I don’t usually get into politics here, but on this day of the final presidential debate, I feel like speaking up. To maintain some connection with literature, here’s a nursery rhyme that, while reading to my grandson, reminded me of a certain despicable person:
Georgie Porgie, pudding and pie,
Kissed the girls and made them cry;
When the boys came out to play,
Georgie Porgie ran away.
I thought I had disliked politicians in the past, but the loathing I bear for Donald Trump makes what I felt for Richard Nixon, for example, seem, in retrospect, more like benign disapproval. (He did go to China, after all.)
This isn’t even about politics anymore. It’s about being a man. About being a decent human being. This crybaby’s not fit to be allowed on the same playground as the rest of us. He’s the very epitome of the kind of guy I would have nothing to do with in college. I would never date a frat rat, but likening Donald Trump to members of a fraternity is not fair to them, just as calling him childish is not fair to children, just as calling the appalling trash that comes out of his mouth “locker room talk” is not fair to athletes.
Seriously, he’s in a horrid little class by himself. And most people I associate with seem to agree on this. Unfortunately, it also seems fashionable to follow the expression of such sentiments with a pouty, “But I don’t like Hillary either.”
As if there’s any comparison!
So I want to state for the record that I like Hillary Clinton. I love that her classmates voted her the first student speaker at their commencement and predicted, in writing, she’d be the first female President of the United States.
And I identify with her. Just a year after she took an argumentative tone with Wellesley’s administration in that standing-ovation speech, I myself got into a verbal spat with John Howard, the President of Lewis & Clark College. A handful of top freshmen had been invited to an honorary dinner where we sat around a big round table with this guy. At some point I made the remark that for me, the high cost of tuition at this spendy private school (My parents could hardly scrape together that one year’s tuition, and were relieved when I elected to transfer to the more budget friendly U of O) would be something of a waste if I didn’t do something other than become a housewife. In this spring of 1970 I had no idea what that would be; I just knew I had a horror of 100% housewifery, thanks to having just read The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan. (Oh, good, another literature connection!)
President Howard asked how women expected to get along with their next door neighbors if they didn’t take classes in international relations, and another girl who’d also apparently earned stellar grades sniffed that she just couldn’t see any higher calling in life than marriage and motherhood. I cannot recall the rest of the exchange, but I’ll never forget President Howard’s closing argument:
“Frankly, I just couldn’t ever imagine being married to someone as unfeminine as you.”
Say WHAT? His personal assessment of me as wife material had WHAT to do with this debate?
Storming back to the dorm, I came upon the guy I’d recently been dating, sprawled on the lawn in his usual 501 jeans. In a huff, I dropped down to my side on the grass beside him and propped my cheek on my hand.
“So,” I said. “Do YOU think I’m unfeminine?”
My future husband clearly did not see any problems along these lines. The rest, as they say, is history.
I’m pretty sure its memories like this that make Trump’s comments push my outrage buttons. No, I was never groped (and THANK YOU, all of you who were and are now speaking up) but I’ve had to endure this nasty business of men trying to take us down by letting us know how unattractive they consider us smart girls. Like we’d even consider for one minute getting in bed with idiots like you, Donald!
So, yeah, I’ll be rooting for Hillary big time tonight. Trump’s over-the-top vocabulary of outrageous hyperbole is so limited, during the last debate I was thinking what a great drinking game it would be if we all did shots each time he used a certain word or phrase—disaster, tremendous, I’ll be honest about this. (Right—liar, liar, pants on fire.) Trouble is, select any one word and the whole country would be passed out drunk in the first five minutes.
I guess folks at the Wall Street Journal thought better of this idea too, and this morning ran a series of stress-relieving yoga poses we could all do instead.
Well, I already did my yoga first thing as usual, so, instead, I’ll be doing the handstitching on my grandson’s new quilt. The one I made him before he was born with Chinese children flying kites didn’t really do it for him, turns out. He wants John Deere tractors. This kid’s daddy was savvy enough at the age of ten to draw horns on a picture of Donald Trump and paste it in a scrapbook. Not yet three, our grandson has been spared the worst of Trump, obviously, and is simply relieved to be reassured this man lives all the way across the country from us.
He piped up a reference to Hillary Clinton yesterday as “that other grandmother.”
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