The Jezebel Witch and the Whore of Babylon

I wonder if I'm the only person who is oblivious to these kinds of things:

John Kerry, the New England Senator who ran for president back during the '04 election, is a descendant of John Winthrop, the Puritan founder of Massachusetts Bay.

In 1637 Winthrop & co. famously banished Anne Hutchinson from Boston after a heated persecutory trial, during which Winthrop and Hutchinson butted heads continuously

about religious doctrine. Winthrop even gives her a cute nickname: the Jezebel Witch. Rather than resort to name-calling and fruitless accusations, Hutchinson tries to appeal to logic.

Which was a mistake. She was, of course, condemned. A sorceress she must be.

Winthrop did such a shoddy job of arguing with Hutchinson, a woman, that the Puritans established a little university called Harvard to boost the old Intelligence Quotient of the male population thereabouts.

But here's the fun part: Anne Hutchinson is the witty, charismatic ancestor of none other than George W. Bush.

As Sarah Vowell describes in The Wordy Shipmates:

Winthrop's heir, John Kerry, debate[d] Hutchinson's great-something grandson, George W. Bush. Only in this instance it's the Hutchinson who is flummoxed by his opponents sensical answers. Bush's constant blinking appears on television as if he thinks the answer to the questions he's being asked are tattooed inside his own eyelids. (p.234)

Bush attended Yale, by the way, not Harvard, which would have been fittingly circular Karmic justice. No university wants that bad press. In Yale's defense though, Kerry went there as well. He should have done foremother proud and gone to a liberal arts college in Rhode Island, where Hutchinson was exiled to. But I guess that would be too perfect.

Here's another interesting tidbit I got from Sarah Vowell: The Puritans were downright outlandish with their nicknames. Hutchinson was called the Jezebel Witch...

But the Pope got an even better/worse epithet. To the Puritans, he was known as the Whore of Babylon.

I guess to the minds of the Puritans, an old celibate man can be the embodiment of slut-titude.