Are We at the Turn of the Melania?

Hello. We begin with a one-question Gene Pool Gene Poll. The rationale — or pretext, if you are a cynic — will become evident shortly. Please vote only in your category; at the suggesting of Biff Wellington, my Substack guru, I will summarize both votes midway through so you don’t have to felony-vote just to see the other group’s answers.

Last week in the Gene Pool, someone submitted an observation about a Nickelback of theirs. (Nickelbacks, you will recall, are things you like even though most people don’t.)

The anonymous reader’s nominee was Melania Trump. He or she contended that Melania was dished a bad hand, and did reasonably well within the constraints of that tainted and demeaning role. An accomplished person with a successful career, she adopted the culture of a country she was not native to, accepted the kind of demeaning, shabby role of dutiful First Lady, performed it with reasonable dignity, and is to be forgiven for any small faux pas she made while under intense and sometimes cruel public scrutiny.

I sorta reluctantly agreed with this until I had a conversation with a good friend, a young-middle-aged writer who tried to explain why she regards Melania with contempt: It is based on a moral calculus she suspects many women share and most men would not entirely understand. My friend is not self-righteous, and is ordinarily slow to judge people from a distance. She is extremely socially liberal.

This is what she said, in summary:

When women with healthy self-esteem agree to begin an intimate relationship with a man, they tend to see it, in part, as an endorsement of him at a deep level, an affirmation of his choices in life. It’s a reward to him for being a fundamentally worthy person. To put it bluntly, she is bestowing a gift, and she is declaring that he DESERVES her. This may be an artifact of a quainter time, and it may seem antifeminist, and she may not be thinking it consciously, but the notion is wired in, and lingers.

A woman might have sex with a man she doesn’t love, but seldom with a man she doesn’t respect, particularly in a lasting relationship. It is the Ilsa Lund phenomenon: Ilsa was a woman of emotional principle. When it was important, Ilsa chose the man she most respected over the man she most loved. She abandoned Bogie at the train station, in the rain for a stiff martinet who was trying to save the world.

How can a moral, centered person respect Donald Trump? He is a creep, a fraud, a bigot, an infantile bolus of insecurity needing constant obeisance, a compulsively lying enemy of the truth, a cheat in business, a cheat in love, a sexual predator, a cruel, selfish, ignorant, vulgar, ego-bloated brute, and, ultimately, a traitor to his country.

In short, even if you know nothing else about her, you know that Melania has made an accommodation with herself that is repellent. You cannot extricate her from that decision. It eclipses everything else.

So I think my friend is right. On a fundamental, deep-dive, soul-judging level, Melania is inexcusable. She should not be casually rationalized or justified.

Continuing with modern politics and my mail bag, I want to give a shout-out to a message I received a couple of days ago., via the “questions / observations” button. I would mention the observer by name — he or she deserves recognition — but for some reason you guys tend not to send your names or contact info in the body of your entry.

Anyway, the anonymous wag suggested that the ongoing controversy over dress codes in Congress can be easily and appropriately solved by requiring all members in both houses to wear clown costumes. This is a brilliant idea, and I hereby endorse it and congratulate, y’know, whatsizface. Under this fine plan, Congressmen will need to look more or less like this:

And Congresswomen more or less like this:

I would add that they would all be issued slap-sticks and have to whap each other in the tuchus every once in a while. Also, seltzer bottles.

Also from the mailbag, in response to my requests for places you have lived but wished you hadn’t, I have been receiving beaucoup nominees for various towns and cities in the United States, among them, Amarillo, Texas.

A jolt of recognition! Many years ago, before I had officially anointed Battle Mountain, Nevada, as the Armpit of America, I’d had a previous nominee. I wrote about it thus:

The worst city I have ever visited is Amarillo, Texas. Mercifully, I remember only a few things about my trip to Amarillo. The first was that all the bars seemed to be named “The Hayloft Lounge” and they all were playing “You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me, Lucille.” I was in Amarillo to visit and write a story for The National Law Journal about the oldest practicing lawyer in the world. It had been assigned by an editor, based on a local newspaper story about how this indomitable centenarian was still an active guy specializing in wills and estates. So I went there, and, and as we spoke in his office, he kept dozing off.

