The Imorality of Despair
I was about 12 years old and sitting with my father in an upscale speak easy called the Sunset Cafe in Chicago waiting for the Reverend Satchelmouth and his gang including Fatha Hines to come on, when this women came up to our table and told my father it was immoral for him to be dragging me into places like this. My father first responded by saying madam, I can assure you I didn't have to drag the boy here, and anyway, immorality can only exist in the presence of despair, and you won't be finding any of that here.
Well, even at twelve, I wasn't so sure that was true, but the woman went off in a huff, and I always remembered my father's definition of immorality. To my father everything in the absence of despair was moral, and you would have a damn hard time getting my father to despair about anything. Of course we had to get up and leave because my father feared the woman was a JPAer (Juvenile Protection Association) and if they really put their minds to it, they could have you black listed in Chicago, and spread the word like wild fire so that old man Albee would just drop you from the roster no matter how popular you otherwise were. The irony is that we headed across town to a rather seedy looking place that probably exuded all sorts of standard (non-despairing) types of immorality, but would be far less likely to harbor JPAers.
The JPAers once got the Davis family blacklisted with the result that young Sammy Davis Jr. spent some time on the street which apparently was preferable to these do gooders than whatever it was that upset them to begin with.
I will be the last to claim that my father's methods of raising me were ideal. Frankly, he had no conception of how to be a father, which didn't exactly prepare me well for the task when my time came. Oddly enough it was something I understood at the time, even though for the most part I didn't mind it. The same cannot be said for my children. Success is capable of sweeping many a sin under the rug, where as failure's great success is the ability to wallow in it. It's just that these do gooders would have been perfectly content to see me out on the street like young Sammy rather than comfortably situated at a cafe table listening to the greatest jazz of this or any other time. It wasn't like I was drinking alcohol (my father did draw some lines more out of fear of my mother than anything else, though not fearful enough to prevent him from dragging me out in the first place), but you could pick up gage on many a South Chicago street corner of the time and I was known to light up from time to time.
This is all in preparation for saying that my father's instincts were right about one thing: save up your disgust for something that matters. My father was a natural born entertainer and he had no truck with despair wherever it might reside. He would from time to time take me into an immigrant ghetto, tell me to knock on a particular door and when the woman answers to hand her the several hundred dollars he had just handed me. I said a while back that politics is not good at nuance. Well there is nothing nuanced about the imorality of despair. Enough said.
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