Dr. Barbara LeSavoy, gun confiscation advocate and Director of Women and Gender Studies at The College at Brockport in New York, may be the authentic embodiment of contemporary totalitarian leftism. She might be LARPing – that is, Live-Action Role-Playing – in the character of a self-lobotomized ideological drone. Or perhaps she’s in the middle of an immersive, Andy Kaufman-style long-form comedy sketch.
Either she, or the character she is playing, is the post-feminist equivalent of the New Soviet Man. Programmed at a chromosomal level to think and act in collectivist terms, LeSavoy looks upon Barack Obama with the same enraptured, unalloyed devotion once directed at Stalin and Mao by their most dutiful cadres.
To her, Obama is social justice incarnate. Anointed by history and endowed with powers that are coterminous with his magnificence, he can change society by decree. Delusions of that variety were at high tide in the summer of 2008, when every syllable Obama read from a teleprompter caused adoring women to disintegrate into uncontrollable weeping.
For many of Obama’s acolytes, passion has yielded to disillusionment. LeSavoy remains devout – but puzzled by the diffidence of the political deity she continues to adore. Why, she asked plaintively in an October 10 op-ed column for the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, doesn’t Obama stretch forth his hand and banish guns from his domain?
Writing “with a bleeding heart,” LeSavoy declared: “I admire Obama. But he has let me down.” Her embattled but resilient faith in her collectivist savior could be fully restored if he would simply “ban firearm possession in America.” Doing this would be a matter of utmost simplicity, she insists, since Obama “is the president of the United States. He can change the country. He can do it today. I believe in him.”
In fact, the only thing about America LeSavoy apparently finds worthwhile is Barack Obama and what she thinks he represents.
“While politically minded, I am not overly patriotic,” she explains. Yet during the 2008 campaign, “my two daughters, partner, and I ate every meal in our house on Obama placemats [that were] plastic-coated, plate-sized paper rectangles with an image of his face framed by colors of the flag.”
By making such a bourgeois purchase, LeSavoy committed an act of capitalist apostasy, but it was in what she earnestly believed was a good cause. While “this mealtime ritual of American allegiance was odd for me,” she found strength in the act of looking “at the image of his face each day and [believing] that he really could be the change in America.”
To be sure, she continues, that faith has been sorely tested. She describes herself as “jaded” in 2012 as Obama stood for reelection, because some of his promises weren’t fulfilled. And yet, she proudly recalls, “I did not waver. I dug into our old dining room cupboards, and found our worn but resilient Obama placemats.”
Those sacred totems were restored to their proper place in the dining room, where LeSavoy, her daughters, and her partner could take strength from the visage of the Dear Leader as they dined on whatever non-exploitative, social justice-compatible fare people of that persuasion eat.
Assuming that Obama doesn’t find a way to make himself ruler-for-life – a prospect that would thrill LeSavoy to the depths of the soul whose existence is denied by her ideology – his term as elected dictator is evaporating. Before giving someone else a turn to inflict misery on countless millions, Obama could ensure his legacy by disarming the public through a presidential decree.
“Firearm possession should be banned in America; president Obama can orchestrate this directive,” insists LeSavoy – who somehow obtained a doctorate degree without learning even the rudiments of constitutional law. (Perhaps she is more familiar with the Soviet version, circa 1938.) Her prose likewise suggests that she enjoyed the dubious benefit of very uncritical English teachers.
Obama’s presidency “can be remembered as a remarkable turn in United States history where a progressive leader forever changed the landscape under which we live and work,” LeSavoy exults in giddy ignorance of the significance of her mixed metaphor.
Apart from miners, sanitation engineers, and others who toil underground, Americans generally aren’t found living and working “under” the “landscape” of our country. However, the history of mass gun confiscation is replete with examples of disarmed people – or the mortal remains thereof – being disposed of beneath the “landscape” where they had once lived and worked.
This was true of genocidal hell states such as Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, and Rwanda during the 100-day orgy of government-orchestrated ethnic slaughter in 1994. In both instances, gun registration laws provided the state with the means to locate and confiscate privately owned firearms as a necessary precursor to systematic slaughter of people deemed unsuitable for the new, “progressive” order.
