MEDEA poetica

282. FAMILY VALUES GRAB BAG

2008-08-21T19:27:00.000-07:00

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.

281. DING DONG

2008-08-21T19:18:00.000-07:00

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!

280. AWW, CAN'T GET RID OF THEM?

2008-08-21T19:11:00.000-07:00

From the Archives (15 May 2007) The latest from the American (Narrowly Defined, Intent-on-Keeping-Up-Appearances) Family Association:

Special Offer On "It's Not Gay" DVD

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!

Um, 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.

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

2008-08-21T19:08:00.000-07:00

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

278. CODE PINK DRAG

2008-08-21T19:07:00.000-07:00

From the Archives (11 May 2007)

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

2008-08-21T18:58:00.000-07:00

From the Archives (10 May 2007)

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

2008-08-21T18:50:00.000-07:00

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:

Dear Demiurgicgrrrl,
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.

Umm. Where do I begin?

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!

2008-08-21T18:45:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2008-08-21T18:33:00.000-07:00

From the Archives (18 April 2007)

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. ...

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

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.

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;

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.

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.

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

2008-08-21T18:24:00.000-07:00

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.

272. Scheherazade

2008-07-24T08:23:00.000-07:00

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!

271. 2006: AN OVERVIEW

2008-04-18T18:55:00.001-07:00

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!?!

270. THE JEEZUS DIARIES

2008-04-18T18:54:00.000-07:00

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:

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

2008-04-18T18:53:00.000-07:00

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

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

2008-04-18T18:52:00.000-07:00

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:

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...

2008-04-18T18:51:00.000-07:00

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!

266. PRAYER FROM AN ATHEIST

2008-04-18T18:50:00.001-07:00

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.

265. LIVING LA VIDA JIHAD

2008-04-18T18:48:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-18T18:42:00.000-07:00

From the Archives

(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.

263. TOPPING THE PLATE, OR, DOMINATION SHIFTS IN THE TECTONICS SINGLES BAR

2008-03-09T11:59:00.000-07:00

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.

262. A LIFE SENTENCE OF POVERTY

2008-03-09T11:57:00.000-07:00

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.

261. WAVING THE JESUS FISH FOR FUN AND PROFIT

2008-03-09T11:55:00.000-07:00

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.")

260. WALKING AROUND WITH OUR SOULS IN OUR HANDS

2008-03-09T11:53:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-03-09T11:49:00.000-07:00

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:

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

2008-03-09T11:45:00.000-07:00

From the Archives. (October 2006) Huh. Someone just sent this to me:

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

2008-03-09T11:43:00.001-07:00

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

2008-03-09T11:37:00.000-07:00

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?

255. ARE YOU BEING SERVED?

2008-03-09T11:30:00.000-07:00

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?

254. WHAT'S IN A NAME?

2008-03-09T11:27:00.000-07:00

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

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

2008-03-09T10:57:00.000-07:00

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.

252. METAPUT*, OR, DRINKING A BITTER ROOT FROM A COMMON CUP

2008-03-08T21:32:00.000-08:00

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

251. HUDOOD YOU LOVE?

2008-03-08T21:25:00.000-08:00

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.)

250. THE SPOILS OF WAR AND PEACE

2008-03-08T21:24:00.000-08:00

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.)

249. FINAL MOMENTS

2008-03-08T21:20:00.000-08:00

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:

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

2008-03-08T21:18:00.000-08:00

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.

247. ESPIONAGE

2008-03-08T21:16:00.000-08:00

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

246. CANCER NATION

2008-03-08T21:13:00.000-08:00

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?

245. PRESIDENTIAL CHOREOGRAPHY

2008-03-08T21:09:00.000-08:00

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

2008-03-08T20:57:00.000-08:00

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:

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

2008-03-08T20:54:00.000-08:00

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.

242. STATES RIGHTS, HUMAN RIGHTS, THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT, & LEMON LAWS

2008-03-08T20:49:00.000-08:00

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

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

2008-03-08T20:45:00.000-08:00

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,

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

2008-03-08T20:41:00.000-08:00

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.....

239. NOTHING BUT A BUNCH OF AMISH BUGGIES HERE, FOLKS

2008-03-08T20:36:00.000-08:00

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?

2008-03-08T20:35:00.000-08:00

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?”

237. WHAT STATE INTERESTS?

2008-03-08T20:30:00.000-08:00

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

2008-03-08T20:28:00.000-08:00

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.

235. DE MINIMIS NON CURAT LEX

2008-03-08T20:24:00.000-08:00

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....”

234. AFTER AN ABSENCE

2008-03-08T20:20:00.000-08:00

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.)

233. THE CAPITAL OF PETTINESS

2008-02-21T20:47:00.000-08:00

From the Archives. (June 2006, late) The French novelist and essayist Stendhal called his hometown "the capital of pettiness" and fled to Paris as soon as he could. I fled to New Orleans. With Danishgrrrl. And boy am I glad I did.

I savored every second of uninterrupted time that we spent together.

The city itself was sobering though, an empty shell of a once-vibrant place that I am only now able to even write about.

Flood-damaged vehicles still lie in rusted, crumbled heaps beneath overpasses. Small white trailers stand in the driveways of moldy houses still in serious states of disrepair. Blue-tarped roofs are everywhere. And plywood-covered windows and doors stretch across the entire city, punctuated by the snapped-off trunks of palmettos.

But where are the people? Even in the French Quarter—an area the floodwaters ostensibly spared—there were so few people.

I understand that tourist dollars are important right now and that our conference brought needed funds to the area, but felt as if we were invading the precious few remains of someone’s sacred shrine, that we were surfing on the residents’ collective misery in a gauche and callous way as the shell-shocked looked on, too tired and despondent to even react to our thoughtless invasion.

Empty turnstiles suggested where crowds once gathered and all I could think when I saw them was Here is the church. Here is the steeple. But where the bloody hell are the people?

No crowds filled the riverfront park or waited to board the Algiers ferry or stood in line at the cool aquarium and even the residents seemed baffled by the malfunctioning walk/don’t walk signs that nearly got us killed more than once.

And the over-riding stench of rotting garbage was everywhere.

Bourbon Street is a sad spilled beer of a place populated by a few mullet-wearing bleached-blond types clutching plastic and looking down the vast and empty streets, trying hard to find the party they’ve been promised. They whoop it up momentarily but, with so few of them there, their gesticulations are herely sad and overly desperate gestures, signifying nada.

Only Cafe du Monde seemed vibrant, still alive.

The place is surrounded by tropical courtyards maintained behind gorgeous wrought-iron gates, and the balconies still boast overflowing flowerpots set against beautiful pastel-tinted stucco .

Plenty of restaurants still offer gumbo and shrimp with remoulade sauce and crawfish etouffée too.

Danishgrrrl and I even stumbled upon a festive wedding parade be-bopping its way down Royal Street with a brass band leading the way.

That felt hopeful at least.

But what felt most hopeful (um, besides the fact that I learned oh so much that will help me do my job more effectively) was the fact that Danishgrrrl and I got to spend so much uninterrupted time together without the kids or our everyday obligations or deadlines and are now practically glowing in each other’s presence.

Sadly, we must now resume our workouts after all that Creole food that we consumed in the shell-shocked shambles of the once vibrant city that is now America’s shame.

READING: The Piano Tuner, which my reading group will discuss tonight.

BEST-OF SPAM (Subject Line): Your penis reminds a computer mouse? (Well, the florescent blue trackball on my Mac mouse IS a little like one of those dolphin dildos. And I do finger the little gray clitoris on my PC mouse when I need to doubleclick. Still, I’d have to say that my penises—‘cause who wants to be limited to one?—are much more shaftlike than any mouse I've seen. Dude.)

232. THE MEANEST FLOWER, AND POWERFUL BODIES REDUCED TO TENDER BATTLEGROUNDS

2008-02-21T20:44:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
(Wm. Wordsworth, from Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood)

From the Archives. (June 2006) My former long-term partner has had to resort to anti-depressants to get through her chemo and her eyes look so damn haunted that I can hardly bear to look at her right now.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I mean, she’s a 43-year-old triathlete with breast cancer who can hardly walk up the stairs now on bad days.

OF COURSE she’s depressed. And overwhelmed. And looking at the strong possibility of not living till old age. And exhausted. And in pain. And weak. And haunted.

And her medical degree, although helpful, comes with loads of statistics about every thing that can go wrong between now and the end of her life.

Who wouldn’t be depressed given this scenario?

I’m glad we’re having dinner tonight, but hate seeing her so sick, have such a very hard time swallowing this reality.

•

Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
(William Wordsworth, from Ode: Intimations of Immortality, from Recollections of Early Childhood)

Now it is Sunday evening and I just ran inside after getting drenched in a downpour.

We’re in that stage of summer when there’s a thunderstorm with lightning practically every night and it is humid but beautiful so long as you keep the AC blasting.

Last night’s full moon was incredible. Danishgrrrl and I snuggled into the hammock and watched it darting in and out of the clouds, so luminous and beautiful and huge, then fell asleep with it peeking into our windows just ahead of the storms.

We slept in this morning, then went for a long hike by the river, where we hung out on the rocks and in the water and talked a lot before hanging out in the hammock again.

(Did I mention that the back yard is looking so cool now that a winding creek runs through it, inviting people to step out of the sunshine and into its shaded spaces?)

•

Had dinner with Tree Friday night to celebrate the end of her chemo. She looks and feels good now and even sauntered through the Race for the Cure on Saturday.

She’s not her normal marathon-running self yet but is doing so much better now that chemo has ended and even her hair is beginning to grow back in a little.

Radiation is easier but now she’s covered with tattoos and ink marks and plastic bulls’ eyes that tell the technicians where to zap her.

I guess you could say that her body is a battleground in an entirely different way than we’ve thought about that battleground before.

She said that Pottergrrl is terrified of this cancer and has returned to the Seventh Day Adventist vegan meals of her formative years.

I guess controlling the food you eat as a response to seemingly healthy people around you suddenly become gravely ill could provide some semblance of control, convince you that (given enough spinach) you might actually remain immune to death and illness.

And yeah,spinach could keep you healthy for a long time but, let’s face it, we’re all going to die.

I got no qualms with that, but would someone please get the sex toys out of the house before my family shows up to claim my stuff?

READING: Sartre’s Existentialism and Human Emotions

LISTENING TO: the glorious, sexy rain. Also weaklazyliar’s “Forgive Me”: I thought that truth was the line that anchored the kite. I thought that love was a kite to fly. I thought that I was holding on, but I was holding on to nothing, holding onto nothing. Forgive me.

BEST-OF SPAM: She needs better sexx, navy bean!!!

231 .JAGGED EDGES

2008-02-21T20:41:00.002-08:00

From the Archive (June 2006) I can’t remember who said “Youth will go but passion and freedom will have to be reconquered each day of your life,” but I have been thinking about that line a lot lately.

So many things vie for our time, threaten to reduce us to strangers spasming at the stoplight as we worry about the next commitment we must reach on time because of some artifical frame that we have allowed our need for a salary to place around our true selves.

It is too damn easy to get wrapped up in crap like this and forget to live your life, forget to even notice that beautiful goldfinch right there in the tree beside you.

Work is consuming nearly all of my time right now and would be a twenty-four-hour job if I allowed it to be.

This isn’t surprising, given that it’s the end of the fiscal year—a normal June, really—but I am trying very hard to retain my passion, to hold onto the poet in the midst of my overcommitments and changing job landscape and arrogant yet oh-so-lousy new boss and her disappointing new administration (and did I mention that she has no idea how to perform my job yet keeps trying to micromanage me anyway?).

Mainly, this is very bad news because I must stay here another year before I am vested and have benefits for life upon retirement.

Danishgrrl says I am burned to a crisp and has suggested an impromptu cookout with friends till she can whisk me off to the beach for a long luxurious weekend.

Hope this helps.

•

Nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design.—Harry Crews

So did anyone else hear that naval-gazing poet Billy Collins read on NPR last night?

Jezzzuslawd that man is self-absorbed! He read a precious little poem about poetry (with a capital P) that was basically a bunch of masturbatory self-congratulatory lines that didn’t amount to anything, and then Terry Gross practically peed her pants congratulating him.

Ugh.

I guess I need to remember that poet laureates are not chosen from poets’ poets.

As for me, I want to slap the pompous man in the name of O’Hara and Broumas and all the new and innovative poets writing meaningful lines today.

Meanwhile, the New York Times is running a series of articles on how genes move and change, written by the amazingly hot smartypants evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson and wow what a picture of her they have posted! It’s almost enough to make me subscribe to Times Select instead of reading my electronic freebie.

Not much time to read right now though—although I am following the impact of Robert Kennedy Jr.’s Rolling Stone article on how the Republicans deliberately stole the election in Ohio.

This is, what, the fourth report to verify this horrifying reality, but has the story been broadcast by the mainstream media

(who, for that matter, still haven’t reported that Gore actually won in Florid.)?

There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark when Americans have to listen to the BBC to find out about the demise of our democratic principles.

