The Big Bang

Well, it is not his theory known for the phrase “big bang” that caught our fancy with astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, known for his 1988 A Brief History of Time. Wheelchair-bound from a neurosensory disorder, news media guffawed with a big bang in a report that the well-known scientist, reviled in some quarters for his outspoken anti-theism, has allegedly been seen frequenting sex shows. Widely reported and broadly commented, the twice-divorced boyish-looking father of three flamed the media’s curiosity recently with his comment that women to him were a “complete mystery.”

In Christendom’s assumed domain like Saipan, the season of Lent invites confession, and that is where we properly begin.

We were in our mid-50s on Saipan by the time we finally heard someone’s suggestion that perhaps we are a bit predatory in our relationship with vulnerable women. Thinking ourselves to be a normal Filipino boy encouraged to chase skirts before settling down, and forgiven the incidences of wild oats scattered in the process of taking advantage of the “weaker” sex as acts of misdemeanor, we ignored such accusations until a professional colleague suggested a visit to a psychiatrist. The finding of possible bipolarity after one sitting whammed us with the knockout of big bang proportion.

This came to head when, in our attempt to be honest and come out clean, we married a perfectly sane female three decades-plus our junior. Colleagues secretly held their breaths and expressed the question, “What d’you think you are doing?” when the union terminated.

Though we have considered our self historically to be liberal and progressive on women’s issues, it was not until our late years that we understood our self to be sexist in language and thought, and irreparably predatory to the vulnerable female of the specie for which no amount of, nor frequency in, penitently saying mea culpa, will forgive us of our culpability.

In one of the bad habits we are called to overcome, labeled by my colleagues with the Symposium of Realistic Living in the book The Road from Empire to Eco-Democracy as The Drag of Patriarchy, they write: “Worldwide, women contribute half the world’s population, perform two-thirds the work hours, receive one-tenth the income, and own less than one one-hundredth of the world’s property (UN Report, 1980). We live in a world where women can be bought and men can rape and even kill their wives under the protection of the law.” We do not have to go too deep or too far beyond Garapan-its shows, gropes, rapes, and murdered women, to know the truth of this statement.

Our fascination with women still cause drooling as we debate whether Angelina Jolie’s legs displayed too much skin on the Red Carpet of the Oscars, or JLo’s low cut attire may actually have been a malfunction!

Nancy Pelosi is waging war against what she labels as the Republican’s “War on Women,” as Congress attempts again to intrude on women’s right to decide what to do with their bodies. Men for 5,500 years have dictated how they should be protected and adorned. Roe v. Wade was a legal form of the middle finger from many ladies; we shudder when our female vocalists gesture the same on stage.

The theorist Hawking, better known for staring at the galaxy and ruminating on such ideas as the universe’s Big Bang, and the incidences of black holes on outer space, seems to me to deserve a medal for pursuing applied research on what his complex and brilliant mind considers a mystery. He might be commended for his continuing interest not only in the opposite sex but on the primitive and native instinct that most of the male of the specie display toward the pulchritudinous mounds, curvatures, and crevices associated with those he continues to see, and we pretend to understand, as a complete mystery.

In our recent stop at an ATM kiosk of our bank, a Putunghua sign on the wall had the following English translation: “WARNING, Please take care of your belongings in pubic.” The Chinese are obviously not as Victorian finicky as their American counterparts. That, or our task of teaching English language to a globalizing China is a wide, open fertile field!

If for anything else, the sense of mystery and the active curiosity of Stephen Hawking are well placed, sitting as he does, like the rest of us, from the perspective of the decline of patriarchy in the advancing demise of what has been heretofore described as Western civilization.

At SVES, we heard often enough of the rationalization that the Chamorro and Carolinian communities are, at bottom, matrilineal in inheritance rights, and Asians generally matriarchal in economics. Women’s rights and social equality are thereby not civil and political issues.

The Road claims: “Although many men and some women talk as if gender equality were already achieved (or as if this achievement were a matter of tying up a few loose ends), men are still oppressing women religiously, sociologically, institutionally, and physically throughout the world.”

We await the moment a woman teaches Hawking, and Saipan women the rest of us, a lesson that would clearly be a eureka moment. Meanwhile, we will let “black holes” and the “big bang” as astrophysics’ terms.

Jaime R. Vergara (jrvergarajr2031@aol.com) is a former PSS teacher and is currently writing from the campus of Shenyang Aerospace University in China.