Okay, I'm not a huge fan of political articles that are just "for fun" reading. I've even been staying away from poltical talk on the message boards because it only serves to hock me off that people can't play nice. Really, referring to McCain's nominating Palin as his VP is being called "putting lipstick on a pig." Wow, Party of Tolerance, no? ;-)
Anyway, Stacy over at Blessed Chaos pointed me to this article (I've copied and pasted the text here, but if you want to click the link it starts with the bold type and continues the rest of the page) today from Salon.com. I am not a reader of that site, but Jarrod informed me that it's a very liberal newspaper type of site. Uh, okay. Goody. Can't wait.
Much to my surprise, the writer, Camille Paglia, gave great kudos to what I love about Sarah Palin. She points out that the liberal media is portraying her as a gun-totin' animal-shootin' religious dummy, which I don't agree with at all. One of the things I like about her is that she isn't drenched in politics in Washington DC. She's a fresh face and while she may lack the "DC Polish" that McCain, Obama and Biden posess, why is that a bad thing? Really, what has that "refinement" gotten us over the past, gosh... let's just go with 50 years?
Now I don't agree with *everything* Paglia is saying [mostly the whole "which did seem to fly by in fragments at times but are
plainly ready to be filled with deeper policy knowledge, as she gains
it (hopefully over the next eight years of the Obama presidencies)" section - but she has a right to feel the way she does and interject humor into the article. After all, we religious, gun-toting dummies need something at our level to grasp on to, right Obama? ;-)]
As I see it, the Palin Effect is a double-headed hydra. On one side
you have Todd Palin, who is clearly a vibrant, macho force in his
family’s life. Just as clearly, he has effectively embraced the role as
a primary caregiver. What does it say that he and Sarah have a mutually
aggrandizing partnership/marriage? A successful professional woman who
embraces a masculine male rather than castrate him? Heaven forfend!
Personally I see it as the benign (and noble) conclusion of the
feminist movement. I guess fish don’t need bicycles, but some of them
want one. And they’d rather it come with some cojones.
Discussing the Sarah Palin effect is quickly becoming a national psychosis, to which I doubt I could add much. The only thing I haven’t seen discussed is a comparison between her popularity and what Rush Limbaugh hilariously and intuitively called Bill Clinton’s “Arousal Gap." I think we’re seeing that Todd Palin isn’t the only man’s man out there who has a healthy appreciation for a strong member of the opposite sex. Here is another benign and admirable consequence of the feminist movement.
Steve Gurney
Niceville, Florida
Yes, both Todd and Sarah Palin, whom most people in the U.S. and abroad had never even heard of until six weeks ago, have emerged as powerful new symbols of a revived contemporary feminism. That the macho Todd, with his champion athleticism and working-class cred, can so amiably cradle babies and care for children is a huge step forward in American sexual symbolism.
Although nothing will sway my vote for Obama, I continue to enjoy Sarah Palin's performance on the national stage. During her vice-presidential debate last week with Joe Biden (whose conspiratorial smiles with moderator Gwen Ifill were outrageous and condescending toward his opponent), I laughed heartily at Palin's digs and slams and marveled at the way she slowly took over the entire event. I was sorry when it ended! But Biden wasn't -- judging by his Gore-like sighs and his slow sinking like a punctured blimp. Of course Biden won on points, but TV (a visual medium) never cares about that.
The mountain of rubbish poured out about Palin over the past month would rival Everest. What a disgrace for our jabbering army of liberal journalists and commentators, too many of whom behaved like snippy jackasses. The bourgeois conventionalism and rank snobbery of these alleged humanitarians stank up the place. As for Palin's brutally edited interviews with Charlie Gibson and that viper, Katie Couric, don't we all know that the best bits ended up on the cutting-room floor? Something has gone seriously wrong with Democratic ideology, which seems to have become a candied set of holier-than-thou bromides attached like tutti-frutti to a quivering green Jell-O mold of adolescent sentimentality.
And where is all that lurid sexual fantasy coming from? When I watch Sarah Palin, I don't think sex -- I think Amazon warrior! I admire her competitive spirit and her exuberant vitality, which borders on the supernormal. The question that keeps popping up for me is whether Palin, who was born in Idaho, could possibly be part Native American (as we know her husband is), which sometimes seems suggested by her strong facial contours. I have felt that same extraordinary energy and hyper-alertness billowing out from other women with Native American ancestry -- including two overpowering celebrity icons with whom I have worked.
One of the most idiotic allegations batting around out there among urban media insiders is that Palin is "dumb." Are they kidding? What level of stupidity is now par for the course in those musty circles? (The value of Ivy League degrees, like sub-prime mortgages, has certainly been plummeting. As a Yale Ph.D., I have a perfect right to my scorn.) People who can't see how smart Palin is are trapped in their own narrow parochialism -- the tedious, hackneyed forms of their upper-middle-class syntax and vocabulary.
As someone whose first seven years were spent among Italian-American immigrants (I never met an elderly person who spoke English until we moved from Endicott to rural Oxford, New York, when I was in first grade), I am very used to understanding meaning through what might seem to others to be outlandish or fractured variations on standard English. Furthermore, I have spent virtually my entire teaching career (nearly four decades) in arts colleges, where the expressiveness of highly talented students in dance, music and the visual arts takes a hundred different forms. Finally, as a lover of poetry (my last book was about that), I savor every kind of experimentation with standard English -- beginning with Shakespeare, who was the greatest improviser of them all at a time when there were no grammar rules.
Many others listening to Sarah Palin at her debate went into conniptions about what they assailed as her incoherence or incompetence. But I was never in doubt about what she intended at any given moment. On the contrary, I was admiring not only her always shapely and syncopated syllables but the innate structures of her discourse -- which did seem to fly by in fragments at times but are plainly ready to be filled with deeper policy knowledge, as she gains it (hopefully over the next eight years of the Obama presidencies). This is a tremendously talented politician whose moment has not yet come. That she holds views completely opposed to mine is irrelevant.
Even if she disappears from the scene forever after a McCain defeat, Palin will still have made an enormous and lasting contribution to feminism. As I said in my last column, Palin has made the biggest step forward in reshaping the persona of female authority since Madonna danced her dominatrix way through the shattered puritan barricades of the feminist establishment. In 1990, in a highly controversial New York Times op-ed that attacked old-guard feminist ideology, I declared that "Madonna is the future of feminism" -- a prophecy that was ridiculed at the time but that turned out to be quite true. Madonna put pro-sex feminism on the international map.
But it is now 18 years later -- the span of an entire generation. The instabilities and diminishments for young women raised in an increasingly shallow media environment have become all too obvious. I had grown up in a vibrant pop culture with glorious women stars of voluptuous sensuality -- above all Elizabeth Taylor, sewn into that silky white slip as the vixen Manhattan call girl of "Butterfield 8." In college, I feasted on foreign films starring sexual sophisticates like Jeanne Moreau, Anouk Aimée and Catherine Deneuve. Sex today, however, has become brittle and superficial. Except for the occasional diverting flash of Lindsay Lohan's borrowed bosom, I see nothing whatever that is worth a second glance. Pro-sex feminism has worked itself out and, like all movements, has degenerated into clichés. And even Madonna, with her skeletal megalomania, looks like a refugee from a horror movie.
The next phase of feminism must circle back and reappropriate the ancient persona of the mother -- without losing career ambition or power of assertion. Betty Friedan, who had first attacked the cult of postwar domesticity, had long warned second-wave feminists such as Gloria Steinem about the damaging exclusion of homemakers from their value system. The animus of liberal feminists toward religion must also end (I am speaking as an atheist). Feminism must reexamine all of its assumptions, including its death grip on abortion, if it wishes to survive.
The hysterical emotionalism and eruptions of amoral malice at the arrival of Sarah Palin exposed the weaknesses and limitations of current feminism. But I am convinced that Palin's bracing mix of male and female voices, as well as her grounding in frontier grit and audacity, will prove to be a galvanizing influence on aspiring Democratic women politicians too, from the municipal level on up. Palin has shown a brand-new way of defining female ambition -- without losing femininity, spontaneity or humor. She's no pre-programmed wonk of the backstage Hillary Clinton school; she's pugnacious and self-created, the product of no educational or political elite -- which is why her outsider style has been so hard for media lemmings to comprehend. And by the way, I think Tina Fey's witty impersonations of Palin have been fabulous. But while Fey has nailed Palin's cadences and charm, she can't capture the energy, which is a force of nature.
Thenk you for not being a jackass about everything. With message boards, people automatically go on the attack when you mention who you like, and that gets really, really old. I don't put a McCain/Palin "sticker" on my forum signature. I don't put a Photoshop stylized picture of McCain in my avatar. I get so tired of people wanting to cram Obama down my throat saying "We NEED CHANGE! Look at what Bush has done to us!" While I agree with change in a general definition, there is very little that I agree with in the Obama camp's philosophies. As I've said before, I'm also not 100% with McCain's spoutings, either. But he scares me far, far less.
Alrighty, I think that about fills the poltical obligation for the week. I know I said I wouldn't blog about political stuff often, and I try not to. But some things chap my ass so much that... well dang it, this is my venting place. Think of it as a public diary, you get what you get. Enjoy, or don't. :)
Now, I really liked the Today show clip that Stacy posted about the Down Syndrome community and the Palin family. I hadn't realized that Trig was *so* young! My mind made up that he was something like 2 years old, and when I kept seeing him at the debates, etc. I kept thinking to myself "Wow, he is an awfully small and fragile 2-year-old." What a dodo I can be. ;-)
I think that it's an awesome recognition of families dealing with Ds and it's many, many faces. Again with the "human" factor of Palin - she's not skirting the issue. She's never hidden the fact she has a child with Ds. She embraces every single child and adult she meets along the route and you can SEE it in her face that she gets what it's like to be faced with those sorts of challenges.
Yep, totally a gun-totin' religious dummy.
*sigh*
feeling that is why Down Syndrome gets a little downplayed. But, also a very important and noble cause, I have opted to do something pink. Give me a few minutes to think of what exactly that will be... *wink*
