191. CREDIBILITY 101 AND THE PATRON SAINT OF WRITERS

From the Archives

(February 2006) Superbowl Sunday—the most dangerous day of the year to be female in the United States—came and went.

I guess the combination of alcohol and testosterone and heightened emotions and high-fivin’ with the dudes when your team scores big and hours of aggression must make some men feel the need to go home and assault the women who dare to love them.

A sad state of affairs indeed.

I did not watch the Superbowl (although I would have cheered for Seattle if I had).

Instead, I attended a wimmin’s gathering in which we formed a sacred circle and celebrated St. Brigit and our collective emergence from the dark winter into a season of new growth.

Our smudgesticks and poetry and candles lit in the four directions and laughter overflowed.

I read a Mary Oliver poem when the decidedly decorative talking stick made its way into my hands and believe it was well-received.

In between all of our ceremonial hoo-ha, we ate really good food and drank really good wine and ate delicious lavender- and chili-infused dark chocolate.

Mmm!

Of course, we also flipped on the game at halftime so we could watch Mick sing about his inability to get satisfaction, then wound up having an impromptu and quite spastic dance in the living room.

(I was hoping that Mick would “accidentally” flip open his shirt and expose his breast, but he showed more restraint.)

So yeah. Good energy abounded and the whole event reminded me of just how much I treasure women who have done their work and settled into who they are and are comfortable with themselves and aware of their power and who are not intimidated by mine or yours.

St. Brigit is the patron saint of writers, so I guess it was as appropriate day for Betty Friedan to die.

•

I did not get to see Tree this weekend, even though she was briefly in the mountains. She had her lumpectomy today and they removed two suspicious lymph nodes ...

... and even typing that is making my blood run cold and my throat clamp down.

The randomness of this is just so unfair. I mean, I was living the rock-’n’-roll life style way back in 1988 when Tree and I got together and am still staying up too late and eating too much bad-for-me food and indulging in good bottles of vino as she counts every morsel and competes in triathlons ...

... and I can’t write more than that on this topic right now because this news is just too overwhelming.

•

We will not accept less than severing the heads of those responsible.

That’s what a preacher at Al Omari mosque said in response to a cartoon depicting Muhammad.

This would-be beheader and other extremists consider it blasphemy to print the image of their god and they really consider it blasphemous to depict their god in a bomb-shaped turban.

(Yet they’re in favor of beheading people who see the world differently and expresse those beliefs openly.)

Maybe the cartoonist should consider this preacher’s protests and the actions of that homophobe in Boston who attacked three gay bar patrons with a hatchet and revise the cartoons, convert the turban into a robe, and depict an axe-toting Jesus as well.

(You know, like that old Molly Hatchet album.)

Nice to know that religious fanatics have not completely silenced dissent here though.

The Washington Post recently ran a cartoon that featured "Dr." Rumsfeld writing “battle hardened” onto the medical chart of a quadruple-amputee soldier’s chart. This prompted protest letters from all six members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

(The administration is still throwing out barbs about the so-called liberal media too but hey, no comparison.)

And here’s more hope.

Bob Schieffer of CBS’s Face the Nation recently grilled former White House Chief Counsel Alberto Gonzales about notifying the White House about the Plamegate investigation, then waiting till the next morning to inform them that they had to preserve all the materials relevant to an investigation (thus giving them time to destroy damning materials).

Now Scooter Libby’s lawyers say that emails from Cheney’s office were deleted contrary to White House policy or, to use their spin (which is reversible. See? You can flip it over to the corduroy side and apply it to those electronic voting machines that registered Bush votes when voters chose Kerry):

The computer system at the White House is supposed to automatically archive emails sent by the president and his aides. For reasons that are still unclear, these emails—which may or may not be relevant to the Plame investigation—were not preserved (from the NY Daily News)

As the church lady says, how conveeeeeenient.

For reasons that are still unclear? I mean gawddamn, how much clearer do they need to be?

And one writer accuses Gonzales of tipping off the White House five days earlier.

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson notes that,

if there were justice in the world, George W. Bush would have to give his State of the Union address from Oprah’s couch.... Bush should have to face the wrathful, Old Testament Oprah who subjected author James Frey to that awful public smiting the other day.

190. DATA MINING WHILE RULING WITHOUT RESTRAINT

From the Archives

(February 2006) All this talk about NSA’s illegal data mining exploits reminds me of Mud’s bright yellow textbook that had the words “DATA MINING” splashed across it in huge block letters. I remember it well because every time I saw the thing I started humming we are miners, hard rock miners. To the shaft house we must go ... and I feel like I’m dying from mining for gold. Yes I feel like I’m dying from mining for gold.

But hey! Let's turn lemons into lemonade, shall we, and make this West Virginia’s new post-regulation theme song now that miners seem to be getting trapped or killed on a daily basis.

•

So don’t you find it odd that President Bush has suddenly discovered science and now says he wants to recruit 30 thousand math and science professionals into our public classrooms?

Hasn’t he made the connection between scientists leaving public education and his party’s Dark Ages attempts to force scientists to teach myth-based bullshit?

And why does he refer to Social Security as a so-called entitlement program when I’ve paid into it every month since I was sixteen years old?

The man talks about our nation falling behind in technology and scientific knowledge, then refers to the federal student loan program as an entitlement program too (as opposed to an intelligent investment in the future—one that gets paid back with interest, as I know all too well).

And does it strike anyone else as depressingly humorous that Bush actually bragged about his party’s “spending restraint” with a straight face yesterday?

Anyone with a brain can see that taking another scalpel to already lean social programs while hemorrhaging money in a war fought on false evidence while operating under the faith-based notion that the dollar will remain the exchange rate while handing even more money to the super-rich is not exactly showing fiscal restraint.

Maybe he meant to say the Republicans are restraining from paying home health-care providers and the working poor adequately (which seems more like ethical restraint to me).

When yesterday’s policy—clearly written by special interest lobbyists from the insurance and drug industries—passed, even Republican party members were acknowledging that this administration’s reverse-Robin-Hood approach is unsustainable (although they didn't always get the reasons right).

Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) said “the present course is unsustainable. We can’t keep cutting taxes and cutting revenues, while cutting programs to protect the most vulnerable in society.”

John Dingell (D-MI) said “the stench of special interests hangs over the chamber.”

Is the administration oblivious to the burgeoning lobbying scandal or do they believe that no one will make the connection to this special-interest butt-kissing and even more civil and criminal complaints that have just been announced against former insurance executives for apparent financial inproprieties?

Meanwhile, NPR ran an interesting show last night about health savings accounts, during which a guy from the Wall St. Journal said that each GM car has about $1,800 dollars in health-care costs rolled into its cost. These benefits makes it hard for US corporations to compete with overseas sweatshops.

The Republican solution is to quit offering health-care benefits to employees.

Why doesn’t it occur to these people that we can refuse to do business with overseas sweatshops instead and force human rights issues onto the table?

(Wouldn't be prudent?)

Remember that bumpersticker: The Labor Movement. We’re the folks that brought you the weekend?

Meanwhile, these corporations are raking in profits and getting tax breaks hand over fist right now.

For instance, if you want to get really pissed, take a look at the record oil company profits that occurred as we paid outrageous gas and heating bills.

The climate is right for corporations to shit on laborers and customers right now though.

Here’s another quote that references yesterday’s bill (that passed): “A vote for this bill is a vote, literally, to take away health care from our children so we can give more money to the super-rich” (Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-NY).

Where’s the goddamn outrage?

But, as Tom at tomdispatch.com notes, “This disconnect between the garnering of potentially staggering powers to rule without restraint and the incapacity to use them for the well-being of just about anyone on the planet (other than a few friends and cronies) is now a major part of our domestic landscape.”

READING: tax documents.

LISTENING TO: someone’s stupid car alarm

SANG IN SHOWER: Why should I keep loving you when I know that you are not true? And why should I call your name when you’re to blame for making me bluuuuuuue?

BEST OF SPAM: Before i wrote you,i prayed that you will be a honest and reliable person whom i can work with to achieve this deal of our life.From my section in the bank, I discovered an abandoned sum of EIGHTEEN MILLION FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND UNITED STATES DOLLARS...

189. DIEBOLD (OR AT LEAST TRIP FORCEFULLY INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT)

... preferably on top of an electronic voting machine that you permanently disable.

From the Archives

(January 2006) I’ve been pondering what to plant in my yard this spring because, yes, as a matter of fact I do have spring fever already.

Blame it on what writer John Rosenthal refers to as January Spring—that five-week period down south when temperatures suddenly soar into the seventies and the sky turns an unblemished blue that is all the more vibrant because we’ve seen nothing but foggy gray for so long.

We Southerners spy that blue and go into a fit—pull out T-shirts and shorts and freeze our tits off as we stand outside oohing and aaahing over the foolish pink tulip poplars and purple hyacinths that have bloomed way too early again and we silently agree to pretend that we don’t know that it will freeze again before winter is officially over.

•

So it’s 31 January 2006. Thomas Merton’s birthday and the 141st anniversary of the Thirteenth Amendment—which I suppose makes it a particularly appropriate day for Coretta Scott King to die.

Then again, maybe she just couldn’t bear the reality of a 58–43 split vote confirming a Supreme Court neocon who is so opposed to affirmative action.

(And then there were none....)

I guess we should all look forward to the boy king bragging about his latest victory in his fifth State of The (Dis)Union Address tonight, huh?

Not that I’ll bother to listen. I know branding and doublespeak when I hear it and would rather read the summary and assessments tomorrow.

And speaking of Bush&Co’s reign of error, Tomdispatch.com points out that four Januaries have already passed since our wanna-be emperor used his address to “brand Iran, Iraq, and North Korea—the first two then bitter enemies, the third completely unrelated to either of them and on the other side of the planet—as a World-War-II-style ‘axis of evil.’”

And it’s already been three Januaries since W said, with a straight face, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Progressives are calling for people to “make a joyful noise and figuratively drown out” the Address tonight. This is part one of a two-part Bush Step Down rally that culminates Saturday in front of the White House, where they plan to demand that W step down and take his program with him.

Now I’m all for rallies that might accomplish something—or at least draw attention to an issue that can be addressed—but this is the pure-T definition of pipe dream.

I do hope that more independent news outlets will notice the statistics cited in Mark Crispin Miller’s Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They’ll Steam the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them) and pressure politicians to investigate yet another potential crime committed by this administration though.

