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.....
Saturday, March 8, 2008
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.)
Thursday, February 21, 2008
233. THE CAPITAL OF PETTINESS
From the Archives. (June 2006, late) The French novelist and essayist Stendhal called his hometown "the capital of pettiness" and fled to Paris as soon as he could. I fled to New Orleans. With Danishgrrrl. And boy am I glad I did.
I savored every second of uninterrupted time that we spent together.
The city itself was sobering though, an empty shell of a once-vibrant place that I am only now able to even write about.
Flood-damaged vehicles still lie in rusted, crumbled heaps beneath overpasses. Small white trailers stand in the driveways of moldy houses still in serious states of disrepair. Blue-tarped roofs are everywhere. And plywood-covered windows and doors stretch across the entire city, punctuated by the snapped-off trunks of palmettos.
But where are the people? Even in the French Quarter—an area the floodwaters ostensibly spared—there were so few people.
I understand that tourist dollars are important right now and that our conference brought needed funds to the area, but felt as if we were invading the precious few remains of someone’s sacred shrine, that we were surfing on the residents’ collective misery in a gauche and callous way as the shell-shocked looked on, too tired and despondent to even react to our thoughtless invasion.
Empty turnstiles suggested where crowds once gathered and all I could think when I saw them was Here is the church. Here is the steeple. But where the bloody hell are the people?
No crowds filled the riverfront park or waited to board the Algiers ferry or stood in line at the cool aquarium and even the residents seemed baffled by the malfunctioning walk/don’t walk signs that nearly got us killed more than once.
And the over-riding stench of rotting garbage was everywhere.
Bourbon Street is a sad spilled beer of a place populated by a few mullet-wearing bleached-blond types clutching plastic and looking down the vast and empty streets, trying hard to find the party they’ve been promised. They whoop it up momentarily but, with so few of them there, their gesticulations are herely sad and overly desperate gestures, signifying nada.
Only Cafe du Monde seemed vibrant, still alive.
The place is surrounded by tropical courtyards maintained behind gorgeous wrought-iron gates, and the balconies still boast overflowing flowerpots set against beautiful pastel-tinted stucco .
Plenty of restaurants still offer gumbo and shrimp with remoulade sauce and crawfish etouffée too.
Danishgrrrl and I even stumbled upon a festive wedding parade be-bopping its way down Royal Street with a brass band leading the way.
That felt hopeful at least.
But what felt most hopeful (um, besides the fact that I learned oh so much that will help me do my job more effectively) was the fact that Danishgrrrl and I got to spend so much uninterrupted time together without the kids or our everyday obligations or deadlines and are now practically glowing in each other’s presence.
Sadly, we must now resume our workouts after all that Creole food that we consumed in the shell-shocked shambles of the once vibrant city that is now America’s shame.
READING: The Piano Tuner, which my reading group will discuss tonight.
BEST-OF SPAM (Subject Line): Your penis reminds a computer mouse? (Well, the florescent blue trackball on my Mac mouse IS a little like one of those dolphin dildos. And I do finger the little gray clitoris on my PC mouse when I need to doubleclick. Still, I’d have to say that my penises—‘cause who wants to be limited to one?—are much more shaftlike than any mouse I've seen. Dude.)
I savored every second of uninterrupted time that we spent together.
The city itself was sobering though, an empty shell of a once-vibrant place that I am only now able to even write about.
Flood-damaged vehicles still lie in rusted, crumbled heaps beneath overpasses. Small white trailers stand in the driveways of moldy houses still in serious states of disrepair. Blue-tarped roofs are everywhere. And plywood-covered windows and doors stretch across the entire city, punctuated by the snapped-off trunks of palmettos.
But where are the people? Even in the French Quarter—an area the floodwaters ostensibly spared—there were so few people.
I understand that tourist dollars are important right now and that our conference brought needed funds to the area, but felt as if we were invading the precious few remains of someone’s sacred shrine, that we were surfing on the residents’ collective misery in a gauche and callous way as the shell-shocked looked on, too tired and despondent to even react to our thoughtless invasion.
Empty turnstiles suggested where crowds once gathered and all I could think when I saw them was Here is the church. Here is the steeple. But where the bloody hell are the people?
No crowds filled the riverfront park or waited to board the Algiers ferry or stood in line at the cool aquarium and even the residents seemed baffled by the malfunctioning walk/don’t walk signs that nearly got us killed more than once.
And the over-riding stench of rotting garbage was everywhere.
Bourbon Street is a sad spilled beer of a place populated by a few mullet-wearing bleached-blond types clutching plastic and looking down the vast and empty streets, trying hard to find the party they’ve been promised. They whoop it up momentarily but, with so few of them there, their gesticulations are herely sad and overly desperate gestures, signifying nada.
Only Cafe du Monde seemed vibrant, still alive.
The place is surrounded by tropical courtyards maintained behind gorgeous wrought-iron gates, and the balconies still boast overflowing flowerpots set against beautiful pastel-tinted stucco .
Plenty of restaurants still offer gumbo and shrimp with remoulade sauce and crawfish etouffée too.
Danishgrrrl and I even stumbled upon a festive wedding parade be-bopping its way down Royal Street with a brass band leading the way.
That felt hopeful at least.
But what felt most hopeful (um, besides the fact that I learned oh so much that will help me do my job more effectively) was the fact that Danishgrrrl and I got to spend so much uninterrupted time together without the kids or our everyday obligations or deadlines and are now practically glowing in each other’s presence.
Sadly, we must now resume our workouts after all that Creole food that we consumed in the shell-shocked shambles of the once vibrant city that is now America’s shame.
READING: The Piano Tuner, which my reading group will discuss tonight.
BEST-OF SPAM (Subject Line): Your penis reminds a computer mouse? (Well, the florescent blue trackball on my Mac mouse IS a little like one of those dolphin dildos. And I do finger the little gray clitoris on my PC mouse when I need to doubleclick. Still, I’d have to say that my penises—‘cause who wants to be limited to one?—are much more shaftlike than any mouse I've seen. Dude.)
