THREE WEEKS AGO, thinking about how “'Dancer' Resurrected” had eerily anticipated Moron Nation's most recent convulsion of misogynistic hatemongering, it dawned on me the final lesson of the Counterculture – the ultimate truth asserted by the Revolution in Conscious – is that female reproductive rights are literally the mother of all other freedoms.
The midwife of this surprising but utterly logical epiphany was an Esquire magazine piece entitled “It's a War on Women and It Isn't Stopping,” Charles P. Pierce's report about the dramatic escalation of the ongoing assault not just on women's legal status but on female identity itself. Though not an Esquire subscriber, I read Pierce's work courtesy of Reader Supported News. Then I added my insight – probably as much a memo to myself as a plea to RSN's readership – to the associated comment thread:
Wake up, people. The right of women to control their own bodies is THE most basic human right. Take away that right – precisely the Republican intent – the entire concept of democracy is nullified. Which is, of course, exactly what the One Percent wants.
I was left so metaphorically open-mouthed by this realization, no additional words would take shape.
Hence I added nothing about how the current plague of rhetorical rape – and it is precisely that – is part of the One Percent's massive, lavishly funded campaign to protect itself by imposing zero-tolerance Christian theocracy on the United States. I did not even point out the Republicans are merely the most obvious theocratic activists – that the Democrats, though far sneakier, are equally culpable. All I could do was wonder why I had been so slow to recognize the pivotal, canary-in-the-coalmine nature of women's reproductive rights. Why had such a simple concept taken me so many years to comprehend?
Obviously I had long ago acknowledged the basic early-American hypocrisies – slavery and death whether in the name of gender or ethnicity – but not until the resurrection of “Dancer” prompted my third or fourth review of Barbara Mor's Great Cosmic Mother and maybe the twentieth such perusal of Robert Graves' White Goddess was I able to understand how oppression itself begins with the oppression of girls and women.
When women are denied the ownership of their own bodies, it is the literal Genesis of tyranny. All other freedoms are downsized accordingly, not quite to meaninglessness, but surely to a kind of hypocritical window dressing. Thus despite the “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” promised by the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights is reduced to drapery, curtains hung to hide the secrets of a dwelling in which – unless one is male, white and thus a member of the (mostly undeclared) ubermenschen – the norms are brutality and abuse, as in (ongoing) genocide against First Nations peoples, the former de jure enslavement of women and Africans, the present-day efforts to “put Them back in their place.”
Here too is the core truth of “Dancer,” its proper one-sentence lead, the synthesis that eluded me for so many years, the unspoken truth of the Revolution in Consciousness: the fact we somehow recognized the liberation of women as the liberation of us all – and though we lacked the vocabulary to say it outright, it was nevertheless the core message of our finest art, our most enduring music and poetry, never more eloquently proclaimed than by the late Tim Buckley in “Phantasmagoria in Two”:
If you tell me of all the pain you've had,
I'll never smile again
I'll never smile again
Now, as penance for the writerly sin of premature expostulation, I am compelled to extensively revise the already-posted “Dancer” manuscript, a project I dread but will dutifully begin in a few days. Not the least of these revisions will be inclusion of a passage on the transformational impact of the birth-control pill, its text inspired by Ruth Rosen's recent commentary on contraception:
For most of human history, sexuality and reproduction have been intricately yoked together. Birth control, particularly the Pill, ruptured that link and gave women the right to enjoy sex without the goal of reproduction...In short, the war over contraception during the last bizarre month was never about religious freedom or women’s health care. It was about controlling women’s right to control their own bodies and to make their own sexual and reproductive choices.
Birth control was therefore the biological wellspring of the entire Revolution in Consciousness, a fact my typically “disembodied” male intellect had overlooked. But now after reading Rosen I realized the pill had redefined womanhood – restoring and radically expanding freedoms increasingly restricted since the sack of Knossos. Without its prelude, the other revolutionary influences that shaped the 1960s and 1970s would probably never have spread beyond the bohemian subculture.
