A White Liberal's Dilemma - Hoping For Black Blood But Getting A Slaveowner's Instead

Bob Muzelle was a liberal's liberal.  There was no progressive cause that he didn't espouse, no battle for social justice he didn't enjoin, and no barricades that he didn't storm.  His beliefs were unshakeable, rock solid, and immured.  He invoked Eugene Victor Debbs, Jane Addams, and Louis Brandeis; had been one of the first Freedom Riders, had gotten whipped and beaten by Bull Connors thugs, crossed the Pettis Bridge with Ralph Abernathy and told of his crusade from pulpit to lectern across liberal America. 

 

Bob was proud of his heritage, working class with American ambitions, son of a New England father and dark-eyed, graceful Missouri mother, the kind of a legacy that added credentials and credibility to his liberalism.  His father had been a Communist organizer in the 30s, founder of the Babylon cell, Long Island's purist and most passionately Marxist-Leninist organization.  His mother had followed suit. a charter member of The Women's Long Island Socialist Congress and equally passionate about social reform. 

Bob won a scholarship to Yale and despite urgings from his parents to avoid that sentinel of white Anglo-Saxon privilege in favor of Brooklyn College, Jewish yes, but solidly progressive, Bob went to New Haven.  The boys at Brooklyn were sons of tailors, garment workers, and diamond cutters who had rallied around Samuel Gompers and fought for trade unionism when it was in its infancy and would be proper, appropriate company for Bob.   

Serving the rich and privileged of Park Avenue, the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts in their carriages and European finery, these Brooklyn workers had tasted the insolence of the rich.  They hated to see their finely cut stones, beautifully tailored dresses, suits, and formal wear worn by these captains of industry, robber baron capitalists, and enemy of the working man. 

 

Bob's parents were not only socialist activists but people of profound rectitude - their fight was a moral one, a righteous one, even a spiritual one.  They were proud of their economic modesty, for their simple home, simple clothes, and simple social aspirations were expressions of belief; so when Bob went off to Yale, their settled world of principle was shaken. 

Despite the seriousness but understated convictions of his parents - neither was one to howl about injustice only to work quietly but insistently for it - Bob wore his progressivism proudly and noisily.  He was the one who addressed the Student Union and shamed them for their social conservatism.  When would Yale welcome Jews and Negroes?  When would it shed its mantle of aristocratic elitism and join 'the commonwealth of the colored'?  He banged on at Woolsey Hall, was a fixture at socialist rallies on the New Haven green, and a tireless advocate for liberal aldermen, legislators, and Congressional candidates. 

 

In all this Bob had become a screechy, male harridan, a hectoring bore, a sanctimonious intellectual thug.  As much as the small liberal claque at Yale admired his political enthusiasm, they hated being around this humorless, arrogant prick. He graduated nominally, so occupied had he been with extracurricular issues, was however accepted at the University of Chicago for graduate study - the admissions committee had been more impressed with his progressive activism than his academics - and kept up his banging and hammering about doing the right thing, but this time in a much larger, more appreciative, and more passionate socialist community. 

They too, however much they admired Bob's singlemindedness wanted no part of him outside the demonstrations, marches, and sit-ins.  He was the same undesirable, obnoxious prick that he had been at Yale, even worse, for he took this universal student espousal of liberal causes as a personal tribute, missing the point that to a man and woman they hated this loudmouthed creep. 

He only became worse after he had been invited to be a visiting scholar at the National Progressive Institute, a think tank which was born in the Sixties and came of age in the Seventies; and it was there that Bob found the big tent he had always looked for.  Gone were the insular days of racial civil rights and in were the halcyon days of women, gays, the environment, and peace.  It was a tasty smorgasbord of every liberal cause under the sun.  He was in his element, but as he gained currency as an eclectic advocate of reform, he became even more intolerable, a canker sore, a reminder to all that even the best impressions may hide a jerk. 

Bob was ignorant of all this for his self-confidence and assuredness were such that nothing could dampen his enthusiasm or mend his ways.  He went on blissfully stupid.  

Later on in his tenure at the Institute the old integrationist policies of Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy, and their colleagues and the militantly segregationist ones of H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael had become passe, to be replaced by African idolatry.  The black man, born of tribal intelligence, forest wisdom, and natural abilities, was to be honored, feted, and promoted to the top of the human pyramid where he belonged. 

