277. GOVERNMENT-STYLE PRE-RELEASE PUBLICITY, OR, I GOT THAT FAHRENHEIT 9/11 FEVER AND THE BOGEY-MAN CURE

From the Archives (10 May 2007)

This office has no record that a specific license was issued authorizing you to engage in travel-related transactions involving Cuba.

That’s what Dale Thompson, chief of general investigations and field operations for the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, wrote to filmmaker Michael Moore after he took eleven ailing 9/11 workers to Cuba to obtain the medical treatment they have been unable to receive in the US. Moore documents this journey in Sicko, his new critique of the US’s high-profit, low-care health-“care” industry.

Does anyone see a similarity between the lip service that the repugs (thanks for the term, mehitabelmmoss!) pay to heroic 9/11 workers (who, in reality, are routinely deprived of adequate medical treatment by repug policies) and the lip service that the repugs pay to patriotism when, in reality, the soldiers they pretend to support and honor are actually inadequately paid, insufficiently armored, and cannot obtain adequate medical treatment because of the corporate-fattening-at-
the-expense-of-the-rest-of-us repug policies?

Nice job making yourselves sound good though, guys.

Perception of truth, not truth—you know, Truthiness—is what matters in the end for this administration.

And you gotta hand it to them. They understand that they can fool many of the people much of the time with the right combination of speciously squishy soundbite-heavy jingoistic communication strategies (with the piquant taste of fear added for extra flavoring)—and boy do they use this knowledge to their advantage.

This is definitely a bottom-line administration—one whose policy has consistently been to cut funding and/or deregulate protections and hope for the best. After all, they can always hire publicity folks to sugarcoat the damage when the chickens/attorney generals who fire US attorneys of who poutyboy does not approve/illegal prisoners/torture victims/maimed soldiers/legislators/lobbyists/crumbling bridges/bursting levees come home to roost.

In other news, did anyone else note that Army officials actually accused Pat Tillman’s parents of being unChristian when they questioned the lies they were being told about their son’s death?

That’s right folks—our government’s response to their grief and desire for answers was to shift the blame to the grief-stricken parents of the Armed Services' poster boy whom our own soldiers killed (oopsie!)—and they did this by questioning whether or not the Tillmans are religious enough.

As if!

But I digress. We were talking about Michael Moore and how he, in a moment of true marketing genius, placed a copy of SiCKO (which premiers next week at Cannes) in a “safe house”—not to be confused with one of Bush&Co’s blood-spattered black houses—in another country “to protect it from government interference.”

Hey, Michael, why not seize the opportunity to market your flick?

I mean, if the government is going to harass someone who points out the administration’s blatant failings—What up, guys? Michael didn’t have a convenient wife whose secret identity Dick could reveal?—then why not pay a fine for your transgressions, then use the harassment to promote your film?

Sounds like a good marketing strategy to me.

Huh. I guess Cheney is still ticked off about Fahrenheit 9/11.

Meanwhile, back at the Oh Holy Shit um I mean Oh Holy Cross Ranch, the Christianists are calling for a boycott of Ford products because Ford supports PFLAG and an upcoming Out at Work session.

The repug protest of the Matthew Shepherd Act might be paying off too, since Bush is vowing to veto the act.

So now’s the time folks. Register your support so that the Christianists don’t leave the world with the impression that all Americans condone hate.

If enough people contact their legislators, then maybe Bush won’t get away with it.

LISTENING TO Holly Near’s “I Am Open”

READING “Michael Moore Faces U.S. Treasury Probe,” by David Germain, Yahoo! News, 5/10/2007. See here.

BEST OF SPAM: you have already won

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

From the Archives

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

The post-performance gathering was also quite illuminating.

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

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

and

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

and

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(You know, like Marilyn Monroe.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

(READ THAT AGAIN. Slowly.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay, I’ll end with the entire quote:

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

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

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

166. CAUSE AND EFFECT

From the Archive

(October 2005) A writer in The Nation points out that, while we focus our attention on whether or not Supreme Court nominees will overturn Roe v. Wade, Bush is stacking the courts with pro-business judges.

I worry that, as a culture, we have such a short attention span that we have already forgotten the Hurricane Katrina debacle because, hey, Brittany Spears had a baby!

Yet this debacle made clear the folly of giving precedence to private financial gain over actual human lives.

And speaking of giving less than a shit about people who live in poverty (or are sliding into it as the middle class vanishes), Bush Inc. has allowed Florida to limit Medicaid benefits. Their approved plan says that “the state will set aside a specific amount of money for each person enrolled in Medicaid,” based on the citizen’s medical condition and historical use of health care.

And the state is now allowed to limit the “amount, duration and scope” of services.

Did you pick up on that historic use of health care? That’s cause and effect from a White House that makes value judgments on human lives.

You’re a poor black New Orleanian? Well, you probably live a sinful life in that den of iniquity and voted Democrat and ate southern/soul food that ain’t real healthy, so you are expendable now, baby.

And, since you inconvenienced us by not drowining at the get-go, we’ll make sure you know how valuable your life is to us now.

Hmm. Says right here that you have been treated for bronchitis twice now, yet you choose to continue to smoke.

No treatment for you.

And you eat the starchy food that poor people can afford instead of grilling out a nice healthy salmon filets?

We choose to not pay for sins.

