Fluffing up the Christmas spirit of love and giving as he always does, once-Cardinal-Ratzinger-now Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church (otherwise known as Pope Benedict XVI) decided that environmentalists can care about the earth, but we also need to care about the future of human beings. In papal estimation, nothing is more dangerous to human beings than, wait for it, gender theory! That's right, Judith Butler, you're doubly dangerous to the future of the human race. Ideas about the social construction of gender, ideas that also accommodate and accept homosexuality and transgender identities, these are real threats to humanity. (For more details, read the BBC articles on papal statement and responses to it).
Of course, as Virginia Burrus has argued, the great bishop known for converting Augustine, Ambrose of Milan, depended upon the power of gender bending revealed by gender theory. And all Catholic popes, bishops, priests, and other monastics have likewise drawn power from this gender bending ability.
And speaking of dangers to the future of the human race, if the Pontiff's concern is reproduction, maybe he should look into his own lifestyle choices, which have certainly terminated any tangible role he could have had in the propagation of the human race.
I, for one, think the monastic lifestyle has been a great thing, something for which the Catholic Church is to be commended rather than reprimanded as many Protestants and seculars like to do (see for instance How the Irish Saved Civilization for a sense of some of the benefits of Catholic monastic life for the future of humanity, even if few scribal monks produced actual offspring). Especially in the earliest Christian centuries, monastic life provided women a way to escape the pervasive ownership of patriarchal marriage (still a problematic institution as elucidated by Breanne Fahs in the latest issue of The Public Sphere, an issue worthy of review for its three other pieces querying marriage and sexuality in the U.S. today). So why is it so difficult for the leader of such an institution to offer up some love and welcome to the peoples who live within the complexities of gender and sexuality? If anyone should understand the important role of non-reproducing populations to the future of humanity, then he should.
-- Image taken from The Public Sphere's article by Fahs. The Public Sphere supplies the following information about the image: "Image: Allusion aux Agences matrimoniales, Croquis californien par Cham. Wood engraving from the New York Public Library collection. Created by Cham (1819-1879), originally published in Le Charivari magazine."
In Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution states that "No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President." Well it seems pretty clear that you have to have been born a citizen of the U.S. to run for president. Too bad for Governor Schwarzenegger. But apparently there is some ambiguity in interpretation. I remember as a child reading this passage of the Constitution in elementary school and being taught that I could not ever run for President of the United States. I was born a U.S. citizen to a mother who was a natural-born citizen (though my father was not a U.S. citizen), but I was not born in the United States or on U.S. soil . But this is where the ambiguity of the passage seems to confuse some people; Senator John McCain was not born in the U.S., but he was born on U.S. soil in a section of Panama then controlled by the U.S. government. I wonder if he had won the presidency if people on the Left would be pursuing legal cases to bar his installment as President?
Well, two separate individuals have pursued legal cases to bar the inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama, though these cases appear, thankfully, to be getting very little traction as reported in today's Los Angeles Times. In one case, Leo C. Donofrio of East Brunskwick, N.J. did in fact sue against both McCain and Obama. In another case Philip J. Berg of Lafayette, Pa. sued against Obama specifically. Of interest to me is that, in my view, where McCain might occupy something of the muddy ground I occupy in my own birth location, Obama's birth certificate clearly locates him in Hawaii, when it was already a state in the United States. While both cases have been largely ignored because you can't just bring a suit unless you can prove personal harm, it still gives me pause: what did the founding authors mean by "natural born Citizen"? Surely, all historical legal precedents recognize Obama to be one because he was born on U.S. soil, which has always been enough to make someone a citizen. You add to that the fact that his mother was a natural-born citizen, and you would think his citizenship should be unassailable. That's the beauty of the U.S. as opposed to a country like Kuwait where you and your children could all have been born there, and you would still not be citizens. Why is it that people in this country need to persist in imagining U.S. citizens to be something they have never been (except in the case of the original Americans who predate Plymouth and Jamestown), people whose ancestors have all lived and died on this land? What does it mean to be a citizen of the U.S. now or ever?
I guess because of my own background, I think that being a U.S. citizen is an enforced choice. Most of us have no choice but to be here, but some of us do actively choose it. Putting aside the specific desires of some to make Obama an absolute other, a non-citizen, what is the deeper desire to disinherit those who think differently about being a U.S. citizen? Whose very ancestry may show up the complexity of calling oneself a citizen of the U.S.?
-- Image of Article II, Section 1 taken from the U.S. National Archives website.
If you work for a major bank in the industrialized world, from Tokyo to New York, then the answer to the question should be an outright NO. Do you deserve a bonus for tanking the world economy? No. Do you deserve a bonus in the U.S. where the average individual is now in increasing peril of filing for bankruptcy because of your stupid mismanagement of the housing market, mortgage backed securities, credit default swaps, or any number of bad banking decisions that led to the current situation? No, you do not. You get bonuses for a job well done, not for drunk driving the world headlong into the worst financial disaster since October 1929.
I could not believe it when I read about the estimated bonuses for bankers working at top companies. I have to agree with another web user, JLP: some people claim bonuses are necessary to keep top talent, but I doubt that's true. I think it's more likely the people saying that want their own bonuses. I also feel like Joe Mysak described in his editorial, I want the bankers heads after even the suggestion that they should get bonuses. First of all, the extreme bonus system of big investment banks was probably a bad idea to begin with and needs to be reformed as both Mysak discussed in his editorial (and as William D. Cohan suggested in today's New York Times). Second, if a bank was just given some cash by the U.S. government, I don't care if the bonuses come from a different pile of money, you don't get bonuses when you need to borrow money.
