By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
All our discussion about being authentic, finding ourselves, shaking off old parental programming and social conditioning, is being reflected in the zeitgeist of the moment, people in the public eye letting it all hang out. The public eye, of course, is pretty jaded, and what it will do with all this information is the question. Some of the revelations will simply confirm what we’ve assumed, but — fair warning — the old saw about ass and you and me remains valid. At minimum, this unlikely rash of candor should shake up what’s cookin’, which is how I see each new day: the diversity of ingredients thrown into the pot produces a tasty, or not, product to be consumed and digested before we start all over again. And, lest we forget, we are what we eat.
Let’s begin with Martha Stewart, domestic maven and marketer. How many of us would have guessed that Martha had participated in a three-way? Moreover, how many would guess she’d admit to it? Can we assume prison broadened Martha’s horizons, or is that just how they roll in the Hamptons? And while passing along her red-hot admission to inquiring minds, I wonder how many of us will think back on Martha’s punishment for insider trading, a tiny stumble on the steep climb to fiscal Nirvana produced by the criminal class on Wall Street. I wonder how many will think of her, in retrospect, as easy pickins, a scapegoat of fiscal accountability in a financial empire grown “too big to fail” and too corrupt to topple. And will any of us ask ourselves, eventually, what might have happened if Martha hadn’t been a glaringly successful woman? Hmmmmm?
There were other women standing tall this week. Without rehashing what Fe so movingly wrote on this topic, we have an example of spontaneous ethical eruption from Texan Wendy Davis, a woman of both impressive chutzpah and astounding bladder control. As the clock ran down just before midnight, the political maneuvering that attempted to evict Ms. Davis from the podium and end her filibuster brought a loud and impressive response from the gallery, filled with voters who were determined that women should have choice over their bodily functions and sexual choices.