232. THE MEANEST FLOWER, AND POWERFUL BODIES REDUCED TO TENDER BATTLEGROUNDS
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
(Wm. Wordsworth, from Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood)
From the Archives. (June 2006) My former long-term partner has had to resort to anti-depressants to get through her chemo and her eyes look so damn haunted that I can hardly bear to look at her right now.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I mean, she’s a 43-year-old triathlete with breast cancer who can hardly walk up the stairs now on bad days.
OF COURSE she’s depressed. And overwhelmed. And looking at the strong possibility of not living till old age. And exhausted. And in pain. And weak. And haunted.
And her medical degree, although helpful, comes with loads of statistics about every thing that can go wrong between now and the end of her life.
Who wouldn’t be depressed given this scenario?
I’m glad we’re having dinner tonight, but hate seeing her so sick, have such a very hard time swallowing this reality.
•
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
(William Wordsworth, from Ode: Intimations of Immortality, from Recollections of Early Childhood)
Now it is Sunday evening and I just ran inside after getting drenched in a downpour.
We’re in that stage of summer when there’s a thunderstorm with lightning practically every night and it is humid but beautiful so long as you keep the AC blasting.
Last night’s full moon was incredible. Danishgrrrl and I snuggled into the hammock and watched it darting in and out of the clouds, so luminous and beautiful and huge, then fell asleep with it peeking into our windows just ahead of the storms.
We slept in this morning, then went for a long hike by the river, where we hung out on the rocks and in the water and talked a lot before hanging out in the hammock again.
(Did I mention that the back yard is looking so cool now that a winding creek runs through it, inviting people to step out of the sunshine and into its shaded spaces?)
•
Had dinner with Tree Friday night to celebrate the end of her chemo. She looks and feels good now and even sauntered through the Race for the Cure on Saturday.
She’s not her normal marathon-running self yet but is doing so much better now that chemo has ended and even her hair is beginning to grow back in a little.
Radiation is easier but now she’s covered with tattoos and ink marks and plastic bulls’ eyes that tell the technicians where to zap her.
I guess you could say that her body is a battleground in an entirely different way than we’ve thought about that battleground before.
She said that Pottergrrl is terrified of this cancer and has returned to the Seventh Day Adventist vegan meals of her formative years.
I guess controlling the food you eat as a response to seemingly healthy people around you suddenly become gravely ill could provide some semblance of control, convince you that (given enough spinach) you might actually remain immune to death and illness.
And yeah,spinach could keep you healthy for a long time but, let’s face it, we’re all going to die.
I got no qualms with that, but would someone please get the sex toys out of the house before my family shows up to claim my stuff?
READING: Sartre’s Existentialism and Human Emotions
LISTENING TO: the glorious, sexy rain. Also weaklazyliar’s “Forgive Me”: I thought that truth was the line that anchored the kite. I thought that love was a kite to fly. I thought that I was holding on, but I was holding on to nothing, holding onto nothing. Forgive me.
BEST-OF SPAM: She needs better sexx, navy bean!!!
231 .JAGGED EDGES
From the Archive (June 2006) I can’t remember who said “Youth will go but passion and freedom will have to be reconquered each day of your life,” but I have been thinking about that line a lot lately.
So many things vie for our time, threaten to reduce us to strangers spasming at the stoplight as we worry about the next commitment we must reach on time because of some artifical frame that we have allowed our need for a salary to place around our true selves.
It is too damn easy to get wrapped up in crap like this and forget to live your life, forget to even notice that beautiful goldfinch right there in the tree beside you.
Work is consuming nearly all of my time right now and would be a twenty-four-hour job if I allowed it to be.
This isn’t surprising, given that it’s the end of the fiscal year—a normal June, really—but I am trying very hard to retain my passion, to hold onto the poet in the midst of my overcommitments and changing job landscape and arrogant yet oh-so-lousy new boss and her disappointing new administration (and did I mention that she has no idea how to perform my job yet keeps trying to micromanage me anyway?).
Mainly, this is very bad news because I must stay here another year before I am vested and have benefits for life upon retirement.
Danishgrrl says I am burned to a crisp and has suggested an impromptu cookout with friends till she can whisk me off to the beach for a long luxurious weekend.
Hope this helps.
•
So many things vie for our time, threaten to reduce us to strangers spasming at the stoplight as we worry about the next commitment we must reach on time because of some artifical frame that we have allowed our need for a salary to place around our true selves.
It is too damn easy to get wrapped up in crap like this and forget to live your life, forget to even notice that beautiful goldfinch right there in the tree beside you.
Work is consuming nearly all of my time right now and would be a twenty-four-hour job if I allowed it to be.
This isn’t surprising, given that it’s the end of the fiscal year—a normal June, really—but I am trying very hard to retain my passion, to hold onto the poet in the midst of my overcommitments and changing job landscape and arrogant yet oh-so-lousy new boss and her disappointing new administration (and did I mention that she has no idea how to perform my job yet keeps trying to micromanage me anyway?).
Mainly, this is very bad news because I must stay here another year before I am vested and have benefits for life upon retirement.
Danishgrrl says I am burned to a crisp and has suggested an impromptu cookout with friends till she can whisk me off to the beach for a long luxurious weekend.
Hope this helps.
•
Nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design.—Harry Crews
So did anyone else hear that naval-gazing poet Billy Collins read on NPR last night?
Jezzzuslawd that man is self-absorbed! He read a precious little poem about poetry (with a capital P) that was basically a bunch of masturbatory self-congratulatory lines that didn’t amount to anything, and then Terry Gross practically peed her pants congratulating him.
Ugh.
I guess I need to remember that poet laureates are not chosen from poets’ poets.
