The Demise Of DEI - The End Of Uppity Black Women

LaShonda Williams looked in the mirror at her classically Ibo face - burnished ebony, high-boned, full-lipped, and beautiful. 'I am a proud African woman' she said to herself as she smiled broadly at the gorgeous image looking back at her; but the times in America were tough, now that that racist incarnate, Donald Trump, was poised to take office.  

 

LaShonda had fought long and hard for DEI - Diversity, Equity, Inclusivity - and now piece by piece the architecture of merit and promise was being dismantled.  America under the white devil would go back a hundred years, return to the Yes, Massa days of Jim Crow, segregated washrooms, and back of the bus white supremacy. 

This morning she walked a bit more slowly than usual to her offices on K Street - The Association of Historically Black Women - stopped for her usual almond milk latte at Starbucks, adjusted her circle pin and pearls, and prepared for the workday ahead.  It would be a day of tribulation as she and her sisters met to decide how to meet the growing pressure to eliminate DEI.  Just yesterday the Iowa legislature banned all DEI courses, departments, and funding from its university system, and more states would soon follow suit.  

The Supreme Court in its ruling against Harvard's discriminatory, unconstitutional affirmative action program was the first crack in the wall, and institution after institution which had waited for the right moment to get rid their programs of diversity, whooped and hollered with delight.  Now they wouldn't have to deal with uppity black women anymore, thought LaShonda as she, increasingly angry and disconsolate, wondered what weapon was still in her armory - how she and her brothers and sisters could stop the hemorrhaging. 

 

LaShonda was by no means alone in her defiance of the new conservative trend.  Bob Muzelle, a social justice warrior since the old days of civil rights, Selma, Birmingham, and Bull Connor, was outraged and incensed that the country was so willing to follow the Supreme Court's lead and return to the days white supremacy against which he had fought for decades.  

'A dark day in history', he said to his colleagues at Concerned Scientists For Justice, the nonprofit organization he had headed for years as it morphed from civil rights to women to gays to the environment, to DEI, and finally to the Trump-hating advocacy claque it now was. In his animus he could only think of the tobacco-stained overall-wearing crackers, Idaho nutcases, and MAGA insurrectionist goons that stood in his way and the way of all righteous men and women, black and white. 

 

Bob was surprised at the cool reception he got from LaShonda when he called her to join forces even more tightly than before - a surprising diffidence from a fellow progressive, an American like him who had fought tirelessly against oppression.  

What he had not realized was that despite his proven credentials - after all he had walked arm in arm with Ralph Abernathy and Dr. King across the Pettis bridge - neither LaShonda nor any of her black brothers and sisters wanted anything to do with this white boy way past his pull-by date, a sad sack black wannabee, a sorry sight shambling his way up and down K Street as though he actually had any shots left in the magazine. 

No, LaShonda and her own would fight this fight without the likes of Muzelle and his tuba-playing misfits; and so they marched to different drummers beating the same rhythm, a sad commentary on the divisive state of America, but so be it.  They would meet at the end of their individual roads, a happy convergence of shared principle and commitment. 

It was not to be. LaShonda turned immediately to the new leadership of Black Lives Matter, shaken by the accusation and arrest of its senior members for financial fraud, but still an organization with resonance and clout in the black community.  It was there that LaShonda would rally the country around the black cause, make it see that DEI demission was no less that blunt, unvarnished racism.  White folks' whingeing and whining, law suits and legal briefs wouldn't cut the mustard.  The time for action, serious action was now. 

 

Nothing is ever the way it is seen or hoped; and LaShonda, despite her very burnished, classic credentials, was sent packing by BLM.  They had nothing to do with this artsy-fartsy issue of inclusivity. 'Where you been, honey?', said Regional Troop Commander Jackson (Given the civil war to be fought against white people, BLM had reorganized along military lines). 'This ain't no hoe-down' and showed her the door. 

The whole place had changed without LaShonda knowing it, probably due to that embezzling crook, she thought, covering more worrisome doubts that the organization had lost currency and relevance; but as often is the case rebuff leads to self-questioning, and LaShonda wondered if she was on the right side. After all, DEI was a white thing thought up by Wailing Wall Jewish intellectuals as part of some neo-socialist Upper West Side canon.  They were always getting in the way. 

