Meet the New Prof - Same as the Old Prof

Except not entirely. Today was my first day teaching as an "assistant visiting professor." Never mind the "visiting" part of it; I still felt a lot less tenuous than I did as an adjunct. I know what I'm doing through early June, and that feels wonderful.

I also seem to have a wonderful group of students in my feminist theory class. It's a small group, and they seem curious, lively, and glad to be there. Funny thing - that's how I felt about it, too.

Soon enough, I'll be grading papers and exams, and I'll be a little less jubilant. For now, I just want to celebrate. There's time enough for politics again tomorrow. (Well, okay, we talked about Palin in class today, but that, too, can wait.)

Criminality versus Dumb Decisions

Earlier this week Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, published an open letter to Sarah Palin in Alternet, asking her to reconsider her position on abortion:

According to press reports your water broke while you were giving a keynote speech in Texas at the Republican Governors' Energy Conference. You did not immediately go to the hospital – instead you gave your speech and then waited at least 11 hours to get to a hospital. You evaluated the risks, made a choice, and were able to carry on your life without state interference. Texas Governor Rick Perry worried about your pregnancy but didn’t stop you from speaking or take you into custody to protect the rights of the fetus.

After, Ayesha Madyun’s water broke, she went to the hospital where she hoped and planned to have a vaginal birth. When she didn’t give birth in a time-frame comfortable to her doctors, they argued that she should have a C-section. The doctors asserted that the fetus faced a 50-75 percent chance of infection if not delivered surgically. (Risks of infection are believed by some health care providers to increase with each hour after a woman’s water has broken and she hasn’t delivered).

The court, believing, like you that fetuses have a right to life, said, "[a]ll that stood between the Madyun fetus and its independent existence, separate from its mother, was put simply, a doctor's scalpel." With that, the court granted the order and the scalpel sliced through Ms. Madyun's flesh, the muscles of her abdominal wall, and her uterus. The core principle justifying an end to legal abortion in the US provided the same grounds used to deprive this pregnant and laboring woman of her rights to due process, bodily integrity, and physical liberty. When the procedure was done, there was no evidence of infection.

(Read the whole thing here.)

Paltrow doesn't specify how many hours passed before Madyun's doctors pressed for a c-section. An old New York Times article says she'd been in labor for two days and in the hospital for 18 hours. Rachel Roth's excellent study Making Women Pay: The Hidden Costs of Fetal Rights states it had been 48 hours since her water broke. That's long enough that Madyun's decision starts to look fairly foolish by my standards and by most medical guidelines.

But here's the thing: People do lots of things that are stupid, risky, macho, or otherwise blameworthy. Some of these risk other people's lives as well as their own. Not all of these things are illegal. One example would be driving while very sleepy or distracted.

This is naturally true for childbearing, as well. Some people choose unassisted home birth, where the father catches the baby and no midwife or other trained assistant is present. Many of the people who propagandize for unassisted birth believe that birth, like sex, should only involve the couple; some of them also subscribe to right-wing religious ideologies. This is loony and irresponsible, in my view. (Not to mention it's asking a hell of a lot of the father!) Still, it's not illegal. Nor should it be. Imagine the mess if every baby born after a precipitous labor triggered a court case.

Another example Paltrow cites is of a woman who insisted on a VBAC at home. There are good reasons that no reputable doctor should condone this. If you give birth vaginally after a cesarean, there's a heightened chance of uterine rupture, which endangers the mother's life as well as the child's. If that occurred at home, odds are great that you'd bleed out before you could get help.

This woman, too, was forced by court order to have a c-section. This goes against our law on medical treatment in every other instance. A person cannot be forced to have surgery or undergo radiation even if they would surely die without the treatment. No one can be forced to donate a kidney - even if he or she is the parent of the patient needing a transplant.

If you believe humans have a right to bodily integrity and autonomy, you cannot legislate women's childbearing decisions. You certainly can argue that these people have an ethical obligation to make wise decisions and that some decisions are so irresponsible as to be unethical. However, unless you want to reduce the woman to an incubator and deprive her of basic rights of personhood, the law has no place intruding on ethics.

This is a long-winded way of saying that it's possible to fully agree with Paltrow's arguments and still maintain that Sarah Palin's choice to board a plane while she was at astronomical risk of going into active labor was a foolish decision. She wasn't taken to task for it legally, nor should she be. Her privilege protected her from any legal action. (Women subjected to forced childbearing decisions have been disproportionately young, poor, unmarried, and non-white.) If we trust women to make their own reproductive decisions, we have to acknowledge that while most women are remarkably altruistic and sensible, there will always be some who make decisions that we personally would never countenance.

But Palin's privilege shouldn't stop us from regarding her choice as 1) reckless and 2) completely hypocritical for someone who preaches the sanctity of fetal life. What's legal - and should remain legal - is not always ethical in every situation. We have a right to demand leaders that understand this distinction.

Palin, the Object of Our Obsession

I know it's time to move on from Sarah Palin. Somehow, we have to shift everyone's focus off of her and back to Obama's promise of - well, not salvation, maybe not even transformation, but at least starting to remedy the fuck-ups of this country that I love.

So why am I having trouble shifting focus, myself? Yeah, I'm scared because she's a wingnut who could too easily become President. But I'm not normally this obsessed about any individual 'winger. Huckabee alarmed me, too, but you didn't see me blogging about him for ten days straight.

I think I've finally figured it out after reading this post by Jessica at Jezebel:

When Palin spoke on Wednesday night, my head almost exploded from the incandescent anger boiling in my skull. ...

And the question now is why? Why does this particular pitbull in lipstick infuriate — and scare us — so viscerally? Why does her very existence make us feel — and act — so ugly? New York Times columnist Judith Warner calls Palin's nomination a "thoroughgoing humiliation for America’s women," because "Palin’s not intimidating, and makes it clear that she’s subordinate to a great man." ...

I think what Ms. Warner is dancing around, but not saying outright, is that for a certain kind of feminist, Palin is a symbol for everything we hoped was not true in the world anymore. We hoped that we didn't have to hide our ambition or pretend that our goals were effortlessly achieved ("I never really set out to be in public affairs, much less to run for this office," the Governor has said.) We hoped that we could be mothers without having our motherhood be our defining characteristic, as it seems to be for Palin. We hoped that we did not have to be perfect beauty queens to get to where we wanted to be in life, that our looks, good or bad, wouldn't matter. ...

I think the correct high school stereotype is of the homecoming queen. For many of us looking back at high school, we can now feel a smug superiority towards the homecoming queen. Sure, she was pretty and popular in high school, catering to the whims of boys and cheering on their hockey games, but what happened to her after high school? Often, she popped out some kids and ended up toiling in some not particularly impressive job. We can look back and say, we might have been ambitious nerds in high school, but it ultimately paid off. What's infuriating, and perhaps rage-inducing, about Palin, is that she has always embodied that perfectly pleasing female archetype, playing by the boys' game with her big guns and moose-murdering, and that she keeps being rewarded for it. Our schadenfreude for the homecoming queen's mediocrity has turned into white hot anger at her continued dominance.

(I've excerpted a lot of it but the whole post is worth reading.)

You know, I don't have any real issues with Palin's beauty queen past. I'm not a great beauty, myself, but I'm also not hideous. I don't know what it's like to have men drool en masse over me, but I've always been attractive enough for nearly all of the men who interested me. So I don't have jealousy issues about beauty. Nor do I discount the intelligence of women who happen to be conventionally beautiful. In high school, I even got along just fine with the homecoming queen, who was the band's drum major.

