The Republican War on Women Gives Me Nightmares
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In his new book ‘The Social Animal’, David Brooks stresses that our unconscious mind is the driver in human behavior. Mine has been operating on steroids this week.
Last evening, I sent a message to a friend explaining that I can’t continue our discussion of Hillary Clinton right now. We fell into a heated discussion of Hillary’s effectiveness as Secretary of State, based on my Monday post. His comment about Hillary not helping the women of the Congo caused me to erupt into a passionate defense of her commitment to women worldwide. I couldn’t bear to have her ripped apart on my own private Facebook wall.
My friend believes that Hillary is too masculine, whereas I am feminine and still powerful. This man is an ‘enlightened’ male and so the ferocity of our debate caught me off guard.
Forty years after women marched for our rights in America, we are not only losing them but still fighting the same sexual political arguments about sexuality, sensuality and the idealized visions of what women must be in order to leverage appeal and effectiveness. How depressing!
My friend was married to a very dominating woman for years, and he says that Hillary reminds him of himself in ways that he doesn’t like. Call me confused!
My week has gone downhill since our argument, except for hearing David Brooks speak at the World Affairs Council in Philadelphia Monday evening. My woes are nothing compared to the poor women of the Congo, Afghanistan, Peru and Zambia, of course. We are not in the same league, although certain universal truths tie us together.
Women As Incubators
I can’t believe I have to get on the Planned Parenthood bus and start marching all over again Thursday for the right to be more than an ‘incubator’, which was Stupak’s term for women in the health care debate. Women can die because we are only ‘incubators’. The focus of the social conservatives is protecting the unborn, unconceived, unimagined.
American women are selfish for not wanting to die in the emergency room because our doctors refuse to induce the medical procedure needed to save our lives — a right the Supreme Court of America has given us. Congress portrays this woman as a self-absorbed alpha woman, when in reality she can easily be a mother of three in a deadly, life-threatening pregnancy.
The mostly men of Congress say the woman should die in the emergency room with a medical complication she did not create. Her existing children should go motherless, her husband wifeless — the entire family unit should be ripped apart, because the doctor refuses to follow the Hippocratic oath to treat the dying.
Then again, women are only incubators. And there is always a coat hanger. If women are going to die anyway in the halls of America’s hospitals, perhaps a young orderly can go for the coat hanger. I think the woman’s existing children would want someone to try to save her.
Washington Bound
Maybe I’ll feel better that at least I am on the move tomorrow, boarding the Planned Parenthood bus to go to Washington. It’s all about young women for me. Philosophically it’s clear to me that America is entering another McCarthy era.
My priority may be women’s rights, but Americans are losing our collective bargaining rights and many others that we treasure. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy, rejects the charge that it is partisan, writing ‘Mackinac Center Is Partisan’ Charges More Revealing of Accusers Than Center. ‘
There is no disputing the facts that Mackinac has requested all emails from certain professors at the University of Michigan. Wayne State University and Michigan State University referencing collective bargaining in general and the terms ‘Scott Walker’; ‘Wisconsin’; ‘Madison’ — and ‘Maddow’. Just watching the Rachel Maddow show and commenting on it is grounds for handing over emails to the Mackinac Center.
This is not Russia, dear readers. This is America and it’s scaring me to death these days that watching the Rachel Maddow show could end your career. I’ve always been a moderate — and sometimes a Republican. I was barely born during the McCarthy era but I’ve watched the hearings and know it was a frightening time for people like me — people who try to advance public conversation on important topic.
Lisa will be in Washington, too. I want us to walk together on the Washington Mall. My greatest fear is that it’s a Thursday and no one will show up. Planned Parenthood assures me this isn’t so. What I understand about my view of America this week is the extent of my fear, which is deep-seeded and revealed itself in a nightmare I had Monday night.
You know that feeling you have when you are screaming in your nightmare but you can’t hear yourself? This is how I woke up yesterday — shaking, crying, terrified. I believe this is a singular event in my life, because I have either totally lovely dreams in technicolor or I have profound dreams that can be very challenging but always have great outcomes that affect my life decisions.
I’ve written about falling into the elevator shaft and living, or soaring into the brilliant light of a sparkling conservatory ceiling. It was so beautiful that I felt I was drifting straight into heaven.
Republicans Are Scaring Me To Death
My unconscious mind was hard at work Monday night, scaring me to death. What happened last evening was one of those small moments that sends chills up my spine. The rest of my post is copied from My Facebook note, where I referenced my friend Dan, the Hillary Clinton dispute, my dream and what happened next.
