TriumphAnt

Now here’s a sentence to give you pause; from a book I’m reading: “This sergeant ‘always attended to his various duties with promptitude and care – and nothing out of the way was discovered of him until… he gave birth to a large boy.’”

The book’s title and sub-title should clear things up: “They fought like demons: Women soldiers in the Civil War”. The “sergeant” in question was a woman who successfully managed to conceal her identity from her unit colleagues right up until that most uniquely female of events occurred, yielding the peculiar performance appraisal noted above.

Looking through the lenses of a 21st century viewfinder, it seems staggeringly impossible to conceive (sorry) of a woman’s being able to conceal her sex until the very moment of birth, but the book does offer a pretty good explanation of a variety of factors by which such a subterfuge might be brought off. And first and foremost among them is this: in the US and Canada of the mid 1800s, there was a universal and ridiculously simple means to visually divide the genders: men wore pants; women wore dresses. So universal was this simple notion that, in the minds of everyone at the time – regardless of education, regardless of social status, regardless of urban vs rural rearing, if it wore pants, it was a man.

Jane “Cat Ballou” Fonda’s torque-converting Levis are therefore fiction.

Since then, of course, gender-bending, androgynous, unisexual, asexual, bi-sexual, even non-sexual dressing has come and gone in a couple dozen fashion waves. (I have a book of Eisenstadt photographs at home, for example, with one that shows a 1930s Marlene Dietrich leaving not a shred of doubt about her sex, despite being garbed in full male formal wear – tux, top hat and tails.)

It’s a fascinating story that even the authors admit raises as many, if not more, questions as answers. But if ever an aspect of the US Civil War were qualified to wear the label, “lesser-known”, it is this one.

Election update: Recently I said that _my_ TV debate would also include the fringe parties. I’m not so firm in that assertion now. I just checked my riding for a complete list of candidates and I expected to find four – Liberal, Conservative, NDP and Green – because they are the _only_ parties I’ve heard of running candidates in our riding, until just now. But I find there are, in fact, eight, because we will also have the opportunity in Ottawa South of voting for an Independent candidate, the Marijuana Party, the Marxist-Leninist Party, and something called the Progressive Canadian Party.

That last one seems to me to be a shameless effort to grab the slow thinkers who roll into the polling station muttering, “No way am I voting for the $@#@#$!!! Liberals; I’m voting for the PCs this time!”

I checked their website and, despite their claim to be “continuing the progressive-conservative tradition of Sir John A. Macdonald and Sir George-Étienne Cartier (and) following the precept of Edmund Burke that the most statesmanlike path to follow is ‘the propensity to preserve’ coupled with ‘the ability to improve’,” they are running precisely 16 candidates in a nation with 308 ridings.

What makes us so lucky in Ottawa South, I wonder? Hell, the Marxist-Leninists have fielded 75 candidates in five provinces, and even the Marijuana Party is running 57 candidates through seven provinces and the Yukon!

So maybe my qualification should be, if the party in question has fielded candidates in, oh, say 75% of the nation’s ridings (that’d be 231 of the present list), and maybe even at least one in each province or territory (although that kisses the delightfully rumpish Bloc goodbye, so I have to say that I’d be open to consider arguments to waive that requirement for national representation – Gad, this nation-building is a tricky thing, isn’t it?), then welcome to my “King of the Forest” debate. Otherwise, you’re on your own.

And now the news… two items from the same day (18 June):

1. al Qaeda has announced to the world that it has beheaded a US contractor they kidnapped because the Saudi government failed to release any of the political prisoners it holds, as demanded by al Qaeda in exchange for the hostage’s life. The hostage in question worked on US weapons systems, including the targeting mechanisms for Apache helicopters, used extensively against Iraqi civilians in the US invasion;

2. a CIA contractor has been charged for beating an Afghani “detainee” to death, while in US custody, with a large flashlight. Coverage also informs us that the CIA contractor “was once fired from a Connecticut police department and had history of run-ins with wives and neighbours”. The Afghani had voluntarily responded to a US request to come in and talk to them about recent terrorist bombings in Afghanistan.

Hmmm… I wonder which of these two stories from this day’s news will provoke the loudest outcries of indignation, outrage, disgust... (Change the last sentence to "should provoke" and the correct conclusion is “both”, among any people who call themselves civilized. Easiest prediction of the day, however, is that the reality, sadly, will skew the moral outrage meter wildly towards the victim of al Qaeda, as though his death or its manner is somehow more appalling than that of the Afghani.)