Letters to the Editor

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A very special T-shirt just for country music fans.
  • @ AKA Smith

    Well, sure, if you take it literally, the implication is that there have been or would be sexual relations with one's mother. But I don't think people generally mean it literally. If someone says, "Fuck your mother," it's a pretty big insult probably not based on an actual fucking event (potential or otherwise).

    To your other point, yes. A mother is a woman. Perhaps Gloria Stenium provides a clue in her January 8 New York Times commentary where she wrote "men especially tend to feel they are regressing to childhood when dealing with a powerful woman..."

    Having said that, it's unlikely we'll see t-shirts for sale that suggest "Obama fucks his mother" or "McCain fucks his mother." (Maybe Giuliani?) (Joke.)

    Everyone has a mother and probably lots of people love their mothers. Lots of men have sisters and daughters, too. That doesn't seem to stop some individuals from degrading the value of females with words and actions.

    Maybe it's simply self interest. When women were denied education and voting rights, men had all the paid gigs and the power to themselves. Moreover, if a man wanted to keep a wife, he had many more tools at his disposal with which to guarantee a woman's fealty and get regular access to sex.

    In this great land, five women graduate from university for every four men. A college degree is more or less the bottom-rung price of entry into the American dream nowadays, if that can be defined as a gig with health insurance. (I don't believe access to health care in fact defines the American dream, but it's a practical measure.) With this trend in progress, the dudes are bound to lose traction. It's a slippery slope to a pink collar ghetto. Seventy cents to a dollar, anyone?

    Still, why do some men hate women when they have mothers and sisters and daughters? Perhaps because they're scared and because they feel emasculated by the presence of powerful women. The loser who made the Clinton cunt t-shirts, whatever his schtick, will never have the power or the legacy that she has.

    Sometimes I think that some (white) men who I have come to know are sort of half-men. They can seem so weak and passive aggressive. It's as though they've never been tested, not really, and yet still ride the historical wave of privilege. They did nothing to deserve these privileges beyond possessing the correct genitals, but they're not about to give them up. And yet, they remain half-men. They lack integrity.

    At least the men of station of a century ago had manners and knew how to treat a lady. I like to think so. What happened?

    Let's give the lady a chance. That's all I'm saying. Maybe the cunts can do better than the motherfuckers. It's worth a shot. With all the planet's life support systems in decline, and the American dream threatening to turn into a nightmare, what have we got to lose? Let's try Clinton first. Then let's try Obama after that. We'll be methodical about it. We'll try everything.

    And if none of our elected leaders comes through, we'll take things into our own hands, just as our founding fathers told us to do in the Declaration of Independence:

    "...But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."