When Corruption Meets Corruption - An African Dictator's Visit To The Harris White House

Prince Alfonse M'bele was the longtime president of 'a dump with oil', the rather nasty reference made in the the halls of the State Department to a miserably poor, crime- and civil strife-ridden country whose only interest to Western donors was its vast energy and mineral reserves. 

The country had for years been on the State Department's priority list because of - and only because of - these resources.  Otherwise it was a pariah - public executions, political refugees, Tonton Macoute-style secret police and a steady stream of dollars and euros to private off-shore bank accounts.  If there was a more corrupt country in Africa, diplomats and CIA analysts had not found it. 

The President lived in a palatial mansion on a promontory overlooking the ocean.  It was done in the style of the Palace of Versailles down to a Hall of Mirrors and a formal garden.  The President liked to take visitors to the palace, stand on the balcony, and wave his arm across the maze-like gardens and the blue sea beyond.  'I did that', he said, giving his visitor the broad, generous M'bele smile and a warm embrace. 

 

Diplomacy and foreign aid stopped here.  M'bele, despite many requests, had never visited the White House.  That would be asking too much, and the thought of one Africa's worst dictators standing side by side with an American president would send the wrong messages.  No, said the State Department, let the dollars and oil flow, and leave it at that. 

'Why has President M'bele not been invited to the White House?', asked the new American President, Kamala Harris. 'We want to be seen extending our hand to all Africans in a sign of solidarity and cultural communion'. 

Harris had during her campaign made her African heritage and the special interest the American people had in restoring social and cultural ties with the continent.  It was not enough to base bilateral relationships on oil and rare earths.  The time had come to recognize the cultural and historical importance of the continent from which her ancestors and those of millions of black Americans had come. 

 

'But the public executions, Madam President...', insisted her aide de camp and chief personal advisor, a black woman selected for her loyalty and familiarity with things African.  

'Public executions?', she quickly replied.  'Thousands of black men have been wrongly accused and tried and are languishing in American prisons. Their life of incarceration, this wanton and blatant deprivation of their human rights and separation from country and family is no different from the public punishment of President M'bele.  Which is why we must free American prisoners and work to establish the rule of law in Africa'. 

 

Oration over and quite pleased with her sense of moral equivalency, she turned to other matters; but before she did, she issued an executive order to her aide. 'Invite him'. 

When M'bele received word of this Presidential invite, he immediately began preparations for the visit and whether or not he should wear the tribal leopard skin robe fashioned after his hero, Mobutu; or should go dressed in Armani.  It was a rhetorical question because 'that woman', he knew valued her African heritage above all, diluted as it was by racial impurity.  Showing up as a proud, traditional African leader will be the frosting on the beryllium cake.  'She will love it', he said. 

American exceptionalism has stuck in M'bele's craw for years.  Who were they to tell black Africans what to do when our continent is the cradle of civilization and we are the first to emerge from the forests as men? He was just as proud of his moral parallels as Harris. 

'Well said, Mr. President', his senior advisor commented.  'Well said indeed', and went on to second ever motion his president had made concerning American hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty. America was, after all the country that killed millions of Vietnamese in the jungles of Southeast Asia, supported Zionism and the murderous, genocidal regimes of Israel, and killed thousands more Muslims in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq. 

Our public executions - executions of traitors and enemies of the state - are morally right and politically justified and who are they to tell us how to run our country?

The preparations for the official visit to Washington went on apace in both capitals.  M'bele had selected an entourage of the most beautiful women in the country, women whose African, European, and Caribbean heritage - traces of Portuguese colonization, Cuban military and economic support, and light-skinned Fulani ancestry made them stunningly appealing.  'That Harris woman', the President said, 'will find herself in these beauties, and all America's men will want them'. 

On her side of the Atlantic, President Harris also was attentive to cultural detail.  Her receiving line should be made up of America's finest black people - athletes, musicians, and entertainers, a potpourri of what one would find at the newly-inaugurated National African American Museum not far from the White House.  

She searched in vain for black academics but came up with only the cheap shot performers like Cornel West, moneygrubbing turncoat who bilked Harvard, then Princeton, then Harvard again, riding affirmative action and bellowing blackness until everyone was sick of his charade; and of course the ambulance-chaser in chief, that chicken-neck Al Sharpton who was in your face everywhere you looked. 

'Africa comes to America', was the meme, the tagline of the upcoming state visit, and so it did in all its tribal finery, drums, native dances, spears and masks.  The M'bele contingent spared no expense for a cultural extravaganza, a show of roots, cultural legitimacy, and human origins. 

The American conservative press was of course not quiet, and roundly criticized the new American president for so hawking racialism and African idolatry.  The man with whom she sat next to eating collard greens and fatback was a mass murderer who had just recently 'removed' three hundred and fifty 'miscreants' mowed down as they tried to 'escape' from federal prison. M'bele had more blood on his hands than Mobutu, Idi Amin, and Robert Mugabe combined; and that was without even considering Eyadema, Barre, and Charles Taylor. 

And this was without even raising the dubious question of moral equivalency.  Most of Africa split its sides when watching the side show of American transgenderism - the swishy skirts and high heels, the buggering, the emasculation, and the woman-worship were disgusting examples of moral turpitude. African men were proud of their machismo, their harems, their serial affairs, and their potency.  How was this twisting deformity of God's plan ever considered moral? And this hammering down of little boys' energy and sexual enthusiasm?  This crackpot feminism and glass ceiling nonsense? 

Of course there was a bit of hysteria on both sides, but the myth of American moral exceptionalism had been debunked and discredited long before the likes of M'bele ever set foot in Washington. How was keeping the American black population enslaved through entitlement, another word for a political permissiveness that never calls to justice ghetto dysfunction? 

Pimps and ho's are welcomed into the national discussion on culture? Assault and rape are understandable expressions of black rage and frustration at continuing white supremacy and Jim Crow.  Affirmative action denies individuality, individual worth and talent and throws all black people into a grab bag of leftovers. 

