'Daddy, Why Am I White?' - Because Louis XIV Was White And The Ensuing Folly Of Racial Identity

Dorothy Bingham came home from school one day and asked her father, “Daddy, why am I white?”.

Mr. Bingham, a careful, dutiful moderate in affairs social, political, and religious, was nonplussed.  “Because Louis XIV was white”, he answered.

Of course that remark, taken as flippancy by social justice cadres, but a proper, reasonable response by a man proud of his European heritage, was thrown back at him with a vengeance.  

In a school racial sensitivity class, little Dorothy had innocently repeated her father’s words; and immediately the teacher and a council of the school’s elders decided upon censure – not of the little girl, of course, who was only mouthing the hate speech of her father – but Hamilton Bingham himself.

The father was called in ‘to conference’ and was seated in the middle of a circle of youngish, mostly black, mostly female teachers and was questioned about his beliefs and his understanding of the virulent, systemic racism that was infecting the school, all schools, and America itself.  Lastly, he was asked if was willing here and now to acknowledge his offence, and to do penance for what was called, in the words of the history teacher, ‘retrograde white elitism’.

Before he had a chance to answer, he was harangued by teacher after teacher who questioned his allegiance to progressive values, improvement in the lives of black youth, and the importance of reparations.  He was asked again and again if would renounce the faux superiority of whiteness, give himself over to the forces of the new progressive Enlightenment, and reform his ways.

Florence Jackson, the principle of the school saved her intervention for last.  Only once she had satisfied herself that Mr. Bingham had been through the purging gantlet of her teachers, and that he had been dutifully chastised, warned, and censured, did she speak.  

She stood, rose to her imposing 6’ height, adjusted her hair, bosom, and dress, and let forth with a blistering sermon worthy of a Pentecostal preacher.  She invoked Booker T Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Jesus, and Che Guevara; she spoke of revolution, solidarity, and purpose.  She thundered on about God’s righteous anger at today’s Sodom and Gomorrah, the holy terror of his wrath, and the necessary, abject submission of sinners like Bingham, in all his petulant resistance, his racial defiance, and his outright ignorance of the nature of superiority, the worst of the lot.

She stood there, towering above the seated claque of inquisitors and the smallish Bingham seated in a kindergarten chair, arms folded, but head upright; waited a full minute, and then said, “So, Mr. Bingham, what do you have to say for yourself?”.

Bingham, about to be drawn and quartered, butchered, and burned at the stake like any Salem maiden, knew when and how to keep his own counsel.  To keep quiet, deferential, and contrite-looking in a strategic posture of retreat, only preparing his will and energy for the battle to follow.  “Thank you for your time and patience, Mrs. Jepson”, he said, smiling at the mispronunciation of her name and the hated honorific, Missus.

 

P.S. 42, formerly the Hiram S. Flanders School, had been named for a hero of the American Revolution who, upon investigation, was found to have been an investor in the New England Three-Cornered slave trade.  Despite his battlefield heroism, valiance, his seat beside Washington crossing the Delaware, and a place in the General’s provisional government, his name along with many other American and local giants, was purged, expunged, and forgotten to give way to the ‘value-neutral, anti-racist’ system of numbering.  

Neither the Principal nor the members of the Administrative Council were aware of Hamilton Bingham’s position and stature within the Washington K Street legal community, nor of his equally prominent place in the city’s most prestigious social organizations.  He had been a lifelong member of the Society of the Cincinnati and the New England Historical Society, both groups that invited for membership only those of the purest family pedigree and a genealogy dating back to America’s earliest years.

Hamilton Bingham represented a dual threat to P.S. 42, Principal Jackson, and the entire Administrative Council because of his unblemished reputation as a litigator and his prominence in the city’s most prestigious, influential private organizations.  Neither the Principal nor any council member had ever heard of Hamilton Bingham except as father to the lovely, pigtailed, little white girl, Dorothy.  Little did they know that he was about to bring down the opprobrium of Washington’s social elite and invoke every last scintilla of courtroom brilliance in his effort to erase this insignificant, irrelevant group of political shills.

Getting back to the casus belli, the Louis XIV quote, it was Bingham’s shorthand for civilizational preeminence.  He hated to use the word ‘superiority’ when it came to French, English, Greek, or Roman civilizations – or Persian, Mauryan, shogun, or mandarin for that matter – but his reticence was only in nodding deference to the tenor of the times; not a capitulation to Third World multicultural hegemony by any means, just a tactical evasion.

