I had a rather subdued Valentine’s Day. I made my fifth trip back to the auto supply store down the street in an attempt to get a battery that would fit my car. Since my 8-year-old battery had finally died in Chicago’s latest cold snap, I’d been on an all-consuming quest for another battery that would fit my car.
The first new battery the store clerk sold me, after consulting the computer, proved to be way too small. My car’s battery hold-down bar arched over this new installation like a bridge over troubled waters - with several inches to spare. So I could clearly expect no restraining action from the bar. What’s more, the battery was much too small for the battery pan where it rested. Between these two misfits, it seemed that the battery would be all too likely to slosh around under my hood, fly off its pan platform, and go smashing into any and all the other mechanisms there. I pictured a punctured radiator, torn fan belts, a cracked engine. Nope. No good at all.
When I went back to the auto supply store though, the clerk pooh-poohed my concerns. He said that he’d read a recent study proving that battery hold-down bars were superfluous. “Not necessary at all.” He assured me that my battery would rest firmly in place – unless of course, I was prone to driving over 60-miles-an-hour and hit a bump. That closing proviso caught my attention.
“Well, yes,” I asserted. “I am likely to go over 60. You almost have to go over 60 on the expressways. And there will surely be bumps in the road. You know life. There are always bumps in the road,” I tried to cajole with philosophy.
“Oh, you don’t look like you’d speed,” the young man said, obviously categorizing me with all those mythic little old ladies who drive just on Sundays, and then only to go a mile down their side streets to the local pharmacy.
This assumption roused me to go almost overboard in my objections. I stood firm in my assertion of a need to have a way of securing my battery in place while participating in the Indianapolis 500. The young man finally acceded to my special necessity of a bolted-down battery while taking curves at jet-propelled velocities.
He reluctantly scuffed off and got a “universal battery hold-down bar” for me. By using that, I could keep the smaller, lighter-weight battery he’d sold me. I’d consequently save on gas. Well, that idea appealed to me. He’d switched from pegging me as a snail’s pace oldster – to a green advocate Yuppie. I’d moved up a notch in status, and so on a number of counts, I accepted this compromise solution and went home with the new plastic hold-down bar.
But it didn’t come near to fitting the new battery in my car. So started my long campaign of exchanging batteries and hold-down bars. What should have been a chore taking only minutes – turned into an endless occupation. And what made this task all the more ludicrous in proportion, was the means I chose to ferry batteries back and forth from house to store. I preferred to do each successive replacement in the comfort of my own garage, rather than switching batteries out in the chill exposure of the store’s parking lot. So each insufficient battery had to be removed and transported in turn back to the store, and each new candidate for installation had to be transported home.
Batteries are heavy! I didn’t want to carry them back and forth even the short distance between my house and the store. So I loaded each one in turn into my baby stroller and off I went. (A shopping cart wasn’t an option because the wire grid at the bottom of those carts didn’t seem strutty enough to hold the prodigious weight of a battery.)
The use of my baby stroller made my excursions quite a spectacle. I became aware that I was probably making myself the subject of a lot of disapproving speculation. Nadia Suleman was bad enough with the octuplets she had just given birth to. But at least her children were real human beings. As I strode along the street, pushing an auto battery in a baby stroller, I presented an even more irrational picture of frustrated motherhood. Poor thing. She doesn’t even have a cat or a dog to love. She has to wheel a car battery around in a stroller.
I must admit, it was a temptation to play into such speculation. I was tempted to tie a little pink bonnet around the battery and beamingly sport it along the avenue, while I exuded parental pride.
For this last trip I took to the auto supply store though, I abandoned the baby stroller and did just drive my car so I could make the exchange in the store parking lot. I did this in spite of the signs that had recently sprouted all around that section of the lot – signs that blared “No Auto Repairing Allowed Here” - and that seemed to be saying “This means YOU!”
The store finally sold me a larger battery, one that conformed to the contours of my original hold-down bar. Their clerk rushed out, dropped the new battery in place under my hood, then disappeared. He probably wanted to leave me alone to break the law against doing parking lot repairs. So I quickly made the requisite reattachments by myself, in the blustery cold. Then I started up the car, and ahhhhh, at last – one task accomplished.
I thought I would celebrate by stopping in White Castle for one of my occasional tasty, but probably not-very-healthy meals there. When I got to the White Castle door though, I saw a pink sign hanging there, announcing their special Valentine’s Day festivities, which required reservations. I remembered – it was Valentine’s Day! It was 5:00 P.M. – the hour their special dining arrangements started.
I peered through their window, the classic outsider looking in, the waif with her nose pressed against the toy store window. There was a roseate glow about the whole interior. I saw red plastic tablecloths, a vase with a red rose on every table, pink drinking cups and pink streamers. Then I noticed couples were beginning to arrive in the parking lot and head into the diner. Some of these couples even looked as if they had dressed for the occasion. A few of the converging women were wearing corsages. I suspected that the White Castle server appointed as greeter for the occasion would probably bestow additional corsages and boutonnières to each new arrival.
