If History Repeats Itself, Then Who Is Kamala Harris? - The Lady With The Wilted Flowers In The Back Row

Kamala Harris has always believed herself to be the reincarnation of Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, seducer of emperors. No one could resist her, so beautiful and sensuous was she, nor resist the allure of the sybaritic East. Enobarbus, confidant of the young Caesar Augustus describes her thus:

The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,
Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes.  

For her own person,
It beggar'd all description: she did lie
In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold of tissue,
O'erpicturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature: on each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-colour'd fans, whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool 

'I am Cleopatra', Kamala said to the image in the mirror, admiring her burnished mahogany skin, her lustrous eyes and full lips, 'Queen of the Nile'.  Or Nefertiti, she reflected, although there was something a bit too austere and patrician about the wife of Tutankhamen, nothing of the full-figured, sensual woman that looked back at her in the mirror. 'No, Cleopatra will do, and I will do her proud'. 

And so it was in that one epiphanic moment that Kamala Harris found her destiny.  History would repeat itself, and she and her reign would be no less grand and glorious than her ancient ancestor. 

It wasn't so much reincarnation - that notion of her mother's had been put to rest ages ago when the old woman said that she had in a former life been a courtesan at the court of Emperor Shah Jahan, had had to serve out her penance returning as barnyard animals, Africans, and jugglers, her soul finally coming to rest in Santa Barbara. 

'Foolish idolatry', said the Vice President as she thought of her mother's pujas and ceremonial nonsense; and although she paid lip service to her Asian roots, privately she wanted no part of that caste-bound, patriarchal, claptrap.  There was something to be said for the Ashokan and Mauryan courts, a certain royal splendor that appealed to her, but they were just Indians after all, not the mighty Empresses of Egypt. 

No, her conviction that she was history come 'round, was based on a warped interpretation of George Santayana's famous adage, 'Those who fail to learn from history are bound to repeat it'. While correct - leaders seem to never learn from the past and therefore history is the same, predictable, slog of familiar events over and over again - Kamala had the idea that greatness also comes this way twice, a concentric inner circle of marvelous events. 

Now, Kamala was not known as a quick wit, so those that got wind of her theory of historical destiny, dismissed it as total nonsense, part of the woman's devilishly peevish personality and nothing more. 

Others who had heard of her preposterous fancies were not so generous.  The woman was nothing more than a vixenish harridan who had made her way to prominence on the flimsiest of pretentions - or, better said, a woman who put up her sails just as the wind of race, gender, and ethnicity started blowing hardest.  She was a fraud, an empty suit, a brainless comer whose channeling of Cleopatra was not surprising in the least. 

'I will have a hard row to hoe', she said to herself on contemplating the Presidency.  Twenty-first century America was certainly not imperial Egypt, and as much power as she would have as Chief Executive, it was nothing compared to that of Cleopatra.  In these moments of vanity, she allowed herself to think of how far America had fallen from the great civilizations from which it was descended.  

 

Although she would never admit it, reigns and regimes which acknowledged the primacy of noble birth, the legitimacy of regal rule, and the divine right of kings, should be the model for the new America, brought back to life by her and her alone. 

'What have I done?', she asked herself, post-mirror epiphany, as she looked over the group of associates, advisors, and inner circle confidants she had assembled for her run to the White House.  What a ragtag, smelly lot, she thought, picked up from the ghetto, gay bars, and across the border in nasty bits.  'Can't have that', she said. 

The damage, however, had been done.  This progressive thang that had been her meal ticket for so long was now part of the First Class dining room - it was the be-all and end-all of political philosophy, the meme of the campaign, the very icon of the America that she and the old fool she replaced had hawked and flogged for years. 

'Nature abhors a vacuum' noted Aristotle and Spinoza, but it is still surprising to see what absolute dreck can fill an empty head. 'There is no end to the stupidity of that woman', said one critic who shuddered at the thought of this tarted-up cipher actually being elected president and told his readers to think twice before pulling her lever on election day. 

'Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely' is another familiar adage trotted out intermittently when presidents get too uppity; but the critic mused that an absolutely empty head could be filled with every discredited idea that ever came down the pike, rattle around in there until it was mixed into a witches' brew of newts and toads, and spewed out as intelligence. 

Kamala's mother once told her that if she was not careful, she would end up like 'the lady with wilted flowers in the back row', the dismal failure of life's round of reincarnations - a woman who has neither the brains nor the gumption to resist the pull of karma. 'Life's a journey in a third class compartment on the Calcutta Mail', she said, remembering her own past trips looking out shit-smeared windows on foul-smelling Indian trains. 

Kamala quickly shook that ugly memory from her head and looked again in the mirror.  No, she thought, nothing poorly reincarnated about me. 

So the lady banged on about black this, black that, gay pride, transgender righteousness, the poor, the disadvantaged, the marginalized; fat cat capitalists, environmental predators, and gun totin', bass boat fishin' Georgia crackers without a coherent notion in her head.  She was Cleopatra on her barge after all, speaking ex cathedra, ex regalia, and high above the rest who listened.  As in her mother's beloved India, it was the duty of some to speak, the duty of others to listen.  If any knowledge was shared, so much the better, but don't count on it. 

The election is but a few weeks away (10/17/24), and the polls are close; so the lady's marvelous chicanery must be working.  Her fol-de-rol and black female persona have done the trick, and the finish line is just up ahead; but at least half the electorate wants no part of her and her posturing, so with any luck she will be that lady with wilted flowers in the back row. 

The Blush Is Off The Bloom Of The Rose - Madame Harris Sits Dazed And Confused In The Oval Office

'Madame President', Kamala Harris's Chief of Staff, began, 'It's time for your Cabinet session'. 

Now Harris, thanks to her political advisors, had assembled a Cabinet that truly looked like America - black, Latino, Asian, gay, transgender, poor, disadvantaged, and marginalized.  She reluctantly chose a white man for a minor cabinet post. Undersecretary for Special Racial Affairs was his title, and his portfolio was a thin as a kindergartner's first week of crayon exercises.  

He was, in an ironic reversal of a Sixties black-man-in-the-plate-glass window dressing, simply there to show America that this new President, down and fully committed to the cause of The Other, still had some respect....well, no, that wasn't quite the word...acknowledgement was better, of white contribution.  All Barton Fielding had to do was to look white, as white as possible in all photo ops, on any dais or stage, and on the steps of the White House. 

The rest of the Cabinet members were legit - LaShonda Jones was a tough ghetto bitch who had earned the respect of her peers thanks to her violent precociousness. Preferring stiletto and rapier to Uzis, she was called The Blade and was selected from a heady crop of candidates from Anacostia, Washington's deep inner city by Alphonse Nickel, Alderman and longtime associate of Mayor-for-Life Marion Barry, for many years six feet under but still revered for his walkin' around money and no-show jobs.  

 

'LaShonda's the one', said Alderman Nickel. 'She will do y'all proud', and so without hesitation the vetting committee passed her with flying colors, and so she was included in the Cabinet as Undersecretary for Black Liaison, a job which, like that of Barton Fielding's had no particular policy or program responsibility, but unlike him, she was to be front and center on every stage. 

The same criteria were applied for the rest of the New Rainbow Coalition - the most swishy gay men, the toughest Bernal Heights butches, the flounciest and biggest cross-dressing transgenders, and the most physically palsied representative of the disabled the selection committee could find. A Cabinet meeting was regular side show, complete with carny barker, hoopla, and festoons. 

Some business had to be done at these meetings the new President was advised, and so as Chief Economic Advisor she had added Cornell Jeremiah Flint, Professor of Economics at Southern Kentucky A&M, a historian who, following in the tracks of Black Athena had claimed that the seminal Fifth Century Greek ideas of democracy and governance had come from black Africa, and that Egypt's Nubian influence was evident in the reign of Tutankhamen and Nefertiti, a black woman.  

