She sounded so hopeful as she began. Like she felt a part of history from the top of it. There was this soft glow of pride as she said her name and her position, as well as what she was here with the intent of doing. And I was happy for her, though I’d never seen her before in my life. She should have been proud. It was a big deal to be there, no matter what she’d achieved elsewhere.
I’m Susan Page of USA TODAY. It is my honor to moderate this debate, an important part of our democracy.
I gave her the respect her being there deserved, as did everyone else tuning in.
But what I along with the entire world witnessed was the absolute absence of respect Vice President Mike Pence -the man on the record as calling his wife “mother”- has for ANY woman outside of his weird Oedipal feedback loop when it comes to the fairer sex.
And I cheered. Every single time he did it, even as he turned my stomach.
Because maybe, just maybe…Mike Pence’s utter disrespect of both Kamala Harris AND Susan Page on that stage is the gamechanger that brings all women in this country together to get him and his cohorts out of public office for the rest of their lives.
We all know his compadre is a belligerent shithead who baited the virus with all the citizens of this country, losing 210,000+ people playing the stupidest game of horse on record only to officially catch it himself, or worse, feign catching it and then throw temper tantrums that no one wants to be in an enclosed space with his sociopathic tendencies running as high as his fever.
The thing is women are not a monolith anymore than Black people are but the gender can be complicated. Women rarely have that much sympathy for other women who ride with the devil for perks getting flipped into roadkill. Somewhere in the synaptic firings keyed to all that 65% of white American women actually voted for the monster currently in office. He still lost the popular vote by 3 million, but we are where we are.
That being said, what many did NOT realize until the spectacle of Wednesday night was that the petty, toxic males in their lives that are more lowkey about “the fuckery of the shebangs” they enact against women everyday [ blocking them from promotions, slandering them, talking over them, stealing their ideas at work] had Mike Pence as their poster boy and patron saint.
Yes, things were more “civilized” in comparison to the shit-show of the week before.
But in that civility was showcased what every working woman comes up against at some time or another in their careers. Many of us knew he was that guy, and that the republican party is full of men who have been in politics for decades, who fought against women having rights to their own bank accounts without their husband’s signature, let alone against the right to decide when or when not to bring forth life in a world that bent over backwards to look the other way when the men who sired those children rode off into the sunset. But many missed the particular nuances in the entire discussion all these years.
Until now.
2020 Vision pulls no punches.
With the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the notorious attempt by the republican party to shove Amy Barrett down the Supreme Court throat as a suitable candidate while votes are already being cast in an election that many of them know they’re losing due to the horse they bet on the first place…women across this country who had been able to live with their eyes wide shut got jostled awake.
When it came out Barrett had been part of the coup that stole the election from Al Gore alongside (now) Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh[ a rapist the republican party pushed through without sincerely vetting him], those women were shaken awake again. These packing the Supreme Court moves reek of payoffs for bad behavior in the mists of time, dirty quid pro quo debts being repaid by a party that was sick long before its current mascot’s fiascoes. Whether you give a rat’s ass about politics or not.
But after it came out that she willingly was being put in place by misogynist men to go after not only Roe vs Wade but also to strike down the Affordable Care Act in the middle of a Pandemic they all said was affecting nobody…when her nomination party became the must-have{covid} super-spreader event of the season all the sleep was knocked from those groggy women’s eyes. No one could un-see the outright disregard those politicians had for family or community, no matter what they professed while pandering for votes.
These are women who have spent the past eight months having to take care of their kids during a pandemic that left them pinned to the hearth like women once were mandated to be by actual laws of the land, not as far back in history as people pretend. They’ve been forced into a mold even June Cleaver didn’t have to deal with because both her husband and the Beaver got out the house…due to the outright negligence of the federal government addressing this Public Health Crisis that they politicized to get out of doing any heavy-lifting over. Why? Because that’s what politicians have done for generations. Only it was on display this year.
Many women have lost jobs they truly enjoyed and the sweet autonomy that comes with maybe not having Virginia Woolf’s a room of one’s own but at least having a zone of one’s life where people actually know your name is Marsha, not “mom.”
None of the grief or sadness connected to that has been allowed to be processed this year, let alone the stunning amounts of grief and outrage over losing loved ones to a disease the now infected president said “affected nobody~”
These are American women who have had to coordinate which ten relatives would GET to pay last respects to the one of over 210,000 people who died due to COVID that was their love, victims who were potentially the lynchpins and caregivers in their lives. Many times it has been the mother who was lost, leaving these families in shambles because No One Was Ready For This.
(Correction: No one that the President of the United States did not FIRE out of racist jealousy over all he inherited from the Black man in office before him was ready for this. In fact, if you look at his actions from clearing out the pandemic task force, ignoring the virus early on and forward there’s not much difference in the tonality exhibited by him and that of the Corps of civil engineers who cleared out the wetlands that were in place to protect New Orleans before Katrina hit. Men who were eventually found guilty of having done so on purpose.)
