Down with First Ladies

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, July 13, 2022

 

Ah, Jill Biden — I had almost forgotten she exists.

 

Jill Biden has been run through the wringer of ritual denunciation for saying that Latinos in Texas are special and unique, like . . . breakfast tacos.

 

Really.

 

About that “diversity” — I don’t know if we are going to land on Latinos or the ridiculous Latinx (la-TINKS?) or the fading Hispanic or a former contender such as Chicano. But I do wonder why in the first place we need a catch-all term to use to lump together people who don’t actually have all that much in common. It is not as though ranchers from Mexican backgrounds who have been in Texas since the 18th century — the people who are serious and literal about that “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us!” stuff — see truckloads of Guatemalan illegals being dumped in Bexar County three times a week and exclaim: “My people!” That whole identity issue exceeds my remit, but I think we can all agree on what we call people who get super-excited about breakfast tacos:

 

Gringos.

 

Set aside, for the moment, the obvious fact that breakfast tacos are not, pace Dr. Biden, unique. They’re made in batches, so one chorizo-egg-and-cheese on flour is pretty much the same as the next one. And that’s fine: All normal people of all races and ethnicities like a good breakfast taco, and if I were of Mexican background, I’m sure I’d be proud to be associated with such fine comestibles, even if nobody goes to Denver and says: “All you pot-smoking snowbillies make me think of omelets.”

 

A good breakfast taco is very good.

 

But the people who go into spasms of ecstasy over this or that breakfast taco? The people who make Yelp lists of the 20 Best Breakfast Tacos in Austin? Those people are Anglos. Crackers. Honkies. Those people are about as Mexican as the taco bowls at the Trump Tower Grill. Those are Audi-driving Whole Foods shoppers.

 

My people.

 

The Bidens are surely just about the whitest family in America (Hunter Biden puts the crack in cracker, does he not?), and Jill Biden’s jamón-handed attempt to show that she’s down with the brown was pretty bad. Cringe, as the kids say. First Lady Jill Biden is an embarrassment, but there is a prior question: Why is there a First Lady Jill Biden at all? Why does this person exist?

 

Previously, Jill Biden’s great contribution to American public life had been providing regular opportunities to mock education doctorates and the habit of people who hold such degrees of affecting the title “Doctor,” as Mrs. Biden does. But now she is ready to make a real and lasting contribution to American public life by dint of her example.

 

We have to get rid of first ladies.

 

First ladies are the worst. All of them, even the ones I like.

 

We live in a republic, not an elected monarchy, and the fact that a woman happens to be married to the president ought properly to mean absolutely nothing for her role in American life. Of course, it is a curiosity. But that we have made it a position and a rank — first! — smacks of the kind of formal aristocracy that we fought a revolution to liberate ourselves from.

 

And, inevitably, the “first lady” begat the “second lady,” or, perhaps even more nauseating, the “second gentleman” in the case of Douglas Emhoff, a poor dumb bastard for whom I legitimately feel sorry. Imagine putting in all that hard work being evil at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman and ending up as an accoutrement to an accoutrement to such a nullity as Dr. Jill Biden’s husband. That is practically purgatorial.

 

If there is a “second lady,” then there must be a “third lady.” I know who the third lady was in the Trump administration — Melania — but who is the third lady/gentleman now? Paul Pelosi, I guess.

 

We don’t need a “first lady.” I don’t know if IBM CEO Arvind Krishna is married, but I guarantee you that if he is, nobody calls his wife the “first lady” of IBM. Karen S. Lynch’s husband isn’t the “first gentleman” of CVS Health. Surely the government of the United States of America can manage to be at least as republican in its manners as the Fortune 500. Patty Smyth is the woman who sang “Goodbye to You,” not some special weird minor figure ceremonial in the tennis world because of her marriage to that lunatic John McEnroe. Dr. Jill Biden is a lightly accomplished, half-educated Ed.D-holding numbskull who sees the locals in San Antonio and thinks: “Tacos. What these people remind me of is tacos.”

 

Nobody would care if she weren’t married to the president. Nobody should care, even though she is.

 

It may sound like I am being facetious, but I’m not: I think we should abolish the term “first lady” and close down all official “first lady”-related programs in the White House. I am a big fan of penny-pinching, but this isn’t about nickels and dimes: It is about the fact that we don’t have kings and queens, don’t need some ersatz version of royalty, and — I hope! — don’t want one.

 

Down with the first lady. This one, and all of them.