"William Tenn - The Masculinist Revolt" - читать интересную книгу автора (William Tenn)

But nothing could destroy the good humor of that crowd. The more seriously inнjured were packed off to hospitals, those with only broken legs or smashed collar bones were joshed uproariously and hauled back to the convention floor for the balloting. A series of resolutions was read off, the delegates bellowing their agreement and unanimity.

Resolved: that the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, granting universal female suffrage, is unnatural biologically, politically, and morнally, and the chief cause of our national troubles...
Resolved: that all proper pressure be brought to bear on the legislators of this naнtion, both holding and seeking office...
Resolved: that this convention go on record as demanding...
Resolved: that we hereby...

There were midterm congressional elections that year.
A Masculinist plan of battle was drawn up for every state. Coordinating commitнtees were formed to work closely with youth, minority, and religious groups. Each member was assigned a specific job: volunteers from Madison Avenue spent their evenings grinding out propagandistic news releases; Pennsylvanian coal miners and Nebraskan wheat farmers devoted their Saturdays to haranguing the inmates of old-age homes.
Henry Dorselblad drove them all relentlessly, demanding more effort from evнeryone, making deals with both Republicans and Democrats, reform elements and big city bosses, veterans' organizations, and pacifist groups. "Let's win the first time outЧbefore the opposition wakes up!" he screamed to his followers.
Scrabbling like mad at their beloved fence, the politicians tried to avoid taking a definite position on either side. Women were more numerous and more faithful voters than men, they pointed out: if it came to a clear contest, women had to win. Masculinist pressure on the ballot box was considerable, but it wasn't the only pressure.
Then the voice of Hank the Tank was heard in the land, asking womenЧin the name of their own happinessЧto see to it that the long, long winter of feminism was definitely past. Many women in his audiences fainted dead away from the sheer flattery of having Henry Dorselblad ask them for a favor. A ladies' auxiliary to the Masculinist Movement was organizedЧThe Companions of the Codpiece. It grew rapidly. Feнmale candidates for office were so ferociously heckled by members of their own sex that they demanded special police protection before addressing a street-corner rally. "You should be ironing your husband's shirts!" the lady masculinists shouted. "Go home! Your supper's burning!"
One week before election, Dorselblad unleashed the Direct Action squads. Groups of men, wearing codpieces and derbies, descended upon public buildings all over the country and chained themselves to lampposts outside. While officers of the law chopped away at their self-imposed bonds with hacksaws and acetylene torches, the Masculinists loudly intoned a new liturgy: "Women! Give us your voteЧand we will give you back your men! We need your vote to winЧyou need to have us win! Women! Give us your vote on Election Day!"
Where, their opponents inquired cruelly, was the vaunted pride and arrogance of Masculinism in such an appeal? Were the Lords of Creation actually begging the weaker sex for a boon? Oh, for shame!
But Dorselblad's followers ignored these jeers. Women must themselves return the vote they had falsely acquired. Then they would be happy, their men would be happy, and the world would be right again. If they didn't do this of their own free will, well, men were the stronger sex. There were alternatives...
On this ominous note, the election was held.
Fully one-fourth of the new Congress was elected on a Masculinist platform. Another, larger group of fellow travelers and occasional sympathizers still wondered which way the wind was really blowing.
But the Masculinists had also acquired control of three-quarters of the state legнislatures. They thus had the power to ratify a constitutional amendment that would destroy female suffrage in AmericaЧonce the repeal bill passed Congress and was submitted to the states.
The eyes of the nation swung to its capitol. Every leader of any significance in the movement hurried there to augment the Masculinist lobby. Their opponents came in great numbers too, armed with typewriter and mimeograph against the gynecocratic Ragnarok.
A strange hodge-podge of groups, these anti-Masculinists. Alumnae associations from women's colleges fought for precedence at formal functions with Daughters of 1776; editors of liberal weeklies snubbed conservatively inclined leaders of labor unions, who in turn jostled ascetic young men in clerical collars. Heavy-set, glarнing-eyed lady writers spat upon slim and stylish lady millionairesses who had hurнried back from Europe for the crisis. Respectable matrons from Richmond, Virginia, bridled at the scientific jocosities of birth controllers from San Francisco. They arнgued bitterly with each other, followed entirely divergent plans of action and generally delighted their codpieced, derbied, cigar-smoking adversaries. But their very variety and heterogeneity gave many a legislator pause: they looked too much like a cross-section of the population.
The bill to submit repeal of the Nineteenth Amendment to the states wandered through an interminable Congressional labyrinth of maneuver and rewording and committee action. Mobs and counter-mobs demonstrated everywhere. Newspapers committed themselves firmly to one side or the other, depending on their ownership and, occasionally, their readership. Almost alone in the country, The New York Times kept its head, observing that the problem was very difficult and asking that the deciнsionЧwhatever it eventually wasЧbe the right oneЧwhatever that might be.
Passing the Senate by a tiny margin, the bill was sent to the House of Representaнtives. That day, Masculinist and anti-Masculinist alike begged and battled for a galнlery pass. Hellfire Henry and his followers were admitted only after they had checked their swords. Their opponents were forcibly deprived of a huge sign smuggled to the gallery in four sections. "Congressman!" the sign shouted. "Your grandmother was a suffragette!"
Over the protests of many legislators seeking anonymity on this issue, a roll-call vote was decided upon. Down the list of states it went, eliciting so many groans and cheers from the onlookers that the Speaker finally had to lay aside his damaged gavel. Neck and neck the two sides went, the Masculinists always holding a slim lead, but never one large enough. Finally the feverish talliers in the gallery saw that a deadlock was inevitable. The bill lacked one vote of the two-thirds majority necessary.
It was then that Elvis P. Borax, a junior Representative from Florida who had asked to be passed originally, got to his feet and stated that he had decided how to cast his vote.
The tension was fantastic as everyone waited for Congressman Borax to cast the deciding vote. Women crammed handkerchiefs into their mouths; strong men whimнpered softly. Even the guards stood away from their posts and stared at the man who was deciding the fate of the country.
Three men rose in the balcony: Hellfire Henry, Old Shep, and white-haired Old Pep. Standing side by side, they forebodingly held aloft right hands clenched around the hilts of invisible swords. The young Congressman studied their immobile forms with a white face.
"I vote nay," he breathed at last. "I vote against the bill."
Pandemonium. Swirling, yelling crowds everywhere. The House guards, even with their reinforcements from the Senate, had a hard, bruising time clearing the gallerнies. A dozen people were trampled, one of them an elderly chief of the Chippewa Indians who had come to Washington to settle a claim against the government and had taken a seat in the gallery only because it was raining outside.
Congressman Borax described his reactions in a televised interview. "I felt as if I were looking down into my open grave. I had to vote that way, though. Mother asked me to."
"Weren't you frightened?" the interviewer asked.
"I was very frightened," he admitted. "But I was also very brave." A calculated political risk had paid off. From that day on, he led the counterнrevolution.

