Sarah Palin’s All My Fault

I did it. I confess. Sarah Palin is all my fault. I, and a million other feminists like myself have unwittingly uncorked the gun-totting, gum chewing, bendy-straw sipping Jeannie and there seems to be no way to stuff her back in the bottle unless we admit it, accept the blame and make amends.

I know, I know. No good deed goes unpunished and all that stuff.

But, jeez, who would of thought?

I was forced to face my own participation in Sarah’s rapid rise to fame during a Thanksgiving phone conversation with my middle son. Normally we avoid politics like the plague. We treat it much the same way we treat football – he doesn’t mention Payton Manning and I don’t bring up Tom Brady. All families have such moments. Mom doesn’t bring out the bare butt baby pictures and son doesn’t talk about the time Mom belched in church. It’s called “Keeping the Peace,” in English. The Jews call it Shalom Bayit.

We strayed this year. My fault. Mea culpa. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. The bitch-bug bit me and I asked him if he still liked Sarah. I thought he might say “No.” I thought I could deal with it like an adult if he didn’t say, “No.”

He, of course, answered, “Of course I do.”

I, of course, said, “Why?”

He then proceeded to say the only thing he could have possibly said to defuse the situation, confuse the issue, placate his mother, save the conversation, the day and the entire mother/son relationship. He said, simply, “Mom, she’s just like you. How can I not like her?”

I was silent for so long he thought my cell phone carrier had dropped another call.

I could have left it there. I could have hung up, blamed AT&T or Sprint and pretended he was right. But instead I gulped, thought “In for a penny, in for a pound,” and said, “Huh?” And he explained.

It had something to do with Sarah’s new reality show and clubbing salmon or halibut or some other big Alaskan fish in the bottom of a boat. Now I’ve never clubbed a fish in my life. Never. Not even close. I don’t even step on spiders or silverfish. If I find them where they don’t belong I take them outside and set them free. I don’t even own a club – I’ve never owned a club. I had a nightstick once, and a flashlight with a long handle but they were entirely for show. And to be honest, I’m pretty sure I never even showed them to anyone. I once threatened a drunken patient refusing to pee in a cup with a Foley catheter but I wouldn’t have really used it on him.

I told my son I never clubbed a fish. He told me I used to take him and his brothers fishing several times a week when they were young. I reminded him that it was a stocked pond in a children’s park two miles from home and the rule was that we threw everything that we caught back in. If the fish was big enough and we could slip him off the hook fast enough we could take a picture first.

It made no difference. Sarah fishes. I fish. Therefore, I am Sarah or, since I am older and undoubtedly fished first, Sarah is me.

He explained to me that Sarah does everything a man does. I, apparently, have also done everything a man does. That has somehow wedded us – at least in the mind of a young Republican.

She is fiercely defensive of her cubs. She is a “Mama Grizzly.” I was fiercely defensive of my children. I was a “Mama Grizzly.” (Actually I was a single mother trying to tread water while keeping their feet dry but I guess it translates somehow.)

Sarah writes best selling books. I write the occasional, moderately successful poem. Sarah makes a million dollars a book. I once won a $150.00 fountain pen as a prize in a poetry contest but I took a check for $50.00 cash money instead. I write on a computer, what do I want with an expensive pen? Sometimes I freelance articles for $.03 a word and someone actually accepts one of them and sends me a check for $15.00. Sarah has a ghost-writer, I do not. I forgot to explain that to him. I don’t think it would matter.

It won’t matter because he sees Sarah as “liberated.” He sees me as “liberated.” He sees her making her way in a man’s world. He’s seen me make my own way in a man’s world. I fooled him into thinking I’d succeeded. Perhaps because of what he views as my success he views Sarah as successful, as well.

I do not know how to explain to him that all of the brave women who have gone before Sarah are being betrayed by Sarah. The original liberators are being humiliated by the faux liberated. Sarah Palin, Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Engle, they have all ridden the coattails of the Geraldine Ferraro’s, the Golda Meir’s, the Hilary Clinton’s. This new breed of foxy females who call themselves Christians, Tea Party members, family-value women – they have capitalized on the hard work, the pain, the sweat and, most of all, the tears, of women like me without one iota of understanding about what being a feminist is all about.

Normally, this would not be bad – after all, that’s why we did it. We did it so other women could someday do it, also. But without the pain, without the fear, without the great personal sacrifice that always befalls “the first,” at anything. That’s why Alice Stebbin Wells took the test to become a police officer, why Sally Ride applied to astronaut school, why Shannon Faulkner walked through the gates of The Citadel – so that all the women after them could do the same without going through what they went through.

But most of us “firsts” did it without winking, without tight red leather jackets and million dollar wardrobes paid for by someone else, without mocking our sisters, without declaring ourselves to be “real Americans” and consigning anyone not exactly “like us” to be “un-American.” We stuck up for one another. We were all mother grizzlies, even those of us without children. The world was our family and the world was what we wanted to nurture and protect. We believed that women, all women, should have control over her own destiny; that women had the right to birth control; to abortion; to divorce; to education; to help from the state and from one another if family and all else failed her. We understood the importance of sisterhood in a world run by and for men. We knew that our chain was only as strong as our weakest link and we did everything we could to protect that weakest link. We fought for education for every child, for food for all children, for health care for all children. We did it that way because we realized that the future depended not only on ourselves but also on our children. It depended on everyone else’s children too.

Most of all, we did it without whining about how unfairly we were being treated. We tried to be right but we admitted it when we were wrong – and we learned from it. We did not bluster, bully, cajole or lie. We just worked as hard as we could and accepted that it wasn’t going to be easy but, darn it, we were going to do it anyhow.

But, remembering that, I do not despair. I know that we, as women, can fix this, too.

We must re-educate ourselves on politics. If we’re young, we can get involved for the first time. If we’re middle-aged or older we can recall our activism and get re-involved. We can use the brains we were given to figure out right from wrong. Equal from non-equal. Good from bad. We can read, we can write, we can rally – and most of all, thanks to Susan B. Anthony and her cohorts, we can vote. Sarah and her ilk need to know that without the woman’s vote, which is the largest single group of voters there is, no one wins. She needs to know that large numbers of us are those women.

No matter how big her club is or how well she wields it we are not gape-mouth fish flopping in the bottom of a boat and we will not be hoodie-winked by a camouflaged women spouting twisted logic and rabid rhetoric who is trying so hard to place fear right next to family in some obscure dictionary that only she has read.

We can’t afford to. Our children are depending on us. Even the young Republican ones.