Iron my Skirt: The Nation

Hilary Clinton “drew out the nation’s misogyny in all its jeering glory and put it where we could all get a good look at it”, writes Katha Pollitt. Now that the dream of a woman in the White House has been decisively deferred, it’s time to look back at what Clinton wrought in this bitter, prolonged fight for the Democratic nomination. Politt admits that Hillary didn’t lose because of sexism, but because Barack Obama, ‘a prodigiously gifted, charismatic politician, took the banner of change away from her’. But what Hillary had done is starkly show up the ways women are belittled for aspiring, and the fact that millions of ordinary women from diverse backgrounds saw their struggles mirrored in Clinton’s experience. And she has made it possible for other women to imagine making a bid for the presidency, though that candidate ‘better have the hide of a rhinoceros’.

Struggles: The New Yorker

In “The Wretched of the Earth”, Frantz Fanon wrote that “the last battle of the colonised against the coloniser will often be the fight of the colonised against each other”, and to watch “the intertwined agonies of South Africa and Zimbabwe today” is to see what he meant. Philip Gourevitch describes the “sinister solidarity” between Thabo Mbeki and Robert Mugabe, as South Africa continues to strenuously deny Mugabe’s systematic terrorising of his people. And yet, American ambassador James McGee continues to document Mugabe’s worst excesses, operating as though America’s standing on these matters weren’t tainted by Abu Ghraib, water boarding and its own extensive record on torture.

... contd.