268. THE GLOBAL O

From the Archives (16 December 2006) Here's a twist. Globalorgasm.org is sponsoring the First Annual Solstice Synchronized Global Orgasm for Peace. This event will um culminate in the 2012 Winter Solstice, when the Mayan Calendar ends and a new era theoretically begins (or, if you're one of those Roswell people, when the little green Mayan aliens return to our tepid Earth.

Taking this at um face value appeals to me, so I plan to add my own surge of "concentrated and high-energy positive input" into the Earth's energy field sufficient to reduce the "current dangerous levels of aggression and violence throughout the world" next Friday.

Our slogan can be We came in peace.

All joking aside though. Yeah. Well. Isn't it great that these seemingly earnest hot-tub sex educators are promoting a publicity stunt that honors connection and sexual freedom and all that?

Really. It is. Here's reality though: my very real sister is in very real danger because she could not find a post-college job that pays enough to satisfy her student loan repayment plan, and John McCain has just announced that our incompetent administration now intends to deploy another 35,000 soldiers. my sister has already received her pre-deployment shots and could be staring down a real gun or stepping on a real bomb within the next 36 hours while Bush&Co dick around with such "expendable" lives for their continued high profits.

So let's be frank here. Jilling off ain't gonna do jack about this one.

I appreciate the sex educators' quixotian naiveté though and support anything that brings sex out into the open in these repressive times.Once again though, Susie Bright says it best:

Anything that promotes connection, and dissuades prejudice, is going to diminish violence. I'm with them on that. But liberation is a philosophy, and without action, any philosophy looks stupid staring up barrels. Who needs more dilettantes: spiritual, orgasmic, or otherwise? Human consciousness sits around like an unplugged vibrator if you don't DO something about it.

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.”

193. WANT SOME TORTURE WITH THOSE CHEERIOS?, OR, THE GEOMETRY OF ATROCITY

From the Archives

(February 2006) I’ve been staring at the newest Abu Ghraib photographs.

(Yes, the ones that Bush & Co. tried so hard to keep under lock and key.)

The first batch was bad enough, but these are definitely worse. They also confirm that American soldiers beat at least one prisoner to death ... and for what? Loyalty to an administration that’s eager to eliminate anyone who challenges it?
Because they were just following orders, sir?

(But no John Wayne noble soldier bullshit can justify this one, fellas, so don’t even start in on It’s a Grand Ol’ Flag or that old following orders routine.)

What we have is lies on top of manufactured weapons on top of human blood smeared from one end of a holding cell to the other on top of white Muslim asses with bright red cigarette holes burned into them.

(Nothing to wave your stupid yellow ribbons about either, folks.)

So how many Americans do you figure are following what’s really going on at Abu Ghraib, at Gitmo?

It’s time we recognize the necessity of bearing witness to the atrocities that are happening in our time. With our tax dollars. In our name.

You know, I’m a writer and I value words, but I also know that reading a hundred descriptions of abuse did not have the same impact of my seeing one photograph of a real human being reduced to a battered collection of chipped teeth and vomit and feces stains and hematomas all wrapped up in swaths of plastic wrap (to better what? Stew him in his own blood?).

So let that image sink in while you eat your Cheerios, dear readers.

•

I downloaded some of the images and have been studying them the way I study Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians—in an effort to understand this geometry of atrocity.

I suppose these images are the twenty-first-century version of those black-and-white photos of cops and their dogs attacking nonviolent black protestors or that Vietnamese man who is one second away from getting his brains blown out by a soldier.

... So, yeah, back to my recovering-Seventh-Day-Adventist pal’s question regarding why anyone would voluntarily watch violence.

Here’s what I believe: Artists must walk into the fire with our souls bared and our eyes wide open and feed on the nightmares that are happening in our midst. And we must find a way to use these images—especially the horrific ones—in a manner that makes it impossible for people to hide inside their iPods and ignore what’s being done in their names.

