Cocktailhag, the blog

Growing up, my sister had a doll named Chatty Cathy.  She was a large doll, a life-size 3-year old girl (but oddly with a flip hairdo like the sorority girls in Animal House, especially at first…) whom, when a string was pulled in her back, a paleotechnic speaker in her chest would squawk out something cute and endearing yet startlingly dumb, ten or so words long, as the string slowly retracted for another pull.  Unfortunately, the technology at the time only allowed her to say about six things, which gets pretty boring even for a four year old, and worse, since she was programmed to say things randomly, she often repeated the same dumbass thing twice in a row.  This rather significant technological shortcoming turned her rapidly from a treasured Christmas toy to an object of ridicule, though never in front of Mom because we were already deeply skeptical about Santa and didn’t want to do anything to discourage her from buying such stupid but nonetheless big toys in the future.  No biting the hand, and all that.  She sat for years in a chair in my sister’s room, scaring all of us at least once or twice, especially in the dark, with her spooky, lifelike stare.

If Chatty Cathy were alive today, I think you could guess her political affiliation; heck, she’d be a girl sidekick on Fox, or at least the former governor of Alaska or the former Miss California.  Maybe those gals just wear that expensive and suggestive clothing so the audience will be too distracted to notice the strings hanging out of their backs as they say “We’re a Christian Nation” for the umpteenth, otherwise potentially boring, time.  The speech technology has improved considerably, though, much to my chagrin, and no doubt to Cathy’s as well.  Now they have about two dozen speechettes, conveniently formulated to be applicable to about a dozen subjects each, and when something doesn’t fit, pull the string and hear the modern, digitized voice, which sounds so lifelike, purr, “Why do you hate America?”  Still, I don’t think we kids would have fallen for that either, for the same reason we disdained poor Cathy, no doubt wounding her to her plastic soul.  It turns out that in the 1960′s, her time simply had not yet come.

Ask about subjects as diverse as health care, unemployment benefits extensions, aid to education, infrastructure, the tax code, bank regulation, and many others, and pull the string, and our latter day Chatty Cathys say, “(squawk) This is socialism, just like Stalin, Mao, and Hitler.”  Ask about terrorism, war, civil liberties, Gitmo, torture… you name it, and the box squawks out, “You sound like Neville Chamberlain, whoever he was.”  Ask about anything to do with social injustice, poverty, suffering, lack of health care, and decent (or any) employment, and as the string retracts, Chatty Cathy says something garbled about worthless freeloaders.  You get the idea.

You see, to the modern right, Chatty Cathy has become the model of political discourse.  They always have an tidily short answer, no matter how inane or irrelevant, to every question, and unlike with my sister or any normal child, their tired words are treated as something new, profound, and revealing, and their comfortable familiarity is a feature, not a bug, as it sadly wasn’t with Cathy.  And, unlike Cathy, the speechettes can be replaced when they become shopworn or too thoroughly exploded.  Thus, no one says, “(squawk) We have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here” anymore.  That string got pulled too many times, as you’ll remember.  And after repeating singsong bromides favoring indefinite detention, abolition of Habeus Corpus, warrantless wiretaps, and on and on for a half dozen years and more, the post-2008 Cathys have a new chip that has fervent but typically out-of -context blather about that Constitution thingy, a document that supposedly loves the police state but loathes universal health care.  Similarly, another chip has of late been rolled out about the horror of deficits, too late to stop them, but Cathy never read newspapers much, so she was understandably a bit late to the field.  Better late than never, though.

Thom Hartmann has recently established a special line for conservative callers, one that moves them to the front of the queue, so I’ve been treated to the return of dozens of Chatty Cathys in the past few weeks, and it’s weird how little she has changed after all these years.  The only innovation seems to be the chip updating and the fact that when you pull the string, she often shouts out her whole repertoire, one after the other; she seems to have gotten herself a really long string this time around.  It didn’t fool me then, though, and it doesn’t fool me now, but since it clearly fools a whole lot of people, I think Chatty Cathy has an unprecedented chance to finally make her big comeback, just in time for Christmas.  (oops.. I meant the “holidays”….)  She’d probably need new hair, and one false eye and eyelash replaced after that unfortunate firecracker incident, but besides that, she’s tanned, rested, and ready for her close-up.