Given how these bits of information fit into one another and expand “Dancer” as well, apparently I am (again) getting assistance from Synchronicity – surely a hitherto-unacknowledged aspect of the Muse.
Another such addition showed up maybe a day after the epiphany sparked by the “War on Women” report, a gift to us all from RTTV newscaster Alyona Minkovski, who at the height of Rush Limbaugh's all-women-are-sluts tirade courageously bespoke a truth about feminism no one in the reflexively anti-sexual United States had ever dared even whisper:
“Damn it,” Minkovski said, “we spend all these years fighting for the right to be sexy and now they're trying to take it away from us.”
To put that in a context more easily comprehensible to my fellow males, imagine living in a realm in which the erect penis is the ultimate symbol of evil – where we males are forced from puberty onward to cover ourselves from neck to knees in stiflingly hot barrel-like garments designed not just to minimize the physical form associated with our gender but to specifically hide any erection or even tendency toward arousal. Imagine too a zero-tolerance regime that metes out unspeakably harsh vengeance on anyone who dares violate the associated taboos: the chopping off one's hands as a punishment for masturbation; castration for any sexual expression beyond that required for breeding; the amputation of one's penis for homosexuality.
Inconceivable, no?
But that's precisely the sort of horrors by which women have been oppressed for centuries: burkas, genital mutilation, execution by fire and stoning. All intended – just as Minkovski implied – to terrify women into fleeing from their own sexuality.
Again, reproductive freedom – sexual freedom – as the wellspring of all other freedoms.
And the loss of reproductive freedom as the beginning of all other tyrannies.
Nor was it just an isolated Rush of Limp-boughed demagoguery against which Minkovsky so justifiably bristled. As the Southern Poverty Law Center's Arthur Goldwag reported, woman-hating has become a new men's movement:
It's not much of a surprise that significant numbers of men in Western societies feel threatened by dramatic changes in their roles and that of the family in recent decades. Similar backlashes, after all, came in response to the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, and other major societal revolutions. What is something of a shock is the verbal and physical violence of that reaction...Women are routinely maligned as sluts, gold-diggers, temptresses and worse; overly sympathetic men are dubbed "manginas"; and police and other officials are called their armed enablers...This kind of woman-hatred is increasingly visible in most Western societies, and it tends to be allied with other anti-modern emotions - opposition to same-sex marriage, to non-Christian immigration, to women in the workplace, and even, in some cases, to the advancement of African Americans.
For various reasons I did not discover this disturbing report on RSN until its (surprisingly brief) comment thread was already nearly three days old.
Had I come to it sooner, no doubt I'd have criticized how Goldwag underplays the connection between the New Misogyny, the alarming growth of Dominionist Christianity and the effectively limitless funding of the latter by the One Percent (see “At Last, Acknowledgement We're Being Herded into Christian Theocracy”). But my comments on another aspect of this aggressive thrust toward Bible-based tyranny had already been rejected by RSN, so I remained silent.
I likewise did not initially react to a disturbing memoir of what happens to homosexual males – or even to seemingly effeminate heterosexual males – under the dreadful sorts of economic and religious oppression that remains the norm throughout most of the Islamic world, was once the norm in the United States as well and now, by the greedy backlash-mandate of the One Percent, threatens to again become the norm here.
But in this case my silence bears no message. That's because I did not discover Abdellah Taia's “A Boy to Be Sacrificed” until maybe an hour ago. It was first published by The New York Times, then picked up by RSN:
In the Morocco of the 1980s, where homosexuality did not, of course, exist, I was an effeminate little boy, a boy to be sacrificed, a humiliated body who bore upon himself every hypocrisy, everything left unsaid. By the time I was 10, though no one spoke of it, I knew what happened to boys like me in our impoverished society; they were designated victims, to be used, with everyone's blessing, as easy sexual objects by frustrated men. And I knew that no one would save me - not even my parents, who surely loved me. For them too, I was shame, filth...How is a child who loves his parents, his many siblings, his working-class culture, his religion - Islam - how is he to survive this trauma? To be hurt and harassed because of something others saw in me - something in the way I moved my hands, my inflections. A way of walking, my carriage. An easy intimacy with women, my mother and my many sisters...The truth is, I don't know how I survived. All I have left is a taste for silence. And the dream, never to be realized, that someone would save me. Now I am 38 years old, and I can state without fanfare: no one saved me.
