Saturday, October 15, 2016

He That is Without Sin Among You, Let Him


I can bring home the bacon.
Fry it up in a pan
And never, never let you forget you're a man
--Enjoli advert

To all the girls I've loved before
Who traveled in and out my door
I'm glad they came along
I dedicate this song
To all the girls I've loved before 
--To All the Girls I've Loved Before,
Willie Nelson  

Men don't have platonic friends okay?
We just have women we haven't f*cked yet
--Chris Rock

First Lady: As I was saying, how do you find the new vicarage?

Vicar: Oh yes, certainly, yes indeed,
I find the grounds delightful,
and the servants most attentive and particularly
the little serving maid with the great big knockers,
and when she gets going...
 --The Dirty Vicar, Monty Python
_____________________

O,k., boys. You did not like my last post, and since I always take my 2nd opportunity when it's 2-for-1 night, I shall give you another chance. (We women can be such harpies and shrews, vixens and wenches.)

To whet you whistle: Think about what's happening as we count down to the final weeks before our presidential election. We are being whipped up into a Puritanical, proletariat frenzy about morality, such as we haven't seen since, well, I dunno.

We are all beside ourselves at the discovery that female objectification is still alive and well. I reflect fondly upon the good ole' days when President Clinton sat in the oval office and did a bit of groping and penetration himself.

Whoever wins this election, we shall have a groper back in the White House (Bubba will be the Mister, this time.) It's all sex and violins, as Ruth Buzzi said.
_____________________________

So the powers situated to emplace She That Will Not Be Denied on the Presidential throne feel they can finally wipe the sweat from their brow.

We have learned from last Sunday's Great Debate that Mr. Trump objectifies and covets women's lady parts. Shocked, you say? Much like Capt. Renault, I s'pect. Puh-leeze.

Anderson Cooper -- that greatly underwhelming talking head who could not even win a round of dumbed-down celebrity Jeopardy! (Ranger had even a SEAL reader -- God bless you, Stevie -- who won a real Jeopardy! contest)  -- came out of the gate like a snorting bull about Trump's sexcapades 20 years ago.

A real "gotcha" moment, eh? News worthy of being "broken" by a national paper like The Washington Post (not). Kinda makes you proud to be an American, no?

But how does Mr. Trump's machismo and bravado disqualify him from the Presidency? Are we riding some sort of crest of female empowerment of which I am unaware?

Less than 100 years ago, the 19th Amendment (1920) gave women the right to vote. (The 15th Amendment granting black males that right was ratified 50 years earlier.) In the first blush of that voting rights victory, the Equal Rights Amendment, designed to guarantee equal rights for women across the board, was introduced to Congress in 1923.

Ninety-three years on, it has yet to be ratified.

Females currently compose a little over 4% of Fortune 500 company's CEO's. Women earn 80 cents for every dollar earned by a man, a gender wage gap of 20%. Intimate partner violence shows no signs of abating, and 20% of women report having been raped in their lifetime.

Forty percent of Americans are regular viewers of online pornography, and 20% of men say they have viewed porn online at work.

Candidate Trump is not accused of rape. Powerful and monied men are an aphrodisiac for some women (news flash, right?). Trump does not hide his proclivities ("I just start kissing them.") To be in the stable of a man like Trump is not to be surprised by his track record.

If we were honest, we would acknowledge that powerful men throughout history take their just desserts. Italy's Silvio Berlusconi, Dominique Strauss-Kahn ("DSK") and Russia's Vladimir Putin, are but a few. But let us look at ourselves first.

Innumerable United States Presidents have pussyfooted about with women to whom they were not married. Among these were Thomas Jefferson, Warren G. Harding, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Woodrow Wilson, FDR (who died in the presence of his mistress), JFK and Bill Clinton (both with teenage White House interns, among others) and LBJ. And the beat goes on.

These were all Gropers-in-Chief, yet we turned a polite eye to their dalliances provided they steered the ship of state with some skill and attention. Their inability to be emancipated men -- whatever that means -- and overmaster their heady and hormonal drives did not disqualify them from their job. Their opponents attempted, to a greater or lesser extent, to utilize their actions against them.

Thing is, reporters -- when that was an actual profession -- used to enjoy habitual relationships with the Presidents. They had entree to the actual news, while agreeing to keep the sordid stuff out of the headlines. Nod, nod - wink, wink.

Make no mistake: The people who slandered these men did not do so on any chivalric grounds of protecting women's honor. Any muck-racking was done with the sheer intent of toppling these men's presidencies. 

Neither people nor the societal structures which house and instruct them, have changed in the mere 2,0000 years when we wrote down some rules about what we should and shouldn't do. (One might go so far back as almost 4,000 years with Hammurabi's Code; in any event, we have not been operating under rules approximately equable to all for very long, and the rules were certainly not equally applied to women.)

