Hillary and Sarah

I've been thinking a lot about Hillary and Sarah and the emergence of women at the top tier of politics and how it's happened.

My first thought was, shouldn't Hillary Clinton be running for v.p. and not Sarah Palin?

Whatever your feelings about Hillary, hasn't she done the work? Put in the time? Handshake by handshake and french fry by french fry earned her 18 million votes--which is about 17.9 million votes more than Sarah's ever gotten?

Lately, when I think of Clinton, a Ray Bradbury story pops into my mind. In this story, a group of schoolchildren have grown up on the planet Venus, where it rains and rains. The sun comes out for one hour every seven years. The kids, who've never seen the sun, are excited. Especially one little girl. But she's a target for bullies. They lock her in a closet right before the sun comes out and leave her there until the rain comes out.

Is that how we treat Hilary Clinton? And if so, I wonder why. What did she do that was so wrong? Why does she have to be punished?

Was it that she dared to throw her glove into the presidential ring on her own gumption? Is Palin OK because she waited for an older white male to anoint her as second on the ticket? That she didn't make people uneasy? Is she still safely subordinate? Or has Palin lived in a way that has confounded the opposition?

I think it's about how Hillary and Sarah represent two different generations of feminism (and yes, I will call Palin a feminist). Palin's is the more successful model. And to be honest, perhaps because I'm closer in age to Palin, I'm more aligned to her paradigm.

So what are the paradigms?

The Hillary paradigm is one I've seen over and over again and it seems to be common among women of a certain age. These are women who grew up, roughly, between 1946 and 1956. I used to call it the "brown-haired girl" syndrome but it could probably better be called the "good girl" syndrome. These are the women who play by the rules, do all the right things and are careful, conscientious and goal-oriented. I remember encountering one such woman on my honeymoon, as we took a wagon ride across an elk preserve in freezing weather. When the wagon stopped for questions, this woman, her straight brown hair neatly center parted, earnestly asked question after question about the elk. The rest of us, turning to ice cubes, were shifting and glaring, but for her this was an educational mission, the rules said this was the time to ask questions, and she wanted all the facts.

My dear sister-in-law, a wonderful person, is like this. She was born in the late 1940s--I believe 1948-- and before she went out to do missionary work in Hong Kong, she planned everything with the utmost care. A retired schoolteacher, not only did she get her finances in order, she earned a master's degree in ESL and then a second master's degree in religion (she already had a master's in education) so she would be thoroughly prepared for her second career. Some of us may have rolled our eyes and said to ourselves, you really don't have to do all this, but it's the way she is. It's how I believe a mini-generation of dutiful, well-educated girls was raised. To follow the rules above else, even when you're breaking the rules. I think it's typified in Hillary having only one child. If you are going to play by the rules of the male world, you minimize your liabilities. You minimize your distractions so you can stay scrupulously focused on the straight and narrow path. You don't expect the world to bend around you. Even when you're not conforming, you conform.

Then along comes Sarah, exemplary new generation woman, busting down the walls with glee. She's not breaking the ceilings, she's reconfiguring the floorplan. While I have many differences from her, she comes out of a worldview I better understand, a world in which, as a woman, you make it up as you go along. Of course you have a bunch of kids--it's what you want and you figure it out. The world isn't about a straight trajectory into a male-paradigm career. You don't worry you'll be "derailed," because you know that as a woman you already are derailed. So you drop out to have children (why not?), then look for an opportunity to jump back in when you can. It's about finding the opportunities that wrap around your family life and not vice versa. It's about shooting through the crevices in the rules in order to construct a life on your own terms. It's about exploiting the possibilities that turn up around you rather rigidly adhering to a plan and a protocol that cover all the bases. It's postmodernism versus modernism.

So I wasn't surprised when I read that legislators in the Alaska statehouse wear "Where's Sarah?" buttons because Palin is so often absent from work to be home in Wasilla. I'm not surprised that she's seized opportunities that catapulted her forward rather than plodding along a predictable path. Sadly, as we've seen so graphically in the case of Hillary, the step-by-step method often seems to leave women bereft and betrayed.