LISTENING TO: the wheels go round and round (I really love to watch them roll)

READING: Sartre’s Existentialism and Human Emotions

SANG IN SHOWER: Kasey Chambers’ “Pony”: When I grow up I want a baby. I’m going to name it after Ralph Stanley...

BEST-OF SPAM: Anything to please your woman (uh huh)

230. EROS

2008-02-21T20:41:00.001-08:00

The inner voice of Eros is arbitrary, bizarre, impeccably honest, bountiful, and so powerful as to be cruel. It takes courage to hear its demands and follow them.—Patrick Califia

From the Archives. (June 2006)That line is from Susie Bright’s site.

Huh. So Pat Califia of Macho Sluts fame has morphed into Patrick huh?

Frankly, I am not at all surprised.

I like the quote.

•

Meanwhile, I spent most of yesterday installing a French drain in my backyard and can hardly bend today, but it is nearly finished and I am heading out there again as soon as I finish my cup of coffee.

The drain runs along a dried-up creekbed that pools during rainstorms and stays too wet for decent grass. I plan to plant a weeping willow where the pipe empties today, after I take a photo of the huge pile of river pebbles that will form a rocky creekbed in my yard by this afternoon.

The mostly wooded backyard needs some attention, and, with luck, the landscape fabric I placed under the drain will keep the whole area clean of weeds and give it a nicer look while draining the standing water away efficiently and attractively.

LISTENING TO: Jenna Mammina’s cool cover of Honeysuckle Rose

READING: a biography of Benjamin Godard and The Poet’s Notebook

BEST-OF SPAM: pseudo saintliness

229. I’M LUCKY. I CAN WALK UNDER LADDERS...

2008-02-21T20:39:00.000-08:00

Show me a 50-foot wall, and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder—Arizona governor Janet Napolitano

From the Archives. (May 2006) Bush has come up with some dumbass ideas before, but building a 50-foot wall (which he calls a fence—I guess because he was advised to avoid those wall associations) that costs $3.2 million per mile along the border as our economy sucks is justifiably INSANE and doling this work out to cronies via yet another noncompetitive bid after every shady thing this administration has done is tantamount to shooting the bird at the tax payers whose dollars this president squanders on his ego rollercoaster.

228. SHE’S A HOUSE ON FIRE; I’M A HURRICANE

2008-02-21T20:32:00.000-08:00

Remember that it only takes one hurricane in your neighborhood to make it a bad season” says Conrad Lautenbacher from the National Hurricane Center.

From the Archives. (May 2006) I hate to bring this up but hurricane season is upon us and guess who’s still in office, tuning his guitar.

I was thinking about the Katrina debacle last night after discovering some chilling yet somehow beautiful New Orleans footage and videos at http://www.filmstripinternational.com and http://www.chrisvids.org.

This made me remember how weird it was to drive from DC to Charleston after a hurricane nearly destroyed the city.

Signs as far away as Charlotte were bent to the ground and debris littered the roadside for hundreds of miles.

It got worse the closer I got to the coast. Then I reached Charleston and discovered that the damage was even worse than I had imagined,that the city had been effectively transformed into a bombed-out wisteria-dripping ruin.

Still, years later, when a local weather station warned that a hurricane was heading my way I said “Are y’all crazy? Hurricanes don’t come this far inland.”

Boy was I wrong.

Our seventy-year-old windows shook in their casements as Mud and I kept looking at each other and asking Is THIS when we fill the bathtub with water and stand in the stairwell with the mattress over our faces?

It was the only time I hated the fact that our house was filled with French doors.

The rain pounded against our thirteen-inch stucco walls so hard that they were saturated clean through. And, even though we scoured the neighborhood, we never found the patio furniture that the wind carried away or mangled beyond recognition.

(And did I mention that plants we’d never planted sprouted up everywhere even as we wondered what became of our tomatoes? Or that I was so damn desperate for a cup of coffee in our powerless town that I actually ground my beans with a rolling pin?)

All of which is a precursor to my saying that being in New Orleans next month is going to be mighty damn weird and I can’t believe that Bush isn’t doing more to prepare for this season (and that I can’t find some long-distance way to make plans to work in a neighborhood while I’m there) .

Meanwhile, Pat Robertson has announced that his god told him that a tsunami will hit the Pacific NW this year (which, to my undying delight, caused owlbear1 to write “Oh mighty Thor! I beseech thee to wack Pat Robertson’s pee pee”).

Meanwhile, tickets for Madonna’s new tour are a mere $350 apiece.

Puhleeez! I mean sure Madonna is great and like a virgin and yogatastic and all that and she survived that unfortunate equestrian accident unlike Christopher Reeves and I am sure that it is oh so fantastic to watch her because she is, after all, Madonna, but we are talking about HUNDREDS OF DOLLARS here and the biggest irony of all is that her tour includes a video montage of Bush, bin Laden, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al. juxtaposed with starving African children (all of whom could be fed and clothed for years if Madonna donated her profits to this cause).

Meanwhile, David Sirota points out in In These Times that the same neocons who preach the so-called culture of life are paid boocoodles of money from the health-care industry to look the other way when sick people skip a trip to the physician because they can’t afford to go.

He asks “Why do we hear so much about how well-off America is, yet our country has the highest number of uninsured citizens in the industrialized world?”

Why isn't that question asked? Because you can't answer it honestly without exploring how Corporate America has bought off enough politicians to make sure our government helps corporations perpetuate this travesty.

....I'm not naïve. I know that corporations exist for one reason and one reason only: the relentless, single-minded pursuit of profit, no matter who gets shafted. That is their stated purpose in a capitalist society, and that's fine. But in our country, corporations aren't supposed to pursue this purpose in a vacuum, unchecked, unregulated, unopposed. There is supposed to be a counterweight, a government separate from Big Business whose job is to prevent the corporate profit motive from destroying society.

That government once passed laws protecting the environment, so the profit motive wouldn't end up eliminating breathable air. That government once protected workers, so the profit motive wouldn't result in Americans toiling in sweatshops. And that government once demanded better wages, so the profit motive wouldn't result in a race to the bottom for poverty-level paychecks. But that government, as we all know, is long gone. Our government has been the victim of a hostile takeover. Over the last thirty years, Corporate America has applied its most effective business tactics to the task of purchasing the one commodity that's not supposed to be for sale: American democracy.

So yeah. Next time you’re watching one of those feel-good Blue Cross Blue Shield look-how-we-love-our-customers ads, remind yourself that HMOs doubled their profits in 2003 and spent $600 million on lobbying efforts and campaign contributions that year.

Sirota also points out that “Frist’s family was forced to pay $1.7 billion in criminal and civil fines for trying to rip off Medicare while running the nation’s largest for-profit hospital chain“ (a chain where I toiled in their crummy kitchens for 7 long years).

And to think it was once considered primitive to feast on the poor.

BEST-OF SPAM: Do you want your dick to be wallpaper for a computer? (Um. I’m not even sure how to answer that?)

227. BAD BREAKS AND EQUESTRIAN MEMORIES

2008-02-21T20:31:00.000-08:00

From the Archives. (May 2006) Maybe it’s because I grew up in an equestrian town where the elite ponies train then race before going on to the big time.

Maybe it’s because racetracks and steeplechases and training grounds and polo chukkers are ubiquitous to the place.

Maybe it’s because my little brother was a fearless polo player.

And maybe it’s because a whole section of my town of origin was unpaved to better suit the magnificent thoroughbreds.

Yeah, maybe it’s because my childhood is laced with so many memories of hall-of-famers racing across the grass that I get a lump in my throat every single time I read about Barbaro.

Current headline > Barbaro’s Chances: 50/50.

226. VULVA LANDSCAPES AND FISCAL IRRESPONSIBILITY

2008-02-21T20:27:00.000-08:00

From the Archives. (May 2006) Tee Corinne, author of the Cunt Coloring Book, is dying of cancer and needs some money. Susie Bright is holding a fundraiser for her but, well, I ain’t in California, so I sent in my donation through paypal because, as Susie says, Tee is the beginning of lesbian erotic photography.

Wish I could claim credit for my title, but Susie used it in Nothing But the Girl to describe Tee’s contributions to the lesbian community, so credit where credit is due for those vulva landscapes (which is about the only thing that would make me switch my painting style to landscapes).

Meanwhile my dear friend Tuscaloosa called to say she won a big writing prize and that a big-name press contacted her with a book contract.

This means that Tuscaloosa and I must hole up and write, but fast!

Meanwhile, with everything going on in the world, Yahoo! wants me to know that Jennifer Aniston is house-hunting in Chicago.

Meanwhile, Bush (the Texas touter of manufactured evidence and terror alerts who employs fear to convince working citizens whose wages continue to fall under his administration to wrap the American flag across their cross-adorned chests and slap yellow ribbon magnets on their cars and send their children off to die in an unnecessary, ineffective, and budget-breaking war against a population that didn’t even produce the terrorists who destroyed the twin towers) now has a six-year history of saying whatever he thinks will most effectively manipulate people regardless of the truth behind his claims.

He recently announced his plans to militarize the Mexican border, for example, but also told Mexico’s president that he does not plan to militarize the border.

Bush took his lying to new lows in a recent immigration speech though, when he said (with an um straight face) that “we cannot build a unified country by inciting people to anger or playing on anyone’s fears.”

Now I am SURE that the terror alert went up and telephone calls got traced when Jon Stewart commented on the ridiculousness of this statement by adding “that’s what terrorism and gay people are for.”

And what are we to make of this president’s assertion of a unified country when his administration has made it blatantly clear that it could give less than a shit about the mass of our citizenry?

Why doesn’t he just proclaim the truth: Y’all peons can just fend for yer selves coz I am giving my SEVENTY-BILLION-DOLLAR tax cut to my prep-school pals..

Budgetary brutality. Distributional bias. Fiscal irresponsibility. Oh my fucking my!

Molly Ivins notes that people who earn over $1 million annually will receive a nearly $42,000 tax cut while the average schmoe will receive a whopping $20.

With all this going on, I was only minorly surprised when a progressive legislator told me that she and her hubbie are going off the grid and joining a self-sustaining commune because they believe that we will reach an apocalyptic moment before the next election.

Well, I hope you have a lot of guns, I replied, since everyone will be coming for your goods after the big collapse.

Meanwhile, I guess I’m just fiddling as Rome burns, since I spent part of yesterday playing my long-neglected piano.

I am currently fascinated by the berceuse, which Jocelyn the tenor sings outside the cave of the eagles in Act II of Godard’s opera Jocelyn. The melody in the second section is especially wonderful, although my out-of-practice fingers just don’t do it justice.

I also went to a private garden's open house and purchased a few native plants that I haven’t been able to find elsewhere. This means that I need to quit typing and get off my ass and make a new plant bed, since it is already 11:30 on Sunday morning and my weekend is disappearing fast.

LISTENING TO: REM’s “Gardening by Night”

READING: Technobarons of the Twenty-First Century: Why Telephone and Cable Companies Want to Take Control of the Internet

BEST OF SPAM: hymen errand

225. NARROWSBURG, USA

2008-02-21T20:24:00.000-08:00

(From the Archives) April 2006. Caught up on Bush&Co last night and the evidence of deliberate deception is overwhelming.

So here’s my suggestion: There’s a town called Narrowsburg in NY State. Let’s send the 29 percent of Americans who still support Bush there and let them live out their narrow worldviews in this aptly named place while the rest of us try to salvage what’s left of our democratic process and once vibrant system of checks and balances.

The deception started well before Colin Powell’s presentation to the Security Council but, as Howard Zinn notes in “Removing America’s Blinders” (The Progressive, 4.24.06), this speech, broadcast one month before the US invaded Iraq, “may have set a record for the number of falsehoods told in one talk.”

WMD evidence cited by Powell includes “satellite photos, audio records, reports from informants, with precise statistics on how many gallons of this and that existed for chemical warfare.”

And whee didn’t the newspapers and reading public jump on that irrefutable-evidence bandwagon as enterprising young conservatives launched their yellow ribbon magnet movement?

Edna St. Vincent Millay expressed her outrage at the outcome of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial by penning a chilling sonnet that begins

Read history. So learn your place in time, and go to sleep—all this was done before.

We do it better, fouling every shore; we disinfect, we do not probe the crime....

What would Vincent say today, when evidence of “the mendacity of our high officials” is so clearly fouling every shore?

Read history, so learn your place in time. That’s Zinn’s message too.

Zinn’s short list of lies our presidents have told to justify American wars follows:

President Polk and American slave-owners wanted half of Mexico, so Polk declared that Mexico “shed American blood upon American soil” and went to war.

President McKinley announced that America wanted to liberate Cuba from Spanish control, “but the truth is that we really wanted Spain out ... so that the island could be open to United Fruit and other American corporations.” Polk, likewise, said that we wanted to “civilize” Filipinos, but we really just wanted “that valuable piece of real estate in the far Pacific, even if we had to kill hundreds of thousands of Filipinos” in order to get it.

President Wilson declared that we had no choice but to enter WWI in order to “make the world safe for democracy,” but the war was really fought “to make the world safe for the Western imperial powers.”

President Truman “lied when he said [that] the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima because it was ‘a military target.’”

