Thursday, August 26, 2010

Former senator in the news

Alan Simpson has outraged feminists by saying that Social Security is like “a milk cow with 310 million tits.”

I’m not sure why feminists, particularly, should be outraged by this. Should any reference or allusion to mammarian organs - even those of the bovine class - be considered a violation of some kind of intellectual property rights enjoyed exclusively by the female of our species? Or did they think Alan Simpson was calling them a bunch of cows?

I’ll tell you what outrages me. The author of the article – presumably somebody with a knowledge of journalism, including its history and icons – completely missed the fact that Simpson lifted his comment almost verbatim from H.L. Mencken, who used the analogy in an editorial he wrote back in the 1930s to refer to FDR’s view of the role of the federal government.

From A Carnival of Buncombe, a collection of essays that Mencken wrote in the 1920s and 1930s ("Sham Battle" - October 26, 1936):
It may be, indeed, that the Rooseveltian or anti-Jeffersonian concept of the government as a milch-cow with 125,000,000 teats still has many years to go."

3 comments:

RebeccaH said...

It's all part of that peculiar British-American conviction that any glimpse or mention of female breasts is somehow offensive. Luckily, British-Americans (and most of the rest of the world) are outgrowing that particular Victorianism.

While in the Middle East, they remove the breasts from clothes manikins.

Steve Skubinna said...

Well, I have heard, and used the phrase "sucking at the federal tit" many times the past several decades.

I wish Simpson had stuck to his guns and told the petulant whiners "Yeah, I gothcer apology swingin'!"

I suspect the real outrages s that always expressed by leftists whenever anyone publicly identifies the goals or results of their policies.

Anonymous said...

More fitting, especially after the Bush tax cuts expire, is that we'll be suckin' hind tit.

Bet that'll freak the HELL outta the "feminists."