Annals Of Underdevelopment - An African Dump With Oil, Foie Gras, And A Fulani Mistress

Fulani women are prized in Africa, for they come from Egypto-Syrian stock and share all the Caucasian traits of those ethnic groups.  As such they are far from the traditional Bantus, the predominate culture of Africa.  Amina Diallo was a Fulani and one of the most beautiful women that Antoine M'bele, President-for-Life had ever seen.  He had paid thousands for her, promised her untold riches and the privileges of a queen, and established her as primus inter pares of his renowned harem. 

M'bele was president of a sub-Saharan African country with oil, emeralds, and rare earths, one whose favor was sought after by America and every important European and Asian nation.  The Chinese had promised to rebuild all of M'bele's country's infrastructure for a guaranteed below market rate for oil, and the Americans had pledged to look the other way at his famous financial siphon into which were poured millions of unaccountable dollars which flowed out into his many Aruban bank accounts. 

'Ours is a shithole with oil', M'bele said with a loud, barking guffaw at a colloquy of international donor agencies gathered in the luxurious forest resort he had built with Swedish assistance.  He was proud of this epithet heard in the corridors of the World Bank and the US State Department.  

He knew that he was untouchable and in great demand.  The world's economic powers, hungry for energy and the rare minerals necessary for cell phones and computers, had always given him a free pass when it came to the bottom line.  As long as they could pump oil and mine Neodymium and Dysprosium, they looked the other way at his governance, off-shore bank accounts, and secret police. 

Harrison Fitch was a Loan Officer for an international development bank in charge of a multi-million dollar 'investment' in improving the country's health infrastructure.  His bank, a close ally of the administration in Washington, agreed to be the non-partisan representative of American interests in the country.  His bank loans would be the cover for the 'cash transfers' enabled by the US State Department.

In other words, the American Treasury would finance the international bank with the resources to be 'loaned' to M'bele.  M'bele was never expected to repay the loan, the bank would renegotiate and reconfigure the loan in a public gesture of international and national accountability, but the money would still exit the country into M'bele's private accounts - all for guaranteed rights to mine rare earths in his eastern provinces. 

Now, Fitch was no fool, and saw ways to benefit from his financial wizardry. He was less interested in the same kind of cash transfers enabled by his bank and the Americans, but wanted to enjoy the same perks as M'bele, or at least share in those riches. 

M'bele, who saw a willing and important ally - although Fitch was merely an international civil servant, a lackey of the powers that be, he could still muddy the waters with inconvenient truths.  Similarly, with proper encouragement, he might write reports more favorable to the regime than were merited, pave the way for bi-lateral agreements and long-term accords.  

Fitch had to do no work in the country given the nature of his assignment.  He merely had to sign off on the receipt of funds by M'bele, their transfer to the Ministry of Health, and onward distribution to regional hospitals and local clinics.   This signature was only a formality, for neither one of the partners actually expected any health return on the investment; so for the three weeks he would spend in country he would be treated with the hospitality due to royalty, most importantly the company of the beautiful Amina Diallo, Fulani princess. 

As much as Amina was prized by M'bele, she was neither wife nor love interest.  She had been bought for a handsome sum by Egyptian traders and was property to be used, bartered, loaned, and traded as M'bele saw fit.  

This was not slavery nor servitude, but a consensual arrangement.  In turn for her service, her extended family in Mali would be well-taken care of and would never have to worry. Her brothers would be educated and even sent to France for university, her father was able to buy up a thousand acres of World Bank-financed irrigated lands along the river, and her mother secure and happy assisted by a bevy of servants. 

M'bele was a considerate and practiced lover.  While Amina felt nothing but duty and financial responsibility when he politely knocked on the door, she was herself a practiced actress, and the President always left very pleased.  

'I want you to meet Amina', the President said to Fitch on their first meeting of his tour of the country. 'I think you will enjoy her company', and so it was that the beautiful Fulani and the banker spent many joyful nights in a suite at the five-star hotel M'bele had built thanks to Norwegian generosity.  

It was an idyll made in heaven, and nothing could have been more perfect.  For an acknowledging signature here and there, a desultory look at a health center or two, and a live-and-let-live complaisance when it came to any bottom line, Fitch could live in the lap of luxury. 

Now, this happy accommodation was not the exception, nor the rule, but a circumstance not overlooked by many in the business.  It was not the moral affair of those sent out to African countries to investigate, discover, and report questionable activities. Moral responsibility, if that term can even be applied anywhere in Africa, was the matter of those in bank headquarters and the President's office.  To those in charge Fitch and his colleagues were errand boys, sent to deliver groceries, and return to the store. 

