What can I say about JHLB? Let’s start with her status as one of my least favorite humans, and for several good reasons, the least of which may be her having lost our community its local paper. Established in1863, it was a staple of this region’s life and history, recording lives lived while affording folks the ability to stay in touch with community events and one another, as well as to celebrate our rural, sparsely populated chunk of America.
That is a great loss, a terrible loss. How did she do this? Oh, you know, her usual blend of arrogance, incompetence, greed and pure as the driven snow pissed on by packs of ravening coyotes bullshit.
Purchased by JHLB in 2017, the News was gone by 2020, and those of you out there who – between 2019 and 2020 – purchased multi-year subscriptions (buy 2 years get another whole year for free!!), which one of my close friends did, whoops! Because only 6 months later, she shut that paper down. Wait!! JHLB is 100% looking into how you can get that money back, as in oops, not at all. Actually, the way she put it was “I’ll fight to get you your money back” – fight with whom? Yourself? It’s like Orange Menace suing the IRS of which he is in charge. No refund yet, folks, but hey, it’s a mere 6 years later… Thankfully, I didn’t buy a subscription, having got her number (ZERO) years earlier.
The family who had owned the paper all those years thought about starting it up again, but JHLB had loaded it with so much debt – in order to pay off her personal debt (helped along by numerous ‘special deal’ subscription fees) – it was unthinkable, and impossible, even for them.
But that’s the least of it. She’s a bully. So what? So are a lot of people. I’ve been accused of the same thing. She’s a liberal. So what? So am I, but with a significant difference: I support liberal and moderate women in public office, and in various other positions of authority; JHLB makes them her competition. In other words, she’s a Queen Bee liberal, a toxic blend of arrogance and deep longing for proximity to and approval from male sources of power and male power, period.
A conventional, still practicing Catholic, JHLB aspires to community leadership, while having destroyed a local newspaper that actually led, however much I disagreed with their deeply flawed (fact checking? huh?! what’s that?!), sexist former editor, who was additionally easily led by a manipulative asshole/longtime reporter because of course he was – as was JHLB. Still, the newspaper and that idiot of an editor actually served the community. JHLB only serves herself.
But more than anything, what I despise JHLB for is her total failure to protect her own daughter. That betrayal, that horror, makes any friendly relationship between us impossible despite our families having known one another since forever.
JHLB was married twice, and in her first marriage – to a player, it must be admitted – she had a daughter. It must be admitted too that JHLB suffered as a result of having divorced hubby numero 1, her mother determining it was a betrayal of their Catholic values, thus making it her duty to stick with Mr. L whatever and however bad he might or might not be, or how personally miserable she was in the marriage. Despite it all, she forged ahead!!
That JHLB remains a practicing Catholic is intellectually fascinating as well as being part and parcel of her marrow deep psychological (and psychologically nutso) makeup. Women who twist themselves into pretzels to fit into patriarchal forms like the Catholic Church fascinate and repel me in equal measure; it is within the context of this pretzel that – along with shame, hypocrisy and fear of public exposure – led to JHLB’s betrayal of her only child.
Husband numero 2, Mr. B, was, you see, a sexual predator, and he preyed on JHLB’s child. Initially, JHLB did the right thing, contacting the authorities, pressing charges, moving the process along toward officially taking the sexually assaultive Mr. B to task. Then, as her pre-teen child was about to speak to the judge, JHLB told her to change her testimony, to say that she’d ‘made it all up’, which her daughter did. All charges were dropped.
This last minute Hail Mary pass request, this betrayal of her basic parental duty, her daughter told me, was actually worse than the molestation and sexual assaults, because her mother was her custodial parent, and her trusted primary relationship. That made perfect sense to me, the deeper betrayal being her mom’s. How could a mother do this? To avoid a second divorce or the public shame of Mr. B being credibly accused, potentially convicted?
But hey, don’t you worry, JHLB had a solution! Clever girl!! Donna and Walt would be so proud (not)!
Clever JHLB’s solution was to install a padlock on the inside of her daughter’s bedroom door, which required her child to remember to lock it every time she entered her own room, every night before bed, every weekend when she was napping, or studying or… whatever, in order to keep her step-father the fuck out. Nice, eh?
I wonder if any of her daughter’s friends or family members saw that padlock and asked, ‘What the heck is that about?’ I certainly hope so. Ironically, later on JHLB would adopt two boys whose dad was another sexual predator and family member not allowed to be around his own children. Boys would be safe with JHLB, right, given Mr. B was dead by then, and anyway, Mr. B was ‘just’ a predator of girls…!!!
One of my favorite novels is Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, in which a mother betrays a daughter in order to preserve her marriage to a step-father who rapes her child. It was – it felt – authentic and, while shocking, totally real. It is, in fact, Dorothy Allison’s fictional version of the true story of her own life. It is also a direct descendent of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which are chock full of parental betrayals of the worst possible kind. JHLB is a deeply flawed human, and – in my view – an untrustworthy, greedy, hypocritical, dangerous, self-important POS.