Golddigger, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise | @MDWorld
February 9, 2013 Martha Thomases 16 Comments
If there is anything we can learn from advertising, it’s that money buys love. Especially now, when jewelry stores stake their very viability on Valentines Day. As a woman, I can measure my desirability by how many men have bought me diamonds.
And, as a voter, I can measure my worth by how much money is in play to attract my vote.
I’ve been tremendously entertained by the internal feuding in the Republican Party. For one thing, it’s fun to watch two groups of people I don’t much like fight with each other. For another, it reminds me of the Democratic Party of my youth.
Back then, the donkey gang was allegedly taken over by the lunatic fringe, the dirty fucking hippies who got involved in politics to end the war in Viet Nam so they could stay home and do drugs and have abortions. It took the span of time from the McGovern campaign to the Clinton campaign for that image to fade.
The Republicans don’t have any hippies, but instead have the Tea Party (and it isn’t even the hippie kind of tea, nudge nudge). Roused by their principles, they got involved in Republican politics to end Obamacare and, eventually, the Federal government as we know it.
That’s not working for them. The kind of candidate who can win a Republican primary can’t win a general election. And the people who run the party are not happy about this. Karl Rove is raising money to put the grown-ups back in charge.
This isn’t a good thing, and I’m not saying that just because it suits me to have elephants lose. Rather, I believe in democracy, and I believe that voters should get to decide their candidates, and, eventually, their elected officials.
The downside of this attitude is that sometimes, the people nominate and elect crazy assholes, and then get the kind of laws that crazy assholes enact. And an uneducated populace elects an unduly proportion of crazy assholes.
The Tea Party is astonishingly uneducated. They don’t like science (see: creationism, women’s health and climate change), they don’t like math (see: economic policy) and they don’t like history.
It is an unfortunate truth of democracy that we’re all in this together, and we have to learn how to get along. I clearly remember that I decided to support Clinton in 1992, not because I agreed with him, but because I thought he could win the election, and would be better for the country than another four years of George H. W. Bush. The Tea Party is not yet at this stage.
“We don’t have to agree on everything to agree it’s time to do something,” Barack Obama said. But I guess that means the Tea Party is against it.
Media Goddess Martha Thomases is uncompromising in her dedication to cashmere yarn.
Neil C.
February 9, 2013 - 9:02 am
The problem is when one party has decided to not agree with ANYTHING the President says and that any kind of compromise is akin to cutting off one’s manhood. I was too young for the ‘filthy hippies’ but at least they wanted to help others and not say “I got mine, F– you.”
Rene
February 9, 2013 - 12:41 pm
It’s pretty damn scary, when Kark fucking Rove is the moderate force in your Party!
And while I agree with Martha that it’s bad when big money wins over the public opinion, this isn’t one of those times. The Tea Party has ceased to be “the public opinion” for a long while, if they ever were.
They are a noisy minority of radicals that has convinced themselves they’re a majority.
Mike Gold
February 9, 2013 - 2:08 pm
I don’t think it’s quite right to say that the Tea Party is doesn’t like science. They certainly like mathematics. Computers issue their social security checks — these days, computers transfer the money directly into their accounts. Guns are designed by engineers. Water boarding involves all sorts of sciences. In fact, most torture involves science. The star wars missile defense system leaks science all over the place. They have actual “scientists” who say climate change is the bunk. They make a big deal about creationism being a science. And, of course. without gravity their buddy Jesus wouldn’t be in business.
Tom Brucker
February 9, 2013 - 2:31 pm
“Balance” in 1968 seems to have a different definition in 2013.
Rene
February 9, 2013 - 2:46 pm
Creationism is “science” in the same way that the discovery of unicorns in North Korea is science.
Mike Gold
February 9, 2013 - 5:47 pm
There could be unicorns in North Korea. How the hell would we know? The locals are so hungry, they could’ve eaten them…
Speaking of which… pooping is also science.
George Haberberger
February 10, 2013 - 6:02 pm
Martha said: “I’ve been tremendously entertained by the internal feuding in the Republican Party. For one thing, it’s fun to watch two groups of people I don’t much like fight with each other.”
And;
“The Tea Party is astonishingly uneducated.”
It is equally entertaining to read a description, or more accurately, denigration, stated as though it were a fact, of a group for which the writer has an admitted animus. It is similar to asking the Capulets what they think of the Montegues or what Javert thinks of Jean Valjean or Lex Luthor’s opinion about Superman. In such cases I always consider that the source has abrogated any presumption of open mindedness and so I factor that into my evaluation.
Rene said about the Tea Party: “They are a noisy minority of radicals that has convinced themselves they’re a majority.”
To which I would refer to the words of Margaret Mead:
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
Mike Gold
February 11, 2013 - 8:01 am
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Yep. Very true.
