Sarah Palin’s on the rise again, and that frightens me. She frightens me because she allows me to see the sheer power exuding from our 24/7 cable news media, taken together with the various and sundry internet political pundits, who’ve claimed equal professional status with trained and experienced political commentators who should know better.
Ever since the day after she lost the 2008 election as John McCain’s intellectually ill-equiped running mate, she’s been fodder for the news media every day of her ensuing life. For some particular reason, everything Palin does is newsworthy. I say her “newsworthiness” is relevant only to the degree to which our political society and our society in general have become totally shallow. I would imagine if Sarah Palin looked a lot more like Sharron Angle, she wouldn’t be so newsworthy, unless it were in a pathetically comical way.
The same media who eviscerated Hillary Clinton in the worst misogynistic way follows Palin about like prurient lapdogs. The Rightwing shills revere her; Leftwing commentators’ reactions vary – from presenting her as the butt of jokes to figuring out elaborate equations which would allow her to capture a Presidential nomination without engaging in a debate; still, it doesn’t detract from the fact that they’re fascinated by her.
To a certain demographic, she’s Everywoman. For women, she’s a mother of five, who chose to raise a child with Downs’ Syndrome, rather than abort him. That makes her a heroine. For men, she dresses up in leather; because they can’t fuck her, they’ll vote for her.
I’ve said all along that she’ll run for President this time around. Now I see the media – MSNBC, no less – validate her by salivating at the prospect of a Palin challenge to the Obama second term. The media created this, just as they created the last election, making the real contest in 2008, that of a woman challenging an African American man for the Democratic nomination. Only this time, there won’t be any misogyny, and if it appears from the Left, Palin and her team will quickly exploit it to make herself the victim. She’s so adept at that.
Vice-Presidential candidates on losing tickets are normally non-entities after the fact. Palin was a rookie governor halfway into her first term when she decided to resign. The event was covered exclusively by the news media as if she were some venerable and long-serving politician of note and repute. From that moment on, her agenda should have been aware to everyone. It gave the news media ammunition to speculate, certainly; and that’s what they’ve done ever since.
She appals and fascinates simultaneously. She’s like the ultra grisly car wreck at the side of the road, the one we swear we won’t look at, but the one we’re drawn to rubberneck for sheer horror of the accident. The same media who were offended in January at her mean-mouthed “blood libel” defence in the wake of Gabby Gifford’s shooting are marvelling now at her dog-and-pony magical mystery bus tour winding along the roads of Middle America sowing seeds of political resentment and anger amongst a demographic, whom – forty years ago – the Democratic party claimed for their own.
If anything, she’s this generation’s equivalent of George Wallace, winding her way into small towns, rural areas and working-class suburbs of major cities, reminding her eager audiences of how they have America’s heartbeat and how anyone reeking of elitism long ago abandoned their values to the netherlands of inconsequence.
She’s a side show, a carnival barker, a hoyden of ignorance who’s also skillful at subtlely reminding people of equal ignorance what differentiates between their real America and the Europhiliacs of coastal elitism, without offering any tangible solutions to these people’s real problems. She doesn’t offer jobs to counter their unemployment; she can’t stop the bailiffs from foreclosing on their family home, but – dang nabbit – she makes them feel good!
She promises them that this President is only enjoying a temporary tenure, and that relief is just around the corner if we can just get him out of a White House in which he was never entitled to live, anyway.
And the media hang on her every word.
They’re spoiling for a confrontation next year, the wet dream of an Obama-Palin confrontation on the campaign trail – the dark-skinned “other”, the spineless college professor against the mean girl, the red-leathered lady who can say and do anything she wants, because no “real man” would punch down on a girl. And if he did, could we really expect anything from a political demographic whose mouthpieces regularly refer to women as “sluts?”
This media made Palin. They made her as decisively as the faux Professional Left sought from January 21, 2009, to drive a wedge in the Democratic Party with their false prophets constantly criticizing, undermining and inflaming the far Left into the Queen Mother of all hissy fits.
The last words uttered by Palin at the end of the upcoming documentary about her rise is the challenge to our President of “game on,” shrieked in an appearance last month in Wisconsin in support of Governor Scott Walker, where she was flanked by no less than Andrew Breitbart. The last words on the screen remind viewers that already Palin can see November 2012.
Two months ago, Rachel Maddow correctly predicted that the 2012 election won’t be fought over the economy, but over abortion; and the prospect of a Palin candidacy, especially if she should choose such a running mate as Herman Cain, will be an all-our culture war of race-baiting, Islamophobia and Dominionism – a battle for the soul of America.
Remember that when Fascism comes to America, it will come draped in an American flag and carrying a cross.
Have you noticed the size of the cross pendant Palin wears around her neck?
Speaking Truth to the Power of the Lying Liars of the US Media, Right AND Left.
Showing posts with label Sarah Palin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sarah Palin. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Same Shit, Different Day, Same Lies, Same Voices
Last week, I watched the return of Real Time with Bill Maher. I always approach each episode of that show with trepidation, because I never know whether Bill's actually going to show up and give us a provocative hour of good commen sense observations or whether he's going to phone in his apt impersonation of a Class A cockhead in desperate need of a condom to cover his face.
I was neither pleased nor disappointed with this week's show, apart from the fact that one of his panel guests was the ludicrous Chrystia Freeland, who sounds like Megan Mullally, trying to be serious after admitting to having smoked two packs a day. Bill sat her between the Democrat James Carville and the Republican Mike Murphy, and I've yet to ascertain anything either of the two men disclosed, because they were constantly being interrupted by this woman. Later in the show, Martin Short appeared, and the latter third of the panel discussion section disintegrated into a frenetically childike dialogue between Freeland and Short, which amounted to Freeland jumping gleefully up and down in her seat as she and Short discussed how much better Canada was than the States - ne'mind the fact that both probably earn much more money here than in their own home country, but there you go.
What disappointed me the most occurred during Bill's initial interview with Elizabeth Warren, when he asked her if he thought anything was achieved by the President "caving" to the Republicans' demand to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest people in the country. I thought it was a pretty stupid question, especially to ask a woman who is a special advisor to the President and, therefore, part of the Administration, itself. It's almost as if Bill thought Warren a pretty smart cookie, but a cookie who was book-smart and lacking in common sense, taking advantage of the fact that Warren apparently likes Bill and feels comfortable on his show, thinking she'd offer an opinion that would garner him a gotcha moment on which he'd feast for the rest of the season.
Of course, Warren gave a safe answer. Whatever she thought of the extension of the tax cuts, she's the sort of person who would see the benefits the President got from this situation that would favour the demographic Warren champions: the fabled Middle Class.
It just stuck in my craw that Maher and many like him are still pushing the myth that Obama "caved" on the tax cuts. He "caved" to the Republicans' demands. He's weak. He has no backbone. He is, as Maher rather self-righteously proclaimed on national television at the end of last year, a "pussy."
As if the only thing that mattered, the be-all and the end-all to people supposedly "in the know", the pundit crowd, were those damned tax cuts. Nothing else mattered, not the unemployed, not the working classes or even the working poor, to whom Maher later tipped the wink as being the bulk and majority of that demographic collectively known as "the Middle Class," the politicos, the pundits, the dittoes following their leads in the blogosphere all wanted that one almighty point scored against the Republicans - right, dead and square in their big, fat, white belly.
A woman in California, a union official and activist for the ILWU, who happens to be an amateur political wonk to the extent that she's constantly tweeting her thoughts, opinions and attitudes to the likes of Lawrence O'Donnell, Bob Cesca and Keith Olbermann and who screams at the television to such an extent that she scares her young son, went into abject meltdown over these tax cuts for the rich, without a thought for any of her fellow proletariat who just might be long-term unemployed or the chances her children gained for financial help in their quest for post-secondary education.
It's the fashion to follow the tax cut craze, which means, more and more, that the Democratic Party is abandoning its championing of the working classes.
Bill Maher is an intelligent man, and he should know better. He's followed government and government procedure enough to know how things work. He knows a compromise when he sees one. This is all just the language of the moment, the game of "Piss on the President," better known amongst older Democrats as "Shooting Yourself in the Foot." The Democrats do that a lot and never learn from it.
Obama caved to the Democrats, so now we have to find someone to mount a primary challenge, never ever remembering the events which occurred after the primary challenges of 1968 and 1980. The first brought us Watergate and introduced us to the Three R's of the Republican brand: Ratfucking, Roger Ailes and Karl Rove. The second brought us 12 years of Republican rule, credit and financial deregulation, trickledown, phony wealth which felt good at the time but came back to kick us all in the ass, and the first Gulf War.
And after all is said and done, with all the legislation passed during the lame duck session of Congress and after the horrific events in Tucson, after the President held it together for us on all those occasions, Bill and his ilk are scurrying about, furiously searching for the next stick with which to beat the President. Social Security? Tackling the tax code? The State of the Union speech? What he should say? What he shouldn't say?
In the year that's the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War - yes, the one which was fought in order to end slavery - I have a hard time taking the Democratic Party seriously, when its most liberal proponents insist on treating the President of the United States like Miss Scarlett treated Prissy, and that's said as someone who was weaned on the Democratic Party.
And if that's not enough, I have to sit, watch and listen to Sean Hannity facilitate the very public unraveling of Sarah Palin for all to see on Monday evening, in a typically incoherent, Biblically-inspired rant, filled with the obvious lies, which just happened to shift the blame for all the violent rhetoric she started and subsequently inspired, back to the Democratic party and liberals in general. Somewhere, somehow in Governor Palin's parallel universe, the Democrats put up crosshair maps, identifying innocent Republican candidates as targets to be taken out, Democrats were the moral, emotional and political scourge of this great, free country, Democrats have been issuing death threats against Madame and her spawn and CNN has been bullying poor Willow Palin, who does a fair job of bullying, herself, if her recent antics on her Facebook page are anything by which she can be measured. In that respect, I fear for CNN's safety, because I would imagine that Willow has pretty much had to bring herself up, what with Mommy prancing about the Lower Forty-Eight, being adored.
Thing is, and not being one to push the envelope of false equivalency, people believe these talking heads. Some poor bastard conned into voting against his own interests and living in a modular home someplace is going to believe Palin when she paints the Democrats and anyone liberal as a danger to the lifeblood of a nation; just as there are adoring scores of people on the Left, slurping up the lattes from the superior sections of the Left Coast, who follow every word Bill Maher says, even when he contradicts himself from one week to the next, whilst ignoring the fact that he looks increasingly more comfortable in the company of Darrell Issa and Bill Frist than he does with anyone of the Democratic persuasion.
And so it will go on and on, with civility as much of an illusion and a pretense as anything else about our sick and sordid political system. Palin's pets will buy into the myth of deranged and unAmerican coastal elites trying to change Brand America to their own socialistic and godless liking, and Maher's minions will continue to believe that the only America that matters is found along the West Coast or in the Northeast, and everything else is Flyover Country or the unreconstructed neo-Confederacy inhabited by a race of racist, illiterate, inbreds who pronounce the word "shit" as having two syllables.
Speaking of the Confederacy, do you know the story of how California tried to secede in 1861 to form the Republic of the Pacific? Their state flag today is almost an exact replica of their intended "republic's" flag, which is more than a bit like those Deep Southerners who want to incorporate the Confederate battle flag as part of their state's emblem.
Maybe the two extremes have more in common than they think. At least they can always share their Obama hate.
.
I was neither pleased nor disappointed with this week's show, apart from the fact that one of his panel guests was the ludicrous Chrystia Freeland, who sounds like Megan Mullally, trying to be serious after admitting to having smoked two packs a day. Bill sat her between the Democrat James Carville and the Republican Mike Murphy, and I've yet to ascertain anything either of the two men disclosed, because they were constantly being interrupted by this woman. Later in the show, Martin Short appeared, and the latter third of the panel discussion section disintegrated into a frenetically childike dialogue between Freeland and Short, which amounted to Freeland jumping gleefully up and down in her seat as she and Short discussed how much better Canada was than the States - ne'mind the fact that both probably earn much more money here than in their own home country, but there you go.
What disappointed me the most occurred during Bill's initial interview with Elizabeth Warren, when he asked her if he thought anything was achieved by the President "caving" to the Republicans' demand to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest people in the country. I thought it was a pretty stupid question, especially to ask a woman who is a special advisor to the President and, therefore, part of the Administration, itself. It's almost as if Bill thought Warren a pretty smart cookie, but a cookie who was book-smart and lacking in common sense, taking advantage of the fact that Warren apparently likes Bill and feels comfortable on his show, thinking she'd offer an opinion that would garner him a gotcha moment on which he'd feast for the rest of the season.
Of course, Warren gave a safe answer. Whatever she thought of the extension of the tax cuts, she's the sort of person who would see the benefits the President got from this situation that would favour the demographic Warren champions: the fabled Middle Class.
It just stuck in my craw that Maher and many like him are still pushing the myth that Obama "caved" on the tax cuts. He "caved" to the Republicans' demands. He's weak. He has no backbone. He is, as Maher rather self-righteously proclaimed on national television at the end of last year, a "pussy."
As if the only thing that mattered, the be-all and the end-all to people supposedly "in the know", the pundit crowd, were those damned tax cuts. Nothing else mattered, not the unemployed, not the working classes or even the working poor, to whom Maher later tipped the wink as being the bulk and majority of that demographic collectively known as "the Middle Class," the politicos, the pundits, the dittoes following their leads in the blogosphere all wanted that one almighty point scored against the Republicans - right, dead and square in their big, fat, white belly.
A woman in California, a union official and activist for the ILWU, who happens to be an amateur political wonk to the extent that she's constantly tweeting her thoughts, opinions and attitudes to the likes of Lawrence O'Donnell, Bob Cesca and Keith Olbermann and who screams at the television to such an extent that she scares her young son, went into abject meltdown over these tax cuts for the rich, without a thought for any of her fellow proletariat who just might be long-term unemployed or the chances her children gained for financial help in their quest for post-secondary education.
