Aristotle on Woman leadership around Democracies

And what's around Democracy [Control by the People], 
however, engenders Final Tyranny for All [a Tyrant's Total Control]:

καὶ τὰ περὶ τὴν δημοκρατίαν
δὲ γιγνόμενα τὴν τελευταίαν τυραννικὰ πάντα,

Control by Wives, 
particularly around the household

γυναικοκρατία
τε περὶ τὰς οἰκίας,

gives birth to reports 
against Husbands

ἵν᾽ ἐξαγγέλλωσι
κατὰ τῶν ἀνδρῶν

and to undisciplined Slaves 
for this same reason.

καὶ δούλων ἄνεσις
διὰ τὴν αὐτὴν αἰτίαν: 

Neither Slaves nor Wives, in fact, can turn on
Tyrannies.

οὔτε γὰρ ἐπιβουλεύουσιν οἱ δοῦλοι καὶ αἱ γυναῖκες
τοῖς τυράννοις,

They're just as much blessings to the days 
and necessarily blessings to the minds
of the Tyrannies
as they are to the Democracies.

ὐημεροῦντάς τε
ἀναγκαῖον εὔνους εἶναι
καὶ ταῖς τυραννίσι
καὶ ταῖς δημοκρατίαις: 

from the Politics (Bekker page 1313b, between and around lines 35 -40)

Proverbs 14 Part V

 In the mouth of the dolt is a rod of pride,

but the lips of the wise will guard them.

--Proverbs 14:3

(trans., Robert Alter)

Aristotle tells us that... 

creatures who are brave or just 

(like lions, bulls, roosters 

and the human male) 

have large deep voices....

The poet Aristophanes put a comic turn 

on this cliché in his Ekklesiazousai: 

as the women of Athens are about to 

infiltrate the Athenian assembly 

and take over political process, 

the feminist leader Praxagora reassures 

her fellow female activists that 

they have precisely the right kind of 

voices for this task.

--Men in the Off Hours 

 (by Anne Carson) 

This Part V of a series could be entitled, "How Aristotle Reads Proverbs 14."  He would want to construct the category that is, above all, the normal one in Nature.  /  And from that he would categorize the other as lesser, perhaps deviant.

But there are those who turn his categories around and upside down.  In this post, I'm hoping that we can see how the proverb we call "Proverbs 14:3" in Hebrew and especially in Greek translation turns the cliché, natural order of hierarchical categories.  Let's come back to that in a while.  First, let's look at how someone recently has categorized translation of the Bible, and other alternatives.  Then, we can read the biblical proverb, and its translation, to see how it goes.

----

1. How someone recently has categorized translation of the Bible, 

and other alternatives.

Earlier in the week, John Hobbins sharply divided Bible translations into two constructed categories:

EITHER 

 “translations committed above all to reproducing the wording and register of the original, translating metaphors with metaphors, and sounding strange wherever the thought and language of the source text is strange relative to our cultural matrix.”     /

OR “translations committed to clarity and naturalness of expression”

John placed into his latter category (quoted above) only and all the Bible translations that he presumed that Wayne Leman and all the bloggers at BBB must surely favor.  He himself favors his former category.  Unfortunately, John didn't give a single example of any translated text of the Bible to justify his categories.  In reply, Wayne made this plea:  "I hope John can find time to turn his thoughts on translation into a series which will give examples of translation which could be compared with how we might prefer to translate here at BBB."  

Suzanne McCarthy did offer examples.  This is what Wayne was asking for but what John himself did not supply.  And, interestingly, these examples do allow us to begin questioning this binary "EITHER / OR" thinking.  In a helpful comment, she showed how the first translators of the Bible are in the category where John assigns Wayne:

One can also see the odd functional translation in the LXX. Moses was described as saying

ἐγὼ δὲ ἄλογός εἰμι
ἰδοὺ ἐγὼ ἰσχνόφωνός εἰμι

Is there perhaps a cultural reason why this metaphor was not translated?  Perhaps there are times when strangeness does indicate that the metaphor should be abandoned.

Notice how Suzanne is allowing that that functional clarity in these translation examples may include "strangeness" even when the translators decide that an unusual "metaphor should be abandoned."  There's not the absolute binary that John might force the translation into, either one way or the other.

What her examples show is how the Greek translations of Exodus 6:12 and Exodus 6:30 do not convey (ערל שפתים) -- the strange embodied female-male Hebrew metaphor of "lips"-"un-circumcised."  Instead, the Jewish translators use differently-strange but clear Hellene.  They first use (ἄ - λογός), which is literally something like "lacking"-"word" in 6:12.  And, in 6:30, they use the un-common Greek compound (ἰσχνό - φωνός), which is literally something like "meager"-"sound" for the Hebrew phrase.  The Greek much more clearly represents the problem Moses is trying to convey to God in protest:  he feels he lacks the words to go back into Egypt and to make his political argument; he is concerned that he will sound only meager in the courts of Pharaoh.  Suzanne has translated these Greek phrases as "un wordy (wild and irrational)" and "weakvoiced (stammering)," which give us a bit of the range of metaphorical extensions in the Greek.  The phrases are rare, strange, but clear in the LXX.  (The latter phrase is not in the NT, and that former phrase is only thrice used, uncommonly, in the NT, but not as some sort of Greek biblish; rather as just rather technical Platonic Greek - as in Acts 25:27, Peter 2:12, and Jude 1:10).

