"'I’d like to burn you at the stake!' growled Betty Friedan at Phyllis Schlafly during a public debate over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) at Illinois State University in 1973."

"Friedan and other feminists were unnerved by Schlafly. She was as sophisticated and accomplished as they were, but profoundly antifeminist. They tried everything to pass ERA and defeat Schlafly, from bribing state legislators to using witchcraft, but to no avail."

Did Friedan really growl or was that humorous hyperbole? I need the video or at least the whole context, which I can't get from the New York Times either, where I first saw this burning-at-the-stake business:

On the left, Betty Friedan, the feminist leader and author, compared her to a religious heretic, telling her in a debate that she should burn at the stake for opposing the Equal Rights Amendment. Ms. Friedan called Mrs. Schlafly an “Aunt Tom.”

I'm reading that today because Phyllis Schlafly has died — after a long public life and at the age of 92. Let's keep reading:

Mrs. Schlafly became a forceful conservative voice in the 1950s, when she joined the right-wing crusade against international Communism. In the 1960s, with her popular self-published book “A Choice Not an Echo” (it sold more than three million copies) and a growing legion of followers, she gave critical support to the presidential ambitions of Senator Barry Goldwater, the hard-right Arizonan who went on to lead the Republican Party to electoral disaster in 1964, but who planted the seeds of a conservative revival that would flower with the rise of Ronald Reagan....

Many saw her ability to mobilize that citizens’ army as her greatest accomplishment. Angered by the cultural transformations of the 1960s, beginning with the 1962 Supreme Court ruling prohibiting state-sponsored prayer in public schools, her “little old ladies in tennis shoes,” as some called them, went from ringing doorbells for Goldwater to serving as foot soldiers for the “Reagan revolution.” 

Little old ladies in tennis shoes... that really was a standard expression, the contempt of the time for the little people, who were openly called little. Back when older women could be frankly minimized as "old ladies." But we still sort out women according to their shoes. And it's less meaningful to be caught wearing sneakers.

According to William Safire's "Political Dictionary," the term "little old ladies in tennis shoes" was "coined in 1961 by Stanley Mosk, then the Democratic Attorney General of California, in a report on right-wing activity." It was then used to attack supporters of Barry Goldwater, specifically the "resolute, intensely dedicated women's group — Western (or at least not Eastern urban), unsophisticated, often white-haired and wearing rimless eyeglasses. They were called 'the little old ladies in tennis shoes' with considerable disdain." Safire tells us that that in 1966, when Reagan was campaigning for governor in California, he recognized the "sexism and ageism" in the phrase and flipped it into a joke, addressing crowds with "Gentlemen — and 'little ladies in tennis shoes.'"

Anyway, goodbye to Phyllis Schlafly. I wasn't on her side in most of this, but I respect the hard work and the strong voice throughout so many decades in the ongoing debate about the kind of America we want.

Nobody says "handsome woman" anymore.

Yesterday on this blog, we were talking about Milo Yiannopoulos. If you listen to the video over there, you'll see that he's pressured inordinately about all the fun that was made of the "Ghostbusters" star Leslie Jones, but the main thing he said about her was just that she looks like a man. I got to wondering: What's wrong with a woman looking like a man?

It occurred to me that no one uses the expression "handsome woman" anymore, and if my long observation of American culture can be trusted, the sequence was:

1. "Handsome woman" was once a standard expression, used as a genuine compliment for a particular kind of woman. Ah, here's something from 1783, "The Distinction Between Words Esteemed Synonymous in the English Language":

"By a handsome woman, we understand one that is tall, graceful, and well-shaped, with a regular disposition of features; by a pretty, we mean one that is delicately made, and whole features are so formed as to please; by a beautiful, a union of both."

2. Because "handsome" was the standard word to refer to a man's appearance — you wouldn't call him "pretty" or "beautiful" — calling a woman "handsome," it was too easy to sound as though you were saying that the woman looked like a man, and nice people started to feel inhibited about saying it.

