Dear Larry, Thanks! John
Only yesterday pundits assured us that George W. Bush, who lost the
popular election by half a million votes, would tread softly and
govern meekly. “He has no mandate to do anything except Be Nice,”
Molly Ivins wrote in the December Progressive. But who needs a
mandate, with the mainstream media resolutely ignoring the
still-unfolding scandal of the Florida election? Bush is making hay
while the sun shines-paying off his debt to business with the
nominations of Elaine Chao, late of the Heritage Foundation, for
Labor; Gale Norton, lead-paint champion, for Interior; and Christie
Whitman, governor of the state with the second-worst air pollution
in the country (Texas is first), for EPA. Over at HHS, anti-choicers
get Tommy Thompson-whose devotion to welfare reform provides a note
of continuity with the worst aspects of the outgoing Clinton
administration. Most ominous, the Christian and loony right gets its
reward for keeping quiet during the campaign: the nomination of John
Ashcroft for Attorney General.
How far to the right is Ashcroft? As I write, the Democrats on the
Judiciary Committee are doing their best to help him obscure his
ghastly twenty-five-year record on abortion, guns, women’s rights,
gay rights, the separation of church and state. A rare exception was
Ted Kennedy, who closely questioned the nominee on his crusade as
Missouri’s attorney general against voluntary school desegregation.
But so far the only senator who has publicly said she will vote no
is Barbara Boxer, never a Nation favorite, while “progressive”
stalwarts like Paul Wellstone and Russell Feingold (who was
particularly fawning and vacuous in his questioning), not to mention
Tom Daschle and Joe Biden, have all said they were inclined to vote
yes (Wellstone and Biden later backpedaled after an outcry). You’d
think the Democrats had lost the popular election! Unless Ashcroft
is discovered to be sleeping with Barney Frank, his confirmation
looks assured. Who in the Senate can be expected to care that as
governor of Missouri, Ashcroft twice vetoed bills that would have
equalized voter-registration procedures in mostly black and mostly
white counties, given that not one senator would sponsor the
Congressional Black Caucus’s January 6 protest of the Electoral
College vote? The Republicans really are reactionaries, but the
Democrats are only pretending to be liberals.
If Ashcroft is not too far out to be confirmed, who is? Accepting an
honorary degree at Bob Jones University in 1999, Ashcroft proclaimed
that in America “We have no king but Jesus.” (Why aren’t Jews up in
arms about that?) This is a man who, on the eve of his swearing-in
as a Missouri senator, anointed himself with Crisco, supposedly
after the manner of the Hebrew kings. Can it be that Barbara Boxer
is the only senator discomfited by the thought of an attorney
general who thinks the Bible instructs him to put salad oil on his
head?
John Ashcroft is not just a conservative: He stands at the place
where Christian fanatics, anti-choicers, militiamen, gun nuts, and
white supremacists come together. As Joe Conason reports, he has
acknowledged meeting with the head of the St. Louis chapter of the
racist Council of Conservative Citizens to discuss the case of a
member jailed on federal charges of conspiring to murder an FBI
agent. He defended the leaders of the Confederacy in Southern
Partisan, the neo-Confederate magazine that has done a brisk
business in T-shirts celebrating the assassination of Abraham
Lincoln (Timothy McVeigh was wearing one when arrested). If Southern
Partisan rings a bell, by the way, it’s because when editor Richard
Quinn was discovered to be managing John McCain’s South Carolina
campaign, a Bush spokesperson criticized McCain for associating with
him.
Among Ashcroft’s many connections on the far side is Larry Pratt,
who, as head of Gunowners of America, functions as a kind of liaison
between the militia movement and Capitol Hill. A handwritten note
from Ashcroft is posted on Pratt’s website (www.gunowners.org).
According to the Guardian, “the two men know each other from a
secretive but highly influential right-wing religious group called
the Council for National Policy, of which Mr Pratt is a member and
whose meetings Mr. Ashcroft has attended.” Tom DeLay and Trent Lott
also belong.
In a glowing profile in CounterPunch (July 1-15, 1999), Alexander
Cockburn uncritically paraphrases the position for which Pratt is
best known-that the surest proof against Columbine-type school
shootings is to arm teachers to shoot students “just like they do in
South Africa, where one instructor recently gunned down a bellicose
student.” South Africa is one of the world’s most violent countries,
with a long history of serious corporal punishment-with whips-in
its dismal black schools, so it’s not immediately obvious why the
United States should follow its lead even if Pratt’s tale is true.