 

How can 'Abortion for all, any time, any place' be morally justified when legitimate moral objections have been raised and summarily dismissed.  Where is the moral equivalency between abortion and the death penalty? 

So, once the official dinners, ceremonies, and exchange of gifts are over with, what is left is two very morally compromised presidents.  No one is suggesting that the moral failings of the United States are in any way the equivalent of the wholesale slaughter in Africa - it is just the hypocrisy, the venality, and the self-serving intellectual myopia of both that rankles.  

China has the right idea - impose no conditionalities on trade or foreign exchange,  Roads for a fixed below market price for oil.  Purchases for rare earths, industrial diamonds, and other natural resources which include planned 'overruns', a blind eye to a given percent of payment added for investment in personal accounts in the Caymans. 

The M'bele-Harris event went off well, despite the carping and bitching from the conservative wings.  It was a celebration of culture and a cementing of financial and economic bonds.  As the tom-toms and African bass drums beat a native rhythm to M'bele's formal exit, the American President smiled.  'Well done', she said to herself. 'Well done'. 

  

Diary Of A Modern Overlord - The Myth Of Social Equality

Everyone knew that Harrison Alcott was a man of intellectual means - a master of ten languages, entrepreneur, Lothario and bedder of more women than the harem of a Turkish pasha, traveler, gourmet, and fashion icon.  Was there nothing that he couldn't do? Anything that was beyond his reach? Anything  farfetched or beyond belief? 

 

Harrison was a child of wealth and privilege - old money, the cultured money of Revere silver, Chippendale highboys, Tiffany lamps, and Townsend chairs; the money of the Vineyard, Rimini, and Gstaad.  'Be all you can be' was an irrelevancy for the likes of Harrison Alcott. In his 'being' there would never be a hard row to hoe, no bootstraps to pull up, no Sisyphean rock to climb.  He was all he would be from the moment of his birth. 

He commanded attention, demanded loyalty already given because of some innate sense of authority.  Alcotts had always owned others and ruled more.  Harrison's great-great grandfather had been the owner of Barker's Rise, a Mississippi delta plantation of a thousand acres of prime Egyptian cotton worked by fifteen hundred prize Angolan slaves.  His great grandfather was a Boston and Newport shipowner who profited from the Three Cornered Trade of African chattel and Caribbean molasses. 

'Alcotts work for no one' was the inscription in the family Bible, followed by 'We own things', surprising for what should have been, 'Except for God Almighty', and those descendants who had read the prophetic words were unapologetic, for they too had owned things and people without regret, guilt, or second thoughts. 

Captain Isaiah Alcott was the captain of a New England whaler which plied the Southern Ocean and returned to Nantucket with enough oil to light the town for year and enough ambergris to scent Boston's finest ladies for years to come.  No one was ever lost on the Augustus, a ship run with iron discipline and unflinching economy, and sail after sail the ship was the prince of the northern fleet. 

Bernard Alcott was a captain of industry, second only to J.D. Rockefeller in oil exploration and refining and the first investor in the new Wall Street bank of J.P. Morgan.  His son, Phillips Alcott ran his fathers earnings into the tens of millions in stock futures and canny off-market investments; and his father, H.F. Alcott was a master of creative financial instruments. 

Each of the Alcott men owned things and people.  Although the days of slavery and the lucrative trans-Atlantic slave trade were long gone, later Alcotts owned investors, employees, and speculators.  Ownership was a birthright, a God-given gift of power and authority. 

Alexander Hamilton knew as much - that is, he understood the legacy of breeding and, despite the populist objections of his colleague Thomas Jefferson and his touting of democracy and citizen rule, he knew that America's elite would always determine the new republic's future.  The Alcotts were beneficiaries of Hamiltonian aristocratic convictions; and bred in economic and financial nobility helped create the new nation. 

 

Slavery was not so much a matter of involuntary servitude but an example of profitable ownership. The new republic was about enterprise and capitalist principles, and slavery, despite the moral objections to it, was a prime example of them.  It mattered not to the Alcotts whether or not slavery was an immoral enterprise.  It was permitted, encouraged, and protected in independent America, and the Alcott family profited immensely.

The early Twentieth Century Alcotts, the claques and rising stars of the Robber Baron era, followed suit.  The thousands of immigrants on the assembly lines of their industrial enterprises were neo-slaves, little different from their African brothers only thanks to a desultory right to vote.  The Alcotts were modern masters and overlords. 

For Harrison Alcott, all this was academic muddle, organizing the obvious with predictable fallacies. He and his family were born to lead, just as millions of families were born to follow.  Democracy is not hurt by the implications of this notion, only strengthened.  Despite howling and breast-beating, class distinctions will always be a part of society as they have been since the Paleolithic. Those destined to lead will lead. 

 

Elitism, privilege, historical legacy will remain despite attempts to expunge, censor, and marginalize them, and thank God for their resistance and longevity. 

And so it was that latter-day Alcotts continued the tradition of ownership, and by so doing consolidated the family ethos of rule, governance, and authority.  It was in their blood.  The portraits on the walls of the Alcott homestead were reminders of this legacy. 

Harrison Alcott extended his inheritance beyond mere finance and economics. He controlled women, brought them easily within his sexual administration, and assembled a harem of female devotees worthy of an emir. 

The women were free to leave but never did. Sexual bondage in an early twenty-first century context was far different than the enforced concubinage of centuries past.  It meant only emotional fealty - the women in Harrison's 'household' were tabled because of desire. At the sexual beck and call of a modern-day pasha had its own deeply psychological appeal. 

Harrison was especially noteworthy and unique because of the era in which he lived - a censorious, neo-Puritanical, neo-Soviet age of preposterous inclusivity.  The very fact that this antithesis of 'diversity', this Nietzschean Übermensch, could exist in a culture of raging social fantasy was unique in and of itself. 

There were a few who interpolated Alcott family history and placed it well within the social bell curve - on one far asymptote while the mass of unwitting Americans were in the soggy middle - but they had to admit the disproportionate power of the asymptotes.  The Alcotts, as far they might be from the norm, would always rule the rest. 

