My Life on the Road: Parts V–VI

I myself cried when I got angry, then became unable to explain why I was angry in the first place. Later I would discover this was endemic among female human beings. Anger is supposed to be “unfeminine,” so we suppress it—until it overflows.

For anyone opposed to the Vietnam War, this reserved, sardonic senator from Minnesota was the only game in town.

All this helped to explain why we were such a disparate group, including a Republican woman who hoped that strengthening the antiwar cause would help a dovish Nelson Rockefeller beat the hawklike Nixon in the Republican primaries, and one other apostate Democrat I knew from our effort to organize writers and editors to withhold the percentage of our tax money going to Vietnam.

Bobby Kennedy was not the “past” to the big majority of black and Hispanic voters who supported him as a symbol of hope, and McCarthy’s constituency for the “future” was overwhelmingly white and not poor.

McCarthy/Obama came to symbolize hope because they were new and unknown, while Kennedy/Clinton seemed like pragmatists just because they had been near power.

Security forces and his own campaign staff had urged him not to be the one to tell this volatile crowd, but he went on stage anyway.

Unlike the enthusiasts who had been the ground troops in New Hampshire, they had adopted McCarthy’s cool, his cynicism, and his disdain for emotion.

But by the time of Bush II, none of those earlier candidates could have made it past Republican primaries inundated with busloads of voters from about thirty thousand fundamentalist churches plus other white ultraconservatives, many of whom had been Democrats before that party got “too inclusive” of black, brown, and female human beings.

Nor could any remaining liberal or centrist Republicans run on a right-wing national platform shaped by the likes of Senator Jesse Helms, the famously racist and formerly Democratic senator from North Carolina, who long opposed sanctions against apartheid South Africa.

A right-wing and supposedly populist group called the Tea Party—supported by such rich hyperconservatives as the Koch brothers—would make the Republican Party so extreme that much of its platform wouldn’t have been supported in public opinion polls by most Republicans.

Forests of newsprint were spent on her hair, though not on Reagan’s obviously dyed and sprayed pompadour.

These were not the right-wing extremists who had accused the Clintons of everything from perpetrating real estate scams in Arkansas to murdering a White House aide with whom Hillary supposedly had an affair.

Some mostly white audiences seemed to hope this country could expiate past sins by electing Obama.

Now, this echo of divide-and-conquer in the past was polarizing the constituencies of two barrier-breaking “firsts,” never mind that the candidates were almost identical in content.

The long knives of reporters—plus a few shortsighted partisans in both campaigns—deepened those fissures until they bled.

No wonder such misogyny was almost never named by the media. It was the media.

I was angry about the human talent that was lost just because it was born into a female body, and the mediocrity that was rewarded because it was born into a male one.

The reasons are as pervasive as the air we breathe: because sexism is still confused with nature as racism once was; because anything that affects males is seen as more serious than anything that affects “only” the female half of the human race; because children are still raised mostly by women (to put it mildly) so men especially tend to feel they are regressing to childhood when dealing with a powerful woman...

When I went on a television show, an Obama supporter, a black woman academic, accused me by saying that “white women have been complicit in the oppression of black men and black women.”

The Times had used an ambiguous pull-quote to characterize the whole op-ed: “Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life, whether the question is who must be in the kitchen or who could be in the White House.”

The attacks grew increasingly virulent.

Then I got on the plane to Washington, went to join the crowd at her historic and generous concession speech—in which she pledged her wholehearted support to Obama—and distributed the buttons to the audience.

He was not only the incumbent but a former attorney general of Missouri, an ordained Episcopal priest, and the rich grandson of the founder of Ralston Purina.

One by one, people in this random audience told their confusing and disenfranchising experiences. Out of the approximately seven hundred people in the auditorium, at least a hundred had been unable either to vote for their chosen candidate or to vote at all.

It’s the very illogic and the juxtaposed differences of the road—combined with our search for meaning—that make travel so addictive.

In 1963, a time of controversy over civil rights and Vietnam, political scared network executives, and satire still evoked George S. Kaufman’s show business adage “Satire is what closes on Saturday night.”

Since learning causes our brains to grow new synapses, I like to believe that the road is sharpening my mind and lengthening my life with surprise.

Since we’ve been discussing the phony pretext of weapons of mass destruction with which Bush justified the invasion of Iraq in the first place, the phony turkey gets a big laugh.

Thus begins a time of sports and camaraderie for my companions, and writing, air-conditioning, and eating junk food for me.

For Thanksgiving Day, we’ve been invited to an afternoon buffet at the nearby desert home of Frank Sinatra and his fourth wife. Our connection is tenuous. It seems the late father of one of the women in our party knew this famous singer.

My hope of fund-raising rises when she mentions chairing a Palm Springs hospital benefit for abused women and children, but it goes down when she chastises me and the women’s movement for not taking up this new-to-her issue.

Loretta is wearing white pants plus blue and red silks, and we are both peering out from under white crash helmets emblazoned “M*A*S*H vs. Ms.”

I was horse crazy as a child. Now I remember why I loved these smart, sleek creatures that deign to let us travel with them.

They seem oblivious to the older black waitress who is serving us, and her face is inscrutable.

In 1978 Father Harvey Egan, pastor of St. Joan of Arc Catholic Church in Minneapolis, invites me to join him on a Sunday morning and give the homily or sermon to his congregation.

Though it’s just a coincidence that his church bears the name of a woman who was burned at the stake for being a heretic who wore men’s clothes (not for being a witch, as Hollywood told us), I think Father Egan enjoys inviting someone who’s been regarded as a jeans-wearing heretic, too.

Napoleon III wanted more soldiers, and Pope Pius IX wanted all the teaching positions in the French schools—plus the doctrine of papal infallibility—so they traded.

Though patriarchal cultures and religions have made hierarchy seem inevitable, humans for 95 percent of history have been more likely to see the circle as our natural paradigm.

In New York a few days later, I hear the news that Archbishop John Roach, Harvey’s superior in the Catholic hierarchy, has reprimanded Father Egan and apologized in public for him.

He remains public about his support for “women and their participation in the liturgy,” for artificial birth control, for the right of conscience that actually does exist within Catholicism, and for peace and justice movements around the world.