(In fact, in an odd chapter of my past life - which I'd forgotten until very recently - my band friends nominated me for "basketball homecoming queen" my senior year of high school, a very obscure honor indeed. It was mostly of a joke, and I was sort of an anti-candidate. I so didn't fit the type and I was never "popular" but I did have plenty of friends. I vaguely recall coming in second.)

But the cheerleaders! A few of them had this slightly simpering, dumbed-down way of dealing with boys. They weren't dumb, they just played the part. They hung out with the girls who were "popular," which - as in most high schools - was not at all the same as being well-liked. They acted just slightly frosty to the rest of us, enough to register with the girls but pass under the boys' radar. (Just to be clear, I have a couple of friends who were cheerleaders in high school. I'm not casting aspersions on all cheerleaders, just a select few from my high school.)

To this day, I have a real allergy to that sort of woman. Sarah Palin strikes me as one of them - as a woman who will fake and flirt and cajole and act stupid to please the menz - and then turn around and stab women in the back, individually and collectively.

Patriarchal systems have always required women like these. Every era has had its Anita Bryants and Phyllis Schaflys. Madame Bitch at Open Salon suggests that far from being the target of sexism, Palin is the very apogee of playing by the patriarchal rules:

What are the ways in which Palin embodies these sexist rules?

• She's number 2, not the top of the ticket.
• Her very appointment is a testament to the paucity of women leaders in the GOP -- had there been more choices, perhaps McCain would have chosen someone with fewer drawbacks.
• She's a mother of 5 children, so her "woman" credentials cannot be challenged.
• She constantly downplays her ambition and her accomplishments, even though the ambition is oozing out of her ears.
• She dumbs herself down.
• She embraces the frantic mommy role, both literally, and figuratively for her leadership roles.

To me, Palin seems not like a trailblazing, hard-charging battering ram, but a gray fascimile of that ideal, and one that is neatly confined into the small allowed space for her to exist, completely controlled for the comfort of the men who created those rules.

(Read the rest here.)

Palin is quite literally being controlled by the men, at least for now. She's being groomed and prepped and the press is not being allowed access to her - although word came out today that she'll grant an interview to Charlie Gibson later in the week. It reminds me a little of Old Testament descriptions of girls being prepared for entrance to the king's harem. The Book of Esther recounts how they spent a full year being beautified with oils and perfumes and makeup before they ever had a private audience with the king.

Palin has her beauty routine down pat, but the patriarchal grooming is no less intense for being focused on the names of foreign leaders and the pros and cons of privatizing Social Security. (I'm not suggesting that these are in any way "patriarchal" subjects. It's only the GOP take on them that's steeped in patriarchal assumptions.) My hunch is she's a quick study, judging from her convention performance. She seems to be smart and very, very tough. If Palin were transported back to the Old Testament, she wouldn't be a girl in the harem. She would be the woman who runs it. (For those of you who've read The Handmaid's Tale: Palin would be Aunt Lydia.)

Palin's experience in beauty pageants is not irrelevant; pageants teach and reward poise, self-possession, and smooth performances. So does cheerleading. I say this sincerely, not snarkily. These are good life skills for anyone. They're invaluable if you're a politician.

I'd like to think we're all beyond knee-jerk high-school emotions, despite the results of the past two elections. But I can't help thinking of another memory, this one from the back of the school bus, where my friend Kate and I were using our halting French skills to disparage the cheerleaders in what we assumed was our secret language. Eventually, one of them - a platinum-blonde named Mary - turned around and glared at us. We'd forgotten that Mary was in third-year French. Oops.

We underestimate the cheerleaders at our peril.

The Leathered Look

I'm sort of fried tonight because I just finished photocopying the syllabus for my new course on feminist theory. It's an existing course in the program but my first time teaching it; expect me to spout off about it for the next ten weeks. It starts with Mary Wollstonecraft and ends up with Judith Butler and intersectionality. It will kick my students' asses - and probably mine, too. Karmic justice.

But since I'm fried, I'm only good for a brief rant. Driving to the office at 9:30 p.m., after the kids were tucked in, was an obstacle course. With human bodies as the obstacles. Two days before classes begin, my little college town is a bacchanalia of late-summer partying. The college boys saunter along in their baggy shorts. The college girls teeter along, clad in strategically placed scraps of fabric. By the hundreds, they're tripping off the edge of the sidewalk or walking down the middle of the street.

Yeah, the dress code is pretty sexist. But that's not what got my dander up. I was struck, again, by how tan the young women are. I can appreciate the slenderizing value of a good tan. On the rare occasions when I've managed to get some color on my thighs, they seemed to shrink three sizes.

But as a pasty-faced native of North Dakota, I've rarely been tan. Best case: People stop asking why I'm so pale. If I live long enough, maybe my freckles will merge.

You know what? That's okay. I'm 44 now, and while no one will mistake me for 20 anymore, I'm holding up reasonably well. I'd be nothing but a mass of misplaced origami folds by now, had I visited the tanning salon as often as my young female students do. The demand to be tan has escalated dramatically since I was their age.

There are lots of things to criticize about the beauty ideal, but the imperative to be tan is particularly evil because it imposes a double bind with a time lag. What makes you "sexy" at age 20 will make you look haggard and old 20 years later. (I realize I'm leaving skin cancer out of the equation. Clearly, if you're having to undergo surgery and chemo, that won't make you prettier, either.) My students realize that tanning will lead to wrinkles later on, yet it all seems abstract. For them, aging is still something that happens to other people. I thought the same thing at age 20.

I wish there were a way to get this across to young women. I joke about it and my point sails right past them. I don't know how to discuss it seriously without sounding like an old scold. I suppose I could tell them that they'll still want to appear sexy and desirable in 20 or 30 years - but that's probably a little too close to hearing that your mother still wants to get off.

LOLcat in a bind from I Can Has Cheezburger?

Choice, Schmoice

Because I'm still trying to perk up, here's Samantha Bee at the Republican Convention, tormenting the poor delegates with the oxymoron of "choosing" in an anti-choice party.



(h/t Feministing)

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

One striking aspect of John McCain's nomination acceptance speech last night was his attempt to define himself as all about change.

On the surface, this appears foolish. Not only did Barack Obama stake out the "change" mantra months ago, it's really hard to appear credible as a change agent when you've voted with the Current Occupant 90% of the time. (I love that Obama commercial that features McCain himself making the 90% claim!) The Obama campaign and a slew of pundits repeated this point almost endlessly today.

But maybe McCain isn't trying to out-change Obama. Maybe it's not necessary to beat him at the change game.

Maybe all McCain needs is to distance himself from the Bush administration enough to reclaim the "maverick" mantle. He then lets Sarah Palin bait us into yet another skirmish in the dreary a culture wars. And if this election becomes all about latté sipping elistists versus caribou-hunting small-town patriots, the Republicans have a real chance.

Hmmm. The only real change in that formula is the caribou.

As an antidote to my gloom, here's a video cleverly lampooning the change theme during those halcyon early days of the primaries - back when the Republican clown car was full to bursting and none of us had a clue how to pronounce "Rielle."

The Neediness of Special Needs Kids

Blue Gal has come right out and said, "Sarah Palin is a bad mother." Her main point is that a child with special needs can't just dispense with hands-on parental care:

As the mother of a special needs kid, I can tell you that at the time of his diagnosis I would have cut off my own limb before taking ANY job that took me away from his care.

I was lucky at that time that I did not need to work. I feel horrible for parents who must work outside the home to pay for the care of a special needs child.

But Christ, she's got a Down's Syndrome baby. She has no idea if the baby has any Mental Retardation issues at this point. Special needs babies are ALL CONSUMING and SHOULD BE. It's like the only issue she had was making political points from not aborting. And then it's right back to work? Not even the standard six weeks maternity leave? Are you kidding me? To hell with her.

