Vermont, where I lived for many years, has become the first state to legalize gay marriage without the prompting of a court order. It’s the fourth state overall.
I was proudly active in that fight — and this new victory is a great testimony to the compassion and idealism of Vermonters.
It also should be a reminder that this isn’t just about rights – which a court can give and a referendum can take away.
It’s about fostering community.
It’s about happiness.
All of which brings to mind the poem “When I heard at the close of the day” from Walt Whitman — that great American poet (who happened to be gay). Even though he was writing back in the middle of the 19th Century, his long, luxurious lines put this moment in just the right context:
When I heard at the close of the day how my name had been receiv’d with plaudits in the capitol, still it was not a happy night for me that follow’d,
And else when I carous’d, or when my plans were accomplish’d, still I was not happy,
But the day when I rose at dawn from the bed of perfect health, refresh’d, singing, inhaling the ripe breath of autumn,
When I saw the full moon in the west grow pale and disappear in the morning light,
When I wander’d alone over the beach, and undressing bathed, laughing with the cool waters, and saw the sun rise,
And when I thought how my dear friend my lover was on his way coming, O then I was happy,
O then each breath tasted sweeter, and all that day my food nourish’d me more, and the beautiful day pass’d well,
And the next came with equal joy, and with the next at evening came my friend,
And that night while all was still I heard the waters roll slowly continually up the shores,
I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands as directed to me whispering to congratulate me,
For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in the cool night,
In the stillness in the autumn moonbeams his face was inclined toward me,
And his arm lay lightly around my breast – and that night I was happy.
I’m still watching Joss Whedon’s “Dollhouse,” and I’m becoming mildly intrigued. Television reviewers had only been given episodes 1-3 when they made their initial, mixed at best, reviews of the series. I wanted to wait until I got through episode 4 before I starting making any pronouncements.
So now here’s a tepid one. The story has great potential as an allegory for women struggling for agency in a increasingly subtle patriarchal world, but it is fulfilling that potential at a snail’s pace. And the feminist themes are being continually undermined by the marketing of its star, Eliza Dushku, who recently posed on the cover of Maxim.
I don’t agree with Nancy Franklin of The New Yorker that the “primary qualification Dushku brings to the part is that she graduated with honors from the Royal Academy of Cleavage.” In fact, I could easily see her growing into the role or the role growing into her.
Like Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Buffy, Echo, Dushku’s character, is valued by others because of her stereotypical beauty. It’s an explicit part of her skill set, as the operators of the Dollhouse put it. Like Buffy, I’m confident (and I can begin to see the seeds being planted) that Whedon is planning to play off of the stereotype and assumptions — and ultimately play against them.
Franklin misses the point when she continues to say, “In terms of gender studies, it is notable that Dushku’s demeanor as a zombie is much the same as the demeanor many actresses her age resort to when trying to project an image of themselves as unthreatening and ‘feminine’: a slouchy walk, a bobbly head, and ever-parted lips.”
She is that way because the operators of the Dollhouse — and their clients — want her that way. By exposing this gendered system, the show can — potentially — undermine it. But Whedon is clearly walking a fine line here, and when The New Yorker doesn’t get it, you might need to make access to the allegory a bit clearer.
And you might want to have a word with Fox and Dushku herself about the messages they are sending off-screen (or at least outside the narrative of the show).
Just when it seems that the drug issue in sports is about to slip from the headlines, and just when it seems that the revelations about steroid use in baseball are coming to an end, something happens.
This time an Olympic Gold Medal collector is photographed filling those massive swimming-developed lungs from a bong. Then the player who was going to remove Barry Bonds from the top of the home run charts — and make any asterisks irrelevant — is hung out to dry by another leak from a sealed grand jury report.
First to the more serious case. Alex Rodriguez has admitted to the use of performance-enhancing drugs after Sports Illustrated reported that Rodriquez was one of the 104 baseball players who tested positive during the confidential drug testing done in baseball in 2003.
Rodriquez told ESPN’s Peter Gammons that yes, he did use performance-enhancing substances for approximately three years beginning in 2001 when he was with the Texas Rangers. For the past week everyone and their dog has had something to say in interviews or on blogs about this “shocking” admission.
What interests me is not the admission, but the process that led to this fiasco. It begins with the fact that for decades baseball players and other athletes have been using an assortment of performance-enhancers. Over the years, only the substance type has changed. It is also likely that non-detectable substances are still being used across the sporting spectrum.
No one should be surprised by Alex Rodriquez’s admission, by the 104 who tested positive in baseball, or the countless others who have tested positive in all sports. And don’t forget all those who have been users but who have not tested positive. This is a simple reality.
