From the Archives (20 September 2007) So. Another so-called family values Republican official has been busted for sexual abuse—only, this time, there's no homosexual element.
Perhaps this explains why the mainstream media has barely covered the story. Or maybe it's because the pedophile is a US attorney in a Republican state where the story stands a decent chance of being conveniently hushed up for the good of the party.
Shh!
Just as the repugs are now attempting to silence the Gonzales debacle—Please! Let the good man get back to his work protecting the chillllllll'ren, people!—stories such as this are too often silenced unless enough people make a big enough fuss to get them the attention they deserve.
Or who knows? Maybe a grown man showing up with a Dora doll and a jar of Vaseline to f*ck a five-year-old girl just doesn't scream "scandal" to Fox News the way a gay man's attraction to a DC page who at least has hair around his genitals does.
What's especially disgusting to me about this whole thing is that Atchison told the deputy who was posing as the girl's mother not to worry because he'd go nice and slow with her.
Meanwhile, The Portly Dyke has posted a picture of the youth cheer-leading squad that this pedophile assists, which makes me wonder about the ways in which he has been "assisting" them . I guess that will either be hushed up or made apparent soon enough. though.
* * *
Meanwhile, I discovered this week that a legal loophole—at least in the drought-parched state of North Carolina—allows automobile insurance agencies to add drivers who have no legal relationship to you to your automobile policy even if you don't want them on your policy and even if they never drive your car and even if they are already fully covered by another agency so long as they live in the same house as you.
(Umm, this applies to most queer relationships, folks.)
How do I know this? Because Nationwide sent a notice informing me that the company has oh-so-helpfully increased my automobile policy by $1,186 and back-dated this coverage to the day when Danishgrrl's daughter received her driver's license.
Oh and they thanked me for being a long-time policyholder.
I complained. Of course. And yelled. And ultimately canceled my automobile and homeowner policies with the company that is ostensibly On My Side. Then I sent a letter of complaint to the state insurance commissioner asking him to investigate Nationwide’s attempt to extort money from me.
Unbelievable.
* * *
And now—on a completely different note—my cute little brother has embarked on a cross-country bike ride to raise money for the families of the nine Charleston SC firefighters who died on duty this year.
Check out his blog to see gorgeous pictures of him/his journey.
He left Georgia on 9/6 to drive out to Palm Springs (where he will embark on his journey) and plans to roll into Charleston in early October.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
281. DING DONG
From the Archives (15 May 2007) Well what a SHAME and boo hoo hoo.
Jerry Falwell, legendary homophobe and enemy of Tinky Winky—the opportunist who actually blamed feminists, gays, lesbians and liberal groups for the 9/11 terrorist attacks—has finally kicked the proverbial bucket.
How can one adequately mourn a man who warns evangelicals that the mythological antichrist is a male Jew living among them?
Hmm. I wonder if Ralph Reed will be at the funeral in all his shame
(and how quickly Pat Robertson will go on air to blame Jerry's death on the lesbians).
At any rate, the sun has come out today and one less bigot dwells on this earth, brothers and sisters, so let me hear an amen!
Jerry Falwell, legendary homophobe and enemy of Tinky Winky—the opportunist who actually blamed feminists, gays, lesbians and liberal groups for the 9/11 terrorist attacks—has finally kicked the proverbial bucket.
How can one adequately mourn a man who warns evangelicals that the mythological antichrist is a male Jew living among them?
Hmm. I wonder if Ralph Reed will be at the funeral in all his shame
(and how quickly Pat Robertson will go on air to blame Jerry's death on the lesbians).
At any rate, the sun has come out today and one less bigot dwells on this earth, brothers and sisters, so let me hear an amen!
280. AWW, CAN'T GET RID OF THEM?
From the Archives (15 May 2007) The latest from the American (Narrowly Defined, Intent-on-Keeping-Up-Appearances) Family Association:
So. I thought maybe I'd offer the good um Christianists an exchange. They give me It's Not Gay to distribute to my friends and I give them It's Not Christian for them to distribute to their friends.
My DVD begins with footage of Jerry Falwell arriving at a rural courthouse with busloads of his faithful lemmings in tow. They're there to protest the "lib'ral judge" who dared try a minister for burning one of his toddlers alive and severely burning another one.
(A true tale.)
Let's listen as Jerry informs the camera that real Christians recognize that women and children are men's property to do with as they choose. (It's their "God-given authority" y'all.)
Watch Jerry explain that men are ordained by God to be the head of their housholds and are therefore free to do whatever God instructs them to do with their own property.
(Who are we to interfere with God's will, people?)
Here's the logic: The minister should thus be allowed to sentence his children back to the fires of Hell without legal intervention because this country based on equality should follow the laws of the bible.
Now let's segue to Fred Phelps, the bigoted, angry minister who tauted Matthew Shepard's parents at the boy's funeral.
Listen as Fred informs the grieving parents that "Matthew is in Hell where he belongs"—because it's Christian to torture the grieving and broken-hearted, particularly when their young son was discovered severely beaten and left to die on a cold Wyoming fence.
Next a white Christian explains how Genesis proves that "nigras" are not human beings like the rest of us but are, instead, "mud people"—I kid you not—which means, conveniently, that human rights laws don't apply to them.
Then there's the Southern woman explaining that Jesus wants her to "submit graciously" to her husband and to any man with a dick in her general vicinity who wants to tell her what to do with her one wild and precious life.
Landover Baptist sells "What Would Jesus Do?" thongs on their website. So I'm thinking that maybe my DVD can end with a sexy shot of this thong, then pan out to the story "Pope Appears in Credit Card Ad to Pay Off Class Action Molestation Suit Brought by 23% of New Jersey."
A voice from on high can then boom "Ask a molested child about straight male Christians, y'all."
Grrr.
Special Offer On "It's Not Gay" DVDUm, I guess I state the obvious when I point out that this homosexual story no one has heard before (told in queers' own words!) is limited to a very specific subset of queer folk who buy into the lie that homosexuality is wrong and actually try to convince themselves that a person can suppress his or her unsuppressible attraction to another person.
From now through Tuesday, May 8, we are offering our video It's Not Gay for only $10, and that includes shipping.
It's Not Gay has already been shown in an estimated 10,000 churches. It's Not Gay tells the other side of the homosexual movement, a side which the mainstream media and professional associations never mention.
It's Not Gay presents a story that few have heard, allowing former homosexuals* the opportunity to tell their own story in their own words. Along with medical and mental health experts, these individuals express a clear warning that the prevalent view of homosexuality being presented to America is not the whole story.
With a running time of 28 minutes, it is excellent for a Sunday School class, Bible study group or other situations.
To order your copy of It's Not Gay, click here.
P.S. Please forward this e-mail message to your family and friends!
So. I thought maybe I'd offer the good um Christianists an exchange. They give me It's Not Gay to distribute to my friends and I give them It's Not Christian for them to distribute to their friends.
My DVD begins with footage of Jerry Falwell arriving at a rural courthouse with busloads of his faithful lemmings in tow. They're there to protest the "lib'ral judge" who dared try a minister for burning one of his toddlers alive and severely burning another one.
(A true tale.)
Let's listen as Jerry informs the camera that real Christians recognize that women and children are men's property to do with as they choose. (It's their "God-given authority" y'all.)
Watch Jerry explain that men are ordained by God to be the head of their housholds and are therefore free to do whatever God instructs them to do with their own property.
(Who are we to interfere with God's will, people?)
Here's the logic: The minister should thus be allowed to sentence his children back to the fires of Hell without legal intervention because this country based on equality should follow the laws of the bible.
Now let's segue to Fred Phelps, the bigoted, angry minister who tauted Matthew Shepard's parents at the boy's funeral.
Listen as Fred informs the grieving parents that "Matthew is in Hell where he belongs"—because it's Christian to torture the grieving and broken-hearted, particularly when their young son was discovered severely beaten and left to die on a cold Wyoming fence.
Next a white Christian explains how Genesis proves that "nigras" are not human beings like the rest of us but are, instead, "mud people"—I kid you not—which means, conveniently, that human rights laws don't apply to them.
Then there's the Southern woman explaining that Jesus wants her to "submit graciously" to her husband and to any man with a dick in her general vicinity who wants to tell her what to do with her one wild and precious life.
Landover Baptist sells "What Would Jesus Do?" thongs on their website. So I'm thinking that maybe my DVD can end with a sexy shot of this thong, then pan out to the story "Pope Appears in Credit Card Ad to Pay Off Class Action Molestation Suit Brought by 23% of New Jersey."
A voice from on high can then boom "Ask a molested child about straight male Christians, y'all."
Grrr.
279. OPEN LETTER FROM MICHAEL MOORE TO THE US TREASURY SECRETARY
From the Archives (14 May 2007)
Secretary Henry Paulson
Department of the Treasury
Secretary Paulson,
I am contacting you in light of the document sent to me dated May 2, 2007, which was received May 7, 2007 indicating that an investigation has been opened up with regards to a trip I took to Cuba with a group of Americans that included some 9/11 heroes in March 2007 related to the filming of my next documentary, on the American Healthcare system. SiCKO, which will be seen in theaters this summer, will expose the health care industry's greed and control over America's political processes.
I believe that the decision to conduct this investigation represents the latest example of the Bush Administration abusing the federal government for raw, crass, political purposes. Over the last seven years of the Bush Presidency, we have seen the abuse of government to promote a political agenda designed to benefit the conservative base of the Republican Party, special interests and major financial contributors. From holding secret meetings for the energy industry to re-writing science findings to cooking the books on intelligence to the firing of U.S. Attorneys, this Administration has shown time and time again that it will abuse its power and authority.
There are a number of specific facts that have led me to conclude that politics could very well be driving this Bush Administration investigation of me and my film.
First, the Bush Administration has been aware of this matter for months (since October 2006) and never took any action until less than two weeks before SiCKO is set to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival and a little more than a month before it is scheduled to open in the United States.
Second, the health care and insurance industry, which is exposed in the movie and has expressed concerns about the impact of the movie on their industries, is a major corporate underwriter of President George W. Bush and the Republican Party, having contributed over $13 million to the Bush presidential campaign in 2004 and more than $180 million to Republican candidates over the last two campaign cycles.
It is well documented that the industry is very concerned about the impact of SiCKO. They have threatened their employees if they talk to me. They have set up special internal crises lines should I show up at their headquarters. Employees have been warned about the consequences of participating in SiCKO. Despite this, some employees, at great risk to themselves, have gone on camera to tell the American people the truth about the health care industry. I can understand why that industry's main recipient of its contributions—President Bush—would want to harass, intimidate and potentially prevent this film from having its widest possible audience.
And, third, this investigation is being opened in the wake of misleading attacks on the purpose of the Cuba trip from a possible leading Republican candidate for president, Fred Thompson, a major conservative newspaper, The New York Post, and various right wing blogs.
For five and a half years, the Bush administration has ignored and neglected the heroes of the 9/11 community. These heroic first responders have been left to fend for themselves, without coverage and without care. I understand why the Bush administration is coming after me—I have tried to help the very people they refuse to help, but until George W. Bush outlaws helping your fellow man, I have broken no laws and I have nothing to hide.
I demand that the Bush Administration immediately end this investigation and spend its time and resources trying to support some of the real heroes of 9/11.
Sincerely,
Michael Moore
Secretary Henry Paulson
Department of the Treasury
Secretary Paulson,
I am contacting you in light of the document sent to me dated May 2, 2007, which was received May 7, 2007 indicating that an investigation has been opened up with regards to a trip I took to Cuba with a group of Americans that included some 9/11 heroes in March 2007 related to the filming of my next documentary, on the American Healthcare system. SiCKO, which will be seen in theaters this summer, will expose the health care industry's greed and control over America's political processes.
I believe that the decision to conduct this investigation represents the latest example of the Bush Administration abusing the federal government for raw, crass, political purposes. Over the last seven years of the Bush Presidency, we have seen the abuse of government to promote a political agenda designed to benefit the conservative base of the Republican Party, special interests and major financial contributors. From holding secret meetings for the energy industry to re-writing science findings to cooking the books on intelligence to the firing of U.S. Attorneys, this Administration has shown time and time again that it will abuse its power and authority.
There are a number of specific facts that have led me to conclude that politics could very well be driving this Bush Administration investigation of me and my film.
First, the Bush Administration has been aware of this matter for months (since October 2006) and never took any action until less than two weeks before SiCKO is set to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival and a little more than a month before it is scheduled to open in the United States.
Second, the health care and insurance industry, which is exposed in the movie and has expressed concerns about the impact of the movie on their industries, is a major corporate underwriter of President George W. Bush and the Republican Party, having contributed over $13 million to the Bush presidential campaign in 2004 and more than $180 million to Republican candidates over the last two campaign cycles.
It is well documented that the industry is very concerned about the impact of SiCKO. They have threatened their employees if they talk to me. They have set up special internal crises lines should I show up at their headquarters. Employees have been warned about the consequences of participating in SiCKO. Despite this, some employees, at great risk to themselves, have gone on camera to tell the American people the truth about the health care industry. I can understand why that industry's main recipient of its contributions—President Bush—would want to harass, intimidate and potentially prevent this film from having its widest possible audience.
And, third, this investigation is being opened in the wake of misleading attacks on the purpose of the Cuba trip from a possible leading Republican candidate for president, Fred Thompson, a major conservative newspaper, The New York Post, and various right wing blogs.
For five and a half years, the Bush administration has ignored and neglected the heroes of the 9/11 community. These heroic first responders have been left to fend for themselves, without coverage and without care. I understand why the Bush administration is coming after me—I have tried to help the very people they refuse to help, but until George W. Bush outlaws helping your fellow man, I have broken no laws and I have nothing to hide.
I demand that the Bush Administration immediately end this investigation and spend its time and resources trying to support some of the real heroes of 9/11.
Sincerely,
Michael Moore
278. CODE PINK DRAG
From the Archives (11 May 2007)
What was she wearing that so displeased the gentle men of the House? Inquiring minds want to know.
My guess: a pink Code Pink T-shirt that stood out amongst the grey-suited set. And I do wonder if they would have kicked out an anti-choice guy wearing a picture of an embryo on his—because they are so often white men—white T-shirt.
Reading this news story reminded me of the time when OUT! (Oppression under Target), a direct-action group I protested with back in the day, disrupted an NEA hearing after Jesse Helms objected to taxpayers paying for homoerotic art.
Minnie Bruce Pratt was there and the guerrilla grrrls came down from NYC breathing fire and protesters lined the 14th St. sidewalks.
We were Hell-bent on getting arrested and, if memory serves—this was way back in 1990 when the world was young and we didn’t yet know that Reagan was probably telling the truth when he said he didn’t remember—the NEA's posted minimum dress code for the event was work/professional, and they only admitted members of the general public who conformed to the board’s aesthetic sensibilities.
OUT! crashed the party, even though we couldn’t wear our typical black OUT! T-shirts and ripped Levis and black Doc Martens with big silver buckles.
We also hid accordioned homoerotic art posters under our nice professional outfits, then disrupted the meeting when the committee tabled any discussion on whether or not they would continue to fund homoerotic art.
Long time passing ... and now our government has issued another dress code.
You'd think fallout from Brownie’s e-mail descriptions of his Fashion God status (that he sent while New Orleans residents drowned) would have taught us all the difference between appearances and someone actually having something useful to say about how the government runs.
Meanwhile, rumor has it that Cindy Sheehan may run for a house seat.
Sheehan is certainly an effective direct action protester—and boy did we need someone like her to stand up and state the obvious—but I wonder how effective she would be in DC.
Still, it would be refreshing to see someone on the Left who refuses to compromise and play nice.
I admire Rudy’s refusal to tow the repug party's anti-choice line (despite the fact that his “while I don’t approve myself” stance is weaselly at best) and am interesting to see how this stance affects voters.
Most Americans are pro-choice, after all, and many fiscal conservatives/social liberals are sick (just SICK, I tell ya) of having their party hijacked by the Flat Earthers. So maybe Rudy will show the conservatives that they are nuts to entertain the nuts and remind them to focus on money matters that affect ALL of our bottom lines and not just those of the big corporations.
I doubt it though.
And speaking of nuts, did anyone see US Rep. J.C. Watts (R-OK) on CNN, equating Rudy’s support for abortion rights with support for slavery rights?
(Add another chalk mark in the reason-impaired repug category.)
READING: CARMAX extended warranty details (never never never buy a car from this place) • Michael Roston’s “Conyers to Gonzales: No, Let’s Keep Talking about the US Attorneys” in Raw Story (5.11.2007) • David Edwards/Mike Sheehan’s “GOP Pundit Equates Giuliani Abortion Hypocracy to Slavery” (5.11.2007), online here • a boring article on fiscal responsibility
LISTENING TO: Nina Simone’s cover of ”Strange Fruit”
BEST-OF SPAM: Even snakes need love
After a procedural objection by Rep. Dan Lungren (R-CA) over a protester from the group Code Pink, [House Judiciary Committee Chair (D-MI)] John Conyers had the protester removed [from yesterday’s hearing with Gonzales], telling her, “With the right attire you’re perfectly able to attend this hearing.”
What was she wearing that so displeased the gentle men of the House? Inquiring minds want to know.
My guess: a pink Code Pink T-shirt that stood out amongst the grey-suited set. And I do wonder if they would have kicked out an anti-choice guy wearing a picture of an embryo on his—because they are so often white men—white T-shirt.
Reading this news story reminded me of the time when OUT! (Oppression under Target), a direct-action group I protested with back in the day, disrupted an NEA hearing after Jesse Helms objected to taxpayers paying for homoerotic art.
Minnie Bruce Pratt was there and the guerrilla grrrls came down from NYC breathing fire and protesters lined the 14th St. sidewalks.
We were Hell-bent on getting arrested and, if memory serves—this was way back in 1990 when the world was young and we didn’t yet know that Reagan was probably telling the truth when he said he didn’t remember—the NEA's posted minimum dress code for the event was work/professional, and they only admitted members of the general public who conformed to the board’s aesthetic sensibilities.
OUT! crashed the party, even though we couldn’t wear our typical black OUT! T-shirts and ripped Levis and black Doc Martens with big silver buckles.
We also hid accordioned homoerotic art posters under our nice professional outfits, then disrupted the meeting when the committee tabled any discussion on whether or not they would continue to fund homoerotic art.
Long time passing ... and now our government has issued another dress code.
You'd think fallout from Brownie’s e-mail descriptions of his Fashion God status (that he sent while New Orleans residents drowned) would have taught us all the difference between appearances and someone actually having something useful to say about how the government runs.
Meanwhile, rumor has it that Cindy Sheehan may run for a house seat.
Sheehan is certainly an effective direct action protester—and boy did we need someone like her to stand up and state the obvious—but I wonder how effective she would be in DC.
Still, it would be refreshing to see someone on the Left who refuses to compromise and play nice.
I admire Rudy’s refusal to tow the repug party's anti-choice line (despite the fact that his “while I don’t approve myself” stance is weaselly at best) and am interesting to see how this stance affects voters.
Most Americans are pro-choice, after all, and many fiscal conservatives/social liberals are sick (just SICK, I tell ya) of having their party hijacked by the Flat Earthers. So maybe Rudy will show the conservatives that they are nuts to entertain the nuts and remind them to focus on money matters that affect ALL of our bottom lines and not just those of the big corporations.
I doubt it though.
And speaking of nuts, did anyone see US Rep. J.C. Watts (R-OK) on CNN, equating Rudy’s support for abortion rights with support for slavery rights?
(Add another chalk mark in the reason-impaired repug category.)
READING: CARMAX extended warranty details (never never never buy a car from this place) • Michael Roston’s “Conyers to Gonzales: No, Let’s Keep Talking about the US Attorneys” in Raw Story (5.11.2007) • David Edwards/Mike Sheehan’s “GOP Pundit Equates Giuliani Abortion Hypocracy to Slavery” (5.11.2007), online here • a boring article on fiscal responsibility
LISTENING TO: Nina Simone’s cover of ”Strange Fruit”
BEST-OF SPAM: Even snakes need love
277. GOVERNMENT-STYLE PRE-RELEASE PUBLICITY, OR, I GOT THAT FAHRENHEIT 9/11 FEVER AND THE BOGEY-MAN CURE
From the Archives (10 May 2007)
Does anyone see a similarity between the lip service that the repugs (thanks for the term, mehitabelmmoss!) pay to heroic 9/11 workers (who, in reality, are routinely deprived of adequate medical treatment by repug policies) and the lip service that the repugs pay to patriotism when, in reality, the soldiers they pretend to support and honor are actually inadequately paid, insufficiently armored, and cannot obtain adequate medical treatment because of the corporate-fattening-at-
the-expense-of-the-rest-of-us repug policies?
Nice job making yourselves sound good though, guys.
Perception of truth, not truth—you know, Truthiness—is what matters in the end for this administration.
And you gotta hand it to them. They understand that they can fool many of the people much of the time with the right combination of speciously squishy soundbite-heavy jingoistic communication strategies (with the piquant taste of fear added for extra flavoring)—and boy do they use this knowledge to their advantage.
This is definitely a bottom-line administration—one whose policy has consistently been to cut funding and/or deregulate protections and hope for the best. After all, they can always hire publicity folks to sugarcoat the damage when the chickens/attorney generals who fire US attorneys of who poutyboy does not approve/illegal prisoners/torture victims/maimed soldiers/legislators/lobbyists/crumbling bridges/bursting levees come home to roost.
In other news, did anyone else note that Army officials actually accused Pat Tillman’s parents of being unChristian when they questioned the lies they were being told about their son’s death?
That’s right folks—our government’s response to their grief and desire for answers was to shift the blame to the grief-stricken parents of the Armed Services' poster boy whom our own soldiers killed (oopsie!)—and they did this by questioning whether or not the Tillmans are religious enough.
As if!
But I digress. We were talking about Michael Moore and how he, in a moment of true marketing genius, placed a copy of SiCKO (which premiers next week at Cannes) in a “safe house”—not to be confused with one of Bush&Co’s blood-spattered black houses—in another country “to protect it from government interference.”
Hey, Michael, why not seize the opportunity to market your flick?
I mean, if the government is going to harass someone who points out the administration’s blatant failings—What up, guys? Michael didn’t have a convenient wife whose secret identity Dick could reveal?—then why not pay a fine for your transgressions, then use the harassment to promote your film?
Sounds like a good marketing strategy to me.
Huh. I guess Cheney is still ticked off about Fahrenheit 9/11.
Meanwhile, back at the Oh Holy Shit um I mean Oh Holy Cross Ranch, the Christianists are calling for a boycott of Ford products because Ford supports PFLAG and an upcoming Out at Work session.
The repug protest of the Matthew Shepherd Act might be paying off too, since Bush is vowing to veto the act.
So now’s the time folks. Register your support so that the Christianists don’t leave the world with the impression that all Americans condone hate.
If enough people contact their legislators, then maybe Bush won’t get away with it.
LISTENING TO Holly Near’s “I Am Open”
READING “Michael Moore Faces U.S. Treasury Probe,” by David Germain, Yahoo! News, 5/10/2007. See here.
BEST OF SPAM: you have already won
This office has no record that a specific license was issued authorizing you to engage in travel-related transactions involving Cuba.That’s what Dale Thompson, chief of general investigations and field operations for the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, wrote to filmmaker Michael Moore after he took eleven ailing 9/11 workers to Cuba to obtain the medical treatment they have been unable to receive in the US. Moore documents this journey in Sicko, his new critique of the US’s high-profit, low-care health-“care” industry.
Does anyone see a similarity between the lip service that the repugs (thanks for the term, mehitabelmmoss!) pay to heroic 9/11 workers (who, in reality, are routinely deprived of adequate medical treatment by repug policies) and the lip service that the repugs pay to patriotism when, in reality, the soldiers they pretend to support and honor are actually inadequately paid, insufficiently armored, and cannot obtain adequate medical treatment because of the corporate-fattening-at-
the-expense-of-the-rest-of-us repug policies?