And that Muzelle asshole, leaving voice messages and texting her at all hours of the night, he was part of that white liberal cabal that thinks it knows about black people's struggles just because they got a few heads busted in Montgomery light years ago.  

'LaShonda, Bob Muzelle here.  We need to talk'; but she had no patience for him and increasingly none for DEI.  What was it anyway? A construct, academic posturing, white liberal hectoring of their own, sensitivity courses, solidarity bullshit.  BLM was right. Take it to the white man in the streets, bust up his jewelry stores, that'll wake up the ofay. 

The Emperor's New Clothes. For years white people bought the diversity angle, a homespun yarn about community, charity, love, and communion never saw the king for the naked jaybird he was; and hated themselves for denying it to the nation because of their systemic racism and white privilege; and then suddenly, the program was seen for what it was - a fairy tale of neo-socialist idealism.  Stick to your own kind was the real winner at the diversity field day. Racial integration was so yesterday. 

 

Meanwhile black people who understood BLM for the scam it was, but a scam from which they could profit, went along, just like LaShonda whose generous foundation grants kept her in Porsches and almond milk lattes; but now that the scheme was outed, it was time to beat it back to Mississippi. 

Bob on the other hand, whose investment in DEI was incontrovertible and part and parcel of his progressive ethos, could not turn away.  There could be no retreat, no demurral.  He was in it for the long run

A run which was not so long as Bob expected or hoped.  The crack in the wall opened like Sesame, and the entire foundation came down in a hurry.  DEI was a goner, and good riddance to it. 

Of course there were those like Bob who kept knocking on black people's doors asking for admittance, but the whole climate in America had changed, so, disconsolate and at loose ends, he went back to climate change, another progressive waystation increasingly bypassed, but still a home away from home. 

Glamour Is Back! - Donald Trump And Beauty Queens Are In; Frump, Flannel And Bad Hair Are Out

Let's face it, Republicans are the more beautiful party - or more appropriately said, Republicans in power are.  The MAGA unwashed, the troops from the hollers, plains, and prairies, may not be the image of Vogue, but those who rule are - presidents of big corporations, Wall Street investors, Senators, and of course Presidents of the United States. 

Democrats have been the party of frump, flannel, and bad hair; and the progressive wing even worse.  No party for the people can look like those who rule.  Nothing in their closets can smack of Louis XIV, the Sun King, bedecked in ermine, silk, jewels, and fine linen, nor even close.  Their victories were won by the likes of Samuel Gompers, an old Jewish man who, tired of sweat shops and pitiful pay, fed up with waiting for Yahweh to come to the aid of the seamstresses in Seventh Avenue lofts, took matters into his own hands and fought for justice - not in an elegant Italian suit, but an old American one, heavy in the shoulders, bulky, and mis-hemmed because of the miserable, dull light on the garment factory floor. 

 

Woody Guthrie, singer of the poor and downtrodden, the Okies of the Dust Bowl, the disadvantaged, and the forgotten was a simple man in simple clothes.  In fact every crusader for social justice, every man and woman concerned with the less fortunate and downtrodden felt right only in homespun, handwoven, simply made clothes.  Mahatma Gandhi was the symbol of peasant simplicity.  His image was the spinning wheel, and his loincloth and shawl were khadi made from the crudest cotton fiber. 

 

Beauty, lifted, rounded, and filled by Rodeo Drive surgeons was anathema to progressives.  Let the lines, wrinkles, and sags come on, badges of courage, earned through decades on freedom rides, at the barricades, and on mean streets for justice and equality, beaten by capitalist thugs and racist Southern pigs, bloodied and bruised but proud.  No glitz and glamour for them, no pretty faces showing wealth and white privilege. 

Of course many of today's progressives have left this old, Upper West Side Jewish look aside, and the pimp and ho ghetto look - rapper chic - has been the new fashion meme. 'The people' are no longer poor whites but poor blacks, and celebrating their culture is in. 

Those who are concerned socialists cannot give any inkling that they are not; and what do tinsel, dangly earrings, sequined sheaths, and high heels say if not exaggerated wealth earned on the backs of the poor? It's OK to have gold caps, platinum grills, stacked heels and zoot suits if you are black and wealthy - the streets have given back what the white man has taken - but no low-cut bodices, flip hair, Hollywood makeup, and stiletto heels if you are not a person of color.  

