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I was going to write something about the reform itself but I'm exhausted right now and so will only write on whatever takes my fancy. And this time it's the following quote:

"Kentuckians want to know how spending trillions of dollars we don't have on a plan that raises health insurance premiums and taxes on families and small businesses is good for healthcare or for jobs or for the economy," McConnell said.

Who knows what Kentuckians really want? Politicians always second-guess groups: Americans want this or that. The idea is to make the reader or listener believe that she or he is wrong if not agreeing with that general statement.

And what about all those trillions of dollars we don't have? It never stopped the Republicans from supporting wars abroad when the president was a Republican. Never mind if the reform actually doesn't cost that much. The propaganda would be the same in any case.

The taxes, as you note, never fall on individuals living alone or on large businesses, only on families and small businesses. The Democratic framing talks about working families instead of families but otherwise agrees. It's quite sad how nobody cares about all those millions of people who live alone.

This quote is a little different but still part of the propaganda framing:

"This is the latest report to confirm that the current healthcare reform proposal fails to bend the healthcare cost curve," said Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America's Health Insurance Plans, an industry lobbying organization .

Why not just say that it fails to slow down the rise in health care costs or fails to reduce the costs? What's so clever about the bending of the cost curve, and which of the many possible curves (total, average, marginal and short- or long-term for each) are these guys talking about? Given that even the estimation of those curves is tricky, why talk about the bending of the curve?

Can you do that? Like clicking your forefinger to your thumb, except with the big toe and the one next to it. And can you clap with one hand? (Use the fingers to clap at the ball of the hand.)

I spend too much time on thoughts like that...

There are few things more uncomfortable than arguing against the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, a Federal law passed in 2004 during the Bush administration that recognizes a child in utero as a victim if he/she is injured or killed with the mother.  It's easy to come across as severely insensitive, so I usually avoid this debate like the plague.

However, the recent tragedy at Fort Hood has made it difficult to ignore.  Army Private Francheska Velez was six weeks pregnant when she was killed in the violent rampage by Army psychiatrist Major Hasan, who opened fire at the Texas military post, killing 13 people.  Now two U.S. Senators and an anti-abortion group are insisting that Hasan be charged with a 14th murder count for Pvt. Velez's fetus.

There is a way to appropriately punish perpetrators for violence against pregnant women without setting a dangerous anti-choice precedent. In early 2004, Senator Dianne Feinstein did just that by introducing The Motherhood Protection Act, an alternative bill which sought stiffer penalties for injuring or killing a pregnant woman and allowed prosecutors to make a double, but not separate, charge -- all without attempting to define when life begins. Unfortunately, her bill failed, and we were stuck with Mike DeWine's Unborn Victims Act instead.

While there is an abortion exception currently on the books, giving a fetus separate, legal status has serious repercussions for the pro-choice movement. This Federal law and the fetal homicide laws later passed by over 35 states lay critical groundwork for our judicial system to pursue an anti-choice strategy and undermine Roe v. Wade. (Who feels secure that Roberts' Supreme Court will protect women's reproductive rights if given half a chance to set them back?)

Think this is merely pro-choice paranoia? Here's what anti-choice leader Samuel Casey had to say about the law: "In as many areas as we can, we want to put on the books that the embryo is a person ... That sets the stage for a jurist to acknowledge that human beings at any stage of development deserve protection -- even protection that would trump a woman's interest in terminating a pregnancy." You can just see those wacky anti-abortion fanatics twisting their mustaches.

Bestowing personhood on fetuses creates an immediate rift between a woman's right to choose and a fetus' "right to life."  It would be naive to believe that this rift will not exploited.  So, while it may be uncomfortable to make this case, using a tragedy to promote an anti-choice agenda is downright disturbing. To urge your representatives to repeal the Unborn Victims of Violence Act -- and instead pass a woman-friendly bill like The Motherhood Protection Act -- sign the petition here.

