The GOP wants you!

In your place, of course

When the August recess arrives, members of congress will (in most cases) return to their districts to ingratiate themselves with the constituents who will be deciding their fates in November's general election. Naturally enough, many of them look to the organs of their political parties for support in this endeavor. We recently learned that the House Republican Conference has the backs of the GOP representatives in congress, providing them with a 31-page manual for maximizing their effectiveness during the crucial days of August. The manual is titled Fighting Washington for All Americans, which clearly implies that the Republicans have nothing to do with Washington (“doing nothing” is arguably true) and that voters must choose Republicans to fix all of the things that Republicans have wrecked in the last several years (like the economy and employment).

Fighting Washington is replete with the sort of subtle and sophisticated strategies that you would expect from the party of Boehner, especially when it comes to outreach techniques that bring women and minorities into the fold. (The “fold,” as with sheep, right?) Since each picture is worth a thousand words, let's take a look at the most eloquent part of the Republican play book. Be sure to keep your eyes peeled for women in leadership positions and black and brown people in any role at all. (Hint: These latter appear almost as often as Waldo.) First, though, the textual preamble.

The women do at least start off strong in the text, where the one-named “Cathy” (like “Cher,” I presume) provides a full-page introduction whose third paragraph is

We know that Washington is broken. It spends too much, borrows too much, and takes too much. It targets people for what they believe. It chokes out jobs with more red tape, blocks new energy resources and makes our health care crisis worse. Our government is out of control.

A killer argument. (Don't forget now: The GOP has nothing to do with Washington's failures.) On the next page, Republican House members are exhorted to submit op-ed pieces to their local print media. A complete sample draft is provided for Republicans too dim to write their own. What's the lead? This:

As we conclude another busy legislative session in Washington, I look forward to working hard at home for the month of August. Each day I am grateful for the opportunity to represent you in our nation’s capital because Washington is broken and needs to be fixed.

It spends too much, borrows too much, and takes too much. It targets people for what they believe and punishes them for their political ideologies. It chokes out jobs with more red tape, blocks new energy resources, and makes our health care crisis worse.

Washington is out of control.

Hey, if it works on the members themselves, why shouldn't it also work on their dim constituents?

Let us now consider the importance of ginning up support from those “potentially targeted by the IRS.” This is ideal, because everyone is at least potentially subject to enhanced IRS scrutiny. One may as well start with the biggest real-life bogeyman of them all!

Check out the IRS's potential victims. That could be a token woman in the pink shirt, with her back toward us. The pants aren't very feminine, though, so we can't be certain. At least youth is represented by the teenage boy in the far corner. No doubt the revenuers are threatening his 501(c)(3) organization. Fortunately, the authority figure of the balding middle-aged man is present to instruct them on anti-IRS self-defense.

We can make a smooth segue from the IRS to the dangers of ObamaCare, which —as we all know—is merely a way to let the tax people threaten our health just as they do our wealth. The scruffy and rumpled doctor needs to be warned that the Obama administration's obsession over drug abuse (they really are rather over the top there) will threaten his easy access to prescription drugs for his recreational use (or energy boosts during long hours on duty in our understaffed socialist health system). That might be a woman there in the back, wearing purplish-blue and framed against a window. No doubt this is subliminal messaging that lets women know they're not entirely forgotten (just mostly ignored unless they're dangerously fertile).

A representative's constituency contains more than dissolute doctors and frightened IRS targets. To embrace the wide, wonderful world of one's district in all of its delightful diversity, organize a meetup! Be sure to salt the crowd with your hand-picked minions (“This will strengthen the conversation and take it in a direction that is most beneficial to the Member's goal.”)

This is the illustration the minions of the House Republican Conference chose to represent a typical meetup. Three white guys and one white gal. (Seen any minorities yet?) The woman is appropriately demure and quiet, listening with a docile demeanor to the guy in the middle. Observe the clasped hands of sincerity. Doesn't this look like fun?

One must be certain to use the August recess to argue in favor of people getting jobs (as distinct from actually passing job-stimulus legislation; this long-discredited socialist approach has been anathema since it was last done for the Bush administration). Fighting America—oops!—I mean Fighting Washington recommends a live YouTube Roundtable to boost jobs and fight (or at least whine) about unemployment.