The Greek or Hellene strangeness was clearer and maybe more acceptable to the Greek readers of the Alexandrian empire.  The Hebrew metaphor was strange among the Greek colonizers.  But it was strange among the religious Jews worldwide only because of the idea of "lips" being "circumcised."  It's one thing for a Jewish male to be circumcised.  But his lips?  Naomi Seidman discusses how normal and natural penis circumcision was but suggests that to extend this to lips is strange and unclear in any context:

In passages like this one [i.e., Genesis Rabbah 46.1], the rabbis expressed their conviction that circumcision is an improvement over nature, the enhancement of an otherwise imperfect human form.  The circumcised body is not mutilated in removing the foreskin....  Circumcision, then has multiple significations beyond its biblical meaning of a covenant connecting the Jewish people with their God; it is a marker of Jewish affiliation for native Jews and proselytes, an act and symbol of resistance to imperial legislation, the final step toward aesthetic perfection, a bodily representation of Hebrew discourse, the access to Torah that constitutes a barrier for non-Jews and non-males, and perhaps also a sign of linguistic talent (remembering the biblical diagnosis of Moses' influent speech as "uncircumcised lips").

The above is from page 89 of Naomi Seidman's book, Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation.  What she is saying that some rabbis have said actually bears repeating:  "circumcision is an improvement over nature," but it's an improvement that inherently separates Jewish males from "non-Jews and non-males."  What she's suggesting that Moses might have said is that "uncircumcised lips" is a personal problem that is to be "diagnosed," an individual affliction that separates him from performing the political discourse that he's been called to as a Jewish male circumcised.  Having lips circumcised, metaphorically, could be a critical improvement for this man of the Hebrews.

It's not too much of a stretch, metaphorically, to see this as a gendered problem.  The "lips" are often in the Hebrew scriptures associated with women.  For example, here is the start of Alter's note for his translation of Proverbs 5:3 (with his italics and his bold font):

the stranger-woman's lips drip honey.  The sensual ripeness of the alliteration in the Hebrew nofet titofna siftey zarah has a nearly identical counterpart in Song of Songs 4:11.  In the translation, "lips drip" is a gesture toward this cluster of sound. 

And here Suzanne calls "the lips" (absent from the Sefer Yetsira, perhaps a "masculinist text") "feminine imagery." She says that Julia Smith's English translation of the "story of the tower" of Babel does bring this imagery across.  However, Suzanne cautions us to note:

While lip in Hebrew is one common way to talk about language, along with tongue, it does not usually appear in English. The lip came to represent the feminine, receptivity and passivity.

In other words, the masculinist way of considering the feminine is to categorize it as a lack, an absence from the necessary message, as having not so much productivity but receptivity and as not engaged in activity but actually devolving into passivity.  Is this why the LXX translators chose not to render the Hebrew metaphor used by Moses of himself in Exodus?  Suzanne asks questions, and adds this:

These are my questions and not my answers. But we do know for sure that the translators of the Septuagint chose to use dynamic equivalence in translation instead of a foreignizing oddness when they felt they needed to. No sign of a circumcision of the lips here.

Naomi Seidman stops short of offering the possibility that the strange Greek is a gendered dynamic equivalent of the strangely-gendered Hebrew metaphor.  However, she does consider one version of the LXX translator motivations:

The [Church] Fathers imagine the Jewish translators as passive channels of God’s [clear] message to the world;

To turn this around, however:

in the [contrastive] talmudic account God works to keep certain things [very clear and clearly] between the Jews and himself [i.e., away from the Greek and the Egyptian worlds], not only sanctioning Jewish conspiracy but taking the role of conspirator-in-chief.  In this regard, the talmudic rewriting of the [Christian] patristic Septuagint legend is a trickster text: the [Jewish] translator is a trickster, who in folklore ‘represents the weak, whose wit can at times achieve ambiguous victories against the powers of the strong.’ Not only does the Talmud present the composition of the Septuagint as an elaborate Jewish trick, it also describes the passages in the Hebrew Bible itself as a ‘hidden transcript,’ the private discourse of a minority culture. [page 63]

Notice how the "Fathers imagine the Jewish translators as passive," and remember how "lip came to represent the feminine, receptivity and passivity."  Could there be something gendered in the Greek translation of Exodus 6?  Or could the act of translation itself be gendered feminin-ish:  clear, and yet foreign and still gendered in a strange way?  Why the lack of the lips for the Greek speaking Moses?  But then again, why "un wordy (wild and irrational)" and "weakvoiced (stammering)"?

Well, pardon me for suggesting that the LXX translators were resisting using Aristotle's Greek.  His masculinist logic was exactly what he taught Alexander to use, for his ruthless ends.  And so, in Alexandria, in Egypt, the Greek-speaking Jews translating their own scriptures from their own Hebrew, might have wanted to turn things a bit.

