The supermarket is playing XM Radio Worst of the 80s. Pat Benatar. Foreigner. Can Flock of Seagulls be far behind?
I am feeling very good about the presidential election and the direction of the US today.
The Democrats just have to not fuck this up now. Which is admittedly a bar that is usually too high for them to clear.
I’d like to live in precedented times for a while.
I’d like a few decades about which future history teachers say, “We’re not even going to talk about that period. It was boring.”
The 90s were like that. It was lovely. The big news was about a married guy who cheated on his wife with an intern.
“It seems like there are two acceptable settings for female politicians: nurturing motherly matron or total bitch.”
My friend Meadhbh Hamrick sends a follow-up in email to my post comparing Kamala Harris to the fictional politiian Chrisjen Avasarala from “The Expanse,” a science fiction series set centuries in the future.
Avasarala is a beautiful Indian woman in her 60s, elegantly dressed in traditional styles from that country. Played by Shohreh Aghdashloo, Avasarala is intelligent, fierce, well-educated, honorable, honest, doesn’t suffer fools the least little bit, and swears like a longshoreman.
My friend Meadhbh Hamrick writes:
… women are often (always?) held to a double standard in politics. It seems like there are two acceptable settings for female politicians: nurturing motherly matron or total bitch. Men on the other hand can certainly be “nurturing dad/grand-dad” (Lloyd Benson or Joe Biden on a good day) or asshole (Ron DeSantis or Matt Gaetz), but they also have a third setting: just a guy doing politics.
….
I’ve been a Harris fan for a couple decades. In the late 90s I was randomly in a position to hear her talk to a gaggle of law students. She’s sharp. Some people in California don’t like her because she was so close to Willie Brown and… I get that. But there are a lot worse things you can say about modern politicians. Some people discounted her candidacy in the past because as California AG, she did her job and managed an organization which prosecuted people accused of violating the law. She also took heat for trying to move a capital murder case to life in prison. I’m actually okay with that and when the pundits talk about it, they keep saying it’s a negative.
And yes, she seems to be throwing down an Avasarala vibe, but I’ve been lucky enough to see her talk where she wasn’t campaigning and she did a good job with “option 3: just a person doing a job.”
