So, my dear editor at my dear press tells me that the reader's report on the poetics book is just a few days away. After two whole seasons of impatience, I find I am now scared. What, oh what, will the reader report? It's been so long that this process has begun to feel like I'm a murder defendant waiting twelve hours for a jury to come to verdict. As defense attorneys will explain, that's not usually a good sign.
To cheer myself up, I present to you the chapter summaries of the first full length study of 20th Century poetry through an Irigarian lens, specifically that of her ethics of sexual difference. I add, should you have unlucky and never read these poets, go read these poets. They are simply astonishing. Especially St.-John Perse's and his Seamarks/Amers. You did not know that poets would try That!
Also, Well now, kids, to my happy astonishment, someone just dropped by and asked to be apprised of the publication of my book, should that ever happen... So I thought, hmmm, for his sake I should put up the chapter abstracts. Hence here 'tis, but modified as I discovered that the chapter on G. Stein is a whole other book on 20th C poetry, and is not in the present volume. Also said visitor, Paul, runs this cool poetry blog: Wordsalad. Go read it.
Ahem, the book:
Prologue: For Novices and Adepts (22 pp.)
Quick review of the position of Irigaray's work in the larger frame of feminist philosophy.
Introduction: What? How?
Overview of the book’s argument, organization, and style included with this proposal.
Chapter 1: A Tantric Ethics of Sexual Difference (60pp. ds. 11pt.)
This chapter describes the dialogical subject, or Diotiman relation, that Irigaray posits in her ethics and that relation’s parallels in Tantric philosophy. Through detailed explication of the terms of Irigaray’s ethics in terms of Tantra as explained by Octavio Paz, Andrew Harvey, and Miranda Shaw, I show that Tantra is a system in which two complex and nuanced subjects are taken to exist and the complexities of that relation are explored. The conclusion of the chapter shows this ethics to require a spiritualization of the carnal and carnalization of spirit in order for Irigaray’s ethics to address humans in their full complexity. Irigaray’s use of touch, the caress, as an important aspect of her ethics is given close consideration.
Chapter 2: Burn the Panopticon (60pp.)
This chapter moves from the symbolism of Tantra to an explication the central terms of Irigaray’s ethics of sexual difference through understanding her work as that of a “symbolist philosopher,” and develops a theory of poetics and the poetic subject (one model of subjectivity generally) in the spirit of that ethics. Imagination, in this ethics, becomes not the flight of fancy, but the risk of responsibly trying to imagine a life beyond the problematics of the postmodern. It is this texture of imagination that allows one to burn the panopticon to see and be otherwise. Having explored some of the sources of Irigaray’s thought outside the Western philosophical tradition, I turn here to the implications of this hybrid thought of sexual difference for poetry, poetics, and the poetic subject as a model for subjectivity in general (as the poet has thought of the poetic subject since at least the German Romantics). The chapter concludes with an examination of Irigaray’s response to Heidegger’s ideas of the poet and of the purpose of that subjectivity of risk and complexity in ethical love for poetry, but also as a site at which poetry can teach us how to be two (and more), that is how poetry can lead to an ethical and vatic sense of our being.
Chapter 3: For the Other in Yves Bonnefoy’s The Motion and Immobility of Douve (56pp.)
This long chapter is both an extensive close reading of Bonnefoy’s long poem and an exploration of how difficult it can be to arrive at a poetics of being two. Exploring the instances of the interval, and examining the subjective dynamics between the voices/characters, I will read this poem as ambivalent in regards to sexual difference. In one direction, its narrative and characters resist any possible trace of such an ethics or mode of being, while in another, theun-dead female figure of Douve presents readers with a textual representation of the sensible transcendental and a respect for the interval like few other figures in poetry. The poem is dramatic, narrative, disjunctive, and surrealist. In this matrix of cooperative, if sometimes dissonant, genres and styles a pair of lovers speak to each other across the abyss of death. Douve, the woman in the poem, is dead, and has taken a disruptive and antagonistic posture toward her former lover. The man in the poem laments the loss of his beloved, associating her with nature and its power, but also seeing her loss as tragedy only for himself in still fairly traditional patriarchal terms. The tension between the two, the insistence even from death that she is not as his fantasy wanted her, the failure to wonder and to allow the other-subject their existence in relation to their gender and their own unique being, threatens not just the integrity of their subjectivities but he integrity of the phenomenal world itself. The poem is examined as an opportunity to meditate on the dangers of refusing being two and on the difficulty of bringing this state of being to consciousness and culture.
Chapter 4: St.-Jean Perse and the Languor of Renewal (c. 35 pp.)
Perse’s poetry is also not yet a poetry of being two, but his sense of language and phenomena, of love and the sensual, and the pleasure and joy often found in Perse’s poems. Working primarily from the Irigarian terms mucous and angels, and her definitions of love of self and love of other, this explication of Perse’s poem focuses on Seamarks. This epic poem registers the complexity of Diotiman relation sometimes by considering human interactions, sometimes relations between humans and nature, and often represents these complexities in the interrelation of symbols and the layers of tension in his poems. Perse is poet of the water, of the wide open ocean, and drop of a tear, and provides an opportunity to explore the Tantric and contemplative paradoxes with which we will learn to live with confidence in a culture of being two: for, in it a city's women march to the sea to demand/pray for a world in which they exist as subjects-feminine, and a pair of lovers take to the sea for a year to be transformed into the founding couple of that world. They layers of Greek drama, Tantric-like cosmology, and frail human risk in the face of always possible failure demonstrate the leap that a culture of two would be, and the difficulty of leaping.
Chapter 5: Jorie Graham’s Parousia (40 pp.)
The close readings offered here focus on the use of multiple simultaneous perspectives, disjunction, and ambiguity to represent the difficulty, and sometimes the success of arriving at a being two. Graham’s work is as encompassing, interdisciplinary, intertexual and ‘difficult’ as Irigaray’s, partly because she working out in poetry many of the problems to which Irigaray applies herself in philosophy. While many of Graham’s astute readers have commented on these propensities of Graham’s styles, none has yet collected those comments into an understanding of Graham’s work as also thinking its way into being two. Jorie Graham is the first poet to write much of her poetry with the concerns and difficulties of Irigaray’s thought in mind. Of the poets I consider in this book, she is the only one to write after Irigaray. Graham’s interest in the stories of Daphne, Cassandra, Penelope, and Eurydice, many of the Guardian Angel poems, the Aubades, and some of her biographical poems directly explore the tension in our culture that Irigaray identifies as patriarchy’s foreclosure of sexual difference.
Chapter 6: This Impasse which Is Not One (40 pp.)
The book concludes by opening onto the wider scene of the present culture. If poetic subjects imply or suggest ways of being human when they are understood as having something to say to ethics and thus living together, this chapter explores, celebrates, decries and laments the trends in our culture at present that might let us move into a culture of positive differences and that frustrate, but do not render impassible, that horizon. This chapter brings the discussion of Irigaray’s ethics out of the “narrow” world of poetics and literary criticism to suggest some of the ways in which the reader might go and engage the world from this Diotiman point of view and where, in addition to Irigaray, feminist and other thinkers are imagining their way into a new world. The work of bell hooks and Ken Wilber and Curtis White, as well as several others, are addressed as to their resonance with Irigaray’s thought and the opportunities for a culture of life they open to us.
Showing posts with label CoL. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CoL. Show all posts
20.11.08
Meaning of this Economic Crisis: A Culture of Life Post
It is a truth explained in psychology and the wisdom traditions: when some aspect of your life or self needs to change, and you refuse, resist, deny that change -- events, conditions, actions beyond your scope of agency will force you into it. That you kick and scream will make no difference: you will have to change and grow, or you will suffer and you will make others suffer with you.
As with the spirit of one, so with the macro-spirit of nations, and now the integrated world. (The wisdom traditions infer this principle by resemblance of patterns.)
When we were fat and happy (or some of us were), we refused to take that advantage and change. We refused universal health care, we refused efficient cars, we passed risk downward, we lied and cajoled and stole and screwed over, we consumed unwisely -- sometimes borrowing on our home equity in order to support that consumption. We refused to start building the green economy we will need to survive in anything like comfort for more than the next hundred years, give or take. Some of us are still flying our private jets to DC to ask for money (as CNN reports the auto company CEOs did this week).
(My apologies to those who have conserved, bought local and fair trade, purchased a Prius, offer their time to those less priviledge, I am not talking about you. You are the change required.)
Today, it's reported that an UNexpected extra 500,000 people filed for unemployment assistance. So, it's getting worse faster than we thought. That downward spiral we have been anemically trying to pull out of ... I can hear Charybdis sucking on our boat (or was Scylla the whirlpool?... anyway.)
The money doled out to financial firms is not moving, and they're waiting for more in the form of lower interest rates. This is their refusal of the revolution. It is also akin to extortion.
This is not your average long, hard recession. This is the Memo From the Universe that we need to get our whole entire house in order, from the ground up, the top down, wall to wall. Our assumptions need revision, our modes of connection and economic flow need restructuring, our values as consumers and citizens need perspective and generosity added to them. Our Rich need to reinvest their profits into their own failing firms and thereby benefit everyone.
We are no longer allowed to live unconsciously. Halelujiah!
We need to save the auto makers. In the process of bankruptcy protection, they will dump their pension obligations. Those obligations will be picked up by what's called the Pension Benefit Insurance Program. It's a federal program that puts taxpayer money up to support pensions promised by corporations that offload their obligations in this way. For the auto workers alone (and who deserve their promised retirements) the bill could be as high 200 billion to the people. Floating the Big Three for a little while, giving them the chance to reorganize, to make consumers lust for electric and hybrid and hydrogen cars, is a much smarter move financially and spiritually. The people will get comparatively little by picking up the tab for the pensions.
We need to rewrite the corporate mandates so that consideration of political stability, of worker and environmental well being, fair labor practices, economic progress for more than 2% of the population are requirements of their citizenship. We need to make corporate citizens fulfill the duties of citizens -- which is a duty to each other, to the people. This is the opportunity.
We did not choose the revolution, but it is choosing us. This is how Kali works: refuse what is required of you, and she will break you until you learn. This terrible downturn, the fear and suffering of the people, the trembling we see in every sector of our economy, this is the call to courage and growth. Refusing it will prolong the suffering, damage, and pain to ourselves and everyone else. Accepting the necessity of the revolution will bring us closer to Shakti -- she rewards life-giving choices with more robust life. We are being called to a real Culture of Life -- a culture that takes the living of life as an end, not a means.
As with the spirit of one, so with the macro-spirit of nations, and now the integrated world. (The wisdom traditions infer this principle by resemblance of patterns.)
When we were fat and happy (or some of us were), we refused to take that advantage and change. We refused universal health care, we refused efficient cars, we passed risk downward, we lied and cajoled and stole and screwed over, we consumed unwisely -- sometimes borrowing on our home equity in order to support that consumption. We refused to start building the green economy we will need to survive in anything like comfort for more than the next hundred years, give or take. Some of us are still flying our private jets to DC to ask for money (as CNN reports the auto company CEOs did this week).
(My apologies to those who have conserved, bought local and fair trade, purchased a Prius, offer their time to those less priviledge, I am not talking about you. You are the change required.)
Today, it's reported that an UNexpected extra 500,000 people filed for unemployment assistance. So, it's getting worse faster than we thought. That downward spiral we have been anemically trying to pull out of ... I can hear Charybdis sucking on our boat (or was Scylla the whirlpool?... anyway.)
The money doled out to financial firms is not moving, and they're waiting for more in the form of lower interest rates. This is their refusal of the revolution. It is also akin to extortion.
This is not your average long, hard recession. This is the Memo From the Universe that we need to get our whole entire house in order, from the ground up, the top down, wall to wall. Our assumptions need revision, our modes of connection and economic flow need restructuring, our values as consumers and citizens need perspective and generosity added to them. Our Rich need to reinvest their profits into their own failing firms and thereby benefit everyone.
We are no longer allowed to live unconsciously. Halelujiah!
We need to save the auto makers. In the process of bankruptcy protection, they will dump their pension obligations. Those obligations will be picked up by what's called the Pension Benefit Insurance Program. It's a federal program that puts taxpayer money up to support pensions promised by corporations that offload their obligations in this way. For the auto workers alone (and who deserve their promised retirements) the bill could be as high 200 billion to the people. Floating the Big Three for a little while, giving them the chance to reorganize, to make consumers lust for electric and hybrid and hydrogen cars, is a much smarter move financially and spiritually. The people will get comparatively little by picking up the tab for the pensions.
We need to rewrite the corporate mandates so that consideration of political stability, of worker and environmental well being, fair labor practices, economic progress for more than 2% of the population are requirements of their citizenship. We need to make corporate citizens fulfill the duties of citizens -- which is a duty to each other, to the people. This is the opportunity.