 

Racial purity was the new meme, origins, bloodlines, and tribal legacy were front and center, displacing discredited notions of civil rights.  Legally the black man had one his battles; it was now to restore the dignity that he, tribal genius of the jungle, much deserved. 

Bob remembered a story that had been retold many times at Sunday dinner - a joking reference to family forbear's sexual dalliance. There was a gap in the family history - no one could place Annabelle's (Bob's mother) great-great grandmother between 1850 and 1855, and rumor had it that she had willingly left home to go off with a compatriot of Nat Turner, the black insurrectionist slave.  This accounted for Annabelle's  'darky' looks. 

When Bob heard this story, fabulist and unbelievable as it seemed, he thought that quite possibly this was the chance to burnish his credentials to a high shine - the one undeniable requisite for the American liberal.  To have black blood - and in this case the black blood of a black patriot. 

He proudly began to talk about this part of his heritage - this, the most significant part - and spoke assuredly about his African legacy.  When the opportunity came for him to take a DNA test, he had no doubt that the results would come back in his favor, black as the ace of spades, putting him in the black pantheon and the undisputed king of the hill. 

'Watch out what you wish for', said Bob's uncle Dave who retold the lesser-known family tale about a great-great grandfather on his father's side who had been a Newport shipbuilder involved in the Three Cornered Trade, had made enough money in transporting slaves to the New World, that he bought a Mississippi Delta plantation where a thousand Angolans were bought and put to work on the cotton fields. 

 

Now, this story was only speculation and hearsay, for there were apparently no written records available at the time, but the shipbuilding part was true, and it took very little intuition to guess at the transatlantic trade and very little logic to jump to the conclusion of slave ownership. 

And so it was that Bob Muzelle spit in a cup and waited for the results of his genetic assay.  To his absolute, crestfallen dismay, there wasn't a scintilla of African DNA in his sample, only European.  What was most troubling was that the greatest dollop of European genetic material was Scots-Irish, the very ancestry of supposed slave-owning great-great-grandfather Hiram Burns

Nonplussed, stopped in his tracks, and befuddled, Bob set out to find out if there was any truth to the story which would corroborate the genetic suggestion of his recent test. The Internet being what it is, ancestry search is now far easier than it was when Uncle Dave did his cursory research, and lo and behold there was indeed a record of a Hiram L. Burns owner of the Waverly Plantation of Indianola, Mississippi.  Waverly was not just a plantation but the plantation of the Delta, a 3000 acre expanse of cotton fields worked by 250 slaves, one of the most profitable enterprises of the South.  

Now what? wondered Bob.  Not only did he not have any black blood in his veins, but coursing through them was that of the most reviled, hated, categorically evil class of people ever to have set foot on American land. 

Now, in most cases of this type, the applicant would simply take the results in stride, fill in the gaps of family history, and close the registry; but Bob was such a jerk, so clueless and hopelessly ignorant, that he withdrew his membership from all the institutes, congresses, caucuses, and advocacy groups to which he belonged. 'I'm white!', he shouted at his reflection of the mirror in his living room, ironically a piece from the classic Southern Empire period. 'Bloody white as the driven snow', and with that little more was heard from him. 

'A proper liberal disappearance' commented one of Bob's conservative Yale classmates who had noticed the absence of his monthly screeds in the Alumni magazine, and who remembered hearing nothing but Bob's belligerent ranting in the tower of Trumbull College as he practiced his speeches.  Not good riddance exactly, but a welcome respite from this noisome pain in the ass. 

What's Love Got To Do With It? - Marriage, A Matter Of Marx, Will And Contract

Marx famously said that man is an economic animal, and he based his theories on that presumption. For all the failings of Marxism, the man was right. 

Expressed another way, human nature - aggressive, territorial, self-defensive, and self-interested - is economic, for we all calculate gains and losses, risks, opportunity, and the forces that determine them as a matter of course.  Everything comes under that particular scrutiny, for there is no sphere of human activity that is not a matter of competing interests. 

