A Real Life Barbie - How A Ditzy Blonde Made It Big In America, The Land Of Opportunity

Belinda Parsons' mother always dressed her up like JonBenet Ramsey, a cute little thing fashioned after a twenty-year old.  A bit weird, thought the Parsons' neighbors who at first thought the little girl was a dwarf, so perfectly fashioned as an adult was she; then they shook their heads in disgust and dismay at such deformity, giving the child a faux precocity and robbing her of innocence. 

'Creepy, that's what it is', said Irma Carlson who took in washing from the rich families of the West End, and whose two little girls were proper, well-brought up Lutherans, respectful and wholly children. 'That's what money will do'. 

But that was just sour grapes. The peculiar adulation of little Belinda had nothing to do with money. It had more to do with Mrs. Parsons, daughter of a shipping clerk and seamstress, who by chance alone married higher up into the social register.  Albert Parsons, a Yale man who crewed for the team, helped win the Henley Regatta, and was a big man on campus, did the right thing when Estella Parsons got pregnant. 

Most Yale men would have given her a few hundred dollars, a train ticket to Montreal, and the address of a good abortionist, but Albert was different. One of the few men of honor on campus - or a doofus, depending on your point of view.  

Life with one of New England's first families should have been enough to cure Estella of her kitschy tastes.  Money usually does that when it comes to clothes, comportment, and accent; but Estella simply couldn't give up her love of soap operas, princess outfits, sequins, and ballet shoes, and of course Barbie.  There was something appealing about all that pink and rose, that fixed smile, that perfect figure that said, 'America !' every time she looked at any one of fifty dolls she had collected and now was anxious to introduce to her daughter.

 

Estella couldn't wait for her daughter to grow big enough to wear the princess costume that she had worn as a child. Of course it wasn't as ornate, glittery, and marvelous as the ones today, but she longed to see her daughter 'coming out'. 

Estella of course felt sorry for the parents of JonBenet Ramsey - who, by the way might have been the killers of their daughter, but until that was proved, they deserved her sympathy - and sorry for the little girl probably abused and left in a dumpster in Ohio or someplace like that; but she couldn't help be taken by the premature beauty of the little girl, whose appearance was so enhanced by an attentive mother.  How precious! How charming! How absolutely inviting!

There was no way that Belinda could develop any other way than into what has been offensively called 'a ditzy blonde'.  

Now, blondes have an automatic ten percent advantage over other women, such is the allure of the precipitously declining demographic of blonde, blue-eyed women in America.  The rainbow coalition, diversity, equity, and inclusion have mixed genes up to such a degree that a woman was lucky to come out streaked and uneven; but Belinda was a pure blonde with blue eyes to match, and given her girly-girl Barbie upbringing, she knew exactly how to attract men.  As corny as it sounds, batting her eyelashes, wetting her lips, and tossing her magnificent hair when an attractive boy approached her was irresistible.

Despite her father's attempts to give the girl some intellectual discipline and to widen her academic horizons, Belinda was diffident to his entreaties at best. She had been gifted with an extraordinary gift, the beauty of a nymph, and she would be a fool not to use every ounce of its telling, appealing nature. 

Had social psychologists had a go at Belinda, delving into the character of such an endowed girl who seemed to eschew any serious interests, they would have been perplexed, for Belinda was not a dumb blonde. As a matter of fact she was hovering up near the Einstein range of intelligence.

These scientists perhaps because of their inflated view of their own intelligence assumed that high mental capacity would always out, would trump superficiality, would dismiss frippery and a tinselly outlook, and would emerge finally as a mathematician, logician, or composer. 

What they overlooked was what one critic had called 'the great American Zeitglitz', a universal love affair with the showy, lowbrow, sequin-and-star fabulism. Las Vegas was the heart and soul of America not Beacon Hill, Park Avenue, or Shawnee Mission.  Soap operas, runways, line dancers, Hollywood and cheap dime-store romantic novels. 

Many are the sophisticated New York matrons with the latest novel of romance writer, Alicia Fox under their pillows.  Elegant, trim, highly educated patrons of the arts, doyennes of the most impressive literary salons in the city, these women could not help sneaking in a few pages to find out if Lance really loved Suzanna. 

 

And down the social phylogenetic scale the romance went, down and down to South Carolina trailers and cramped four-family quarters in Pismo Beach. 

This is all by way of saying that smart women like Belinda Parsons could be heady with brains and still tempted by cheap thrills and lovey-dovey romance. 

Belinda, however, had more to her than most.  She learned at an early age that her intelligence plus her blonde, seductive beauty were a potent mix.  Men, dupes for love beauty and pilloried for their bullying misunderstanding of women and bested by them (viz Shakespeare's Rosalind, Viola, and Portia), would always be fools to be had. 

Belinda didn't need school larnin', Kant, Kierkegaard, or Sartre, to make her way in the world. Always a step shy of the femme fatale, clearly film noir in inspiration but far more openly ambitious than those women, Belinda always got what she wanted. 

 

A stint in Hollywood, cabarets in Los Angeles, and clubs in South Beach were the training ground where she perfected her talents; and before long she was on a First Class seat to Washington, DC, the protege of one of the most powerful men in Congress who fell for her just as hard and fast as the thousand others she left in her trail. 

'My wonderful, beautiful Barbie', said her mother when Belinda returned home to Chillicothe, proud as pudding at her daughter's remarkable success.  She for a while thought she might have overdone the JonBenet Ramsey/Barbie thing, but saw how right she was.  

For the rest of us, America, what a great country!  As cheap, lowbrow, and trailer trashy as you can find anywhere, but oh, those diamonds in the rough, those blonde women who can work wonders. 

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 predominant ethnicity 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 the court, and established her as queen 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, permanent below market rate for oil, and the Americans had pledged to look the other way at his famous financial siphon into which was poured millions of unaccountable dollars and which flowed out into his many Aruban bank accounts. 

'Ours is a dump 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 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' 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 saw Fitch as 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. Conversely with proper encouragement, he might write reports more favorable to the regime than were merited and 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, 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 spent 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 from 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 pleasurable 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.

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 chain. The international banks were well-known for their influence, status, and first-class travel; but there were hundreds of other government-financed NGOs who sent out consultants 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.  However African leaders like M'bele were not put out of work.  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.