As the results pour in, take some time to read this EXTRAORDINARY essay about Hillary and everything she symbolizes by Robin Morgan, author of the book The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism (1989).
In the essay, "Goodbye to All That (#2)," Morgan says goodbye to all of the socio-cultural crap and detritus - to put it frankly - that has been heaped onto Hillary over the years and in this election. It is a HILLARY MANIFESTO! A declaration of indepedence from the male-centered media gaze and the psycho-sexual lens through which the media view her.
Goodbye to her being exploited as a Rorschach test by women who reduce her to a blank screen on which they project their own fears, failures, fantasies.
Goodbye to the phrase “polarizing figure” to describe someone who embodies the transitions women have made in the last century and are poised to make in this one.
More excerpts and analysis after the flip.
Moragan tackles the race issue head-on: WARNING she is VERY confrontational about it, but in being so she shows how viciously sexist this election cycle has been, though it may still be an invisible sexism. And she takes on the Kennedys. I, personally, love when she says she won't buy into Caroline Kennedy's daddy-fantasy:
Goodbye to the double standard . . .
—When a sexist idiot screamed “Iron my shirt!” at HRC, it was considered amusing; if a racist idiot shouted “Shine my shoes!” at BO, it would’ve inspired hours of airtime and pages of newsprint analyzing our national dishonor.
—Young political Kennedys—Kathleen, Kerry, and Bobby Jr.—all endorsed Hillary. Senator Ted, age 76, endorsed Obama. If the situation were reversed, pundits would snort “See? Ted and establishment types back her, but the forward-looking generation backs him.” (Personally, I’m unimpressed with Caroline’s longing for the Return of the Fathers. Unlike the rest of the world, Americans have short memories. Me, I still recall Marilyn Monroe’s suicide, and a dead girl named Mary Jo Kopechne in Chappaquiddick.)
I LOVE when she dismisses those so-called "Clinton-haters" or "Hillary-haters" - who are, unfortunately, so rampant on this site - as pure, straight up sexists. No doubt, many women who don't support Hillary will find this infuritating:
Goodbye to the toxic viciousness . . .
Carl Bernstein's disgust at Hillary’s “thick ankles.” Nixon-trickster Roger Stone’s new Hillary-hating 527 group, “Citizens United Not Timid” (check the capital letters). John McCain answering “How do we beat the bitch?" with “Excellent question!” Would he have dared reply similarly to “How do we beat the black bastard?” For shame...
Goodbye to the sick, malicious idea that this is funny. This is not “Clinton hating,” not “Hillary hating.” This is sociopathic woman-hating. If it were about Jews, we would recognize it instantly as anti-Semitic propaganda; if about race, as KKK poison. Hell, PETA would go ballistic if such vomitous spew were directed at animals. Where is our sense of outrage—as citizens, voters, Americans?
I love how she controversially characterizes Baraack's relationship with his white voters - sure to inflame - and shows, just as Erica Jong did in her Op-Ed piece in the Washington Post yesterday, that he can be seen as a kind of token; and how we expect Hillary to act like a man and then lambast her for it:
Goodbye to a campaign where he has to pass as white (which whites—especially wealthy ones—adore), while she has to pass as male (which both men and women demanded of her, and then found unforgivable). If she were blackor he were female we wouldn’t be having such problems, and I for one would be in heaven. But at present such a candidate wouldn’t stand a chance—even if she shared Condi Rice’s Bush-defending politics.
I LOVE LOVE LOVE the way she address our national obsession with their marriage and the way Hillary is saddled with and blamed for all of Bill's fuck-ups, and how she gets Teddy K in on the mix:
Goodbye, goodbye to . . .
—blaming anything Bill Clinton does on Hillary (even including his womanizing like the Kennedy guys—though unlike them, he got reported on). Let’s get real. If he hadn’t campaigned strongly for her everyone would cluck over what that meant. Enough of Bill and Teddy Kennedy locking their alpha male horns while Hillary pays for it.
—an era when parts of the populace feel so disaffected by politics that a comparative lack of knowledge, experience, and skill is actually seen as attractive, when celebrity-culture mania now infects our elections so that it’s “cooler” to glow with marquee charisma than to understand the vast global complexities of power on a nuclear, wounded planet.
