It turns out a Trump debate can amuse me after all, as I learned after being sent a link to this tweet. Before anyone clicks it, I should caution you’ll want your sound on — but not turned up too loud. You may also have to unmute the tweet itself. It’s uncanny, this clip of the pet-eating quotes over the Peanuts theme, and I enjoyed it not just because it was funny but because my paternal grandmother and aunts loved Peanuts and two-thirds of them — Grandma and my kookiest aunt — were Trump supporters.
That grandmother watched Fox News all day as she slipped into dementia. She thought Trump was a buffoon but called him “my guy” anyway, just as Romney and McCain and Dubya had been her guys. (Kooky Aunt, a bigot for as long as I’ve known her, ordered the MAGA-QAnon combo meal and still hasn’t stopped devouring it.) My grandmothers never had much in common besides their grandkids and my mom’s mom once told me, of former Missouri governor Matt Blunt, who was in office at the time, “I don’t like to say this, but I have hatred for him in my heart. I really do.”
He wanted to amend the Constitution to ban gay marriage, a stance she disagreed with and Paternal Grandma heartily endorsed even though it meant her other daughter, a lesbian, couldn’t marry her longtime partner. Eventually she threw in the towel on homophobia when three-fourths of her granddaughters ended up gay. Later still, when my cousin’s then-wife, and then my cousin, transitioned and started referring to themselves as gay men, my dad and aunts assumed their mom would be horrified, but she barely seemed to notice.*
This is another of those rambles that’s not going anywhere; it relates to nothing but why the Peanuts music made me laugh. Today was busy but not worth writing about — I had an in-person LSVT appointment in the morning and in the afternoon I met with a guy about house stuff. Tomorrow will be busy too, with a morning appointment and LSVT in the afternoon. On Friday, I have to be at the hospital at 6:00 am for the esophageal manometry my GI ordered.
The house will probably be spotless by then because I’ve been cleaning and reorganizing things just to keep busy; I’d rather not think about having a tube shoved up my nose and snaked down my throat for what the scheduler said will be a 30 to 45 minute test. Luckily, a magnificent distraction is on the horizon: Auntie V, who never would’ve fallen for Pizzagate, is about to make her triumphant return on Eight is Enough. Not only that, it’s a two-part extravaganza that introduces another Bradford patriarch, Tom and Viv’s dad. And I believe it’s set in Hawaii, so maybe Merle will don a hula skirt.
* I love my cousin and their husband; they’re two of my favorite people. My fondness for them coexists with the fact that there are limits to the disbelief I can suspend in deference to someone else’s self-image. It’s common now within the ‘queer’ community, which isn’t the same as the gay community, for younger trans men — i.e., biological women — to identify as gay. They disproportionately pair off with other trans men, which means they’re biologically lesbian couples (for lack of a better term) who call themselves gay men. No matter how I approach it intellectually or emotionally, I arrive at the same conclusions: it’s sexist and homophobic and transparently absurd. It makes me want to say “Senator, I served with Jim Nabors. I knew Jim Nabors. Jim Nabors was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jim Nabors.”