It's the fashion to follow the tax cut craze, which means, more and more, that the Democratic Party is abandoning its championing of the working classes.
Bill Maher is an intelligent man, and he should know better. He's followed government and government procedure enough to know how things work. He knows a compromise when he sees one. This is all just the language of the moment, the game of "Piss on the President," better known amongst older Democrats as "Shooting Yourself in the Foot." The Democrats do that a lot and never learn from it.
Obama caved to the Democrats, so now we have to find someone to mount a primary challenge, never ever remembering the events which occurred after the primary challenges of 1968 and 1980. The first brought us Watergate and introduced us to the Three R's of the Republican brand: Ratfucking, Roger Ailes and Karl Rove. The second brought us 12 years of Republican rule, credit and financial deregulation, trickledown, phony wealth which felt good at the time but came back to kick us all in the ass, and the first Gulf War.
And after all is said and done, with all the legislation passed during the lame duck session of Congress and after the horrific events in Tucson, after the President held it together for us on all those occasions, Bill and his ilk are scurrying about, furiously searching for the next stick with which to beat the President. Social Security? Tackling the tax code? The State of the Union speech? What he should say? What he shouldn't say?
In the year that's the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War - yes, the one which was fought in order to end slavery - I have a hard time taking the Democratic Party seriously, when its most liberal proponents insist on treating the President of the United States like Miss Scarlett treated Prissy, and that's said as someone who was weaned on the Democratic Party.
And if that's not enough, I have to sit, watch and listen to Sean Hannity facilitate the very public unraveling of Sarah Palin for all to see on Monday evening, in a typically incoherent, Biblically-inspired rant, filled with the obvious lies, which just happened to shift the blame for all the violent rhetoric she started and subsequently inspired, back to the Democratic party and liberals in general. Somewhere, somehow in Governor Palin's parallel universe, the Democrats put up crosshair maps, identifying innocent Republican candidates as targets to be taken out, Democrats were the moral, emotional and political scourge of this great, free country, Democrats have been issuing death threats against Madame and her spawn and CNN has been bullying poor Willow Palin, who does a fair job of bullying, herself, if her recent antics on her Facebook page are anything by which she can be measured. In that respect, I fear for CNN's safety, because I would imagine that Willow has pretty much had to bring herself up, what with Mommy prancing about the Lower Forty-Eight, being adored.
Thing is, and not being one to push the envelope of false equivalency, people believe these talking heads. Some poor bastard conned into voting against his own interests and living in a modular home someplace is going to believe Palin when she paints the Democrats and anyone liberal as a danger to the lifeblood of a nation; just as there are adoring scores of people on the Left, slurping up the lattes from the superior sections of the Left Coast, who follow every word Bill Maher says, even when he contradicts himself from one week to the next, whilst ignoring the fact that he looks increasingly more comfortable in the company of Darrell Issa and Bill Frist than he does with anyone of the Democratic persuasion.
And so it will go on and on, with civility as much of an illusion and a pretense as anything else about our sick and sordid political system. Palin's pets will buy into the myth of deranged and unAmerican coastal elites trying to change Brand America to their own socialistic and godless liking, and Maher's minions will continue to believe that the only America that matters is found along the West Coast or in the Northeast, and everything else is Flyover Country or the unreconstructed neo-Confederacy inhabited by a race of racist, illiterate, inbreds who pronounce the word "shit" as having two syllables.
Speaking of the Confederacy, do you know the story of how California tried to secede in 1861 to form the Republic of the Pacific? Their state flag today is almost an exact replica of their intended "republic's" flag, which is more than a bit like those Deep Southerners who want to incorporate the Confederate battle flag as part of their state's emblem.
Maybe the two extremes have more in common than they think. At least they can always share their Obama hate.
.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
The Euphemism of Plain Speech (Yes, That's an Oxymoron)
by Marion Watts on Thursday, 13 January 2011 at 12:11. Right, come the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November 2012, I hope to take up arms with my laptop, sitting here in merry old England, and exercise my Constitutional right as an American citizen. No, I'm not going to beat the elderly Queen about the head with my computer, not even Prince Charles, although I admit I'd quite like to give a resounding bitch slap to that smirky, little twerp, George Osborne, who I reckon happens to be Eric Cantor's brother, from whom he was separated at birth.
I simply mean that I'm going to vote in the next Presidential election, because, according to Sarah Palin, today's rhetorical meaning of "taking up arms" means voting; and, after all, Palin's a wordsmith, right? I mean, who'd argue with "refudiate?"
Silly me. Here I thought "taking up arms" meant ... well, taking up arms, arming yourself for some sort of conflict, the way the French Resistance did when the Nazis invaded France; but I suppose that's a different place, a different time and a different meaning - like years ago, during the English Restoration of the Seventeenth Century, the only time a woman or a girl was referred to as "Miss" indicated that she was a member of the oldest profession, as in "'tis a pity she's a whore."
So I guess "taking up arms" really means "voting" because Palin says it does.
And I suppose Robert Gibbs's referral to the "Professional Left" really didn't mean those people who espouse a Liberal or Progressive point of view and get paid by a corporation or an entity for propagating that Left-of-centre viewpoint, either in print or via the media of television or radio. Since I'm a linguist and that's a profession, and since I'm pretty Leftist, I guess that means me. Since my cousin's an unskilled worker and he's Leftist too, I guess that means he. I suppose you can be professionally unskilled. I didn't know that the entire populace, hoi polloi, plebosphere who lean Left were entirely professional, but I'll take Ed Schultz's interpretation of it because Big Ed's on television, and he should know, right?
And when Michele Bachman makes a clarion call for all her constituents to be "armed and dangerous in the streets," she really means she wants them to be politically aware. Gee, I guess my 82 year-old aunt must be causing quite a sensation in the little hamlet where I was raised. I've never met a more politically astute person in my life, so I guess the local police department/sheriff's office must be kept pretty busy keeping her in line, since she's always been "armed and dangerous in the streets" (even though we've only got one state route which passes through the village).
Then there's the question of socialists and Nazis. Just who are they in today's political climate? I thought Silvio Berlusconi was pretty damned close to being a Nazi, without actually saying that he was (which is illegal in Italy), but it seems that Barack Obama is a socialist and George W Bush is a Nazi, depending on which political persuasion you follow. Or maybe Barack Obama is the Nazi and George W Bush is the socialist, if you're Ann Coulter. Who knows?
All I know is that a Democratic Congresswoman is critically injured, and six people - including a Federal judge, a 30 year-old Congressional aide and a 9 year-old child - are dead because a disturbed person, who may or may not have been influenced by the extreme rhetoric of violence which seems to be the acceptable norm for political discourse on one side of the political equation these days. The alleged assailant did, however, appear to have rather eclectic reading tastes, which seem, upon initial examination, to lean rightwards into the realm of Glenn Beckistan, but no one's blaming Beck.
No one's really blaming anyone in particular, even though Sarah Palin seems to think that everyone on the Left is blaming her and is acting the victim anyway for whatever purpose. Hey, Sarah, nobody's blaming you, but if you suddenly take down your Congressional Target Practice map, listing 20 Democratic Congressional seats represented as targets in firearms' crosshairs within an hour after this attempted assassination of a government official-cum-massacre of various private citizens, you're really showing somewhat of a cover-your-ass mentality, aren't you? Normally, I'd say "guilty conscience," but I would iimagine that "guilt" isn't a concept with which you're familiar, and I doubt you have anything reasonably resembling a conscience.
I actually agree with various voices on the Right, shouting that we should blame the shooter, but that doesn't mean that this tragic incident shouldn't prompt us to look closely at the extreme and often irrational dialogue that's been bandied about all over the place from the bureacracy to the blogosphere for the past two years. From "anchor babies" on the Right to "public option" on the Left, hands UP, who hasn't got a headache from the shouting, the hatred and the vitriol?
As the late James Brown said, "Big mouths say nothing."
They might not say anything, but they sure do cause deep and probably impenetrable rifts. The talking heads act as our cheerleaders, ratcheting the volume of dialogue up to fever pitch, then lighting their Havana cigars, chortling mercilessly and walking away to their seven-figure corporate salaries whilst the plebs snark and bicker amongst themselves.
Insult is traded with insult. People revel in argumentum ad hominem, especially when it comes to referring to the President. The worst the last Democratic President had to endure in this respect was being called "Bubba" consistently by the likes of the late Tim Russert, scion of the Beltway media establishment. (Well, karma even has a way of biting a dead man's ass, Big Tim; after all, your legacy has been David Gregory in the MTP chair and your ineffectually trivial son pretending to be NBC's nepotistic Capitol Hill correspondent). The worst Jimmy Carter had to endure from said media was being labelled a Cracker.
The current President is treated with derision and disrespect by both sides of the political equation. The Right seek to ostracize him in the eyes of their so-called base by emphasizing how "different" he is to previous occupants of the Oval Office, and they're hardly subtle in indicating why he shouldn't be there. (Are you listening, Birthers?) The Tea Party, that lovechild of Libertarians crossed with John Birchers and delivered by the Koch Brothers, has cornered the market in vitriol on that subject.
The Left treat the President with scorn and condescension, almost implying that he's an idiot, incapable of walking down the street and chewing gum at the same time. They're over-solicitous to the point of patronising when they obsess about what he's going to say before he says it, then jump in, feet-first in mouth, with intense criticism, five seconds after he's said it. Second-guessing is a way of life.
And at various times, to both sides, he's painted as an elitist. The Right say he's unAmerican, and the Left say he's weak. Worse than weak, he's been labelled an "appeaser" and a "quisling" for compromises he's made. People on the right call him an idiot and want to "knock some sense" into him. People on the Left call him a "pussy" on national television.
Some on the Right refer to him as an anti-colonial Kenyan, but we get the gist. And we get the gist when people on the Left take to referring to the President as the "Affirmative Action President" or, simply, "the house nigger." Suffice it to say, the latter are the ones whose voices are the most strident in favour of redacting the n-word from Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn."
But I suppose Newt Gingrich didn't mean anything racial when he made the Kenyan remark, and I'm sure Bill Maher wasn't stereotyping the President as ghetto superbad and violent when he remarked that he wanted a "real" black President who was a gangsta who'd open his jacket to the Congress and Cabinet to reveal a concealed weapon on his body ... as in "gun" and nothing phallic.
I'm beginning to be confused as to when euphemism became plain speech, and plain speech came to be explained away as harmless euphemism, but it seems to me that the Republicans have become increasingly more recalcitrant whenever there's a Democratic incumbent in the White House, and the Democrats are simply frustrated that, for all their elite Left Coastal and Northeastern credentials, the only candidates who've successfully made it to the White House on their ticket in the past 35 years have been two Bubbas and a black man.
And that's really what's fueling all this ire in America at the moment, from Capitol Hill to the most rural of boondocks: The Right can't stand the thought of a black man in the White House, who isn't there to serve drinks, and the Left can't abide the fact that there's a black man in the White House, who's smarter than everybody else and the only adult in town, much less in the room.
Happy New Year.
.
I simply mean that I'm going to vote in the next Presidential election, because, according to Sarah Palin, today's rhetorical meaning of "taking up arms" means voting; and, after all, Palin's a wordsmith, right? I mean, who'd argue with "refudiate?"
Silly me. Here I thought "taking up arms" meant ... well, taking up arms, arming yourself for some sort of conflict, the way the French Resistance did when the Nazis invaded France; but I suppose that's a different place, a different time and a different meaning - like years ago, during the English Restoration of the Seventeenth Century, the only time a woman or a girl was referred to as "Miss" indicated that she was a member of the oldest profession, as in "'tis a pity she's a whore."
So I guess "taking up arms" really means "voting" because Palin says it does.
And I suppose Robert Gibbs's referral to the "Professional Left" really didn't mean those people who espouse a Liberal or Progressive point of view and get paid by a corporation or an entity for propagating that Left-of-centre viewpoint, either in print or via the media of television or radio. Since I'm a linguist and that's a profession, and since I'm pretty Leftist, I guess that means me. Since my cousin's an unskilled worker and he's Leftist too, I guess that means he. I suppose you can be professionally unskilled. I didn't know that the entire populace, hoi polloi, plebosphere who lean Left were entirely professional, but I'll take Ed Schultz's interpretation of it because Big Ed's on television, and he should know, right?
And when Michele Bachman makes a clarion call for all her constituents to be "armed and dangerous in the streets," she really means she wants them to be politically aware. Gee, I guess my 82 year-old aunt must be causing quite a sensation in the little hamlet where I was raised. I've never met a more politically astute person in my life, so I guess the local police department/sheriff's office must be kept pretty busy keeping her in line, since she's always been "armed and dangerous in the streets" (even though we've only got one state route which passes through the village).
Then there's the question of socialists and Nazis. Just who are they in today's political climate? I thought Silvio Berlusconi was pretty damned close to being a Nazi, without actually saying that he was (which is illegal in Italy), but it seems that Barack Obama is a socialist and George W Bush is a Nazi, depending on which political persuasion you follow. Or maybe Barack Obama is the Nazi and George W Bush is the socialist, if you're Ann Coulter. Who knows?
All I know is that a Democratic Congresswoman is critically injured, and six people - including a Federal judge, a 30 year-old Congressional aide and a 9 year-old child - are dead because a disturbed person, who may or may not have been influenced by the extreme rhetoric of violence which seems to be the acceptable norm for political discourse on one side of the political equation these days. The alleged assailant did, however, appear to have rather eclectic reading tastes, which seem, upon initial examination, to lean rightwards into the realm of Glenn Beckistan, but no one's blaming Beck.
No one's really blaming anyone in particular, even though Sarah Palin seems to think that everyone on the Left is blaming her and is acting the victim anyway for whatever purpose. Hey, Sarah, nobody's blaming you, but if you suddenly take down your Congressional Target Practice map, listing 20 Democratic Congressional seats represented as targets in firearms' crosshairs within an hour after this attempted assassination of a government official-cum-massacre of various private citizens, you're really showing somewhat of a cover-your-ass mentality, aren't you? Normally, I'd say "guilty conscience," but I would iimagine that "guilt" isn't a concept with which you're familiar, and I doubt you have anything reasonably resembling a conscience.
