Bob Dylan is getting the Nobel Prize in Literature. This may be the only appropriate time for me to say something that’s been on my mind for half a century.
A water pump generally has one handle. Also a broken water pump doesn’t “don’t work.” It “doesn’t work.” So it should be “The pump doesn’t work because the vandals took the handle [singular].” I’m not saying Dylan doesn’t deserve the Nobel Prize, just pointing out what needed pointing out.
Likewise I won’t say here now that Trump shouldn’t be elected president. As we get closer to November, I may panic. With changing polls in the next three weeks, I might very possibly start to cry and beg for a blanky. But my hope is to keep the discussion purely on the level of factual nitpicking.
Before I begin, we need a language check-in. This is a family newspaper, so I can’t talk like a U.S. presidential candidate. So let’s agree to make some word substitution for the sake of some of my friends and their ideas of what their mothers should be reading.
So, Donald Trump says that because he is a star, he can get away with grabbing any woman between the legs. He can just saunter right up and grab her and what is she going to say? He’s a star.
That was laid out in a tape from 2005. But recently, Jeff Sessions, a U.S. senator, said that grabbing is not sexual assault. It is assault, it is assault of a sexual nature, it is sexual assault.
At least Trump had the sense in the second debate not to try to say that. His defense was that he only said he could do it, that “it was only words.” But here’s Jeff Sessions trying to help by telling us that it wouldn’t be sexual assault if he did it. Yikes.
We are reminded of the notion, also put forth by some politicians during the last presidential election cycle, that sex that results in pregnancy could not have been rape, because the woman’s body won’t let pregnancy happen as a result of unwelcome sex. Not so. But when you think back on it, given that history, are you surprised this conversation is happening now?
Now I want to talk about the people pushing #repealthe19th. This came up because statistician Nate Silver observed that among women, Trump is going down in flames. People noticed that the data shows in fact that if women didn’t have the vote, Trump would be far enough ahead in the polls he’d probably win. So they said, let’s repeal the 19th Amendment, which is the one that gave women the right to vote almost a century ago.
I have to point out a few little nitpicky factual problems with that idea. One, passing an amendment to repeal the 19th would take more than a month. So they all waited too long to use this method to get Donald elected.
Two, there seems to be an idea that, as only men voted for the 19th Amendment, therefore only men would get to vote on the amendment to repeal it. This is a flawed concept. A conception worthy, I must say, by virtue of its immense flawfulness, of a Sessions or a Pat Robertson or a Limbaugh.
No. Actually, as the 19th was passed and is law, the amendment to repeal it would have to be subject to women’s votes.
I am aware that there are some women who would vote for the repeal. In 1978–79 I happened to live in Switzerland when women’s suffrage was still barely controversial.
It had been granted in most of the country by 1972, but Cantons Appenzell Ausser-und-Inner-rhoden were still holding out and women didn’t get the vote there for another decade.
I had an odd conversation with a certain Frau Braun in my workplace, who said they were right to dig in their heels in the Appenzell Cantons, as women’s suffrage was a mistake. She shouldn’t have to read newspapers and know politics, she said. That’s the man’s job.
Nitpick Three. Frau Brauns are in short supply in this country.