As for me, I want to slap the pompous man in the name of O’Hara and Broumas and all the new and innovative poets writing meaningful lines today.
Meanwhile, the New York Times is running a series of articles on how genes move and change, written by the amazingly hot smartypants evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson and wow what a picture of her they have posted! It’s almost enough to make me subscribe to Times Select instead of reading my electronic freebie.
Not much time to read right now though—although I am following the impact of Robert Kennedy Jr.’s Rolling Stone article on how the Republicans deliberately stole the election in Ohio.
This is, what, the fourth report to verify this horrifying reality, but has the story been broadcast by the mainstream media
(who, for that matter, still haven’t reported that Gore actually won in Florid.)?
There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark when Americans have to listen to the BBC to find out about the demise of our democratic principles.
LISTENING TO: the wheels go round and round (I really love to watch them roll)
READING: Sartre’s Existentialism and Human Emotions
SANG IN SHOWER: Kasey Chambers’ “Pony”: When I grow up I want a baby. I’m going to name it after Ralph Stanley...
BEST-OF SPAM: Anything to please your woman (uh huh)
230. EROS
The inner voice of Eros is arbitrary, bizarre, impeccably honest, bountiful, and so powerful as to be cruel. It takes courage to hear its demands and follow them.—Patrick CalifiaFrom the Archives. (June 2006)That line is from Susie Bright’s site.
Huh. So Pat Califia of Macho Sluts fame has morphed into Patrick huh?
Frankly, I am not at all surprised.
I like the quote.
•
Meanwhile, I spent most of yesterday installing a French drain in my backyard and can hardly bend today, but it is nearly finished and I am heading out there again as soon as I finish my cup of coffee.
The drain runs along a dried-up creekbed that pools during rainstorms and stays too wet for decent grass. I plan to plant a weeping willow where the pipe empties today, after I take a photo of the huge pile of river pebbles that will form a rocky creekbed in my yard by this afternoon.
The mostly wooded backyard needs some attention, and, with luck, the landscape fabric I placed under the drain will keep the whole area clean of weeds and give it a nicer look while draining the standing water away efficiently and attractively.
LISTENING TO: Jenna Mammina’s cool cover of Honeysuckle Rose
READING: a biography of Benjamin Godard and The Poet’s Notebook
BEST-OF SPAM: pseudo saintliness
229. I’M LUCKY. I CAN WALK UNDER LADDERS...
Show me a 50-foot wall, and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder—Arizona governor Janet Napolitano
From the Archives. (May 2006) Bush has come up with some dumbass ideas before, but building a 50-foot wall (which he calls a fence—I guess because he was advised to avoid those wall associations) that costs $3.2 million per mile along the border as our economy sucks is justifiably INSANE and doling this work out to cronies via yet another noncompetitive bid after every shady thing this administration has done is tantamount to shooting the bird at the tax payers whose dollars this president squanders on his ego rollercoaster.
228. SHE’S A HOUSE ON FIRE; I’M A HURRICANE
Remember that it only takes one hurricane in your neighborhood to make it a bad season” says Conrad Lautenbacher from the National Hurricane Center.
From the Archives. (May 2006) I hate to bring this up but hurricane season is upon us and guess who’s still in office, tuning his guitar.
I was thinking about the Katrina debacle last night after discovering some chilling yet somehow beautiful New Orleans footage and videos at http://www.filmstripinternational.com and http://www.chrisvids.org.
This made me remember how weird it was to drive from DC to Charleston after a hurricane nearly destroyed the city.
Signs as far away as Charlotte were bent to the ground and debris littered the roadside for hundreds of miles.
It got worse the closer I got to the coast. Then I reached Charleston and discovered that the damage was even worse than I had imagined,that the city had been effectively transformed into a bombed-out wisteria-dripping ruin.
Still, years later, when a local weather station warned that a hurricane was heading my way I said “Are y’all crazy? Hurricanes don’t come this far inland.”
Boy was I wrong.
Our seventy-year-old windows shook in their casements as Mud and I kept looking at each other and asking Is THIS when we fill the bathtub with water and stand in the stairwell with the mattress over our faces?
It was the only time I hated the fact that our house was filled with French doors.
The rain pounded against our thirteen-inch stucco walls so hard that they were saturated clean through. And, even though we scoured the neighborhood, we never found the patio furniture that the wind carried away or mangled beyond recognition.
(And did I mention that plants we’d never planted sprouted up everywhere even as we wondered what became of our tomatoes? Or that I was so damn desperate for a cup of coffee in our powerless town that I actually ground my beans with a rolling pin?)
All of which is a precursor to my saying that being in New Orleans next month is going to be mighty damn weird and I can’t believe that Bush isn’t doing more to prepare for this season (and that I can’t find some long-distance way to make plans to work in a neighborhood while I’m there) .
Meanwhile, Pat Robertson has announced that his god told him that a tsunami will hit the Pacific NW this year (which, to my undying delight, caused owlbear1 to write “Oh mighty Thor! I beseech thee to wack Pat Robertson’s pee pee”).
Meanwhile, tickets for Madonna’s new tour are a mere $350 apiece.
Puhleeez! I mean sure Madonna is great and like a virgin and yogatastic and all that and she survived that unfortunate equestrian accident unlike Christopher Reeves and I am sure that it is oh so fantastic to watch her because she is, after all, Madonna, but we are talking about HUNDREDS OF DOLLARS here and the biggest irony of all is that her tour includes a video montage of Bush, bin Laden, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al. juxtaposed with starving African children (all of whom could be fed and clothed for years if Madonna donated her profits to this cause).
Meanwhile, David Sirota points out in In These Times that the same neocons who preach the so-called culture of life are paid boocoodles of money from the health-care industry to look the other way when sick people skip a trip to the physician because they can’t afford to go.
He asks “Why do we hear so much about how well-off America is, yet our country has the highest number of uninsured citizens in the industrialized world?”