I actually agree with various voices on the Right, shouting that we should blame the shooter, but that doesn't mean that this tragic incident shouldn't prompt us to look closely at the extreme and often irrational dialogue that's been bandied about all over the place from the bureacracy to the blogosphere for the past two years. From "anchor babies" on the Right to "public option" on the Left, hands UP, who hasn't got a headache from the shouting, the hatred and the vitriol?
As the late James Brown said, "Big mouths say nothing."
They might not say anything, but they sure do cause deep and probably impenetrable rifts. The talking heads act as our cheerleaders, ratcheting the volume of dialogue up to fever pitch, then lighting their Havana cigars, chortling mercilessly and walking away to their seven-figure corporate salaries whilst the plebs snark and bicker amongst themselves.
Insult is traded with insult. People revel in argumentum ad hominem, especially when it comes to referring to the President. The worst the last Democratic President had to endure in this respect was being called "Bubba" consistently by the likes of the late Tim Russert, scion of the Beltway media establishment. (Well, karma even has a way of biting a dead man's ass, Big Tim; after all, your legacy has been David Gregory in the MTP chair and your ineffectually trivial son pretending to be NBC's nepotistic Capitol Hill correspondent). The worst Jimmy Carter had to endure from said media was being labelled a Cracker.
The current President is treated with derision and disrespect by both sides of the political equation. The Right seek to ostracize him in the eyes of their so-called base by emphasizing how "different" he is to previous occupants of the Oval Office, and they're hardly subtle in indicating why he shouldn't be there. (Are you listening, Birthers?) The Tea Party, that lovechild of Libertarians crossed with John Birchers and delivered by the Koch Brothers, has cornered the market in vitriol on that subject.
The Left treat the President with scorn and condescension, almost implying that he's an idiot, incapable of walking down the street and chewing gum at the same time. They're over-solicitous to the point of patronising when they obsess about what he's going to say before he says it, then jump in, feet-first in mouth, with intense criticism, five seconds after he's said it. Second-guessing is a way of life.
And at various times, to both sides, he's painted as an elitist. The Right say he's unAmerican, and the Left say he's weak. Worse than weak, he's been labelled an "appeaser" and a "quisling" for compromises he's made. People on the right call him an idiot and want to "knock some sense" into him. People on the Left call him a "pussy" on national television.
Some on the Right refer to him as an anti-colonial Kenyan, but we get the gist. And we get the gist when people on the Left take to referring to the President as the "Affirmative Action President" or, simply, "the house nigger." Suffice it to say, the latter are the ones whose voices are the most strident in favour of redacting the n-word from Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn."
But I suppose Newt Gingrich didn't mean anything racial when he made the Kenyan remark, and I'm sure Bill Maher wasn't stereotyping the President as ghetto superbad and violent when he remarked that he wanted a "real" black President who was a gangsta who'd open his jacket to the Congress and Cabinet to reveal a concealed weapon on his body ... as in "gun" and nothing phallic.
I'm beginning to be confused as to when euphemism became plain speech, and plain speech came to be explained away as harmless euphemism, but it seems to me that the Republicans have become increasingly more recalcitrant whenever there's a Democratic incumbent in the White House, and the Democrats are simply frustrated that, for all their elite Left Coastal and Northeastern credentials, the only candidates who've successfully made it to the White House on their ticket in the past 35 years have been two Bubbas and a black man.
And that's really what's fueling all this ire in America at the moment, from Capitol Hill to the most rural of boondocks: The Right can't stand the thought of a black man in the White House, who isn't there to serve drinks, and the Left can't abide the fact that there's a black man in the White House, who's smarter than everybody else and the only adult in town, much less in the room.
Happy New Year.
.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Why I'm Scared of Sarah Palin
While I’m not a person who scares easily, I’ll be brutally honest and say this woman scares me more than any politician I’ve known in any country. She scares me far more than the chillingly cheerful Russian leaders we were taught were our enemies when we were children. She scares me more than Franco, and I spent a fair amount of time in Spain when Franco was enjoying the last wind in his sails before his ultimate fall. She certainly scares me more than Maggie Thatcher or Ronald Reagan ever managed to do; and whilst I viewed the emergence of George Bush the Younger on the political scene in 2000 with the sort of horror reserved for observing an impossibly drunk fraternity boy opening his flies on a wintery evening to write his name in piss on the snow, I viewed Palin’s debut on the political stage with abject fright.
Just as I’d had Bush pegged as the rich frat guy you enjoyed hanging out with until he got drunk and puked on your shoes, from the minute I saw Palin, she oozed the mean girl gene. And I mean “mean.”
But what alarmed me even more, as the campaign season swung forward, was her abject ignorance. The interview with Charlie Gibson, where she had no idea what a particular foreign policy initiative was and tried to blag her way through the question (“In what respect, Charlie?” Smile sweetly, bat the eyelids.), impressed upon me the image of a woman who’d used her looks to progress as far as she had. She really was the Homecoming Queen who’d stepped up to the plate to become Queen of the Prom, and this was it. Then came the Katie Couric interview, where her answer to what newspapers she read (“some of’em, all of’em”) was a frantic clutching at straws and where her total ignorance of any Supreme Court decision was almost comical (“I’ll get back to ya on that one.”)
Then came the subtle hate speeches, where she intimated that Candidate Obama wasn’t exactly like any other candidate who’d run before, if he were, at all, like any American. After all, he “palled around” with terrorists.
In all honesty, I’m not certain whether Palin, herself, frightens me or whether what she and her followers radiate as a whole, frightens me more. It’s not just the cult of anti-elitism, it’s the ingrained idea that anyone who obtains a university degree from a quality institution, much less someone who attains a professional degree from a law school or a graduate degree is something pejorative. It’s the whole idea that they’ve almost been chosen by a cruel Christian god whom they’ve appropriated to impart their message of entitlement to take this country back to a time in which they fervently believe, but which actually never existed.
The Founding Fathers whose memories she verbally fondles in her speeches were the most elite members of society of their time. They were Deists, and some were even atheists. They were cultural products of the Age of Reason. If Thomas Jefferson or James Madison came back today, Palin would sneeringly label them “Democrats.” If Jesus Christ appeared, he’d be denounced as a Progressive and castigated. Again.
Palin’s made racism fashionable again. I guess you could say that racism is the new black this season, all because there’s an intelligent, articulate and compassionate black man in the White House. But it’s not that sort of racism. It’s the sort which leads people to make campaign adverts showing distinctly dark men hovering around a suspicious gate, intimating that Latinos are suspected of being here illegally; it’s the sort of ignorance borne of that sort of racism which leads a candidate for the United States Senate to remark condescendingly to a room of Latino students that some of them “looked Asian.” It’s a plea to “peaceful Muslims” to “refudiate” their inalienable right to worship as they please where they please. It’s pointing out in the worst possible and most tactless way that the First Lady of the United States is not “one of us,” whatever that means.
What frightens me even more is the attention this woman garners. Honestly, the late Princess of Wales didn’t garner this much hype at her peak. MSNBC gives her as much attention as Fox, and Fox employs her. Almost every morning, Joe Scarborough and his lackeys sit around their table and plot various ways by which this woman not only can secure the Republican Presidential nomination, they plot her course to the White House. Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann certainly talk about her as much as they ever did Hillary, but without the venom; and their criticisms are such that one is left with the definite impression that if they got the opportunity and she gave them the chance, they’d fuck her. On his latest Sunday program, Matthews even compared her favourably to Bill Clinton in political acumen.
The press are obsessing about her viability as a Presidential candidate. I wish they’d stop. Because the more they obsess, the more concrete the possibility becomes, and then I’m forced to remember that this is the country who deemed Richard Nixon dead in the water, after he went down in defeat to Pat Brown in the 1962 California gubernatorial race, and Nixon stormed back in 1968 to win, not one, but two terms as President. His second Administration not only left us with the legacy of Watergate, it also left us with Roger Ailes and Karl Rove, who cut their teeth either working on media strategy for the Republican party or ratfucking the Democrats in the name of Nixon.
And this is also the country which enabled the Supreme Court to annoint George W Bush as 43rd President of the United States, and then elected him to a second term out of sheer fear, they guy with whom you’d want to share a beer. This is the country who elected a black man to clean up the mess left by the trust fund frat boy, but who somehow can’t seem to accept the fact that this President speaks to us and treats us as though we’re children.
And the big fright is that there’s just about enough of us Oedipal enough to want to throw caution and reason to the wind, conjuring up age-old images of dark bogeymen, creatures from the black lagoon and things that go bump in the night, to seek solace in the bosom of a Mama Grizzly.
Just as I’d had Bush pegged as the rich frat guy you enjoyed hanging out with until he got drunk and puked on your shoes, from the minute I saw Palin, she oozed the mean girl gene. And I mean “mean.”
But what alarmed me even more, as the campaign season swung forward, was her abject ignorance. The interview with Charlie Gibson, where she had no idea what a particular foreign policy initiative was and tried to blag her way through the question (“In what respect, Charlie?” Smile sweetly, bat the eyelids.), impressed upon me the image of a woman who’d used her looks to progress as far as she had. She really was the Homecoming Queen who’d stepped up to the plate to become Queen of the Prom, and this was it. Then came the Katie Couric interview, where her answer to what newspapers she read (“some of’em, all of’em”) was a frantic clutching at straws and where her total ignorance of any Supreme Court decision was almost comical (“I’ll get back to ya on that one.”)
Then came the subtle hate speeches, where she intimated that Candidate Obama wasn’t exactly like any other candidate who’d run before, if he were, at all, like any American. After all, he “palled around” with terrorists.
In all honesty, I’m not certain whether Palin, herself, frightens me or whether what she and her followers radiate as a whole, frightens me more. It’s not just the cult of anti-elitism, it’s the ingrained idea that anyone who obtains a university degree from a quality institution, much less someone who attains a professional degree from a law school or a graduate degree is something pejorative. It’s the whole idea that they’ve almost been chosen by a cruel Christian god whom they’ve appropriated to impart their message of entitlement to take this country back to a time in which they fervently believe, but which actually never existed.
The Founding Fathers whose memories she verbally fondles in her speeches were the most elite members of society of their time. They were Deists, and some were even atheists. They were cultural products of the Age of Reason. If Thomas Jefferson or James Madison came back today, Palin would sneeringly label them “Democrats.” If Jesus Christ appeared, he’d be denounced as a Progressive and castigated. Again.
Palin’s made racism fashionable again. I guess you could say that racism is the new black this season, all because there’s an intelligent, articulate and compassionate black man in the White House. But it’s not that sort of racism. It’s the sort which leads people to make campaign adverts showing distinctly dark men hovering around a suspicious gate, intimating that Latinos are suspected of being here illegally; it’s the sort of ignorance borne of that sort of racism which leads a candidate for the United States Senate to remark condescendingly to a room of Latino students that some of them “looked Asian.” It’s a plea to “peaceful Muslims” to “refudiate” their inalienable right to worship as they please where they please. It’s pointing out in the worst possible and most tactless way that the First Lady of the United States is not “one of us,” whatever that means.
What frightens me even more is the attention this woman garners. Honestly, the late Princess of Wales didn’t garner this much hype at her peak. MSNBC gives her as much attention as Fox, and Fox employs her. Almost every morning, Joe Scarborough and his lackeys sit around their table and plot various ways by which this woman not only can secure the Republican Presidential nomination, they plot her course to the White House. Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann certainly talk about her as much as they ever did Hillary, but without the venom; and their criticisms are such that one is left with the definite impression that if they got the opportunity and she gave them the chance, they’d fuck her. On his latest Sunday program, Matthews even compared her favourably to Bill Clinton in political acumen.
The press are obsessing about her viability as a Presidential candidate. I wish they’d stop. Because the more they obsess, the more concrete the possibility becomes, and then I’m forced to remember that this is the country who deemed Richard Nixon dead in the water, after he went down in defeat to Pat Brown in the 1962 California gubernatorial race, and Nixon stormed back in 1968 to win, not one, but two terms as President. His second Administration not only left us with the legacy of Watergate, it also left us with Roger Ailes and Karl Rove, who cut their teeth either working on media strategy for the Republican party or ratfucking the Democrats in the name of Nixon.
And this is also the country which enabled the Supreme Court to annoint George W Bush as 43rd President of the United States, and then elected him to a second term out of sheer fear, they guy with whom you’d want to share a beer. This is the country who elected a black man to clean up the mess left by the trust fund frat boy, but who somehow can’t seem to accept the fact that this President speaks to us and treats us as though we’re children.
And the big fright is that there’s just about enough of us Oedipal enough to want to throw caution and reason to the wind, conjuring up age-old images of dark bogeymen, creatures from the black lagoon and things that go bump in the night, to seek solace in the bosom of a Mama Grizzly.
Thursday, August 5, 2010
C*ntry First?
The cover of the latest edition of TIME magazine shows the noseless face of an 18 year-old Afghan girl, who was disfigured as a result of running away from a forced marriage. The cover suggested that this is what would happen when the US left Afghanistan.
Like many on the Left side of the political equation, I vehemently oppose the continuation of this war. Like many on the Left side of the politcal equation, I knew from the getgo that Iraq was a lie. Like many on the Left side of the political equation, I am a woman, who came of age during the decade of the 70s, that era in which great strides of gender equality were achieved.
Many on the Left side of the political equation cry out that this heart-rending picture is nothing less than blatant emotional blackmail. It may be; I don’t know, but it makes me uneasy.
I have a friend from my college years, a lifelong Republican and conservative, an educated man and a lawyer, who’s served several hitches in Iraq and Afghanistan as a JAG lawyer. We often disagree politically, but I appreciate his insight and respect his opinion. Even before the TIME cover became a topic of conversation this week, he made my conscience squirm.
