CHAPTER 13: Finishing School for Fathers
From "The Saga of One F**ked Mother"
“Finishing School for Fathers” is Chapter 13 of Mother-Fucking: The Saga of One Fucked Mother. It is too long for a Substack newsletter, so the second half will be published next week.
Dr. Blue’s novel is based on her own experience of the Post-Separation Crisis. It uniquely conveys how Family Court judges are “mother-fucking” women—a form of systemic violence directed at ex-wives—as protagonist Legion is systematically and methodically deprived of her children and money and reduced to “one fucked mother”.
In this chapter, Legion bemoans how women are the majority yet men have ruled and made decisions that cause so much harm, individually and societally. She fantasizes about men being required to attend a “finishing school” before marriage—a program to prepare and qualify them for being good husbands and fathers. In retrospect, she sees Herry wanted only to be a despot, which patriarchal society enabled.
Legion ruminates on how history disappears women’s contributions; how male domination and wars have caused so much violence; how men have not ever really listened to women; and how even famous civil rights leaders and progressives have not promoted women’s everyday rights and needs.
In the previous chapter, “The Unimportance of Unconscious Women”, Legion discovers a secret Herry has been keeping that threatens their livelihood and confirms his misogynistic mindset. She comes to the realization that she had been socialized into accepting her diminished status as a woman and chastises herself for not having had the wherewithal to speak up. Although she realizes she had little power in the family pre-separation, she will soon be shocked that she has even less post-separation—thanks to Family Court.
Chapters are stand-alone interesting so you can begin reading anywhere. A Cast of Characters follows to help readers at any point. All published chapters are included in the Women’s Coalition News & Views Section: “The Saga of One F**ked Mother”—accessible on the top bar of our home page. Sequential chapters are published every Wednesday. Of course, subscribers will find each new chapter in their inboxes, so make sure to subscribe if you haven’t yet!
CHAPTER 13
Finishing School for Fathers
“The petty despot of the man-made home is hindered in his humanness by too much manness.”
―Charlotte Perkins Gilman in Chapter Two, “The Man-Made Family,” of her 1911 work, Our Androcentric Culture, or The Man-Made World
There was Mona at the first, of course, then Justine, Trevor’s mom and a local municipal judge’s wife able to work at mothering from her home 24/7 and very watchful of Trevor’s asthma which I, as his soccer coaching assistant, had to also be. Justine was not overprotective. I was actually surprised. Jesse was a bit this way—asthmatic—but not too badly. Exercise‐induced and viral‐induced, the pediatricians were terming it to me from time to time, especially two or three days into cold- and flu-like illnesses, but we had experienced nothing yet really serious with Jesse although, with that kinda’ little cardiac thing of his, too, I always wondered about the potential of his pulmonary system to turn against him and worsen. And although Justine had been elated to learn Dr. Edinsmaier would be coaching, she was equally reassured and satisfied with my skills as a veterinarian to be able to discern when enough was enough and easily allowed Trevor to participate.
The brisk, cold air coming on strong in November and early December could help relieve at the onset of an attack or it could bring it on in the first place; that was somewhat mysterious but just the way it was for him, and Trevor himself handled this with the polish of an emergency room nurse so we all managed. Lastly, I met with the loftiest luck a lady could run into when I was introduced to Grace Portia, who in everyday parlance, certainly was the epitome of both her first and married, last names. All soccer moms—so all of them with little boys in Mirzah’s Unit A, too.
Grace and Grace’s gentle-hearted and, thankfully, not too blue-blooded husband, Lionel, have remained my friends. Simply there, and at any time, day or night. If not this year, then when I needed ’em the next year, they were. One time recently when I hadn’t talked to Grace in months, Jesse asked, when her name must’ve come up or that of one of her kids, if I ever still saw her.
“Well, it’s been awhile, I guess.”
“Well, how long?”
“Uuhhh, I don’t know. Maybe six months, maybe eight. I don’t remember.”
“Then how can you say you’re still friends with her?”
O o o o o o! Grace had that answer when next I did visit with her and told her of this exchange with so youthful a Jesse but who was now a legal adult. “It could be years and then when one of us rang up the other, it’d be like we took up where we left off, ya’ know, … ‘last week’. I mean it. It could really be years.”
It isn’t as if Grace and Lionel hadn’t a thing else to do with their lives than attend to me either. Lionel is a microbiologist, even now working his entire microbiologist heart out on that marvelously elusive (for it, anyhow) Mycoplasma creature in all its variants. Such a bugaboo this itty bitty bug is to swine, feline and, O, yeah, people—and all of their lungs and some of their joints! I like a lot what Lionel is doing for a living, and he does it a lot. His passion, Mycoplasma.
