Folly, Fancy, And Food - Cuisine, The Idle Pastime, A Tale Of The Conversion Of A Foodie

Henry Badger had grown up on meat and potatoes, Mom's pot roast, canned peas, and peach cobbler. Dinner was part of the day no different from getting up, milking the cows, chasing the crows from the corn, and wringing the necks of chickens.  It was filling, welcome, and plentiful, a hearty meal for the family - sustenance, replenishment. 

He never thought twice about making more of food than it was until he left Ohio for the East where the mix of Jews, Italians and a raft of other immigrants introduced him to fettucine, lox, tacos, and innards.  It seemed like these foreigners ate everything that crawled.  A colleague told him of his first trip to rural Africa where when served a plate of unrecognizable food, was told it was bush meat - field rat, monkey, snake, bat.  'If you can catch it, you eat it', his African companion added. 

This is what it was like for Henry Badger from Bolivar, Ohio, small farm community which had neither the time, the interest, or the resources for anything other than what grew or was raised on the farm.  This array of unidentifiable ethnic foods was indeed bush meat. 

The same colleague had been invited out for dinner and dancing in the neighborhoods of Kinshasa.  Food was cooked in large cauldrons, scooped up by bandanaed mamas and heaped onto palm leaves. 'It looked like caterpillars', he said, lost in the bubbling sauce but floating to the top, netted and served; and so it was that Henry picked and poked at the food he found everywhere until he got used to the surprise and began to differentiate.  

It was all strange but in a way tempting.  Taste buds that had never been challenged by anything more than boiled meat and mashed potatoes suddenly were exposed to sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and acid sometimes together in mystifying but satisfying combinations. 

A foodie was born.  Food became artistry, innovation, uniqueness, and near ecstasy.  Where had he been all his life? Why had such Persian, Tuscan, Anatolian, and Greek delights not made it to his Bolivar, Ohio table? Squid, octopus, branzino, mahi mahi, and tile fish were on sale at the Grand Street fish market and Washington state oysters and Maine mussels next door.  The charcuterie on Hudson Street had foie gras, cervelle, and sweetbreads. 

The preparation and presentation of these foods was not simple - a Bolivar three-sectioned meal, ingredients partitioned, separated for space and convenience.  These foods were plated architecturally with height, dimension, and proportion.  They were garnished with springs of green shoots, fruit coulis, and an assortment of grains, nuts, and berries.  An artist's palette, a display of food rather than a meal. 

As he earned more - intern, adjunct, associate, then junior partner - he was able to afford more and was soon known as a connoisseur - a man who frequented the best restaurants with the most innovative chefs, the most interesting wine list, and a variety of dishes blending unusual traditions from Asia, Europe, and the Americas. 

By and by he furnished his kitchen with the most sophisticated five-star equipment, and began to prepare his own dishes.  He cruised the New York markets from the Upper West Side to Houston Street, meeting and greeting purveyors of the finest and most sought-after products and ingredients.  In a short time, her was a master of cuisine, knowledgeable about wine, expert in terroir, merroir, and climate. 

He foraged New Hampshire tide pools, Georgia marshes, and South Carolina low country wetlands and created dishes that were of the land but confected into his own creations.  His home became a salon for food sophisticates where the talk was of Azerbaijani, Kazakh, and Faroe Island cuisine. The conversation was diverse, high-toned, and deep. 

The farm boy from Bolivar, Ohio had been transformed - so much so that he felt he had come from another planet. Food - cuisine - had taken the boy out of Ohio never to return. 

Or so he thought.  One day as he was curating freshly foraged sea grass and periwinkles a la Rene Redzepi, deciding on their geometric arrangement, he was distracted - disturbed for a moment, his fingers delicately holding periwinkle, poised above a plate already artfully presented and arrayed.  

He sucked the tiny morsel of flesh out of its shell, opened the refrigerator, looking for that something that had disturbed him, and found nothing but odds and ends - devices, grommets, mini-hinges and bolts.  There was nothing to eat, snacking had become passe, an appetite intruder, an unwanted filler; but that niggling phantom of a thought had something to do with the growling hunger in his stomach.  His creations, as artistic and tastefully presented, as curiously inventive as they were, left one empty.  An hour of looking at Rothko and Miro and leaving the museum wanting Raphael. 

It was not an epiphanic moment nor anything like it.  The clouds did not part and he did not see Norman Rockwell's painting of a farm family's Thanksgiving dinner and did not go immediately back to basics, but something changed as he looked into his Bosch three story, deeply dimensioned appliance and saw nothing to eat - Rothko's tubes of cerulean and ochre. 

