A Lifelong Progressive Moves To Pyongyang - 'I Want To See The Mother Lode Before I Die'

Bob Muzelle had been a progressive as far back as he could remember - sitting around the dinner table listening to Uncle Shmuel talk about Samuel Gompers and Eugene Lafayette and the heady days of workers' rights, bread lines, the Socialist Manifesto, and The Daily Worker; or on Freedom Rides to Selma and Montgomery with the Reverend Brixton Mayberry. chaplain and civil rights icon of the Sixties; or with his black brothers and sisters protesting police brutality, white incivility, and American injustice. 

 

In fact over the years there was not one progressive cause that Bob did not embrace and fight for with heart and soul - the environment, global warming, American military adventurism, transgender rights...

Here Bob paused in looking over his past commitments, for it was only with a good measure of will and fidelity to the overall cause of progressive reform, that he embraced this last crucifying spike into self-important bourgeois heterosexualism.  If the truth be known, there was nothing more revolting, more disgusting than…that…an abomination. a crude, twisted perversion, a God-forsaken act; and he had all he could do to stay the progressive line from which any deviation was tantamount to apostasy and worse traitorous defection. 

No one in his cadre ever suspected his true feelings.  For all intents and purposes and for all eyes to see, Bob was the gay man's friend. He propped him up when he was feeling uncertain and weak, marched with him from Bay to Breakers and even strapped on buskins and a leather halter to show solidarity at the Folsom Street Fair. This was all to Bob's credit, for just the thought of what these men did when the parades and marches were over, just the thought..,

This careful charade, this willing suspension of disgust, this public display of affection and support for gay pride was exactly what made Bob a progressive's progressive. While his colleagues gave desultory support to glass ceilings, the Ross Ice Shelf, and black employment numbers, Bob - despite his inner feelings, could always be found at the barricades, whether he liked it or not.

Yet beneath the defiant, proud, and righteous commitment, it took more than a little moral nudging to get Bob to leave his prejudices at home.  Not only did he in his most private moments, turn away in revulsion as the very idea of gay sex, he had the same questionable distaste for the black man - anathema in progressive circles to be sure, but there it was, and he couldn't deny it. 

Anacostia, Washington DC's most abysmal slum, a miasma of dysfunction, crime, sexual abuse, child abandonment, and drugs was not the hellhole described by conservatives.  To Bob and his fellow progressives, this characterization was wrong, racist, and rancid.  The black man wherever he was stood tall, on the pinnacle of human society, a man of the primitive forest with primal sensitivities and native intelligence, deprived of his potential by slavers and Simon Legrees, and only now coming into his own.  The inner city was simply the place of his new incarnation, his bold step toward realizing his full potential. 

  

With not a little concern and trepidation, Bob planned a trip to Anacostia to see for himself.  He turned down offers for an armed security guard, armored vehicle, and a caravan of Suburbans, and decided to drive downtown in his old Corolla - a sign of empathy for the poor and disadvantaged. 

He wasn't prepared for the vileness of the place, the abandoned burnt out hulks of cars, the boarded up storefronts, the trash heaps, the detritus, the Fentanyl nodders.

'Whatchoo doin' down here, white boy', said a gold-grilled homeboy in a pimped out Cadillac, pulling out his Uzi, dangling it out the window, and pulling closer for a better look.  The Caddie had blocked the Corolla, no exit possible and a group of do-rags and Glocks came out of the projects to have a look-see. 

 

'Get out the car, bitch', gold-grille said to Bob, and what could he do but comply.  Here he was in Gaza West, destitute and ravaged, surrounded by Sierra Leonean doped-out child soldiers, armed to the teeth, dressed to the nines by some weird designer, all ready to....

Here he tried to pull himself back into familiar territory, land of the Black Prince at the top of the human pyramid, fugitive from Earth's homeland; but he only wanted the clot of black men to break up and give him running room back to Bethesda, his wife Corinne, and sundowners by the pool. 

As horrendous as the experience was, it was an epiphany.  Here in America progressivism had strayed so far from its muscular, virile roots of early Twentieth Century, that it was but an afterthought, an incidental trifle among the people to whom it was supposed to have shown the way.  For years he had never given up his belief in Stalinist discipline and Maoist certitude.  These leaders understood the debilitating, corrosive nature of capitalism and did something about it.  

The Russian Revolution and The Great Leap Forward were not just political activism but fundamental reform.  There was no possibility of living together with capitalism.  To do so would be complicity in the downfall of humane society. 

 

Bob watched with dismay as the Berlin Wall came down and as Deng Xiaoping turned to the West.  Only Enver Hoxha maintained his Maoist vision and turned Albania into a people's idyll; but his reign was short-lived and the allure of cheap market capitalism forced him out of power. 

Now only North Korea remained as the last one, true, Communist state and it was there that Bob wished to go if not to spend the remainder of his days.  Progressivism was no more than a feeble, watery version of Socialism, a movement without teeth, panzers, and indelibility; and Socialism was no more than a cut-out version of the real thing - revolutionary Communism. 

'You've got to be kidding', Bob's wife Corinne said when he broke the news about his intention; but no amount of blandishment, cajoling, or threats could make him budge from his assigned course. 'I must know', he said, 'I must find out'. 

Now, North Korea was not getting its due these days, its leadership thought what with Iran and Russia pulling some shifty moves for geopolitical power; and the publicity from some deflated old neo-socialist has-been like Bob Muzelle might not be of the high order they wanted, but why not?  And after a few weeks of parading him in and out of model cities and futuristic programs, they could revoke his visa, charge him with treason, and negotiate with the US for his release.  After all, look at how Hamas benefitted from taking those Jewish hostages. 

 

His eulogy - no one in progressive circles wanted to call it an obituary, since neither hide nor hair of him could be found after his trip to Pyongyang, and no stalwart solider in the cause was willing to bury an empty suit - was fitting.  It went on ad infinitum ad nauseam about his principles, his good works, and above all his commitment to progressivism. All agreed that 'he will be missed'. 

In fact he was missed by no one - it was he who had missed the boat entirely, failed to see the hopelessness of a neo-socialist fairy tale in capitalist America, failed to expose the bald, irreparable dysfunction of the ghetto, the overblown, hyper-heated climate hysteria, and the ridiculous distortion of gender politics. 

'What ever happened to Bob Muzelle?' a causal acquaintance recently asked a college classmate. 'Disappeared', but those of a more sanguine disposition imagined him living with a lovely young Korean wife. There is always a sex angle in treachery.