women of FLDS subjected to intolerance, witchhunts, and mob mentality
I love tight places. I’m a claustrophile. I often build a small igloo of pillows with a comforter over it in bed and crawl inside to sleep in the winter. If I ever found myself inside a closed coffin, I’d probably say, “wow, I can get use to this!” I guess that’s why marriage, being a stay-at-home housewife, being locked in to domesticity, and caged (in the Kieslowski WHITE way), fits my mindset so nicely. I’ve never been involved with a man who was possessive, controlling, and micromanaging me, but that sounds posh as well.
So I started thinking last night, what am I frightened of? Here it is.
1. Fear of Moths and bugs
I hate moths because of what they do to fabric. I have so many mothballs in my walk-in closet (a room actually) that I often smell the way I dress…like an old lady. Hard-shelled bugs frighten me to death. Whenever I see a stinkbug, I scream. I found half a dozen in my home recently, and I almost had to be checked into an emergency room.
2. Fear of Shellfish
Lobsters and crabs, especially the horseshoe crabs send me running. This ties into my fear of water (see next entry). As a child, the moment I stepped into the ocean (I was born near an oceanfront), I imagined stepping on all sorts of icky things. The horseshoe crab’s long spike frightened me to no end. I still have nightmares of beaches filled with these beastly things. If I ever go wading in the ocean and one of my foot were to touch a shell or even one seaweed, I would get a heart attack and die immediately. Sure lobsters and crabs may taste good, but as far as I’m concerned, they are huge evil scary monsters out to bite me. Even a cooked lobster looks like it can jump up and grab me at any moment. Dinner napkins have never seemed such a feeble shield.
3. Fear of Water
When I was four, my parents left me on the edge of a man-made pond. In a lapse of attention, I fell backwards and sunk in. As I sunk to the bottom, I could see the algae green sun disappear into darkness. There is a road in Provincetown, MA that promptly ends -after a blind hump- in a T-intersection three feet away from the ocean. I have nightmares going down that road several times a year.
Whenever there’s a leak in the plumbing of the house I live in, I pretty much go bonkers.
4. Fear of Obesity
I have never been too thin or too rich, although both seem unreachable at this point.
5. Fear of Dirt
One’s own dirt is one thing: no matter how disorganize you may appear to be, you know where you last put your hand and how long ago you washed it. But if I ever catch someone sniff-checking the armpits of their clothes, I’d faint on the spot. I have a 0-second policy with any food that falls on the floor. The time I take to cook is epic – all from endless rounds of anti-bacterial soap handwashing to prevent cross-contamination.
6. Fear of Abandonment
7. Fear of Hollywood Remakes
The point of diminishing returns, or the vicious circle of mediocrity has never been so frightening as present day climate.
8. Fear of Censorship
In 1981, Herbert Vesely made the film Exzesse to tell the story of how in 1912, the painter Egon Schiele was charged, arrested, and imprisoned for doing sketches of an underaged girl. He was charged with kidnapping. The girl, Tatjana Georgette von Mossig, finally came forward and said there was no kidnapping, and Schiele was released after three days, despite the order that all his drawings of her be burned. Vesely’s film was an attempt to retell the story in a different light, perhaps exonerate Schiele’s legacy, but since the actress Nina Finkelstein, was sixteen at the time of filming, this movie is unobtainable today. 70 yrs later and we haven’t progressed all that much.
9. Fear of Witch-hunts
I love the innocuous ideas of femininity and domestic tranquility from Helen Andelin and the the Mormons. I don’t agree with most if not all of the ideas of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS not to be confused withe regular LDS Mormons) stand for, but the whole Yearning For Zion Ranch raid in 2008, based on a false tip from a nonexistent 16 yr old person (played by 33 yr old Rozita Swinton), resulting in the forcible removal of 462 children from their parents – with no evidence found to support any of the charges, reeks of the Salem witch trials in the 17th century and the McCarthy Hearings in the 50s.
I can’t believe all the anguish the children and their mothers went through in the interrogation sessions..(here is a sample, from a nonpartisan: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4B5i0E_cN0 ) all this from a few hoaxed telephone calls from someone who has a record of making fake phone calls? Put aside religious intolerance, the odious charges of abuse, and our closemindedness towards polygamy and what are you left with? Four words: Where Is The Evidence?
The whole FLDS beliefs aside, just the thought that I can pick up the phone, make any accusation, and wreck someone’s lives in this modern day and age, is frightening. It doesn’t help the public’s bloodlust for sensationalism and victimhood- combined with human nature to believe what one choses to believe – produces a curdling cry for the heads of the FLDS. Almost sounds like they’d show up at the gates with torches.
10. Fear of Revisionism and Unnatural Selection
The process of publishing, where titles that hold revelatory – but not politically correct- observations, become discontinued and forgotten is scary. How do we keep from going in the wrong direction if we don’t even know where we came from? Erin Pizzey’s book Prone to Violence, which prompted death threats from PC feminazis. David Olive’s “The Chauvinist’s Bedside Book” implicating so many of our beloved figures from our past, detailing how chauvinistic they were…Plato, Aristotle, Rosseau, Samuel Johnson, John Knox, Hillary Clinton..gone.
Then you have Amazon elections, where adulating 5 star reviews always get the most vote …(is THAT any surprise?)…can actually determine the lifespan of a published title.
The way movies – the modern equivalent of books – have scenes removed to go from NR rating to R rating is pretty disturbing. I’ll have a conversation with someone about some movie, and someone will say, “I swear there was a scene in there.” And come off sounding like a nutjob. You then go to old beta and VHS tapes and you see the scene, which has disappeared from the DVD edition.
History, and how facts get veiled while half-truths advance, make me wary of what constitutes reality.