Once I had a friend who was sick and in financial straits. She asked me if she could borrow $50 to buy her medication. Of course I willingly lent her money I figured I wouldn't see again. My willingness to help though was tinged with anger when I learnt that she had gone to a tanning salon the day before. Sorry, but if you have money for a tanning salon then you don't need a loan from me for medication, end of story. People with the kind of thinking evidenced by my friend then and bankers now have met grim fates in past troubled times. Just think Marie Antoinette and Revolutionary France. You can eat your cake, but if you're not careful, your head may in fact roll as Maureen Dowd suggested. So all that money these banks have stashed away for bonuses, they may want to view that as a source of cash flow and bailout funds, rather than turning to the U.S. government for handouts.
Kansas Congressman Dennis Moore (Democrat of course) keeps an update on his website about the size of the U.S. debt (as of October 15, 2008, that would be $10,326,055,380,264.11). That is $33,807.90 per person in the U.S. So, bankers, if you get your bonuses, perhaps some small redemption might be sought by paying down your and several others' share of the national debt. Or, perhaps you can bail out the educated classes, as suggested by one Facebook group, by paying off all $17 billion of outstanding student loans. Or maybe they can have a lottery of homeowners to bailout so that fewer people have to live out of their cars come spring. But if bankers give themselves these bonuses and keep it, they better hope it's enough to purchase a hideaway in a remote location where the angry mob can't show up with torches, pitchforks, and a guillotine.
This video of Keith Olbermann was sent to me, and it did bring me to tears. His reflections on Prop. 8 eloquently capture many of mine. I had to pass it on in the small ways I can.
I was sitting in the lovely Wisconsin home of another Obama volunteer on Tuesday night. We had spent the afternoon knocking on doors, supplying people with the information on where they could go vote. That afternoon had left me cautiously optimistic of the results. Though Wisconsin was no longer an official swing state, there were enough McCain-Palin signs in the neighborhood to suggest that it had once been an area with strong Republican tendencies. Yet it was also a neighborhood with a large number of "For Rent" and "For Sale" signs as well as blatantly vacant and foreclosed upon homes. Many of the people we encountered were so fed up with President Bush, whom they equated with Senator McCain, they could not wait to vote for Senator Obama. After talking with them, seeing that neighborhood, and living in the U.S. as I have for most of the last eight years, it was with great relief that at 10pm CST, I watched the numbers tick up next to Obama's name. He went from being the front-runner to being Mr. President-Elect as soon as the polls closed in California, Oregon, and Washington.
While I cannot express to you my complete joy and relief at the outcome of the presidential election, I find myself dismayed by the outcome of California's vote on Proposition 8, which bans gay marriage. This dismay was increased when I learned that a friend of mine went to vote in the Vista Samoan Seventh Day Adventist Church. Let's leave aside the momentary question of why churches are valid polling locations (as opposed to public institutions like say, schools). My friend informed me that this church actually violated California Elections Code Sections 18370-18371. All over the polling location, inside, next to the voting booths, the church had local newsletters advocating for Proposition 8, and the logic of these newsletters made false suggestions, like somehow gay marriage will threaten their tax-exempt status (which only would have increased my support of gay marriage were it true, but alas it is not). No advocacy for anything on the ballot should take place inside or within 100 feet of the polling location, and this is a law I am familiar with as someone who has volunteered on previous campaigns.
So though Colorado stepped up and voted down an amendment defining human life as the moment of conception, California proved itself home to homophobic bigots willing to lie and break the law in order to prevent gay couples from experiencing the same marital miseries as the rest of us. When I looked over the list of reasons given for support of Proposition 8 on that website I linked to earlier, I couldn't help but wonder why these groups were so willing to lie. I also couldn't help but wonder about how their mind works on such domino-effect logic, that if "A" happens, it will topple through the alphabet and destroy "Z." If you oppose gay marriage, then don't marry a gay person, but it has absolutely nothing to do with your daily life. And, I also need to comment on one final thing said by Orange County's own Rick Warren: "For 5,000 years, every culture and every religion – not just Christianity – has defined marriage as a contract between men and women...There is no reason to change the universal, historical definition of marriage to appease 2% of our population." This is actually historically inaccurate. First of all, marriage has in much of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic world been defined as a contract between one man and multiple women. Secondly, even in the state of California, cultures have existed within the last five hundred years with different views. Certain indigenous Californian tribes actually had chieftains who married transvestite men, and these men were believed to have special powers and were selected as one of the chief's "wives" to bring blessings upon his household. In his book Converting California, James Sandos eloquently describes many of the customs of indigenous Californian tribes regarding marriage that Warren would no doubt find scandalous. But just because they scandalize Warren doesn't mean that these practices did not take place.
-- photo from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/world_news_america/7712138.stm
The McCain/Palin campaign sent out one last effort at over-simplification and pure lies today, so I attempted to make my own corrective.
I was recently helping someone study for U.S. naturalization, and while the booklet does not necessarily contain the questions I would chose, Question 93 suggested one thing: the most important right granted U.S. citizens is the right to vote. Please vote.
Since the disastrous economy has left the McCain-Palin campaign with no other options, Governor Sarah Palin, font of wisdom and knowledge that she has proven herself to be (that would be sarcasm for the rest of you, as this particuar governor can't name a newspaper she reads or a supreme court case besides Roe v. Wade when pressed by Katie Couric) accused Senator Barack Obama of hating his country so much that he hangs out with former terrorists. Truth: Senator Obama served on a charity board with a former member of the Weather Underground, someone who is now a respectable college professor. That's like accusing me of supporting backroom arms dealing because I went to school with a current Democrat who once voted for Ronald Reagan under whose watch the Iran-Contra affair transpired.
I think, however, that this is part of a coordinated attack, one that nurses doubt about Senator Obama's background and patriotism. Today, at Walmart, I saw that the National Examiner found "proof" that Senator Obama is a Muslim. In case you were wondering, he's not.
