A beautiful moment in history!
When was the last time you read something by Chas Smith without a hint of sarcasm? Something truly earnest that poured from his heart to the paper? I cannot recall one thing ever.
That’s part of the reason we love Chas. He’s lighthearted, funny, and doesn’t allow the weight of the world to affect anything beyond his hairline. But sometimes you have to wonder what Chas is all about.
Because nobody is truly indifferent. We all have things that are important to us — like Derek and his sharks, JP and his Scotland, etc. — things that affect our everyday moods and emotions. But it’s often hard to pinpoint what really matters to Chas Smith.
Until yesterday.
Scrolling through The Book, I caught glimpse of Chas’s signature yellow profile picture with what appeared to be a novel beneath it. Considering his posts usually consist of BeachGrit articles, it caught my attention. I scrolled back to discover the most uplifting post of the week, and the first instance of sincerity from our old pal Charlie. It read:
Last night I sat in a movie theater and wept for the first time since 1982. Then I was six-years-old and E.T. was playing and I thought he was dead. Now I am forty and watching Wonder Woman with my four-year-old daughter on my lap.
And in the day and age of “grab-them-by-the-pussy” and Cliff Huxtable’s quaaludes watching a woman shred multiple battlefields of men while my little girl crosses her forearms in a defiant pose completely did me in.
At this very moment she is running around the house with a postcard as a shield, a necklace as a lasso, a colored pencil as a sword and a hand-me-down Super Girl outfit substituting for Wonder Woman’s. I’m taking her again tonight because she is begging. And because there is currently nothing better on this earth than empowering her.
To hell with Trump. To hell with Cosby. The future is hers.
This beautiful sonnet was reinforced in my mind when listening to NPR this morning. The station was talking about Kurdish women fighters who were part of the war against ISIS. Some of them were there because they loathed the Islamic State, but many were there as a means of avoiding and/or deconstructing a patriarchal society. One woman joined in order to flee from a marriage that her brother had arranged for her.
Very sad, but there was one instance of brilliance.
It turns out that under Muslim doctrine, being killed by a woman soldier blocks your entry to eternal bliss, virgins, etc. The Kurdish fighters, knowing this, use a loudspeaker to taunt the ISIS members, reminding them that if they die at the hands of a woman they will be eternally doomed. If that’s not empowerment I don’t know what is!
Anyways, back to Chas.
When researching the Panama story from last week, I stumbled upon an old essay he had written for Stab. It started:
Panama is an unshaved Hispanic pussy. Gently rolling folds covered with lush vegetation spill into endless pleasure of ocean. Or sea. Giant metal phalluses, captained by white men, enter her from the front and from the rear. It is almost always wet season.
Which led to:
I ended the evening with three underage girls, if memory serves, in a hot tub at the Courtyard Real Hotel. I was wearing a Tahitian Themed Jean Paul Gaultier swimsuit with a print of Tahitian boys. I was drinking a frosty sangria and the girls were nude.
One can’t help but think that having a daughter has had a profound effect on Chas’s outlook on life, if not his fashion sense.
So thank you Chas for showing us your heart — but mostly thanks to Hemingway for making it ten times bigger!