And everyone—Kennedy (US level of involvement), Johnson (Gulf of Tonkin), Nixon (secret Cambodian bombings)—“lied about Vietnam ... all of them claiming it was to keep South Vietnam free of communism, but really [the US wanted] to keep South Vietnam as an American outpost at the edge of the Asian continent.”

Then [Pez-dispenser] Reagan lied about the invasion of Grenada and said that the tiny nation of Grenada was a threat to our nation.

Then Bush the Elder “lied about the invasion of Panama, leading to the death of thousands of ordinary citizens in that country” and “lied again about the reason for attacking Iraq in 1991” [on the day that his son Neil went to trial, thus effectively killing the story]. This invasion was “hardly to defend the integrity of Kuwait” but was, really, to “assert US power in the oil-rich Middle East.”

And the lies continue to hemmorhage.

Zinn points out the obvious—that, when leaders throw around the terms such as national interest, national security, national defense, most citizens assume that they are talking about We The People, but they’re actually talking about profits and markets, about protecting big business and increasing its wealth.

Zinn also points out that the WHO ranked the US 37th in overall health performance in 2000.

This rating was based on money our country spent per capita for health care.

And here’s a sobering (if oft-repeated) fact: in the richest nation in the world, one in five children is born into poverty.

(Remember those New Orleans photographs? There are a whole lot more poor people out there, even if the nightly news rarely serves them up for public consumption.)

We’re the most powerful country in the world, yet 40 countries have a better record of infant mortality rates that we do.

Cuba does.

We lead the world in the number of people in prison (yet resist charging our seemingly insane president with treason).

It’s clear our policies consider some people expendable. And it’s clear that Bush&Co are rewarding the megarich at the expense of the rest of us.

Our history of “slaveowner against slave, landlord against tenant, corporation against worker, rich against poor ... [of] ethnic cleansing, in which millions of Indians were driven off their land by means of massacres and forced evacuations ... our long history of slavery, segregation, and racism ... [our] record of imperial conquest in the Caribbean and in the Pacific, our shameful wars against small countries a tenth our size: Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq. And the lingering memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki” tell a story that should make us all hang our heads until we summon up the courage to get out there and protest what is being done in our name.

224. AGGRIEVED OUT-GROUPS

2008-01-13T17:47:00.000-08:00

“The future. What’s that?”
—Belisario, one of a group of hunter-gatherers who left the Colombian jungle to join the modern world, as quoted in yesterday’s New York Times

From the Archives

(May 2006) I read today that Christianists are urging believers to participate in an Othercott by seeing a different movie on the day The Da Vinci Code opens.

And here’s a telling factoid. Their alternate movie of choice is Over the Hedge, a nice little animated feature.

(Keep those blinders on, guys, while the world moves right on past you.)

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that the reverend Jim Garlow of San Diego is training pastors in methods to convince parishioners to throw Da Vinci Code parties in their homes because Garlow asserts that “it’s the task of the missionary to learn the language of the indigenous people” so that the missionaries can correct our ignorance.

(Interesting how he uses noblesse oblige empirespeak to justify his fundamentalism, huh?)

Meanwhile, writer David Brooks has announced that the problem with democrats is that we have become “a collection of aggrieved out-groups” who have not recognized that “multiculturalism and identity politics are dead.”

He sees democrats “purging the last vestiges of the New Left and returning to the older civic liberalism of the 1950s and 1960s” now . . . and yeah, I see a little of that too—but primarily from Republican wannabes who think assimilation with Bill Frist is how we move forward.

(Do you read “Forget The Queers” of “Forget Feminism” in this approach? How about “Forget Leadership?”)

Mother’s Day is this weekend, so perhaps David has been looking back fondly on the 1950s, when his mom no doubt wore a perky Ozzie-and-Harriet skirt and popped sleeping pills when no one was looking and filtered his daddy’s coffee through Eisenhower golf socks as she died inside.

Yes, David we all long for those golden days when the pill was unavailable and battered women’s shelters didn’t exist because no one saw the need for them and the thought of a husband being charged for raping or silencing his wife was unheard of. (But where would David have heard it anyway since women were so rarely admitted to positions of power?)

Dear Dave. Just so you know, we queers ain’t going away, despite how smugly you pronounce that we're passe.

Amazing how white men so rarely recognize that considering people unlike themselves to be special interest groups is just another example of their expectation of privilege.

Meanwhile, can you believe that the Senate approved a two-year extension of the boy emperor’s tax cuts that benefit the super-rich at the expense of the rest of us?

Turn off your television sets, boys and girls. This is reality.

SANG IN SHOWER: Holly Near’s “Simply Love”

READING: Donna Tartt’s Little Friend

LISTENING TO: Jennifer Warnes’ cover of Leonard Cohen’s “First We Take Manhattan”: I don’t like your fashion business mister. I don’t like those drugs that keep you thin. I don’t like what happened to my sister. First we take Manhattan. Then we take Berlin.

223. ADVOCATING A GAY “LIFESTYLE”

2008-01-13T17:46:00.000-08:00

From the Archives

(May 2006) I’ve been catching up on my reading and so will be blogosampling again.

The Washington Blade reports that Brigham Young University is considering expelling 5 students who participated in last month’s Equality Ride demo whether or not they’re gay, despite the fact that one of them demonstrated off campus.

Why? Because their honor code forbids students from “advocating a gay lifestyle.” (sic)

And, on our side of the country, a judge has thrown out a case filed against UNC Chapel Hill by a Christian fraternity that wants funding even though it refuses to sign an inclusive pledge.

And speaking of hot-button social issues, has anyone else noticed that the governor of Illinois has taken a lesson from Bush&Co and is using his executive powers to make hot-button changes despite the homophobic Christianist legislators in his state?

He instructed the state’s health department to direct 10 million dollars in grants to embryonic stem cell research, for example, after Bush’s idiotic pronouncement of what is and is not appropriate scientific research, and used executive privilege to bypass the legislative process and grant domestic-partner health-care benefits to state employees.

(Go team)

No big surprise, but the Christianists (who make up the 32 percent of Americans who still support the boy emperor and appear to be just fine with his secret torture camps and wiretapping) don’t like it one bit when a Democrat uses such powers to set progressive policy.

Meanwhile, a 15-year-old created a set of videos about a group that Susie Bright refers to as our “Onward-Christian-Bullshitters Administration.” WWJD is the strongest of the bunch and will leave a lump in your throat and fill you with more than a little outrage (especially if you saw My Name Is Rachel Corrie last night).

Check out http://peacetakescourage.cf.huffingtonpost.com/ and please forward it to your friends.

222. THE EVERPRESENT EXPERT, NOW APPEARING AT A GYM NEAR YOU

2008-01-13T17:45:00.000-08:00

From the Archives

(May 2006) Ever noticed how there’s always a guy who insists on passing himself off as an expert despite the fact that he doesn’t know jack?

Well, I encountered a member of this tribe today and handled it with my usual tact and southern grace.

Big surprise that he wore a big gold cross and a gleaming St. Christopher medallion (making it very easy to imagine him at anti-choice rallies, insisting that he instruct women in how to behave in their own bodies).

Dude and I attended a 2-hour Understanding The New Weight Room seminar, where he constantly interrupted the female trainer leading the session to inform us that (1) women have no upper-body strength and (2) women have no business in a gym.

In between, he told women where we should actually stand to use equipment, where we should actually walk in the new facility, how we should actually behave in general. And he became increasingly agitated when we either ignored him or told him (in my case) that none of us came to the session to hear his opinions, so why didn’t he just shut up and let the trainer do her job.

I’ve lifted weights for years now (but am unfamiliar with this new style of equipment) and, like the exercise physiology grad. student/trainer who led the session, know my way around a weight room. So, near the end of the session, when she asked for a volunteer who was familiar with the leg press, I stepped right up, smirked at the guy, then promptly pressed a 190-pound set.

Then, leaving my settings in place, I said, “So do you actually work out on weight machines or just talk about them?”

Turns out Mr. Scrawny could barely press these weights down and, when he did, they was so heavy that they flew back fast and loud, nearly pushing his bony knees into his chest.

THAT got a smirk out of all of us and left him red-faced and stewing for the rest of the session.

Conclusion: Sometimes it’s good to be the asshole.

221, MINUTEMEN IN LUNCH COUNTER TOWNS

2008-01-13T17:43:00.000-08:00

From the Archives

(May 2006) The ultra-conservative anti-immigrant vigilante group the Minutemen will be in Greensboro NC tomorrow and progressive organizations are calling for folks across the south to show up and tell the thugs that they are not welcome there.

Unfortunately, I will be in a tedious training session for our new and decidedly inadequate health insurance during this event.

As near as I can tell, this new PPO pays for my mammogram but, should it be suspicious and my doctor proactive enough to order an immediate ultrasound, then this diagnostic procedure will not be covered (because we “elected” to change the definition of my Routine Appointment by introducing a Diagnostic Procedure).

Put another way: BCBS is willing to penalize me and decrease my odds of surviving cancer in order to ensure that their organizational schemas are kept under separate nutshells.

Gawd. No wonder my doctor friends are leaving the field in droves!

•

This is one of those weeks in which I have something scheduled every evening through Sunday (which is why I am doing laundry at 11:30 PM).

Tonight, I attended a reading of the disturbing play My Name Is Rachel Corrie. My favorite local experimental theater company hosted this reading and asked invitees to help them decide whether or not to disrupt their fall schedule in order to produce it this year.

Rachel Corrie is the 23-year-old American peace activist who was crushed by a bulldozer while acting as a human shield for Palestinian homes in Gaza and this play was created from her journals and e-mails.

So why the mad rush to production?

Well, after 2 sellout runs in London, the NY Theatre Workshop was SUPPOSED to begin a run of the play next month, but they suddenly cancelled production, citing a need to “mollify” the pro-Israeli community.

Katharine Viner, co-editor of the play, says

if a young, middle-class, scrupulously fair-minded and dead American woman, whose superb writing about her job as a mental health worker, ex-boyfriends, troublesome parents, struggles to find out who she wanted to be, and how she found that by traveling to Gaza and discovering the shocking conditions under which the Palestinians live—if a voice like this cannot be heard on a New York stage, what hope is there for anyone else?

Besides the obvious censorship implications, this cancellation is of particular concern because the producer says he is not concerned about people who see the show, but is instead concerned about the people who don’t see the show but declare it viciously anti-Israeli anyway.

Viner again:

Since when did theatre come to be about those who don’t go to see it? If the play itself . . . is not the problem, then isn’t the answer to get people to watch it, rather than exercising prior censorship?

Indeed.

Rachel's words condemn violence and express outrage about attacks by the fourth largest army in the world on people whose livelihoods and food and water and shelter have been taken away from them.

That’s powerful stuff and well worth presenting to the world, despite the censors’ threats.

This is the second play I’ve seen this week that asks how clean our tax-paying hands are.

The off-off-Broadway Guardians, staring Katherine Moennig (the actor who plays Shane on The L Word), was poorly attended and may have already closed, but I am so glad I saw it.

Moennig portrays Lynddie England as a somewhat sympathetic grunt who understands the implications of ignoring a direct military order far more than she understands the implications of her (abhorrent) actions.

Then there’s the vacuous Guardian reporter following her in search of a bigger office.

At first I was concerned that the playwright planned to make a series of easy jokes about uneducated southern hicks who grew up in violent landscapes and so spread their violence around the globe, but the play was better than that.

In fact, the Oxford-trained reporter comes off as the true empty shell in the end—as an opportunist who cares about the atrocities committed at abu Ghraib only insofar as they can further his career or heighten his experience of violence as an erotic sport.

A (gorgeous) lawyer representing Gitmo prisoners spoke after the play and reminded us of yet another of Bush&Co’s many communications ploys: They basically changed the way they refer to prisons in order to avoid Geneva requirements for how prisoners of war must be treated in prisons.

She also reminded us that, while armed services scandals are typically punished by moving up the chain of command to the ultimate authority who authorized the crime, in the case of abu Ghraib, a handful of women who all say they were following orders they were left no choice but to obey have taken the fall while their superior officers remain in command.

220. EPISTOLARY EROTICISM AND THE RICH AND THE ARTLESS

2008-01-13T17:42:00.000-08:00

From the Archives

(May 2006) Just read Susie Bright’s description of being included on an infuriating Pushing The Envelope writers panel at the recent LA Festival of Books.

What fool would put Susie and Karen Finley and Dennis Cooper—legitimate visionaries who do push the envelope and encourage us to think and fuck and gasp and experience the world in new and profound ways—on the same panel with the milquetoast let-me-flaunt-my-riches-and-good-looks-as-my-bona-fides-’cause-there-ain’t-nothing-else-of-substance-here lame late-late-night TV host Craig Ferguson (a man who actually sums up sex as an act between “one man and one woman” in between berating feminists)?

The intent was obvious—showcase a privileged white man performing The Man Show and watch a bunch of progressive writers react (in the interest of creating a buzz at the festival, no doubt), but the organizer somehow failed to inform the writers that they were being set up for a public smackdown.

