Racial Harmony - An Old Freedom Rider Tries To Relive Ebony And Ivory But Finds 'Whites Need Not Apply'

Vicki Batten was an old Freedom Rider - on the busses to Montgomery to march with Martin and Ralph across the Pettus Bridge in Selma.  Ah, what a heady time! she remembered. More like a camp jamboree than serious business until, of course they were set upon by Bull Connor's dogs, beaten like tramps by his thugs, thrown into jail with nothing but bread and water. 

'I would never have had it otherwise', she said, reminiscing about those times, the halcyon times of racial integration, ebony and ivory, black and white, arms linked singing 'We Shall Overcome'.  She still wore an amulet given to her by a young black boy, a gri-gri he had been given by his former slave grandmother, given by her grandmother as she was loaded aboard the slave ship taking them to America. 

'Dis keep dem evil sprits gone fo' evah', the boy said to Vicki as she set off on the long march for freedom.  'Now Olodumare is wif you'. 

She had tears in her eyes as she remembered that day, that boy, and the sun rising over the Pettus bridge, the stink of the tannery on the far banks of the river, the solidarity, the camaraderie, the brilliant, unalloyed hope for a better future. 

She and her classmate were on their way up to Poughkeepsie for their Vassar reunion.  It had been many years since she had visited her old school, and she was filled with fond memories of girlhood, first love, and the intimations of her professional calling.  When visiting professor Harold Bloom read from Blake's The Tyger, she was moved to tears and knew at that moment that her life was to be dedicated to beauty. 

'Do you think Felicia will be here?' Vicki's classmate asked as they made the final turn onto the campus, already festooned with welcome Class of 19___banners, white tents put up in the quad, caterers already fussing with tablecloths and silver services. It was a beautiful May day, and the weekend promised to be a memorable one. 

Felicia had been Vicki's first love and the two were an item during a year together - strange, unique, and a curiosity since those were the days when that kind of love was far more undercover and not supposed to exist, especially not at such a high-toned campus like Vassar. 

'A flirtation', snapped Vicki, hoping that she would not have to be reminded of her sexual dalliance under the covers at Stratham House; but the thought had crossed her mind.  What would she say to her after so many years? especially since Vicki had gone on to marry, have children, and lead a quietly traditional life - except of course for Selma. 

To her surprise and pleasure, Felicia was at the reunion and even more surprising, she too had been in Alabama during the time of civil protest. Now she was in a different political place, a different emotional country, and far from Selma, but she had been moved by the same integrative spirit at the time.

Now, the paths taken by the two former lovers had diverged significantly after the Freedom Rides.  Vicki had followed her heart and joined the civil rights movement, but for one reason or another meandered into redistributive wealth, climate activism, and world peace.  She had never once lifted her nose from the grindstone, and was as passionately committed to these existential causes as she had been for the black man. 

Felicia on the other hand had turned the corner, looked at her sexual and political dalliances as youthful fantasy, and become a corporate lawyer who was proud that she had defended both Amazon and Microsoft in famous anti-trust cases. She came to the reunion dressed to kill, all Armani and Arpege, a fashion plate looking like a well-tailored Catherine Deneuve, desirable but aloof. 

Vicki felt shabby standing next to her.  A life of social commitment did not pay well nor was it expected to.  Money was the root of oppression, racism, and climate denial; but still and all, she wanted to look like Felicia and in fact be like Felicia who warmly invited her to their summer home on Nantucket or their winter place on St. Bart's. 

Vicki had heard about Felicia, Amazon, and Microsoft - the Vassar Alumnae Magazine literally gushed with pride over her achievements - but Felicia had heard nothing about Vicki.  A life in the trenches meant keeping your head down. 

'When this shindig is over' said Felicia, warmly embracing her old friend, 'we must have lunch'.

Other than that fortunate, happy occasion of meeting Felicia again, the reunion was a routine affair. Quiche, chardonnay, girl talk, chatter about children and grandchildren, a few noteworthy alumnae talking about art, the human genome, chips, and rare earths, but nothing more.  Vicki was glad it was over, thinking more about her coming lunch with Felicia than the affairs of her classmates. 

