As some of you know, I recently deleted my entire blog. I had several reasons (of which this episode was less an immediate trigger than it was the icing on the hyper-rhetorical cake), but the bottom line was that my life had been overtaken by (overt) political blogging, such that most other subjects and activities had become subordinate.
There was also a growing disgust with the state of political discourse within the feminist blogosphere. Many of the feminist blogs to which I had once looked for nuanced explorations of crucial issues of politics and culture were now doing little besides spewing constant streams of grossly distorting invective against Barack Obama (or what they would oh-so-innocently refer to as “vetting the candidate”).
When I took a deeply felt, authentically diplomatic approach, my would-be sisters advocating for Hillary Clinton generally ignored me (with precious few exceptions - you know who you are). And when I took more of a fighting approach, I began to deplore the sound of my own voice.
Finally, I did a post specifically on the dangers of the Obama/Clinton divide among progressives (using a one-shot opportunity to guest blog at Huffington Post), and while responses were generally favorable (I was thanked, for instance, for “inserting a little sanity into the divisive discourse”), it was also clear that my words could not begin to counteract what was, after all, a tsunami-sized wave of grossly cynical, and sometimes openly hateful discourse.
So, does my about-face with regard to overt political blogging mean I no longer care - passionately - about these issues? Hardly. (Indeed, what woke me up in the middle of the night, provoking me to write this, was a dream containing the audaciously brassy and insistent chorus line from Skunk Anansie’s Yes It’s Fucking Political.) Well then, does it mean my support for Barack Obama’s candidacy is in any way lessened? Most certainly not.
But if months engaging in what had been a labor of love - writing about the issues in this election - have gotten me absolutely nowhere in terms of fostering open, substantive dialogue with progressives’ common interests in mind, why on earth would I continue with that labor now? (For while it is my candidate’s prerogative - and, indeed, mandate - to respond as needed1 to constant attacks coming from the Clinton camp, I don’t see that my doing so adds to the current discourse.)
Today, as Pennsylvania voters go to the polls, I’m going to impose a total news blackout in this household (from TV to newspapers to blogs to Twitter) until I know most of the returns are in, and my kids are in bed. Because, in the event Clinton’s last-ditch effort to save her campaign, by deploying that most Rovian of all despicably Rovian tactics - using the image of Osama bin Laden in campaign ads, in an effort to scare voters (remember when Democrats were in universal opposition to this practice?) - is successful (where ’success’ would mean more than a marginal victory in this particular state, with significant net gain in pledged delegates), I am going to be incredibly angry. And I’d rather my kids didn’t see me like that.
Whatever the outcome, this time tomorrow, I’ll compose myself again, and deal with whatever comes next. If, somehow, Clinton becomes the Democratic party’s nominee, I will certainly vote for her, because McCain is by far the more dangerous candidate.
In the Huffington Post guest blog entry referenced above, I included in a footnote this somewhat out-of-place comment: Each post I write on the election, I die a little. Extricating myself from these debates, then - despite a constant stream of outrages to which I might otherwise have been compelled to react - has been in the interests of self-preservation, and I don’t regret it.
Going back to something I jokingly said on Twitter, awhile back:
Feminist blogosphere, I wish I knew how to quit you.
I’m happy to say that with this last post, I finally have.
Good luck, Pennsylvania. I hope you’ll vote your conscience.
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1 As Obama said, in an interview to be aired in full on the Today Show later this morning:
This is an old trick, right? Somebody attacks you and attacks you and attacks you, and when you finally call them on it, suddenly you’re ‘engaging in the same tactics.’ We have been extraordinarily restrained during the course of this campaign and have generally responded only to attacks that have already been leveled at us by Senator Clinton.