Eighties Sweaters Are Back: 2.2. Vintage Victorian for Women Only

In the early 1980s, reprints of Little House on the Prairie, Anne of Green Gables, The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, and anything by Beatrix Potter sold well and generated a market for nostalgically "feminine," lacy, and ruffly styles--often on shirts worn with jeans or skirts worn with T-shirts and leather jackets. 

Knitted sweaters were not an authentic Victorian style for women at all. Victorian knitters made socks, mittens, shawls, scarves, purses, and coverings for everything, but their jackets were made of woven fabric or fur (or both). Edwardians wore sweaters as men's sportwear, not part of a girly-girl look. In the Eighties knitters tried to fill in the gap with lacy and ruffly sweaters that seemed to an Eighties eye to fit in with Victorian and Edwardian styles.

What's Victorian about this Annette Mitchell design? It's a 1980s casual sweater shape knitted in a type of cheap yarn that sold best in the 1970s. (No apologies. I used Red Heart, so the sweater is almost indestructible. You could peel it off, throw it into a snowbank, forget about it till springtime, dig up the sodden object and run it through washing and drying machines, and the creamy white sections would be as creamy as ever. It's a relatively cheap yarn that resembles some even cheaper yarns, but it's a good yarn for those who like machine-laundering their sweaters.) But the texture comes from a cluster stitch pattern Victorians did use--for borders on mitts or scarves, or the endless dustcovers they put over everything that didn't move away. And some Victorians liked the new, loud combinations they got from those new aniline dyes. Not all the dyes they used were as reliable as ours, but consider the way writers like Louisa May Alcott enthused about "pretty" combinations like beet and carrot--compared to which this mix of cream, teal, and burgundy seems mellow.

This Pat Mencini design uses more fancy stitches Victorians used for lacy accessories. Victorian ladies didn't wear bulky, boxy cardigans, but after the novelty of beet and carrot colors wore off there was a late Victorian fashion craze for all shades of pink, rose, mauve, lavender, and purple. 

What was considered to make a sweater 1980s "Victorian"? 

a. Very fluffy or very smooth yarns. Real Victorians loved angora, alpaca, and mohair (for shawls and scarves) and any form of silk. 

b. Glittering yarn spun with strands of lurex or olefin was not an authentic Victorian fashion, but it was part of the fluffy-ruffles look of the eighties.

c. Elaborate textured stitches, preferably in lightweight yarns. Throughout the Eighties knitting designers tried to revive interest in knitting traditional shapes with lightweight yarns, as favored in the Edwardian era. Knitters tended to study these dainty lightweight pieces, say "Pretty, pretty," and carry on knitting with blanket-weight yarns. Few people had time to knit at eight stitches to the inch any more. However, for knitters who were willing to commit to long slow-growing projects, knitting with thin yarn paid off with lighter, more wearable, more flattering sweaters. Throughout the Eighties, designers like Sasha Kagan, Patricia Roberts, and Alice Starmore created patterns intended to entice knitters back to thin yarns--but those who bought their yarn at Woolworth's, K-Mart, and other forerunners to Wal-Mart didn't find a good selection of thin yarns, and kept up the clamor for patterns to be made with thick yarns.

d. Natural fibres were a subject of controversy among knitters in the Eighties, and still are. Wool is the most traditional yarn for knitting, and many knitters actually love the feel of natural wool yarn on our fingers. People trying to market wool yarn insisted that it was the ideal type for knitting. People who were in fact allergic to chemicals used to process wool in the early twentieth century said that in that case knitting was obsolete, because wool was obsolete--they wouldn't touch a wool sweater. Too many wool lovers adopted a defensive attitude I call wool snobbery, or woolly-bullying. "Well, if you're satisfied with other fibres," they said, nonverbally adding "then you're a hopeless case and we don't want to be seen with you. Stay out of our wool shops." Most things actually knitted and worn in the 1980s were acrylic but, toward the end of the decade, cotton yarn started to become popular.

Designers who went in for the updated Victorian-influenced styles in a big way were Laura Ashley, Annette Mitchell, and Pat Mencini; designs by Nancy Vale, Edina Ronay, Sasha Kagan, Alice Starmore, and Christian de Falbe often fitted into the fluffy-ruffles look.

e. There is no question that shaped lightweight sweaters that follow the contours of a woman's body, more or less, are a feminine look. However, in the 1980s nobody but Christian de Falbe seemed to remember how to knit them. People remembered that the 1940s form-fitting sweater look was achieved by wearing a wool sweater while it was wet and letting it shrink to fit; in the 1980s people admired the fortitude of those who'd actually done that, but they weren't going to do it themselves. Designers seemed not to remember how to shape sweaters. Eighties knitting magazines are full of pleas for shaping and fitting, which designers generally ignored.

Pattern books to look for: 

1. The most obviously Victorian (or, properly, Edwardian) inspirations in an Eighties pattern book were Annette Mitchell's. The Country Diary Book of Knitting, all knitting with more than eighty Eighties patterns for sweaters, accessories, and stuffed toys, actually came after The Country Diary Book of Crafts.

2. Pat Mencini, listed as a contributor to the books above, wrote her own Edwardian-inspired Beatrix Potter Knitting Book. Amazon doesn't even have a page for this one, though it was available in many wool shops in the Eighties and may still be in some of them. 

3. Though the cover sweater on this book was not part of the Eighties idea of Victorian or Edwardian style, many of the designs inside the book were. 

4. Christian de Falbe had his own wool shop, designed his own wools, and printed his own fashion magazines (with the help of a lot of anonymous people) in the 1980s. Most of his designs weren't photographed with long skirts, lace ascots, or picture hats--but most of the favorites collected in his hardcover book might have been, and some were photographed with hats and gloves. Amazon lists several copies of this book but does not have a picture of it. Click on the title to buy Designs in Hand Knitting.

Eighties Sweaters Are Back: 2.1. Witty Knits

Section 2 of 2 of these Eighties Sweaters posts had five subsections. I'll try to get them all online while people can still stand to think about warm thick sweaters. 

Historically the first major Eighties Sweater fad that didn't draw on an ethnic tradition started in Britain, with the royal nod from Charles and Di, and was called "witty knits." For the first time in fashion history, knitted sweaters and accessories became conversation pieces. 

Witty Knits included several "witty" effects, such as knitted-in cartoons, lettering, and whimsies like Michael Simon's "sweater with sweaters" where the actual sweater was festooned with miniature mock-ups of other sweaters. They could be quite stylish and flattering. However, elaborate colorwork and decorations could also become damaged and "ugly," prefiguring the 1990s' Ugly Holiday Sweaters, after relatively little wear.

What makes a sweater "witty"?

a. Cartoon images as distinct from geometric patterns. These images could include simple animal and flower shapes, or complete reproductions of actual drawings. 

b. Knitted-in lettering as a design feature. Traditional sweaters were sometimes marked with dates and initials worked unobtrusively into a waistband or cuff. Eighties sweaters often splashed words over the front or back of a sweater, or down a sleeve. Lettering was sometimes chosen in languages other than the knitter's own; several Japanese sweaters feature English words, and European and American sweaters feature Chinese or Japanese words, that don't make much sense. 

c. Trompe l'oeil effects that attempted to make one thing look, at least for a moment, like another thing. Eighties socks were sometimes designed to look like shoes. More wearable, though less witty, were knitted sweaters designed to resemble woven shirts or jackets. 

d. The "sweater with sweaters" appealed to many knitters, and spawned variations like "hats with hats," "mittens with mittens," "sweaters with mittens," and so on. The original idea was to save some of the yarn from other things you had knitted and use it to knit realistic mock-ups of those things, but few knitters really achieved that and many just knitted little repeating garment-shaped motifs. 

e. Little pictures of the modern world as repeating motifs. While anchors, leaves, reindeer, and similar nature-inspired motifs were traditional, in "witty" Eighties sweaters designers worked in motifs like plumbers' tools, $ and other money symbols, animal paw prints...I've even seen a dog blanket with little toilets worked in fairisle stitch, with smaller border patterns repeating words like "Sit--Heel" and "Bad Dog."

