House of Eratosthenes

The first printed citation I can find is from the Texas newspaper The Port Arthur News, from February 1946. This was headed – “Meryll Frost – ‘Most courageous athlete of 1945′” “As he received his trophy, the plucky quarterback unfolded the story of how he ‘came back’. He said ‘They say behind every great man there’s a woman. While I’m not a great man, there’s a great woman behind me.'”

It’s a great quote, no matter who said it, because it is a quote that believes in greatness. Not only greatness, but genuine gratitude. Post-1945, though, I guess we just can’t leave something like that alone…

Behind every great man is no one. The woman is 3 steps ahead.

Behind every great man is a great woman. And behind them both is a queue of children looking forward to their inheritance.

Behind every great man is a great woman who gives him all that false confidence.

Behind every great man there’s a great woman…behind every great woman there’s envy.

Behind every great man is a woman rolling her eyes.

Men aren’t supposed to be great anymore, apparently. That’s just not modern-thinking enough for us.

The Wendy Davis scandal makes me wonder if we’re seeing a reversal of that now. I’m wondering if it compels others to wonder about the same thing? “Behind every great woman there’s a man she dumped right after he paid for her education.”

“It was ironic,” Jeff recalls…”I made the last payment [on her Harvard Law loan], and it was the next day she left.”

The scandal has legs for two reasons: First, as a feminist icon, Davis’ credentials must be put to serious question since it’s hard to envision her as any sort of “independent” modern career-minded woman; she comes off looking more like a blood-sucking parasite. Second, no matter which way your political affiliations lean, I think we all should be able to get behind the idea that the people we admire should be good. We should be wanting our children to be more like those people. No one wants their children to go through life just using friends, relatives, spouses, and then tossing them away like empty eggshells.

Uh…right?

New light is being shed, I fear, on a recent phenomenon:

Frankly, I don’t know what it is about California, but we seem to have a strange urge to elect really obnoxious women to high office. I’m not bragging, you understand, but no other state, including Maine, even comes close. When it comes to sending left-wing dingbats to Washington, we’re number one. There’s no getting around the fact that the last time anyone saw the likes of Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi, they were stirring a cauldron when the curtain went up on “Macbeth”.

Boxer Feinstein and Pelosi, if I recall correctly, are all financial partners with their respective husbands, as is Hillary Clinton who also fits the profile and whose political agenda is in lock-step with the others. Pro-gun-control, pro-big-government, higher taxes, and always surrounded by this bullying, domineering aura of greatness. The rest of us are all supposed to think of them as great, accomplished women. But none of their admirers can offer any specific details as to why. This often happens with super-rich people, and all of them fit that. But they’re all rich because of their husbands.

The left has other caterwauling pantsuit-wearing female superstars who have had no husbands at all, and therefore could boast of being truly independent. This is where things start to get strange: The left does not promote them that way. The best they can manage to achieve is their patented feigned-theatrical-shock when the bachelorette’s sexuality is called into question. That whole thing doesn’t interest me too much, although maybe I should take the time to inspect it; it’s a glaring double standard, when you think about it a bit. How many “jokes” do we see in the modern era, politically-charged and otherwise, that are nothing more than references to male homosexuality? So it’s funny to think of male figures as gay, but shocking and intolerable to think of famous females that way? I don’t understand.

But the immediately relevant observation is: The left does not seem to appreciate independence, even when they’re bragging about it. They don’t seem to get what it is. They seem genuinely ignorant of the concept.

Which is remarkable, when you consider that their overall agenda — viewed from a very high, thirty-thousand foot level — all has to do with making all of us, not-that-way. Our health care, the education of our children, our defense from bad people breaking into our houses, our sources of energy, even the thoughts in our head are to come to us by way of centrally-administered and centrally-managed services monopolized by the state. Their sales pitch often has to do with principles of “tolerance” and “diversity” which they do not practice, and personal sophistication which they define only nebulously, clumsily. There’s a certain logic to that, you can’t really sell slavish dependence.

The profile of their dependency-salesman is shaping up much more crisply and clearly than the pitch the salesman is practicing. “He” is a female, who may or may not be married, but if there ever was a husband in the picture he’s mentioned very rarely, or not at all. She’s in the public eye a whole lot. But she doesn’t smile, unless it’s a Pelosi-grin that makes you wonder about her sanity. You never hear of her actually having a dialogue with anybody, although you haven’t long to wait for a sound clip of her droning on wisely about something, perhaps scolding someone who isn’t supposed to answer back, like an indignant schoolmarm talking down to her most sluggish third-grader. Wendy Davis aside, they’re all far, far less appealing to the male ideals of pulchritude than the average female you might see pulling up to a gas pump, or shopping on a weekend. One has the impression that the power-brokers are applying a standard of “no sane straight man would ever want to see her naked,” although trust me on this, you’re not allowed to point that out in mixed company. And yet so much energy goes into sustaining that standard, it seems almost impolite to indefinitely ignore the effort.

