment of deprivation – the quest for the pleasures we enjoyed in his or her company is suddenly replaced by an anxious, torturing need, whose object is the person alone, an absurd, irrational need which the laws of this world make it impossible to satisfy and difficult to assuage – the insensate agonizing need to possess exclusively.

Vladimir Nabokov was equally compelling about jealousy, and in the final scenes of Lolita Humbert has Claire Quilty read this poem:

Because you stole her
from her wax-browed and dignified protector
spitting into his heavy-lidded eye
ripping his flavid toga and at dawn
leaving the hog to roll upon his new discomfort
the awfulness of love and violets
remorse despair while you
took a dull doll to pieces
and threw its head away
because of all you did
because of all I did not
you have to die

So Randall and Margot's experiment was doomed from the start.  They loved each other.  They were no Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson. It didn't take long from Margot to notice that Randall was spending more than just a casual amount of time with Mme. X; and no time at all for Randall to notice his wife's thickening waist. 

They were simply not cut out for the libertine life, and that sexual affairs were corrosive, debilitating, and ultimately destructive. If carried forward the open marriage would end in jealousy and both partners would marry again for the same hopelessly Petrarchan reasons. Better to stay put. And they did. 

Falling Out Of Love With Trees - The Tale Of A Reformed Environmentalist

The world is Gaia, the Earth Mother, a universal whole, a One, a miraculous integrity of living things.  It knows when a butterfly has hurt its wing, when a fish jumps in the ocean, and when a sparrow drops from a tree. Man is the interloper who trespasses on Creation, the damager, and the destroyer. 

These were the thoughts of Selma Potter as she drove to the Shenandoah, the valley in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, his place of solace, peace, and belonging. As he left Washington far behind, a feeling of serenity and happy expectation came over him.

Every weekend she loaded up the car and headed for the mountains for two days of hiking, camping, and communing.  The woods were not just a place to go or a getaway or even a refuge. In fact they could not even be called a place, nor did their copses, glades, rooks, and rills. 

She belonged to them  They were a part of her. When she was in them, they and she were indistinguishable. A wind through the trees was her breath, the water rippling in a stream was her lifeblood, the ground beneath her feet her solidity, her body, her substance. 

Only the Shenandoah gave her a measure of inspiration, some inkling that her life was not entirely meaningless.  Nature was itself inspirational, intimating meaning, suggesting that the life of Hindu sadhus and Tibetan monks sequestered high in the Himalayas reaching out for God was not just religious extremism but something valuable to be sought after. 

'I am Nature', she wrote in her diary, annotated after every trip to the woods and illustrated with miniature pen-and-ink spectral drawings, somehow capturing the spiritual nature of the environment.  'I am God and God is me'. 

The woods of Southington Mountain the ponds and lakes in Vernon, Avon, and Farmington, and the shores of Long Island Sound now meant something profound; and for the first time interior and exterior became equal parts of an existential algorithm. Philosophy and rocks, stones, leaves, and branches were joined in an intellectual symphony. 

On a recent trip to the Rockies Selma felt herself transported, from the intimate confines of the Shenandoah to the high peaks of the West.  She smiled as she started up the long, winding cliff trail up to the top of Blantyre's Peak, her place of rest and solace, his Tibetan sanctuary, his holy shrine, her resting place.  The day was bright, clear, and cold.  The first tinges of yellow were on the aspen leaves, and few reds and golds were appearing on the cottonwoods.  

The day was brisk, and Selma felt that special energy that she always had when she stepped into the mountains.  A spring in her step, a firm grip on the steep ledges of the upper reaches of his climb, deep breaths at 12,000 ft. in the air.  All was right with the world. 

Selma had not always felt such an intimacy with nature, if fact just the opposite.  She resented - hated - her family trips to their cabin in the woods a dreary, dark, sodden place in West Virginia.  As a young child she was spooked by the silence. It was an alien refuge, hostile, abandoned, and frightening. 

The nights were worst, but the days down on this bottomland were barely more light, and it too hours of hard climbing to reach sunlight, and the empty, desolate plateau where it shone was no better.  It was flat, featureless, and devoid. 

She never expected those dark days to return and so she was surprised that when one day the hike up Blantyre's Peak became more and more of a slog.  No matter how hard she tried to rid her mind of the clutter of dissatisfaction, there it was ahead of her at every turn.  Nature had become an empty, spiritless place, devoid of anything remarkable or new.  The view from the top of the mountain, a hundred miles of prairie extending to the Montana border, a vast empty space she once saw as a metaphor for infinity had become simply a desolate, empty, unwanted place. 

It wasn't supposed to be this way.  There was supposed to be something permanent about nature, some indescribable subtlety that always touched the soul, landscapes that in their simplicity reflected the mind of God more than any New York skyscraper could; so how was it that she was bored, tired of being cold, pulling off galoshes and stoking the fire.  Tired of seeing nothing but featureless rangeland in the shadow of uninhabitable mountains.  

After a while even the Shenandoah had lost its cachet; or better had lost the spiritual significance that she was so sure she saw.  Leaves were just leaves, vistas were just breaks in the clouds, panoramas just perspective, silence was not golden but empty.  What was she doing here? she repeatedly asked himself; but she had no ready answer. 

On every hike in every season, her mind filled rather than emptied, and the clarity he had once sensed in solitude was entirely gone, replaced by nonsensical clutter, scattershot ideas, bits and pieces of men, food, and camaraderie. The woods - her woods, her solace, her go-to place for spiritual rest had become nothing but a buggy waste of time.  What had Thoreau been thinking?

The fluttering leaves on the trees which once gave her a poetic sense of justice and profound happiness were now just leaves.  Fluttering was physics.  The magic of the woods, the spiritual sanctuary she had always sought had become simply a buggy, hot place she wanted to leave. 

Were Thoreau and his Transcendentalists crackpots? Outliers? Crazy hermits fleeing what was humanity's best and most enduring expression - cities? What was nature after all but a place to be transformed into Westward Expansion, Manifest Destiny? Was Genesis wrong?

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and on every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth 

What was she doing in the woods, far from anyone or anything.  Who was she kidding? And so she returned home.  She had not had the epiphany she sought, but an epiphany nonetheless. Copses were not the spiritual idylls of the deep woods.  Glades were only incidentally infertile bits of ground not miraculous visions.  Susurrus was not a verse from heaven but equation - wind + pine trees = sound. 

Selma felt that she had been sold a bill of goods - or rather had bought the goods from a snake oil salesman.  Nature was nothing but rocks, trees, and vines. Louis XIV, the Sun King, revised nature, cleared the land and built the Gardens of Versailles. That was something to reflect upon.