Eve Ensler, the American playwright re Sarah Palin...

[Guest]

Eve Ensler, the American playwright, performer, feminist and activist
best known for 'The Vagina Monologues', wrote the following about Sarah
Palin:

"Drill, Drill, Drill

I am having Sarah Palin nightmares. I dreamt last night that she was
a member of a club where they rode snowmobiles and wore the claws of
drowned and starved polar bears around their necks. I have a
particular thing for Polar Bears. Maybe it's their snowy whiteness
or their bigness or the fact that they live in the arctic or that I
have never seen one in person or touched one. Maybe it is the fact
that they live so comfortably on ice. Whatever it is, I need the
polar bears.

I don't like raging at women. I am a Feminist and have spent my life
trying to build community, help empower women and stop violence
against them. It is hard to write about Sarah Palin. This is why the
Sarah Palin choice was all the more insidious and cynical. The
people who made this choice count on the goodness and solidarity of
Feminists.

But everything Sarah Palin believes in and practices is antithetical
to Feminism which for me is part of one story -- connected to saving
the earth, ending racism, empowering women, giving young girls
options, opening our minds, deepening tolerance, and ending violence
and war.

I believe that the McCain/Palin ticket is one of the most dangerous
choices of my lifetime, and should this country chose those
candidates the fall-out may be so great, the destruction so vast in
so many areas that America may never recover. But what is equally
disturbing is the impact that duo would have on the rest of the
world. Unfortunately, this is not a joke. In my lifetime I have
seen the clownish, the inept, the bizarre be elected to the
presidency with regularity.

Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution. I take this as a
metaphor. In her world and the world of Fundamentalists nothing
changes or gets better or evolves. She does not believe in global
warming. The melting of the arctic, the storms that are destroying
our cities, the pollution and rise of cancers, are all part of God's
plan. She is fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered
species list. The earth, in Palin's view, is here to be taken and
plundered. The wolves and the bears are here to be shot and
plundered. The oil is here to be taken and plundered. Iraq is here
to be taken and plundered. As she said herself of the Iraqi war, 'It
was a task from God.'

Sarah Palin does not believe in abortion. She does not believe women
who are raped and incested and ripped open against their will should
have a right to determine whether they have their rapist's baby or not.

She obviously does not believe in sex education or birth control. I
imagine her daughter was practicing abstinence and we know how many
babies that makes.

Sarah Palin does not much believe in thinking. From what I gather
she has tried to ban books from the library, has a tendency to
dispense with people who think independently. She cannot tolerate an
environment of ambiguity and difference. This is a woman who could
and might very well be the next president of the United States. She
would govern one of the most diverse populations on the earth.

Sarah believes in guns. She has her own custom Austrian hunting
rifle. She has been known to kill 40 caribou at a clip. She has shot
hundreds of wolves from the air.

Sarah believes in God. That is of course her right, her private
right. But when God and Guns come together in the public sector,
when war is declared in God's name, when the rights of women are
denied in his name, that is the end of separation of church and
state and the undoing of everything America has ever tried to be.

I write to my sisters. I write because I believe we hold this
election in our hands. This vote is a vote that will determine the
future not just of the U.S., but of the planet. It will determine
whether we create policies to save the earth or make it forever
uninhabitable for humans. It will determine whether we move towards
dialogue and diplomacy in the world or whether we escalate violence
through invasion, undermining and attack. It will determine whether
we go for oil, strip mining, coal burning or invest our money in
alternatives that will free us from dependency and destruction. It
will determine if money gets spent on education and healthcare or
whether we build more and more methods of killing. It will determine
whether America is a free open tolerant society or a closed place of
fear, fundamentalism and aggression.

If the Polar Bears don't move you to go and do everything in your
power to get Obama elected then consider the chant that filled the
hall after Palin spoke at the RNC, 'Drill Drill Drill.' I think of
teeth when I think of drills. I think of rape. I think of
destruction. I think of domination. I think of military exercises
that force mindless repetition, emptying the brain of analysis,
doubt, ambiguity or dissent. I think of pain.