"You were always at the forefront of feminism in college," he remarked once in an online exchange. "Yet I wonder at how you and your fellow Lefties can just turn a blind eye to the mistreatment of women in Afghanistan. I mean, that’s supposed to be your thing, isn’t it?"
I suppose it is, and it makes me uncomfortable. The picture of Aisha on the cover of TIME made me more uncomfortable, but the reaction to some people, who purport to be from the Progressive Left, made me downright shameful. A woman, who is a regular commentator on Huffington Post flatly stated that she didn’t give a rat’s ass about the women in Afghanistan, that if they didn’t stand up to the men controlling for their rights, they, basically got what they deserved.
Charming. And oh-so-au courant-liberal. Actually, that attitude positively reeks of the attitude promoted by the likes of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan during the Eighties – the meme of "I’m all right, Jack; fuck you." I know that Ronald Reagan’s supposed to be to the Left of the current crop of retrograde Republicanism, but since when did Progressives morph into exponents of Ronald Reagan’s philosophy?
Other than that woman’s reaction, the rest of the commentary was filled with people one could visualise squirming in their chairs as they typed painfully constructed rigamaroles of sound bites gleaned from the latest fashionable infotainment pundit, trying to justify that Aisha’s punishment was everything to do with the way her culture was intended to be and simply wasn’t worth our effort and expenditure in lives and money.
But Aisha’s treatment has everything to do with us, because we enabled the Taliban. Once we decided to look the other way, in the wake of Russia withdrawing from Afghanistan, leaving a trail of chaos, as the warlords battled to outdo one another, we allowed the Taliban to rise from the rubble, and we condemned a whole generation of women and girls to the darkness of ignorance and brutality.
And now the Left are looking away again.
Look, I’m not advocating staying in Afghanistan any longer than is necessary. I’d have the troops home tomorrow if I could. I’m not even sure what can be done to help women like Aisha, but the attitude I found from the Left towards this – and especially the crass comment made by the woman on HuffPo, amazes me that there’s an attitude towards women here that ranges from abject indifference to callous cruelty.
Last Sunday night, Bill Maher finished a three-night stint through the Midwest, ending up in Madison, Wisconsin. The next day, Bill posted a raving review of the Madison gig on his Facebook page. The reviewer, clearly a fan, literally bent over for Bill in praise. One of the funniest aspects of the evening, the writer gushed, was Bill’s take on Sarah Palin (a staple for Bill Maher – more than any other commentator or fundit he goes out of his way to bring the subject of Palin into the discussion, even when she hasn’t been in the news.)
The reviewer thought it an absolute riot that Bill managed to call Palin a c*nt no less than six times in a minute – in a New York minute, knowing Maher’s delivery.
I thought it appalling.
I am not a Palin fan. I loathe the woman. I despair that this willfully ignorant woman, someone disdains quality higher education as exclusive and elitist, blaming the latter for all that’s wrong in the country, whilst elevating the mundane and ordinary to new heights of misconceived excellence. I find her divisive, hateful, and extremely derisive and disrespectful of our President. This is a would-be politician who begins by criticizing policy and ends with a full-on personal attack. She is unfamiliar with government and government processes, poorly eductated, inarticulate, quasi-illiterate, sly, untrustworthy, nepotistic, and blatantly untruthful. In short, she is a narcissistic liar.
But she is not, nor does she deserve to be called a c*nt – and certainly not six times in one minute in front of an audience in a public venue.
No woman does.
Yes, you’ll say, Palin is certainly capable of being just as vile, without resorting to crude, guttersnipe language (unless you want to count her pathetic and misspelled attempt at bilingualism – always better to say "balls" if you can’t spell cojones. And she certainly does deserve to be hit hard verbally and discredited.
But any man who resorts to calling a woman a c*nt in public is certainly less of a man, in himself, and shows a singular lack of intelligence in doing so.
Congratulations, Bill ... you’ve just joined the ranks of celebrated men whom you’ve previously criticized as their moral equals:-
*John McCain, who famously referred to his wife by the c-word in 1992, and
Mel Gibson, whom you recently flayed in a tweet, referring to his very ugly verbal abuse of the mother of his younger child, whom he called – yes – a cnt.
To your credit, Bill, you’re nothing, if not genuinely fair and balanced, because in February 2008, you famously referred to Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, by the c-word on Real Time, in frustration at her refusal to give up the ghost in favour of your candidate of the moment; so maybe there’s a place for you on Fox News after all.
When I objected to this on Facebook, I was met with a torrent of criticism - some rational, most blindly loyal to Bill to the point that people began to sound like blithering and blathering followers of a religious cult.
Some of those arguing actually called the word "quite beautiful" and pointed out that Shakespeare used it regularly. Wrong. Shakespeare used it alliteratively in allusion and as a clever play on words, never actually saying the word directly. Bill deals in directness. He called Palin and Clinton the actual word.
Others maintained that it’s used in quite normal conversation both in Australia and in Europe. Again, mostly wrong. I can’t speak for the Australians, but the British have the filthiset mouths in Europe when it comes to swearing. Even then, it’s a word used in the extremest and ugliest cases and by the lower gene pool of society (which seems to be expanding rapidly). And it’s understood that a man who refers to a woman as that word is living at the extreme of society at best. It’s something that’s never heard in polite company on the Continent.
Worse than the rational arguments, were the reckoning, by men and also by women, that Palin deserved this epithet, for all the reasons I listed above. One mature woman with grown children purported to use the word all the time, and saw noting wrong with it.
But would she like to be called a c*nt?
No reply to my question. When she carried on in a wild fervour about how Bill was the ultimate purveyor of truth in the United States, I asked her the question again: would she mind if someone called her a c*nt?
She finally said she’d rather be called a c*nt than a Republican.
I then replied, "Consider it done. You’re a c*nt, and by the way, you’re more than halfway to being a Repuiblican, with your attitude to fellow women and your narrow-mindedness intact." And then I blocked her.
But the one question no one deigned to answer was this: If they’re OK with Bill calling Palin a c*nt, does that mean they were OK with him calling Hillary the same?
Budding politicians came to the fore, mouthing words which said nothing. Not even sentences made sense. Waffle. I sensed the disciples of the man who purports to speak power to truth suffered a singular Aisha moment.
What a quandry! How could Bill be wrong about calling Hillary a c*nt and right about calling Palin the same? For people on the Right, surely Hillary is just as fearsome, just as divisive, an Ivy League elitist who encompasses everything that is wrong with this country (in their eyes). One side’s c*nt is another side’s Queen Mother, only Bill didn't differentiate.
Bill is the only political satirist-cum-pundit, other than Glenn Beck, who consitently brings Obama’s race into the fray; but not in a positive manner. Thus far this year, Obama’s been "President Sanford and Son", the "tanner of two evils" and the ineffectual, professorial President who needs to "black it up a little" with some stereotypical ghetto culture. His disciples decry criticism of such things as harmless, considering Bill’s "only a comedian." Yet if Beck or O’Reilly had said the same things, they’d be all over their asses like a duck on a june bug. It seems one man’s perceived racism is another man’s comedy, depending on which side of the political coin on which you be found.
Because we on the Left are never racist, are we? And we can never be accused of being sexit either, can we? Or even homophobic, now that Prop 8’s on its way to being ruled unconstitutional.
And if we are, we can laugh it off, can’t we, as comedy. After all, we on the Left, who occupy themoral high ground, we kknow, don’t we, who really puts c*ntry first and who puts the c*nt in country.
Like many on the Left side of the political equation, I vehemently oppose the continuation of this war. Like many on the Left side of the politcal equation, I knew from the getgo that Iraq was a lie. Like many on the Left side of the political equation, I am a woman, who came of age during the decade of the 70s, that era in which great strides of gender equality were achieved.
Many on the Left side of the political equation cry out that this heart-rending picture is nothing less than blatant emotional blackmail. It may be; I don’t know, but it makes me uneasy.
I have a friend from my college years, a lifelong Republican and conservative, an educated man and a lawyer, who’s served several hitches in Iraq and Afghanistan as a JAG lawyer. We often disagree politically, but I appreciate his insight and respect his opinion. Even before the TIME cover became a topic of conversation this week, he made my conscience squirm.
"You were always at the forefront of feminism in college," he remarked once in an online exchange. "Yet I wonder at how you and your fellow Lefties can just turn a blind eye to the mistreatment of women in Afghanistan. I mean, that’s supposed to be your thing, isn’t it?"
I suppose it is, and it makes me uncomfortable. The picture of Aisha on the cover of TIME made me more uncomfortable, but the reaction to some people, who purport to be from the Progressive Left, made me downright shameful. A woman, who is a regular commentator on Huffington Post flatly stated that she didn’t give a rat’s ass about the women in Afghanistan, that if they didn’t stand up to the men controlling for their rights, they, basically got what they deserved.
Charming. And oh-so-au courant-liberal. Actually, that attitude positively reeks of the attitude promoted by the likes of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan during the Eighties – the meme of "I’m all right, Jack; fuck you." I know that Ronald Reagan’s supposed to be to the Left of the current crop of retrograde Republicanism, but since when did Progressives morph into exponents of Ronald Reagan’s philosophy?
Other than that woman’s reaction, the rest of the commentary was filled with people one could visualise squirming in their chairs as they typed painfully constructed rigamaroles of sound bites gleaned from the latest fashionable infotainment pundit, trying to justify that Aisha’s punishment was everything to do with the way her culture was intended to be and simply wasn’t worth our effort and expenditure in lives and money.
But Aisha’s treatment has everything to do with us, because we enabled the Taliban. Once we decided to look the other way, in the wake of Russia withdrawing from Afghanistan, leaving a trail of chaos, as the warlords battled to outdo one another, we allowed the Taliban to rise from the rubble, and we condemned a whole generation of women and girls to the darkness of ignorance and brutality.
And now the Left are looking away again.
Look, I’m not advocating staying in Afghanistan any longer than is necessary. I’d have the troops home tomorrow if I could. I’m not even sure what can be done to help women like Aisha, but the attitude I found from the Left towards this – and especially the crass comment made by the woman on HuffPo, amazes me that there’s an attitude towards women here that ranges from abject indifference to callous cruelty.
Last Sunday night, Bill Maher finished a three-night stint through the Midwest, ending up in Madison, Wisconsin. The next day, Bill posted a raving review of the Madison gig on his Facebook page. The reviewer, clearly a fan, literally bent over for Bill in praise. One of the funniest aspects of the evening, the writer gushed, was Bill’s take on Sarah Palin (a staple for Bill Maher – more than any other commentator or fundit he goes out of his way to bring the subject of Palin into the discussion, even when she hasn’t been in the news.)
The reviewer thought it an absolute riot that Bill managed to call Palin a c*nt no less than six times in a minute – in a New York minute, knowing Maher’s delivery.
I thought it appalling.
I am not a Palin fan. I loathe the woman. I despair that this willfully ignorant woman, someone disdains quality higher education as exclusive and elitist, blaming the latter for all that’s wrong in the country, whilst elevating the mundane and ordinary to new heights of misconceived excellence. I find her divisive, hateful, and extremely derisive and disrespectful of our President. This is a would-be politician who begins by criticizing policy and ends with a full-on personal attack. She is unfamiliar with government and government processes, poorly eductated, inarticulate, quasi-illiterate, sly, untrustworthy, nepotistic, and blatantly untruthful. In short, she is a narcissistic liar.
But she is not, nor does she deserve to be called a c*nt – and certainly not six times in one minute in front of an audience in a public venue.
No woman does.
Yes, you’ll say, Palin is certainly capable of being just as vile, without resorting to crude, guttersnipe language (unless you want to count her pathetic and misspelled attempt at bilingualism – always better to say "balls" if you can’t spell cojones. And she certainly does deserve to be hit hard verbally and discredited.
But any man who resorts to calling a woman a c*nt in public is certainly less of a man, in himself, and shows a singular lack of intelligence in doing so.
Congratulations, Bill ... you’ve just joined the ranks of celebrated men whom you’ve previously criticized as their moral equals:-
*John McCain, who famously referred to his wife by the c-word in 1992, and
Mel Gibson, whom you recently flayed in a tweet, referring to his very ugly verbal abuse of the mother of his younger child, whom he called – yes – a cnt.
To your credit, Bill, you’re nothing, if not genuinely fair and balanced, because in February 2008, you famously referred to Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, by the c-word on Real Time, in frustration at her refusal to give up the ghost in favour of your candidate of the moment; so maybe there’s a place for you on Fox News after all.
When I objected to this on Facebook, I was met with a torrent of criticism - some rational, most blindly loyal to Bill to the point that people began to sound like blithering and blathering followers of a religious cult.
Some of those arguing actually called the word "quite beautiful" and pointed out that Shakespeare used it regularly. Wrong. Shakespeare used it alliteratively in allusion and as a clever play on words, never actually saying the word directly. Bill deals in directness. He called Palin and Clinton the actual word.
Others maintained that it’s used in quite normal conversation both in Australia and in Europe. Again, mostly wrong. I can’t speak for the Australians, but the British have the filthiset mouths in Europe when it comes to swearing. Even then, it’s a word used in the extremest and ugliest cases and by the lower gene pool of society (which seems to be expanding rapidly). And it’s understood that a man who refers to a woman as that word is living at the extreme of society at best. It’s something that’s never heard in polite company on the Continent.
Worse than the rational arguments, were the reckoning, by men and also by women, that Palin deserved this epithet, for all the reasons I listed above. One mature woman with grown children purported to use the word all the time, and saw noting wrong with it.
But would she like to be called a c*nt?
No reply to my question. When she carried on in a wild fervour about how Bill was the ultimate purveyor of truth in the United States, I asked her the question again: would she mind if someone called her a c*nt?
She finally said she’d rather be called a c*nt than a Republican.
I then replied, "Consider it done. You’re a c*nt, and by the way, you’re more than halfway to being a Repuiblican, with your attitude to fellow women and your narrow-mindedness intact." And then I blocked her.