(Read the rest here.)

Now, whether you consider this relevant to Palin's fitness for office is your call. I'm disinclined to disqualify a candidate on this basis. Plenty of solid public servants have been crappy parents and spouses.

Palin herself seems to differ. Her speech Wednesday night put her family members front and center. In fact, that's the only positive I remember (along with her invocation of McCain's POWness) in her stew of snark and sarcasm. But since she considers motherhood one of her qualifications to be VP - perhaps the main qualification - I'm not going to tell you not to judge her on that.

Instead, I'd like to back away from electoral politics for a moment and discuss the nitty gritty of parenting a child with special needs. In the past few days, I've heard it repeated over and over that Palin's child will automatically get the best possible care due to her privileged status, and thus it doesn't matter if she and her husband delegate Trig's care to others. This is a pernicious lie.

I have a little experience with a developmental delay - and I mean a true delay, not a permanent disability. My younger son, the Tiger, had a significant speech delay. He's doing great now. Between the ages of two and three, we went to speech therapy for an hour each week. For part of that time, we also had weekly home visits from an Early Intervention specialist.

I suppose a nanny could have kept the Tiger company at all those appointments. But would a nanny have stepped in when a young speech therapist used techniques that were obviously doomed? For instance, she tried to elicit words by withholding toys from the Tiger. This was a huge success - in pissing him off. I knew how stubborn I was. I knew she was only setting everyone up for failure. So I gently but firmly insisted she try to harness his natural goofiness and sense of humor instead. This not only kept the weekly sessions from becoming a nightmare of tears and refusal, it also worked way better.

The Early Intervention specialists had better instincts. However, if I hadn't pressed for an evaluation sooner rather than later, the bureaucratic wheels turn so slowly in this county that he would have turned three - and aged out of eligibility - before services even began. I think this is a reflection of the lack of funding for such services, locally; social workers are stretched thin, and this becomes a form of de facto rationing.

Maybe a nanny would have been just as assertive. More likely, though, she would not have known my child in the same depth as I did. She would not have felt as deep an investment. She might have felt that negotiating with the professionals and insisting on a partnership with them was above her pay grade.

What I also learned is yes, you need the professionals, but you also need the whole family to be on board with teaching speech at home. I scoured the Web for helpful advice and we all became better communicators. Instead of speaking in full paragraphs with tons of subordinate clauses like I do here at Kittywampus - hey, it worked fine with my first kid! - I learned we needed to start with individual words and work our way up, matching the Tiger at the level he was at. This led to scintillating exchanges where he would say "car" and I would go "red car" and words like "scintillating" were banned altogether. But it paid off big time. Today, you'd notice some quirks in the Tiger's usage (and that would be worth a whole 'nother post) but you'd never call him disabled.

So my experience was really with "developmental delay lite," and yet it was tremendously helpful that I was only working part time. I'm not arguing that one parent must therefore stay at home, only that if both parents' jobs are all-consuming, a special needs child will pay the price. I'm also not assuming that the mother has to take the lead. The crucial thing is that both parents are connected and tuned in to their child's unique needs and strengths, and that at least one of them has adequate time and energy to devote to that child's extra needs for nurturance. (For a perspective on how much harder this quest is when a child has Down syndrome, see this post by Mother Who Thinks in Salon's comment section.)

No one except the parents will know that child's temperament, personality, and needs inside and out. No one else will love that child as deeply. No one else will be as fierce an advocate. That is what you can't outsource, no matter how wealthy you are.

And now I'm off to see the Tiger play the Gingerbread Man in his kindergarten play. (He's one of several G-Men.) I'm already teary-eyed at the thought of it.

Update 9/5/08: Since I dashed off to school before I had a chance to re-read this post, I realize I should come back to the Palins. I want to emphasize that I don't think mothers have a unique responsibility to their kids apart from the gestating and breastfeeding. Todd Palin could absolutely step up and be his baby son's number one advocate - as long as that doesn't contradict the religious-wingnut ideology of male headship of the family. So far, I've mostly seen Trig in Bristol's arms, and his long-term welfare is seriously not her job.

Since I bumbled that one, here's a photo that shows why I was in such a hurry to get to the play. This was the Tiger's costume. Please note the green face on the Gingerbread Man; the Tiger is not into realism. The kid attached to it was equally funny.

Maybe I'm a Wimp ...

... but I'm just so dispirited at the fact that Obama is not leading McCain in the polls 65% to 35%, I'm struck dumb.

I can't believe how much time McCain devoted to his POW saga in his convention speech. I thought that was mostly a job for surrogates. How wrong I was. How ironic that the original chicken-hawk party finally touts its war experience now, five-and-a-half years after we first invaded Iraq.

I can't believe how little the playbook has changed since 1980. Big government Democrats blah blah blah, we're the real patriots blah blah blah, we want to give YOU the choice (unless you choose abortion) blah blah blah.

Add 9/11, 9/11, 9/11 and stir.

No amount of "Governor Palin is my soulmate" will change that script.

I think Chris Matthews just coughed up a hairball. If I'm not wrong, I think Keith Olbermann just called the RNC festivities "the political equivalent of Chuck E. Cheese." No wonder I'm cringing.

Photo by Flickr user Brian Toad Photography, used under a Creative Commons license.

Y'know, I used to own a 1974 Ford Maverick. Four doors, a V-8 engine, metallic copper paint. Bumpers that put up with my incompetent parking skills. It blew up on the freeway near Hercules, California, in 1988 with Grey Kitty in the backseat, unconfined. (This taught me the virtues of a cat carrier.) I thought it spontaneously combusted, but no, it was just the radiator. The blow-up was nonetheless fatal - to the Mav, that is. GK and I survived.

If the American public is about to invest in a "Maverick" (or two), we deserve whatever blow-up we get.

Update 9/5/08: I just fixed the typo in the first line so the percentages no longer read 6% to 35%. I'm discouraged, yes, but I'm not quite that math-challenged. Phooey!

Free Rice, Now in New Flavors

Photo of rice terraces in the Philippines by Flickr user ~MVI~, used under a Creative Commons license.

I've mentioned before that I've had some fun with Free Rice, a procrastination vocabulary-game site, which donates a few grains of rice to hungry people for each answer you get right. By now, they've donated some 42 billion grains. I have no idea how much this translates into in terms of satisfied tummies. I think its main service is publicizing the hunger problem as well as the failure of the United States to join other wealthy nations in pledging to donate 0.7% of GDP toward solving the world hunger problem. Indeed, we ranked dead last in OECD figures for 22 developed countries in 2007.

Anyway, just in time for school starting, Free Rice has now expanded way beyond its original vocabulary game. I was excited about the multiplication facts. No, I haven't forgotten that much of my education; the Bear is in third grade, and I'm thinking this might help him learn to multiply with less nagging (me) and stubbornness (him).

Some of the other subject areas are diverting for grow-mutts. There are Famous Paintings (which gets hard fast, and I guessed cleverly) and World Capitals (ditto, except I totally embarrassed myself). In foreign languages I aced the German and the French, which tells you it's easy. My French is pretty rudimentary, and I bailed as soon as I hit level 10 of 10. I got to level 8 with my Dora the Explorer Spanish plus a few cognates. There are also Italian, chemical symbols and English grammar, which I didn't try yet.

Happy procrastination!

Watching the Words Go 'Round

You don't often get to see the puppet-strings on TV:


To be fair, we don't much see the strings that hold up the Democrats, either. Maybe MSNBC was trying to kick some Republican ass. But my, it's hard to attack your opponent credibly for being "only words" - which is what Sarah Palin was doing in this portion of the speech - when you're so evidently wedded to the teleprompter.

