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The Pagina Monologues
David Brooks, in his column today (behind the New York Times’ Iron Subscription Curtain), compares and contrasts what he imagines are the liberal reactions to two very bad people:
This is a tale of two predators. The first is a congressman who befriended teenage pages. He sent them cajoling instant messages asking them to describe their sexual habits, so he could get his jollies.
The second is a secretary, who invited a 13-year-old girl from her neighborhood into her car and kissed her. Then she invited the girl up to her apartment, gave her some vodka, took off her underwear and gave her a satin teddy to wear.
Then she had sex with the girl, which was interrupted when the girl’s mother called. Then she made the girl masturbate in front of her and taught her some new techniques.
The first predator, of course, is Mark Foley, the Florida congressman. The second predator is a character in Eve Ensler’s play, “The Vagina Monologues.”
Foley is now universally reviled. But the Ensler play, which depicts the secretary’s affair with the 13-year-old as a glorious awakening, is revered.
Brooks thus decides that as every single person who has been repelled by Foley must therefore have attended, raved about, and mistaken for non-fiction Ensler’s play, that the liberal project is once again doomed as it refuses to heed the self evident wisdom of Brooks.
One might object that Brooks is confusing enthusiasm for a play with uncritical support for every character depicted in that play, and a few commenters have already. As Ann Althouse points out, they are wrong wrong wrong:
But “The Vagina Monologues” is presented as propaganda, isn’t it? Brooks made a point of the audience’s approval. And consider the extreme enthusiasm for producing this play, which is out of all proportion to its artistic value.
The third letter notes Brooks’s omission of the “simple point” that what Mark Foley did was “real” and “The Vagina Monologues” is “make-believe.” But, again, the enthusiasm for “The Vagina Monologues” is very real.
This is such an obvious point I cannot believe Professor Althouse needs to spell it out. I mean, the Terminator series of films was released to critical and popular acclaim both, and I can’t think of a single person who doesn’t agree that this indicates a widespread and fervent desire that the world be wiped out in a giant nuclear fireball and then taken over by malevolent, intelligent, amoral machines. It’s just common sense.
But there’s a more disturbing connection between the play and the current Congressional sex scandal that both Brooks and Althouse have missed. The connection: The Vagina Monologues is in fact a coded playbook for young pages by which they have planned the seduction and humiliation of innocent Republican Members of Congress.
How do I know this? Because a few years back I was sent a very limited print run of the galleys for the first edition of the play in book form, and while I no longer have the full document, I do have the first pages the publisher asked me to tear off before discarding the book. When the current scandal broke, something about it seemed familiar. It took me a few days of digging through my files to find it. I have transcribed the relevant material here:
I come from the “up there on the Hill” generation. That is, those were the words — spoken rarely and in a hushed voice — that the women in my family used to refer to all members of Congress, Republican or Democrat. It wasn’t that they were ignorant of terms like Senator, Representative, Speaker, or Pederast. On the contrary, they were trained to be teachers and probably had more access to information than most.
It wasn’t even that they were unliberated, or “straitlaced,” as they would have put it. One grandmother earned money by ghostwriting Goldwater speeches — of which she didn’t believe a word — and then earned more by betting against him in the election. As for my own mother, she had been a pioneer newspaper reporter years before I was born, and continued to take pride in bringing up her children in a more enlightened way than she had been raised. I don’t remember her using any of the slang words that made professional politicians seem dirty or shameful, and I’m grateful for that. As you’ll see, many pages grew up with a greater burden.
Nonetheless, I didn’t hear words that were accurate, much less prideful. For example, I never once heard the word statesman. It would be years before I learned that politicians were the only organ in the body politic with no function other than to spread influence. Thus, whether I was learning to talk, to spell, about our society I was told the name of each of its amazing parts — except in one unmentionable area. This left me unprotected against the shaming words and dirty jokes of the blog world and, later, against the popular belief that rich men, whether as secret lovers or employers, knew more about public service than we public servants did.
I first glimpsed the spirit of self-knowledge and freedom that you will find in these pages when I lived in India for a couple of years after college. In Hindu government offices I saw the state emblem; four lions, standing back to back, mounted on an abacus with a frieze carrying sculptures in high relief of an elephant, a galloping horse, a bull and a lion separated by intervening wheels over a bell-shaped lotus. I was told that dozens of years ago, this image was created as a symbol of diverse people coming together to run their lives through cooperation and education.
Here I snip an extensive and not-work-safe discussion of the Kama Sutra and its use as a training manual for assistants to members of the Lok Sabha. It goes on for some time. The chilling sentence is the last one legible above the tear:
Still, India and democracy seemed a long way from American attitudes about Members of Congress when I came home. But the sexual revolution of the 1960s made more of Congress sexually available to more beastly pages. The “no” of the 1950s was replaced with a constant, eager “yes.”
I find this obvious plan to disempower Congress an abhorrent repudiation of all things American, and an arrogation of the privileges normally accorded to the President. I exhort Professor Althouse and Mr. Brooks to condemn this vile conspiracy. And to say something about the shocking degree of support in the US for people who wear goalie masks and cut up innocent teenagers with chainsaws. They have been silent for too long.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
That title is pricelss.
By: By nina on 2006 10 06
Title of the post, that is.
By: By nina on 2006 10 06
You’re missing the forest for the dead-tree pages, Chris. The real question—and I’m sure Althouse will not wait long before asking it—is: how long did the House Democratic leadership know about The Vagina Monologues, and why didn’t they resign when they knew about it?
Unlike Foley, who clearly did the right thing.
By: By Michael Bérubé on 2006 10 06
how long did the House Democratic leadership know about The Vagina Monologues, and why didn’t they resign when they knew about it?
On that subject, I just realized that Freeper comments involving Hillary Clinton and The Vagina Monologues are a near-inevitability.
Shoot me now.
By: By Chris Clarke on 2006 10 06
I, for one, await with breathless anticipation the opening of Jeff Goldstein’s new opus,
The Penis Panegyrics, or The Little Dick That Could
By: By Rob G on 2006 10 07
Miss Patsy and I have the policy of never never never passing up the opportunity to say that David Brooks is the biggest cocksucker in the universe. No one sucks power’s cock like David Brooks. Slurp, slurp, every column.
And on TV, he’s so Uriah Heep. Ick.
yrs,
B. Dagger Lee
By: By bdaggerlee on 2006 10 07
The DIFFERENCE is that we are enabling lesbians in our uh i mean their sinister plot to TAKE OVER THE WORLD, PINKY!!1!
whereas, Foley, yah, he’s a Gay, but he’s still a man.
and we hate men.
QED.
what we really want is an America that looks exactly like Amazon Women on the Moon.
By: By belledame222 on 2006 10 07
Well, we’re on our way to the “on the Moon” look. Come the day, I will welcome our new Lesbian Overlords Overladies whatever.
By: By Rob G on 2006 10 07
Lesbian Overlordies.
By: By bdaggerlee on 2006 10 07
Andrew--
I read Brooks indirectly, when he says something so monumentally stupid that my favorite bloggers feel compelled to comment.
By: By gordo on 2006 10 09
<i>behind the New York Times’ Iron Subscription Curtain</i>
LOL—I call it “in money jail.”
By: By amba on 2006 10 26
Categories:
Satire
