> nst> Sorry. You missed my point. It was—YPTE—introspective. I was > noticing that I could not believe that a world without women was > dreary without being a sexist. > > > > nst> Probably not that interesting a thought if one is under 50, or > 60, or 70, or perhaps even 80 > and I submit to all that the main point of the storyline is the sorry/not-sorry (unintended/unexpected/yet-predictable) consequences of using violence (one of the most egregious types of levers).
The "dreariness" of a world without women would seem to be eclipsed by the personal grief of *virtually* every male on the planet losing his wife/mother/daughters/sisters/female-friends overnight (in the personal) and the abrupt if delayed (by a remaining lifespan) existential grief of the end of a spectacular (if clearly flawed, as demonstrated by the central theme) species. Maybe a (very few?) fully psychotic misogynists found it a pleasing condition (in which case I "blame the Mother" ;^) ) Unlike most post-apocalyptic storytelling, the misery is not (overtly) miserable health crises (nuclear holocaust) or marauding bands (though they did feature) or competition for exhausting resources, or retreating from an angry/disappointed "mother earth", but rather a simple but profound "absence" and incontrovertable "end of humanity", leaving the men of the world to contemplate (or not) how they treated women before they all went away. <blatant Moralizing> If Marcus' nihilist view that "it is all levers" is more true than not, it explains why this grand experiment of "civilization" seems to be collapsing into a cesspool of it's own making, under it's own weight. Or it's own hubris. Or under the self-perpetuating seduction of vengeance and retribution: (don't click if you hate poetry) The People of the Other Village - Thomas Lux <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48485/the-people-of-the-other-village> My parents taught me (mostly by example) that punishment of children was at best a necessary last resort, resulting from and reflecting upon a failure of good parenting leading up to the need for acute correction. They were at least a *little* more direct/vocal about the same principle in public life, that our criminal justice system *only* existed, with it's myriad attempts at exacting justice without revenge and finding clever forms of "punitive retribution" to at least appear like "natural consequences" (not a term in parenting vocabulary at that time quite yet, but practiced by my parents and a few others I knew). Our current "Lord of the Flies" scene in DC (and across the country) may require all kinds of exacted punishment to re-align elements of society to where we can live together in relative peace, but to not acknowledge that the mere entertainment of the likes of Donald Trump as a national leader represents an abject failure of our culture to "make sense". The calls for removal/impeachment/censure/disbarment are all reasonable triage actions to minimize continued damage, even if they are in many ways "too little too late". But I am saddened as I hear a great deal of the rhetoric on the topic armatured around *retribution* and *vengeance*... Self-Righteously yours, - Steve
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