From the Archives. (October 2006) A geologist at UNC Chapel Hill recently discovered that the Amazon River once flowed in the opposite direction. Yep. Just think about it. The world’s largest river basin once flowed from the Atlantic to the temperate Pacific but suddenly reversed course some 500 million years ago when a butchy Grace Joneslike tectonic plate from Africa felt the pull of a saucy plate from South America and remembered longing.
Africa shuddered briefly then slid her way across the crowded dance floor as South America anticipated the pleasure of promised resistance. Then Africa was sliding her long fingers along the South America’s curves and moaning softly as something solid gave way inside her. Recognition disappeared as suddenly as it appeared though, as South America’s mouth found Africa’s taut raised peaks, licked hungry stone.
The plates stepped back, took in the full enticing length and breadth of each other with wolf-quick motions, each still confident that nothing could dislodge her geography. Then South America pressed wrapped her long muscular legs around Africa’s eager hips and pressed the full intoxicating weight of her passion against her.
Dampness sprang from Africa’s deserts as they embarked together on an expedition into each other’s lush valleys and mounds.
Their mouths went dry. Then wet. Then dry again, their landscapes slick as the lovers gyrated through the long opening moments of this inevitable dance, during which one partner moves from controlled cautious motion into full-blown erupting earthquake, quivering and screaming as ridge finds fissure finds cave finds pounding contraction and caution tsunamis into all-out heaving gasps.
Then one plate shifted her significant weight long enough to press the full gravity of her presence into the other and the other reciprocated and they sucked in air and held on, drinking in the intoxicating musk of each other as caves throbbed open and tidepools filled with water.
Africa’s fissures were already stretched taut when the two shifted gears just long enough to stare into each other’s astonished eyes. Then the floor gave way and Africa's backbone arched and she found herself screaming with each alternating heave and thrust.
When South America tightened her legs around Africa’s bucking hips, whole valleys flooded as her stone façade gave way, spreading spewing molten lava over twitching thighs with each eruption as sedimentary stone and watery amens spewed full force from her dilating caves.
Then Africa fell headlong into that timeless moment when the slightest shift can re-establish gravity, tear open all boundaries as bodies move into and out of and over and around another’s in a heaving tectonic vibration that can leave whole rivers churning with release.
Sunday, March 9, 2008
262. A LIFE SENTENCE OF POVERTY
From the Archives. (October 2006) 25 years and 4 months, adjusted to 19 years and 2 months with good behavior and the requisite “Hi, my name is Jeff and I am an alcoholic” confessional.
Yep, that’s the punishment our judicial system meted out to ENRON mastermind Jeffrey Skilling.
The judge commented that Skilling’s “crimes have imposed on hundreds if not thousands a life sentence of poverty.”
First, if that’s a crime, then why ain’t George in jail?
Second, don’t you worry that former ENRON employees will still be bagging groceries in 2025 when Jeffrey is released back into the world?
So. I’ve been pondering the phrase life sentence of poverty ever since I read that line this morning.
Have also been mulling over the reality that so many news stories demonstrate our levels of cultural, environmental, intellectual, and soul-depriving poverty.
Example: have you seen what former Louisiana legislative candidate David Duke has been up to lately?
The guy’s copying Ralph Reed and his ilk and urging racist people to run for office.
Now I respect David Duke more than I respect Ralph, because at least he states what he believes out loud, whereas Ralph advises folks to run as stealth candidates in order to increase the likelihood that they can force their extremist views on everyone else.
But John Ubele has gone a step further and is encouraging his flock to form a national pro-White political party.
Meanwhile, Foley’s subterfuge and David Kuo’s timely confessional and Bush's "taking the Lord's name in vain" have left the Christianists aghast with the reality that, golly gee, people might actually make fun of them while kow-towing to them for political advantage.
So now they want their own party.
Church. Politics. What’s the difference anymore? (Except for those handy tax breaks)
I suggest that these 2 groups have a confessional lovefest wherein they collectively state their intention to control the lives of the rest of us. Then they can form their own party and see how far they get.
I know. Let’s call them the Bigocrats!
Mistuh Big ...
Anyway, Writergrrrl spent 15 long and head-banging years involuntarily committed to those fundies and untold numbers of hours under the judgmental vice of Baptist camp counselors and can tell you with confidence that submitting to those purportedly Jesus-inspired strictures, particularly if you are a woman, is the equivalent of accepting a life sentence of spiritual poverty.
Yep, that’s the punishment our judicial system meted out to ENRON mastermind Jeffrey Skilling.
The judge commented that Skilling’s “crimes have imposed on hundreds if not thousands a life sentence of poverty.”
First, if that’s a crime, then why ain’t George in jail?
Second, don’t you worry that former ENRON employees will still be bagging groceries in 2025 when Jeffrey is released back into the world?
So. I’ve been pondering the phrase life sentence of poverty ever since I read that line this morning.
Have also been mulling over the reality that so many news stories demonstrate our levels of cultural, environmental, intellectual, and soul-depriving poverty.
Example: have you seen what former Louisiana legislative candidate David Duke has been up to lately?
The guy’s copying Ralph Reed and his ilk and urging racist people to run for office.
Now I respect David Duke more than I respect Ralph, because at least he states what he believes out loud, whereas Ralph advises folks to run as stealth candidates in order to increase the likelihood that they can force their extremist views on everyone else.
But John Ubele has gone a step further and is encouraging his flock to form a national pro-White political party.
Meanwhile, Foley’s subterfuge and David Kuo’s timely confessional and Bush's "taking the Lord's name in vain" have left the Christianists aghast with the reality that, golly gee, people might actually make fun of them while kow-towing to them for political advantage.
So now they want their own party.
Church. Politics. What’s the difference anymore? (Except for those handy tax breaks)
I suggest that these 2 groups have a confessional lovefest wherein they collectively state their intention to control the lives of the rest of us. Then they can form their own party and see how far they get.
I know. Let’s call them the Bigocrats!
Mistuh Big ...
Anyway, Writergrrrl spent 15 long and head-banging years involuntarily committed to those fundies and untold numbers of hours under the judgmental vice of Baptist camp counselors and can tell you with confidence that submitting to those purportedly Jesus-inspired strictures, particularly if you are a woman, is the equivalent of accepting a life sentence of spiritual poverty.
261. WAVING THE JESUS FISH FOR FUN AND PROFIT
From the Archives. (October 2006) Well well well, the sins of the Gross Old Pedophiles are certainly coming home to roost, aren’t they?
Now we have the Curt Weldon scandal on top of the Foley scandal on top of the Ralph Reed scandal on top of the Abramoff scandal on top of Who’s Next?
Meanwhile, I spent my lunch break re-reading the Times’s expose on special-interest handouts that the Republicans continue to extend to religious groups and lemmetellya if I’m ever accused of tax evasion, I plan to state that my actions were ecclesiastic decisions subject to special interest provisions.
I mean, who knows? Seems as if folks can avoid all sorts of legal ramifications simply by waving a little Jesus fish around.
(Which reminds me of the drug-dealing jeweler in my hometown who took to writing "Jesus Loves You" on his sign after getting busted for selling pot. His new-found faith didn't keep him from continuing to deal though.)
So. What separate and unequal benefits have our legislators adopted to subsidize religion (even as they work to deny equal benefits to those of us who worship at the labial font)?
Let’s start with legalized job discrimination. Secular businesses such as day care centers and hospitals are at a competitive disadvantage now as the fish-wearers reap more profits.
Fish-wearers are being awarded tax breaks for initiatives such as luxury communities, theme parks, and golf courses that have nothing to do with maintaining a house of worship. This deprives localities of tax revenues while forcing us all to subsidize groups whose principals we may oppose.
Yes, it seems that Bush&Co decided to take a slice of the Establishment Clause too when they set their eyes on the Constitution er that “just a goddamn piece of paper.”
•
Meanwhile, I finally connected with Jamie, who has, no doubt, been holed up reading the On Our Back issues that I pasted generic magazine covers on so that she can take them to her treatments.
(Those nurses have no idea what's inside her copy of Computer World. Hee!)
MOST OBNOXIOUS BUMPERSTICKER SEEN THIS WEEEK: A confederate flag with the caption Fighting Terrorists since 1864
COOLEST BUMPERSTICKER SEEN THIS WEEK: Just another godless atheist working for equality and world peace.
BEST OF SPAM: "Essential message. You must read" (which was delivered alongside "Significant letter. You require to read.")
Now we have the Curt Weldon scandal on top of the Foley scandal on top of the Ralph Reed scandal on top of the Abramoff scandal on top of Who’s Next?
Meanwhile, I spent my lunch break re-reading the Times’s expose on special-interest handouts that the Republicans continue to extend to religious groups and lemmetellya if I’m ever accused of tax evasion, I plan to state that my actions were ecclesiastic decisions subject to special interest provisions.
I mean, who knows? Seems as if folks can avoid all sorts of legal ramifications simply by waving a little Jesus fish around.
(Which reminds me of the drug-dealing jeweler in my hometown who took to writing "Jesus Loves You" on his sign after getting busted for selling pot. His new-found faith didn't keep him from continuing to deal though.)
So. What separate and unequal benefits have our legislators adopted to subsidize religion (even as they work to deny equal benefits to those of us who worship at the labial font)?
Let’s start with legalized job discrimination. Secular businesses such as day care centers and hospitals are at a competitive disadvantage now as the fish-wearers reap more profits.
Fish-wearers are being awarded tax breaks for initiatives such as luxury communities, theme parks, and golf courses that have nothing to do with maintaining a house of worship. This deprives localities of tax revenues while forcing us all to subsidize groups whose principals we may oppose.
Yes, it seems that Bush&Co decided to take a slice of the Establishment Clause too when they set their eyes on the Constitution er that “just a goddamn piece of paper.”
•
Meanwhile, I finally connected with Jamie, who has, no doubt, been holed up reading the On Our Back issues that I pasted generic magazine covers on so that she can take them to her treatments.
(Those nurses have no idea what's inside her copy of Computer World. Hee!)
MOST OBNOXIOUS BUMPERSTICKER SEEN THIS WEEEK: A confederate flag with the caption Fighting Terrorists since 1864
COOLEST BUMPERSTICKER SEEN THIS WEEK: Just another godless atheist working for equality and world peace.
BEST OF SPAM: "Essential message. You must read" (which was delivered alongside "Significant letter. You require to read.")
260. WALKING AROUND WITH OUR SOULS IN OUR HANDS
When we are working, we are working nervously. We are carrying our souls in our hands. (Sabah Al-Atia, a trash collector in Baghdad, as quoted in the New York Times, 13 October 2006)
From the Archives. (October 2006). Stacy Shiff had some interesting perspectives in today’s “Desperately Seeking Susan (NYT, 10.13.2006):
Now we are Photoshopping rather than airbrushing; with enough slicing and dicing, an argument can be made for anything.
Examples:
Impeaching a president for a blowjob is definitely not a miscarriage of justice if that president is the so-called liberal Bill Clinton.
or
Passing legislation that makes it impossible to convict a president of war crimes that he and his administration committed is not a miscarriage of justice if a powerful Christian jihad lobby supports that president and the corporate-owned news outlets fail to publish negative opinions about it.
or
Telling the president in an early-August daily briefing entitled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US” doesn’t mean that the president and his staff had any idea that Bin Ladin might attack in the US.
or
Being briefed in July about said looming attack after meeting in reserved airspace does not mean that Condi committed perjury when she said No one could have guessed that terrorists would use planes as weapons against buildings.
or
Publishing sensational story after sensational story about children being executed or horny legislators flirting with nubile young men is, apparently, much more responsible journalism, however, than calling for Condi’s resignation after she covers up her lies.
And, hey, now the president can declare journalists who express outrage are enemy combatants and haul them off to Gitmo.
Our democracy has turned into a bad joke.
Meanwhile, some folks in the blogosphere are suggesting that the Republinazis outed Foley themselves, knowing that the reaction would distract folks from the fact that Condi got caught covering up her prior knowledge of the 9/11 terrorist threat.
So let me make sure I have the formula right: Out a queer = Bush gets pardoned for authorizing war crimes that result in torture and death + legislators suspend the Constitution right in front of our faces + the Iraqi debacle gets worse every day (and let’s don’t even mention all those billions of dollars that vanished without a trace under Bremer’s watch)
...
but, hey, sex sells.
259. LUCIFER’S FOLLIES, OR, I KNOW, LET’S BLAME THE HOMOSEXUALS!
From the Archives (October 2006) Huh. Jerry Falwell says that Hillary’s nomination as Democratic presidential candidate would arouse even more evangelical opposition than Lucifer’s.
Wonder what Jerry’s nomination would arouse among thinking people?
