on the current political crisis...

Subject: Gloria Steinem responds to Sarah Palin
Gloria Steinem is an author, feminist organizer and co-founder of the Women's Media Center. She supported Hillary Clinton and is now supporting Barack Obama.


Summary - Palin: wrong woman, wrong message
Sarah Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Hillary Clinton. She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger.
-Steinem
By Gloria Steinem
September 4, 2008

Here's the good news: Women have become so politically powerful that even the anti-feminist right wing -- the folks with a headlock on the Republican Party -- are trying to appease the gender gap with a first-ever female vice president.
We owe this to women -- and to many men too -- who have picketed, gone on hunger strikes or confronted violence at the polls so women can vote.

We owe it to Shirley Chisholm, who first took the 'white-male-only' sign off the White House, and to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who hung in there through ridicule and misogyny to win 18 million votes.

But here is even better news: It won't work. This isn't the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about
baking a new pie.

Selecting Sarah Palin, who was touted all summer by Rush Limbaugh, is no way to attract most women, including die-hard Clinton supporters. Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Clinton. Her down-home,
divisive and deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more than twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is owned and operated by the right wing and a platform that opposes pretty much everything Clinton's candidacy stood for -- and that Barack Obama's still does.

To vote in protest for McCain/Palin would be like saying, 'Somebody stole my shoes, so I'll amputate my legs.'

This is not to beat up on Palin. I defend her right to be wrong, even on issues that matter most to me. I regret that people say she can't do the job because she has children in need of care, especially if they wouldn't say the same about a father. I get no pleasure from imagining her in the spotlight on national and foreign policy issues about which she has zero background, with one month to learn to compete with Sen. Joe Biden's 37 years' experience.

Palin has been honest about what she doesn't know. When asked last month about the vice presidency, she said, 'I still can't answer that question until someone answers for me: What is it exactly that the VP does every day?' When asked about Iraq, she said, 'I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq.'

She was elected governor largely because the incumbent was unpopular, and she's won over Alaskans mostly by using unprecedented oil wealth to give a $1,200 rebate to every resident. Now she is being praised by McCain's campaign as a tax cutter, despite the fact that Alaska has no state income or sales tax.

Perhaps McCain has opposed affirmative action for so long that he doesn't know it's about inviting more people to meet standards, not lowering them. Or perhaps McCain is following the Bush administration habit, as in the Justice Department, of putting a job candidate's views on 'God, guns and
gays' ahead of competence. The difference is that McCain is filling a job one 72-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency.

So let's be clear: The culprit is John McCain. He may have chosen Palin out of change-envy, or a belief that women can't tell the difference between form and content, but the main motive was to please right-wing ideologues; the same ones who nixed anyone who is now or ever has been a supporter of reproductive freedom. If that were not the case, McCain could have chosen a woman who knows what a vice president does and who has thought about Iraq; someone like Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison or Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine.

McCain could have taken a baby step away from right-wing patriarchs who determine his actions, right down to opposing the Violence Against Women Act.

Palin's value to those patriarchs is clear: She opposes just about every issue that women support by a majority or plurality. Shebelieves that creationism should be taught in public schools but disbelieves global warming; she opposes gun control but supports government control of women's wombs; she opposes stem cell research but approves 'abstinence-only' programs, which increase unwanted
births, sexually transmitted diseases and abortions; she tried to use taxpayers' millions for a state program to shoot wolves from the air but didn't spend enough money to fix a state school system with the lowest high-school graduation rate in the nation; she runs with a candidate who opposes the Fair Pay Act but supports $500 million in subsidies for a natural gas pipeline across Alaska; she supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, though even McCain has opted for the lesser evil of offshore drilling. She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger.

I don't doubt her sincerity. As a lifetime member of the National Rifle Assn., she doesn't just support killing animals from helicopters, she does it herself. She doesn't just talk about increasing the use of fossil fuels but puts a coal-burning power plant in her own small town. She doesn't just echo McCain's pledge to criminalize abortion by overturning Roe vs. Wade, she says that if one of her daughters were impregnated by rape or incest, she should bear the child. She not only opposes reproductive freedom as a human right but implies that it dictates abortion, without saying that it also protects the right to have a child.

So far, the major new McCain supporter that Palin has attracted is James Dobson of Focus on the Family. Of course, for Dobson, 'women are merely waiting for their husbands to assume leadership,' so he may be voting for Palin's husband.

Being a hope-a-holic, however, I can see two long-term bipartisan gains from this contest.

Republicans may learn they can't appeal to right-wing patriarchs and most women at the same time. A loss in November could cause the centrist majority of Republicans to take back their party, which was
the first to support the Equal Rights Amendment and should be the last to want to invite government into the wombs of women.

