The Mandingo Factor

by Jim Washburn

Do you pull U.S. money out of your pocket and ask, “What the fuck is this?”

Do you find yourself flipping off inanimate objects?

Do you forget you’re carrying a knife until you’re in line to get wanded at Downtown Disney?

Do you think there’s going to be a Republican “Mandingo” sex scandal?

If you answered yes to all the above, good. That means I’m not the only one.

On the money front, I can almost buy into the flat-birthers’ contention that there’s a plot afoot to make us accept a universal multi-national currency, the Amero, the Churro or whatever, and that one way of doing that is to make our own money so disagreeable that no one wants to touch it. What’s touted as anti-counterfeiting watermarks on our bills just makes them look like you left them in your madras sweatpants when you did the wash. The bills have gone through so many makeovers that someone could hand you virtually anything with a number and a white man on it, and you’d have to assume it’s money. It’s such crap that when I spied a folded $100 bill on the ground in a parking lot recently, I immediately thought “fake!” because it looked too damn clean, and I was right: it was some real estate investment firm’s sneaky flier.

Have you looked at a nickel lately? They’ve changed Jefferson to look like a square-jawed soap opera hunk. If you shift the coin in the light, though, he seems to grow fangs. I’ll wait while you go look.

There they are, don’t you agree, long, saber-tooth fangs, so rarely seen on our founding fathers previously? Wassup with that? Is it to discourage us from using cash? Is it some statement the artist snuck in on our vampiric economic system?

I don’t know, but I’ve been reflexively flipping off my change bowl recently, along with my cluttered clothes closet, my computer’s non-functioning CD burner and other items that really don’t care if I’m flipping them off or not. I’ve hardly ever flipped anything off, since Bush’s motorcade was always routed elsewhere. But there I go these days, three fingers on each hand curling back like Elvis’ lip-snarl, until it’s just the last man standing, being shook vigorously at the offending inanimacy. Wassup with that? I dunno, but I do seem to be enjoying it.

Give it a try. Maybe it’ll work for you, too.

I flipped off an entire vicinity last night, the one that vicinates around Disneyland. (I’m sorry, but if they’re going to keep changing money, I’m exercising the same license with words.) We were on the way to see Los Lobos, while the rest of the be-autoed world had apparently decided to drive around Disneyland’s gates for hours, like that’s as close to Autopia as they can afford to get.

Finally we turned onto the lane that led to Downtown Disney’s lots, only to find all cars eventually had to execute a U-turn back down the long lane and onto the street again with no parking in sight, like Disney’d decided to herd cars through the sort of blind-turn mazes they use for crowd lines in the park. A flipping of offness ensued.

We finally parked, which is an untold story in itself, unlike the Los Lobos story, which I’ll probably tell next week. Damn if they’re not the best band in the world.

It was on our way into the abominable House of Blues that I remembered I had a folding knife clipped to my back pocket. I couldn’t go back to the car—it was parked under the Matterhorn by then—and I didn’t want to throw the knife out, so I slipped it into my front pocket with my keys, thinking it would arouse less suspicion there when the metal detector wand went off. Plus, you can cloud men’s minds. No kidding. Though it causes a small tear in the fabric of reality, you can redirect the thoughts of others with your mind. I did so, and the guard was only concerned with the quarters—soon to be Quarteros—in my other pocket.

I need the knife for my work, in the course of which I sometimes have to cut someone a new asshole. (I’m lying: I’ve never so much as cut someone a new navel. I use the implement to open packaging, trim insulation off wires, cut detonator holes in C4 and other commonplace chores.) And because I possess the ability to cloud the minds of others, not to mention my own, my knife got to enjoy the Los Lobos show. It thought they were really sharp.

Sharper perhaps than Louisiana justice of the peace Keith Bardwell, who made news this week by refusing to marry a black man to a white woman. “I’m not a racist,” he declared. “I just don’t believe in mixing the races that way.” He claimed to be acting out of concern for their unborn children, who, being of mixed race, face more obstacles. He does have a point there: Name me even one person of mixed race who’s ever risen to any sort of position of influence or authority in this country.

