It’s time for the next installment of my 2013 Year in Review Lists: the 2013 Year in Politics. Each December that I do this, it gets increasingly difficult to distinguish between the stories that properly belong on this list and those that fit more comfortably on the Year in Pop Culture list, which says something either really encouraging or really disheartening (or, most likely, both) about the state of politics today. As ever, there was far too much material to choose from in 2013, so go ahead and insert all the relevant caveats about whatever this list lacks. (NB: there’s a better-than-average chance that whatever you find missing from this list will show up on the Year in Pop Culture list, forthcoming.) One thing that the 2013 Year in Politics made abundantly clear is that the longstanding and deeply-problematic Dividing Line between the so-called “public” and the so-called “private,” which we inheritors of the European Enlightenment still cling to with (an increasingly-loud) desperation, has been all but erased from existence. If it ever existed in the first place. Which it didn’t.
For easier navigation, rememoration and ingestion, I’ve divided the following highlights and lowlights from 2013 by my judgment of them. Here are the Yay!s, the Nay!s, what I’m calling the Bartleby’s (i.e., the yay/nay, whatevs, Idk-I’d-prefer-not-to-decide’s) and the WTF?s.
#StandwithWendy: If you made a list of a million— nay, a billion— things that I thought I’d never be caught dead doing, staying up past midnight to watch a live webcast of a Texas Senate session would without a doubt be at the top of that list. Until I found myself doing just that late on the evening of June 25. That night, Texas State Senator Wendy Davis, who had laced up her pink tennis shoes and undertaken an 11-plus-hours filibuster to block the passage of Texas Senate Bill 5 (which would have effectively eliminated Texas women’s right to choose to terminate pregnancies) was forced to stop her filibuster on highly suspect (read: totally bullsh*t) procedural grounds. Her colleagues in the Texas State Senate subsequently tried to force through a passage of Bill 5 before the midnight deadline, only to be quite literally prevented from doing so by the vox populi. (If you didn’t see it live, you really must watch the video of the final moments of that Senate session.) For me, anyway, the last several years as a political agent have been increasingly disheartening. Those moments of democratic elation that I felt throughout 2007-08 Presidential campaign season– which I now call the Year Before Obama Broke My Heart– and which were briefly reignited in 2011 with the OWS protests– which I now call the Revolution That I Almost Lived Through– had all but disappeared from my affective memory in the intervening years. Then, appearing on the horizon as a mirage manifests itself to the thirsty, was Wendy Davis. I’m such a sucker for the a venir. Bless my heart.
Little Girls Have Big, Loud, Strong Voices… AND THE WORLD IS LISTENING: Sixteen-year-old Pakistani Malala Youfsafzai, not for nothing, published a bestseller this year, was the youngest person ever to be nominated as a finalist for the Nobel Peace Prize, was invited to chat it up with Jon Stewart on American television and she had a day named in her honor. Oh yeah, and at the ceremony for Glamour’s 2013 Women of the Year she said: “There is no freedom, but still there is hope… We are not toys.
We are not stickers you put on magazines. We are not puppets. We are
human beings with capabilities and potentials.” I just want to say for the record that I unapologetically stand by including Malala Youfsafzai’s inclusion on this list, and not the 2013 Year in Pop Culture list, because (like Wendy Davis’ above and Leticia van de Putte’s below) Malala Yufsafzai’s distinction this year is a signal for the rest of us, perhaps more dramatically than any other, that the resignation of “women’s issues” to the realm of the private is tres passé. If the 2013 Year in Politics taught us nothing else, it’s that our best, brightest, most inspiring and groundbreaking human beings are of, ahem, what has been for ages condescendingly (but, in this case, accurately) called “the fairer sex.”
Leticia Van de Putte says, on behalf of women everywhere, COME AT BE BRO: Gawd, I don’t even have enough adjectives in my vocabulary to express how much righteously justified indignation I felt when, sitting in my pajama pants, eating a pizza and
mad-Twittering like some kind of possessed #crazyfeminist, nearing midnight on an otherwise totally-uneventful Wednesday night, I watched on my precious laptop, the heretofore-unknown-to-me Texas State Senator Leticia van de Putte take the floor and DROP THE MOTHER-F**KING MIC ON THE WHOLE THE TEXAS STATE SENATE AND THE WHOLE WORLD. I don’t know anything about her voting history or her campaign platform, but if I EVER find myself within a thousand mile of Senator Van der Putte, you better BELIEVE that Imma buy this woman a drink. (Dear Senator Van de Putte, I sincerely hope that you drink!) Never before have I marked a single moment in my Year in Politics lists as THE moment, and srsly all due respect to Wendy Davis’ valiant effort, but I this year I can’t help myself but bow before the feet of Sen. Leticia Van de Putte. THIS is the Year in Politics 2013 moment, as far as I’m concerned. And, yeah, come at me bro:
That absolutely glorious performance notwithstanding, it only (unfortunately) goes downhill from here in the 2013 Year in Politics. Still, for your own sake, take this precious moment, readers, to relive that glory of democracy.
Nay!
CLOSED FOR BIZNESS: Obvs, the most important political story of the year is the 2013 Federal Government shutdown. I don’t know what there is, really, to say about this