26/5/95

Grave New World

Look out, you sexists, polluters, oppressors and imperialists. The Big Bang Coalition has come to civilize us.

     The first of the entourage stepped out of the plane into the bright sunlight at Ben-Gurion Airport. The friendly El Al steward took her elbow and gallantly guided her out the door. "Welcome to Israel, Ma'am," he said with a smile.
     She grabbed his arm, twisting it sharply. He howled in agony. "I am a woman," she hissed at him, "not a cripple. Touch me again and I'll have you arrested."
     The rest disembarked without harassment. The last one spat derisively at the whimpering steward. "Men!" she sneered.
     They grabbed their luggage, marched through Customs and assembled outside the Departures gate, where their bus awaited them.
     They did not come here to tour the holy sites, bask on the beach or pat immigrants on the head. They were here on a barnstorming mission to change the world.
     They were the feared, hated, revered, reviled radicals of the Big Bang Coalition, an umbrella organization for some of the most militant isms on Earth.
     They had already achieved notable results.
     In Greece, feminist Delilah deCastro of Women on the Warpath revived the Amazons, convincing hundreds of women to cut off a breast in protest against Greek chauvinism.
     In New Guinea, Juan Freedman of the Radical Left for Human Rights went on a hunger strike in support of cannibals.
     Bianca Schwartz of the anti-racism Equality Or Else made headlines in Greenland when she complained that the island has no Hispanic mayors.
     Environmentalist Diana Panopoulos, of Assault of the Earth, warned the Serbs to show a little more concern for the ozone layer when they're burning down Bosnia.
     Shirley Manson of the politically-correct Watch Your Mouth! told the people of India they should call themselves Native Americans.
     And now they were in Israel. They had a lot to do.
     Group leader Gina McCarthy, a lawyer with Big Bang Coalition, led her troops onto the bus, except for Delilah deCastro, who threw herself under the bus. "Sexist provocation!" she shrieked.
     Bil'a the bus driver, a Palestinian woman from an oppressed village in occupied territory, asked what the problem might be. Delilah said she'd rather be run over than board a vehicle bearing the word "MAN" on the front.
     "Oh, but that's only the manufacturer's name, not their policy," Bil'a explained.
     Shirley tittered, and whispered to Diana: "bet it's the first time she's been under a man."
     McCarthy hacked off the offending logo, and Delilah crawled out, kicked a hole in the grille and boarded with an air of triumph.
     The bus drove off, and McCarthy took the microphone. "We will be arriving in the racially divided occupied capital in about 35 minutes, driving along a highway built with underpaid Arab labor. We have a full itinerary. On the way to our hotel, we pass the Knesset, where we'll stop for a quick scream at government policy. We will arrive at the hotel for a complimentary cup of orange juice and a sit-in to protest the construction of its pool on the site of natural rock formations. Then we will hold the manager hostage until all political prisoners are released, eat supper, wash up and then lay siege on the Chief Rabbinate for not being an equal-opportunity employer. We'll return to the hotel by hijacking a Mercedes taxi purchased with extortionary Holocaust reparations."
     Juan Freedman watched the scenery go by. "Nice country," he said.   
     McCarthy burst a vein. "Open your eyes, man! You're looking at a hell-hole, human-rights-wise. See that farm there? That's a notorious slave-labor kibbutz, where human beings are made to work for no pay. Those wrecked vehicles by the roadside are a monument to carbon monoxide poisoning. And over there, a human being died while exercising his freedom of expression by pushing a bus over a cliff. See that village? Arabs, robbed of self-determination."
     Diana joined in. "And that forest--"
     "You mean," politically-correct Shirley said, "that vertically-inclinated verdancy aggregation over there on the left?"
      "Yeah. It was imposed on a site of natural desertification, another sordid example of environmental manipulation."
     Juan felt sick with disgust. Diana thought she knew why: "Fumes. From a nearby garbage dump. Whiff it, Juan."
     Shirley's eyes opened wide. "You mean they have a domain of superfluous unwantery, right here in the Holy Land?"
     "No, I mean a goddam garbage dump," Diana said.
     Bianca became alarmed. "I'll bet it's upwind from a neighborhood packed with lower-income units. You know, I read somewhere that people here are paid benefits based solely on the fact they originate from foreign countries. An outrageous example of reverse prejudice."
     "Worse than that," Juan said, "I understand they entice Jews from Arab countries to relocate here, where they're forced into the army to wage war against their own lands!"
     "That's the way of the Zionists," Bil'a the Palestinian joined in. "You know, they even entice Christians from abroad to do their dirty work, stealing our jobs and condemning my innocent people to squallor and subjugation. We grovel in the dust on our knees at the feet of the Jew masters."
     Delilah was in tears. "Women and children, too?"
     "Oh, especially women and children!" Bil'a responded keenly.
     Bianca moaned sorrowfully. "Those poor Palestinians."
     Shirley corrected her: "Those poor Zionistically-challenged Semites."