We did not choose the revolution, but it is choosing us. This is how Kali works: refuse what is required of you, and she will break you until you learn. This terrible downturn, the fear and suffering of the people, the trembling we see in every sector of our economy, this is the call to courage and growth. Refusing it will prolong the suffering, damage, and pain to ourselves and everyone else. Accepting the necessity of the revolution will bring us closer to Shakti -- she rewards life-giving choices with more robust life. We are being called to a real Culture of Life -- a culture that takes the living of life as an end, not a means.
21.8.08
New Rule Protects Doctors from Their Job, The Pill Could Be Abortion
Feministing's response, and a link to action at Planned Parenthood. And to screaming at that spineless bunch of patsies in Congress (who can't even protect the Constitution and balance of powers with a much needed impeachment.... so what do we really expect?)
I would like to know which doctors are being punished for not performing abortions. Where? When? I'm delighted that conscience will be protected. I also know that from time to time abortion is necessary to save a woman's life, and if my life were in the balance, I would want my ER doc to know how to do it and then to actually do it. Yes, doctors of conscience, any proceedure that would save my life is a matter of full medical competence. I am a human, whether you like it or not.
But back to this question of conscience. Now, when a woman chooses to terminate a pregnancy, she has also consulted her conscience. When a man joins the KKK he has also consulted his conscience. So, let's try this on for size, a little test by analogy.
(Note that I am fully aware that this 'protection' is limited to matters of medical termination of a pregnancy. However, that limitation is in no way acceptable, even on its face. At least if what is really at stake here is principle, which it isn't. But, Pandagon's read makes my analogy the stronger.)
So, I ask you to consider this scenario: A member of the KKK is seriously injured at a rally. Without proper medical care, his life will be forever altered physically, emotionally, and economically. His actual breathing life is, however, not threatened. The emergency staff in the ER tasked with his care are a mix African Americans , Caucasians, Native Americans, Latinos, and Asian and South Asian Americans, all of whom just happen, on that shift, to be morally opposed to the ideology, action and choices of the KKK. They refuse to treat the clansman on grounds of these moral objections as his condition is a direct result of his choices. KKK-boy is SOL.
WTF is OK w/ u re: this?
The difference here is that pregnancy can and often is the result of an accident, a mistake, a misjudgment, or (worse) a violation. It is often as unwilled as an injury. Joining the KKK is voluntary and intentional all the way down the line. The really big difference here, the key difference, is that becoming pregnant is never (on the woman's part) a vicious act. Neither, for that matter, is choosing to abort. There is no woman, rubbing her hands together, thinking, "Alright! I'm gonna abort this baby!" There are white supremacists, however, who do rub their hands in glee at the prospect of a rally or a chance do some harm to their supposed inferiors. That's part of being a racist fuckwit, all that totally ineffectual glee.
The Hippocratic oath does, in deed and in fact, trump personal morality. If not, medical care could be provided at the pleasure of the provider. Hippocrates realized this, waaaaaay back in the day, and said as much. He knew that without doctors sworn to this morality, one that trumps clan, city-state, ideology, even personal choice (because these people were hardcore): people would be let to suffer, be left maimed, and die -- because of the preferences of the physician.
Which, for the last 2400 years, give or take, has been considered totally unacceptable in civilized society. Which, for the last EVER, has been one of the hallmarks of civilization.
Don't want to perform an abortion, Doc? OK. That's totally hunky-dory. Work in a medical field in which you will not be asked to. Think thoracic, geriatric, genetic, do brain surgery. Whatever. What in hell is so hard about that? Seriously.
The real stakes here are not the fabulated cognitive dissonance between the Hipporactic oath and a woman's right to choose. The real stakes here are in the current, totally unpredictable, election. And congrats McBush Co, LLC: abortion just went back on the debate agenda. Which is what's at stake here is motivating that little bitty base that wants to rule unopposed in its comfy theocracy. The base that does not grant the rights of others to their Constitutionally protected creed. -- You're worried they won't turn out for your patsy. Aren't ya?
So, it's not the 1950s, or 1890s, or even the Middle Ages you find attractive, but a Greece pre-Socrates, a Greece pre-democracy. The Greece of the Iliad, the Odyssey. I mean, this works analogically with both your social and economic policy, and your domestic policy come to maunder that. It is also, I would just like to point out, and like the 600-odd commandments of the Torah from which you cherry pick your morality, a PRE-CHRISTIAN Greece to which you would take us.
Good luck surviving there, fellas, in that old world or its present incarnations.
You, no, you do not have the chop for that. This move right here proves that much.
And it gets better, people. HHS tries to draft rules that define contraception as abortion. Feminist Majority has the scoop there, and the petition.
On their way out, McBush Co., LLC are going to try very hard to get the rest of their misogynist agenda through. Stay awake.
I would like to know which doctors are being punished for not performing abortions. Where? When? I'm delighted that conscience will be protected. I also know that from time to time abortion is necessary to save a woman's life, and if my life were in the balance, I would want my ER doc to know how to do it and then to actually do it. Yes, doctors of conscience, any proceedure that would save my life is a matter of full medical competence. I am a human, whether you like it or not.
But back to this question of conscience. Now, when a woman chooses to terminate a pregnancy, she has also consulted her conscience. When a man joins the KKK he has also consulted his conscience. So, let's try this on for size, a little test by analogy.
(Note that I am fully aware that this 'protection' is limited to matters of medical termination of a pregnancy. However, that limitation is in no way acceptable, even on its face. At least if what is really at stake here is principle, which it isn't. But, Pandagon's read makes my analogy the stronger.)
So, I ask you to consider this scenario: A member of the KKK is seriously injured at a rally. Without proper medical care, his life will be forever altered physically, emotionally, and economically. His actual breathing life is, however, not threatened. The emergency staff in the ER tasked with his care are a mix African Americans , Caucasians, Native Americans, Latinos, and Asian and South Asian Americans, all of whom just happen, on that shift, to be morally opposed to the ideology, action and choices of the KKK. They refuse to treat the clansman on grounds of these moral objections as his condition is a direct result of his choices. KKK-boy is SOL.
WTF is OK w/ u re: this?
The difference here is that pregnancy can and often is the result of an accident, a mistake, a misjudgment, or (worse) a violation. It is often as unwilled as an injury. Joining the KKK is voluntary and intentional all the way down the line. The really big difference here, the key difference, is that becoming pregnant is never (on the woman's part) a vicious act. Neither, for that matter, is choosing to abort. There is no woman, rubbing her hands together, thinking, "Alright! I'm gonna abort this baby!" There are white supremacists, however, who do rub their hands in glee at the prospect of a rally or a chance do some harm to their supposed inferiors. That's part of being a racist fuckwit, all that totally ineffectual glee.
The Hippocratic oath does, in deed and in fact, trump personal morality. If not, medical care could be provided at the pleasure of the provider. Hippocrates realized this, waaaaaay back in the day, and said as much. He knew that without doctors sworn to this morality, one that trumps clan, city-state, ideology, even personal choice (because these people were hardcore): people would be let to suffer, be left maimed, and die -- because of the preferences of the physician.
Which, for the last 2400 years, give or take, has been considered totally unacceptable in civilized society. Which, for the last EVER, has been one of the hallmarks of civilization.
Don't want to perform an abortion, Doc? OK. That's totally hunky-dory. Work in a medical field in which you will not be asked to. Think thoracic, geriatric, genetic, do brain surgery. Whatever. What in hell is so hard about that? Seriously.
The real stakes here are not the fabulated cognitive dissonance between the Hipporactic oath and a woman's right to choose. The real stakes here are in the current, totally unpredictable, election. And congrats McBush Co, LLC: abortion just went back on the debate agenda. Which is what's at stake here is motivating that little bitty base that wants to rule unopposed in its comfy theocracy. The base that does not grant the rights of others to their Constitutionally protected creed. -- You're worried they won't turn out for your patsy. Aren't ya?
So, it's not the 1950s, or 1890s, or even the Middle Ages you find attractive, but a Greece pre-Socrates, a Greece pre-democracy. The Greece of the Iliad, the Odyssey. I mean, this works analogically with both your social and economic policy, and your domestic policy come to maunder that. It is also, I would just like to point out, and like the 600-odd commandments of the Torah from which you cherry pick your morality, a PRE-CHRISTIAN Greece to which you would take us.
Good luck surviving there, fellas, in that old world or its present incarnations.
You, no, you do not have the chop for that. This move right here proves that much.
And it gets better, people. HHS tries to draft rules that define contraception as abortion. Feminist Majority has the scoop there, and the petition.
On their way out, McBush Co., LLC are going to try very hard to get the rest of their misogynist agenda through. Stay awake.
Sympathy Cards
People are dying. My neighbors' dad/grandpa, a close friend's brother and dad. All this week. For the close friend, no card. Why? Because I went to go by a card for the neighbors, and sympathy cards lack an essential quality...
sympathy.
I've lived near and known my neighbors for over 20 years. I babysat all three boys, who are now all 2 to 3 times larger than I am. I used to toss them onto the couch in a game well called Flying. One is now a pro rugby player, and I assure you, the size of a small truck. When he got be about my size (he was 10) he said I couldn't tell him what to do because I wasn't bigger than him anymore. My response: I grabbed him about the waist, turned him upside down, and bounced his head gently on the floor, righted him, and asked, "What was that?" We have not, thank goodness, had the payback moment. His mother cracked up at the time and said, "Huh, I hadn't thought of that." But, then she's 5' 10". This is an amazing family of care, good manners, helpfulness, smarts. They are the kind of people that you just know are good to the core and willing to act on it. You know this right when you meet them. I know Grandpa had a hand in that from stories they've told. Grandpa was the special elder to the youngest of the sons. We were just talking about that last week when the son came over to ride horses. He, by the way, is studying to be a large animal vet.
When my grandma, Betsy Helen, died, there was not a thing in the world you could tell me. I knew her death was a good thing for her, I knew that she welcomed it, I knew that I had a hole in my chest, I knew that I would have to walk through that hole. People let me be, or held me, or let me rattle on telling stories about her for a long time, or let me stare into space at odd moments. But, they did not shower me with half-baked schmaltz. Which was wise. Her wake and funeral reflected her and how she lives in all of us. We told stories, we cooked marvelous food, we laughed big belly laughs at some stories and at each other. We showered Grandpa with hugs and sat by him in silence. We cried, hard, at the eulogy. We spent that time loving each other real hard. It is one of my favorite memories, ever.
Deaths and families and funerals all have their own character, their quirks and necessities. Attending to those nuances is a big part of loving those in grief.
These cards, however, suck. What is it about death? I mean, really, it's not a shocking new development in the human experience, and these cards just skip right over any actual emotion or connection or reality to canned phrases and pablum seconded only my mother's day cards. They do not approach the situation honestly or sincerely. I hate them. What about the phrase, "May your hearts find their lightness again.... with sympathy" is in any way comforting or even really kind? "The stars may not be lights, but windows in the heavens through which our loved ones watch and love us." Oh. my. god. Thanks, I feel all hugged and supported. This emptiness, this cliche, can this actually feel even just OK when the emotions a grieving person stews in are Vast and Quite Deep and often Complicated even paradoxical? We're going to tell fairy tales in this situation? What are we? Even the official phrase, "I am sorry for your loss," is more genuine and real.
Is it that hard to find the words, the look, the gesture that will tell a grieving human, "I am right here with you"?? Is it? I don't think so. I've done it, I've seen it done, I've received it.
Someone died. This is normal. On the other hand, it's a terrible, normal, everyday thing that breaks our hearts utterly. Because there is no recourse, no alternative. That particular heart break is one we Must Learn and Make Part of Us in order be human together. These fucking cards do their level best to negate that, to refuse it, to guard against it. They are the antithesis of care or love. They are the words of strangers. We are not strangers in the presence of death. We are intimates, siblings, immediate family there.
So, if you become a grieving person, and I don't send you a Hallmark Card, please be assured I have something much more appropriate in the works. Cultures of Life deal with death head on and in full. Just keep that in mind.
sympathy.
I've lived near and known my neighbors for over 20 years. I babysat all three boys, who are now all 2 to 3 times larger than I am. I used to toss them onto the couch in a game well called Flying. One is now a pro rugby player, and I assure you, the size of a small truck. When he got be about my size (he was 10) he said I couldn't tell him what to do because I wasn't bigger than him anymore. My response: I grabbed him about the waist, turned him upside down, and bounced his head gently on the floor, righted him, and asked, "What was that?" We have not, thank goodness, had the payback moment. His mother cracked up at the time and said, "Huh, I hadn't thought of that." But, then she's 5' 10". This is an amazing family of care, good manners, helpfulness, smarts. They are the kind of people that you just know are good to the core and willing to act on it. You know this right when you meet them. I know Grandpa had a hand in that from stories they've told. Grandpa was the special elder to the youngest of the sons. We were just talking about that last week when the son came over to ride horses. He, by the way, is studying to be a large animal vet.