Why isn't that question asked? Because you can't answer it honestly without exploring how Corporate America has bought off enough politicians to make sure our government helps corporations perpetuate this travesty.
....I'm not naïve. I know that corporations exist for one reason and one reason only: the relentless, single-minded pursuit of profit, no matter who gets shafted. That is their stated purpose in a capitalist society, and that's fine. But in our country, corporations aren't supposed to pursue this purpose in a vacuum, unchecked, unregulated, unopposed. There is supposed to be a counterweight, a government separate from Big Business whose job is to prevent the corporate profit motive from destroying society.
That government once passed laws protecting the environment, so the profit motive wouldn't end up eliminating breathable air. That government once protected workers, so the profit motive wouldn't result in Americans toiling in sweatshops. And that government once demanded better wages, so the profit motive wouldn't result in a race to the bottom for poverty-level paychecks. But that government, as we all know, is long gone. Our government has been the victim of a hostile takeover. Over the last thirty years, Corporate America has applied its most effective business tactics to the task of purchasing the one commodity that's not supposed to be for sale: American democracy.
So yeah. Next time you’re watching one of those feel-good Blue Cross Blue Shield look-how-we-love-our-customers ads, remind yourself that HMOs doubled their profits in 2003 and spent $600 million on lobbying efforts and campaign contributions that year.
Sirota also points out that “Frist’s family was forced to pay $1.7 billion in criminal and civil fines for trying to rip off Medicare while running the nation’s largest for-profit hospital chain“ (a chain where I toiled in their crummy kitchens for 7 long years).
And to think it was once considered primitive to feast on the poor.
BEST-OF SPAM: Do you want your dick to be wallpaper for a computer? (Um. I’m not even sure how to answer that?)
227. BAD BREAKS AND EQUESTRIAN MEMORIES
From the Archives. (May 2006) Maybe it’s because I grew up in an equestrian town where the elite ponies train then race before going on to the big time.
Maybe it’s because racetracks and steeplechases and training grounds and polo chukkers are ubiquitous to the place.
Maybe it’s because my little brother was a fearless polo player.
And maybe it’s because a whole section of my town of origin was unpaved to better suit the magnificent thoroughbreds.
Yeah, maybe it’s because my childhood is laced with so many memories of hall-of-famers racing across the grass that I get a lump in my throat every single time I read about Barbaro.
Current headline > Barbaro’s Chances: 50/50.
Maybe it’s because racetracks and steeplechases and training grounds and polo chukkers are ubiquitous to the place.
Maybe it’s because my little brother was a fearless polo player.
And maybe it’s because a whole section of my town of origin was unpaved to better suit the magnificent thoroughbreds.
Yeah, maybe it’s because my childhood is laced with so many memories of hall-of-famers racing across the grass that I get a lump in my throat every single time I read about Barbaro.
Current headline > Barbaro’s Chances: 50/50.
226. VULVA LANDSCAPES AND FISCAL IRRESPONSIBILITY
From the Archives. (May 2006) Tee Corinne, author of the Cunt Coloring Book, is dying of cancer and needs some money. Susie Bright is holding a fundraiser for her but, well, I ain’t in California, so I sent in my donation through paypal because, as Susie says, Tee is the beginning of lesbian erotic photography.
Wish I could claim credit for my title, but Susie used it in Nothing But the Girl to describe Tee’s contributions to the lesbian community, so credit where credit is due for those vulva landscapes (which is about the only thing that would make me switch my painting style to landscapes).
Meanwhile my dear friend Tuscaloosa called to say she won a big writing prize and that a big-name press contacted her with a book contract.
This means that Tuscaloosa and I must hole up and write, but fast!
Meanwhile, with everything going on in the world, Yahoo! wants me to know that Jennifer Aniston is house-hunting in Chicago.
Meanwhile, Bush (the Texas touter of manufactured evidence and terror alerts who employs fear to convince working citizens whose wages continue to fall under his administration to wrap the American flag across their cross-adorned chests and slap yellow ribbon magnets on their cars and send their children off to die in an unnecessary, ineffective, and budget-breaking war against a population that didn’t even produce the terrorists who destroyed the twin towers) now has a six-year history of saying whatever he thinks will most effectively manipulate people regardless of the truth behind his claims.
He recently announced his plans to militarize the Mexican border, for example, but also told Mexico’s president that he does not plan to militarize the border.
Bush took his lying to new lows in a recent immigration speech though, when he said (with an um straight face) that “we cannot build a unified country by inciting people to anger or playing on anyone’s fears.”
Now I am SURE that the terror alert went up and telephone calls got traced when Jon Stewart commented on the ridiculousness of this statement by adding “that’s what terrorism and gay people are for.”
And what are we to make of this president’s assertion of a unified country when his administration has made it blatantly clear that it could give less than a shit about the mass of our citizenry?
Why doesn’t he just proclaim the truth: Y’all peons can just fend for yer selves coz I am giving my SEVENTY-BILLION-DOLLAR tax cut to my prep-school pals..
Budgetary brutality. Distributional bias. Fiscal irresponsibility. Oh my fucking my!
Molly Ivins notes that people who earn over $1 million annually will receive a nearly $42,000 tax cut while the average schmoe will receive a whopping $20.
With all this going on, I was only minorly surprised when a progressive legislator told me that she and her hubbie are going off the grid and joining a self-sustaining commune because they believe that we will reach an apocalyptic moment before the next election.
Well, I hope you have a lot of guns, I replied, since everyone will be coming for your goods after the big collapse.
Meanwhile, I guess I’m just fiddling as Rome burns, since I spent part of yesterday playing my long-neglected piano.
I am currently fascinated by the berceuse, which Jocelyn the tenor sings outside the cave of the eagles in Act II of Godard’s opera Jocelyn. The melody in the second section is especially wonderful, although my out-of-practice fingers just don’t do it justice.