Do we want a future of drilling? More holes in the ozone, in the
floor of the sea, more holes in our thinking, in the trust between
nations and peoples, more holes in the fabric of this precious thing
we call life?

Eve Ensler

September 5, 2008"

[Guest]

1. Eve Ensler is an activist and wrote this piece for and it appeared on the Huffington POST....not much more to say.

2. Sen Obama is you check is in the process of changing his mind on drilling and now supports "limited expansion of offshore gas and oil drilling" To this point he has not agreed to drilling in the artic but is "re visiting" the subjct !

[Guest]

In these final days of campaigning for the U.S. Presidency, all kinds of partisan rants are flying back and forth...many within threads on this very forum. Some are short, some are long, some are funny, some are stupid, some are mean, some are well-researched, many are not, many are either the parsing of words or even just plain lies.

But seldom do we encounter a partisan political essay as well-written as the one authored by Eve Ensler. You don't have to agree with her beliefs or her choice of candidates. But reading such a well-crafted piece of writing is well worth the time to understand how a thoughtful person with very specific social objectives thinks about our politics and our candidates.

[Guest]

In these final days of campaigning for the U.S. Presidency, all kinds of partisan rants are flying back and forth...many within threads on this very forum. Some are short, some are long, some are funny, some are stupid, some are mean, some are well-researched, many are not, many are either the parsing of words or even just plain lies.

But seldom do we encounter a partisan political essay as well-written as the one authored by Eve Ensler. You don't have to agree with her beliefs or her choice of candidates. But reading such a well-crafted piece of writing is well worth the time to understand how a thoughtful person with very specific social objectives thinks about our politics and our candidates.


She is a great writer but I would doubt if it was posted on here as an example of great writing. While it is factually INCORRECT, the periods and commas appear to be in the proper place so points for that.

[Guest]

Another example of fine writing:

by Frank James

Little late to the party on this but it's still worth noting. Christopher Buckley, son of the late conservative writer William F. Buckley Jr. has endorsed Sen. Barack Obama.

With typical Buckleyan wit, the former Esquire editor and White House speech writer (Bush 41) makes clear he hasn't jumped ship and become a liberal. Instead his decision springs more from his disappointment with Sen. John McCain than any embrace of Obama's guiding political philosophy or agenda.

Here's an excerpt from the Daily Beast:

As to the particulars, assuming anyone gives a fig, here goes:

I have known John McCain personally since 1982. I wrote a well-received speech for him. Earlier this year, I wrote in The New York Times--I'm beginning to sound like Paul Krugman, who cannot begin a column without saying, "As I warned the world in my last column..."--a highly favorable Op-Ed about McCain, taking Rush Limbaugh and the others in the Right Wing Sanhedrin to task for going after McCain for being insufficiently conservative. I don't--still--doubt that McCain's instincts remain fundamentally conservative. But the problem is otherwise.

McCain rose to power on his personality and biography. He was authentic. He spoke truth to power. He told the media they were "jerks" (a sure sign of authenticity, to say nothing of good taste; we are jerks). He was real. He was unconventional. He embraced former anti-war leaders. He brought resolution to the awful missing-POW business. He brought about normalization with Vietnam--his former torturers! Yes, he erred in accepting plane rides and vacations from Charles Keating, but then, having been cleared on technicalities, groveled in apology before the nation. He told me across a lunch table, "The Keating business was much worse than my five and a half years in Hanoi, because I at least walked away from that with my honor." Your heart went out to the guy. I thought at the time, God, this guy should be president someday.

A year ago, when everyone, including the man I'm about to endorse, was caterwauling to get out of Iraq on the next available flight, John McCain, practically alone, said no, no--bad move. Surge. It seemed a suicidal position to take, an act of political bravery of the kind you don't see a whole lot of anymore.