Other than standing up for disability rights (and good for her on that, although Pat Buchanan just referred to it as "Down syndromes," in the plural): Did we hear any tangible policy positions tonight?

Also to Palin's credit: Someone coached her not to say "nucular" again. I hope that sticks. I hope it won't matter beyond November 4.

Photo credits: Me and my DVR.

Palinofeminism

So much for my foray into reporting gossip. I stand by my judgments of the past few days, but my usual mode is analytical, not judgmental. And if I weren't still so frozen with fear that Sarah Palin could actually become our president if McCain wins and dies, I'd write on something warm and fuzzy. Instead, I'm gusting uneasily alongside the Angelus Novus.

And so you get one more post on Palin while I await her speech at the convention.

It's occurred to me that Palin's ill-advised plane flight is - in a curious way - a stepchild of feminism. In her own way, Palin is a feminist. Seen through this prism, Palin's membership in Feminists for Life is actually a pretty accurate description of her politics. She believes women can work and wield power while raising a family. So do I. Her nomination illustrates the breadth of the consensus on women rising to the highest ranks of politics.

Exhibit A for this consensus: Rudy Giuliani just asked his convention - to thundering applause: "How dare they question whether Sarah Palin has enough time to be with her children and be vice president? How dare thay do that? When do they ever ask a man this question?" Not only Phyllis Schlafly but a host of evangelical women see no problem with Palin combining motherhood and presidential campaigning.

But because Palinofeminism is so superficial, it falls immediately into the hoary trap of equality versus difference that has plagued feminism ever since the Woman Question emerged. Historically, European feminists have tended to emphasize differences between men and women while agitating for a society in which those differences - especially childbearing - would not relegate women to second-class status. Anglo-American feminists, by contrast, have put more stress on the equality of men and women.

This historical divergence is schematic, of course, and you can find individual figures who departed from the main current of feminism in their countries. Still, the distinction is real enough that it helps explain why Germany and France and Sweden accommodate motherhood with generous legally-mandated paid maternity leave - and the United States does not.

Now, present-day American feminists are no longer so naive as to believe that a little suffrage and a pinch of formal legal equality will produce actual equality in society. The work of Joan Williams, for instance, shows how further progress toward gender equality will be blocked as long as the American economy demands "ideal workers" with no domestic responsibilities. As long as we deny that care-giving and mothering are profoundly gendered in both idea and fact, women will be systematically disadvantaged in the workplace and public life.

But the many, many American women who pursue a career despite otherwise conservative ideals aren't much aware of these more nuanced approaches. They're usually ignorant of the history of the equality versus difference debates. And so they're condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past. They compete with men on men's terms. If the job calls for them to be manly, they'll be downright macho - no matter how feminine their face or figure.

They don't see that women can never win on men's terms. They don't realize that we have to change the standards and definitions to reflect the importance of reproduction and care-work - or we'll never succeed in the public sphere. This is more than a little ironic because the same folks often trumpet the sanctity of the traditional family and male headship of the family, never mind that the economy (far more than feminism) has totally undermined both.

Of course, we can't know exactly why Sarah Palin chose to fly home after her water broke. We do know she was determined to give her speech regardless, come hell or broken water. We know she revealed her pregnancy only in the seventh month. We know she announced her return to work when baby Trig was just three days old. Through this arc of events, Palin showed she wouldn't let maternity interfere with her public duties for more than 48 hours.

Former Massuchusetts Governor Jane Swift, the first governor to give birth in office and the only one before Palin, followed a similar trajectory during her pregnancy with twins. She too worked during their infancy - and got in trouble for misusing government workers as her personal babysitters. She decided against running for reelection because of the subsequent bad publicity. Her career foundered on maternity - in part because she felt obliged to carry on as if nothing had changed.

The press has bandied about the Thomas Eagleton comparison in the past few days - and who knows, perhaps Palin too will be forced to withdraw (although the way the Republicans are rallying tonight, I doubt it). But I think the stronger analogy is to Swift's story. Swift herself sees the parallels between Palin's situation and her own.

Seen through the lens of Palinofeminism, both these women's choices make a lot of sense. I'm not snarking here; I'm sincerely trying to understand. If you feel you must compete on men's turf and on masculine terms, then you don't acknowledge the changes a pregnancy brings. Yes, most women can do their usual work throughout pregnancy. (I finished grading exams about five days before the Tiger was born.) Yes, many of us balance full-time work with an infant, though it's often a psychotically sleep-deprived time.

But most women make some some compromises with our schedules, demand some concessions from our bosses, and make space in our lives for that small but needy new human. If you're a hard-driving ambition woman, your compromises will likely be smaller. If you're a high-powered Republican woman - much less one in the macho state of Alaska! - there's precious little latitude for even imagining compromise. Things aren't a whole lot easier for high-powered Democratic women; but it's probably significant that women like Hillary Clinton deferred their political ambitions until their children were no longer little.

The people who pay most for Palinofeminism are the women themselves who try to do it all. Sure, it helps set an impossible standard for the rest of us, and so it harms women as a class, too. But really, it's those unreconstructed 1980s-style superwomen - and their families - who pay the price.

And yes - when men try to do it all at once - they, too, pay by not ever really knowing their children. But feminists have been saying that for a couple generations now.

The Rubble of History

Watching the Republican National Convention, the image that keeps haunting me is Paul Klee's Angelus Novus. This is the figure that Walter Benjamin called the angel of history - blown ever forward by the winds of time, face turned perpetually toward the past, watching the rubble of human "progress" pile up behind him:

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

(Walter Benjamin's ninth thesis from his "Theses on the Philosophy of History," cited in Wikipedia - yeah, I'm that lazy. Wikipedia claims fair use of this reproduction of Klee's Angelus Novus, and so do I.)

Of course, it's not the convention itself that calls forth the angel of history. It's the repeated references to danger and terror and 9/11. It's the memory of the avoidable human wreckage piled upon the ruins of the Twin Towers in the seven years since. And it's the very real fear that we as a country might not be wise enough to recognize the rubble for which we're culpable, nor strong enough to turn and face forward into the wind.

Peggy Noonan, Unplugged

While discussing Sarah Palin - and thinking the mikes were off - Peggy Noonan says what she really thinks of McCain's VP pick: "political bullshit."

Lovely to hear after all those years of Noonan generating it.



Thanks to Molly for tipping me off to this. As Molly says: "Watch it before it disappears!"

Why the GOP *Needs* Roe

Yeah, we all know that overturning Roe v. Wade is so firmly anchored in the GOP platform by now, the party's edifice would collapse without it.

But here are three reasons why the Republicans desperately need Roe to remain in force:

1. Legal abortion mobilizes the Religious Right like perhaps no other single issue. It forges activists and brings voters to the polls. (Gay marriage has served them well, too, but it doesn't resonate as well with young evangelicals, who are more inclined than their elders to live and let live.)

2. If Roe were overturned, you'd see a backlash against the backlash. Suddenly most American women (and many of the men) would recoil against stories of 12-year-olds forced to carry to term or women bleeding out after taking RU-486 without supervision. They might also realize that Roe protected their own right to self-determination and didn't just enable the loose morals of that slut down the street.

3. Without Roe, the 'wingers couldn't crow about the morals of conservative women like Sarah Palin who "choose life" or "decide not to abort." Oodles of commentators have noted the hypocrisy of this. If choice were illegal, the opportunity to show one's superior virtue would evaporate.

I'm not foolhardy enough to say "bring it on" - the short-term human costs of overturning Roe would be unacceptable. I'm just saying that the Republicans benefit from a synergy that relies on abortion remaining legal, safe - and not especially rare.