I dreamed that I woke up in my bed and there were tiny black cats the size of mice everywhere. They were crawling and wriggling like maggots and there were a few black cats nursing them. The mother cats just lay there and endless little kitties, really tiny and some a little bigger but still very small were lying everywhere suckling on the mothers. They kept coming everywhere in my bed. I would move a pillow and there were more everywhere. I was screaming for help but I couldn’t move because they were crawling on me.
I hit send to Dan and went back to Anne of Carversville writing. Working on the first post my colleague put in Private Studio, I looked at a Vogue Turkey editorial by photographer John Lindquist.
He doesn’t have much on his website but there was a small button in the corner that said ‘blog’. I pushed the button and I promise you from the bottom of my heart that today 4-5-11 at 7:13 pm, this is the first image on his website, uploaded on March 17, 2011.
http://www.john-lindquist.com/blog/
Girl in lace teddy with black cat by John Lindquist
I’ve always been paid really well for my 6th sense and intuitive forecasting ability. This trait scares the crap out of me sometimes. This little story happens ALL the time, which is why I’m so concerned right now about the future lives of America’s women.
Lisa and I will report on our day in Washington, and I will share details about my summer in Wisconsin, where I proudly raised the American flag every morning and took it down before nightfall. Senator Wiley’s grandchildren — our next door neighbors — played the bugle, and I got misty eyed lowering Old Glory.
America’s New McCarthy Era
Anne’s first boyfriend was the grandson of Senator Wiley’s sister, who lived in Minneapolis. Ten years later I sat on the Chelsea stoop of my New York apartment with my landlord, who was a playwright. He asked me about my background and I explained that I grew up in Minnesota but I so loved Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin.
The sequence of events are long lost in my memory, but the playwright told me that he had gone to prison during McCarthy era. I volunteered that I knew Senator Wiley from Wisconsin, that he was such a great man. He insisted that we be very patriotic with our flag raising ceremony each day at the lake, but I was all for it.
My playwright landlord just looked at me, his young tenant and laughed. ‘Do you not know that Senator Wiley was Joseph McCarthy’s right-hand man?’ he asked me.
‘No way,’ I exclaimed.
‘Believe it,’ he said. And of course it is true.
The same man that I respected and honored, the man whose grandson was my first boyfriend, whose granddaughters were great friends to me, the town that recognized my talent and ran me for student council president when I was the new girl in school, also produced the co-leader of the McCarthy hearings.
Beware of wolves in sheeps’ clothing. In the case of the war on women, not much is left to the imagination. Meaning no offense to cat lovers, the black cats are running wild in America.
Now March!
Especially if you are a woman, your marching orders are clear. You either support women’s rights in America or you don’t.
You agree that as a woman your own life is more important than that of a multi-celled embryo. You believe that your existing children deserve to not have their mother die, because a vastly male majority of Bible-toting men refuse to abide by a US Supreme Court decision.
Your children deserve to grow up with their mother and not have you dead in some emergency room, because no one will treat you — the liberal pariah, the incubator for the unborn, the woman who has hailed to be a good woman, a good mother.
Remember the obnoxious moment in the House of Representatives when Rep Chris Smith (R-NJ) took to the floor of Congress to read the graphic description of an abortion procedure. Jackie Speier (D-Ca) rose to speak, saying:
“I really planned to speak about something else. But the gentleman from New Jersey just put my stomach in knots. Because I’m one of those women he spoke about just now. I had a procedure at 17 weeks pregnant with a child who moved from the vagina into the cervix. And that procedure that you just described is a procedure that I endured.
“I lost the baby. And for you to stand on this floor and suggest that somehow this is a procedure that is either welcomed or done cavalierly or done without any thought, is preposterous.”
Rep Jackie Speier Talks of Her Abortion
Across America, men want to make miscarriage a felony, so that you can be investigated to see if you failed to take proper care of your fertilized egg. In enlightened countries of the world, we call such behavior fascism.
In America, it’s called freedom — a vision of freedom that I never thought I would see again in America. After the Holocaust, after Stalin, after the McCarthy hearings, I thought we were terrified that fascism could take root again in America.
Black Cats In Our Bedrooms
But the black cats are roaming into bedrooms all over America, because American women, especially the marrying kind, aren’t having enough children. You are too much like Hillary, although I think Phyllis Schlafly makes Hillary look like a pussy cat.
Do you read me loud and clear, or must I continue to have nightmares on your behalf? I’m beyond the age of childbearing and not afraid to die.
When the Republicans eliminate Medicare and Medicad as they propose, telling me that I must make my own way through the health care system as an old person, I am not afraid to commit suicide if I become ill. This latest Republican action will disproportionately affect women, who live longer. As a self-employed person in New Jersey and New York, I was paying $1000 a month for health insurance. After the passage of Obamacare, my health insurance is $316 a month.
I am not afraid of the black cats, except in my sleep. What about you? Anne
