I want my news media back!
I am SO. OVER. this wedding (despite the fact that I’m covering it tomorrow for Columbia News Tonight). I’ve been avoiding TV news all week long, even my beloved “Nightline,” because all the mouth-breathing coverage just makes me mad. I started maxxing out in January when, while flipping channels in search of a morning show (WHY do they all go to commercial AT THE SAME TIME?), “Good Morning America” ran a complete non-story speculating on where the bridal party might stay the night before the wedding. Annoying.
But this morning I started to crack a little bit on my TV-news boycott, and turned on “Morning Joe” just for fun. Whereupon my face just about melted off, Indiana-Jones style. Fast-forward this clip to 12:45 and watch the madness unfold; apologies for the jankified setup (WordPress is giving me fits with embed codes tonight. #nerdalert).
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036789/ns/msnbc_tv-morning_joe/#42796686
Okay, ready? Let’s overlook the fact that the reason said press conference even had to happen was because the media continually fanned the Trump flames (check this out re: how stupid he thinks we all are); the absolute crush of microphones and photogs awaiting him yesterday after the president’s announcement should be enough evidence of that. Instead, let’s focus on the show that’s been BROADCASTING FROM LONDON all week telling us that we should really, you know, probably pay more attention to Afghanistan.
So, my eyes were bleeding. But then, THEN!, back over at GMA, the broadcast led with 15 minutes on the tornadoes in the south, the obvious lead (Brian Williams gets it), before attempting to bridge it to Robin Roberts anchoring their London coverage with, “Hey Robin, you’re from Mississippi, how do you feel about this?” followed by a split-screen of SIX live correspondents located all over the city. As if the crazy tornado destruction weren’t enough, Bieber forbid there’s a horrific national tragedy here at home tomorrow, because we’ll probably have virtually nobody to tell us about it.
Or is that really just the way we want it? News outlets wouldn’t be spending this time — and money! The MONEY! For someone who keeps hearing about how broke her industry is, THE. MONEY. — to provide this wall-to-wall insanity if they didn’t think we wanted it. I couldn’t even escape it over at Vh-1, where I’ve spent most of my mornings this week, as they intercut music videos with a collection of soundbytes from celebrities on various red carpets about THEIR thoughts on the wedding. A contingent of my beloved New Kids made an appearance, but most poignant was David Alan Grier, who said something along the lines of (I couldn’t find the clip), “I’d rather read about Kim Kardashian and her cellulite…this is our royalty, America.” What he didn’t add, but was written all over his face as he stared into the camera, was, “You’ve created this. Now live with it.”
My feelings about this whole thing are pretty complicated. Sure, I’m pretty much a love nihilist, but I generally like most weddings and the inevitable insanity they tend to inspire. And while the Mario Testino engagement portrait makes me feel all warm and fuzzy, and despite the fact that I can’t get away from it (emails awaiting me in my inbox this morning: “In-stores only: Be King for a Day with 40% off!” and “30% Off Royal Wedding-Worthy Dresses!”), I just cannot get into this thing. To borrow from Prince William himself, it makes me feel sort of “hollow,” maybe because it really feels kind of smarmy. This week’s New Yorker cover sums it all up nicely; even if they have “asked for this” or “known what they’re getting into,” at some point, is all our panting going to actually destroy the day for the people it’s (allegedly) revolving around? In the end (and as it usually is), is it really all about US?
The Tea Party says this all the time in reference to the country (maybe it got sucked into the vortex that is my coffee table), but I’m going to apply it to the media: I want my news back! I want information and understanding and context and thoughtfulness and meaning and emotion. I don’t want three dresses and six hairstylists and “EVERY OUTFIT SHE’S EVER WORN” (are you KIDDING me?!) and birthers or any of that. I’m facing a near-six-figure debt and genuinely worried about whether I’m going to remain financially solvent. And I know I’m not the only one, simply by virtue that I don’t have any other responsibilities that need food and clothing and health insurance.
Don’t you think it’s time to evaluate what we expect of our media? It’s the only way to change what they give us in return. Let’s do some of that in the inevitable hangover/wedding withdrawal period that happens this weekend as we crash back to our miserable American lives (isn’t that the root cause of all this royal escapism?) and realize that we’ll never have that life, so we should probably stop spending so much energy on it. And focus it instead on things like, you know, Afghanistan.
