This is so hilarious, I had to post it.

A Liberal’s Pledge to Disheartened Conservatives
November 14th, 2006

To My Conservative Brothers and Sisters,

I know you are dismayed and disheartened at the results of last week’s election. You’re worried that the country is heading toward a very bad place you don’t want it to go. Your 12-year Republican Revolution has ended with so much yet to do, so many promises left unfulfilled. You are in a funk, and I understand.

Well, cheer up, my friends! Do not despair. I have good news for you. I, and the millions of others who are now in charge with our Democratic Congress, have a pledge we would like to make to you, a list of promises that we offer you because we value you as our fellow Americans. You deserve to know what we plan to do with our newfound power — and, to be specific, what we will do to you and for you.

Thus, here is our Liberal’s Pledge to Disheartened Conservatives:

Dear Conservatives and Republicans,

I, and my fellow signatories, hereby make these promises to you:

1. We will always respect you for your conservative beliefs. We will never, ever, call you “unpatriotic” simply because you disagree with us. In fact, we encourage you to dissent and disagree with us.

2. We will let you marry whomever you want, even when some of us consider your behavior to be “different” or “immoral.” Who you marry is none of our business. Love and be in love — it’s a wonderful gift.

3. We will not spend your grandchildren’s money on our personal whims or to enrich our friends. It’s your checkbook, too, and we will balance it for you.

4. When we soon bring our sons and daughters home from Iraq, we will bring your sons and daughters home, too. They deserve to live. We promise never to send your kids off to war based on either a mistake or a lie.

5. When we make America the last Western democracy to have universal health coverage, and all Americans are able to get help when they fall ill, we promise that you, too, will be able to see a doctor, regardless of your ability to pay. And when stem cell research delivers treatments and cures for diseases that affect you and your loved ones, we’ll make sure those advances are available to you and your family, too.

6. Even though you have opposed environmental regulation, when we clean up our air and water, we, the Democratic majority, will let you, too, breathe the cleaner air and drink the purer water.

7. Should a mass murderer ever kill 3,000 people on our soil, we will devote every single resource to tracking him down and bringing him to justice. Immediately. We will protect you.

8. We will never stick our nose in your bedroom or your womb. What you do there as consenting adults is your business. We will continue to count your age from the moment you were born, not the moment you were conceived.

9. We will not take away your hunting guns. If you need an automatic weapon or a handgun to kill a bird or a deer, then you really aren’t much of a hunter and you should, perhaps, pick up another sport. We will make our streets and schools as free as we can from these weapons and we will protect your children just as we would protect ours.

10. When we raise the minimum wage, we will pay you — and your employees — that new wage, too. When women are finally paid what men make, we will pay conservative women that wage, too.

11. We will respect your religious beliefs, even when you don’t put those beliefs into practice. In fact, we will actively seek to promote your most radical religious beliefs (”Blessed are the poor,” “Blessed are the peacemakers,” “Love your enemies,” “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God,” and “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.”). We will let people in other countries know that God doesn’t just bless America, he blesses everyone. We will discourage religious intolerance and fanaticism — starting with the fanaticism here at home, thus setting a good example for the rest of the world.

12. We will not tolerate politicians who are corrupt and who are bought and paid for by the rich. We will go after any elected leader who puts him or herself ahead of the people. And we promise you we will go after the corrupt politicians on our side FIRST. If we fail to do this, we need you to call us on it. Simply because we are in power does not give us the right to turn our heads the other way when our party goes astray. Please perform this important duty as the loyal opposition.

I promise all of the above to you because this is your country, too. You are every bit as American as we are. We are all in this together. We sink or swim as one. Thank you for your years of service to this country and for giving us the opportunity to see if we can make things a bit better for our 300 million fellow Americans — and for the rest of the world.

Signed,

Michael Moore
mmflint@aol.com
(Click here to sign the pledge)
www.michaelmoore.com

P.S. Please feel free to pass this on.

http://64.62.196.98/News/2006/014738.asp

Cecelia Fire Thunder, the first woman to serve as president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe of South Dakota, was impeached by a vote of 9-5 on Thursday.

The tribal council impeached Fire Thunder after she stirred controversy about the state’s restrictive abortion law. She said she would start a women’s clinic on the reservation that could provide, among other services, abortions.

Fire Thunder was suspended and ordered not to talk to the media prior to be being impeached. She plans to challenge the tribal council’s decision, which she said was not in accordance with the law.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecilia_Fire_Thunder

On November 2, 2004, she was elected as the first female leader of the Oglala Sioux. In 2005 she was suspended from her position on the council for 66 days, under impeachment proceedings initiated under allegations associated with a US$38 million loan for the Tribe. She was returned to her position when the complaint was dismissed by the council on December 30.

She became the subject of wide public attention in March of 2006 for her declaration of intent to create a Planned Parenthood clinic on her own land. This was in response to the passing of State legislation banning virtually all abortions within South Dakota. With the sovereign independence of Indian reservations in the United States promised by the federal government, the territory would not be subject to state laws.

On May 31, 2006, it was reported that Fire Thunder was again suspended from her duties as president by the Oglala Sioux tribal Council. In addition, the Council issued a ban on all abortions on tribal land.