I also went to a private garden's open house and purchased a few native plants that I haven’t been able to find elsewhere. This means that I need to quit typing and get off my ass and make a new plant bed, since it is already 11:30 on Sunday morning and my weekend is disappearing fast.
LISTENING TO: REM’s “Gardening by Night”
READING: Technobarons of the Twenty-First Century: Why Telephone and Cable Companies Want to Take Control of the Internet
BEST OF SPAM: hymen errand
Wish I could claim credit for my title, but Susie used it in Nothing But the Girl to describe Tee’s contributions to the lesbian community, so credit where credit is due for those vulva landscapes (which is about the only thing that would make me switch my painting style to landscapes).
Meanwhile my dear friend Tuscaloosa called to say she won a big writing prize and that a big-name press contacted her with a book contract.
This means that Tuscaloosa and I must hole up and write, but fast!
Meanwhile, with everything going on in the world, Yahoo! wants me to know that Jennifer Aniston is house-hunting in Chicago.
Meanwhile, Bush (the Texas touter of manufactured evidence and terror alerts who employs fear to convince working citizens whose wages continue to fall under his administration to wrap the American flag across their cross-adorned chests and slap yellow ribbon magnets on their cars and send their children off to die in an unnecessary, ineffective, and budget-breaking war against a population that didn’t even produce the terrorists who destroyed the twin towers) now has a six-year history of saying whatever he thinks will most effectively manipulate people regardless of the truth behind his claims.
He recently announced his plans to militarize the Mexican border, for example, but also told Mexico’s president that he does not plan to militarize the border.
Bush took his lying to new lows in a recent immigration speech though, when he said (with an um straight face) that “we cannot build a unified country by inciting people to anger or playing on anyone’s fears.”
Now I am SURE that the terror alert went up and telephone calls got traced when Jon Stewart commented on the ridiculousness of this statement by adding “that’s what terrorism and gay people are for.”
And what are we to make of this president’s assertion of a unified country when his administration has made it blatantly clear that it could give less than a shit about the mass of our citizenry?
Why doesn’t he just proclaim the truth: Y’all peons can just fend for yer selves coz I am giving my SEVENTY-BILLION-DOLLAR tax cut to my prep-school pals..
Budgetary brutality. Distributional bias. Fiscal irresponsibility. Oh my fucking my!
Molly Ivins notes that people who earn over $1 million annually will receive a nearly $42,000 tax cut while the average schmoe will receive a whopping $20.
With all this going on, I was only minorly surprised when a progressive legislator told me that she and her hubbie are going off the grid and joining a self-sustaining commune because they believe that we will reach an apocalyptic moment before the next election.
Well, I hope you have a lot of guns, I replied, since everyone will be coming for your goods after the big collapse.
Meanwhile, I guess I’m just fiddling as Rome burns, since I spent part of yesterday playing my long-neglected piano.
I am currently fascinated by the berceuse, which Jocelyn the tenor sings outside the cave of the eagles in Act II of Godard’s opera Jocelyn. The melody in the second section is especially wonderful, although my out-of-practice fingers just don’t do it justice.
I also went to a private garden's open house and purchased a few native plants that I haven’t been able to find elsewhere. This means that I need to quit typing and get off my ass and make a new plant bed, since it is already 11:30 on Sunday morning and my weekend is disappearing fast.
LISTENING TO: REM’s “Gardening by Night”
READING: Technobarons of the Twenty-First Century: Why Telephone and Cable Companies Want to Take Control of the Internet
BEST OF SPAM: hymen errand
225. NARROWSBURG, USA
(From the Archives) April 2006. Caught up on Bush&Co last night and the evidence of deliberate deception is overwhelming.
So here’s my suggestion: There’s a town called Narrowsburg in NY State. Let’s send the 29 percent of Americans who still support Bush there and let them live out their narrow worldviews in this aptly named place while the rest of us try to salvage what’s left of our democratic process and once vibrant system of checks and balances.
The deception started well before Colin Powell’s presentation to the Security Council but, as Howard Zinn notes in “Removing America’s Blinders” (The Progressive, 4.24.06), this speech, broadcast one month before the US invaded Iraq, “may have set a record for the number of falsehoods told in one talk.”
WMD evidence cited by Powell includes “satellite photos, audio records, reports from informants, with precise statistics on how many gallons of this and that existed for chemical warfare.”
And whee didn’t the newspapers and reading public jump on that irrefutable-evidence bandwagon as enterprising young conservatives launched their yellow ribbon magnet movement?
Edna St. Vincent Millay expressed her outrage at the outcome of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial by penning a chilling sonnet that begins
So here’s my suggestion: There’s a town called Narrowsburg in NY State. Let’s send the 29 percent of Americans who still support Bush there and let them live out their narrow worldviews in this aptly named place while the rest of us try to salvage what’s left of our democratic process and once vibrant system of checks and balances.
The deception started well before Colin Powell’s presentation to the Security Council but, as Howard Zinn notes in “Removing America’s Blinders” (The Progressive, 4.24.06), this speech, broadcast one month before the US invaded Iraq, “may have set a record for the number of falsehoods told in one talk.”
WMD evidence cited by Powell includes “satellite photos, audio records, reports from informants, with precise statistics on how many gallons of this and that existed for chemical warfare.”
And whee didn’t the newspapers and reading public jump on that irrefutable-evidence bandwagon as enterprising young conservatives launched their yellow ribbon magnet movement?
Edna St. Vincent Millay expressed her outrage at the outcome of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial by penning a chilling sonnet that begins
Read history. So learn your place in time, and go to sleep—all this was done before..
We do it better, fouling every shore; we disinfect, we do not probe the crime....
What would Vincent say today, when evidence of “the mendacity of our high officials” is so clearly fouling every shore?
Read history, so learn your place in time. That’s Zinn’s message too.