As seen in the picture, a job roundtable need not be a roundtable at all. It can actually be as simple as a white guy haranguing people who are trying to have lunch in a cheap diner in an unidentified war zone. See the pensive lady in this one? (She's wondering if she's getting paid enough for this soul-killing posing job.)

Did you know that the Republicans favor family leave? It's another perfect topic for a roundtable! Your Republican representative can single the praises of the Working Families Flexibility Act, which empowers employers to rearrange your hours so as to avoid overtime pay. But don't worry, if you end up working overtime anyway and don't get a chance to take compensatory time off, you will eventually get paid. (Please don't think of this delayed compensation as an interest-free loan of your wages to your employer. That doesn't sound nearly as good as “flexibility.”)

As before, no roundtable is actually necessary. It's just an expression. Since we're talking about working families, it's important to run a photo with an unambiguous female in it. There's actually three or four in this one, and the nice lady in the blue top is congratulating a morbidly obese Tea Party member on his recent eating contest victory. Note the subtle way it reminded the reader about health issues and the dread impact of ObamaCare! And a bonus: There's a black guy in the back! Hi, black guy! (We're done with you now. Bye-bye!)

It's important to never stop hitting the jobs issue. (Remember, it's all Obama's fault that no jobs measure had gotten through the House of Representatives since the GOP took control in 2011. But what else could you expect from a shiftless black guy?) But let's stay on topic. Jobs!

The compassionate conservative congressman will find time to at least shake the hands of people waiting in an unemployment line. (Most of them are overweight, so look into cutting the food-stamp program some more.) There are one, two, maybe three women in this picture. A high point!

Now on to the job fair! Representative Bucshon managed to get his job fair on the local NBC affiliate. (Time to call up the local Fox affiliate and scream threats at them. Didn't Murdoch's check clear?)

There's something funny about this video-capture photo. Notice how the mix of men and women begins to approach societal norms when a real-life event is captured? Quite a contrast to the default choices of Republican operatives. Did any of them scratch their heads and think this picture was somehow “wrong” and out of place in their play book? I guess they decided to use it to please Rep. Bucshon. But it is a little jarring. (Hey! Is that a minority in the back? Or is he only in a shadow?)

The Republicans have a big demographic problem. Not only do minorities refuse to vote for them, so do most young people. But never fear! Having recognized this deficiency in their recruitment program, the GOP is highlighting the predatory impact of ObamaCare, which will force millennials to pay for healthcare while they're young and healthy, thus helping Mom and Dad and Grandma and Grandpa to stay alive while the youngsters could be using that cash to improve the quality of their partying. Vile redistributionist policies! If young people can be inveigled into destroying ObamaCare today, they can live happier, wealthier lives right now and not be concerned about it till much, much later (which is another matter altogether and not part of the current discussion).

Oh, look! Helping young people understand the wickedness of ObamaCare apparently involves old white-haired guys giving a talk to groups of young, pretty, nubile females. Hey, man, do you really want a camera in the room? (Oh, okay. I hadn't thought of that.) Big progress, though, for female representation in Fighting Washington. We have three young women listening submissively to an older man (just as God intended).

I know from personal experience that farmers love the Republican Party. It appears to make no sense, but they do. (Something about rugged individualism and subsidies for agribusiness.) Certainly the GOP will not fail to address farm issues during the August recess.

As we all know, women have nothing to do with agriculture. Neither do minorities. They're just no good at it (unless, of course, they're under the supervision of an overseer).

Much of the same is true with energy production. That's an engineering problem, and there's the rub. Women don't like hard hats because they muss their hair. The GOP understands this.

Also, there are no young or minority engineers. Get over it if you don't like it. The Republicans accept reality just the way it is!

Hey! Just one doggone minute here! Where did that picture of award-winning black engineering students from Clarkson come from? (It sure wasn't from Fighting Washington, I'll tell you that much!)

Sorry. We got a little off-topic there. Let's turn instead to the GOP's concerns about fuel and food. According to the GOP play book, the August recess should be used to tour gas stations and grocery stores (with the members acting like they've actually been in those places in recent years and not just during childhood). After making sure that the station owners and grocers “are comfortable with the overall messaging them” (that is, ensuring that these people understand that Obama is evil incarnate and responsible for all their problems), the congressman can stage a series of events where he stops off at each business to decry the horrible things Obama has done for them while the owner nods and/or wrings his hands.