One of the most fascinating angles to the Rod Blagojevich saga is the reaction of mental health professionals to everyone calling him “crazy” or “cuckoo.” As the Chicago Tribune reports:
The language offends many and blames mental illness for alleged criminal behavior, they say.
Ann Raney, CEO for Turning Point Behavioral Health Care Center in Skokie, said the center’s board members were so disturbed about the name-calling that they devoted much of a meeting last week to talking about it.
“We need to be clear that unethical or confusing or bad behavior should never be construed as mental illness,” Raney said.
On the contrary, statistics show that people suffering from mental illness are more likely to be victims of crime than they are to be perpetrators, said Fran McClain, program director for the Josselyn Center for Mental Health in Northfield.
Psychologists interviewed by State Journal-Register of Springfield, IL, want to make it clear that Blagojevich might very well have a “narcissistic personality disorder,” but that does not make him crazy.
While Blagojevich’s outrageousness might be funny to some — it’s clearly the greatest thing to hit the cable news networks since the election — the reaction gives me pause.
Although the articles don’t explicity note it, it seems obvious that these mental health professionals are trying to fight stereotypes and misconceptions of mental illness that pervade our media. Television dramas and films rarely treat the full complexities of mental illness, choosing to focus the most extreme and sensational cases rather than the disorders that many “regular” people live with everyday.
That means — more than anything else – a focus on violence and aggressive, criminal behavior of people with mental illness. It’s the basis, after all, of more than one horror movie franchise.
I have Tivo’d “Wonderland” — a show about the daily workings of a psychiatric ward, which DirecTV is reviving after an aborted run on ABC a few years back. I’ll report back if I find anything ground-breaking, but DirecTV’s heavy promotional campaign, which has inundated subscribers for months, does little to change any minds. The chairs are flying, the patients are screaming … and I imagine real doctors and mental health advocates sighing yet again.
That’s the question most people have asked since I returned from attending the Inauguration festivities in Washington, D.C.
And my answer surprises even me: It is the road trip home, listening for the first time to Barack Obama reading “Dreams of My Father.”
We’ve gone from the ridiculous to the sublime. Somehow Americans have managed to elect an intellectual to the highest office.
As the self-aware reflections in his first book suggest, though, Obama is much more than an intellectual. Listening to his narration, as he takes on voices as varied as his high school friend Ray and his Kenyan sisters, aunts and “Granny,” I realize our president could just as easily have been a novelist — not simply a stodgy law professor.
Considering Obama’s intellect and artistry, then, I have cringed each time a TV host or pundit has noted that this Inauguration is particularly historic because America now has its first African American president. The significance of that fact is undeniable, but it is such a limiting lens through which to see this moment.
Obama has so many other unprecedented qualities — which his cultural and political analyses in “Dreams of My Father” reveal. He is progressive in the most radical sense, the president who can truly navigate our 21st-century world because he has spent his life thinking … critically thinking … about … everything.
By this time in my own thought process, I shift my mind again (never has a moment of cognitive dissonance felt so good), and I begin to think about that rest stop in Pennsylvania on the way home. I went into the restroom, and I saw four adolescent boys goofing off, as they are wont to do.
But these boys — all African American — also proudly donned big buttons celebrating Obama. I hope I’m not being overly presumptuous here — but I’ve heard it time and time again — boys like these had been brought to the Inauguration by parents who wanted them to witness the moment first-hand: a black man becoming the most powerful person in the world.
The boys would now know they can be anything they want to be (or so the hope goes — more on that later).
There’s no reason, I realized looking at the boys, that Obama can’t be both the first African American president and the first president to grasp the complex realities of living and leading in the Information Age.
In fact, as a close reading of “Dreams of My Father” makes clear, Obama’s lack of a coherent familial and racial identity is what spurs his thinking. He is able to approach most political and cultural texts (both spoken and written, informal and formal) as an outsider and coolly dissect their messages.
The passage from the book that most resonates in this regard comes when he walks into his first South Side Chicago barbershop — Smitty’s — soon after arriving in the city to start his career as a community organizer.
For just $9.99, you can own your own set of “Sweet Sasha” and “Marvelous Malia” dolls.
“They’re such adorable girls,” Ty Inc. spokeswoman Tania Lundeen said Wednesday of the Obama sisters — Sasha, 7, and Malia, 10. “How can we resist?”
But by the end of the week, Ty Inc. — the company that created Beanie Babies — announced the names were chosen because “they are beautiful names,” not because they resemble the first daughters.
Whatever. Sadly, these dolls lack agency in their own world. Malia doesn’t even have her own camera.