GOP cause-and-effect never extends to exacting payment from the corporations that pollute our environment and make us all sick with their pollutants, however.

So my question is this: Now that Florida can legally set a ceiling on insurance spending per person per year and per lifetime, what will JEB and W do with the next Terry Schiavo when she meets her insurance cap?

Inquiring minds want to know.

(Actually, Bush Inc. is making it harder to declare bankruptcy too, so I suppose Schiavo’s spouse will be stuck with the bills and a vegetable he can’t put out of her misery.)

•

One of my former roommates—a public-health advocate—decided to go to medical school because she saw the writing on the wall about Roe v. Wade and wanted to be in a position to set up illegal abortion clinics à la the Redstockings when the time comes.

And sometimes I believe I’m going to wind up pursuing Constitutional law in an effort to battle these Christianists who want to rewrite our rights.

(Note to self: send more $ to Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.)

Meanwhile, Steve Satterwhite of The Texas Observer interviewed some of fundies who want a constitutional amendment banning gay marriages and civil unions (i.e., who are working to codify discrimination against a portion of the citizenry) and what they said is just astounding. These people really do want to destroy our Constitution! And what they pass off as fact with such confidence just baffles the mind.

Satterwhite points out the echo-chamber phenomenon that I have discovered with my fundie students—a tendency to use the same phrases and inaccurate statistics to argue the same points (which some liberals do too, of course). Many (in the classroom and in this article) quote “widely discredited reports by Paul Cameron,” the man who started the urban legend about queers inserting hamsters into their rectums.

This doctor was dropped from membership in the American Psychological Association in 1983 because he did not meet professional codes of ethics and conduct, yet his lies continue to make the circuit as facts.

Example. Mary Ann Markarain from Sugar Land said

Sin is sin. We're not animals. [oh?] We're people, and I do not believe that you're born homosexual. They only have two signs over at the hospital: blue ones for the boys and pink ones for the girls. God knows when we're born what we're supposed to be.

The proof is in the pudding. Ninety-two percent of all gay males engage in rimming, the process of licking the rim of the anus and ingesting various amounts of fecal matter. Forty-seven percent of all males engage in fisting, the act of placing their fist in their partner's rectum for sexual pleasure. Twenty-nine percent of all homosexual males engage in golden showers—the practice of lying on the floor, typically nude, and allowing their partner to urinate on them. This is abnormal. These are things I've never read in the newspaper. This isn't something you hear about on CNN. But this is something that is taking place.

Now I know this is not real pleasant, but the truth needs to come out. When we say the word “gay,” we're really just hiding because we're really not understanding what that word really entails—what it means, what people are doing, and why this can hurt society as a whole. It's never been an accepted lifestyle. If we allow this to become accepted, then the numbers will grow astronomically. Now they want to take it into the classroom, to teach our children that this is okay. Our society is two to three percent gay, but if you teach children that homosexuality is okay, then we're going to have a lot of problems.

The median age of homosexual men dying with AIDS is 39 years old; that's wrong, not natural. The median age of all other homosexual men dying from other causes is 42. Do you consider 42 young? I consider it extremely young since I'm one year away from it. The median age of death for lesbians is 45 years old—of lesbians. That compares to 75 years old for heterosexual men and 79 for heterosexual women. Only one percent of homosexuals die of old age; only three percent ever live to age 55. Think about it, and then tell me that God doesn't have some problem with this whole thing—that God isn't speaking. It's unnecessary to put my name in the paper—you can just say that "God said," and here's the statistics.

Where did Mary Ann from Sugar Land learn these woefully inaccurate statistics and how many more people wrote them down and believe them after Cameron shared them on hate radio?

Monte Watkins from Houston said A few years ago, my husband and I were at one of the [Gay Pride Week parades]. After the parade broke up, some of them walked by us, talking to each other, but I heard them look around and say, “Mess with us, and we'll rape your kids."

Yeah. Sure you did.

Alan Ward of Stephenville said

There is a natural way that human beings are crafted to operate, and that is on a heterosexual basis.
We had a homosexual in my family, a young man. During high school, he learned to be gay; he wasn't before that. Was that different for my family? You bet it was, because we are a family of heterosexuals who really believe in being heterosexual.

About two years ago, that young man learned not to be homosexual, and he has a girlfriend now. Right in the midst of all this social controversy, he learned to be gay, and then he learned not to be. I've seen him changed, and I've seen two or three or four changed.

Logically, [policing sexual behavior] is out of the reach of the government, but I'm not saying that I believe it should be.

There is not enough manpower—not enough people working for the government—to go into every home of every professing homosexual to put eyes on them and watch to see that they do not commit homosexual acts. That's not possible. There is not enough manpower.

I’ll say there’s not (and ever heard of the Right to Privacy?).

Of course, many Christianists deny scientific evidence anyway, so reminding them that homosexuality exists in many species, that's it's a naturally occurring deviation from the norm, is ineffective. And it doesn’t seem to occur to them that their god could have made some people homosexual on purpose just as he made some of us, say, left-handed—that maybe this is a gift, as my friend Louisville and some Native-American tribes call it.

Nope it’s a choice, pure and simple.

But so is believing in myths, dude. And you don’t get to rewrite our nation’s constitution based on your myths and unsupportable lies and smear campaigns.

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