Letters to the Editor

• "fFull of sound and fury, signifying nothing..."

  [Read the article: The race vs. gender war]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  The American media may be able to hoodwink Americans into believing that the struggle for the Democrat nomination is a race v. gender war but, from where I'm sitting the first casualty of this war - as in all wars - is the truth. I have a number of questions and I would appreciate an honest answer. If I receive verbal abuse for asking questions which should have arisen in this corrosive situation, I'll paraphrase the words of Oscar Wilde and describe "ad feminam" (in this case) ranting as "the last refuge of the scoundrel".

  Q1 Why is Barack Obama being associated with slavery? According to what I have read in a non-partisan press (not American), his father was born in Kenya and went to the U.S. on a scholarship. I have not read that African-born Barack Obama senior was involved in any Civil Rights activities while studying in the U.S. He returned to Kenya and eventually died there. It is certainly an imaginative leap to connect that man with the tribulations of black people in the United States. If it is all about skin colour, why don't Americans just come out and say so without all this pretence!

  Q2 If it is a gender-fuelled conflict, why has Senator Obama's mother been quite deliberately left out of the story? It was she, Ann Dunham, wo gave birth to him and it was from her that he derived his American citizenship. Genealogists are claiming that she was of Scots-Irish descent. Is that an embarrassment?

  Q3 I thought the execrable Jim Crow laws (the "one drop" etc.) were long gone in America but manipulative people seem intent on reviving them, although Barack Obama is clearly not "black".

  Are you all still living in the world of "Gone with the Wind" or in a Frank Yerby novel?

  Q4 The gender-fuelled premise seems very shaky when you consider that Greek-born, Arianna Huffington of "The Huffington Post" doesn't even bother to conceal her hostility to Hillary Clinton. Arianna studied at Oxford and was a minor celebrity in the U.K. before moving to America so that she is not unknown in this part of the world. The scorpion stings of Maureen Dowd and Camille Paglia have been highly personalised, with caustic comments from Dowd on HRC's appearance and loathsome ruminations from Paglia on the Clintons' marriage.

  My own conclusions are that your media is out of control and incompatible with any higher concepts of democracy. Why should that concern me? Well, your PC dogma has now spread to Western society and the Clinton/Obama bun-fight has starkly revealed what a sham it is. It is no more than another form of censorship where people are afraid to speak in an unapproved manner. There are so many permutations of the "dumbing down" of education and other important spheres of life that I need not go into them. Even more pernicious, is the BIG LIE told by your government about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Your media aided and abetted that lie which did not just affect American lives(the only ones that matter to Americans!) but so many people from the elderly to tiny babies right across the world. Now you are facing into an election which seems to consist of nothing but slogans, feigned indignation, cries of victimisation from all sides while an "incident" in the Persian Gulf last week almost propelled you into a military/naval stand-off with Iran. But this time it could be nuclear.

  I do not agree with Gary Kamiya. In my opinion, you have too many puffed-up pundits in your media who aren't good for much except stirring the pot. As your economy spirals downwards, you should know that programs such as Women's Studies are less likely to help you out of your troubles than advances in a whole range of subjects needed to face the challenges of this new century. I'm a woman and read not on the basis of the author's gender but whether a book might be entertaining, thought-provoking and so on. Long before the Feminist Movement, there was a saying "The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world".

  Permalink Tuesday, January 15, 2008 10:48 AM