Doing Good Or Having Fun? The Poor Are Satisfying, Fun Is Just A State Of Mind

Bob Muzelle had never thought twice about doing good, the principle that had guided his life ever since he was a child, but here he was, sitting on the curb of 17th and Constitution disconsolate and overwhelmed by the radical upheaval of the very institutions that were the lifeblood of American aid, compassion, and right behavior.  

The new Trump Administration and its operational arm, the Department Of Government Efficiency, had closed the doors of the Agency for International Development, and in one fell swoop consigned the world's poor to a life of continued penury and pain. 

For years Bob had worked for the agency, or rather for the hundreds of non-governmental organizations granted federal funds to carry out development activities in Africa.  He had traipsed through swamps and jungles; had braved the Saharan sun, choked on bush meat, and shaken with malaria all for the sake of the poor and the misbegotten, the people whom time had forgotten and who were living, desperate and forgotten, in grass huts and sisal lean-tos.  

Bob never complained, for this personal suffering was his hair shirt.  His scabies, amoebae, river fever, and angina were the scourges and whips of the Roman soldiers along the Via Dolorosa, Jesus' way to Jerusalem.  He once joined a Holy Week procession in Spain, whipping himself bloody, a crown of thorns on his head, his bare feet cut and bruised from the march to Golgotha. 

While others enjoyed the Olympic pool at the Independence in Abidjan, dined on grilled grouper and lobster in Luanda, and enjoyed the pleasures of lithe, caramel-colored Fulani women in Bamako, Bob spent his time in the bush, making his way to far-flung outposts of misery whose inhabitants, starving and destitute looked to him for aid and succor.  No, the sybaritic life was not for him and never would be.  His road to peace in salvation was here in the most miserable, benighted, forbiddingly pestilential places of Africa.

Now, the gates to this personal heaven were closed.  Donald Trump had arbitrarily announced that the poor of Africa were not his concern, that the United States would no longer finance fraudulent, inefficient, unsorted, and hopelessly fanciful and idealistic wastes of money.  Bob was out on his ear. 

In the Cormac McCarthy book, No Country for Old Men, Anton Chigurh says to Carson Wells, a gun pointed at his chest, about to kill him,  'If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?', a remark that applied to most of us but particularly to Bob at this moment of profound despair.  His life's work - doing good and helping the poor - had been scuttled in one half-hour.  

Not only that, the nation was rallying around the President.  It was time for Africa - and the diaspora it spawned - to man up, accept responsibility, and make something of itself.  Trump and his supporters in so many words were echoing Cormac McCarthy. 

As Bob sat on the curb watching the caravan of dump trucks hauling the detritus, the leavings from USAID, a once honorable institution to the incinerator, he recalled Chigurgh's line to Carson Wells. If foreign aid - doing good - was no longer and for all intents and purposes did not exist and never existed, then what had his life been worth?

 

While colleagues frolicked by the sea and ate lobster and foie gras flown in from Brittany and Lyon, Bob had given heart and soul to the poor.  Were memories enough to validate a monastic, abstemious life, a life of intent and purpose but without a moment's pleasure?

Epictetus and the Epicureans notwithstanding, wasn't investment valuable per se?  He had airline tickets, a passport stamped with visas from the worst places on earth, photographs of him with black people - a chronicle of doing good, not just fleeting memories. 

Yet when a thing is gone, then its antecedents are gone, and every scintilla of its past disappears.  

And so it will be for the fun enjoyed by his indifferent colleagues, Bob insisted, satisfied.  Their romps are finished as well.  However, sybarites have one distinct advantage - fun is a state of mind, unlinked to any one place or activity.  The Olympic pool at the Independence and the Fulani women of Niamey might disappear and be things of the past, but such delights are everywhere.  If not Fatima from Luxor, then Amanda from HR, martinis and oysters at the Willard, and long weekends in Miami. 

There was no getting around it. Here on the curb Bob sat, an overweight, unattractive man nearing his pull-by date with nothing to show for it but a resume worth less than a menu from a bad restaurant.  No one cared that he had done good, because the whole idea had been dismissed as so much background noise. People were responsible for their own destiny, the new meme went, and along with it any flaccid ideology of faux compassion. 

There is still Europe, Bob thought.  The EU had not yet given up on foreign assistance and helping the world's poor, but it was so flooded with unwanted African immigrants creating black slums where none had ever existed, demanding Sharia rights in countries which deplored them, taking welfare with no thought of returning the favor, that the idea of doing anything for these hangers-on, regardless of where they lived, was an increasingly distant thought.

'You can go into sales', said his wife, far less concerned with the demise of a program which she had always suspected was a waste of time and money, teasing Bob into some semblance of reality; but he was having none of it, so emotionally drawn and destitute was he.  Images of waifs and orphans clouded his thinking, disturbed his already precarious equilibrium, and left him bereft and adrift. 

He got up from the curb once the DOGE cavalcade had passed and walked up 17th Street until he got to a funkier, shabbier, but more conciliatory part of town - i.e. which had a few old-fashioned bars where you could get a shot of Wild Turkey and a beer and not be looked at - and stopped into The Blarney Stone.  

Stumbling out the door into the bright May sunlight an hour later, drunk as a skunk, but completely deadened to the depressing thought of the loss of the poor, a livelihood, and purposeful intent, he was momentarily heartened.  'Who the fuck cares?', he shouted to no one in particular, caught the N4 and headed home.