Instead, they “come with a password to an online ‘virtual world’ where real girls can decorate their dolls’ room, change their clothes or go shopping,” reports the Chicago Sun Times.
Michelle Obama is not impressed with the 12-inch pseduo-replicas.
“We believe it is inappropriate to use young private citizens for marketing purposes,” Obama’s press secretary, Katie McCormick Lelyveld, said in a statement today.
Also this week, Mattel announced it will launch its first complete line of African-American Barbie dolls.
Plus: There’s a new blog on girls as media producers. Mary Celeste Kearney writes that she created Girls Make Media “because I’ve been researching girls’ media production for over a decade now, and wanted to pull together in one place information about girl media producers, as well as programs for and research about girls’ media-making.”
Kearney — an associate professor of radio, television and film, and women and gender studies at the University of Texas at Austin — is looking to link to other programs (in and outside of the United States), so let her know if you doing something interesting in this field.
Some, including Richard Sandomir of The New York Times, have suggested that in this time of economic crisis, when it appears that the number of sellouts will drop, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell should end or suspend the blackout policy.
This is a reasonable sentiment, although one might question if offering more blood and circuses offers a viable solution to America’s economic problems, or if it suggests that the NFL should serve as one more version of the opium of the masses.
Rather than simply offering a temporary respite for the unemployed, now might be a good time to look at the history of the blackout, with a view toward ending this economic privilege enjoyed by the NFL by virtue of a combination of court decisions and legislation.
The relationship between the NFL and television goes back to the early days of television following World War II. A number of teams developed their own television arrangements, and some even had their own regional networks. These spotty operations came and went with uneven results.
The first major experiment with television came in Los Angeles, where the Rams allowed local television to broadcast all of its 1950 home games. Game sponsor Admiral Television agreed to make up any losses in home ticket sales. When attendance dropped by 110,000 from the previous year, Admiral had to produce $307,000. The following year, the Rams televised road games only; as a result, home attendance bounced back to 1949 levels.
With this graphic negative demonstration of the power of television, Commissioner Bert Bell moved in 1952 to centralize control of television contracts — televising games on a regional basis, while instituting a blackout of all home games within 75 miles of the team city. The Justice Department moved immediately to challenge the NFL’s actions. However, in 1953, a federal district judge ruled that the NFL constituted a “unique kind of business,” in which classic economic competition would destroy that business. The court upheld the blackout policy of home games and the territorial blackout which made the regional network solution possible.
At the beginning of the 1960s, under the leadership of the new commissioner, Pete Rozelle, the NFL, rather than individual teams, signed an exclusive TV contract with CBS. The court ruled that the pooling of contracts was an anti-trust violation. With a loss in the courts, the NFL turned to the executive and legislative branches for relief. With the strong support of the Kennedy White House and Congress, the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 was passed, authorizing home game blackouts as well as a league-wide television contract. This triumph of the NFL cartel led to even stronger advocacy of the free enterprise system by NFL owners.
This is where the policy stood through the 1960s and the years of warfare with the AFL, which, as a matter of interest, did not have a blackout rule on its telecasts. With the growing popularity of professional football, the merger of the two leagues, and the coming of the Super Bowl, the blackout would again become an issue. Repeated NFL game sellouts led to frustration for home fans who had to travel 75 miles to see their home team play at home — on a television away from home.
He’s on his own channel on your satellite television. He’s in MTV videos by rap and reggae artists. His ads pop up on the Web sites you read. He’s delaying a World Series game to buy a block of national TV time. And when you’re cruising down the street in your favorite racing video game, his face whizzes by on a cyber-billboard
The only place he hasn’t appeared yet is on a box of Wheaties.
Love him or hate him, and whether it helps him or hurts him, the presidential hopeful is everywhere.
“It’s stunning, isn’t it?” said Dick Crepeau, a contributor to PopPolitics.com and a professor of American cultural history at the University of Central Florida. “It’s very, very calculatingly done, and they’ve done it very well.”
Brooks enlists Crepeau and other cultural critics to look at the benefits and possible pitfalls of being “everywhere.” While Obama has been able to reach non-traditional voters by appearing in places like a billboard within popular video games (the image above is from Burnout Paradise on Xbox 360), the McCain campaign uses the opportunity to claim, once again, that he is more “style than substance.”
Bitch magazine has been providing readers a “feminist response to popular culture” for the past 13 years. In a sea of mediocre media, Bitch consistently and forcefully rises above the fray. Just take a look at the diversity of topics covered — and voices included — in the past 41 issues.