When my grandma, Betsy Helen, died, there was not a thing in the world you could tell me. I knew her death was a good thing for her, I knew that she welcomed it, I knew that I had a hole in my chest, I knew that I would have to walk through that hole. People let me be, or held me, or let me rattle on telling stories about her for a long time, or let me stare into space at odd moments. But, they did not shower me with half-baked schmaltz. Which was wise. Her wake and funeral reflected her and how she lives in all of us. We told stories, we cooked marvelous food, we laughed big belly laughs at some stories and at each other. We showered Grandpa with hugs and sat by him in silence. We cried, hard, at the eulogy. We spent that time loving each other real hard. It is one of my favorite memories, ever.
Deaths and families and funerals all have their own character, their quirks and necessities. Attending to those nuances is a big part of loving those in grief.
These cards, however, suck. What is it about death? I mean, really, it's not a shocking new development in the human experience, and these cards just skip right over any actual emotion or connection or reality to canned phrases and pablum seconded only my mother's day cards. They do not approach the situation honestly or sincerely. I hate them. What about the phrase, "May your hearts find their lightness again.... with sympathy" is in any way comforting or even really kind? "The stars may not be lights, but windows in the heavens through which our loved ones watch and love us." Oh. my. god. Thanks, I feel all hugged and supported. This emptiness, this cliche, can this actually feel even just OK when the emotions a grieving person stews in are Vast and Quite Deep and often Complicated even paradoxical? We're going to tell fairy tales in this situation? What are we? Even the official phrase, "I am sorry for your loss," is more genuine and real.
Is it that hard to find the words, the look, the gesture that will tell a grieving human, "I am right here with you"?? Is it? I don't think so. I've done it, I've seen it done, I've received it.
Someone died. This is normal. On the other hand, it's a terrible, normal, everyday thing that breaks our hearts utterly. Because there is no recourse, no alternative. That particular heart break is one we Must Learn and Make Part of Us in order be human together. These fucking cards do their level best to negate that, to refuse it, to guard against it. They are the antithesis of care or love. They are the words of strangers. We are not strangers in the presence of death. We are intimates, siblings, immediate family there.
So, if you become a grieving person, and I don't send you a Hallmark Card, please be assured I have something much more appropriate in the works. Cultures of Life deal with death head on and in full. Just keep that in mind.
6.8.08
More Found Days in San Francisco
Right. Enough looking for my check book.
So, up the nice flat street and bit of hill to City Lights. Book addicts and 20th Century Poetry majors understand why this is important. Beats, atmosphere, place of history, memorial to Kerouac and Cassidy and Ginsberg and ......... Lawrence Ferlinghetti established and owns the joint. It is one of many Lit Meccas dotting the orb we toddle on. The place is wedge between China Town (around which the Beats wonder in more than one tale) and some classic titty bars. Here I arrive with my List of Books to find that I can only find one of them -- mostly as I am not hot for much contemporary fiction at the moment, nor for a copy of everything any Beat ever wrote. Proto-Beats like Miller, yes (accidentally), and anthol. for Lioness (no dice), and Language for a New Century -- finally!
Whilst musing over others' muses, a Savior installs himself with, oh yes, sandwich board and bullhorn, to harangue the titty bar clientèle, "We do not want you to burn in a lake of fire for eternity. Do not enter that den of vice and sin! Consider your soul!" Etc. Like anyone bent on watching strippers can even hear him. Poor Savior. We inside the temple are amused and a little sad for Savior. Meanwhile, I'm flipping through Miller to find this: We'd have to take the whole world into consideration and see that every man, woman and child got a square deal. We'd have to have something positive to offer the world--not just defending ourselves...and pretending that we are defending civilization. If really set out to do something for the world, unselfishly, I believe we would succeed. So here Miller and I and the Savior coalesce, and my inkling that interning with Smart Mag of Soul is a good idea, AND that there are a gazillion yummy quotations in here that go in my Murdoch-Irigarary essay, just to keep people on their toes.Behind the temple is The Alley with its art and plaques and pigeons which someone kindly left
with a whole baguette to peck. And I'm for heading home. The bus I'm to take is not running here, I discover, at this time, and hiking is all that's left. It is UPHILL every way I test, and not just a little. I'm a gal raised on the prairie, so any incline of a grade more than 15* is mountain climbing. These are grades of 30 and 45 and 50*. But there are views to be had on the way up. Way in the back of this one is the bridge, not that you can tell, tho my phone camera takes pretty kickin pics.
It's a good walk. That was the night of staying in and Pizza Orgasmica, which was pretty good, but not as inuendoed.
So, we back up now to Thursday and Friday.Arrive Thursday. Lioness is in fine fettle and hankering to eat at a place called The Street, likely cuz it's on Polk, the street where SF keeps much of its swank and fun. Now here is food. Apperatives of vodka infused in-house with fig (scrumptious) and cucumber (must drink this every summer), and then a steak salad for me which has become in a Lioness-phrase The Platonic Steak Salad of meat the thickness of a chapbook, seared and rare, with Gorgonzola and box cherry tomatoes on romaine. Lioness had the shrimp risotto, divine. Then a cheesecake of Meyer's Lemons with raspberry drizzle and a glass of real, honest to Joan of Arc calvados for a digestif! The joint itself is hip full of hip SF folk in their zen-like grooviness and music contemporary-electronic-jazz-Ocean's 11-soundtrack-y pleased us all night. Lioness fills me in on the smart and world-saving work at the sexuality seminar that will help her rescue teenagers from dumbassed views and addresses to their sexual being. She rocks. But, those are her stories to tell. Thence away from delightful eatery and off to unpack and sleep. After that meal, one sleeps convinced: Let us stop playing the role of recidivist. Let us stop murdering each other. The earth is not a lair, neither is it a prison. The earth is Paradise, the only one we will ever know. We will realize it the moment we open our eyes.... We have only make ourselves fit to inhabit it.
Friday. Lioness does a half-day at the seminar, and we hook up downtown for lunch and the SFMOMA to see Frida Kahlo exhibit. Which, if that's anywhere near you on its tour, GO. This was my astonishing find, Moses. Whew. Now, a bit of fun here is that we wind up the stairs with the gaggles of other art enthusiasts to the top floor for the exhibit. Across the atrium, a small window, into which is peeking
Oh joy and happiness! Tickled to dissolution. So, gazing and exploring there is also the grand red abstraction: Philipe Guston's 1955, For M. And thence to the street again to home, to rest and find our way to the evening meeting with Princess. This sadly, went wry and lead to the bus stop with the Broken Screaming Man, to whom I wish all the peace ever.And Sunday before the awesome cab ride to travel doom, there was tapas and this drink. This drink was also a vodka drink. Again infused. Grey Goose Pear Vodka with slice of pear and sprig of rosemary, very bruised. I argued it tasted like the sky. Lioness argued it tasted like winter twilight. Fair enough. This inspired a Christmas Cocktail Party plan, which in turn inspired my idea that we bruise the sprigs and slices by concocting the libation in a hamster ball with ice cubes and play catch with it amongst the guests. Lioness on this plan, "I love the way your inner fascist is balanced by your inner anarchist." Because she is hilarious, and right. Moment's before, we were eating a small pile of roasted and garlicked eggplant, under a sliced of quickly sautéed tomato, under a heap of goat cheese, to which I announced, "This will be breakfast every day after the revolution." So, she's right.
Thanks for inviting me out, dear sister. Now, gotta find that check book and write something about Murdoch while the universe will not let me work on anything else because she's telling me to work on Murdoch, now, silly, while you can. Do not be distracted by the shiny new projects just yet!
20.7.08
Lost Days in San Francisco
Sunday in San Francisco, meant to get up On Time and hustle over to the, not kidding, African Orthodox Church of St. John Coltrane, but was up late processing life and soul with Lioness, hence went to bed functioning on one tenth of brain, and forgot to set alarm. No Jazz Mass for me. But, a link for all of us that we may gaze and desire in classic "can't have that" mode. Next time. Next time with lovely M who is kinetic enough that I'll be kinetic enough to get my booty to church on time.
Also, it's cold and windy out. Yesterday, I hiked the city, and hiked home to the top of Nob Hill from China Town and City Lights, and it was cold and windy then too, so I'm not feeling it today. I simply am not feeling brave and jumpy enough for The Haight and Church and possible other wonders.
So, stay in, waste it, and read H. Miller's The Air Conditioned Nightmare purchased at City Lights yesterday. Because he was human, and even here on the Mother Ship, there's way too much that's not-human. The doppelganger mad homeless I've seen in the last two days are haunting me. One, late at
night, Lioness and I having visited the Princess in town for BlogHer, and eaten at some random forgettable cafe, wait for the bus. A man is doubling over and screaming, "ahhhhalalallalalalalala!" about every four to seven seconds. He is not performing. He is mad, lost, shattered, and trying to walk down the street, but has to stop, bend, and yell every few seconds. Truly a lost soul. There is no way to help him, no one can even tell if its possible to communicate to with him. Everything that is inhuman in us infected this man and sent his self away. Next day, in Union Square Park, am waiting for another bus after visit with the Princess and new son, The Boy Detective. Another homeless man lies on the grass as if napping, head cradled in arm, face down, convulsing. I observe because he might need more aggressive help than a city shelter and hot meal. He is laughing, at nothing, and no one, alone in his laugh, and seems just as trapped in it as Yelling Man was in his yell. This is the nightmare paralleling the pretty pretty city and it's lovely lovely groove and jazzy church. Not at all ironically, these men bookended visits to The Westin St. Francis. Anyway, it was air conditioned, heavily carpeted, elegantly jammed, discreetly lit, pompously efficient in every detail. S-w-a-n-k. Lioness stayed in this day too and read for her seminars. That work, this crewe of people she's meeting, and the knowledge sister is nailing down, this will help the world suck less. I'm so wildly proud of her. While stimulating, it has not been easy for her. Brave woman.
Art is not born of a dead people.
Have now returned home. Let's us begin with the return home. I can get back to hiking the city later. Air travel these days.What. As Miller puts it, writing of America as WWII gets into high gear: we sit in the sky and talk of cardboard boxes and button fasteners, while they sit in the sky and talk of extermination. Now the reverse, but still. I was waiting to sit in the sky. On the way to SFO Monday bright, I met Dean, the taxi driver. I like taxis because I never know whether the driver will be chatty and affable or not (unless in the South or Ireland where, always). Dean was chatty. He warmed me up with weather (excellent for walking, easy on the tourists), and the architecture (color, history) and BAM, we were off on Dean (the painter's) theory of urban renewal and historical restoration, which boils, correctly, down to this: How can you have a vision
for your future if you cannot see your past? A rhetorical point applicable far far beyond the city. Also, Dean is not originally from America, he's from someplace where the routine is to keep the history. And then on walking: humans are designed for it, suburbs make us fat and dead. He was vibrant, wide open, and completely one of Henry Miller's men. Alive. I arrived at SFO awake and happy and ready to go.
In the city one can stroll at random and feel like a civilized human being. But not the airport. Flight out of SFO was delayed beyond my scheduled arrival time at LAX. Clearly the Travel Gods were not with me this day. Something else held their attention. This happens. Roll with it is my take. Time to give in and shop. Couple lefty mags to read (RS's cover of Obama, just he man, no words, go you RS!!) , a souvenir coffee cup for a friend who collects souvenirs from other people's trips.She's awesome. Some lunch. A snack. Some walking around noticing the distinct and unsettling lack of clocks in SFO. At last on the plane. Up, pleasantly, and notice that none other than Forrest Whitaker is sitting three rows up. -- !!!!! -- I don't know what snafu led him sit in coach on my flight, and I waited to detect the incomplete gesture, the smile not right, the tell that this was an impersonator, but no, it was him. We locked I eyes, I smiled thanks for the good work, and so there he was. All cheerful and easy. That fast way of turning his head, the slightly lazy eye, him. The French father behind me asked for a pic with his son, and got it, happily. So, you know, brush with fame. Then saw a forest fire out the window. Billows of brown smoke rising wide and high as a mountain before flattening in the lower winds. Angry thing it was. A future. Then, LAX.
They buy anything and everything, just keep the money in circulation.
