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writing for godot

Women OK'd for Combat? We've Come a Long Way, Baby!

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Written by Sally   
Friday, 25 January 2013 00:45

So, it’s official. Wahoo! (Or Hoo-ahh!) The brain trust in the Pentagon has decided that at long last, we gals too can sack and pillage, right along with the dominant less-than half of our society. Does that mean we’ll get to keep the spoils? Will there be booty? Will our prize be Paris (or Helen)? (Personally, I’d prefer Hector). Do we get to turn those we conquer into our slaves, destroy their property, their children, their crops, their lives and have them do our least bidding, or have we missed out on that part? Does it mean that we, too, will get to fly drones and fire big cannons (what? we don’t use cannons anymore?) and shoulder-fire rockets into suspicious looking primitive villages, lay waste communities, napalm farms and fields and forests, cluster bomb schoolyards and get medals for the number of scalps we return with or dots in crosshairs we blow up (especially the ones with big red X’s painted on their sides and roof?) Does that mean we get to charge up yonder hill that has changed hands 100 times in the past 20 years, past the bodies no one has bothered to collect from previous skirmishes (and get to use words like skirmish—what fine onomatopoeia—like intestines spilling out from a bayonet wound, all in good sport and fun, of course), just so our General (or Madam General) can affix a few more ribbons to his or her wizened or ample chest?

But soft, what is that niggling concern? A small problem arises. That which appears to our male counterparts to be a pre-industrial hovel where possibly antagonistic sub-human targets carry out whatever substitutes for existence, may, (if there happens to be a string of colorful hand-made diapers hanging on a laundry line, or spicy smoke from a cook-fire burning, or a child carrying water to their chickens, the bucket splashing silvery droplets over their spindly knees, just may look like home to a woman, even a highly indoctrinated woman, who may remember fondly now the non-glorious work of daily living). This may create a pause in our efficient fighting machine.

But for sure our Pentagonal Heads have thought of that. Just as they found a way, through psychological screening, to address the moral inhibition of farm boys in WW1 and 2 to shoot their guns at the “enemy,” even when they were being shot at, by developing an array of morality-desensitizing movies, games, toys and exercises (the beginning of our lucrative, economy-stimulating toy gun market, Hollywood violence orgy, and graphic video game market), I’m sure they’ve already come up with Games for Gals, based on themes of liberation and revenge. Smash the Dirty Dishes. Burn the Bra. Pack heat with Sarah Palin. Free the chattel (but you might be required to burn a few in the process). Psychedelic glasses that make young children appear to be many-eyed, monstrous Aragoggian spiders.

But will the disembodied Brains be able to disguise community, civilization, Love in its humblest forms to the discerning eye of one who was formed out of the stuff of her mother to bear life?

“Love has earth to which she clings,
With hills and circling arms about -
Wall within wall, to shut fear out.
But Thought has need of no such things,
For Thought has a pair of dauntless wings...” (Robert Frost)

It remains to be seen.

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