A month after her suspension, on June 29, 2006, Fire Thunder was impeached from her duties as Tribal President. Six charges were made against Fire Thunder, the most topical being that she organized the aforementioned clinic outside of her authority as president and that she didn’t consult with the council about the project and get their permission. Other charges were that Fire Thunder used the media, the U.S. Post Office and the Oglala Sioux Tribe to solicit funds for the clinic.

Fire Thunder has said that she will challenge the impeachment decision.

Ok, ok, I confess I sometimes feel like doing this to someone. Admit it. You do too.

Intercourse is a political institution. As Andrea Dworkin said,

“If we’re not willing to look at intercourse as a political institution, that is directly related to the ways in which we are socialized to accept our inferior status, and one of the ways in which we are controlled, we are not ever going to get to the roots of the ways in which male dominance works, in our lives. The fact of the matter is that the basic premise about women is that we are born to be fucked. That is it.”

… “Now that means a lot of things. For a lot of years it meant that marriage was outright ownership of a woman’s body and intercourse was a right of marriage. That meant that intercourse was, per se, an act of force. Because the power of the state mandated that the woman accept intercourse. She belonged to the man. The cultural remnants of this is that in our society, men experience intercourse as possession of women. The culture talks about intercourse as conquering women. Women surrendering. Women being taken. We are looking at a paradigm for rape. Not at a paradigm for reciprocity, for equality, for mutuality or for freedom. When the premise is that women exist on earth, in order to be sexually available to men for intercourse, it means that our very bodies are seen as having boundaries that have less integrity than male bodies. Men have orifices. Men can be penetrated. The point of homophobia is to direct men towards women. To punish men for not using women. And that’s an acknowledgment of how aggressive and how dangerous men know male sexuality can be for women. When a woman goes into court and she says I’ve been raped, the judge, the defense lawyer, the press, and many, many, many other people say: no, you had intercourse. And she says no I was raped. And they say a little bit of force is fine. You know that, you know it’s still true. It hasn’t changed. When you look at male domination as a social system, what you see is that it is organized to make certain that women are sexually available for men. That is its basic premise. And we have a choice. And the choice is not in the political science books. The universities are not trying to work out this level of choice for us. The question is what comes first, men’s need to get laid or women’s dignity. And I am telling you that you cannot separate the so-called abuses of women from the so-called normal uses of women. The history of women in the world as sexual chattel, makes it impossible to do that.”

… “as sex is currently socialized and existing in our society, men can’t have sex with women who are their equals. They’re incapable of it. Right? That’s what objectification is about.”

… “We need to understand how male violence works. That’s one of the reasons that studying pornography and fighting the pornography industry is so important. Because that’s the pentagon. That’s the war room. They train the soldiers. Then the soldiers go out and do the actions on us. We’re the population that the war is against. And this has been a terrible war. Because our resistance has not been serious. It has not been enough.”

… “These are women who thought that they had a right to dignity, to individuality, to freedom, to creativity, and in fact, they couldn’t even walk down a city block in freedom. Many of them were raped as children in their own homes, by relatives. By their fathers, by their uncles, by their brothers, before they were, quote, women. Many of them were beaten by the men who loved them. Their husbands, by lovers. Many of them were tortured by those men and when you look at what happened to these women, you say Amnesty International where are you? Where are you? Because the prisons for women are our homes. We live under martial law. We live in places in which a rape culture exists. That is a women’s home, where she lives. Men have to be sent to prison, to live in a culture that is as rapist as the normal home in North America. We live under what amounts to a military curfew. Enforced by rapists. And we say usually that we’re free citizens in a free society. We lie. We lie, we lie everyday about it.

… We survive through amnesia. By not remembering what happened to us. By being unable to remember the name of the woman who was in the newspaper yesterday.”

… “I want us to stop lying. I think that we tell a lot of lies to get through everyday and I want us to stop lying. And one of the lies that we tell is that this kind of woman hating is not as pernicious, as lethal, as sadistic, as vicious as other kinds of hatred that are directed against people because of a condition of birth.”

…. “We have had a brilliant movement that has saved many lives. And I, especially, thank you and honor you, those of you who work in rape crisis centres and in battered women shelters. I wished to hell you had been there during some parts of my life. And anyone my age, anyone in their forties, would not have encountered any kind of help. Like the kind of help we provide. But we have to change our focus now. We have to stop it from happening. Because, otherwise, we accept that our condition is one in which the rape of women is normal. Brutality towards women is normal.”

… “In the United States, violence against women is a major pastime. It is a sport. It is an amusement. It is a mainstream cultural entertainment. And it is real. It is pervasive. It is epidemic. It saturates the society. It’s very hard to make anyone notice it, because there is so much of it. <…> But the fact of the matter is, that if you live in a society that is saturated with this kind of woman hating, you live in a society that has marked you as a target for rape, for battery, for prostitution or for death.”

… “One of the reasons that the Right reaches so many women is that the Right has a transcendent god that says I will heal all your hurt and all your pain and all your wounds. I died for you. I will heal you. Feminists do not have a transcendent god who can heal that way. We have ideas about fairness and justice and equality. And we have to find ways to make them real. We don’t have magic. We don’t have supernatural powers. And we can’t keep sticking women together who have been broken up into little pieces. So what I think is that fighting back is as close to healing as we are going to come.”