Every bad thing anyone ever said about LAX is true and then some. Sadly. I'm a bright-side sort, really, don't expect angels to pee in my beer. I'm pretty sure they already did. Defeat awaits the optimist, however. It
arrives at not-quite ridiculous 11.55pm. Six minutes late, and it's tomorrow. I call the 'rents with the skinny. They suggest bargaining for an earlier flight. I try. There are none that do not route me through A. Chicago, or B. Atlanta and get me in at 1 am or 9can't wait for the pessimist. The pessimist is already there. Chat up the AA rep about the next flight to STL, of which there had better be one, and there is. at 6.20. OK, that's only a few more hours delay and puts me into STLish tomorrow morning!!!! NFW am I doing that. Call the 'rents with my refusal. Agreed. Check the flight status board. My flight is now delayed until, gulp, center self, 8.40 pm. I will not arrive in STL until 3 am, which means that I will not see my house until 4 am. Which I don't, and decide to just ride it out Tuesday and not sleep (which I didn't, until 7 pm when I fell like a stone). But, I'm in LA right now, stuck there long enough that I bought a Tshirt to commemorate the experience. These are my feet and and another book which I started reading because deconstructing the notion of hospitality in philosophy was, srsly, comforting in the badland that is LAX where was so little to be found. Because, you see, there was this huge storm over the Rockies and then the Midwest around which all the flights were diverting, both ways. In the total travel time from apartment on Nob to home at Walden, I could have hied myself to, oh, Bangkok, or Istanbul. Really.
Up side of this: not the bowl of "chili" I had at the Chili's (you sad bastards) in the terminal, nor the million hours til my next cigarette. Only this: I got to fly around a thunderstorm of epic intensity for the second time in my life!!!!!! I flip out over this. This rocks. This is why there is 20th Century technology. Seeing that energy, that explosion from the point of view of angels--oh. hell. yes! I want this for a present someday: four hours circling a thunderstorm in a plane. Anyone? Coming? There will be music? C'mon. I'm going to save up for it. OK, and my iPod battery made the whole trip, and the flight attendant decided I was cute and doubled my drinks. I was not so cute at that hour, but I had inquired of the crew to make sure they felt OK and were still alert. Same attendant showed me the cover of the current US NEWS&WR, the snake eating tail, and said, "This is what the crew feels like. It's been an ass of a day." So, I was humane to this guy because he was human to me and voila, free libations for me. Easy. I mean that late at night, trapped in a tube hurtling through the sky, exhausted, sleepless, no longer able to focus well enough to read, I will not turn down booze offered to moi for being moi. Oh no. I can't sleep on planes, so I read, play cards, or drink a little. What.
THE WORLD AWAKE! Just to repeat that to yourself five times a day is enough to make an anarchist of you. How would you awaken the world? Have you ever thought about it? Or would you rather remain asleep?
On that flight, it was a toss up (but for my nosleeponplanes thing). I would fly people around thunderstorms. I would do that and say, We will have to stop this on Wednesday so that we might survive.
And that, that was the down time. I leave you with this bit from Henry, indicting myself on two counts along with all of us: The wealthy can always be induced to support another museum; the academics can always be counted upon to provide us with watch-dogs and hyenas; the critics can always be bought who will kill what is fresh and vital; the educators can always be rallied who will misinform the young as to the meaning of art; the vandals can always be instigated to destroy what is powerful and disturbing. The poor can think of nothing but food and rent problems; the rich can amuse themselves by collecting safe investments furnished to them by the ghouls who traffic in the sweat and blood of artists; the middle classes can pay admission to gape and criticize, vain about their half-baked knowledge of art and too timid to champion the men whom in their hearts they fear, know that the real enemy is not the man above, whom they must toady to, but the rebel who exposes in word or paint the rottenness of the edifice which they, the spineless middle class, are obliged to support.... Such is the state of America to-day. How long will it endure? Perhaps the war is a blessing in disguise. Perhaps, after the war we have gone through another blood bath, well will give heed to the men who seek to arrange life on in other terms than greed, rivalry, hatred, death and destruction.
That was four for five wars ago. All I have to add to this, to the coal-hot rant of that generation is this:
How dead are you willing to get?
Also, it's cold and windy out. Yesterday, I hiked the city, and hiked home to the top of Nob Hill from China Town and City Lights, and it was cold and windy then too, so I'm not feeling it today. I simply am not feeling brave and jumpy enough for The Haight and Church and possible other wonders.
So, stay in, waste it, and read H. Miller's The Air Conditioned Nightmare purchased at City Lights yesterday. Because he was human, and even here on the Mother Ship, there's way too much that's not-human. The doppelganger mad homeless I've seen in the last two days are haunting me. One, late at
night, Lioness and I having visited the Princess in town for BlogHer, and eaten at some random forgettable cafe, wait for the bus. A man is doubling over and screaming, "ahhhhalalallalalalalala!" about every four to seven seconds. He is not performing. He is mad, lost, shattered, and trying to walk down the street, but has to stop, bend, and yell every few seconds. Truly a lost soul. There is no way to help him, no one can even tell if its possible to communicate to with him. Everything that is inhuman in us infected this man and sent his self away. Next day, in Union Square Park, am waiting for another bus after visit with the Princess and new son, The Boy Detective. Another homeless man lies on the grass as if napping, head cradled in arm, face down, convulsing. I observe because he might need more aggressive help than a city shelter and hot meal. He is laughing, at nothing, and no one, alone in his laugh, and seems just as trapped in it as Yelling Man was in his yell. This is the nightmare paralleling the pretty pretty city and it's lovely lovely groove and jazzy church. Not at all ironically, these men bookended visits to The Westin St. Francis. Anyway, it was air conditioned, heavily carpeted, elegantly jammed, discreetly lit, pompously efficient in every detail. S-w-a-n-k. Lioness stayed in this day too and read for her seminars. That work, this crewe of people she's meeting, and the knowledge sister is nailing down, this will help the world suck less. I'm so wildly proud of her. While stimulating, it has not been easy for her. Brave woman.Art is not born of a dead people.
Have now returned home. Let's us begin with the return home. I can get back to hiking the city later. Air travel these days.What. As Miller puts it, writing of America as WWII gets into high gear: we sit in the sky and talk of cardboard boxes and button fasteners, while they sit in the sky and talk of extermination. Now the reverse, but still. I was waiting to sit in the sky. On the way to SFO Monday bright, I met Dean, the taxi driver. I like taxis because I never know whether the driver will be chatty and affable or not (unless in the South or Ireland where, always). Dean was chatty. He warmed me up with weather (excellent for walking, easy on the tourists), and the architecture (color, history) and BAM, we were off on Dean (the painter's) theory of urban renewal and historical restoration, which boils, correctly, down to this: How can you have a vision
for your future if you cannot see your past? A rhetorical point applicable far far beyond the city. Also, Dean is not originally from America, he's from someplace where the routine is to keep the history. And then on walking: humans are designed for it, suburbs make us fat and dead. He was vibrant, wide open, and completely one of Henry Miller's men. Alive. I arrived at SFO awake and happy and ready to go.In the city one can stroll at random and feel like a civilized human being. But not the airport. Flight out of SFO was delayed beyond my scheduled arrival time at LAX. Clearly the Travel Gods were not with me this day. Something else held their attention. This happens. Roll with it is my take. Time to give in and shop. Couple lefty mags to read (RS's cover of Obama, just he man, no words, go you RS!!) , a souvenir coffee cup for a friend who collects souvenirs from other people's trips.She's awesome. Some lunch. A snack. Some walking around noticing the distinct and unsettling lack of clocks in SFO. At last on the plane. Up, pleasantly, and notice that none other than Forrest Whitaker is sitting three rows up. -- !!!!! -- I don't know what snafu led him sit in coach on my flight, and I waited to detect the incomplete gesture, the smile not right, the tell that this was an impersonator, but no, it was him. We locked I eyes, I smiled thanks for the good work, and so there he was. All cheerful and easy. That fast way of turning his head, the slightly lazy eye, him. The French father behind me asked for a pic with his son, and got it, happily. So, you know, brush with fame. Then saw a forest fire out the window. Billows of brown smoke rising wide and high as a mountain before flattening in the lower winds. Angry thing it was. A future. Then, LAX.
They buy anything and everything, just keep the money in circulation.
Every bad thing anyone ever said about LAX is true and then some. Sadly. I'm a bright-side sort, really, don't expect angels to pee in my beer. I'm pretty sure they already did. Defeat awaits the optimist, however. It
arrives at not-quite ridiculous 11.55pm. Six minutes late, and it's tomorrow. I call the 'rents with the skinny. They suggest bargaining for an earlier flight. I try. There are none that do not route me through A. Chicago, or B. Atlanta and get me in at 1 am or 9can't wait for the pessimist. The pessimist is already there. Chat up the AA rep about the next flight to STL, of which there had better be one, and there is. at 6.20. OK, that's only a few more hours delay and puts me into STLish tomorrow morning!!!! NFW am I doing that. Call the 'rents with my refusal. Agreed. Check the flight status board. My flight is now delayed until, gulp, center self, 8.40 pm. I will not arrive in STL until 3 am, which means that I will not see my house until 4 am. Which I don't, and decide to just ride it out Tuesday and not sleep (which I didn't, until 7 pm when I fell like a stone). But, I'm in LA right now, stuck there long enough that I bought a Tshirt to commemorate the experience. These are my feet and and another book which I started reading because deconstructing the notion of hospitality in philosophy was, srsly, comforting in the badland that is LAX where was so little to be found. Because, you see, there was this huge storm over the Rockies and then the Midwest around which all the flights were diverting, both ways. In the total travel time from apartment on Nob to home at Walden, I could have hied myself to, oh, Bangkok, or Istanbul. Really.Up side of this: not the bowl of "chili" I had at the Chili's (you sad bastards) in the terminal, nor the million hours til my next cigarette. Only this: I got to fly around a thunderstorm of epic intensity for the second time in my life!!!!!! I flip out over this. This rocks. This is why there is 20th Century technology. Seeing that energy, that explosion from the point of view of angels--oh. hell. yes! I want this for a present someday: four hours circling a thunderstorm in a plane. Anyone? Coming? There will be music? C'mon. I'm going to save up for it. OK, and my iPod battery made the whole trip, and the flight attendant decided I was cute and doubled my drinks. I was not so cute at that hour, but I had inquired of the crew to make sure they felt OK and were still alert. Same attendant showed me the cover of the current US NEWS&WR, the snake eating tail, and said, "This is what the crew feels like. It's been an ass of a day." So, I was humane to this guy because he was human to me and voila, free libations for me. Easy. I mean that late at night, trapped in a tube hurtling through the sky, exhausted, sleepless, no longer able to focus well enough to read, I will not turn down booze offered to moi for being moi. Oh no. I can't sleep on planes, so I read, play cards, or drink a little. What.
THE WORLD AWAKE! Just to repeat that to yourself five times a day is enough to make an anarchist of you. How would you awaken the world? Have you ever thought about it? Or would you rather remain asleep?
On that flight, it was a toss up (but for my nosleeponplanes thing). I would fly people around thunderstorms. I would do that and say, We will have to stop this on Wednesday so that we might survive.
And that, that was the down time. I leave you with this bit from Henry, indicting myself on two counts along with all of us: The wealthy can always be induced to support another museum; the academics can always be counted upon to provide us with watch-dogs and hyenas; the critics can always be bought who will kill what is fresh and vital; the educators can always be rallied who will misinform the young as to the meaning of art; the vandals can always be instigated to destroy what is powerful and disturbing. The poor can think of nothing but food and rent problems; the rich can amuse themselves by collecting safe investments furnished to them by the ghouls who traffic in the sweat and blood of artists; the middle classes can pay admission to gape and criticize, vain about their half-baked knowledge of art and too timid to champion the men whom in their hearts they fear, know that the real enemy is not the man above, whom they must toady to, but the rebel who exposes in word or paint the rottenness of the edifice which they, the spineless middle class, are obliged to support.... Such is the state of America to-day. How long will it endure? Perhaps the war is a blessing in disguise. Perhaps, after the war we have gone through another blood bath, well will give heed to the men who seek to arrange life on in other terms than greed, rivalry, hatred, death and destruction.
That was four for five wars ago. All I have to add to this, to the coal-hot rant of that generation is this:
How dead are you willing to get?
27.6.08
Very Long Poem
Sometimes I write this prosey, humor-y poems that are not like the others. Here's one from the frustration file in the overwritten style of the break-up letter:
May 2007
The Kitchen Table
Dear America,
We have been married for thirty-eight years, and while you have always been something of a fuck-up, America, you used to be a dashing, well-meaning, even groovy fuck-up who tried to do some good in the world. It wasn’t always good, but you and I could at least feel that your motives were right and just, that we had both good and bad in our marriage, as we should expect. And we were so in love for a while, and the sex was delicious at first. I know, I know, I pledged myself to you. I was so happy just be with you that I said that pledge everyday for years. But you made a pledge to me too. These last twenty years, the last six mostly, have become too much for me to bear. I barely recognize you now. I just can’t keep apologizing for you in public all the time. Especially since I remember my pride at being with you, extolling your virtues at all those dinner parties. But that public embarrassment is nothing compared to our private life.
I am leaving you. The sadness I feel at those words nearly stops my hand, but I feel I owe you some explanation.