Reading it over a working dinner – whole wheat bread, cheddar cheese, an apple and hot tea – I recognized its relevance not just here in this sequence of links (obviously another gift of that Muse named Synchronicity), but I saw too its meaning to me personally, long ago a boy who like Taia was damned as too effeminate and who therefore learned very early in childhood to prefer the physical, intellectual and emotional safety of female companionship (see “Dancer,” Part Two).
In adolescence I was slender, slight, belittled for having “wrists like a girl” and ridiculed for the diverse ineptitudes symptomatic of dyslexia, all characteristics that had made me a disappointment to my father, a hate-object to my stepmother and an instrument of secret, subversive revenge for my mother to employ against not just the man whose sperm fertilized her egg to produce me but against maleness in general, myself included. From age 14 onward I ruthlessly purged myself of any obviously “feminine” traits, and when Nature blessed me with the deep basso voice that is often the trademark of Blissian males, I seized it as the cornerstone on which to build myself a he-man facade even as I despaired at my powerlessness over skeletal structure and disability. My makeover effort was motivated entirely by fear, not of homosexuality (which never held any terrors for me), nor of rejection by my family (which I already accepted as irremediable), but merely of being targeted by the omnipresent schoolyard bullies: the unofficial junior Gestapo by which the United States indoctrinates its children in the social Darwinist methodology of capitalism.
Thinking of these matters tonight, my memories painfully inflamed by Taia's poignant text, I could not but wonder: might my life have been more fulfilling had I not – in fear of the bullies – relentlessly stripped myself of any effeminate trait over which I (presumably) had control? Had these discarded traits been, in my case, the defining characteristics of a homosexual? Might I now in old age be more contented had I been gay?
Had I somehow allowed myself to be terrorized into the ultimate betrayal – that of one's self?
Probably not; the few times I had sex with men, I found the encounters emotionally unfulfilling, merely variants on masturbation and therefore equally dispassionate. Those long-ago experiences – with two friends many years before the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome inflicted its regime of biological terror – were in decided contrast to the physical/intellectual/emotional joys of sex with women, pleasures all the more exquisite when they are naked-souled expressions of mutual love and desire.
But the point here is not my sexuality. The point is that we have progressed as a society far enough out of prudery and shame and all the other anti-sexual legacies of Abrahamic religion, I dare ask myself such a formerly forbidden question, and do so openly, in print.
Alyona Minkovski again, this time speaking for all of us, male, female or transsexual; straight, gay or bisexual: “We spend all these years fighting for the right to be sexy, and now they're trying to take it away from us.”
Hence in conclusion the relevance of JoAnn Wypijewski's “Reproductive Rights and the Long Hand of Slave Breeding”:
If there is an upside to the right's latest, seemingly loony and certainly grotesque multi-front assault on women, it is the clarion it sounds to humanists to take the high ground and ditch the anodyne talk of "a woman's right to choose" for the weightier, fundamental assertion of "a woman's right to be."
Published by The Nation, further disseminated by Truthout and linked in its totality here, it is a piece so complete there was nothing I could add via the comment thread. I offer it both in support of Minkovski's grievance and my own belated realization the denial of women's rights is the denial of all human rights as well.
What's at stake in this struggle is not only “a woman's right to be.” It is everyone's right to be. If the One Percent can take that right away from women, then they can take anything away from any of us.
*****
From Santorum the Sexophobe to Rickie the Racist
APART FROM MUSIC, I rarely post videos here in OAN because I long ago realized the mainstream media makes “television news” a contradiction in terms.
But this news video is uniquely informative. It shows Republican Presidential Hopeful Rick Santorum denouncing President Barack Obama as a “government nig...”
