House of Eratosthenes

Becky notices something rather disturbing. Disturbing and, for her, surprising…not surprising for me. But I’m standing in lockstep with her on the disturbing part.

I never expected the National Organization of Women to endorse Sarah Palin. I know from personal experience that a girl’s inability to wrap her head around the idea that the fetus subjugates women, is enough to get her membership revoked.

But even so, still having respect for the goals of the organization, I thought they might join other feminists, who are equally opposed to Palin’s politics, but defend her against the rampant sexism.

After all, the ACLU, on principle, defends such vile clients as the KKK and NAMBLA.

That didn’t happen.

No duh.

It is incredible they are endorsing Obama-Biden simply because the Republican ticket has a woman who has a slightly different view of feminism than they do.

No it isn’t. They’re supported by the billions-of-dollars-strong abortion industry. It’s not an effort to secure equal rights for women, it’s an effort to bolster and buttress that industry.

NOW President Kim Gandy states that women in our country won’t support Palin because Palin’s idea of feminism differs from hers.

First of all, it appears from the polls that a good number of women do not take their marching orders from NOW, and actually find Sarah Palin kind of appealing.

Yup. It’s the plague of our society, held over from the twentieth century, a demon teleported into our world through the miracle of electronic mass communication: The mystic who purports to speak for “all of us,” who in reality did not go door to door finding out what “everyone” thought.

I’m sure when the angels look down on us and observe us continuing to put these mystics on soapboxes they don’t deserve, they forgive us for falling into this habit. We invent the radio, one man is able to speak to millions of his fellows in a single moment…it’s rather unavoidable that someone will form the habit of telling us what we’re thinking. And those among us with weaker minds, will accommodate him.

I don’t think the angels are quite so forgiving of this tendency we have to carry that bad habit out of one century, and into another. At some point we should be getting over it. Maybe that’s what’s happening with Sarah Palin. Kim Gandy can present herself as a magical spokesperson for any & all living female things, all she wants. That don’t make it true.

On that part, I agree with Becky.

The thing she said toward the end, kind of set me off. Which is rather a pity, because I’m sure this was not a central pillar to the message she was trying to present:

NOW reminds me of the bitterness we have detected under the skin of another caricature of the seventies—Jesse Jackson. The success of Barack Obama made the Reverend’s tired rhetoric irrelevant.

But at least Jesse finally bit his tongue and is going along for the ride—which would not have been possible but for the ground breaking work of himself and others in the prior century. [emphasis mine]

To which I had to enter the following comment:

Shenanigans.

Maybe it’s my six-foot-tall-white-straight-maleness, maybe it’s my virginity with respect to working for a trade union, or maybe it’s some combination derived from my never having drawn a benefit from being associated with some annointed victim-status ankle-biter activist class.

But when I see an activist uproar of any kind, I see raw, naked jealousy. These populist mobs band together, and before they even discuss how they want to make the world a better place in any great detail, they’re talking about how to deal injury to other classes of people…Class-driven activist movements *are* jealousy. They play Robin Hood taking things away from one class, and giving those things to another class. And Becky, I refuse to believe any progress has been made anywhere, in anything, because of jealousy.

These angry movements are just like FDR’s New Deal — the designated problem was ultimately solved not because of ’em, but in spite of ’em. It simply isn’t possible for a modern society to tumble onward into the ether that is the future, centuries at a time, continuing to marginalize the talents and contributions of people because of the color of their skin or their gender or sexual preference. The first time you need to get *real* work done, and there’s some dearth of talent available to assist you in doing it, you’d be forced to get the hell over it. Black…white…if he lifts his load, what the frickin’-frack do I care?

No, I’m not giving Jesse Jackson credit for bubkes. He doesn’t deserve it. He doesn’t have the mindset necessary to make real freedom available to people. He’s just a rabble-rouser, a black-n-white bean counter, a headline grabber, an ambulance chaser. And worst of all, he’s smart enough to figure out that the day we have real equality is the day he’s out of a job, so he’ll do whatever it takes to stop it from happening. The man’s just a victim-monger and a rather disgusting spectacle of victim-mongering at that.