Reading Recommendations:
The Evolution of the Princess Myth, from Disney to Diana to Kate (The Atlantic)
Five Reasons to Hate the Royal Wedding (Time)
Don’t Let’s Watch the Royal Wedding (The New Yorker)
#HistoryLesson: A.J. Liebling (@columbiajourn alum) on Queen Elizabeth’s 1947 wedding (The New Yorker)
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Love Letter to Detroit
A couple friends and I watched the wig-out reactions to this commercial roll in over Facebook and Twitter last night with a slight tinge of confusion here in New York City. We thought the whole thing maybe dragged on 30 seconds too long, didn’t need that line from Eminem at the end and certainly not a white guy stepping in front of a black choir to utter it, but more than anything, we were fascinated to see how people back home in Michigan reacted to it and claimed that, they, too, were “Imported from Detroit,” the city that a multi-million-dollar two-minutes now marks as back, baby! Wait, what?
I started writing this post about Detroit last spring during the brouhaha over Chris Hansen’s hour-long Dateline special. The watercooler-talk winner of last night’s Super Bowl ads gives me a chance to revisit it.
Back then, there was a lot of talk around Metro Detroit about the Dateline ep and its allegedly unbalanced portrait of the city. There was a big New York meeting about it with the NBC brass and a town hall at Cobo. On local station WDIV’s Sunday-morning “Flashpoint” show, host Devin Scillian asked his panelists why the broadcast didn’t show a shot of Campus Martius or Eastern Market on a Saturday morning and how such elements could have altered the broadcast and pointed it in a more positive direction. And sure, those things are favorable city features, but they are largely outweighed by the urban blight symbolized by the ubiquitous ruin-porn shot of the decaying train station that all the national media seem to grab when they descend on the city ever since the 2008 bottoming out of the auto industry pulled the city’s decline into the nation’s consciousness.
At the time, razor-sharp blog Dyspathy (writer Jeff Wattrick is now blogging for MLive) had a great missive, the biggest takeaway being this:
We perceive Dateline as the problem. One dimwit on DetroitYES, the in-house art project for the region’s guilty white liberals, says Chris Hansen may have hurt Detroit’s efforts to lure important conventions! Our perceptions are the problem. Dateline doesn’t matter. It’s as insignificant as a grain of sand in the Sahara Desert viewed from a satellite.
What is significant? Start with the city’s $400,000,000 structural budget deficit. Then let’s move onto a metropolitan population more segregated than anything in Jim Crow’s wildest dreams. There are also great Depression-like unemployment rates across the state, and third world literacy rates in the city. We have an outdated state tax system that chips everyone’s paychecks for just enough to not pay for decent roads or affordable public universities. Anyone have a fun story about Avalon’s delicious scones? Maybe someday our outrage can be directed at real problems instead than some hairspray on a second-tier tv news magazine.
Then known to his readers as Woodward’s Friend, Wattrick was right on. Instead of bullshit meetings to beat the dead horse that was the broadcast, what we really should’ve be doing is kicking into high gear efforts to correct things that were, and still are, in fact, the truth.
So now we have this commercial, and we’re wigging out all over again, but for a different reason. This time people are clamoring to call the city their own, although I wonder when they were last downtown on a night when the Wings or Tigers weren’t playing. For me, that was the night I got back into town in December and made my parents take me to dinner at Angelina Italian Bistro, a fabulous place across from Grand Circus Park and the Detroit Opera House and Comerica Park. And you know what? Saturday night and the place was dead. All the people now shouting their allegiance to the Motor City were probably out in Royal Oak.
It wasn’t unlike the night the previous spring that inspired this initial post. It was a gorgeous evening; shortly after 6:30, the sun was still hanging above Woodward Avenue, but the entire area was dead. The Campus Martius fountain was flowing but the café tables that surrounded it were deserted. Traffic in the direction of Wayne State University and the museum district, where I was headed, was virtually nonexistent. Everybody who works downtown had evidently already headed home to Oakland County. Nobody was staying to have dinner or maybe do some shopping, probably because there aren’t a whole lot of places to do either along the main corridor between Hart Plaza and the Fisher Building.