'Why are you still in that rat's nest', asked Felicia when the two met a month later at the Four Seasons.  'As corrupt as can be. BLM LaShonda whatever in prison for fraud and embezzlement. Your inner cities sinkholes, rabid, disgusting....Oh, I'm being too forward, aren't I, darling?'

Felicia, however forward and intemperate her remarks, had hit the nail on the head.  When Vicki thought to reup her allegiance to the cause of racial justice and made overtures to the Black Women's Social Caucus, Washington's most prominent civil rights non-profit, she was met at the door, shepherded through metal detectors, frisked and asked to empty her pocketbook. 

'Sorry 'bout that', said her host. 'Can never be too careful these days'.  On the walls of Letitia James' office there were no photographs of King, Abernathy, Rosa Parks, or even Malcolm X, Rap Brown, and Stokely Carmichael, icons of the black cause, heroes of the movement. "We don't do that shit no mo'" said Letitia. 'Them's history and we's the present'; and from that moment on Vicki knew she didn't belong.  Better not to mention Selma, Bull Connor, Montgomery or any of the rest of it.  

'What did I tell you?', Felicia said when she and Vicki met again.  'Not that you've spent your life for a lost cause', Felicia went on, 'because of course you did what you thought was right, but still and all in all, you were barking up the wrong tree'

A pause for reflection.  What had started off as a happy, unified, collegial, and happy event - blacks and whites together, singing in unison, arms locked, embracing, and just happy to be together - had become a racially divided, racist, identity-flaunted nightmare.   How did this happen? 

'Is Harold Bloom still alive?', Felicia asked.  Vicki was unsure but after checking found out that he wasn't.  How she had been impressed by him, by Blake, and by the deliberate parsing of those few, spare lines of Tyger! Was it too late to return to the fold?  Of course it was.  She should have retired years ago, but hung in there. 'Sunken costs', said Felicia.  Too much invested regardless of the innocence and yes, ignorance of the investment. 

Florida beckoned.  Vicki knew that she should not be thinking condo in 'The Free State', the fascist state, but she was tired of northern winters, slush, and potholes.  She would have preferred to go out in a blaze of glory, the signing of another civil rights bill perhaps, something to mark her efforts; but she couldn't shake that niggling comment of Felicia - she said sinkhole but she really meant shithole - and decided that a Tampa beach would be the anodyne appropriate for a tired warrior. 

Felicia was in the news again, arguing corporate interests before the Supreme Court. Vicki was happy for her, Frost's the road not taken Vicki's fate, but let bygones be bygones.  Those camp songs on the Freedom Rides were something, weren't they?

The Daydreams Of An Eternal Idealist - Hitler, Stalin, And Mao Were Just Bumps In The Road

Taken together Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were responsible for one hundred million dead; and yet Vicki Parsons was still optimistic.  Bumps in the road, she said.  The road to the peaceful, verdant, and communal society of the future is all but guaranteed.  History does not always repeat itself.  Humanity is not consigned to perpetual war, ignorance, selfishness, and there resides in all of us a natural reserve of goodness, generosity, and good will. 

 

Just whistlin' Dixie, of course, but if it weren't for optimists like Vicki the world would be even more corrupt and venal than it already was - or so said her colleagues and friends, all united in their belief in the natural, inborn, and ineradicable goodness of Man and his ultimate utopian future. 

In the mean time, the world kept up a drumbeat of violence, mayhem, terrorism, and war as if there were no tomorrow.  Pol Pot mandated forced marches out of Cambodian cities into the countryside and executed shopkeepers, bureaucrats, doctors, and teachers to cleanse Khmer society of all traces of bourgeois, capitalist society.  'This is the Year Zero', he said, the first of a new history of a perfect world.  Millions died of execution, starvation, and disease until he was stopped by the Vietnamese army.

