'I Hate Him', Said Matrons Over Cucumber Sandwiches - How Patrician Ladies Were Delighted By The Attack On The President

Vicki Parker liked to organize neighborhood soirees - gatherings of friends and neighbors to honor local poets and artists and to share ideas about America and the political scene. A recent event feted Abigail Saunders, an elderly woman who had been writing verse for decades without notice or publication.  Despite her claim that she was writing only for herself 'and for those souls who feel inspired by my words', she had hoped that some journal would accept her work. 

The work, however, was a treacly assemblage of childhood memories of her cat, the arbor in the yard, and  the picnics on the lawn.  She never got much beyond 'the pretty blossoms, the birds in the sky, O what wonders where they fly' but Vicki persisted.   Her voice was true, she said, and her words metaphors, charming allusions to a better world.  

The assembly gathered in Vicki's suburban home smiled with each verse, each bound by acceptance of the hostess' kind invitation to at least pay lip service to the poet and to try their best to find a scintilla of meaning in the poet's childish lines. 

When Vicki opened the gathering up for questions, there were but a desultory few who politely lobbed a few marshmallows - was there a real arbor, when during the day did she write, etc. - but the reading ended as all of Vicki's events did with tea sandwiches and iced tea and little else. 

It happened that one of these events - this time to fete a local artist - followed the attempted shooting of the President at the White House press dinner; and the group was more interested in parsing the attempt on his life than listening to Mildred Barnes talk about her still lifes. 

It was a disgrace, the women all nodded in agreement, that such violence should occur.  'We must rid the country of guns', said one to which others chimed in with the same opinion.  Guns, guns, guns, they said in chorus, the symbol of an America gone wrong; and from there turned to the seditious nature of conservatism, its idolatry of guns, individualism, and raw capitalism.  Trump deserved it, they all agreed, for anyone promoting an ethos of white supremacy, Wall Street greed, and American xenophobia was bound to be the subject of hatred. 

If there was ever a more treasonous opinion, it would be hard to imagine.

Each of these suburban matrons had grown up with the same privilege as Vicki. They were proud, patriotic Philadelphians and Bostonians, schooled in the Constitution, the War of Independence, and their ancestors' role in both.  Ginny Adams was an Adams of the John Adams family and had just moved from her home on Beacon Hill to the Washington area because of grandchildren.  She hated to give up the silver, crystal, lace and Chippendale of her family home, and had looked up at the portraits of the founders of America every morning. 

Despite her Republicanism, her deep Old English patrician roots, and her love of country, Ginny had come to hate Donald Trump not so much for his policies - she was certainly for lower taxes, the private sector, and secure borders - but for his persona.  He was a boor, a charlatan, a cheap Las Vegas trickster with a fondness for line dancers, arm candy, and meretricious spending.  The White House ballroom was the last straw, a defilement of old, historic, 18th century propriety, one that reflected the values of her family. 

'Disgusting', she shouted to the noisy women up in arms about the further fall of America into the hands of gunrunners and dogs of war. 

'Disgusting, what, dear?' she was asked. 

'The ballroom, Isabel, the ballroom', Ginny replied, but Isabel couldn't follow the non sequitur exactly and what it had to do with the attempted assassination, so turned to the group who were now onto Melania, her slanty eyes, triple plastic surgeries, and empty head.  'What I wouldn't give to have Michelle back in the White House', one said. 

 

Sort of, most women privately agreed. They would rather have the elegant, statuesque, beautiful Melania than this....Here all of them stopped themselves short from admitting very racist thoughts, for Michelle did look like, God forbid...some....What they were all thinking never was said, never could be said, and never would be said, but there it was. 

'Please, ladies, please', Vicki pleaded. 'Can we let Margaret (the artist in residence) have the floor?' but none of the women, flushed with the delirium that speaking one's mind about the evil in the White House produced - a kind of feverish, overheated pleasure - wanted to look at lifeless, amateurish, clunky, clownish paintings by some street painter. 

The poor artist only managed to show a few of her tableaux before the women scraped their chairs and went back to the living room, the Chablis and cucumber-and-chutney tea sandwiches.  'What will he do next?', said one, referring of course to the President. 'ICE and DOGE were bad enough, but that boorish thug has other fish to fry.'

While Vicki was happy to see her friends so animated and so committed to the downfall of the President, she felt badly for Mildred Barnes who had hoped to show off her entire portfolio but had been stopped in her tracks.  'I must invite her back another time', thought Vicki tending to the maid who couldn't keep up with the demand for her canapes and truffles.

If these ladies of all people, women of presumed stature, breeding, education, and sincerity, could have  so quickly turned the corner, gone round the bend with complicit hatred, what hope was there for ordinary Americans? The bile and venomous, inchoate hatred now viral in the country and spreading has its consequences.  Tantamount to crying 'Fire' in a crowded theatre, free speech gone awry, turned nasty, bullying, and unconscionable. 

Vicki tried to square her ordinary sentiments of diversity, equity, and inclusivity with her growing visceral hatred for the President - good and evil have always co-existed, she said, struggling to remember her college Kierkegaard...or was it Augustine? - but squaring was irrelevant in a time of political apocalypse; and so even she, perhaps the most reserved if not recondite member of her suburban friends, lost it.  From the dignified patron of the arts, she became the harridan of Beeker Lane, the Madwoman of Chaillot, as crazed and addled as any woman in America. 

For the next meeting she did away with the frills - no more still life artists or neighborhood poets - and replaced them with a political litany, a mudwrestling event with no holds barred.  Matrons they might be but they had not lost their moxie. 

The lights were always on way past midnight at 4567 Beeker Lane, doors banging, shouts in the garden; but what could you expect when the tyrant, the boor, the fascist was still in the White House?