[Consider the demand of the anti-choice movement in the US carried to its dire extreme: the medical procedure known as abortion would receive an absolute ban. To put it another way, every fertilizing event involving human egg and sperm must under all circumstances be brought to term, or legal punishment incurred. This proposition is rife with disastrous consequences, seen and unseen, too numerous to name, for people and society.

Perhaps most distributing is its potential for reducing women to reproduction machines. The circumstances surrounding fertilization do not matter. Also of no concern are the prevailing life-circumstances of the pregnant woman. The zygote is instantly privileged over her will, indeed over her very life.

What about miscarriage, one might ask? The body's natural mechanism for aborting an embryo/fetus when reproduction at the cellular level goes wrong, as it very often does. And what naivety supposes that reproduction at the level of human affairs cannot go wrong, as it very often does? If abortion be outlawed and women who have it jailed, is the next step then to jail women who miscarry, because they also fail to bring the fetus to term? Or more to the point, shall we put god behind bars? For all life comes from god, so he must have said no. What if the pharmaceutical industry, whose claims and products are often reckless and dangerous, markets a drug designed to prevent miscarriage? Will women, who refuse to take it and miscarry, be punished? And women, who take it and miscarry, be exonerated?

Far from being attempts at humor, these questions are meant to highlight absurdities and contradictions that begin to emerge if we approach the issue with humanity in heart and humanity in mind. But the spectacular brain-hobbling effects of religious dogma prevent many from thinking honestly, even compassionately, about the serious problems created for society by outlawing abortion.

When biological complications make pregnancy dangerous or impossible, and the woman naturally aborts, this is called therapeutic abortion (i.e. miscarriage) for which she receives sympathy and support. When sociological complications make pregnancy dangerous or impossible, and the woman medically aborts, this is called elective abortion. But now she is subject to shame, guilt, censure, even allegations of murder.

In cultures dominated by ignorance and hypocrisy, sociological complications (such as rape, incest, domestic violence, absent father, no family support, unplanned pregnancy, pariah status, financial distress, health, safety, psychological issues) are treated as no cause for concern. Yet these complications may be just as devastating to pregnancy as biological malfunction, and abortion equally therapeutic.

The very terms used by the medical profession (elective vs. therapeutic) reflect the age-old harmful bias towards a mind/body dichotomy. This discredited notion has deep roots in Western philosophy as an intellectual conceit made plausible centuries ago by Plato's dialogues. Christianity turned this idea into religious gold, maximizing in the process its potential for harm. Convince people to cut themselves off at the neck, and they'll spend a lifetime in church praying for salvation. In Christian-think, the mind is a terrible thing to use; the body a beautiful thing to mortify.

Priority is given instead to an elusory spirit or soul whose ultimate concern is not this life or world, but an everlasting rendezvous with god in the next. The insidious schism reflects, indeed necessitates, other harmful bifurcations (heaven vs. hell, light vs. dark, good vs. evil, in-group vs. out-group). Whenever religion swings its self-righteous, double-bitted axe to cleave the world asunder, Earth and all that embrace it as first and final destiny invariably fall out on the wrong side of the split. To the extent that Abrahamic religion is celestial not terrestrial, ethereal not material, static not dynamic, sectarian not humanitarian, it is anti-Life in the broadest sense of the term.

The worst sin imaginable cannot be enunciated for fear of its being embraced as wholly desirable: to live on Earth unmolested by thoughts of god. Theistic religion inculcates the view, not that the Earth is a life-sustaining, ecological wonder that we must love, care for and preserve, but that earth is a hard-pan, spiritual battleground to be destroyed in a high-stakes game of end-times and Armageddon. Compelled by the logic of its own beliefs, Christianity must devalue the Earth for a world of make-believe, voraciously mortgaging the present to a fairy-tale future when believers will dwell as disembodied spirits happily ever-after in god's magic kingdom. This appalling, child-like fantasy is Christianity's highest goal and greatest vision. No surprise then in the US that environmental activism is now the legal and moral equivalent of terrorism, while the American Taliban creep ever closer towards making a woman's life legally subordinate to a zygote. Nothing can be permitted to escape the degradation and depredation of the craven men who practice religion's mind-crippling delusions.

Rejecting the false dichotomy of mind/body, and the harmful dualism that follows therefrom, is the first step on the long road towards putting oneself and the world back together. Though mind and body may have access to different information at different times, the mind-body is a unified system of consciousness that cannot be divided and must be sovereign over its own flesh. If a woman decides to abort pregnancy within medically approved limits, her decision and right to do so must be respected, whether it be the will of her body or mind, which are one and the same (consubstantial). Otherwise the door is open for reproductive slavery, and control of the ovaries passes back into the hands of men where it does not belong.

Which is certainly the hidden motive that must be concealed behind the bristling frontlines of religious zealots on a mission from god to rid the world of an indispensable medical procedure. Not that anyone should doubt that the god-induced psychosis of the anti-choice movement in the US is not real. But many in its ranks resemble patsies: people of limited intellectual capacity whose strong, unwholesome passions make them highly susceptible to easy manipulation by cynical forces. In this case, rightwing reactionaries (and their many neoliberal allies) wrapped in the power of church and state who are desperate to repatriate the female organs of reproduction, as though it were lost turf in a country where women have wisely been trusted with legal control over the female body.