Nice job making yourselves sound good though, guys.
Perception of truth, not truth—you know, Truthiness—is what matters in the end for this administration.
And you gotta hand it to them. They understand that they can fool many of the people much of the time with the right combination of speciously squishy soundbite-heavy jingoistic communication strategies (with the piquant taste of fear added for extra flavoring)—and boy do they use this knowledge to their advantage.
This is definitely a bottom-line administration—one whose policy has consistently been to cut funding and/or deregulate protections and hope for the best. After all, they can always hire publicity folks to sugarcoat the damage when the chickens/attorney generals who fire US attorneys of who poutyboy does not approve/illegal prisoners/torture victims/maimed soldiers/legislators/lobbyists/crumbling bridges/bursting levees come home to roost.
In other news, did anyone else note that Army officials actually accused Pat Tillman’s parents of being unChristian when they questioned the lies they were being told about their son’s death?
That’s right folks—our government’s response to their grief and desire for answers was to shift the blame to the grief-stricken parents of the Armed Services' poster boy whom our own soldiers killed (oopsie!)—and they did this by questioning whether or not the Tillmans are religious enough.
As if!
But I digress. We were talking about Michael Moore and how he, in a moment of true marketing genius, placed a copy of SiCKO (which premiers next week at Cannes) in a “safe house”—not to be confused with one of Bush&Co’s blood-spattered black houses—in another country “to protect it from government interference.”
Hey, Michael, why not seize the opportunity to market your flick?
I mean, if the government is going to harass someone who points out the administration’s blatant failings—What up, guys? Michael didn’t have a convenient wife whose secret identity Dick could reveal?—then why not pay a fine for your transgressions, then use the harassment to promote your film?
Sounds like a good marketing strategy to me.
Huh. I guess Cheney is still ticked off about Fahrenheit 9/11.
Meanwhile, back at the Oh Holy Shit um I mean Oh Holy Cross Ranch, the Christianists are calling for a boycott of Ford products because Ford supports PFLAG and an upcoming Out at Work session.
The repug protest of the Matthew Shepherd Act might be paying off too, since Bush is vowing to veto the act.
So now’s the time folks. Register your support so that the Christianists don’t leave the world with the impression that all Americans condone hate.
If enough people contact their legislators, then maybe Bush won’t get away with it.
LISTENING TO Holly Near’s “I Am Open”
READING “Michael Moore Faces U.S. Treasury Probe,” by David Germain, Yahoo! News, 5/10/2007. See here.
BEST OF SPAM: you have already won
276. AMERICAN FAMILY (AND SPECIOUS REASONING) ASSOCIATION
From the Archive (8 May 2007) The American (Very Narrowly Defined) Family (and Specious Reasoning) Association forwarded to me a "list of representatives who voted to give homosexuals special rights," along with this message:
Senior citizens, children, and pregnant women are perhaps more vulnerable to physical assault, but this is generally based on perceived vulnerabilities, not hate.
People would perhaps be more prone to assault these folks because of a perceived belief that they would be unable to defend themselves, but such a case does not involve assaulting a person because of his or her political views or life choices.
Court witnesses are, of course, already protected.
And, lookie, here's yet another example of the repugs trying to classify the unborn as viable human beings.
(Acorn. Tree. They're the same, right?)
The Christianists clearly knew that these unparallel groups were inappropriate for this legislation too, otherwise they would NEVER have considered throwing in pregnant women.
I mean, come on, do they WANT to be charged with a hate crime every time they harass a woman who wishes to end her pregnancy?
If this legislation passes, then could they be charged with a hate-crime assault every time they attempt to bar a woman entrance to a Planned Parenthood clinic. Inquiring minds want to know.
Dear Demiurgicgrrrl,Umm. Where do I begin?
Below is a list of representatives who voted in favor of the Hate Crimes Act which gives homosexuals special rights not given to others. Homosexuals are considered a “protected class” under the bill.An attempt was made to add senior citizens, pregnant women, prior victims, children under 18, the unborn, court witnesses and members of our armed forces to the bill, giving them the same “protected class” given homosexuals. The Democrats defeated all amendments, reserving the “protected class” for homosexuals only.
If your representative is listed below, please call and let him or her know that you will remember the vote in the next election.
You can reach your representative by calling 202-224-3121. Ask to be connected to your previously? representative. If you don’t know your representative, give the operator your address and you will be connect directly to his or her office.
Senior citizens, children, and pregnant women are perhaps more vulnerable to physical assault, but this is generally based on perceived vulnerabilities, not hate.
People would perhaps be more prone to assault these folks because of a perceived belief that they would be unable to defend themselves, but such a case does not involve assaulting a person because of his or her political views or life choices.
Court witnesses are, of course, already protected.
And, lookie, here's yet another example of the repugs trying to classify the unborn as viable human beings.
(Acorn. Tree. They're the same, right?)
The Christianists clearly knew that these unparallel groups were inappropriate for this legislation too, otherwise they would NEVER have considered throwing in pregnant women.
I mean, come on, do they WANT to be charged with a hate crime every time they harass a woman who wishes to end her pregnancy?
If this legislation passes, then could they be charged with a hate-crime assault every time they attempt to bar a woman entrance to a Planned Parenthood clinic. Inquiring minds want to know.
275. NOW THAT'S A REAL HATE CRIME!
From the Archives (5 May 2007) I subscribe to the American Family Association's (AFA) action alert service so that I can alert my progressive friends to the need to counter fundie protests. Hence I know that the Christianists really have their panties in a wad this week.
The fundies are worried SICK about the possibility of the Hate Crimes Act actually passing, so yesterday they urged folks to ask PrezBush to veto the act should it reach his desk.
The AFA also warned religious brethren that they will no longer be able to spew their hatred in church or on the Web or in a public setting without being arrested unless if they fail to successfully defeat this act.
Reasonable people would say that folks who target victims because of their sexual orientation should be charged with a hate crime, since these people are committing an act of hatred—remind me to tell you all about the joys of having queer spray-painted onto your car when you’re sixteen years old and living in a small southern town if you doubt that—but the AFA insists that "liberal leaders" just want to extend special rights to us queer folks.
(No. No. You're confused. Special rights are those things that you and your ilk extend only to heterosexuals who fall in love.)
So. Today the AFA has taken a particularly dishonorable stand and resorted to equating pedophilia with queer love.
(Yes, yes, I suppose you could get the two confused, since the government insists on placing the names of queers who engage in consensual sex on the same sex0offender lists as the men who kidnap and molest your toddlers.)
Yep. Today's Action Alert warns that, since the definition of sexual orientation is not spelled out in the act, Christians will be forced to stop discriminating against ANY form of sexual orientation.
Then (because they're nothing if not thorough), the AFA includes the following list of sexual orientations (er sex crimes)—a list that the logic-challenged will no doubt assume lists acts that will be protected under the Hate Crimes Act.
(Note how many times queer people crop up, when most sex crimes are committed by heterosexual men.)
Interesting that lewdness is defined as a sexual orientation too.
The um good folks at Don Wildmon's wet-n-wild ranch would have you believe that this is really a 'Thought Control Bill," but no one is saying that people can be charged with a hate crime for what they think.
So listen up, Bubba: we're talking actions here.
It's your ACTIONS, how you express your bigotry, that are being put on notice. Spewing hatred has real consequences and your campaign against queers causes real crimes.
And you don't get to violate other people's rights just because you don't approve of their choices.
Capiche?
Okay. Life will be saner after this weekend, when my chorus's concert and my (gulp) duet are behind me.
(The first performance went fine, despite my stage fright, and a woman in the audience even told me that my cello-rich voice brought tears to her eyes.)
Sweet, huh?
The fundies are worried SICK about the possibility of the Hate Crimes Act actually passing, so yesterday they urged folks to ask PrezBush to veto the act should it reach his desk.
The AFA also warned religious brethren that they will no longer be able to spew their hatred in church or on the Web or in a public setting without being arrested unless if they fail to successfully defeat this act.
Reasonable people would say that folks who target victims because of their sexual orientation should be charged with a hate crime, since these people are committing an act of hatred—remind me to tell you all about the joys of having queer spray-painted onto your car when you’re sixteen years old and living in a small southern town if you doubt that—but the AFA insists that "liberal leaders" just want to extend special rights to us queer folks.
(No. No. You're confused. Special rights are those things that you and your ilk extend only to heterosexuals who fall in love.)
So. Today the AFA has taken a particularly dishonorable stand and resorted to equating pedophilia with queer love.
(Yes, yes, I suppose you could get the two confused, since the government insists on placing the names of queers who engage in consensual sex on the same sex0offender lists as the men who kidnap and molest your toddlers.)
Yep. Today's Action Alert warns that, since the definition of sexual orientation is not spelled out in the act, Christians will be forced to stop discriminating against ANY form of sexual orientation.
Then (because they're nothing if not thorough), the AFA includes the following list of sexual orientations (er sex crimes)—a list that the logic-challenged will no doubt assume lists acts that will be protected under the Hate Crimes Act.
(Note how many times queer people crop up, when most sex crimes are committed by heterosexual men.)
Interesting that lewdness is defined as a sexual orientation too.
SEXUAL ORIENTATIONS
Coprophilia—sexual arousal associated with feces
Exhibitionism—the act of exposing one's genitals to an unwilling observer to obtain sexual gratification
Fetishism/Sexual Fetishism—obtaining sexual excitement primarily or exclusively from an inanimate object or a particular part of the body
Frotteurism—approaching an unknown woman from the rear and pressing or rubbing the penis against her buttocks
Gay/Homosexual—people who form sexual relationships primarily or exclusively with members of their own gender
Gerontosexuality—distinct preference for sexual relationships primarily or exclusively with an elderly partner
Incest—sex with a sibling or parent
Kleptophilia—obtaining sexual excitement from stealing
Klismaphilia—erotic pleasure derived from enemas
Lesbian—a homosexual female
Lewdness—sexually unchaste; inciting to lust or debauchery
Masturbation—erotic stimulation of one's own genitals
Necrophilia—sexual arousal and/or activity with a corpse
Paraphilia—a condition in which a person's sexual arousal and gratification depend on fantasizing about and engaging in sexual behavior that is atypical and extreme
Partialism—A fetish in which a person is sexually attracted to a specific body part exclusive of the person
Pederasty—Sex between an adult and a child, usually an adult male and a male child
Pedophilia—Sexual contact between an adult and a child—Bisexual Pedophilia—term used for an adult who derives sexual gratification from sexual contact with a child without regard to the sex of the child
Heterosexual Pedophilia—term used for an adult who derives sexual gratification from sexual contact with a child of the opposite sex
Gay Pedophilia—term used for a male adult who derives sexual gratification from sexual contact with a child of the same sex
Lesbian Pedophilia—term used for a female adult who derives sexual gratification from sexual contact with a child of the same sex
Prostitution—the act or practice of offering sexual stimulation or intercourse for money
Sexual Masochism—obtaining sexual gratification by being subjected to pain or humiliation
Sexual Sadism—the intentional infliction of pain or humiliation on another person in order to achieve sexual excitement
Telephone Scatalogia—sexual arousal associated with making or receiving obscene phone calls
Toucherism—characterized by a strong desire to touch the breast or genitals of an unknown woman without her consent; often occurs in conjunction with other paraphilia
Transsexual—a person whose gender identity is different from his or her anatomical gender
Transvestite—a person who is sexually stimulated or gratified by wearing the clothes of the other gender
Urophilia—sexual arousal associated with urine
Voyeurism—obtaining sexual arousal by observing people without their consent when they are undressed or engaged in sexual activity
Zoophilia/Bestiality—engaging in sexual activity with animals
The um good folks at Don Wildmon's wet-n-wild ranch would have you believe that this is really a 'Thought Control Bill," but no one is saying that people can be charged with a hate crime for what they think.
So listen up, Bubba: we're talking actions here.
It's your ACTIONS, how you express your bigotry, that are being put on notice. Spewing hatred has real consequences and your campaign against queers causes real crimes.
And you don't get to violate other people's rights just because you don't approve of their choices.
Capiche?
Okay. Life will be saner after this weekend, when my chorus's concert and my (gulp) duet are behind me.
(The first performance went fine, despite my stage fright, and a woman in the audience even told me that my cello-rich voice brought tears to her eyes.)
Sweet, huh?
274. INTIMATING POETRY
From the Archives (18 April 2007)
But you’re right. Innocent people are dying violently and our public policies do drive (or at least contribute to) this continued violence.
Lawdgawd these are sobering times. And the sad reality is that survivors will now flash back to bloody VTU or Columbine or Amish classrooms when the slightest trigger reminds them of them of the slaughter they survived.
Maybe it's a solidarity thing, but the fact that the shooter was an English major—someone who wrote plays and poems, used a creative venue to try to give voice to the chaos and psychosis and violence that terrorized him—bothers me too.
"It was not bad poetry. It was intimidating," poet Nikki Giovanni said of his violent writing (after she kicked him out of her poetry class because he intimidated other writers).
Yeah. Psychotic people are intimidating. And potentially dangerous.
And NEED TREATMENT.
When the killer wrote, was he using language to sort through the chaos, to explore his anger à la Larry Brown? Or was he using language as a vehicle for creating a virtual world where violence reigns and paranoid megalomaniacal fantasies can run unfettered?
The jaded self-loathing part of me says, Well, at least the guy was trying to get in touch with his anger—which is more than I can say for this scattered writer, who paid boocoodles of money to complete graduate writing studies at a private institution and even dared to call herself a writer once upon a time, but who has since sunk into the tepid managerial workaholic waters that, way too often, numb my feelings in the name of higher efficiency (and the occasional night of sleep).
And what's my excuse for not updating this blog in so long?
Well, the truth is simple.
The trade-off is good though and I am drawing up plans for a poetry shack that will help me find some precious time alone eventually.
Take a step back for a moment and think about how frightening those shootings at VA Tech were yesterday, and then consider—painful though it may be to do so—that Iraqis face that kind of massacre every day, and they have done so for several years. ...Um. One example is a contained and theoretically safe place of learning with a safety department assigned to protect folks, and one example is an entire country that's at war being bomboarded by soldiers who signed up for the armed services.
32 people died in Virginia on Monday and 65 perished in separate attacks in Iraq the day before. The latter hardly made the news.—Joshua Holland
But you’re right. Innocent people are dying violently and our public policies do drive (or at least contribute to) this continued violence.
Lawdgawd these are sobering times. And the sad reality is that survivors will now flash back to bloody VTU or Columbine or Amish classrooms when the slightest trigger reminds them of them of the slaughter they survived.
Maybe it's a solidarity thing, but the fact that the shooter was an English major—someone who wrote plays and poems, used a creative venue to try to give voice to the chaos and psychosis and violence that terrorized him—bothers me too.
"It was not bad poetry. It was intimidating," poet Nikki Giovanni said of his violent writing (after she kicked him out of her poetry class because he intimidated other writers).
Yeah. Psychotic people are intimidating. And potentially dangerous.
And NEED TREATMENT.
When the killer wrote, was he using language to sort through the chaos, to explore his anger à la Larry Brown? Or was he using language as a vehicle for creating a virtual world where violence reigns and paranoid megalomaniacal fantasies can run unfettered?
The jaded self-loathing part of me says, Well, at least the guy was trying to get in touch with his anger—which is more than I can say for this scattered writer, who paid boocoodles of money to complete graduate writing studies at a private institution and even dared to call herself a writer once upon a time, but who has since sunk into the tepid managerial workaholic waters that, way too often, numb my feelings in the name of higher efficiency (and the occasional night of sleep).
And what's my excuse for not updating this blog in so long?
Well, the truth is simple.
1. I am so freaking busy with my new boss that I don't have the luxury of insight right now;My reality is that acclimating to life with Danishgrrrl (and her three kids, one dog, one cat, one bird, and frequent need to process) feels, in general, like an exercise in giving up all hope of time for reflection.
2. Danishgrrrl sometimes reads my back entries and becomes upset by my descriptions of previous lovers, and then compares these experiences to our hectic life together while doubting my commitment to her;
3. I am too scattered to even think much these days and there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight short of quitting my job.
The trade-off is good though and I am drawing up plans for a poetry shack that will help me find some precious time alone eventually.
273. SATIRICAL BONBONS AND THE GHOST OF JONATHAN SWIFT
From the Archives (16 January 2007) “If you’re dealing with the ugly social issues of our time, why not serve them up as a delicious bonbon?” asks Julien Nitzberg, clever librettist for The Beastly Bombing (or a Terrible Tale of Terrorists Tamed by Tangles of True Love).
I haven’t written a Gilbert-and-Sullivanlike satirical operetta involving skinheads and al Qaeda operatives who sing “I Hate Jews” while plotting to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge recently, but do find myself in the awkward position of trying to define if and when satire can cross that proverbial line, particularly when it comes to children.
See, I watched South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut with Bugboy recently—or rather he watched it as I designed then printed then trimmed then numbered my chorus’s concert tickets and dance tickets and raffle tickets while looking up every now and again to watch the antics.
Bugboy and I laughed when the devil, who was unhappy about his relationship, picked up Satan is from Mars, Saddam is from Venus. We laughed when Eric sang “Kyle’s mom’s a bitch, she’s a big fat bitch” (and yes, I do understand fat issues and am aware of just how many girls and women starve themselves on a regular basis in an attempt to conform to our stupid misguided cultural norms).
We laughed when Terrance sang the infamous La La La La . And we laughed when Mr. er Ms. Garrison showed up for class with her balding head and womanly earrings and funkdalagalactic dress, even though this image pokes fun at queers and, unbeknownst to Bugboy, his father.
Then Bugboy uttered the near-constant “Shut up you Jew” line—and, well, herein lies the problem with satire.
Some people—and not just half-grown chill'ren like Bugboy—believe that the quest for laughter gives them permission to use a racist or sexist or heterosexist line that was uttered for satirical emphasis in a different context.
Not funny.
I like to think that most of us recognize the difference between satire and insult, but it’s clear that we need to discuss these nuances with Bugboy.
Free expression keeps thinking people sharp and questioning. Uncensored reflection doused with a healthy disrespect of convention is vital to good art and good democracy and good cogitation too. Satire reveals connections that lectures and so-called PC behavior obfuscate. And we all know that censorship is employed to force acquiescence, obedience.
I appreciate how well South Park’s writers reflect the more ridiculous aspects of our culture. They leave no stone unturned, which is as it should be. That’s why their cultural jabs are so right on.
The writers get their point across succinctly when they do such things as name the lone black student Token. Their depiction of Starvin’ Marvin, the Ethiopian who would rather live on another planet, and the lisping Big Gay Al and his island for misfit queer animals highlight what our policies and assumptions can do to real people.
One of my favorite South Park episodes involves the children turning against the rainforest because they get so many bug bites there.
Then there’s that dangerous smug cloud that stretches from LA to South Park CO after George Clooney gives his awards speech. The cloud grows stronger and more dangerous each time a Prius owner opens his or her mouth too.
(And yeah, we all know that global warming and deforestation are big deals, but these episodes are just too goddamn funny for words.)
Years ago, I helped project the Mapplethorpe exhibit onto an exterior wall of the Corcoran after the museum cancelled the show because I was so pissed that the board bowed to Helms’ censorship pressure. I don’t want to show Mapplethorpe’s arm-fucking photo to my partner’s eleven-year-old though.
I haven’t written a Gilbert-and-Sullivanlike satirical operetta involving skinheads and al Qaeda operatives who sing “I Hate Jews” while plotting to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge recently, but do find myself in the awkward position of trying to define if and when satire can cross that proverbial line, particularly when it comes to children.
See, I watched South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut with Bugboy recently—or rather he watched it as I designed then printed then trimmed then numbered my chorus’s concert tickets and dance tickets and raffle tickets while looking up every now and again to watch the antics.
Bugboy and I laughed when the devil, who was unhappy about his relationship, picked up Satan is from Mars, Saddam is from Venus. We laughed when Eric sang “Kyle’s mom’s a bitch, she’s a big fat bitch” (and yes, I do understand fat issues and am aware of just how many girls and women starve themselves on a regular basis in an attempt to conform to our stupid misguided cultural norms).
We laughed when Terrance sang the infamous La La La La . And we laughed when Mr. er Ms. Garrison showed up for class with her balding head and womanly earrings and funkdalagalactic dress, even though this image pokes fun at queers and, unbeknownst to Bugboy, his father.
Then Bugboy uttered the near-constant “Shut up you Jew” line—and, well, herein lies the problem with satire.
Some people—and not just half-grown chill'ren like Bugboy—believe that the quest for laughter gives them permission to use a racist or sexist or heterosexist line that was uttered for satirical emphasis in a different context.
Not funny.
I like to think that most of us recognize the difference between satire and insult, but it’s clear that we need to discuss these nuances with Bugboy.
Free expression keeps thinking people sharp and questioning. Uncensored reflection doused with a healthy disrespect of convention is vital to good art and good democracy and good cogitation too. Satire reveals connections that lectures and so-called PC behavior obfuscate. And we all know that censorship is employed to force acquiescence, obedience.
I appreciate how well South Park’s writers reflect the more ridiculous aspects of our culture. They leave no stone unturned, which is as it should be. That’s why their cultural jabs are so right on.
The writers get their point across succinctly when they do such things as name the lone black student Token. Their depiction of Starvin’ Marvin, the Ethiopian who would rather live on another planet, and the lisping Big Gay Al and his island for misfit queer animals highlight what our policies and assumptions can do to real people.
One of my favorite South Park episodes involves the children turning against the rainforest because they get so many bug bites there.
Then there’s that dangerous smug cloud that stretches from LA to South Park CO after George Clooney gives his awards speech. The cloud grows stronger and more dangerous each time a Prius owner opens his or her mouth too.
(And yeah, we all know that global warming and deforestation are big deals, but these episodes are just too goddamn funny for words.)
Years ago, I helped project the Mapplethorpe exhibit onto an exterior wall of the Corcoran after the museum cancelled the show because I was so pissed that the board bowed to Helms’ censorship pressure. I don’t want to show Mapplethorpe’s arm-fucking photo to my partner’s eleven-year-old though.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
272. Scheherazade
by Susan Elbe
from Eden in the Rearview Mirror (Word Press)
Another night washes up at my feet
and all down the block lightning
bugs drizzle their glow juice.
In tight twos, couples
stroll the vein-blue summer light.
In cafes, undiluted secrets
shared between old friends
over sweets and bitter tea.
In the alleys, damaged men
ration cigarettes and loneliness,
the whole street, an ark
of stories asking Why?
and Why not? me, as mutable
as Chinese whispers or
shorelines remade by water.
And mine too, a story with no wedding,
no milky-mouthed children,
a few hours of abandon in warm beds,
then abandonment.
Loss and lesson, all it seems I have.
A sweet-onion moon, its light
thin as tears, silvers the trees.
How did I get this far
thinking goodness would save me?
Once upon a time is what saves us.
When morning rises up like cream,
its light mimics evening,
as muted, blue. I'm still here,
but one crow on a rooftop
squanders his one and only tale.
****
If someone knows how to insert space before a line using HTML, would you please tell me so that I can set poems correctly?
Thanks!
from Eden in the Rearview Mirror (Word Press)
Another night washes up at my feet
and all down the block lightning
bugs drizzle their glow juice.
In tight twos, couples
stroll the vein-blue summer light.
In cafes, undiluted secrets
shared between old friends
over sweets and bitter tea.
In the alleys, damaged men
ration cigarettes and loneliness,
the whole street, an ark
of stories asking Why?
and Why not? me, as mutable
as Chinese whispers or
shorelines remade by water.
And mine too, a story with no wedding,
no milky-mouthed children,
a few hours of abandon in warm beds,
then abandonment.
Loss and lesson, all it seems I have.
A sweet-onion moon, its light
thin as tears, silvers the trees.
How did I get this far
thinking goodness would save me?