As he explained to his daughter, she was white because she was the last of a long lineage of white men and women – kings, queens, and courtiers of England, married to the royalty of France, Germany, and Poland, rulers of vast lands, caretakers of great wealth, patrons of the arts, science, and philosophy, and the architects of polity and the rule of law.  Not only was she never to question the legitimacy of her race, but to be perennial proud of it.

This pride in racial heritage had nothing to do with racism.   Believing in the rightness and greatness of one’s own historical culture had nothing to do with the values of any other.  There was no room for denigration or arrogant superiority.  Let others judge relative value, importance, and longevity.  Bingham had always been known as a fair, just, and respectful man – respect for which qualities had to be put on hold given his ferocity, insatiable ambition, and vicious pursuit of victory in the courtroom. 

His associates in the best social company of Washington were as determined, willful, and decisive in their desire to limit the ignorance of America’s cancel culture vultures; to stand proudly and firm for the principles of their storied past; and to defy the insidious movement to neuter it.

The law firm of Bingham, Potter, Light, & Means filed a law suit against Principal Jackson, the Administrative Council, and the Chairman of the DC School Board on Constitutional grounds.  They contended that the accused violated the principle of academic neutrality, ruled with political not pedagogical intent, and violated the laws of privacy and civil rights.  

They obtained documents from disgruntled school staff that chronicled the school’s misuse and distortion of educational principles. The Principal and Administrative Council, in collaboration with and support from the Women’s Progressive Alliance and National Socialists for Reform, developed a manifesto which unmistakably stated their undermining  objectives

Not only were they party to abject historical revisionism by adopting the contentious and false principles of The 1619 Project, and the most incendiary black-only premises of crypto-prudence marginal street fighters, but they took an overtly racist stance on ‘white inferiority’, ‘black superiority’, and most importantly to Hamilton Bingham, the need to ‘dismantle the crumbling pillars of European civilization’.

Money was no issue.  Not only was Bingham ready to take on the legal assault pro bono, but contributions from the scions of Washington’s privileged elite poured in – indirectly of course.  The lawsuit would be successful and Bingham, Potter, Light, & Means were willing to stay the course for as long as it took.

The legal action gained national prominence.  Finally, the conservative press claimed, there was action beyond words.  ‘A historic suit’, ‘A gut punch to the pusillanimous Left’, ‘The beginning of the end of political indecency’ were only some of the headlines.

Thanks to the successful lawsuit  the Principal and Council Members left after settlement (they got nothing but restored union membership), the school withdrew its contentious and deformed ‘Social Justice Curriculum’, and the Three R’s were restored.  Bingham was vindicated and victorious. ‘Diversity’ was respected at P.S. 42, but that meant teaching about Plato, Aristotle, Elizabeth I, the Hapsburgs, and the Holy Roman Empire.  A victory in and of itself.

A Fly In The Ointment - When Jesus Appeared To Kamala Harris On The Campaign Trail

Ordinarily when Jesus appears to someone, it is cause for rejoicing and hallelujahs, but in the case of Presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, it was a matter better kept private. She was, after all, running on a secular progressive ticket, and talk of spiritual happenings, especially Christian ones, would not be well-received.  Yet Jesus was Jesus, and some attention must be paid. 

As she recounted the issue to her closest and most trusted advisor, he appeared to her as she was doing her toilette - a smoky figure in the mirror whose features slowly became more clear and distinct.  To her surprise he was a white man...well not exactly white white, swarthy would be a better description, more Arab looking than she had thought, but certainly him. 

He smiled at her in that special, loving, way of his.  His eyes were warm and happy, and there was a particularly masculine, inviting look on his face.  She started to reach out to him, but instead rubbed her eyes. He wasn't supposed to be real after all, something no more than a fictitious hope for the gullible and credulous, but there he was as she looked again.  His smile had broadened, his eyes twinkled with delight, and she knew that it was he. 

She stood there before the mirror, her makeup half on, her hair still a mess of tangles, and her nightgown looking very shabby and unpressed.  'Are you real?', she asked the image in the mirror, but she got no answer, only a broader, even more inviting smile.  A warm, colorful light - comforting and peaceful - shone in an aura around him, pinkish like cotton candy, reminding him of her days as a girl on the Venice Beach boardwalk. 