Sadly today, the smut has become the kernel. Rather than a ship of the state, the next President will steer a ship of fools. Our behaviors have not regressed; we are the same nutty sexual monkeys.

What has changed is that voyeurism and exhibitionism have moved from the edge to the center. Representative Weiner can send an image of his over a cell phone, and someone like Anderson Cooper can make us think that the voyeuristic "bust" is actual news.

The move to accept the LGBTQQIP2SSA communities got you thinking the sky's the limit in terms of gender enlightenment? You may pat your smiling liberal self on the back, but think again.

Last Monday's BBC America featured a two-minute story on the travails of newly-robbed multi-millionairess Kim Kardashian and her husband Kanye's end-of-show response -- approximately 7% of the network's world news broadcast for that day. Now ask yourself a question: what makes Mrs. Kardashian newsworthy? 

It is one thing alone, to wit: her massive tits and arse. You can't have it both ways, people.

Seen another way, what makes candidate Clinton preferable? Is it because she is monastic? Is she consistent?

In 1992 in the face of sexual misconduct charges against her husband, President Clinton, Mrs. Clinton  told CBS anchor Steve Croft that she was not a "stand by your man" kind of woman. She also asked the news media not to turn the 1992 campaign into "a game of 'gotcha'." 

But she ended up standing beside her man for future political returns and "gotcha" is now her game. Even then, her feminist creds were decaying as she worked hard to discredit every woman associated with Mr. Clinton.

This is the Caesarean Secretary of State Clinton who said of Libya's President's death by mob, "We came, we saw, he died." Today, she is Lady Macbeth silently screaming, "Out, out, damned spot!"

She has now morphed into Grandma Hillary, a safe and sexless white woman with a milquetoast running mate in Mr. Kaine (an acceptable white male.). But Grandma Hillary is not toothless.

She is Jung's archetypal Old Crone, and she may subvert or conform to the power structure at will; she has nothing left to lose. She will not usher in an Age of Aquarius because she will have to be (as Ranger puts it) a "Billy Badass" as the first United States female head of state.

If one believes what one reads, it seems that despite the amazing support that elected a Republican candidate not even backed by his own party, Mrs. Clinton must win. It is somehow cognitive dissonance to think otherwise.

She is the politician between the two, and politicians become Presidents. You could not have a haberdasher, or a community organizer or a peanut farmer, fer gawdssakes.

But back to the sex story. It is unlikely that Mr. Trump would grab for Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel's vajayjay for any reason, and is not she the only one who really matters? And did not our own President G. W. Bush err by attempting a back rub of the Frosty One?

The only one to watch out for would be Denmark's Prime Minister Helle-Thorning Schmidt, with whom President Obama and England's David Cameron enjoyed a selfie (to the apparent disdain of Mrs. Obama). However,  the lovely Mrs. Trump should provide eye-candy enough to keep her husband's roving little hands at home.

But as Donovan sang, this may be the Season of the Witch. No het white male today is immune from excoriation at the press's whim. Secretary of State John Kerry was lambasted for his effete Spandex-wearing, Francophile ways. Now, Mr. Trump for his machismo.

So Trump wants to grab and kiss women? BFD. In a Don Draper sort of way, he is like a rib-eye steak in a world of crepe-y raw vegans. As it is written of the Big Macher in the Sky, so it could be said of Mr. Trump, "I am that I am". (As for the shape-shifter Mrs. Clinton, there is no declarative "I AM" in her "I" -- only a reflection of her audience du jour.)

We could watch no more after this October Surprise. Such thin gruel for such a glutted audience
__________________________

Addendum:

It was deplorable when the Republicans moved to impeach President Clinton over his indiscretions, and it's equally deplorable that this lower level of lasciviousness has the Democrats so wrapped over Mr, Trump.

Granted President Clinton showed no discretion and poor morality with his Oval Office escapades. It was so Arkansas and tatty. Surely there were throngs of older women among his wealthy inner circle of supporters who would have obliged him (though they might not have been wearing thongs.) But it was not comme il faut to dally at work, when one should be focused on world leaders and such. Off-duty, please.

Now, Mrs. Clinton has the opportunity to rise to the occasion, to address the madding throngs and say, "Good sirs, please let us all join in the important matter before us, which is to help the American people understand our positions on matters of State, not of the genitals."

She could be a giant. Instead, she revels in the swampland, in silence. We know she's there, salivating as her moment approaches. She hasn't got the cahones to do what is needed at this moment.

Another stray thought:

It is clear how entrenched our patriarchy is when it cravenly exploits the few women they've kept in the pocket to expose Trump's poor behavior, as though they are silly little maidens who had no idea how to protect themselves from the Big Bad Wolf's roving hands. (I will develop that idea soon.)