Photo courtesy of Big Stock Photo

Jerryell Myesha Foster of Baltimore was last seen Tuesday November 24 2009 at approximately 8:20p.m. Thank you to La Reyna's blogpost for alerting me to this latest missing person. As has been noted many places, if you're not white, don't expect to get national media attention if you disappear. It's not just racism, folks, it's misogyny too, and classism too when dealing with poor and working

Silly Site o' the Day

From: Kabhi Kabhi Mere Dil Mein, Yeh Khayal Aata Hai...,  Deepa D.'s blog  Link to: I Didn’t Dream of Dragons, by Deepa D. An excerpt: The Western publishing industry has the luxury of being able to support the base camps of crappy first novels and cliché-ridden genre fiction hacks and niche-marketed speciality books that creates the momentum for the breakout book, the genius author. If you

You know what’s fun? Where fun equals needless and bizarre? Particular products, apparently picked at random, being marketed as just for the dudes. I mean, we are all probably familiar with companies making special pinkified versions of their products for the girlies, like tools! and tape! and… earplugs! (Lots of gendered goodness through that Sociological Images link, thanks to @Chromiee on Twitter for it.) But let’s delve into the differences in how gender is here enforced for men and women.

For instance, tissues. I’m not certain that tissues need to be gender specific, but apparently Kimberly-Clark, manufacturers of Kleenex, are.

Last year, I was casually walking down an aisle at my local supermarket when a tissue box caught my eye. ‘Ooh,’ I thought. ‘Giant tissues. I would like some of those.’ I took a closer look at the box. Lo and behold, the box said ‘MAN-SIZE tissues’ in big manly letters. Not for me then. Pardon me for asking, but do the rest of us not sometimes get a lot of snot and not want to bother with tiny little tissues only good for three blows? Or is it only manly men who blow out large manly chunks of dead cells from their noses who merit MAN-SIZE tissues? Do the tissues come extra tough for an extra masculine blow? Not only that, but the two box patterns one could choose from were cricket equipment and an old-style map of the world. So, what, playing sport and exploring are for men then? Just… why?

So, because I was a bit amused and because I am a Scary Feminist™, I took down the number Kimberly-Clark provided on the box for feedback. I called them up, feeling a bit silly, and told the woman on the customer service line about misogyny and compartmentalising and cricket and marketing and assumptions and I want giant tissues, too! I must have gone on for a while, because:

‘So, what exactly is your complaint?’

‘Uh. The packaging and the man-size messaging is full of misogynistic messages. If you changed those things, it’d be really good and it’d invite women to buy your product.’

‘Okay. Thanks for calling. I’ll pass that along to the marketing team. Thank you very much.’

The tissue boxes are still in my supermarket, if you were wondering.

The point is: when it comes to gendering non-gendery products, womanhood (and femininity! because they are the same thing!) is so often coded as bad. And it’s not just women who get hurt by this sort of thing; there is never any room for non-binaries in this world of rigid binary gendering. This is just another way to keep anyone who doesn’t conform to binary gender out in the cold.

The girlie versions of these products are coded pink and sparkly and such by way of setting girls and women up as a subgroup. We need special things set aside for us, because the things for regular people (read: men) just won’t do. It’s that idea of the default human again, which we see in medicine and sport (it’s always pointed out when it’s a women’s cricket team, because “cricket team” itself is always male) and all sorts of areas in society. We are a special subgroup for marketers to exploit.

Dudely versions of these products don’t cater to men as a special subgroup. The dudeification of products – that is, where it’s a case of specifically targeting products at men and boys rather than just assuming only men would by this stuff – relies on the disparagement of women. No girls here, we have manly products, you don’t want to be associated with that girly girl crap! Sometimes it’s merely in the unnecessary exclusion of women. That’s the case with Nutrigrain cereal being marketed as Iron Man food, which will help boys grow up big and strong (because that’s what you always want as a man, and never as a woman, right?). Then there are companies that like to make it explicit. For instance, you can go check out the charming Yorkie chocolate bar featured over at Shakesville the other day (with the slogan ‘it’s not for girls!’). Then you have the violent and full-on hateful; Cara blogged on rape-promoting pencil sharpeners back in 2007. Women can be used just as one pleases, from exclusion to counterpoint to objects on which it’s just fine to spill one’s hate.