But the one question no one deigned to answer was this: If they’re OK with Bill calling Palin a c*nt, does that mean they were OK with him calling Hillary the same?
Budding politicians came to the fore, mouthing words which said nothing. Not even sentences made sense. Waffle. I sensed the disciples of the man who purports to speak power to truth suffered a singular Aisha moment.
What a quandry! How could Bill be wrong about calling Hillary a c*nt and right about calling Palin the same? For people on the Right, surely Hillary is just as fearsome, just as divisive, an Ivy League elitist who encompasses everything that is wrong with this country (in their eyes). One side’s c*nt is another side’s Queen Mother, only Bill didn't differentiate.
Bill is the only political satirist-cum-pundit, other than Glenn Beck, who consitently brings Obama’s race into the fray; but not in a positive manner. Thus far this year, Obama’s been "President Sanford and Son", the "tanner of two evils" and the ineffectual, professorial President who needs to "black it up a little" with some stereotypical ghetto culture. His disciples decry criticism of such things as harmless, considering Bill’s "only a comedian." Yet if Beck or O’Reilly had said the same things, they’d be all over their asses like a duck on a june bug. It seems one man’s perceived racism is another man’s comedy, depending on which side of the political coin on which you be found.
Because we on the Left are never racist, are we? And we can never be accused of being sexit either, can we? Or even homophobic, now that Prop 8’s on its way to being ruled unconstitutional.
And if we are, we can laugh it off, can’t we, as comedy. After all, we on the Left, who occupy themoral high ground, we kknow, don’t we, who really puts c*ntry first and who puts the c*nt in country.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Clowns to the Left of Him, Jokers to the Right
So here we are at the end of a long, hot summer (at least in Britain - how's that for an oxymoron), after an August of scorching and offtimes ridiculously ignorant debates about a topic which has suddenly become urgently de rigeur in the United States: healthcare reform.
It really has been the silly season back home - embarrassingly so for me. Living in Europe, I've just come off 8 years of trying to convince people this side of the Pond that not all Americans were as certifiable as the neocons in possession of the bully pulpit, allegedly duly elected representatives, indicating the will of the people. Just about the time when I can put my head above the figurative parapet and attempt to wave a US flag, I'm confronted with the absurd Town Maulings.
Universal healthcare in Europe is a given. It's been around a long time. In fact, it's so much taken for granted by citizens of the countries where it's established, that many citizens complain vigourously about the quality of the healthcare they receive; and even though they wouldn't be without the universal healthcare that they have, the naysayers trying to discredit Obama as a socialist/communist/fascist/illegal alien/the Devil incarnate listen to their bleatings across the Atlantic and embellish upon them, using this spin as fodder to fuel the fires of fear amongst the lowest common denominator of voters in the States.
After all, better the devil you know than the devil you don't, even if you didn't realise that the devil that gave you Medicare just might be the government.
That's the ignorance of the Right - ugly, hideously white, quasi-illiterate,faith-based, excluding and intolerant and all in the name of Christianity.
That's the base ignorance which comes as a result of poor education, which resides in provincial and rural communities, usually found in the Deep South or in the sparsely-populated Western states, the stuff of people raised on a diet of Civil War stories and survivalists. The stuff of Timothy McVeigh, the paranoia that stoked Columbine, the sort of misappropriated loyalty that equates the Pro-Life campaign with the Pro-Death approval of the death penalty.
But the Right isn't the exclusive domain of ignorance, for ignorance resides on the Left-hand side of the American street as well; and in many ways, it's just as ludicrous, just as loud-mouthed, just as close-minded and just as intolerance. This brand of ignorance is uglier, because most of its proponents are educated, presume to be intelligent, and, quite frankly, should know better.
Of course, it's all about healthcare reform. What isn't, nowadays? For the shills of the Far Left, the self-proclaimed Progressives (who are anything but), Obama has done nothing right since taking office on January 20th. First there was the Wall Street bail-out, then the compromise with the Republicans on the Stimulus Package. There was the bi-partisan approach altogether, and now healthcare. Sprinkled amongst all that, Obama's neglected to legalise marijuana, repeal Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell and rescind the Defence of Marriage Act.
But healthcare's taken as much a centre stage for these people as it has for opponents of reform; and they just might, unwittingly, unite to kill it off entirely.
According to these people, Obama should have let the banks tank and at the same time, magically pull jobs from a magician's top hat. Do they not realise that, had Wall Street not been given a lifeline, there would be no jobs full stop, never mind magical ones pulled from magical hats. The United States economy would simply stop ... along with most of the major economies of the developed world. Of course, everyone deplores the greed engendered by Wall Street and the ethos of bonus that thrives there, but without the banking industry, where would the basic economy be?
These are people who, wrongly, believe that the greener grass of Europe is a haven of socialism.
Wrong.
European countries are beehives of capitalism. In fact, capitalism first came of age in England. The emergence of the English middle class signaled the end of the Middle Ages and heralded the dawning of a new sort of Renaissance. The noblesse oblige of France gave way to the noblesse de robe and, by extension, the solid bourgeoisie, or ... middle class. The only vestiges left of socialism are the healthcare systems - eclectic throughout Europe in design - and the public transport systems in each country, which vary from the sublime of France and Germany, to the ridiculously expensive in the UK.
The battle-cry of the some on the Progressive Left, regarding healthcare, is 'single-payer.' Single-payer or nothing. Forget the Third Way (ineffectual at the best of times, in my opinion), single-payer is the only way.
But it's not. And, I ask ... do they understand it? Do they understand that 'free at source' doesn't really mean ... 'free'? When they cry out that 'the government pays, that's what "single-payer" means,' do they understand where the government gets the money to pay for this medical care?
They get it from taxes, which will have to be raised across the board. Not the rich, not corporations. Everyone. Proportionately, yes - after all, to each according to his ability - but raised still.
I've lived under a single-payer system for 28 years. Simply put, on a good day, it works; on a bad day, it sucks. It's the luck of the draw, or rather, the luck of where you live. Live in an area where your local health authority has managed its budget well, and you'll never know a waiting list or anything less than a pristine hospital. Live where the bureaucrats who administer the authority's budget are feckless, and you'll have services cut, waiting lists months long and MRSA-infected hospitals with six-bed, mixed wards.
They'll grudgingly accept a 'public option', a vaguely-expressed version of they hybrid public-private combination popular throughout Southern Europe. This actually makes these sorts seem a bit more sensible. It at least tells me they're aware of the fact that Medicare only covers 80% of medical expenses and extending Medicare for all, would need a private top-up option added. (Of course, this is in opposition to the shills shouting 'Medicare for all' as a single-payer option, without stopping to think that 'Medicare for all' would mean 'all' would have to cough up the balance.
Then there's an idiot, shouting on another site, about getting rid of insurance companies entirely. Entirely. Presumably, this person doesn't drive a car or live in a house, which might burn or be damaged by a storm or hurricane. Presumably, he doesn't travel or own anything of value that might be lost or stolen, much less value his life in the event he has a family for whom provision might have to be made in the unlikely event of his death. Because all of the above would entail insurance, which would mean he would, in the words of the Wicked Witch of the North, kinda sorta, you know, need insurance companies.
Single-payer's the answer. Public option, maybe. Employer-based and co-operatives is a sell-out to Big Pharma and Big Business.
And this is when my head really begins to explode with anger, because in the midst of all this pandemonium, chaos, confusion and outright lies that have dominated the better part of the summer, this lot, the Left, the so-called Progressives, are ready to throw Obama under the political bus, walk away, denounce him as a traitor. Just like that. After 8 months.
I'm sorry, but even if Jesus Christ were the Son of God, even he wouldn't be able to undo in 8 months what it took the asswipes who raped our Constitution and instituted a rule of thuggery 8 years to achieve.
Already, on some sites there is talk of hoping there might be a primary challenge to Obama's leadership in 2012. Who could it be? Some say Hillary, who's repeatedly said she won't run at 65. Some are even hopeful of Ralph Nader, as if the United States would profit from having an 80 year-old at the helm - not to sound ageist, but one would live in hope that his Vice President would be considerably younger.
And these selfsame people sneered at Sarah Palin for being a quitter.
Obama never had the Right. From the getgo, they would always be against him. He's losing the Centre, because the Centre are confused as to what sort of healthcare plan he has in mind; and, quite honestly, that's Obama's fault for not having something, if not concise, at least a concrete, if rudimentary, plan about how to approach this reform. Yet I can understand his reticence to do so, considering the resounding bitchslap the Democratic Congress gave the Clintons in 1993, when they presented a healthcare plan fait accompli.
Obama, the Constitutional lawyer, is making government work the way government should work: Congress was called upon to legislate, to formulate an cost-effective universal healthcare package, even though, as I said on Bill Maher's forum, Congress is, at best, dysfunctional at the moment. It's polarized between the Right wingnut theocrats and a Democratic caucus that's at once high on the fact that they've gained the bully pulpit and suspicious of each of its own diverse factions within itself.
Forgive my Lincoln moment, but a House divided against itself cannot stand (the Democrats), and you can't please all the people all the time (healthcare and the President). Sometimes I think Lincoln was the last sane Republican; and look what happened to Lincoln.
I'm reading James Carville's latest book at the moment, 40 More Years, and one thing strikes me: Throughout the book, Carville refers to the Republicans as just that - 'the Republicans' or 'the Republican Party.' On the other hand, when he speaks of the Democrats, he refers to them as 'the Democratic caucus' or 'the Democratic coalition,' and those epithets ring true. Coalitions are weak at the best of times, and the Democrats are as culturally diverse as America, itself. All you needed to do was scan the sea of faces at each of the national conventions last year. Which one most closely resembled the America you know? And which one looked like the America of the 19th Century?
Exactly.
Earlier this summer, my socio-political muse, Bill Maher, was interviewed by Howard Kurz on CNN. During the interview, Kurz briefly mentioned the tea party phenomenon and the fact that some statements emanating from that movement were veering into the realms of a fascist fantasy. However, this was Freedom of Speech. He asked Bill about the First Amendment, and Bill made a remark that, for lack of a better word than a British one, gobsmacked Howard Kurz. Bill remarked that in travelling about, he noticed a worrying trend amongst younger people, specifically those on college campuses. More than the Right wingnutters, or at least just as much, college students on the Left were calling for a denial of Freedom of Speech. In short, they wanted to squelch dissent. I don't know what baffled and astounded Bill more - the fact that these people wanted to rescind this basic right, or the fact that they clearly were unfamiliar with the Constitution, which is probably why Bill was led to surmise that America was a stupid country.
And that surmisal pains me ... not because I disagree with Bill, because I did, at first; but now I agree. Because I see ignorance on the Left as well as the Right. There's a difference, however. The Right revere Sarah Palin and cult of willful ignorance, which denotes intellectual elitism as something pejorative and not to be trusted. These people revel in what they don't know and wear it proudly as a badge of honour, clinging to their guns and their religion in defence of this.
The Left, well, the Left are like those pseudo-intellectual wannabe high school philosophers - the sort who swanned about the halls of high schools in the early 70s, clutching a copy of Lord of the Rings, whose bookmark never seemed to progress past the first third of the interminably boring story. It looked cool. So now it looks cool to pretend you understand and are familiar with the Constitution, while all the time you know as much about it as the wingnutters from the Right: jack shit.
And it's ok for you to call down the Right as stupid, blind, narrow-minded et al, whilst crying for the Republicans to be silenced on the one hand, and Obama to be sacrificed on the other. Their ignorance is more tragic, for they are blind to it, lost in a forest out of which they can't find their way, because there are simply too many trees.
Their ignorance is an ignorance of arrogance, where their way is the right way and they know better than anyone, irregardless of experience.
As my late mother would say, they won't be told.
People I've met on various internet sites and blogspheres, people from this type of Left, tell me I've been away from the US too long. I'm constantly being told that I don't know my own country, that I don't live here anymore, and, therefore, even though I possess a passport, pay taxes and vote regularly, I've no right to comment upon or even worry about any socio-economic or political situation in the United States. Well, I'll tell you what I DO know.
I know that never before in my sordid life on either side of the Atlantic, have I ever been spurred with a sense of optimism and hope as I was last year during the campaign of Barack Obama. I'd never seen a Presidential candidate that inspired me so much. I was beginning to wonder if any ever would.
My parents came of age during the Great Depression. My father cast his first vote for Roosevelt's second term in 1936; my mother's first vote came four years later when she voted for his third term. Both their families were suffering along with everyone else when Roosevelt told them they had nothing to fear but fear, itself. My dad went to war, and my mother learned to drive and worked his job, for twice the salary he earned. During the war, she and her sisters shut up their various houses and returned to live with my grandparents, so they could pool their ration cards.
Later, they were Kennedy Democrats, and, as a small child, I could sense their excitement when Kennedy won to ask us not what our country could do for us, rather that we should ask what we could do for our country. They grew up and matured under a notion of service and sacrifice, if the time required it. They may have grumbled a bit, but they simply got on with it, and they endured.
In his first show of the 2009 season, Bill touched upon this subject, wondering if the people of today had an inkling of an idea about service to the country, about responding when the President asked for their help in achieving some of the monumental tasks heaped upon him to achieve. Bill was pretty pessimistic about that, reckoning that our society today was lazy; they wanted instant gratification, and they wanted the President to 'do' everything for them to alleviate their suffering without doing anything in return. This was not, reckoned Bill, the same generation as the so-called Greatest Generation.
He's been proven right. This is what we're seeing now. People from both sides of the political coin, turning their back on a gifted, sensitive, caring and intelligent President. Inexperienced, you say? Who has the necessary experience for this Poisoned Chalice? In the past 30 years, we've had a peanut farmer, an actor, a patrician, a philanderer and a dolt. For the first time in my life, it seems as if we have a man in the Oval Office who genuinely cares about the people who've chosen him, as much as he cares about the people who haven't.
He's a human being, a man; he's fallible like we all are. He'll make mistakes and falter, but he's criticized even when he admits error; and he'll falter even more if those of us who voted for him just turn our backs and walk away, along with the birthers, the teabaggers, the Creationists and the old Confederacy. Good company, eh?
