By Crispin Sartwell
Capital Times Advisor
I’m writing this on Tuesday
night, March 7. It is evident as of
tonight that George W. Bush or
Albert Gore will carry us into the
thrilling new millennium. I tell
you this as seriously as I can: I
am likelier to clean Route 83
with my tongue than vote for
either of those people. Voting is a
right, not an obligation.
That’s why we’re founding a
new social movement, Nation
Against Participation. Together,
we can sleep happily through the
general election. Our group
doesn’t have an 800 number, a
mailing list, or a web site.
There’s only one thing you need
to do to belong: fail to vote in
November.
There are many kinds of
moral failure. Some folks are
thieves. Some are adulterers. A 1
Gore and George Bush are
deeply, pervasively, obviously
inauthentic. They’re fakes. I
don’t believe anything these peo
ple say, and I think that there is
Letters to the Editor
Humanities Major Submits Opinion
Dear Editor,
I submitted to Tamhelm.
That’s right. On Feb. 15, 2000,
the Tuesday after the Friday
that I saw the poster, “You
Must Submit,” I handed in my
literary work. As of this writing
I do not know whether the work
has been accepted, but that is
beside the point. The point is
when and why I submitted the
work.
Let me backtrack a little.
Over the Christmas vacation I
tried to decide what I wanted to
submit: whether to rework an
old poem, write a new one,
hand in an expository piece, or
try again with a short story that
had been rejected elsewhere.
Christmas vacation came and
went. So did the rest of January
and part of February. Then I
saw that the first deadline of
February 7th had been extend
ed. Reprieve. OK, I still had
time. Into the second week of
February, I still had made no
decision. The reworked poem
Howdy-Doody
no conviction that either man
holds so firmly that he would not
compromise it to be president.
You know exactly what I
mean. Watch A 1 Gore respond to
a question: he’s mechanically
muttering a collage of focus
grouped catch phrases: "this
risky scheme," etc. Even the
inflection has been tested. His
words have no content, not
because Gore doesn’t take a def
inite position but because in
some sense the candidate is not
saying it at all. He might believe
it; he might not. He’s muttering
someone else’s script. It’s
Howdy-Doody time.
Both Bush and Gore had
crises in their campaigns this
year, and their response was to
retire into a hotel room for a
weekend with their pollsters and
emerge with a different set of
beliefs and a different personali
ty. No human being can actually
do that (really, try it yourself),
and so I conclude either that
Bush and Gore are not human
beings or that what they’re say-
did not work. I did not like the
new one. My expository piece
on Woodstock ‘99 seemed to
have lost its relevance. That left
the short story. You know what,
I thought to myself, maybe I’ll
just forget the whole thing this
year. Then I saw the poster,
“You must . . .Submit ... to
Tamhelm,” with that woman
with the bullwhip.
My very first thought was,
this is a higher directive order
ing me to get my act together
and submit something, any
thing, to Tamhelm. OK, OK,
I’ll do it. My second thought,
following closely on the heels
of the first, was, what kind of
slutty display of twisted humor
was this? Am I submitting
something to Tamhelm because
I have been so conditioned as a
female member of society to
submit? Was I submitting
something despite the message
of the ad, or because of it? It’s a
joke dummy.
The ad worked. I fell for it. I
got caught up in the double
ing about who they are is false.
After New Hampshire, Bush
retreated with advisors and they
figured out that McCain’s
"reform" message was striking a
chord. Duh. So Bush emerged on
Monday as "Reformer with
Results." That didn’t actually
mean anything about his con
duct: Bush was still the candidate
of the Republican party estab
lishment and of the big-money
donors and had no plans to dis
turb them in their fat happy con
trol of the United States govern
ment and in particular of himself.
When Republican donors and
elected officials lined up like
geese behind Bush before the
campaign even began, they
demonstrated their rejection of
plain-spokenness and honesty,
their deep contempt for truth.
That was predictable, because in
a political system that valued
truth, neither political party
could exist.
Henry David Thoreau once
said that "as a snow-drift is
formed where there is a lull in
entendre of the meaning of the
word. So maybe Katie Eye and
Patsy Bauer have a future in
advertising. But at what cost?
Is anything fair game as long as
it sells? I have to admit Eye and
Bauer opened up a panoply of
issues here, I suspect unintend
ed, and certainly not malicious.
What makes the issue of the
posters especially challenging
is that given freedom of expres
sion, they have engaged many
people with varying viewpoints
in a dialogue impossible had
they not been allowed to
express themselves. Still, I
found the ads insulting.
This semester I have been
especially aware of the mes
sages people send out in the
way they dress because I am
taking Dr. Margaret Jaster’s
Clothes and Culture class. One
of the major insights I have
gained in the class is how, his
torically, women have been
depicted to be controlled
through the use of clothing in a
male dominated society. Those
Time
the wind, so, one would say,
where there is a lull in the truth,
an institution springs up. But the
truth blows right over it,
nonetheless, and at length blows
it down." Nation Against
Participation: We are the wind.
Now let me make the case for
joining us in our NAP. You often
hear that it is a civic duty to vote,
and that if you don’t vote you
can’t complain about what hap
pens. But I, and I daresay many
other folks, simply do not care
who wins the election. There’s
no point in trying to figure out
who’s the lesser of two evils,
especially given that we do not
have the slightest idea what these
people believe or who they are, if
indeed there is anything that they
believe or anything that they are.
The system that nominated
these two people is profoundly
corrupt. As it stands, the party
picks a candidate early on the
basis of how well that candidate
will serve their contributors, then
showers that candidate with
money, organization, and rules
images have been, and still are
reaffirmed in the society in
everything from billboards of
beer ads to garden supplies,
even if there is no specific
intent to demean women.
It matters little whether the
person in the poster in the short
whatever and high heel shoes
was in fact a woman. It could
have been a man, dressed as a
woman, but what matters is that
the image is one of a sexual
ized, objectified woman.
One thing I do feel encour
aged about is that Bauer and
Eye feel so far removed from
any real threat of oppression
that they are free to joke about
it. In fact, the joke is funny
because they have taken the
woman as object of oppression
and made her into woman as
object of humor. And, judging
by the response of the survey
taken by The Capital Times,
most people saw the humor in
the posters. The trouble is some
women and abused males are
just newly emerging from
COMMENTARY
that ease his way to the nomina
tion.
If you participate in that sys
tem by voting for one of the
selected candidates, you are
implicitly approving of the
process by which that person was
nominated. You are to some
small extent responsible for the
process and its results. If you
couldn’t actually stand behind a
Gore administration or Gore
himself as president, I suggest
that it’s your civic duty not to
vote for Gore.
Let’s say that only 10% of eli
gible voters cast ballots on
November 7. Then everyone will
be saying what we at NAP have
known for years: that our democ
racy is in crisis. Something will
change.
NAP will focus the amazing
power of our collective pent-up
apathy into a positive statement
about the state of American poli
tics. And I predict that we will
win, that more Americans will
not vote than will vote for both
candidates combined.
being victimized and the humor
is not so funny. Others, mostly
women, are still enmeshed in
the power struggle, so for them,
the posters reinforce negative
stereotypes and are actually
hurtful.
No one wants humorless,
serious advertising all the time.
And sometimes literary jour
nals take themselves too seri
ously, so I applaud Eye’s and
Bauer’s attempt to shake things
up a bit. But I do wish they had
been a little fairer and refrained
from objectifying only women.
How about a poster with a man.
In chains. Yes, that’s it. Now
where did I put my handcuffs?
Ilene Rosenberg
Humanities