I like a lot what Grace does, and not only does she do it a lot, too; but so do I, and have, for quite a few years now. But before we both got into keeping secrets—secretarying, that is—secretarying for a salary, we did a bunch of other stuff together first. Grace is the mother of three kids, just as I am. Boys they happen to be, too. And, voila, they are all just within the same knockabout ages as mine, each just a year younger so both of her two younger sons, Nathan and Noel, were Mirzah’s teammates and became the fastest of friends with both my Mirzah and Jesse. Zane, maybe because of his proximity to most of the Portia family by way of his own brothers, took an interest in Grace’s oldest, Neil, or the other way around, I don’t remember. At any rate, all three of her and Lionel’s Boys and all three of mine, it really was incredible to watch. And I loved it.
Grace had been an accountant with Willard’s Department Store chain for seven years before growing and bearing anybody. Very gently married that entire length of time and on the road much of it, she, too, was able and very much wanted to stay at home like Justine and I were doing. Mona, on the other hand, married but not so tenderly as Grace, took care of BJ and his older sister and traveled on treacherous wintry Iowa highways the nerve-wracking 35 racing interstate miles it is into the capitol city to work evening shifts as a pediatric intensive care nurse who had actually saved children discovered unconscious and way under the iciest of waters for long, long over life’s time limit. This just frickin’ fascinated me as well as her stories of the little kids’ plastic surgeon there, Dr. Jude Carruthers, who made it the holiest of his missions in life to lower Iowa’s legal limit on blood alcohol to 0.04 striving, he was, to stop the butchery to those same little kids’ smiles—and the emotional carnage to the viscera of their mommies and daddies.
* * * *
One of those other jobs Grace still accomplishes superbly and did so extremely well for years before she as aptly assumed her duties as a merit-level university secretary is the evidently difficult work of listening. With the exception of AmTaham, I know of no one who has mastered this job of developing empathy for nearly all other people through the work of listening as Grace has.
She should open a private college of her own where the only major offered is Listening. And, for tuition, charge the bloody beYesus out of the students who most need ... to be willing ... to learn to listen: politicians, world leaders, judges, lawyers, corporate executives, some teachers—the always-a-teacher ones, some college administrators, all the journalists and media and entertainment artists, film, television, music and otherwise, athletes, militarists and many, many doctors, in fact most of them actually. Most definitely, every last one of those walking around the World who think in any way—most especially via their particular path to freedom and peace—that they are going to proclaim it their life’s purpose, much less, make it their life’s earnings to go around telling the rest of us others how we all should know a redeeming and delivering god and act like we do know one. Ya’ know, ‘holy’ … men.
Grace could start with the basics as in any undergraduate degree program. Like with a course called “On One Simple Observation of the Earth.” For the media students and entertainment industry folks, this would be a requisite, the nucleus course, I am thinking. As it would be the same for the degree requirements of all the world leaders and politicians and certainly for the programs of all of them that are the generals and any other manner of military leaders. I guess included in the militarists’ category are also all of the lawyers and the judges who, we so well remember, are still lawyers after they get elected or appointed to judgeships.
As well as, equivocally it may appear at the first, those peacenik catechists espousing from this nation’s Washington Mall pulpits, sermonizing love and brotherhood and commitment all over its vast gymnasia and sports areas and any other of the Entire Globe’s rooftops, basilica balconies, bloodied mosques, enshrined embankments, big‑sky blocs, disheveled levees, simple taluses, tabernacle bunkers, Baptist alters. And master bedrooms.
Course content would center, then, around just what its title states, one simple observation the World over. The fact that there are children across six continents isn’t the observation either. But nearly.
Connectedly enmeshed to this fact that there are these said children—and that are not our children everywhere really the ‘it’ that anyone working toward being able to call herself or himself by the title of Ancestor does anything for every single day during her or his own entire lifetime—is the Truth that: this fact is fuckingly and totally forgotten with every single move that every one of Grace’s college students thinks up and makes. That’s the simple observation the course covers. In depth.
Or, not. It can probe it shallowly, too, for that matter. Because it isn’t difficult nor profound to see and to understand. Certainly not hidden or disguised at all. It’s everywhere in everything any one of these community pillars thinks up and, then, decides to go ahead and do.