But the South African consul says there is no such policy and knows
of no such incident having occurred, nor did a media search turn one
up. Need one point out as well that millions of pistol-packing
teachers present something of a danger to defenseless
schoolchildren? On the other hand, since Pratt also believes in guns
for kids (Ashcroft’s note was to thank Pratt for enlightening him
about the anti-gun provisions in the juvenile justice bill), the
students could just shoot back.
Pratt’s website is a grab bag of nuttiness (“What the Bible Says
About Gun Control”; “Guns Save Health Care Costs”). But it would be
wrong to see him as a marginal, if colorful, figure. CounterPunch
doesn’t mention it, but Pratt has been a leader of the hard-core
Christian right for many years. He led the walkout of religious
conservatives at the White House Conference on Families in 1980; he
has fundraised for Operation Rescue. In 1996, he was cochairman of
Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaign until he was forced to resign
when his links to Christian Identity and white-supremacist groups
became public. Today Pratt pals around with Lott, DeLay, and
Ashcroft-whom Bush Senior reportedly considered for the Attorney
General post but rejected as too extreme to be confirmed.
That was then, this is now.
February 5, 2001
No Olive Branch
How many times did we hear during the endless campaign that Bush
wouldn’t go after abortion if elected? Republicans, Naderites, and
countless know-it-alls and pundits in between agreed: Pro-choice
voters were too powerful, the country was too divided, the
Republicans weren’t that stupid, and Bush didn’t really care about
abortion anyway. Plus, whoever won would have to (all together now)
“govern from the center.” Where are all those smarties now, I
wonder? Bush didn’t even wait for his swearing-in ceremony to start
repaying the immense debt he owes to the Christian right, which gave
him one in four of his votes, with the nominations of anti-choice
diehards John Ashcroft for Attorney General and Tommy Thompson to
head Health and Human Services.
On his first full day in office, Bush reinstated the “gag rule”
preventing international family-planning clinics and NGOs from
receiving U.S. funds if they so much as mention the word “abortion.”
(This action was widely misrepresented in the press as being a ban
on funding for performing abortions; in fact, it bans clinics that
get U.S. aid from performing abortions with their own money and
prohibits speech-whether lobbying for legal changes in countries
where abortion is a crime or informing women with life- or
health-threatening pregnancies about their legal options.) A few
days later, Thompson announced he would look into the safety of
RU-486, approved by the FDA this past fall-a drug that has been
used by half a million European women over twelve years and has been
more closely studied here than almost any drug on the market. In the
wake of Laura Bush’s remark to NBC News and the Today show that she
favored retention of Roe v. Wade, both the President and the Vice
President said the administration has not ruled out a legal
challenge to it, placing them to the right of Ashcroft himself, who
told the Judiciary Committee he regarded Roe as settled law (at
least until the makeup of the Supreme Court changes, he did not
add).
Don’t count on the media to alert the public. The press is into
champagne and confetti: Who would have thought Dick Cheney would be
such an amiable talk show guest! Time to move on, compromise, get
busy with that big tax cut. “Who in hell is this ‘all’ we keep
hearing about?” a friend writes, “as in ‘all agree’ that the Bush
transition has been a smashing success?” An acquaintance at the
Washington Post, whose executive editor, Leonard Downie, Jr., claims
to be so objective he doesn’t even vote, says word has come down
from “on high” that stories must bear “no trace of liberal
bias”-interestingly, no comparable warnings were given against
pro-Bush bias. So, on abortion, look for endless disquisitions on
the grassiness of the anti-choice roots, the elitism of
pro-choicers, and the general tedium of the abortion issue. Robin
Toner could barely stifle a yawn as she took both sides to task in
the New York Times (“The Abortion Debate, Stuck in Time,” January
21): Why couldn’t more anti-choicers see the worth of stem-cell
research, like anti-choice senator Gordon Smith, who has several
relatives afflicted with Parkinson’s (but presumably no relatives
unwillingly pregnant); and why can’t more pro-choicers acknowledge
that sonograms “complicate” the status of the fetus? In an article
that interviewed not a single woman, only the fetus matters: not
sexuality, public health, women’s bodies, needs, or rights.
Now is the time to be passionate, clever, original, and urgent. I
hate to say it, but pro-choicers really could learn some things from
the antis, and I don’t mean the arts of arson, murder, and lying to
the Judiciary Committee. Lots of right-wing Christians tithe-how
many pro-choicers write significant checks to pro-choice and
feminist organizations? Why not sit down today and send President
Bush a note saying that in honor of the women in his family you are
making a donation to the National Network of Abortion Funds to pay
for a poor woman’s abortion (NNAF, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA
01002-5001)?
