Blair Zarubick's Open Salon Blog

Sarah Palin is not watching my kids.

Mon, 6 Jul 2009 15:07:25 -0400

I'm thinking about Kate Hardings excellent post on Broadsheet today, June 6, 2009, on criticism of Sarah Palin's “message to her children.” I urge you to read it because it does point out that women in politics still face a simplistic and cruel double standard, and no matter what we might feel about Palin, she does not deserve this criticism. Being a parent I find that I am less likely as I grow older to define anyone as a “bad” father or mother, but that I quite often think “I'd hate to be his or her kid.” I thought that quite a bit about Sarah and Todd during last summer's GOP convention and the recent break with the designated first son-in-law-to-be has only strengthened my prejudice. I have also had these thoughts about Governor Marc Sanford of South Carolina and Senator Ensign of Nevada, about George H. W. and Barbara Bush, as well as the late Micheal Jackson. All that being said it remains true that women are expected to be nurturers and that men are expected to be emotional remote and selfish, and so the criticism of parenthood will always cut more deeply into a woman running for office than into a man even if they are opponents and they have both shown the exact same narcissism and frigidity. As the world struggles to be a less misogynistic place our efforts have been more successful at depreciating male privilege than elevating women's status and opportunity. So the sum effect is that men have less of a guaranteed free pass while women bear the same inflated onus.

Women already bear the unfortunate double standard adherent to National Security. Because our military and foreign policy is dominated by paranoia and hubris, every candidate for high office, be they male or female, must demonstrate a sociopathic willingness to destroy the entire species if events should so demand. This criteria, coupled with the demand that only married hetero candidates with children can hope to ascend to the White House, compels every female politician with higher ambition to play either Medea, or Mother Courage. Talk about bad parenting!

Many years ago it became popular to observe that average American voters would rather drink a beer with George Bush than Al Gore or John Kerry. A fairly silly test that I would like to replace with my own. This test is about parenting so those Americans without kids will just have to imagine just like the millions of Americans who don't like beer.

Imagine you are in a park with many other people of all sorts, rich, poor, gay, straight, bi, try, polyamorous, women, men,people with god, people without, people with more gods than you can count, Afro, Asian,Euro,Pan Pacific, you get the picture. You have kids. At the park all of the people who want to be President are waiting to participate in a Family Debate. Your partner, or partners are not there because they had to work. Just before the event there is a terrible tragedy like 9/11x9/11, right in the part of town where your loved ones are working. Cell phones are out and there is a general panic.

Someone from the podium begins to speak, he feels your pain, he's knows you have much to do, that you must find out about your families that you must volunteer to assist in rescue. He also knows that you are concerned about your children and that you have no idea where you can turn....

So he suggests you leave the children with them. The candidates. You can pick any person up there, they're all ready to help and keep your children safe and calm, fed and secure. Behind the speaker you see Newt Gingrich wince and shake his head while behind him Karl Rove just laughs. Bush, Clinton, Gore, Obama, Romney, McCain, Palin, Pawlenty, Biden, Huckabee, Sharpton ,Jackson, McKinny, Kucinich, Nader,even Carter and Dole are all there. Who would you choose, if you had to choose?

I said it was a silly test, but not as silly as the beer test. I've drunk a beer with countless assholes that I would never leave in charge of my kids. And really there is an emergency here, our planet is on fire and we are all dying of something sooner than we are ready, and we worry about what will happen to those we love when we can not look out for them. Who would you trust with the security and happiness of your beloved?

I like this test because it is weighted towards our given biases about women but there's room for men to make the cut. I also like it because it makes the whole First Lady/Gentleman thing somewhat pertinate. Some might bristle at the President as Big Momma or Big Daddy, but what the hell, we already call him/(someday) her Leader of the Free World and give he, or (someday soon, honest) she the most dangerous arsenal in the history of humanity.

I don't know what kind of parents Sarah and Todd Palin are, but I wouldn't leave my kids with them.

Poetry and Venom

Mon, 25 May 2009 15:05:15 -0400

Recently the contest to elect the new Oxford Professor of Poetry rose to the front of British News sites when the distinguished Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott dropped from the race after concerns were raised, anonymously, about his conduct with female students in previous teaching positions. The story has only grown in interest for British journalists since it has been revealed that the eventual appointee Ruth Padel, emailed journalists about this issue prior to the vote. Now Padel, a great, great granddaughter of Charles Darwin, has been forced to resign her post and a new election is called to appoint her replacement. A cynic might imagine this story to be a dream come true for Oxford and for poetry, for, short of physical violence, there is no other circumstance that might keep the Poetry Chair on page one for more than a week. The story has however done great damage to two renowned Poets and threatens to damage the reputation of Great Britain's oldest university.

