Stregoneria

For those who are wondering

2007-06-07T19:06:00.000-04:00

I'm taking a hiatus from blogging for the time being. I'm in the midst of writing a book.
If you miss me, and want to read my old stuff, you can find it archived at CultureKitchen or at My Left Wing/Lorraine's page.

At the moment, I've been seized by a writing daemon so strong I have no choice but to obey. The Muse is a stern taskmistress. I bend myself willingly to her commands.

House For Sale

2007-03-28T10:06:00.001-04:00

My house is for sale. Listing Details are here.

It's a gorgeous house, inside and out. I'm going to miss it, and I hope that it winds up in the hands of someone who will take good care of its historical charm. The house was built in 1848, has four bedrooms, a carriage house (for those who have always dreamed of having an artist's studio), a study, living room, dining room and eat-in kitchen. (The kitchen is bigger than the studio apartment I used to live in.)

Here's the carriage house.

Pan's Labyrinth

2007-02-12T14:51:00.001-05:00

Fascist ideals of masculinity had no real use for women other than as the vessels through which passed the next generation of fascist males. Its aesthetic was built upon a world where women were the conduits for sexual release and the pride that came from having reproduced a junior version of yourself who would carry on the ideals with which you yourself had been inculcated. Women, when they were not serving their purpose as mothers, or as virgins—potential mothers—were garbage, part of the larger population of undesirables and vermin who needed to be brought to heel, to be destroyed.

In Fascist Spain, in 1944, Franco's forces had been triumphant, but there was still opposition in the countryside. It is against this background that the splendid movie, Pan's Labyrinth takes place. Billed as a "fairy tale for grownups" it is just that. An old-fashioned, pre-Victorian fairy tale. A myth. As such, it is full of disturbing nightmarescapes and brutality that will sicken you. It is also one of the most beautiful movies I've ever seen.

I should say right now that I saw it with my 15-year old daughter, who also loved it. It would have terrified her 9-year old sister (who did not attend), and my recommendation to parents is that consider carefully the ability of their children to contextualize both the horror and the beauty that the movie presents.

Pan's Labyrinth combines many of the tropes from the ancient myths. The main character, Ofelia, is a 12-year old girl who travels with her pregnant mother to the country headquarters (the mill) of Ofelia's new step-father, a captain in Franco's army who commands a base of men who are seeking to root out and destroy the band of guerilla fighters who hide in the wooded hills that surround the headquarters.

Ofelia refuses to call the captain "father," a disobedience that annoys her mother, but that also contains within it a larger struggle: the refusal of the feminine to obey, be disciplined, by the masculine.

Almost as soon as she arrives, Ofelia is befriended by the magical creatures that have inhabited the woods for eons. A fairy leads her to a faun, and it is the faun who charges Ofelia with the completion of three tasks, before the waxing moon is full. The tasks are terrifying, and as is the case in all such myths, require great ingenuity and courage on the part of its heroine. And, of course, the food-rationed child is tempted, while in the underworld, by luscious food. There's a pomegranate, of course, but I won't spoil it by telling you whether she partakes of the food that did in Persephone.

Running alongside the mythical story is what is happening in the battle between the Fascists and the rebels. Mercedes is the captain's housekeeper, and she efficiently directs the day-to-day operations of running a large household full of important men, while leading a secret life that disrupts the Fascist work and aids those in the woods who seek to free Spain of the tyranny of Franco.

The third major female character is Carmen, Ofelia's mother, who has been made sick by the carrying of the Captain's child. The pregnancy is draining her of everything, and the metaphor of a Female Spain, having been penetrated and impregnated by Fascism and thus sickening and dying, is personified in Carmen, who is kept constantly drugged and bedridden in order to be able to give birth to a healthy son.

And yet, it is Carmen, in a moment of wellness made possible by her daughter's heroics, who says some of the film's most memorable and heart-breaking lines. She tells her daughter that adults cannot believe in magic, that Ofelia must give up her magical thinking, because everyone has to deal with reality, even if that reality is ugly. The message is clear: the Fascists are in power, and it is we who must accede to their demands. I was reminded of Thucydides' History of the Pelopponesian War when he wrote that "the powerful extract what they can, while the weak grant what they must."

But, in Pan's Labyrinth, the weak have another power at their disposal. It is the same power that the weak—and especially women—have been associated with in those cultures in which the state (whether as represented by a monocultural church, or, as in the case with Fascism, the ultra-rational state) has attempted to take all power from the people. Magic. The manipulation of a magical realm to attempt to effect change in the real world. And it is not accidental that the person who is invested with this power is a girl.

For me, Pan's Labyrinth was about watching the feminine archetype of nurturer, possessor of secret knowledge, and wise warrior goddess in battle with the rational, brutal, and psychically wounded masculine archetype.

The further you venture into the labyrinth, the less clear it becomes where evil ends and justice begins. And yet, the one true thing I held onto is that Ofelia, with all her flaws and fears, is the heroine that I would want to be.

The Feminist Blogosphere Vs. Bill Donohue

2007-02-12T14:48:00.000-05:00

I have sat with this for days now, trying to bring to fruition in language the tremendous anger, sadness, and yes—fear—that flooded me last week as I watched Amanda and Melissa become the targets of Christofascists' attacks. (For tremendous work on the topic, please see Liza's posts, including a full roundup of links to the feminist blogosphere's reaction.) I choose my words carefully, and when the urge comes upon me to let loose a string of expletives—necessary language for me sometimes, the ur language that boils forth from an angry soul—I try to tamp it down. I want to be heard.

One thing I do know. Jesus did not say: "Shut Your Pie Hole."

But Paul did: In I Corinthians, 14:34-35, he writes, Let your women keep silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak; but they are to be submissive, as the law also says.
And if they want to learn something, let them ask their own husbands at home; for it is shameful for women to speak in church.

Women, you see, are to be seen and not heard. But it was Paul who said that, Paul who took on the mantle of interpreting he who had already spoken. Paul put words in the mouth of the dead and called it church law.

"But," you say, "Look around. There are plenty of women out there speaking, writing, making noise. They are not told to shut up."
Oh, but my friends, they are. Last week, the John Edwards for President campaign was asked to fire two of its voices because those voices--with their consistent calls for women's equality; their sometimes sarcastic, angry venting against the injustices perpetuated against women using language that offended because it was considered profane; with their ceaseless calls for gender equality that sometimes, in rage, they thought might only happen when women were freed of the shackles of religions that keep them perpetually pregnant and slaves to their own reproductive systems--those voices, the Edwards campaign was told, were offensive.
Leading that charge was William Donohue, President of the Catholic League, who had no problem telling women to shut the fuck up. He has claimed a membership of 350,000, and using the hammer he thought such membership entitled him to swing, he went after the uppity women. And it's not just Amanda and Melissa. It's Rosie. And Joy. And Barbara. And Mara. And Brenda.

The
transcript from the "Tucker" show on Wednesday, February 7, 2007, was chilling. This exchange, in which Donohue brags about silencing women and Tucker Carlson cheers him on was nauseating.

DONOHUE: Well, (INAUDIBLE) in 2004 worked for the Kerry/Edwards campaign. I found about her background and they had to silence her. Then they got Brenda Bartel Peterson (ph) to quit or be fired because of her background. What I‘m saying is this, these people are somewhat clueless. They are somewhat naive. They need to find out who is working for them.
You know, you‘ve got to vet these people. You need to have a gate keeper. Apparently they don‘t have one.
CARLSON: I have the feeling they‘re going to have one from now on.
DONOHUE: I hope the Republicans and the Democrats are all watching this carefully, because there‘s a lot of Bill Donohues out there which are watching this.

(quotations from the transcript are sic.)

(By the way, the "Inaudible" from the transcript is not inaudible at all. You can watch the video below the fold. I heard the name the first time Donohue said it. It's
MARA VANDERSLICE. And you should definitely look up her story.)

The entire video interview between Tucker and Bill is deeply disturbing. Why? Well, read through the transcript and see if there are men mentioned who need to be silenced. Silenced. Don't you love that word? What does it bring to mind? Muzzles? Ball gags? Women should be seen and not heard; isn't this one of the principal messages of conservative Catholicism, fundamentalist Protestantism, fundamentalist Islam, fundamentalist Judaism? Shouldn't we all just shut the fuck up?

But Donohue messed with the wrong people. As soon as word got out that Amanda and Melissa had been attacked, the forces of the feminist blogosphere flexed its muscle and pushed back. And, as it turns out, we have at least two million voices—and growing—with which to counter the forces of misogyny.

My guess is, as this campaign season moves forward and the blogosphere plays a significant role in analyzing, persuading, cajoling, advocating, and venting—serving as a conduit between voters and the candidates who seek to represent them—we will see more of the Bill Donohue-type attacks on the left. What people write on their blogs will be read, archived, brought out at opportune moments to try to embarrass or, as Donohue hoped, silence us. But you know what? Fuck 'em. Fuck 'em all.

I speak only for myself, but I speak as a member of a network that I watched counter the ravings of a lunatic (and his nodding, guffawing puppet, Tucker). But as an individual I say this. I will not be silent. I will not be cowed. I am not a member of the Christian Church, and whatever woman-hating Paul said does not apply to me. It does not apply to the feminist blogosphere. We will not be moved. We will not be silent.
Just fucking deal with it.

Ourselves

2007-01-19T13:20:00.000-05:00

David Grossman addressed a crowd that had gathered on November 4, 2006. November 4 is the date that Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. It is important to note, if you read through the entire speech (and please, please do so), that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was in the crowd.

And these are some of the reasons that, in an amazingly short time, Israel has degenerated into heartlessness, real cruelty toward the weak, the poor, and the suffering. Israel displays indifference to the hungry, the elderly, the sick, and the handicapped, equanimity in the face of, for example, trafficking in women, or the exploitation of foreign workers in conditions of slave labor, and in the face of profound, institutionalized racism toward its Arab minority. When all this happens as if it were perfectly natural, without outrage and without protest, I begin to fear that even if peace comes tomorrow, even if we eventually return to some sort of normality, it may be too late to heal us completely.

This diary is not intended as a criticism of Israel. It is intended as an appreciation of a beautiful speech that is itself a reflection of what happens to a country, to a people, who are continually at war.

In that respect, I read it as an opportunity to ask what will become of us, of Americans, if we continue on this path that we have set out upon, or, if you prefer, that has been laid out for us by this administration.

But, in the past 100 years, I wonder how many armed conflicts we have engaged in. (Anyone? I know there's an historian out there who can give me that exact figure.) And I'm not just talking about our official wars. I mean the unofficial ones, too. The "police actions" in the Dominican Republic; the interference in elections in Chile; the intervention in the former Yugoslavia.

Our need to take up arms, to have an enemy, to step into the perceived "fray," regardless of whether it, in fact, exists.

How much of our refusal to deal with our own racism, with poverty, with the suffering of our own people is a direct result of the constant distraction of war? Do we not care that immigrants toil in our cities for close to nothing? That our toys and knick-knacks are made by slave labour? That women in this country slide ever closer to their former status as chattel? That our elderly choose whether to pay for prescriptions or food?

One of the harsh things that this last war sharpened for us was the feeling that in these times there is no king in Israel. That our leadership is hollow, both our political and military leadership. I am not speaking now of the obvious fiascos in the conduct of the war, or of the way the rear echelon of the army was left to its own devices. Nor am I speaking of our current corruption scandals, great and small. My intention is to make it clear that the people who today lead Israel are unable to connect Israelis with their identity, and certainly not with the healthy, sustaining, inspiring parts of Jewish identity. I mean those parts of identity and memory and values that can give us strength and hope, that can serve as antidotes to the attenuation of mutual responsibility and of our connection to the land, that can grant meaning to our exhausting, desperate struggle for survival.

Today, Israel's leadership fills the husk of its regime primarily with fears and intimidations, with the allure of power and the winks of the backroom deal, with haggling over all that is dear to us. In this sense, our leaders are not real leaders. They are certainly not the leaders that a people in such a complicated, disoriented state need. Sometimes, it seems that the public expression of their thinking, of their historical memory, of their vision, of what really is important to them fills only the tiny space between two newspaper headlines. Or between two police investigations

Can one lead if one's leadership comprises the constant refrain of "Be afraid. Be very afraid." Can one lead if one's finger is constantly pointing at some other and emphasizing the differences rather than the commonalities? Can one lead if one asks others to do what one is not willing to do oneself?

We have no leadership. We have corruption. And fear. We have no history. We have no vision. We have only the blaring of headlines that distract us; we look away from the bloodshed and the suffering of others in order to participate in the pornography of celebrity, of the news of the fantastical, the marvelous, the grotesque.

Just as there is unavoidable war, there is also unavoidable peace. Because we no longer have any choice. We have no choice, and they have no choice. And we need to set out toward this unavoidable peace with the same determination and creativity with which we set out to an unavoidable war. Anyone who thinks there is an alternative, that time is on our side, does not grasp the profound, dangerous process that is now well underway.

Peace is possible. Our administration tells us that it is not. That we must be ever vigilant against those who would destroy us. But it is that constant vigilance that does destroy us. We lose a part of our souls each time we stand in line at a security checkpoint. What must we do to make peace a reality? If war is the not the answer, what then must be done to find another solution?

From where I stand at this moment, I request, call out to all those listening —to young people who came back from the war, who know that they are the ones who will have to pay the price of the next war; to Jewish and Arab citizens; to the people of the right and the people of the left: stop for a moment. Look over the edge of the abyss, and consider how close we are to losing what we have created here. Ask yourselves if the time has not arrived for us to come to our senses, to break out of our paralysis, to demand for ourselves, finally, the lives that we deserve to live.

Amen

Water, Water Everywhere

2007-01-12T11:05:00.000-05:00

The town of Roscoe sits at the confluence of the Willomec Creek and the Beaverkill River. It is tucked into a niche in the Catskills, a valley through which the Beaverkill traipses like a dancer. Unlike the Mississippi, say, or the Columbia, there is no sense that this is a river of broad, burly shoulders, pushing aside huge mounds of dirt on its way to the sea. No, this is a gentle river, home to thousands of lazy trout, and eventually, the river flows into the Delaware and after that, Chesapeake Bay.

But back in late June, central New York state and northern Pennsylvania were drenched in ten inches of rain. And the tiny little Beaverkill became leviathan. Roscoe, Walton, Livingston Manor and other towns were under eight feet of water. People drowned. Houses were carried downstream. Roads were washed away.

In August, I walked along the river. It had returned to its pre-flood daintiness, and in fact, I was told that the river was now so shallow that you couldn’t take a canoe down it. You’d have to portage the canoe through the shallows. The signs of the destruction were everywhere. Part of the motel where I stayed, a motel I’ve stayed at several times before because it is quiet, inexpensive, and sits upon the banks of the river, had washed away. People told me how they’d watched the motel building run into the bridge, and then, smashed by the torrent, watched as it was carried miles downstream. On the door to my room was a dark mark a foot or so above the door handle. It was the waterline. Inside the room, only the bare essentials had been restored. There wasn’t even a phone. Just a bed, and a couple of pieces of furniture that looked the worse for wear. The bathroom had been scrubbed clean, but the smell of bleach and mold was overpowering, sickening. In the corner of the bathroom grew a fungus that looked like kelp, something Neolithic, as if it belonged on the sea floor.

So, I did a lot of walking. The sky was a shade of blue that would break your heart—so much deeper than forget-me-not, but not as dark as the indigo indications of an encroaching storm. How to describe the ripple of water over stone? As I walked along the Beaverkill--the sun on the back of my neck, its warmth on my shoulders as if someone had draped his arm there—I watched the water. The movement is subtle in most places; your senses tell you that it is, in fact, still, but the water moving across the stones dispels the notion of stillness. The sun glints in such a way off the angles of the water, those angles the signs of the disruption on the surface as the water moves over stones.

And the stones are testament to motion. The stones are not jagged. There is not a rough edge left on any of them. They are ovoid, softened by the caress of water. I’ve noticed these changes in my face of late. My face is softening, like a baby’s face, the skin that used to cling so tautly to the bones beneath are letting go, sliding. Maybe I have smiled too much in my life. Perhaps I’ve focused on too many things out of my reach. The furrow in my brow is now a gorge, a chasm in the otherwise smooth plain of my forehead.

I feel too fleshy. Such a privileged complaint, I know, to lament the passage of time and its effects on the body. I have already surpassed the average life expectancy of entire sections of the African continent. I should be grateful. Instead, I bitch. But I note the patterns of sun and wear on my neck and chest, and I see a glimpse of my older self.

If you didn’t notice the smashed guard rails, the washed-out sections of road, the boarded-up buildings, there would be little evidence of what had happened along the Beaverkill. Already, the wildflowers have filled in the spaces created when water washed away earth. The downed trees have become part of the landscape. The Canada geese, the loons, drift undisturbed. The water was clear, and I could make out the tiny fish fry—just a couple of inches long, that swam close to the banks. A bald eagle beat its wings and flew a straight trajectory, the center of the river directly below it.

Only the people had suffered. They had built their towns on flood plains—not even 100- year flood plains, either. The river has flooded twice in three years. Despite that fact, folks were rebuilding, in exactly the same spots that they had been flooded out of just six weeks prior.

I keep that in mind as I contemplate my body, the one that nature is wearing away. Time doesn’t seem to be moving, but it is. I don’t think I’m changing, but then, every now and then I catch a glimpse of myself and I think, “Have I always looked like this?” I could undergo plastic surgery, could coat myself in miracle products that promise to rejuvenate my skin, make it appear fresh. But there’s no stopping this process. I am getting older. My body is getting older. Eventually, bit by bit, I’ll be washed away. But the wildflowers will still be there, as will the eagle and the loons. And ultimately, that means everything to me.

NC-18

2007-01-11T11:53:00.001-05:00

Today is the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. I come, not to bury the decision, but to praise it.

I also come to mourn for the young women, those under the age of 18, who for whatever reason—fear, for example—cannot tell their parents that they need an abortion and thus suffer unreasonably.

Parental consent laws are a hot-button issue. Many, many on the left support abortion rights, and yet, when it comes to the fate of those under the age of 18, there seems to be a "NMD" (not my daughter) attitude that consumes them. They argue, and I know because I've argued against them, that no person under the age of 18 should be allowed to make their own medical decisions.

This is what I wrote a few months back:

I want to talk about parental consent laws, and why I have a problem with them. I'm not condemning anyone for feeling different than I do; I already know that there are people here, people I respect, who believe that parental consent laws are a good idea. So, I want to offer this in the spirit of discussion, and not in the spirit of rancor.
Communicating with your children about the intimate act of sex is not easy. Communicating with a teenager about anything is not easy. I'm not a perfect mom. I fuck up on a regular basis, and I've learned to say "I'm sorry" to my children for particularly egregious fuckups because it's important to me that they know that I'm aware of my limitations. Which I think gives them room to know about their limitations.
My children talk to me. Because I believe in their right to privacy, I cannot tell you the things they have brought to me as issues, but needless to say, I've dealt with things that are relevant to this discussion.
I know that being a parent is terrifying. I make the assumption that parents love their children and want what's best for them, while I also acknowledge that such is not always the case.
New York is not a parental consent state. I'm glad of that. Even as I hope that if either of my children were faced with the kind of decision that abortion is, they would talk to me about what they want and need to do.
These days, when I take my eldest to the doctor's office, she goes in alone. She has private conversations with the doctor, and unless she gives the doctor permission, I learn nothing about what happened within those walls. I'm okay with that, because it's crucial to me that my daughter understand that what she says to her doctor is private, confidential, sacrosanct. That's the way it's supposed to be.
As it turns out, she usually chooses to tell me what's going on. I take her to the doctor already knowing what the issue is. But I don't pretend that there may not be things I don't know about.
The other thing that has helped tremendously in the raising of my daughters has been the notion of a "pod." My daughters are surrounded by other people who love them. There have been instances where my eldest daughter has confided something to a friend's mom, or to one of my friends, sometimes with the instruction that said confidante should approach me with the issue my daughter suddenly feels shy about discussing. And sometimes, she just talks to another adult female because that's what she wants and needs.
I'm okay with that. I wish that other people were okay with that. i wish that adults could allow their teenagers to grow and develop into young adults, instead of treating them as extensions of themselves to be disciplined, broken, bent to a higher will.
Parental notification laws, to me, are a blaring neon sign that proclaims that people are afraid to trust their children. And I don't have naive beliefs that teenagers don't fuck up on a regular basis. But that is part of their humanness. And if I am going to maintain my commitment to the humanity of others, I have to extend that to my children. My children are not me. I gave birth to them, and I am here to love and nurture and protect them, but I do not own them. The line between "doing something to protect teens" and "declaring your ownership of teens' is thin, but I cling to that line, and trust that it will hold.

Many people whom I have a great deal of respect for, disagreed with me on this one. Alas, I have learned that ultimately, it's best not to get into any kind of discussion about raising one's children. We all have our ways. We all think we're right. And ultimately, I believe, we are all doing the best that we can.

But still, I look at this map and I wonder what it's like to be in a state that is not shaded "white" on this map.

David Beckham: Designated Hitter?

2007-01-11T11:12:00.000-05:00

David Beckham, once considered one of the best soccer (football) players in the world was told yesterday by his club, Real Madrid, that his contract would not be renewed. The news had been expected for weeks. Beckham has lost something in his step. He's not as fast as he used to be, and there has been much criticism that Becks doesn't seem to take the game as seriously as he once did.

So, what was the solution?

Go to Los Angeles.

The 31-year-old former England captain will sign a five-year contract worth as much as $250 million, according to Sky Sports. He'll join the Major League Soccer team in August, Beckham said in a statement today.

Beckham, acquired from Manchester United partly to help increase Madrid's merchandise sales, will play out the end of his career in the U.S. Since he and his England team exited in the quarterfinals of last year's World Cup, Beckham lost his place in the national team and has failed to secure a regular first-team berth at Madrid following Fabio Capello's appointment as coach.

If you have never seen David Beckham take a free kick, you have missed a thing of beauty. You've missed a thing of beautiful physics as he is renowned for being able to "bend" the ball so that it bypasses the defensive wall and swirl into the goal.

Unfortunately, lately, the only thing Beckham seems able to do is to take free kicks. Which leads to the question: Will American soccer actually create a "designated hitter" so to speak. That is, someone whose sole job is to come in and take free kicks? Beckham is only 31, and yet, his legs seem that of an older man.

Still, he may be able to bring magic to Major League Soccer. And, as someone who grew up in a family where soccer is a religion, that isn't such a bad thing.

Ashes on My Fingers

2007-01-08T17:43:00.000-05:00

When I lay in bed, I clutch a large teddy to myself. It's an infantile reaction to my loss, but it helps. When I lie in that position, on my side, my legs pulled up in a semi-fetal position, I can almost feel Yves tucked up against me. When we were laying in bed, that night, that only night that we were together, he wrapped himself around me, his chest against my back, and he said, "I think this was the most perfect sleeping position ever invented. Because it allows me to kiss the back of your neck like this." And then he sent shivers down my spine as his lips brushed underneath my ear. He didn't stop there. He kissed the place where my neck met my shoulder, and then trailed his lips, in tiny increments that thrilled me not only with the sensation of the kiss but with the anticipation of the next, he moved his lips all the way down to the small of my back, and then turned me toward him so that he could kiss my belly. "I love this belly," he said.

I don't often find men with whom I'm sexually compatible. Of course, I find men who are perfectly content to fuck me, or be fucked, but, magazine bravado to the contrary, I don't often find men for whom sex is a passion. Certain men touch you as if they are you; so closely have they familiarized themselves with the female body that it's as if they've become female themselves. And no, the men who claim that they are lesbians are not the ones I'm talking about either. I'm fascinated by the inherent insecurity and shallowness I've encountered in men who consider themselves to be modern-day Casanovas. And there are other men who are so intimidated by women's bodies that they they never fully give themselves over to love-making. In fact, I've been told by more than one of those types of men that I'm too much woman, that I'm too voracious, or have too much of a sexual appetite for them. So, finding a man who has a passion for sex but is not a "dog" and who is secure giving himself completely over to the experience of making a woman happy is a rare, and wondrous, thing. Another thing to be pissed at the universe about.