The antis look big and powerful because they have a built-in base in
the Catholic and fundamentalist churches. But (aha!) pro-choicers
have a built-in constituency too: the millions and millions of women
who have had abortions. For all sorts of reasons (privacy concerns,
overwork, the ideology of medicine) few clinics ask their patients
to give back to the cause. Now some providers and activists are
talking about changing that. “My fantasy,” Susan Yanow of the
Abortion Access Project wrote me, “is that every woman in this
country gets a piece of paper after her procedure that says
something like, ‘We need your help. You just had a safe, legal
abortion, something that the current Administration is actively
trying to outlaw. Think of your sisters/mothers/daughters who might
need this service one day. Please help yourself to postcards and
tell your elected representatives you support legal abortion, join
(local group name here), come back as a volunteer,’ and so on.” If
every woman who had an abortion sent her clinic even just a dollar a
year, it would mean millions of dollars for staff, security, and
cut-rate or gratis procedures. Think how different the debate would
be if all those women, and the partners, parents, relatives, and
friends who helped them, spoke up boldly-especially the ones whose
husbands are so vocally and famously and self-righteously
anti-choice. If women did that, we would be the grassroots.
February 19, 2001
Vaginal Politics
Imagine Madison Square Garden brimming over with 18,000 laughing and
ebullient women of every size, shape, age, and color, along with
their male friends, ditto. Imagine that in that immense space,
usually packed with hooting sports fans, these women are watching
Oprah, Queen Latifah, Claire Danes, Swoosie Kurtz, Kathleen
Chalfant, Julie Kavner (voice of Marge Simpson), Rosie Perez, Donna
Hanover (soon-to-be-ex-wife of New York’s semi-bigamous mayor), and
sixty-odd other A-list divas put on a gala production of The Vagina
Monologues, Eve Ensler’s theater piece about women and their mimis,
totos, split knishes, Gladys Siegelmans, pussycats, poonanis, and
twats. Imagine that this extravaganza is part of a huge $2 million
fundraising effort for V-Day, the antiviolence project that grew out
of the show and that gives money to groups fighting violence against
women around the world. That was what happened on February 10, with
more donations and more performances to come as the play is produced
by students at some 250 colleges around the country, from Adelphi on
Long Island-where it was completely sold out, and where, sources
assure me, the V-word retains every bit of its shock value-to Yale.
And they keep saying feminism is dead.
The Vagina Monologues, in fact, was singled out in Time’s 1998 cover
story “Is Feminism Dead?” as proof that the movement had degenerated
into self-indulgent sex chat. (This was a new departure for the
press, which usually dismisses the movement as humorless, frumpish,
and puritanical.) In her Village Voice report on the gala, Sharon
Lerner, a terrific feminist journalist, is unhappy that the
actresses featured at the Garden event prefer the V-word to the
F-word. (“Violence against women is a feminist issue?” participant
Isabella Rossellini asks her. “I don’t think it is.” This from the
creator of a new perfume called “Manifesto”!) Women’s rights aren’t
what one associates with postfeminist icons like Glenn Close, whose
most indelible screen role was as the bunny-boiling man-stalker in
Fatal Attraction, or Calista Flockhart, television’s dithery
microskirted lawyerette Ally McBeal. Still, aren’t we glad that Jane
Fonda, who performed the childbirth monologue, has given up exercise
mania and husband-worship and is donating $1 million to V-Day?
Better late than never, I say.
At the risk of sounding rather giddy myself-I’m writing this on
Valentine’s Day-I’d argue that the implied contradiction between
serious business (daycare, abortion, equal pay) and sex is way
overdrawn. Sexual self-expression-that’s self-indulgent sex chat to
all you old Bolsheviks out there-was a crucial theme of the modern
women’s movement from the start. Naturally so: How can you see
yourself as an active subject, the heroine of your own life, if you
think you’re an inferior being housed in a shameful, smelly body
that might give pleasure to others but not to you? The personal is
political, remember that?
The Vagina Monologues may not be great literature-on the page it’s
a bit thin, and the different voices tend to run together into
EveEnslerspeak about seashells and flowers and other lovely bits of
nature. But as a performance piece it’s fantastic: a cabaret floor
show by turns hilarious, brassy, lyrical, poignant, charming,
romantic, tragic, vulgar, sentimental, raunchy, and exhilarating. In
“The Flood,” an old woman says she thinks of her “down there” as a
cellar full of dead animals, and tells of the story of her one
passionate kiss and her dream of Burt Reynolds swimming in her
embarrassing “flood” of sexual wetness.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Virginity or Death!
by Katha Pollitt
Copyright © 2006 by Katha Pollitt.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Random House Trade Paperbacks
Copyright © 2006
Katha Pollitt
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-8129-7638-X