All of our marriage together, while you helped to support me and make my teaching our children and others’ possible, I have suffered, America, the buffeting of your abuse. I can’t win what has become only battle with you no matter much my love for you leads me to wish to fulfill your desires.
Over the years, more and more often, what you have promised and what you have done diverge. Either you are lying maliciously, or are simply too callous to care about the effects of your behavior. You said you would focus our family’s well being, but neglected us in the most disappointing way. You refused to let our children really learn, or even to feed some of them, and you made many of them sleep outside for no reason at all. When I raised objections, you said I was crazy, that they had to learn to fend for themselves, and huffed out of the house to disappear for hours. Then you went and tore up Kyle and Dwayne’s landscaping, probably to warn we what would happen should I let the kids back in, but that’s another matter. You said that you would consult me in the important decisions, that we would discuss them and choose the best courses together. Instead, you have made decisions unilaterally, saying that discussion was a sign of my doubt, even a lack of love for you. When you allowed discussion, you misrepresented the facts and choices, leading me to agree to courses of action I would never assent to with full knowledge. The cognitive dissonance is just too much bear. No matter how much I remember loving you, I just don’t know who you or we are anymore.
And the physical abuse? Need we rehash that? You know what you did. What you allowed to happen. Remember how you used to want me to call you Uncle when we were in bed together. “Say Uncle, Say Uncle,” you would whisper in the desperate moments. Well, then it changed, it changed to, “Who’s your daddy?” I started to worry that the incest metaphors were getting too creepy, so I asked that we not play that game anymore. You know what you did. And you taped it, and you put it on YouTube, and now men on the street won’t stop leering and rubbing against me. I just can’t deal with this. I know I could go to the police, but getting the fuck out of here is just easier than dealing with your legal system. There are so many husbands with whom I would be safer that staying with you is simply irrational.
And the neighbors? What really terrifies me is that you’re becoming more and more paranoid. Yeh, I know one of their spoiled kids blew up our tool shed, but you know, the Karsoszy’s kids were in there too. Why did you have to go all Rambo like that? We were not the only ones bereft that day. I know that some of them just are not on the same reality map we are, but you and I are not on the same reality map anymore either. I fear that you have felt my withdrawal from you, my support flagging. Your constant fear even of people we use to have cookouts with and worked with on some of the homeowners association projects, I fear you might escalate your more and more random and aggressive behavior toward them. They’re so scared of you that they haven’t even noticed the crack house is open for business again. I know, right on the corner where we worked so hard to get them out, but they’re back because everyone used to look up to you and now they don’t know where to look. I have no idea why you had to blow up down the Jaffif’s Rose of Sharon, but you did. And they had nothing to do with the shed, and you knew it. Now I can’t even look Noor in the eye. She and I used to have coffee. Now we have nothing. That was all you, America. You’re breaking everything. Isolating me more and more from my friends. Where did you get that C-4 anyway? What is in that room in the basement you put the electronic lock on?
Anyway, I’ve asked you for years and years to help me get the radon thing under control and a water filter that catches arsenic, but you just won’t do it. You’ve gone so overboard with your precious goddamn “lawn care” that my vegetable garden and my roses are poisoned at the root. I couldn’t grow us edible vegetables if I were Martha Goddamn Stewart. And all that smoking in the house, do you know what that’s doing to my health? Do you care? No, all you do is bitch about our insurance premiums, how we can’t afford that new Escalade.
There’s just too much to write. I mean thirty-eight years of unstable and now dangerous marriage, America? How could I explain it all?
I have to go catch my plane. Now don’t go looking for me, don’t ask what flight I was on. The most mortal moments in a woman’s life are the days just after her abusive husband discovers she is leaving, so I assure you, America, by the time you read this, I will be long gone. I have had myself declared legally dead so my paper trail will end. I stole the identity of a long dead French sheep farmer who used to make Roquefort. To do this, I have betrayed you for a long time by saving part of my meager teacher’s salary in a tax exempt account in the Cayman Islands that I might pay for identity theft and expatriation to a place where you will never find me. I know the double insult of my betrayal and absence will leave no place for you to aim your anger. Your frustration and possible consequent behavior sadden me for both you and those you will no doubt injure or annoy as you burn it off.
But I can’t help anyone if I am not whole, and I am not whole, America. Not anymore. Please, take care of yourself, and there’s a casserole in the freezer. I know how you hate getting back from a junket and there’s no food ready in the house. I have arranged for transfer of the kid’s custody to people who love them, and made that custody a condition of your inheritance of my assets and possessions in my will. I suggest you get some therapy and put yourself back together, but you will have to do it without me. I don’t care what you do with the house or my grandmother’s silver or any of it. A legal death certificate and the new notarized will are on the desk next to your iPod. So, that’s all up to you, which is how you like it. I just need to rest. I’m going someplace where I’ll have to live by my hands. You know, most of the world. Working with my hands, concentrating on simple survival will help settle my soul and rebuild my sense of connection to life. It’s all I can manage now.
I loved you.
Your legally dead wife,
Kathy
May 2007
The Kitchen Table
Dear America,
We have been married for thirty-eight years, and while you have always been something of a fuck-up, America, you used to be a dashing, well-meaning, even groovy fuck-up who tried to do some good in the world. It wasn’t always good, but you and I could at least feel that your motives were right and just, that we had both good and bad in our marriage, as we should expect. And we were so in love for a while, and the sex was delicious at first. I know, I know, I pledged myself to you. I was so happy just be with you that I said that pledge everyday for years. But you made a pledge to me too. These last twenty years, the last six mostly, have become too much for me to bear. I barely recognize you now. I just can’t keep apologizing for you in public all the time. Especially since I remember my pride at being with you, extolling your virtues at all those dinner parties. But that public embarrassment is nothing compared to our private life.
I am leaving you. The sadness I feel at those words nearly stops my hand, but I feel I owe you some explanation.
All of our marriage together, while you helped to support me and make my teaching our children and others’ possible, I have suffered, America, the buffeting of your abuse. I can’t win what has become only battle with you no matter much my love for you leads me to wish to fulfill your desires.
Over the years, more and more often, what you have promised and what you have done diverge. Either you are lying maliciously, or are simply too callous to care about the effects of your behavior. You said you would focus our family’s well being, but neglected us in the most disappointing way. You refused to let our children really learn, or even to feed some of them, and you made many of them sleep outside for no reason at all. When I raised objections, you said I was crazy, that they had to learn to fend for themselves, and huffed out of the house to disappear for hours. Then you went and tore up Kyle and Dwayne’s landscaping, probably to warn we what would happen should I let the kids back in, but that’s another matter. You said that you would consult me in the important decisions, that we would discuss them and choose the best courses together. Instead, you have made decisions unilaterally, saying that discussion was a sign of my doubt, even a lack of love for you. When you allowed discussion, you misrepresented the facts and choices, leading me to agree to courses of action I would never assent to with full knowledge. The cognitive dissonance is just too much bear. No matter how much I remember loving you, I just don’t know who you or we are anymore.
And the physical abuse? Need we rehash that? You know what you did. What you allowed to happen. Remember how you used to want me to call you Uncle when we were in bed together. “Say Uncle, Say Uncle,” you would whisper in the desperate moments. Well, then it changed, it changed to, “Who’s your daddy?” I started to worry that the incest metaphors were getting too creepy, so I asked that we not play that game anymore. You know what you did. And you taped it, and you put it on YouTube, and now men on the street won’t stop leering and rubbing against me. I just can’t deal with this. I know I could go to the police, but getting the fuck out of here is just easier than dealing with your legal system. There are so many husbands with whom I would be safer that staying with you is simply irrational.
And the neighbors? What really terrifies me is that you’re becoming more and more paranoid. Yeh, I know one of their spoiled kids blew up our tool shed, but you know, the Karsoszy’s kids were in there too. Why did you have to go all Rambo like that? We were not the only ones bereft that day. I know that some of them just are not on the same reality map we are, but you and I are not on the same reality map anymore either. I fear that you have felt my withdrawal from you, my support flagging. Your constant fear even of people we use to have cookouts with and worked with on some of the homeowners association projects, I fear you might escalate your more and more random and aggressive behavior toward them. They’re so scared of you that they haven’t even noticed the crack house is open for business again. I know, right on the corner where we worked so hard to get them out, but they’re back because everyone used to look up to you and now they don’t know where to look. I have no idea why you had to blow up down the Jaffif’s Rose of Sharon, but you did. And they had nothing to do with the shed, and you knew it. Now I can’t even look Noor in the eye. She and I used to have coffee. Now we have nothing. That was all you, America. You’re breaking everything. Isolating me more and more from my friends. Where did you get that C-4 anyway? What is in that room in the basement you put the electronic lock on?
Anyway, I’ve asked you for years and years to help me get the radon thing under control and a water filter that catches arsenic, but you just won’t do it. You’ve gone so overboard with your precious goddamn “lawn care” that my vegetable garden and my roses are poisoned at the root. I couldn’t grow us edible vegetables if I were Martha Goddamn Stewart. And all that smoking in the house, do you know what that’s doing to my health? Do you care? No, all you do is bitch about our insurance premiums, how we can’t afford that new Escalade.
There’s just too much to write. I mean thirty-eight years of unstable and now dangerous marriage, America? How could I explain it all?
I have to go catch my plane. Now don’t go looking for me, don’t ask what flight I was on. The most mortal moments in a woman’s life are the days just after her abusive husband discovers she is leaving, so I assure you, America, by the time you read this, I will be long gone. I have had myself declared legally dead so my paper trail will end. I stole the identity of a long dead French sheep farmer who used to make Roquefort. To do this, I have betrayed you for a long time by saving part of my meager teacher’s salary in a tax exempt account in the Cayman Islands that I might pay for identity theft and expatriation to a place where you will never find me. I know the double insult of my betrayal and absence will leave no place for you to aim your anger. Your frustration and possible consequent behavior sadden me for both you and those you will no doubt injure or annoy as you burn it off.
But I can’t help anyone if I am not whole, and I am not whole, America. Not anymore. Please, take care of yourself, and there’s a casserole in the freezer. I know how you hate getting back from a junket and there’s no food ready in the house. I have arranged for transfer of the kid’s custody to people who love them, and made that custody a condition of your inheritance of my assets and possessions in my will. I suggest you get some therapy and put yourself back together, but you will have to do it without me. I don’t care what you do with the house or my grandmother’s silver or any of it. A legal death certificate and the new notarized will are on the desk next to your iPod. So, that’s all up to you, which is how you like it. I just need to rest. I’m going someplace where I’ll have to live by my hands. You know, most of the world. Working with my hands, concentrating on simple survival will help settle my soul and rebuild my sense of connection to life. It’s all I can manage now.
I loved you.
Your legally dead wife,
Kathy
12.6.08
Hale-God-Damn-lujia!
We get Habeus Corpus back!!!
I know, it means the evil doers get it too, but if they don't have it, neither do we.
I know, it means the evil doers get it too, but if they don't have it, neither do we.
"The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times,” Justice AnthonyM. Kennedy wrote for the court.Especially so.
ExxonMobile Advert, Gen X, Changing of the Guard and Rant
Head's Up, people.
I'm good at noticing Things That Are Rediculous, so please, you do not have to smack me with them while I'm watching TV (though, that is where you keep a lot of these Things).
I'm watching the news last night. An ad comes on for ExxonMobile. (disclosure: my grandpa retired from Mobile as one of their gazillions of VPs, which means he worked for you, which means I owe you nothing). Calm, expert sounding, warm-faced people are waxing imaginative and ecologically conscious about the future of our energy needs and working to solve them. The shots are all Traditional Bust of Authority Figure portraits, from mid-chest up. It's all very reassuring in tone (and schmaltzy). And then, gradually (it's a looooooong, expensive ad) all they're talking about is OIL and new, expensive widgets for getting at it, and how much investment all that is going to take. Don't worry, the ad means, there's plenty of oil, we don't need to change energy sources, we're using our Value of the Whole Roman Empire Profits to invest in widgets and exploration and extraction, and never you mind the impending eco-collapse and deaths of billions of people, land and water wars, having to learn to raise and butcher your own meat, weave your own cloth.....
Now, we know they're nervous, Oil Companies, about how much $$$$ they have and how we want to know what in the world they're doing with it. I want them nervous. I don't want their schmaltzy-assed propaganda. I want them and their cadre to get the Memo From the Planet.
It reads: Work with me here, or I will decimate you. --- Love, Kali.
Like the love and reproductive capabilities of women, the planet is exhaustible.
I want them to produce solar panels and home-batteries so cheap that we can buy them at Wal-Mart, put them on roofs all over the world (except for religious and historical buildings), get off the grid, and power up our small, cute, electric cars in order to commute to our local, recently dispersed, centers of corporate work. See, the internets literally mean that we don't have to be In The Office in order to be in the office. Build more trains for long distance travel. Power those with wind and solar electricity too. That host of Living Smaller ideas whack-o hippies and tree huggers have been suggesting for freaking decades.
