Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves!
I chanced upon this firsthand account of the Alaskan women’s rally against Palin’s nomination. It was heartening.
Never, have I seen anything like it in my 17 and a half years living in Anchorage. The organizers had someone walk the rally with a counter, and they clicked off well over 1400 people (not including the 90 counter-demonstrators). This was the biggest political rally ever, in the history of the state. I was absolutely stunned. The second most amazing thing is how many people honked and gave the thumbs up as they drove by. And even those that didn’t honk looked wide-eyed and awe-struck at the huge crowd that was growing by the minute. This just doesn’t happen here. – ‘Alaska Women Reject Palin’ Rally is HUGE!
Alaska Women Say She Be Failin’
A couple of hours after Gov. Sarah Palin returned to the Outside, as Alaskans call the Lower 48, her local critics swarmed an Anchorage intersection to correct the widespread impression that the whole of the Last Frontier endorses her candidacy.
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“The whole thing grew out of frustration,” said Charla Sterne, one of the organizers, who like several people at the rally declined to say where they worked (several said they were state employees and feared retribution). – In Anchorage, an Anti-Palin Protest – Washington Post
I couldn’t resist including a sample of the signs:
- Bush In A Skirt
- Palin: She Be Failin’
- Jesus Was a Community Organizer
- Palin: Thanks But No Thanks
- Smearing Alaska’s Good Name One Scandal @ a Time
- Candidate To Nowhere
- Rape Kits Should Be Free
- Voted For Her Once: Never Again!
- Community Organizers are the Real Patriots
- Barbies for War
- I Shall Not Be Pandered To
- Give Palin Your Vote AND Your Draft Age Child
- Sarah Palin: So Far Right She’s Wrong
- Coat Hangers for McCain
- Sarah Palin, Undoing 150 Years of American Feminism
- Hockey Mama for Obama (on a hockey stick)
A break from politics, sort of
I say sort of because Hanisch, nearly forty years ago now, cogently made the case that the personal is political.
Though it may not readily appear so, what I set out to write about is entangled in a thicket of weighty concerns, including first and foremost the 2008 Presidential Election, the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bailouts, the mortgage crisis, the credit crunch, Sarah Palin’s nomination as VP candidate, the necessity for women to remain economically self-sufficient…
Yesterday, as I was taking a break at my favorite…
Well, actually nevermind yesterday. Literally just this moment, at 2:32am, I received a call from a restricted number. I didn’t think it could be a telemarketing solicitation, although I would not put it past them these days. But it wasn’t a telemarketing firm. It could, nonetheless, be construed as a kind of a solicitation.
(more…)
Well-Intentioned But Manipulated
In “The Mirrored Ceiling,” the latest post in her New York Times blog Domestic Disturbances, Judith Warner articulates incisively the gross insult and danger that is Palin’s nomination.
Palin sounded, at times, like she was speaking a foreign language as she gave voice to the beautifully crafted words that had been prepared for her on Wednesday night.
But that wasn’t held against her. Thanks to the level of general esteem that greeted her ascent to the podium, it seems we’ve all got to celebrate the fact that America’s Hottest Governor (Princess of the Fur Rendezvous 1983, Miss Wasilla 1984) could speak at all.
Could there be a more thoroughgoing humiliation for America’s women?
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One of the worst poisons of the American political climate right now, the thing that time and again in recent years has led us to disaster, is the need people feel for leaders they can “relate” to. … it brought us after all, two terms of George W. Bush. And it isn’t new; Americans have always needed to feel that their leaders were, on some level, people like them. …But never before George W. Bush did it quite reach the beer-drinking level of familiarity… There’s a fine line between likability and demagoguery. Both thrive upon manipulation and least-common-denominator politics.”
Some of the comments to this Blog post were especially worthwhile. In particular, I appreciated Elizabeth Fuller’s comments (#5 and #387 ), as did so many others who commented, and Bill’s comment #363. They were gems. I just hope that the populace is made up of such thoughtful people who do discern the dissimulation being waged by Steve Schmidt, John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the Republican Party who, in order to put themselves in the White House, would do everything but put the country first and in fact would soil and undermine the very values upon which this nation was founded. I hope they are able to see that Sarah Palin is none other than a lipstick wearing, Alaskan iteration of George W. Bush: just as ill-prepared because they are not curious about the world in which they live, they have not dedicated themselves to challenging themselves, their hubris allows them to believe they possess all the wherewithal that could possibly be necessary to be (V)POTUS, and they lack respect for the Constitution and would violate that foundational belief in the separation of church and state.
