Is Herman Cain the Reincarnation of A Vengeful Black Republican?
"Any car gets good gas mileage if you don't drive it!" With that piercing bit of logic, my father was arguing that I should take my mother's 15-year-old Chrysler New Yorker back to California rather than buy a far more manageable, used Volkswagen Rabbit for my cross-country trip home from New Jersey. Is it any wonder that the "9-9-9" tax plan of another anachronistic African-American Republican doesn't really surprise me so much?
Yes, like Herman Cain, my own father was a staunch GOP black man, a loyal party activist, who frequently disparaged Democratic black folk. Unlike the man ostensibly running for the party's 2012 presidential nomination, his excuse was being born in 1902 and growing up in the Old South, where the "Dixiecrats" maintained segregation with an iron fist; he found it unforgivably short-sighted for his people to leave "the party of Lincoln" just because "Roosevelt put 'em on Welfare." Of course that was before it became clear that the leaders my parents called "the Rockefeller-Javitz wing" would be trampled by the stampede of southern Democrats -- call them "the Thurmond-Helms wing" -- flooding their party in the wake of the Civil Rights Act … and that nothing would ever be the same.
Still these two men are so remarkably alike that it honestly feels like my father has returned from the grave after nearly 30 years to haunt the Republicans who left him with such bitter disappointment. How better to get back at them for stringing him along even through the humiliation of Goldwater all the way into the disaster of Nixon? How could he rest on the other side when "the great emancipator's" bastard descendants had squandered the promise of a Senator Ed Brooke in his lifetime, and sneered at the first black president after he was gone?
My father was widely celebrated for his gregarious sense of humor, which was supposed to be so hysterical that you shouldn't mind when the joke was on you. He specialized in characterizing people and things by satirical names, sometimes borrowed ones, like the Dick Tracy villain "Flattop" -- think "Uzbecki-becki-stan-stan" -- with the trick being that you were always supposed to know exactly who he was talking about, no matter how many different people he might refer to as "Flattop." The comic turns could get pretty confusing, even frustrating, when it sometimes became unclear whether the fact-bending was truly in jest or not ("They're not gonna sell you yogurt -- that's Jewish food!"). Surely his friends thought his folksy manner in the examination room was intended to put his patients at ease. I didn't know that other people found his teasing word-twisting problematic until one day my third-grade friend Towanda told me, "My mama say she ain't goin' to your daddy for a doctor no mo', 'cause he laugh too much!" Towanda's mama may have saved my sanity.
Now, am I shocked by the pizza-pitching lobbyist's sexual harassment and adultery scandals and how Cain has handled them? 'Fraid not. When my mother had left home for what turned out to be the last time, my father called me repeatedly, insisting that her departure was somehow my fault. "I never touched her in violence!" he proclaimed way too early one Sunday morning (during a conversation in which he also rejected the relevance of time zones). "You must've at least once," I told him defiantly, "She had a black eye last time I was there." My father laughed again. "That was make-up!" he chuckled with not a moment's hesitation. "We laughed about that thing when you left here … how we fooled you like that!" Of course I'd have none of it. From then on, he wove the rest of the family an impressive web of reasons why my mother had moved out of his house because of some argument she had with me over the phone from 3000 miles away. What does my parents' relationship portend for Cain's much-anticipated "meeting" with his wife this weekend to discuss his women and the White House? Well, he'll certainly expect her to believe whatever he tells her on face value, and don't be surprised if he expects the rest of us to do the same.
What does surprise me is the failure to focus more attention on Cain's campaign finance infractions than on the "sex sells" stories he's managed to serve up. As attractive as the media may find the "black stud" narrative (C'mon … Herman? Stud???), based on my "life with father" I can tell you that everybody's missing the boat by following the mistresses instead of the money. My first glimpse of my father's Achilles Heel was hidden in the conflicting answers he gave on the college financial aid application. My mother had herself hoped to learn what was going on under the family's fiscal hood, but we were never able to get enough comprehensible information out of him to complete the forms. It wasn't that the physician was insolvent -- he did ultimately pay cash for my college education. He just assumed total control over the purse-strings (my mother wouldn't have known about a Ginger White either) and made his own rules about how to do that. In the end his will took years to resolve because he pushed his "high-priced, big-shot lawyer" to include several provisions that, while they were to his liking, were not in accordance with the laws of the District of Columbia.
If Herman Cain really is my father come back as the GOP's avenging angel, it's my bet that there are secrets galore in Cain's financial dealings -- his connection to the Koch brothers and his sudden entrance into politics just for starters -- that would reveal far more of what the citizenry needs to know about the background of a potential U.S. president than even the most egregious sexual harassment charges have told us. Unfortunately, that's not what we seem to be interested in. If his campaign does survive the weekend, find a really good auditor … or just listen to Towanda's mama.