III
The Counter-Revolution

The anti-Masculinists had acquired both a battlecry and a commander-in-chief.
As the Masculinist tide rose, thirty-seven states liberalizing their divorce laws in the husband's favor, dozens of disparate opposition groups rallied to the standard that had been raised by the young Congressman from Florida. Here alone they could ignore charges of "creeping feminism." Here alone they could face down epithets like "codpiece-pricker" and "skirt-waver," as well as the ultimate, most painful thrustЧ"mother-lover."
Two years later, they were just strong enough to capture the Presidential nominaнtion of one of the major parties. For the first time in decades, a manЧElvis P. BoнraxЧwas nominated for the office of chief executive.
After consulting the opinion polls and his party's leading strategists, not to menнtion his own instincts and inclinations, he decided to run on a platform of pure, undiluted Mother.
He had never married, he explained, because Mother needed him. She was eighty-three and a widow; what was more important than her happiness? Let the country at large live by the maxim which, like the Bible, had never failed: Mother Knew Best.
Star-studded photographs of the frail old lady appeared all over the land. When Dorselblad made a sneering reference to her, Borax replied with a song of his own composition that quickly soared to the top of the Hit Parade. That record is a marvelнous political document, alive through and through with our most glorious traditions. In his earnest, delicately whining tenor, Borax sang:

Rule, Maternal! My mother rules my heart!
Mother never, never, never was a tart!

And there was the eloquence of the famous "Cross of Swords" speech which Borax delivered again and again, at whistle stops, at church picnics, at county fairs, at state rallies.
"You shall not press down upon the loins of mankind this codpiece of elastic," he would thunder. "You shall not crucify womankind upon a cross of swords!
"And do you know why you shall not?" he would demand, his right hand throbнbing above his head like a tambourine. The audience, open-mouthed, glistening-eyed, would sit perfectly still and wait eagerly. "Do you know?
"Because," would come a soft, slow whisper at last over the public address system, "because it will make Mother unhappy."
It was indeed a bitter campaign, fought for keeps. The Dorselbladites were out to redefine the franchise for all timeЧBorax called for a law to label Masculinism as a criminal conspiracy. Mom's Home-Made Apple Pie clashed head-on with the Sword, the Codpiece, and the Cigar.