 

And if you are a committed, repentant white, you must show contrition and the painful suffering of others.  The corridors of Washington's non-profits are filled with bad hair and bad skin - acceptance of white guilt and solidarity with the nation's underserved. 

The Second Coming of Donald Trump is not just political, it is cultural - a revolutionary onslaught that will not only change the nature of government, but will set a new standard for looks. Middle-brow glitz, glamour, and showiness are in.  Hollywood, Las Vegas, and beauty pageants; yachts, resorts, and arm candy are the new iconic images for the world to see.  Blonde, blue-eyed, starlets; chiseled-chinned, sandy-haired leading men, the gorgeous, the undauntedly beautiful will lead the way. 

There was one Democrat, John Kennedy, who showed the country some style - Camelot, however, was a privileged, New England, aristocratic scene of tailored women, Pablo Casals and Robert Frost, old silver, Chippendale, and Townsend chairs.  It had nothing to do with either the culture or aspirations of most Americans.  Its royalty appealed, but in a storybook, fantasy dream.  The Trump women are real Americans, big-titted, glamorously made-up, high-stepping women right off the Vegas Strip. 

Bob Muzelle, a lifelong progressive, dutiful marcher and defender of the poor, and tireless champion of black people and women, felt the bile rise when he saw the first phalanx of Trump women come to town. It was bad enough that the man himself and his claque of insurrectionist, anti-democratic autocrats were about to take over the reins of government from a true patriot, a gentleman, a man of the people; but these ditzes, these blonde airheads, these bimbos were too much.  Not one woman of color among them, not one proud, African American, not one Dahomey, sculpted face.  It was a shameful, hateful display of white racism. 

Bob called for a meeting of his staff - Scientists for International Responsibility was a minor progressive lobby group - and asked them for their opinions on how to meet the scourge, the infection of the MAGA thugs. 

As he looked over the assembly and saw nothing but a general unkemptness, an indifference to appearance, a disordered, unappealing, almost disreputable unattractiveness, he like most men of his generation could only think of the blonde, sylph-like beauties of Hollywood, how he had wanted them and women like them, but ended up with Sylvia Goldberg, child of Lower East Side socialists, garment workers, laborites, and insufferable bores.  

What was he thinking? and now that he surveyed his stable of eager young men and women and saw this...this desperately unappealing group...he stopped in mid-sentence, disturbed by the image of Nancy Blythe, a stunningly sexy and beautiful girl, prom queen at New Brighton High, every boy's dream, but for him - a disassembled, porky, acned boy - impossible. 

 

'Colleagues', Bob said once he regained his composure, 'the fight lies ahead', but out the window fronting K Street he saw a group of Trump women - they had to be, so gorgeously blonde and blue-eyed were they - headed across Farragut Square to the White House.  He lost his train of thought, lost in a reverie of Nancy Blythe and her sleeveless blouses, stumbled on for a few more minutes, then excused himself. 

Could it be?  No, never in a million years would he ever cross the political divide, and certainly not for a busload of beautiful women; and yet....and yet the idea of governing surrounded by such nubile, pristine beauty was irresistible.  That old fucker Trump is almost eighty, Bob realized, and he is still surrounded by beautiful young things, squiring them, teasing them, loving them; while he sits in his decades old suit sitting in a shabby office surrounded by nothing but dire ugliness. 

Bob recovered, although not completely. After all he had given his whole life to social justice and the dedicated men and women who had sacrificed theirs for a greater cause, and could not turn his back on them however much he might like to. 

In the late Spring when he opened the windows to his office - it was so old one could indeed open the windows - he could hear the revelry on Pennsylvania Avenue down by the White House.  The beautiful young things were always spilling over onto the lawn, laughing and cheering, and he wanted to be there.

As much as they will deny it, deep down in every progressive soul is a Republican, someone who wants to give up the morose seriousness of social justice and have some fun.  It wasn't exactly that Bob had wasted his life, but certainly had Nancy Blythe given him the slightest hint of interest, his life would have been entirely different. 

Living Well In A Dump With Oil - An Amoralist's Happy Life In Africa

Friedland Bingham was a child of privilege and some honor. His ancestors had been founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and had gone on to establish the New Haven Plantations and Yale University, and his father, known as a man of Constitutional principle, a historian, and a philosopher had been Chief Justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court.

