It is possible that by the end of this campaign season, I’ll be standing all alone: no friends left. I am trying to stay away from it, for the most part, noting only headlines and their sources. An acquaintance, a self-described independent, reports that he is watching the news carefully to determine where he stands in this race, which of the candidates he judges will be best for the country. I am stunned to think that there are people in this country who think that the TV, newspaper, and internet versions of the ‘campaign’ are being run by Emmanuel Kant (or even by Will and Ariel Durant), intellectual masters who are serving up a feast of ideas that we can all look over and consider carefully. The closest connection I get to the ‘pig in lipstick’ comment is that we are generally being served swill and, worse yet, are lining up to consume it.
Very mysterious.
The last day or so, I have received several opportunities to vent my spleen on a website called womenagainstsarahpalin.blogspot.com. As a long-time reader of George Lakoff (Metaphors We Live By, Don’t Think about an Elephant, etc.), a former English/writing teacher, and a garden-variety over-educated elite member, I’d like to say a few words about why I find this language offensive. The website explains how the women in charge wrote to forty of their friends asking them to write about why they opposed Sarah Palin’s entry into the presidential campaign. Those forty then sent it out to their many friends, and now they have over 140,000 women writing about why they oppose Sarah Palin.
Fine. I’m cool with that. I didn’t join the fray, despite these invitations from long-time friends, because I am not a woman against Sarah Palin. I am a woman, and I would never vote for Sarah Palin for anything I can think of (animal control officer?), but I am not in any way, shape or form uninclined to vote for Sarah Palin because either she or I are women.
This group makes me embarrassed for the political left just as I have become profoundly embarrassed for the political right. I fear that the political left is just getting its sea legs in making the whirling descent down the hole to the bottom where we just grunt at one another, hurl insults, and brandish weapons, where language, ideas, and discussion is lost in the maelstrom; where, at the end, we ascend bloody and beaten all, pompously congratulating ourselves on “our democracy.”.
Okay, so what’s wrong with ‘women against Sarah Palin’? Let me pose this. If you ran into a group titled ‘Progressives Against Sarah Palin’ or ‘Liberals Against Sarah Palin’ or ‘Pro-Choice Advocates Against Sarah Palin,’ or ‘Pacificists Against Sarah Palin’ or even ‘Moose Against Sarah Palin,’ you wouldn’t bat an eye, nor would I. The meaning and message of all of those groups is clear: Sarah Palin does not share the values of those who are opposed to her, she is being excluded from those groups. ‘Woman Against Sarah Palin’ is absolutely different: exactly what are the values of ‘WOMEN’ as a group that Sarah Palin doesn’t share? How can she be excluded from the group 'women'? It is clear in the letters posted to the website what values THESE women don’t share with Sarah Palin, but THESE WOMEN do not, now or ever, constitute the group WOMEN. Just how arrogant is that? The group, the category ‘WOMEN’ IS a vastly larger group. By trying to appropriate the larger group as their own identifier, these particular women are simply gutting the language further as well as indulging a colossal degree of narcissism.
I’m sorry to see these women doing this. If all of this seems tiresomely fine-pointed, consider the fact that you have never heard of the following groups: Men Against McCain, Men Against Obama, Black People Against Clarence Thomas. Or, how about ‘Tall People Against Bill Bradley,’ to reach back to an earlier and simpler time. And that’s because there are no such groups, even though lots of men don’t like McCain for President and lots of other men don’t like Obama for President. I’m pretty sure that Jesse Jackson was no fan of Clarence Thomas but Jesse Jackson knew better than to name a group ostensibly speaking for Blacks against a Black candidate for office, a suggestion that Clarence Thomas wasn’t really a Black man. Anybody can attack Sarah Palin’s ideas all they want. That is what freedom of speech is all about, of course. But nobody gets to say that WOMEN reject Sarah Palin because she does not share the values of women, or even that WOMEN is a category that contains specific values. And also, those tall people who were against Bill Bradley: what was their story?
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4 comments:
Many conservative men look at the Palin decision very simplistically. They believe that she was chosen because she's a woman, women will vote for gender rather than issues, and that is why McCain will win. Perhaps your friends are just putting voice to the fact that there are some women who will not voting based on gender.
I think the difference between these women and the other hypothetical groups you mention is that no one outside these other hypothetical groups is claiming to represent the groups' interests. I think the women who are organizing this web site are reacting to an attempt by someone who doesn't share their values to claim to represent their interests; the purpose of the web site is to deny that Palin speaks for them simply because they're women. Since the association between women and Palin is being exploited by the McCain campaign, it seems reasonable that people who don't share the values of that campaign would want to dissociate themselves from that attempt.
more specifically, 'women' is not a group with interests or values or anything of that sort. palin can't speak for women and neither can the specific women on this site. 'women' are adult members of a biological category not an interest group. i just think they ought to name themselves for what they DO represent--whatever that might be--and it is not women. palin shouldn't say that she speaks for women, and other women ought not either.
You might want to take this up with Wendy Doniger at the Washington Post who wrote, "Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman."
(lifted from Ann Althouse's selection of the most obnoxious anti-Palin posts so far http://althouse.blogspot.com/2008/09/20-most-obnoxious-anti-palin-quotes-so.html
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