Capitalism, said Marx, was a destructive, divisive force that robbed society of its collective potential.  In its competitive individualism, pitting man against man, it sapped productive energies.  If these individual energies could be marshalled together for the common good, mankind as a whole could benefit.  One must work with this universal shared good in mind, said Marxists who embraced the idea of progress, positive social evolution, and the promise of a perfect, harmonious world. 

 

Needless to say Marxism for all its utopian ambitions ignored the profoundly individualistic nature of man, Darwinian competitive survivalism, and the more fundamental nature of human interaction - buying, selling, and trading for benefit and profit. 

However much Marx believed that these individualistic ambitions could be tamed by the state and conformed to its collective vision, he did not deny them.  He was as aware of Darwin as any thinker of the late 19th century and was a keen observer of history.  He must have seen that both individual competition and private economic enterprise were aspects of human society ever since the earliest human settlements, but was somehow convinced that its emergence into a new, modern world could not survive such economic brutalism. 

Long after the demise of Marxism and Communism, the keen observation that man is an economic animal persists.  Despite reformists, progressives, and Utopians, the dirty little secret - man's undeniable individual ambition and his determination to best others at all costs - is no longer whispered but accepted if not embraced. 

Marriage is the perfect example of social Marxism.  It may initially be thought to be an expression of love and caring, but over time it becomes contractual.  Men and women thrown together willy-nilly by persistent Petrarchan notions of romantic love, soon find that without perimeters, conditions, codicils, and caveats marriage cannot survive.

Marriage is not contractual in the purely legal and accounting sense, although most modern marriages are bound by prenuptial arrangements, detailed trust funds, painfully specific and demanding clauses of equal economic and financial rights.  It is contractual in less codifiable ways.  There are so-called moral codes of behavior - fidelity is the most prominent - that are nothing more than extensions of the legal contracts which broadly define the context of marriage.  A woman wants to keep her husband from straying because of a potential loss of economic value, the disruption of a carefully-prepared investment portfolio, and the loss of an additional caretaker, a father. 

As much as one can accuse men of hateful misogyny, jealousy is standard fare for all societies. A woman’s infidelity, never certain and always suspect, can lead to illegitimate birth, questions of lineage and heritage for the well-to-do and questions of economics for the hoi polloi. Why should a man, hard pressed to survive in a marginal environment, invest anything in a child who is not his? Issues of misogyny, machismo, patriarchy, and sexual abuse all derive from male uncertainty. It is a matter of security, let alone male ego and pride, to know paternity.

Some bio-ethicists have suggested that jealousy provided an evolutionary adaptation for males to assure paternity and to avoid spending resources on other males’ offspring and led females to guarantee protection and support for her offspring by having a steady partner. Men need to be sure that their children are theirs; and women, once having secured an economically viable mate, need to be sure that he doesn’t stray.

Perhaps the best fictional depiction of jealousy is in Strindberg’s play, The Father.  For years the Captain has ruled his wife, Laura, and commanded all decisions about her, their home, and their daughter.  When Laura feels that he has finally overstepped his bounds, making arbitrary decisions about their daughter and her education, she decides to refuse and force his capitulation.  

She does so with the psychological canniness and evil intent of Iago, introducing the idea, however subtlety that their daughter is not his. She knows that paternity is at the heart of male jealousy and insecurity – men can never absolutely know whether the children borne by their wives are theirs – and she progressively suggests that their child might not be his.  

Such doubts, especially since they never can be proven, are by nature corrosive, and eventually the Captain goes mad.  Laura commits him to a mental institution, and she takes charge of her daughter.  Adding insult to injury she tells him, “Now you have fulfilled your function as an unfortunately necessary father…, you are not needed any longer and you must go.”

Most modern marriages where the old Victorian prescriptions of male and female roles are no longer valid, need to negotiate a new, unwritten contract to assure a proper balance of emotional investment, risk, and reward. Values are calculated subjectively - taking out the trash every so often is not worth cooking daily or worse, cleaning toilets.  

Successful, or at least long-lasting marriages have achieved accommodation and social parity.  Wives' and husbands' duties and responsibilities are negotiated, valuated, and mutually agreed upon.  Whether paying the bills and doing the taxes is actually and objectively the equivalent of cooking dinner is not the point.  Only the mutual economic agreement is. 