Because it was incredibly clear that Yves and I were each other's sexual mirrors. To open myself up to the pleasure he was giving me, I had to trust him. I can imagine that for those who have never fallen into bed with someone on the first date, this may not make a lot of sense, but for someone like me, who is driven by her need to understand the world through knowledge filtered through her flesh, first-date sex has a certain ritualistic quality to it. It's when the date is outside the ritual, when it's clear that despite the short amount of time that has been spent together, there's real knowledge of the other there, that's when magic happens. And there was magic between Yves and me. Rough magic. Sweet magic. Sexual magic.
And I'm upset that I lost that, too. That one is hard to admit, because it makes me sound so shallow. "Oh I miss Yves because he was great in bed." But it's true. Sexual compatibility can be more difficult to find than someone you can simply talk to. Because true sexual compatibility presumes, I think already, that you can talk to this person.

When I put my hand on the urn, it warmed under my hand, and I remembered us curling our hands together at the restaurant. And that look. That look in his eyes when his mouth was between my legs and he was watching me experience all the pleasure he was giving me. These were the words I wrote at the memorial service in the black notebook I had brought with me. On the table that in a religious context would have been considered an altar, there was a photo of Yves—in it he stared into the camera with a puckish glint in his eyes. Next to the photo was the urn containing his terrestial remains—the charred bits of bone and flesh that were all that was left of him. I stayed away from the urn for much of the meet-and-greet part of the service. I was introduced to dozens of people who had loved Yves and who wanted to meet the woman who had been with him when he died. When I finally got an opportunity to approach the urn, I stood, my hand resting upon the urn, my eyes locked with his. I knew that look. And that was what I wrote in my notebook.

No one approached me while I stood next to the urn. It was as if I had been given a cordon sanitaire, or perhaps, more aptly, an asile sacré, a sacred sanctuary where I could be alone with him in the midst of all those people. Around me, people talked, looked at the collages of photos that had been positioned throughout the room, held each other's hands, hugged. It wasn't as if I was watching them, but I was aware that I was not alone in the room. And yet, for the period of time that I stood there—somewhere, I think, between two minutes and twenty—it was just him and me.

The urn was silver, and intricate scrolls traversed it. It had texture, and I stayed my hand from caressing the urn. It would have been easy to do. To rub it, to touch it, to try to bring it to life. I have enough experience with caressing flesh and causing it to change under my hand; I think I was self-conscious enough to know that standing in front of the crowd and stroking Yves' urn would have been too crude an act. But, in my head, there was nothing crude about it. I wanted to unscrew the lid from the urn, plunge my hand into the ashes there, and become sticky with Yves. I wanted to take a handful of those ashes and put them in my pocket, carry him with me for the rest of my life.

Anne Lamott has written about tasting the ashes of a friend. I am not certain I could have done that, I think, sucked the ashes from the end of my fingers, but certainly I can imagine that, given the opportunity, I might have done.

Miss Havisham

2007-01-08T11:51:00.000-05:00

I was afraid, in those first few days after Yves died, that I would turn into Miss Havisham. I didn't want to shower, or change my clothes. If I sat and pulled my knees up close, put my face down on my chest, made a tent out of my sweater, I could smell him. He was still there on my flesh, the places he had touched and licked and sucked. The skin he had told me was so touchable, so soft. The skin he had stroked in play, but also in wonder, in awe, that this thing was happening to us. And so, I buried my nose under my cardigan and breathed in deep.
When I finally did take a shower, I wept. I wept that I was washing off whatever remained of him. I wept as the sponge passed over the parts of my body where his mouth and fingers and cock had been. I wept that the previous shower had been a deux, the two of us playing grownup games.
I stayed in the shower for a long time. I needed its warmth to penetrate what had become numb. My interactions with the world that weekend were carried out behind a curtain of gauze. People hugged me, but I did not want to be touched. I couldn't feel anything except that theirs were not the bodies of my lover. It was raining that weekend, but the air had the stifled, semi-opaque feel of summer; it clogged my sinuses, clouded my eyes.
I was so afraid that weekend that I would forget. I wanted to hold on to every little word he had said to me, every phrase, everything that had made me laugh, or shiver in delight of what was to come. Truthfully? I wanted to become Miss Havisham. I wanted to be 80-years old and able to remember every last detail of those few hours I had had with him. I wanted to wear those clothes until they were rags, wanted to be able to tell the story over and over again to a generation not yet born, of what it was like when he touched me. How it felt when his tongue was in my mouth, or the laughter at the restaurant that night, how when I got up to use the restroom at the restaurant, I could feel his eyes caressing me as I walked away from him.
I wrote words and phrases down in a black notebook. The writing was schematic; the details were few. The words scalded me, but I wrote what I could, holding the pen as if it were the fire-end of a poker. But the words look. like. this.
Weeks later, I look at them, and they still burn. I do not want to be reminded of Yves' death, and yet, I know, I knowthat I have no choice.

Rockin' the Congress

2007-01-06T08:57:00.000-05:00

On this day in 1973, "School House Rock" debuted. Last night, apropos of nothing, my youngest brother mentioned that he had never forgotten any of the lyrics to any of the songs. They had become embedded in his brain, always there for access.

I felt the same way when I took a test in eighth grade in which I had to write the words to the Preamble of the Constitution. I, like everyone else in the class, simply sang the song under my breath as a I wrote.

'Course, I can't find the Preamble on YouTube, but I did find "How a Bill Becomes a Law."

Funny, but nowhere in that song does it mention that the president gets to attach any of his goddamned, fucking, wrong-headed, fascist signing statements to those laws.

Just sayin'.

The Witches Among Us

2007-01-05T09:20:00.000-05:00

I often think, when I'm reading the news, of the years I spent working as an undergraduate and graduate student to understand, through my study of history, of why people interact with one another the way they do. I was especially interested in notions of "community," of how communities define themselves as much by what they "are not" as by what they are.

In for example, Quattrocento (15th century) Italy, war raged (those pesky French were always invading, Constantinople fell), disease raged (the Black Plague originally swept through Europe in 1348, carrying off at least one-third, and possibly one-half, of the populace), crops failed, etc, etc. (Amazing how one can use "etc" to casually dismiss the untold suffering of thousands of people. You know, like Iraq, etc.)

In the Quattrocento, Franciscan Observant preachers--such men as Bernardino da Siena and Bernardino da Feltre--berated, warned, and raged at the communities in which they traveled to preach about tolerance of "sodomites," witches, and Jews. Allowing sodomites and witches to live amongst the Christian members of a community was sure to call down God's wrath, and Bernardino da Siena had no shortage of precedent from the Bible to cite as proof of God's hatred of tolerance. Later, Bernardino da Feltre would get it into his crazed head that Jews drank the blood Christian boys during Passover, and caused the tragedy surrounding the death of Simon of Trent.

I spent a lot of time studying witchcraft. Not actual witchcraft, which I'm sure never existed--at least in the ways it was defined by the witch hunters. I wanted to know why 80 percent of those accused were women; why the panics got worse after the Reformation, and were especially virulent in newly Protestant nations; how witch panics operated like ripples in a pond but would come to a sudden end; how Plato and Aristotle played a part; how stripping away from people a notion of "good works" led to the kind of ostracism of old, poor women who sometimes were accused of witchcraft; how the horrendous rates of infant and maternal mortality led people to believe that malevolence had been directed at those who died.

In short, this blog entry could potentially turn into a dissertation, so I'll try to steer it back to the article at hand.
Witches are being persecuted in various villages in Africa. In northern Ghana, for example, 80 suspected witches were expelled from their village. They are sent to live in "scruffy camps".

Like the witches' trials in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 or the Cold War persecution of alleged communists in 1950s America, the fate of a suspect often hangs on the word of another.

Death, illness, dreams, superstition or even visible signs of success may be enough to provoke accusations of sorcery.

No matter how hard the allegation is to prove -- or how hysterical the accuser -- the fact that witchcraft is virtually impossible to disprove means many women are forced to live outside their communities, some for as long as 30 years.

Many of the women and men who find themselves in the camps are there because of the kinds of bad things that happen to ordinary families: a child dies, a marriage goes bad. A desire to assign agency to evil leads to accusations of witchcraft.

And, of course, there's always envy. Or perhaps more telling, the idea that someone, especially a woman, has stepped outside of her traditional role.

In some cases, witchcraft offers an easy explanation as to why one person is successful and another is not.

"In cases where successful women, brilliant women, have gone beyond the confines of their status as women, witchcraft is used as an explanation," said Dr Abraham Akrong, of the University of Ghana's Institute of African Studies.

While the writer of this article seems surprised, the following statement is not ironic at all:

Ironically, the rise in Ghana of charismatic Christian churches, with their focus on the fight against evil, has intensified fear and belief in witchcraft, even among educated people, Akrong said.

As I said, witchcraft persecutions increased in those areas that had supposedly traded in their superstitious beliefs in relics and saints and priests for the "more rational" religion of the various sects of Protestantism. Fundamentalist Christians are the descendents of Protestants, not Catholics, and the increasing belief among Fundamentalist Christians that evil operates with agency in the world (the devil is afoot) feeds directly into traditional beliefs in these villages that evil can be explained by a witch's bad will.

So, what does this have to do with us? (Who you calling us? Okay. Americans living in the US in 2007 under the rules of the Patriot Act.)

Being labeled a witch begins with word of mouth. A neighbor gets into a dispute, accuses another neighbor of witchcraft, and the rumour mill grinds up another victim. In this country, right now, suspicion of being a terrorist, terrorist sympathizer, etc is enough to launch an investigation. Step out of line in the airport security checkpoint and you might find yourself held overnight in a jail cell. And now, anything you send through the U.S. mail service may, if it's deemed "suspicious", can be opened according to the president's signing statement.

In many ways, we are no different than the neighbors who accused each other of being secret Jews, or sodomites, or witches. We have new words to define our fears--we call the folks who could potentially hurt us "terrorists." We watch them closely. We sit in our houses, afraid to go out for fear that the terrorists are going to blow up a plane, or put poison in our food, or make us sick. That they will destroy our cities because we tolerate their presence.

The two Bernardinos are laughing in their graves.

Image details: ID F064-002
Title Cerbère [et] Léonard
Medium photo-offset
Book Bataille. Le Diable au XIXe Siècle. Paris et Lyon : Delhomme et Briguet, 1895. Page 937.
Notes Les principaux démons, tels qu’ils appparaissent d’ordinaire d’après les diverses constatations: Cerbère [et] Léonard. anthropomorphic dog with bird’s feet; horned devil with witch’s broom, lifting skirt to show his other cheek
Theme The Marvelous
Subjects satan/devil
Rare and Manuscript Division, Cornell University Library

Cross-posted at Culture Kitchen and Progressive Historians

I Stand Here Ironing

2007-01-03T11:06:00.000-05:00

In 1980, I was a college freshman. I entered school with an inchoate feminism, a sense of rage that I was treated differently because I was a woman, that there had been things that had already happened to me in my 17 years that made it clear to me that being a woman came with baggage that seemed unique to my sex. But I didn't really have a name for it.

I had done a lot of reading. I began reading at three, taught by a father who sensed my hunger for knowledge, and it's true that I spent much of my childhood not outside communing with the nature who has become my teacher at this point in my life, but, rather, nose buried in a book. Still. The voices that spoke to me prior to college were rare.

One of the first courses I took was "Introduction to Women's Studies." And one of the first texts I ever read was "I Stand Here Ironing." When I read just a few minutes ago that Tillie Olsen had died, it was as if I was standing on a beach and the tide was running out beneath my feet. I could feel the sand moving me back almost 30 years, and I was standing there, ironing. Reading. Remembering that the text had had an impact on me, but not remembering exactly what that was. Just that it moved me.

And, as I read through the story of Tillie Olsen's experience, an experience that I now feel obligated to read about more fully, I cringed in recognition.

Politically active and class conscious, joined to the world as if every soul were a soul mate, Olsen countered the literary myths of her male peers. She did not immortalize the cowboy or the outlaw, but the woman who stayed home. For her characters, the open road did not lead to freedom, but only to the next job.

And then I read the following passages and my heart stopped. Tears came to my eyes. Oh God. I know this is not about me, it's about her but here it is:

But Olsen's theme - and her fear - was silence, the dream only dreamed. Olsen knew this firsthand. After beginning a novel in the 1930s about a migrant family, her writing career was delayed 20 years for sheer lack of time. She never stopped regretting all the stories never told.

"Well, I'm going to be one of those unhappy people who dies with the sense of what never got written, or never got finished," she said.

How many women writers out there can tell the same story? How many more generations of women's stories will go untold?

I just read the acknowledgements to the latest novel I'm reading. It's a fantastic book, but there was something in the acknowledgement that got to me. The women writer thanked her husband for putting up with the fact that she spent 10-12 hours a day in her office, working on her novel. She is a young woman, no children, and I found myself wondering if we are still not stuck in the days of the choice--children or writing. And money? I assume that the best way for most women writers to get their work done is to a partner who can support the two of them while the writer toils away on the project that brings in no income.

And now, as I'm writing this, I remember the poem by Marge Piercy.

For the young who want to
by Marge Piercy

Talent is what they say
you have after the novel
is published and favorably
reviewed. Beforehand what
you have is a tedious
delusion, a hobby like knitting.

Work is what you have done
after the play is produced
and the audience claps.
Before that friends keep asking
when you are planning to go
out and get a job.

Genius is what they know you
had after the third volume
of remarkable poems. Earlier
they accuse you of withdrawing,
ask why you don’t have a baby,
call you a bum.

The reason people want M.F.A.’s,
take workshops with fancy names
when all you can really
learn is a few techniques,
typing instructions and some-
body else’s mannerisms

is that every artist lacks
a license to hang on the wall
like your optician, your vet
proving you may be a clumsy sadist
whose fillings fall into the stew
but you’re certified a dentist.

The real writer is one
who really writes. Talent
is an invention like phlogiston
after the fact of fire.
Work is its own cure. You have to
like it better than being loved.

Obviously, I need to work. Tillie Olsen, I thank you for the gift of your life, your writing, the journey you started me on when I was a 17-year old girl. The 43-year old woman has a lot to think about. I wish you peace on the continuation of your journey.

If there is a heaven, may you find a room of your own there.

A memorial service is planned, although no date has been set. Olsen's family requested that instead of flowers, donations be made to the Tillie Olsen Memorial Fund for Human Rights, Public Libraries and Working Class Literature, c/o the San Francisco Foundation, 225 Bush Street #500, San Francisco, CA 94104.

cross-posted at Culture Kitchen and My Left Wing

Teardrop on the Fire

2006-12-30T10:12:00.000-05:00

Teardrop on the Fire. The night before I met Yves, we talked on the phone. He told me that he was listening to a lot of 80's music—that that was his mood. He would tell me later that he had been so nervous about meeting me that he had just wanted to get lost in old, familiar music. I remember that in the background, I could hear something playing, but I don't remember what it was. I just remember hearing the underlying excitement in his voice. That excitement has always manifested itself for me as anxiety—near panic—and there have been times that being so energized about meeting someone has sent me into a panic attack. So I understood his mood. I wasn't put off by it, or scared. I just knew that he and I shared one more thing.

Later, after the events had transpired, I would find the playlist of what he had listened to that night. He was the Web master for the housing cooperative he was a part of, and he maintained a site that contained news about the co-op, and playlists of music that the group's members could stream. Those playlists would remain on the page until he posted whatever new songs had appealed to him. He always entitled his playlists "Playing while we hack." If you happened to check the page while he wasn't there, you'd find the old list, but where a new list should be, it would simply say, "Nothing… Our desktop's speakers are silent." Since the day of November 11, 2006, those words have become permanent on the site. They feel etched onto the monitor of my computer. The list of songs he was listening to the night before he met me are there—they are a permament record of that night, but I cannot seem to glean much of any meaning from that list.

I've always found in music some form of release, some form of profundity that I haven't been able to find elsewhere. Perhaps it's because my primary ways of taking in the world are both auditory and tactile. I'm not much of a visual thinker. I'm not sure I could rank the five senses perfectly, but my guess is that vision battles it out for third position with taste and smell. I'm a toucher. Always have been. But my ears are the secondary gateway to my world. My ears give me words. Even when I'm writing, I'm not seeing images. I'm hearing a string of words turning themselves into meaning.

So, finding the song list was a gift. And, when that song list was given to me, on a cd, by one of Yves' friends, it was a treasure. Unfortunately, I can't get the cd to play, and there has been something about deliberately seeking out the songs to download from iTunes or buy has been some kind of digging for pain that I have avoided. And yet. If I am to write, I must immerse myself in the grief. And the joy. The scales by which we measure a life. The ratio of grief to joy, with our hope that written in an equation, that joy is the denominator, and not the numerator.

But I'm working on it, on plumbing the depths so I can get to the ecstacy. Yesterday, I downloaded the song by Massive Attack: "Teardrop." It's on the list. An erstwhile lover once gave me a mix cd that comprised Massive Attack, Portishead, and Tricky. "Teardrop" was not one of the tracks. So, "Teardrop" can remain Yves' song for me. It's not an 80's tune, and, in fact, it gets a lot of play these days as the theme song for "House." But no matter. When you're trying to squeeze a lifetime's worth of meaning into the events of a single week, songs take on a significance not ordinarily accorded to them.

cross-posted at Culture Kitchen

New Shins Video!

2006-12-21T10:42:00.000-05:00

Only about a month until the new The Shins cd comes out: Wincing the Night Away.

Here is the most excellent first video from the cd brought to you by the fine folks at Sub Pop.

All I Want for Christmas

2006-12-20T11:59:00.000-05:00

For more La Cucaracha.

Shame

2006-12-13T12:44:00.000-05:00

I am not an expert on China. Far from it. But I know hatred of the body when I see it. And it is just as ugly in China, or Afghanistan, or Iran, as it is in the United States.

This photo will give me nightmares. Because sometimes, I think that we, as a nation, are about 15 minutes away from this type of bullshit ourselves.

SHANGHAI, Dec. 12 - For people who saw the event on television earlier this month, the scene was like a chilling blast from a past that is 30 years distant: social outcasts and supposed criminals - in this case 100 or so prostitutes and a few pimps - paraded in front of a jeering crowd, their names revealed, and then driven away to jail without trial.

The police kept watch over the public shaming. Suspects were allowed to partly hide their faces with masks.

The act of public shaming was intended as the first step in a two-month campaign by the authorities in the southern city of Shenzhen to crack down on prostitution.

Imagine. Rounded-up prostitutes--but not their johns--paraded before a crowd in order to be humiliated and shamed. So what? So they'll never be forced to resort to prostitution to put food on their table again?

And where the fuck are the men who solicited them? Are some of them perhaps the government officials who decided that this type of punishment was appropriate?

The good news is that for many people in China, what happened was unacceptable:

But the event has prompted an angry nationwide backlash, with many people making common cause with the prostitutes over the violation of their human rights and expressing outrage in one online forum after another.

And in the type of comment that actually gives me hope that a "right to privacy" really is an inalienable human right--even in a culture such as China's, where not so many years ago, spying on one's neighbors was part of the Cultural Revolution--could it be that same right might be recognized in our own country?

"With the development of human civilization and law, this kind of barbaric punishment with its strong element of vengeance has been abandoned," Yao Jianguo, a Shanghai lawyer, wrote in a public letter addressed to the National People's Congress, China's legislature.

Paraphrasing a famous letter by William Pitt during a debate over the excise tax in Britain in 1763, he wrote: "Wind may come in, rain may come in, but the King may not, which is to say that even a poor person living in a slum has his own inviolable rights."

I contrast the reaction in China against the government's hypocrisy and harsh, barbaric punishment with our own culture war.

Yesterday, for example, Paul Barnes, pastor of one of the mega-churches in Colorado who had condemned gays resigned his position because, well, why else? Because it turns out, he's gay. Such is his shame, his self-hatred, that he now finds himself the victim of his own hate-filled rhetoric. And there appears little chance, as with Ted Haggard, that his church will welcome him back into the fold with open arms. Jesus, after all, preached that we should hate and revile gays. All that stuff about Jesus telling you to love one another? That's just liberal twaddle, inserted into Bibles at some later date. The real Jesus was a real man. Most definitely not a homosexual.

Then there's Mary Cheney. Regardless of how one feels about Ms. Cheney's decision to continue to support her father's murderous policies in Iraq, the truth remains, she's entitled to privacy. As far as I know, she has not called for the thought police to enter everyone's bedrooms and determine what constitutes Biblical sexual behaviour. (Which, last time I checked, included adultery, bestiality, masturbation, early withdrawal as birth control, oh, and that "virgin birth" hokum.) And yet, it hasn't prevented certain women from getting their granny panty-knickers in a twist. My favourite group of clucking clueless cunctators, the CWFA had this to say:

Janice Crouse of Concerned Women for America described the pregnancy as "unconscionable."

"It's very disappointing that a celebrity couple like this would deliberately bring into the world a child that will never have a father," said Crouse, a senior fellow at the group's think tank. "They are encouraging people who don't have the advantages they have."

I'm sure that Doctor Crouse would be only to happy to have Mary and her partner do the shaven-head perp walk while angry crowds jeer and throw shit at Mary's pregnant abdomen. Again, I'm sure their Jesus would be right there, aiming that rotten tomato at the fundus.

What I want to know is this. Why do those people who are always trying to use shame as a weapon seem to feel none of it themselves? Do they ever have trouble sleeping at night wondering if their insistence on monitoring the motes in their neighbors' eyes might be harmful in some way to those people? When they see the images of tortured, humiliated prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, do they not think that perhaps, that kind of shame constitutes a form of torture? What goes through their heads? Fuck their heads? What about their hearts? Does what constitutes their shriveled souls not hiccup in recognition that what is done to the least of us is also done "unto me?"

Time

2006-12-09T09:59:00.000-05:00

It's been four weeks since Yves died. As I write this, at about this time on that Saturday morning, his respirator was turned off and he slipped into death, surrounded by his family and friends. I was not there, as I had said my own goodbye to him earlier that morning.

In a way, what happened feels as if it was a lifetime ago. It's difficult for me to believe that it's been less than a month. The past four weeks have worked me over like a "work of art." Some days have had moments so painful, I have fantasized about ending my own pain in a permanent way. Other days have brought moments of such exquisite beauty and understanding of life that I have thanked Yves, again, for the gift of his presence in my life, brief as it was.

I have not been able to contemplate, with too much acumen, questions about the afterlife. This experience has not suddenly made me a Christian or a Buddhist or anything in particular. The only thing I can tell you with some certainty is that is has made me a more calm person. There is a whole realm of fear that has been lifted from me. I am no longer afraid of death. I have seen it. And while I am not ready to embrace my own death at this particular moment--there are still things I want to do, and I have two daughters to raise and watch grow up--when death comes, I hope that I will slip into it as peacefully and surrounded by as much love as Yves was. I think that's the best we can hope for. A peaceful, loving death.

Thirst

2006-11-30T10:23:00.000-05:00

Mary Oliver has a new book of poetry,Thirst, out now.
It is exquisite.
There were poems that made me hold my breath in awe of their loveliness.
But, methinks that many of us, who love Oliver for her seemingly paganistic love of the earth, may be disturbed because, in the wake of the death of her life-partner, Oliver mentions Jesus.
As far as grief is concerned, I believe that whatever gets you through the night is the right thing to do. Ms. Oliver is entitled to whatever comfort she can find.

My grief has not made me turn to Jesus. It has revealed to me aspects of the sacred that I was not aware of, but it is too early for me to talk about that in anything that doesn't resemble babble.

