Well First of All, Margaret

How The Debate Moderators Were So Awful

File:The Scolding Woman and the Cackling Hen MET DP825985.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

[So sorry I can’t read this out today! I’m in a zoom call, sob.]

I am very sad and sorry that I didn’t manage to climb on here yesterday to welcome all you new readers and generally scrabble along in the usual way. I started about seven drafts on various subjects and each time I was so interrupted that I couldn’t collect any of my thoughts to find out if they were interesting. Part of the trouble is that I’d spent too much time during the night scrolling through seemingly endless footage of hurricane devastation. Just when I was coming to the end of that I got swallowed up by the port workers strike and that horrible video of the union president explaining that he will soon be “crushing” America. Then Iran started bombing Israel and I just couldn’t pull myself out of a fog of doom. I know this earth is not our home—I get it—but some days it is such a sorry truth to contemplate. The continual cataclysmic reminders are hard to endure.

Anyway, the culmination of such a long and discouraging day was that my kids wanted to watch the debate, to my chagrin. The last debate, you might remember, was so awful, as was the one before that. Why should we have to submit to listening to people so unable to express themselves talk about what will be happening to us all in the years to come? Couldn’t we just not have these trials of our patience and good temper? Couldn’t the candidates submit written answers?

Anyway, if you watched it, you will know it was a lot better than expected. Mr. Vance can talk his way out of a paper bag, or, in this case, the poor behavior of the two female moderators who just couldn’t help themselves. They thought they were being clever, I imagine, but they were a lot more Florence Foster Jenkins than Kiri Te Kanawa, if you get my drift.

It has taken me a long time to understand the term “longhouse” in its current usage, no matter how many times it is explained to me or articles I read about it. But last night the whole concept clicked fully into place. According to the AI-generated Bing search,

Longhouse is a slang expression and a metaphorical concept popularized among the far-right and alt-right. It used to refer to a matriarchal society that is distinguished by suppressing non-conformity to established rules by canceling individuals rather than direct conflict and valuing safetfy (including emotional safety) over privacy and individualism, among other things.

I don’t know about far-right or alt-right. I am neither of those things and I’m running into the term all over the place. Here is an article about it in First Things which is hardly some fridge unhinged publication. Of course, I don’t expect Bing to know that. If I may be permitted to just layer on a lot of my own thoughts, especially taking the debate last night as an egregious example of how this works, longhousing is when a woman speaks condescendingly and disrespectfully to a man in order to control him, to put him in his place and then the same woman cries in agony when that same man responds in kind. It is to be a baby about the propensity of men to mansplain but then to turn around and demand to speak to the manager. Honestly, it’s a very feminine form of bullying, of taking advantage of the different rules that govern male and female relationships in order to domineer or get something by unfair means.