Is this so unlike what Anne Carson reminds us that Aristophanes's women do?  Here's the fuller context of this post's epigraph above:

     It is in large part according to the sounds people make that we judge them sane or insane, male or female, good, evil, trustworthy, depressive, marriageable, moribund, likely or unlikely to make war on us, little better than animals, inspired by God. These judgments happen fast and can be brutal. Aristotle tells us that the highpitched voice of the female is one evidence of her evil disposition, for creatures who are brave or just (like lions, bulls, roosters and the human male) have large deep voices. If you hear a man talking in a gentle or high-pitched voice you know he is a kinaidos (“catamite”).  [See how Aristotle puts this in one of his biological treatises, History of Animals 582a, and in Physiognomics 807a, where he himself has to vocalize nothing, since Aristotle there is a writer to readers, male to other males.]

     The poet Aristophanes put a comic turn on this cliché in his Ekklesiazousai: as the women of Athens are about to infiltrate the Athenian assembly and take over political process, the feminist leader Praxagora reassures her fellow female activists that they have precisely the right kind of voices for this task. Because, as she says, “You know that among the young men the ones who turn out to be terrific talkers are the ones who get fucked a lot.”

     This joke depends on a collapsing together of two different aspects of sound production, quality of voice and use of voice. We will find the ancients continually at pains to associate these two aspects under a general rubric of gender. High vocal pitch goes together with talkativeness to characterize a person who is deviant from or deficient in the masculine ideal of self-control. Women, catamites, eunuchs and androgynes fall into this category. Their sounds are bad to hear and make men uncomfortable. Just how uncomfortable may be measured by the lengths to which Aristotle [writing On the Generation of Animals 787b-788] is willing to go in accounting for the gender of sound physiognomically; he ends up ascribing the lower pitch of the male voice to the tension placed on a man’s vocal chords by his testicles functioning as loom weights.

Is it better to translate strange metaphor for the same strange metaphor (maintaining "un-circumcised lips") in both the Hebrew and the Greek?  Or is there an-other purpose behind translating one strange gendered metaphor for a different one?  In the world of Aristotle's masculinist binary logic, rhetoric for males only, doesn't "un wordy (wild and irrational)" and "weakvoiced (stammering)" turn his cliché?

--

2.  reading the biblical proverb, and its translation

Now we turn to Proverbs 14:3.

בְּֽפִי־֭אֱוִיל חֹ֣טֶר גַּאֲוָ֑ה וְשִׂפְתֵ֥י חֲ֝כָמִ֗ים תִּשְׁמוּרֵֽם׃

ἐκ στόματος ἀφρόνων βακτηρία ὕβρεως χείλη δὲ σοφῶν φυλάσσει αὐτούς

"In the mouth of the dolt is a rod of pride, but the lips of the wise will guard them." - Robert Alter (from the Hebrew and Greek)

"In the mouth of the foolish one a rod of pride; and the lips of the wise shall watch them." - Julia Smith (from only the Hebrew)

"Out of the mouth of fools comes a rod of pride; but the lips of the wise preserve them." - Lancelot Brenton (from only the Greek)

It's striking here is how seemingly literal the Greek translation of the Hebrew is.  Are the Hebrew metaphors strange?  Gendered?  Are the Greek metaphors also both equally strange and gendered?

Yes,

but do note how Aristotle would read this.  He would get the allusions to women although he'd not want to concede that they may be either rhetorically saavy or politically wise.  Maybe females could be sophistic.  But as speakers, especially as political speakers, they'd be useless.

In his Athenian Constitution, he prohibits women from the judicial and the legislative processes.  Only the men can have rods, which some English translators have rendered "canes," "staff," or "staves."  The word he chooses is the one the LXX translators have chosen for the "dolt" in Proverbs 14:3; in the Athenian Constitution, Aristotle describes the male-only instrument for procedures:

The courts [in Athens are to] have ten entrances, one for each tribe, twenty rooms, two for each tribe, in which courts are allotted to jurors [who are men, not women], a hundred small boxes, ten for each tribe, and other boxes into which the tickets of the jurymen drawn by lot are thrown, and two urns. Staves [βακτηρίαι] are placed at each entrance, as many as there are jurymen, and acorns to the same number as the staves [βακτηρίαις] are thrown into the urn, and on the acorns are written the letters of the alphabet, starting with the eleventh, lambda, as many as the courts that are going to be filled. [63.2, trans. by H. Rackham]

Aristotle would not have thought of Aristophanes's play as funny in the least.  Here's a bit where the lead woman is encouraging another woman to pretend to be a man of the court, to trick the court's audience, while the audience of the play is in on the trick:

Praxagora:  Quick then [disguised woman], take the chaplet; the time's running short. Try to speak worthily, let your language be truly manly, and lean on your staff [βακτηρίᾳ] with dignity. [line 150, trans. Eugene O'Neill]

So Aristotle would only allow only men who speak in politics to have the "rod," the staff, βακτηρίᾳ.  But he would think in terms of lips [χείλη] and open mouths [στόματος] when he categorized women, who were to be wives, to bear babies.  Here's from his gynecological writings:

It is a sign of conception in women when the place is dry immediately after intercourse. If the lips of the orifice [τὰ χείλη ᾖ τοῦ στόματος, literatlly "the lips of the mouth"] be smooth conception is difficult, for the matter slips off; and if they be thick it is also difficult. But if on digital examination the lips feel somewhat rough and adherent, and if they be likewise thin, then the chances are in favour of conception. Accordingly, if conception be desired, we must bring the parts into such a condition as we have just described; but if on the contrary we want to avoid conception then we must bring about a contrary disposition. [Hist. of An., 583a, trans., D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson]

If Aristotle or Alexander or any Athenian male trained in good Greek were to read the LXX Proverbs 14:3, then immediately they would read (or mis-read) it as strange, as gendered, but as a reversal of the Aristotelian logical belief that females are inherently lesser than males, that women are not to engage in rhetoric or politics, and that women are just tricky like the sophists but not at all wise.  The Hebrew proverb in Hebraic Hellene actually mirrors the Hebrew feminine metaphors, but it takes them forward into political dimensions as well.