Darwin, in his seminal work on evolution wrote about supremacy - the natural, innate drive for dominance and perpetuation of the species and the existential wars to determine genetic future.  Social Darwinism, discredited by progressive Utopians, best describes the ascent and longevity of the Alcotts - a family with social and intellectual rights and the strength and determination to continue them.  The Alcotts, as long as they retain their commitment, their purpose, and their legacy will always rule. 

Seen One Mountain, Seen 'Em All - The Irrelevance Of Environmentalism In An Artificially Intelligent, Virtual World

Paul Archer grew up in a small new England town - not quite big enough to be classified in the census as a city, but too large to be much like the drive-through places of the South. He lived in the West End of town, a suburb really, although in that part of Connecticut, far enough away from Hartford or New Haven there were no bedroom communities.  

The West End was the old Anglo-Saxon redoubt where generations of New Englanders, captains of industry who built the town into something of an indispensable, had lived. Appointments were all Revere, Townsend, and Chippendale, houses were white frame, trellised, and picket-fenced.  Summers were spent on the Vineyard or Nantucket, and children were all at Choate, Andover, and Exeter. 

New Brighton was in many ways semi-rural - the truck farms of Berlin and Southington were a short drive away, Meriden Mountain was accessible for climbing, and orchards and cornfields were common no more than five miles out of town.  The Lancaster Country Club, the watering hole for the West End, had been designed by Ben Hogan and was one of the county's premier golf courses.  It was surrounded by the Pequot hills, the town reservoir, and the spacious houses along Monroe Street. 

Paul's childhood was a mix of all this - schooling, summering, and socializing were all predictably prescribed but pleasant.  His trajectory from Adams Country Day to Groton and on to Yale was familiar and preserving of the historic privilege of his families and others in the West End. 

Growing up Paul's life was interior, surprising for one for whom environmentalism became his modus vivendi, his defining cause, and what he considered his purpose in life. Despite the proximity of the outdoors, his life like that of his colleagues was one defined by intellect, travel, and the appreciation of art, literature, and philosophy.  His father, educated at Yale and Oxford had taught his son that the entire world was within the mind, and all outside it was confounding and irritating at best.  

It was the distilled experiences of Plato, Aristotle, Einstein, Kant, and Faulkner - the pure reason and purer sensibilities of the world's greatest minds - that were enough to complete one's education. One needn't stray outside the social milieu - his milieu - in which such intellectuality thrived.  So while Paul's father never dismissed mens sana in corpore sano, it was always the mind which prevailed, not 

 

At some point after graduate school on his way to post-doctoral studies in computer engineering, Paul discovered environmentalism.  Perhaps because this was the cause celebre of the day, or perhaps because it was the first time that he felt energized, if not passionate about anything, he became a profound believer in the crisis of global warming.  

The woods of Southington Mountain the ponds and lakes in Vernon, Avon, and Farmington, and the shores of Long Island Sound now meant something profound; and for the first time interior and exterior became equal parts of an existential algorithm. Philosophy and rocks, stones, leaves, and branches were joined in an intellectual symphony. 

Environmentalism had grown significantly by the time Paul became involved.  More and more people had become committed to slowing or stopping global warming and stopping the commercial rape of the natural world.  Environmentalists not only united to increase political influence but to join a movement which had higher, even spiritual ends.  Saving the planet was no different from religious evangelism and the saving of souls.  Environmentalists were passionate, even ecstatic about their mission; and belonging to a like-minded group of believers was like participating in a Holy War or a Crusade.

All this was appealing to Paul whose conversion to belief and newfound skepticism of his father's restrictive logic-only vision was thrilling and life-changing. Environmentalism added an entirely new dimension to the dry intellectual pursuits he had been following up till now. 

He joined many of the environmental subgroups that had formed as competitive lobbies - for clean water, clean air, clean oceans, carbon emissions, organic farming, the spotted owl and the snail darter, and the capitalism that underlay all the assaults on the natural world 

He did not give up his studies, however, and had begun to write on the increasingly important world of virtuality. Although users of virtual reality looked upon it as enhancement of the real world, slowly but surely the real world was becoming supernumerary if not irrelevant.  What would happen, he wondered, when the link between brain and computer became perfect and seamless?  When the mind, enabled and facilitated by the computer had access to all the world's information, history, and live experiences instantaneously; and when individuals could construct, confect, and construe 'reality' in any way they pleased?

Who would not prefer to walk through the gardens of the Palace of Versailles, dine with the Duchess de Nantes, sleep with Persian princesses and Palestinian dancers? Or more to the point, what was the point of preserving the natural environment when it could be created virtually?  Artificial Intelligence was already revolutionizing the way the real world is perceived.  Imagine when this powerful tool is linked with brain-computer inter-functionality!

 

'Seen one mountain, Seen 'em all' was the cynical but ironically prescient hate poster Paul saw on the way to work.  It was the work of an anti-environmentalist climate change denier group which resented government's arrogant policy to electrify its way to some distant environmental Utopia. 

Paul was by no means a climate change denier.  Far from it.  He was convinced that the planet was warming due to the indifferent burning of fossil fuels and that dire consequences would result unless rising temperatures could be slowed.  However as a computer engineer working in the world of AI-facilitated virtual reality, the group had a point. The environment, nature and the very fundamental configuration of human interaction would no longer be regarded the same way. 

If there was an existential change in the wings, it was not the warming planet, it was a society running for the exits of a brick-and-mortar, buggy, hot-and-humid, 'métro, boulot, dodo', incessantly routine, overcrowded world. 

Mountains, lakes, forests, birds, and animals would be virtual choices not absolutes.  The ascribed sanctity of nature and the environment would be a thing of the past.  Individual choice would neutralize value. Causes, passions, crusades would be folded into a universally personal experience. Genetic engineering will be the new environmentalism, reconfiguring the human species to live anywhere at any time under any conditions, realigning the codes of plants to grow wherever convenient, readjusting the living world to sustain the virtual. 

