Ellen Goodman The Washington Post

November 8, 2009

Ellen Goodman
The Washington Post
1150 15th Street NW
Washington, DC 20071

RE: Great picture but some things are still owed to the ledger. Some comments on your column about Afghanistan and your sounding of the feminist war tocsin in today’s Miami Herald.

Ellie! Sweetheart!

Either you have had your face lifted or your photo has been alchemized. Either way you look great. Honest. Be careful you don’t have your face pulled too tight. You’ll be peeing through your navel. Hot damn but you’re almost a cougar.

“Have you heard this old proverb? Whether the rock hits the pitcher
or the pitcher hits the rock, it’s going to be bad for the pitcher.
Women are the pitcher in this story.”

I suppose a line from a Broadway musical can fall into proverbdom. For the record, it’s from The Man of La Mancha. Sancho Panza is telling Don Quixote about his tragic sense of life. Don Quixote is, meanwhile, ignoring Dulcinea’s very active social life and her always oversubscribed dance card while he speaks of the way things should be rather than how they really are. The building blocks of modern American Liberalism are once again revealed.

Since your theme is “windmills, tilting at”, let me point out a few – What’s the word, what’s the word, as the GEICO gecko asks – inconsistencies in your theme. It’s a bit less harsh than logical inconsistencies based on fallacious premises. I think it is a vestige of my male chivalry.

You label this country’s involvement in Iraq as a “dangerous misadventure”. About that statement two things must be noted.

#1 – Clio is a notoriously slow writer. How long did it take for the absolute guilt of Alger Hiss to be realized? That he should have been taken to Salem and had his treasonous ass hung like the witch that he was is now obvious. I use this an as an example of the way the Muse sits on the sidelines and watches the caravan pass by. An odd camel shitting every now and then is ignored. Who knows how she will judge?

#2 – Attention must be paid to the almost forgotten fact that 3/4ths of Congress voted for what you call a “dangerous misadventure”. The modern American Liberal Democrats – I just repeated myself, didn’t I? – in Congress upon hearing the alarm bells sounded like a gaggle of wanabee Vercingetorixes. To show my sensitivity to gender matters you could use Boedacia. You can’t say I’m not trying to be fair.

As I trudge through your column I find myself agreeing more and more with the character Jack Nicholson played in “As Good As It Gets”. When asked how he became a successful women’s writer he replied that it was easy. “Use reverse Logic and forget reason.”

Is it too late for an all volunteer Amazon Brigade?

Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Madeline Albright, Maxine Waters, Janet Reno, Rosalyn Carter, Eliot Spitzer’s wife, Amber, the ghosts of Bella Abzug, Lillian Hellman, Martha Mitchell, and Mary Magdalene, Barbara Boxer, the non serene Williams sister, Sonia Sotomayor’s madre, Kate Gosselin, Barbra Streisand, Rosie O’Donnell, Elizabeth Edwards, Angelina, most of The View, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz [I include her because she said last February that it would only take some “adjustments” in Afghanistan and it would be game, set, and match for the good old U.S. of A.] The Dixie Chicks, you. If I’ve left out any particularly bellicose hecates, harridans, or doxies please feel free to include them.

A few months of PE with Barney Frank blowing the up down whistle, a few months to get your menstrual cycles synchronized, some intense weapons training and God help those poor Afghan WOG bastards. It will take you about 2 weeks to clean out Kafiristan. In 6 months we’ll have empowerment symposia and Pilates training all over the place. And, as soon as they get bras, they’ll burn them.

You say that the reason to send men to Afghanistan is to make it safer for the girls?

Afghan gender equity?

“There is no Democracy without women.
So here we go.
This is our last chance.
And theirs.”

Woodrow Wilson, another cement headed Progressive, at least wanted to make the world safe for democracy. You want to make it safe for Afghan pole dancers.

God’s Holy Trousers! We’ve fought wars over less but if you want this country to go to war to promote gender equity may I suggest that we have some gender equity at Arlington Cemetery? All of the Kennedys buried there are male. How about we limit the next batch to the female side of that family?

Anyway it’s a great picture.

You are the journalistic equivalent of Dorian Gray.

Antigone would have been proud.

What do you think of “The Minstrel Girl” as a new title?

As Kipling, the first great multi cultural apostle of diversity and Nobel Prize winner back when that counted for something said…

“When you’re wounded on Afghanistan’s plains
and the women come out cut up what remains
roll up to your rifle and blow out your brains…”

Chicks to the front! You go girl!






Kevin Smith