And does anyone believe that Fox and O’Reilly accidentally—oopsie! real sorry folks—ran a banner identifying Foley as a Democrat at least twice before someone called them on their self-serving little blunder?
Yep, I’ve been catching up on my reading.
Checked out Mollie Ivins’s dildo diaries today and can confirm that Texas is even more backwards than my repressive home state.
Have also been following the Times series on the ever-expanding benefits that our leaders are extending to christianist groups. Hope the series garners a strong response.
This made me wonder what the christianists have been up to—besides being strangely silent about Foley—and that’s how I discovered the Christian Coalition trainer who encourages people to make up press credentials in order to find out if voters are planning to vote for republicans (and then harass them if they’re not).
The Christian Right’s lack of morals are really coming to light in the wake of this scandal.
Yep, another closeted Republican suffering from internalized homophobia has followed the path blazed by Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, and Ralph Reed and gotten himself revealed as a moral hypocrite.
Is anyone surprised?
So how are the christianists responding? Well, they’re playing the specious blame game in an effort to avoid taking responsibility for putting their careers before their so-called morals. Or they're keeping quiet in an effort to keep the Republican failures in connection to this scandal under wraps.
Examples:
The Foley revelations, according to Gary Bauer, chair of the Campaign for [Homophobic, Evidenced-Based-Reality-Rejecting] Working Families, are merely "an attempt to discourage Christian conservative voters and to get some percentage of them to stay home so that the Left can retake the United States Senate and the United States House."
Yep. We Lefties brainwashed the man into seducing nearly grown boys using the same brainwashing methods that you christianists have used with the children you send to your brainwashing camps.
(I know. I’ve been there.)
Other politicos are trying to distance the scandal from political parties altogether and blame, yes, the homosexuals:
Wonder what Jerry’s nomination would arouse among thinking people?
And does anyone believe that Fox and O’Reilly accidentally—oopsie! real sorry folks—ran a banner identifying Foley as a Democrat at least twice before someone called them on their self-serving little blunder?
Yep, I’ve been catching up on my reading.
Checked out Mollie Ivins’s dildo diaries today and can confirm that Texas is even more backwards than my repressive home state.
Have also been following the Times series on the ever-expanding benefits that our leaders are extending to christianist groups. Hope the series garners a strong response.
This made me wonder what the christianists have been up to—besides being strangely silent about Foley—and that’s how I discovered the Christian Coalition trainer who encourages people to make up press credentials in order to find out if voters are planning to vote for republicans (and then harass them if they’re not).
The Christian Right’s lack of morals are really coming to light in the wake of this scandal.
Yep, another closeted Republican suffering from internalized homophobia has followed the path blazed by Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, and Ralph Reed and gotten himself revealed as a moral hypocrite.
Is anyone surprised?
So how are the christianists responding? Well, they’re playing the specious blame game in an effort to avoid taking responsibility for putting their careers before their so-called morals. Or they're keeping quiet in an effort to keep the Republican failures in connection to this scandal under wraps.
Examples:
The Foley revelations, according to Gary Bauer, chair of the Campaign for [Homophobic, Evidenced-Based-Reality-Rejecting] Working Families, are merely "an attempt to discourage Christian conservative voters and to get some percentage of them to stay home so that the Left can retake the United States Senate and the United States House."
Yep. We Lefties brainwashed the man into seducing nearly grown boys using the same brainwashing methods that you christianists have used with the children you send to your brainwashing camps.
(I know. I’ve been there.)
Other politicos are trying to distance the scandal from political parties altogether and blame, yes, the homosexuals:
Neither party seems likely to address the real issue, which is the link between homosexuality and child sexual abuse. (Tony Perkins, President of the Family Research Council, in reference to the Foley scandal)
What? Don’t you wonder how this idiot can even write that with an um straight face on the heels of one heterosexual man raping and executing public school girls whom he took hostage in Colorado and another heterosexual man executing a roomful of Amish youngsters whom he planned to rape and torture?
At least Foley was flirting with people who have hair around their genitals.
Perkins also said, and fairly ungrammatically, that "it shouldn't be totally surprising when we hold up tolerance and diversity as the guidepost for public life this is what you end up getting."
Think about that.
Human Life International went a step further and attempted to blame the Foley scandal on Planned Parenthood. (The fuck?)
There is never an acceptable excuse or rationale for the type of deviant behavior former Congressman Mark Foley has admitted to. Homosexuality is every bit a part of the culture of death as is abortion and contraception. Not surprisingly, Foley was an ardent supporter of both, representing the interests of Planned Parenthood 64 percent of the time thus far in 2006.
Yes, put those children in christianist schools so they never have the opportunity to learn about evidence-based reasoning, then feed them crap like this and some of them just might buy your bullshit.
•
Meanwhile, a woman on Craig’slist discovered that her academic husband is cheating on her and wrote this wonderful rave, which I’m posting here because it will vanish soon, although it’s currently posted at http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/sfo/141149695.html:
RAVE: My cheating husband!!!
Ok, so I just found out that you've been writing about 25 emails a day to one of your female colleagues, all signed with the words "with bated breath". GREAT! You seem to have decided that bisexual vegetarians with questionable hair choices are more up your alley. WONDERFUL! Oh, did you say that she cares about your academic career, unlike me, who is always at work? Great! I'm such a bitch, aren't I, me with all of my work and bill paying. I'm glad that someone has the time to listen to you talk about postmodernism. That really takes a lot off my back. Actually, upon close inspection, it seems like this whole thing is taking a lot off my back. For example...
Things I Don't Have to Do Anymore since You Have Found a Deeply Intellectual Fuck Buddy:
1. Pay your rent.
2. Get you through graduate school.
3. Hear the word "deconstruction" while I'm trying to eat a goddamn hamburger.
4. Fry bacon for you.
5. Pretend to enjoy CNN.
6. Pretend to care about all things academic.
Things I Will Be Able to Do:
1. Buy shoes.
2. Eat chicken, which you find disgusting.
3. Shop at a store other than Target.
4. Unapologetically watch America 's Next Top Model.
So go ahead. Fuck her. I know you want to. I mean, you pretty much said so in that last email, now didn't you? If you'd just get on with it, I could possibly have you out by the end of the month, and be able to enjoy all of next month's pay check without having to buy any of your books or any of your pencils or any of your goddamn subscription-only foreign news channels. You've been to the movies, you've had study dates. The next logical step is fucking. So put down the goddamn books and get your mouth on hers. Let's step it up! I want to go buy myself some shoes!
And yeah, I'll be sad, and I'll cry and I'll eat some Ben and Jerry's. But you know what? I won't be homeless. You, my friend, you're going to have to get a job that doesn't involve reading Nabokov. So enjoy that. God knows I will. In fact, I'll give you five bucks if you'll just hurry the fuck up and get it over with. Take the money, dude. You're going to need it.
Oh, and yeah, I did break into your email. So go ahead...tell me what you read in some obscure book about privacy. Tell me loud and long. Because I'm never going to have to hear that shit again.
141149695
Yee haw, babe.
258. WORSHIPPING AT THE HOUSE OF LABIA LOVE, OR, FAREWELL HABEAS CORPUS, WE HARDLY KNEW THEE
From the Archives. (October 2006) Huh. Someone just sent this to me:
Apt, really, since my singing group performed at a queer event held at a local progressive church last night and, when we went out to our cars, found this on our windshields:
Love that goes UPWARD is WORSHIP.
Love that goes OUTWARD is AFFECTION.
Love that STOOPS is GRACE. (DG Barnhouse)
Apt, really, since my singing group performed at a queer event held at a local progressive church last night and, when we went out to our cars, found this on our windshields:
NEVER DOUBT GOD’S LOVE FOR YOU
The Bible makes it clear that “God is Love” (1st John 4:8). This is a true character trait of God that is widely spoken of within the gay community. But did you know that there are other character traits of God which are equally true, yet hardly spoken of at all within gay circles? Namely, that God is a holy, righteous, and just God who, by his very nature, must administer punishment for sin?
You may have wondered, “If God is a loving God, how could He punish people in such a way?” Because God is perfect and His standard is perfection (the 10 commandments). Have you ever lied, stolen something (even if it was something trivial and small), used God’s name in vain, or lusted after another person (Jesus calls this “adultery” in Matthew 5:28)? Then you have broken God’s law, and the Bible make it clear that “He who stumbles at one point of the Law is guilty of breaking it all” (James 2:10), and “The soul that sins shall die” (Ezekiel 28:10). Be honest with yourself; you’re in big trouble on judgment day, DESPITE YOUR HOMOSEXUAL LIFESTYLE.
But God’s mercy can triumph over judgment in your life. God loves you, and has made a way for you to escape His wrath. Do you know what God did for you so that you wouldn’t have to go to hell? He sent His Son, Jesus, to die on a cross to receive your punishment. Jesus satisfied God’s justice and wrath against sin, so that when you stand before God on the day of judgment, you won’t have to receive His justice and wrath. This, my friend, is the greatest expression of love, Jesus died a substitute death so you could live (Romans 5:8). Then He rose from the dead, defeating death and proving Himself to be who He says He is; the Son of God and Savior of the world.
So, God has made a way for all men to be forgiven, and to receive the gift of everlasting life, Now the only question that remains is if you are willing to receive this gift. The Bible makes it perfectly clear that God commands all people everywhere to repent (Acts 17:30-31, Mark 6:12, Luke 13;3, Acts 3;19, Acts 26:20), and to trust in Jesus as Savior, since there is no way you could save yourself (John 3:16-21, John 8:24, John 14:6, Acts 4;12).
So please don’t be guilty of creating a God after your own imagination to suit yourself that you are more comfortable with; a God who is comfortable with your sins, including your homosexual lifestyle. The Bible warns, “Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, no idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor sodomites, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners shall inherit the kingdom of God,” and, “the cowardly, unbelieving, adominable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death: (Revelation 21:8). It’s been appointed for man once to die, and after this, the judgment (Hebrews 9:27). By this time, it will be too late to repent and make things right. Humble yourself before God, turn from your sin, and put your trust in Jesus as your Savior...today! Whether you walk down an aisle of a Church to make your peace with God of just kneel beside your bed at night does not matter...God is more concerned with the attitude of your heart than the place where you accept His gift of salvation. Tell Him you are sorry for your sins and turn from them. Ask Him to fill your heart with His presence so you can live above the power of sin, Tell Him you’re putting your trust in Jesus as your Savior from this day forward. God promised to forgive all that repent and put their trust in Jesus! Then read your Bible daily and obey what you read. And find a church to plug into that has not compromised the Word of God. God will never let you down. For more information, check out http://www.wayofthe master.com/goodperson.shtml
Well, my friend, you clearly failed your grammar courses, but at least you know to leave the second e out of judgment. You have also misunderstood a crucial aspect of adultery if you believe that lusting after another person alone qualifies.
My hunch, however, is that you are in such desperate need of some earth-shattering guilt-free lust that this was probably a Freudian slip. In fact, given your homophobic tendencies and desire to be around the fabulous when we congregate, I am guessing that you are, at this very moment, struggling mightily with your attraction to people of the same gender.
Let me remind you that the group with the highest incidence of divorce in our country is evangelical Christians.
Now some would say that it follows that your god hates evangelical Christians more than he hates, say, homosexuals. But, hey, you're the one who insists that your god is a loving god, so maybe he just wants to free your women from their oppression.
I guess I better be careful about sharing my honest opinions now though, since the rule of law that we’ve lived by for so many years is now officially dead—or will be once Bush signs the terrorist bill into law.
Goodbye Bill of Rights. Hello rightless people who can be deprived of life, liberty, and property without due process based purely on our president's suspicions about you.
Susie Bright points out that "everyone who watches TV knows all about Foley's boxer shorts, but the loss of one's right to privacy, or a jury trial, doesn't seem to make anyone's dick hard.”
Yeah.
What frightens me most though is that this bill not only gives Bush the right to determine the application of the Geneva Conventions but actually denies the courts the jurisdiction to hear any challenges to his interpretations.
In other words, we now have a dictator in what was a democracy, and a coke-snortin' one whose GPA was a low C, at that.
