Getting Dressed

I’m not sure what is the most depressing part about the current Palin hysteria: the fact that the campaign thought she needed all those designer clothes to run for VP, the fact that she herself seemed to think she needed all those clothes, or the fact that the press seems to think that having all those clothes was great, but either it wasn’t a good idea for her to have them because she’s running as a regular person, or it wasn’t a good idea for the Republican Party to pay for them because she should pay for them herself. Or worse.

Oh, feminism, where have we gotten to after all these tiring years? I read or hear some journalist or campaign person or both saying, ‘Well, of course, it’s a lot more expensive to dress a woman for a campaign.’ Really? Why would that be? Well, that would be, I guess, because they are objects to be adorned and they have to be adorned expensively and with great variety or we won’t really like them. We certainly aren’t going to like them for their ideas or for their ‘war hero’ qualities, I imagine. I wonder if Hillary Clinton feels she just didn’t spend enough on her clothes and that’s why she’s not running for president?

I am deeply saddened that after all this time, women, too, are still so profoundly committed to worrying about their attire: whether it’s sexy enough, flashy enough, fashionable enough, cute enough, expensive enough, glamorous enough; but never whether it’s comfortable enough, or whether it’s a match for the task the woman has at hand. You can’t go out to the world of commerce and see all those babes in high-heels without thinking about—and wincing in anticipation of--the back problems in their future. Or to the beach, where you can consider whether a future as a dermatological oncologist isn't a smart way to go for financial security.

Men, who have their own problems of failed maturity, at least seem better able to handle clothes. Virtually none of us--male or female--knows whether Obama has never worn the same suit twice, has only one suit, or has fifty suits that are all just alike. He comes out, he’s dressed, he looks suitable, and that’s good enough (suitable! What a great word in that context!). Ms. Palin looks okay to me, but I wouldn’t notice if she were wearing Valentino Originals or Liz Claiborne off the rack from a discount mall. But then I come from the rural northwest where Ms. Palin’s everyday Alaska clothes look perfectly fine and, except for those high heels and the Louis Vuitton bag (scroll down to October 22), genuinely appropriate (although the high heels may be necessary for ‘fancy beauty pageant walking').

My sympathies sort of go out to the Republican donors who didn’t think that was what they were buying with the earnest money they sent to their party. Would they have felt as bad if the money had been used to pay for bespoke suits for McCain? Is their unhappiness about its being used for expensive clothes? Or expensive clothes for women? The McCain Campaign says there are more important issues to discuss, but for myself, I think that why women have (1) to think of themselves as and/or (2) to be treated by others as Barbie dolls ought to be one of the top ten issues for the country. When I think of important female political leaders, my mind does not go to Cleopatra; I think about Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, Indira Ghandi—asexual, unfashionable beings for the most part (although I may not be a good judge of high fashion saris). If Americans ever do elect a women as President, she’ll doubtless look more like this than like Ms. Palin or Ms. Clinton, of course. We like our women to be glamorous and sexy, but if they rise to the bait, we don’t trust ‘em.


(Fabric Portrait, 9"x13", 2008)

Are You Amused?

Several people have written to me asking whether I plan to write about Sarah Palin. It seems to me unlikely that I would have anything to offer on that topic that others have not already written. Nevertheless, a couple of things that have been written have come to my mind in recent days and roiled around there. The first, a book written over two decades ago; the second, an essay published in the L.A. Times this past week.

Neil Postman was a NYU professor, a media theorist, and a cultural critic. In 1985, he published a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death. It was about the way in which the pervasiveness of television was altering the culture. Wikipedia describes it thus: “Postman argues that television confounds serious issues with entertainment, demeaning and undermining political discourse by making it less about ideas and more about image.” I read the book in 1985, sensed that what he was saying sounded right, and kept it in mind. Part of the reason that I thought he was onto something was that I was teaching bioethics/’legal and ethical issues in healthcare’ to undergraduates at UCLA at the time and was comparing them to the undergraduate students I had first taught at UCLA twenty-five years earlier, in 1960, when I was teaching rhetoric/English composition to students of the same age.

The students of 1960 didn’t know how to write any better than the students of 1985, but no worse, either. What seemed to me to be different was the students’ understanding of the context they and I found ourselves inhabiting. In 1960, we saw it pretty much the same: I was the instructor and they expected me to teach them something. They assumed that I had something to teach them and, though they might not like learning it or might not entirely see what was the value of learning it, they expected to try to learn it. I, similarly, thought I had something to teach them and expected them to try to learn it. By 1985, I was still in the 1960’s context, but these 1985 students had moved on, for the most part, to a different context. And it was something like ‘education as a television program.’ Their question was not, ‘What have you got for me?’, as the 1960’s students’ question might be understood. It was more like, ‘Do I like this? Am I enjoying this? Is this class any fun?’ During those intervening 25 years, the students had transmogrified from students to audience, I had been moved in their view from teacher to performer, and the entire operation had been reconceived of as entertainment not education. Just as Postman said.

Now I didn’t think I was an entertainer nor that what we were doing was entertainment. But that didn’t really matter because a context is created by all parties to the activity. If I was to make any headway with my idea of what we were doing, I had somehow to incorporate their idea of what we were doing and lead them through it to my idea. I tried to be more entertaining and slip the education through where I could. I wasn’t unhappy some years later when I moved on to other worlds and no longer had to entertain people who wouldn’t mind being educated but only if it came through an entertainment context.

So, I now look at this campaign process and feel some sympathy for the people who thought they were going to be journalists but have ended up being performers in an entertainment endeavor. And I feel some sympathy for politicians who thought that they were going to explain their political views and policy goals but are instead expected to be star performers in an entertainment world. The American public appears, largely, to be interested in being entertained first, last and foremost, although it’s possible that the right person would still be able to slip in a little enlightenment here and there. But I don’t feel much sympathy for the audience that eagerly seeks out this entertainment extravaganza, pretending that it’s a political campaign or that it has any enlightenment or education at all, even as I understand how they got into audience mode. If we weren’t watching, obsessing about, writing about, and generally enjoying it as an entertainment spectacle, the politicians and the journalists wouldn’t be doing what they are doing. It takes two to engage in this. And it is here, alas, where I see Postman’s book title as prescient: We do, indeed seem to be amusing ourselves to death.

Which brings me to the second piece of writing, an op-ed by Sam Harris, in which he says, with respect to the press’ and public’s enthusiasm for Gov. Palin (and President Bush) as a 'regular guy’ (or gal), not some fancy-pants educated twit, but someone just like them (but with more money and political pull), someone who makes them cheer and hiss and boo as if they were at a wrestling match: ‘This is one of the many points at which narcissism becomes indistinguishable from masochism. Let me put it plainly: If you want someone just like you to be president of the United States, or even vice president, you deserve whatever dysfunctional society you get.’

Amusing ourselves to death. I am surely seeing the death part, but I’m personally having a little difficulty experiencing the amusing part. But then, I’m an educated twit, I suppose, even if I’m just a girl who grew up in the potato fields of Idaho. Forgot to learn to shoot large quadrupeds, however.