There’s one thing I didn’t put in the Law Journal story. What I didn’t write was that when the world’s oldest practicing lawyer excused himself to go to the bathroom, he shuffled back to his desk having peed all over the front of his pants. The entire story — which in retrospect was dreadfully dishonest ( I was young and callow) — was filled with technically accurate lines that had painfully avoided anything to do with his current competence or consciousness, lines like “When Mr. Stuckey was born, Grover Cleveland was President!”

There’s a point to this excruciating narrative, and I am getting to it right now. And it’s also political. Some people, and some places, hang on too long: Dianne Feinstein. Mitch McConnell. Amarillo.

Amarillo was once thriving, a hub for the cattle industry and an iconic part of the colorful Wild West. Today, one of its biggest remaining industries is Tyson Foods, which tortures chickens to death in fetid conditions. Also Toot’n Totum, which appears to be a convenience store chain that misspells “Tote ’em,” misplaces one apostrophe, and omits another.

Amarillo is inhospitable. It is the coldest place in Texas. If you are thinking, well, it still must be plenty warm down there, you would be wrong. Amarillo has hit minus-15 in the winter, which is also New York City’s all-time low. Amarillo is also blisteringly hot in the summer, but the locals defensively say it doesn’t feel so bad because it is a dry heat, which is true. It is dry and desiccated, like a loofah in the oven or, y’know, an armadillo.

It appears still to be a place of rampant desperation and despair. Amarillo has one of the highest crime rates in the country. Like that armadillo in the oven, the locals’ sense of humor about their plight tends to be dry. From a Reddit post: “One of the best things about Amarillo is that we have an absolute zero ax-murdering crime rate here, so we got that going for us.”

Here’s another:

“Unfortunately, the closest Bojangles is in Tennessee.”

It has bad infrastructure:

“If you end up in Amarillo avoid the south-west part of town if it starts to rain. They get a few inches and the streets flood like crazy.”

Another poster points out that the closest metropolis, the place to flee to for fun and sophistication, is Oklahoma City. And it is a five-hour drive.

In its defense, Amarillo may feel small and insignificant, but it is big enough to have its own hate group. “Repent Amarillo” is a religious nutcake organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center has denounced for fomenting bigotry and intolerance. The SPLC says Repent Amarillo engages in vicious calumny on “LGBT people, abortion clinics, Muslims, Buddhists, Wiccans, Episcopalians, Methodists, Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholics, and ‘swingers.’ ” (Point for further study: How did they miss the Jews?) The group also launched a boycott against the city of Houston, because of the election of a gay mayor.

Back to Dianne Feinstein, who overstayed her welcome but served her country admirably. We should remember her for being among the mightiest champions of feminism in politics, which she accomplish through example more than rhetoric, and for her strength in confronting the worst public moment in her life. You should see this very short video, on the day that Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone were shot to death by one of their colleagues. Read Feinstein’s eyes. A stunning minute in history.

And finally, before we go live with your questions and my answers, this video of lithe and talented dancers, human beings becoming a tiger.

I may be taking only fewer than normal questions and observations today, because duties elsewhere remain.

Now, for questions and observations. If you are reading this in real time, please remember to refresh the page from occasionally, to see new stuff.

Q:  The White House Press Secretary put out a statement on the anniversary of the Las Vegas shooting that said “Tragically, it remains the deadliest mass shooting in American history.” Wouldn’t that mean it’s tragic that it remains the deadliest shooting, or in other words, that there have not been deadlier ones? Which is an absolutely horrible thing to say and surely not her intent. 

A:  Thank you.  This made me laugh out loud and you are right.

TIMELY TIP: If you’re reading this right now on an email:   Click here to get to my webpage, then click on the top headline (In this case, “Are We at the Turn…” ) for the full column, and comments, and real-time questions and answers. And you can refresh and see new questions and answers that appear as I regularly update the post.

Also it would be swell of you to support us financially. We’re cheap, in more ways than one.

Q:  Miserable place I lived:  Naval Communications Station, Adak, Aleutian Islands. Sure it was safe from snipers, punk sticks, jungle vermin, Agent Orange and other perils of Vietnam, and sure I “volunteered.” But... there were No women on the Station. There WERE about 1,000 mostly single, sex starved young men. The main outdoor recreations were hunting (never done, negative interest in doing) and fishing (tried, frustrated both dad and myself. Did catch a total of two sunfish, one barely legal bass. Well, I think it was legal...) the main indoor recreation was subsidized alcoholism — 25-cent beers, 50-cent mixed drinks. Also popular was bowling — which in self-defense I got quite good at — but which always featured at least one designated beer frame per game. there were daily tremors. One the first night I was on island a tremor measured 5.6.  The "library" featured little but leftovers from WW II and naval training manuals. The end of the runway was a cliff. One could hike up the nearby mountain to see the wreckage of a Navy plane.  The two weeks of "summer" were the only time it wasn't totally overcast. My next and last station was on another island, Okinawa. It had recovered from my uncle’s “visit” almost 30 years prior, and was everything Adak was not.

