cell913blog.com #66

 On nymag.com (New York Magazine) in a piece entitled ‘Why are Conservative Men So Scared of Cat Ladies?’ by Sarah Jones May 4, 2022, we find this quote from JD Vance to Tucker Carlson in 2021:

‘We are effectively run in the country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too,’ Vance told Tucker Carlson in 2021….(Notable, too, in addition to AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), the name Pete Buttigieg (then childless) is included in Vance’s 2021 list of deplorables!)

(Ms Jones continues:)The cat lady is an old stereotype based on stupid beliefs about spinsters and feminists. Associated with women and ‘the domestic sphere,’ cats appeared in anti-women’s suffrage imagery ‘to portray suffragettes as silly, infantile, incompetent, and ill-suited to political engagement,’ according to the Society Pages. The idea is that if a cat is allowed to vote, something has gone terribly wrong. The same is true if a woman shuns family life to surround herself with cats. The cat lady is a cheap way to own the libs. A playground taunt, it also says something about the bully who uses it. Hatred and fear are often so intertwined they can be difficult to tell apart. The cat lady canonically has no man. Her needs and habits aren’t dictated by a husband and children. She can make up her own mind, and she is free to do what she likes, which means she has the time to be political. Without the ballast of a family, a woman can be hard to control.

The ’divide’ engulfing the American public, as well as the two political parties, has several identifying features. White supremacy, deporting illegal immigrants, catering to the wealthy, blocking and banishing immigrants, suppressing voting, women’s, LGBTQ and all minority rights, abolishing DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion), reinstating the Ten Commandments in all state classrooms in Louisiana, requiring The Bible to be taught in Oklahoma, abolishing The Department of Education, stacking the Supreme Court which has conferred absolute immunity on all official acts of the president and has overturned Roe v Wade….and cutting all aid to Ukraine…these are just some of the more prominent features of the trump-cabal.

And the evangelical, fundamentalist, literalist, ‘real-women’ patriarchy of ‘Christian’ nationalism is central to the desperate clinging to power of frightened and insecure white men. “Taking us back to where we are supposed to be,” is a chant being echoed through the arena in Milwaukee at the Republican National Convention. And one of the central images of that determination is contained in the words, “strength and power”. President Biden is seen and considered as weak, too old and too ineffective in a dangerous world. Retreating from the demands and expectations of international engagement, however, is not, from the Trump-Republican perspective considered ‘weakness’. Rather, it is sees as ‘looking after the homeland’….and the Ukrainians must be permitted to fall to Putin’s invasion. A small federal government (until it can overtly, hubristically and unabashedly overturn Roe v Wade) has allegedly, ostensibly and obviously hypocritically, been at the centre of Republican politics for decades.

Human gender, sexuality, a woman’s right to choose, gender identity and the LGBTQ movement, so enraging to Putin and conservatives in many quarters, is also anathema to the trump cabal. Women, as American history has so often maintained have been officially excluded from the political arena, on the strength of some home-making, domestic ideal model, that carried with it an implicit bias of condescension to the female intellect. Suffragettes marched to secure the vote.

Every day the drum-beat of messages, messengers, polls, fund donors, Hollywood personalities, and even candidates for the Senate and the House urging President Biden to withdraw from the race and defer to his Vice-president, Kamala Harris.

Even Biden himself cannot prosecute the case for restoring access to medical abortion and all other health services to women as well as, or as convincingly as the Vice-president, should she become the democratic candidate for the presidency. Also, any attempt to do an ‘end-run’ around, or to bypass the Vice-president in favour of an open convention where she would compete with others, is a path littered with legitimate obstacles, both legal and political.

And so, now that Biden has been diagnosed with COVID, and has quarantined himself, and the Republican convention ends today, it would seem reasonable that Biden’s decision to withdraw could come this weekend, or certainly prior to the Democratic convention in Chicago on August 19-22.

