Djelloul Marbrook

Connecting the dots between the horrors we’ve committed is like connecting the stars, and yet I think I know what the horrors have in common: fear of women, fear of children.

Pomp, blather and ideology serve the oppression of women’s eternal potentiality and the psychic gifts with which children arrive in our dangerous care.

Just as corporate greed smirks behind self-righteous apocalypticism, so fear of women lurks behind extremists and their self-serving phallocentrism. The Taliban’s treatment of women is a raw and religiose version of the lengths to which church, state and enterprise go in the West to deprive women of equality.

I once asked an Episcopal parish priest to explain why women should not be priests. He regarded the benighted boob before him with pity and pronounced, Our Lord didn’t call any women to be apostles. When I had regained some measure of composure I said, For the love of God, He didn’t call any Ukrainians either. I’ve always been pleased that I used that cliché, for the love of God, precisely because there wasn’t any love of God in the priest’s answer. This almost comic incident epitomized, to me at least, the crime of institutionally harming half of humanity in the name of bogus dogma, to say nothing of the fact that our knowledge of the life of Mary Magdalene haunt’s the church’s misogyny.

Our success in convincing children that they don’t see what they clearly do see and don’t know what they clearly do know is equaled only by our success in coercing them to help us cover up the abuses visited on them.

We’re addicted to the hyperbolic world created by the pervasive abuse of children. Its operatics hold us in their demeaning thrall. We’re as vigilant as grand inquisitors for the few children who have survived their upbringing with their birthright senses intact. We do all we can to ostracize and marginalize such freaks. If we must, we’ll institutionalize and drug them. If we accidentally marry them, we’ll destroy them and blame it all on them.

The hypocrisy required to sustain this tragic crime manifests in all manner of diseases which we dutifully treat as if they were separable from their psychic causes.

We cook up all sorts of phony concerns—stem cell research, same-sex marriage, flag burning, the ordination of women—to distract us from our criminal pursuits. Our excesses—obscene consumerism, war-making, blindness to the human misery in our midst, fanaticism, greed—inure us to the consequences of our behavior. We’re doing this for your own good, we tell our victims. There’s no antidote to the poison of believing this.

I think the advertised omnipresence of women in the West has frightened a significant number of dimwits in Christendom, Islam, Israel and India. They see a world in which half the human race might have its say, and they don’t want any part of it. Such a world is a house of horrors to them. They pile a lot of words around their misogyny, but it can’t hide the fact that in the society they want women will be shadows.

To say American society was attacked on September 11, 2001, is diversionary. It reeks of convenience. We are the society from which a vision of the liberated woman is beamed to the rest of the world. For this we were attacked. Regressive elements in our society disdain this vision, but we remain its origin. The phallo-goons of the world perceive us as determined to let women run amok in the world, as men have from the beginning.

When the Republicans in the United States saw the politics of sub rosa, coded racism and polarization circling the drain they began to whip up fear of Nancy Pelosi becoming the first woman to serve as speaker of the House of Representatives. Oh, we’re not concerned about her being a woman, they assured us, it’s just that she’s so liberal, and she’s from San Francisco, and you know what that means. The country knew exactly what it all meant, and it had had enough.

We oppose women clerics, corporate and war leaders for reasons that sound no less disingenuous than the Taliban’s. But in our society we’re constrained to pay lip service to ideas we abominate, which is why the smirk is as common as flag pins on blue suits in Washington.

We’re not engaged in a great patriotic crusade against Islamo-fascists. We’re engaged in a worldwide conflict over whether women and children will be treated decently. If the battle lines are drawn more sharply in Muslim countries it’s only because a consensus has yet to form among them as to which century to inhabit.

This war is a disgrace from which none of us will emerge unsoiled. The longer we persist in couching it in terms of oil, arms and ideology the harder it will be to admit to ourselves that it’s about the denigration of women and the warping of children into video-game figures.

It’s time to give our mouths a rest and look each other in the eye for a long, silent, thoughtful time, the way the great Renaissance artist Artemisia
Gentileschi (inset, Judith Beheading Holofernes) looked at the male-dominated world that betrayed her. Without the other half of the human race we are mean cripples.