Cunt (29 page)

I often hear biological women (for, again, we are the only ones who feel free enough
to converse on the topic) say they have been “lucky” so far.

Meaning they haven’t been sexually assaulted.

So far.

While the threat of rape is always present for any woman who doesn’t have her head
lodged up her ass and/or who can’t afford bodyguards, women will still refer to themselves
as “lucky.”

This produces similar results as when we attempt to quantify sanctity.

It’s fucking chickenshit bullshit denial that leads to neurosis.

If you live in a culture that rapes its children, you can, under no circumstances,
consider yourself “lucky.”

Are people in the U.S. “luckier” than people in Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador,
Rwanda, South Africa, Palestine, Iraq, Indonesia, Sierra Leone, Bosnia, Venezuela,
Mexico?

Do you feel “lucky” to know that, according to Michael Moore in
Stupid White Men
, your garden-variety twelve-year-old in Guatemala can give you more information about
the World Bank than your garden-variety U.S. “investigative reporter” can?

On a recent jaunt through the News of the Weird website, I found numerous instances
of mental instability in our culture:

The U.S. Postal Service revealed in March that ten men had already been convicted
as part of an Internet group that exchanged videos of themselves administering beatings
to children (often their own). One man wanted to join the club but lacked an authentic
video to contribute and so made one of himself administering corporal punishment to
a small mannequin. Among the group: a middle school teacher, a nurse, a former Boy
Scout leader, and a former Sunday school teacher. (
Chicago Tribune
, 3/13/02)

A twenty-seven-year-old woman told reporters in January that when she called the Camarillo,
California, police on Saturday, December 22, to report a sexual assault, she was told
that the staff is limited on weekends and that she should call back Monday morning
(and when she did that, detectives counseled her to report for a medical exam). (Scripps
Howard News Service, 1/3/02)

Among the absurdities touching Enron was the report in February by a former employee,
broadcast by NBC News, that the company ran a mock trading floor in its Houston headquarters,
furnished with desks, large flat-panel computer screens and teleconference rooms,
for the sole purpose of making visitors believe the company furiously traded commodities
full-time. In reality, revealed the employee, the equipment was only hooked up internally,
and the employee-“traders,” who appeared to be frantically placing orders, were merely
talking to each other. (
NBC Nightly News
, 2/27/02)

A State University of New York at Buffalo professor, in a recent ecology journal,
expressed confidence that eventually butterflies could be genetically altered to permit
advertising logos and other designs on their wings. (
Chicago Sun-Times
, 3/13/02)

It took me eight minutes to find these items, and there were plenty more to choose
from. It was not difficult.

Let’s go back and pretend biological women are the only ones who suffer from sexual
violence in this country. If that were indeed the case, then isn’t 33 percent of one
half of the potential voting population still a pretty heady figure to be dealing
with?

Doesn’t it seem like that’s kind of a crisis, and should possibly be discussed and
acted upon?

What if one out of every three multinational corporation CEO’s were raped every year?
Don’t you think that would raise kind of a ruckus?

People in power—those who broadcast “issues” and enact laws—
know
that women in America are systematically raped, killed, beaten and cowed into submission.

Doesn’t it seem
odd
that—affecting such a huge percentage of the population—violence towards women isn’t
a loaded topic like abortion “rights,” cloning and terrorism? How about the subject
of white violence and corporate devastation on reservations? Police brutality in black
neighborhoods? How about the fact that young black men comprise over 40 percent of
the prison population in this country?

None of these issues are on the desks of the people who make policy and decisions
because everything that keeps people down and hurt and struggling serves those in
power.

It
serves
those in power to rule a population of people who are traumatized. That way, we are
much too busy dealing with alcoholism, drug addictions, peer competition and post
traumatic stress disorder to really pay much notice to how deeply we are being shafted.
Those of us not dealing with any of these problems are very, very busy gazing at our
lucky, lucky stars.

I am pretty fucken sure, however, that no one is free from violence and abuse.

If you haven’t been directly targeted, someone in your family most certainly has.
And if it has affected your family, it has affected you too, possibly in deeply personal
ways, in phobias or neurosis, in anxiety or self-esteem issues.

No one is exempt.

Certainly not monarch butterflies.

Even if you are one of the “lucky” ones, who has somehow, magically survived life
in this culture without the “taint” of sexual violence in your life, you nevertheless
suffer from the complexities of being socialized in a culture of heinous abuse.

Maybe you think I am full of shit, but let me remind you that denial is one of the
most common responses to heinous abuse.

People are constantly telling me, either directly or via the “media,” to stop bitching
about the white man and all of the “perceived” injustices he is responsible for.

I would like to clarify my position on this point.

I am not against the white man.

Robert Graves was a white man and if he hadn’t written
The White Goddess
, I would simply not be as smart as I am today. White men constantly honor me by reading
my book. Michael Moore is a goddamn pasty-faced corn-fed glowing white-assed man,
and I hardly pass a day of my life lately without referencing him because he’s such
a gorgeous shit-talker.

My white brother is one of my favorite social commentators on the planet.

Greg Palast: white man, love him.

Henry Waxman and Dennis Kucinich: white men and fucken politicians; love them.

My three nephews: white as driven snow; love them, pray for them, will do anything
to improve the quality of their lives, even, and especially if, that means reigning
in the sense of entitlement and strict gender roles that will be thrust upon them
by an unforgiving, mindlessly brutal and competitive culture.