3. Only not-so-nice people were left saying it. We laughed watching "Seinfeld," when Elaine said — about George's girlfriend who looked like Jerry — "she's quite a handsome woman." And here's Captain Kirk in 1966:


4. The joke/insult use died off because the original, serious usage no longer existed. You have to have the reference point to make it funny, and the envious deployment of an incomplete compliment doesn't leave you unscathed if you use a word that nobody nice ever uses.

5. Here we are in the present, where the word "handsome" could be revived. And why not? There should be no stigma in a woman looking good in a way that tends toward the masculine. And it shouldn't be bad for a woman to look good in a way that doesn't highlight sexual accessibility. That's the look many woman like and might seek to enhance rather than to overcome.

"Obama Cancels Meeting with Philippines President Who Called Him ‘Son of a Whore.'"

There's a headline.

ALSO: Obama looked at Putin.

Hillary has an incredibly long coughing fit.

Today, in Cleveland:



She tries to turn it into a joke: She's "allergic" to Trump. But this was painful.

IN THE COMMENTS: Marty Keller said:

Inexplicably, she keeps coughing into the mike....

I can explicate it... 3 ways:

1. She doesn't understand electronic devices and mishandles them... as we have seen.

2. She'd like you to think she doesn't know how to handle electronic devices. Bolsters her story.

3. She wanted to exaggerate the coughing fit: She's looking for a way out.

"If you asked me who the greatest rock singer of all time is, I'd probably think for about one second before saying..."

"... Freddie Mercury."



Had he lived, he would have been 70 years old today.

Ant and bee in the saffron crocus.

ABC's Nightline goes after Milo Yiannopoulos and I've never bothered with this guy one way or the other...

... but this ham-handed effort to cut him down made me side with him. Why is the ABC reporter sneering and yelling at the person he's interviewing?



"I think America's had enough of nice manners. If my rudeness provokes conversation, if my rudeness provokes people into, first of all, into saying 'Oh! What a monster!' and blah blah blah and then 20% of the people talk about what I was actually saying, I will consider my career to be a terrific success."

"They’re snooping and snarking around campuses, pouncing on 'politically correct' utterances and protocols in their effort to de-'liberalize' liberal education..."

"... which they’re claiming to save from 'The New Intolerance of Campus Activism,' as Friedersdorf’s headline writer put it sloppily. (He probably meant to write 'in,' not 'of' — a Freudian slip, perhaps.) But the freedoms of speech that conservative pundits are touting so passionately against 'liberal' totalitarianism on campus mean little if moneyed interests have the megaphones and the scapegoats, while most ordinary citizens have laryngitis from straining to be heard."

Wrote Jim Sleeper in Salon last year, which I'm reading now because Greg Lukianoff  pointed it out as an example of "Sleeper’s weird diatribes." Lukianoff is powerfully outraged at Sleeper for an op-ed that appeared in the NYT yesterday.

Did you hear that the Spanish media about the election involves astrology?!

Yesterday's "Meet the Press" had a panel discussion that began with the moderator Chuck Todd asking about criticism from "some Latino leaders" about the Clinton campaign's lack of outreach to Latino voters. There has been no Spanish language advertising. Todd turned first to Maria Teresa Kumar, the president and CEO of Voto Latino. "Are they slow? Are they behind?" This ensues:

MARIA TERESA KUMAR: The fact that Trump, is the Republican candidate, has actually given the Hillary campaign tons of media and Spanish media, so much so is that we have--

CHUCK TODD: The free media trumps everything--

MARIA TERESA KUMAR: The free-- no, but I mean to really crystallize it, there is a Latino astrologist named Walter Mercado that we've all grown up with, listening to in Spanish media. He has gone after anti-Trump. So the fact that she is so much media buy in the Spanish languages is good, it's fantastic. But her challenge is actually going to get the Latino millennials, the ones that are English dominant that may not be turning it on....

What?! Astrologist?!! We had to rewind. That just flew by, and she never elaborated her point. I'm going to assume that "go[ing] after anti-Trump" means going anti-Trump/going after Trump. What is this astrology going on in Spanish media? What on earth is the discussion in Spanish? I'd heard that it's different from what we're hearing in English, but... astrology? Oh, my. I hadn't heard about astrology in politics since the Reagan era.