257. THE CHRISTIAN LEX NON SCRIPTA
From the Archives. (September 2007) I found a freaky site that is maintained by people who want to make the Bible the law of the land. Here’s a sample No Trespassing sign that they invite readers to post around their compounds:
NO TRESPASS
Notice of Foreign Law, on
Private Land; Read before entering:
You are hereby noticed that entering This land subjects You to This contract:
This land is private, and is not subject to public use or control. The Owner has the character suae potestate esse. Over This land flies the American Banner of Peace, and the Law thereon is the Holy Scriptures, and the Christian lex non scripta. The Owner has enacted other various ordinances, to which all who enter This land are subject. Among these ordinances is a
Five thousand dollar Land use fee,
charged per man or woman, per day, or any part of a day, for any man or woman (hereinafter, "Lessee") entering upon This land without prior written license in his possession at all times while upon This land. Acceptance of all ordinances shall be evidenced by the presence of any man or woman upon This land, not in possession of said license, and shall create a constructive lease agreement, binding Lessee to the terms of all ordinances which the Owner has laid upon This land. Said fee shall be deemed due and payable in full within thirty days from first notice, and payment shall be made in silver coin, at full face value. Lessee hereby agrees that if payment of said fee becomes delinquent, that said amount shall become a lien upon all of Lessee's non-exempt property. Any property brought onto This land by Lessee is subject to impound until settlement is made in full. Other ordinances are in effect upon This land, to which all who enter are subject, unless exempted by license. A complete list of ordinances may be obtained from the Owner. Ignorance of the Law shall not be an excuse, nor shall it relieve any person from liability therefor. Notice is hereby given that any license, lease, or right of usage may be revoked with five minutes notice. Revocations shall not relieve anyone from liabilities already incurred. Verbal invitees given five minutes grace as to fee only.
Notice to agents of government:
By entering This land you accept all of the above stated terms in full. Additionally, you affirm both individually, and in your official capacity, under penalty of perjury, under the laws of these united States of America (Title 28 U.S.C. Sec. 1746), that you will support the Constitution for these united States of America and the Constitution for This republic, and all the laws promulgated thereunder in conformance with the above named Constitutions, and will extend and protect the unalienable rights secured therein to the Owner, and those under His protection, and will faithfully perform all the duties of your office as it relates to Them, in compliance with the above Constitutions to which you acknowledge that you have already taken an Oath to perform said acts and actions to the best of your ability. Violations of the rights of the Owner, or those under His protection, shall be assessed a civil penalty of one million dollars in silver coin for each violation. Damages may also be prosecuted under Title 18 U.S.C. Sec. 1621 and Sec. 241, and Title 42 U.S.C. Sections 1986, 1985, and 1983, resulting in up to ten years in prison, and additional civil penalties.
The Owner may be contacted by sending correspondence to the following location:
They also offer a Boom to Bust Monopoly kit that enables parents to alter their Monopoly games to reflect the poor persecuted Christian’s version of reality. Parents teach their kids all about how this country is “going down the toilets” by gluing new cards atop existing Monopoly cards and their children learn to shelter their assets from Big Brother and the IRS while negotiating with the banks and investors in order to succeed until the next big bust.
This would seem extreme except for the fact that I can think of at least 2 uncles in SC who would no doubt approve.
256. REALITY WARS, OR, THE WHITE BOYS' GUIDE TO STOKING THE SINS OF OMISSION
From the Archives. (September 2006) In an article I wrote for our local indy rag some years ago, I talked about the fact that, even though my ex and I were together for ten years and declared our commitment to each other in a public ceremony, my family of origin continued to list me as single on their family trees.
They were cordial if a bit uncomfortable when I brought Mud to our family gatherings and usually included those awkward how’s your er um how's Mud doing? questions in conversations when she wasn’t there, but consistently refused to acknowledge the significance of our relationship in any formal way.
In other words, their actions attempted to make real people around them invisible in order to ensure their own comfort.
It is no coincidence that the Judeo-Christian god granted Adam the right to name things.
And yes. You are right. Ding ding ding! I AM writing about the power wielded by people who are allowed to name things and define reality. Again.
Because inquiring minds want to elucidate the fact that our dominant society insists that a huge facet of the lives of one in ten of us be rendered invisible.
(And let's don't forget that their insistence is not limited to queers. They also want poor people and black people and AIDS babies and leather afficionados and the homeless to vanish for their continued comfort.)
How threatening would it be to their carefully manufactured worlds if our official documents reflected the actual data??
Did you know that 4 corporations publish nearly every textbook used in our public schools system and that these publishers hold hearings in which groups of, say, so-called Intelligent Design advocates are allowed to fill the entire hearing room and then insist on their opinions being printed as facts? Yes, all too often, this group’s turnout and volume dictate what schoolchildren are taught as reality.
It's no surprise that organized Christofascist groups are the primary ones showing up either. No big surprise that fundies pays speechwriters big bucks to change the names of things in order to make the wrong seem right and idiocy seem intelligent and pesky principles seem obsolete.
I guess, given these dysfunctions, it should be no surprise that the Governator is intent on redefining reality for his state too.
Yep, I read today that California has been legally bound to offer an inclusive curriculum in their public schools since the seventies. The result is that men and women excel in equal numbers in textbooks (i.e., if Barbie says Math is hard, then Ken does too).
Then, this year, the legislature took this law a step further and approved a bill requiring state textbooks to "accurately portray in an age-appropriate manner the cultural, racial, gender and sexual orientation diversity of our society."
Finally! Lesbians will be depicted as something other than pathetic man-hating spinsters who drown in the wells of loneliness that are the fairy-tale fate of unmarried women (when, near as I can tell, the actual fate of far too many women is to hide in women's shelters from the violent men in their lives who wish to control their every move).
The governator viewed this bill as too threatening and vowed to veto it, so as a compromise, the legislature amended it to say only that textbooks will not reflect adversely on people based on their sexual orientation.
That’s STILL too much reality for the governator though, so he vetoed this version too.
Good thing this man is in a position of authority and gets to name things, eh?
They were cordial if a bit uncomfortable when I brought Mud to our family gatherings and usually included those awkward how’s your er um how's Mud doing? questions in conversations when she wasn’t there, but consistently refused to acknowledge the significance of our relationship in any formal way.
In other words, their actions attempted to make real people around them invisible in order to ensure their own comfort.
It is no coincidence that the Judeo-Christian god granted Adam the right to name things.
And yes. You are right. Ding ding ding! I AM writing about the power wielded by people who are allowed to name things and define reality. Again.
Because inquiring minds want to elucidate the fact that our dominant society insists that a huge facet of the lives of one in ten of us be rendered invisible.
(And let's don't forget that their insistence is not limited to queers. They also want poor people and black people and AIDS babies and leather afficionados and the homeless to vanish for their continued comfort.)
How threatening would it be to their carefully manufactured worlds if our official documents reflected the actual data??
Did you know that 4 corporations publish nearly every textbook used in our public schools system and that these publishers hold hearings in which groups of, say, so-called Intelligent Design advocates are allowed to fill the entire hearing room and then insist on their opinions being printed as facts? Yes, all too often, this group’s turnout and volume dictate what schoolchildren are taught as reality.
It's no surprise that organized Christofascist groups are the primary ones showing up either. No big surprise that fundies pays speechwriters big bucks to change the names of things in order to make the wrong seem right and idiocy seem intelligent and pesky principles seem obsolete.
I guess, given these dysfunctions, it should be no surprise that the Governator is intent on redefining reality for his state too.
Yep, I read today that California has been legally bound to offer an inclusive curriculum in their public schools since the seventies. The result is that men and women excel in equal numbers in textbooks (i.e., if Barbie says Math is hard, then Ken does too).
Then, this year, the legislature took this law a step further and approved a bill requiring state textbooks to "accurately portray in an age-appropriate manner the cultural, racial, gender and sexual orientation diversity of our society."
Finally! Lesbians will be depicted as something other than pathetic man-hating spinsters who drown in the wells of loneliness that are the fairy-tale fate of unmarried women (when, near as I can tell, the actual fate of far too many women is to hide in women's shelters from the violent men in their lives who wish to control their every move).
The governator viewed this bill as too threatening and vowed to veto it, so as a compromise, the legislature amended it to say only that textbooks will not reflect adversely on people based on their sexual orientation.
That’s STILL too much reality for the governator though, so he vetoed this version too.
Good thing this man is in a position of authority and gets to name things, eh?
255. ARE YOU BEING SERVED?
From the Archives. (September 2006) I loaned Dorothy Allison’s Trash to Danishgrrrl a few weeks ago and found myself flipping through this book about class, geography, and gender issues last night.
Allison articulates things about my childhood and shame and adult anxieties that I never even acknowledged out loud to myself before reading this book.
She also goes a long way toward explaining my anxiety about taking Danishgrrrl to SC to meet my family of origin.
Meanwhile, I have been shaking my head at the fact that Andrew Fastow is going to the slammer for a mere six years. I mean, think about what this guy did and its repercussions (not to mention the fact that he already received a great plea bargain agreement that reduced his sentence to just 10 years behind bars).
My question is, why not punish this man the way his crimes punished others and take away his retirement accounts and benefits and compensation and job, then force him to spend the rest of his days living on a fixed minimum-wage income?
The judge defended Fastow’s light sentence by saying that he had been persecuted and portrayed as a symbol of corporate greed after Enron’s collapse.
Aw.
(Excuse me but wasn’t his choice to perform criminal activities that led to Enron’s collapse the very thing that earned him this reputation in the first place?)
Maybe I am naive, but my impression is that most law-abiding citizens frown upon criminal activity, especially when the criminals rake in millions while leaving tax payers to bail out the people he bilked.
My understanding is also that justice is theoretically blind, but this articulate white sociopath with a is getting off way too fricking easy.
Question: does anyone believe for a moment that this judge would extend a comparable rationale to, say, a child molester?
Oh you poor man, your neighbors shunned and persecuted you and crossed the street when you approached and made you suffer so. Oh you poor, poor man. You have paid such a steep price already, So I tell ya what I’m gonna do. I'll sentence you to four years less than your plea bargain agreement because of your awful, awful suffering.
And inquiring minds want to know what exactly this guy’s “extraordinary steps toward rehabilitation” were.
Did he donate one of his MacMansions to the thousands of Enron employees whose savings he bilked?
Nope. Near as I can tell, the judge was referring to the fact that the poor man had to raise his two kids alone for one year while his criminal wife served her similarly minimal sentence.
Guess the judge doesn’t recognize that members of the law-abiding population struggle to raise their kids with limited resources and in single-parent homes too—and will have an even harder time of it now that we have to bail out these corporate crooks.
Unbelieveable.
Meanwhile, the Georgia branch of the Christian Coalition voted to leave this organization because it is just not conservative enough for them anymore.
Their stance is that the organization ought to be focusing solely on the core issues: criminalizing abortion and legalizing homophobia
(coz the Bible tells them so).
I suggest that they realign themselves with Fred Phelps so that everyone knows exactly what kinds of bigots we are dealing with.
No time right now, but I also made a mental note to research Republinazi pollster Frank Luntz’s materials. He’s the guy who provides speaking tips to the GOP and, apparently, his 160-page memo “The New American Lexicon” is the source of GOP members’ current insistence on using Democrat Party instead of Democratic Party.
LISTENING TO: George Winston’s “Summer”
READING: A fascinating article on fused participles (yawn). Last night, I also flipped through Great Lies for Adults to Tell Kids. (My personal favorite is “Wine makes mommy clever.”) Also Dorothy Allison’s Trash, which I will excerpt later.
SANG IN SHOWER: do your chain hang low? Do it rattle to the flo? (I curse Danishgrrrl’s teenagers for getting this stuck in my head!)
BEST-OF SPAM: Did you know that statistics say that sex makes you look 12 years younger?
Allison articulates things about my childhood and shame and adult anxieties that I never even acknowledged out loud to myself before reading this book.
She also goes a long way toward explaining my anxiety about taking Danishgrrrl to SC to meet my family of origin.
Meanwhile, I have been shaking my head at the fact that Andrew Fastow is going to the slammer for a mere six years. I mean, think about what this guy did and its repercussions (not to mention the fact that he already received a great plea bargain agreement that reduced his sentence to just 10 years behind bars).
My question is, why not punish this man the way his crimes punished others and take away his retirement accounts and benefits and compensation and job, then force him to spend the rest of his days living on a fixed minimum-wage income?
The judge defended Fastow’s light sentence by saying that he had been persecuted and portrayed as a symbol of corporate greed after Enron’s collapse.
Aw.
(Excuse me but wasn’t his choice to perform criminal activities that led to Enron’s collapse the very thing that earned him this reputation in the first place?)
Maybe I am naive, but my impression is that most law-abiding citizens frown upon criminal activity, especially when the criminals rake in millions while leaving tax payers to bail out the people he bilked.
My understanding is also that justice is theoretically blind, but this articulate white sociopath with a is getting off way too fricking easy.
Question: does anyone believe for a moment that this judge would extend a comparable rationale to, say, a child molester?
Oh you poor man, your neighbors shunned and persecuted you and crossed the street when you approached and made you suffer so. Oh you poor, poor man. You have paid such a steep price already, So I tell ya what I’m gonna do. I'll sentence you to four years less than your plea bargain agreement because of your awful, awful suffering.
And inquiring minds want to know what exactly this guy’s “extraordinary steps toward rehabilitation” were.