Go buy the Oliver book. You won't regret it.

And I don't want to violate her copyright, but I do want to offer the shortest poem in the book. It spoke directly to me.

The Uses of Sorrow

In my sleep I dreamed this poem

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.

Unborn-Child Pain Awareness

2006-11-30T10:13:00.000-05:00

Sometimes, as my dad always says, "you don't know whether to shit or go blind." (It's an English idiom.)

When I see what the members of the Right have done to the language in an effort to try to change reality, I know exactly what my father is talking about.

This week, in one of those grandstanding fuckwadded-up pieces of bullshit that they specialize in, right-wing Republicans will introduce House Resolution 6099, The Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act. Because, according to the bill's sponsor, fetuses of 20-weeks gestation are capable of feeling pain. The answer? Is not to assume that it's a medical fact and require doctors to administer pain to these fetuses. No. The bill requires that doctors INFORM women about to undergo post-20 week abortions that their fetuses will feel pain.
See? That's the "awareness" part.
It's all part of the wicked baby-killer thou art woman bullshit.
According to Yahoo news,

The bill, by Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., defines a 20-week-old fetus as a "pain-capable unborn child" — a highly controversial threshold among scientists. It also directs the Health and Human Service Department to develop a brochure stating "that there is substantial evidence that the process of being killed in an abortion will cause the unborn child pain."

Abortion providers would be required to inform the mothers that evidence exists that the procedure would cause pain to the child and offer the mothers anesthesia for the baby. The mothers would accept or reject the anesthesia by signing a form. The bill allows for an exception for certified medical emergencies.

Seems kind of ironic that Mr. Smith is getting all verklempt about unviable fetuses, when shit like this is happening across the country:
Women in prison give birth while wearing shackles and without pain meds.

Shawanna Nelson, a prisoner at the McPherson Unit in Newport, Ark., had been in labor for more than 12 hours when she arrived at Newport Hospital on Sept. 20, 2003. Ms. Nelson, whose legs were shackled together and who had been given nothing stronger than Tylenol all day, begged, according to court papers, to have the shackles removed.

Or, perhaps a more obvious parallel: House Resolution 855

Commending the cooperation of important allies in counterterrorist operations, condemning the criticism of such cooperation by the European Parliament, and commending the counterterrorism efforts of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Whereas renditions are an anti-terror tool that the United States has used for years, consistent with its laws and treaty obligations;

Whereas the Central Intelligence Agency does not condone or tolerate torture , transport individuals to other countries for the purpose of torture , or knowingly receive intelligence obtained by torture ;

Whereas the counterterrorism efforts of the Central Intelligence Agency contribute to the security of the United States and Europe and reduce the likelihood of terrorist attacks;

We don't torture. Therefore, the pain felt in the torture cell? N'existe pas--you traitorous, pathetic, American-hating, terrorist-loving assholes.

And, of course, there's always circumcision: removing the foreskin of a male infant can be alleviated with a little wine-soaked rag, but a 20-week fetus, which is incapable of life outside the womb, suffers horribly--maybe--so doctors need to make sure that the ignorant sluts thinking about aborting the fetuses must be informed of that fact.

If it is true that a 20-week fetus feels pain, than yes, by all means, alleviate that pain and suffering. But this is so clearly not about that. This is about voicing objection to abortion.

Just for good measure, the bill reiterates, with pornographic, horror-film relish, the following:

(A) The dilation and evacuation (D and E) method of abortion is commonly performed in the second trimester of pregnancy. In a dilation and evacuation abortion, the unborn child's body parts are grasped with a long-toothed clamp. The fetal body parts are then torn from the body and pulled out of the vaginal canal. The remaining body parts are grasped and pulled out until only the head remains. The head is then grasped and crushed in order to remove it from the vaginal canal.

(B) Partial-birth abortion is an abortion in which the abortion practitioner delivers an unborn child's body until only the head remains inside the womb, punctures the back of the child's skull with a sharp instrument, and sucks the child's brains out before completing the delivery of the dead infant, and as further defined in 18 U.S.C. 1531.

If you listen closely, you can hear the slap-slap-slap of someone beating off to the idea of such exquisite violence, all perpetuated because of the sin and depravity of woman, with her ever-devouring womb and her dangerous, but oh so tempting, vagina dentata.

In one of those bursts of irony that take the breath away, the bill further explains the following:

(7) There is a valid Federal Government interest in preventing or reducing the infliction of pain on sentient creatures. Examples of this are laws governing the use of laboratory animals and requiring pain -free methods of slaughtering livestock, which include, but are not limited to the following

So, animals are entitled to pain relief before being slaughtered. Fetuses, who are also being slaughtered according to the semantics here, should also be given the same treatment that we give animals.

Oh, but shit like this?

That's to be commended. Iraqi people don't feel pain. Why the fuck should their fetuses?

What It's Like

2006-11-27T13:02:00.001-05:00

I think I may be at the losing my mind stage of grief. It's combined with the "I must have made this all up in my head" stage. And a few days ago, I would have sworn I was fine. But this morning, it's as if I've stepped on a rake.
As usual, when shit like this happens, I lose all sense of my body's proportions. I got up this morning convinced that I now weighed more than the HMS Queen Mary, but when I stepped on the scale, it said I had lost weight since Y died. Of course, the only things I've eaten are eggnog lattes, an occasional cookie, and "bites of food." I make food, take a few bites, and then don't want to eat anymore.

I read the news and nothing gets in. I think to myself that I should write about bloggy stuff--who the fuck cares that my life right now is trying to sort out what the fuck happened to me--and I should go back to being an intellectual.

It's the little things that make you crazy at times like this. A sunset the other night that was gorgeous--and knowing that he could not see it.

I was sort of lost in those thoughts when I dragged myself over to the cafeteria to get a tuna melt. And the woman behind the counter, the same woman who I get stuff from every day, asks me if I saw the Kramer "thing." And then she goes off about how no one knows that the hecklers had been calling Kramer names beforehand. "He needs to stop apologizing" she says. And I think she's coming dangerously close to making some racist statement (she heard Kramer on Bill O'Reilly last night, she informs me) and I'm thinking in my head, "Please, please, please make her shut up. I can't let her make racist statements, but I can't fucking deal with this right now. Shut up. Shut up. Please shut up." And then she changes the subject and says her husband can't find anybody to do welding anymore and soon, they'll have to import all those jobs, too. And I castigate myself for letting this shit go, but she's a cafeteria worker and I'm faculty, and I become aware of the class/power differential, and then I get all fucked up in my head and I take my sandwich and pay for it and take about five bites, and throw it in the garbage. Wasting food.
And that's what it's like inside myself right now.

Interjections

2006-11-26T22:28:00.000-05:00

In an attempt to teach my students grammar and all that stuff they have previously failed to learn, I'm returning to Grammar Rock.

This time: INTERJECTIONS!!!

Be Vewy Vewy Quiet

2006-11-26T22:19:00.000-05:00

What's Opera, Doc, one of the classics. I learned more about opera from Looney Tunes than I did from anyone else until I grew up.

The woods are closed

2006-11-26T10:53:00.000-05:00

It's unwise to walk in the woods right now. It's gun season, and the woods are full of hunters looking for winter meat and frightened animals. By the time I can go back in the woods, it will be snowshoe season, and this last canopy of leaves will have become the basis of next year's humus.

Memories of Summer Heat

2006-11-26T10:49:00.000-05:00

This summer, it was so hot in my poorly insulated old house that candles drooped in response. Now, months later, the bent candles remain.

Friday Nights

2006-11-25T10:34:00.000-05:00

Friday nights are hell. There is something about anniversary days, regardless of how close or far-removed they are from the actual event, that set something off in my psyche. Yesterday was only the second Friday that had passed since Y's collapse. Last Friday was the memorial service, and this Friday, well, this Friday I needed to find something to do with myself.

Wednesday night, I was driving with a friend due west. The sun was setting, and the vermilion sky cast the barns and the trees in a sort of blood-amber light. In the midst of all that redness was the palest sliver of new moon. Inanna's moon, and I was reminded of the legend that says that the sliver of new moon is Inanna's boat, carrying the souls of the worthy from the underworld to heaven.

I could not take comfort from that legend. The only thing I could think was, "When you're dead, you don't get to see these things anymore." And the idea that Y could not see what I was seeing pierced me. Death is not about the dead. It's about the living. It's about how we make meaning out of the sudden disappearance of what was once a presence.

I keep seeing his ghosts everywhere. They're private moments, and I'm collecting them all, trying to piece them together so that perhaps, if I gather enough of them up, I can glue them together and make him present again.

Ridiculous. I'm a rational, intelligent human being. And yet.

Un-Named and Uncounted

2006-11-22T11:39:00.000-05:00

When Caoily was 10 months old, she came down with rotavirus. If you have children, and you've been through this, then you know how awful this common infection is. Everything you put into your child--in my case, breastmilk and some solids--comes out in a very short time as a watery, noxious, seemingly neverending river of shit that overflows diapers. I would breastfeed her, and she would be shitting simultaneously, covering both of us in it as I tried to get fluids into her to keep her from dehydrating.
Our pediatrician hospitalized her after 12 hours. For three days, she stayed on a simple solution of electrolytes and fluid through an IV in her leg, the only vein the anesthesiologist (I had insisted on an anesthesiologist) could find to puncture.
She was one of the lucky ones.
1.6 million African babies will die in their first 28 days of life. If it takes you five minutes to read this diary, 15 babies in Africa will have died.
But hey, apparently, we're making progress.

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Each year more than one million babies in sub-Saharan Africa die before they are a month old because of a lack of essential health care, a U.N. report said on Wednesday.
"Sub-Saharan Africa remains the most dangerous region in the world for a baby to be born -- with 1.16 million babies dying each year in the first 28 days of life," said the report published, in Johannesburg and Geneva.

According to the World Health Organization:
New report shows improvements in child survival in Africa for the first time since the 1980s - but more than a million African babies still die in the first month of life.

Up to half a million African babies die on the day they are born - most at home and uncounted. According to the report, Liberia has the world's highest newborn mortality rate at 66 deaths per 1,000 births compared to less than 2 deaths per 1,000 births in Japan and 6 deaths per 1,000 births in Latvia. Half of Africa's 1.16 million newborn deaths occur in just five countries - Nigeria, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, United Republic of Tanzania and Uganda. Nigeria alone has over 255,000 newborn deaths each year.
"The health of newborn babies has fallen between the cracks - Africa's un-named, and uncounted, lost children," said Dr Francisco Songane, Director of the Partnership. "We must count newborn deaths and make them count, instead of accepting these deaths as inevitable. The progress of these six African countries demonstrates that even the world's poorest countries can look after their newborns, their most vulnerable citizens. They have shown the way-we must seize the opportunity."

It's that fucking phrase, "un-named and uncounted," that is sticking in my craw.
Uncounted.
Uncounted.
That's what we're doing in Iraq, right? Not counting the dead? That's what we do when the dead don't matter. We don't give them names. We don't count them.
That's what we say to each other in games where nothing's at stake. "That doesn't count."

Did you know that American Indian infants are 1.7 times more likely to die than "white" infants?

Does that count?

Did you know that in Massachusetts, in 2003, black infants were 3 times as likely to die as white infants?

Where the fuck are the right-to-life crowd on all this? Oh yeah. Busy trying to protect potential zygotes. Fuck the born. Fuck all of them.

I can hear some of you muttering now. Lorraine. Dudette. We know you're kind of flattened by grief and all, but you're not making a lot of sense. African mortality rates and the anti-choice faction in America? What's the connection? If you pay attention, you already know the answer to that question. You see, the reason that so many mothers and children are infected with HIV in Africa, and thus, the reason so many un-named children die, is because that same sanctimonious, woman-hating, fuckwad-loaded group of organizations in America and the Vatican who spend all their fucking energy weeping and gnashing their teeth over sacred sperm and holy ovaries are the same fucking groups who support Gag rules, and oppose the distribution of condoms, and who continue to preach that sex is bad, abstinence is the only way, and dead babies are God's way of manufacturing little angels whose wings fan his magnificent face and keep him cool.

If you want to send, oh, I don't know, the equivalent cost of a can of cranberry sauce to one organization that's making a difference, may I suggest Medecins sans frontieres?

Angel

2006-11-21T11:25:00.000-05:00

Because I have not yet finished crying.

Ashes

2006-11-19T13:16:00.000-05:00

Me. In the hotel room. Right before I left for the memorial service.

Y. A photo he sent to me when we were preparing to meet one another.

I feel as if I've dropped a box of marbles on a hardwood floor. They're rolling everywhere. They are my memories of Y. I'm afraid I won't be able to gather them all up, that some will never be found again. Maybe years later, when someone is renovating the house, they'll find a single cat's eye underneath a floorboard and someone will wonder at its significance.
Note from my notebook as I've tried to write down what is happening to me right now.
This is the letter I sent to his friends and family after he died.

Y's last day

Dear Friends of Y,

I want to tell you about November 10, 2006, about the hours that I was with Y. I know that Yves was a private man; he and I talked about that, but I believe he would be okay with my talking about such personal matters with his friends. I think he would like for you to know that on November 10, he was a very, very happy man, and that except for the last five-to-ten minutes of consciousness, he was in no pain.

I ask you to indulge me for writing in English. I do speak and understand French, but there would be no way that I could tell you all of these things in a language other than my native one.

Y and I met on-line. The online personals. Both of us felt rather dorky about meeting this way, but in this modern world, sometimes, it's the only way to reach across the miles and find someone interesting. I had been out on internet dates before. Some had been good, some had been awful. Y had never posted online before. The weekend of November 3, we made contact. First, at the site, and then very quickly, through our private e-mail accounts. Instantly, there was a connection. And Y called me on the telephone when we had been in contact for less than 24 hours. From then on, we talked on the phone a lot, e-mailed a lot, exchanging bits of information about our lives and our families and what we wanted.

I found myself impatient to meet him, and I "dared" him to meet me Friday. I had the day off work, and I offered to drive up to Montreal to meet him. He agreed. And both of us were very nervous. We kept talking about our "butterflies," how we were taking such a chance to meet a total stranger and hope that there would be chemistry. We had agreed that I would most likely sleep in the guest bedroom, although there was a lot of flirtation back and forth about whatever possibilities might occur. We had seen photos of one another, and there was already a feeling that we were going to be attracted to one another.

I stopped by my work to pick up my reading glasses and called Y about 9:15 to let him know I was on my way. At about 1:15 pm, he called me to ask where I was. I pulled up in front of his apartment building about 2:30 I think. He came out to my car, helped me in with my bags. We were both happy to meet one another. As soon as I arrived, I walked over to his refrigerator and looked inside. He was puzzled, and I said,
"My girlfriend's a little worried about me coming up here without meeting you first." So I made him listen as I called my friend and said to her, "Well, I've checked. There are no body parts or decapitated heads in the refrigerator."
And Y said, grinning, "You better check the freezer." And we laughed.

We sat down on his couch, began to talk, and he said that we should go to the market to get a few things because there was nothing to eat in the house. And so we had this plan to go run all these errands, and I went into the bathroom. I came out, and simultaneously, we reached for each other and kissed. "Made out" as Y said. And at one point, I asked him, "Do you think we're going too fast?" And he said, "Yes, but I don't want to stop."
And we made love all afternoon. It got dark, and we were laughing and touching and Y just kept telling me how lucky he was, how amazing this was, this thing that we could feel happening between us. And he said a lot of personal things to me that meant a great deal to me, lover's talk.
Anyway. It got dark, and we agreed that it was time to go to the market and get some food. We took a shower together, and then we set out to go into the village. We were going to go buy some food to bring back and cook, but both of us acknowledged that we were starving, and Y decided we would go to this restaurant he knew. So, we turned the corner, and Y just lit up because there, in front of us, were H and M. M got out of her stroller, and she showed her daddy her banana popsicle, and I heard him tell her that he would come get her from daycare and spend time with her, and she told him about the banana popsicle, and they hugged and kissed.
Then we walked on, and he was grinning, and he said that seeing his daughter had made the day even more perfect because she was everything to him. He said that when he thought of her, he could think of nothing else.
And he stopped at a little store and bought some cigarettes and he and the shop clerk talked about M and her banana popsicle. And then we went to the restaurant.
We were very silly at the restaurant, making jokes, and flirting, and having a good time. And Y said, "I think I've won the lottery." And he talked about how happy he was that this date had turned out to be so perfect.
We talked about all the things we needed to buy at the market, but Y had a little headache, so we decided we would go shopping the next day.
So we walked home, and we ran into Y's friend and her daughter, and we walked with them until we got to the apartment building.
We went into the apartment, and I told Y to lie down after he had taken some aspirin for his headache. I rubbed his scalp, and his neck, and shoulders and back, and he talked about how much it meant to him to be touched. And we talked about how amazing this all was, and then, again, we made love.
And he kept saying, "I've won the lottery." And "I know I'm repeating myself, but I've won the lottery." And we were making jokes about all the ways we could find to get ourselves arrested that weekend. And he was going to make pancakes and fruit and yogurt for me for breakfast. And coffee. Definitely coffee, because we both loved coffee.
At about 9 pm, Y started apologizing because his headache hurt and he wanted to sleep for a while. So I curled up next to him and I got out a book of poetry that I had brought and read to him while he lay there.
The poems are all by the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, and the first one I picked to read to him because I knew it would make him laugh.

A Dog After Love

After you left me
I had a bloodhound sniff at
my chest and my belly. Let it fill its nostrils
and set out to find you.

I hope it will find you and rip
your lover's balls to shreds and bite off his cock-
or at least
bring me one of your stockings between its teeth.

And we did laugh at the absurdity of the poem, the jealousy and such.

I was flipping through the book, and the next poem I read was completely random:

In a Leap Year
In a leap year the date of your death gets closer
to the date of your birth,
or is it farther away?
The grapes are aching,
their juice thick and heavy, a kind of sweet semen.

And I'm like a man who in the daytime passes
the places he's dreamed about at night.
An unexpected scent brings back
what long years of silence
have made me forget. Acacia blossoms
in the first rains, and sand dunes
buried years ago under the houses.

Now all I know how to do
is to grow dark in the evening. I'm happy
with what I've got. And all I wish to say is
my name and address, and perhaps my father's name,
like a prisoner of war
who, according to the Geneva Convention,
is not required to say a single word more.

And then I said I wanted to read to him Amichai's most famous poem. And I told him the story of how when Yitzak Rabin and Yasser Arafat won the Nobel Peace Prize, this was the poem that Rabin read. I wanted to read it to Y because I knew he had children. It was only later that I realized what was contained in the poem.

God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children

God has pity on kindergarten children.
He has less pity on school children.
And on grownups he has no pity at all,
he leaves them alone,
and sometimes they must crawl on all fours
in the burning sand
to reach the first-aid station
covered with blood.

But perhaps he will watch over true lovers
and have mercy on them and shelter them
like a tree over the old man
sleeping on a public bench.

Perhaps we too will give them
the last rare coins of compassion
that Mother handed down to us,
so that their happiness will protect us
now and in other days.

Y was tired, and he closed his eyes. I read a novel for a little while. I have chronic insomnia, so I took my sleeping pill and I fell asleep.

About an hour later, Y woke me up. He got out of the bed, and he said "My headache is killing me. I'm going to take some tylenol." And I listened as he went in the bathroom. I heard a noise, and and I heard him turn on the water to get a drink, but the water was running really hard. So I got up to see what was going on. Y was sitting on the floor, his back against the wall, and the pills were spilled on the floor. He said, "Please help me take the pills." So I got them and gave them to him and a glass of water. I grabbed a washcloth and soaked it in cold water and gave it to him to put on his forehead. I knelt down beside him and he said, "Help me back to bed." So I tried to help him stand up, but he fell against me and I fell against the vanity and felt myself bruise. He was rubbing his arm, and I said to him, "We should call the doctor." And he said, "No. I'm just a little dizzy. Just let me sit here for a minute and then we'll try again."

I got this idea. I went into the bedroom to grab the duvet, and I came back and said to Y: "Crawl on to this blanket and I'll pull you into the bedroom. We'll put you back to bed." And he tried to move forward. At that point, I said, "I'm calling 911" and I called the number.

Y pitched forward, putting his head down on the blanket. His eyes fluttered closed, and I wrapped the blanket around him. He was breathing very hard, and he was unconscious. He could not hear me. But I kept rubbing his back and sitting with him, waiting for the ambulance. He was shaking. But he was in no pain. When the EMTs arrived, they could get no response from him. I believe he was already on his way to somewhere else.

They worked on him for a few minutes, and then they took him to the hospital. I went in my car. I waited in the waiting room. Two doctors asked me to describe everything that had happened before Y collapsed and I told them. I asked if I could see him. They would not let me, and they told me to go home and they had a lot of tests to do and they would call me.

So I went back to Y's apartment and I lay on his bed. I slept a little, and then the phone rang and they told me the bad news that he had had a massive brain bleed. They told me they didn't know how to contact his family, but I remembered that Y's cell phone was on the kitchen table, so I went and got it. I remembered that when we ran into M and H, that Y had told me the name "H" and I looked for that in his phone list. I gave them the phone number. They told me they were going to take Y to another hospital.

You know the rest. H called me at 7, and I went to the hospital to say goodbye.

I want you all to know that Y did not suffer. He had a headache, but I do not think that even when he was feeling dizzy that he knew he was dying. He was so insistent that he did not need a doctor when I first said it. And he was not alone as he sank into unconsciousness. I was there with him. He knew he was being cared for.

I have done so much crying since Y died. There are so many things to be sad about, including my own sense that I had found this man with whom there seemed to be this bright future, and then it was snatched from me, from us.

But I am so grateful that I got to be there for Y. It has struck me repeatedly, all the strange things that happened. Why did his brain bleed happen when I was there? Why did we change direction and then run into H and M? Why was it so intense between us? Why did Yinsist on telling me, over and over again, how happy he was?

I have been shattered by this experience. I feel as if I got to be a part of something so much greater than myself, that I got to be present for Y and take care of him in his last conscious moments. That I got to help him to have such a happy day.

Part of me is so angry. Angry that he leaves behind Z and M who still need him. Angry that he will not see them grow up. Angry that I got to have just a few hours of Y before he left. I am not a religious person, but if I meet God someday, I will kick him in the shins. I think Y would approve.

------
So that's what I wrote to his family. His family has been insisting that I was the angel in all of this, and they asked me to be at the memorial service. Y had been alone for two years before he met me.

I was fussed over at the memorial service, and I was asked to tell the story of his last day. Which I did. And at some point, I'll be able to write about what I said and how I let all those people know that Y had not suffered, how he had given me the gift.

I was okay at the memorial service. Before I spoke, his friends, who were all musicians, took turns singing various songs in French and English. I was sitting, and one of his friends got up and said, "Y was not alone on his last day. He was with an angel, and she is right here now with us." And then she started playing this song, by Sarah Maclachlan, and I fell apart.

