And the men who kill them
It would seem I’ve chosen the wrong decade to quit drinking. With apologies to Samuel Clemens, it’s easy: I’ve done it dozens of times. For whatever reason, though, I selected the summer of 2022 to take a longer, less-defined hiatus from one of my longest-standing hobbies. These weren’t conscious factors in the decision, but it is possible that regime change and the possible ebbing of the plague suggested a time of greater peace and tranquility, with less necessity for Bourbon-based self-medication. Concurrently, the looming possibility of a third world war would seem to encourage clarity and light-footedness. But my decision was, ultimately, a more hopeful one; looks like I predictively shit the bed on that one. I was raised in a fairly stereotypical, West Coast product of the American Dream kind of household: two working parents, one sibling, emphasis on the twinned pillars of hard work and education. Also a somewhat hard-to-parse hybrid of kindness, service and the tenacious holding of grudges (and the specter of lapsed Catholicism); it’s a cocktail that leads organically to cocktails. More to the point, it was an early and often repeated lesson in our household that Roe v. Wade and the struggle for the Equal Rights Amendment were vital and emblematic of the vicious, often ignored but ongoing war for the rights of women in this country. When I met the girl I would eventually marry, I was wearing Education Now and Babies Later shoelaces; needless to say, she dug them. But then and now, I didn’t really think of fairness and balance as issues of gender politics, much less as politics at large. It seemed a foregone conclusion, to my naive teenaged self, that women, by virtue of living (especially in a democracy in the modern world), would naturally be afforded self-determinism and control of their bodies. But I had forgotten that we still live in the Dark Ages of stupid fucking white men. That puts too fine a point on it, I know, as there are women and people of color who support the dictums of the panel of ghouls in gowns currently fomenting regression and murder; it’s still all white exclusionist bullshit. So, being the progressive beta cuck that I am — albeit one now reconsidering surrendering his weapons and in fact actively readying them — Friday didn’t exactly put me in a mood to watch Elvis — not that that…