Today my father finally has an all-female axis of evil. It wasn't clear to me for a while whom Hillary had displaced. She is in half of the email jokes he forwards me from his marine and salesman buddies. Inevitably the slam is that she is fat, has big thighs or a broad ass. Like that's a bad thing!
At first I thought maybe Hillary had knocked Jane Fonda off the list. Jane is kind of out of it, revealed by time as just a celebrity after all, no Joan Baez let alone Mata Hari.
Her parentage probably juiced up the symbolic irony of her aid and comfort to the enemy. Her golden father. Her degenerate brother. Like a first family, the Fondas played out the generational epoch like a sacrificial goat agony on display for the entire community gathered in the amphitheatre to purge the demons and get on with agriculture and power politics and sex.
But she sold exercise vids, got plastic surgery, married Ted Turner and did the tomahawk chop for the Braves. Now Turner is another bête noir for the right, a multimillionnaire daffy liberal, one of Friedman's superempowered individuals like Soros interested in playing against the grain. But you never hear about him in my house.
So Jane Fonda is old news, though in my youth her name came up more often than the hereditary monster of my clan, Oliver Cromwell. There's a funny story about that, a game of charades where I telepathical guessed Oliver Cromwell a millisecond after my dad stood up to act out his famous person. It was a watershed moment. He was crushed. Am I so predictable he asked? No one had to answer that.
There were similar moments of me baiting him about his repetitive Jane Fonda outbursts after that litany got tired for me. Streisand seemed to always lurk there for occasional use, I suspect because her jewishness, her large nose, her voice (both her undeniable singing skill and her New York accent), and of course her outspokenness. She did not know her place, as an entertainer and a woman, and this galls him.
Streisand has never more been popular in this regard, with her recent visibility in Democratic party politics. Both my dad and I could share a laugh about John McCain's hilarious "sings the music of Barbra Streisand" on SNL. So she's still in it.
A couple of those email forwards came this morning. I scrolled down through the layers of untrimmed forward headers, spotted the words "Jane Fonda" and "traitor" and didn't bother to read the message. So I guess Jane's still got it as a bogeyman, which leads to the unavoidable conclusion.
Oliver Cromwell is off the A-list.