June to Ward! There’s Something Wrong with the . . . Republican Debate!

Mainly, that I kept thinking about Leave It To Beaver.  Like, every candidate was an evil doppelgänger to characters on a sweet — AND NO LONGER RELEVANT TO OUR LIVES EXCEPT DURING A CABLE NOSTALGIATHON — television show.  I love me some nostalgia, but I keep hoping that the ongoing presidential mini-series might swerve into contemporary relevance.  

Fat chance.  As long as Republicans babble-squabble about economic and social policies most of the country has moved beyond, they keep rebranding themselves as the Grand Old/Outdated Party.  Not to mention the last debate’s signature trait — puerile name-calling, which of course sent viewers (or, at least, me) into reveries of elementary school nonny-nonny-boo-boo contests.  Which, in turn, led to thoughts of that era’s (few, because there were only three channels available on my family’s newly and proudly purchased TV set) must-watch programs, of which Leave It To Beaver was primus inter pares.  It didn’t occur to me, as a kid, that this child-centric show was also boy-centric (what other choices were there, other than the Mickey Mouse Club, which was more gender-balanced?).  In fact, I’d never thought about it until, well, a couple days ago, when I was trying to sort out the reasons that comparing the debate to the Cleaver family saga made sense.

So that’s one reason: both LITB and the Republican Debates are male dramas, full of jockeying for supremacy and the tensions of male bonding and the conundrums of potential male power.  The second reason, as I suggested above, is the juvenile level of ‘discussion.’  The third reason is the retronaut quality of today’s Republican discourse and policy.  As Elizabeth Warren asked Republicans (re the jihad against Planned Parenthood) a day or so ago, “Did you fall down and hit your head and wake up and think it’s the1950s?”  

The fourth reason is that the GOP debaters actually remind me of LITB characters.  In some instances, they look like them; in all instances, they embody stereotypical traits encapsulated in those characters.  

Will the real Eddie Haskell stand up?

Although Rand Paul certainly has Eddie Haskell hair, and a good measure of Eddie Haskell smarminess, Donald Trump wins the role so fast it’ll make your head spin.  Eddie’s signature trait is seamless sycophantic duplicity, as in threatening Beaver in one breath (“beat it kid, or else”) and complimenting his mother June in the next (“you’re looking lovely today, Mrs. Cleaver”).  As in (Trump version): Carly Fiorina is too ugly to be President but I think she’s a beautiful woman.  Also, to many of us Eddie is the star of the show, the snarkiest and most interesting of the Cleaver brothers’ (male) friends.  Until his poll numbers tank: Donald Trump takes the coveted role of Eddie Haskell.

Wally and the Beaver: a tale of two brothers

Leave it to Beaver’s core is the relationship between an older and a younger brother — at times supportive, at times contentious.  Wally, stolid and not overly bright, tolerates the Beaver, his chubby-cherub-cheeked and spit-shined-hair shadow, until the pesky sibling interferes with his plans.  This relationship is supposed to be the heart of the show, but Eddie Haskell ‘changes the narrative’ by pitting brother against brother, to the dismay of the parental elites. How can one not think of the relationship between the Florida pols in this race?  The older ‘brother’ Jeb! Bush used to consider the younger ‘brother’ Marco Rubio as his protege; now they’re fighting over closet space in their shared primary bedroom, often egged on by the Donald, the Haskellesque agent provocateur.

What about the women?

Women do make appearances in Leave It To Beaver, and two make an impression.  My favorite is Beaver’s classmate Judy, the sanctimonious tattle-tale whom nobody likes.  For good reason:  she’s a humorless prig who will probably grow up to be a disastrous CEO who shamelessly touts her bad business record as qualification for higher office.  Now that we’ve disposed of Carly Fiorina . . . let’s consider Ted Cruz.  His utter despicability makes it hard to match him with a LITB character, as the show has a paucity of actual villains.  With apologies to the great Barbara Billingsley, I have to pair Cruz with June Cleaver — primarily because of similar coy smirky smiles, secondarily because as the series progressed, June becomes more and more frantic and irrational, manically dishing up (green?) eggs and ham breakfasts to her unappreciative family.

