For Feisty Feminists

You’ve probably heard about McCain’s latest ad, which says that Obama wants to teach kindergartners comprehensive sex education before they learn to read. This is based on a bill he supported that would teach kids how to identify and report sexual predators. It’s real slimy. I think it’s pretty clear that any hope for a clean campaign from the McCain camp is gone.

The Obama campaign response?

Last week, John McCain told Time magazine he couldn’t define what honor was. Now we know why.

DAMN.

Read Pat Buchanan’s latest rant at Real Clear Politics. He buries the blatant race-baiting two-thirds of the way down:

Why did the selection of Sarah Palin cause a suspension of all standards and a near riot among a media that has been so in the tank for Barack even “Saturday Night Live” has satirized the infatuation?

Because she is one of us — and he is one of them.

Barack and Michelle are affirmative action, Princeton, Columbia, Harvard Law. She is public schools and Idaho State. Barack was a Saul Alinsky social worker who rustled up food stamps. Sarah Palin kills her own food.

Michelle has a $300,000-a-year sinecure doing PR for a Chicago hospital. Todd Palin is a union steelworker who augments his income working vacations on the North Slope. Sarah has always been proud to be an American. Michelle was never proud of America — until Barack started winning.

Now, who is the ‘us’ that Pat Buchanan is talking about, and who is the ‘them’? If it’s really about the democratic ticket and not about race, why is Joe Biden absent from this discussion?

Even if we weren’t talking about Pat Buchanan - a virulent racist whose response to Obama’s speech on race (referring to him as ‘Barack,’ but using last names for all the white people mentioned) was “It is the same old con, the same old shakedown that black hustlers have been running [for years]” and “White America needs to be heard from, not just lectured to” - it’s pretty clear who is meant by ‘them’ and ‘us.’

The village I am at right now is in the wilderness. I see deer fairly regularly - one afternoon, there were 7 or 8 deer walking along. A few days before that, I saw a deer as I was eating dinner on one of the porches. I pointed it out to the folks I was eating with, and they were unimpressed. They had all been here for one year or more, so seeing a deer is not an event.

I did see a baby black bear the other day. I have not seen the mama bear. The baby walked off the porch of the dining hall, ambled along the back of the lodge, and then disappeared. It is not a good sign that they are coming into the village - it means they are hungry and the food in the wilderness has not been enough. It is bad for the village and for them that they are here; they can do a lot of damage to the village, and they should not be comfortable around humans for their own safety. There is not much we can do, besides keeping everything rewarding (anything with food on it) away from the bears’ reach until they go into hibernation.

That’s my wilderness experience right now; it is very different from the city, and very different from any place I’ve ever lived (always in cities; the closest to wildlife was a house that had mice). I’ll get to see the change from summer to fall to early winter, both in the environment and in the community here.

McCain has picked Sarah Palin as his running mate. I haven’t decided if I think this move is brilliant or profoundly stupid. I’m leaning toward profoundly stupid, because she has no national experience, plus the fact that she’s a woman - even if a pro-life, anti-gay marriage, traditional, non-threatening woman - will probably make some fundies heads explode, and may make some of those middle of the road defect to the Obama camp.

Clinton lost the primary. So, the first woman on a major party ticket in the general election since Geraldine Ferraro is anti-choice, anti-woman, and very conservative. Already the misogyny has started, with comments about her looks, her intelligence, rumors about the parentage of her youngest child. Some feminists are calling out the misogyny, even as they disagree with her politics. While I hope that continues, I think it’s possible to avoid misogyny but still look at the gender issues, the ways in which a woman who toes the line like Palin will get places that women who actually care about other women cannot.

Someone posted this excerpt from Andrea Dworkin’s ‘Right-wing Women,’ it illuminates why someone like Palin, a token, is electable - not like Clinton, who did not dissociate herself from other women, but tried to work for them.

The token woman carries the stigma of inferiority with her, however much she tries to disassociate herself from the other women of her sex class. In trying to stay singular, not one of them, she grants the inferiority of her sex class, an inferiority for which she is always compensating and from which she is never free. If the inferiority were not reckoned universally true, she of all women would not have to defend herself against the stigma of it; nor would her own complicity in the antifeminism of the institution (through disassociation with lesser women) be a perpetual condition of her quasi acceptance.