Abstract

Mary Gordon

The article presents an essay regarding social and political conditions in the United States. Perhaps the most dramatic change in the past thirty years is the mainstreaming of the idea that men and women are equal. What all fundamentalists share is a determination to repress the freedoms and rights of women. When this is coupled with a sexual anxiety about homosexuals--who after all take the place of women in the imagination, or assert that the definition of the female is more malleable than had formerly been thought--you get a potent substance that feeds the toxin of anxiety. On top of that: The notion that people we once thought of as our inferiors have us by the throat--because we are dependent upon them for oil and because they can drive planes into our buildings--has shaken many people to their roots. We should remember that the chances of unseating a President in wartime were small and that we did much better than we might have predicted.