Crack Whores at the Turkey Pardoning

Let’s get this out of the way right at the outset. I find politicians pardoning turkeys at Thanksgiving deeply nauseating because the tradition thinks of itself, very wrongly, as charming and cute ‘n’ folksy, and because the poor turkey hasn’t actually done anything for which it needs to be pardoned. 

That said, I was mightily amused, if that’s the right word, by last week’s flap about Little Miss Republican Christian Propriety, a member of the staff of the doubtless very distinguished Rep. Steven Lee Fincher of Tennessee. Rep. Fincher’s a former member of the Fincher Family, which sings gospel favorites at county fairs, and managing director of Fincher Farms, which grows cotton, corn, soybeans, and wheat — and receives close to $1 million every year in government subsidies (not handouts, definitely not, handouts being what poor persons of color get!) from the big, bad federal government.

Little Miss Republican Christian Propriety took umbrage at Sharia and Malaria, as I enjoy calling the Obama daughters dressing for the turkey pardoning like crack whores, or at least modern secular teenaged girls, and was sorely aggrieved by their seeming not to respect the hallowed office Daddy holds.

I’m not so sure that offices deserve respect, though I’m pretty sure that most of the politicians who hold them abundantly deserve its opposite. When I was last in DC, the city of my birth, I went with my reluctant spouse to a Thai restaurant with a happy hour, and was there appalled when some political big shot’s motorcade passed by with much impatient — and, it seemed to me, imperious — blaring of horns. That struck me as the sort of thing one might experience in some cruddy little banana republic rather than in a country in which each of us gets the same number of votes. Scatter, peons, and avert your eyes! His Excellency draws nigh! Richard Nixon’s having conspired with the North Vietnamese to prolong the war in Vietnam doesn’t disgrace The Office, and neither does St. Ronnie’s having sold arms to Iran. Barack Obama’s daughters dressing as girls their age dress disgraces it.

Little Miss Republican Christian Propriety didn’t object specifically to Malaria, the elder First Daughter, crossing her arms and glaring at Daddy as he let fly a succession of knee-slappers about the turkey pardoning being an executive action unlikely to outrage persons like Rep. Fincher as much as his earlier one concerning illegal immigrants, but that’s what breaks my own heart a little bit, as I recall my own daughter’s teens.

Her first day of middle school, she was proud to walk to her first class holding my hand. By the Friday of the second week (her mother and I had divorced years before), she was getting into my car when I picked her up after school on Friday afternoon as though into a pit of leper puke. I’d greet her and lean over to give her a kiss, and she, shuddering with revulsion, rolling her eyes, would snarl, “Can we just get going, please?” On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the most heartbreaking, it was around a 1000. If Mr. Obama is anything like I, he is apt to find his girls’ regarding him as a clueless old embarrassment much more painful than anything else in his life.  I suspect the Tea Party’s disdain is nothing compared to his girls’.

I expected that, after a couple of years of her acting toward me as though I weren’t just the root of all evil, but the evil itself, my daughter would resume loving and admiring me. Seventeen years later, it still hasn’t happened. What goes around really does come around, harder. I was a perfect little shit to my own parents, not just as a teenager, but well into my adulthood (to whatever extent I may be said to have entered adulthood). I deserve what I’ve got.

Little Miss Republican Christian Propriety, I learn as I compose this, has ceased to work for Rep. Fincher, from whose, uh, message I suspect she has come to be seen as A Distraction. My guess is that she’s banking on being named President Palin’s chief of protocol, as which she will be able to ensure that visitors to the White House don’t dress like crack whores.

[Suggested listening: This angel, whose laughter was Bach, who lit up my world withher smiles, glowers implacably now. She’s embarrassed being seen within miles of me. Instead of the daughter I know, there’s a brusque little mean so-and-so.]