Anderson Cooper asked NY’s new Republican candidate for governor, Carl Paladino, whether he’d allow abortions for victims of rape and incest. “No, Paladino said, “They have adoptions available for them.”
Paladino joins a Mount Rushmore of craziness: Ken Buck, Rand Paul, and the Sarah Palin wannabes: Sharron Angle and Chris O’Donnell, all of whom seem utterly lacking in imagination, and capable of valuing creativity only as it is manifest biologically.
So, let’s add a little creativity. Let’s have a little imaginative play here: Candidate Paladino becomes susceptible to an unwanted pregnancy; now, suddenly, he may have to put his big business dealings, his speaking engagements, his work on hold while he lies in bed for several months. (We’ll give him a complicated pregnancy as a result of rape.) Because of PTSD – a common enough result of assault -- he drinks more than he should and the fetus is compromised, not that he even knew he was carrying at the time. He’ll deliver a special needs child, not easily adopted. Also, just to let him experience a few more of the difficulties and get the full effect: because of his age, the pregnancy may be life-threatening. As it happens, he won’t die, but he’ll have a long recovery. Does his stance change? And how soon?
Sharron Angle tells him God has a plan and gets rid of the Department of Education. Chris O’Donnell tells him to put his man pants back on and sends him flowers, against Karl Rove’s advice. Ken Buck tells him to Buck Up. Rand Paul suggests he keep the baby and homeschool it. This will take more time away from the construction business and cut down on those offensive emails. The good news is that Paul thinks that home schools should not be regulated by government, so the baby need not be educated at all, and maybe can be put to work eventually picking up scrap around construction sites.
After all that, Paladino might have a better sense of what women are asked to sacrifice when others control their creativity. The others don’t get it unless it happens to them.
I have dreams of broadcasting myself into those heated congressional debates – say like Bart Stupak’s silliness on the Health Care Bill, and then, when his obstructionism is finally overcome, when even less imaginative members are yelling “Baby Murderer” at him – Say right in the midst of that, like God manifest on the ceiling, I show up howling “I don’t tell ya’ll what to do with ya’lls wieners when ya’ll are at home, so don’t you tell me what to do with my insides!” And there I’d be, a mad cow, a howling post-menopausal lone voice, looking nothing like the conventional God and readily dismissible.
So perhaps the broadcasting into chambers might not work.
Instead, if Christine O’Donnell wins, she will be happy to tell them what not to do with their wieners – and what women can’t do with their own bodies – either for pleasure or for sense.
What I wish for now is more empathy. Empathy requires imagination. Empathy requires a creative leap of faith. Empathy is what we know when we are, for a moment, godlike in our ability to understand how someone else might feel. To develop empathy, we need more than mere life. We need nurturance, we need love, we need security, we need faith. We need experience or education. We need free time, we need play, we need the right to move as we will. Ensuring that for one another requires a lot of caregiving, the kind of caregiving the radical right assumes someone else – probably a mother, if anyone – will supply.
Christiane Northrup, an OB-GYN and writer, explained that she realized she could have two children and write a book, or she could have three children. She has two children and a number of wonderful books. It’s not just the nine months in the womb; it’s the ongoing work and responsibility-- which most women accept and want. But they should be able to parent in their own time and on their own terms.
I’m amazed at how much this onslaught on women’s rights seems to strangle me, and oddly, silence me. In the short term, I can’t figure out what to say in a note to my mother, much less how to finish the poem I've been playing with; in the long haul, I feel this burden in my heart has kept me too sad for years. I can howl, I can rant, but the quiet creative speaking voice that has balance, depth, and vision and the occasional serendipitous rhythm, alliteration, and shine is stilled under the clutching at my gut that doubles me over and makes me cry.
Despair, self-loathing, stress, also prevent that flow of juice that rises to the top in happiness and lets us play in the world.
So, too, is creativity stifled by poverty, hunger, homelessness, and madness: all likely to be increased by the exclusionary politics supported by the current unsilent right. Without Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, health care and “social justice,” without these things, we may see that art, joy, hope will be – again – aristocratic privileges.
Well, perhaps creativity will out in small and sneaky ways: We’ll add to the repertoire of blues, I’ll rant more poetically, and somewhere, someone who might’ve astonished multitudes will thrill his children with his compositions for washtubs and spoons.
And so, I’m drawn right now to the manic joy of HOBBY LOBBY shopping – all those rows of offbeat Christmas tree decorations in amongst much, much, much conventional art. But the display of zebras in purple vests and red shoes, or toads in pink boas with corkscrew bottoms instead of legs, or giant pink platform shoes in spangled multi-colored glory gives me hope we’ll creep past the structure of lockstep. I notice a plastic peace sign with a flag background. I probably wore one myself in protest against the Vietnam War. Four ornaments up from the peace sign, past the fur-rimmed mug, and just to the right of the plastic TV dinner ornament (turkey and mac’n’cheese, miniaturized) gleams a bright Tomato Soup can with bands of glitter around its top and bottom. Shades of Andy Warhol! Warhol and the Vietnam War protesters have entered the Bible Belt mainstream. Sanitized and glamorized, but here they are.
I’m reminded of this summer’s visit to the Grassroots Art Center in Lucas, KS, where, among M.T. Liggett’s political art, Kenneth W. Starr is memorialized as a round-bellied metal fantasy "cigar detective," and where Mri-Pilar has reimaged Barbie, overturning every expectation for Barbie’s clothes, roles, and point of view. Such art reminds us viscerally that not everyone sees the world the same way. Thank God.
And imagination is at play: What if a zebra wore shoes?
What if Barbie became a new age goddess with tentacles coming out of her head? (Think squid, not Medusa.) What if Carl Paladino got pregnant? What if women had choices? What if every child was loved and nurtured and, even, intended? What if we thought less about mass producing ourselves and considered every woman and every child an individual work of art? (And, do I need to say what the government’s policies about education and health would be under those circumstances?) Out of such a world might come something better than Eden -- a knowing, an undeceived, and a clear-eyed Eve, and a hell of a lot of good art.
So, perhaps there is still hope, if Hobby Lobby can stock this slightly subversive stuff, admittedly intended for a Christmas tree, and purchased as hymns play in the background. It is still possible to decorate the backyard shrine to Kwan Yin or some other Goddess with fashion trendy zebras or spangled TV dinners. No one is preventing that yet. And with Kenneth Starr as a green-gold critter and the Barbies as everything: Dino-Barbie, Masked Barbie, Eve-Barbie, Anti-Barbie Barbie, perhaps we can slide right past the neurotic regimentation of the reactionary culture warriors, divert their attention with home decorations or wild yard art and march off into a more hopeful future while they are still mazed and dazed and spending money on glorious consumerism, little zebras in red court shoes marching in line across their mantles, buttressed by luminescent tomato soup cans at either end.
