A Dyke A Broad #75
How the graveyard of democratic (or any other) dissent is the idea that any evidence to the contrary of your dearly held belief is always propaganda.
Hello from Paris!
Sunday afternoon, I took a city bike over to the neighborhood of Porte St. Martin to meet a friend for coffee. I got there early on purpose, and poking around the side streets, found a skinny public park hidden behind two immense doors open just enough to let you squeeze through. There were a couple sunny benches inside, so I basked for a while like a lizard or a cat trying to empty my mind of language. Wishing I could be anything but a writer. Wishing I’d never set out to write yet another book about lesbians that I’m now struggling to revise.
Nonfiction is dead. Or reality is. Or language. Words are so easily corrupted that trying to use them to establish facts, prove a point is almost a humiliation. Who but an idiot would try to disprove lies constructed like a tiny bomb with a tiny hidden wire which any attempt to disarm will result in immediate “literal” death? And by death I mean humiliation, and by “literal” I mean metaphorical, but everything now means its opposite, so take it however you want.
None of this is new for me. In the beginning was my mother, who when I said, “the Earth is round,” would reply, as a matter of principle, “No, it’s flat. You’re grounded.” (Because she was the parent and could.) There was the preacher who, when I confronted him with dismissing a woman employee out of misogyny, could dismiss me as a confused little girl. (Because all women are confused who confront men.) There were also the doctors who said, when I arrived with a list of questions so that I wouldn’t forget anything, that I was exaggerating about my symptoms, “Here’s a prescription for prozac.” (Because he was a doctor, an expert, and all women do make stuff up for attention.)
Then of course there are my periodic attempts to argue with individuals from the huge and depressing segment of the global left who still repeat Cuban propaganda about how great the “revolution” was—and is—despite decades of evidence to the contrary. In fact, all the evidence to the contrary is proof that the U.S. is still out to get them. So the “revolution” must be great.
Despite all the facts at my disposal, and the things I’ve witnessed first-hand, I don’t think I’ve ever changed one mind. About anything.
Now, Putin’s propaganda army is telling Russians that there is no war in Ukraine, just a teensy-weensy “special operation” to get rid of “Nazis”. And protect the Russian people from NATO and the evil, decadent West, whose nefarious influence at Russia’s borders is an existential threat for their country. Most importantly, any contradictory message is evil anti-Russian propaganda. Fake news. Beware.
That’s the hidden wire. The graveyard of democratic (or any other) dissent. The idea that any evidence to the contrary of your dearly held belief is always propaganda, always has the intention not to reveal but destroy. Add power politics to that, endless gaslighting of women, of dykes, a person like me will always lose. Especially if you add one more factor, one more hidden wire that comes into play if you do begin to have doubts.
Writing about Trump, Professor Jacob T. Levy noted,
George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Vaclav Havel—can help us recognize this kind of lie for what it is…. Saying something obviously untrue, and making your subordinates repeat it with a straight face in their own voice, is a particularly startling display of power over them. It’s something that was endemic to totalitarianism.
In short, you’re ashamed. And the longer it goes on, the more you abase yourself, the harder it is to admit you’ve been a chump. So you don’t. If anything you double-down.
Which is why I admire people like Marina Ovsyannikova, who actually muster up the courage to revolt. She’s the one who interrupted a Russian TV broadcast shouting, “Stop the war. No to war,” while carrying a sign saying, “Don’t believe the propaganda. They’re lying to you here.” She, of course, was immediately arrested, interrogated for 14 hours, and is now at home waiting to be tried for “discrediting” the Russian military, which could earn her a 15-year prison sentence.
Yes, she risks her life while I simply struggle to write the most basic observations about my life as a woman, as a lesbian in which my mere existence testifies to the importance of sex and its orientations. Because that puts me in conflict with what some gender ideologues assert—that gender is real, not sex—everything about me wrong, a priori, everything I say is a lie.
Still, I can’t help it. I want to communicate, tell my side of things, and that desire twists me into knots, ruins my sentences, makes me feel a little sleazy, humiliated in advance because of the near certainty that I will surely end up, not in prison, but like that little kid trying to make a stand for themselves in the Dollar Store, but instead getting their pants yanked down, and their bare butts paddled right then and there by their parents determined to shame them as they were shamed by their kid’s outraged squeals.
As my father said, “Quit your crying or I’ll give you something to cry for.”
Ugh. I can’t stand it.
Speaking of censorship
That’s it for this week.
Thank you for reading.
Disgruntedly yours,
The monster that dare not bleat her name