The C-word

Well before The Coultergeist started preening into the cameras at Fox Noise, the only person whom I referred to using "The C-word" was right wing groupie Phillis Schlafley. I once-upon-a-time actually make her snap at me. It's true. With simple logic, even--that anathema to neo/theocons everywhere. She was comparing St. Ronnie's "Star Wars" pipe-dreams to JFK's aspirations for the space program. And I asked the simple--some would say, "D'uh!"--question of how billions of dollars in vaporware were going to save us from chemical or biological attacks. She screwed up her already-prissy mug and snapped, "Well, it won't!"

I was so proud of myself at the time. Still am, 's'matter of fact. (And to think that I was barely through the process of shedding the Reagan Youth cocoon that had wrapped me in Manichean simplicities and Mayberry platitudes through most of my adolescence...)

But it makes me wonder if, despite the toll fake tans and bottle-blonding and plastic surgery will take on that poisonous little bimbo (meaning the Coultergeist), history will repeat itself in another generation. I personally don't plan to grace this country with my citizenship (or, more importantly, my tax dollars) by that time, mind you. But it still makes me sad that rational, educated folk can give that dried-up Uncle Tom any attention whatsoever. Particularly when she deserves to spend her final days in obscurity and stripped of any dignity she was not willing to accord her fellow citizens and human beings. Bluntly and brutally put, if she spent the next decade drooling her pureed meals down her fuzzy chin and waiting overlong between Depends-changes, I would be the last to call call Fate unjust.

Now, I like to think that my adopted liberalism gives me a more humane outlook on others--failings, foibles and all. But for someone who has done as much damage (from the cowardly vantage of the sidelines, no less!) as this self-advancing trollop--I will always think of her as the model for Margaret Atwood's "Serena Joy"--the "grace" that should flow from a civilized nation should be cut off. Let her rot in obscurity. Let her die alone and afraid. Let her grave grow rank with weeds and let accident befall the tombstone so that no one will know where her corpse festers. And if she and her ilk are immortalized at all, let it be in the spirit of comedia della arte caricature.

Such fate would be more befitting of a civilized democracy, which should ultimately be a meritocracy of ideas. Rewarding a persona who makes the Mom in "The Manchurian Candidate" look like Aunt Bea is most emphatically NOT open-mindedness. I could trust my cat to handle noxiousness better than this. Her Ladyship's not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree, but her sense of context and propriety are infinitely superior. And considering that she has to use her own tongue as toilet paper, that's saying something, peeps.