Mentioned on
another thread:
They don't play the bipartisan game (they regard it as "date rape"!), so why are we?
It's oddly telling that the Right so often uses metaphors of sexual abuse. Take Grover Norquist's recent bit of triumphalism, comparing the defeated Democrats to castrated animals, soon docile and no longer "peeing on the furniture."
A while back, the bumper-sticker generator that's always running in my mind came out with this: "If the presidency were a marriage, Bush would be a wife-beater."
A satisfying rhetorical slam, but it may clue in to something deeper. There's a recent piece by Mel Gilles on Mathew Gross's blog that articulates all this very well, called "The Politics of Victimization."
Says Gilles:
Listen as Donna [Brazille] and Nancy Pelosi and Senator Charles Schumer take to the airwaves saying that they have to go back to the drawing board and learn from their mistakes and try to be better, more likable, more appealing, have a stronger message, speak to morality... Hear the cacophony of voices, crying out, "Why did they beat me?"
...The answer is quite simple. They beat us because they are abusers... But we are looped into the cycle of violence, and we need to start calling the dominating side what they are: abusive. And we need to recognize that we are the victims of verbal, mental, and even, in the case of Iraq, physical violence.
He details the parallels, and draws from them how to deal with the abuse:
Any battered woman in America, any oppressed person around the globe who has defied her oppressor will tell you this: There is nothing wrong with you. You are in good company. You are safe. You are not alone. You are strong. You must change only one thing: stop responding to the abuser... we absolutely must dispense with the notion that we are weak, godless, cowardly, disorganized, crazy, too liberal, naive, amoral, "loose", irrelevant, outmoded, stupid and soon to be extinct.
The Right has cultivated a systematic "technology of abuse" that they've used to bitch-slap their way to power and stay there. We've let them do it and they will keep at it until we refuse to accept it any longer. Once we get out of our sick relationship with them, we can get on with our own agenda.