Mao's Great Leap Forward was the inspiration for Pol Pot. Millions were sent into the countryside in forced labor collectives, mini-gulags which produced little and consigned all to poverty and death by starvation. 

Stalin's totalitarianism was brutal and universal, and tens of thousands died in Siberian gulags.  Hitler's death camps are well known - unconscionable, unbelievable horrors of mass ethnic extinction. 

'History is not the sacred shibboleth you make it out to be', Vicki said to her conservative Vassar classmate whose husband was a favorite of George W Bush who rewarded him with a senior diplomatic post.  'We are not under the yoke of the past. Things can change for the better.'

The classmate, a friend since the old days and used to Vicki's remonstrations, said only, 'Well, dear, let's see'.  

The Twenty-First century was starting off badly, Vicki had to admit.  Perhaps not with the same rigorous cruelty of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, but with a violent entitlement nonetheless. The current wars in Iran, Gaza, and Lebanon were but minor league skirmishes compared to historic conflagrations, but violent nevertheless.  What did that mean?

'Let us pray', said Reverend Archibald Pender of the Westmoreland Methodist Church of Christ, and then with his spiritual invocation put aside, he launched into his familiar sermon about Donald Trump, 'Predator in Chief', usurper, unlawful inhabitant of the White House. 

The congregants of the church attended Sunday services just to hear the Reverend Pender call out the evil in the White House, to expose his villainy before the faithful, and show his godforsaken evil intentions. 

There were many Sunday services like the Reverend Pender's but none so forceful, accusatory, and brutally honest as his.  He virtually thundered with righteousness and saw himself as Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Jacob all put together. 

 

Vicki was completely taken by him.  His words touched her deeply and strengthened her resolve.  The interloper would soon be out of the White House, peace would again reign, and goodness would prevail. God was her spiritual lover, her soulmate, her congregational husband. 

At the same time American and Israeli rockets were reducing Tehran to rubble, eliminating the imams and ayatollahs, destroying missile silos and underground drone armories, blowing offenders of the blockade in the Strait of Hormuz out of the water as the air forces of both countries ruled the skies.  

Hamas, resurgent after months of Israeli bombing, was once again 'referred to the underworld', blasted to within a fraction of survival; and Hezbollah, thinking it had a military advantage because of Israel's involvement with Iran and Gaza, stepped up its attacks on Haifa and Jerusalem but was summarily 'excused from this earth'. 

'Bumps in the road', Vicki insisted, nothing but interruptions in the journey forward.  The new world - the one of gender reassignment, the replacement of the black man on the pinnacle of the human pyramid, and the redistribution of wealth concentrated in Wall Street - would not be deterred.  The very goodness of the new American century would not only result in domestic unity but international peace. 

Vicki had given her all to the movement, even as unlikely as it was to come to fruition.  She was a passionate, lifelong, true believer in the progressive mission for a better world. 

Her conservative friends tried to dampen the fires a bit, if for no other reason than to prepare Vicki for the comedown, the intrusion of Trump on her marvelously innocent dream; but there would be no such thing.  No matter how many rockets rained down on Tehran, no matter how many Hamas and Hezbollah operatives were eliminated, peace was in the air, ephemeral perhaps but there to be grabbed. 

How someone like Vicki could stay the course, hold true to communalism, world peace, and the world community and diversity in the face of such Machiavellian ambition was a puzzle.  She must have known; and yet there she was, still in the choir loft, singing the same hymns, praying to God with no reward.  There must be a place in heaven for such faithful. 

'La Lucha Continua', Vicki shouted on her way to the National Mall to protest the bombing of Iran. There was no way that this inconscient, inhuman, barbaric assault on innocent civilians could continue; that the bullying ape in 1700 would have his way.

 

Peace was the answer, but of course Vicki was just singing hosannas, as far removed from human enterprise as the man in the moon. 