To LeSavoy it seems obvious that Obama must employ dictatorial means “to impose gun control laws in America that will reduce high levels of male violence and usher in a culture of peace and civility.” Trapped within the smelly little orthodoxy of post-feminist collectivism, she either ignores or doesn’t understand the fact that the means she endorses would involve “high levels of male violence” carried out by police officers and military personnel.
As part of her ongoing mission to transform bright, talented female students into members of the permanent dependency class, LeSavoy publishes a journal called “Dissenting Voices.” Representative essays bear such titles as “Girls, Instagram, and the Glamorization of Self-Loathing,” and “Adiposity and Anarchism: Exposing and Examining Fat Oppression in a Capitalist Society.”
Like those suffering the misfortune to be indoctrinated by her, LeSavoy is exquisitely sensitive to “micro-aggressions” and other forms of “cultural violence.” And owing to the ideological equivalent of color-blindness, she apparently cannot perceive state-inflicted violence unless it is directed at people belonging to “specially protected classes” – or perhaps she simply assumes that the mechanism of disarmament and regimentation would always be controlled by transcendently noble beings like the incumbent president she adores.
For someone who makes a living condemning “male violence” against women, LeSavoy seems inexplicably eager to deprive women of the means of protecting themselves against prohibitively stronger, predatory men. It is possible that she believes that previously intractable human nature would be summarily transformed if the hoi polloi were disarmed. However, this would merely turn firearms ownership into the exclusive monopoly of the society’s most sinister stratum – the enforcement caste, which is notorious for making women the targets of its privileged violence.
Women who are married to, or in a relationship with, police officers are at least twice as likely to become victims of domestic violence as are the rest of the female population. This shouldn’t be surprising, given that police are trained and licensed to commit aggressive violence and to treat non-submission as an offense meriting summary punishment. People accustomed to commanding others, and employing “pain compliance” to overcome resistance, often find it impossible to confine those habits to their professional lives.
“Since the earliest days of law enforcement, domestic violence in police families was considered an officer’s personal business, one of those private realms into which departmental administrators chose not to involve themselves,” retired Chicago PD Homicide Lt. Dennis Banahan explained to Police Magazine. “Their attitude was that unless the problem affected an officer’s job performance, they’d prefer to ignore it. Whatever happened behind closed doors remained private. Since a large part of a cop’s M.O. is to maintain a game face, personal problems were considered just more of what we were expected to suck up and keep hidden.”
“Police officers have always prided themselves on their ability to keep secrets within the law enforcement family,” acknowledged the law enforcement trade publication. “That’s the case in some departments to this day…. [N]o incident was more likely to bring down the Blue Wall or trigger the Code of Silence than a cop who beat his wife. Nor did agencies want to get involved.”
Damage control, rather than prosecution or protection of the victim, has long been the chief priority of police in dealing with domestic violence incidents. According to Banahan, the first officers on the scene “were expected to be the primary spin doctors.”
Witnesses other than the victim and the offender would be removed from the scene. The victim – assuming she survived – would be separated from the abuser, not for her protection, but to isolate her and make her more vulnerable to manipulation.
“She’d be told that an arrest would serve no one’s best interest, and would absolutely jeopardize the officer’s job, thereby threatening the family’s security,” Banahan explained. “In effect, that’s telling a bleeding victim, `Hey, sorry about the broken arm and that your nose will never be the same again, but drop a dime on this guy and you’ll all be in the welfare line tomorrow.’”
In effect, the woman and any children would be blackmailed into protecting the interests of an abusive cop – sacrificing their personal security to protect the abuser’s job security.
The ministering angels who would carry out Obama’s divinely ordained mass disarmament – were he to answer LeSavoy’s earnest entreaty — would be drawn from the ranks of the profession described by Lt. Banahan. She doesn’t understand the implications of what she is asking her political deity to do. But this is to be expected of campus progressives, who tend to be poster children for not thinking things through.
If Barbara LeSavoy is genuinely the person described in her op-ed column, she is owed a measure of pity tempered with wariness. If she is engaged in some kind of bizarre performance art, the skill she displays is worthy of applause – as long as she doesn’t lose herself in the role. It’s worth remembering that sentiments of the kind she expressed are hardly uncommon within what we might call the “eliminationist left.”
