Satirical Denouncements of the Wicked Americans and We Anti-Matriarchalists

By Loren Berengere

Satire does not reason; it batters into submission. Thus, its first purpose is realized: to overcome an unwillingness to criticize the very subjects a brainwashed populace has deemed its most sacred cows. Satire is kaleidoscopic and disjunctive: it hangs a series of moral portraits on the wall and forces us to look at them. The splendor, squalor, and complexity of the American scene and the witty, high-spirited caricature of modern philosophical schools were never more vividly presented than by Americas first vinegary satirist.Volume Two of We Anti-Matriarchalists presages the crisis toward which our civilization is moving.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 11, 2010
• ISBN: 9781450013772

Loren Berengere

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Copyright © 2010 by Loren Berengere.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2009913429

ISBN: Softcover    978-1-4500-1375-8

ISBN: Hardcover  978-1-4500-1376-5

ISBN: E-book       978-1-4500-1377-2

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Contents

Volume One: Satirical Denouncements of the Wicked Americans

Part One: The Sixteen Satires

Prologue: Entrechat of an Epithet Hurler

Propylon: Satura Fantasia

Program: Why I Write Satire

Satire One: The American-Africans

Satire Two: The San Franciscans

Satire Three: The Media Filth Machine

Satire Four: The New Mexicans

Satire Five: The New Cowboys

Satire Six: The Texas Rich

Satire Seven: The Homosexuals

Satire Eight: The Hollywood Glitterati

Satire Nine: The American Woman

Satire Ten: The American Writers

Satire Eleven: The Shrill Viragoes

Satire Twelve: The Right Wing Looneytunes

Satire Thirteen: The Lawyers

Satire Fourteen: The Cyberserfs

Satire Fifteen: The Hotelkeepers

Satire Sixteen: The Truckers

Part Two: Satirical Pastels

Part Three: Sale of the Philosophers

Part Four: Dialogues of the Dead

Part Five: A Symposium of Professors

Part Six: The Schoolfishers

Volume Two: We Anti-Matriarchalists

Foreword

A Disclaimer

An Annotation for Lotus Eaters

Some Rough Notes on the Hidden Mission of the United States in Western History

Midnight Polemics on Midday Impressions

laudant illa, sed ista legunt

Berengere, Juvenalissimo

Caveat Lector

The satirical idiom is slang. Put the book of satire down now if you are offended by slang: satire won’t blame you. You’ll even find a few bad English words and phrases here. I can only say that the satirist, like the ancient Greek Cynic, his kid brother, lives free of many, many things . . .

Dedication

Quintilian knew that a model existed for Roman satire, but refused to acknowledge it. Roman satire took a Greek model. The Greek satirists were hornet-men. Even Socrates was a kind of bee. No one, absolutely no one, could sting like an Archilochus, a Hipponax. The Cynics had stingers in their tails.—I say that these Greeks partook of an originary satirical spirit, a spirit of hard satire. And this was possible because they were hard men, hardened by circumstances. To be blunt: since Chaucer, English satire has been soft satire, a dilution of Roman vinegar. Why? Because the English satirists were soft men, that is why. Those purporting to imitate Juvenal—the perfect exemplar of hard satire, satire’s true spirit—only fool themselves. I, singlehandedly, introduced vinegary satire into the English language. It is simply pitiful when a manicured money-grabber like Twain writes something hokey and pokey;—and calls that satire. Satire stings hard; it bites hard. Satire is the diamond genre. What is hardness? Satirical hardness comes into the world through disgust.—Suffice it to say that satire is not comedy. Comedy does not care for truth. Satire not only cares for truth, it finds the truth;—and tells it. Consequently, I dedicate these satires to satire itself.

