Thanks. I meant no harm.

:) Great post, I had misjudged your intentions.

Eesh I'm trying hard to write clearly here but I keep coming off like some jerk in your estimation. My point is that the SKILLSET needed to run a country is damn rare and needs training and experience as well as native smarts.

I'm no 17th century French nobleman (shocking, I know), so no, I do not believe that the rich are born w/ the needed skills to govern. The ability to govern must be learned. Do the rich have more access to the institutions and groups that can provide them w/ these skills? Absolutely yes, you are correct. Is it a shame that the poor have an outrageously harder time of acquiring access to the institutions and groups that provide the skills needed to govern? Absolutely yes, you are correct. It is wasteful, stupid and shameful of our country and the world at large to keep most of the human population from achieving their potential and thus an opportunity to improve their station and perhaps the world about them - and that problem should be fixed.

That said - we have to govern today, right now, so we have to choose a qualified candidate. Or out of a limited pool - the most qualified candidate.

But again, SKILLSET. If you need a root canal do you go to a trained, licensed dentist or do you go to your kind-hearted, moral and sweet poor neighbor, who works damn hard for $8 an hr on some factory floor? Dentist, right? My seeing a dentist doesn't mean I think factory workers and single moms and recent immigrants and bisexuals or what have you are worthless and stupid. I need a dentist. Maybe your factory worker neighbor always wanted to be a dentist, cool, we should help her out, but for now, I'm going w/ the trained dentist.

Does my belief that the best person to fix my teeth is a dentist so fill you w/ rage that you're going to your local dry-cleaner for that toothache you've got?

"Admit that you are being reactionary out of anger so you can deal with your anger in a sane manner and get back to the business of seeing reality - not your twisted bizarro version, but the real reality."

What, you think your version of reality is more real than mine? Interesting, you do know that's what delusional people often insist?

Aside from that, I'm glad you are a lower class woman putting your voice out there. I don't agree with you even an inch :) but glad you're here just the same.

Even though I also don't agree with Hyblaean, I think you're going a bit too far here with your interpretation of her choice. You can make the same points to her without sounding so judgmental--something like "Democrats are more likely to accept you and your partner's right to a marriage than Republicans, male or female. Obama might help you more than Palin." Hyblaean has always supported left-wing ideas and candidates; there is no need to offend her in order to disagree with her.

Now, on condemning Palin--I do condemn her. I agree with your comparison: Mussolini was a dictator and should be opposed despite the fact that he made the trains run on time. I just wanted to mention the reverse point--trains running on time is not bad just because Mussolini was in favor of that. If Ms. Palin makes mainstream feminism do some thinking about foundational issues, that will be good (I see this happening in Ms. Traister last article on her problems with Ms. Palin). That most certainly does not mean I want to support Ms. Palin as the kind of woman I'd like to see in power--no, not at all.

As for Paglia... I can see the reason for criticism. I agree with John Updike's comment on Paglia's style--"just one short declarative sentence after another"--being sometimes tiresome. And her insistence of essentialist themes--women are "chthonian", and men have to "fight" for "independence" from this chthonian matrix before they can rise to something, etc. look to me sometimes like metaphors and analogies gone wild and bad. But... I will defend many of her points concerning the history of feminism, the deleterious effect of post-modernism and deconstructionism on culture, and also the way feminism--or better, some more radical schools of thought--seemed to downplay men, as if this was logically necessary for the advancement of women. (The example that first comes to my mind is the cliché about 'dead white males'--which I always found disrespectful. Maybe the idea was trying to advance other viewpoints, those of non-white, non-male groups; but the message often seemed to be: ignore the 'dead white males'--as if there hadn't been wonderfully interesting people among them with great contributions to social progress.)

I won't defend all of Paglia--but I will say she seems to me to have consistent viewpoints. She's not simply trying to antagonize whoever is in power in the feminist world: she actually comes from an artistic-literary tradition that values the cannon and is fascinated with archetypes as represented in high and low culture. Her apparent support of Ms. Palin (and I stress 'apparent', because she did make it clear she doesn't agree with Ms. Palin's political opinions) has more to do with how Ms. Palin fits some of these historical archetypes--let's say the one of Diana/Artemis, the Hunter Goddess (the same whose temple was the first reason for Frazer to write The Golden Bough, another work which enormously influenced Paglia)--and therefore also Paglia's whole vision of Western culture.

Knecht, I will stress again that I don't disagree with you: feminism--or egalitarianism or humanism--is not simply about putting more women in positions of power. But since you mention class as an important factor--I don't think that poor women are less likely to be 'formal feminists' than rich women. Many poor women come from traditional situations which do stress e.g. religiosity, commitment to traditional families, etc. And precisely poorer women can identify with Ms. Palin as 'their kind of woman'--a mother of 5 who also works and somehow manages to do everything that is necessary, a female jack-of-all-trades. In fact, I'll go as far as saying that women from more privileged classes are more likely to dislike Ms Palin as an arrivist and opportunist than less privileged women. (AKA Smith, I think, had a post in the letter thread to Ms. Traister article about a conversation with one such less privileged woman who is now going to vote for McCain.)

Hm, this post is already getting too long, besides being the second. I was going to start another paragraph on how class actually suggests another parallel to this situation: communists being surprised when workers apparently took the side of their "exploiters" via trade-unionism (so that they, the communists, had to rationalize this by saying the workers suffered from 'false consciousness' and were being 'bought with high salaries')--but I'd better not. This is too long already. :-)