— Andrea Dworkin, “Terror, Torture, and Resistance,” 1991

This applies to rapists as well, which is, of course, a form of battering and violence against women:

“Though the legal system has mostly consoled and protected batterers, when a woman is being beaten, it’s the batterer who has to be stopped; as Malcolm X used to say, by any means necessary–a principle women, all women, had better learn. A woman has a right to her own bed, a home she can’t be thrown out of and for her body not to be ransacked and broken into. She has a right to safe refuge, to expect her family and friends to stop the batterer–by law or force–before she’s dead. She has a constitutional right to a gun and a legal right to kill if she believes she’s going to be killed. And a batterer’s repeated assaults should lawfully be taken as intent to kill.”

— Andrea Dworkin, “Trying To Flee,” 1995

I found this little nugget over at Pandagon.

Nancy Goldstein, regular commenter round these parts, has written up a true story about how she took the advice of Stephanie Millman and called Bill Napoli to help her make one of those decisions that we females are too feeble minded to make for ourselves – this time whether to have chorizo or bacon in her paella. While it’s funny in and of itself that she did this, the ensuing conversation is hysterical.

I’ll say this for the senator: he returned the message I left on his home machine promptly, which would have been very useful except that he said he’d never heard of paella (or Google, when I suggested that he look up some recipes online). Even my description of the dish’s primary ingredients didn’t seem to help him with my chorizo/bacon quandry. So we shelved the paella dilemma and moved on to the abortion ban.

The rest of the conversation proves what we long suspected – Bill Napoli is an ignorant ass that doesn’t know squat about women’s lives or bodies and doesn’t feel he needs to in order to make laws regarding those. He also isn’t aware of the laws of other nations, which is a charitable way of looking at this part:

Bill asked me if it wasn’t time for a civilized nation like ours to end abortion. I countered that the US is almost entirely alone among so-called “first world” nations in its anti-choice fervor: that even France, a Catholic country, makes it easier for a woman to obtain a safe, legal abortion on demand.

There’s a slight chance Napoli doesn’t realize Europe is “civilized”, though. He’s so ignorant of other things that it’s entirely possible. Like this:

In our remaining minutes, I learned that Bill doesn’t believe that women don’t always have a choice about whether or not to have protected sex. He swore that I was the first woman ever to tell him that sometimes contraception fails. And he doesn’t believe that women who do choose to abort take that decision very seriously and aren’t happy about it. He claims that 99% of the 800+ abortions that were performed in South Dakota last year were “abortions of convenience” — whatever the heck that means.

Ignorance is bliss – must be nice to live in a world where contraception doesn’t fail, rape isn’t an issue, and you can get an abortion in a drive-through window. Turns out what Napoli don’t know could fill several football stadiums.

What I find interesting is this – because Napoli didn’t know jack about paella or Google, he declined to make Nancy’s choice for her. He probably also correctly assessed he doesn’t know anything else about Nancy’s life that would influence the decision – does she like bacon or chorizo better? Does she have both at hand, or would one require a trip to the store? No doubt this was a wise decision on his part. It’s generally accepted that if you don’t know shit, you shut the fuck up. So there’s no doubt that Napoli can comprehend this idea, that private decisions are best made by the individual who knows the most about the situation.

So if Napoli can grasp that he’s not one to tell Nancy what to make for dinner, then why the hell does he think he can assess the private decisions of more than a million women a year without knowing much about women and definitely not knowing jack shit about their individual lives?

http://www.indianz.com/News/2006/013061.asp

“When Governor Mike Rounds signed HB 1215 into law it effectively banned all abortions in the state with the exception that it did allow saving the mother’s life. There were, however, no exceptions for victims of rape or incest. His actions, and the comments of State Senators like Bill Napoli of Rapid City, SD, set of a maelstrom of protests within the state.

Napoli suggested that if it was a case of “simple rape,” there should be no thoughts of ending a pregnancy. Letters by the hundreds appeared in local newspapers, mostly written by women, challenging Napoli’s description of rape as “simple.” He has yet to explain satisfactorily what he meant by “simple rape.”

The President of the Oglala Sioux Tribe on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Cecilia Fire Thunder, was incensed. A former nurse and healthcare giver she was very angry that a state body made up mostly of white males, would make such a stupid law against women.

“To me, it is now a question of sovereignty,” she said to me last week. “I will personally establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on my own land which is within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation where the State of South Dakota has absolutely no jurisdiction.” Strong words from a very strong lady. I hope Ms. Fire Thunder challenges Gov. Rounds and the state legislators on this law that is an affront to all independent women.”

More pearls of wisdom from I Blame the Patriarchy.

Bill Napoli Is A Fucking Perv

State senator Bill Napoli of South Dakota, the state that recently claimed occupancy rights to the citizenry’s heretofore privately-owned uteruses, has been watching too much “Law & Order: Mutilated Women Unit.”

