9/18/08

When The 1585 started, it was going to be the political website that wrote about ideas instead of people.  The one that got all smart about the philosophy behind the Culture War, instead of simply dogging after every new tidbit in the he-said-she-said of one scandal after another.

Every once in a while, though, writing about a specific person can’t be helped, because the person is the issue.  Sure, you can try to wink-and-nod it with no names, but you end up sounding like a British tabloid journalist trying to get around some weird law.

And so, after three weeks of deliberation, I say:  Fine.  

Congratulations, Sarah Palin.  You are the first specific politician that 1585 has written an entire essay about, and only the second specific person.  (The first?  Paris Hilton.)

Deep down, I guess I always knew I would have to write a Palin essay — but I didn’t want to do so right away. The 1585 has always been more interested in coming up with the last word on something than the first.  And aside from pointing out that Palin was a pandering stunt necessary to shake up a race that McCain was definitely going to lose (remember him? the guy ostensibly at the top of the GOP ticket?) and/or photoshopping funny jpegs about her pregnant kid, there wasn’t a whole lot to say early on — at least not that everyone else on the ol’ series-of-tubes wasn’t already saying.  As we see it, here’s where we’re joining the game:

Phase One:  Palin gets the nod.  The left shits its pants when they see McCain has picked a woman and tries to blitz, painting her as comically underqualified, borderline-retarded, and “obviously” the biggest joke/blunder in running-mate history, and trying to make everything that looked even remotely like a possible scandal stick at once.  It didn’t work, but hell, it’s the play I would have called.

Phase Two:  As always happens when we try to lead by talking about how stupid someone is, Palin benefits from both low expectations and sympathy, making nation jizz itself with surprise and relief upon learning she can put a sentence together.

Phase Three:  The right charges through that opening, painting all the initial attacks as simple sexism and/or regionalism.  The media go along with this in order to sell more magazines to imbeciles for a week or so, but then the right gets cocky and gives Palin a wider tether, blowing her minivan-mom cover and revealing her to be an extremist street-brawler.

Phase Four:  Once  a) more info comes out about what Palin actually believes,  b) she bites the bag and steps out the door in her debutante ball with Charlie Gibson, and  c) people start remembering what happened the last time the left tried to warn them that someone was an idiot and they didn’t listen, all the initial concerns finally start to look fair, and the Palin bounce bounces out.  The Repubs are currently letting Palin play Nixon-style enforcer to free up McCain to Be Like Ike, and praying that  a) McCain stops sucking at Being Like Ike, and  b) a buttload of women who do not pay attention to anything at all ever wake up on Election Day and go “Hey, look, it’s a woman!”

We realize that, over the last three weeks, many of you may have been expecting a Palin essay from me.  Those of you who are familiar with the sort of thing I normally write about may have been expecting one so much that, when one didn’t appear, you thought something had happened to me and were worried.  If so, I'm sorry.

But during that time, a strange and interesting thing happened:  I got emails from a fair number of people who assumed I liked Sarah Palin.  My reaction to this was… well, a lot like Cartman’s when people assumed he thought Family Guy was funny.

Frankly, the people who thought this of me have obviously been reading the site drunk, or just skipping around to all the parts about being sexy or something.  And they’ve ended up with a conclusion about The 1585 that rests on the fallacy of affirming the consequent:  Yes, I have argued that people shouldn’t automatically think that hot women are dumb — but that doesn’t mean you should automatically think they’re not dumb.  Yes, I have argued that women who are tough and sexy at the same time should be admired for being tough and sexy at the same time — but I never said that this outweighs all other possible concerns.  For example, if a woman who was tough and sexy at the same time put sugar in my gas tank, filled my apartment with poisonous snakes, and stabbed me a bunch of times, guess what?  I would still be pissed at her, even if she had done these things in a tough and sexy manner.

Both for her own sake, and for the extent to which she contributes to awareness that such things are possible, I am sincerely glad that Governor Palin once single-handedly won a rugby match against six grizzly bears while wearing five-inch heels and a self-tanned moosehide sports bra, and afterwards still had enough energy leftover to cook up a mess o’ flapjacks for the posse about to set off after the varmints what robbed the stagecoach, or whatever the hell she did.  Really and truly, I am.  I think this is cool, and in the absence of other concerns I would be swayed by it.  And you can give me a call just as soon as we are in the absence of other concerns, but so far we are not, and I am not holding my breath for a time when we will be.