Last year’s Dateline wasn’t entirely off-base, and sure, last night’s commercial was well-produced and inspiring, but there’s still a long way to go before anybody can claim Detroit as “back” or “beautiful.” Everyone who spends any significant amount of time living or working in the city knows it. They know you wouldn’t feel safe walking from the Fox Theater to the Detroit Public Library. They know that even when you’ve got theater tickets at the Fisher, there’s not a single restaurant in the building or even one within walking distance to visit before or after the show. Before we saw “Jersey Boys” last year, my mom and I enjoyed a white-trash dinner of chips and candy bars from the Fisher’s first-floor CVS.
Also worth noting is this story from Ron Dzwonkowski in today’s Freep, citing a recent report that Michigan is the #2 state when it comes to “brain drain”—college graduates leaving the state. So how many people who are so proudly calling themselves “Imported from Detroit” are now living in Chicago or Los Angeles or even here in New York, effectively rendering themselves Detroit EXPORTS?
I don’t mean to harsh anyone’s mellow here, and I’m not claiming to be from the mean streets of the D (I’ll pay the $25 to park in CoPa’s gated parking lot on game days instead of on a side street for free), but I did work down there for close to two years and know what I saw on a day-to-day basis. And in the end, Lauren’s right. If everybody really does take the kind of pride in “their” city that they’re professing and not just because some ad agency told them to, they need to be the people driving the change and development the city so badly needs. It’s a big task, but it can be accomplished one chunk at a time. The best place to start would be on Woodward, right there where Marshall parked his 200 last night.
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Tags: Chrysler, Chrysler 200, Detroit, Eminem, Super Bowl commercial
Rahm-ination
It really shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody to hear that I think Rahm Emanuel is totally hot. He’s got that graying-older-man thing that I love so much going on (looking at you, David Brandon!) and kicks ass at everything he does, which are basically the only two qualifications I look for in a man. He’s a tough-as-nails badass; the completely horrifying story about how he lost half of his right middle finger should be enough to prove that, but then you add in the super-stock of B.A. brothers he came from and it’s pretty much all over.
Over the holidays, when the luxury of time allowed me to lovingly comb every section of the New York Times and spend 15 straight hours parked on the couch in front of New Year’s Day bowl games, I read a piece by political writer Matt Bai that put the first Rahm Emanuel court decision—the one that initially OK’d him to run for mayor of Chicago—in an interesting context, arguing that anyone who goes to work in Washington for the federal government is essentially only on loan from his or her home district and never really leaves it.
“The diamond-shaped District of Columbia was conceived as a district — and not as a city or a state of its own — for a reason,” Bai wrote. “It is supposed be an amalgam of the 50 states, a place where we send talented emissaries, elected or otherwise, who are willing to serve. In theory, all the people who populate the federal government, whether as senators or midlevel bureaucrats, are on loan from other places, often doing the nation’s business at the cost of more lucrative or convenient opportunities back home.”
“Plenty of people don’t like Mr. Emanuel, and plenty more don’t like his politics,” Bai continued later. “But whatever one thinks of the man, it’s indisputable that he has spent most of his adult life doing the people’s work. Had the elections board counted that against him, whether or not he had set foot back in Chicago for months at time, it would have lent credence to the destructive idea that there is Washington and there is the rest of us, and somehow public servants are supposed to choose between the two.”
I got to thinking about this argument yesterday when an Illinois appeals court overturned that first ruling and ordered Emanuel’s name off next month’s mayoral election ballots. The state’s Supreme Court put him back on today and has agreed to review the appeal. And how serendipitous that the news should come on the same day I found a recent Newsweek op/ed on national service, published by Gen. Stanley McChrystal.
“‘Service member’ should not apply only to those in uniform, but to us all,” McChrystal writes.
“All of us bear an obligation to service—an obligation that goes beyond paying taxes, voting, or adhering to the law. America is falling short in endeavors that occur far away from any battlefield: education, science, politics, the environment, and cultivating leadership, among others.”
He goes on to outline his opinions on exactly what defines national service, how long it should last, and what incentives should be provided to those who complete it.
