While I like the point that Rebecca Traister makes in this video---that a feminist campaign wouldn't look that different, only women would be addressed directly as adults---I don't think she goes far enough.
This isn't just any potentially feminist campaign. This is a potentially feminist campaign that needs to win over heartbroken and angry Hillary Clinton supporters who have not only, as is usual, not been dealt with as adults themselves, but have also gotten to watch their candidate of choice being dealt with like a recalcitrant child, or a monstrous creature, rather than an adult human being.
I want to address one particular issue which is essential to the Obama campaign: that of the emotional involvement Clinton's supporters felt and feel for her. The emotion with which Clinton's campaign was greeted by her female supporters should be instructive, and not--as it has been--an item of mockery and contempt. Instructive because when was the last time you saw women voters get that emotionally invested in a campaign, rather than just rationally involved? Women are not, as has been hinted over and over again this year, emotional voters. We have never seen such a public spectacle of respected women leaders getting upset (and often saying stupid things about race) around an election. Women public figures have always behaved with rationality around elections heretofore ... elections of white men.
And the fact that everyone feels so comfortable dismissing the emotion of Clinton supporters (because women always come back to the party fold even when their candidate loses) is a testament to how reliable, valuable, and non-emotional women voters are. So the rage seen in the aftermath of the Clinton campaign must be respected because this is the time when women Clinton supporters' emotions have genuinely been tapped, and the party really could lose supporters if they don't reach out.
And how is the Obama campaign to respect that emotion? Let me point out that the Obama campaign is hands down the most deliberately emotionally engaging campaign I've ever seen. The "Yes We Can" speech? Was there anything rational or wonky in that speech at all? And the sight of will.i.am and his Hollywood buddies getting literally ecstatic while singing along to Obama's words is far and away the most mockable, vulnerable, emotional political spectacle I've ever seen. And that includes Howard Dean's campaign-ending screech and Eminem's "Mosh."
From start to finish, Obama's campaign has been an appeal to emotions: hope, power to the powerless, triumph, unity, healing, peace, justice, renewal, passing of the torch. And he's proven to be a knockout at managing this process of appealing to emotions ... to people's better emotions, instead of the fear, anger, and selfishness that Republican campaigns always appeal to. In fact, this is why he beat Hillary. Because Hillary's advantage, which was also largely emotional (nostalgia for the nineties, attachment to the Clintons, desire for a woman president, etc.) was squandered in her campaign's attempt to sell her as serious, rational, and wonky.
So why isn't the Obama campaign drowning Clinton supporters in emotion the way they've been drowning men, young people, and people of color in hope, etc? Why doesn't Obama get his ass out there and give a rousing "Yes She Can" speech? Why do the particularities of over half the population as a group get short, or no, shrift with Obama? The longer his passion goes on being silent on women's issues, the more sexist, uncaring, and disrespectful of Clinton supporters he looks. And there will be a point at which he can't come back from this.
To be more specific: The "issues" page on Obama's website doesn't have a "women" section. You have to go into the issues menu to find the page on women. And the page that deals with women's issues is the driest, wonkiest page on his whole website. It's thorough, sure, but completely uninspiring. We've been hearing progressive candidates mentioning all this stuff within our hearing, for our benefit, for decades now, and seen no movement on these issues. Spouting the standard issues is the prerequisite. What we really need is for the candidate who most benefited from the misogyny directed at Hillary to show passion about women's issues specifically, and to engage our passions.
And this is pretty fuckin' weak stuff. What, you couldn't spare more than two sentences, one of them run-on, to woo 18 million voters?
I'm still insulted, and the longer this crap goes on, the more insulted by Obama's campaign I'll be. If you can't be bothered to treat with me and 18 million others when it matters this much, why should I trust that you'll represent my interests when the campaign is over? I'm waiting.
Just finished watching the John Adams miniseries, which is terrific.
A lot is going on this week. Aside from all that, I'm realizing how wearing it is to participate emotionally in this election.
The Carl Brandon Society did a panel at Wiscon about identity intersectionality in an election year. It was called "Some of Us Are Brave" and focused on African American women.
That's how I've been thinking of intersectionality, too, and not really applying it to myself. At the same time, though, I've seen Asian Americans as a group called out for supporting Clinton, called racist. I've seen white feminists as a group called racist for supporting Clinton. I've seen my male friends, Asian Am and otherwise, supporting Obama and giving Clinton's Iraq War vote--and nothing else--as a reason. At the "Some of Us Are Brave" panel I've had a middle-aged male Asian American Obama supporter try to school me on how to manage Asian American activism--something I've been doing for ten years. And this week I got called out by an older feminist for disagreeing on a minor matter, and again schooled on issues I've been discussing and acting on for twenty years.
And another thing: I've gotten no second of public space to enjoy the ascendence of our first biracial presidential nominee because absolutely everyone, from white Republican to black Democrat and back again, is deeply invested in reading Obama as just black (except when it suits their agendas not to), despite the extremely nuanced reading of his own identity that he's offered the whole world for years now. I don't get to feel a kinship with him based on that.
I am extremely dissatisfied with every party, every Democratic campaign, and the behavior of every group of supporters in this election. There is no group, no campaign, and no candidate who has not been treated unfairly in public, and who has not also treated someone else unfairly. And because of the multiplicity of my own identity, group belonging, and loyalty, I have been able to come down nowhere.
My loyalty to Clinton has been treated as racist and suspect, because of hatred of Clinton herself, because of the stupidity of Clinton's supporters, and because of my own identities: my Asianness, my whiteness, my non-blackness, my gender, and my age. If Clinton had lost fair and square, i.e. not because she's a woman, I would be now recovering my joy at Obama's candidacy. But I feel no joy whatsoever, because I feel that every part of my public, political self has been attacked from one angle or another.
And it goes on even now. It's as if there's no joy anywhere at Obama's win, because we've already built up too much bitterness. The racial and gender watchdog machines are on red alert, the racial and gender offense-taking machines are white hot from cranking out product, but where are the liberal joy machines?
This is not all that's going on and stinking up my week. But it's a big chunk. I think I'm going to try ... try ... and take a break from politics for a week or two. Maybe that'll lighten things up a bit.
So, after being bitchy about Michelle Obama last week, I finally sat down and watched Hillary's whole Obama endorsement speech. I'd been avoiding it without noticing that I was actively avoiding it. This is how out of touch with my own feelings I am: the moment Hillary walked onto the stage in the video, I literally burst into tears and continued sobbing sporadically throughout the entire speech. I completely surprised myself.
It's been a long campaign already.
It was what I wrote earlier about my experience of Hillary that triggered it. See, Hillary is my Hillary. She came onto the scene in a big way in early 1992, which was when I was getting ready to graduate from college and go out into the world and ... do what? We'd drained our already compromised coffers with a pointless war, added immeasurably to the national debt, and the economy was in the toilet. There were no jobs for kids fresh out of college.
Plus, we'd been at war barely a year before. The frenzy of that time and its immediate aftermath, the protests, the car-horn fights on the streets over bumper stickers, wondering if my friends were really going to be drafted, feeling utterly betrayed by my leaders in a very visceral and immediate way ... all of that exhausted the part of me that engaged in public life.
The war was a capper on a very long 12 years of incredibly damaging, nation-changing Republican rule. I'd been brought up at constant odds with the culture around me. My entire adolescence and young adulthood had been about being politically and even morally under the public gun. I couldn't bear thinking about entering adulthood in that atmosphere of hostility to everything that was important to me.
Does any of this sound familiar to you young Obama supporters out there?
By 1992 I didn't care anymore, and, in fact, left the country four days before the election. (I voted early, of course.) I didn't come back for six years.