Angel
Spend all your time waiting
For that second chance
For a break that would make it okay
There's always one reason
To feel not good enough
And it's hard at the end of the day
I need some distraction
Oh beautiful release
Memory seeps from my veins
Let me be empty
And weightless and maybe
I'll find some peace tonight

In the arms of an angel
Fly away from here
From this dark cold hotel room
And the endlessness that you fear
You are pulled from the wreckage
Of your silent reverie
You're in the arms of the angel
May you find some comfort there

So tired of the straight line
And everywhere you turn
There's vultures and thieves at your back
And the storm keeps on twisting
You keep on building the lie
That you make up for all that you lack
It don't make no difference
Escaping one last time
It's easier to believe in this sweet madness oh
This glorious sadness that brings me to my knees

In the arms of an angel
Fly away from here
From this dark cold hotel room
And the endlessness that you fear
You are pulled from the wreckage
Of your silent reverie
You're in the arms of the angel
May you find some comfort there
You're in the arms of the angel
May you find some comfort here

So, I've been listening to that song. But I've also been listening to this song, by Dar Williams, especially this part:

After All

But now I'm sleeping fine
Sometimes the truth is like a second chance
I am the daughter of a great romance
And they are the children of the war

Well the sun rose with so many colors
It nearly broke my heart
And worked me over like a work of art
And I was a part of all that

So go ahead, push your luck
Say what it is you've got to say to me
We will push on into that mystery
And it'll push right back
And there are worse things than that

'Cause for every price
And every penance that I could think of
It's better to have fallen in love
Than never to have fallen at all

'Cause when you live in a world
Well it gets in to who you thought you'd be
And now I laugh at how the world changed me
I think life chose me after all

This is the first time I've tried to write about this. There is so much more left to say. I think there is a book in here somewhere, but right now, I'm the blank page.

I want you all to know that your kindness to me sustains me.

I miss him so much.

Dirge Without Music

2006-11-16T13:56:00.000-05:00

Some of you know that I was with Y. on Friday night when he suffered a massive brain bleed and died. It is why I have been so quiet the past few days.

I have been writing down notes everywhere since Y. died. At some point, I will be able to make sense of things. There is something profoundly sacred in what happened, and right now, I am riding the waves of the universe, allowing myself to float. Eventually, there will be a spilling of ink. My sense is that once I begin to write about all of this, there will be no stopping.

This is the poem I'm clinging to today.

Dirge without Music
Edna St. Vincent Millay

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, --- but the best is lost.

The answers quick & keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,
They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

Thank you to all the people who have reached out to me these past few days. I am grateful. But right now, I am feeling quiet. And I know that I am loved.

Freedom

2006-11-06T13:57:00.000-05:00

Light at the End of the Path

2006-11-06T12:29:00.000-05:00

Is that light I see before me? November 8, how I await you.

Amanda Rocks

2006-11-06T12:23:00.000-05:00

Amanda at Pandagon has an amazing post about the Haggard clusterfuck. Turns out, the person responsible for Haggard's straying is none other than his wife. If she'd just been more loving, poor old Ted wouldn't have gone looking for cock and meth.

Is there nothing that Fundies will not stoop to if it keeps them from having to re-think any of their positions?

We Shall Not Be Moved (Backwards)

2006-11-06T12:19:00.000-05:00

The Pomegranate
by Eavan Boland

The only legend I have ever loved is
the story of a daughter lost in hell.
And found and rescued there.
Love and blackmail are the gist of it.
Ceres and Persephone the names.
And the best thing about the legend is
I can enter it anywhere. And have.

As a child in exile in
a city of fogs and strange consonants,
I read it first and at first I was
an exiled child in the crackling dusk of
the underworld, the stars blighted. Later
I walked out in a summer twilight
searching for my daughter at bed-time.
When she came running I was ready
to make any bargain to keep her.
I carried her back past whitebeams
and wasps and honey-scented buddleias.
But I was Ceres then and I knew
winter was in store for every leaf
on every tree on that road.
Was inescapable for each one we passed.
And for me.
It is winter
and the stars are hidden.
I climb the stairs and stand where I can see
my child asleep beside her teen magazines,
her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit.
The pomegranate! How did I forget it?
She could have come home and been safe
and ended the story and all
our heart-broken searching but she reached
out a hand and plucked a pomegranate.
She put out her hand and pulled down
the French sound for apple and
the noise of stone and the proof
that even in the place of death,
at the heart of legend, in the midst
of rocks full of unshed tears
ready to be diamonds by the time
the story was told, a child can be
hungry. I could warn her. There is still a chance.
The rain is cold. The road is flint-coloured.
The suburb has cars and cable television.
The veiled stars are above ground.
It is another world. But what else
can a mother give her daughter but such
beautiful rifts in time?
If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.
The legend will be hers as well as mine.
She will enter it. As I have.
She will wake up. She will hold
the papery flushed skin in her hand.
And to her lips. I will say nothing.

Caliberal has been in despair about what has happened to women in this country. I love Cali; she's my girlcrush, and I wish we lived closer so I could hang out with her. But here, in my home, I have two reasons for every move I make in honor of women. Two daughters, born of my body, and the lights of my life.

Sometimes, I just want to throw up my hands and give up. We are going backwards when it comes to women's rights in this country. The Fundamentalists, whose fear of women is so pronounced that they can't think of enough ways to punish us for having vaginae, currently seem to have direct access to those in power who make decisions about women's rights.

Of course, it's the same in various parts of the world. Bob Herbert's columns this week dealt with violence against women--violence that was directed at women solely on the basis of their sex.

My friend, Amy, said it more eloquently, I think, but then again, I think poets say most everything more eloquently than those of us who write clumsy prose in offering to the Muse.

Voices
Amy Small-McKinney
Rwanda, Africa

Lake Kivu plaits through the Rift valley,
a current of despair and revenge.
I was the Hutus' favorite daughter,
Pauline Nyiramashuko.
I am their nation; a lakebed,
my mouth a volcano,
a danger to anything that breathes.
My nation insisted I become a nation,
scissors, opened and closed, life sliced
in two. I sent my son, Shalom,
to young Rose, the Tutsis' plea to God,
to where she hid, to the fields
where her faith fought back.
I called to the Tutsis, exhausted as rain:
Here is your food. Here is your shelter.
All of their death took only an hour;
a red chested cuckoo asked why.
I told him: My eyes are split open,
I am sorry; I am not.
Bombay, India

This will never end, my wandering
into the twilight, out of my Bombay
backyard, my parents' final basket of fruit,
my peafowl sashaying to the males' courtly
help help of recognition.
I miss my peacocks more than mother or father,
birds of prey who could not comprehend
this girl's longings.
When the males release
their plumage, they call ahhh ahhh;
the peahen mutters Hell-o Hell-o.
I can not tell you
what you want to hear,
cannot remember the travelers' eyes, faces, words,
any kindnesses as I drifted out of my skin,
as my mouth became the rapist's chick, wingless, blind.
This will never end. No, I am not that girl:
her sorrow song not mine.
Provincetown, USA

I do not wake up every morning and thank God
that I am a man; I love my mother.
I will never tell my wife.
What I love most is morning,
my line cast for stripers,
their obedient mouths.
The girl was pretty, tall, lean enough.
In the graveyard, the headstones
shut their eyes, their mouths sang
silently, she did not hear their sympathy.
All of my life looked
meek in the setting sun.
I heard her No, but who
could stop in the throes of opening.
That was another life.
Meerwala, Pakistan

She was never my true child.
My snow white crane,
her red right eye, her hysterical cry
entreating me, Faz Mai, to feed her.
I hear her
in the shallow waters of the Indus,
but my breasts are not milky,
the weeping sustenance that calls
my fledgling home for food
is only rain. Even my tears
have dissolved into breaths I take
when I must breathe, have to breathe,
for the child who floated out of me
into my blister of nothing.
And for my cousin Naseem,
like me, forced to spread herself
into our country of dread,
into the fields where white bulbs
of cotton are slowly dying.
Pennsylvania, USA

That was another life.
I had not yet cradled my daughter,
she had not suckled
my lexicon of milk.
I had not forgiven myself
for being a body,
a dutiful daughter,
for inhaling my era's
numbing acceptance.
I refuse to remember him.
I refuse to remember the Portuguese
stones of loss, the nearby sea
smacking its futile fish.
He kissed me.
He did not kiss our child's sigh
as I slipped it into the waters
of the Holiday Inn, my thumb nail,
my lily, I named No, Please No.
At times, I want to be his body,
to feed him with regret
I need to imagine.
Now white bulbs push up and out
of my hardened suburban soil.
What I have learned is lime, water,
what returns and will not return.
Still, there are times I want to be you,
Naseem Mai, pesticide flowing through
your still body like fresh milk.
Now I am milk. My daughter has eyes
so blue they become the sea,
daybreak, another country.
Home

I return to the sink, the toilet, the mop, the clothes,
the little neck splayed opened, my husband's
silky undershirt, its smallest tear.

My husband snaps a picture
of our daughter shaping mud
for her report on the prairie photographer
who fell in love with sod,
the wonders of sod,
gave up everything for sod:
medical school, lovers, home,
to travel, to take pictures
that would be lost
in a fire, all 1500, except negatives,
imprinted on glass,
sheltered from obscurity
so, finally,
nothing was lost.

I love my imaginings of this man,
this Solomon Butcher,
the long stretches of land,
the wind, the occasional tree,
the lone dugout,
how he wanted to discover the world,
discover the woman, her fire
beneath the caldron.

I love my life,
my mislaid child,
this century of tears,
life before life.

This week, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on an abortion question. One of the heroines of the right-to-choose movement, Jane Hodgson died a few days ago. Dr. Hodgson was sentenced to jail in 1970 for performing an "illegal" abortion. She acted on her conscience, choosing to provide medical care to a woman who had contracted German Measles during her pregnancy. Rubella is devastating to the developing fetus. But don't think that the anti-choice forces give a shit about any of that. Every sperm, egg, and zygote is sacred. Women, on the other hand, don't count for shit in their world.

Perhaps it's best that Dr. Hodgson not live to see what continues to happen that women fought and died for just a generation ago. Eight men, none of whom will never be pregnant, never face the danger of pregnancy, never have to make a choice about what they carry within their bodies, will rule on whether women and their doctors can be trusted to make the right decision about late-term abortion.

The law lacks the exception for a pregnant woman's health that the court held in the Nebraska case to be constitutionally required; Congress simply declared that the procedure was never necessary.

Congress declared that the procedure is never necessary? Jesus Fucking Christ. Is this the same Congress that voted to authorize the president's search for chimerical weapons of mass destruction? That spent days arguing over whether Terri Schiavo was alive? What, did they all go to medical school during one of their recesses? What the fuck?

But you know what? Regardless of what the Supreme Court decides, we will fight them. We will fight them with Emergency Kindness. We will fight them with my nascent plan to create a network of women willing to help minors get Plan B. We will fight them by educating our daughters about the beauty and perfection of their own bodies, their own souls. They will not take our daughters.

For a generation, we have been losing ground. But it is time for a new generation of Bread and Roses. Of Beauty and Sex. Of Love and Pleasure. Of Equal Opportunity and Freedom.

Bread and Roses
by (Lyrics: James Oppenheim; Music: Martha Coleman or Caroline Kohlsaat) (1910s)
As we come marching, marching in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing: "Bread and roses! Bread and roses!"
As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women's children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!

As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient cry for bread.
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.
Yes, it is bread we fight for -- but we fight for roses, too!

As we come marching, marching, we bring the greater days.
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more the drudge and idler -- ten that toil where one reposes,
But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and roses! Bread and roses!

Twenty years ago, I fought my shame by posing for photos for a friends' artistic portfolio. I never thought I would post any of those photos publicly, but today, for my daughters, and for myself, and for Cali, I re-claim my body, my rights, my freedom.

It's not perfect, but it's mine. And I'll be godfuckingdamned before I let them, or anyone else, tell me what I can do with it. And if they think that they can mess with my daughters, they clearly, clearly do not know the wrath of Mom-Lorraine.

When the Enemy is the Self

2006-11-03T12:31:00.000-05:00

Ted Haggard had a bad day yesterday. His self-loathing, his hatred of his body and its desires, desires he has stifled and twisted, caught up with him--publicly, and shamed, he resigned his position as President of the National Association of Evangelicals.

It's the kind of thing that schadenfreude is all about: watching, with glee, the suffering of one who has been hoisted by his own petard.
But, yesterday, I also had a bad day. I spent much of yesterday crying, sick to my stomach, unable to catch my breath, and contemplating the various implements within my own house that could be used to effect my own demise.

Jesus commanded that we should love all people as we love ourselves. But perhaps Ted Haggard and many, many of his compatriots do not love themselves; therefore, they cannot love others.
I get that kind of pain.

Pain has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not.

It has no future but itself,
Its infinite realms contain
Its past, enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.
Emily Dickinson, XIX

My pain yesterday was precipitated by a cruel remark made by someone that struck at the very heart of me. It was a criticism of some essential part of myself. Not a valid criticism, but the kind of remark one makes when one has set out to hurt someone. It found its mark, and devastated, it took me hours to dig myself out of the hole that I had been thrown into. Of course, as anyone who has suffered from these types of events will tell you, once you get in the hole, you are quickly joined by the other monsters, and before long, one remark had become an entire critique of my useless, awful life.

I suppose I'm lucky in that I've had to deal with these types of events before. I've learned coping mechanisms--some cathartic, some merely busywork until the crisis has passed. But it was a long, horrible day. For a few hours, my self-loathing was at its zenith, and I fantasized, in exquisite detail, the various ways that if I really wanted to, I could end that pain forever and kill myself. The only thing that kept me from doing it was the memory that this has happened to me many times before, and if I could just hold on, eventually the storm would blow through me. It did. When the acute feelings had passed, I was left with the sensation of being a tree that had been violently stripped of all its leaves. Naked and exposed. My whole body ached.

Life is tough and brimming with loss, and the most we can do about it is to glimpse ourselves clear now and then, and find out what we feel about familiar scenes and recurring faces this time around.

Roger Angell Let Me Finish

One of the toughest things that depression and addiction have taught me is that my secrets will kill me if left in the dark. It does not mean that I have to equip myself with a bullhorn and proclaim my secrets to the world (although some might argue that I tend to use blogging to do such things), but rather, that when something makes itself aware to me, pushing it down into the darkness, ignoring it, is the quickest way I know to start myself on some sort of downward spiral. And so, when I feel some truth, or some urge, or some desire, I make sure to admit it to myself, and if necessary, tell someone else.

Relentless honesty can be exhausting. And as the Dalai Lama said, "Honesty without compassion is cruelty." That's the rub for me. It's all well and good to be honest, but if it merely becomes one more way to beat the shit out of myself, well, that's not the intention of honesty. Which isn't to say that I don't admit the bad about myself; it's just that if I am acknowledging some part of myself that needs improvement, I need to do so in a way that allows me to move forward in change, rather than getting stuck slung over some barrel, where I invite everyone to take a whack at my ass.
Mr. Haggard's secrets, Mr. Foley's secrets, Mr. Swaggart's secrets, Mr. Limbaugh's secrets, Mr. Bush's secrets--have not, as far as anyone can tell, made them more compassionate, self-aware human beings. Instead, they have retreated into addiction, and into projection, where their self-loathing evinces itself as cruelty to others. Pedophilia. Making fun of disability. Going to prostitutes. Sending others to war. Jesus said to love others as you love yourself. If their behaviour toward others is a reflection of their own feelings toward themselves, their inner pain must be overwhelming.
For those of you who don't know Mr. Haggard's story, here are parts of it.

The evangelical association states on its Web site that homosexual sex is condemned by Scripture, and Mr. Haggard has advocated passage of an amendment to the United States Constitution to ban same-sex marriage.

The accuser, Mike Jones, told KUSA, Channel 9, in Denver that Mr. Haggard had paid him for sex over the last three years, and that he had methamphetamine several times.
“People may look at me and think what I’ve done is immoral,” Mr. Jones, who said he is no longer a prostitute, told KUSA. “But I think I had to do the moral thing in my mind, and that is expose someone who is preaching one thing and doing the opposite behind everybody’s back.”
Mr. Haggard said in a lengthy interview with KUSA that he had never used drugs of any kind and that he did not smoke or drink alcohol.
Mr. Haggard has been a supporter of an amendment to the state’s Constitution banning same-sex marriage, on which Coloradans will vote next week. He told KUSA that the accusations might have been politically motivated.

Later, however, this came out:

Rev. Ted Haggard, Evangelical Senior Pastor of New Life Church in Colorado Springs, has confessed to some of the accusations against him according to Rev. Ross Parsley, who is serving as Acting Senior Pastor of the 14,000-member Protestant church.
Rev. Ted Haggard, a key Evangelical in the religious right and president of the National Association of Evangelicals, said in a statement that he placed himself on administrative leave "pending investigation, spiritual counsel, and a decision by the church's board of overseers" after he was accused of using drugs and participating in a three-year homosexual relationship.
After he resigned, the board of overseers met with Haggard. "It is important for you to know that he confessed to the overseers that some of the accusations against him are true," said Parsley in an e-mail to the congregation.

Earlier in his life, Haggard saw demons. As he told the Colorado Springs Gazette:

Haggard had experienced a vision in high school after he was born again.

He said he saw demons hovering over newborn babies at a hospital, waiting to instill in them negative character traits such as hatred, greed, drug use and masturbation.
These were the kind of spirits Haggard knew he had to fight. Haggard said he never thought of leading his own church.

Masturbation as a demon? It doesn't take a genius to figure out that even as a teenager, Haggard struggled with what his flesh desired and what his brain told him he could have. What a conflict that must have been for him. He married and had five children. If it turns out that Haggard is, in fact, gay, he will have no need for hell. The self-loathing he has lived with is its own hell.
I am not excusing Haggard's deeds as leader of homophobic groups in Colorado and across the country. It will be interesting to see the group's reaction to their former leader: will they turn on him as the mob often does, or will they practice Christian forgiveness, hating the sin but loving the sinner? Will they send him off to be "re-educated," so that he may once again return to trying to mortify his flesh in the name of some despotic God's commandments in Leviticus?
Or, is there a possibility for Ted Haggard's redemption? Will this be his conversion experience? Will this be the moment that, his heart broken wide open by what is happening to him, that he learns to love the part of himself that he used to loathe? Will it cause him to ask forgiveness of the gay community, and to join the ranks of those of us who want all people to be able to love whom they choose to love? I think that's my wish for Ted Haggard. For him to know peace.
I can only love others as I love myself. And as I wish myself peace, I wish it for those who suffer. Maybe, if their suffering is eased, they will stop inflicting their pain onto us.

Your grief for what you've lost lifts a mirror
up to where you're bravely working.

Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
here's the joyful face you've been wanting to see.

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralyzed.

Your deepest presence is in every small
contracting and expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as birdwings.

Rumi Birdwings

Male Contraceptive Pill a Reality?

2006-10-31T14:28:00.000-05:00

News out of Great Britain suggests that a male contraceptive pill is not too many years away from the market. The pill has been shown to not affect male hormone levels (thus not making them into girly girls), but it does prevent the manufacture of sperm.

In trials so far these have produced no worrying side effects - however scientists think men may still worry about whether introducing female hormones could harm their virility in some way.
The new approach would therefore avoid this problem. The common perception is that few women would actually believe a man who said he was on the Pill.
However a study published in the British Medical Journal in 2000 found that only two per cent of women said they would not trust their partner to take a male Pill.

I bet you can tell where this diary is going. Down.
If you are a woman, would you feel comfortable relying on your male partner to take care of contraception?
If you are a man, would you consider taking the pill in order to ensure not getting your partner pregnant? Would you worry about side effects? Would having your fertility affected make you feel less "manly"?
Given a man's choices about contraception previously: condoms, coitus interruptus, coitus reservatus, and vasectomy, this may be a welcome addition to the options.
Obviously, not everyone site has to worry about pregnancy. Those of us who are gay or sterile are out of this loop, but I would hope that even so, you may still have an opinion on the topic.
This diary is partly tongue-in-cheek. But I think that the reproductive rights debate may change in ways subtle and not-so-subtle if a male birth control method that had no permanent nor sensation side-effects were to become available.

High Heeled Sneakers

2006-10-30T11:17:00.000-05:00

What Do Women Want?

by Kim Addonizio

I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what's underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty's and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I'm the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I'll pull that garment
from its hanger like I'm choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I'll wear it like bones, like skin,
it'll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.

Late Night Thoughts

2006-10-25T09:47:00.000-04:00

I shouldn't be writing tonight. My neck hurts. My neck or arms or back almost always hurt, the result of a computer over-use injury that first popped up in 1996. It doesn't help to write long-hand. The nerves and wiring in me is fucked up, and when I get like this, I'm supposed to rest. Sometimes, I do that. I stop writing for a while. But for me, stopping writing is like stopping breathing. I begin to feel choked, overwhelmed, clogged up. I begin to drown in my own life, the pent-up sensations of taking the world in and then having nothing to "do" with that knowledge.

Outside, it is cold. It has sleeted much of the day. Sleet is ambivalent snow. Neither one nor the other, it just makes a mess. I wonder sometimes if my ambivalence creates the same affect in my own life. Neither here nor there, one nor the other. Happiness, when it comes, is not a long-term visitor, but when she arrives, I sometimes feel as if I overwhelm her, make too much of her being around. Perhaps if I gave her time to settle in, she wouldn't feel the need to leave so quickly. Sort of like the way I used to scare off lovers when I was younger. Sometimes, I just overwhelmed them with my need for their company, for their … love. And they would leave, hurriedly, sometimes cruelly.

Now, I spend a lot of time alone. My children split their time between their dad and me, and I no longer expect the men in my life to be permanent fixtures. I have learned, finally, to be alone, to like my own company, even on nights such as this when I am full of longing and wanderlust and not entirely sure of what it is that I want.

When I was younger, nights like this frightened me. The things I did to keep from having to be alone were myriad. I sought distraction, and that distraction took many forms. Men. Drugs. Bars. Television. Even books. That desire to get lost, to get totally fucked up and disoriented was strong, because if I didn't know where the hell I was then I didn't know where. I. was. To be aware of my true location, my true size, my real situation, was uncomfortable. I hate discomfort. Discomfort is dis-ease. That itchy, crawly sensation inside my own skin to be someone else, to be somewhere else, is god-awful. It makes me want to tear at my own flesh. I wish I could say that it has gone away. But it hasn't. What has changed is my ability to sit with it. To let it come into the room with me, see what it wants, see what it is trying to tell me.

A few years ago, shortly after I had left my marriage, at a moment when I felt completely adrift, I chanced upon Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. I do not remember how I found them, or why I felt compelled to buy a copy in the bookstore, but I did. I have a distinct memory of being sat in a coffeehouse in Seattle, and reading Letter #8 for the first time.

Have you ever had a moment when you have read something so true, so resonant with your own struggle, that you have vibrated upon reading it? It was as if someone had touched a gong within me.

The letter was written in August of 1904. It begins by discussing sadness as moments in which something enters into us, that, in fact, sadness is the reaction of our emotions to being confronted with something that whose meaning is not immediately apparent to us.

It continues:

And to speak of solitude again, it becomes always clear that this is at bottom not something that one can take or leave. We are solitary. We may delude ourselves and act as though this were not so. That is all. But how much better it is to realize that we are so, yes, even to begin by assuming it. We shall indeed turn dizzy then; for all points upon which our eye has been accustomed to rest are taken from us, there is nothing near any more and everything is infiintely far…So for him who becomes solitary all distances, all measures change; of these changes many take place suddenly, and then, as with the man on the mountaintop, extraordinary imaginings and singular sensations arise that seem to grow out beyond all bearing. But it is necessary for us to experience that too. We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible in it. That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm…For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed; it is shyness before any sort of new, unforseeable experience with which one does not think oneself ready to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most engimatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhastively from his own existence…We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us. We are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of years of accomodation become so like this life, that when we hold still we are, through a happy mimicry, scarcely to be distinguished from all that surrounds us. We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must rry to love them.

Last week, alerted by caliberal that Eve Ensler had published a new book, I picked up a copy. Insecure at Last: Losing It In Our Security Obsessed World was not unlike reading Rilke the first time. Except for something important. The first time I read Rilke, which wasn't all that long ago, everything he said resonated, even if I felt I wasn't ready for the truth I was reading. I knew that I was suffering, but in reality, it was my fear of potential suffering that could still happen to me that was absolutely paralyzing. I did not think that I could bear one more moment of pain, that anything else that life had to throw at me would undo me. But Rilke opened something up in me that night. It made me aware that my fear would only lead me down the same paths I had already traversed. Those paths had led me to the place I was. All of my attempts to avoid suffering had simply created new ways for suffering to get in.