While I do wonder why people should care whether Senator Obama knows a former radical or whether his father was a Muslim, I realize that people do. Nicholas D. Kristof reminded me in today's New York Times that a lot of decisions are unconsciously racist. I know more than a couple of former Senatory Hillary Clinton supporters who just don't trust Senator Obama. While I'm sure that he lies as much as your average politician, I can't help but wonder if their distrust has a lot to do, unconsciously, with the dueling terror figures of the U.S. nightly news - the black man and the Muslim terrorist. Personally, my support for Senator Obama was partially compelled by his biography, and as the daughter of a Kansas woman who married someone from the global South, I related to his story and his struggles, trying to place himself in a world that still likes to see things in terms of black and white. Yet I realize that for those people who see the world in black and white, even unconsciously, that biography is too dangerously filled with unfamiliar terms. Kristof points out that Senator Obama might have as much as 6% more of the electorate if he were white, according to a Stanford-AP-Yahoo study. I just hope that enough of the electorate can see past those unfamiliar terms and realize that our situation is just too dire to support a familiar biography, one that got the U.S. into this colossal mess in the first place.
Just again, for the record, Senator Obama is not a Muslim, a terrorist, or friends with terrorists. He would never have made it this far if any of those things were true (which is really sad because I bet there are plenty of American Muslims who would make good presidents, but apparently we aren't that ready for liberal Catholics like John Kerry yet). And please, if you don't support Senator Obama, make sure your reasons have to do with genuine policy concerns and not your lack of familiarity with people like him.
According to a New York Timesarticle, a group of ministers are going to defy the IRS, challenge the law, and endorse a presidential candidate. This takes place after the IRS seriously investigated the liberal All Saints Episcopalian Church in Pasadena, CA for supposedly endorsing John Kerry by having a sermon critical of the Iraq War immediately prior to the 2004 election.
I hope these ministers go forward with their plans, wielding their power to influence the weak of mind who can't make their own decisions. But then maybe we can start taxing their, and everybody's, religious organizations who feel the same way. I'm sorry but Rick Warren and the Catholic Church are not not-for-profits. And in 2004, the Catholic Church tacitly endorsed George W. Bush when it sought to deny Kerry, and other like-minded people, communion because of his pro-choice stance.
The list of things I wish my tax money did not pay for is so long, war in Iraq, Afghanistan, most of the defense department, most of the corporations that work for the defense department, etc. What I don't mind paying for, public education, road repair, social security, medicare, and welfare, are the things half the country seems to hate paying for. My question now, as President Bush himself warns of economic disaster, is do I really want my tax money paying to bail out these huge investment firms. I do not. Having read and listened to other significant economic thinkers on the subject (like the wonderful 9/19/08 program on Bill Moyers Journal), I am not certain our tax dollars can actually save the faltering financial system. Oddly, I find myself sounding like a more traditional Republican, we should allow them to go out of business because the time to use the $700 billion has passed. Where was that money when ordinary people were losing their homes? Where was corporate welfare when it could have saved ordinary people and not Wall Street? A year ago we could have saved this financial system if we also brought in tools for greatly increased regulation. But since we have a deregulated financial system, it should be allowed to fail in a deregulated fashion. More than that, I am certain that several people have done some illegal things somewhere, so CEOs and other prominent executives of these companies should be arrested, their assets liquidated, and all that money should be put toward bailing out the industry they screwed up with their idiocy and greed. But greed is human nature, which is why some people aren't libertarians - human greed cannot be trusted to moderate itself. The time to pass this sort of reformation on the finance industry also has passed, and as Ron Suskind reminds us, the warning bells were Enron if only we had had an administration who would listen. But at least their colossal screw-up allowed me to be amused by this phony spam message.
If we do bail out the financial system, as we inevitably will since both political parties are owned by Wall Street, let's hope it's with careful government oversight that builds in safeguards against corporate and government greed. This government must do more than bailout the current financial system; it must rebuild it as something other than it has been.
By the way, I bet you wish we hadn't gone into Iraq now because where are we going to get $700 billion? China. And then we are in debt to a not-very-nice rising superpower, throughout our generations forever.
As a woman, I have often stated I would have no interest in living in most of the world before New York in 1968. My reasons for this are pretty straight forward. Most women throughout the recorded history of the world did not have equal rights before the law, and in the modern world they have certainly been denied equal rights to health care and health research. It is only in startlingly recent times that the medical establishment figured out that women might get heart disease for reasons different than men and that maybe they needed to research women as well. While I don't want to deny there were probably some societies and some wealthy women within certain societies that had privileges that equaled or exceeded that of some men within those societies, I do not feel that is true of most of my ancestors, and I am concerned about how little access to fair healthcare women get today.
Most disturbing to me at present is the death throes of the Bush administration and its attempts to deny women equal healthcare on the basis of "morality." Hillary Rodham Clinton and Cecile Richards described this attempt today in a passionate and important editorial for The New York Times. A pharmacist should, as described by the great Stephen Colbert, be allowed to dispense viagra unchecked but can choose not to fill a birth control prescription. That's no big deal if you live in Manhattan because there is bound to be another pharmacist who will, but if you live in the middle of Mississippi or Western New York or any other place that is more sparsely populated, you are out of luck in having the freedom to choose the pill. And the birth control pill is not just useful as a contraceptive. I was a teenage girl who had incredibly irregular and painful periods, and the pill straightened that out. The pill has also been proven to help prevent certain forms of cancer.
But that's not the point, the point is that taking the Hippocratic Oath means you must provide me the healthcare I request and not what suits your morality, if that morality conflicts with healthcare if that healthcare is necessary and broadly approved by my own cultural and moral traditions. What if a white supremacist doctor felt that all non-white people didn't deserve healthcare treatment, that morally he was degrading the world's population by helping them live? We would have a problem with that wouldn't we?
So, that said, I want to at least leave you with Stephen Colbert's now, to me, classic meditation on this subject.
They captured so many things I had been thinking. And Tina Fey is brilliant. But now, I hope we can all follow Arianna Huffington's suggestion. Let's stop talking about Sarah Palin and instead focus on the issues that really matter, like the collapsing finance industry.
