Crushing Krisis

The Newest Oldest Blog In New Zealand

politics

Sarah Palin doesn’t care about you or me.

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This post is about three things Crushing Krisis has habitually avoided for a number of years – snap reactions to current events, personal opinions on politics, and sex.

Maybe this September CK will be about getting out of my comfort zone?

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Today’s morning Metro declares “Bloggers face calls for Palin restraint” – which, hilariously, could refer to bloggers backing off of any number of major Palin-related embarrassments that arose over the weekend – have you heard the one about how she fired the local officials that didn’t support her bid for Mayor? – but clearly pertains to the unplanned announcement of the unplanned pregnancy of her seventeen-year-old daughter Bristol.

I do feel a certain amount of restraint is due on this matter. Obama himself yesterday reminded the press that family is off limits. It wouldn’t be fair to make Bristol the focus of partisan crossfire, nor is her pregnancy a reason to assail the personal family values of her mother.

What we should not be restraining ourselves on is how Bristol’s pregnancy pertains to actual campaign issues, and to the poor political judgment of her mother Sarah Palin and her partner John McCain.

Make no mistake – Sarah Palin is a woman, but she does not support women. She does not support their right to choose, and furthermore she is a figurehead in a party that largely supports abstinence-only sexual education – something that Pennsylvania’s typically beloved governor Ed Rendell just accepted funding for on the state level.

Let’s me be very clear: abstinence-only sex ed does not work.

I could state this as a matter of personal opinion. I could even state it based on data that supports the assertion.

However, allow me to state it based on the fact that I was a peer educator for four very defining years of my life – high school.

In those four years I believed, practiced, and taught that abstinence was the best possible decision for a high school student when it came to sex. However, I also believed and taught that abstinence is not the only option, just like pregnancy doesn’t only result from missionary position vaginal intercourse.

Teenagers don’t come pre-equipped with this information. Someone needs to communicate it to them, or else they wind up as misinformed adults who think the withdrawal method is a valid way to protect themselves from pregnancy and disease, or who think they can’t get pregnant if they have sex just before or during or after their period, or who don’t realize that mutual masturbation or trading oral sex can deliver sperm just as effectively as intercourse, or who can’t recite that the four bodily fluids that transmit HIV are blood, semen, vaginal fluid, and breast milk.

That’s why teens need sex education, and why the best sex education is often supported by peer education. Peers are not afraid to talk about condoms, whether it’s how to put them on or how they feel. They are are not afraid to disclose facts that parents don’t know or are afraid to admit: that sex is about a lot more than intercourse, and that teens can abstain from any or all of it while still developing and affirming their sexual identity.

Many teens are put in the position where their abstinence is no longer an option, let alone their best or only option. That situation is different for each teen, and it’s not the place of the mainstream media or political bloggers to contemplate what that situation was for Bristol Palin.

However, if all teens – Bristol included – received education on contraceptives that was supported by their peers and parents, they could be better protected from pregnancy, and from the risk of disease.

And, let me ask you, how would this be playing out differently if the headlines blared, “Bristol Palin: HIV Positive”?

That’s just as likely a result not only of her actions, but of the ignorance of her mother and the Republican party. Birth control is not just about birth. Pharmaceutical birth control is about regulating the body, and physical barrier protection is about just that – protecting yourself.

Sarah Palin does not care about any of that, and by extension, neither does the Republican party.

This dissonance is an example of the ultimate failure of the GOP – how they barely practice what they preach, and even in practice the preaching tends to fail. And it’s a single issue indicative of all the reasons McCain and Palin are the wrong choice to lead our nation.

Forget Bristol. Forget, even, that Palin is pro-life, as that is an issue equal parts personal and political.

Remember that Palin wants to swap out sex-education programs for abstinence-only programs.

Remember that Palin supports creationism being co-taught with evolution.

Remember that Palin believes global warming may not be entirely a man-made phenomenon, and Palin also believes global warming might not even being happening.

Remember that Sarah Palin does not feel that crimes motivated by discrimination against sexual orientation should be classified as hate crimes, because in her opinion “all heinous crime is based on hate.”

Remember that in Sarah Palin’s opinion the message written on my door last month – the cat shit shoved into my home – was motivated by normal hate. And so was the deaths of Matthew Sheppard and Larry King. Not hate based on bias, on fear, on lack of acceptance. Not hate that requires specific regulation and punishment to dissuade others from acting on it. Just regular, run-of-the-mill hate that wasn’t meant to threaten me based upon my identity, real or assumed.

Sarah Palin doesn’t care about women, teenagers, or our planet. And she doesn’t care about me.

A vote for John McCain is a vote that endorses all of those positions – the policies of a party that’s no longer just assaulting logic, but outright denying it.

Bristol Palin is just one small example – teach abstinence, knowing that isn’t effective but claiming that it’s more moral, and when the teaching (and the associated morals) fail convert that failure into success by endorsing the family values that will raise and love that unplanned baby, and support that unwed mother.

