Country songs and ‘scandals’

Driving along recently, I had a heretical thought: A person could get more sensible advice about men and women from the country oldies station than The New York Times. Or from The Washington Post, The New Republic, National Review or any publication devoted to nonstop analysis of metropolitan sexual angst written by 20-something Women's Studies majors from expensive liberal arts colleges.

See, I'd been thinking about "Grace," the anonymous protagonist of a kiss-and-tell narrative in something called Babe. Of course there was a lot more than kissing in Grace's graphic account of a one-night-stand gone wrong with a public figure, comedian Aziz Ansari.

Anyway, on the car radio came Travis Tritt's classic country hit "Here's a Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares)."

"Call someone who'll listen and might give a damn / Maybe one of your sordid affairs / But don't you come 'round here handin' me none of your lines / Here's a quarter, call someone who cares."

There's scarcely a man alive who can't identify, if only on a vestigial level.

I've been lucky in love all my life, but anybody who's never experienced rejection and heartbreak hasn't really lived. That's one of country music's enduring lessons.

Anyway, according to her own account, this Grace person pursued a well-known celebrity until she caught him. She ended up half in the bag at his place and helped him take her clothes off, at which point things evidently went bad — to hear her tell it.

There's a country song about that, too — Loretta Lynn's "Don't Come Home A-Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind)" — although it's about husbands and wives. Next morning, Grace sent Ansari an angry text saying he should have responded more tenderly to her "nonverbal" reluctance. He apologized. Next came the pseudonymous screed in Babe, pretty much a backstabbing careerassassination attempt. And still the hapless comic has continued to apologize to every feminist writer on the East Coast. In less enlightened circles, there's a redneck proverb to the effect that if you couldn't have sex with women, there would be a bounty on them.

Far from me to endorse so crass a sentiment, but it does occur to me that a woman who threw herself under a Travis Tritt or a Hank Williams Jr. would likely know better than to expect whatever it was "Grace" expected.

Meanwhile what's amazed me — as an inveterate reader of novels and opinion columns written by women — has basically been two things: what naive readers, and supposedly educated people, can be when their ideological passions are engaged; also that nobody's thought to turn the situation inside-out.

In literary terms, any halfway sophisticated reader would call Grace an unreliable narrator. Her version of events is highly subjective, prone to exaggeration and her motives suspect. People prating about "unequal power dynamics" and "patriarchy" treat the fool thing as scripture.

SAnsari has been too much of a gentleman, to use an outdated concept, to respond in kind. But suppose he did? To wit, what if the genders were reversed, and Grace found herself lampooned by name in a comedy routine?

It would cause quite a stir, is all I can say.

Which brings us to the saga of the president and the porn star, also anticipated in a country song: "Fancy," by Reba McEntire.

She sang, "Just be nice to the gentlemen, Fancy / and they'll be nice to you."

However, the song's "Fancy" was merely a courtesan, like a couple of Trump's wives. But there are a couple of unique things about porn stars, which our naive chief executive clearly neglected to take into consideration.

First, "Stormy Daniels" is by definition an exhibitionist, so of course she's going to tell. Second, Trump's bagman/lawyer could buy her off, but the nondisclosure agreement ended the moment he was elected and she realized how to monetize her notoriety.

Meanwhile, the only halfway appropriate country music accompaniment for the tale of Hillary Clinton and the misbehaving spiritual adviser would have to be Dolly Parton's "Nine to Five."

Anyway, I've got an aversion to preachers in politics. If I'd been running things, he'd have been shown the exits after the first naughty email — although none of us knows how naughty it was.

What we do know, however, is that Hillary's getting scolded for "protecting" a staffer charged with sexual harassment after merely docking his pay and mandating therapy.

Which happens to be, as writer Joe Conason points out, exactly how The New York Times dealt with ace reporter Glenn Thrush, who blames heavy drinking.

There must be a million country songs about that.