The Attack of the Verbose Vaginas

Some folks are perfectly normal in a general sort of way, but indulge a personal quirk or two. Perhaps they insist on drinking the evening Ovalteen from a sippy cup.  Or perhaps they skate around the kitchen in their socks while wearing a chenille toilet seat cover on their heads. [Thick wool socks are best.]

Silly but harmless idiosyncrasies.

Other folks are arrogant meatheads from top knot to shoe soul; rump fed clotpates from aorta to outer crust; mentally negligible phonies from first breath to last. Come to think of it…

A person named Eve Ensler wrote a highly successful “play” (The Vagina Monologues) about a talking vagina that toured the world (35 countries, I believe), and that every spring gabs it up on college campuses from one end (cheap pun) to the other end (another cheap pun) of Our Nation.  Just when Professor Plum breathes a sigh of relief that he had heard the last of this loquacious organ, sure enough it rears its little head and visits the campus to speak with another batch of coeds.  And then the ardent vaginalists roam the campus slapping posters all over the walls---especially in the departments, or coops, that tend to house them: English (or Anguish), Behavioral Sciences, History, and of course Women’s Studies.

Professor Plum considers the Vagina Monologues to be of a piece with other campus sex and gender and diversity festivities.  A piece of what? Well, it seems that the living is easy for a lot of kampus kiddies. Their Daddy’s rich and their Momma’s good looking. They don’t have to direct their attention and harness their energies in the service of the daily bread and a roof over the empty head. They have credit cards, easy majors, and lots of time on their hands. Seduced by TV, glamour mags, and movie stars, they direct their attention inward and harness their energies in the service of pleasure-eliciting hormones. They major in Anguish (“What does it all mean?”), Sociology (social voyeurism), Psychology (“Let’s learn all about ME.”), Women’s Studies (“Let’s learn how oppressed I am.”), and Art History (“I like colors.”)

And THIS adds up to a blasé attitude.

“Ho, hum. I’m bored. Another bombing? Been there. Done that. Do you think Jennifer will forgive Brad?”

And to a lack of seriousness about life (“What am I here for? What exactly will I do to justify my existence?”), about self (“Is anyone home inside these clothes?”), and the rest of humanity (“Boy, Africa is in bad shape. Does this belt work with these slacks?”).

The Vagina Monologues is perhaps the apex, or nadir depending on where you have started, of this brainless self-indulgence. The appeal to pie-eyed students reveals the egoism and the content fosters it.

It’s hard to imagine women students from Asia, preparing for careers in medicine, engineering, and physics, getting all glandular about the vagina show writhing and rolling into town.

“The heck with trig! I can’t wait to run around campus with my sisters and whoop it up as a vagina warrior. We’re gonna yell ‘c%$t’ over and over to show what big girls we are.”

But let’s see, Dear Reader, if there are any commonalities between the values, self-indulgence, and the level if intellect revealed in The V. Monologues and other ideas that have escaped from Ms. Ensler’s head.  

Here’s Eve Ensler, writing after she attended a conference.  [My comments are in boldface and brackets.]

Please Don’t Go Back to Sleep

Dear America: I am longing to reach you [This must be close to world-class hubris. She sets herself up as some kind of prophet for the whole country.]– crossing this river of indifference and consumption and denial. [I’m already nauseated. That’s some jam-packed river.] I am trying to find you, reaching out through the desperate limitations of words and descriptions, swimming through the rhetoric of terror and God. [And don’t forget about swimming through all that indifference and consumption and denial.]

I need you to wake up. [YOU need us to wake up?  When exactly did you first start thinking that anyone cares about what YOU need?] The house is on fire and you are still sleeping, lulled by the intoxication of smoke and mirrors. [What does smoke and mirrors (a magic show) have to do with a burning house? Keep those metaphors straight, will ya, Eve?] I need you to wake up and I know that shaking you, scaring you will only make you cling to your sleep and sleep more. [”cling to sleep.” How do you cling to sleep?]

How then do I tell you what’s going on? [Oy, this woman is full of questions. First it’s how do I wake you up and now it’s how do I tell you. Hey, if you haven’t answered the FIRST question, how come you are on the second question? Try logic, Eve. Beginner’s luck.] How do I tell you about the one hundred thousand dead Iraqi people that you and I are responsible for murdering?  [Oh, here we go. Lie number 1.] Each one of them valued their life, longed for their morning, [Yeah, each one got up and burst into song… “Oh, what a beautiful morrrrning. Oh, what a beautiful day. The Baathists have cut off my finnnngers. Everything’s going my way.”] soon he will cherished their first cup of milk or coffee or tea. [I detect something moderately insane in that last phrase.] In what way shall I deliver what I learned? [Write it on a pine cone and shove it.] The substance identical to illegal napalm that melted tender five year old skin; the cluster bombs that have left their murderous and disguised offspring, throngs of bomblets set to explode, scattered on the Iraqi earth; the depleted uranium from the Bunker Busters we dropped that now lives in lungs and livers and soil. [Nice cadence. Pure left-wing delusional talk. I wonder where Eve–-whose main area of expertise appears to be her groin–-got all this info? Oh, yeah, I forgot. She was at a conference in Turkey, where the keynote speakers were Arundhati Roy and Richard Falk, loons of the left and card-carrying America bashers.]