Nevermind that not every young mother in the nation has a determined state governor for a mom. Nevermind that for every potential baby there is also potential for another life marked by HIV. Nevermind the implicit failure of abstinence-based education in the very home of the potential Vice President who supports it.

Nevermind?

No.

And that is why we cannot and will not restrain ourselves.

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(A big thank you to Five Thirty Eight for planting this kernel, and for many of the links.)

Alla This

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On Thursday morning I was very much in my head while sitting on the trolley, listening to Ani DiFranco’s madly terrific new song “Alla This.” The song is partially about the intersection of the personal and the political, with Ani at one point delivering the following:

i won’t rent you my time
i won’t sell you my brain
i won’t pray to a male god
cuz that would be insane
and i can’t support the troops,
cuz every last one of them’s being duped,
and i will not rest a wink
until the women have regrouped

I already love the song as much as anything she’s done this decade, but at her concert earlier this month that verse sent a thrill through my body – in eight lines it succinctly hits commercialism, religion, war, and feminism. Amazing.

The verse ended as I stepped off the trolley, and my mind began to wander. I thought about Ani’s constant challenging of the patriarchal status quo, and how any form of discrimination ultimately connects back to that hegemony.

In the distance between the trolley doors and the stairs to sunlight somehow that rolled into my wondering about the Iraqi citizens, and if life has actually improved for those that exist outside of the patriarchy both of that nation and of the force the world is imposing on it.

I wondered, what about the gays and lesbians in Iraq? I knew nothing about this group, though I was sure they existed. What was their life like before the invasion, and what was it like now? While I am advocating for the rights of my lesbian friends to marry are their Iraqi counterparts struggling for the simplest of rights – for the ability to exist as themselves without fear?

Sometimes my brain and the internet do a peculiar zeitgeist tango, where the same day I wonder about a topic it shows up in my daily reading, and sure enough when I got to my desk CNN was running a story entitled “Gays in Iraq terrorized by threats, rape, murder.”

As it turns out, as the Iraqi government came unmoored the situation of their GBLT citizens deteriorated. Any hint of their sexuality risks not only their own lives, but the lives of their entire families.

What a terrifying closet to be trapped within.

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Just a day later I was at the Philadelphia Theatre Company to see Elise’s brother in his weekly theatre lab.

One of his classmates – barely a teenager – wrote a brilliant play about how bullying can go too far, as the actions of a few are enabled by the inaction of their peers at large. Here the result was the death of a young girl at the hands of her tormentors – their faces unimportant, as all of her classmates were complicit in her fate.

In the play’s last scene Elise’s brother acted as a federal agent, gingerly interrogating one of the girl’s classmates, getting nowhere. Finally, grimly, he asks her:

“Is it true that the girl who was murdered had a crush on you?”

And then, brilliantly, sparking immediate tears in my eyes as much for his delivery as for the line itself:

“Have you ever heard of a boy named Matthew Shepard?”

So powerful, and from the pen of a girl half of my age. Vital proof that we still have some terrifying closets of our own, whether their doors are open or closed.

As the lights came up, Ani’s voice rung out again in my mind as the voice of murdered girl, of those Iraqi men, of Matthew, and of Larry.

i will not stand immersed,
in this ultra violent curse
i won’t let you make a tool of me
i will keep my mind and body free
bye bye minutiae
of the day to day drama,
i’m expanding exponentially,
i am consciousness without identity

Oblermann, At Length

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I love words.

I was notorious as a child for needing something to read at any idle moment. Eating breakfast? Better hope that cereal box has lots of copy on it. Long car ride? Multiple paperbacks required, just to be safe.

The internet has taken the edge of my constant need to consume the written word, but I sometimes get intellectual heartburn from all the junk food of message boards and user comments I devour to keep my gears spinning. Even worse than the junk are insubstantial articles – 500 and 1,000 word affairs that get me all spun up and then just stop.

I vastly prefer, and eternally adore, longform journalistic writing, especially in the form of media critique. It’s a style of writing I love to consume, and the style I enjoy writing the most. You can trace my appreciation back to being hooked on the reviews at Furia.com in the nineties, and more recently in Jacob Clifton’s poetic, academic, polemic recaps of Battlestar Galactica.

Last weekend the piece that caught my extended attention was from the New Yorker – a complete recounting of the personal history and personal psyche of Keith Oblermann.

Based on the sheer word count that has been devoted to Oblermann recently, I’m assuming you know who he is. You have to remember, I don’t consume these people on television – just through their print coverage and occasional video clips – so I commensurately don’t understand how famous they are to actual teevee viewers. However, even from my detached vantage point Keith Oblermann’s name and face seem to have reached zeitgeist levels of recognition.

I used to enjoy Keith’s critical essays on MSNBC dot com long before I knew he was an on-air personality because he didn’t do the typical journalistic dance of balance when someone was clearly in the moral right or wrong. He just spoke the truth, which sometimes meant speaking out against his topic of discussion. Yet, he wasn’t an op-ed writer – he was just a reporter. He just reported the truth.

