The Politics of Absolutely Everything

By GAIL COLLINS
NYT

This week we had a huge political fight about breast cancer. Clearly, we have now hit the point where there’s nothing that can’t be divided into red-state-blue-state.

Nothing. The other day I saw a blog called “I Dig My Garden” that had a forum on whether Republicans could truly love gardening. And there was a little dust-up in Albany over politicization of a local pet blog, which had featured a discussion on Mitt Romney’s driving to Canada with the family dog strapped to the roof of the car.

But breast cancer would seem like the last thing to go. Everybody hates cancer and everybody likes breasts — infants, adults, women, men. Really, it’s America’s most popular body part.

The Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation has made its fight against breast cancer into one of the most successful charitable enterprises in recent history, partly because it makes everybody feel good and helps corporate sponsors create good will. It’s raised about $2 billion over the years. This is the group that brought us the pink ribbons and pink umbrellas and pink beauty products, and “Buckets for the Cure,” a rather controversial promotion it undertook with that well-known purveyor of healthy eating choices, Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Breast cancer tends to get a disproportionate share of health care financing, and Komen’s enormous success tilts things still further. (The foundation spends a good deal of time and money tracking down smaller anticancer organizations and demanding that they cease and desist from using the words “for the cure” or using the color pink.) Critics also suggest that Komen is way too fixated on mammograms, which are a good tool, but are hardly the be-all-and-end-all of cancer prevention. On the other hand, Komen does financially support much-needed grass-roots programs like Planned Parenthood’s medical exams for mostly young, lower-income women.

(More here.)