Can you believe the news of men of late? Deeds done that you’d call inane if not for collateral damage, ramifications, and victims? A presidential candidate with a love child. A governor with one too. A congressman broadcasting his ‘package’. The French president of the International Monetary Fund accused of violent sexual abuse. Jeesh. Brings to mind the first line of a Neruda poem: “It so happens I am sick of being a man”.
Well, I don’t wish I played for another team and understand those actions to be, like, mutations in the drive without which none of us would be here. Still, what’s up? Take the last incident cited above. How could one of the most prominent men on the planet undertake such horror? From whence could he have come?
First reports from France conveyed a sense of outrage for the fact that a front runner for their next presidential campaign was seen across all media doing a perp walk. Soon though came reports of other unwanted encounters with DSK and then, amazingly, of a broader related permeation of French society.
It was incredible to listen to a female editor of the prominent French newspaper, Le Monde, describe conditions for women, though not perfect, as much better here in the USA than en France. This from a culture in which the employment of idiomatic Americanisms can be illegal and American taste and popular culture vilified.
Made me break out de Tocqueville. “In France… women commonly receive a reserved, retired, and almost conventual education… then they are suddenly abandoned, without a guide and without assistance, in the midst of all the irregularities inseparable from democratic society.”
Yikes!
“Long before an American girl arrives at the marriageable age, her emancipation from maternal control begins: she has scarcely ceased to be a child, when she already thinks for herself, speaks with freedom, and acts on her own impulse. It is rare that an American woman, at any age, displays childish timidity or ignorance.”
Democracy in America was first published in France en Francais in 1835. Perhaps “plus ca change plus ca meme chose” – More things change the more they remain the same. The American women with whom I’m most familiar would most definitely not be taken for ignorant or timid. Toward one should an uninvited paw be extended, a bloody stump would be what was pulled back.
*Walking Around
**cf post of 10/9/09 for more examples of neat stuff us guys think up
The Subtle Landscape 
Leave a comment