brushfire"This, yes, this, it was always like this." -Stanley Koehler
REFLECTIONS OF AN EMPTY NESTER
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Dear Mrs. Wickert,
The basic premise of your open letter to Hillary Clinton is that the presidential nominee is not someone you can hold up to your daughter as a positive role model to women. You make your case boldly and proudly, concluding by saying, “In a way, I guess I should thank you, Mrs. Clinton. You have made it easy to teach my daughter who she does not want to aspire to be. Now may I have the courage to stand up and show her the woman she does want to be.” And I suppose you began by courageously posting this letter on your blog, Courageous Motherhood? Nice try, but there's one problem, as illustrated by this little footnote to your post: “I am not afraid of criticism or disagreement with my post, or my overall views. However, due to the fact that many are unable to have a civil conversation, and have resorted to threats and vicious name calling, I have decided to no longer accept comments on this particular post.” Not feeling so courageous now, are we? Oh, the irony. Hillary Clinton, the woman, wife and mother you feel so free to publicly criticize, has withstood 30 years of “threats and vicious name calling.” She even withstood a dog whistle to Second Amendment supporters by Donald Trump who falsely claimed that, if elected, she plans to abolish this right (she doesn't). She has been called every name under the sun, including the very worst things you can call a woman. She has been held to impossible double standards in the ugly world of politics dominated by men, vilified, slandered, lied about, insulted — you name it. One political operative even created an anti-Hillary Clinton group called Citizens United Not Timid — referred to by its acronym. He later lamented he could not think of a good acronym for B.I.T.C.H. And yet you couldn't withstand a day or two of public criticism without getting your feelings hurt. How's that for setting an example for your daughter? “As the mother of a beautiful young daughter, my desire is to teach her every day that she is priceless, valuable and precious beyond anything else in this world,” you wrote. “I tell her that God has placed her on this earth for a very specific reason. I make sure that she never doubts her place here.” I find it interesting the adjective you chose to describe your daughter is “beautiful.” Years ago I attended a lecture at a conference about educating girls. My older daughter was four at the time. The speaker said when people commented on how pretty her young daughter was, she — the mother — would reply, “And strong, too!” My husband and I have joked about this for years. We're proud of our beautiful daughters, too — but mostly we're proud they're strong and brave and know their own minds and aren't afraid to stand up for what they believe. In my book, Hillary Clinton presents a pretty good example of strength, courage, resilience and conviction in the face of incredible opposition. Do our daughters believe this as well? As adults in their 20s living independent lives, they can speak for themselves. But the texts they shared during the first presidential debate showed how proud they were to be female while watching Hillary Clinton stand up against the bullying rants of a misogynistic miscreant who couldn't even follow a simple instruction like “don't interrupt when it's not your turn.” (Our son chimed in too, by the way. Raising strong young men who support the rights of women is equally important.) Here is more of what one commenter on Facebook called your "sanctimonious drivel": "Mrs. Clinton, how can I possibly tell my daughter to follow you as an example after you allowed your husband to assault and demean multiple women throughout his political career?” Excuse me. Did I read that right? “You allowed your husband to assault and demean multiple women”? (The emphasis is all mine. As is the incredulous question mark.) Since when was this Mrs. Clinton's fault? Is there a little victim shaming going on here? Do you mean to imply that when a woman's husband is unfaithful, it's the wife's fault? Or just when it's Hillary Clinton? “What about the sisterhood, Mrs. Clinton?” you asked. “Did you expose your husband for his abuse? No! Instead, you enabled him as the abuser and tried to silence his victims. How can you live with yourself? Female empowerment? Nice try!” Well, nice try on a complete non-sequitur there, but that's the least of my issues. Let's start with your vilifying a woman who worked on saving her marriage — some might say she upheld her sacred vows — in the face of public humiliation and scrutiny, forgave her husband — “To the Lord our God belong mercy and forgiveness” (Daniel 9:9) — and raised her own strong, capable daughter in the process. Even Donald Trump — not known for saying nice things about women unless it's something crude about some aspect of their anatomy — called Chelsea Clinton a nice young woman. Wrapping it all up in a neat and tidy bow pretty enough to adorn your daughter's hair, you wrote: “My prayer, Mrs. Clinton, is that I would be able to teach my daughter how to be a true woman. A strong woman. A self-respecting woman. A woman who sees herself through the eyes of her Creator. I pray that she would be a woman of compassion, kindness, service, selflessness. One who has integrity and looks out for the needs of others.” Ummmm (to borrow your word)... I think you just described Hillary Clinton. Sincerely, Mary Anne Brush
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Do people tell jokes anymore?
