Iraq

We've just had the five year anniversary of the Invasion of Iraq and a curse on the houses of all the journalists who are using the word 'invasion' now that it's gone so horribly wrong and that public opinion is so much against it, but didn't use it five years ago.

Five years ago a group of boys on a train pinned me up against the wall because they could see from my black arm band that I had been at a demonstration protesting the War. One of them said 'How are you going to feel if that fucker Hussein does have weapons? You're going to be responsible for all the babies that die.' Everyone from undergraduate history students up knew that the War would make the world more dangerous, not less dangerous, especially if Iraq really did have nuclear weapons.

At the time I was teaching poetry to first year undergraduates and I made them read Wilfred Owen; a class full of kids who thought we should be at war berated me for my ghoulishness in turning their stomachs with Owen's descriptions of the war dead.

Just recently, an American friend of mine looked confused when I said that the upcoming election was in the context of America being at war. Then he said '...Oh! you mean Iraq? Most Americans don't think of us as being at war.' I told him, in my insufferably self-righteous way, that most Iraqis do think of America as being at war.

Our attitude to war is only maintained by the absence of wars at home, which is what Owen, who died in the Battle of Sambre a week before the war ended, meant when he said that anyone who had seen or heard what he had would not urge war. My great uncles, who signed up underage like so many Australia boys, were POWs in Changi and the Burma Railway and it broke them. But believe me, it made pacifists of them.

The best reason not to vote for McCain is that he is a man who fought in Vietnam, was captured and tortured, and still believes that the war in Iraq will achieve any worthwhile purpose. I cannot imaging the depths of the kind of pathology that would drive a man to such a delusion.

You be the Kremlin and I'll be the saint

I'm starting to feel that feminism is a bit conditional in its attitude to women. I am angry about Prof. Greer's comments on Clinton-actually livid is probably closer the mark-, but I have to concede that it is a malaise which Feminists have always suffered from.

Feminism immediately understood that the Patriarchal definition of the Good Woman was a hiding to nothing for us, but made the awful mistake of trying to oppose it with an alternative definition and then crucifying those women who don't 'live up' to it.

As early as the Renaissance, De Pizan invites all good women to live with her in the City of Ladies. Her definition of a 'good woman' was -is! - groundbreaking, but her invitation is still conditional*.

Centuries later another Frenchwoman, De Beauvoir, argued that if women want to have the same rights as men then they have to behave like men, without any sense that perhaps not all women regard male behaviour as a dizzying height definitional of civilized humanity.

Even De Gouges, in many ways the most free from this conception, campaigned for women to be subject to the Death Penalty, then suffrage, so that no one could say that women do not deserve the vote. Of course, De Gouges was executed in 1793 during the Terror and women didn't get the vote in France until 1944.

Women seem always to have felt a pressure to demonstrate that they, that we, deserve equality, in contradistinction to most disadvantaged groups. I suppose that this is why women, generally, seem so paranoid about appearing to be self-serving. There is no question that African Americans will vote for Obama while American women are often reluctant to vote for Clinton, not least in order to make the point that they wouldn't vote for someone just because she's 'one of their own'.

Certainly, conditional equality is totally absent from the masculine equivalents. The Rights of Man and of the Citizen begins "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights." It continues "Law can only prohibit such actions as are hurtful to society. Nothing may be prevented which is not forbidden by law, and no one may be forced to do anything not provided for by law." It doesn't say "your rights are conditional on you being a really top bloke", the only requirement is one made in the interests of order; that men obey the law. Equally The Declaration of Independence claims that "all men are created equal", and though this truth turned out to be a little less self-evident than everyone had hoped, in its language and conception it imagines that the essence of equality is that we are born with it and that it is not dependant upon our actions.

And now Prof. Greer has joined the list of Feminists who believe in women's equality subject to their virtue by joined the endless succession of people who want to criticize Clinton on personal rather than professional grounds. Greer is quoted saying "She's so bossy and cold and manipulative." (Can anyone remember when such things were said of a male politician? Must be because male politicians do not have these qualities. No. Wait. What about John Howard's entire front bench?)
Not that Greer is against female leaders, but she seems to feel that it only furthers the cause if they are women who's lifestyle meets with her approval. Now not only do when have to succeed, we have to be saints too, her kind of saints.


Greer, who was in Melbourne promoting her book Shakespeare's Wife, was quoted in The Australian 11/3/2008 as saying, without any apparent consciousness of the irony, "I can't see that Hillary would appeal to feminists because, why is she there? She is there because she is Bill's wife."


Surely, people as feminists are delighted to see any indication that the idea of women in every aspect of society is becoming more acceptable, and surely as individuals they vote their consciences across a range of issues.


*Boccaccio's On Famous Women, one of the inspirations for De Pizan, by contrast gives the biographies of great women who have performed great deeds, regardless of whether they were 'good' or 'wicked'.