Everything we to know and do is already thought, half-built, or so obviously suggesting itself that it's not like we can claim we have no idea.
For one: Put gobs of the remaining oil energy into creating the new energy infrastructure so that we can stop burning carbon and killing ourselves. Dammit. That is the message of peak oil, and don't pretend that you don't know that and don't just refuse to play nicely.
This is what has always pissed me off about much of the Greatest Generation and mainstream Boomers (and the uber-wealthy, and lots of patriarchal history): We have a new idea! --- It's the same old idea! Ta-da!
Like, oh, say: dumping economic risk down scale. This was the economic logic of which political system we threw off in the revolution and the New Deal? Come on. You know the answer. That's right: Aristocracy and Robber Baron-ism. The new idea was called NeoLiberalism, but it's just an old idea. The people are a resource, kind of like a coal mine, let's get all we can out of them, ha-ha, another glass of sherry my man? Besides, if we drain them now, they won't be able to afford the costs of these necessary changes, and we win!! No?, then cognac?
(To those of you of that class who are working for good, I do not mean you. I thank you. Cuz, dude/ttes I do not have the scratch you do to leverage.)
A book I came across recently: X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft but Can Still Keep Everything from Sucking. Which pretty much sums up my sense of the last 40 or so years of American social, political, and cultural history (backlash, etc.). Since about age 14 my running question has been: How did you people fuck you-name-it up this badly?
You see, there was "America" as I was taught it, and there was America as I was living it. They do not jive.
Which sense of betrayal and outrage and dark astonishment is why I'm jazzed about Obama and the Jonesin Generation (as in jonesin to get things done). I do not think he is the messiah, I do not think he can Fix It All For Me. (My only problem with the Amazingly Strong Hillary was not even really about her, it was just that the past is not where I want to go. Which is totally emotional, and not really fair, and insufficiently feminist of me, but there it was.) I think he, and lots of folk in that generation and mine, have evolved different assumptions and and can create structures so that We can Implement Really New Ideas and Save Souls from Torment and Trouble Here On Earth.
Because, duh, History is the accumulated evidence and force of Decisions People Make and Accede To.
What's happening here,
in our political moment, underneath the gender and race (class, civil rights, respect for peoples of the world, and all that) issues we notice still need our sustained and fierce attention (and some scathing pressure on talking heads to get the hell with it, man),
is...
A Changing of the Guard.
Not just "change" like changing your pants. A shift. Like chaning your self. Gradual, needing some foundation laying, rewarding, enhancing, and totally possible.
It's pretty clear to me that lots of the Greats and Boomers in power (econ, politic) simply don't know or really care (both of which are marks of shame) to clean up the messes they made.
So, get out of the damn way and let us and the Yers and Millennials and Indigos do it. (And you Xers who are driving your two kids to soccer and commuting 40 min each way in an SUV, cut that kind of shit right out. If you're acting like the Me Generation (many Boomers), Stop It. It's just embarassing.)
We will need to consult you, we will need your help, but your deep-structure-level SOP is not working and you can't seem to learn any other tricks.
Note: To those in the G and B generations who are working for the new ideas and the cleaning up, I do not mean you. I am, however, very sad that you are not in charge. Also, for the insanely hard work of getting this country through the middle of the last century, my hat's off, I bow, I sing your praises.
It's just that running our history and the planet right out to the end of its tether is not going to be pretty. See, y'all also just assume that there's enough. And there's not. Not of the material stuff we need to live and improving living for those for whom it sucks. And as for privatization, neo-con, neoliberal thang ya'll have going on and voted for Twice, that's death. Death. The monoculture of consumerism and corporate life --- death.
There's plenty of death for all us. We don't need to make more. Hence my occasional maunderings about what the phrase "culture of life" really means. Hence, this post.
ExxonMobile, stop it with the obviously fake concern for planetary and human well being. It's just insulting the way you did that.
Everybody else: the problems we face are Collective problems. All the individual responsibility and pluck and ingenuity in the world cannot address Collective problems. I mean, it's necessary but not sufficient. We will have to start working and playing together much better than ever.
That's all for now,
PRSC
I'm good at noticing Things That Are Rediculous, so please, you do not have to smack me with them while I'm watching TV (though, that is where you keep a lot of these Things).
I'm watching the news last night. An ad comes on for ExxonMobile. (disclosure: my grandpa retired from Mobile as one of their gazillions of VPs, which means he worked for you, which means I owe you nothing). Calm, expert sounding, warm-faced people are waxing imaginative and ecologically conscious about the future of our energy needs and working to solve them. The shots are all Traditional Bust of Authority Figure portraits, from mid-chest up. It's all very reassuring in tone (and schmaltzy). And then, gradually (it's a looooooong, expensive ad) all they're talking about is OIL and new, expensive widgets for getting at it, and how much investment all that is going to take. Don't worry, the ad means, there's plenty of oil, we don't need to change energy sources, we're using our Value of the Whole Roman Empire Profits to invest in widgets and exploration and extraction, and never you mind the impending eco-collapse and deaths of billions of people, land and water wars, having to learn to raise and butcher your own meat, weave your own cloth.....
Now, we know they're nervous, Oil Companies, about how much $$$$ they have and how we want to know what in the world they're doing with it. I want them nervous. I don't want their schmaltzy-assed propaganda. I want them and their cadre to get the Memo From the Planet.
It reads: Work with me here, or I will decimate you. --- Love, Kali.
Like the love and reproductive capabilities of women, the planet is exhaustible.
I want them to produce solar panels and home-batteries so cheap that we can buy them at Wal-Mart, put them on roofs all over the world (except for religious and historical buildings), get off the grid, and power up our small, cute, electric cars in order to commute to our local, recently dispersed, centers of corporate work. See, the internets literally mean that we don't have to be In The Office in order to be in the office. Build more trains for long distance travel. Power those with wind and solar electricity too. That host of Living Smaller ideas whack-o hippies and tree huggers have been suggesting for freaking decades.
Everything we to know and do is already thought, half-built, or so obviously suggesting itself that it's not like we can claim we have no idea.
For one: Put gobs of the remaining oil energy into creating the new energy infrastructure so that we can stop burning carbon and killing ourselves. Dammit. That is the message of peak oil, and don't pretend that you don't know that and don't just refuse to play nicely.
This is what has always pissed me off about much of the Greatest Generation and mainstream Boomers (and the uber-wealthy, and lots of patriarchal history): We have a new idea! --- It's the same old idea! Ta-da!
Like, oh, say: dumping economic risk down scale. This was the economic logic of which political system we threw off in the revolution and the New Deal? Come on. You know the answer. That's right: Aristocracy and Robber Baron-ism. The new idea was called NeoLiberalism, but it's just an old idea. The people are a resource, kind of like a coal mine, let's get all we can out of them, ha-ha, another glass of sherry my man? Besides, if we drain them now, they won't be able to afford the costs of these necessary changes, and we win!! No?, then cognac?
(To those of you of that class who are working for good, I do not mean you. I thank you. Cuz, dude/ttes I do not have the scratch you do to leverage.)
A book I came across recently: X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft but Can Still Keep Everything from Sucking. Which pretty much sums up my sense of the last 40 or so years of American social, political, and cultural history (backlash, etc.). Since about age 14 my running question has been: How did you people fuck you-name-it up this badly?
You see, there was "America" as I was taught it, and there was America as I was living it. They do not jive.
Which sense of betrayal and outrage and dark astonishment is why I'm jazzed about Obama and the Jonesin Generation (as in jonesin to get things done). I do not think he is the messiah, I do not think he can Fix It All For Me. (My only problem with the Amazingly Strong Hillary was not even really about her, it was just that the past is not where I want to go. Which is totally emotional, and not really fair, and insufficiently feminist of me, but there it was.) I think he, and lots of folk in that generation and mine, have evolved different assumptions and and can create structures so that We can Implement Really New Ideas and Save Souls from Torment and Trouble Here On Earth.
Because, duh, History is the accumulated evidence and force of Decisions People Make and Accede To.
What's happening here,
in our political moment, underneath the gender and race (class, civil rights, respect for peoples of the world, and all that) issues we notice still need our sustained and fierce attention (and some scathing pressure on talking heads to get the hell with it, man),
is...
A Changing of the Guard.
Not just "change" like changing your pants. A shift. Like chaning your self. Gradual, needing some foundation laying, rewarding, enhancing, and totally possible.
It's pretty clear to me that lots of the Greats and Boomers in power (econ, politic) simply don't know or really care (both of which are marks of shame) to clean up the messes they made.
So, get out of the damn way and let us and the Yers and Millennials and Indigos do it. (And you Xers who are driving your two kids to soccer and commuting 40 min each way in an SUV, cut that kind of shit right out. If you're acting like the Me Generation (many Boomers), Stop It. It's just embarassing.)
We will need to consult you, we will need your help, but your deep-structure-level SOP is not working and you can't seem to learn any other tricks.
Note: To those in the G and B generations who are working for the new ideas and the cleaning up, I do not mean you. I am, however, very sad that you are not in charge. Also, for the insanely hard work of getting this country through the middle of the last century, my hat's off, I bow, I sing your praises.
It's just that running our history and the planet right out to the end of its tether is not going to be pretty. See, y'all also just assume that there's enough. And there's not. Not of the material stuff we need to live and improving living for those for whom it sucks. And as for privatization, neo-con, neoliberal thang ya'll have going on and voted for Twice, that's death. Death. The monoculture of consumerism and corporate life --- death.
There's plenty of death for all us. We don't need to make more. Hence my occasional maunderings about what the phrase "culture of life" really means. Hence, this post.
ExxonMobile, stop it with the obviously fake concern for planetary and human well being. It's just insulting the way you did that.
Everybody else: the problems we face are Collective problems. All the individual responsibility and pluck and ingenuity in the world cannot address Collective problems. I mean, it's necessary but not sufficient. We will have to start working and playing together much better than ever.
That's all for now,
PRSC
4.6.08
Unwanted Friendly Virtual Gestures Getting You Down?
Princess who blogs at Flooded (and many other joints) found this here anonymous service, StopForwarding.Us. Send that friend who mindlessly forwards every single inane-ass forward sent to her or him by their equally mindless inane-ass friends in chains going back to the ante-deluvian period a Miss Manners level polite push back.
We who are under construction think of forwards as gifts. We send them with thought and consideration and hope for the recipient's happiness. Not because we have functional fingers.
We who are under construction think of forwards as gifts. We send them with thought and consideration and hope for the recipient's happiness. Not because we have functional fingers.
History in the Making
Thank you both, Hillary and Barak, for turning the page. Congrats Barak! Congrats America!
This is going to be great fun!!!
Dig the new zen!
Not the irritating racism hiding in the translation humor.
The actual zen.
We get to go under construction!! Whahoooo!
Note: to you patriarchal scaredy cats (fe/male) who couldn't handle the idea of a woman in The Seat of power, watch it. You're history.
29.4.08
Sex, Labor, and My Car
Sexuality became commodified and started appearing everywhere, but without the least trace of individuality. The porn industry taught us how to have sex. Like fashion, the more sexuality is standardized, the more easily it can be sold.
Even the Europeans are getting bored with faked sexuality. Please, do not have your sex by the image. Instead, follow this advice.
Globalized labor in the EU looks a lot like globalized labor in NAFTA (except for the legal status of national borders). But you figured on that, right?
Also, my little 92 Nissan Sentra gets 34 MPG, with old oil and underinflated tires, and maybe a power steering leak (to be rectified shortly).
28.4.08
Cool Posts/Blogs inspired by humility and priviledge
On how be patient with your imperfect self: "How to Fuck Up." At Shakesville, which is a pretty cool news, politics, live well kind of place. They're having fun with McCain right now, which is entertaining because, well, it is. Not nice fun, but fun.
Which, one of my fave male feminist bloggers, Hugo Schwyzer, linked as part of his thinking about how he doesn't deconstruct and rectifiy his white priviledge nearly enough:
Also, this whole blog sent to me by Shane: TheGSpot, feminism, inequality, smartness.
And then, just because the outrage channel in my brain has been worn completely and totally out, I'll let Bitch PhD tell you about how the Reps are not interested in OUR democracy, or any, really, to tell truth.
I suppose I'm tagging this a culture of life post because on the whole, these are good observations in that direction many of which I should continue to undertake myself.
Which, one of my fave male feminist bloggers, Hugo Schwyzer, linked as part of his thinking about how he doesn't deconstruct and rectifiy his white priviledge nearly enough:
I’m tired of being one of those people whose sensitivity is so carefully tuned to some and not to others.