The errand boys, however demeaning the assignments might sound, clambered for work.  What could be better than a sojourn in a five-star hotel with a beautiful mistress, and treated to Moet-Chandon, foie gras, and the finest food west of Suez?

 

These 'arrangements', of course, were at the very top of the development pinnacle.  The international banks were well-known for their influence, status, and first-class travel; but there were hundreds of other consultants sent by home agencies to oversee projects in health, education, and welfare - projects which sponsors knew would have little chance of success but showed the world that rich, white nations cared about the black man. 

Money went in one door and out the other, but there was at least some actual enterprise - a teacher training workshop, a few clean syringes, a community loan operation.  These projects never amounted to much and were never expected to, but had enough visibility to ensure positive reports back to Congress and the American taxpayer who wanted their dollars to be doing good. 

These consultants never enjoyed the pleasures of beautiful Fulani women, but were not denied creature comforts - a decent per diem and hotel allowances, business class travel, all expenses paid European stopovers, etc. They were all in on the scam - for that was what international development was - and never gave it a second thought. 

When Donald Trump got rid of USAID, only these consultants were sorry, for the sinecure was now over.  African leaders like M'bele were not put out of business.  They simply did their business directly with Exxon Mobil, Microsoft, and Apple.

'The halcyon years', said Fitch from his retirement home on Hilton Head.  'The best, the absolute best', and so they were, those idyllic nights and days, the pleasures, the indolence, the perfection of it all. 

'We were lucky', Fitch said to a brother-in-arms, a colleague from a sister bank who had enjoyed the same happy, sybaritic life as Fitch.  'Very lucky indeed.'

One Of Us, One Of Us, Or Looking For A Niche When No One Will Have You - The Sequelae Of Identity

Halsey Taylor grew up in a uniformly white, Christian, middle-class community, all of whom had respectable jobs, went to church on Sunday, played golf and bridge, marched in Fourth of July parades, had Sunday dinners, and ate simply but well. 

 

New Brighton was not exactly an idyll - Elvira Carlson hanged herself by a clothes' line in the backyard in view of the neighbors; and Frank Ardmore was a cheat and fraudster - but all in all it was a familiar, recognizable piece of the American pie that could be found anywhere. It was a time of patriotism, comity, and community. 

Halsey was a bit of a difficult child, an obstreperous adolescent, and an angry young woman champing at the bit, wanting more than New Brighton could ever offer.  What that something was, Halsey had no idea; but she knew that she was destined for more than the kinder, kirche, kuchen her hometown offered.

She went off to Smith College, one of the Seven Sisters who mimicked the Ivy League in every way - heritage, family, promise, culture - but who were exclusively female, still, despite their pedigree, second class institutions. 

It was a good, logical choice for a young woman of intelligence and ambition, but Halsey was unprepared for the randy lesbianism of the place - the horny assumptions of every upper class woman who took le droit du seigneur as written and who preyed on the young freshman ingenues who came to Northampton thinking only of Kant, Pericles, and Shakespeare. 

It was like swatting away flies, so buzzingly insistent were these women who assumed that entry into the club of the Seven Sisters meant sexual complaisance.  As time went on the insistence became more aggressive and insistent, more like a maximum security prison than a girls school - sex for favors, sex because it was available, slaves and chattel, overlords, and Simon Legrees all in this quaint Massachusetts town and ivy-halled college. 

Once out of college, finding herself adrift - the old New Brighton angst had not diminished, but virtual resentment against the received wisdom and assumed values of Smith increased - she foundered.  Where was the husband she had been promised, the Capitol Hill internship, the coattails of power?

Her classmates had all gone underground; or at least joined forces with the anti-establishmentarian Left, and become a feral mob of political dissidents. Not exactly traitors to their families and their heritage - Smith, like the other Seven Sisters and the Ivy League was still patrician to the core, aristocratic in philosophy and outlook, wealthy and privileged - but close, credulous followers of the New Age. 

She demurred, hesitant to belong to the great sweeping demographic cohort of  'The Sixties', faux liberalism, and facile, love-the-one-you're-with fellowship; but in those days, what else was there?  She had not found Mr. Right of Greenwich, Connecticut, Wall Street banker, and scion of Cabots and Lodges, had certainly not been willing to fold back in to the graces of middle-brow New Brighton, and found the caterwauling about civil rights, peace, and justice loud and irritating. 

Yet she needed a place to hang her hat, to lay her head on the pillow, to call home.  Things, however, got progressively worse as old style, Lafollette, Gompers, and Brandeis liberalism morphed into post-Sixties progressivism.  Catcalls and hysteria replaced any sensible correctional policies, bull dykes and drag queens pushed aside generational sanity, and the country had devolved into a potpourri of nasty-minded cabals. 