When I read Ensler last week, I found myself shaking my head in agreement. Not in the "aha" moment, but rather, in the recognition that fear has driven many, many people to forfeit their freedoms, to justify torture and war, to pledge allegiance to madmen, for that false sense of security. And in reading Ensler, and in being reminded of all that we have given up out of fear, made me want to … what?

At what point do people "get" that false security is allowing our fear of possible futures to pollute our right nows? There are worse things than the monsters. There is being paralyzed by fright, sitting in the cave watching shadows, afraid to go out into the sunlight. I feel as if I'm living in a nation of cave-dwellers. But I have hope, because I think that there are a lot more people venturing outside, braving their fears to really examine where our need for security has brought us. That is the "right now" that I see.

October Pond

2006-10-25T09:43:00.000-04:00

Hidden Grave

2006-10-25T09:41:00.000-04:00

Election Night

2006-10-11T13:31:00.000-04:00

I had forgotten it was John Lennon's birthday on Monday. It also happens to be one of my dearest friend's birthdays, and he received my birthday greetings and wishes for a good year. So it was that I was thinking about when I saw the mention of Lennon today.

My connection to John Lennon is virtually non-existent, other than the fact that I came from a working-class Northern English factory town—he a Liverpudlian, me a Mancunian. But there is a link to John Lennon in my life. It's also a link to politics and my personal story, so if you're in the mood to read, I'm in the mood to tell.

In November of 1980, I was a college freshman. I had spent the entire summer prior to college working on a congressional campaign. It was exciting work, and I met many "famous" politicians, got to hob-nob with political movers and shakers. I was young, and I kind of got adopted by the campaign as the "kid," but the deal was, I was also intense and well-organized, and I wound up being the volunteer coordinator. Yep. 17-year old me organizing phone banks and sign parties and envelope-stuffing parties.
I also had an enormous crush on one of the campaign coordinators. He was a recent graduate of college, taking a year off before applying to law school, and I thought he was to die for. I thought about him constantly. Even when I went away to college, every weekend, I'd go back down to campaign headquarters and work with him. And, because I was going to college in the same district, I still got to see everyone when they came up for events.

He and I talked all the time. He was a huge Beatles fan, especially Lennon. We talked about music. About politics. About how the world was going to be a better place. We talked about human rights. About how labor unions were important. About how he was going to law school to get involved in international justice. Each day, my crush became more and more of a love. I was blissful in his company. I couldn't help it.

November 4, 1980. For a liberal Democrat, it may reign as one of the worst nights ever. It wasn't just Jimmy Carter getting trounced by that animatronic moron. It was the liberal Democratic senators who lost their seats that night: Church, Bayh, McGovern, Magnuson. I forget all of them now, but I just remember being despondent. As the election returns came in, it just went from bad to worse to grim. A caravan decided to head south to our main headquarters so our candidate, who had clinched his race, could make his victory speech. It was late. After 11. Nobody noticed that I was pouring myself drinks from the open bar. But by midnight or so, with it hellaciously clear that nothing was ever going to be the same, I was pretty drunk.

As was he. He offered me a ride home to my parents' house. My folks had no idea I was in town, of course. I remember we got into his car and he said to me, "Well. You have two choices, I can drive you to your folks, or you can come home with me."

Guess which I chose? I wasn't a virgin then. I had lost my virginity at 15, and my fantasies about this guy had always included sex. Of course I said yes. And what I needed from him was more than sex. I needed comfort. Some assurance that the world that I thought was collapsing all around my feet wasn't really collapsing. That it wasn't really as bad as it looked. That this country had not really just elected Reagan and a band of such conservative dismal Republicans that certainly, now, Orwell's 1984 was about to manifest itself.

He needed that, too. He needed to lose himself in me, to pretend that the world would be different. So that's what we did. We went back to his apartment and we fucked all night long. Literally. The room was light by the time I fell asleep. We slept for a few hours, and then, when he woke up, he said to me, as only a 22-year old male could, "That should not have happened."

I don't think I could have been more devastated. The world was over and the guy I thought I was in love with had just disowned everything that had passed between us. He drove me to the bus station, and I remember crying all the way to my college town.

Three weeks later, I'm late. It's just a day or two. No biggie. But I'm getting worried. This is 1980, and they don't sell pregnancy tests in stores. There's a health clinic on campus, but the earliest they'll do a pregnancy test is two weeks after a missed period. Three days. Four. Five. No blood. I call him, tell him the news. He's supposed to be leaving for Europe right after Christmas. He's supposed to be starting law school in the fall. This is not in his plans.

He begins to call me every day to ask me one simple question. "Have you gotten your period yet?" And every day, the same answer. "I'm sorry. No. I haven't."

I didn't tell anyone. Who was I going to tell? I just carried myself through my days in a daze. I tried not to think about it. I had heard that you could make your period late by stressing out over it, so I tried to tell my body to relax. I went running, every day, thinking that the exercise would make me start.

Abortion was legal, and was available in the college town where I lived. But I didn't know what I wanted to do. If I was pregnant, could I go through an abortion? I preferred not to think about it.

I saw my folks. Didn't mention anything going on with me. I went to classes, did my school work. Talked to him every night. It was bittersweet. On one hand, he was talking to me and I thought I might be in love with him. On the other, he clearly did not want to be talking to me. He wanted me to go away.

Finally. The first week of December. I went into the health clinic the first thing in the morning. I peed into a jar. I would get my results in the afternoon—after three p.m. they informed me. He had arranged to meet me off-campus at 4:00. I showed up at three in the clinic office. "Negative" the nurse said, and I must admit, my feelings were mixed. I was happy to not be pregnant. But I also knew what it meant for him.

He showed up at the café. I told him the news. He was so happy. He was so happy I wanted to punch him. He was happy because he wouldn't be saddled with me. That he could let me go now. That I could go away and he could go away and that was that.

And he did. But a few days later, I was sleeping and my mom called me. I thought she was calling because it was her weddding anniversary and I had forgotten. No. She was calling because John Lennon had just been shot to death. It was like 8 pm my time.

The only person I could think to call was him. And so I did. He was crying, couldn't talk. I don't remember what we said, but the conversation lasted maybe 60 seconds. I wanted so much to hold him, make him feel better. But I couldn't.

It was the last time we ever talked.

Becoming A Radical

2006-10-11T13:10:00.000-04:00

On May 14 1970, I had just celebrated my seventh birthday. I was living at the time in a suburb of Chicago. In 1965, my parents had emigrated from England, my brother was born in 1966, and in 1970, my mother was pregnant again. The events that I'm about to speak of undoubtedly happened on May 15, but I've been snapped back to that time a conversation I had with Liza, about the radical impulse, the differences among so many bloggers—the division that has arisen among those of us who look at the upcoming election and want to cry over our "choices."

Some of us have been accused of being single-issue voters who are willing to see the Democrats lose in November because they are running so may anti-choice D's. In fact, we've been lectured by quite a few people about how if we elect these anti-choice Democrats, choice will still be preserved. It's a logic I can't follow; won't these folks wind up serving on committees where they're still going to be able to have a say on issues related to privacy? Or will they magically vote the way they are told to by the leadership? 'Coz you know, that's been working out so well these past two years.

Anyway. I want to talk about how I became a radical leftist, the moment at which I understood that my way of looking at the world was coming from some other place than "love of country" or "patriotism," the two things we start almost immediately to teach children in school. Kindergartners say the Pledge. But they don't often talk about issues of social justice.

In my family, we did. Nearly every single night.

1970 was the year of Kent State. But I don't remember Kent State. I don't have a single image in my head of it, other than the photos I saw much later, and the song by CSNY. It's not Kent State that changed my life. It's Jackson State. On May 14, two students were killed by police at Jackson State in Mississippi. And that I do remember. Because I remember specifically what I said to my father while we were watching the news about the killings: "Daddy. I don't ever want to move down south. All they do is kill people down there."

The possibility of moving down south was not out of the question. My father was a management consultant, and we moved from assignment to assignment, following him all over the country. I was to move 11 times in 10 years. By the time I was 7, we were on our third move, and recently, even though we were living in Chicago, he had started traveling to Texas to help out with a short-term project. That day, I was filled with terror to think that I could wind up down south.

By the time I was 7, I knew my father's stories about his personal heroes: Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. My father told me stories about his father's witnessing of Gandhi's trip to Northern England, where Gandhi had asked the workers there to allow Indians to make their own cloth. My father had been inspired by King. Although my father was not a religious man, he carried a copy of the Beatitudes in his wallet. He told me that those words were the only words that someone needed to know about religion.

I don't know if the news showed footage of the dead students at Jackson State. I do know that, even now, I have a visceral reaction when I think about that day. I have images in my head of chaos and guns and black students running for their lives. I have an image in my head of my 7-year old self, trying to make sense of what had happened.

The Jackson State killings was the day I realized as a child that there were people in the world who would kill other people for the simple act of asking for what was theirs.

Certainly, the spark of my progressivism had been lit by my father, sitting at the kitchen table with me, telling me stories about people who wanted to change the world. But Jackson State was the day that I burst into flame as a leftist.

I'm not a liberal. I am a leftist and I am a pacifist, but I believe that there are things that are worth fighting for. That justice is worth fighting for. That the right to own our bodies and not be judged by our gender, sexuality, or ethnicity is worth fighting for.

The day that Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green died, was the day that my life changed. That was the day that I got it, that even as a 7-year old white girl, the killing of black students on a college campus was something that could happen to me. And it's for that reason that 35 years later, I will not keep my mouth shut, I will not back down, and I will proudly bear whatever epithets the wingnuts want to throw at me.

Because injustice is so clear that even a 7-year old can see it. And I may no longer look at the world through the eyes of a child, but the rage it engenders in me is that of my little self. And so for her, and for my children--and your children, too--I fight on.

It's one of the reasons that the Democrats are breaking my heart. Around us, our civil liberties are being destroyed, our cities are dying, we are fighting an illegal war, we are destroying the right to privacy, to the claiming of our own bodies. And what are we focused on right this moment? E-mails between a Congressperson and his page. Sleazy, yes. But not the abomination that is Iraq. Or the horror that is our treatment of Iraqi/Afghani/Pakistani prisoners. Or the terror that women feel when they realize they are pregnant and they have no where to go. And not the sadness that gay men and lesbians feel about their inability to secure basic civil rights in this country.

Politics is not a fucking game. It's not an academic problem that you get interested in because you read a little Machiavelli or Burke. Politics is life. There are people dying because of our politics.

And all over the world, children are getting radicalized by what is going on around them. Watching their homes being bulldozed, their families being murdered, their playmates being dragged off in the middle of the night, burying their dead, it's all become part of their politics. And those people who can't be bothered with politics, but love the sleaze of a good scandal—are fucking entertained and aroused by the content of pathetic e-mails are not the voters that the Democrats want at the polls. Those folks will turn on the Democrats in a heartbeat.

We want those voters who, having seen the carnage being committed in our name, want answers, want change, want justice. I'm embarrassed by the haymaking over the Foley affair. Yes. I recognize the hypocrisy, and I love the schadenfreude, but at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. What matters is justice. Goddamn it. I want the Democrats to stand for justice.

For more information on the Jackson State murders:?

Black Kent State

JSUM

AA Registry
Collegian

Black College Wire

Chomsky

The Word

2006-10-11T13:07:00.000-04:00

It might have been written a hundred times, easily, on that enormous face. Humpty Dumpty was sitting, with his legs crossed like a Turk, on the top of a high wall -- such a narrow one that Alice quite wondered how he could keep his balance -- and, as his eyes were steadily fixed in the opposite direction, and he didn't take the least notice of her, she thought he must be a stuffed figure, after all.

`And how exactly like an egg he is!' she said aloud, standing with her hands ready to catch him, for she was every moment expecting him to fall.

`It's very provoking,' Humpty Dumpty said after a long silence, looking away from Alice as he spoke, `to be called an egg -- very!'

`I said you looked like an egg, Sir,' Alice gently explained. `And some eggs are very pretty, you know,' she added, hoping to turn her remark into a sort of compliment.

Ssssh. Can you hear us? The sounds we make our muffled. There is not much room for us here in these mass graves. We are stuffed together, face to face, arms strewn across one another, feet covering bellies. We are the dead of 1915. The smell of our rotting bodies has long ago dissipated; the flies have moved on. There is grass over the places where we were thrown into the earth.

But, if you listen closely, you can hear our murmurs. It is not so much justice we want. Justice is for the living. What does it benefit the dead to be granted justice after we are gone?

What we want is to be acknowledged. We are here. And we did not get here on our own.

So what would you have it be called?

Armenians claim that as many as 1.5 million of their ancestors were killed between 1915-1923 in an organized campaign to force them out of eastern Turkey and have pushed for recognition of the killings around the world as genocide.

Turkey acknowledges that large numbers of Armenians died, but says the overall figure is inflated and that the deaths occurred in the civil unrest during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

Don't call it genocide, the Turks say, and if you do, you shall be jailed. It insults "Turkishness" to say that they were capable of killing us like that. You cannot even talk about it in your fiction:

The charges stemmed from remarks made by an Armenian character in Shafak's novel The Bastard of Istanbul, published in March. "I am the grandchild of genocide survivors who lost all their relatives at the hands of Turkish butchers in 1915," Dikran Stamboulian says, referring to the controversial topic of the mass murder of Armenians in the last days of the Ottoman Empire.

"It was an absurd reason to start a trial and a very sensible way of ending it," said Shafak's husband, Eyup Can, outside the heavily guarded Istanbul courthouse.

Shafak was the latest public figure targeted by a group of nationalist lawyers using the notoriously vague article 301 of Turkey's penal code. Protesters linked to the group had attacked novelist Orhan Pamuk when he went on trial last December. Around 300 riot police were on hand yesterday to prevent violence, with dozens more plainclothes police inside. Joost Lagendijk, a Dutch MEP attacked at Pamuk's trial, was given eight bodyguards.

It is not allowed. It did not happen.

The irony of the latest development would kill us if we were not already dead. The French have introduced a bill that would punish those who deny that it was genocide.

Turkey called Monday on the European Union to oppose French legislation that would outlaw denials that World War I-era killings of Armenians amounted to genocide.

Lawmakers in France, which has some 400,000 citizens of Armenian origin, have introduced a bill to penalize Armenian genocide denial with fines and jail terms. Turkey, which says the deaths came during a period of civil unrest and don't constitute genocide, asked the European bloc it seeks to join to weigh in on its side.

''We expect the European Union to express its opposition against such a development that restricts freedom of expression in France, because it contradicts key values of the EU,'' said Justice Minister Cemil Cicek, who also serves as the government's spokesman.

Do you not see why that is so funny? Call it genocide in Turkey and go to jail. Deny it was genocide in France and go to jail.

In the meantime, we are still dead. Still here. Still waiting.

The Turkish Prime Minister, who apparently believes as your president does, that a lie repeated repeatedly eventually becomes the truth has reacted thusly:

ISTANBUL, TURKEY // Turkey's prime minister vowed today to fight against what he called a "systematic lie machine" pushing to label Turkey's World War I-era killings of Armenians as genocide.

And still, we are dead.

Hrant Dink, who last year was prosecuted for talking about the genocide, has accused the French of hurting Armenians, of killing dialogue, by its insistence on trying to make it a crime to say that our deaths were not genocide.

Commenting on the "genocide denial bill," which is scheduled to come before the French Parliament October 12, Dink said "When this bill appeared first, we were fast to declare as a group that it would lead to bad results......As you know, I have been tried in Turkey for saying the Armenian genocide exists, and I have talked about how wrong this is. But at the same time, I cannot accept that in France you could possibly now be tried for denying the Armenian genocide. If this bill becomes law, I will be among the first to head for France and break the law. Then we can watch both the Turkish Republic and the French government race against eachother to condemn me. We can watch to see which will throw me into jail first.....I really think that France, if it makes this bill law, will be hurting not only the EU, but Armenians across the world. It will also damage the normalizing of relations between Armenia and Turkey. What the peoples of these two countries need is dialogue, and all these laws do is harm such dialogue."

But how can you have a dialogue with people who say your words are meaningless, that they are lies, that they are make-believe? How can their be dialogue when the other side has closed their ears to your truth?

Peter Balakian, who has written much about what happened to us, had this to say:

I think any true and meaningful dialogue can only happen if there is truth. We can't have debate without truth. Those who come to converse around a table must acknowledge the truth about the Armenian genocide and the moral nature of what genocide is, and then we can move forward.

Balakian told our stories in his book, Black Dog of Fate. It is not to be read by the faint of heart.

In the summer of 1915 in Diarbekir, every day you heard about Armenians disappearing. Shopkeepers disappearing from their shops in the middle of the day. Children not returning from school. Men not coming back from the melon fields. Women, especially young ones, disappearing as they returned from the bath. Shops had been looted by Turks more frequently that year. The pastry shop on Albak Street had been robbed and burned. The carpet store near the mosque had been broken into and cleaned out. Farms in the outlying valley had been stripped of their goats and sheep by Kurdish bandits, and everyone knew this had been sanctioned by the Vali. In the middle of the day a teacher at the Armenian school, Kanjian, was shot to death by the son of the mudir. No reasons given. No action taken. Mr. Kanjian's body was thrown in a wagon by the zaptieh and driven around the market square...
Whenever we passed near a eucalyptus tree I gathered some leaves so that at night I could suck on them to get water in my mouth. I lay on the desert ground at night, sucking a eucalyptus leaf and staring at the moon. The moon is terribly bright in August in the desert around the Euphrates. All that month it grew each night. It followed us. It was a wolf's eye. It was the opal charm of a Turkish sorceress. Some nights it was a damask seal and some it was a Persian charger stripped of its blue. It was scouring and harsh on the weeds and rocks, and the few animals that darted through looked like unreal silvery creatures. I lay on my back and felt the grooves of my cuts made by the Turkish whips ease onto the hard ground, and I stared at the moon. Often I unfolded the piece of the kilim. It was the piece I used under the lamp on my nightstand in my bedroom. I held it up to the moonlight and looked at the colors and thought of my bedroom windows, one looking out to the street and the other into the fruit trees of our courtyard. It was just a simple kilim of aubergine and saffron medallions. In one latch-hook medallion there was a green scorpion, in the other a red scarab. In the moonlight the colors were eerie, and after a while they seemed to float in the black air and then drip like roman candles.
One night as I sucked on a eucalyptus leaf and stared at my kilim in the moonlight, I felt the boot of a gendarme against the side of my neck. I rolled over so as to hide my face in the ground. But the boot continued to kick me and then to step on my head. As I buried my head more fiercely in the ground, the boot hooked me under the chin and pried me up, and the next thing I knew I was looking up at a man whose mustache looked silver in the moonlight. I watched him unbuckle his pants and I shut my eyes and the next thing I knew a stream of hot piss shot into my nose and over my face. The cuts on my neck and cheeks began to sting and my eyes burned. Soon my hair was like a sticky mess of rancid flax. When he finished he kicked some dirt onto my face, and I lay there squeezing my kilim, which was also wet, and I felt a small breeze blow over my face. For a long time I did not open my eyes.
When I did, I took a eucalyptus leaf I had saved and wiped my eyes. When I looked up, the moonlight had turned the sky white and I could see my mother's face as if it floated on the white lace of our dining table. She was saying to me: Let them take you, let them take you, we will bring you back at Easter. Then the moon turned red as my taffeta dress, and my love had come in green velvet gloves and the scarf that hung in the walnut tree.

Run, run run the little chicken said. Your cheeks are like apples, and the wind takes your golden hair and sends it to the mountains.
From seven stores, I gathered silver and made a ring and put it on pearl's finger.
The moon stared at me all night. In the morning I woke inside the piss-gummed web of my hair, and I sucked on the eucalyptus leaf to make some saliva to clean off my face. Later I found some weeds, and I ground them up and spread them in the wounds enflamed by the piss.
One night I was raped. I prayed every night to the Virgin Mary and to Jesus and to God. And they answered my prayers. After this I felt some mindless will to survive.

And still we lie. In the dirt. Our bones turned to dust. Many of us will never be found. And if you cannot find us, if you cannot find the evidence that we were the victims of genocide, well, then how can you say it was so? And even if you do find the evidence, even if you were to be confronted with thousands of our skeletons, scattered across the horizon, hanging from the trees, the bodies of mothers and children and old men and old women and young men and ... and ... everyone. What then would you call it?

The French and the Turks will slap economic sanctions on one another, they will rail and hiss and spit at one another, they will throw the word "genocide" back and forth, and they will hold a mirror to each other's face and say, "You did this. Look." Algeria rhymes with Armenia. But no one will look. And we will still, still be dead.

It is, after all, a word. Just like justice, which is not for us. But please, please, can we not be allowed to claim the word "genocide" so that the enormity of what was done to us can be comprehended?

`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'

`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

`The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master -- that's all.'...

`That's a great deal to make one word mean,' Alice said in a thoughtful tone.

`When I make a word do a lot of work like that,' said Humpty Dumpty, `I always pay it extra.'

October Sky

2006-10-05T14:29:00.000-04:00

Look, I want to love this world

as though it's the last chance I'm ever going to get

to be alive

and know it.

Mary Oliver, "October"

I woke up with hope on my tongue this morning. It was a sweetness on the flesh of my lips, a tiny taste of something larger than myself, some reason to get up this morning and partake of a mad world.

I have been resentful as hell that it's autumn. But this morning, something shifted.

I have spent the past couple of weeks in fear. Dread, from the Old English, ondrædan may be a better word. My fearful self counseled against staying here through another winter. Winter here is cruel. There is no mercy in the January wind, no safe place to walk when treacherous February freezes every surface.

As much as I love autumn, its beauty is ominous. And for the past two weeks, I've allowed that sense of fear to cloud my ability to see the beauty around me. To lose track of time and space and my own heartbeat amidst the roar and rush of fear.

But how can I not love these colours? My computer camera does not do them justice; it cannot catch the glow, the iridescence, of a dying leaf lit from within. The sun merely illuminates that last burst of dying energy. It is a gorgeous, melancholy, but joyful, hopeful thing.

I didn't go to work straight away this morning. Instead, I fixed myself my usual two cups of coffee, ate a bowl of cereal, and decided to go for a long walk. There was a bite in the air. Today, we'll be fortunate if the temps reach fifty, and the Arctic wind, blown across the Canadian prairie, whistled in my face as I trudged up the hill. There was a canopy of trees, all in various stages of turning. The willows were still green--they are always the last to turn around here. According to the meteorologist on the news last night, we are at 50-75 percent peak, which means that we'll be at 100 percent in a week or so.

The peak will break your heart. I often drive for dozens of miles, up into the hills, just to stare at the hillsides. It becomes like living in the middle of an impressionist painting. Oranges, and scarlets and golds bleeding into one another against a cerulean sky.

Autumn reminds me that dormany comes. Transition comes. And change happens.

So many of the people I love are in transition. I have spent countless hours the past few weeks listening as friends try to process the changes that are happening in their lives. And my beloved grandmother, Hilda Raymond Bradshaw Priestley, who came into this world in 1916, will not live to see her next birthday. She is dying, and as much as I will miss her, I know that she has lived a long and joyful life. She herself says that 89 years is enough. And so my prayer for her is to have death come to her on her terms.

We are a nation in transition, too. It is autumn for this country; all around us, the leaves are changing, and many, many of us are afraid of the cold wind that blows through Washington and bites us all.

But I'm tired of the fear. I want to embrace the hope of what could be, instead of focusing on my dread of the possibilities of Yetis.

I am not naive. And I do not have expectations. The wisdom of the rooms is that expectations merely lead to resentments. But hope. Well, "hope is the thing with feathers." And today, I intend to fly.

I no longer want to anticipate the worst. To do so merely allows the worst to happen to me twice: once in my imagination, and once in the the future--if it is to be. If the future is bad, I'll deal with it then.

