Purification by Extirpation (Julja)

Dear Julja,
° If you are an adherent of the ACLU, NOW, Lambda, Jewish Defense League, Free Willie Association, or the Church of the Cow Pope.org, you will already have seen Moolaadé.
° If, however, you are a cardcarrying member of The Unitary SozialDemokratikRepublikal Party, The Holy Catholick Apostlibled and AntiMarian Church, the American Guild of Amateur Surgeons, or the GREENPETASIS Antiinsectivore Council (poor little cockroaches!), you wouldn’t need to see it, you were in the supporting cast.

§

° Female genital mutilation, cioè, the nonsterile excision, by amateur female practitioners, of prepubescent girls’ clitorides.
° The equivalent not of our own barbaric circumcision of males, but of whacking off the glans penis itself: if the boy survived haemorrhage, infection, and urethral scarblockage, he could still become a potent top, he just couldn’t get enough pleasurable feedback to make topping worth his while.

§

° Six little girls escape from their Purifiers, a sorority of Devils with a Red Dress On. Four ask sanctuary of Collé Ardo, who some years back refused to allow her own daughter to be purified. Collé invokes the protection of a preJudaeoChristianIslamic Daemon, Moolaadé, whom even the most devout of the village dare not offend.
° And then the story unfolds.
° An unlikely act of heroism . . . .
° Gummintsponsored murder . . . .
° A likely act of heroism . . . .
° Triumph!
° Exeunt omnes adhuc vivae, singing and dancing . . . .

§

° If the little girls themselves hadn’t protested, no Moolaadé.
° If a charismatic leader hadn’t been at hand, Collé, no Moolaadé.
° If the Grand Imam had supported the oppressors, no Moolaadé.
° If radio hadn’t opened the women’s minds to the possible, no Moolaadé.
° If the women hadn’t made common cause behind Collé, no Moolaadé.
° If the women hadn’t known the difference between burning a bra and being burnt at the stake, the Moolaadé himself would’ve wasted away with AIDS.

§

° Manifestations by the hundreds of thousands, day after day after Ukrainian day.
° That’s what it takes for a braburning Cause.
° Suing they ass off over and over and Tort Court over till some Justice finds for Lawrence against Texas, Jesus’s widow importuning the slacktitted judge.
° That’s what it takes, for a serious Cause.
° Nonviolent MartinLutherKinglike civil disobedience, jailed night after night after Mississippi night, then lynched by the State Troopers and buried beneath an earthen dam.
° That’s what it takes for a burnatthestake Cause.
° And anybody anywhere who thinks he can bribe Congress into honesty, frighten Devil Republican with Witch Democrat, Moolaadise Oppression all by his Gary Cooper lonesome self some fine morning--well he she or it’d be better off joining you and me for afternoon tea.
° I’m serving fresh Sri Lankan Pasticceria Messicana sandals and strong green. Warm, irradiated Euromilk if you so choose.

§§§§§

° Were you ever mutilated as a child?
° I was, twice.
° You can still hear echoes in Sandy’s fleur-de-lis room at the b&b of fiveyearold me screaming like a little girl fixing to have her clitoris excised by some brutish religiondraped Devilwoman. For once upon a time I caught my left thumbnail in a closing door. The nail was quite some puckered, the flesh livid. And it was judged best to pull all the nail off bit by bit, loose nail and intact nail, clear down to the root, "so it would grow back right." Well it did grow back right, can’t argue with success.

° And as for sexual mutilation--well, it used to be sound hygiene for our nurses, after bathing and towelling us dry, to masturbate boychildren till the foreskin could be retracted, then apply vaseline to the glans, then return the foreskin to position. Just as it used to be sound practise for nurses to ease infant howling with masturbation, paregoric, or a sugartit. I pray the Moolaadé, Iddio God, la Guadalupe, and all the Italic Saints to strike me dead if I’m making this up.
° Well, here I am, apparently it’s true.
° Sometime, when I was four or five, the foreskin began to be too tight, don’t ask me why, I’m not Dr. Ruth, I’m not even Dr. Kinsey. So I was taken to Dr. J------’s for a partial circumcision. Very partial, no fear of Hitler.
° But without so much as an aspirin, it did smart.