Again she rubbed her eyes and shook her head, but he was still there, but now fading like an old photograph until he was a silhouette, and then nothing, and only her face stared back at her from the mirror. 

Now, the ghost of the murdered King Duncan appeared twice to the procrastinating, pusillanimous Hamlet, and the ghost of Banquo appeared to Macbeth at the feast; but Kamala, doubting, but unable to shake the image of Jesus from her mind, hoped that he would not appear again.  A wish for such a second act would only suggest her infidelity and her disbelief when she was convinced that he had actually visited her. 

At the same time, she kept looking up into the evening clouds hoping that he would appear again, giving her a sign, some indication as to why she had been chosen and what he intended her to do.  

The clouds always seemed to float and amble into Christlike images, he with his arms held out to embrace or a hand pointing to the heavens above, or when one cirrus appeared over the evening horizon, she was sure it was his trailing Palestinian robes.

 

The fact was, second sighting or not, she now believed in him. 

Yet the old politician in her warned against the usual shows of devotion - black women jumping up from the pews, and running up the aisle towards the altar shouting, 'Je-sus...Je-sus, come to me', collapsing in a heap before the preacher who shouted praises and comforted his trembling congregants. 

No, she must keep her own counsel, act as though nothing had happened, pretend that she was the same proud black woman on her way to the White House, and be done with it.  Jesus would understand. 

But she could not keep such a thing quiet.  After all it was not like a rare bird sighting in the Shenandoah, but the living Christ; so she decided to pursue the matter indirectly, obliquely she said, and sought out LaShonda Washington, a black inner city woman on her staff who, despite Kamala's polite suggestions, spoke his name on various occasions.  

Kamala knew that such belief was not uncommon among her people, and as much as she preferred the far more austere celebrations at the Episcopal church on Lafayette Square, she knew that the black church seemed to be the most frequent place for Jesus visitations. 

LaShonda was effusive in her tale of being born again. 'There I was', she told the Vice President, 'minding my own business, when lo and behold, He appeared above the altar, walked to me, put his arms around me, and smiled. "Oh, Jesus", I said.  "Oh Jesus, you have found a lost soul", and just as quickly as he had come, he disappeared'. 

Tears were streaming down LaShonda's face as she spoke to the Vice President. 'I'm blessed', she said. 

'What did he look like', asked the Vice President. 

'He was beautiful', LaShonda said, 'so beautiful I couldn't stand it', and when pressed, she described him no differently than the man Kamala had seen in the mirror.  

Now, a more intelligent person might well have concluded that anyone seeing Jesus just as he has been portrayed for a thousand years was just doing their own personal AI - recreating yet another idealized image.  The real reincarnated, divine Jesus, if he ever really did appear, might look like Uncle Fred; but Kamala and LaShonda were not so circumspect and Doubting Thomas-like.  

The next morning, drawn and haggard from a long day on the stump and some twitchy issues with Ohio, she looked in the mirror of her boudoir, and there he was again, this time with a stern look of disapproval on his face.  Again Kamala rubbed her eyes and shook her head, but when she looked up he was still there.  If looks could kill, she remembered her mother saying, and so it was with Jesus, and in that one instant of implicit reproach, she became a believer. 

'I must tell the world', she said to herself, 'that he is real'. 

'Let us pray', Kamala said to her campaign staff gathered in the trailer outside the fairgrounds at Chillicothe where she was to speak, 'and give thanks to Our Lord, Jesus, for this day'.  She bowed her head, and began, 'O Lord, O God Almighty, forgive us our sins and shine thy light upon us, Amen'. 

When she had finished, her aides looked on in stunned silence.  This ambitious, vixenish, harridan who had no patience for anyone or anything that stood in her way; this loud, cackling harpy who was venomous and hateful of 'those dumb white crackers', who dismissed religion - any religion - as antithetical to the very ethos of progressivism and whose believers were nothing but racist fools, was now praying?  What was up?

Only LaShonda added two and two and realized exactly what the Vice President was after when she asked her about seeing Jesus in the rafters in the Mt. Zion Baptist Church of Aberdeen.  The Vice President had seen him as well. 

'What about the Jews?' asked an aide. 'The are at the core of our constituency'. 

