June 18 is the nth anniversary of the fining of Susan B. Anthony for voting.
I have written two diary entries on this. The first is reasonably serious, and the second couldn't be more snark if I were writing it for April Fools' Day.
June 18, 1873: Bigotry $100, equal rights $.02.
On Nov. 4, 2008, tens of millions of Americans, representing dozens of demographics, will vote for the next president of the United States. Despite media analysts' best efforts to try to segregate them, to talk about the black vote, the gay vote, the "security mom" vote and the youth vote, ultimately all voters will be ... American. There will be no president of black America, no president of poor America, no president of female America. There will simply be a president of the United States of America.
These Americas have been united, at least on the ballot, since 1972, when the voting age was lowered to 18, thus allowing all soldiers to vote for who sends them where, and when. (Shockingly, nobody is in any rush to demographize military families.)
In 1872, 100 years before the first election in which 18-year-old Americans of all backgrounds and demographic distinctions were allowed to vote, Susan B. Anthony voted.
And on June 18, 1873, she was fined $100 for the offense of voting while female.
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Since I wrote
recently on suffrage, and since too many people have written too eloquently on Susan B. Anthony and the suffrage movement (which took a cue from
these guys) for me to attempt any sort of re-telling worth its weight in electrons, I've decided to go a different route with this piece.
You can, if you like, thank those proponents of telecom amnesty, who publicly think trial lawyers are actually worse than terrorists, for this entry. They, and their ilk, are trying to convince America that some Liberal Force is at work destroying America, and to save it, you must sign all your rights away to people who will of course take care of them. Maybe. (As long as you pay them on time for the privilege.)
Some people, some politicians and some political parties like to rail against big government, against too many laws, against frivolous lawsuits that eat taxpayer money like so many termites given antique oak and a week's head start.
These opponents of trial lawyers, and of people actually having to pay for breaking the law and violating Americans' civil rights, would of course be opposed to laws that
infringe upon the academic interests of Americans, right?
And they would naturally be opposed to a lawsuit brought against an American citizen who ... tried to vote.
The response would naturally be, "She broke the law, and she deserved to be punished." And the slightly (but only slightly) more educated response would include the point that Anthony used her trial to advocate for suffrage - and never paid that fine.
That response would actually be entirely fine with me. People who break the law should be punished.
Whether they're trying to vote or succeeding in spying on Americans without justification.
Ah, but there's the rub. Is there justification for breaking the law? Then it should be considered a guideline, or we can look the other way on occasion.
The trouble with FISA is that two of the phone companies involved in this mess say they were asked by the Bush administration to spy on Americans six months before September. So the "These patriotic companies were only looking out for you" argument doesn't work - because they weren't. They were looking out for themselves, and they apparently trusted that the Bush administration wasn't actually operating with a "The law is what we say it is" approach.
So the reach of the government - big government - has effectively caused laws to be broken, thus causing the phone companies to have to go to court if they're eventually held accountable for their illegal actions. (This nuance is either lost on or ignored by those who really would very much like the phone companies to get away with breaking the law.)
In 1872, most of our current exit poll demographic groups were not allowed to vote or were strongly discouraged from voting. So the current attempts by various people (and most media outlets) to splinter Americans by gender, age, appearance and education, and to then say that a particular candidate has a problem with "old white women," would have been lost back in the day.
It is perhaps a tribute to our electorate, ever-expanding in diversity and size, that we must now consider the young black female vote, the gay Jewish vote, the "security mom with Irish roots who likes her occasional Marvin Gaye LP" vote.
But it's intensely offensive, not to mention useless. To suggest that you can take two people of equal background and assume they will have equal concerns is quite amazing.
Take two white men. Both are in their mid-20s, both earn at just above poverty-level, and both have college degrees. Both live in traditional Republican strongholds.
Andrew will probably vote for John McCain, and I couldn't be much more sold on Obama. But according to the demographics people talk about in the media, we're ... identical. Because we share so much background information, we must be in the same category of voter, right?
See, if you focus on who's voting, you can look at census data and say "Well, if candidate X can energize the [demographic y] voter block here, s/he can really bring it home on election day." And you don't have to actually ask the voters what they want in a candidate. It's all about the game.
And it stops being about what people want. You lump me in with other low-income 20something white men with college degrees, and I become a number.
And people start talking (entirely erroneously) about how Barack Obama has a "poor white people" problem instead of looking at how his platform and voting record match up with what the American people want. Or people look at all white men, see that John McCain has a slim lead among them, and say that white men must not identify with Obama, whatever the hell that means.
What would be far more accurate, and what would make this election seem a lot less close than many people are trying to make it out to be (because ratings are up, and you don't kill what keeps your ratings up), is to look at the number of people who want their next president to be the opposite of Bush, the number of people who want to expand CHIP or otherwise have affordable health care (to try for universal health care, even).
Americans want to know that we don't torture anyone. We want to recover some of our Iraq losses, to stop rewarding oil companies for fleecing us, to stop giving tax breaks to organizations that outsource, ... to generally do the things Obama wants to do.
But because that's obvious, because that paints a very bleak picture for a party trying to tell us we deserve less than we want, that's not the dialogue out there right now.
