Though I fully realize that — Bill Whittle’s hopeful “cheering her from the rafters” comment notwithstanding — there are plenty of anti-war, or anti-“conservative”-economic-policy, or otherwise differently ideologically disposed feminists who will not be jumping enthusiastically on the Sarah Palin bandwagon, Phyllis Chesler’s point about the dilemma a few feminists face strikes a definite chord with me:
Do we vote to keep abortion legal and to stop the anti-Choice conservatives from taking over the Supreme Court–or do we vote to make sure that the American military is allowed to stop the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists in their tracks? Can we really achieve both goals by voting for one candidate? If not, then what is the more pressing priority? For ourselves, for our country, for the world at this moment in history?
If American women retain the right to choose whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term–in my view, a prerequisite to female human freedom, what does this mean if the jihadists bomb the country back to the seventh century? If the jihadists triumph, American women will be forced to convert to Islam, to wear veils or burqas (body bags), and risk being stoned to death, hung, or honor murdered if they want to choose their own husbands, attend college, dress like modern American girls do, or convert to another non-Islamic religion.
…
Mind you: Senator Obama’s eloquence is thrilling and the good old laundry list, beginning with abortion, matters a great deal to me. But jihad is here and here to stay and I would need to be persuaded that Obama and Biden really understand that. Also, since anti-Semitism, disguised as anti-Zionism has arisen today on the Left, not the Right, as has the academic feminist betrayal of a universal vision of human rights for everyone, everywhere, including Muslim women and dissidents, I would need to be assured that voting for abortion does not mean that I end up voting against Israel, against the Jews–and against Muslims who are under Islamic seige.
Camille Paglia has plenty of disagreements of her own with Palin’s positions, but is nonetheless cheering her nomination. As something of an apostate myself in relation to contemporary mainstream feminism, with its strong ties to progressive-left ideas about justice, equality, and economics, I for one find it refreshing and heartening to hear from someone who thoughtfully breaks with the regnant orthodoxy, and is inclined to think about individual issues independently of whether her conclusions fit with a particular party’s monolithic, take-it-or-leave-it platform.
On a related note, Neo-neocon made some interesting observations about the anger Sarah Palin’s nomination has provoked in some conventional feminists:
It’s synergistic; something about Palin’s combination of brains, charm, beauty, conservative viewpoints, and proletarian pastimes has brought out an almost unprecedented verbal viciousness in women who by all rights should be proud of her achievements as the second female Vice-Presidential nominee in history. Is this not a goal for which the woman’s movement has labored for so long? Apparently not—if she’s a conservative, and a charming and beautiful one at that.
This seems to be experienced by some as an almost unbearable dilemma, leading a few of Palin’s critics to deny Palin’s very identity as a woman even as they proclaim and deride it. This makes a certain twisted sense: if a feminist defines herself as being for women, and if Palin is a woman with unacceptable views who nevertheless is on the verge of achieving power, then it solves a knotty problem to declare her to be an unwoman.
Thus we get Wilson’s bizarre opening salvo,”Sarah Palin may be a lady, but she ain’t no woman.” Wilson and her sisters get to define the parameters of womanhood, you see, and to ban those who don’t meet their PC criteria.
A brilliant article at National Review Online, that has managed to capture so much of what I feel and at the same time lift me up in the spectacular way that only Bill Whittle can do.
Read the whole thing by all means (not remotely hard to do once Bill’s writing gets you hooked). There’s some honest, tough-love assessment of the Republican party’s recent self-inflicted failings therein, coupled with an honest-to-gosh celebration of the possibility of a turnaround that now, seemingly against all odds, looms large. I can’t resist quoting a few gems of expression from this great piece:
I’ve seen post after post on Hillary forums about how much they love Sarah, how they are energized and lifted out of depression by her (and the sight of an actual Roll Call made some of them weep). They gush about how she reminds them of their hero, how tough and savvy and unafraid she is. And I have seen these women, hard-core, feminist Democrats for 30 years and more, sit in slack-jawed amazement at Palin and at how fiercely Republicans — Republicans! — are defending her, backing her, and cheering her to the rafters. These Clinton supporters say they don’t know what to think any more: The Republicans are behaving like Democrats and the Democrats are behaving like Republicans!
If you think that’s an insult, you’ve got it exactly backwards. That is not only a huge compliment from these abandoned, centrist Democrats who bemoan the loss of their party to the radicals, it is an early rumbling of a tectonic shift in American politics which we are only dimly beginning to grasp. Who are the real feminists? A significant portion of our former hard-core opposition is now rethinking in a fundamental way who it is that actually does what their former allies only talk about.
…
When John McCain told me what I and untold millions of Americans have always believed, what others tell me to be ashamed of and mock me for — that I live in the greatest country in the world, a force of goodness and justice in dark places, a land of heroism and sacrifice and opportunity and joy — to me that went right to the mystic chords of memory that ultimately binds this country together. Some people don’t know what it is, but there is such a thing as patriotism — pure, unrefined, unapologetic, unconditional, non-nuanced, non-cosmopolitan, white-hot-burning patriotism. John McCain loves this country. I love it too. Not what it might be made into someday — not its promise, always and only its promise — but what it was and what it is, a nation and an idea worth fighting and dying for.