And that is because of the only corollary to Grace’s core college course matter. The one easily established and known for millennia already: the heartbeats, thoughts and opinions, the passions and struggles of 53 percent of the general, daily human population is, by the media and by almost all of the legislatures and societies of the Earth, lumped into both its reporting and into its statue‑making and into its decision‑making as if that 53 percent acquiesce to or, for that matter, wholly support—by their silence, their softness, their submissiveness, their servility, their deference and their kowtowing—the massively destructive decisions made that so smash their Not Male comings and goings on this Planet.
The IMPACT on certain others, certain others known as the majority, of what these dudes think up and then implement is, well, it’s just staggering and, nearly always, life‑altering. That is simply and merely all that there is that can be said about these everyday decisionings by these guys who cannot possibly hope to start, on their deathbeds, as even interning, amateur or apprentice Ancestors if they, first, haven’t graduated from Grace’s curriculum. Each breathing his last breath will only be that forever. No one two years, ten years, 100 years after the guy’s death will care. Much less, remember him. It will merely be as if he … never walked the World at all. Ever.
Not if he hasn’t learned, while still breathing, that the job of Ancestor is the only one that there ever really is. As the character with the Listening degree waiting in the dungeon, Sengbe Pieh his name was, after his ship, the Amistad, beached had been well‑taught.
An easy illustration: About a particular hot spot or raging issue, all major networks’ anchors report, evidently without glancing at their own footage, their own photographs, their own recordings, any images or words beamed from their satellites in the empyrean or their nebulous and amorphously received internet transmissions, something like the following, every single night, on the World’s news, “India today denounced yada, yada, yada brought about by scores of uprising Pakistanis to the north and east, yada, yada, yada. And the militant Pakistanis, in return, threatened retaliation against the deploying Indians who now have unparalleled nuclear capabilities in the south, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
The honest and accurate account, whether printed or broadcast, one that would be … dah, accountable and, well, truth, might, instead, be projected to all us listeners, even those of us who listen only with our eyeballs or our fingertips, as something like:
“The men of the armies and government of India today denounced yada, yada, yada brought about by scores of uprising Pakistani men to the north and east, yada, yada, yada. And the militant men of Pakistan, in return, threatened retaliation against the deploying Indian men assigned and stationed just today to man the x number of poised nuclear warhead launches in the south, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
But. Do we ever hear the general, daily news reported in as flat‑out an accurate and honest an accounting as that? Let alone, account after account after account―through an entire broadcast of up‑to‑the‑hour news, through every single enraging issue printed in newspaper accounts? Even when it is the TRUTH. We do NOT. We do not. We never, ever do.
On television this morning, 04 October, this very same mother‑fucking morning that a dozen years ago already a most fat and irascible lummox in one thud on my Forest door launched against it and me, the Ancestor who I am studying to be, the divorce proceedings’ papers thereby annihilating my world peace, what do we see instead? Madeleine Albright, literally now, bursting out from the Palestinian and Israeli shitfuck otherwise known as a ‘negotiation session’ and, literally again she is, running down the corridor after one of the mother‑fucking (remembering, I am, to be literal a second time here in just this paragraph alone) ‘world leaders’, some guy in a head turban thingy which seems to mean to the rest of us all that he is some sort of a religious person. And I, do I, believe that this well‑fed guy is religious because he wears this drape, calls himself a leader of something or someone led and, with the alliance of a few or a lot of other guys, cripples and kills a few or a lot of humans who aren’t in his cabal‒all in the name of his Allah?
AmTaham used to invoke Allah, too. I first remember hearing the word when I was probably three. AmTaham knew everything; he was my daddy. And when he prayed, no one died. No one even got spanked. “Allah, our Allah,” this archival and ancestral Missouri Synod Lutheran all his years prayed, “Thank you for our little Legion. Thank you for this little bit of land.” I was beside him again, both of us barefoot on the dewy, cold grass just out the south front porch door, the smaller of the two porches just off the massive kitchen but this one also with the gray‑painted floor suitable for the harsh seasonal weather‑beatings and the color of all the farm porch floors in Iowa. It was 5 am, and I was watching him, no small feat for a three‑year‑old; Daddy was 6 foot 2 inches tall forever, and I never was.
We would then quietly glide inside, we angels of Allah, after a deep breathing and a praying session, our daily negotiation, and have coffee together whitened with real and fresh cow’s cream from the Jersey named Camel ‘til she passed. Then her next name was Camel II, and her last name was Pearl, and she was a Guernsey by then. Just the two of us and boiled‑over coffee made in a black and blue‑speckled enamel pot with its bald wire and wood grip, brewed over an open, cob‑fed flame by AmTaham’s own hand, coffee with the grounds swirling and settling, sweetened and so lip‑smacking delicious.