No one’s speaking about how the psychological toll of ANY of these events could break a person and we’ve had them all in 2020, plus civil unrest. There’s no time to talk or process anything! As soon as anyone catches a breath of fresh air the media slams in more poison from the top, in cahoots with the abuse whether they want to be or not due to Narcissistic Triangulation, where the abuser uses others to attack the target. Whole ‘nother post for another day, that one.
And yet still… on Wednesday evening we found the time.
As a people. Male and female, across party lines. Because everyone felt brutalized by last week’s dumpster fire and in the hail of insanity since that has been incessantly coming from the man in ‘roid rage in the oval office against isolation orders, hopped up on drugs against a hoax or losing his mind in the codependent withdrawal/aftermath of having faked infection and now being held to quarantine /isolation protocols due to his proclamations.
And we had hope for these two. Hope that they’d somehow…put a voting body at ease by being the two adults that we all desperately needed to be reminded would also be “in the room where it happens.”
We marshalled our snacks, assembled our watch parties and warily tuned in.
The final Death blow to the Republican ticket rode in as the pale horse[faced monotone guy], talking over Kamala Harris AND Susan Page without ANY reading of the audience tuning, outright lying on the American People as a whole every time he opened his mouth. It was the most tone-deaf to the times display collectively seen in a mighty long time.
That Guy? The one who calmly outright lied and said the Joe Biden ticket supported abortions up until delivery dates as his President is screaming with covid dementia from medicines that were created using stem cell research?
That guy who already Did Not Stand a Chance against senator Kamala Harris coming in blossomed like a fresh pile of shit on a hot summer day.
Right before our very eyes he unmasked, revealing himself to be the epitome of the beast running the systemic racism machine that multiple generations are flooding out into the streets to topple.
Yeah, that guy would be the [somehow still faceless] mug of the machine appointing a woman who was a literal Handmaid in the very real cult that was Margaret Atwood’s inspiration for the Handmaid’s Tale. & by the way, the surreal experience of watching it become a TV show the current powers that be hoped to use as predictive programming/ tenderization for all the gender insanity currently afoot still gives me chills (“which kind of woman would YOU be in the new regime?”).
As his wife-mother waited alongside him without a mask at the end, as tone deaf to the times as her son-husband, after centuries of injustice Mike Pence may have done what no issue on earth has been able to do for women’s rights across the color line.
Mike Pence may have brought all women of every color together…
To make sure HE is gone from public life after 2020. Once and for all.
Am I being Too optimistic?
Think about it. What suburban wife, housewife or otherwise, takes kindly to men talking over them incessantly? Even Permit Pattys and Amy Coopers are likely in an “I’d like to speak to the manager NOW~!” type uproar over his disrespect, and rightly so! I’m telling you, husbands of wives all over this country, even conservative ones, sat on couches next to their women muttering about his behavior. And those husbands have Seen those daggers in the eyes of those wives before and know to stay out of the way.
How’s this for funny? Some guys do not even get that when Harris had to say twice “I will not be lectured to on Law & Order by you-” it was because Pence was basically MANSPLAINING the ins and outs of the jobs SHE HAD ACTUALLY HAD & EXCELLED AT…with no experience in it at all BEYOND BEING BORN WITH A-
Cough*.
Thank God Mike Pence can’t un-ring that “I’m that guy” bell.
And now~ it all the way tolls for all of them in no uncertain terms.
And it NEEDED to be about the depravity of both Pence and Trump.
It had to be showcased they are BOTH the epitome of America’s actual problem with itself.
Now everyone knows a vote for Pence royally fucks them in a way that never was going to register rolling eyes at the shenanigans of his ticket partner.
To me, that is the true[and best so far] October Surprise.
Gaia gave the women[ and decent men] of America a common foe to smack down that is more virulent and insidious than you know who. God exposed the root of all this evil wearing the true, soft-spoken sociopathic face of it… in prime time, for all to see.
So of course, Pelosi moved on the 25th Amendment the next day.
Because Pence neutered all chances of ANY sympathy votes from ANY women to keep him in place after Trump is removed. He also showcased not being viable even IN that interim position. He showed he’s a different kind of disgusting fuck of a politician who must go up in flames with the ship he sailed in on.
&Real Talk? Pence pedantically monotone-fucked Trump up the ass on primetime tv. Without even asking. That’s why Trump has been in a tizzy, hysterically screaming about Hilary Clinton and everything else on Fox News Business. His boy fucked him like the pussies that both of them hate from different directions. Just took him. Like he was a bigger celebrity or something~ and could get away with it.
And that’s a beautiful thing…
Something that no democrat was going to be able to do. It was almost missionary-esque, the way Trump had to lay there isolated in the White House, taking that stealth ticket-fuck. I mean, like he said, “What could he do?” No wonder he called Senator Kamala Harris a Monster. Her manuevering through all the “tropes” they had waiting to lob at her and still handing Pence his ass somehow tricked Pence into activity he’s going to have to send himself to an illegal camp to fix.
…And up in Heaven, Ruth Bader Ginsburg receives yet another pair of wings.
So does that fly.
(GLYPH pours out a drink for the fly…and shyly hopes Jeff Goldblum shows up on SNL to play with all this)