Pattern books to look for: 

* Patricia Roberts was a very hip, trendy, witty Eighties sweater designer, whose designs Bishop Richard Rutt denounced for their "deliberate fatalism." Check out: 

and: 

I have the omnibus edition--both books in one fat volume. It is NOT for sale. I show it only to people who are likely to be able to pay for the time these designs take. As a knitter you're guaranteed to find these books a challenge with elaborate instructions in fine print, but knitters have been testifying for almost forty years now that those elaborate instructions are, so far as they've been able to determine, error-free. 

* Ruth Herring and Karen Manners, Knit Masterpieces. Famous paintings charted for knitting into sweaters. 

(They were also the designers of this totally Eighties classic, and nineteen more even wittier designs, in a later book called Knitting Wildlife. Yes, the lettering on the sleeves says "Save the Whales.")

* Lalla Ward, Beastly Knits. Early Eighties with very cartoonish animals, including a batwing sweater with a bat image on it. 

* Melinda Coss: 

"Witty knitting" collections continued to be knitted into the 1990s, notably Catherine Cartwright-Jones's Tap-Dancing Lizard. 

Book Review: Knitting Workshop

Title: Knitting Workshop

Author: Elizabeth Zimmermann

Date: 1981

Publisher: Schoolhouse Press

ISBN: 0-942018-00-1

Length: 177 pages

Quote: “The size of the needle can determine your GAUGE. Your state of mind can influence your GAUGE. In short, GAUGE is an idiosyncratic matter.”

Right. What you might not like about this book is that it’s the first hardcover book Schoolhouse Press (EZ’s children) produced, and it has a quirky 1950s folk-culture look with uneven margins, ALL CAPS in almost every paragraph (to identify the key word or sentence), and underlines for emphasis. It looks amateurish. (The family’s work improved greatly during the 1980s.) And all the illustrations are black-and-white. And the book was well bound, but the materials used were on the cheap side, so without having even been wet or dirty my copy picked up a distinctly musty odor just by being stored in a house in a damp climate. I hate books that do that.

Persevere. Schoolhouse Press really ought to bring out an improved edition, because this amateurish-looking little book should be worth whatever you paid for it if you knit hats and sweaters for sale.

I’ve been posting some discussions of Eighties Sweaters. Well, although she did have colleagues, the trending appeal of hand-knitting in the Eighties was the fruit of Elizabeth Zimmermann’s work. Her work, personal charm, and connections got a weekly show called The Busy Knitter on television, at least in Canada, and created a market for a series of Knitting Workshop videos. This book is the scripts for the videos. EZ was the master knitter from whom all of us learned in the 1980s (as did most people who were knitting in the 1960s and 1970s) and in this book you get her views on the major trends in traditional hand knitting for the next…easily twenty years, actually. (Traditional sweaters go in and out of fashion in New York, but they can be dated to a specific year only if the knitter was thoughtful enough to knit the date into the sweater somewhere.) You get the basics of shaping, first the contemporary “fashion” shapes (including the simple, boxy “Norwegian” shape), then the most memorable of EZ’s quirky garter stitch designs, and then the classic lace shawl, Aran cable, Guernsey textures, and Fair Isle colorwork techniques. If you follow EZ’s instructions for working with your own idiosyncratic “GAUGE” and the size and shape of the person who will be wearing the sweater, you can make any of the designs in this book, using almost any yarn, to fit almost any person.

Used judiciously, they’ll even suit almost any wearer whom they do technically fit. Though EZ marketed wool, her knitting caught the eyes of knitters in the Eighties because the wool she used was blanket-weight or even thicker. EZ lived in Wisconsin and her husband, a lifelong skier, took her to Aspen and other snow-intensive places, so they liked having dozens of snowproof sweaters. You could copy it with the cotton or acrylic yarns the local dime store sold. Many knitters did, and that was how we learned that in places that don’t get a lot of snow people seldom actually wear a snowproof sweater. In Virginia, for example, everybody wants to have one snowproof sweater (often identified with Maine or Canada, depending on the owner’s choice of summer vacation spots) but that sweater will not necessarily be worn every winter. People bitten by the “decluttering” bug will donate theirs to a charity store. There will be more of a demand for lighter, more breathable sweaters. If you want to wear these sweaters indoors, you might want to use cotton, or at least a much lighter-weight wool. They’d still be of the Eighties, and expert knitters would still recognize them as EZ’s designs.

If you want dozens of sweaters, for yourself or for dozens of friends who want an Eighties Sweater, this book is for you. And if you don’t want dozens of sweaters, the Knitting Workshop will also give you enough ideas for distinctive caps and shawls (a heavy, non-reversible shawl is a poncho) to last a lifetime.

Book Review: Mother Daughter Knits

Title: Mother-Daughter Knits

Authors: Sally Melville and Caddy Melville-Ledbetter

Date: 2009

Publisher: Potter / Random House

ISBN: 978-0-307-40872-3

Length: 160 pages

Quote: “Obviously my [M]om has more experience and so tends to write intermediate to advanced patterns—while I write beginner to intermediate patterns…[W]e knew that we both want what we wear to look and feel as good as possible…hence the Knit to Flatter and Fit material.”

After Elizabeth Zimmermann died…no knitter of my generation could take her place, really. Meg Swansen (EZ’s daughter) did a great job of carrying on without taking EZ’s place. Sometimes it appears to me that the knitter who’s come closest is Sally Melville. Her work reminds me of EZ’s in several ways:

1. There’s a consistent focus on knitting as a craft. Fashion comes second. Both knitters published designs that were fashionable in the season of publication (which is quite a feat), but both always seemed to have begun with an idea of “This is an interesting technique; what can I make with it?” rather than “What can I do with this yarn, especially if it was a manufacturing mistake in the first place” or “How can I shoehorn knitting, which is a woman-empowering craft, into New York fashion, which is a nasty woman-exploiting capitalist game?” One gets the feeling that they designed things when they did and published the designs when they were fashionable. I like that in a knitter.

2. There’s a continuous exploration of what knitting can do. EZ wrote one short, pithy beginner’s book, easy to overlook if you’re thinking “I already know how to purl,” that encapsulates everything you need to become a designer. SM wrote a series of technique books, presented as lessons for beginners, that also worked as fashion pattern books for serious knitters. 

3. Both tended to design sweaters that I wouldn’t want to wear, myself. That’s not bad. Both designed sweaters that do suit people who are different from me, and when you’re motivated to make your knitting pay for itself—as I’ve always been—that’s a very good thing. 

4. Each started knitting, designing, and publishing on her own, but reached new heights of success by working together with a daughter.

In this book SM and her daughter explain exactly why their sweaters mostly don’t work for me. Genetically predetermined hormone balances determine whether and where women’s bodies start to curve around pads of fat that won’t go away. My family tend to be top-heavy. SM and her daughter are thinner, with a little more curve below the waist than above. So the standard sweater, unshaped, with a waist that either stops at the natural waistline or continues just far enough to cover the natural waistline when one bends forward, makes them feel that they look bottom-heavy. Outside of my home town, where most people are related, I’ve seen more women whose shapes were closer to theirs than women whose shapes are closer to mine. Those women need this book.

