CURRENT MOON

Sunday, September 07, 2008

Palin: Toxic Mimic


Derrick Jensen talks a lot about toxic mimics. Rape, for example, is a toxic mimic of love and/or pleasurable, consensual sex. Identification with Diane Sawyer and Britney Spears is a toxic mimic of belonging to a community. You get the idea.

I've been thinking about the Republican Party's embrace of Sarah Palin, working mother, and I keep thinking "toxic mimic." The Democrats run Hillary Clinton, a woman, wife, mother, experienced lawyer and stateswoman. The Republicans show up at her speeches carrying banners that say: Iron My Shirts. They complain about everything from her "whine" to her "cackle" to her "cleavage" to her tearing up when emotional. They say she only won her Senate seat because Americans felt sorry that her husband cheated on her. (OK, Matthews said that. He's a Republican in my book.)

And then McCain gets a wild hair up his ass over being told "NO" by his staff when he wants to pick Joe Lieberman, a toxic mimic of a Democrat, and, all unvetted, selects Palin for his VP candidate. And all of a sudden, the Republicans scream sexism over and over and over again when legitimate questions are raised about Palin's experience, history, preparation.

One thing a toxic mimic can do, absent great care, is to cheapen and destroy the original archetype, concept, thing. It's a large part of their purpose. Thus, someone who's been raped may never again experience uninhibited love and/or sex. Sitting in your living room, watching tv, and feeling a connection with Diane Sawyer, brought to you by GE, keeps you from getting out into your real community and making bonds with real people. People for whom you'd stand up. Running Palin, who has taken advantage of the opportunities provided by feminism while deliberately trying to destroy it, may seriously undermine the progress of feminism.

Of course, we live in a culture soaked in patriarchy. So the "good" choice is to vote for Barack Obama, who thinks women shouldn't be "entitled" to abortions for "mere" mental health reasons, who picks Joe Biden, who shit all over Anita Hill, for his VP, even though a v large group of Democrats were obviously hungry for a female VP. The "good" choice is to vote for the Democrats, who picked Harry Pro-Coat-Hanger Reid for speaker, the same Reid who called Palin's speech "shrill."

But that doesn't change the toxic mimic nature of Palin's candidacy. She wanted to ban books in the library of her small Alaska town. She's pro-coat-hanger. She's anti-science. She's against teaching science in schools. She belongs to a church that wants to "convert" gays. She's a walking, talking, living, breathing, breeding toxic mimic of feminism.

What are you going to do between now and November to keep her from being one 75-year-old melanoma away from the White House? Do it for Hillary Clinton. Do it for your daughter, niece, friend. Do it for feminism. I love this movement too much to surrender it to its toxic mimic.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Once again, I have to hold my nose to vote. But holding my nose is better than living under a burqa, real or figurative.

Anonymous said...

I used to see Ms. Hill out shopping for groceries here in this college town where I live. A vision of poise and grace.
And I still hate Biden for treating her like shit

Anonymous said...

I feel bad for what happened to Anita Hill, too.

But that was HOW many years ago????

Time to let go.....and get Obama and Biden elected.

Anonymous said...

anonymous, dear heart, I ain't letting go of any of this shit.

You wanna know why?

Because it FUCKING MATTERS! Patriarchy is a feature, not a bug.
It doesn't get better unless it gets pressed and pressed and pressed and pressed...ad infinitum.

You let it go, if you're so inclined. I'm going to shake it until it falls out of the tree, lands on a rusty garden weasel and bleeds to death in my driveway.

I've always had to vote the lessor of two evils, and I'm well practiced. But don't for a minute think I'm EVER going to be resigned to it.

Anonymous said...

I still don't get how feminism became the sole possession of the left. It seems to me the goal of feminism is for every woman to be able to achieve and go for the gold out there. Toxic mimic, however, is a very creepy term. We are dealing with the creepy out there women.

I suppose if you never cared about abortion or birth control as issues, all of this seems a bit much.

Feminism succeeds when mainstream women start to go for it. That's what happens. You get someone committed like Susan B. Anthony or Mary Daly, they fight like hell, and then later all their efforts go to reward the conventional, the conservative and the mainstream.

Painful as this is, the choice of Palin merely suggests that women's votes matter, and that even the Republican guys in charge really get this.

Palin was one of the radical right's stealth candidates. The big boys of Republicanism in Alaska saw her as a rising star, and they encouraged her to bring up "hot button issues" in a staid small town. The stealth candidates took over school boards (Vista, CA-- google that school board and how the towns people finally booted them out), and this was a nationwide strategy of the Republican right wing christian groups.

Palin is their most successful stealth candidate, but you have to read between the lines to see how she rose so fast. Nobody out there has connected her to the Ralph Reed school of stealth candidates, but we should investigate just who funded her campaign for governor, or who helped with direct mail when she was running for mayor of Wasilla.

That's the bad news. The good news is that feminism forced men to put women in these positions. It means we won a battle. It is the fault of stupid leftist men like Obama who simply passed up another well qualified woman for some old sexist guy of the past. Do this and you create a vacuum. And vacuums get filled, not fun, but it does happen.

steve simels said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
steve simels said...

It is the fault of stupid leftist men like Obama who simply passed up another well qualified woman for some old sexist guy of the past

Assumes facts not in evidence. You have no idea whether Obama passed up Hillary.

In any case, the thing to remember about Palin and the whole toxic mimic thing is that she's Clarence Thomas II.

I.e., an obviously unqualified candidate selected as an ideological sop to the Republican base and a giant "fuck you!" to the Dems. It's that simple...

Anonymous said...

would any of you consider voting Green this time around?