Just because they're the jokers on the Right, doesn't mean you should take pride in being the clowns on the Left. Maybe it's time the Democrats stopped falling in love and started falling in line a bit - hey, we could have a party, like, you know ... the Democratic Party.
It really has been the silly season back home - embarrassingly so for me. Living in Europe, I've just come off 8 years of trying to convince people this side of the Pond that not all Americans were as certifiable as the neocons in possession of the bully pulpit, allegedly duly elected representatives, indicating the will of the people. Just about the time when I can put my head above the figurative parapet and attempt to wave a US flag, I'm confronted with the absurd Town Maulings.
Universal healthcare in Europe is a given. It's been around a long time. In fact, it's so much taken for granted by citizens of the countries where it's established, that many citizens complain vigourously about the quality of the healthcare they receive; and even though they wouldn't be without the universal healthcare that they have, the naysayers trying to discredit Obama as a socialist/communist/fascist/illegal alien/the Devil incarnate listen to their bleatings across the Atlantic and embellish upon them, using this spin as fodder to fuel the fires of fear amongst the lowest common denominator of voters in the States.
After all, better the devil you know than the devil you don't, even if you didn't realise that the devil that gave you Medicare just might be the government.
That's the ignorance of the Right - ugly, hideously white, quasi-illiterate,faith-based, excluding and intolerant and all in the name of Christianity.
That's the base ignorance which comes as a result of poor education, which resides in provincial and rural communities, usually found in the Deep South or in the sparsely-populated Western states, the stuff of people raised on a diet of Civil War stories and survivalists. The stuff of Timothy McVeigh, the paranoia that stoked Columbine, the sort of misappropriated loyalty that equates the Pro-Life campaign with the Pro-Death approval of the death penalty.
But the Right isn't the exclusive domain of ignorance, for ignorance resides on the Left-hand side of the American street as well; and in many ways, it's just as ludicrous, just as loud-mouthed, just as close-minded and just as intolerance. This brand of ignorance is uglier, because most of its proponents are educated, presume to be intelligent, and, quite frankly, should know better.
Of course, it's all about healthcare reform. What isn't, nowadays? For the shills of the Far Left, the self-proclaimed Progressives (who are anything but), Obama has done nothing right since taking office on January 20th. First there was the Wall Street bail-out, then the compromise with the Republicans on the Stimulus Package. There was the bi-partisan approach altogether, and now healthcare. Sprinkled amongst all that, Obama's neglected to legalise marijuana, repeal Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell and rescind the Defence of Marriage Act.
But healthcare's taken as much a centre stage for these people as it has for opponents of reform; and they just might, unwittingly, unite to kill it off entirely.
According to these people, Obama should have let the banks tank and at the same time, magically pull jobs from a magician's top hat. Do they not realise that, had Wall Street not been given a lifeline, there would be no jobs full stop, never mind magical ones pulled from magical hats. The United States economy would simply stop ... along with most of the major economies of the developed world. Of course, everyone deplores the greed engendered by Wall Street and the ethos of bonus that thrives there, but without the banking industry, where would the basic economy be?
These are people who, wrongly, believe that the greener grass of Europe is a haven of socialism.
Wrong.
European countries are beehives of capitalism. In fact, capitalism first came of age in England. The emergence of the English middle class signaled the end of the Middle Ages and heralded the dawning of a new sort of Renaissance. The noblesse oblige of France gave way to the noblesse de robe and, by extension, the solid bourgeoisie, or ... middle class. The only vestiges left of socialism are the healthcare systems - eclectic throughout Europe in design - and the public transport systems in each country, which vary from the sublime of France and Germany, to the ridiculously expensive in the UK.
The battle-cry of the some on the Progressive Left, regarding healthcare, is 'single-payer.' Single-payer or nothing. Forget the Third Way (ineffectual at the best of times, in my opinion), single-payer is the only way.
But it's not. And, I ask ... do they understand it? Do they understand that 'free at source' doesn't really mean ... 'free'? When they cry out that 'the government pays, that's what "single-payer" means,' do they understand where the government gets the money to pay for this medical care?
They get it from taxes, which will have to be raised across the board. Not the rich, not corporations. Everyone. Proportionately, yes - after all, to each according to his ability - but raised still.
I've lived under a single-payer system for 28 years. Simply put, on a good day, it works; on a bad day, it sucks. It's the luck of the draw, or rather, the luck of where you live. Live in an area where your local health authority has managed its budget well, and you'll never know a waiting list or anything less than a pristine hospital. Live where the bureaucrats who administer the authority's budget are feckless, and you'll have services cut, waiting lists months long and MRSA-infected hospitals with six-bed, mixed wards.
They'll grudgingly accept a 'public option', a vaguely-expressed version of they hybrid public-private combination popular throughout Southern Europe. This actually makes these sorts seem a bit more sensible. It at least tells me they're aware of the fact that Medicare only covers 80% of medical expenses and extending Medicare for all, would need a private top-up option added. (Of course, this is in opposition to the shills shouting 'Medicare for all' as a single-payer option, without stopping to think that 'Medicare for all' would mean 'all' would have to cough up the balance.
Then there's an idiot, shouting on another site, about getting rid of insurance companies entirely. Entirely. Presumably, this person doesn't drive a car or live in a house, which might burn or be damaged by a storm or hurricane. Presumably, he doesn't travel or own anything of value that might be lost or stolen, much less value his life in the event he has a family for whom provision might have to be made in the unlikely event of his death. Because all of the above would entail insurance, which would mean he would, in the words of the Wicked Witch of the North, kinda sorta, you know, need insurance companies.
Single-payer's the answer. Public option, maybe. Employer-based and co-operatives is a sell-out to Big Pharma and Big Business.
And this is when my head really begins to explode with anger, because in the midst of all this pandemonium, chaos, confusion and outright lies that have dominated the better part of the summer, this lot, the Left, the so-called Progressives, are ready to throw Obama under the political bus, walk away, denounce him as a traitor. Just like that. After 8 months.
I'm sorry, but even if Jesus Christ were the Son of God, even he wouldn't be able to undo in 8 months what it took the asswipes who raped our Constitution and instituted a rule of thuggery 8 years to achieve.
Already, on some sites there is talk of hoping there might be a primary challenge to Obama's leadership in 2012. Who could it be? Some say Hillary, who's repeatedly said she won't run at 65. Some are even hopeful of Ralph Nader, as if the United States would profit from having an 80 year-old at the helm - not to sound ageist, but one would live in hope that his Vice President would be considerably younger.
And these selfsame people sneered at Sarah Palin for being a quitter.
Obama never had the Right. From the getgo, they would always be against him. He's losing the Centre, because the Centre are confused as to what sort of healthcare plan he has in mind; and, quite honestly, that's Obama's fault for not having something, if not concise, at least a concrete, if rudimentary, plan about how to approach this reform. Yet I can understand his reticence to do so, considering the resounding bitchslap the Democratic Congress gave the Clintons in 1993, when they presented a healthcare plan fait accompli.
Obama, the Constitutional lawyer, is making government work the way government should work: Congress was called upon to legislate, to formulate an cost-effective universal healthcare package, even though, as I said on Bill Maher's forum, Congress is, at best, dysfunctional at the moment. It's polarized between the Right wingnut theocrats and a Democratic caucus that's at once high on the fact that they've gained the bully pulpit and suspicious of each of its own diverse factions within itself.
Forgive my Lincoln moment, but a House divided against itself cannot stand (the Democrats), and you can't please all the people all the time (healthcare and the President). Sometimes I think Lincoln was the last sane Republican; and look what happened to Lincoln.
I'm reading James Carville's latest book at the moment, 40 More Years, and one thing strikes me: Throughout the book, Carville refers to the Republicans as just that - 'the Republicans' or 'the Republican Party.' On the other hand, when he speaks of the Democrats, he refers to them as 'the Democratic caucus' or 'the Democratic coalition,' and those epithets ring true. Coalitions are weak at the best of times, and the Democrats are as culturally diverse as America, itself. All you needed to do was scan the sea of faces at each of the national conventions last year. Which one most closely resembled the America you know? And which one looked like the America of the 19th Century?
Exactly.
Earlier this summer, my socio-political muse, Bill Maher, was interviewed by Howard Kurz on CNN. During the interview, Kurz briefly mentioned the tea party phenomenon and the fact that some statements emanating from that movement were veering into the realms of a fascist fantasy. However, this was Freedom of Speech. He asked Bill about the First Amendment, and Bill made a remark that, for lack of a better word than a British one, gobsmacked Howard Kurz. Bill remarked that in travelling about, he noticed a worrying trend amongst younger people, specifically those on college campuses. More than the Right wingnutters, or at least just as much, college students on the Left were calling for a denial of Freedom of Speech. In short, they wanted to squelch dissent. I don't know what baffled and astounded Bill more - the fact that these people wanted to rescind this basic right, or the fact that they clearly were unfamiliar with the Constitution, which is probably why Bill was led to surmise that America was a stupid country.
And that surmisal pains me ... not because I disagree with Bill, because I did, at first; but now I agree. Because I see ignorance on the Left as well as the Right. There's a difference, however. The Right revere Sarah Palin and cult of willful ignorance, which denotes intellectual elitism as something pejorative and not to be trusted. These people revel in what they don't know and wear it proudly as a badge of honour, clinging to their guns and their religion in defence of this.
The Left, well, the Left are like those pseudo-intellectual wannabe high school philosophers - the sort who swanned about the halls of high schools in the early 70s, clutching a copy of Lord of the Rings, whose bookmark never seemed to progress past the first third of the interminably boring story. It looked cool. So now it looks cool to pretend you understand and are familiar with the Constitution, while all the time you know as much about it as the wingnutters from the Right: jack shit.
And it's ok for you to call down the Right as stupid, blind, narrow-minded et al, whilst crying for the Republicans to be silenced on the one hand, and Obama to be sacrificed on the other. Their ignorance is more tragic, for they are blind to it, lost in a forest out of which they can't find their way, because there are simply too many trees.
Their ignorance is an ignorance of arrogance, where their way is the right way and they know better than anyone, irregardless of experience.
As my late mother would say, they won't be told.
People I've met on various internet sites and blogspheres, people from this type of Left, tell me I've been away from the US too long. I'm constantly being told that I don't know my own country, that I don't live here anymore, and, therefore, even though I possess a passport, pay taxes and vote regularly, I've no right to comment upon or even worry about any socio-economic or political situation in the United States. Well, I'll tell you what I DO know.
I know that never before in my sordid life on either side of the Atlantic, have I ever been spurred with a sense of optimism and hope as I was last year during the campaign of Barack Obama. I'd never seen a Presidential candidate that inspired me so much. I was beginning to wonder if any ever would.
My parents came of age during the Great Depression. My father cast his first vote for Roosevelt's second term in 1936; my mother's first vote came four years later when she voted for his third term. Both their families were suffering along with everyone else when Roosevelt told them they had nothing to fear but fear, itself. My dad went to war, and my mother learned to drive and worked his job, for twice the salary he earned. During the war, she and her sisters shut up their various houses and returned to live with my grandparents, so they could pool their ration cards.
Later, they were Kennedy Democrats, and, as a small child, I could sense their excitement when Kennedy won to ask us not what our country could do for us, rather that we should ask what we could do for our country. They grew up and matured under a notion of service and sacrifice, if the time required it. They may have grumbled a bit, but they simply got on with it, and they endured.
In his first show of the 2009 season, Bill touched upon this subject, wondering if the people of today had an inkling of an idea about service to the country, about responding when the President asked for their help in achieving some of the monumental tasks heaped upon him to achieve. Bill was pretty pessimistic about that, reckoning that our society today was lazy; they wanted instant gratification, and they wanted the President to 'do' everything for them to alleviate their suffering without doing anything in return. This was not, reckoned Bill, the same generation as the so-called Greatest Generation.
He's been proven right. This is what we're seeing now. People from both sides of the political coin, turning their back on a gifted, sensitive, caring and intelligent President. Inexperienced, you say? Who has the necessary experience for this Poisoned Chalice? In the past 30 years, we've had a peanut farmer, an actor, a patrician, a philanderer and a dolt. For the first time in my life, it seems as if we have a man in the Oval Office who genuinely cares about the people who've chosen him, as much as he cares about the people who haven't.
He's a human being, a man; he's fallible like we all are. He'll make mistakes and falter, but he's criticized even when he admits error; and he'll falter even more if those of us who voted for him just turn our backs and walk away, along with the birthers, the teabaggers, the Creationists and the old Confederacy. Good company, eh?
Just because they're the jokers on the Right, doesn't mean you should take pride in being the clowns on the Left. Maybe it's time the Democrats stopped falling in love and started falling in line a bit - hey, we could have a party, like, you know ... the Democratic Party.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Life's a Bitch and So Am I
Women.
You either love them, or you hate them.
That's speaking as a woman.
The late George Carlin once said that women were crazy, and men were stupid; but women were crazy because men were stupid. That may be true to a certain extent. The greatest sex appeal a man can have for me comes from sheer intellect and a quick wit. That's why I'd choose Frank Rich anytime over Brad Pitt, but I'm not certain I'm in total agreement with George on this one. Of course, men, at their worst, can be frustrating and even infuriating enough to drive a woman to the verge of a nervous breakdown, yet women have ample ways and means of doing that, and doing it deliberately, to respective other members of their gender.
After all, as the song says, 'Sisters are doing it for themselves.' I'd go one step further and say that sisters are also doing it to themselves.
I've had a love-hate relationship with my own gender since I came into the world, with the end result being that the women I love mean the world to me and the women I dislike, I could easily obliterate.
In the last episode of Real Time with Bill Maher before a hiatus, my spiritual twin interviewed the actress Cameron Diaz, who'd recently made headlines (coincidentally immediately before the release of a film) by saying that, as a woman, she didn't particularly want to have children and wasn't worried about being childless. If she meant this, I applaud her.
