Kansas City Blogger
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Things You Know Are True But Won’t Admit
The quality of the candidates who make it on the ballot depends upon the quality of the electorate. The politicians who make it on the ballot are low quality because they appeal to the median voter. If the median voter has silly views, then smart, well-informed, intellectually honest, forthright politicians don’t stand a chance.
Many people complain that we’re always stuck choosing the lesser of two evils. The Comedy Central show South Park compared the 2004 presidential election to a school mascot election between a Turd Sandwich and a Douche. Why are we often stuck choosing between a Republican Turd Sandwich and Democratic Douche? It’s not because the system is broken or corrupt. It’s because the system works. …
If we want to fix our democracy, then we need to fix ourselves. We need to become smarter, less biased, and more intellectually honest when it comes to politics. We need the median voter to be a virtuous voter.
Mom
The Source of All E-vil
One supposes it is unfair to blame Ms. Jarvis for the commercial orgy that Mother’s Day has become. She did, after all, renounce the holiday she helped create, announcing that “commercialism was destroying Mother’s Day.”
Still, one can not help but wonder how wonderfully uneventful Sundays in May might pass had Ms Jarvis managed to put on her big girl panties and internalize the grief over her mother’s death. 1
Instead the nitwit Ms. Jarvis started a viral campaign to honor the “purity of a mother’s love.” Richer nitwits 2 threw their weight, prestige and money behind her efforts. And despite some opposition in Congress the holiday was eventually immortalized in 1914.
Which caused the floral industry to bloom. 3
However the holiday soon became what it is today, a mandatory spend-fest. This actually pissed off Ms. Jarvis, who wanted Mother’s Day “to be a day of sentiment, not profit.” In 1920 Ms. Jarvis told people to stop buying flowers and other gifts for their mothers, and she turned against her former (floral) commercial supporters. She referred to the florists, greeting card manufacturers and the confectionery industry as “charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers and termites that would undermine with their greed one of the finest, noblest and truest movements and celebrations.” 4
Of course it went downhill from there; Ms. Jarvis was once dragged screaming out of a meeting of the American War Mothers by police and arrested for disturbing the peace in her attempts to stop the sale of Mother’s Day carnations. One of the last times anyone ever spotted Ms. Jarvis in public she was going door-to-door in Philly, asking for signatures on a petition to rescind Mother’s Day.
In her dotage she became a recluse and a hoarder. 5
- Reputedly a saint of a woman…but in retrospect, what mother wasn’t? ↩
- John Wanamaker and H.J. Heinz. ↩
- Ms. Jarvis had this thing for carnations, her dear departed mum’s favorite and best flower. ↩
- Okay, that last bit? The “one of the finest, noblest and truest movements and celebrations”? That may be a bit of hyperbole. However the “charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers and termites” characterization? There Ms. Jarvis was decades ahead of her time. ↩
- All of which could have been avoided, as well as this damnable ‘holiday’, had Ms. Jarvis simply kept her mouth shut and instead instructed her florist to place a dozen carnations upon her her late mother’s grave in perpetuity. But nooooooooooooooooo… ↩
Posted in idee fixe, in passing, life...or something like it
Tagged Anna Jarvis, Mother's Day
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