In a 3.2 N.Y. Times column about Colm Toibin‘s The Testament of Mary, a forthcoming one-woman stage show starring Fiona Shaw and based on Toibin’s novella, Maureen Dowd quotes a line that sunk in:
“All my life when I have seen more than two men together I have seen foolishness and I have seen cruelty,” Mary says about the disciples of her martyred son. “But it is foolishness that I have noticed first.”
For some reason this line woke me to what I believe is probably a very sincere longing on the part of many strong women today. They don’t just want more economic opportunity and increased power in business realms. They don’t want just a fair and equal voice in civic and cultural affairs and in government. With ample justification they feel genuine contempt for the way men have been running things over the last several centuries, and they’d like to basically take over and run the show their way and get it right. They want to live under a sane, less warlike and at least a semi-rational matriarchal society. I swear to God the older and wiser I get the better this idea sounds.
If a fundamental matriarchal power-grab would mean replacing bullheaded pistoleros like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell and the nihilistic Republican Congresspersons who don’t have a constructive or a fair-minded bone in their bodies and who would rather pull the temple down on everyone’s head than accept reasonable solutions then bring it on. And anything else you can throw in. Women are crazy in their own ways, of course, but they couldn’t mess things up any worse than Boehner and the rightie wackos have. Hillary Clinton or Elizabeth Warren winning the White House in 2016…you name it.
Postscript: I have only one nagging hesitation about what I just wrote. I worked under exec producer Linda Bell Blue at Entertainment Tonight in ’98, and it was the most horrifically political and terrifying work environment I’ve ever known in my life. It was all about petty office power games and anxiety and who’s up and who’s down. Nothing in that environment was the least bit calm or serene. It was all about performing in front of your co-workers in order to convince them that you wouldn’t say anything bad about them when they weren’t around. Women were always conferring in their offices with the doors closed, and the subject was always other women who were huddling in their offices, etc. I naturally wanted to keep getting paid but I hated it there. Half the time I wanted to take gas so I wouldn’t have to deal with all the bullshit. I was 40% upset when I was canned but 60% relieved.