The cynicism is impossible to miss. The same forces working hysterically to outlaw abortion have little or no regard for human beings at any other stage of life. They're against laws mandating strong benefits for maternity and medical leave, against child care and elder care, against public education and national healthcare, against living wage laws and affordable housing; against well-funded social programs to relieve gang violence, drug addiction, homelessness, mental illness, high unemployment; against strong policies for green energy, organic agriculture, environmental and labor protection. On the other hand, they funnel trillions of dollars into wars that kill, cripple and maim thousands in the blink of an eye, and fund them for decades.

Patriarchy is not listed among the seven wonders of the ancient world, yet the enduring power of its architecture is astounding - greater even than the great pyramid of Giza. After long centuries of habitual use, surely the blueprint is deeply etched into the circuits of the human mind. Despite the social progress of the twentieth century (women's suffrage, access to education, jobs, public life, their own bodies, greater sexual freedom), patriarchy today is as toxic as ever. How did it survive through centuries of catastrophic wars, collapsing empires, economic upheavals, religious revolutions? Rather easily, it turns out. Patriarchy does not operate under its own name, but through specialized forms of behavior institutionalized again and again by societies coming and going from deep antiquity to the present day.

Most persistent and pernicious among these are murder and resource theft institutionalized by the military (and all industry that supports it); economic exploitation institutionalized by elite control of the means of production (slavery, capitalism, command economy and the like); god (which exists but only as human behavior) institutionalized by religion; and corruption institutionalized by bad government (any center of political control that supports and promotes patriarchal behavior as captured by these and other institutions).

How then can devastating wars, failed states, economic convulsions, or religious revolutions affect patriarchy? These are the very products of patriarchy; its raison d'être. It matters not to patriarchy that there are wars: only that they be aggressive, and result in theft, slaughter, destruction, profit. It matters not to patriarchy that the state may collapse: only that the next one be as self-serving to its interests. It matters not to patriarchy that there are economic upheavals: only that the next economy be as exploitative as the last, and great quantities of ill-gotten gain flow to the apex of the social pyramid. Religious revolutions and revivals are especially welcome: god is the litmus test of fealty to patriarchy; your covenant to obey and not to question. Contempt for evidence here is your nod that facts do not matter when the god card is played; indeed your nod that facts may never matter. Faith, as rejection of reason and rationality, is the greatest power give-a-away you can make. A nation organized and trained by faith to reject these powers (which we claim make our species unique) exposes itself to permanent manipulation, and puts great pressure on any so-called wall between church and state, as rulers compete to punch through it and tap in to all the power that's been given away. God is patriarchy's first lie and earliest behavior; the germ that must be spread that makes possible the full disease.

Wars of aggression to kill and steal, economic exploitation to enrich the few and impoverish the many, a plague of religions to program for stupidity and obedience, and bad government to manage it all - this is the life-blood of patriarchy, which flows through male and female veins alike; which elevates female managers who drink the Kool-Aid (Thatcher, Condi, HRC); which damages men as much as women. Has humanity ever invested much of itself in developing alternative models? Certainly the superstructure of domination is very old, and patriarchy had a long-running start before it leaped from the ancient world into the modern, like Athena from the head of Zeus: fully formed, dressed in war garb and ready for action. If any nation at any time in world history was uniquely positioned to question the paradigm, the US after victory in WWII surely had an opportunity. But we know what happened: it used its victory as license to steam-roll the world.]

Nieces, nephews, though it’s late in the history

of the night, yet the Perseids are blazing

‘gainst the crazed, god-goaded beast devouring

all futures of the beautiful nurturing Earth.

Soon you will molt the chrysalis of ad’lescence

and stretch your limbs like wings. Perhaps then you will read

your uncle’s words, and struggle to know him

for the first time; perhaps wonder what man was this

who lurked in the margins of your life,

who had little to say and less to offer,

always the odd thing when he spoke;

who preferred a murder of ravens in the desert

to the company of relatives in the den;

who never married or joined the church; who came back

hungry from deserts and mountains shaking a rattle,

stammering out songs to native plants and coy birds,

making you nervous, then really being a fright

trying hard to fit in. Perhaps you will find

these poems always too strange to be played.

But if one day you awake, sweet nieces and nephews,

and know by experience, there’s no left and no right,

only the ecology of that which sustains:

pure water and food, clean soil and air -

the poetry will be awaiting.

If one day you awake, sweet nieces and nephews,

and know by experience, wars of aggression must never

be waged, from the story of Troy to Obama’s

Dubya-made debacles of Af-Pak and Iraq -

the poetry will be waiting.

If one day you awake, sweet nieces and nephews,

and know by experience, empire’s a shoebox

fits over the head, good Americans

never take off, not even in bed -

the poetry will be waiting.

If one day you awake, sweet nieces and nephews,

and know by experience, education, healthcare

and unions are citizen rights, denied by rich

ignoramuses sick in the head -

the poetry will be waiting.

If one day you awake, sweet nieces and nephews,

and know by experience never to accept

no promises of heavenly kingdoms -

the poetry will be waiting.

If one day you awake, sweet nieces and nephews,

and know by experience, god is a lullaby

for grownups afraid of the dark -

the poetry will be waiting.

If one day you awake, sweet nieces and nephews,

and know by experience, your body’s

their battlefield and every generation

must be conquered anew -

the poetry will be waiting.

If one day you awake, sweet nieces and nephews,

and know by experience, truth is the best

remedy for a world built on lies; wish

to fight back, live brave and be free -

the poetry will be waiting.

little big pine

Grabrielino land

pearl of venus shimmering

in the clamshell crack of dawn

august 2009

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Little Big Pine: citizen, patriot, poet; may be reached at littlebigpine@gmail.com.

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