As you know by now, South Dakota, in a perverted bid to appease the Virgin Mary by revoking human status from its female citizens, has banned abortion. This is quite a spectacular ban. It features an added stupidity that makes it sparkle merrily against the backdrop of plain old regular bans. The added stupidity is this: it precludes abortions even for the hard-luck cases—victims of rape and incest, and women whose health is put at risk by pregnancy— that occasionally tug at the heartstrings of those on-the-fence anti-choicers who, after a few drinks, become moved by the pathos of such a woman’s suffering, almost the way they might be moved by the suffering of a dog, causing them to declare, “Aw hell, it’s kinda mean to make her give birth to her own sister; let daddy’s little rape victim have her abortion.”

In a free society a woman would be able to terminate with absolute ease an unwanted pregnancy for any reason that strikes her fancy. But we do not live in a free society. We live in an oppressive misogynist theocracy. It is from the aforementioned “tragic” exceptions that abortion rights have been dangling in the breeze for some time now. They dangle, precariously, because of the prevailing godbag sensibility that women, who by popular decree must always sacrifice themselves to the common good, should suffer the tortures of the damned before they are allowed to exercise basic human rights. And the aforementioned Napoli jagoff, when asked on The News Hour about the circumstances under which he would personally condescend to allow a woman some modicum of human dignity, sums up this godbag zeitgeist thusly:

A real-life description [of an exception scenario] to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.

Note the ease with which he describes this horror as “real-life,” the clarity with which he sees his heroine as a protegée of the Virgin Mary, the relish with which he gratuitously adds the piquant pornographic details. You can practically see his dick swelling with patriarchal pride.

See also Rene’s illuminating comment from yesterday’s post; she actually saw this interview on TV, whereas I only read the transcript.

South Dakota and Libya: Blood Brothers In Misogyny
March 5, 2006

A significant portion of the patriarchy-blamer’s ideological day is spent pondering the subject of rape. Rape is, as we have seen, the founding principle of patriarchy and the model from which patriarchy’s most popular form of propaganda, porn, takes its inspiration. Rape isn’t just a subset of unrelated incidents perpetrated by a fringe contingent of sickos. It is, as Susan Brownmilller asserted, “a conscious process by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.”

If you are a man, and you don’t rape women, well, goody for you, but if you email me with some inane vituperation about how your personal noble restraint invalidates Brownmiller’s statement, you will only embarrass yourself. No matter what kind of man you are, you benefit in a thousand different ways from the violent sexualization of women’s subordination. Actual rapists have got the initial shock and awe covered, but they’re only the infantry; it’s up to the rest of you to finish the job.

You do this by demonizing feminists, by renting women for lap dances, by letting rapists off the hook in court, by buying cheap crap Victoria’s Secret thongs for your woman, by congratulating your girlfriend on her boob job, by ignoring mass rapes in Rwanda, by passing along the URL to Paris Hilton’s fuck video, by ogling that girl at the bus stop, by letting your mom do your laundry, by “giving away” a bride, by voting control of women’s uteruses over to godbag politicians, by pressuring your girlfriend to take it up the ass because all your friends are doin’ it, by having an opinion on the size of human labia, by arguing that stripping is “empowering,” by claiming you’re “hardwired” to be turned on by women who emulate the ludicrous fashion practices of strippers and centerfolds, by your inability to conceive of sex without dominance, and by refusing, despite 30 years of intelligent, educated women telling you otherwise, to concede that you don’t really, truly view women as human beings in anything approaching the same light in which you view yourself.

But women, you might be inclined to argue, having heard somewhere that some men have started doing housework, have it so much better now. You think so? Then how is it that an American woman is raped every couple of minutes, and that 78% of these rapists are husbands, boyfriends, or dates? Less than 16% of these rapes are reported. Less than half of those are prosecuted. The average amount of time these few convicted dickwads spend in the clink: 11 months.

The dehumanizing groundwork laid by these rapists forms an excellent foundation upon which to build many a creatively misogynist cultural practice. The women of South Dakota, some of the first casualties in the impending gynocide, have been bought and paid for by some lunatic bid to overturn Roe in the Supreme Court. Such a thing would not have been possible in a culture where women are viewed as you are viewed: as something beyond the essence of sex.

Is the connection between rape and modern civilization’s Xtreme Mxogyny still too fuzzy for you? Then let’s check out Libya, where they don’t pussyfoot around. It’s crystal-fucking-clear in Libya. Like in the US, getting raped in Libya is a crime. The difference is that in Libya they dispense with the charade of joke trials for rapists that really punish the rape victims. in Libya, you go directly to jail. I’m talking about the victims, not the rapists. Getting raped is punishable by indefinite detention without legal representation.

That’s right. According to the Human Rights Watch, Libya actually imprisons women for the crime of “moral misconduct,” claiming it is for their own good. Like uterus-owning South Dakota, which is protecting women from themselves, or rapist-loving Illinois, which lets rapists go free despite videotaped evidence, Libya cannot trust women to make their own decisions, or put rapists in jail. So they just lock up these inconvenient women in “rehabilitation centers.”

“We let the ones with good behavior work, the ones that don’t raise their voices, the ones that sleep quietly.”

