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opinion@businessmirror.com.ph • Sunday, February 21, 2016 A5
Hillary Clinton is a woman who doesn’t know her place
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By Gina Barreca | The Hartford Courant (TNS)
ILLARY Clinton is not leaning in: She’s standing up. Some people don’t like that in a woman and they become antsy and nervous. It’s true that Clinton is daring to exhibit unfeminine behaviors, such as employing the personal pronoun “I.” This, as we know, makes a woman sound arrogant, self-centered and narcissistic, as well as making her sound like the kind of woman who wouldn’t immediately go make you a fresh pot of coffee just because, you know, she was busy running for president. We all know that “I” is harder to hear when said by a woman than when it’s said by a man, don’t we? For example, I wouldn’t dare say that I know it. What you would hear instead is, “We know that many women, as well as men, cringe when women make any sound that doesn’t include a smiley-faced coo-ey noise because someone might be uncomfortable, don’t we?” But Clinton wasn’t asking questions last week. She was answering them. There she was, at the debate in Wisconsin, wearing a jacket so yellow she looked as if she were wrapped loosely in caution tape.
She didn’t look soothing and she didn’t speak reassuringly. She didn’t look soft or girlish. She looked and sounded like a piece of work; she took the stage and held it. Clinton spoke of dangers and rough landscapes ahead; she didn’t promise smooth sailing, or an easy ride. Instead of lulling followers into shallows, she offered a detailed map and dependable guidance created by hard-won experience. It’s what a beacon does. It calls attention to itself. But women aren’t supposed to call attention to ourselves. We’re supposed to be nicer than that. We’re supposed to be scented votive candles, not powerful lighthouses. Were we ever scolded by our friends when Clinton spoke the unspeakable: “When I’m in the White House.... Our friends thought it wasn’t nice that Clinton talked about what she would do if she won because nobody likes an egotistical and smug woman. Our friends thought opponent Bernie Sanders was correct to remind her
of her place by interrupting her with something she clearly needed to know—“You’re not in the White House, yet.” Clinton was being presumptuous, another thing nobody likes in a woman, even if she is running for the nation’s highest office. When men interrupt women, it’s seen as
a corrective. We’re supposed to say, “Thanks for sharing!” If women interrupt men, men think those women should be restrained by SWAT teams. It’s a disruption of the natural order. The fact that male candidates for power have, from the Neolithic period onward, begun every speech with “When I am the
winner...” never seemed to bother anybody, but naturally that’s different. We’re trying to remember why. Oh, right! It’s because men don’t have to be nice. Men can demand attention. Men make themselves heard without apology, penance or pangs of conscience. That’s why Sanders could attempt
to interrupt Clinton while she was speaking by waggling his hand to be called on as if he were once again running for class president at James Madison High (a public school attended by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, songwriter Carole King, “Cousin Brucie” Morrow, Nobel-Prize winning economist Gary Becker, “Judge Judy” Sheindlin and my dad, Brooklyn being Brooklyn). Clinton’s detractors say that she’s not smiling enough, not encouraging her rivals or soothing her enemies, that she’s a “buzz kill” and a “wet blanket” (those charming descriptions were from a CNN pundit) and that Clinton isn’t being enough of a “cheerleader.” Perhaps that’s because she’s an actual leader; pompoms would only be a distraction at this point. They accuse her of being aggressive, of being firm, of being unexciting and, most horribly, of suggesting that the 19th Amendment might exist for any reason apart from giving women the right to vote men into office. And no, it doesn’t mean we have to vote for every woman on the ballot any more than putting bread on the table means you have to eat every slice. It’s good to have it, though, right? Especially with a hot cup of coffee. I’d like mine caffeinated, please; I’m staying wide awake for this election.
Harper Lee created the greatest American hero
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OME years ago, I added To Kill a Mockingbird to the syllabus of my course on Ethics in Literature. I teach in a law school, and the students in the seminar were as hard-bitten and hypercritical as one would expect. Most of the works we read they trashed from one end to the other, often with the easygoing savage hauteur of the young intellectual. But not Mockingbird. They treated the classic with a respect bordering on awe. Prompting them to criticize it was as successful as prompting an Evangelical to criticize the Bible.
