Gender and Race and Religion shouldn't matter, but...

Caution: today's posting is not as humorous as (I hope) future ones will be, but it's a subject that has been bothering me. A lot.

And, no, I won't normally be posting on a daily basis during this campaign. But I've just started this blog and these have been strong concerns. For a little while, you'll see frequent postings if you check in here. They'll taper off, and then near the end of the election cycle I'll go through my quadrennial state-by-state projections of who may win which electoral votes. Something to look forward to, if you like politics and humor. At times, my blog may likely get funnier/nastier than the novelty song from "Fiorello," the 1959 Broadway musical that celebrated Fiorello LaGuardia's career: "Politics and Poker,/Politics and Poker,/Playing with a hand,/That's mediocre.//Politics and Poker,/Politics and Poker,/Shuffle up the deck,/To find the Joker."

Gender: Years ago, we had a poster of Golda Meir, sometme after she had become Israel's prime minister in 1969. The caption was, "But can she type?" It was meant to poke fun, in a sardonic way, at the attitude that women belonged in the home and had no business in business or in other allegedly 'real-world' activities. At the time, Golda Meir was one of the very few women in such a publicly important and powerful position. Indira Gandhi was prime minister of India, but Margaret Thatcher was still ten years away from her position. People may have been aware how influential Eleanor Roosevelt had been in her husband's administrations, but she didn't occupy an elected, officially-titled powerful position.

Race: The last time I saw Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire in "Holiday Inn" on tv, the network's editors had removed one holiday from the movie as originally printed, Lincoln's birthday, in which the singers/dancers appeared in blackface. When the movie was made (1942), it was only fifteen years after Jolson's "The Jazz Singer," and apparently blackface was not unacceptable in polite company, or in Hollywood. I wouldn't have known enough at the time to know one way or the other.

Religion: Religious jokes, which used to be a fertile source of humor for professional comedians and folk-on-the-street (note my politically-correct avoidance of "man-on-the-street"), are now rarely uttered in public. Except occasionally by land-grant institutions' provosts who haven't gotten out much in their personal and religious lives. (oops, a streak of nasty/funny just emerged). And I agree with that reduction of religious jokes, as I do with the hoped-for elimination of ethnic jokes. In the past, I have tended to change the subject of such jokes as I may hear to a university a few hundred miles to the south of my home.

From my point of view, these three categories--gender, race, and religion--are valid topics of serious discussion if such discussion can educate and can help bring us together by emphasizing how much more unites us with our fellow and sister human beings than divides us. Negative portrayals and poking fun at 'the different' are belittling, and not helpful in forwarding the recognition of what I truly believe is "the worth and dignity of every human being."

So it is that I have grave concerns about the underlying national significance of Super Tuesday's comments by CNN's commentators. In discussing Missouri (which is currently in first place on my "THE SINGLE KEY STATE in this election" list, but more on that in a future post), John King and others talked about the splits in Missouri's population. Geographically, most of the state is rural (and how many states CAN'T make that statement, John!), with the eastern enclave of St. Louis and the western enclave of Kansas City as the major metropolitan hubs, City-the-Greater and City-the-Lesser. Last time I visited those two places, East City-the-Greater was a slum, and City-the-Lesser felt like the gateway to the west (or at least to Kansas which, to a NYC boy, was the same thing).

Tuesday night's analyses pointed to how Huckabee on the Republican side was winning overwhelmingly in the "evangelical" southern quarter of the state, how Obama's strength came from the "African-American" population in KC and especially in St Louis, and, nationally, how women were supporting Hillary "overwhelmingly." I don't object to John King and the others pointing these facts out, or even using these terms, since that's what the exit polls apparently were showing them. I was a little surprised, however, that the commentators I happened to be listenting to mostly avoided talking about Romney-as-Mormon; they talked about his winning his various "home states": his birth state MI, his home state MA, and his "spiritual home" state UT. I'm not sure how they explain away CO, WY, MT, ND, MN, ME, and AK. But they did seem to avoid most discussion of his religion. Maybe, since it has been such a big part of previous discussions, they decided enough already.

I am concerned, however, that we're still thinking in such terms, and that perhaps indeed some significant numbers of people ARE voting based on gender, race, religion. I am concerned that such views still seem so important at a time when more than four thousand Americans, and countless tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, have died in Iraq; when our international reputation is in shambles when we most need to use our former powers of moral suasion with other nations; when our educational system is in great need of improved salaries for teachers, and of less concentration on getting students to pass tests and more on actually getting them to develop the fundamental abilities to learn and live successfully after formal schooling; when the environment is changing far more drastically and more quickly than we thought possible even seven years ago (not sign the Kyoto Treaty, anyone?); and when the economy has been so manipulated as to make the divide between Disraeli's mid-nineteenth century "Two Nations" a greater reality today than it was when dubya was inaugurated.

I point these concerns out (a) because it's my blog, and I can; (b) because gender, race, and religion (in my view from this distant outpost of the world) should pale in comparison to the earth-shaking, human-defeating concerns surrounding and invading us; and (c) because these are issues I will be discussing in future posts.

I'm not even sure the TV commentators are using the correct terms. They use "Evangelical"; but that term is vastly different from "Fundamentalist" (the term I didn't hear on Tuesday night). These two groups, often lumped together as "the religious right" politically, reflect vastly different approaches to religion, especially in their view of and attitude toward people who don't believe as they do. Historically, evangelicals in England (my educational touchstone) have been in the forefront of social reform. England would not have achieved significant improvement in working conditions and vital health legislation in mid-nineteenth century, for example, had it not been for the moral and political leadership of evangelical members in the House of Commons.

Well, this is heavier than I hoped the blog would be, but I needed to clear this part of my conscience. More paper, less rock next time; you can bring your own scissors. And I'll make future posts shorter, at least until we get to the actual projections of how the states will line up electorally. Comments are always invited.