Who are these women? Rape victims, women who have had unapproved consensual sex, “illegally” pregnant women, prostitutes, homeless women, or, as one Libyan attorney puts it, “anyone with families who … want to get rid of their daughters for any reason.”

Nada Mounir, seventeen, was brought to [the Benghazi Home for Juvenile Girls] on April 21, 2005 after the death of a relative who tried to rape her. She attacked him with a knife in self-defense, and he subsequently died of complications. She told Human Rights Watch, “[h]e tried to rape me but he didn’t succeed. My parents were in another house. He came from behind the house. He kissed me. He had a knife. He pulled me down by my hair and said he was going to do it but I took the knife and stabbed him. I told my mother about it. She took me to the police station. They [the police] took me to the prosecutor who brought me here.” Her family refuses to visit her or agree to take custody of her. She does not have a lawyer.

Once they’re in, the only way out is for a male family member to “claim” them. This claiming requirement applies even if the woman in question is an adult and has committed no crime other than that of having been raped. Because male family members generally want nothing to do with them, they are left hanging until some stranger agrees to marry them. This results in male fuckwads lurking around the detention centers looking to score some prison pussy.

Libya feels it is on the cutting edge of progressive thought when it provides prisons for these women instead of just letting their families kill them outright. “In the street there is no protection for them,” they say. But in Libya, “protection” means they are locked up, handcuffed, held in isolation, forced to sit through religious lectures, deprived of education, of hygiene, and of contact with the outside world. They are forced to endure invasive “virginity examinations.” If they escape, they are brought back.

In South Dakota, rape victims who get pregnant aren’t thrown in an actual prison, but it’s hard to think of compulsory pregnancy in any other way. Unless you’re a guy.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words….

At a mass demonstration in Pakistan, the sign says… well, read it for yourself.

Pearls of wisdom from I Blame The Patriarchy.

Art vs Porn: For Some Reason, The Debate Rages On
February 3, 2006

In yesterday’s discussion on, among other things, pornography, reader Christopher poses a few questions the answers to which are right up my patriarchy-blaming alley. Rather than hide their brilliance in the murky subumbra of the comments section (and because everybody loves a post about porn), I unveil my remarks here. I would like to take credit for them, but, as another smartypants commenter pointed out, “the ideas on this blog are nothing new.”

“Are all scenes of sex degrading?” inquires Christopher. “What about stories or drawings that don’t involve real humans? What makes something “porn” as opposed to “art”?”

The official Twisty position on porn is that in a patriarchy all commodified sexual imagery (photographic, verbal, cartoony, et al) is exploitative, which condition relies entirely on patriarchy’s having previously commodified women generally. In other words, if this were a society in which women’s humanity were not a matter of debate, where we were not viewed in terms of our position on the fuckbag continuum (i.e. “too young to fuck,” “too fat to fuck,” “too pregnant to fuck,” “just right to fuck”), pornography could not exist.

That’s right. This is my radical hypothesis: where women are not the sex class, women’s sexploitation cannot take place.

Though they delude themselves that their titillation does not depend on the humiliation of subordinate beings, men vehemently and almost universally disagree with the aforementioned hypothesis. That’s because they are empirically aware that prurience and dominance are central to the male experience, and cannot imagine a world without it. They insist that patriarchy can never be abolished to the extent I advocate. Their identities are so closely linked to the sexploitation of an underclass that they believe the overthrow of patriarchy is tantamount to their own castration. They say, “you’re crazy, Twisty, if you think we can part with the Male Gaze. It is hardwired straight to the male tentpitchular lobe.” They cannot conceive of having a class-neutral reaction–a reaction that doesn’t revolve around some sense of porkational entitlement–to a picture of a naked woman. What would happen to “desire” if men were no longer consumed with judging the women around them in terms of our degree of conformity to the fuckbag ideal? The human race would die out!

Of course, all that would really happen is that women would be human beings. The titillating, supposedly-transgressive-yet-doggedly-mainstream drama of the male domination fetish would vanish. “Raunch,” like other fads, such as trepanning, virgin sacrifice, and strirrup pants, would exist only in the quaint oblivion of yore. Actual human sex would be conducted in a manner consistent with preserving the dignity of all parties involved. Pictures of human sex would have an impact similar to images of an amoeba dividing in half.

Sexy-men and the bitches they dominate say, “Twisty, you humorless old prude, where’s the fun in that?”

Poor sexy-men with their pussy-shredding Viagra! Poor bitches in their Japanese fetish shoes! Enlightenment is fun. Try to live your lives on a level that does not emulate “Jackass,” why dontcha?

Christopher wants to know why all forms of narrative representation–drama, fiction, art–aren’t “exploitative of the human condition,” since most such narratives “attempt to arouse our emotions by allowing us to vicariously view the experiences of others. Why, in the abstract, sex should be more objectionable than violence, or death, or anything else is something I have yet to grasp.”

For one thing, there is not a designated “violence” class or a “death” class, but there is a sex class, and images that seek to normalize its oppression are themselves oppressive. Furthermore, in our wonderful world pornography, which is violence, and sex, which is women, are now synonymous. Thus the experience of pornography is neither narrative nor vicarious; it is desirable specifically because it provokes a primal physical reponse independent of cognition or intellectual analysis. This universal availability of this response is dependent on the aforementioned violent oppression of the sex class.