But something else that happened in 1992 was that I got to meet Hillary. My parents are heavily involved Dems in their Midwestern town, so when Hillary did a charter plane tour of the Midwest to visit local party stalwarts, my folks got an invite. They brought me along.
The deal was that the local Dems would bring out the folks to the lobby of the chartered plane terminal at the local airport--usually a prettied up hangar--get their name tags on, entertain them with refreshments and local politicians (this was the first time I was ever glad-handed and it freaked me out), and then line them up along the wall when Hillary's plane landed. Hillary would step off the plane, go into the lobby, walk around the rectangle of people, shaking hands, get back on the plane, and go to the next town. She could hit five or six towns a day, if not more.
And the whole thing went off without a hitch. I got smarmed by local candidates, I ate some kraft cheeze on crackers, and then stood against the wall. Hillary appeared, short and smart in her pastel suit, headband in place (remember the headband, ladeez?) and started her circumlocution. She was good at it. When she got to me she managed to get my name without appearing to look at my name tab. "Hello, Claire," she said, and shook my hand, looking me right in the eye.
Hillary's the only politician I ever fell in love with, so I have nothing to compare it to. Of course, it's not like falling in love, but the only language we have for our intensely personal feelings for a public figure is the language of love and seduction. She "seduced" us with her charisma---and folks, let there be no doubt about it, the woman is dripping with charisma. It takes a charismabomb like Obama to make her look bloodless by comparison. Remember, she even held her own standing next to Bill Clinton, and that man radiates from a distance of a football field. It's why she sets so many men's teeth on edge: that's how you feel about a person you hate, whose charisma is unavoidable.
And anybody who wants to say that in 1992 Hillary was touring the country by herself as a wife and not a politician in her own right can go fuck themselves with a chainsaw. That was why Hillary was so profoundly hated by men from the git-go: because she and Bill offered her as a co-politician, not a wife. She helped get Bill into office and then was resented for doing so.
But more than her qualities as a politician (charisma and the ability to command loyalty, interest and collaboration among her colleagues, which, let's face it, she has in spades) it was the fact that she was outspokenly feminist at at time when the backlash against the women's movement in the 70's hadn't quite died down yet. She changed the paradigm of the First Lady. She drew attention to her own career and skillsets. She wasn't a helpmeet; she was a partner, at a moment in history when our culture was struggling to find a term for "life partner" that could apply to both women and men, both married and unmarried couples. She was a partner in every sense of the word. And she was the first First Lady who was a Ms.
Let's remember how important language and naming were in the Clintons' campaign. Hillary insisted on being called "Hillary Rodham Clinton," making it clear on a sub-verbal level that the "Clinton" part was the compromise, not the "Rodham" part. This is why she became "Hillary" to the nation at large--both to her supporters and her detractors: she was using language and naming protocols still too new in the mainstream culture for people to be comfortable with, so they stuck to her first name. Even this was a triumph: she did an end-run around people's feelings and got them on a first-name-basis with her out of sheer discomfort. From there on out, even the most vitriolic attack had a slight ring of familiarity, of affection, to it.
I can't tell you how profound having Hillary center mainstream was for me. I was just 22 when Bill secured the nomination and Hillary declared her cookielessness. The female-empowerment I was raised with was turning into a feminism that I didn't quite know what to do with. I was discovering that while I shared the concerns of my male friends--concerns that didn't always affect me directly--they were not sharing my concerns, even those that DID affect them directly, like reproductive rights.
I had no public leadership in these concerns. Don't get me wrong: there were the Gloria Steinems and the Camille Paglias (I love that she's so passé now; she wasn' t then), but they were considered either tokens from the margin, or special interest leaders. Hillary was the first outspoken feminist at the center. She was also the first Baby Boomer at the center, not a coincidence. To have my opinions and concerns reflected back at me for the first time in my life from the campaign stump---to see a person on the stump who "looked like me" in a profound way, who respected and shared my beliefs about myself---created a revolution in my thinking about politics, my nation and its possibilities, and even about who I was in the world.
I was a young woman in 1992 looking for a place in a world that had changed a great deal, but hadn't yet finished changing to accommodate me. And Hillary's leadership changed my view of how the world could work.
Does any of this sound familiar to you young Obama supporters out there?
If I was 22 now, I might well be feeling the same way about Obama. But I'm 38 now, and I don't believe that I'm young enough in mind to ever feel that way about a politician again. That so many of my male cohorts DO feel this way about Obama saddens me. It tells me that they never got to fall in political love when they were young enough to do it. They've had to wait too long. Their love is now tinged with an ugly bitterness: they couldn't, perhaps were not allowed to, love Hillary when they were young, and now hate her for trying to interfere with their overripe love for Obama.
I never realized that Hillary was a wedge driven between me and my male cohorts back then, because wedges start out in a tiny crack. It isn't until the wood splits that you can even really see the division. I can't ever care about Obama as much as I care about Hillary because Hillary has been with me for sixteen years. She's been a light on the political landscape for sixteen years. She's been my Hillary for all my adult life. Obama made a speech three and half years ago, two years ago started scrabbling at the position that my Hillary has been earning for two decades, and suddenly, I'm supposed to love him?
But I don't think men of my generation or older can love Obama as much as they hate Hillary, and for the same reason. They've been threatened by her for sixteen years. Part of Obama's appeal during this campaign has been that he has a chance of defeating a very strong Hillary. They'll never admit it, these men who have been living with Hillary, as I have, for sixteen years, but their votes until now have been as much a not-Hillary vote as they are an Obama vote.
My anger is the anger of someone who has looked around her and seen that her peers, her partners in the world, the men of her cohort, do NOT share her values ... not really. (I'm not talking about the fringe that constitutes my social circle. We're all freaks here.) But my sadness is all directed at myself. I did not acknowledge, did not even realize, how much Hillary meant to me personally until it was too late. I was intimidated by the loathing men I used to respect unleashed in public. Even while I saw how wrong it was, I allowed myself to be mealy-mouthed in supporting Hillary.
And I allowed the people of color who supported Obama, both men and women, to intimidate me with their covert and overt accusations of racism directed at all Clinton supporters. (Again, not necessarily those of my freakish fringe.) I have always refused to tacitly support the idea that a person's argument is only as good as their identity by refusing to present my credentials before I speak. But I've allowed myself to be afraid in this debate that my identity and my decade of full-time anti-racism work would not be enough. And I did not speak out clearly enough that this woman of color supported and loved Hillary.
My male liberal cohorts did not betray Hillary. They've always been clear about hating her. They betrayed ME, but that's almost another story. My sadness is that I'm the one who betrayed Hillary ... because all of this hatred--all of this hatred from liberals towards a successful, strong liberal ALLY--hurt and intimidated me and succeeded in making me less effective than I know I can be. I let it go too much, and I suspect I'm not the only one who did. And perhaps my failure in strong advocacy is what made the tiny percentage point differences that lost Hillary the nomination.
Feminists intimidated by male hatred into advocating their cause less strongly. Is there a more powerful argument for the continuing effectiveness of misogyny than that?
So last week, I mourned Hillary's lost chance, and my lost chance, the way I should have celebrated it while it was still alive. And I'm writing about it this week so that I can put it away in time to get the Obama campaign on the clue train. Yeah, that's right, I'm not asking if they want me ... I'm not asking at all. I'm there and they're going to listen to what I have to say about gender issues and what the fuck have they been thinking for the past year and half.
I might even write them an open letter. We'll see.
Beyond Christian's deplorable reference to Obama as an "inadequate
black male" was a wail worth hearing. She also said, "I'm proud to be
an older American woman!" I can feel her pain. Reading the sexist
attacks on Clinton and her white female supporters, as well as on
female journalists and bloggers who've occasionally tried to defend her
or critique Obama, has been, well, consciousness-raising. Prejudice
against older women, apparently, is one of the last non-taboo biases.
