Friday, December 18, 2020

Doctor, Doctor - Give Me The News

 So the Cleveland baseball team will, eventually, stop embarrassing themselves by showing up with a racist epithet on their jerseys. One hundred five years after they started.

Huzzah.

Meanwhile, a hundred years after the women's suffrage movement finally won women of all political persuasion the vote here in the United States, there are some who suggest that women shouldn't be doctors. I'm looking at you, Joseph Epstein. In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Mister Epstein suggested that "Jill Biden should think about dropping the honorific, which feels fraudulent, even comic." If you've been staying in the house and have grown tired of watching anything but The Crown, you may have missed the moment when the Electoral College finally gathered and did their thing, exhausting all but the most ridiculous paths to the re-election of the former game show host and soon to be former "president." Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States. He won. A bunch of times. A bunch of different ways. But that hasn't kept the "faithful" from trying to drum up support for frivolous lawsuits and howling loudly in the streets to keep the inevitable from happening. 

Mister Epstein, who  was fired "for being insufficiently correct politically" from his job as editor of the American Scholar back in 1997, had other insufficiently correct politically words to toss into the fray that has been the 2020 election. His suggestion that Doctor Jill Biden drop the Doctor from her name as she ascends to the title of First Lady was met with some derision. It is Joseph, I'll call him "Mister" Epstein, that wanted Doctor Biden to come clean about her title, Doctor of Education. He harps on about how writing a dissertation doesn't automatically bestow Doctor on someone. He claims that he has an honorary doctorate, but no one calls him Doctor Epstein. He goes on, "A wise man once said that no one should call himself “Dr.” unless he has delivered a child." Going hyper-literal here: If a person was to deliver a baby himself, that would be some sort of medical miracle, and since Doctor Biden has given birth, it seems as though this tossed gauntlet has been picked up and slapped back some time ago.

There are those who, most correctly politically or not, have pointed out that "Mister" Epstein would never have written such an article about a man. This is made even more evident by reviewing some of "Mister" Epstein's previous writings, like the one in which he wrote that he “would wish homosexuality off the face of this earth." Later he wrote that," given a choice, owing to the complications of homosexual life, most people would prefer their children to be heterosexual.” 

Of course, "Mister" Epstein wrote those words some time ago, and history has changed the face of our country many times since then. But my guess is that he'll still be wearing his Cleveland Indians jersey and belittling the accomplishments of women until he goes to that big cocktail party in the sky. 

If he gets invited. 

No comments:

Post a Comment