There used to be a maritime custom that seamen crossing the equator for the first time were pounced upon by their shipmates and held down while their heads were shaved. Something much more powerful and meaningful than crossing the equator hit America shortly after 9 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, March 3. Did you feel the twinge when Donald Trump took us by the hand and led us to the nadir of our presidential cultural level so far?
In a February campaign rally, Sen. Marco Rubio abandoned his comfortable high ground and started mocking Trump's "small hands." "You know what they say about men with small hands," warned Rubio. I had no idea what was said about men with small hands, but after a minute or so even I got the drift. Rubio aimed low and hit the target. And I was confident that football would sit there in the middle of the field and never get one inch closer to either goal line. But no such luck!
Trump, with the un-embarrassability of a stone moose, took the measure of Sen. Rubio that Thursday and said, "[Rubio] referred to my hands, if they are small, something else must be small. I guarantee you there is no problem. I guarantee." And the American culture took another nosedive. Sitting there unexplained, that jape would have vanished for lack of bulk. When Trump provided us with subtitles, he spilled the very last bean at the bottom of the cauldron. Lower than that he can't get, we can't get, can't be gotten!
There were funnier and more forgivable "violations," not in college locker rooms, not in high-school locker rooms, but in junior high school locker rooms. "Men with small hands may also be small elsewhere, but I've got no such problem myself!" That bit of bombast from a candidate for president of the United States and therefore implicit leader of the Free World!
Journalists are busy asking one another how they feel about the depravity of it all. I told Melanie Morgan of KSRO in Santa Rosa I deplored the principle but enjoyed the spectacle. We agreed that speaks for a huge majority of honest Americans!
We spend all our discretionary time on the big fight, good versus evil and who's ahead. (Point of personal pride: On that issue of "good versus evil," a friend who gives evil a harder time than any other writer is David Kupelian, whose literary gifts have been compared to those of C.S. Lewis. David is managing editor of WND.com, with blockbuster best-selling books to his credit like "The Marketing of Evil," "How Evil Works" and "The Snapping of the American Mind.")
"Good versus evil" may be the "main event," but we also have a long and rich undercard. What about good taste versus bad taste, niceness versus meanness, selfishness versus generosity, cooperation versus obstruction? Who's ahead in those and other categories? Our culture was gaining from the birth of the republic until 1960. It's been on a downward glide-path ever since, with the current "small hands" imbroglio providing an abrupt downward shove.
At a Boy Scout camp outside Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1944 a crisis struck that turned Scouting upside down in four counties. On "Skit Night," when each cabin put on a little act of some kind, "the Asheboro boys" blew up the arsenal. Their skit contained a word that was unsayable at that time.
The word was "damn."
You never heard "damn" or "hell" on the radio, and the word "butt" was as vulgar as anything else in the language, almost as vulgar as that other word for the same body part. You know, the three-letter word that for so long was verboten unless it referred to a donkey. In 1934 the First Lady of Broadcasting, Mary Margaret McBride, was suddenly cut off the air for using the word "pregnant"! What was said instead? Try "in the family way."
All of this serves to remind me of "the dirtiest story I would ever tell on the radio": Two elderly women were on the train from western Massachusetts to Boston. They fell to talking and discovered they had quite a lot in common. They were both retired. They were both retired teachers. They were both retired English teachers. And they were teachers of English grammar, as opposed to literature.
One of them asked, "What brings you to Boston?" adding that she was her town's librarian and traveled to Boston several times a year to procure books. The other retired teacher responded,"I go to Boston quite often to get scrod." After an intense educated pause, the first woman then said, "Hmmm … After all these years, I never realized that verb had an irregular past participle!"
I definitely felt that twinge (and cringe!) when the "small hands" barrier was breached. Fortunately, there's still some grace and class in the world. One example is how the ever-gracious Finns quietly moved the Arctic Circle half a mile so a visiting Eleanor Roosevelt could make history without getting her boots muddy!
I once held a "Clean Limerick" contest on my radio show. The contest was a flop because we could only come up with two clean limericks. One of them taught us:
God's plan made a hopeful beginning.
Man ruined his chances by sinning.
We trust that the story
Will end in God's glory,
But, at present, the other side's winning.
Media wishing to interview Barry Farber, please contact [email protected].
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