I’m not sure who first used this title, and it may even have been me, in 2009, when I wrote a short essay on “Homer Simpson and the Constitution” at RedState.com The line had nothing to do with the content of the essay, and the content of the essay flew way over the head of the editors there, for it argued that all American have the most common of forbearers, and we should pay attention to the lesser in our society for we all arose from that very same stock.
It was one of my “never take yourself too seriously” inquiries which is rejected out-of-hand by two generations now. It’s like me telling Jonah Goldberg that in some small junior college in Georgia there is likely a student there from a farm family near Waycross who is as well read and has a wiser understanding of American history and its underlying philosophy than he does.
Of course there is, and thousands more, only they will never be heard.
It was about humility and gratitude.
I think it was Mark Twain who first used “reformed whores”, probably in a piece having to do with the early history of California after the Gold Rush at Sutter’s Mill. Twain arrived there a decade later, when San Francisco was only a pup, so he had more firsthand knowledge of its founding Pilgrim families than most.
San Francisco has always liked to view itself as the Boston-of-the-West-Coast, the home of the Founding Pilgrims of California. And in comparison with Los Angeles they may have a point.
But the joke going around when Mark Twain visited was that Nob Hill, the wealthiest and most blue-blood neighborhood of Bay Area aristocracy, far more than the nouveau riche properties of Pacific Heights where Lady Di lives, was originally settled by got-rich miners and the whores they took as brides.
This is where the phrase, “there’s nothing so self-righteous as a reformed whore” comes from, for it’s true, former prostitutes were very anxious to wipe away that social stain.
And let me tell you, no Mayflower grand dame highbrow could ever match these 24-carat dowagers on Nob Hill for that perfect down-the-nose self-righteous sense of privilege.
But I’m not making fun here. On the contrary, for America is unique in world history for its ability to produce this sort of cultural phenomenon. We had no royalty so a kind of royalty sprung up just by being there first.
In Europe a self-educated man from the lower classes might rise to the rank of being able to manage a prince’s finances (Bob Cratchit) but lower class women could not even dream of squeezing pimples on Elizabeth I’s shoulders, and only the most elegantly educated in the salons of Paris could rise to the rank of courtesan (kept woman, er, whore) such as Milady de Winter.
But here in America a girl of 19 in our first century, who could barely get a bath once a week, and barely a change of underwear, still could meet a miner in a saloon, who then struck it rich and then get to bathe in a gold tub by 30.
Or maybe she would only marry the man who would build the only granary within fifty miles on the South Platte. By Nebraska standards, that’s rich.
I think it was me who added the “Lawyers Wives” to the title, for that was how I saw many of them after I graduated from law school, for they carried the same sort of reflected glory of status in their husbands’ careers. Very socially-conscious. Since my wife had shared beers with prostitutes in Tokyo, at a CIA front called Manos, she was less insecure of her status. I recall, at a dinner while sitting with another captain and his wife, she blurted out “Wayne could have been a doctor, but he chose law instead.” My wife looked at me, then Wayne, and no doubt tried to imagine me taking the medical school boards, and just fell out in uncontrollable laughter.
No comparison. You could BS your way through a lot of questions in law school (I’m told that it’s even worse now.) But no doctor could BS his way through an Anatomy and Physiology exam. The rigors of medical schools would assassinate most law students, which probably explains why they sit at the high end of public respect while lawyers are down there next to Congress and CNN.
Still, for all the humor, it is natural in a country that defined rags-to-riches, always the risen ape, that people should want to reform their manners, habits, and even morals, as their circumstances became bettered.
So why have we, for the past two generations, while generally starting out at near the top, become nothing like our forbearers,
…instead have purposefully decided that they want to purge themselves of all those shoulders we stand on, and actually reaffirm our “constitutional right” to reject all the norms of civilization and adopt all the accoutrements of barbarism, forsaking every code of decency and morality, all in the name of an unearned privilege we have assigned ourselves?
I should have connected these dots when my kids were still in high school in the late 80s.
If there were any virgins at all where Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford went to high school, we have yet to know it, unless they took the pledge. And apparently Brett Kavanaugh did.
Now, Wikipedia makes no note of Kavanaugh;s religion, but he was likely a Roman Catholic. But it’s anyone’s guess as to how “religious” he was. But schools in that era were doing pledge programs all over the US, and many were associated with local churches. I know this because my son, 5 years younger that Kavanaugh, as part of a high school program took the pledge in his sophomore year, and stayed with it through high school and college, marrying three years after he graduated.
He took a beating in high school, (including a couple of fist fights) mostly from male athletes giving him a razz over it. But he was a star athlete and got a scholarship to an up-scale small university in Ohio, so had the last laugh. A big handsome lad, he had a few girl friends there, but lost two because of that pledge. One told him it just wasn’t cool to be a virgin at 21. (Besides, what would she tell her girl friends?)
So I suspect there’s a back story to Kavanaugh’s virginity choice. Tim Tebow had a great career, and we also know he took a beating in the locker room and in the media due to his adherence to his pledges about morality.
We just didn’t know that old-fashioned ideas about morality, sex, marriage, fidelity were all being mocked by a group who has identified themselves as the arbiters of a new, modern morality. Or actually, a lack thereof.
I should have seen this coming for I defended a black sergeant in the Army in 1974 for rape, a charge made by a young WAC because he had refused, on several occasions, to have sex with her. You see, he was married, his wife back in South Carolina, and this little vixen had made it known that she was going to have sex with every black man in the MP Detachment, and my client was the only holdout, the last notch on her gun.
My defense case was strong, and people came from far and wide, including my wife, just to see me cross examine her. He was acquitted. But only this week did I learn why the Army command had brought this case to trial in the first place.
Political correctness.
I plan to tell this story at VeteransTales.org. soon, but it does set a benchmark about the political correctness on this sort of charge.
You see, my sergeant was acquitted but his wife in America divorced him anyway.
We’ve come a long way. Society as we know it has been flipped while no one was minding the store.
According to the profile provided us by the yearbooks at the school attended by Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser, it appears that all the skanks at that school were from the upper classes of their society. These weren’t the daughters of third shift laborers.
This should bother you.
Sluttery has come a long way, and our society as one which can procreate and move from one generation to the next safely and healthily, has slipped considerably.
You might even say it has slid into survival-endangering territory. But when your best and brightest, your most educated, not only project, but protect and laud the most hateful expressions of a civil society…I’m moving away from mere skankery here… it’s time to take a deep breath and pause and reflect.
Unlike the reformed whore, who tried to hide her whoredom, our new world order seems to want to highlight it.
Even if they had all the guns to march us off to camps, why would they think they could survive beyond a generation before curling up and dying of dissipation, or more likely, surrendering to the next invader waiting in line?
The skanks education system, so-called “better schools” seem to produce the likes of Diane Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi,and Michael Aventti,…all coming from the same sort of social background, and, let’s be frank, the same Blue demography, even if in otherwise Red States, who see themselves as a ruling class-in waiting.
These little Valley Girls from Maryland, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco,, and their gelded Beta-male companions, are no longer reformed whores, their are redesigned whores.
These people are the opposites of the gals who started San Francisco. These people want to purge their own histories as well of the rest of us, that their sort ever existed. If they can purge their own histories, they can purge ours, up to and including that America ever existed.
Trust me, it can be done.
Right now the only option available to us is the ballot box.
I really would hate to see them force us to reach up over the mantle and pull down Ol’ Betsy.
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