At the end of my college years, I found myself having dinner with the president of the student council. We chatted as he discussed his own plans to go on to Washington and eventually, hopefully, head into elected public life himself. I can't remember all the details of the conversation, but I remember being left with a strongly depressing realization. The leaders of our nation didn't get there because they felt any special call to serve and help other people through public policy. Basically they were all previous student government members who decided to move to something bigger because winning popularity contests was what they did. And while student government no doubt helps you sense if politics is for you, isn't it disturbing to think how few members of Congress may recognize the substantive difference between legislating the U.S. government and allocating student organization funds on a college campus?
I was reminded of this last night as I watched Sarah Palin, certainly the most energetic member of the Republican party, campaign for point guard of her high school basketball team (yes, I read that posting on several newspaper sites by a Wasilla resident). I don't think her qualifications are at issue for me, but her lack of quality as a human being certainly is at issue. Her speech took what BBC reporter Justin Webb described as "parliamentary-style jabs" at the Democratic Party.
First of all, what is so wrong with being a community organizer? I know it doesn't qualify as "executive experience," but it shows a desire to help people fight for what they know they want; instead of assuming you can just tell people how to live their lives as Governor Palin seeks to do. Community organizing also demonstrates a character of community service, something sorely lacking in Governor Palin's own record, which demonstrates a history of serving her ambition and her personal vendettas. And how is Harry Reid's hatred of John McCain an endorsement of him for president? That's a good joke for a blog post but completely unsuitable to a responsible public speech. Of course, all the Republicans act a bit medieval in their tendency to boo and laugh publicly and disrespectfully (and this at a convention who lauded how nice people are in Minnesota and in "America" in general - really all I was reminded of was my own Midwestern childhood, where people are nice to you when they need you but happy to stab you in the back if it helps further their own agendas. That's not nice; that's crueler than just being rude from the start). But what I learned most about Governor Palin last night is not that she is some Reformer who is being criticized because she's a woman outside the Washington mainstream. Her cold ambition, cruel jabs, and pure partisan focus should help her fit right in with all the other Republicans in D.C., the rest of whom never figured out that serving the people of the United States of America is a bigger task than being student council president.
I received my Time magazine special Republican Convention edition yesterday. The contrast with last week's Democratic Convention edition was clear. The second and third page of the main article on Barack Obama was populated with odd pictures of pieces of Obama. The article also implied that there were five ways people read Obama if not all those ways together. By contrast, the article on John McCain had one big word up top "hon-or." And the image montage of McCain on the article's third page was that of an "all-American" military son in classic black and white photographs.
I am not blaming Time solely for this. Obviously, we as a public are responsible for our inability to peg Obama down (while assuming first and foremost that he is "a black man," or at least that is what Time's list of Obama facets told me I assume) while we tend to place McCain in a one-stream narrative of honor. The managing editor's note introducing this issue of Time made an important point: McCain and all presidential candidates are more complex than we think. And maybe in some ways it's a privilege of Obama's liberal multiracial self that he gets to be more publicly complex. But Time's own editorial suggested that it is politically expedient to fit a simple singular narrative that eradicates complexity. And I can't shake the nasty feeling that the public inability to navigate complexity, perhaps even a public distaste for complexity, is somehow bound up with that albatross of "race." If it wasn't, why would "black man" be the first descriptor of Obama listed in the article lead?
-- images are all of Time, September 1 and September 8, 2008 issues.
With the FISA bill and everything, I have not been the biggest fan of Barack Obama lately. Maybe it's appropriate that I should remove all labels supporting him from my surroundings. Yet, I was quite shocked last night when I came back to a parking lot and found that someone had torn off my Obama bumper stickers. I admit that for years when I saw those "W" bumper stickers, I was filled with the desire to ram my car into the other cars sporting them. But guess what, I am a human being, which means I can exercise some limited self-control. I may rant online, but I can avoid defacing other people's stuff.
My bigger question about the person who tore off my bumper sticker is this: what did you think ripping off my bumper stickers would accomplish? If you are just angry about Barack Obama fine, but you know I'm going to buy more bumper stickers, which means more money for the Obama campaign, which just encourages him. So other than remind me that I share this country with some uncivilized ogres, what did you accomplish? You actually made me more committed to voting for Barack Obama this fall during a month when my support for him has been flagging. Good work.
Okay, just a light ramble into cyberspace this afternoon.
Tonight I was watching P.O.V., and it aired a fascinating documentary about the 2004 election called Election Day. More than once a Republican-inclined voter or poll worker described voting as a "privilege, not a right." I have been reminded before that we live in a representative republic, not a democracy, which somehow also means that we're not entitled to vote. I find this ironic as the people who argue this also supported bringing "democracy" to Iraq at the point of a gun. So which is it? Democracy? Republic?
But putting that aside, is voting a right? The constitution is actually difficult on this one. Amendment 14 makes it clear that any man votes in elections, unless he has been involved in "rebellion, or other crime." This is one level of a problem that still plagues us. What kind of "crime" keeps one from being able to vote? If one is no longer in prison, if society has determined that one has been rehabilitated from one's crime, is one still considered a rebellious or criminal participant? And of course Amendment 15 and 19 had to make it clear that voting was open to all citizens regardless of race or gender. And Amendment 24 removed the financial (and racial) barrier of a poll tax. So in theory all citizens never convicted of a crime have the right to vote. But maybe it seems like a privilege because it took until 1964 for some constitutional guarantee of what is still not universal suffrage? Maybe it seems like a privilege because the organization of our elections clearly does not enable every citizen to vote? Watching voting in poor urban neighborhoods of St. Louis sure hits home that voting is a lot easier if you live in a wealthy suburb.