When in doubt as to whether the work in front of you is porn or art, I suggest this simple test: does the “emotion” you experience when you consume these representations elevate your humanity? Or does it reduce you to a miserable, drooling voyeur?

Or consider this scenario: a contingent of tasteful, evolved aliens arrives from the planet Obstreperon. Because life (and patriarchy-blaming scenarios) imitates science fiction, their mission is to weed out the riffraff from this corner of the galaxy. They’ve heard complaints that Earth is a big, fat, greedy sex shop, dragging property values down in Sector 3, embarrassing the neighbors and scaring their kids. See that big alien with the giant head who looks suspiciously like me? Her brain-ray is poised to annihilate our species unless we can convince her that we have something of philosophical value to contribute to the cosmos. You are elected to save the planet, and you have just one chance to prove that we are not a civilization of priapic redneck morons. Do you show this charming, good-looking alien your copy of A Room Of One’s Own, or do you whip out How To Become An Alpha Male: The Lazy Man’s Way To Easy Sex and Romance With 20 or More Women A Month?

By Doris “Granny D” Haddock
t r u t h o u t | Speech
Thursday October 6, 2005

The following speech was made at Orchard House, home of the Alcotts, in Concord, Massachusetts.

On my walk across the nation several years ago I had the honor of speaking from a pulpit where Dr. King once preached. How I felt the power of his words and his love somehow still echoing in that great room! More recently, on the anniversary of his death in Memphis, I had the honor of speaking from the balcony where he took his last breath.

You, of course, understand how his politics of nonviolence was informed by the sacrifices of Gandhi, and how Gandhi’s nonviolence was informed by Tolstoy and Ruskin, who, in turn, were inspired by the American Quakers working for the abolition of slavery. The great Quaker voice was William Lloyd Garrison, who spoke to this very group so many years ago - as did Emerson and William James and Julia Ward Howe and other voices for justice who spoke to you in dark times. And so, in the long shadow of these people, I humbly raise my voice today.

We meet in a time when two great and growing divisions are separating us as Americans: rich versus poor, and left versus right. I would like to speak to the second of these, as its resolution would help solve the other.

The political issues that divide the American people are great issues, with severe consequences for the moral life of the nation and the fate of the planet. These are issues equal to the issues that divided us in 1860, and we should fear the historical similarities.

In some ways the conflict of the Civil War was not resolved, but rather accommodated, in the same way that smoldering coals under ashes are but a fire asked to bide its time. Do not the sparks now swirl up fresh? Is the heat and danger we feel not the old conflict between those who believe that authority comes from above: from an Old Testament God, delivered through husbands, presidents, preachers, ayatollahs and plantation overseers to people arranged in layers according to their worth - is it not a conflict between those authoritarians and those others who instead believe that all men are created equal, and that the authority to govern issues forth from them, upward to their government - their common vessel of community - and not downward? Is this not the divide of 1860 and also of our own time?

We have an advantage that our countrymen did not have in 1860, for, despite our tendency to assign colors to states, our differences are not locked into the different economies of different regions. Our differences are with our neighbors, our friends, our family members. We can argue this out peaceably across fences and dinner tables instead of across a bloodied continent as before.

But again it is the work of ending slavery. This time it is a slavery of the mind, which the hardest kind to deal with, as it is usually characterized by the unwillingness of the victims to be emancipated. But it must happen if the suffering of this nation and of the world is to end.

Let us consider the self-repression of the political right. And in this argument, I am talking to some of my own friends and hoping they will open their minds to a new thought from me, for I offer it in good faith and friendship.

Where authority and power flow down from above, from heaven to the White House to husbands and ayatollahs, the free and joyful living of people can be quite the enemy. If you will remember the free spirit of those flower children who grew up in the 1960s, for example, you will also remember the harsh attitude that attended to their joys from the more traditional, often more rural, elements of our society. Those political leaders who rose from this time, who lived in this more open and free way - less constrained by the rules of authority - were especially vilified by the authority clan. You need only to think of the special treatment given to the Clintons, who were of this generation and climate, to know the truth of this. And it fits the international pattern, of course, that the woman, Mrs. Clinton, would be singled out for the cruelest stones.

What attracted such hatred? It was their freedom, their sense of equality, and their joys.

Here it is: those in the clan of authority are not given the privilege - the natural right - of living their own lives. They do as they are told, say and think what they are told. Smothered is their curiosity and their healthy skepticism, and also their imagination, joy, freedom, and lust for life itself. When they see others actually living lives, they react with anger, as if someone had cut to the front of a line that, for them, never moves.

What is the proof of this theory? Those enthralled to authority, cowering under it, lose sight of their own lives. They will venerate above all else the symbol of the yet unruined potential of life: the curled-up unborn. The authority clan will have the image of an unborn baby as its flag, and they will claim to honor and defend innocent life, but that will be a great lie to themselves. For they will not be the ones to demand DNA testing of all prisoners on death row; they will not be the ones to demand health insurance for all children, or better nutrition in all schools, or peaceful alternatives to international conflicts. They will be the ones to rail against these things, for the authority clan parades itself as pro-life while it is truly more like a cult of death. Having died themselves, strangled by authority and fear, they cannot wish happy lives for others - they cling only to that magic symbol of what might have been. They relate to the unborn baby selfishly; it is themselves: unborn, unlived, stil hoping for a life.

