This morning, listening to my voicemail following a week off from work, I  found a message from an irate reader who was deeply ticked off by a Times Union reprint of a melancholic blog post I wrote after the election. Apparently it was too melancholic for her taste. Apparently I am too much of a crybaby and just need to get over it. And apparently she was concerned for my maturation and developmental welfare, because  she instructed me, loudly, to “PUT YOUR BIG-GIRL PANTS ON.” Yes, she said this phrase in all-caps. I’m also certain she hyphenated it, because otherwise she’d be telling me to put my big GIRL pants on, and she must know that I already own plenty of those.

In any case, I found her voicemail altogether amusing and entirely old news, because A) I am indeed a crybaby; B); I have a hard time getting over anything, and by anything I mean anything; and C) I DON’T OWN ANY BIG-GIRL PANTS AND NEVER HAVE, FRIENDS. Never will, either. NEVER EVER EVER.

I have always had a problem with pants. In short: I always owned THE WRONG ONES. This means I always wore THE WRONG ONES. My life is a long, sad narrative of bad trousers, misguided jeans, ill-fitting shorts, ludicrous crop pants and miserable, idiotic slacks.

You want proof? Sorry, I don’t have photos of my 1985 culottes. Or the striped purple elephant pants that I wore in a delusional state through most of high school. Or the mustard-colored highwaters that I wore to work for the longest time until I noticed a large bleach splotch on the crotch and realized, what’s more, THAT THEY WERE BUTT-UGLY.

I do, however, have a photo of the purple paisley harem pants that I wore when I met my late husband’s family in 1990. It was Christmas.  I was madly in love with this Chris guy. I wanted to impress his parents and siblings, and so of course I showed up to meet them all in PURPLE PAISLEY HAREM PANTS. These were not big-girl pants. These were not medium-sized-girl pants. I would argue that they did not classify as tiny-girl pants, because even an infant would rip off her diaper and crap all over the things rather than let her idiot mama dress her that way in public. They were, in short, THE WRONG PANTS.

But being lovely, classy, gracious people, my future in-laws never said a peep about the egregious swaths of billowing polyester that cinched around my ankles and made my short, stubby legs look even shorter and stubbier. Not until I mentioned them years later. And they still didn’t say anything. But by then I had  moved on to yet new frontiers of pants stupidity, including the tragic pair of bell-bottomed jeans that I wore long past their expiration date and — even wronger —  the lamentable orange corduroys with the saggy ass and worn-out knees THAT I STILL OWN AND WEAR TO THIS DAY, occasionally over my blue leopard-print pajama bottoms, although not to work, and did I just admit to that in public?

And I haven’t even gotten to the lilac khakis I’ve been squeezing into the last couple of summers. Ooooh, I love those things. Those are seriously NOT big-girl pants. Nope. I won’t be pulling those on to appease any ticked-off readers, that’s for sure. They’ll never grow up. Neither will I.

UPDATE:

I first published this post back in July, after the Republican National Convention. I’m re-publishing it now because I am struck even more by the parallels between Lewis’ vision and today. The idea of a frothing, autocratic demagogue with militias behind him is no mere fiction; the thought of a newly elected president muscling through a racist agenda, fomenting unrest and tossing his enemies behind bars is no mere phantasm. Can you imagine what Lewis would say, were he alive and watching this sick pageant before us? He’d be aghast.

And yet I keep recalling my mother’s words after the Soviet Union fell. “Democracy is messy,” she observed. “I don’t think the Russians realize how messy it is.” She had faith in that messiness. She believed devoutly in our ability, as a nation, to make mistakes and recover from them. The great gift of democracy is the authority it gives us to make those mistakes. It grants us the power to do the right thing, yes, but it also gives us the power to do the wrong thing, and it is in that power — to screw up, sometimes spectacularly — where we prove ourselves as Americans. The genius of this radically inclusive system,  and the never-ending terror of it, lie in our own fallibility and potential for electoral fiascoes. It lies in our humanity, in our brokenness, in our best intentions curbed by our worst impulses.

And it lies in our resilience. Our stubbornness. Our innate, star-spangled, mulish optimism, which pushes us onward and upward through the muck. Since when do Americans give up on anything? Since when do we give up on each other?

Below, then, is my original post from this past summer. Read it and vote. And remember: Whoever wins on Tuesday, and whatever holy chaos results, we damn well need to get through it together. The mess is ours. The mess is us. God bless America.

***

ORIGINAL POST:

“Aside from his dramatic glory, Buzz Windrip was a Professional Common Man.

Oh, he was common enough. He had every prejudice and aspiration of every American Common Man . . . . But he was the Common Man twenty times magnified by his oratory, so that while the other Commoners could understand his every purpose, which was exactly the same as their own, they saw him towering among them, and they raised hands to him in worship.”

***

Buzz Windrip, in case you hadn’t met him, is the fascist demagogue in Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 satire “It Can’t Happen Here,” which pundits have sometimes invoked in the long months since Donald Drumpf first rose to prominence in this election, and then rose and rose again. It is not the world’s greatest novel, being overwritten, under-realized and saddled with way too much dated lingo for 21st-century eyeballs. Also, Buzz is not an exact fictional counterpart; for one thing, he runs as a Democrat.

But as the Republican National Convention concluded last week, I kept thinking about Lewis’s vision — and his characterization of a power-crazed, racist incendiary who runs for president with the support of a hoodwinked populace.

Windrip isn’t an Everyman, but he does a good job faking it for the disaffected, underserved, frustrated masses. He’s both one of them and a cut far above them, someone who claims the power and the wherewithal to make promises he has no intention of fulfilling: among them, a $5,000 guaranteed income. This is where the parallels with Drumpf pique and scare the bejesus out of me, because, just like Windrip, this cheap Narcissus has bamboozled his supporters into believing that he cares about them. He doesn’t. This is what he cares about: Donald Drumpf.

In “It Can’t Happen Here,” apologists and toadies fall into line, assuming Windrip will moderate once elected, but of course he doesn’t. He creates a militia. He tosses Supreme Court justices in prison. He takes over the media. He establishes concentration camps for dissenters. And so on. I am not saying any of that will happen if Drumpf is elected; I’m not saying we’re doomed to endure a real-world version of an 81-year-old novel. But we need to pay attention. We need to be vigilant about this democracy of ours. We need to tell ourselves it can happen here, or we’ll be lazy about ensuring that it won’t.