Did he donate one of his MacMansions to the thousands of Enron employees whose savings he bilked?
Nope. Near as I can tell, the judge was referring to the fact that the poor man had to raise his two kids alone for one year while his criminal wife served her similarly minimal sentence.
Guess the judge doesn’t recognize that members of the law-abiding population struggle to raise their kids with limited resources and in single-parent homes too—and will have an even harder time of it now that we have to bail out these corporate crooks.
Unbelieveable.
Meanwhile, the Georgia branch of the Christian Coalition voted to leave this organization because it is just not conservative enough for them anymore.
Their stance is that the organization ought to be focusing solely on the core issues: criminalizing abortion and legalizing homophobia
(coz the Bible tells them so).
I suggest that they realign themselves with Fred Phelps so that everyone knows exactly what kinds of bigots we are dealing with.
No time right now, but I also made a mental note to research Republinazi pollster Frank Luntz’s materials. He’s the guy who provides speaking tips to the GOP and, apparently, his 160-page memo “The New American Lexicon” is the source of GOP members’ current insistence on using Democrat Party instead of Democratic Party.
LISTENING TO: George Winston’s “Summer”
READING: A fascinating article on fused participles (yawn). Last night, I also flipped through Great Lies for Adults to Tell Kids. (My personal favorite is “Wine makes mommy clever.”) Also Dorothy Allison’s Trash, which I will excerpt later.
SANG IN SHOWER: do your chain hang low? Do it rattle to the flo? (I curse Danishgrrrl’s teenagers for getting this stuck in my head!)
BEST-OF SPAM: Did you know that statistics say that sex makes you look 12 years younger?
254. WHAT'S IN A NAME?
From the Archives. (September 2006) There’s nothing like sitting in the surgical oncology waiting room of a major medical center to remind yourself of just how inconsequential a little burgundy Civic puttering along in front of you in the left lane really is.
It’s 10:48 AM and my dear friend and mentor Louisville and her partner and I have been at the hospital since 7:55 AM. We're here for Louisville‘s biannual breast cancer follow-up exams.
Have spent the morning thinking about the importance of naming things—perhaps because I’ve been catching up with my former undergraduate advisor/English professor/mentor, who introduced me to Adrienne Rich's Diving into the Wreck.
Or maybe it’s because I just read that Safia Amajan, a women’s rights leader in Afghanistan, was gunned down in front of her house yesterday.
Or maybe it’s because it's so hard to ignore the fact that our discriminatory marriage laws look at one kind of couple and say you are legitimate, then look at another and insist that they see nothing.
Or maybe it's because this White House administration is so clearly manipulating the names of things.
Bush, for example, interrupted a reporter who began On both the eavesdropping program and the detainee issues ... to say We call it the terrorist surveillance program, Hutch, with his customary Richy Rich sneer.
To quote the ever-intelligent Molly Ivins
It’s 10:48 AM and my dear friend and mentor Louisville and her partner and I have been at the hospital since 7:55 AM. We're here for Louisville‘s biannual breast cancer follow-up exams.
Have spent the morning thinking about the importance of naming things—perhaps because I’ve been catching up with my former undergraduate advisor/English professor/mentor, who introduced me to Adrienne Rich's Diving into the Wreck.
Or maybe it’s because I just read that Safia Amajan, a women’s rights leader in Afghanistan, was gunned down in front of her house yesterday.
Or maybe it’s because it's so hard to ignore the fact that our discriminatory marriage laws look at one kind of couple and say you are legitimate, then look at another and insist that they see nothing.
Or maybe it's because this White House administration is so clearly manipulating the names of things.
Bush, for example, interrupted a reporter who began On both the eavesdropping program and the detainee issues ... to say We call it the terrorist surveillance program, Hutch, with his customary Richy Rich sneer.
To quote the ever-intelligent Molly Ivins
If we stop calling it eavesdropping plus torture with kangaroo trials, will it stop being eavesdropping, torture and kangaroo trials, and become “anti-terrorist activity”? Who gets to name things?
Maybe Sidney Blumenthal does, at least when he’s astute enough to refer to our petulant president as a Mayberry Machiavelli.
•
And let's all give a big hooray for those plane-spotters. Who knew that geek hobbyists fascinated with planes would corroborate the detainees’ stories?
Their amateur photographs and tracking skills were what first alerted journalists to the fact that the CIA was using commercial planes to transport prisoners to black houses, after all. And those commercials planes led journalists to identify the shell companies the CIA created to hide their apparent criminal activity. And the plane-spotters’ details, along with Google Earth, allowed journalists to identify the actual black house buildings where the detainees were held.
No wonder Big Brother want to put controls on the web.
And what has become of our democracy when our president follows the lead of Pinochet and gets himself and his goons retroactive amnesty for their crimes against humanity?
I am ashamed to be an American right now, ashamed to live in a land where people are too busy reading layering instructions for their fall wardrobes to register what we are condoning...
...yet I am complicit too.
For example, let me ask you a question: If women with big breasts work at Hooters, where do women with one leg work?
The answer? I-Hop, of course.
I learned that joke from watching a TV show called Two and a Half Men with Louisville and her partner last night because, after a long day of driving and worrying about whether or not her breast cancer has returned, we needed to veg.
And, before that, we watched Antique Roadshow.
That’s more TV than I’ve watched in the last several months (unless you count those L Word rentals), but my guests are TV watchers so, hey, when in my living room do as the paintings do, right?
LISTENING TO: Etta Baker, since she died at the age of 93 yesterday. Amazing that she didn't start performing until she was 60.
253. PICTURES OF MATCHSTICK MEN AND ME
From the Archives. (September 2006) Back in my architectural design days, I designed a building, then built a miniature version of it out of matchsticks just to see if I could.
I’ve been thinking about all those matchsticks after reading the UN report that a whopping 5,106 people in Baghdad died violent deaths in this past June and July alone.
So here’s what I want to do. I want to place Dick Cheney and George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld in a dark room with a camera on them and a sepia-toned shots of children’s faces playing behind them, and have them light and then extinguish, one at a time, 5,106 wooden matchsticks and toss them into a pile (or maybe a pit would be more appropriate).
Then I would like to show this footage to every American and ask him or her to think about what they did in June and July of this year as 5,106 people were exterminated.
Our president apparently believes that calling torture an “alternative set of interrogation procedures” will fool the people and, sadly, it just might since because, let’s face it, we’re awfully busy holding on to our jobs these days ... and those Republinazis who protested when Clinton said he didn’t inhale don’t seem to be standing up now to object to this ridiculous terminology.
I’ve been thinking about all those matchsticks after reading the UN report that a whopping 5,106 people in Baghdad died violent deaths in this past June and July alone.
So here’s what I want to do. I want to place Dick Cheney and George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld in a dark room with a camera on them and a sepia-toned shots of children’s faces playing behind them, and have them light and then extinguish, one at a time, 5,106 wooden matchsticks and toss them into a pile (or maybe a pit would be more appropriate).
Then I would like to show this footage to every American and ask him or her to think about what they did in June and July of this year as 5,106 people were exterminated.
Our president apparently believes that calling torture an “alternative set of interrogation procedures” will fool the people and, sadly, it just might since because, let’s face it, we’re awfully busy holding on to our jobs these days ... and those Republinazis who protested when Clinton said he didn’t inhale don’t seem to be standing up now to object to this ridiculous terminology.
Saturday, March 8, 2008
252. METAPUT*, OR, DRINKING A BITTER ROOT FROM A COMMON CUP
From the Archives. (September 2006) Police discovered 30 new bodies with clear signs of torture in Baghdad today, including a civilian whose dismembered parts washed up on the beach, and the Times reports that the average number of weekly attacks in Iraq has risen 15 percent in the past 3 months.
The number of civilian casualties? Fifty-one percent higher.
We refer to the deceased as bodies, I guess because the essence of what makes a person a person is so obviously gone and their slab of flesh is all that remains.
Reducing real people to their form also allows us to distance ourselves from the brutal way their lives ended, enables us to—at least for the moment—mask the knowledge that these were actual people who dreamed and cried and fucked and loved and held their kids on their laps in the morning before their screams melded with the sound of their torturer’s power drill.
Is this supposed to send a message to the world that Rumsfeld et al. will never control their region ot were they brutalized because they worship differently?
And has anyone mentioned the reality that religious groups in Iraq actually got along and shared positions of power before the US invasion?
Yes, Bush&Co are certainly liberating those poor downtrodden people who greeted us with flowers.
I was already feeling pessimistic about this violent world before I read about those newest torture victims, but this line in the Times made it even worse: “The Lord’s Resistance Army [of Uganda], a messianic rebel group, was exploring a new dimension of violence by building an army of abducted children and forcing them to burn down huts, slice off lips and pound newborn babies to death in wooden mortars, as though they were grinding grain. ‘I killed and killed and killed,’ said Christopher Oyet, an 18-year-old former rebel who was kidnapped at age 9. ‘Now, I am scared of myself.’”
Turns out the leader of that brutal messianic group, an apparently paranoid schizophrenic man given to religious delusion, now has 60 kidnapped child brides with him in the jungle and chances are good that he will be given amnesty in exchange for a fragile peace.
*a Ugandan ceremony
The number of civilian casualties? Fifty-one percent higher.
We refer to the deceased as bodies, I guess because the essence of what makes a person a person is so obviously gone and their slab of flesh is all that remains.
Reducing real people to their form also allows us to distance ourselves from the brutal way their lives ended, enables us to—at least for the moment—mask the knowledge that these were actual people who dreamed and cried and fucked and loved and held their kids on their laps in the morning before their screams melded with the sound of their torturer’s power drill.
Is this supposed to send a message to the world that Rumsfeld et al. will never control their region ot were they brutalized because they worship differently?
And has anyone mentioned the reality that religious groups in Iraq actually got along and shared positions of power before the US invasion?
Yes, Bush&Co are certainly liberating those poor downtrodden people who greeted us with flowers.
I was already feeling pessimistic about this violent world before I read about those newest torture victims, but this line in the Times made it even worse: “The Lord’s Resistance Army [of Uganda], a messianic rebel group, was exploring a new dimension of violence by building an army of abducted children and forcing them to burn down huts, slice off lips and pound newborn babies to death in wooden mortars, as though they were grinding grain. ‘I killed and killed and killed,’ said Christopher Oyet, an 18-year-old former rebel who was kidnapped at age 9. ‘Now, I am scared of myself.’”
Turns out the leader of that brutal messianic group, an apparently paranoid schizophrenic man given to religious delusion, now has 60 kidnapped child brides with him in the jungle and chances are good that he will be given amnesty in exchange for a fragile peace.
*a Ugandan ceremony
251. HUDOOD YOU LOVE?
From the Archives (September 2006) The UN reports that Iraqi civilians died at the rate of 100 a day in June and the New York Times reports that, in Baghdad alone, 90 tortured and executed bodies were found scattered around the city yesterday—just as Bush made his impassioned plea for the right to wiretap innocent-until-proven-guilty (in theory) people.
That’s one giant step backwards for basic human rights—I guess because he’s the decider.
What have we created? And why are people so goddamn complacent about having their rights stripped away before their very eyes?
... And yes, bomb supporters, I DO know that Saddam and his henchmen are charged with killing at least 50,000 Kurds before our soldiers ever stepped foot in Iraq.
So what’s your point? That the population was already decimated before we showed up expecting to be greeted with flowers anyway, so it’s okay to rape and blow away the rest of them to suit our imperial dreams?
Lordie lordie lordie. I keep thinking about the Iraqi brothers who ran my favorite lunch spot until shortly after 9/11 (when they had to close because sales dropped to almost zero). One of them was severely burned and I didn’t understand the significance of being Kurdish back then, so didn't think much about it, but now I wonder if he got burned in one of Saddam’s chemical-weapon strikes before he fled to the US?
Meanwhile, Karl Rove, the architect behind Bush&Co’s efforts to turn us into a police state, is apparently the son of Big Gay Al.
Yep, he was apparently quite close to his fag dad, but this didn't stop him from bashing gays in order to help Bush win the election. Of course, this self-professed agnostic had no trouble puckering his lips around Pat Robertson's flabby white ass either.
The hypocrite.
And how’s this for a compromise on the restructuring of Pakistan’s Hudood Ordinance? Rape victims will now be subject to the same punishment as women found guilty of adultery.
One real giant step into modernity, guys.
•
And finally, farewell Ann Richards. You were my rock star.
BEST-OF SPAM: Nothing could be prettier in pink. (Um. You obviously do not know me AT ALL.)
That’s one giant step backwards for basic human rights—I guess because he’s the decider.
What have we created? And why are people so goddamn complacent about having their rights stripped away before their very eyes?