 

He wrote in his memoir, A Man of Justice, that his juridical inspiration came from Epictetus and the Stoics, men who subscribed to no religious or moral principle, but adhered to a more universal philosophy of acceptance. Such amoral wisdom of course did not begin with Epictetus but in Mohenjo-Daro, the first settlement of the Aryans who brought with them a fundamental distrust of destiny's capriciousness and set down the first notions of an evolutionary religion, Hinduism. 

The Buddha followed the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads and offered that 'there is no change but change', the philosophy that there can be no absolutes in a randomly ordered, permanently shifting world. 

Justice Bingham, guided by this philosophy was never a partisan jurist, never tempted by the rightness of conservatism or liberalism, only the fundamental meaning of the words of Jefferson and his colleagues. 

 

And so it was that Bingham's son, Friedland, followed in the stoic footsteps of his father - not in the law, but in economics.  The law of supply and demand was a neutral principle which guided all life, whether in actual buying and selling or in contractual matters as well.  Good marriages were those in which the partners were equally balanced - individual price points established, and behavior following accordingly. 

Bingham took his post-graduate academic credentials to international development - the process of assisting the poor countries of Africa to progress and ultimately join the commonwealth of developed nations. 

After a very short time, he realized that those who thought that such development was possible were just whistlin' Dixie, and that the big men of Africa had no interest whatsoever in changing their tune.  They were becoming impossibly wealthy thanks to their control over rare earth metals, gas, and oil so in demand in the West; and thanks also to the millions of dollars in bi-lateral and multi-lateral financial and economic assistance shifted to off-shore bank accounts.  The World Bank, African Development Bank, USAID, and every European donor saw their generous soft loans and grants disappear like wisps of smoke. 

From the very beginning of his professional career in Africa, Friedland had no other interest than the challenge of adapting pure economics to immature markets.   If a country subscribed to the principles of the Scottish Enlightenment and the economic wisdom of Adam Smith and instituted appropriate reforms, so much the better; but his job was simply to lay out the architecture for such reform, provide a manual for construction, and leave the rest to the revolving wheels of history. 

So, in country after country, he designed a suitable economic plan and left the country satisfied that he had done what his patrons expected of him and had met his own personal challenge.  While many of his colleagues smitten by the presumed nature of international 'development' - doing good - and persisting in that febrile idealism by renegotiating loans, and trying 'more culturally appropriate' and congenial approaches to development, Friedland was under no such illusions. He understood that Africa had after over sixty years of independence, become shamelessly poor, misgoverned, and as ruled by tribalism, animism, totemism and bald-faced nepotism as ever before. 

As such, there was no other alternative than to do the prescribed dance of Siva, recreating the universe after destroying it in a perpetual, amoral, inevitable, and unavoidable cycle.  His economic charting of the future was but the first arpeggio of the dance, his architectural renderings, the plies and pas-de-deux, a graceful, beautiful expression of intellect and design. What came of it meant absolutely nothing. 

Given such a philosophy, it was easy for Friedland to live the good life in Africa, which despite its political miasma, offered five-star hotels, excellent cuisine, and marvelous views.  Again, unlike many of his development colleagues who felt that such a sybaritic life was shameful given the poverty and suffering of the people around them, Friedland had no such qualms.  Africa was a miserable mess, unlikely to achieve European standards, and expressing grief over a situation caused by a very definable and remediable set of socio-cultural and political factors, was silly, vain, and purposeless. 

So Friedland always took the executive suites at the modern hotels presidents built to show Western visitors their forward-looking vision of a top-of-the-line Africa; always ate at the French restaurants supported by presidents' men and their European advisors; and squired the most beautiful Fulani, mulatto women.  

The 'Ile de France' was one such restaurant in an African capital.  Run by a Parisian chef who had been given a Michelin star for his boutique marvel in the 7th arrondissement and who had been offered ten times his French salary and given unlimited import privileges by the President, the restaurant was the equal of any in Paris or Lyon.  There were always live lobsters and Belon oysters, the finest foie gras, and of course inimitable Burgundy and Bordeaux wines - all affordable on Friedland's all-expenses-paid account. 