Mirabile dictu, one passion had been displaced by another.  Having been raised from the spiritually dead by environmentalism, it was an easy elision to the passion of virtual reality; but where he found that the old-fashioned, Armageddon-style environmentalism was nothing more than smoke and mirrors, the post-human generation was a lock.

When One Woman Is Not Enough - The Odyssey Of An Uncontrite Sexual Adventurer And The Women Who Loved Him

Bartlett (Bart) Parsons was a man of moderate intelligence, good looks, and excellent upbringing, a man bred for moderate success, a respected career, prosperous and healthy family, and a sense of well-being. 

This all was not surprising given his family's history, one dating back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Salem, the New Haven Plantations, and the first Puritan settlements in what is now New Jersey.  Bart's father, Lionel, had been a well-known man of particular rectitude and impeccable honesty, a leader of the community, and a faithful wife and loving parent. There was no question that Bart, their only son, would follow in the same footsteps. 

 

After Yale, Bart married well, a girl from an equally prosperous and well-known family. After living for a while in her family's townhouse on Beacon Hill, they bought a house in the nearby suburb of Winchester from which he commuted to downtown while she pursued a career in fashion design - a cottage industry at first, but certainly to mature into a more lucrative position in one of the big fashion houses in New York. 

There was only one fly in the ointment. Bart was a sexual wanderer, a man who loved women, who adored their style and their irresistible allure.  He understood women.  He listened to them, deferred to their whims, respected them, loved them intently and always without fail exited from affairs with grace and humility.  His former lovers always loved him. 

He had not exactly been railroaded into marriage.  He knew quite well the step he was taking and the risks of dalliance to follow, but his sexual confidence was such that he knew he would be able to negotiate with, please, and satisfy his wife who would always be thankful for such intimacy and profound understanding. 

Theirs was not a Harold Nicholson, Vita Sackville-West open marriage, one Bart found in its openness only a boring similitude.  Sexual conquest provided the juice - arranging play dates on a mutual calendar with one's wife was uneventfully routine - and such arranged sexual libertinage never appealed.  And so it was that Bart took lovers at will while keeping his wife in such blissfully satisfied ignorance, that she either never doubted his fidelity or didn't care.  What were a few incidental affairs when she had found a man who truly and absolutely knew her. 

 

She like most women were not after love per se, but understanding - respect from men so hard to find and so long in coming.  Women had suffered years of patriarchy, dismissiveness, and desuetude, so to find a man like Bart who showed her every bit of respectful deference, she was more open to a particular sexual tolerance that other women found unthinkable. 

In fact - and again not unlike most women - Bart's wife found his sexual attractiveness to other women intriguing and indefinably appealing. She was the one who had bedded this man of universal appeal, not they; and marriage to an undeniably sexually lethal male was a feather in her cap. 

'What do women want?', Sigmund Freud remarked after years of being perplexed by women's strange, indecipherable sexual cosmology; but Bart had known all along that before women finally got over the centuries of playing second fiddle, emotional and sexual chattels, they would still be looking for what had never been granted to them - to be taken seriously.  

As he sat across the table from any one of his many lovers, listening patiently and intently to their stories of demanding fathers, immature lovers, bad and worse sexual opportunities, and above all about the treasure inside them, he knew that sex would come soon. 

 

Of course every so often he would come upon a special edition, a one of a kind woman who had found herself, had as much confidence, energy of pursuit, and inextinguishable demands for sexual variety as he, and had not one iota of female vulnerability. 

He surprisingly and uncharacteristically had fallen for Berthe because she was his sexual homonym, an irresistible, implacably confident woman who had no need whatsoever for legitimacy, acknowledgment, or dues paid.  Bart was the one in need of her attention, her counselling; and she had no patience for need. 

There was Evangeline, a woman whose ubiquitous sexuality gave her limitless license and left her with no regrets.  She took Bart as she took hundreds of others willy-nilly, a woman whose eclecticism was Nietzschean and made her straw boss of all her lovers. 

 

But few others like these two ever crossed his path. Most women were not only unlike them, but were from a different planet - women who were still complaisant in the company of men, and still with so much residual patriarchy and male intimidation, that assertion - the real amoral assertion of Goneril, Regan, Cleopatra, Emma Bovary, and Hedda Gabler - was not even a pipe dream.  These women were simple, easy prey for the likes of Bart Parsons. 

There are some men who have bought into the feminist, MeToo, women first, foremost, and forever movement. Men who attend conferences on sexual equality, who approve safe spaces and male sanctions, who demand 50-50 parity without exception, and who subscribe completely to the notion of female gender supremacy.  They are reproductive necessities - the rooster's contribution - and nothing more, and they are evolutionary losers.  

Savvy men like Bart have given all this a pass.  'The lady doth protest too much' agreed Bart who saw these now familiar female paroxysms as nothing more than a necessary St. Vitus' dance of tribal cleansing; but beneath the Sturm und Drang, women still had not changed, and men like Bart knew well how to - guess what? - listen, understand with respect and concern.  

So with a few glitches - the likes of Berthe and Evangeline - Bart went on his way.  Whether complicit, admiring, or ignorant, his wife stayed the course especially now that there were sunken costs in the marriage - house, children, retirement accounts, and sociability. As his sexual pull-by date approached, he found slippers and a dog by the fire more and more appealing, but there was his December-May affair with Donna from Accounting.  

'Granted, she isn't my first love', says the Coleman Silk character in Phillip Roth's The Human Stain about his affair with a woman half his age, 'nor is she my best love; but she's certainly my last love. Doesn't that count for something?'

And so it was for Bart.  The affair ended as all before it.  Donna from Accounting said she would always love him and she probably did; and he returned once and for all to hearth and home. 

Anyone Can Be President - Genius Clusters And The Looney Toons Of American Democracy

Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, and Franklin have been described as a genius cluster - stars in a rare constellation of uniquely qualified, intelligent, creative individuals that had never occurred before, and given the history of the two hundred and fifty years since, never occurred after.  These men got the ball rolling, created a republic based on philosophical principle, Christian faith, and high-born noblesse oblige only to have their descendants see it turn into a vaudevillian show of antics, presumption, and folly. 