Hand-knitting was an Eighties trend so, really, when I consider my pattern hoard, what hand-knitted sweater is not an Eighties Sweater? Revising older patterns to work with currently available yarn was very much an Eighties fashion…These are not Eighties Sweaters. Very little sweater shaping went on in the Eighties. Traditional sweaters had been worn by men and did nothing at all to flatter women’s curves, and the fashionable shape was boxy above snug ribbed waists and cuffs. The shaping of the sweaters in this book is very much a post-Eighties thing. (But go ahead and wear them. Many things that were actually knitted in the Eighties had shapes different from the patterns the knitters had tried to follow. My own very first Eighties Sweater had shaping, although it wasn’t designed to have.)

A couple of their shaped sweaters have waistlines designed to ride a little higher than the natural waist. That style was fashionable for the season, and it looks great on the slim models in the book. It also tends to be forced upon women whose figures are temporarily distorted. As a result, though short-waisted styles are comfortable and fun to wear for top-heavy women too, people do tend to greet a top-heavy woman in a short-waisted garment with “Congratulations! When is the baby due?”

That said, I’ve enjoyed knitting with this book…for the market, of course…and the first sweater I knitted, varying a design in this book slightly, sold in hours.

There really are thirty different patterns, though some of them are for things like headbands and neckties. They are different patterns, though, no basic stand-by shapes with a different color or texture thrown in somewhere. There are Shrugs, a sort of short shawl that’s held in place by a little vague sleeve shaping joining them under the arms. There are quirky ideas, like the sidewise-knitted boat-neck pullover and the scarf-laced-through-the-buttonholes cardigan and all the sleeveless sweaters, that I consider silly. (If top-heavy women ever wear vests, they have to be very light and very short and very well fitted; no stretchy knitted fabrics need apply.) Then there’s the shirt-shaped cardigan, the Camelot Coat that really does resemble early 1960s dress and coat shapes, the long-or-short shruglike jacket, the drapey mohair Mother-Of-The-Bride cardigan, the Gray Cardigan shaped by ribbing and cabling, the Altered Austen Jacket (which could very easily be altered back to put the waistline at the actual waist), and the Crinkly Blouse Cardigan, all of which are different from anything anyone else has knitted and at least one of which might appeal to you.

Because some may think the Jumper (dress) is another silly idea…If I knitted it, I would either knit only the skirt or knit a proper bodice with sleeves, and I would use Red Heart acrylic. Any knitted skirt that is long and roomy enough to be wearable is heavy enough to stretch under its own weight, even if you use lightweight yarn, and especially if it gets wet. Wool will shrink, so nobody in her right mind knits a wool skirt, unless we’re talking about the long waistband referred to as a “skirt” on some fishermen’s sweaters. Cotton will stretch, so you’d have to be cautious wearing a hand-knitted cotton skirt or dress. Cheap acrylic will shrink, and often shrink unevenly, so it’s best saved for rugs and dog blankets. Red Heart acrylic will stretch horrifyingly if wet, because it’s heavy…I have a big roomy robe knitted of Red Heart that I wear in cold markets to show off the heating, even snowproofing, qualities of this blanket-weight material. A long knitted skirt is like a blanket around your knees, only it moves with you when you stand up. I once dashed out of a cold building during a power outage wearing it. The skirt was soaked. I splashed home holding it up almost doubled to keep the skirt out from under my feet. Then I ran it through the washer and dryer and, you may see it if you can’t believe it,  it snapped right back to its original shape with the skirt just over my boot tops. So, yes, it’s worth knitting a street-length skirt if you use Red Heart. But for the life of me I can’t imagine why anyone would bother knitting a street-length skirt in that very stylish mix of wool and viscose yarn, which would have made a nice jacket, but not a skirt.

It's almost guaranteed that some of these designs won’t appeal to you—leg warmers?! Others probably will, though, and the nicest thing about this book is that the instructions do spell out how to alter things like high waistlines. The knitting mother and daughter can’t promise complete instructions for every body but they have taught a lot of knitters who had different kinds of bodies, and they explain how to make most of these designs fit most people who want them.

Bad Poetry: Cow Villanelle

"Cow Villanelle" was written for a contest last fall. I've not heard any more of it since, so it must be time to post it here. I was nudged in that direction partly by a link Kim M. Russell shared to a British'zine called "Visual Verse." They post a picture and print whatever readable "poems" people can type into a form in one hour. Considering the circumstances of writing, several of the poems are remarkably good. If you scroll down through the poems that are and are not about pet pigs, you'll notice one spew of misguided rage that assumes that pet pigs are going to become factory-farm swine. Well, if the poet had had time to think it over I'm sure she would have written something better. Then you come to quite a clever poem, by Alun Roberts, celebrating "The Tamworth Two," a pair of factory-farm swine that escaped--like Chicken Ten Thousand--and did become pets. Delightful. 

(This short link means the'zine may not stay up for very long. Click fast!)

https://visualverse.org

COW VILLANELLE

One screams: “You mustn’t milk a cow!

It’s exploitation! It’s not right!”

The cow says: “Milk me, milk me now.”

Before the grasslands saw a plough

Wild cows turned grass roots up to light.

(Did other calves help milk that cow?)

Our First Nations did not know how

To milk cows; slaughtered them outright.

(Today’s cow bellows: “Milk me now!”)

They thinned the herds because (oh wow!)

Too many cows on land were blight.

Cow-loving Hindus milked the cow.

The taming of both cow and plough

Spread east to west like morning light.

The cows bawled: “Come and milk me now.”

Not greed but kindness (I avow)

Sent farmers out to barn by night,

Where pity urged them: “Milk the cow.”

Now greedy farmers have learned how

Computers press milk-robots tight

Against the cows—“Yes, milk me now!”

Barns lose that early morning row.

Cows work milk-robots day and night.

One screams: “You mustn’t milk a cow!”

The cow lows: “Milk me, milk me now.”

At this web site “Bad Poetry” refers to (1) the classic collection by Kathryn and Ross Petras, or (2) the self-parodies bloggers post for Bad Poetry Day, or (3) verse written by me. I don’t think all of my verse is all that bad, but it’s whimsical. I’d rather play with forms and the way ideas do or don’t fit into forms than argue that Free Verse is poetry, not prose, for reasons other than having uneven right margins. 

(I don’t think Free Verse is bad, but I’ve never understood how it can be called poetry. I think form of some kind is what makes a piece of writing poetry; I think most Free Verse “poems” could be better classified as very good, thoughtful, short pieces of prose.)

However, I’m not completely satisfied with this villanelle. It doesn’t tell the whole story. Maybe some day I’ll think of a way to fit the whole story into the length and form of a villanelle, or maybe I’d rather tell it in prose, thusly:

(1) I do share PETA’s belief that other animals are sentient and deserve as much consideration, as much respect for their “personhood,” as  we humans do. Not the respect that comes from believing someone else is my superior or that, in a question of who deserves to survive, someone else deserves to survive more than I do and I should automatically sacrifice my life to theirs; I don’t believe that about most humans, let alone other species. I believe altruism would be pathological if it really existed, which it doesn’t, except in a few extraordinary situations. But the respect that comes from believing that everyone else has as much right and reason to live their own lives in their own way that I have, that most of the time we can all coexist very well, and that often we can mutually benefit from communicating and cooperating with one another.

(2) For that reason, I do not share PETA’s belief that relationships between humans and other animals are automatically exploitative of the other animals, that we should just exterminate the species and varieties humans have been selectively breeding for compatibility with us for thousands of years, and that the only way we can properly relate to any non-human lifeform is to gaze admiringly on it from a great distance. I think it’s probably true that cats tamed humans as much as the other way round (having lived with a cat family who were rescued from an alley when the biggest, boldest kitten started training a child to bring food to the family). Observations of bison or even Brahma cattle do not suggest to me that taming humans was their idea…but observation of Jersey and Holstein and even Brahma cattle suggests that they benefit from having been domesticated.