Last time I heard that sort of hate speech in public was when I infiltrated a Ku Klux Klan rally in East Tennessee. It was 1964, I was a reporter for a small but relatively fearless daily, and I was hoping Imperial Wizard Robert Shelton would utter some quotable trash-talk indicative of the Klan's festering hatefulness, as indeed he did.
The N-word, of course, was always the Klan's trademark pejorative.
Memo to the working press: Ask Santorum if he is now – or ever has been – a member of the Klan. If the answer is no, ask if he has volunteered to serve as a Kleagle, Klan-speak for recruiter. If the answer is again no, ask if he is a Klan fellow traveler, a Klan-symp. Then – no matter how Santorum answers – ask him if he realizes the Klan is as anti-Catholic as it is anti-Black.
(With thanks to Yayoi Winfrey for forwarding the video link.)
*****
Lying Democrats More Dangerous Than Fascist Republicans?
WHILE THE REPUBLICANS make no secret of their fascist agenda – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us – the Democrats hide behind humanitarian and often populist rhetoric even as they hurl us under the proverbial bus.
I encountered a glaring example of this bitter truth in recent monthly bills from Group Health Cooperative and CenturyLink.
Both confirm last year's rumors the Democrats were secretly appeasing the Republicans and the Ruling Class masters of both parties by sneaking through several seemingly minor tax increases and Medicare cutbacks aimed exclusively at lower-income people – this as additional tax cuts pamper the One Percent.
Which demonstrates the most disheartening reality of present-day U.S. politics: the elected Democrats who campaign on New Deal principles but, once in office, behave like Republicans, slapping ever increasing taxes on the poor and ever more completely exempting the rich from any taxation at all.
Worse, unless these betrayals are genuinely glaring – as in Obama 's reversal on repeal of the Bush tax cuts – they're typically covered up by an overly protective Ruling Class Media, then further shielded, depending on the affiliation of the perpetrator, by partisan media on the Left or Right.
For example, note how unreported stealth cutbacks to Medicare Extra Help subsidies hiked prescription drug copayments by four percent and raised Extra Help premiums by one percent, adding about $54 per year to my own Medicare outlays and proportionally afflicting every other Medicare Extra Help recipient.
Hardest hit are those with the largest annual prescription drug expense. The four percent copay hike adds only about $6 to my annual prescription drug bill, but those whose outlay was $2,400 in 2011 will see it rise $96 this year to a total of $2,496.
That's an increase of $8 per month, to $208 from $200 – devastating to someone struggling to survive on a severely limited income in a time of skyrocketing food, transport and medical costs. Translated into food, that's a monthly loss of four loaves of whole-wheat bread or about two pounds of lean ground beef.
Apropos shielding by partisan media, a spokesman for the the Medicare Rights Center – supposedly the prime defender of Medicare recipients – says MRC knows nothing about such increases, even implies they're not real. AARP – formerly the American Association of Retired Persons – meanwhile ignores the issue. No doubt every Medicare Extra Help recipient in the nation is as vexed by these fuck-you denials as by the fuck-you message of the increases themselves.
Meanwhile the regressive federal fees on my telephone and Internet bill went up $1.30 per month – another unpublicized hike in another flat-rate rate tax, which means it penalizes the poor even as it favors the rich.
As someone far wiser than I once observed, “the lesser of two evils is still evil.”
*****
Email Embargo against Outside Agitator's Notebook URL Finally Ends
MY THANKS TO THE Nurds at CenturyLink for (1) again acknowledging the reality of the embargo imposed on the URLs of Outside Agitator's Notebook and (2) finally – after almost seven weeks – lifting the blockage.
I don't know if it was my constant nagging in OAN print or my repeated complaints to CenturyLink or some combination of both that finally convinced whomever needed to be persuaded to toggle whatever needed to be switched, but something surely did the trick.
Let's hope the blockage doesn't happen again – not the least because CenturyLink's Internet is otherwise vastly superior to the relatively expensive but nevertheless bottom-tier service Comcast begrudgingly provides its non-business (i.e., less profitable) users.
LB/2 April 2012
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