I was having a good day. But sometimes the universe places entities in such proximity within each other, that they simply can not be ignored, and they chew at your brain and your soul and your need for chemically-induced balancing agents. I woke up this morning around 4:30. I finished my three cups of coffee and my reading for this weeks' classes by 8:00, at which point my fiancée and I left for school. I taught my Composition 101 class from 9:00-9:50, then headed for toward the Student Union Memorial Center for my next coffee refresher. I was already bothered by the lack of attendance and attention garnered by my students. As I reached the lawn, somewhere between Biology Sciences West and the Student Union, what should fill my eyes but a giant logical fallacy--the great appeal to emotion often projected by the pro-life movement--giant pictures of aborted fetuses complete with irrelevant slogans to genocide and slavery. Fine. I determined for once to disregard my personal beliefs and opinions for the sake of the performance at hand. I took my deep breaths, went and bought my coffee from what I will now call a concession stand, and proceeded out, taking my seat and listening calmly to the discourse at hand.
What I found most interesting about the ventriloquists--there were two lead male actors in this play--was their body language. Let's call the pro-lifer Thing 1, and the pro-choicer Thing 2. The reason I utilize the Seussian references is because my morning's Thing 1 and Thing 2 were little more than absurd half-humans, playing a role for the world's most clichéd stage.
The great wall of red bricks as their backdrop, the proverbial curtains lifted, the actors glistening under the bright natural light. It was such a beautiful morning. Although attempting to disguise their performance as if in dialogue, Thing 1 and Thing 2 each had their hips turned out toward the crowd so as not to upstage themselves (talk to a theater major; this is a common blocking problem). Their bodies constantly aware of the crowd's presence, they proceeded their mindless and irresolvable discourse. For Thing 1 and Thing 2 were arguing a matter which has no clear, definitive, or absolute answer.
There existed in the language of the discourse, however, a thematic link Thing 1 and Thing 2 shared in common. It relates to Ritchie’s “Ventriloquist Folklore,” which I read somewhere during cup of coffee number 2.
A minor side note or significance: ventriloquism comes from the Latin words venter and loquī, meaning womb, mother, or source of offspring and to speak, respectively.
The ethical and metaphysical gap between the actors only survived because of a trivial misunderstanding of perspective, a perspective with which Thing 1 and Thing 2 each silently agreed. As white man, Thing 1 spoke on behalf of the fetus, that “speechless entity that is not likely to demand suffrage, practice civil disobedience, or hold sit-ins” (370). Also as a white man, Thing 2 spoke on behalf of women (although he mentioned briefly that he was not, perhaps, the best candidate to do so, a point which was quickly forgotten in the performance (perhaps whoever wrote the script needs to proofread a bit more)).
What became apparent about the performance—in all the swirling madness of the Foucauldian projections of power—was that through performance, Thing 1 and Thing 2 failed to do much more than project their respective male bravados, to fight neither for women nor for fetuses, but for the satisfaction of their own male egos.
So these arguments go. The rampant clichés, the pretentious body language, the false representation of “others,” all for some meager satisfaction to show the public how large ones masculinity protrudes from ones mouth. I was having a good day, but I moved on, sullied and disappointed, awaiting the next chapter.
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