And AmTaham gently negotiated with mutual whispers and sips, ones probably not the best for a little itty bitty kid, but, hey, not harmful at all by comparison to those taken in some Kashmiri embankment or aboriginal backwater rez or rat‑infested boiler room in South Tremont where the one Canuck, white‑trash twin died on me in her dresser drawer‑crib set by her mama just a couple inches up, literally now, off that Bronx slum’s well‑packed and greasy dirt floor when, 17 years hence, I was ‘practicing’ some type of maternal‑child/public health/student nursing religion, “How would you like to be able, when you grow up, Legion, to get up every single morning, go out onto this land of Allah’s and feed the World, too?”
So I learned, AmTaham being an excellent teacher—just like this other religious guy is an excellent teacher, the one who fucked with Ms. Albright and truly fucked with her beseeching, with her begging of him—I learned from watching AmTaham but who, then yet, at my tender age of three hadn’t tutored me on reality, I learned from him that men, that Males were wonderful, absolutely wonderful human beings.
Madeleine Albright, the only one of the majority to ever be the Secretary of State in United States history, the only woman to boss that federal Cabinet agency possessed of the cunning to exact profound international impact, and this is what she has to do to try to allure the attention of this child‑killer?! The pains, even their deaths, of any one of those little itty, bitty kids bursting out and running down corridors away from the bullets and the landmines is, to him, shitfuck on his shoe soles. Not to mention the spirits of the starved and breathing dead ones never to bound forth from anywhere. If it weren’t—if it weren’t so much mother‑fucking and mere shitfuck to him, then he wouldn’t kill any children. And he wouldn’t allow anyone else to either. Period.
Not amazingly deep nor crafty at all. Pretty simple, that.
AmTaham True is dead and gone to Allah now, but Ms. Albright could sure use him, I am thinking. Then I think better of that: even though AmTaham knew everything, even he can’t get this other outwardly religious guy to actually frickin’ practice his own religion. It’s about change and the two, implementing tools of it again: awareness and willingness. Daddy owned nearly everything there was to own in the way of true wealth, most especially knowledge and wisdom—not the same things, of course—and the unquestioning constancy of the love and loyalty of his family and friends. But even AmTaham True never owned another’s willingness.
Another easy illustration: On an enraging issue this one is: race. Or, is it about race? It isn’t really about race at all. Race and racism is just the spun camouflage. When he delineated them and I first heard him do so, I thought C. Everett, our former First Physician, was right about i) the abrogation of personal accountability, ii) greed and iii) racism as being the three diseases that, if not immediately and completely stemmed and eradicated worldwide, would, in such short order, that is, inside my lifetime, totally destroy it, the World. He isn’t. He isn’t right.
Pompously presumptive of me? Uppity? Damn straight. About time, too.
“Deal with it,” so sayeth da’ judge. My judge. All of them. And that must have come to a total of about 25, I am thinking. Let’s see. Counting the two judges at district court who ruled finally and all of ‘em whose chicken tracks just appeared out of the wild, the blue or nowhere at all on all those legal documents issued and decreed as law, before those three last district decisionings, and the five at the state’s court of appeals level two different times (the chief being on each of my three-judge appellate panels there both times) and the one only who calls himself ‘a justice’ that it took at the supreme court level flicking my case—and my life—away from himself with such the disgusted and nose‑in‑the‑air flapping of his left wrist and his one‑sentence ruling, yeah, well, the count of 25 judges altogether just might be about correct.
Same number of words in that ‘Deal with it’ phrase tossed at me often enough by Herry as well as ‘the court’ as there are in some others’ winning choice of three‑word phrases flung about with as much meaninglessness at other women, “Free at last. Free at last. Thank who? We’re free at last?!”
Noooot quite. Not before the marches. Just those in my lifetime alone. The ones on Washington or Pine Ridge or Selma or Afghanistan or Rwanda or Salvador or Ukraine or Jakarta or Belgrade or Saudi or Khartoum or Soweto or Jordan or Manila or Kashmir or Quebec or Pretty Woman’s street corner in Bombay or a second‑level Lorraine Hotel room in Memphis in May or one at New Year’s because of trafficking from Qing‑Dao or the North Slope’s Arctic Ocean beach splattered with sealing skiffs.
And we—we women—not peaceful and not free after all of that marching either.
All of the marching and all of the warring and all of the breathing episodes impacting all of us DEhumans—the majority throughout recorded history, that being about 12,000 of something called ‘years’ and put down into a time‑and‑event construct called a calendar. Whether a religious calendar or a not‑so‑religious one, these calendars with events placed on them then that are made, and made important, by only men.
