This is the way the internet works:
One morning you click on Scott Rosenberg's blog & see what blogs he reads. You see that, in order to understand the current situation in Venezuela, he has recommended Miguel Octavio's blog "The Devil's Excrement"
This reminds you of when you were in Latin America as a young woman, a decade ago and of the time you went to the movies one afternoon in Bogota, Colombia and saw Gerard Depardieu as Colombus in 1492: Conquest of Paradise. This movie gave you your first original socio-political insight ever: you thought you'd finally understood why Latin America was the way it was, why there was rampant corruption, horrific poverty, and such a pervasive sense of "Salvese quien pueda" or "dog eat dog"--so much so that you couldn't even stand in a buffet line at a party without literally being shoved out of the way by elegant Colombian matrons.
It all goes back to the beginnings, you thought, to the Pilgrims vs. the Conquistadors & to their motives, to religious freedom vs. greed.
You thought maybe this idea was a little too simple, as are most of your ideas in the political realm (when, in fact, you have them), until one day a decade later you read a column by Georgie Anne Geyer in which she says the exact same thing, using a few more words.
Scott Rosenberg's blog makes you remember this column and so you decide to do a google search to see if you can find Geyer's column on-line, so that you can read it again.
But no luck; you can't find it.
However, a column by Geyer on the death of the Queen Mother captures your eye. You download it and read it and these paragraphs capture your heart:
So, why did I cry?
I think I cried not because her death brought us to the end of a political or economic or military or social era, but because it seemed to me almost to bring us to the end of that particular era of motherliness. My mother had it, all the warmth and loveliness and style and uprightness. Women were the culture-bearers then, and all we need to do is look around us to judge the importance of their contribution. In matter of fact, they WERE civilization, and that is one major reason why civilization as we have known it is in the process of dying now, too.
I would say also that I was mourning the end of the era of the "professional mother." In saying that, I am not at all trying to be either cynical or clever, but just to describe women who were, in deed and in truth, true professional mothers. They made mothering not only a profession but an art, a science, a literature, a philosophy, a psychology and a physics. Somehow they knew that by giving and loving, they were not dissembling or weakening themselves but touching the same generous chords in others -- so that the end result was a net gain for everyone.
Their dying began with my generation, when girls suddenly decided they could be just as good lawyers and doctors and engineers and journalists as men; when women decided that it wasn't enough to make motherliness a respected profession but that they had to give it up to act just like the men; and when free women, confused about womanliness, gave up the more complicated fight of integrating womanliness into equality and just accepted all the questionable qualities of male behavior in the marketplace.
The sad part today is that, of even women who stay at home and who choose to be primarily or totally mothers, not many can be said to be motherly. Even these possible inheritors of the grail have absorbed the limited and impoverishing zeitgeist of their time -- and somehow accepted that what men had told them all along was right: that the male world was superior.
You read those words and you think, "She's right. She's right. Here I am, a mom who stays at home, and I've half-swallowed the party line of this impoverished zeitgeist. Only half-swallowed because something stays me true to this course in life, even though at times I wish I were something else--doctor, lawyer, professor.
But I'd never felt I was "inheritor of the grail", until maybe now.
If anyone asks me what I do, I'm going to tell them I'm fighting the impoverished zeitgeist. And I do a great deal of battle in the kitchen.
5:15:12 PM 
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