Eve Ensler, the American playwright, performer, feminist and activist best known for “The Vagina Monologues”, wrote the following about Sarah Palin.
Drill, Drill, Drill
I am having Sarah Palin nightmares. I dreamt last
night that she was a member of a club where they rode
snowmobiles and wore the claws of drowned and starved polar
bears around their necks. I have a particular thing for
Polar Bears. Maybe it’s their snowy whiteness or their
bigness or the fact that they live in the arctic or that I
have never seen one in person or touched one. Maybe it is
the fact that they live so comfortably on ice. Whatever it
is, I need the polar bears.
I don’t like raging at women. I am a Feminist and
have spent my life trying to build community, help empower
women and stop violence against them. It is hard to write
about Sarah Palin. This is why the Sarah Palin choice was
all the more insidious and cynical. The people who made this
choice count on the goodness and solidarity of Feminists.
But everything Sarah Palin believes in and practices
is antithetical to Feminism which for me is part of one
story — connected to saving the earth, ending racism,
empowering women, giving young girls options, opening our
minds, deepening tolerance, and ending violence and war.
I believe that the McCain/Palin ticket is one of the
most dangerous choices of my lifetime, and should this
country choose those candidates the fall-out may be so great,
the destruction so vast in so many areas that America may
never recover. But what is equally disturbing is the impact
that duo would have on the rest of the world.
Unfortunately, this is not a joke. In my lifetime I have
seen the clownish, the inept, the bizarre be elected to the
presidency with regularity.
Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution. I take
this as a metaphor. In her world and the world of
Fundamentalists nothing changes or gets better or evolves.
She does not believe in global warming. The melting of the
arctic, the storms that are destroying our cities, the
pollution and rise of cancers, are all part of God’s
plan. She is fighting to take the polar bears off the
endangered species list. The earth, in Palin’s view, is
here to be taken and plundered. The wolves and the bears are
here to be shot and plundered. The oil is here to be taken
and plundered. Iraq is here to be taken and plundered. As
she said herself of the Iraqi war, “It was a task from
God.”
Sarah Palin does not believe in abortion. She does
not believe women who are raped and incested and ripped open
against their will should have a right to determine whether
they have their rapist’s baby or not
She obviously does not believe in sex education or
birth control. I imagine her daughter was practicing
abstinence and we know how many babies that makes.
Sarah Palin does not much believe in thinking. From
what I gather she has tried to ban books from the library,
has a tendency to dispense with people who think
independently. She cannot tolerate an environment of
ambiguity and difference. This is a woman who could and
might very well be the next president of the United States.
She would govern one of the most diverse populations on the
earth.
Sarah believes in guns. She has her own custom
Austrian hunting rifle. She has been known to kill 40
caribou at a clip. She has shot hundreds of wolves from the
air.
Sarah believes in God. That is of course her right,
her private right. But when God and Guns come together in
the public sector, when war is declared in God’s name,
when the rights of women are denied in his name, that is the
end of separation of church and state and the undoing of
everything America has ever tried to be.
I write to my sisters. I write because I believe we
hold this election in our hands. This vote is a vote that
will determine the future not just of the U.S., but of the
planet. It will determine whether we create policies to save
the earth or make it forever uninhabitable for humans. It
will determine whether we move towards dialogue and
diplomacy in the world or whether we escalate violence
through invasion, undermining and attack. It will determine
whether we go for oil, strip mining, coal burning or invest
our money in alternatives that will free us from dependency
and destruction. It will determine if money gets spent on
education and healthcare or whether we build more and more
methods of killing. It will determine whether America is a
free open tolerant society or a closed place of fear,
fundamentalism and aggression.
If the Polar Bears don’t move you to go and do
everything in your power to get Obama elected then consider
the chant that filled the hall after Palin spoke at the RNC,
“Drill Drill Drill.” I think of teeth when I think
of drills. I think of rape. I think of destruction. I think
of domination. I think of military exercises that force
mindless repetition, emptying the brain of analysis, doubt,
ambiguity or dissent. I think of pain.
Do we want a future of drilling? More holes in the
ozone, in the floor of the sea, more holes in our thinking,
in the trust between nations and peoples, more holes in the
fabric of this precious thing we call life?
Eve Ensler
http://electra.blogsome.com/2008/09/19/drill-drill-drill-eve-ensler-on-sarah-palin/thanks amie, for being my daughter and friend, and for educating me - once again, mom/kpete
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