The Beer Drinking Test For Picking a President
Neponset on Eschaton comments threads says that it is ba-a-a-ck:
October 1, 2007. Jill Zuckman wants to know about the "age old
question", which candidate do you want to have a beer with.
We should add some more recent questions of similar importance. For
example, which candidate would you most like to add to a threesome
with you and your favorite partner? Which candidate would you most
like to drill your teeth at the dentist's office? Which candidate most
makes you think of a leaf-chopper and why?
These are all equally relevant tests in my mind. You know what? I
don't want a president I can have beers with. I want a president who
knows how to run this country and wants to do it in a way which
doesn't steamroll over people and ideas that I value. Beer drinking
palship might be on my list of desirables but really only in the sense
that I hope the next president doesn't drink and push those red
buttons.
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Posted by: echidne / 10/01/2007 05:57:00 PM
Sauce For The Gander
Remember the need for the Senate to censor the MoveOn ad for the way
it called General Petraeus General "BetrayUs"? Now that Rush Limbaugh
has called soldiers who are against the Iraq occupation "phony
soldiers", the "what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander"
game is being played. Will the Senate censure Rush, too? Or is it
acceptable to say mean things about the military as long as it is not
said about the generals?
On one level this is all pure horsecrap. On another level it's pure
horsecrap, too. But sometimes manure is what we need to handle and
it's good for compost, at least.
This is the sort of blog post that a good editor would erase. From one
metaphor to another in less than a hundred words! Yea me.
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Posted by: echidne / 10/01/2007 05:16:00 PM
Learning to Drive. A Review
Katha Pollitt's new collection of essays, Learning to Drive And Other
Life Stories, is not about politics in the sense we have grown
accustomed to expecting from her but about life, especially about its
not-so-pleasant aspects. She writes about her struggles to learn to
drive a car, about her reactions to finding that a boyfriend of seven
years had a harem of other women, about the lives and deaths of her
parents and about aging. She writes about her own life as a
half-finished prospect and about the way feminism, politics and the
specific time and place of her existence interact or how she thinks
all these interact. And she has been very heavily slammed for doing
this.
Susan Salter Reynolds in Los Angeles Times writes:
It must be my problem. Watching a feminist I've admired my entire
life dissolve into a whingeing puddle in her late 50s is painful.
Katha Pollitt's fourth collection of essays is self-indulgent at
best: She writes about losing her boyfriend; Web-stalking her
ex-boyfriend (a phrase used so often it causes a kind of vertigo as
a reader learns to anticipate the free fall of self-hatred and
victim mania); yuppies on Manhattan's Upper West Side (apparently
sacred ground for poverty-stricken intellectuals); real-estate
developers in Connecticut (No! Yes!); and the popularity of plastic
surgery. These are just a few of the topics that get Pollitt going.
"It's not as if I like being like this," she admits. "People who
despair after a certain age are just depressing. We don't have the
looks for it, and besides, we make others uncomfortable: what if
we're on to something?"
And Toni Bentley (the author of a book about the joys of erotic
submission) makes the connection even more openly in the New York
Times: That Pollitt shows herself as sometimes vulnerable and not in
control means that feminism as an ideology has failed:
Groaning and moaning from clever, sassy women has become a genre
unto itself, the righteous revenge of the liberal, pre-, during- or
postmenopausal woman (anyone missing?) in the post-chick-lit age
(it is over, isn't it?). Perhaps this heralds the birth of
fourth-wave feminism? (Or is it the fifth?) Or maybe it's not
something political, but just plain old biblical revenge: God knows
women have centuries of wrongs to catch up on. An enraged, educated
woman (Vagina dentata intellectualis) with her arsenal of
experience, observation, self-deprecation and indignation is a
force to be reckoned with, a kind of intellectual Mike Tyson --
though, apparently, she is still not as likely to be seduced into
bed as the bombshell bimbo, one reason she's so irate. Not only is
she entitled to be angry, but it is virtually the bedrock of her
independence, and pugnacious prose is her lethal weapon.
...
Ultimately, a sharp tongue, a quick wit and ample intellect provide
a powerful defense but little consolation for women in search of
that phantom that is freedom from men and the vulnerability of
love. They can trap the rats -- with the impunity feminism ordains
-- but jailers are in prison too.
It's a hard thing, this being a feminist icon. Are you holding that
coffee mug with the right amount of strength and clarity, my dear? It
would have been better if Pollitt had revealed a problem with running
a gang of armed feminists in Manhattan, or an addiction to taking
steroids or something else which is sort of manly. Of course it would
have been best if she had written essays about how she beat patriarchy
into the gonads and came out a winner and the current ruler of the
world. Make a note of that for the next book, Katha.
Then to reviewing the actual book which I read before reading any of
the reviews, though I did hear that some of them were nasty. The book
can be read on different levels, and the level I enjoyed best was the
purely sensory level: of enjoying Pollitt's lyrical language, of being
seduced into the book as into drinking a glass of sparkling wine, of
slowly getting inebriated with the rhythm and flow of the sentences,
of being lulled into thinking that the ride to drunkenness should
always be this gentle, only to be suddenly stopped, when a sentence
blows into your face like a popping champaign bubble, revealing
something hilarious or true or just very odd:
Sometimes I think I would like to be word - not a big important
word, like "love" or "truth," just a small ordinary word, like
"orange" or "inkstain" or "so", a word that people use so often and
so unthinkingly that its specialness has all been worn away, like
the roughness on a pebble in a creek bed, but that has a solid heft
when you pick it up, and if you hold it to the light at just the
right angle you can glimpse the spark at its core."
