Dem 47
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GOP 53
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Never Forget: WTF?

Today's reminiscence comes from reader P.R. in Saco, ME. We have chosen to leave it uncensored, for reasons that will presumably be plain. In any event, forewarned is fore-armed:

My mother was a 1950s military wife. My father was U.S. Naval Academy, class of '51, a Seabee (Construction Battalion). He was on-ship during the Korean War; often headed up public works departments on various bases; had two tours of duty in Vietnam; was commanding officer at the now-defunct Davisville naval base in Rhode Island. His career was decorated and my mother was his supporting cast.

With each move, which happened on average every year and a half as I was growing up, my mother packed up three girls and her husband; told us which belongings we had to leave behind because they were over the weight limit for shipping; and enrolled us in the local schools where we had to make new friends yet again. When she and my father ended up producing three girls with IQs over 150, and we got squirrelly in our various ways because my father wasn't around, and "gifted and talented" classes didn't exist, my mother shepherded us. She raised us alone when he was in Vietnam, where he was learning how to drink to the bottom of his sorrows at being apart from his wife and daughters. Through all our unexpressed grief from loss each time we moved, and my father's life being on the line, my mother commandeered the joint. She was steely.

My mother was well-read, if not educated. My parents were old-guard Republicans, even as their Democrat-leaning daughters argued with them at the dining room table on evenings. My parents were the rarest of birds, socially liberal but fiscally conservative. My mother supported my father's vote and referred to whichever leader was in place as "worthy leader."

In our small family ecosystem she held a tight fist around decency and civility. Swear words, in our house, were "shut up" and "stupid." (My ex-husband used them both in a sentence to refer to me once and, well, that marriage wasn't long for the world.) My mother's worst curse word was "damn!" when she dropped the spaghetti on the kitchen floor one evening. So, in her sixties, on an afternoon after she and my father had seen a matinee, she was flummoxed when I asked her how she had liked the movie. She said: "Well, it was pretty good, but I don't understand why they have to use..." she was on a roll here, and she meant to say "the Eff word," but what actually came out of her mouth was, "I don't understand why they have to use the FUCK word..." Whereupon her face went white, her mouth fell open, and her eyes went wide. That word had never been meant to issue forth from her mouth. Perhaps she was recalling soap from her 1930s childhood.

So, as I recall my shocked mother's sacrifice, I lament, as would she, the decline in presidential conduct of recent news cycles. Never mind that she never in her life would have been able to vote for Donald Trump, and "worthy leader" would have been relegated to the trash bin. She would simply be uncomprehending as to the degradation of political standards, human standards, since her era, a time in which it was her duty and responsibility to be supporting actress for all my father's patriotic stardom.

My mother thought swear words were indicative of a tiny vocabulary. (Perhaps they go inevitably with tiny hands.) My mother, for all her complications of a highly intelligent woman trapped in so many ways by gender expectations of the 1950s, knew that crudeness and lack of decency were no way to support and represent one's country.

Thanks, P.R. (Z)



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