Volume One

Satirical Denouncements

of the Wicked Americans

The Sixteen Satires

Entrechat of an Epithet Hurler

I neither quaffed from the polluted spring once made holy by winged Pegasus’ hoof, nor courted gewgaw critics, nor sold my soul for the royalties made possible by reviews on idiots’ computers; furthermore, I do not recall smoking shamans’ herb on modern Parnassus so as to emerge an instant success. Pseudo-Heliconians and muddied Pirene I leave to sex-addicts who have their genitalia licked by the literary journals. It’s as an insurgent, forever plotting, a lawbreaker on the run, that I hang my Hipponaxian pasquinades on the wall. Who taught the modern storyteller how to weave, the essayist to think, the parrot the art of imitating human speech? It was that master of expertise, that maker of writers’ itch: the belly. Just let the prospect of a full belly gleam and you’ll witness a covey of chattering magpies bathing in the nag’s profaned Corinthian stream.

Satura Fantasia

Why I Write Satire

Who is so tolerant of American injustice, who so hardened, that he wouldn’t itch for satire’s epee when, never up on the platform himself, he’s inflicted with the noise of another tribad, gangster-mack, Super Hebrew, baritone-tongued Radhakrishnanite, frowning imam, and grandson of a Viet Cong? Isn’t it enough that I’m suffocated by Pynchon’s heap of words? Must I stomach another round of Maya Angelou mumboing in the front room of every Schwarzenegger barbeque, witness the newsworthy commotion that sees Maria Shriver pass out on the floor and Caroline Kennedy tap into the Empyrean when that pitiful mastodon reaches her first peroration? another onset of delirium tremens when that self-flagellating Leftist throws her higgledy-piggledy muddle at me on inauguration day and calls that poetry? (—Nietzsche is correct: poets cannot fill souls any longer.—)—No? Still not enough when that radio muleteer, slippery as owl shit, rakes in $30,000 an hour for raving about his micro-penis (—how else could his brain be so inflated?—), driving out all hope for reflection with his nil admirari, killing the spirit in man? What about that shiny Kenyan, knee high to a field nigger, anointed with fresh oil, his gaunt shoulders hitched to Tyrian purple, airing a sapphire ring, that small, ephebic head hosting a heavy crown? Tell me: who could endure such sparkle and canker cheek by jowl? What scribbler worth his stones could refrain from casting his lot with great Juvenal, wild and breezy Lucilius, and vindictive old Varro who, though reconciled to Caesar, tossed in indignatio’s sultry bed? Wouldn’t you want to cram whole notebooks with feverish invective when you hear one more silver-spoon-in-his mouth politician give a log cabin speech? Screw manners! I’ll readily confess that when I stand at the corner and see another illegal hormiga, accordion whining, whoosh by in a Bugati, a Ferrari, a Bear-flagged yellow Rolls barreling up the Waldo Grade for fog-shrouded Marin I want to scream! And if I saw the hijo in dim San Quentin, jutting out ominously into the jostling bay, I’d feel no better; would you? Anger is not supposed to well inside when that claque of broadcast swine any sober ancient Greek would recognize as bottomfeeding rhetors who claim wisdom goes with material gain;—when the people are intimidated by those boffos? These crimes! Shouldn’t I take a long look at them, thrusting the Tivolian lamp in your faces the way the rummy Cynic once went searching for an honest man? Look: it makes me want to puke when I see the way we’ve turned that lamb-faced swell of a Southern preacher into a veritable god! That oyster gumbo I enjoyed comes swimming up my throat when he bleats: I only want to do God’s will! No, that’s a freedom-riding blasphemy; you want to do Frantz Fanon’s will, Leopold Senghor’s will! (—Those oysters were caught in New Orleans; maybe that’s the reason they stain the floor.