Serving Mammon

All over the world, and for much of history, women have tried to avoid getting pregnant, and often sought to abort if they did, even at risk of their own lives. In modern times, wherever abortion has been legal, abortions rarely resulted in their deaths. I do not know if making abortion legal results in more abortions. But it's very clear that legal, available, and affordable birth control results in a lot fewer abortions. It's not even debatable. Statistics bear that out.

Nevertheless every Republican administration since Ronald Reagan's has instituted the so-called "global gag rule" withdrawing aid to any organization providing reproductive healthcare that includes abortion, or even alludes to abortion as an option. This has a large impact on the provision of birth control and invariably leads to more abortion. The current Republican administration has gone many steps further and has withdrawn money for all charitable aid services, if the organization that provides them does not denounce abortion. Mortality from malaria, HIV, tuberculosis, and other diseases is expected to spike. That is what it means, now, to be pro-life.

An adviser for the administration's new policy issued a strange rationale. She said "The Trump Administration, and most of America, doesn't believe that taxpayer funding ought to go to abortion. And it certainly shouldn't go to nations that generally are very, very pro-life, which is true all across Africa. The cultural imperialism that exists at the heart of this idea, that they can't be happy unless they have abortion like we do, is outrageous."

Cultural imperialism. This is not a phrase she came up with off the top of her head. This is calculated propaganda straight from a think tank.  The idea is to rip a page from the left-wing playbook, mark it up a bit, and toss it back. We lefties hate imperialism. We're always going on and on about countries forcing themselves on other countries. We're anti-colonial. We find it deplorable to blast our way into another culture and replace it with our own.

We are so shocked by the audacity of the phrase in this context that we splutter and falter. There are so many things wrong with this that we don't even know where to start objecting. That's the point, of course.

We're stuck with this counterproductive policy because those in power are not especially interested in reducing the number of abortions. They are interested in claiming their place in a holy war, marching into battle with the brightest banners and the loudest trumpets, a battle in which abortion is the greatest of sins but war is a perfectly honorable way to murder people. Many of us liberals are puzzled by the willingness of some self-described Christians to overlook or even reward reprehensible moral behavior in their candidates--let alone their worship of mammon--but we are making the mistake of imagining their doctrine stems from the Gospels, from the Sermon on the Mount. From Jesus. And it doesn't. It comes from Revelation. And according to Revelation, Christians are headed toward a final, cataclysmic battle for the human soul, and the sides we choose will mean our salvation, or not; so we'll follow that godly anti-abortionist, anti-gay leader straight to the gates of Hell, and it doesn't matter how many people we kill along the way, as long as they're post-fetal. All we need is righteous fervor and enough sacrificial Muslims.

With a few exceptions, the leaders themselves don't care about these issues. They're in it for themselves. The President himself almost certainly doesn't care about abortion--I'd be astonished if he hasn't paid for more than one himself--but he knows a good lever when he sees one, and many people can be maneuvered into voting for plutocrats as long as they swear allegiance to the right hot issues. Millions of single-issue voters will flock to their side if they claim to be anti-abortion, or pro-gun. But make no mistake, they're on their own side. They're fine with war. They'll make one out of whatever they have at hand.

That is why Iraq was selected to be bombed into smithereens after 9/11. Iraq was irrelevant but handy. Over a half million Iraqi citizens perished and those that survived lost their livelihoods as the United States, having manufactured deliberate chaos, privatized industry and opened up the country to piracy by multinational corporations. Billions were made and funneled off to private hands as our conquering armies smoothed the way to installing unfettered capitalism, which was the main goal all along. Quite a caper for a party that disapproves of "cultural imperialism." Iraqi society predictably disintegrated into factions, many of them now stoutly anti-American. And on and on it goes. Our leaders still profess to be against terrorism, but they're not. That's something they can use. Peace is the enemy of profit.

And We Shall Purify

Boy howdy, some year, huh? We women are getting us some justice after a lifetime of abuse, or possibly the whole of human history--anyway we're finally holding the boys to account, and it's exhilarating. We got 'em by the balls and we're dribbling down the court for the score. Seems like the good guys were due for some kind of win, since it didn't work out for Colin Kaepernick and the gang when they tried to respectfully point out that the police were getting away with murdering them. You could sort of see why they might be aggrieved, what with all the death, not to mention the previous three hundred years of dehumanization, but unfortunately for them it turned out they were just overpaid niggers who hated America, as the President clarified, and they didn't get much traction. Maybe some other year. Maybe more death. Maybe it's not quite their time yet.

But it's sure our time now, right, ladies? We are done with being groped and cat-called and having to keep quiet lest we lose our jobs and the whole bit, which we get to call the Rape Culture because there's nothing that can be said that hyperbole doesn't say even better and louder. Women are refusing to remain silent in the face of oppression and men are finally learning how pervasive it has been. This is a good thing. Many men were unaware of what we've been going through, especially the ones who up till now had labored under the delusion they were innocent even though they are clearly equipped to be on the rapist side of the rape culture ledger.

This is particularly fun for me because I've never been in a mob. I was only one year old when Joe McCarthy was in his heyday, so my memory of it is patchy, although I certainly remember "the Commies" serving as the bad guys for decades. (We call them Muslims now.) Of course this is different. All those people accused weren't actual Commies and it shouldn't have mattered if they were, whereas now we know who's truly guilty on account of all the penises. It's wonderful to see men getting what they deserve. From off-color jokes to rape, it's all the same. We're through.

Show you just how much we mean it: we'll take down good ol' Al Franken. He's been an effective senator on the right side of durn near everything when we don't have any good senators to spare, but he engaged in shenanigans. Sometime. Probably. Ha ha! Take that, Al! Bet you're sorry you allegedly did all that stuff you probably might have done! Sure, it's the kind of stuff I've done myself, like butt-grabbing without permission, and if you'd done it to me it probably wouldn't have offended me or the next fifteen women, but it offended at least a few, and that should be that. It's our time now, baby. We've got a big net and we're fixing to catch a lot of men in it. We've all been groped and leered at but we ourselves are pure and we're taking you down. Zero tolerance, baby. It's the very definition of principled.

Maybe another day we'll have time to take aim at some other principles. Maybe we'll take a hatchet to radical capitalism and the party that primarily promotes it, the politicians who serve none but the rich and have seen no commons that shouldn't be privatized for profit, no resource that shouldn't be mined or harvested for profit, no population that shouldn't be demonized or destabilized or destroyed to smooth the way for more profit, no warmaking that can't be turned to profit. Who feel no shame about stumping for guns and against abortion whether they care about those things or not, because it will fool so many people into voting for them, so they can continue to wreck everything for profit. Who will happily devastate the living earth. For profit.

Talk about your rape culture.


[Author's note: today is International Margaret Day! You all know what to do!]