Now, on the other hand, does the fact that I really, really want McCain/Palin to lose mean that I am going to betray core 1585 principles and start looking the other way about anti-hot-woman prejudice just because it might be advantageous to our short-term interests?  No.  The fact that hot women are not only not necessarily dumber, but frequently smarter (THOUGH, CLEARLY, NOT ALWAYS) than average, is as core a 1585 principle as any, and yes, I extend the protection of this principle even to Sarah Palin. 

But anti-hot-woman prejudice is a big part of what’s got me so pissed here, because Palin’s pick simply highlights the GOP’s hypocrisy on that front.  They pass over a bunch of Republican women who have paid way more dues to get to the pretty one, and instruct all their pocket-pundit hatchet-parrots to wax on about what a “babe” she is?  Can you fucking imagine how they would react if the Democrats did that?!  They’d call it the “Hollywood” pick and offer it up as proof that the Donkey is all about trying to get your teenage daughters to prance around half-naked and take it up the butt.*  FOX News would simply turn into a picture of the candidate with the word SLUT superimposed over it 24 hours a day in flashing red letters.

    *(Granted, I am trying to do this, but that doesn’t mean the Democratic Party is.)

But when they do it, it’s fine.  Just like how actors have no place butting into politics unless their name is John Wayne or Ronald Reagan, and neither do musicians unless they’re country musicians, in which case we should all stand up when their shitty song comes on as if it were the national fucking anthem.

Ironically, because they’re the side that hates sex, being a far-right lunatic is the only way to get away with being a “babe.”  The people who would normally be the ones making the slut jokes change their stripes, and suddenly you’re a “brassy dame” getting fawned over in Mickey-Spillane-speak.

But regardless, none of this means that Sarah Palin herself is stupid.  You should definitely not think that Sarah Palin is stupid just because she likes to rock the heels and show off the sweater-huskies and was almost Miss Alaska and used to have big ’80s hair.

…You should think she’s stupid because she fucking believes that dinosaurs and cavemen lived at the same fucking time.

Now, some Liberals who try to argue this will be accused of secretly thinking that Sarah Palin is dumb because she’s hot and constructing a surrogate argument about thinking she’s dumb for some other reason.  But you know what?  In my case, I humbly suggest to those who are familiar with my previous work that, regarding being believed when I say that I don’t think someone is stupid because they’re attractive, but do think they’re stupid because they’re a religious fundamentalist, my record bears me out.

But the simple “pretty women are dumb” stereotype isn’t the most dangerous one currently drawing its power from Palin, much as Antaeus did from the Earth.*  No, it’s the more complex one that begins by (as most pro-dumb stereotypes do) replacing the terms “dumb” and “smart” with “common-sense” and “nerdy,” and ends by asserting that pretty women with common sense are Conservatives and ugly nerdy women are Liberals.

    *(Why didn’t I just say “as Superman does from the sun,” since it would have meant the same exact thing and people would have understood it?  Because I felt like talking over people’s heads, that’s why.  Nooch.)

     
Exception.                                                                                         Rule.                                   

What?  You think it’s trivial to ride this point?  Oh, I’m sorry.  I was under the impression that Americans occasionally form political identities based on trivial things.  But now that you’ve told me this isn’t true, I’ll start talking about the Bridge to Nowhere instead, because everyone cares so much.  Thanks.

At this point, I’m starting so sound like the danger is that male voters who don’t normally sleep beneath the GOP tent will be lured in by Palin and her creamy Alaskan milkshake.  But I think we all know that this isn’t what we’re up against.  The real risk, of course, is that McCain/Palin will attract women.  But which women? 

Like a lot of you, for a while I thought Obama should have picked a woman running mate.  Not because I was scared that Hillary supporters would defect to McCain, since I think this alleged phenomenon was basically made up by GOP strategists who apparently all read The Secret and figured they could make it happen just by believing it would.  Much like Common Men in Wordsworth Poems, disgruntled Hillary defectors are people I keep hearing there are lots of without ever managing to actually meet one (the people who claim to be them in comment threads are obviously just Republican trolls pretending to be them — so remember, just like in countless other situations you find yourself in on the internet, that is not actually a woman).