For now, I want to embrace my own reality that, while fully aware of the ugliness and horror of everything around me, is also deeply cognizant that while it is not yet the autumn of my life, I am close. So I must embrace where I am. Now. Today.

When death comes

like the hungry bear in autumn;

when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;

when death comes

like the measles-pox;

when death comes

like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:

what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything

as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,

and I look upon time as no more than an idea,

and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common

as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth

tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something

precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life

I was a bride married to amazement.

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don't want to wonder

if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,

or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

Mary Oliver, "When Death Comes"

Besides, even in winter, there is still beauty in the stark reminders of loss.

The Last Kiss

2006-09-17T10:53:00.000-04:00

If the new fascism has a pretty face, it may very well be the face of Zach Braff. That, perhaps, is one of the more painful lines I've ever written. I'm an admirer of Mr. Braff--Garden State was well-crafted, and Mr. Braff's ability as creator of mix tapes was sealed with the soundtrack. It was the soundtrack to The Last Kiss that drew me in the door: the music is a heady collection of mellow reflections on love and betrayal and all that affairs of the heart encompass (and I'm listening to it as I write this). So, why, 15 minutes into The Last Kiss was I ready to start chucking my shoes at the screen? And why, at the end of the movie, was I so infuriated that I wanted to walk up to Mr. Braff and cold cock him?

I'm not the kind of person who is unable to differentiate betweeen an actor and a role. I have singled out Zach Braff because chances are, most of the audience for this movie is going expecting some further installation of Garden State. There are some parallel themes—men in their 20's who haven't quite found their way being the most obvious. In The Last Kiss, however, there's a new element: the women all have vagina dentata Every single one of the women has only one object in mind: to castrate the man she's with so he will never, ever stray.

Misogyny is both a fear and a hatred of women. In TLK, they're both so interwoven, it's hard to unpack them. And, of course, on the surface, the four male characters love women: they want to fuck them, and live with them, and make babies with them. Kind of. Except when women are being icky and reminding the men of what they, as women, really represent: maturity. And maturity, as exemplified by the marriage of Blythe Danner and Tom Wilkinson is a soulless wasteland of no sex, no communication, no passion—just cruelty disguised as snark or benign neglect.

And the movie's producers, who, one assumes, hope this will be a successful "date" movie, know that eventually, Braff must be tamed himself. But in a loving way. In a way that seems completely of his own choosing, after enduring mortification of the flesh and the public castration—you can practically hear the door to his house slamming on his unit—the tamed, soon-to-be-30 year old who recognizes that it is time for him to grow up, settle down, and make a baby. Assume responsibility. Be a good citizen.

He still has his male buddies. And lest we think there's any hint of homoeroticism in those relationships, early on we are treated to watching the four of them watch women simulating lesbian sex for the boys' viewing pleasure. Any guy who likes girls on girls isn't going to turn around and ask his friend for a blowjob. No sir.

The thing that creeped me out during my entire viewing of the movie was the sense that I had read this all before. Male Fantasies, Klaus Theweleit's two-volume study of the culture of masculinity in proto-fascist Germany kept flashing into my head. Women, who are both the object of sexual desire and the way of death. Domesticity, which, while heralded by the state as the sign of maturity is, in the soldier's ethos, the destruction of the korps. For more of my writing on this you can see here, here, or peruse my other posts.

I'm overreaching. I'm sure that I am. On the surface, this is one more movie about giving up one's selfish youth and embracing the suburban hell that is the preordained fate of white, middle-class, privileged America. But the fact remains. The Last Kiss was a nightmarescape for this feminist, who saw in this movie such overt hatred of women that it chilled me right down to my undomesticated cunt.

Cleopatra, Bill Clinton, and Re-Writing History

2006-09-09T12:52:00.000-04:00

The many faces of Cleopatra have been playing through my mind of late. I've just watched the entire first season of Rome, HBO's glorious series, which begins its first season in 52 BCE and ends on March 15, 44 BCE. (That should give you a clue as to what the thrust of the plot is.)
In Rome, Cleopatra is an opium-smoking girl-gone-wild, chained to her bed by her brother and his nasty eunuchs, and once set free, looking to get fucked and solidify her power, in that order.
Okay, where am I going with this? Well, I have a point, but I'm writing this in the the throes of an inner ear infection, so if this post loses its equilibrium, we'll blame the labyrinthitis. Better bring a spool of thread.
Cleopatra is a clear case of a phenomenon that is played out repeatedly, each time an historian sits down to interpret a life and give meaning to the past. In her article for The Guardian, Lucy Hughes-Hallet writes:

All legends have a tendency to mutate, to be reshaped in each successive era according to the prejudices and preoccupations of those who retell the tale. But Cleopatra's is more than usually protean. It was first formulated in her own lifetime by her enemies' propaganda. Its primary purpose was to discredit her lover Mark Antony.

Cleopatra and Antony had formed a partnership that was as much a political alliance between two mutually useful potentates as it was a love affair. But the story, as Roman poets and historians tell it, was that Antony had become so besotted with the queen of Egypt that he was willing to give up his chance of ruling Rome in order to enjoy the pleasures of her bed. So Antony, the canny politician and commander with empire-building ambitions to rival Alexander's, was reinvented as a degenerate hedonist and a traitor to Rome. As a by-product of that successful exercise in news manipulation, Cleopatra was cast as the woman for whose love's sake the world would be well lost.

Cleopatra - the gratification of every conceivable desire - has been repeatedly reimagined by writers, artists and film-makers in accordance with desires of their own. She was one of the most powerful women in the ancient world, and she was defined by the Romans and their heirs as the foreigner - at once the menacing stranger and the temptress, offering the chance of escape from the tedious limitations of one's own known world. So sexual and racial politics have shaped the variations on her story, transforming her from serpent to dove and back again to suit her public's yearnings and fears.

Cleopatra becomes a cipher, an empty signifier into which all sorts of meanings can be poured: seductress, victim, power-hungry bitch, suicidal lover, ambitious woman, Achilles' heel for both Antony and Caesar, feminist heroine, powerful black woman, example of Egyptian (read: Arab) decadence, exotic. In recent years, Cleopatra was the focus of scholarly debate sparked by Martin Bernal, who argued that Greek culture borrowed heavily from African culture, thus making Africa the mother of western civilization. But as country music fans know, she's also the subject of the song sung by Pam Tillis, "Just call me Cleopatra, everybody, 'coz I'm the Queen of Denial." In other words, Cleopatra can be everything and nothing. Dangerous, wise, and farcical. Simultaneously.
Ironically, I know jackshit about Cleopatra other than what I've read in novels, plays, western civ textbooks, movies, television shows, and histories. And ultimately, it doesn't matter what I do or do not know about Cleopatra. It's all material that has been interpreted for me by someone else.
But, even if I did have access to the primary documents about Cleopatra, even if I could have been a fly on her wall, everything I would know about Cleopatra would be contingent upon the way I interpret experience. So I guess I'm getting closer to the center of the maze I'm walking. What is it that historians know and how do they know it?

I can't speak for all historians, and given the "history wars," of the past thirty years (part of the greater culture wars), I doubt I could find two historians that have exact agreement on this point.
Here's what I think I know. Our past is a source of meaning for us. I think we're about to see a huge discussion of this with the airing of the ridiculous interpretation of history that ABC will air about September 11. The buzz on the Internet is that ABC's interpretation blames, who else? Bill Clinton for the bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. ABC freely admits that there are "fictional scenes" in the docudrama, fictional scenes that paint a pretty awful picture of the Clinton administration.

And people are right to howl. But the show, for me, points to the larger issues of truth, fiction, experience, and interpretation. Intepretation does not mean that you get to make shit up. Unfortunately, because one can argue that all knowledge is contingent, one can very easily arrive at a place where we know nothing, therefore all interpretations are equal. Not so. At least not in my world. There is still a line between lying and not lying, and this administration crosses that line near every fucking day. Given the volume of lies that are thrown at the American people every day, it's no wonder that ABC thought it could make some stuff up of its own and have an impact on how September 11 would be forever interpreted. That's pretty ego-feeding stuff--the idea that your lies will become part of the "true story."
But for me, the way to correct interpretation does not mean I'm crawling over the the fundamentalist camp. Sometimes, it gets presented to us that there are only two ways of looking at the problem of words: either they're literally true or they mean nothing and can mean anything. What a mess, huh?

I have written about thes issues before in looking at the memoir of James Frey and his public evisceration by Oprah Winfrey. I cited Joan Scott's article "Experience," in which she interrogated the notion that even reading someone's diary would ultimately not give us access to truth. Why? Because, in a nutshell, even as things are happening to us, we are intepreting the experience. We are converting sensory input into language, we are making the even make sense to ourselves, we are giving ourselves a mechanism to later understand what has happened to us.

Does this mean that shit didn't really happen? Of course not. One of the standard responses to this kind of argument from me is to immediately argue that my argument gives credence to Holocaust deniers. Bull fucking shit. But I would argue that we can read every single memoir by every single Holocaust survivor and still not really know what happened inside those camps. And that is not to deny their pain, their very real suffering, or the reality that the Holocaust occurred.

I have long questioned why we appropriate the past. I know I did because I wanted to understand humanity, ultimately, because I wanted to better understand myself.
I think this is where I want to leave it for now. I've tried to open up a huge, wide open space for discussion here. I hope you'll jump in.

What It's Like For a Girl

2006-08-07T10:06:00.000-04:00

When I was in fifth grade, the Equal Rights Amendment was making its rounds about the states, looking for confirmation from the legislatures. It was a hot topic in our classroom. On the television at night, we saw the images of war and destruction in Viet Nam, saw the colour images of soldiers being carried off the battlefields. Saw the sawgrass whipping in the wind of the helicoptor rotors. We saw the dead Vietnamese, too. The little kids, our age, covered with napalm, or the men in their black pyjamas. It was our nightly dinner companion, the war, and for many of us, it was the conversation at the dinner table, too.

My parents didn't believe in the Domino Theory. They believed the war was bullshit, a waste, and the images would enrage my father. Shortly before the November, 1972 election, Henry Kissinger stood in front of microphones and promised that "peace was at hand." I begged my father to vote for Richard Nixon over George McGovern because I honestly believed that Nixon was going to end the war. I wanted to take off the bracelet I wore, the one that bore the name of an American POW who had been captured in 1965, and who still sat in a Hanoi jail. I thought about his family, his children, and wondered how they coped with their father gone.

So, when the teacher in our class suggested that we should debate the ERA in our classroom, it was those images that filled our heads and coloured our debate. The boys found our Achilles' heel, and they shot at it. "If the ERA passes, girls will be drafted, too," they taunted. We caved. I didn't want to go to war. I didn't want to get shot. I didn't want to be one of those people laid out on a gurney dying a horrible death in the maelstrom of the chopper blades.

To a girl, we voted down the ERA in our classroom. And to a boy, they voted for it.
1972 was also the year SCOTUS rendered a decision in Roe v Wade. It should have been the final battle in a long war, a correction of a wrong done to women in the previous hundred years. Abortion had been legal in the 19th century, but as women entered the work force, organized themselves into labor unions, went into colleges--as what we often refer to as "modern life" emerged--new old-time religions sprang up. Fundamentalisms. A return to the literal word of the Bible. And, not suprisingly, throwing new light upon woman's true nature and true place in the world. Fundamentalism was a modern reaction to the unruliness of the world. And women were the stirrers of that unruliness.

We were all daughters of Eve. We could be disciplined through marriage and childbearing, domesticated like animals, but our sexuality, the free expression of our persons, either rendered us monstrous intellectual spinsters or wild whores. The governments of the USA and its states passed various laws restricting women's access to contraceptives, abortion, even sex education information. It was a crime to send that information through the U.S. mail.

I was too young to be affected by that stuff. But as I entered teenhood and young adulthood, I was shocked to discover that the home I had grown up in, the one where I was frequently told that I could be anything I wanted to be, was not the world at large.

I learned a new language: a language of fear. Fear of the things that could be done to me because I was a woman. I was told to "hush." I was told to not draw attention to myself. I was told not to walk alone at night. I was told that it would be very easy to hurt me.

It was my sexuality that seemed to get me into the most trouble. Since I was a young child, my way of experiencing the world has been through my flesh. Where others take in new knowledge through their eyes, or their ears, I most frequently experienced the world through what I could touch. It wasn't sexual at the beginning, although maybe it was in that pre-sexual sexual kind of way. But I need to feel the stroke of the blade of the grass when I touched it, scrub my hand against the tree bark, stick my finger in the milkshake before I drank it.

And when men came into my life, and I had a desire to know them, to truly know them, it was not enough to hear them speak, I wanted to touch and be touched. Sometimes, a small kiss was enough for me to know that I didn't want to know someone further; at other times, I felt as if it was only in the sensation of being penetrated, of being pinned beneath someone's weight, that allowed me into a knowledge for which there was no other means of attainment.

And it was good.

I used contraception. I did not want to get pregnant. I didn't want to get sexually transmitted diseases, either, but sometimes, I still did and would undergo whatever antibiotic treatment was necessary. But I lucked out in the pregnancy department. I didn't have to consider abortion, but it was always there.

But even in the past five years, since I've been divorced, things have changed radically. I wrote before about trying to secure a Plan B prescription the night after unplanned sex. And how when I spoke to the nurse at the clinic, I felt dirty for asking.

I'm tired at the moment. I'm tired of this being cast as a single issue, this right to an abortion. I'm tired of it being cast as solely a women's issue. I'm tired of being told that I should vote for candidates who are Democrats, even if they ignore the party platform that says we as a party support choice.

I think I will say this over and over and over again until I am incapable of speech. I want you, whoever you are, to think about what it means if you are told that you cannot do with your body as you wish. What would it be like for you if you were told that you could no longer fuck the person you wished to fuck? That you could no longer eat the food that you want to eat? That the medical treatment that you and your doctor had authorized for you was not allowable under the new laws? What would it be like to know that you could not be secure from observation in your own home? That it was now possible that every phone call you made was monitored? What would it be like to know that your most private, intimate acts could be regulated by strangers?

If your body is not your own, if the very essence of your flesh is regulated by others, what use then do you have for freedom of speech? Of what would you speak? How could you speak if you were not free to experience the world through your body? How could you worship the god of your understanding if you did not have sovereignty over your own flesh? What difference would it make to you what was published in the "free" press if ultimately, you yourself was shackled?

It tears at me, grates me that I am told, repeatedly, that a woman's civil rights are ultimately less important than "party unity." That we have to allow a few people who oppose women's civil rights into our party in order to gain power, and that once we have power, we will restore women's civil rights. This argument does not make sense to me. In fact, it's insulting. It asks me, as a woman, to make the sacrifice that I'm always asked to make: Put others first. Put other causes first. You are not important, but your support is important. Women are supposed to sacrifice, let others go first. It's in your nature: you're nurturers.

And if we say no, then we are selfish. We are single-issue voters who would rather see the party collapse than give up our selfish insistence on something so insignificant as choice.

But without choice, without determining the boundaries of my own flesh, who am I? And how can you possibly ask me to give that up in order that you gain power?

When I was a little girl, I thought the worst thing that could happen to me would be to have the government tell me that I had to go fight a war and risk being killed. I didn't know about the other war.

I will choose what enters me, what becomes

of my flesh. Without choice, no politics,

no ethics lives. I am not your cornfield,

not your uranium mine, not your calf

for fattening, not your cow for milking.

You may not use me as your factory.

Priests and legislators do not hold shares

in my womb or my mind.

This is my body. If I give it to you

I want it back. My life

is a non-negotiable demand.

Marge Piercy, Right to Life

Mary got pregnant from a kid named Tom that said he was in love

He said, "Don't worry about a thing, baby doll

I'm the man you've been dreaming of."

But 3 months later he say he won't date her or return her calls

And she swear, "God damn, if I find that man I'm cuttin' off his balls."

And then she heads for the clinic and

she gets some static walking through the door

They call her a killer, and they call her a sinner

and they call her a whore

God forbid you ever had to walk a mile in her shoes

'Cause then you really might know what it's like to have to choose

Everlast: What It's Like

IMAGE SOURCE: Imogen Cunningham, "The Unmade Bed"

Fireweed and Dead Children

2006-07-25T15:12:00.000-04:00

When I was a child, in England, in the North, there was still fireweed growing among the scattered bricks of empty lots. Fireweed is often the first plant to grow after a fire or bombing. It is the scab that covers the wound, a filling in of the holes in the earth, where "death came in like thunder." It grows, too, in the Pacific Northwest, on scarred hillsides where fire has taken down the trees, leaving behind the charred skeletons of what was once magnificent.

The fireweed was a reminder. Even in the 1960s, it had been less than two decades since the countryside had been ravaged by German bombs. In many places, all evidence that the war had ever happened had been erased, but in the neglected North, the barren urban land, incapable of growing anything else, had covered itself with fireweed as a cloak against its hideousness.
I search for refuge from all of this. Perhaps I'm not entitled to refuge. After all, the bombs are not falling on my children, they are not destroying my homes, I am not of a people that another people has set out to eradicate from the face of the earth, so really, what the fuck am I getting all upset about? It is my own narcissism that tries to claim that the suffering all around me, that is around me but is not touching me, can justify my own helplessness and rage of the past, god, I don't even know how long anymore.

But I know this. The images of the past several years have torn craters into my memories, created sores that are inhabited by dead children, and bombed-out buildings, and by images of madmen and women who hasten us toward our doom. I have been walking around the past few days so sick to my stomach that eating has been a struggle. I come to various blogsites for refuge, to find camaraderie within a community, and what I find, again, and again, and again are people who want to throw bombs at one another, who seem to have no qualms about stating unequivocally that one position is right and the other is wrong.

I have always been frightened of fundamentalism. When one decides that one set of words is more important than any other set, that one does not have to listen to the words of another because that other language is wrong, well, all is lost.

When language fails us, what do we have left? Dead children. That's what we have left. Dead children and fireweed.

Interpreting the Horror

2006-07-14T14:02:00.000-04:00

How do we establish our solidarity with the dead and dying without appropriating their pain?

How can we on the Left proclaim our horror and disgust with the killing being done in our name, without resorting to the tactics of a power-mad White House that dared to tell us that the victims of 9/11 cried out for blood?

I do not think these are moot questions. Nor do I think them academic. They have arisen on this site in the past few days, and they are questions that I have long contemplated.

Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? but who takes off his eye from a comet when that breaks out?

Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? but who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world? No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Neither can we call this a begging of misery, or a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves, but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbours.

John Donne

John Donne proclaimed that every person's death diminished the human continent. We all know the quotation, although most of us have not seen it in its full context. In the very next sentence, he begs the question: Is taking on the pain of others a begging of misery? He answered the question in the negative, although one could argue that he did it for selfish reasons. You see, understanding another's misery reminds us that our own lives are finite, and that if we are to draw closer to God, as Donne saw it, we needed to be reminded of that fact.

For those of us who are atheists, however, that reminder serves another purpose, perhaps. For me, it is a reminder of just how fragile all of us are, how fragile my children are and the other people whom I love, and how, for whatever reason, what is befalling my global neighbor is still of concern to me. Especially when it is being done in my country's name.

Many of us feel these feelings, and we have attempted to bridge the gap between us, we of the cars and plentiful food and relatively safe surroundings, and them, of the bombed-out homes and constant terror of being shot, raped, mutilated.

And so we try to tell their stories, to make them our own. But, in our desire to understand, do we diminish their suffering?

Do we dehumanize the dead when we tell stories about them, as if we knew them? Is it arrogance on our parts? To some readers, perhaps. For others, it is an opening into a life that allows them to feel the pain, indeed, to shed tears for the suffering. And in that it might move people to action, it is a good thing.

But is it redemption? Alas, no.

The dead may not be redeemed. The dead may not be brought back to life, restored to their families, resurrected in their original, perfect human bodies. They are dead. Gone.

When I was still an historian, this troubled me greatly. I read the horrific trials of women such as Matteuccia di Francesco, a young woman of Todi, Italy, who was tortured into making a confession of witchcraft. Her punishment? Death by fire.

One reads the confession of Johannes Junius, and his pain virtually cries out for his story to be told. What was his life like before he was carried away to the strappado, his arms dislocated and broken until he confessed to being a witch?

We cannot know. Sometimes, I used to weep that I could not tell their stories. Ultimately, it was one of the reasons I chose to leave the field. I could not bring these people back to life. I could not give them their lives back, somehow redeem their deaths of its meaninglessness. And the stories I told would be my stories, my interpretation of lives lost, my assumption of their identities in order to make myself feel better about what they had suffered.

I could not do that in the field of history. But I could do as a writer. What is the purpose of art? Well, that's a dumb question as its answers are manifold and meaningless, too. But one purpose, so to speak, of art is to remind us of the human condition. To remind us that despite a myriad of cultural differences, there are similarities too.

This I know. It is a terror to be raped. It is a horror to lose a child.

It is a place to start from. If I cannot bring back to life the dead, I can not allow their deaths to pass in silence.

It is what the writers here do. We howl at the moon. We point our fingers. We publish those pictures to get people to feel, like a kick to the gut, the costs of war.

The other side does it, too. They put words in the mouths of the dead, but only our dead. Not the dead children. If you believe them, there are no children there. Only insurgents and criminals and terrorists.

So, perhaps it is up to us to keep pointing out the crying children, and trying to interpret their tears. It is our act of love and compassion and helplessness. It is our tears of rage.

This is my great-grandfather. He died in 1917, in Flanders' Fields, in one of the most useless fucking wars ever fought. I know virtually nothing about him. My grandmother was a babe in arms when he was killed. Her mother died when she was nine. She knows virtually nothing about her father. There are no stories to tell.

There is just vast, ineffable silence about who Robert Raymond, age 25, of the Lancashire Fusiliers, really was.

In the distance, I hear a bell tolling.

Carnival of the Feminists at Ink and Incapability

2006-07-05T12:16:00.000-04:00

The newest Carnival of the Feminists is up. There are scads of fabulous posts, and oddly enough, a little something by me.

The next carnival will be held at Figure: Demystifying the Feminist Mystique, so get your entries in soon!

Silly Limericks

2006-06-27T12:33:00.000-04:00

There once was a junkie named Rush
Who had trouble exploring the bush
So he smuggled some pills
That would jack up his thrills
And wound up with a glove up his tush

Privacy, it seems, only applies
To those who are hired as spies
For the average bloke
Secrecy’s naught but a joke
So says the president who lies

This morning as I performed my ablution
I sought for myself some solution
To our troubles and strife
In this knocked around life
And I thought, maybe, ‘tis revolution

Don't call me Hysterical

2006-06-26T10:38:00.000-04:00

Shortly before I underwent a hysterectomy in November, I received an anonymous letter via e-mail. I had not been shy about my need for surgery. I am more than aware that my uterus is a political organ. I fear that just as SCOTUS has recently ruled that there's no need for a "knock-knock" before violating civil rights, so too, it will soon be permissible to enter a woman's vagina without her consent. Or, as the case is more likely to be, to tell a woman that she can't make decisions about what may or may not enter and lodge inside her uterus.

And so, knowing that the personal is political, to quote what was once a revolutionary statement but which seems to have lost its meaning, I chose to write about my decision, and my fear, in undergoing this procedure.

Thus, someone out in the blogosphere decided to send me a letter, under a pseudonym, in which they denounced my decision to be public about what I was about to undergo. In the letter, the person described to me how I'd been duped by the male medical establishment, how six months after my surgery I would begin to suffer the horrible effects of various blood vessels dying in my pelvic region, how I would feel like shit. And worse, this person pointed out, I would be responsible for the positive push I may have given other women to have the same operation done. That by talking positively about my decision to have my uterus removed, I was contributing to the ruin of other women.

All of this vitriol arrived just a few days before my surgery.