Zinn’s short list of lies our presidents have told to justify American wars follows:
President Polk and American slave-owners wanted half of Mexico, so Polk declared that Mexico “shed American blood upon American soil” and went to war.
President McKinley announced that America wanted to liberate Cuba from Spanish control, “but the truth is that we really wanted Spain out ... so that the island could be open to United Fruit and other American corporations.” Polk, likewise, said that we wanted to “civilize” Filipinos, but we really just wanted “that valuable piece of real estate in the far Pacific, even if we had to kill hundreds of thousands of Filipinos” in order to get it.
President Wilson declared that we had no choice but to enter WWI in order to “make the world safe for democracy,” but the war was really fought “to make the world safe for the Western imperial powers.”
President Truman “lied when he said [that] the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima because it was ‘a military target.’”
And everyone—Kennedy (US level of involvement), Johnson (Gulf of Tonkin), Nixon (secret Cambodian bombings)—“lied about Vietnam ... all of them claiming it was to keep South Vietnam free of communism, but really [the US wanted] to keep South Vietnam as an American outpost at the edge of the Asian continent.”
Then [Pez-dispenser] Reagan lied about the invasion of Grenada and said that the tiny nation of Grenada was a threat to our nation.
Then Bush the Elder “lied about the invasion of Panama, leading to the death of thousands of ordinary citizens in that country” and “lied again about the reason for attacking Iraq in 1991” [on the day that his son Neil went to trial, thus effectively killing the story]. This invasion was “hardly to defend the integrity of Kuwait” but was, really, to “assert US power in the oil-rich Middle East.”
And the lies continue to hemmorhage.
Zinn points out the obvious—that, when leaders throw around the terms such as national interest, national security, national defense, most citizens assume that they are talking about We The People, but they’re actually talking about profits and markets, about protecting big business and increasing its wealth.
Zinn also points out that the WHO ranked the US 37th in overall health performance in 2000.
This rating was based on money our country spent per capita for health care.
And here’s a sobering (if oft-repeated) fact: in the richest nation in the world, one in five children is born into poverty.
(Remember those New Orleans photographs? There are a whole lot more poor people out there, even if the nightly news rarely serves them up for public consumption.)
We’re the most powerful country in the world, yet 40 countries have a better record of infant mortality rates that we do.
Cuba does.
We lead the world in the number of people in prison (yet resist charging our seemingly insane president with treason).
It’s clear our policies consider some people expendable. And it’s clear that Bush&Co are rewarding the megarich at the expense of the rest of us.
Our history of “slaveowner against slave, landlord against tenant, corporation against worker, rich against poor ... [of] ethnic cleansing, in which millions of Indians were driven off their land by means of massacres and forced evacuations ... our long history of slavery, segregation, and racism ... [our] record of imperial conquest in the Caribbean and in the Pacific, our shameful wars against small countries a tenth our size: Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq. And the lingering memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki” tell a story that should make us all hang our heads until we summon up the courage to get out there and protest what is being done in our name.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
224. AGGRIEVED OUT-GROUPS
“The future. What’s that?”
—Belisario, one of a group of hunter-gatherers who left the Colombian jungle to join the modern world, as quoted in yesterday’s New York Times
From the Archives
(May 2006) I read today that Christianists are urging believers to participate in an Othercott by seeing a different movie on the day The Da Vinci Code opens.
And here’s a telling factoid. Their alternate movie of choice is Over the Hedge, a nice little animated feature.
(Keep those blinders on, guys, while the world moves right on past you.)
Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that the reverend Jim Garlow of San Diego is training pastors in methods to convince parishioners to throw Da Vinci Code parties in their homes because Garlow asserts that “it’s the task of the missionary to learn the language of the indigenous people” so that the missionaries can correct our ignorance.
(Interesting how he uses noblesse oblige empirespeak to justify his fundamentalism, huh?)
Meanwhile, writer David Brooks has announced that the problem with democrats is that we have become “a collection of aggrieved out-groups” who have not recognized that “multiculturalism and identity politics are dead.”
He sees democrats “purging the last vestiges of the New Left and returning to the older civic liberalism of the 1950s and 1960s” now . . . and yeah, I see a little of that too—but primarily from Republican wannabes who think assimilation with Bill Frist is how we move forward.
(Do you read “Forget The Queers” of “Forget Feminism” in this approach? How about “Forget Leadership?”)
Mother’s Day is this weekend, so perhaps David has been looking back fondly on the 1950s, when his mom no doubt wore a perky Ozzie-and-Harriet skirt and popped sleeping pills when no one was looking and filtered his daddy’s coffee through Eisenhower golf socks as she died inside.
Yes, David we all long for those golden days when the pill was unavailable and battered women’s shelters didn’t exist because no one saw the need for them and the thought of a husband being charged for raping or silencing his wife was unheard of. (But where would David have heard it anyway since women were so rarely admitted to positions of power?)
Dear Dave. Just so you know, we queers ain’t going away, despite how smugly you pronounce that we're passe.
Amazing how white men so rarely recognize that considering people unlike themselves to be special interest groups is just another example of their expectation of privilege.
Meanwhile, can you believe that the Senate approved a two-year extension of the boy emperor’s tax cuts that benefit the super-rich at the expense of the rest of us?
Turn off your television sets, boys and girls. This is reality.
SANG IN SHOWER: Holly Near’s “Simply Love”
READING: Donna Tartt’s Little Friend
LISTENING TO: Jennifer Warnes’ cover of Leonard Cohen’s “First We Take Manhattan”: I don’t like your fashion business mister. I don’t like those drugs that keep you thin. I don’t like what happened to my sister. First we take Manhattan. Then we take Berlin.
223. ADVOCATING A GAY “LIFESTYLE”
From the Archives
(May 2006) I’ve been catching up on my reading and so will be blogosampling again.