 

How did this happen? The phenomenon of genius clusters has never been explained.  How Russia produced Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, and Turgenev all born within twenty years of each other, each revolutionizing literature in unique ways, all remarkably astute, is a mystery.  Never had there been such a group since Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, playwrights even more revolutionary and artistically unique, men who left epic poetry and mythical hagiography behind and wrote of human ambition, desire, and tragic flaws within a dramatic context - one with such relevance and of such philosophical and dramatic insight that it influenced all literature ever since. 

Of course nothing happens independent of enabling factors - perhaps the Peloponnesian War was a defining moment for Greek tragedians.  So disruptive, devastating, and existential it was, that perhaps Aeschylus and his colleagues saw that tragedy, human failings, and overpowering ambition were more fitting to represent on stage than mythic heroism.  Perhaps the horror of the Napoleonic wars, the Battle of Borodino, and the perennial quest for conquest and dominion was the trigger for Tolstoy's unmatched fiction. 

 

And perhaps the daunting task of forming a new republic after a bloody war of independence was enough to bring out the best in men who, because of their recognized status in colonial society, were ready, willing, and able for the task. 

In any case, Americans are fortunate to be the inheritors of genius, to live and serve in a political system still alive and well after more than two centuries - a structural work of political art that somehow anticipated the new algorithm of democracy, one that created checks and balances, incentives, and brakes, and above all opportunity for all. 

All this, however, is being rethought - disassembled, reworked, and revised.  What these old white men created in 1789, say progressives, has little relevance in the diverse, polyphonous society of today.  These men, most of whom were slave-owning or slavery-enabling, have a debt to pay rather than receive tributes rendered. 

Finally, these progressives continue, American society is a true democracy, one distinct from the patriarchal, elitist version of the past, and one in which all are truly equal.  Equality of opportunity ensured by an enabling government has been replaced by de facto equality - men and women no matter what their roots, abilities, or promise are the same to be treated the same.  Government is no longer simply an enabler and protector of rights, but an intervenor. 

Out of what is necessarily a grab-bag, a hodge-podge nation of undefinable, indistinguishable lowest common denominator uniformity, can only come politicians with the same unremarkable potpourri mentality.  There is no way that a Churchill, Lincoln, or Roosevelt can possibly emerge from this peasant soup let alone a genius cluster. 

 

America deserves the likes of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, both heirs to Disney's Looney Tunes, Daffy Duck, Porky the Pig, Mickey Mouse, and Elmer Fudd.  They are caricatures of American democracy, examples that anyone can be president; or to put it more definitely, any man Jack or his grandmother can sit in the Oval Office.  American leaders are not the select, the best and the brightest, heirs to high principle and noblesse oblige, but the very worst of 'the common man'.  

Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have nothing at all going for them that Jefferson, Hamilton, or Churchill would recognize as uniquely talented, multi-dimensional, and patriotic.  They are cartoon character created in some Hollywood studio to look like America but in comically exaggerated poses. 

Who's kidding whom?  Trump is a big, oversized, Mussolini-esque windbag, a Borscht Belt tummler, a carny barker, a raunchy comedian, and a bare-knuckled dirty street fighter.  Harris is an empty suit, a woman who touts her racial mix, her blackness, and her sex as though they had anything to do with governance.  She is the caricature of diversity, a comic book Wonder Woman with only fantastical notions of identity, inclusivity, and 'the new heterogeneity'.

Not to complain.  Americans deserve no better, so far have the principles and vision of the Founding Fathers have been eroded or better ground under the heel of the new race-gender-ethnicity revisionists. This is what happens when a culture of excellence is exchanged for one of simple-minded ordinariness.  Jefferson and Hamilton did not emerge out of the boondocks by chance and patronage making it to Washington.  They were brought up, educated, and encouraged in a culture of privilege, one that never doubted the legitimacy of the aristocracy and its obligation to lead and lead well. 

When race, gender, and ethnicity alone become the criteria for leadership, democracy - let alone the country - is in trouble.  When the hysterics of a showman, a bad loser, a smarmy provocateur can actually get a hundred million votes, there is no hope for resurrection. 

Alexander Hamilton anticipated what the new republic would become if left to its own devices.  He insisted, over Jefferson's objectives, that there be a body like the British House of Lords to be made up of aristocratic, privileged and highly educated men who have been brought up in the spirit of honorable service.  This body would act to counteract what would certainly be the self-serving demands of the populace. 

The Senate, Hamilton's creation, has turned out to be no different from the House of Representatives, a collection of rubes, con men, and climbers with little interests other than reelection, feathering their own nests, and retiring with a small fortune. 

The ridiculousness of identity politics, the cancel culture, bombast, and the sneaky cadging of snake oil salesmen is bound to last for a while, particularly since its bottom-feeding ethos has all but eliminated anyone of real character and ability. 

Harris is the far worse of the two, for she embraces and embodies this dumbed-down, revisionist, simple-minded platform of skin color and sex.  She is likely to win the November (2024) election, and the nation is guaranteed four years of black enthusiasm and a lionization of the hodge-podge.

Love In An African Dictatorship - Leaving The Nasty, Immoral Bits Outside The Bedroom Door

Henry Peterson's job was attending to the failing countries of Africa in a last-ditch attempt to right the sinking ships of the continent.  Since independence, African countries have been on a downward spiral, falling farther each year into poverty, corruption, misrule, crime, and civil unrest.  Only few countries have been spared the worst of this trend, but they too have GDPs that are less than even the poorest American state. 

 

In any case Henry, a senior manager of an international bank based in Washington, made thrice yearly trips to the countries under his financial and economic wing.  The most important was a former Portuguese colony, a country which for years had fought a bloody civil war and had emerged badly damaged but still sitting on top of untold reserves of oil, diamonds, and rare earths.  It was ripe for the rise of an African big man, someone with tribal loyalties, Machiavellian purpose, and an indifference to the country itself; and so it was that Henry Peterson swallowed his pride and his bile, and three times a year visited the President in his regal chambers in the capital. 

