Heather Mallick's Column

It's a shame that Mallick concedes Alaska hillbillies and "white trash" to the Republicans. As she notes, with reference to Thomas Frank, the mystery of the hick vote is that they'd be better served by another political party. But her descriptions of the type that supports the thuggish right, despite their own social interests, is excellent and on the money ...

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White trash ... is rural, loud, proudly unlettered (like Bush himself), suspicious of the urban, frankly disbelieving of the foreign, and a fan of the American clichй of authenticity. The semiotics are pure Palin: a sturdy body, clothes that are clinging yet boxy and a voice that could peel the plastic seal off your new microwave.

Palin has a toned-down version of the porn actress look favoured by this decade's woman, the overtreated hair, puffy lips and permanently alarmed expression.

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A follow-up column in which Mallick discovers her "inner hick" and quotes Don Herron's Charlie Farquharson, Will Rogers from Oklahoma, or RedGreen from Possum Lodge, would be a good supplement to the first article and draw attention to a different sort of rural tradition that stands for something other than Republican venom and microcephalic heads.

Hi fellow babblers
Thank you for being so civilized, even if you disagree. I called Palin "white trash" (why? because she is white and she is trash, and she thinks raped incest victims should bear their dad's baby, don't get me started ...)

God knows what's happening to John Doyle for having called Palin an Alaskan hillbilly, but I am getting hundreds of emails from the American south. My husband vets all my email for death threats and he comes in with my coffee in the morning, saying "The consensus in West Virginia is that you are a f------ c---. In the Caroliinas, however, you are a lonely lesbian. The coffee this morning is organic fair trade Costa Rican." Then he laughs quietly to himself in his British way.

I feel so bad making the guy read alll this stuff from Obama-haters. But he says the Canadian right-wingers are angry but restrained, which is good. I am proud of Canadians for their sanity and politeness.
Is there really a Bob Jones of Bob Jones University? He wants to meet me, I take it with an AK-47 in his hand.

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Originally posted by Ghislaine:
[b]

Why did you write that she is not female?[/b]

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Now that's a literalist enough reading of what Heather said to get you tuition to Billy-Bob Jones University.

Mallik:"No, she isn't even female really. She's a type, and she comes in male form too."

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Originally posted by Wally Keeler:
[b]I have a close friend who gave birth to the daughter of a rapist. I will have to inform her that Heather Mallick wishes her fine and loving daughter was never born.[/b]

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Assuming for just a moment you are not just a troll,
--how clueless are you? The essence of "choice" is precisely not other people's "wishes" (or state demands), it is that your alleged friend has a choice whether or not she wishes to carry her rapist's fetus to term.

[ 10 September 2008: Message edited by: contrarianna ]

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Originally posted by Ghislaine:
[b]Did anyone else find parts of [url=http://www.rabble.ca/columnists_full.shtml?x=75127]this column[/url] incredibly offensive? [/b]

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Nope, i thought she was dead on the money, so to speak, and very amusing while doing it.

What I found really offensive was having a Stephen Harper picture up, with his thumb up, on the rabble main page. Though one could choose to take it as his giving approval for Mallick's words, I suppose. [img]wink.gif" border="0[/img]

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[b]The original thread on cbc.ca has some commentators saying they will complain to the CBC ombudsman about this column.[/b]

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For what? Giving her opinion?

"I called Palin "white trash" (why? because she is white and she is trash, and she thinks raped incest victims should bear their dad's baby"

Any woman who freely chooses to bring a child to birth, regardless of who the father is, deserves to be respected. The daughter of my friend knows full well the stigma of being the daughter of a rapist -- there are people who have taunted her for being born, and she had known people who have especially degraded and trashed her white-skinned mother for her free choice. Mallick has clearly demonstrated that if a woman does not freely choose as mallick would have chosen, then that woman deserves to be trashed for her free choice.

Get it?

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Originally posted by Wally Keeler:
[b]"I called Palin "white trash" (why? because she is white and she is trash, and she thinks raped incest victims should bear their dad's baby"

Any woman who freely chooses to bring a child to birth, regardless of who the father is, deserves to be respected. The daughter of my friend knows full well the stigma of being the daughter of a rapist -- there are people who have taunted her for being born, and she had known people who have especially degraded and trashed her white-skinned mother for her free choice. Mallick has clearly demonstrated that if a woman does not freely choose as mallick would have chosen, then that woman deserves to be trashed for her free choice.