Blanton Collier, a former Peace Corps Volunteer in Togo who had risen through the ranks of USAID until he had become the Administrator's principal associate was chosen as her National Security Advisor.  Now, Blanton Collier's Peace Corps experience was limited to chicken raising, and his career at USAID was front man for the African Reparations Caucus, a group which lobbied for increased aid for the Dark Continent. 

President Harris was delighted with the assembly she had chosen, and she greeted the Cabinet, now swollen to twice its previous size, with warm and generous praise. 'I am SO glad to see you all here this morning looking so well and ready to do the nation's business.  You are the chosen few...' 

Here she riffed on in an ironic reference to the Jews, replacing Yahweh's selection with peoples of Palestine, Mesopotamia, and the Fertile Crescent; and before she finished she had woven a tapestry of marvelously unique and diverse world history. 

The Cabinet members applauded, then settled in as they waited for the President's more policy-oriented remarks; but Kamala said only, 'I'll leave you to it', and exited with her aides. 

'But, Madam President', pressed her Chief of Staff, 'what about energy, Putin, Xi, and the Ayatollah?'

'What about them?', the President replied rather testily. 'That's what I hired you for'; and so the Advisor huddled with his staff to parse policy insights from her former speeches and papers.  These, however, were few and far between.  As Vice President she had been responsible for nothing, and as a prosecutor in California she knew only how to sail into crooks, make them twist and wither in the dock, and send them to jail.  Her Senate tenure was completely unremarkable, duty paid to her home state, bringing home the bacon and looking like America, but nothing else. 

So putting together a coherent policy on energy, foreign policy, international finance, and world economics was difficult indeed.  The only area in which there was a decent paper trail was domestic affairs.  There the President had spoken ad infinitum about black this, black that; the desperate poor, the marginalized, the forgotten, and Latinos.  

Yet at the same time, there wasn't a whisker of a real policy statement.  For all intents and purposes she was not unlike Chauncey Gardner, aka Chance The Gardener, the retarded caretaker in Jerzy Kosinski's book Being There whose aphorisms about gardening are taken by the political elite to be pithy metaphors for governance.

 

Her electorate was at first unconcerned about the lack of any policy direction coming from the White House.  President Harris' calls for reparations for the descendants of former slaves and for the aggressive inclusion of transgenders in boardrooms, classrooms, and bathrooms were quite enough to convince her supporters that they had pulled the right lever.  Besides, she was a quick learner, and would soon figure out what to do with those damn Jews. 

Unfortunately Democrats had a paper thin majority in both houses, so her vagaries were dismissed. 'We know exactly what she means', said the House and Senate Majority leaders, and although they had as little clue as anyone of the Left or Right, they put on a good show. 

And so it was that the blush was off the bloom of the rose - even Kamala's most ardent supporters were disappointed.  They had hoped for a flood of Executive Orders on her first day in office, and all she did was host a ladies' tea in the Rose Garden for Howard and Morehouse alumna, women delighted that one of their own was in the Oval Office and could do no wrong. 

'That's your job' became the meme of the Administration.  Kamala had recruited the best and the brightest, and she was to be their beacon, their North Star, their unwavering point on a moral compass.  The rest was mere detail, numbers on a spread sheet. 

The Right predictably howled and vented, and Trump was not one to take narrow defeat sitting down; but not long after Inauguration Day, even Harris' most ardent supporters began to wonder what they had done. Here was a vaporous, empty-headed succubus sitting at the helm of power and there was nothing for them to do but smile.  

Things went from bad to worse, and it wasn't long before Republicans played the impeachment card, and the Congress went in short order from inchoate body of grabbers to a bloody mess; but Madam remained above the fray, indomitable as only a vaporous, vacant person can be, and lasted out her term. 

'Thank God that's over', sighed the American electorate on both sides of the fence. 

'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.