I've wanted to tell this story for quite some time, but a quote from Juan Cole yesterday really prompted me to finally put it down.
   "The Republican Party that Nixon invented melded the moneyed classes of the Northeast with the white evangelicals of the South. This odd couple went on to simultaneously steal from and oppress the rest of us. The moneyed classes were happy to let the New Puritans impose their stringent morality, since they could always just buy any licentiousness they wanted, regardless of the law."
   I was working as a cab driver, as I have in a couple of cities over the years. It was probably a lot like you would imagine it would be, especially because I drove at night. But it was a living, and one night in particular has stuck with me. It's a true story, and the verbatim quotes were etched in my mind.
   I picked up a large, bald man at the train station. Suit, no tie. The kind of guy that looked incomplete without a cigar. He had a younger male friend with him and they had probably been drinking, but were not excessively drunk.
   He asked me to take them to the nearby housing project.
   I just looked at him, and he said, "They know me there."
   On the way, he spoke loudly in the tone of a man who did not need to be careful. I don't remember much of what he said except when, amazingly, he brought up the name J. Edgar Hoover.
   "He was the man," he said.
   We got to the projects and the large man disappeared, leaving me with his younger friend for what seemed like an eternity. The friend was very talkative. He had gone to school with an A-list celebrity and his wife divorced him when she caught him in bed with another woman.
   The large man, he said, had a net worth of $4.3 million.
   "He's the man," he said.
   Eventually, the first man reappeared, with an attractive black woman. She got in the car of her own volition, but she looked uneasy. He gave me the address of the house they were going to.
   "These two are gonna put on a show for me, right?" he said.
   On the way, the black girl said she thought she was gonna be sick.
   "You OK?" I said staring into the rearview mirror. She said yes, it's OK, and I drove on.
   We got to the destination and it haunts me still.
   This is a true story, although it almost sounds fake. Blatantly stereotypical. The stuff of cheap detective novels, or worse. But that day I decided a few things, and I've tried to live up to them ever since. I'm tempted to sermonize at this point, but that's their game.
   Res ipsa loquitur.