Thoughts from the ammo line

There must be A Better World somewhere, but probably not on the good old soap operas. Ammo Grrrll remembers ANOTHER WORLD. She writes:

Boy, what a difference it would have made in my life to have a giant Easter Bunny swoop down and rescue me while I was making a fool of myself. Just more White (Rabbit) Privilege on display. Of course, it is decades too late to prevent me from making a fool of myself. Still, The Lord looks after His fools and even enables some to make a living at it. The late George Carlin had an entire comedy album entltled “Occupation: Foole.” However, for today’s topic I was not yet a professional fool, but still a rank amateur.

Let’s take a trip in the Wayback Machine to 1968 and visit a 22-year-old Future Columnist (FC going forward), sitting on an uncomfortable sofa in the parlor of her rented house in a tiny Minnesota town. She has no children yet and her husband has a one-year teaching contract.

There are no employment opportunities for her in this town of 744, but no worries. They have no car and the rent on their fully furnished little house is $50 a month. So her husband’s salary of $500 a month is more than adequate for their needs. In fact, by the time they move to St. Paul at the end of the school year, they will have SAVED $3,000 of the $6,000 her husband made! A lot of people probably spend more than that in a year just on Starbucks or tattoos…Oops, don’t get the FC started on what wretched savers most people are.

But back to the FC on the couch — what to do with her time? At some point, she will get off that couch and start a nursery school with 4-6 little ones. Sadly, it will turn out to be an inadvertent “non-profit” enterprise. SOME “non-profits” include executive salaries in the mid-six figures, but evidently those non-profits weren’t charging fifty cents an hour for four hours, three times a week for a Nursery School that provided a full lunch, snacks and crafts. Oh, well. Perhaps business will not be her strong suit going forward.

She had never believed she would be a Soap Opera Person. Her Grandma always referred to soap operas as “my stories,” whose plot lines she was heavily emotionally invested in. But from 1:30 to 3:00 each weekday (before Miss Susan’s Fun, Failing Nursery School) the FC would watch, first, Days of Our Lives, then The Doctors, and finally, Another World. But the most accurately named, in the opinion of the Future Columnist, was Another World. For it was certainly a very different world from her own.

For one thing, in every episode a major woman character would go visit another major woman character mid-morning, generally unannounced and generally bearing bad news. In Alexandria, Minnesota, where the FC had grown up, if a neighbor lady rang your doorbell at 10 a.m., it would be for a pre-arranged coffee party that could include one of Dorothy’s famous homemade Caramel Pecan Rolls. By 10 a.m. the FC’s Mama was ready for a break anyway. She had probably washed clothes and dusted and vacuumed the entire house by then.

In Another World housewives never seemed to work at all, yet lived in clean and beautiful homes. They also dressed every day the way Mama might dress for church. On Easter. No wonder they couldn’t cook or dust.

But in Another World, no matter what time company arrived, the hostess would ask, “Would you like a drink?” Then she would go to a special cart filled with fancy, cut-glass bottles and produce a generous pour of a non-specific “drink” in a squat glass with ice cubes. The characters would exchange long looks, shot in closeup, but they never actually DRANK from the drink. That must have been a deal they worked out with the television censors at the time. Nowadays, of course, there is full frontal nudity, or at least backal nudity, simulated sex acts, possibly with aliens, but those were tasteful times in which even deodorant ads had to show statuary rather than actual armpits, which were considered icky.

Women in the soaps were forever having discreet off-camera sex with men they weren’t technically married to. And yet, they seemed entirely unfamiliar with birth control. When they DID get pregnant – and trust me, they ALWAYS did — their husbands, some of whom were sterile from having the mumps as an adult, were never suspicious. The pregnancies lasted for several years, in the manner of elephants. A baby would at long last arrive, but there must have been extremely troublesome union rules about toddlers, because in half the time the pregnancy took, the child would be ten years old. Yet the adults didn’t age at all. If only…

It amazed the FC that, no matter how preposterous the plot line and dialogue, no matter how tedious the long, meaningful looks, no matter how slowly the story moved forward, she would faithfully tune in the next day to see what was going to happen. There were always mini-cliff hangers on Fridays to ensure your return on Mondays. And so, “like sands through the hourglass, these (were) the Days of (Her) Lives.”

If those Soap Operas had absurd plot lines, it took a few decades for real life to catch up. Now one of the major problems my novelist husband has is keeping ahead of the satire curve. What looks like clever parody soon is just reportage on reality. It’s downright frustrating! We are in a Perpetual ‘Nother World now, and it’s not a pleasant one.

If someone had asked me decades ago to predict whether we would one day have a black woman on the Supreme Court, I would have said, “Sure, and she will have to be so smart that there can be no question that she belongs there.”

But if someone had also asked what that nominee would say to the gimme question of “What is a woman?,” in a million years I would not have guessed, “I don’t know because I’m not a biologist.” And then if someone had asked whether three predictable, boring turncoat “Republicans” would vote for a judge who does not even believe in “natural rights,” but who does apologize to pedophiles for having to kinda sorta sentence them, I would have said “Nope. Even THEY will vote against her. That is a bridge too far.”

Haha. What a cockeyed optimist I am! How could I have doubted that Lisa, Susie, and Willard Mitt would come through? Because we now live in Another World. (But seriously, did you know Mitt’s real name was Willard? Wasn’t there a movie with a rat named Willard?)

And if asked whether a multimillionaire moron on The View would say that nowhere in the Bible does it suggest that homosexuality is prohibited, I would have said, “Even Joy Behar has to know better than that.”

Now it’s one thing to DISAGREE with the prohibition, fine. I’m not crazy about shrimp being on the non-kosher list, either. I can observe the dietary laws or not. But I don’t pretend the laws aren’t there. Behar could have just shut her pie hole or said, “I’m not a biologist” or “I’m not a theologian” or “I’m not funny, smart, or interesting but here I am on TV,” but no. She had to weigh in.

Speaking of weighing in, television news used to feature average to attractive persons of a serious nature who seemed to be quite intelligent. Maybe smart, attractive people made the viewers feel inadequate or “triggered” because now it seems the qualifications for being on television in any capacity are to be obnoxious, overpaid, and morbidly obese. The Three “R”s are all well and good for school, but for on-camera work, you need to embrace those Three “O”s. And the Four “D”s – Diverse, Dimwitted, Dishonest, and Democrat.

Whatever else anyone thought of Chet Huntley or Walter Cronkite, can you imagine either of them choking the chicken in a Zoom conference? Can you feature David Brinkley giving the prospective questions in a Presidential debate to just one candidate? Can you find archives of Johnny Carson calling the sitting President of the United States a “c—holster for Kruschev”? No, in THAT world, there were manners, dignity, self-respect; in this Cowardly New World, not so much. What would the press have done if a misplaced laptop from the Bush twin girls contained crack pipes and underage boys? The very thought is absurd.

Regular, hard-working, tax-paying people of all races seem to be fine, if my experience in the Dusty Little Village or my Heartland travels are any sort of gauge. But the people in charge constitute Another World full of ugly and shockingly stupid people. It’s long past time we say so to their fat angry faces. I keep clicking my Ruby Slippers, but I don’t seem to be able to access our old world of decency, intelligence, and manners. “Auntie Em, Auntie Em.”