This is yet another occasion where womenfolk are irrelevant. When it comes to grocery shopping or gassing up the car, all you need is a couple of white guys. Message received!

Another good topic is higher education, where you can address major concerns like student loans (and the importance of letting interest rates fall too low), lack of available jobs (because of Obama's destruction of the economy during 2008, before he was president), workforce training (which community colleges should provide more efficiently to compensate for budget cuts imposed by Republican governors), and keeping education affordable (see “student loans” and “workforce training” again).

And what says “higher education” more than a white guy lecturing at a white audience? Nothing, of course! (It is just possible that an Asian or two has slipped into this group, but that's okay because Asians are a good minority. Especially in math class.)

It's not enough to tour through farms, warehouses, gas stations, and schools, of course. You have to get out there among the little people. Like the good, honest folk who work in mom-and-pop outfits in strip malls that GOP policies are putting out of business via tax breaks to more efficient megacorporations with off-shore labor forces (where the miracle of the unfettered free market enable young people to find employment opportunities that would be denied them in the US [at least until they are teenagers]).

For a common touch, wear jeans under your sports coat. Commoners will relate to that. It's not clear that women were required in this picture, but perhaps they do the cleaning up. They seem friendly enough to their oppressor, suggesting that it must be hard cider in those plastic jugs. The wine is probably another reliable sales item in depressed economic sectors.

Republicans hate red tape (except when it comes to regulating abortion clinics), so  naturally Fighting Washington suggests yet another roundtable discussion on government over-regulation. A congressman can wander into a convenient factory and bring production to a total halt while he delivers a sermonette on the importance of efficiency through deregulation. He can demonstrate this by refusing to wear a safety vest while lecturing the employees.

If he lives through the experience, he can then visit a senior citizen center, part of his reliable support base as he promises to protect Social Security and Medicare from his party's policies.

The woman in the picture is just posing. She's got her flag pin on her lapel and is probably an example of the female of the Republican congressional representative species. She's a nice lady and probably won't be pushing the old man down the escalator in the background after the camera goes away. Legislation takes longer, but has fewer fingerprints.

When a GOP member of congress gets tired of going walkabout on these various roundtable tours, he can always cede the heavy lifting to local talk-radio hosts. Most of them are always willing to carry water for the GOP. You can read almost any dreck you like from cue cards cut from the party platform (or Fighting Washington!) and they'll run with it. They already feed their listeners several hours every day of right-wing cant. Rest assured that they know your talking points even better than you do!

This photo depicts a model talk-radio station. See the man's arm in the lower-left corner? He's undoubtedly the guy who has the cut-off switch in case the female host is having her time of month and goes off the reservation.

Broadcast media are dominant these days, but it's important not to neglect the surviving print media, which can be important in certain key demographics (like the old people who subscribe so they can keep up with Peanuts). Remember that op-ed stuff. You can get newspapers to run articles that align with your interest if you schmooze sufficiently ingratiatingly with the paper's editorial board.

As shown in the picture, modern editorial boards are made up exclusively of old white guys. These people are the GOP's core constituency and hardly even need an excuse to pitch their stories the way the local congressman would like.

Townhall meetings are lot like roundtables and all the previous tips and rules apply. Don't forget to salt the audience with shills who have the questions you'd prefer to answer. Get free media from your minions inside talk radio and newspaper editorial boards. Then you're on solid ground.

If you're a member of congress who wants to impress people at a townhall meeting, don't leave your visual aids immobile on an easel. Wave them around. That makes it harder to read anything that they can reconsider later, but people will remember your passion. Also, if you have an assistant with a semi-dark complexion, tell people he's of Indian descent (like Bobby Jindal!) and not Mexican (which will make people think he's illegal, or at least his parents were). Call him “Raj” or “Apu.” These are media-tested acceptable exotic names and will make your audience give themselves credit for their fake open-mindedness.

Republican candidates who learn the lessons of Blighting—I mean, Fighting Washington can be certain to reap the votes of their palest and most gullible constituents. Their success will continue until the dwindling supply of such constituents reaches a certain critical level. Fighting Washington is Exhibit A in the argument that the Republican establishment thinks that critical level is many cycles away.

Please prove them wrong in 2014.

Scott Adams changes his tune?