“Complacent, over-monied right-wing jabberers. They’re just as ubiquitous and just as annoyingly useless as the wanna-be Maoists back in the mid 1970s who did their level best to remind us that personal fulfillment and artistic expression were politically incorrect and counter-revolutionary. Popular politics invariably spawns a host of trend-riders just as surely as a damp basement spawns mildew.
—an apt comment someone left on Susie’s blog

Meanwhile, Kate Clinton said (at her show last night) that she woke up dreaming that Suzie Ormans was going down on her.

She also described our boy emperor as someone who gives new meaning to the term “unattended luggage.”

Apt, eh?

219. UNIVERSAL MUSIC

2008-01-08T09:30:00.000-08:00

From the Archives
(May 2006) This just in:

The poet Muriel Rukeyser said the universe is composed of stories, not of atoms. The physicist Werner Heisenberg, on the other hand, declared that the universe is made of music, not of matter. And we believe that if you habitually expose yourself to toxic stories and music, you could wind up living in the wrong universe, where it’s impossible to become the gorgeous genius you were born to be. That’s why we implore you to nourish yourself with delicious, nutritious tales and tunes that inspire you to exercise your willpower for your highest good.

Astrologer Caroline Casey offers an apt metaphor to illustrate how crucial it is for us to hear and read good stories. She notes that if we don’t have enough of the normal, healthy kind of iodine in our bodies, we absorb radioactive iodine, which has entered the food chain through nuclear test explosions conducted in the atmosphere. Similarly, unless we fill ourselves up with stories that invigorate us, we’re more susceptible to sopping up the poisonous, degenerative narratives.

The preceding oracle comes from Rob Breszney’s new book PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings

218. CONTINUITY AND THE DECIDER

2008-01-08T09:23:00.000-08:00

Let's review the rules. Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put ’em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know—fiction!
—Stephen Colbert, keynote speech at White House Correspondents’ Dinner, 28 April 2006

From the Archives (Cinco de Mayo 2006) I’m on seemingly perpetual hold while trying to make an appointment to get my bashed-in car repaired and feel as if I’m standing at St. Burchardi Church in Halberstadt waiting for the next chord in John Cage’s “As Slow a Possible” organ recital to peal through the air.

(The next chord in the first movement of this recital won’t sound for another full month. Then either silence or another chord will follow and will perhaps offer some variation in musicology, if a pipe is added or deleted from the organ.)

Let’s mark our calendars in advance for 5 September 2070, when the second movement of this slow recital begins . . . and tell our grandkids to pass on the Prophecy of the Slow Recital, for it is foretold that, 639 years (after the second movement begins (or when the church gets sick of dealing with a deceased composer’s work), the composition will finally be completed.

Actually, hearing ANY new chord would be a vast improvement over the wretched musak version of “Afternoon Delight” that is currently playing on my speakerphone in between the sporadic Your call is very important to us and will be answered in the order in which it was received. Please stay on the line. message.

Meanwhile, I’m having a true lunch break for a change because I feel lousy and skipped my workout. Stayed up till 2:30 AM finishing an illustration project and slept very little in the city, so am probably just exhausted.

And I’m reading about teledildonics as I snarf down my salad.

Don’t know what teledildonics is? Well pull up a chair chere!

Author Liz Langley (of Alternet’s “Cybersex Grows Up”) describes teledildonics as “the ability of two people, in separate locations, to manipulate sex toys via the internet. You could finger your mouse in New York, and make someone in California sing the ten-second aria.”

Yep. Apparently, a few computer-savvy American soldiers are already using the Sinulator to keep their lovers happy from afar.

The possibilities are mind-boggling.

•

Meanwhile, student stores is closing for renovations, so I just purchased the following items for ~$2 each:

1. a CD of American lesbian composers
2. Physics Demystified: A Self-Teaching Guide (coz I have forgotten way too much)
3. House of Leaves
4. Susan Ludvigson’s Sweet Confluence: New and Selected Poems
5. Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World’s Best Poems
6. Carolyn Forché’s Blue Hour (poems)
7. Robert Creeley: Just in Time, Poems 1984–1994

Whee! Lots of reading to do after I finish this project.

I also have lots more to write about and am so so happy that I finally got to see my bestgrrl again. Haven’t had time to process the trip yet, so that'll have to come later.

LISTENING TO: John Cage and Lou Reed's Songs for Drella (of course).

217. UNDERWIRE ALERT. QUICK! RAISE THE TERRORIST THREAT LEVEL TO RED!

2008-01-08T07:16:00.000-08:00

From the Archives

(May 2006) I finally rolled into my driveway after a long day of traveling and, as my pal Cin (who picked me up from the airport) said, I can tell you’re completely exhausted, Medea, because your voice sounds different.

Yeah.

Mostly, though, it’s different because my reconstructed shoulder is hurting like hell from hauling a suitcase and laptop all over creation.

Lars and I left the Village around 10 this morning and I’ve been traveling ever since. Took the subway to Grand Central Station (while reading a scene in Carole Maso’s Ghost Dance that occurs in Grand Central Station), then hopped the express bus to LaGuardia.

Sat around for an hour and a half reading (after my underwires alerted security to the fact that I have big tits), then sat in the Atlanta airport for another two hours before finally touching ground here.

Cin took me out to dinner afterwards and we talked nonstop till she pulled up in front of her house . . .

. . . where we discovered that someone crashed into the driver’s door of my cute little car!

Fortunately, a young woman came running up as we were studying the damage and fessed up that her new-driving mom was making a U-Turn and hit me.

Whew!

•

So. Back in the nineties, the village of Chapel Hill produced a poster showcasing the coolest doors in town.

After staying at Shulamith’s apartment yesterday, I decided that someone should cop this idea and produce a Bathtubs of the City poster.

As any struggling artist (who isn’t subsidized by Daddy Warbucks) knows, the bathtub is seldom in the bathroom in low-income NYC apartments. Instead, it's usually somewhere in the general vicinity of available plumbing (and smack dab in the middle of the kitchen or living room, in most cases).

Shuli’s tub is by the kitchen sink and in clear view of any location except the toilet in her apartment (and, if I lived there, I would make a collapsible tabletop that fits over the thing).

Anyway, Lars and I stayed there last night because Shuli is currently in the hospital and we needed to take care of her cat this morning anyway.

(Actually, Shuli is not just in the hospital, but also currently believes that she OWNS her building and the two buildings beside it, and she demanded that Lars hand over the keys. She also said that Lars is dead to her and shoved her out the door. And she insisted that her own cat is dead, even after Lars showed her photographs of us petting the cat.)

Poor Lars. She’s a good friend and went back for more abuse today because she knows Shuli will remember the visit when she’s back on her meds.

So, understandably, I’ve been thinking about Kate Millet’s Looney-Bin Trip a lot today—especially because Shuli discussed the premise with Kate in detail as she worked on the manuscript.

They both assert that people with mental illnesses have the right to choose whether or not they take medication and both insist that medications blunt their brilliance.

This is a complicated subject for me, since my mother has an adult-onset suicidal paranoid schizophrenic disorder which caused her, at various points in my childhood, to OD in an attempt to silence the voices, and wrap the piano in tinfoil in an attempt to silence the voices, and douse her children with witch hazel or Lysol or whatever she believes at the moment would keep us safe from the voices at that moment, and to ultimately shoot herself in an attempt to escape the voices.

These occurred while she was off her medication as we were trying to get her help (but when she did not yet qualify for help because she was not deemed an immediate threat to herself or someone else).

We did manage to involuntarily commit her twice—a legal procedure that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy—and this forced her to take the meds that keep her relatively functioning and, frankly, the meds have kept her on a fairly even keel over the years, so I have to say that I disagree with Kate and Shuli (but understand their resistance to meds).

They see the meds as blunting their brilliance, but it seems to me that mental illness is the real culprit here and not the meds.

Sure, mania can convince you that you are filled with brilliant perceptions as you crank out reams of writing (been on mania-inducing drugs; done that), but it can also convince you that your neighbor's mailbox requires you to kill them.

We're all familiar with those sad statistics too.

And the fact of the matter is that Shuli is not brilliant when she quits taking her meds.

Instead, she overflows her bathtub until the ceiling below hers collapses and sets her living-room floor on fire and stands in the middle of her apartment screaming until the police haul her away.

What a shitty-ass situation all around.

216. UNITED STATES OF STUPID’S DAY WITHOUT IMMIGRANTS

2008-01-07T14:47:00.000-08:00

From the Archives

(May 2006) Irregular girl has a Flickr photo of a graffitied wall that reads “pay your own way.” I’m trying to parse this sentiment with our country’s resistance to illegal immigrants, who point out regularly that businesses survive on the sweat of their minimum-wage labor.

I’m in Brooklyn right now but we’re headed to PS1 to see Jessica Stockholder’s gallery show soon. We’ll head over to Dietch Project’s Garden Party next, where we hope to see a mound of earth with beautiful nude women draped on it. Then we’ll head over to Union Square for the big immigration rally.

The East Village is weird to Lars because the Second Avenue Deli, an institution, closed since she left and there’s just a big sad empty building where it used to be.

Meanwhile, yesterday was too beautiful to be indoors so we spent the day walking all over the city.

Met up with pals for lunch, then went to check on Shulie’s cat (because Shulie quit taking her meds again and was consequently committed). It took thirty minutes, but we finally coaxed the kitty out from behind some paintings.

Actually, Lars and I may stay at Shuli’s after we see Guardian, since I’ll need to hop the bus from Grand Central Station to LaGuardia early the next day and, well, the cat needs some attention.

I got up early this morning and went up on the roof to stare at the water. The statue of liberty was there with her white arm raised and, beyond that, New Jersey sat in a smoggy gray haze.

Instead of enjoying the view though, I was thinking about how wonderful it would be to wake up in Seattle and have coffee on my deck while staring across the water at snow-capped mountains.

If Lars stays on the west coast, then there’s a good chance that I will wind up there eventually.

•

Met Tuscaloosa for an impromptu dinner before leaving town. She was awarded a two-week stay at a writing retreat and wants me to apply for the same time period, since we get tons of work done when we retreat together (and eat very well to boot).

Meanwhile, anyone keeping up with the King and King controversy—not to be confused with the Rodney King controversy, in which actual people were harmed—knows all about the uproar in Massachusetts over a teacher reading this tale of a crown prince who rejected one beautiful princess after another before falling in love with a handsome prince.

He and the prince marry, seal their commitment with a kiss, then live happily ever after just as het fairy-tale lovers do, and all was right in the world until a meddlesome “parents’ rights” group threatened to sue the school for portraying queers in a positive light!

Meanwhile California fundie doctors are claiming that their religious beliefs give them the right to treat lesbians differently than other patients and are refusing to provide fertility treatments to us.

It shocks me that this case was thrown out of lower court three years ago.

They’re job is to treat patients, not make moral or religious judgments about us.

Meanwhile, University of Cumberland in Kentucky expelled a twenty-year-old boy for identifying himself as gay on his personal webpage.

It’s happening right here folks.

215. YOU CALL THIS A SUSTAINABLE WORLD?

2008-01-07T13:16:00.000-08:00

From the Archives

(April 2006) Short, brutish, and dirty. Is that all life is?

Here I sit in my studio at 11:48 p.m. on a Thursday night on the eve of my trip to NYC. It rained all day (again) and my grass is suddenly very high (something I can do nothing about till next week).

My drive home from the theatre tonight was a journey through a foggy undifferentiated landscape that no more than suggested a sustainable world (whereas my pals' experimental Chekhov interpretation that I just witnessed squashed flat any possibility of a sustainable world).

My favorite local theater staged this adaptation of Two Sisters (On Ice), which they describe as “a passionate look at desire and disenchantment set in an Edward Gorey-like landscape with a Hawaiian soundtrack.”

(Ponder that.)

The male cast alternated between stiff brown uniforms and revealing tighty-whities and one sister masturbated whenever the subject of work came up. Oh I looooong to work. I really looooong for work, she moaned.

How could one possibly rise in standing ovation to a Chekhov play when his message has squashed you flat into your seat?

(And yet sex, in all its emptiness, does still offer at least momentary transcendence.)

Came home to play around on my keyboard and then stare at my cello and guitars and twenty-four-volume art encyclopedia set—at this stuff that can occasionally make my existence seem meaningful.

There’s The Life of James McNeill Whistler, sitting beside me on a shelf. And Vita Sackville-West’s letters to Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir’s biography, Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, Mark Mathabane’s Kaffir Boy, Kafka’s Trial and, because I live in the violent southland, Larry Brown’s Fay and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina.

Plato’s Parable of the Cave asks me to consider whether or not I am turning to look at the light and Warren’s Symbolism of Subordination reminds me that I have not chafed against black leather in entirely too long.

My worn paperback copy of Works of Love, Kierkegaard’s nonpseudonymous picture of his Christian faith, has been overtaken by the solid blue planes of Sartre’s paperback Existentialism and Human Emotions (since Sartre tied Kierkegaard to my easel some years ago and continues to lash him there as I cogitate, demanding that Søren face the implications of personal action in this purposeless universe).

Meanwhile, Daniel Chirot is bursting at the seams to explain in professorial terms How Societies Change as Jane Wagner shouts that reality is “nothing more than a collective hunch” y’all.

My Cherokee sacred calendar competes for space with Ken Wilbur’s Brief History of Everything and Carolyn Forché’s always nearby Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness.

