Another Review of the Women's Rally

["Doug Jones" <credenda@moscow.com>]

Dear Visionaries,

 

I, too, attended the "women's" rally, and though I don't share the organizers' ideology (I'm a Credenda/Agenda editor after all), I am certainly NO defender of the topless ordinance, for reasons given in a previous post. I am surprised that some commenting on the rally have been so giddy about its success. Even if I had shared their vision, I would have been embarrassed to my toes.

 

Speaker after speaker lamented about how the "progressive" community of Moscow is so unorganized, as if that were its real problem. Yet staring them in the face at this rally was a vision that would fail to inspire anyone but the most devoted ideologue. Even the most organized group can't get excited about grey oatmeal. The clash between alleged "progressivism" and the truckloads of tiresome cliches was unbelievable; the rally even began with overused music. Where are the new categories, the fresh vision, the creativity? I get exasperated and angry at right wing/Republican rallies for countless stupidities, but this rally just bored me.

 

Speaker after speaker invoked the same reverent appeal to divine Equality (Praise Be Unto It) to answer every perceived question. Some on this list have assured us that secular ethical standards are complex and subtle intricacies of history, subjectivity, etc., but none of that reared its head here. All we heard against every suggestion of difference was a brute deduction of from the unchanging Moral Absolute of Equality. And just like at the recent anti-Fred-Phelps rally (see that review at www.credenda.org/old/rainbowrally.html), this Abstract Equality clashed regularly with Abstract Freedom, often within the same speeches. Of course, no one blinked at the constant clashes of these values, calls for freedom that sought radical difference and uniqueness for individuals, right next to the more dominant calls for unbounded equality that pushed for the elimination of all differences, or as one speaker put it -- "erase the differences between the sexes." Back and forth it went, difference/no difference, on and on, the same Roberspierrean clash we've been hearing since the birth of the Enlightenment. This they call progressivism.

 

The speakers found it very important to repeatedly assure us that this was an important issue; that line started sounding like the magician who keeps telling us that the glass is ordinary. My favorite argument was one of the last speakers who told us that "what goes on here is really important because it is." I also always find it curious that multicultural proponents such as those here were so quick with the insults to other primitive cultures; burka this and burka that digs were so common it felt like a Gordon Liddy show at times. Their sensitivity is selective apparently. I especially enjoyed the speaker who after genuflecting and invoking abstract equality as required went on to condemn America's selling of bodies, especially women's bodies -- selling women to "fuel the machine of capitalism." But she apparently didn't know or chose to sidestep the fact that these local women were doing just that. They were collecting cash for toplessness, not just expressing themselves. Progressives defending the machine of capitalism was intriguing.

 

City Councilperson Peg Hamlett helped tone down some of the anti-money anger against having to pay for an election, and she offered a reasonable alternative to the ordinance that focused on "lewd acts" rather than "breasts." Immediately the crowd burst into anger against her Taliban desire to impose her morality on the rest of us. Just kidding. You can apparently impose morality if you have the right credentials. She was applauded. Even the woman with the "keep your laws off my body" placard did not mind submitting to Peg Hamlett's law. But this sort of move makes all the hysterical replies against "imposing morality" ring hollow. It turns out just to be another progressive hypocrisy. And all the cliches and hypocrisies and value contradictions add up into one tiresome vision.

 

The organizer kept praising the turnout of 170, now I hear the number has grown to 200 "supporters" who showed up out of population of 28,000(?). Several times the crowd was praised for being progressive, but the stranger next to me told me he showed up to see the "cops wrestle with topless women." Another friend overheard some guys behind her asking "when are the girls gonna take off their shirts." Thus progressivism meets Jerry Springer. Jerry Springer inspires ratings but you can't inspire a fight against injustice while at the same time invoking an Equality that results in a Jerry Springer culture. Yet that, apparently, is the progressive vision for Moscow. You don't need ordinances to see a vision implode so sadly. Please have the courage to keep standing up to the mike. We need more rallies like this.

 

 

Doug Jones