"That's what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age."
-- Matthew McConaughey as David Wooderson in Dazed and Confused
We all knew guys like Wooderson, the graduated but never gone dude who hung out with the high school crowd in Richard Linklater's 1993 movie Dazed and Confused (which might be the most accurate feature film ever made about the American high school experience). The sort of guy who had his own apartment and a Z28 Camaro he was making payments on.
One guy I knew, who was in his early 20s, always went to the football games wearing his letter jacket from back in the day. He worked for his dad who must have paid him all right because he had his own ranch house with a hot tub and a refrigerator on his deck devoted exclusively to chilling Miller High Life ponies. He must have had more than 100 of those golden seven-ounce (no deposit) bottles in there. I thought that was the coolest thing.
For the record, I never got in that hot tub, but some girls I knew did. They thought it was hilarious. They did not think Letter Jacket Dude with his fridge full of splits of the Champagne of Bottled Beer was cool at all. (They say girls are generally more mature than guys at that age, and I have no reason to doubt that. I was a full-on idiot at 17.)
Anyway, we hung around with LJD a little bit--he was always around when we had our impromptu parties out at the lake, and whenever we'd pop into McDonald's on a Friday night he seemed to be there, slurping on a large Coke he'd dosed with Old Grandad--and mostly we didn't judge. It wasn't until a few years later when we were in college that we'd talk about how creepy he seemed. Once we were free of it ourselves, none of us wanted to be seen dating a high school girl. We made fun of guys who, having graduated, attended our proms.
But that was just our experience; even then I knew that 14-year-old girls could have sexual agency and power. I knew that band directors could run off with students. I knew that it was me that was simple, not the universe, and that any opinions I could form about the ways that human beings courted affection weren't worth expressing to the wider, wilder world.
We wanted girls to like us, to want to be with us, to ride in our cars and wear our jackets when they felt cold. And sure, OK, there was enfolded in that longing a wish to be seen a certain way, as the sort of guy who could attract a girlfriend, and to that end we would do all sorts of things. We'd form bands and play sports and try to dance. We--most of the boys I knew --were just dumb kids incapable of predatory grooming.
But, like Woody Allen says, the heart wants what it wants.
The entirely credible picture of Roy Moore we've been presented with over the past couple of weeks makes him look sad and dangerous. What sort of 30-year-old man hangs around malls and high schools looking to hook up? Maybe a man who has trouble relating to women with life experience commensurate with his own?
I know in other cultures--and maybe in the hard fundamentalist world Moore inhabits--it's not unusual for men in their 30s to date and even marry teenagers. Some people can find a biblical rationale for it. Some people believe a woman should literally live under the roof of her father until she marries. But that's not a mainstream idea these days, and it wasn't a mainstream idea back in 1977 either.
And if like me and just about everyone in Congress you find the accounts of the women who have come forward to accuse Roy Moore of icky and criminal behavior credible, it's more than the ages of the girls he allegedly approached that's alarming. It's that ugly insistence, the assertion of male dominion that strikes a lot of us as unsavory. The Moore described by his accusers is no gentleman. He's a pathetic Wooderson looking to make time with the unformed and the pliable, seeking partners incapable of challenging his sense of himself as an extraordinarily cool dude.
It also fits in with the caricature we've come to know: the know-nothing justice twice debenched for refusing to follow the law of the land, the racialist bully who loudly proclaims his own morality and special relationship with Jesus while whipping out his widdle biddy pistol in public to demonstrate his masculine bona fides, the irresponsible rabble rouser who asserts that certain American cities are in thrall of Sharia law (and when challenged by Vox reporter Jeff Stein to name these cities, shrugs and says it "doesn't matter"). Moore is a fabulist and conspiracy theorist who until recently insisted that Barack Obama wasn't born in this country.
The public persona of Roy Moore is the embodiment of the kind of cracker that someone who has never thought much about or attempted to understand the South would invent, a caricature of a certain kind of Southerner, a crude and offensive stereotype come to life. He is a lazy character on a dim-witted situation comedy written by lazy, jaded bicoastal hipsters who would never condescend to watch the product they script. There is no nuance in his character, no capacity for irony in his sensibility. There's nothing about him--not even his atrocious poetry--that suggests a vivid inner life.
There's nothing about this character that would seem to compel serious people to take anything he says seriously.
Except our politics are tribal now, and that to many it matters more that a candidate look and sound a certain way than exhibit anything like a grasp of the issues facing our country, any empathy for people unlike himself, or even a modicum of decency.
www.blooddirtangels.com
Editorial on 11/19/2017