The meal went well, applause all around, especially for the periwinkle sea gras first course.  The conversation was lively and congenial but rarely strayed from food and wine. His table had become an altar, his kitchen a sanctuary, and his living room the nave. The scene was like Renoir's Boating Party but without the lambency, the pure, relaxed enjoyment of the simple food, the summer evening, the women, and the company.  It was an ironic inversion, a distortion, an intrusion. 

Again, Henry did not rush over to Zabar's for a pastrami on rye - again, epiphanies are for novels - but the refrigerator moment became amplified and again, borrowing from a Victorian novel, a metaphor for what he had become. An idler. 

Change is rarely abrupt, and so the reversion of Henry Badger back to meat and potatoes was gradual.  Little by little there was divestiture - the Bosch refrigerator and the Viking stove went on offer on eBay, the hours of foraging and cruising open markets became desultory and insignificant.  He made more trips home to Bolivar. 

Some people who grew up in a a time and place of simple food wonder how they got along without balsamic vinegar, Vietnamese fish sauce, harissa, tahini, and cold pressed olive oil; but these things simply crowded out the basics with which everyone was happy. They were clutter, unnecessary add-ons, displacement of essentials with nonessentials. 

Not only did Henry resign from haute cuisine, he left New York, another metaphor for his retraction from upscale clutter.  He didn't go back to Bolivar - that would have been a stretch - but he did move to somewhere smaller, more livable, and above all uncluttered. 

No Kings, No ICE, No Trump - The Whites Only Political Jamboree Of A Small Southern Town

Bridget Pitcher fixed the last of the cucumber sandwiches, poured the unsweet tea into thermoses, and fixed her hair.  This was to be the rally of the year, an all-purpose, big tent affair where everyone from her small Mississippi town would come out to protest the antics of Donald Trump. 

Bridget had arranged protests before - the last one that made the Columbus Dispatch was Occupy Wall Street, a heady affair to protest the concentration of wealth in the New York investment banks and to proclaim a new era of redistribution. 

That event was less well attended than Bridget had hoped, for someone had brought up the fact that Morgan Stanley had invested millions in Columbus Iron and Steel - a failing business unable to keep up with the robotic age and still noisy with lathes, mechanical presses, and power drills. 

'Invest' is not quite accurate - Morgan Stanley bought up Columbus Iron and Steel, reconfigured it completely, balanced robotics with skilled labor, and under a new name, Columbus Dynamics, Inc., hired two hundred workers. 

That and the fact that workers' 301k retirement accounts were flush with cash thanks to the surging stock market, made possible by Wall Street investment, dampened enthusiasm for the protest.

'These Jewish bankers don't keep their money under the mattress', said Alden Phillips, haberdasher, civic leader, and pastor of the Mt. Olive Baptist Church of Aberdeen. 

It was not a question of antisemitism because ninety-nine percent of the town knew that Jews were responsible for the ungodly trash coming out of Hollywood, why it was difficult to get a homeowner's loan, and how Congress had been bought by George Soros, the Rothschilds, and the Jewish bankers of Florence. 

Yet here was Phillips saying that if the Jews wanted to invest their money in Columbus, the town should take it and send them flowers, not protest the 'fulcrums of productivity', one of his stock phrases spoken from the pulpit when it came to Jesus and the Baptist Church. 

One member of the committee to organize the Occupy Wall Street protests suggested, given the idea by Phillips, that the town should be protesting the international Jewish conspiracy which was at the heart of most of America's problems. 

Bridget took the floor to politely disagree.  The Jewish conspiracy angle was a good one, but what the town was protesting was Wall Street's manipulative powers, the dangers of concentration of wealth, and the cabal of trigger happy capitalists ready to make a buck - Columbus Iron and Steel notwithstanding. 

The skein of wool, however, came unraveled, and no one could agree on just what Occupy Wall Street was or what was the purpose of the protest, so although the event went on as planned, attendance was desultory at best. 

The No Kings rally that Bridget organized was far more successful.  She recruited everyone - Walmart greeters and checkout clerks, dime store cashiers, telephone linemen, and housewives, all of whom were convinced by Bridget's impassioned appeal - Donald Trump was an autocrat, a dictator in waiting, a man bound and determined to become king, establish an imperial kingdom, and destroy democracy. 

No Kings had a nice ring to it, something more palpable and immediate than the Wall Street thing, and so it was that a good crowd, still more sparse than Bridget had hoped came out on a bright May Sunday to protest. 