° Setting the kettle to boil this very instant, Giac.

P.S. And as for Hotel Rwanda--if Stalin’s 20,000,000 and Hitler’s 6,000,000 didn’t disgust the human race, what hope had 1,000,000 Tutsis and Hutus?

Gianicolo Latin School (Foto)

Janiculum Latin School. From the second floor (American third), third window to the right of the stairtower, young Giac is smiling his gattoothed grin and waving to you. You'll have to employ your xray vision, not because of the palm tree, but because his room is on the back of the building. Timetravelling, Giac.

Victory by Surrender (Piers)

Dear Piers,
° I wish you could’ve seen the Priestess’s face as I approached the Altar for Communion.
° I wish I could’ve.
° For the instant she saw me she averted her eyes, and it was God’s own miracle she didn’t trip and dash the Host clear to Kingdom come. And then what a lot of scraping and sanding there’d’ve been:

15. Si Hostia consecrata, vel aliqua ejus particula dilabatur in terram, reverenter accipiatur, et locus ubi cecidit mundetur, et aliquantulum abradatur, et pulvis seu abrasio hujusmodi in sacrarium immittatur.

° So the tile’d've had scratch marks and the Altar Guild’d've had fits.
° I might not’ve been able to see the Priestess’s face, but it didn’t prevent my reading her mind: "O my Daddy was right right right, Nursing would’ve been a happier choice, nothing but bedpans and excremental stench from morn till night, but still--."
° I didn’t blame her, I saw her point.

§

° It‘s exactly a year since the Series of Unfortunate Events at Assumption. Folks who don’t know me still come up, as after the funeral for Andrew’s wife, and thank me for singing the hymns so unselfconsciously. Some folks who know me, like Andrew, are touchingly friendly. Some folks who know me dread me, as if I were some French anticlericalist fundamentally attacking the right to exist of Institutions and Institutionalites that persistently outrage human decency.
° I don’t blame them, I see their point.

§

° I hold in memory C----’s (A Picture of Me) Thanksgiving blog:

My aunt started ranting about John Kerry. I kept my mouth shut . . . . But when she started ranting about sexual preferences, I had to speak up. I held my own and she kept changing her argument. She beat me down anyway.

After the dishes had been cleared, my uncle walked up to the table, where my dad and I were still sitting.

"Here’s the thing," my uncle said. "It says ‘In God We Trust’ on our money. We sing ‘God Bless America.’ We say ‘One nation under God.’ We have freedom of religion, not freedom from religion."

"Huh?" my dad and I asked together.

"You have to believe in God to be an American," my uncle said. "People who don’t believe in God do not belong in this country."

"I strongly disagree with you," said my dad, a traditional Catholic.

And then the temperature rose.

§

° How peaceful that Thanksgiving Day dinner would’ve been if gentle Giac had devised the responses. For I have learnt from Smart David, and Smart David isn’t called that for nothing.
° First, the samesexers (for I don’t know what the deuce "gay" means. And neither does anybody else, just try to define it yourself, then rerun Kinsey and pay attention this time.)

Aunt: "Gayism is rampant."
Giac: "It seems so, and yet so many die young of AIDS, you’d think they’d be nearly extinct by now."

Aunt: "It’s sinful."
Giac: "Yes, Jewish Law is very clear that they must be put to death."

Aunt: "They prey on children."
Giac: "Well yes, parents have to be on constant guard nowadays. Of course, you mean preying on males, it’s nongays that prey on female teens. Why the Church and the YMCA and Boy Scouts and Schools can’t get it through their heads that two adults must be present whenever there’s a single child, I just don’t know. Protects the child, protects the adult."

Aunt: "I saw two of ‘em kissing during intermission at the Opera, and I just wanted to puke."
Giac: "I know how you feel, so many samesexer guys aren’t even cute. Ewhhhh!"

Aunt: "They’re always parading it in front of folks."
Giac: "That’s God’s own truth, nobody wants to hear about anybody else’s sex life. Well, Jennifer and Brad’s maybe."

Aunt: "I’m surprised to hear you so reasonable, considering those friends you run around with."
Giac: "O, you mean Xak, he does look like a fotomodel. And boy does he know how to dress."

