I Need Your Help

I’m smart.

(Right?)

Not to sound like a clingy, insecure twat, but sometimes I’m just not sure.

In college, I made Dean’s List enough times to satisfy my parents, but they were never very demanding, so maybe that’s not the best barometer. I got a “D” in biology, which I took in college, and I suppose I could have managed a “C” if I had gone to class more than maybe 20%. One day, towards the end of the semester, I deigned to show up to take a test and there was a different professor at the front of the room.

“Who the hell is that?” I asked a classmate whose name I did not know.

“That’s the professor,” the girl answered.

“Where’s the other one—the one from the beginning?” I asked, thoroughly confused.

“On maternity leave,” she informed me, staring at me like I had a purple dick growing out of my left eye socket.

There was a pause as I took in that information.

“She was pregnant?”

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John Stewart claims that you have to be smart to be a smart ass, but I’m not so sure, I might have managed to accomplish the latter while sort of skirting the former. I think I’m able to fool most people into thinking that I’m smart—the glasses and tucked-in collar shirts definitely help— and, ever since I was a little boy I’ve used my inordinate vocabulary as a cover for being intellectually average.

It is that intellectual averageness that leads me, more often than not, to lean on far smarter people for assistance. You know the kind of respect I have for you, and so I’m going to lean on you in this post. I really need your help. Your comments aren’t just snappy one-liners to me—they are fuel that helps propel me to a greater understanding of the multi-faceted and complex world in which we all inhabit together.

So, please, will you help me today, my loves?

Will you help me figure out what the fuck is going on with this Betty White shit?

I need your help, because I don’t get it.

I really, really don’t.

On Facebook which, unfortunately, is the most accurate register of popular public sentiment I can find, just take a peek:

153,187 people “like” Betty White’s “page.”

118,620 people “like” her, um, “other page.”

150,156 people want her to host the Academy Awards. Sorry, Steve & Alec.

Amazingly, only 11,786 want her on “GLEE.” Who the hell would she be? Sue Sylvester’s mother?

Right—don’t give them any ideas…

There are also pages devoted to her hosting the Emmys, the Oscars and, yes, an alien parasite. At least somebody out there still has a sense of humor.

So, I’m left to ask—- what the fuck is going on? You’ve obviously got to be smarter than me (I?) to figure this one out. Is this retro feminism? Is this… um… a suddenly socially acceptable fetish? Is it because she’s the last “Golden Girl” still to claim verticality? Even if that is the case—what’s the big deal? In 1975, was the American populous obsessed with Moe Howard—the last surviving member of the original Stooge clan?

I kind of doubt it.

Is she what we want to be when we’re in our eighties? Is she the funniest woman alive? Is the ability to be funny somehow all of a sudden attractive to us—even at Betty White’s age? I don’t know—I still kind of want to watch Sarah Silverman and Janeane Garofalo take a shower together, (gee, I hope they don’t spend much time Googling themselves) but maybe my tastes are somewhat skewed. I’ve been told that before.

Hot, comedic, fantasy-lesbian showering aside, I don’t think anybody would give two shits about Betty White if she’d stroked out years ago and was all bent up like a pretzel in a wheelchair having drool wiped off her chin by some Jamaican nurse assistant. Is that mean? Yes, but, if you think about it, it’s the truth. It’s not enough for us to have nostalgia, the memory of what someone was once upon a time, we need to be presented with a visual that is just what we remember from our own youth, and if that present image deviates from our memory, well, it’s unacceptable. Why do you think she still puts peroxide in her hair—for her health?

I mean, don’t get me wrong. I think Betty White’s meteoric upswing in popularity is great—for her—and I certainly don’t hope she strokes out just to prove my point, but I just kind of wonder what the hell it’s all about and what it says about our society. I don’t think it says anything especially terrible, but I don’t think it says anything particularly great, either. It is pretty amazing that a bunch of twenty and thirty-somethings are under the spell of an elderly woman, but it’s also kind of weird, too. No doubt some stipend-starved grad student has/will a scholarly paper or article about this phenomenon, and they’ll cite statistics and sources and will spend an inordinate amount of their university’s research grants conducting interviews with assholes my age, and I kind of hope they do.

Because I’m fucking stumped. All I know is this: if Betty White scores a gig as Sue Sylvester’s mom, I’m calling her agent, because I want a cut.