Eve Ensler, the American playwright, performer,
feminist and activist best known for 'The Vagina
Monologues', wrote the following about Sarah Palin:
Drill, Drill, Drill
I am having Sarah Palin nightmares. I dreamt last
night that she was a member of a club where they rode
snowmobiles and wore the claws of drowned and starved
polar bears around their necks. I have a particular
thing for Polar Bears. Maybe it's their snowy
whiteness or their bigness or the fact that they live
in the arctic or that I have never seen one in person
or touched one. Maybe it is the fact that they live
so comfortably on ice. Whatever it is, I need theM
polar bears.
I don't like raging at women. I am a Feminist and have
spent my life trying to build community, help empower
women and stop violence against them. It is hard to
write about Sarah Palin. This is why the Sarah Palin
choice was all the more insidious and cynical. The
people who made this choice count on the goodness and
solidarity of Feminists.
But everything Sarah Palin believes in and practices
is antithetical to Feminism which for me is part of
one story -- connected to saving the earth, ending
racism, empowering women, giving young girls options,
opening our minds, deepening tolerance, and ending
violence and war.
I believe that the McCain/Palin ticket is one of the
most dangerous choices of my lifetime, and should this
country chose those candidates the fall-out may be so
great, the destruction so vast in so many areas that
America may never recover. But what is equally
disturbing is the impact that duo would have on the
rest of the world. Unfortunately, this is not a joke.
In my lifetime I have seen the clownish, the inept,
the bizarre be elected to the presidency with
regularity.
Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution. I take this
as a metaphor. In her world and the world of
Fundamentalists nothing changes or gets better or
evolves. She does not believe in global warming. The
melting of the arctic, the storms that are destroying
our cities, the pollution and rise of cancers, are all
part of God's plan. She is fighting to take the polar
bears off the endangered species list. The earth, in
Palin's view, is here to be taken and plundered. The
wolves and the bears are here to be shot and
plundered. The oil is here to be taken and plundered.
Iraq is here to be taken and plundered. As she said
herself of the Iraqi war, 'It was a task from God.'
Sarah Palin does not believe in abortion. She does not
believe women who are raped and incested and ripped
open against their will should have a right to
determine whether they have their rapist's baby or
not.
She obviously does not believe in sex education or
birth control. I imagine her daughter was practicing
abstinence and we know how many babies that makes.
Sarah Palin does not much believe in thinking. From
what I gather she has tried to ban books from the li
brary, has a tendency to dispense with people who
think independently. She cannot tolerate an
environment of ambiguity and difference. This is a
woman who could and might very well be the next
president of the United States. She would govern one
of the most diverse populations on the earth.
Sarah believes in guns. She has her own custom
Austrian hunting rifle. She has been known to kill 40
caribou at a clip. She has shot hundreds of wolves
from the air.
Sarah believes in God. That is of course her right,
her private right. But when God and Guns come together
in the public sector, when war is declared in God's
name, when the rights of women are denied in his name,
that is the end of separation of church and state and
the undoing of everything America has ever tried to
be.
I write to my sisters. I write because I believe we
hold this election in our hands. This vote is a vote
that will determine the future not just of the U.S.,
but of the planet. It will determine whether we create
policies to save the earth or make it forever
uninhabitable for humans. It will determine whether we
move towards dialogue and diplomacy in the world or
whether we escalate violence through invasion,
undermining and attack. It will determine whether we
go for oil, strip mining, coal burning or invest our
money in alternatives that will free us from
dependency and destruction. It will determine if money
gets spent on education and healt hcare or whether we
build more and more methods of killing. It will
determine whether America is a free open tolerant
society or a closed place of fear, fundamentalism and
aggression.
If the Polar Bears don't move you to go and do
everything in your power to get Obama elected then
consider the chant that filled the hall after Palin
spoke at the RNC, 'Drill Drill Drill.' I think of
teeth when I think of drills. I think of rape. I think
of destruction. I think of domination. I think of
military exercises that force mindless repetition,
emptying the brain of analysis, doubt, ambiguity or
dissent. I think of pain.
Do we want a future of drilling? More holes in the
ozone, in the floor of the sea, more holes in our
thinking, in the trust between nations and peoples,
more holes in the fabric of this precious thing we
call life?
Eve Ensler
September 5, 2008
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