So I started revving RFR back up whenever I got too mad to content myself with raving on about beets and beer. I'll post the newer ones here as I extract them from the miasma of my files.
Cream? Lemon? Conspiracy Theories? Radio-Free Robin Pours Tea
By Robin Ford Wallace
Won’t you have a spot of tea?
Yes, Gentle Reader, it is we, Radio-Free Robin, smiling primly behind the teapot with white gloves on, wearing our itty-bitty black cloche with the flirty veil. The last tea party we attended was not to our taste, so this week we are hosting one of our own.
Cream or lemon? How many sugars? Or would you prefer artificial sweetener?
If so, a word to the wise: Nutrasweet is an attempt by the federal government to destroy the brain cells of the American electorate, on the principle that stupid people are easier to control.
Or so we are informed by Jimmy Carter, who has it on the best of authority, because a friend of his noticed, driving around in his car, that when one of those silly sad songs where somebody dies came on the radio, tears would spring unbidden to his eyes and he’d cry like a baby. So Jimmy’s friend went to his doctor and Jimmy’s friend’s doctor told him to quit using Nutrasweet because that’s what was making him so sentimental.
Naturally, concluded Jimmy’s friend, Jimmy’s friend’s doctor or possibly just Jimmy, it followed as night to day that the feds are using artificial sweeteners to make Americans stupid and lackadaisical, solidifying their evil big-government agenda while we slump unheeding behind our steering wheels swilling Diet Coke and weeping helplessly to the tune of “Honey” or “Teen Angel.”
Jimmy Carter explained all this last week while he was replacing the heating element in our drying machine. We allude, of course, not to Jimmy Carter of Plains but to Jimmy Carter of Bryant, the most brilliant and accomplished handyman in the tri-state area. This Jimmy Carter never held elected office and doesn’t even have a Southern accent; he retired here from elsewhere and talks like a Yankee, emitting, as he wrestles your laundry equipment, little grunts and snorts and subvocal cuss noises like Popeye.
Nonetheless, we confess we cannot resist addressing him as “Mr. President,” and even, from time to time, frothing gratefully on about how much good in the world dear Mr. Carter has done since losing the election in 1980 – building houses for the poor in America, defending human rights in the Third World, repairing the overhead light fixture in our living room.
But we cannot agree with Mr. C about everything and in fact protested, as we handed him a cuppa, that the relationship between stupidity and docility seems often not so much direct as inverse. We had noticed this at the aforementioned tea party, where speakers seemed not only to believe in hypotheses such as the one Jimmy had just propounded, but to be actively angry about them, and determined to get even.
We had set off for the tea party (pinning on our cloche) with such high hopes! It sounded so genteel! So courteous! So pinky-finger-crookingly, cucumber-sandwich-eatingly, one-lump-or-two-ingly civil! Anyway, how many places these days can a girl wear white gloves?
But arriving on the scene with pinky crooked, cloche cocked and mouth set for crumpet, we found more hot air than hot tea and more conspiracy theories than cucumber sandwiches. We heard postulations that made Jimmy’s Nutrasweet theory sound like hard science, everyone was shouting, and we are sad to report that nobody offered us tea.
We date ourself, perhaps, by confessing to a few fading memories of that dewy dawn of time when dinosaurs roamed the earth and Saturday Night Live was still funny, but we could not sit through the tea party without thinking of Emily Litella, the Gilda Radner character who combined moral indignation with hardness of hearing, so that she was constantly spewing outrage about all this talk of presidential erections, or demanding what, precisely, was wrong with showing sax and violins on television.
When someone would finally set her straight – no, we want to save endangered species, not endangered feces – poor Ms. Litella would look lamely at the camera and say, “Never mind.”
At the tea party, speakers seemed fatally afflicted with Litella Syndrome. Grabbing the wrong end of the stick, they took firm hold and laid fiercely about like Samurais, taking arms against a great sea of troubles that didn’t, strictly speaking, exist.
They were noisily against health care reform of any kind, because it was a government plot to kill them, and against environmental protection because they were pretty sure laws would be passed forbidding them to exhale, on the grounds that it would increase the atmospheric level of carbon dioxide.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, a humanitarian resolution aimed at protecting children from the ravages of war, is so mild and so general that protocols against selling children into prostitution, or as combat soldiers, are strictly optional, for countries that don’t mind seeming that harsh and judgmental.
But at the tea party we learned that the purpose of this convention was to keep us from spanking our children. If we did, we were told, international police – perhaps from Interpol – would come and drag us to prison.
We waited patiently for the punchline, but nobody ever said, “Never mind .”
Nor was the first word uttered about crumpets.
Ironically, behind all the paranoiac ravings and the YouTube clips of gravelly-voiced Fox News fascists, what it boiled down to in the end was a plea for Your Vote, candidates for office trumpeting that government is evil, and would we please elect them to it?
