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Iron Jawed Angels is an HBO docudrama about Alice Paul and
Lucy Burns, the founders of the National Woman's Party (NWP) and
their bitter struggle in the early 1900s to ratify the 19th Amendment
and allow women to vote.
I'm embarrassed to admit that, before seeing this movie, I knew
almost nothing about the suffragist movement. I mean, I always knew
it was when women earned the right to vote and all, but I never
knew the names of the heroes, or the extent of their sacrifice,
or the dirty deeds of their detractors. However, even though I had
never seen this movie before, I must have seen it a thousand times
- just with different names.
Whether it's Iron Jawed Angels, or Dances with Wolves,
or Mississippi Burning, or Shindler's List, or
The Patriot, or Braveheart, it's always the
same old story: one group brutally oppresses another group - usually
in the name of God - and the oppressed group must fight like sumbitches
for equality.
And the reason progress takes so unbelievably long is because it
takes so unbelievably goddamn long for the bovine-like public to
eventually see the light and permit social reconstruction to begin.
It's the same old story.
This country was founded as an escape from religious oppression.
So what'd we do? We decimated the natives because they didn't worship
the same God and immediately set up our own system of oppression,
called slavery. Then after decades of that treachery came emancipation,
and, eventually, we even gave the black man the vote.
Of course, black women were left in the dust, along with every other
female in the country. And when they took their quest to the all-male
Congress, they were told "Sorry sweetie-pie, you have your
hands full raising our children and washing our underwear. How about
we just take care of all that boring voting stuff for you?"
And when the NWP took to picketing the White House, angry passers-by
threw rocks and bottles at them for having the gall to criticize
a President during wartime.
And when Emily Leighton, the wife of Sen. Thomas Leighton, joined
the NWP cause, that mote-minded, wart-sucking Senator husband of
hers took her children and her allowance away.
And after Alice Paul and her fellow picketers were arrested on a
bogus charge of "obstructing traffic," President Woodrow
Weasel Wilson tried to commit her to a mental institution and destroy
her for wanting a voice in her government - while at the very same
time he was making speeches like this one to garner support for
the war: "We shall fight for that which we hold dearest to
our hearts" ...we fight for the right of the people to have
a voice in their own government."
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It's the same old movie, only the titles ever change.
Whenever watching these social-injustice period pieces, I always
wonder, What if I had lived in that time? Would I have supported
the suffragette movement? Or would I have been one of those gynophobic
grubsuckers who pelted female picketers with glass and stone? If
I owned a plantation, would I have gleefully whipped my slaves into
a submissive pulp, or would I have howled like a hellhound against
the evils of slavery?
I'm sure we'd all like to believe that we would have acted nobly
in a time of social upheaval, but clearly we all wouldn't have.
Because this level of tyranny requires the complicity of a huge
majority of the population.
So how would you have acted?
Here's one way to tell: How do you feel about the raging political
debate over gay marriage? It's the same old story, once again. Here
we have yet
another group, brawling and bleeding and begging for a basic human
right - to love whomever they choose - while a nauseatingly huge
percentage of the population wishes to deny them.
And 10 or 15 years from now, when the fairy dust has settled, how
will the way you acted today be remembered in the docudramas of
tomorrow?
Will you be remembered as the gay-bashing shit-kicker who believed
God hates fags?
Will you be remembered like the prudish senator who considered homosexuality
a blasphemy comparable to pedophilia or bestiality?
Or will you be remembered as the Christ-stricken president who seeks
an amendment to the Constitution to further exclude our queerer
brothers and sisters from this society?
Seems to me, if you are one of these people today, I bet you would've
been mighty proficient with a whip in 19th-century Alabama, or would
gladly have stolen the Injuns' land in 18th-century Dakotas, or
would have systematically raped the wives and daughters of 13th-century
Scottish peasants. Because that's who you are, that's who you always
were, throughout time, again and again.
A reincarnation of fascists.
You all just keep getting reborn with the same ignorant mind you
had before, doomed to commit all your ignorant deeds - like demanding
that marriage be defined only as a union between a man and a woman
- and the best the rest of us can do is hope that someone will be
around to say out loud, "Well, hey asshole, 'asshole' is defined
as a union between ignorant and obnoxious, and speaking of rebirth,
I hope the next time you die, they'll reincarnate you in front of
a bus so you won't have time to tyrannize some other poor bastard
whose only crime was that they were different than you and your
ignorant, fascist friends." ©
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