As the townspeople joined the procession from the four corners of the town and from nearby Westport and Aberdeen, Bridget's colleague from the local community college said, 'I see nary a black face', and in fact none had any intention of showing up.  Although the town was now over 40 percent black, few showed any interest in Bridget's politics and less in her public assemblies.  

Years after slavery and Jim Crow, black people were still yessum and no suh darktown tarpaper shack nonvoting residents, contributing nothing in the way of taxes, leadership, ownership, or responsibility; so it was no wonder that not a soul among them had any interest in wasting a Saturday afternoon baking in the sun for some white cockamamie nonsense. 

This time around - that is, for this Big Tent affair which was going to be one grand, one-size-fits-all protest against Trump and for the environment, the black man, and the transgender - Bridget made a special effort to rally the black community. 

'I don't do no faggot shit', said Pharoah Jones to which Bridget smiled and quickly made her exit.  It took quite an effort to get her out of her white neighborhood, but in the interest of solidarity and communal solidarity she made the trip.

'I'll never do that again', she confided to her colleague.  'It was awful'.  She and the Big Tent organizers had to be satisfied with a whites only crowd. 'Just like the old days', said Bridget's 100 year old grandmother who remembered the white settled time before the diversity hoopla. 

Bridget promised to wheel her to the best street corner to watch the march, and would set up her own beach umbrella and make her special sweet tea. 

The police closed Main Street between 4th and 15th to make way for the parade, refreshment stands were set up at convenient intervals, and the football field at the high school where marchers were to end up, listen to speeches, and cheer, was festooned with banners, flags, balloons, and signs. 

There was no particular order to the event - no particular corner of the field for climate, another for black rights, and another for the gender spectrum - so it was a hodge-podge of parochial protests.  Nevertheless the spirt of protest was universal and engaging.  People hugged each other, commiserated, and prayed together.

'What is the purpose of the event', Bridget was asked by a Dispatch reporter.  'What do you intend to accomplish?'.  The reporter was recently hired by the paper because of his credentials.  He had been a journalism major at Columbia but wanted to return South to his roots.  It was a Northern, Jewish question, and Bridget fumbled and scrambled until she gathered herself and said it was about America and the dangerous direction it was taking.

The reporter, despite his polite, genteel Southern upbringing had forgotten his manners during his years in New York and pursued the issue until Bridget blurted out, 'You know quite well, sonny' and walked away. 

The whole event was not about meaning or purpose but about solidarity, camaraderie, and togetherness.  Piqued and upset by the interview, she went back to her cucumber sandwiches and hand-painted signs until her anger passed. 

This event, supposed to be the jewel in the crown, was even less attended than No Kings.  It was a ragtag affair at best, only half of the sandwiches got eaten, most marchers gave up even before they got to the football field, and the speakers spoke to only a scattering of diehard believers. 

When she was approached by a progressive community organizer from Jackson to organize another event to protest the wars in Gaza and Iran, she demurred.  

She never gave up her passion for progressive causes, and wrote letters to the editor of the Dispatch on a weekly basis, but all in all she retired her public persona and tended to her husband, Irish Setter, and two grandchildren.

The Senator's Fortune - How A Canny Politician Made Millions From The Gold Mine Of Political Office

The most liberal Senators in Congress - Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren among them - have three houses, a multi-million dollar bank accounts, and a quite handsome lifestyle. Some like these two have been in office for decades and in so doing have managed to acquire considerable wealth.  What they declare is a fraction of their total worth, for canny investment counselling comes with the turf.  

It is rumored that Sanders has untraceable accounts in Aruba, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Bimini.  It might not be the wealth of Croesus, but when Sanders eventually retires, he will be able to live high off the hog. 

All this might be expected from  a conservative Senator whose contributors are numbered among the top corporations in the country.  A little walkin' around money to grease the wheels of government in their favor was well worth the investment; but for a diehard socialist, a man who every day preaches taxation of the rich, redistribution of wealth, and punitive financial restrictions on Wall Street investment unlimited offshore wealth is unexpected. 

This is a story not of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, but of another Senator who flew beneath the watchdog radar, who was marvelously ingenious about diversifying his sources of income, his investments, and his very unique and profitable financial instruments.  

This tale will be about how he managed to acquire vast undetected wealth.  His time may come, so adept is he at this subtle chicanery that decades may go by without federal investigation and indictment, but while he is still as free as a bird and enjoying his wealth, the story begs telling.  

Senator X - or 'Bob' as he will be called here - was from a small farm community typical of many in rural America a few decades ago but disappearing quickly as agribusiness bulldozes family farms and employs fancy robotics to till, sow, and harvest all in the corporate interest. 