I've been stunned by the extent to which trashing Clinton supporters as
washed up old white women is acceptable. A writer whose work I respect
submitted a piece addressed to "old white feminists," telling them to
get out of Obama's way. I've found my own writing often dismissed not
on its merits (or lack thereof) but because as a woman who will turn 50
in September, I'm supposed to be Clinton's demographic. Salon's letters
pages, as well as the comments sections around the blogosphere, are
studded with dismissive, derisive references to bitter old white women.
Once I heard Walsh invoking the words of two bigots to make her point,
I checked out. Physician heal-thy-mutherfucking-self. Ferraro is the
same woman who argued that "racial resentment" was OK. Walsh apparently
thinks Harriet's description of Obama as an inadequate black male, "was
a wail worth healing." I'm physically sick reading that. I never much
agreed with Walsh's take on the Clinton's, but for my money, she just
fell into Pat Buchanan territory. Anyone who thinks there's something
to take from someone who says it's fine to resent black people
racially, who claims that there's something worth hearing in describing
the first black man to ever win a major party's nomination as "an
inadequate black male" is the moral equivalent of a racist to me.
Oh, HELL NO. Walsh specifically said beyond the deplorable "inadequate black male" comment was a wail worth hearing. It is NOT OKAY to twist that into her saying that "inadequate black male" is a wail worth hearing. That's just plain stupid. Walsh was VERY CLEARLY saying that these women had a message about sexism that was obscured by their racism, and NOT that their racism was okay.
And pointing out that a woman who is a forty-year democratic party stalwart, as well as a woman who is the nation's first female vice presidential candidate, might have something apropos to say about sexism in elections despite their manifest racism, does NOT put Walsh into the lunatic fringe. There are few women out there being loud and passionate about the sexism in this campaign who aren't outright Clinton supporters and, racist or not, all white women Clinton supporters have been accused of implicit racism in this election at one time or another. To say that a woman who approves the gender message of a racist commenter is herself beyond the pale is tantamount to an attempt to silence the debate on sexism in this election.
I'm sooooo sick of hearing people say that racism puts people completely beyond the pale ... that the moment somebody says something racist, you simply don't have to listen to them anymore. People can be--and usually are--vastly ignorant about everybody else's oppression, but very clear and articulate about their own. The poor whites who blame undocumented immigrants for their own bad education and healthcare and underemployment are obnoxious not because their situation isn't truly bad, but because they're blaming it on the wrong people. And ignoring the whole complaint because of its racism is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
This is EXACTLY the attitude that led to Obama's stupid and arrogant bitter white people comment. This is exactly the attitude that puts educated, powerful blacks like Obama beyond the sympathy of poor and working class, less-educated whites. If Obama is going to win, not only does he have to stop making bitter white people comments, but his supporters have to stop ignoring the desires of people tainted with the racism brush, since they make up the majority of voters.
If a misogynistic black man can be both held to account for his misogyny, and also listened to for his experience of racism, then racist white women who have just been treated to the year-long public spectacle of a wealthy, powerful, and respected white politician publicly pilloried by men of all races because she is a woman can be both held to account for their racism, and MUTHERFUCKING LISTENED TO for their experience of sexism.
And just like non-blacks don't get to tell blacks when they've crossed the line in their frustration with racism, MEN DO NOT GET TO TELL WOMEN when they've crossed the line in their frustration with sexism. If Coates wants to analyze, instruct, or ream Ferraro and Christian for their racism, more power to him. And yes, it's time for them to shut up. But to dismiss the just protest against manifest and obvious sexism made by these women is not okay. And it's not okay to dismiss Walsh's argument because she jumps off of Ferraro's and Christian's comments.
Coates says further:
I want to see Barack Obama out there courting the vote of all women. I
want to see him talking specifically about what his plans are. But I've
got no interest in seeing him court those who would use feminism, as a
cover for their own blackaphoic views. Later for them. Let them vote
McCain, and go join the party where bigotry is part of the platform.
The rest of us have a country to save.
HUNH? Does Coates really think that Ferraro's and Christian's public brainfarts were about how afraid they are of black men? Their feminism isn't anything but a cover for their racism? Wow, that's gotta be the most sexist thing I've heard all year.
DUDE, IT'S NOT ABOUT YOU. I know it's shocking, but sometimes, even in a world Obama inhabits, even in an election that includes your wannapund ass, race isn't the thing people are focused on. These women are angry about a woman NOT getting elected, they're not really angry about a black man GETTING elected. They're blaming it on a black man getting elected, because they need something to strike out at, and this is something new that they don't understand. But their passion is all about the wimminz. Shockingly enough, they're passionate about THEMSELVES, NOT YOU.
Of course it's not okay for them to be striking out in this racist manner. And yes, they need to be called out for it. And yes, Ferraro and Christian need to shut up, now. They've lost their right to the talking stick because they can't seem to hold it without being racist. But let's be clear: if the race had been between Clinton and Edwards and the same thing had happened, the same campaigns had been run minus the racial element, Ferraro and Christian, not to mention Gloria Steinem, would be making just as loud public statements about the sexism of the campaign, and would be just as angry. And rightfully so.
At the end of the day, a woman's racism will not buffer her from
misogyny. DO NOT tell me or anyone else that racism somehow makes a
woman's testimony about sexism worthless. And Walsh does get to point this out because SHE'S got the talking stick.
I swear to you, I swear, Geraldine Ferraro is on either the McCain payroll, or crack. Observe (emphases all mine):
Here we are at the end of the primary season, and the effects of racism
and sexism on the campaign have resulted in a split within the
Democratic Party that will not be easy to heal before election day.
Perhaps it's because neither the Barack Obama campaign nor the media
seem to understand what is at the heart of the anger on the part of
women who feel that Hillary Clinton was treated unfairly because she is
a woman or what is fueling the concern of Reagan Democrats for whom
sexism isn't an issue, but reverse racism is.
Note the lack of scarequotes around "reverse racism." Yes, she's using the term seriously. It gets worse:
As for Reagan Democrats, how Clinton was treated is not their issue.
They are more concerned with how they have been treated. Since March,
when I was accused of being racist for a statement I made about the
influence of blacks on Obama's historic campaign, people have been
stopping me to express a common sentiment: If you're white you can't
open your mouth without being accused of being racist. They see Obama's
playing the race card throughout the campaign and no one calling him
for it as frightening. They're not upset with Obama because he's black;
they're upset because they don't expect to be treated fairly because
they're white. It's not racism that is driving them, it's racial
resentment. And that is enforced because they don't believe he
understands them an their problems. That when he said in South
Carolina after his victory "Our Time Has Come" they believe he is
telling them that their time has passed.
Wow. Just ... wow. I almost wanted to write that she doesn't get it, but she does get it ... or would be getting it if she were writing those words on behalf of blacks instead of random, unnamed whites. But wait, there's more:
Whom he chooses for his vice president makes no difference to them.
That he is pro-choice means little. Learning more about his bio doesn't
do it. They don't identify with someone who has gone to Columbia and
Harvard Law School and is married to a Princeton-Harvard Law graduate.
His experience with an educated single mother and being raised by
middle class grandparents is not something they can empathize with.
They may lack a formal higher education, but they're not stupid. What
they're waiting for is assurance that an Obama administration won't
leave them behind.
Seriously? What does she think she's doing here? Telling people what to think? Fortunately, as we discovered during Hillary's campaign, nobody's listening. Will somebody please shut her up before anyone starts?