—) Are not such themes well worthy of Juvenal’s pen? Why should I hold back from flailing our Untouchables? American history can be divided into two halves: the front and the back of a Memphis bus. But will this suffice when Navy Seabees build Fun Barracks for the Marines (—The old Stoicism, those toffs of attorneys say, discriminates against women.—) and cut gloryholes in the walls? (—Once unisex bathrooms are mandated by our glorious Constitution, those squirrels at our Pentagon say, Can we discriminate against fellatio?—) When one gets command of an army or a fleet because he shines? Just watch him salute white-gloved, snapping to like some machine. Is he saluting our flag or some other flag? He knows promotion springs not from merit, but from threats of discrimination litigation, whatever flag it turns out to be; he knows he’s incompetent; he also knows that when a nation’s fixated on righting past wrongs it forfeits its future. No, the moral law is set in stone; if you play with fire you will get burned, this no matter what our periwigged dolts at the Harvard Law School say. It’s one long continuous process of degeneration anyway.—What? You feel you lack the talent to write satire? Don’t be shilly-shally: indignation is the mother of le mot. Narrative’s remote; satire’s immediate. You must burrow down to the dirt of private and social fact. You were the first one chosen for childhood games? Your belly’s never rumbled? Your ego’s never been macheted? Never once sniffed the fur of a woman you know you can’t have? Then don’t pick up this sword: the Muse will punish the one she thinks is a cad. On the other hand, if you’re really cut out for such a polemical spree, approach Calliope with a winsome smile, act like she’s lucky to have caught your youthful eye, and she just may reward you. Believe me, the time is right! Since Deucalion moored his ship on a mountain peak, since black-haired Eve came out of the bushes naked, has there ever been so rich a crop of vices? When has greed’s purse yawned wider? Consumerism, gadgetry, faddism, junk information, the soulless stampede to turn man into a thing;—these are the father of modern democracy, not J. J. Rousseau. When was gambling more frantic than it is today? Even the wild Indians must have their revenge. Go ask any cabbie in Vegas what’s wrong with his town. Gaming breeds cynicism and lack of trust; yet where’s the immorality in spurning the old American instincts when the buffalo are all gone?—All human endeavors make the mixed mash of my satires. The whole business presupposes decline: never has levity hovered so close to philosophy and tragedy. Comedy’s done in a vacuum; there is no solemn moral call: laughter’s an end in itself. But Erasmus influenced the course of events; the Christian polemicists went to Juvenal’s fire to warm their fervent hands. Cicero and Caesar tipped their hats to Ennius and Varro; Lucilius told the great how to behave at Rome. The satirist first sees, then depicts. The elements of narrative he will not reject, but essay he always spurns. He’ll do philosophy in honor of old Menippus, but just as a scout cannot see in a fog, its problems are far from his art: the real is the present situation, truth is here and now.—So ponder these things in your mind. Meanwhile, my fellow satirists, hoist your sails, unsheathe your Juvenalian swords! For this is the dark dawning of the zenith of vice: it’s not enough, therefore, to see what you can get away with saying against those whose bones are covered by the Latin and the Flaminian Roads.