How do I tell you about the strategic planning of such atrocities in the boardrooms, the backrooms, the back seats of limos, [She was there with Bill Clinton, who was doing some strategic planning.] the organized take over and looting of Iraq [Looting? I guess those Marines who died trying to recover museum artifacts were really looters. Shameful. Go back to your vagina, Eve. It’s calling for your attention.] right out from under the terrorized, hungry, thirsty Iraqi people. [This conference was in June. I guess they didn’t get to discussion of all the homes, schools, hospitals, roads, and water plants we built.] and How do I get you to listen to the stories of our soldiers who are trying to kill themselves now, longing to escape the madness of murdering and maiming for no reason. [Oh, yeah. Lots of soldiers are TRYING to kill themselves. I guess carrying combat knives and three or four firearms makes it hard to kill yourself. You have to try over and over. What a disgraceful skank.]

Please don’t go back to sleep. [Please get your hands out of your pants.] I know how hard it is to hear of the massive black holes, called prisons we have dug to hold thousands without charging them, without trials or the torture, the meanness, the cruelty we are inflicting upon them. [Who is “them”? Oh, you mean the guys who cut off Iraqis’ hands, who put them in coffin-sized steel boxes for years, who dropped poison gas on Kurds, who buried 100,000 Iraqis in mass graves. You mean THOSE guys. What kind of mind can think this stuff without turning on itself? Is there no inner voice that says, “I am so full of crap, so loathsome and odious, such a lying bastard that I ought to just curl up and die of shame?” Guess not. There is no lie too big for a leftist with a woody.]

America, those who now control our country have changed and ended law. [Ended law? You can’t fault Eve for lack of skill at shoveling massive quantities of manure.] I do not believe you are so calloused or selfish that you do not care. Your sleep is induced. You are distracted and derailed. [Derailed? How do you derail persons? “Ooops. I was just rolling down the tracks and I fell off.”] The corporations have concocted and perfected these sleeping potions for years, developing ingredients to make you despise every bit of yourself, to feel ugly and fat and stupid and poor and not enough. [Eve is describing herself and her kind. Does a person who has self-respect turn her vagina into a business? Well, maybe a high-class whore.] And so you spend your time and every bit of the money you do not have buying products that will make you better, skinnier, lighter, whiter, tighter. [Oh, here we go with more vaginal allusions.] And as you consume and consume, the corporations consume you. [This is supposed to be a cute bit of wordsmithing. Sadly, it’s merely putrid.] They take your money and your time and your voice and your instincts and your outrage and your sorrow and your anger and your grief. [Baloney. I’m loaded with these things.] They consume your courage and leave fear in its place. They devour your conscience and your memory and your compassion. [Wow, I thought only Ted Kennedy did that!]

And how do I speak when they are sure to tie my tongue? [A consummation devoutly to be wished. She fails to mention that the Baathists actually cut OUT tongues.] When they will say I do not love my country or support the troops or honor the dead or believe in their God? [That’s exactly what we say, Eve. Eve knows that she has stepped waaaayyy over the line but she sets herself up as a victim.] How do I break through your sealed wrapping, your self-obsession, your TVheadphonedDVDcell pod? [And how do I get you to just shut up?]

America I am getting desperate [That’s why G-d have you hands, Eve.] and I know this will not get me published or heard. [Thankfully.]Those who control the information will say I’m extreme, that I’ve gone mad. [No, that’s too romantic. We’ll just think you are an hysterical, self-indulgent gas bag.] But I have heard the cries of children in the exploding houses of Falluja. [Yes, shot by Sadr’s men.] I have seen the agonized faces of the sleepless Iraqi women who still clutch the outline of their charred dead babies in their arms. [How do you clutch an outline?] I have watched as we as a nation grow more isolated, despised and alone. [Eve is thinking of her future.]

America, there is not much time left. The fire is spreading, consuming the world. We are the arsonists. [It must feel sooooo good to see oneself as some kind of prophet. Anointed by marx and chomsky.] We will need each other to find our way out through the lies and haze. [Haze?] It will take our greatest imagination, courage and skill to subdue these flames. [But it will only take a sock to shut you up, Eve.]

This letter was written immediately after The World Tribunal on Iraq in Istanbul where I served with thirteen others from around the world on a jury chaired by Arundhati Roy. The Tribunal consisted of three days of hearings investigating various issues related to the war on Iraq, such as the legality of the war, the role of the United Nations, war crimes and the role of the media, as well as the destruction of the cultural sites and the environment. The session in Istanbul was the culminating session of commissions of inquiry and hearings held around the world over the past two years.

 

Arrogant. Dumb as a sack of hammers. Ignorant. Empty. Enemy.