It’s about setting women on the outside: women are to be a subset of humanity, to be catered for specially or to be the standard of that which the real people ought not to want to be. And, as ever, those who don’t fit the sex/gender binary don’t exist. Excuse me while I go dig out my old handkerchiefs.

Now that was mean, because this post is all about the minor irritation I get from all those headlines:

8 Essential Sites for Cyber Monday
9 Low-Fat Holiday Desserts
Top Doctors Spill 10 Big Health Secrets
10 Commandments You Should Not Break

Every time I go to the supermarket for food I see the women's magazine covers at the checkout: Seven Ways To Drive Your Man Crazy! Ten Perfect Diets! Grrr.

Why all that fascination with numbered lists? Is it because those are about the easiest headlines to make if one wants to tie together lots of pretty unrelated bits?

I shouldn't complain, because my headlines tend to have nothing to do with the posts themselves which makes me cry when I try to search for something in the archives. They are mostly just clever goddessy quips.

(And now, a brief digression from our ongoing Diocletian working session, which continues here and here.)

Someone emailed me last night about Sarah Palin. “Do you think she’s going to run for president?” my correspondent asked.

Of course she’s going to run for president. She’s already running for president.

I knew that the day she resigned the Alaska governorship. Some people thought she was really retiring from politics. Not me. I watched the video clip of her resignation speech and knew exactly what was up.

“I’ll be damned,” I said to myself. “She’s Andrew Jackson.” Literally. I said those actual words.

I say those same words to myself almost every time I see her on the news. Latest report: thousands of people lined up around the block in some little town, waiting for her to sign their book. People crying. Women bringing their babies, bringing pictures of their menfolk who are deployed in Iraq.

It reminds me of the story of Andy Jackson’s Inauguration, with the people climbing through windows and standing on the furniture in the East Room. Broken glass trampled underfoot; huge punchbowls of lemonade on the White House lawn. A joyous mob of rednecks and riff-raff.

Jackson was pretty uncouth himself. He may have been backwoods nobility by his own lights, but to the East Coast elites, he was practically a caveman. He and his wife Rachel were Scotch-Irish hillbillies, the kind of people who lived in cabins and chewed tobacco. Their marriage was a bit off, too: they had probably cohabited before getting hitched, with Andrew chasing off Rachel’s first husband with a pistol. John Quincy Adams got all sniffy about that. “A convicted adulteress,” his supporters called Rachel. A “common harlot.” They said Andrew Jackson’s own mother was a prostitute too, a British camp follower who’d married a mixed-race man somewhere in those godforsaken backwoods. That was early 19th-century speak for “trailer trash.”

But the people loved Andy Jackson. Adored him. He was the first truly populist, grassroots political figure in American history.

He was also, it must be said, a horrible man. A genocidal white supremacist whose Indian wars and forced removals were what we’d now call ethnic cleansing. He was also a slave owner, a bellicose imperialist, and a demagogue who vastly overstepped presidential authority. Nevertheless, he was a hero to the common citizens of his time and place. And the populist democracy he brought to Washington was probably his greatest (albeit occasionally dangerous) contribution to American politics.

I don’t know how successful Sarah Palin’s political career will be, but I do know she’s tapping into the same vein of popular resentment and working-class sensibility as Jackson. The amazing thing is that she’s a woman. That’s a first in this country: a female politician who functions as an inflammatory, fire-in-the-belly populist hero. A female Andrew Jackson! If she weren’t so politically divisive, I’d say we should put up a plaque.

Unfortunately, I don’t like Palin’s political views much more than I like Jackson’s. I wish to hell she were a liberal, or at least a Democrat. Then I could enjoy this with equanimity. As it is, it feels kind of like watching a woman become the head of the mafia. Part of me is going, “oh, hey, a woman…” But on the other hand, it’s still the mafia.