Sexual favors are by no means independent of the unwritten marriage contract.  The old rules no longer apply, and intercourse is now a negotiated affair.  Too much or too little demand from either husband or wife can disturb the balance of power, the social contract, the economic status quo. Negotiations over thermometer settings, clattering, taking out the dog, hairs in the sink, the toilet seat up or down are all part of the contract. 

D.H. Lawrence wrote most expressively and insightfully about sexual relationships.  He understood that they were micro-Darwinian in nature, matters of sexual dominance and submission which were stand-ins for the larger context of marriage or partnership.  He never advocated male dominance or female submission or the opposite; but insisted that unless this dynamic were settled, the affair would end without satisfaction. 

 

Yet even if this equation is solved, there must still be limits to the extent of domination.  That must be negotiated, for excess, particularly if it is constant, will destroy the social and economic contract established. 

Henrik Ibsen wrote extensively about will.  A Nietzschean in creative spirit, his plays are about the expression of will as a validation of human identity.  Hedda Gabler, Rebekka West, and Hilde Wangel are all women for whom, a la Nietzsche, such expression is the essence of their existence.  There is no reason other than pure will that Hilde urges the Master Builder to climb to the top of the tower to assuredly fall to his death, nor Rebekka's calculated manipulation of the weak credulous Rosmer; or Hedda Gabler's willful destruction of her former lover and attempts to do so with her husband.  She commits suicide as a final act of will. 

 

Marriage is the place where the expression of will finds its most fertile environment.  As the playwright Edward Albee has said, 'Marriage is the crucible of maturity'.  Within its impenetrable confines the ambitions, energies, and will of each partner must inevitably clash and some accommodation reached - a settlement which will lead to maturity. 

Properly negotiated, this chance alliance of two distinctly different individuals, can provide for reproduction, mutual care, comfort, and support.  What's love got to do with it?  Like Shakespeare's plays, it doesn't matter who wrote them.  They are works of genius.  Whether love actually exists as a separate, higher order of human interaction, or a construct to assure the longevity of an economic partnership, matters not. 

In Praise Of The Outrageous, The Untamed, And The Incorrect - Life Would Be A Thudding Bore Without Them

Lively Markham had been brought up to be a temperate, obedient, respectful, and dutiful girl, and for most of her childhood she was indeed.  A model student, prayerful churchgoer, enthusiastic volunteer, and mother's helper.  Until early adolescence when it seemed someone had flipped a switch, turned this girl of manners and rectitude into a model of intemperance, exaggeration, and downright outrageous behavior.  

 

In a short time she became the pariah of the class, a girl who wore plaid and engineer boots, décolleté, rhinestone, and lace gloves, who sat with her legs apart, trash talked and just by her presence offended.  The status quo, especially among young teenage girls, was nothing to take lightly.  

'What happened?', asked her parents who had marked early on for a career in law or medicine, a good marriage and bright, pretty blonde children.  'What did we miss?', they asked each other, but neither could come up with a reasonable answer. 

'Perhaps it is Great Uncle Harry's genes - you know, the ones that came down through your mother's side of the family', suggested Lively's father, although this line of reasoning, so often pulled out when arguments got desperate, was a dangerous one; but this time his wife didn't object, so befuddled was she over the sudden volte face of their perfect young daughter. 

In and out of trouble, called before the Principal and Monseigneur Brophy whose priests had told him, only barely hiding Lively's true identity. that the girl was inventing the most salaciously sexual arabesques in the confessional, none of which or at least only a bare fraction of which could possibly be true. One priest in particular, Father Billings, admitted he had sought pastoral counselling for the immoral and sinful thoughts elicited by the young girl.

She slouched, chewed tobacco, swore like a trooper, and worst of all espoused the most disturbing political ideas.  Hers, according to one teacher, was what he called 'the Genghis Khan' approach to history.  While he and others in the uniformly progressive school taught a more moral-based curriculum - that colonialism, European monarchy, and the rule of the Hapsburgs were unfortunate bumps in history's gradual, progressive journey to a better world - Lively was a champion of Nietzsche, Wagner,  and neo-Darwinian survivalist supremacism. 