Miller says

for GOP voters, the 2004 presidential election was little short of miraculous: Behind in the Electoral College even on the afternoon of the vote, the Bush-Cheney ticket staged a stunning comeback. Usually reliable exit polls turned out to be wrong by an unprecedented 5 percent in swing states. Conservatives argued, and the media agreed, that ‘moral values’ had made the difference.

(Can you say branding?) Miller says theft, not moral values, swung the election. And he uses statistics to back up his claim.

In reference to the 2002 congressional elections, he outlines how, in Colorado, Georgia, Minnesota, and

a couple of other states—there was what we might call "Diebold magic" everywhere. In all these states, you had far-right-wing politicians predicted to lose by pre-election newspaper polls and by exit polls,

yet all of them won.

During the presidential elections, electronic touchscreen machines flipped Kerry votes into Bush votes in at least 11 states and evidence of wrongdoing in Ohio is copious.

Bush allegedly won that state by 118,000 votes, but the various stratagems, tricks and tactics used to prevent people from registering, to prevent them from voting, to throw away provisional ballots [see John Conyers’ report to the House Judiciary Committee]—all ... add up to a number far greater than 118,000.

Ohio practices were applied in other key states as well, most notably Florida, Oregon, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, New York and New Mexico, where

we're told that Bush won by some 7,000 votes. We know of over 17,000 Democratic voters who were unable to cast a vote for president [though] because the touchscreen machines in their districts refused to record a vote for president.

These 17,000-plus New Mexicans turned out to vote in Democratic areas, and they didn't record a vote for president. Seventeen thousand is 10,000 more than 7,000. That glitch alone can account for the ostensible victory margin of Bush over Kerry in New Mexico. Greg Palast's new book will have a whole chapter on New Mexico. It's hair-raising stuff, and we haven't heard a word about it. The same kind of thing happened in Iowa, where Bush supposedly won by under 10,000 votes.

The press kept telling us after the election that a huge outpouring of religious voters account for Bush's miraculous victory.

Well that's nothing more than a talking point that the religious right itself put out after the election. There is no statistical evidence whatsoever that there was any increase in the number of religious voters. ... Exit polls were most inaccurate—by a big margin—in those areas that used electronic voting machines with no paper trail ... (and particularly noticeable in 5 swing states).

Miller advises people to check out the Election Incident Reporting System website, where you can type in the name of your state or county and see a transcript of all the complaints that were lodged that day by people who called 1-866-MY-VOTE.

And on that note, I am going to change into my gym clothes and go break some things in kung fu class.

188. I NEED A HERO, I’M HOLDING OUT FOR A HERO TILL THE MORNING LIGHT ...

From the Archives

(February 2006) Just drove to the Gothic Wonderland to hear my friend Tuscaloosa read. The place was packed and she was, as always, brilliant and charming and oh so literate.

I’m so proud of her and the good work she’s doing.

Our friends remain aghast that Tuscaloosa and I never got together and, occasionally, I’m surprised by this too. In many ways, we’re a perfect fit. But I was married, then she was married, then I was married again and, well, the timing just never worked out.

We are very dear friends who recognize each other’s gorgeousness however and she’s someone I can talk with about anything—and someone I do talk with about writing on a very regular basis.

I’m going to include a long excerpt from Molly Ivins’s “Why Hilary Won’t Save Us,” but, first, can you believe that I actually heard an advertisement for a Toddler Spa (!) that offers designer haircuts and manicures?

Oh for the love of gawd throw your precious little rugrats outside and let them get grubby instead.

I mean, come on, if they can’t get their hands dirty when they’re toddlers, what hope do they have?

Anyway, here’s Molly. It’s just too good not to paste here:

The recent death of Gene McCarthy reminded me of a lesson I spent a long, long time unlearning, so now I have to relearn it. It's about political courage and heroes, and when a country is desperate for leadership. There are times when regular politics will not do, and this is one of those times. There are times a country is so tired of bull that only the truth can provide relief.

If no one in conventional-wisdom politics has the courage to speak up and say what needs to be said, then you go out and find some obscure junior senator from Minnesota with the guts to do it. In 1968, Gene McCarthy was the little boy who said out loud, "Look, the emperor isn't wearing any clothes." Bobby Kennedy—rough, tough Bobby Kennedy—didn't do it. Just this quiet man trained by Benedictines, who liked to quote poetry.

What kind of courage does it take, for mercy's sake? The majority of the American people (55 percent) think the war in Iraq is a mistake and that we should get out. The majority (65 percent) of the American people want single-payer health care and are willing to pay more taxes to get it. The majority (86 percent) of the American people favor raising the minimum wage. The majority of the American people (60 percent) favor repealing Bush's tax cuts, or at least those that go only to the rich. The majority (66 percent) wants to reduce the deficit not by cutting domestic spending, but by reducing Pentagon spending or raising taxes. The majority (77 percent) thinks we should do "whatever it takes" to protect the environment. The majority (87 percent) thinks big oil companies are gouging consumers and would support a windfall profits tax. That is the center, you fools. Who are you afraid of?

I listen to people like Rahm Emanuel superciliously explaining elementary politics to us clueless naifs outside the Beltway ("First, you have to win elections"). Can't you even read the damn polls?

... Oh come on, people—get a grip on the concept of leadership....

Alito is all but confirmed. New scandals are erupting daily. Please! Someone rise up already and call a spade a spade. As Barack Osama said of Rosa Parks, “she reminded us all of the central truth of the American experience—that our greatness as a nation derives from seemingly ordinary people doing extraordinary things.”

We are in need of a person who can do extraordinary things right now, before the corporations completely take over. (Alternet, 1/23/2006)

Molly’s letting out all the stops now.

187. INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER JILLITHAN SWIFT, REPORTING LIVE FROM PLANET OUT

From the Archives

(January 2006) This whole JT Leroy/ James Frey debacle got me wondering about the legitimacy of other creative types’ stories, so I did a little digging and discovered that embellishment runs rampant among us creative types.

Why just yesterday I discovered that Adrienne Rich isn’t really Adrienne Rich at all but is instead the once-popular singer-songwriter Paul Williams, a small blond man who recorded “Just An Old-Fashioned Love Song” back when we were all still playing our music on turntables.

You remember this hit, right? Just an old-fashioned love song playing on the radio and wrapped around the music is the sound of someone promising they’ll never go. You’ll swear you’ve heard it before as it slowly rambles on and on and no need it bringing it back ’cause it’s never really gone....

So how’d I smoke Paul out? Well it occurred to me that Paul’s hair looks an awful lot like any number of haircuts at Michigan Women’s Music Festival or any pride event or, for that matter, in my local writing group, and then click! I realized that Adrienne has always sported that same bowly haircut too (only Paul cleverly dyed it brown).

Well, you better just go ahead and sob into your dog-eared copy of Diving into the Wreck now because, even though some people will insist that she couldn’t be Paul and that Adrienne is firmly ensconsed in some remote Old Dyke Winnebago community in the desert, the truth is that this Adrienne construct is living proof of what a little hair dye and a lot of feminist theory can do to a man.

I never suspected that a small-time rock star could evolve like that but, of course, Ladyslipper has been telling us for twenty-some-odd years now that Meg Christian abandoned wimmin’s music for higher enlightenment.

And, well, that explanation always seemed a tad too convenient to me.

Turns out Meg’s ashram is a bunch of dildoeedoo. You see, Ladyslipper didn’t want the bad publicity so, when Meg got busted for masterminding a highly illegal lipstick ring and wound up in Leavenworth, they made up a PC story, but fast.

Could it get any worse, you ask.

Well, I’m sad to report that Mab and Minnie Bruce aren’t even from Alabama and Dorothy Allison ain’t from South Cackylacky either and nary a one of them can say y’all properly (yawwwwl).

Nope. The three chicas merely drove through the Deep South on their way to a Janis Joplin concert, parked their Falcon in an obscure Bamberg SC parking lot and, while sharing some of the Colonel’s secret recipe, decided that what the movement really needed was three professional lesbo southerners because, let’s face it, we are few and far between.

And I am spinning yarns out of thin air just because it amuses me, y'awwwl.

READING:The Nation

LISTENING TO: Siouxie and the Banshee’s “Peek-a-Boo”

SANG IN SHOWER: Elton John’s “Levon”

BEST-OF SPAM SUBJECT LINES: your academic credentials have expired (egads, man!)

186. SLURPING WORD SOUP IN THE CULTURESPHERE

From the Archives

(January 2006) Rachel Neumann, in an end-of-the-year AlterNet story, laments the fact that conservatives won the 2005 war on frames—"how we talk about the big news and big ideas in the culturesphere"—by using effective catch phrases such as War on Terrorism and Intelligent Design and the ever-popular War on Christmas, and suggests a few phrases that progressives can adopt tbefore the next elections: Debacle in the Desert, the Great Mistake, the Iraqi Quagmire, and Plamegate.

(They don’t exactly turn my head but I do hope that Christianism catches on.)

Meanwhile I've been thinking about how pathetic it is that US citizens require a clever phrase to recognize what’s going on (a song that Marvin Gaye really needs to update for 2006).

I mean, think about it. Gaye could begin start the chorus with illegal, illegal and see if anyone looks up from the football finals to notice that the CIA played a role in an Abu Ghraib killing and created secret Eastern European prisons.

What’s going on when doctors and psychologists participate in Guantánamo Bay tortures and the Pentagon pays the Iraqi press to publish pro-USA stories?

(And it infuriates me no end to know that the New York Times waited till after the elections to inform its readers that the boy emperor authorized the NSA to spy on ordinary American citizens—Quakers, people!—without warrants.)

We sound like a third-world country with a greedy despot who makes people disappear, and not like the cradle of democracy, and, if I were teaching this semester, I would make Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians and Forché's Against Forgetting and Ariel Dorfman’s poetry required reading.

I am not teaching right now though (but I am listening intently).

So here’s what I’m thinking: If we must rely on clever little soundbites to get people to stand up and take notice, then let’s pepper our conversations in 2006 with this Jesse Jackson-inspired phrase that I just created: Lost Your Home? Just Live in the Dome.

Or let’s just play the word-association game: Faith-Based Giving. Holy Mission. Christian Taliban. Body Armor. Escalating Gas Prices. Mass Destruction. Cindy Sheehan. Broken Levees. Brownie. Abu Ghraib. Illegal Wire-tapping. Sanctioned Torture. Corruption. Recessed Appointments. Abramoff. Cronyism. Boy Dictator. Brownie. Brownie. Brownie.