Palin's Cowboy Judgment, Confirmed

By now we've all heard that Bristol Palin wasn't pregnant last winter, but she's pregnant now. There's no room for schadenfreude. She shouldn't be made the poster child for the failure of abstinence-only approaches to teenage sexuality; we have too many such poster children already. She's going to face the difficulties of early motherhood with the added burden of publicity. She'll also find deep joy in her baby, I'm sure - a point too rarely mentioned for all the moralizing about "teenage mothers." She's embarking on an amazing adventure in one of the hardest ways possible. I wish her well.

But as I wrote yesterday, it's Sarah Palin's conduct that's at issue. We now have no reason to doubt that after her water broke, Palin first delivered a speech in Dallas and then traveled all the way back to her hometown. Yes, she beat the odds by not going into labor. It was a foolhardy maneuver, just the same.

Here's what eMedicine says about premature rupture of membranes (ROM, or "yikes, my water just broke!"):

Most patients (90%) enter spontaneous labor within 24 hours when they experience ROM at term. ...

All patients with ROM should be asked to come to the hospital to ensure fetal well being.

(For a solid discussion of this issue in laywoman's terms, see this article at drspock.com.)

In other words, this is not a situation where there are two reasonable alternatives, such as accepting or refusing pain relief in labor. (Yeah, I know some people will condemn epidurals, but I'm not willing to go there in this post.)

After one's water has broken, the major risks to the fetus are infection (which remains fairly modest within the first 24 hours) and a prolapsed cord (which can occur if the fetal head is not securely engaged, thus blocking the cervix). Cord prolapse is less likely in second and subsequent deliveries because the head is usually engaged during the last few weeks, covering the cervix as it begins to dilate. Since Sarah Palin was only at 36 weeks, it would have been prudent to be checked by a doctor, since cord prolapse can threaten the baby's life.

The very great risk in Palin's case was that she'd deliver the baby on the plane. As I wrote in yesterday's post, the time between her water breaking and her arrival at the medical center in Wasilla appears to have been about 16 hours. Afterward, she said she was confident it was safe to travel due to her previous pregnancies. As far as I've gathered, none of them involved a child with congenital anomalies or premature labor. I assume she didn't take to the air with those pregnancies, either, after her water broke. As much as I respect women's body-knowledge, there were too many known unknowns here.

She played chicken with delivering her baby in the air - and won. If she hadn't gotten so lucky, an Alaska Airlines attendant might well have caught her baby. This happens occasionally, and mother and baby are usually just fine. But this was a risky call with a baby four weeks premature and known to have Down syndrome, thus at high risk of heart defects and other physical problems.

You can say this was a personal decision about her body and her baby. Yes, it was. I'm not suggesting Sarah Palin be treated as a criminal like those expectant mothers who've been subjected to court-ordered cesarean sections or who've been jailed in South Carolina for admitting crack cocaine use. I'm only suggesting we consider what this publicly-performed instance of private decision-making says about her judgment and temperament.

I'm not even saying she should be held to a much higher standard just because she has presented herself as a paragon of Christian motherhood. (The hypocrisy of being "pro-life" but then risking your baby's life just to get home is so manifest, I'll spare you my sermonizing.)

I'm just saying that this incident shows reckless behavior more befitting a cowboy than a national leader. We've already had eight years of cowboy governance. We know what comes from arrogance and ignorance of risks.

And if Palin's judgment looks pretty poor here, it's topped by John McCain's in choosing a candidate whose main qualification is her appeal to the Christian Dominionist wing of the Republican Party.

What Palin's Pregnancy Says about Her Poor Judgment

We here at Kittywampus typically think it's far more fun to debunk rumors and conspiracy theories than to spread them. But I've been sick for the past few days with something flu-ish, and while sprawled on the sofa feeling sorry for myself, I've had too much time to read about Sarah Palin. And since I'm a historian of childbirth, the oddities in her pregnancy story set me wondering.

For one, no one on her staff suspected she was pregnant until she announced it at seven months. For another, Palin flew back to Alaska from Texas after her water broke; her son Trig was born a few hours after she reached the hospital. Let's say that again: Palin chose to get on an airplane and travel for at least eight hours after her water broke, risking a preterm birth while in the air.

These improbable details come from Alaskan news reports last spring; they're the closest I'll come to hard facts in this post. But as soon as I started Googling for more information, I learned they've spawned an even weirder rumor: that baby Trig is actually the son of Palin's oldest daughter, Bristol.

I'm only going to touch briefly on the rumor. I think the alleged facts as presented by Palin may actually be more damning. I also have qualms about digging into the private life of a minor child. The issue here is Palin's conduct, not her daughter's. And even Palin's behavior in this regard might be off the table - except she wants to make my uterus part of the public domain, so why should hers be private? Especially when her conduct was downright reckless by just about any standard?

Here's the main evidence for the rumor: Bristol was allegedly out of school due to mono for at least four months - a point that is unconfirmed - in order to hide her pregnancy. If the baby were Bristol's, it would explain why her mother had to hurry back from Texas to Alaska. There are pictures of Bristol that show what could be a baby bump, but might also simply be a belly, as well as photos of an incredibly svelte Sarah two months before her supposed due date. (For more details, see the diary at Daily Kos and a post at Menstrual Poetry, which lay out the most persuasive version of the case.)

The most compelling visual evidence is this photo taken when Palin claimed to be seven months pregnant:

(See the Daily Kos for more photos.)

I don't see even the shadow of a baby bump - and by seven months, you should. During my second pregnancy, my students started speculating was-I-fat-or-pregnant when I was just shy of five months, days before I told them. By seven months, strangers were predicting my baby's sex from the shape of my belly.

Granted, a few women don't show until very late in pregnancy. Most of them are fat to start with. Governor Palin is quite trim. She also had four previous pregnancies, and very few women show less with successive babies. It is possible to be petite and hide a pregnancy until the seventh month; my father's second wife did this in the early 1960s, basically by starving herself. So we'll give Palin the benefit of the doubt. Let's say she restricted her calories and has tremendous abs.

Assuming for just a moment that the rumor is true: As an advocate of abstinence-only education and a foe of abortion, Palin would've had ample reason to insist her daughter carry out the pregnancy - but in secret. This isn't just a plot line from Desperate Housewives. It's a time-honored way for highly religious parents to deal with the personal shame and public embarrassment of a pregnant, unwed teenager. Palin's public position would only have amplified the crisis. Perhaps they'd arranged for an adoption but the Down's diagnosis scuttled the deal - which might explain why Palin announced she was expecting so late in the game. (While the incidence of Down syndrome is exponentially higher in 44-year-olds than in 17-year-olds, it can occur with very young mothers, too. A routine ultrasound could have triggered suspicion if the nuchal fold - a fold in the neck - were unusually thick; so could routine blood testing.)

On the other hand, assuming the rumor is false: Perhaps Palin's fitness routine kept her unusually trim. She might well have kept mum about her pregnancy because she's the sort of high-achieving woman who thinks she has to prove she's ten times tougher than a man. We know she went back to work right after her daughter Piper was born, and we know she likes macho sports like hunting, so this would be in character for her.

But either way - whether the rumor is true or false - Palin's judgment looks pretty poor. If it's true, she's shown herself capable of lying on a grand scale. Yes, this is a family matter, but she has allowed baby Trig to become a political statement - a public symbol of her pro-life views. And do we really need another vice president with a Cheneyesque propensity for cover-ups?

But let's assume the rumor is false - as one must, for Bristol Palin's sake, until some enterprising reporter manages to locate a birth certificate and medical records. (Actually, Palin herself should release all these records and put the rumor to rest. I've found one response to the Daily Kos material with pictures purporting to debunk the rumor, but the appearance of a belly in one photo doesn't explain its absence in others.)