So we found little value in this new kind of tea party on either the social gathering or the social change level, except perhaps to iterate politically what we have so often stressed horticulturally: People tell lies.
And furthermore, my dear, absolutely no one was wearing a hat.
END
What Kind of Car Does America Drive? To the Joadmobile, Radio-Free Robin!
By Robin Ford Wallace
“What Kind of Car Does God Drive?”
That was the name of a sermon I remember from my childhood, back in the Middle Pleistocene. I remember the name, I mean, and that it was designed to appeal to children. Otherwise the whole thing is a blur, and a testament to the beautiful optimism of the preacher. Children don’t listen to sermons.
I’m not sure anybody does. A couple of years ago, attending a wedding, I found the service so smarmily sexist I was afraid the bride would toss down her bouquet and deck the officiator. The guy sounded like he was talking about housebreaking a puppy.
So as soon as the ritual smackeroo had been planted on the neoconnubial lips, I clambered forth to hear what the other women would say, because there were one or two firebreathin’ feminists in attendance who make your narrator look meek and unopinionated.
You know what they said? They said: “Lovely service.” They said: “Does this dress make me look fat?” And: “Didn’t they say there would be champagne?”
See, they were regular churchgoers, and hadn’t heard a word. I was not, so I was the only one in the room still in the habit of paying attention.
I am not trying to make any kind of statement here about religion. I’m apologizing in advance for the sermon I’m fixin’ to give myself, or maybe I just want to talk about cars.
Last week, in connection with my work facilitatin’ the free and unfettered flow of information, I had to attend an evening meeting in a neighborhood I’d never been to before.
I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned it, but I’m Geographically Challenged to the point I can’t find certain of my bodily apertures with two hands and a roadmap. That’s why I swung by the place that afternoon on my way somewhere else, on the principle I’d have a better shot at finding it in the daylight.
I found the neighborhood without incident and thought I might as well snap a few pictures for my article while the sun still shone. But while I was cruising the streets, peering myopically around for photo ops – as a news photographer, I make a pretty good pastry chef, but that’s another story – a sedan swung aggressively in front of me and parked, blocking me in a side street. A man leapt out of it and put me, more or less, under citizens’ arrest.
Who was I? What was my business here? All right, if I was a journalist, where was my business card? I didn’t have one? Ha! He knew it! He had just known it!
I gave him my name. I explained my business. I showed him my driver’s license and a copy of this newspaper with my byline on the front page. Four times. Nothing seemed to reassure him so finally I confessed: I was working for the Russians.
The man didn’t laugh or apologize. He said, grimly: “We’ve had trouble here before.”
Finally I got it: He thought I was going to break into somebody’s house. “What?” I said. “I am, like, a girl.”
That was a gut reaction, and a euphemism. What I really am is a middle-aged white woman, a plump, housewifely little person who looks like she might pack a mean meatloaf. You might not want to leave me alone with a plate of a chocolate chip cookies but people like me do not break into houses. We knock at the front door, and bring soup.
Anyway, it wasn’t my face that had riled up Mr. Neighborhood Watch, I knew – it was my vehicle.
The red Toyota pickup truck I bought in 1995, like its owner, is perhaps not quite as cute as it was then but – also like its owner – it is still operating at the peak of its powers, thank you very much, except for the air conditioning and reading 6-point.
Anyway, it’s paid for. Toyota is seriously good at building cars, middle-aged white women are seriously good at regular oil changes, and the free and unfettered flow of information, while highly entertainin’, seriously sucks as an income generator. So lacking a lottery win, your local defender of democracy will continue riding into battle in a vehicle that looks like it might have taken the Joads, or anyway the Clampetts, to California..
But old cars mark their drivers as poor and that is enough, these days, to make them suspect. Twice this past year I’d been pulled over and checked out by the cops, and now this.
I drove away that day humiliated but also wondering: When, exactly, did this come about? Riding around that neighborhood, I’d been reminded of the suburb where I grew up (Pleistocene Acres), where everybody had four and five kids crammed into tiny ranchers, with rusty old station wagons to haul them around in. It was a boom economy but nobody seemed to have much money and there didn’t seem to be any shame in it. Now, ironically, as jobs evaporate and it gets easier and easier to be poor in America, social trends tend increasingly toward targeting the poor.
Not that I’d ever be one to make value judgments, but: This is wrong, stupid and utterly evil. During all those sermons about Jesus and the poor, was everybody else making grocery lists, or wondering if the dress made them look fat?
Well, I’m out of space, so we must discuss this further in a sequel. But before I hop into the Joadmobile and clank off into the night, let me leave you the answer to the question I asked in opening, as supplied by a beautiful old fourth-grade joke:
God drives a Plymouth, as evidenced by the Genesis quote: “He drove them from the garden in his Fury.”
END
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