Makes you think of Neumann's Destruction of Democracy, huh?

•

I read today that at least four groups comprised of military families are actively opposing our self-proclaimed emperor’s Great Mistake.

Amadee Braxton, a member Veterans Against The War, says

Veterans of the Iraq war and those still serving are the ones most capable of explaining the differences between the war the Bush administration portrays and the reality of the war on the ground. Most ... veterans realize, when they're over there, that they're viewed as an occupying force; not as liberators but as target practice. Americans were lied to, and Iraqi veterans are uniquely qualified to describe the disastrous consequences of that lie.

Her group emphasizes the connections between spending billions on the Debacle in the Desert and domestic cuts at home.

A good message indeed but the working-class voters hurt most by domestic cuts still support Shrub, despite his torture and disregard of poor people and the recent New Orleans apartheid, because he has somehow convinced them that he is a moral man.

(Why isn't helping the poor and seeking peace and justice considered moral?)

I just don't understand but suspect that, if we find a way to get beyond soundbites and speak heart-to-heart with people, most people will recognize the difference.

But how to do that when the headlines are focused on Brad and Angelina adopting a baby or Ted Kennedy having a secret love child or Eminem and Kim tying the knot (again)?

(Well, he did clearly still had strong feelings for her.)

And now I know that those two Carolina Panthers cheerleaders who were making out in that bathroom got fired for embarrassing the team after one planted a kiss on another (which, obviously, ranks right up there with murdering your pregnant wife or drag-racing down Charlotte highways in your Masurati ... or Porsche or Spyder or whatever luxury vehicle it was that those players were driving when one of them ate the gravel biscuit.

•

So yeah. Here it is 2 AM already and I am on yet another political rampage and still wide awake (goddamnit to Hell and Stillwater Texas).

I cannot sleep this week and have resorted to a glass of wine in an attempt to exhaust myself into slumber.

Why? Well I’ll sound like a ho hum broken record if I list the obvious reasons here, but here goes:

First, I read that a musician who plays here a lot was murdered with his wife and two children in a home robbery invasion and I cannot block the visuals.

(Please please tell me that they killed the parents first. And please please tell me that they killled the husband first so he didn’t have to die knowing that he failed to protect his family because I know men well enough to know that, otherwise, his father’s voice was chastising him for failing to protect his family as he died.)

And please please tell me that the stupid-ass teenagers who killed four people for a few lousy bucks at least used silencers so that the last one to die didn’t have to listen to the first three executions.

And please please please help me quit envisioning their teeth chattering in terror as the kids screaming Daddy.....

So yeah. I’m a visual AND aural person and know I’ll have nightmares if I go to sleep and so am resisting it.

Other reasons? Well, I have definitely entered the hot-flash zone and feel as if I'm roasting alive right now even though I dropped the heater down to 62 degrees.

But I am whining again and it’s after 3 AM already and I really ought to go to bed now since I have to get at 7 so I will at least go lie in the bed now and try to tell myself that I can sleep.

(Whimper.)

185. THE FUNNIEST JUSTICE, OR, MEN IN BLACK (THE SEQUEL)

From the Archives

(January 2005) A (no doubt tenured) professor reports in today’s Times that transcripts of the oral arguments of the US Supreme Court reveal the funniness quotient of the various judges.

Scalia is the funniest (pre-Roberts) judge, weighing in at a nine-month tally of seventy-seven laughing episodes in one gestational period. On average, that means the conservative unibrowed justice was good for 1.027 laughs per argument.

Breyer was the next funniest justice, weighing in at 45 laughs in the same nine-month period (which ain’t much, when you think about it). Ginsburg, on the other hand, produced only four such snorts in the same period.

(Let the feminist jokes begin, despite the fact that the white men are defining what’s funny.)

So Mud’s father asked me once, How many feminists it takes to screw in a lightbulb?

Oh I dunno, I replied.

Well, first of all, that’s NOT a funny question! And, second of all, that’s Ms. Feminist to you, asshole. And, as any enlightened man would know, the word “screw” is a misogynistic term. The very fact that you use it makes it clear that you hate all women, and....)

Well. Anyway, Ruth’s four pitiful ha’s top those of good ol’ Clarence Thomas, who has a downright pathetic humor quotient.

See, Clarence (who apparently only finds pubic hairs on Coke cans funny) rarely even speaks during oral arguments, so it’s no surprise that he failed to produce even a single bout of laughter in the same nine-month period (and yes my mind is calculating the accepted humor vs. minority status vs. discomfort with judicial white-boy fraternity quotient versus the generally accepted as agreed-upon humor, but let’s don’t forget that we are talking about a man who called a sister who works 60 hours/week picking crabmeat out of shells in the unair-conditioned Georgia heat a lazy American).

This man will no doubt vote to leave the minimum wage exactly where it is.

And speaking of cheap tricks, did you notice that the London Times ran an ambush article after reporters anonymously submitted two Booker award-winning novels from the 1970s to twenty publishers and agents? One of these novels was Naipaul’s In a Free State and the other was Stanley Middleton’s Free State.

The Times claims that this exercise “draws attention to concerns that the industry has become incapable of spotting genuine literary talent" ... and yes, I do think that pressure to sell a set number of books in a set number of days can produce formulaic titles in much the same way as Hollywood can produce formulaic, predictable films by big-name directors.

But, as Publishers Lunch points out, we really should ask ourselves what would have happened if the reporters had done the same thing with some of the London Times’s op-ed essays submitted blindly to top newspapers.
And, while we’re at it, let’s remind ourselves that novels written three decades ago may no longer be particularly compelling to readers—especially if Naipaul wrote it.

(Oh Oh Oh. A bias. A clear and unadulterated bias that is clearly and freely noted here.)

So yeah. Naipaul won an award but, you know, it ain’t exactly compelling reading sometimes.

And I’ve worked in the publishing industry long enough to know that overworked publishers send unsolicited material or material delivered from a person rather than an agent to their slush pile. I also know that mentioning a big award or a major publisher in your cover letter can translate into a contract really quickly because none of the overworked publishing types want to be the one who let the good stuff slip by.

I’m not sure what any of this proves except that publishing is an overworked, underpaid field that no one should work in (and that the Times possesses way too much willingness to scoff at its own industry when, really, there are all kinds of new dictators that it could be studying for profiles in American criminal activity and such).

And while we’re on the topic of the nonessential (but oh so entertaining) publishing industry, why is James Frey running hog- wild? This opportunist now says that Talese et al. weren’t sure if they’d call his book fiction or memoir .. and this after she defended his sorry ass when his lies were revealed (at considerable professional sacrifice to her career and prestige).
Or maybe she was aware all along and encouraged him to sell it as fact.

The guy is still selling books right and left though, so let the controversy continue....

•

Now let me tell you about the funny thing that happened at work today in the vaguest kind of way that cann’t cause me to get fired.

Faculty, as a general rule, rule on college campuses and the most unorganized ones tend to demand and expect extreme assistance. So this truly unorganized faculty member instructed her secretary to drop everything and do a complicated last-minute task this morning. The secretary pointed out that she had other pressing (and scheduled) deadlines to meet and then the unorganized faculty member said (and I quote) “I don’t care. That' a direct order. Now do it.”

And this is when her prone-to-extremes and pushed-to-the-edge secretary basically lost her shit (and mine and yours too) and threw down the faculty member’s papers and followed her up and down the halls yelling that these unreal expectations are bullshit, just bullshit! and I don't have to account for your lack of planning and I don’t remember everything else, but she definitely included the phrase “you just go fuck yourself.”

Yeah.

So. Whee. Work was sure fun today!

184. TRANSITIONING INTO THE NEW HUMANITY

From the Archives

(January 2005) Headline on Yahoo! today: “Shatner sells kidney stone to charity.”

Huh. I wonder if it will try to rap, entertain its new owner....

If that’s not disturbing enough, then here’s news from Kiplinger’s: if you’re one of those consumers who charged $232 billion on your Visa between November 1 and Christmas Day, then you’ll be pleased to know that your government is concerned about your credit-card debt so—even though you have probably not gotten a substantial raise in 5 years and even though the cost-of-living has gone up substantially and even though your heating and transportation costs have doubled—nevertheless, your friendly Big Brother has issued new federal guidelines that require creditors to double your minimum credit-card payments.

Meanwhile, the coauthors of the million-copy selling, New Age Medicine Cards deck and the memoir Crossing into Medicine Country are also looking out for us.

(People are so NICE, aren’t they? I mean, all this charity has inspired me to do a Sally chant: They like me. They really liiiiiiike me!).

Yep, the Medicine Card folks are now publishing 2012 Oracle: Transitioning into the New Humanity, and well before 2012! This divinatory deck and accompanying book are “intended to help guide humanity through immense world change heralded for 2012 by the Bible Code, Nostradamus, astrology, and the Mayan calendar.”

(Why not go all out and include the fucking Code of fucking Hammurabi in that list too?)

Well, clearly, I best rush right out and purchase this deck since I like to plan ahead for such momentous life events.

I wonder, though, if these co-authors might need to make a slight adjustment in their calculations. I mean, our boy dictator apparently believes that the earth is only 6 thousand years old. And we know he’s competitive. So surely he’ll notice soon enough that he and his party and their corporate interests haven’t quite controlled the Press as much as, say, dictators in Chile and El Salvador were able to do.

Nope, he just hasn’t gone far enough.

If he believes that our ancestors walked the Earth with the dinosaurs, then the Medicine Card folks better adjust their oracle transitions to fit these beliefs or he’ll prohibit them from publishing this information.

Meanwhile MSN is looking out for us (there are angels everywhere!) by publishing this depressing list of

THE TEN WORST THINGS YOU CAN EAT
Hydrogenated/Trans fats > These manufactured fats are used in bakery items and margarine. Studies indicate that it isn't so much how much fat you consume, but what kind you consume. These are the worst, so better avoid cookies, crackers, baked goods etc. that include hydrogenated oil in their ingredient list.
Olestra > This fake fat is used in the manufacturing of fat-free potato chips and other snack foods. It binds with fat-soluble vitamins A, E, D and K and carotenoids—substances believed to keep the immune system healthy and prevent some cancers—and eliminates them. Proctor and Gamble, Olestra’s producer, has acknowledged the problem with vitamins and is now fortifying their um food-like stuff with them. Olestra causes some serious digestive problems in many people too and environmentalists suggest that, since Olestra does not break down, it is incredibly harmful to our environment.
Nitrates > Nitrates are used in many foods, especially cured meats such as bacon and hot dogs, to preserve color and maintain microbial safety. Nitrate is harmless, but it can convert to nitrite, which can form nitrosamines, a powerful cancer-causing chemical, in your body so, whenever possible, look for nitrate-free preserved meats. If consuming foods containing nitrates, have a glass of orange juice at the same time (for instance, orange juice with your morning bacon), since Vitamin C is known to inhibit conversion to nitrosamines in your stomach.
Alcohol > This one item has created more problems than all the rest put together. Of course, it is possible to consume alcohol wisely and safely. Just stick to that one glass of red wine for its healthful side effects, exercise caution, and don’t overdo it.

