Year: 2008

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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.

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Fighting Bob

I read a bunch about the Bread & Roses Strike when I was living up near Lawrence, so I figure I should poke around Wisconsin’s history and what do I find but this quote:

“The purpose of this ridiculous campaign is to throw the country into a state of sheer terror, to change public opinion, to stifle criticism, and suppress discussion. People are being unlawfully arrested, thrown into jail, held incommunicado for days, only to be eventually discharged without ever having been taken into court, because they have committed no crime. But more than this, if every preparation for war can be made the excuse for destroying free speech and a free press and the right of the people to assemble together for peaceful discussion, then we may well despair of ever again finding ourselves for a long period in a state of peace. The destruction of rights now occurring will be pointed to then as precedents for a still further invasion of the rights of the citizen.”

The scary part is the guy who said it died in 1955, so he wasn’t talking about the current war or the current destruction of rights – but he could have been. (The guy was “Fighting Bob” LaFollette, former Governor of Wisconsin, Congressman, Senator, and onetime candidate for President – who carried 17% of the popular vote, no mean feat in a two-party democracy.)

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Today’s Lesson: Intersectionality

We’re covering this in GEST 100 tomorrow, and I think it’s always the kind of piece that’s worth re-reading:

Sojourner Truth (1797-1883): Ain’t I A Woman?
Delivered 1851, Women’s Convention, Akron, Ohio

Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that ‘twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all this here talking about?

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?

Then they talk about this thing in the head; what’s this they call it? [member of audience whispers, “intellect”] That’s it, honey. What’s that got to do with women’s rights or negroes’ rights? If my cup won’t hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn’t you be mean not to let me have my little half measure full?

Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ’cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.

If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back , and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.

Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain’t got nothing more to say.

(We’re reading it with some Angela Davis.)