A:  Thank you.   Nice details.  Here’s a detail I cannot explain and maybe someone out there can.  I spent three days in Portland and noticed that people spent inordinate amounts of time in their parked cars.   You’d watch someone get into his or her car, sometimes whole families, and you’d pull up behind them for the parking space, and wait.  And wait.  And wait.  And finally, you’d get out of your car and walk up to theirs, and they roll down their windows, and you ask if they are leaving, and they act aggrieved, as though it is none of your business.   Happened at least three times in three days.

Q: I grew up in Brooklyn, attended high school and college in downtown Brooklyn, living at home. Out of college I worked for IBM in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., about 70 miles north of NYC. I lived in Chelsea, a "suburb" of Poughkeepsie. Calling it a place exaggerates its reality. Post office — where I had to get a box, because there was no delivery to my unnumbered house on River Road South — was a shed attached to a random house. Not known to me when I moved in was that I was near a grade-level train crossing. so my first summer there the 5 a.m. freight woke me. I’m sure there was a sign for train engineer, “Gabe lives here, blow horn.” I was also near a volunteer firehouse with a working siren to summon the crew. There was a plus -- my living room window looked out on Hudson River, beautiful year-round. But it was far too rural -- good place to raise kids or watch grass grow. Not so good for city folk. After a while I was driving to Brooklyn mid-week to see friends, and taking classes at New School in lower Manhattan. IBM was a great first job but I only lasted three years, then moved to DC.

A: Relatedly, from my story about Battle Mountain: 

To stay the night, I chose the Owl Club, where rooms are only $29 because the place doesn’t go in for fancy big-city amenities like a coffee maker in the room, or an iron, or a shoe-buffing cloth, or shampoo, or a clock, or a telephone, or spotless carpeting.

I sank into bed for my promised good night’s sleep, which I admit, in all candor, was delivered exactly as advertised, the solemn covenant between Battle Mountain and its guests remaining intact right up until 4:21 a.m. when the Union Pacific rumbled and roared and clanged and whistled its way through downtown, about 200 feet away.

Q: I am an actor, and at one particular regional theater venue, they housed me in a two-floor dwelling down a one-mile driveway in the middle of the woods by myself in the winter. I referred to it as “Creepy Old House,” and I had to sleep with headphones in because the pipes were so loud and the house was so creaky I thought I would be murdered at any moment. It was truly a place for filming slasher flicks. 

A:  But you acted just like a slasher-film patsy, like the ones who decide to inspect the garage at midnight.   You don’t put headphones on when you go to sleep!  If you do you won’t hear the crazed machete-wielding clown creeping up on you.

Here is the mid-chat elaboration ordered by Biff Wellington: As predicted, so far in the poll, men are somewhat more willing to give Melania some slack: 11 percent say they feel positive or somewhat positive about her. Women, 3 percent.

Q: Bogie left her at an airfield, not a train station! Signed, an annoying person

A: Do not lecture me about Casablanca. I have seen it googol times. She left him at a train station. Then HE gallantly left HER at the airport.

Q: The military sent us to Italy for a few years, and, upon arriving, told us to blend in. I quickly realized that was impossible, not because I don’t look or speak Italian, but because there are thousands of cultural norms one internalizes that are very difficult to fake. For instance: waiting in line. Americans wait in line in a way that when they get to the front, they expect the thing that they’re waiting for will happen. They face front, maybe lean forward, and patiently wait their turn. Italians know they may not get the thing they’re waiting for, and therefore they wait accordingly. They wander off, maybe have an espresso, maybe go find a friend… i was never able to blend in that circumstance. But it was a fun place to live. One gets used to it after a while. Eventually we hit Germany, where people wait in line in a very orderly fashion. -Marc from the Military

A: Marc from the Military, meet Marc from the Post.  When my erstwhile colleague Marc Fisher became the Post’s Berlin correspondent he was gobsmacked by the toilets.  They had a porcelain shelf in the bowl to catch your solid waste and leave it there, so you can better inspect it hypochondriacally  before you flush, looking for worms or whatnot.  Very neurotic.  

