A Man Who Imagines Himself A Poet Writes A Memoir - The Marvelous Art Of Self-Deception

Arnold Gray retired early from his job at an international bank.  Tired and discouraged after years of flogging African countries to do the right thing, he decided to settle in to a new life of renewal.  Foreign assistance was now in the rear view mirror, its ups and downs receding into the distance, and a new life of self-exploration and promise was before him. 

'I'm going to write a memoir', Arnold said, 'about my passion, the outdoors' and with that no sooner had he cleaned out his office at the bank, did he sit down at his desk at home, brewed a cup of chamomile tea, and set to work on his new enterprise.  Now, finally, he would be able to put his perspective down in black and white, tell of his years of  cycling, backpacking, and hiking.   

Most of his weekend excursions were on bikes - marvelous machines tuned to perfection, carrying above and beyond his expectations of grace, power, and agility.  'I rode a 21-speed', he wrote, 'and as I approached the first incline on my way through the Shenandoah, I clicked through the gears until I found a comfortable place. 

 

A decent start, but then Arnold, captivated by the sheer elegance of the bikes machinery, went on to tell of gear ratios, torque, wheelbases, incline calculus, braking distance, and the new gyroscopic stabilizer, a $1000 element which provided stability without compromising pull-ratios or gliding security. He didn't stop at an overview - a glimpse into cycling's advancements for the lay reader - but a disquisition on engineering. 

As he rounded steep turns, it wasn't the feeling of speed, the counterpoise of balance and inertia, the whizzing landscape of pines, firs, and oak; nor the sweet, floral scent of magnolias, the sunlit clouds over the Blue Ridge, the exhilaration of a physicality only felt in this one dynamic place - hurtling forward amidst the grandeur of the mountains. 

He didn't write about all this because he couldn't.  There wasn't a scintilla of poetry in the man, not one drop of spiritual drama, not an iota of princely beauty.  The woods, the forests, and the mountains were simply the context - the environment - within which he pedaled, made his way up and down back roads, and clocked his miles. 

The first chapter was indeed Arnold Gray - a disquisition on what makes a bicycle go.  It was ponderous, tedious, and boring.  

 

'I have something to say'. Arnold told his friends at the bank when he announced his retirement; but when pressed he could only manage 'biking'.  Most imagined trips through the Western mountains, over the Donner Pass, by the Pacific in Carmel and Pebble Beach, sunsets over Biscayne Bay, Napa, Sonoma, and wine country - a travelogue, a personal account of wind in your hair travel. 

Arnold, however was no Shelley whose poem 'Mt. Blanc' told of his epiphany as the clouds obscuring the mountaintop cleared, and he felt overwhelming joy, surprise, and spiritual discovery

And when I gaze on thee
I seem as in a trance sublime and strange
To muse on my own separate fantast,
My own, my human mind, which passively
Now renders and receives fast influencings,
Holding an unremitting interchange
With the clear universe of things around;
One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings
Now float above thy darkness...

 

Travel writing is an old art.  Ibn Battuta, an Arab traveler wrote of his experiences in 1350, a travelogue of personal impressions, ethnography, and adventure.  Sir Richard Francis Burton wrote of his trek to Lake Tanganyika to find he source of the Nile and his penetration into Islam's holy of holies, the Kabbah in Mecca.  

Mungo Park wrote of his journeys up the Niger River to locate its source, and told tales of his repeated capture by African tribes, bartered and sold as a white slave, and somehow managing to escape. Paul Theroux wrote a series of travel books which were more reflections on his place, on earth, his purpose, and the meaning of his ambitions and desires than simple descriptions. 

In his The Book of Tao, a collection of writing from the world's most famous travelers and their particular reflections on the spiritual nature of travelling alone. 

One of the best memoirs of recent years are Roald Dahl's Boy and Solo, the latter a recounting of his days as a RAF fighter pilot, the former about his childhood.  Both have little to do with the actual events of his life, but his often hilarious, ironic, and marvelously creative telling of how he saw them, what he felt, and the often ridiculousness of each situation. 

 

The two-volume memoir of Russell Baker, a journalist for the Washington Post and editorial writer is in the same deferential, modest, humorous mode.  Life is a circus, Baker often noted, but what a fun ride.

Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration, wrote Locked in the Cabinet, a memoir of his time in Washington, and again done with the same self-deprecatory, humorous, sanguine view of life. 

Everyone thinks they have a memoir in them just waiting to be written, but when it comes time to write it, it often comes out sodden, trite, and punishingly boring.

A three-tour Vietnam War helicopter pilot, a man who love the war, flying helicopters, and landing in hot LZs taking fire, began writing his memoir - one which many thought would be a best seller.  In an era of PTSD, the horrors of war, the misery of death and destruction, the pilot's expression of the joy of battle from above would be unique. 

Yet when he started to write, the results read like an inventory sheet.  Like Arnold and his bikes, he wrote about rotor torque, inclines, inertia, gravitational forces, cargo, maintenance, and logging time.  There was no sense of the sheer joy he had flying about enemy lines, laying down suppressive fire, avoiding the lines of tracer bullets rising from the jungle - just altimeters, compasses, and range finders. 

A doctor who ironically was diagnosed with terminal cancer when he was only thirty-five, defied predictions and lived a long life, albeit with a variety of experimental drugs, radiation, immune therapy, and surgery.  He wrote a memoir about his journey but the book was an unremitting clinical spreadsheet. He was more interesting in telling about the alternative clinic in the Alps, aromatherapy, radioactive implants and the techniques of the procedure than his reactions to the early death sentence.  Few people got through the first chapter. 

'I have a story to tell', he told his friends; but he had no idea of the nature of the genre - memoirs are not dutiful biographies, but stories of personal events, life, loves, danger, adventure, travails, and beauty. 

Both Arnold and the helicopter pilot thought that they had something important to say, something vital and human; and they were both surprised to see that they had nothing of the kind.  Even in the unimaginable scenes of combat, the pilot could only manage wind velocity and arcs-of-fire.  Those who imagined life over the treetops in Vietnam had more creative juices than the pilot every had.  Those who imagined bike rides up and down the Tetons, Denali, or the Rockies had more fantasy and communing with nature than Arnold could muster on his best days. 

Those who opened the doctor's book were expecting My Left Foot, a marvelous, humorous, delightful memoir of a severely disabled boy who became a world-renowned painter, all using only his left foot. Needless to say, they were disappointed. 

In many cases failed memoirs are because of inexperience.  The writer does have something to say, but cannot find the words to say it.  In most others, however, the writer has nothing to say but is laboring under the false impression that he does - the marvelous art of self-deception. 

'At least he tried', said Arnold's friends as each rewrite was as uninspired, intellectually lethargic, and frightfully boring as the previous one.  Arnold finally gave it up, never really sure why he couldn't manage something that people liked; but that his friends never let on. 

Dreams Of A Political Arriviste - The Consort Of A Kingly Leader And Finding Him In Washington

Barbery Byfield was a typical girl of her generation - coquette, ingenue, but with that precocious sexuality that most girls affect but she had in abundance.  She was indeed a Lolita, a nymphet, a girl barely out of high socks and school uniforms, who had desires well beyond her age. 

When she read the Arabian Nights, or Rapunzel, Goldilocks, or The Fairy Princess, she did not let them float happily in her fantasy.  When she dressed up in sequins, crinoline, and glitter, she was not just pretending to be a prima ballerina, noticed by the Tsar of Russia and invited to the Winter Palace.  She was that ballerina. 

When she saw pictures of the palaces of Persepolis, Constantinople, and Babylon, she was not just an imagined princess of the pasha's harem, but was that lady of exotic charms. 

She spent her classes daydreaming, imagining a world far beyond Chillicothe, Ohio, the farm, the cornfields, and the Methodist church - a world of wonder, limitless possibilities; a life of sybaritic pleasure, sexual abandon, frankincense and myrrh.  

Her grades slipped, her teachers critical, and the principal dismissive.  'Unless your grades improve, Miss Byfield, I would be remiss if I didn't remind you of your responsibilities', said the principle, an old queen never satisfied; but Barbery knew that her future was not in conjugations, the Hundred Years War, or Jeffersonian expansionism. 

Where was it, then? she wondered.  'Dreams are misfortunes in disguise', her mother had warned her, a woman who had had her share of promising but ultimately disappointing love affairs.  In fact, Mrs. Byfield was never entirely sure that Barbery was the offspring of Mr. Byfield or the ravishing Viscount of Northumberland who had swept her off her feet, treated her like a queen, then left her for the Duchess of Kent.  