Or when a sentence gives us the gist of what I think the book is
saying, as in this description of Pollitt looking backwards to
understand a crisis in her life:
In the months to come, I would look back on this time in my life
almost as a kind of out-of-body travel, from which I had returned
with nothing but a sense of memory of having been somewhere
inexpressibly exciting and far away. It wasn't like a dream,
exactly; although it had a dream's strange internal logic. It was
like looking through the window of an airplane at night, the way
the city below appears so near, yet untouchable behind the glass --
a network of lights, flames, stars.
I also read the book on the level of finding a major theme in it, for
me at least, and the theme has to do with map-making, the many ways,
some silly, some creative, some obvious, that we all make maps about
that universe out there, those people and the way power is allotted to
them; maps about how we relate to the rest of the landmarks, maps
which will allow us to navigate this life. Maps.
Pollitt calls it "observing" in the title essay about learning to
drive. In the essays about her unfaithful lover and her obsessive
reactions after finding out about the infidelities she calls the
map-making internet stalking. She doesn't actually stalk her ex-lover.
She is making maps, writing a history, providing an explanation,
although in that specific example the endeavor is not a helpful one.
But it is how humans try to make sense out of events, by thinking and
by observing, and sometimes by compulsively going over the same ground
to see if a large STOP sign was ignored, if a car engine light flashed
on unnoticed. An attempt to make sense.
In other essays the theme crops up again. The essay about a Marxist
study group portrays the group participants as making sense of the
demise of communism by finding it in books and in the study group, by
making maps. "Sisterhood" shows us Pollitt's own attempts to make
sense of the love affairs of her ex-boyfriend by interrogating those
he took to his bed. What did he want? Did he ever love her? These
examples show the pointlessness of maps about the past but they also
show the human attempt to understand, to create a coherent explanation
for incoherent events.
Pollitt's essays about her parents' lives and deaths mention their FBI
files, places to seek for further information now that they can no
longer be questioned themselves, and in one essay we join Pollitt in
rummaging for files in the basement of her father's house, searching,
searching, making maps. Even the short piece on the environment uses
something to draw maps, this time of Connecticut's disappearing
shoreline which reminds Pollitt of Danish landscape paintings,
sometimes available for purchase on eBay:
Besides, I tell myself, there may be a picture buried in there of
the view from Beach Park Road - there were quite a few minor
painters in this part of Connecticut at one time; it's quite likely
that pictures of those very fields exist. Or, if not of that exact
view, there may be a picture of another view very much like it,
perhaps in Denmark.
This is how I read the essays before reading them on the third level,
the level that the reviews focus on and the level that has to do with
a feminist writer revealing parts of her life which show her
not-in-control, perhaps even out-of-control. And Pollitt does choose
to reveal these episodes. Note that she doesn't tell us that she
learned to drive. It is only from a later essay that I deduce she
actually does drive these days. Note also that she lets us observe
with her (Pollitt-the-cool-observer) the breakup of a long-term
relationship and its odd obsessive effects on her behavior (on
Pollitt-the-cyberstalker). She doesn't tell us how she regained her
balance. It is only from reading carefully that I find she is newly
married, for example. In short, the selection of episodes and themes
is purposeful. The author wants to show us her "soft underbelly".
She's not writing her memoirs, mind you, not trying to tell us that
the Whole Life of Katha Pollitt is Dreadful. She is choosing to focus
on certain events only.
Rebecca Traister in Salon discusses the advisability of this:
Picking up these pieces again in book form, accompanied by other
essays about Pollitt's daughter, the Marxist reading group she
joined in part to impress her scoundrel boyfriend, and friendships
with the women with whom her ex cheated on her, I have a much more
intricate reaction than when I first read them. Instead of simply
rearing back from them, I wonder: Is there ever a point at which it
is a good idea for women, especially intellectual, politically
engaged women, to strip off their clothes and caper naked as
jaybirds in front of a line of would-be assassins?
Is it advisable? For whom? Perhaps the theme I spotted in Pollitt's
book required this particular approach, and perhaps allowing feminists
to be human beings requires them to be allowed to have problems and
flaws and even out-of-control times in their lives? But Traister is of
course right in pointing out that a book of this kind exposes Pollitt
to anti-feminist ridicule and the embarrassment of those who prefer
their feminists in armor at all times.
There is an advantage to the approach Pollitt took, and that is the
advantage offered by the feminist views she offered to explain the
events surrounding her relationship and its ending. If nobody
discusses such intimate reactions, how can we then decide whether we
agree or disagree with assertions such as the neediness for male love
in women or the desire to center ones life around a man or whether G.,
Pollitt's ex-lover, is just a jerk or something more like a metaphor
for all men?
How can we learn that someone else views men in a certain light,
perhaps a light quite as alien to us as the Manhattan street lights
would be to someone living in outer Siberia? How can we learn to
differentiate the effects of a certain social class or place of
residency or even industry on our views about men and women and the
role of love in general? Generational differences, do they matter?
Does it matter that the men Pollitt knows are men in the media or the
arts or other places where a certain type of personality seems more
frequent?
I don't know. These are some of the questions the book elicited in me,
mostly, because my experiences with love and men are not those Pollitt
regards as general among the women she knows. It could be that I am
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