Rather than be discouraged by this commercial juggernaut, he was impressed by how efficiently wealth was created.  His father had worked long, hard hours just to keep his head above water, secure the land, the farmhouse, the livestock, and his reputation; while in one fell swoop the multinational company with its bottomless resources, paid bottom dollar to family farmers, deployed their high-tech machinery, turned unprofitable wheat fields into soy and corn acreage for processing and export to China. 

Money was to be made in America, easy money, and it only took enterprise, a feel for risk and opportunity, and a silver tongue. Investments came forthwith to those with a tale of profit to tell. 

He decided early on that politics would be his path to fortune. He would benefit from the wealth of others rather than have to create it himself.  Political office was exactly the place, for the more he studied the mechanics of politics  - how to win, how to stay in power, and how to enrich yourself while doing the nation's business - the more he was convinced this was the path he would take. 

He was smart enough to earn a scholarship to a well-known private university where he majored in finance, went on to business school where he honed his financial talents and studied both the legitimate operations of high-end investment and the schemes of Bernie Madoff, Jeffrey Skilling, and Enron.  There was little difference between the two - only a question of which side of street you were working. 

As a promising intern for the Congressman from his district who happened to be a member of the powerful Ways and Means committee, Bob learned the intricacies of federal revenue, investment, and rate of return.  Not surprisingly the mechanisms of financial management in the private sector were the inverse of the private.  No one cared about results only the appearance of doing good, doing the right thing.  A hundred million dollars could be allocated and disbursed with good will and heady promises, and then forgotten until it was time to reallocate more funds. 

'Tricks of the trade', the Congressman shared with his ambitious intern turned aide thanks to his quickness and financial acumen.  Disbursed monies were not exactly forgotten, especially his favorite, 'block grants' made to states for a particular purpose but not tied to any particular project - i.e. none of the usual rigmarole require for specific grants. Governors knew the value of such block grants, cash cows they were for them and their retirement accounts. 

It was understood that a certain proportion of each block grant would come back to its Congressional sponsor - in this case Bob's Congressman - and everyone would be happy. 

The case of the recently unearthed Somali scandal in Minnesota was a case in point. A portion of the millions that were granted to the Somali fraudsters came from federal grants. The Democrat administration of Joe Biden was eager to put money where its mouth was, stop talking about diversity and inclusivity and invest in it.  As usual there was 'leakage' all along the way and politicians from influential Congressional committees to state and municipal authorities took a cut. 

How, Bob wondered, could he take advantage of both corporate America's wealth and influence, and the bounty of unaccountable progressive largesse?  He could become an Independent, but would be cut off from the centers of partisan power; and in these days of divisive political alignment, being a moderate anything was not in the cards; but if he played these cards carefully - for example convincing corporate interests that he would drag his feet on restrictive legislation and at the same time promising poor constituents of his passion for social reform - he could make money. 

The American electorate, as credulous and gullible any, first voted Bob to the House and then to the Senate.  He ran brilliant campaigns promising something for all.  'I am a man of the people', he said, 'all people' and went on to detail how he would work with both the private sector and local community organizations to make the state a more productive, equitable place.  It was marvelous, and people of his state were taken in hook, line, and sinker.  

Now, kickbacks - the stock in trade of any enterprise - cannot be the crude cash-in-envelopes for Senators as they are for municipal aldermen, ward council members, or mayors; but given the high-tech, sophistication of online, encrypted, coded transfers, money 'exchange' can go undetected. 

To go into politics, one has to leave moral concerns at the door.  There is no place for whining about doing the right thing. Bob's intricate schemes did no harm, were part of the cost of doing business, were pieces of the 'share and share alike' ethos of American public service and corporate enterprise - so even if he did care about ethics, which he didn't - he would be covered. 

For all of his years in office, he pleased both progressive activists and corporate investors.  He was the go-to man for all comers.  There were always accounting loopholes in federal allocation and disbursement rules, and Bob learned how to take advantage of all of them.  He continued on his way, charming and charmed, feathering his nest, and accumulating a wealth beyond the dreams of any Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. 

He was beyond suspicion and beyond reproach. If your intention when becoming a politician is to make money, just like any other American entrepreneur, then you spend your time and best efforts in so doing.  Governance is simply a matter of covering all bases. 

So when Bob retired, he was feted, honored, and praised.  There'll never be another one like him, the people of his state all said in unison.  They were surprised when he did not return home after resigning from the Senate and found his residency in the small Caribbean island of Bequia unusual; but little did they know.  A tax haven, a convenient private airport from which he could fly to the rich watering holes of Miami, Rio, St. Bart's, and St. Thomas, Bequia was the perfect place for him.