Terminators and Feminists

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I have a soft spot for the tormented, beautifully muscled Sarah Connor in the movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day. I have always had a hatred for war, always a fondness for feminists. Sarah is a single mother who knows that an atomic war is coming but instead of being paralyzed by that knowledge she is determined to do whatever she can. One might assume that T2 is violent, action-filled and... nonfeminist. Nope. To see Sarah is to glimpse feminism.

For several years I was a nonvoting member of the university Women's Collective and Resource Center. One of the other males at the center did that thing where a man dresses head-to-toe (cap-a-pie) in spongy body armor, and then the women are encouraged to hit him as hard as they can. The results may go beyond learning literal self-defense: on a metafilter web site a woman describes how she swiftly became empowered to react differently in so many aspects of her life. Feminists believe in empowerment.

Were I to hit a man in such armor, my first blow would likely be at half strength, but then my next blow would probably land at mostly full strength. For a number of women, though, blow after blow is delivered at only a teeny fraction of what they are capable of: such is the power of social conditioning. In all fairness, those same women would strike desperately hard if their child was being threatened. I respect Sarah Connor for her self empowerment to strike hard: not only does she learn to use various military weapons but even when her life is over- or at least into limbo, in the insane asylum- she is determined to stay as physically fit as she can.

(Jericho)

In the latter part of the cold war, as we learned to live with the horror of missile silos, we could choose to try our best to stave off Armageddon, or we could be passive. In times when most people would wimp out, be overwhelmed, throw up their hands in defeat... when I felt like Crazy Eddie who, after being condemned by the king to death, got the king to commute his death sentence "for one year" so that he could "teach the king's horse to sing..." then, in those trying times, I could always depend on the Women's Movement to keep up with me, to keep slogging away at my side. Feminists believe in peace.

When a man confronted Eddie he said gaily, "A lot can happen in a year. The king might die. I might die. Or the horse might learn to sing."

As a boy I learned the lyrics to a spiritual: "...Joshua fit (fought) the battle of Jericho, and the wall come a-tumbling down." Back when I was encouraging people to "hold on" to "never give up" because there might be a miracle, I never imagined that one day a horse over in Berlin would sing.

Sarah never gives up. She can't: She can't forget the vision of herself in a gingham dress which Sarah will never wear, with her children whom Sarah will never know. Who can forget seeing her other self and the children in that searing deadly wind? Sarah can't.

(Maritime)

Given her obsessed lifestyle, it is unlikely she would stop to think long enough to call herself a feminist. As for young people today, it is weird how they will say they do believe in equal rights yet they do not believe in feminism. Perhaps they think, "I personally won't smack into sexism, hit a glass ceiling, (etc.)" I have to smile at such all too human contradiction.

I couldn't smile when two of my male roommates expressed their contempt for all the people of the four atlantic provinces (employment there was at 50%, and much of it was seasonal) for not moving to where the jobs are, for not moving a few time zones towards the pacific. After keeping a straight face at the thought of four provinces suddenly full of ghost towns, I protested that the federal tax payers wouldn't pay for the infrastructure to move that many people, not when Canada only has a single little national highway, "highway # 1," which is often two single lanes, not "twinned." We talked and at last the two exposed their contradiction: they finally admitted that their contempt was because, "I wouldn't stay there."

Their use of "I" without looking at the systemic things such as infrastructure (or social oppression), is, to my mind, classic non feminism from my father's youth when only men worked. Those two are like that certain sort of lady in the pre-war company town, the sort of town that had only the one "company store," the sort of store where the prices "purely by coincidence" were raised every time the wages were raised. That lady got a job as "the" receptionist for the company and then said primly, "This a tough economic region but every family should still find enough money if they make the effort, as I did."(Others said primly: If the exceptional woman/Negro can overcome social oppression so can the average not-so-blessed person- or so went the crazy talk)

(Coherent light)

The other housewives, in true feminist spirit, instead came up with a co-operative store where the workers, "we," are the owners. I respect their vision and daring-do. I suppose feminists can try to think big and think straight because in this poor muddled world they cooperate in seeking for a coherent philosophy. Feminists envision the bigger picture, "It takes a village to raise a child," they look for the systemic factors such as patriarchy, and they scrutinize things to see where "the personal is the political."

