Vibing "stop swelling" vibes at ita's hands, with a side of "calm down, play nice, please don't fall apart on her" to the entire rest of ita's body.
ION, I'm feeling Allyson-like levels of smiting rage--just got the first of what I expect will be many, many political emails over the coming months, this one from a friend whom I know personally to be sweet and funny and loyal and endlessly generous, but who has jumped on the "If Hillary's the nominee I'm voting third-party" train; in trying to formulate a response, I stuttered through a crazy mishmash of:
- thoughts on the truly nastier sexist assumptions (some thinly veiled, some buck naked and right out front) behind a lot of the criticism of her candidacy so far
- reflections from a biography I just read about a politically astute, passionate Regency-era English duchess who might have been a major statesman if she'd been a man, and who's instead mostly a wacky fashion footnote
- worries about another four or eight years of a nakedly right-wing president making judicial nominations from the Supremes on down
- thoughts about Matilda and all the other Buffista babies growing up in a country where hospitals, doctors, even goddamn pharmacists can, in many jurisdictions (with no penalty and no avenue of recourse) refuse treatment and medications
- thoughts about gender politics, the Norm and the Other, the ones with power and the ones with exactly such privileges as the powerful ones deem appropriate and non-threatening and how damaging and limiting all this is to all of us, no matter what gender or class or race
and then I got totally incoherent. I tried, but my response was mostly an emotive "these are my bone-deep fears" mess. To which his response was a lame joke about Diana Ross and the Supremes, followed by whining about how the Democrats co-opted the Populist platform back in the '30s.
And now I seriously want to rip his nuts out and shove them down his fucking throat. This really, really bodes ill for the entire rest of the year, doesn't it?