—the notion that it’s fun to elect a handsome, cocky president who feels he can learn on the job, goodbye to George W. Bush and the destruction brought by his inexperience, ignorance, and arrogance.
Of course, I love her characterization of our relationship with Barack, our disaffection for politics, our civic-spiritual despair, the way our mania for celebrity has fundamentally altered for the worse our political culture, and so our turning toward a marquee cipher - who, as she shows, when reduced to his media essentials is scarily siomilar to you know who.
I LOVE the way she dismisses the false rhetoric projected on Hillary, what we can call, the media reductions: that she is "entitled" to something, that she is a "polarizing figure" because she has lived her life AS a modern woman, and that she isn't "likeable." Thank you Robin Morgan for tossing all this straight out the window:
Goodbye to the accusation that HRC acts “entitled” when she’s worked intensely at everything she’s done—including being a nose-to-the-grindstone, first-rate senator from my state...
Goodbye to the phrase “polarizing figure” to describe someone who embodies the transitions women have made in the last century and are poised to make in this one. It was the women’s movement that quipped, “We are becoming the men we wanted to marry.” She heard us, and she has.
Goodbye to some women letting history pass by while wringing their hands, because Hillary isn’t as “likeable” as they’ve been warned they must be, or because she didn’t leave him, couldn’t “control” him, kept her family together and raised a smart, sane daughter. (Think of the blame if Chelsea had ever acted in the alcoholic, neurotic manner of the Bush twins!) Goodbye to some women pouting because she didn’t bake cookies or she did, sniping because she learned the rules and then bent or broke them. Grow the hell up. She is not running for Ms.-perfect-pure-queen-icon of the feminist movement. She’s running to be president of the United States.
I LOVE how she takes young women to task for falling prey to peer pressure, especially pressure exerted by males, boyfriends, or who feel themselves to be living in some fantasy "post-feminist" universe:
Goodbye to some young women eager to win male approval by showing they’re not feminists (at least not the kind who actually threaten thestatus quo), who can’t identify with a woman candidate because she is unafraid of eeueweeeu yucky power, who fear their boyfriends might look at them funny if they say something good about her. Goodbye to women of any age again feeling unworthy, sulking “what if she’s not electable?” or “maybe it’s post-feminism and whoooosh we’re already free.” Let a statement by the magnificent Harriet Tubman stand as reply. When asked how she managed to save hundreds of enslaved African Americans via the Underground Railroad during the Civil War, she replied bitterly, “I could have saved thousands—if only I’d been able to convince them they were slaves.”
I’d rather say a joyful Hello to all the glorious young women who do identify with Hillary, and all the brave, smart men—of all ethnicities and any age—who get that it’s in their self-interest, too. She’s better qualified. (D’uh.) She’s a high-profile candidate with an enormous grasp of foreign- and domestic-policy nuance, dedication to detail, ability to absorb staggering insult and personal pain while retaining dignity, resolve, even humor, and keep on keeping on. (Also, yes, dammit, let’s hear it for her connections and funding and party-building background, too. Obama was awfully glad about those when she raised dough and campaigned for him to get to the Senate in the first place.)
And I LOVE LOVE LOVE the way she takes Barack to task for wanting to "turn a page on history" when that page is the one that is inscribed with the history of the women's movement and everything it has accomplished; I love how she suggests that Barack would not even be running if it weren't for women like Hillary, who "blazed a path" for him in the first place:
And goodbye to the ageism . . .
How dare anyone unilaterally decide when to turn the page on history, papering over real inequities and suffering constituencies in the promise of a feel-good campaign? How dare anyone claim to unify while dividing, or think that to rouse U.S. youth from torpor it’s useful to triage the single largest demographic in this country’s history: the boomer generation—the majority of which is female?
Old woman are the one group that doesn’t grow more conservative with age—and we are the generation of radicals who said “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” Goodbye to going gently into any goodnight any man prescribes for us. We are the women who changed the reality of the United States. And though we never went away, brace yourselves: we’re back!