If Palin actually flew from Texas to Alaska after her water broke - and medically, there's no difference between a "leak" and a "break" - it was incredibly irresponsible. Alaska Airlines doesn't bar flying in late pregnancy, so it was entirely Palin's judgment call. Here's how the Anchorage Daily News reported it at the time:

Palin was in Texas last week for an energy conference of the National Governors Association when she experienced signs of early labor. She wasn't due for another month.

Early Thursday -- she thinks it was around 4 a.m. Texas time -- she consulted with her doctor, family physician Cathy Baldwin-Johnson, who is based in the Valley and has delivered lots of babies, including Piper, Palin's 7-year-old.

Palin said she felt fine but had leaked amniotic fluid and also felt some contractions that seemed different from the false labor she had been having for months.

"I said I am going to stay for the day. I have a speech I was determined to give," Palin said. She gave the luncheon keynote address for the energy conference.

Palin kept in close contact with Baldwin-Johnson. The contractions slowed to one or two an hour, "which is not active labor," the doctor said.

"Things were already settling down when she talked to me," Baldwin-Johnson said. Palin did not ask for a medical OK to fly, the doctor said.

"I don't think it was unreasonable for her to continue to travel back," Baldwin-Johnson said.

So the Palins flew on Alaska Airlines from Dallas to Anchorage, stopping in Seattle and checking with the doctor along the way.

"I am not a glutton for pain and punishment. I would have never wanted to travel had I been fully engaged in labor," Palin said. After four kids, the governor said, she knew what labor felt like, and she wasn't in labor. ...

They landed in Anchorage around 10:30 p.m. Thursday and an hour later were at the Mat-Su Regional Medical Center in Wasilla.

Baldwin-Johnson said she had to induce labor, and the baby didn't come until 6:30 a.m. Friday.

"It was smooth. It was relatively easy," Palin said. "In fact it was the easiest of all," probably because Trig was small, at 6 pounds, 2 ounces.

Palin said she wanted him born in Alaska but wouldn't have risked anyone's health to make that happen.

"You can't have a fish picker from Texas," said Todd.

(Source: Anchorage Daily News. See also the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.)

It doesn't matter if Palin was not in labor upon boarding the plane. She could very easily have gone into active labor in transit. Between the time her water broke until she arrived in the hospital, nearly 16 hours passed.

Palin's version of the story raises a host of questions:

• Why would you deliver your speech as scheduled instead of getting checked out by a doctor?
• Why would you then board a plane without at least being examined by an obstetrician for any signs of fetal distress?
• Why would you simply inform your physician, rather than asking whether it was advisable to fly?
• Given that the drop in air pressure can bring on contractions, why would you take a very significant chance on your baby being born on an airplane?
• Why would you do this knowing he was a month early?
• Why would you risk it knowing he had Down syndrome, which can affect the heart and other organs in ways that aren't obvious prior to birth?
• And why would you take the extra time to drive to Wasilla's little hospital, rather than proceeding directly to a major medical center in Anchorage, equipped to handle prematurity and other complications?

You don't have to take my word that Palin was taking a massive risk. At TPM Cafe, a doctor writing under the name of Steevo calls it "incredibly poor judgment." (Steevo's whole post is very informative.)

Regular readers know that I'm not terribly quick to judge or blame mothers. But this incident is not just a parenting issue; it's a matter of basic sense and judgment. If we accept Palin's version of events, she was highly irresponsible. This was batshit crazy.

And quite apart from Palin's position on the issues - which are awful enough - this is not the kind of judgment I want to see in the White House. Eight years of recklessness have been - as Obama said in his great speech - ENOUGH.

Update, 8/31/08, 9:15 p.m.: Reader Molly pointed me to this post by Andrew Sullivan, which suggests the story is moving up the food chain. I highly recommend this excellent, very reasonable analysis by Skeptic Dad. And man, I can't believe the traffic this post is generating. Maybe I ought to cover gossip more often?!

Update 9/4/08, 9:30 p.m.: This post has now eclipsed my all-time greatest hits: the Duggars' 18 kids, the health benefits of ejaculation, and the finger length-testosterone link. If you've made it this far through this post (written fuzzy-headed while I fought a mild flu), you might want to read my somewhat less rambling followups exploring the medical reasons why hopping that flight was foolhardy, and what such macho behavior suggests about Palin's flavor of feminism.

Huckabee Nostalgia

I never thought I'd feel wistful about Mike Huckabee not getting the VP nod. I didn't really think he'd have a chance. He's too extreme in his religious beliefs. He's too retrograde on women's rights.

Ha! After just a day, such troubling questions have arisen about Sarah Palin that I'm wallowing in nostalgia for Huckabee.

Let's run the comparison. First, Palin and Huckabee are both strikingly good-looking. Let's call that a wash even though Huckabee has never been profiled in Vogue. (Neither has ever been on the cover, though a convincing photoshopped fake of Palin as a cover girl made the rounds yesterday.) And yeah, I realize appearance shouldn't even be an issue, but as figleaf points out, John McCain saw Dan Quayle's looks as a great source of electoral appeal, so maybe McCain thinks Palin's beauty will draw some votes.

Now, Quayle was so dumb that he squandered any potential sex appeal as soon as he opened his trap. My first impression of Sarah Palin is that she's brighter than Quayle - although I cringed all the way down to my toenails when she said "nucular" in her first big speech yesterday. My guess is that behind the pretty facade, Palin - much like Huckabee - is reasonably smart and very politically savvy. After all, she mounted a bloodless coup within Alaska's political establishment and defeated a sitting Republican governor in the 2006 primary.

Palin was surely more palatable than Huckabee to the Grover Norquist types because she doesn't seem to share his concern for social justice - the quality that I liked best in Huckabee, along with his sideline as a rock musician. Her plan for lifting Alaskans economically seems to be further exploitation of the state's natural resources. Kinda hard to generalize that to the whole country. (On energy policy, she most closely resembles Dick Cheney - minus the evil scowl.)

When it comes to religious extremism, Palin may just top Huckabee. Especially on the grassroots level, the religious right would have been happy with Huckabee as the VP candidate. But Palin put James Dobson over the moon, according to an AP story:

Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, who initially said he could not vote for McCain but has since opened the door to an endorsement, called Palin "an outstanding choice that should be extremely reassuring to the conservative base" of the GOP. Dobson added that the ticket "gives us confidence he will keep his pledges to voters regarding the kinds of justices he would nominate to the Supreme Court."

Now, the AP is also reporting that while Palin's office says she does not identify herself as a Pentecostal, she has attended more than one church affliated with the Assemblies of God. Last I checked, the Assemblies of God were at the very heart of Pentecostalism. Why might Palin play this connection down in favor of saying she attends a nondenominational church? In a very even-handed assessment, Professor John Fea, a historian of religion in America at Messiah College, notes that public figures sympathetic to Pentecostalism tend to fly under the radar with the more radical elements of their faith, lest they alienate even other committed evangelicals. He expects Palin will likely do the same.

And that's where it gets scary. Maybe Palin herself does not believe that the Rapture is imminent. Maybe she doesn't believe in demonic possession or exorcism. Maybe she has never spoken in tongues. Maybe she's as skeptical as I about faith-healing. I realize there's a fair amount of variety within Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity, and maybe Palin doesn't buy the whole package.