Where did she belong, adamantly white, upper middle class, Christian, straight, and mindful of the Founding Fathers? 

Giorgia Meloni, conservative President of Italy famously and proudly said, 'I am Giorgia.  I am a woman.  I am a mother.  I am Christian.  I am European, and I am Italian!, encapsulating in one speech the fundamental principles of European conservatism; and Halsey Taylor responded.  'I am Giorgia' she said. 

All well and done, but how to translate that particular European ethos into American civic reality?  Every principle Meloni endorsed was considered anathema by the American Left.  Womanhood? What was that when considering the fluidity of the gender spectrum?

Halsey had been an advocate of civil rights.  She had always hoped that Jefferson's search for a homeland for freed slaves had been fulfilled.  The third American president understood that the release of hundreds of thousands of uncivilized African tribal savages into the body politic would cause disruption and havoc.  That unfulfilled expectation had led to decades of racialism and division - the inner city, the ghetto, the inchoate demands of the supposedly black underserved were its legacy. 

The release of gayness and transgenderism on the American public was no resolution to sexual enslavement, but a horrific distortion of normality.  Open borders had once and for all exposed the brown and black populations as underdeveloped, unsocialized, and unwanted.  Cries for the redistribution of wealth were no more than romantic idealism and neo-Communist cant. 

Politics had destroyed the original American ethos. Ambition, opportunity, advancement as a function of talent, intelligence, and capability were suspect.  Identity, so flimsily and errantly based on race, gender, and ethnicity had destroyed comity and universal subscription to fundamental values. 

She was in effect, stripped naked.  A woman with intelligence, ability, legacy and agency standing alone in the square, spat upon, ready to be bound, tethered, and burned at the stake. 

She had few choices.  She could furl her ensign, rejoin the sailing fleet, hoist the flag of social reform, and lie, complaisantly on her comfortable unearned income; join the ultra-conservative nationalists and build a political party as successful as the AfD party in Germany or Marine LePen's ultra-nationalists in France; or show up the idiocy and faux sanctity of American progressives...But where would that leave her?

She was no Stoic, no Epictetian no desultory sitter on the sidelines who could watch the hysterical cacophony of the Left without reaction; but still and all in all where was she to go?

It is ironic but understandable how a culture of inclusivity was by its nature exclusive,  Rather than assume that everyone was part of one, unified, companionable national community, one had to prove one's bona fides - black, gay, etc. 

Progressivism by its very canonical aspiration for Utopia, has fragmented, dissolved, and dismissed any sense of unity, of pulling together rowing the same boat; and so it was that Halsey ended up adrift, a supernumerary to political advocacy, a fifth wheel. 

Yet, she started off as a rugged, uncowed, determined individualist - a pissy little kid who knew what was what - and managed quite well.  The world is 99.9 percent accommodated, fitted nicely into prescriptive groups, but Halsey part of the tiny fraction not only survived but prospered. At least she knew that she was of the elite. 

When Diversity Goes Rogue, Stick To Your Own Kind - The Demise Of A Central, Universal Ethical Core

In Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, the Broadway 50s musical based on Romeo and Juliet, a boy and girl from two opposing gangs, one white and the other Puerto Rican, fall in love. Anita, a friend of Maria, warns her against getting involved with someone from a different community.  She sings:

A boy like that
Who'd kill your brother
Forget that boy
And find another
One of your own kind
Stick to your own kind
A boy like that
Will give you sorrow
You'll meet another boy tomorrow
One of your own kind
Stick to your own kind

“Stick to your own kind” is her refrain. If you don’t, you’re asking for trouble.  Of course Maria does not listen, bad turns to worse, and the final scene is a melodramatic replay of the end of the star-crossed lovers.

Of course Bernstein was just whistlin' Dixie.  Ever since the first Paleolithic settlements, human beings have formed likeminded groups and have been suspicious of 'the other'.  Human and animal societies have always prized centrality, core identity, universal belonging and have fought fiercely to defend polity, consensus, security, and identity.  Bee and ant colonies are built on complex social systems designed to propagate, protect, and defend the colony.  No outsiders, no intruders, no external intent is tolerated. 

In human society there has always been a tendency to form larger groups of associated, similar interests.  There is clearly strength in numbers, but only if those numbers add up to the same sum.  Groups become larger groups, extend their each, become more and more inclusive.  Religion became a central camping ground as did politics. 

Social groupings - the natural colloquies of the similar and likeminded - have always described human aggregations and always will. 

