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eve ensler on sarah palin: DRILL, DRILL, DRILL

By September 10, 2008Politics

From the Huffington Post

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 chose 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?

Join the discussion 3 Comments

  • SuperTrooper says:

    I don’t care for her or McCain myself, but I write these fanatical forwards… Now on to the stuff I don’t believe… for instance, I’d like to see proof of shooting 40 caribou in one clip, and shooting hundreds of wolves from the air, especially since wolves are on the endangered species list in most places, shooting “hundreds” of wolves sounds like quite the fanatical embellishment meant to stir people up as surely should would have been in big trouble for shooting “hundreds of wolves”, and most caribou hunting licenses allow for 2 animals to be “harvested”…

    How about the Austrian hunting rifle? Maybe the”evidence” came from this blog that the poster quickly revealed he “made up” after it started circulating the internet as fact, it mentions the 40 caribou, seems like quite the coincidence doesn’t it?
    http://unbearablebobness.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/08/governor-sarah-palin-quotes.html

    Wait, maybe she was responsible for this?
    http://newsminer.com/news/2008/jul/26/dozens-caribou-found-shot-near-northwest-alaska-vi/

    Even snopes says that is fake:
    http://www.snopes.com/politics/palin/newsquotes.asp

    I’d also like to see proof of “From what I gather she has tried to ban books from the library, has a tendency to dispense with people who think independently.” That sounds like quite the opinion… Snopes has research on that too:
    http://www.snopes.com/politics/palin/bannedbooks.asp

    “Given that, as yet, there is no documentation of any books having been banished from the Wasilla library by Mayor Palin, or even of which books she may have had in mind when she broached the subject, whence comes the considerable register of tomes now being circulated as “the list of books Palin tried to have banned”?”

    Who knows what she was talking about? Maybe she wanted to get rid of smut books like the Red Shoe Diaries, we’ll never know as it never went past “What would your response be if I asked you to remove some books from your collection.”

    You might also check out this
    http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/sliming_palin.html

    and

    http://arcticglass.blogspot.com/2008/09/my-sarah-palin-experiences.html

  • Phil says:

    Many people, as we well know, speak out of their asses. Eve Ensler, on the other hand, speaks out of her vagina. When it comes to empowering women or giving young girls options, Sarah Palin is a much better role model than most women in the spotlight, including Ms.. Ensler. It never ceases to amaze me how people like her can care so passionately about polar bears or other creatures or causes and yet seemingly not care for the lives of defenseless human babies who are aborted every year, the overwhelming majority NOT conceived via rape or incest. I believe the figure in have heard is about 40 million abortions in the past 25 years or so. The hypocrisy is astounding — I guess fetuses and infants in the womb don’t qualify for Ms. Ensler as an “endangered species”.

    As for Ms. Palin, a self-made woman who possesses strong family core values and the pioneer spirit which made this country great, she must be discredited and ridiculed, because God forbid, a God fearing woman from humble circumstances who puts family first and her constituents ahead of special interests must not be allowed to succeed. After all, she isn’t Ivy League educated, she’s a hockey mom for gosh sakes, she not vegan, and she’s silly enough to send her son off to fight for this country, helping protect the right of free speech for pompous windbags, elitists and two-faced feminists (who can’t celebrate the accomplishments and potential success of a woman politician, unless she’s “our kind” of woman) to regurgitate their bile and vindictiveness. Sarah Palin has more integrity in her little finger than Nancy Pelosi has in her entire phony body, and is a breath of fresh air in the sordid, corrupt arena of American politics which for too long has benefitted special interests as opposed to the people.

    And aside to to Ms. Ensler: So you have never even seen or touched a polar bear. Well, should you ever be in close enough proximity to touch one, it would probably rip your face off with one swipe of it claws and then devour you. As Shakespeare put it, “Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished”! Should you ever find yourself in that position, however, you better hope that Sarah Palin is close by with her rifle to save your faux feminist ass.

    Phil

  • Julie Roads says:

    I disagree so intensely with everything you have written here. My answers? See my latest post…’do you speak palinese?’…good luck in November!

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