Bakers of the world, unite!

I always thought of the Girl Scouts as a consolation prize for girls who wanted to be Boy Scouts.  Boy Scouts had knives and khaki uniforms, and were taken to the woods by Scout Leaders and forced to find their way home using only the stars and Boy Scout compasses.  They had an official handbook that was reviewed by Paul Fussell,* and they won merit badges for things like raising hogs and building tree houses.  Eventually they could become Eagle Scouts, which was dazzling, and then, I don't know, Navy SEALs?  Girls Scouts had Kelly green uniforms with skirts, and were pressured to sell cookies, a preparation for a life of selling Amway or Avon cosmetics.  Instead of Eagles, they would be mommies.  Mommies with careers in door-to-door commerce.

Like everything else, the GSA has changed utterly, as Yeats might say.   For one thing, they now apparently teach socialism.  We know this because Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was a Girl Scout, and now she wants everybody to have access to medical care and clean water.  Where else could she have picked up these radical ideas?  That's why Jane Chastain, former sportscaster and current political pundit, demands a boycott of Girl Scout cookies.  Although Chastain herself qualifies as a feminist icon by virtue of broadcasting actual boys' professional football games, she believes girls should be taught godliness and kitchen skills, not all this Marxist-Leninist subversion or how to identify an illegal receiver without watching the replay.  It seems that a lot of the current Congresswomen have Girl Scout backgrounds, and the GSA is proud of having taught them "self-confidence" (as Chastain writes with unconcealed disgust).  Well, I imagine it takes a whole truckload of self-confidence to run for public office, and even more to endure the constant barrage of abuse directed at AOC and, to a lesser extent, her colleagues.  Alongside dialectic materialism, I hope the Scouts also taught them CPR, which will be useful when one of those old white men on the R side of the aisle starts wheezing and foaming at the mouth about climate change or WALL.  (The Oversight Committee probing Michael Cohen was just the curtain-raiser, and look how they acted.)

To go from hatred of Nancy and the girls to punishing the Girl Scouts seems like the kind of leap once practiced by Evel Knievel, but if Chastain had a merit badge for Logical Thought she wouldn't be working for World Net Daily.  Before she rose to prominence as the Hispanic Hillary, Ocasio-Cortez worked as a bartender.  I wonder if Jane Chastain plans to call for/participate in a boycott of mixed drinks.



*The Boy Scout Handbook and Other Observations, Oxford University Press, 1982