Another victim of the matriarchy

It was clever of Scott Adams to include his e-mail address in his Dilbert comic strip. The readers are a constant source of grist for the cartoonist's mill, enabling Adams to demonstrate the existence of endless variations on the theme of corporate mis-, mal-, and nonfeasance. I long expected Dilbert to grow stale over the years, but I've been pleased to discover how well it has held up. I make a point of reading it every day.

Last week I picked up a copy of Your New Job Title is “Accomplice,” the latest in an endless stream of Dilbert compilations. Since I'm the kind of guy who always peruses the front matter, I took a minute to skim over the cartoonist's introduction. It contained a passage that took me by surprise:

Eventually, corporate America excreted me. My bosses explained that I was unqualified for any sort of promotion because I had boring DNA and a scrotum. That's a true story, by the way. Reverse discrimination was a big thing in California in the nineties. And for what it's worth, that was not the first time my scrotum had caused me trouble.

This seemed a slight departure from Adams's previous accounts of his departure from Pacific Bell. Consider, for example, what he told Inc. in 1996, a mere year after he received his walking papers:

I'd told all of my bosses I would resign if they ever felt my costs exceeded my benefits. One of the benefits, of course, was the positive PR. I get interviewed often. Anyway, in the spring of 1995 I got a new boss, and I reiterated my offer to resign if asked. A few weeks later he asked. The reason given was budget constraints. I'm pretty sure it was a local management decision, not one from the top.

Adams gives no hint that he was cashiered because of genital deficiencies. Perhaps he was concealing the sexist policies that forced him out of corporate America and now feels that masculine empowerment has freed him to tell the whole truth. I rather doubt that. He has never been too tongue-tied to express himself on such matters in the past. Adams infamously compared women who espouse equal pay for equal work to children who beg for candy. His credentials as a men's rights advocate seem bright and shiny, buffed to a high and slightly belligerent gloss.

I noted in particular the claim that California was a hotbed of women versus men “reverse discrimination” in the 1990s. From my own perspective and recollection, it seems to me that Adams's claim is untrue. In the decade of the nineties I was in the midst of academia, the unapologetic ground zero of diversity and unashamed “political correctness.” Our college president during that period was (gasp!) a woman. She presided over the hiring of six tenure-track faculty members for the mathematics department. Four of them were men. She was doing a remarkably poor job of oppressing the guys.

Proof by anecdote!

Mr. Man defends the patriarchy

In hell's faculty lounge

The recent accounts of the misogynistic exploits of Professor Superior and Professor Troll remind me that hell's faculty lounge has other occupants. I heard the story of this particular gentleman from one of his retired colleagues. The retired colleague was a regular at a lunch group I often attended. When he reminisced about the good old days as an econ prof in the years after World War II, he enjoyed telling tales out of school. Sometimes he'd tell us about Mr. Man.

Mr. Man was a dedicated woman-hater. A life-long bachelor and a professor of the old school, Mr. Man always wore a three-piece suit, the knot in his tie neat and tight. He taught economics and business law. Most of the students enrolled in his classes were men, which met with Mr. Man's approval. Econ and law are serious subjects, suitable for masculine endeavor. By the same token, it was outrageous that a few women would attempt to master them. Mr. Man grudgingly accepted that his institution was coeducational and that women were allowed to enroll in his classes, but he didn't have to like it.

It was the contention of the purse-lipped Mr. Man that the girls on campus were pursuing men, not an education. He considered it his duty to drive as many of them out of his classes as possible, thereby opening spaces for the boys who were more deserving of them. Mr. Man's favorite ploy involved the prelude to his orientation lecture on the first day of the semester. Standing primly at the lectern at the front of the room, the professor would greet his students with a cautionary admonition:

“This, gentlemen ... and ladies, is a college course in business law. Business law is a serious endeavor requiring diligence and your full attention in class.” Mr. Mann paused for effect as he scanned the class through his rimless spectacles. “You will be expected to observe the highest standards of comportment and scholarship. To this end, I offer a particular admonitory note to the young ladies in class.” Mr. Man's demeanor became more brittle as he steeled himself to confront the dreaded female presence, but he was equal to the task:

“Would all the ladies in class please sit properly and bring your knees together?” Not having been forewarned, or not having believed those who attempted to warn them, the women in class were usually shocked by Mr. Man's rhetorical question. A brief rustle would disturb the silence of the room as the women uncomfortably shifted in their seats and wondered if they were expected to actually press their knees together for the duration of the period. Mr. Man would view their discomfiture with wry satisfaction, a very thin smile on his face. As the rustle of fidgeting women died out, he would deliver his gracious peroration:

“Thank you, ladies. Well, gentlemen, now that the gates of hell have been closed, let us see if we can give our attention to business law, shall we?”