I don't mean the kind you share on Facebook. I mean jokes as an oral tradition, with half the pleasure coming from the art of telling them, the timing and delivery of the punch line. As a child, we spent hours gathered in our family living room in the evening, telling joke after joke. It didn't matter if we'd heard it before; sometimes that was even better. So many sentences started with: “Tell the one about...” My father was a master joke teller. For years, it was part of our nighttime routine. He would sit at the edge of my bed when tucking me in and tell me a joke. A particular favorite ended with: “And if possible, I'll even find a banana for your monkey.” It's only funny if you've heard the rather lengthy story leading up to the punch line, but it involves a mother on a train infuriated because another passenger insulted her baby, followed by the train conductor's attempts to mollify her. One recent morning, my brother and I exchanged our father's punch lines via text. I was sitting in my kitchen in Michigan. He was at his home in Baltimore. “From here, Doc?” “Good, though.” “Had to. Dead, you know.” This last has to be told with a British accent. The line leading up to it is: “So sorry, old chap. Heard you buried your wife.” In the first, a patient responds to a doctor's instructions to deposit a urine specimen in one of the vials on the counter across the room. You don't have to hear the full joke anymore; just the punch line is enough to elicit that light feeling in your chest, even if you don't laugh out loud. Here's a family favorite: “I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have only six months to live.” “I think I'll need a second opinion, Doc.” “OK, you're ugly, too.” The jokes were always clean. If the original version included a salty word or two, my father would replace it with something PG-rated. They were never offensive and we never laughed at anyone’s expense. He loved the one- or two-liner, but he also enjoyed the occasional shaggy dog story. I remember him telling us the actual shaggy dog story — a long drawn-out tale of a person's search to fulfill a request for a shaggy dog. You know the punch line, of course, when the long sought-after dog, after much effort, expense and travel across the globe, is finally delivered: “Not that shaggy.” He also loved coming up with his own jokes. There was one about absence making the heart grow fonder. It involved the liqueur absinthe, an adult male deer — not a stag, but a hart — the actor Henry Fonda and a misplaced comma. It never really made sense — “Absinthe makes the hart grow, Fonda” — but he worked awfully hard on it. Sometimes we would laugh just to make him stop. A one-liner he was particularly proud of fell into his lap. He took part in a hike organized by the English department at his university. One of the professors, an annoying fellow named Max, didn't accompany them on the hike, giving others the opportunity to complain about him. “This has become quite the anti-Max climb,” my father quipped. He enjoyed nothing more than a good repartee or sparring of wits. He appreciated other people's humor as much if not more than his own and was always quick with a laugh. He was a loyal Johnny Carson fan and always stayed up late for his monologue. His favorite comedian was Pat Paulsen and he often imitated his dry delivery of the line: "Picky, picky, picky." Some of my childhood favorites were tales from his own youth. There was the little girl who stomped her foot and said, “I'm sick, sick, sick of playing house!” There was the little boy looking out his classroom window. “Hey Teach, look at the boid!” “That's not a boid, Robert, it's a bird.” “That's funny. Choips like a boid.” There were boyhood summers spent in Maine at a place called Max's Camp. Max would make breakfast for the campers. He would ask each how they wanted their eggs. After taking individual orders of two eggs over easy, one egg sunny-side up, two poached eggs — you get the idea — he would produce scrambled eggs all around. One of my father's favorite stories was about the campers taking turns cooking. The rule was you would cook until somebody complained. People wised up, keeping their mouths shut even if the food was terrible. As a result, one guy got stuck cooking so long he had finally had it. He found several cow pies in a nearby pasture and fried them up in a pan over the campfire for dinner. The first camper to take a bite looked up. “Hey, this tastes like cow dung!” (Another word would have been funnier, but remember, my father always kept it clean.) The camper looked back down at his plate and resumed eating. “Good, though.” What is it with white people? Can't we just say how we feel and move on without everyone making such an issue over every little thing? All we want is to make America white — I mean great — again and we get called deplorable?