We mustn’t forget ‘the guys’

Both Wally and the Beaver have pals with whom they hang around.  Rarely do any of ‘the guys’ drive an episode’s plot, but they function as comic relief and as all-purpose foils.  Wally’s most memorable friend (other than Eddie, of course) is Lumpy, an oversized lug who vacillates between being a bully and being a marshmallow. Can we say Chris Christie? As far as Beaver’s friends go, there’s the sniveling Whitey and the conniving coward Larry.  And yes, we can and should say Scott Walker and Mike Huckabee.  Whitey/Scott, who seems to have the intelligence of a no-see’um, consistently disappears into the scenic woodwork; Larry/Mike has major talent for whining, lying, and blaming everyone else for whatever bad fortune or malfeasance occurs within his orbit.

Are there any actual adults on the set?

Good question. Like today’s Republican party, Leave It To Beaver consigns women to housekeeping and (non-unionized) elementary-school teaching roles, thus infantalizing them and leaving ‘adult’ responsibilities to the men. Ward Cleaver is the paterfamilias, one part Dagwood Bumstead and one part a Robert Young/Danny Thomas hybrid.  Although Ward makes mistakes and doesn’t always express himself judiciously, he’s ultimately the voice of reason and solver of problems. This is the role many relatively sane Republicans hope John Kasich will fill.  Which he hasn’t yet.  Ward’s friend and coworker Fred Rutherford (Lumpy’s father) is another male adult, frustrated and often inarticulate. Ben Carson, whom some conservangelicals see as an acceptably ‘grown up’ alternative to Trump, Cruz, or Huckabee, fits here.  After all, both Fred and Ben rock those Rick Perry smart glasses.

Where is Gus the Fireman, the real problem-solving adult disguised as an apple doll, when we need him?  Since Burt Mustin, who played Gus, was born in 1884, he may have voted for Teddy Roosevelt, back in the nostalgia days when Republicans were un-ironically progressive.  When he was playing Gus, he may have voted for Dwight Eisenhower, the Republican who called out the military-industrial complex.  I wonder for whom he would vote today. 

Donald Trump’s Pluralis Majestatis

Thanks to MSNBC’s lazy programming, I watched a good deal of Donald Trump’s Dallas event last night.  At first I was mesmerized, in a can’t-stop-listening-to-William-Hung’s-"She Bang" kind of way, by the Trumpster’s endless opening riff on himself.  Winning . . . polls . . . great . . . they love me . . . killing it (that would be: winning in the polls) . . . etc. ad nauseum.  Then, as slack-jawed paralysis wore off, I noticed something rather interesting.  Trump uses the pluralis majestatis in oddly compelling ways. (Pluralis majestatis would be the ‘royal we’ for those of you who, like Sarah Palin, think U.S. citizens should speak American only).

Most politicians glom onto the ‘royal we’ as a transparent substitute for “I.”  Rhetoric 101 teaches that you don’t pepper a speech (or application letter, or academic essay) with the first-person singular pronoun.  In most real-life situations, doing so makes you seem egotistical or, at the least, a boring and un-self-aware speaker/writer.  For politicians, the downside of overusing “I” is that it suggests you’re in the race for yourself, not for your would-be constituents.  Thus: “we” is the preferred pronoun . . . in all instances.  Like:  “When we decided to enter this race” or “we hope to restore accountability to government.”  Using “we” in these ways has become a vaguely annoying verbal tic that signals inauthenticity (this year’s cardinal political sin) rather than inclusiveness.  

Somehow, Donald Trump is able to employ the pluralis majestatis effectively.  Perhaps because of the size and whoop-dee-do-and-ass-ishness of his crowds, when he says “we,” it feels as if he really means we (read: all of his supporters, plus him).  It’s a way of reinforcing the aspirational logic of his candidacy:  I’m very rich and a great guy; you support me; therefore you’re (potentially) very rich and self-evidently great.  We all win!  (We meaning “me,” of course, plus all of “you.”) 

Trump has a history of identifying with royalty, be it even-worse-hair-than-mine Don King

 or insane, cantalope-calf-fearing Iowa Republican Steve King

In Trumpapolis, we also means not-them . . . not the losers, the weaklings, the stupids, the illegals, the terrible negotiators, the Mexicans, the Chinese, the ugly or uppity women. The Trumpian we is not just a dog-whistle to resentful, often bigoted, voters; it’s a yoooge in-your-face shout-out, reinforced by strategic ‘you-centered’ qualifiers and asides (as in ‘We’ll have so many victories, you won’t believe it’). Cheer loud and long if you recognize the password to the bully-boy fraternity that must be cool because the Donald is chapter president!  And it might let you pledge!!