(3) Much of prehistoric North America  did belong, basically, to bison, and their few predators, including the boldest and toughest young men in several groups of humans, who kept them from destroying their grassland habitat by tearing up the grass and wallowing in the mud. Bison are wild cattle; they can crossbreed with domestic cows. Cattle and cattlemen are part of the balance of nature on this continent. The “cowboy” culture appeals to us because it fits into our ecology...provided that men can curb their greed and herd cattle in sustainable ways. I do agree with the PETA types that some developments in Modern Agriculture make one wonder how many men can do that.

(4) Cows, left to themselves, are both pregnant and nursing at least one calf, more if possible, for most of their lives. Humans don’t impose that lifestyle on them, although humans benefit from it. They don’t have noticeable postmenopausal lives. They enjoy being milked; they complain loudly if they have to walk around with full udders, mostly because full udders are heavy and uncomfortable, also because full udders are vulnerable to painful, sometimes fatal infections. They’re not very demonstrative of affection (which is probably fortunate) but they do seem to bond with people who milk them, following such people around a pasture, nonverbally saying “Any time!”

(5) So, on Old MacDonald’s family farm where Old Mac and his family went out to the pasture to milk each cow every twelve hours, where the cows roamed around eating grass and chewing their cud in the shade all day, the cows’ ecological footprint was small (they produced only manageable amounts of methane and polluted only manageable amounts of soil and water). The whole scheme was sustainable…until MacDonald Junior went off to agricultural college and picked up ideas about maximizing production by slaughtering calves early, keeping cows indoors all the time and confusing their hormones with artificial light, feeding them unnatural mixes that contained more animal protein and continual doses of antibiotics, and so on. The latest development was milk-robots that allow factory farmers to avoid paying laborers even for attaching cows to milking machines every twelve hours.

(6) And the news item that prompted this villanelle was…When milk-robots were installed on dairy farms, the cows quickly learned to use them—and not only twice a day, either. Since milk-robots don’t have other things to do and don’t have to lug half-filled buckets about, cows can use them several times a day, and they do.

Do we, in the United States, currently have more cattle than we really need, producing more milk than the entire world can use, with undesirable side effects like surplus cheese being pressed upon poor people in lieu of things that might be better for them, and like the way cooks and restaurant owners are systematically trained to ruin food by dumping cheese or cream into it? Absolutely. Do we have a dairy industry trying to tell people that humans’ nutrient needs are exactly like rats’ and that we can’t be healthy without choking down a gallon of dairy products a day, even now that doctors know that humans’ nutrient needs are different from rats’ and that the majority of human adults are losing more than they gain, nutritionally, by ingesting too many dairy products? Indisputably. (Butter, cream, ice cream, and cheese may taste good to many people—ice cream tastes good even to me—but our bodies may use up more calcium digesting all that saturated fat than they gain.) Do all these cows put out a lot of methane that could at least be trapped and used as fuel? Certainly—people are currently working on harvesting that methane! Do they take up a lot of grassland that might be used to house more humans? Yes, though there’s some doubt that housing more humans would be an improvement. Would we be healthier if all cooks were trained to send dairy products to the table on the side of food rather than dumping them all over the food? No reasonable doubt about that.

Does that mean that all use of milk products, or of beef or of leather, is bad? I don’t think so. I think there must be some reason why all the major religions on Earth teach that a proper, moderate, sustainable “exploitation” of cattle’s natural behavior and survival needs is good.

Left to themselves, bovines do not form pair bonds between one male and one female, but form herds consisting of one adult male, several females, and calves. Male and female bovines are born in approximately equal numbers. Most of these males don’t reproduce, don’t fit into herds, and don’t live long. Bulls fight and may kill each other; or, in nature, a pacifist “Ferdinand” bull would just wander about alone until some predator killed him. So, cattle naturally produce a surplus of males, whose ecological position is food. When humans neuter them so that they’re not motivated to kill each other, and turn them out in fenced pastures, male cattle can live longer and healthier lives than most of them could hope for without human help. Again, there’s some question about whether we need as many cattle as we currently have, but it’s hard to support the argument that raising male cattle for use as beef, and leather and gelatin, is altogether bad.

I believe the present state of our dairy industry is sick with greed—but that it’s possible for dairy farming to be healthy, sustainable, and a good thing for cows as well as humans. I don’t believe that that argument can fit into a villanelle. Only the image of the PETA activists screaming that we should stop milking cows, and the cows bellowing back that we should milk them more often than we tend to consider necessary, seemed to fit into a villanelle.

Can we do an Amazon link? Meh. This wretched laptop, the Piece of Garbage or POG, "updated" itself earlier this week and Amazon now says it can't do links any more. Anyway this post might deserve a serious study of factory farming, but we already linked to Old MacDonald's Factory Farm, back in 2015 I believe, and this post refers to a classic picture book called Chicken Ten Thousand. It's become rare, with copies starting about $40. In real life, middle-aged women used to tell GBP or me, "I'll never forget a book I read as a child, about a chicken who escaped from a factory farm. I don't remember the author or title but I remember that book." I remember the author and title. This is the book. Factory farms that produce meat raise chickens specially bred to be so stupid and so lazy that they seem equally boring with or without their heads cut off, nowadays, extremely unlikely to escape and become anybody's pets. But some battery hens kept to produce eggs are capable of becoming pets, if rescued.

Book Review: The Westing Game

Title: The Westing Game

Author: Ellen Raskin

Date: 1978

Publisher: Scholastic

ISBN: 0-439-41281-1

Length: 216 pages

Quote: “I, Samuel W. Westing, hereby swear that I did not die by natural causes. My life was taken from me—by one of you!”

Samuel W. Westing of Westing Paper Products was about as eccentric as a millionnaire could be, but how could he possibly have known that, and written it into his will? If you keep thinking about that question, you may solve this wacky mystery before any of the sixteen heirs does.

When Westing addresses the sixteen heirs as “my nieces and nephews” he is, of course, stretching the meaning of the phrase, as I use “The Nephews” to include both nephews and nieces, related both by blood and by friendship. The heirs include families with mother, father, and children. But all the residents of Westing Towers were personally invited to move in by Westing, and the interesting part of the story is finding out how all these ethnically diverse, distinctly characterized people are related to him, and thus to one another—though one of them’s being invited was a mistake. If it makes for an unlikely story in the context of a murder mystery, it is an interesting reflection on an aspect of urban life that’s not changed since 1978. Humans are meant to live in extended families; breaking out of our original extended families and isolating ourselves in the cities merely makes the social networks that replace our original families more surprising.

Westing’s will directs his lawyer to lead the sixteen heirs through an elaborate puzzle-solving game. “What they don’t have is more important than what they have”—each character starts with an odd selection of words that, when put together, form a song lyric. Readers will wonder how it was possible for anyone to plan so presciently a game that would be played after his death. That’s another clue.

After writing a pile of picture books Ellen Raskin wrote four mystery novels for sophisticated middle school to young adult readers. My loyalty will forever be to The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon I Mean Noel, the one I read while it was a brand-new book, in grade three. I think The Westing Game was a lesser work produced near the end of the author’s life, but publishers thought the four books were good enough to bring out as a matched set of hardcover volumes with wonderfully wacky illustrations. Possibly the reason why I was less keen on the other three had something to do with my finding the set when I was fifteen, really a bit old for them.

What Raskin did right was give child readers a mixed and balanced set of girl protagonists, no two alike, not an idealized self-two-years-older and not a teen romance in the lot. In the other books Caroline Carillon was fat, gave up, and relied on her adopted children to solve her mystery; Mona Figg was whiny; Dickory Dock was smart and talented, but not nearly as much so as she thought. Turtle Wexler, in this book, is a twelve-year-old shin-kicking brat. Each book gave some hope that each character’s adventures had improved her, by the end.