But that was--sigh--then. John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, "We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us." This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget "by the end of my first term." Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?

All this is genuinely saddening, and for the country is perhaps even tragic, for America ought, really, to be governed by men like John McCain--who have spent their entire lives in its service, even willing to give the last full measure of their devotion to it. If he goes out losing ugly, it will be beyond tragic, graffiti on a marble bust.

Of Obama, he says:

As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a "first-class temperament," pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he's a Harvard man, though that's sure as heck no guarantee of anything, these days. Vietnam was brought to you by Harvard and (one or two) Yale men. As for our current adventure in Mesopotamia, consider this lustrous alumni roster. Bush 43: Yale. Rumsfeld: Princeton. Paul Bremer: Yale and Harvard. What do they all have in common? Andover! The best and the brightest.

I've read Obama's books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I'm libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O'Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.

But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren't going to get us out of this pit we've dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.

Obama has in him--I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy "We are the people we have been waiting for" silly rhetoric--the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.

So, I wish him all the best. We are all in this together. Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, I'll be pulling the Democratic lever in November. As the saying goes, God save the United States of America.

[Guest]

This writer seems to be a little closer to the center than Eve Ensler. I'm more comfortable with that position.

I enjoyed reading his viewpoint. Actually, his viewpoint pretty closely mirrors my own. I've said here before that I have voted for the Republican candidate in 11 of the last 12 presidential elections. I was enthusiastic when John McCain made the comeback to become the GOP candidate.

But one single paragraph in this writer's essay describes exactly what happened to me--how I changed my mind...

John McCain has changed. He said..."We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us." This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget "by the end of my first term." Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?

That's why I'll be voting for Obama, because John McCain is a "candidate of change". Except in his case, he changed from someone I could comfortably--even enthusiastically--vote for to the person described in this essay.

[Guest]

But reading such a well-crafted piece of writing is well worth the time to understand how a thoughtful person with very specific social objectives thinks about our politics and our candidates.


And this would be the same Eve Ensler that gave us such well crafted thoughtful writing as noted in Wikipedia:

"The Vagina Monologues includes a section entitled "The Little Coochie Snorcher that Could". This portion of the play, as originally performed, has been criticized for including a lesbian "rape" scene of a 13-year-old girl by a 24-year-old woman who uses alcohol to lower the inhibitions of her victim.

At the conclusion of the segment, the narrator (the grown-up thirteen year old girl) fondly reminisces about the rape, claiming that it helped to nurture her and help her grow as a woman, and finishes the play with the line, "If it was rape, it was good rape".

The segment received criticism not only for depicting any rape as "good", but also for forming a double standard, as elsewhere in the play, male-on-female rape is depicted as not only inexcusable but the ultimate act of violence against women.

The scene was modified in later performances; the young girl's age was changed to 16, and the "good rape" line was omitted."

I guess a lot of people didn't find her "thoughtful."

I believe we each have to evaluate the context of her lesbian child "good rape" viewpoint against our own standards. If you were from NAMBLA you would be doing high fives. If you were the parent of a victim of child rape.........fill in the blanks. Perspective. I've read Ensler's work before and agree that she has specific social objectives.

I also agree that we need to read opposing, even radical views that conflict with our own. I enjoy reading the eclectic assortment of opinions on TOTV. The interactive component is a bonus. It is too easy and tempting to find comfort by reading only what supports are complicated personal belief system that is defined by the totality of our life's experience. That would be shortsighted at best.

Whalen...thank you for a very informative post.

[Guest]

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/382133_keilloronline08.html?source=mypi

[Guest]

The Vagina Monologues was a theater hit in Chicago for quite awhile before we left for TV two years ago. It may still be playing, for all I know. I was never tempted to attend. In fact, had someone given me a ticket I probably would have found something else to do. Even though I thought her political essay was well-written, I would still not be tempted to attend. A little too thinly-disguised and highly-focused far, far left for me, I'm afraid.