RAMBLING NOTES FROM A ROVING RADICAL BEHAVIORIST: CLINTON, BUSH, SKINNER AND SOCIAL DETERMINISM

Behavior and Social Issues, Spring/Summer 2004 by Malott, Richard W

Key words: B. F. Skinner, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, social determinism, biological determinism, radical behaviorism

(Gentle reader: This essay relies on gratuitous, inflammatory political commentary to emphasize its scientific point.)

My Favorite Peckerwood

The peckerwood pecked on the school house door.

Pecked so hard 'til his pecker got sore.

From the old Folkways LP, Prison Songs, collected in the Mississippi prisons by the late Allan Lomax. Unfortunately the Sanitation Department removed it from the CD reissue, which I discovered when I was entertaining the fantasy of compiling a personal CD called Peckerwood Blues, because I have the collector's pathological compulsion not only to categorize but also to subcategorize, and I had to have a subcategory of the blues for white folks singing the blues. Peckerwood is an old, pejorative, southern African-American term for white trash.

I also have the pathological compulsion to Googleize every archaic term I fall in love with. But the only relevant citation I could find was a description of Bill Clinton as a peckerwood. And Clinton is absolutely my favorite Peckerwood president, if not my favorite president period. He impresses me for several reasons:

First, he so dramatically illustrates that men's brains are in their penises. Can you imagine risking the presidency and world security, not to mention marriage to one of the world's smartest, most articulate women, for fellatio by Monica Lewinsky? Marilyn Monroe, a favorite of other presidents, might be more understandable, but Monica Lewinsky?!

Now, it's easy to rationalize that Clinton is just a white-trash aberration and not representative of everyman. But before you make a desperate grab for that straw, consider some old research by David Barlow, where he hooked up a representative sample of red-blooded, freedom defending, American men by their manhood to a mechanical strain gauge, a plethysmograph, one that could measure penile tumescence from a subliminal 1% to an outrageous 100%. Then he showed them slides of nude females from the ages of adulthood to the age of four. And there was no age so young that the image of the nude female did not evoke significant movement on that plethysmograph, thereby revealing that all American men are latent pedophiles.

The Clinton case study and the Barlow experimental research also suggests to me that there is no such thing as a non-sexual, platonic relationship between a red-blooded American man and any female. For further elaboration on this suggestion, check out the CDs and DVDs of the standup routines (not the movies) of our country's most perceptive social analyst under the age of 67, Chris Rock-really.

Second, Clinton impresses me because he kept on trucking in spite of the greatest presidential humiliation since Watergate; not only was his judgment called into question but so was his taste. Any other person would have crawled under the sheets and hid there for a year. As former SNL social analyst, Denis Miller, pointed out, Clinton must have cahones the size of watermelons. What a man.

Third, ever since childhood I've been turned off by ALL politicians, because of their histrionic, hypocritical, chest-thumping hyperbole (aka BS). But Clinton is so straight, so sincere, so well-reasoned that I'd rather be lied to by Clinton than told the truth to by Bush, not that the latter event has ever happened.

(And, to digress briefly, when I see a crowd of yahoos desecrating our American flag by enthusiastically waving little replicas of that great flag during one of Bush's swaggeringly vacuous speeches, I become depressed thinking that we have become a nation of yahoos; and am inclined to agree with the ancient wisdom that, in a democracy, the people get the president they deserve. But the president we deserve may not be the president the whole world deserves.)

(And a little digression on the digression: I wonder if there has ever been a president of the United State whom so many people have hated so intensely. Maybe not the majority of our citizens, but a large and rabid minority. There's little as reinforcing as a good hate. And the reinforcing power of the emotional rush resulting from sharing that Bush hate in person, commentaries, articles, books, cartoons, and email jokes is suggested not only by the frequency of that behavior but especially by its intensity, its vehemence. It's almost as if we Bush haters hope he performs even greater atrocities on humankind, so we can get an even more reinforcing emotional rush, by being even more outraged.)

And finally, Clinton impresses me because he illustrates the extremely rare Abraham Lincoln ability to rise from white-trash, peckerwood obscurity to one of the 100 most powerful positions in this US of A, president of the USA, without having been born into the Harvard-Yale-Princeton power elite ala Bush and so many other presidents, but having worked his way into it, a blow for our side in the nature-nurture debate so recently activated by Richard Herrnstein.