Life couldn't possibly be the way Trump saw it, Vicki concluded, an existence as bad as Hobbes had offered - short, nasty, brutal, and ugly - but there it was, unmistakable and undeniable, and this throwback was taking advantage of it.  That was the irony of it all.  Good people like Vicki came up empty after years of righteous protest while the brute prospered.  

'What hath God wrought?', Vicki recalled from Bible study; but God was an extra in this drama, an offstage prop, a fill-in from central casting. 

Vicki's children were fighting again - Bernoulli's principle gone awry. Only smashing and breaking had value. 'Haven't I taught them anything?', Vicki wondered. 

'Mom, something's burning', her daughter shouted; but Vicki's mind was elsewhere, in that hopeful never-neverland of dreamy promise.  She yelled at her daughter, 'Well, take it off the bloody stove', but immediately regretted taking Trump frustration out on Baby Dolly.  This is what life had come to, trapped like a fly in molasses, buzzing but impotent.  Donald Trump would go on killing just like Genghis Khan, the Crusaders, and the English soldiers at the siege of Agincourt. 

'I refuse', she said.  'I absolutely refuse', but for an instant she realized there was nothing to refuse. All her caterwauling, her chorus of defiance, her bellowing demands were just blowing in the wind. 

Epiphany? Cause to turncoat and cross the aisle? Yes and certainly, but not yet.  'Takes time', Indians say. Siva's cycle of creation and destruction although endless does not revolve in a day; and so it was that Vicki gradually pried herself loose from the grasp of her handlers and became her own woman.  Not that she cheered Israeli missiles blowing Iranian shelters to smithereens or American precision laser-guided bombs taking out an imam, but inwardly applauded their resolve and then capitulated to old 'let it be' Epictetus. 

Spheres Of Influence, Donald Trump, Taiwan, And Latin America - Machiavelli And Regional Hegemony

'This is my sphere of influence', Harper Flynn said to his wife who was once again rearranging things on his desk after dusting, 'which means hands off. 

'But dear', his wife said. 'It wanted dusting and it is a part of the household after all'; and so it was that a discussion of Taiwan, the President's trip to China, and the question of regional hegemony turned into a marital squabble. 

That always seemed to be the case.  Women simply couldn't keep to themselves, couldn't keep out of it despite themselves. As a young child whose room was a ruckus of boy things - toy dump trucks, soldiers, dinosaurs, comic books, and baseball stirrups, he couldn't understand why his mother was always in their picking up.  'Because I know it's there', she said to her son when he asked why he couldn't keep his room the way he wanted. 

In the Ondaatje book, The English Patient, Count Almasy insists on a world without maps, a world without ownership and belonging, a simple world as God made it with no national boundaries, no claims, no deeds, and no definition.  The desert was never one place, said Almasy, but always shifting.  What was here today will be gone tomorrow, the desert's own and no one else's. 

Of course this idea as noble and elegantly simple as it was, was untenable, and before long Almasy was claiming Katherine as his, and to save her life he gives away secrets to the Germans. 

There is nothing new or particularly unusual about staking a claim.  This is what the first settlers of the American West did - simply marked off the perimeter of their land, fenced it and kept off interlopers and intruders with a shotgun. 

The Lewis and Clark expedition was the first step to land titling, legal ownership, and capital.  One's land had value when titled and could be mortgaged, sold, or rented; and that alone was the key to westward expansion and Jefferson's Manifest Destiny. 

The territory from the Atlantic to the Pacific was America's, Jefferson said, European America's and over the course of the next hundred years ago European Americans tamed and settled that land and crisscrossed it with railroads.  The Indians - Native Americans - were in the way, and by the early Twentieth Century were either eliminated or in reservations. 

There was nothing new or special about this territorialism. Genghis Khan and his Mongol-Turkic armies burst out of the steppes with his ten thousand horsemen, and conquered territory from Europe to Japan. He was known for his savagery, and the roads between conquered villages were lined with severed heads on spikes as a warning to all in his path. 

