Gay N Gay: katha pollitt

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Premature Exaltation

I don't feel much like writing tonight, or doing anything much tonight for that matter, probably because I have too much I need to do.But anyway, President Obama apparently delivered a campaign speech the other day that has his fans all aflutter. Steve Kornacki was so worked up that he posted two pieces on Salon, Monday's "What a president with a strong hand sounds like," and today's "The

Premature Exaltation

How Are the Pollitt Fallen

Oh, dear; this is very sad. And painful to watch.

Katha Pollitt's latest column in The Nation is one more painful exhibit of the damage that the Obama administration, following hard on eight years of Bush-Cheney, has done to liberal brain cells. Could it get much worse? I fear it will.

During the Clinton years, Pollitt delivered a series of attacks on the man's policies, especially where women's issues were concerned, while most mainstream feminists were still fawning on him, hoping for access, invitations to the White House, recognition and respect. (A lot of those columns can be found in Subject to Debate [The Modern Library, 2001].) Not all were fooled -- I still treasure this ringing denunciation of Clinton and Gore and Leiberman by Barbara Ehrenreich, for example -- but Pollitt was one of those who most steadfastly resisted the Clinton allure.

Still, Pollitt was one who took Bush's accession really hard; I remember how dispirited, even despairing, her columns from early 2001 were. She recovered, though, and was doing all right until Barack Obama came along, causing an embarrassing relapse as she tried to persuade herself and others that this guy was different, and that "An Obama victory could have big positive repercussions for progressive politics." (Ehrenreich also fell for the Obama shuck.) Pollitt even sank to dissing Cindy McCain's looks, a sexist move she'd properly have savaged anyone else for doing. She rallied briefly, criticizing Obama's support for "faith-based" initiatives, which suggests that anti-religion had come to trump even feminism for her. But before long she was flailing desperately away at a Naomi Klein column that once would have been easy meat for her, trying to defend Obama but bereft of anything to defend him with. Except Hilda Solis, who's looking lonelier and lonelier these days in that hornet's nest of DLCers we call the White House.

But today, ah, today, she declared her support for the Senate "health reform" bill in terms of political and even moral exhaustion. We feminists caved in and let you Democrats turn the bill into "a major blow against abortion rights." So don't accuse us of political purity! (That's what Pollitt accuses others of, we who sit in our cabins on Mount Disdain and sneer cruelly at the true believers.) We are team players! It's those Republicans who are the purists! And they don't play fair! So now, "The way I see it, the Democratic Party and the Obama administration owe supporters of women's rights a huge payback for cooperating on its signature issue." She provides a wish list. Item: "Full funding for Title X. ..." Item: "Full speed ahead on the Paycheck Fairness Act. ..." Item: "Confront maternal mortality. ..." Item: Ratify "the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women." Item: "Fully fund the Violence Against Women Act ..." Finally, she gets so het up she lets loose a dainty semi-expletive: "Speaking of violence against women, Dems, would you look in the effing mirror?" Whoa there, little lady! Don't let your emotions get the better of you. Better sit down. Would you like a glass of water?

I am not saying this to derogate Pollitt's concerns; I agree with her priorities and demands completely. I'm simply unable to believe that she thinks anyone in the Democrat Party is going to listen to her. This is not the first time that writers at The Nation have issued fatwas to the Democrats, or to Obama himself (Pollitt signed her name to that one too, as did Ehrenreich). You can see how much they've achieved. They don't seem to have noticed that not only is the rest of the left laughing at them, so are the Democrats and particularly the White House.

It's not for me to say what Pollitt should do. This is not an open letter from a formerly devoted reader, begging her to listen to the voices of the people who lifted her to an editorship at The Nation and urging her to return to the core values that made her one of the reasons I kept my subscription going longer than I should have. Nor is it a long-distance poultice, telling her that I feel her pain. I really don't know what it is, except maybe my own cry of pain at seeing a very intelligent woman stuck in an abusive relationship with a rotten politician. Only she can extricate herself from it, though.

How Are the Pollitt Fallen

But Mom! All the Other Kids Are Going to School in Thongs!

Katha Pollitt has a good column at The Nation about the supposed Second Wave / Third Wave rift in feminism, between the supposedly sexless hippie chicks of the Second Wave and their supposedly riot grrls-gone-wild Third Wave daughters.