 

This particular country had all it takes for an accumulation of wealth at the top - vast reserves of oil and underground fields of scandium and lanthanum so extensive they could power half the smart phones and computers in the world.  European countries would give anything to get their hands on these metals, and did so.  They looked the other way as millions of unaccountable monies flowed into the personal treasury of the President while private companies hired by them kicked back millions more. 

So the cost of construction of the Hotel Independence and the fluid transfers of funds and import access for the Ile de France were but a drop in the bucket.  The Oak Bar at the hotel was not only the favored watering hole for expatriates but the place to see and be seen by the local glitterati. 

'An apple doesn't fall far from the tree', said Friedland's father to his son over prime rib and martinis at his own see-and-be-seen Washington steakhouse, very appreciative of the young man's approach to economics and life.  It was indeed possible, both men knew and shared, to combine serious intellectual enterprise and epicureanism - a sojourn in a shithole need not be that bad - and with a conscience free of consequence like they both had, life could be a wonder.  

The Life And Death Of An Overachiever - Doing Good Isn't Worth A Piece Of Cheese In The End

Franchot (Frank) Billings had been born and raised in an unengaged family, much like Fowler, the Graham Greene character in The Quiet American who sees no point in striving for right in an indifferent world, and is happy enough with a quiet, settled, sensual life in Southeast Asia.

On the other end of the spectrum is the Nietzschean Superman for whom the exercise of pure will is the only validation of existence in a meaningless world; and in between are the Stoics, Epicureans, and Buddhists who take life as it is - there is nothing in life but change, an inevitable changing of the moral and social guard so certain one cannot help but react to it; but that reaction should only be acceptance. 

The world is maya, illusion, say Hindus, and the path to enlightenment is realizing its temptations and turning away. 

Despite his parents' moral laissez-faire, Franchot somehow felt that there was something more to life than taking it lightly without consequence.  He was a natural born doer with a need to effectuate, to make a difference, to right wrongs, and to do the right thing.  Where this instinct came from, his parents never knew.  For them life was such a complex, ever shifting tangle of options, decisions, consequences, and unexpected bounties that it was better to leave it alone, maintain a good posture, and see what comes next.

'It was that Yale preacher', said his father, referring to the Reverend Berkeley Sloane Bierstadt, a pretentious religious windbag who made headlines thanks to getting bitten by an Alabama attack dog on a Freedom Ride - an accident of happenstance because the dog had been sicked on a black man with a tire iron but bit too early and took a chunk out of Berkeley's leg.  Berkeley had actually been running the other way when the police line charged, knowing that he would never be a Christ on Golgotha but always a simple grocer's son from Babylon, Long Island.   

 

Yet when he returned to Yale, he in a most recondite but leading way suggested that he had been on the first line of demonstrators defying Bull Connor and his Dobermans; but the credulous, impossibly eager, and hopelessly idealistic undergraduates took the bait, and from that moment on lionized the Reverend and looked to him for hope and inspiration, 

Franchot's father always knew there was something 'off' about that flatulent blowhard in New Haven, and now his own son was an acolyte. Reverend this, Reverend that was all he ever heard from the boy, besotted, smitten by a charlatan, an ambitious whiner who had the chutzpah to stand up in front of an assembly of incoming freshman, bless them, anoint them, and insist that their real purpose of being at Yale was to do good. 

'God Almighty, what a jerk' said Abel Billings, and asked his son as politely and respectfully as possible, what he saw in the man.  With that innocuous overture, the emotional floodgates of the young man opened, and Abel could only sit there and listen to one treacly love story after another.  'Hooked', Abel said to his wife as his son boarded the New York, New Haven & Hartford back to Yale.

Abel looked at his wife with a strange, inquisitive, nasty look.  Could Franchot be the offspring of some other man?  That was the only way to explain such an apostate, a boy so far off the Billings family rails that he must have come from somewhere else. 

'Don't look at me that way', said his wife, knowing what was on her husband's mind, and although she resented the thought, shared it.  Although she had always been faithful, perhaps Franchot was a Rosemary's Baby, spawn of the devil.  A big joke, a laugh when she made the reference to her bridge partner, a woman whose own child was seemingly from another planet let alone the one of a sexual interloper; but when push came to shove genetic splicing and recombination could be the only reason. 

