High Morals Drifters (20)

“But you haven’t answered my question.”
“You mean WWDD?”
“Yeah, what would Dixie tell the boy?”
“I have a feeling she was a wild one; we just never knew it, except when she rode horses and did stuff like that, so that wildness would probably come out in what she told him. But she was also very polite.”
“So WWDD?”
“She’d probably tell him to go for it, but politely take shit off nobody.”
“So she’d cut you a new one politely. How’d that work?”
“Mostly flashing eyes did the work. The language and tone were always clean.”
“You were all in position to do that or worse what with the oil money back then.”
“That’s true; she was able to do a fair amount with her piece. Put a lot of it into breeding both here and in England. So we could tell the other breeders nicely to get lost.”
“Oil makes for politesse.”
“It did in Paris and London. I was looking through the trunks her nephew sent after she died and found a few drafts to Hogarth. She must have bankrolled some of it. And I saw a draft or two to a French Gallery. She must have been helping somebody out because she did not collect art.”
“Do you think she was really one of the girls?”
“Yeah, I do. She knew Gertrude Stein and Alice B. There’s a draft to Alice B in ‘61. She also knew Auden’s wife, Erika Mann. She once showed me a real chummy picture of her and Mann. Other stuff leads me to think this, too.”
“Hmm.”
“But when she came home, she came home. She had no bones to pick with anybody. I guess, like Auden, she could the leave the institutions alone and live her life. She did not have to wreck a church and be a bishop.”
“Did your mother know?”
“Yes, said as much. Dixie was family. She could always stay with us. Besides, the important bloodlines were on the ranch, especially after the oil decline.”

High Morals Drifters (19)

“What would Dixie tell him?”
“You mean WWDD?”
“You irreverent sumbitch.”
“Dixie died when I was just getting some sense about her.”
“What do you mean?”
“After her husband died, she spent a fair amount of time in London and had to have had a place there. She knew a lot of people in the later suffragette movement. Then she tied into some writers and artists. She somehow came to know Leonard Wolf, the Hogarth Press guy. Ran with some pretty wild folk. She gave me an edition of Mrs. Dalloway. I don’t know that literature very well. Had a girl friend who did.”
“That’s got to be worth some money.”
“I don’t need the money. It will just sit there next to my Giles Tippettes. It has a home next to Jailbreak.”
“If I remember, Virginia Wolf sure needed one.”
“A jailbreak?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, she sure was living with some shithouse rats.”
“So Dixie may have been with some of these folks.”
“Mavis would have crapped.”
“Yes.”
“So you never have brought that up.”
“I will when you can Botox that curl out of her lip.”

High Morals Drifters (18)

“She ever work with you?”
“Yeah, she taught me a few riding moves. Also when we got to doing artificial insemination, one summer she showed me how to work with teaser cows, collection, extension, storage, estrus, all of that stuff, you know, and how to keep the records. Pretty much the whole shootin’ match. One fall, when she was over here a spell, she helped me with my Cicero.”
“Cicero? What the shit?”
“She was a bit of a Stoic, what with the falling out of that fox hunt. She kinda read his orations for fun.”
“That ain’t exactly bathroom readin.’”
“No it ain’t. She sure knew those figures of speech.”
“Thought her little nephew could use a little upgrading?”
“I guess she thought she needed a better man to talk at her.”
“But you’d already heard enough repetition for emphasis in the Sunday sermons. Just couldn’t become that better man, huh?”
“Well, not many around these days anyway, never are.”
“Sure a lot of artful dodgers.”
“Yeah, guys with a mouthful, but no clue what to do.”
“Mama’s boy is going to tangle with a bunch of ‘em.”

High Morals Drifters (17)

“Dixie ever marry?”
“Englishman. Killed in a fox hunt. Got thrown, I guess. She never said.”
“How’d she get over there in the first place?”
“Let me see. Her father was my great, great uncle on my mother’s side.”
“So she’s really just a cousin.”
“Yeah, Hick, but we kind of inflate cousins into aunts.”
”So what was the deal with Dixie?”
“Her father sent her over to look at some breeding stock with her brother. It was after the end of the war. He brought them back, but she stayed. Fell in love with one of the breeders. He was killed not much later. She went to London for a while and got a bit involved in the later suffragette movement.”
“Where’d she get her money?”
“She bred stock. Also the ranch here threw off some money from time to time. She’d come back to Texas every few years to check lineages, so she was in on the breed here.”
“Damn. How long she been gone?”
“89. Rode ‘til she was in her 80s. Tended her nephews in England and their sons. They still have a big operation. She was a wizard with stock.”
“Pretty good old gal, huh.”
“Tough, but fair. Work with anyone that was trying, but you damn sure’d better be trying or she’d cut you a new one.”