Her views on environmentalism were especially noxious.  Whether or not the climate was warming was irrelevant, she said.  Man is an integral, irrevocable piece of the environment, done to as much as done by, a small bit of matter in a perennially changing universe.  Why fuss?

And when it came to other progressive issues, she was just as dismissive.  'A cock and bull' story, she wrote in a paper on sexual inclusivity. 'Pure nonsense.  A distortion that belies credibility.  A fantastical imagining.  An impossibility'.  Marked 'See me' by her social studies teacher, the paper suggested a troubled girl, and when in conference it was delicately asked whether the girl was questioning her own sexuality'. 

'Bullshit', Lively said as she looked around the room, festooned with rainbow flags, Venn diagrams of sexual interchangeability, and roughly sculpted head of an African prince claimed by Letitia Washington to be her Togolese ancestor.  'Bullshit', Lively repeated and got up to go. 

'Now wait just one minute, young lady', said the miffed and nonplussed Ms. Hartley who proceeded to lecture the young girl on her ideas, her language, and what was becoming a very, very offensive attitude. 'Maybe Mr. Parfry lets you off the hook, but not I'.  Charles Parfry was cut from the same cloth as the young Markham girl, a rumbling, mischievous man who had chosen the wrong profession given his wicked attitude, but who had few other places to turn given sunken costs and limited opportunities. 

'This school cannot tolerate your behavior any longer', Amanda Hartley said to Lively, her face in hers, wagging her finger in remonstrance, 'and unless some significant changes are made around here, you may well have to find other venues for your intolerance'. 

Now, Lively was a very smart girl, and the very best colleges and universities vied for her interest.  Although she was white and straight, Harvard bent the rules and jiggered the school's admission policy (just this once) to accommodate her.  

Harvard was not what she thought.  On her first day on campus there were demonstrations for the Palestinian cause.  The Palestinians??? Are you crazy, she shouted at the speaker, and followed with a stream of hateful invectives usually not heard on the uniformly progressive campus, tarring and feathering 'the saints of the desert', dismissing their cause as ill-conceived, anti-historical malarkey.  Wrestled down by the bitches of Mather House and dunned out of the Yard by a thousand hectoring, chanting students, Lively, bruised but energized got roaring drunk at the Grafton Pub, and spewed bile all over the dark Cambridge streets. 

The Devil in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov appears to Ivan in a fevered dream and laughs at Ivan's pompous self-assured philosophical naivete.  I am a vaudevillian, the Devil says, and without me the world would be nothing but churchgoing and Sunday dinners, a perfectly thudding bore.  I am who stirs the pot, who adds the spice, who is responsible for miscreants, reprobates, and cheaters. I am who makes life interesting.

 

Of course Dostoevsky was right, and Shakespeare whose works have no heroes, only the most fabulous villains.  Tamora, Richard III, Goneril, Regan, Iago, and Dionyza are not just accidental foils for a principled, moral playwright.  They are the characters which make the perpetual motion Grand Mechanism, as critic Jan Kott has called it, go round.  

If one were to lay all Shakespeare's Histories down in chronological order, one might be surprised at the repetitive expressions of human nature - avarice, jealousy, ambition, hate, guile, chicanery... the list is endless.  Yet he finds a way in each and every one of these devilish characters to make the turning of the wheel endlessly fascinating. 

Lively was by no means evil.  She only admired evil men - or rather that natural human impulse that defies the artificial notions of rectitude, propriety, and civil obedience. Nietzsche had it right in one - only the expression of pure will validates the individual.  The timid, the reserved, the hesitantly moral, are the herd over which the Übermensch rides 

 

In this age of sanctimony, correctness, and invented commonality, the outrageous is in short supply.  Not only is the bombast, braggadocio, and exaggeration of outsized characters very rare indeed, it is hated by the run of the mill - the ordinary, the unremarkable claimants to a treacly utopian future. Over-reachers, says Nietzsche, are 'beyond good and evil'.  They are expected, natural expressions of the most hardwired - and indispensable - force of human nature. Try as one might, they will always pop up when least expected. 

Lively loved her life, the aggression, the contentiousness, the sheer chutzpah of in-your-face honesty.  She was one of a kind - brilliant, savagely honest, and remarkable.  She was Shakespeare's shrew but never tamed, always loud but never stupid.  A woman for all seasons.