In addition to my eternal praise of his hotness, it probably also shouldn’t be that surprising to learn that, five years ago, an advocate of this type of national service was one Rahm Emanuel. He devoted an entire chapter of his 2006 book The Plan: Big Ideas for Change in America to a concept of national civilian service and the history behind such an initiative, including the Peace Corps (launched at my Ann Arbor alma mater) and AmeriCorps.
The whole chapter is worth a read (thanks, Google Books!), especially because it adds some context to the passage about “basic civil defense training…where they will learn what to do in the event of biochemical, nuclear, or conventional attack; how to assist others in an evacuation; how to respond when a levee breaks or we’re hit by a natural disaster.” Much of the political right went nuts over that one when Emanuel was appointed White House chief of staff in 2008.
Other concepts of national service, McChrystal’s included, are much broader than that, and some proposed national service initiatives have mentioned incentives like tuition reimbursements (ask Donna Debt over here about that one!). But even in looking at the above statement on its own, can anyone really argue that arming one another with the knowledge of what to do in a time of crisis is actually a bad thing?
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Tags: Chicago mayor, Matt Bai, national service, Rahm Emanuel, Stanley McChrystal
Listen Up: This American Life
This is one of the most spectacular episodes of This American Life I’ve heard in a long time, and I usually think they’re all pretty great. I’d heard Act I before on Wiretap, and it’s still just as hilarious; Act II heartstring-tugging and thought-provoking; and Act IV I’ve listened to probably 10 times since Sunday afternoon. It’s one of the most romantic things I’ve ever heard. 46:06. If you listen to nothing else, listen to that.
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Tags: NPR, This American Life, Wiretap
Dudes and the News
I like Lawrence O’Donnell as well as the next guy, but I’m bristling at today’s announcement that he’ll host MSNBC’s new 10 pm show. Do we really need another BOWG (big old white guy) to deliver us an additional hour of televised news and commentary? No women, younger-ish candidates like my secret boyfriend Willie Geist, or anybody with a multicultural background were available to develop a show targeted at a youthful audience in the vein of the completely kick-ass Rachel Maddow, who’s now sandwiched between Keith Olbermann (whom I unabashedly adore) and one of his frequent pinch-hitters?
It could just be that I’m bitching because I planned to one day occupy that time slot myself. But I can definitively say that if I have to settle for more BOWGs giving me my news, I generally like them all lathered up and shouty (see Olbs, fantastically wild Chris Matthews and Morning Joe Scarborough), and I just don’t think OD’s got the crazy to cut it for me.
Filed under: Uncategorized, What I'm Watching | Leave a Comment
Tags: BOWGs, cable news, Chris Matthews, Joe Scarborough, Keith Olbermann, Lawrence O'Donnell, MSNBC, news, politics, Rachel Maddow, TV news
Donald trumps us again
He may have the worst hair in the business, but no one can call Donald Trump a bad marketer. He is, in fact, brilliant at it, and he’s got America’s number on speed dial.
Every year he finds a way to get us to pay attention to his beauty pageant, usually by tossing us something to be outraged about, which we foam and freak over like caged tigers over prime rib. Last year we salivated for months over Carrie California, homophobia, “free speech” and sexxxy pictures. This year it’s breaking ethnic barriers and…sexxxy pictures.
The hype started last week when NBC led off the Today show with a “story” about the sexxxy pictures Miss USA (also owned by NBC) posted to its Web site of contestants, not waiting for blonde hair and silicone to generate this year’s buzz. Then the first Muslim woman won the title, which is absolutely worth talking about (I don’t want to say “newsworthy” because we’re talking about a beauty pageant here; no one expects her to now broker Mid-East peace), but that discussion was quickly drowned out by the inevitable sexxxy picture scandal.
The topic dominated Detroit radio this morning on my way into work. Around midnight, something like eight of the top 10 stories on freep.com had something to do with Miss USA Rima Fakih from Dearborn, MI and her sexxxy stripper photos, released Monday by local radio show Mojo in the Morning. And this is in a city where a 7-year-old girl was shot and killed in her sleep during a police raid Sunday morning as a reality TV crew rolled.
