Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll waves BYE BYE, BONNETS. She writes:

You can only imagine the vast experiential knowledge a short, elderly woman raised in the ’50s in a small Minnesota town has of street gangs. I do know from West Side Story that “when you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way, from your first cigarette to your last dying day.” Those lyrics alone should suggest just how vicious the gangs were in 1957 when I was a pre-teen and that “modern” Romeo and Juliet story debuted. These were tough guys that SMOKED! Cigarettes! I’m not even kidding. Very very bad boys.

In the Broadway hit and movie, the Puerto Rican gangstas wore purple shirts and tight black pants and danced in the streets. My teenage girlfriends and I used to sing and act out the whole West Side Story soundtrack. Hey, nobody had a television or video games, we had to make our own fun! We particularly enjoyed “Officer Krupke”: “Officer Krupke, I’m down on my knees. Cuz no one likes a fella with a social disease.” Comedy Gold!

Judging by the current crop of brain-dead losers shooting up funerals, baby showers and freeways in Chicago, I am going to go out on a limb here and guess that there is considerably less dancing by the gangs of today. I certainly hope that on page 5,328 of the shovel-ready “infrastructure” bill there is a provision for more accurate target training for Crips and such so that these criminals only take out each other and not some little girls doing homework in their houses or jumping on a trampoline.

Many decades after West Side Story, my husband and I took in a black foster kid from Honduras. Since I worked at night, he and I went to a lot of gangsta movie matinees in the ’90s. I was often one of very few white persons and even fewer adult women in the theater. Many of those gangsta movies were about dealing heroin or crack cocaine, sporting jewelry the size of hubcaps, having a lot of random, irresponsible sex and murdering rivals, always with the gun held horizontally like an idiot. No wonder they never hit their targets.

One common theme was of the trajectory of the lives of the gangstas. If they managed to survive long enough, they could kind of “retire” to a life of yuge respect as an O.G. or Original Gangsta. No matter how much cooler the young studs thought they were, they OWED respect and admiration to the ones who came before, the O.G.s. And it was enforced.

Not so much the current crop of mentally unbalanced feminists, some of whom are now men in dresses. The Revolution, it is said, always eats its young. You can never keep up with the latest zig or zag in orthodoxy.

First they came for the real pioneers of the feminist movement – Betty Friedan, Simone de Beauvoir, Germaine Greer, Kate Millett, Gloria Steinem. The O.G.s (Original Grifters) who are still alive were viciously turned on for not being radical ENOUGH and especially for being too white and too little woke. I mean, if you have a book called The Feminine Mystique, that might imply that there was a masculine mystique. Or The Second Sex, which would be an admission that there were only two sexes, which our current asylum-worthy ruling class has decided is about 55 sexes – and counting — too few.

Then they came for any woman who said aloud that testosterone gave men the advantage of being faster and stronger than women (Martina Navratilova). They quickly moved on to cancel any woman who was slightly concerned that even the WORD “woman” was being erased in order to cater to the Tampax in the Men’s Room Crowd. Sakes alive, J. K. Rowling got swept up in that particular Stalinist purge because she dared to dream that there was still such a thing as a “woman.” Silly wabbit.

Luckily, J.K. is a billionaire who can tell the Twitter Mob to pound sand. The Mob has the attention span of a gnat, anyway, and so “the moving finger Tweets,” and, in the prescient quatrain of Omar Khayyamm (1048-1131), “having Twit, moves on.”

And so they did. Looking, looking, always looking for their next victim. Twitter is a humorless succubus, populated by legions of sad professional victims with no moral center, no lives of their own. Jack Dorsey would appear to be its perfect creator.

If I had had to bet which O.G. they would have attacked next, I would have lost the proverbial ranch. Because – wait for it – their target was 81-year old Canadian dowager MARGARET ATWOOD herself! Whom these brave Twitter warrior trans activists insulted, threatened and doxxed, publishing her home address for the crime of sharing an article that was slightly critical of them.

Poor Margaret is pure as the driven snow on her Climate bona fides. She is a vegetarian who admits to once in a while eating a fish or crustacean. And yet she is under the illusion that she is a WOMAN and can just toss that word around willy-nilly without the slightest nod to the mutilated men who will show her what’s what.

London writer Erin Perse, in a PostMillenial article defending Ms. Atwood, showed an example of the kind of Twitter attack to which she has been subjected. Included in the article is a cartoon Twitter meme that goes like this: “There are: Girls with penises; Boys with vulvas; and Transphobes without Kidneys.” And shows a girl-like creature with a knife. Cute. How is that not a terroristic threat?

For those who never read the book (including me), Ms. Atwood wrote a wildly successful dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, about a time in the future (in America, but of course), when population has dropped drastically and the few fertile women left are forced to be breeders for important men. The Evil Male Theocrats In Charge would dress us the way ALL men like to see women – in ugly shapeless red dresses and throwback bonnets. Yikes.

Evidently, poor Margaret never saw an episode of Star Trek in which all future women, no matter what reptilian planet they hailed from, had enormous bazooms and clingy or revealing little outfits. At least one of them always fell madly, if inappropriately, in love with Captain Kirk.

So it looks like it may be “Bye, bye to the bonnets” as an adorable protest costume. Boy, if the women in bonnets could terrify legislators by scratching on the door of the Supreme Court, imagine how scary a lunatic like The Giant Hardware Store Freak in Eye Makeup who lost his mind over being called “Sir” would be?

Who will be next? Maybe start a Twitter war with Texan Ray Wylie Hubbard, who wrote “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother” when he should have written “Up Against the Wall, Neck of Color Birthing Person with a Cervix.” Just FYI, Ray Wylie’s 75th birthday is tomorrow! You gotta love a guy whose autobiography is called A Life…Well, Lived.