Such is the stuff dreams are made of, she recalled; and best warn her daughter off such fancies before it was too late. 

But too late it was, for whether a product of genetic destiny or environmental influence, her daughter Barbery followed in her footsteps, enamored of the princely life, the romantic, and the wellborn. 

'At least keep your knickers on

, her mother finally said to her precocious daughter, 'until Mr. Right comes along', but those were words of an older generation of women.  Hers, feminist, demanding, and impatient, was different.  If she wanted a trail of disappointed men behind her, so be it. 'Reputation' today was more a question of dominance and success than virginity. 

It was a fine line to walk, the one between the slatternly and informed choice.  There were the usual suitors from which she assessed like Portia - Bobby Parker, captain of this and that, a bit slow off the mark but zesty and confident; Alfonso Evans, eccentric artist with little talent but with an insouciance which appealed; Dickinson Putnam of the Putnams, the Putnams of the Davenport expedition, the Salem trials, and the founding of New Haven; and Ralph DiMarco, goomba, the first New Haven Italian to be admitted to Yale, a political foundling with all kinds of connections and good in bed. 

Women have made fame, fortune, and history thanks to their ineffable and irresistible sexual appeal.  Margaret, wife of the weak King Henry VI, tired of his shilly-shallying rule, took over the reigns of power, defeated the French and saved England from foreign rule.  Cleopatra made short work of her Ptolemaic adversaries, and ruled Egypt for decades, in the meantime bedding Julius Caesar and having two children by him before luring Marc Antony into her bed chamber.  Ibsen, Strindberg, Dreiser, and Lewis wrote of indomitable women who took what they wanted and left a trail of men behind them. 

The problem was this: there was no American royalty, no cultured legatees of a thousand years of history, not even a significant aristocracy to speak of.  Yes, there were the Cabots and Lodges, Rittenhouse Square, Beacon Hill, and the Waldorf, but they couldn't hold a candle to the Bourbons or the Windsors. 

All that America had was this unwashed, hungry, bourgeois class of go-getters - the Zuckerbergs, Bezos, Buffets, Gates, and Jobs and their successors; so Barbery's fantasies of a palatial life were as fanciful as ever.  Times had changed. 

Or had they? Was an affair with an Ohio Congressman, an important member of the Ways and Means Committee of Congress, he heir to the wealth that only a few years in elected government can provide,  not the same as a rung on the ladder of viscounts, counts, and dukes but a reasonable aspiration?  Distasteful perhaps, but equivalent. 

So with a higher prize in mind, Barbery shared her bounty with others in Washington, moving her way up from interns to Congressional aides to inner circles. 

It is supposed that the political elite is a notch above the rest, more savvy, canny, and worldly wise; but the reverse is true.  These politicos, especially those with tenure, were particularly vulnerable to the blandishments and advances of young women like Barbery. 

As Shakespeare well knew, men are boobs and women can run rings around them.  Viola, Rosalind, and Portia were marvels of misandry, dismissing men like so much lint.  Lady Macbeth and especially Queen Margaret wife of the Danish regicide king and uncle to Hamlet, were the most well-known examples of native feminism.  Not to mention Tamora, Queen of the Goths or Dionyza harridan and murderous queen. 

 

So these fools in Washington would be easy pickings; but would bedtime with the nation's philanderers  be any satisfaction of Barbery's desires?   Would a liaison with the likes of Newt Gingrich, Mark Sanford, John Edwards, or even Bill Clinton, duplicitous, craven, heartless idiots, be the apogee of her ambition?

Doubtful.  Washington has no aristocratic sophistication, no Old World cavalier culture, no royal entitlement, and worst of all, no class.  It is a barnyard, pigsty, rutting free-for-all. 

Yet there is value and honor in accepting the challenge and wearing the laurels of victory.  So what if Congressman X is a rube from the sticks? Having him prostrate, vulnerable and hers was worth something.  Perhaps not in the annals of Mme. de Maintenon or Marie Antoinette, but a statement nonetheless. 

And so it was that Barbery Byfield found her home - not the Palais de Versailles or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon exactly, but a fertile ground for dominance and sexual satisfaction, the very essence of woman. 