It was clear that there was no room for the likes of me, a single person with traces of motor oil on her jacket, at the posh place the White Castle had become on this special day. I peered in with a trace of longing for a little while yet, before I turned away, resigned to the rejection of “no room at the inn.”
Jay Leno made short work of the concept of spending Valentine’s Day at the White Castle. He said if that’s all a girl’s date is willing to spring for, he’s clearly “just not that into you.”
But I don’t know. That rosy casualness looked sort of appealing to me. If I’d had a date for the day, I think I would have been happy to be treated at White Castle. No wine lists to try to fake my way through. No need to gird up in pantyhose and cinched waist. No judgmental wait staff who would have to be tipped despite bringing the wrong soup and no extra butter.
I was reminded of my childhood, of all the times my mother and I headed to the suburbs for some gathering with the family on Holidays. My father wasn’t able to drive us, so just the two of us would bundle up and go by bus and train. Along the route, we’d pass several greasy spoons where a few down-and-outers would already be scarfing down thin slices of turkey swimming in what was obviously glutinous gravy out of a can. Once when we passed a begrimed restaurant window and saw a particularly grizzled diner sitting alone in there on Christmas - my mother looked pityingly at the scene and said, “How sad – to have to eat in such a place on Christmas.”
But I thought then of the assemblage awaiting us in the suburbs. I thought of my aunt and her unremitting games of withering one-upsmanship. I thought of my cousin Harry whose handshakes always lasted too long and always involved his pulling us toward him into protracted hip-to-hip contact. I thought of all the distraction of these parties – with my uncle swearing at the malfunctioning stereo - swearing at the dog someone had allowed to come bounding into the living room – swearing at his losing football team on TV. And my aunt was sure to inject herself into this already fractured picture – with scoldings to my uncle as she’d catch him eating a potato chip. She’d dourly remind him how he was thereby jeopardizing his cholesterol count and risking imminent heart attack. If somehow, against all odds, a slightly more heartfelt conversation got started amidst all this incident, she would break off her warnings about myocardial infarction, would sigh heavily about how she couldn’t prepare the meal all by herself, and would ask the conversants if they would please come and help her in the kitchen.
There was never so much as an iota of family cheer about these gatherings – much less love. I had pointed this out to my mother, summarizing my brief against all these people we were forced to foregather with simply because of an accident of blood. And my mother was brought up short. She realized how she’d been indulging in a mythologized, Norman Rockwell painting of Holiday parties. She had been superimposing this Saturday Evening Post picture over the reality. So when I said I actually wished I could join that unshaven reject there in the greasy spoon – she reversed her former commiseration – and agreed with me. In there, we’d have had the freedom of both our togetherness and our own thoughts. We could have eaten potato chips and heavy gravy without reminders of escalating cholesterol counts. We could have celebrated the spirit of Christmas, a spirit of silent essentials.
And so it was as I gave one last look back through the window of the White Castle, wishing I had a date who’d take me there, where we could sit over one of those red plastic tablecloths – free of the swirling snootiness of restaurants with pretensions. We could sit there and look at each other, and look out the surrounding windows at the passing people and traffic, none of them at cross-purposes with us.
But I didn’t have any such date. I had to content myself with the lesser triumph of a car battery that fit in place under my hood – and that started my car. I got back in that newly reappointed car, and drove home to a TV dinner in front of a Seinfeld re-run.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Friday, February 13, 2009
Dampening Blagojevich's Spirits
Illinois citizens’ high spirits over the election of our Senator Barack Obama as President - have been somewhat dampened by the disgrace of our Governor Rod Blagojevich. Have we gone from the sublime to the ridiculous? We are the laughing stock of the world. And the Governor’s recent appearances on TV shows haven’t helped.
Although Governor Blagojevich lives only a couple miles from me, I’ve never met him. However I have met his father-in-law, Richard Mell, the powerful Chicago Alderman whose influence helped get Rod Blagojevich in office in the first place. Shortly after Blagojevich was elected, the two men had a falling out over who had unfairly profited from granting control over a large landfill acreage in the State. There has been a strained silence between the two men ever since, with Alderman Mell’s daughter left awkwardly in the middle between father and husband.
However Rod Blagojevich was re-elected for a second term as Governor, and Alderman Mell remains one of the most influential senior members of Chicago’s City Council. Mell has his big ward offices just down the street from me. I occasionally drop in there when I have a comment or question about ward services. Then there was that time Alderman Mell dropped into my residence. The visit had some very unpleasant consequences – for Alderman Mell.