And that's a disservice to every American voter.
June 18, 1873: She didn't know her place
On Election Day, 1872, Susan B. Anthony voted.
This, by itself, was no capital offense.
But oh, she had to go bragging about it. Had to gossip with her fellow agitatresses. Had to get their hopes up about an America in which you didn't have to have a job, pay taxes and wear pants to tell the country who should be its next president.
And I'm not saying it was entirely a bad thing that women (and blacks, and the folks who were old enough to kill a man but not old enough to vote) weren't allowed to vote, but the rules are the rules.
And by the rules, Susan B. Anthony was on this date in 1873 fined $100 for not knowing her place in this country.
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I know this site is about progressives, and I respect that, but once a month, I step outside the box and really give it to you like it is. I like to think of this as my own no-spin zone. If you should at any point get the vapors (that's Southern talk for "be offended), I'd advise you just skip to the end of this little sortie.
Seeing as we got that settled, here goes.
Here's the spin: Voting is a birthright of American citizenship.
Here's the truth: Voting is a privilege extended to a sacred few who historically have been the difference-makers in this country. The great thinkers. The people who were charged with keeping our American traditions in place.
So it was perfectly logical for only white land-owning men to be allowed to vote until the Civil War. And it was perfectly understandable that to vote, those who didn't pay taxes before the Civil War, seeing as they weren't even employed (some day, historians will finally get around to admitting the massive welfare system we had in place for blacks before 1865. Keeping blacks around the house was expensive, so it's natural that the occasional black child ended up stealing away to another family for more food and a better life), had to pay a tax or show they were deep thinkers.
And it was only appropriate that the white male thinkers of this country extend that right to women after their sons had been sent off to war. They were obviously terribly vexed about having their babies off in harm's way over in Europe, and one of them even thought deeply enough to flirt and skirt her way to a position in Franklin Roosevelt's Cabinet.
Now, as I said before, the tests we put in place soon after Reconstruction were really meant as recompense for all those years of living free under the downright charitable roofs of silent welfare supporters from Maine to Texas. But the methods used were having a slightly detrimental effect. Instead of paying their voting taxes and studying hard at the library for their constitution tests, the free blacks in this country just weren't voting.
Now, I would argue that if you aren't working to earn your place in the world, someone is going to take it for you. And in many instances, I think, that happened. The politicians who were voted into office tended to work for their deep-thinking, tax-paying constituents, and if you didn't speak up, you didn't get heard. We can hardly blame politicians for failing to drive out to every rural voter in Nowheresville, Alabama, and visit with shallow-thinking blacks who didn't have the drive to be any more than dirt farmers.
But way back in the 1960s, some Massachusetts Liberal got it in his high-falutin' head that he was going to labor so to take the hard thinkin' out of voting.
Southerners, who more than anyone knew what happens when you give a black person a handout (he stays in your house for the next 60 years - and makes a MESS in your kitchen with watermelon), opposed this for nearly two months, filibustering and trying to talk sense into this babe in arms from the North. South Carolina's own Strom Thurmond set a record for sense-talkin' when he did it for over a day straight.
Well, you get what you pay for, and since then, we've been giving such handouts to blacks and others God did not make for deep thinking. (Oh, sure, there are exceptions, but they just prove the rule.) We give them free college educations. We desegregated the military for 'em - even gave one a few general's stars. We opened our finer eateries to them, allowed them on television, set them loose on the basepaths and on the gridiron. We even named their version of English for them.
And my heavens, what we did for women. Did you know that if you're a woman (as I surely am not), you can do jobs traditionally reserved for men? Here's a hint: if it's got an -or or -er ending, it's a man's job. Yet there Hillary Clinton is, off being a senator. And look at all the women earning a living as deep thinkers - managers. (Personally, I prefer to see them around ... noon, if you know what I mean.) We've got women playing doctor, women driving, women fighting each other in the ring, everything. Women can even choose when they want to bring a bundle of joy into this world. CRAZINESS!
Even wearing pants.
Now, as I said before, I do not think all of this is necessarily bad. These are trying times we live in, and the more tax-paying deep thinkers (another man's job being taken over by women) we have, the more problems we can solve.
But I know from reading my history that we used to let a man pay his own way through school. Working hard, studying hard, none of this scholarship stuff, these Pell grants, these namby-pamby loans. A man worked for a living, even if it meant it took him longer to get through school. And if it wasn't meant to be, he settled down to raise a family, and that family helped him earn the money to pay bills.
And I'm not saying that's how it should be all the time. Of course it can be good to take some time off from work. All that hard thinking and hard working takes its toll on a man. (It's even harder on a woman.)
But maybe we should try an experiment after this November. We'll have all the womenfolk get back to what they'd always done before they started agitating, and we'll get all the blacks back living free in our houses, eating fried-baloney sandwiches, polishing our shoes and mowing our lawns, and we'll just see if everyone isn't happier after that.
Oh, and I guess that Obama fellow can have his vice president take over for him until the traditional deep thinkers judge which society works best for all concerned. That shouldn't take too long. We'll make the decision with deliberate speed.
GOTCHA!
Giving reasons for your preference is encouraged, though not required. I may post my preferred entry even if 15 people say they like the other one. I may not.