No, I think the Hillary people are safe.  I mean, shitloads of the Hillary people I knew were Hillary people in the first place not just because she’s a woman, but because they knew Hillary would piss off Conservatives way more than Obama would (I myself was the last Hillary-to-Obama convert among my friends, solely for this reason), so it seems unlikely that they’ll align themselves with the Conservatives two months after their top priority was pissing them off for the sake of pissing them off.  (And admittedly, this would have been pretty sweet, but in the end Obama was just too awesome.)

The problem, I think, isn’t women who actively wanted Hillary — it’s women who passively wanted Hillary.  Women who, when it comes to politics, care very little and know even less — who tend to agree with the majority on every issue, and usually just change the subject or leave the room whenever politics comes up because they, quote, “don’t like it when people try to influence people and stuff.”  Usually, of course, the risk with these women is that they won’t vote at all.  You may remember them from 2004 (when they were allegedly going to vote for Kerry, having been instructed to by their god-queen, Jennifer Aniston) as the women you had to be physically restrained from strangling after they came up to you on November 3rd and said “Oh my Gaaaaaad, I was tooooootally going to vote, but I was going to go vote with Kristieeeeeeeee and Steeeeeeeeeph, and we were going to have bruuuuuunch first, but then Kristieeeeeeeee couldn’t make bruuuuuunch, so we didn’t vooooooooote.” 

Yes, if Hillary had gotten the nom, a lot of these women would have voted for Hillary (and then, if Hillary had won, come up to you the next day and made fun of you, acting under the assumption that you didn’t want Hillary to win because you’re a man, and then after you explained that you in fact did want Hillary to win because you’re a Democrat, and that you voted for her and even campaigned for her, not understood you and kept making fun of you anyway, probably while singing some fucking Beyoncé song).

And if Obama had picked a woman running mate, a lot of them would have voted for Obama solely for that reason.  Now, of course, the risk is that they will vote GOP because of Sarah Palin.  I don’t wish to be unfair to these women, so I have done some personal research into their thought processes on this front.  And as near as I have been able to discern through some weeks of inquiry, it is as follows, presented in its entirety:  “Oh my Gaaaaaad, Sarah Paaaaaalin!  I bet she looooooves chocolate, and haaaaaates Mondays, and is toooooooootally addicted to Greeeeeey’s, just like meeeeee, isn’t that right, Mister [name of cat]?” 

Anyway, when Obama picked Biden, I certainly wasn’t pissed or scared.  I was happy.  I like Biden.  I think he’s personable and honest, and I like that he gets pissed off about stuff that people should get pissed off about.  And I liked that every time you saw him during the convention he was flashing a crazy smile and doin’ the finger-gun thing at people.  He reminds me of the Fonz, or possibly Snoopy in those strips from the early ’80s where he put on sunglasses and became “Joe Cool.”  I think that after Obama wins, Biden should get some big shades and a skateboard and start referring to himself as “VP Joey B.”

When McCain picked Palin, of course, I was pissed — at myself.  It seemed like I hadn’t had a conversation about anything besides VP picks for the previous three months, and yet somehow, neither I nor any of my friends had managed to form the exact sentence “Obama has to pick a woman, because if he doesn’t then McCain will pick a woman and we will be in deep shit.”  

But eventually —proving that hindsight is not in fact always 20/20 — I realized what was wrong with that sentence:  it assumes that McCain still would have picked Palin, even if Obama had picked a woman first.

But I don’t think this would have been the case.  Sure, after Obama doesn’t pick a woman and then McCain does, it looks like Obama should have — but then it dawns on you (or it should) that if Obama had picked a woman, McCain would have picked not a woman but another white dude, and then run a totally different campaign, relying on the hatchet-men in the conservative media to paint the diverse Dem ticket as the special-rights-affirmative-action-P.C.-Police, in a pronounced fuck-you to the very demographic that, as it happens, he is currently courting.

I defy you to tell me I’m wrong.

Anyway, there was simply a huge disadvantage to picking first.  It was like a game of scisssors-rocks-paper where, instead of throwing your hands out at the same time, you have to throw yours out first and then the other guy gets to think about it for a week.

