Rape Portrait #4
Oil pastel on paper.
—The Beginning—
When Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan win the election in 2012, there are an estimated twenty-five thousand rapes a year that result in pregnancy.
— 2—
By 2014 the Romney/Ryan-backed slew of pro-birth laws go into effect, expedited by a presidential decree that overturns the need for said laws to pass through Congress and Senate. Planned Parenthood is demolished. Sex education no longer takes place in the few remaining public schools in America. Creationism is the word of the day.
The uneducated — and the opportunistic — take advantage of the new scientific and legal “fact”: If a woman conceives it’s not rape.
—3—
Since the majority of rapes are perpetrated by someone known to the woman, rapists follow their victim’s menstrual cycle so as to escape prosecution. His dominion over her does not end after ejaculation, but continues as he exercises his paternal visitation rights. A so-called “heat of the moment” rape rarely happens. These particular crimes are premeditated, and often enjoyed over long periods of time.
If the woman lives.
— 4 —
Rape Mothers take advantage of ever-loosened gun laws under the Romney/Ryan ticket. Suicides numbers are the highest since the Great Depression, and almost as high as those who jumped from the Twin Towers as they collapsed.
Even so, by 2015 the United States sees the fruits of the Rape Policies: Thousands more women a month giving birth to unwanted children. That is, the mothers who don’t kill themselves, or their babies in botched abortions. The number of rape babies born in prison also rises, since risky behaviour such as riding a bicycle or exercising while pregnant go into law as dangerous to the fetus, punishable by jail time.
The Republicans really want every single last one of those rape babies to live. Nobody understands why. When questioned Republicans avoid the question. “The right to life!” is all they will say.
“But, Governor, isn’t your stance more pro-birth than pro-life?” Asks a reporter who is soon arrested for treason and put to death.
Minimal social service assistance to the unfortunates becomes non-existent. Because of the “new” belief that a legitimate rape produces no seed, the onus falls on the mother. She must have enjoyed it. Must have wanted it. Or she wouldn’t be pregnant.
—5 —
Some Rape Mothers leave their babies on church doorsteps or in wealthy neighborhoods. The government responds by putting chips in both baby and mother so she can be found, fined, and her Rape Baby returned. This also makes sure that Rape Babies are banned from adoption circles. Adopting a Rape Baby is illegal, also punishable by a fine and jail time… if you don’t have a good enough lawyer who can convince the judge beyond reasonable doubt that you didn’t know the baby’s Legitimacy Status.
— 6 —
In 2028 the first wave of Rape Babies enter adolescence.
It’s a terrible thing indeed to know you are unwanted. Even if your mother did her best to make you feel loved. Most of the Rape Babies, or RaBies, were not so lucky. But the RaBies that were blessed — the ones who had parents, or just moms, who did their very best to keep resentment, anger, disgust, far from the eyes of the child — still wondered what it would have been like to have come into the world under different circumstances. Many are convinced they would so have been born, but without faces that remind their mothers of the men who violated them.
The RaBies band together and discuss this at length.
Does your mom’s rapist visit you? Does your mom beat you when she drinks? Did Rape Daddy fight for custody? Does your mom cover your face with a pillowcase because she insists a monster looks from behind your eyes?
Solemn. They share their stories. Smoking cigarettes, playing hooky, under the bleachers at school.
How can the government say they’re pro-life when they just nuked Iran? And what about the murder rates from no gun laws? And my mother and I don’t have health insurance ‘cuz we can’t afford it. My Rape Daddy’s trying to make another one in me.
Smoke after smoke. The RaBies are only required to go to school. There’s no oversight as to their actual attendance. Or passing their classes.
The RaBies carry an inbred fatalism.
Do you wish you weren’t born? Do you wish you were dead?
The RaBies nod. On this they all agree.
