Chapter Seventy-Nine : Grizzly Bear
Strange Fruit
I would prefer that Obama win the election—not so much because he’d be so much better than Romney on policy but because he will disappoint so many of his loyalists that it would be good for radical politics. Instead of people bellyaching about McCain’s awfulness, as they would have had he won in 2008, we got Occupy. Occupy faded, in part because attention was turned to the presidential campaign… Presidential politics, given the power of money and all our constitutional structures that nurture orthodoxy, is the natural terrain of the big boys. It would be much more fruitful to organize around specific issues, like single-payer health insurance and living-wage bills; to develop better institutions, like livelier unions and third and fourth parties; and if one must work in the electoral realm, to build from the bottom up, where the likes of us could actually make a difference.
“Why Should the Left Support Obama? Doug Henwood”
At some level, I agree with Mr. Henwood– I usually agree with him— but at the same time I have some real misgivings. It’s true that lots of us have been so worried about the far right that we are willing to be, in effect, leftist yellow dog Democrats, willing to vote for any Democrat, even if he’s a yellow dog, figuratively or literally. I’m not sure that this is more than anecdote, but Facebook has made this election seem terrifying.
We’re all busy with families and jobs and to one extent or the other we are all low-information voters. On Facebook, though, I’ve discovered how deeply the right-wing has penetrated my family and friends back in Louisiana and Texas. I know conservatism well; I was raised by a man who joined the Republican effort to elect Reagan in 1976. I suspect Dad was Republican because he thought the chaotic Democratic party couldn’t run the country.
He shot himself in the foot. A few years into the Reagan era, when Dad died, the Republican administration had already succeeded in its efforts to eliminate Social Security’s once generous survivor’s benefits program. That made it much more difficult (among other things) for my little sister to go to college. Dad mistakenly thought Reagan would help him and the middle class. I see my family members and childhood friends making the same mistake.
Reagan’s election in 1980 was a landmark event, signalling more than three decades of erosion of power and affluence for everyone but the very rich. Reagan seemed like a bozo at the time and maybe he did no more than articulate the program already well underway. Romney seems like a very similar sort of clown, and maybe he too is doing nothing more than articulating the plan, but his ideas are worse than Reagan’s. We all need Obama to win.
Modern Mysogony
I probably shouldn’t be surprised by the current crop of misogyny among the far right but I am. This isn’t simply a case of taking one step back for every three steps forward. These men are repeating ideas about woman which seem to date to the last century, before woman could vote, much less before abortion was legal and contraception widely available.
We’ve been talking about feminist backlash for nearly two decades now and it has reached a kind of off-hand casualness that is astonishing. I found a remarkable post that catalogs the wide variety of rapes so far identified by Republicans:
GIFT-FROM-GOD-RAPE: “When life begins with that horrible situation of rape, that is something that God intended to happen.” -Richard Mourdock (R), candidate for Senate in Indiana, on October 23, 2012
“The right approach is to accept this horribly created, in the sense of rape, but nevertheless…a gift of human life, and accept what God is giving to you.” -Rick Santorum (R), Senator and Presidential candidate, on January 20, 2012
“Richard and I, along with millions of Americans…believe that life is a gift from God.” -Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas voicing his support of Richard Mourdock’s statement about rape-induced abortions, on October 24, 2012
LEGITIMATE RAPE
“If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” -Republican Congressman & Senate candidate Todd Akin of Missouri on August 20, 2012
HONEST RAPE
“If it’s an honest rape, that individual should go immediately to the emergency room, I would give them a shot of estrogen.” -Republican Congressman & Presidential candidate Ron Paul of Texas on February 3, 2012
EMERGENCY RAPE
“It was an issue about a Catholic church being forced to offer those pills if the person came in in an emergency rape.” -Republican Senate candidate Linda McMahon of Connecticut (also confusing churches with hospitals) on October 15, 2012
EASY RAPE
“If you go down that road, some girls, they rape so easy.” -Republican State Representative Roger Rivard of Wisconsin, on December 21, 2011 and endorsed by VP Candidate Paul Ryan on August 9, 2012
FORCIBLE RAPE
Republican Vice-Presidential nominee Paul Ryan, Todd “legitimate rape” Akin and 214 other Republicans co-sponsored the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act”, which would prohibit federal funding of abortions except in instances of “an act of forcible rape or, if a minor, an act of incest.” -H.R. 3, 112th Congress, January 20, 2011
“GOP Misogyny: Republican Embrace of Rape Culture” Nancy a Heitzeg
It’s as if there were a secret linguistic underground out there that had long been discussing rape in this hateful fashion and, without anyone really noticing, developing an entire misogynistic lexicon.
Charlotte Gainsbourg: Anna
http://vimeo.com/41351122