Christmas In The Ghetto - The Last DEI Warrior Visits The Worst Slum In Washington

The Washington, DC slums are among the nastiest in the country, as drug addled as South Central, as putrid and derelict as the worst of Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago, or Detroit; and the thing of it is, they are a stone's throw from the Capitol. 

Bob Muzelle, longtime progressive, Freedom Rider, social justice warrior, advocate for gay rights and women, knew that he had a Christmas mission - to bring enlightenment to the inner city. 

 

Bob had grown up in a modest Christian home in Babylon, Long Island.  His father was an accountant and his mother a homemaker. Both were laborites, Eugene Victor Debs Socialists, and supporters of Adlai Stevenson who was for the little man, the common man not unlike the Muzelles, and a principled liberal who led a lost cause against the military giant, American war hero, man of the elite, Dwight Eisenhower.  For both of Ike's terms, the Muzelles did their best to organize political opposition to the man who simply rested on his laurels, played golf, and received tributes for doing nothing. 

Where was Eisenhower when the black man was suffering oppression, living under a Jim Crow society far worse than the more congenial antebellum South?  To be black in America was to be invisible, ignored, and dismissed - consigned to inner city reservations of pitiful neglect. 

So young Bob came to liberalism honestly as a matter of legacy and family tradition; but he took to it with even more passion and commitment than his parents.  From a young age he not only sympathized with the plight of the black man, he wanted to be one of them.  When the first crossover blues and funky rock was heard on New York radio, Bob knew he had found his calling.  The music spoke to him, and when he saw pictures of the Delta kings who were wailing the blues, he felt he knew them.  He might be white, he reasoned, but his soul was black. 

 

He wanted to be shuckin’ and jivin’ at the Apollo, arm-in-arm with black folk, squiring high-shelved women, drinking malt liquor and smoking Kools on a Harlem stoop.  Only because of the dire warnings of his parents - ironically concerned about the race hatred and endemic violence of the very communities the professed to love -  he never went uptown. 

When he was admitted to Yale, he hit his stride.  The Reverend Blanton Lodge, scion of the famous Boston family, ordained Episcopalian minister, chaplain of the university, and first on the busses to Selma and Birmingham, took a liking to the young man, took him under his wing, and built him into a mighty activist.  Together they took on the country's dysfunction - its racism, the military-industrial complex, Wall Street, and the persistent abuse of women. 

After Yale and a PhD in Chicago Bob did tours in every major city of the country, lecturing, hectoring, badgering, and imploring white people to open their eyes to injustice and urging black people to unite in reformist solidarity.  He was a whirling dervish of positivism, a man possessed, a force to be reckoned with. 

When he finally ended up in Washington in a senior manager at Action for Social Responsibility (ASR), he was no less impassioned, and as an executive he had the power to influence legislators and opinion-makers.  For many years he labored in this capacity, and was a well-known noodge on Capitol Hill. He was fearless, tireless, and devoted. 

  

Since his Freedom Rider days, Bob had been content to be a mover and shaker, a man of distinction who could influence national policy, and aside from frequent trips to universities, corporate board rooms, and state legislatures, he had not gone down and dirty.  The ghetto had become a cause, a meme, an ethos and a cultural icon rather than a place; but now late in his career, he decided to change that. 

For Bob, the black man, despite allegations of endemic crime, dereliction, abandonment, violence, and abuse, was still the primal man of the African forest, a being of supernal ability, in touch with the world around him like no other, a native environmentalist, a communitarian, and spiritually endowed.  The ghetto, the inner city, the slum were just social gulags of the white elite, but within them flourished the culture of the future. 

So Bob envisioned his Christmas Mission, yearly descents into the neighborhoods across the Anacostia River, the ones so unfairly condemned as dysfunctional warrens of primitivism, savagery, and tribal ignorance. The same voice, the same passion that had rallied white Americans to the liberal cause would resonate with black ones 

So on Christmas Day, he went across the river where his first stop was the Ebenezer Baptist Church of Anacostia, a historic black church that had welcomed refugees from the Reconstruction South and had been a sanctuary for spiritually abused and economically marginalized ever since.  The Reverend Pharoah Barnum was the pastor, and thanks to his past friendship with Mayor for Life, Marion Barry, and through him connections to the Democratic leadership in Congress, Bob's visit there was easily arranged. 

However, the black community had changed since the old days, and there was only a desultory, indifferent sprinkling of older women in black hats and veils who nodded off after Bob's introductory remarks.  He tried to gin up some of the old passion, the roots blackness that he used to channel, the hallelujah spirit of the Bible, but the ladies still snored on. 

'I've got to go deeper', Bob said to himself, and so it was that he visited the Cowper-Berman Homes, a vast public housing project that matched the old Chicago Cabrini-Green or the Central Ward projects in Newark.  Indian Country to be sure, and did he really want to go there, an aide asked him? but Bob was undaunted, kept the windows of his car rolled down, and waved to passers-by. 

'What the fuck you want, white boy', a giant metal-toothed, grilled black man shouted at him at a stoplight, ramming a Baretta into Bob's face. 'Get the fuck up outta here before I blow your fuckin' brains all over your faux leather seats'; and that was just the beginning.  As he picked his way through the trash heaps, dog shit, needles and syringes in front of A-Block of the projects, catcalls and spit rained down from each floor.  'Ain't no black pussy for you here, white boy...suck some white dick uptown, fa--ot...punch your ticket in Georgetown, motherfucker...' and at the steel, barred and blocked prison door that led to the 'social room' where he was to meet and greet, was a posse of impossibly black, do-ragged, armed thugs. 

'Where the fuck you think you goin', ofay?' said one as the rest crowded around him. 'I know one thing, it ain't here'. 

'We better go, boss', said Bob's chief aide and major domo.  'They don't want us here'; and so it was that there were no jingle bells that Christmas, no carols, hosannas, or Ode to Joy.  Bob had brought a message of love and brotherhood and barely made it back across the river. 

'St Paul never had it so tough', he said to the major domo, trying to squeeze a smile out of the aide who thought he would never get out alive; but Bob was sorely deceived and disappointed.  Had all his fervency been for naught?  Why on earth had he made this nasty, idle, lousy shithole his life's work?  

Maybe I should have been an accountant', he thought, remembering his father's famous last words as he headed into no man's land; and shortly thereafter, just like the old man retired to Florida.  'What was I thinking?', he said to his wife as he left a rather stingy tip for the black waiter.