The election, like last years Democratic Primaries, pitted a potential first Black man versus a potential first White woman with a potential first Central Asian male, Arvind Mehrotra, thrown in for spice. Before wading in to the traditional muck of identity politics that attenuate any struggle of this sort it should be noted that both Walcott and Padel are in fact guilty as sin of the indiscretions of which they are accused. Although Walcott continues to claim that he is blameless, it is a matter of public record that he was publicly disciplined by Harvard for inappropriate conduct in 1981, and in 1996 he settled a sexual harassment suit with one of his students at Boston University. Likewise Padel has admitted that she forwarded the concerns of a female Oxford student to two reporters, though she claims to have no connection to the anonymous dossier that was sent to the committee which instigated the questions that led to Walcott's withdrawal. The dossier included photo copied pages from The Lecherous Professor an academic investigation of sexual harassment on American college campuses that detailed Walcott's 1981 Harvard case. In Padel's emails she cites the Lecherous Professor and even suggests that Barack Obama refused to engage Walcott to recite at his inauguration because of these issues, an accusation for which there seems to be no evidence.

When confronted by her involvement in the scandal Padel contradicts herself. On the one hand she claims that she holds Walcott and his work in great esteem and that she is saddened by his withdrawal, on the other hand she argues that the concerns of the female student that came to her were serious and warranted examination. It seems that Padel has realized, far too late, that whatever the merits of the young student's concerns, that she as a candidate was the absolute least well placed person to communicate those concerns. As of today Padel is the former Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and her considerable contributions to literature and scholarship are unfortunately clouded by this fortnight of folly.

As for Oxford one can only wonder. The Poetry Chair has been held in the past by noteworthies such as Auden, Graves and Heany. Most recently the chair was the scholar and critic Christopher Ricks, who is a respected intellectual, but hardly a house hold name. This election was a chance to reinvest the chair with some of it's former glamor while at the same time including “other” voices of the English tradition. While there is a great deal of teeth gnashing about the “smear tactics” of the dossier, there might never have been a question raised about Walcott's suitability without it. Even now, some of Walcott's supporters argue that at 75 he does not pose a threat to young women, an opinion that belies a bizarre naiveté about sex and power. Others argue that the Poetry Professor works only as a lecturer and not as a one to one mentor. Given that there are two public decisions against Walcott one would suspect that any reasonable vetting would have preempted the dossier and made it moot, but questions arose only after it's delivery. It seems that like many inert and tradition bound institutions, Oxford's concern for the accessibility of it's curriculum and society to young women is only to be understood as a fear of complaint and controversy.

Pagan Easter

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 12:03:57 -0400

In the Daffodil kingdom

The Red-Wing Black Bird,

The Great Blue Heron and

The Purple Finch

Herald the resurrection

Of the crucified vines.

Stretched out in rows

like the army of Spartacus,

Victims of a sumptuous empire,

Reaching as far as the high woods

Where even his wild weedy lover

has been enslaved by traders.

a poem on the gathering storm

Fri, 6 Feb 2009 03:02:30 -0500

here we stand electing

hope to counter fear,

The things we are protecting

things that we hold dear.

Will we remember last September

when the water rises above our knees?

Will we tender any pretender

with rights to hold both locks and keys?

Will we wonder when all's asunder

How it was really when all seemed dry?

Have we gone crazy, but ain't it hazy?

There's not but one star shining in the sky.

I don't have an answer

for my creeping dread

but it will be hard sleeping

where we've made our bed

The Hero's Ordeal

Sat, 24 Jan 2009 04:01:11 -0500

I set out to dedicate my performance of MacBeth as an offering to theWhite Goddess, the lunar mother of passion, creativity, destruction, magic and madness that Robert Graves identified as the source of all true poetry. Like many supplicants I've been hoping that my offering would inspire the deity to smile upon me and to ease my way in my quest to honour Her and Her son Dionyssus. I asked why would the Goddess lead me to this door if she would not provide me the means and the way to accomplish this task? Difficulties continued to accumulate, til at last I was standing in the rain waiting for a bus to my opening night with a voice so ravaged by fatigue and over exertion that I sounded like Harvey Fierstein.

Standing there I thought about my friend Risa Aratyr, who wrote a wonderful Celtic fantasy about 13 years ago called Hunter Of The Light.

Risa's hero is the Goddess's Hunter, bound by a geis to chase a Sacred white stag for a year and a day and then bring him down to maintain the balance between darkness and light. I had never heard of a geis before Risa's book, but what I understand is that it is a sacred task that one must complete or suffer a broken soul. One should always consider this before accepting any geis. Thinking of Risa's book and the hero's journey I finally remembered that the hero's journey is supposed to be an ordeal.

The rasping squawk of my voice was nearing the realm of stupid and had I an understudy, no one would have let me go on. The show however must go one, and so I must go on like a hero bound by a geis which would break my soul should I fail.

I won't recount the entire saga of my opening night performance but just mention that I indeed finished the show, and what's more, though I felt a collective cringe from the audience when I spoke my first line, I also felt very soon after the audience lean in to hear me in rapt attention.

I think now I do believe in the curse of MacBeth, and I do not fear it, for now I understand it is intrinsic to the geis that She requires if you are to taste the glory of this wonderous poetry.

Blessed be