And so, given that it is now over seven months since my operation, I feel that I should check in with the world, and let other women know what the effects have been of having my political organ removed.

I feel fantastic. The condition that necessitated surgery was adenomyosis, a condition in which I bled profusely throughout the month. It was unpredictable, and frequently, in the middle of sexual intercourse, I would start hemorrhaging. I have never been squeamish about sex during menses, and I've been fortunate that I've had partners who were also not turned off by blood. So, the blood was not the issue. The issue was the constant pain, and the weakness caused by anemia. I felt sick all the time. My uterus was approximately the size of a 13-week pregnancy, and for someone who is tiny like me, it meant that my stomach bulged. Again, no big deal. But I felt permanently bloated.

We tried other therapies to alleviate the problem. They didn't work, and in fact, made things worse. One night, after having hemorrhaged for the entire day, and now, too weak to stand, a friend took me to the emergency room. My gynecologist came in to see me, and we decided then that there was no point in putting off the surgery. It was time to overcome my fears and do what was best for me.

My biggest fear about hysterectomy was about sex. And so, I want to talk frankly about that here.

I was deathly afraid that I would no longer be able to have orgasms, or if I did have them, that they would be pale shadows of their former selves. For me, orgasms build, and when they reach their crescendo, I feel contractions deep inside of me--intense, starbursts of pleasure that I had always assumed was the result of my uterus responding to the electricity racing across my flesh. How would I experience that level of pleasure if there was no uterus to contract?

I was haunted by the idea that I would lose a sensation that is of paramount importance to me. Perhaps it makes me shallow, this desire to feast at the full banquet of sex. But I believe that there are few things that are freely available to us, and for me, sex--both the connection I feel to another human being and the loss of boundaries I experience during orgasm--is an integral part of who I am.

I was terrified of losing that.

After surgery, one is advised not to have intercourse for six weeks. For the first couple of weeks after surgery, I felt awful. I lost a lot of blood during the procedure, and my iron level was down to 27 (normal is 42). So, I wasn't thinking a lot about sex. But, things started to wake up, and I decided to take matters into my own hands, so to speak. When the orgasm came--complete with the deep sensations of contraction and vibration--I wept. I wept. I called my closest friends. I shared my joy. I felt no shame in doing so. And, when I was able to resume intercourse, it was to discover that everything still worked. In fact, it worked better, as I now did not feel this sluggish, clogged-up sensation in my pelvis.

And life without periods has been interesting. I don't bleed, of course, but since I still have my tubes and my ovaries, I experience a normal cycle, complete with bloating, crankiness, and breast tenderness. Woohoo!

I realize that for many, this may be too much information. But I was open about having the procedure before I had it done, and I feel an obligation to let those who reached out to me prior to surgery know that I'm well. I'm fabulous.

I also want to say that there were women who reached across the internet to let me know that I would be okay. They shared their experiences with me privately. And I thank them for that. I may cringe when I see this posted, but I just want to reach out to those who may be in similar positions to the one I was in last fall and tell them: it's okay. It will be okay.

Quote of the Day

2006-06-23T12:08:00.000-04:00

Taking such a broader approach to "life issues" would affect evangelical attitudes not only toward abortion and capital punishment but also to matters related to race and to the poor. The social and economic policies of this nation seem to have created a permanent underclass. If evangelicals believe that God cares about the fate of a fetus, it shouldn't require a huge leap in logic to surmise that God also cares about people of color or prisoners or immigrants or people with an orientation other than heterosexual.

"Jesus is Not a Republican" by Randall Balmer

Well, Shut My Mouth

2006-06-23T10:44:00.000-04:00

More book banning activities brought to you by your local fundamentalist fuckwads. The Guardian reports that Cassell Dictionary of Slang has been banned from North Carolina school districts.
Sup?
WTF?
Quit busting my balls.
Quit jerking my chain.
Damn straight.
They 86'd the book from the library.

I can't even begin to imagine the logic behind this, but it gets better. Another book that got banned was... wait for it...
Junie B. Jones and Some Sneaky-Peak Spying

Junie!! How could you????

What kind of asinine organization bans Junie B. Jones? And why that particular book? Why not ban Junie B. Jones is a Barber Shop Guy? I'm telling you, that book is a hell of a lot more dangerous. It actually suggests that children should pick up a pair of scissors and cut their own hair.

I went to the Called2Action web site, and no, I'm not going to provide a link to them; they're idiots. But I read up on the urgent action that was needed to ban certain books from Wake County Schools. Among the books were the usual suspects: Beloved, The Color Purple, The Chocolate War. But I cannot find anything on poor old Junie.

Does anyone know why Junie's been banned in Wake County???

Where Are We Going?

2006-06-22T10:49:00.000-04:00

From a hike in the Catskills in late March.

Carnival of the Feminists Includes Me

2006-06-22T10:08:00.000-04:00

The 17th Carnival of the Feminists is up at Bitch Lab, and yours truly has a piece published there. It's called "Appetites" and I reproduce it here.

The 18th Carnival of the Feminists will be held at Ink and Incapability. Check out the call because, while the topics are wide open, there are also some intriguing possibilities for essays.

Appetites

I was at the mall last night. I loathe the mall, and yet, I find myself there fairly frequently. The village where I live has no pharmacy, nothing other than a small convenience store that charges convenience store prices. So all necessities come from the mall and the large grocery store next to it. Thus, my position at a table in the Food Court, eating Subway sandwiches with my daughter for our late dinner.

As usual, I was people watching. The college students are gone, flown like robins in reverse. They’ll return in the waning days of summer, and change the character of this area. Last night, it was locals. And I started noticing something. Virtually everyone was carrying around extra weight. Lots of belly fat. Some of them were so slowed up by the extra weight that they lumbered. I started looking for lean people. There were a few, but as a percentage, it was less than 20 percent.

I know that we’re engaged in a national crisis over American obsesity. We blame television, and our sedentary lifestyles, and the availability of cheap, high-fat food. We drink too much soda. We eat too much candy and potato chips and fast food. We don’t exercise. It’s all our fault. We’re the richest nation on earth and we’re a bunch of slobs. Blah Blah Blah.

I’d like to offer some thoughts.

I have been re-reading Caroline Knapp’s brilliant book: Appetites: Why Women Want. In it, Knapp (who died way too young at 42 of cancer) wrote of women’s appetites: for food, for sex, for material goods. She did not condemn desire. Rather, in a complex argument that I’m treating schematically here, she looked at how desire is twisted in our culture. For white, middle-class women especially, (and Knapp admits that her observations/experiences are based on her own position as white and middle class) thwarted desire lies at the heart of many of our cultural maladies.

It is the illusion of choice that thwarts the desire. It is the illusion that a well-educated, intelligent white woman is going to have access to real power in this culture that ultimately turns desire in on itself, twists it, cripples it, so that the thwarted desire becomes the source of suffering. In a way, it’s the Noble Truths of Buddhism. In another way, it’s what it’s like to be told you have power in America when you do not.

And Knapp argues that for women, who despite the seeming accommodations made for women’s liberation by the powers that be, are especially affected by this thwarted desire. As I said, she’s writing as a white, middle-class woman, and how this thwarted desire manifests itself in other groups of people is not in her expertise. But her argument spoke to me.

Knapp was an anorexic. In a way, this provokes a “ho hum” reaction in me. After all, just how many more books do we need to read about white anorexia? But this book spoke to me because I also have an eating disorder. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’ve dealt with bulimia for the last several years. I thought it was a thing of the past. But the past few months, when I’ve been cloistered in a cave of depression, the bulimia called to me. And sometimes, I answered that call.

It’s embarrassing to admit. What sane, dignified, intelligent person wants to admit that sometimes, after eating a meal, or a bar of chocolate, or an ice cream sundae, she would stick her finger down the back of her throat and vomit? Especially one who is the mother of two daughters and who is desperate for them to not emulate that kind of behaviour? I found ways of being secretive about it, including going outside and vomiting in the backyard, away from the house. In the dark. Alone. So no one could see. It wasn’t a full-scale relapse. But it happened often enough that I could smell relapse in the miasma of my own vomitus.

My depression has been fueled by a few things. Basic brain chemistry, for one. My genetic line on both sides of my family condemn me to craziness of various stripes. I am beyond grateful that my brain chemistry can be treated with drugs, and I no longer worry about the fact that I have to take antidepressants. Illness is illness. But on top of the brain chemistry has been a situational depression. All of it fueled by utter powerlessness. It ranges from the national—I live in a country run by people from whom I feel completely alienated—to the more personal—my job bores the bejesus out of me for reasons that are too lengthy to go into here. And, added to that is the constant worry, as a single mom, that I am literally a single paycheck away from not being able to feed my children. It’s a potent combination, and there have been many days in the past three months where that combination has knocked me on my ass. Or, knocked me to my knees, bending over a toilet.

I will tell you one more thing before I get back to those folks at the mall. Every time I threw up in the past three months, I was entirely conscious of what I was doing. The conversation went something like this: “Throwing up is not going to solve your problems.” And the response in my head was always something like, “Fuck you. It’s going to make me feel better.” In a situation where I cannot seem to move myself out of the position I’m currently in, the fact that I could manipulate my body endorphins, exercise control over my food intake, hurt myself, was moving myself. It was power. False power. But power nonetheless.

So, I look around and I see a lot of folks who are obese. And I found myself wondering why there has been such a growth of obesity in the past couple of decades. And all the reasons in the third paragraph still apply.

But I think there is another facet to all of this. We, as a nation, do not know how to make ourselves feel better. We do not know how to move ourselves out of the positions that the vast majority of us find ourselves in. We have been gradually stripped of our power. We cannot afford to buy the toys that we could that distracted us. When I was a kid, many, many people had RVs, and boats, and a new car every year. Middle class folks. But the middle class is drowning, and the poor, well, the poor are long underwater.

So, what do we have? We have food. Cheap, fattening, sweet food. And our televisions. The solace of food is what many of us give ourselves because we have nothing else. We can see what we want: it’s there on our television sets every night. Taunting us. But we cannot have it. We send our children off to fight in an unjust war. We work our barely-getting-by jobs. We struggle to make ends meet. And we eat. It doesn’t change anything. But for those moments when that sweetness is on our tongues, we feel better in our powerlessness.

Fundamentalism (again)

2006-06-21T13:21:00.000-04:00

Those of you who've schlepped through my posts before know that I tend to focus my attention on certain issues. Fundamentalism scares the bejesus out of me, for example, and I've been known to pick at it a time or two.
So, imagine my delight when I came across this article today. "The four fundamentalisms and the threat to sustainable democracy" by Robert Jensen presents a provocative argument that it is not just religious fundamentalism, but a variety of fundamentalisms that create a threat to sustainable democracy here in the United States.

Let's start by defining fundamentalism. The term has a specific meaning in Protestant history (an early 20th century movement to promote "The Fundamentals"), but I want to use it in a more general fashion to describe any intellectual/political/theological position that asserts an absolute certainty in the truth and/or righteousness of a belief system. Such fundamentalism leads to an inclination to want to marginalize, or in some cases eliminate, alternative ways to understand and organize the world. After all, what's the point of engaging in honest dialogue with those who believe in heretical systems that are so clearly wrong or even evil? In this sense, fundamentalism is an extreme form of hubris, a delusional overconfidence not only in one's beliefs but in the ability of humans to know much of anything definitively. In the way I use the term, fundamentalism isn't unique to religious people but is instead a feature of a certain approach to the world, rooted in the mistaking of very limited knowledge for wisdom.

It's funny that Jensen uses the term hubris. I tend to reserve the term as that which applies to people I consider tragic heroes, the classical sense of the term, where the one flaw (and it's always fatal) is to have pride great enough that one thinks one is better than the gods. For that, people are made to suffer, To be struck down.

While I agree with Jensen in principle, I think the word I would use is "narcissism." The sense that it's all about me. My interpretation. My beliefs. That I should always get my way, and I'm going to make you suffer in order to bring you around to that point of view. And, as part of that, I'm going to intepret a text or a word in the ways I see fit.

The antidote to fundamentalism is humility, that recognition of just how contingent our knowledge about the world is. We need to adopt what sustainable agriculture researcher Wes Jackson calls "an ignorance-based worldview", an approach to world that acknowledges that what we don't know dwarfs what we do know about a complex world. Acknowledging our basic ignorance does not mean we should revel in stupidity, but rather should spur us to recognize that we have an obligation to act intelligently on the basis not only of what we know but what we don't know. When properly understood, I think such humility is implicit in traditional/indigenous systems and also –the key lesson to be taken from the Enlightenment and modern science (a contentious claim, perhaps, given the way in which modern science tends to overreach). The Enlightenment insight, however, is not that human reason can know everything, but that we can give up attempts to know everything and be satisfied with knowing what we can know. That is, we can be content in making it up as we go along, cautiously. One of the tragedies of the modern world is that too few have learned that lesson.

Here, I agree. I've talked before about my fear of control freaks: those people who are so afraid of things being out of their control that they set out to control all of us. To make us comply with what makes them feel safe. And, once again, that's a type of narcissism. And it's fear. I think, at its heart, it's about the fear of the greatest thing out of our control: death.

Death comes to all of us. You're going to have to take my word on this, even though I know there are people out there (not necessarily anyone here on this site) but certainly, members of this administration, who I swear think that they can make some kind of Faustian bargain, can unlock the secret to eternal life if they just control-freak their way over the rest of us. (Are you listening George, Dick, and Donald? Death is coming for you, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. But I will tell you one thing: killing Iraqis and American soldiers is not the bargain that Mephistopheles is looking for. That's fucking garden-variety bargaining. Get some imagination.)

And so, Jensen identifies four varieties of fundamentalism that he sees as especially inimical to democracy: religious, economic, nationalism, and technological fundamentalism. His arguments for each of these is compelling, and I invite you to read the article in full.

One of my favourite parts of the article is his discussion of economic fundamentalism, especially this quotation:

In other words, economic fundamentalism - the worship of markets combined with steadfast denial about how the system actually operates - leads to a world in which not only are facts irrelevant to the debate, but people learn to ignore their own experience.

Capitalism is a funny thing: market fundamentalism teaches us that we would all be better off if we all have an opportunity to make it based on our own merits. That if we work hard enough, and are clever and talented enough, we'll "make it afterall." But certainly my experience--as an over-educated, single, divorced mother tells me something completely different. And so which am I to believe? The ideology or the reality? And is my reality your reality? And if, in fact, experiences differ among us, as we know they do, how then can there be a fundamentalist adherence to an economic system that doesn't work for the majority of us?
After Jensen has reviewed the four types of fundamentalism, he turns to his suggestions for future resolution of the problems. And, like a good anti-fundamentalist, he doesn't claim any one answer as the gold standard. He does, nevertheless, end the article on a note of hope. It's not a false hope, the kind born of "happily ever after" or "the sun will come out tomorrow." It's rather the hope that I always admire, that kind of Camusian hope that life is fucking hard, and yet we prevail. We don't get what we want, but what comes to us can be enough. That sometimes, the monsters do come in the middle of the night, but they can be faced down and sent on their way. That there doesn't have to be just one way of looking at things. That all things are possible, even if all things will not be.

And I can live with that.

I'm Back

2006-06-21T13:13:00.000-04:00

This poor old blog has been so neglected. I apologize to those of you who actually read me. But as you probably know, I've been continuing to post. Virtually everything I've written blog-wise in the past 12 months can be found at CultureKitchen or at My Left Wing.

So, it's not like there isn't plenty of Lorraine out there on the Internet.

But Stregoneria has been calling to me of late. A place to call my own. So, my plan is to post here and to crosspost in the usual places.

Welcome back!

Pablo Neruda

2006-06-21T13:03:00.000-04:00

Evil one, neither fire nor hot vinegar

in a nest of volcanic witches, nor devouring ice,

nor the putrid turtle that barking and weeping

with the voice of dead woman scratches your belly

seeking a wedding ring and the toy of a slaughtered child,

will be for you anything but a dark demolished door.

Indeed.
From one hell to another, what difference? In the howling

of your legions, in the holy milk

of the mothers of Spain, in the milk and the bosoms trampled
along the roads, there is one more village, one more silence, a broken
door.
Here you are. Wretched eyelid, dung
of sinister sepulchral hens, heavy sputum, figure
of treason that blood will not erase. Who, who are you,
oh miserable leaf of salt, oh dog of the earth,
of ill-born pallor of shadow?

The flame retreats without ash,
the salty thirst of hell, the circles
of grief turn pale. Cursed one, may only humans
pursue you, within the absolute fire of things may
you not be consumed, not be lost>
in the scale of time, may you not be pierced by the burning glass
or the
fierce foam. Alone, alone, for the tears

all gathered, for an eternity of dead hands
and rotted eyes, alone in a cave
of your hell, eating silent pus and blood
through a cursed and lonely eternity. You do not deserve to sleep
even though it be with your eyes fastened with pins:
you have to be
awake, General, eternally awake
among the putrefacation of the new mothers,
machine-gunned in the autumn. All and all the sad children cut to

pieces,

rigid, they hang, awaiting in your hell

that day of cold festivity: your arrival.
Children blackened by explosions,

red fragments of brain, corridors filled
with gentle intestines, they all await you, all in the very posture
of crossing the street, of kicking the ball,
of swallowing a fruit, of smiling, or being born.

Smiling. There are smiles
now demolished by blood
that wait with scattered exterminated teeth

and masks of muddled matter, hollow faces
of perpetual gunpowder, and the nameless
ghosts, the dark
hidden ones, those who never left
their beds of rubble. They all wait for you
to spend the night. They fill the corridors
like decayed seaweed.
They are ours, they were our

flesh, our health, our

bustling peace, our ocean
of air and lungs. Through
them the dry earth flowered. Now, beyond the earth,
turned into destroyed
substance, murdered matter, dead flour,
they await you in your hell.

Since acute terror or sorrow waste away,
neither terror nor sorrow awaits you. May you be alone and accursed,
alone and awake among all the dead,
and let blood fall upon you like rain,
and let a dying river of severed eyes
slide and flow over you staring at you endlessly.

Pablo Neruda General Franco in Hell translated by Richard Schaaf.

A note on this diary: I've been reading the poetry of Pablo Neruda lately. When I read this poem, about Franco, I was struck by how much of the anger that Neruda poured toward the butcher of Spain I feel toward our current president.

I'm not much of a visual thinker, but I wanted to try to pull images--both old and new--together to illustrate my feelings, and to link Neruda's rage and my own.
One of the images is copyrighted and comes from Dahr Jamail.

The Literary Courtesan

2005-07-13T12:37:00.000-04:00

The Literary Courtesan is a friend of mine. Tell her Lorraine sent you.

Shut It Down

2005-06-30T19:16:00.000-04:00

For more information on how you can help, contact The Center for Constitutional Rights

Am I Ready?

2005-06-30T07:51:00.000-04:00

Rob Brezsny tells me that this is my horoscope for this week:

Taurus (April 20-May 20)
This is the one of the shortest horoscopes I have ever written for you. That's because there is just one simple message, which you should take to heart in a hundred ways. Are you ready? Trust yourself as you have never trusted yourself before. Trust your perceptions, your feelings, and your body. Trust your bratty whims, your weird longings, and your momentary lapses. Trust your urge to merge, your itch to bitch, and your yearning to learn. Trust your ability to know exactly how to trust.

So, as I get my commitment letter from the bank on the house I've just bought, finish up the edits to a manuscript to a novel that will be on an agent's desk by the end of July, prepare to teach a course this fall that I've never taught before, the question is, am I ready? I am.

Challenge

2005-06-23T08:01:00.000-04:00

I've issued an invitation to all bloggers Declaration of Independence here. If you're interested, check it out.

Sovereign Nation vs. Rogue Nation

2005-06-20T07:25:00.000-04:00

I've held off on commenting on the "we know where Bin Laden is" stories that ~~official organ of the Bush administration~~Time magazine is touting in its interview with CIA Director Porter Goss. This is the same administration that has had "excellent ideas" where to find just about everything. Problem is, in order to have excellent ideas, they have to be based on reality, and this administration is a little reality-challenged.

The director of the CIA says he has an "excellent idea" where Osama bin Laden is hiding, but that the United States' respect for sovereign nations makes it more difficult to capture the al-Qaida chief.

But this quotation in the lastest news snippet made me spit coffee on my keyboard. We have respect for sovereign nations? Really?

I think this may be one of those semantics problems. A "sovereign nation" is one that allows us to "extraordinary rendition" our human rights issues, takes our money and allows us to place our bases there, or, in general, accepts our current administration's definition of emissions standards, human rights, or science. "Rogue nations" are those who give us the finger. If Bin Laden was hiding in a rogue nation, we'd be invading in a New York minute.

Leaves Me Cold

2005-06-18T09:27:00.000-04:00

My daughter will tell you that every time I hear something that even remotely resembles Coldplay, or one of the myriad Coldplay wannabe bands on the radio, I hit the "scan" button. This article gave meaning to my aversion.

Imagine if the biggest rock band in the United States was fronted by someone who looked and sounded just like George W. Bush. Worse, by someone who was from the same social caste as Bush and who thought that everything Bush does is "BRILLIANT." So BRILLIANT, in fact, that said rock star offered Bush his cell number with an invitation for him to call if he ever felt like chatting about world poverty, or world peace, or fancied being taught how to play a mean F-chord on guitar. You would think that was weird, right? Especially if you associate rock with rebellion -- with the guitar-smashing antics of the Who or the anarchic shenanigans of the Sex Pistols -- and not with schoolgirlish sucking up to the biggest Boss Man of all.

You want to listen to real rock? Check out Sleater-Kinney.

Sex With Jeff

2005-06-17T09:25:00.000-04:00

Jeff has a damn good post on sex education today over at CultureKitchen. You've all heard me blah-blah-blah on this one. I'm deferring to Jeff today.

Are You FUCKING kidding me?

2005-06-15T15:44:00.000-04:00

(I apologize in advance for the profanity-laden rant. But this stuff makes me nuts.)
More from the department of making shit up:

In one of those moments when the NYT decided to provide free advertising to the Heritage Foundation, it prominently features the following from one of our favourite right-wing thinktanks:

Studies Rebut Earlier Report on Pledges of Virginity

By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN

Challenging earlier findings, two studies from the Heritage Foundation reported yesterday that young people who took virginity pledges had lower rates of acquiring sexually transmitted diseases and engaged in fewer risky sexual behaviors.

The new findings were based on the same national survey used by earlier studies and conducted by the Department of Health and Human Services. But the authors of the new study used different methods of statistical analysis from those in an earlier one that was widely publicized, making direct comparisons difficult.

Independent experts called the new findings provocative, but criticized the Heritage team's analysis as flawed and lacking the statistical evidence to back its conclusions. The new findings have not been submitted to a journal for publication, an author said. The independent experts who reviewed the study said the findings were unlikely to be published in their present form.

Okay. Say this with me now. Manipulating the data to make it look like the truth is still considered LYING. (And I still believe that bearing false witness is a big no-no. But what do I know? I'm an unethical atheist.)

Now that certain people have decided that science can be interpreted any damn way you please, and thus, there is TOO scientific proof for Intelligent Design, apparently, you can take a survey and change the data just a little tiny bit and get whole different results. Who'd a thunk?

So, even though the original study was published in a vetted journal, and this one is not going to be published in a journal, doesn't make this one any less legitimate, right?

Those studies that came out of Texas that showed higher rates of pregnancy among the kids who'd taken abstinence-only education courses must have been bullshit, no?

The team needs to do "a lot of work" on its paper, said David Landry, a senior research associate at the Alan Guttmacher Institute in New York. He said in an interview that it was "a glaring error" to use the result of a statistical test at a 0.10 level of significance when journals generally use a lower and more rigorous level of 0.05.

.10 or .05, what's the big diff? Sheesh.

