I know my title Appallation isn't a word, but it should be.  I want my feelings of being appalled to be a state, a condition.  Not that I want to be appalled, but I have been appalled for an extended period of time.  I looked up appalled to help me figure it out, and I think that I like the Middle English version the best which suggests an ongoing condition and a fall from grace:  apallen.

Maybe I also like the sound of this new word because it brings to mind the topic of my appallation--Palin, as in Sarah.  While the furor has died down and while her flaws have slowly been exposed, I still can't believe that McCain picked her as his VP. 

Tuesday, my students brought up the election, and while I am really not supposed to use the classroom as a bully pulpit, I mentioned Dan Quayle (of whom most of them had not heard).  I mentioned how absolutely untried, slightly fumbling and even average and unformed he was.  I told them that his idiocies hadn't mattered, though, in the long run.  Bush was elected anyway.

I am in appallation, living there these past few weeks  I am completely, 100 percent apallen.

In the same New York magazine I read the article on publishing, I read a short column about Bernard-Henri Levy's thoughts on what he would tell Barack Obama and how he felt about Sarah Palin.  He said that he would tell Barak to "ask the voters i they are ready to give the keys of the White House to a woman who said when she was running for governor of Alaska, to discuss in the schools--as if they were remotely the same thing--both the science of Darwinism and the fraud that is creationism.  I would beg him to speak directly . . . to the women of this country,, asking them if they are prepared to see themselves in the caricature of a free woman who plans to deny her peers one of their most cherished and hard-won rights, the right to an abortion.  I would underline the cynicism, the absence of feeling one must have to exhibit in front of the world's television cameras that which a mother should hold most dear, most private, and painfully precious:  a child with Down syndrome.  I would advise him to assign this task to Hillary."

For the full read, click on this article.

Sarah is readying herself for the debates, and she has been coached on her performance, as are all debaters.  But is there anything inside her that would truly help this country?  Does she have anything to offer us at all besides the sad truth of the novelty factor of a woman running as VP?  I wish it weren't a novelty, and I wish it weren't a false choice for women.  The bottom line is that she isn't for us.  She's for a belief system that she purports to be true, a belief system that she wants taught in schools.  Belief systems are taught as myth in our US schools, or as religious studies.  Not as facts.

I don't have a daughter, but I may have granddaughters some day, sooner than I can probably imagine.  When I was my oldest son's age, I was working on baby number two, so it might not be long.  In any case, I don't want to leave those potential girls with a sad history of a loss of reproductive rights.  All my reproductive life, I knew I had options.  I didn't choose that option, but I knew that it was there for me.  I knew that it was there in the worst cases for my friends, when times were hard and horrible.  I knew that it was there for women who could not, under any circumstance, raise a child.

So I can move away from teasing Sarah's hair and her mannerisms and even the patina of false email information that has come down the pike.  I can let go of the dead animals hanging in rooms that she owns and her brandishing of weapons.  I can stop snickering at her replies to Katie Couric and Charles Gibson. 

My appallation has settled into a soft, cold feeling of dread for women in the US and for myself--for our rights.  Let is hope that this condition goes away.

Jessica