Mom And Dad Are Fighting, The Elon and Don Cat Fight - Marriage, Romance, Bromance, All The Same Thing

Turkish soap operas are some of the world's best and are filled with the genre's stock in trade - sex, jealousy, ambition, greed, envy, and rivalry.  In other words, they are serialized pictures of marriage and family life everywhere.

 

A very honest literary critic wondered whether serious drama was overrated and the soap, whether Turkish, Mexican, or Brazilian were underrated.  Yes, serious dramatists used poetic license, metaphor, and lyricism to make a point, but weren't the lessons learned exactly the same? Why should Maggie the Cat in Tennessee Williams Cat on a Hot Tin Roof get top billing when every day beautiful, seductive, manipulative women were running rings around men on Turkish television?

And, again to be honest, why is any of this potboiling melodrama necessary when the real thing is being played out in life all around us. 

Take the Harpers, a modest, hard-working couple, good neighbors, and attentive to their children.  Who would have thought that he was a serial adulterer, she an alcoholic, and the children all disciplinary problems all on the verge of being sent to reform school?  

Or the Peters, he a senior executive at the World Bank and she a successful lawyer, both in cahoots in one of Washington's premier scandals.

The marriages finally came apart and the bitter squabbles were heard from one end of Albemarle Way to the other even when the windows were closed.  The Harpers' were epic and spilled out into the street, and were as vicious, unrestrained, and nasty as anything devised by Albee for George and Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

HE You sorry, miserable cunt, you fucking moron, what do you take me for, bitch?

HER: You're the moron, you fucking eunuch, you prick, you worthless piece of shit

 

And more of the same, not worth repeating here.  The point only being that this exchange was par for the course for marriage, a knock-down, dragged out, bloody affair with no winners only two people left crippled, maimed, and irrepressibly pissed, harboring hate and vindictiveness on into the night and weeks beyond. 

Being married for a long time gives one plenty of time to suss out each other's weaknesses and sore points, so by the time the Harpers were through with each other that fine May afternoon, they had a go at just about everything and everybody - a hurtful, damaging, unrecoverable affair; but once again, no surprises there. 

Mrs. Gayle went after Mr. Gayle with a carving knife.  Mr. Blanding poured molasses into Mrs. Blanding's brand new Mercedes, and Mrs. Whelan burned every last sheet of Mr. Whelan's yet to be published novel. 

None of this is new.  The wife of the great Sir Richard Francis Burton, explorer, linguist, and adventurer, first up the Nile to its source, first Westerner to enter the Kabbah of Mecca, burnt all his letters and diaries in a pique of rage over some unexplained offense.  Women all over the world have acted out of the same rage and impotent hostility to scatter, burn, and destroy anything associated with their husbands; men have ransacked closets, thrown toiletries and jewelry out the window, and slashed expensive dresses into ribbons. 

 

Robert Altman's scene in Short Cuts in which Stormy Weathers takes a chain saw to everything in his ex-wife's home and leaves only a pile of splintered wood, sofa stuffing, and mutilated clothing for her to find when she gets home from a weekend with 'Bob'. 

Wives are quick to fly off the handle over nothing if that nothing is persistent, toilet seats left up, hair in the sink, underwear on the floor; and men pissed at being hectored lash back with longstanding, built up rage. 

It is no surprise that such 'differences' occur in friendships - one word is often enough to break a long, familiar relationship, and political differences in an overheated political climate will do in any camaraderie - and it is certainly no surprise that jealousies, suspicions, and doubts infect partnerships at the highest levels of government. 

The tensions must have been building for a long time for Elon Musk to accuse the President of having consorted with serial rapist, pedophile, and crooked sexual manipulator par excellence, Jeffrey Epstein. 'Your on the list', howled Musk at the President, letting the world know that for all Trump's public statements of patriotism and moral rectitude, the President is nothing more than a low life, a stupendously duplicitous and untrustworthy person. 

The President calmly but clearly stated that Musk was angered at the fact that The Great Spending Bill reduced subsidies for Tesla and electric vehicles.  'A sickening, disgraceful, unconscionable piece of shit' shouted the monumentally pissed off Musk, or words to that effect and the fight was enjoined.  The most powerful man in the world and the richest were in a mudslinging, down and dirty, fight to the end; and the public could not be more delighted. 

 

What was happening in every kitchen, every den, and every bedroom was being played out for the world to see - not just the neighbors on Albemarle Way but the world! No need to turn into As the World Turns, Guney Kuzey, or Amor! Soap operas, reality TV, and the very worst of Jerry Springer could never match the best cat fight in recent history. 

At the end of Virginia Woolf George and Martha, exhausted from their all-night battle, flayed to the marrow, emptied of every last bit of bile and venom, look at each other with hope. Perhaps now they can begin again on more understanding, even loving ground.  No one in the audience believes that this angry hateful, spiteful couple can ever be anything else but, but playwright Albee felt it necessary to throw them a bone of hope. 

At the end of Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof  Maggie and Brick after long months and years of bitter antagonism, suspicion and lack of 'veracity', come to the same crossroads.  'I love you', says Maggie to which Brick responds 'If only it were true' - a ray of hope but no theatregoer is convinced and assumes that the couple will return quickly to their own biting, cruel ways. 

'Better to get it all out', say marriage counsellors, 'like bad enchiladas'; but such outing takes its toll and for human beings, the vindictive, never-ever-forget people they always have been, such disgorging is just a prelude to many more bad dinners and revolting upchucks. 

So few Americans think this Elon-Don thing will end up well.  Both men will sulk, ruminate, and think up even more vile accusations to fling at each other.  This was a 'bromance' after all, not just an incidental work thing. 

Hold on to your hats, Ladies and Gentlemen, the show is about to begin.