I stand behind those comments with respect to Ms. Gandy, Ms. Ireland, Ms. Yard, et al, as well. Throughout the years those people are all guilty of advocating new rules for the benefit of “everyone” when what they really had in mind, was the exact opposite of everyone. They’ve held themselves up as uniters while laboring to divide us. Sarah Palin is living proof — throughout the decades, they were jousting at windmills. Where’s the chauvinist pig just aching to vote for McCain, now threatening to stay home because now he’s gotta vote for a GURL? Where is that guy? Obviously, his presence was exaggerated. It’s undeniable now. And that is why they can’t stand her.

When I was a little kid, being told we had these movements in the sixties that made us enlightened and so forth, I believed it uncritically. As I grew a little older, I had these little alarms going off in my head, which I then tuned out as I was instructed to tune them out. When I grew to maturity, the problems became undeniable. And now that I’m an old man, I just find this mindset offensive in the extreme: We were a nation of racists and bigots back then, and no longer are.

Let me take on that last one first: We’re as bigoted as we want to be, any time we want, toward anyone. All it takes to set us off is the sense that those around us are willing to accept bigotry, and we’ll roll out as much of it as can be managed. I would point to Dr. Helen’s column on Pajamas Media about the male-bashing for my examples…but that’s just the first armload. I can find many more.

Secondly: We were a nation of bigots before? Sure, we had separate entrances and drinking fountains, etc. That’s true. But it’s also true there were people around back then, who knew that was wrong, and said so out loud. And really, I don’t think there would be quite so many outspoken dissenters today. We have become exceptionally proficient at discriminating against people. Like I said, all it takes is a sense that people within eyesight and earshot will be accepting.

Thirdly: Presuming we are enlightened now (false) and weren’t back then (false), for reasons that will become evident if you so much as skim over the comment I left for Becky, there are some real problems with crediting these pitchfork-and-torch-bearing populist mobs for this enlightenment that supposedly took place. Real problems. It’s a logical impossibility for a benevolent sense of symbiosis to culminate from a spirit of snarky and spiteful gettin-even-withem-ism. It simply cannot be done, I would argue.

No, here’s what happens. If there are more people around to do work than there is work to be done, people look for ways to justify their existences. And they’ll do what’s called “circling the wagons” in order to make that happen. They’ll band together. By sex and by color, they’ll band together, exaggerating the achievements of those who look like them, and dismissing whatever contributions were made by someone different.

If there’s work to be done, and not enough people to do it, they’ll stop doing this. They’ll be forced to. Think about…passing buckets of water to people of different sexual preferences and skin colors, when the house is on fire and the fire truck hasn’t shown up yet. Think about…piling up sandbags when a river is threatening to overflow its banks. Think about…little green men drifting down here from outer space with those ray beams that disintegrate what they touch, declaring war on our planet. Go on, discriminate against blacks, gays, or women. Try to do as much soft-discrimination as these left-wing activist groups do on a daily basis. Just try.

You’ll be ripped apart, and skinned alive. Rightfully so.

But when the work disappears, we’ll be right back at it again. Whoever is empowered to make an office look like something…will make it monochrome. If it suits ’em to make it look vanilla, they’ll make it look vanilla. Or chocolate. Or all-female, or like the weekend Bible-study class. Whatever makes ’em comfortable — as individuals. They’ll surround themselves with the like-minded; they’ll do it every time. Those who protest against it most vociferously, are the ones most competent at practicing it when it suits ’em. And when there’s little or no real work to be done.

We’re not past any of it. Quite to the contrary, our urgent work is at a low nadir, and we are now consumed in a process of justifying ourselves when we can’t be justified because we’re not trying to do anything. And so the National Organization of Woman, as Becky observes, ends up endorsing a the ticket that does not have a woman on it — endorsing it for propping up the political agenda. That’s because the agenda is what it’s all about. It has nothing to do with the chicks. It never did. The (perceived) anger of all those chicks, the ones Kim Gandy has in mind, has been the pressure that drove the turboprop attached to the engine shaft of this supposed “womens'” movement. But a bundle of far-left political agendas, is all it ever was or ever will be. And, ironically, those far-left political agendas had to do with preserving twentieth-century prejudices and bigotry for as long as they could be preserved — driving wedges between classes of people who don’t look like each other.

It never had anything to do with the chicks from day one.

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It Never Was About the Chicks IIIThursday, September 18th, 2008

It Never Was About the Chicks III
Thursday, September 18th, 2008