The Thanatos Syndrome

life is improved, Tom.”
    â€œYou mean you’ve tried it?”
    â€œIn one junior high school in Baton Rouge, five hundred black girls, year before last forty percent knocked up by age thirteen, last year one girl pregnant—one girl!—and why? because her mamma was packing her lunch box and she missed her progesterone during estrus. And, Tom, get this: a one hundred percent improvement in ACT scores in computation and memory recall in these very subjects.”
    â€œHow about language?”
    â€œLanguage?”
    â€œYou know, reading and writing. Like reading a book. Like writing a sentence.”
    â€œYou son of a gun.” Bob gives me another poke. “You don’t miss much, do you? You’re quite right. And for a good reason, as you must also know. We’re in a different age of communication—out of McGuffey Readers and writing a theme on ‘what I did last summer.’ Tom, these kids are way past comic books and Star Wars. They’re into graphic and binary communication—which after all is a lot more accurate than once upon a time there lived a wicked queen.”
    â€œYou mean they use two-word sentences.”
    â€œYou got it. And using a two-word sentence, you know what you can get out of them?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œThey can rattle off the total exports and imports of the port of Baton Rouge—like a spread sheet—or give ’em pencil and paper and they’ll give you a graphic of the tributaries of the Red River.”
    â€œHow about the drop in crime and unemployment?”
    Bob smiles radiantly. “Tom, would you laugh at me if I told you what we’ve done is restore the best of the Southern Way of Life? Would you think that too corny?”
    â€œWell—”
    â€œWell, never mind. Just the facts, ma’am. Here are the facts: Instead of a thousand young punks hanging around the streets in northwest Baton Rouge, looking for trouble, stoned out, ready to mug you, break into your house, rape your daughter, packed off to Angola where they cost you twenty-five thousand a year, do you want to know what they’re doing? Doing not because somebody forces them—we ain’t talking Simon Legree here, boss—but doing of their own accord?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œCottage industries, garden plots, but mainly apprenticeships.”
    â€œApprenticeships?”
    â€œPlumber’s helpers, mechanic’s helpers, gardeners, cook’s helpers, waiters, handymen, fishermen—Tom, Baton Rouge is the only city in the U.S. where young blacks are outperforming the Vietnamese and Hispanics.”
    â€œYou’re not talking about vo-tech training.”
    â€œI’m talking apprenticeship. What would you do if you’re running an Exxon station and a young man or woman shows up and makes himself useful for gratis, keeps the place clean, is obviously honest and industrious and willing. I’ll tell you what you’d do, because I know. You’d hire him. You want to know what we’re talking about?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œWe’re not talking about old massa and his niggers. We’re not talking about Uncle Tom. We’re talking about Uncle Tom Jefferson and his yeoman farmer and yeoman craftsman. You wouldn’t believe what they can do with half an acre of no good batture land. And look at this.” He shows me the key chain of the Mercedes. It is made of finely wrought wooden links. “Carved from one piece of driftwood.”
    â€œVery nice.”
    â€œNice! You try to do it! And, Tom—”
    â€œYes?”
    â€œHave you driven by the old project in Baton Rouge lately?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œWell, you know what they were like—monuments of bare ugliness, excrement in the stairwells, and God knows what. You know what you’d see now?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œGreen! Trees, shrubs, flowers, garden plots—one of the anthropologists on our board noted a striking resemblance to the decorative vegetation of the Masai tribesmen—and guess what they’ve done with the old cinder-block entrances?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œThey’re now mosaics, bits of colored glass from Anacin bottles, taillights, whatever, for all the world like—can’t you guess?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œThe African bower bird, Tom. Lovely!”
    â€œI see.”
    â€œDo you remember the colorful bottle trees darkies used to make