The Things We Leave Undone While We Sweat The Small Stuff

Photo: tavisalks.com/Remaking America

In this country millions of children are going hungry.  There are as many reasons as there are hungry children, but not a single one of them is the fault of the child.

This year's count puts the homeless at nearly 600,000. Many of them are our veterans, come home from wars with wounds that won't heal.  Nearly a third of them live on the streets.  Some cities work diligently to keep them off the streets, not by sheltering them but by making their attempts to sleep outdoors more difficult.

Our public schools are barely holding together, as funding, along with creativity and our ability to see our children as our future, declines.  The future of our public learning institutions is in jeopardy, and there are some who see that as a good thing.

Men and women in their middle years are now taking jobs normally held by teens or retirees.  $20 and $30 an hour jobs are long gone for the masses.  A $15-an-hour job is now classified as a goal to reach instead of a hurdle to jump over.

People who were promised adequate retirements are finding, 30 years after the pact, that nothing was written in blood.  The money they worked for and counted on has been stolen away and they have no choice but to accept it.  As criminal as it seems, it's just the way it is when times are bad and we all (well, almost all)  have to tighten our belts.

Our need to keep health care obscenely profitable is responsible for shortening lives and causing needless pain.  We seem not to be able to make the connection when ad campaigns by insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and hospital chains bombard our airwaves.  Someone is paying for those ads.  We try not to think about who that might be.

Our roads and bridges and buildings are crumbling and we're supposed to believe there is no money to fix them.  We wait for the inevitable disaster that will open the vault to the funds hiding there all along.  Large numbers of people will have to die as a sacrifice before more can live.

Private interests are carpet-bombing the land of the free and the home of the brave.  We say we don't know how to stop them, apparently not even noticing that we've made a habit of nurturing and promoting politicians who make no secret of their allegiance to them.

But I'm not telling you anything you didn't already know.

So why aren't we talking about these things all day every day until something gets done about them? Why aren't we seeing periodic updates on these insults to the human spirit on the news?

A hungry child wonders where she'll be sleeping tonight.

A good person working hard to build a safe future suddenly finds herself jobless with no comparable employment in sight.

A man nearing retirement age finds that the equity in his house is worth a third of what it was 10 years ago, and his retirement package is worth even less.

A person gets sick.  The illness becomes chronic.  Work is out of the question, but the costs to stay stable have risen and are now beyond reach.  Next step: bankruptcy.

Tent cities are springing up, then being torn down.

And so on.

These stories get published and most of us react the way the writer intended, but the big news takes over and the stories, sad as they are, get lost.

Big news like (you knew this was coming) sports world scandals, Sarah Palin doing anything, God's personal messages to certain GOP leaders, the hurtful words one public person used against someone else, and the interminable, advertiser-driven, celebrity happenings.

When was the last time the news media was so captivated by a story about any of the abuses I've listed, they made it "Breaking News" and stayed on it for days on end, without regard for regular programming?

When was the last time the public went on a rampage against those abuses, protesting in numbers so powerful they couldn't be ignored until change finally came?

Never.  It has never happened.  Which is why we're still where we are, and the perpetrators are still where they are--growing stronger in a place where they need not be afraid.

There are powerful factions out there working to build our country to their liking.  They welcome the distractions, and often manufacture them in order to divert our attention away from their efforts to take us down.  After decades of practice, the demagogues have fear-mongering down to an art form.  It's no accident, for example, that Ted Cruz looks, acts and sounds like Sen. Joseph McCarthy.  Or that Rand Paul confuses libertarianism with liberty.  Or that a vengeful, gun-toting God has suddenly become the Right's co-pilot.

They understand the media better than we do.  They know that religion, bigotry, and misogyny push the right buttons and keep the noise going.  They know enough of us are easily distracted and will believe anything but the truth.  Those people are their ace in the hole.  They couldn't win without them.

Our mission, if we choose to accept it, is to bring the dialogue back to the bigger issues and keep them front and center.  Our story is the story of the masses.   We owe it to ourselves to get it right.