Throughout all recorded history and over all the World then, … peace? Peace? Justice? Equality? Freedom? Free? All of us folks of the majority then? Including Herry’s great black fuck, Edwina? The fellow teacher at his same inner city middle school? Whom he wouldn’t marry? Ever, he said. Whom he wouldn’t even bring home to meet his mommy, Detanimod, or any other of the Edinsmaier wolf pack? But with whom he certainly felt, free at last, to glut and to fuck? For four years straight? It wasn’t that she was ten years his senior, the bearded and good, good draft‑dodging and so very, very ‘liberated’ and ‘progressively leftist’ and ‘peace‑espousing’ and ‘nonviolence‑advocating’, so ‘reverent’ Dr. Edinsmaier himself told me. Herry said it was her race.
But. But. That wasn’t it. That’s what he said it was. That is what Dr. Koop says. And that—racism—is what it would so successfully and so selfishly be concealed as being, too ― by the not‑so‑reverent‑after‑all Reverend Doctor King Junior who himself, along with the ease and with the aid of all of the other ‘religiously’ complicit and silent men in the civil rights movement, brought the majority of us DEhumans exactly squat in the amount of ‘good’ and of ‘peace’ and of ‘nonviolence’. Actually … logically and mathematically, realistically and literally here, Martin Luther King Jr, massively continued in and only contributed to the furtherance of the negative number that is the amount of peace and freedom from brutality and tyranny done by the minority onto the majority. And he and they, the minority all right, all knew it. As they were thinking it up and making it their bloody, mother‑fucking choices to go ahead and perpetrate their mother‑fucking violence upon us DEhumans … anyhow.
Even Martin Luther King Jr’s most mordacious and trenchant biographer to date, Michael Eric Dyson, who writes on pages 163 and 164 in Chapters 8 and 10 of I May Not Get There With You how it was that King himself, like so much chaff, threw around the word “motherfucker” behind closed hotel suite doors, refers in his book’s dedication to his own wife—in the year 2000—as his “wife, friend, lover”. Still.
Well, heeellloooo, Mr. Dyson! Let’s just be redundant and then redundant some more, shall we? Or, are you truly only revealing by your so entitling of her this way, Mr. Dyson, what we all already know to be your and other so‑called men‑of‑conscience’s definitions of entitlement for the word “wife”. That Ms. Dyson wasn’t, and isn’t still, by her simple act of marriage to you alone, already your friend and lover. Already your best friend and your only lover.
Back in his mid 20s then, they’d all be wrong about Herry’s not marrying Edwina, about 36, being racism. And they would all know, as they were spouting this, that they were choosing to be wrong. That they are ingrained hypocrites entrenched in something else entirely. The something they always, always already knew as they did their pontificating about Herry’s not wedding Edwina being due to racism that not one of them was ever, ever, ever about to give the hell up. Hell. Throughout about the most recent 12,000 man‑made years, throughout christianity, islam, judaism and a shitfuck of other man‑made ‘religions’, women, big girls and little itty bitty girls and all of the fucked mothers among them, have had to always, always, always—suck it up.
Crying racism is such a great, great cover‑up for the core content and its corollary taught here at Grace’s college. These men and other men would say it is ‘the most’, racism is. The most controversial, the most inflammatory, the most galvanizing and, therefore, unwaveringly bound to put into words and into riots everyone’s bottled‑up and stunned state at the hideousness of how racist and, therefore, how evil Dr. Edinsmaier truly is. He would never marry Edwina because she was black. Incense them so, this non‑deed of his would, that they would be right ready, tonight, to march some more they would. If not demand his complete undoing. Or some such. And they’d still all be wrong. And, all of them, know it.
Except about one thing: Herry is evil.
See, in addition to all of that of Herry about which we already know, Herry quite literally fucked a whole lot of folks, all of the critters female of which I ever knew including most probably all of the cattle, dogs, pigs and chickens which, according to Rolodex inventory cards scripted in his own hand, he also fucked. You can close that jaw of yours that dropped way back in Chapter One when you read about the wine‑bottle dildos, now can’t you?
Herry, who didn’t think I ever knew about those ‘ladies’ as well as the others with whom he’d shit all over me in the dark nights of the Forest master bedroom—but about which I did know—Herry, the (raised‑up‑a) christian, well‑nourished, well‑educated and apparently well‑fucked, English‑speaking caucasian, never entertained wedding Edwina because, for him … now get this: She was the wroooong woman. Maybe she was even the wrong species. Probably she wasn’t, although I don’t know, sheep‑like enough for him, ya’ know, soft, servile and deferent enough for him. “Baaaahh, Herry, O, baaaah, my darling Herry.” But, for sure, she was the wrong DEhuman. The wrong woman.
