I still haven’t decided how much reportage I’ll be doing on JALC about the 2024 election hellscape-slash-battle for the soul of the nation. The older I get, the more aware I am of how minimal my “insights” are about these sort of political things: and so there seems minimal value to me going all pundit-like on here.
However, with the sort of momentous week like we’ve just had, I simply can’t restrain myself.
It all started Sunday night when I decided it was finally time to update JALC’s header image.
Strike that: it all started almost 2 years ago, when I recommitted to my blogging and decided to use my collection of “badass lady Pops” as a recurring motif in the pictures accompanying some of my posts. (One and two.)*
The first trumpeting of that motif was an attempt to use the full collection as the banner image here on JALC.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t properly thought through the actual proportions of the banner image in this particular WordPress template, so the banner image ended up being less the panoramic wonder I’d imagined and more of an awkward, semi-pixellated closeup of approximately half of my early-2019 lineup.
To wit:
Now I was kind of annoyed about it, but I’m also super-lazy, and I didn’t have a quick and easy way to rearrange the collection in two rows, especially since they were all arrayed at the very front edge of an overstuffed bookshelf. So that banner image continued to appear on JALC for all the intervening months between then and now.
But here’s the thing: this particular shelf is one of the bookshelves that gets cleared off annually so I can set up my Solstice Village. Which meant that I had a precise window of opportunity—after packing up the houses but before UNpacking the Shakespeare books—where I could jury-rig some display shelves and create a new banner image that better matched the template proportions.
I have—rather demonstrably—a potty mouth. I even lay claim to it in my tagline up there.
This propensity towards foul-mouthed discourse probably explains my love for T-shirts with provocatively foul–mouthedslogans.
Now, I’m actually too chicken-shit to wear anything so bold and brassy, but I continue to dream of myself as if I were braver. And there was a time, back at Penn, when I had a mildly foul-mouthed shirt that I loved.
I used to wear this. In public. Ah, youth!
I am, of course, musing on honorifics today on account of a truly execrable Op-Ed published in the Wall Street Journal some week-and-a-half ago. You probably know the one—I’m not linking it here—where Joseph Epstein, some retired lecturer I shall be calling “Joey” for the duration of this piece, lambasted Dr. Jill Biden for continuing to use the academic title (Dr.) relevant to her graduate degree (Ed.D.) and profession (community college professor). Since Dr. Jill Biden is not an MD-carrying medical doctor, Joey suggests, she shouldn’t put on airs by using any title beyond “First Lady.”
Honestly, I wasn’t planning to write about this. It was so obviously click-bait, something designed to provide outrage—which it quite deservedly and expectedly did, despite the follow-on article by the WSJ’s opinions editor saying how shocked (SHOCKED, I tell you!) he was about the liberal snowflakes over-reacting to the piece.
So why give these douche-canoes more of the attention they were so obviously craving? There’d be better things to write about…
But then someone on a distant external ring of my professional circle commented in an email about how, ideologically and symbolically speaking, he and Dr. Jill Biden were equally under attack by this op-ed’s voicing of current anti-intellectual and anti-education beliefs. Him and Dr. Jill and their “fake degrees.”
And I nearly took his fucking head off. Which belatedly made me aware that I’ve been having some feelings about this all.
Another title from the “just caught my attention” collection. This book caught my eye last year when I attended my second Mama Gena’s weekend in the Ziegfeld Ballroom. That site isn’t actually the building where the Follies were performed, but it still had a potent resonance, walking in the spiritual footprints of the Ziegfeld Girls while doing Mama G’s program, and then learning about this novel about 1940s New York showgirls all at the same time.
Full disclosure: I’ve never read anything by Gilbert before. I know Eat, Pray, Love was a huge phenomenon, and that Gilbert followed it up with another memoir (or two or three) as her life took additional twists and turns. It wasn’t ever a definitive decision I made against reading her stuff, I just never got around to it. (So many books, so little time…)
Still, knowing what little I know about the whole Eat, Pray, Love thing, I was truly puzzled about what type of “New York showgirl” story this particular author might want to tell. Would it completely eschew her introspective memoir thing to go all the way into glitz and escapism? Would it tell an anachronistic story of female sexual liberation and expression? What exactly would I find behind this pink feathered cover?*
So, one of the things that’s been pissing me off this election season is all the calls for liberals and progressives to dig deeper and understand the Trump voter. NY Times think pieces on how we don’t understand America if we don’t understand Trump’s appeal. CNN op-eds on how we need to listen differently. Politicians and pundits alike have been telling liberals to reach out, to empathize, to build bridges.
And why has this been pissing me off? Because 4 years ago, after Trump won in 2016, democrats, liberals and progressives were inundated with the exact same advice. Listen. Learn. Understand. Build bridges.
It’s almost like there’s certain groups of (*cough*white*cough*) people who want to make sure they stay at the center of the universe and the center of all American discourse.
Preface: I’m not sure how many posts I’ll make analyzing the 2020 elections through various lenses. I have at least 2 such lenses rattling around my brain, but it may unfold into a longer series. We’ll see. I’ll just keep cross-linking this little family of posts together as it takes shape. So: watch this space for more.
Mid-day today, I got a group Facebook message from a friend of mine, C:
Hey! If you are getting this message it’s because either you have posted about Warren or I think you might like/support her.
On my way to work today, I realized that I drive by her house every day. People are leaving notes and flowers on her porch.
With this realization, C had had a flash of inspiration. Her plan was simple: she was offering to deliver any messages any of us wanted to send to Elizabeth Warren. If we could email our message to C by 5, she’d print them all out and then drop them on Warren’s porch as C made her way home from work.
I’m betting I’ll be referring to Kubler Ross’s famous five stages of grief a fair amount over the next few weeks. Because once again, a female presidential candidate who I admire and am rooting for—and even love—is out of the race. And once again, my heart is broken.
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