I’ve tried explaining this to the women who are leaning towards McCain because of Palin, but… well, they don’t really understand me.

So then I try pointing out that Palin thinks dinosaurs and cavemen lived at the same time. 

But that backfires, because it turns out that women who like Palin also think dinosaurs and cavemen lived at the same time.

Not because they’re religious, but just because they’re really stupid.

So I try explaining in a nice way that the last dinosaurs (or, to be precise, non-avian dinosaurs, since, cladistically speaking, birds are technically dinosaurs) died 62.5 million years before the appearance of anything that could even charitably be referred to as a human.

And then they ask me what I “have against birds.”  I am not sure why.

Anyway, even though the Palin bounce is dying down, we still need an anti-Palin counter to use on these women.  They tend to be low-information voters, so they won’t be aware of just how extreme Palin’s positions really are — and more importantly, they might not believe you when you tell them.  You see, some people just have a hard time believing that women can be batshit-insane arch-conservatives.  If Sarah Palin believed all the same stuff but were a man, people would be comparing her to Hitler twenty-four hours a day.  She is farther to the right than Rick Santorum, for fuck’s sake.  What’s that?  People have no trouble comparing other conservative women to Hitler — Ann Coulter, for example?  True.  But Ann Coulter is a skinny blonde.  People have no trouble believing that skinny blondes can be evil.  Think about all the major female far-right pundits who actually get called out on being fascist psychopaths — they are all skinny blondes.  Sarah Palin, on the other hand, is a curvy brunette — and not only that, but a curvy brunette who wears glasses… which means she could basically behead an abortion doctor with a samurai sword on live TV and tons of people would still think she was a centrist. 

Besides, talking about how terrible on “women’s issues” Palin is won’t even make a dent with the type of women we have to worry about here, since they’re precisely the ones who are scared to call themselves feminists.  We need an angle that will make these women dislike Palin, and it has to be as uncomplicated and knee-jerk emotional as the reasons they like her in the first place.

The solution?  We ride the polar-bear thing.  Hard.

I’m not kidding.  Get on it.  In the next few weeks I want to see the internet littered with heartbreaking lolpolarbearz.  And I think Palin had something to do with that whole shooting-wolves-from-helicopters thing, so you might want to throw in some bullet-riddled lolwolfz too.  I think we all know what type of woman is at risk of being swayed by Palin’s presence on the GOP ticket, and I think we all know that this is how to hit them where they live.  What else are we going to talk about — the fact that she tried to get her sister’s ex-husband fired?  Shit, that’ll just make them like her more.   

But even this might not be enough.  I think you know as well as I do how many women there are, even among “high-information” voters, who seriously believe that all the fucking problems of the world would instantly, magically be solved if a woman were President (which a Vice President still in her mid-40s would be in a pretty good position to eventually be).  The “do you really think we’re this dumb?” liberal blogosphere may be overly optimistic in assuming that women’s answer to the question “would you want there to be a woman president even if she disagreed with you on most issues?” is broadly “no.”  I fear it may (albeit, in many cases, secretly) very broadly be “yes.”

So why hasn’t the right put a woman on the ticket before?  As I tried to point out in college, they were waiting.  Like you would with a savings bond or a bottle of fine wine, the right was waiting for the identity-politics left to mature.  And then, once there were enough generations of people on our side who had been trained since birth to vote for a woman simply because she’s a woman (just like, you know, Gloria Steinem explicitly told us to do back in January…  Oops!  Thanks a lot, Gloria!), they would start running women themselves, thereby getting all of their own side plus about one-third of ours.

What’s that?  You say I was so obviously right about this that everyone must have heard me out fully and then thanked me profusely for helping so much, and that there’s no possible way they could have just called me a sexist and told me to shut up?

Let me tell you about a place called college.

Anyway, what this means is that trumpeting the “John McCain is old and might die” angle, like we were doing back when we thought Palin’s lack of experience was our ace, is in fact a very, very bad idea.  At least, as far as women are concerned.  As far as right-leaning men are concerned, however, it is an awesome idea.

So how do we negotiate this?  Watch carefully.

