Achy breaky heart

I am really an oldie. I do not know the Kardashians, though I remember a Robert, one of O. J. Simpson’s good friends who, without formally joining the dream team, stayed in the background so that he can hanky-panky without being legally accountable.

I went to school in Kentucky and Texas half of the ’60s and the start of the ’70s. I did not listen to country music because I grew up worrying just how many Patsy Clines one can sing. I did not know of Billy Ray Cyrus except I recall his name associated with a line dance craze I watched but did not practice. Touted as one of the best in country western, I got versed in Billy Ray’s Achy Breaky Heart.

The uppity crowd of Washington, D.C. considered the song one of the worst songs ever written. But I was clear America was better off doing line dancing rather than dusting off the Garand or oiling the Enfield rifle, hoarding an M-16 or AK-47, and palming a 9mm Beretta, nursing a grudge on an acquaintance, a classmate, or a neighbor.

I taught at CNMI PSS (I subbed until Ms. Janet of SVES thought my extensive travels were good for Social Studies) bringing a wide range of global teaching experiences reflected in the pedagogical ease, comfort, confidence and composure I manifested in the classroom.

I head in this direction because in the last four years, I was considered a wordsmith to friends who read my ST writings. I also taught Oral English to university students, lectured in macroeconomics to foreign students at Shenyang Aerospace U, tutored students at Shou Wang School, and held English conversations at the bar down the street that grows cannabis in its front pots. I knew a lot of twerps, but I never heard of “twerking” before.

A portmanteau of “twist” and “jerk”, twerking is a sexually suggestive way of dancing in the U.S. deep South where getting down “dirty” included those who “twerked” their butt down to and up from the floor. So when Miley Cyrus popularized the style, I realized how far back I had calcified. I did not know Miley Cyrus, and when I was told that she and Justin Bieber twerked in a video, I quietly asked, “Who is Bieber?” (I resided in Prairie Canada in the late ’70s but that was before he was a twinkle in his parents’ eyes.) 

I got straightened out on the boyish Canadian who ludicrously sang “Baby” with deep voiced Ludacris, then got introduced to a scantily clad Miley as a child of Billy Ray Cyrus of Achy Breaky Heart. That left me holding the tail end of twerking. Some of my students in China wanted to know what twerking was, or, if they already knew, wanted to know if it was legal in America so they can learn it well and be ready to dance it when they got to Uncle Sam’s shores!

Now media tries to paint an “achy breaky heart” scenario for Obama after the midterm elections. As midterm elections go, the incumbent did not lose as much compared to recent Presidents during their term. Obama was not on the ballot; many Democrats distanced themselves from the White House rather than deal with the manifest ire of the white male, many of whom were southern Democrats who voted Republican.

Mary Landrieu, Louisiana’s lady senator, was the only one who had enough guts to point out the obvious, that whites have problems with the President given his Kenyan and Anglophile pedigree. Surprisingly, the lady was ahead in the actual voting vs. poll count though she may not survive the runoff. But if she does, that will be one “achy breaky heart” for the Republicans I will not mind.

Like Obama, though a Democrat in Hawaii, I am of the Abe Lincoln Republican Party against the likes of George Wallace. Call him names but BHO is one smart dude. White males of both parties have machismo and race problems with the Brit-Kenyan-Hawaiian-Indonesian American and vented it in the polls, a reflex after the fact. Commentators after the last election who analyze the current political situation say that of the waged culture war, the liberals and the progressives won!

Now come the conservative bishops of the Roman Catholic Church who call Francis the Protestant Pope when he opened up church discourse without much reservation or secrecy; the bishops are up in arms over the Vatican’s welcoming stance on the LGBT crowd and divorcees.

In Western Alberta this summer, I told a colleague, “I want to be old, to look old, to be listened to for the wisdom of my experience rather than the cosmetology of my skin. I am old, and I love it.” Folks obsess at looking young; nothing is more ridiculous than someone trying to fit into tight denims marketed for people more than half their age at three inches less on the girth. Virtual reality is where America’s butt lives.

“Achy breaky heart” is probably not the metaphor I’d use to lament the coming of old age—wrinkles on the brow, lines under the eyelashes, spandex battle at the bulge, the debate on the extra sugar in the tea, and tiffs with those who can’t handle Francis. I am a real oldie who is a Goldie, though, no longer pliant to twerk!