Voting makes me sappy. Waiting while poll workers shuffle through thick
books of names, pulling back the curtain, pressing the little “Vote”
button -- in a society that seems more fragmented every day, casting a
ballot is a rare shared experience (even if frightening numbers of
Americans still ignore this coveted franchise). Getting to vote back in
January for
either a female presidential candidate or an African-American one was a particularly verklempt experience for me, despite the
fact there’s a raging debate about whether that vote counts for shit,
having been cast in Florida.

But why has it taken our country so
long to get this far? Sometimes it seems like the U.S. will be the last
nation ever to get a female leader. After all, women have been proving
since at least the days of Cleopatra that you don’t need gonads to
govern. With Cristina Kirchner in Argentina and Michelle Bachelet in Chile, South America is way ahead of North on this issue.

There
are some who argue that women lead differently than men: gentler, more peaceful, maternal. About the only
nice thing I can say about Margaret Thatcher is that at least she
proved that sexist generalization wrong. Iron Ladies of Liberia, a powerful documentary by Siatta Scott Johnson and Daniel Junge that played last week at the Miami International Film Festival, explores this notion of gendered power by looking at the first year in office of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.
The African country’s first female president appointed several women
cabinet members to help her pull Liberia out of a tragic morass after
years of civil war. The film shows in graphic montages the beyond daunting task ahead of
them: rivers full of trash, no electricity, no running water, 90
percent unemployment rate, crushing international debt.

Liberians
call Sirleaf Old Ma, along with the Iron Lady. Narrated by Johnson, a
woman journalist who admits she’s pulling for one of her own to save the
country, Iron Ladies probably isn’t the most objective film
ever made. But the filmmakers got access to many high-level meetings,
and not all of the drama captured is favorable to Old Ma.

The
best scene is when Sirleaf manipulates a room full of retired soldiers
to give up their protest. After listening to their concerns
sympathetically, she chastises and chastens them for the role they
played in destroying their country. The weathered men become guilty,
apologetic children,
caught with their hands in a brutal cookie jar. Equally as effective is
the way Sirleaf and her finance minister get the U.S. to forgive
Liberia's debt, after playing kissy-kissy with China.

***

This blog is a revival for me: As pop culture writer at The Miami Herald,
I for a time penned a column called Populism. It was my chance to dig
deep into arts and entertainment trends, to look for big truths in what
sometimes pass as small things -- to find philosophical justification
for my career-long obsession with what's supposed to be ephemeral.
After nine months as editorial director at MOLI, I'm picking up my
(virtual) quill again. Assembling the cast of characters of the MOLI View,
and editing them daily, has been a highlight of my working life. But
I've increasingly wanted to be one of them, to offer my own words of
wisdom into the admittedly overcrowded blogosphere.

So here I go again. Now I get to find out what this job has been like for the other amazing editors at the View. I hope I can live up to their shining examples.