'They have blood on their hands', the Vice President replied. 'Give us Barabbas'. 

The aides huddled and refigured the new calculus.  They might win Mississippi but lose Massachusetts, win decisively in Alabama but lose California.  That clearly would not work.  They would have to tone the Vice President down, cool her jets, and write more accommodating speeches; but they had not expected the lady's adamant response. 'This is not just some garden party', she said, ‘but Our Lord and Savior we're talking about here.  The people must know'. 

Of course her electoral defeat was sealed.  Georgia crackers didn't believe her for one instant, New York Jews felt as condemned as Shylock's compatriots of Venice, capitulating as he did to Christian demands for renunciation, young Eastern socialist claques wanted no part of this menopausal hack, and psychiatrists rushed to print about her schizophrenia. 

 

'He never helped me', Kamala said to herself after her resounding collapse in the polls, miffed and angry that such an eminence could look the other way when history was about to be made. 

She opined that perhaps the face in the mirror had been her own - the dark complexion, the tangled hair, the eyes, the lips - and that she imagined herself a savior.  That allegation was not new.  In any case, for whatever reason, she was finished as a politician and had visions of herself as a beautician like her cousin Amanda. 

Scandal In The Vatican - The Pope, The Cardinal, And The Unexpected Pregnancy Of Maria Luisa Valenti

It would have been a simple matter of getting rid of it if it hadn't happened to the Cardinal, a senior member of the College of Cardinals who, although high ranked, was not an old man.  No, the former Antony Pietrangelo was young enough to still have his head turned, and so it was that his affair with Maria Louisa Valenti began, first in the confessional where the young woman told unbelievable stories of sexual abandon, to the vestry where the Cardinal and the young woman met to discuss her possible vocation, and finally to the inner chambers of the Vatican, a place for comfortable worship not far from the Sacristy. 

 

This affair might seem out of place and quite unseemly especially when it concerned such a high-ranking member of a church which had always been a defender of virtue; but the Cardinal was a man after all, and a young, virile one at that.  

The Cardinal was a Renaissance man, well-read and -versed but lusty and as at home in the sanctuaries of the Vatican as in the bars of his native Vico Equense.  Before the priesthood and well after, the Cardinal had had affairs which in no way compromised his love of Christ and the Church.  Jesus himself was man, and at some point in his short thirty-three years he certainly had a woman.  If one was to take the duality of Christ seriously and admit his human side, then carnality was most definitely a part of it. 

 

The Cardinal's rise was unheard of, so quickly did he ascend the hierarchy - bishop at 29, archbishop at 35, and cardinal at 42.  He was a man for all seasons, loved by the people, respected by his elders, and favored by the Pope.  

The higher he rose, the harder it became to keep his affairs quiet  If nothing else the Vatican is a very bitchy place, and any assignations or quiet cinq-a-septs were outed post haste.  It wasn't even a question of turning a blind eye - the Cardinal and his lovers were recondite to a fault, careful, and vigilant - and no one was the wiser; and yet, no one suspected a thing. 

One would have thought that such MI-5 secrecy would have been more trouble than it was worth - after all there are only so many nooks and crannies in the Vatican where pleasures can be taken, and the smaller the crypt, the less the abandon - but the Cardinal was so self-assured about himself, his fidelity to Christ and his holy mission, that he was unconcerned. 

And then it happened, perhaps in the shrine of the Holy Virgin, a small, tasteful place of meditation below the Sistine chapel and out of the way of novitiates and interns. Maria Luisa had howled to high heaven and he could no longer resist her passion, and so it was that she became pregnant. 

When he was told, his immediate reaction - quite surprisingly given his preeminence in the Church - was to return the infant soul to Christ; but on second thought, parsing the Biblical and Catholic injunctions against such an act, he concluded that he could be no part of such a thing. 

As any man would do, the Cardinal asked Maria Luisa, 'Are you sure?' to which the young woman replied, 'Yes, Your Eminence', an honorific she could never leave at the door no matter how passionate the love that went on inside. 

Ironically the Council of Cardinals was to meet in session to discuss this very issue.  While hardliners had not budged in their condemnation of abortion, the more liberal-leaning prelates were willing to consider some apertura.  Wasn't the rape of a virgin the very violation of womanhood that Mary herself represented?  Wasn't being violated and impregnated by some feral ape worth special dispensation? 