First off, to all American women over the age of eighteen, I say:  There is absolutely no chance that John McCain will die.  None.  I know he is 72 years old, but he is as strong as a fucking ox.  Two weeks ago in Scranton, Pennsylvania, he lifted a goddamn VW bug right up over his head and threw it at a helicopter.  John McCain could not die if he tried to die.  In fact, I have it on good authority that John McCain is a Highlander, and that the rumors of his bouts with cancer were created to defuse suspicion of this.  That being said…

**WOMEN, DO NOT READ THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH**

To all right-leaning males who are concerned about Sarah Palin’s lack of experience, be advised that John McCain will almost certainly die any second now.  The man is 72 years old for fuck’s sake, and the unimaginable stress of those years as a POW must have taken its toll.  John McCain sheds clouds of dust behind him as he walks.  He comically struggles to lift common office implements, in the manner of Mr. Burns.  If you get close enough to John McCain in the right light, you can actually see through him as if he were a character in a Back to the Future movie who unwittingly just caused the past versions of his own parents to have a big fight with each other.  The old bastard is obviously going to drop dead ten minutes after taking office, and then that grinning arctic succubus Sarah Palin will be the most powerful human being on the face of the earth.  You don’t want that.  Doesn’t she remind you of your friend’s mom when you were a kid who was always walking back and forth past the door of his room for no reason and being all “What are you boys up to in there?” when you weren’t even doing anything?  She totally does, right?

**WOMEN, RESUME READING HERE**

Now, if and when McCain — who, remember, is very likely immortal — loses, there is a damn good chance that Sarah Palin will end up at the top of the GOP ticket in 2012.  What other stars will they have?  This past season proved that the evangelicals are not having any of Romney and Giuliani, and as for Mike Huckabee, although he shares their values, he was apparently simply not enough of a dick for them.  For the folks who are supposedly all about the teachings and example of Jesus, it is not enough that a candidate believes what they believe — he or she has to have game when it comes to shit-talking people who don’t.  Huckabee didn’t, but Palin does, in spades.

So unless Huck gets on ’roids, the most likely scenario for a DeceptiCon ticket without Palin at the top would be for some charismatic centrist to be popular enough to absorb the hit of an evangelical boycott.  And the best chance for that happening is…  that’s right, Amend for Arnold.

Now, is all that clear?  Here’s a recap:

—Women, don’t vote for McCain/Palin, because there’s a good chance that if the woman Vice-President thing doesn’t work out for them, the GOP will run her for actual President in four years, and you’d like that even better, right?

—Guys who like McCain, you should also not vote for him, because if he loses there’s a good chance that the Constitution will get fucked with so the Republicans can run Arnold, and you’d like that even better, right?

—Internet assholes who just want something funny to happen, do everything in your power to make McCain/Palin lose, since this will lead to an Arnold vs. Palin GOP primary in 2012, which will be the funniest shit ever.

So, moving along, I…

Hold up a minute.  Is what I’m doing here okay?  I’ve spent a lot of this essay ripping on women who might be moved to vote for McCain/Palin solely on account of the whole woman thing.  But I’m a dude.  Am I really in a position to dismiss that?  After all, Camille herself (despite having made it clear that she is voting for Obama) opined last week that “Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna.”  So maybe I should try to be a little more…

Wait — Camille said what?!  Okay, fuck it, she’s just lost her mind this time.  I can only assume that Camille thinks the second-biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna was that Sandra Bullock movie where she’s a cop who goes undercover in a beauty pageant and ends up finding not only the bad guys, but… herself.

Would you like me to concede that, on some levels, with regard to certain things, any female president would help move women forward?  Fine.  Camille is, I guess, right to point out that it is myopic of certain feminists to act like a woman achieving something only helps women if the woman who achieved it is a Liberal.  I mean, Elizabeth I of England was beneficial as a feminist role model, and she fucking made it punishable by hanging for Irish people to own musical instruments — which is, you’ve gotta admit, probably more evil than anything Sarah Palin is planning on doing.  Even if all a woman president managed to do was not hide under her desk and cry when some military shit happened, she would have quashed that stupid “Can a woman be commander-in-chief?” concern*, which would be a big help.  Would this, however, be worth the very real risk of Roe v. Wade getting overturned?