The American-Africans

"Kwame, who can count up the rewards of a distinguished career in civil rights? The emoluments; the glory and honor; the hauteur of the untouchable who sashays down hallowed Congressional halls for a personal colloquy with the likes of Mfume, Hountondji, Oruka, or some Mumbo from Motown; the jive of these NAACP lawyers rapping out yet another ingratiating amicus curiae for the old dodderers’ clerks on the court to rubber stamp; not to speak of the special status conferred on one from just being a brother—; it’s well worth your time, son, to get in Tuskegee or Morehouse, study hard, and work on developing a Cyclopic, jaundiced eye. If you do well serving the cause the sky’s the limit, there’s nothing you’ll hope for, you’ll hobnob with Nabobs and, like me, eat two steaks instead of one. Oh, if I were only young again! I’d paint my face beige and walk through the Gates of Special Privilege—no more a dark nigger—an overconfident, fired-up recruit ready for battle. Make no mistake: a lot has changed and nothing has changed: there’s still hordes of hooded Whitefolk down in Alabama and even right here in Seattle who don’t like us. Looka here: you got to learn about yoh roots, son; you got to get some pride whooped up! Learn to honor where you came from. Learn your Negritude: you possess unique abilities Whitefolk wish for; next time you’re naked, go find a full-length mirror and give yourself a good long look. Whitefolk wish for a root like that, and it’s proof, one more proof, that your ancestors were the Pharaohs! Whitefolk still tell us we were chunking spears and chewing on tree bark south of the Sahara; no, no, we were reared back on a royal barge floating down the River Nile! Be proud of what you got, and know this: Whitefolk be wondering about and worrying about yoh penis more than you be worrying about it. Miss Toni Morrison said that. So study hard, Kwame, and stay away from those drugs; the biggest drug, son, is to know where we came from and who we are; if you don’t believe we’re the harvest wonderful of the whole human race, then forswear our sacred status, renounce Africa, Marcus Garvey, Benjamin Elijah Mays, Fanon, Du Bois, Olaudah, and all the rest. Renounce Bishop Turner’s dream of a black-skin God, renounce Martin King’s Dream and you ain’t got no dream: you’ll be like Willy and Tommy flipping somebody’s burgers and mopping some White man’s flo!—And if you should someday choose to go to Congress you’ll find a junta of us there, brothers and sisters together serving Africa with unexampled Negro pride. Quick, savage ripostes; unlimited nerve; more chips on our shoulders than a math teacher can count and, above all, the ability to holler louder than anyone else;—these will be your Congressional characteristics, your balm in Gilead. And you’ll make every senator from Dixie fall in line, too! We know now what happens to the cracker who calls us what we don’t want to be called; keeping the peckerwoods in line is our raison d’être. If he offends the party line once we’ll arraign him before the Congressional Caucus for African Supremacy. They’ll be more shit fall than Whitie can ever clean up. Learn the rules, Kwame; then see to it that every soul obeys them but you.—The key to living in America, for us, is in finding the right name. Once upon a time, we were colored. Then some forward-looking brother who cared about his people burned Watts. Burn, baby, burn! Brother H. Rap Brown said, and next thing you know, we were Afro-American. That’s close, but the timing wasn’t there. We suffered, we persevered; and then the big one hit:—Black! We were Black; and as any fool can see, Black is beautiful. This is how we arrived at that Kwame . . . and you must never forget. In the beginning, Whitey said we were ugly. We went on in the kitchen—where Mama was frying chicken—and took a look at ourselves: we leaned over the sink that was full of Mama’s dirty dishwater. And we said to ourselves, ‘Uh, uh, uh, we are ugly!’ But one day we went back into Mama’s kitchen; we drained that dirty dishwater out and put in clean, fresh water instead. We leaned over the sink, looked at ourselves, and exclaimed, ‘All along it was that dirty dishwater that was ugly and we were beautiful!’ Let’s say it loud; we’re Black and we’re proud! Let’s say it right; we don’t wanna be White! Now let me tell ya what happened next: After a long time of being Black, after suffering through the benign neglect of the Reagan years, after seeing all the millions of dollars Reagan’s wife spent on those dresses—when she should have worn a pair of blue jeans and donated those millions to the ghetto, to us—; after all the neglect, what happens? We become African-Americans, that is what happens! And this most appropriate name is there to refute one direct lie of the White man: that we’re just niggers and therefore we ain’t got no culture. Then, Kwame, three significant things happened to put us on the map: Bill Clinton, O. J. Simpson, and Rocking Rodney!"