I’d always had my living quarters adjacent to and actually mixed in with my family printing business. When I finally phased out my business, I rented space in the building to a young man bursting with enthusiasm over launching his own printing business. I’d assumed he would enlist his wife and two children to help him occasionally run the office, in the same sort of let’s-pull-together family conviviality that I had enjoyed growing up. But that didn’t materialize. Roberto was clear about not wanting his children to have to participate in what he considered the menial tasks connected with printing and mailing. His wife also kept generally absent from the operation. So I didn’t get to see any home-learning, family business perpetuated on my premises, as I’d hoped.
Nevertheless, Roberto jumped in by himself with gusto. He was very charming, so he was successful at getting a stream of people to come in here with their business. He would schmooze with them, gleam joviality and brightness, and give them confidence that he would execute their work orders with dispatch. He was in fact so charming, that people hardly ever seemed to notice when their jobs came out either horribly botched, or else never came out at all. The people would still flock to Roberto and his beaming glad-handing – again and again. I had thought to sort of casually keep my hand in the printing trade vicariously through his energy. I had thought I might circle on the periphery of his business, learning some of the new computer techniques being applied to graphic design and printing. However, all too often, I got drawn into the vortex of Roberto’s ineptitude.
In due course, Aldermen Mel came in here as one of Roberto’s customers, and he also fell into the vortex of continuous mishap. Mell probably wanted to throw some work to a local minority business. Whatever brought him in here, I was impressed to see Alderman Mell standing at the office counter one day, being schmoozed by Roberto. Mell was asking if Roberto could do a special job for him. He wanted some invitations to a Democratic fundraiser printed. He would supply his own paper, some very expensive gilt, deckle-edged linen cards. Roberto of course assured Mell he was the man for the job. And as Mell looked into Roberto’s eager, intelligent eyes – he became sure too. Mell proceeded to haul in boxes of the special stock. The two men parted in beaming mutual reassurance of the wonderful gold filigree invitations that would soon emerge.
But it was not to be. Robert was Roberto. He was a master at raking in the business. But when it came to actually doing a job, he was out and away and nowhere to be found.
Roberto could think up no end of distractions to defer actually having to start doing any work. He always wanted to add services to his basic printing operation. He asked me if he could install gumball machines and maybe even some video game machines on the premises. One minute, he entertained “diversifying” into printing T-shirts, and then on into tie-dying fabric. The next minute he thought he might sell money orders and telephone cards. He considered adding a translating service to his business. He would translate letters and telephone calls for those of his Hispanic customers who didn’t know much English.
Most of these mushrooming dreams never took root. They went up in a powder puff of dispersed spores. However Roberto did succeed in foisting one adjunct business onto my premises. Not long after he’d established himself here, he decided to breed dogs as a sideline. He brought a bouncy male boxer appropriately named “Rocky” into the building, to be available for round-the-clock stud service. However, Roberto was rarely around to train or feed or walk Rocky. When I couldn’t take up the slack, the dung and disarray would start building up around the printing presses.
Roberto’s legitimate customers naturally got lost in this rain of distraction that Roberto precipitated on the scene. Their jobs were neglected. Most particularly, Alderman Mell’s guilt-edged paper languished in a corner. As the days wore on, I kept reminding Roberto that he HAD to get busy with Mel’s order. Mell’s deadline was approaching. If Roberto would just make good on this account, he would no doubt get loads of additional work from the ward offices and from the Chicago Democratic machine in general. He’d be made in the shade.
But Roberto postponed and postponed, as he always did – running out and about soliciting yet more business over lengthy lunches around town. Finally, the night before Mell was scheduled to come in and pick up his printed invitations, Roberto grudgingly came in here late and set to work. He fell into the usual foul mood that overtook him whenever he was forced to actually execute any of the jobs he’d netted. In this case though, I could tell there was some additional frustration eating at Roberto as he revved up the press and started slapping ink onto its rollers.
When Mell arrived the next day to pick up his presumably dazzling gold-filigreed invitations – I heard what had happened. Roberto sheepishly confessed that his dog, Rocky, had urinated all over Mell’s cartons of paper. But ever one to turn a negative into a positive, Roberto immediately perked up. He assured Mel that he had rescued at least a quarter (maybe even a full half!) of the paper. He had gone ahead and run the slightly damp paper through his machines, risking damage to his press feed rollers in the process. But he had done it - as a special favor to Mell. I melted away anonymously into the background – so Mell could never connect me with this disaster, with this patently absurd reframing of who was damaging whom.
Mell took it in good part. He didn’t let his practiced politician’s smile crack even a splinter. He and Roberto joked in the vein of “dogs will be dogs.” Mell said it would be all right – that he might have enough invitations to go around. Or else he could make up any deficit in some makeshift fashion. They parted amiably. But of course Mell never came back.
I sighed with infinite regret. There went Roberto’s big chance. There went my big chance – to have a going business on my property again – or even just to have a tenant who could pay his rent.
Roberto finally folded and moved out in abject failure – leaving all sorts of corruption in his wake. Rocky’s stains are still in evidence here and there, permanent reminders of the whole sodden episode.
