171228_Madame-DeFarge_Weaving-a-Revolution.txt

"Vanity Fair Admits Video Telling Hillary Clinton To Take Up Knitting “Missed The Mark”" National Memo. December 28, 2017

With a screenshot of Madame DeFarge, I wrote:

"It's an un-hackable database of political criminality, after all!"

=== to further explain, I wrote:

It's a picture of Madame DeFarge, from the 1935 adaptation of Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities".

DeFarge is a woman bent on revenge against the aristocrats, particularly those of one family that destroyed her own. As part of the French Revolutionaries, she knits, and her knitting secretly encodes the names of people to be killed. Thus, as she sits and witnesses the crimes of the French Aristocracy, she bitterly knits the names and crimes into a tapestry, to be used against them after the revolution.

=== to elaborate, I wrote:

There is much symbolism surrounding DeFarge, since the three Fates of Classical mythology are women who spin the thread of life, and cut it when a mortal life is at its end. In another way, she is a type of Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, who weaves a tapestry shroud for her father-in-law in order to hold off the petitions of her suitors, who claim her husband must be dead after so long at sea. Penelope famously unravels the tapestry every night, so she is never finished with it, putting off the suitors for an indefinite time.

The act of weaving the tapestry shroud is supposed to be her last act as a daughter-in-law and member of Odysseus' family and household. The burden of the shroud is symbolic of her duty as a married woman, and its cultural importance makes the labor inviolate in the face of her suitors and their demands, as well as the demands of her clan. Being a woman, Penelope has no authority of her own by which she can choose to remarry or wait for her husband's return, and so she cleverly uses her weaving as a way to use the rigid gender rules of her society in her favor.

Similarly, perhaps, DeFarge conceals her important role in the Revolution behind a different kind of tapestry. The domestic labor of knitting cannot be suspected to be 'political' or 'revolutionary', since it is a 'woman's work'. Thus, the death list of the Revolution is never revealed to the Aristocratic forces.

In a final parallel, though, we have seen this year a third act of fabric-making as a concealed act of empowerment. Millions of women marched in cities, towns, lonely roads, and isolated fields around the world in protest against Donald Trump's inauguration as President. On their heads were the pink knitted hats, pointedly named after the object of one of Trump's many transgressions against human decency. While the sight of multitudes of protesters crowding streets and parks and plazas worldwide was powerful in itself, the "pussy hat" provided a colorful punctuation to the crowd, making a statement as straightforward as an upraised fist: 'Donald Trump is the enemy, and I will oppose him'.

03/28/2020

And now, we have yet another act of fabric craft, largely by women, as a consequence of this horrifying election. Because of short-sighted mismanagement, petty vindictiveness, and now-familiar stupidity, medical protective equipment must be hand-crafted in homes across the country. The cloth mask is a public and visible sign of the failure of the Republican-dominated government to accomplish even the most basic of functions in an emergency.

Wear yours proudly in public. It is the "Phrygian cap" of American resistance against incompetent kakistocracy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/business/coronavirus-masks-sewers.html "A Sewing Army, Making Masks for America"