Melody: I keep on reading about how you believe in the inherent goodness of humanity, and I was just wondering how someone like Bush fits into that world view... if he does, at all. Gloria: Well, yeah. He wasn't born that way. As a baby, he probably had a whole person inside him! But that family is enough to turn anybody into a raving power maniac, and they certainly did it with him.
Melody: When I saw the picture, the famous picture of him, with a bunch of other white guys, gleefully signing away our rights as women... all I could think was, "ok, how is that not just pure evil?"
Gloria: Well, you know, there is certainly evil effect. There are certainly going to be millions of women and a lot of men who simply are not alive because he's in the White House. There are going to be whole species of animals, and living things, and plants that are not alive anymore, and will never come back, because: he killed them. So, that's an evil impact. I don't think it's inevitable. He wasn't born that way.
It takes a lot of work, actually, to break the bond of empathy that I think, probably, is natural. I mean, I think it's probably part of our evolutionary equipment to feel an instantaneous "I'm going to help!" to a member of our own species, and maybe to all living things, I have no idea. But, it takes a lot of work to break it, and our child-rearing methods, and child abuse, and humiliation and shame, and all those common occurrences, break that leap of empathy. There was this, some kind of study, that I've never been able to really find except in references, you know, I've never seen the whole study. But it was of the "Good Samaritans." These were people during World War II who were not themselves Jewish but who saved Jews, at risk to themselves, great risk. People were always studying them 'cause they wanted to replicate them, you know. And the question was: "what did they share?" because, they actually sounded quite alike. Even though they were very disparate, they would say: "I'm not a hero. I don't know why I did this, I just did it. I just didn't think of not doing it." So the question was, "was there something shared about family structure, education, religion, moral teaching...?" But no one could come up with anything... except one thing: which was that they hadn't been abused as children. So, to me that argues that if empathy isn't cut off by abuse and humilation and deeply convincing you that there are only two choices, to be the victor or the victim, that there is this leap of empathy to other people.
Melody: OK, "feminism as the F-WORD!"
Gloria: Right! Well, the problem is, among other things, I mean, of course, feminism has been demonized as a word, like, affirmitive action and liberal, you know, there's been a campaign against it, to, distort it. But, it's also true that people behave as if anything except total success is failure. And, actually, as many or more women, depending on what poll you look at, self-identify as feminists, as self-identify as Republicans. I don't call that a failure. It's quite remarkable.
Melody: Well, the fact that anyone identifies as a Republican is just a failure...
Gloria: But, it's not so much about Republicans as it is about who's taken over the Republican party, because, actually, seventy-three percent of Republicans are pro-choice. I mean, they're not bad people, it's just that their party got taken away from them.
Melody: I still just don't understand how it happened, at all.
Gloria: Lyndon Johnson was probably not wrong when he said, when the Civil Rights act of 1964 passed, he said "We've just lost the south for the Democrats for decades and decades to come" and he was right. I mean, because the right wing Democrats fled the inclusion of blacks, and they became Republicans. So, a lot of these bad guys used to be Democrats, you know, like, Reagan used to be a Democrat. Jesse Helms used to be a Democrat.