And to think, I voted for her. Well, no I didn't, really, only in my high school fake election. But still.
there's an internet brouhaha going on over a girl -- word used advisedly -- named Rachel Moss, who went to WisCon and posted a con report on Something Awful with pictures of mostly fat and transgendered participants, taken without permission, making fun of these people for their non-normativity. She apologized, then took her apology back. She took her post down, but someone else put it back up without her permission and a dogpile of cretins jumped in to finish the work. By the time they were done, they pulled WisCon photos off of Flickr to add to the mess, making fatphobic, transphobic, ablist, racist, and generally misogynist comments about a wide variety of individuals, many of whom are my friends, and all of whom are at least nominally my allies, by virtue of being WisCon attendees who treat others with the modicum of respect required for this Con. There's a link to a mirror of the original post at Angry Black Woman, who is also calling for people to post about this and make sure Rachel Moss' name is well connected to this on the internet.
I don't care about Rachel Moss -- the culprit here -- and I'm happy to see her banned from WisCon, but I'd be just as happy to see her show up again and get snubbed and hissed as she deserves. I doubt very much she'll even try to come back. Apparently she's on the public (blogging) record as having an eating disorder of her own--bulimia--which makes this attack both more understandable and more disgusting. I'd ask that no one who comes through this post attack Rachel Moss for her eating disorder--that's her problem--but rather for her unacceptable behavior regarding WisCon.
I have the advantage of having been an extremely close friend for 18 years of a woman who suffers from Cushing's Disease, a disease that affects women disproportionately, and that actually makes women fat. I got to see her develop from a physically healthy and average-sized petite 20-year-old into an obese woman in her late twenties, without any "normal" reasons for the change. I got to watch her fight misogynist doctors and careless HMOs for over a decade before she could get someone to diagnose her with the often fatal disease she already knew she had. I got to see total strangers casually call her "lardass" and suchlike on the street, dropping bombs on her when they weren't even in a bad mood (I get the bombs usually when the bombers are in a bad mood), simply because that's what you do with a fat woman.
And we're talking about a woman whose obesity was very definitely not "her fault."
But then I've also gotten to see in close friends the effects of early abuse and early eating disorders pushed upon them by family members (I tend to think pushing eating disorders on a child is abuse, but the abuse I'm talking about was often from someone else, and far more serious and devastating than even eating disorders). If these people "made themselves" obese by overeating, what person who knew the kind of childhood they had, the kind of families they have, could possibly blame them or say that their eating was their own fault?
And who the fuck are these people to take it upon themselves to decide that someone deserves to be openly hated -- and to hate themselves -- for a body that they did not choose? Thinking about it makes me want to cry in a way that thinking about all the bullshit that actually touches my own life --- the racism, the stupidity about multiraciality, the neverending aggression I get from men for being tall, and all the put-downs I've had from misogynists --- does not make me want to cry.
My feminism, my antiracism, my refusal to allow total strangers to get me to agree that my tall woman's body is abnormal, all of these empower me. But watching fat people get smacked down makes me want to cry because while most of me is an ally, a small part of me still tugs me towards the smack-down crew, and how can we fight this when I'm also the enemy?
There's still a little voice in my head that agrees with such awful people as Rachel Moss when they say awful things about fat people. I've come close many times to stomping that little voice out, but it's a tough one. It's the same voice that tells me I'm fat, but it's okay as long as other people are fatter. I know a lot of you out there know that voice, even if you won't admit it.
Rachel Moss knows that voice, only she has completely failed--if she ever tried--to stomp it out. She's let that voice take over, and it's a monster's voice. That's what she's turned into for the time being: a monster, who's projected her hatred of her own body onto the bodies of others, to get some relief. Who can really doubt that that's what's happening with women who hate on fat women?
And who can doubt that that's what's happening with women who hate on disabled people? I read the blog of a friend every day who posts about how much pain she's experienced that day and whether or not--and for how long--she was able to stand before having to resort to her wheelchair. Her blog strikes me dumb because nothing I experience puts me in such physical pain and I can't even properly imagine it. And some ... god I don't have bad words enough to express it, let me resort to other languages ... some turtle's egg, some drecksau posted a picture of her in her wheelchair and called her a "cripple" and someone else hoped she'd get cancer and undergo chemo so she could cosplay Charles Xavier.
I'm actually crying with rage as I write this. I don't think I can dig deeper into the comments on that post to find the extraneous shit. So far they've turned a picture of a (black) friend of mine into an icon with the tag "100% N*gger" on it, hoped that a Muslim woman's head gets chopped off, and ... I'm not continuing with this filth. Who are these people? And will someone who knows how to do this
please let the rest of us know how to get them kicked off the social networking services they're using so we don't have to hear about their shit anymore?
But all you need to know about shame and cowardice is that every one of those losers posting in comments is hiding behind a username and icon, and every single one of the women they are making fun of is out in the open on the internet.
I'm closing comments on this post because I'm just passing the word on.
I'll be the first to admit that I never pay my credit card bill on time. But that's not really a problem for banks. As long as you pay it, they benefit from the late fees and extra interest.
Nevertheless, I add this as a caveat before I go ahead and ream my credit card bank.
I'm with an Omaha bank through no fault of my own. My mom co-signed for a credit card for me way back in college with my parents' Michigan mom 'n' pop bank, which then got bought up by a bank in Florida, which then got bought up by First National Bank of Omaha.
I've had problems with them not communicating with me before (they like to do everything by mail, even though I've told them I don' t have a secure mailbox. When my old card expired and a new card arrived, it didn't, and I had to yell over the phone over the course of two weeks to get a new card) and they should, by now, be calling me if I have a problem, but I guess they don't care enough about credit card fraud.
So I go to reserve a car with citycarshare last night and they tell me my account has been disabled for nonpayment. So I go to the Omaha website and see that my payments, for once, are up to date. WTF? So I call them and THAT'S how I find out that SOMEONE called in "a problem" with my credit card, prompting them to send me a new card--with the same number but a new expiration date and security code--without calling me first.
This was well over a week ago and I got neither the notice, nor the new card. Clearly, they've been stolen.
Let's just take a step back, shall we? I realize that credit card banks have to take all such calls seriously, and I realize that they must know about the kinds of frauds perpetrated in this manner (the most common of which is somebody calling in a lost or stolen card, whose number they conveniently can't remember, on someone with an unsecured mailbox; then waiting until the replacement card is sent and grabbing it).
But you can take such a call seriously AND STILL CALL YOUR CUSTOMER ON THE PHONE TO INFORM THEM OF THE CIRCUMSTANCES. Unless, of course, you're trying to save money and don't care if you screw your customers doing so.
After your customer has had problems receiving her new credit card because of an unsecured mailbox, don't you make a note of that on your customer's record and treat her case differently the next time there's an issue? After all, any money they might lose to a fraudster is money THEY have to swallow themselves. They can't blame me for it.
I guess they must have done a cost-benefit ANALysis and decided that it would cost them less to lose a certain amount to fraud than to keep enough phone operators on board to call customers in these circumstances. I guess that's why credit card commercials make such a big deal about platinum card members getting a call when something bad happens ... because nobody else does.
In any case, it's high time I started looking for a new credit card company. Any suggestions?
... for the following, popular (and in most cases, incorrect) terms and usages?
garner: as in her novel garnered praise. Yuck. This is only used to talk about pop culture reviews. Why would you use a word that only refers to pop culture reviews? Pop culture reviews are disgusting and pointless. I should know, I write a lot of them. But I never garner. I NEVER garner. Nor should you.
