When Michelle Obama says "life is short and change is needed and women are smarter than men"...

... it's highlighted at Breitbart, but why? I suspect the Breitbart folks think it shows that MO is arrogant and feminism has gone too far and want to stir up readers to say Look! Now men are being oppressed and civilization doomed unless we get a vigorous injection of social conservatism.

But I'm hearing the First Lady's rhetoric as corny and old school, like the way men of the so-called Greatest Generation used to talk about their wife, their better half. It was once standard etiquette for a professional man to aver that his homemaker wife was, of course, much smarter than he. It was part of maintaining the old order. And Michelle Obama has taken the behind-the-scenes homemaker role in relation to her husband. She's being old fashioned and speaking in an old fashioned way.

And yet those who feel true nostalgia for the past won't acknowledge this, because they don't like where her husband wants to take us. So perhaps I'll stand alone in what I'm saying, but I'm old, and I remember. I lived through the 50s and the 60s, the pre-women's movement era, and I remember the kind of talk that I hear resonating in her words. It drove me mad, and it still makes me mad. I don't think it's feminism and I don't think it's good for women. It might be good for men... if they understood how to use it... like the Greatest Generation guys they imagine they can emulate.