Present at the Creation (Of Feminism): Part One

The witches and wretches who populated my childhood like lice in a savaged scalp

By

David Gottfried

Dean Acheson, the United States Secretary of State under President Truman, authored “Present at the Creation,” and in this magisterial if myopic tome he explains how he, and other fine boys from Groton, Harvard and Yale, made the world safe for America, Mc Donald’s and Western Governance. More specifically, he explains how he and his elite confederates organized the Western Effort, at the close of World War Two, to contain communism.

Of course, I have never been in the rarefied precincts of men who can move a plant from Indiana to South Korea as effortlessly and guiltlessly as they can put out a cigarette, but to negate the misery of being a six year old Jewish boy surrounded by Amazons auditioning to be Ethel Mermen or Barbara Streisand, I think I will try on the duds of swashbuckling Masculine Wasp grandeur, and I’ll now speak to the lads at Groton about growing up with women who founded the modern feminist movement and the bitchery they bequeathed:

—

My parents had split, and my Father had died. My Mother’s Sister had also dumped her Hubbie.

My Mother and my Aunt “befriended” an assortment of motley characters to decorate their lives. These characters were – with the exception of expressive crazy men, like Jack Walkowitz, who was a cab driver who spent most of his money seeing a strict Freudian 5 days a week – woman irate at their exes and going to an organization known as PWP, parents without partners, to find a replacement. I remember the offspring of PWP singles very well.

One little girl persistently talked about her Mother’s lonely vagina, and I will never forget Jack Walkowitz’s Daughter, Judy Walkowitz – I loved to corner her and say, “Judy, Judy, Judy,” in imitation of a classic movie scene I had never witnessed -- a girl so filled with apparent hate of all men that she made Mrs. Danvers, of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rebecca,” seem easy-going.

When Judy was 8, she talked about her theories of sexual demographics. Since men were so awful, they should be segregated from women. She proposed that the Northern part of the United States be exclusively female (Her love of “Little Women” fostered an identification with all things Yankee) and that the South be relegated to males. This reminds me that a few years later, in either 1970, or 71 or 72, a gay organization in New York proposed zoning by sexual orientation, and they opined that the Upper East Side of Manhattan should be designated the Gay Women’s district and that the Upper West Side of Manhattan should become the Gay Men’s district.

But back to Judy and Me at PWP: At PWP meetings, whether they were get togethers where single parents tried, usually awkwardly and pathetically, to couple off, or events for the children who all seemed to be trying on their developing neurotic characters for a strained and turbulent adolescence, everybody tried to be chic.

Jackie Kennedy as the Good Witch of the North

My Father died two days before JFK had died, and I saw and felt the spell of the Kennedys and what passed for chic everywhere I went. Whereas Jackie might eat pate dolloped on the finest French breads and crackers, my Mother, wearing her 4-dollar chic scarf from A & S department store, would eat chopped liver on a bagel near Brooklyn College and pretend that she was discussing third world revolution with Sartre and Franz Fanon.

My Mother had graduated from Brooklyn College at age 19 (She skipped four years of grammar and high school), in 1945, and since she felt so young, gifted and gilded with ballerina-like stage presence while at Brooklyn College, she never stopped going back there.

Immediately after my Father had died, my Mother, a thoroughly brilliant woman with the emotional sensitivity of a mongoloid thug, decided to enroll the two us, Mother and Son, in a course in Brooklyn College entitled, “Mothers and Sons learn French together.”

Terminal Woody Allenitis

Of course, in the early sixties, most upwardly mobile Jews in Brooklyn knew they had to train their children to be the most obedient and spectacular scholars in the world. Indeed, I knew a little Jewish girl who weighed 40 pounds at the age of 10 because her criminally insane Father insisted that she become a brilliant Hebrew poetess, and he nagged the little girl so much she got ulcers and couldn’t eat.

As Brooklynites, we hadn’t “made it” financially as had our Jewish betters in Longgg Island, New York. (I always sensed that many Jews from Long Island emphasized the G in Long Island, making it a hard, sound-emitting letter, like a hard punch socking you in the jaw to remind you of your relative impoverishment.) Therefore, we Brooklynites always strived harder to succeed and, all in all, we behaved like the most peculiar hot house flowers in a Woody Allen movie, grossly disturbed neurotics and psychotics trembling with insecurity.

In any event, “Mothers and Sons Learn French Together” seemed to me to be an exercise in higher educational faggotry.

The Full Fecal Experience of Learning French

First, I had to listen to my Mother practice her enunciation of French vowels.

My Mother suffered from chronic constipation and whenever my Mother roared “eh,” or ooh or ahh to practice her French vowels, my field of vision was assaulted with images of big brown turds coming out of my Mother’s butt. Sometimes my Mother and the other intellectually obnoxious women in her circle said their vowels in unison, at which times I felt that I had been sucked into a Jewish women’s sewer of sorts. They yelled eeh, as if they were practicing the e sound in Bella, for Bella Abzug, so they would be ready to sound like a he-man construction worker when they nominated Bella Abzug, for United States Senator, at a meeting of the Democratic State Committee.