My friend liked to trot out the story of Mr. Man whenever a stranger was a guest at the lunch group. He enjoyed seeing the reaction to his delivery of Mr. Man's punchline, which usually involved bulging eyes and dropping jaws. The old professor said that no action was ever taken against Mr. Man for his bizarre behavior or comments. He actually thought that no one had even dared file a complaint in those days back in the Eisenhower administration. The postwar generation was not inclined to rock the boat or call attention to itself, so Mr. Man's students just put up with their professor's eccentricities. Mr. Man defended the ramparts of higher education as long as he could against the onslaught of women who wanted to learn economics or business law, but even he could see that the tide was against him. By the time he retired, he must have felt defeated. His defeat, however, is not yet complete.

The story of Mr. Man strikes most people as a good example of how far we have come from the bad old days. Let's not be too complacent about it. Professor Superior, for example, was still behaving in a similar way forty years later at my own school; he merely had to be more careful in his choice of words than Mr. Man. As FemaleScienceProfessor made clear in her own account, Professor Troll feels entitled in the present day to denigrate the skills and scholarship of his female colleagues. The social environment has become very inhospitable to such misogynistic males, but natural selection has yet to make them extinct. It's still, unfortunately, too early to drop our guard against this particular endangered species.

Sir Isaac Newton, feminist?

Newton won't bite that apple!

This weekend I read a book just because everyone else is doing it. To me, this is one of the least persuasive reasons for reading a book. My friends can tell you that keeping up with current fads is at the bottom of my priority list (though why should you accept the testimony of such a small group of people?).

In this case, however, I have many excuses, the main one being that Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code relates to topics (religion, Catholicism, codes) that are actually interesting to me. When a friend lent me a copy of the book at last Friday's lunch group, I buckled down and dashed through it. The experience was relatively painless. I found The Da Vinci Code entertaining, cleverly plotted, and often amusing (although not always in the places that Dan Brown probably intended).

My opinion on Brown's sincerity in his promotion of a suppressed feminist past for Christianity is unimportant. There are certainly many misrepresentations of historical fact (e.g., Constantine created the Bible, the Council of Nicea first promulgated Christ's divinity), but fiction writers are specialists in pretense. Edgar Rice Burroughs took pains at the beginning of Tarzan of the Apes to depict himself as merely the editor of a mysterious manuscript that had come into his possession:

I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other. I may credit the seductive influence of an old vintage upon the narrator for the beginning of it, and my own skeptical incredulity during the days that followed for the balance of the strange tale....

I do not say the story is true, for I did not witness the happenings which it portrays, but the fact that in the telling of it to you I have taken fictitious names for the principal characters quite sufficiently evidences the sincerity of my own belief that it may be true.

---

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did the same thing with his tales of Sherlock Holmes, just as Laurie King continues the tradition today with her own contributions to the Holmes legend. Dan Brown is in good company.

Good fiction requires plausibility, of course. If the reader can't suspend disbelief, the novel fails. If the reader explodes in incredulous laughter, we may reasonably infer that a faux pas has been committed. I can cite two such instances. One is Professor Langdon's lecture on phi, the Golden Ratio, a risible episode which I will save for a later commentary. The other is not entirely Brown's fault, although he falls into the trap of making it a significant plot point.

I refer to the inclusion of Sir Isaac Newton in the list of grand masters of the Priory of Sion. Given the Priory's supposed role in preserving the shocking secret of Jesus Christ's marriage to Mary Magdalene and her intended role as leader of the Church, Sir Isaac is one of the unlikeliest candidates imaginable for the job of grand master. A lifelong bachelor and overt misogynist, Newton would have been horrified at the notion that Christianity's true history included equality between the sexes. At least once, during what may have been a spate of mental aberration or melancholy, he directed paranoid rages at friends, apologizing at one point to John Locke for declaring “that you endeavoured to embroil me with women.” Imaginary or not, it seems that Newton numbered matchmaking among the cardinal sins.