 

Was the President of the United States immune to feminine wiles?  No President in American history led a faithful, uxorious life.  Every single one of them had a mistress except perhaps for Jimmy Carter who admitted only to having 'lust in his heart' which of course counts for the same thing, almost. 

Donald Trump has a beautiful younger wife and during his long career has squired the most desirable women; and since all men even at an advanced age think of sex every waking moment, the President would certainly be fair game. 

Particularly now when he is at the top of his game he would be at his most susceptible. All powerful men reach an inviolate plateau, a no-fly zone, an untouchable position from which they feel they can do anything without prosecution.  Especially in a president's second term in office, his last by Constitutional injunction, he feels more empowered and immune than ever. 

Former President of France Nicolas Sarkozy kept his mistress in the Presidential Palace, the Elysees, at his beck and call.  President Mitterrand's lover and illegitimate child mourned at his grave alongside his wife and legitimate children. 

There would be no fuss - there could be no fuss - if Barbery moved into the presidential quarters, but that was  putting the cart before the horse, engaging in one of her romantic fantasies before political reality.

The old adage - men will always be men - has not changed in millennia. Men are and always will be suckers for sexual attention and will throw fidelity, trust, and honesty to the winds for sexual adventure. 

In fact the older a man gets, the more insistent he becomes about expressing his virility; and a May-December affair, if ever achieved, can be transformative for an older man.  

Now, Donald Trump might be a hard sexual nut to crack, but he's no different from John Q. Public, wanting that nubile, silken freshness that only the likes of Barbery Byfield can offer. 

At this moment Barbery is in wings, but soon will show herself in all her marvelously seductive allure,  Why Barbery, you might ask given the tarts, comers, and glamorous showgirls of the world? Because some women have it and some don't, and this President  among all before him knows what's what.

What A Great Country! - How A Somali Pirate Turned A Fraud Ring Into A Drug Empire Under The Nose Of The US Government

Bashir Abdi was born and raised in Mogadishu.  He had never known anything but civil disorder, mayhem, and political chaos.  His country, Somalia, had been this way for decades - a lawless, ungoverned and ungovernable state, and to survive one had to rely on wits, ingenuity, craft, and fearlessness. 

 

His father, Barre, had brought him up with the survival skills necessary in such an unstructured society.  The rules that applied elsewhere- honesty, fairness, justice, consideration, and compassion - not only did not apply in Somalia but were tickets to an early death. 

No, the Abdi boy was brought up in a culture of harsh reality, violence, cruelty, and self-interest.  At a very young age Bashir accompanied his father on the pirate boats that plied the Indian Ocean.  He learned how to fire a machine gun and was trusted with manning the M240 mounted on the prow to lay down suppressive fire as they approached their target. 

Later as a young man, he was entrusted with leadership and had brought home a number of high-value assets.  He was also a member of the X-7 militia, a paramilitary group turned into gangland crewe responsible for 'sanitizing' the city and making it 'clean' for extrajudicial rule.  Fortunes were made in the lucrative drug trade, for Mogadishu became a key transit point for Southeast Asia heroin, a trusted depot given the military acumen and ferocity of its managers. 

'It is time to go to America', Bashir's father said to him one day.  'There is more money to be made there in one day than in a lifetime in Somalia'. 

Barre Abdi also knew that as well as profiting mightily, his son would not be killed.  American authorities were easily convinced to give immigrants and easy pass, and would overlook 'minor' infractions of the law.  More importantly, shooting a black man no matter what the circumstances, was simply not done in the United States, so the young man would be safe from harm. 

Entry into the United States over the years had been possible, especially if one had the financial resources of the Abdi family.  The thousands paid in bribes to American officials - from the border patrol to the courts - made illegal entry a simple matter.  

The Abdi money was not needed, however, since Bashir entered the United States during the Biden Administration, well known throughout Africa as an easy mark. Biden and his Congressional supporters made it known that all were welcome.  He and his fellow progressives felt they had a duty, a holy obligation to right the wrongs of decades of American imperialism, neo-colonialism, and racial oppression of Third World nations and to give succor and asylum to anyone fleeing that world. 

Given this political stance and the myopia which went along with it, the fraud, embezzlement, and financial crime committed by the Somali community grew geometrically.  No one in the Administration dared look at Somali books, for doing so would have been tantamount to racism.  There was already a widespread popular belief in the endemic criminality of the black man, American or African, and investigating him would only confirm that rancid prejudice. 

