…men??
Your Eyewitness thought it was more than a bit ironic that the world celebrated “International Men’s Day”, as – continuing what’s been happening over the last few millennia of recorded history – men had just launched wars in which even babies were being butchered!! Putin and Zelensky in Europe and Netanyahu and Haniyeh in Israel and Gaza are men upkeeping a hoary tradition, aren’t they? Your Eyewitness is a card-carrying member of the tribe called “men”, but he can’t turn a blind eye, because we do have some good guys among us: by and large, we’re mostly cads and bounders!!
Even back in the day before we crept out of caves, weren’t we bopping women over the head, and not even bothering to drag them into the aforementioned caves to “have our way” with them?? And hasn’t that, more or less, been our attitude towards women ever since?? We don’t have to get into academic discourses about “patriarchal societies” and all that. We know that it wasn’t till the 1800s that women even got the right to vote in the so-called “progressive” societies, like Britain!! And they had to struggle like the devil (male…get it?) as “suffragettes” to gain that right!!
Now that they’ve had to continue fighting tooth and claw for such “gains” as “equal pay for equal work”, we’re having all kinds of conniptions against “feminism” as if what’s being demanded is against some universal order!! And that’s the crux of the matter, innit?? The “good book”, which we were told is the ground of all wisdom, declares: “For a husband has authority over his wife just as Christ has authority over the church; and Christ is himself the Saviour of the church, his body. And so wives must submit completely to their husbands, just as the church submits itself to Christ.”
Now, some men complain that because of this “authority” they gotta exercise, they have to play a very debilitating role: always having to keep a stiff upper lip – boys don’t cry!!, you sissy!! – having to take care of the family; having to be hard-assed when they’d rather be sobbing in some corner etc etc. Now, dear (male) reader, notice how you recoiled about that “sobbing in a corner” bit?? You still feel that wouldn’t be “manly”!! You still buy into that “toxic masculinity” role that eventually veers towards “slapping some sense” into females!!
So, yes, there are some good men; so yes, some men are sensitive. But to return from where we started, are we to let Netanyahu and the Israeli leadership off the hook because a few Israeli citizens have protested the genocide of Palestinians that’s being committed?
We’ve got a long way to go, baby – before we can celebrate Men’s Day!!
…the Carters
That you immediately knew which “Carters” your Eyewitness was talking about signals the impression that Jimmy Carter – the peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, who became the 39th President of the US, from 1977 to 1981 – made on the world. His wife Rosalyn just passed at the age of 96, and he’s in hospice care at the age of 99 – both at the modest home they built in 1961 when they got married. It’s interesting that James Earl Carter – who insisted on being called “Jimmy” – became more famous after he became president than when he was!!
And it’s all because the American public judged him for not being as “manly” as he oughta been!! They frankly thought he was a wimp, for instance, when he refused to bomb Iran into the Stone Age after a bunch of mullahs deposed the Shah, who was a staunch American ally.
The manly George Bush did demonstrate American manhood by invading Iraq in 2003!! 300,000 civilians were killed in carpet bombings!!
…Venezuelan rehabilitation
With all the affirmations of support for our cause on Mad Madro’s bellicosity; with the U.S giving approval for T&T and Shell to start developing Venezuela’s Dragon Gas Field; and the latter about to sign off, Maduro’s gotten a lifeline!!