Historians tend to agree that Newton died a virgin and that he may have been the kind of repressed homosexual who remains compulsively unattached throughout life. In any case, the “repressed” seems apt. One might expect that a requirement for the position of grand master of the Priory of Sion would be a robust heterosexuality, especially in light of the essential role of hieros gamos in the sect:

Langdon had read descriptions of this ceremony and understood its mystic roots. “It's called Hieros Gamos,” he said softly. “It dates back more than two thousand years. Egyptian priests and priestesses performed it regularly to celebrate the reproductive power of the female.” He paused, leaning toward her. “ And if you witnessed Hieros Gamos without being properly prepared to understand its meaning, I imagine it would be pretty shocking.”

---

No doubt Newton would find it so! One might also, therefore, question the role of Leonardo Da Vinci, who filled his art and his sketchbook with portraits of his favorite male model, the “little devil” Salai. There are definite problems with the roster of grand masters of the Priory of Sion.

One final thing, this one more of a head-shaker than a belly laugh. Langdon and Neveu roam London in search of “a knight a Pope interred,” at first not realizing the reference is to Newton, over whose funeral Alexander Pope presided. The second line of the poetic clue is “His labor's fruit a Holy wrath incurred.” Although I'm not especially good at mystery novels, I had already twigged to the fact that it was a reference to Alexander Pope, Sir Isaac Newton, and his famous apple, although I was put off the scent a bit by that “Holy wrath” business.

“Newton is buried in London,” said Langdon. “His labors produced new sciences that incurred the wrath of the Church.”

---

Excuse me, Mr. Brown, but are you confusing Sir Isaac with Signore Galileo? Newton incurred no Church wrath. His works in mathematics, optics, and physics were epochal, but they provided a new foundation for the system of the world rather than upsetting the existing order. The Church of England had no complaint with him (provided he kept prudently quiet about his unitarian tendencies) and he was beyond the reach of the Roman Catholic Church (to which “Church” usually refers in Brown's novel).

No, Isaac Newton doesn't fit Dan Brown's scenario very well at all.

Shrill feminist

Would I have the balls for it?

Many years ago my friend Elaine and I were swapping tales from our childhood, sitting in her Greenwich Village apartment and comparing notes. She was raised in a semi-observant Jewish family and joked that she would title her autobiography Eat the Pizza in the Living Room with the subtitle Because we're keeping the kitchen kosher. I was a cradle Catholic in whose family some mothers popped out an annual child while others mysteriously spaced them out. Both of our families seemed to appreciate the advantages of a cafeteria approach to religion.

Then Elaine hit me with the blockbuster. As a young girl, she had been taught a morning prayer:

Blessed art thou,
O Lord our God, King of the universe,
for having made me according to Your will.

---

Surely that is not an offensive prayer, is it? It depends on the context. This was the prayer for girls. Boys, however, were taught to pray a different prayer:

Blessed art thou,
O Lord our God, King of the universe,
for not having made me a woman.

---

Even though I was accustomed to the rock-ribbed patriarchy of Roman Catholicism, Elaine's recitation of these childhood prayers rocked me back on my heels. That moment crystallized for me—a somewhat inattentive male—how little I had grasped the inherently privileged position I had attained by the simple expedient of being born with XY chromosomes. Indeed, if I took the God notion more seriously, I should undoubtedly pray fervently each day, thanking Him for not having made me a woman. If He had, how could I avoid being furiously angry every moment of every day?

No doubt some people would be happy to explain to me that I misunderstood the prayers (tell that to Elaine, why don't you?) and the innocent intent behind them. Don't bother. I am quite familiar with the tortuous arguments of apologists, who can turn the egregious into the mundane, water into whine, and paternalism into solicitude. I was raised Catholic, remember?

This chain of recollection was stimulated by a recent flurry of letters in one of the regional newspapers I read. It all started, as it so often does, with a letter from a man who wanted to explain to women how to take responsibility for pregnancies. Men, as you know, are particularly good at explaining things to women. (As a childless bachelor, I am available to provide expert counseling on marital relations and child rearing. Cheap rates, too.) This particular man was at pains to explain his view of women's reproductive rights (although, for some reason, he felt that “rights” needed to be fenced in by quotation marks):

Sorry to be so ignorant (what'dya expect from a man), but I thought women always had reproductive rights that no law, court, government agency, etc., could ever take away. They have the “right” to decide whether or not to have children, if and when to get pregnant, when to have sex and with whom, whether to be married or not, choose whether to use birth control and what method (condoms, shields, spermacides, pills, etc.), or sexual abstinence and, even, to become surgically sterile.