Now Bitch needs all the help it can get to continue publishing smart feminist analysis and media criticism.
This is not a good time for independent media, as Andi and Debbie make clear in their funny and poignant video. Take a look, and then click here to give what you can, or visit Bitch’s donate section for more info on the sustainer program, hosting a house party and other actions.
I heard Chuck Todd report on Meet the Press today that insiders in both campaigns acknowledge that a major factor in Wisconsin and Michigan is an unspoken (and un-pollable) racism from white rural voters — “the Bubba vote.” Todd says that the Obama campaign has a “magic number”: They need to go into election day with a 58 percent majority in the polling in those states, because they are going to lose seven percent of voters who will tell pollsters they are for Obama but who instead will vote their racial fears when they complete the ballot.
What Todd didn’t mention is that this racism isn’t simply a result of a backwards segment of the population; it is being actively fomented by the Republican party and their surrogates. And I’m not talking about intimidating African American voters and others in places like Michigan, where they are threatening to challenge all voters who have received a foreclosure notice on their home (a legally questionable and certainly “mean-spirited” tactic).
No, I’m talking about the distribution of “Obama Waffles” at the Values Voters Summit. It featured a variety of racist portrayals of Obama. While the image on the front recalls classic racist stereotypes, the image of Obama on the top shows him wearing an Arab-like headdress. The image on the back depicts Obama wearing a Mexican sombrero. Joan Lowy of the AP writes:
The box was meant as political satire, said Mark Whitlock and Bob DeMoss, two writers from Franklin, Tenn., who created the mix. They sold it for $10 a box from a rented booth at the summit sponsored by the lobbying arm of the Family Research Council. [...]
While Obama Waffles takes aim at Obama’s politics by poking fun at his public remarks and positions on issues, it also plays off the old image of the pancake-mix icon Aunt Jemima, which has been widely criticized as a demeaning stereotype. Obama is portrayed with popping eyes and big, thick lips as he stares at a plate of waffles and smiles broadly.
Placing Obama in Arab-like headdress recalls the false rumor that he is a follower of Islam, though he is actually a Christian.
On the back of the box, Obama is depicted in stereotypical Mexican dress, including a sombrero, above a recipe for “Open Border Fiesta Waffles” that says it can serve “4 or more illegal aliens.” The recipe includes a tip: “While waiting for these zesty treats to invade your home, why not learn a foreign language?”
If you want to see how a caricature can legitimately use humor and make a political point, I would suggest Steven Brodner’s illustration of Sarah Palin in a recent New Yorker. BagNews Notes, as usual, has the insightful and convincing analysis:
Palin [...] is a reality show. Sixteen days out, her visage continues to permeate the media sphere, as the electricity — primed by biographical fairy tales tightly bound to visual spin aimed at the right brain — continues to trump the reams of qualifying or damaging information that is streaming out.
The crossed arms on two screens and in the larger caricature reflects her inherent defensiveness and hostility. The fish “that big” and the hand gestures on “Bridge to Nowhere” call out the chronic double speak. The way the eyes track in relation to the angle of her head speaks to how well she knows where the camera is (while the disappearing neck telegraphs the underlying reality of “the empty suit.”)
In real life as well, one can easily sense all this, but still she rolls.
Even though many Democratic activists are calling for it, I’m not yet sure that the Obama campaign needs to meet the Republicans down in the muck. I think the alternative narrative — which keeps them on a high road — might hold the most power, if we can afford to be a little patient.
Regardless, they need to seize control of the narrative. And an image, I’ve heard, can be worth a thousand words.
CNN’s Campbell Brown on Monday interviewed a spokesman for John McCain about what experience Sarah Palin, McCain’s pick for VP, has to be commander in chief.
The interview began with a discussion of when McCain knew about the pregnancy of Palin’s 17-year-old daughter and whether Palin had thought about the ramifications of putting her daughter in the spotlight. Spokesman Tucker Bounds sidestepped the questions, and the conversation transitioned — as every conversation with Republicans in St. Paul does — to Palin’s qualifications and reform-mindedness.
But this time around, an interview with a campaign spokesman quickly moved into the realm of Must See TV.
My two favorite takes so far on John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin for his running mate:
Stephen Colbert accuses nay-sayers of missing the significance of the moment: “A lot of people are saying that Sarah Palin is being used as a cheap political ploy. That is such petty cynicism. This is historic. For the first time in America, a woman has reached the highest levels of being used as a cheap political ploy.”
See his entire analysis here:
And Maureen Dowd is just happy that while reporting from the campaign trail, she can still indulge one of her “guilty pleasures”: watching “a vacuously spunky and generically sassy chick flick” — even if she already knows how this one is going to end.