The Washington Blade reports that Brigham Young University is considering expelling 5 students who participated in last month’s Equality Ride demo whether or not they’re gay, despite the fact that one of them demonstrated off campus.
Why? Because their honor code forbids students from “advocating a gay lifestyle.” (sic)
And, on our side of the country, a judge has thrown out a case filed against UNC Chapel Hill by a Christian fraternity that wants funding even though it refuses to sign an inclusive pledge.
And speaking of hot-button social issues, has anyone else noticed that the governor of Illinois has taken a lesson from Bush&Co and is using his executive powers to make hot-button changes despite the homophobic Christianist legislators in his state?
He instructed the state’s health department to direct 10 million dollars in grants to embryonic stem cell research, for example, after Bush’s idiotic pronouncement of what is and is not appropriate scientific research, and used executive privilege to bypass the legislative process and grant domestic-partner health-care benefits to state employees.
(Go team)
No big surprise, but the Christianists (who make up the 32 percent of Americans who still support the boy emperor and appear to be just fine with his secret torture camps and wiretapping) don’t like it one bit when a Democrat uses such powers to set progressive policy.
Meanwhile, a 15-year-old created a set of videos about a group that Susie Bright refers to as our “Onward-Christian-Bullshitters Administration.” WWJD is the strongest of the bunch and will leave a lump in your throat and fill you with more than a little outrage (especially if you saw My Name Is Rachel Corrie last night).
Check out http://peacetakescourage.cf.huffingtonpost.com/ and please forward it to your friends.
(May 2006) I’ve been catching up on my reading and so will be blogosampling again.
The Washington Blade reports that Brigham Young University is considering expelling 5 students who participated in last month’s Equality Ride demo whether or not they’re gay, despite the fact that one of them demonstrated off campus.
Why? Because their honor code forbids students from “advocating a gay lifestyle.” (sic)
And, on our side of the country, a judge has thrown out a case filed against UNC Chapel Hill by a Christian fraternity that wants funding even though it refuses to sign an inclusive pledge.
And speaking of hot-button social issues, has anyone else noticed that the governor of Illinois has taken a lesson from Bush&Co and is using his executive powers to make hot-button changes despite the homophobic Christianist legislators in his state?
He instructed the state’s health department to direct 10 million dollars in grants to embryonic stem cell research, for example, after Bush’s idiotic pronouncement of what is and is not appropriate scientific research, and used executive privilege to bypass the legislative process and grant domestic-partner health-care benefits to state employees.
(Go team)
No big surprise, but the Christianists (who make up the 32 percent of Americans who still support the boy emperor and appear to be just fine with his secret torture camps and wiretapping) don’t like it one bit when a Democrat uses such powers to set progressive policy.
Meanwhile, a 15-year-old created a set of videos about a group that Susie Bright refers to as our “Onward-Christian-Bullshitters Administration.” WWJD is the strongest of the bunch and will leave a lump in your throat and fill you with more than a little outrage (especially if you saw My Name Is Rachel Corrie last night).
Check out http://peacetakescourage.cf.huffingtonpost.com/ and please forward it to your friends.
222. THE EVERPRESENT EXPERT, NOW APPEARING AT A GYM NEAR YOU
From the Archives
(May 2006) Ever noticed how there’s always a guy who insists on passing himself off as an expert despite the fact that he doesn’t know jack?
Well, I encountered a member of this tribe today and handled it with my usual tact and southern grace.
Big surprise that he wore a big gold cross and a gleaming St. Christopher medallion (making it very easy to imagine him at anti-choice rallies, insisting that he instruct women in how to behave in their own bodies).
Dude and I attended a 2-hour Understanding The New Weight Room seminar, where he constantly interrupted the female trainer leading the session to inform us that (1) women have no upper-body strength and (2) women have no business in a gym.
In between, he told women where we should actually stand to use equipment, where we should actually walk in the new facility, how we should actually behave in general. And he became increasingly agitated when we either ignored him or told him (in my case) that none of us came to the session to hear his opinions, so why didn’t he just shut up and let the trainer do her job.
I’ve lifted weights for years now (but am unfamiliar with this new style of equipment) and, like the exercise physiology grad. student/trainer who led the session, know my way around a weight room. So, near the end of the session, when she asked for a volunteer who was familiar with the leg press, I stepped right up, smirked at the guy, then promptly pressed a 190-pound set.
Then, leaving my settings in place, I said, “So do you actually work out on weight machines or just talk about them?”
Turns out Mr. Scrawny could barely press these weights down and, when he did, they was so heavy that they flew back fast and loud, nearly pushing his bony knees into his chest.
THAT got a smirk out of all of us and left him red-faced and stewing for the rest of the session.
Conclusion: Sometimes it’s good to be the asshole.
(May 2006) Ever noticed how there’s always a guy who insists on passing himself off as an expert despite the fact that he doesn’t know jack?
Well, I encountered a member of this tribe today and handled it with my usual tact and southern grace.
Big surprise that he wore a big gold cross and a gleaming St. Christopher medallion (making it very easy to imagine him at anti-choice rallies, insisting that he instruct women in how to behave in their own bodies).
Dude and I attended a 2-hour Understanding The New Weight Room seminar, where he constantly interrupted the female trainer leading the session to inform us that (1) women have no upper-body strength and (2) women have no business in a gym.
In between, he told women where we should actually stand to use equipment, where we should actually walk in the new facility, how we should actually behave in general. And he became increasingly agitated when we either ignored him or told him (in my case) that none of us came to the session to hear his opinions, so why didn’t he just shut up and let the trainer do her job.
I’ve lifted weights for years now (but am unfamiliar with this new style of equipment) and, like the exercise physiology grad. student/trainer who led the session, know my way around a weight room. So, near the end of the session, when she asked for a volunteer who was familiar with the leg press, I stepped right up, smirked at the guy, then promptly pressed a 190-pound set.