—Rocking Rodney? Who might he be?—

"How soon you forget, son! I’m speaking of Rodney King . . . the other King! The point is to scare the hell out of Whitefolk, and what better way to do that than to burn LA? It’s just like our divine ancestors: every now and then they’d decide it’s time for a good burning and set grass fires all around everywhere to burn the woods—singe it good, you know what I’m talking about, boy?—; that would tell the skunks, wolves, and foxes who’s boss. It got to be done. And Brother O. J. was our role model. He gave us visibility, and as Ralph Ellison says, that’s what counts. Bill Clinton was like Moses, a kind of Mumbo-Moses. So do you see, Kwame, how it’s all in the name?—And speaking of names . . . Once you get up to Capitol Hill, be sure and find yourself a good intimidating name; . . . one like Carol Mosely Braun, Zora Neale Hurston, Stephanie Tubbs Jones, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Sheila Jackson Lee, or Helen Bethune Jamison Washington Rogers Hogg. You must get you a souped-up name; because if you don’t intimidate the hell out of people, they’ll see you as just another nigger, and then where will you be? So, as soon as you get yourself a feisty name, you must go up and introduce yourself to the big wonderful brother working on getting us paid. It’s not necessarily the case that everybody owes us a living, but it certainly is the case that everybody owes us a regular paycheck. Looka here, Kwame: we built the White House, Monticello, Wall Street, the House of Seven Gables; hell, we built it all! We picked the cotton Betsy Ross used to sew the flag! We made the boots Mr. Lincoln put on his feet! We hewed the canoe that floated down the Delaware! And you know who planted that cherry tree George Washington cut down? We did, boy, and don’t you ever forget it! We rolled the tobacco into Ulysses Grant’s cigars! We pressed Robert E. Lee’s white uniform, cobbled his boots, and polished his sword! We cut the timber that made Old Ironsides float! Mr. Jefferson’s wines were made from the grapes we crushed with our bare black feet! I’ve even been told that it was a poor unknown Negro like me who curled Custer’s hair and dyed it red! And you tell me we ain’t got no money coming for all that? We damned sho do!"—But for many years now the Nile has emptied its sewage into our native Mississippi. I see Bunker Hill. You see Pyramids. Nilotic lingo, nose rings, prayer rugs: the Voodoo Story Tree has become America’s only mythology. Nations and individuals always get what they deserve. Why should I care? Why? And you! How can you see the yawning chinks and rents in our wall? All you want to do is take the money and run. What ethos has there ever been but to make a quick pile? So ride, ride, ride down the moonless sable river, taking no thought for the morrow and doing nothing to fend off the Stygian wave. When the miasma has been accumulating for so many years, how can you blame the thunderbolt when it strikes? Drive, drive with your sepia horses the gold-bestrewn chariot that is doomed!—Your average White boy, every hick in Georgia and cowbell Texas, every Tennessee tiddlywink and pseudo-redneck in Armpit, California;—these rap, bap, bop, du-wop and bebop in their shiny African chilibowls, tennis shoes unlaced, filthy toesack jeans; but don’t be judgmental, dear citizens, if you’re going to Gomorrah you just as well slouch there. Judgmental has become the sin of sins thanks to the shamming of hippo-bottomed Oprah Winfrey;—when the likes of that gets accepted as our educator—and not to pass over his brutality, our fat simpleton Rush Limbaugh, another journalist—; when these pigs oink their way into American morals, tell me: what could the word moral possibly mean?—Yet things may turn around, for look who’s blowing in; true, true enough, these renegade Mexicans have family values, don’t they? So hold your lip—don’t even think wrong thoughts about sending them back—; they’re here to do the jobs we won’t do, correct? So if your trade is construction, landscaping, house painting, or pool scrubbing you just as well make a beeline for Canada like the hippies who ran from the draft. What can you do in America? I’m with you: I can’t tell a lie, praise a silly book, prefer a weakling’s scrawny neck to Hercules’, or fall in love with the new just because it’s new. Is it worth nothing that my infancy, nourished by unpolluted blithe air and the propinquity of so many of the last great souls, promenaded like a king down Route 66? And besides, who are you to think proscribed thoughts about people of color? You should be ashamed; do you, after all, have the cash to defend an anti-discrimination suit against a caballero from Oaxaca? A hoto from Juarez? Confess it: there’s no place for America the Exception anymore; not when some Mwanda’s caprice hoodoos the house. When he drips into the willing ear a drop or two of poison; when he carries in him anyone you want: Greek rhetorician, sorcerer, acrobat, community organizer, down-and-out millionaire, poseur, pimp, preacher, political insider, Jew hater, black Muslim, arbiter of taste, circus act, social engineer, impersonator, professional whiner, philosophaster, seducer, cry baby, censor, ham: when that shows up I’m exiled; I can only serve my besieged country by opposing it.