The D.N.A. of Babbittry
Musings on Boodle Aldermen & An Autonomous School Board — SATIRE
Recent test scores reveal that the Manchester School District is an abysmal failure. Reading comprehension of kindergarten through 8th grade is 22%.
“ TWENTY-TWO PERCENT!” The Old Sheepherder spat out. “That means more’n than t’ree-quarters of Manchester’s public school children can’t read at an average level of comprehension.
“And make sure you put me down as SheepHERDER,” he said. “None of that fancy-arsed ‘Shepherd’ shit for me, if you please.”
He claims that mathematics in the K-8 cohort is even worse: 15%. Eighty-five percent of kids shepherded by Manchester’s public school lids cannot comprehend mathematics with any competency.
“Dadburn it,” The Old Sheepherder said. ”This is the product what you stock your $500 million super high school wit’? The money’d be better spent on an abatoir.” The twinkle in the Sly Fox’s eye obviated any need for a wink to signal that he was engaging in hyperbole again: What he called, “The ol’ bully bull-bullshit.”
Sometimes I forget I am talking with a Republican, an unhappy admixture of Goldwater and Rockefeller GOPper, as if somehow the two rivals for the 1964 nod to be beaten up on by LBJ in the Electoral College had swapped genes and become a chimera…. Though those sometimes are few and far between, I must admit.
“These school charter questions. Just one more issue ignored by Manchester politicians, the leadin’ lights o’ the Queen City… ya know? The members of Manchester’s social and business Brahmin caste.
“All of ’em — each and every damn one — created from the D.N.A. of Babbitry and Small Town Boosterism!”
Being a genuinely old man, he scrunched up on one haunch and punctuated his sermon with a fart! Just like that.
It was gross, but politics is not for the faint of heart.
On Calvin Coolidge
“Now Calvin Coolidge, that was probably the last true Republican president,” The Old Sheepherder said. From Vermont stock. A tough taciturn Yankee that would brook no shit from cops, communists or trade unions.
“He knew the score.
“After all, the chief business of the American people is business.”
Now I know a little more about Red Lewis’s novel Babbitt than I do about Silent Cal Coolidge, whose sporting of an Indian war bonnett so embarrassed the young John F. Kennedy when he saw the picture in the old Boston Evening Transcript it made him forever swear off the wearing of hats.
“Coolidge was little understood as Americans dadburn it — they just don’t know the psychology of power! Cal’s son Junior croaked sometime when he was finishing up Harding’s term and it just took the mickey out of him.”
Babbit was published three years before President Coolidge’s famous quip “The business of America is business” was made before the American Society of Newspaper Editors. It was an exploration and expose of the hypocrisy and conformity of the middle class America, the America of businessman George Babbitt, in which the Dollar Bill was God Almighty.
The business of America is business. That’s the world of which we speak. A world where religion, morals, and do-goodism lead to the accumulation of wealth. And it is your wealth by which ye will be judge by. The American Creed.
Babbitt was one of the books that transformed Minnesota-born Sinclair Lewis into a Nobel laureate, the first American to be honored with literature’s most famous booby prize.
“Babbitry in the D.N.A. is the matrix upon which the politics of Boodle is brought to the Queen City,” The Old Sheepherder claims.
The Boodle
Besides being a student of municipal politics, The Old Sheepherder fancies himself a cinema buff.
Speaking of In the Buff:
In Carnal Knowledge (1971), Oscar-winning director Mike Nichols masterpiece of mid-century American sexula mores, Ann-Margret’s character Bobbie has a dialogue with Jonathan (Jack Nicholson) — who has bed her but not yet wed her — that evokes politics, and not just sexual politics.
The two are as stark naked as Eve and Adam before The Fall.
Bobbie : Most guys I know are pricks. I don’t know anymore what they want.
Jonathan : I’ll be happy to tell you. They want
[slaps Bobbie’s behind]
Jonathan : The Boodle. But they ain’t gonna get The Boodle.
Bobbie : Goddamn right.
Jonathan : Because this kid here has got The Boodle.
Bobbie : You’re pretty sure of yourself, aren’t you?
The Boodle meant graft in the time of Boss Tweed, and Thomas Nast — the greatest editorial cartoonist of them all — depicted “Boodle Aldermen.”
As the whiskey sours went down, the sheer bitchery of The Old Sheepherder goes up. Deep in his cups, we were on the cusp of one of his manifestoes:
“If the aldermen put this charter question on the municipal ballot, I believe it is evidence that Boodle Politics is alive and well and thriving in Manchester, New Hampshire.
“A large windfall for developers and contractors building unneeded and unnecessary new buildings in a failing school district will be the outcome of School Board autonomy, mark my words!
And lemme tell you, kid! If autonomy with taxing power is given to the School Board — then the Manchester Tax Payer, like Ann-Margret’s Bobbie in Carnal Knowledge, will end up getting fucked!”