The news from 1988:

President Reagan and his wife, Nancy, are both deeply interested in astrology, the White House spokesman, Marlin Fitzwater, said today, and two former White House officials said Mrs. Reagan's concerns had influenced the scheduling of important events.... Mr. Fitzwater said Mrs. Reagan is particularly worried about the impact astrological portents can have on her husband's safety. But he declined to say exactly how Mrs. Reagan had used astrological information. And the President, answering a question at a photo-taking session, said, ''No policy or decision in my mind has ever been influenced by astrology.''...

Marcello Truzzi, a professor of sociology at Eastern Michigan University, said he has collected evidence over many years documenting the Reagans' interest in astrology. ''I don't think Reagan is a truly avid astrological person, but I think if all things are equal, it has some impact on him,'' said Mr. Truzzi, who also heads an independent institute, the Center for Scientific Anomalies Research.... Professor Truzzi noted that President Theodore Roosevelt was an astrology buff, and that President Franklin D. Roosevelt quoted horoscopes....

Back to the present. Who is this Walter Mercado?



Oh! What did I see there:



Bill Clinton!

So what did Mercado say about el señor Donald Trump?



I'm sorry I'm having trouble understanding that. Plus, it's a year old. Here's an article from July in The Miami Herald: "Walter Mercado says Trump presidency would bring ‘total destruction’ of the world."

“I did a chart about what I see in the future and the present of this monster, this backwards person that can lead not only the United States, but the world, to total destruction,” Mercado said in Spanish. “He has no knowledge of politics and no knowledge of any type of diplomacy. He is a person that thinks money can buy anything and thinks that you can buy the conscience of all of humanity. The conscience cannot be bought with these policies that are so insulting and offensive to the human race.... I am totally, completely and absolutely in favor of Hillary, and astrologically, she is the better prospect,” he said. “God willing, the stars will align so that we will have the right president.”

NYT: "Young Blacks Voice Skepticism on Hillary Clinton, Worrying Democrats."

A NYT article by Jonathan Martin observes the problem — which will, presumably, be pointed to as an explanation if Clinton loses — that young black people lack the motivation to turn out to vote.

Mrs. Clinton’s difficulties with young African-Americans were laid bare in four focus groups conducted in Cleveland and Jacksonville, Fla., for a handful of progressive organizations spending millions on the election: the service employees union, a joint “super PAC” between organized labor and the billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer, and a progressive group called Project New America. The results were outlined in a 25-page presentation by Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster, and shared with The New York Times by another party strategist who wanted to draw attention to Mrs. Clinton’s difficulties in hopes that the campaign would move more aggressively to address the matter....

[According to a poll from earlier in the summer:] In Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia, 70 percent of African-Americans under 35 said they were backing Mrs. Clinton, 8 percent indicated support for Mr. Trump and 18 percent said they were backing another candidate or did not know whom they would support. In 2012, Mr. Obama won 92 percent of black voters under 45 nationally, according to exit polling.

And that is how Hillary loses the election, isn't it? Those are the swing states, and she needs the black vote to which her party feels entitled.

Part of Mrs. Clinton’s problem, said Symone Sanders, a former top aide to Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign, is that the candidate is overly cautious and is conducting an outdated style of black outreach. Ms. Sanders has begun taking matters into her own hands. She said she was working with other young activists to recruit black celebrities for a millennial mobilization tour through Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia.

“Black churches and an H.B.C.U. tour is just not going to cut it in 2016,” said Ms. Sanders, referring to historically black colleges and universities. “The Clinton campaign has to be willing to get out of what’s comfortable and get on the streets.”

[Addisu Demissie, Mrs. Clinton’s voter outreach and mobilization director,] said the Clinton campaign’s efforts were more expansive, pointing to voter registration efforts already underway in barbershops and salons as well as sneaker and video game stores.

When I first read that, I thought there was a plan to get Hillary Clinton into those places, but it's only a voter registration effort. (By the way, isn't that list of 4 places to find black people a little disrespectful?) Sanders — Symone, the former aide to Bernie — seems to be talking about Clinton herself getting out "on the streets" where she is not "comfortable." When is the last time Clinton went somewhere where she's uncomfortable? I'm sure part of the rising panic in her campaign lies in the suspicion that if she were to go where she isn't comfortable, she'd only make it worse.