I am not talking about political conservatives. People who follow leaders like Goldwater, Forbes, and Buckley do believe, in the great mainstream of American thought, that government is the council fire of community. They just want it not to be all-consuming. The people we are dealing with today, who are so far to the right of traditional conservatives that it is unfair to call them that at all, do not believe that our government is our campfire of community. They would replace it with a church, a strict family, and, as they have shown us so many times in history, even with a dictatorship that derives from imagined divine powers, and with a reign of brutal authority that sanctions criminal aggressions on other nations, torture, and the suspension of civil liberties. How many times have we seen this happen abroad, and how many times have we wondered if we would have the courage and the character to act up if it happened here - if our own army was turned into a police force against us?

I think every man and woman of us wants to be a patriot to this great nation. How sad to miss our cue when the alarm bell rings for us! How horrible to be enslaved to the wrong way of thinking at such a time of national crisis! We owe it to our friends and neighbors to free them if we can, so they might stand with us.

I will propose a mental experiment to see if we can find a string or two that can help us lead our friends out of this dangerous maze.

Imagine that your friend is very much pro-life and pro-war and doesn’t see the illness of her mental conflict.

I think you might notice that this friend of yours lives a slipcover-protected life and has not even allowed herself the freedoms of a good fantasy life. Let’s repair that.

Let me suggest that we take her to a good arts district, rent her a studio apartment full of art supplies above a good sidewalk café, find her a lover and come back in ninety days to see if her politics have changed. As she lives a real life, as she explores her own potential, she will learn to let others live and enjoy their lives, too. She will want to help the young woman artist next door who gets herself into trouble. She will even begin to be amused and impressed instead of angered and depressed by the Clintons and other lively, joyful, free-living people of this beautiful earth.

When people begin to really live their lives, the black and white certainties do not turn to shades of gray, but to the million-jeweled hews of a morning’s dew. That sparkle is the reality of life revealed. Life is about living, and about helping other real people get through this world with a minimum of pain and a maximum of human dignity. We simply can’t do that with authoritarian politics and its deadly abstractions. We can only do that with our love and our freedom to think for ourselves and act individually and as a community.

And that was the example of Jesus, wasn’t it? Did he not challenge the organized church of his day, challenge its authority, and overturn its rules that had hardened into cruelties and corruptions? Did he not show us how we might act instead from the love and charity of our own hearts, and, in this rebellion, did he not say, follow Me? Are we not to think for ourselves? Was so grand a thing as the human mind meant to be wasted?

Our founders were deeply spiritual and also deeply secular - a well-balanced condition of the mature mind that eludes today’s political fundamentalists. Our founders respected human freedom and the urge toward greater equality. Over the centuries, we have tried to make this nation a better expression of their intent, so that there would be no second-class citizens, no arbitrary authority that limited our life, liberty or pursuit of happiness. And the better angels of that Revolution stand yet upon our shoulders as we oppose the clan of authority, that cult of death, whose cloak of human oppression has cast its shadow over our children’s future.

What must we do? We must bring the light of consciousness to people who are enslaved by the darkness. We must show them - make them see - the clear links between the Taliban and the American fundamentalists. It is about power, male power, and subservience. Why can’t a young girl in trouble get an abortion in the preferred world of the fundamentalists? It isn’t because of the sanctity of life, or the fundamentalists would be acting to preserve life by getting medicine to Africa instead of impeding it. They would be halting executions and building up our institutions of peace.

The desperate attitude of the far right toward not only the unborn baby but even brain-dead people on life support reveals something about their true religion: they have little. There is nothing in their actions that reveals a belief that life is eternal, that there is no death except as a doorway to something better. Their brand of Christianity simply does not relate to the teachings of Christ. The worst of the hate-mongers who misuse the Bible to make million-dollar church incomes and push a political agenda of male domination and hate are easy to spot, for they cherry-pick Bible passages to suit their purposes. They disregard any turning of cheeks, they disregard the fact that Jesus never mentioned the homosexuality that they so fear. They seem not to fear that, as very rich men, they themselves might have a hard time driving their Hummers through the eye of the needle into heaven. They claim that every word of the Bible must be followed, but if they really believed that, they would have stoned themselve to death years ago, as they are as sexually frisky and full of covetous looks as anybody else. They forgive themselves freely, of course, even when they promote the murder of foreign leaders.

They refuse a young girl an abortion for the same reason they would refuse her birth control: because in either case she would be exercising power and control over her own future - and such power and control is reserved for the authorities - male authorities - below whom she is to cower and serve and reproduce. It is all about that, and we have to start saying so, so that the far right will no longer have the women marching in its toxic ranks - at least the smarter women.