So I’m not giving up blogging. But something has got to change. I’ve got to get better, much better, not to increase my readership but because my future children and my current students desperately need me to be the kind of man I am not yet, in words or actions, choosing to be.
As a link he includes to Feministe shows, it's possible that breaking down one's own cultural baggage doesn't happen enough because, well, read this.
If there’s one thing I know, it’s that recovery from bad behavior happens. And if there’s another thing I know, with nearly ten years clean and sober, it’s that it happens in community. Preferably with a sponsor. So I need an anti-racism sponsor, and my project is to find one. I’ve got some ideas of where to look on campus. If I can have a boxing coach and a Pilates instructor to make my body hard, if I can have a spiritual director to teach me how to deepen my relationship with God, I sure as hell can have someone who will help open my eyes and kick my ass until I surrender forever the privileges to which I so viciously and viscerally cling.
Also, this whole blog sent to me by Shane: TheGSpot, feminism, inequality, smartness.
And then, just because the outrage channel in my brain has been worn completely and totally out, I'll let Bitch PhD tell you about how the Reps are not interested in OUR democracy, or any, really, to tell truth.
I suppose I'm tagging this a culture of life post because on the whole, these are good observations in that direction many of which I should continue to undertake myself.
26.4.08
You Go Rev. Wright!!!!
UPDATE: Please note, this post was composed after watching Wright with Bill Moyers before the shall-we-say performances of Sunday and Monday, and the heartbreaking spectacle of the end of a long friendship. Note too: democracy is for grown-ups who fundamentally accept the prinicple that friends, even pastors and their parishoners, can disagree while loving and respecting each other. Democracy is a widening, an opening discipline. In case you wonder why we have an electoral college, pledge and super delegates: this (w)right here is the reason.
****************
Do Not be hoodwinked by soundbites. Rev. Wright on Bill Moyer's Journal last night aquitted himself quite well. Here's the interview, the whole hour. There is nothing to fear in this man that is not :
1. A legitimate and careful reading of scripture, and
2. That same reading informed by actual knowledge of history, and
3. A practice of his faith and ministry based on the premise that lived world outside the church and the lived world inside it must be thought and loved to together.
One of his main points last night boiled down to this: it is possible to know what is immoral in our history and still love this country. It is possible to condemn a government's deeds and still love its ideals. It is possible, necessary, to love your god, your family/friends/community, your country, in the full knowledge of their truth -- which is infinitely more complicated than any mythology you create for them or they create about themselves.
Related point: My fave quote of this past while is from the Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson, "If you really live your live on the model of Christ, you will be in trouble most of the time."
Do Not Be Hoodwinked by the information chop shops.
****************
Do Not be hoodwinked by soundbites. Rev. Wright on Bill Moyer's Journal last night aquitted himself quite well. Here's the interview, the whole hour. There is nothing to fear in this man that is not :
1. A legitimate and careful reading of scripture, and
2. That same reading informed by actual knowledge of history, and
3. A practice of his faith and ministry based on the premise that lived world outside the church and the lived world inside it must be thought and loved to together.
One of his main points last night boiled down to this: it is possible to know what is immoral in our history and still love this country. It is possible to condemn a government's deeds and still love its ideals. It is possible, necessary, to love your god, your family/friends/community, your country, in the full knowledge of their truth -- which is infinitely more complicated than any mythology you create for them or they create about themselves.
Related point: My fave quote of this past while is from the Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson, "If you really live your live on the model of Christ, you will be in trouble most of the time."
Do Not Be Hoodwinked by the information chop shops.
15.4.08
Obama, guns, liberal elites, memory
Obama said the wrong thing about small town America. People are freaking out. But they're freaking out way too much about the wrong thing. I could and do point out that W said a similarly stoopid thing once, to a dinner for the uber-rich corporate barons, the real elite,
"...or as I like to call you: my base."
And real Americans put him in office, again. To my complete astonishment and dismay.
The National Review points out that Obama is one of the elite, and knows little about real or ordinary Americans.
The Nation points out that these scary liberal elites don't exist, not the way you think they do.
And what's more: the very people teaching you to fear liberal elites like the red scare are ...
conservative elites.
From the Ivies, from the priviledged classes. All of them. Even Ann Coulter.
So, to borrow from Lewis Black: if you don't want people who use the word "summer" as a verb running your country, your industries, your universities, your media: you want revolution.
Enough with the smoke and mirrors already.
Obama and Clinton and McCain didn't start out elite or "ruling class", they worked (or married) their ways up there, like real Americans wish they could, mostly can't, and aren't serious enough about it to insist on the kind of political and economic reform (deep, wide, huge reforms of sweeping consequence) that would actually help them.
Anyone who rises to these levels of power is elite, hangs out with the elite, rubs elbows, kisses ass, summers, and generally does not eat dinner at Applebee's or shop in big box stores with you and me. Dig?
If you want influence with that class of people, you have three choices:
1. Become one of them.
2. Make them very, very uncomfortable.
3. Be one of them, and make them uncomfortable, establish the New Deal which made America amazing, get elected to the Oval Office four times.... oh, right.
The conservative elites have dismantled all that now. Right. Might need a revised version, but you and I will not get that unless we insist. Creatively.
The kinds of organizations (unions) and regulations and laws and cultural attitudes required to make them uncomfortable, well, we real Americans have to work harder to make those a reality and in ways the "ruling" class doesn't see coming.
I can handle smoke blown up my ass, but those shards of mirrors? Dude, that's harsh.
Cool it.
"...or as I like to call you: my base."
And real Americans put him in office, again. To my complete astonishment and dismay.
The National Review points out that Obama is one of the elite, and knows little about real or ordinary Americans.
The Nation points out that these scary liberal elites don't exist, not the way you think they do.
And what's more: the very people teaching you to fear liberal elites like the red scare are ...
conservative elites.
From the Ivies, from the priviledged classes. All of them. Even Ann Coulter.
So, to borrow from Lewis Black: if you don't want people who use the word "summer" as a verb running your country, your industries, your universities, your media: you want revolution.
Enough with the smoke and mirrors already.
Obama and Clinton and McCain didn't start out elite or "ruling class", they worked (or married) their ways up there, like real Americans wish they could, mostly can't, and aren't serious enough about it to insist on the kind of political and economic reform (deep, wide, huge reforms of sweeping consequence) that would actually help them.
Anyone who rises to these levels of power is elite, hangs out with the elite, rubs elbows, kisses ass, summers, and generally does not eat dinner at Applebee's or shop in big box stores with you and me. Dig?
If you want influence with that class of people, you have three choices:
1. Become one of them.
2. Make them very, very uncomfortable.
3. Be one of them, and make them uncomfortable, establish the New Deal which made America amazing, get elected to the Oval Office four times.... oh, right.
The conservative elites have dismantled all that now. Right. Might need a revised version, but you and I will not get that unless we insist. Creatively.
The kinds of organizations (unions) and regulations and laws and cultural attitudes required to make them uncomfortable, well, we real Americans have to work harder to make those a reality and in ways the "ruling" class doesn't see coming.
I can handle smoke blown up my ass, but those shards of mirrors? Dude, that's harsh.
Cool it.
11.4.08
Dear FAA, American, United, Delta, et alii
Remember this:
You. Carry. People.
PRSC
PS. Look, I get the culture of the post-industrial capitalist world. Quarterly profits, off-loading risk down the line to the consumer/citizen. I get it. I get that it is quite other than a culutre of life, in which humans are of primary value.
You carry people. To my mind, you just entered the same echelon of trust and respect I offer HMOs.
You. Carry. People.
PRSC
PS. Look, I get the culture of the post-industrial capitalist world. Quarterly profits, off-loading risk down the line to the consumer/citizen. I get it. I get that it is quite other than a culutre of life, in which humans are of primary value.
You carry people. To my mind, you just entered the same echelon of trust and respect I offer HMOs.
24.2.08
Sexism, Media, Stop Now
From NOW, via Mary Hunt. I second this irritation. On the one hand, with Obama and Clinton (the very fact that so many refer to her by her Christian name is a sign), we see that people of color and white women Can set themselves in position for the most powerful office in the nation. On the other hand, we are also getting a fine study in just how not over it our society and culture are.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Gender has emerged as an underlying theme in the media coverage of the US Democratic primary. I forward this thoughtful piece from NOW's Kim Gandy NOT as an endorsement of any candidate but as a way think about what is going on. Note toward the end a petition to sign if you are fed up as I am with gender stereotyping in the media. NOW's site is down so I am forwarding this from another list which is why the links may not be live.
Best wishes, Mary E. Hunt
Ignorance and Venom: The Media's Deeply Ingrained Sexism
Below the Belt: A Biweekly Column by NOW President Kim Gandy
February 14, 2008
My email runneth over. I can't tell you how many people have emailed or called me outraged by the sorry display of sexism in the media these days. Much of this venom is currently directed at one woman -- Sen. Hillary Clinton -- though as we have pointed out before <http://www.now.org/issues/media/011708nbcletter.html > , no woman in the public eye, from Nancy Pelosi to Michelle Obama, is exempt.
For the first time in our nation's history, the idea of a woman president is no longer limited to the fantasy world of TV or movies. Possibility could become reality this November, and some folks are just having a hard time dealing with it. That many of those people have high-profile jobs at major news outlets is a cryin' shame.
We've been down this road before –- yes, NOW called out the media's bad behavior several times last year, and thousands of women and men demonstrated their agreement by signing our petition <http://www.now.org/issues/media/election_media_petition.html > demanding serious and fair election coverage. Well, we're barely into 2008, and already we have plenty of fresh examples of the media's failure to clean up its act.
The press have been brutal to Clinton, no doubt about it. Whether consciously or not, too many reporters, commentators, pundits and the like appear unable to critique Hillary Clinton without dusting off their favorite
sexist clichés, stereotypes and insults. Some of these remarks seem mild, while others are offensive and truly outrageous. Taken together, they create an environment of hostility toward all women, not just Senator Clinton. At this moment it feels like she is a stand-in for every woman who has ever tried to get ahead and be taken seriously by the powers that be.
There are four common themes in media coverage of Clinton's candidacy:
First, Clinton is criticized using a gender-based grading system. The media evaluate how she looks, dresses, talks, laughs and even claps. She is held to double standards familiar to working women. A man demonstrates toughness and strength; a woman who behaves similarly is called icy and rigid. His behavior shows compassion and warmth, but her similar behavior shows too much emotion and maybe weakness. He knows how to work the system; she is manipulative. He shows a mastery of the subject; she is nit-picky. He thinks
through all the options before charting a course; she is calculating. Familiar?
Second, our society still has not come to terms with ambition in women -- it is suspect. Clinton is frequently charged with doing or saying anything to win. But I think it has an extra sharp anti-woman overtone as it is used against Hillary. In other words, everything Clinton does to win the election -- strategizing, organizing, confronting, comparing and contrasting -- is interpreted as calculating, fake or just plain evil. But when a man
campaigns hard, refusing to cede an inch, they call it . . . running for office!
Third, Clinton is presumed to be where she is today because of her husband, Bill. The fact that Clinton has a famous former president for a husband is used to discredit her own achievements and to imply that maybe she couldn't have made it on her own. I'm trying to remember if any of these commentators implied that George W. Bush shouldn't be taken seriously as a candidate because his father had been president. Or that people shouldn't vote for a certain male candidate because he clearly got a leg up from his powerful family's money, legacy? Or say from the advantages bestowed by his wife's fortune? Who's to say that if Hillary had taken the fast-track first, instead of Bill, she wouldn't have risen to the top before him?
Finally, when all else fails, belittle the voters. Women voters are irrational and biased, and voting only on the basis of gender, the press are happy to intimate (at least about the women who are voting for Hillary), and
they not so subtly imply that all voters are stupid and shallow. When the pundits try to mind-read the general public to guess why they cast their ballots one way or another, they often conclude that voters make decisions
based on the same superficial traits that fascinates the talking-heads themselves -- like who seems "comfortable in their own skin" or who strikes them as annoyingly nerdy.
One more thing: Hillary Clinton, and women in general, aren't the only ones subject to gender-based assessments. Barack Obama and John Edwards have also been degraded when the media detect in them "feminine" characteristics or behaviors (like paying attention to your appearance) that supposedly are
unbecoming in men. That's right, both women and men can be poked with the "girls are icky" stick.
Regarding women and men and politics, we really ought to be past the tree house-years. It's not just those in the public eye who are hurt when the media promote sex stereotypes. Daughters everywhere are hearing the message that a woman can't be as competent and effective a leader as a man. Or that all strong women are ball-busters (or nut-crackers) -- right up until they finally reveal that they're just weepy wimps. (Never trust a crying woman. She's after something, you know.)