If you like one of Raskin’s mysteries you’ll probably like all four, and though this one’s not my favorite it might well be yours.

And here’s a tip for mothers wondering whether they want to buy murder mysteries for middle school readers: I, the writer known as Priscilla King, hereby kill the photographer known as Gena Greene. I do that by admitting that Gena Greene, Lady Greensleeves, was the name of a different business I had before Priscilla King became more profitable. For a long time they were two different business entities; since Gena Greene’s 35mm camera was made obsolete and I never got a good digital camera, the only frugal way to bring that business into the Internet Age has been, well, to admit that Gena Greene is me with a different work hat on. That’s not the solution to The Westing Game but it’s a clue to one way it’s possible to write murder mysteries that aren’t too heavy for middle school readers.

Probably the Last Petfinder Post: Very Small Dogs

I started to type "Chihuahuas." Chihuahuas are pretty common in the United States but they still might be considered a fancy breed. So this post is about adoptable dogs who have reached their adult weight, and it's less than ten pounds.

I've tended, as an adult, to like big dogs who look useful. That's a visual prejudice that does not necessarily pass a reality test. Small dogs can certainly raise the alarm if their home is invaded; they're better at keeping a low enough profile that intruders don't see them until they raise the "barknado"; and they can fight if they think they need to. Small dogs are easier to feed, clean up after, keep in a small apartment, and cuddle. Chihuahuas, having been bred in a warm climate for short, thin, low-shedding coats, are known for nonverbally claiming they're cold when they're not being cuddled. (They do chill easily, but they also learn to turn on their shivers when they catch the eye of someone they know is likely to pick them up.) They need relatively little walking, because just bouncing around their home and yard gives them a good deal of exercise. And they can at least scare rats and mice. Small dogs can be very useful to those who don't care about stereotypes. 

Small dogs tend to live much longer than big dogs, too. Big dogs are "old" after five years; small dogs can live more than fifteen years if they're lucky. If you hate having a longer lifespan than any of your pets ever will, a small dog is probably preferable to a big one. 

There are a lot of small dogs in the shelters. Whether or not you insist on a classic Chihuahua look, you're likely to find a cat-size dog in any city in the Eastern States. 

And Petfinder, unfortunately, is not cooperating as well this year as it did last year. Somebody's obviously been tweaking the site to give visitors a hard sell, rather than making life easier for writers. Even as I typed "10101" into the appropriate space the site was programmed to remember that this laptop was last used to search for a dog in Kentucky. Actually this week I'm not going to search in Kentucky; these posts search for animals near New York, Washington, Atlanta, and one or two other places that are not the same every week. 

I recommend animal lovers do this: Post and tweet everywhere you go online, during the next week, "If @Petfinder is about the animals, the site should be 100% cookie-free." 

1. Zipcode 10101: Prissy from New Jersey 

Prissy is a mature dog, eight years old, and set in her ways, according to the shelter. She doesn't like sharing her human with children or other animals. For a Chihuahua she's apparently not very cuddly, either; she wants to be near her human, but not to be held, as much of the time as possible. The shelter staff are really trying to recommend this dog to a retired and/or disabled person, and say they won't let anyone under the age of 25 have her. 

That they want to know that you have a Real Fence, as well, does make some sense apart from the control-freaking about which member of the family adopts this dog. She weighs only five pounds. Predators could eat her. Drivers wouldn't see her in traffic. Small dogs need some protection in a world where everyone else, including some chickens, is bigger than they are. 

To meet Prissy, click https://www.petfinder.com/dog/prissy-50559474/nj/wayne/hounds-in-pounds-inc-ga864/ .

But really...before the next dog picture, youall need to know that something about Microsoft's latest "update"-that-nobody-wanted-or-needed and Petfinder's data-sale service is really making it impossible for a person of merely normal determination to use the site. "Waiting for" this, waiting for that, waiting for a dozen irrelevant sites before Petfinder navigates between pages: Google, Apis, Cloudfront, Facebook, Captcha, etc. etc. ad nauseam. No normal person is ever going to sit through this. It took more than half an hour to open the article about Prissy and it's taking more than half an hour to open the page of D.C. dog pictures, and unless I receive a hand-typed e-mail from Petfinder assuring me that drastic changes have been made, this is going to be the Last Petfinder Post. I blame the Humane Pet Genocide Society. I think those people really hate it when a shelter animal escapes the gas chamber.

2. Zipcode 20202: Tiny Tim from D.C. 

He's nine years old but his foster humans feel that, in his case, even for this nine-pound dog that's pretty old. They mean he has arthritis. Nevertheless, he has that defensive attitude some small dogs get. They seem to feel that if they don't challenge other dogs to fight, especially bigger dogs, they'll get no respect at all. Tiny Tim is recommended as fine with cats, shy but polite with adult humans, but apt to fight with other dogs and too nervous to be around children. 

Expect a few reruns of: 

"Is that a Chihuahua? Must be! Those ears!"

"He's pretty big for a Chihuahua." 

"Actually he's a Miniature Pinscher...and Chihuahua crossbreed." 

Well, that's what the shelter staff think, anyway, going on what they know about Miniature Pinschers in the area. He has no pedigree. 

Tiny Tim's adoption fee is on the large side for a small dog, but it does cover all the standard veterinary care, beyond which he's not expected to need anything else but routine maintenance for a few more years. If you think this adorable face is worth $200, click: https://www.petfinder.com/dog/tiny-tim-50476440/dc/washington/k-9-lifesavers-dc19/

3. Zipcode 30303: Elvis and Pru from Dunwoody

Admittedly, Rat Terriers are not everyone's idea of the cutest dogs, but these two formerly feral litter mates have a bond with each other that ought to count for something. (Also, there was a cuter picture of a tiny terrier, but his adoption fee covered microchips instead of complete veterinary care. Also, there was a picture of a classic Chihuahua that seemed to be nonverbally saying "You know I'm cuter than those two" as I clicked past him, but it's taken me three hours to get this far through the sludge that Petfinder has become and the littermates' picture is still not showing and I'm not going to click on another Petfinder page ever again until that site can guarantee visitors ZERO WAIT TIME.) 

There was a sweet little story about these pups, too...but after more than three hours creating this post I'm too tired, too discouraged, and too unhappy to care. What's been an enjoyable process has turned without warning into something that nobody in their right mind is ever going to endure twice. I'm very sorry about this. To meet Elvis and Pru, click: https://www.petfinder.com/dog/elvis-must-be-adopted-with-pru-50327192/ga/dunwoody/rescue-me-ga-inc-ga535/ .

There is no bonus link. Unless our pressure gets Petfinder.com radically reformed, there will never be another Petfinder link here.

Book Review: The Sign of the Beaver

Title: The Sign of the Beaver

(Amazon links and photos will return, whenever the POG is sorted out, which may take a professional...)

Author: Elizabeth George Speare

Date: 1983

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin / Dell

ISBN: 0-440-47900-2

Length: 135 pages

Quote: “It was a good life, with only a few small annoyances…One of these was the thought of Indians. Not that he feared them.”

In the 1760s, twelve-year-old Matt and his family move to Maine. When the parents “have to” travel again, they leave Matt in charge of their little homestead. North America is still so unsettled that Matt spends his time shooing crows off the corn patch, snaring rabbits, and stuffing dry moss in his moccasins for warmth. He worries a little bit about Penobscot raiders and hopes a nice English neighbor family will be able to help him if he needs any adult help, at the beginning of the book. Then an English neighbor steals his gun and a kind Penobscot family show him some skills that help him survive.