•

Meanwhile, did anyone else note that this Outsource Everything administration contracted control of our ports to the Arabs?

•

And did you know that this past Sunday was EVOLUTION SUNDAY?

This little soire didn’t receive the publicity that Frist’s Creationist Sunday event garnered, but Evolution Sunday is part of the Clergy Letter Project—a religious response to fundamentalists’ insistence that real Christians must choose between modern science and their religion.

Turns out over 10,000 ministers disagree with Frist’s fundamentalism. They signed a letter stating that evolution is “a foundational scientific truth” and say that rejecting it “is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children.”

They also said

We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator.

The bad news is that most of the signatories are from mainline Protestant denominations, which are shrinking nearly as fast as evangelical fundie churches grow.

And here’s an interesting spin on a vote that actually endorses incorporating intelligent design into South Carolina classroom materials.

John Drake opened his AP article thusly:

COLUMBIA—The Education oversight Committee voted Monday to reject standards for high school biology that deal with teaching evolution and insisted the curriculum incorporate critical analysis.

Now I know you’re probably thinking his “critical analysis” involves evidence-based methodologies, but he’s actually referring to creationism.

And now I’ll end on a personal note.

My triathlete ex Tree just found out that she has a 69 percent chance of surviving for 5 years if she has only radiation treatment and an 81 percent chance of surviving for 5 years if she has chemo and radiation. (She elected for chemo, naturally.)

So please give yourself a breast exam. Today.
TAGS >

186. SLURPING WORD SOUP IN THE CULTURESPHERE

From the Archives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

Amadee Braxton, a member Veterans Against The War, says

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Whimper.)

158. NO PLACE FOR A POET

From the Archives (September 2005)

Laura Bush
First Lady
The White House

Dear Mrs. Bush,
I am writing to let you know why I am not able to accept your kind invitation to give a presentation at the National Book Festival on September 24, or to attend your dinner at the Library of Congress or the breakfast at the White House.

In one way, it's a very appealing invitation. The idea of speaking at a festival attended by 85,000 people is inspiring! The possibility of finding new readers is exciting for a poet in personal terms, and in terms of the desire that poetry serve its constituents—all of us who need the pleasure, and the inner and outer news, it delivers.

And the concept of a community of readers and writers has long been dear to my heart. As a professor of creative writing in the graduate school of a major university, I have had the chance to be a part of some magnificent outreach writing workshops in which our students have become teachers. Over the years, they have taught in a variety of settings: a women's prison, several New York City public high schools, an oncology ward for children. Our initial program, at a 900-bed state hospital for the severely physically challenged, has been running now for twenty years, creating along the way lasting friendships between young MFA candidates and their students—long-term residents at the hospital who, in their humor, courage and wisdom, become our teachers.

When you have witnessed someone nonspeaking and almost nonmoving spell out, with a toe, on a big plastic alphabet chart, letter by letter, his new poem, you have experienced, close up, the passion and essentialness of writing. When you have held up a small cardboard alphabet card for a writer who is completely nonspeaking and nonmoving (except for the eyes), and pointed first to the A, then the B, then C, then D, until you get to the first letter of the first word of the first line of the poem she has been composing in her head all week, and she lifts her eyes when that letter is touched to say yes, you feel with a fresh immediacy the human drive for creation, self expression, accuracy, honesty and wit—and the importance of writing, which celebrates the value of each person's unique story and song.

So the prospect of a festival of books seemed wonderful to me. I thought of the opportunity to talk about how to start up an outreach program. I thought of the chance to sell some books, sign some books and meet some of the citizens of Washington, DC. I thought that I could try to find a way, even as your guest, with respect, to speak about my deep feeling that we should not have invaded Iraq, and to declare my belief that the wish to invade another culture and another country—with the resultant loss of life and limb for our brave soldiers, and for the noncombatants in their home terrain—did not come out of our democracy but was instead a decision made "at the top" and forced on the people by distorted language, and by untruths. I hoped to express the fear that we have begun to live in the shadows of tyranny and religious chauvinism—the opposites of the liberty, tolerance and diversity our nation aspires to.