Ernest Hemingway still sneers from The Sun Also Rises (a title, that, although the writer ultimately chose to end his life, nevertheless suggests hope) and shock and awe: america’s war on words offers cross-continental evidence that our bloody clashes leave us with bloated defense budgets even as we suffer from near-global and decidedly immobilizing post-traumatic stress disorder.

•

Meanwhile, the dada exhibit in DC ends in two weeks and I have very little chance of getting there, let alone considering firsthand the artists’ interpretations of their culture-destroying world ravaged by war.

Bet my favorite fur-lined cup is there, too.

(Yeah yeah. I know this is an exhausted image now—just a symbol of a time and a place in which artists still had sufficient faith in humanity to be outraged by the fact that, left to our own devices, we have a tendency to sprout short brutish hairs on our fine bone china and pick each other’s bones and feeble attempts at meaning clean—or to at least satirize them wickedly well.)

Then there’s Foucault, iconoclastically exploring why we as a species feel compelled to continually analyze and discuss sex.

Meanwhile I am trying to figure out what to do with my two plastic tubs of organic broccoli florets, half a plastic tub of organic mixed herb greens, bag of Brussels sprouts (which I hope will still be salvageable by the time I return), an unopened packet of good goat cheese.

A good meal, but that’s probably more broccoli than I can eat in a day, even if I do cook it in some good sesame oil and garlic and have it with tempeh for breakfast.

•

And now it’s morning and various experts are announcing that the possibility of frost is officially over for this season. I started fragile plants from seeds weeks ago and will plant them in earnest when I return from the city.

That’s not my worry right now though. For the moment, I just need to eat some breakfast and head to the airport.

So I’ll end with a poem:

WILD SWANS
by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)

I looked in my heart while the wild swans went over.
And what did I see I had not seen before?
Only a question less or a question more;
Nothing to match the flight of wild birds flying.
Tiresome heart, forever living and dying,
House without air, I leave you and lock your door.
Wild swans, come over the town, come over
The town again, trailing your legs and crying.

214. CYNICISM SURVIVAL KIT

2008-01-07T13:14:00.000-08:00

From the Archives

(April 2006) The New York Times recognizes today’s somber twenty-year anniversary with an interactive “Chernobyl’s Legacy: 20 Years Later” online exhibit that includes these observations:

We all know what Chernobyl is, what an atomic plant is, but I’ll tell you how we saw it. An enemy had come to our country. We had to defend ourselves. And we set out to protect our country, our people. We all had those feelings, all of us in the 100-man brigade (that initially went in to create the sarcophage). But of course it differed from a real war. In a real war, shells explode, bullets fly, bodies fall, blood flows. Here, the sun was shining overhead. Beautiful gardens stood all around, bulging with fruit. Birds were singing. You couldn’t possibly have imagined that all this was death.—Arkady Rokhlin, Nuclear Engineer and one of the Chernobyl liquidators

In war you know where you are, where the neutral territory is, where the enemy is, where the plane is, how its bombing you, how its chasing you, how it catches you. There you couldn’t see the enemy. You see it when you’re burned already. When you’re a corpse. It’s invisible. It’s everywhere and nowhere.—Constantin Baskin, Nuclear Systems Specialist

Your soul is covered in blood. You want to cry, but you can’t.—Leonid Shavray, Chernobyl firefighter

This reminds me of a poignant poem that French surrealist and working-class hero Jacques Prévert wrote during his military service in WWII.

BARBARA
(translated by Harriet Zinnes and published in Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness)

Remember Barbara
It rained without letup in Brest that day
And you walked smiling
Glowing ravishing drenched
Under the rain
Remember Barbara
It rained without letup in Brest
And I passed you on the Rue de Siam
You smiled
And I smiled too
Remember Barbara
You whom I did not know
You who did not know me
Remember
Remember that day just the same
Do not forget
A man was taking shelter in a doorway
And he called out your name
Barbara
And you ran toward him in the rain
Drenched ravishing glowing
And you threw yourself into his arms
Remember that Barbara
And do not be angry with me if I call you by your first name
I call all those I love by their first names
Even if I have met them only once
I call all who love by their first names
Even if I do not know them
Remember Barbara
Do not forget
That gentle, happy rain
On your happy face
On that happy town
That rain on the sea
On the arsenal
On the boat of Ouessant

Oh Barbara
What shit war is
What has become of you now
Under the rain of iron
Of fire of steel of blood
And he who held you in his arms
Lovingly
Is he dead missing or still living
Oh Barbara
It rains without letup in Brest
As it rained before
But it is not the same everything is ruined
It is a rain of mourning terrible and desolate
No longer even a storm
Of iron of steel of blood
Only of clouds
That burst
And disappear like dogs
Down the streams of Brest
Like dogs that will rot far away
Far away very far from Brest
Of which there is nothing left

If it’s raining for the fourth day in a row tomorrow, then I will probably hang out in a café and write another entry before I get on the plane. Otherwise, I’ll be back late next week with plenty of stories from NYC.

Now, however, I'm going to a play.

Ciao.

213. THE EROTIC MADAME X

2008-01-07T13:13:00.000-08:00

From the Archives

(April 2006) I wonder about so many things—why John Singer Sargent, the famous Edwardian portrait painter whose erotic portrait of Madame X caused such a scandal, abandoned portraiture in 1910 in favor of murals and landscapes.

I wonder why I inevitably forget to water the orchids that (sort of) live in my office window but have no trouble remembering to water the orchids that live in my dining room.

I wonder why posting (artful) nudes to Flickr inevitably results in guys sending me links to photos of their hard-ons

(which has me toying with the idea of returning the favor by posting a “friends”-only page of pictures of my hard-ons: the black one, the green one, the red one, the two-headed one—you get the point— with the subject line KEEPS ON TICKING—that I can send just to them).

(Right back at’cha, guy.)

And now I have to go to a 1-1/2 hour meeting. Bleah.

212. DUNGEONS AND MOUNTAIN CASTRATIONS

2008-01-07T13:10:00.000-08:00

From the Archives

(April 2006) This news just in from the NC mountains:

AUTHORITIES SHUT DOWN DUNGEON
(Waynesville NC) At least six men traveled from across the nation and South America to have their genitals mutilated and be trained as sex slaves at a rural house south of Hazelwood, about 30 miles west of Asheville.

Sheriff Tom Alexander and DA Micheel Bonfoey arrested three men on felony charges of castration without malice, maiming without malice, and practicing medicine without a license. The sheriff and prosecutor said the victims were all willing participants.

The men—two, ages 60 and 61, who identified as a couple and a third, 49, who identifed as as “slave”—were given court-appointed lawyers. They are in the general population at the county’s Detention Center.

The victims met the men through a locally produced Website that published photographs of men engaging in sadomasochistic behavior. Yahoo! shut down the site in December 2004. The castrations took place last year beginning in March and continued through November, according to police documents.

One of the men—Master Rick—had logged onto the Internet only the day before his arrest looking to add to his “stable of slaves,” according to press reports. His advertisement ran on collarme.com and two other similar Web sites.

“This is NOT a game with Me. I live this lifestyle, have currently 1 live in 24/7 slave, whom I Own,” he wrote in an ad. “Looking to train other slaves and to add to My stable of slaves also. Am always open to giving experiences and expanding limits, but only with Male slaves and subs (submissives).”

During a search of the home, investigators found DVD recordings of the castrations.

DA Bonfoey said a case of castration without malice is extremely rare. Consenting to castration, he said, is not a defense under NC law.

He said the castration law was likely written to protect sex offenders against vigilantes.

I can venture a guess at what Audre Lorde would have to say about this if she were alive today.

(And I wonder if Master Rick is aware that castration is a Class 3 felony in this state?)

•

And now a story that stopped this grrl who paid her own way through undergrad/grad school (with the help of massive student loans) in my tracks:

The New York Times ran an article about fashion at Columbia U (“where privilege and experience meet”) today that reminded me of the near-constant cognitive dissonance that I experienced as a working student trying to eke out enough of a living to buy the next textbook or packet of Ramen.

At Columbia, one student whose sense of fashion is showcased in the Times describes herself as not trying too hard. What’s that look like? Well, she wears vintage boots and a Valentino scarf and carries a Ferragamo bag that she picked up in Paris.

(Did I mention that the African American stripper who was allegedly raped by prep-schooled Dukies was stripping to pay her tuition? Or that GWB wants to pare back the federal student loan program?)

Another Columbia student wears a John Varvatos jacket that his fashion consultant/personal shopper chose for him at Bloomingdale’s.

Oh oh oh. Your worries ain’t like mine, sugarcakes . . .

Meanwhile, I am making plans to see Guardian, a play starring the actor who plays Shane on The L Word, when I’m in NYC in a few weeks. She’s playing Lyndie England and a ACLU lawyer attempting to defend Gitmo prisoners will speak afterwards.

This ought to be interesting.

211. NOT-SO-INNOCENT HUMAN TURNED UPON BY OWN HORMONES

2008-01-04T09:56:00.000-08:00

From the Archives

(April 2006) Scientists discovered a new blue ring around Uranus and I spent the morning editing an analysis of 2003–4 domestic violence statistics for North Carolina.

Sobering stuff.

The state’s domestic violence programs provided services to 45,211 individuals and its courts issued 11,954 domestic violence protective orders (DVPOs) in this one-year period. Also, during this year, fifty-eight women were killed by current or former husbands or boyfriends and ten men were killed by current or former wives or girlfriends.

Love makes the world go round . . . and makes us collide into each other with all our emotions blaring when it goes wrong too.

Today, I am aching from overdoing it at the gym and am feeling jaded about life in general (especially after reading all these domestic violence statistics) and I just want to curl up in a ball and eat some good bad-for-me comfort food right now.

My body is the earth. My body is the water.

That’s what my chorus sang when we performed Diane Benjamin’s amazing “Where I Live: A Breast Cancer Oratorio” recently and this pretty much encapsulates how I think about my body.

My body allows me to experience back-scratching, gasping-into-her-hair pleasure and deep intimacy.

It longs for the feel of wind blowing through my hair.

It gets goosebumps when it encounters empathy.

It allows me to experience awe and see beauty and feel such great sorrow that all I can do is rock in place sometimes, immobilized.

My body is a miraculous, sensation-driven outer shell, a vehicle that transports my creative spirit, my soul-force, the big-picture me from one place to another— the thing that gives me legs so that I can find beauty and meaning.

Benjamin reminds us that, besides being spirit, we are also complex energy machines that are radically altered by the chemicals that we absorb though.

Between the sung phrases above, a narrator intones Talc. Used in baby and other powders.... Methylene chloride. Used in decaffeinated coffee.... CONFIRMED CARCINOGENS.

On and on the narrator announces her short list of the many confirmed carcinogens that can break down our machines.

I try to remember this song when I (still) crave a cigarette, try to remind myself—especially on Mondays when the elliptical cross-trainer leaves my legs feeling particularly heavy—that I am a machine that requires regular care and routine maintenance.

Now you’d think that five people with breast cancer, two people with ovarian cancer, one person with prostate cancer, a father who died young from lung cancer, and a butt-load of (mostly average weight) relatives with diabetes and amputated limbs would be enough to bang me over the head with the fact that my machine needs my immediate, concentrated attention but, sadly, I still cave and have a big dish of fettuccini alfredo or a bag of potato chips sometimes.

Since I am a poet, I use personification when I’m zoning out on the elliptical cross-trainer, dub my body the Complex Energy Machine (CEM) that I must provide with specific fuel and, you know, walk like a dog.

And I work to understand the metabolic processes that my body executes each time I give it food and exercise.

And, because I am a poet who has a hard time stepping out of my head, I also remind myself that artists before me have also measured out their lives in such tedious coffee spoons.

•

Storms swept through here this past weekend, so I only went outside long enough to take a (wet) walk through the gardens, pick up some groceries, and rent ENRON: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Grizzly Man.

I love the fact that, when we’re seriously flawed and floundering for a way to thrive without alcohol or drugs or other destructive behaviors, some of us are lucky and realize that nature can save us.

(At least until the grizzlies kill you.)

I really like the perspective of the filmmaker who made Grizzly Man, like this film that is, ultimately, about someone who was almost crippled by his human foibles but who found grace in Alaska.

LISTENING TO: Ani DeFranco’s “Dilate” (which will probably not help me fall asleep)

READING: San Francisco trannie Emil Heiple’s Body of Loss (a zine). I started reading the Urban Hermitt’s Flow Chronicles too, but just couldn’t get into it—I guess because I’ve never felt that I’m in the wrong body. Instead, I just get frustrated when people tell me that the fact that my body looks a certain way is supposed to mean that I should limit how I use it or live my life.

SANG IN SHOWER: Möxy Fruvous’s “Drinking Song”

210. FORENSIC VAGINA SPECIALISTS AND THE NATIONAL CENTER FOR MEN

2008-01-04T09:49:00.000-08:00

From the Archives

(April 2006) Random factoid: people who are employed to check vaginas for evidence of abortions are referred to as forensic vagina specialists.

Meanwhile, Harvard’s Harvey Mansfield has written Manliness, a celebration of privilege that Yale University Press recently published.