This reminds me of a nasty practical joke I proposed in my book The Hypochondriac’s Guide to Life and Death, a joke to play on a on a  hypochondriac.  It wouldn’t work in Germany.  

What you do is put some fishing worms in the toilet tank, and the next time the hypo uses the toilet, the last thing he will see are big old worms swirling down the drain.

Q: I have mixed feelings about Antwerp, Belgium. On the one hand, I liked living in a 15th-century apartment that used to be a salt warehouse in the former slaughterhouse area (where the gutters ran with blood.) I liked living across from the Zwaaterzusters (Black Sisters)! convent and St. Paul’s Church. Loved being walking distance from the 15th-century Grote Markt, the Cathedral of Our Lady, Peter Paul Rubens’s home, and so much more (such as great beer and easy access to Germany, Paris, Amsterdam, and London). But on the other hand, there are no trees. Trees are sacrificed for parking lots. Trees, please. Austeblifje.

A: The only thing I know about Antwerp is this flash mob, one of the first, that I still watch from time to time because of its breadth.  Two things occur to me: Almost everyone was in on it – many of the apparent travelers we see at the beginning wind up being a very well trained part of the troupe.  And the second is they must have emptied out all the girls’ dance classes in Antwerp.

Our Heinz-57 spaniel mix Ozzie would, in no particular order of importance, 1. Repeatedly jump vertically under trees while barking incessantly in superhero-like attempts to capture arboreal squirrels, somehow convinced that when the last jump failed to propel him airborne, the next one miraculously just might. 2. Fart loudly whilst lounging and then, stunned, whip his head around and glare indignantly at his own hindquarters.

A: One of my favorite quotes is from Frank Skinner:  “A dog is not intelligent.  Never trust an animal that is surprised by its own farts.”  

Q: I once had two cats, (actually, I had six at that juncture in my life, but this story is about two of them) named Yang and Yin. Yin liked to sleep on the top of doors. Now, when I say, "the top of doors," here is what I do NOT mean: I do not mean that the door was horizontal, and, say, laid flat across two sawhorses, or flat on the floor. I mean that Yin would take a running start, LEAP off the floor, BOUNCE off a bookshelf, and eventually find herself along the top edge of an open, mounted door. (Mounted in both senses of the word). She would sit on the top of the door, with her two left legs dangling down on one side, and her two right legs dangling down on the other. We had to exercise caution, here. I lived in terror of someone failing to notice Yin in her customary position, slamming the door, and amputating two of her legs in one horrendous act. But no amount of training could deter her from this practice. One momentous day, we had an earthquake sufficient in magnitude to rattle the door significantly and, not to put too fine a point on it, freak the flippin' bejesus out of Yin. All four of her legs began to churn mightily, like one of those old Saturday cartoons where Tom or Jerry began to run, legs whirling into a blur, bodies perfectly motionless. At this point, Yang (remember Yang?) became aware that something was wrong with his sister. Now, Yang was the most serene cat I have ever had or known. Earthquakes didn't faze him, nor did sirens, other cats, dogs, or fireworks. Yang was cool. Reacting instantly, he climbed the bookshelf next to the door, attained (roughly) the same height above the floor as Yin, and launched himself at her, through the air, triggering her startle reflex. She appeared to levitate off the top of the door, and wound up on a chair, thoroughly terrified, looking like a piece of lint filled with static electricity. Every hair on her body was up. Yang, now back atop the bookcase, navigated his way back slowly to his sister, and began grooming her until she was calm. I nominate Yang for cleverest and Yin for dumbest. PS: Even with this experience behind her, she still sat on doors for the rest of her life.

A:  This reminded me of a joke.  Man goes to buy a horse.  Gets a good price, but the seller warns him that the animal “likes to sit on flowers.”  This did not faze the buyer, who had no flower garden, so he bought the horse and rode it away.  About a mile away, they had to cross a small, shallow creek.  Mid-stream, the horse suddenly sat down, throwing the rider off his back. The buyer rode the horse back to the seller and complained about that. The seller slapped his forehead.  “I forgot to tell you, he also likes to sit on fish.”

This is Gene. As I signaled you, this has been an exhausting day, so I am cutting out a little early. Pat has alerted me that she will clean up approximately 41,000 typos. Please keeping sending in questions and observations here, and I will address them on Thursday.