Once upon a time is what saves us.
When morning rises up like cream,
its light mimics evening,
as muted, blue. I'm still here,
but one crow on a rooftop
squanders his one and only tale.
****
If someone knows how to insert space before a line using HTML, would you please tell me so that I can set poems correctly?
Thanks!
Friday, April 18, 2008
271. 2006: AN OVERVIEW
From the Archives (5 January 2007) Raging gas prices and Borat guffaws and the Pentagon prayer memo. An Inconvenient Truth and Abu Ghraib and North Korean nuclear testing. Mutilated American soldiers burning in the streets of Yusufiya and Spike Lee reminding us of When The Levees Broke.
The White House declining to provide Hurricane Katrina papers to investigators trying to determine what went wrong and that poseur James Frey portraying himself as a badass. Gitmo suicides and the judicial system informing the president that he can't just hold prisoners in cruel and degrading conditions indefinitely without ever charging them with a crime.
Radio talk show bobbleheaded bimbos declaring those judges radical liberal activists. A potentially activist US Supreme Court. Military tribunals and illegal black houses and Boeing transporting prisoners overseas for torture. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, killed in an American air strike.
Haditha, where American soldiers executed 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians. Coercive interrogation techniques and the cowboy who used his silver spoon to avoid Vietnam now trying to legalize torture. Molly Ivins highlighting Texas's ridiculous sex toy laws. Cindy Sheehan and the self-same cowboy who declared the Constitution just a goddamn piece of paper.
Americans bidding farewell to habeas corpus then turning back to Survivor. Danish cartoonists poking fun at (now rioting) jihadists (proving, again, that religious freaks can dish it out but they sure can't take it).
Coretta Scott King breaking her earthly bounds along with Lloyd Bentsen. (Bentsen's best line, spoken to Dan Quayle in the VP debate: I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you are no Jack Kennedy.) Katie Couric trying to morph herself into seriousgrrl. Magazines splashing Branjolina across every major supermarket aisle while ignoring the atrocities in Darfur. An Indonesian earthquake and Pedro Almodóvar's Volver and Penelope Cruz still looking mmm, mmm good.
Ann Richards' farewell—her best line: Poor [king] George [the former]. He can't help it if he was born with a silver foot in his mouth—and Medea wondering who inherited Ann's kewl Harley.
Tom "the hammer" DeLay getting busted at last, then trying to reinvent himself online. Jason Cooper, the American reservist, hanging himself after returning from Iraq. Seventy-some other PTSD-suffering American soldiers also committing suicide once they're back on "safe" soil.
A Day without Immigrants and poor Ilan Halimi, kidnapped and tortured and murdered for being a Jew.
Pat Buchanan and Mel Gibson and Michael Richards spouting their white-man bigotry—again—as stupid conservative dingleberry legislators floated ideas for building a wall around the whole dang country in an effort to keep them suspicious fuuuuurners out—apparently forgetting that the servants who keep their gated communities repaired and clean and spic (um) and span are mostly underpaid foreigner workers.
American soldiers setting another Iraqi woman on fire after raping her in Mahmudiya. Seattle extremes: rave murders and flooding and mudslides in my favorite part of the country and let's don't forget the Seattle non-profiteer who was murdered for being a Jew.
Lawrence Summers finally leaving Harvard and those unprepared Mount Hood hikers.
Abeer Qassim Hamza, the young Iraqi girl whose name means "fragrance of flowers," raped then murdered by even more American soldiers (who had already killed her family).
Tee Corinne, pioneering lesbian artist, erotic photographer, and author of the vagina coloring book, dying without insurance. Addvwaitya, the two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old giant aldabra tortoise whose name means "the one and only," dying in a dusty India zoo.
OJ confessing what everyone already knew and Rupert being pressured into pulling his noxious book. Floyd Landis pissing away a Tour de France victory and Lou Rawls dying too.
Lim Jeong-hyun posting his amazing version of Pachelbel's Canon online and those sorry poseurs who rushed to claim his glory.
Ken "Enron" Lay and his criminal folksiness dying. (If only they could throw Pat Robertson and his eye-twitching hokeyness in there with him.) Tabloids showing Americans more than we ever wanted to know about TomKat's cover-up-my-queerness-marriage.
Meanwhile, Darfur.
A culture of violence seeping its way into an unwired Amish schoolhouse. James Brown getting on the bad foot and dying in Georgia. Robert Altman dead. Eleven-year-old Haleigh Poutre suffering massive brain injuries after the state of Massachusetts repeatedly failed to protect her.
Reagan welcoming Caspar "Iran-Contra Affair" Weinberger into the metaphorical fires of Hell as the American poor let out a collective satisfied sigh, knowing full well that the man who all but demolished Johnson's Great Society programs in the name of higher profits was finally dead dead ding dong dead, the greedy warlock. Dead.
Reagan greeting Slobodan "The Butcher of the Balkans" Milosevic there too and Shelley Winters dying (causing old-timers to hum to themselves there's got to be a morning after, It's waiting just outside the door. The White House listening in to private conversations and claiming the right to detain American citizens without a trial or formal charges. Creeping presidential powers. Mark Foley and Ted Haggard and other prominent Colorado Christianists revealing their reckless homophobic hypocrisy.
Fat-ass misogynist Rush Limbaugh attempting to hide his Viagra. The Duke lacrosse team behaving badly. Again. (My hunch? The exotic dancer got righteously pissed when those Richie Rich pricks complained about having to watch a black—gasp!—exotic dancer dance).
I think the prick who told the dancer to thank her grandiddy for his nice white cotton shirt crossed the proverbial line, so she decided that the assholes deserved what she could give them.
Americans flocking to watch Ang Lee's hunky cowboys get it on, then voting to define marriage as a relationship between one man and one woman (plus a whole lotta divorce lawyers and child psychiatrists) only.
New Jersey courts (eventually) making that nonsense null and void.
Saddam breaking his neck (oopsie!) and Jeffrey Skilling getting his and Wilson "Mustang Sally" Pickett—poof!—gone in the midnight hour.
Another Kennedy making the news by crashing his car in the middle of a drug-induced whoopie night. US soldier deaths exceding the 3,000 mark and casualties exceeding 50,000. (Prosthetic sales are up, they say, while the number of dead Iraqi civilians exceeds anyone's estimation.)
American soldiers forced to buy their own protection while Haliburton profits soar. Exxon boasting record profits while citizens go broke filling their tank and oilmen in the Oval office pat each other on their hairy hoary backs for helping big bidness. McCain deporting another 35,000 troops while Bush&Co reconsider the draft in an effort to stay their ridiculous course.
Young Republicans praising their monkeyboy president from the privileged safety of the blogosphere—convinced, no doubt, that any president who would cut benefits for soldiers in harm's would never ever draft his own kind.
Generals discovering a clever new way to kill two birds with one stone by rejecting their previously favored Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy.
Joe "Comback Kid" Lieberman proving again that vanilla GOP wannabes can get themselves re-elected in TV Land.
Donald Rumsfeld finally getting the boot after Democrats seized control of the House and Senate and even the White House was forced to acknowledge their debacle.
Now, jeezuslawd, would those legislators fucking do something!?!
The White House declining to provide Hurricane Katrina papers to investigators trying to determine what went wrong and that poseur James Frey portraying himself as a badass. Gitmo suicides and the judicial system informing the president that he can't just hold prisoners in cruel and degrading conditions indefinitely without ever charging them with a crime.
Radio talk show bobbleheaded bimbos declaring those judges radical liberal activists. A potentially activist US Supreme Court. Military tribunals and illegal black houses and Boeing transporting prisoners overseas for torture. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, killed in an American air strike.
Haditha, where American soldiers executed 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians. Coercive interrogation techniques and the cowboy who used his silver spoon to avoid Vietnam now trying to legalize torture. Molly Ivins highlighting Texas's ridiculous sex toy laws. Cindy Sheehan and the self-same cowboy who declared the Constitution just a goddamn piece of paper.
Americans bidding farewell to habeas corpus then turning back to Survivor. Danish cartoonists poking fun at (now rioting) jihadists (proving, again, that religious freaks can dish it out but they sure can't take it).
Coretta Scott King breaking her earthly bounds along with Lloyd Bentsen. (Bentsen's best line, spoken to Dan Quayle in the VP debate: I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you are no Jack Kennedy.) Katie Couric trying to morph herself into seriousgrrl. Magazines splashing Branjolina across every major supermarket aisle while ignoring the atrocities in Darfur. An Indonesian earthquake and Pedro Almodóvar's Volver and Penelope Cruz still looking mmm, mmm good.
Ann Richards' farewell—her best line: Poor [king] George [the former]. He can't help it if he was born with a silver foot in his mouth—and Medea wondering who inherited Ann's kewl Harley.
Tom "the hammer" DeLay getting busted at last, then trying to reinvent himself online. Jason Cooper, the American reservist, hanging himself after returning from Iraq. Seventy-some other PTSD-suffering American soldiers also committing suicide once they're back on "safe" soil.
A Day without Immigrants and poor Ilan Halimi, kidnapped and tortured and murdered for being a Jew.
Pat Buchanan and Mel Gibson and Michael Richards spouting their white-man bigotry—again—as stupid conservative dingleberry legislators floated ideas for building a wall around the whole dang country in an effort to keep them suspicious fuuuuurners out—apparently forgetting that the servants who keep their gated communities repaired and clean and spic (um) and span are mostly underpaid foreigner workers.
American soldiers setting another Iraqi woman on fire after raping her in Mahmudiya. Seattle extremes: rave murders and flooding and mudslides in my favorite part of the country and let's don't forget the Seattle non-profiteer who was murdered for being a Jew.
Lawrence Summers finally leaving Harvard and those unprepared Mount Hood hikers.
Abeer Qassim Hamza, the young Iraqi girl whose name means "fragrance of flowers," raped then murdered by even more American soldiers (who had already killed her family).
Tee Corinne, pioneering lesbian artist, erotic photographer, and author of the vagina coloring book, dying without insurance. Addvwaitya, the two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old giant aldabra tortoise whose name means "the one and only," dying in a dusty India zoo.
OJ confessing what everyone already knew and Rupert being pressured into pulling his noxious book. Floyd Landis pissing away a Tour de France victory and Lou Rawls dying too.
Lim Jeong-hyun posting his amazing version of Pachelbel's Canon online and those sorry poseurs who rushed to claim his glory.
Ken "Enron" Lay and his criminal folksiness dying. (If only they could throw Pat Robertson and his eye-twitching hokeyness in there with him.) Tabloids showing Americans more than we ever wanted to know about TomKat's cover-up-my-queerness-marriage.
Meanwhile, Darfur.
A culture of violence seeping its way into an unwired Amish schoolhouse. James Brown getting on the bad foot and dying in Georgia. Robert Altman dead. Eleven-year-old Haleigh Poutre suffering massive brain injuries after the state of Massachusetts repeatedly failed to protect her.
Reagan welcoming Caspar "Iran-Contra Affair" Weinberger into the metaphorical fires of Hell as the American poor let out a collective satisfied sigh, knowing full well that the man who all but demolished Johnson's Great Society programs in the name of higher profits was finally dead dead ding dong dead, the greedy warlock. Dead.
Reagan greeting Slobodan "The Butcher of the Balkans" Milosevic there too and Shelley Winters dying (causing old-timers to hum to themselves there's got to be a morning after, It's waiting just outside the door. The White House listening in to private conversations and claiming the right to detain American citizens without a trial or formal charges. Creeping presidential powers. Mark Foley and Ted Haggard and other prominent Colorado Christianists revealing their reckless homophobic hypocrisy.
Fat-ass misogynist Rush Limbaugh attempting to hide his Viagra. The Duke lacrosse team behaving badly. Again. (My hunch? The exotic dancer got righteously pissed when those Richie Rich pricks complained about having to watch a black—gasp!—exotic dancer dance).
I think the prick who told the dancer to thank her grandiddy for his nice white cotton shirt crossed the proverbial line, so she decided that the assholes deserved what she could give them.
Americans flocking to watch Ang Lee's hunky cowboys get it on, then voting to define marriage as a relationship between one man and one woman (plus a whole lotta divorce lawyers and child psychiatrists) only.
New Jersey courts (eventually) making that nonsense null and void.
Saddam breaking his neck (oopsie!) and Jeffrey Skilling getting his and Wilson "Mustang Sally" Pickett—poof!—gone in the midnight hour.
Another Kennedy making the news by crashing his car in the middle of a drug-induced whoopie night. US soldier deaths exceding the 3,000 mark and casualties exceeding 50,000. (Prosthetic sales are up, they say, while the number of dead Iraqi civilians exceeds anyone's estimation.)
American soldiers forced to buy their own protection while Haliburton profits soar. Exxon boasting record profits while citizens go broke filling their tank and oilmen in the Oval office pat each other on their hairy hoary backs for helping big bidness. McCain deporting another 35,000 troops while Bush&Co reconsider the draft in an effort to stay their ridiculous course.
Young Republicans praising their monkeyboy president from the privileged safety of the blogosphere—convinced, no doubt, that any president who would cut benefits for soldiers in harm's would never ever draft his own kind.
Generals discovering a clever new way to kill two birds with one stone by rejecting their previously favored Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy.
Joe "Comback Kid" Lieberman proving again that vanilla GOP wannabes can get themselves re-elected in TV Land.
Donald Rumsfeld finally getting the boot after Democrats seized control of the House and Senate and even the White House was forced to acknowledge their debacle.
Now, jeezuslawd, would those legislators fucking do something!?!
270. THE JEEZUS DIARIES
From the Archives (2 January 2007) For some reason, my little sister "forgets" that I am a dyke and, whenever I return to my mom's house—let's say for Christmas, with my new lover—brings some dufus guy over on the sly for what she believes will be a blind date.
This past Christmas, she mentioned that she had invited Bart, an eccentric guy who drives an old teal-and-white Bel Air around town at 25 m.p.h., to come over and "hang out with" me.
I told her "Fine. And now you can just cancel the date," to which she replied "but he's had a crush on you ever since you worked together in the hospital cafeteria [in 1981], Medea."
Well yeehaw man! That's good enough for me. Let me just dump my lovely grrlfriend in the basement so I can hook up with the Bartman to ensure that my sister is comfortable with who I am.
Did I mention that this is the same little sister who speaks in tongues under duress (the latest piece of evidence that she has inherited my mother's paranoid schizophrenic diorder)? Or that she believes that women should not carry out the trash or use birth control or do whatever else her misogynistic "women should submit graciously to men" church tells her to believe?
Hard to parse this with her being a soldier, but she has managed to work that inconvenience out somehow.
This is the person who always asks to borrow money to pay off her credit card after using her paycheck to get pedicures and manicures, the same person who says that demons and angels talk to her and tell her what to do. And yes, she has access to AK-47s and could be in a war zone one day soon.
This certainly helps ME sleep at night ... and let's don't even TALK about how much her imminent deployment or the fact that she peppers her conversations with "well, if I die, Mama and Carmen will be set for life" is doing to keep my mother's paranoid tendencies in check or to keep my young niece from worrying instead of sleeping.
Oh yeah. And did I mention that she gave me a 2-CD gospel music set for Christmas? Yep. Gave it to a woman whose favorite holiday pastime is decapitating nativity scenes and leaving the plastic baby Jezus heads in the sheep's mouths.
But maybe I just have one too many bad associations with the Southern twitch Baptist church of my childhood to handle this very well.
Meanwhile, Keep The Faith delivered to my bulk mail folder today an email with the subject line Free Guardian Angel Bear—Because God Loves You.
I considered writing Mr. Keep The Faith to explain that creativity is my religion—it has saved me more than once—but, hey, we're talking about someone whose religion is on the level of stuffed bears.
Too bad the spam angel didn't tell him about dictionaries or the proper use of semicolons before he sent this little poem. My guess is the little thumb-sized thang has bent wings and ain't getting enough air down in this guy's stinky pocket.
Anyway, here's the precious poem:
Huh. How quaint.
LISTENING TO: Randy Newman's "Louisiana 1927" (they're trying to wash us away...)
READING: A New York Times article about the Simply Droog: 10 + 3 Years of Creating innovation and Discussion exhibit. Hope I can go.
SANG IN SHOWER: Lucinda Williams's "Blue" (perhaps because I had to return to work today)
This past Christmas, she mentioned that she had invited Bart, an eccentric guy who drives an old teal-and-white Bel Air around town at 25 m.p.h., to come over and "hang out with" me.
I told her "Fine. And now you can just cancel the date," to which she replied "but he's had a crush on you ever since you worked together in the hospital cafeteria [in 1981], Medea."
Well yeehaw man! That's good enough for me. Let me just dump my lovely grrlfriend in the basement so I can hook up with the Bartman to ensure that my sister is comfortable with who I am.
Did I mention that this is the same little sister who speaks in tongues under duress (the latest piece of evidence that she has inherited my mother's paranoid schizophrenic diorder)? Or that she believes that women should not carry out the trash or use birth control or do whatever else her misogynistic "women should submit graciously to men" church tells her to believe?
Hard to parse this with her being a soldier, but she has managed to work that inconvenience out somehow.
This is the person who always asks to borrow money to pay off her credit card after using her paycheck to get pedicures and manicures, the same person who says that demons and angels talk to her and tell her what to do. And yes, she has access to AK-47s and could be in a war zone one day soon.
This certainly helps ME sleep at night ... and let's don't even TALK about how much her imminent deployment or the fact that she peppers her conversations with "well, if I die, Mama and Carmen will be set for life" is doing to keep my mother's paranoid tendencies in check or to keep my young niece from worrying instead of sleeping.
Oh yeah. And did I mention that she gave me a 2-CD gospel music set for Christmas? Yep. Gave it to a woman whose favorite holiday pastime is decapitating nativity scenes and leaving the plastic baby Jezus heads in the sheep's mouths.
But maybe I just have one too many bad associations with the Southern twitch Baptist church of my childhood to handle this very well.
Meanwhile, Keep The Faith delivered to my bulk mail folder today an email with the subject line Free Guardian Angel Bear—Because God Loves You.
I considered writing Mr. Keep The Faith to explain that creativity is my religion—it has saved me more than once—but, hey, we're talking about someone whose religion is on the level of stuffed bears.
Too bad the spam angel didn't tell him about dictionaries or the proper use of semicolons before he sent this little poem. My guess is the little thumb-sized thang has bent wings and ain't getting enough air down in this guy's stinky pocket.
Anyway, here's the precious poem:
ANGEL IN YOUR POCKET
I am a tiny angel
I'm smaller than your thumb;
I live in people's pockets
Thats where I have my fun.
I dont suppose you've seen me,
I'm too tiny to detect;
Though I'm with you all the time,
I doubt we've ever met.
Before I was an Angel
I was a fairy in a flower;
God, Himself, hand-picked me,
And gave me angel power.
Now God has many Angels
We become His special tools.
And because God is so busy,
With way too much to do;
He said my assinment
Is to keep close watch on you.
When He tucked me in your pocket
He bessed you with Angel care;
Then told me never to leave you,
And I vowed always th be there.
Huh. How quaint.
LISTENING TO: Randy Newman's "Louisiana 1927" (they're trying to wash us away...)
READING: A New York Times article about the Simply Droog: 10 + 3 Years of Creating innovation and Discussion exhibit. Hope I can go.
SANG IN SHOWER: Lucinda Williams's "Blue" (perhaps because I had to return to work today)
269. FOIL-WRAPPED PROPAGANDA
From the Archives (20 December 2006) I suppose I could think of this as preparation for Danishgrrl's and my looming trip to the truly frightening Jehovan-dripping borough of South Carolina, but I am nevertheless annoyed at this holiday card that someone placed in my mailbox:
The holly-bordered exterior reads
and the interior reads
The holly-bordered exterior reads
BELIEVE IN MIRACLES
The Virgin Birth...
"Behold, a virgin shall be with child ... and they shall call His name Emmanuel ... God with us." Matthew 1:23
The Resurrection...
"...Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: He is risen..." Mark 16:6
The Soon Return...
"...I will come again, and receive you unto Myself; that where I am, there ye may be also." John 14:3
and the interior reads
Wishing you the joy of believing ... the celebration of life ... and the peace of eternal hope in Jesus Christ.
May Your Christmas Be Blessed.
" ... He who believes has eternal life." John 6:47 NASB
To me, seeking real-life solutions to the particular difficulties of our earthly existence (random disease and limited lifespans and human frailty and violence and ignorance and loss and perplexingly annoying religious commands to cut my hair or never cut my hair or wear a dress or or wear a burqa or whatever) instead of bowing prostrate before some made-up yahoo that religious leaders use to extort money from their congregation is humanity's best shot at curing disease and finding real redemption, so how 'bout you keep your superstitions out of my mailbox Yo.
Meanwhile, Danishgrrl's kids are guilt-tripping her about "ruining" their holidays by introducing change and refusing to invite her ex-husband to spend the day with us and we don't like this one bit. The jerk is encouraging this too while e-lecturing her about honoring the fact that the kids don't want change—and this from the man who couldn't be bothered to purchase a real tree for them.
Grr!
So here's my pre-New Year's resolution: I will not be silent if my bigoted Aunt Becky has anything to say about my so-called sinful life style this year. I have lost my patience and have armed myself with the HRC's "Answers to Questions about Marriage Equality" that I can hand to her if she starts. (I'll also threaten her with donating them to her church's library in her name—maybe THAT will get a reaction!)
I’m also thinking of making a bumpersticker that says "Can I Vote on Your Marriage?" and affixing it to my car before the trip.
So yeah. Here I sit, dreading Christmas down south, dreading Danishgrrl discovering the sad situation that was my childhood, but very glad that the bullethole my mom put in the kitchen ceiling way back in 1979 when she tried to violently off herself was at least patched a few years back, so we don't have to stare at it or the blood spots on the ceiling anymore.
268. THE GLOBAL O
From the Archives (16 December 2006) Here's a twist. Globalorgasm.org is sponsoring the First Annual Solstice Synchronized Global Orgasm for Peace. This event will um culminate in the 2012 Winter Solstice, when the Mayan Calendar ends and a new era theoretically begins (or, if you're one of those Roswell people, when the little green Mayan aliens return to our tepid Earth.
Taking this at um face value appeals to me, so I plan to add my own surge of "concentrated and high-energy positive input" into the Earth's energy field sufficient to reduce the "current dangerous levels of aggression and violence throughout the world" next Friday.
Our slogan can be We came in peace.
All joking aside though. Yeah. Well. Isn't it great that these seemingly earnest hot-tub sex educators are promoting a publicity stunt that honors connection and sexual freedom and all that?
Really. It is. Here's reality though: my very real sister is in very real danger because she could not find a post-college job that pays enough to satisfy her student loan repayment plan, and John McCain has just announced that our incompetent administration now intends to deploy another 35,000 soldiers. my sister has already received her pre-deployment shots and could be staring down a real gun or stepping on a real bomb within the next 36 hours while Bush&Co dick around with such "expendable" lives for their continued high profits.
So let's be frank here. Jilling off ain't gonna do jack about this one.
I appreciate the sex educators' quixotian naiveté though and support anything that brings sex out into the open in these repressive times.Once again though, Susie Bright says it best:
Taking this at um face value appeals to me, so I plan to add my own surge of "concentrated and high-energy positive input" into the Earth's energy field sufficient to reduce the "current dangerous levels of aggression and violence throughout the world" next Friday.
Our slogan can be We came in peace.
All joking aside though. Yeah. Well. Isn't it great that these seemingly earnest hot-tub sex educators are promoting a publicity stunt that honors connection and sexual freedom and all that?
Really. It is. Here's reality though: my very real sister is in very real danger because she could not find a post-college job that pays enough to satisfy her student loan repayment plan, and John McCain has just announced that our incompetent administration now intends to deploy another 35,000 soldiers. my sister has already received her pre-deployment shots and could be staring down a real gun or stepping on a real bomb within the next 36 hours while Bush&Co dick around with such "expendable" lives for their continued high profits.