Just so you don't think I'm making this up, here are a few (of course I had to leave out MSNBC's Chris Matthews
<http://mediamatters.org/items/200801180013 > because he deserves a whole list all by himself) -- of the latest offenders:
Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, Feb. 13, 2008
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/13/opinion/13dowd.html >
Relaying a joke told by Penn Jillette: "Obama is just creaming Hillary. Youknow, all these primaries, you know. And Hillary says it's not fair, because they're being held in February, and February is Black History Month. And unfortunately for Hillary, there's no White Bitch Month."
Katie Couric, CBS's 60 Minutes, Feb. 10, 2008
<http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/main500251.shtml?id=3814250n&channe
l=/sections/60minutes/videoplay
er3415.shtml>
Interviewing Clinton: "What were you like in high school? Were you the girl in the front row taking meticulous notes and always raising your hand? Someone told me your nickname in school was 'Miss Frigidaire' -- is that
true?"
David Shuster, guest-hosting MSNBC's Tucker, Feb. 7, 2008
<http://mediamatters.org/items/printable/200802080003 >
Regarding Chelsea Clinton making calls for her mother's campaign: "[T]here's just something a little bit unseemly to me that Chelsea is out there calling up celebrities saying, 'Support my mom.' . . . doesn't it seem like Chelsea's sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way?"
Lester Holt, MSNBC's primary coverage, Feb. 5, 2008
<http://mediamatters.org/items/200802060004?f=h_latest >
Incredulously, apparently shocked by exit poll results: "With the field of Democratic candidates reduced to two, we asked primary voters, 'Who would make the best commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces?' And here, it was Hillary Clinton who was the clear favorite. The first woman candidate with a serious shot at winning the presidency beat out her male rival -- look at these numbers -- 50 percent to 35 percent. Keep in mind, this at a time the nation is fighting on two fronts."
Andrew Sullivan, TheAtlantic.com, Feb. 4. 2008
<http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/02/clinton-the-an
t.html>
"The second bout of public tears just before a crucial primary vote - after no evidence that Senator Hillary Clinton has a history of tearing up in front of the cameras - provokes the unavoidable question: should feminists actively vote against Clinton to defend the cause of female equality?"
Bill Kristol (New York Times columnist), panelist on Fox News Sunday, Feb.
3, 2008 <http://mediamatters.org/items/200802030002 >
"Look, the only people for Hillary Clinton are the Democratic establishment and white women . . . . White women are a problem, that's, you know -- we all live with that." After other panelists stated their disagreement,
Kristol responded: "I know, I shouldn't have said that."
Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, Jan. 30, 2008
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/30/opinion/30dowd.html >
"Like Scarlett O'Hara after a public humiliation, Hillary showed up at the gathering wearing a defiant shade of red."
Mike Barnicle, guest on MSNBC's Morning Joe, Jan. 23, 2008
<http://mediamatters.org/items/200801230004 >
"[W]hen she reacts the way she reacts to Obama with just the look, the look toward him, looking like everyone's first wife standing outside a probate court, OK?"
Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, Jan. 23, 2008
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/23/opinion/23dowd.html >
"It's odd that the first woman with a shot at becoming president is so openly dependent on her husband to drag her over the finish line."
Tucker Carlson, MSNBC's Tucker, Jan. 22, 2008
<http://mediamatters.org/items/200801230007 >
"It takes a lot of guts for a rich, privileged white lady who is one of the most powerful people in the world to claim that she is a victim of gender discrimination. . . . She hasn't driven her own car in almost 20 years and
she's a victim of discrimination? I mean can't we both agree that's just BS?"
Gail Collins, The New York Times, Jan. 10, 2008.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/10/opinion/10collins.html?_r=1&oref=login >
"The women whose heart went out to Hillary knew that it wasn't rational. . they gave her a sympathy vote."
Chris Matthews, guesting on MSNBC's Morning Joe, Jan. 9, 2008
<http://mediamatters.org/items/200801180013 >
"Let's not forget -- and I'll be brutal -- the reason she's a U.S. senator, the reason she's a candidate for president, the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around. That's how she got to be senator from New York."
If you share my concern about the level of media sexism, sign our petition
to the media <http://www.now.org/issues/media/election_media_petition.html >
NOW and tell them that their sexist campaign coverage must stop.
Thanks to our friends at Media Matters for their excellent research on media sexism which contributed to these links.
Recent Below the Belt columns <http://www.now.org/news/note/> | XML
<http://www.now.org/news/blogs/xmlsrv/rss2.php?blog=3&cat=16 >
Copyright 1995-2008, All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-commercial use. National Organization for Women (This was printed from http://www.now.org/news/note/021408.html )
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Gender has emerged as an underlying theme in the media coverage of the US Democratic primary. I forward this thoughtful piece from NOW's Kim Gandy NOT as an endorsement of any candidate but as a way think about what is going on. Note toward the end a petition to sign if you are fed up as I am with gender stereotyping in the media. NOW's site is down so I am forwarding this from another list which is why the links may not be live.
Best wishes, Mary E. Hunt
Ignorance and Venom: The Media's Deeply Ingrained Sexism
Below the Belt: A Biweekly Column by NOW President Kim Gandy
February 14, 2008
My email runneth over. I can't tell you how many people have emailed or called me outraged by the sorry display of sexism in the media these days. Much of this venom is currently directed at one woman -- Sen. Hillary Clinton -- though as we have pointed out before <http://www.now.org/issues
For the first time in our nation's history, the idea of a woman president is no longer limited to the fantasy world of TV or movies. Possibility could become reality this November, and some folks are just having a hard time dealing with it. That many of those people have high-profile jobs at major news outlets is a cryin' shame.
We've been down this road before –- yes, NOW called out the media's bad behavior several times last year, and thousands of women and men demonstrated their agreement by signing our petition <http://www.now.org/issues
The press have been brutal to Clinton, no doubt about it. Whether consciously or not, too many reporters, commentators, pundits and the like appear unable to critique Hillary Clinton without dusting off their favorite
sexist clichés, stereotypes and insults. Some of these remarks seem mild, while others are offensive and truly outrageous. Taken together, they create an environment of hostility toward all women, not just Senator Clinton. At this moment it feels like she is a stand-in for every woman who has ever tried to get ahead and be taken seriously by the powers that be.
There are four common themes in media coverage of Clinton's candidacy:
First, Clinton is criticized using a gender-based grading system. The media evaluate how she looks, dresses, talks, laughs and even claps. She is held to double standards familiar to working women. A man demonstrates toughness and strength; a woman who behaves similarly is called icy and rigid. His behavior shows compassion and warmth, but her similar behavior shows too much emotion and maybe weakness. He knows how to work the system; she is manipulative. He shows a mastery of the subject; she is nit-picky. He thinks
through all the options before charting a course; she is calculating. Familiar?
Second, our society still has not come to terms with ambition in women -- it is suspect. Clinton is frequently charged with doing or saying anything to win. But I think it has an extra sharp anti-woman overtone as it is used against Hillary. In other words, everything Clinton does to win the election -- strategizing, organizing, confronting, comparing and contrasting -- is interpreted as calculating, fake or just plain evil. But when a man
campaigns hard, refusing to cede an inch, they call it . . . running for office!
Third, Clinton is presumed to be where she is today because of her husband, Bill. The fact that Clinton has a famous former president for a husband is used to discredit her own achievements and to imply that maybe she couldn't have made it on her own. I'm trying to remember if any of these commentators implied that George W. Bush shouldn't be taken seriously as a candidate because his father had been president. Or that people shouldn't vote for a certain male candidate because he clearly got a leg up from his powerful family's money, legacy? Or say from the advantages bestowed by his wife's fortune? Who's to say that if Hillary had taken the fast-track first, instead of Bill, she wouldn't have risen to the top before him?
Finally, when all else fails, belittle the voters. Women voters are irrational and biased, and voting only on the basis of gender, the press are happy to intimate (at least about the women who are voting for Hillary), and
they not so subtly imply that all voters are stupid and shallow. When the pundits try to mind-read the general public to guess why they cast their ballots one way or another, they often conclude that voters make decisions
based on the same superficial traits that fascinates the talking-heads themselves -- like who seems "comfortable in their own skin" or who strikes them as annoyingly nerdy.
One more thing: Hillary Clinton, and women in general, aren't the only ones subject to gender-based assessments. Barack Obama and John Edwards have also been degraded when the media detect in them "feminine" characteristics or behaviors (like paying attention to your appearance) that supposedly are
unbecoming in men. That's right, both women and men can be poked with the "girls are icky" stick.
Regarding women and men and politics, we really ought to be past the tree house-years. It's not just those in the public eye who are hurt when the media promote sex stereotypes. Daughters everywhere are hearing the message that a woman can't be as competent and effective a leader as a man. Or that all strong women are ball-busters (or nut-crackers) -- right up until they finally reveal that they're just weepy wimps. (Never trust a crying woman. She's after something, you know.)
Just so you don't think I'm making this up, here are a few (of course I had to leave out MSNBC's Chris Matthews
<http://mediamatters.org/items
Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, Feb. 13, 2008
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02
Relaying a joke told by Penn Jillette: "Obama is just creaming Hillary. Youknow, all these primaries, you know. And Hillary says it's not fair, because they're being held in February, and February is Black History Month. And unfortunately for Hillary, there's no White Bitch Month."
Katie Couric, CBS's 60 Minutes, Feb. 10, 2008
<http://www.cbsnews.com/sections
l=/sections/60minutes/videoplay
Interviewing Clinton: "What were you like in high school? Were you the girl in the front row taking meticulous notes and always raising your hand? Someone told me your nickname in school was 'Miss Frigidaire' -- is that
true?"
David Shuster, guest-hosting MSNBC's Tucker, Feb. 7, 2008
<http://mediamatters.org/items
Regarding Chelsea Clinton making calls for her mother's campaign: "[T]here's just something a little bit unseemly to me that Chelsea is out there calling up celebrities saying, 'Support my mom.' . . . doesn't it seem like Chelsea's sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way?"
Lester Holt, MSNBC's primary coverage, Feb. 5, 2008
<http://mediamatters.org/items
Incredulously, apparently shocked by exit poll results: "With the field of Democratic candidates reduced to two, we asked primary voters, 'Who would make the best commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces?' And here, it was Hillary Clinton who was the clear favorite. The first woman candidate with a serious shot at winning the presidency beat out her male rival -- look at these numbers -- 50 percent to 35 percent. Keep in mind, this at a time the nation is fighting on two fronts."
Andrew Sullivan, TheAtlantic.com, Feb. 4. 2008
<http://andrewsullivan.theatlant
t.html>
"The second bout of public tears just before a crucial primary vote - after no evidence that Senator Hillary Clinton has a history of tearing up in front of the cameras - provokes the unavoidable question: should feminists actively vote against Clinton to defend the cause of female equality?"
Bill Kristol (New York Times columnist), panelist on Fox News Sunday, Feb.
3, 2008 <http://mediamatters.org/items
"Look, the only people for Hillary Clinton are the Democratic establishment and white women . . . . White women are a problem, that's, you know -- we all live with that." After other panelists stated their disagreement,
Kristol responded: "I know, I shouldn't have said that."
Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, Jan. 30, 2008
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01
"Like Scarlett O'Hara after a public humiliation, Hillary showed up at the gathering wearing a defiant shade of red."
Mike Barnicle, guest on MSNBC's Morning Joe, Jan. 23, 2008
<http://mediamatters.org/items
"[W]hen she reacts the way she reacts to Obama with just the look, the look toward him, looking like everyone's first wife standing outside a probate court, OK?"
Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, Jan. 23, 2008
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01
"It's odd that the first woman with a shot at becoming president is so openly dependent on her husband to drag her over the finish line."
Tucker Carlson, MSNBC's Tucker, Jan. 22, 2008
<http://mediamatters.org/items
"It takes a lot of guts for a rich, privileged white lady who is one of the most powerful people in the world to claim that she is a victim of gender discrimination. . . . She hasn't driven her own car in almost 20 years and
she's a victim of discrimination? I mean can't we both agree that's just BS?"
Gail Collins, The New York Times, Jan. 10, 2008.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01
"The women whose heart went out to Hillary knew that it wasn't rational. . they gave her a sympathy vote."
Chris Matthews, guesting on MSNBC's Morning Joe, Jan. 9, 2008
<http://mediamatters.org/items
"Let's not forget -- and I'll be brutal -- the reason she's a U.S. senator, the reason she's a candidate for president, the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around. That's how she got to be senator from New York."
If you share my concern about the level of media sexism, sign our petition
to the media <http://www.now.org/issues
NOW and tell them that their sexist campaign coverage must stop.
Thanks to our friends at Media Matters for their excellent research on media sexism which contributed to these links.
Recent Below the Belt columns <http://www.now.org/news/note/> | XML
<http://www.now.org/news/blogs
Copyright 1995-2008, All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-commercial use. National Organization for Women (This was printed from http://www.now.org/news/note
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