Well-Intentioned But Misguided
When I returned from my first year at Bryn Mawr College, I was a bit of a firebrand. Full of zeal, passionately committed to righting wrongs, to disabusing grossly mistaken notions less enlightened folks held, and so on. (Yes, cringe all you’d like… It’s totally deserved.)
One of the issues of note for me was the politics of naming. Of ensuring that we did not continue to perpetrate violence by denying people their right to self-definition. So, holier than thou I was, thumping on my soapbox (yep, this tendency is obviously not new) that it’s not merely about being politically correct (which to me meant wanting pat, easy answers so that those who were so hung up on being pc would not have to really reflect upon their own complicity in the perpetration of violence) but about putting an end to violence psychically, socioeconomically, culturally, that it was about radical change, and so on.
So, here I was, a zealous eighteen year old telling my very kind thirtysomething neighbor (who was trying to raise her son on her own after a divorce all the whilst trying to pursue a meaningful career that’d utilize the top knotch education she’d received at William and Mary) how horrible it was that people continued to say “indians” to refer to Native Americans, that this name reiterates the violence of Euro-American hegemony. At that moment, my good neighbor tried to get me to step back and question whether I might be shooting myself in the foot by being so aggressively dogmatic in “enlightening” and “raising the consciousness” of my neighbors. And to question whether I was not in my own way doing violence to Native Americans by reducing them to being nothing but dignified victims of Western hegemony, by allowing myself to regard them primarily in terms of their victimization. And to ask myself if every single person who was of indigenous descent would choose to self-identify as Native American, that might it not be that Native American was yet another externally imposed label, one that says more about those other Americans who are not Native? If I remember correctly, I think she tried to tell me that, if anything, it was a more common practice amongst those I was calling Native American to identify themselves by their tribal affiliations.
I didn’t catch it then. In fact, (more…)
Shame on the Whole Lot of You
Steve Schmidt has transformed John McCain’s campaign into an elbows-out, risk-taking, disciplined machine. – An Adviser Puts His Stamp on McCain Campaign – The New York Times
Steve Schmidt stands for all that I find problematic about politics. His modus operandi is what most people purport to find repugnant about politicking. McCain used to criticize this type of “win at all costs, including stretching the truth so much that it bears little resemblance to itself” politicking. That McCain who was critical of dirty politics, I actually liked.
Must we resort to this to win? Are we that base? To stoop to such demeaning strategies and to devour such meat with frightening voracity that we make a pack of laughing hyenas appear civilized?
This criticism is not limited to Steve Schmidt and whichever likeminded Republicans.
Dems! Whatever happened to being the change you want, of wanting a more elevated, diginified political engagement? (more…)
A Millennial College Grad Discovers Sexism in the Workplace
New female college graduates, raised in a post-feminist culture, can have a hard time adjusting to a workplace where gender bias still exists. – Girl Power at School, but Not at the Office – NYTimes.com
Ha! Imagine what it is like for someone graduating from a women’s college! Anyhow, a must read for women.
That said, the author is missing one piece of the puzzle. She says repeatedly that the workplace requires “abilities that men are just more likely to have already” or that “men have long known” how to succeed in the workplace. She never quite hits on why or it never dawns on her to think why, which is problematic.
Honey, who do you think were involved in shaping for not only decades but centuries the cultural values, the preferred modes of interpersonal conduct, that prevail in today’s workplace? Now think again why men seem to know already how to best navigate their workplaces, or seem better prepared to do so?
Pretty Woman: Sarah Palin
Imagine my delight when the hokey chick flick came out on the campaign trail, a Cinderella story so preposterous it’s hard to believe it’s not premiering on Lifetime. – Vice in Go-Go Boots? – Maureen Dowd, NYTimes.com
I normally don’t go for Maureen Dowd. But this one did make me laugh. That said, I wonder at which point does critique become satire, then slur?
Yes, I still find insulting the choice of Palin as VP because she’s so grossly underqualified for that particular position. Perhaps she is a fine governor for Alaska. But 2nd in line to the POTUS? What was McCain thinking? What happened to the man who was once the Republican I Liked and Secretly Suspected Was a Democrat? (I just caught myself about to shoot off, “is he senile?” but realized how problematic that might be.)
That said, though we can critique her hypocrisy re: family values, if feminists want to argue for choice, we cannot go around criticizing her decision to be a Governor rather than the primary caretaker of her child, Down Syndrome or not.
I am a bit shocked by her hubris and audacity in thinking herself capable of being POTUS. I’d have respected her more if she’d declined.
Sarah Palin vs Hillary Rodham Clinton
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Sarah Palin Isn’t Hillary Clinton
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Professional Experience |
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Political Experience |
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