So let's be frank here. Jilling off ain't gonna do jack about this one.
I appreciate the sex educators' quixotian naiveté though and support anything that brings sex out into the open in these repressive times.Once again though, Susie Bright says it best:
Anything that promotes connection, and dissuades prejudice, is going to diminish violence. I'm with them on that. But liberation is a philosophy, and without action, any philosophy looks stupid staring up barrels. Who needs more dilettantes: spiritual, orgasmic, or otherwise? Human consciousness sits around like an unplugged vibrator if you don't DO something about it.
267. THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS...
From the Archives (21 November 2006) Voltaire’s birthday and snow flurries are falling this AM. The air is brisk and electric and cold and here we are on the cusp of a five day holiday.
Danishgrrrl and her kids and I are excited about cooking for and entertaining 12 this Thanksgiving.
I’ve always enjoyed planning and preparing (and eating) big meals and look forward to getting busy in the kitchen despite the fact that I currently have four blisters and 2 sensitive fingertips on my dominant hand because I stupidly grabbed the handle of a hot pan with my bare hands.
So yeah. I’ve been flipping through cookbooks and foodie magazines for weeks now, cutting out recipes and gathering centerpiece ideas and salivating happily.
(Yeah yeah. I know I don’t seem like a Martha Stewart type, but I do love to cook and, hey, I think it’s cool that I now know how to cut a sunburst into the top of an orange and make the thing into a votive holder that will look great surrounded by bay leaves … which are surrounded by garlic mashed potatoes and barbecued turkey and sugar-glazed ham and dried-cherry-and-sage-and-apple-and-pecan stuffing and green beans with pomegranate seed/mustard sauce and baked winter squash and homemade pound cake and apple pie and… well, maybe this IS the best of all possible worlds . . .
•
Garrison Keillor described Voltaire’s world on the Writer’s Almanac today, and I was struck by the similarities between his France and today’s America—a landscape in which the country’s leader (Louis XIV/King George the Lesser) persecutes people who worship differently (Protestants/Muslims/atheists/iberal Christians) and turns the country into a “ferociously intolerant society, with little freedom of speech or religion”—a place where torturing and imprisoning people who challenge these strictures (in Bastille/Gitmo … black houses … your own home) … is accepted and intolerant citizens report Muslim clerics who are seated on a plane together as possible terrorists …
… not that I believe that others should forced into silent participation in someone else’s religious rituals just because we happen to share the same public space.
I object when my coworkers pray to their mythological god before a common work meal and I object when a guy on a plane makes me listen to his prayers that he can say to his own damn self and leave me out of it.
Anyway it’s still icy cold outside but I gotta get back to work now so Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
Danishgrrrl and her kids and I are excited about cooking for and entertaining 12 this Thanksgiving.
I’ve always enjoyed planning and preparing (and eating) big meals and look forward to getting busy in the kitchen despite the fact that I currently have four blisters and 2 sensitive fingertips on my dominant hand because I stupidly grabbed the handle of a hot pan with my bare hands.
So yeah. I’ve been flipping through cookbooks and foodie magazines for weeks now, cutting out recipes and gathering centerpiece ideas and salivating happily.
(Yeah yeah. I know I don’t seem like a Martha Stewart type, but I do love to cook and, hey, I think it’s cool that I now know how to cut a sunburst into the top of an orange and make the thing into a votive holder that will look great surrounded by bay leaves … which are surrounded by garlic mashed potatoes and barbecued turkey and sugar-glazed ham and dried-cherry-and-sage-and-apple-and-pecan stuffing and green beans with pomegranate seed/mustard sauce and baked winter squash and homemade pound cake and apple pie and… well, maybe this IS the best of all possible worlds . . .
•
Garrison Keillor described Voltaire’s world on the Writer’s Almanac today, and I was struck by the similarities between his France and today’s America—a landscape in which the country’s leader (Louis XIV/King George the Lesser) persecutes people who worship differently (Protestants/Muslims/atheists/iberal Christians) and turns the country into a “ferociously intolerant society, with little freedom of speech or religion”—a place where torturing and imprisoning people who challenge these strictures (in Bastille/Gitmo … black houses … your own home) … is accepted and intolerant citizens report Muslim clerics who are seated on a plane together as possible terrorists …
… not that I believe that others should forced into silent participation in someone else’s religious rituals just because we happen to share the same public space.
I object when my coworkers pray to their mythological god before a common work meal and I object when a guy on a plane makes me listen to his prayers that he can say to his own damn self and leave me out of it.
Anyway it’s still icy cold outside but I gotta get back to work now so Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
266. PRAYER FROM AN ATHEIST
From the Archives (16 November 2006) Dear Random Matter and Antimatter Swirling All around Me, Convincing Some People to Believe That You are a Divine Creator Instead of, at Most, Alterable Energy,
I have this car, see? A shiny one. Cute. With groovy dashboard lights in neon colors.
It's cute. And fun to drive. Zippy.
Only there are long periods of time when I don't drive it. Ever. Because the car is a lemon. Really. A bright yellow gawdawful glowing lemon. Faulty electrical systems? I got one. Some say all VWs have them. And this one certainly does.
It breaks down. Often. And leaves me stranded. And poor. And it leaks. Gas most recently. A potential kaboom. Expensive new gas lines. Nearly 1K.
The last straw. Now car for sale. Still zippy. And cute.
Buy it. Please. It’s parked. Waiting.
I have this car, see? A shiny one. Cute. With groovy dashboard lights in neon colors.
It's cute. And fun to drive. Zippy.
Only there are long periods of time when I don't drive it. Ever. Because the car is a lemon. Really. A bright yellow gawdawful glowing lemon. Faulty electrical systems? I got one. Some say all VWs have them. And this one certainly does.
It breaks down. Often. And leaves me stranded. And poor. And it leaks. Gas most recently. A potential kaboom. Expensive new gas lines. Nearly 1K.
The last straw. Now car for sale. Still zippy. And cute.
Buy it. Please. It’s parked. Waiting.
265. LIVING LA VIDA JIHAD
From the Archives (15 November 2006) Stop42’s ad against raising the minimum wage in jihadist Colorado features Moses and the Judeo-Christian god:
MOSES: We need divine intervention. They want to chisel Amendment 42 into Colorado's constitution where it doesn't belong.
GOD: What on earth are you talking about?
MOSES: An annual minimum wage increase in stone for eternity!
GOD: When inflation and recession come, it will be a catastrophe!
MOSES: It's a plague we'll face every year.
GOD: We can't let the people make this mistake. Go. Spread the word. Vote no on 42!
In response to this ad, Barbara Ehrenreich notes that
perhaps God, for all his omniscience, hadn’t noticed that the states that already had higher minimum wages haven’t yet plunged into “inflation and recession.” Or that the 1997 hike in the federal minimum wage wasn’t followed by nationwide economic calamity. It’s stranger still that the deity would choose to weigh in on the side of the Colorado Restaurant Association and against the poor and downtrodden.
Or maybe no one noticed that, while Bush&Co may have convinced the so-called godly to support their imperialist policies for the past 6 years, even American jihadists seem to have wised up to the fake cowboys.
Word to Bush&Co: screw the people long enough and they will realize that they are being used.
They will also vote—at least in 24 states—to increase the minimum wage you reject in order to take care of their own.
(You know what they say: If the leaders won’t lead...)
But wait. There’s more post-election good news!
Bill Maher outed hypocritical RNC chair Ken Mehlman this past weekend Larry King Live. CNN managed to edit the segment out of later rebroadcasts but, hey, it was too late then.
So there you have it: another imperialist homophobic hypocrite unveiled (and how do they keep managing to convince people to promote legislature that adversely affects them?).
Lindsay Beyerstein notes on Alternet
The outing of Mehlman, after all these years, is proof of the institutional implosion of the Republican Party. Nobody wants to cover for a closeted gaybasher, and Mehlman is no longer powerful enough to command complicity.
Meanwhile, last week ultra-conservatives in Jerusalem forced organizers to cancel their Pride parade by clashing with the police, burning bins of trash, and throwing stones. The jihadists also announced that holding the parade would be “surrendering to mental illness” and, no big surprise, declared queerness a crime.
(Ah, they do like to pretend that they get to define the law of the land for everyone, don’t they?)
The irony of their throwing stones is definitely not lost on Medea, but don’t you wonder why an army as well-trained as Israel’s couldn’t quell a few fundie trash-burners? Obviously, the will to defend queers just wasn’t there.
So there we have it: another example of jihadists using selective Bible verses to further their cause.
Meanwhile, Pam’s Spaulding notes that the Houston landscaping bidness Garden Guy Inc. (“Treating you with respect and honesty are the cornerstones of our reputation”) picked up $40K in new bidness but lost a mere $1K in bidness (that’s 2 customers) after e-mailing a queer client to inform him that Garden Guy Inc. chooses not to work for homosexuals.
“Why can’t people handle it when you say the truth?” co-owner Sabrina Farber asked after receiving angry e-mails and phone calls in response to her actions.
Indeed Sabrina. Why can’t you handle the fact that, when you exhibit hate, then outrage gets flung right back atcha? It’s called a vicious cycle, Hon, and, guess what, you're on the side of hate and intolerance and you got called on it. Publicly.
So take note: You and your homophobic husband have just provided the world with yet another example of why US courts are still required to enforce protection of minority groups in this land of the (purported) free where jihadists such as yourself target others based on irrational and religion-stoked hate.
Meanwhile, a chorus pal who is selling her condo recently discovered that some asshole broke in, shit on her floors, and left a Watchtower with scribbled homophobic messages on it for her reading enjoyment.
(FYI Sabrina. That’s a hate crime. And it invokes public outrage, even down here in the Southland.)
•
So. My obvious segue here is to thank all those prognosticators who wrote off liberal southerners as dispendable irrational irrelvant hicks. But thanks really are not enough. So I’ll invite them to read Bob Moser’s “New Southern Strategy” in the Nation instead. (You know, the article that begins “The South—aka “Jesusland”—has a message for those national Democratic wizards who advised writing off the South: ... Fuck you.”)
Check it out at http://www.alternet.org/stories/44085/
•
Meanwhile, Jamie had her first chemo treatment yesterday and I was relieved to see her out and about and cracking jokes afterwards—particularly because Tree's first treatment went so badly. A relief too to hear her laughing too. “You pulled the C card, didn’t you?” she said to her ex (who, indeed, sis pull the C card to get what she wanted, as she said, laughing back).
Guess you gotta remember to laugh when the world throws you the stinkin' C ball.
264. THROWING STONES
From the Archives
(12 November 2006)
(12 November 2006)
One of the basic guidelines I use when meeting new people is to never ever trust someone who identifies themselves as a “Christian” within the early throes of casual conversation. They believe they are communicating their higher moral standing, but what I hear them clearly saying is “I have a serious mental disorder.” – DBSHOLES
The National Archives recently either uncovered or strategically published (in the hopes that someone would recognize a corresponding zeitgeist when it stared them in the eyes) some 800 photographs that Dorothea Lange took of the more than 110,000 people of Japanese descent whom our government imprisoned in filthy horse stalls and drafty tar-paper shacks back in the so-called glory days of patriotic yore. Like Lange’s Depression-era photographs, these images capture a shameful moment in US history at a very personal level.
The War Relocation Authority hired Lange to document the internments, then restricted her lens before finally confiscating her internment photography altogether. Their instructions were clear: No objects that might identify a concentration camp as a concentration camp—no wire fences or watchtowers or searchlights or whips or starving people or armed guards herding detainees—allowed. Instead, she was allowed to capture the sale of interned people’s belongings while giving a human face to the enforced poverty and misery that our government imposed on these people’s lives.
Imagine, for a moment, what it would be like to be captured and imprisoned by your country merely because your racial heritage has suddenly become suspect and to watch as your very personal belongings—that funky clock you purchased from an artist in grad school, the painting your ex gave you on your first anniversary, your laptop, your photographs, your grandmother’s rings, your prized first editions of all your favorite books—are sold.
I try to ask myself who benefits from specific exertions of power, especially when they involve fear-mongering—and fear was definitely behind the frenzy of post-Pearl Harbor Jap-hate editorials and speeches that spurred this round-up of Japanese American citizens, just as fear and the flimsy promise of protection are behind our current willingness to neuter habeas corpus in a post-9/11 world.
Bush&Co would of course argue that Americans benefit when this administration imprisons and tortures Others because their coerced confessions could stop a terrorist attack on our consumer-driven way o’ life. Of course, most thinking people would argue that Bush&Co have done more to threaten our way of life than anything bin Laden or Saddam could ever do.
Question: Who benefits when a president claims that Americans do not torture prisoners, then pushes through legislation that forgives the torture he has already authorized?
Answer: A lot fewer people today than did on Monday, thanks to the American people, who have spoken and spoken loudly ... despite the GOP’s attempts to silence us with robo-calls; despite the officials (in mostly Democratic precincts) who had no clue whatsoever how to operate those pesky voting machines; despite the conservatives who threatened Latino Democrats in Colorado with arrest if they attempted to vote; despite the Maryland GOPers’ false ballots; despite hate radio encouraging callers to tie up the Democratic fair-vote phone lines; despite Bush&Co’s ridiculous assertion that a vote for Democrats is a vote against your country or any of those other jaw-dropping GOP fascist declarations.
... which reminds me: I saw a bumpersticker this morning that said Bush won’t stop lying until you stop believing.
Here’s what I believe: Ted Haggard’s outing (as a hypocrite) hot on the tail of Mark Foley’s outing (as a hypocrite) hot on the tail of myriad other GOP hypocrisies hot on the tail of all this GOP truthiness may have convinced the Oxford English Dictionary to finally designate truthiness a word (and they SHOULD have convinced Republicans that their leaders are hypocritical shucksters who are sending democracy down the tubes a a very fast rate).
So now, a partial list of other conservative hypocrites:
• William Bennett, who attempted to remold our free-thinking founders as Bible-thumping conservative moralists and espoused the importance of moral conduct while on an out-of-control gambling binge;
• J. Edgar Hoover, who publicly persecuted queers while maintaining a forty-four-year homo relationship (and, probably more than any recent American, branded the idea that gay men are lurking pedophiles into the American psyche)
• those conservative Catholic priests who place restrictions on women’s bodies (despite having now clue what it is like to have to choose) and blame queers when they get caught covering up for pedophiles
• those GOP leaders who turned a blind eye to Foley’s trolling while running ads that accuse Democrats of being “soft on child molesters”
• hypocritical fundie religious leaders who accept illegal trips to Scottish golf courses from lobbyists
• Bill Frist, who feigned the ability to diagnose brain function from a video even as Terry Schiavo’s doctors insisted that she was in a persistent vegetative state. (As Molly Ivins says, “that whole Terry Schiavo debacle was like waking up one morning finding Fidel Castro in the refrigerator.”)
• Republinazi Rush Limbaugh, who describes himself as a moralist while popping pills uncontrollably
• Ralph Reed, the baby-faced fundie hypocrite who manipulated people of faith for his own financial and political gain for so years (and probably while jerking off to pictures of those Northern Mariana sex slaves he secretly supported)
• Sen. Sperm Thurmond (from Medea’s very scary state of origin), who promoted racism while secretly supporting a black daughter he shared with the then-underage African American woman who worked in his home
• those holier-than-thou GOP assholes who demanded Clinton’s head on a silver platter for his extramarital relations but who have since been revealed to be adulterers themselves
• those holier-than-thou religious freaks who succeeded in passing the so-called marriage protection amendments in Colorado, Idaho, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia, and Wisconsin on Tuesday by citing the sanctity of their so-called holy unions EVEN THOUGH evangelicals have the highest divorce rate of any group in this country and EVEN THOUGH our Constitution plainly states that ALL citizens are entitled to the same rights.
And now, let us celebrate
• the South Dakota voters who defeated attempts to ban abortion and
• the Arizona voters who defeated their state’s so-called marriage protection amendment and
• the Missouri voters who, like Californians, voted to pay for stem cell research themselves since their so-called national leaders are too beholden to the fundies to back this vital research themselves.
And let's close with a song: Ding dong. Santorum is gone. The evil Rick is gone. (And Rumsfeld too. Ha Ha.)
Goodbye and good riddance to a few representatives from the current crop of fascists.
(Oh and by the way maybe your marriage bans stand today, but New Jersey put the writing on the wall and openly queer candidates won in Alabama (!), Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Oklahoma, (over sixty-six elected) and HRC reports that the people also elected over 200 officials who publicly support equality.
So, as Susie Bright says, “Let the Corporate and DLC Ass-Kicking Resume!”
READING: The New York Times, which reported the Lange story. Alternet, which does a good job of outing the GOP hypocrites; HRC’s election coverage.
Sunday, March 9, 2008
263. TOPPING THE PLATE, OR, DOMINATION SHIFTS IN THE TECTONICS SINGLES BAR
From the Archives. (October 2006) A geologist at UNC Chapel Hill recently discovered that the Amazon River once flowed in the opposite direction. Yep. Just think about it. The world’s largest river basin once flowed from the Atlantic to the temperate Pacific but suddenly reversed course some 500 million years ago when a butchy Grace Joneslike tectonic plate from Africa felt the pull of a saucy plate from South America and remembered longing.
Africa shuddered briefly then slid her way across the crowded dance floor as South America anticipated the pleasure of promised resistance. Then Africa was sliding her long fingers along the South America’s curves and moaning softly as something solid gave way inside her. Recognition disappeared as suddenly as it appeared though, as South America’s mouth found Africa’s taut raised peaks, licked hungry stone.
The plates stepped back, took in the full enticing length and breadth of each other with wolf-quick motions, each still confident that nothing could dislodge her geography. Then South America pressed wrapped her long muscular legs around Africa’s eager hips and pressed the full intoxicating weight of her passion against her.
Dampness sprang from Africa’s deserts as they embarked together on an expedition into each other’s lush valleys and mounds.
Their mouths went dry. Then wet. Then dry again, their landscapes slick as the lovers gyrated through the long opening moments of this inevitable dance, during which one partner moves from controlled cautious motion into full-blown erupting earthquake, quivering and screaming as ridge finds fissure finds cave finds pounding contraction and caution tsunamis into all-out heaving gasps.
Then one plate shifted her significant weight long enough to press the full gravity of her presence into the other and the other reciprocated and they sucked in air and held on, drinking in the intoxicating musk of each other as caves throbbed open and tidepools filled with water.
Africa’s fissures were already stretched taut when the two shifted gears just long enough to stare into each other’s astonished eyes. Then the floor gave way and Africa's backbone arched and she found herself screaming with each alternating heave and thrust.
When South America tightened her legs around Africa’s bucking hips, whole valleys flooded as her stone façade gave way, spreading spewing molten lava over twitching thighs with each eruption as sedimentary stone and watery amens spewed full force from her dilating caves.
Then Africa fell headlong into that timeless moment when the slightest shift can re-establish gravity, tear open all boundaries as bodies move into and out of and over and around another’s in a heaving tectonic vibration that can leave whole rivers churning with release.
Africa shuddered briefly then slid her way across the crowded dance floor as South America anticipated the pleasure of promised resistance. Then Africa was sliding her long fingers along the South America’s curves and moaning softly as something solid gave way inside her. Recognition disappeared as suddenly as it appeared though, as South America’s mouth found Africa’s taut raised peaks, licked hungry stone.
The plates stepped back, took in the full enticing length and breadth of each other with wolf-quick motions, each still confident that nothing could dislodge her geography. Then South America pressed wrapped her long muscular legs around Africa’s eager hips and pressed the full intoxicating weight of her passion against her.
Dampness sprang from Africa’s deserts as they embarked together on an expedition into each other’s lush valleys and mounds.
Their mouths went dry. Then wet. Then dry again, their landscapes slick as the lovers gyrated through the long opening moments of this inevitable dance, during which one partner moves from controlled cautious motion into full-blown erupting earthquake, quivering and screaming as ridge finds fissure finds cave finds pounding contraction and caution tsunamis into all-out heaving gasps.
Then one plate shifted her significant weight long enough to press the full gravity of her presence into the other and the other reciprocated and they sucked in air and held on, drinking in the intoxicating musk of each other as caves throbbed open and tidepools filled with water.
Africa’s fissures were already stretched taut when the two shifted gears just long enough to stare into each other’s astonished eyes. Then the floor gave way and Africa's backbone arched and she found herself screaming with each alternating heave and thrust.
When South America tightened her legs around Africa’s bucking hips, whole valleys flooded as her stone façade gave way, spreading spewing molten lava over twitching thighs with each eruption as sedimentary stone and watery amens spewed full force from her dilating caves.
Then Africa fell headlong into that timeless moment when the slightest shift can re-establish gravity, tear open all boundaries as bodies move into and out of and over and around another’s in a heaving tectonic vibration that can leave whole rivers churning with release.
262. A LIFE SENTENCE OF POVERTY
From the Archives. (October 2006) 25 years and 4 months, adjusted to 19 years and 2 months with good behavior and the requisite “Hi, my name is Jeff and I am an alcoholic” confessional.
Yep, that’s the punishment our judicial system meted out to ENRON mastermind Jeffrey Skilling.
The judge commented that Skilling’s “crimes have imposed on hundreds if not thousands a life sentence of poverty.”
First, if that’s a crime, then why ain’t George in jail?
Second, don’t you worry that former ENRON employees will still be bagging groceries in 2025 when Jeffrey is released back into the world?
So. I’ve been pondering the phrase life sentence of poverty ever since I read that line this morning.
Have also been mulling over the reality that so many news stories demonstrate our levels of cultural, environmental, intellectual, and soul-depriving poverty.
Example: have you seen what former Louisiana legislative candidate David Duke has been up to lately?
The guy’s copying Ralph Reed and his ilk and urging racist people to run for office.
Now I respect David Duke more than I respect Ralph, because at least he states what he believes out loud, whereas Ralph advises folks to run as stealth candidates in order to increase the likelihood that they can force their extremist views on everyone else.
But John Ubele has gone a step further and is encouraging his flock to form a national pro-White political party.
Meanwhile, Foley’s subterfuge and David Kuo’s timely confessional and Bush's "taking the Lord's name in vain" have left the Christianists aghast with the reality that, golly gee, people might actually make fun of them while kow-towing to them for political advantage.
So now they want their own party.
Church. Politics. What’s the difference anymore? (Except for those handy tax breaks)
I suggest that these 2 groups have a confessional lovefest wherein they collectively state their intention to control the lives of the rest of us. Then they can form their own party and see how far they get.
I know. Let’s call them the Bigocrats!
Mistuh Big ...
Anyway, Writergrrrl spent 15 long and head-banging years involuntarily committed to those fundies and untold numbers of hours under the judgmental vice of Baptist camp counselors and can tell you with confidence that submitting to those purportedly Jesus-inspired strictures, particularly if you are a woman, is the equivalent of accepting a life sentence of spiritual poverty.
Yep, that’s the punishment our judicial system meted out to ENRON mastermind Jeffrey Skilling.
The judge commented that Skilling’s “crimes have imposed on hundreds if not thousands a life sentence of poverty.”
First, if that’s a crime, then why ain’t George in jail?
Second, don’t you worry that former ENRON employees will still be bagging groceries in 2025 when Jeffrey is released back into the world?
So. I’ve been pondering the phrase life sentence of poverty ever since I read that line this morning.
Have also been mulling over the reality that so many news stories demonstrate our levels of cultural, environmental, intellectual, and soul-depriving poverty.
Example: have you seen what former Louisiana legislative candidate David Duke has been up to lately?
The guy’s copying Ralph Reed and his ilk and urging racist people to run for office.
Now I respect David Duke more than I respect Ralph, because at least he states what he believes out loud, whereas Ralph advises folks to run as stealth candidates in order to increase the likelihood that they can force their extremist views on everyone else.
But John Ubele has gone a step further and is encouraging his flock to form a national pro-White political party.