THEY ARRIVED at their Jerusalem hotel, demonstrated, rioted, noshed, freshened up and gathered again at a bus stop, headed for downtown.
     The bus came. Juan, wearing a Che Guevarra T-shirt, got on. The bus driver, wearing a Farrah Fawcett T-shirt, threw him out. "Sorry, mister, this bus is only for women."  
     Delilah couldn't believe her ears. "Right on!" she said joyously. She boarded with much ado, faced the passengers and raised her fist. "Way to go, girls. You've overpowered the chauvinists, told 'em where to get off, hit 'em where it hurts! If you can push them off this bus, you can lock them out of your homes, kick them out of your beds, take over their jobs! Today, this bus; tomorrow, the world!"
     "You don't understand," said one of the women, her shaven head covered, eight bedraggled children clinging to her drab ankle-length dress. "Our men put us on this bus to keep us out of theirs."
     "What? Sexually segregated buses?"
     "It's God's will," the passenger explained.
     "We women know our place," said another, "safe from our own temptations. If we set eyes on strange men, the next thing you know, we'll be reading newspapers, watching television, getting ideas of our own. Then how will we serve our husbands and their sons?"
     Delilah fainted. McCarthy dragged her out into the fresh air and the bus pulled away. The coalition was dazed. When she came to, she wanted to know just what sort of an Israeli man could treat women like this. She grabbed a fellow about to get into his Mercedes and wrestled him to the sidewalk. He was wearing tight pants. A gold chain nestled in his exposed hairy chest.
     "Pig!" the feminist screamed, pinning him to the ground. "How dare you Israeli men squelch our natural temptations, rob us of sexual self-determination, make us into mindless birthing machines!"
     He grabbed her hair, kissed her roughly and grinned. "Relax, motek, I use a condom."
     "Rape!" she shrieked.
     "Unilaterally countenanced fornicatory relationship," Shirley echoed.
     He wriggled out from under her and fled.
     "So, now we've met Mr. and Ms. Typical Israeli," Diana mused. "What do you think, Delilah?"
     "I think we've seen it all."
     "Oh, no, we haven't. Look!"
     Across the street, a woman was sitting bowed at the feet of a soldier, a machine gun at her head. Delilah went nuts. "Stop, you macho moron!"
     The soldier swung around.
     Delilah gasped. "But you're a woman!"
     "Yeah, and this scumbag is a terrorist, caught in the act."
     "Wrong, sister; she's a woman. A victim. Your own kind. Let her go."
     A police van drove up and a policeman took possession of the prisoner. The coalition leapt into action.
     "Police brutality!" McCarthy howled.
     "Male chauvinism!" Delilah shouted.
     "She's a hostage of political suppression!" Juan screamed.
     "You're stereotyping persons of the Moslem race," Bianca charged.
     "Justifying the propagation of the military-industrial complex, which contributes to pollution," Diana added.
     "But she tried to stab an innocent bystander," the policeman said. "She's a terrorist."
     "Freedom fighter," Shirley corrected.

BIL'A GAVE the coalition a thorough tour of the country.
     They visited Bnei Brak, where synagogues are segregated to prevent Sephardi women from praying to the Jewish God together with Ashkenazim.
     They passed a Habadnik proffering tefillin from a roadside table. "Are you Jewish?" he asked Juan. "No, but she's Moslem," Juan said, pointing to Bil'a. "Let her put them on."
     They were chased by a raging black-clad mob all the way to Ramat Gan, to the Safari, where animals were being denied the right to privacy.
     In Bethlehem, Shirley held a politically-correct protest against the depiction of Jesus Christ as Jewish, or male, or white. "He may have been an Afro-American," she told journalists, citing Louis Farrakhan as her source. "He was probably a woman," added Delilah, "who had to masquerade as a man to get ahead in a male-dominated society -- which was, at the time, of course, Palestinian." 
       In Afula, Juan told a crowd that the aspirations of Hamas should be respected.
     Bianca said Zionism will continue to be a form of racism "until you people open your borders to all the unhappy Africans who don't happen to be Jewish."
     Delilah praised the Palestinians as the most gender-liberated on Earth, for "where else do women civilians wage war against armed men?"
     Diana accused Haifa felafel vendors of creating an ecological disaster by dumping stale cooking oil.

AT THE end of their mission, the Big Bang Coalition organized a press conference at the airport, staging a sit-down strike on the runway. "We appeal to the Arab world not to make peace," McCarthy told the journalists, "until Israel learns to behave like a civilized nation."
     Shirley corrected her: "Like a Christian nation."