... And yes, bomb supporters, I DO know that Saddam and his henchmen are charged with killing at least 50,000 Kurds before our soldiers ever stepped foot in Iraq.
So what’s your point? That the population was already decimated before we showed up expecting to be greeted with flowers anyway, so it’s okay to rape and blow away the rest of them to suit our imperial dreams?
Lordie lordie lordie. I keep thinking about the Iraqi brothers who ran my favorite lunch spot until shortly after 9/11 (when they had to close because sales dropped to almost zero). One of them was severely burned and I didn’t understand the significance of being Kurdish back then, so didn't think much about it, but now I wonder if he got burned in one of Saddam’s chemical-weapon strikes before he fled to the US?
Meanwhile, Karl Rove, the architect behind Bush&Co’s efforts to turn us into a police state, is apparently the son of Big Gay Al.
Yep, he was apparently quite close to his fag dad, but this didn't stop him from bashing gays in order to help Bush win the election. Of course, this self-professed agnostic had no trouble puckering his lips around Pat Robertson's flabby white ass either.
The hypocrite.
And how’s this for a compromise on the restructuring of Pakistan’s Hudood Ordinance? Rape victims will now be subject to the same punishment as women found guilty of adultery.
One real giant step into modernity, guys.
•
And finally, farewell Ann Richards. You were my rock star.
BEST-OF SPAM: Nothing could be prettier in pink. (Um. You obviously do not know me AT ALL.)
250. THE SPOILS OF WAR AND PEACE
From the Archives (September 2006) The papers are reporting the discovery of the bodies of 65 Iraqis who were beaten and/or tortured with power drills (!!!) before being executed with a bullet to the head.
Question: Does anyone suppose that Bush&Co’s torturers have anything to do with these victims’ demise and the upsurge in violence?
Let me offer a suggestion to ABC:
Why don’t you ask Katie Couric to read Charles Martin’s poetry about the disappeared and other victims of torture online?
Or choose your own poem. There are plenty of first-hand accounts of such violence in Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting.
And read it during prime time as penance for that misinformed Republinazi propaganda about how liberals are to blame for 9/11. Pronto.
LISTENING TO: Space Ghost, Coast to Coast
BEST OF SPAM: beware, fatigue can kill you. (I know. I know.)
Question: Does anyone suppose that Bush&Co’s torturers have anything to do with these victims’ demise and the upsurge in violence?
Let me offer a suggestion to ABC:
Why don’t you ask Katie Couric to read Charles Martin’s poetry about the disappeared and other victims of torture online?
Or choose your own poem. There are plenty of first-hand accounts of such violence in Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting.
And read it during prime time as penance for that misinformed Republinazi propaganda about how liberals are to blame for 9/11. Pronto.
LISTENING TO: Space Ghost, Coast to Coast
BEST OF SPAM: beware, fatigue can kill you. (I know. I know.)
249. FINAL MOMENTS
From the Archives (11 September 2006) I was going to include a poem to commemorate the five-year anniversary of the day when 2,749 people evaporated in a haze of collapsing beams and staircases and ceilings and falling bodies, but Garrison Keillor read a better one on NPR this morning, so I’ll post it at the end of this entry.
It’s Monday morning, September 11, and I am half awake. Punched the snooze bar for a solid 35 minutes this morning—a typical morning activity of mine that Danishgrrrl finds endlessly amusing—then finally crawled my ass out of bed and drove to work, thinking about what my bestgrrrl Lars said on 9/11: it’s a good thing that the terrorists didn’t realize that most New Yorkers don’t even make it into work before 10, because otherwise a whole lot of people who were waiting in line at Starbucks would have died too.
Thought about all those missing persons posters that covered the city too, and about the grandmother with pink rhinestone-studded sunglasses and a gold lame raincoat who died in the twin towers whose obituary Garrison Keillor described on the air.
And this all led to bad images of my little brother doing search and rescue in unbelievably hot, pitch-black blazing buildings where he crawls around on his hands and knees, searching for survivors.
There are so many awful ways that our lives could end, and so many awful ways that our country has ended Iraqi lives since the twin towers were attacked and I am feeling jaded and overwhelmed by the news right now.
All right. The poem:
It’s Monday morning, September 11, and I am half awake. Punched the snooze bar for a solid 35 minutes this morning—a typical morning activity of mine that Danishgrrrl finds endlessly amusing—then finally crawled my ass out of bed and drove to work, thinking about what my bestgrrrl Lars said on 9/11: it’s a good thing that the terrorists didn’t realize that most New Yorkers don’t even make it into work before 10, because otherwise a whole lot of people who were waiting in line at Starbucks would have died too.
Thought about all those missing persons posters that covered the city too, and about the grandmother with pink rhinestone-studded sunglasses and a gold lame raincoat who died in the twin towers whose obituary Garrison Keillor described on the air.
And this all led to bad images of my little brother doing search and rescue in unbelievably hot, pitch-black blazing buildings where he crawls around on his hands and knees, searching for survivors.
There are so many awful ways that our lives could end, and so many awful ways that our country has ended Iraqi lives since the twin towers were attacked and I am feeling jaded and overwhelmed by the news right now.
All right. The poem:
FOR THE FALLING MAN
by Annie Farnsworth
from Bodies of Water, Bodies of Light
I see you again and again
tumbling out of the sky,
in your slate-grey suit and pressed white shirt.
At first I thought you were debris
from the explosion, maybe gray plaster wall
or fuselage but then I realized
that people were leaping.
I know who you are, I know
there's more to you than just this image
on the news, this ragdoll plummeting—
I know you were someone's lover, husband,
daddy. Last night you read stories
to your children, tucked them in, then curled into sleep
next to your wife. Perhaps there was small
sleepy talk of the future. Then,
before your morning coffee had cooled
you'd come to this; a choice between fire
or falling.
How feeble these words, billowing
in this aftermath, how ineffectual
this utterance of sorrow. We can see plainly
it's hopeless, even as the words trail from our mouths
—but we can't help ourselves
how I wish
we could trade them for something
that could really have caught you.
248. TORTUROUS BROADCASTS
From the Archives. (September 2006) Well the boy emperor is no longer even denying the existence of the secret CIA prisons abroad.
How many years has it been now that he’s been holding these people without trial? Five? And now he’s moving 14 who are purported to be the “world’s most wanted Islamic extremists.”
(Um, except for bin Laden, whom you cannot seem to catch?)
Consider, for a moment, what is not said in this sentence: “Most of the detainees have been interviewed extensively and are believed to have little remaining intelligence value.”
Despite evidence of water-boarding, the boy emperor said “I want to be absolutely clear with our people, and the world. The United States does not torture. It’s against our laws, and it’s against our values. I have not authorized it and I will not authorize it.”
Nope. You just send your prisoners to offshore torture houses and avert your eyes while other people do it.
Interesting timing to announce the existence of 14 detainees purported to have orchestrated 9/11 just days before this somber anniversary and weeks after losing a case in which the government insisted that it is authorized to hold prisoners without trial for as long as they damn well feel like it.
(Oh and just 2 months before the midterm elections in which Republicans are floundering.)
Meanwhile Blair refuses to set a date when he will leave office.
Time to re-read Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, folks.
How many years has it been now that he’s been holding these people without trial? Five? And now he’s moving 14 who are purported to be the “world’s most wanted Islamic extremists.”
(Um, except for bin Laden, whom you cannot seem to catch?)
Consider, for a moment, what is not said in this sentence: “Most of the detainees have been interviewed extensively and are believed to have little remaining intelligence value.”
Despite evidence of water-boarding, the boy emperor said “I want to be absolutely clear with our people, and the world. The United States does not torture. It’s against our laws, and it’s against our values. I have not authorized it and I will not authorize it.”
Nope. You just send your prisoners to offshore torture houses and avert your eyes while other people do it.
Interesting timing to announce the existence of 14 detainees purported to have orchestrated 9/11 just days before this somber anniversary and weeks after losing a case in which the government insisted that it is authorized to hold prisoners without trial for as long as they damn well feel like it.
(Oh and just 2 months before the midterm elections in which Republicans are floundering.)
Meanwhile Blair refuses to set a date when he will leave office.
Time to re-read Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, folks.
247. ESPIONAGE
From the Archives. (September 2006) Have been catching up on Alternet stories and just read that investigators are following leads on two suspicious deaths in Europe.
Seems both deaths involve an informant who exposed illegal wiretapping that almost certainly involved the US.
The Italian informant revealed how the CIA and Italy’s CIA equivalent used information obtained from wiretapping to abduct an Egyptian cleric and fly him to Cairo to be tortured.
Surprise! The informant wound up dead of apparent suicide beside his car.
Then there’s the Greek software engineer who discovered an eavesdropping bug in his company’s system that allowed them to, among other things, listen in on the prime minister’s and other top officials’ cell phone calls.
Funny how this man who was looking forward to his upcoming marriage also died of an apparent suicide and what a big coincidence that his death coincided with the phone company’s destruction of evidence just before they reported to the prime minister that “unknown outsiders” had illegally tapped into top government officials calls.
READING: The Spirit Catches You Then You Fall Down
BEST-OF SPAM: hide peanut butter
Seems both deaths involve an informant who exposed illegal wiretapping that almost certainly involved the US.
The Italian informant revealed how the CIA and Italy’s CIA equivalent used information obtained from wiretapping to abduct an Egyptian cleric and fly him to Cairo to be tortured.
Surprise! The informant wound up dead of apparent suicide beside his car.
Then there’s the Greek software engineer who discovered an eavesdropping bug in his company’s system that allowed them to, among other things, listen in on the prime minister’s and other top officials’ cell phone calls.
Funny how this man who was looking forward to his upcoming marriage also died of an apparent suicide and what a big coincidence that his death coincided with the phone company’s destruction of evidence just before they reported to the prime minister that “unknown outsiders” had illegally tapped into top government officials calls.
READING: The Spirit Catches You Then You Fall Down
BEST-OF SPAM: hide peanut butter
246. CANCER NATION
From the Archives (September 2006) I figured out today that 18 people in my family or immediate circle of friends or work peers have been diagnosed with cancer in the last 8 years.
Can somebody tell me what in the hell is going on?
I mean, I appreciate the medical research that (sometimes) gets my loved ones to the other side of chemo and all the medical breakthroughs and all that, but what is going on? Is our environment poisoning us because we’ve filled it so full of chemicals? Are the hormones they've put in our food to blame? Or what?
And what’s the connection with obesity (if there is one), because I’m sorry, but I don’t buy the argument that larger portions at restaurants explains these statistics adequately.
Then there are those studies no one talks about that say that most people who are fat do not actually overeat and that some people who are fat are far healthier than thin people.
So what’s really making us grow?
And speaking of size, sales of wasteful SUVs are down 45 percent and sales of small cars are up 70 percent, thanks to the increasing gas prices.
Meanwhile, today’s Yahoo! headline is “GDP growth increases slightly in spring.”
I read that line and immediately thought about these 18 people who have been diagnosed with cancer.
Does anyone else consider it troubling that every time a person is diagnosed with cancer our GDP goes up?
Can somebody tell me what in the hell is going on?
I mean, I appreciate the medical research that (sometimes) gets my loved ones to the other side of chemo and all the medical breakthroughs and all that, but what is going on? Is our environment poisoning us because we’ve filled it so full of chemicals? Are the hormones they've put in our food to blame? Or what?
And what’s the connection with obesity (if there is one), because I’m sorry, but I don’t buy the argument that larger portions at restaurants explains these statistics adequately.
Then there are those studies no one talks about that say that most people who are fat do not actually overeat and that some people who are fat are far healthier than thin people.
So what’s really making us grow?
And speaking of size, sales of wasteful SUVs are down 45 percent and sales of small cars are up 70 percent, thanks to the increasing gas prices.
Meanwhile, today’s Yahoo! headline is “GDP growth increases slightly in spring.”
I read that line and immediately thought about these 18 people who have been diagnosed with cancer.
Does anyone else consider it troubling that every time a person is diagnosed with cancer our GDP goes up?
245. PRESIDENTIAL CHOREOGRAPHY
Since 9/11, military contractors like United Technologies, which makes Black Hawk helicopters, have seen their profits explode and their executives and top shareholders rake in windfall salaries. And as the rest of us shell out record prices for gas, oil executives claim that “we’re all in this together.” (Alternet)
From the Archives. (31 August 2006) And what about Haliburton and those $40 Cokes?
Spent the day trying not to barf from viewing all the carefully choreographed footage of GWB kissing up to shell-shocked NOLA residents in an obvious attempt to cast his abysmal leadership failures in a more favorable light.
I guess his advisors are finally worried that his pathetic approval ratings might adversely affect the GOP come election time.
Let’s think big picture though boys: this guy and his administration are adversely affecting history—at least until someone manages to add up all the subterfuge and Constitution-be-damned under-the-radar actions they’ve undertaken since 2000.