Meanwhile, Foley’s subterfuge and David Kuo’s timely confessional and Bush's "taking the Lord's name in vain" have left the Christianists aghast with the reality that, golly gee, people might actually make fun of them while kow-towing to them for political advantage.
So now they want their own party.
Church. Politics. What’s the difference anymore? (Except for those handy tax breaks)
I suggest that these 2 groups have a confessional lovefest wherein they collectively state their intention to control the lives of the rest of us. Then they can form their own party and see how far they get.
I know. Let’s call them the Bigocrats!
Mistuh Big ...
Anyway, Writergrrrl spent 15 long and head-banging years involuntarily committed to those fundies and untold numbers of hours under the judgmental vice of Baptist camp counselors and can tell you with confidence that submitting to those purportedly Jesus-inspired strictures, particularly if you are a woman, is the equivalent of accepting a life sentence of spiritual poverty.
261. WAVING THE JESUS FISH FOR FUN AND PROFIT
From the Archives. (October 2006) Well well well, the sins of the Gross Old Pedophiles are certainly coming home to roost, aren’t they?
Now we have the Curt Weldon scandal on top of the Foley scandal on top of the Ralph Reed scandal on top of the Abramoff scandal on top of Who’s Next?
Meanwhile, I spent my lunch break re-reading the Times’s expose on special-interest handouts that the Republicans continue to extend to religious groups and lemmetellya if I’m ever accused of tax evasion, I plan to state that my actions were ecclesiastic decisions subject to special interest provisions.
I mean, who knows? Seems as if folks can avoid all sorts of legal ramifications simply by waving a little Jesus fish around.
(Which reminds me of the drug-dealing jeweler in my hometown who took to writing "Jesus Loves You" on his sign after getting busted for selling pot. His new-found faith didn't keep him from continuing to deal though.)
So. What separate and unequal benefits have our legislators adopted to subsidize religion (even as they work to deny equal benefits to those of us who worship at the labial font)?
Let’s start with legalized job discrimination. Secular businesses such as day care centers and hospitals are at a competitive disadvantage now as the fish-wearers reap more profits.
Fish-wearers are being awarded tax breaks for initiatives such as luxury communities, theme parks, and golf courses that have nothing to do with maintaining a house of worship. This deprives localities of tax revenues while forcing us all to subsidize groups whose principals we may oppose.
Yes, it seems that Bush&Co decided to take a slice of the Establishment Clause too when they set their eyes on the Constitution er that “just a goddamn piece of paper.”
•
Meanwhile, I finally connected with Jamie, who has, no doubt, been holed up reading the On Our Back issues that I pasted generic magazine covers on so that she can take them to her treatments.
(Those nurses have no idea what's inside her copy of Computer World. Hee!)
MOST OBNOXIOUS BUMPERSTICKER SEEN THIS WEEEK: A confederate flag with the caption Fighting Terrorists since 1864
COOLEST BUMPERSTICKER SEEN THIS WEEK: Just another godless atheist working for equality and world peace.
BEST OF SPAM: "Essential message. You must read" (which was delivered alongside "Significant letter. You require to read.")
Now we have the Curt Weldon scandal on top of the Foley scandal on top of the Ralph Reed scandal on top of the Abramoff scandal on top of Who’s Next?
Meanwhile, I spent my lunch break re-reading the Times’s expose on special-interest handouts that the Republicans continue to extend to religious groups and lemmetellya if I’m ever accused of tax evasion, I plan to state that my actions were ecclesiastic decisions subject to special interest provisions.
I mean, who knows? Seems as if folks can avoid all sorts of legal ramifications simply by waving a little Jesus fish around.
(Which reminds me of the drug-dealing jeweler in my hometown who took to writing "Jesus Loves You" on his sign after getting busted for selling pot. His new-found faith didn't keep him from continuing to deal though.)
So. What separate and unequal benefits have our legislators adopted to subsidize religion (even as they work to deny equal benefits to those of us who worship at the labial font)?
Let’s start with legalized job discrimination. Secular businesses such as day care centers and hospitals are at a competitive disadvantage now as the fish-wearers reap more profits.
Fish-wearers are being awarded tax breaks for initiatives such as luxury communities, theme parks, and golf courses that have nothing to do with maintaining a house of worship. This deprives localities of tax revenues while forcing us all to subsidize groups whose principals we may oppose.
Yes, it seems that Bush&Co decided to take a slice of the Establishment Clause too when they set their eyes on the Constitution er that “just a goddamn piece of paper.”
•
Meanwhile, I finally connected with Jamie, who has, no doubt, been holed up reading the On Our Back issues that I pasted generic magazine covers on so that she can take them to her treatments.
(Those nurses have no idea what's inside her copy of Computer World. Hee!)
MOST OBNOXIOUS BUMPERSTICKER SEEN THIS WEEEK: A confederate flag with the caption Fighting Terrorists since 1864
COOLEST BUMPERSTICKER SEEN THIS WEEK: Just another godless atheist working for equality and world peace.
BEST OF SPAM: "Essential message. You must read" (which was delivered alongside "Significant letter. You require to read.")
260. WALKING AROUND WITH OUR SOULS IN OUR HANDS
When we are working, we are working nervously. We are carrying our souls in our hands. (Sabah Al-Atia, a trash collector in Baghdad, as quoted in the New York Times, 13 October 2006)
From the Archives. (October 2006). Stacy Shiff had some interesting perspectives in today’s “Desperately Seeking Susan (NYT, 10.13.2006):
Now we are Photoshopping rather than airbrushing; with enough slicing and dicing, an argument can be made for anything.
Examples:
Impeaching a president for a blowjob is definitely not a miscarriage of justice if that president is the so-called liberal Bill Clinton.
or
Passing legislation that makes it impossible to convict a president of war crimes that he and his administration committed is not a miscarriage of justice if a powerful Christian jihad lobby supports that president and the corporate-owned news outlets fail to publish negative opinions about it.
or
Telling the president in an early-August daily briefing entitled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US” doesn’t mean that the president and his staff had any idea that Bin Ladin might attack in the US.
or
Being briefed in July about said looming attack after meeting in reserved airspace does not mean that Condi committed perjury when she said No one could have guessed that terrorists would use planes as weapons against buildings.
or
Publishing sensational story after sensational story about children being executed or horny legislators flirting with nubile young men is, apparently, much more responsible journalism, however, than calling for Condi’s resignation after she covers up her lies.
And, hey, now the president can declare journalists who express outrage are enemy combatants and haul them off to Gitmo.
Our democracy has turned into a bad joke.
Meanwhile, some folks in the blogosphere are suggesting that the Republinazis outed Foley themselves, knowing that the reaction would distract folks from the fact that Condi got caught covering up her prior knowledge of the 9/11 terrorist threat.
So let me make sure I have the formula right: Out a queer = Bush gets pardoned for authorizing war crimes that result in torture and death + legislators suspend the Constitution right in front of our faces + the Iraqi debacle gets worse every day (and let’s don’t even mention all those billions of dollars that vanished without a trace under Bremer’s watch)
...
but, hey, sex sells.
259. LUCIFER’S FOLLIES, OR, I KNOW, LET’S BLAME THE HOMOSEXUALS!
From the Archives (October 2006) Huh. Jerry Falwell says that Hillary’s nomination as Democratic presidential candidate would arouse even more evangelical opposition than Lucifer’s.
Wonder what Jerry’s nomination would arouse among thinking people?
And does anyone believe that Fox and O’Reilly accidentally—oopsie! real sorry folks—ran a banner identifying Foley as a Democrat at least twice before someone called them on their self-serving little blunder?
Yep, I’ve been catching up on my reading.
Checked out Mollie Ivins’s dildo diaries today and can confirm that Texas is even more backwards than my repressive home state.
Have also been following the Times series on the ever-expanding benefits that our leaders are extending to christianist groups. Hope the series garners a strong response.
This made me wonder what the christianists have been up to—besides being strangely silent about Foley—and that’s how I discovered the Christian Coalition trainer who encourages people to make up press credentials in order to find out if voters are planning to vote for republicans (and then harass them if they’re not).
The Christian Right’s lack of morals are really coming to light in the wake of this scandal.
Yep, another closeted Republican suffering from internalized homophobia has followed the path blazed by Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, and Ralph Reed and gotten himself revealed as a moral hypocrite.
Is anyone surprised?
So how are the christianists responding? Well, they’re playing the specious blame game in an effort to avoid taking responsibility for putting their careers before their so-called morals. Or they're keeping quiet in an effort to keep the Republican failures in connection to this scandal under wraps.
Examples:
The Foley revelations, according to Gary Bauer, chair of the Campaign for [Homophobic, Evidenced-Based-Reality-Rejecting] Working Families, are merely "an attempt to discourage Christian conservative voters and to get some percentage of them to stay home so that the Left can retake the United States Senate and the United States House."
Yep. We Lefties brainwashed the man into seducing nearly grown boys using the same brainwashing methods that you christianists have used with the children you send to your brainwashing camps.
(I know. I’ve been there.)
Other politicos are trying to distance the scandal from political parties altogether and blame, yes, the homosexuals:
Wonder what Jerry’s nomination would arouse among thinking people?
And does anyone believe that Fox and O’Reilly accidentally—oopsie! real sorry folks—ran a banner identifying Foley as a Democrat at least twice before someone called them on their self-serving little blunder?
Yep, I’ve been catching up on my reading.
Checked out Mollie Ivins’s dildo diaries today and can confirm that Texas is even more backwards than my repressive home state.
Have also been following the Times series on the ever-expanding benefits that our leaders are extending to christianist groups. Hope the series garners a strong response.
This made me wonder what the christianists have been up to—besides being strangely silent about Foley—and that’s how I discovered the Christian Coalition trainer who encourages people to make up press credentials in order to find out if voters are planning to vote for republicans (and then harass them if they’re not).
The Christian Right’s lack of morals are really coming to light in the wake of this scandal.
Yep, another closeted Republican suffering from internalized homophobia has followed the path blazed by Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, and Ralph Reed and gotten himself revealed as a moral hypocrite.
Is anyone surprised?
So how are the christianists responding? Well, they’re playing the specious blame game in an effort to avoid taking responsibility for putting their careers before their so-called morals. Or they're keeping quiet in an effort to keep the Republican failures in connection to this scandal under wraps.
Examples:
The Foley revelations, according to Gary Bauer, chair of the Campaign for [Homophobic, Evidenced-Based-Reality-Rejecting] Working Families, are merely "an attempt to discourage Christian conservative voters and to get some percentage of them to stay home so that the Left can retake the United States Senate and the United States House."
Yep. We Lefties brainwashed the man into seducing nearly grown boys using the same brainwashing methods that you christianists have used with the children you send to your brainwashing camps.
(I know. I’ve been there.)
Other politicos are trying to distance the scandal from political parties altogether and blame, yes, the homosexuals:
Neither party seems likely to address the real issue, which is the link between homosexuality and child sexual abuse. (Tony Perkins, President of the Family Research Council, in reference to the Foley scandal)
What? Don’t you wonder how this idiot can even write that with an um straight face on the heels of one heterosexual man raping and executing public school girls whom he took hostage in Colorado and another heterosexual man executing a roomful of Amish youngsters whom he planned to rape and torture?
At least Foley was flirting with people who have hair around their genitals.
Perkins also said, and fairly ungrammatically, that "it shouldn't be totally surprising when we hold up tolerance and diversity as the guidepost for public life this is what you end up getting."
Think about that.
Human Life International went a step further and attempted to blame the Foley scandal on Planned Parenthood. (The fuck?)
There is never an acceptable excuse or rationale for the type of deviant behavior former Congressman Mark Foley has admitted to. Homosexuality is every bit a part of the culture of death as is abortion and contraception. Not surprisingly, Foley was an ardent supporter of both, representing the interests of Planned Parenthood 64 percent of the time thus far in 2006.
Yes, put those children in christianist schools so they never have the opportunity to learn about evidence-based reasoning, then feed them crap like this and some of them just might buy your bullshit.
•
Meanwhile, a woman on Craig’slist discovered that her academic husband is cheating on her and wrote this wonderful rave, which I’m posting here because it will vanish soon, although it’s currently posted at http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/sfo/141149695.html:
RAVE: My cheating husband!!!
Ok, so I just found out that you've been writing about 25 emails a day to one of your female colleagues, all signed with the words "with bated breath". GREAT! You seem to have decided that bisexual vegetarians with questionable hair choices are more up your alley. WONDERFUL! Oh, did you say that she cares about your academic career, unlike me, who is always at work? Great! I'm such a bitch, aren't I, me with all of my work and bill paying. I'm glad that someone has the time to listen to you talk about postmodernism. That really takes a lot off my back. Actually, upon close inspection, it seems like this whole thing is taking a lot off my back. For example...
Things I Don't Have to Do Anymore since You Have Found a Deeply Intellectual Fuck Buddy:
1. Pay your rent.
2. Get you through graduate school.
3. Hear the word "deconstruction" while I'm trying to eat a goddamn hamburger.
4. Fry bacon for you.
5. Pretend to enjoy CNN.
6. Pretend to care about all things academic.
Things I Will Be Able to Do:
1. Buy shoes.
2. Eat chicken, which you find disgusting.
3. Shop at a store other than Target.
4. Unapologetically watch America 's Next Top Model.
So go ahead. Fuck her. I know you want to. I mean, you pretty much said so in that last email, now didn't you? If you'd just get on with it, I could possibly have you out by the end of the month, and be able to enjoy all of next month's pay check without having to buy any of your books or any of your pencils or any of your goddamn subscription-only foreign news channels. You've been to the movies, you've had study dates. The next logical step is fucking. So put down the goddamn books and get your mouth on hers. Let's step it up! I want to go buy myself some shoes!
And yeah, I'll be sad, and I'll cry and I'll eat some Ben and Jerry's. But you know what? I won't be homeless. You, my friend, you're going to have to get a job that doesn't involve reading Nabokov. So enjoy that. God knows I will. In fact, I'll give you five bucks if you'll just hurry the fuck up and get it over with. Take the money, dude. You're going to need it.
Oh, and yeah, I did break into your email. So go ahead...tell me what you read in some obscure book about privacy. Tell me loud and long. Because I'm never going to have to hear that shit again.
141149695
Yee haw, babe.
258. WORSHIPPING AT THE HOUSE OF LABIA LOVE, OR, FAREWELL HABEAS CORPUS, WE HARDLY KNEW THEE
From the Archives. (October 2006) Huh. Someone just sent this to me:
Apt, really, since my singing group performed at a queer event held at a local progressive church last night and, when we went out to our cars, found this on our windshields:
Love that goes UPWARD is WORSHIP.
Love that goes OUTWARD is AFFECTION.
Love that STOOPS is GRACE. (DG Barnhouse)
Apt, really, since my singing group performed at a queer event held at a local progressive church last night and, when we went out to our cars, found this on our windshields:
NEVER DOUBT GOD’S LOVE FOR YOU
The Bible makes it clear that “God is Love” (1st John 4:8). This is a true character trait of God that is widely spoken of within the gay community. But did you know that there are other character traits of God which are equally true, yet hardly spoken of at all within gay circles? Namely, that God is a holy, righteous, and just God who, by his very nature, must administer punishment for sin?
You may have wondered, “If God is a loving God, how could He punish people in such a way?” Because God is perfect and His standard is perfection (the 10 commandments). Have you ever lied, stolen something (even if it was something trivial and small), used God’s name in vain, or lusted after another person (Jesus calls this “adultery” in Matthew 5:28)? Then you have broken God’s law, and the Bible make it clear that “He who stumbles at one point of the Law is guilty of breaking it all” (James 2:10), and “The soul that sins shall die” (Ezekiel 28:10). Be honest with yourself; you’re in big trouble on judgment day, DESPITE YOUR HOMOSEXUAL LIFESTYLE.
But God’s mercy can triumph over judgment in your life. God loves you, and has made a way for you to escape His wrath. Do you know what God did for you so that you wouldn’t have to go to hell? He sent His Son, Jesus, to die on a cross to receive your punishment. Jesus satisfied God’s justice and wrath against sin, so that when you stand before God on the day of judgment, you won’t have to receive His justice and wrath. This, my friend, is the greatest expression of love, Jesus died a substitute death so you could live (Romans 5:8). Then He rose from the dead, defeating death and proving Himself to be who He says He is; the Son of God and Savior of the world.
So, God has made a way for all men to be forgiven, and to receive the gift of everlasting life, Now the only question that remains is if you are willing to receive this gift. The Bible makes it perfectly clear that God commands all people everywhere to repent (Acts 17:30-31, Mark 6:12, Luke 13;3, Acts 3;19, Acts 26:20), and to trust in Jesus as Savior, since there is no way you could save yourself (John 3:16-21, John 8:24, John 14:6, Acts 4;12).
So please don’t be guilty of creating a God after your own imagination to suit yourself that you are more comfortable with; a God who is comfortable with your sins, including your homosexual lifestyle. The Bible warns, “Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, no idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor sodomites, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners shall inherit the kingdom of God,” and, “the cowardly, unbelieving, adominable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death: (Revelation 21:8). It’s been appointed for man once to die, and after this, the judgment (Hebrews 9:27). By this time, it will be too late to repent and make things right. Humble yourself before God, turn from your sin, and put your trust in Jesus as your Savior...today! Whether you walk down an aisle of a Church to make your peace with God of just kneel beside your bed at night does not matter...God is more concerned with the attitude of your heart than the place where you accept His gift of salvation. Tell Him you are sorry for your sins and turn from them. Ask Him to fill your heart with His presence so you can live above the power of sin, Tell Him you’re putting your trust in Jesus as your Savior from this day forward. God promised to forgive all that repent and put their trust in Jesus! Then read your Bible daily and obey what you read. And find a church to plug into that has not compromised the Word of God. God will never let you down. For more information, check out http://www.wayofthe master.com/goodperson.shtml
Well, my friend, you clearly failed your grammar courses, but at least you know to leave the second e out of judgment. You have also misunderstood a crucial aspect of adultery if you believe that lusting after another person alone qualifies.
My hunch, however, is that you are in such desperate need of some earth-shattering guilt-free lust that this was probably a Freudian slip. In fact, given your homophobic tendencies and desire to be around the fabulous when we congregate, I am guessing that you are, at this very moment, struggling mightily with your attraction to people of the same gender.
Let me remind you that the group with the highest incidence of divorce in our country is evangelical Christians.
Now some would say that it follows that your god hates evangelical Christians more than he hates, say, homosexuals. But, hey, you're the one who insists that your god is a loving god, so maybe he just wants to free your women from their oppression.
I guess I better be careful about sharing my honest opinions now though, since the rule of law that we’ve lived by for so many years is now officially dead—or will be once Bush signs the terrorist bill into law.
Goodbye Bill of Rights. Hello rightless people who can be deprived of life, liberty, and property without due process based purely on our president's suspicions about you.
Susie Bright points out that "everyone who watches TV knows all about Foley's boxer shorts, but the loss of one's right to privacy, or a jury trial, doesn't seem to make anyone's dick hard.”
Yeah.
What frightens me most though is that this bill not only gives Bush the right to determine the application of the Geneva Conventions but actually denies the courts the jurisdiction to hear any challenges to his interpretations.
In other words, we now have a dictator in what was a democracy, and a coke-snortin' one whose GPA was a low C, at that.
257. THE CHRISTIAN LEX NON SCRIPTA
From the Archives. (September 2007) I found a freaky site that is maintained by people who want to make the Bible the law of the land. Here’s a sample No Trespassing sign that they invite readers to post around their compounds:
NO TRESPASS
Notice of Foreign Law, on
Private Land; Read before entering:
You are hereby noticed that entering This land subjects You to This contract:
This land is private, and is not subject to public use or control. The Owner has the character suae potestate esse. Over This land flies the American Banner of Peace, and the Law thereon is the Holy Scriptures, and the Christian lex non scripta. The Owner has enacted other various ordinances, to which all who enter This land are subject. Among these ordinances is a
Five thousand dollar Land use fee,
charged per man or woman, per day, or any part of a day, for any man or woman (hereinafter, "Lessee") entering upon This land without prior written license in his possession at all times while upon This land. Acceptance of all ordinances shall be evidenced by the presence of any man or woman upon This land, not in possession of said license, and shall create a constructive lease agreement, binding Lessee to the terms of all ordinances which the Owner has laid upon This land. Said fee shall be deemed due and payable in full within thirty days from first notice, and payment shall be made in silver coin, at full face value. Lessee hereby agrees that if payment of said fee becomes delinquent, that said amount shall become a lien upon all of Lessee's non-exempt property. Any property brought onto This land by Lessee is subject to impound until settlement is made in full. Other ordinances are in effect upon This land, to which all who enter are subject, unless exempted by license. A complete list of ordinances may be obtained from the Owner. Ignorance of the Law shall not be an excuse, nor shall it relieve any person from liability therefor. Notice is hereby given that any license, lease, or right of usage may be revoked with five minutes notice. Revocations shall not relieve anyone from liabilities already incurred. Verbal invitees given five minutes grace as to fee only.
Notice to agents of government:
By entering This land you accept all of the above stated terms in full. Additionally, you affirm both individually, and in your official capacity, under penalty of perjury, under the laws of these united States of America (Title 28 U.S.C. Sec. 1746), that you will support the Constitution for these united States of America and the Constitution for This republic, and all the laws promulgated thereunder in conformance with the above named Constitutions, and will extend and protect the unalienable rights secured therein to the Owner, and those under His protection, and will faithfully perform all the duties of your office as it relates to Them, in compliance with the above Constitutions to which you acknowledge that you have already taken an Oath to perform said acts and actions to the best of your ability. Violations of the rights of the Owner, or those under His protection, shall be assessed a civil penalty of one million dollars in silver coin for each violation. Damages may also be prosecuted under Title 18 U.S.C. Sec. 1621 and Sec. 241, and Title 42 U.S.C. Sections 1986, 1985, and 1983, resulting in up to ten years in prison, and additional civil penalties.
The Owner may be contacted by sending correspondence to the following location:
They also offer a Boom to Bust Monopoly kit that enables parents to alter their Monopoly games to reflect the poor persecuted Christian’s version of reality. Parents teach their kids all about how this country is “going down the toilets” by gluing new cards atop existing Monopoly cards and their children learn to shelter their assets from Big Brother and the IRS while negotiating with the banks and investors in order to succeed until the next big bust.
This would seem extreme except for the fact that I can think of at least 2 uncles in SC who would no doubt approve.
256. REALITY WARS, OR, THE WHITE BOYS' GUIDE TO STOKING THE SINS OF OMISSION
From the Archives. (September 2006) In an article I wrote for our local indy rag some years ago, I talked about the fact that, even though my ex and I were together for ten years and declared our commitment to each other in a public ceremony, my family of origin continued to list me as single on their family trees.
They were cordial if a bit uncomfortable when I brought Mud to our family gatherings and usually included those awkward how’s your er um how's Mud doing? questions in conversations when she wasn’t there, but consistently refused to acknowledge the significance of our relationship in any formal way.
In other words, their actions attempted to make real people around them invisible in order to ensure their own comfort.
It is no coincidence that the Judeo-Christian god granted Adam the right to name things.
And yes. You are right. Ding ding ding! I AM writing about the power wielded by people who are allowed to name things and define reality. Again.
Because inquiring minds want to elucidate the fact that our dominant society insists that a huge facet of the lives of one in ten of us be rendered invisible.
(And let's don't forget that their insistence is not limited to queers. They also want poor people and black people and AIDS babies and leather afficionados and the homeless to vanish for their continued comfort.)
How threatening would it be to their carefully manufactured worlds if our official documents reflected the actual data??
Did you know that 4 corporations publish nearly every textbook used in our public schools system and that these publishers hold hearings in which groups of, say, so-called Intelligent Design advocates are allowed to fill the entire hearing room and then insist on their opinions being printed as facts? Yes, all too often, this group’s turnout and volume dictate what schoolchildren are taught as reality.
