Top 5 Minutes Pro-Palin Feminist Journalists Should Spend Before They Write Another Newspaper Column

One of the most disturbing things I have been hearing lately is that some supporters of Senator Clinton may be flocking to Governor Palin (an extremely small number, no doubt, but significant nonetheless); I have even been reading some columns across the country’s newspapers in which self-described feminists try to persuade women to do so. I was going to make a completely reasoned, logical response as to why this is a bad idea.

Bad move. Politics is not about reason or logic. It’s a popularity contest held by an uninformed electorate. Think I’m being too cynical? How about this: think of someone you know of average intelligence. Got that in your head? Now realize: half of Americans are dumber than that person. And a lot of them vote.

What Karl Rove politics has taught me is that reality is nebulous: you’re allowed to say anything made-up if you want, as long as you get your talking points across. I‘ve finally decided: why fight it? Why not go down that rabbit hole? Why not construct an argument that proves your point even if you're not sure you believe in it, and even if the evidence you present isn't accurate?

Why pretend that people care about journalistic principles, or even know what they are? Why pretend that truth about yourself or reality or what you actually believe in is relevant to anything at all? Guys like Sean Hannity and Bill O‘Reilly have figured out anything can sound like the truth if you yell it loud enough and you‘re a big enough cocksucker.

I say why not fight fire with fire…that way we can all burn.

I am McBane, and I approve this message.

5) Minute One

Feminist, I just read your column.

I’ve sat here and thought about it for awhile.

I feel compelled to respond, and I’m not sure why. I guess it’s because I have talked with many women who share a viewpoint similar to yours. Though a Man, I want to understand your frustration better. Because I feel like there are very, very strong arguments out there not to vote for McCain-Palin and to vote for Obama-Biden, and yet so many Hillary supporters like yourself seem to be unconvinced.

It would be demeaning of me to say that when it comes to voting you don’t understand the repercussions of your decisions; it’s equally likely, if not more so, that I don’t get it. Or more benignly, it could just be that we just come from different places and don’t interpret things in the same way. But now that your article has let me understand your frustrations a little better, let me give you my point of view, so maybe you can try to understand the frustrations of people like myself.

I've spent the last 30 years of my life trying to overcome physical maladies and illnesses inflicted on me in a Russian gulag at the end of the Cold War. I have been bed-ridden for months at a time. I’ve had nearly 50 surgeries. Even now, I can barely walk upright. My life is exhausting and terrifying. If I had no family to help me and had to try and get by on the assistance the government gives, I would not be alive right now. I’m not complaining - what happened to me can (and does) happen to all different types of people. But chronic suffering is a powerful thing. It makes you never want to see it happen to anybody else.

I live in one of the largest military towns in this country. My three best friends are all in Iraq right now. I also personally know several people who died there. I have read and watched as people who have lost limbs, or have been heavily psychologically damaged have since come back. A lot of them don’t get the care we should give them. When I see them and the sacrifices they and their families have made for God knows what reason, I never know what to say. I do know I have no idea how to make any of it right. I just want to stop this ridiculous crap.

I live in a place with a lot of human trafficking. My wife is a former victim. I researched the area extensively when I got my doctorate. Trafficking is pervasive and cheap; at least in the days of slaves as chattel, there was reason to take care of them from an investment standpoint. Now humans are easily identified, kidnapped, used up, and disposed of. There are slaves of all kinds. There are sex slaves, mainly young girls: Eastern Europeans on the east coast, Asians on the West, Latinas in the south. There is slave labor: (ECONOMIC POP QUIZ - what do you get when you globalize a world economy? Competitive labor costs! What’s the most competitive labor cost? Slaves!) many of them are children. Coal workers in Brazil, brick makers in Pakistan are some of these.

Fighting traffic in humans is something I currently do for a living now, and I can't sleep most nights. I see something new and horrible every day. Human trafficking is at a point where there are more slaves alive now than there were during the antebellum South (the population of people alive right now is obviously much larger, but still - every one of those slaves is an independent person. They’re not just a statistic. As Lincoln said, “if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.”)

4) Minute Two

So no, kindly columnist, I’m not in your shoes. But I know something about disappointment and suffering - these two things have been at the core of my life; both experiencing them and studying them. They are not uniquely feminine experiences. And I feel like McCain and Palin are on the wrong side of how to improve the lives of those who suffer. They don’t want universal health care. They don’t want to admit we made mistakes in Iraq and need to stop hemorrhaging money and human lives there. They’re not worried that we might all be dead from global warming in 50 years. I could go on, but the Republicans are on the wrong side of so many issues, it’s amazing.

I should qualify that: wrong is to some extent a relative matter. But I think logically, secular humanism is something that absolutely everyone in this world would benefit from. (By most definitions, that is an essential component of feminism.) And I think that the Republican party and Sarah Palin is the wrong place to go looking for that.

You’re a journalist. I understand that you have to write columns that make a provocative argument. But do you really believe what you’re saying? I hope so, because people who read it will be convinced that you mean it. To paraphrase the late Kurt Vonnegut: we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. If your principles are such that you feel like voting for a ticket with Sarah Palin on it outweighs all the arguments against it, then you should do it. But if you would feel guilty about it, maybe you shouldn’t.