Now all these allegations of corruption have been leveled against Alderman Mell’s son-in-law – Rod Blagojevich. I get the feeling that a high percentage of the Illinois electorate would like to resurrect Rocky – to do to Blagojevich what he did to Mell’s gilt-edged paper.
Although Governor Blagojevich lives only a couple miles from me, I’ve never met him. However I have met his father-in-law, Richard Mell, the powerful Chicago Alderman whose influence helped get Rod Blagojevich in office in the first place. Shortly after Blagojevich was elected, the two men had a falling out over who had unfairly profited from granting control over a large landfill acreage in the State. There has been a strained silence between the two men ever since, with Alderman Mell’s daughter left awkwardly in the middle between father and husband.
However Rod Blagojevich was re-elected for a second term as Governor, and Alderman Mell remains one of the most influential senior members of Chicago’s City Council. Mell has his big ward offices just down the street from me. I occasionally drop in there when I have a comment or question about ward services. Then there was that time Alderman Mell dropped into my residence. The visit had some very unpleasant consequences – for Alderman Mell.
I’d always had my living quarters adjacent to and actually mixed in with my family printing business. When I finally phased out my business, I rented space in the building to a young man bursting with enthusiasm over launching his own printing business. I’d assumed he would enlist his wife and two children to help him occasionally run the office, in the same sort of let’s-pull-together family conviviality that I had enjoyed growing up. But that didn’t materialize. Roberto was clear about not wanting his children to have to participate in what he considered the menial tasks connected with printing and mailing. His wife also kept generally absent from the operation. So I didn’t get to see any home-learning, family business perpetuated on my premises, as I’d hoped.
Nevertheless, Roberto jumped in by himself with gusto. He was very charming, so he was successful at getting a stream of people to come in here with their business. He would schmooze with them, gleam joviality and brightness, and give them confidence that he would execute their work orders with dispatch. He was in fact so charming, that people hardly ever seemed to notice when their jobs came out either horribly botched, or else never came out at all. The people would still flock to Roberto and his beaming glad-handing – again and again. I had thought to sort of casually keep my hand in the printing trade vicariously through his energy. I had thought I might circle on the periphery of his business, learning some of the new computer techniques being applied to graphic design and printing. However, all too often, I got drawn into the vortex of Roberto’s ineptitude.
In due course, Aldermen Mel came in here as one of Roberto’s customers, and he also fell into the vortex of continuous mishap. Mell probably wanted to throw some work to a local minority business. Whatever brought him in here, I was impressed to see Alderman Mell standing at the office counter one day, being schmoozed by Roberto. Mell was asking if Roberto could do a special job for him. He wanted some invitations to a Democratic fundraiser printed. He would supply his own paper, some very expensive gilt, deckle-edged linen cards. Roberto of course assured Mell he was the man for the job. And as Mell looked into Roberto’s eager, intelligent eyes – he became sure too. Mell proceeded to haul in boxes of the special stock. The two men parted in beaming mutual reassurance of the wonderful gold filigree invitations that would soon emerge.
But it was not to be. Robert was Roberto. He was a master at raking in the business. But when it came to actually doing a job, he was out and away and nowhere to be found.
Roberto could think up no end of distractions to defer actually having to start doing any work. He always wanted to add services to his basic printing operation. He asked me if he could install gumball machines and maybe even some video game machines on the premises. One minute, he entertained “diversifying” into printing T-shirts, and then on into tie-dying fabric. The next minute he thought he might sell money orders and telephone cards. He considered adding a translating service to his business. He would translate letters and telephone calls for those of his Hispanic customers who didn’t know much English.
Most of these mushrooming dreams never took root. They went up in a powder puff of dispersed spores. However Roberto did succeed in foisting one adjunct business onto my premises. Not long after he’d established himself here, he decided to breed dogs as a sideline. He brought a bouncy male boxer appropriately named “Rocky” into the building, to be available for round-the-clock stud service. However, Roberto was rarely around to train or feed or walk Rocky. When I couldn’t take up the slack, the dung and disarray would start building up around the printing presses.
Roberto’s legitimate customers naturally got lost in this rain of distraction that Roberto precipitated on the scene. Their jobs were neglected. Most particularly, Alderman Mell’s guilt-edged paper languished in a corner. As the days wore on, I kept reminding Roberto that he HAD to get busy with Mel’s order. Mell’s deadline was approaching. If Roberto would just make good on this account, he would no doubt get loads of additional work from the ward offices and from the Chicago Democratic machine in general. He’d be made in the shade.
But Roberto postponed and postponed, as he always did – running out and about soliciting yet more business over lengthy lunches around town. Finally, the night before Mell was scheduled to come in and pick up his printed invitations, Roberto grudgingly came in here late and set to work. He fell into the usual foul mood that overtook him whenever he was forced to actually execute any of the jobs he’d netted. In this case though, I could tell there was some additional frustration eating at Roberto as he revved up the press and started slapping ink onto its rollers.