° It can go on and on and on. Surrender after surrender after surrender. Bit after bit after bit of camouflaged retort. And in the end--
° --in the end, nothing. For Aunt was only ever saying, "This is my kitchen, this is my family, this is our belief."
° I don’t blame her, I see her point.

§

° And then comes Uncle.

Uncle: "It says ‘In God We Trust’ on our money. We sing ‘God Bless America.’ We say ‘One nation under God.’ We have freedom of religion, not freedom from religion."
Giac: "Very true. Just think of the old Calvinist Blue Laws, you couldn’t buy a CoCola on Sunday. No, America’s never had freedom from religion."

Uncle: "That’s not what I meant."
Giac: "O no no, certainly not."

Uncle: "This nation was founded on religion."
Giac: "Very true. If the Anglicans hadn’t persecuted the Calvinists so, I reckon America would be part of Quebec or Mexico to this day."

Uncle: "The Founding Fathers wrote it into the First Amendment."
Giac. "Well they had to, didn’t they? For they’d left it out of the Constitution itself!"

Uncle: "Hollywood won’t stop till they’ve driven God entirely out of the public schools."
Giac: "Isn’t it amazing? Lord have mercy, we used to have prayer and recite Bible verses every day at ten, you always had to have one memorised. I remember B-- I----- and S---- Y--------, they always raced to be the first to say, "Jesus wept." Made old Miss B----- so mad, she paddled whichever one of ‘em got there first, it was a hoot."

Uncle: "People who don’t believe in God don’t belong in this Country."
Giac: "I know what you mean. I bet there’re twice as many Jews and Muslims and Protestants in this country as Catholic(k)s."

° And I just defy him to try to rescue the Protestants, "Good Lord, Uncle, they don’t even believe in the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar!"

° For it’s all about mouthing, it’s all about marking territory, it’s all a plea for attention. Not for nothing did Daddy use to call Crossfire, "The Fussers."

"You’re a worm!"
"You’re a dick!"
"I called you one first!"
"No, I did!"
"Did not!"

American political discourse in a nutshell.

° Jane Austen: "His argument did not merit rational opposition."
° Ben Franklin: "Answer a Fool according to his own Folly."
° Giac: "If I can’t be a bigger Fool than Uncle George and Auntie Kerry, I oughta retitle this blog."

§§§§§

° O yes, Smart David.
° One day a somewhat motheaten young man walked up to the bar at Corner Coffee. He noticed the new Atomic Clock.
° "What happened to the old one?" he asked without any apparent motive.
° "It broke," responded Smart David without any apparent malice.
° "What made it break?" enquired the Motheaten One without any apparent lick of sense.
° "Why do things break?" responded Smart David with smiling, seething, suppressed sarcasm.
° I saw his point.

° Still dumber than Smart David, still defiantly unmotheaten, Giac.

P. S. "Every time I lay eyes on you you’ve grown cuter," said the elegant female as she stroked your cheek after the missa pro defunctis. I told you so.

Fries with your Aspurger? (Coz)

Dear Coz,
° Or, as dictionaries will have it, Asperger’s.
° Don’t know about you, but I’ve never been able to resist a list of symptoms. I’ve never failed to discover them in my own body within minutes after reading.
° So when I first encountered Asperger’s Syndrome, during an interview with Gorilla Girl on NPR Crazy Radio one Sunday night, I was in hog heaven.
° "I disliked the feel of cloth against my skin, and was forever taking off my clothes." I myself sleep in the nude, and Shetland wool itches me half to death.
° "I was forever telling the plain truth." O me too!
° "I used to have temper outbursts." We McLey males trace our famous tempers back three generations, it’s a sign of genetic continuity!
° "I was forever being beat up at school." Eighth grade, little Lanny Yardass, all 200 pounds of him. Used to beat us all up by turns, and sexually assault us as well, recess after recess.
° "I used to have trouble knowing where my body ended and others’ began, so I was forever running into folks." I myself--am very nearsighted.
° "Life as a teenaged outLesbian in my small town became dangerous." Well as signs of dementia go . . . .

° Yet the gist of her complaint was that she had always suffered from social dysfunction, from profound outofthegroupness. At 15 she ran away from home, drifted, became a successful poledancer, and that led to a job tending gorillas. In a world free of human language, she finally found peace. Spent five years achieving a diagnosis of Asperger’s, married (o joy of Sapphic love!), wrote book, flogged same.
° For her, an official diagnosis of Psychiatric Strangeness increased her contentment.
° Would it have for me?

