Big Bertha
Phallus Worship in the Heart of America
"History teaches us that religion and patriotism have always gone hand in hand, while atheism has invariably been accompanied by radicalism, communism, bolshevism, and other enemies of free government.... I confidently believe that a red-blooded and viral humanity which loves peace devotedly, but is willing to die in defense of the right, is Christian from center to circumference, and will continue to be dominant in the future as in the past." General MacArthur
General MacArthur's phallogocentric Christianity proceeds from a blood-engorged, virile single center violently inserted in the Other, leaving no room for plurality of penises, multiple wives, or communism in the commune. The conquered Other is expected to passively comply, as if she were a slave, pursuant to the absurd patriarchal doctrine that man is woman's crown although she crowns both male and female equally at birth.
Phallus worship is a long-standing religion of the ancient warrior caste and modern militarists. Attic culture, for example, practiced the phallic religion coincident to militarism, imperialistic expansion, and daily brutality, limiting the respectable woman's role to duties incidental to the sexual reproduction and nourishment of more warriors - the Nazi imperialists followed suit with the production of cannon fodder for the Fatherland. Greek males took the prize for proud public exhibition of penises, preferring small ones because, at least according to Aristotle, they were more productive.
Phallus worship is thriving in the Heart of America in the form of its outstanding landmark, the monumental phallus, complete with angelic testicles, of Kansas City's Liberty Memorial. The size of the erection is no tribute to the enlightened democracy of small Greek communities but rather expresses the WASP culture with its circumcised Jewish, imperialistic Roman, and barbaric Gothic precedents. Its height contributes to the patriotic illusion, belied by the events of 9/11, that Pater is looking out over his brood as they work and sleep. Although the victims of the twin towers of the military-industrial complex in New York were awarded Purple Hearts or the civilian equivalent thereto, the paters of patriotism were not looking out for the laboring brood but were attending instead to their commodity fetish and the competitive accumulation of private property.
However that may be, A $20 million bond was recently approved by Kansas City voters to enlarge the memorial into a museum for the glorification of world war in the name of peace. The local Knight Ridder newspaper employed the full array of propaganda tools - news articles, editorials, op-ed articles, and letters to the editor - to press upon unwitting readers the idea that the only fundamental objection to the enlargement of the phallus was the quantity of money involved, not the quality of morals. A single moral argument was allowed by the editors immediately prior to the election: a parks department commissioner, a woman, argued on the editor's side of the editorial pages that enlargement was the patriotic (fatherly) thing to do for the foster children of America.
I objected repeatedly to the newspaper's phallus enlargement campaign. I claimed that the fundamental issued was not money, as the jingo newspaper persistently insisted, but morals, and that the paper, the only major and daily newspaper in Kansas City, was obviously abusing its virtual monopoly to stifle the expression of that fact, and to make certain that any pacific objection to the enlargement of the pagan war-penis not see the light of day. Furthermore, that object and its militant objective in all parts of the world, which the current thuggee administration of the United States would dominate in order to free the world for the practice of its own version of American democracy whether the world likes it or not, is already waved daily in the face of the public.
I averred that the proposed enlargement of the Liberty Memorial was immoral and obscene, especially in view of the fact that the Other side of the story had been deliberately suppressed. I suggested that any plan to enlarge the phallus should include the prominent, visible display of female genitalia. Of course I pointed out that the enlargement plan did include projections of war shows onto the monument's large public skirt and the excavation of a uterus in which life-sized exhibits of gruesome trench warfare as well as old guns could be secreted and displayed to children, thus planting in their naive minds seeds for the perpetuation of future world wars.
I believed at the time, I think wrongly now, that an outward display of female genitalia at the Liberty Memorial would pacify if not obviate the violent inclinations associated with the monumental phallus, provided that the sexual relation exhibited were consensual. The Liberty Memorial plan to tear open the earth, subdue the dragonness and embed guns in her womb was in my opinion contrary to the stated peace objective. In other words, the many premature ejaculations of "peace" by civic misleaders were hypocritical - any such peace for them would be nothing but a relaxing, smoky interlude before the next bloody orgy in the perpetual war unto the self-extinction of the human race.
Still, in all good reason I must confess, contrary to my sentiments in favor of my own lost mother, my version of the immortal goddess of oceanic peace, that the mother dragonness in the cave beside the stream may be violently indisposed even to gentle male caresses on the surface, for there may be no final redemption of the original mammalian diremption or violent divorce of the sexes. Men who overestimate the dragonessa's maternal instinct may be eaten alive whole after being roasted by her fiery breath. When women find their true voice, it may not be as pacific as maternal feminists suppose.