When Mell arrived the next day to pick up his presumably dazzling gold-filigreed invitations – I heard what had happened. Roberto sheepishly confessed that his dog, Rocky, had urinated all over Mell’s cartons of paper. But ever one to turn a negative into a positive, Roberto immediately perked up. He assured Mel that he had rescued at least a quarter (maybe even a full half!) of the paper. He had gone ahead and run the slightly damp paper through his machines, risking damage to his press feed rollers in the process. But he had done it - as a special favor to Mell. I melted away anonymously into the background – so Mell could never connect me with this disaster, with this patently absurd reframing of who was damaging whom.
Mell took it in good part. He didn’t let his practiced politician’s smile crack even a splinter. He and Roberto joked in the vein of “dogs will be dogs.” Mell said it would be all right – that he might have enough invitations to go around. Or else he could make up any deficit in some makeshift fashion. They parted amiably. But of course Mell never came back.
I sighed with infinite regret. There went Roberto’s big chance. There went my big chance – to have a going business on my property again – or even just to have a tenant who could pay his rent.
Roberto finally folded and moved out in abject failure – leaving all sorts of corruption in his wake. Rocky’s stains are still in evidence here and there, permanent reminders of the whole sodden episode.
Now all these allegations of corruption have been leveled against Alderman Mell’s son-in-law – Rod Blagojevich. I get the feeling that a high percentage of the Illinois electorate would like to resurrect Rocky – to do to Blagojevich what he did to Mell’s gilt-edged paper.
Monday, February 02, 2009
Barack Obama - A No-Girlie Man
It was inspiring to watch the Obama inauguration. Those two million people in Washington, so moved, so joyous at having finally “overcome” – made me sort of wish I could have been there and have fully gotten into the spirit of it all. And I do think that Barack Obama will make a good President.
I think he’ll be more of a true statesman than we’ve had in a long time. He has the right temperament for the job. He won’t go off the deep end, feeling a need to assert our American supremacy over other countries and cultures. He won’t make rash, pressured decisions. To piggyback clichés – I trust that, as much as is possible, Obama will steer the ship of State successfully through rough waters and keep it on an even keel.
Having said all that, I hate to be a naysayer by raking up anything negative about Obama, especially since my objection might at least initially appear to be a quibble. However Obama said something along the way that gave me a glimpse into a prejudice he’s harboring and that really saddened me – because I believe it’s a prejudice we must to work harder to eradicate.
When Barbara Walters was interviewing Obama and his wife, she brought up the jolly topic of the dog he intended to adopt for his daughters. Since there are allergy problems in his family, he initially said a shelter dog probably wouldn’t be an option. With that, Walters suggested a few breeds such as poodles that don’t shed, but that are incidentally rather petite animals. A dismissive look came over Obama’s face, and he said that anything like that would be “too girlie” for him.
My heart sank. In that moment, I knew for sure we still have a lot more to overcome. It might seem I’m making a mountain out of a molehill when I take someone to task for dismissing a dog because it is too “girlie.” But in that remark, I do see a mountain that women still have to climb before they can stand on an equal footing with men in this country and in the world.
Just imagine what would have happened if Walters had suggested some breed of dog that has long black strands of hair, and Obama had dismissed the idea of getting any such breed because it was “too pickaninny.” A wave of shock and protest would have rolled around the world. And rightly so. Whether you dismiss something as “girlie” or as “pickaninny” – you are applying a diminishing, infantalizing term to a whole group of people, and you are floating the presumption that it’s OK to feel disdain for that group based on such a stereotype. Both “girlie” and “pickaninny” carry connotations of being laughable and lesser.
When Arnold Schwarzenegger refers to someone disparagingly as a “girlie-man,” I might be inclined to take it more in stride, considering the source is a former bodybuilder who no doubt had some habitual competitive reason for sneering at anyone less muscular. However, the usage is never really acceptable. Every female is or was once a girl, just as every black person is or was once a youth. So to use slangy, demeaning terms for that state of youth in whole segments of the population can’t do anything but reflect and perpetuate prejudice.
The only difference between “girlie” and “pickaninny” as pejoratives is that the former is so ubiquitous a usage, we accept it and have largely become deaf to the dismissal inherent in it. That fact that Michelle Obama and millions of other women sit by in cheerful, accepting silence when men disdain something because it’s “girlie” - i.e. because it has the assumed frivolous, feeble, second-class qualities of a girl – is testimony to how embedded this form of prejudice is in our culture. We’ve become deaf to the barb in the usage. We’re inured to it. Men automatically get away with using the term, and women themselves will play along and even bandy the term among themselves, although usually in a slightly different, “Hey, girlfriend,” context.