For large social groups comity is essential.  Fragmentation into self-interested groups is antithetical and destructive.  This is why China has always been a powerful nation and is now increasingly so.  It has refused ethnic separatism and insisted that all distinct groups abandon cultural distinction and join the universal, national polity of the nation at large. 

At the heart of this cultural polity is a strong ethical, Confucian core.  Separate ethnic identity means nothing compared to universal comity - subscription to a social, ethical, and moral core that guides every action and anneals divisions of self-interest. 

Japan is no different, hewing to the same idea of a central ethical core, in their case derived from Shintoism and Buddhism, but with a strong, undeniable cultural and historical legacy. 

Russia and Turkey, both with storied empires, understand the importance of cultural unanimity.  The Ottoman Empire - like the Roman, Mongol, Mauryan, or Persian - could never have existed without a strong, ineradicable cultural center and a universal embrace of it. 

Understanding the natural human tendency to form identity groups, but equally realizing the corrosive nature of such separatism has been the key to national strength and geopolitical supremacy. 

The United States once understood this - Thomas Jefferson and his Founding Fathers colleagues formed the new republic based on philosophical and religious principles.  The nation, although refusing the dictatorial imposition of European religion, would nonetheless be 'One Nation Under God' and would be guided by the principles of the Enlightenment. Logic and reason were only means to the end of better understanding God and his Creation. 

Now, however, the nation is ruled by identity politics - the division of the country into racial, ethnic, and gender groups, all legitimized by narrow self-interest.  National ethos, polity, comity, subscription to universal norms of right behavior have been rejected in favor of cultural separatism.  Blacks and whites have nothing in common, nor do gays and straights.  There is no attempt to find common ground because a priori, ipso facto there is none. 

Europe, after decades of the liberal, inclusivist policies which have let in millions of Middle Eastern and African Muslims, has realized the mistake it made.  These immigrants, always harshly critical of and militantly aggressive against all other religions, have made it clear that they will create a sub-state within national borders.  They have refused European secularism, and have insisted that God's law - their Islamic social code - will always have the ultimate say. 

Conservative leaders in France, the UK, and Germany will most certainly be elected in the next round of voting, and they have vowed not only to close the borders but to deport all who are in the country illegally and to insist on overt and universal subscription to European cultural laws and traditions.  Cultural diversity will be respected as long as it does interfere with, counter, or reject the universal norms of the nation. 

Poland and Hungary have made cultural integrity the cornerstone of their political agenda.  Poland has been publicly proud of its tight immigration policy, and Giorgia Meloni, President of Italy has said loudly and proudly, 'I am Giorgia.  I am a woman.  I am a mother. I am Christian. I am European, and I am Italian!' the litany of foundational values. 

Japan under its new conservative leadership has vowed to close down mosques, deport anyone who has not become fully Japanese, and has vowed to preserve Japanese culture. 

Of course the European Left has cried fascism, neo-Nazism, and right-wing extremism, and have begun a hate-mongering campaign to cast all conservatives as retrograde, bullying Hitlerian National Socialists. 

Conservative adherents have been very outspoken in their frustration and anger at having for so long been forced to bow to the claims of the Left that white, Christian Europe has been nothing but a predatory, warmongering, colonialist, oppressor, and good riddance to it. 

American conservatives have raised the same angry cries.  For years Americans have been told that white, Christian America is evil, the perpetuator of slavery, Jim Crow, persistent systemic racism, and the oppression of minorities and the poor.  The creation of identity groups has been an important way to counter white, straight, Christian supremacy. 

Conservatives are having no more of it.  White, Christian, Europe has given the world modern civilization - art, literature, science, philosophy, architecture, laws, and civil governance - and its inheritors in America should not only be proud of that legacy but do everything to restore it. 

To create a culture of identity is to foist a superficial, discrediting, demeaning philosophy on the citizenry.  A focus on race, gender, and ethnicity diminishes and detracts from the attention which should be paid to intelligence, talent, creativity, insight, and social courage.  There will always be differences among people. 

The bell curve will always and inevitably define human society - there will always be the smarter and the less able, those with will and ambition and those without, those with talent and insight, and those who remain ignorant and credulous. 

The bell curve describes performance, actual or potential - and that has always been part and parcel of the American ethos.  A land of infinite opportunity which some will take advantage of and others won't.  Racial differences might be factors in the character of the bell curve, but are irrelevant in and of themselves. 

Europe will soon close its borders, expunge anti-cultural elements, and return to a central cultural ethos. The smell of ragu, kielbasa, couscous, and thieboudienne will still fill alleys and byways, but that's where cultural diversity will stop.