A number of people have quoted their mothers, lately. It makes me wonder, what — someday — my children might remember of me.
I’d like to think they’ll remember my insistence that “Saying you’re sorry doesn’t count unless you are looking into your brother’s eyes.”
But it’s far more likely to be something I screeched in the heat of a long-ago moment — like, when they were tossing a toy truck around in my living room (the only room with breakable knick-knicks) and I screamed, “If it leaves your hand, it leaves the house!”
When the toy next got thrown (as I knew it would), I snatched it away, opened the front door…and hurled it out into the snow. Oh, the howling! (Okay, so they thought it went into the snow, but it really only went as far as the screened-in porch. Still, it’s the thought that counts.)
James Comey quoted his mother — sort of — in testimony to Congress, when a senator asked him “Do you want to say anything as to why we should believe you?”
Mr. Comey replied, “My mother raised me not to say things like this about myself.” I guess she wanted him to be modest.
More recently, someone else quoted his mother.
It was John Kelly, the Marine Corps general who is now President Trump’s chief of staff, angrily calling a certain Florida congresswoman “an empty barrel.” Kelly explained the phrase on Fox earlier this year: “As my blessed mother used to say, ‘empty barrels make the most noise.’”
Kelly spoke recently to the White House press corps, ostensibly to explain the rituals of military death and mourning, which he sadly knows, having lost one son in battle himself. And he started out with a very spare, very moving account of what happens when someone’s family member is lost.
But he quickly turned a corner, into criticizing one family who had recently received a condolence call from President Trump and felt the worse for the experience. And said so.
Mr. Kelly apparently was “stunned” that the family’s congresswoman had listened in on the call — something he knew because he had listened in, himself.
Now, if a member of the U.S. Congress is close enough to a bereaved family that they invite her to sit with them in their car, at an airport, waiting for a casket — and she does it! — that is really nobody else’s business. And if the family say they’re hurt by something anybody says, you needn’t be an expert on protocol to know there’s only one acceptable response:
“I’m sorry.”
And if Mr. Kelly — or his boss — had mustered the strength to do that, we could all have moved on, and listened to the beauties of their tax plan for lo, the past many days.
Instead, Mr. Kelly launched an attack on the congresswoman, calling her “the emptiest of barrels” and accusing her of self-serving grandstanding at an event he happened to attend, the dedication of a new FBI building in 2015.
The trouble is, as columnist Eric Zorn wrote in the Chicago Tribune, “White House chief of staff John Kelly got every important point (of his criticism) wrong.”
Or, as my mother never said, “If you can’t say anything nice about someone, call a press conference and tell a passel of lies.”
Of course, who cares if Mr. Kelly gets a few little facts wrong? It’s not like he’s a reporter. No— he’s only the closest advisor there is, to the most powerful man on the planet! What difference do a few facts make, in the Oval Office? Apparently, none.
Kelly misses the olden days. “You know, when I was a kid growing up, a lot of things were sacred in our country. Women were sacred…. That’s obviously not the case any more as we see from recent cases. … Gold Star families, I think that left in the convention over the summer.”
Calling a woman “an empty barrel” sure doesn’t sound respectful to me. But what do I know?
Here’s the thing. Mr. Kelly, you claim to mourn the loss of honor and integrity in our society. But you only held this press conference because your boss, the President of the United States, couldn’t stop a name-calling battle with the women of a Gold Star family.
Your boss has attacked Gold Star families; war heroes; handicapped persons; and, in the most vulgar terms possible, women. So now, you are telling tales, in the service of the emptiest, noisiest barrel of them all.
As my mother would say, Shame on you.