They wear pantsuits. Or stirrup pants. Which I suppose is fine now and then…but they do it all of the time. A woman wearing a pantsuit is like a stranger walking around at night; now-and-then doesn’t mean much of anything at all, but when it’s an all the time thing, no exceptions at all even across months and years, you have to start wondering about vampires.

But finally there is the voice. Oh, Lord in Heaven, the voice. Screech! Hey, we all send representatives to the capitol to win arguments, right? That’s the job. We should be expecting some people to show up there who are experienced, and therefore skilled, at winning arguments. We should expect them to have picked out and refined some tactics for doing this. But some politicians drone on in dulcet tones. To a fault; many’s the time I’ve wondered how their assistants manage to stay awake, listening to them talk like Charlie Brown’s teacher fifteen hours or more every day. Wa-waaa-wa-wa-wum-waaah-wum. Not so with MacBeth’s pantsuit-wearing pro-abort witches.

The glass shatters with every damn syllable. What’s it like to have dinner with contentious broads like these? You have to cover your eardrums every time you ask for the mashed potatoes?

Wendy Davis, for now, is remarkable as an exception to the “no sane straight man would ever wanna see her naked” rule — even though she fits the profile in all other respects. Most perplexing is the bullying overtone, emanating from somewhere, no one seems too sure about the source, commanding us to think of her as some sort of great person even though there’s no clear definition of her greatness. Lately, though, she’s begun to look a bit haggard, and perhaps the Dark Side of the Force has begun its aging process on her.

Point to all this is: If I were a left-wing power broker, I would be seriously second-guessing this idea of putting Ms. Davis out into the limelight as some rising political superstar. She has the potential to get people thinking and talking, about things I don’t think the left-wing power machine wants discussed. Questions just sort of naturally arise, like: What is the liberal-democrat vision for our daughters, anyway? We hear so much about what conservative Republicans want girls to do with their lives, and we’re supposed to think the worst of it, although most of us don’t find the idea of lifetime financial and emotional stability, with happy and healthy children and a loving husband, to be too dreadful. If you have an infant girl, how do the lefties want her to spend her life, if not that way? That’s the question I think people should start asking — better late than never.

Should she achieve financial solvency at all? If so, should it come from actually producing something? Or should she life off the efforts of others? Maybe sit on Harvard’s faculty, or go to Congress in a pantsuit and do a lot of screeching? A supply-and-demand problem emerges. There are lots of baby girls being born, and only so many slots there; no society can endure with too many non-producers, regardless of whether the non-producers can shatter glassware with their screechy voices.

I imagine the lefties want every girl to go to college; they say so. What kind of degree does she earn? A useful one? Who pays for it? Should she latch on to some dimwitted but high-earning husband, use him and then toss him away like Jeff Davis? Is it okay, on Planet Liberal, to be a shameless, blood-sucking people-using parasite when you’re a female?

The Wendy Davis mess compels us to ask the question. And keep asking, until we get an answer. A good answer, that doesn’t avoid the subject by smearing the opposition.

Second, no matter which way your political affiliations lean, I think we all should be able to get behind the idea that the people we admire should be good. We should be wanting our children to be more like those people. No one wants their children to go through life just using friends, relatives, spouses, and then tossing them away like empty eggshells.

With friends like these….

I think the left is so used to playing the “all criticisms of blacks/chicks/gays is racist/sexist/homophobic” card that they no longer see them as cards. They honestly seem to believe that being black/female/gay = immunity from any kind of criticism. So they send out these ball-busting harridans, because why screw around with a slingshot when you’ve got an ICBM? Purely as a practical matter, they pull the moonbat base plus all the low-info idiots who will vote for grrrl power regardless of her positions. That right there gets you almost to the finish line. So send out the most extreme extremist you can find, provided she can cry on cue.

But as you say, there’s hope. At some point, conservatives are going to wise up to the fact that they’re going to get called every name in the book no matter how many transgendered gay black disabled orphans they pull from burning buildings, and go on the attack. The trick to defeating a soulless gold-digging bitch like Wendy Davis is to point out, loudly and repeatedly, that she is in fact a soulless gold-digging bitch, and if she’s ever in your house, a rational person counts the spoons after she’s gone. And if you vote for her, you’re just as bad.
- Severian | 01/30/2014 @ 07:58

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Behind Every Annoying WomanThursday, January 30th, 2014

Behind Every Annoying Woman
Thursday, January 30th, 2014