Get it?[/b]

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No that's not what Mallick is saying at all. I don't like the phrases either but that doesn't mean that she's saying that.

She is saying that she thinks Palin is not good (trash) because PALIN thinks that no woman should be given the choice. PALIN wants to make it illegal for women to have any say in the matter, no matter what their end choice is. So your friend would not have even had the ability to make any choice whatsoever. It would have been made for her by somebody else.

Get it?

In every legal sense, I have voted for free choice, however, I am disgusted with the unbridled malice of too many pro-choicers, and as much as you want to downgrade Mallick's hateful and spiteful rant, makes me want to say that Mallick is more representative of maliciousness of too many feminists.

Mallick has brought down a once respectable movement to a gang of schoolyard bullies who tease, taunt, and degrade those who do not hold the same political view 100% of the time.

I disagree with Palin's stand of compulsory birth, but I disgree more deeply with Mallick's highly degenerate and offensive behaviour towards another woman.

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Originally posted by Wally Keeler:
[b]Mallick has clearly demonstrated that if a woman does not freely choose as mallick would have chosen, then that woman deserves to be trashed for her free choice.[/b]

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Either this is a bald-faced lie, or you are the one who needs to take a reading comprehension course.

You choose.

[ 10 September 2008: Message edited by: M. Spector ]

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Originally posted by Wally Keeler:
[b]
I disagree with Palin's stand of compulsory birth, but I disgree more deeply with Mallick's highly degenerate and offensive behaviour towards another woman.[/b]

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"Highly degenerate" is a better description of your fake libertarianism. It's fake because you take more offense at the tone of those you disagree with than with those who actually want to legislate a faith-based elimination of choice. Your linked blog indicates a devotion to right-wing oriented "free speech" sites yet your support of Palin ignores her attempt to get a librarian fired for failing to ban books she didn't like. "Choice" and "Free speech", for you, is obviously just a disposable talking point.

I don't always agree with Mallick, and for me there are a number of dead lilys in this bouquet. But don't forget this is meant as a humour column and hyperbole is a device she favours.

So if you are referring to the following quote in your criticism, you might just as well decry that she is advocating killing "ratboy".
"I know that I have an attachment to children that verges on the irrational, but why don't the Palins? I'm not the one preaching homespun values but I'd destroy that ratboy before I'd let him get within scenting range of my daughter again"

I like Mallick too, although she does tend to come across as snobby quite often, even when I agree with her.

I chanced to hear some of "The Stafford Show" after "Leafs Lunch" on the internet today. Even if by accident, and even if hearing these yahoos encourages my inner hick to reach for the shotgun and blow up my computer real good, it's occasionally interesting to hear what the looney-tune right-wing fringe, (a.k.a. "The Mainstream Media") has to say.

Guess, what? Mike and his sidekick were talking about our Heather today. Mike said she's insane, although characteristically, he wasn't bothered by questions of sexism or classism, two issues which rate far lower in importance than the heartbreak of psoriasis or pattern baldness in his books.

He also said she should be kicked off the taxpayer-funded CBC and get a real journalism job; one where she would have to answer to advertisers. Mikey has a point there, anyone who strays from the message that liberal-capitalism in all its glorious manifestations is the Lord's work ought to be unemployed.

There really isn't room for unfettered thought in the arena of public opinion. It's just bad for business.

That said, as a working-class Saskavite with strong rural roots, I'm not crazy about such classist terms as "white trash" or "hillbilly," given that we here in the land of living skies have been called, for example, "inbred banjo-pickers" by those to the east of us.

Heather Mallick is a paid agent of the government of Canada via the CBC. Part of my tax paid for the malevolent fungus growing inside her mouth. If there is any "white trash" on this thread it is her. Why? Because she is white and because she is trash, and because she uses taxpayers money to poison debate with malevolent and peurile arguements. She sucks federal taxcock and swallows it. She is a typical bureauCRAP.

That last comment was unnecessary and offensive. I don't think it is fitting on Babble to have a Rabble columnist subjected to overt misongyny.