No, I think men cannot trust in the motherly instinct of the Other, the female sex, to pacify the warring world. We have good reason to expect that organized mass murder would be the frequent case even if all men were subject to a matriarchy. Bachofen's Mother Right, which implied that communes were democratically managed by women who loved all their children equally regardless of their unknown fathers, has been deemed mistaken by experts of both fundamental sexes.
Archeology teaches us that uterine worship was more popular than phallus worship in the old days; but war was the rule, anyway, as if human beings like some other animals are natural born killers even of their own species, for no "reason" at all. Yes, perhaps women in particular primitive cultures had more rights than women in certain parts of the civilized world possess today, and some peoples organized matriarchies, yet war was usually the rule as one group clashed with another for one reason or another. A few students of human nature believe that no good reason for war exists; that war simply
is; that war is something men and certain other animals like hyenas will do regardless of, for instance, abundant territory and food supplies. As we know very well, women participated as warriors in the old days; women generals also led men into battle; and women otherwise aided the violent cause on the scene, sometimes along with their children. As for matriarchies, matriarchs might depose a chief and elect another to lead the tribe, clan or nation into war. Yet, on the whole, males were on top all the while, or were behind for their own enjoyment according to the practice of the ancient rape cult - might makes right.
Of course men really loved women and they felt some remorse for subjugating them, especially when they sulked or killed themselves. Female forms were put on pedestals and worshiped as goddesses, yet the pagan abuse and "Christian chastisement" continued with a vengeance at home. And where religion raised the female principle to the highest level, women were routinely traded like cattle, beaten like curs, and even worse.
Wherefore progressive men say that the height of a civilization can be measured by the treatment of its women. But regressive men complain about the feminization of society, fearing that menstruating socialists will establish a promiscuous commune of property, leaving little to resent and to fight over. Well, they have nothing to fear, for communists secretly love a good fight, no matter how flattened by equality they might be.
And so it goes with the rest of the world regardless of ideological partialities. Radical feminists of both sexes are losing faith in the pacific supposition of maternal feminism - that the maternal instinct naturally supports life and peace instead of death and war. The feminist peace movement lost most of its steam when United States suffragists and British suffragettes purchased their right to vote with formal vows to support the Great War, then went to work cranking out bullets and cannon meat. The worse fear of male chauvinists, that war would be voted down by women, was allayed when they discovered that women tend to a conservatism which conserves the waging of war in the name of an indefinite god.
We recall that a few independent-minded women grew sick and tired of supplying cannon meat for the generals. Radical feminists believed that once women gained control of their bodies, they would breed peaceful men. But U.S. suffragists, fearing that the general woman's movement would be undermined by radical maternal feminism, wanted the first female representative to cast "a man's vote." Jeannette Rankin, the first U.S. Congresswoman, did not string along with the good old boys: she voted against both world wars because, she said, she was a woman.
"I believe that the first vote I cast was the most significant act on the part of women, because women are going to have to stop war. I felt that the time the first woman should take the first stand, that the first time the first woman had a chance to say No to war, she should say it."
As for her vote before the nation entered World War II, Rankin declared, on the first roll call, "Nay. As a woman I can't go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else."
Courageous Greek women once held out against war, depriving their men of the pleasure of their company; at least ideal Greek women did so in a play - written by a man. The modern majority of voting women have supported war ever since their electoral role was suffered with suffrage. We cannot claim that women simply sold out - it is far more likely that women like men are following the brutal inclination of human nature, its love of violence. Indeed, it seems that equal rights for all includes the liberty to kill with the best killers. Since men are physically stronger than women, technology puts an equalizer in their hands. When a lovely female bomber pilot was interviewed during the Second Bush War on Iraq, the right of women to kill was not questioned; the main concern expressed in the subtext was with what would happen to her if she fell into the hands of misogynist freedom fighters or terrorists unwilling to save themselves for the houris in Paradise.
Alas, maternal feminism is in the minority and it has no clout. The sisterhood has virtually dissolved into twenty-odd feminisms, not to mention those who took up diverse other isms, many of which do not directly appertain to sexual differences. Still, feminism like other liberation movements changed people's minds. For its own good, the upper hands must learn from the underdogs. When the struggle changed hearts as well as minds, feminism the world a lot of good. Much more could be done if only men and women did not love to hate so much, and would take up some other form of dancing besides war-dancing around totem poles.
Kansas City's Liberty Memorial
