Marilyn Monroe with Portrait of Abraham Lincoln
Sharon Tate in School Girl Clothes with Plush Easter Bunny
Marilyn Monroe and Sharon Tate: Two Provocative Pictures
I found a folder as I was cleaning up my hard drive.
The folder was marked, “It’s Chinatown.” I had no idea what it was or what it contained.
The folder held two digital pictures: One of screen star, Marilyn Monroe, the other of the model and starlet, Sharon Tate.
Both women were known for their beauty and talents. Both died tragically.
I felt a profound sadness wash over me as I looked at these oddly naive pictures.
I saw the yearning of a young Marilyn wanting to be more than a sex object. I viewed the reduction of Sharon Tate playing a school girl, latching on to a plush Easter Bunny.
Men built the cities. They built them — they took charge of them. And men have tried to control and diminutize women ever since.
As a Christian, I may not approve of abortion; but I live in America where there is something called the Bill of Rights where every man and woman is the recipient of certain freedoms. Those freedoms include privacy, the ability to worship as we choose, and the freedom over one’s own body.
We have so much as a country to deal with: sub-standard education, poverty, moral malaise, an economy that needs jump-started.
Yet somehow we seem to have turned on one another, to hate each other over this abortion issue as if there can’t be discourse anymore without hate and ire.
At the end of the movie, Chinatown — Evelyn Mulwray is killed by the police when a bullet tears through her head. The protagonist, Jake Gittes, who had an intimate relationship with her, is ushered away from the bloody carcass with the words, “Forget about it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”
Chinatown is the symbol of all that is rotten and horrible in the cities that men built.
In this season, shouldn’t we be looking for honoring one another’s rights, even if we do not agree with the specific behavior?