Another reason Trump’s pluralis majestatis works is the host-audience dynamics previously forged by The Apprentice.  Viewers may root for one contestant or another, but they identify with the man sitting on the decider throne.  We get to fire people!  We get to reward pluck and promise!  We, theoretically, would get to pick ourselves as winners!  

This is not to say that Donald Trump shies away from using “I.”  Anything but! In an occult algorithm that would put Google search-results wizards to shame, the more he trumpets himself, pronominally and otherwise, the more the “we” resonates as as a strong group-identifier for those who do feel weak, or perilously weakened by economics, demographics, and cultural-value shifts. It’s a variation on the Napoleon complex.  Trump himself is not short (he’s 6’2” tall, although it’s widely reported that his fingers are stubby, and let’s not even discuss his relationships with women), but his excessive self-praise and continual recourse to size descriptors (great, huge, tremendous, big) suggest an underlying distrust of his own potency.  

Plus, he smokes cigars. 

Is It that much of a stretch to question whether, within Trump’s pluralis majestatis, lurks a compensatory appeal to threatened manhood?  We wonder . . . 

The herd seek out the great, not for their sake but for their influence; 

and the great welcome them out of vanity or need.

—Napoleon Bonaparte

Exclusive! GOP Pre-Debate Rorschach Test Results

Breaking News:  CNN has leaked results of the psychological test it just administered to all Republican Presidential candidates. This testing regime was instituted after Bobby Jindal and Lindsey Graham protested the network’s capricious rejiggering of the big-boy debate polling criteria in order to accommodate the lone woman in the race. 

 “Hyphenated-Americans, including Woman-Americans, have no place in our great country,” said Indian-anchor-baby Jindal. “There must be a better way of determining who qualifies for standing proudly erect on the natural-born-citizen media stage.” Cuban-anchor-baby Marco Rubio agreed, as did Canadian anchor-baby Ted Cruz. As did Senator Graham, although his objections centered on gender stereotypes.  “A female president needs to be able to put aside her natural bless-your-heartedness,” he explained,“ and be willing to unleash the gods of war.” 

Neurosurgeon Ben Carson may have mentioned something about frontal lobes, but no one could hear what he said.  Governors George Pataki and Jim Gilmore tried to join the Jindal-Graham protest, but news outlets couldn’t access their Twitter accounts, if such exist.  It took Twitter-savvy poll-leader Donald Trump to bring CNN to its senses.  “We can’t have people who have blood pouring out of their whatevers making decisions about huge, beautiful walls,” he tweeted.  “Let’s have a smart test!  It’ll be great!  And don’t let that third-rate loser Hugh Hewitt near it.”

CNN, mindful of future ratings, agreed.  The network, with the help of Reinz Priebus, hired a panel of psychologists and psychiatrists to administer the classic ten-image Rorschach ‘ink blot’ test [these are the actual original ink blots, presented in the original order] to the Republican field.  Here’s what the test revealed.

Scott Walker:  That’s me!  Beating the Unions!  

Chris Christie:  That’s me!  Blessing the Hurricane Sandy relief efforts.

Jeb! Bush:  Ese soy yo, al ser un gobernador decisiva Florida érase una vez.

Rand Paul:  That’s me!  Outreaching to the darker masses yearning to be Republicans.

Donald Trump:  Haven’t you watched coverage of me?  In Iowa I said I was Batman, and that’s me . . . being Batman.  Giving rides on the Batcopter.  Children love me!

Scott Walker:  Uh, Scandahoovians enjoying a fish boil in Door County?

Mike Huckabee:  Evil Wizards plotting the war against Christmas.

Bobby Jindal:  They look like Parsees or Sikhs or Hindus or something hyphenatingly unAmerican.

Jeb! Bush:  Los estadounidenses deben hablar Inglés, no asiática.  A partir de ahora, patriótico Inglés solamente.

Donald Trump:  I’m winning with the Asians.  And the Hispanics.  And the Blacks.  And the Evangelicals.  They’re all great!  

Ben Carson:  Hoo-boy.  Easy peasy!  The wrong kind of ‘black’ welfare mothers having fun with government handouts.

Rick Santorum:  Abortioneering witches.