— 7 —
Dustin Lazard is fourteen, one of the older RaBies in his school. His uncle is also his father. Uncle/Father is the reason Dustin’s got six fingers on one hand and an IQ just above that of a child with Down’s Syndrome. His mother (cousin?) is kind, loving. Dustin knows if he weren’t developmentally challenged — “a simpleton” as his mother says — he’d have it as bad as many of his fellow RaBies. Beatings, verbal abuse, scapegoated for all that is wrong in the world.
— 8 —
During one of the RaBies under-bleacher sessions comrade Bonita Applebaum shows them wicked bubbly scars on her belly. Her mother burns her with boiling water every time she gets upset and tries to drink it away. Bonita tells them it was The White Rapist who, when claiming paternity, sued to name his daughter. Bonita. The Spanish word for “beautiful”. An ultimate fuck you. Bonita’s mother doesn’t use her name. She calls her shit.
Come here, little shit. Did you do your homework, piece of shit? If it weren’t for you, useless asshole, I’d never be in this mess.
Oh yeah, Bonita forgot her mother calls her “asshole”, too. And more.
Tears stream down Bonita’s face.
Dustin has an idea.
The RaBies listen, intent. Connor knows computers and social media, he’s going to spread the plan. The others agree. They’ll use a secret hashtag: #CureForRaBies. Word of mouth travels fast. They decide to do it on Paul Ryan’s birthday, Mitt Romney having been assassinated in 2020 by a woman whose rapist terrorized her for years, forcing her to carry his seed to term four times.
— 9 —
January 29, 2029. The Rape Babies leave their homes for the last time. Some sad. Most grateful that it will all be over soon. All across America they congregate at the locally designated spots. A park. The school’s football field. The local church. In their canteens they’ve spiked the drink with whatever toxic agent they could find at home. Rat poison. Drano. Liquid Plumr. Engine cleaner.
A note of explanation pinned to their shirt, or bag, or automatically sent to their their custodial individual through the smart phone.
When all is said and done, roughly twenty thousand rape babies take their own lives.
Happy Birthday, Paul Ryan.
— 10 —
The dead RaBies’ mothers weep, mostly ashamed at how relieved they feel. They dig the chips from their arms and smash them underfoot. The relief is short lived.
— 11 —
The totalitarian government bans Rape Babies from congregating in groups, a crime punishable by a fine and juvie time. The American government tries to shut down the entire internet when RaBies meetings move online. The Rape Babies are far more clever than these old stodges who maintain power.
— 12 —
The first wave of Rape Babies took themselves out of the equation in 2029.
In 2039 the second wave of Rape Babies decide to eliminate known rapists in a mass murder spree, starting with their own fathers. This next wave was nowhere near as clean and clinical as the first. The RaBies have only grown in anger and its the violators who pay. The Rape Mothers join in —there are so many more of them!— capitalizing off the still-loosened gun laws.
Prisons are flooded. The government decriminalizes drug laws and lesser offences to make room for the exponentially growing number of murderers.
— 13 —
By 2049 the third wave of Rape Babies, along with the few survivors from the second wave, begin the campaign to end all campaigns. Death by any means necessary for anyone, anywhere. Suicide before capture.
— 14 —
The Third Wave was the final wave. The government responds by waging an all-out war on the Rape Babies and their supporters. A new law goes into place providing for the euthanization of Rape Babies on their tenth birthdays. The Rape Babies respond by blowing up the White House. There are no winners of the American War, only utter devastation. A country borne of blood returns to its roots.
— The End —
An unpopulated America lays fallow. The handful of survivors flee north and south. In 2050, just one month after the end of the American War, China fills boatloads of its citizens and sends them to the abandoned USA. It’s their right after all: China’s billions in campaign contributions won Romney and Ryan the election all those dozens of years ago.
——
©2012 Sezin Koehler, image by Zuzu Kahlo
For further information on the “legitimacy” of this “imaginary” mini-ethnography and view into the future please visit The New Yorker. And while you’re at it, please vote to re-elect President Barack Obama in 2012.