(noun or pronoun) and I: used accusatively or datively. I'm fine with You and I went to the store, since that is, in fact, correct. But Do you want Keanu and I to bring anything to your luau? is right out, because it's wrong. Whenever you're about to do this, stop, and remove the "______ and" part and just leave the "I" part. Then, if it sounds right, go ahead. If it sounds wrong, fix it. I went to the store is clearly right. Do you want I to bring anything to your luau? is clearly wrong, unless you're from the Caribbean.
beg the question: used to mean raise the question. Raising the question is exactly what it sounds like. Begging the question is a silly, hoity-toity philosophy thing that nobody understands. It has something to do with circular arguments, and doesn't have an object. That is to say, you can't "beg the question that _______," you can only "beg the question."
... is, is that ...: as in The reason is, is that I don't ever think before I speak. People, people, there's only ever one "is" in a sentence. Yes there are exceptions but YOU will never need them. The reason is COMMA that I actually do know what I am talking about. God, that drives me nuts! Where did the second "is" come from?
peak: instead of "peek" or "pique." People, a "peak" is a high, pointy thing, like at the top of a mountain or a hairdo. "To peek" is to take quick, stealthy glance. "To pique" is a French word meaning to anger or to excite or arouse a feeling in someone. So when you're writing your personals ad, you should write, Your post about your pink, patent-leather dungeon piqued my interest. A movie preview is a "sneak peek."
cut and dry: arrrggghh! It's cut and dried, people! Past Tense! The past tense of "cut" is "cut." It means something is set, determined, will not grow or change. As in flowers that have been cut and dried. If you say "cut and dry," that's present tense, it's a command. Basically you're TELLING someone to go cut and dry whatever it is that you're talking about. That makes no sense! Arrrggghhh!
The post argues that article II of the treaty does American interests "harm," although it never specifies what that harm is. Apparently, because article II was intended to restrict funding to NASA (and succeeded), that means we should repudiate it now.
Now we find ourselves in an entirely different world. The Soviet Union is no more. Mars, it
turns out, has far more water than we previously suspected: enough to support colonies, and even programs aimed at giving it a climate more hospitable to humans. The reward for going to Mars has increased dramatically.
Um, okay ... and what was that reward again? I mean, aside from learning how to keep people who leave Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field for extended periods from dying of radiation sickness? Or maybe giving science fiction writers more jazz? Or maybe sheer excitement?
People, people, we're not looking at a viable alternative living space here. To terraform Mars would require more Earth resources than it would produce or maintain ... probably ever. The potential mineral resources might be attractive ... assuming the iron and nickel are even there in a useful form ... if we needed iron and nickel that badly ... which we don't. But we don't know how to power spaceships without fossil fuels--something that we may well run out of in the next century--and transportation of any resources from Mars would far outcost the resources themselves.
How can conservatives NOT understand the liberal tendency to see them as crazy, greedy, and pathologically nationalistic, when a typical conservative response to a renewal of funding in space exploration is a call to claim sovereignity over unviable and as-yet unreachable territories in contravention of law, common sense, and even imagination?
I want to hit my head against a wall repeatedly, but this attitude is exactly what I need to understand for da nobble, which of course takes place on a Mars already claimed as a territory by the US.
***** UPDATE
oo. Missed this is in the first sweep. Here's an actual PIRG guy (albeit from Texas) advocating the creation of an International Agency for the Development of Mars to enable the selling of Martian territory to private individuals to spur the development and settling of human colonies on Mars.
Again, why? I dunno, but this guy gives more of an answer than the previous dudes:
The IADM should be structured so as to allow ordinary citizens to
purchase land shares and prevent all of the shares from being gobbled
up by governments and corporations. If this is successfully done, I
think it’s possible that we will see a rebirth of a social drive which
has been largely extinct for the last century: the push for the
frontier. In an increasingly bland, stratified, and commercialized
world, the desire to strike out on one’s own, to build a new home even
in a harsh and unforgiving environment, will again come to the fore. By
mid-century, I wouldn’t be surprised to see restless and adventurous
people, the spiritual descendents of the American pioneers, buying
Martian land with the full intention of settling it themselves.
Why now? Well, because our world is "increasingly bland, stratified, and commercialized," and the best solution to this is to create a new frontier and get our manifest destiny flowing again, not, you know, to use our imaginations or to fix our problems or anything.
I've just about given up on the left-side Clinton/Obama debate being anything approximating rational.
Obama has impressed me recently with his whorish ability to please opposing types of Democrats simultaneously, and I'm hopeful that this could translate into effective executive skills, although with Obama we just won't know until we know.
But I've almost stopped caring in any case because Obama-supporting online wannapunds have utterly failed to notice how brilliantly whorish--rather than brilliant--his race speech was, and continue to accuse the Clinton camp of the same kind of whorishness, broadly accusing them of racism while refusing to use the word.
Lately people have been saying that "Clintonhasgonetoo far." Interestingly enough, everybody who expresses this sentiment uses the exact same words. Also interestingly, many of the "gone too far" purporters have identified wildly different incidents as the straw that broke the camel's back. (Some otherwise smart commentatoresses have actually taken issue with Hillary questioning Obama's experience and credentials, as if a presidential candidate's experience and credentials are somehow not fair game. Seriously?)
And many of them have simply not bothered to identify where and how, exactly, Hillary went too far. So where, actually, did Hillary go too far? Or was it Bill who went too far? Is there a difference in people's minds? (And, btw, do I still need to explain why it's a problem to take issue with Bill and blame it on Hillary?)
And most importantly, do you really think they arrived at this opinion independently?
I'm remembering a time I try hard to remind people of (but no one seems to remember it) about 20-12 months ago, when the word on every Dem-voter's lips was "I like Hillary butshe'snotelectable." It was such a pervasive sentence, and was said over and over again by different people in exactly the same word order and tone, that it was impossible not to conclude that the whole thing was a stealth campaign.
Of course, it became so pervasive that the press had to pick up on it, and the moment it broke the surface, Clinton's campaign dispatched it, ruthlessly and effectively. I tend to think the Clinton campaign did a stealth campaign of their own to make the story break cover so they could squash it. No one says that Clinton is "not electable" now. They just say she's "gone too far." How curious.
What I'm also hearing, particularly from black online wannapunds, is that, while before they would have voted for Clinton if she got the nomination, now theywon't. WTF? So you, lefty liberation atheologist, with a hard-on for social justice, will vote for fucking John McCain because clueless Clinton hath offended thee? Or, almost worse, avoid the polling place entirely?
Seriously?
That's the point, isn't it? If those of you undecideds out there don't choose Obama, the rest of us Dem-voters will take our ball and go home, and you can just sit there with your President McCain for eight years, kicking yourself for not choosing the Unity Candidate with the Sexy Voice. After all, if you don't choose Unity, then the lack of Unity is your fault.
It's blackmail, of course, but who am I to object to political blackmail? If it's effective, that is.
It's frustrating because I'd like rational debate, but this is an election, and elections are not about rational debate and probably shouldn't be. Because, as I've said before, we should be electing not the person with the best program, but rather the most effective political whore whose program approximates the one we want. So the person who best manipulates the election is clearly the best whore. That may well turn out to be Obama.
Two more points, no three:
Firstly, on the rational debate about the issues tip--which everyone says they want, but nobody really wants--Clinton constantly surprised everyone by how great she was on debates about the isshooz. Every time, in fact. Her only missteps were when she was confronted (read: blamed) for Bill Clinton's policies, when she was confronted with her pro-Iraq-War-whore vote, and when the debate veered away from the issues into the gender/race/electability thing. So here we are in the loooong post-important-primaries wasteland, where the isshooz have pretty much been exhausted and there is nothing new to say. So what are we focusing on? The candidates' identity issues ... where Clinton doesn't do well and Obama, because of his whorishness, does.