Perhaps it's generational, the benefits of seeing the Hillary group's successes and failures, but my life has been much more like Sarah's. I had three children because that's how it happened and I worked work around it. I fell into a second career that wrapped (usually) around my family. I've been fluid about dropping in and out of the work force. I haven't played by the rules. Like Sarah, an intentional faith life, including a radical change in denomination, has been a major part of my life story.

What about you? How have you navigated career, children, life?

Japanese Buddhism: In Trouble?

An article in the July 14 New York Time discussed the possibility that Buddhism might be dying out in Japan.

Some of the reasons given:

-The Japanese have an eclectic view of religion. They move easily between Shintoism and Buddhism and aspects of Christianity. The implication is that they are not wedded to Buddhism.

-Buddhism has more or less lost relevance to everyday lives in Japan.

-Buddhism suffered a blow to its credibility when it closely aligned itself with the militaristic government and policies of WWII Japan. Now its words of peace ring hollow.

-Buddhism's last stronghold was in funerals but people are increasingly avoiding the high cost of a Buddhist funeral by going to a secular funeral home or simply cremating the dead and skipping the funeral.

-Buddhism was strongest in the rural areas, where the population is fast dropping.

In universalist Quaker circles, Buddhism is more or less revered. I was told, however, by a professor Eastern religion at McDaniel College, that the Buddhism liberals love is an American cultural construct that bears little resemblance to the Buddhism practiced in most Asian countries. For example, while American Buddhism is a highly individualistic faith practice rooted in a 1960s zeitgeist, Asian Buddhism (and clearly that is a broad and varied field!) typically is based in the community, such as in ancestor worship. Asians who come to this country, he said, will often import Buddhist priests because the religious community creates good karma by serving the priests.

According to adherents.com, roughly six percent of the world population is Buddhist. It is the smallest of the four largest world religions: Christianity, Islam and Hinduism all have more than double the adherents. There are more adherents to "no religion" than to Buddhism.

What do you think can "save" Buddhism or any other religion that is losing numbers? Or to put it another way, what makes a faith strong?

Newspapers

The Washington Post ran a story today saying that the Baltimore Sun will cut another 100 jobs. Cuts on top of cuts. I was reminded of an op-ed piece that appeared in the Post recently about the Los Angeles Times: that newspaper too has been ordered to enact another series of draconian staff cuts. This is after one editor left a few years ago protesting the last round of crippling cuts.

Interestingly, according to the op/ed piece, the L.A. Times is scrutinizing reporters on the basis of their productivity. Those who have churned out the most stories will (probably) survive.

As a person who worked for seven years as a newsroom reporter (as distinguished from a freelancer) I can say for a fact that journalism suffers when the whole focus is on churning out as many stories as possible as if they were assembly-line widgets. In fact, not surprisingly, that's what they become: boring and predictable. Ultimately, they become phony stories. Not surprisingly, people stop reading the newspaper.

It should go without saying that the only way, usually, to get the real story, the more difficult and nuanced and harder-to-write story beneath the superficial story that's so simple to churn out, is to allow journalists to dig, ask questions, visit places, take some time to think. But it seems as if, even at the major papers, that time is being yanked away.

As many people have pointed out, weak newspapers are bad for democracy. Investigative reporting is the hardest and most time-consuming for journalists to do, but without it, many abuses by business and government will go on and get worse. Communities are better when newspapers can uncover the unsavory, but now can't expect to have papers with the resources to search out the problems. It will be much easier now for people with power to hoodwink harried reporters.

As we know, newspapers revenues are falling because people turn to the Internet instead of the papers. But newspapers themselves contribute to the problem by adding little value beyond what people can get scanning the Internet.

What is the answer? Obviously, government support of papers would create a conflict of interest. And apparently most of the big papers are going to radically compromise their quality. I imagine the answer will be in the Internet and in the smaller, more independent papers that won't be concerned with high profits.

I hope that in the process of making this transition, journalistic values are not too terribly compromised. One of the things I liked most about journalism were the strict rules that were meant to keep the profession honest and everyone on the same page.

Obama again

As I read his book, Dreams from my Father, I'm struck by how powerfully Barack Obama brings back the shape, the smell, the look and the feel of certain moments in time. He reminds me of what it was like to be a child in the 1960s and a college student in the late 1970s or early 1980s. To be formed in the post- New Deal, post-1960s, pre-Reagan world. He brings back the feel of those days, when people had serious discussions about socialism and feminism, and government was not considered a curse. When above all things, we didn't want to become bourgeois.