(Damn it! Now that is just not fair!)

Raw oysters > Raw oysters can carry a deadly bacteria that can cause severe illness or death so are marketed strictly in the "buyer beware" category. You take a big risk every time you consume them raw.
Saturated animal fats > That means fatty meats, especially beef and pork, or the skin on poultry. It also includes full-fat dairy products such as cheese, milk and cream. Fatty meat and dairy products do have some contributions to make to a diet, but none that can't be found elsewhere.
Soda > Drinking soda is a poor way to get fluids. They are full of sugar or artificial sweeteners and often contain caffeine, artificial colors and flavors. Substitute homemade soda by mixing sparkling water with fresh, 100 percent juice.
Low-acid home-canned foods > Home canning can be dangerous for foods low in acid such as green beans, carrots, or other garden vegetables. The potential of botulism is high because home canners often do not reach the temperatures and pressures necessary to kill the botulism spores that may contaminate the food. Low-acid home-canned foods are one of the main causes of food poisoning.
High-fat snacks, chips > Even if they are made with vegetable oil, they should be minimized. The balance of fat in our diets has shifted too far to the omega-6 variety (found in most processed vegetable oils) and it is thought that consuming too many of omega-6 fats may lead to certain chronic diseases. Focus on fruits and non-fat whole grains for snacking instead.
Liquid meals > They aren't inherently bad for you, but they do keep you from eating whole, natural foods that contain more nutrients and fiber and disease-fighting phytochemicals. They may be okay for people who are too sick to eat, but don't let them displace the real foods in your diet.

Finally, my advice (’cause hey I’m looking out for you too, wink wink): just don’t even look at the number of nitrates that are now allowed under the revised-for-corporate-gain-at-the-expense-of-your-health “organic” label. It’s too depressing.

All right. Back to work now. Mush, mush!

183. KLEPTOCRACY, AMERICAN-STYLE, OR ANOTHER DAY OF ARMCHAIR ÜBERLIBERAL RANTING

From the Archives

(January 2006) MLK Jr. Day 2006, so most businesses are closed. I am perched in a rocker with a nice cup of tea, looking out the window at the remnants of a two-day snowstorm that is now being washed away by a gentle rain.

“It’s easy to be an armchair überliberal,” a Sun magazine letter writer notes, but “out in the confusion and hubbub of the world, people of different races are living flush up against one another, doing what they can to build bridges of understanding and create small spaces of kindness in their daily lives.”

I want to believe that is true. And I know that is sometimes true.

I know that people who have very little can be incredibly generous, that a few brave souls will eventually rise up, refuse to sit in the back of the bus or organize Freedom Rides through KKK territory, that, every once in a great while, humanity will make an incremental step forward.

I also recognize that I am talking about kindness in the era of Abu Ghraib, in a year in which the VP of our democracy is lobbying Congress on behalf of cruel and unusual punishment.

When my pal Rosa was a peace corp volunteer in Africa, a woman whose younger sister died told her matter-of-factly that her deceased sister’s infant twins would now die too. This is reality in a place where scant resources and massive starvation are the norm.

Resignation in the face of atrocity is ocassionally the norm in the underbelly of US culture too, where families struggle to survive —sometimes for generation after generation and sometimes by learning to work the system—but the twins would have had a much better chance of surviving in this country.

... so let’s all sing oh oh your worries ain’t like mine now, shall we, and turn back to our reality TV shows because, as Barbara Bush says, look how well those poor people are doing!

Meanwhile, it is almost certainly no coincidence that MLK was assassinated when he began to criticize capitalism.

The twins fought to survive in a landscape in which the strongest takes the food and therefore thrives.

In our landscape, the ones with the most resources claim others’ resources as their own—through business transactions and increased profit margins and decreased benefits for workers and abysmally low minimum wages and diminished workers’ rights and confiscated pensions, through supply and demand.

The rich rob the poor legally because they have the resources necessary to do so.

If you grew up among poor but honest Americans, as I did, then you scrimped and saved and did without and followed the Golden Rule and lived in accordance with the tenets of the bible—that disastrous tome that has helped so many politicians and ambitious popes and robber barons keep generation after generation of people compliant—while you kept your eyes fixed firmly to the afterlife.

(Sounds like a bad spam subject line, doesn’t it?)

It’s no coincidence that, when I lived in DC, it was the drug dealers who bought the shoeless children their shoes, not the government or any of those money-laundering nonprofits that Republicans open right and left.

Talk to dealers and gang members and you will learn that many recognize the social structures that oppress them and they’re understandably infuriated by the fact that our society allows members of their extended family to roam the glass-strewn streets barefoot while others have so much.

In some ways, the drug dealers and gang members who sprout in our squalor are the true entrepreneurs, the disenfranchised who somehow discover a way to achieve the American dream.

Listen to good rap music or good indy music or good art or, well, many things and you will discover an undercurrent of unrest along with a determination to deviate from the predetermined suburban script for having it all.

•

So okay I’ll jump topics again and end with a poem:

WATER PRAYER
by Stuart Kestenbaum (From The Sun magazine (12.2005)

And this morning I awoke to rain, which makes
its own rhythm on the window, and the world is full
of these rhythms, rhythm of water, rhythm of the heart,
which sounds like an underwater pump, the lub-dud
of all it knows, which is making all I know possible,
and on the roof rain falls and turns to hail, then snow,
then rain again, running down the shingles to the gutters,
the gathering-up that makes rivers and lakes and oceans,
from cloud to drop to torrent, how nothing is lost.

LISTENING TO: the tea kettle starting to boil

READING: The Sun magazine

182. WE ARE ONLY COMING THROUGH IN WAVES

From the Archives

(January 2006) Okay does anyone see a pattern here? We withhold body armor from soldiers then mortality rates rise. We destroy our environment then hotter oceans yield stronger hurricanes and tsunamis. We destroy barrier islands then hurricanes hit cities full force. We deregulate, then inspectors who once drove their Chevies to the levees to see if they’re dry and structurally sound wind up bagging groceries somewhere. We lower taxes to the point that chronically understaffed offices can no longer perform vital services such as visiting mines to ensure compliance, then trapped miners die waiting for missing rescuers to arrive.

There’s a gap we’re not minding here, a critical black hole into which the cause-and-effect rationale of people who complain about long lines at the DMV while demanding further tax cuts has been sucked.

Meanwhile, 5 million more of us slipped into poverty in the last four years even as the conservative bobbleheads insisted that our economy is fine, and middle- and lower-class citizens experienced substantial cost-of-living increases alongside a 40-percent rise in health-care costs.

Molly Ivins points out that the federal minimum wage has held steady at $5.15/hour since 1997 even though the Economic Policy Institute reports that inflation has eroded away minimum wage’s buying power to its second-lowest level since the fifties.

The gap between (vanishing) middle-class workers and the super-rich is the largest ever recorded, yet no one’s calling it the new gilded age. Yet.

Conservatives argue that increasing the minimum wage hurts small businesses and causes layoffs, but there’s ample evidence to prove otherwise.

Meanwhile, Democrats are holding strategic sessions to determine how to best pepper their speeches with more religious and “moral” phrases. But bless Edwards’s lobbyist-fed heart, at least he is saying publicly that “the poverty thing” is a moral issue.

•

I forgot to include one key event in my recap of 2005: Bill Frist watched a video of Terri Schiavo then declared that she “certainly seems to respond to visual stimuli,” even though her autopsy revealed that she was blind.

(It is, as Paul Simon says, an age of miracles though, isn’t it?)

Frankly, I haven’t met anyone who isn’t glad that 2005 is behind them. As Molly Ivins says, “With a few, shining exceptions (such as Cindy Sheehan) we can bid adieu to 2005 without great regret. Or, as Texas Gov. Rick Perry said to a reporter earlier this year, "Adios, mo-fo."

SANG IN SHOWER: “Slipsliding Away” by Paul Simon

READING: Hoppin’ John’s Charleston, Beaufort, and Savannah Dining at Home in the Lowcountry cookbook (gotta find that poached pear recipe before this weekend)

BEST-OF SPAM: We cure any disease!

181. DIVINE PUNISHMENT, OR, WAS JESUS A NAMBY-PAMBY FRAT BOY?

From the Archives

(January 2006) Wasting no time whatsoever, Pat Robertson announced yesterday that Ariel Sharon’s stroke was divine punishment for “dividing God’s land.”

Interesting how egomaniacs always want you to believe that they speak for god, isn’t it?

(What was Terry Schiavo’s coma divine punishment for, Patso?)

As for me, I’m holding onto the hope that Pat’s latest decree will inspire Oral Roberts to climb back into his crystal tower and refuse to come down until God delivers a Jim Jones poison Kool-Aid acid test to the idiots over at the 700 Club.

(And, man, I can’t WAIT till Pat finally dies so I can announce his death as God’s wrath pouring down on the Christianists.)
Meanwhile, Pat and his pals are pressuring NBC to bump the “Book of Daniel,” which premieres Friday.

This show stars Aidan Quinn as an Episcopal priest with a queer son, and the Christianists consider it another indication of NBC’s “anti-Christian bigotry.”

The fact that a gay man produced the show no doubt encourages this view too. And they’re particularly unhappy about the fact that the priest has long conversations with Jesus.

(Wonder who’s playing Jesus? Maybe they revived that Jesus of Montreal star.)

I fail to parse how a sitcom that features Jesus in a starring role can be labeled anti-Christian, but a Dobson spokesperson describes this Jesus is “a namby-pamby frat boy who basically winks at every sin and perversity under the sun.”

What would they have him do with human foibles? Shoot electric lightning bolts out of his pinkies?

Clearly, they want that black-and-white Old Testament god instead of a human who recognizes subtllety, frailty.