The conservatives reacted with predictable pique.  What could be more innocent than the child?  It did not consider how or by whom it was born.  It was simply a child of God and should be allowed to live. 

The debate was interminable, at times raucous and at times downright nasty; but there was absolutely no give on either side.  Meanwhile our Cardinal simply sat and listened, immured as he was within the walls of his own dilemma. 

The young woman wanted nothing to do with abortion.  The child of a cardinal was tantamount to a child of Christ, so close was he to Peter and the Savior.  She might have done wrong in terms of Catholic doctrine, but she felt that God himself had ordained this pregnancy, and she was not about to do anything to interrupt it. 

 

Maria Luisa being unmarried and beginning to show - the Cardinal had dithered for weeks and neither was willing to admit his role in the affair or to act decisively to end the pregnancy - the villagers of Vico Equense naturally began to wonder who was her young man?  It must be someone in Rome, perhaps a student at one of the seminaries in Vatican City, or perhaps even a wealthy patron; but no one ever dared to suggest or even consider the possibility of such a sacrilegious liaison as one with a cardinal. 

The Cardinal's preoccupation began to worry the Pope. He had been one of his proteges, and he had loved and supported him since he was a young archbishop, and now there was clearly something wrong.  

They sat together, had coffee, talked over old times and happy days at the seminary, but never were able to hit the mark.  The Pope, like everyone in Vico Equense or anywhere else for that matter, could not possibly imagine such an improper liaison and so assumed that the Cardinal's unease had something to do with his faith.  What else was there, after all, in the cloistered, abstemious environment of the Vatican? 

The thing of it was - another unconscionable consideration - the Pope was now nearing ninety, in bad health, and certainly not long for this world. Substantial rumors had it that our Cardinal was in line for the job.  He was young, conservative in matters of faith, liberal in matters of morals and the changing social environment, prayerful and obedient, and as pious and devoted to Jesus as anyone in the College. 

More and more this idea of returning the child's soul to Jesus gained traction in the increasingly troubled mind of the Cardinal. There was no doubt that the unborn but viable, soulful being would find comfort and everlasting peace in God's kingdom.  Life on earth, as the Cardinal well knew, was no bed of roses, and the chances of this poor, innocent soul being corrupted by the slime and moral filth of the streets were good indeed. The debate in the conference room had not touched on this aspect of human dignity and divine resurrection, and yet there it was, as plain as day, the answer to his prayers. 

'No, Your Eminence', replied Maria Luisa to his entreaties. 'I will not do it', and no matter how earnest his pleas, no matter how ardent his appeals, and no matter how cogent his doctrinal logic, the woman was unmoved and unbowed; and she was now approaching the danger zone.  It was now or never. If not, the truth would out.  She could not be trusted, and his career at the Vatican would be abruptly and irreconcilably ended. 

Horrible, unthinkable, horrific thoughts kept niggling into his head.  What about....No, no, not that! The Cardinal shook his head, yet he could not shake the image of Lucca Ponti, capo of the Neapolitan Camorra, nephew of Cardinal Imperati and good friend of his, important contributor to the Vatican treasury, good Catholic, but known only and feared for his uncompromising control of  Campana. 

 

Once again the Cardinal was given to the particular insight of men under moral and political pressure. Nothing I could ever do would be as bad as my predecessor, the Cardinal opined (here the Cardinal had jumped a step), Pope Benedict IX, member of a powerful Roman family that wielded significant influence in ecclesiastical and political circles, whose papacy was remembered only for allegations of scandal, immorality, and even simony.  Or Pope Alexander VI, whose papacy was one of the most controversial in Church history, marked by allegations of nepotism, corruption, and moral decadence.

No, any step the Cardinal might take in this Maria Luisa affair would be nothing compared to that of the many popes, cardinals, and prelates who had done far more serious things than simply....how should I put it, he thought...returning a soul to Jesus. 

The disappearance of the young women in Vico Equense was a local tragedy, and while all suspected foul play by the father of her unborn child, not one squeak that it could be the Cardinal was ever heard.  Lucca and the Camorra had done their job, and the affair was closed. 

At this writing, the old Pope is still in his chair but failing, and rumor has it that within a month or two white smoke will rise from the Vatican smokestack to announce a new Pope.  Whether he should be our Cardinal or not is only guesswork or presumption.  Only time and God will tell.