Forgotten emotions stir in me as I read Obama. I wonder if Caroline Kennedy, a great Obama supporer, doesn't feel the same stirrings. We all are of an age, a mini-generation. If Obama takes as his starting point idealized images of the civil rights movement of the early 1960s, and Caroline Kennedy starts from her idealized images of her father's presidency as a return to Camelot, wouldn't that make them likely partners?

As has been often said, Obama resonates with young people. That's clear to me, living with teens who find him "cool" and from talking to the streams of 17- and 18-years when I worked in the primary elections as an election judge.

But I wonder now if Obama doesn't have a special resonance, either for good or for ill, for people who are of his same mini-generation as him, those of us born between about 1957 and 1963, people too young to participate in the 1960s, to have friends in Viet Nam or go to Woodstock, people who spent all of the 60s as children but are old enough to remember those times.

On the other hand, my proximity in age to Obama has, I think, made me unimpressed with him.

Obama is now being taken apart for his "ambition" and "opportunism," just as Clinton was. Can we get over this? To run for President is, by definition, to be ambitious and opportunistic.

It would be nice if Obama could prove to be another Lincoln, but I don't hold my breath. I also worry that his race will derail him. I hope this will not happen but I'm white and I know how white people think. White people are good at getting nervous about race and then convincing themselves they're nervous for some other, more socially acceptable, reason. For instance, anxiety about sending one's children to school with minority children translates into concern about "test scores." This then leads to flight to white areas, which might look racist, but which white people would deny had anything to do with race. I wonder if a white nervousness about the Obama's blackness (even though he's biracial) will build up and translate into some widespread anxiety about some other issue that is acceptable. Again, I hope this doesn't happen, and I hope that the younger generations are less uptight about race than their parents and grandparents!

Who are you supporting for President? What do you think of Obama?

Hillary for President?

Hillary Clinton won the Pennsylvania primary and people seem mad at her. How come she can't "get out of the way?" Off the playground?

Am I the only one bothered by the fact that we set up an electoral process, a method of doing things, and then get mad at Clinton for wanting to follow the rules? Shouldn't voters in places like Pennsylvania and Indiana get the same chance to have their voices heard as voters in Iowa or New Hampshire? If the primary process is so bad, why do we have it? And if we have it, why do we get angry at a candidate for using it? Why not simply change it for the next election and have all the primaries within, say, a four-week period? It seems hypocritical to have a process and then want to circumvent it when it becomes inconvenient. And it seems typical to me of how women so often get kicked for trying to follow the rules.

Clinton has been criticized by, among others, Maureen Dowd, for scratching Obama's reputation. But isn't she doing him a good service in preparing him for the the general election should he get the nomination? I'm sure what she's thrown at him is nothing compared to what he will get should he be the nominee.

One of the more bizarre columns I read complained that the white world was putting Obama in his place for daring to be too uppity. Hello universe. Who is putting him "in his place?" A woman. Hasn't this same woman been endlessly punished for daring to step out away from the edges of the playground and take a place in the center of it?

My money is still on Clinton getting the nomination, odd as that may seem. And I think she would be a good president. What do you think of all this?

Race or Gender II

I have been thinking about the New York Times piece on race and gender, which argues that it is much easier to overcome race than it is to overcome gender.

I have long thought about this. It's easier (not easy!) to overcome race because race, at least as we understand it in this culture, is simply a cultural construct. We arbitrarily decided at some point that people with darker skin would be treated as an underclass.

Studies of the human genome have underscored how culturally constructed race is. While there are some genes that lead to superficial differences in appearance, I understand that a random white person is as likely as not to have more genetic similarity to a random black person than to another random white person. And vice versa. In other words, I may have more genetic similarities to a sister in Cameroon than a sister in Norway.

Gender, on the other hand, is not merely socially constructed. Men and women really do have pronounced genetic differences. Women can have babies, men can't. There are anatomical differences and hormonal differences between men and women. There are also culturally constructed differences. The problem becomes eradicating the culturally constructed differences that hurt women while valuing and taking into account the genetic differences.

