Re: eek!

On Wed, Nov 28, 2001 at 06:35:18PM -0000, Miguel Ramos wrote:
> 
> I think the point is: what do we care about the private life of our
> political leaders? why do we have to transform everything into a soap opera?
> when will we begin to regard and evaluate our political leaders based on
> their positions instead of a subjective opinion of the kind "I like his
> smile", "He looks honest", etc? when will the media stop promoting this kind
> of things?

Hmm, probably never. But in these cases the media, at least in the US,
simply regurgitates what some politician or another feeds it.

Since sexual politics is, and has been in the US at least, in some form or
another, a part of the public political debate since the 18th century, I
think pointing out the hypocrises of one side or another is a legitimate
form of political criticism, and that's all I meant to do.

The "private life" is itself a highly ideological, political construct. The
very notion of privacy itself is istorically-conditioned and
ideologically-constructed. There is a history of privacy and it bends in
particular ways with political history generally, as well as with, in the
West at least, the historically-specific creation of personal subjectivity
and the like.

To wit:

B. Moore, Privacy: Studies in Social and Cultural History
A. Paradailhe-Galabrun, The Birth of Intimacy: Privacy and Domestic Life in
                        Early Modern Paris
P. Strum, Privacy: The Debate in the United States Since 1945
P. Ward, A History of Domestic Space
L. Curry, The Human Body and Privacy on Trial (forthcoming)
C. Jagodzinski, Privacy and Print: Reading and Writing in 17th-Century England
Anything by Foucault


So...

If Bush, under the strain of deciding which country of brown or black people
to bomb next, falls off the wagon and starts boozing it up with Rumsfeld
every day, is that private? He made it an issue. He struggled with
alcoholism before his public career started. Should we ignore that? Even the
way he represented his alcohol usage was highly political; he never said he
was an alcoholic, since that is highly ramified term in this context.

How about if he coerces sex from his wife on a regular basis? Is that
private? Is the way a male political leader treats subordinate women not
relevent, given the Taliban? His usage of their extreme misogyny to justify,
in part, his illegal war? Is it not relevant given the calls for inclusion
of women into any post-Taliban gov't in Afgh?

Is any politician's public image a political matter? If Bush tries to butch
up, post 9-11, to seem more like the newly vogue "ordinary hero", is that
politically relevant? If he does so in part by making it seem like he's
giving his wife the high, hard one on a regular basis, is it relevant
*then*?

If details of Bush's "private life" vis-a-vis his sexual relationship with
his wife are truly private -- in the sense that it's not a legitimate topic
of political debate of the rest of us -- maybe he should fire the people who
made his sexual persona a campaign strategy point? And he surely should
excoriate the right wing for making Clinton's such a big deal, too.

> Why do we have to make a political criticism about this? 

For reasons I've outlined: because *they* started it, to be blunt.

> Because the
> question here is:
> When will people grow up, and start looking at things in racional terms,
> when that is what matters.

Simply declaring that sexual politics and the like are not rational, tout
court, is hardly an ideal move, and I suspect, whether you intend it as such
or not, it's also a very political move.

If everyone agreed that it were irrational to discuss these matters, then my
discussing them would be questionable. But people don't widely agree about
that, so you ought to argue for it, rather than merely asserting it.

Take marriage itself, which is a rather peculiar social institution in this
regard; it's licensed by the state, so it's not wholly private, and yet we
want to say our marriages are private in some sense. Even before there were
States, other public institutions had some say about marriage arrangements.
The US Congress passed legislation *defending* one particular conception of
marriage, again, which only highlights the degree to which everyone's
marriage was always already a political act, process, and institution.

I committed a political act simply by getting married at all, say some
radial feminists, whose perspective I have only come to know and appreciate
and consent to only after getting married in the first place.

Surely, given all this, Bush's marriage is not apolitical; or, if it is,
it's not simply so, and it will take a bit more explanation to remove the
prima facie assumption that it's as political as everyone else's, if not
more so.

> That is, I think, the reason why that excerpt deserved comment.

Uh, ... See above.

By the way, Miguel, it looks like your email program or some other piece of
software on your system sent me a message earlier that may have included a
virus; please clean up your system!

Best,
Kendall Clark