Organizing my thoughts on this election

I know nobody will read this. I haven't a clue how to market myself, and that goes for the blog world too. So I get to use this as a place where I throw out thoughts and ideas and then go back and edit them later, with nobody criticizing me before my ideas have gelled. Yeah, take that!

I've been incredibly emotional through the Democratic National Convention, and I'm trying to pinpoint why.

I was originally planning on voting for Clinton. Then, as I watched with increasing shame and disgust the unraveling of her campaign, I began to second guess myself. I yearned for a female Democratic candidate, but maybe not this one. Obama, who I'd respected but who had not fully swayed me, seemed wise, gentle and intelligent. Originally I was vaguely cynical of his message of hope. I, like many others, wondered if there was substance behind his words. The more I listened to him, though, the more I realized there was powerful substance. Substance on an intellectual level that I'd forgotten could exist in American politics. So in February I both caucused and voted for Obama.

Here's the thing. I've been moved intellectually by the things Obama has done and said since my state's primary. But I haven't been moved to tears. I've thought, "thank god we've got a candidate we can look up to and respect, because when he talks, you can tell he respects YOU. Thank god we have a chance to not have four more years of condescension and contempt." But these thoughts have typically been accompanied by dry eyes.

Then came the DNC and I've been reduced to a blubbering mess. Even between speeches, the crowd shots have turned on the tear spigots. And I've been really taken aback. I didn't expect this reaction. I don't undersand. But I might have a hypothesis.

There's the historicness (yes, not really a word, I know) of it. Nominating a black guy is nothing short of amazing to me. And a dent in the walls of racial oppression is a dent in the walls of ALL oppression. And if women aren't satisfied with that idea, they've got Michelle Obama, who is an incredible role model and a shining example of the strength of our gender.

There's the unity of it....that there are millions of people who really do feel the same way I do, and who care enough to do something about it.

But the thing I think has continually struck me right to my very core, is that this nomination will very possibly mark the end of eight years of oppression. Not just failed policy, war mongering and constitutional decimation, but complete psychic oppression. I can compare the last eight years to being stuck in the shittiest job ever, where your boss sneers every time he speaks in your direction, where you get crappy performance evaluations even though you work your ass off, where you can't ask for a raise because you're afraid of being punished for posing the question, where the Coke machine costs $1.25 because the company keeps those profits too, where your privileged coworkers keep getting raises and free Cokes and glowing evaluations. And underscoring all the crap you deal with day in and day out is that YOU CAN'T QUIT. Because there's not any other job to move to, at least not one you could afford. That is the world we've inherited, and it paints the very lenses through which we see our lives and the world around us. We've been in that fog. You don't even know how bad it is when you're in it. But now I see, and I realize just how awful the Bush administration has really been. They took the hope out of life. On a very real and concrete level my life is harder than it was eight years ago. I have to watch every penny I spend. I can't find a better paying job because the market is both saturated and thinning. I get a jolt of shock EVERY time I finish checking out at the grocery store. I only put $10 of gas in my car at a time, because I can't afford to fill the tank. But worst of all, I've been reduced to base cynicism, the last resort of those of us who are intelligent but powerless.

That's why Barack Obama took hope on as his mission. We've been stagnating in a world that seemed fairly well hopeless. And we have to win. This is more important than anything else I've experienced in my entire life. And the weight of that...well...it's heavy. So I cry. In rage at eight years lost, in hope that things can finally change, and in fear that if we don't win, there will be no place for me in this world at all.

gender and stuff

Yeah. And stuff.

I used that lighthearted title to put potential readers at ease. I'm not going to launch into a vitriolic rant about the gender issues that are boiling just below the surface of this election cycle. Or maybe I will. If my clever title trick worked, you're already reading. Hah!

I turned on Fox yesterday. I do that sometimes. You know why. You do it too. Anyway, they were profiling Geraldine Ferraro. I was confused for a few minutes. Why is this on FOX of all places? What is going on? My confusion was particularly pronounced, because the day before that I'd watched Britt Hume acknowledge that Michelle Obama gave a good speech at the Democratic Convention. I wondered what sort of weird happy pill had been slipped into his coffee that morning. Then the rest of the Fox panel followed suit, with only William Kristol dribbling on about the mediocrity of it all.

"Ok. So has Fox gone soft?," I asked myself. Then it hit me. How could I be so stupid. They're pandering to me. They want women to see how sensitive they can be, and thus how sensitive Republicans can be. They used Geraldine Ferraro's story to strike a nerve with me, to remind me how far women have come, but how far we have yet to go. They want me to think that Clinton's absence from the ballot in November is symbolic of every obstacle we women still face. They want me to vote for McCain.

When I figured this out, I felt really exploited. And angry. Following Clinton's speech, some lady on the Fox panel went on and on about how great her speech was. Kristol was sitting next to her, and his expression was one of utter derision. He doesn't give a rat's ass about Clinton, women who support Clinton, or women in general. He thinks the blonde lady sitting next to him is a dingbat, an unqualified nitwit, unable to analyze her own shopping list let alone politics. And Kristol, I think, is pretty representative of the type of people running the show at Fox.

I don't know how effective this shit is. I tend to assume people are smarter than that, but then people tell me, "No, Claire, they're really not..." and show me some link or other to the rantings of this or that whackadoodle.

Do you think Fox's tactics are working? How about when they pander to black, Hispanic, and other minority voters? Please anyone who accidentally finds this post, let me know what you think.