Mittie the Moocher
He
gave her his townhouse and his racing horses,
Each meal she ate was a dozen courses,
She had a million dollars worth of nickels and
dimes,
She sat around and counted them all a million
times.
--Cab
Calloway, “Minnie the Moocher,” 1930
Like many people interested in politics, I spent much of
yesterday mesmerized by coverage of Mitt Romney’s “secret tapes.” It’s hard to say what aspect was most
entertaining, the candidate’s stupefying lack of logic or the buzzard flash mob
quickly conjured by panicky conservative pundits. On the first point:
hmmm, I did and will vote for President Obama, which puts me and most of
my family and friends in the 47% who, because we won’t vote for Governor Romney
. . . don’t pay taxes, see ourselves as victims, get government handouts, and
have no sense of personal responsibility.
That would be no, no, no, and no.
On the second point: if the
enemy of my enemy is my friend, does that mean I now have to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal and the Weekly Standard?
[For those who haven't heard or read the remarks, here's a link to the complete surreptitious video:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/watch-full-secret-video-private-romney-fundraiser]
A tune started to play in my head while I watched Mitt Romney
dismiss half of the American electorate – Cab Calloway’s “Minnie the
Moocher.” This terrific
jazz/blues/scat song was composed near the beginning of the Great Depression;
it alternates between narrative lyrics and call-and-response scat singing. The ‘story’ of the song concerns
Minnie’s attempts to sponge off rich men (including the “King of Sweden” who
“gave her things that she was needin’”).
Unfortunately, the wages of mooching are sin and ruin; Minnie hooked up
with “Smokie,” who in turn hooked her on cocaine and opium. We are left, after a bravura barrage of
scatting, with the plaintive refrain, “Poor Min, Poor Min.”
Here are two versions of the song:
--an excellent early
recording (not a video)
--a fun video showing
Cab Calloway and his orchestra in full performance mode, from
The Blues Brothers (1980):
The moral of the song, if one cares to extract one, is the
same as the moral Mitt Romney was pushing in Boca Raton. ‘Moochers’ – those who live off the
largesse of others – are weak, dissolute, and a drag on society. The song can also be read as a lament
for or critique of the excesses of the Roaring Twenties, when fun, overindulgence,
and magic money seemed to bury the Puritan work ethic. Similarly, people like Governor Romney appear to run on nostalgia fumes generated by a mythology of better, simpler,
more ‘American’ times before they were ruined by entitlements, immigrants, and
redistribution of wealth.
I love Cab Calloway, and I feel silly burdening his wildly
inventive song with ideological descants (even in the service of semi-satirical
commentary). Nonetheless, I’m not
the only one to do so. In 1932,
the animation pioneers Max and Dave Fleischer released a cartoon version of
“Minnie the Moocher,” starring Betty Boop, her canine boyfriend Bimbo, and Cab
Calloway as a menacing ghost walrus.
This has got to be one of the greatest cartoons ever. Luckily, it’s available online:
The moral remains
the same, but the terms have shifted.
Betty Boop decides to run away from home after being scolded by her
parents for irresponsibility. She
climbs out her bedroom window at night, joins Bimbo, and they end up in a
hallucinatory, sexualized Plato’s Cave in which spectral figures materialize to
the strains of “Minnie the Moocher,” conducted by the Walrus (goo-goo-g’joob –
the walrus was animated using the Fleischer rotoscope process, in which cartoons
are drawn directly over filmed images . . . in this case, of Cab Calloway
performing the title song).
Skeletons drink poison booze (which turn their bodies black – make of
that what you will), ghosts are electrocuted, phantasmal kittens cannibalize
the body of their phantasmal cat mother.
Surrounded by these horrors, including a particularly disturbing
ululating witch, Betty and Bimbo flee the cave for the safety of “Home, Sweet
Home.”