It's no surprise that organized Christofascist groups are the primary ones showing up either. No big surprise that fundies pays speechwriters big bucks to change the names of things in order to make the wrong seem right and idiocy seem intelligent and pesky principles seem obsolete.
I guess, given these dysfunctions, it should be no surprise that the Governator is intent on redefining reality for his state too.
Yep, I read today that California has been legally bound to offer an inclusive curriculum in their public schools since the seventies. The result is that men and women excel in equal numbers in textbooks (i.e., if Barbie says Math is hard, then Ken does too).
Then, this year, the legislature took this law a step further and approved a bill requiring state textbooks to "accurately portray in an age-appropriate manner the cultural, racial, gender and sexual orientation diversity of our society."
Finally! Lesbians will be depicted as something other than pathetic man-hating spinsters who drown in the wells of loneliness that are the fairy-tale fate of unmarried women (when, near as I can tell, the actual fate of far too many women is to hide in women's shelters from the violent men in their lives who wish to control their every move).
The governator viewed this bill as too threatening and vowed to veto it, so as a compromise, the legislature amended it to say only that textbooks will not reflect adversely on people based on their sexual orientation.
That’s STILL too much reality for the governator though, so he vetoed this version too.
Good thing this man is in a position of authority and gets to name things, eh?
They were cordial if a bit uncomfortable when I brought Mud to our family gatherings and usually included those awkward how’s your er um how's Mud doing? questions in conversations when she wasn’t there, but consistently refused to acknowledge the significance of our relationship in any formal way.
In other words, their actions attempted to make real people around them invisible in order to ensure their own comfort.
It is no coincidence that the Judeo-Christian god granted Adam the right to name things.
And yes. You are right. Ding ding ding! I AM writing about the power wielded by people who are allowed to name things and define reality. Again.
Because inquiring minds want to elucidate the fact that our dominant society insists that a huge facet of the lives of one in ten of us be rendered invisible.
(And let's don't forget that their insistence is not limited to queers. They also want poor people and black people and AIDS babies and leather afficionados and the homeless to vanish for their continued comfort.)
How threatening would it be to their carefully manufactured worlds if our official documents reflected the actual data??
Did you know that 4 corporations publish nearly every textbook used in our public schools system and that these publishers hold hearings in which groups of, say, so-called Intelligent Design advocates are allowed to fill the entire hearing room and then insist on their opinions being printed as facts? Yes, all too often, this group’s turnout and volume dictate what schoolchildren are taught as reality.
It's no surprise that organized Christofascist groups are the primary ones showing up either. No big surprise that fundies pays speechwriters big bucks to change the names of things in order to make the wrong seem right and idiocy seem intelligent and pesky principles seem obsolete.
I guess, given these dysfunctions, it should be no surprise that the Governator is intent on redefining reality for his state too.
Yep, I read today that California has been legally bound to offer an inclusive curriculum in their public schools since the seventies. The result is that men and women excel in equal numbers in textbooks (i.e., if Barbie says Math is hard, then Ken does too).
Then, this year, the legislature took this law a step further and approved a bill requiring state textbooks to "accurately portray in an age-appropriate manner the cultural, racial, gender and sexual orientation diversity of our society."
Finally! Lesbians will be depicted as something other than pathetic man-hating spinsters who drown in the wells of loneliness that are the fairy-tale fate of unmarried women (when, near as I can tell, the actual fate of far too many women is to hide in women's shelters from the violent men in their lives who wish to control their every move).
The governator viewed this bill as too threatening and vowed to veto it, so as a compromise, the legislature amended it to say only that textbooks will not reflect adversely on people based on their sexual orientation.
That’s STILL too much reality for the governator though, so he vetoed this version too.
Good thing this man is in a position of authority and gets to name things, eh?
255. ARE YOU BEING SERVED?
From the Archives. (September 2006) I loaned Dorothy Allison’s Trash to Danishgrrrl a few weeks ago and found myself flipping through this book about class, geography, and gender issues last night.
Allison articulates things about my childhood and shame and adult anxieties that I never even acknowledged out loud to myself before reading this book.
She also goes a long way toward explaining my anxiety about taking Danishgrrrl to SC to meet my family of origin.
Meanwhile, I have been shaking my head at the fact that Andrew Fastow is going to the slammer for a mere six years. I mean, think about what this guy did and its repercussions (not to mention the fact that he already received a great plea bargain agreement that reduced his sentence to just 10 years behind bars).
My question is, why not punish this man the way his crimes punished others and take away his retirement accounts and benefits and compensation and job, then force him to spend the rest of his days living on a fixed minimum-wage income?
The judge defended Fastow’s light sentence by saying that he had been persecuted and portrayed as a symbol of corporate greed after Enron’s collapse.
Aw.
(Excuse me but wasn’t his choice to perform criminal activities that led to Enron’s collapse the very thing that earned him this reputation in the first place?)
Maybe I am naive, but my impression is that most law-abiding citizens frown upon criminal activity, especially when the criminals rake in millions while leaving tax payers to bail out the people he bilked.
My understanding is also that justice is theoretically blind, but this articulate white sociopath with a is getting off way too fricking easy.
Question: does anyone believe for a moment that this judge would extend a comparable rationale to, say, a child molester?
Oh you poor man, your neighbors shunned and persecuted you and crossed the street when you approached and made you suffer so. Oh you poor, poor man. You have paid such a steep price already, So I tell ya what I’m gonna do. I'll sentence you to four years less than your plea bargain agreement because of your awful, awful suffering.
And inquiring minds want to know what exactly this guy’s “extraordinary steps toward rehabilitation” were.
Did he donate one of his MacMansions to the thousands of Enron employees whose savings he bilked?
Nope. Near as I can tell, the judge was referring to the fact that the poor man had to raise his two kids alone for one year while his criminal wife served her similarly minimal sentence.
Guess the judge doesn’t recognize that members of the law-abiding population struggle to raise their kids with limited resources and in single-parent homes too—and will have an even harder time of it now that we have to bail out these corporate crooks.
Unbelieveable.
Meanwhile, the Georgia branch of the Christian Coalition voted to leave this organization because it is just not conservative enough for them anymore.
Their stance is that the organization ought to be focusing solely on the core issues: criminalizing abortion and legalizing homophobia
(coz the Bible tells them so).
I suggest that they realign themselves with Fred Phelps so that everyone knows exactly what kinds of bigots we are dealing with.
No time right now, but I also made a mental note to research Republinazi pollster Frank Luntz’s materials. He’s the guy who provides speaking tips to the GOP and, apparently, his 160-page memo “The New American Lexicon” is the source of GOP members’ current insistence on using Democrat Party instead of Democratic Party.
LISTENING TO: George Winston’s “Summer”
READING: A fascinating article on fused participles (yawn). Last night, I also flipped through Great Lies for Adults to Tell Kids. (My personal favorite is “Wine makes mommy clever.”) Also Dorothy Allison’s Trash, which I will excerpt later.
SANG IN SHOWER: do your chain hang low? Do it rattle to the flo? (I curse Danishgrrrl’s teenagers for getting this stuck in my head!)
BEST-OF SPAM: Did you know that statistics say that sex makes you look 12 years younger?
Allison articulates things about my childhood and shame and adult anxieties that I never even acknowledged out loud to myself before reading this book.
She also goes a long way toward explaining my anxiety about taking Danishgrrrl to SC to meet my family of origin.
Meanwhile, I have been shaking my head at the fact that Andrew Fastow is going to the slammer for a mere six years. I mean, think about what this guy did and its repercussions (not to mention the fact that he already received a great plea bargain agreement that reduced his sentence to just 10 years behind bars).
My question is, why not punish this man the way his crimes punished others and take away his retirement accounts and benefits and compensation and job, then force him to spend the rest of his days living on a fixed minimum-wage income?
The judge defended Fastow’s light sentence by saying that he had been persecuted and portrayed as a symbol of corporate greed after Enron’s collapse.
Aw.
(Excuse me but wasn’t his choice to perform criminal activities that led to Enron’s collapse the very thing that earned him this reputation in the first place?)
Maybe I am naive, but my impression is that most law-abiding citizens frown upon criminal activity, especially when the criminals rake in millions while leaving tax payers to bail out the people he bilked.
My understanding is also that justice is theoretically blind, but this articulate white sociopath with a is getting off way too fricking easy.
Question: does anyone believe for a moment that this judge would extend a comparable rationale to, say, a child molester?
Oh you poor man, your neighbors shunned and persecuted you and crossed the street when you approached and made you suffer so. Oh you poor, poor man. You have paid such a steep price already, So I tell ya what I’m gonna do. I'll sentence you to four years less than your plea bargain agreement because of your awful, awful suffering.
And inquiring minds want to know what exactly this guy’s “extraordinary steps toward rehabilitation” were.
Did he donate one of his MacMansions to the thousands of Enron employees whose savings he bilked?
Nope. Near as I can tell, the judge was referring to the fact that the poor man had to raise his two kids alone for one year while his criminal wife served her similarly minimal sentence.
Guess the judge doesn’t recognize that members of the law-abiding population struggle to raise their kids with limited resources and in single-parent homes too—and will have an even harder time of it now that we have to bail out these corporate crooks.
Unbelieveable.
Meanwhile, the Georgia branch of the Christian Coalition voted to leave this organization because it is just not conservative enough for them anymore.
Their stance is that the organization ought to be focusing solely on the core issues: criminalizing abortion and legalizing homophobia
(coz the Bible tells them so).
I suggest that they realign themselves with Fred Phelps so that everyone knows exactly what kinds of bigots we are dealing with.
No time right now, but I also made a mental note to research Republinazi pollster Frank Luntz’s materials. He’s the guy who provides speaking tips to the GOP and, apparently, his 160-page memo “The New American Lexicon” is the source of GOP members’ current insistence on using Democrat Party instead of Democratic Party.
LISTENING TO: George Winston’s “Summer”
READING: A fascinating article on fused participles (yawn). Last night, I also flipped through Great Lies for Adults to Tell Kids. (My personal favorite is “Wine makes mommy clever.”) Also Dorothy Allison’s Trash, which I will excerpt later.
SANG IN SHOWER: do your chain hang low? Do it rattle to the flo? (I curse Danishgrrrl’s teenagers for getting this stuck in my head!)
BEST-OF SPAM: Did you know that statistics say that sex makes you look 12 years younger?
254. WHAT'S IN A NAME?
From the Archives. (September 2006) There’s nothing like sitting in the surgical oncology waiting room of a major medical center to remind yourself of just how inconsequential a little burgundy Civic puttering along in front of you in the left lane really is.
It’s 10:48 AM and my dear friend and mentor Louisville and her partner and I have been at the hospital since 7:55 AM. We're here for Louisville‘s biannual breast cancer follow-up exams.
Have spent the morning thinking about the importance of naming things—perhaps because I’ve been catching up with my former undergraduate advisor/English professor/mentor, who introduced me to Adrienne Rich's Diving into the Wreck.
Or maybe it’s because I just read that Safia Amajan, a women’s rights leader in Afghanistan, was gunned down in front of her house yesterday.
Or maybe it’s because it's so hard to ignore the fact that our discriminatory marriage laws look at one kind of couple and say you are legitimate, then look at another and insist that they see nothing.
Or maybe it's because this White House administration is so clearly manipulating the names of things.
Bush, for example, interrupted a reporter who began On both the eavesdropping program and the detainee issues ... to say We call it the terrorist surveillance program, Hutch, with his customary Richy Rich sneer.
To quote the ever-intelligent Molly Ivins
It’s 10:48 AM and my dear friend and mentor Louisville and her partner and I have been at the hospital since 7:55 AM. We're here for Louisville‘s biannual breast cancer follow-up exams.
Have spent the morning thinking about the importance of naming things—perhaps because I’ve been catching up with my former undergraduate advisor/English professor/mentor, who introduced me to Adrienne Rich's Diving into the Wreck.
Or maybe it’s because I just read that Safia Amajan, a women’s rights leader in Afghanistan, was gunned down in front of her house yesterday.
Or maybe it’s because it's so hard to ignore the fact that our discriminatory marriage laws look at one kind of couple and say you are legitimate, then look at another and insist that they see nothing.
Or maybe it's because this White House administration is so clearly manipulating the names of things.
Bush, for example, interrupted a reporter who began On both the eavesdropping program and the detainee issues ... to say We call it the terrorist surveillance program, Hutch, with his customary Richy Rich sneer.
To quote the ever-intelligent Molly Ivins
If we stop calling it eavesdropping plus torture with kangaroo trials, will it stop being eavesdropping, torture and kangaroo trials, and become “anti-terrorist activity”? Who gets to name things?
Maybe Sidney Blumenthal does, at least when he’s astute enough to refer to our petulant president as a Mayberry Machiavelli.
•
And let's all give a big hooray for those plane-spotters. Who knew that geek hobbyists fascinated with planes would corroborate the detainees’ stories?
Their amateur photographs and tracking skills were what first alerted journalists to the fact that the CIA was using commercial planes to transport prisoners to black houses, after all. And those commercials planes led journalists to identify the shell companies the CIA created to hide their apparent criminal activity. And the plane-spotters’ details, along with Google Earth, allowed journalists to identify the actual black house buildings where the detainees were held.
No wonder Big Brother want to put controls on the web.
And what has become of our democracy when our president follows the lead of Pinochet and gets himself and his goons retroactive amnesty for their crimes against humanity?
I am ashamed to be an American right now, ashamed to live in a land where people are too busy reading layering instructions for their fall wardrobes to register what we are condoning...
...yet I am complicit too.
For example, let me ask you a question: If women with big breasts work at Hooters, where do women with one leg work?
The answer? I-Hop, of course.
I learned that joke from watching a TV show called Two and a Half Men with Louisville and her partner last night because, after a long day of driving and worrying about whether or not her breast cancer has returned, we needed to veg.
And, before that, we watched Antique Roadshow.
That’s more TV than I’ve watched in the last several months (unless you count those L Word rentals), but my guests are TV watchers so, hey, when in my living room do as the paintings do, right?
LISTENING TO: Etta Baker, since she died at the age of 93 yesterday. Amazing that she didn't start performing until she was 60.
253. PICTURES OF MATCHSTICK MEN AND ME
From the Archives. (September 2006) Back in my architectural design days, I designed a building, then built a miniature version of it out of matchsticks just to see if I could.
I’ve been thinking about all those matchsticks after reading the UN report that a whopping 5,106 people in Baghdad died violent deaths in this past June and July alone.
So here’s what I want to do. I want to place Dick Cheney and George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld in a dark room with a camera on them and a sepia-toned shots of children’s faces playing behind them, and have them light and then extinguish, one at a time, 5,106 wooden matchsticks and toss them into a pile (or maybe a pit would be more appropriate).
Then I would like to show this footage to every American and ask him or her to think about what they did in June and July of this year as 5,106 people were exterminated.
Our president apparently believes that calling torture an “alternative set of interrogation procedures” will fool the people and, sadly, it just might since because, let’s face it, we’re awfully busy holding on to our jobs these days ... and those Republinazis who protested when Clinton said he didn’t inhale don’t seem to be standing up now to object to this ridiculous terminology.
I’ve been thinking about all those matchsticks after reading the UN report that a whopping 5,106 people in Baghdad died violent deaths in this past June and July alone.
So here’s what I want to do. I want to place Dick Cheney and George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld in a dark room with a camera on them and a sepia-toned shots of children’s faces playing behind them, and have them light and then extinguish, one at a time, 5,106 wooden matchsticks and toss them into a pile (or maybe a pit would be more appropriate).
Then I would like to show this footage to every American and ask him or her to think about what they did in June and July of this year as 5,106 people were exterminated.
Our president apparently believes that calling torture an “alternative set of interrogation procedures” will fool the people and, sadly, it just might since because, let’s face it, we’re awfully busy holding on to our jobs these days ... and those Republinazis who protested when Clinton said he didn’t inhale don’t seem to be standing up now to object to this ridiculous terminology.
Saturday, March 8, 2008
252. METAPUT*, OR, DRINKING A BITTER ROOT FROM A COMMON CUP
From the Archives. (September 2006) Police discovered 30 new bodies with clear signs of torture in Baghdad today, including a civilian whose dismembered parts washed up on the beach, and the Times reports that the average number of weekly attacks in Iraq has risen 15 percent in the past 3 months.
The number of civilian casualties? Fifty-one percent higher.
We refer to the deceased as bodies, I guess because the essence of what makes a person a person is so obviously gone and their slab of flesh is all that remains.
Reducing real people to their form also allows us to distance ourselves from the brutal way their lives ended, enables us to—at least for the moment—mask the knowledge that these were actual people who dreamed and cried and fucked and loved and held their kids on their laps in the morning before their screams melded with the sound of their torturer’s power drill.
Is this supposed to send a message to the world that Rumsfeld et al. will never control their region ot were they brutalized because they worship differently?
And has anyone mentioned the reality that religious groups in Iraq actually got along and shared positions of power before the US invasion?
Yes, Bush&Co are certainly liberating those poor downtrodden people who greeted us with flowers.
I was already feeling pessimistic about this violent world before I read about those newest torture victims, but this line in the Times made it even worse: “The Lord’s Resistance Army [of Uganda], a messianic rebel group, was exploring a new dimension of violence by building an army of abducted children and forcing them to burn down huts, slice off lips and pound newborn babies to death in wooden mortars, as though they were grinding grain. ‘I killed and killed and killed,’ said Christopher Oyet, an 18-year-old former rebel who was kidnapped at age 9. ‘Now, I am scared of myself.’”
Turns out the leader of that brutal messianic group, an apparently paranoid schizophrenic man given to religious delusion, now has 60 kidnapped child brides with him in the jungle and chances are good that he will be given amnesty in exchange for a fragile peace.
*a Ugandan ceremony
The number of civilian casualties? Fifty-one percent higher.
We refer to the deceased as bodies, I guess because the essence of what makes a person a person is so obviously gone and their slab of flesh is all that remains.
Reducing real people to their form also allows us to distance ourselves from the brutal way their lives ended, enables us to—at least for the moment—mask the knowledge that these were actual people who dreamed and cried and fucked and loved and held their kids on their laps in the morning before their screams melded with the sound of their torturer’s power drill.
Is this supposed to send a message to the world that Rumsfeld et al. will never control their region ot were they brutalized because they worship differently?
And has anyone mentioned the reality that religious groups in Iraq actually got along and shared positions of power before the US invasion?
Yes, Bush&Co are certainly liberating those poor downtrodden people who greeted us with flowers.
I was already feeling pessimistic about this violent world before I read about those newest torture victims, but this line in the Times made it even worse: “The Lord’s Resistance Army [of Uganda], a messianic rebel group, was exploring a new dimension of violence by building an army of abducted children and forcing them to burn down huts, slice off lips and pound newborn babies to death in wooden mortars, as though they were grinding grain. ‘I killed and killed and killed,’ said Christopher Oyet, an 18-year-old former rebel who was kidnapped at age 9. ‘Now, I am scared of myself.’”
Turns out the leader of that brutal messianic group, an apparently paranoid schizophrenic man given to religious delusion, now has 60 kidnapped child brides with him in the jungle and chances are good that he will be given amnesty in exchange for a fragile peace.
*a Ugandan ceremony
251. HUDOOD YOU LOVE?
From the Archives (September 2006) The UN reports that Iraqi civilians died at the rate of 100 a day in June and the New York Times reports that, in Baghdad alone, 90 tortured and executed bodies were found scattered around the city yesterday—just as Bush made his impassioned plea for the right to wiretap innocent-until-proven-guilty (in theory) people.
That’s one giant step backwards for basic human rights—I guess because he’s the decider.
What have we created? And why are people so goddamn complacent about having their rights stripped away before their very eyes?
... And yes, bomb supporters, I DO know that Saddam and his henchmen are charged with killing at least 50,000 Kurds before our soldiers ever stepped foot in Iraq.
So what’s your point? That the population was already decimated before we showed up expecting to be greeted with flowers anyway, so it’s okay to rape and blow away the rest of them to suit our imperial dreams?
Lordie lordie lordie. I keep thinking about the Iraqi brothers who ran my favorite lunch spot until shortly after 9/11 (when they had to close because sales dropped to almost zero). One of them was severely burned and I didn’t understand the significance of being Kurdish back then, so didn't think much about it, but now I wonder if he got burned in one of Saddam’s chemical-weapon strikes before he fled to the US?
Meanwhile, Karl Rove, the architect behind Bush&Co’s efforts to turn us into a police state, is apparently the son of Big Gay Al.
Yep, he was apparently quite close to his fag dad, but this didn't stop him from bashing gays in order to help Bush win the election. Of course, this self-professed agnostic had no trouble puckering his lips around Pat Robertson's flabby white ass either.
The hypocrite.
And how’s this for a compromise on the restructuring of Pakistan’s Hudood Ordinance? Rape victims will now be subject to the same punishment as women found guilty of adultery.
One real giant step into modernity, guys.
•
And finally, farewell Ann Richards. You were my rock star.
BEST-OF SPAM: Nothing could be prettier in pink. (Um. You obviously do not know me AT ALL.)
That’s one giant step backwards for basic human rights—I guess because he’s the decider.
What have we created? And why are people so goddamn complacent about having their rights stripped away before their very eyes?
... And yes, bomb supporters, I DO know that Saddam and his henchmen are charged with killing at least 50,000 Kurds before our soldiers ever stepped foot in Iraq.
So what’s your point? That the population was already decimated before we showed up expecting to be greeted with flowers anyway, so it’s okay to rape and blow away the rest of them to suit our imperial dreams?
Lordie lordie lordie. I keep thinking about the Iraqi brothers who ran my favorite lunch spot until shortly after 9/11 (when they had to close because sales dropped to almost zero). One of them was severely burned and I didn’t understand the significance of being Kurdish back then, so didn't think much about it, but now I wonder if he got burned in one of Saddam’s chemical-weapon strikes before he fled to the US?
Meanwhile, Karl Rove, the architect behind Bush&Co’s efforts to turn us into a police state, is apparently the son of Big Gay Al.
Yep, he was apparently quite close to his fag dad, but this didn't stop him from bashing gays in order to help Bush win the election. Of course, this self-professed agnostic had no trouble puckering his lips around Pat Robertson's flabby white ass either.
The hypocrite.
And how’s this for a compromise on the restructuring of Pakistan’s Hudood Ordinance? Rape victims will now be subject to the same punishment as women found guilty of adultery.
One real giant step into modernity, guys.
•
And finally, farewell Ann Richards. You were my rock star.
BEST-OF SPAM: Nothing could be prettier in pink. (Um. You obviously do not know me AT ALL.)
250. THE SPOILS OF WAR AND PEACE
From the Archives (September 2006) The papers are reporting the discovery of the bodies of 65 Iraqis who were beaten and/or tortured with power drills (!!!) before being executed with a bullet to the head.
Question: Does anyone suppose that Bush&Co’s torturers have anything to do with these victims’ demise and the upsurge in violence?
Let me offer a suggestion to ABC:
Why don’t you ask Katie Couric to read Charles Martin’s poetry about the disappeared and other victims of torture online?
Or choose your own poem. There are plenty of first-hand accounts of such violence in Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting.
And read it during prime time as penance for that misinformed Republinazi propaganda about how liberals are to blame for 9/11. Pronto.
LISTENING TO: Space Ghost, Coast to Coast
BEST OF SPAM: beware, fatigue can kill you. (I know. I know.)
Question: Does anyone suppose that Bush&Co’s torturers have anything to do with these victims’ demise and the upsurge in violence?
Let me offer a suggestion to ABC:
Why don’t you ask Katie Couric to read Charles Martin’s poetry about the disappeared and other victims of torture online?
Or choose your own poem. There are plenty of first-hand accounts of such violence in Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting.
And read it during prime time as penance for that misinformed Republinazi propaganda about how liberals are to blame for 9/11. Pronto.
LISTENING TO: Space Ghost, Coast to Coast
BEST OF SPAM: beware, fatigue can kill you. (I know. I know.)