Take away the radio station element, the should-they-or-shouldn’t-they question, the implied racism (which is unquestionably an outrage), whether you support this woman or think she should lose her title less than 48 hours after claiming it. The question I want answered is this: What are we so mad about? Most women who participate in pageants like Miss USA are using their looks to leapfrog into careers as models, actresses, entertainment talk show hosts and the Lingo girl. Sometimes questionable but always sexxxy photos and videos are an inevitable part of trying to get ahead in that kind of career trajectory. Don’t tell me we’re outraged when they inevitably surface because we look to pageant contestants as role models for other women.
Oh Donald, you got us again! Every other time of the year we dismiss Miss USA and its sister productions as sleazy misogynistic exploitations of women, but every spring we become invested in them all over again and outraged at the conduct of their participants. And all because of the scandals you feed us and tell us we should care about.
Filed under: rants | 1 Comment
Tags: Dearborn, Donald Trump, feigned outrage, Michigan, Miss Universe, Miss USA, Miss USA photo scandal, NBC, Rima Fakih, scandal, sexxxy pictures
Meatheads
So this is actually happening right now.
Via the Freep: “Great Americans eat red meat,’ declared Sen. Alan Sanborn, R-Richmond.”
I guess that makes me Benedict Arnold.
I’m not going to get into a rant about how we as a society have adopted a diet, among a host of other activities, that’s literally killing us. You can find that here.
Instead, for all of the people like Senator Sanborn and my brother, who once proclaimed, “Mmmmmm…MEAT!” while showing me an open mouth full of some kind of flesh (“Mmmmmm…HEART DISEASE!”), I’m going to suggest some interesting reading and watching: Food Matters by Mark Bittman (which helped convert me); The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, and Food Rules by Michael Pollan; and the recently Oscar-nominated documentary film Food, Inc., which you can actually stream from Netflix and watch RIGHT NOW! I haven’t read or seen all of these, and this list is nowhere near exhaustive (see titles like Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer and a host of drool-inducing vegan cookbooks), but they’re worth considering before you throw Sarah Palin’s idiotic “If God didn’t want us to eat animals, why did He make them out of meat?” rationalization at me. Then I’ll ask you to point me to the biblical passage that deems meat consumption as a-OK with the Divine.
I quit eating meat and fish a little less than a year ago, and I did it after learning about the devastating environmental impact of meat production. As Food Matters will teach you, once you combine the energy that goes into growing corn for feeding, raising, transporting, and processing livestock, “serving a typical family-of-four steak dinner is the rough equivalent of driving around in an SUV for three hours while leaving all the lights on at home.”
But I did it primarily out of guilt. I’m rocking a real mid-20’s guilt problem, one that included feeling like a terrible wretch of a person when I passed the snout of an unsuspecting, slaughter-bound pig sticking out of the side of a livestock truck on the highway.
And except for the occasional McNugget craving, I don’t miss it too much. Sure, I’m slightly biased, but I don’t think calling attention to how much better you can feel when you eliminate meat from your diet for just one day a week, let alone once a YEAR, as Michigan’s governor proposed, is offensive enough to merit a Senate resolution or ignorant protest barbeque in Lansing. Eat what you want, respect other people’s food choices and they’ll in turn respect yours. Then STFU.
Filed under: rants | 3 Comments
Tags: Detroit Free Press, Food Inc. movie, Governor Jennifer Granholm, Jonathan Safran Foer, Mark Bittman, Michael Pollan, Michigan Senate, STFU, vegetarianism
Name this blog!
I was just checking the traffic stats for this site, and ”Taryn It Up Entertainment” is the number-one search term driving whatever traffic I do get. Wondering if someone could potentially be pissed that I’m mooching the title of their DJ business or something, I Googled it. And here’s what I found:
“The wait is finally over – sultry XXX adult hardcore superstar Taryn Thomas is back and better than ever in Vogue Nasty the inaugural release from her company Taryn It Up Entertainment available on DVD and VOD on October 6th. Taryn’s return to film is marked with the same high level sexual energy and deviance she displayed in the past earning her the title ‘Porn’s Dirtiest Girl,’ a title which she lives up to with her reckless sexual abandon in Vogue Nasty which will be distributed exclusively by Antigua Pictures.”
OF COURSE it’s a PORN STAR!! Because that’s how my life works! Reality show producers, where you at!?