So as I brace for the U.S.A.'s celebration of its republic, I can't help but maintain that voting is a "right not a privilege." It is a right as long as a country purports to champion global democracy. If a country champions mere oligarchy, then fine, said country should admit this; in an oligarchy, its fine to describe voting as a "privilege."
So yes, I was listening to the news again today, and when discussing historians' views of President George W. Bush, historians were accused of leaning too far left. As an example, historians' negative view of Ronald Reagan twenty years ago was contrasted with a positive view of him today, and apparently now we see him as one of the greatest presidents of the 20th century.
I have a few rants about this. A man is not a great president just because he's a likable fun guy. If that was the case, then my brother should run for president and be considered "great." So my first point of critique of the "great" Reagan, and I admit I was a kid in the 1980s so maybe I don't remember it that clearly, but when did people decide that an evil empire rhetorical, Iran-Contra, trickle-down economic failing president became great just because the Cold War happened to dissipate during this president's second term? So many of our domestic problems in education and yes, health care, owe themselves to the Reagan-era and Reagan-mismanaged economics. And I am tired of people giving Ronald Reagan all the credit for the end of the Cold War. As if the presidents that preceded him since Truman did nothing and as if the Berlin wall came down just because he said it should. The Reagan administration had its role, but try not to over-exaggerate his role.
Second, if he comes out as one of the better presidents of the 20th century, maybe that's because we're not grading on much of a curve. Even so, I would think that any historian could conclude that the following presidents, in chronological order, were all better presidents, leaders, policy geeks, etc., than Ronald Wilson Reagan: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and William J. Clinton. I would even contend that Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, and Lyndon Johnson were probably better presidents when one looks at the higher points of their records and leadership choices. Yes, I realize that I'm naming all the democratic presidents of the 20th century as better than Reagan. Too bad it's true. Reagan comes in just ahead of George H.W. Bush, Gerald Ford, and Calvin Coolidge. What this means is, that even grading on the curve of 20th century presidents, he still doesn't come out as one of the "greatest" unless by "greatest" you mean he was elected president twice, wasn't assassinated, and didn't resign.
On Saturday, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton gave a really classy endorsement and concession speech. I thought this was promising for the Democrats heading toward the fall. But apparently her powerful words were not enough. Okay, you know what is really getting under my skin right now. The 1/4 of Hillary Clinton supporters who say they are going to vote for John McCain. Hillary Clinton gave a ringing endorsement of Barack Obama, has pledged herself to support them. But these people who supported her so fervently now contend that they would be better served by voting for John McCain. It would be like me arguing, were the tables turned, that Hillary Clinton is just too polarizing a figure for me. I just want someone that can appeal to both Democrats and Republicans, so I'm going to vote against everything that made me a Democrat, everything that made me support Barack Obama, and vote for John McCain. I wonder what Hillary Clinton supporters would think of such childish behavior were their candidate the nominee. The other Democrats didn't give me the one I want so I'm going to punish the planet by voting against them.
I want to be clear that I am proud of the behavior of Hillary Clinton supporters, like those in my own family, who have immediately turned around as Obama supporters, or at least McCain opponents. The problem is that there are far too many Democrats who supported Hillary Clinton, and who strike me as being racist. So I am listening to this idiotic attorney in Atlanta this morning on NPR. That's right, I am talking to you Barbara LeBey. She claims that she is going to vote for John McCain in the fall. Her first reason for jumping ship on her lifetime voting history as a Democrat: her opposition to Obama's tax increase plan. Yeah, you know, the plan that is identical to Hillary Clinton's plan. But when she is confronted on that issue, she then claims that Obama is too inexperienced, and that quite frankly she's afraid of him. You're afraid of him, Barbara LeBay. I think this is the most revealing thing you said. Is that because he's a black man named Barack Obama? I think it is. It's fine that you claim it's because he's a "blank slate," and an "upstart" who is too willing to talk with terrorists, but I don't think that any of that really matters. So what would you think if I had reacted to a Hillary Clinton nomination by saying I was just too concerned she would cry at crucial moments? You would say I was a sexist, and you would be right about such a comment.
LeBay claims to have marched for the Equal Rights Amendment and for Civil Rights. It seems a bit odd to be willing to support an opponent of abortion rights and Martin Luther King, Jr. day then. I understand that racism is something we all suffer from in some direction or other in this country. But if we claim to be self-critical, self-conscious, intelligent people, then we owe it to ourselves to at least try to think rationally about why we are making the choices we make.
I know this has been a rant and that calling these people who voted for Hillary Clinton and refuse to vote for Barack Obama stupid racists won't do any good. But this is just so upsetting to me because this is the future of the world we're talking about, and some of you want to put that in the hands of a man who thinks we can spend 10,000 years in Iraq, a man who can't differentiate between Sunni and Shiites. I leave you with the words that were said on the same NPR show yesterday. Comedy duo guest, "Frangela" spoke with Madeleine Brand on "Day to Day" yesterday. Angela Shelton, part of the duo, was a strong Hillary Clinton supporter, and she said, that "this is about making sure John McCain is not our president." Fracis Callier, her colleague, spoke of these new McCain supporters and said the following about them, "It makes me feel as though you didn't support Hillary. You were supporting something else. Because if you are for her ideas and platform, and the things that Hillary Clinton was about, you couldn't be supporting John McCain."
Girl A is friends with Guys C, D, and E. Girl B befriends Girl A. Girl B has past relationships with Guys D and E and claims confusion over Guy E but also claims to have no interest other than compassionate friendship for Guy E. Girl A, in a fit of gossipy self-loathing, relates confidential information about Guys D and E, information which Girl B then uses to garner one more night with Guy E. Moral: We are all guided by our particular psychoses and rationalize every other choice we make in service to our guiding psychoses.
