And now, a break from Distributism to share this little gem from the local Rochester paper. The full story, which I found online (at a Texas paper), is a searing expose of Bush’s “habit” of kissing the women he appoints. In public. As far as I could tell, it’s happened twice, yet the article begins, “And they said Clinton was touchy-feely.”
Well. Rather than dive into the abysses of analogy that opens, I’d like to update you on the ongoing, unmixed progress of women’s liberation. As Melissa Fletcher Stoeltje reports:
But here’s the rightest rule of all: In today’s workplace, etiquette has become gender-neutral. Meaning, you treat men and women exactly the same. This relates to all of it - opening doors, helping with chairs, putting on coats.
“If the woman is your boss or a client, then, yes, you should open door for her,” says Klinkenberg [founder and director of Etiquette International]. “If you’re doing it because you think it’s gentlemanly, that’s really not appropriate. When you’re dealing with a more junior person, that person should open the door for a senior person. And the most senior person is always the client.”
So back when women were oppressed, we guys had to open the door for any one of them. Now, we only do it if she’s our boss or we’re selling her something.
Male chauvinists must be so mad.
For Chesterton Fans Only
Stop reading! You’re not a Chesterton fan! This post is over!
Okay, fine. Hilka Klinkenberg goes on to relate an amusing anecdote about a Southern man whose only crime upon hearing her philosophy (aside from supposedly calling her “Little lady,” which ought to merit a fine) was to reject it with the words, “Little lady, I don’t know how you do things up North, but down here we treat women in the office the way my mama taught me.”
The remark is apparently its own rebuttal. Who could learn anything but the rankest male chauvinism from a Southern mama? Possibly the mama was a man. There must be some blindingly obvious fallacy, because the only response we get is:
Time rolls slowly forward in some places. But roll it will, the experts say.
Unless this is a new take on Einstein, I can only assume that “rolling forward” means “doing what everyone else does .” Everyone except the people who don’t do it. Like in the South. And the White House.
Chesterton had a special place in his heart for experts who gently co-opt the Space-Time Continuum. They are always inevitably right. If you disagree, that doesn’t mean that the Space-Time Continuum might be doing its own thing and letting us bozos think what we want or do what our mamas say. No. You think you’re independent, but you’re really Left Behind. And they are still inevitably right.
We’re just darn lucky the terrorists haven’t figured out how to fly the Space-Time Continuum around, otherwise who knows what the hell we’d all inevitably start thinking?
SON: Mom, why are you aiming a tank at the local correctional facility?
MOM: I can’t stop! The terrorists all got Ph.D.’s!
In this line of thought, if an expert likes something and it happens even once, it has come to stay. Which brings us to a particularly good bit of Chesterton.
THE WHEEL OF FATE
by G. K. Chesterton
The evil we are seeking to destroy clings about in corners especially in the form of catch-phrases by which even the intelligent can easily be caught. One phrase, which we may hear from anybody at any moment, is the phrase that such and such a modern institution has “come to stay.” It is these half-metaphors that tend to make us all half-witted. What is precisely meant by the statement that the steam-engine or the wireless apparatus has come to stay? What is meant, for that matter, even by saying that the Eiffel Tower has come to stay? To begin with, we obviously do not mean what we mean when we use the words naturally; as in the expression, “Uncle Humphrey has come to stay.” That last sentence may be uttered in tones of joy, or of resignation, or even of despair; but not of despair in the sense that Uncle Humphrey is really a monument that can never be moved. Uncle Humphrey did come; and Uncle Humphrey will presumably at some time go; it is even possible (however painful it may be to imagine such domestic relations) that in the last resort he should be made to go. The fact that the figure breaks down, even apart from the reality it is supposed to represent, illustrates how loosely these catch-words are used. But when we say, “The Eiffel Tower has come to stay,” we are still more inaccurate. For, to begin with, the Eiffel Tower has not come at all. There was never a moment when the Eiffel Tower was seen striding towards Paris on its long iron legs across the plains of France, as the giant in the glorious nightmare of Rabelais came to tower over Paris and carry away the bells of Notre-Dame. The figure of Uncle Humphrey seen coming up the road may possibly strike as much terror as any walking tower or towering giant; and the question that may leap into every mind may be the question of whether he has come to stay. But whether or no he has come to stay he has certainly come. He has willed; he has propelled or precipitated his body in a certain direction; he has agitated his own legs; it is even possible (for we all know what Uncle Humphrey is like) that he has insisted on carrying his own portmanteau, to show the lazy young dogs what he can still do at seventy-three.
Now suppose that what had really happened was something like this; something like a weird story of Hawthorne or Poe. Suppose we ourselves had actually manufactured Uncle Humphrey; had put him together, piece by piece, like a mechanical doll. Suppose we had so ardently felt at the moment the need of an uncle in our home life that we had constructed him out of domestic materials, like a Guy for the fifth of November. Taking, it may be, a turnip from the kitchen-garden to represent his bald and venerable head; permitting the water-butt, as it were, to suggest the lines of his figure; stuffing a pair of trousers and attaching a pair of boots, we could produce a complete and convincing uncle of whom any family might be proud. Under those conditions, it might be graceful enough to say, in the merely social sense and as a sort of polite fiction, “Uncle Humphrey has come to stay.” But surely it would be very extraordinary if we afterwards found the dummy relative was nothing but a nuisance, or that his materials were needed for other purposes–surely it would be very extraordinary if we were then forbidden to take him to pieces again; if every effort in that direction were met with the resolute answer, “No, no; Uncle Humphrey has come to stay.” Surely we should be tempted to retort that Uncle Humphrey never came at all. Suppose all the turnips were wanted for the self-support of the peasant home. Suppose the water-butts were wanted; let us hope for the purpose of holding beer. Suppose the male members of the family refused any longer to lend their trousers to an entirely imaginary relative. Surely we should then see through the polite fiction that led us to talk as if the uncle had “come,” had come with an intention, had remained with a purpose, and all the rest. The thing we made did not come, and certainly did not come to do anything, either to stay or to depart.
Now no doubt most people even in the logical city of Paris would say that the Eiffel Tower has come to stay. And no doubt most people in the same city rather more than a hundred years before would have said that the Bastille had come to stay. But it did not stay; it left the neighbourhood quite abruptly. In plain words, the Bastille was something that man had made and, therefore, man could unmake. The Eiffel Tower is something that man has made and man could unmake; though perhaps we may think it practically probable that some time will elapse before man will have the good taste or good sense or even the common sanity to unmake it. But this one little phrase about the thing “coming” is alone enough to indicate something profoundly wrong about the very working of men’s minds on the subject. Obviously a man ought to be saying, “I have made an electric battery. Shall I smash it, or shall I make another?” Instead of that, he seems to be bewitched by a sort of magic and stand staring at the thing as if it were a seven-headed dragon; and he can only say, “The electric battery has come. Has it come to stay?”