Jeb! Bush: I don’t think, If we knew then, maybe, Iraq, Obamacare, I’m my own man . . .

Donald Trump:  Low energy!  Those ladies are hot, and if they remind me of Ivanka . . . I’ll cherish women so much it’ll make your head spin.

Lindsay Graham:  I know!  Call on me!  It’s Slim Pickens on that American-power rocket. 

Chris Christie:  Siddown and shut up.  It’s me on a traffic cone.

Marco Rubio:  It’s me protecting my water bottle.

Rick Perry:  Isn’t that a turtle on a fence post?  Oops.

Donald Trump:  Better adjust your smart glasses, Rick.  It’s me sitting on the tremendous pile of money Mexico paid for my beautiful border wall.

Mario Rubio:  Fidel Castro destroying our plantocratic wealth UNFAIR!

Rick Santorum:  Satan destroying sacred sperm.

Carly Fiorina:  Demon sheep destroying my last campaign.

Rand Paul:  William Jennings Bryant destroying William McKinley and the gold standard.  Shoulda coulda.

Donald Trump:  Haven’t I already said I’m Batman?  That’s me destroying all of you in every poll. Plus I’m very rich, even without the gold standard.  And very, very smart. The Wharton School of Finance is terrific, and I did very, very, very well there.

Carly Fiorina:  Duh. Phallus impaled in powerful vagina. Just watch me bitch-slap Hillary Clinton.

Mike Huckabee:  Josh Duggar!  Kim Davis!  Religious Liberty!  Gay Agenda!  Because Obama!  

John Kasich: Upright Republican fake-moderate fake-governing a blue state.

Donald Trump:  It’s a safari trophy pelt! Just ask my sharp-shooting big-game-hunter kids, Donald Junior and Eric. They’re great!  I’m so big on the First Amendment, you wouldn’t believe.

Scott Walker:   Unicorns?

Jim Gilmore:  My Little Ponies!  I used to be a track steward.

Ben Carson:  Separated Siamese Twins?  

Donald Trump:  Siamese, Chinese, Japanese . . . they’re all cunning.  And great negotiators! But I beat them every day.  I just raise the price on my classy New York real estate! They love me!  Let’s make America great again!!

Scott Walker:  This is the unicorn one, right?  Pretty colors.

Ted Cruz:  Jesse Helms’s sanctified aura?  Because we need 100 more senators just like him.

Bobby Jindal: It’s an anti-Christian hyphenated-American celebration of a pagan holiday, Holi, which entails throwing colored pigments.

Ben Carson:  Colored pigments.  Good one!

Donald Trump:  Pigs?  Rosie O’Donnell!  Just kidding — she’s great.

Scott Walker:  No, this is really the unicorn one.  I see the antlers. 

Lindsey Graham:  Bombs bursting in air on Day One of the Graham administration.  Benghazi!  Iran deal!  Secretary of Defense McCain!

Ted Cruz:  Obviously Green Eggs and Ham.  Top yellow: eggs.  Middle green:  Green eggs (Harvard Debate club shout out!).  Bottom pink:  Ham!!!!!  Winner.

Donald Trump:  Loser! I’m not going anywhere, and you’re not getting any of my delegates.  

Carly Fiorina:  Look at that phallic ooze.  The real reason Hewlitt-Packard tanked.

Jeb! Bush:  Even though there’s a not-really-connected-to-my-brother Cheney-esque blue ganglion menacing the flaccid pink . . .

Donald Trump:  Everyone’s sleeping!  Weak!  Low energy again!  But you’re a really nice guy.

George Pataki:  Did someone mention me?  I’m a nice guy.

Rick Perry:  Even a broken clock is right once a day.

After this Republican Candidate Rorshach Test, CNN has decided not to air the upcoming debate.  

Not to worry, however. The debate will be carried on the Sarah Palin channel. You can see it from her porch in Alaska.

Jobs That Suck

It’s Labor Day weekend, a good time to think about work (note:  I said ‘think about’ it, not actually do it — party on, amigos). I’ve been fortunate: most of my working life has been spent in a job I really liked, and did pretty well at — teaching at the university level.  Most of my other jobs have centered on writing, which I also really like, no matter the task.  Nonetheless, I’ve had a few jobs that qualified for a major suckage award.