For this reason, I worry that placing the grid of the civil rights over the women's movement, while a politically very potent tool for gaining rights, has been a false fit in many ways. While there is a one-to-one identity between black males and white males, black females and white females, that same one-to-one doesn't work between males and females.

I think we need to construct a better paradigm. But how?

Race or Gender

“We can make categorization by race go away, but we could never make gender categorization go away,” said John Tooby, a scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who ran the experiment. Looking at the challenges that black and female candidates face in overcoming unconscious bias, he added, “Based on the underlying psychology and anthropology, I think it’s more difficult for a woman, though not impossible.”

Alice Eagly, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University, agrees: “In general, gender trumps race. ... Race may be easier to overcome.”

The challenge for women competing in politics or business is less misogyny than unconscious sexism: Americans don’t hate women, but they do frequently stereotype them as warm and friendly, creating a mismatch with the stereotype we hold of leaders as tough and strong. So voters (women as well as men, though a bit less so) may feel that a female candidate is not the right person for the job because of biases they’re not even aware of.

“I don’t have to be conscious of this,” said Nilanjana Dasgupta, a psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “All I think is that this person isn’t a good fit for a tough leadership job.”

from NYT April 7, 2008 My Racist, Sexist Self, Nicholas Kristof


What do you think? Is gender prejudice harder to overcome that racial prejudice?

Thoughts on the news

I wanted to share a story I read today in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/08/science/08anasazi.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5087&em&en=07f38adb0ae2d1a4&ex=1207886400

It's about a group of cliff dwelling Indians out west who suddenly left their homes in the late 1200s and never returned. Nobody knows why. For years, the speculation was a drought or colder weather or the combination of the two driving them away. Now, the experts are looking deeper and theorizing it might have been ... religion. Interesting on more than one level, but to me, another sign that the scientific community is beginning to take faith more seriously.

Yesterday, the NYTimes had a story about inflation in Asia driving up the cost of cheap imports. The angle of the story was that this was a bad thing for Americans ... but is it? Wouldn't it be wonderfully green if all that stuff from China and Viet Nam became so expensive that we had to buy mindfully and take care of our possessions? Wouldn't it be great not to be choking on so much stuff? And not to get too deliriously carried away with wild dreams, but what if the combination of rising fuel prices, a falling dollar and inflation in Asia meant it made sense to reopen our factories in this country ... and employ Americans at good wages ... and ship goods only a few miles ... Or maybe if not factories, home-based cottage industries owned by ordinary people ... wealth dispersed among all of us ...

Am I crazy?

Ensorcell me

In her New York Times column "Surrender, Dorothy," Maureen Dowd threw out a word that *moi* was not familiar with: ensorcell. It was used to describe Barack Obama. I thought it might have something to do with sorcery and, in fact, it does. It means to enchant or bewitch.

I have been enjoying reading the New York Times on line because I find the site easy to navigate. It's also updated frequently. It's fast, I'm very seldom annoyed by pesky pop-up advertisements and the headlines are great. It still doesn't offer the same convenience as print ... which for me is the ability to scan a page of articles very quickly, but it's helping me cope with cyberspace.

Anyway, all that being said, I read a piece today in the Times that I imagine was supposed to be witty and tongue-in-cheek, but it came across, at least to *moi*, as nasty. It reminded me of the old days, when the Washington Post would regularly go over the top in cattiness. The Post has made great strides in recent years at civility ... and of course, they publish *moi*, so now I am very fond of them.

However, I digress. The article was about dating and reading and all the people in New York City who have dumped each other over reading. New Yorkers are a finicky bunch. If you've never heard of your date's favorite author, you're out. If your reading tastes are deemed too middlebrow (say, John Irving), you're out. But if you carry a book that seems to scream pretension, you're also out. And if your taste doesn't match your date's perfectly-- for instance, horrors, if you actually like Virginia Woolf, you're out.

Well, we all have our middlebrow reading tastes (I'm reading the Golden Compass trilogy, right now, which probably doesn't even qualify as middlebrow) and we all love authors our friends love to hate. I hope we book lovers are a little more generous, good humored and down to earth than The Times makes us out to be.

I love Nancy Drew as well as Jane Austen. I can also enjoy a good middlebrow adult mystery and some contemporary "highbrow" literary fiction leaves me cold. Are there politically incorrect books you like? Enscorcell me.