But given her church-going history, Palin needs to clarify her beliefs. While I generally think faith is a private, personal matter best kept out of the public arena, her beliefs becomes our business if she thinks demons are at work in our lives. Or if she believes the Apocalypse is nigh and that we ought to be hurrying it along. Or if she embraces dominion theology - which basically calls for theocracy - as blogger Dogemperor thinks is possible. (My understanding of Pentecostalism isn't deep enough to evaluate Dogemperor's arguments, but I'm inclined to be convinced because his/her analysis of Feminists for Life is spot on.)

Even if Palin only believes in the warmer, fuzzier elements of Pentecostalism, like faith healing, I'm still, well, skeptical. We've already had one president who was completely divorced from the reality-based community. We sure don't need another. And on the whole, Pentecostalism is more loosely tethered to reality than Huckabee's Southern Baptist church.

When it comes to reproductive rights, Palin is about as reactionary as Huckabee, who said he would sign a bill like the one in South Dakota that would have permitted abortion only to save a woman's life. During her gubernatorial campaign, a staffer said Palin would ban abortion even in cases of rape and incest. However, he also said she'd allow a health exception, which is a loophole that nearly every hardcore anti-abortion activisit wants closed. I have a feeling Palin will be forced to back away from the health exception. Interestingly, she told the press back in 2006 that she favors contraception - which despite being the obvious way to reduce abortions won't sit well with much of the "pro-life" establishment. I'm curious whether she'll stick to her guns.

As I mentioned yesterday, Palin has been lionized by pro-lifers for knowingly giving birth to a baby with Down syndrome. In comments, Heather rightly pointed out that I'd parroted their way of framing her decision (she chose to have the baby "anyway"), which offends many within the disability community. But that is fairly consistently how the pro-lifers view it - as a noble sacrifice:

Palin has been held up by many evangelicals as a model for her decision to give birth to her fifth child in April after learning that he has Down syndrome.

"I think that's a plus in her favor with conservatives," said the Rev. Don Argue, a past president of the National Association of Evangelicals and chancellor of Northwest University in Seattle. ...

[Dobson] called her refusal to abort her fifth child "bravery and integrity in action."

(Source: Yet another AP article.)

Of course, if - like Dobson - you believe there's only one moral response, why single Palin out for unusual bravery?

And why celebrate her "choice"? If McCain and Palin (and Huckabee) have their way, there will be no choice. Period.

Ugh. I think my Huckabee nostalgia has been cured. But I don't feel one bit better.

McCain's Palin-eolithic VP Pick

Wow. John McCain has picked Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Sarah Palin? WTF??? That's pretty much what the media is saying, too. Palin is so obscure that the reporters on MSNBC admit they're reduced to consulting the Wikipedia's article on Palin, just like me. I was slightly shocked to see that Palin is a few months younger than me - talk about feeling old! - and amused to read that she's a former runner-up for Miss Alaska.

But I actually had heard of her once before this. What jogged my memory was the story of her giving birth to a baby with Down syndrome earlier this year. It was her fifth child. She knew the diagnosis in mid-pregnancy and chose to carry on anyway.

And this, I'm thinking cynically, is her main qualification. She has served as governor for just two years. We all know that lots of social conservatives dislike McCain. Palin is not just red meat for them, she's prime rib. She's a member of Feminists for Life, which mixes a little feminism with lots of "life." As a mother, she has lived her anti-abortion beliefs. (Gotta give her some grudging credit for not being hypocritical.) Oh, and she's a hunter who enjoys mooseburgers (the TV reporters are grooving on that tidbit).

I'm sure McCain is hoping Palin's XX chromosome will help him pick off some votes among centrist women - and maybe even bait a few of those near-mythical PUMAs into voting for a woman candidate. If so, they'd have to be just about delusional to think that Palin - a radical social conservative - is at all fungible with Hillary Clinton. As Debbie Wasserman Schultz just said on MSNBC: "I know Hillary Clinton, and Sarah Palin is no Hillary Clinton."

Palin may be a new, fresh face who made her name as a reformer, but her actual positions on the issues are hard to distinguish from the same old paleo-wingnuttery.

And my goodness, don't the Republicans have better-qualified women? Kay Bailey Hutchison? Christine Todd Whitman? Olympia Snowe? Debra Pryce? Even (shudder) Condi Rice? Oh, whoops! These gals have actual records that might get dragged into the election.

I would have had the same beef if Obama had picked, say, Evan Bayh. Sure, the vice presidential candidate should help corral votes, but they should also be prepared to lead should the president die or become seriously disabled - which in purely actuarial terms is not irrelevant when the president is 72 years old and counting.

The choice of Palin reminds me a little of Mondale selecting Geraldine Ferraro - mere tokenism. We all know how that turned out.

Finally, at the risk of sounding totally judgmental and anti-feminist: I do not think any parent of a four-month-old baby should sign onto a nationwide campaign, even if said baby is totally healthy. A baby that small is so damn needy. I can totally see how the temptation was irresistible; Palin won't be handed this chance again. I realize that if women are going to move up in politics, they can't wait until they're postmenopausal to launch their careers.

But caring for an infant can't be totally outsourced. I'm sure the baby will travel with Palin. They'll hire the best nannies. Even so, I think if you bring a child into the world, you need to be present for them when they're little. A child with special needs will need more than that, as Dan Conley argues eloquently at Open Salon.

For me, feminism also means caring for the weakest among us, and one corollary to that is that both parents need to be willing to reshuffle their priorities to ensure their children's needs are met. How can you do that with an infant while campaigning for the vice-presidency?

And how does that accord with anyone's "family values"?

Shorter Repub Response

Even Fox News is having a hard time spinning Obama's acceptance speech against him. (I know. I watched five minutes of Faux News so you won't have to. Don't say I never did y'all a favor.)

Obama was smart, compassionate, moving - and tough. I wanted him to at least mention restoring the rule of law and eliminating torture. Yeah, I know these are downer topics. They would've bogged Obama down in the ugly morass of what to do about the war criminals who've eviscerated the Constitution. But still!

Otherwise, I thought Chris Matthews' drooling response to Obama's speech was about right (and I cannot believe I just wrote that).

So how can the Republicans counter this next week at their convention? They don't have any alchemy of their own.

Since I'm all Fauxed out, I bring you the shorter GOP response :

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About Those Supposedly Anal-Retentive Germans ...

I'm back in my verdant garden, and I'm loving it. But goshdarnit, I do miss Berlin - warts, dog poop, and all.

Berlin contradicts lots of stereotypes about Germans. While there are pockets of stodginess, most of the city's younger inhabitants (and by younger, I mean under age 60!) appreciate nonconformity and human variety. Berlin has an openly gay mayor and it's just no big deal. You see punks and anarchists and eager young politicians and artists and students and little old ladies with ridiculous small dogs. You see lots of red, orange, and purple hair. (Call me sentimental, but I just dyed my hair red today; while I'm not quite Nicole Kidman, it looks pretty great.)

The city also puts to rest the idea that Germans are anal-retentively obsessive about cleanliness. Sure, in the south and in most villages, everything is shiny and well-groomed. I've seen people actually rake the gravel in front of their houses into neat, straight lines just to maintain order.

But when you arrive in Berlin, you're liable to slip and fall in a pile of dog shit within your first 48 hours. (This happened to my own dear mom once.) I can't say I love this trait of Berliners, who own some 150,000 dogs according to one estimate. According to my personal estimate, I'd say about 1 turd in 100 gets picked up.

Like any big city, Berlin also has human denizens who regard the world as their potty. Our subway station smelled particularly vile this summer. Apparently someone is trying to reassert order and sanitation on this one count (and I'm all for it), because this lovely sign was posted just outside the station:

Photo by me, Sungold. The sign says "entryway under video surveillance."

What I adore about this sign is that it's not homemade. Someone is mass producing these beauties.