 

The Crusades were organized by Pope Urban II to rid Jerusalem of the infidel, but they were no different than the armies of Genghis Khan, territorial in intent, and bloody in execution.  Jerusalem is ours! said Urban, western, Christian, civilized and European. 

The history of territorial expansion is long, consistent, and predictable; so the desires of Russia for Ukraine, China for Taiwan, and the United States for Venezuela and Cuba fit a pattern.  American with military force ousted the Communist dictator in Venezuela, Russia will eventually regain the Donbass region of Ukraine, and Taiwan will become part of greater China.  It is the law of hegemony or spheres of influence. 

The United States has always been territorial.  Manifest Destiny was an expression of territorial right.  Texas belonged to the United States, not Mexico; Chile and is copper mines were well within America's sphere of influence so President Allende had to go.  The United States supported the military regimes of Brazil and Argentina because they were always to remain America's allies; or put another way, America's foreign properties. 

 

While not in America's immediate geographical sphere of influence, it intervened militarily in the Philippines and took it over as colonial ruler for years. The US fought a long, bloody, and ultimately losing battle to keep Vietnam and all of Southeast Asia within its sphere of political influence. Its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, similarly failed enterprises, were to keep those parts of the world under American control. 

Ronald Reagan intervened militarily in Nicaragua,  the Dominican Republic, Haiti,  and El Salvador for the same reasons.  They belong to us, said the President, if not by Constitution and title, then by right. 

So those in America who find Donald Trump's warning to Taiwan to keep its missiles in their silos, and to make no public pronouncements of independence from China, do not understand history.  The assimilation of Taiwan into China is a foregone conclusion just as Hong Kong and Macau were; and there is no way that the United States will engage in a bloody no-win war with China to defy it. 

Trump is a true Machiavellian and his foreign policy is based on national self interest. What would America gain by confronting the Chinese over Taiwan?  Nothing.  By the same measure what does America gain by perpetuating the war in Ukraine at a cost of tens of thousands of lives, the destruction of the country's infrastructure, and billions of US treasury dollars when a Ukrainian victory, as impossible as that might be, would gain the US nothing.

The Biden Administration insisted that democracy was at stake in Ukraine, an extension of American exceptionalism; but as Machiavelli pointed out centuries before, it is folly to get involved where there is no tangible, observable, quantifiable reason to do so. 

American liberals are howling, beating their chests in righteous indignation.  How could he? they sputter? How could he give away a sovereign country? Toss it into China's hamper with nary a second thought.  The answer is easy, they say - billions of dollars of trade with China that will benefit his cronies and American oligarchs.  Another example of the crude insensitivities of this rube, this barroom brawler, this fool. 

Of course billions are at stake in the US-China negotiations, and that is the whole point of the new Machiavellian foreign policy of the United States.  And Trump, the ultimate deal maker, knows that China holds all the cards.  It owns our debt, is a country of a billion and a half Confucian-inspired patriots, has progressively and deliberately rounded up the world's rare earths, and is in a geopolitical position of supremacy. Throw it all away out of some exceptionalist principle.  Read Machiavelli's The Prince. 

Harper Flynn got the geopolitical picture easily - life was a series of territorial disputes, ownership was not only the basis of capitalism but a feature of human nature and his office was his.  

His wife not surprisingly also took the office dispute as a metaphor.  There were principles involved here, contracts of marital communalism, the right way to behaves within larger contexts.  Machiavellian territorialism was just a convenient academic cover for taking and holding what is mine regardless of the larger world.  

The world if filled with One Worlders, Neville Chamberlain capitulating idealists, peace at any price accommodators who put a fictious value over reality.  Anyone in their right minds should have seen Hitler's intentions; and it should not have taken an outspoken Churchill to call out Stalin's hegemonic ambitions. 

Taiwan for the time being will remain quiescent, unobtrusive, and no obstacle to profitable deals to be concluded by the world's two greatest adversaries.  As it should be.  Foregone conclusions should never be challenged, and above all, a la Machiavelli,  moral principle should never get in the way of geopolitical self interest.