Wednesday, December 11, 2019

Ohio leads USA in presidents, cruel abortion laws

 

     I swear, Ohio wasn’t broken when I left it. The Buckeye State was in fine shape in the late 1970s, a solid Midwestern place — high in the middle, round at both ends.
     Sure, people snickered at Cleveland. The Cuyahoga River really was so polluted it caught fire. Our mayor, Dennis Kucinich, really did resemble Howdy Doody. His predecessor, Ralph J. Perk, really did set his hair on fire, trying to cut a ribbon with an acetylene torch. An awkward, Nixonian man, Perk made Richard M. Daley seem graceful as Nijinsky.
     But we had industry: steel plants, car manufacturers. We had science. My father worked at the NASA Lewis, adjacent to Cleveland Hopkins Airport. I’d visit and wander the place, goggle-eyed. I remember those remote manipulators used to handle radioactive material — you put your fingers into tubes so you could operate large robotic arms, like on “The Simpsons.”
     We had culture. A world-class orchestra. An impressive art museum, particularly if you hadn’t yet been to The Art Institute. Even little Berea, my hometown, west of the city, had interesting stuff going on. The Berea Summer Theatre put on edgy productions like “R.U.R.,” the Karel Čapek play that introduced the word “robot” to the English language in 1921. Baldwin Wallace College brought in significant speakers, like Margaret Meade, the great anthropologist. I still have her autograph.
     Ohio people were salt-of-the earth types who drank Black Velvet whiskey neat and Genny Pounders — 16-ounce cans of Genesee Cream Ale, the local swill of preference. The state was home to eight presidents. True, those presidents were all guys like Benjamin Harrison, Rutherford B. Hayes and William Howard Taft — their brilliance not exactly shimmering off the pages of history — but that, too, seemed apt. We didn’t have to shine, we Ohioans. We were happy just to show up, punch the clock, survive another day.


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12 comments:

  1. "Indiana being the Mississippi of the North..." good one

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  2. Few educated people still believe the Genesis creation story. That any woman ever bought the myth is a testament to the power of indoctrination. In Moses' tale, Eve is only created after Adam and the beasts, an afterthought to God's plan. But that is not the greatest insult to women, nor is it her causing the expulsion from paradise. It is the manner of her creation. She issues from the anesthetized body of Adam, who suffers not in the process. The rest of mankind incubates in woman, at her discomfort and often against her will, then issuing at considerable pain and mortal peril to all of our Mothers. In the last century women finally wrested some control over their bodies only to have the Mike Pences of this world attempt to shove them back into servitude to their fictional faiths. Yes, all religions are fictions sprung from the imaginations of Man. Some are honest in their ignorance, others deliberately manipulative or evil. If there is One True God, omniscient and omnipotent, who wants us to know his plan for us, He would tell us. Unambiguosly.

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  3. Oh for God's sake, do those people think they can just make up facts about obstetrics and will them into existence? This is even more ridiculous than that transvaginal wanding nonsense that was just upheld by the Supreme Court.

    And I'm sorry, Unknown, but wringing your hands about the number of abortions is not what is needed right now. Not when the right -- and it is a right -- is under attack.

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  4. Not the point of your post, I know, but this brought back college memories of guys from the East saying, “If I can’t have Genny, I don’t want any.” Although of course they’d drink whatever was available.

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  5. Not sure if the total number of abortions is a good measure of the effectiveness of pro-choice versus pro-life, even given that the pro-life advocates play dirty.

    john

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  6. Did your list of presidents exclude Warren Harding on purpose?

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    1. Harding's father had the best line about his son: "Warren, if you was a girl, you'd be pregnant all the time". Not sure who found that out, but it's great.

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  7. Greetings to a native Ohioan from someone who actually lives in your home state. Chicagoan by birth and Ohioan by choice, and currently in my 28th year here. You're right on the money, Mr. S, Ohio is definitely broken. It wasn't when I arrived in '92. Ohio has gotten progressively worse, and the decline accelerates with every passing year.

    Ohio is a beautiful state, overwhelmingly green in the summertime, and gorgeous in the fall. So much natural and scenic beauty here. So much to do. So much diversity. I love Ohio...it's Ohioans that I can't stand.

    Do any of these pathetic Bible-thumpers even have any kind of medical background whatsoever? Obviously NOT! We desperately need the Wizard of Oz to give these ignorant scarecrows in the Statehouse some "bran-new brains"...thereby replacing the feces between their ears. Once again, thanks to these asshats, North Missitucky is the laughingstock of the world, for all the wrong reasons. And I am once again ashamed to be a North Missituckian. Or is it Missitucker? To rhyme with mother...never mind.

    Ohio is always making national and world headlines for all the wrong reasons. The fiftieth anniversary of what Ohioans euphemistically call "The Shootings" will be here in five months. The rest of the world knows it by where it happened...forty-some miles from where I'm typing this...Kent State. Can't wait to see what kind of utter stupidity all these legislative Benights of Columbus spew from their esteemed pieholes on what Buckeyes call "May Fourth"...

    Former Gov. James Rhodes (who never apologized, compared the atrociy on his watch to a "train wreck"...and basically shrugged and said "Shit happens!") is still alive and well in what is rapidly becoming a "shithole state"...but now he and his ilk hate women instead of hippies and radicals.

    As for Warren G. Harding, he is alleged to have been a high-level poobah in his town's chapter of the KKK (a distant relative in his hometown of Marion once showed me what she claimed were the robes he supposedly wore), but in the small-town Midwest of the 1920s, the Klan was (sort of) the Kiwanis of its day.

    Poor bedraggled Ohio. We become the leader in cruel abortion laws, even as we lose the dishonor of producing the worst POTUS America has ever had. As Himself likes to crow: "Sad!"

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    1. Except there have been rumors for decades that Harding was part black.

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    2. Supposedly, Harding's rumored ethnicity was common knowledge in his hometown, and he may have even challenged someone to a duel for calling him the n-word. Many of Harding's neighbors may not have even given a damn. He was a grand poobah--the local newspaper editor, a state-level politico, and a rather big fish in a very small pond.

      The woman who owned those Klan robes in the late Seventies also shared his surname, and she also had an enormous oil painting of him above her fireplace. So it was very easy to buy her story, even though she may have been lying.

      My Carolina cousin, a Yankee by birth and a Rebel by choice, was often invited to join what the locals referred to as their "sporting club"--they were completely clueless that he's Jewish. Small-town Klansmen weren't...and still aren't...the brightest crayons in the box. Just the whitest.

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  8. I gather that you mean the spirit of James Rhodes is alive. He's been dead for many years now. He's also the only politician I ever shook hands with, when I was about 15, at the Ohio State Fair.

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    1. Yes, I should have said "the spirit of"...and when Rhodes died in 2001, many obituaries included his refusal to ever admit any sort of responsibility for the shootings. Years afterward, he would still say things like: "Hey, train wrecks happen, too." Fortunately, I was not living here while he was in office. But the Kent tragedy became his legacy, and it is why he will always be remembered.

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