Attack of the Big She-Cats

From I Can Has Cheezburger?

What's with all the big-cat metaphors for women of a certain age? Unless you've been in an induced coma all this week, by now you've heard the acronym PUMA - "Party Unity My Ass" - for intransigent Hillary supporters, which as we all know, are all foaming-at-the-mouth, ferociously menopausal women.

Never mind that Katha Pollitt looked for these legendary beasts in Denver and couldn't find any. They were all circling around Chris Matthews like a pride of lions around potential meat, I suppose. Here's what Katha saw:

I thought I might find some PUMAs at the Equalitea-- like every other journalist here, I want to track down those elusive felines. (Later I learn they have spent the day hanging with Chris Matthews, getting enormous amounts of exposure and making women look like lunatics.) In the powder room I run into Ellie Smeal and Mavis Leno. "What about those PUMAs?" I ask.

"There has to be some reality here," Ellie says exasperatedly. "Personally I think a lot of these people were McCain supporters all along. I know plenty of women who gave heart and soul to Hillary who are with Obama now."

(The Nation has the rest of Katha's amusing PUMA hunt.)

Yeah, it's not that to-the-death Clinton loyalists don't exist. They do. They have legitimate gripes against the media's sexism during the primary; not so legitimate against Obama's campaign. Those few who are still holding out on Obama are just playing straight into the Republicans' paws. As Nora Ephron writes in today's Huffington Post, preserving Roe v. Wade ought to be argument enough to sway every remaining Clintonista into the Obama camp.

But most of these alleged PUMAs are the product of Republican machinations. Amanda Marcotte has been exposing the thinness of the PUMA narrative for nearly two months now. At least some of them are this season's version of the Roveian Swiftboaters or the Nixonian ratfuckers.

And then there are the even wackier PUMAs who've crept out of the LaRouche wilderness. Some followers Lyndon LaRouche showed up at Obama's Berlin speech, as my friend Kevin at Rumproast reported a few weeks ago. LaRouchians in Berlin? Not exactly my idea of a broadbased American movement.

The PUMA appellation comes on top of "cougars," those predatory over-the-hill gals on the hunt for tender young man-meat. And with two data points, I think we've got a budding metaphorical field - a new way of framing aggressive, powerful femininity.

I dunno. It's no secret I love cats. I'm fascinated by the big ones, too. But there's no shortage of condescension and misogyny in both of these terms. As Kate Harding acidly observes at Salon, by some definitions, a 40-year-old woman dating a 35-year-old cub already counts as a cougar. A PUMA is by definition shrill and irrational.

So there's no question that pumas and cougars are yet another expression of backlash against feminism. These cats aren't meant to evoke beauty or grace. They're an expression of fear. My gut says it's mostly male fear, but that may be unfair. Lots of women, too, fear powerful female politicians (who put their own powerless into relief or just get branded as bitches). Or they worry that overtly sexual women might steal their man.

The metaphors draw on the current of cultural ailurophobia that goes back at least to the witchhunts, and that has been wed to misogyny ever since. If a pussycat can be a witch's familiar, how much worse these big kitties! In a world where insect bites account for far more disease, death, and misery, we still hold these shared fears of the great cats as - tellingly - "man eaters."

And yet there's an optimistic way to view these big she-cats, too. By definition, backlash only occurs when there's something substantial to oppose. It's no coincidence, I think, that this frame is appearing in parallel with Clinton's candidacy and media reports of women have sex just because they want to.

And didn't Helen Reddy sing it first? "I am woman, hear me ROAR!"

So we've got two options, as I see it, which aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. We can ironically appropriate these catticisms, much like feminists have taken back "bitch"; we can be tigresses and lionesses, or at least mama ocelots. Or we can mock them altogether. You've probably already seen this wonderful spoof that ran on the Daily Show last month, but if you haven't, it'll be your best-spent five minutes of the day.

Eighty-Eight Years Ago Today

Let's face it: Eighty-eight is a weird number, unless you're a piano player. And so the only reason we're all hearing about today being the eighty-eighth anniversary of American women winning the vote is because the Democratic convention is shining a spotlight on it. And that's only happening because Hillary Clinton became the first woman to be a serious, serious contender for the presidency.

But precisely because eighty-eight is such an artificial number to celebrate, it's got me doing the math. I realized that my grandma - the one who fancied herself the queen bee of Republican politics in North Dakota - was already thirty when American women achieved suffrage. I was just shy of thirty when she died in 1993.

When you run the calculation that way, eighty-eight years sounds like nanoseconds on a geological scale. It's a lot harder to take for granted our right to vote. And yeah, non-white men got the vote earlier, but if they lived in the South, Jim Crow kept them from actually exercising their vote even when I was a little girl.

And so it's especially frustrating when CNN picks out a teary Hillary delegate from the crowd at the convention in Denver and gives her about five uninterrupted minutes to state that she won't vote for McCain, but Obama has two months to convince her that she shouldn't just stay home. This particular delegate was black, female, and about my age. I don't begrudge her tearing up; heaven knows I got all wet-eyed watching Michelle Obama's speech yesterday, and I did it again today at the thought that McCain could maybe possibly actually win.

But staying home to make a point? You might as well vote for Ralph Nader.

The Devils We Don't Know

Exorcist kitteh from I Can Has Cheezburger?

Dishing out a little of the Republicans' medicine, Joe Conason notes that some of the names under consideration for John McCain's running mate have much more serious character flaws than the old plagiarism accusations against Joe Biden. To wit, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal claims to have not just witnessed an exorcism but performed one himself. Oh, and while he was at it, Jindal cast out his friend's cancer along with the demons.

Where Conason goes wrong is in assuming Jindal's demonic history is a liability. Not so fast! As I mentioned a few months ago, a Baylor Religion Survey found that 43.6% of respondents believe demons definitely exist, while another 22.6% said they probably do. A miniscule 12.4% ruled them out.

So if roughly two-thirds of Americans believe in demons, and those believers trend Republican anyway, McCain should pick Jindal - why the hell not? He might also try speaking in tongues at the Republican convention next week. That'll get him more votes than promising us another 100 years in Iraq.

Reaping What I Sowed

Back in June, about a month later than optimal, I planted something like 30 tomato starts in my garden. I'd grown them from seed - mostly heirloom varieties, with a couple of hybrid cherries - but neglected to plant them on time because I got too busy. (I'm a passionate gardener, but my ambition always outstrips my organization.) They were spindly and purple-yellowed by the time I put them in the ground; if they'd been Christmas trees, Charlie Brown would have taken them home. Before we started our summer travels, I put down newspapers as a weed barrier, my husband caged them, and we mulched them with straw.

Here's those runty little plants, ten weeks later:


The bed in the next photo has traditionally been a lost cause because its inhabitants compete with the silver maple's thirsty roots. But these maters aren't just holding their own, they seem to think they're performing a solanaceous version of Jack and the Beanstalk.


Unsurprisingly, given how late I was in planting them out, my cherry tomatoes are doing the best. They're so rampant that they'll probably be one big mass of disease before long, but for now, they're a jungle of delights.


And here's my namesake, the Sungold cherries. As you might expect, they're juicy and delicious.


I've also got oodles of Snow White, Galinas, Black Cherry, and Sweet Million cherries. Even the Sweet Millions, which are little red guys similar to what you can buy in the stores, have an uncommonly sweet and complex flavor this year. We've picked about three-quarters of a gallon in the past 24 hours - and eaten them all. The big guys are mostly still ripening, but I did carve up a Cherokee Purple for lunch.

Never mind manna. To heck with ambrosia. Tomatoes - juicy, tangy-sweet, and warm from the sun - are the favored foods of the gods.