Is it just either one sort of translation or the other?

EITHER 

 one of those “translations committed above all to reproducing the wording and register of the original, translating metaphors with metaphors, and sounding strange wherever the thought and language of the source text is strange relative to our cultural matrix.”     /  ?

OR one of those “translations committed to clarity and naturalness of expression”?

Well, not exactly.  Doesn't Proverbs 14:3 in Greek turn the constructs of the imperial Greek males and the royal Egyptian men all around?  Is it the ones with the rods who are wise?  The rods for males only?  Or are the rods jammed in their proud mouths?  Hasn't protection, rather, come from the lips that are wise?  What a funny wise turn, resisting the binary, from the feminine Hebrew to the feminine Hellene.

What the American Congress SHOULD look like

Miriam Perez writes:

Gender parity is one of the most egregious of the disparities–we [in the USA] should have 127 more female reps in Congress than we currently do (that’s a two fold increase from current numbers).

We fail pretty big on race as well, where 72 of the current 457 seats occupied by white representatives should go to communities of color based on population numbers.

In terms of religion, Mormons are overrepresented in Congress as well as Protestants, Catholics and Jews. Underrepresented are Hindus and those who are unaffiliated.

And she shows this chart:

Go here to see a larger version.  Miriam gets the larger image from "Cord Jefferson at GOOD Magazine [who] posted this impressive infographic."  Read all about it from Miriam here.

If Your Body's Sexed Female, Your Highest Political Places

Female Heads of State and Government

White House website highlights senior level female staff

Are We [in the USA] Ready for a Woman President [Yet]?

Female Heads of State and Government

[USA] White House website highlights senior level female staff

Are We [in the USA] Ready for a Woman President [Yet]?

Subversive Rhetoric: Against Slave-Owning Americans, Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks and Romans

If you get there before I do

Coming for to carry me home

Tell all my friends I'm coming too

Coming for to carry me home

      Within a matrix of overwhelming repressive power, the rhetoric of the spiritual and its ability to "play" in and among the interpretive gaps and disjunctions between the social worlds of slave and slave holder became a powerful subversive tool against repression.  Such rhetoric is political; it takes sides.  It simultaneously subverts and directs power.  Black preachers and others who employed the song ["Swing Low, Sweet Chariot"] for political purposes carefully crafted a multivocal rhetoric in which both slave and slave master could participate, albeit with very different interests and understandings.
      Since the rhetoric was appropriately constructed to attend to each group's social and political interests, each group could participate in their own symbolic world of meaning.  The slaveholder certainly would not have been aware that the rhetoric signaled the arrival of the Underground Railroad and the slaves' intent for freedom here instead of the hereafter.  Those slaves who had not read 2 Kings or heard the story of Elijah preached might not have been aware that there was another signification for the rhetoric in the planter class's romanticized notions of slave piety.  Only those individuals who traveled between both worlds, such as slave preachers, would have understood the rhetoric's double signification and why the song needed such a multivalent character to be effective.
      The separatist rhetoric of Ezra 9-10 and Nehemiah 10-13 is similarly multivalent.  Like the spiritual "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," the rhetoric of Ezra and Nehemiah also emerges from a context of repression.  Judah suffered under Persian domination that was no less brutal than that of the Assyrians and Babylonians before them or that of the Greeks and Romans who succeeded them.
---
above, an excerpt from the chapter "Ezra and Nehemiah," by Rev. Dr. Herbert Marbury, Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible at Vanderbilt University, and Clergy of the North Georgia United Methodist Conference, in The Africana Bible: Reading Israel's Scriptures from Africa and the African Diaspora.  (HT David Ker)

Post-race-and-gender Politics Question

(Let's not use f-words today.) Let's ask (instead), How long have the politics of the USA been post-racial and post-gender (and post-Aristotle)?

"Let’s hope that the key conferences aren’t when she’s menstruating or something, or just before she’s going to menstruate. That would really be bad. Lord knows what we would get then."
--G. Gordon Liddy
(HT Allison Gaudet Yarrow of The Sisterhood)























--President Richard M. Nixon with his Chief of Staff H. R. "Bob" Haldeman
(HT Karen Tumulty of Time Magazine)

Aristotle was one of the earliest to tackle the problem: he saw menstruation as a sign of female inferiority, related to the passive part he felt women played in reproduction.
(--from Janice Delaney's, Mary Jane Lupton's, and Emily Toth's
The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation)

But menstruation is not just any cyclical occurrence. It involves the shedding of blood, which is itself a dire event, with or without group synchrony and astral coincidences, and at least intuitively associated with acts of deliberate bloodshed. Aristotle observed in the Historia Animalium that menstrual blood runs "like that of an animal that has just been stabbed" in sacrifice and Hippocratic medical texts used the same analogy.
(--from Barbara Ehrenreich's
Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passion of War)