Unfortunately for the Tea Party, they got totally(and, in my opinion, very sadly) co-opted by Alies and the Koch-heads faster than Secretariat ran the Belmont Stakes. By definition, they had a scattered agenda, no leadership (an appealing but ineffective idea), no end game, and proved themselves incapable of organizing a box of Animal Crackers. (Ummmm… Animal Crackers…).
You know, just like the Occupiers.
Neil C.
February 11, 2013 - 8:39 am
But Mike, the Occupiers were just a bunch of lefties, still fighting the wars of the the 60s, man….Tea Partiers are a group of ‘Mericans who want us to go back to the values of a select group of white people in the 50s.
Mike Gold
February 11, 2013 - 9:06 am
Hey, I liked the 1950s. I loved genuinely red hot dogs. Cinerama was pretty cool. Love Bo Diddley. Pepsin LifeSavers. Real Royal Crown Cola. The 20th Century Limited. Getting on an airplane without walking through the fallopian tube jetway.
Then again, everybody smoked tobacco everywhere, lynching people was still acceptable, homosexuals were put in jail (“that’ll learn ’em”), the pledge of allegiance became anti-American non-secular dogma, loyalty oaths were demanded, Negros sat in the back of the bus, women stayed in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant, Santa Claus hawked cigarettes, the air was unbreathable, cars got eight miles to the gallon, we put fire hoses and sicced dogs on people who stood up for their rights while we murdered civil rights workers, and if your mother attended an anti-fascist discussion in the 1930s you were supposed to turn her in.
Yeah. screw that. As Otto Bettmann said, “The good old days — they were terrible.”
Martha Thomases
February 11, 2013 - 10:04 am
Middle class white women stayed in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant in the 1950s. Women of color worked outside the home, along with inside.
And, yada yada yada, there are exceptions to these generalities.
Mike Gold
February 11, 2013 - 10:50 am
What color are you referring to? Or, I guess more to the point, which colors are you excluding? I’ve always found the phrase “people of color” to be bigoted. You don’t think middle class white women didn’t work? Or just not in the quantity of black women, Asian women, Latinas, and other non-Caucasian incarnation of femaledom, which, therefore, makes all the middle-aged white women privileged?
I was a latch-key kid; my mother worked. Now we can debate the difference between upper-lower-class and lower-middle-class, but when your parents are sharing a single egg for dinner while the two kids are eating a thin glaze of hamburger meat spread over a piece of generic white bread and broiled in the oven while daddy works six days a week leaving at 5 in the morning and not returning until 7 at night, I think the whole whitey thing goes out the window.
That’s what I get for being such a goddamned egalitarian.
Martha Thomases
February 11, 2013 - 10:58 am
You can razz me for it, but I use the term “of color” in the sense of non-white, because I consider it to be both commonly understood and polite. If I remember my coloring books correctly, white is the absence of color.
Your mother worked? Mazel tov. My mother also tried to get an occasional job (I remember she attempted to sell Parker pens door-to-door), but, because she was privileged, she could give it up when she didn’t like it.
Being able to choose to work is a privilege. Almost by definition, a privilege isn’t something one gets automatically. So, yes, being middle class in the 1950s (above a certain income level that almost certainly fluctuated with the area in which one lived) meant being able to afford a wife who stayed at home. And sometimes, also, additional household help.
Mike Gold
February 11, 2013 - 11:15 am
My mother didn’t CHOOSE to work. If she didn’t work, the four of us would have been living in a 1952 Buick.
If white is the absence of color, than non-Hispanic white people are, by definition, colorless. Personally, I am a swarthy, slightly darkish Eastern European white motherfucker who was once actually accused of “passing.” I’m proud of my heritage, I’m proud of my nationality, and I’m proud of my attitude. My pigmentation? Big fucking deal. Stereotyping me, let alone stigmatizing my mother, for our pigmentation is absolutely no different than if I was Asian-American, African-American, Hispanic, or Plutonian.
Yes, Plutonian. Did YOUR native planet get decertified by Neil deGrasse Tyson? I don’t think so.
What about white middle-class lesbians? Oh, wait. My bad. We’re taking about the 1950s. There were no white middle-class lesbians. Except — because my family is REALLY infuriating — one cousin of mine, who was exactly that. She had a great apartment. Not as nice as my male cousin who married a black woman, but they’re both doctors so they don’t count.
Martha Thomases
February 11, 2013 - 11:18 am
Mike, we’re not arguing about whether or not people who aren’t affluent choose to work. We’re agreeing.
I’m of roughly the same ethnic background as you, but when surveys ask, I say I’m white. It’s what is understood by the populace. Also, my doctor wants me to wear sunscreen, so I will only get more pale.
Mike Gold
February 11, 2013 - 11:29 am
When surveys ask, I’m Ashkenazi-American and I’m pissed there’s no check-off box. Then again, it gives the research coders something to do.
I understand the sunscreen thing. When my daughter goes out on a sunny day, she explodes in a ball of fire.