Then, leaving my settings in place, I said, “So do you actually work out on weight machines or just talk about them?”
Turns out Mr. Scrawny could barely press these weights down and, when he did, they was so heavy that they flew back fast and loud, nearly pushing his bony knees into his chest.
THAT got a smirk out of all of us and left him red-faced and stewing for the rest of the session.
Conclusion: Sometimes it’s good to be the asshole.
221, MINUTEMEN IN LUNCH COUNTER TOWNS
From the Archives
(May 2006) The ultra-conservative anti-immigrant vigilante group the Minutemen will be in Greensboro NC tomorrow and progressive organizations are calling for folks across the south to show up and tell the thugs that they are not welcome there.
Unfortunately, I will be in a tedious training session for our new and decidedly inadequate health insurance during this event.
As near as I can tell, this new PPO pays for my mammogram but, should it be suspicious and my doctor proactive enough to order an immediate ultrasound, then this diagnostic procedure will not be covered (because we “elected” to change the definition of my Routine Appointment by introducing a Diagnostic Procedure).
Put another way: BCBS is willing to penalize me and decrease my odds of surviving cancer in order to ensure that their organizational schemas are kept under separate nutshells.
Gawd. No wonder my doctor friends are leaving the field in droves!
•
This is one of those weeks in which I have something scheduled every evening through Sunday (which is why I am doing laundry at 11:30 PM).
Tonight, I attended a reading of the disturbing play My Name Is Rachel Corrie. My favorite local experimental theater company hosted this reading and asked invitees to help them decide whether or not to disrupt their fall schedule in order to produce it this year.
Rachel Corrie is the 23-year-old American peace activist who was crushed by a bulldozer while acting as a human shield for Palestinian homes in Gaza and this play was created from her journals and e-mails.
So why the mad rush to production?
Well, after 2 sellout runs in London, the NY Theatre Workshop was SUPPOSED to begin a run of the play next month, but they suddenly cancelled production, citing a need to “mollify” the pro-Israeli community.
Katharine Viner, co-editor of the play, says
(May 2006) The ultra-conservative anti-immigrant vigilante group the Minutemen will be in Greensboro NC tomorrow and progressive organizations are calling for folks across the south to show up and tell the thugs that they are not welcome there.
Unfortunately, I will be in a tedious training session for our new and decidedly inadequate health insurance during this event.
As near as I can tell, this new PPO pays for my mammogram but, should it be suspicious and my doctor proactive enough to order an immediate ultrasound, then this diagnostic procedure will not be covered (because we “elected” to change the definition of my Routine Appointment by introducing a Diagnostic Procedure).
Put another way: BCBS is willing to penalize me and decrease my odds of surviving cancer in order to ensure that their organizational schemas are kept under separate nutshells.
Gawd. No wonder my doctor friends are leaving the field in droves!
•
This is one of those weeks in which I have something scheduled every evening through Sunday (which is why I am doing laundry at 11:30 PM).
Tonight, I attended a reading of the disturbing play My Name Is Rachel Corrie. My favorite local experimental theater company hosted this reading and asked invitees to help them decide whether or not to disrupt their fall schedule in order to produce it this year.
Rachel Corrie is the 23-year-old American peace activist who was crushed by a bulldozer while acting as a human shield for Palestinian homes in Gaza and this play was created from her journals and e-mails.
So why the mad rush to production?
Well, after 2 sellout runs in London, the NY Theatre Workshop was SUPPOSED to begin a run of the play next month, but they suddenly cancelled production, citing a need to “mollify” the pro-Israeli community.
Katharine Viner, co-editor of the play, says
if a young, middle-class, scrupulously fair-minded and dead American woman, whose superb writing about her job as a mental health worker, ex-boyfriends, troublesome parents, struggles to find out who she wanted to be, and how she found that by traveling to Gaza and discovering the shocking conditions under which the Palestinians live—if a voice like this cannot be heard on a New York stage, what hope is there for anyone else?
Besides the obvious censorship implications, this cancellation is of particular concern because the producer says he is not concerned about people who see the show, but is instead concerned about the people who don’t see the show but declare it viciously anti-Israeli anyway.
Viner again:
Since when did theatre come to be about those who don’t go to see it? If the play itself . . . is not the problem, then isn’t the answer to get people to watch it, rather than exercising prior censorship?
Indeed.
Rachel's words condemn violence and express outrage about attacks by the fourth largest army in the world on people whose livelihoods and food and water and shelter have been taken away from them.
That’s powerful stuff and well worth presenting to the world, despite the censors’ threats.
This is the second play I’ve seen this week that asks how clean our tax-paying hands are.
The off-off-Broadway Guardians, staring Katherine Moennig (the actor who plays Shane on The L Word), was poorly attended and may have already closed, but I am so glad I saw it.
Moennig portrays Lynddie England as a somewhat sympathetic grunt who understands the implications of ignoring a direct military order far more than she understands the implications of her (abhorrent) actions.
Then there’s the vacuous Guardian reporter following her in search of a bigger office.
At first I was concerned that the playwright planned to make a series of easy jokes about uneducated southern hicks who grew up in violent landscapes and so spread their violence around the globe, but the play was better than that.
In fact, the Oxford-trained reporter comes off as the true empty shell in the end—as an opportunist who cares about the atrocities committed at abu Ghraib only insofar as they can further his career or heighten his experience of violence as an erotic sport.
A (gorgeous) lawyer representing Gitmo prisoners spoke after the play and reminded us of yet another of Bush&Co’s many communications ploys: They basically changed the way they refer to prisons in order to avoid Geneva requirements for how prisoners of war must be treated in prisons.
She also reminded us that, while armed services scandals are typically punished by moving up the chain of command to the ultimate authority who authorized the crime, in the case of abu Ghraib, a handful of women who all say they were following orders they were left no choice but to obey have taken the fall while their superior officers remain in command.
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