blogger profile

Margaret Pilarski

editorial assistant

i'm a feminist, and if you're reading this then you are too, you just might not know it yet. i like to eat cheese and travel, but i'm usually broke and/or spending my money on shoes and cocktail rings. i love dogs, rain, and driving offensively (and putting the last comma in a listed series). i'm se...

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election smarts

as a twenty-something who just fell off the idealist academic truck, i feel like a lot of election talk has watered down to likability, rumors, and electoral crap math. listening to it just makes my brains melt out of my ears. there are bigger problems with this election than how old john mccain is and why people think obama is muslim (he is not).

there are two specific things that have been on my mind. #1 voting machines/ the ability to intimidate at the polls, and #2, by using the wrong words to discuss actual issues, we never actually get at the issue, but just continue to push around verbal vomit without realizing it.

so, to quickly address #1: i know i’m not supposed to cite wikipedia as a source, but check out this list of 2004 election controversies. it’s pretty clear there are a lot of problems, and about zero of them have been fixed. no matter if 80% of people say “woo yeah, obamaaaaaaaaaa” and then go (attempt to) vote at a poll with a diebold voting machine or something – who knows, maybe their vote got eaten and BAM! john ‘i’m 100 years old and you must have your baby’ mccain wins and the universe as we know it ends and we all move to canada. hey, it has happened twice before.

now, on to #2. like i said in the beginning, average people and even the pundits have been boring me. none of what they are saying even matters because of they way they are saying it. this academickyness is also known as political correctness. yes, i am the person that corrects you when you say: “i’ve got to man the sign-up table for an hour, but i’ll meet you for coffee afterward” – don’t you mean that you’ll be working at the sign-up table? i know, small potatoes. but to me, it all counts. every single little bit of language counts. and it’s hard, it’s really hard to catch yourself, to think and speak differently, but i honestly think language makes a world of difference and so i’ll keep correcting myself... and you.

nicholas kristof, sexy brainiac ny times columnist, has a great article out about the push to ‘otherize’ obama. language makes apparent the us/them mentality that you have in your head (and may not even be aware of). read the article, it’s good. here’s the gist of it:

What is happening, I think, is this: religious prejudice is becoming a proxy for racial prejudice. In public at least, it’s not acceptable to express reservations about a candidate’s skin color, so discomfort about race is sublimated into concerns about whether Mr. Obama is sufficiently Christian.

The result is this campaign to “otherize” Mr. Obama. Nobody needs to point out that he is black, but there’s a persistent effort to exaggerate other differences, to de-Americanize him.

and to accompany it, follow up with this most excellent editorial about the way we talk about people, specifically regarding race, and the way we live within the lines.

if you don’t go read the whole thing, at least read the end:

Mr. Obama seems to understand that he is always an utterance away from a statement — or a phrase — that could transform him in a campaign ad from the affable, rational and racially ambiguous candidate into the archetypical angry black man who scares off the white vote. His caution is evident from the way he sifts and searches the language as he speaks, stepping around words that might push him into the danger zone.

These maneuvers are often painful to watch. The troubling part is that they are necessary.