This division only holds up in a few cases, if at all, like Katie Roiphe and her mother Anne. In general, as Pollitt says,

it's chronologically off. If second wavers are those who made the women's liberation movement in the late 1960s and '70s, they are not the mothers of today's young feminists but their grandmothers. ... The wave construct obscures the perspective of women ten or even twenty years younger, like, um, me--in 1966, when NOW was founded, I was a junior in high school--or Susan Faludi (b. 1959), bell hooks (b. 1952) or Anna Quindlen (b. 1952).
The same thing happens at the other end. "Third wave" was indeed intended to define a new generation--it was coined by Rebecca Walker, Alice Walker's daughter--in 1992. The original third wavers, with their reclaiming of "girl culture" and their commitment to the intersectionality of race, class and gender are now touching 40; they hung up their Hello Kitty backpacks some time ago. Many, like Walker, have children: they are the mothers who, today's "young feminists" complain, use up all the air in the room, according to Nation writer Nona Willis Aronowitz. But the term continues to be used to describe each latest crop of feminists--loosely defined as any female with more political awareness than a Bratz doll--and to portray them in terms of their rejection of second wavers, who are supposedly starchy and censorious. Like moms. Somebody's mom, anyway.

Good stuff, and worth reading in its entirety. It reminded me, first, of similar confusion I've encountered about the gay movement. "Back in your generation, they were all activists!" some younger gays have told me. Not by a hell of a sight, unfortunately. I suppose it's not surprising that people believe such things, since by definition the people who turn up in old video clips about Gay Liberation were activists; and those who don't, though not all were closeted, are invisible. But the movement was the tip of the iceberg of queers in America, and I think that's still true, though probably the gay marriage issue has gotten more of us involved than ever before.

Pollitt's remarks also reminded me of this bit from a 1979 article by Joanna Russ, which I think supplements Pollitt's arguments nicely. It's this dynamic that the media try to exploit with the Second Wave / Third Wave trope:

Every women’s studies teacher, for example, knows the female student who comes into her office and announces defiantly that she’s going to get married – the world is still full of girls who think that heterosexual alliances with men represent a form of rebellion against sexless Mommy. How do these young women imagine their mothers ended up where they were? Yet the hope persists that heterosexual activity (a little wilder than stuffy Mom’s) will provide access to the men’s freer, wider world. Mother’s function as the forewoman who polices Daughter’s sexuality, in many American families, gives some color to this notion – that an alliance with men is an alliance against Mother – and yet these girls must have at least the suspicion that Mom made the same bargain. And surely they know that heterosexual alliance can’t confer membership in the men’s world but only a place (Mother’s place, in fact) on the sidelines. But they don’t. And so they end up married, leading the same life as Mother, or – if unlucky – a worse one with less bargaining power. And their daughters repeat the process.

(From her review of Dorothy Dinnerstein's The Mermaid and the Minotaur, reprinted in The Country You Have Never Seen [University of Liverpool Press, 2007], page 162.)

But Mom! All the Other Kids Are Going to School in Thongs!

Katha Pollitt has a good column at The Nation about the supposed Second Wave / Third Wave rift in feminism, between the supposedly sexless hippie chicks of the Second Wave and their supposedly riot grrls-gone-wild Third Wave daughters.This division only holds up in a few cases, if at all, like Katie Roiphe and her mother Anne. In general, as Pollitt says,it's chronologically off. If second

But Mom! All the Other Kids Are Going to School in Thongs!

Katha Pollitt has a good column at The Nation about the supposed Second Wave / Third Wave rift in feminism, between the supposedly sexless hippie chicks of the Second Wave and their supposedly riot grrls-gone-wild Third Wave daughters.This division only holds up in a few cases, if at all, like Katie Roiphe and her mother Anne. In general, as Pollitt says,it's chronologically off. If second

Hope-alicious

Naomi Klein's column in the latest Nation, "A Lexicon of Disappointment," indicates that satire isn't one of her strengths. As the title suggests, it's basically a list of terms based on the root of "hope": hopeover, hopesick, etc. Not one of her better efforts.

