This is copy for the first segment of POWER TRIPS... -- a radio and podcast project I'm currently working on. The Mother Earth Power Works project is in the works, but held up by a few details that must be figured out before I can go ahead with it. mc

SARAH PALIN is now a mainstay in the news. She is darling of the Tea Party – the right wing, populist movement which has eclipsed the neocon’s long domination of the Republican Party. She endorses political candidates, contributes to Fox news, promotes her books and children and manipulates the media and public to buy into her ideas of what is important in American life and everywhere else. And that would include Canada.

In March, she spoke in Calgary to a fawning crowd of a thousand and clinched the deal by talking about her roots in the prairie provinces. They loved it. (As an aside – After departing the White House, George Dubya Bush’s first gig was also in Calgary. His second gig was in Toronto. Proving that Canadian political correctness will extend to just about anything.)

Why am I bringing this up? Because Sarah and the women of the Tea Party have proclaimed themselves to be feminists! The Christian Science Monitor, even, tells us that Sarah is “a feminist first and a ‘tea partyer’ second.” In the article, Palin goes on about the “pro-woman sisterhood” and she “made it clear that...modern conservative feminism means that having children and being active outside the home are not incompatible.” Palin’s message, of course, was coined at the dawn of feminist consciousness and is therefore at least 50 years behind the times. And neither she, nor the Monitor, seem to know this.

As for their claim to feminism – how ridiculous. The story is this: Conservative women enjoy getting together and organizing campaign details. Activist moms commiserate around the kitchen table about the 2 main parties being old boys’ clubs. Over coffee and cake, they rue their lack of power. But in the Tea Party, they say, they have found their voice. And their latest development? They’ve come up with the idea that they are “mamma grizzlies” rising up against Washington to protect their cubs! Cute. Folksy.

These right wingers are just chips off the old orthodoxy. Conservative politics are antithetical to women’s individual freedom and self-determination. In reality, the oppression of women is a basic principle of conservative ideology. Always has been – and still is.

Within the backlash against feminism, conservative women have always been happy to play the role of flagellant consorts. They have been indifferent to the evolution in women’s consciousness – and to their own position in the social contradictions that have entrapped them. They missed out on the learning and logic, the history and experience. The evolution. Everything that got us to where we are – around the world. The good stuff. The feminism.

Now they’re co-opting the inarguable authority and legitimacy of feminism and there it stops. They have no idea how to think about it. So they retreat into momma grizzly trips and lash out at the real thing – feminists – with spite and scorn and pretentiousness. Said one, recently, “Sarah will...really be amenable to women’s rights....”

It’s their sting. They are resentful because they held themselves back while other women forged ahead with their own intellectual, emotional and cultural advancement. Reality is dawning on them. They’re out of step – and like their men, they don’t like it. It’s hard on the ego – so they attack feminists and women’s rights. They claim to be us, while trying to negate us. Faux feminists – what a concept! How convoluted. How wacky.