The President always greeted him graciously and warmly. The Ogre Of The Jungle, an approximate and much tamer version of his native Umbundu, one which suggested mayhem, cannibalism, and animal lust, was nowhere to be seen among the Tiffany, chintz, Chinese silk, and Louis XVI furniture.  The President, dressed in Armani and Gucci was a model of European sophistication and class, and threw most diplomats off the scent.  They had seen financial spread sheets, intelligence reports, and spoken to expatriate dissidents about the depredations of the man, but still when standing before him, arms extended in welcome, they demurred and decided to withhold judgment.

A mistake of course, for the Ogre of the Jungle more than merited his title and took every last cent granted by the international donor community and secreted it securely in personal bank accounts in Switzerland and the Caymans. 

Peterson knew all this and still remained the Bank's envoy.  His mission was not to try to stop the hemorrhaging of dollars out of the country, but to convince the big man to invest at least some of it in the infrastructure, social welfare, and health programs the Bank had featured throughout Africa. 

The Bank had tried for years to at least turn the country towards a semblance of liberal democracy and an equitable distribution of its vast mineral wealth but had predictably failed.  Loan after loan defaulted and renegotiated until Bank senior executives had had enough and the latest unpaid loan was to be classified as 'unperforming' and cancelled without hope for renewal.  

The United States, however, watched the Chinese move in and negotiate sweet deals with the President. A no-condition exchange, below market price oil for infrastructure investments, had been concluded, and with that foothold the Chinese expanded their interests to more essential mineral reserves. 

Henry had no particular qualms about dealing with such a corrupt autocrat.  His job was to work within, around, and on the margins of corruption; to accept it as part of the cost of doing business, keeping the geopolitical house in order.  He had no illusions about such a system and was long past looking for what a Washington bureaucrat had called 'positive leakage' - the dribble of funds that might make it to the village.  Even if some earmarked funds had somehow gotten past the sticky fingers of Luanda, it was sure to be hoovered into the pockets of local administrators. 

So all that was required of Peterson was an elaborate pas de deux, a fanciful dance of  pirouettes and plies where, when the music stopped playing, President and Bank envoy embraced and went back to personal affairs - the President to his mistress on the Peninsula, and Peterson to his suite in the newly-completed five-star Barcelo hotel overlooking the port.  

The war had been over for some years and the city, and thanks to the President's Tonton Macoute secret police and RAB (Rapid Action Battalion) strike force, the banlieus - the same nasty crime-ridden neighborhoods found in the Paris' northern suburbs - had been neutralized, and crime in the capital had been reduced to a normal level for a city of its size. 

 

As a result, Peterson's life was good.  Again thanks to the President, high end French and Portuguese restaurants serving the mulatto elites and the growing international community were now commonplace, so eating out was a pleasure, not a nightmare in the early post-war years where food was scarce.  

As was common among the international development community, Peterson had an African lover - a beautiful mixed-race (Tutsi/Ethiopian) woman whom he had met at a diplomatic function honoring the President and his 'Children Are Our Future' campaign.  She was not exactly to be bought, but welcomed the attention showered on her by her European lover.  Peterson was approaching late middle age, knew that cinq-a-sept romantic affairs were things of the past and only sexual commissions were in his future, and so gladly welcomed the overtures of Lady Fatima.  

 

Each new World Bank 'World Development Report' cited Peterson's country as an example of how a responsive public-private partnership could enhance loan performance but this was only smoke and mirrors to camouflage the cravenly corrupt collusion between international donor and recipient.  The pressure the Bank felt from the United States, to mention only one country desperate for the country's energy and mineral wealth, was 'robust'.  In short, the country was to remain well within the commonwealth of democratic nations, and investment should continue. 

Fatima, although a business-minded, was not without charm and a spirited intelligence.  Best of all in Peterson's mind was her marvelous, morally disassociated attitude.  She cared even less than Peterson about the self-interested maneuverings of the President.  She knew enough about Ethiopia's decades-long political miasma, its wars with Eritrea, and its shameless siphoning off of international humanitarian aid to private offshore accounts.  Her own Tutsi relatives in Rwanda under Paul Kagame were robbing the country blind. 

She was as nonchalant about all this as Peterson who had long since given up any pretense of standing on higher moral ground.  He was complicit.  His hands were as dirty as any in the President's inner circle.  Just because he didn't hand out envelopes stuffed with cash, didn't mean that he and his employer didn't share the blame. 

What made he and Fatima such a brilliant couple was their shared anomie - a Euro-cynicism borne of both millennia of squabbling neighbors and internecine warfare and an African fatalism that came from tribal paganism and later an inured moral fatigue.  

The Permanent Kindergarten - The Feel Good Esteem And Dumbing Down Of American Education

'Good job!', said Mrs. Blanding, Bobbie Harkins' kindergarten teacher, looking over her drawing of a princess - or the intention of one, scrambled as it was in a mess of wild, colored flourishes. 

Mrs. Blanding was firmly against the 'color within the lines' school of early childhood development.  In her view and that of her administration, children needed to express themselves, find their own talents, and develop into remarkable individual human beings. It really didn't matter that little Bobbie couldn't even draw stick figures - i.e. some semblance of representative art that suggested she saw the world as it was - it was only important that whatever creative urge produced the scribbles, they be encouraged, supported, and praised. 

 

'It's a princess', said Bobbie holding up her finished portrait. 

'And a very lovely one indeed', replied Mrs. Blanding as she pinned the drawing on the bulletin board.  'One of the very best'. 

Mrs. Faber, the first grade teacher, was excited to begin the serious business of education, to move on beyond the feel-good, friendly, colorful spirit of kindergarten to reading, writing, and arithmetic.  She unlike her colleague felt that coloring within the lines was instrumental - a labor of discipline, cognition, and serious intent - and it became a metaphor for her pedagogical approach.  No child was to be praised for scratches and scribbles and only for progress seeing and translating the world. 