To add to the fun, Klein's piece gave Katha Pollitt an opening for a blog post in defense / support of her guy. "All is not well in Obamafanland," Klein wrote. A "growing number of Obama enthusiasts are starting to entertain the possibility that their man is not, in fact, going to save the world if we all just hope really hard." I think Pollitt strategically misread Klein:

I have a lot of respect for Naomi Klein, but I think her own hopes for a mass radical movement are getting in the way here. According to polls, after all, Obama is wildly popular. A Harris Interactive poll released on April 7 found that 68% of Americans have a good opinion of him. That doesn't necessarily mean they approve of everything he's doing, but it means that a heck of a lot of people who didn't vote for him like him now. Is there any evidence that "a growing number of Obama enthusiasts are starting to entertain the possibility that their man is not, in fact, going to save the world if we all just hope really hard"? And by the way, did anyone over the age of 21 ever really believe this? That hope, an emotion, was going to "save the world," the way children clapping their hands saves Tinkerbell? Are Americans really such idiots? Hmmm, better not answer that.

It seems Pollitt realizes she wrote herself into a corner here. Did anyone over the age of 21 believe that faith in Obama would save the world? Well, yeah, though I'll concede that that belief seems to have been concentrated among the younger voters, the ones who got their first taste of electoral politics working for Barack. Like the student I quoted here, who said "For me, I think it's the idea of change ...", though maybe she doesn't actually expect real change to happen. Or the people in this video with their wishlists that Santa Obama was supposed to consult when he filled their stockings. Or the student who, confronted with Obama's actual positions during the campaign, told me that that he needed to have hope, and if he couldn’t have faith in Obama he might as well not vote at all.

Naomi and I must talk to different people. For example, I don't know anyone as stupid as the hopefiendish "Joe" who "actually believes Obama deliberately brought in Summers so that he would blow the bailout, and then Obama would have the excuse he needs to do what he really wants: nationalize the banks and turn them into credit unions." Think what you're saying, Joe! Had Obama intentionally put in someone he knew would fail, he would not only be a clairvoyant and a psychopath-- callously indifferent to the ruin of possibly millions of people-- he'd also be risking political suicide. Because had he first chosen a course he knew would fail he would not have the political capital to "what he really wants."

One commenter, beingalam at 04/20/2009 @ 8:18pm, responded neatly:

Note that hypothetical "Joe"'s reasoning is really not all that different from the "Obama is appointing establishment moderates to cabinet positions so that he can, under cover of establishment authority, really pursue an aggressively progressive agenda" line that was pushed by many liberal commentators when Obama was announcing his cabinet nominees. So I'm not sure that Klein is really all that off in terms of the characterization of Joe.

I agree, although "moderates" doesn't really describe Geithner, Summers, Gates, or Clinton. Maybe Klein's rather hamhanded attempt at satire failed to register on Pollitt's irony meter, or maybe being an Obama supporter has turned her irony meter off. She went on to finger the real culprits:

The only people I've found who've given up on him, who feel betrayed, misled, and foolish, are those leftists who didn't like him in the first place and voted for him in a weak moment as the lesser evil. They, predictably, went back to their cabins on Mt. Disdain before Obama had even been inaugurated.

This may be true among the people Pollitt knows, but it isn't always true. I voted for Obama as the lesser evil, but I don't feel betrayed, misled, or foolish; I knew exactly what I was voting for, but did so anyway so that Obama fans couldn't attack me as a Republican or a vote-waster when I criticized him. (And maybe we were right about Obama to begin with, unlike so many Obama fans?) Perhaps Pollitt is thinking of someone like Glenn Greenwald, who's become increasingly critical of Obama's embrace of Bush administration rationales for executive secrecy and arrogation of powers:

It is becoming increasingly difficult for honest Obama supporters to dismiss away or even minimize these criticisms and, especially, to malign the motives of critics. After all, the Obama DOJ's embrace of many (though by no means all) of the most radical and extremist Bush/Cheney positions -- and the contradictions between Obama's campaign claims and his actions as President -- are now so glaring and severe that the harshest denunciations of Obama's actions are coming from those who, during the Bush years, were held up by liberals and by Obama supporters as the most trustworthy and praiseworthy authorities on these matters.