249. FINAL MOMENTS
From the Archives (11 September 2006) I was going to include a poem to commemorate the five-year anniversary of the day when 2,749 people evaporated in a haze of collapsing beams and staircases and ceilings and falling bodies, but Garrison Keillor read a better one on NPR this morning, so I’ll post it at the end of this entry.
It’s Monday morning, September 11, and I am half awake. Punched the snooze bar for a solid 35 minutes this morning—a typical morning activity of mine that Danishgrrrl finds endlessly amusing—then finally crawled my ass out of bed and drove to work, thinking about what my bestgrrrl Lars said on 9/11: it’s a good thing that the terrorists didn’t realize that most New Yorkers don’t even make it into work before 10, because otherwise a whole lot of people who were waiting in line at Starbucks would have died too.
Thought about all those missing persons posters that covered the city too, and about the grandmother with pink rhinestone-studded sunglasses and a gold lame raincoat who died in the twin towers whose obituary Garrison Keillor described on the air.
And this all led to bad images of my little brother doing search and rescue in unbelievably hot, pitch-black blazing buildings where he crawls around on his hands and knees, searching for survivors.
There are so many awful ways that our lives could end, and so many awful ways that our country has ended Iraqi lives since the twin towers were attacked and I am feeling jaded and overwhelmed by the news right now.
All right. The poem:
It’s Monday morning, September 11, and I am half awake. Punched the snooze bar for a solid 35 minutes this morning—a typical morning activity of mine that Danishgrrrl finds endlessly amusing—then finally crawled my ass out of bed and drove to work, thinking about what my bestgrrrl Lars said on 9/11: it’s a good thing that the terrorists didn’t realize that most New Yorkers don’t even make it into work before 10, because otherwise a whole lot of people who were waiting in line at Starbucks would have died too.
Thought about all those missing persons posters that covered the city too, and about the grandmother with pink rhinestone-studded sunglasses and a gold lame raincoat who died in the twin towers whose obituary Garrison Keillor described on the air.
And this all led to bad images of my little brother doing search and rescue in unbelievably hot, pitch-black blazing buildings where he crawls around on his hands and knees, searching for survivors.
There are so many awful ways that our lives could end, and so many awful ways that our country has ended Iraqi lives since the twin towers were attacked and I am feeling jaded and overwhelmed by the news right now.
All right. The poem:
FOR THE FALLING MAN
by Annie Farnsworth
from Bodies of Water, Bodies of Light
I see you again and again
tumbling out of the sky,
in your slate-grey suit and pressed white shirt.
At first I thought you were debris
from the explosion, maybe gray plaster wall
or fuselage but then I realized
that people were leaping.
I know who you are, I know
there's more to you than just this image
on the news, this ragdoll plummeting—
I know you were someone's lover, husband,
daddy. Last night you read stories
to your children, tucked them in, then curled into sleep
next to your wife. Perhaps there was small
sleepy talk of the future. Then,
before your morning coffee had cooled
you'd come to this; a choice between fire
or falling.
How feeble these words, billowing
in this aftermath, how ineffectual
this utterance of sorrow. We can see plainly
it's hopeless, even as the words trail from our mouths
—but we can't help ourselves
how I wish
we could trade them for something
that could really have caught you.
248. TORTUROUS BROADCASTS
From the Archives. (September 2006) Well the boy emperor is no longer even denying the existence of the secret CIA prisons abroad.
How many years has it been now that he’s been holding these people without trial? Five? And now he’s moving 14 who are purported to be the “world’s most wanted Islamic extremists.”
(Um, except for bin Laden, whom you cannot seem to catch?)
Consider, for a moment, what is not said in this sentence: “Most of the detainees have been interviewed extensively and are believed to have little remaining intelligence value.”
Despite evidence of water-boarding, the boy emperor said “I want to be absolutely clear with our people, and the world. The United States does not torture. It’s against our laws, and it’s against our values. I have not authorized it and I will not authorize it.”
Nope. You just send your prisoners to offshore torture houses and avert your eyes while other people do it.
Interesting timing to announce the existence of 14 detainees purported to have orchestrated 9/11 just days before this somber anniversary and weeks after losing a case in which the government insisted that it is authorized to hold prisoners without trial for as long as they damn well feel like it.
(Oh and just 2 months before the midterm elections in which Republicans are floundering.)
Meanwhile Blair refuses to set a date when he will leave office.
Time to re-read Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, folks.
How many years has it been now that he’s been holding these people without trial? Five? And now he’s moving 14 who are purported to be the “world’s most wanted Islamic extremists.”
(Um, except for bin Laden, whom you cannot seem to catch?)
Consider, for a moment, what is not said in this sentence: “Most of the detainees have been interviewed extensively and are believed to have little remaining intelligence value.”
Despite evidence of water-boarding, the boy emperor said “I want to be absolutely clear with our people, and the world. The United States does not torture. It’s against our laws, and it’s against our values. I have not authorized it and I will not authorize it.”
Nope. You just send your prisoners to offshore torture houses and avert your eyes while other people do it.
Interesting timing to announce the existence of 14 detainees purported to have orchestrated 9/11 just days before this somber anniversary and weeks after losing a case in which the government insisted that it is authorized to hold prisoners without trial for as long as they damn well feel like it.
(Oh and just 2 months before the midterm elections in which Republicans are floundering.)
Meanwhile Blair refuses to set a date when he will leave office.
Time to re-read Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, folks.
247. ESPIONAGE
From the Archives. (September 2006) Have been catching up on Alternet stories and just read that investigators are following leads on two suspicious deaths in Europe.
Seems both deaths involve an informant who exposed illegal wiretapping that almost certainly involved the US.
The Italian informant revealed how the CIA and Italy’s CIA equivalent used information obtained from wiretapping to abduct an Egyptian cleric and fly him to Cairo to be tortured.
Surprise! The informant wound up dead of apparent suicide beside his car.
Then there’s the Greek software engineer who discovered an eavesdropping bug in his company’s system that allowed them to, among other things, listen in on the prime minister’s and other top officials’ cell phone calls.
Funny how this man who was looking forward to his upcoming marriage also died of an apparent suicide and what a big coincidence that his death coincided with the phone company’s destruction of evidence just before they reported to the prime minister that “unknown outsiders” had illegally tapped into top government officials calls.
READING: The Spirit Catches You Then You Fall Down
BEST-OF SPAM: hide peanut butter
Seems both deaths involve an informant who exposed illegal wiretapping that almost certainly involved the US.
The Italian informant revealed how the CIA and Italy’s CIA equivalent used information obtained from wiretapping to abduct an Egyptian cleric and fly him to Cairo to be tortured.
Surprise! The informant wound up dead of apparent suicide beside his car.
Then there’s the Greek software engineer who discovered an eavesdropping bug in his company’s system that allowed them to, among other things, listen in on the prime minister’s and other top officials’ cell phone calls.
Funny how this man who was looking forward to his upcoming marriage also died of an apparent suicide and what a big coincidence that his death coincided with the phone company’s destruction of evidence just before they reported to the prime minister that “unknown outsiders” had illegally tapped into top government officials calls.
READING: The Spirit Catches You Then You Fall Down
BEST-OF SPAM: hide peanut butter
246. CANCER NATION
From the Archives (September 2006) I figured out today that 18 people in my family or immediate circle of friends or work peers have been diagnosed with cancer in the last 8 years.
Can somebody tell me what in the hell is going on?
I mean, I appreciate the medical research that (sometimes) gets my loved ones to the other side of chemo and all the medical breakthroughs and all that, but what is going on? Is our environment poisoning us because we’ve filled it so full of chemicals? Are the hormones they've put in our food to blame? Or what?
And what’s the connection with obesity (if there is one), because I’m sorry, but I don’t buy the argument that larger portions at restaurants explains these statistics adequately.
Then there are those studies no one talks about that say that most people who are fat do not actually overeat and that some people who are fat are far healthier than thin people.
So what’s really making us grow?
And speaking of size, sales of wasteful SUVs are down 45 percent and sales of small cars are up 70 percent, thanks to the increasing gas prices.
Meanwhile, today’s Yahoo! headline is “GDP growth increases slightly in spring.”
I read that line and immediately thought about these 18 people who have been diagnosed with cancer.
Does anyone else consider it troubling that every time a person is diagnosed with cancer our GDP goes up?
Can somebody tell me what in the hell is going on?
I mean, I appreciate the medical research that (sometimes) gets my loved ones to the other side of chemo and all the medical breakthroughs and all that, but what is going on? Is our environment poisoning us because we’ve filled it so full of chemicals? Are the hormones they've put in our food to blame? Or what?
And what’s the connection with obesity (if there is one), because I’m sorry, but I don’t buy the argument that larger portions at restaurants explains these statistics adequately.
Then there are those studies no one talks about that say that most people who are fat do not actually overeat and that some people who are fat are far healthier than thin people.
So what’s really making us grow?
And speaking of size, sales of wasteful SUVs are down 45 percent and sales of small cars are up 70 percent, thanks to the increasing gas prices.
Meanwhile, today’s Yahoo! headline is “GDP growth increases slightly in spring.”
I read that line and immediately thought about these 18 people who have been diagnosed with cancer.
Does anyone else consider it troubling that every time a person is diagnosed with cancer our GDP goes up?
245. PRESIDENTIAL CHOREOGRAPHY
Since 9/11, military contractors like United Technologies, which makes Black Hawk helicopters, have seen their profits explode and their executives and top shareholders rake in windfall salaries. And as the rest of us shell out record prices for gas, oil executives claim that “we’re all in this together.” (Alternet)
From the Archives. (31 August 2006) And what about Haliburton and those $40 Cokes?
Spent the day trying not to barf from viewing all the carefully choreographed footage of GWB kissing up to shell-shocked NOLA residents in an obvious attempt to cast his abysmal leadership failures in a more favorable light.
I guess his advisors are finally worried that his pathetic approval ratings might adversely affect the GOP come election time.
Let’s think big picture though boys: this guy and his administration are adversely affecting history—at least until someone manages to add up all the subterfuge and Constitution-be-damned under-the-radar actions they’ve undertaken since 2000.
So what’s the administration’s spin on the 1,700 people who died and the hundreds of thousands of families that lost their homes as Shrub strummed his guitar?
Well, let’s see. This was an opportunity for Amurrrrricans to learn how to respond better to our public image er catastrophes because, damn it, you people actually documented the atrocities that this administration can no longer pretend didn’t happen.
That’s right. An opportunity. Just like getting booted out of the welfare system is an opportunity to find minimum-wage work as a toilet cleaner.
(Now forget what you saw on your TV sets, citizens, and get back to shopping.)
This administration has illustrated to the world what the politics of greed looks like and wouldn’t know what to do with Melvin McLeod’s observation that “the real substance in politics is in the heart, not the head” if it slapped them in their privileged faces.
Thich Nhat Hanh, profound Vietnamese priest, founder of the Engaged Buddhism movement, and prominent author, says that we must learn to see others’ suffering as our own, that this alone is how we can save our world in the twenty-first century.
•
So yeah. Today marks one year from the date when our boy emperor observed the destruction of Hurricane Katrina from the safety of Air Force One while the inhabitants drowned.
Meanwhile, Susie Sexpert has posted a blog entry entitled God Is My Sex Toy Co-Pilot.
Her message: zealots must stay in bed with Jesus/ Allah /Krishna as they copulate—which is, she observes, “a threeway you can’t ever quit.”
244. ALL WET
From the Archives. (August 2006). The following is a partial list of people who have expressed interest in purchasing my used car:
1.
A student named Zirui who has only driven cars in Asia and who sent an e-mail instructing me to drive to his house and show my car to him because he does not have a car and so cannot meet me.
(Uh. No.)
2.
An annoying Nextel sales guy named Alan who asked me to meet him in front of the Brookstone store at the mall at 3 PM. So, instead of going to the water park with Danishgrrrl and her kids to cool off on one of the hottest days of the year, I stood in the blistering sun for 20 fucking minutes before deciding that Alan was a no show.
Then the guy actually had the audacity to e-mail me to ask why I didn’t show up. I replied that I waited 20 minutes for him and he wrote back to say “I assumed u would call me when u got to the mall so never left the kiosk where I was waiting inside. Is car still 4 sale?”
I didn’t reply because I don’t want this stupid ass driving my car.
3.
The freshman who offered me $3,000 less than asking price because “It’s all I have,” assuming, I guess that I am running a charity for students with all of my riches.
4.
And, finally there’s the smart-ass MBA student who offered $1,500 less than asking price sight unseen. When I told him I am not interested in selling my car for $1,500 under Blue Book value, he replied “but I have an advantage. I can make a decision quickly.”
Oh I bet you can, Sugarpants. And let me guess: your biz-school prof told you to always state your so-called advantage in negotiating. But get this: MOST people can make a decision quickly if someone agrees to sell them a cute little car for $1,500 under Blue Book value.
My reply? “Enjoy driving a used Yugo, slick, since that’s all you’ll be able get for that piddling amount.”
•
And now, for something entirely different:
If I forget, for a moment, that unfortunate angel dust episode or all those joys of being a juvenile delinquent on probation or that time I got my backside shot full of rock salt because a gardener caught me trespassing on private property or that time I hit my Algebra teacher full in the chest with a trash can after she was an ass to me or that time the cops set up a road block to stop my speeding Camaro but, instead of stopping, I put the car into a skid and slid right around them and kept on going or that time I outran a highway patrol car on a red clay road in the same blue Camaro, tossing out beer cans frantically, or any number of other episodes from my misspent youth, then I could say that Annie Proulx is wilder than me based on this summary from today’s Writer’s Digest:
1.
A student named Zirui who has only driven cars in Asia and who sent an e-mail instructing me to drive to his house and show my car to him because he does not have a car and so cannot meet me.
(Uh. No.)
2.
An annoying Nextel sales guy named Alan who asked me to meet him in front of the Brookstone store at the mall at 3 PM. So, instead of going to the water park with Danishgrrrl and her kids to cool off on one of the hottest days of the year, I stood in the blistering sun for 20 fucking minutes before deciding that Alan was a no show.
Then the guy actually had the audacity to e-mail me to ask why I didn’t show up. I replied that I waited 20 minutes for him and he wrote back to say “I assumed u would call me when u got to the mall so never left the kiosk where I was waiting inside. Is car still 4 sale?”
I didn’t reply because I don’t want this stupid ass driving my car.
3.
The freshman who offered me $3,000 less than asking price because “It’s all I have,” assuming, I guess that I am running a charity for students with all of my riches.
4.
And, finally there’s the smart-ass MBA student who offered $1,500 less than asking price sight unseen. When I told him I am not interested in selling my car for $1,500 under Blue Book value, he replied “but I have an advantage. I can make a decision quickly.”
Oh I bet you can, Sugarpants. And let me guess: your biz-school prof told you to always state your so-called advantage in negotiating. But get this: MOST people can make a decision quickly if someone agrees to sell them a cute little car for $1,500 under Blue Book value.
My reply? “Enjoy driving a used Yugo, slick, since that’s all you’ll be able get for that piddling amount.”
•
And now, for something entirely different:
If I forget, for a moment, that unfortunate angel dust episode or all those joys of being a juvenile delinquent on probation or that time I got my backside shot full of rock salt because a gardener caught me trespassing on private property or that time I hit my Algebra teacher full in the chest with a trash can after she was an ass to me or that time the cops set up a road block to stop my speeding Camaro but, instead of stopping, I put the car into a skid and slid right around them and kept on going or that time I outran a highway patrol car on a red clay road in the same blue Camaro, tossing out beer cans frantically, or any number of other episodes from my misspent youth, then I could say that Annie Proulx is wilder than me based on this summary from today’s Writer’s Digest:
She had a reckless past: She tried to leap over a barbed-wire fence and didn’t make it; she ran away through the rain on the eve of her wedding and found herself lying on a railroad bridge in front of an oncoming train; she got caught in a thunderstorm on her third flying lesson; she threw a knife at someone she thought she hated; she swam across a lake while she was eight months pregnant; she was speeding and rolled a car late one night.
Brokeback Mountain ain’t so bad either.
And, finally, it’s 45 minutes since I started this entry, which means that, in the time I've spent typing, our country has spent another $8,388,333.50 on the war in Iraq.
BEST-OF SPAM SUBJECT LINES: kill the pain or it will kill you
243. ROLLOVER AND PLAY DEAD
From the Archives. (August 2006) Yahoo! headlines are bizarre today. Besides the never-ending updates about the arrest of a skinny teacher who confesses to raping and killing JonBenet Ramsey—and could someone tell me how anyone can rape a six year old yet claim to love her?—there’s Breast implants linked to suicide, not cancer.
I could have told them that augmenting your body to suit cultural whims doesn’t buy happiness.
Then there’s the pathetic How much Paris Hilton is too much? (which, incidentally, manages to give us even more Paris Hilton).
The good news, of course, is that a judge called a halt to Bush&Co’s illegal wiretapping program.
But an even bigger headline, if you’re LGBT—and one that will never make Yahoo!’s headlines—is that Bush signed the Pension Protection Act into law today.
One special right that this country has long extended exclusively to heterosexual couples is the right to rollover retirement plans when a partner dies. Before today though, surviving LGBT partners were forced to withdraw the lump sum and then pay major penalties.
Now the non-spousal rollover provision extends the same right to “spousal equivalents.”
Another special right that has long been extended exclusively to heterosexual couples is the right to withdraw funds from your partner’s retirement fund if you’re faced with medical or financial emergencies.
Example: say my partner, Homo Schiavo, has 300 thousand dollars in a 401(k) and is in a horrible accident that has left her in a coma and she remains in a coma for years while I am left to pay the mortgage plus all those medical bills alone.
Well, now I can withdraw these funds from her retirement account to help cover her medical expenses.
That one is covered in the Hardship Distribution provision.
Not much else to report, but that’s good enough news for now.
I could have told them that augmenting your body to suit cultural whims doesn’t buy happiness.
Then there’s the pathetic How much Paris Hilton is too much? (which, incidentally, manages to give us even more Paris Hilton).
The good news, of course, is that a judge called a halt to Bush&Co’s illegal wiretapping program.
But an even bigger headline, if you’re LGBT—and one that will never make Yahoo!’s headlines—is that Bush signed the Pension Protection Act into law today.
One special right that this country has long extended exclusively to heterosexual couples is the right to rollover retirement plans when a partner dies. Before today though, surviving LGBT partners were forced to withdraw the lump sum and then pay major penalties.
Now the non-spousal rollover provision extends the same right to “spousal equivalents.”
Another special right that has long been extended exclusively to heterosexual couples is the right to withdraw funds from your partner’s retirement fund if you’re faced with medical or financial emergencies.
Example: say my partner, Homo Schiavo, has 300 thousand dollars in a 401(k) and is in a horrible accident that has left her in a coma and she remains in a coma for years while I am left to pay the mortgage plus all those medical bills alone.
Well, now I can withdraw these funds from her retirement account to help cover her medical expenses.
That one is covered in the Hardship Distribution provision.
Not much else to report, but that’s good enough news for now.
242. STATES RIGHTS, HUMAN RIGHTS, THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT, & LEMON LAWS
From the Archives. (August 2006) Just finished reading Tracy Kidder’s Mountains beyond Mountains, which my reading group will discuss tomorrow night.
Kidder writes about Dr. Paul Farmer, a Harvard-trained physician who has devoted his life to curing infectious diseases in the poorest part of Haiti and other vulnerable areas. A prescient insightful enlightening book about a man with a self-described “hermeneutic of generosity.”
Farmer, an admirer of liberation theology (although he ultimately rejects all ologys), observes that “We should all be criticizing the excesses of the powerful, if we can demonstrate so readily that these excesses hurt the poor and vulnerable.”
He asks
Kidder writes about Dr. Paul Farmer, a Harvard-trained physician who has devoted his life to curing infectious diseases in the poorest part of Haiti and other vulnerable areas. A prescient insightful enlightening book about a man with a self-described “hermeneutic of generosity.”
Farmer, an admirer of liberation theology (although he ultimately rejects all ologys), observes that “We should all be criticizing the excesses of the powerful, if we can demonstrate so readily that these excesses hurt the poor and vulnerable.”
He asks
What happens when the destitute in Guatemala, El Salvador, Haiti, wherever, are moved by a rereading of the Gospels to stand up for what is theirs, to reclaim what was theirs and was taken away, to ask only that they enjoy decent poverty rather than the misery we see here every day in Haiti? We know the answer to that question, because we are digging up their bodies in Guatemala.
He also notes that “All the great religious traditions of the world say, Love thy neighbor as thyself. My answer is, I’m sorry, I can’t, but I’m gonna keep on trying.”
I didn’t realize until reading this book that human-rights abuses of previous American prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay were deemed unconstitutional way back in 1993, after US soldiers quarantined and abused HIV-positive Haitians there.
•
Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking about how state’s rights rears its ugly head whenever bigots object to being told that the law will no longer sanction their bigotry.
Take 1868, for instance. This is when the federal government required all states to eliminate slavery and swear allegiance to an American Union.
Now some southerners will argue till the bacon grease and turnip juice seep out of their very pores that the Civil War was a “war of Northern aggression” that was never about slavery at all, but the obvious truth of the matter is that racists reacted to this ruling by asserting state’s rights and insisting that they did not have to abide by objectionable federal laws.
They did the same during integration, arguing that Brown should not be forced on states that oppose integration.
Today, like-minded South Dakotans assert that they can declare abortion illegal even though federal law recognizes the legality of this clinical procedure.
And I can’t even keep track anymore of how many states are scrambling to pass so-called marriage protection legislation that sanctions the withholding of benefits to a minority of our population.
(And then there are the states that fund stem-cell research and living wages.)
I listened to Schoolhouse Rock as a kid and so know that the preamble to our constitution states that it exists to form a more perfect union, establish justice and insure domestic tranquility.
No mention of God in there, but article 1, section 9 makes it clear that no bill of attainders may be passed.
Tech. Law Journal defines this as “a legislative act that singles out an individual or group for punishment without a trial.”
Now, I know this is my own unusual take on this definition and I know I am not a lawyer but, um, if those anti-inclusive-marriage laws don’t single out individuals or groups for selective punishment/denial of benefits, then I don’t know what does.
James Madison (Federalist No. 44, 1788) wrote that
Bills of attainder ... are contrary to the principles of the social compact, and to every principle of sound legislation ... The sober people of America are weary of fluctuating policy ... They have seen with regret and indignation that sudden changes and legislative interferences, in cases affecting personal rights, become jobs in the hands of enterprising and influential [um, Christianists?] and snares to the more-industrious and less-informed part of the community.
Anyway, I was curious and checked out my state’s preamble. Yes I know I am smack dab in the Bible Belt, but was still surprised by how often the thing endorses Christianity.
So here you go:
We, the people, grateful to Almighty God, the Sovereign Ruler of Nations, for the preservation of the American Union and the existence of our civil, political and religious liberties, and acknowledging our dependence upon Him for the continuance of those blessings to us and our posterity, do, for the more certain security thereof and for the better government of this State, ordain and establish this Constitution.
I am, frankly, appalled.
LISTENING TO: Me’shell N’Degéocello covering Dolly’s Two Doors Down
SANG IN SHOWER: Gillian Welch’s Wind and Rain
BEST-OF SPAM SUBJECT LINE: For Carders, Spammers, Hackers, PPC cheaters, Child Porn webmasters, Doorway makers, Botnet owners.
Um, are these the virtual seven dwarfs?
241. STANDOFF AT THE TV STATION
From the Archives. (August 2006) As Mel Gibson begs forgiveness from the Jews he has insulted yet again and Rumsfeld continues to demonstrate just how clueless he really is, 500 women have taken control of a state-run TV station in Oaxaca, Mexico, and are broadcasting a video showing cops kicking protesters out of the town’s main square.
The women are banging spoons against pots and pans to draw attention to their belief that Gov. Ulises Ruiz rigged the election and uses violence to repress his opposition.