Hence feminists will go to conferences, participate in workshops and read essays. Sarah is bereft of sisterhood yet in her own way, all alone, she is chiseling out a philosophy. In T2 she angrily confronts a scientist, Dr. Dyson, who will soon be largely responsible for triggering our Day of Judgment. Losing her temper she yells that people like him kill because they cannot create life, cannot feel a child growing. In the book version by Randall Frankes she goes on to point out that men's version of creating is to give their name to the guns that they create. Naturally I'm proud to be a male but I have to admit that, since then, the local police force has adopted a new service pistol and wouldn't you know, it is named after Mr. Glock.

In my young adulthood I watched as a few "woman's libbers" got other women jobs as lawyers and judges, doctors and police officers. We take this for granted now, but not then. It was two years before my father was born that a few suffragettes got other women the vote. At the time it was hoped that women, on becoming part of democracy, might be a civilizing influence for world peace. But I presume there are too few people like Sarah.

My own mother believes in peace, but I can't deny that there are other cultures, equal to ours in the sight of God, where mothers teach their children to hold on to a double standard for women and foreigners, to hold fast to their hatred, and, in the end, to value hatred over peace. Oh well, says Eddie and I, at least in my father's lifetime no two democracies have ever declared war on each other, so perhaps as democracy spreads...?

(Civil)

With democracy comes freedom of thought. Sarah, unfortunately, has little access to the give and take of free speech. Bereft of a circle of empowering sisters she faces her knowledge of the coming horror all alone...

...Alone, Sarah almost destroys her soul but then her child is her call to sanity. As young John says to someone else, "Don't you get it? Haven't you learned anything? You can't go around killing people."

In Sarah's time the focus was on nuclear armageddon. In my time, when terrorists "don't get it," I take some comfort that, statistically, there is no connection (correlation) between poverty and terrorism, rather, the decisive factor is whether there are civil liberties such as freedom of speech, and the right to peacefully assemble to petition for redress of grievances. So maybe as democracy spreads...?

(Growth)

Feminism, says my hardrive's dictionary, means political and social and economic equality to men. In other words feminism takes in nearly everything. A feminist visiting Sarah's asylum would ask if the patients, men and women, are being empowered to be all they can be, by growing as much as they can, by making as many decisions as they can. Democracy in America, as the French observer De Tocqueville once explained in his classic, is where a free people make little decisions, often, so they will grow fit for making big decisions, occasionally, at the voting booth. Perhaps democracy, then, is a prerequisite for people to be motivated to even care to know what growth is, let alone care, Allah willing, for the growth of women.

When I first saw Sarah she was unmarried, unpregnant and wearing a waitress uniform. A man from the future warned her that she was going to find strength she never knew she had, grow in ways she never thought possible. And grow she did.

In chats with my feminist friends we would discuss how our culture's entertainment, especially Hollywood, influenced us. I am firmly of the opinion that T2 is suitable for citizens who believe in fairness and equal rights. John might be temporarily a delinquent ("acting out" from his shock of learning about his crazy mother) but beneath that surface Sarah has instilled a value of consideration for others- and the fortitude to act on that value. The movie is moral. Yes, Sarah tries to escape lawful custody but she is trying to save the world. Yes, she strikes a man hard with a broom handle but only after he has been sexually assaulting her, while she lay helpless, on an ongoing basis. Her son, a weapon-savy boy, will reload for his mother, but he won't hold a gun himself.

It wasn't that long ago that editors would not publish Andrew Vasche's mysteries about an ex-con, Burke, who fights child pornography rings, because nobody believed such rings existed. Now we believe. Feminists, through ongoing effort to shift the rock of denial, have helped shift our consciousness that sexual abuse exists, and can be harmfull for a lifetime.

(Hero)

For me it is almost worth the price of admission just to see, for one second, my hero do a victory hop and skip in the prison hallway. In that instant I see a human being go from victim to survivor. Not a shuffling peasant, no- a woman of holy fire. Sarah will always create her own empowerment.