You see, I have
no beef
with white men.

It
just so happens
that pretty much everyone I
do
have a beef with, is either a white man or on the white man’s payroll.

I recently read Michael Moore’s
Stupid White Men.

I would have probably read and thoroughly enjoyed this book in any context, but I
enjoyed it with a
particular glee
knowing that it has been on the bestseller list for over four months now. The bestseller
list is a calibrated reflection of the American collective consciousness. I infer
the interest in this book to mean that a lot of folks in this country are unhappy
living in the world the white man has created.

Books like
Stupid White Men
and
A Language Older Than Words
are part of a healing process.

It makes sense to me that those whom many would identify as “part of the problem”—that
is, white men—are in fact, making attempts to become “part of the solution.”

I also imagine that the pressure white men are feeling at this point in their history
is somewhat agonizing.

More fucken power to the white man, I say.

But seriously, folks, it’s time to overthrow the government.

It’s time for the Cynthia McKinney/Barbara Lee Administration.

It is time for everybody
besides
white men and those on their payroll to run the show. Michael Moore gives us a bit
of insight about this in
Stupid White Men.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot. There are tons of elected city positions and
there is no reason whatsoever that y-o-u shouldn’t be voted into office.

Like the water?

Then run for port commissioner.

Fair-minded Libra?

Run for city attorney.

Morbid Goth?

City coroner is the job for you.

Transgender folks should be writing the city’s sexual harassment policies and running
for sheriff.

Run for city council, postmaster or the board of education.

Moreover, support the fuck out of the very few people in political power who don’t
seem to be on the payroll of white men. Presently there are a few such people in Congress:
Barbara Lee, Henry Waxman, Jan Schakowsky, Cynthia McKinney, Dennis Kucinich and John
Conyers.

At present, it is of utmost importance to
support the fuck-all
out of politicians who have our backs, whether or not we live in their state. When
you read about some Congressperson talking shit, email them. It’s easy—just type their
last name on any search engine.

Ultimately, we need all grandmothers, all the time.

A grandmother who has raised her children and/or other people’s children is the perfect
person to be in national office. Grandmothers have their life experiences to help
them make sage judgments, they generally have more compassion than everyone else,
and if the white men in power assassinate one grandma, they will not only have hell
to pay for offing an old woman, but there are plenty more where she came from. Grandmothers
also have the time to focus. No one has to worry about someone having to breastfeed
during the State of the Union Address. And since the sexuality of elderly people is
completely ignored in this culture, grandmothers won’t have their energies taxed with
sex scandals.

We are in dire need of a grandmother-based government.

We cannot transform the government unless indigenous people, people of color, queers,
freaks, self-actualized revolutionaries and transgendered folks make some serious
stabs at procuring power.

Recognize sexual assault of individuals for what it is: a minute aspect of a vast
continuum of abuse that has taken place on the planet for over five hundred years.

Stop looking inward at your own individual reality.

Place yourself in the continuum, and act.

Do not, under any circumstances, put this book down and turn on the teevee.

The teevee debilitates our culture.

I know a Yaqui gentleman who abstains from drinking alcohol as an act of political
resistance.

In a similar vein, I abstain from watching the teevee.

More perhaps than reading
The White Goddess
, my teevee boycott has made me smarter. My mind is sharp and my critical thinking
skills are constantly challenged because I do not have a teevee deadening my brain,
making me feel like things that are completely unacceptable are somehow okey-dokey.

It is not okay to pigeonhole, stereotype and tokenize people of color, but the teevee
does it all the fucking time.

It is not okay to normalize whiteness or heterosexuality.

It is not okay to glorify the insignificant lives of people the teevee insists are
important celebrities.

It is not okay that the teevee pays Jennifer Aniston more money for filming one episode
of
Friends
than a sixth grade teacher will see in her entire career.

It is not okay to objectify all women, exoticize women of color and present transgendered
people as caricatures, if at all.

In order to appear on the teevee, you have to make the teevee executives happy. In
order to make the teevee executives happy, you have to make the white men who run
the gigantic corporations that run the teevee companies happy. In order to make all
these men happy, you have to be serving them in some capacity, however indirectly.
If you do not serve these men, then you will not appear on the teevee.

This reality is mathematically precise.

In case you ever wondered, this is why I don’t have my own late night talk show.

This is why the folks at International A.N.S.W.E.R. don’t have their own news channel.
This is why it’s Larry King instead of Noam Chomsky, Jerry Springer instead of Jocelyn
Elders, Eminem instead of Seeds of Wisdom and Martha Stewart instead of the Dalai
Lama.

Maybe you are one of those people like my mom who says, “Oh god Inga leave me alone.
I only watch the Discovery Channel.” Well I’ve watched the Discovery Channel with
her and what I learned is that the Discovery Channel serves the white men too. It
shows us that there is no situation on this planet that is free from the prying, entitled
eye of “civilized” human beings. Isn’t it a very strange voyeurism that leads people
to film polar bears fucking in the last corners of the world where they manage to
eke out an existence? And maybe that tribe of indigenous people in the Brazilian rainforest
really wouldn’t enjoy knowing exactly how many millions of unknown and largely ignorant
people are scrutinizing images of their lives.