This Sunday I was treated to 1950s sexual politics masquerading itself as an article in The New York Times written by someone who has the liberal credentials of actually having written for Mother Jones. The article, "Students of Virginity" by Randall Patterson, decided that, fifteen years or more after this movement really took off, it was time to talk about celibacy on college campuses because Harvard University finally happens to have a chapter, dubbed "True Love Revolution." Problem one, then, this didn't matter when other, less famous and less wealthy schools had chapters?
Myriad are the questions and concerns this article brought up for me. Instead of reading a journalistic examination of this complex issue, I felt like I was reading a propaganda piece for the virtues of Victorian era femininity but recast as a feminist stance. First you have your main figure, a girl from a town in Colorado where supposedly no one had sex, who finds herself in the midst of "godless Harvard," where apparently hook-up style sex is rampant. She is then contrasted with her colleague, the male co-chair of Harvard's True Love Revolution. While, and I ask you to consider the images above as I write this, she is rendered as sexy, strong, and smart, her male colleague is rendered as creepy. That's right, chastity is sexy in women, but in men, it's just creepy. Why can't a normal, sexy man make a respectable choice for abstinence?
But of course the 1950s propaganda doesn't stop there, our white-middle-class heroine is then pitted against a "harlot"/"vixen" in complete uniform, a mini skirt, a lack of self restraint in her love of food, and a seeming idiocy about her own opinions in the one paragraph she gets to express them. Oh, and one other thing, our vixen happens to be Asian American. That's right, now I feel like it's a classical virgin vs. harlot with the added colonial overtones that all non-white-middle-class women are completely sexually available and so lustful they cannot control all their hormonal habits. Coincidence?
Putting aside these questions about the overt ways race and gender interplay in an article that seems to support the position of the virgin, I am left with several other questions. Why are chaste women always pitted against a rival whose sexual preferences resemble those of pornography? Why wasn't her opponent in debate a woman who takes a more moderated position towards sexuality? We may feel overloaded in this society by images of Paris Hilton and Girls Gone Wild, and I might be with the Colorado virgin in seeing the danger to feminist strength in those women as well (always being sexually available porn style is being just as much controlled by men and being just as much an object with no subjectivity as the virgin, if not more so; I must agree with that). The choice is not virgin vs. harlot. In fact, both the virgin and the harlot, as archetypes in this dichotomy, are women who package themselves for patriarchal society's desires, not their own. A woman's sexual choices are much more complicated than that, and the one thing this article can remind is how much these choices, for both men and women, should be about self-respect and meaning, not just hormones, lust, and the images peddled to us by the media and other communities. And every man or woman should be self-conscious about why she chooses what she chooses about sexuality.
And how snide a name is "True Love Revolution," assuming that gays for one (whom the group only accepts if they are celibate), and other people who do not marry somehow do not experience "true love," but people who married experience true love, people who often did so throughout history as part of economic contracts not love? Also, haven't we learned the dangers of valorizing marriage as a kind of perfect utopian home life? Isn't that a lesson we can take from the 1960s even if we didn't live through them? And what was with the publishing of letters to Harvard's Crimson that implied the "vixen" was just not the wifely material that the "virgin" was? Not only does that yet again replicate 1950s mentality but it assumes our "vixen" wants a traditional monogamous marital relationship, which she may very well not.
I can still imagine that some (I know not all, and that the virgin and harlot imagery exists because some people have made choices that look just like that) women and men can and have over the centuries chosen to be neither virgins nor harlots; celibate freaks nor virile dogs. That there is a much more complicated path in between that does justice to the full personhood of all the women and men involved in a sexual exchange. What is significant about now, and better about now than the 1950s, is the the freedom to choose for oneself without society setting up the old stereotypes. But this article felt like a step backwards instead of the step forwards it was presenting itself as.
--- Images of True Love Revolution leaders Leo Keliher and Jamie Fredell, taken by Katherine Wolkoff for The New York Times
In the last two days, I have read four editorials from the New York Times and three in the Los Angeles Times exploring how landmark was Obama's speech on race this past Tuesday. Obama's speech made me teary eyed at moments, but somehow it still left me feeling empty, like drinking a diet soda. I still think he's the best choice we have for the next president of the United States, in large part because anyone who voted for the Iraq War should be removed from public office (and should definitely not be president). I think that these authors were so impressed by Obama's speech only because of the depressing lack of deep, thoughtful, and constructive public conversation that currently transpires around the complexities of race, not just in this country, but in this hemisphere.
I did read one editorial of different tenor in today's Los Angeles Times from Michael Meyers, executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition. Meyers believed that Obama blew it, that he had the opportunity to point that we are all just members of the human race, and that people like Jeremiah Wright must step aside and make way for a "color blind" America.
I disagree with Wright's take much more than those that laud the speech. Being mixed white and Latina (which are already "racially" mixed and oddly fraught terms), I have learned to distrust anyone who claims they are "color blind;" that's usually a way of stating "I have unexamined racial biases." Obama did not make that claim, and yet I also disagree with Nicholas D. Kristof's editorial that Obama misspoke originally when he claimed there was just America and not a black one and white one.
So this is just a meandering post. I can't tell you something other than that I just need us to be somewhere else right now. And part of getting there is about changing who can be president of the United States, and that's only one reason why it's essential that either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton be the next president (even if my clear and unequivocal preference is for Obama).
I am really tired of the U.S. obsession surrounding what words cannot be said on television. We all know these words, so not showing them on television is not going to protect us from learning what these words are. It's okay for us to watch blood gushing out of patients on innocuous romantic dramas like Grey's Anatomy, but it's completely unacceptable for Jane Fonda to use the word "cunt" on The Today Show, even when that word is the title of a play and is not being used in a specifically profane or insulting manner? Meredith Vieira then apologized to the nation, claiming they would never want to offend the audience. Well, I'm offended that a word that appears in the title of a play is considered offensive. If Fonda had been using it in a derogatory manner, then maybe we could argue about whether it belonged on a morning talk show. Maybe. I think that if The Today Show really wanted to apologize, they could focus on how empty their programming generally is and how they contribute to a kind of national malaise.
