Letters to the Editor
LilyRose
Published Letters: 63
-
White Female Anger--Joan Walsh
[Read the article: Will gay marriage doom the Democrats?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Joan Walsh is not a Republican (as far as I can tell), but she is going to use this blog as a Republican would, as a platform to insidiously post articles that essentially point out all that is wrong with Obama, with the hope that the drip-drip-drip of doubts she intends to sow will demolish his chances in Nov., thus paving the way for HRC to run in 2012.
What this race has shown is that
a) Being white is a position of privilege, a position so deeply ingrained (and why not, after 500 years of colonization, slavery, and genocide) that a white female's power is not something that needs to be earned; it has been assumed to always been there.
b) The 'Women's movement' is and has always been about white women and white men, i.e., a white thing, and the movement's holier-than-thou attitude comes saturated with the "White Woman Burden," used by many, like missionaries in the 18th and 19th century to civilize the barbarians.
c) The non-white people's problems are of their own making: they are arrogant, presumptive, cannot wait their turn, and ultimately incapable of understanding the large concepts like democracy, literature, winning or gun powder (which is true--the Arabs and Persians and Central Asians brought trade to South Asia; the Portuguese, Dutch, and British men and WOMEN brought guns and religion and high culture, like forks and corsets.
d) What someone like Joan Walsh will never understand is that Obama's supposed weaknesses--white 'hard-working' men and women; white women, gay rights and religious right, etc.--are NOT OBAMA'S WEAKNESSES, they are the weaknesses of a nation that has failed to deal with its racist past and its imperial present.
Instead of putting the burden on all of us to at least address uncomfortable realities of the hearts of darkness within us, Joan Walsh is asking the designated barbarian, if you will, to prove his worth to the Kurtzs (and Marlows).
It is a perverse approach to race relations--but not a unique approach; it is one handed down over centuries.
HERE'S THE DEAL:
Obama was always a long shot. ALWAYS. And he will always be a long shot in a nation that does not stop to consider the Iraqi casualties and is only now wanting out of the war because paying 4.00 for gas is just too much of a consequence, that supports one of the worst occupiers of moderns times-Israel, that has never addressed--really addressed--its treatment of the 'Other.' In the cultural studies world of Stuart Hall, Franz Fanon, or Edward Said, the very fact that Obama is even here, NOW, is astonishing.
SO, Joan, roll out all the quiet posts highlighting all that is wrong about Obama. But you are not the first to be doing this--the narrative has been around for a very long time. Some of us are just trying to rewrite it, somehow, and even if we fail, it will not be because of Obama; it will be because of all of us.
-
A message to hillbillies (and to Joan Walsh's surrogate, Dee Davis)
[Read the article: Why don't those hillbillies like Obama?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]DEMOCRACY IS A PRIVILEGE!
Instead of letting itself be ruled by media manipulations and soundbites (Rev. Wright, "bitter"/guns dialectic), rural America--which voted for Bush-Cheney TWICE--might want to educate itself.
Rural America's inclination to vote for warmongering neo-cons who pander to religion and guns and mediocrity is not so much Obama's problem as it is the existential problem of American identity.
In a time and era when alternative information is so readily available, the richest and the 3rd most wired nation in the world (after Japan and S. Korea) should not shift the responsibility for informed decision-making (a vote) from the voters to the candidate.
Hillbillies are welcome to forgo shoes and to marry their siblings, but to base their votes on misinformation, race-baiting sound bites, and manipulations is absolutely unforgivable. Appalachia is NOT in the remote mountains of Afghanistan; it is in the heart of the United States. Dee et al: Play your banjo, but also pick up a book or read news from an outlet other than MSM; that is, be informed. If rural America votes en mass for McCain, then it reveal more about the myth that is our standing as a super power.
-
What is "little kids"?
[Read the article: Little girls gone wild]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The sexualization of little girls is not something new at all. Girls in most countries around the world are married off by the time they hit puberty, and most give birth by the time they are 13. Youth, especially youth in girls, has always been exalted. It is only in the past 100 years--and only in very select countries--that we even have a separate identity for young children and grown-ups. In capitalist societies, the sexualization has simply shifted from the goal of marriage and family to the consumption of sexualization (i.e., making money selling it). Also, white (Western) feminists' idea that being more male in their sexual appetite will make them more equal to their counterparts has exacerbated the problem because girls just do not know where natural desire starts and manufactured desire ends.
By the way, can people PLEASE stop using Lolita as a synonym for sexualized girls? Has anyone--including the author--actually read Nabokov's book? There is literal sexualization (parents and children colluding to buy and wear sex-worker clothes) and the sexualization of a girl through the mind of a pedo bent on raping (the novel).