Not content with having his foot in his mouth, Bardwell continued to shove his ass in there too, explaining, “I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home. I marry them. They use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else.”

A half-century after desegregation, this guy still thinks it’s a sign of how tolerant he is that he’s let blacks use his restroom. None of the stories I’ve read cite Bardwell’s age, but my guess is that he comes from that dying generation of Southern gentlemen who are so secure of their place in the world that they actually say what they think. How many more Americans actually think something similar about “race-mixing” and just aren’t saying it?

How about much of the Republican leadership making pilgrimages to conservative “Christian” Bob Jones University, where interracial dating was outlawed? That’s like going to a university where they wrestle snakes and speak in tongues in debate class, and acting like it’s normal. And it isn’t normal, or shouldn’t be, this fear of love.

Which leads us to Obama and the Mandingo factor. That sounds like a Robert Ludlum title, The Mandingo Factor, perhaps the book that would have followed The Clusterfuck Weekend. But what I’m talking about is the cultural detritus of the 1975 movie Mandingo, in which strapping slave Ken Norton has it off with the white plantation owner’s wife. Cut to an article a couple of years ago in some sub-Esquire men’s mag that reported on swingers’ “Mandingo parties” where Southern white gentlemen of substance would watch while their wives were drilled speechless by piles and piles of her black friends. I can only surmise that the husbands appreciated the “speechless” part.

The idea of interracial sex, especially of black men with white women, has been a huge cigar smoldering in the American subconscious for just about forever. It’s an image that was hustled before Congress in the 1930s as a reason why they should outlaw cannabis, which was alleged to lead white women into acts of interracial congress. Black on white lovin’ was the fear that Lenny Bruce mocked in the 1950s, as Lou Reed did in song in the 1980s with “I Wanna Be Black,” yet all these years later it’s still evidently a loaded issue to many Americans.

I accidentally spend hours looking at online porn, and I’ve noticed a post-election mainstreaming of Mandingoesque sites such as BlacksonBlondes.com and CuckoldSessions.com (Don’t go there! I check them out so you don’t have to, then I cloud my mind). The typical plotline on the latter site, as best I can discern from the free snippets, is Ms. White Wife becomes so bored with her husband’s white ass that she locks him in a chastity device and makes him watch her do orifice-challenging things with three black handymen, and then makes him mop up, and she’s fresh out of Kleenex. As if the black guys didn’t have enough to do already, they sometimes pause during the proceedings to flip the husband off.

It’s like a fever dream forged in a panicked id: Women represent the earth, nature and the future, which the white man has tried to contain and dominate through the ages. The chastity belt represents the liberal courts and legislatures, restricting the poor, beset white man’s otherwise robust free-market response to the challenge posed by the black men, who represent the unknowable present and the innate selfhood that the white man is forever constrained from recognizing in himself, a sacrifice he’s made in the name of civilization and control. And the spooge? It represents a fucking mess.

I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to predict here that sometime before the Obama years are over, at least one of the seemingly endless Republican sex scandals—most recently exampled by California representative Michael Duvall’s alleged quim pro quo with an energy lobbyist—will involve some manner of Mandingo scenario.

How could it not? Every other consideration, including certainly the good of the nation, seems to have fallen by the wayside in conservatives’ attempt to politically emasculate Obama. Their fear of a black planet seems rooted in some primordial tribalism that trumps reason and even self-preservation. Along with that fear, I suspect there’s a fascination with forbidden fruit, the sort of impulse that leads a Larry Craig to seek his bliss in a men’s room. When your party has a priapic hard-on for power, dominion and control, maybe a situation where you’re powerless and humbled is beguiling.

You probably know black people, and so know that every one of them is an individual, not an archetype. Hung like a Lipizzaner perhaps, but an individual nevertheless, with unique joys, fears and talents. How long does it take for a nation to wake up to that?

Check back with me in three or hopefully seven years, and if there hasn’t been a Republican Mandingo sex scandal, I’ll buy you a soy chilidog, paid for with Ameros.

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