This is an even nicer version of the European-immigrants-learn-Native-American-survival-skills story that Lois Lenski made out of the Molly Jemison story in Indian Captive. Matt is nobody’s slave. The Penobscot family who adopt him are so polite they even pretend that Matt’s going to teach their boy, Attean, to read English, although that project doesn’t go far and may be meant just to save Matt’s pride. When his parents stay away longer than anyone expected, Matt is offered the choice whether to move to Canada with his Penobscot family or stay in Maine and wait for his own family. Speare convinces us that all the adults involved think better of Matt for the decision he makes.

Twelve-year-olds don’t usually have much to tell us about their feelings during what are obviously emotional crises. They feel emotions, but not the same emotions adults do, nor do they have words to talk about them. In the best cases they stay busy. In this book Matt stays busy. We’re not told much about his emotions; we’re told a lot about how he cooks, hunts, fishes, mends his clothes, and expresses his longing for his mother by making new kitchenware as a gift for her.

Because European immigrants really did rely on survival skills they learned from Native Americans, it’s possible to suspend disbelief in this story while reading it. Only at the end did I find the predominant thought in my mind being, “They’re all utterly generic characters.” And maybe that’s as it should be. Speare didn’t need to give her five English and five Penobscot characters individual personalities. This is a teaching story, not a retelling of a factual story, so it may be proper that most of the characters don’t even have full names. Demographic descriptions are enough. Any English colonial boy might have shooed crows and snared rabbits like Matt. Any Penobscot grandmother might have told her family not to bring a White boy home, if they insisted on befriending one, and then decided there might be hope for a White boy who was thoughtful enough to rescue her grandson’s dog from a trap. These particular families weren’t real and we know nothing about the real individuals whose stories were in some ways similar to this story.

One thing I would have left out of this book is Matt’s criticism of the old Puritan primers that drew on the church catechism, teaching the alphabet with “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all. Heaven to find, the Bible mind,” and so on. I don’t believe a real child of the 1760s would have dared to dismiss those primers or ideas with contempt, or even admit he didn’t understand them, although very likely he didn’t. In the 1760s children were taught the answers to the questions in the catechism. They learned them by rote; if they couldn’t repeat the right answers from memory they were scolded or spanked. If they didn’t understand the answers or the questions, they either kept quiet about it, or confessed their “unregenerate” condition to the church for prayer. Matt might have been clever enough to anticipate that “In Adam’s fall” wouldn’t mean anything to Attean, and he probably would have thought a novel like Robinson Crusoe was more fun, but at this period of history religious indoctrination was inescapable. A mature man might have admitted to a skeptical thought, if he was looking for trouble. I’d like to see evidence that a twelve-year-old ever did.

Speare’s young-adult story, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, was more deftly spun around the history of a colony that has more history, and won awards. The Sign of the Beaver seems to have taken less thought and research, but of Speare’s other fiction this is the book that everyone agrees deserves to be reprinted along with The Witch of Blackbird Pond.

Book Review: The Well

Title: The Well

Author: Mildred D. Taylor

Date: 1995

Publisher: Scholastic

ISBN: 0-439-05652-7

Length: 92 pages

Quote: “It is David’s story, but…it becomes Cassie’s and her brothers’ too.”

In other words, it’s part of the Logan family saga. The fictional Logan family, based on Mildred Taylor’s own family, are Black landowners in segregated Mississippi. They constantly confront racism, yet they always know they’re better off than some people because they have their land and their unity as a family.

David Logan is the father of Cassie and Stacey and their little brothers. Though it was the sixth volume published in the saga, it takes place before Cassie and Stacey are born, while David is a middle school boy.

Because the Logan family saga is child-focussed, publishers and teachers have made what I consider the mistake of marketing it to children. Children can read Taylor’s words; children can certainly relate to the Simms and Logan children’s family feud. The trouble is that children don’t see how that lively, funny, childish feuding perpetuates the nastier grown-up hate that maintains the hostile atmosphere and carries it down to future generations. Most children’s stories are written by adults, and many are more about the adult characters than they are about the children and would be better read by other adults. The Logan family saga fit that description more than average. A story about how children learn all about stocks and bonds, and sort out those of Great-Grandpa’s certificates that turn out to be worth just the amount of money their parents need, may bore child readers; a story about how children act out their parents’ mutual resentments can lead child readers astray.

Kids love it when Cassie and Stacey enhance that puddle the hateful bus driver likes to speed through just to splash them. They love it when Cassie beats up Lillian Jean Simms. They love it when Hammer Logan knocks Charlie Simms down, too, as any good brother would. Serves those bullies right! Yessss! Kids relate to the frustration David and Hammer feel when Charlie finds a way to get revenge, and relish the punishment Charlie’s father gives him…but in the end everybody loses the benefit of the well. Kids do not necessarily understand that Charlie’s frustrated ego is still seeking revenge when the grown-up Charlie Simms has opportunities to show hate to the Logan children and their little friends; that David is still paying for Hammer’s having defended him when Charlie pushes Cassie off the sidewalk. From a ten-year-old’s viewpoint the lesson The Well teaches is that Charlie is a jerk, and needs to be knocked down harder and more often.

For adults the Logan family stories are excellent—well written, fact-based stories that explain why so many Black Americans are so unfriendly to so many of the White Americans who now long to have Black friends, and also deserve to outlive our generation as true stories about why hostility and revenge never make things better.

For children—I am afraid—the Logan family saga are just one more of the punches children feel Charlie Simms needs, one more act of revenge, one more brick in the wall. Neither David nor Cassie ever meets one of the White adults who actually want to make things better, at this period, like the ones who sent Joycelyn Elders to medical school. That happened; it’s history. But in these books it’s not balanced with any awareness on the Logans’ part that they happen to have particularly bad neighbors. The Logans all grow up feeling, as Stacey puts it in Let the Circle Be Unbroken, you “can’t love nobody White, and don’t ever try.” So the history is one-sided, and though White children can and do empathize with the Logan children’s instincts (and ability) to hit back, they take away from this kind of one-sided history the message that the fight is still going on. I remember the bus story in Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry as a positive inspiration to a peaceful protest my schoolmates and I were doing about our own bus system; child readers do not have to be Black to identify with the Logan children. But it wouldn’t surprise me if some child readers took the Logan stories as a positive inspiration to go out and beat up a schoolmate in the other color category.

So I would advise parents and teachers: Do not buy the Logan stories for your children, even though some of them look like picture books to read aloud to preschoolers. Do not make these stories required reading at school. Do read these stories, yourselves, and when the children want to read them, talk about them with the children. Discuss how the personal hostilities just keep going on and going on. Discuss ways people have actually made things better, instead of perpetuating the feuds. Read the true stories. White Americans need to read Black American history; if you are White, let the Logan family saga provoke you to read the facts.

Remembering Rush Limbaugh

(All these words about a radio host whose show I rarely heard, and just a short, silly poem about a dear friend? Published words measure what people know to be public information, not what they feel.)

People who worked during the daytime were not Rush Limbaugh's audience. That was and still is what my same-age friends needed to keep in mind. The only same-age acquaintance I had who was a Limbaugh fan had become a fan in the hospital. The radio show addressed people in hospitals, and people with mononucleosis, and long-distance truck drivers whose minds were mainly on the road but who found that Limbaugh's voice kept them awake. 

"He belabors every point! He'll say something that makes sense and then spend half an hour or an hour going over it. He preaches! And where does he get those people that call in, anyway?" 

But it worked for my father, during the year he was adjusting to being "legally blind," still able to see blurry shapes around him but unable to read. 

"Well, of course he can't help having cataracts," Mother said. We were driving back from Berea. "I've tried to be patient but your father's in the house, mostly in the kitchen," which was where radio reception was best, "listening to the radio, constantly. Country music and news and sports and there's this person called Rush Limbaugh. Have you heard of him? A retired football player who just talks about politics for three hours a day! It's supposed to be funny, and sometimes it is--but three hours!" 