Meanwhile, the empathetic namby-pamby Jesus must be thrilled to see Tom DeLay on trial and the Boy King’s feet pressed to the fire and Abramoff’s so-called charitable giving coming back to bite him and those other conservative moneychangers on their lily-white asses.

And, low and behold, Abramoff’s plea agreement reveals that he funneled $50,000 to the wife of one of DeLay’s senior staff members (a woman who is probably in some Texas church right now praying her well-perfumed ass off that some higher being will get her out of this one).

The whipster god must be chuckling at the fundies’ misuse of the word family too, now that we know that DeLay’s former chief of staff apparently created the US Family Network nonprofit in order to receive $1 million from an Abramoff client.

Oh and I bet he’s happy as a clam to know that Randy Cunningham is finally headed to prison and we all know now that Bill Frist (who can diagnose patients from a video) uses his AIDS charity to funnel half a million dollars to his pals and allegedly pulled a Martha and sold some of his family’s HRC stock illegally too.

(Wanna place bets on whether or not he’s sent to some West Virginia prison though?)

Meanwhile, the Times is finally abuzz with talk about the symbiosis between lobbyists and lawmakers but who’s surprised by THAT relationship? We legalized lobbying after all.

(But whodathunk lawmakers would be greedy instead of looking out for every citizen’s interests? Amazing!)

SANG IN SHOWER: “The sun’s so hot and my heart is thumping. Let me buy you a beer or something...” (Lucinda Williams)

READING: Alternet’s “Fighting GOP Corruption”

LISTENING TO: “Triangle man, triangle man. Doing the things that a triangle can.” (Moxy Früvous)

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Government officials and government action are not for sale.” (Alice Fisher, assistant attorney general in charge of the department’s criminal division, as she suggested that a bigger influence-peddling scandal is about to unfold)
(We should all say a silent thank you that her boss is not former attorney general John Ashcroft.)

180. STRATEGIC DISTRACTIONS, OR, WHEN IN DOUBT, ADD MORE CHEESE!

From the Archives

(January 2006) The latter part of my title (“When in doubt, add more cheese”) is the final line of a New York Times food article written by a child of the seventies who grew up eating falafel and stir-fry and only recently discovered the pleasures of well-prepared macaroni and cheese.

This foodie would appreciate the graffiti scrawled on the bathroom door of a major live music venue here: Random Cheese Fact No. 4: Cheese is the best ingredient in any dish in which it is a part.

I don’t have any clue why someone would pay good money to see Sun Ra or the Connells or Two Dollar Pistols, then head to the bathroom to scrawl cheese facts on the door, but there you have it.

(And ueah I’ve been ranting about our government so much lately that I figured I’d talk about food today before I slip into a familiar rant.)

So, yeah. In the deep south where I was raised (twitch twitch), macaroni and cheese is a staple. A field guide to the region would define its natural habitat as Baptist meals on the grounds, funeral wakes, Sunday afternoon family gatherings, your Grandmother’s Thanksgiving table, hot food bars, and little plastic children’s bowls everywhere.

My paternal grandmother always arrived at our house for Thanksgiving carrying a glass baking dish of the creamy stuff fitted into a matching wicker basket (and, incidentally, made THE BEST macaroni and cheese in the world).

The gourmands who insist that Whole Food’s free-range chickens taste divine tend to incorporate a horrid white sauce, but even this newly macaronied author recognizes that this sauce is wrong for the dish.

(And, come to think of it, my ex Mud once took this mistake a step further and added onions to her bechemel sauce.)

Any southerner worth her weight in grits would tell you that you should not get too adventurous with time-honored culinary traditions that are all about nostalgia and comfort though (although parmesan-topped collard greens ain’t half bad).

Meanwhile, the White House now has three leak investigations underway.

(No, not corruption investigations, leak investigations.)

The most secretive administration since Nixon—one that condones torture and suspects Mexicans crossing the border of terrorist acts—isn’t concerned with it’s corruption; they just wantsto know who dared challenge the dictator’s wishes.

(Wonder if the neocons handpicked their investigators to ensure that they only ask questions that monkeyboys can answer?)

So here, let me coin a phrase. Our administration is plaming the messenger. (You heard it here first.)

There's no so-called liberal bias behind my failure to understand how a thinking citizen can fail to notice that punishing whistleblowers thwarts democracy. Plamegate (or Nixon, Revisited) may catch up with the Administration eventually, but I bet attention will remain focused on who informed the public about the (illegal) eavesdropping.

(Speaking of which, wonder what Bunnatine Greenhouse is up to these days?)

I worry that Americans have been rendered so logic-impaired by the Tim Russerts and Rush Limbaughs and Pat Robertsons and yammering hate-radio soundbiters of our age that they’l kowtow to whatever the administration tells them to believe.

Or maybe we’re just decorative citizens now who spend our time focused on consumer questions such as what to wear and where to live and what ringtone to use on our flip-top mobile phonesas our civil rights vanish?

And why not? I mean, come on. Consumer culture tells us that we are defined by our material possessions and our very-own FEMA director wrote, in the midst of a hurricane that was drowning thousands of people, “I am a fashion god.”

Or, worst of all, do you think people actually believe that it’s fine for our unapologetic president to confer dictatorial authority on himself and to stalk anyone who dares question his authority?

(Yep. What a strategy: Plame the messenger and maybe no one will notice that a military coup is taking place in their homeland.)

•

Meanwhile, I guess we’ll have to get ourselves geared up for the Alito hearings, which begin on Monday.

(That information alone has no doubt sent many a tofu-eating liberal in search of some good old mac and cheese.)

But we can at least remind ourselves that the GOP is mired in corruption and plaming the messenger will only cover that fact up for so long.

Alito is the scariest nominee since Bork. A loyal friend to big business who opposes to the Establishment Clause (which prohibits public prayer/religious displays) and is “especially proud” of his work opposing abortion and affirmative action.

He protects homophobic speech. And, at a time when corporations rape the environment even as our polar ice caps are melting, the judge favors limiting our ability to sue against toxic omissions under the Clean Air Act (which he probably also opposes).

Alito favors capital punishment for children and opposed admitting women to his alma mater. And he was deputy assistant attorney general to Ed Meese.

(Remember those “Meese Is A Pig” protests? I've still got my pig nose from them .)

He disagrees with the Miranda decision and struck down an anti-harassment policy that interfered with Christian groups’ right to speak out against queers (because, you know, it's just a life-style choice really. People can choose to whom we are attracted.).

Alito also has a history of being sole dissenter in cases involving sex or race discrimination.

(Thank you Daniel Pollitt for sharing this information with the world.)

...but enough about Alito because maybe you’d prefer to know which men are the nation’s most eligible bachelors.

That’s what Yahoo! is headlining today.

I feel trapped in a rock-paper-scissors world where convenience and stress and obligations and static from the talking heads are trumping my civil rights. And I don’t like it one bit.

SANG IN SHOWER: “Rock the boat, don’t rock the boat baby. Rock the boat. Don’t tip the boat over.” Who sang that? I want to say Hues Corporation but am too lazy to Google it.

READING: The Nation

179. LET THE DNA CHIPS FALL WHERE THEY MAY

From the Archives

(4 January 2006) Julian day 2,453,740 and I am wondering if John and Yoko named their son after this measure.
It’s 12:02 AM and I am backing up my four-thousand-plus iTunes songs in anticipation of an upgrade to Creative Suite II tomorrow.

So lots to ponder these days. A Virginia coroner’s preserved blood samples were subjected to modern DNA tests, and they exonerated five inmates who spent a total of 90 years in prison on rape convictions. Gov. Warner has now ordered that the coroner’s other samples be tested and has vowed to “let the DNA chips fall where they may.”

Meanwhile, at a time when it’s well nigh impossible to avoid suggestions of Republican corruption, King Bush the Latter has announced his nominees for the Federal Election Commission. His choices, according to the New York Times., “would keep the policing of campaign abuses firmly in the hands of party wheel horses.”

Our would-be king waited till the Senate recessed to make his announcement in an effort to avoid confirmation hearings (which certainly makes me believe that there’s nothing, nothing at all, to worry about).

Even though one of his nominees “is reported to have been involved in the maneuvering to overrule the career specialists” at the Justice Department who “warned that the Texas gerrymandering orchestrated by Rep. Tom DeLay violated minority voting rights” and in “such voting rights abuses as the purging of voter rolls in Florida in the 2000 elections.”

It appears that big money has taken over our voting rights now too.

(An did I mention Shrub’s connections to the company that makes the popular [and untraceable] electronic voting equipment?)

I suppose I could have entitled this entry “Let the Republican Chips Fall Where They May,” since Ralph Reed (ha ha snort) and Tom DeLay (who will yet be found guilty of money-laundering and conspiracy yet) and Dennis Hastert and Sonny Bono’s widowed wife-turned-representative and Trent Lott and numerous other Republicans who accepted $4.4 million in funneled corporate funds plus lavish gifts from super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff have been squirming in their loafers ever since Abramoff agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in the burgeoning corruption and bribery investigation of Washington lawmakers.
According to the Times, the soon-to-be-falling Republican chips could make Abscam and The Keating 5 look like small potatoes.

So let’s see, there’s CIA leaks and NSA wiretapping, and nd Michael Scanlon, former aid to Tom DeLay, pleading guilty to conspiring to bribe officials and now cooperating with prosecutors.

And Abramoff, who scammed $80 million from native-American tribes (my ancestors curse you, now cooperating with prosecutors.

It won’t take long, according to the Times, to follow the bouncing Abramoff ball to David H. Safavian (indicted former head of the White House procurement office), Karl Rove (whose former employer became Abramoff’s personal assistant), Tyco (whose executives funneld $2 million to Grassroots Interactive), Ralph Reed (demanded laundered tribal money from Abramofff), Tom DeLay (“Abramoff is one of my closest and dearest friends”), and Rep. Ney (R-Oh), who went to Scotland to golf on Abramoff’s dime.

And that’s just what we know right now.

Let’s say that out loud fast: law makers breaking laws. No ethics none.

This certainly explains the Democrats' strategy of fighting Republican culture of corruption in the next election, eh?

(And who knew that Ralph Reed was even a candidate for lieutenant governor in Georgia? Why Georgia? And is this a step to higher office à la Pat Robertson?

Reed is, after all, the strategist who came up with the idea of placing stealth Christianist candidates in public office. And gosh, don’t those untaxed Christian Coalition purse strings keep getting looped around every corrupt Republican thing?)

