09 February 2010
Jenny Sanford: It Was Sure Nice Having Prisoners To Wash My Dog
Memo to Jenny Sanford(regarding her Daily Show appearance): it's all well and good to call Mark Sanford a cheap philanderer. Cool. But it doesn't help your case when you bemoan the loss of prisoner slave labor to wash your dog.(and then say that your dog is now filthy as a result) I realize, having grown up there, that this doesn't seem so strange in SC, but the rest of the country--as with this NY audience--thinks it is. And it really is. The look of utter bafflement on Jon Stewart's face, and his polite attempt to try to avoid a series of withering cracks toward her, are priceless.
Amazingly, she seems totally unaware of this even when she hears the crowd reaction, despite that she was brought up in Illinois(but in the very toney and racist Winnetka) and worked in New York. You'd think she'd have been a bit less...well, tonedeaf, frankly. I thought at first she was joking, but as it went on it was clear this was no joke, it was a real complaint. Yes, Jenny, in the rest of the country people feel a little less chummy about involuntary servitude. Having worked in SC, a right-to-work state already, in a mere normal job(a music instrument warehouse, for about 5 months in 1995 before I just walked out one day in disgust), I can attest slavery appears something they get very nostalgic about, judging by all the overtime I was never paid then.
Like with Andre Bauer, the more one looks at SC and those surrounding Sanford, one realizes that, yes, he's filthy scum, but those around him in some cases almost make him look not so bad. I almost respected her till seeing this interview, but it's obvious she's just another clueless overprivileged Southern white aristocrat.
But then, this is the same woman who still went through with her renewal of vows even though her husband eliminated "faithful" from said vows. It's hard to feel much pity. Like with Elizabeth Edwards, her husband is so awful that you want to take sides. But the cold fact is that, the more you look at it, things aren't so black and white--though victimized, both these women are pretty bad themselves, having allowed the public humiliation of their families and dragged out trauma their children will deal with for years, for the sake of protecting their own power and status derived from their hubbies, which would have been--and was--harmed by simply leaving the swines they married.
And frankly, all this is very much a Carolina dynamic, and I can't really explain it to y'all. I can only say: see why people like me leave it? It's the sort of place that makes David Lynch seem realistic. Take it from a recovering Southerner: The more one looks at Dixieland, the more one wants to look away, look away.
Memo to Jenny Sanford(regarding her Daily Show appearance): it's all well and good to call Mark Sanford a cheap philanderer. Cool. But it doesn't help your case when you bemoan the loss of prisoner slave labor to wash your dog.(and then say that your dog is now filthy as a result) I realize, having grown up there, that this doesn't seem so strange in SC, but the rest of the country--as with this NY audience--thinks it is. And it really is. The look of utter bafflement on Jon Stewart's face, and his polite attempt to try to avoid a series of withering cracks toward her, are priceless.
Amazingly, she seems totally unaware of this even when she hears the crowd reaction, despite that she was brought up in Illinois(but in the very toney and racist Winnetka) and worked in New York. You'd think she'd have been a bit less...well, tonedeaf, frankly. I thought at first she was joking, but as it went on it was clear this was no joke, it was a real complaint. Yes, Jenny, in the rest of the country people feel a little less chummy about involuntary servitude. Having worked in SC, a right-to-work state already, in a mere normal job(a music instrument warehouse, for about 5 months in 1995 before I just walked out one day in disgust), I can attest slavery appears something they get very nostalgic about, judging by all the overtime I was never paid then.
Like with Andre Bauer, the more one looks at SC and those surrounding Sanford, one realizes that, yes, he's filthy scum, but those around him in some cases almost make him look not so bad. I almost respected her till seeing this interview, but it's obvious she's just another clueless overprivileged Southern white aristocrat.
But then, this is the same woman who still went through with her renewal of vows even though her husband eliminated "faithful" from said vows. It's hard to feel much pity. Like with Elizabeth Edwards, her husband is so awful that you want to take sides. But the cold fact is that, the more you look at it, things aren't so black and white--though victimized, both these women are pretty bad themselves, having allowed the public humiliation of their families and dragged out trauma their children will deal with for years, for the sake of protecting their own power and status derived from their hubbies, which would have been--and was--harmed by simply leaving the swines they married.
And frankly, all this is very much a Carolina dynamic, and I can't really explain it to y'all. I can only say: see why people like me leave it? It's the sort of place that makes David Lynch seem realistic. Take it from a recovering Southerner: The more one looks at Dixieland, the more one wants to look away, look away.
Labels: mark sanford, right wing, South Carolina, wtf
¶ February 09, 2010
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