In a more semi-serious analysis, Gail Collins yesterday summarized the big insult:
Over the last week, we have heard over and over and over that Tuesday was the anniversary of the day women got the right to vote. (They got it when a state representative in Tennessee, where the House was split on the ratification issue, changed his vote because his mother wrote him a letter telling him to shape up. That’s a story that I would love to get into, but, unfortunately, right now we have Sarah Palin to deal with.)
After that big moment of enfranchisement, women went through a long period in the desert where they had the vote but not much else. Then came the great revolutions of the 1970s, when all the assumptions about the natural divisions between the sexes were challenged. During that era, women could be excited and moved by symbolic candidacies that promised a better, more inclusive future, like Shirley Chisholm’s presidential race and Geraldine Ferraro’s presence on the Democratic national ticket.
This year, Hillary Clinton took things to a whole new level. She didn’t run for president as a symbol but as the best-prepared candidate in the Democratic pack. Whether you liked her or not, she convinced the nation that women could be qualified to both run the country and be commander in chief. That was an enormous breakthrough, and Palin’s nomination feels, in comparison, like a step back.
If she’s only on the ticket to try to get disaffected Clinton supporters to cross over, it’s a bad choice. Joe Biden may already be practicing his drop-dead line for the vice-presidential debate: “I know Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton is a friend of mine, and governor, you’re no Hillary Clinton.”
Of all the things about Sarah Palin, John McCain’s running mate, that bother me, her identification as a “feminist” is not one of them.
Yes, I realize she is not a feminist in any authentically enlightened sense of the term and her feminism doesn’t make conservatives flinch even a little bit.
But I’m so tired of “feminism” being a dirty word, that I don’t mind a little misappropriation. It’s just too much fun to see Pat Buchanan defending McCain’s choice on MSNBC Friday night by gleefully shouting, “But she’s a feminist!”
Melich admits that, at Friday’s announcement, “Palin was energetic, warm and reminded me of all those earnest young women we feminists have been recruiting into the women’s political movement since the early l970s.”
But she sees McCain’s choice of her as simply a political “disguise”:
McCain hopes that by picking a woman he can show he’s open to doing things differently, but his selection is window dressing and insulting to anyone who knows that he opposes equal pay for equal work legislation and opposes a woman’s right to choose. And this is just part of the list of issues of concern to women that he doesn’t champion.
It’s nice to see a major media outlet willing to call out John McCain for the lies and slimy innuendo that his campaign has become.
But the greatest insight coming out of the whole “how many houses does he own?” episode has to be from BAGnewsnotes, who puts it in the context of McCain’s POW experience.
This shot of McCain in 2000 showing the prison to his son, Jack, evokes just how much the Hanoi Hilton — where McCain dwells so often in his speeches and his anecdotes — actually does seems to resonate as a “primary residence” — those cell walls representing the last, longest home that McCain could call his own.
You might say it’s a bit of a psychological stretch, but there’s no denying that McCain often appears lost in a place only he knows.
The most pressing question in this presidential campaign has become: Why isn’t the Obama campaign (or their surrogates and sympathizers) spreading insidious rumors about John McCain to counterbalance all the junk out thereabout Obama?
Now, I subscribe to plenty of liberal/lefty e-mail lists — so I feel fairly in touch with the viral pulse out there. And I know plenty of Obama sympathizers will say that they’re working very hard at getting out the unknown stuff about John McCain.
But my response to them would be that you’re still hampered by this ridiculous need to stay in the realm of truth.
For example, Brave New Films has done a great job of exposing “The Real John McCain.” In their latest salvo, they reveal that McCain, in fact, is the true elitist. He and his wife own, among other things, ten mansions:
Unfortunately, though McCain’s elitist hypocrisy might scandalize many of us, it doesn’t come across as a threat to the American way of life. That’s because old, rich white men have always held power in this country. Strangely, it’s not news — both to the man in the street and the Man in the media.
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Like Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Buffy, Echo, Dushku’s character, is valued by others because of her stereotypical beauty. It’s an explicit part of her skill set, as the operators of the Dollhouse put it. Like Buffy, I’m confident (and I can begin to see the seeds being planted) that Whedon is planning to play off of the stereotype and assumptions — and ultimately play against them.
What Todd didn’t mention is that this racism isn’t simply a result of a backwards segment of the population; it is being actively fomented by the Republican party and their surrogates. And I’m not talking about 
If you want to see how a caricature can legitimately use humor and make a political point, I would suggest Steven Brodner’s illustration of Sarah Palin in a 
Joe Miller of Factcheck.org