Dad scheduled cataract surgery and came out worse than he'd been before. He decided it would be safer for him to live in a bare, dim little flat in the retirement project in town. The flat had three main rooms, all facing the street: patient's bedroom, nurse's room, and sitting room, separated by a corridor from kitchen, storage room, and bathroom. I was appointed Dad's nurse because I had more at-home time than my mother or sister had. I had three or four occasional jobs, baby-sitting, washing cars, renovating houses, recording a retrospective album, and an unpaid job of reading and studying as much as possible to prepare for any chance I might get to finish my B.S. I spent a lot of time in the nurse's room; on one side or the other I could hear the Limbaugh Show, most afternoons. 

I actually liked the song parodies. New recordings, with modern technology, often sounded better than the original hit records, whether I had them or not. I regretted that Limbaugh seldom broadcast a song parody twice. Dad caught a few of them on tape. The Clintons were in the White House, good for endless ridicule and parodies. "And a tax cut for you and for me!" "All your money, I will tax from you." "All of Hillary's schemes come crashing down." Hillary Clinton's first use of brain damage as a defense spawned "I don't remember! My brain's been in a blender!" Several songs posted at this web site were inspired by the Limbaugh Versions of classic rock songs. I would have loved for someone to have recorded them for the Limbaugh Show, or the Glenn Beck show. 

Dad and I hadn't been close for about fifteen years--since I started to look like Mother. It was that "Grooveyard of Forgotten Favorites" on the Limbaugh Show that got us sharing laughs and talking again.

The Limbaugh Show was contributing words and phrases to the language, too. "Dittos," "Megadittos," and "Dittoheads." "Rush Rooms" was the new name for the private-party rooms in trendy restaurants, because so many yuppies liked to catch the first few minutes of the Limbaugh Show on lunch break. "Uglo-Americans" was one of the more complex running jokes: Rush Limbaugh knew he wasn't handsome, and when he said the less beautiful were an oppressed ethnic group, that was something a lot of us could relate to. "Talent on loan from God" was another one; people thought it sounded boastful, but they were meant to hear it as a reminder of what "talent" means and that we're all meant to be using ours. Other vainglorious lines from the show, "With half my brain tied behind my back, just to make it even," and "The man millions of women hope their daughters will marry," were just jokes. "The folks in Rio Linda" were people who were even further behind than the audience for daytime radio. Limbaugh "loved the women's movement--especially when I am walking behind it," often sneered at "feminazis" (I prefer "feminitwits" for the sort of embarrassments he meant), but he made Mona Charen famous. He made fun of "victim group" thinking, too, but he actively celebrated the conservative writers who belonged to ethnic minority groups. 

While I was discovering Shelby Steele in The Best American Essays and agreeing that he's one of our best nonfiction writers, Dad was the older person who greeted me on the way in from work with "Have you ever heard of a writer called Thomas Sowell, S O W E L L? He was on the Limbaugh Show today. I think they told Limbaugh to have a Black person on there, because this Dr. Sowell is not a radio person. But he had some good things to say." At the time Thomas Sowell's books weren't in libraries everywhere. The Limbaugh Show created the demand and brought them in. 

I'm not sure how many other ethnic-minority writers Limbaugh introduced to other people. I don't make much effort to remember such things, but I'm fairly sure he was the first to introduce me to the work of Dinesh d'Souza, Michelle Malkin, and Allen West--all of whom have been quoted and linked to more often, at this web site, than Limbaugh himself has, for the following reason: they put more of their work on the Internet free of charge.

A lot of Democrats seem to want to believe that Republicans are racists. I suppose they can talk about their relatives and I'll talk about mine...I don't know any Republicans who hate any other ethnic group, as such. I know some Republicans whose post-traumatic stress flares when they see Asian faces or smell Asian food, but they consciously and conscientiously do not hate Asian or even Vietnamese people. Generally, my experience is that the older generation of Republicans want to have friends who look and sound different from them, but haven't met many of them and have been shy and awkward when they did meet one. Republicans my age and younger mostly do have close friends who look and sound different from us. So they're (and I'm) like, yes, if people are going to feel "hurt" by not getting more handouts at other people's expense, by all means hurt their feelings--but leave our friends and relatives' ethnic identities out of it, thank you just the same! 

(Tangent alert: "Reparations for slavery" is one of the easiest left-wing talking points for R's to ridicule, and it is indeed ridiculous, on the scale they talk about it. But I did once discuss it with a Republican I knew well--my mother, actually. "Though most people have no idea what their ancestors were doing in 1860, most White people's ancestors were not slave owners and quite a few Black people's ancestors were not slaves, our very special family has kept track of these things. We have the ancestor who blew out his fortune by freeing 300 slaves in one day, and he gave those ex-slaves jobs in his business and encouraged some of them to use the business name as their family name. Wouldn't it be fun, and cool, and wouldn't it just show those Jeffersons, if we set up a Family Foundation to raise money for scholarships for our Black and Lumbee namesakes?" Mother thought about it; I could tell she liked the idea of showing up the Jeffersons, and then she said, "But none of the White ones have that kind of money. The business never recovered." Now I'm not a Republican, but Mother was, and that's the way Republicans feel about reparations for those who can prove exactly where their ancestors were enslaved. About large groups? Bad joke.)

Older people seemed to like the Limbaugh Show more than my own generation. "He is a nut," said the real estate investor I was helping renovate houses, fondly. It was at one of her houses that I watched one of the great moments of layered wit in the TV version of the Limbaugh Show. Democrats were still cackling about the way Dan Quayle had read a misprinted cue card on a game show and insisted that "potatoe" was the correct spelling. Limbaugh set up a whole half-hour show around a simple math mistake a Democrat had recently made--and right in the middle of that show Limbaugh made a simple math mistake. 

"Did he just say what I thought I heard?"

"Did he? But that wouldn't be right..."

He had said what I had heard. I got the message. Intelligent people make stupid mistakes when they're talking fast in public. Lighten up! It was one of those times that made it clear that Limbaugh was several I.Q. points ahead of his show. He did little things like that for those of the audience who were alert enough to appreciate them.

Cognitive dissonance set in, for me, when a co-worker who wasn't much older than I was said admiringly that Limbaugh "was a gentleman." He certainly didn't talk the way older Virginia gentlemen, like Dad, used to talk. Even Virginians my age didn't talk like that; we weren't old enough, I suppose. Yet there were episodes of compassion and forbearance on the Limbaugh Show. Mocking other entertainers was Limbaugh's job, and once he kept his audience laughing for almost an hour with an elaborately exaggerated apology to a snowflaky sort of caller, but he was kind to and about people who just didn't belong on radio. 

Perhaps an all-time high point--he remembered it as one--was "Dan's Bake Sale." It started with a joke when a caller tried to tell Limbaugh he couldn't afford to subscribe to the Limbaugh Letter, and Limbaugh advised him to take a fiscally conservative approach to his problem. "Have a bake sale!" People picked up the idea and ran with it. Dan's Bake Sale grew into a sort of Republican-fest where people bought and sold all sorts of things. Yuppies, Limbaugh reported, came to the show to advertise themselves--"Will work for $50K," fifty thousand a year. "Dan" made a lot more money than he needed to subscribe to the Limbaugh Letter. Limbaugh made money, too, and so did several people in his audience. For weeks the Bake Sale was the best and funniest thing on radio.

The show Jim Traficant took over was the episode that convinced me that Limbaugh had a kind of genius. Congressman Traficant of Ohio was a Democrat. That hadn't prevented him from making some statements that were approvingly quoted on the George Peters FacTapes, nor did it necessarily have anything to do with the trouble he eventually got into for some business dealings in Ohio. I suspected it was of him that P.J. O'Rourke had written that, when he visited his U.S. Representative, of the hundreds of letters his Congressman got none was appreciative. So here was a political opponent on his way down, calling in to the Limbaugh Show, making himself a big fat target. 