The other Taryn’s production company is also behind the inevitable “Jersey Shore”-themed porno. And her WordPress blog actually LINKS to mine! Synergy! “Taryn it Up” is also the name of a charter fishing vessel out of Port Aransas, Texas, which I will of course have to book at some point in my life.
To eliminate any future confusion, and while I definitely appreciate the boost in readers, I’ve got to re-name this thing. Given the events of the past few minutes, “Taryn F. Hartman” (those who know me best understand that self-assigned nickname) didn’t seem like a totally appropriate title. I tentatively titled it “Taryn Hartman, Taryn Hartman” (also a book title I’ve kicked around) after the 1970s TV show I’ve heard people talk about in reference to my name and which I clearly knew nothing about until I looked it up on IMDB and learned “this deliriously demented serial focused on the beleaguered heroine Mary Hartman, an average American housewife. In the first year, Mary suffered the travails of mass murder, adultery, venereal disease, homosexuality, religious cults, and UFO sightings, before she finally succumbed to a nervous breakdown on a syndicated talk show.” I can’t win today!
The current title is a nickname a teacher gave me when I was 15 and is the literal Spanish translation of my last name, but I’m taking suggestions. I unfortunately can’t offer much more than my eternal appreciation in exchange for your input, but you’ll forever be able to regale friends and lovers with the tale of how you helped that one girl who (sometimes) writes that one blog you read like once distinguish herself from the porn star of the same name. Advantage: you.
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Tags: antonyms, confusion, emergencies, Taryn
A Tale of Two Ladies
In the wake of last weekend’s big Tea Party speech in Tennessee, there’s been a lot of talk throughout the current news cycle about Sarah Palin and a potential 2012 presidential run. By the end of the week, it will likely wither and die out for a while until she pops up again to read answers to pre-screened questions off her palm, pass go and collect six figures.
Can you imagine Palin as our first woman president?
My blog-star girlfriends at Jezebel say “Make No Mistake: Sarah Palin is Running for President in 2012.” Daniel Stone at Newsweek says she can’t because she’s too polarizing (“Elections are won and lost in the middle, not on the extremes.”). When her book came out late last year, I heard a TV commentator say she’d have a hard time getting anyone to work for her since she fired so many accusations at former staffers through the pen of her ghostwriter.
But I worry that given enough time, which she without question has before the next campaign begins in earnest, enough people could be swayed by inane cries of “I want my country back!” to become convinced that what America needs is a new direction, different from that other new direction we voted for a little over a year ago. Ah, Americans, us and our instant gratification! We are just so fickle! It’s the American way!
What’s really frightening is that we’ve done it before. “Don’t think she’ll get very far?” Jezebel asks. “Perhaps you’ve forgotten about this guy,” it asserts, while linking to the Wikipedia entry for George W. Bush. We already elected a “dude prez,”, the guy with whom we could see ourselves sucking down MGDs and choking on pretzels. Also, he owned a baseball team! And hey, his dad, who he kinda looks like, was presbident too, so that must make him qualified, right?
I started reading “Game Change” on the train back from Chicago on Sunday, and although I’m only 17 pages in, one line immediately struck me: “In the White House she had been, from the start, a profoundly polarizing presence. (Much to her bafflement, too; what she’d done to provoke such a lunatic crop of haters was a mystery to her.)” on Hillary Clinton, from the book’s first chapter. What’s most heartbreaking is that, at least from what I’ve read thus far, Clinton was apparently pretty seriously considering a late entry into the race in 2004. You know, that year the Democrats had nothing? Ketchup with a side of Pert Plus and a future love child, just for good measure? Her disadvantage in 2008 was that she was the familiar face up against the white-hot heat of a rapidly rising star. Four years earlier, while she was helping her future opponent campaign for his Senate seat, she could have simultaneously crashed through both the open door that was the party’s nomination and the glass ceiling and really made history.
During the 2008 campaign, I was particularly surprised at the vitriol directed at the race’s lone female contender. The proliferation of Facebook hate-groups like “1,000,000 AGAINST Hillary Clinton” and “Tell Hillary Clinton to get back in the kitchen and make me a sandwich” was nothing short of appalling, particularly when they showed up in my news feed because some of my girlfriends had joined them.
