The Adventures of Cancer Bitch

MARCH 19. I WAS MARCHING

145 waited in Devonport to welcome back bald fiancés and bald boyfriends with a few teeth missing. Others developed pv later or cancers. Some 700 of them have banded together to sue the British Department of Defence for compensation. The former radio operator quoted above was diagnosed with polycythemia in 1974. The bbc refers to it as a rare form of blood cancer that his doctors have linked to his exposure to radiation. (For his sake and the sake of the lawsuit, the disease should be as dire as possible; it’s sometimes considered precancerous, as a small percentage of people with it develop leukemia, and it’s sometimes considered cancer, but it’s not really cancer cancer.) I felt like saying, Aha, when I read about the British lawsuit, though I have never sailed the high seas for the United Kingdom. I’m of a mind to blame large institutions for bad things that happen to people. But I was never around a nuclear test. I had a lot of chest X-rays as a child because of my asthma and the two times I had pneumonia , but how could I ever prove a connection between the X-rays and the polycythemia? I’m not part of a group of sailors or soldiers or anything else that had repeated chest X-rays. I am a lone Cancer Bitch from the lone prairie. With extra-thick blood and a bad attitude. MARCH 19. I WAS MARCHING I’m not sure what my favorite color is or what my favorite breed of dog is (dachshund some days, beagle, others) but I know what my favorite chant is. It’s: Show me what democracy looks like. This is what democracy looks like. Tell me what democracy sounds like. This is what democracy sounds like. I like it because it’s accurate. I am marching with the Code Pink women’s group up Michigan Avenue, holding pink signs and banners aloft, and the shoppers 146 and other pedestrians flanking us on the sidewalk are either neutral or making the V peace sign. The cops are out in force at bends in the road. At the foot of the Michigan Avenue bridge there were about 60 of them—a half dozen on horseback, a few with dogs, a lineup in riot gear, batons ready for action. But they didn’t use them. This is not Mexico City or Paris or Chicago, 1968, or Tiananmen Square, 1989, or even Chicago, 2003, when antiwar protesters were blocked and arrested en masse, and this is not Lhasa, Tibet. This is Chicago and we have a permit, we are orderly, most of us, though there are a few young men in front of me jumping and dancing haphazardly in a way that makes me think they’re anarchists who wouldn’t mind disturbing the peace. They are examples of what anthropologist Esther Newton has called her enema man. He is the person in your march who you are ashamed of, who does not represent you and your lovely well-behaved and acceptable self. She describes him in her book Margaret Mead Made MeGay. It’s 1971 and she’s taking part in a gay pride march in New York City, though she’s scared she’ll be recognized. And then she sees a pale man with a sign that says, Pennsylvania Enema Society and he’s carrying a disgusting enema bag, and she’s even more self-conscious, that she’ll be judged by association. But she writes: But the revolution is less authenticforeveryoppressedpersonitexcludes .Theenemamanis...myforbiddenselftwisted intohumanflesh,justasIamthetwistedfleshofthestraightwoman’sforbiddenself. The anarchists, the people who want to overthrow the government , who believe that Bush was behind 9/11, who want Israel to disappear, these are the people with unacceptable opinions, whom I don’t want to be linked with, but who are part of the coalition against the war. I have chosen to be with them. This is what democracy looks like, I’m telling the people on the sidelines. Maybe it’s because I want them to like me. To understand that our country allows freedom of speech, that we are not unpatriotic or un-American, that we are exercising our First Amendment rights. We’re all in this together, whether we agree or not. I am moved by these words, these thoughts, a little choke in my throat. So this is democracy and it’s good and it feels good. And marching is just...