Girl Zines, Tiger Woods, and Health Care Reform Hysteria

2010 starts with more health care nonsense. Also, Alison Piepmeier talks about girl zines, and Tiger Woods sex scandal gets bizarrely political.

 

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Rape in the military

Dick Morris goes full wingnut

Sarah Palin beats on the "death panels" thing

Bart Stupak throws a pity party

Girl Zines

Brit Hume tries to convert Tiger Woods

Don Imus corrects the record

Pat Buchanan sides with Hume

The Daily Show makes fun of it all

Scott Lively praises harsh homophobia in Uganda

 

On this episode of Reality Cast, an interview with Alison Piepmeier about her new book on the girl zine culture, its history and present. Also, the religious right continues to dominate the conservative discourse on health care, and I finally am forced to talk about the Tiger Woods sex scandal.

 

Not that this story is especially new, but a documentary has been made about rape in the military. 

 

• military *

 

Apparently, the number of reports of rape are soaring upwards as the war drags on.  I'm not surprised that this ongoing war with no end in sight is encouraging nihilistically violent male behavior.

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Hey, 2010!  Hope y'all had a good vacation.  I spent mine catching up on some reading, so it was kind of like work, because I read some feminist stuff.  But it was older feminist stuff, from the 70s, namely works of the famous pro-sex, pro-pleasure feminist Ellen Willis.  There was a quote from an essay she wrote in 1980 that gave me the chills, it was so perceptive.  I quote:

 

The antiabortion movement is the most dangerous political force in the country. I believe---and in saying this I intend no hyperbole whatsoever---that it is the cutting edge of neo-fascism, a threat not only to women's rights and to everyone's sexual freedom and privacy but to freedom of religion and civil liberties in general.

 

What was interesting was how right Willis was to see that the anti-choice movement was really gearing up to be the front lines in pushing a hardcore right wing agenda.  This has become even more true than she  predicted 30 years ago.  And really, until this past year, I don't think most liberals saw that.  But the murder of Dr. George Tiller plus the way abortion was used as a Trojan horse strategy against general health care reform put a lot of doubts to rest. 

 

What all this means is that so-called pro-life movement has really played a major role in creating hysteria over health care reform, and certainly that didn't slow down much over the holiday.  What was interesting was that while abortion was the big anti-choice bullet to shoot at health care reform, the death panels thing, like all right wing memes, was far from dead and made a resurgence.  Dick Morris trotted it out on "Fox and Friends". 

 

• health care 1 *

 

This, of course, is an utter lie.  It is true that some tumors are so slow-growing that it's better not to put a very old person through chemo who will die of natural causes before the cancer gets to them, but that choice is usually made by doctors.  And it's not to save costs, but to not kill someone or ruin someone's last years with chemo.  Lies like this get at the weird insinuation that anti-choicers make, which is that the only reason that there's death is someone screwed up.  Not true.  It's coming for all of us, and doctors have an obligation not to promise immortality when they can't deliver.

 

Sarah Palin hasn't given up promoting the zombie lie, either.

 

• health care 2 *

 

Of course, all this is meant to distract from the fact that the current system is what kills people, by rationing their health care by not offering it at all to people with pre-existing conditions, especially if their employers don't cover it. But I think conservatives get that. They just think that if someone poor gets health care, they won't. It's a lot like the way anti-abortion people imagine that if someone else gets away with having sex, they lose out. 

 

Not that abortion is going away as a scare tactic, by any means.  Bart Stupak is doing what wingnuts do best, which is playing the victim, with Fox News offering an assist.

 

• health care 3 *

 

Only in the upside down world of right wing propaganda is it crazy and wrong and beyond the pale for leaders in a party to try to exert their power on representatives who are flouting the party line.  Next week: commentators on Fox News act horrified that politicians who support health care reform continue to get 8 hours of sleep a night, like they not only deserve to live, but also to get rest.

 

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insert interview

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I thought there would be a small chance that I would be able, especially due to the holiday, to avoid doing a segment addressing the baffling controversy over Tiger Woods' infidelities.  And I say "baffling", because I simply cannot and will not believe that anyone is genuinely shocked that a world famous athlete who has people singing his praises all day and night might have both the opportunities to cheat and the entitlement issues to do it.  Since I refuse to believe anyone is reacting out of genuine shock or moral outrage, I'm forced to conclude that the whole controversy is being conducted for the same reason any disingenuous sex stuff gets into the public consciousness, which is that it's an excuse for the right to start pushing their agenda on the public. 

 

Luckily for my theory, it was neatly proven true by Fox News pundit Brit Hume, who decided this was a good time to make a strike for Christian dominance. 

 

• tiger 1 *

 

Of course, there's no reason to think that non-Christians have no idea of what it means to seek self-betterment or redemption, or to think that Christians are exempt from doing hurtful things.  In fact, Don Imus actually took it upon himself to correct Hume's assumption, even while blowing smoke up his ass about how he's so great blah blah.

 

• tiger 2 *

 

What I think was interesting about this whole thing is that Hume, by rushing forward  with this nonsense, really revealed something about the American religious right that they might otherwise take pains to conceal.  And it's this: They seem to think that sex is their property.  Or to be more specific, that sexual sin is.  The idea that Buddhists are just dandy with cheating on your wife is a weird assumption, but if you think about where Hume is coming from, it makes sense.  This in turn should tell you something else.  The right isn't interested in controlling sexuality because of babies or family values per se, but you already knew that.  Nor does it have much to do with "life".  But it does have everything to do with social control and dominance, and part of that agenda is asserting that Christianity is, if not an official state religion, a de facto state religion.  And sex is just a tool they use as part of that agenda.

 

The much-touted hostility to secularism is fundamentally a hostility to diversity, since, after all, true respect for a diverse population would mean not singling out one belief system as dominant in the public square.  But they can't come right out and say this, so instead they lean on sexual hysteria and judgments to smuggle that message in.  Which is why Hume got support from some interesting characters, like Pat Buchanan.  

 

• tiger 3 *

 

He dissembled more, suggesting that at best this was Hume being impolite instead of being a real meathead. But Buchanan supported the idea of shaming Woods for his religion and suggesting that all Buddhists everywhere are big ol' fans of adultery.  And that it was fine to do this without knowing the first thing about Buddhism.  Look, I'm no expert on world religions, but any fool could tell you that it's unlikely that a major religion is going to really valorize disruptive behavior like adultery.  Of course, these two clowns probably don't realize Buddhism is a major religion.

 

Like I said, what should be clear is this: The Christian right has decided that sex is their gateway to push their other ideas, especially their hostility to diversity and religious freedom.  When it comes to female sexuality, people have enough guilt and sexism to be unable to see this.  But now that it's a very wealthy man whose sexual dalliances are being used as an excuse to attack him for being different, I hope people see this.  The Daily Show certainly did.

 

• tiger 4 *

 

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, but you just said, oh wait, you were full of it edition.  Scott Lively, who was one of the organizers of an anti-gay rally that set off Ugandan legislators to write a law that could punish homosexuality by death, is running around claiming that he didn't want it to happen that way.  But it's hard to believe him, when he says stuff like this.

 

• lively *

 

Yeah, so there you go. I fail to see how Uganda could step much further in the direction Lively wants. What can you do worse than killing people?  Desecrating their corpses?  The good news is that the wingnuts who supported this murderous legislation aren't being able to run from it like they'd like, and their true ugly selves are coming out.

 

 

Follow Amanda Marcotte on Twitter, @amandamarcotte