A multi-racial, woman, former prosecutor in San Francisco, and former Attorney General of California could conceivably take the national stage as the Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States, in a moment in which the stakes for many millions could not be higher. Women, people of colour, immigrants, refugees, students and teachers, the medical profession (fearful of engaging in any intervention around troubled pregnancies), recipients of social programs, the homeless, and all of the people living in nations which are members of NATO, the people of Ukraine, and the people of Taiwan.

And while the demographics, by isolating each group, of those who would be profoundly and negatively impacted by a trump-vance electoral victory, are wide and deep, the cultural ethos, the zeitgeist, the anima mundi of the nation would be transformed in ways that would require decades to recover from.

Try for a moment to square this circle of intention: Trump would decrease corporate taxes by some $700 billion while Vance lambasts Wall Street calling them ‘Wall Street barons’ who ‘crashed the economy,’ in an apparent reference to the 2008 financial crisis. That set off a spiral of lost jobs made worse by Democrats who ‘flooded this country with millions of illegal immigrants,’ (Vance) said. (from bloomberg.ca, in a piece by Nancy Cook, July 17, 2024, entitled, ‘Vance Assails Wall Street in Populist Pitch to Convention’)

Epitomizing the Horatio Alger mystique, Vance, describes his life in ‘rags-to-riches’ terms, while political opponents see the dark hand of silicone valley behind both his campaign for the Senate in Ohio and later, his selection as Vice-presidential candidate on the Trump ticket. From cbsnews.com, in a piece by Daniel Klaidman, July 16, 2024, entitled, ‘The billionaire who fueled JD Vance’s rapid rise to the Trump VP spot’:

And big donors, particularly from the tech sector, provided the rocket fuel he needed to advance in electoral politics. Vance’s most prominent benefactor over the years is Peter Thiel, the iconoclastic pioneer and investor. Thiel hired Vance at his global investment firm in 2017, and then nurtured Vance’s political rise, donating $15 million to his 2022 Ohio Senate campaign….Since then, Vance has received entrée to other tech mega-investors and was instrumental in organizing a $12 million fundraiser for Trump in June….Thiel brought Vance to his very first meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in February 2021, according to the New York Times…..Thiel’s philosophy has been described as ‘techno-libertarian,’ but critics say it veers toward authoritarianism, and even fascism (he wrote in an article in a libertarian journal in 2009, ‘I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.’…Thiel helped bail out Trump financially at a time when he most needed it: after the release of the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape. He gave $1.25 million, and shortly after Trump’s 2016 victory Thiel was given an office at Trump Tower where he recommended candidates for jobs in the incoming administration, according to The Atlantic’s Barton Gellman.

Not incidentally, it seems relevant to remind ourselves that Elon Musk, another of the Trump sycophants, has committed $45 million each month of the presidential campaign in support of the Trump-Vance ticket.

Tech-giants and their deep and libertarian pockets will certainly want favours for their financial support. And who knows what those will be, should the Trump-Vance ticket win in November.

Pitting the rights of women (and others), championed by a multi-racial female candidate against a male attitude of ‘cat-ladies’ at a time when the ‘alpha-male’ archetype is blazing in headlines about Putin, Trump, Xi, Kim, Benjamin, (and now Vance) will finally bring into stark relief the previously somewhat hidden issues of gender identity and place that relief in the faces of the American voters. Previously, shades of ‘evolved’ or ‘alpha’ masculinity hung silently over presidential elections. Hillary’s attempt to ‘shatter the glass ceiling’ fell short with complicity of men like James Comey, and of course, Trump himself who ‘stalked’ her in debate.

It is Vance who tells us that transgender is a ‘hatred’ of Putin, and thereby exposes his own prejudice and bias and undoubtedly that of others like DeSantis. Human rights, that detested volcano despised and arrested by authoritarians, with the not-so-silent applause from the trump team, is on the ballot, with democracy, liberty, truth, and the public square.

Can the now-beleaguered Democratic party and their ‘ticket’ for the presidency, as well as the ‘down-ballot’ candidates win just enough votes to hold the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives? The world is watching, while counting the beads of their preferred prayer ‘rosary’.