Yesterday I encouraged my tween to take in some compelling propaganda that highlights, condones and/or actively encourages the perspective that women are weak, men are the protectors, sexual relations are controlled by the male, male spousal abuse is a forgivable aspect of their innate character, and good and evil are identifiable and tinged with racist overtones.

My 12-year-old and her friends are pretty sophisticated propaganda consumers at this point in their 21^st-Century upbringing, so they were aware of and had their own opinions of the whole ‘weak female’ controversy – but the domestic violence and racist aspects of the Twilight/New Moon juggernaut (and I’m presuming few between here and Ouagadougou wouldn’t have recognized my topic) were new and startling for me.  Not having read the books (I can’t stomach Meyers’ execrable prose), I was unprepared for the scene where main protagonist Bella, torn between her Aryan vampire lover and the Native American werewolf aspirant for her affections, visits the latter’s lair.  A number of highly-pumped shirtless young men sit at a table, served lovingly by Bella’s counterpart, a dark-skinned female.  Turning from the counter to provide fresh-baked cookies to the joking males, the werewolf’s human female reveals a face raked by scars.  She moves about offering food, smiling and gently kidding the guys.  The scene closes on a warm kiss with her boyfriend.  Later, it’s explained that in an uncontrolled fit of pique he’d injured her because she was “standing too close.”

I asked the tweens whether there was any further exposition in the book. Had she rebelled? Was there indictment of his behavior, or retributive measures from his clan?  If there was, the girls didn’t recall it.  “It was just a quick thing,” explained the oldest and most sophisticated of the group.  “He was just angry, and she was too close to him.  He was sorry afterward.”  I was slack-jawed.  This very bright and thoughtful girl on the verge of young womanhood (daughter of a feminist university professor and a equality-minded lawyer), had just mouthed something  out of a bygone rule book.  Postulated a concept that was dated even when I was their age in 1973. 

I can handle the perspective that female blood is an uncontrolled, lust-inducing exudate against whose lure a moral male must summon superhuman control, and that such moral men must be consistently vigilant to protect females from men of lesser fiber.  The metaphor is so obvious and awkward as to be laughable, and laughingly sloughed off.  Also humorous and worthy of jesting discussion is the concept that the ‘change’ from human to vampire (aka loss of virginity) is a ‘death’ which is rightly put to vote before the family of the male.  I can even take the precept that the moral male agrees to such a death only if marriage is accepted (the entire tween audience swooned as the question was posed.  My own jaw dropped even lower.  He’ll allow her to change into a vampire if she agrees to lifelong partnership with her violator/savior? This is 2009?  I’m not sitting in some sort of timewarp tunnel to the 1950s?).  But okay.  I can take all that.  Worthy fodder for discussion with this next generation of females.

But that male violence issue.  That’s a bit of a poser.  That might require a public protestation or two.  That might beg the suggestion that the next benefit for ‘My Sister’s Place’ employ a poster of the ravaged face of this beautiful young actress, and a flaming title slashed at the mid-point:  “THIS ISN’T UNDYING LOVE.  IT’S SELF-HATE.”

A philosopher friend asked how it's possible to hold high standards (which, being high, cannot ever be met) and simultaneously be happy.

I thought about that.  This is what I thought:

I'm not sure it's impossible to hold standards and live happily.  I believe devout religious believers do this - at least some do - because for them, happiness IS the standard, and the quest to achieve the standard is part of a voyage that, although it cannot end in success, will nevertheless (if you're good) get you far enough for those Pearly Gates (even if God cannot be scientifically proven to exist, it IS apparently scientifically proven that believing in Him makes you happier.  Quite the quandary right there.)

 

For those of us with the sense that the mortal coil is all we've got, things get stickier.  Today's stickiness (just today's, just anecdotally): I'm sitting on the sofa after work and dinner, laptop in hand, writing a volunteer-related email.  Ms. 8's bugging me.  Really bugging me.  She wants quality time with her Mom.  I don't have it to give.  I want organizing time and email time and just plain me-time, damnit.  I'm laughing falsely and typing and trying to hold it together.  I click the wrong thing and open up the NYT.  Front image:  all those white-wrapped dead children in Gaza.  Jeeezusfuckinchr.....!  A million things pour through the mind.  Hamas' cold-bloodedly calculating strategies about firing from the protection of the populace.  Israel's dreams, perennially upheld behind blood-soaked barricades.  US sanctimonious complicity.  My own willingness to shut eyes, shut purse, turn away.  All those grieving parents.  All those mothers, just like me....Ms. 8 comes around the edge of the computer.  "What's that, Mommy?"  "The newspaper, honey." I close the laptop.  I follow her into the kitchen.  She's skipping.  How can one ever find happiness in so ephemeral a moment as this one small, happy child-skip instant, lost in a morass of my own - and my society's - inadequacies?  Oh, God.  Or, no, wait - He doesn't exist.

Wherever on the African continent I've touched down, when the plane door opens and conditioned European air dissipates in the cacophonous onrush of sub-Sahara, there's the overriding scent of laterite dust.  Traveling afoot or in open-air vehicles, it gets in your hair, suffuses your clothes, tinges your sweat.  It's ubiquitous and often unpleasant. 

The day I left Africa for the last time, I mourned the loss of laterite.  I spent those hours breathing consciously of it; with every inhalation reliving another golden memory.  The good, the difficult, the dangerous, the revelatory -- all dust-wrapped and priceless.

If, right now, I were suddenly transported back, there would be nothing there of that last day's supercharged emotion. Even if you mourn it often, and even if you return - you never have the totality of a place-and-people in quite the same way as you had it for the flash of time just before your departure.

Is anticipative nostalgia so painful because it is so fleeting?

I have a friend who's leaving a long-time home he loves, where he has roots and family, obligations and adulation, on all sides.  Every time he turns around, there's another farewell, another joking jibe belying teary eye, another lengthy embrace, another last look at a long-loved sight.  My friend's a world traveler with plenty of relocation in his past, but he didn't want to make this move right now.  There's an angry 'what-if' patina on all his nostalgia.  He sees the final good-bye streaking toward him at unstoppable speed.  He's sad, he's happy, he's angry, he's resolved, he's overwhelmed. 

The thing about 'always having Paris' (as a metaphor for any  loss of great magnitude), is that you actually don't.  You only 'have Paris' in that fulgent instant just before you turn resolutely away from an abandoned dream:  the moment when you know, with all your soul, how precious it is; and, simultaneously, how integral to your being it was.

Heartache.