A long time ago I picked up David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and immediately set it down again. Being the kind of person who can’t imagine ever reaching the end of her appetite for books, I will usually think: there will be time. There will be time to read this and understand it and think about it. And until that time, I think I will read something else to while the hours away. Something, hopefully, that does not expose me to the risk of carpal tunnel syndrome. And that has no footnotes, none whatsoever.
I never really liked Wallace’s fiction that much – the short pieces I read, anyway. As is often the case with prestigious writers I don’t like, I don’t think he was untalented. I can see why young men love him. There’s a visceral, throttle-the-dictionary pull to his prose. I can see how that can get addictive. He wrote with what often felt like a strong optimism in the possibility of language, which was great in an essay but took me nowhere in a story.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Feminism, obama, palin, stupid stupid stupid
Speaking of discourse: Obama went there, and used the phrase “lipstick on a pig” at a rally yesterday. Oh yes, I know, he meant to attack the McCain/Palin’s claims to the mantle of “change,” not Palin specifically. Of course, Palin is the only reason McCain can now talk about change without looking like an utter fool, and as such the two aren’t precisely separable. And as everyone remembers from a short two weeks ago, “The only difference between a bulldog and a hockey mom is lipstick.” No matter how often Obama’s used the phrase in the past, in this news cycle the connection is swift and obvious.
So any speechwriter or adviser or for that matter, candidate, is smart enough to know that the press will go straight for any such remark as plainly referring to Palin. Even your average political rally audience is going to. Even assuming they were not that smart, you have to ask yourself what kind of dialogue is going on internally in a campaign that they are insensitive to the sexist overtones in an expression that only a few short months ago were being used against their own damn primary candidate? It boggles the mind that anybody thought the power of this phrase was worth the risk of using it.
Don’t get me wrong. John “At least I don’t put my make-up on like a trollop, you cunt” McCain gets no credibility with me when he cries sexism, particularly since it is he who started this whole lipstick on a pig nonsense against Clinton.
But it by no means excuses this asinine misstep that McCain is a hypocrite here. Obama rose to the bait the Republican party laid out for him – and he’s the one running on the platform about changing the way we talk about politics. It’s actually not that hard to practice what you preach in this instance – despite the anti-political-correctness brigade’s assertions, it’s really not that hard to avoid sexist and racist language if you would genuinely like to do so.
Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, indeed.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Last night I had two Canadian friends to dinner. Along with pasta and cold cucumber soup, we had the typical sort of behind-closed-doors political discussion that foreigners living in the States excel in. In this mode of conversation, every statement is punctuated by an expression of incredulity at “America,” “Americans,” and their crazy ways. The subject almost always ends in the same place – disbelief at the completely polarized way Americans talk about public affairs. In a political discourse where the word “independent” more often than not means “equal parts Democrat and Republican,” the with-us-or-against-us mentality is more prevalent than anyone seems willing to admit.
This has been brought home to me in the last week listening to – and reading – various people whose opinions I respect argue about the perky moosehunter from Alaska whose nasal vigour has so captivated the nation. Jessica Grose at Jezebel noted that for a certain sort of woman, in which class she includes herself, Sarah Palin can cause “violent, nay, murderous, rage.” On Shakesville, while simultaneously decrying sexism in certain attacks on Palin, Misty says she is a “conservative fuckneck.” I could list more examples, but you get the drift.
Now, of course, both of these remarks are taken out of context. They are the icing on relatively coherent critiques of Palin’s political positions and her sugarcoating of her own record. And of course they are irreverent, in the way blog writers like to be irreverent because their writing is impulse-driven and off-the-cuff. But they’re still of that “irrational American” variety of political criticism that worries me.