Meanwhile, Free Press has moved up the release date of James Risen’s State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration to Today, since the AP already exposed Risen’s major revelation that the US is secretly eavesdropping on US citizens.

This book outlines how the CIA ignored information that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction. In fact,

State of War provides an account of the origins and scope of the wiretap program that basically repeats the revelations contained in Risen and Lichtblau's stories in the Times. But the book also argues that the NSA's eavesdropping policy shows the extent to which the war on terrorism has spurred the intelligence community to flout legal conventions at home and abroad. Risen's chief target is the CIA, where, he argues, institutional dysfunction and feckless leadership after 9/11 led to intelligence breakdowns that continue to haunt the U.S. Though much of State of War covers ground that is broadly familiar, the book is punctuated with a wealth of previously unreported tidbits about covert meetings, aborted CIA operations and Oval Office outbursts. (Time magazine)

I am losing faith. (Not that I had much to begin with.)

When exactly will the impeachment procedures begin?

178. ANOTHER YEAR OF APOCALYPTICAL EVENTS FINALLY ENDS, OR, ON TO THE HOLY WARS, BROWNIE!

From the Archives

(31 December 2005) Bush, when touring the country to promote his dumb idea of privatizing Social Security, said that his objective was “to kind of catapult the propaganda.”

I like a president who kind of does something, don’t you?

The kind of logic behind that official statement makes about as much sense as the Family Research Council's and other conservative groups’ response to the new human papillomavirus vaccine.

We can virtually eliminate cervical cancer by giving every 12-year-old girl this vaccine, yet socially conservative groups oppose it because they believe it provides an incentive to engage in premarital sex.

(Yet they called themselves pro-life.)

•

And now, a poem for the new year. I hope yours is filled with love and hope and creativity and passion and good health and prosperity and music.

LUTE MUSIC
by Kenneth Rexroth

The Earth will be going on a long time
Before it finally freezes;
Men will be on it; they will take names,
Give their deeds reasons.
We will be here only
As chemical constituents—
A small franchise indeed.
Right now we have lives,
Corpuscles, Ambitions, Caresses,
Like everybody had once—

Here at the year's end, at the feast
Of birth, let us bring to each other
The gifts brought once west through deserts—
The precious metal of our mingled hair,
The frankincense of enraptured arms and legs,
The myrrh of desperate, invincible kisses—
Let us celebrate the daily
Recurrent nativity of love,
The endless epiphany of our fluent selves,
While the earth rolls away under us
Into unknown snows and summers,
Into untraveled spaces of the stars.

Since that wonderful poem was written by Kenneth Rexroth (a poet who once sold pamphlets promising a cure for constipation), I suppose I should include a link to some jazz music here, but you’ll just have to find that new Miles Davis compilation on your own because I am far too busy pondering the fact that three poor counties in my state are apparently competing for a five-thousand-ton-per-day solid waste dump that will turn the eastern region into the fourth largest waste dump in the nation.

It sucks to be poor

(and stinks too).

•

So while I was sipping mulled wine and not even thinking about my New York Times electronic subscription last week, a jury ruled that Wal-Mart must pay $172 million to employees because the chain failed to provide meal breaks to nearly 116,000 hourly workers (who, let’s face it, probably purchased their uneaten lunches at Sam’s Club anyway, thus giving the Waltons even more money).

Meanwhile, word leaked out that our government has been conducting secret radiation searches in the homes and businesses and mosques of Muslim Americans (can you say guilt by association?).

Here’s a response from the Council on American-Islamic Relations:

This disturbing revelation, coupled with recent reports of domestic surveillance without warrant, could lead to the perception that we are no longer a nation ruled by law, but instead one in which fear trumps constitutional rights. All Americans should be very concerned about the apparent trend toward a two-tiered system of justice, with full rights for most citizens, and another diminished set of rights for Muslims

. . . or Quakers. Or queers. Or liberals. Or . . .

Hmm. Remember when the US attorney general labeled all environmentalists communists whom our country will weed out one by one by any means necessary?

(Damn tree huggers fucking up our social security system ...

... or something.)

And I’ve been asking myself what it means that King Bush the Younger now flaunts the fact that he so flagrantly broke the law.

Does he actually believe that he is above the law?

(He must.)

Or is this a desperate response from a desperate criminal who got caught red-handed?

Will distracted citizens fall for this preemptive preening?

And ’tis the season, so let’s note a not-so-stellar anniversary: on Christmas Eve 1992, King Bush the Elder (who is not often confused with a wise man) was watching over his thousand points of light when, lo, a star appeared in the east and told him what he had to do—pardon former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger and five other neocons for their Iran-Contra criminal activity as American citizens focused on our eggnog.

(Your illegal actions will still be noted in the history books though, boys.)

Meanwhile, in the hopeful news department, at least 1,500 people attended a Christmas Eve mass held by an recently excommunicated St. Louis priest despite warnings from their archibishop that doing so would be a mortal sin (the definition of which sure has become pedestrian of late).

And Merriam-Webster Online reports that these are the most looked-up words in 2005: (10) inept, (9) levee, (8) conclave, (7) pandemic, (6) tsunami, (5) insipid, (4) filibuster, (3) contempt, (2) refugee—and the word most people needed defined: integrity.

(That paragraph is a found poem, really.)

And, finally, something to keep in mind as you wake up with your champagne hangover: At the first light of the new year, Buddhists all over the world will begin reciting prayers and meditating for peace.

Okay. I’ll close with something to consider as we slide into this new year.

Do you think there’s any correlation between the surprising success of that lame, feel-good, anthropomorphic penguin movie that has nothing to do with reality and how stunned we all felt as the many apocalyptical natural events of the past year wiped out so many of us?

SANG IN SHOWER: Summertime, and the Living is Easy (don’t ask me why ’cause it sure ain’t summer here)

READING: A week’s worth of the New York Times

LISTENING TO: The Holly and The Ivy, as performed by the Washington Men’s Camerata

BEST YEAR-END QUOTE: I’ve never trusted the number 10, or five, or any other multiple of fingers on a simian’s hand when it comes to recognizing excellence. (critic Byron Woods)

177. YEAR IN REVIEW

From the Archives

(30 December 2005) The local indy paper ran a political cartoon this week featuring a holiday card from the infamous East Waynesville NC Baptist Church whose minister instructed parishioners to vote Republican. The picture depicts Jesus being pulled in a chariot by an elephant wearing a Vote Republican banner and the caption reads The Entry of Christ into Jerusalem.

So yeah, 2005. Cindy Sheehan and Terry Schiavo and Lance Armstrong (again) and skyrocketing gas prices. King Bush the Latter’s “Bamboozlepalooza Tour.”

(Wish I could take credit for that description, but alas, a critic coined the phrase, not me.)

A facial transplant and two Supreme Court seats handed on a silver platter to the neocons.The year we executed our one thousandth prisoner since the death penalty was reinstated by the Supreme Court in 1976.

The year Barbara (wish she’d been born with a silver spoon shoved up her ass) Bush said of Hurricane Katrina refugees who had survived the squalid conditions under one dome only to be transported to another:

So many of the people here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working out very well for them.

Note well, Babs: those refugees were primarily black and primarily poor and primarily carless American citizens who had no way out of the city. They’re also the people whose basic needs are not met when your son gives precedence to private financial gain over human lives—you know, your son who flew off to California to strum his guitar as America’s racial underclass drowned.

(You must be so proud of him.)

But guess what? The whole world saw firsthand the poverty that millions of Americans live in day in and day out and the failed infrastructure that Reagan dismantled in order to increase corporate profits.

Re-election (sigh). Abu Ghraib. Fallujah. Wire-tapping. Camp Casey. Tax breaks for the ultrarich; abject poverty for so many others.

Corporate takeovers of the organic food label.

(Do you care that the number of approved synthetics in your so-called organic food jumped from 30 to 500 this year? I do.)

Anti-war rallies.

The ivory-billed woodpecker (again). Disappearing ice caps and a 27 percent increase in greenhouse gases. Avian flu and abstinence. Underfinanced national parks. Pipelines.

Great strides in Africa. A woman president. Swaziland’s laws that finally allow women to own property and take out loans without male sponsorship. Zimbabwean women likewise inheriting property.

Oh and we caught bin Laden.

(Just joking. That would require competency. But maybe Brownie can get right to work on that.)

•

My pal Tuscaloosa, who partied her way through Naw’leans and Baton Rouge back in the day, greets the dead at midnight on December thirty-first.

Well, this year calls for farewells, not hellos.

Farewell St. Bernard Parish: we hardly knew thee and certainly didn’t see thee.

Farewell Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

Farewell Rosa Parks: your bravery gives me hope.

Farewell Terry Schiavo, whose shell of a body was finally allowed to die.

Farewell Richard Pryor: you made me laugh but should have known better than to do what you did with that Bic lighter.

Farewell Uncle Donald: you were too young to die.

Farewell Pope John Paul II: the awful spectacle of you on display in all your tremulous golden-crowned glory moved me even though you’re a homophobe who held firm to misguided ideas about women’s autonomy and our role in the Church.

Farewell 250,000+ South Asian tsunami victims.

Farewell 8,000 Gaza settlers who thought you’d never be evicted.

And—although Cheney insists that we should “pay no attention to the carnage”—farewell to the 30,000+ Iraqis whom my country acknowledges murdering.

(And Dick, just so you know, experts say the actual number exceeds 100,000.)

Farewell 37-cent stamps and farewell to millions of West Africans who died of starvation while we tossed half our lunches into the garbage.

Farewell 2,165 US soldiers who died on Iraqi sand.

Farewell to the innocence of the other 7,500+ US soldiers who were seriously wounded and their families, and farewell to their belief that those fictitious weapons of mass destruction justify this carnage.

Farewell to the people who were simply eating lunch or leaving their Mosque or tying their children’s shoelaces when the suicide bombers found them.

Farewell 73,000 people killed in the Himalayas when the earthquake struck.

Farewell 950 Shiite pilgrims killed in the stampede.

Farewell London commuters.

And farewell to Christo’s beautiful mystical billowing saffron gates

(We needed your magic this year)

176. SO THIS IS CHRISTMAS

From the Archives (28 December 2005)

A CHRISTMAS POEM
by Robert Bly (from Morning Poems)

Christmas is a place, like Jackson Hole, where we all agree
To meet once a year. It has water, and grass for horses;
All the fur traders can come in. We visited the place
As children, but we never heard the good stories.