Second point: remember folks (why do you keep forgetting?) Obama is only 46. He's a top-end Gen Xer, or else in the crack between generations. Culturally, he belongs more to the later generation. As the brief debate over his supposed drug use suggested, rather than having to assert his non-inhaliness like a Baby Boomer candidate I could mention, he in fact may have exaggerated his drug use in a savvy ploy to speak to his natural constituency. He grew up after the heaviest part of the civil rights movement and during the heaviest part of the feminist movement. His understanding of race and gender politics, purely from a generational standpoint, would have to be different from Clinton's; given his family and personal history, his understanding of both is necessarily more sophisticated.
Is this a bad thing? Of course not. But it's not necessarily a good thing when you're trying to appeal to older voters who do not have the same sensibility as you.
By the same token, Clinton is firmly a Baby Boomer and second wave feminist. Her language and understanding of race and gender are Baby-Boom-Generation-determined. Does that mean she's behind the times? Well, she's no more behind the times than most of the rest of her generational cohort. (I won't break that down. I'm not satisfied with her language or concept of these issues, but then I'm a third wave feminist and a Gen Xer.) Does this means she's off-putting to Obama's GenX supporters? Yes. Does this mean that the awkward language and concepts she uses will lead her to support the wrong policies? Well ... not necessarily.
Does it mean that she may not prioritize social justice for racial minorities? Maybe. And does Obama's greater sophistication on these issues mean that he will prioritize social justice for racial minorities? Hmmm ... I somehow doubt it, especially in the light of his race speech which said, pretty clearly, "It's understandable that blacks are so angry, but their anger isn't right. And by the way, whites' anger about affirmative action is just as legitimate so we should all just get along."
And finally, keep in mind that we're all getting bored with this and want to move on to the main event. This is why we're starting to unravel and shoot ourselves in our collective feets by saying stupid things like "I'd rather vote for McCain than Clinton because she's gone too far!" It's like a playground where the nerd who doesn't know how to stand around and be cool gets hopelessly ragged on. Or maybe, the adult who doesn't know what "hella" means gets hopelessly ragged on. Earnest Hillary, who is no better than she should be anyway, can't hang out and be cool with the cool kids and Obama can. So, in our after school before dinner boredom, we're beating up on Hillary.
I still don't know who would be the better president, but I'm starting to suspect that all of this adds up to Obama being the better candidate.
First, here's the whole speech, in five parts, hi-def:
I'm starting to change my mind about Obama. No, it's not because his baritone turns me on, or his sincerity, intelligence, charisma, and social consciousness get my panties all ... *sigh* ... YOU know.
It's because he's a first class pander.
Check it out:
"In no other country on Earth is my story even possible."
Argh. We all know it's just speechifying, but does he have to be so crass? Or maybe he's so used to playing the exotic for white American oafs, he really doesn't know how mundane his story is compared to the tragedy, mendacity, and exotic parallelism of other stories.
But seriously, that's just a throwaway line all whores politicians have to ... well, throw away. Where he really went onto the reservation was when he sold out his ... er ... "former" pastor, a guy he seems to have unloaded just before all this shit hit the fan. (I wonder why.)
Oh sure, sure, he made a lot of proud noises about how he could no more abandon his poor, old pastor--who was more like family than an advisor, mind you, although he was part of Obama's campaign as recently as late last year--than he could abandon his loving, white grandma, whom he also sold out in this speech. But really, saying that what your pastor (and, until recently, advisor) says in his speeches is just wrong wrong wrong wrong is ... well let's just say it rhymes with "shmelling shmout."
Doubt it? Dude, this is what he said about Wright's comments:
A profoundly distorted view of this country, a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America. A view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam. As such, Rev. Wright's comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity, racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems: two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis, and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but problems that confront us all.
Do you think he knows what "endemic" means? 'Cuz the PC consensus is that racism is endemic in America. To suggest it isn't is kinda turning back the clock. Oh yeah, and ignoring the deep-rootedness that makes it so persistent. And the whole "elevates what is wrong" bit? Barack, baby, you're denouncing him for seeing the glass as half empty? We get it, you're an optimist. Gah.
Now, the rest of us aren't privy to what Wright says in private about Israel, but his public statements? Duuude, you seem to be putting words in his mouth. Even the freakin' Anti-defamation League has no issue with him. See below. And then to add that whorish politically savvy throwaway line about radical Islam? I'll just leave the wad of cash on the bedside table, mmm?
I think these are all the Wright quotes Obama and pundits are responding to:
Seriously? Except for the AIDS genocide accusation, what part of what he said here isn't true? I mean, weren't YOU expecting Bush et al to plant WMDs? I was. I didn't count on the fact that most of America either wouldn't care that he was lying or wouldn't be literate enough to read about how he lieded. And this is all aside from the fact that that might simply have been a bitter joke.
But the best sellout is the money shot. After eloquently (seriously, my panties again) explaining the bitterness of old time activists like Wright, he actually went forth and paralleled the frustration of African Americans with the current dissatisfaction of middle-class white Americans who went and voted themselves into "two wars ... a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis, and potentially devastating climate change":
In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.
Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren't always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.
Then repeat the platform and end on a note of hope in the next generation. (Young white girl and old black man. She joined the Obama campaign because her mother needed health care and she needed food. The ol' black man, of course, joined the Obama campaign for her. Magical. Like "Song of the South." You can almost see them tap dancing together at the DNC.)
Wow, recent white political doopidity = 400+ years of oppression? I love America!
And Barack's gonna let all the white liberals get away with it. He just said so.
So, all sarcasm aside, I'm beginning to believe that Barack is whorish enough to make a go of this politician thing. He's savvy enough to please his entire natural constituency. That was a tightrope walk of a speech and he sold the fuck out of it. And yeah, he'd sell his own grandmother for office ... in public.
I'm starting to love this guy for president. Maybe he'll be my slimeball. Too bad we're not gonna have a chance to see if the other slimeballs will let him play their reindeer games first.
I mentioned yesterday that I loathed the movie Juno and that was all I was gonna say about it. But now Lauren, who is normally smart as a whip, says she liked it, publicly defending it against the wannabe macho dismissal of a critic who thought No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood were the best moobies of the year. I share her argh about the latter, but argh back at her about the former so much that I must write this blog post.
David Edelstein of New York Magazine, goes to bizarre extremes to attack Juno
by criticizing both director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody
(whose name he snarks on) for having successfully “engineered every
response” from the audience, as if that’s not what filmmaking is at its heart.
... I think it’s also important and darn fascinating to pay attention when a
bona fide cultural phenomenon is prancing tweely across your radar.
Juno is that dancer. Among the many wonderful things about this movie
is the fact that it could not have been made at any other time in
history. It is positively fresh on the subject of teen sexuality and
reproductive choice and it manages to be hilariously funny and
gut-wrenchingly poignant at the same time.
Yes, Juno's twee, and that's annoying, and no, twee is not the argument against that stupid flick that I want to push. All teen films are either twee or outright sentimental, so no big deal. Harold and Maude was twee, but I love it anyway.
But Lauren's argument that all films manipulate the audience doesn't hold water. It's true that all art is manipulation in the purest sense of the word. But the art that we treasure as great is that which manipulates the senses to mediate an experience in a particular way. That experience must overwhelm the audience sensually so that their senses (perhaps not all of them, but the ones engaged by that art form) are employed wholly in the service of the piece for its duration. The experience must also short-circuit the audience's sense of the normal and the ordinary, so as to present them with the spectacle of some element of mundane life in a manner that makes that element fresh.
So much for great, or even good, art. There are also films--art--that are successful without overwhelming the senses with new input, or making the familiar intelligible by rendering it strange. These films rather grab hold of our expectations, both sensory and narrative, ... and fulfill them. That simple.
