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NICE GIRLS, AND THE OTHER KIND, or, TODD AKIN'S WORLD

10/5/2012

Nice Girls and the Other Kind, or, Todd Akin’s World.
                    Sometimes it's hard to be a woman,
                    Givin' all your love to just one man
           You'll have bad times, and he'll have good times,
                  Doin' things that you don't understand
             But if you love him, then you'll forgive him,
                  'Cause after all he's just a man
                                                                             (Tammy Wynette, Stand By Your Man)
   It’s old-tyme chivalry going back to King Arthur. Todd Akin opens doors for ladies, doffs his hat in elevators (I do too), and would be scandalized if one offered to pay the check (not me!). If he saw The Honeymooners, he understood Ralph Kramden, Brooklyn bus driver who hollered, “No wife of mine will ever work a day in her life!”
   In the 1951 movie, Bright Victory, Arthur Kennedy returns blinded from WW-II. His girl can’t handle it and they split. He learns he can become a lawyer if someone reads law books to him, finds a new girl and says, “Honey, we’re going to be a lawyer!” The blithe chauvinism—she does the reading, he gets the degree—of days when it was unthinkable for a woman to be a lawyer, is the world of Todd Akin, who after a debate with Claire McKaskill called her “unladylike,” and “a wild cat.” Her response: “I was a prosecuting attorney and came out fighting. What did he expect?”
   What he expected began long before 1947 when he was born. Todd Akin lives in a world I learned about from Ardrah Buddin, my WW-II navigator who grew up in South Carolina, believing that there were nice girls and the other kind. He was much more interested in the other kind because nice girls didn’t like sex, even when married, so a man had to have “something on the side.” Budden grew up, he said, thinking that “nice girls don’t even shit, they take chemicals.” But he expected to marry a nice girl. It’s likely Todd Akin thought those things.too because at age 55 he still thinks that a nice girl can’t be knocked up by a rapist because her body “shuts down.” If she gets pregnant, she must have “asked for it,” so isn’t a nice girl after all. (Talk about blaming the victim!)
   Akin is scared of unladylike wild cats like Claire McKaskill, only comfortable with weak fluttery nice girls. A century ago, too blushingly delicate to spread their legs, they rode horses side-saddle. In Italy in the 1950s, nice girls rode motor scooters side-saddle, behind a man, knees pressed primly together.
   “Women and children first!” cried gallant gents on the sinking Titanic, and sure enough, 74% of the women survived, only 20% of the men. But I’d like to know what percentage of those saved women had been in First Class, how many came from below.
   Todd Akin loves Tammy Wynette.
                             Stand by your man, Give him two arms to cling to
                   And somethin' warm to come to, when nights are cold and lonely
                      Stand by your man, And show the world you love him
                    Keep givin' all the love you can, Stand by your man.
                                        * * *
      (TO SEE "MITT ROMNEY RAP," CLICK HERE)

FIRST PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE

10/3/2012

           First Presidential Debate
   When I was six, “Uncle Don” came on the radio every evening during supper.
   Hello nephews nieces mine,
   I’m glad to see you look so fine.
   How’s Mama? How’s Papa?
   But tell me first just how you are.
   I’ve many many things to tell you,
   On the radio,
   This is Uncle Don, your Uncle Don .        Hello, little friends, hello!
   I didn’t like Uncle Don and a few years later heard that after one program, thinking the mike was off, he said, “That ought to hold the little bastards!” I had detected that undercurrent of loathing in Uncle Don just as I detected the undercurrent of distaste Mitt Romney has for the folks he could once bury in spread sheet data while making millions with Bain Capitol.
   Some think Romney did okay in his debate with Barack Obama. His expression was usually a pained smile, except when he turned serious to spew out remedies for an economy four years into the ten-year depression left by the self-same policies he proposes will end it.
   Surprising to some, he repudiated most of the extreme Teapublican ideas which were the mainstay of his candidacy—until tonight. Teapublicans won’t like it, but what can they do now? Maybe it revived expiring Republican moderates. But beneath everything Romney said was, “That ought to hold the little bastards.”
   Smart, handsome, well educated, and well spoken, Romney causes sub-cutaneous itching. During the debate, I found myself more interested in doping out what made him so personally perturbing rather than nailing the contradictions in his arguments. As for Barack Obama, he blandly let Romney get away with vagaries and mis-statements, preferring not to expose the lying schemer, or himself as an angry opponent.
   Romney, sometimes pleading, looked like a tight-rope walker afraid the next step would tumble him into the abyss. He didn’t use the smile seen in stump speeches, where he doffs jacket and tie, slides into jeans, and flashes a firefly smile—on, off, on, off, on—beamed like a lighthouse into the dark night.
   Obama approaches the microphone, comfortable in his skin, and with an athlete’s ease. You can see that he needs that time on a basketball court. Romney, wound tight as a watch spring with nervous energy, moves in fits like a caroming pool ball with no route of its own. He reminded me of the time I saw Michelle Bachmann dance with her husband to end one of the stump speeches of her ludicrous presidential run, moving in brittle patterns like a figurine on a Swiss cuckoo clock.
   After the debate, little light shed, I came away still feeling that Obama is in my corner. Romney wants people to love him now, but you have to give love to get it. Mitt’s urgent talk and firefly smiles can’t convince anyone that he loves them.
                                                * * *

   (TO SEE "MITT ROMNEY RAP," CLICK HERE)

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Author (Yuma, AZ, 1944)

Being 90 years in this world, with great kids, great grandkids, great wives (two, one at a time) and great memories, I wonder why some people seem to have stopped loving the U.S.A.? I will wonder in print right here. If you wonder too, or can provide some answers, please comment.
Stuart Hodes

       With my friend, Nero.
             April, 2012.
    Photo by Ray Madrigal