Over a thousand supporters are gathered outside the station to show their support for these women so, as Alternet notes, maybe the revolution will be televised after all.
Meanwhile, Kansas school board results suggest that the Christianist plan to infiltrate our government in order to rewrite the laws may only be successful as a short-term strategy, since 5 of the 10 anti-evolutionists who passed the jaw-dropping Kansas Standards have now gone the way of the dinosaur, even as our theocratic White House continues to align itself with the Zionists who want the US and Israel to attack Iran in order to “fulfill God’s plan for both Israel and the West.”
This will, they believe, bring about the second coming of their mythic Christ child.
Oh fucking please.
And it sure doesn’t help that some freak minister has written a bestseller on this topic that over 700,000 Americans have already purchased.
My question is, why are these religious centers of indoctrination even enjoying tax-free status?
Meanwhile, Rumsfeld testified that, if we leave Iraq prematurely, “the enemy would tell us to leave Afghanistan and then withdraw from the Middle East. And if we left the Middle East, they’d order us and all those who don’t share their militant ideology to leave what they call the occupied Muslim lands from Spain to the Philippines” and then, according to this outdated line of reasoning, our country would be forced “to make a stand nearer home.”
As the NYT editors point out,
The women are banging spoons against pots and pans to draw attention to their belief that Gov. Ulises Ruiz rigged the election and uses violence to repress his opposition.
Over a thousand supporters are gathered outside the station to show their support for these women so, as Alternet notes, maybe the revolution will be televised after all.
Meanwhile, Kansas school board results suggest that the Christianist plan to infiltrate our government in order to rewrite the laws may only be successful as a short-term strategy, since 5 of the 10 anti-evolutionists who passed the jaw-dropping Kansas Standards have now gone the way of the dinosaur, even as our theocratic White House continues to align itself with the Zionists who want the US and Israel to attack Iran in order to “fulfill God’s plan for both Israel and the West.”
This will, they believe, bring about the second coming of their mythic Christ child.
Oh fucking please.
And it sure doesn’t help that some freak minister has written a bestseller on this topic that over 700,000 Americans have already purchased.
My question is, why are these religious centers of indoctrination even enjoying tax-free status?
Meanwhile, Rumsfeld testified that, if we leave Iraq prematurely, “the enemy would tell us to leave Afghanistan and then withdraw from the Middle East. And if we left the Middle East, they’d order us and all those who don’t share their militant ideology to leave what they call the occupied Muslim lands from Spain to the Philippines” and then, according to this outdated line of reasoning, our country would be forced “to make a stand nearer home.”
As the NYT editors point out,
no one in charge of American foreign affairs has talked like that in decades. After Vietnam, of course, the communist empire did not swarm all over Asia as predicted; it tottered and collapsed. And the new "enemy" that Mr. Rumsfeld is worried about is not a worldwide conspiracy but a collection of disparate political and religious groups, now united mainly by American action in Iraq.
I swear, it really is the Crusades all over again.
They want to send our poverty-stricken eighteen-year-olds to die in their Christianist crusades.
LISTENING TO: Dolly’s gorgeous cover of “Seven Bridges Road” from her Little Sparrow CD
240. ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS
From the Archives (1 August 2006) “End of life issues are very sensitive, especially if you are the person whose end of life we are talking about.” So said Charles Foti Jr., New Orleans attorney general and obvious opponent of the Schiavo decision.
Foti had a doctor and two nurses arrested on murder charges this week for allegedly euthanizing several elderly and acutely ill patients who were enduring their third day of 100+° post-hurricane conditions in a hospital with no electricity and little remaining food or medical supplies.
These women stayed on duty when the hospital administrators and medical personnel evacuated to higher ground and put themselves in harm’s way for their patients (which is more than anyone can say for our president who strummed his guitar as the ciy drowned).
Foti aparently believes that the doctor should have let those patients die a slow overheated death instead of allegedly putting them out of their misery (which sounds oh so humane to me).
I know. I know. Some of you will say that the good doctor could have called on Bill Frist to cure those patients via video. Or asked Pat Robertson to pray for their rescue. Or called a few legislators in for photo ops. But, hey, seems to me they did what they could in obscene circumstances.
My question is, why isn’t Foti charging Bush&Co with murder?
After all, they are the ones whose incompetence and blatant disregard for survivors resulted in these people having no choice but to fend for themselves and make such hard choices.
And come on. This ain’t like those nursing home owners who left those 34 patients to drown. These women stayed at the hospital after the calls to evacuate because they cared about their patients.
Foti accuses these women of “acting like God,” which I guess tells us just how much his Christianist beliefs color his misuse of power.
•
Meanwhile, Danishgrrrl just called from her ex-mother-in-law’s place in Tacoma to say a mentally ill Muslim man shot five Jewish people at a synogogue because he’s “angry at Jews and the United States.”
Religion kills, man.
•
Visited Jamie last night after her hysterectomy. She’s uncomfortable and wants to be at her own place (which is, unfortunately, up 3 flights of stairs) instead of at her cranky ex’s house, but is stuck there till at least this weekend. She’s got staples in her stomach and is tired of waiting for more detailed biopsy results.
Right now, the oncologist says she may only need radiation treatments though.
I guess, if there’s any good news in all this, it’s that she will be away from her stinky work place for at least 6 weeks.
LISTENING TO: Gossip’s “Listen Up,” (the iTunes music store free download of the week). Before that, I was listening to Neil Young’s “Bird” When you see me fly away without you. ... feathers fall around you and show you the way to go. It’s ooooooover.....
Foti had a doctor and two nurses arrested on murder charges this week for allegedly euthanizing several elderly and acutely ill patients who were enduring their third day of 100+° post-hurricane conditions in a hospital with no electricity and little remaining food or medical supplies.
These women stayed on duty when the hospital administrators and medical personnel evacuated to higher ground and put themselves in harm’s way for their patients (which is more than anyone can say for our president who strummed his guitar as the ciy drowned).
Foti aparently believes that the doctor should have let those patients die a slow overheated death instead of allegedly putting them out of their misery (which sounds oh so humane to me).
I know. I know. Some of you will say that the good doctor could have called on Bill Frist to cure those patients via video. Or asked Pat Robertson to pray for their rescue. Or called a few legislators in for photo ops. But, hey, seems to me they did what they could in obscene circumstances.
My question is, why isn’t Foti charging Bush&Co with murder?
After all, they are the ones whose incompetence and blatant disregard for survivors resulted in these people having no choice but to fend for themselves and make such hard choices.
And come on. This ain’t like those nursing home owners who left those 34 patients to drown. These women stayed at the hospital after the calls to evacuate because they cared about their patients.
Foti accuses these women of “acting like God,” which I guess tells us just how much his Christianist beliefs color his misuse of power.
•
Meanwhile, Danishgrrrl just called from her ex-mother-in-law’s place in Tacoma to say a mentally ill Muslim man shot five Jewish people at a synogogue because he’s “angry at Jews and the United States.”
Religion kills, man.
•
Visited Jamie last night after her hysterectomy. She’s uncomfortable and wants to be at her own place (which is, unfortunately, up 3 flights of stairs) instead of at her cranky ex’s house, but is stuck there till at least this weekend. She’s got staples in her stomach and is tired of waiting for more detailed biopsy results.
Right now, the oncologist says she may only need radiation treatments though.
I guess, if there’s any good news in all this, it’s that she will be away from her stinky work place for at least 6 weeks.
LISTENING TO: Gossip’s “Listen Up,” (the iTunes music store free download of the week). Before that, I was listening to Neil Young’s “Bird” When you see me fly away without you. ... feathers fall around you and show you the way to go. It’s ooooooover.....
239. NOTHING BUT A BUNCH OF AMISH BUGGIES HERE, FOLKS
We are nothing but a bunch of Amish buggies and tractors out here. No one would care. (Brian Lehman, whose business, Amish City Popcorn, is on a government list of potential terror targets, as quoted in the New York Times)
From the Archives. (31 July 2006) Hmm. Wonder if his business is located beside a secret missile silo?
It’s Monday, 24 July 2006, and I am in the oh so progressive state of South Carolina, home of confederate flags and mustard-based barbecue and “100% Redneck” T-shirts and “Save the Males” bumperstickers and fundamentalist Baptist schools that place razor-wire atop their fences in an effort to keep the wicked out.
Or maybe it’s there to keep the Baptists’ rebellious children in; otherwise they might be smart like me and make a fast escape from this hell hole.
The place feels so hopeless and Faulknerian and sad to me but, at the same time, I’m hyperaware of how many of “God’s good people” here are eager to pass Bible-based laws that would see me stoned.
(Monday) And now I’m in the small Missouri town of St. Robert with my niece, hanging out in a nearly empty cinderblock Budget Inn behind a Waffle House and gas station where my sister reserved a room. We are currently the only occupied room on the back wing and our door faces an abandoned carwash and Electra’s, a seedy topless bar that is frequented by soldiers.
Great.
I’ll write more later but, right now we have to go pick my little sister up at her Army base.
(Tuesday night) Spent last night at Ft. Leonard Wood, where my niece was reunited with her soldier mother, who let her eat four helpings of frosted yellow cake as she listened to her mother explain that she joined the Army because she couldn’t find another way for the two of them to have a better future.
Hope it’s not at too high a price ...
... and yes I did manage to hold my tongue during the prayer invoking God’s favoritism of US troops because, frankly, if there is a god, then I hope she is powerful enough to keep my little sister out of harm’s way (this harm including the all-American soldiers who are raping their female peers with alarming regularity over in Iraq).
My biggest impression of the graduation banquet was that these rows and rows of newly minted soldiers are far too young to be heading off to war. And no big surprise that they are mostly from the poorest states in our union (and mostly from the deep south).
We watched jingoistic slide shows in which the soldiers demonstrated how to use an overstuffed Q-Tip-looking thing to fight another soldier; how to throw a rope over a wall and climb up the knots; how to slide on your stomach through a mud puddle; how to shout “Yes drill sergeant!” on queue and do whatever your drill sergeant tells you to do just because he says to do it.
Hard to see how this prepares anyone for real-time battle, much less for the sight of the dismembered arms and legs that are supposed to prove our country’s superpower status.
I managed to hold my tongue during these slide shows, even though they might as well have been campaign footage for the president.
I didn’t barf when they played a country song about the Statue of Liberty turning her welcoming hand into a fist after 9/11 so she could kick some Iraqi ass either.
Nor did I point out that the suicide bombers were not even Iraqi and that those weapons of mass destruction are still missing.
Then, finally, all the flag-waving was over and my sister was officially on leave for 10 days, so we piled her duffel bags into the rental car and went swimming at the seedy cinderblock hotel.
Tomorrow we rise at 5 AM and drive 3 hours to St. Louis—a city that is experiencing power outages—on our trek back to South Carolina.
And then I high-tail it out of there as fast as my lesbian “life style” legs will carry me.
BEST-OF SPAM: We never repent of having eaten too little.
238. WILL THE REAL JESUS CHRONICLERS PLEASE STAND UP?
From the Archives (July 2006) I just read that Dan Brown of Da Vinci Code fame claims that 80 gospels vied for inclusion in the New Testament canon.
Theologians say that only a few dozen gospels didn’t make it in (including The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which features a five-year-old boytoy Jesus making likenesses of sparrows from mud and bringing them to life).
Brown claims that thousands of Jesus fans recorded these neglected events about Jesus's life, but that’d be hard to believe, considering the low literacy rate among his followers.
SANG IN SHOWER: Tracy Droch’s “Did Jesus Have a Baby Sister?”
Theologians say that only a few dozen gospels didn’t make it in (including The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which features a five-year-old boytoy Jesus making likenesses of sparrows from mud and bringing them to life).
Brown claims that thousands of Jesus fans recorded these neglected events about Jesus's life, but that’d be hard to believe, considering the low literacy rate among his followers.
SANG IN SHOWER: Tracy Droch’s “Did Jesus Have a Baby Sister?”
237. WHAT STATE INTERESTS?
No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. (Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution)
From the Archives (21 July 2006) Last month Georgia courts ruled that the peach state can continue to discriminate against a small portion of our citizenry by extending over one thousand special rights to the majority while denying these same rights to minority homosexuals who wish to declare their love publicly and enjoy the same responsibilities and benefits of wedded um bliss that hetero citizens purport to enjoy.
New York courts basically ruled the same, only their reasoning goes that het marriages are so fragile that the state must use special rights to protect the hets from the spooky homos who so threaten their conjugal bliss.
This is akin to the tactic bishops use to downplay the fact that the priests are raping children. You know, just shift the blame to the homosexuals (even though pedophilia is not the same thing).
Which leads me to ask, if breeders’ marriages are so freaking fragile, then why doesn’t the state require them to attend remedial marriage classes instead of legalizing discrimination? Aren’t their children worth this expenditure of public funds or are children only valuable to the state before they’re born?
And lookie! Tennessee and Nebraska courts have legalized discriminatory and punitive bans on gay marriage now too, and even the snow-loving Easterners are declining to block a vote to ban queer marriage in the only state where gay marriage is currently legal.
So let’s examine the facts.
A full 70 percent of Nebraskans saw fit to deny their homosexual neighbors the equal rights guaranteed them by the laws of this land. AND they voted to deny state employees domestic-partner benefits and visitation rights too.
Is this equal protection?
Federal District Court Judge Joseph Bataillon states the obvious when he says that Nebraska’s amendment goes
far beyond merely defining marriage as between a man and a woman…. It imposes significant burdens on both the expressive and intimate associational rights [of gay men and lesbians] and creates a significant barrier to the plaintiffs’ right to petition or to participate in the political process.
He also states the obvious when he suggests that the amendment “was motivated, to some extent, by either irrational fear of or animus toward gays and lesbians.”
Seems this Court of Appeals is comprised not of public officials who uphold the law but instead by bigots willing to rule unanimously that “laws limiting the state-recognized institution of marriage to heterosexual couples are rationally related to legitimate state interests and therefore do not violate the Constitution of the United States.”
Uh would that be the state’s interest in upholding bigotry and propping up failed marriages to maintain the illusion of the happy suburban family that most American families don’t match in the first place?
Define these interests, you gentle um men in judicial dresses.
The New York Times says that Nebraska’s drastic ban is most likely headed to the Supreme Court. Does this inspire anyone to believe that nondiscrimination will be upheld in the land of the free and the home of the cappuccinoed?
*
Meanwhile, I have a question: Do the good folks at Alternet really believe that they come off as anything other than a bunch of privileged self-congratulatory East Coast smartasses when they post two headlines in one week as profound as "Is Israel Dumb?" and "Is Bush an Imbecile?"
Howzabout "Does Name-Calling Create Democracy?" or "Name-Calling: The Lazy Journalist’s Friend,” guys?
You might consider the impression you’re creating in between snickering at your frat-boy cleverness.
*
Meanwhile I packed Danishgrrrl and her 3 kids into a Seattle-bound plane bright and early this morning and won’t see them for 2 long weeks. The kids will visit with various relatives while Danishgrrl and her sister on Mercer Island move their father into an assistant living facility.
It sucks to get old and feeble.
236. YOUR PERSONAL STORAGE STORY
From the Archives (12 July 2006) Ponder, if you will, the reality that Crate and Barrel paid a copy writer buttloads of money to pen the headline Customize your own personal storage story.
Yes folks, your life’s narrative will be defined not by your deeds or by whom you love but by the woodlike objects that you purchase to put your shit in.
Maybe you’re more jaded than I am and have already retorted, Well, writergrrrl, why does this surprise you? After all, we live in a culture in which the phrase “the clothes make the man” is commonplace and cosmetic surgery abounds.
And the reality is that, today, even writergrrrl is focusing on consumer produces as the torture scandal unfolds.
Remember how my German lemon of a car developed a gas leak and had to be towed to the garage way back on 30 June? Well, I finally got my car back on 11 July and am now $820 poorer (and that’s without paying the additional $1,300 to repair my busted AC).
And that, my friends, is why I am currently car shopping.
Yes folks, your life’s narrative will be defined not by your deeds or by whom you love but by the woodlike objects that you purchase to put your shit in.
Maybe you’re more jaded than I am and have already retorted, Well, writergrrrl, why does this surprise you? After all, we live in a culture in which the phrase “the clothes make the man” is commonplace and cosmetic surgery abounds.
And the reality is that, today, even writergrrrl is focusing on consumer produces as the torture scandal unfolds.
Remember how my German lemon of a car developed a gas leak and had to be towed to the garage way back on 30 June? Well, I finally got my car back on 11 July and am now $820 poorer (and that’s without paying the additional $1,300 to repair my busted AC).
And that, my friends, is why I am currently car shopping.
235. DE MINIMIS NON CURAT LEX
From the Archives. (6 July 2006) My title, roughly translated, means the law doesn’t bother with trifles.
It does, however, consider torture chambers and journalistic censorship and phone tapping to be trifling, if you take the Boy Emperor’s word for it.
Meanwhile, his popularity is, understandably, waning.
If I were emperorgrrrl, I would make Ariel Dorfman and Garcia Lorca and Garcia Márquez and Neruda and Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness required reading and each and every citizen would have to discuss the characteristics of dictatorships before they could change the channel to American Idol.
Still, the Supreme Court did finally and unanimously agree that forklift operator Sheila White was discriminated against because she is a woman—and after only 9 years of this case winding its way through the system—so, who knows, maybe torture will be ruled against (again) in the end too.
•
I’m taking a break before cooking some wild mushroom risotto and settling in to watch Snow Falling on Cedars with Danishgrrl. Cinnamon the cockatiel is bang bang banging on her bell—let me out!—as Danishgrrrl sits beside me, researching assisted-living facilities for her father.
We spent July 4 helping a friend get her house ready for the market, then hung out with Jamie and her daughter and some other pals at the pool. Got home just in time to watch the NYC fireworks on TV (where, somewhere in the crowd, Danishgrrrl’s three kids were smiling).
We were supposed to go to the beach today but it’s pouring, so we went vintage clothes shopping instead and boy did I find the perfect pair of bright red cowgrrrl boots! I pulled them on and the shop owner and Danishgrrrl both said, simultaneously, those were MADE for you, Writergrrl! So now I’m grinning every time I think about them.
•
Meanwhile I read today that the video game Border Patrol, a web favorite, features Mexican drug dealers and pregnant women and mariachi dudes who cross the border in an attempt to reach the welfare office ... but only if the players don’t shoot them first.
Let’s take a guess which party endorses this game.
So tomorrow I must return to my sad work reality. It’s been a wonderful 3 days off and I’ve managed to not even think about the fact that I’m carless or how much this most recent repair will cost. Have also been looking around, trying to imagine another car I would like as much as my cute little lemon.
LISTENING TO: Danishgrrrl’s dog snore
READING: Susie Bright, who just pointed out that a perineal massage is nothing more than fist-fucking
SANG IN SHOWER: Phoebe Snow’s “There’s A Boat That’s Leaving Soon for New York, Cooooooome with me....”
It does, however, consider torture chambers and journalistic censorship and phone tapping to be trifling, if you take the Boy Emperor’s word for it.
Meanwhile, his popularity is, understandably, waning.
If I were emperorgrrrl, I would make Ariel Dorfman and Garcia Lorca and Garcia Márquez and Neruda and Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness required reading and each and every citizen would have to discuss the characteristics of dictatorships before they could change the channel to American Idol.
Still, the Supreme Court did finally and unanimously agree that forklift operator Sheila White was discriminated against because she is a woman—and after only 9 years of this case winding its way through the system—so, who knows, maybe torture will be ruled against (again) in the end too.
•
I’m taking a break before cooking some wild mushroom risotto and settling in to watch Snow Falling on Cedars with Danishgrrl. Cinnamon the cockatiel is bang bang banging on her bell—let me out!—as Danishgrrrl sits beside me, researching assisted-living facilities for her father.
We spent July 4 helping a friend get her house ready for the market, then hung out with Jamie and her daughter and some other pals at the pool. Got home just in time to watch the NYC fireworks on TV (where, somewhere in the crowd, Danishgrrrl’s three kids were smiling).
We were supposed to go to the beach today but it’s pouring, so we went vintage clothes shopping instead and boy did I find the perfect pair of bright red cowgrrrl boots! I pulled them on and the shop owner and Danishgrrrl both said, simultaneously, those were MADE for you, Writergrrl! So now I’m grinning every time I think about them.
•
Meanwhile I read today that the video game Border Patrol, a web favorite, features Mexican drug dealers and pregnant women and mariachi dudes who cross the border in an attempt to reach the welfare office ... but only if the players don’t shoot them first.
Let’s take a guess which party endorses this game.
So tomorrow I must return to my sad work reality. It’s been a wonderful 3 days off and I’ve managed to not even think about the fact that I’m carless or how much this most recent repair will cost. Have also been looking around, trying to imagine another car I would like as much as my cute little lemon.
LISTENING TO: Danishgrrrl’s dog snore
READING: Susie Bright, who just pointed out that a perineal massage is nothing more than fist-fucking
SANG IN SHOWER: Phoebe Snow’s “There’s A Boat That’s Leaving Soon for New York, Cooooooome with me....”
234. AFTER AN ABSENCE
234. From the Archives (June 2006)
After an Absence
by Linda Pastan
After an absence that was no one's fault
we are shy with each other,
and our words seem younger than we are,
as if we must return to the time we met
and work ourselves back to the present,
the way you never read a story
from the place you stopped
but always start each book all over again.
Perhaps we should have stayed
tied like mountain climbers
by the safe cord of the phone,
its dial our own small prayer wheel,
our voices less ghostly across the miles,
less awkward than they are now.
I had forgotten the grey in your curls,
that splash of winter over your face,
remembering the younger man
you used to be.
And I feel myself turn old and ordinary,
having to think again of food for supper,
the animals to be tended, the whole riptide
of daily life hidden but perilous
pulling both of us under so fast.
I have dreamed of our bed
as if it were a shore where we would be washed up,
not this striped mattress
we must cover with sheets. I had forgotten
all the old business between us,
like mail unanswered so long that silence
becomes eloquent, a message of its own.
I had even forgotten how married love
is a territory more mysterious
the more it is explored, like one of those terrains
you read about, a garden in the desert
where you stoop to drink, never knowing
if your mouth will fill with water or sand.
I’ve been reading about a Massachusetts school for the disabled that allegedly delivers electric shocks to students if they cuss and nag and dress like slobs. The Rotenberg Center says that about half of its population of around 150 incarcerated youth require this “aversive therapy” and defends this practice by noting that autistic and disabled students sometimes bite themselves and slam their heads against walls so violently that they could blind themselves—um, perhaps because the people who are supposed to be caring for them are, instead, operating a goddamn Skinner box and using public funds to shock them?
I’m looking forward to Danishgrrl’s return so I can ask her all about the other treatments in use for autistic and disabled kids.
Meanwhile, I had to have my lemon of a car towed to the mechanic yesterday because its latest in a long series of problems is a major gas leak that involves the fuel pump and cracking plastic gas line fittings and possibly the gas tank needing to be replaced and, well, one good tossed cigarette or splash of gasoline on my exhaust system could have turned writergrrrl to toast.
Unfortunately, my mechanic can’t get parts till Friday because of the holidays and will have to remove the back seat and floor panel to do this work, so it probably won’t be ready till the tenth.
So all I am seeing right now is a string of dollar signs and frankly, I wish someone would have tossed a cigarette and just blown the lemon up (without anyone getting injured, of course) so that I could at least get some insurance money out of this fiasco.
Anyway, this has been a hellacious week and I miss Danishgrrrl and my new boss is breathing down my neck and the last day of the fiscal year is upon us and I am about to pick up beautiful Danishgrrrl at the airport, so life will surely get better tonight.
READING: a recipe for grilled salmon with a tequila-cilantro marinade
BEST-OF SPAM: Does your wife think that banana is harder than your penis?
(Um, she hates bananas and so do I.)
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