I’m not accusing President Obama of having any deep antifeminist streak. But I did feel that pinprick of disillusionment - that “Oh, no, not you too” regret when I heard Obama toss away poodles as an option because, being girl-like, they were beneath him. And his off-handed comment reminded me of the larger battle women have had to fight to attain some degree of equality. I was reminded of how historically in the U.S., women have had to wait, and wait, and wait, and wait… to gain respect. They have again and again deferred their dreams in order to allow black men to advance theirs. Black men have preceded women in being recognized as full human beings – in law, and in language.
Before the Civil War, it was primarily women who spearheaded the abolitionist movement. However, these women often felt they were fighting for a package deal. They felt that when slaves gained their freedom and were given the vote, women would automatically be included in this enfranchisement. They felt that with abolition would come an across-the-boards recognition of human rights. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other suffragettes organized the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 with high hopes that their arguments would be heard and that all the oppressed would soon be liberated in unison. Women, especially Southern women, joined hands with African-Americans (in spirit if not always literally), to march forward toward this goal of universal suffrage.
However, there was a lot of pressure on the women to take a back seat. It was felt that if they pushed for their rights, they would trivialize the whole effort to extend civil rights to others and would jeopardize the more crucial abolitionist movement. Many women reluctantly did defer to this sentiment. They agreed that slavery was the greater evil and that they shouldn’t do anything to jeopardize the eradication of that institution. If the world thought that women’s demands for the vote were silly, just so much more “girlie” nonsense, it would be counterproductive to link those demands to the more legitimate claims of black males.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other more militant suffragettes continued to press for equality, even in the face of all the urgings they received to “cool it.” But indeed they were headed for disappointment. The 15th Amendment to the Constitution, granting black American males the right to vote, was ratified in 1870. Women’s claims, still deemed by the majority to be ridiculous, were ignored. Worse yet, the black men who had been women’s comrades throughout the years of struggle for abolition and equality - almost all abandoned women after 1870. Once they got the right to vote, most of them never looked back. They didn’t extend any helping hands back to women in their on-going struggle.
Some say it was that betrayal that hardened the hearts of many activist Southern women against blacks – and that ultimately fed into what became the South’s uniquely virulent form of discrimination against blacks. On the whole though, it wasn’t so much bitterness that the women felt, as disappointment, depression, and even heartbreak. Although Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and others continued to write, speak, and organize on behalf of women’s suffrage, many women just gave up after the Emancipation Proclamation and the 15th Amendment so pointedly failed to include them in the new liberties. Much of the fighting spirit went out of the movement.
It wasn’t until the turn of the century that the movement was re-energized by a new wave of feminists. Then women such as Alice Paul in the U.S. and the Pankhurst family in England started a radical assault on the bastion of male supremacy. They chained themselves to pillars; they marched. In the U.S., they appealed to President Wilson over and over again to consider their claims.
Woodrow Wilson was another intelligent, essentially decent President who fought for an end to all imperialist presumptions – our own and those of other countries. He gave his all to trying to establish the League of Nations on a sound footing, with U.S. participation. However Wilson had this one blind spot. He couldn’t see women as true equals. He probably never used a word such as “girlie.” That wasn’t a word in such currency then. But records show that he at least privately thought women’s claims were “frivolous, flibbertigibbet, ludicrous.” He consistently refused to even give the suffragettes a hearing.
It took a long time to wear away his reluctance enough to get him to lend his support to the push to grant women the vote. It wasn’t until 1920 that women finally, finally won that right – with the 19th Amendment. This was a full 50 years after black men had been granted the legal right. I’m not so old, but my mother was the first woman in my family who could vote when she turned twenty-one. My great-grandmother and grandmother, although born in the U.S., could not.
And although women now have the right to vote and a variety of other legal rights, they are still pervasively devalued in so many social ways. Black men seem to have preceded them once again in commanding respect.
If a man were to complain, “I just can’t figure blacks out. I don’t know what they want,” there’d be a riot of protest. He’d no doubt be roundlytaken to task for the remark. Since he’d be assuming that all blacks are alike, all inscrutably erratic and whimmed, he’d probably receive a lot of lectures about the need to remember that black people are individuals and that any right-thinking person would know to consider them on an individual basis, not to lump them as a homogeneous mass.
However if the same man complains, “I just can’t figure women out. I don’t know what they want,” it’s taken as a perfectly acceptable piece of barroom philosophy. In that case, he probably receives a few commiserating pats on the back and responses of, “I hear you, buddy.”
Similarly, if a little boy were to announce, “I hate blacks! They’re icky! They’re stupid,” he’d no doubt receive some swift attitude correction, if his parents were the least bit modern and liberal in their thinking. However, when the same little boy announces, “I hate girls! They’re icky! They’re stupid,” most parents think it’s cute. They view such an attitude as a normal phase, one that every boy passes through on his way to taking the obverse view of “liking the girls” and vigorously pursuing them – all of them - one big, fabulous, indivisible conquest for him.