(Poor Harv. I guess his own school wouldn’t publish this sexist diatribe so hot on the heels of ousting its own prez because of his propensity to mutter sexist crapola.)

Mansfield claims that women secretly like housework and enjoy changing diapers whereas men not so secretly like war and look down on so-called women’s work.

“Now that women are equal,” he asserts, “women should be able to accept being told that they aren't, quite."

Equal? Huh? In what universe?

Slide down from your ivory tower on your own slug slime Harv and check out the Really World where salary inequities and cliterectomies and misogyny and religious bias etc. etc. etc. keep far too many women under the thumbs of violent and controlling men

(who, let me guess, are just being men when they claim such authority as their own—at least according to your neat calculations).

This inequality is happening at a time when men are intent on depriving women of the very right to control our own bodies too (yet some of these same men sue when they are forced to support their offspring).

Example: The National Center for Men—that poor downtrodden group—has filed a lawsuit they’ve dubbed Roe v. Wade for Men on behalf of a twenty-something-year-old man who claims that he should not have to pay child support because the woman he impregnated told him that she was on birth control and thought she was infertile.

So let me guess: Harvey and his ilk believe that the stripper who was allegedly gang-raped at Duke should bear the child if she becomes pregnant as a result of the alleged assault, but that the thugs who allegedly raped her should not be held accountable because boys—the poor testosterone-driven things—will be boys.

Meanwhile The National Center for Men continues to express outrage about how freaking unfair it is that men tend to die earlier than women.

(I am so goddamn SICK of hearing men celebrate their bad behavior while whining about the fact that they will be held accountable for this same behavior!)

As Kimberly Gadette says in Wake Up and Smell the Diapers,

consuming cheese doodles and beer and lolling on the couch does not make for longevity. Darn the luck, if only men liked housework. By getting off that sofa and washing a floor, scrubbing a toilet, raising a kid, they, too, might live longer.

Reality bites, iron boyz.

Meanwhile, I wish I were attending the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham instead of working, especially because this year’s festival includes a special Class in America series.

(I say that with some level of irony, since my ex-wife’s best friend’s very upper-crust British father—a man who celebrates his classism and privilege but is way too effete to ever succeed at the physical requirements of being a soldier and so maybe isn't really a man after all according to Harvey's definition—is one of the judges who selected this year’s films. )

Okay. I need to pour my homemade soy parsley soup into a Tupperware and scram now . . .

. . . but first, I forgot to mention that I had Lucinda screaming on my iPod last night while walking and was so distracted that I damn near stepped on a great blue heron, which startled the bejeezus out of both of us. Its beak was nipple height and its beautiful body was so close to mine that I felt the wind from its wings as it flew away. Wow!

LISTENING TO: Siouxie and the Banshees

READING: An article about domestic violence

SANG IN SHOWER: America's “Daisy Jane” (from my junior-high-school daze)

BEST-OF SPAM: “go longer for her” (Oh I do baby. I do.)

209. COMFORTABLE AS A FLOAT

2008-01-04T09:47:00.000-08:00

From the Archives (April 2006)

BITTERNESS
by Olga Broumas

She who loves roses must be patient
and not cry out when she is pierced by thorns.
—Sappho

In parody
of a grade-B film, our private
self-conscious soapie, as we fall
into the common, suspended disbelief of love, you ask
will I still be
here tomorrow, next week, tonight you ask me am I really
here. My passion delights

and surprises you, comfortable
as you’ve been without it. Lulled,
comfortable as a float myself in your real
and rounded arms, I can only smile
back, indulgently
at such questions. In the second reel—

a season of weeks, two
flights across the glamorous Atlantic, one
orgy and the predictable divorce
scenes later—I’m fading out
in the final close-up
alone. As one

heroine in this
two-bit production to the other, how long
did you, did we both know
the script
meant you to wake up doubting
in those first nights, not me, my daytime
serial solvency, but yours.

Yesterday—the same day that a child was testifying before Congress about being abused by online sexual predators—a high-ranking Bush official was arrested for pedophilia. Yes, Bush’s deputy press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security tried to solicit sex from a fourteen-year-old girl.

This also from the Post:

Another Homeland Security official—Frank Figueroa, special agent in charge of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Tampa—faces trial this week on charges of exposing himself to a teenage girl last year at a mall. Figueroa, who has been suspended, pleaded not guilty.

As my Baptist mother used to say, be sure your sins will find you out, yo.

SANG IN SHOWER: Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” (which dates me, huh?)

READING: The search warrant for 610 N Buchanan St. (AKA the lacrosse team house beside Duke campus).

BEST-OF SPAM: I FAILED AND STILL MAKE 94K! [but apparently cannot find the caps lock key on his computer]

208. FAKE MEAT, ANYONE?

2008-01-04T09:44:00.001-08:00

From the Archives

(April 2006) Strippers, prostitutes, porn stars and escorts are the sacrificial lambs we feed to the Patriarchy.

So says Biting Beaver at bitingbeaver.blogspot.com.

Meanwhile, the Tennessee Guerilla Women are promoting a flaming red burka—it’s all the rage for Spring ’06 in the red states.

But the biggest topic on wimmin’s blogs today is the alleged gang rape of a black stripper at a predominantly white Duke University lacrosse team party.

The New York Times says this case has placed new strains on Duke’s ties with the city of Durham.

(ya think?)

A spokesperson for the accused says that these boys are “from wonderful families.”

(Note that this spokesperson chooses to focus on the boys’ families though and not on the actual players, fifteen of whom have been arrested in Durham since their arrival at Duke.)

Without giving away my anonymity, I will say that I spent many years at The Gothic Wonderland and remember the lacrosse house in question being toilet-papered more than once by campus women’s groups as a warning to women that someone was sexually assaulted there.

I can also say with certaintly that the lacrosse team (and many Dukies) earned their reputation for celebrating their obnoxiousness (and that this reputation extends beyond the Cameron Crazies).

Example: Cops who arrest Dukies for drunken and disorderly conduct are often taunted with such barbs as Ooo. I bet you had to complete a whole high-school degree to get YOUR job . . .

This allegation is being made in a gritty town that is 50 percent black, a town in which 15 percent of the residents live below the poverty line.

The gap between the Haves and the Have Nots grows wider daily in Durham and across the globe, and Durham is already a place where a whole lot of the working poor resent the drunken, privileged eighteen-year-olds racing around in their luxury vehicles.

The demographics of the university population where the lacrosse team is enrolled and the university population where the stripper is enrolled could not be more different, and these differences are definitely not lost on the Durhamites.

Frankly, I admire any DA who would even pursue a case of this proportion, given the money and pressure that are no doubt breathing down his back right now.

(And I hope he has a damn good case too because, otherwise, his ass is now officially grass.)

So yeah I can just imagine what the town/gown relationship is like right about now.

A perfect storm.

207. YOU DON'T SEND ME FLOUR

2008-01-04T09:42:00.000-08:00

From the Archives

i thank heaven somebody's crazy enough to send me a daisy
—e.e. cummings

Someone who does not write books, who thinks a lot, and who lives in [an] unsatisfying society will usually be a good letter- [or blog-] writer.
—Friedrich Nietzsche

(March 2006) Tonight I’ll attend a screening of Over the Farm: A New Deal Resettlement and Its Legacy. This independent film takes a historical glance back to the landless African American sharecroppers who were offered forty acres and a mule in Tillery NC back in the thirties.

Then, even though I have no Final Four men’s teams left in the office pool, I plan to cheer for George Mason University because the brilliant poet Carolyn Forché once taught there.

•

Meanwhile, here are the opening two sentences of Benedict Carey’s New York Times article about intercessory prayer:

Prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery, a large and long-awaited study has found. And patients who knew they were being prayed for had a higher rate of post-operative complications like abnormal heart rhythms, perhaps because of the expectations the prayers created, the researchers suggested.

Shocking that this is newsworthy, really.

Christianists were, of course, quick to respond.

First a chaplain at the Mayo Clinic announced that the study says nothing about the power of personal prayer or about prayers for family members.

“Working in a large center like Mayo,” he said, “You hear tons of stories about the power of prayer, and I don’t doubt them.”

How novel.

And let me guess, you tell those same families that it was the will of your god when their prayers were not answered.

Another Christianist reminds us that we don’t know how MUCH prayer each person received

Or if they inhaled while praying, dude.

Medea. Slaps. Forehead. Soundly. Now.

206. SUDDEN AZALEAS

2008-01-04T09:40:00.000-08:00

The Rider
by Naomi Shihab Nye

A boy told me
if he roller-skated fast enough
his loneliness couldn't catch up to him,

the best reason I ever heard
for trying to be a champion.

What I wonder tonight
pedaling hard down King William Street
is if it translates to bicycles.

A victory! To leave your loneliness
panting behind you on some street corner
while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
no matter how slowly they fell.

SANG IN SHOWER: Alison Krauss’s “There Is a Reason” (for it all—which I sing an octave lower than this angel-voiced woman)

READING: The Epoch Times, which someone tossed in my driveway. It appears to be a Falun Gong publication.

BEST-OF SPAM: Smart brain: the subliminal software they tried to ban!

205. SEE BRAIN RUN. RUN BRAIN RUN!

2008-01-04T09:35:00.000-08:00

From the Archives

(March 2006) Solomon Pomenya, a fifty-two-year-old Ghanian doctor who witnessed the total eclipse of the sun yesterday, said,

I believe it's a wonderful work of God, despite all what the scientists say. This tells me that God is a true engineer.

I love that we humans respond to beauty and mystery by searching for higher meaning, that we find inspiration in the natural world and its wonders, but do wonder why we must attribute such beauty to a higher being.

Inspiration, for me, seeps out as poetry or music or art, as some attempt to express in a tangible way what my senses and mind and soul absorb and process.

This means that, when I read a statement such as Dr. Pomenya’s, I substitute “creative spark” for “God.”

•

The philosopher Umberto Eco taught himself to eat and walk and shave and live and write faster in order to get more work done.

Eco says

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

I share this suspicion yet obsess about meaning.

Eco studies semiotics, a field in which philosophers analyze the complex meanings of cultural/pop products: Michael Jordan bobbleheads and that stupid bucking chicken commercial and Bond. James Bond and Brangelina and the whole American Idol phenomenon and that vapid Barbara Walters television show in which seemingly intelligent women say such things as “Well, I call other women bitch. Sure I do, and don’t tell me you don’t either.”

(This MUST be some male producer’s idea of what women do when we are alone together—when we’re not tying each other up in knots and fist-fucking each other to earth-trembling orgasms, that is).

So what is it about Americans and our cultural products, our stuff, that makes us max out our credit cards and pay exorbitant interest rates just to garner more stuff?

Are commercials really that persuasive or do we lack some core meaning that would keep us from going on such mad spending sprees?

Why do so many of us prefer to be consumers rather than citizen activists?

Jon Stewart riffed on the genetically altered “healthy” omega-3 hogs on tonight’s Daily Show.

Scientists have apparently altered them to match the naturally healthy but rare Iberíco hogs (which North Carolina’s Cane Creek Farms raises and sells to organic restaurants).

Stewart asks “Why should we eat in moderation when a scientist can just change an entire species’ genetic make-up to benefit our fat asses?”

Why indeed.

And why do we prefer poison to spots on our apples? Epcot to the real thing?

Don’t Americans want to know why so many foreigners despise us, how other cultures live and change and deal with consumer products?

(Wait. I know the answer to that.)

Perhaps our lust for consumer products and our isolationist tendencies are the natural by-products of Americans’ fear of our own emptiness, are the result of our inability to move beyond the Puritanical workaholic ethics that our culture has handed down to us.

What, besides God, would help us find meaning?

Eco says

I'm not saying there's no difference between Homer and Walt Disney. But Mickey Mouse can be perfect in the sense that a Japanese haiku is.

Ponder that one.

204. BACKSLIDING AWAY

2008-01-04T09:30:00.000-08:00

From the Archives

(March 2006) I’m sitting in a grease-scented dive listening to Johnny Cash as dyksters smoke clove cigarettes around me.

(Johnny would like to remind you that he never got over those blue eyes and I would like to remind you that the illuminated keyboards on Mac Powerbooks are truly wonderful things.)

Did y’all note that the New Hampshire House defeated a proposed amendment to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman but, interestingly enough, the good folks of this same state do not recognize gay marriages or civil unions performed in other states?

Or that Kris Kristofferson has a new CD?

I am brain-dead and sick of work and in need of some serious escape, and so have been Googling random words from Alternet stories in a sort of Charles Bernstein approach to information gathering. This has resulted in my discovery of some interesting conspiracy theories that, among other things, detail the size of Dick Cheney’s large schlong.

Seems that in 1995, way back when I was a poor post-grad student dedicating most of my income to paying off student loans, Claudia Mullen gave the following testimony to a US presidential advisory committee investigating post-WWII government radiation experiments:

Between the years 1957 and 1984 I became a pawn in the government's game. Its ultimate goal was mind control and to create the perfect spy, all through the use of chemicals, radiation, drugs, hypnosis, electric shock, isolation in tubs of water, sleep deprivation, brainwashing, verbal, physical, emotional and sexual abuse.