The Fleischer
cartoon foregrounds the original lyrics’ sexual component (Minnie was a
“red-hot hootchie-cootcher,” i.e. a prostitute) and turns them into a
cautionary tale. Betty Boop –
although drawn as a sexually seductive woman – is also a ‘good girl’ living
with her parents. Leaving the
shelter of home (with her boyfriend, no less) exposes her to all sorts of physical
and emotional dangers. That she
ends up safe in bed – alone – underscores the value of obedience and
chastity.
Again, reading a brilliantly
surreal cartoon seriously does a disservice to its delightfulness. Yet watching the depression-era
“Talkartune” brings up a few other dimensions of the current discussion about
‘mooching.’
Betty Boop, deterred
from a life of dissolute ‘mooching,’ is saved from being a victim. Victimhood is sexualized – it’s a
female thing that happens to the weaker sex, particularly when women don’t
listen to their fathers or father figures. Why does this remind me of the recent controversies about
abortion, rape, and even birth control?
Why is it always ‘Welfare Queens’ who suck money and freebies from the
public tit, rather like the rapacious ghost kittens in Fleisher’s cartoon?
Mitt Romney’s
remarks in Florida, and his disastrously premature remarks about violent unrest
in North Africa, exhibit an odd hyper-masculinity. We should never apologize, never be weak, never show our taxes,
never condescend to listen to people with whom we don’t agree, never coddle
those in difficult circumstances.
We should draw lines in the sand and be ready to bomb the hell out of
any place that doesn’t recognize our irrefutable supremacy and moral
rectitude. We should be Leaders
from Outfront rather than Leaders from Behind (that would be: followers). We should be Makers, not Takers. We should be Ayn Randian Capitalist
Heroes in public, and firm but fair Paterfamiliases in private.
Those who don’t fit
into this equation are feminized in Romneyesque discourse. They apologize and sympathize. They think that hope-and-change fairy
dust can solve real problems. They
are weak and lazy. They lack
responsibility. They are
freeloaders. They are infected with ‘foreignness.’
And so on.
Both in Calloway’s
song and the Fleischers’ cartoon, Minnie mooches (or might mooch) off men
because that’s the only course open to her. New Deal programs were not enacted until later, so living on
the government ‘dole’ was not an option.
Today, the social safety net first woven in the 1930s, though frayed and
threatened, remains in place, as do the gendered roles assigned to the provided
and the provided for.
So as we wimpy
47-percenters swan around our government-subsidized housing counting food
stamps, we think back to when we were manfully employed. I don’t know about you, but my average
tax rate has been around 30%. I
have no recourse to exotic tax shelters, or even to many deductions. One could argue that hugely rich men
who do have such recourse, and take advantage of it, could be justly described
as ‘moochers.’ Unless, according
to Mitt Romney’s logic, they are Republicans.
Oh well. Barring some catastrophe, we may be
witnessing the end of Governor Romney’s viability as a Presidential
candidate. As cranky Conservatives
call for his head, or his campaign chief’s head, or advisors and pollsters and
strategists’ heads, they may be sealing his fate and guaranteeing the outcome
that they don’t want: four more
years of Barack Obama and the supremacy of tax-evading, negligent,
government-dependent slacker-citizens.
Which might make Mitt Romney adopt a new favorite song, the song Betty
Boop sings in the Fleischers' “Minnie the Moocher” when she cries over her
parents’ attempts to make her a responsible young woman:
They always, always pick on me;
They never, never let me be . . .
When I’m gone, you wait
and see,
They’ll all be sorry that they picked on me.
To which the 47%,
now swollen to 51% or more, could reply, in Cab Calloway’s immortal words:
Oh,
skip-bop-doop-bop-lay-de-doo!
Skee-bop-de-google-eet-skee-bop-de-goat!
Skeet-dot’n-dot’n-dot’n-dot’n-dottee-oh!
Hi-de-hi-de-ho! Hi-de-hi-de-ho!