I will say this: if liberals (or Democrats) want to discourage Palin’s popularity, they need to stop with the double standards and the misogyny. The folks who make up Palin’s base may be misinformed on policy matters, but they’re not necessarily stupid. They can see quite well that Sarah Palin is no nuttier than most of the other clowns in the political circus, especially the Republicans (with a special shout-out to our Democratic Vice-President, who is a talking donkey.) They can also see that despite this basic kinship of clowns, Palin is nonetheless singled out as if she’s some kind of unique inbred subnormal mucus-dripping monster from outer space.

Her fans think this is down to anti-conservative bias, plus some class snobbery. I think it’s mostly sexism, plus some class snobbery. Either way (or both), the snobbery is coming through loud and clear. Which does not bode well for Democrats.

What Democrats (or liberals) ought to be doing is studying what it is that makes Palin so popular. They might start here, for example. They might also think about why and how Palin’s womanliness appeals to so many people. Because it does, and not for the reasons you might think.

Here’s a tip, offered gratis to everyone on the left: repeating over and over again the pet phrases and canned insights you’ve picked up about Palin and her supporters from other leftists (Bible Spice/purity queen/racists/white resentment/teabaggers) is the equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and going “lalalala I CAN’T HEAR YOU lalalalala.” It might play well on the blog circuit, but it’s not helping you understand what’s really going on.

Assuming you want to, of course.

Author Leslie Sanchez has made a name for herself as a political analyst and former presidential advisor. She’s been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, and appeared as a pundit on ABC, NBC, CNN, and Fox News, among others. [1]

Her recent book, You’ve Come a Long Way, Maybe: Sarah, Michelle, Hillary, and the Shaping of the New American Woman, studies the impact of these women on the 2008 presidential campaign.

While her analysis is interesting, it’s far from objective. By inserting heavy-handed conservative judgments at every opportunity, she alienates and mocks readers who might disagree. The book, though thoroughly researched, reads more like a long op ed piece than legitimate journalism.

The quoted passages and reference materials do offer insight to the prevalence of sexism during the race. “Rush Limbaugh, speaking of a particularly unflattering photo of Clinton, … asked: ‘Will Americans want to watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?’” Though, he claimed aging men look “more authoritative, accomplished and distinguished.” Then, discussing Palin’s appeal, he said “she’s not going to remind anybody of their ex-wife, she’s going to remind men, ‘Gee, I wish she was single.’” (p.50-51). While Limbaugh is one of the more inflammatory pundits, many others described Hillary as too cold, and Palin as “exceptionally pretty,” and “a real honey.” (p.47) Even Michelle Obama, an accomplished lawyer and activist, had the media focus on her wardrobe and physique (particularly her arms) more than anything else.

“According to a poll of women conducted for Lifetime Networks after the 2008 election, ‘65 percent of women – majorities in every demographic and political group – said that male and female candidates are held to different standards on the campaign trail.’ Women thought it was easier for a man to be ‘taken seriously by the voters,’ or to be ‘covered seriously by the media.’” (p.125) Americans also frowned upon Palin as a working mom more than Obama as a working dad, and tended to view racism as a bigger problem than sexism.

Sanchez presents interesting points in this way, but veers into dangerous territory when revealing her biases. For one, she claims that any women who supported Hillary in the primaries, but didn’t switch teams to vote for Palin, were anti-feminist. “[My feminist friends] assumed that, as a career woman, I would be naturally offended by certain of the governor’s policy convictions. I was dumbfounded, and I turned the question around on them. ‘How could you not support Palin?’ … Didn’t the ’sisterhood’ mean anything to them?” (p.78) This superficial standpoint emphasizes only the biological similarities between the candidates, ignoring the fact that Clinton and Palin are political and ideological opposites.

The patronization and sexualization of women headed toward the White House was phenomenal last year, and You’ve Come a Long Way, Maybe couples valid arguments with revealing research. Still, Sanchez’s overt conservatism blurs the line between fact and opinion, and her casual, inconsistent writing style leaves much to be desired.

Sources:

[1] Leslie Sanchez Official Site: About Leslie Sanchez

[2] Sanchez, Leslie. You’ve Come a Long Way, Maybe: Sarah, Michelle, Hillary and the Shaping of the New American Woman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.