    *(Or would she?  The right is the sexist half of the country, and even though it is in their interest to suspend such rhetoric while they’ve got a woman on their ticket, will that really mean it’s gone for good?  Even if Palin ends up President someday, the right will just go back to saying the most sexist shit imaginable as soon as the Democrats run a woman.  I think the fact that they still claim to be more responsible with money even after the nation just saw with its own eyes a two-term Democrat who left us with the biggest budget surplus in history succeeded by a two-term Republican who turned it into the biggest deficit in history pretty much proves that they will just fucking say whatever they want…  Why reward them for being the ones who made it so hard for a woman to rise to that level in the first place, especially if they’re just going to go back to doing so?)        

Yes, with regard to the advancement of any marginalized group, image is incalculably important.  Dynamic figures who allow the society to look at that demographic in a new way can shake things up a lot via a few iconic moments here and there.  But image is not all-important.  If someone is going to be in charge of a bunch of really important shit, there are concerns aside from their ability to do the female equivalent of looking into the camera and going “They call meeee Mistah Tibbs!”

To be honest — to be as fair as I can possibly be here, so that no-one can say that I wasn’t — I guess there’s no way I can know how women feel.  I simply have no door into the question “Would I want a member of my particular marginalized group to become president, the first one from our group and possibly the only shot I have at seeing this in my lifetime, even if this person disagreed with my deepest beliefs?”

It’s not that I don’t belong to any marginalized groups.  I’m an atheist, of course, and as most of you probably already know, atheists are in fact the most discriminated-against group in terms of who Americans would or would not support for president.  But since this is a minority of opinion, and not of birth, there sort of is no way for an atheist to not share my deepest beliefs.  I mean, my main beefs with Palin are the fact that she wants Creationism taught in schools and opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest, and these are positions that tend not to pop up among atheists.  Someone who is “like me” in that way is almost certainly “like me” in the others too.

But then, all that being as it may, this woman fucking believes that dinosaurs and cavemen lived at the same fucking time.

And John McCain (remember him?) isn’t much better.

McCain, for example, is wholly unaware that Velociraptor, as depicted in the 1993 film Jurassic Park, bore a far greater resemblance to the then-current idea of Deinonychus than to Velociraptor itself, and that, in the years since Jurassic Park, a consensus has been reached that both Velociraptor and Deinonychus were feathered — almost certainly, in the case of Deinonychus, and beyond all doubt in the case of Velociraptor, quill knobs having been found on the forearm of an especially well-preserved Mongolian specimen in September 2007.  Even less forgivably, John McCain also thinks that Dimetrodon and Edaphosaurus were dinosaurs, even though they lived during the Permian period and had synapsid openings.

McCain/Palin:  Wrong on dinosaurs.  Wrong for America.

But if McCain/Palin does end up winning on the votes of the masses of unremarkable, flatliner, politically illiterate women, there will be one silver lining, however thin:  Women will no longer be able to say that they are more mature than men.  Ever.  The idea that women are inherently more progressive, more tolerant, more concerned with or in touch with the things that really matter — that in any argument between a woman and a man about anything, “everybody knows” that the woman is the one who’s really right — will have been utterly and permanently vaporized in a conflagration of unprecedented inanity.

What will these women be able to say after they have done this?  “Whatever!  Sure we extended the reign of the most disastrous regime in American history, rewarded borderline-retarded, fascist religious lunatics with even more power, widened the gap between rich and poor wider than it has even been and perhaps irrevocably, and given our blessing to a state of apparently permanent war in the Mideast, all just because we thought the phrase ‘hockey mom’ was cute… but men are the immature ones, because they still play video games when they’re thirty?”

Sorry.  No dice.  Not this time.  So be advised, all you Cathy-clipping, baby-talking, cat-calendar-hanging, workout-tape-buying-and-then-never-using Hummel-suckers:  You can elevate the far-right zombie Sarah Palin to the vice-presidency — and yes, quite possibly subsequently to the presidency — or you can continue to be assumed to be “mature” and right about everything all the time.  You cannot have both.

But why do I bother addressing them?  These women are just about the last people in the nation who would read The 1585 (I tried putting those polar-bear jpegs on icanhascheeseburger.com, but they wouldn’t take them).  It is up to those of us who are here to disseminate these memes as effectively as we can.

And with any luck, this November 4th, Kristieeeeeeeee will have to bail on brunch again.