Below is the email I contemplated sending Paul Krugman of the New York Times today because of his views on Senator Obama's supposed cult of personality. I decided it was too long a rant to send in an email to someone I don't know, so why not publish it in cyberspace for a bunch of people I don't know (or all five of you I do know) to read it at their leisure? The column in question was "Hate Springs Eternal" in this morning's paper.
Mr. Krugman:
I do want to say first that I have long admired your column, and that I will continue to admire and support your work by reading it long after this campaign season has ended.
I am writing in response to your column and subsequent blog post because I wanted to let you know that our experiences of this campaign season starkly contrast each other. I currently live in California, and I support Hillary Clinton but my preferred candidate this season is Barack Obama. While you assign the Democratic campaign's vitriol to Senator's Obama supporters who supposedly worship the cult of his genius Roman style, my observations tend to place more of the vitriol in Senator Clinton's camp. I have heard some horrible things said about Senator Clinton, but mostly from people who blanket oppose Senator Clinton and would campaign for a ficus rather than support her (and these people really bother me, but that's another issue). I admit that my circles may incline me to hear from moderated rational people and not fanatical fascist supporters of Senator Obama, whom I am certain do exist (and yes I saw the video). Nonetheless, my experience of Senator Clinton supporters was that they were the overly antagonistic ones. A number of women I spoke to, including family members, tended to view me as a traitor to all women for supporting Senator Obama. By contrast, the one time a person on my district's Obama listserv sent out an email blanket insulting Hillary Clinton, the listserv was filled with emails distressed by such behavior. They viewed supporting Senator Obama as a choice they had made, but they respected Senator Clinton as a Democrat, a leader, and a candidate.
On your blog, you brought up the race issue. Now, as you alluded to in your blog, perhaps I believe what I believe because I do actually believe that in a legislative way Al Gore "invented" the internet. The thing about racism is that it survives because it is capable of behaving in ways that are inexplicit but significant at the same time. Tying Senator Obama's victory in South Carolina to Jesse Jackson's is about as explicit as you can get while still claiming plausible deniability, but we'll give Bill Clinton the benefit of the doubt and say it was a subconscious racial connection rooted in historical facts. Dolores Huerta, whom I have also been a great admirer of, attempted to portray Senator Obama as someone who has no interest or concern for Latina/os. Frank Rich, your fellow columnist, made clear in his Sunday piece that the Clinton campaign has actively played on the race issue, especially between Latino/as and African Americans. A Clinton campaign pollster claimed that Latina/os would not vote for African Americans (as a footnote to this piece: you can't say any one ethnic group always votes one way - as it turns out some white men are willing to vote for people outside their own immediate racial-ethnic group). Senator Clinton then supported this statement to Tim Russert by claiming it was a "historical" fact when, as Rich pointed out, plenty of Latina/os have voted for African Americans at local levels in both California and across the country. Though not explicit, I cannot doubt that at some level, even if merely a subconscious one, that was meant to work as race-baiting between Latino/a and African American voters. Such behavior did factor into my ultimate decision to support the campaign of Senator Obama (among a range of factors).
If Senator Clinton is the fairly elected nominee, I do intend to support her in the fall. If Senator Obama is the nominee, I do expect that attacks will be made against him and his character that will dwarf anything stated so far by Senator Clinton's campaigners. For some reason, U.S. voters do like living in "Nixonland" as you cleverly called it. While I have long admired your keen and insightful wit on issues like this, I think this time your support of Senator Clinton, like others' support of Senator Obama, may have kept you from seeing that Senator Clinton's campaign has made some serious missteps with regard to race, and more specifically that what antagonism exists in the Democratic race runs on both sides and has its own strong expression in the Clinton camp.
This is just a random shout out to the internet-verse. A couple of weeks ago, I read this piece on Patrick Stewart in the New York Times. In there he mentioned, with what seemed a small tinge of regret, that he will never play Hamlet, Romeo, Orlando, or Benedick. I saw Romeo and Juliet in New York's Central Park last summer, and I realized I had never really taken to that play before because I had not liked the actors and actresses I have seen as Romeo and Juliet. This memory connected in my head with the fact that I also have long admired Stewart's ability to act, even if he wasn't always provided the best cinematic roles.
So, here is what I'm asking of the universe. If you have or know anyone who has the ability to produce Romeo and Juliet, might I suggest you turn the story around? Make Romeo and Juliet the parents instead of the children. I think that would be a fascinating turn on the play. And then you can cast Patrick Stewart, and that would be amazing to watch. Just let me know where you are going to produce this so I can find a way of seeing it.
--- The above photo was taken by Steve Forrest/Insight-Visual, for The New York Times in London's Gielgud Theater, and it can be found with the Jan. 23, 2008 article linked above on Patrick Stewart.
On her deathbed, my Missouri-born, Kansas-residing grandmother asked my aunt to read Bill Clinton’s autobiography to her. Yes, on my mother's side, I come from a long line of cradle-to-grave working Kansan Democrats. That’s right, Democrats in Kansas, and they’re not from some liberal elite bastion of a place. I spent much of my childhood in my grandmother’s mobile home, in a trailer park along the Kansas river.
This election is a big deal. For those of us on the left side of the political oval, it does feel like another Republican in the White House could certainly spell the end of the United States of America that could be. And we have reason to be excited about our top contenders. Democrats in the United States do, by and large, have no qualms about electing a woman or an African American man, knowing that their biographies might actually give them added knowledge and skills presently lacking in our president.
But one day in December, I woke up with the conviction of supporting Barack Obama for president. My decision to support Senator Obama was entirely mercenary. I saw his popular polling among independents and evangelicals, and meanwhile one of my own friends vowed she would never vote for Hillary Clinton because she hates her so much.
