[Dialogue] An opinion on difference between DEMS and PUGS

[Charles or Doris Hahn]

This is from www.mahablog.com
 
  
Wednesday, July 28, 2004
No Fear 
 
To see the fundamental difference between the Dems and
the Pugs, just look at Teresa Heinz Kerry and Laura
Welch Bush. 
 
Teresa Kerry is real. She will be who she is --
multifaceted, refined yet earthy, cerebral and
sensual, focused and passionate. Even as she plays the
role of supportive spouse, she does it her way -- she
spoke last night of her own experiences, making it
clear she has her own identity and is not just the
woman's auxiliary of John Kerry. 
 
And then there's Laura Bush. I do not dislike Laura.
She's an attractive and gracious woman. However, she
seems ... artificial. I suspect when she's off camera
Karl Rove pulls her battery pack and tucks her away in
a pink satin box. 
 
The Hard Right is tooling up to demonize Teresa the
way they demonized Hillary. And why do they hate
Hillary? They're afraid of her. 
 
I watched a bit of the "Chris Matthews Show" this
weekend. Matthews and his panel of "pundits" could
think of nothing else to talk about than how Hillary
is playing the Democrats to get herself elected
president. The theory is that Hillary the Ambitious,
Hillary the Schemer, would rather Kerry lost in
November so she can get the nomination in 2008.
 
I bet Matthews has nightmares about Hillary hiding
under his bed, waiting to rip his heart out of his
chest and eat it.
 
The Republicans are playing to the emotions of white
men who resent losing their place in the center of a
patriarchal universe. They've been doing this since
the Nixon Administration, and they get better and
better at it. And by now we've got a whole generation
of white guys who grew up believing some snotty
liberal elitist feminazis are out to castrate them. 
 
I know I've sung this song before, but it's an
important point. I think misfiring masculinity may be
the root of all political evil in this country. See,
for example, the way Norman Mailer linked Fear of the
Female to support for the war in Iraq. 
 
As sociologist Arlie Hochschild wrote in "Let Them Eat
War":
Let's begin by re-imagining the blue-collar man, for
we do not normally think of him as a fearful man. ...
Since the l970s, the blue-collar man has taken a lot
of economic hits. The buying power of his paycheck,
the size of his benefits, the security of his job --
all these have diminished. ... For anyone who stakes
his pride on earning an honest day's pay, this
economic fall is, unsurprisingly enough, hard to bear.
How, then, do these blue-collar men feel about it? Ed
Landry said he felt "numb." Others are anxious,
humiliated and, as who wouldn't be, fearful. But in
cultural terms, Nascar Dad isn't supposed to feel
afraid. What he can feel though is angry. As Susan
Faludi has described so well in her book Stiffed, that
is what many such men feel. As a friend who works in a
Maine lumber mill among blue-collar Republicans
explained about his co-workers, "They felt that
everyone else -- women, kids, minorities -- were all
moving up, and they felt like they were moving down.
Even the spotted owl seemed like it was on its way up,
while he and his job, were on the way down. And he's
angry." 
A wise person I know once said, "everything you feed
will grow." And Republicans have been feeding the
resentment felt by working-class white men for nearly
forty or so years. GOP surrogates like Rush Limbaugh
and Bill O'Reilly keep it stoked. Had it not been fed
it might be dead by now. In the past forty years white
guys might have gotten over their resentment and
accepted a more egalitarian world. But it was fed, and
now it's huge and impenetrable. And George Bush is
playing to it to the hilt, because it's all he's got. 

 
Back to Laura Bush -- the connection between
subservient wives and "regular guy" status discussed
nicely in this Buzzflash interview with the
above-mentioned Arlie Hothschild.
Buzzflash: ... Bush can't communicate directly to the
white male about how he stands for the white male
being on top, so there's a lot of coding going on, it
seems. And much of this is subliminal, because Bush
can't say, well, I keep Laura in her place, but -- 
Hochschild: You never see her. She's in a lockbox.
BuzzFlash: And she's always walking behind him and is
carefully scripted to say as little as possible. If
she says anything, it's once or twice a month, and
it's a sentence or two, or maybe a highly controlled
interview. In their relationship, she symbolizes the
woman who is always deferential to the husband. ... 
He's picking their pockets but saying to them -- with
a wink and a nod, in politically correct code words
and symbols -- like that all-male signing of the
late-term abortion bill, where only white males were
present -- the white guys are in charge here. "Notice
there's no women," Bush is coding to them. "We're
reigning them in, but not officially -- we're going to
say we're all for women." 
And then a wink, a wink and a nod.
This National Review Online article describes Laura
Bush as an ideal First Lady: "She is poised,
well-read, low-key, and rarely discusses controversial
issues in depth [i.e., she keeps her mouth shut and
knows her place -- maha] She seems to believe her
husband was elected and that, as First Lady, she is
there to support him. ... We are comfortable with
Laura Bush. A former teacher, she is non-threatening,
classy, and devoted to mother-and-apple-pie issues
like literacy and schools. She is easy to interview
but journalists are not going to hear her spouting off
about how much she has come to dislike Democratic
spin, even if she does." [emphasis added]
The author, Sheri Annis, describes Teresa Heinz Kerry
as "refreshing." But clearly, she finds THK a little
disturbing and possibly a freak:. "She does not stick
to the talking points. In fact, Heinz Kerry described
Republican charges about her and her husband as
un-American during the couple's joint 60 Minutes
appearance. Such heated rhetoric is no way to win over
swing voters... Teresa Heinz Kerry didn't land on the
cover of Newsweek because she's a strong, independent
woman, but because she's viewed as quirky."
Um, how many years has it been since Betty Friedan
wrote The Feminine Mystique? (Forty-one, I believe.)
In 1973 I had a summer job working for the PR
department of the Missouri State Fair. One of my
duties was to write stories for home-town papers about
the winners of livestock shows. So I spent a couple of
weeks attending cattle competitions. 
The dairy cattle judges said something peculiar
whenever they gave a prize to a cow; something like,
"I like this here cow 'cause she's got a good udder on
her and good femininity." This seemed  more like Miss
America than Best 2-Year-Old Holstein. 
So finally I asked one of the judges what he meant by
"good femininity." He looked bemused. It means, he
said, that she stays out in the pasture an' chews her
cud and don't cause no trouble.
The difference between the Dems and the Pugs is that
Dems aren't afraid of women who cause trouble. Dems
seem to enjoy trouble-causing women, in fact. 
But Pugs are afraid of them. Pugs prefer Holsteins to
human women. This is why Pugs are weenies.