I was lukewarm on McCain Thursday night, but after that close I will follow that man to the ends of the earth with a smile on my face and a song in my heart.
And I don’t know whether or not we will win in November, but for the first time I feel like we deserve to win more than they deserve to lose. And I find myself at peace for the first time in … well, it seems like forever. Because now I know that we will win or lose based on what we love and what we believe in, and that we have managed to find two politicians who have lived those values through good times and bad.
Bill comments on his new gig at NRO over at his usual site, Eject! Eject! Eject!
It hasn’t been my intent for Fearless Dream to become a “link blog” or sort of “backup RSS feed” for Eject! Eject! Eject!, and it’s high on my freshly minted, unabashedly optimistic 2008 To Do list to put some serious time into writing about the ideas that I’ve been continuing to turn over in my mind and gather in note files and on bits of paper. But I can’t resist the compulsion to point out, even if for the third time in a row, that Bill Whittle has come through yet again with another characteristically excellent, must-read, on-point essay: “Forty Second Boyd and the Big Picture”.*
Find a comfortable chair, as this one’s a two-parter, but rest assured that the destination is well worth the journey. By part 2 I was, as I’ve certainly found myself before on many occasions with Bill’s incomparable writing, on the edge of my proverbial seat, my heart aglow.
By all means, ignore the following and go directly to Bill’s site to read the whole thing… But I can’t resist quoting for well-deserved emphasis one of the many gems of expression contained in Bill’s essay. It’s vital that we think about these points until they really sink in, because we owe it to our fighting men and women and to the people of Iraq not to give up.
I think the Surge has had spectacular success not because of the additional troops so much as for the fact that when the media and the Democrats demanded we cut and run… we did not cut and run. We doubled down. When the calls for defeat and dishonor were at their loudest – sad to say a not unwarranted street rep we had made for ourselves – somehow, somehow we simply just hung on and gave them not a retreat but a charge.
Jesus Christ, but that must have gotten someone’s attention. Yes, the Surge is working. But I believe it is not a surge of boots that is doing the work so much as it is a surge of hope.
And hope… well, hope is a dangerous thing. For every day that Iraq returns not only to normal but to free normal is a day remembered. It is a day to which other, darker days may be compared.
Every day of success, every newly opened shop, every school and soccer game free of secret police and each and every night devoid of the terror of arbitrary arrest and execution is something to lose. It is something the murdering bastards of al Qaeda cannot give but can only take away. We have taken their sword from them. They wield it now only against themselves. They will do it, too: more pain and more death are coming, for that is all they know how to do. But hope walks the streets of Baghdad now, hope in the form of decent and brave young men and women who have held a line against all odds and perhaps bought with their courage and their blood the time we need for that hope to spread.
I certainly share Bill’s admiration and appreciation for our deeply heroic and courageous men and women in uniform, who are daily putting their lives on the line for worthy ideals that are well worth fighting for, as well as for the superb reporting work that independent journalists such as Michael Totten and Michael Yon have done, telling both our soldiers’ stories and the stories of the Iraqi people as they persevere in a shared struggle to build a stable free society and a future worth having. It has become my chief regret in life that I have not served my country in the armed forces. I heard the call when war came to New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania on the calm, still morning of 9/11, and after much soul-searching came to believe (quite possibly with an unmerited sense of self-importance, and/or as a rationalization for simple lack of courage) that there was some other way I would be able to help more effectively, by putting my best effort forth in the crucial battle for hearts and minds. I have thus far done but a shamefully infinitesimal fraction of what I set out to do, of what I feel duty-bound to do, in that regard. But this is a new year, a gift of time, and with it another chance to summon my best effort, to begin to repay to whatever extent possible the profound debt I owe to those who have made my life possible, to the country and culture of liberty that I hold dear.
* Links updated 2009-10-29
Over at Eject! Eject! Eject!, Bill Whittle reflects on the state we’re in, following an adroit and roundly deserved Fisking:
We can no longer afford to let this anti-American garbage pass unchallenged. As a kind and secure people, we tend to let a lot of this go under the bridge, but this kind of crap gets more and more traction, and those days I think must come to an end for a while.
[…]
America is dying from relentless and unwarranted criticism that is so out of the realm of reason and measure that it is corroding the foundations of society.
I would never, ever want an American history that excluded slavery and the fate of the Indians. But ask a college kid today about American history, and most will tell you it is nothing more than slavery and the Indians.
That has to be fought tooth and nail.
It does indeed.
Mind-nourishing food for thought and good discussion on the topic over at Bill Whittle’s place.
I’m back from New York, by the way, and hope to soon make time to post pictures and thoughts from my November 23rd visit to the World Trade Center site. Stay tuned…