Of course, that's not easy to do because experienced filmgoers have highly developed bullshit detectors and a hunger for novelty that almost--but never quite--overwhelms their demand for fulfilled expectations. So these not-so-good films succeed insofar as they are able to disguise with successful handwaving their ability to give you exactly what you've had before.
Juno is one of the latter sort of films. It belongs in a genre of film whose structure is derived from the gestation period of homo erectus. "Conception--pregnancy--birth" is the "incentive moment--rising action--climax" of this subgenre, point for point. The purpose of this subgenre is to "celebrate" the "renewal" of "human" life and "hope" in the form of the "next generation" and to "reaffirm" our current family structure or to affirm and confirm (some kind of "firm") a new one. It is a genre that, intentionally or no, cannot accept the presence of abortion ... quite simply because abortion is a narrative party pooper: you can't end a story before the climax.
Subgenre All-Stars include: Nine Months, Parenthood, Father of the Bride II, The Seventh Sign, Fools Rush In, She's Having a Baby, The Snapper, The Object of My Affection, and and and. The only title I can think of belonging to the category of "classic" is Rosemary's Baby, a precursor to the curse of eighties and nineties pregnancy flicks, and a pre-deconstruction of them all. The rest are, at best, B movies. I didn't seed the list. I seriously couldn't think of a single top-ranked or top-critiqued movie in this genre, nor find one on a google search.
And for a very good reason: the genre is crapulous, status-quo-reifying, herd-placating "family fare." It's not about questioning anything, but rather making everyone feel great about the way things are.
In the new millenium this genre has taken on new life. The three 2007 avatars are Waitress,Knocked Up, and Juno. But wait, didn't everybody loooooooove all three films last year? I mean, looooooove them?
Well, of course. After all, Gen X is both in charge of movieland AND making babies now. So we've updated the genre to satisfy our own ideas of what family must be and placate our feelings of having sold out ... whatever our generation was supposed to stand for ... in favor of parenthood, condo purchases, and stay-at-home-somethings.
The major difference in new-millenium-Gen-X pregnancy movies is that they are all about confirming "alternative" families, which is, of course, all the to good, if you consider giving alternative families their own crapulous sub-genre "good." Juno and Waitress are ultimately both affirmations of single motherhood, when necessary, as it clearly is when the father leaves you because he's a child or you leave him because he's abusive. Both are, not coincidentally, written by women.
Knocked Up is a more traditional pregnancy flick. It's written, produced, directed, and from the point of view of men, which is why it posits that ugly losers with no jobs, income, responsibility, charm, or personality can walk into a complete family life with a beautiful, successful woman, just by going into a nightclub one night that the real world wouldn't let them in the door of. It posits the only family that straight guys would want, then "reaffirms" it with a "funny" birth scene involving your buddies and a beautiful, happy ending.
Juno manages to disguise its genrehood slightly by being about both the family for whom the baby is destined, and the birth mother. But, although the dialogue is snappy, nothing is questioned or subverted. We don't want to reify teenage motherhood; teenage mothers are supposed to be confused, so this one is confused. We want to support adoptive families, which we have more and more of as the "me, too!" generation puts off childbearing even longer than the Baby Boomers, so we make Juno not bother considering abortion seriously. We want to affirm single motherhood, so we get rid of the adoptive husband while turning him into a plot-point/red-herring.
Most importantly, we treat motherhood as a reward for virtuous women. Juno is not virtuous: she had sex when too young and undereducated; she had sex without considering herself in love; she had sex without thinking responsibly about it. Clearly she doesn't deserve a baby. Her weeping after the birth is the seep of remorse.
The Jennifer Garner character--played by an actress who, already popular, swept the hearts of America by marrying Ben Affleck and naming their adorable baby something both slightly unusual and not at all rock-star-weird--clearly possesses sufficient adulthood, responsibility, and virtue, and is rewarded with motherhood at the end.
One more point: Juno, as many critics have remarked, is given Gen X hipster dialogue. No kiddie today, not even Frances Bean Cobain, could possibly have all the Gen X indie cultural referents that Juno pretends to. That's the tip-off, folks, that you're being manipulated: your teenie hipster protag, cooler than school and wrestling with things way beyond her maturity level, still has the time to flatter your taste.
It's a flat, empty, manipulative, masturbatory, neck-chaining, nose-to-grindstoning, mainstream-behavior-mold of a piece of shit of a movie. And no, it's not a coincidence that it topped off a year of other such movies in the same year that the US Supreme Court upheld the first federal abortion ban since Roe v. Wade.
I'm back in the family womb for the weekend for a family ... occasion ... and we're sitting at dinner tonight. My relative is talking about the movie Juno, which I found entertaining but empty when I watched it, and came to loathe while thinking about shortly thereafter. (Some hints as to why here.)
So my relative is describing the movie and gets to the character of Juno herself and describes her as a wiseass and "politically incorrect." What? I dug in about that. What was "politically incorrect" about the character? Both her politics and her indie cred are flawless. He couldn't say or give me examples, just repeated that she's a wiseacre and makes funny comments.
Argh!
I've been picking up on this for a while now but I can't avoid the conclusion anymore. "Politically incorrect" is now a synonym for "smartass" or "irreverent!" Just kill me now!
It wouldn't be so bad if "politically incorrect" would just wholesale replace the word "irreverent," since the latter appears to be hard for some people to pronounce and those same people get so much joy out of declaring themselves the former.
But that's not what's happening here. What's happening is that people are still aware of the term's current denotation--referring to language and ideas that are, from the liberal point of view, politically regressive and potentially discriminatory--but have added strong connotations. Those are, of course, "irreverent," "smartass," and, wandering a little further afield, "cool." "Politically incorrect" is now spoken or written with an almost universal sense of delicious, naughty approval.
Or put another way, social justice activists never use the term at all.
So let's go back to the drawing board, shall we, children? Let's start with FrankChin:
Political correctness" seems to be a too serious and fascist, demagogic way of saying "civil language". Of course, when civility is not our purpose, there are other languages and vocabularies available to us. With the need for a language of civility and doing business with strangers without betraying our secrets or slashing our wrists or starting a war in mind, I suggest PC stand for "pidgin contest".
Civil language and tolerant behavior can't be imposed from the top without exercising heavy police-state censorship and driving everyone with a discouraging word underground. But in the bustling, competitive, passionate marketplace atmosphere of a port city or corner store, civil language and tolerant behavior are invented, or you go broke, brah.
Yep, that's right, folks, "civil language." That's what people are referring to when they say "political correctness." I'll spell it out, though: if you replace "politically incorrect" with "speaking without civility," it becomes a lot less cool.
"Juno was a wonderful character because she was such a wiseass ... she really spoke without civility!"
"That Bill O'Reilly He's great! He speaks so uncivilly all the time!"
"You're just mad because I spoke to you rudely. But your stupid civility is fascist!"
"Don't you just find rude speech refreshing sometimes? I mean, I get so tired of being polite to strangers all the time!"
Yeah, I'm overplaying the point. Because, as we all know, political correctness isn't just about polite language. It's about giving over the power of naming to the people being named; the power of description to the ones being described. And that's a lot more profound than just being polite. What it means is that your public speech, to a certain extent, is buffeted by somebody else's winds of change--without your input or say so--and you're still responsible for keeping up with it. Why, that's ... that's ... undemocratic!
The term "politically incorrect" is the ultimate expression of privilege. I think everyone would find it obnoxious if a stranger, on being introduced to "John," insisted on calling him "Telly." But when a whole group of people prefer to be called "disabled" rather than "handicapped," this is somehow an imposition on the non-disabled speaker.