I tried to see my way clear to attend the festival in order to bear witness—as an American who loves her country and its principles and its writing—against this undeclared and devastating war.

But I could not face the idea of breaking bread with you. I knew that if I sat down to eat with you, it would feel to me as if I were condoning what I see to be the wild, highhanded actions of the Bush Administration.

What kept coming to the fore of my mind was that I would be taking food from the hand of the First Lady who represents the Administration that unleashed this war and that wills its continuation, even to the extent of permitting "extraordinary rendition": flying people to other countries where they will be tortured for us.

So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.

Sincerely,
SHARON OLDS

•

Here's a quote from Friday's New York Times: "I find that I am becoming more and more angry," said a 40-year-old priest on the West Coast who said he had not decided whether to reveal his homosexuality publicly. "This is the church I've given my life to and I believe in. I look at every person I come in contact with as someone who's created in the image and likeless of God, and I expect that from the church that I'm a part of. But I always feel like I'm 'less than.' "

136. SHOCK AND AWE

From the Archives (August 2005)

CONSUMER
by Jude Todd

Abysmal: extremely, hopelessly bad; of or pertaining to an abyss.

Abyss: hell; Hades; realm of the god Pluto, who opened a gaping maw in the Earth to trap and consume Persephone. Some say that the Iraq war is an abyss from which Americans cannot emerge. (See americium; engulf; plutocracy; plutonium.)

Americium: a man-made transuranic element produced by the high-energy helium bombardment of uranium and plutonium. Americium is found in weapons that employ depleted uranium (DU); ingesting the tiniest particle of americium can cause cancer (see consumption) and genetic defects. (See absysmal; Pluto.)

Consume: to eat; to use up; to devour. From the Latin sumere, “to take.” The “con” in “consume” is not derived from Latin con/com for “together,” in which case it might mean communion, as in eating together, i.e., sharing; rather, this “con” means “altogether,” or “wholly,” so to consume is to take wholly, i.e. to engulf.

Consumer: one who consumes; an organism that feeds on others. 20 percent of the world’s wealthiest humans consume 86 percent of its resources. U.S. Americans are particularly adept consumers; we currently engulf 30 percent of the Earth’s natural resources. We also produce more waste per capita than any other country. (See greed.)

Consumer goods: objects produced to satisfy human desires, often without regard for the good of either human or non-human others. (See greed.)

Consumption: the act of consuming. An older use of “consumption” referred to tuberculosis and to a progressive wasting of the body. Contemporary consumption results in the wasting of the Earth’s body and of the body politic of all nations. Wars waged to protect the U.S. consumptive lifestyle waste life. (See DU; greed; Gulf War(s).)

DU: depleted uranium, an extremely dense radioactive waste product of nuclear reactors, used in cluster bombs and other weapons in both Gulf Wars. DU is composed of uranium-238, neptunium, plutonium, and americium, all rolled into a hyper-dense b all of hell that burns on contact and causes cancer, neurological diseases, and genetic defects. In the first Gulf War, over 320 tons of DU were pounded into the Iraqi earth. The amount of DU used in Gulf War II is unknown. Because DU continues to kill long after its initial use, the United Nations considers DU a “weapon of indiscriminate use” and, therefore, a violation of the Geneva Conventions. (See abysmal.)

Engulf: to consume; to swallow up. (See abyss; greed; gulf.)

Greed: excessive desire for wealth. In many cultures, greed is understood to cause destruction, so their teachings guard against it. Even before the U.S. culture consumed this land, Pueblo Indians told stories of times when greed destroyed the world. (See abysmal.) In U.S. culture, however, greed is celebrated, and during a crisis it is especially prized. After the 9/11 attack, U.S. Americans were urged to fight that evil by buying more goods. (See americium; Gulf War(s).)

Gulf; a portion of sea enclosed in land; a deep hollow; an abyss. (See Pluto.)