Simply that. And not a thing any more outrageous, controversial, inflammatory or galvanizing … than that. Not a thing.
Long, long before Herry ever met Edwina he knew what would, for him, constitute the right woman. After all, he’d written The Textbook on it. Now I am not going to presume to know who she is or what her characteristics are. Lord knows, I wasn’t she.
* * * *
Grace could even offer a PhD program and that program would exclusively be, absolutely and without exception, required for any man in the World who wanted to hold the title of ‘husband’. Keyword here, for admissions into the program, being ‘wanted’. The dissertation, also a requirement and without exception, would be each candidate’s take on what ‘wanting to be a husband’ means. And his proving of it. Ya’ know, the authenticating and substantiating proof part of the dissertation. That way, every one of them, like all PhD dissertations are allegedly supposed to be, would be original work: ya’ know—never before done.
This is where we would, in theory, find out who, as far as Herry believes, would be his right woman. In theory, I say, because Herry Edinsmaier would not be accepted into the program. Because of that key and absolutely necessary qualification to acceptance, that is, the ‘wanting’ to be a husband. The willingness to do the work of being one in the first place. Much less at the end of the program, that is, inside a marriage. To a DEhuman. To a female human.
The focus of this ‘situation’ with Herry and Edwina and racism and O! just how absolutely heinous is this whole thing! is all simply a smokescreen to rapaciously continue to ensconce in shrouds, again, and preserve from the slightest divestiture for all of accounted history where the focus and the investment in this day‑to‑day breathing truly ought to be. With … Edwina! She is of the majority here! And she is where the focus should have always been placed at the first. This is how it was before recorded history began and this is what is soooo dangerous to men everywhere for the last, O, 12,000 or so ― since recording did begin.
Flip/Reverse. Finally. After 12,000 years.
What about her finding and marrying the right man, her being well‑fed, her being well‑schooled, her being well‑loved and well‑made‑love‑to? What about that?! What about her impacting Herry if Edwina wanted to, so smashing anything of his or his family’s? And he remaining, or at the very least becoming for the first time in that written‑down history of ours, soft, servile and deferent about it? What about her forgetting about his needs, his wants, his desires, his this, his that, his anything. Period. And he attending, and always attending, and wanting to, to all of that only in her? What about that?! What about Dr. King and Dr. Edinsmaier being made, like by her if Edwina wanted to, to never mother‑fuck again? Ever. What about that?!
Now the bachelor’s degree is a BL, of course, the bachelor’s degree in Listening. No arts, no science, no BA, no BS letters about it. Listening degrees are granted only after passing the finals in Willingness, the other core tool given as the laboratory accompanying and required with every single course taught at Grace’s college. Ya’ only get one chance at these finals, too, and graded only pass/fail as well. Grace pretty much knows about your genuineness right off so no amount of choice‑making on answers later is going to snow her. Kinda’ like veterinary medical school when I attended. You fuck up and fail one course? … Tough shit. You’re out. No appeal.
The job opportunity for which one needs to have successfully graduated with this major in Listening is that of Ancestor. You cannot ever hope to be one by any other major studied elsewhere or by any test‑out nor by any licensure, registration or certification nor by any other means including … breathing, breathing, breathing … then not breathing. Ever again. You initially receive and subsequently maintain the title of Ancestor with the duties and accountabilities thereof only through earning the Listening degree from Grace’s college. Even if you grow and bear or spawn itty bitty little kids because you fucked a mother somewhere sometime or are, yourself, a fucked mother.
Only minor, both undergrad and grad and also required if one ever intends to be called Ancestor, will be one’s credits earned in Silence. Here, all of these students arriving at Grace’s college and deplaning from their enterprising planetary leadership starship will study all the various forms and uses of Silence. Uses both for good and for bad purposes in life which are sometimes, as we all know, the same use – just put differently. Sometimes ever so slightly, so subtly, too.
The basic core course, “Centering”, in this minor is, of course, learning to Hear your own Inner Voice: the itty bitty “That of God” inside yourself. That “that” that everyone everywhere, on this Planet at least, has. And probably in the entire universe although about that Grace and I do not know. Grace states that only the very disciplined will ever make it through Centering’s first class although after the first day the student gets another chance. And another. And another. Ad lib. If they are willing to try. And actively seek out the chances. Kinda’ like … confession. Only this one sticks.
Because with each class session the student gets better and better. She or he just can’t help it but get better. The trick, the key to passing this in the minor curriculum is in … coming back to class. That’s where the discipline leads to willingness which automatically leads to and results in … getting centered … eventually. And successfully completing the minor program.