—And besides, Momoh, what’s the use of your gaudy spotlights? What’s the advantage of being valued by your bloodline, of displaying the painted portraits of Southern preachers, organizers of street demonstrations, speakers at marches, and sanctimonious affirmative action attorneys who made it up to the Court? What’s to be gained from being able to boast of an ephebe in the Oval Office with its bright ceiling-high windows and laurelled marble floor, if under the noses of our Kennedy clan, the life you live is rotten? What’s the point, Mbiti, of those plaster busts of Nefertiti in your bedroom, Ptah-hotep in your hall, and Anton Amo on your patio if you gamble the night away with Kete, Wande, and Kwasi, your big fat belly full of skunk urine laced with hops and malted barley, if you don’t go to sleep until Lucifer rises, the very moment when the movers and shakers of the Republic, the Old Republic slowly strangled by you Mbiti, were hurrying out of their beds, the sky still bright with hope, the hope poisoned by you Momoh in the name of your hope! You cheer your new leader like the people do when Osiris has been found, but the god of this country, you who have hoodooed a whole people out of its soul, is not resurrected: he is dead. You’ve snatched away the old morals with curving talons and exploited the imputation of racism to drum in your conception of the cosmos. Democracy—read your Plato, Mbiti—is a provisional form of government. Up ahead: the Comintern. What good is it to me that you’ve managed to forge for yourself a new batch of False Decretals and a pompous, pompously Africanized avatar of the Donation of Constantine? Why not have Harriet Jacobs and Mary Seacole sign the Declaration? (—Or Pushkin’s Gannibal—) Get Phillis Wheatley to pen the Federalist Papers. Look: if Alex Hamilton’s a racist, bemoaning the people as the Great Beast, then make Frederick Douglass found Wall Street, his German woman by his side, set up the Bank of New York, and shoot at Aaron Burr. Who’s to stop you? Granted, you do this in the light of the moon—like you’re stealing watermelons—but the Sun still sees you, though he’s busy working on the other side of the earth. Go ahead and make Martin Luther King with his horrid groans the father of your country. Let those who do not recognize his groans as beautiful music be condemned as public enemies, forever excluded and cast out, pining for greasy cheeseburgers in Fun Town. Tell me, tell me, how will your plaster gods take care of a trembling Rome when the Cimbri and Teutones swagger and rage? Let us deal with the judicial advantages of people of color. New boons for Coloredfolk, to be sure, but these laws are written in gleaming marble, not sandstone. On the criminal side of the court, the trusty race card’s a sure defense that’s never failed. That straw-chewing lawman—Sheriff Bull Conner—may sport an intimidating paunch—it fits inside that starchy white shirt like a peg fits a hole—but he’ll be taken down a peg if he doesn’t tip his Stetson to the local Black Caucus, telling the politically-active pastor he knows something when he doesn’t. Today, it’s all a case of mind over matter: The Caucus don’t mind, and he don’t matter. Then, on the civil side of the court, assume the plaintiff cannot make out a prima facie case; if the same plaintiff gets called a nigger, the bar is lowered, the judge is all smiles as the jury returns with cold cash in compensatories and gold bars in punitives. The blind goddess has been stripped of her blinders; her gold-trimmed beloved Blackstone—poor old Wigmore gaping bug-eyed in the corner—has been replaced by the texts of Negritude. By the same token, if Whitey gets bullied and billied by the badge, who’ll represent his interests in court? When his teeth are knocked out, what will he do? Get a hearing before the legislature? Maybe he’ll loiter for days and nights around the Governor’s Mansion; he’ll holler through the fence, Hey, So-and-So! Got a minute? So you see we’re not on an equal footing though the highest god in the Pantheon of Judicature is our revered equal protection clause. If you’re the cop who slured this blemishless criminal defendant who killed his wife, if you’re the one who used the dreaded n-word, the defense attorneys will have a field day; there’s only one humane conclusion: every bit of evidence against the murderer’s a rank fabrication Then, the prosecution must rehabilitate the witness’s befouled credibility:—Are you a fascist? A supremacist? Do you stalk through Selma in a funny-looking white get-up? Did you vote for the old White man in 2008? I might as well get down. How do you feel about change? Do you like Brother Malcolm? Elijah Muhammed? Did Bobby Seale’s chain clanking get on your nerves? Do you believe in the solidarity of the Black Panther Party? Are you pleased with Angela Davis’ woolly balloon? Do you fast and pray on Juneteenth? Do you read Ebony? Jet? Jive? Hep? Should Sheila Jackson Lee speak at seven funerals a day or should she cut it down to five? When do you expect to join the NAACP? Does Jesse Jackson’s passionate son turn your stomach? Do you make an annual pilgrimage to the Ebenezer Baptist Church? Should Dr. King be on Mt. Rushmore? Stokley Carmichael? Huey Newton?