Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll is wondering WHICH HERO AM I MOST LIKE? She writes:

An occupational hazard of being a comedian is thinking you have a great new joke when it is already out there. Working comics are constantly asking each other: “Is this somebody’s bit or did I think it up?” Even as a wordsmith, now whenever I think of a decent quip I worry somebody else has already thought of it, especially in our Commentariat, about half of whom could be standups.

But I made myself chuckle pondering that with Dodge doing away with the awesome muscle car, the Charger — to focus on electric cars — that they could still keep the name. The new “Charger” will just be driven a few miles and then charged up — if the battery doesn’t blow up. Okay, that’s what I got this morning…if somebody already said it, sue me.

The other day in downtown Prescott, I debuted my new t-shirt with the slogan “I Identify as Non-Bidenary” on it. (And yuge thanks to the anonymous donor who sent it to me. What a great surprise! I WILL find out who you are and pay you back…). As I walked around the Courthouse Square attracting a lot of smiles, laughs and thumbs-ups, a guy wearing a “Let’s Go Brandon” cap warned me that some woman had complained – to the Prescott COPS! — that his hat offended her.

The lady officer told the crazy, intolerant, humorless hater of The First Amendment that there was nothing she could do about it. I would bet everything I own that the harridan wasn’t a local or even an Arizonan. We are way too close to California. Plus we attract Canadians, though mostly in the winter. Tragically, Canadians seem to be perfectly fine with abusing truckdrivers or arresting people who “misgender” their own children. (With notable exceptions such as valued commenters Cas and The Crazy Canuck, Peace Be Upon Y’All.)

In vain did I wait for the totalitarian woman to approach me so I could use my favorite Yoda-ism: “Offended you are? A [flip] I don’t give.” Alas, that never occurred.

But inspired by the mortifying, delusional megalomaniac and sore loser Liz Cheney, I have given a lot of thought to just which famous hero I most resemble. I guess she already appropriated both Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, possibly for his legendary drinking, but there are still plenty of heroes left. Several candidates come to mind, yet each falls a little short of my own wonderfulness. We can’t all be me.

I feel that I am almost as much like Winston Churchill as Liz Cheney is like Abraham Lincoln. The closest Liz Cheney has come to being Lincolnesque was her vibrant support from the child-grooming Lincoln Project. I used to smoke “Winstons” long long ago, and if I’m around British people for even five minutes, I am horrified to discover that I am falling into a Downton Abbey version of a British accent! “Oh my God, they will think I am MOCKING them, but I can’t help it.” Sadly, except for a shared minor weight issue and the occasional quip erroneously attributed to either Winston or me, that is where my similarities to the great Mr. Churchill end.

Then again, am I more like JFK? Liz didn’t feel it necessary to limit herself to comparisons with women heroines and neither do I. Besides, as all our children are being taught, there IS no such thing as gender anyway. Well, either that or there are 57 of them, with more added every day. My favorite is “polysexual,” which sounds kind of cheerful, even though I consider myself more of a Pollyanna. My best guess is that it means you are willing to have sex with just about anything – men, women, (whatever THEY are), trees, snakes, gerbils, javelinas, possums, and ickier still, Hunter Biden or Harvey Weinstein. But back to JFK.

Like JFK, I often go by AG, the initials for my nom de column. Friends in Bozeman, MT gave me a darling little necklace with an A and a G hanging from a delicate gold chain to stand for Ammo Grrrll. So, there’s that striking coincidence.

I have also been in a boating accident, which was 100 percent my own fault. My cousin and I were about 13 and we were warned not to take the motorless rowboat out on Lake Ida where we were vacationing because a storm was coming. Haha. What does an old Navy vet know about impending storms, anyway? The storm came up in the form of heavy winds and light rain and my cousin proved shockingly worthless as a co-oarsman, so it fell entirely to me to save our stupid teenage hides. She wouldn’t even bail water out of the boat with her hands. Her sole contribution was to cry, which added to the overall sogginess. Who needs a gym when you can row a storm-tossed boat with waves slopping over the sides, seemingly for hours? We literally are lucky to be alive.

It was after dark when – with shaking exhausted arms and blistered hands — I finally reached the dock, where my frantic father expressed his relief by yelling at me for 10 minutes and grounding me for the rest of the vacation. When I stepped from the boat to the dock, I hit my hand on some sharp object and probably needed stitches, but I pretended it wasn’t that bad lest I incur further wrath. So that was quite a bit like the PT 109.

JFK had his steadfast and loyal brother Robert to watch his back as his Attorney General. I have a brother, Jim, who’s always had my back even though he is 9 years younger. Once in an ill-advised booking, Jim drove me to an outdoor Sunday concert at the University of Minnesota, Morris. The minute I got onstage – I didn’t even get ONE joke out — several football players who had been drinking since Thursday started booing and throwing ice at me out of their beer coolers. And my brother, also a Navy vet who spent time in the Mediterranean on the USS Nimitz, took considerable umbrage and volunteered to fight them all. Even drunken football players can probably spot a big, muscular, very enraged, uh, crazy guy, and nobody took him up on it, even en masse.

So JFK and I have that protective brother connection in common as well.

It was well known that the entire Kennedy clan was an athletic lot. There were dozens, possibly hundreds, of supercompetitive brothers, sisters, and cousins, just from Ethel’s loins alone. One of their fun family activities was touch football. What a bunch of wussies! When I was 12, I could throw a pretty good spiral, kick off to the opponents from the distance of a whole front yard, and was the only girl invited to play in the neighborhood tackle football games. I was very proud to be considered team-worthy.

However, I soon figured out, it may not have been for my football skills alone! It turned out that I was just entering exuberant “young womanhood” and the teenage boys would often tackle me even when I didn’t have the ball. Boys! Whatcha gonna do? I quit playing and that, plus rampant sexual and racial discrimination – not the fact that I was a 4’10”, 83 lb. girl of pallor – cut short any chance I had with the NFL. “I coulda BEEN somebody, Charlie…”

So, yeah, bottom line, I think I’m quite a bit like JFK. Who else do I remind myself of? Well, not Joan of Arc, though she was certainly heroic. Never cared for the short haircut, can’t ride a horse, and not at ALL a fan of burning at the stake. Plus, I only speak high school level French, and that very poorly. There’s only so far you can get leading a relief army in the siege of Orleans when your language skills consist of endlessly asking directions to the library or informing puzzled soldiers that “Margot and my uncle are visiting for a week.”

Since Joan was a participant in The Hundred Years’ War, I’m surprised Heroic Liz missed comparing herself to that unfortunate teen heroine. Boy, talk about a war that the Cheneys and their spawn could get behind! If you can turn your $7 Million net worth into $44 Million in just six years, think what you could do in 100 years of Halliburton?

I have never been elected to anything in my life, not Prom Queen or even Student Council, so I am not sure how I would react to a drubbing like Cheney took a week ago Tuesday. But I do believe, rather than go on at an unseemly length about my personal historic courage, I might just take some of my $44 Million, buy an island somewhere without Internet service, and disappear. Forever.

But that’s what I thought about Toobin, too, so what do I know? Are there people born without an Embarrassment Gene? I think that’s one earmark of a sociopath.

And I bet that sometime during the campaign, I also would have VISITED Wyoming. Or at least used it in a sentence in my campaign brochure. A brochure with just a voodoo doll of President Trump with a deranged blonde woman screaming and putting pins into the doll is not a good look.