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in the whole of Palestine (Israel)

FOR FULL EQUALITY OF NATIVE AND ADOPTIVE PALESTINIANS

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Unmanning

By Steven Allen

 

yes adam to the cry of

anti-semite

they will now add

the even more shrill cry of

anti-feminist.

 

anti-woman actually

for woman and feminist

are synonymous in

 

the discourse of the masters.

 

i think this is probably the most

heretical piece you have written

 

to the gods of

finance and their many and varied

divide and conquer schemes.

 

illich in one of his last pieces in

his time of power

 

attributed the great divide not to

agriculture or capitalism or

science but

 

gender. and mourned its loss.

 

i remember writing long long ago

how a feminist perspective was necessary

(carlyles logic varnish)

to justify the inability of a traditional

family to survive under the new constraints

of capitalist expansion.

 

(my exact words are lost)--but this unmanning

of which you speak is nothing new and understood

to be

 

consistent with if not the lynchpin of

 

the advance of the bankers.

 

these more recent words of mine i know well:

 

(i paraphrase): the public loves its bankers

and offers them the same tribute as it once did

its kings.

 

eventually the many-headed beast decided it didn't

need its kings, eventually it may decide it doesn't

need its bankers

 

but it is more likely always that there will be

a general collapse

 

than that

 

the people (aka the many headed beast) will

ever figure anything out.

 

i wrote those words originally just before

the arrival in my life of my last moment of

 

feeling something of a man; knowing something of

 

love

 

real or pretend

 

with one young maiden, deeply troubled not

scandinavian fair but asian dark and sweet and deep

 

and smart.

 

and very very young. (i remember you suggested the

ancients touted a sixteen year old as the remedy for

manly ennui, not that young but not far removed)

 

it was my last counter-intuitive love

before

 

time and tragedy

 

(and the many dubious natures

of the girl, for the eternal;

once eternal now i guess

femme is always unknown, only held for a moment

by us poor

 

fellows at best if we may, or once might)

 

ended my moment in the manly hope

of conventionally gendered

romance,

 

some love

some touch

some something

other than the usual

empty space, air or hostility between

 

i and another

 

she and him.

 

two sentimental hearts.

 

forever.

 

i have pursued i told you once of late

only the personal

 

but somehow my isolated personal

can also perhaps not escape the social

miasma surrounding.

 

for whatever reasons of individual

deception or

 

merely the workings of the weight of

a world crumbling under its

 

long past due date masters

 

or some combination thereof:

 

 

my hand no longer holds hers.   

 

 

all these things too will pass and if

somehow

 

something green remains of the old virtues,

 

it will be no doubt a matter of the mercy of god

as well as the fairness of maiden and honor of

man

 

achieving once more some chivalry of fact.

 

in due time. (beyond yours and mine)

 


 

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