by
Tom Wolfe
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"You come up here now, after all this time, and you tell me there are people with prison records on the board of directors of the Little Shepherd Day Care Center. You inform me of that fact."
"I'm not telling you, Reverend Bacon," said Fiske. "That's what the Human Resources Administration is telling us both."
"I want to tell you something. I want to remind you of something you told me. Who do we want to run the Little Shepherd Day Care Center? Do you remember? Do we want your Wellesley girls and your Vassar girls coming up here to take care of the children of Harlem? Do we want your social benefactors? Do we want your licensed civil-service bureaucrats? Your lifers from City Hall? Is that what we want? Is that what we want?"
Fiske felt compelled to answer. Obediently as a first-grader, he said, "No."
"No," said Reverend Bacon approvingly, "that is not what we want. What do we want? We want the people of Harlem looking after the children of Harlem. We're going to draw our strength . . . our strength . . . from our people and our own streets. I told you that a long time ago, in the earliest days. Do you remember? Do you remember that?"
"Yes," said Fiske, feeling more juvenile by the minute, and more helpless in the face of that steady gaze.
"Yes. Our own streets. Now, a young man grows up on the streets of Harlem, the chances are the police have a sheet on that young man. You understand? They have a sheet on that young man. I'm talking about a police record. So if you're saying to everybody who's ever been in jail and everybody coming out of jail and everybody on parole, if you're saying, 'You can't participate in the rebirth of Harlem, because we gave up on you soon as you got a record' ... see ... then you are not talking about the rebirth of Harlem. You're talking about some make-believe place, some magic kingdom. You're fooling yourself. You're not looking for a radical solution. You're wanting to play the same old game, you're wanting to see the same old faces. You're wanting to practice the same old colonialism. You understand? You understand what I'm saying?"
lol
"None of it? How can that be?"
"This was seed money. We had to sow the seed. Some of it fell on fallow ground."
"Sow the seed? Reverend Bacon, surely you didn't advance these people their money before they did the work!"
"These are minority firms. People from the community. That was what we wanted. Am I not correct?"
"Yes. But surely you have not advanced --"
"These are not firms with your 'lines of credit,' your 'computerized inventories,' your 'pre-staggered cash flows,' your 'convertible asset management,' your 'capital-sensitive liquidity ratios,' and all that. These are not firms with factors to go to, like they have in the garment industry, when bad luck knocks on the door with your 'unavoidable delays' . . . see . . . These are firms founded by people in the community. These are the tender shoots that sprout up from the seeds we sowyou, me, the Episcopal Church, the Gates of the Kingdom Church. Tender shoots . . . and you say, 'unavoidable delay.' That's not just a term, that's not just your red tapethat's a sentence of death. A sentence of death. That's saying 'Kindly drop dead.' So don't tell me I can just explain it to them. Unavoidable delay . . . Say, unavoidable death."
lmao
"Steam control. It's a capital investment. It's a very good one. You know what capital is? You think it's something you own, don't you. You think it's factories and machines and buildings and land and things you can sell and stocks and money and banks and corporations. You think it's something you own, because you always owned it. You owned all this land." He waved his arm back toward the bay window and the gloomy back yard and the three sycamore trees. "You owned all the land, and out there, out there in ... Kansas . . . and . . . Oklahoma . . . everybody just lined up, and they said, 'On the mark, get set, go!' and a whole lot of white people started running, and there was all this land, and all they had to do was get to it and stand on it, and they owned it, and their white skin was their deed of property ... see ... The red man, he was in the way, and he was eliminated. The yellow man, he could lay rails across it, but then he was shut up in Chinatown. And the black man, he was in chains the whole time anyway. And so you owned it all, and you still own it, and so you think capital is owning things. But you are mistaken. Capital is controlling things. Controlling things. You want land in Kansas? You want to exercise your white deed of property? First you got to control Kansas ... see ... Controlling things. I don't suppose you ever worked in a boiler room. I worked in a boiler room. People own the boilers, but that don't do 'em a bit of good unless they know how to control the steam ... see ... If you can't control ... the steam, then it's Powder Valley for you and your whole gang. If you ever see a steam boiler go out of control, then you see a whole lot of people running for their lives. And those people, they are not thinking about that boiler as a capital asset, they are not thinking about the return on their investment, they are not thinking about the escrow accounts and the audits and the prudent thing ... see ... They are saying, 'Great God almighty, I lost control,' and they are running for their lives. They're trying to save their very hides. [...] .Oh, conduct your audit! . . . But the time is coming when you will say: 'Thank God. Thank God! Thank God we entered the money on the books Reverend Bacon's way!' Because I'm the conservative, whether you know it or not. You don't know who's out there on those wild and hungry streets. I am your prudent broker on Judgment Day. Harlem, the Bronx, and Brooklyn, they're gonna blow, my friend, and on that day, how grateful you will be for your prudent broker . . . your prudent broker . . . who can control the steam. Oh yes. On that day, the owners of capital, how happy they will be to exchange what they own, how happy they will be to give up their very birt/irights, just to control that wild and hungry steam. No, you go on back down, and you say, 'Bishop, I've been uptown, and I'm here to tell you we made a good investment. We found a prudent broker. We're gonna occupy the high ground when it all comes down."
"Come to think of it," said Moody, "I never have seen a black waiter in a restaurant in New York, except for lunch counters. You really think Bacon is going to get anywhere?"
"Depends on what you mean by that."
"Well, what will happen?"