Today’s young African-American voters are less likely to be found in black churches and more likely to be found in schools, loosely organized activist groups and online....

Not sneaker and video game stores?!

Not only are younger black activists reached in different ways, they also have far higher expectations on leaders, dismissing boilerplate pleas for racial equality and justice as insufficient.

She has that and the contention that Donald Trump is a racist. Meanwhile, Trump has his "What do you have to lose?" approach. The NYT article quotes a Democratic politician who calls that question "disrespectful to the black community" but then tells us that the millennials in the focus groups did not respond to a photo of Trump with the line "We have to beat the racists." So the Clinton campaign knows it needs to come up with something better... and that the election depends upon it. 

At the koi pond...

Today, in Allen Centennial Gardens.

College kids are saying their parents won't let them major in liberal arts.

According to WaPo business and economics writer Steven Pearlstein, who is also a Public Affairs professor at George Mason University.

For me, there’s nothing more depressing than meeting incoming freshmen at Mason who have declared themselves as accounting majors. They’re 18 years old, they haven’t had a chance to take a course in Shakespeare or evolutionary biology or the history of economic thought, and already they’ve decided to devote the rest of their lives to accountancy. It’s worth remembering that at American universities, the original rationale for majors was not to train students for careers. Rather, the idea was that after a period of broad intellectual exploration, a major was supposed to give students the experience of mastering one subject, in the process developing skills such as discipline, persistence, and how to research, analyze, communicate clearly and think logically.

4 thoughts:

1. Why are they 18 years old? Why not mature a little by doing something valuable or stupid for a few years? Start hemorrhaging money after you know yourself well enough to decide what you want to do in life.

2. In the old days, the days of the "original rationale," only an elite set went to college. It was a good bet that the degree would leverage your success, and in your secure elitism, you could indulge in the professor's dream that you were rounding yourself out.

3. It's not the student's mission to keep from depressing the professor. Have your own list of things you want for yourself because you know yourself. It would be weird if you put not depressing professors on it.

4. Of course, it's not all about pleasing your parents either, but at least your parents love you, probably. But feel free to continue to use your parents as you explain to professors why you don't think it's such a good idea to major in the field they are struggling to preserve as an ongoing operation.

"You know, I speak with people inside her circle, and one of the reason why they don't like her in large groups or to do press conferences is because she doesn't play well there."

"She's not comfortable in that position. That's only going to make her look more staged, more strategic and less authentic. And so, it's a purposeful strategy why she's not doing press conferences, because that will only add to her unfavorabilities. Look, the email thing, is just terrible, in my opinion, especially when you start looking at the rationale. You know, Matthew and I were joking. She thought the 'c' was to help her put things in alphabetical order. But there's no 'a,' there's no 'b,' and there's no 'd.'"

Said ABC news contributor LZ Granderson today on ABC's "This Week," after the host Martha Raddatz asked him whether Hillary Clinton is "doing enough" about her problem of her favorability rating being at "an all-time low among registered voters, now on par with Donald Trump at 59 percent and 60 percent respectively." Granderson began his answer with: "Well, I they think what they're doing is not adding to the problem."

That is, Hillary is being kept under wraps, because if we see her, we'll only like her less.

And then ABC News chief political analyst, Matthew Dowd attempts to do gender politics:

[Hillary] is judged -- she is judged a little bit, I have to say, all of the controversy surrounding her and they're both -- Donald Trump and her, she's judged a little bit on a Ginger Rogers standard, which is, is that the bar is so low for him. I mean, Ginger Rogers, the famous like she did everything Fred Astaire did but backwards and in heels.

Suddenly, Trump is the Fred Astaire, judged by an easier standard when what his opponent/partner is doing is actually harder?



Obama used the old "backwards and in high heels" line at the Democratic convention last month. He was trying to help Hillary... even though Hillary used "backwards in high heels" against him in 2008:

She said Obama had noted that she looked rested since she ended her campaign against him for the Democratic nomination, and she told him she’d been exercising for a change.

