Palin responds to several successive interview question as if there were no--and indeed is not ever any--gray areain sexual politics, as if being "pro-life" were equivalent to what she calls "choosing life" (and this video dates from long before McCain picked her for duck-duck-grey duck). As she flatly refuses to even acknowledge the differences between the situations that the interviewer offers, repeating "I would choose life" with the complacency and saccharine kindness that only the self-righteous can muster, it occurred to me that, unlike other conservative thinkers that I have known--indeed, unlike even the zealots and near-Nazis that I've known--Palin actually thinks that her deeply warped ideas describe the world, that you don't need anything more than an adage and a strong will to make the world as you think it should be, and, most importantly, that if you govern the world as you would govern the world you want, that the world will come to match the government you offer. Palin has forgotten that it's the dealer's game, and the odds are with the callous world, which invariably overpowers the insufficient and brittle structures we invent. The repeated lesson of history is that reality's great gambit is to overpower and undermine attempts to contain it through description; it wins every time against the theorized, the dreamed, the written, the desired, the proclaimed, the denied, the imagined and the depicted.
What has this to do with gender politics? you ask. Amber made a great quip last night, which she meant as a kind-of serious throwaway: When I said "pro-life," she responded, "Or, as I like to say, anti-choice." This reversal of the key terms of the abortion debate reveals the degree to which (as per far too often) it is the "anti-choice" lobby that has established the terms of the debate. Who, after all, wouldn’t "choose life"? It is primarily Sarah Palin's complacency--the complacency of the chosen-—that makes me so fucking angry about her nomination, but also the way that central questions about gender politics and government are obscured by the tepid debate about Palin's gender, womanhood recast as the glory of motherhood, which makes a woman stronger rather than weaker. Palin trumps Clinton through her ever-productive womb and her mobilization of the sexual appeal of that fertility through the production of an ahistorical femininity. In this arena, a world whose changes are immaterial to the highly motivated, women’s rights (rather than her own nomination) are a kind of affirmative action; if women had been strong enough, they would never have been kept down by unchecked fecundity.
But the great power of Obama's promise is that he can roll with the punches, that he is going to look around before he decides what to do, that--in contradistinction to my vision of Palin--not just government but ethical behavior and responsible relationships with other people overall depend on the capacity to look at what is actually outside of you before you decide what to do or say. To be certain, Palin's gender has no relation to her politics whatever and it's more laughable than insulting to imagine a Hillary Clinton supporter voting for this Stalinist bitch, but she is being presented as someone who is able to cope with the modern world without giving up her value system. [NB: Palin doesn't, of course, describe herself as a feminist and as this quite elegant discussion on Slate points out, this is not what our mothers fought for--for our right to choose; to return to work the day after giving birth and to be so fucking awesome we neither want nor need any physical, household, bodily, familial or emotional help]. But, aside from the fact that--and I paraphrase from The View--you can't exchange a vagina for a vagina, even one whose fertility is unchecked, the larger point is that Sarah--and Bristol--Palin''s rights and abilities to have the children they want, to keep the babies that may not have been foreseen, to decide that motherhood is what they want, that they don't want to use birth-control or wouldn't ever terminate a pregnancy, are never and have never been in jeopardy. Pro-choice is not (as my Dad is unfortunately though occasionally wont to say) "pro-abortion"; rather, it supports the right to choose either way.
This occurs to me partly because I--like most of my peers--spent decades understanding Roe v. Wade as central to my own life. I never lived in a time or a place when I didn't know that free, safe and private advice, support, and--did I so want--an abortion were available to me. When I was seventeen (or twenty-seven), if I had gotten pregnant, I would have gotten an abortion, as most of my friends who got pregnant did. Now, however, at the grand old age of 33, when I am much less likely to make such grand mistakes than at 17, I know that I would never have an abortion. My relationship with Roe v. Wade has shifted; the rights it endows are for mychildren and grandchildren, not for me. And, of course, for Sarah Palin's three daughters.
The idea that Bristol Palin's pregnancy is related to Sarah Palin's parenting is absurd; the Christian Right finally got one thing right when they admitted that seventeen-year-old girls get pregnant all the time, in every country in the world, every state in the Union (even those that might want to secede), and even in the most evangelical of evangelical households. And, frankly, most seventeen-year olds get pregnant because they don't use birth control even when they do have sex-ed classes, curfews, moms who don't work or regale their children with stories of when they marched on Washington and piles of condoms for the taking in guidance offices and clinics.
But, Palin's "I am pro-life" goes far beyond the question of an unplanned pregnancy, elaborating a policy stance into a lifestyle choice. Her daughter, therefore,--her seventeen-year old high-school senior of a daughter--is not just having this child, she is getting married and raising that child. I'm going to show my age, but, in my day, if you didn't want to get an abortion (and in my parents, when you couldn't), you went to stay with Aunt Susy for a year, to attend a different school and get some "rest". Then you came back and finished high-school. If Bristol Palin was sacrificed for this campaign, it is not only in that her personal life was made public for her mother's benefit, nor even that she "chose" to bear this child—and I don’t think any of us believe she had any real "choice"—to ratify her mother’s ethical stance, but because she "chose" to marry and keep the child, to extend the Palin clan to a third generation. Her entire life was sacrificed for Palin’s ideals. And that, perhaps, is my point. I think Sarah Palin was lucky as hell that Bristol was the one who got knocked up. She seems like a sweet kid, but very much sculpted by her mother and bearing the brunt of the intense parental scrutiny, protectiveness and pressure that only the oldest girl in a family can feel. So, she said she'd keep the kid and marry the boy, and, frankly, she probably wasn't going to leave Wasilla anyway.
But Sarah Palin has three & daughters, and one of those daughters is going to show her, in the worst and most painful way possible, how much her ideologically-restrictive, Stalinist, depressingly provincial tight-fist rule costs. If Bristol were a slightly different child, was given a bit more or a bit less freedom, went to better or even worse schools, spent her childhood in Anchorage or Washington, was a year or too older or younger, she wouldn't have agreed to bear that child; she would have run away, or aborted it by herself or drank and smoked herself and it into oblivion; and one of Sarah Palin's daughter is going to be that child. Piper Palin may spend the next ten years of her life in Washington; it will be 2015 or so before she's thinking about sex, and we don't even know what the world will look like. But Sarah Palin, who will not let herself or is not able to imagine any kind of world that she can't control if she is given a chance, will still be laying out the same rules and the same reasons and expecting them to resound as they did before.
But doesn't that seem unlikely? Maybe Piper won't want to give up her scholarship to college or just because mom says so. Maybe one of Palin's daughters will be raped in the big city, or some older boy or relative will use her and leave her. For whatever reason, if Sarah Palin makes her two younger daughters live in a world
where sex-ed is unnecessary and abortion is illegal, one of them won't want to have the child that will inevitably be conceived. And Sarah will watch her world--the one she has constructed so painstakingly and bolstered with the center of her arrogant little soul--, along with any other worlds she could even imagine, come smashing down around her head as she watches one of her daughters bleed out on her pale-pink bathroom floor, with a hanger sticking out of her cootch, because there wasn't a single goddamn doctor or nurse in Alaska who would give her an abortion.
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* A good friend of the author and of the author's husband, too. -- Ed.
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