For the Hippocratics the weakness of a woman's body (her porous flesh) caused menstruation; for Aristotle menstruation caused her physical weakness.
(--from Sarah B. Pomeroy's
Women's History and Ancient History)

Aristotle tells us that the highpitched voice of the female is one evidence of her evil disposition, for creatures who are brave or just (like lions, bulls, roosters and the human male) have large deep voices. If you hear a man talking in a gentle or high-pitched voice you know he is a kinaidos (“catamite”). The poet Aristophanes put a comic turn on this cliché in his Ekklesiazousai: as the women of Athens are about to infiltrate the Athenian assembly and take over political process, the f****ist leader Praxagora reassures her fellow f*male activists that they have precisely the right kind of voices for this task. Because, as she says, “You know that among the young men the ones who turn out to be terrific talkers are the ones who get f***ed a lot.” This joke depends on a collapsing together of two different aspects of sound production, quality of voice and use of voice. We will find the ancients continually at pains to associate these two aspects under a general rubric of gender. High vocal pitch goes together with talkativeness to characterize a person who is deviant from or deficient in the masculine ideal of self-control. Women, catamites, eunuchs and androgynes fall into this category. Their sounds are bad to hear and make men uncomfortable. Just how uncomfortable may be measured by the lengths to which Aristotle is willing to go in accounting for the gender of sound physiognomically; he ends up ascribing the lower pitch of the male voice to the tension placed on a man’s vocal chords by his testicles functioning as loom weights.
(--from Anne Carson's
Glass, Irony, and God
- the unoffending *s have been added for our comfort.)

Females blurt out a direct translation of what should be formulated indirectly [as by a syllogism of logic] . . . . [S]ince woman does not bound herself, she must be bounded. The celebrated Greek virtue of self-control (sophrosyne) has to be defined differently for men and for women, Aristotle maintains. Masculine sophrosyne is rational self-control and resistance to excess, but for the woman [according to Aristotle] sophrosyne means obedience and consists in submitting herself to the control of others.
(--from Anne Carson's
Men in the Off Hours)

Race Matters

Guess what we had for Monday night's party?

That's right.  Bubba burgers.  (Had that one for leftover lunch yesterday; short on lettuce but still good).

And guess what I wore?  

Right again.  I wore that t-shirt my Jewish American buddy Gary gave me.  He, Maggie, and their kids joined our family for dinner, so I thought it'd be fitting.  His cousin had made several hundred of the shirts to try to sell on ebay for a few hundred more bucks, a failed venture.  Valerie and Germaine our African American neighbors came over too, and laughed loudest at the slogan on me.  Julie had just coincidentally picked up WonderBread buns from the store shelves, when the popular local brand is Mrs Bairds.  And I displayed the bag and the burger patty box, as in the pic above, for more chuckles.  (What hasn't been so funny is that someone keeps stealing the Obama signs from our yards).

Anyway, my in-laws were with us too, one of them really named "Bubba," so it was quite a great mix of people.  Lots of laughter!  

We did talk and disagree some about U.S. presidential politics (as the in-laws can't believe anyone--in a red state anyway--would support such a liberal inexperienced candidate), ate banana pudding outside by the pool under the moon (to celebrate the latest draft of my dissertation), and then went in to watch the Browns trounce the Giants (and since we're mostly Cowboys fans, who cares right?).  

Of course, during a commercial, I had to go and quote something out of Cornel West's Race Matters:

"In white America, cultural conservatism takes the form of a chronic racism, sexism, and homophobia. Hence, only certain kinds of black people deserve high positions, that is, those who accept the rules played by the games of white America." 

Then, yesterday, as I'm getting ready to leave for work, my father-in-law, a Euro American pastor of a fundamentalist west Texas Cowboy Church gives me something.  He opens his Bible and in his drawl reads:

"Be warned, my son, of anything in addition to them.  Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body."  

More laughs.  He's a history - Bible double major who's been to two different seminaries for two different advanced degrees and now rides horses as much as he preaches.  I get that he's telling me, "It aint the learnin' but what direction your schoolin' takes you in that matters most.  Don't go hurtin' nobody with your smarts."  (Which also translates to:  "Conservatism in America is what we want most, and if you're one of us, then don't go rocking the boat.  Why change so much").

Makes me wonder who I am, and who "we" really are.  But on the drive in to work yesterday, I kept thinking about what my sponsor says from time to time:

"It's better to be a resentment than to have one."  

Normally, I could live with that advice.  But I've been reading too many of Aristotle's "it's better to" statements lately.  

I don't want either (A) to be a resentment or (B) to have a resentment.  

I don't want either (A) to read lots of certain books and offend my conservative in-laws or (B) to stay quiet about "our" "white" America.   

When race matters, and class, and gender, and language, I want my family friends and neighbors to have good change in all directions, not just in one or the other.

White Privilege and the Election

Remember "the racial dynamics at play in this presidential election."

A reminder from Courtney Martin.

Are We Ready, Really?

“This has been a long campaign. and we've traveled this road with one of the most formidable candidates to ever run for President. In her 35 years of public service, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has never given up on her fight for the American people. Senator Clinton has shattered myths and broken barriers and changed the America in which my daughters and your daughters and granddaughters will come of age.”

“I honor her today for the valiant and historic campaign she has run. She shattered barriers on behalf of my daughters and women everywhere, who now know that there are no limits to their dreams. And she inspired millions with her strength, courage and unyielding commitment to the cause of working Americans.”