Given the recent backlash against him, it seems that Keith (or, at least, his public persona) has undergone a translation from truth-speaking broadcaster to liberal figure(talking)head, held in apposition to make-pretend journalists like Bill O’Reilly.

The difference, I think, is that Keith has aggressively shifted the focus of his considerably audible and influential voice away from the morally black and white and into the politically gray. He’s still engaged in a mainly journalistic pursuit, rather than an opinionated one.

As discussed in the feature-article, Keith recently punctuated a special commentary by commanding our commander-in-chief to “Shut the hell up!” Of course, most of Bush’s words and actions seem more morally black than politically gray to any rational human being, but it is a bit beyond the pale to viciously criticize a sitting president from your anchor chair.

However, Keith has also turned his focus into the Democratic fray to slam Hillary Clinton for invoking the assassination of RFK when discussing why the nominating process might (and, per her, should) continue through the summer. Unlike Bush, this is clearly a gray area, or at least gray enough that a nine-minute retort seems a little overboard … possibly the vented hot air of a gasbag.

As the hot air continues to vent, and as the dissenters continue to get in line, the picture of the New Oblermann becomes increasingly crisp. He is not just liberal Bill O’Reilly, or liberal anyone else, because he’s not simply espousing liberalism. He’s espousing truth and logic, much in the same way Jon Stewart does, except he does not have the shield of “Fake News” to hide behind. And, sometimes to highlight the illogical he needs to rachet up his own rhetoric to full blast to make sure there is no mistaking his commentary for equivocation.

Sometimes Keith Oblermann needs to be illogical to attach the illogic.

A commitment to truth and logic in real news is a scary thing – something many Americans haven’t experienced in their lifetime, and certainly not anything they’ll catch on their local six o’clock news. Keith is treading into untested waters with his brand of journalistic critique. And, even if it’s all just hot air, right now you can hear the bones of the rest of the mainstream media establishment creaking in the wind.

Or at least that’s what it seems like from my teevee-abstaining, mainstream-media-eschewing vantage point.

Best Political Quote…. Ever?

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[The current Republican Party is] a dead, rotting carcass with a few decrepit old leaders stumbling around like zombies in a horror version of Weekend at Bernie’s, handcuffed to a corpse.

Attribution? Improbably, longtime GOPer Larry Hunter, as quoted by The New Republic. Via Salon.

I literally rolled around on the floor in convulsions of laughter the first time I saw Weekend At Bernie’s, but the morbid schtick didn’t hold up as well to repeat views as, say, Clue.

In a related incident, I garnered a Bernie’s reference this weekend during my decisive win of a limbo tournament, made all the more impressive by the fact that I was competing against at least two people less than five feet tall.

Also, IIRC, my unbeaten streak in seriously competitive limbo extends back to at least 1999.

Ontologically related to the above: the movie poster for Oliver Stone’s impending W is so great that I may have to hang it in my home office:

The Suppression of Don Siegelman

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I’ve been reading a lot of Huffington Post to stay up-to-date on the election cycle, although I often find myself the most intrigued by their non-election content.

This week Larisa Alexandrovna brought to light that a seemingly benign broadcast blackout of 60 Minutes in Alabama last week was likely connected to a shockingly Soviet attempt by the Republications to keep former governor Don Siegelman out of the sight and mind of his former electorate – a campaign that has lead to an election slimly lost by recount and a suspect conviction that has lead to his imprisonment.

It sounds too outlandish to be true, but the most disturbing part is that once you delve beneath the surface of the story the details of Republican opposition and flawed justice get even more incredible. For the background on Siegelman’s story, and it’s disturbing connection to Rove’s tenure in the White House, please see Larisa’s summary on alterna-news site The Raw Story. (Or, read her series, The Permanent Republican Majority: 1, 2, & 3).

Also in the government-coverups department, is the CDC trying to cover-up a major cancer threat?

US Violates Geneva Conventions… Again!

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Because i am such a major nerd and am in love with my single journalism class, i have subscribed to all manner of news services, including ABC’s daily Nightline email, which just passed along this article. I’m sure the story is all over by now, but i’m too busy working on my project to know. I simply find it ironic because the United States Army is so completely oblivious to the Geneva Conventions that we are so quick to invoke whenever any of our soldiers are captured.

Lawmakers Say New Abuse Photos Even Worse – The abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. troops went beyond the photos seen by most Americans, shaken lawmakers said Wednesday after viewing fresh pictures and video that they said depicted forced sex, brutality and dogs snarling at cowed prisoners….

Even in such a grim article, there is one amusing passage…

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, said he thought “some people are overreacting. The people who are against the war are using this to their political ends,” he said.

Further GOP reaction via CNN. Personally, I can’t think of a way to use this to criticize Bush or the war effort … it’s more about a problem with the way we recruit, screen, and train our soldiers. More importantly, i don’t think there’s a way to overreact to violating the Geneva Conventions. If our armed forces wantonly do what they’re doing, then we are in no position to complain when one of our citizens is captured and brutally slaughtered.