Of course there were no coloring books in Mrs. Faber's first grade, so Bobbie felt dazed and confused.  She had been led to believe that she was a talented little girl who could do anything her heart desired. When she was asked to make sense of text, she thought the writing was just some weird code meant to accompany the pictures. She paid attention only to the images of children swinging in the park or playing with their puppies and kittens; and when it came to numbers she was lost in the weeds.

In tears after the first week, she sobbed to her mother about that mean Mrs. Faber and refused to go to school the next day.  Her mother, a doting and fondling a parent if there ever was one and a woman committed to a progressive, esteem-based education, couldn't restrain herself.  She had heard stories about the Faber woman, her harsh educational conservatism, and her social inflexibility, but sending her daughter home in tears was another thing altogether.  This has to be nipped in the bud, she thought, and planned a visit to the school the very next day. 

Everyone but little Bobbie’s mother knew that she was not the sharpest knife in the drawer, and despite her mother's solicitude and the emotional correctness of last year's kindergarten teacher, there was no way that the girl was headed for anything more challenging than beautician school.  Of course there is no foolproof way to predict any child's trajectory; but Mrs. Faber had been around long enough to know dumb from smart.

Now, because of such rigor, Mrs. Faber had come under the lens of the school administrators, all of whom had been steeped in cooperative learning, esteem-building, multiple intelligences, and learning diversity.  In their view, the goal of primary school was not to begin the process of citizenry and social capability, but to encourage a sense of identity.  To do so, the curriculum had been configured to recognize difference and to celebrate it; and if this meant some indifference to intellectual competence, so be it. 

 

Word of Bobbie's mother's harangue and her dressing down of Mrs. Faber quickly reached the school principal who called Faber in for a conference in which he made it abundantly clear that such reversion to antiquated modes of instruction would not be tolerated; and that if he heard any more complaints from parents, Faber would be censured. 

Faber, knowing that the girl in question would indeed end up as a beautician and was not worth the aggravation of trying to teach her anything, and certainly not worth the risk of demotion, left her to her own devices, swallowed her gall when it came to praising her for good intentions like when she tried to add 8+5, watching her stumble through 12, 14, and 'I don't know, Mrs. Faber' until she finally stumbled on the right answer. 

From second grade onwards, Bobbie sailed along, learning little but feeling increasingly good about being a girl who was polite and considerate of her classmates.  'Social intelligence' in the new educational algorithm was the jewel in the crown of multiple intelligences.  'Book larnin' as the old-timers called it, was worth little if a person did not have the finely-tuned sensitivity of inclusive compassion.

And so it was that Bobbie graduated from one grade to another still as dumb as a stone, having no idea whatsoever about her intellectual failings, but as happy as a clam - as was her mother who saw that her dunning of Mrs. Faber, long since dismissed from the school for 'antipathetic' behavior had led the way to a uniformly progressive curriculum. 

High school had been no different, for it too had subscribed to the same educational philosophy as that of earlier grades; and Bobbie cruised along, peppering away at simple arithmetic until she could finally make sense of double-digits and finally managing to read My History, a book about diversity with enough illustrations to ensure that even the slowest readers got the picture.  If students graduated with a solid, well-honed sense of respect, tolerance, and admiration for people of color, the administration felt it had done its job. 

 

Most students of even modest ability bailed out of the public school system and enrolled in the city's many private schools.  There, although some residual infection remained - e.g. schools were sure to have a black student inaugurate every important event and did their best to assure that their grades were the same or better than white and Asian students - most pulled no punches and competed aggressively for the most Harvard acceptances. 

 

Bobbie's mother, despite the plaudits and kudos received by her friends' children at Sidwell, St. Albans, and Cathedral, was angered at their abandonment of the progressive ethic, choosing the limited, elitist path of intellectual excellence over the more salient, rounded, and important focus on being.  

This was a good cover for the intellectual vacuum of her daughter, and although her mother had hoped for a bit more than beautician school, and chafed at the irony of the fulfilled prophecy of Mrs. Faber those many years ago, she was happy that her daughter would be providing a good service to the community. 

Would Bobbie have done better than weaves and hair coloring if she had been pushed more and tolerated less?  Perhaps not much.  There's only so much you can play with the cards dealt to you - nature always trumps nurture - but there is wiggle room in the genes, and rather than looking blankly at instructions for anything more complicated than trimming bangs she might have become, ironically, a teacher.

 

Bobbie's mother worked around the beautician bit, and told friends that she was a fashion stylist, a service industry entrepreneur, or a private consultant; but everyone knew that Bobbie did hair in the Potomac Hair Salon in Gaithersburg, and so the mother had to eat crow. 

The public school system finally got the picture, and having followed the post-graduation career of its students, realized that they had all become beauticians.  Graduation had been a celebration of diversity, and one student after another spoke a few garbled words at the podium to applause and cheers, and stumbled off never to be heard from again; and administrators decided it was about time that there be a true valedictorian who made at least some sense and went on to college. 

Hammered and slammed by progressive academics at the Department of Education for its refuge into the old, discredited, patriarchal ways of the past, the school board trimmed its sails and introduced academic reforms only slowly - slowly enough not to offend or discourage the less advantaged.  As a result the first valedictorian was no great shakes and disappeared into the woodwork, but 'at least we tried', said one school official. 

President Harris' Finger On The Nuclear Trigger - What's A Woman To Do?

It hadn't been months of the Harris presidency and the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, and even North Korea ramped up their nuclear talk.  Now that a woman was in the White House, and a progressive one at that, they were sure she would keep her finger off the nuclear trigger.  Her thoughts were only on her people - the black African diaspora and women in general. Collateral interests included gay men and women, native Americans and her official utterances included some inchoate rambling concern about 'the poor'.  In other words  this potpourri of distracting, inconsequential issues was of no interest to anyone but the United States and its new Chief Executive. 