“With profound gratitude and great humility, I accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States. Let me express my thanks to the historic slate of candidates who accompanied me on this journey, and especially the one who traveled the farthest – a champion for working Americans and an inspiration to my daughters and to yours -- Hillary Rodham Clinton…

And now is the time to keep the promise of equal pay for an equal day’s work, because I want my daughters to have exactly the same opportunities as your sons…

The men and women who serve in our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and Independents, but they have fought together and bled together and some died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a Red America or a Blue America – they have served the United States of America…

We have the most powerful military on Earth, but that’s not what makes us strong. Our universities and our culture are the envy of the world, but that’s not what keeps the world coming to our shores. Instead, it is that American spirit – that American promise – that pushes us forward even when the path is uncertain; that binds us together in spite of our differences; that makes us fix our eye not on what is seen, but what is unseen, that better place around the bend. That promise is our greatest inheritance. It’s a promise I make to my daughters when I tuck them in at night, and a promise that you make to yours – a promise that has led immigrants to cross oceans and pioneers to travel west; a promise that led workers to picket lines, and women to reach for the ballot.”

--Barack Hussein Obama, African American man presidential candidate, to us Americans

“To serve as vice president beside such a man would be the privilege of a lifetime. And it’s fitting that this trust has been given to me 88 years almost to the day after the women of America first gained the right to vote. I think — I think as well today of two other women who came before me in national elections. I can’t begin this great effort without honoring the achievements of Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 and of course Senator Hillary Clinton, who showed such determination and grace in her presidential campaign. It was rightly noted in Denver this week that Hillary left 18 million cracks in the highest, hardest glass ceiling in America but it turns out the women of America aren’t finished yet and we can shatter that glass ceiling once and for all.

So for my part, the mission is clear: The next 67 days I’m going to take our campaign to every part of our country and our message of reform to every voter of every background in every political party, or no party at all. If you want change in Washington, if you hope for a better America, then we’re asking for your vote on the 4th of November. My fellow Americans, come join our cause. Join our cause and help our country to elect a great man the next president of the United States.”

--Sarah Louise Heath Palin, woman Euro American vice presidential candidate, to us Americans

“Palin is the first candidate ever to credit me publicly.”

-- Geraldine Anne Ferraro, woman Euro American vice presidential candidate, to a tv news man

“Congratulations.”

-- Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton, woman Euro American presidential candidate, to Palin in a phone conversation

“Good luck, but not too much luck.”

-- Obama to Palin

So really, Are we ready for a woman president?

Some Applications of Aristotelian Politics to Modern America

One blogger today posts a bunch of stuff Aristotle says, tries to tie it on America with the title “Some Applications of Aristotelian Politics to Modern America,” and won't allow anyone to comment there.

Feel free, then, to comment here. I'll start, by quoting Ishmael Reed:

“And the last material [Richard Wright] wrote was in Haiku. So I was thinking, ‘How can I extend this?’ And I started studying Japanese. And Frank Chin’s analysis of African American folklore comparing that with Chinese warrior stories and Japanese fairy tales coming up with the same material for characters and strategies in common everyday life, in stories about Brer Rabbit and I got a war novel out of it, that’s one element. I try to mix up stuff in Japanese by Spring—that’s my style. So I do have Japanese in there, and like a jazz musician, it ends in another key, so at the end, Yoruba. . .

But it’s happening in the country. You've got Garrett Hongo in Japanese and English. A number of Latino writers writing in Spanish and English, and the most well known writers in the Latino community still write in Spanish. You have a Quebec situation in North America, both in Canada and the United States.

We were the first ones to use the term ‘multicultural,’ and I wish we never used it because now it doesn’t mean anything. Academia got a hold of it and now it’s just a big hustle. Anybody is multicultural. . . So, though people depict us as a Third World organization, our idea of multiculturalism was to include all the ethnics, and I don’t mean this Balkanized theory, but rather people who are bi-cultural, multicultural. Popular culture unites America, not Aristotle.”

Are We Ready for a Woman President?

Professor Karlyn Kohrs Campbell (scholar in presidential rhetorics and in women’s rhetorics in the U.S.) gets us remembering. Kohrs Campbell, asking if we're ready, has identified several women who have made the world readier for an American woman president:

*Elizabeth Cady Stanton. 1848. Reads the “Declaration of Sentiments” co-written by her and several women, and modelled after Jefferson’s Declaration, for the first national woman’s rights convention. Charlotte Woodward, a 19-year-old, participates. (Frederick Douglass and other African Americans and other male first-wave feminists or feminist allies are also participants).

Victoria Claflin Woodhull. 1872. Runs for U.S. President (and is the first woman to do so). Woodhull’s choice for running mate in her Equal Rights Party was Frederick Douglass, making him the first African American candidate for Vice President. Woodhull and her sister, Tennesee, were the first stock brokers who were women; they gave professional advice to Cornelius Vanderbuilt.

Belva Ann Bennett Lockwood. 1884 and 1888. Runs for U.S. President on the Equal Rights Party ticket. In her first run, she’s the first woman to get votes—149; her second run gains her more than 4,000 votes. Lockwood is also the first woman to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. She represented indigineous Americans in Cherokee Nation v. United States, and won for the native Americans, the Eastern and Emigrant Cherokees nearly $5 million in settlements. Lockwood said, "We shall never have equal rights until we take them, nor respect until we command it."

