Once, long ago, I was on a country road in Eastern Tennessee when I stopped at a convenience store for gas and coffee. The girl behind the counter was trying to help another customer find a price on some item and finally said, in an accent composed of long summer days, sweet tea, and mountain laurel, “Well, I am just plain bumfuzzled.”
Bumfuzzled. I had never heard the word, and I loved the way the young woman coated those three syllables with apple-blossom honey so that they sugared the air of that little store. I inserted that sticky word in my memory bank and bring it out now and again, mostly for the amusement of family and friends. No one else has ever said bumfuzzled in my presence, though when I looked the word up online just now, I see former president Bill Clinton once used it in an address.
Well, today bumfuzzled describes perfectly my state of mind. Political paradox and cultural incongruity have thrust me into a state of high confusion. Like the young woman, I am “just plain bumfuzzled.”
Let’s start with national security.
When I walk into a courthouse or board an aircraft, I must pass a checkpoint where a guard instructs me to empty my pockets and remove my watch, and place these items in a basket that a scanner then searches for illegal explosives, weapons, chemicals, and other contraband. At times, that guard even orders me to remove my shoes before I pass through a similar screening mechanism.
Meanwhile, some of my fellow Americans are advocating for open borders. Tens of thousands of people annually slip back and forth across the borders of our country, some of them seeking work, some wanting the freebies passed out by our government, a few looking for victims to rob, murder, or rape.
Yet progressives, libertarians, and many Republicans, including some in Congress, don’t bat an eye at these contraction regarding our national security. Indeed, some even loudly proclaim we should do away with borders.
This anomaly between the strict regulation of airport security and calls for open borders bumfuzzles me.
Then there is the paradoxical approach we apply to sex these days. Some people dash back and forth between positions of sexual liberation and neo-puritanism, making such sharp turns and abrupt about-faces that they leave the rest of us breathless watching them.
An example: Stormy Daniels, a porn star, figured in the news for a while because of a sexual encounter she allegedly had with President Donald Trump over ten years ago. Some feminists and progressives have celebrated Daniels, less for her profession or her wit than for her accusations against Trump. They have made a celebrity of the sort of woman Hilary Clinton once called “trailer trash” and “bimbos.”
Meanwhile, Miss America organizers recently announced that its pageant will no longer feature a swimsuit competition. (Actually, the organizers are no longer calling it a pageant, but a contest or a competition or something.) Judges will now evaluate contestants solely on their talent and intelligence. (I am willing to bet money that in less than ten years, men claiming to be women will join the line-up in this competition.)
So we lionize a woman who earned her bucks (bad pun) sporting about naked in front of a camera and became a household name while others are banning from wearing swimsuits in the Miss America pageant.
So I ask: are we a nation of unzipped libertines or blue-nosed prudes?
Bumfuzzling.
Certain advocates of feminism also baffle me.
Ivanka Trump is a beautiful woman, a mother of three, a former model, successful fashion designer, television personality, writer, and key figure in her father’s inner circle. In other words, she appears the quintessential feminist, yet some in the sisterhood viciously attack her in the media, mostly because she is Donald Trump’s daughter.
So I’m wondering: do politics trump (pardon that one) sisterhood? How is it possible that accomplished women like Condoleezza Rice, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Nikki Haley are forbidden seats at the feminist banquet?
Bumfuzzled: that’s me.
Next up on my list of perplexities is Chicago.
Since 2003, murders in Chicago have surpassed the number of US military personnel killed in action in Afghanistan and Iran during this same period. Year after year, the Windy City massacres continue.
Several ironies come into play here. For nearly a hundred years, Chicago has stood as a Democratic stronghold. The city is home to some of the strictest gun control laws in the country. The majority of the murdered are black people killed by other black people.
What sort of city, state, or nation allows such wholesale slaughter to go unchecked year after year? Are we bored? Are we indifferent because most of the victims are black? If black lives really mattered, would not politicians, community organizers like former president Barack Obama, and police work round the clock to end these killings?
You got it: bumfuzzled.
Well, today bumfuzzled describes perfectly my state of mind. Political paradox and cultural incongruity have thrust me into a state of high confusion. Like the young woman, I am “just plain bumfuzzled.”
Let’s start with national security.
When I walk into a courthouse or board an aircraft, I must pass a checkpoint where a guard instructs me to empty my pockets and remove my watch, and place these items in a basket that a scanner then searches for illegal explosives, weapons, chemicals, and other contraband. At times, that guard even orders me to remove my shoes before I pass through a similar screening mechanism.
Meanwhile, some of my fellow Americans are advocating for open borders. Tens of thousands of people annually slip back and forth across the borders of our country, some of them seeking work, some wanting the freebies passed out by our government, a few looking for victims to rob, murder, or rape.
Yet progressives, libertarians, and many Republicans, including some in Congress, don’t bat an eye at these contraction regarding our national security. Indeed, some even loudly proclaim we should do away with borders.
This anomaly between the strict regulation of airport security and calls for open borders bumfuzzles me.
Then there is the paradoxical approach we apply to sex these days. Some people dash back and forth between positions of sexual liberation and neo-puritanism, making such sharp turns and abrupt about-faces that they leave the rest of us breathless watching them.
An example: Stormy Daniels, a porn star, figured in the news for a while because of a sexual encounter she allegedly had with President Donald Trump over ten years ago. Some feminists and progressives have celebrated Daniels, less for her profession or her wit than for her accusations against Trump. They have made a celebrity of the sort of woman Hilary Clinton once called “trailer trash” and “bimbos.”
Meanwhile, Miss America organizers recently announced that its pageant will no longer feature a swimsuit competition. (Actually, the organizers are no longer calling it a pageant, but a contest or a competition or something.) Judges will now evaluate contestants solely on their talent and intelligence. (I am willing to bet money that in less than ten years, men claiming to be women will join the line-up in this competition.)
So we lionize a woman who earned her bucks (bad pun) sporting about naked in front of a camera and became a household name while others are banning from wearing swimsuits in the Miss America pageant.
So I ask: are we a nation of unzipped libertines or blue-nosed prudes?
Bumfuzzling.
Certain advocates of feminism also baffle me.
Ivanka Trump is a beautiful woman, a mother of three, a former model, successful fashion designer, television personality, writer, and key figure in her father’s inner circle. In other words, she appears the quintessential feminist, yet some in the sisterhood viciously attack her in the media, mostly because she is Donald Trump’s daughter.
So I’m wondering: do politics trump (pardon that one) sisterhood? How is it possible that accomplished women like Condoleezza Rice, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Nikki Haley are forbidden seats at the feminist banquet?
Bumfuzzled: that’s me.
Next up on my list of perplexities is Chicago.
Since 2003, murders in Chicago have surpassed the number of US military personnel killed in action in Afghanistan and Iran during this same period. Year after year, the Windy City massacres continue.
Several ironies come into play here. For nearly a hundred years, Chicago has stood as a Democratic stronghold. The city is home to some of the strictest gun control laws in the country. The majority of the murdered are black people killed by other black people.
What sort of city, state, or nation allows such wholesale slaughter to go unchecked year after year? Are we bored? Are we indifferent because most of the victims are black? If black lives really mattered, would not politicians, community organizers like former president Barack Obama, and police work round the clock to end these killings?
You got it: bumfuzzled.