---

See? It's simple! Girls who give in to pressure from their boyfriends merely forgot to “just say no”! Women whose contraceptive measures fail (for now, anyway, until we manage to outlaw contraception as a violation of God's plan for the universe) are just irresponsible for not having chosen more effective means—like surgical sterilization (at least until we ban it). And don't forget to say no to rapists, too. They'll understand. They're men.

I'm not exactly a sensitive New Age male (“New Age”—no, thank you!), but I find myself taking extreme offense at the obtuseness of some of my brethren. For years now I've wondered why all women aren't angry with us every minute of every day. That question is only partly rhetorical. I know moral outrage is difficult to sustain, even under severe provocation. (That's probably why Bush got a second term.)

A syllabus of horrors

While my consciousness is momentarily raised, before it slips back into a more tranquil state, I am moved to share a collection of miscellaneous items from my memory trove. Each item is well-attested, having occurred either in my presence or in the presence of a friend or colleague who witnessed it. Nothing in this little syllabus of horrors is a “friend of a friend” urban legend.

• A math department meeting at our college came to an end without a decision on the contentious issue of a uniform departmental policy on classroom technology. Our most technophobic colleague, an old-school curmudgeon, sauntered over to the young female faculty member whose policy proposal he had successfully tabled, expressed the hope that she would not hold a grudge against him, and then chucked her under the chin. As the woman said later, “The only reason he got that damned finger back intact was that I was so surprised.”
• A colleague in the history department openly decried the presence of women (they're just there to find husbands) and minorities (they're lazy and ill-prepared) in his classes. We called him the professor of Aryan studies. He was reputed to have the longest list of student grievances on file in the instruction office when he finally retired in the 1990s.
• The business law professor at a sister college was a virulent old misogynist who declared that each woman enrolled in his classes was depriving a more deserving male of an education. He famously began each semester by putting the women in their place. “Ladies, please keep your knees together. Gentlemen, now that the gates of hell have been closed, let us proceed.”
• A member of the California legislature stood up on his hind legs and objected to a measure to criminalize spousal rape: “If I can't rape my wife, then who can I rape?”
• My younger brother and sister were in high school and old enough for driver's licenses. My sister is a year and a half older than our brother. It was decided that they would be permitted to drive to school, provided that our kid brother was in charge. After all, he's the boy. My sister complained that she was always at our brother's mercy if he decided he wanted to cruise Main Street awhile before going home after school. But, then, she's the girl, so it was all supposed to make sense.
• A bit of a twist: My grandmother's will included all of her descendants, without exception. It also included all of the spouses of her descendants, but with one exception: my sister's husband. The other spouses were female and, as such, became members of the family when they married my grandmother's sons and grandsons. They belonged to us, you see. I suppose we should have been grateful that my sister wasn't left out because she now belonged to my brother-in-law's family.
• An even bigger twist: A colleague was appalled when one of her female students presented her with a drop card for a geometry class in which she was excelling. The student had been told—by a female counselor!—that girls did not need to take math, that it was too hard anyway, and would damage her GPA. Sisterhood may be powerful, but sometimes it's treacherous.

I won't make the mistake of denying the reality of progress. For example, the professors in the above list are all gone now, and the worst case (the “gates of hell” guy) flourished in the fifties and sixties; he wouldn't last long today, mercifully. What troubles me the most, however, is the degree to which the thoughtless assumptions of the past afflict those who should know better. The female counselor who routinely warns her female advisees away from math is particularly worrisome, as she appears to have bought into the idea that math and science are for boys, and girls shouldn't trouble their poor little brains over it. No wonder the women in my math department regard her with special horror.

Every polemic of this sort runs the risk of falling into the trap of excessive generalization. Who dares say how women should think and feel when we are talking about a group that includes such diverse elements as Phyllis Schlafly and Betty Friedan? (Actually, Schlafly would probably be happy to tell us, in no uncertain terms.) The point, though, is that the male-imposed burkah is less distant from our modern American society than we might like to think. Just read the letters to the editor or listen to the rantings of Rush if you don't believe me. And thus I wonder, why aren't women angry all the time?