Also, the NYT Book Review features a new release on Eleanor Roosevelt's lesbian affair with Lorena Hickok. Why is it that a man's affair, once revealed, become licentious, but a woman's lesbian affair is accepted de facto.

Any thoughts?

[cross-posted @ Rangeragainstwar.]

14 comments:

  1. Dear Lisa –

    I am not without sin. During my teens and twenties my only thoughts about the human race were about what was under the skirts of the female half. And even now at 73 and happily married I still look at the field and one day last week I found myself unconsciously eye-humping a stranger until I recollected my manners and started staring at my feet and the ceiling.

    But I have never called you or any other woman a harpie, shrew, vixen or wench. And neither have I called any woman an old crone, or witch, or swamp dweller :-)

    My main beef with the Dumpster came long before the reports of his habit of groping. My beef is with his shady business practices, his cheating of partners, creditors, small businesses and contractors, and taxpayers. The man is not a ‘macher’. He is a scam artist, a promoter of smoke and mirrors, a pathological liar. I also dislike his slander of veterans and of Americans like my smallest great grandson surnamed Garcia, whose paternal ancestors were Californios a couple of centuries before the Trump (or Drumpf) grandfather immigrated from Germany. Mark my words, Trump will next be deporting Catholics and Jews. He has already been in a twitter flame war with Pope Francis, and has made anti-semitic inferences to cabals of international bankers.

    I agree Hillary is not perfect. She is not the monster that the media tries to make her out to be. She will be a good president, possibly a great one if the Congress changes hands. I for one will be glad when the election is over. But the slime attacks won;t stop even then. Let us hope Trump's encouragement of rebellion and assassination are not heeded.

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  2. See, mike, that's the thing: you're too polite, and keep your naughty boy thoughts inside. OTOH, I say what I think and see. (Mum always said I wear it on my sleeve, which is not always to my benefit.)

    I had to think for a mo' when you said, "Dumpster". I think that is a slander of the candidate? I do not do that, and instead call them "Mr." or "Mrs.".

    I did not say he was a "macher", but I made an analogy to the declarative "I am".

    There is no evidence that Trump wants to deport Catholics and Jews; you are buying into the Hitler canard. He has never made a call to assassination.

    I am not privy to the press you speak of which makes Mrs. Clinton into a monster. Far as I can see, she is their choice and presumed heir-apparent.

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  3. Lisa -

    Ranger Jim is a lucky man to have a strong, outspoken woman like you as a companion in life.

    And the Trump campaign is lucky to have you too. I am not understanding why you are such a fan of a pathological liar like Trump. But as Jim might say: 'Sua Sponte'.

    BTW regarding my so-called Dumpster slander - the man is a piece of trash. Let him sue me. And you, Lisa, did not say Mrs Old Crone, nor Mrs Witch, nor Mrs Revels-in-Swampland.

    Sorry if I missed your analogy re "I am", as I have always been a little slow. But it sure sounded to me like you were favorably comparing him to "the Big Macher in the Sky" and "Rib-Eye Steak". My own opinion and that of the great majority of our fellow Americans is that he ain't worth bubkes.

    Trump is not Hitler. But like Hitler he thinks he knows more than the generals and has said he will institute torture. You are right that he will never be allowed to deport Catholics and Jews. But I think he should stop with the anti-Pope tweets and the comments on a"cabal of international bankers".

    The press's attacks on Mrs Clinton have been going on for a quarter century and are still going on. Are you buying into right wing cock and bull stories? (spelling for press's???? I was never good at apostrophic usage. Maybe should have just said "press attacks", you think?)

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    1. mike,

      Thank you for the kind words.

      Like I say, I write on the spectacle, and not the content of the player's positions. Everyone must vote for himself.


      Chief:

      I know this is a military blog, but I think we may discuss politics as the connection to the next Commander in Chief is inexorable.

      I will have more, because I feel we must try and understand the tragedy unfolding in real time.

      This is most singular election in our lifetimes, for certain. With the addition of the new media platforms, perhaps any.

      Delete
  4. Oh for God's sake, Lisa...

    "Why is it that a man's affair, once revealed, become licentious, but a woman's lesbian affair is accepted de facto."

    Affair? Seriously? You really wanna die on that hill, that this is about Drumpf's "affair"?

    If you cannot grasp the concept of "consent" than I cannot explain it to you.

    I'm sorry, but these posts of yours are getting frankly ridiculous. I'm going to stop reading and commenting because they just get my blood pressure up and my spirits down.

    And to think that of all the people that I thought would get a cynical chuckle about the GOP's creation and then loss of control of The Creature it was you...

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    1. Of course, per Mrs. Roosevelt, I was keeping the reference to her husband, alone. Yes, both were consensual, and yet their lifestyles (which the press largely kept hidden) did not accord with the prevailing moralities, no?

      That is all I am saying. I find it interesting that a man is called a bounder or worse for such behavior, and yet the latest book speaks respectfully of Eleanor's affair.