Again, perhaps I simply don’t understand the argument of a lot of disaffected Hillary supporters (like yourself). Because the sense I get is simply that they are seeking an ephemeral feeling of vindication for their candidate losing the nomination. Hillary is qualified to be president; to some degree I will even admit she is a sympathetic character, and (assuming a Democratic congress) I would have gladly accepted her as my president (and she still may end up back in the White House, one day). But to me, to support Sarah Palin in the name of feminism to subconsciously make up for Hillary losing the primary seems like a perversion of feminist ideals. Again, I’m just a Man. I only have one X chromosome. So hopefully I‘m just being stupid right now and there are some other points I don‘t understand.

3) Minute Three

One of those points I might not understand is how Sarah Palin’s femininity could transfer from her being vice president to ultimately empowering women across the nation at large. I can’t imagine it being as amazing as some women seem to suggest. I imagine that if Barack Obama becomes president, on inauguration day the sun will rise, the sun will set, a lot of black people will look around and smile for a minute, and then they probably get back to the largely mundane tasks of their lives, like the rest of us. I imagine if Hillary was in that situation instead, many women would do the same thing; they would just happen to notice that in Hillary‘s case, they would start to see things on her agenda that would change their lives for the better, as opposed to Palin, who would make their lives worse.

Let’s be honest, too. Thatcher. Meir. Merkel. Women have been in charge, and will be in charge, all around the world. Some of them are capable. Some are not. Some are on the right side of the issues. Some are not. I don’t understand why there needs to be a woman on this winning ticket, right now, in this election year.

One thing I do understand: a woman will eventually be president of this country. Of that, there is no doubt in my mind. I think, ironically, one of the things working against Hillary was that she was such a presumptive favorite that it created an underdog appeal for Obama. Two years ago no one (and I mean no one) said “well Hillary Clinton is certainly up by a huge margin in all the polls now, but by the simple fact of her gender she cannot possibly win an election for president.” Again, we will have a woman president. Is it overdue? Yeah. Fuck yeah, even. But would women be suffering if Obama-Biden were in charge instead of McCain-Palin? No. I know something about suffering. I abhor it.

This would not be suffering.

Did Hillary get a raw deal in the primaries? I think she probably did. But is getting Palin on the ticket what would make her happiest? Are you fucking kidding me?

I mean yes, Chris Matthews is a nincompoop. Keith Olbermann can be one too. So can a lot of media members. So can a lot of Men. (So can a lot of women.) And I don’t mean to make light of this; I understand your frustration runs deeper for a lot of different reasons, and I understand that perhaps when you saw what happened to Hillary, it maybe felt like part of your identity was being attacked as well. That maybe you felt some betrayal of what the possibility of being a woman in America was; that maybe you felt like you suddenly realized that the country was full of sexist hypocrites and that you weren‘t as close to equality as you thought.

I don’t feel quite the same way, obviously, and I freely admit that I can’t understand if you feel this way or not, or how much it bothers you if it does; it’s hard to measure another person’s emotion.

But there are 300 million people in this country. There are six and a half billion people in the world. A lot of them are super-fucked. They need help right now. They can have an America in the hands of a party that, at its’ core, I think still cares about people; or they could have a McCain-Palin ticket, the ticket of a party that at it’s core cares about markets and trying to remake the world into America, though America a) doesn‘t have that capability any more and b) is kind of a huge hypocrite when it comes to “implementing“ American ideals in other countries.

4) Minute Two

This is kind of an important election.

I happen to love the Democratic ticket, but I will accept that hypothetically there could be better solutions, or choices, than Obama-Biden (that involve Clinton). But I just remember 2000, when I voted for Nader, because I thought maybe it really didn’t matter all that much who won between the two major parties; I just wanted a third-party voice to be heard.

I was about as wrong as a human being could possibly be; it did matter who won. A week later, no one gave a shit about Ralph Nader‘s movement. And Bush is still our president. The economy sucks. Our military is fucked. We have a debt that, along with rising Social Security and Medicare costs for the baby boom, will cripple my generation fiscally. We could lose Afghanistan. We’re not doing anything with Pakistan. We’re happy to let the oil companies continue our stupid energy policy. Bin Laden is still at large. We’re creating a free recruitment campaign for terrorists every day we stay in Iraq. We won’t fix Iraq; the surge is bullshit - violence is down because we’ve set up a nation of Tony Soprano-styled divisive ethnic groups. Russia is getting scary again. We need someone who can hold their own with Putin and Maliki and Ahmadinejad and Jintao and hell, even Sarkozy (the French are always dicks). We can’t have eight years even remotely like the last one. Even if a woman is part of it. You see what I’m getting at?

Good. Now remember: you’re a newspaper columnist. That means you’re about as oppressed as Leona Helmsley. If it bugs you that much that Clinton didn’t get the nom, look in the mirror; maybe you could have been a little more active. Maybe you should have cared as much as Obama supporters did, knocking on doors and organizing caucuses and raising money. Don’t cry about it now; now there’s no justification for you to be a coward and make an incendiary argument for McCain/Palin (especially one that people will read) when you know (or should know) that it’s an irresponsible thing to do.

1) Minute Five

Be a feminist; it‘s a great thing to be.

But don’t be a bitch.

And don‘t vote McCain/Palin.