And American women, who suffer more because of having two full-time jobs than from any other single injustice, finally have support on a national stage from male leaders who know that women can't be equal outside the home until men are equal in it. Barack Obama and Joe Biden are campaigning on their belief that men should be, can be and want to be at home for their children.

This could be huge.

friday august 1st...first friday art walk.

the bird study

summer 2008

i told myself i would take the summer off from art to act pregnant. ha! i have been offered a spot in several amazing shows that i simply could not turn down.

first of all, this friday July 11th "super Nova" opens at the Kymara Gallery in the north dam mill in Biddeford, Maine...it is a show featuring some super amazing artists of andy warhol notoriety, ultra violet, billy name and bibbe hansen and even some performance art...i am lucky to be one of the two local artists featured in that show! the gallery is supposedly covered in tinfoil! it should be a blast this friday...come check it out. it is going to be over the top!

in august i am lucky to be half of a two person show at the amazing Sanctuary Gallery in Portland, Maine. a lot of my photo-lithographic work will be featured in that show...stuff i don't normally show! i am so excited for it. the show opens on the First Friday Artwalk...the 1st of August. would love to see you there.

and last but not least, a couple weeks before the new baby is born in the biddeford mills again, the etsy maineteam is having a giant craft fair. i am hoping to make it to this, but with my track record of cookin' my buns rather quickly, i may have a newborn by then! i will be there as a consumer at least if not as a vendor! it is going to be a fair not to be missed. etsy is just the best...and i love supporting local artisans...

hope everyone is having a great summer and that you and everyone you know come to say hi at one of my shows!!!!!

julie and keira's invitation...

lovely heidileigh

some portrait work i've done recently...

show!

the opening for the latest show that i have work in is this coming friday...the 22nd from 5-7 pm. love to see your face there...

fruit

please join me...

for lisa coley...

the lost button

the first print to be pulled off of my new wee baby press.

for the love of pods i ii & iii

funny...

i always assume no one reads this blog...i put my work up here so that i have my images hosted. it is a place i come to view my work as an outsider...and then all of a sudden i'll speak to someone, or get a comment from someone who has read or viewed my blog...funny. i appreciate anyone taking the time to read my garble or look at my work.

thanks.

i have another show booked for 2008. a month long solo exhibition at the white heart...a very cool lounge/bar in portland. it is the reason i have begun to pump out work. well, that and the inspiration of my subject matter. i am loving it. but i feel like i have prematurely stopped working on some of the images i have recently posted simply for some girth in the size of my body of work. i feel the pieces are kind of incomplete and plan on going back to work on them before the show. but really, there isn't much time left before january...and i want all new work up.

so...i would appreciate comments. even if it feels like a negative one, or critical. i want to hear it. i have more work to do on this stuff. i know that. why don't you let me know what you think would make it all come together batter. and in the meantime i am going to keep posting myunfinished work.

ciao, bellos.

driver 8...oh how i love you.

two new pieces in the works...

to be printed on recycled brown paper with a coat of golden ink aid to make them glow!!!!! once i get my rinter working i'll scan the output...but for now the images in the works...

scissoring

still more to come...

me...

her instrument of choice

the beginning...the very beginning...of some new work. come on now and be critical, but remember that it is the group of things that go together that make the statement.

creation

i have a big show in april 2008. not for a while, but for me, huge. the wheels have begun to spin about new work. new work. such a novel idea.

i cannot waste time creating anything that doesn't speak. the venue i have set up is very conservative...the library in kennebunk. the space my work will be in is shared by cildren, thus i have to curb my usual vulgarity. but by how much? i want to make a statement politically, but without insinuating violnce, nudity or any obscenity, how i am to do that?

my draw, or interests lie in print-ized portraits. i have established this. this is the genre for me right now. i want to focus on the working class and somehow establish in my work an elitism about having humility...i have a particular interest in this because recently i began a green (non-toxic, eco-friendly cleaning business to support my family. there is much to be learned about life before one cleans other peoples' grime for a living. let me tell you.) i struggle finding ways of justifying being a cleaner even though i have a degree and can do many many things...fact is...i think that cleaning a person's home in a safe noon-toxic way is a sort of holitstic health practice. preventative meds in a very basic way. organization, cleanliness...there is something very noble about what i am doing and what others like me do...

i think my style of portraiture can capture an arrogance in the sweat-collar class well. it is, i believe, what i shall attempt to do...that or some paper plate lithos of utensils with illustrious names...hmmmm.

my itsy bitsy etsy