So what’s the administration’s spin on the 1,700 people who died and the hundreds of thousands of families that lost their homes as Shrub strummed his guitar?
Well, let’s see. This was an opportunity for Amurrrrricans to learn how to respond better to our public image er catastrophes because, damn it, you people actually documented the atrocities that this administration can no longer pretend didn’t happen.
That’s right. An opportunity. Just like getting booted out of the welfare system is an opportunity to find minimum-wage work as a toilet cleaner.
(Now forget what you saw on your TV sets, citizens, and get back to shopping.)
This administration has illustrated to the world what the politics of greed looks like and wouldn’t know what to do with Melvin McLeod’s observation that “the real substance in politics is in the heart, not the head” if it slapped them in their privileged faces.
Thich Nhat Hanh, profound Vietnamese priest, founder of the Engaged Buddhism movement, and prominent author, says that we must learn to see others’ suffering as our own, that this alone is how we can save our world in the twenty-first century.
•
So yeah. Today marks one year from the date when our boy emperor observed the destruction of Hurricane Katrina from the safety of Air Force One while the inhabitants drowned.
Meanwhile, Susie Sexpert has posted a blog entry entitled God Is My Sex Toy Co-Pilot.
Her message: zealots must stay in bed with Jesus/ Allah /Krishna as they copulate—which is, she observes, “a threeway you can’t ever quit.”
244. ALL WET
From the Archives. (August 2006). The following is a partial list of people who have expressed interest in purchasing my used car:
1.
A student named Zirui who has only driven cars in Asia and who sent an e-mail instructing me to drive to his house and show my car to him because he does not have a car and so cannot meet me.
(Uh. No.)
2.
An annoying Nextel sales guy named Alan who asked me to meet him in front of the Brookstone store at the mall at 3 PM. So, instead of going to the water park with Danishgrrrl and her kids to cool off on one of the hottest days of the year, I stood in the blistering sun for 20 fucking minutes before deciding that Alan was a no show.
Then the guy actually had the audacity to e-mail me to ask why I didn’t show up. I replied that I waited 20 minutes for him and he wrote back to say “I assumed u would call me when u got to the mall so never left the kiosk where I was waiting inside. Is car still 4 sale?”
I didn’t reply because I don’t want this stupid ass driving my car.
3.
The freshman who offered me $3,000 less than asking price because “It’s all I have,” assuming, I guess that I am running a charity for students with all of my riches.
4.
And, finally there’s the smart-ass MBA student who offered $1,500 less than asking price sight unseen. When I told him I am not interested in selling my car for $1,500 under Blue Book value, he replied “but I have an advantage. I can make a decision quickly.”
Oh I bet you can, Sugarpants. And let me guess: your biz-school prof told you to always state your so-called advantage in negotiating. But get this: MOST people can make a decision quickly if someone agrees to sell them a cute little car for $1,500 under Blue Book value.
My reply? “Enjoy driving a used Yugo, slick, since that’s all you’ll be able get for that piddling amount.”
•
And now, for something entirely different:
If I forget, for a moment, that unfortunate angel dust episode or all those joys of being a juvenile delinquent on probation or that time I got my backside shot full of rock salt because a gardener caught me trespassing on private property or that time I hit my Algebra teacher full in the chest with a trash can after she was an ass to me or that time the cops set up a road block to stop my speeding Camaro but, instead of stopping, I put the car into a skid and slid right around them and kept on going or that time I outran a highway patrol car on a red clay road in the same blue Camaro, tossing out beer cans frantically, or any number of other episodes from my misspent youth, then I could say that Annie Proulx is wilder than me based on this summary from today’s Writer’s Digest:
1.
A student named Zirui who has only driven cars in Asia and who sent an e-mail instructing me to drive to his house and show my car to him because he does not have a car and so cannot meet me.
(Uh. No.)
2.
An annoying Nextel sales guy named Alan who asked me to meet him in front of the Brookstone store at the mall at 3 PM. So, instead of going to the water park with Danishgrrrl and her kids to cool off on one of the hottest days of the year, I stood in the blistering sun for 20 fucking minutes before deciding that Alan was a no show.
Then the guy actually had the audacity to e-mail me to ask why I didn’t show up. I replied that I waited 20 minutes for him and he wrote back to say “I assumed u would call me when u got to the mall so never left the kiosk where I was waiting inside. Is car still 4 sale?”
I didn’t reply because I don’t want this stupid ass driving my car.
3.
The freshman who offered me $3,000 less than asking price because “It’s all I have,” assuming, I guess that I am running a charity for students with all of my riches.
4.
And, finally there’s the smart-ass MBA student who offered $1,500 less than asking price sight unseen. When I told him I am not interested in selling my car for $1,500 under Blue Book value, he replied “but I have an advantage. I can make a decision quickly.”
Oh I bet you can, Sugarpants. And let me guess: your biz-school prof told you to always state your so-called advantage in negotiating. But get this: MOST people can make a decision quickly if someone agrees to sell them a cute little car for $1,500 under Blue Book value.
My reply? “Enjoy driving a used Yugo, slick, since that’s all you’ll be able get for that piddling amount.”
•
And now, for something entirely different:
If I forget, for a moment, that unfortunate angel dust episode or all those joys of being a juvenile delinquent on probation or that time I got my backside shot full of rock salt because a gardener caught me trespassing on private property or that time I hit my Algebra teacher full in the chest with a trash can after she was an ass to me or that time the cops set up a road block to stop my speeding Camaro but, instead of stopping, I put the car into a skid and slid right around them and kept on going or that time I outran a highway patrol car on a red clay road in the same blue Camaro, tossing out beer cans frantically, or any number of other episodes from my misspent youth, then I could say that Annie Proulx is wilder than me based on this summary from today’s Writer’s Digest:
She had a reckless past: She tried to leap over a barbed-wire fence and didn’t make it; she ran away through the rain on the eve of her wedding and found herself lying on a railroad bridge in front of an oncoming train; she got caught in a thunderstorm on her third flying lesson; she threw a knife at someone she thought she hated; she swam across a lake while she was eight months pregnant; she was speeding and rolled a car late one night.
Brokeback Mountain ain’t so bad either.
And, finally, it’s 45 minutes since I started this entry, which means that, in the time I've spent typing, our country has spent another $8,388,333.50 on the war in Iraq.
BEST-OF SPAM SUBJECT LINES: kill the pain or it will kill you
243. ROLLOVER AND PLAY DEAD
From the Archives. (August 2006) Yahoo! headlines are bizarre today. Besides the never-ending updates about the arrest of a skinny teacher who confesses to raping and killing JonBenet Ramsey—and could someone tell me how anyone can rape a six year old yet claim to love her?—there’s Breast implants linked to suicide, not cancer.
I could have told them that augmenting your body to suit cultural whims doesn’t buy happiness.
Then there’s the pathetic How much Paris Hilton is too much? (which, incidentally, manages to give us even more Paris Hilton).
The good news, of course, is that a judge called a halt to Bush&Co’s illegal wiretapping program.
But an even bigger headline, if you’re LGBT—and one that will never make Yahoo!’s headlines—is that Bush signed the Pension Protection Act into law today.
One special right that this country has long extended exclusively to heterosexual couples is the right to rollover retirement plans when a partner dies. Before today though, surviving LGBT partners were forced to withdraw the lump sum and then pay major penalties.
Now the non-spousal rollover provision extends the same right to “spousal equivalents.”
Another special right that has long been extended exclusively to heterosexual couples is the right to withdraw funds from your partner’s retirement fund if you’re faced with medical or financial emergencies.
Example: say my partner, Homo Schiavo, has 300 thousand dollars in a 401(k) and is in a horrible accident that has left her in a coma and she remains in a coma for years while I am left to pay the mortgage plus all those medical bills alone.
Well, now I can withdraw these funds from her retirement account to help cover her medical expenses.
That one is covered in the Hardship Distribution provision.
Not much else to report, but that’s good enough news for now.
I could have told them that augmenting your body to suit cultural whims doesn’t buy happiness.
Then there’s the pathetic How much Paris Hilton is too much? (which, incidentally, manages to give us even more Paris Hilton).
The good news, of course, is that a judge called a halt to Bush&Co’s illegal wiretapping program.
But an even bigger headline, if you’re LGBT—and one that will never make Yahoo!’s headlines—is that Bush signed the Pension Protection Act into law today.
One special right that this country has long extended exclusively to heterosexual couples is the right to rollover retirement plans when a partner dies. Before today though, surviving LGBT partners were forced to withdraw the lump sum and then pay major penalties.
Now the non-spousal rollover provision extends the same right to “spousal equivalents.”
Another special right that has long been extended exclusively to heterosexual couples is the right to withdraw funds from your partner’s retirement fund if you’re faced with medical or financial emergencies.
Example: say my partner, Homo Schiavo, has 300 thousand dollars in a 401(k) and is in a horrible accident that has left her in a coma and she remains in a coma for years while I am left to pay the mortgage plus all those medical bills alone.
Well, now I can withdraw these funds from her retirement account to help cover her medical expenses.
That one is covered in the Hardship Distribution provision.
Not much else to report, but that’s good enough news for now.
242. STATES RIGHTS, HUMAN RIGHTS, THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT, & LEMON LAWS
From the Archives. (August 2006) Just finished reading Tracy Kidder’s Mountains beyond Mountains, which my reading group will discuss tomorrow night.
Kidder writes about Dr. Paul Farmer, a Harvard-trained physician who has devoted his life to curing infectious diseases in the poorest part of Haiti and other vulnerable areas. A prescient insightful enlightening book about a man with a self-described “hermeneutic of generosity.”
Farmer, an admirer of liberation theology (although he ultimately rejects all ologys), observes that “We should all be criticizing the excesses of the powerful, if we can demonstrate so readily that these excesses hurt the poor and vulnerable.”
He asks
Kidder writes about Dr. Paul Farmer, a Harvard-trained physician who has devoted his life to curing infectious diseases in the poorest part of Haiti and other vulnerable areas. A prescient insightful enlightening book about a man with a self-described “hermeneutic of generosity.”
Farmer, an admirer of liberation theology (although he ultimately rejects all ologys), observes that “We should all be criticizing the excesses of the powerful, if we can demonstrate so readily that these excesses hurt the poor and vulnerable.”
He asks
What happens when the destitute in Guatemala, El Salvador, Haiti, wherever, are moved by a rereading of the Gospels to stand up for what is theirs, to reclaim what was theirs and was taken away, to ask only that they enjoy decent poverty rather than the misery we see here every day in Haiti? We know the answer to that question, because we are digging up their bodies in Guatemala.
He also notes that “All the great religious traditions of the world say, Love thy neighbor as thyself. My answer is, I’m sorry, I can’t, but I’m gonna keep on trying.”
I didn’t realize until reading this book that human-rights abuses of previous American prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay were deemed unconstitutional way back in 1993, after US soldiers quarantined and abused HIV-positive Haitians there.
•
Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking about how state’s rights rears its ugly head whenever bigots object to being told that the law will no longer sanction their bigotry.
Take 1868, for instance. This is when the federal government required all states to eliminate slavery and swear allegiance to an American Union.
Now some southerners will argue till the bacon grease and turnip juice seep out of their very pores that the Civil War was a “war of Northern aggression” that was never about slavery at all, but the obvious truth of the matter is that racists reacted to this ruling by asserting state’s rights and insisting that they did not have to abide by objectionable federal laws.
They did the same during integration, arguing that Brown should not be forced on states that oppose integration.
Today, like-minded South Dakotans assert that they can declare abortion illegal even though federal law recognizes the legality of this clinical procedure.
And I can’t even keep track anymore of how many states are scrambling to pass so-called marriage protection legislation that sanctions the withholding of benefits to a minority of our population.
(And then there are the states that fund stem-cell research and living wages.)
I listened to Schoolhouse Rock as a kid and so know that the preamble to our constitution states that it exists to form a more perfect union, establish justice and insure domestic tranquility.
No mention of God in there, but article 1, section 9 makes it clear that no bill of attainders may be passed.
Tech. Law Journal defines this as “a legislative act that singles out an individual or group for punishment without a trial.”
Now, I know this is my own unusual take on this definition and I know I am not a lawyer but, um, if those anti-inclusive-marriage laws don’t single out individuals or groups for selective punishment/denial of benefits, then I don’t know what does.
James Madison (Federalist No. 44, 1788) wrote that
Bills of attainder ... are contrary to the principles of the social compact, and to every principle of sound legislation ... The sober people of America are weary of fluctuating policy ... They have seen with regret and indignation that sudden changes and legislative interferences, in cases affecting personal rights, become jobs in the hands of enterprising and influential [um, Christianists?] and snares to the more-industrious and less-informed part of the community.