Certainly, all jobs suck some of the time (e.g., sudden deadlines, pointless meetings, impossible clients/students) and all jobs have sucky aspects (e.g., minimal-to-zero raises, commuting time, paperwork sinkholes).  In addition, each of us has a mental list of jobs-to-be-avoided-at-all-costs-even-if-it means-hawking-squeegee-services-at-intersections.  For me, that would include anything related to the health field (blood makes me faint, as do shots), mass child care (love my own child; don’t love random children in big snotty groups), or anything to do with truly hard labor (my muscle mass is lower than the growth rate of my IRA, so I would suck abysmally at brawny employment, which therefore would be sucky employment pour moi). 

My work history, in sum, has been quite privileged.  I never had to take a job I knew I’d detest  or at which I’d be overwhelmingly likely to fail.  But I have held two jobs that were absolutely awful, and I was absolutely awful at. 

Travel Agent Travails

As a very young military wife in Okinawa, I became bored quickly with officers’ wives’ tea parties and general neocolonial lassitude.  I thus decided to get a job ‘off-post’ (not a decision enthusiastically endorsed by the military brass, but it was the Vietnam era, so who cared). Because my father had founded an incentive travel agency, I applied to American Express Travel (Okinawa) to be a travel agent.  I was immediately hired, as I was not Japanese/Okinawan, and it was thought that I’d interact better with the military wives who were the agency’s main clientele.

What a disaster.  Since I couldn’t speak decent or even fractured-but-understandable Japanese,  it was very hard to book flights on the airlines serving the island.  I had to depend on my lower-paid and understandably resentful Okinawan colleagues to do just about anything . . . or I would run a couple of blocks to the local airline office and try to explain (or draw, or point out in the IATA catalogue) what a client wanted to book.  Result?  Unhappy clients, unhappy co-workers, unhappy boss, unhappy me.  I considered quitting, but quitting a job was something that never had occurred to me.  Of course it hadn’t:  I’d had decent part-time or summer jobs as a teenager (at a book store, at a radio station), and I hadn’t needed to quit them because they were self-limiting (hello college!).

I did quit this job, but not for the above reasons. I got tired of, and irritated at, my clients.  The officers’ wives — and senior non-coms’ wives — swooping into the office ordered me around as if I were . . . an Okinawan!  To be fair to my much younger self, my umbrage was not ‘racially’ motivated as much as it was class motivated.  My parents were not even approaching rich, but as educated adults in a small Wisconsin town, they were socially accepted, even sought after.  And I’d assimilated enough of military rank protocol to bridle at women whose husbands held lower ranks than mine barking commands at me or berating me as if I was their maid.  (I hope that being upset at the way they ignored my extremely capable and linguistically talented co-workers was part of my malaise, but I can't -- after all this time -- be sure that it was, to my discredit.)

I’m not proud of the reasons why I quit, but I’m glad that I did. I soon got a much more congenial job as editor/writer/art director of a local weekly magazine . . . and I learned that one can resign from a job without the world coming to an end.

Tax Scut

I still don’t understand what motivated me to ASK for tax-season work at a friend’s accounting firm.  Background: my mother had just died, I had previously taken early retirement from the professoriat in order to help care for her, and I was at loose ends.  So I guess this request made sense at the time.

But whoa — how eye-opening!  For eight dollars an hour, I assembled forms, addressed envelopes, called clients, entered data, answered phones (badly, as I couldn’t ever figure out that office’s phone system), ignored suppurating paper cuts, filed client folders, and never got any feedback except that I stapled things somewhat sloppily.  After putting in my time, I’d return home physically exhausted (yes, I know this is not hard labor, but it’s a lot of hours on your feet doing repetitive tasks) and mentally numbed.  Hours at work, and nothing, NOTHING, interesting had happened.  Even when I tried to point out a potential problem or anomaly in a file I was assembling, I was dismissed (occasionally, I caught an actual accounting error — this would be corrected silently, and my eagle-eyed-ness was never acknowledged).  Even more so when I tried to suggest how a task could be performed more efficiently.  I was a tax scut, nothing more. (And yes, I can understand why my attempts at ‘professional relevance’ were ignored — the firm had hired a scut, not an unasked-for and probably unqualified  and no-doubt irritating self-styled problem solver.)