Those stories only get told in the big tents, late
At night, when a trapper who has been caught
In his own trap, held down in icy water, talks; and a man
With a ponytail and a limp comes in from the edge of the fire.

As children, we knew there was more to it—
Why some men got drunk on Christmas Eve
Wasn't explained, nor why we were so often
Near tears nor why the stars came down so close,

Why so much was lost. Those men and women
Who had died in wars started by others,
Did they come that night? Is that why the Christmas tree
Trembled just before we opened the presents?

There was something about angels. Angels we
Have heard on high Sweetly singing o'er
The plain. The angels were certain. But we could not
Be certain whether our family was worthy tonight.

Well, Christmas is over. The goose got fat and the chickens and the children came home to roost and discover just how many stories that we’ve told ourselves for years are, in fact, inaccurate (at least if our siblings are to be believed).

This Christmas, I also learned that my older sister is the type of person who will back a truck down the hill and start randomly tossing perfectly good furniture and dishes and other random items out of my mother’s basement and into a pile destined for the dump.

Can I just say that it rankles my ass that my sister took it upon herself to decide what family items are disposable?

So I asked my mother if she was comfortable with this approach and she said, “Well, you kids can always sort through everything when I’m dead.”

Poke.Spike.In.Eye.

In.Out.In.

Ouch.

... and I still don’t know if this purge was something Dee discussed with my mom or if she just decided that my mother doesn’t keep her house up to Dee’s gated community standards, and so took it upon herself to toss someone else’s stuff.

Some of the items were worth a fair amount of money and I knew I could sell them pretty quickly at an antique auction, so I grabbed what wasn’t already broken to sell for my mother—a nice, solid oak chair; a huge old jar like the ones that country store owners used to fill with pickles; a large distressed wooden box that I wrote my name in when I was, judging from my handwriting, six years old (which I might just keep for myself); brass and crystal and carved wooden doorknobs with accompanying brass plates; my father’s old hacksaw; a cool old Kreamerware kitchen tin with “Sugar” written on it in turquoise script, etc.

Many other items were already broken or buried at the bottom of the pile, just like the perfectly functional (and valuable) loom that Dee tossed on another one of her purges.

I escaped to the bad Chinese buffet, where I sat down with my plate of dumplings and promptly started to sob ...

.... maybe because I expect nothing and what I expect defines me—that’s a line from a Philip Schultz poem, not my own, and the problem is, I clearly expect something or this wouldn’t bother me so much

.... so maybe because I keep expecting something and nothing is what turns up (which is a Jesse X lyric: more of this: the same nothing. And more days. ... Dazed with sweet air, she'd forgotten how to count in English. Or any language.).

.. or maybe because I hate seeing my mother’s dysfunction on display but also recognize that tossing the evidence won’t make it go away.

... or maybe because I feel like an unrespected stranger that my family doesn’t even bother to try to know.

... or maybe because I feel guilty about abandoning them too.

I guess I could choose to comfort myself with the knowledge that Christmas has been about delusions ever since the Christians co-opted it from the pagans (which they originally did not to celebrate Jesus's birthday but because the Church needed to respond to a heretical claim that Jesus was only a spirit, as opposed to a body. Hence, they turned the pagan revelry into a celebration of their mythical savior's theoretical humanity).

Of course the Puritans outlawed Christmas altogether years later ... but I guess no one told this to the Fox commentators.

Anyway, happy fucking holidays y’all.

175. HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF

From the Archives

(November 2005) In case you haven't been paying attention to Bush's illegal NSA wiretaps: article two of the three articles of impeachment against Nixon states that the president committed a crime

by directing or authorizing [intelligence] agencies or personnel to conduct or continue electronic surveillance or other investigations for purposes unrelated to national security, the enforcement of laws, or any other lawful function of his office.

So the Pentagon has been spying on Americans at the insistence of the president—a man who, when told that his wiretapping order violates the US Constitution, replied that it’s “just a goddamn piece of paper” and waaa waaa waaa baby wants what baby wants and he’s perfectly willing to kill 30 thousand Iraqis and your sons and daughters and to stamp out Democracy to get it.

Maybe Nixon said this too before he was impeached (and knowing Nixon, he probably said it afterwards too, since he blamed everyone else for his failures).

Frankly, I want a president who treasures the Constitution more than his fucking LIFE or any short-term goals that he and the lobbyists who define their platform might have.

I want her to value public service over private interests PERIOD.

I want her to consider this belief holy, a calling.

I want Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird, or the female equivalent, guiding our country—someone who will stand up to powerful interests and insist on policies that are good for ALL the people, not just the few with deep pockets and persuasive lobbyists.

I mean let’s face it, our Constitution is bigger than any one over-privileged cowboy who probably wouldn’t have even passed high-school grammar without Daddy’s connections

(and he damn well better be glad that Barbara Jordan ain’t around today or he’d already be impeached).

And let me just say that my southern Baptist mother and plenty of other fundamentalists must be aghast to know that this so-called Christian man uttered the phrase god damn out loud—bu we always knew he was an opportunistic poseur, right?

Meanwhile inquiring minds want to know what enemy so threatens national security that we must bypass customary procedures that routinely grant permission to wiretap phones with 4 hours’ notice anyway.

Is it those terrorists that the FBI warned Condi and George about? Those spies with their fingers on a nuclear bomb?

Why no. It’s those scary Quaker anti-war activist terrorists, that’s who.

Run Dick run! Better move us to red alert!!

(You’d think it’d be obvious to anyone who knows anything about Quakers that they are opposed to violence, but maybe the chickenhawks consider opposition to the war to be our greatest national threat [to coin a Vietnam phrase].)

Our president lies blatantly about weapons of mass destruction, about torture, about votes. No wonder we’re all jaded.

Meanwhile, my trunk is loaded down with gifts (which may not be unrelated); my stockings are overflowing and my suitcase is too, so I will leave you with a quote:

For now I am in a holiday humour.—Shakespeare

And, since I may not be online again before New Year’s, here’s another one:

AND NOW let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been, full of work that has never been done, full of tasks, claims, and demands; and let us see that we learn to take it without letting fall too much of what it has to bestow upon those who demand of it necessary, serious and great things.—Rainer Maria Rilke

READING: “It is unconstitutional to teach [so-called intelligent design] as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom. ... We find that the secular purposes claimed by the [School] Board amount to a pretext for the Board's real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom."

So wrote the judge in his 139-page opinion in the PA evolution case.

LISTENING TO: silver bells

BEST-OF SELECT SPAM: MASTERDICK! Do you know . . . I love you?

174. WE WAS JUST FOLLOWING TERRORIST PROTOCOL

From the Archives

(December 2005) This report of federal marshalls shooting a bipolar air traveler really disturbs me. I keep picturing my mother off her meds and running in terror from the marshalls, and I know exactly how his poor wife must have felt as she ran behind her husband, trying desperately to calm him down.

Barbria’s bipolar father was in a similar situation. Before 9/11, she got a call from Miami letting her know that he had barricaded himself in a hotel room, where he set his pillow on fire and was screaming that he had a bomb and would blow the whole freakin’ town up.

The cops somehow figured out that he was mentally ill and needed his meds though, and they managed to cart him off to an asylum instead of killing him.

It still amazes us both that they didn’t just shoot him.

And I know that the federal marshalls were probably following routine post-9/11 protocol, but this story really breaks my heart.

And now I’ll end this depressing observation with a quote from the dead man’s 11-year-old niece, who describes her uncle this way:

If I caught lizards and accidentally killed one, he would almost be kind of sad. He would say, ‘What if that happened to you?”

Meanwhile, Christina Hopkinson’s debut novel IZOBEL BRANNIGAN.COM is about a woman who Googles herself and discovers that someone created a website about her that depicts her as leading a fabulous, extraordinary life.

As a joke, my ex Mud once created an alter ego for her best friend, who bought the prank for a while and e-mailed all of her friends in fascination. Her alter ego was a kindergarten teacher in rural Ohio who collected Precious Memory trinkets and glass unicorns and taught Sunday School at a Methodist church and read Harlequin romances in her spare time. Her favorite TV shows were Wheel of Fortune, General Hospital, Little House on the Prairie, and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, and she had an extensive collection of Broadway musical LPs that she liked to sing along to as she washed the dinner dishes.

(We had so much fun creating that composite.)

In a similar vein, my pal Tuscaloosa created an Internet alter-ego named The Scourge of the Piedmont. She’s incredibly witty and Scourge was famous in local dyke chat rooms for a while. In fact, we were once chatting at a party and a woman referred to some witty tidbit that Scourge had said online that very morning.

Mud spent most of her spare time participating in live-action role-playing (LARP) games in which she created characters who have specific traits and specific flaws. The LARPers weave an imaginary world and their characters behave in accordance with the attributes they choose for them.

These virtual worlds have specific norms and customs that LARPers also create for each game . . . and boy do they have some elaborate costumes!

Then there’s always the Sims.

Those kinds of games bore me really fast (although the sociological implications are fascinating). I am also fascinated by the notion of creating yourself whole cloth and wonder if keeping a blog somehow satisfies that urge in me.

It certainly gives me a place to contemplate and vent and process and ponder my failings and be at least occasionally creative, but I nevertheless choose what I do and do not reveal here; I present myself in a very particular kind of light.

Plus, you never know, I could be a 350-pound straight man who lives in his mother’s basement with 22 lab rats and a extensive medieval sword collection and I might just get off fantasizing about lesbians. Stranger things have been known to happen.

(I’m not him though. I'm just little ol’ dyketastic me.)

BEST OF SPAM: You need this wall (thanks but I’ve got too damn many of my own already erected).

173. CHRISTMAS UNDER SIEGE

From the Archives

(December 2005) Someone’s stealing 110-foot light poles right out from under the noses of the Baltimore police and this one-line description appeared in today’s online New York Times:

The Bush administration seems to be losing sight of the fact that the majority party may not use its powers to strip citizens of their rights, politicize the judicial system or rig the election process.

And we wonder why so many North American youth have lost faith in the (sometimes still) democratic process and don’t even bother to vote.

I cruised through the mountains this morning in a heavy downpour. Usually the temperature rises as I drive down the mountain and the sun comes up in my eyes but, this morning, the sun stuck its head under the covers instead of rising and the temperature fell steadily.