Which brings us back to the original point. If a man were to disdain something because it was “too pickininny, too Buckwheat, too blackie,” he would probably be branded as a racist and ostracized by most informed people. However, when he disdains something because it is “too girlie,” almost no one even notices, least of all the woman sitting next to him through life.
It’s not that I want to add another brick to the heavy load of political correctness that we’ve been hauling lately. I’m all in favor of wild, offensive, irreverent talk that’s recognized as such. I’m in favor of agreeing with and playing into stereotypes in order to float them up there for all to see and puncture. But when diminishing references are passed off and passed over as commonplaces, when they are scattered over the ground as prosaic as pebbles – that’s when I object.
So Barack Obama’s election signaled a major victory against prejudice. However, there are other battles against prejudice to be fought. There are all the casual, deprecating references to women, to old people, to other groups of people that are still routinely acceptable. And victory in all these other battles seems as if it might elude us for a long time to come.
I think he’ll be more of a true statesman than we’ve had in a long time. He has the right temperament for the job. He won’t go off the deep end, feeling a need to assert our American supremacy over other countries and cultures. He won’t make rash, pressured decisions. To piggyback clichés – I trust that, as much as is possible, Obama will steer the ship of State successfully through rough waters and keep it on an even keel.
Having said all that, I hate to be a naysayer by raking up anything negative about Obama, especially since my objection might at least initially appear to be a quibble. However Obama said something along the way that gave me a glimpse into a prejudice he’s harboring and that really saddened me – because I believe it’s a prejudice we must to work harder to eradicate.
When Barbara Walters was interviewing Obama and his wife, she brought up the jolly topic of the dog he intended to adopt for his daughters. Since there are allergy problems in his family, he initially said a shelter dog probably wouldn’t be an option. With that, Walters suggested a few breeds such as poodles that don’t shed, but that are incidentally rather petite animals. A dismissive look came over Obama’s face, and he said that anything like that would be “too girlie” for him.
My heart sank. In that moment, I knew for sure we still have a lot more to overcome. It might seem I’m making a mountain out of a molehill when I take someone to task for dismissing a dog because it is too “girlie.” But in that remark, I do see a mountain that women still have to climb before they can stand on an equal footing with men in this country and in the world.
Just imagine what would have happened if Walters had suggested some breed of dog that has long black strands of hair, and Obama had dismissed the idea of getting any such breed because it was “too pickaninny.” A wave of shock and protest would have rolled around the world. And rightly so. Whether you dismiss something as “girlie” or as “pickaninny” – you are applying a diminishing, infantalizing term to a whole group of people, and you are floating the presumption that it’s OK to feel disdain for that group based on such a stereotype. Both “girlie” and “pickaninny” carry connotations of being laughable and lesser.
When Arnold Schwarzenegger refers to someone disparagingly as a “girlie-man,” I might be inclined to take it more in stride, considering the source is a former bodybuilder who no doubt had some habitual competitive reason for sneering at anyone less muscular. However, the usage is never really acceptable. Every female is or was once a girl, just as every black person is or was once a youth. So to use slangy, demeaning terms for that state of youth in whole segments of the population can’t do anything but reflect and perpetuate prejudice.
The only difference between “girlie” and “pickaninny” as pejoratives is that the former is so ubiquitous a usage, we accept it and have largely become deaf to the dismissal inherent in it. That fact that Michelle Obama and millions of other women sit by in cheerful, accepting silence when men disdain something because it’s “girlie” - i.e. because it has the assumed frivolous, feeble, second-class qualities of a girl – is testimony to how embedded this form of prejudice is in our culture. We’ve become deaf to the barb in the usage. We’re inured to it. Men automatically get away with using the term, and women themselves will play along and even bandy the term among themselves, although usually in a slightly different, “Hey, girlfriend,” context.
I’m not accusing President Obama of having any deep antifeminist streak. But I did feel that pinprick of disillusionment - that “Oh, no, not you too” regret when I heard Obama toss away poodles as an option because, being girl-like, they were beneath him. And his off-handed comment reminded me of the larger battle women have had to fight to attain some degree of equality. I was reminded of how historically in the U.S., women have had to wait, and wait, and wait, and wait… to gain respect. They have again and again deferred their dreams in order to allow black men to advance theirs. Black men have preceded women in being recognized as full human beings – in law, and in language.
Before the Civil War, it was primarily women who spearheaded the abolitionist movement. However, these women often felt they were fighting for a package deal. They felt that when slaves gained their freedom and were given the vote, women would automatically be included in this enfranchisement. They felt that with abolition would come an across-the-boards recognition of human rights. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other suffragettes organized the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 with high hopes that their arguments would be heard and that all the oppressed would soon be liberated in unison. Women, especially Southern women, joined hands with African-Americans (in spirit if not always literally), to march forward toward this goal of universal suffrage.
