|
|
|
The Elevation of Nancy Pelosi
 Last
week history was made. A woman, Nancy
Pelosi, a Democrat, was chosen speaker of the U.S. House of
Representatives, and anyone within hearing distance of a television set heard
the word historic hundreds of times. To listen to the media hype,
you’d have thought it was the most exciting event since
Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic, and that millions of people
must be lining the streets of New York to give  Mrs. Pelosi
a roaring ticker-tape parade.
Mrs. Pelosi herself
spoke of her selection as a great triumph for women, as if she had just
overcome tremendous odds to break the “marble ceiling.” An
unprecedented human achievement!
Maybe I just live in a
dull neighborhood, but nobody I ran into seemed to find it the least bit
exciting. In fact, nobody even mentioned it.
Of course much
depends on whether you consider acquiring political power a great
accomplishment. Frankly, I’d be more impressed if a woman became
heavyweight boxing champion.
Seeking a historical
parallel, my mind raced back nearly a quarter of a century, to 1984, when
the media went into similar throes as the Democrats chose a woman to be
their vice-presidential candidate. Her name, as every student of history
knows, was Geraldine Ferraro. Then too the word historic was used
with abandon.
The parallels
don’t end there. Ferraro was a woman, a Democrat, Italian-American,
and Catholic. So is Pelosi. One more little thing: Ferraro was outspokenly
pro-abortion. So is Pelosi. All this is more than mere coincidence.
If either one of them
had expressed opposition to abortion, it goes without saying that the
Democrats wouldn’t have exalted her. This throws an interesting light
on the historic achievements of women. In today’s America, there are
few constraints on how far a woman can rise, so long as she is a Democrat, a
professed Catholic, and a proponent of abortion.
Pelosi does have one
advantage over Ferraro. She was the daughter of the mayor of Baltimore,
so, despite her self-dramatization, it’s not as if she had to struggle
to overcome her humble origins. This isn’t exactly a Horatio Alger
story.
![[Breaker quote for The Elevation of Nancy Pelosi: So what?]](2007breakers/070109.gif) If,
as is not improbable, a woman finds a cure for
cancer, nobody will be very surprised. There will be nothing marvelous about
it. It won’t be hailed as a great “woman’s
achievement.” It will be the sort of thing we have come to take for
granted.
The liberal creed holds
that women and minorities never have a nice day. The victim act should have
been retired long ago, but it has persisted long past the point of satiety.
Indeed it’s refreshing to read old political debates, from the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with their nearly total freedom from
grievance and resentment.
Though the
self-conscious victims among us talk as if they have been excluded from
constitutional protection, the original Constitution (including the Bill of
Rights) says nothing about race or sex. It speaks of “persons.”
Much nonsense is spoken about it by people who don’t stop to reflect
on what that word implies.
Women have been
elected and appointed to public office, including Congress, for a century or
so now. Why is so much fuss being made about a very minor political
milestone today?
Presumably Geraldine
Ferraro is still alive somewhere or other, but for an epoch-making figure she
is curiously obscure. Her 1984 campaign was of course a flop, soon
enmeshed in her and her husband’s shady business associations,
leading her to complain that she was, yes, a victim — of anti-Italian
stereotyping. (Old-timers may recall her laments about what happens to
people whose names end in vowels.) It became hilarious when her own
husband got into trouble with the law.
So you’ll pardon
me if I don’t join the celebration over history’s latest
development. Events of great historical importance don’t always make
headlines the day they occur. When another Italian Catholic unexpectedly
found land between Western Europe and the Orient, it took a while for the full
significance to dawn on other Europeans.
In those days, of
course, the technique of hype was still in a primitive state. Today it is so far
advanced that many Americans actually believe that something of
consequence happened last week.
Joseph Sobran |
||
| Copyright © 2007 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
|
||
|
||
|
Archive Table of Contents
Current Column Return to the SOBRAN’S home page. |
||
|
|
| FGF E-Package columns by Joe Sobran, Sam Francis, Paul Gottfried, and others are available in a special e-mail subscription provided by the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation. Click here for more information. |