Anyway, I was curious and checked out my state’s preamble. Yes I know I am smack dab in the Bible Belt, but was still surprised by how often the thing endorses Christianity.
So here you go:
We, the people, grateful to Almighty God, the Sovereign Ruler of Nations, for the preservation of the American Union and the existence of our civil, political and religious liberties, and acknowledging our dependence upon Him for the continuance of those blessings to us and our posterity, do, for the more certain security thereof and for the better government of this State, ordain and establish this Constitution.
I am, frankly, appalled.
LISTENING TO: Me’shell N’Degéocello covering Dolly’s Two Doors Down
SANG IN SHOWER: Gillian Welch’s Wind and Rain
BEST-OF SPAM SUBJECT LINE: For Carders, Spammers, Hackers, PPC cheaters, Child Porn webmasters, Doorway makers, Botnet owners.
Um, are these the virtual seven dwarfs?
241. STANDOFF AT THE TV STATION
From the Archives. (August 2006) As Mel Gibson begs forgiveness from the Jews he has insulted yet again and Rumsfeld continues to demonstrate just how clueless he really is, 500 women have taken control of a state-run TV station in Oaxaca, Mexico, and are broadcasting a video showing cops kicking protesters out of the town’s main square.
The women are banging spoons against pots and pans to draw attention to their belief that Gov. Ulises Ruiz rigged the election and uses violence to repress his opposition.
Over a thousand supporters are gathered outside the station to show their support for these women so, as Alternet notes, maybe the revolution will be televised after all.
Meanwhile, Kansas school board results suggest that the Christianist plan to infiltrate our government in order to rewrite the laws may only be successful as a short-term strategy, since 5 of the 10 anti-evolutionists who passed the jaw-dropping Kansas Standards have now gone the way of the dinosaur, even as our theocratic White House continues to align itself with the Zionists who want the US and Israel to attack Iran in order to “fulfill God’s plan for both Israel and the West.”
This will, they believe, bring about the second coming of their mythic Christ child.
Oh fucking please.
And it sure doesn’t help that some freak minister has written a bestseller on this topic that over 700,000 Americans have already purchased.
My question is, why are these religious centers of indoctrination even enjoying tax-free status?
Meanwhile, Rumsfeld testified that, if we leave Iraq prematurely, “the enemy would tell us to leave Afghanistan and then withdraw from the Middle East. And if we left the Middle East, they’d order us and all those who don’t share their militant ideology to leave what they call the occupied Muslim lands from Spain to the Philippines” and then, according to this outdated line of reasoning, our country would be forced “to make a stand nearer home.”
As the NYT editors point out,
The women are banging spoons against pots and pans to draw attention to their belief that Gov. Ulises Ruiz rigged the election and uses violence to repress his opposition.
Over a thousand supporters are gathered outside the station to show their support for these women so, as Alternet notes, maybe the revolution will be televised after all.
Meanwhile, Kansas school board results suggest that the Christianist plan to infiltrate our government in order to rewrite the laws may only be successful as a short-term strategy, since 5 of the 10 anti-evolutionists who passed the jaw-dropping Kansas Standards have now gone the way of the dinosaur, even as our theocratic White House continues to align itself with the Zionists who want the US and Israel to attack Iran in order to “fulfill God’s plan for both Israel and the West.”
This will, they believe, bring about the second coming of their mythic Christ child.
Oh fucking please.
And it sure doesn’t help that some freak minister has written a bestseller on this topic that over 700,000 Americans have already purchased.
My question is, why are these religious centers of indoctrination even enjoying tax-free status?
Meanwhile, Rumsfeld testified that, if we leave Iraq prematurely, “the enemy would tell us to leave Afghanistan and then withdraw from the Middle East. And if we left the Middle East, they’d order us and all those who don’t share their militant ideology to leave what they call the occupied Muslim lands from Spain to the Philippines” and then, according to this outdated line of reasoning, our country would be forced “to make a stand nearer home.”
As the NYT editors point out,
no one in charge of American foreign affairs has talked like that in decades. After Vietnam, of course, the communist empire did not swarm all over Asia as predicted; it tottered and collapsed. And the new "enemy" that Mr. Rumsfeld is worried about is not a worldwide conspiracy but a collection of disparate political and religious groups, now united mainly by American action in Iraq.
I swear, it really is the Crusades all over again.
They want to send our poverty-stricken eighteen-year-olds to die in their Christianist crusades.
LISTENING TO: Dolly’s gorgeous cover of “Seven Bridges Road” from her Little Sparrow CD
240. ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS
From the Archives (1 August 2006) “End of life issues are very sensitive, especially if you are the person whose end of life we are talking about.” So said Charles Foti Jr., New Orleans attorney general and obvious opponent of the Schiavo decision.
Foti had a doctor and two nurses arrested on murder charges this week for allegedly euthanizing several elderly and acutely ill patients who were enduring their third day of 100+° post-hurricane conditions in a hospital with no electricity and little remaining food or medical supplies.
These women stayed on duty when the hospital administrators and medical personnel evacuated to higher ground and put themselves in harm’s way for their patients (which is more than anyone can say for our president who strummed his guitar as the ciy drowned).
Foti aparently believes that the doctor should have let those patients die a slow overheated death instead of allegedly putting them out of their misery (which sounds oh so humane to me).
I know. I know. Some of you will say that the good doctor could have called on Bill Frist to cure those patients via video. Or asked Pat Robertson to pray for their rescue. Or called a few legislators in for photo ops. But, hey, seems to me they did what they could in obscene circumstances.
My question is, why isn’t Foti charging Bush&Co with murder?
After all, they are the ones whose incompetence and blatant disregard for survivors resulted in these people having no choice but to fend for themselves and make such hard choices.
And come on. This ain’t like those nursing home owners who left those 34 patients to drown. These women stayed at the hospital after the calls to evacuate because they cared about their patients.
Foti accuses these women of “acting like God,” which I guess tells us just how much his Christianist beliefs color his misuse of power.
•
Meanwhile, Danishgrrrl just called from her ex-mother-in-law’s place in Tacoma to say a mentally ill Muslim man shot five Jewish people at a synogogue because he’s “angry at Jews and the United States.”
Religion kills, man.
•
Visited Jamie last night after her hysterectomy. She’s uncomfortable and wants to be at her own place (which is, unfortunately, up 3 flights of stairs) instead of at her cranky ex’s house, but is stuck there till at least this weekend. She’s got staples in her stomach and is tired of waiting for more detailed biopsy results.
Right now, the oncologist says she may only need radiation treatments though.
I guess, if there’s any good news in all this, it’s that she will be away from her stinky work place for at least 6 weeks.
LISTENING TO: Gossip’s “Listen Up,” (the iTunes music store free download of the week). Before that, I was listening to Neil Young’s “Bird” When you see me fly away without you. ... feathers fall around you and show you the way to go. It’s ooooooover.....
Foti had a doctor and two nurses arrested on murder charges this week for allegedly euthanizing several elderly and acutely ill patients who were enduring their third day of 100+° post-hurricane conditions in a hospital with no electricity and little remaining food or medical supplies.
These women stayed on duty when the hospital administrators and medical personnel evacuated to higher ground and put themselves in harm’s way for their patients (which is more than anyone can say for our president who strummed his guitar as the ciy drowned).
Foti aparently believes that the doctor should have let those patients die a slow overheated death instead of allegedly putting them out of their misery (which sounds oh so humane to me).
I know. I know. Some of you will say that the good doctor could have called on Bill Frist to cure those patients via video. Or asked Pat Robertson to pray for their rescue. Or called a few legislators in for photo ops. But, hey, seems to me they did what they could in obscene circumstances.
My question is, why isn’t Foti charging Bush&Co with murder?
After all, they are the ones whose incompetence and blatant disregard for survivors resulted in these people having no choice but to fend for themselves and make such hard choices.
And come on. This ain’t like those nursing home owners who left those 34 patients to drown. These women stayed at the hospital after the calls to evacuate because they cared about their patients.
Foti accuses these women of “acting like God,” which I guess tells us just how much his Christianist beliefs color his misuse of power.
•
Meanwhile, Danishgrrrl just called from her ex-mother-in-law’s place in Tacoma to say a mentally ill Muslim man shot five Jewish people at a synogogue because he’s “angry at Jews and the United States.”
Religion kills, man.
•
Visited Jamie last night after her hysterectomy. She’s uncomfortable and wants to be at her own place (which is, unfortunately, up 3 flights of stairs) instead of at her cranky ex’s house, but is stuck there till at least this weekend. She’s got staples in her stomach and is tired of waiting for more detailed biopsy results.
Right now, the oncologist says she may only need radiation treatments though.
I guess, if there’s any good news in all this, it’s that she will be away from her stinky work place for at least 6 weeks.
LISTENING TO: Gossip’s “Listen Up,” (the iTunes music store free download of the week). Before that, I was listening to Neil Young’s “Bird” When you see me fly away without you. ... feathers fall around you and show you the way to go. It’s ooooooover.....
239. NOTHING BUT A BUNCH OF AMISH BUGGIES HERE, FOLKS
We are nothing but a bunch of Amish buggies and tractors out here. No one would care. (Brian Lehman, whose business, Amish City Popcorn, is on a government list of potential terror targets, as quoted in the New York Times)
From the Archives. (31 July 2006) Hmm. Wonder if his business is located beside a secret missile silo?
It’s Monday, 24 July 2006, and I am in the oh so progressive state of South Carolina, home of confederate flags and mustard-based barbecue and “100% Redneck” T-shirts and “Save the Males” bumperstickers and fundamentalist Baptist schools that place razor-wire atop their fences in an effort to keep the wicked out.
Or maybe it’s there to keep the Baptists’ rebellious children in; otherwise they might be smart like me and make a fast escape from this hell hole.
The place feels so hopeless and Faulknerian and sad to me but, at the same time, I’m hyperaware of how many of “God’s good people” here are eager to pass Bible-based laws that would see me stoned.
(Monday) And now I’m in the small Missouri town of St. Robert with my niece, hanging out in a nearly empty cinderblock Budget Inn behind a Waffle House and gas station where my sister reserved a room. We are currently the only occupied room on the back wing and our door faces an abandoned carwash and Electra’s, a seedy topless bar that is frequented by soldiers.
Great.
I’ll write more later but, right now we have to go pick my little sister up at her Army base.
(Tuesday night) Spent last night at Ft. Leonard Wood, where my niece was reunited with her soldier mother, who let her eat four helpings of frosted yellow cake as she listened to her mother explain that she joined the Army because she couldn’t find another way for the two of them to have a better future.
Hope it’s not at too high a price ...
... and yes I did manage to hold my tongue during the prayer invoking God’s favoritism of US troops because, frankly, if there is a god, then I hope she is powerful enough to keep my little sister out of harm’s way (this harm including the all-American soldiers who are raping their female peers with alarming regularity over in Iraq).
My biggest impression of the graduation banquet was that these rows and rows of newly minted soldiers are far too young to be heading off to war. And no big surprise that they are mostly from the poorest states in our union (and mostly from the deep south).
We watched jingoistic slide shows in which the soldiers demonstrated how to use an overstuffed Q-Tip-looking thing to fight another soldier; how to throw a rope over a wall and climb up the knots; how to slide on your stomach through a mud puddle; how to shout “Yes drill sergeant!” on queue and do whatever your drill sergeant tells you to do just because he says to do it.
Hard to see how this prepares anyone for real-time battle, much less for the sight of the dismembered arms and legs that are supposed to prove our country’s superpower status.
I managed to hold my tongue during these slide shows, even though they might as well have been campaign footage for the president.
I didn’t barf when they played a country song about the Statue of Liberty turning her welcoming hand into a fist after 9/11 so she could kick some Iraqi ass either.
Nor did I point out that the suicide bombers were not even Iraqi and that those weapons of mass destruction are still missing.
Then, finally, all the flag-waving was over and my sister was officially on leave for 10 days, so we piled her duffel bags into the rental car and went swimming at the seedy cinderblock hotel.
Tomorrow we rise at 5 AM and drive 3 hours to St. Louis—a city that is experiencing power outages—on our trek back to South Carolina.
And then I high-tail it out of there as fast as my lesbian “life style” legs will carry me.
BEST-OF SPAM: We never repent of having eaten too little.
238. WILL THE REAL JESUS CHRONICLERS PLEASE STAND UP?
From the Archives (July 2006) I just read that Dan Brown of Da Vinci Code fame claims that 80 gospels vied for inclusion in the New Testament canon.
Theologians say that only a few dozen gospels didn’t make it in (including The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which features a five-year-old boytoy Jesus making likenesses of sparrows from mud and bringing them to life).