I have to take a break from endorsing Senator Obama for a moment to support Senator Clinton. Why do people hate Senator Clinton so much? Hate is a strong word and stronger feeling, and I own I am filled with a certain writhing disgust every time President George W. Bush or Vice Present Dick Cheney open their mouths or even appear in photographs greeting me as I enter LAX on a return flight from Latin America. Nonetheless, I can put that feeling aside and listen to them, and if I had to choose between Adolf Hitler and George Bush on a ballot, I would not stay home that day just because I loathe the Bush administration.
But people hate Senator Clinton with a kind of fervor that I thought was reserved for someone who had killed your family, scalped your dog, and made you eat your poor puppy for dinner. That kind of hatred does not reflect well on them. In the case of my friend, I could not help but wonder if it was because Senator Clinton was a strong woman on parity with her husband but certainly not controlled by him. If somehow, my friend who had been intelligent and capable but chose a much more dependent role in relationship to her husband, if maybe she could not stand the cognitive dissonance of that choice when faced with the likes of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Admittedly Senator Clinton is not always the most likable of people to watch, but she is a strong, capable, intelligent, and decisive human being, all qualities we supposedly like in a president. I really believe her when she says she has committed her life to small daily victories that make people’s lives better. So you can find her annoying, but hate her, what is wrong with you? If, in this day and age, you are afraid of a strong woman who is smarter than you are, you bring the human race down as a species.
So back to how I wound up with Senator Obama. Partially, it is a matter of our somewhat mirror biographies, in that we are both the descendants of mothers born to the state of Kansas and fathers born to countries in the global South. I can see that Senator Obama has struggled with his African American identity in ways that evoke my own struggles with being Latina but looking “Greek”. I also agree with arguments made in the New York Times and by Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek. Senator Obama’s biography does make a difference to the kind of leader he can be. The rest of the world would look at us differently if our president was half Kenyan. And his intimate familial knowledge of Kenya, his childhood experiences in Indonesia, change the way he looks at and interacts with the rest of the world. The future of this country demands we have a president who can work with the rest of the world better than the last one. For those of you who did not get the memo, the United States is not the only important power on this tiny blue planet. We need a president who can do more than transcend the divisions of Republican and Democrat. We need a president whose very being can transcend the divide between the United States of America and the rest of the world.
Of course I read Time this week, and much to my chagrin, I discovered I am part of some soapy idealistic movement of people under 30 who believe in politics again. That is not it; I think a lot of us just believe that we are in a perilous situation, and we desperately need the right person to help us right now. It would be a grave misstep to elect a Republican, even one as honorable and heroic (at least in his youth that is) as John McCain. Republican fiscal policy has failed the bulk of us whenever they have been in charge since 1980, and most of us under 30 know that. McCain offers no alternative. Republican social policy erodes the possibilities for the poor, minorities, and women, or well basically everyone who is not wealthy, white, and male. Since that is 98% of us, you would think we could have no trouble voting them out of office. Republican foreign policy has generally alienated even our allies, especially the policy of this current administration. As we face an uncertain future, we are much more dependent on the good will of friends and neighbors than we have ever been before. That makes either Senator Clinton or Senator Obama a no-brainer kind of choice against any Republican, or so I would think, but then I thought Al Gore was a no-brainer kind of choice over George W. Bush.
Democrats should be happy with either of our top candidates, excepting some rabid Hillary Clinton despisers. Their differences are not so much those of substance but of style. This is not to say their policy differences are insignificant, and for you Obama critics out there, he does have some quite substantive policy initiatives to consider. As a Democrat, I consider it my obligation to castigate Senator Clinton for her vote authorizing the Iraq war, and I do so with this post. She, and many of her fellow Democrats, betrayed our party and our country on that day. Senator Obama guarantees that we will leave Iraq within 16 months of his taking office, but Senator Clinton has offered no such guarantee.
I also believe the difference of style is an important one. Mark Leibovich’s recent New York Timesarticle on this issue paints the distinction in stark contrasts that echo what I have seen in the campaigns. Professor Lani Guinier, in this piece, observes that Senator Clinton “is the talented lawyer serving her clients” while Senator Obama is a community organizer to his core “who sees the source of his power as the ability to inspire people to mobilize.” Here in California, my experience of the Clinton campaign is one of an admirably committed civil servant, but the Obama campaign has an army of committed volunteers who are always inspired to help organize others in support of him. Less-than-wealthy Clinton supporters are left more out in the wilderness; my own mother just today found out how she can support Senator Clinton in the caucuses back home in Kansas.
These are just a few of the reasons I have chosen to support Senator Obama, though it is an admittedly close election in my mind, with two superior candidates. Let me just say, however, that all politicians will betray their own best intentions. They are politicians because they are power-hungry individuals who can bend in the wind when need be; the rest of us aren't politicians because we can't compromise our ideals that much. I do not believe that either Senator Obama or Senator Clinton can completely heal the country of the Bush ills. But I do believe that Senator Obama has a slightly better shot at doing so and an even better shot at defeating Senator McCain. If you are in a Super Tuesday state, please be sure to do the rest of us a favor and vote. If you’re voting Democrat, you should strongly consider Senator Obama’s claim that he has the right experience to govern our country right now.
---- This was a really long post, but I have a couple of additional side notes:
The music video above should be a little clearer on the fact that it is also saying, "Sí, se puede," as well as "yes, we can" in so many languages that people speak in the United States. I was pleased to hear Spanish and see American Sign Language, but what about others?
Those of you spreading emails that claim Senator Obama is a Muslim should be ashamed of yourselves. Not only is that email an out and out lie, it is playing on ignorant religious fears that degrade our whole country. While I would have no fear of electing a Muslim for president were she or he the right person for the job, I know that is an opinion not shared by much of the country. I know politics is about dirty trickery, thus why I am not a politician, but come on people, even Senator McCain, whose adopted Bangladeshi child was used against him in 2000, would probably find that a low blow.
