New Blog Location

Moved to Wordpress. Catch up with me there. 

Travel well, my readers.

Gloria Steinem on Human Trafficking at Washington University

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A Poem, likely the beginning of something

Poetry came to visit again, too bad she seems to be in a bad mood. But, she's got the feel of something new astir in here. We shall see where this goes.

*******************************************************

folded in this trunk, somewhere, is the me

this moment is not about sex

the debt of that girl’s death also folded in the trunk

this moment is not about to happen

somewhere, in the me, the dance that girl performed is written

this moment is happening

and is not about sex

nothing lyrical or pretty is folded in here

the debt of lyrical to that girl

So, Wanna Pay Your Taxes Now?

Back in the 1980's, there was a recession. States needed to cut budgets. They cut money from psychiatric care facillities. The persistent homeless rates went up as people who weren't really dangerous, but who could in no way function on their own, wound up on the streets. I had a chat with a man in San Francisco who carried on very involved conversations with the rat living on his shoulder. Yes, the rat talked back. The rat's name was Charles. The man never told me his name. So, it's the 20tweens, another deep recession, and states are cutting budgets again. Now we're parolling criminals. (In between, we privatized much of the prision system, and that complicates things, I know...) Now we have a national focus on a really sweet girl who was abducted, defiled, killed, and buried in a shallow grave by a known and repeat sex offender because there's no money to keep very bad people in jail (and because we think rape is a less serious offense than murder). This was one of the "hard decisions" we are forced by circumstance to make.

So, I ask you. Do you want to pay your taxes now?

"What's your definition of Post-Feminist?" asked a friend of mine.

Post-feminist: (n. adj, Am E) A rhetorical flourish of the backlash offered as a compliment or sign of historical chic, but functionally a rightist conservative term meant to short circuit actual feminist cultural work. Know uses: She's nice to men so she's a post-feminist. He speaks to women respectfully, so he is a post-feminist. In the post-feminist era we have addressed the complaints raised by feminists concerning parity, education, safety from intimate violence, and the commodification of women as tools of the entertainment and advertising industries. In the post-feminist era, women are not abused, not sold into sexual slavery, not paid less, not suspected of emotional unpredictability, professional ineptitude, or intellectual handicap. Everything's ducky now, so hush. Oh, and post-feminist pornography is all images of hot lust in reciprocal and mutually satisfying sexual partnerships.