*Charlotte Woodward. 1920. Casts her vote as one of the first women legally to do so in the United States. At age 81, she is the only participant from the first national woman’s rights convention of 1848 still alive.

Margaret Chase Smith. 1940 and 1964. Is elected Senator as the first woman to the U.S. Congress in 1940. Senator Smith showed political courage by criticizing the antics of communist witch hunter, Senator Joseph McCarthy, in her speech “Declaration of Consicence.” Although she’s passed over as the Republican nominee for Vice President in 1954, Senator Smith makes a run for the presidency in 1964. Senator Smith is the first woman nominated by either major party. Her votes in the primaries carry her all the way to the Republican National Convention.

Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm. 1968 and 1972. Is elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, the first African American woman to be included in the U.S. Congress, in 1968. In 1972, Chisolm runs for the U.S. Presidency, the first black woman to do so. She received 151 delegate votes.

Frances “Sissy” Tarlton Farenthold. 1972. Becomes the first woman to be nominated and voted on for U.S. Vice President. Farenthold was one of three women of a class of 800 to graduate from the University of Texas Law School in 1968. With Barbara Jordan, she was the only other woman to serve on the Texas State Legislature in 1968; and with Jordan, Farenthold was one of the “dirty thirty” Members of the Texas State House of Representatives who called for the ouster of the allegedly corrupt Speaker at the time.

Sonia Johnson. 1984. Becomes the first woman to be nominated for U.S. President by two different political parties (the U.S. Citizens Party and the Peace and Freedom Party). In 1977, Johnson co-founded Mormons for the ERA with three other women . She testified in 1978 to the U.S. Senate’s Constitutional Rights Subcommittee, and the next year delivered the speech “Patriarchal Panic: Sexual Politics in the Mormon Church” to the American Psychological Association, moves which had her excommunicated from the Mormon church. (Campbell wonders why 2008 Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney has been publicly silent on Johnson.)

Geraldine Anne Ferraro. 1984. Becomes the the first woman to represent one of the two major political parties as a candidate for Vice President. Polls showed that she was more popular among American voters that her running mate, presidential candidate Walter Mondale.

Patricia Nell Scott Schroeder. 1988. Becomes the first woman Presidential candidate whose tears in public get attention. In 1972, she’s become the first woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Colorado in that state’s 79-year history. And in her first term, she’s become the first woman appointed to the House Armed Services Committee, where she literally shares one single chair in the committee room with Ron Dellums, whose become the first African American on the Committee. The Committee chair remarks: “That girl and that black are each worth about half. I'll give them one chair.”

Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton. 2008. Becomes the first woman Presidential candidate who has resided in the White House.

Professor Karlyn Kohrs Campbell reflects that the world has already had to be ready for a Texas gun-slinger cowboy type for President the last eight years. Yes, he's not the only model for a president, for a male president anyway. Kohrs Campbell asks whether we’re ready not just to look at Hillary Clinton as a viable Presidential candidate, but also at how we ourselves look at her. Is the anti-Hillary rhetoric we speak or hear or tolerate or speak against, is it actually against a woman because she’s a woman running for president? Who can our mothers, and sisters, and daughters—aspiring to be President—look to? What models are there? Do we even have good models in our own heads, or any ideals at all, for a “womanly” President? If not, then we may look to Margaret Chase Smith and to “Sissy” Farenthold with June Jordan, who’ve called us not to tolerate lapses in judgement; we may look to Francis Perkins, President FDR’s secretary of labor, the first woman in the cabinet of a President, and the only person to stay in FDR’s cabinet during his twelve years in office. And there are others, many others, we can look to as exemplary: Jean Duane Jordan Kirkpatrick, the first woman U.S. Ambassor to the United Nations; Claudia Alta Taylor “Lady Bird” Johnson, whose 1964 Whistle Stop campaign tour caused Max Freedman to write: “Lady Bird’s no passive partner. . . Perhaps this marks the emergence of women as central figures in a national contest instead of being on the edges of a campaign”; Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court; Kathleen Gilligan Sebelius, the second woman to be Governor of the state of Kansas, and the first woman to give a political party’s response to the President’s State of the Union Address; *Leticia R. San Miguel Van de Putte, Texas Senator, the first woman to give a political party’s response to the President’s State of the Union Address in Spanish.

------------------------

*Kohrs Campbell did not identify Cady Stanton or Woodward or Van de Putte in the particular speech I heard her give. And the other recollections above are from my quick notes as she talked (and from subsequent research). Those who brought Professor Kohrs Campbell to Texas Woman’s University to make the address have said they hope to make it public some day. I figure we can correct all my mistakes here then. (And trickydame at FCW Society gives a very similar history when asking if we're ready).

Update: Girl with Pen

Obama's Teachers?

Motherpie has an interesting post trying to figure out why Barack Obama may be the slight frontrunner ahead of Hillary Clinton (this Monday before super Tuesday):

Is it Aristotle's rhetoric (as vetted by George Lakoff)? Is this man who would be above women (and that slighter of some feminists) really Obama's teacher(s)?

Obama does speak to the heart. Maybe Aspasia or someone else taught him. And look, Oprah, Caroline Kennedy, Maria Shriver and other contemporary women orators are backing him. And Motherpie does get us wondering whether Barack's a Mac and Hillary's a PC.