Considering oneself a victim of fascist political incorrectness because you can't call women "girls" or champion sportswomen "nappy-headed hos" or refer to spoken Chinese as "ching chong ching chong" or call South Asian journalists "Macaca" is nothing but the tantrum of someone whose speech has never been limited by those of lesser socioeconomic status before.
Boo-fuckin'-hoo to you. Grow the fuck up and start treating people with minimum respect. All your childish tantrums aside, it's not gonna stop, so get used to it.
I didn't think this needed to be said, but apparently it does:
Do not post comments on my blog that attack or promote political candidates!
No, I'm not a nonprofit. I can say what I want. I can endorse (or not) any candidate or legislative measure I want to.
But I won't encourage or abet any stupidity on my blog---and those woodenly-written, hysterical mini-rants about this or that candidate that are intended to look enough like blog posts to fool internet cretins (hint: they don't) are damned stupid.
Don't go there. Or you will be deleted, and probably also banned. And if you really piss me off, I might even sell out your email address in some vaguely unethical, but legal way. See comment rules here.
Despite the grand title for this post, I've done no research and have not even anecdotal evidence to support my assertion that chronic disease will give you doctor phobia.
No, not everybody. But seriously, think about it. The reason that most people aren't afraid of doctors or don't hate them might be that most people, most of the time, for most of their lives, are fairly healthy. Or, if they're not, their poor health is a result of lifestyle, and manifests in frequent bouts with colds and flus and things of that sort, i.e. not doctor-ready disease. So most people just plain don't see doctors very often, very long, or very intensively.
People with chronic disease associate doctors with bad things: the time you got so sick you almost died and went to the doc/hospital and they told you you had a disease which would constantly threaten, and in the long run shorten, and on a daily basis completely alter your life. And thereafter, going to an office to get frequent updates of bad news.
And this is the best case scenario. I mean, this is what happens when you have good doctors. When you have bad doctors, you can add to the above:
The time/s something really bad happened that didn't seem to have anything to do with your disease and your doctor blew it off and you ended up in the hospital, and it was a fellow chronic disease patient who explained to you what was wrong.
The time something really bad happened that DID have to do with your disease, and you ran around the doc's office/laboratory/hospital, freaking out and telling everyone what was happening to you and what you needed and nobody would listen to you or give it to you until you'd had a meltdown/seizure/fainting fit.
The time you were in shock, a condition which is a common side effect of your treatment, and your doctor let you walk out of his office into traffic because he didn't like how you were behaving.
The time/s your doctor didn't know something that you did know, but wouldn't admit it and made you feel like an idiot, even though you KNEW you were right and an article came out years later that proved you right.
The times you went to your disease doctor for common problems and s/he told you s/he wasn't a primary care physician, so you asked for a referral and they wouldn't give you one, then you picked one out of the phone book and they were so clueless about how your chronic disease behaved with common problems that you (see a theme developing here?) ended up in the hospital.
The time/s you started with a new doc and during the intake interview the doc came up against the fact that your symptoms are atypical, so s/he just plain wrote down what s/he expected your symptoms to be, rather than what you had just told them they were, and you only found out later when you got the ten-page DMV form back from them that they had to fill out for you to get your drivers license, that they had sold you out to the DMV for the typical, and more dangerous, symptoms that you didn't have.
Yes, all of these have happened to me.
And, on top of all of this, I had the ultimate bad experience: during a common, out-patient surgery in 1999, my anesthesia began to wear off halfway through the surgery, and during the last fifteen minutes I felt what was going on. (It was eye surgery.) It hurt, but the anesthesia hadn't worn off entirely, so it was really more about fear and loss of control than anything else.
After that I didn't go back to that opthamologist for three years. Sure, I made appointments, but then, when the day for the appointment came, I'd just ... forget. Then I'd remember when it was too late and make another appointment and then ... forget. Again and again. For three years. Finally, it occurred to me that I didn't actually have to go back to that doctor and I found a new one. Two years later, I finally got my butt into a seat in his office.
From there things went to worse. I was absolutely awful to the staff in his office. Of course, they put me through an obstacle course which was worse than usual: a clipboard for my info, a nurse to take more info, a tech to do the tests, an underling doc to do an initial examination ... all of this before I got to see the real doc. The underling doc asked me some questions which made it clear that he wasn't too familiar with diabetes ... and I told him so. By the time the real doc came, I was persona non grata. Even after I burst into tears and commenced to sob in his office for half an hour, it didn't seem to occur to anyone to ask if I was alright. All that mattered was how I was treating them, how they felt about me.
I finally explained what had happened to the doc and he got a lot nicer ... but not before he had defended the bad doc to me. What an asshole. Yeah, both of them.
Now understand: I realized that I was avoiding the eye doc, but I didn't actually feel any fear per se. I didn't feel anything, not even the desire to avoid the doc. It was all happening under the surface, and manifesting in a very simple inability to remember my doctor's appointments. After my crying jag at the eye doc's, I realized that I had been hiding a leetle bit of trauma, but I still didn't realize that I might be doctor phobic until this past week.
See, I'm trying to get in to see a new doc, who works together with a primary care doc (my current doc doesn't do that, but it's important for chronic patients whose common flus and infections are complicated by the chronic disease). I made an appointment, forgot it, made another one, and forgot that, too.
It was weird. The second appointment, I put it into three different calendars and reminded myself mentally of the appointment three or four times a day for a week. Then, the day of the appointment, I forgot about it from nine in the morning until 5 in the evening--exactly as long as needed to prevent me from doing anything about it.
It was bizarre being able to observe my own neurosis in operation. So obvious! So unsubtle! So effective! I decided to nip it in the full-blown bloom and went straight into the doc's office the next day, without an appointment, and asked to be allowed to introduce myself to the doc, just for a sec. He seems like a nice young man, the first doc I've had who was very obviously younger than I. Let's hope that does the trick.
People who know me consider me independent in the extreme, and it's true, I insist on my independence. But what no one realizes is that my life is lived in a state of the most abject dependence: on doctors. The pharmaceutical products that literally keep me alive--insulin and thyroid--aren't available over the counter, why exactly, I don't know. I can't get a lifelong prescription for them. I can get, at most, a year's prescription for the stuff I've been using for twenty-six years. I need a doctor to get them for me.
I can't even order tests for myself. I'm supposed to get a certain set of tests done quarterly, my entire life, but I can't order them myself, or read them myself. A doctor has to order them for me and gets them sent directly to her/him. I can't even go and look at my medical files at will. I have to request them and go through red tape.
My health, my quality of life, even my mobility (like my ability to get a driver's license) hang by a doctor's whim, mood, ability to understand, or free time to keep up with their medical journals. No healthy adult has a life so affected by another adult's quality of mind--not even an employee of a bad boss. It's impossible to understand what this is like if you are not a chronic patient yourself.
The "good" diabetics I know (of), the ones with good control, manage a sort of doublethink that I can't maintain: while they educate themselves thoroughly and relentlessly, they also maintain a plausibly deniable subservient relationship to their doctors. If you read their blogs or listen in on their boards, they never make a move without checking with their docs first. They'll even use language that fits more with a parent/child relationship or a military hierarchy: getting "the go-ahead" and such like. Permission granting.
I'm not sure this isn't the healthiest way to deal with doctors who are trained to unconsciously despise patients, and to consider themselves--and not the patients--the hero of the story. Until our medical system evolves further and doctors get less adulation from patients kept ignorant by the appalling state of our pubic science and health education, and more understanding from well-informed, empowered clients (which is what we are), to stay healthy you probably do have to behave like a good child.
Which means I'm fucked.
By the way, this is all by way of saying that I won't be getting the pump in November. My next attempt at an appointment with the doc isn't until early December.
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