"I don't know," said Fiske, "but they want to be waiters at Leicester's about as much as you and I do. I kind of think they just might settle for a contribution to the Reverend Mr. Bacon's good works in Harlem, and then they'll move on to the next restaurant."
"Then it's just a payoff," said Moody.
"Well, that's the funny thing," said Fiske. "Things do change. I'm not sure he cares whether they change or not, but they change. Places he never heard of, and wouldn't care about if he had, they'll start hiring black waiters rather than wait for Buck and all those characters to turn up.
sooo cynical omg
Christ God! Scalping her must have been an undertaking! Had he been feeling better, Fallow would have paid a silent tribute to the extraordinary esthetique de I'abattoir that enabled these shameless devils, his employers, his compatriots, his fellow Englishmen, his fellow progeny of Shakespeare and Milton, to come up with things like this day after day. Just think of the fine sense of gutter syntax that inspired them to create a headline that was all verbs and objects, with the subject missing, the better to make you claw your way inside these smeary black pages to find out what children of evil were fiendish enough to complete the sentence! Just think of the maggot's perseverance that enabled some reporter to invade chez Perez and extract a picture of Granny that made you feel the bloody act in your fingertipsin your very shoulder joints! Just think of the anticlimax of "scalp Grandma" . . . "then rob her." The pointless brilliant anticlimax! Christ, if they'd had more room, they would have added, "then leave all the lights on in her kitchen."
lol
[...] Like more than one Englishman in New York, he looked upon Americans as hopeless children whom Providence had perversely provided with this great swollen fat fowl of a continent. Any way one chose to relieve them of their riches, short of violence, was sporting, if not morally justifiable, since they would only squander it in some tasteless and useless fashion, in any event.
"Yo ho ho," said Kramer.
The wagon train. "Yo-ohhhhhhh" was the cry of John Wayne, the hero and chief scout, signaling the pioneers to move the wagons. This was Indian country and bandit country, and it was time to put the wagons in a circle for the night. Anybody who thought he was going to be able to walk two blocks from Gibraltar to the parking lot after dark in the Four-four and drive peacefully home to Mom and Buddy and Sis was playing the game of life with half a deck.
Out on the sidewalk, Peter Fallow could see the cars and taxis speeding uptown on West Street. Christ God, how he longed to be able to crawl into a taxi and go to sleep until he reached Leicester's. No! What was he thinking? No Leicester's tonight; not a drop of alcohol in any form. Tonight he was going straight home. It was getting dark. He'd give anything for a taxi ... to curl up in a taxi and go to sleep and head straight home . . . But the ride would be nine or ten dollars, and he had less than seventy-five dollars to last him until payday, which was next week, and in New York seventy-five dollars was nothing, a mere sigh, a deep breath, a passing thought, a whim, a snap of the fingers. He kept looking at the front entrance to the City Light building, which was a dingy Moderne tower from the 1920s, hoping to spot some American from the newspaper with whom he could share a taxi. The trick was to find out where the American was heading and then to pick out some destination four or five blocks short of there and announce that as one's own destination. No American had the nerve to ask one to share the cost of the ride under those circumstances.
After a bit there emerged an American named Ken Goodrich, the City Light's director of marketing, whatever in God's name marketing was. Did he dare once more? He had already hitched rides with Goodrich twice in the past two months, and the second time Goodrich's delight over the opportunity to converse with an Englishman on the ride uptown had been considerably less intense; considerably. No, he did not dare. So he girded his loins for the eight-block walk to City Hall, where he could catch the Lexington Avenue subway.
Only the problem of dinner remained to be solved. Dinner at Leicester's, even without wine, was at least forty dollars per person. Fallow headed for the coin telephone on the corner. There was this Bob Bowles, the American magazine editor . . . It should work out . . . The skinny woman he lived with, Mona something, was very nearly unbearable, even when she wasn't talking. But everything in life had its price, didn't it?
He entered the booth and dropped a quarter in the slot. With luck he would be back inside of Leicester's within the hour, eating his favorite dish, the chicken paillard, which tasted especially good with red wine. He liked Vieux Galouches, a French wine that came in a bottle with an eccentric neck, the best.
god
Kramer didn't know how much of this to believe. He had once read an article in The Village Voice describing Bacon as a "street socialist," a black political activist who had arrived at his own theories about the shackles of capitalism and the strategies required to give black people their due. Kramer had no interest in left-wing politics, and neither did his father. Yet in their house, when he was growing up, the word socialist had religious overtones. It was like Zealot and Masada. There was something Jewish about it. No matter how wrongheaded a socialist might be, no matter how cruel and vindictive, he possessed somewhere in his soul a spark of the light of God, of Yahweh. Maybe Bacon's operation was extortion, and maybe it wasn't. Looked at one way, the entire history of the labor movement was extortion. What was a strike but extortion backed up by real or implied threat of violence? The labor movement had a religious aura in Kramer's house, too. The unions were a Masada uprising against the worst of the goyim. His father was a would-be capitalist, a servant of capitalists in actual fact, who had never belonged to a labor union in his life and felt infinitely superior to those who did. Yet one night Senator Barry Goldwater had been on TV promoting a right-to-work bill, and his father had started growling and cursing in a way that would have made Joe Hill and the Wobblies look like labor mediators. Yes, the labor movement was truly religious, like Judaism itself. It was one of those things you believed in for all mankind and didn't care about for a second in your own life. It was funny about religion . . . His father wrapped it around himself like a cape . . . This guy Bacon wrapped it around himself . . . Herbert wrapped it around himself . . . Herbert ... All at once Kramer saw a way to talk about his triumph.