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February
13, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
Banning
the Koran
George
Monbiot
American
Imperialism
February
12, 2002
Uri Avnery
The
Great Game:
Oil, Sharon and Iran
Tommy
Ates
Black
Land Loss
February
11, 2002
Walt Brasch
The
Synergizing of America
John Troyer
Enron's
Deep Throat?
February
9, 2002
John Blair
Criticize
Cheney, Go to Jail
February
8, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
Ashcroft
the Bigot
Molly
Secours
Racism
and Real Estate
Wole Akande
World
Economic Forum:
The Aftermath
Cockburn/St.
Clair
Dita
Sari Tells Reebok
to "Shove It"
February
7, 2002
Patrick
Cockburn
Taliban's
War on Chess
John Chuckman
Howdee,
Dick!
Tariq
Ali
Mullahs
and Heretics
February
6, 2002
Amira
Hass
On
the Edge of the
Non-Violent Demonstrations
Vivian
Berger
Sentenced
to Rape
Vladimir Georgiyev
Russian Intelligence:
War on Iraq Begins in Sept.
Tom Turnipseed
"Axis
of Evil" a Cover for Corporate Corruption?
David
Vest
The
Enron Creature
February
5, 2002
Norman
Madarasz
Dispatch
from Pôrto Alegre
Tom Malinowski
What
to do with
Our "Detainees"?
Dita Sari
Why
I Rejected the
Reebok Human Rights Award
February
4, 2002
Eric Miller/Beth
Daley
Five
Weapons Systems
That Bilk the Taxpayers
Kenneth
Roth
Dear
Condoleezza,
You've Misstated the
Geneva Convention
Robert
Jensen
The
Occupation Must End
Shahid
Alam
How
Different Are
Islamic Societies?
David
Vest
Everybody
Says I Loathe You
John Chuckman
American
Politics of Grief
February
3, 2002
Zoltan
Grossman
War
and New Military Bases
February
2, 2002
Francis
Schor
Carlucci's
Strange Career
February
1, 2002
Dr. Susan
Block
The
Great Ashcroft Cover Up
Jeremy
Voas
Why
We're Suing Ashcroft
David
Vest
10
Things I Know About Him
January
31, 2002
Rahul
Mahajan
The
State of the Union:
A New Cold War
Dave Marsh
Miles
Copeland, War
and the Future of Music
John Pilger
The
Colder War
Alexander
Cockburn
American
Journal:
Killer Dog, Weird Couple
Dr. Susan
Block
Blowback
and Daniel Pearl
January
30, 2002
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Linda
Lay, Hill and Knowlton and the Tears of a Clown
Jack McCarthy
Free
Noelle Bush!
Michael
Ratner
Memo
to Bush: Adhere to
the Geneva Convention
Jay Moore
Proud
to be an American?
Susan
Block
The
Great Pretzel Swallower
and Guantanamo Porn
January
29, 2002
Gary Leupp
Why
This War Was, and Remains, Utterly Wrong
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Birds of Kandahar
Patrick
Cockburn
Afghan
Opium Trade
Back in Business
January
28, 2002
Larry
Chin
Brosnahan
for the Defense
Mokhiber/Weissman
Tyranny
of the Bottom Line
George
E. Curry
Civil
Rights Nominee Called Affirmative Action "Racist"
Sen. Russ
Feingold
Campaign
Finance Reform?
Think Enron
John Chuckman
Liberal?
Media?
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
INSIDE
EXCLUSIVE
TO
COUNTERPUNCH
SUBSCRIBERS
Published Oct. 15, 2001
8-Page Special Issue
War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
Search
CounterPunch
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
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February 14,
2002
It's Time for a Woman to Make a
Real Run at the Presidency
By John Chuckman
With the tone and substance of national policy
in the United States in a seemingly bottomless downward spiral,
threatening both the peace of the world and the freedom of Americans,
it may be fair to ask, why talk about a woman running for president?
The simple answer is that the best promise for improvement may
well be in calling on the talents of humanity's other half, so
largely ignored in American politics (actually, humanity's more-than-other
half since males on average die much younger).
I sincerely believe America has scraped
the bottom of the barrel for male leadership talent with George
Bush. Indeed, in some ways this is true of both parties since
Al Gore, while a far more intellectually-capable man, threw away
the election with a fatuous, me-too campaign and insisted on
blaming Mr. Clinton's past activities for his loss. Hardly the
stuff of great leadership.
When will a woman run for president?
When this question is posed in op-ed opinion pieces, the answer
frequently offered is something along the lines of "when
one decides to run." A very reassuring bromide that injects
"choice," that most pliable word of American corporate-speak,
into the discussion.
Of course, the reality is that an apron-strings,
cookies-and-milk mind-set still dominates much of American society's
attitudes about women. People abroad likely find it hard to appreciate
the truth of this when they think of America as a place of rapid
change and advanced technology.
But not everything is technologically
advanced in America. You have only to recall the incompetent
mess of Florida ballots in the last election for an example of
how a technologically advanced nation can be backward even in
areas of technology.
And rapid change certainly does not occur
uniformly through American society. This is a nation where millions
of people look for signs of Satan in children's books and attend
religious revivals where folks are slapped on the forehead to
cure cancer. One of the largest fundamentalist Christian denominations
in the United States proudly declares that the little woman's
place is to support her husband as patriarch of the family. The
role for women amongst American fundamentalist Jews is pretty
much what one would expect to find in the mid-17th century.