Bloomberg View
By Stephen L. Carter
Harper Lee, who died on Friday at 89, always professed herself astounded at the role of her masterpiece in the lives of so many millions of readers. The story’s images are seared into us. Those who don’t read it in middle school read it in high school. The book is as firmly installed in the popular culture as a novel can be. It’s inspired satires galore—including on The Simpsons—and Aaron Sorkin is now adapting it for Broadway. Mockingbird was published in 1960. After the book quickly sold 500,000 copies, Life magazine quoted an ecstatic neighbor who said to Lee: “The next thing you’ll be getting one of those awards from across the water.” Maybe not—Lee had to settle for a Pulitzer Prize and, later on, a couple of presidential medals—but the book’s influence on generations of schoolchildren can hardly be overstated. The story of Scout Finch’s Alabama childhood and her father’s brave but doomed defense of a black man accused of raping a white woman is not only one of the bestselling novels of all time (estimates run above 40 million copies), but also one of the most loved. As the legal
scholar Thomas Shaffer has put it: “The millions of people who like To Kill a Mockingbird are not analytical about their liking it. The story of Atticus Finch appeals in an immediate way to people.... He is a hero.” The novel was published at an auspicious moment. Lee, moved by such events as the killing of Emmett Till to reflect upon the racial attitudes of the town where she grew up, at first had trouble shaping the narrative. But when she finally succeeded, she had written what Oprah Winfrey would call “our national novel” and the writer Jane Smiley would later call “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the 20th century.” The book was part autobiographical—Lee modeled Scout on herself, Atticus on her father, the neighbors in Maycomb on her neighbors in Monroeville—and even the scorching tale of the trial in the bigoted town was something of a cri de coeur. Her experiences outside the South had redefined her, but she could never quite turn her back on the world that had spawned her. On initial publication, Mockingbird received generally glowing reviews, although the New York Times
warned that “some of the scenes suggest that Miss Lee is cocking at least one eye toward Hollywood.” If she was, that was a good thing. The film version is one of the most beloved movies ever and in 2003 the character of Atticus Finch (portrayed by Gregory Peck, who won the Academy Award) was selected by the American Film Institute as the greatest movie hero of all time. After the film, however, Lee disappeared. Not really. She wasn’t a Garboesque recluse. She simply preferred to spend time with friends and neighbors. One of her closest friends was Truman Capote, with whom she had traveled when he was researching In Cold Blood. A Capote biographer described their bond as “a common anguish” over childhoods where each felt rejected by parents and peers alike. Meanwhile, fans waited for her next book. And waited, and waited, and waited. Lee was 34 years old when Mockingbird was published. When Go Set a Watchman finally saw the light of day in 2015, she was 88. The new novel, as it turned out, was mostly from an old manuscript, the
In frigid weather, let the dogs inside By Lindsay Pollard-Post
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People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals /TNS Forum
T’S so cold in many parts of the country that car batteries are calling it quits, streets have been transformed into skating rinks because road salt isn’t working and exposed skin can become frostbitten in a matter of minutes. Yet, countless dogs—domesticated animals who are suited to curling up in armchairs, not enduring Arctic temperatures—are left outside in this bone-chilling cold 24/7, on chains or in backyard pens. And not all of them will survive. Every winter, dogs who are left outdoors freeze to death; suffer from
frostbitten ears, toes and tails; and die of dehydration or starvation— often while the people who left them out there are just a few steps away inside a cozy, warm house. Rita was one of those dogs. A police officer reportedly found her dead on Valentine’s Day 2014 inside a pen in Madison, Illinois, that was partially covered with snow and strewn with feces. Her food and water were frozen, there was blood in the pen, her ribs were protruding and she was chained, preventing her from reaching her doghouse. A neighbor testified that she was so concerned about Rita that she had rigged up a system to lower buckets of food and water to the dog and tossed straw into the pen in an attempt to give her some warmth. Last month a puppy was found frozen to death inside a plastic
igloo-shaped doghouse in Atlantic County, New Jersey, after being left outside in dangerously cold temperatures. Another dog, possibly the puppy’s mother, who was also left outside, was severely malnourished and died after being rushed to a veterinarian. Both dogs’ water bowls were frozen solid. Dogs’ fur don’t provide them with adequate protection from freezing temperatures and biting wind, especially the short fur of dogs, like pit bulls, pointers, beagles, Rottweilers and Doberman pinschers. Puppies and elderly dogs are especially vulnerable to extreme temperatures, and older dogs who have spent many winters outside endure the added misery of aching, arthritic joints. Many dogs who are chained or penned “out of sight, out of mind” in backyards are deprived of ad-
equate and legally required shelter. They spend the winter shivering in drafty, overturned plastic barrels or huddling under haphazard lean-tos constructed out of old mattresses, rusty car parts or whatever else is lying around the yard. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’s fieldworkers routinely deliver sturdy, straw-filled doghouses to dogs who are forced to live like this. A doghouse is no substitute for a warm, loving home, but for these neglected animals, proper shelter often means the difference between life and a painful death. But the coldest thing that chained and penned dogs have to endure isn’t the temperature—it’s their owners’ indifference. Companionship means everything to dogs—they are social animals who want and need to be with
rough original from which Mockingbird derived. Watchman was a huge commercial success, but critics were largely unkind. In The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik called it “a failure as a novel,” but, nevertheless, “testimony to how appealing a writer Harper Lee can be.” Michiko Kakutani in the Times labeled it “a lumpy tale” and “a distressing narrative filled with characters spouting hate speech.” Yet, I wonder whether behind much of the criticism of Watchman there might not lurk a bit of disappointment that the heroic Atticus Finch turned out to be just another bigoted yokel. The anger at the second novel, in other words, might be part of the love for the first. The Atticus we all met on first reading To Kill a Mockingbird back in grade school supplied a hero for all seasons, and we prefer to keep him that way. As Shaffer points out, “An important thing about hero stories is that they appeal from life to life.” That’s what Lee gave us: A hero story we can’t forget. And so one modest young woman earned her place among the literary immortals.
their human “pack,” have their chins scratched, hear the words “Good dog!” and be loved unconditionally, as they love us. They need to exercise their bodies and minds with long walks, games of fetch and new sights, sounds and smells to explore. Stuck in the backyard like snow shovels, dogs get none of these things that make their lives worth living. If you have dogs living outside, warm their hearts—and yours—let them inside. If there are chained or penned dogs in your neighborhood, make sure they have proper food, water and shelter— and notify authorities immediately if they don’t or if their lives are in danger. And urge their owners to welcome them inside to be with the rest of the family. There is nothing colder than leaving man’s best friend out in the snow.