PrintMay 28, 2010
The New Cleaning Ladies of Leftism
Forty years ago, American society (or at least those parts of it owned by the leftist establishment) was aflutter with feminism. This was the newest incarnation of the flower of leftism. Hugh Hefner and Playboy, though pilloried by these feminists, naturally genuflected at its holy altar. Colleges rushed to include courses in "Women's Studies," oblivious to the fact that "Aryan Studies" in German colleges represented the nadir in human scholarship and that the stark "Women Good, Men Bad" animus of this pseudo-academic adventure smells just like something the National Socialist Student Association would have cooked up.
Men were dumbfounded to discover that they had been "oppressors" -- that they had forced wives to stay home while they savored the sweet joys of rush-hour traffic and heart-attack jobs, that the higher life expectancy of women proved that inadequate attention had been paid to "women's health issues," that they relished the privilege of suffering horrific combat wounds while women performed noncombatant roles in the military, and that the sex which owned most of the wealth of our nation was also, somehow, the helpless sex.
Truth, as all sane folk and grownups always knew, is that neither sex has a clear advantage over the other. Sex differentiation in species close to Homo sapiens very closely mirrors those sexual roles which have independently evolved in wholly separate cultures for thousands of years. This surprising fact -- that men and women are inherently different and complementary -- never surprised conservatives, and to their great credit, conservative women emphatically rejected the notion that the apparatus of leftist inquisitions were needed to protect them from the dark hearts of wicked men.
Something else happened, too. The tired, nagging voice of leftist feminism showed its dirty petticoats the first time that questioning ideological orthodoxy demanded decency. Bill Clinton -- if we are to believe the impassioned and credible tales of multiple women -- did not just have affairs. He intimidated women. He sent goons to stalk them. He took advantage of women at their weakest. And, very probably, Clinton savagely raped Juanita Broaddrick. The New Cleaning Ladies, the aging ward heelers of stale feminism, came in and mopped up all the evidence, showing credentials which confirmed them as semi-officially sanctioned representatives of women everywhere.
When George W. Bush launched campaigns in Afghanistan and in Iraq, the strategic prudence of his crusade was the subject of fair review. The impact of these campaigns on women, however, was clear: Whoever else may have been liberated, women were magnificently liberated. The misogyny of Islam is a very old story, and radical Islam treats women worse than other versions. The explosion of crimes like honor killings in America and other parts of the West is ignored by the New Cleaning Ladies of old femi-leftistm. The nuttiest slanders of the Christian or the Jewish attitude toward women can be blown into a shrill shriek of horror by these old hags, but show them a girl subjected to "female circumcision" by enemies of America and its liberties, and the crones yawn.
But "the times, they are a-changing." Now the scalpel of conservative writing cuts deeper than does just the pen of Ann Coulter. She is not just brilliant, but beautiful and bold. Ann movingly wrote loving tributes to the memories of her mother and of her father, both of whom she clearly admired and adored. She was but one of the army of principled pens guided by female hands. Barbara Olson, Laura Ingraham, and other confident conservative authoresses took on the left, including that dreary patch of it called "feminism."
Sarah Palin, quite literally a beauty queen, stood up as perhaps the bravest braveheart in the conservative movement. Now Nikki Haley, the thirty-eight-year-old conservative frontrunner to be the next Governor of South Carolina, is making a statement. Angela McGlowan, another handsome woman, may capture a Democrat House seat for the GOP in Mississippi this November. Nikki and Angela have something else in common: Both are what leftists like to call "people of color," whom the rest of us call just "people." Nikki's parents both emigrated from India. Angela grew up in a big black family in Mississippi.
These are women who need no crutch of nebulous patriarchy to earn a place at the table of public debate. These women love and trust men as well as women. They trust in the goodness of Judeo-Christian traditions, and they worship God as common children, like all mankind, of His creation. Their cheerful, saucy, direct, and polemical assaults on leftism will force counterattacks -- indeed, those counter-attacks have already begun. And because the left is, at essence, simply vile, the attacks on Sarah and Ann have been vile.
In the corner, with the mop and bucket, stare the old ladies of femi-leftism, knowing their place, biting their tongues as their masters mock each element of womanhood which these conservatives possess. So Sarah has a special needs child? Men heap cruel mockery, and their female servants sit by. So a male blogger has invented an affair with Nikki Haley? Well, the New Cleaning Ladies of leftism don't think all men are bad. Even the tiniest tweaks they make now, like about when Obama shoved aside Hillary and then gave her an empty job, are unheard, except when they may affect the big battle against the opponents of leftism (i.e., anyone who bonded heart and soul to leftism.) While the New Cleaning Ladies of leftism watch, real women, like Ann and Sarah and Nikki and Angela, will lovingly guide America to a happier future.
Bruce Walker is the author of two books: Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie and The Swastika against the Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity.