America's South, with its cloying ideals
of belles, cheerleaders, baton-twirlers and cotillions, represents
patriarchal values in the raw. After all, it is the place that
spontaneously generates people who speak in tongues and handle
poisonous snakes as part of divine worship. Almost the nation's
entire supply of fundamentalist preacher-entrepreneurs, people
who make a fine living out of refusing to recognize what century
they live in, are incubated and developed in the South. And the
South, due to changing trends in population, is the part of the
country that has risen to great new influence in American politics.
The treatment of Hillary Clinton set
a standard of viciousness no other society on earth, claiming
to be civilized, could match. An intelligent and independent-minded
woman was harassed and insulted for eight long years simply because
she was intelligent and independent-minded. Undoubtedly, it all
served as an effective warning that the Barbara Bush image, the
smiling granny serving cookies and milk while overseeing ghost-written
books about her dog Fluffy is the preferred one for the White
House.
In a very real sense, Elizabeth Dole,
who did make a weak attempt at the Republican nomination, despite
the benefit of a syrupy Southern accent, was never a serious
candidate. Comments on Ms. Dole's abilities, reported in the
mainstream press, included her skill at descending from a podium
and the fact that her shoes coordinated with decor.
She was always a weak candidate, having
held appointed offices, with no genuine experience in politics,
and someone who long played public cheerleader to her morose
and plodding husband's political fortunes (some would say that
alone disqualified her), a gracious man who returned the favor
by publicly disparaging her campaign early on (What else does
one expect from someone who actually bawled at Richard Nixon's
burial?).
The strong, lingering smell of anti-feminism
in America, kept alive by people who believe we should be guided
by principles that predate the Renaissance and the Enlightenment,
certainly helps explain why the most capable women don't run.
Christine Whitman, former governor of New Jersey, is an outstanding
example, now safely tucked into a lesser cabinet post (lesser
as far as the Bush Boys are concerned - after all, what's the
environment but a name for a photo-op?) where she is free to
say virtually nothing - a very dynamic governor, whether you
agree with all her policies or not, reduced to a cipher.
Perhaps, "can't run" is the
more appropriate expression, since money, steam-shovels full
of it, from private sources drives the entire American political
engine. George Bush provided the definitive proof that a candidate
most people never heard of and who had never taken any interest
in national policy can win, provided only he started his journey
through the primary campaigns with $70 million stuffed in his
pockets and received frequent top-ups as he glutted the airwaves
with numbing pictures of vacuous benignity. The sources of this
money still do not see fit to trust women with command over resources
in business, so it is not surprising they do not trust them with
command over resources in politics.
Something is very wrong with national
politics when a country of America's stature can't come up with
a better choice than George Bush or Al Gore (incidentally, has
anybody noticed the increased role of inheritance in the great
republic?). America's rotten system for financing elections is
at the heart of the matter. What other nation holds to a mindless
equivalency between money and free speech? Presumably, if you
pushed this legalistic, anti-democratic notion to its limit,
big-money contributors would be entitled to do all the speaking
in elections. Everyone would still have a vote, but only those
with money could talk to them. George Bush's campaign hinted
strongly at the future possibility.
The party system is also at fault here.
Despite the countless chamber-of-commerce testimonials we hear
about free enterprise in America, it doesn't seem to have occurred
to anyone to institute it into politics. We have a virtual monopoly
situation (actually, what economists call a duopoly) with two
parties using countless dodges, gimmicks, and unfair rules to
keep out competitors. Just a little room is left around the edges
of all the high barriers to entry so that some suggestion of
a free market is maintained, much the way small independent bottlers
of soda receive a few square feet out of an entire aisle dedicated
to Coke and Pepsi products in a supermarket. The restrictions
against a third-party candidate's even getting on the ballots
of all fifty states would fill a book.
New parties bring new ideas and new blood.
Why does anyone believe that two parties are any more capable
of this than if there were only two banks doing all financial
transactions? Republicans in particular love to blather about
"creative destruction" in the economy. Did it ever
occur to them that the same Schumpeterian principle applies to
institutions like political parties? The national parties have
crotchety old establishments that do not contain many women or
other fresh-thinking people in influential positions.
Methods of national debate also are part
of the problem. So long as argumentative nonsense is regarded
as debate, an immature and intellectually-dull national politics
will continue. Negative advertising is only a small part of this
phenomenon. Many talented people are repulsed at entering a contest
where lung-power and attitudes play a far greater role than ideas
or wisdom. This was certainly the case for General Powell, and
I suspect former Governor Whitman. One could make a joke about
this form of debate appealing more to hormone-driven males than
thoughtful women, but in fact it does not appeal to the thoughtful
of either sex. Yet it dominates American politics, just as dominates
the airwaves with public affairs programs that don't inform.
Change in the way America does the business
of politics offers the best chance for escape from the intellectual
and moral sinkhole represented by the Bush administration. Such
change would bring more excellent people forward, and I have
no doubt that at least half of them would be women. And America
would take a big step forward in its promise to be a democratic
society, rather than one run by money with a semblance of democratic
institutions. But in saying these things, I fear I may be pointing
towards solutions whose very impossibility now leaves a sense
of a settled and depressing fate.
John Chuckman
is a columnist for YellowTimes.
He encourages your comments: jchuckman@YellowTimes.ORG
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