HIS DARKER SELF

My yearbook page doesn't look anything like this,
and not just because I didn't own a sports car.

By the time you read this (that is, if you really do read this), Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam could be on his way to collecting a five-figure pension, having just spent a weekend unable to give a straight answer to a question that most 21st-century politicians have never been asked: Are you in blackface or under the Ku Klux Klan outfit?

Granted, it's difficult to remember everything you did 35 years ago. Speaking personally, I couldn't tell you exactly what I did 35 minutes ago. But there are some things that are just so unusual, so striking, that to say they slipped your mind makes one think that you slipped on your mind. Like, did you pose in blackface or under the Ku Klux Klan outfit?

Bing definitely isn't dreaming of a white Christmas.

I ask the question twice because it just seems to be something most people could answer relatively quickly. Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, and Freeman Godsen & Charles Correll (a/k/a Amos & Andy) would have no problem, that's for sure. Even fellows you wouldn't necessarily expect -- Bing Crosby, Laurel & Hardy, the Marx Brothers -- could recollect those singular moments: Nope, no way am I the guy in the Ku Klux Klan outfit.

Any longtime observer of politicians caught in the beartrap of their own misbegotten behavior can easily spot the signs that will likely lead Northam to his resignation. First, just boasting that he would never resign is the political equivalent of the highway sign reading LAST EXIT BEFORE TOLL. Like the wise man said, those who ignore history are doomed to hold embarrassing press conferences.

Second, the aforementioned ever-changing explanation. Behind door one: blackface. Behind door two, KKK. What do you choose, Ralph? One day, "not sure". Next day, "not me at all". Yet it's on your page in your med school yearbook with other pictures of you. And your nickname was "Coonman" even though you claim not to know why. No wonder why CNN misidentified the Governor as a Republican. (Full disclosure: I don't know why my childhood nickname was Moose.) 

If my wife ever gave me that look in public,
I'd find the nearest sewer to crawl into.

Third -- the most heinous of all -- Northam completed the cowardly/disgraced politician's hat trick by dragging his humiliated wife onstage during his non-confession. Good Lord, man, isn't it bad enough that she's married to you -- now she has to drown in the waves of your bile? What on earth goes through men's minds (and those of their advisors) when they think this looks good? The poor woman even had to prevent her idiot husband from demonstrating his Moonwalk skills! If there are things wives find unforgiveable of their husbands, this must rank #2 behind him screwing his mistress in the window of Best Buy.

If that wasn't enough, Ralphie-boy tried to excuse it all away by using the old everybody did it routine. Which might have been true if he graduated from med school in 1921. But in 1984? Well... he just might be right. USA Today provided a list of five politicians, Northern and Southern alike, who had no idea that their fairly recent blackface appearances would ever be considered insulting. Now you know why it never occurred to these people that such a thing would ever be considered detrimental to their political careers. Everybody, it seemed to them, really did do it! (I think Herman Goering made a similar excuse, but that was over 70 years ago.)

The author in 1975, dreaming up his next
tasteless stunt.

Not that I'm innocent. There are things I did during my early college years that make me embarrassed now; things I witnessed that were hilarious at the time which no longer pass the (literal) laugh test. No, my hands aren't entirely clean (except of black shoe polish).

And I can take a trip down memory lane even further, like being called into the principal's office after momentarily dislocating a classmate's thumb in 6th grade. That was 50 years ago. Do I have an extraordinary memory? Not at all! I just remember shit I did. For that alone, I'm more qualified than Ralph Northam to be governor of Virginia.

If I can pat myself on the back at all, it's because the stuff that would derail a politician's career was over by the end of my sophomore year -- hence the phrase "sophomoric humor". If there's a phrase for "final year of med school humor", I would've thought it represented something classier than what I participated in at 19. 

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