'Uncle Harry', she blurted out, remembering the great-uncle on her mother's side who was a crazed follower of Eugene Victor Debs, Samuel Gompers, and the early 20th century progressives in Chicago, a man who had been institutionalized for his fevered, inchoate, Biblical rantings.  The family, profoundly conservative, laid his mental debility to socialism, but of course it more likely was because of the DNA of one of his infantile ancestors. 

In any case, Abel Billings sat his son down to consider the larger context - Epictetus, Vivekananda, Gautama Buddha, and Sartre, the insignificant nature of the universe, the futility of purposeful human enterprise, and the final end of all of us tossed dans un tas pele-mele. 

'Enjoy life', Abel urged his son. 'Don't waste it. Do you have a girlfriend?', this last comment causing the young Franchot to hit the roof.  How typical of his father's generation, how ignorant and obtuse.  A get it up, get it in, wham bam, thank you ma'am mentality that sickened him.

Back at Yale, Frank spent more and more time with the Reverend Berkeley (Call me Berk) at the barricades for black people, women, peace, and the environment.  Studying was a desultory pain in the ass, and he was called up by the Dean of Students and given a warning.  He was at Yale to study and to shine academically not to fritter away his time with streetcorner preachers.  

The Dean was politically farther right than any Ivy League administrator and one hundred percent of the faculty, so this ad hominem attack on a colleague - after all both he and Bierstadt were paid by Yale - was not surprising although given the upper class manners of the place, was looked at askance. 

No admonishment by Yale or his parents did any good, and Franchot left Yale with a burning desire to make a difference.  After a short sojourn at Chicago where he had time to at least begin his dissertation Socialism And Porky Pig - America's Wallowing in Excess, A Conundrum before he left for a position at Physicians For International Responsibility, a conscientiously objecting, deeply Quaker, morally Christian peaceful organization with an anti-nuclear agenda. 

 

It was the perfect place for Frank for it was as wildly enthusiastic about its purpose as was Berk Bierstadt and his minions at Yale.  Within its walls there was not a scintilla of doubt about the rightness and sanctity of their cause - world peace - and to a man believed that they could make a difference, edge the doomsday clock back a few seconds, shake some sense into the powers that be, and go to bed in a world slightly more sane than before. 

Year after year he went, from one passionate cause to another, to the barricades, burning the midnight oil penning anti-capitalist screeds, and appearing everywhere in a perpetual St. Vitus' dance of dervish-like energy.  

As the times moved on, Frank was quick to follow suit - black people morphed into gay men who morphed into transgender queers.  Peace became universal moral suffrage, raising the poor from poverty, which evolved into African judicial reform which turned into...the list was endless. 

Only in his late seventies did he bank his fires - or rather they simply died out on their own.  It was on a Florida beach one January evening as he scrolled through his emails and Internet sites of interest, that he looked over at his wife snoring on her chaise lounge, mouth agape, arms akimbo, and it suddenly all came together. 'It' being the sum of the ridiculousness of old age and the beating of the political bush that never produced any tigers -  a sad and miserable state of affairs. 

At that one moment, the words of his father came back to him. 'The guy's a jerk'. Franchot had never paid his father any mind, but now, suddenly he could feel the vaporous, flighty winds of the Reverend Berkeley Bierstadt.  He could smell the foul nastiness of the Anacostia slums and see nothing but pimps, ho's, and Fentanyl dopers.  The 21st Century was starting off as bloody-minded, territorial, and militarily ambitious as the hundreds before it.  Women were uppity, transgenders were circus freaks, and there was no climate Armageddon in sight. What the fuck had he been doing all his life?

His wife farted and a dog barked.  It was time for sundowners.  He closed his computer, not even bothering to shut it down properly, folded his beach chair and headed home.  

This wasn't the end, of course.  No story except murder ends so finally.  Frank went back to Washington, banged on about social justice at a few conferences and seminars, but the attendees had only desultory interest, and the scattered few in the audience mumbled and scratched their way through half his speech and then made their way to the exits.  

Trump was in town and ready to throw out the whole progressive kit and kaboodle for which Frank had struggled for five decades. The country wanted no more black this, black that. Glass ceiling or not, women should make their own way.  Agriculture was shifting north, so what? and with the likes of Putin, Xi, Kim, and the Ayatollah no one was giving peace a chance. The cycle had reached its nadir and was starting up again.  'Fuck 'em', said Franchot again, uncharacteristically crude and dismissive, but at his age, who cared?