—Now here’s Momoh again, demanding his pound of flesh. What’s going on? Why must I always have to listen to your wails? Let’s end this excess; this groaning’s too much for me. If you don’t have something running at least once every six months then your humanity’s being contested, a long-tailed demon’s poking sharp sticks at you—a White demon, to be sure—and you must fight! For God’s sake, man, don’t you have a lick of sense? You can hardly put up with the tiniest, most miniscule crumb of inconvenience, however trivial. You’re always blazing with your guts in a ferment over some molehill you’ve turned into a Kilimanjaro. Listen here: you’re not a young buck any longer. Have you learned nothing from your experience of the world? Tell me, then; tell me the alleged facts of this latest affliction? Will I be surprised? Will your eloquent raving cause me any fear? And what of the people? Aren’t you afraid? Aren’t you afraid we’ll all wake up one morning and see you for who, for what you really are? Good people, Momoh, put up with the unpleasant things of life. The better part of happiness is not to resist the yoke. I’ve heard you say that the root cause of all your burdens is economic, that economic justice, not merely political emancipation, is your goal. A lie, Momoh; you are deceiving yourself and your brothers. Put hunks of diamonds on every finger and toe; lavish upon your heart all the things it could possibly desire, and the beating of your cold heart would always spell discontent. Add to your already sizeable bank account all the gold in the Seven Cities of Cibola, and you’d still feel violated at every turn, traduced by grim White faces and dimly imagined Caucasian conspiracies. You holler the loudest because this makes a decadent like you feel alive. Where is your happiness? It lies in the success by which you’ve convinced yourself that your original ancestors had narrow noses and thin lips, designed the Pyramids, invented Numbers, Words, and Thoughts, and forced the Jews to make bricks without straw. Where will it all end, Momoh? Your real ancestors, believe me, will tremble when they see your fledgling wings melt in the Sun. Come to your senses, my man! What a sight it’ll be when you go splash in the sea! Will that be your last act? The end of all your spectacles? Very well, then; what’s your newest beef? What makes you justiciable? Aha! The legists are wagging their learned heads; do you really have a case? The defendant, you say, willfully and with racism aforethought pointed at your person her dirtiest look. This act, coupled with the fact in evidence that the defendant, being a White woman who did not smile at you and who did not in any way seem smitten by your exotic looks and princely Nubian demeanor—as the complaint alleges—was prejudicially encumbered by a certain sweatshirt across the front of which the following was bigotrously emblazoned: Long Live the Confederacy. The juxtaposition of these facts, plaintiff strenuously contends, proves the tort of Intentional Infliction of Ethnic Distress. Oh, Momoh, Momoh! What a precious creature you think you are! Du Bois, a whole century before Black men left off cutting slits in their brogans so their feet could get air, back when the letter R was still pronounced aura, and four solit quotas made up one dollar, affirms on every page that his people are the cream of the crop, but this is getting kind of ridiculous. Who do you think you are, man? Why are you so extraordinary? Let’s level; let’s get down. I’d like to get some closure; how about you? Your attorneys complain that your manhood’s contested on a daily basis, and conclude that’s what racism is; Momoh, who are you fooling? You’ve got a sweet-smelling blonde on your arm with breasts the size of muskmelons and three more lolling around moonstruck in your new Coupe Deville and your manhood’s being contested? Momoh, Momoh, you must be calling the cats. You’ve gone daft. You’re crazy as hell. You’ve simply got to come down from that tree. Go ahead, go ahead, stand there and scream like a mountain lion, threaten everyone, throw your weight around, do a jig on the table, call me a racist, and redefine eloquence with your delusions and shams. I’ll still say, What you togg’n bout? I give up, are you the son of a golden-feathered hen and we little common white chicks are hatched from cursed eggs? Do you have the voice of Stentor and all we can do is go peep-peep? Get real for once: the facts alleged in your complaint are run of the mill; you’re using our legal system as a pawn. You’ve turned the Constitution into a streetwalker. Aren’t you boiling over for no good reason? How much water must run under your bridge before everything will be OK? Will you drain the oceans? Where’s your sense of shame? You’re