Brown claims that thousands of Jesus fans recorded these neglected events about Jesus's life, but that’d be hard to believe, considering the low literacy rate among his followers.
SANG IN SHOWER: Tracy Droch’s “Did Jesus Have a Baby Sister?”
Theologians say that only a few dozen gospels didn’t make it in (including The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which features a five-year-old boytoy Jesus making likenesses of sparrows from mud and bringing them to life).
Brown claims that thousands of Jesus fans recorded these neglected events about Jesus's life, but that’d be hard to believe, considering the low literacy rate among his followers.
SANG IN SHOWER: Tracy Droch’s “Did Jesus Have a Baby Sister?”
237. WHAT STATE INTERESTS?
No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. (Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution)
From the Archives (21 July 2006) Last month Georgia courts ruled that the peach state can continue to discriminate against a small portion of our citizenry by extending over one thousand special rights to the majority while denying these same rights to minority homosexuals who wish to declare their love publicly and enjoy the same responsibilities and benefits of wedded um bliss that hetero citizens purport to enjoy.
New York courts basically ruled the same, only their reasoning goes that het marriages are so fragile that the state must use special rights to protect the hets from the spooky homos who so threaten their conjugal bliss.
This is akin to the tactic bishops use to downplay the fact that the priests are raping children. You know, just shift the blame to the homosexuals (even though pedophilia is not the same thing).
Which leads me to ask, if breeders’ marriages are so freaking fragile, then why doesn’t the state require them to attend remedial marriage classes instead of legalizing discrimination? Aren’t their children worth this expenditure of public funds or are children only valuable to the state before they’re born?
And lookie! Tennessee and Nebraska courts have legalized discriminatory and punitive bans on gay marriage now too, and even the snow-loving Easterners are declining to block a vote to ban queer marriage in the only state where gay marriage is currently legal.
So let’s examine the facts.
A full 70 percent of Nebraskans saw fit to deny their homosexual neighbors the equal rights guaranteed them by the laws of this land. AND they voted to deny state employees domestic-partner benefits and visitation rights too.
Is this equal protection?
Federal District Court Judge Joseph Bataillon states the obvious when he says that Nebraska’s amendment goes
far beyond merely defining marriage as between a man and a woman…. It imposes significant burdens on both the expressive and intimate associational rights [of gay men and lesbians] and creates a significant barrier to the plaintiffs’ right to petition or to participate in the political process.
He also states the obvious when he suggests that the amendment “was motivated, to some extent, by either irrational fear of or animus toward gays and lesbians.”
Seems this Court of Appeals is comprised not of public officials who uphold the law but instead by bigots willing to rule unanimously that “laws limiting the state-recognized institution of marriage to heterosexual couples are rationally related to legitimate state interests and therefore do not violate the Constitution of the United States.”
Uh would that be the state’s interest in upholding bigotry and propping up failed marriages to maintain the illusion of the happy suburban family that most American families don’t match in the first place?
Define these interests, you gentle um men in judicial dresses.
The New York Times says that Nebraska’s drastic ban is most likely headed to the Supreme Court. Does this inspire anyone to believe that nondiscrimination will be upheld in the land of the free and the home of the cappuccinoed?
*
Meanwhile, I have a question: Do the good folks at Alternet really believe that they come off as anything other than a bunch of privileged self-congratulatory East Coast smartasses when they post two headlines in one week as profound as "Is Israel Dumb?" and "Is Bush an Imbecile?"
Howzabout "Does Name-Calling Create Democracy?" or "Name-Calling: The Lazy Journalist’s Friend,” guys?
You might consider the impression you’re creating in between snickering at your frat-boy cleverness.
*
Meanwhile I packed Danishgrrrl and her 3 kids into a Seattle-bound plane bright and early this morning and won’t see them for 2 long weeks. The kids will visit with various relatives while Danishgrrl and her sister on Mercer Island move their father into an assistant living facility.
It sucks to get old and feeble.
236. YOUR PERSONAL STORAGE STORY
From the Archives (12 July 2006) Ponder, if you will, the reality that Crate and Barrel paid a copy writer buttloads of money to pen the headline Customize your own personal storage story.
Yes folks, your life’s narrative will be defined not by your deeds or by whom you love but by the woodlike objects that you purchase to put your shit in.
Maybe you’re more jaded than I am and have already retorted, Well, writergrrrl, why does this surprise you? After all, we live in a culture in which the phrase “the clothes make the man” is commonplace and cosmetic surgery abounds.
And the reality is that, today, even writergrrrl is focusing on consumer produces as the torture scandal unfolds.
Remember how my German lemon of a car developed a gas leak and had to be towed to the garage way back on 30 June? Well, I finally got my car back on 11 July and am now $820 poorer (and that’s without paying the additional $1,300 to repair my busted AC).
And that, my friends, is why I am currently car shopping.
Yes folks, your life’s narrative will be defined not by your deeds or by whom you love but by the woodlike objects that you purchase to put your shit in.
Maybe you’re more jaded than I am and have already retorted, Well, writergrrrl, why does this surprise you? After all, we live in a culture in which the phrase “the clothes make the man” is commonplace and cosmetic surgery abounds.
And the reality is that, today, even writergrrrl is focusing on consumer produces as the torture scandal unfolds.
Remember how my German lemon of a car developed a gas leak and had to be towed to the garage way back on 30 June? Well, I finally got my car back on 11 July and am now $820 poorer (and that’s without paying the additional $1,300 to repair my busted AC).
And that, my friends, is why I am currently car shopping.
235. DE MINIMIS NON CURAT LEX
From the Archives. (6 July 2006) My title, roughly translated, means the law doesn’t bother with trifles.
It does, however, consider torture chambers and journalistic censorship and phone tapping to be trifling, if you take the Boy Emperor’s word for it.
Meanwhile, his popularity is, understandably, waning.
If I were emperorgrrrl, I would make Ariel Dorfman and Garcia Lorca and Garcia Márquez and Neruda and Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness required reading and each and every citizen would have to discuss the characteristics of dictatorships before they could change the channel to American Idol.
Still, the Supreme Court did finally and unanimously agree that forklift operator Sheila White was discriminated against because she is a woman—and after only 9 years of this case winding its way through the system—so, who knows, maybe torture will be ruled against (again) in the end too.
•
I’m taking a break before cooking some wild mushroom risotto and settling in to watch Snow Falling on Cedars with Danishgrrl. Cinnamon the cockatiel is bang bang banging on her bell—let me out!—as Danishgrrrl sits beside me, researching assisted-living facilities for her father.
We spent July 4 helping a friend get her house ready for the market, then hung out with Jamie and her daughter and some other pals at the pool. Got home just in time to watch the NYC fireworks on TV (where, somewhere in the crowd, Danishgrrrl’s three kids were smiling).
We were supposed to go to the beach today but it’s pouring, so we went vintage clothes shopping instead and boy did I find the perfect pair of bright red cowgrrrl boots! I pulled them on and the shop owner and Danishgrrrl both said, simultaneously, those were MADE for you, Writergrrl! So now I’m grinning every time I think about them.
•
Meanwhile I read today that the video game Border Patrol, a web favorite, features Mexican drug dealers and pregnant women and mariachi dudes who cross the border in an attempt to reach the welfare office ... but only if the players don’t shoot them first.
Let’s take a guess which party endorses this game.
So tomorrow I must return to my sad work reality. It’s been a wonderful 3 days off and I’ve managed to not even think about the fact that I’m carless or how much this most recent repair will cost. Have also been looking around, trying to imagine another car I would like as much as my cute little lemon.
LISTENING TO: Danishgrrrl’s dog snore
READING: Susie Bright, who just pointed out that a perineal massage is nothing more than fist-fucking
SANG IN SHOWER: Phoebe Snow’s “There’s A Boat That’s Leaving Soon for New York, Cooooooome with me....”
It does, however, consider torture chambers and journalistic censorship and phone tapping to be trifling, if you take the Boy Emperor’s word for it.
Meanwhile, his popularity is, understandably, waning.
If I were emperorgrrrl, I would make Ariel Dorfman and Garcia Lorca and Garcia Márquez and Neruda and Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness required reading and each and every citizen would have to discuss the characteristics of dictatorships before they could change the channel to American Idol.
Still, the Supreme Court did finally and unanimously agree that forklift operator Sheila White was discriminated against because she is a woman—and after only 9 years of this case winding its way through the system—so, who knows, maybe torture will be ruled against (again) in the end too.
•
I’m taking a break before cooking some wild mushroom risotto and settling in to watch Snow Falling on Cedars with Danishgrrl. Cinnamon the cockatiel is bang bang banging on her bell—let me out!—as Danishgrrrl sits beside me, researching assisted-living facilities for her father.
We spent July 4 helping a friend get her house ready for the market, then hung out with Jamie and her daughter and some other pals at the pool. Got home just in time to watch the NYC fireworks on TV (where, somewhere in the crowd, Danishgrrrl’s three kids were smiling).
We were supposed to go to the beach today but it’s pouring, so we went vintage clothes shopping instead and boy did I find the perfect pair of bright red cowgrrrl boots! I pulled them on and the shop owner and Danishgrrrl both said, simultaneously, those were MADE for you, Writergrrl! So now I’m grinning every time I think about them.
•
Meanwhile I read today that the video game Border Patrol, a web favorite, features Mexican drug dealers and pregnant women and mariachi dudes who cross the border in an attempt to reach the welfare office ... but only if the players don’t shoot them first.
Let’s take a guess which party endorses this game.
So tomorrow I must return to my sad work reality. It’s been a wonderful 3 days off and I’ve managed to not even think about the fact that I’m carless or how much this most recent repair will cost. Have also been looking around, trying to imagine another car I would like as much as my cute little lemon.
LISTENING TO: Danishgrrrl’s dog snore
READING: Susie Bright, who just pointed out that a perineal massage is nothing more than fist-fucking
SANG IN SHOWER: Phoebe Snow’s “There’s A Boat That’s Leaving Soon for New York, Cooooooome with me....”
234. AFTER AN ABSENCE
234. From the Archives (June 2006)
After an Absence
by Linda Pastan
After an absence that was no one's fault
we are shy with each other,
and our words seem younger than we are,
as if we must return to the time we met
and work ourselves back to the present,
the way you never read a story
from the place you stopped
but always start each book all over again.
Perhaps we should have stayed
tied like mountain climbers
by the safe cord of the phone,
its dial our own small prayer wheel,
our voices less ghostly across the miles,
less awkward than they are now.
I had forgotten the grey in your curls,
that splash of winter over your face,
remembering the younger man
you used to be.
And I feel myself turn old and ordinary,
having to think again of food for supper,
the animals to be tended, the whole riptide
of daily life hidden but perilous
pulling both of us under so fast.
I have dreamed of our bed
as if it were a shore where we would be washed up,
not this striped mattress
we must cover with sheets. I had forgotten
all the old business between us,
like mail unanswered so long that silence
becomes eloquent, a message of its own.
I had even forgotten how married love
is a territory more mysterious
the more it is explored, like one of those terrains
you read about, a garden in the desert
where you stoop to drink, never knowing
if your mouth will fill with water or sand.
I’ve been reading about a Massachusetts school for the disabled that allegedly delivers electric shocks to students if they cuss and nag and dress like slobs. The Rotenberg Center says that about half of its population of around 150 incarcerated youth require this “aversive therapy” and defends this practice by noting that autistic and disabled students sometimes bite themselves and slam their heads against walls so violently that they could blind themselves—um, perhaps because the people who are supposed to be caring for them are, instead, operating a goddamn Skinner box and using public funds to shock them?
I’m looking forward to Danishgrrl’s return so I can ask her all about the other treatments in use for autistic and disabled kids.
Meanwhile, I had to have my lemon of a car towed to the mechanic yesterday because its latest in a long series of problems is a major gas leak that involves the fuel pump and cracking plastic gas line fittings and possibly the gas tank needing to be replaced and, well, one good tossed cigarette or splash of gasoline on my exhaust system could have turned writergrrrl to toast.
Unfortunately, my mechanic can’t get parts till Friday because of the holidays and will have to remove the back seat and floor panel to do this work, so it probably won’t be ready till the tenth.
So all I am seeing right now is a string of dollar signs and frankly, I wish someone would have tossed a cigarette and just blown the lemon up (without anyone getting injured, of course) so that I could at least get some insurance money out of this fiasco.
Anyway, this has been a hellacious week and I miss Danishgrrrl and my new boss is breathing down my neck and the last day of the fiscal year is upon us and I am about to pick up beautiful Danishgrrrl at the airport, so life will surely get better tonight.
READING: a recipe for grilled salmon with a tequila-cilantro marinade
BEST-OF SPAM: Does your wife think that banana is harder than your penis?
(Um, she hates bananas and so do I.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
