Jacki Schechner thinks a woman would make an exceptional commander in chief. Just not this one:
I think it does women a disservice to play the sexism card at this stage in the game in this particular circumstance....
Neanderthal men who think women belong in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant are not a large enough demographic to be holding Senator Clinton back from clinching this nomination, and claiming that's her downfall is both disingenuous and bad form. Save the fight for when it matters. When there is real discrimination based on sex. If anything, the press has been infinitely generous with Clinton - keeping her in this race long after the math proved Obama's delegate lead insurmountable. Again, she's not losing because she's a woman. She's losing because she got bad campaign advice and ran with it.
If you listened to my podcast commentary, I made it very clear I was excited by the idea of the first female President. I just don't think Clinton's turned out to be that female. That doesn't make me naive or a traitor to my gender. If anything, it does us some justice. One of us is going to make an exceptional Commander-in-Chief someday.
I just want my President to be someone I can look up to and be proud of as a human being. Gender aside, Clinton is not that person.
It's been one of those times recently. I feel like for days I've been reading nonstop about war, political infighting, bullies, violence, and general internets stupidity. Now, there are a lot of unhappy things going on, and many of them deserve -- need! -- attention. It's also true, however, that the onslaught can get overwhelming, and there is good news out there, even if sometimes you have to search to find it. It certainly makes me feel better to give some attention to uplifting stuff, so without further ado, a few recent stories that are, each in their own way, a nice break from a tough spate of news:
In the large-scale, saving the planet category we have a new, three-year, $300 million campaign to mobilize Americans on climate change. God dag! Led by Al Gore and the Alliance for Climate Protection, the effort is reportedly one of the most ambitious and well-funded public advocacy operations in history. It will apparently attempt to match awareness with actual political/legislative action, and is being timed to coincide with the election. I don't write about climate very much because I simply am not an expert on the issues, but it affects just about everything -- including my pet issues of foreign policy and national security, eventually -- and this looks to be a great project.
In international news, last week Pakistan's parliament elected its first woman Speaker. Independent of the overall record of the role/treatment of women in the nation, it's always great to see barriers being broken, and for a country that has already had a female prime minister, this is another important milestone. Dr. Mizra is no token, either; a three-time rep, she was elected by an overwhelming margin -- 249 to 70.
The problem of skyrocketing foreclosures can hardly be spun as good news, but in the face of tragedy and difficulty, many organizations are stepping up to help, and it's in these under the radar circumstances that sometimes important efforts can get overlooked. Which is why the Humane Society effort to make sure that people who lose their homes don't lose their furry friends as well deserves a mention. With families struggling to keep and feed their pets in the face of increasing financial difficulty, this new grant program should do some real good. After my longtime canine companion passed earlier this year, I set up a recurring donation to HSUS, and I'm tremendously glad some of that contribution will go to this initiative.
Finally, in a hilarious "damn the man" vein, I include this for the ingenuity (and without any particular comment on the politics of makeup or schools or whatever): a creative -- and apparently scientifically brilliant -- group of high school girls were irritated with a school ban on nail polish, so they invented a kind that you can see outdoors but not indoors. Some chemical reaction far beyond my ability to comprehend makes the polish bright red outside and nearly invisible/transparent inside. I want some!
Obviously lots of news that sucks is still important to be aware of. I know -- I focus on Iraq, for goodness sake. And good stuff is hard to find; it took me a couple hours to find just these few nuggets! But there ya go. Every day is a new day, with new challenges but also new good, and all that. Hope y'all enjoy.
My new favorite blog has, by my rough count, 14 new posts this morning. All substantive, many on foreign policy issues (yay!), and on a Monday, no less. By the time I get this post up, I'm sure there will be more, and you really should go scroll through 'em all. I want to highlight one in particular, though, that gets to the core (in a roundabout way) of why the US has such problems dealing with international issues in general and the Middle East in particular.
In discussing a really spectacular (and heart-wrenching) article in the NYTMag about a young girl in Syria who dishonored her family at the tender age of 15 by . . . being kidnapped and raped, and who was stabbed to death by her brother a year later, Jill points out that there's a tendency to "other" the attitudes and behaviors of so-called honor cultures. I certainly did it when I read the article; my first response was, "Those people are insane." Hell, this happens even when bad stuff happens here -- we immediately distance ourselves from uncomfortable attitudes or events -- but it turns out that the "honor codes" from which the relevant Syrian laws derive come not from the much-maligned Quran, but from a combination of Bedouin tradition and . . . Napoleonic regulations, imposed upon the region by the French mandate. As Jill notes,
The notion of protecting women’s chastity is certainly not solely an Islamic one. Honor killings are the most brutal outcome of a system that fetishizes virginity, female submission and male authority and ownership, but it’s dishonest to pretend that these killings come from some crazy foreign value system totally unlike our own. [...]
The people who killed Zhara, and the people who kill thousands of girls and women all over the world in the name of “honor,” are evil extremists. But they aren’t rare, and they aren’t unique in their view of women as property, their emphasis on “chastity” as an all-important freshness guarantee, and their desire to control women’s bodies and sexual choices.
Indeed. Adding to that, on a more meta level this helps demonstrate the weird dichotomy of having an action (honor killing) that's so far beyond our experience -- to the point of revulsion, and, I think, rightfully so -- that we can't have any response but mental separation *along with* the fact that Americans exist in a culture that largely sympathizes with the ideas behind that horrific act, ideas elucidated by Jill above.
This is a tough line to walk as we try to deal with other cultures and people (especially in the Middle East), and it further represents a challenge for those of us who want to simultaneously understand and respect differing values . . . but retain the right to condemn them. I'm certainly not a full-on cultural relativist, and I have no problem saying that some cultural practices are bad, or even evil (including, I should note, some of our own). Conversely, we can't just dismiss everything we don't like, if only because the best tactical way to change things is to know where the weak spots are, know how to effect change in an pragmatic way.