I encountered some sleet and slushy snow too, so I guess I’ll be placing my snow boots in the trunk a little early this year.

•

This past weekend, a friend told me about a letter she wrote to her fundamentalist church informing then that she was withdrawing her membership because there is nothing in the Bible that says women cannot hold positions of power but they refuse to let women take an active role in the power structure and insist that women behave submissively.

For these reasons, she informed them, she was using the only power that she had—the power of her feet—to walk away from this organization that she now refers to as “the cult.”

Since my mother just pointed out that I am still a member of the southern (twitch) Baptist church of my childhood until I officially withdraw, I need to write a similar letter.

This is way down on my list of priorities right now, but I plan to reference my aunt Becky’s homophobic correspondence plus Sue Monk Kidd’s Dance of the Dissident Daughter (an excellent book for survivors of religious fundamentalism). I also want to state my belief that members of the convention practice hatred and bigotry, which violates Jesus's message of love and inclusion.

I know this probably won’t matter a hill of beans to anyone and will probably just succeed in making my mother uncomfortable in one of the few places to which she still ventures, but it’s important to me to say why I am withdrawing.

Maybe I’ll CC my mother and aunt too ... and hmm, maybe I should write this letter before Christmas, since I’ll no doubt receive another God-can-cure-you epistle when I show up down south.

My aunt, like so many Christianists, insists that our nation’s founders intended for our country to be a theocracy. I have concluded that she has never read a single unbiased biography of our founders and that the leaders of her cult assume that their followers are stupid, since they write such nonsense and encourage them to pass it off as fact.

Contrary to popular superstition, Thomas Jefferson understood very well that the only religious freedom the Puritans were interested in (besides their own) was the freedom to label people who disagreed with them as witches. He knew their biases resulted in witchhunts back then just as they do today, and that these extremists were more than willing to supplant Jezus’s message of inclusion with the Nicene Creed and to create scapegoats for their own benefit.

And THAT reality—along with the long, long history of religious persecution in Europe and elsewhere—is why the US Constitution spells out the separation of church and state so strongly, Aunt Becky.

Once our country had Thomas Jefferson—a possible slave rapist ( I hope it was mutual lust) but a damn insightful one who at least believed in democracy. Now we have an Constitution-shredding president who has forced Grand Canyon National Park to sell scientifically inaccurate creationist books in their bookstore.

(!)

Yes indeedy, Christianists and their children (who no longer even have to attend a public school where they would receive evidence-based information about their world) can now purchase these inaccurate tomes and take their own creationist rafting trip down the canyon (during which they will learn about humans coexisting with the dinosaurs and how there is no such thing as carbon evidence or evolution and how everyone knows that Eve was the original sinner who corrupted good men and removed us all from paradise).

What’s that Muhammed Ali line:

I ain't no Christian. I can't be when I see all the colored people fighting for forced integration get blown up. They get hit by the stones and chewed by dogs and then these crackers blow up a Negro church... People are always telling me what a good example I would be if I just wasn't Muslim. I've heard over and over why couldn't I just be more like Joe Louis and Sugar Ray [Robinson]. Well, they are gone and the black man's condition is just the same, ain't it? We're still catching hell.

So here’s my version: I ain’t no Christian. Hell no, I can’t be when I see good homosexuals assaulted by fundamentalists. We’re strapped to a fence and bludgeoned to death or left to die on the street by homophobic cops, sent into exile for being atypical, rate.

People are always telling me what a good person I’d be if I’d just take one of those cure-yer-homosexuality classes and forget how incredibly alluring women are.

(Yes. I love women. And I love that I do.)

But why should I be a fundie talking head instead of who I am? Those other women are the female impersonators, if you ask me, and my very existence is threatened by this bigotry.

We queers are denied basic civil rights that are extended to every other citizen of this country merely because of whom we love, so get out of my face with your religious mythologies and your just-as-I-am bullshit and quit trying to kidnap democracy.

In fact, why don’t you climb back into Plato’s cave where you can stare at the wall and insist that you see only darkness.

So. Yeah. I also just read that Christians are now boycotting businesses that don’t use holiday greetings that they deem appropriate. Christmas is “under siege” by “professional atheists” and “Christian haters,” see, and there is a “liberal plot against the holiday,” according to Fox commentators.

So the American Family Association is leading a boycott against Target because the phrase Merry Christmas is not in the chain’s marketing material.

And the Catholic League is leading a boycott against Wal-Mart because they don’t like the way the chain’s website searches for the word Christmas.

(But, hey, if liberals AND conservatives boycott the place, then maybe they’ll actually give their employees a living wage in an effort to improve their image.)

Now, dear readers, please do make a note of the fact that Christianists do not like terms such as “Happy Holidays” and “Seasons Greetings” and, if they hear such phrases, may very well decide that you too are a professional liberal atheist Christ hater.

Should this happen to you, I suggest that you pick up the nearest brass sleigh bell and, in the midst of your jingalingalinging, bop him or her over the head.

You can follow this action up with a hearty “Happy New Year.”

Or, better yet, point out to your dazed admirer that there is absolutely no biblical evidence whatsoever that the so-called virgin birth happened on or around 25 December. Instead the Christians replaced the Roman Saturnalia celebration with this holiday in an effort to convert celebrants.

SANG IN SHOWER: Carry me back to Memphis. Gotta find my Daisy Jane... (an old America song)

BEST OF SPAM: Subject: Wrist.Factors (well that IS quite the subject now isn’t it? And also the reason some of us have metal bedframes.)

172. THE CHURCH OF THE BIG DILDO

From the Archives (December 2005)

You have navigated with raging soul far from the paternal home, passing beyond the seas’ double rocks and now you inhabit a foreign land.—Medea

Yes that would be me living here in this foreign land where my orchids are sprouting brand new stalks and the clementines I purchased just a few days ago are already beginning to mold.

(What is UP with that? I mean jezzzzuslawd I’m eating three a day!!)

Whole Foods’ produce department has gone way downhill recently (and I still don’t understand why they can’t be bothered to buy locally grown produce when it’s so readily available). I mean, throw some (finely sifted sea) salt over your shoulder in these parts and you’re bound to hit some hippie who went back to the land and has been selling organic rosemary or pig-sniffed truffles or free-range something at the local farmers’ market.

Anyway, so here I am with my short attention span changing topics again when what I wanted to say is that yes, indeedy, this here dykestergrrrl has navigated myself relatively far away from my paternal homeland and you better believe that I only looked back long enough to find those barbecue and cornbread and coconut cream pie recipes.

I was fortunate enough to not desire the tiny strictured life that my family designed for me but, wow, do they keep trying to cram me back into their mold.

In fact, it’s beginning to feel as if they’re stalking me—which, no doubt, means that the church had another save-the-queers-from-themselves drive.

My mother asked what church I attend. (The church of the big dildo, Mom.)

My homophobic Aunt Becky informed me in highlighted all caps that I am going to spend eternity in Hell because I don’t believe every rabidly hateful thing that her minister insists is Jezus’s word and because I “live in unnatural sin.”

Oh. Wait. No. The Baptists don’t concern themselves with Jezus anymore. (He was just too liberal.) It’s all about their so-called literal interpretation of the worduvgawwd now.

(Don’t you wonder in what dank cellar they’ve locked Jezus away? It’s apparently the same cellar where they’ve locked the Christians who took “feed the poor and care for the sick” to heart, since the new Falwell/Dobson/Robertson Jezus impersonator promotes giving huge tax cuts to the rich at the expense of the poor and fails to provide healthcare for the indigent.)

(And yes I know that there are plenty of good liberal Christians out there who are mighty embarrassed that Pat Robertson and his cronies are managing to speak for them all, but I am talking about the organized Christianists with an obvious GOP agenda here.)

And don’t get me started on my little sister, who converted to Catholicism and believes their spiel about separate and unequal gender roles being part of God’s master plan and who knows just knows that I can be cured of my lust for gorgeous women—one of whom, by the way li’l sister, brings me to ecstatic screaming climaxes on a very regular basis.

(Think about THAT the next time you’re mumbling some prescribed phrase out of your lectionary.)

Meanwhile our local dyke chorus has, for the first time in its 22-year history, elected to perform a traditional holiday concert that includes Jezus songs.

See, many of us are classically trained musicians who really enjoy challenging carols such as Rutter’s “Mary’s Lullaby” and “Lo How A Rose E’er Blooming” or the lovely “Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day,” and it is exceedingly difficult to find any classical carols that don't reference the J-Man.

So we bit the bullet and introduced Jezus into our estrogen mix for just this one concert—only we unknowingly did this the same semester that HRC invited us to perform at their Gospel and Unity event (which they, incidentally, presented to us as inclusive of all organized religions).

Turns out their event was actually an attempt to bring African-Americans into their fold ... and I guess they could only envision African-Americans, even queer ones, as gospel-belting churchgoers.

(Hey, ever heard of Audre Lorde or Essex Hemphill or Pomo Afro Homo?)

The HRC event overflowed with evangelical Jezus-farting, but there was neither hide nor hare of Buddha or Pan or Muhammed or Spiderwoman weaving the world or the magnificent golden carp.

So, understandably, my dyke sister-singers are up in arms now about our apparent conversion.

What was I thinking when I voted to perform this Jezus music in the first place? And is it enough that I opted not to participate in the HRC event (because my Jezus allergy can detect allergens from miles away and I was sneezing the second HRC said the word "gospel"). I also declined to design their publicity material for the same reason, but did perform in our holiday concert because, well, I love Rutter and have not yet convinced the chorus to purchase an SSAA arrangement of “Ave Pudendum.”

But anyway, to make matters worse, the local (queer) MCC church asked our chorus and the local gay men’s chorus to perform at their holiday fund-raiser too and, well, we assumed we'd sing “Deck The Halls” and “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” etc, but, well, they just delivered a song list to us and it couldn’t be more Christian!

(Whee our next board meeting is sure going to be fun!)

Meanwhile, I miss the days when the Christians that our chorus sang about were the blood-thirsty extremists who murdered 9 million European women during the witch hunts, and so plan to propose that we sing Holly Near’s “I Ain’t Afraid” (of your Yahweh. I ain’t afraid of your Jesus. I ain’t afraid of your Allah. I’m afraid of what you do in the name of your god) and “Did Jezus Have a Baby Sister?” and “Ave Pudendum” at our next holiday concert, as penance.

LISTENING TO: Maggie Sansone’s Ancient Noels

BEST OF SPAM: last longer John (oh baby I do)