I was exploited unwittingly for nearly three decades of my life and the only explanations given to me were that the end justifies the means and I was serving my country in their bold effort to fight communism. I can only summarize my circumstances by saying they took an already abused seven-year-old child and compounded my suffering beyond belief.

The saddest part is, I know for a fact I was not alone. There were countless other children in my same situation and there was no one to help us until now. I have already submitted as much information as possible including conversations overheard at the agencies responsible. I am able to report all of this to you in such detail because of my photographic memory and the arrogance of the people involved. They were certain they would always control my mind.

Although the process of recalling these atrocities is not an easy one, nor is it without some danger to myself and my family, I feel the risk is worth taking.

Dr. L. Wilson Greene, [who] received $50 million dollars from the Edgewood Chemical and Radiology Laboratory as part of the TSD, or Technical Science Division of the CIA, once described to Dr. Charles Brown that “children were used as subjects because they were more fun to work with and cheaper too.” They needed lower profile subjects than soldiers and government people so only young willing females would do. Besides, he said, “I like scaring them.”

In 1958 they told me I was to be tested by some important doctors from the ... Human Ecology Society, and I was instructed to cooperate. I was told not to look at anyone's faces, and to try hard to ignore any names because this was a very secret project. I was told all these things to help me forget. Naturally, as most children do, I did the opposite and remembered as much as I could. A Dr. John Gittinger tested me, Dr. Cameron gave me the shock, and Dr. Greene the X-rays. Then I was told by Sid Gottlieb that “I was ripe for the big A,” meaning ARTICHOKE.

By the time I left to go home, just like every time from then on, I would remember only whatever explanations Dr. Robert G. Heath, of Tulane Medical University, gave me for the odd bruises, needle marks, burns on my head, fingers, and even the genital soreness. I had no reason to think otherwise. They had already begun to control my mind.

The next year I was sent to a lodge in Maryland called Deep Creek Cabins to learn how to sexually please men. I was taught how to coerce them into talking about themselves. It was Richard Helms, who was Deputy Director of the CIA, Dr. Gottlieb, Capt. George White, and Morris Allan who all planned on filling as many high government agency officials and heads of academic institutions and foundations as possible so that later when the funding for mind control and radiation started to dwindle, projects would continue. I was used to entrap many unwitting men, including themselves, all with the use of a hidden camera. I was only nine years old when the sexual humiliation began.

I overheard conversations about part of the Agency called ORD, which I found out was Office of Research and Development. It was run by Dr. Greene, Dr. Steven Aldrich, Martin Orne, and Morris Allan. Once a crude remark was made by Dr. Gottlieb about a certain possible leak in New Orleans involving a large group of retarded children who had been given massive doses of radiation. He asked why was Wilson so worried about a few retarded kids, after all they would be the least likely to spill the beans.

We’ve got the Artichoke, the grassy knoll, the Franklin Cover-Up, Project Paper Clip, MK Ultra, Bohemian Groove, the conspiracy of silence (a sex scandal involving children at Boystown), the Finders, The Church of Set, Cathy O'Brien’s ritualized sexual abuse involving Dick Cheney’s abnormally large penis and Mark Philips, the neurolinguistic programmer who toured the conspiracy circuit with this woman.

Then there’s Dave McGowan’s Programmed to Kill: The Politics of Serial Murder. McGowan sees rampant Satanic pedophilia/ritual murder connections in this so-called pedophocracy that we mistakenly call a nation.

Lots to read and I'm a skeptic.

Nevertheless, I’m looking around this dive now wondering which of these folks drops phrases such as “Project Paper Clip” and “Bohemian Groove” as they sip their beers, which dyksters believe the UFO stories are real?

203. COMING SOON TO A THEATRE NEAR YOU: HETS-ONLY WATER FOUNTAINS

2008-01-04T09:28:00.000-08:00

From the Archives

(March 2006) I'm catching up on the news and, as usual, sampling it.

Seems that Idaho activists recently fanned out across downtown Boise to attach small white Heterosexuals Only signs to every bench and fountain and doorway and statehouse bathroom they could find.

This action coincided with the forty-first anniversary of the Bloody Sunday march in Selma.

Amazing how time advances yet bigotry stands still, isn’t it (and how some folks use religion to justify it in both cases)?

Elsewhere in these united states, the good folks of Burlington VT—oh to ride my Bike around Lake Champlain again!—elected to name a nearby peak Brokeback Mountain.

And elsewhere Jerry Falwell had the Soulforce Equality Riders arrested when they stepped onto Liberty University property. But, in a move that makes perfect sense to my Alabama-bred pal Tuscaloosa and this escaped-from-the-Baptists grrrl, Liberty U students greeted the queer riders with cookies.

And farther south, five Savannah soldiers taunted and severely beat a gay man.

These soldiers are members of the Third Infantry Division at Fort Stewart—the same place where an artist pal’s cross-dressing young stepson is now stationed.

Gawd do I hope the boy’s discreet!

LISTENING TO: The rain

READING: Transgender Warriors and a new cookbook manuscript

BEST OF SPAM: Safe way to drown your girlfriend in cum. (Yuck! Howzabout I drown her in throbbing contractions and water-based lube instead?)

202. COYOTE O COYOTE CAN YOU EXPLAIN?

2008-01-04T09:25:00.000-08:00

From the Archives

(March 2006) Don’t you wonder how a coyote wound up in Central Park?

It seems likely that someone released it there. But then again maybe it wandered down from that Connecticut camp where my ex Mud and her new game-playing boytoy got eaten alive while participating in one of those dumb live-action role-playing weekends.

Yeah, I’m sure that’s what happened.

The coyote scanned the surviving LARPers, decided that there were just too many insouciant Yalies who can play-act but have no clue how to interact in their herd, then wandered off to the mean streets of the city in search of real people and some Adobo-infused dinner.

The Times calls the coyote’s appearance “as unexpected as seeing Woody Allen on the arctic tundra,” and that about sums it up.

About as unlikely as seeing that poor whale swimming up the Thames too.

201. I AM A COMMON WOMAN. . .

2008-01-04T09:20:00.000-08:00

...There are a lot more just like me
Holding the whole damn world together,
Day by day, week by week.

Turn to your neighbor;
Look in her face.
You can read it in her eyes:
We all are common women,
As common as bread,
And will rise, will rise.
—Mary Beth Elliot/Joan Simcoe’s song “Common Woman”

From the Archives (March 2006) This afternoon, we held a reception for an employee who retires next week. Our fearless leader applauded her “quiet contribution” (at the rate of $26,000 annually after 30 years of service), praised her diligence and attention to detail, then presented her with a gift certificate to a big-box office supply store before we partook of reception fare together.

I’m glad we honored her publicly, glad she retired with full benefits after dedicating so many years of her life to this place, but couldn’t help but remind myself that this same fearless leader told me to get rid of her just four years ago.

(I’m cocky, so replied Why don’t you tell me how much money you need instead [big boy] and let me find it for you?)

So perhaps readers will understand why the edges of my parched lips curled into an uncontrollable snarl when Fearless Leader shook the hand of a woman who will retire having no idea how hard I had to work to save her position and benefits just a few short years ago.

Everybody knows that the deal is rotten. Old Black Joe’s still picking cotton for your ribbons and bows. Everybody knows.

What’s that Percy Bysshe Shelley line:

The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature

Today I need some poetry so, okay, I’ll end with a poem:

MY HEART

I’m not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I don’t prefer one “strain” to another.
I’d have the immediacy of a bad movie,
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind. I want to be
at least as alive as the vulgar.
(...) and my heart—
you can’t plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.
—Frank O’Hara

200. POET BEATINGS AND FIGHTING INJUSTICE

2007-12-15T20:22:00.000-08:00

From the Archives

(March 2006) Consider for a moment the irony of the fact that Yahoo!’s lead headline today is The Trumps choose a name for their baby boy!

But only one major US paper has reported the news that Iranian security forces brutally attacked a group of women observing International Women’s Day.

These feminists organized under a platform of peace to support basic human rights, yet were ambushed by truckloads of state-authorized thugs who dumped garbage on them, kicked them and beat them with batons.

Victims include the famous (and elderly and nearly blind) poet Simin Behbehani, who says that the purpose of her poetry is to fight injustice.

Meanwhile, Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Ali as-Sistani issued a death fatwa against queers and is calling for us to be killed in the “worst, most severe way.”

This fatwa makes Medea want to grab her handy-dandy Sears and Roebuck vise grips and wrench the grand(iose) ayatollah’s scrotum about in the worst, most severe way.

SANG IN SHOWER: No, but I conditioned my frizzy hair

READING: Hiss and Tell’s latest entry (singing the praises of large breasts)

LISTENING TO: Kasey Chambers’ “Falling Into You”

BEST OF SPAM: Want your love back? (Well, I’m SURE I’d be asking a random e-mailer for it if I did)

199. A NEW DARK AGES, OR, REMEMBERING AWE

2007-12-14T10:04:00.000-08:00

From the Archives

(Monday • 6 March 2006) I’m thinking about faith.

Many of my progressive Catholic friends miss the rituals and mysticism of their faith but cannot in good conscience participate in what they describe as a repressive and greedy organization. These days, their evolving spiritual practices include worshipping the moon or Spiderwoman weaving this big world. Others have joined Unitarian Universalist fellowships. And others use energy work and meditation to fill the void.

I once worked with a group of radical Catholic activists who rented whole floors of apartment buildings that we used as stealth offices. Priests’ or nuns’ bedrooms were off limits, but everyone otherwise walked freely between apartments, setting up women’s pottery collectives in Nicaragua; acquiring, organizing, and delivering humanitarian aid to Central America; writing inclusive non-hierarchical lectionaries and responsorial psalms; working to end the death penalty and to free Mumia; working to include women in the distribution of holy sacraments; editing and creating an inclusive non-hierarchical Bible; thwarting the anti-choice movement and the many sexist bishops who oppose women’s equality.

The founders of this organization—a Jesuit priest and nun—have since been excommunicated, but their work goes on.

One of the many things I learned as we ate our hummus and bean sprout sandwiches was that the now rabidly anti-choice Catholic church actually allowed abortions until the late 1800s, when the pope conveniently declared abortion an excommunicable offense just as France’s diminishing birth rates threatened its ability to maintain a strong army.

(Not coincidentally, the emperor declared the pope infallible soon after this decree.)

Matthew Fox, another radical Catholic, said

There are two Christianities in our midst. One worships a punitive father and seeks obedience at all costs. It is patriarchal, demonizes woman, the earth, science, gays, lesbians and deep thought. It builds on fear and it supports empire-builders. Its theology includes a Punitive Father in the Sky and teaches original sin.

The other Christianity recognizes the Original Blessing that all beings derive from. We recognize awe, not sin, not guilt, as the starting point of true religion. We recognize a Divinity who is source of all things and is as much mother as father, as much female as male. We honor creation and diversity. When God created everything, He pronounced it all good. We are here to make love to life. Yes, we are here to make love to life… Delight in creation and take your dreams into our politics and institutions….

We live in the midst of a suicidal economy, motivated by love of money. We have reached a dead end. What we need to turn it around are hearts in love with life. How do we do it? We first must move from domination to partnership and we begin by educating our young in awe and wonder, not how to take tests. Awe leads to reverence which leads to gratitude which will reinvent our species. This is the task of our generation, to regain awe. The 3 R’s need to be balanced by the 10 C’s; contemplation, creativity, chaos, compassion, courage, critical consciousness, community, celebration, ceremony and character.

I don’t recognize a divinity as the source of all things but do recognize that it is possible that we, plants and animals and people alike, could make up a larger soul (but not in an icky Borg way).

And we certainly make up boocoodles of matter and antimatter.

I also favor the notion of honoring creation and diversity, and appreciate the notion of being here to make love to life and delight in creation and take our dreams into our politics and institutions.

As Barbara Kingsolver says,

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what to hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can't say it. Elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers or the destroyed. That's about it. Right now I'm living in that hope, running down its hallways and touching the walls on both sides.

LISTENING TO: Ferron (Beware you sagging diplomats for you will not hear one gun, and though oceans lie between us, we will not be undone. And it won't take long . . .)
READING: Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes
BEST-OF SPAM: A cure for every disease!

198. I GOT THOSE MARKETED CRAVINGS AND BODY-IMAGE BLUES

2007-12-04T20:28:00.000-08:00

From the Archives

(March 2006) I went to a diva competition last night that was a real hoot.

The post-performance gathering was also quite illuminating.

See, several contestants were overweight by today’s standards, so, as soon as they left the post-performance party, the petty remarks began:

Did you see those flabby arms? Someone should have told her to dance with those ham hocks covered.

and

How many babies do you reckon she’s had anyway? If you can’t lose the tummy, honey, at least hide it with a girdle.

and

Good lord! Did you catch a glimpse of those thunder thighs?

(Thighs that were, interestingly enough, primarily on gorgeous African-American and Latina contestants.)

I am relatively fit, yet understand that devotees of our culture’s diet, exercise, fashion, beauty, cosmetic, and plastic-surgery industries can have severely limited images of beauty and health.