High Morals Drifters (16)

“Did you know that my aunt Dixie was a suffragette?”
“Which one was she?”
“Big, tall, red headed lady. Was always so nice when she came back from her travels in Europe. Always had stuff for me.”
“I may remember her. Did she come to church ever?”
“No, she couldn’t stand it. But she did ride in those quarter horse races we used to have.”
“God. If she’s the one, she had to be in her late fifties when I saw her that one time. She rode Big Trace and won.”
“That was her, but she was older than that. She was born in ‘93.”
“She must have been a hell of rider.”
“She learned young like we all do and then rode English. Mama said she could ride anything.”

High Morals Drifters (15)

“You know, with Mavis there was never any confusion.”
“Well, you sure knew where you stood.”
“You knew what to wear, say, do around her, or there would be hell to pay.”
“Those after-church dinners of hers, where you had to explain the sermon, were something else.”
“Regrettably, I attended a couple. I thank you for that. It’s tough to talk about what you just slept through.”
“Meow, Meow, Meow, Meow. And you shall have no pie...”
“With these other sisters. Wonder what dinner with them would have been like?”
“I guess you’d have had to recite the minutes of the current cadre.”
“They’d be right there listening.”
“Yeah, to listen to you explain why you’re a fifth wheel.”
“If you didn’t, there’d be another hell to endure.”
“Speaking of the fifth wheel, where is your old man in all of this?”
“I think he had to have rolled over or off.”

High Morals Drifters (14)

“It’s amazing women like that raise anything other than a dust cloud.”
“I know it. But they have very good ways most of the time. Every now and then a Bible verse just uncorks ‘em.”
“Then you run for cover.”
“I’ve been straight to hell many a time; usually managed to get out the back door by hanging my head and asking for mercy.”
“Amen to that.”
“The problem with all of this is that good ways don’t come from a Bible verse any more than from a pure idea. You can twist up either one, any way it suits you. So you got to pick your ways, anyway. It’s your take. Neither the Bible nor the theory will get you off the hook.”
“Sounds a bit like Sartre.”
“It does, without the ontological hoopla.”
“Well, brother, shall we pray for our twisted sisters?”
“I’m in fear of prayer at the moment.”

High Morals Drifters (13)

“Speaking of Mama, here comes your old aunt Mavis.”
“Shit. No place to hide.”
“Kinda feels like you’re naked in the Garden of Eden, with that old, dried up Bible Belter, hitching up her britches and marching your way.”
“Hello, Aunt Mavis.”
“Pleased to see you, Ma’am.”
“Whew, she just walked right by. Barely smiled with that lip of hers; what’s eatin’ her?”
“She’s on her way somewhere with a mission from God.”
“Oh, Lord. It’s those junior high girls over by the old five and dime. They got their midriffs showing.”
“They will tremble at God’s Word in the body of Mavis or they’ll go straight to hell.”
“Let’s mosey on down to the river.”
“We can get washed there.”

High Morals Drifters (12)

“So are we going to turn him into a theorist of Mama’s moves?”
“We can’t; he’ll lose if we do that anyway. We’ll just tell him what a theory is; tell him that if one is coming at him, it’s like a duck; if it flies, it dies. ‘Aim small, miss small’, that kind of thing, if he’s inclined.”
“But that can be real dangerous. They’ve got theoretical game wardens there to keep him from shooting down theories. They’ll confiscate his hunting license by marking it with an “F”.
“If they threaten that, we’ll have to tell him to parrot the theories. He just needs to get the hell out of there in four years, or he’ll be ruined, a double talker forever.”
“Yeah, when we’re old gassers, we’d like to have our fishing buddy to carry the tackle and get our stories straight for posterity.”
“Damn, right. Besides, I’d hate to listen to Derrida fishin’. That boy’d call a paradox in a bobber.’”
“I guess, if they are going to trade in paradoxes, he might as well learn to lie to them.”
“No other way; they won’t know the difference.”
“We’ll just have to throw away all our bicolor floats.”

High Morals Drifters (11)

“But there is one more thing I don’t get; we have to explain to him how some people think that ideas are the mark of a good person, not what the person does.”
“Yeah, and he’s just getting out of high school.”
“Well, he’s going to run into a bunch of pointy heads that will tell him just that, down there in Austin. Better to give him a heads-up on this rather than to leave it to the University.”
“Yeah, they’re going to say that he’s got all the wrong ideas when he hits town, when in fact he has no ideas, just ways. This is going to be tough since you cannot reduce what he does into a theory.”
“Well, you can describe some of his ways.”
“Yes, you can, but a description of something is not a rule for it. To do something as a rule is not to do it because of a rule.”
“What are you getting at?”
“He’s going to be described by others in particular ways.”
“Ok.”
“If they don’t like his ways, they will inflate their description into a theory of him. It’s the old Anti-Semite and Jew deal.”
“Yeah…?”
“They’ll say something like ‘you’re one of those who…,’ making up a false class of folks he fits into just for their purpose to diminish or control him. The next step will be to invent a false rule as to what this false class of folks does and a reason why he is one of the false ones and why he should not follow that false rule which he never followed in the first place. Then the hate speech comes next. And so on.”
“ That’s kiddie shit, which anyone can handle; you can always a punch a sumbitch in the face.”
“But when the school does it to you, it’s done in subtler ways.”
“Or your girl friend. And you can’t throw a left.”
“They’ll be throwing invisible lefts.”
“By damn, you have faith in things unseen.”

