The Anchoress

It’s just a jump to the left
And then a step to the right
With your hands on your hips
You bring your knees in tight
But it’s the pelvic thrust that really drives you insane,
Let’s do the Time Warp again!
- “Time Warp” from The Rocky Horror Picture Show

Believe it or not, the reason that song popped into my head is because of Helen Reddy.

I can hear you now: “Hella-whaaa?”

I ran out to get a cuppa java from a deli that really does serve “The World’s Best Cup of Coffee” and had the radio on as I drove, and I was astounded to hear the sharp nasally voice of 1970’s Political Music Icon Helen Reddy singing the anthem of her time:

“If I have to, I can do anything!
I am strong! (Strong!)
I am invincible! (Invincible!)
I am WOMAN!”

Understand, it has been decades, literally decades, since I heard that song played over the airways. And I think it’s significant that I heard it today.

A few days ago I wrote that Democrats never seem to know what time it is. They seem a little like Fitzgerald’s Gatsbians who “beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Here we are in the 21st century - persumably time has moved forward, and yet with the ascendancy of the Democrats, we are immediately treated to the presence of George McGovern and the withdrawal mentality of Haight-Ashbury people who never wanted to commit to anything beyond keeping up with a trend and finding that elusive “self-fulfillment.”

So, when I heard Reddy’s yap suddenly coming through my speakers, I smiled and thought…”ahhh…right on schedule! We’re back in 1972! Again! Endlessly!” Next up: we throw love beads at Mahmud Ahmadinejad, drape daisy chains around our daisy cutters and tell harried, overworked waitresses to hold chicken salad between their knees, because that’s keeping it real, man.

If only Abbie Hoffman were still around to “levitate the pentagon.”

I remember the days of “I am Woman” very well. I recall watching a news report wherein a group of Equal Rights Amendment supporters, newly shed of their brassieres were holding hands ala the old plague-song “ring around the rosie” and singing the anthem together in their new-found, jiggly sisterhood.

I am woman watch me grow
…
But I’m still an embryo
With a long long way to go

Erhmmm…that got a little dicey-with-irony after a while. All those embryonic women talking about their futures, their boundless potentialities all while simultaneously calling for routine elimination of human embryos - excuse me, “products of conception” - who were regarded as mere “clump of cells” whose destruction was compared to having a tooth pulled, and whose potentialities were considered quite irrelevent if they were to get in the way of a “real, living” woman’s opportunities.

Of course, the abortion debate is never ending, and the ante has been upped now, as some leaders of the Church of England think sick newborn babies should just be killed. Euthanasia is just a really late-term abortion, right? Euthanasia is the new answer to not letting anything stand in your way, whether it be a handicapped child, or a slowed-down parent. And it’s coming to a Soylent Green Clinic near you.

Ah, the progress of the progressives and the pelvic left marches on. Birth control was supposed to free women (mostly it freed men) and abortion was supposed to make “every child a wanted child.” Now, if your child is not the right sort of child, it doesn’t matter if you want it or not, you should not have it. If you (or your growing baby) are not fit to be perfectly productive, then you owe it to society to either kill the baby or die yourself, rather than inflict such vulgar weaknesses upon the rest of us. Society has nothing to learn from you, and you have nothing to teach it. Better to die and, as old Scrooge noted, “decrease the surplus population”.

All these decades later, the “enlightened” boomers have learned nothing about The Holiness of Be-ing, even though they have had some great instruction put before them.

As we watch this seemingly inexorable march toward the elimination of imperfect or sickly people for the good of humankind, I wonder, sometimes, if the Michael J Fox’s of the world realize that they are advocating the sorts of people and policies that will one day tell him that if he really cared about being a good citizen in the world, he’d take himself out.

Perhaps Pope Paul VI’s biggest mistake of his papacy was not putting forth his prophetic encyclical Humanae Vitae as an infallible teaching. It is possible that even characterized as such, this much-maligned (and barely read) document might have still be sneered at and ignored by the usual suspects, but perhaps a few more folks would have at least taken the time to digest the thing, and think about it. Have you? Maybe you should, now. Even if you’re not a Catholic, it is a document meant to speak to the whole Christian church. Now is a good time to read this brief and prescient teaching.

There is a perfect storm brewing, and it is no accident that we are in a shifting time warp (time is an illusion, after all). Unsettled issues have a way of bobbing up to the surface over and over again like so many unweighted corpses.

“You can bend but never break me
’cause it only serves to make me
More determined to achieve my final goal
…
I am strong! (Strong!)
I am invincible! (Invincible!)

Invincible. Life and death. Servant or master. Me or you. The whole existential struggle brought all the more fierce with a concept of “liberation” that has morphed into something as deleterious as an embryonic stem cell implanted into a hopeful brain.

The storm’s a comin’ and the issues are going to play out. Gimmee a seat at the Church of What’s Happening Now, man, and don’t trust anyone under 55!

Groovy. Let’s GROWL.

UPDATE: In one of those marvelous synchronicities, I finished this piece, posted it and then found this splendid piece by Elizabeth Powers waiting for me in my email, via reader Wayne:

Though the liberalism that emerged from the sixties is usually interpreted as a triumph of idealism over the moral slumber of the 1950s, there is another way to regard that idealism. In truth, the 1950s was a very good time, of which all of us living today are the fortunate beneficiaries…While our parents had experienced World War II and the Depression, we grew up with path-breaking dermatological and dental care. When the “sixties” arrived…many of us were unwilling to make the same sacrifices our parents had made, either by going to war or becoming mothers. Sacrifice meant wasting all our good dermatological care, our college education, and indeed the good life for which they had raised us. We justified our unwillingness to follow in their footsteps by portraying the decade in which we had been raised as the breeding ground of repression, authoritarianism, xenophobia, moral and sexual hypocrisy, and untold (and therefore in need of telling and exposing) varieties of injustice. The fact is, we simply had it too good and wanted to keep things that way.

There is a noisy contingent still trapped in those times and whose opposition to the war in Iraq comes straight from the sixties playbook, but such overtly anti-American attitudes haven’t, in the current conflict, gained much traction. After all, the Boomers have grown up, chronologically at least, and the liberals among them don’t relish camping in tents in Crawford, Texas, or even marching in the streets. They have also benefited most from America, Inc. By now, they have made it through the institutions, the media, the law, and the universities. They have paid off their mortgages. They enjoy the advantages of the best health care system in the world. They are about to receive not only Social Security but also the fruits of their considerable investment in retirement plans. The terms of their opposition to war and to authority have changed—the president is an incompetent—but, as in their youth, they remain averse to sacrifice. Their priorities are now those of people who have had a good life and don’t want to jeopardize it.

Brava, Ms. Powers! Read it all, folks.