One of Grace’s most prestigious and distinguished visiting scholars will be Dr. Sierra Blue Elk, PhD immunologist and attorney, presently breathing with her husband and their two children on the banks of Spicy Creek outside of Manderson, South Dakota. Dr. Blue Elk’s classes will study with regard to Listening and Silence … a couple of other subjects: Humility and Patience. She will orally recount for these students, over their patience‑acquisition classroom period of one straight‑up and straight‑through ten‑hour session, the now 1,031 years’ worth of the accounts of her immediate Ancestors of the majority. I believe I learned about three years ago when I first Heard Dr. Blue Elk give account of herself, then her mama, then her grandma, then her great‑grandma, then her great‑great‑grandma and then her, well, you get the idea, that this itty bitty piece of knowing of hers, that is, the 1/12 or so of the last dozen man‑made millennia about which she knows intimately and by heart, went back through, let’s see now, she said 29 generations. That she, Sierra and her spouse, had just held, a few months back at that time, the Ancestral ceremony to, literally now, pass on to her majority child, Shoshanna, the hunting knife which is also now, uummm, 1,031 years old. That she knows of. This family knife, Dr. Blue Elk states, is the Oglalas’ and the Lakotas’ spiritual symbol of reason, prosperity and healthful satiety and is, therefore, very much the opposite of one symbolizing the gruesome and grisly slaying of human beings … that is, wholly unlike my neighbor Patrick’s gold cross which he so faithfully encircles that o‑so quiet but allegedly very christian neck of his, his begemmed, death‑producing crucifix.
Another of Grace’s professors, one of only two males on her college faculty for sure, the other being Wyoming’s infamous folksy country solicitor and defender Gerry Spence, is radical feminist, John Stoltenberg, who has for a long, long time so carefully in his writings, one being Refusing To Be A Man: Essays on Sex and Justice and another being his articles appearing in On The Issues, cautioned students already on recognizing and understanding, when Listening, who the Silent and stealthily stalking wolves really are. The Jerry Falwells, the Rushes and the William F. Buckleys, the Enriqué Bolaños Geyers, the George Wills and all of the Promise Keepers, the Geto Boys and Ice Cube and Ice-T, the Pat Robertsons, the Osama Bin Ladins and the Talibans of the Earth, the Karl Roves, the Sigmund Freuds and the Clarence Thomases, we can all Hear.
But. But. Mr. Stoltenberg writes, “Men of the liberal/progressive left have their own effective means of treating women like second‑class citizens: by defending the pornography industry, for instance, which as social propaganda for the subordination of women leaves Leviticus and the letters of St. Paul in the dust. I don’t agree with eroticized male supremacy in any guise, nor do I agree with Promise Keeper’s scriptural or doctrinal justification for it. Rather, I tried to point out that nowhere on the progressive/liberal left have men taken it upon themselves to collectively pay attention to their everyday ethics. In that respect (certainly compared with the aspirations of Promise Keepers), progressive/liberal men don’t really occupy the moral high ground they often like to think they do. And women who have cast their political lot with them need to understand this.” Cast her lot with the socialist, peace‑now ‘progressive’ men whom a girl cannot so easily hear or see as … monstrous. But who, nevertheless, soooo fuckingly are. Men who have, nowhere, paid attention to their everyday ethics, collectively, individually or otherwise … men such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr and Dr. Herod Edinsmaier. The course will be called “Dances With Monsters.”
* * * *
There are many more courses to the minor, of course, especially about the bad things for which Silence is used. Most cruelly, passive‑aggressive oppression in husbands and fathers comes to my mind. And how to kick their addiction to the use of the icebox treatment on wives so rampantly routine. The addiction that, in addition to the mother‑fucking, torments and tortures the entire family. Like when the child, Zane in the case I am thinking of with Herry in front of both his younger brothers, is ordered to turn to and tell his mama, me of course, to hand over the checkbook for Herry’s going to gas up. And I’m sitting right there. That kind of torture to both mama and children.
Another course studying Silence’s terrorism: “Men Who Conspiratorially Shut Up Too Much.” This course covers the analysis of and solution to the pogroms wrought by men who think of themselves, as I would wager, for example, Ralph Nader thinks of himself as and as Scholar Stoltenberg calls them, “men of conscience.” Who, however, are simply acting. Acting, by their Silence, like the ordinary men that they truly are, always have been and will always want to continue being. Acting, by their Silence, to cause such total and overwhelming destruction.