No sooner was Kamala in the White House that the Ayatollah ramped up his threats.  'Kill the Jew', he shouted from atop the highest minaret in Teheran, having taken the microphone from the muezzin about to chant evening prayers.  'Kill every last one of these blood-sucking leeches.  Kill them all and clear the land for the only chosen people - Muslims!' And in a strange reprise of George Wallace on the steps of the University of Alabama, he shouted, 'Islam now, Islam tomorrow, Islam forever', after which the muezzin took the microphone and began Salat al-maghrib. 

 

'He's just scimitar-rattling', suggested Kamala's National Security Advisor, smiling at his own clever tournure de phrase. 'Nothing new there, Jew-baiting at best.  Pay no attention'; but of course the new President did indeed pay attention.  What would she do if the Ayatollah really meant business this time and launch a skyful of nuclear missiles Israel's way?  She nervously eyed the black briefcase chained to the wrist of the young Marine by her side and wondered if her time had come, a retaliatory strike to blow the Ayatollah and his mullahs off the face of the earth. 

'God forbid', she said to herself.  She would not be the first president to bomb innocent brown people.  She stopped her thought in her tracks.  Well, the third President if you counted the Vietnamese who by rights should be included even though they were not brown but yellow.  Again she stopped herself in mid-thought.  Why were they called yellow in the first place?  Really more a rust-color with a yellowish tint if the light is right...And in no way she was going to follow in the footsteps of Richard bloody Nixon and LBJ even with the foresight of the Great Society. 

When she heard the words of Russian President Putin who had ratcheted up his attacks on Kyiv and in public pronouncements echoed the sentiments of the Ayatollah - Russia was ascendant, and once more the world would feel the might of the Imperial past - she again glanced at the nuclear briefcase. War with Iran would be a playground fight at best, but with Russia? That motherfucker has more nuclear weapons than we have even counting the 'uncountable, deniable' nukes under the Nevada desert. 

'I don't even want to go there' said the President to herself in the large Empire mirror she had put up in the Oval Office shortly after her inauguration; but still, she was President now, not just a hawker of the good news that got her elected; and thank God she was, because if her opponent had won our nukes would be on their way even as we speak. 

'President Xi, Madam President, has issued....'

'Stop right there, Malcolm', she said to her National Security Advisor.  'No more bad news today; and besides the Chinese are not ogres'.  She remembered her kindly Chinese gardener, Hong Fat who had tended the roses in her Southern California home, the laundryman, Cheng Wang, who gave her candies when she and her mother dropped off her father's shirts, and Ling-Tze, the man in the white apron stirring the boiling vat of noodle soup she loved so much. 

President Xi had always struck her as a kindly gentleman, a nationalist in the best sense of the word, a patriot; and she was sure she could do business with him; but there he was, she later found out, sending a fleet of warships steaming for Taiwan and suggesting that he would reduce Taipei to rubble if the insurrectionist, traitorous government continued its anti-mainland hostility. 

The afternoon affair in the Rose Garden was just what the President needed to take her mind off nasty things.  It was a ladies tea like the ones she had always imagined when she saw drawing room, Edwardian episodes on PBS - elegant, formal affairs with porcelain tea cups and silver services, women all dressed up in frilly hats, low-cut bodices, bustles, and dainty shoes.  Her prerogative and her choice.  Aides scurried before her, the whole country was at her beck and call and today she would preside over the most elegant gathering the White House had seen in years. 

The briefing paper put on her desk in the evening, after the tea - to be honest, a very successful event - was unsettling for it contained top security satellite images of Iran's first strike preparations; that and the increasingly incendiary remarks by the Ayatollah were cause for concern.  So led into the war room by her Chief of Staff and accompanied as always by her code-carrying Marine, where she had to address an august assembly of top brass, CIA operatives, State Department, National Security Advisors. 

'There are no black people here', she said to herself as she scanned the roundtable of nervous men and only a few women.  That will have to change.  The black point of view in matters like this would be critical.  Coming from a background of incessant internecine tribal warfare, black men of the diaspora would be well-placed to provide context to the intimidating threats common in the African forest.  True, centuries had passed since Africans had come to this country, but the griot oral tradition was still alive and well. 

And the woman's perspective?  Nothing more need be said about the importance of the compassion and human love that had always been women's purview.  Women would be the mitigating force to hold off testosterone-fueled aggression. 

'Madam Vice President', the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs began, 'we must act now, act resolutely, and act with everything in our arsenal'.  

How could this be? the President asked herself.  How did this fool get traction over there in the Pentagon?  He sounds like General Curtis LeMay who suggested blowing the Soviets back to the Stone Age.  A nuclear war would last only thirty days with minimum American casualties and limited damage to the United States.  'We would rid the world of the Communist scourge once and for all'.  But she had to listen for he was her top military advisor after all, but the problem was he insisted on talking in generalities.  Act now against whom?  All of them?

 

When the war room had settled down, the President spoke in her now familiar metaphorical mix, as indecipherable as ever but said with passion and commitment. The men around the table nodded and tried not to show their bemusement and confusion.  She was the President after all. 

'I didn't sign up for this', Kamala again said to herself, having vastly underestimated the tangle of high office, and very much out of her element which was diversity and inclusion and a vaporous, Genghis Khan attitude; but she had no where to turn. 'Heavy is the head that wears a crown' finally made sense after grappling unsuccessfully with Shakespeare in a required college course; so she banged on about resoluteness, definitiveness, and principle, wading in shallow waters, avoiding the deep end, speaking in her own brand of tongues until she closed the meeting with generous thanks. 

Nothing much happened after than inconclusive meeting.  Russia ramped up its attacks on Ukraine vowing to get rid of that pesky Jew once and for all.  The Ayatollahs felt no reason to keep their nuclear silos under wraps especially with the ground war against Israel by Iran's clients going so well; and the Chinese simply consolidated their political power, encircled Taiwan, rolled tanks into Xinjiang Uighur land and bought up most of Africa and its rare earths. 

Kamala returned to what she knew best - women and the black man - and did her best to create a diverse, inclusive, and progressive society.  She paid no attention to the polls or her conservative critics and simply went on her own way.  'I am a black woman', she said proudly, and left it at that.