And they really don’t like it when audiences crown a diva who doesn’t conform to the narrow standards of beauty these industries promote.

In fact, judging from last night’s behavior, I’d say this makes the scrawny girls downright pissed.

Don’t you wonder why, as a culture, we won’t acknowledge the reality that weight loss, for most of us, does not generally translate into improved chances of survival?

(Newsflash: being skinny does not ensure happiness either, but the pursuit of it can certainly harm people.)

Most of the “fat” divas weren’t really even fat, but were instead what my grandmother called “pleasantly plump”—maybe a size 14.

(You know, like Marilyn Monroe.)

So I’m wondering why we as a culture need to make fun of/marginalize/look with disgust upon moderately overweight people.

Why do we continue to believe that scrawny people are healthier when evidence confirms that being moderately fat by today’s standards isn't even unfit (and it looks a whole lot better on a woman IMHO)?

And let’s remember what the appearance industries don’t want us to acknowledge: 30 thousand Americans die annually from being underweight, in part because we equate with unworthiness.

Here’s some alarming data from Courtney E. Martin’s soon-to-be-published Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters:

In 1995, 34 percent of high school-aged girls in the US thought they were overweight but, today, 90 percent do.

To make matters worse, a survey of contemporary American parents confirmed that 1 in 10 would abort their child if they found out that he or she had a genetic tendency to be fat.

(READ THAT AGAIN. Slowly.)

Commercials feed us the lie that overweight people possess weak character and magazines feed us the lie that normal weight people are fat.

So I’m curious: Do you find it alarming that a recent Ellegirl magazine’s poll of 10 thousand readers found that 30 percent said they would rather be thin than healthy?

Or that over half the young women between the ages of 18 and 25 would prefer to be run over by a truck than to be fat?

No mention is made of the type of appearance-related articles and ads that run in this fashion magazine, but let’s remember that the teenage group most likely to consider or attempt suicide is girls who worry that they are overweight.

My hunch is that most of them measure themselves against models such as the ones found in the pages of Ellegirl too and find themselves wanting.

What’s particularly sad to me is that these girls feel worthless because of their appearance, when their substance, their souls (if you will) are so much more important.

I have rarely measured out my activity in tedious little TS Eliot coffee spoons and did not grow up reading magazines that encourage me to believe that I am inferior and ugly simply because I reject their products and diets and lies.

My friends would tell you that I have a healthy ego despite this obvious lack of social conformity (in between my bouts of insecurity and shyness anyway) and that I am tall, dark and handsome, and I guess what I'm saying is that I feel very fortunate because I've never felt compelled to focus much on what it feels like to present as ugly.

Still, I’m a dyke and one reality of being a dyke is that most of us wind up rejecting our parents’/church’s/peers’/cultures’ ideals in order to live life authentically.

Most of us also present as different, as Other—and, in my case, as more masculine than my mainstream sistuhs(and definitely more cocky).

So yeah, I guess I do have some experience in this arena, despite the fact that I have mostly lived in the interior with little interest in conforming.

Meanwhile, where's the valid nutritional information that is not driven by sales and that does not reject the perfect creature that I know I am? (-;

Where's the information driven by data, not cultural bias?

Maybe I'm just in denial but, to me, a healthy life style does not entail punishing myself or focusing on what I lack, but instead focuses on living in a manner that enables me to be as healthy as possible, both spiritually and physically.

As J. Eric Oliver says in Fat Politics: The Real Story behind America’s Obesity Epidemic, “equating weight loss, instead of life style changes, with improved health is like saying ‘whiter teeth produced by the elimination of smoking reduces the incidence of lung cancer.’”

Okay, I’ll end with the entire quote:

It is not fat itself that is unhealthy, but our hypocritical attitudes and compulsive behaviors that are. We drive two blocks to the grocery store and then spend 20 minutes circling the parking lot so we can get a close spot. Once inside we load up our carts with low-fat, microwave meals and diet shakes filled with artificial everything. In the checkout line, we read about the latest fitness trend in Men's Health or Self, then get back into our cars, drive the two blocks home, and sit in front of the television all night eating Pizza Hut while drinking a liter of Diet Coke. We go to bed late, wake up early, head to work—in our cars, of course—where we will spend the next eight hours stationary and bored. Rinse. Repeat.

The messages are coming in loud and clear, and they are riddled with disempowering dichotomies—all or nothing, feast or famine, disgustingly fat or virtuously thin, deeply flawed or triumphantly perfect. There is no talk of what Buddhists describe as ’the middle path,’ no discussion of the pleasure of walking, eating homemade food, slowing down. There is no permission to say ‘no’ sometimes and ‘yes’ sometimes, and have those no's and yeses be simple answers, insignificant scores on a Scrabble board, representative of nothing more than a mood. Instead our yeses and no's signify our desirability, our life expectancy, our self-worth.

And that’s bullshit. Because, as Martin says, ‘It is not fat itself that is unhealthy, but our hypocritical attitudes and compulsive behaviors that are.”

197. CASUAL AND MEANINGLESS PRODUCTS

2007-12-04T20:25:00.000-08:00

From the Archives

(March 2006) As some readers know, I love the Pacific NW and would like to retire to Whidbey Island or thereabouts and spend the rest of my days kayaking in Lake Washington’s bird sanctuaries (where I will photograph and sketch birds) and off Vancouver (where I will cavort with the killer whales pods) and at Ebey’s Landing (where I will paint watercolors and watch birds).

I’d like to write on the deck of my tiny cottage and take long ferry rides and walk the wind-swept beaches while admiring the Olympic mountain range, then drive to Hurricane Ridge with my windows down and finally make use of my copy of How to Make Totem Poles (but I will never never ever kayak through the busy locks again as the huge boats nearly wash me into the walls).

Here’s something I don’t like about Seattle though: The Center for Science and Culture at the Discover Institute (which may sound like an organization that uses the scientific method to study and understand the world, but it’s really a bunch of so-called researchers who advocate the theory of intelligent design) is there.

(And I've already noted C-YA’s presence there.)

So, even though the Seahawks finally reached the SuperBowl (a game a coworker described as “they try to get more balls through the goalposts than the other team, right?”) and even though there’s all that water with mountains and fabulous sunsets and rain in one cool place, Seattle is nevertheless a little bit less appealing to me now.

The city's hosting the 14th Annual Women of Wisdom 2006 Conference (Return to the Well) though, and wow do I wish I could go to this crystal-squeezing feel-good event.

•

And speaking of evolution (heh) have you noticed that the Catholic church doesn’t promote the fact that Pope John Paul II said (in 1996) that evolution is “more than a hypothesis” ?

He qualified his statement though:

Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense—an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection—is not.

Whereas the new homophobic pope Benedict said that humans “are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution.”

And there you have it folks: two men in skirts who devoted their lives to scientific exploration in accordance with professionally established evidence-based methods of scientific inquiry have, in the typical voice of the (white male) expert, solved the vast mysteries of creation for us all.

Meanwhile Christianists recently coined the term “evolutionism” to categorize people who use the theory of evolution to refute what the Christianists call God’s hand in creation.

(Or was that a Martian’s hand? You can never be sure with their so-called Intelligent Design.)

Meanwhile, in the About Time category, a recent Supreme Court ruling said that Ashcroft’s Federal Department exceeded the proper bounds of its authority when it tried to undermine Oregon’s assisted-suicide law—or, as the Times says so well, the decision “rejected Mr. Ashcroft’s attempt to impose his religiously conservative ideology on a state whose voters had decided differently.”

Mastuh Ashcroft first tried to trump the election results with a federal law that was overturned. Then, as attorney general, he announced that the Controlled Substances Act granted him the authority to prevent doctors from prescribing lethal drugs for the purpose of suicide.

Clever little troll, isn’t he?

The current Bland Old Party is, when you think about it, amazing. Frist announces that he is capable of medically diagnosing a patient via video; Ashcroft announces that physician-assisted suicides are not a “legitimate medical purpose”; and Bush announces that he can wiretap anygawddamnbody he chooses because he is the commander-in-chief of the known universe.

(um that’s of the armed services, dude)

The GOP clearly believes that they, not doctors, can define the parameters of medical practice...

....Meanwhile, it is 78 degrees outside, so I am going to walk in the great outdoors now, where daffodils are suddenly popping out everywhere, and banish any images of Karl Rove from my skull.

Ciao.

196. PRESIDENT FOR LIFE

2007-12-04T20:24:00.000-08:00

From the Archives

(February 2006) DC's City Paper used to call Marion Berry “Mayor for Life” before he got busted for crack cocaine.

If Bush & Co had moved forward with their plan to cancel the recent presidential election (citing the threat of a terrorist attack), as Newsweek reported, then the City Paper would have perhaps revived this phrase while kicking it up a few notches.

Yep, the White House and DOJ seriously considered cancelling the elections (no doubt before those computer programmers devised a way to change Kerry votes to Bush ones).

So, who knows, we could have had a president for life who raises the terror alert to high whenever someone protests his position on the throne.

•

Meanwhile, an Austrian court has sentenced a historian to three years in prison for espousing his belief that the Holocaust never existed.

That’s in Austria.

In the US, people like Dr. Paul Cameron—who was kicked out of the APA long ago for announcing manufactured and bigoted results—continues to spread their homophobic crap far and wide.

And politicians like Rick Santorum continue to pronounce Cameron’s fictions as fact.

Cameron is the one who broadcast the lie that gay men routinely insert hamsters into their rectums.

Research groups failed to find even a single queer who practices this sex act and Cameron was uable to back up his claim with evidence, yet Santorum et al. repeat this data as if it’s accurate.

They also repeat the rumor that queers die in their forties, which is a lie even when you factor in the AIDS epidemic.

And no. I don’t believe one should be jailed for espousing opinions, even when they’re misguided and hateful and ignorant.

The Klan had the right to their ignorant opinions and so does Dr. Cameron. I’m glad that thinking people challenge their lies and logic though and kick them out of societies that require e-v-i-d-e-n-c-e. . .

(and don’t you wish the press still had to offer fair and balanced news? Thanks a whole lot, Ronnie.)

Telling historians that they cannot explore controversial theories—even about horrific events such as the Holocaust—limits knowledge. And I believe that scholars should be free to pursue their theories.

That’s how we learn new things and expand our knowledge.

•

And now a quote.

The now busted Ralph Reed said the following to Christian teens:

We will never know how many marriages and lives were saved, or how many children were spared the consequences of compulsive gambling, because of our work to shut down casinos.

To quote Ecclesiastes, all things shall come to pass, Asshole.

•

Okay. I’ll close with this factoid. It’s 27 February 2006. On this date in 1991, President Bush the Older declared “Kuwait is liberated. Iraq’s army is defeated.”

Prescient, wasn’t he?

195. LITTLE PINK HOUSES FOR YOU AND ME

2007-12-04T20:22:00.000-08:00

From the Archives

(February 2006) Sometimes I think I should just quit reading the news because stories such as this one leave me shaking my head in disbelief like the curmudgeon that I seem to have become, and then, instead of scribbling these tidbits into my journal as I once did, I wind up regurgitating this wild mix of random factoids into my blog like so much hip-hop news sampling.

My latest head-shaker? Well, there’s a Seattle group called C-YA (Catholic Youth Abstaining) that could come up with nothing better to do (since they’re abstaining from sex, natch), than to copy those idiots who object to “Happy Holidays” greeting cards and so launched a put-the-saint-back-in-Saint-Valentine’s-day campaign.

I though this story was a spoof at first because the group doesn’t provide any details about who their revered saint is or why we should consider him relevant to our lives, but then I went to their webpage and saw their floating discombobulated Jesus head that looks exactly like the Jesus that Southern Baptists used to print on their paper funeral fans and, well, knew it was legit.

I’m thinking maybe I should log onto some fundie websites and encourage them to protest this site, perahps by launching a put-the-body-back-on-the-bobbleheaded-Jesus campaign.

•

Meanwhile, the CIA has apparently gotten away with secretly removing over 55,000 pages from public access (even though they are required by law to report such removals to the Information Security Oversight Office.

Yup. Access to 9,500 documents was secretly revoked, depriving historians and the public of our nation’s history and of our cold hard facts.

These documents do not appear to contain sensitive information that a terrorist might use to harm our country either, but do demonstrate agency incompetence sometimes.

Example: a CIA assessment released just two weeks before 300,000 Chinese troops entered Korea states that Chinese intervention was "not probable."

That one’s classified now.

(Maybe they need a new category for documents that contain “bureaucratic sensitivities”?)

One odd twist to this scandal is that historians—let me guess, Bush will classify them as liberal historians—who have copies of these now-reclassified documents may now be in violation of the federal Espionage Act.

No big surprise but, now that it’s been caught red-handed, the administration is, in typical fashion, writing off the whole thing as a “bureaucratic quirk.”

You see, gullible citizens, these reclassified documents were never properly declassified (even though they were reviewed, stamped as declassified, given freely to researchers, and published), and so they remain classified (said the Grinch to Cindy Lou Who as he stuffed her Christmas tree up the impossibly small chimbly), which means that pulling these documents from public access now is not illegal at all.

Let me guess. They didn’t inhale either.