As examples, Greenwald goes on to list the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Keith Olbermann, Senator Russ Feingold, Nancy Pelosi, and libblogger Digby, among others. No doubt Pollitt will manage to malign their motives; but maybe she just needs to get out more.

Pollitt protests:

Like everyone, I'm worried about the bailout, Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm appalled that he envisions no prosecution of those who set up the legal framework of torture and those who carried it out. And what about Bagram? On the plus side: he's been terrific on women's rights and reproductive rights here and abroad, made some excellent appointments (Hilda Solis at Labor), reached out to the Muslim world, opened communications with Cuba and Iran, said he'll close Guantanamo, declared an end to torture, and, with the stimulus, successfully challenged the notion that government spending (except on the military) is bad. He's made it less embarrassing to be an American. I think he'll make good judicial appointments. If another Katrina happened tomorrow, I think he'd handle it well.

I couldn't help noticing that the only "excellent appointment" Pollitt could name was Hilda Solis, who was indeed an excellent choice, but who stands out like a sore thumb in his Cabinet among the Bush holdovers and Democratic Leadership Council hacks. And it appears that Obama's support for labor ends with having appointed Solis; he seems to have lost interest in the Employee Free Choice Act, for example. Yes, Obama has done well on women's rights and reproductive rights here and abroad, though I think "terrific" is a slight overstatement. But Pollitt's other points aren't terribly convincing: they are mostly symbolic gestures ("said he'll close Guantanamo"and "declared an end to torture" while leaving other torture sites intact; "reached out to the Muslim world" while continuing to kill Muslim civilians; his openings to Cuba and Iran have been half-hearted at best, still laden with his predecessors' propaganda. As Mike Whitney wrote at Counterpunch yesterday:

Foreign leaders are clearly relieved to see the last of George W. Bush, and they appear to be willing to give Obama every opportunity to mend fences and break with the past. But Obama has made little effort to reciprocate or show that he's serious about real change. The emphasis seems to be more on public relations than policy; more on glitzy photo ops, grandiose speeches and gadding about from one capital to another, than ending the chronic US meddling and militarism. Where's the beef or is it all just empty posturing?

Dude! Barack totally shook hands with Hugo Chávez! Is that change, or what? ... "Less embarrassing to be an American" is still embarrassing. I remember the early 90s, when Pollitt lay into liberals who were excited by Bill Clinton's every burp; but if she was a Clinton partisan, she managed to hide it better then. Pointing to Obama's great poll numbers, fixating on the single token liberal in his cabinet, celebrating his symbolic send-a-message reach-out-and-touch-someone gestures -- these are not strong responses to Klein, especially granting how easy Klein made it for her.

Last summer Pollitt wrote hopefully, "An Obama victory could have big positive repercussions for progressive politics." Now she's reduced to insisting that he was the lesser evil, and scolding those on the left who aren't satisfied by him: "FDR didn't satisfy the left either," she sniffs. Be glad for what you have, Glenn and Digby and Russ and Noam! Surely, comrades, you do not want Bush back?

Hope-alicious

Cooperation, Not Obedience

I hadn’t planned to read Nicholson Baker’s new book , Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, but I’m beginning to think I should. Reviewing Human Smoke in the New York Times, Colm Toibin called it “a serious and conscientious contribution to the debate about pacifism. He has produced an eloquent and passionate assault on the idea that the deliberate targeting of

Cooperation, Not Obedience

Katha Comes A Cropper

Oh, dear. I knew that liberal/progressive Democrats’ heads would explode when Nader declared his candidacy once again. I shouldn’t have been surprised when declared Obama partisan Katha Pollitt splattered her brains all over the page in the latest issue of The Nation, but still, it doesn’t make me feel any better to know that I could have predicted it. Ralph Nader has a perfect right to

Katha Comes A Cropper

Things Have Come To A Pretty Pass When Feminism Is Allowed To Invade The Sphere Of Private Life

I haven’t been able to get validated to post comments at TPM Cafe, where there was a discussion going on about Learning to Drive, Katha Pollitt’s new book of autobiographical essays. But that’s okay -- I have my own little soapbox here. I’ve been reading Pollitt’s essays in The Nation for decades now, and I own all three collections, plus a copy of her book of poems, Antarctic Traveller, that

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