We Don't Get to Gloat

And the Corn Pop story

We didn't have even one day to gloat, after making Trump look so bad in the hearings. Next day, his judges won a couple of big ones.

            Damn.

            Anyway, we're not good at gloating. We know it's bad form to gloat, it's beneath us. The right can gloat.

            They sure as hell can. It's a sign of rude vigor.

            I am reminded of a recent New Yorker cartoon. A dog and a cat on barstools. Cat says, "The difference between you and me is, you're happy to eat catfood. I wouldn't touch dogfood." I figure the dog shrugs that one off.

            We won't eat the right's lunch, not outright. They're happy to eat ours.

            We are good at disdaining the right. Which can become disdaining folks. In the video shot January 6, there is a scene that I saw once but can't find anymore, in which rioters attack a pile of abandoned TV equipment. They kick it, they try unsuccessfully to set fire to it, they jump up and down on all this apparatus. One rioter -- he's longhaired, as hippies used to be but road crews are today -- yells at it:

            "You fill us with lies [kick, stomp], you laugh at us [kick, stomp], and then you go out and gallivant!"

            When was the last time you heard the word gallivant? If ever. It's a very old-fashioned word. My mother, who would be 108, next week, if she were alive today, used to use it, enviously. It implies showing off, with cool abandon. In the 1936, black-and-white version of Showboat, Irene Dunne sings "Gallivantin' Around," while moving oddly from, sort of, the groin. "Look at that gal shuffle," marvels Paul Robeson’s character. Ms Dunne’s character is doing African-American strutting, very whitely.

            In my days as a far more out-and-about active member of the media, I did not lie.

            But I did make fun of unliberal people.

            And then I did go out and gallivant. Yes I did. And would do so again today. But while I was gallivanting, working people were getting ready to get up and do work that I didn’t have to do.

            Last day of the finally-getting-our-teeth-into-Trump week, I talked to a man who said, "I am a working man!"

            Then he said something like, "Trump-I-don't-know-blm-blm-blm, but -- this Popcorn thing!"

            I said, "Huh?"

            "The popcorn, with the colored people! He didn't really do that! And he never drove a tractor-trailer! And why'd he open the oil pipeline to Russia? And I can't understand a word he says!"

            I disputed the oil-pipeline-to-Russia charge, but had to confess that I had never heard anything about the popcorn or the tractor-trailer.

            "And they talk about the poor mother! How about the poor little baby in there! They can scrape it out right up until the last minute -- "

            "Well that's not true," I said. "But the popcorn . . . ?"

            "You don't know about that?" he said. "You must listen to the wrong news!"

            I googled, and learned that Biden back in 2017 told a story from his lifeguarding days, when he told "a bad dude" to get off the diving board. The bad dude was called Corn Pop. Corn Pop was flaunting his refusal to wear a bathing cap, which was required for some reason in those days at that pool. And Biden, by his account, not only told Corn Pop to get out of the pool, but addressed Corn Pop as "Esther," meaning Esther Williams. (She was a movie star who swam in her movies.)

            And so Corn Pop and the other bad dudes who were his friends were waiting, with razors, for Biden when he got off from work, and Biden, anticipating this, was carrying a  length of chain, and he faced Corn Pop down by reasserting the necessity for Corn Pop to stay out of the pool when not wearing a bathing cap, but Biden apologized for addressing Corn Pop as Esther Williams. And Corn Pop accepted this apology, and no violence ensued.

            And according to a reputable media person who looked into this story, there was indeed a Corn Pop and at least one witness backs up Biden's version.

            The tractor-trailer thing is a similar case.

            But I guess the man I was talking to heard these stories on Fox News, or worse, and those stories, of putative Biden lies (along with abortion rights, and the price of gas, and his difficulty understanding what Biden says) were what upset him, rather than all the emerging evidence that Trump had lied about being re-elected.

            I don't know the upshot of this. I was going to post something about why I didn't appear on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me this weekend, so I could just plug in my bluff -- you know that show’s regular feature, "Bluff the Listener"?

            I'll do that tomorrow.