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Nora strikes…

Posted on Monday 21 April 2008


… This is an election about whether the people of Pennsylvania hate blacks more than they hate women. And when I say people, I don’t mean people, I mean white men. How ironic is this? After all this time, after all these stupid articles about how powerless white men are and how they can’t even get into college because of overachieving women and affirmative action and mean lady teachers who expected them to sit still in the third grade even though they were all suffering from terminal attention deficit disorder — after all this, they turn out (surprise!) to have all the power. (As they always did, by the way; I hope you didn’t believe any of those articles.)

To put it bluntly, the next president will be elected by them: the outcome of Tuesday’s primary will depend on whether they go for Hillary or Obama, and the outcome of the general election will depend on whether enough of them vote for McCain. A lot of them will: white men cannot be relied on, as all of us know who have spent a lifetime dating them. And McCain is a compelling candidate, particularly because of the Torture Thing. As for the Democratic hope that McCain’s temper will be a problem, don’t bet on it. A lot of white men have terrible tempers, and what’s more, they think it’s normal.

If Hillary pulls it out in Pennsylvania, and she could, and if she follows it up in Indiana, she can make a credible case that she deserves to be the candidate; these last primaries will show which of the two Democratic candidates is better at overcoming the bias of a vast chunk of the population that has never in its history had to vote for anyone but a candidate who could have been their father or their brother or their son, and who has never had to think of the president of the United States as anyone other than someone they might have been had circumstances been just slightly different.

Hillary’s case is not an attractive one, because what she’ll essentially be saying (and has been saying, although very carefully) is that she can attract more racist white male voters than Obama can. Nonetheless, and as I said, she has a case…
Well, I’ve made it this far without being offended by all of the comments about the intrinsic racism and sexism of white guys [which I am]. But Norah Ephron scored with this piece. I was offended from the first line all the way to the end. I expect she actually believes what she says. Why else would she have written it? But I wonder who she’s writing it to? It’s sure not written to white guys like me who are Democrats. It’s hardly going to be read by Republican white men who will then jump up and say, "I see the light!" and vote for a Democrat.

In reducing this election down to these terms, she frames human kind lower than Freud and Darwin – a puddle of instincts and narcissism. It’s not that these things aren’t important. It’s that Nora seems to be indulging her own narcissism and biases here, rather than engaging in a rational political commentary. This article purports to be about the sexism and racism of others, but comes across as an expression of her own…

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