Not every woman is meant to be a mother, and no one should assume that all women want to be; neither is motherhood the right of every woman, although there are some women who genuinely believe that. Conversely, there are some women, mostly of the fecund variety, who look upon childless women with varying degrees of pity and disgust, mostly the latter; because most women with children assume that women without children are childless by choice; and that's not always the case.
So, if Cameron were being truthful, I admire her for admitting as much; but the cynic in me doubts that this was anything more than a clever publicity ploy, meant to draw attention to the fact that an ageing ingenue has reached her late thirties, come off a long relationship with a male singer a decade her junior, and is now at an age where she's cast as playing the mother to adolescents. It's an actor's way of throwing our indirect vibes which say, 'Hey, I might be pushing forty, but I'm fun, I'm skinny, I come with no strings, and I'm available.'
It's the last cry of the It Girl.
Besides, she qualified the statement by saying, in the next breath, she could change her mind the moment the right man comes along to sweep her off her feet - someone like George Clooney, Jake Gyllenhaal or one of the Jonas Brothers - or she may decide, in the next couple of years, like Madonna and Angelina, to make a 'Mercy' mission to Africa; so, forgive me, if I take what Miss Diaz says, regarding this subject, with a large, unhealthy portion of salt.
There was another salty section of the twenty-minute interview as well, when the discussion veered onto the subject of women in general. Bill Maher remarked upon the particularly vicious and competitive nature of women, especially in the show business industry, opining that women were 'haters'. Diaz demurred and denied this strongly, asserting that nothing of the sort was true.
Well, I beg to differ.
I happen to think that Bill Maher nailed this one, and I've lived the life to prove it.
All one has to do is look at nature ... 'deadlier than the male' ... 'queen bee' ... 'black widow spider.' All are feminine derivatives and all denote the ugliest sort of power-broker. Women do nothing for women, and a woman in power is the first to break the mold and forget her sisters under the skin.
Margaret Thatcher, in the years she served as Prime Minister of Great Britain, did less to advance the role of women in society and even less to enhance and insure women's rights in the workplace and in the home, than any Prime Minister, either before or after her. Sarah Palin, as Governor of Alaska, charged female rape victims for the cost of the rape kit used in their examinations at hospitals. As a Vice-Presidential candidate, she wanted abortion wiped from the legal statutes, making it a crime, no matter the circumstances of the unwanted pregnancy. Thus, she would have forced victims of rape and incest to carry their children to term; she even went as far as wanting to outlaw contraception. In short, she was denying those of her gender, a choice; yet in the Todd Purdun interview in Vanity Fair recently, we heard Palin voicing uncertainty in wanting to give birth to her fifth child, musing about finding out about her pregnancy whilst out-of-state, and contemplating the fact that, since she was relatively unknown in the area she was visiting, she might just, you know, mosey on down the street to the local abortion clinic and ... well, you know ... So Sister Sarah would have exercised the choice she, as a potential Vice President, would seek to deny to others.
The two worst bosses for whom I've ever worked, both sides of the Atlantic, have been women. The first one was the principal of the junior high school in my home town, where I went to teach after graduating from college. She was known as 'the White Tornado', and she was the wife of a local Baptist clergyman. Years later, I found out she'd been having a lesbian affair with the head of the English department at that school, and between the two of them, they made the faculty's collective life hell on earth. I left after two years, and when I did leave, I managed to find out that that particular school, alone, had a faculty turnaround of 33% each year, mostly due to the atmosphere emanating from the principal's office.
A fish stinks from its head, they say.
My second encounter of feline envy in the workplace occurred in the Nineties, when I was working in publishing in the UK. The editor of the specialist publication, for which I worked, was taking semi-retirement. She nominated, as her successor, a woman who worked in the department, who just happened to be her closest friend; but who was woefully underqualified for the task at hand. She was a German woman, whose English left much to be desired, and the word 'jealousy' was simply invented for her personality. It fit her like a glove. Until that moment in time, I had absolutely no conception at all about what a child, much less an adult, must suffer at the hands of a bully. She humiliated openly, she shouted, she swore; at times, she looked as though she could easily have resorted to violence. She would have made a martinet look like a pansy; and all this was because she was inadequate professionally, knew it, and her pride would not allow her to admit her shortcomings; but pride goeth before the fall, and at the end of her tenure of one year, she was sacked.
Did I mention her staff consisted solely of women? It should come as no surprise.
So when I watched that interview, I was suddenly filled with the urge to find Commander Scott of the starship Enterprise and have him beam me up and over to LA, so I could stride into that studio, excuse myself politely for interrupting and then say, 'Cut the shit, Cameron, and shut up. Bill, you're right. Women are haters. They're bitches, they're competitive, they manipulate, and they do themselves and their gender no favours at all.'
I have worked with women, on both sides of the Atlantic, who've progressed up the ladder of professional success on their backs, and then lorded it righteously over those of us who didn't deem it necessary to compromise our ideals and morals to do so. These poachers then became gamekeepers, having used everything other than professional ability and intelligence to achieve their success. You'll never know how much I pumped the air in triumph last week when Liz Trotta, a conservative columnist, schooled the male cheerleader on Fox News by telling him Sarah Palin had blatantly used her looks and sex appeal to secure every bit of political success she'd garnered, only to have her glaring intellectual inadequacies shown up for the shams that they were.
On this side of the Atlantic, the BBC recently sacked Arlene Phillips, one of the nation's top choreographers and an OBE (who happened to be 66 years old) from the British version of Dancing with the Stars, only to replace her with a former winner of the contest, who's a pretty twenty-something singer (but no trained dancer), in order to attract the youth, sorry yoof audience. Is it no wonder, then, that what women do to themselves, is mirrored in men's treatment of us?
Another hero of mine is Florence King, a southern journalist and writer, who describes herself as a misanthrope. Back in the Seventies, King wrote a book of essays, describint Southern types, called Southern Ladies and Gentlemen. She devoted two lengthy chapters to young Southern womanhood, maintaining that there were basically two types of Southern women: Scarletts and Melanies.
Margaret Mitchell was no fool, and when she wrote her one great literary work, she peopled it with character types whom she'd observed and with whom she'd grown up. It was as realistic a piece of life imitating art as was The Andy Griffith Show in mirroring the lives of the people in a small Southern town.
King described the 'Scarlett girls' in depth. They were always the girls who had to be at the forefront or centre of attention. They may not have been the prettiest girl at the dance, but they were easily the loudest or the ones attracting the most attention. Their manner often belied or masked any deficiencies of character or looks. They were flirts, voracious flirtsl when it came to men and all things masculine; and here's where the Melanie connection comes into play.
Scarletts were like succubi to Melanies. The Melanies were always the humble, little wrenlike girls, the ones who volunteered to man the refreshment committees for the Prom or the Homecoming dances or whatever. Melanies were always polite and pleasant and usually found themselves sitting at home watching The Love Boat alone on a Saturday night.
Scarletts sought out Melanies like magnets seek metal. Every Scarlett needed a Melanie friend. Not only did having a Melanie friend make a Scarlett seem nicer, reasoned King ('Oh, isn't that Ellie May just too nice, the way she's so friendly with that poor plain little Gertrude Lipshitz?'), and thereby make Scarletts seem such sweet-natured women in the eyes of the men they sought to conquer, having a Melanie friend hang out by her side, only emphasised how pretty Scarlett was and how ... plain the other girl was in comparison. I mean, didn't Gidget have LaRue? Didn't Lucy have Ethel? Wasn't Elly May's cousin called Jethrene and looked like a man in drag? (Wait, Jethrene was a man in drag).
Melanies did things out of the goodness of their hearts and natures. Scarletts did things in order to make themselves look good in the eyes of the objects of their desires. Sometimes this worked and sometimes it didn't. Offtimes, you found that the men who bought into this phoniness, at the end of the day, weren't worth entertaining at all. I mean, how can anyone respect someone as shallow as an Ashley Wilkes, who bought the Scarlett act as the real thing, when you could let your hair down and let rip mentally and physically with someone like Rhett Butler and end up looking like the cat that ate the canary, amongst other things?
Myself, I never liked Scarletts, and Melanies bored me to tears. Scarlett girls, mean girls, Heathers, whatever you call them, brought out the natural bitch in me. I was nice to Melanies, but beyond civil pleasantries, I didn't give them too much time of day as well. So I was, like my native state Virginia, in the general scheme of US history, in a 'straddle state' - not quite a Scarlett (in my opinion) and - thank whoever - not a Melanie.
I could bitch and plot with the best of the mean girls, but I couldn't quite bring myself to the point where I played 'dumb' and flirted openly. A quick verbal repartee and exchange of wits was what aroused me in dealing with a man. As far as the other sort of girl, I simply was too selfish enough ever to be that good and pure. Later, Florence King, again, explained this sufficiently for me.
Virginia girls, she opined, were not Southern Belles. They couldn't be, because Virginia was a state born of the Age of Reason and Enlightenment. Virginia girls were taught and taught well, and raised to show and appreciate intelligence. Martha Jefferson spent her last days, copying out passages from Tristram Shandy. We gave the world the first woman to be elected to the British Parliament, Nancy Astor. We claim Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow and Margaret Sullavan. Katie Couric, a Virginian, is the only woman in America anchoring a network news program. We educated Tina Fey. OK, we made some mistakes. Pocahontas married a Brit and died. I like to think I'll learn from her misgotten fortune.
Yet what Florence King so eloquently explained, can't only be applied to Southern women, but to all women in general. Not only are women haters, they are fierce competitors and blatantly subtle users of other women in order to achieve their own ends. As bullies, they used to use psychological cruelty, and in doing so, they hurt far more effectively than their male counterparts, who used their fists and physical force. Now, however, in some parts of the world, the girls are doing the same - and by combining psychological bullying with the physical aspect of it as well, makes them truly deadlier than the male.
The accents might be more airhead Valley Girl than Southern, but the aims are the same.
But, having said, all of the above, I have met, befriended and been befriended by some of the most wonderful women in the world, in my opinion. I'm still the best of friends with two women, whom I've known since grade school. One's a lesbian, and the other is a businesswoman, who runs two businesses non-stop seven days a week. Each time I go back to Virginia, there are several evenings spent with the girls - all-night talkfests, fueled by raspberry ripple icecream as teenagers have been taken over by all-night discussions of everything from politics to local gossip, fueled by Chianti or double gins and tonics. My two best friends from college are the daughter of an Army officer, who, herself, is an FBI agent, and a born-again Christian, who works as a recreational therapist (and who knows better than to foist her beliefs on me, although I'll allow the occasional quiet prayer from her on my behalf; one can't be too cautious). In the UK, I'm friends with a snarky Welshwoman, who's Celtic with a distinctly capital 'C' and a no-nonsense Geordie girl who calls a spade a spade, unflinchingly.
And then there's the wonderful batallion of women I've met via the Internet on a particular forum of interest to us. Intelligent, articulate, informed, perspicacious, of various age groupings and spanning, geographically, from sea to shining sea. Along with my plethora of relatives, they keep what's happening in my country real for me and they've no idea how much they defray the homesickness.
There's even the occasional man in the equation too.
The surprising element about, well, life, as much as femininity, I suppose, is the amount of mellowing a person does as they do get older. I read recently of an encounter between Denis Healy, an elderly Labour statesman in the UK, and Margaret Thatcher, once his political nemesis. Someone noted that, when Healy and Mrs Thatcher met again, when both were elderly, they embraced. Healy noted that as one grows older, one's enemies become one's friends.
That's so true.
Through Facebook, I've started talking with a woman who was a year behind me in high school. Put bluntly, we never liked each other. I always thought she was, in a nutshell, stuck so far up her own ass, she couldn't see the daylight it she tried; but we've been talking pretty civilly for the past few months. A couple of weeks ago, when I was feeling a bit down in the dumps, for some reason, we started a conversation online. First asking about this person and that person, until such a point in time, that we actually agreed to get together for lunch when I'm next home in November. As I was about to log off, she piped up and offered: 'You know, you're really nice; but I was scared shitless of you in high school. You and Sharon and Robin really ran that school your senior year.'
'You what?' I exclaimed. 'I never.'
'But you did!' She insisted. 'You've no idea. EVERYONE bowed to you.'
'NO!' I protested. 'Who was I? I was a geek. I was never the cheerleader or the homecoming queen. Me?'
'You've no idea,' she repeated, insistently. 'It was just YOU, your manner. It wasn't hateful or anything. In fact, I damn well admired it. It was your name, your family, you and Sharon had that antecedent, and Robin got carried along. Believe me, whatever YOU thought about any person, is what everyone else's idea eventually was. And then,' she concluded, 'Y'all left.'
So there I had it - if not from the horse's mouth, then from the mare's, which is far more important. I was a bitch. I had been, all along and unbeknownst to me, a Scarlett woman. For a sheer hundredth of a second, I was genuinely without words. It was as if my breath and all articulace had been suctioned out of me by a hurricane-force wind. Then I remembered this woman had not only feared me, she'd admired me as well. Besides, it was getting late in my evening, I was five hours ahead of her and I wanted to go to bed.
'I may have finished high school, honey,' I typed. 'But I left the baton of bitchiness behind for you. Did you pick it up?' I asked.
'Damn right!' came the reply.
I suppose the key to being a Scarlett woman is simply to embrace your bitchiness and run with it - and always, always seek to use it in a positive way.
Y'all take care now, y'hear?
You either love them, or you hate them.
That's speaking as a woman.
The late George Carlin once said that women were crazy, and men were stupid; but women were crazy because men were stupid. That may be true to a certain extent. The greatest sex appeal a man can have for me comes from sheer intellect and a quick wit. That's why I'd choose Frank Rich anytime over Brad Pitt, but I'm not certain I'm in total agreement with George on this one. Of course, men, at their worst, can be frustrating and even infuriating enough to drive a woman to the verge of a nervous breakdown, yet women have ample ways and means of doing that, and doing it deliberately, to respective other members of their gender.
