Women know

LITTLE ROCK — I’ve never been much of a believer in historical theories about the Indispensable Man. There may be some examples-Washington, Lincoln, Moses . . . but they are few. But the indispensable woman, I believe in.

Call it Greenberg’s Law: Women are the innately superior sex. Maybe it’s their intimate connection with life, their being the bearers of the next generation. My theory may not be backed by any scientific evidence, but it’s something every man has surely felt. At least if he’s got a lick of sense.

You might even call it a prejudice-in the sense of Edmund Burke’s definition of prejudice as the body of judgments passed on as received wisdom from age to age. The word for it in these fecund Southern latitudes is mother wit. Note that nobody ever called it father wit.

When it comes to great truths, each generation shouldn’t have to work them out on its own. They don’t have to be written down, any more than the English constitution is. Every boy soon learns that women seem to know intuitively what the weaker male sex may grasp only by effort and education.

Which is why it requires marriage and family to civilize the male animal. He needs a woman’s tutelage.

Brighter boys learn the lesson of female superiority early; dimmer ones may never catch on. A story: It was homecoming weekend many years ago in Pine Bluff, Ark., and a clump of us stood on Main Street waiting for UAPB’s high-stepping black marching band to come striding by, drum major and majorettes and 76 trombones and all. (Tell me again that there’s no “natural sense of rhythm,” that it’s all just a racial stereotype. Then explain jazz, its origins, history and spread.)

A venturesome little boy in our group stepped off the curb to look way, way up the street-where the little girl on the Sunbeam Bread sign, a local landmark, was swinging endlessly to and fro. Way in thedistance, the boy spotted the prancing majorettes throwing their batons high, higher, highest, catching them on the beat. “Wow!” he exclaimed, returning to report what he’d seen.

His conclusion: “Girls have to know so many things!” Here’s another story about the natural wisdom of women, or at least their instinctive suspicion of grand-sounding male plans. It must have been in early 1974, when Watergate was just a trickle in the news rather than the flood that would sweep away a president and all the president’s men.

I was at my desk at the Pine Bluff Commercial when the White House called. I know, buildings don’t make phone calls. But I was younger back then, and so naive that when the presidential aide-to-an-aide called, I was much impressed, especially with myself.

It seems I’d written a column in praise of some aspect of Richard Nixon’s foreign policy at the time.

One of the bigger papers had picked it up, and, Mr. Aide confided, The President had liked it very much. The way he pronounced The President, it was capitalized and italicized. It dang near had a halo around it. What’s more, The President had liked the column so much he wanted to know if I’d like to join the White House staff as a speechwriter.

Mr. Aide and I agreed that I’d think it over, and the White House could call me back in a day or so. Not that I was about to leave Arkansas-I’d already left a couple of times before and learned that I do not thrive above a certain degree of latitude. But I had to tell somebody about the call-somebody I wanted to impress. It’s a male thing, or at least a young male thing. So when lunch time came, instead of walking down to the diner for a sandwich, I drove home to break the Big News to my wife.

Like a puppy dog carrying a prize bone he’d just dug up.

When I told her about the call from the White House, trying to be suitably modest, her response was simple, immediate and to the point:

“Are you crazy?”

In my case, it might have been more accurate to say crazier, since I’d already shlepped her off once before for the sake of a job. A job in Chicago. With a one-year-old in tow. Just in time for a record snowfall. The charms of moving “up” in the world had been lost on her ever since.

Of course the White House never called back. I realized later the call had been what was then called a stroke-as when a politician strokes a columnist by telling him how brilliant he is. The younger the columnist, the more effective the technique tends to be. I had to learn as much; women seem to know these things without having to think about them.

Even the most sober and prudent of us males may have to learn by trial and error rather than simple intuition. Consider the case of Henry Paulson, who was secretary of the Treasury when the Great Panic of ’08-’09 broke and was whirling out of control. One scary Sunday he realized all his efforts to save Lehman Brothers would be in vain, and that AIG was unwinding fast, too. Much like Greece, then Spain, and soon enough the euro today.

Mr. Paulson felt himself collapsing, too. Much like all his grand plans.

He was starting to panic. But he still had enough self-possession to do the sensible thing. He called his wife. As he tells the story in his memoir:

“I knew I had to call my wife. . . . ‘What if the system collapses?’ I asked her. ‘Everybody is looking to me, and I don’t have the answer. I am really scared.’ ”

Just back from church that Sunday, she responded calmly-by citing Timothy 1:7:

For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.

Amen.

I’m telling you, women know.

Paul Greenberg, editorial page editor of the Democrat-Gazette, has been taking some time off. Today’s column is an updated vesion of one he wrote in 2010. E-mail him at: [email protected]