(#2) Feb.2, 2008
Robin Morgan
'Goodbye To All That' was my (in)famous 1970 essay breaking free from a
politics of accommodation especially affecting women (for an online
version, see
http://blog.fair-use.org/category/chicago/).
During my decades in civil-rights, anti-war, and contemporary women's
movements, I've avoided writing another specific 'Goodbye . . .'. But
not since the suffrage struggle have two communities--joint
conscience-keepers of this country--been so set in competition, as the
contest between Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC) and Barack Obama (BO) unfurls. So.
Goodbye to the double standard . . .
--Hillary is too ballsy but too womanly, a Snow Maiden who's emotional,
and so much a politician as to be unfit for politics.
--She's 'ambitious' but he shows 'fire in the belly.' (Ever had labor pains? )
--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. Sen 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.)
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 HRC nutcracker with metal spikes between splayed thighs.
If it was a tap-dancing blackface doll, we would be righteously
outraged-and they would not be selling it in airports. Shame.
Goodbye to the most intimately violent T-shirts in election history,
including one with the murderous slogan 'If Only Hillary had married O.J. Instead!' Shame.
Goodbye to Comedy Central's 'Southpark' featuring a storyline in which
terrorists secrete a bomb in HRC's vagina. I refuse to wrench my brain
down into the gutter far enough to find a race-based comparison. 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.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?
Goodbye to the news-coverage target-practice . . .
The women's movement and Media Matters wrung an apology from MSNBC's
Chris Matthews for relentless misogynistic comments
(www.womensmediacenter.com). But what about NBC's Tim Russert's
continual sexist asides and his all-white-male panels pontificating on
race and gender? Or CNN's Tony Harris chuckling at 'the chromosome
thing' while interviewing a woman from The White House Project?
And that's not even mentioning Fox News.
Goodbye to pretending the black community is entirely male and all women are white . . .
Surprise! Women exist in all opinions, pigmentations, ethnicities,
abilities, sexual preferences, and ages--not only African American and
European American but Latina and Native American, Asian American and
Pacific Islanders, Arab American and-hey, every group, because a group
wouldn't exist if we hadn't given birth to it. A few non-racist
countries may exist--but sexism is everywhere. No matter how many ways
a woman breaks free from other discriminations, she remains a female
human being in a world still so patriarchal that it's the 'norm.'
So why should all women not be as justly proud of our womanhood and the
centuries, even millennia, of struggle that got us this far, as black
Americans, women and men, are justly proud of their struggles?
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 black or 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 was celebrating the pivotal power at last focused on African American
women deciding on which of two candidates to bestow their vote--until a
number of Hillary-supporting black feminists told me they're being called 'race traitors.'
So goodbye to conversations about this nation's deepest
scar-slavery-which fail to acknowledge that labor- and sexual-slavery
exist today in the US and elsewhere on this planet, and the majority of those enslaved are women.
Women have endured sex/race/ethnic/religious hatred, rape and battery,
invasion of spirit and flesh, forced pregnancy; being the majority of
the poor, the illiterate, the disabled, of refugees, caregivers, the
HIV/AIDS afflicted, the powerless. We have survived invisibility,
ridicule, religious fundamentalisms, polygamy, teargas, forced
feedings, jails, asylums, sati, purdah, female genital mutilation,
witch burnings, stonings, and attempted gynocides. We have tried
reason, persuasion, reassurances, and being extra-qualified, only to
learn it never was about qualifications after all. We know that at this
historical moment women experience the world differently from
men--though not all the same as one another--and can govern
differently, from Elizabeth Tudor to Michele Bachelet and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.
We remember when Shirley Chisholm and Patricia Schroeder ran for this
high office and barely got past the gate-they showed too much passion,
raised too little cash, were joke fodder. Goodbye to all that. (And
goodbye to some feminists so famished for a female president they were
even willing to abandon women's rights in backing Elizabeth Dole.)
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.
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 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. 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.
Goodbye to the shocking American ignorance of our own and other
countries' history. Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir rose through party
ranks and war, positioning themselves as proto-male leaders. Almost all
other female heads of government so far have been related to men of
power-granddaughters, daughters, sisters, wives, widows: Gandhi,
Bandaranike, Bhutto, Aquino, Chamorro, Wazed, Macapagal-Arroyo, Johnson
Sirleaf, Bachelet, Kirchner, and more. Even in our 'land of
opportunity,' it's mostly the first pathway 'in' permitted to women:
Reps. Doris Matsui and Mary Bono and Sala Burton; Sen. Jean Carnahan .
. . far too many to list here.
Goodbye to a misrepresented generational divide . . .
Goodbye to the so-called spontaneous 'Obama Girl' flaunting her
bikin-clad ass online-then confessing Oh yeah it wasn't her idea after
all, some guys got her to do it and dictated the clothes, which she
said 'made me feel like a dork.'
Goodbye to some young women eager to win male approval by showing
they're not feminists (at least not the kind who actually threaten the
status quo), who can't identify with a woman candidate because she
actually 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.)he'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.)
I'd rather look forward to what a good president he might make in eight
years, when his vision and spirit are seasoned by practical
know-how--and he'll be all of 54. Meanwhile, goodbye to turning him
into a shining knight when actually he's an astute, smooth pol with
speechwriters who've worked with the Kennedys' own
speechwriter-courtier Ted Sorenson. If it's only about ringing
rhetoric, let speechwriters run. But isn't it about getting the policies we want enacted?
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 US 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 women 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 child care 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.
We are the women who now comprise the majority of US voters.
Hillary said she found her own voice in New Hampshire. There's not a
woman alive who, if she's honest, doesn't recognize what she means.
Then HRC got drowned out by campaign experts, Bill, and media's obsession with everything Bill.
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.'
That was Hillary Rodham Clinton defying the US State Department and the
Chinese Government at the 1995 UN World Conference on Women in Beijing
(the full, stunning speech:
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/hillaryclintonbeijingspeech.htm).
And this voice, age 22, in 'Commencement Remarks of Hillary D. Rodham,
President of Wellesley College Government Association, Class of 1969'
(full speech:
http://www.wellesley.edu/PublicAffairs/Commencement/1969/053169hillary.html'We are, all of us, exploring a world none of us understands. . . .
searching for a more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating mode of
living. . . .
integrity, the courage to be whole, living in
relation to one another in the full poetry of existence. The struggle
for an integrated life existing in an atmosphere of communal trust and
respect is one with desperately important political and social
consequences. . . . Fear is always with us, but we just don't have time for it.'
She ended with the commitment 'to practice, with all the skill of our being: the art of making possible.'
And for decades, she's been learning how.
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 dothis 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 US
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.
Me? I support Hillary Rodham because she's the best qualified of all
candidates running in both parties. 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.
As for the 'woman thing'?
Me, I'm voting for Hillary not because she's a woman--but because I am.
www.robinmorgan.us
eta, I support Obama and am a woman. Although I agree with much of this, I think the last line is moronic. To vote for Senator Clinton because she is a woman is as moronic as voting for senator Obama because he is a person of color.
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