If I ran the Democratic Party, I would lay it all out in expensive advertising campaigns. I would have the sociologists and the psychologists talking about the tricks of mental slavery that are being used to trick decent Christians and other people into following un-Christian leaders and policies. As with any kind of mental counseling, progress depends on the spread of consciousness - of self-awareness. I would let more and more people, especially the women, come to understand the nature of the lies that surround them and defraud them. I believe they really are for life and for liberty, but they must be given better information, better moral and emotional support.

It would be important to have well-known voices of authority deliver that message - the Walter Cronkites and Oprah Winfrey’s of America - if they would ever be brave enough to do so. And here is why the message must be delivered by such voices.

Imagine walking down a street in my Peterborough. You run across a retired couple and start talking politics. You get on the subject of abortion. Listen, you say, the Europeans have a very small percentage of the abortions we do in the United States. They have cut the number of abortions by providing better sex education, providing more contraception, and accepting a more open and honest attitude about the sexual lives of their young people. If your concern is to reduce abortions, surely you must become an advocate of these programs that actually do the trick!

But the couple disagrees. They tell you “it isn’t about doing what works in Europe and what might work here, it is about doing the right thing for the right reason, and following the word of God.”

Well, that was a real conversation in Peterborough, though I’m sure they must have been visitors.

If you wonder why the other side of the political aisle seems so resistant to the facts, it is because they are not interested in what works, what is pragmatic; they are interested in obedience to authority. It is nothing less than mental bondage to the cult of authority. This is of course unworkable in the civic arena, where pragmatism is the belief system we must share as our common ground. The only way to break through that problem is if our few national voices of authority will please give these authority-dependent people permission to think freshly about our important issues.

There is another string leading out of this dark maze. Better leaders can make great differences in the life of a society, but we cannot elect them if we do not change from electoral organizing to social organizing.

When I went on a 23,000-mile voter registration journey before the last election, I walked through many housing projects and low-income neighborhoods where no one from the outside had dropped by to talk politics since the last election. The Democrats only come around, I was told, every few years to ask for their votes, but they weren’t there to listen to their problems, to help them craft political solutions, and to stand behind them and amplify their voices. These people were of the opinion that, if the Democrats won or lost, their own lives wouldn’t really change much. It is simply exploitive politics to come around begging for votes without giving so much as a crouton in return. We have to be involved all year long, every year, and in every neighborhood that needs political help. That is movement building - not just stumping for candidates.

The residents of Cabrini Green in Chicago, and the people of the slums of Ft. Myers, Miami, St. Louis and New Orleans told me they needed our organizing help and our voices added to theirs - for they love their children too and want decent lives. Many of the streets I walked in New Orleans were later strewn with the drowned poor, as if America had progressed no further than the days of the Titanic, when those traveling life in steerage are never offered the lifeboats. So much criticism has fallen on the president for the flooding disaster in New Orleans, but the Democrats have had a long century to make life better and they have not done so. The New Deal and other programs, offered at a distance, are helpful but no match for a party meetinghouse in every neighborhood to raise the political competency and expectations of the area.

Politics is not just about raising money for candidates. Politics is about creatively serving the needs of your people, and the election is just the report card on how you are doing and how many people you have helped and how many people are following your leadership because you were there for them. We do get the government we deserve, you see, and the crowd standing behind us in critical times is the crowd we have served through the years. People will not speak up about global warming, I assure you, until they first have a warm house for their own children.

So here are my two thoughts. We must help people see the mental traps that they are victim to, and we must do this by telling it like we see it, by asking them to see that the pro-life, pro-war movement is really a cult of death, that fundamental Christianity represents the opposite of Christ’s teachings, that authoritarian control and elite profiteering are the strings of the far right’s puppet show.

Let us indeed believe that all people are equal, but let us not assume that all political opinions are equal, for some are toxic and sociopathic and require our loving intervention. Let us intervene. Let us stand up in church gatherings, let us confront our friends. Let us use the tools of mass communication to awaken people to the lies that bind them.

And let us return to real politics in the neighborhoods - especially those neighborhoods where we are most needed. As it stands now, people who do not receive the support they need from an ever-receding community are turning to the very churches that have been politically killing those needed government services. This is a dangerous tailspin that we can only arrest with a political return to the neighborhoods. Let us demand of our party leaders that we move from electoral to social organizing, so that there is more rock and less hot air under our candidates as we move into the future.

These are big projects. Do we have enough energy remaining for this sort of thing?

What is it to our souls when we have to just keep slugging through dark places? Why, after all that has happened in America, from stolen elections to the destruction of our necessary institutions of mutual help, are you, personally, still at it? Why, after seeing our country become the international symbol of irresponsible conduct, of torture, of political imprisonment, of destruction to the global ecosystem, are your spirits not smeared across the plaza under the treads of these tanks?

Are your hearts perhaps stronger and your souls deeper than you imagined? Yes, this is what you came here to do. There is no greater gift than to be given a life of meaning. There is no greater heroism than to bravely represent love in a dark time of fear and danger.

We are resolved to help each other. We are resolved to represent love in the world and to follow our national dream.

So look at the situation wisely and know that a happy ending is not to be found under the paper moon of child’s brief play. Accept and celebrate the fact that we are deeply engaged in a long, hard drama of global meaning. We welcome the fight. We welcome it, and, by George, we are up to it.

Thank you.