A moral movie means karma. It's only right that a shrink who messed with Sarah's mind has his own mind blown, but what of Doctor Dyson? How does a husband and father have a rendezvous with death? Easy: Because of Cyberdine Industries. That's where a suspended pteranodon alludes to nuclear winter, where they all but paint a picture of Doctor Robert 'dare to be responsible' Oppenheimer on the doors of their vault: That vault requires two keys, turned simultaneously, to open up. When I was a child hearing the sorry air raid sirens being tested, we all knew it took two keys to empty out the silos. In that Cyberdine vault was "the button." There rested the impossible robot hand and the incredibly advanced chip. Dyson saw.

(Fate)

He was a scientist and citizen who knew that science and democracy requires questions and transparency, knowing that if an invention requiring a previous series of steps suddenly appears, then either the steps have been kept secret or the device has been stolen; he was a scholar who knew how to search the science literature and scrutinize the newspaper files, those files which would have led him to Sarah Connor's story; he was a man of planet Earth who knew we all must be alert to question strange new paths of death, from factories putting mercury down pipes into the sushi of Tokyo bay, to pesticides killing the higher animals, to fluorocarbons rising up to blast the ozone; and so when Dyson was ordered, "don't ask!" and when he agreed not to question that button in the vault, when he passed along his orders, when he silenced a young long haired idealistic scientist, then, like a good Muslim German, he failed in his duty as a scientist, citizen, scholar and moral human being. Dyson failed.

"The future is not set," said the emissary to Sarah Connor. "There is no fate but what we make."

Feminists believe in empowerment and peace and cooperation and analysing together to raise their consciousness and create a philosophy for prioritizing. And yes, they wear bras as any woman does. The feminists could have taken my boyhood world of the 1950's for granted, the way the rest of us did. Instead, looking as crazy and as laughable as someone seeing "soldiers from the future," they acted on a belief in seeing and knowing and taking responsibility. They saved us all from that 50's life. They changed my fate.

In the last year or two there has been a TV series, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles where she starts out, in the pilot episode, wearing a girl's waitress dress that is too darn short for a woman. Of course she would soon set out to create a different future. Incidentally, she chronicles both the cold war and our present. I look forward to seeing season two on DVD after reading on the net where an anthropologist, Grant McCracken, wrote: Anyone interested in what feminism means for popular culture must watch this show.

Sean Crawford

Still crazy after all these years,

still traveling through time,

at one second per second,

Calgary, January 2009

footnotes:

~I get homesick reading the 1940's Martian Chronicles. We thought the future was set, that we were fated to more gadgets but no social change.

~(As for Hollywood horror, when I saw Rosemary's Baby, made when feminism was just gaining airspeed, I noted how Rosemary gets her sisterhood, and clarity, at long last, but it's so little so late, and I thought: What a vast difference there would have been for Rosemary had the events happened to her just five years later.)

~My hard drive dictionary says feminism is from the 1960's. Maybe so. My memory puts those weekly consciousness raising groups in the early 70's. I think that after always making coffee for the 60's male activists who said, "Power to the people" the female people thought that they could have power, and be leaders, and have coffee too.

~The biggest spontaneous ovation I will ever receive was at a weekly (for ten weeks) peace meeting. The meetings were so big that a huge lecture theater proved inadequate for the first meeting; (people were sitting in the aisles) we subsequently had to use a music recital hall. Most of us were from off campus. After someone complained about the futility of declaring the campus a "nuclear free zone" I said that yesterday I felt the same, but that here, today, I was trying to be positive, for such declarations are not an end but a means to an end, a way of moving us further along the road to a solution that we cannot conceive of yet. I mentioned other unpredictable miracles such as Alcoholics Anonymous and stopping the White (A-bomb) Train, miracles that offered a way out from a hopeless terminal condition.

I said building peace is like everyone working together on a giant mural while you can only see the one little leaf that you are painting so painstakingly. You don't just quit. Instead you have a blurred vision of this big world that we are all working towards... And then, starting from off on the right, everyone in the hall applauded long and loud in solidarity.