We are the women who brought this country equal credit, better pay, affirmative action, the concept of a family-focused workplace; the women who established rape-crisis centers and battery shelters, marital-rape and date-rape laws; the women who defended lesbian custody rights, who fought for prison reform, founded the peace and environmental movements; who insisted that medical research include female anatomy; who inspired men to become more nurturing parents; who created women’s studies and Title IX so we all could cheer the WNBA stars and Mia Hamm. We are the women who reclaimed sexuality from violent pornography, who put childcare on the national agenda, who transformed demographics, artistic expression, language itself. We are the women who forged a worldwide movement. We are the proud successors of women who, though it took more than 50 years, won us the vote.
I love how Morgan chides Hillary for saying, absurdly, that she "found my voice" in New Hampshire, when we all know she has been speaking strongly in her own voice for years, since she gavve that famous commencement speech at Wellsley in 1968, in fact. Moragn points to Hillary's history-making speech in Beijing in 1995 on women's rights and human rights, worth quoting here to refresh our minds:
So listen to her voice:
“For too long, the history of women has been a history of silence. Even today, there are those who are trying to silence our words.
“It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls. It is a violation of human rights when woman and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution. It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small. It is a violation of human rights when individual women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war. It is a violation of human rights when a leading cause of death worldwide along women ages 14 to 44 is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes. It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against their will.
“Women’s rights are human rights. Among those rights are the right to speak freely—and the right to be heard.”
I love, as she ends her essay, her rallying cry to other women, to step up and find their own voices:
So goodbye to Hillary’s second-guessing herself. The real question is deeper than her re-finding her voice. Can we women find ours? Can we do this for ourselves?
“Our President, Ourselves!”
Time is short and the contest tightening. We need to rise in furious energy—as we did when Anita Hill was so vilely treated in the U.S. Senate, as we did when Rosie Jiminez was butchered by an illegal abortion, as we did and do for women globally who are condemned for trying to break through. We need to win, this time. Goodbye to supporting HRC tepidly, with ambivalent caveats and apologetic smiles. Time to volunteer, make phone calls, send emails, donate money, argue, rally, march, shout, vote.
And, finally, I love that in the end she is supporting Hillary NOT for the gender issue, but because she is clearly the most qualified candidate in any party:
Me? I support Hillary Rodham because she’s the best qualified of all candidates running in both parties. I support her because her progressive politics are as strong as her proven ability to withstand what will be a massive right-wing assault in the general election. I support her because she knows how to get us out of Iraq. I support her because she’s refreshingly thoughtful, and I’m bloodied from eight years of a jolly “uniter” with ejaculatory politics. I needn’t agree with her on every point. I agree with the 97 percent of her positions that are identical with Obama’s—and the few where hers are both more practical and to the left of his (like health care). I support her because she’s already smashed the first-lady stereotype and made history as a fine senator, because I believe she will continue to make history not only as the first US woman president, but as a great US president...
Me, I’m voting for Hillary not because she’s a woman—but because I am.
Like I said, extraordinary. A manifesto for Hillary. A full-frontal confrontation with both the race and gender cards! which everyone knows is there but no one wants to talk about for FEAR of FEAR of FEAR of being labaled something or other.
I found this essay LIBERATING! I feel like I finally cleared my throat.
I won't be at all surprised by the nasty response it gets.
UPDATE: Well, as I said, I'm not at all surprised by the response in the comments, or by the negative ratings. The idea that anyone would negatively rate an impassioned feminist essay in support of a woman candidate just REINFORCES the very points Morgan makes in the essay. And, the negative ratings also show that Obama supporters cannot admit into their mental universe an admittedly highly personal, but clear-eyed assesment of the darker side of the Obama symbolism - in other words, one that actually address the race issue - and that does so by showing how in this election there has been a silent struggle between sexism and race, as almost all feminist commentators from Gloria Steinem to Erica Jong and now to Morgan have pointed out in the pages of the nation's most respectable newspapers - only to be attacked, vilified, and ridiculued as Hillary has - and as this diary has. So, sexism is alive and well in the camp of Obama supporters as with so many others.