What struck me like an IRS audit summons was that jobs like this — bottom-level ‘white collar jobs’ — are soul-suckers. The pay is awful, the respect is non-existent, the opportunities for career growth are slim-to-none.  I was used to decades of pretty much being able to design and implement my own professional life. Many (maybe most) people, I learned at an age (that would be: older) when the lesson really hit home, do not.  Their jobs suck.

So on this labor day, I salute all my still-working friends and those who are advocating better conditions (wages, hours, benefits, unions) for working Americans.  My job history is not typical, I know.  But it is varied enough, even given my privileges and opportunities, to be able to say that some jobs truly suck. I fear that there seems to be inadequate political will to change, or at least modify, some modifiable working conditions for jobs ranging from professional to 'unskilled.' I sincerely hope I’m mistaken.

Happy Labor Day!

  

The Ultimate Retro Raleigh Quiz

Doesn’t matter how long you lived in Raleigh —

It’s the quality of the experience 

I don’t know how to make interactive quizzes, so here’s one in the lame form of a blog.  The U.S. political scene has been so brain-eating-wormishly insane that, after a few weeks of fevered writing, I am out of things to say.  But blogs need to be fed. 

This offering, in part, is in response to recent ‘news’ assessments of best places to live and the equivalent, many of which highlight Raleigh and its suburbs. Eat your heart out, people who now live in Mequon or Melrose or Boise or somewhere in the snake-infested Southwest. It’s also a response to the Buzzfeedy ‘How Southern/ North Carolinian Are You?’ quizzes that waft across our Facebook feeds.  Most consequently, to me, this is a way to buy a little more time to think of something new to write about politics.

The Retro Raleigh quiz is especially but not exclusively for former NC State graduate students, and it attempts to assess that experience through what most of us actually did or didn’t do (rather than through silly benchmarks like preference for sweetened or unsweetened iced tea). The point might be — if you agree with a whole lot of these propositions, you can claim to be a ‘Raleighite’ in perpetuity.  Even if you now don't live in Raleigh, Apex, Wake Forest, Garner, or Cary. Lucky you!  

You can claim to be a genuine Retro Raleighite if:

—You’ve had way too much to drink at Mitch’s.

—You’ve ridden the Pullen Park Carousel.

—You’ve participated in Moral Mondays, or wished you’d been here to do so.

—You’ve bought something at School Kids Records.

—You pulled an all-nighter grading 40 Freshman English papers.

—You’ve fed the pigeons in Capitol Square.

—You’ve run or jogged around the NC State track.

—You’ve had way too much to drink at PR.

—You’ve played golf, or putt-putt, or whacked away at a driving range somewhere in Wake County.

—You’ve gone to a movie at the Rialto.

—You’ve said vile things about Carolina.

—You pulled an all-nighter writing a final paper for a course you basically ignored all semester.

—You still have outstanding overdue books at D. H. Hill Library.

—You’ve slept for over an hour in the (late lamented) Tompkins Hall graduate lounge.

—You’ve gone to the North Carolina Museum of Art, or the North Carolina Museum of History, at least twice.

—You’ve spent some uncomfortable time, feeling old but oddly good about yourself, at Cup-A-Joe.

—You’ve had breakfast or brunch somewhere around Moore Square.

—You attended a live Whiskeytown performance and had way too much to drink.

—You crashed at a friend’s Raleigh apartment for more than three days in a row.

—You idolized an NCState professor and then thought better of it.

—You’ve attended a sporting event at Reynolds Colosseum.

—You’ve complained about how ‘theory’ is ruining appreciation of literature.

—You’ve borrowed a friend’s car and then 'forgot' to refill the gas tank after being stuck in Beltline traffic.

—You’ve attended a performance at the Theatre in the Park or the Raleigh Little Theatre in the Rose Garden. 

—You’ve gone bowling on Hillsborough Street (forgot the name of the second-story place, sorry!) and also had way too much to drink there.

—You’ve said vile things about Duke.

—You've attended a Durham Bulls baseball game and hwtmtd 

—You couldn't find your room on the first day of classes (double points if the class was in Harrelson).  

There are 28 questions (I think -- it's late, and counting while scrolling is not high on my priority list).  Nonetheless, if you answer in the affirmative to 20 of these questions, you are an official Retro Raleighite.  Aren't you special!