High Morals Drifters (10)

“One thing I don’t get. Most of these women were not raised by feminists, so we cannot say they were raised differently.”
“Well, that’s true; most of them just reject the way they were raised and proceed on some manifesto or other. I remember down at the University it was real hard getting attention when my girl friend had gone off to read Kate Millett with her coffee cadre. They’d all gotten mad at each other, and she’d come home mad at me. Ideas get people all stirred up.”
“Real glad I just liked that diner waitress.”
“Yeah, she’d come back and say, ‘you do this and you do that’ and then she’d say ‘see you’re really a this and a that, have been all along’ and I’d say ‘what’s a this and a that?’ and she’d say ‘a man who does this and that.’”
“God damn.”
“So I’d ask her ‘if I agree to quit doing this and that, are we ok?’ and she’d say ‘no, you’re a hopeless this and that.’”
“How long did that deal last?”
“Too damn long.”
“Well, maybe that’s what we tell him. That these women don’t exactly have ways; that they have ideas that are sacred to them and that it is a mystery of their faith that he is an example of the patriarchal profane.”
“That might do better.”

http://www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/millett-kate/theory.htm

High Morals Drifters (9)

“So a woman hurls an epithet at him to the effect that he is a benighted chauvinist and gives him a knee.”
“Whoa, this is not the time for the Art of Courtly Love.”
“No. Wrong kind of knee; she gave him the other kind. These women are not like his mother; in fact, they may hate her as much as him, for showing him all her misguided ways.”
“So we‘ve got to give him more than a warning to look out for these women; this is not like getting a fork wrong in a place setting. This is akin to an intolerable felony, worse than nippin’ whiskey at a Baptism.”
“Yes.”
“What are we going to tell him?”
“ I don’t know. I guess, we can say that these women are like unshaved warriors; he might understand it if he thought he was waylaid by pack of Amazons. He did go to school, you remember. He was force-fed a little mythology back home in Pampa.”
“Yes, but that still does not sound right. This is more like part of a conflict between religions.”
“Maybe that is what we say; he was raised one way, they another. They are up there in Boston. Be careful around them.”
"Might work."
“I can tell him about the wedding up at that Vermont farm I once went to with the Dykes on Bikes.”
“Damn, I didn’t know about that.”
“Yeah, they had running water up there, but they made us attend and throw lime in their outhouse.”
“Worse than the Panhandle.”
“Right about that. All kind of big wigs were there from Houston; the gent was a filmmaker and his bride was Texas money. It was like George Bush in a Port-a-Potty on one side and who knows else waiting on the other. They had some sorry damn paper to wipe the seat.”
“No theory of ‘how’ there.”
“Well, kinda our bodies, ourselves, but they hadn’t yet written a chapter for this.”

http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/themes/amore/art_of_courtly_love.shtml

http://www.dykesonbikes.org/


http://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/

High Morals Drifters (8)

“Look, suppose a boy is all Mama’s.”
“Ok.”
“Mama tells him to respect women and open doors for them.”
“Ok.”
“So he does this as a boy, then again as a young man on his Senior Trip. In Boston, on his travels from the flyover, not far from a women’s collective, he does it. He gets slapped upside the head by a couple of, shall we say, more forward thinking women.”
“Ok. But you’re…, you’re going to rile somebody talking like that.”
“Well…, they slapped my man. They think God’s a woman, anyway, so women can slap men around anytime they want. They turn the tables on the Patristics that way.”
“A kind of special, evangelical, reverse discrimination, huh? You’re up to no good with that.”
“Look, the point is, do we rewrite his mother’s lessons as though they were rules, or do we say to him, ‘Just take a sharp look at the gal and see which side of the fence she looks like she’s on.’ That if she is ridin’ it, you know, try to figure what side she’s leaning toward today. That this is part of dealing with some women.”
“Probably better to give him a “heads-up”, than write his lesson as a bunch of rules, and then have to rewrite them again. And don’t call ‘em ‘gals’, for Christsakes.”
“That’s what I’m thinking, because his mother did not give him rules to start with. She just told him what to do, splotched with some sayings and homilies. Most of the time he picked up on what to do. He could not give you a theory, either.”

(Here Terry Gross is working at a revision of the effects of the theory of feminism with Ariel Levy:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6549015

But in 1987, she had a bit of trouble

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6554380

with a true feminist, Anita O’Day)