Barack and Michelle on Good Morning America
Barack asserts: “lay off my wife” and stick to the issues. Michelle debunks the claim that she’s opposed to Hillary for VP, noting all the accomplishments Hillary has achieved. Both seem to be staking out the boundaries or tearing down boundaries in the gender debates.
Today is a special and bittersweet day for me, so I won’t be posting much. Happy birthday wishes to Amber Rose, my oldest daughter (of three). From the moment of her birth, I’ve done my best to encourage her that there were no restrictions on what she or any woman could achieve. I still believe that, despite the obvious biases and glass ceilings that await. They are anachronisms, they will fall, as every barrier does. And in the meantime, I’m reminded of my own progression of ideals.
Yeah, as a boy, I wanted to be president, like JFK. Or a major league centerfielder like Mickey Mantle. As the years passed, I’d learn that both were not models of perfection as human beings. They excelled at their professions, despite their personal weaknesses and failings. Their professions, too, lost their status to me. Politics is a dirty game, full of deceit and deception. Athletic endeavors require pushing edges of health, including legal and illegal procedures and chemical concoctions.
I wanted my daughters to be able and eager to pursue even those things, the pinnacles of professions that I valued, even though no women has reached either yet. But I also have come to re-value what professions matter. For example, I used to think pursuing art and music was rather frivolous. Now I consider them to be among the most important of human endeavors. Being president? Not so much. Oh sure, it’s an important job that can affect millions of lives. But it also carries the likelihood of a number of adverse side effects, however unintentional. More than a few have gone into it with noble intentions and emerged with a great number hurt by their efforts. To me, that makes it a high risk job where events do not always yield to the person who holds it. And millions may hate them. Some may try to kill them.
I’d rather my children just pursue whatever interests them and that they refuse to yield to any old barriers that impede. Amber works in a medical profession; her younger sisters crunch numbers for retailers currently, but they may head to college for other pursuits. Only one has an interest in politics. She wanted Hillary to win and I didn’t try to dissuade her or influence her to go with Obama. We discuss politics, certainly, but she also knows that I now admire other professions more.
I do get perplexed by the rationales behind the hardened positions some take. Some serious groundbreakers I’ve admired, for example, Dolores Huerta and Geraldine Ferraro, have indicated they don’t plan to vote for Obama in November. It’s loosely analogous with the play Lysistrata: do what I want or there’ll be no added joys for anyone. I could understand it if Obama was a war monger or in some way was an opponent of women. But I haven’t seen that in his policies and votes. And since - like me- he’s fathered daughters, I can’t imagine him restraining their endeavors and dreams. I suppose it’s possible but really, it just doesn’t compute.
I view politics as a reality we have to contend with, But the role of politician requires the direction and restraint of an active citizenry to maintain the best interests of the most. It is the grassroots activist that I admire far more than the officeholder now. Yet similarly, some activists can do damage in pursuit of narrow ideological aims.
Artists and musicians, on the other hand, can pursue anything, beyond the bounds and constraints of any critic and no one is left impoverished or wounded or dead in their wake.
I still wish I could discuss these things with Amber. But while she was being treated for an illness 12 years ago, she inexplicably disowned me and shut me out of her life. That will ever be my personal glass ceiling. I don’t understand why it’s there, how or when I might break through it. It sapped my emotional and psychic strength for many years, turned me from an idealist into a cynic, with an anti-social ‘fuck-it-all’ streak that I had to learn how to control for the sake of all the others I love and try to assist.
I’m still the loving father I was when she knew me last. If I’ve gained any wisdom from the experience of being shunned by a child, it can best be expressed as this: taking a rigid position that yields to no common sense can be terribly destructive. Certainly, some principles require that we not yield. But as we are each capable of error, we must be exceedingly careful in determining what our stand is being made on and what our stand can actually accomplish. A hardened position sometimes produces nothing more than unjustified pain.
May 19th, 2008 at 10:08 am
If Barack and Michelle want attacks on spouses to be off-limits, they should have thought about that before they smeared Bill Clinton as a ‘racist’!
Obama’s hypocrisy knows no bounds.
May 19th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
I don’t know about that, Frank. I personally think that the media has sensationalized that little factoid that makes you so judgmental of Obama’s hypocrisy, when the hypocrisy of the media in molding the political discourse, and the hypocrisy, flip-flopping, and dirty tricks of McClueless remain unexplored and ignored by the media. I also personally think it might be a softening up tactic so that Johnathon Sidney McSame the Third’s wife - his second one, the beer heiress, not the one he dumped just before the Keating scandal - will get away without being grilled like Michelle Obama.