§

° Might it still?
° Here’s the official checklist.

Problems with eye contact. (Me me me, I used to feel folks could detect my mental reservations if they looked into my eyes. In fact, it was the shiftiness itself that betrayed me.)

Failure to develop peer relationships. (Me me me, as long as I was young and collegey, I was perfectly content letting others seek me out.)

Lack of spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment. (What? Was this true even of Gorilla Girl, didn’t she have at least one friend? Was the town that small?)

Markedly impaired expression of pleasure in other people’s happiness. (What?)

Inability to return social or emotional feelings, ritualistic. (O yes, love Solemn Mass, Vespers, unfaked Benediction.)

Repetitive finger flapping. (Great Garthuselah, how do you flap the fingers?!)

Obsession with train schedules, phone books, stamp collecting, ecc. (Me me me, for I use a phone book to look up numbers to this day. And I used to moon over steamship schedules, for returns to Italy.)

Preoccupation with parts of whole objects. (Me me me, for I am more a chestman than a buttman or legman or eyeman or--.)

Repetitive self-injurious behaviour. (Me me me, for I never learn a blessed thing from bad experiences.)

Six out of nine, I’m a victim of Asperger’s Syndrome. What a relief! Now I can, I can, I can--well really, what difference would it make?
° I’ve learnt on my own to look into folks’ eyes, Piers’s seagreeners enticed me, only took five years.
° I’ve learnt on my own that I’m not in a college dorm any longer, and that my physical value in America is less than my physical value in Italy. Must have some invitations engraved.
° I’m still like Justine, I tend to have the same emotional experience over and over and over, and never learn. Or do I just really like that particular experience?
° And if liking boobs or back or gams makes a guy nuts, no wonder the world’s in the shape it’s in.

§

° And yet, I was so very unhappy for such a very long time.
° And yes, I believe I could’ve been diagnosed with Asperger’s if I’d tried (or if a parent had wished it.)
° And no, I don’t think it would’ve given me the least bit of comfort, pace Gorilla Girl.
° For I plainly perceive that what I lacked was selfconfidence (I always understood keenly how very much I did not know, and overestimated the competence of others.) I was not an external selfstarter, cioè, I was almost entirely an interior person.
° I lacked a mentor, a firm and rational wellwisher. On the other hand, I escaped an amorous priest or scoutmaster.
° And pretty much on down the list. I lost what the Psychiatrists wish me to have, and gained what they fail to envision as possible to have.
° Intendimi chi può, che m’intendo io.

§§§§§

° Kinsey, the golden age of Sex. That toobrief couple of decades after penicillin had been discovered and before Venereal diseases had reasserted their suzerainty over humankind. For a grand total of twenty years, out of a million or more, folks could share every bodily fluid they could ooze without danger. Pain peeing? Penicillin. Chancres coming out the wazoo? Penicillin. Heartbreak of psoriasis? Penicillin.
° Well those days are gone forever.

° The movie made Michael Medved, Maggie Gallagher, all the Pharisees madder than wet hens. "How dare Hollywood glorify such a man as that! Why doesn’t Hollywood focus on the eros of married love?"
° They must not’ve seen the Kinseys’ honeymoon, after they finally worked their way through the hymen. Talk about wild monkey love! Talk about married eros!

° But the Pharisees were right to be defensive against Kinsey. For the man, in spite of all the titillation, had one core insight, which he’d intuited from his study of his first 100,000 specimens of gall wasp:

"There’re no two alike. No two gall wasps, no two humans."

And this is the profoundest rebuke, a common sense rebuke, to all the Pharisees that ever have been, from Moyses’s deuteronomical scholiasts to our own suborned Legislators, who never rest as long as there is one natural, Godcreated human difference uncodified, uncensured.
° Even in Manolos, not one size fits all . . . .

° Full of Bocaspurgers, your cousin, Giac.

P. S. If temperatures remain cold, but not freezing, prepare to lend a hand at hogkilling. I absolutely refuse to clean the chitterlings this year! Buon compleanno!