And Traficant was terrible on radio. He choked, he fumbled, he dithered. Limbaugh didn't need to try to make him sound like an idiot. Some people, when put behind a microphone, just naturally do sound like idiots. The difficulty, if you are doing a radio show with them, is finding smooth ways to shut them up before they sound worse than they already do. If they're your opponents and they're on the way down, do you even try?

Limbaugh didn't even try to shut the older man up. He helped him out. Repeatedly. 

Anybody can make fun of a victim of mike fright, and anybody who has any business even in the school radio lab can ease one off the air, but keeping one on the show and getting intelligent statements out of him takes genius. 

Limbaugh could ad-lib for hours, even when he was in pain. He had the basic show business gift of being able to make a mistake into a joke. Only for one year did I hear the Limbaugh Show with any kind of regularity, and during that year I often turned away from it--"Who wants to listen to that crowd kick that around for another hour?"--but I did learn to respect Limbaugh's talents. 

I had agreed to live in the nurse's room in Dad's flat for one year and not a day more. After that my mother or sister could have the room if they liked. Toward the end of the year Dad said, "I've learned my way around this place. I'd rather be alone at night, in case I want to get up and play back something on a tape or something. I want you to go home and your mother and sister to stay where they are." So we did. I was getting more work hours, anyway, and had fewer occasions to hear the Limbaugh Show--except when people for whom I worked were listening to it. Quite often they were. And my parents paid off my college loans, in exchange for a year's work caring for a difficult patient. Dad didn't mean to be a difficult patient but he was.

Dad eventually lost patience with the Limbaugh Show. "They don't let him talk about anything of any consequence," like the Waco disaster, because attention to the disaster had supposedly inflamed Timothy McVeigh. The George Peters FacTapes investigated stories like that one, "for our Select Audience, for whom we know this information will be dangerous only to some people's continued employment." The FacTapes were more fun but still, from time to time, Dad continued to listen to the Limbaugh Show and try to tape-record any particularly good song parodies for me.

I think the Limbaugh Show was very good for Dad and for the other blind and disabled people who got involved in the FacTapes. The existence of cassette tape technology had been there to give them the idea that there was still something useful they could do. The success of the Limbaugh Show, the proof that people were interested in intelligent debates on serious topics, led directly to the FacTapes. The audience were actually more interested in information about medical news and charitable organizations than they were in politics; still, the Limbaugh Show convinced them that it was useful for blind and disabled people to collect and report information. 

The show went on. It continued to spawn neologisms. Eventually there were "Rush Babies." What was that? Young adults who'd grown up hearing the Limbaugh Show as babies. They made people my age feel old. But the way they rallied around when people called for censorship of the Limbaugh Show, even the young women who changed the phrase to "Rush Babes," made us feel better about becoming old. 

Limbaugh wasn't perfect. No one is. He became addicted to prescription painkillers, opening the national dialogue about this social problem. He taunted Michael J. Fox about Fox's disabling disease, causing some to feel that Limbaugh's own disease was conscience-activated "karma." 

There was that ambiguous "joke" about Chelsea Clinton. 

The original joke was, "Welcome to Washington. If you want a real friend, buy a dog."

George H.W. Bush's variation was, "I don't need a dog; I have Barbara." Well--I thought she was a fine-looking grandmother; I dressed like her, to some extent, and still do.  But grandmothers aren't what a typical college boy wants to date, so "dog" was ambiguous.

And then Limbaugh said, "Bill Clinton doesn't need a dog; he has Chelsea." Reactions broke down pretty precisely by birth date. People I knew who were born before 1950 thought that obviously the message was "Hillary is not a true, loyal friend," and the joke was funny. People who were born after 1950 thought that obviously the message was "Chelsea is not attractive," and of course she was too young to be someone a college boy wanted to date; she looked like a child because she was a child, and making fun of that was just plain mean. 

Who knows what Limbaugh meant with that crack, except that when you ad-lib for three hours a day or more you're likely to come up with a stupid attempt at a joke now and then. Most of us would probably have come up with more clinkers, and clunkier ones. Anyway he apologized, and, to be fair, he was born at the cut-off point.

Then there was the flap about Sandra Fluke. I seriously think that it's appropriate for men to leave it for women to chastise the women who embarrass us, as she did. Men calling a woman stupid can sound like sexist bigots. In the case of Fluke, who wanted tax-funded birth control pills, there was no shortage of women to call Fluke stupid. She was at a university in Washington. If you don't learn how to enjoy a date with no fear of pregnancy while at university in Washington, you are beyond hope.

And the cigars...I wonder whether Limbaugh used the cigars just to give people something to make stale jokes about. Life's too short to try to think of a cigar joke that's not stale.

There were also aspects of Limbaugh's life and work that weren't featured on his show. One that comes to mind is the classic joke, "God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve." I don't think Limbaugh was the first to say it but I'm sure he was the first to have it printed with his name on a best-selling T-shirt. If opposing things the homosexual lobby are screaming for is "antigay," then probably most conservatives are "antigay." This web site, which has actively promoted the work of people we know to be homosexual, also maintains that the homosexual lobby's decision to scream for same-sex marriage as opposed to an end to discrimination against the unmarried was "an own goal," was stupid, was tacky, and showed a howling lack of public spirit. As with opposing some of the things some of the ethnic minority groups have blathered about, it has nothing to do with hating people and everything to do with despising bad ideas. Meh, I don't know, maybe Limbaugh gave haters more occasions to call him antigay than I've done...well, I claimed lesbians as friends back when that was not trendy and took courage. I don't know whether Limbaugh ever had a "gay" friend but it was acknowledged, even by his enemies, that he gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to AIDS charities.

Some accuse Limbaugh of "polarizing" people too much. In 2000 many people said that candidates Bush and Gore both looked and sounded like a matched pair. The clamor to "radicalize" and "polarize" seemed to originate on the Left and affect primarily Democratic Party leaders, often setting them up against their followers. (Some surveys showed that, apart from voting for the handouts on which they depended, many D voters--possibly the majority--otherwise held views as "conservative" as the average R voter.) Limbaugh was a moderate and temperate conservative; he was also a solid, consistent one. If you see that as more harmfully "polarizing" than the way some D's want to work with the assumption that all R's and even I's must by definition be horrible people, well I say you need new glasses.

I think Limbaugh deserves to be remembered as a trailblazer who inspired, and opened doors for, thinkers from all sides. Michael Moore, James Carville, and Al Franken were among his imitators and competitors. I remember trying to decide which D's work came closest to Limbaugh's and thinking it was Moore. (My husband maintained that it was Carville. We used to debate that sort of thing for fun, with no emotional attachment to convincing each other, while driving at night.) Even when the Limbaugh Show focussed on football, or when other serious radio and TV talk shows focussed on medical news or car maintenance, Limbaugh was the first to bring serious content back to the commercial media. 

(Who can take his place? I'm not sure why bloggers have even bothered raising this question. He has a brother who's done some good work. I think Glenn Beck and Laura Ingraham come closest to Limbaugh's style. Some like Mark Levin, and younger, untested talents I don't recognize yet. Still, it's a silly question. There will never be another Rush Limbaugh.)

I think Limbaugh also deserves to be remembered as someone who passed "retirement age" and kept his career alive, for the last twenty years, in the face of intense pain. 

I think Limbaugh probably deserves to be remembered best for organizing the Bake Sale--the event that showed the world that Republicans can be warm, lovable, goofy, and public-spirited. I always knew that about the ones who are related to me. Much of the world remained to be convinced. Limbaugh did that.