Jinx, buy me a drink!

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Originally posted by kropotkin1951:
[b]That last comment was unnecessary and offensive. I don't think it is fitting on Babble to have a Rabble columnist subjected to overt misongyny.[/b]

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You don't, however, seem to have any problem with babblers accusing each other of a [url=http://www.rabble.ca/babble/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=47&t=000029&p... debating style[/url].

By the way, Heather Mallick is not "white". She is of mixed background; South Asian and Scottish, if I'm not mistaken.

al Q, I've never heard that about people from Saskatchewan. The only Westerners I've heard slagged here in a stereotypical sense are Albertans. I think there is a lot of respect for Saskatchewan as the cradle of social democracy.

I didn't see that at the time or I would have said something.

The term "white trash" is not only classist, which is obvious, but racist as well. And I don't mean "reverse racism" either. When someone says that someone is "white trash" there is an assumption in that phrase. An assumption that "trash" usually isn't "white" and therefore when it is, the phrase needs to be qualified.

White trash, as opposed to the usual plain old trash.

[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_trash]What "white trash" means.[/url]

A way to insult poor people with low education and no prospects. (Complete with the racist assumption being that you have to differentiate the WHITE "trash" from all the rest of the "trash".)

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Originally posted by lagatta:
[b]I like Heather, and get what she means about "Palin" being a manufactured product.

What I do find very questionable about what she wrote is the idea of parents considering teenagers who are past the "age of consent" as their chattel. It is none of her parents' f-ing business whom a 17-year-old chooses to sleep with. God knows we've all made mistakes in that regard. Oddly, in that Heather resembles Sarah Palin.

Though teenagers must have access to sex education and contraception, including abortion.[/b]

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I agree with your last line, lagatta, but I am totally with HM on the "ratboy" comment. It's more complicated than the idea of teenager as chattel -- and yes, as the mother of two daughters who are not yet but will in a few years be teenagers, everything that has a big effect on their lives has a huge effect on mine.

I might have agreed with your assessment before I had kids, but now I just don't see it through the same lens. It's different remembering what it felt like to be a teenager and knowing what it feels like to be responsible for someone else.

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I didn't know that parents had the right to dictate who their 17 year old daughters have sex with...

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What does "right" have to do with it?

"While white trash is most commonly used as a pejorative, low- to middle-income rural whites often self-identify as rednecks."

Didn't that guy who may soon become Sarah Palin's son-in-law call himself a redneck?

About a year ago I was in a room full of tractor mechanics who proudly self-identified as "crackers." They thought it was funny being a cultural stereotype, down to the clichй of having gun-racks in the rear window of their half-tons.

Then just ignore my posts. You insulted me instead of debating the issue of language respectfully and I responded. I admit responding to your comments was beneath me and I apologise for stepping into the gutter with you to respond.

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Originally posted by Michelle:
[b]
The term "white trash" is not only classist, which is obvious, but racist as well. And I don't mean "reverse racism" either. When someone says that someone is "white trash" there is an assumption in that phrase. An assumption that "trash" usually isn't "white" and therefore when it is, the phrase needs to be qualified.

White trash, as opposed to the usual plain old trash.

[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_trash]What "white trash" means.[/url]

A way to insult poor people with low education and no prospects. (Complete with the racist assumption being that you have to differentiate the WHITE "trash" from all the rest of the "trash".)[/b]

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This objection to Heather's use of "white trash" misses the point because you're taking it out of context.

If I were to call, say, one of my clients at the methadone clinic "white trash," it would be hurtful and offensive. But Heather is taking this pejorative and turning it on its head to apply it to someone who is potentially a heartbeat away from the presidency; someone who used her position as governor to exercise a petty vendetta; someone who forbids sex ed for teens; someone against abortion in all cases.

Heather is not using this term strictly as a pejorative. She's using it as a cultural critique.

When Heather speaks of "white trash," she is pointing to a damaging aspect of American culture. She enlarges on this more eloquently than I can, but basically it's that part of America that's proudly anti-intellectual, bigoted, hypocritical, falsely and manipulatively sentimental, xenophobic, war-mongering, and socially regressive.

And that's why so many people are pissed off at Heather: she's not just insulting Palin, but a lot of Americans.