Why was there such a Hillary backlash in 2008? I doubt it was for her policies alone, because we still voted the Democrat in with a busload of fanfare. And with all the Palin love going around right now, it certainly couldn’t have been for the pure fact that she had different plumbing and parts than her opponents.
I suspect it’s because a whip-smart, well-educated (Wellesley and Yale Law School), politically experienced woman poses a definitive threat to society as we currently know it. That’s why Hillary Clinton was disliked by much of the American public from the start. For all our claims to the contrary, in many ways contemporary American culture still wants to keep women in the role of the inferior sex. That women are encourgaged to pursue higher education and in fact now make up more than half of all college students is nothing but a slick veneer for the fact that socioeconomically, we’re still stuck in the 1950s. The dominating ethic seems to be akin to “Sure, we’ll let the girls go to college and have their little careers and feel independent—for a while,” until that much-fabled (and for me, intensely loathed) biological clock starts ticking too loudly to be ignored. Then they’ll want to meet nice guys and have big white weddings and settle down in cute little houses and have a couple of babies and live happily ever after. The End.
That’s not wholly incorrect: I know plenty of women who would be and are happy to do that, my own mother included, and she’s the bomb-dig. The fact that I almost fall over when someone my age tells me as much doesn’t make it a problem; it becomes a problem when a society or culture ascribes this arc to an entire demographic, in the process damaging that group’s ability to alter its role in the society in question.
In sharp contrast to Clinton, Sarah Palin poses no threat to our blissful way of life. On Saturday night she knocked President Obama for being a law professor, insinuating that his education and prior profession somehow make him an unsuitable commander-in-chief. A pageant contenstant-turned-local news sports reporter-turned-small-town mayor-turned-half-term governor evidently is a sensible alternative. She appeals to the average American—whoever that is—allegedly for her thorough understanding of the middle class, although I can’t think of any middle-class citizens with multi-million-dollar book deals who can command 100Gs per speaking engagement. Thanks to her army of very visible children, we identify with her first as a mother, and it’s widely known that she makes a mean moose chili, further conforming to the way we collectively view women as cooks, cleaners and kid-keepers.
Need more evidence? Nearly 20 years ago, when her husband was first running for president, Clinton was widely criticized for saying, “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life.” The soundbyte lived on and remained an issue in 2008.
And it’s not just Clinton; we do the same thing to nearly every politician or official who breaks the conventional mold we have for women. We’re far more likely to eviscerate their appearances or lifestyles than their actual policies. We delight in making fun of Nancy Pelosi’s facial expressions and ignore the history-making fact that she’s the first woman Speaker of the House. We laugh at Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm’s mole—I once read a letter to the editor in the Detroit Free Press that said the writer was unable to take seriously anyone who let such a mark “fester” on her face. It goes beyond looks, too: during last summer’s confirmation process, it was considered odd that Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Surgeon General Regina Benjamin were middle-aged single women, to say nothing of the criticisms leveled on Benjamin’s weight. In making fun of their appearances, we’re devaluing them as people and their policies as legislators and leaders.
Women’s rights continue to be a struggle every day in this country. A bunch of BOWGs (Big Old White Guys) are trying to tell us they’re best-suited to decide what we can and can’t do with our bodies, who we can and can’t marry. The debate over some health insurance plans covering Viagra but not birth control has been going on for over a decade. We scored the right to vote, and an implied political equality, in 1920, but close to a century passed before the government enacted a fair-pay act. Yet instead of imploring our female (and I hate using that word over “woman” because it makes me think of animals, as in “female dog”) elected officials to fight on behalf of their gender and standing behind them when they do, we’re content to laugh at their physical attributes, and that hurts everybody.
All of this just makes me feel really, really bad about the present and future prospects for women politicians, and woman leaders in any profession. Did 2008 teach us that you have to fit into an idealized mold, as Palin does, to be electable? And if so, what does that say about our future as a nation? As I said before, we’ve been there, and we all know how that one turned out.
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Tags: 2008 election, 2012 election, BOWGs, Game Change, Hillary Clinton, Jennifer Granholm, Nancy Pelosi, politics, POTUS, president, Regina Benjamin, Sarah Palin, Sonia Sotomayor, women, women in politics, women's rights
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