After all, as the song says, 'Sisters are doing it for themselves.' I'd go one step further and say that sisters are also doing it to themselves.
I've had a love-hate relationship with my own gender since I came into the world, with the end result being that the women I love mean the world to me and the women I dislike, I could easily obliterate.
In the last episode of Real Time with Bill Maher before a hiatus, my spiritual twin interviewed the actress Cameron Diaz, who'd recently made headlines (coincidentally immediately before the release of a film) by saying that, as a woman, she didn't particularly want to have children and wasn't worried about being childless. If she meant this, I applaud her.
Not every woman is meant to be a mother, and no one should assume that all women want to be; neither is motherhood the right of every woman, although there are some women who genuinely believe that. Conversely, there are some women, mostly of the fecund variety, who look upon childless women with varying degrees of pity and disgust, mostly the latter; because most women with children assume that women without children are childless by choice; and that's not always the case.
So, if Cameron were being truthful, I admire her for admitting as much; but the cynic in me doubts that this was anything more than a clever publicity ploy, meant to draw attention to the fact that an ageing ingenue has reached her late thirties, come off a long relationship with a male singer a decade her junior, and is now at an age where she's cast as playing the mother to adolescents. It's an actor's way of throwing our indirect vibes which say, 'Hey, I might be pushing forty, but I'm fun, I'm skinny, I come with no strings, and I'm available.'
It's the last cry of the It Girl.
Besides, she qualified the statement by saying, in the next breath, she could change her mind the moment the right man comes along to sweep her off her feet - someone like George Clooney, Jake Gyllenhaal or one of the Jonas Brothers - or she may decide, in the next couple of years, like Madonna and Angelina, to make a 'Mercy' mission to Africa; so, forgive me, if I take what Miss Diaz says, regarding this subject, with a large, unhealthy portion of salt.
There was another salty section of the twenty-minute interview as well, when the discussion veered onto the subject of women in general. Bill Maher remarked upon the particularly vicious and competitive nature of women, especially in the show business industry, opining that women were 'haters'. Diaz demurred and denied this strongly, asserting that nothing of the sort was true.
Well, I beg to differ.
I happen to think that Bill Maher nailed this one, and I've lived the life to prove it.
All one has to do is look at nature ... 'deadlier than the male' ... 'queen bee' ... 'black widow spider.' All are feminine derivatives and all denote the ugliest sort of power-broker. Women do nothing for women, and a woman in power is the first to break the mold and forget her sisters under the skin.
Margaret Thatcher, in the years she served as Prime Minister of Great Britain, did less to advance the role of women in society and even less to enhance and insure women's rights in the workplace and in the home, than any Prime Minister, either before or after her. Sarah Palin, as Governor of Alaska, charged female rape victims for the cost of the rape kit used in their examinations at hospitals. As a Vice-Presidential candidate, she wanted abortion wiped from the legal statutes, making it a crime, no matter the circumstances of the unwanted pregnancy. Thus, she would have forced victims of rape and incest to carry their children to term; she even went as far as wanting to outlaw contraception. In short, she was denying those of her gender, a choice; yet in the Todd Purdun interview in Vanity Fair recently, we heard Palin voicing uncertainty in wanting to give birth to her fifth child, musing about finding out about her pregnancy whilst out-of-state, and contemplating the fact that, since she was relatively unknown in the area she was visiting, she might just, you know, mosey on down the street to the local abortion clinic and ... well, you know ... So Sister Sarah would have exercised the choice she, as a potential Vice President, would seek to deny to others.
The two worst bosses for whom I've ever worked, both sides of the Atlantic, have been women. The first one was the principal of the junior high school in my home town, where I went to teach after graduating from college. She was known as 'the White Tornado', and she was the wife of a local Baptist clergyman. Years later, I found out she'd been having a lesbian affair with the head of the English department at that school, and between the two of them, they made the faculty's collective life hell on earth. I left after two years, and when I did leave, I managed to find out that that particular school, alone, had a faculty turnaround of 33% each year, mostly due to the atmosphere emanating from the principal's office.
A fish stinks from its head, they say.
My second encounter of feline envy in the workplace occurred in the Nineties, when I was working in publishing in the UK. The editor of the specialist publication, for which I worked, was taking semi-retirement. She nominated, as her successor, a woman who worked in the department, who just happened to be her closest friend; but who was woefully underqualified for the task at hand. She was a German woman, whose English left much to be desired, and the word 'jealousy' was simply invented for her personality. It fit her like a glove. Until that moment in time, I had absolutely no conception at all about what a child, much less an adult, must suffer at the hands of a bully. She humiliated openly, she shouted, she swore; at times, she looked as though she could easily have resorted to violence. She would have made a martinet look like a pansy; and all this was because she was inadequate professionally, knew it, and her pride would not allow her to admit her shortcomings; but pride goeth before the fall, and at the end of her tenure of one year, she was sacked.
Did I mention her staff consisted solely of women? It should come as no surprise.
So when I watched that interview, I was suddenly filled with the urge to find Commander Scott of the starship Enterprise and have him beam me up and over to LA, so I could stride into that studio, excuse myself politely for interrupting and then say, 'Cut the shit, Cameron, and shut up. Bill, you're right. Women are haters. They're bitches, they're competitive, they manipulate, and they do themselves and their gender no favours at all.'
I have worked with women, on both sides of the Atlantic, who've progressed up the ladder of professional success on their backs, and then lorded it righteously over those of us who didn't deem it necessary to compromise our ideals and morals to do so. These poachers then became gamekeepers, having used everything other than professional ability and intelligence to achieve their success. You'll never know how much I pumped the air in triumph last week when Liz Trotta, a conservative columnist, schooled the male cheerleader on Fox News by telling him Sarah Palin had blatantly used her looks and sex appeal to secure every bit of political success she'd garnered, only to have her glaring intellectual inadequacies shown up for the shams that they were.
On this side of the Atlantic, the BBC recently sacked Arlene Phillips, one of the nation's top choreographers and an OBE (who happened to be 66 years old) from the British version of Dancing with the Stars, only to replace her with a former winner of the contest, who's a pretty twenty-something singer (but no trained dancer), in order to attract the youth, sorry yoof audience. Is it no wonder, then, that what women do to themselves, is mirrored in men's treatment of us?
Another hero of mine is Florence King, a southern journalist and writer, who describes herself as a misanthrope. Back in the Seventies, King wrote a book of essays, describint Southern types, called Southern Ladies and Gentlemen. She devoted two lengthy chapters to young Southern womanhood, maintaining that there were basically two types of Southern women: Scarletts and Melanies.
Margaret Mitchell was no fool, and when she wrote her one great literary work, she peopled it with character types whom she'd observed and with whom she'd grown up. It was as realistic a piece of life imitating art as was The Andy Griffith Show in mirroring the lives of the people in a small Southern town.
King described the 'Scarlett girls' in depth. They were always the girls who had to be at the forefront or centre of attention. They may not have been the prettiest girl at the dance, but they were easily the loudest or the ones attracting the most attention. Their manner often belied or masked any deficiencies of character or looks. They were flirts, voracious flirtsl when it came to men and all things masculine; and here's where the Melanie connection comes into play.
Scarletts were like succubi to Melanies. The Melanies were always the humble, little wrenlike girls, the ones who volunteered to man the refreshment committees for the Prom or the Homecoming dances or whatever. Melanies were always polite and pleasant and usually found themselves sitting at home watching The Love Boat alone on a Saturday night.
Scarletts sought out Melanies like magnets seek metal. Every Scarlett needed a Melanie friend. Not only did having a Melanie friend make a Scarlett seem nicer, reasoned King ('Oh, isn't that Ellie May just too nice, the way she's so friendly with that poor plain little Gertrude Lipshitz?'), and thereby make Scarletts seem such sweet-natured women in the eyes of the men they sought to conquer, having a Melanie friend hang out by her side, only emphasised how pretty Scarlett was and how ... plain the other girl was in comparison. I mean, didn't Gidget have LaRue? Didn't Lucy have Ethel? Wasn't Elly May's cousin called Jethrene and looked like a man in drag? (Wait, Jethrene was a man in drag).
Melanies did things out of the goodness of their hearts and natures. Scarletts did things in order to make themselves look good in the eyes of the objects of their desires. Sometimes this worked and sometimes it didn't. Offtimes, you found that the men who bought into this phoniness, at the end of the day, weren't worth entertaining at all. I mean, how can anyone respect someone as shallow as an Ashley Wilkes, who bought the Scarlett act as the real thing, when you could let your hair down and let rip mentally and physically with someone like Rhett Butler and end up looking like the cat that ate the canary, amongst other things?
Myself, I never liked Scarletts, and Melanies bored me to tears. Scarlett girls, mean girls, Heathers, whatever you call them, brought out the natural bitch in me. I was nice to Melanies, but beyond civil pleasantries, I didn't give them too much time of day as well. So I was, like my native state Virginia, in the general scheme of US history, in a 'straddle state' - not quite a Scarlett (in my opinion) and - thank whoever - not a Melanie.
I could bitch and plot with the best of the mean girls, but I couldn't quite bring myself to the point where I played 'dumb' and flirted openly. A quick verbal repartee and exchange of wits was what aroused me in dealing with a man. As far as the other sort of girl, I simply was too selfish enough ever to be that good and pure. Later, Florence King, again, explained this sufficiently for me.
Virginia girls, she opined, were not Southern Belles. They couldn't be, because Virginia was a state born of the Age of Reason and Enlightenment. Virginia girls were taught and taught well, and raised to show and appreciate intelligence. Martha Jefferson spent her last days, copying out passages from Tristram Shandy. We gave the world the first woman to be elected to the British Parliament, Nancy Astor. We claim Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow and Margaret Sullavan. Katie Couric, a Virginian, is the only woman in America anchoring a network news program. We educated Tina Fey. OK, we made some mistakes. Pocahontas married a Brit and died. I like to think I'll learn from her misgotten fortune.
Yet what Florence King so eloquently explained, can't only be applied to Southern women, but to all women in general. Not only are women haters, they are fierce competitors and blatantly subtle users of other women in order to achieve their own ends. As bullies, they used to use psychological cruelty, and in doing so, they hurt far more effectively than their male counterparts, who used their fists and physical force. Now, however, in some parts of the world, the girls are doing the same - and by combining psychological bullying with the physical aspect of it as well, makes them truly deadlier than the male.
The accents might be more airhead Valley Girl than Southern, but the aims are the same.
But, having said, all of the above, I have met, befriended and been befriended by some of the most wonderful women in the world, in my opinion. I'm still the best of friends with two women, whom I've known since grade school. One's a lesbian, and the other is a businesswoman, who runs two businesses non-stop seven days a week. Each time I go back to Virginia, there are several evenings spent with the girls - all-night talkfests, fueled by raspberry ripple icecream as teenagers have been taken over by all-night discussions of everything from politics to local gossip, fueled by Chianti or double gins and tonics. My two best friends from college are the daughter of an Army officer, who, herself, is an FBI agent, and a born-again Christian, who works as a recreational therapist (and who knows better than to foist her beliefs on me, although I'll allow the occasional quiet prayer from her on my behalf; one can't be too cautious). In the UK, I'm friends with a snarky Welshwoman, who's Celtic with a distinctly capital 'C' and a no-nonsense Geordie girl who calls a spade a spade, unflinchingly.
And then there's the wonderful batallion of women I've met via the Internet on a particular forum of interest to us. Intelligent, articulate, informed, perspicacious, of various age groupings and spanning, geographically, from sea to shining sea. Along with my plethora of relatives, they keep what's happening in my country real for me and they've no idea how much they defray the homesickness.
There's even the occasional man in the equation too.
The surprising element about, well, life, as much as femininity, I suppose, is the amount of mellowing a person does as they do get older. I read recently of an encounter between Denis Healy, an elderly Labour statesman in the UK, and Margaret Thatcher, once his political nemesis. Someone noted that, when Healy and Mrs Thatcher met again, when both were elderly, they embraced. Healy noted that as one grows older, one's enemies become one's friends.
That's so true.
Through Facebook, I've started talking with a woman who was a year behind me in high school. Put bluntly, we never liked each other. I always thought she was, in a nutshell, stuck so far up her own ass, she couldn't see the daylight it she tried; but we've been talking pretty civilly for the past few months. A couple of weeks ago, when I was feeling a bit down in the dumps, for some reason, we started a conversation online. First asking about this person and that person, until such a point in time, that we actually agreed to get together for lunch when I'm next home in November. As I was about to log off, she piped up and offered: 'You know, you're really nice; but I was scared shitless of you in high school. You and Sharon and Robin really ran that school your senior year.'
'You what?' I exclaimed. 'I never.'
'But you did!' She insisted. 'You've no idea. EVERYONE bowed to you.'
'NO!' I protested. 'Who was I? I was a geek. I was never the cheerleader or the homecoming queen. Me?'
'You've no idea,' she repeated, insistently. 'It was just YOU, your manner. It wasn't hateful or anything. In fact, I damn well admired it. It was your name, your family, you and Sharon had that antecedent, and Robin got carried along. Believe me, whatever YOU thought about any person, is what everyone else's idea eventually was. And then,' she concluded, 'Y'all left.'
So there I had it - if not from the horse's mouth, then from the mare's, which is far more important. I was a bitch. I had been, all along and unbeknownst to me, a Scarlett woman. For a sheer hundredth of a second, I was genuinely without words. It was as if my breath and all articulace had been suctioned out of me by a hurricane-force wind. Then I remembered this woman had not only feared me, she'd admired me as well. Besides, it was getting late in my evening, I was five hours ahead of her and I wanted to go to bed.
'I may have finished high school, honey,' I typed. 'But I left the baton of bitchiness behind for you. Did you pick it up?' I asked.
'Damn right!' came the reply.
I suppose the key to being a Scarlett woman is simply to embrace your bitchiness and run with it - and always, always seek to use it in a positive way.
Y'all take care now, y'hear?
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Wanted: US President: Train on the Job
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