Gulf War(s): wars started by George Bushes to preserve the consumptive lifestyle of the richest U.S. Americans. (See abyss; americium; DU; engulf; greed; plutocracy.)

Pluto: the Greek god who caused Persephone to be engulfed by an abyss in the Earth. Pluto imprisoned Persephone in Hades and consumed her, i.e., he raped her. The Earth shared Persephone’s shock, terror, and grief; grains refused to grow and all life wasted away. Pluto tricked Persephone into eating a tiny particle, a pomegranate seed, so that she would spend half her life in hell. (See abysmal; plutocracy; plutonium.)

Plutocracy: government by the wealthy, i.e., those who own most of the goods, those most adept at consumption. (See greed.)

Plutonium: a man-made transuranic element used to make DU. Its half-life of 24,000 years ensures that plutonium will be highly toxic for hundreds of thousands of years. Engulfing even a tiny partcle of plutonium can cause cancer/wasting. (see abysmal; americium; consumption; Pluto.)

Waste: By-product of consumption. (See abysmal.)

—from shock and awe: war on words, ed. By Bregje van Eekelen, Jennifer González, Bettina Stötzer, and Anna Tsing. Feminisms and Global War Project of the Institute for Advanced Feminist Research (New Pacific Press: Santa Cruz, 2004).

33. A VIOLENT WOMAN IN A VIOLENT DAY

From the Archives

(March 2005) I just spent the most wonderful hour doing karate catas this morning while looking out the window at the rain that is supposed to turn to snow as the day progresses. This does not bode well for the thirty or so flowers that are blooming in my yard.

Had two glasses of red wine while I worked on the Great American Novel last night. Haven’t had much to drink of late—a couple of beers watching basketball with pals maybe.

Either I didn’t drink enough water before bed or my body didn’t like the sulphites last night, because my head’s all stuffy today. Good reminder that drinking is, really, just putting poison into my body.

I’m better off sticking to water, but not sure I will.

So here’s a poem for this rainy day in a warring time:

THIS MORNING
by Muriel Rukeyser

Waking this morning,
a violent woman in the violent day
laughing.
Past the line of memory
along the long body of your life
in which move childhood, youth, your lifetime of touch,
eyes, lips, chest, belly, sex, legs, to the waves of the sheet.
I look past this little planet
on the city windowsill
to the tall towers’ bookshapes, crushed together in greed,
the river flashing flowing corroded,
the intricate harbor and the sea, the wars, the moon the planets
all who people space
in the sun visible invisible.
African violets in the light
breathing, in a breathing universe. I want strong peace, and delight,
the wild good.
I want to make my touch poems:
to find my morning, to find you entire
alive moving among the anti-touch people.

I say across the waves of the air to you:
today once more
I will try to be non-violent
one more day
this morning, waking this world away
in this violent day

7. LIVING LA VIDA JIHAD

From the Archives

(March 2005) Well, it’s happened. I just noticed that one day this month is so chock full of meetings that the only time I can even pee or eat will be between 1 and 1:30 or between 2:45 and 3! Durn!!

Am practically slackjawed over news from Islamabad that a village council just overturned the convictions of five men who were found guilty of gang-raping a woman back in 2002. The council also commuted the death sentence of the sixth man to life in prison (and found the other eight men the victim accused of raping her innocent back in 2002).

Of course, the prosecution asserted that the council ordered the crime as punishment for the victim’s brother’s alleged love affair in the first place, which is especially ironic given the reality that, in the course of the trial, it came out that the men who had accused him of the affair had actually sexually molested him and were trying to conceal this fact with their current accusations and demands for revenge.
Unf*ckingbbelievable.

Meanwhile, the latest polls show that only 39 percent of Americans think that this war has been worth the lives lost fighting it. Monday's attack—the single bloodiest one yet with, what, over 120 people killed?—must have dropped that number even lower.

There’s something happening here. And what it is is exactly clear.