Women of the Year

   “I grew up in a beautiful era, now sadly in the past.  In it there was great readiness for change, and a talent for creating revolutionary visions. Nowadays no one has the courage to think up anything new… they just keep rolling pout the same old ideas.” Olga Tokarczuk

                          Marsha P. Johnson          below, Mirabel sisters

A special issue of Time with Jackie Kennedy on the cover was devoted to honoring influential women each year since 1920.  There were some obvious choices – suffragists Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt, First Ladies Eleanor Roosevelt and Michelle Obama, civil rights pioneers Rosa Parks and Angela Davis, feminists Simone de Beauvoir and Gloria Steinem, entertainers Billie Holiday and Aretha Franklin, writers Rachel Carson and Toni Morrison, athletes Babe Didrikson and Serena Williams, and lawmakers Margaret Chase Smith and Patsy Mink.  A transvestite, Marsha P. Johnson, who participated in the 1969 Stonewall Inn Riot, made the list. I had never heard of some foreign leaders and scientists, as well as wheelchair-bound Judith Heumann, who fought for rights of access for the disabled.  I learned that when Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered the Mirabel sisters - Minerva, Patria, and Maria Teresa – murdered in 1960, the resultant outrage contributed to his downfall. 

Hollywood barrier-breaker Rita Moreno, a Puerto Rican native who starred in “West Side Story” (1961), revealed that she refused to sing such demeaning lyrics as “Puerto Rico, you ugly island/ Island of tropic diseases.” The words were changed at her insistence.  Our misogynist President has demeaned at least a half-dozen women on the list, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Ellen DeGeneres, Nancy Pelosi, Angela Merkel, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and last year’s  “Time Person of the Year” Greta Thunberg (I kid you not, as Jack Paar used to say).

Not all women profiled escaped criticism, especially foreign leaders such as Indira Gandhi, who instituted repressive measures against India’s poor, Aung San Suu Kyi, complicit in the Myanmar army’s brutal campaign against Rohingya Muslims, and even Liberia’s Nobel Peace Prize recipient Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, for tolerating corruption and cronyism. Birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, it was pointed out, embraced eugenics as a method of weeding out defective babies.  Notably by their absence: Betty Friedan, author of “The Feminine Mystique,” who objected to outspoken lesbians supposedly tarnishing the women’s rights movement, and Phyllis Schlafly, who successfully campaigned against the Equal Rights Amendment.  Though she had a rancid effect on the body politic, Schlafly was a far more important newsmaker (Time’s standard for selecting its Person of the Year) than many of the more admirable women on the list.

I spotted a woman from Ivy Tech wearing a “SRAIGHT OUTTA TRIO” t-shirt and told her my son worked with TRIO students at East Chicago Central.  She said she was Central class president in 1996, that her maiden name was Letise Walden and now Jenkins, and she had worked with Mr. Lane on the school yearbook. 

The stock market Dow Jones average had fallen below 20,000, and price of gasoline has dropped below 2 dollars a gallon.  Strack and Van Til  was open, but several customers and employees were wearing masks.  The bread shelves were almost bare.  My sons were concerned that I am still going to my IUN office, but the building has been sanitized and I hardly see anyone, much less get close to them.  Chesterton library is closed, but I have several books at home that are unread or that I have barely begun.

I am taking my time with Olga Tokarczuk’s “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead” because it is so rich with meaning – and sad, which seems fitting in these plague times.  She writes: “Sorrow lies at the foundation of everything, it is the fourth element, the quintessence.”  Living in a wooded area inhabited by hunters who await their prey in pulpits, Tokarczuk  notes: “For what on earth was taught from that sort of pulpit.  What sort of gospel was preached?  Isn’t it a diabolical idea to call a place from which one kills a pulpit?” The book opens with a neighbor fetching Janine in the dead of winter to help dress a man found dead from swallowing a dagger-shaped bone from a deer he’d slain.  The macabre task complete, Janine observes the “dead hobgoblin’s body in a coffee-colored suit.”

Having returned three CDs to the library’s outside video slot, I dug into my collection and put on albums by Counting Crows, Arcade Fire, and Donnas. The first two are rather somber in tone, but the Donnas ”Spend the Night” always puts me in a good mood.  As the lyrics of “Take Me to the Back Seat” advise, “let’s get this baby rockin.’”  “Take Me to the Back Seat” ends:

do you need a map?
let's skip the nightcap
i'll make it sticky sweet
just take me to the backseat

Hearing the Donnas brings back memories of a sitter by that name who’d look after us when our parents went out.  A sultry brunette who smoked cigarettes and wore sweaters that showed off perky breasts, she would sit in Vic’s chair reading a novel. I can imagine snuggling in her lap as she recites a dirty passage from “Peyton Place” to me, although by the time of that potboiler’s publication, I myself would be babysitting other kids and Donna dating collegians.

Ray Smock weighed in on the coronavirus pandemic with an essay entitled “Old Ways Won’t Work Anymore.” It begins:

    Trump is our plague president and he is a political plague. So let’s face the fact that we must deal with many things simultaneously, the virus and the ineptitude of a president and his top officials, who are in way over their heads. Congress and the rest of the government must find ways to work around the president to minimize his negative effects while science, medicine, and saner political leaders deal with the virus. Congress needs to assert its own powers, over the desires of the president. But the current GOP members are sticking with the president all the way, even as some of them come down with the virus. 

    The recent negotiations between Speaker Pelosi and Secretary of the Treasury Mnuchin, appear to be one of the work-arounds, that was deftly designed so it could be sold to the president. We still need his signature on legislation. State governors need the federal government and they all say so. But many of them are already taking steps ahead of our president to meet the emergency. From what I can tell from news reports, a lot of the government decision making on the pandemic at the presidential level must first pass through the office of Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, as if Trump was still running his real estate business. Shakespeare could not write a stranger tragedy.

    We are a nightmare from nature and a nightmare by the failure of our political system. Yet, we can pull through this, defeat the virus and build up our economy and our nation again. Even as we fight through the unknown, we should be thinking clearly that the old politics will no longer work. We cannot be at each others' throats over things that now seem inconsequential, when the whole world is at risk. 

    Lincoln said during the Civil War that to save the Union we had to disenthrall ourselves of old thinking. Time to heed Lincoln again, even as we are stuck with Trump. The virus will pass. And so will Trump’s presidency.

We will have much to lament and much more work to do when we beat the virus. The fall elections as difficult as they may be, will be a major event for change. We must un-elect the president and a good number of members of Congress. We need a fresh start, with new leaders, and new thinking about how we govern ourselves and protect the people. We cannot ever allow a future president to get rid of a unit of our national security apparatus that was there to protect us from pandemics, just because that unit was created by a previous administration.

While galleries are closed, thanks to social media, one can still enjoy art.  Here’s VU museum curator Gregg Hertzlieb’s latest Facebook cover photo: