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Sullivan Said

I just came back from an impressive lecture by Andrew Sullivan about the current election. When it was planned, they didn’t realize he’d be speaking on Super Tuesday, but it’s good that he did.

It was a pretty stunning analysis of the way the Boomer generation’s politics have divided the country and our politics for too long, and pointed up the ways that the (predicted) winning candidates, McCain and Obama, transcended some of those divisions, divisions left over from the 60s: the blue/red, left/right, hippie/straight divide.

His articulation of the way Hillary Clinton is the last current hope of any Republican party unification was not just funny but on the mark. She pisses off Republicans in a way no one else can, and as Sullivan put it, “It may not be her fault – but it is a fact.” & I agree. I’ve been frustrated by the Democratic Party’s backing of her for a very long time – not because I dislike her, but because she symbolizes – fairly or unfairly – the kinds of ideas that divide the country. (Even if, as Sullivan pointed out, both she & her husband are moderates.)

What he had to say about McCain was equally interesting: that because he was in, and suffered during, the Viet Nam War, he would never go after the likes of Kerry in the ways his Republican party cohorts did. And that what may have gotten him through his own torture was the thought that the country he was fighting for would never do such things. But we have. And so, Sullivan pointed out – and as he said, “maybe naively” – McCain feels the dishonor Dubya and his cohorts have brought to America in a way that most Americans feel it, as well.

The image of Mitt Romney as Glenn Close in the bathtub scene in Fatal Attraction will forever stick in my memory as well.

But of course Sullivan is well-known by now to be an Obama supporter. As he pointed out, Obama is not a Boomer. Thankfully. And like most people under 40 in the US, Obama knows that it isn’t a choice to be pro-gay or pro-family, that the idea of women being equal isn’t radical or terrifying, and that there isn’t necessarily a divide between letting a government help people it can help while letting the rest thrive with relative freedom from government. Conservative after conservative Sullivan interviewed (for his Atlantic Monthly article on Obama) said they like him, because even when Obama disagreed with them, he listened to them with respect.

It strikes me now – a half hour after Sullivan finished speaking – that what both candidates stand for, more than anything, is not being their own Party’s favorite son (or daughter), and simultaneously being capable of bringing some dignity back to politics in the US.

I hope he’s right.

Now go out & vote.

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New Resources

So I’ve discovered a few interesting new resources in team teaching Gender Studies 100 this semester, and never posted some I discovered last term. Here are a few:

  • The Trouble with Testosterone by Robert Sapolsky – a very accessible read about the popular misunderstandings about testosterone (for instance, that it causes aggression)
  • Iron Jawed Angels – about the last push for the vote for women in the US
  • The Fire, Earth, Water trilogy by Deepa Mehta – stunning, beautiful film series by a woman director about various aspects of Indian culture. Mehta has a gentle but powerful hand as a story-teller.
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Tillie Olsen

I didn’t know she died last year. I’m feeling a bit like a door just hit me in the face. I came to know her through her work at CUNY’s Feminist Press, and it was like a revelation: a working class white woman writer, brilliant and often neglected. Her book Silences was then, & is now, a revelation.

The NYT notes, in her obituary, that when Margaret Atwood reviewed it when it came out, she said:

“It begins with an account, first drafted in 1962, of her own long, circumstantially enforced silence,” Ms. Atwood wrote. “She did not write for a very simple reason: A day has 24 hours. For 20 years she had no time, no energy and none of the money that would have bought both.”

The books she helped bring back – like Life in the Iron Mills and Daughter of Earth (Agnes Smedley’s autobiography) were some of the first reflections of where my people came from I’d ever read.

How frustrating not to have known.