The AR bows down before the DIK, not a DIK elect, as G&S had it, but a wise female, having gone where only women have to go and survived, learned, loved and still loves, so hopes in his case the AR.
The Taliban now and again are requiring women to drape themselves completely in public, contrary to their promises. Young women are not allowed to go to school. And as before, must not go out without an escort.
The leaked draft of the recapture of women’s bodies came first, then the decision formalized. The end of Roe vs. Wade, in the USA, in anticipation of The Handmaid’s Tale, and contrary to promises made by recent SCOTUS recruits.
Egypt’s and other countries’ end of the Arab Spring. Turkey. Saudi Arabia. Too many others. And close to home. Tyranny always wants to restrict women’s freedom first, as prelude to the wider horror. The restriction is often presented as wholesome, good and positive. Think pro-life. Think the Nazis’ display of happy exercising women on the same playgrounds where later came the marching and the murder.
“No bowing down,” murmurs the DIK. “Dirty ears, for one thing. Dirty soul, for another if not done in spiritual wisdom and gentle humility and friendship.”
She raised our pups, raised me, an old buck, as my mother did when I was a pup. My male madnesses fade with age, but I remember enough to marvel at the instinct and force that ran through me, and how my father guided me in observing it, stepping back from it, taking time to both respect and fear it, in myself and others.
A dear doe friend in her later years recently left her burrow to travel to Poland to aid refugees fleeing the deranged buck’s invasion of Ukraine. She caught Covid in the process but had been vaccinated so her symptoms were mild and her suffering a badge of courage. She is home now and safe, and a writer, telling her stories of war, those of her own family history, being Jewish, a Russian exile, with relations in Ukraine, and her most recent witnessing.
In Russia, journalists, and protesters, women and men, who told truth to power are arrested. Jews are leaving again, fleeing to Israel and even to Germany. A resident population, as others before them, live deluded, dreaming of a past that never was, supporting the infliction of a terrible present upon the helpless and the brave. The deluded await the big stick, the calamity, only that that can awaken them, and even then, not always.
J. B. Thompson 