Moles, Trolls and Cornholios

It seems as if everyone, bastard and non-, is running for the Republican Presidential nomination.  And they all popped up last Thursday, ready to be hammered by the Fox moderators and each other.  Particularly during the main event, when the fearsome threesome of Brent Baer (aka Eddie Munster after having raided John Boehner’s pancake makeup kit), Chris Wallace (doing his best hey-I’ve-got-gravitas-just-like-my-dad act), and Megyn Kelly (don’t call me Bimbo because I’ve got a superfluous ‘y’ in my name) inaugurated the night by seeming to stage a ‘Fox and Friends’ takeover . . . before delivering big-assed whacks, with the pol occupying the center hole taking most of the blows.

Bam!  Right off the bat, a show of hands!  Who is a potential Republican traitor, to the extent of mounting a third-party candidacy?  ‘Me, myself, and I,’ Donald Trump volunteered.  ‘I’ll support myself if I’m the nominee;  otherwise, quién sabe, as the rapists say?’  Talk about starting the debate with a ratings grabber.

The evening just got more and more strange.  With every petulantly bellicose response, Trump increasingly resembled a deranged cuttlefish squirting toxic ink over the entire Republican Party. The littler fishies thrashed about helplessly, bubbling platitudes and canning themselves in oleaginous talking points.  After the debate ended and it was time to buss up the beer bottles and popcorn, I decided that the cephalopod metaphor forming in my mind drew from the wrong part of the animal kingdom.  Instead, what about the charges that Donald Trump is really a Democratic mole?

Trump-as-mole started as an Onion-esque conspiracy theory.  Yet is it really preposterous?  Trump revels in insulting (and occasionally unmasking) almost every Republican [‘thought’?] leader (e.g. Jeb: lacks energy; Lindsey: can't crack 1%; Carly: brings on migraines).  His screed about ‘giving,’ for example — that he gives to all candidates so they will do him favors — is a strong indictment of the Citizens United decision, which has allowed cockamamie GOP candidates to compete and often win.  Sure, he used ‘giving’ to explain why Hillary Clinton attended his most recent wedding.  But it applies equally, even more devastatingly to pipsqueak Republicans in search of their own private billionaire.

Then there are Trump’s dumps on women.  Plenty were brought up during the debate (calling women slobs, pigs, and better-on-their-knees); not to be undone by himself, the Donald added to his caddishness on Friday, suggesting that moderator Megyn Kelly was ‘mean’ to him because she had blood coming out of her ‘wherever.’  [Every woman over the age of twelve knows exactly what he meant, as we’ve all heard versions of his distasteful put-down at times when we’ve been angry, outspoken, or have challenged male authority.]  What better way to expose Republican misogyny in general than to voice it crudely and wait for Republicans to come up with unconvincing lukewarm responses or for Democrats to pounce on his remarks as indicative of the mainstream GOP’s anti-women policies, as Hillary Clinton did today?  Worthy of a really really smart, really really really rich mole!

The self-gratifying excessiveness of Trump’s ‘you’re on the rag’ stupidity, and the way he has kept escalating it for the past three days, suggests that the billionaire may be more of a troll than a mole.  He’s trolling the Republican establishment for sure, which includes picking a fight with Fox News and making them grovel for forgiveness, as has been announced tonight re the conciliatory genuflection of Roger Ailes. Trump is also trolling the entire democratic electoral process; what egomaniac wouldn’t shoot for the biggest possible target?  Is this really what our country’s political decisions have become — a sorry brew of Orwellian pop-up polls, reality TV ratings, and social media buzz?

The redundantly logorrheic insistence of Trump’s outrageousness suggests another trolling target. If you’ve convinced yourself that you’re the most successful, intelligent, appealing  person in modern history, what could be more fun than trolling yourself?  Can you get the booboisie to keep supporting you, no matter how you up the insanity ante?  

A mole and a troll (and a cuttlefish, but it didn’t rhyme). Obviously, I’m casting about for ingenious comparisons with which to characterize Donald Trump’s jaw-dropping rise to political prominence.  Let me try a final one, which to me seems quite apt.

