“We must remember that we are women born,
Unapt to cope with men; and, being ruled
By mightier than ourselves, we have to hear
These things—and worse. For my part, I will ask
Pardon of those beneath*, for what perforce
I needs must do, but yield obedience
To them that walk in power; to exceed
Is madness, and not wisdom.”
*The Dead.
-Antigone, by Sophocles
So said Ismene to her sister Antigone when she spoke of defying her brother Kreon’s order that their other brother Polynikes, slain in civil war, would be given no rites due the dead, which were spare comfort as they were according to the bleak Hellenic cosmology.
Yesterday I was struck by this passage by Sophocles, bluntly stating the plight of women among traditional societies of warriors, rendered most stark in the case of their inability to even affect morality, let alone the course of events.
Even now, as I read the JTC evangelical comic titled Squatters, depicting three Islamists on the cover, and which goes on to call for WWIII in support of Isrаel, I cannot get Sophocles’ insight out of my mind. For yesterday I spent a half hour reading articles online about women in ISIS territory being savages and brutes for not openly acknowledging the wrongs of their ruling men for placing heads on poles.
In our Material Mecca of Femininity we seem to believe that a woman in such a situation should protest, and willingly have her head join the gallery of the dead.
Really?
Our women, as a group, do not have the courage to refuse stolen goods, and are so fearful that any TV producer who supplies a yarn about hunky FBI agents cuffing serial rapists is guaranteed a good rating.
Oh, I’m sorry, our Hollywood actresses could topple ISIS with a passionate glare, and then slaughter them in their thousands.
After the fifth person parroted the media line that these women were barbarians for not offering their own heads up in defiance, it occurred to me that most of the idiots in this country cannot conceive of a world in which a women’s disobedience can cost her head. That explains why the propaganda was swallowed whole.
But why the propaganda?
I spent a weekend with family in TV Land, subjected to the mind numbing dirge that spews from the TV. Many, many shots of female reporters indignantly accusing Palestinian men of using women and children as human shields aired over the networks. These clips came to my mind as I read again and again, western female anger over these slave women not martyring themselves.
Surely a raging surgically enhanced WASP bitch-on-wheels would scold the ISIS patriarchs, safe in her Hollywood immunity to knives and bullets.
Surely an African-American matriarch would bobble her head with fist on hip and finger pointing, “Uugh-ugh, nigga, somebody cleanin’ dis shid up ‘casue hell if I walkin’ out in da gutta fo his headless ass!”
Surely these Muslim women are just not as courageous as our media-hardened women of righteousness, who have the courage to scream in the face of local law officers with full knowledge that the federal cops will back them up and cut the legs out from underneath the ‘punk police’.
Do we buy that, or do we simply admit that our women have just agreed tacitly to the bombing of Islamic women and children, that we are getting on board for a bug hunt that might one day rival the War in the Pacific for exterminating zeal.
Sophocles would get it. 99 out of 100 Americans will not.