“During the campaign … Barack would get up faithfully every morning and go to the gym. I would get up and have my hair done,” she said as she introduced him. “It’s one of those Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire things.”

She can't use that getting-my-hair done line in 2016, Trump's hair being what it is. (And by the way, what is it?)

Anyway, the political use of the old Ginger Rogers line goes back to at least 1988, when the future governor of Texas, Ann Richards, gave the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention: "[I]f you give [women] a chance, we can perform. After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels." (The pre-political use came not from Ginger Rogers herself, but from Frank and Ernest.)

But, I'm sorry, I sure don't see Hillary getting judged by a tougher standard than Donald Trump. It's the other way around. It's quite obvious. So it's a cliché, which is another reason not to say it. But it doesn't even serve your purpose, Matthew Dowd, because it's patently inapt and only draws attention to the fact that the backwards here is the bending over that the media have been doing for Hillary.

Now, let's see if Donald Trump can dance like Fred Astaire:

"There’s also a twelve-step aspect to improv’s appeal..."

"... the notion that, at the end of all the regimentation and rule-following, you may be not only a funnier performer but also a better person. U.C.B. alumni I spoke with likened the effects of classes to immersion therapy, meditation, and 'creative cross-training.' Others credited improv with helping them to overcome shyness and writer’s block, learn how to listen, and hone their skills in hitting on women."

From "HOW THE UPRIGHT CITIZENS BRIGADE IMPROVISED A COMEDY EMPIRE," by Emma Allen in The New Yorker — which I also just cited at the end of the previous post, the one about the dipshit revolution at Burning Man.

But isn't the whole thing a vacation from sense? If you create another world, then what sense flows from that?

"Mob justice at Burning Man: Luxury camp that lets guests pay to skip the complex logistics of attending desert festival is vandalized by a 'band of hooligans' who cut power lines and glued doors shut."

'What happened last night should be known on social media,' [White Ocean Camp] wrote in a post on its Facebook page.  'A very unfortunate and saddening event happened last night at White Ocean, something we thought would never be possible in OUR Burning Man utopia. A band of hooligans raided our camp, stole from us, pulled and sliced all of our electrical lines leaving us with no refrigeration and wasting our food and, glued our trailer doors shut, vandalized most of our camping infrastructure, dumped 200 gallons of potable water flooding our camp.... We have felt like we've been sabotaged from every angle, but last night's chain of events, while we were all out enjoying our beautiful home, was an absolute and definitive confirmation that some feel we are not deserving of Burning Man... We actually had someone from the organization tell us that in paraphrase "it makes sense that you have been sabotaged as you are a closed camp and not welcoming."'

Well, of course, it makes sense. 

But isn't the whole thing a vacation from sense? Nonsense gives rise to new sense. If you create another world, then what sense flows from that?

"If this unusual thing is true, what else is true?"/Si Haec Insolita Res Vera Est, Quid Exinde Verum Est?" That's the motto of the improv organization Upright Citizens Brigade, which I happened to be reading about (in The New Yorker) when I encountered this dipshit revolution at Burning Man.

"I think, perhaps, we may have some difficulty in calling her St. Teresa..."

"... Her holiness is so near to us, so tender and so fruitful, that we continue to spontaneously call her Mother Teresa."

Said Pope Francis at the canonization ceremony.

ADDED: From the archive:

She tried her best to believe. Her atheism was not like mine. I can't believe it and I am glad to think that it is not true, that there is a dictator in the heavens. So the fact that there is no evidence for it pleases me. She really wished it was true. She tried to live her life as if it was true. She failed. And she was encouraged by cynical old men to carry on doing so because she was a great marketing tool for her church, and I think that they should answer for what they did to her and what they have been doing to us. I think it has been fraud and exploitation yet again....

ALSO: To clarify the previous quote, which is (obviously?) from Christopher Hitchens, here was the news from 2007:

The letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever — or, as the book's compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, "neither in her heart or in the eucharist."

That made me think of:

I'd like to conclude with a passage from 1 John, Chapter 4. You know it? See, most groups I speak to don't know that. But we know it. If you want, we can say it together: "No one has ever seen God, but if we love one another, God lives in us and His love is made complete in us." And that is so true.