Let the Mothers Show Us

I stopped writing columns about holidays the day a newspaper publisher threatened to beat me bloody if I ever again wrote about the Virgin Mary.

It happened at the Oakland Tribune where I was pumping out essays six days a week on anything within reach. A friend, who was an unfrocked Jesuit, called one day with “proof” that the virgin birth was a sham.

The Jesuits are known for their scholastic approach to the Scriptures, so I figured the guy knew what he was talking about, even though he declined to reveal his method for calculating Mary’s fertility cycle, which had been the basis for his hypothesis.

I suppose I was a little dubious because the man was suspected of having a drinking problem, but it was Mother’s Day and the subject seemed appropriate. It was a lapse of judgment that haunts me still.

The publisher, upon reading my submission, ordered me into his office and, bellowing like a wounded elephant, informed me that by the very act of writing the column I had offended him, his mother, his church, his Masonic Temple, the Republican Party and every Christian from Concord to San Jose.

His face, normally a tone of placid pink, glowed a brilliant red, and I felt that at any moment he might burst into flame as he ordered the Virgin Mary out of my professional life forever.

I mention this only as a somewhat circuitous route to another column on Mother’s Day, which I had always considered to have been created for the sole purpose of selling Mom-oriented trinkets from Taiwan.

I may be changing my mind.

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What got me to thinking about it was my recent appearance at a meeting of FAIR, an acronym for Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, a subject with which, as a columnist, I am only vaguely familiar.

I was a “resource person” along with Ariana Manov, a brilliant and articulate radical feminist and co-host of KPFK’s magazine “Up for Air.”

Manov, whose rhetoric can make palm trees sway, got up and shook her fist at the world for about 30 fascinating minutes, and then it was my turn. I was unprepared to deliver a speech because I had assumed my job as a resource person was only to answer questions about the rotten, one-sided, power-drunk, dog-kicking, bootlicking, racist media. I could handle that.

But suddenly I was expected to orate for half an hour, all the time sustaining a persistent theme, and I was at a loss to do that. The best I could manage was to babble away and hope that something of substance emerged.

Later, as I tried to sneak out, an elderly man stopped me and said, “The mothers will show us how.” He was surprisingly quick for an old guy and scooted off like a mouse from a snake hole before I could ask what he meant.

My wife, Cinelli, who was with me, said he was referring to a portion of my, well, speech about how it was up to women to lead us out of the mess L.A. is in. “I said that?” I asked, surprised. Cinelli nodded. “You said that.”

That’s odd, because the only leadership my own mother ever offered was the advice that if I didn’t quit drinking I would end up like my father, dead in Oakland and in hell. I must have gotten the message because I moderated my drinking and moved out of Oakland.

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However, I do believe what I was alleged to have said: that women, and maybe especially mothers, could offer a level of leadership in L.A. that has not been displayed by any male on any level in the 25 years I’ve been here.

I would like to see mothers apply the same punishment to errant politicians that they apply to children who misbehave, by taking them gently by the ear and leading them to their room, or in the case of a politician, out of town.

Women are playing more important roles in the conduct of society and I think it’s time they just took over. I’m not talking about those who head up film studios or try high-profile cases, but all of the others not in the spotlight who have yet to be heard from.

I want to see them bring to public life the instincts required to raise kids, because the good old boys who’ve been running things have gotten us into one fine mess here and around the world.

More and more mothers are confronting the thugs and drug dealers who are imperiling their children and making their neighborhoods dangerous. More are standing up in the arenas of government and demanding changes.

I want to encourage them on this eve of Mother’s Day weekend to persevere in their quest for a better world by taking their own children back from the streets and then taking back the streets from the thugs.

It may be our last chance. If we don’t do something fast, we’re all going to die and go to hell right here in L.A.

Al Martinez can be reached through the Internet at [email protected]