(feminist) rhetorical questions for us voters

Jim Aune at The Blogora thinks it's all rhetoric. Barack Obama has a "winning formula" while Hillary Clinton "can't give a decent speech." So Aune gets us re-reading Karlyn Kohrs Campbell's essay "The Discursive Performance of Femininity: Hating Hillary" in the first issue of Rhetoric & Public Affairs (1998): 1-20.

Campbell says there:
"Hillary Rodham Clinton's style of public advocacy typically omits all of the discursive markers by which women publicly enact their femininity. Her tone is usually impersonal . . . her ideas unfold deductively . . . all kinds of evidence is used. . . . she is impassioned but very rarely emotional. . . . [She is unable to] feminize her rhetorical style, to perform a culturally defined feminine role publicly. . . . [while her audiences have a] failure to appreciate [her true power to persuade]. . . . If we reject all those who lack the feminizing skills of an Elizabeth Hanford Dole, we shall deprive ourselves of a vast array of talent" (pages 1, 6, 15).

In Iowa yesterday, did Mr. Obama and Mr. Edwards have Ms. Dole's "feminizing skills"?

Do only women such as Ms. Clinton and Ms. Dole have to "publicly enact femininity" to be persuasive?

Or have frontrunners Mr. Obama and Mr. Huckabee exhibited "discourse markers" and exuded a "tone" that are more "personal," if they also use (in a more manly way) all kinds of evidence and are also more (masculinely and, therefore, more) logically deductive?

Is John F. Hobbins fair in comparing a rhetorically savvy "mother in Israel" with Mr. Obama and Mr. Huckabee?

Can Hugo Schwyzer be so sure of himself when implying (1) that Mr. Obama and Mr. Huckabee contrast greatly with really "handsome, articulate men [such as Mr. Romney and Mr. Edwards] who [therefore more] struggle with slickness"? And (2) that "a debate between Obama and Mike Huckabee would be a thing to behold; [because they are more like women -- less handsome, and less articulate, rather like] two consummate 'outsiders', two men running on two differing visions of hope, two men who have an extraordinary ability to connect with a wide variety of people"?

What does feministing rhetoric really sound like for (or against) Ms. Clinton, Mr. Obama, Mr. Huckabee, and other candidates?

(and here's another in quick update) Can you answer Virginia Rutter's questions: "Who votes their gender?" and "What does this mean?"

a (personal) progress report

Oy vey!

I have to tell you all this:

Should you not turn around to become children

you should not enter into the royal palace of the sky.

As you lower yourself to the level of this child here,

you are the greatest one in the royal palace there.

--Joshua, a Bethlehem baby and child of Egypt

just as we as society have begun to raise our daughters more like sons

–more like whole people–

we must begin to raise our sons more like our daughters

–that is, to value empathy as well as hierarchy;

to measure success by other people’s welfare as well as their own.

--Gloria Steinem, a whole person and feminist

Our family enjoyed the holiday celebrations together. But I did bring up presidential politics and religion and sex to the adults. And someone did ask me about the dissertation.

One of the relatives after a very short while declared that she may agree to disagree with me (on the candidates, on the church, and on the crises of sexism) but was most certain that neither of us would change the other’s mind.

Another asked in mocking disbelief: “how? why would you, a man, be a feminist? isn’t it kinda dishonest for you to translate anything of Aristotle as if you were his daughter?”

Now you might be asking me the obvious: “Why bring up taboo topics of conversation with family members during the holidays?”

So now I’m just asking these questions:

Whether we can dialog through Aspasia’s (aka Socrates’s) dialectic? Why do we have to think we have to change each others’ minds, when what I’m after really is my own very profound need to change? What if I refuse to turn around? Who will that help? And why your limited question focused on my gender, on my feminism? Where are the questions about my American barbarianism (not Aristotle’s Hellenism), my twenty-first-century academic learning (not his neo-Platonic teaching), my translated English (not his original Greek), my position of being a child (not his patriarchy), my repentance (not his rhetoric)?

And I'm still wondering about the antidotes to envy. What was Jesus after in talking to the men following him, those males each one wanting to be the top dog in the kingdom of heaven (as recorded in that epigraph above)? What was Gloria Steinem after (as in that other epigram, from “Supremacy Crimes”) when remembering it’s mostly those less-whole humans with penises who are the most violent, the most hierarchical? Doesn’t each one of us have a role to play, our own role to play out, in envy moderation? When will I know that I myself value empathy of others, and measure success by any other person’s welfare as well as my own?

Thanks to Molly and Suzanne for helping us ask the questions of envy, and of empathy, and of personal change.

My personal progress report on the dissertation is this: I've finished the interlinear Greek-to-English translation of the whole of the Rhetoric. Now, I've just about finished reworking John H. Freese's 1926 version. Each English word is being chosen for its ambiguity, for its relation to the body (mine mostly, but Pythias's empathetically), for its absolute refusal to sit as a static abstract transliteration of the Greek (no elite academic-rhetoric-ese here), for its transformative power (as if a conception, a pregnancy of sorts), for its regard for woman's discourse (as Nancy Mairs relates it), for its feminist binarying that values empathy as well as hierarchy. Some day or another in 2008, I'll post up some of this.