(Cross-posted at dagblog, Daily Kos, and Freak Out Nation.  Featured on Crooks & Liars MBRU)

One good reason the Feminist Movement had to Get Moving

In 1973 Marabel Morgan wrote a book called "The Total Woman".  It was a follow-up to her successful "Total Woman" programs, in which Marabel taught women how to be seductive and outwardly submissive so as to get whatever  they wanted from their stern or indifferent husbands, most of whom had chronic roving eyes and/or wallets covered in cobwebs.

The secret, as Eve could have told any one of those wannabe Stepford Wives, was sex.  No, not withholding it, a la the women in Lysistrata, but reveling in it, wallowing in it--in a Godly way, of course--as the very best way to keep your man happy.  (Second best is staying sweet by keeping your mind clear and your mouth shut.)

Marabel had assignments for the women, who paid $15 for four two-hour sessions.  Most of them involved sex as the pivotal tool to keep hubby happy.  If wifey wasn't happy doing it, she'd better get happy, toot sweet, because the bible tells her so.

The little woman was expected to be an "atmosphere adjuster" in the morning by being pleasant to look at, be with, and talk to.  She was to walk her husband to the car each morning and wave until he was out of sight.

She was to call him at work an hour before quitting time (just before she took her bubble bath and cleaned carefully between her toes) to tell him she craves his body.

She was to "thrill him at the front door" by dressing in sexy costumes. "A frilly new nighty and heels will probably do the trick as a starter," Marabel writes. (One of the women in her class won First Prize in Marabel's mind by stripping naked, wrapping herself in Saran Wrap, and topping herself off with a strategically placed red bow.)

And if he came home growling, Marabel cautioned:

"Don't deprive your husband of intercourse when he acts like a bear.  He may be tired when he comes home tonight.  He needs to be pampered, loved, and restored.  Fill up his tummy with food; soothe away his frustrations with sex.  Lovemaking comforts a man.  It can comfort you, too."

From there the book gets deeper and darker, as Marabel tries to convince the "Total Woman" that in order to be totally Total she will have to come in second in everything.  In Chapter 6, Adapt to Him, she finally gets to the meat of it:  "The biblical remedy for marital conflict is stated, 'You wives must submit to your husbands' leadership in the same way you submit to the Lord.'  God planned for woman to be under the husband's rule."

In the Oh, King, Live Forever section of that same chapter, she writes, "I have been asked if this process of adapting places a woman on a slave-master basis with her husband.  A Total Woman is not a slave.  She graciously chooses to adapt to her husband's way, even though at times she desperately may not want to.  He in turn will gratefully respond by trying to make it up to her and grant her desires.  He may even want to spoil her with goodies."

Gag me with a maggot, even thirty years later, honest to God.  But it goes on:

"What if the king [Ed. note: King Hubby] makes the wrong decision?  Oh, that's a hard one, especially when you know you're right, and there are times when that is the case.  The queen is still to follow him, forthwith.  A queen shall not nag or buck her king's decision after it has been decreed.  Remember those speedy trials, gals!"  

The Execution of Anne Boleyn

Oh, Holy Mother of all that's Totally Total, sometimes I think Marabel was really a guy:

"It is only when a woman surrenders her life to her husband, reveres and worships him, and is willing to serve him, that she becomes really beautiful to him.  She becomes a priceless jewel, the glory of femininity, his queen!"  (P. 80, still on Chapter 6.)

As much fun as Marabel Morgan's book seemed to be to the tittilatees of the world (She was a perky regular on The Phil Donahue Show and made the cover of the top mags of the day),  the real message was one of female submission--of biblical proportions. Marabel herself admitted as much in 1992, when she told a reporter, "Subservience is involuntary, but submission is my choice."  She said submission--not the sexual come-ons--was the real point of her book.

I knew it!  I just knew it! (No, I didn't.  Not until I re-read it again yesterday. I picked up the book for 50 cents at a thrift store last week, just as a curiosity, and the whole religious submission thing caught me by Total surprise.  I'm beginning to wonder if I ever read anything but Chapter 10--"Super Sex".)