Can't we go back to the good old days? You know, before we had to check our privilege and be politically correct all the time. It’s exhausting! On top of it all, we’re waging all these wars. The War On Christmas. The War On Christianity. The War On Patriotism Thanks to Black Athletes Who Don’t Stand for the National Anthem. Now it’s The War On White People Wearing Faux Dreadlocks. Man, where is our freedom? Can’t we just wear dreadlocks for heaven’s sake if the urge strikes us? And what is it with black women who get to straighten their hair while we can’t braid ours? Hey, Beyoncé gets to wear blonde extensions. I’m calling foul on that — she’s appropriating my white culture! Why can’t I appropriate hers? Isn’t imitation a form of flattery? Why must I seek to understand her culture before I take it as my own? I just think dreadlocks are cool! Also, we white people are so over slavery. We get it, Mrs. Obama. You wake up every morning in a house built by slaves. But don’t you know those slaves were well fed? (Thanks for that little history lesson, Bill O'Reilly.) And we are so over black people pulling the race card every time they are stopped and frisked for making "furtive movements," pulled over for driving while black — in the case of one fatal shooting, the officer is recorded saying the driver had "a wide-set nose" like a robbery suspect — incarcerated in prisons or disciplined in schools at disproportionate numbers compared to white people, killed for carrying a toy gun or walking in the middle of the street or driving with a broken taillight or selling loose cigarettes or CDs or reaching for their wallet at the officer's request or taken on a “rough ride” in a police van by officers of the law. Or maybe they're not killed on the spot, but pulled over for failing to use a turn signal, arrested for not putting out a cigarette and found hanging in a jail cell three days later. Also, don’t black people understand we white people are color-blind? We don’t care if you’re black, white, purple or rainbow colored. Honestly, we can’t see you. Unless of course you’re walking in our neighborhoods or our stores, in which case we lock our cars tight or pull our purses closer or maybe even call the police. And if you're wearing a hoodie or your pants are too low or you're playing that loud rap music or overly self-congratulatory in a post-game interview after a big football win, we might call you a thug, which is really code for that other word we can’t say anymore. But if you have on a coat and tie and are obviously well educated, we call you “articulate” — and if you’re in the White House we call it progress and shake our heads when people cry racism because don’t they know a black man is president of the United States? Oh, and in addition to being color blind, we’re also tone deaf. We can't be bothered to learn how to pronounce your oddly spelled names. Don't even get me started on that. We also have no sense of subtlety. When you say, “Black lives matter,” we say, “But all lives matter!” And also: “Blue lives matter!” Which of course they do, but police officers choose to put on their uniforms each day, while black people don’t choose the skin they’re born in, yet they still expect to be treated with decency, humanity and respect. But if we're supposed to understand this distinction, couldn’t they have spelled it out by saying “Black lives matter too?” Would it have been so hard to add that one little word? Maybe then we would understand how the Black Lives Matter movement was prompted by "Two hundred and fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy." In other words, centuries of oppression and inequality, with black lives in every facet of society valued less than lives of white privilege. I know what you’re thinking: there I go with that word again — privilege. I checked my privilege at the door already. I check my privilege in the mirror every day, just to make sure it’s still there. Yes, I’m still white — phew! Sometimes it’s hard to tell because I’m like, you know, color blind. |
Mary Anne BrushJournalist, fiction writer, wife and mother |