However, there was a lot of pressure on the women to take a back seat. It was felt that if they pushed for their rights, they would trivialize the whole effort to extend civil rights to others and would jeopardize the more crucial abolitionist movement. Many women reluctantly did defer to this sentiment. They agreed that slavery was the greater evil and that they shouldn’t do anything to jeopardize the eradication of that institution. If the world thought that women’s demands for the vote were silly, just so much more “girlie” nonsense, it would be counterproductive to link those demands to the more legitimate claims of black males.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other more militant suffragettes continued to press for equality, even in the face of all the urgings they received to “cool it.” But indeed they were headed for disappointment. The 15th Amendment to the Constitution, granting black American males the right to vote, was ratified in 1870. Women’s claims, still deemed by the majority to be ridiculous, were ignored. Worse yet, the black men who had been women’s comrades throughout the years of struggle for abolition and equality - almost all abandoned women after 1870. Once they got the right to vote, most of them never looked back. They didn’t extend any helping hands back to women in their on-going struggle.
Some say it was that betrayal that hardened the hearts of many activist Southern women against blacks – and that ultimately fed into what became the South’s uniquely virulent form of discrimination against blacks. On the whole though, it wasn’t so much bitterness that the women felt, as disappointment, depression, and even heartbreak. Although Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and others continued to write, speak, and organize on behalf of women’s suffrage, many women just gave up after the Emancipation Proclamation and the 15th Amendment so pointedly failed to include them in the new liberties. Much of the fighting spirit went out of the movement.
It wasn’t until the turn of the century that the movement was re-energized by a new wave of feminists. Then women such as Alice Paul in the U.S. and the Pankhurst family in England started a radical assault on the bastion of male supremacy. They chained themselves to pillars; they marched. In the U.S., they appealed to President Wilson over and over again to consider their claims.
Woodrow Wilson was another intelligent, essentially decent President who fought for an end to all imperialist presumptions – our own and those of other countries. He gave his all to trying to establish the League of Nations on a sound footing, with U.S. participation. However Wilson had this one blind spot. He couldn’t see women as true equals. He probably never used a word such as “girlie.” That wasn’t a word in such currency then. But records show that he at least privately thought women’s claims were “frivolous, flibbertigibbet, ludicrous.” He consistently refused to even give the suffragettes a hearing.
It took a long time to wear away his reluctance enough to get him to lend his support to the push to grant women the vote. It wasn’t until 1920 that women finally, finally won that right – with the 19th Amendment. This was a full 50 years after black men had been granted the legal right. I’m not so old, but my mother was the first woman in my family who could vote when she turned twenty-one. My great-grandmother and grandmother, although born in the U.S., could not.
And although women now have the right to vote and a variety of other legal rights, they are still pervasively devalued in so many social ways. Black men seem to have preceded them once again in commanding respect.
If a man were to complain, “I just can’t figure blacks out. I don’t know what they want,” there’d be a riot of protest. He’d no doubt be roundlytaken to task for the remark. Since he’d be assuming that all blacks are alike, all inscrutably erratic and whimmed, he’d probably receive a lot of lectures about the need to remember that black people are individuals and that any right-thinking person would know to consider them on an individual basis, not to lump them as a homogeneous mass.
However if the same man complains, “I just can’t figure women out. I don’t know what they want,” it’s taken as a perfectly acceptable piece of barroom philosophy. In that case, he probably receives a few commiserating pats on the back and responses of, “I hear you, buddy.”
Similarly, if a little boy were to announce, “I hate blacks! They’re icky! They’re stupid,” he’d no doubt receive some swift attitude correction, if his parents were the least bit modern and liberal in their thinking. However, when the same little boy announces, “I hate girls! They’re icky! They’re stupid,” most parents think it’s cute. They view such an attitude as a normal phase, one that every boy passes through on his way to taking the obverse view of “liking the girls” and vigorously pursuing them – all of them - one big, fabulous, indivisible conquest for him.
Which brings us back to the original point. If a man were to disdain something because it was “too pickininny, too Buckwheat, too blackie,” he would probably be branded as a racist and ostracized by most informed people. However, when he disdains something because it is “too girlie,” almost no one even notices, least of all the woman sitting next to him through life.
It’s not that I want to add another brick to the heavy load of political correctness that we’ve been hauling lately. I’m all in favor of wild, offensive, irreverent talk that’s recognized as such. I’m in favor of agreeing with and playing into stereotypes in order to float them up there for all to see and puncture. But when diminishing references are passed off and passed over as commonplaces, when they are scattered over the ground as prosaic as pebbles – that’s when I object.
So Barack Obama’s election signaled a major victory against prejudice. However, there are other battles against prejudice to be fought. There are all the casual, deprecating references to women, to old people, to other groups of people that are still routinely acceptable. And victory in all these other battles seems as if it might elude us for a long time to come.
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