Eyes on the prize. Either Obama or Clinton will defeat the Republican’ts in November - and both campaigns are finally coming to that realization, too. I hope, and realizing that they need to work together. As much as yer basic bucket of crabs can be expected to…
May 19th, 2008 at 8:04 pm
Kevin,
You say:
I do get perplexed by the rationales behind the hardened positions some take. Some serious groundbreakers I’ve admired, for example, Dolores Huerta and Geraldine Ferraro, have indicated they don’t plan to vote for Obama in November.
The only reason you and others may be “perplexed” about this is you’ve actually turned a deaf ear to it. the vicious misogyny has been truly outrageous. People who don’t see this, or find any problem with it, are the problem, not those of us who are fed up by it.
51 percent of the population is pissed so the tits at the sexism that the “sweeties” just refuse to shut up and “make nice” about it any longer. A big American throng of women standing up and delivering a double fisted one-finger salute to the misogyny that this country is in utter denial about and to which no one wants to address at all… and so…
Little Sweeties Threaten to Boycott Obama
Friday, May 16, 2008
http://guerillawomentn.blogspot.com/
and
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Women Stand Up for Hillary
http://guerillawomentn.blogspot.com/
Women respond to the loud bullies in the male-biased media, who are so devoted to The Chosen One, by standing up for Hillary with full page ads across the country. Not So Fast, the full-page ad in yesterday’s USA TODAY reads:
Hillary’s voice is OUR voice, and she’s speaking for all of us.
We are the women of this nation. We are rich and poor, young and old, married with kids, married without kids, single moms, gay, straight, and widowed. We are every color. We are of every religion. We are from all political parties.
We love our country. Now more than ever, so much of what we cherish is at risk – our homes and our health, our safety and our planet, our children and our values. We raise our voices, in one glorious, defiant chorus, to tell the world that these times demand strength, courage and vision.
And that is why we stand united in our unwavering support for Hillary Clinton.
We want Hillary to stay in this race until every vote is cast, every vote is counted, and we know that our voices are heard.
The ad was paid for by Women Count PAC, a newly formed political action committee which is running similar ads across the country. Women Count was created “to ensure that the 51% of American citizens who are women have their values and votes counted in the political process.”
(via Riverdaughter)
video via The Red Queen
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgLAn5a_Kcc
May 19th, 2008 at 10:08 pm
I have turned no deaf ear. I just have never been persuaded by arguments like you and they make. I defended Bill throughout his two terms though I voted third party in ‘96 because his issues did nothing for my white working class family. I especially defended Hillary because of the horrible things said about her, as personally or professionally, she earned none of it.
But when it came to her running for president, I couldn’t support that. And I don’t hold Obama responsible for his ardent online supporters or the MSM. It may be my very own value system at work, but I feel the premier issue remains the hundreds of thousands of dead in Iraq, ours and theirs. And I don;t consider racism or sexism above mass murder as an issue. I wonder about people who put that, the price of gas or anything else above that. It’s not just Hillary supporters and not just women who do that.
Deaf ear? No. Despairing heart and soul. Before any monetary or political goals, before anything beyond the barest minimum survival, I rank healing Iraq first. And if people think they have to elect McCain to make their point, to hand the Supreme Court to the conservatives for the next two decades, then pardon me, but I have zero respect for that attitude. I consider it juvenile.
And if you or anyone thinks I’ll be punished by seeing Obama lose, they’re doubly nuts. I expect no personal benefit from him nor Hillary. It’s my kids who’ll suffer. And after all I did to teach them about their bold foremothers - especially Huerta - I’m sure they’ll wonder if it’s the same hero throwing them to the wolves, just as I do.
Obama as the devil, as the object lesson some folks want to make of him - after Bush, Cheney, half the Supremes, and so many true misogynists… all I can do is say, go for it. Y’all have every right. But don’t ever expect me to consider it sensible or just. I hear you perfectly; it’s just the content of that sound that will leave me forever perplexed.
It’s just too Mary Daly for me.
May 19th, 2008 at 11:58 pm
I have mostly backed out of this argument, seeing good and bad in both, but knowing that only democrats can put some kind of brakes on the mad profiteers who would kill us all and blame us in the bargain. I will vote for the Democratic candidate in November. To do otherwise achieves the goals of the GOP and the multi-millionaires and billionaires who fund them. I know that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, but no woman scorned is running hell.
++++