Beavis and Butthead fans know that Beavis has a completely unhinged alter ego, ‘The Great Cornholio.’  Cornholio is Beavis in a fugue state, yelling gibberish, waving his arms, and being even more scatologically juvenile than his ‘normal’ persona.  Cornholio has a thing about Latin America, like (heh-heh) Lake Titicaca and talking in a ‘Spanish’ accent . . . in one episode, he’s deported to Mexico by the INS. The ‘normal’ Beavis usually has no memory of Cornholio’s escapades, and/or will deny them vehemently.  What makes the Cornholio/Beavis dyad so funny is that the everyday Beavis is childishly, vulgarly unfiltered to begin with.  Can absolutely self-absorbed, politically incorrect excess be amped up? To make that surreal point, even the Cornholio alter has an alter: Bungholio. 

Thus I suggest Donald Trump as The Great Cornholio, incorporating the mole and the troll into increasingly fantastic, free-floating, maybe even sociopathic self-representations.  And if you don’t agree with me, you’re a stupid, weak, hormonal loser. 

It’s a Guy Thing: the Republican Debates and the Optics of Gender

I spent most of my academic life in a department that expected female faculty to host (and cook and clean up for) parties . . .  and to keep silent when male models of pedagogy (all-knowing lectures from on high rather than, say, collaborative dialogue) were constantly rewarded. Thus, a formulaic academic title — catchy phrase, colon, and real subjects A and B — seems appropriate for this short rumination on the upcoming Republican debate and its potential for being a total body slam against women.  

Fox News has just announced the Thursday line-up.  All white guys except for the BINO Ben Carson and LINOs Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.  As I said: all [virtual] white guys.  Even if Carly Fiorina (a WINO) or Piyush ‘Bobby’ Jindal (an IINO) had been included, it still would have been an all-white-guy line-up.  But the optics might have been different, particularly if disastrous-CEO Fiorina had been standing on the stage.

You know that Planned Parenthood funding will be brought up.  It’s the hot issue of the day.  So imagine this:  ten middle-aged guys thundering about how that organization should be defunded by every governmental and private agency known to man. Will Jeb Bush be asked about his comment re Planned Parenthood, “I’m not sure we need a half a billion dollars for women’s health issues?”  Will Donald Trump be asked why he thinks breastfeeding is disgusting?  Will Mike Huckabee be asked whether championship of ‘traditional marriage’ means championship of traditionally subservient women’s roles? Will all of them be asked why Hillary Clinton is un(pants)suited to be President?  

This is just the start of what could be a monumental fail for the Republican Party.  So many issues that voters actually care about are entangled in gender considerations. Minimum wage:  important for women trying to support a family on a shoestring income. Gun violence: important to women who fear being shot in domestic disputes and/or who fear for their children’s safety every day.  Immigration: important to women who want their families to remain together and for their kids to succeed.  Policing and incarceration:  important to women who see their husbands, sons, and fathers imprisoned for relatively minor offenses, thus rupturing their families, not to mention their own risks if they get caught up in our anything-but gender-and-income-and-ethnicity neutral justice system. Health insurance:  uh, duh — particularly when improving women’s health services is a key component of Obamacare, which all Republican candidates seem to think is the Nazi Muslim devil’s plan to . . .  oh who knows, to make the unterfrauen dominant? 

I’m not arguing that these issues have impacts only on women.  Instead, I suggest that they have distinctive impacts, ones that need recognition and articulation.  Which no one on the Republican debate podium will be able to do.  

They could, of course.  You don’t have to be a woman to support and advocate for women’s issues, experiences, and points of view.  I can imagine, for instance, that if Joe Biden enters the scrum, he would be as articulate (in his endearing Uncle Joe way) about such matters as would Hillary Clinton (whose adult life has been significantly dedicated to women’s issues [and don’t even bring up slut-shaming vis-a-vis Bill’s sexual adventures because what in the hell would you do, ladies, if put in that horridly no-win situation?)].  In an alternate political universe, I can imagine some current Republican candidates trying to do the same as Vice President Biden.

But it’s this year’s political universe. The Republican Presidential Debate of August 6, 2015, will be an all-guys thing, not only in gender optics, which may be bad enough, but in defensive white male-based attitude. White males — white Republican males, or I-think-like-a-white Republican male because I’m a victim of ‘liberal’ change — are the core of the Republican base. No one will contest this base ideology, I suspect, even if their life experiences and private souls prompt them otherwise (nonetheless, I hold out a modicum of hope for John Kasich).  The debate will be an unhappy and antiquated guy thing:  in effect, as the men trumpet their dislike of everything that’s happening currently, women will be told to bake cookies while they shut up and listen and internalize the misogynistic message.

I hope I’m wrong.