Sitting Shiva On She
Don’t ask. I’m a 60 year old white woman with the last name Clinton. How do you think I feel?
Please do not tell me your long night of the soul “Let this cup pass from me, Oprah” story about when you decided to switch from Hillary to Obama. I do not feel your pain.
Please do not send me that “Good-bye to All That Part II” Robin Morgan piece. It’s brill, but it reminds me of one of those desperate prayer chain letters. When you haven’t got a prayer. Besides, I am the weakest link in chain letters.
When I ask you a simple question, like “Can we get to 42nd Street in this traffic?”, please don’t breathlessly bug-eye me with, “Yes we can!” Sheesh.
Like the new Lexus, I have pre-collision intelligence, so I didn’t watch the last Democratic debate. My partner did. Actually she switched back and forth between American Idol with Simon Cowell and American Idol with Tim Russert. At least my partner didn’t announce to everyone that if I didn’t do well in Ohio and Texas, I wouldn’t have a chance.
I put on her new BOSE headset, cranked up Strauss’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra” and did the crossword puzzle.
Did I miss anything?
Obama won? Wow, I so did not see that one coming.
I’ve been thinking about returning to my radical lesbian separatist roots. Get back to the land. Get off the grid. Get some flannel shirts and patchooli at Urban Outfittters. Okay, maybe not that far back. But I have been re-reading my favorite feminist thinkers.
Like contemporary French Feminist philosopher, Monique Wittig. She said that heterosexuality is a political regime in which “woman” exists only through her relation to the category “man”. Between Gauloises, she called for the abolition of gender categories and boldly proclaimed that lesbians are not women.
Aha! My mistake was wanting a woman president. Next time I will be much more specific. I want a lesbian president, who is not beholden to a man or the derivative, woman. Think Mike Bloomberg, but vive la difference. He bought the NYC mayoralty fair and square so he did not owe anyone anything. That allowed him to go after smokers, small-gun toters and trans fats.
Shiva is the paradoxical god of opposites. What is the opposite of cynicism of despair but the audacity of hope. Where is Christine Quinn? Get me Tammy Baldwin’s number.