The title is an essay by Ted Steinberg published on September 6, 2019 at counterpunch.  He’s kindly given me permission to reprint it all, after I'd explained that it’s not only one of the best pieces (a dual hero journey) I’ve read in a long time, but it really should be read all of a piece.   Had I needed to retell some it, surely I’d have made a hash of it.  It’s chock-full of the many epiphanies both he and Edward Said had experienced along their roads less traveled.

Mr. Steinberg uses plain-speak, non-academic language throughout, perhaps because the vignette begins with himself at age 13, and he weaves ‘the cake’ motif as a central touchstone throughout the progression, and along the way discovers that the indigenous in Israel had been airbrushed out of history in his Hebrew school.  I hope you’ll think it’s a brilliant as I do, and appreciate it even half as much.

I’m not a card-carrying feminist, but more of the accidental feminist variety.  I’d reluctantly gone to two women’s lib meetings when I was at CU, and thought: meh; how very revolutionary to burn yer bras.  The accidental part concerns the fact that I labored in many traditionally ‘male only’ venues: construction crews, learned carpentry, worked ‘maintenance’ for the City of Cortez to make enough money to go to massage therapy school, later built a house with Mr. wd, learned to lay river rock,  cold-chisel paving stones, and all that.  I got my first construction job after being pinched in bum by some asshat where I was waiting tables in Breckenridge, CO; I said fukkit, threw my apron on the bar, and got the hell outta there.