Since the local police, the FBI, and the wider network of federal law enforcement agencies were told to look the other way, the Somalis raked in hundreds of millions a year, built financial fortunes, and were looked at within the underground community of scammers, fraudsters, and snake oil salesmen, as brilliant profiteers. 

Bashir Abdi felt quite at home in Minneapolis despite the bitter cold.  He was welcomed as a hero, thanks to his reputation and that of his family, perhaps the most successful criminal operatives on the African continent - and that was saying something given the widespread endemic, universal corruption in every corner. 

'We will teach you all you need to know', Bashir was told as he settled in to his new white collar role.  At first, of course, he missed the thrill of the chase, the roar of quad Yamaha 350s, the gunfire, and the final assault; but he soon got used to a life of leisure. 

The government of the United States at every level had been so snookered, so completely bamboozled by the ethos of 'diversity' and 'inclusivity' that Somalis had a virtually free rein.  Child care centers which were no more than empty storefronts with welcoming signs, eldercare transport services without a single vehicle, and home visit nursing care without a nurse to be seen were the rule. 

'What a great country', Bashir said to his colleagues after evening prayers and a night with a Somali princess; but he was becoming increasingly bored with the simple routine.  Yes, his Aruban bank accounts were swelling, but he missed the life of excitement and adventure he had enjoyed back home.

Fraud was a profitable enterprise, but it lacked mojo, risk, and reward.  Drug running had been at the center of the Abdi business, so Bashir naturally considered that avenue of profit here in the United States. 

There were two avenues open for an enterprising man like Bashir - one was the lucrative cross-border trade in California-Mexico, but that was locked down by Latino gangs.  No one crossed Mara Salvatrucha, MS-19 or even intimated joining their ranks.  Bodies were littered on both sides of the border for just that. 

The other was the smaller but still lucrative drug market in New York City.  Frank Lucas had made hundreds of millions through a canny marketing scheme - buying heroin wholesale direct from Southeast Asia, shipping it on military transport planes shuttling between Saigon and New York, and selling it at a competitive price on the street. 

Lucas was long dead and buried but the drug trade in Harlem and beyond was still not only viable but rewarding.  Bashir had a feeling that with his credentials - black men in Harlem had heard of Somali macho derring-do and liked it, and understood the need to be more canny about their investments.  A veteran of the biggest scams going in the United States would be welcome in New York. 

While Bashir started as an accountant - well, more of a financial advisor - he let it be known that he would be a valuable asset in the muscle end of the business.  He had shown no mercy on the high seas and was known up and down the Somali Coast as the Genghis Khan of piracy, and there were enough upstart factions causing interruptions in the now standard-issue trade, that some measure of 'discipline' was called for; and he was the one. 

The reputation that preceded him was well-deserved, and in a few short months bodies were showing up in the Meadowlands, drug sales returned to normal, and the domain of the new drug lords of Harlem increased by leaps and bounds. 

Never one to turn his back on friends, family, and community, Bashir returned to Minneapolis and began to transform what had only been a scam into a serious, American-style, gangland operation.  He used his Harlem connections as sources of heroin, meth, and Fentanyl, built a cadre of loyalists within the Somali community, and selected the best and the brightest to work for him. 

Within a short time, the streets of Midwest cities were filled with his products; and the local authorities, still under restraining orders and unable to investigate anyone in the black community, did nothing. It was a bonanza, a jamboree, an operation that simply printed money. 

With the election of Donald Trump, the aggressive operations of ICE, and the long-overdue investigations into Somali Minnesota fraud, Bashir knew it was time to leave.  He knew the day would come as it did for Frank Lucas and the Big Men of Africa - not in federal prison but in his villa in St. Tropez which he had already bought and furnished.  Since his record was clean - federal authorities in the US never even suspected his level of involvement in the childcare fraud or the drug trade - and with generous payments to EU authorities, his residence in the South of France would be undisturbed. 

Everything in life is subject to the dictates of the bell curve; and even in a continent only known for misrule, corruption, venality, abject poverty, and medieval tribalism, there can be bright stars, men of brilliance, enterprise, and creativity.  Bashir Abdi was one of those stars and at last report was living decently and well on the Cote d'Azur.