Since its publication in 1974 the book has sold over 10 million copies. (Out of print now, but available on Amazon and in thrift stores everywhere.)  It lost favor for a few decades but the King Hubby ideas that seemed so ridiculous in "The Total Woman"  are starting to look pretty good to a whole lot of Christian women who find themselves re-living the age of Old Testament As Normal.

I think I've finally found the answer to the question I asked last February, when, incredibly, millions of GOP women were seen cheering the men who were fighting against free contraceptives: What do you see in those men?  Apparently, they see nothing, hear nothing, think nothing.  Maybe that's why Marabel's very last paragraph might make more sense to them than it does to me:

Please, don't be satisfied with a new paint job and some redecoration.  Plug yourself into the One, the only One, who can give you life.  Pascal said, "There is a god-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man, which cannot be satisfied by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator. . ."  God is waiting and wanting to fill your vacuum, to make you complete.  Total.  Right now you can become a Total Woman.

Oh, did I mention that Marabel dedicated this book to her good friend, Anita Bryant?  Or that she learned her parenting skills from Dr. James Dobson, author of Dare to Discipline?  She quotes him in Chapter 12, Blueprint for Blessings:  "When [the child] flops his hairy little toe across the line you've drawn, that's the time to give it to him."

Lovingly, of course, with big hugs afterward, because, as Marabel suggests throughout her book, "I'm completely out of touch with reality and you can be, too. Totally."  (Not her exact words, but close enough.)

No Preacher Presidency this year. Santorum is out.

The big news yesterday was that Rick Santorum has suspended his presidential campaign.  After great deliberation, spurred on by the realization that he never had a chance at it anyway, he has cancelled his campaign plans and most of his public appearances.  As with every concession speech, Santorum says he's not giving up the fight.  There's more to come. The fight for freedom, except for women, children, the poor, the jobless and the heathens, goes on.

Yesterday, on the same day he stepped down from the podium, he stepped up to the pulpit for a scheduled appearance with James Dobson at his latest "Focus on the Family" smack-down.  I'm not surprised.  Just as George W. Bush's wishful true calling wasn't really as President of the United States but as baseball commissioner, Rick Santorum's true calling is as Grand Fundamental Firekeeper.

Being president would have been a feather in his tri-corner cap, but it's probably just as well it didn't happen.  If he had been chosen, he surely would have found himself governing an entire country full of surly sinners, most of whom would likely balk at having to practice his peculiar brand of holy paternalism.  It would be a full-time job, just keeping those ingrates under control.

Odds are his first priority would have been to hammer away at our constitution (a document almost as vague and open to interpretation as a certain Holy Book), attempting to turn the "dem" in democracy into a "theo" forevermore, or until the next secular coup, or until the world went up in flames, whichever came first.  But there are only so many hours in the day, and even if the West Wing had been turned into the Right Wing, there are demands on a nation's president that are. . .well, let's just put it out there. . .purely secular.

Santorum's rise to second place in the Republican primaries, based on nothing more than a series of sermons outlining some truly archaic and increasingly out-of-touch religious beliefs, caused real consternation in some circles expecting the more traditional, run-of-the-mill, I'll-promise-you-anything-if-you'll-vote-for-me campaign.  

The man was a tiger when it came to social crime and punishment, and he wasn't afraid to snarl his disapproval at whole segments of the population who might, for example, use artificial birth control. Or who might think for even a minute there could be some wisdom in separating government from the church.  But it turns out there were whole segments of primary voters who were looking for answers to questions about our economy, our environment, our crumbling infrastructure, our place in foreign affairs.  They were questions Rick Santorum either couldn't or wouldn't answer.  It was as if he didn't know or care what office he was running for.  The sermon was the thing and he was reaching crowds in the millions. 

Now that part, milked to the extreme, is over, but I predict we haven't seen the last of Mr. Santorum.  He'll take his Faith and Values show on the road and crowds will follow.  At every turn, when religion and government collide, Rick will be there.   But he will not be president of the United States.

Praise be.
  

Sign at Rose City Park Church, Oregon