The men, their machismo behaviors and the results of same studied about in this class include all of the Ciudad Juárez and El Paso Border cops, all of the Secret Service men and all of the other politically and corporately ‘protective’ men including vice‑presidents and congressmen in just about every United States president’s tenure, some, of course, that spring to mind being JFK or Franklin D. or Tommy Jefferson or WJC and the much, much‑too‑numerous‑to‑mention men of the evangelistically orating, save‑us‑all‑from‑Satan’s‑slavery business which spans every race in the World. But it would also include Anthony and Buck and Zhang and Hank and Osaka and Osage and Mwumba and Igor and Nez and Marlon and Singh and Pierre and Llagiigñiq and Carlos and Rex and Zuni and Boris and George and OJ and Diego and Yul and Mohammed and McCain and Brataslav and Hawkeye and Mario and Farouk and those two other neighbors next door, Al and Patrick.
How it is that these guys stay shut up, amazingly enough, even after their buddies’ or acquaintances’ wives and girlfriends and daughters and grandmothers and nieces are, well … screwed! Or cut! And sewn shut! Or foot‑rotted! Or purposefully left abandoned to the hyenas! Or burned! By pyre fire or by acid! Or stoned! Or wire‑hangered to death! Even after, amazingly enough again!, these females who are supposedly loved ones are dehumanized by linguistic rape, ya’ know that rape: “free speech.” ‘Free’ as in, “My ‘freedom’, certainly not hers, to my words—and even though my thinking them and my saying them or my writing them or my taking pictures is an act, an action, I cannot be stopped from it … from uttering these words—cuz I have my ‘freedom’ of speech rights! Screw hers! Fuck her rights—hers to have ‘freedom from’ … woman‑loathing and ‘freedom from’ … criminal men like me with my hate speech!” The erotically violent neighbors about whom these so‑called men of conscience, really ordinary men and, of course, erotically violent themselves as they visit the pornography sites anywhere including the one between their own two earlobes, … withhold words. Who themselves, while outwardly Silent, are secretly applauding or sometimes even openly clapping right out loud after “not guilty” verdicts are returned!
In Grace’s graduate program, these courses could all be offered at the master’s level, too. So if the televangelist, the freedom fighter, the prime minister, the boss doesn’t really ‘want’ to be a husband or go on for the PhD, he can still get a master’s degree in Listening. By completing the master’s program in Silence. Grace teaches here. Maybe. Maybe not. A quilter herself bringing warmth to the Heartland for some length of time now, Grace may not be able to stand being out in the cold alone on this one. She may simply not even allow it at all for that matter. Since she is the Chief Administrator of the Listening College, she may not even get this master’s program up and running — if it has to involve bringing to her campus direct from his Raunch Ranch the Guest Bad Example teacher, Dr. Herod Edinsmaier, the literal cows’, dogs’, pigs’ and chickens’ mother‑fucker to whom Legion True was once married and by whom mother‑fucked herself — which is what some on its Curriculum Committee are recommending to Grace.
[to be continued…]
* * * *
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Dr. Legion True: One Fucked Mother
Dr. Herod (Herry) Edinsmaier: ex/“Sperm Source” [“re: I am snide” backwards]
Mirzah Truemaier: Legion’s son
Zane Truemaier: Legion’s son
Jesse Truemaier: Legion’s son
AmTaham True: Legion’s father [Mahatma backwards]
Mehitable True: Legion’s mother [Me hit-able—i.e. she was abusive]
Ardys and Endys: Legion’s sisters [names backwards]
Sterling: Legion’s brother [mother’s planned name of next son (who never came)]
Juggern Aut Misein Edinsmaier: Legion’s father-in-law [juggernaut; aut = 0; misein = “to hate (misogyny)”]
Detanimod Edinsmaier: Legion’s mother-in-law [dominated backwards]
Fannie Issicran McLive: fawning enabler of ex [narcissis(t) and Mc(Evil) backwards]
Legion’s Friends: Yanira, Grace, Stormy, Lynda, László, Jane, Kincaid, Joseph, Sheryl
Jim Cornball: Herry’s friend from AA and realtor
Loser Lorn: Insurance agent referred by Cornball
Judge Harley Butcher: Family Court judge
Judge Sol Wacotler Seizor: Family Court judge
Judge Barry Crowrook: Appellate Court judge
Judge Pansy Shawshank: Appellate Court judge
Jazzy Jinx: Legion’s Family Court lawyer who sold her out
Author: Dr. Blue, aka Ofherod, BSN, DVM, PhD = Commander Edinsmaier's Handmaid (Commander reiamsnidE's Handmaid)
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