In 2016 I wrote on social media that I was put off by Hillary Clinton's "shrieking" in her victory speech after a state Democratic primary contest.
I was inundated with angry responses from women aghast that I would criticize Clinton in a way that gave away anti-woman bias.
I pushed back. I'd criticized Al Gore for clumsy shouting in his speeches. So you had two substandard Democratic presidential candidates, both challenged oratorically. A writer seeks the best word as a describer. He shouted. She shrieked. What was the difference?
That I didn't know the difference was the dead giveaway, I was told.
I looked up "shriek." It means making a high-pitched noise from excitement.
So my transgression stemmed from the fact that "shout" is not gender-loaded but "shriek" is, either by natural tone or stereotype or connotation or all of the above.
The real charge is that I revealed a gender bias against Clinton, though I got proudly strung out favoring her for president over that old man in the primary and that man-child in the general election.
Alas, I struggle.
So, I lead a class of seniors in which I spend 50 minutes each Wednesday morning analyzing political news.
In recent weeks I've been discussing, among other issues, the emerging Democratic presidential race, emphasizing the challenges facing Joe Biden, the outsider-driven potency of Bernie Sanders, and the sudden phenomenon of Pete Buttigieg.
That's a man, a man and another man.
One week a male class member--one of the enlightened ones, I suppose--asked why pundits were emphasizing three men and paying scant attention to the female Democratic candidates--Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Kirsten Gillibrand, Tulsi Gabbard and Marianne Williamson.
I replied that Biden and Sanders happened to be front-runners and that Buttigieg had connected generationally and to upper-class, college-educated white liberals in a way that none of the women candidates yet had.
But then I got a load of Elizabeth Warren's policy command in a town hall last week on CNN. I wondered: Had I diminished Warren though she was:
• As boldly progressive as Sanders but without the socialist label?
• More policy-specific than Buttigieg?
• Possessed of fewer idiosyncrasies than Biden?
Had I subconsciously undervalued her because she is a woman?
"Yes," several women in the class said.
Could I at least get credit for public introspection?
"Yeah, OK."
Could I at least get credit for trying to do better?
"I don't think you can," a woman said.
Apparently, there is the theory that 65 years of Arkansas male existence are hard to overcome toward evolution to modern enlightenment.
We'll see about that.
As journalist Ezra Klein put it, Warren responds to policy questions with policy while Sanders responds with morality.
She wants to leave rich people alone up to $50 million, which is plenty on which to get by, and tax an additional 2 percent thereafter. Then she wants to use the money to forgive up to $50,000 in student debt for persons with incomes less than $100,000, provide free tuition at public two-year and four-year colleges, and underwrite universal access to pre-K programs.
Some economists and tax specialists say she's overstating the income from that wealth tax because rich folks will figure out how to appear less wealthy and thus avoid its application.
But at least we're talking policy and math rather than shallow, senseless rhetoric.
As part of Warren's populist emphasis on keeping the corporations from over-running us, she takes on Amazon.
She says it is getting too big and anti-competitive. She says we need to break off some of what it does so that it won't be buying everything for us from vendors it favors based on knowledge it has of our interests through its aggregating information revealed by our purchases and searches. She's saying a single corporation running all of our consumer activity is neither good for us nor for those who'd like to compete fairly in the marketplace.
She's saying one company doing everything ought to be made to spin off some of that in the way decades ago Ma Bell was made to break itself up.
She's right. Amazon runs my life. It would be better if it ran only part of my life and a couple of other corporations ran the other parts.
When Warren went west a couple of weeks ago, she waved her proposal to undo the Trump administration's public lands policy. She proposed, among other things, to ban new fossil-fuel exploration on public lands and make admission to every national park free.
For those reasons, I'm announcing that I'm determined to move Elizabeth Warren to the top tier of my consciousness, where she will join all those men.
I'm sure someone is saying I remain gender-biased against Kamala, Amy, Kirsten, Tulsi and Marianne.
Alas, I may be capable only of one epiphany at a time.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 04/28/2019