Sometimes, one learned to turn the pain into pleasure as any sick sexual masochist understands all too well. So, if I didn’t have beef last night, the fetid and gastrointestinal thoughts created by my Mother’s sound effects could morph into the shit-colored gravy of beef stew, as both shit and beef gravy are dominated by the color brown. Needless to say, hallucinations are a fast ticket to a diagnosis of schizophrenia. However, let’s not knock hallucinations: My florid imagination was sort of like a recipe for the finest French beef bourguignon when the raw material was loud middle-aged women farting.

The Little Boys’ Commentary on Learning French and Breaking Wind

I don’t think I was necessarily scarred by my Mother’s method of studying French, which went hand in hand with simulated bowel movements, but my consciousness is rather “assed out” as bulbous butts breaking wind is always in my field of vision. For example, I can never forget the chants that me and other 8-year-old Jewish boys made up and recited at the Well Met Sleep Away camp:

..

Deep in the heart of the African jungle

You can hear the sound of the constipated apes.

Ooh, ahh, gotta get it out

Ooh, ahh, try a little harder.

..

At various times of the day, for no particular reason, one of us would recite chants which revolved around male anatomy:

..

When your balls hit the floor like a B 54,

It’s a rupture

..

I don’t know what prompted me and my fellow 8 years olds to fabricate and ritually recite this peculiar chant, but if my Mother had known about it, she, revering Freud as Catholics might have revered the Pope, would have referred we troubled children to psychoanalysts, and would have kept us there until and when we were heterosexual adults. (And after talking to a shrink about the delusion that one’s balls were hitting the floor like a B 54, and talking about this for 5 or 10 or even 15 years, any boy would feel like such a mushy, maladjusted sexual freak that he wouldn’t be gay and he wouldn’t be straight. He would be a mano sexual, or someone whose dick is married in holy wedlock to his hand.)

Of course, the bringing together of Mothers with their Sons to go to class together was perfect for magnifying Oedipal guilt. In other words, while my Mother was regaling me with her fecal vowel sounds, I kept thinking: My Father is rotting in a cold grave because I am getting all my Mother’s love and attention. I know that my fellow male homosexuals don’t want to hear it, but Oedipal guilt leads, according to Rado (one of Freud’s followers), straight to homosexuality. When a boy feels he has betrayed his father by having hanky panky with his Mommie, he will furiously seek out punishment from other men and that punishment often manifests itself as sado masochism lite, or butt-fucking. (Footnote 1) READ THIS FOOTNOTE TO BETTER UNDERSTAND THE REST OF THIS ESSAY.

I don’t remember a single French word from the course (I was too busy sneering to listen to the fluting voices of the mothers and the male teacher), but I remember the atmospherics of the joint. It was as claustrophobic as an itty-bitty tea house put together with one aesthetic principle: Daintiness. Footnote 2

The male teacher who taught the class “Mothers and Sons Learn French Together” seemed like such a poofy, woofy sissy boy, especially given the fucking songs he taught us to sing.

First among these songs was “Frerer Jacques.”

I was appalled. The song was the dullest dreck I had ever heard, like an infant’s diarrhea stirred with lots of sugar to make it palatable. And, finally, what the fuck did the Frenchy words mean.

In the song, the French term “Alo wetta” stood out. Who could be so unfortunate as to be an all wet “alo wetta.” I decided that the Alo Wetta was a creepy fagelah (Yiddish for faggot or little faggot) that had wet the bed. Finally, what the fuck was a Frerer Jacquez. I figured that the Frerer Jacquez was a fagelah that wore a jock strap and nothing else when he went to the playground.

I concluded that France, frerers and the entirety of the French language was essentially sissified, and my Mother, who had hoped Brooklyn College would anoint her Jackie Kennedy the Second, responded to my angry masculinity by indignantly singing Le Marseilles in her perpetually tone-deaf voice.

I become the most misbehaving malcontent at Mommie and Faggot French class, and my Mother and I were summarily dismissed from the land of croissants and were condemned to eat onion and garlic bagels instead. Yippee ! Instead of being dragged out of bed on a cold Saturday morning in February of 1964, I was free to crawl into the embryonic cocoon of Saturday Morning cartoons and blessed Normalcy.

—

Footnote 1 The last paragraph seems to agree with certain Freudian contentions, and that of course implicitly contradicts earlier paragraphs which mock the Freudian “science.” I suppose that’s because I am so Hegelian that my mind constantly ricochets back and forth between polar ideas. Hegal said that every idea produces its own opposing idea and that the creative mind is sort of like a cacophonous factory in which each idea is constantly demolished to make way for a newer concept. Unfortunately, this can get in the way of living as I explained in this poem:

THERE IS A METHOD IN MY MADNESS

..

I am a walking, talking Hegelian dialectic

Somedays I’m pro-gay

Sometimes I’m homophobic

Sometimes I’m Hugo Chavez

Sometimes I’m Menachem Begin

And I loved the large muscles I once had

And now I have myotonia, a form of

Muscular Dystrophy

So don’t tell me I am just a loon

I’m just ridden by a persecutorial logic that does not suit living

Footnote 2 This reminds me that Virginia Woolf once argued that American art often suffered because some Americans felt that they had to be extra genteel or dainty or effete to be artistic.