A Friday Chat About Politics, Ninja Turtles, and Representation in Media

By Nicole Dieker July 29, 2016

ESTER: I feel like every Friday we begin chatting by saying, “WHEW,” or something in reference to What Kind of Week It Has Been. And here we are again.

NICOLE: It’s been exciting, though! I was taking a Lyft back from the first night of the PNWA conference last night and the driver was so jazzed about Hillary Clinton’s speech. “She’s making history!” he told me.

ESTER: Yeah! Everyone’s super excited except my 103.5-year-old grandma, who’s a lifelong Democrat. She voted for Obama and has MSNBC on full-time. I asked my mom if my grandma has been watching the Convention and my mom said, “No, she’s old-fashioned. She doesn’t think a woman should be president.” I was like, “What?? Why? What about me, what about if I wanted to run? Would she still disapprove?” And my mom was like, “[silence].”

NICOLE: Wait, you and I are almost old enough to actually run for president! That’s great! One of us should totally do it. [Puts finger on nose immediately.]

ESTER: Hahahaha, I wouldn’t even want to be President of the Baby-Sitters Club. Although I did get that superlative once, in some end-of-year thing: Most Likely To Be First Female President. I felt honored, if entirely misunderstood. I would vote for you, though! You could bring bean-measuring and bean-evaluating, if not bean-counting, to the White House. 🙂

NICOLE: I think being President would be my nightmare. Probably the only job worse than being a flight attendant, which is my actual nightmare. (No offense to flight attendants. You just don’t want me up there clutching the armrests in fear as I pass out drinks.) I like the bean-evaluating part, but I would not want to be in charge of the executive-decision-making part.

ESTER: I would maybe like the decisions part, but I would hate being criticized constantly and publicly. If I could be President secretly … ? No, it would still be terrible. Too much stress. I would die of an overdose of empathy about three weeks in. I can’t take on Feeling the Pain of the Nation; as a kid, I couldn’t even handle feeling the pain of Raphael the Ninja Turtle. I would have to leave the room sometimes when the other turtles made fun of him.

NICOLE: I guess Raphael was the only turtle who came with a negative descriptor: Raphael is cool, but crude. They never appreciated him.

ESTER: “Gimme a break!” Yeah, totally. Did you identify with one of them?

NICOLE: I mean, I was generally Donatello when we played Turtles because he was not the leader but he was the logistician/tactician? Also the nerd. But I didn’t really identify with him.

ESTER: Who would have thought that we would both grow up and become April O’Neil?? An Internet-age version, anyway. Was she the only woman in their entire universe? Their Smurfette? It feels like that, looking back. Gross. Our childhoods were way more problematic than I remember. I vastly prefer our present, in which women in glowing white pantsuits accept nominations to positions of real power, and in which even Walmart apologizes for having yanked t-shirts that dared to suggest that a woman could be President someday.

NICOLE: That was the weirdest story. Why not sell those shirts? If Walmart doesn’t want to make money, you know something’s wrong. Also, April was not the only female character in the Turtle universe. There’s also her friend Irma.

Irma Langinstein (1987 TV series)

But Irma was blatantly unpopular. That was kind of her character trait.

ESTER: WAIT WHAT [reads furiously] I don’t remember her at all. She’s like Velma from Scooby Doo, only even less cool.

NICOLE: “Weapon of choice: handbag.” COME ON.

ESTER: “Occupation: secretary.” Oh and there’s this too: “While her charm, romantic spirit, brash sarcasm, and shy attributes define her strengths, Irma also suffers from a case of severe clumsiness, and her obsession with finding a romantic partner eventually reduces her to craving for monsters, mutants, and even the Turtles themselves at one point.” This was the 90s! I mean, okay, maybe “brash sarcasm” did count as a strength back then, but the rest of it? Gak. Basically what I’ve learned this week is that the 90s were way, way worse than I recall.

Bill Clinton proves Americans still lose their minds when a man puts his wife’s career first

NICOLE: Thank goodness for shows like Ghostwriter and Square One TV so I could see both girls and women taking leadership roles and not, like, lusting after teenage turtles. Oh, and Sesame Street! There were a lot of women in that show. Not a lot of female Muppets, at least when I remember watching. They’ve fixed that now.

ESTER: Right, I remember feeling sad, even watching Muppet Babies, that the gender ratios were so skewed. And yet I also remember feeling, and being told, as a young child that I could do or be anything, even become President someday. (Though clearly not by my grandma.)

NICOLE: Me too. We definitely did the first-grade class exercise where we had to draw ourselves as presidents and write down how we would improve the world. I cannot remember what I wrote, but I’m pretty sure I went with the obvious “world peace” answer.

ESTER: Listen, I’m not going to name names, but SOME CANDIDATES still haven’t considered “world peace” as a priority.

NICOLE: I’ll be the first to admit that world peace is going to be difficult. But having it as a long-term goal, even if you know it is a long-term unachievable goal, feels important.

ESTER: If we can get from where we were, as a society, when you and I were kids to where we are now … ? I don’t know. Maybe anything is possible. Including the end of the world! Because let’s be clear, that could still be right around the corner!

NICOLE: Do you mean, like, an asteroid?

ESTER: Yes, Nicole. An orange-tinted asteroid with bad hair, crashing into Earth and giving a big thumbs up to the cameras as everything erupts into flames. (I was very affected by Trump’s biographer writing, in all seriousness, that America’s putting the “sociopath” he shadowed for a year in charge of the nuclear codes could very well bring about the end of the world.)

Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All

NICOLE: I need to google “how many people does it take to launch America’s nukes” because it’s got to be more than one, this has to be a decision made via consensus, right?

ESTER: [dies laughing]

No, I mean, I would hope so? But what if the people who have to agree were all hand-picked yes-men? Then where are we? It’s not like all three branches of government have to give the OK.

NICOLE: Wikipedia says you need the President and the Secretary of Defense, which is a position the President appoints, so … yeah.

ESTER: Get ready to duck and cover, I guess. Let’s end on a happy note! Perhaps these pics? Balloons are fun! Tim Kaine enjoys balloons!

Politicians lose their minds over balloons: Photos of the happiest moments at the DNC last night

NICOLE: I have been loving all of the “Clintons love balloons” tweets this morning. A reminder that even in the midst of all of this, there is joy. Both the joy the Clintons (and Tim Kaine) feel towards balloons, and the joy all of us are having on social media.

ESTER: Exactly. It’s the little things.

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