      We seem to have different standards for men and women, do you agree?

      Delete
    2. oops ... p.s. to Chief:

      Please know that, tho' it's not a chuckle I get, I am truly amazed by this spectacle before us. I did not take an interest in this election until reading a few months of the vitriol against the Republican nominee-who-could-not-be (and yet who was.)

      Trump never was a GOP creation [many still disown him!], and that is a major fact which we are missing. The GOP (and everyone) got this SO wrong.

      Out of their stable of 16, they thought at least one would capture the imagination, but since none of these men HAD an imagination, they fell flat. All parroted one platform or another, all losers. They were ALL sops, and the voters got THAT.

      It seems that the majority of Trump voters were not these crazed Tea Party, pro-life, birthers. Trump is not that. He's pretty middle-of-the-road for a Republican, ISTM. Moreover, Mrs. Clinton seems pretty hawkish, and to the Right of the Left spectrum, IMHO.

      So that makes this no easy choice.

      I have a few more posts in me trying to deconstruct the thing. Hopefully before Hallowe'en.

      Like I have said before, media and semiotics are my thing :).

      Delete
  5. But before I go, I'm gonna leave you with this, just because unlike your frankly bizarre screed Matt Taibbi has crafted a little gem pointing out the REAL story you should be on top of AND furious about...

    http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/the-fury-and-failure-of-donald-trump-w444943

    Here's the nut grafs:

    "Trump from the start had been playing a part, but his acting got worse and worse as time went on, until finally he couldn’t keep track: Was he supposed to be a genuine traitor to his class and the savior of the common man, or just be himself, i.e., a bellicose pervert with too much time on his hands? Or were the two things the same thing? He was too dumb to figure it out, and that paralysis played itself out on the Super Bowl of political stages. It was great television. It was also the worst thing that ever happened to our electoral system.

    Trump’s shocking rise and spectacular fall have been a singular disaster for U.S. politics. Built up in the press as the American Hitler, he was unmasked in the end as a pathetic little prankster who ruined himself, his family and half of America’s two-party political system for what was probably a half-assed ego trip all along, adventure tourism for the idiot rich.

    That such a small man would have such an awesome impact on our nation’s history is terrible, but it makes sense if you believe in the essential ridiculousness of the human experience. Trump picked exactly the wrong time to launch his mirror-gazing rampage to nowhere. He ran at a time when Americans on both sides of the aisle were experiencing a deep sense of betrayal by the political class, anger that was finally ready to express itself at the ballot box.

    The only thing that could get in the way of real change – if not now, then surely very soon – was a rebellion so maladroit, ill-conceived and irresponsible that even the severest critics of the system would become zealots for the status quo.

    In the absolute best-case scenario, the one in which he loses, this is what Trump’s run accomplished. He ran as an outsider antidote to a corrupt two-party system, and instead will leave that system more entrenched than ever. If he goes on to lose, he will be our Bonaparte, the monster who will continue to terrify us even in exile, reinforcing the authority of kings.

    If you thought lesser-evilism was bad before, wait until the answer to every question you might have about your political leaders becomes, “Would you rather have Trump in office?”

    Trump can’t win. Our national experiment can’t end because one aging narcissist got bored of sex and food. Not even America deserves that. But that doesn’t mean we come out ahead. We’re more divided than ever, sicker than ever, dumber than ever. And there’s no reason to think it won’t be worse the next time."


    Yep. Oh, so very WASF yep.

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    1. I have read Taibbi do much better. In fact, when he shamed the press a while back, he was at his finest and most honest.

      I can only wonder what prompts such a magniloquent piece as this.

      Delete
  6. This is such a bizarre election, I cannot believe the speed, fury, and incredible brevity of every 'shocking' scandal. The media is being exposed quite severely as being incredibly unhelpful in this election season.

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    1. PF Khans,

      I am speechless before the spectacle. Truly, "incredibly unhelpful" does not do it justice.

      What we are seeing is so far beyond the average hatchet job -- the visceral hatred so deep -- that I can only wonder what is behind it all.

      Delete
  7. Oh, as an aside it's cojones, the J is pronounced as H, and the H is silent (why have it at all (ask a messkin)....on the other hand, don't. Oh Mike, it's Bupkis. No weisenheimer intent proffered.

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  8. Hey Fasteddiez,

    Good ta see yaz. True dat, but my OED allows the phonetic "cahones".

    Chork it up to the bad influence of social media, and the rapidity with which errors are repeated.

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  9. Fasteddiez -

    Good to hear from you. No offense taken, always good to hear your kibitzing. What have you been doing lately?

    BTW i've also seen bupkus, bubkis, and bubkes. But it's all 'merde de chevre' isn't it? Or maybe I mixed that one up too?

    ReplyDelete