CBS PRODUCER MARY MAPES remains a news item because of her pivotal role in the bogus-document fiasco that further dishonored CBS and mass media in general. (Note: I refuse to succumb to the pandemic mindlessness that suffixes every scandal since Nixon with a “gate,” as if to suggest some ever-beckoning passage to a dark universe of journalistic stupidity.) But my gate-trashing is merely an aside, and this piece truly is about Mary Mapes, specifically about how the mainstream media’s portraits of her all omit the vital fact her own father labels her a radical feminist – a labeling that, if accurate, explains all one needs to know of the motives driving Mapes’ documented penchant for bad journalism – reporting that is (at the least) profoundly biased and may indeed stoop to deliberate fabrication. Mapes’ father was quoted on this very topic a couple of weeks ago by John Carlson, a conservative talk-radio host on Seattle’s KVI; the father, whose name is Don Mapes, said he is "really ashamed” of his daughter, adding that “she went into journalism with an ax to grind...to promote feminism.” And “radical feminism" at that.
I have never met Mary Mapes – in any case, print and broadcast journalists seldom intermingle – but I have surely encountered many of her ideological sisters, including some of the original leadership of “Women’s Liberation,” as the feminist renaissance labeled itself during its emergence in the late 1960s. Hence a little history both personal and political is here in order:
Women’s Lib originated in New York City, born of its bohemian subculture, and not only was I working there at the time, I was on speaking terms with some of its leading exponents, who frequented the same saloons I did – the Annex, Stanley’s, finally (and chiefly) the late and very much lamented Lion’s Head, where informed debate was as much a part of the bill of fare as the Ballantine draft beer and the delicious hamburgers. I was also by then deep in the research for “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” my lost-forever book documenting the resurrection of the Great Goddess – the manuscript and all the associated notes and photographs of which were destroyed by a house fire in 1983. But this was 1969, and I was paying particularly close attention to the feminist renaissance because its mere existence was further proof of my hypothesis: that at the heart of the Counterculture was precisely what its more articulate members proclaimed – a “revolution in consciousness,” a cultural earthquake of which (or so I believed), the rebirth of humanity’s oldest deity was the epicenter. In other words, Women’s Lib was laboratory evidence, and I was watching it as closely as any Dr. Frankenstein ever watched his monster.
Women’s Lib was initially an ideological melting pot, recruiting heavily not only from the peace and civil rights movements and the rebellious Counterculture in general but from the art and literary scenes as well, thus including many women whose overall values were not hate-America-radical at all and who would today be categorized as “libertarian liberal” or even “secular conservative.” But within a very few years the hate-America elements had taken over the movement from top to bottom – probably because of their superior (and often Marxist-trained) organizational skills. Later, by the mid-1970s, Women’s Lib had renamed itself “feminism” and was reaching out to both the increasingly significant pagan renaissance and the ever-more-muscular environmentalist movement. From the pagan equivalent of sacred scripture – recollections of the age of the Great Goddess preserved in mythology and folklore – the feminists constructed a distorted (and mostly secular) notion of female supremacy, even as from environmentalism they stole its “save-the-planet” mandate and grafted it onto feminist ideology as a non-negotiable imperative to “gynocracy” – world-wide female-supremacist dictatorship. From this extended (and woefully under-reported) incubation-period emerged the down-with-American-liberty, smash-Western-Civilization ideology that is American and Canadian feminism today – a credo more properly labeled “matrifascism” for its long-range goal of “abolishing patriarchy” and thereby (using the selfsame tactics Hitler outlined in Mein Kampf) imposing a female-supremacist version of the Third Reich on all the peoples of Earth.
Having thus molded itself into a movement the form of which is probably unique in history – a movement seemingly devoid of organizational structure but as ideologically disciplined as any band of storm-troopers – feminism quickly filled the ideological vacuum created on the Left by the collapse of Marxism, and soon afterwards became the dominant force in the Democratic Party as well. In keeping with its intent to undermine patriarchy “by whatever means necessary,” it then eagerly lent its victim-identity doctrines to America’s racial and ethnic minorities, with the result that – certainly for the first time in post-World-War-II U.S. history – there is a sufficiently large element of the population hostile enough to American ideals to present a credible threat of wartime Fifth Column activities. Thus too feminism’s paradoxical fondness for terrorist Islam: Muslims are fellow “enemies of the white patriarchy.” And if Islam’s global caliphate becomes reality, and all women everywhere are forced to undergo clitoridectomy and wear the Burka? “Well,” the feminists say, “there’s no doubt women will suffer horribly. But that will just bring on the final revolution against patriarchy: the elevation of women to their historically ordained positions as rulers of the planet.”
Of course I cannot say that these are specifically Mary Mapes’ values; as I said at the beginning, I have never met the woman. And no one has dared ask Mapes to what extent her conduct is dictated by feminism's compulsion to slander and subvert. But I can testify with absolute certainty that these are the values of radical feminism in general, and therefore of the Mary Mapes sisterhood that has not only infiltrated U.S. media from top to bottom, but now controls public education, academia, the welfare bureaucracy and so much more – all in fulfillment of Hitler’s dictum that a minority party’s only possible path to power is infiltration of the major institutions of state and culture. Once again, Slouching Toward Dhimmitude.
Which brings me to my point. This morning’s Wall Street Journal has the most informative story I have yet read on Mary Mapes and her career. But its author studiously avoids the term “feminism” (and all other derivatives of the F-word as well). Too bad: but for the WSJ writer’s craven act of self-censorship (equivalent to writing about Josef Goebbels without ever once mentioning "National Socialism"), it would have been much easier for readers to conclude that Mapes’ underlying motive is monkey-wrenching “patriarchy” at every opportunity – almost certainly the common denominator in every chapter of her long history of pseudo-journalistic outrages: dezenformatsiya passed off as news. Which makes her conduct yet another example of what prompted me to conclude 26 years ago that feminism is the most dangerously, maliciously, treacherously subversive movement in human history.
Posted by Loren at October 5, 2004 03:45 AM