I figure there's going to be lots of explaining to do soon. See, if these kids are not having sex, how are they going to explain those pregnancies? Hmmm. That virgin birth story worked once before....

The Remains of the Day

2005-06-13T09:03:00.001-04:00

Copyright: Mark D. Beazley, BigToePhotography

These two photographs are taken from Roosevelt Island, on the East River in the middle of NYC. Roosevelt Island was formerly known as Blackwell Island, and it used to house an insane asylum, a smallpox hospital, and a women's prison. Emma Goldman spent time in that prison. These are photographs of what remains of the smallpox hospital. There are more photos over at Mark's site. Please check them out.

BlackwellRoosevelt Island

2005-06-13T09:03:00.000-04:00

Menstruating She Devils

2005-06-12T15:32:00.000-04:00

Menstruating She Devils is making its way into the world. Come on over and see what we're up to.

This amazing image is by the incomparable Tild.

Why Feminism is NOT just a woman’s issue

2005-06-07T13:40:00.000-04:00

One of the most disheartening things for those of us who consider ourselves feminists is the sense that it has become a ghetto term; the Right was successful in labeling us as man-hating FemiNazis (or, as one recent Dkos poster referred to us: “menstruating she-devils”), when the irony is that feminism is the bedrock of progressive politics. Feminism links the private with the political, interrogates how restrictions on personal behaviour echoes out to national policy, and understands gender not as “sex,” but as power—who has it, who wants it, and how those in power get to portray those who do not.

The discussions of the personal, which could be categorized constitutionally as those things covered under the "right to privacy," principally things such as abortion and gay civil rights, have come up repeatedly as the things that people are willing to throw overboard in order to save the Democratic party. But I would urge no surrender on any of this.

Maybe you think that abortion and gay marriage don't matter. Maybe you think they're things we're distracting ourselves with. But my argument, nay, my plea, would be for us as progressives to consider the personal issues as political issues and realize that if we take away anyone's right to privacy, eventually, we will lose our own.

We need to reclaim the body. If we claim the body, then we are able to say categorically that torture, capital punishment, sexual repression, gender inequality, are not part of the progressive agenda. If we claim the right to privacy, we are able to say that illegal search and seizure, religious indoctrination in schools, public prayer, refusal to sell Plan B, abstinence-only education—all of these things—are not acceptable. If we claim gender as power differential, we are able to see how the sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners is tied into notions of dominance—the same notions of dominance that will be used against all of us.

And it’s gender studies that have allowed us to see these things. Gender as defined by Joan Scott:

Scott’s definition of gender has two parts and several subsets; they are interrelated but analytically distinct. Her definition rests on two propositions:
1. gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes;
2. gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power.

Riane Eisler had this to say about the personal as political and our reluctance as progressives to discuss it:

Today, it's regressive fundamentalists, not progressives, who are more comfortable talking about the personal as political. They, not progressives, dominate the debate over "private" life and "family values."

Yet family relations directly influence what people consider normal and moral in all relations -- public as well as private. We must challenge the reactionary, increasingly fundamentalist "traditional family values" agenda. We cannot build a healthy democracy on a foundation of authoritarianism and intolerance -- in the home and outside it."

Family relations affect how people think and act. They affect how people vote and govern, and whether the policies they support are just and genuinely democratic or violent and oppressive.

Slogans like "traditional values" often mask a family "morality" suited to undemocratic, rigidly male-dominated, chronically violent cultures. They market a "traditional family" where women are subordinate and economically dependent, where fathers make the rules and severely punish disobedience -- the kind of family that prepares people to defer to "strong" leaders who brook no dissent and use force to impose their will.

How can we expect people raised in authoritarian families -- where men are ranked over women and children learn that any questioning of belief and authority will be punished -- to vote for leaders whose policies promote justice, equality, democracy, mutual respect and nonviolence?

It's not coincidental that for regressive fundamentalists -- whether Christian, Hindu, Jewish or Muslim -- the only moral family is one that models top-down rankings of domination ultimately backed up by fear and force. It's not coincidental that the 9/11 terrorists came from families where women and children are terrorized into submission.

You do not have to be a woman to recognize that gender and feminism are inextricably tied to the progressive agenda. You do not have to be a woman to recognize that when progressive males start shitting on so-called women’s issues, they are missing the point. If you do not understand how power works, how it is rooted in the binary oppositions that we ascribe to the sexes, then you will continue to focus on saving one tree while the entire forest is being razed.

Kos and Pie

2005-06-07T07:50:00.000-04:00

I never had a problem with the pie ad. I think the reason is that I've become so used to living in a society that equates women with their bodies that I literally didn't see it.

I also had the experience of posting on CultureKitchen about issues of choice and having an anti-choice company place banner ads with my diary. Liza Sabater figured out very quickly that the more people who clicked through to the site, the more CultureKitchen made, which would allow her to continue to pay for the space that allowed she and I to post our views on the very issue of abortion, among others. So, sometimes, you wind up making money off people in this world who are doing their damndest to defeat you. I kinda liked that.

But, the response from Kos to the pie ad has caused me to opt out of the DailyKos community. As someone who writes primarily about the connection between the personal and the political, I have no choice but to be a feminist. I care about gender issues, sexuality issues, surveillance issues, sex education issues, marriage issues, etc., etc., etc. And what bothers me more than anything about the tone of the debate is that CERTAIN (not all) heterosexual males don't seem to get that what they deem women's issues or gay issues are one step away from being their issues. Anyone rememeber Neimoller's famous quotation?

I have also been called a whore for writing about sexual issues as explicitly as I do, so I can hardly be considered a sexless harridan. I love certain men. I want to live in a world where no one has to contest their rights as human beings because of gender or sexuality.

I know that some people don't understand why some of us are so fucking angry at Kos right now that we can't see straight.

It's not about the fucking ad. It's about the fact that those of us who think that there will be no politics to fight about if we don't protect the right to privacy have been told repeatedly that our issues don't matter. That we should be patient, get in line, wait our turn.

HOW MANY MORE YEARS ARE WE SUPPOSED TO WAIT?

I got tagged

2005-06-02T17:03:00.000-04:00

And because I'm afraid of bad blogging karma, I'm going to respond.

Your favorite band/artist:
1. Peter Gabriel
2. Tori Amos
3. Patty Griffin
4. Death Cab for Cutie/The Postal Service

Your hobbies/interests:
1. Writing
2. Reading
3. Pop culture
4. Gardening

Things that scare you:
1. Heights
2. Deep Water
3. Christian Fundamentalists
4. George W. Bush

Your favorite fiction writers:
1. Margaret Atwood
2. Umberto Eco
3. Karen Novak
4. Russell Banks

Your three celebrity crushes:
1. Clive Owen
2. Mariska Hargitay
3. Jonathan Poneman

What you are wearing right now:
1. Teva sandals
2. Backless, sleeveless summer dress
3. nothing
4. nada

What you want in a relationship:
1. Emotional availability
2. Compassion
3. Intelligence
4. Wit

Your everyday essentials:
1. Coffee
2. Blogging
3. Writing
4. My daughters

Your drugs of choice:
1. various prescriptions
2.
3.
4.

Sleeping in the Forest

2005-06-01T15:15:00.000-04:00

Sleeping in the Forest by Mary Oliver

I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths
among the branches of the perfect trees.
All night I heard the small kingdoms
breathing around me, the insects,
and the birds who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water,
grappling with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.

"I went into the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Henry David Thoreau

I have just returned from a full week of seclusion. I went to the Catskills, checked into a motel along the banks of a river, and spent seven days in my own company. During that time, I had no access to the Internet, nor to my cell phone. A few friends knew where I was; they called me intermittently on the motel phone. I saw people every day when I went for my meals; I chatted with the people who lived in the small town where I was, and one night, I even drove down to Manhattan for a date, but for the most part, I wrote, I hiked, and I read. Alone.

What I want to talk about is solitude.

May Sarton once said that loneliness was the absence of the other but solitude was the company of the self. I've just experienced that. It's not the first time in my life that I've enjoyed a period of time alone and not been frightened by it, but it's taken me a long time to reach a point where the idea of going off by myself, without a companion, does not fill me with dread.

Loneliness is a terrible sensation. The absence of others opens up before us like the maws of hell; and the desolation of isolation feels like being hugged by the ice-cold arms of death itself. Perhaps the fear of being alone is the fear of death; it's the one journey that we must take alone. There will be no one there to accompany us, and the struggle against that feeling drives many of us to behaviours that are ultimately harmful, even if the things we do seem to be staving off loneliness at the time.

My week away was amazing. Its purpose was to finish my novel, which, I'm happy to report, I did. The novel is done. After some revisions, it will be ready to shop around for possible publication. But I didn't write for publication. I wrote to communicate, to set free the ideas in my head, to give parts of myself voice. Ironically, I did this while being quiet.

While I'm engaging in a solipsistic recitation of a week spent alone, I'm aware of a few things that I think are relevant to my politics. One of them is that my ability to go into the woods for a week is a privilege. The motel was incredibly inexpensive, but still, a week in a motel is not cheap. If I had camped, I would have needed equipment; my point being that a week in the wilderness these days is only for the privileged classes who can afford to get away from it all, or the everyday life of the rural poor who call those areas their home. Economically disadvantaged, I assume that they are able to enjoy the natural beauty that those of us trapped in urban and suburban sprawl long for.

I could tell you about the experience of my hikes into the wilderness every day. Of how I never saw another human being; of the pair of eagles that flew just over my head; of the newborn fawn, still wet from his mother's body; the snakes I nearly stepped on; the mother grouse that feigned not being able to fly in order to lead me away from her nest; of the multitude of wildflowers in the woods. There. I guess I have told you. But really? I hope you get to experience some facet of this yourself.

The other thing that was reiterated to me by my trip is the sense that if only we could make peace with isolation, with solitude, and not feel the panic of loneliness, our politics would benefit. The need for company, for relationships, can lead to issues of domination and control and cruelty and abuse. Yes. Relationships are powerful and can be fulfilling and lovely. But our fear of being alone can drive us to do cruel things to keep some people near. It works its way up the chain of our relationships, so that our politics becomes a macrocosm of crying, grasping need. Of pure want. Of suffering.

I walked in a local graveyard. There were too many children's graves there. Some of them were recent; in a town as small as it was, there seemed to be too many adolescents and children in the ground. There was also something stunning: carved into the side of the cemetery, overlooking the river, was a huge granite memorial with Chinese inscriptions and carvings of Chinese ancestors. The only sensation that I can use to describe this monument and its setting, the absolute peace that I felt when I sat in the middle of it with the sun kissing my face and the breeze off the river keeping me cool, is perfection. Quiet perfection.

There is no point to this diary. It is a simple acknowledgement on my part of the power of this community; of how, having returned from being away, I wanted to make contact again. Of how grateful I am for all of this. Of how much gratitude I have for both community and solitude.

So, I'm grateful to be back. Grateful to be alive. And eventually, I'll read all the news I missed for the week and re-immerse myself in the politics before us. But I'll carry the wilderness with me, just as I carried this community with me into the woods.

NCAA addresses Indian Nicknames

2005-05-16T12:54:00.000-04:00

The NCAA announced today that it is contemplating how to manage the issue of college teams that continue to use nicknames taken from reference to Indian tribes (Redmen, Utes, Savages, Braves, etc.).

Native American coalitions have asked the NCAA repeatedly to ask its member schools to drop these nicknames. They are seen by Native peoples as derogatory and offensive. Schools, of course, claim that adopting these nicknames is a tribute to the spirit of Native Americans.

Ah, nothing like a little cultural appropriation after you've practiced genocide to try to make up for your actions. I'm sure there are colleges all over Germany with nicknames like "Jews," "Hebrews," "Gypsies," and "Slavs." Those nicknames would certainly honour the spirit of the murdered souls, don't you think?
I'm not sure why this is so difficult for school administrators to get. After all, Stanford made the change years ago, and there doesn't seem to have been a complete collapse of fan loyalty now that it's the Cardinal.

When the NCAA dealt with schools that continue to use the Confederate flag in their school flags, its decision was that schools could continue to participate in their conferences, but various levels of NCAA championships could not take place at those schools. That's quite a financial hit if you are not able to host a regional tournament in a revenue sport.

Now, faced with what is sure to be a hot-button issue, the NCAA is getting ready (after four years of study) to issue recommendations about how to change school mascots and names.

I know that one of the arguments is that no one is asking schools to change their names if they are called the "Spartans" or "Trojans." But those universities do not sit in the middle of conquered or stolen or swindled land, do not sit next to reservations where those native peoples live in some of the worst states of poverty in the country, are not seen as affronts to the people they are meant to honour.

It is time for the NCAA to deal with this matter firmly. There should be penalties attached to Indian nicknames. If you know, for example, that the name of your team hurts the people who are supposedly meant to be honoured by it, why would you resist changing the name?

Culture of Rape: Spiritual and Physical

2005-05-14T17:24:00.000-04:00

When you force religion down someone's throat, something else is sure to follow. I want to talk about the connections between spiritual and physical rape; this morning's report in the New York Times that proseltyzing for Christianity was taking place in a systematic, insensitive way while academy leadership turned its head bears striking similarities to what happened when hundreds of women at the Air Force Academy reported being raped.

A chaplain at the Air Force Academy has described a "systemic and pervasive" problem of religious proselytizing at the academy and says a religious tolerance program she helped create to deal with the problem was watered down after it was shown to officers, including the major general who is the Air Force's chief chaplain.

The academy chaplain, Capt. MeLinda Morton, 48, spoke publicly for the first time as an Air Force task force arrived at the academy in Colorado Springs on Tuesday to investigate accusations that officers, staff members and senior cadets inappropriately used their positions to push their evangelical Christian beliefs on Air Force cadets.

This is not the first time that "insensitivity" has reared its ugly head at the service academies, especially the Air Force:

One female student in seven attending the nation's military academies last spring said she had been sexually assaulted since becoming a cadet or midshipman, according to a report on the first survey of sexual misconduct on the three campuses released yesterday by the Defense Department.

More than half the women studying at the Naval, Air Force and Army academies reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment on campus, according to survey responses. But few of those incidents, and only a third of the assaults, were reported to authorities. A new confidentiality policy for assault victims, also released yesterday, attempts to improve reporting of sex crimes on military campuses.

The survey, conducted largely in response to allegations of widespread sexual harassment and assault at the Air Force Academy in 2003, suggests a prevailing climate at the academies that worries military leaders. Too many students condone off-color jokes and unwanted sexual advances. Too few dare to confront classmates with their transgressions or to report them to anyone else, the survey shows.

Not surprisingly, cadets do not report the sexual assault or harassmen to their commanding officers for fear of retribution. It seems that the commanding officers do not "get" it when it comes to matters of insensitivity.

More on the attempts to promote sensitivity to religious difference:

She said the R.S.V.P. program was significantly altered after it was screened last fall for 300 academy staff members and officers. Military officials confirmed that the program had been altered but said changes were routine in the development of such training programs.

Maj. Gen. Charles C. Baldwin, the chief of chaplains for the entire Air Force, screened the R.S.V.P. program in October, Captain Morton said, and afterward asked her, "Why is it that the Christians never win?" in response to some of the program's dramatizations of interactions between cadets of different religions.

So, being a Christian is about winning?

What's more important is the climate that is perpetuated at the Academy, where being a Christian is the price of serving one's country:

Captain Morton said, "People at the academy were making cadets feel an obligation that they are serving the will of God if they are engaging in evangelical activities, and telling them that this is harmonious and co-extensive with military service."

One staff member who spoke on condition of anonymity said on Wednesday: "There's certainly an impression that evangelicals here have that the leadership is kind of on their side. And there's a feeling among people who are atheists or people who are other varieties of Christian that the leadership does not really accept them."

Now imagine an environment of evangelical Christianity, where women are subordinate to men, and picture how the following are taking place simultaneously:

From the

rape scandal:

"Our goal is to produce military leaders of character," Schmitz said at a news conference. "And obviously, sexual assaults are not a good indication of character. In fact, they're a very bad indication."

Two-thirds of the sexual assaults against men and women -- 248 incidents -- were not reported to authorities, the survey shows. Officials said this is a result of privacy concerns and myriad other factors that deter assault victims from reporting the crime in the general population.

But students reported other factors germane to their campus culture. One is fear among victims that they, too, could be punished for conduct related to the assault, such as underage drinking. Another is a sense of loyalty to classmates. A third is fear of reprisals by classmates or senior officers, according to the survey. Of the 96 cases that women reported to academy authorities, 29 led to criminal investigations, according to the survey. It was unclear how many led to actual charges against the alleged offender.

I think it could be argued that an environment in which loyalty is emphasized, the desire to belong is cemented through the idea that spiritual cohesion is necessary--therefore drop your individual religious identity in deference to the group's--and a belief that there is some kind of "winning" involved when you are successful in defending your faith, are all a fertile breeding ground for attitudes of insensitivity, entitlement, and brutality and power/control that leads to rape.

Rape Your Wife For Jesus

2005-05-12T14:24:00.000-04:00

Fuck. Here we go again. W. David Hager--beloved OB-GYN from Kentucky, the man who President Bush wanted to appoint to an essential role in the FDA, the man who refuses to dispense various forms of birth control to his patients because it offends his moral values--that Dr. Moral Values, that one--raped his ex-wife repeatedly from 1995 to 2002, when she finally left him. Oh, and he didn't just rape her vaginally. He raped her anally, while she was taking medication being used to treat her narcolepsy. The man buggered his wife while she slept.

The details can be found in this week's The Nation. The story is sordid, and I don't want to quote any of it here. You can read it for yourself. Quite frankly, the man clearly has serious hang-ups about sex. But duh. Most of us could have told you that given the things he has said and done in the past. He's obsessed with sex; he's obsessed with the idea that women can't be trusted with their bodies, that they need a paternalistic doctor to tell them how their reproductive systems really work, and how if they gave themselves to Jesus, their ills would be cured. (Of course, I gave myself to Jesus, and now he never calls.)

Some of you may remember Hager as the asswipe that the current president (sic)
appointed to the FDA's Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs. He was one of the few members of this committee who voted against making Plan B available over the counter. His reasoning? It would encourage adolescents to engage in unsafe sex. (The fact that he considers Plan B to be an abortifacient was not a factor. Yeah right.)

So, Hager is not exactly the man I want with his hands in my vagina while I'm getting my annual pelvic exam. He and I do not see eye-to-eye on women's health care issues. (Oh god. I just thought about that man's gloved fingers inside my vagina and I think I have to hurl.) My question is, why do misognynistic fucknuts like this go into obstetrics and gynecology? Sheesh. I wonder if it's because he's a little insecure in his manhood? Wants to have power over women? Wants women to come to his office and tell them all about their sexual histories while he hides his woody under his desk while he lectures them on their immoral abuses of their god-given womanly parts? (By the way, this man actually told his wife while he was fucking her that he couldn't tell the difference between her anus and her vagina. Um. That's just a little too frightening for me to even think about.)

So, tell me again. W stands for women? Not quite. W stands behind men who anally rape their wives--better to see the view.

Anger

2005-05-05T18:25:00.000-04:00

Last night, I was hanging out with a group of drunks and addicts who are trying to stay sober. The topic was anger. Anger. Shit. An emotion that I'm intimately familiar with, but am only now learning to deal with. Anger, which for me, is perhaps the most complicated emotion I deal with. Anger and I have a history; I bear its scars, most of them internal, unseen by the outside world, but the contours of which I can trace like a map. Anger and grief, anger and self-hurting, anger and addiction.

Why am I telling you this? Because so much of my politics is my attempt to channel the anger, to calm the rage, to make a difference so that the anger I feel does not win. And I struggle with my anger, especially now, when I see what we're up against. I have spent my life wanting to react with the grace of Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. But I'm a mother, and more and more, I find myself reacting to the bullshit with the rage of Medusa. If I could, I'd turn them to stone. Not because I want to hurt them. But because I don't want them to hurt anyone I love ever again.

I started to write out a list of things that make me angry. And I realized that that list would comprise thousands of words. I suspect that many of us are angry about similar things. That there is injustice, and that our government, hell-bent on pursuing the worst of agendae, ignores those of us who want a truly kinder and gentler culture.

I'm a woman. Perhaps it's my gender, perhaps it's the family I grew up in, but anger is the scariest of emotions. I grew up in a situation where expressing anger was the fastest way to provoke someone else's anger; in that environment, those who were bigger hurt those who were smaller. After a while, I learned that anger was a dangerous thing. I turned that anger inward. Rendered powerless, I used my anger to beat the shit out of myself. Eating disorder. Ulcer. Substance abuse.

Only recently have I learned that anger is not my enemy. Anger takes two faces with me, and in learning to intepret which anger I'm dealing with is helping me to become a better political activist.

Anger sometimes makes me flail. I hate flailing. It's like being caught in a current; sometimes, the answer is not to fight, it is to let the water carry you where you need to go. My anger is like that sometimes. If I flail against it, I drown. If I let it carry me, sometimes I come to shore in a new place with a new perspective.

I've learned to ask my anger a question. Is this anger I'm feeling because I feel powerless, because I can't get my own fucking way, because I can't get someone to do the thing I want them to do? Or is my anger pushing me to change something? Is my anger an expression of power or powerlessness?

Addicts know a lot about powerlessness. Powerlessness is the recognition that we don't get to be in charge of the world, as Annie Lamott once said, "It's realizing that you're not secretly God's West Coast representative." Powerlessness is about realizing that each of as individuals make our own decisions, and I don't have control over anyone else's life. So wanting to change someone's behaviour, that's an anger of powerlessness.

The other anger? Well, I consider that to be an anger of empowerment. This government pisses me off. I can write letters to George Bush until my fingers wither and fall off; he's unreachable. There's no point in trying to reason with him. But, there are things I can do with my anger against this man who dares to think of himself as leader of the free world even as he seeks to strip liberties from everyone who does not agree with him.

What can I do? Well, first of all, I can do this. I can write. And then I can choose to write to people who might have access to power that I don't have: my representatives. My senators. Newspapers. I can also make a difference in the lives of my daughters. I can model behaviour for them that will serve them well later in life: if I show them that one can live a life of integrity and passion in the midst of madness, perhaps they can draw on that later in life. I can contribute to organizations that are making a difference in the lives of those we have harmed. I can feed a hungry child. I can read to a child who has no one to read to them. I can realize my true size in this gigantic world while resolving to take up the space that I'm supposed to. (As a woman, taking up space is a revolutionary act.)There are other things I can do: sometimes, I don't know what those are until the anger has battered against me. Anger is my nemesis, but it's also my mirror. It reflects back to me what's important.

For those of you familiar with the Steps, you know I'm attempting to practice the first three steps here.

I'm a control freak. It's part of my addiction. If everyone would just let me be queen of the universe, we'd all live in peace and harmony and justice and love. Really. But the universe seems to have other plans. And so I light my affirming flame, want to burn bright enough so that those in darkness can feel the heat and the light.

And finally, I came across this poem today. I don't know if McKay was talking about The White House in DC, but this is my affirmation today.

The White House
Claude McKay

Your door is shut against my tightened face,
And I am sharp as steel with discontent;
But I possess the courage and the grace
To bear my anger proudly and unbent.
The pavement slabs burn loose beneath my feet,
A chafing savage, down the decent street;
And passion rends my vitals as I pass,
Where boldly shines your shuttered door of glass.
Oh, I must search for wisdom every hour,
Deep in my wrathful bosom sore and raw,
And find in it the superhuman power
To hold me to the letter of your law!
Oh, I must keep my heart inviolate
Against the potent poison of your hate.

The Wabi Sabi that is Ichiro

2005-04-26T11:11:00.000-04:00

I love Ichiro!!!!

A Response to Thomas Frank

2005-04-23T10:23:00.000-04:00

Thomas Frank has a piece in this week's NYRB that will serve as an addendum to the paperback edition of What's the Matter with Kansas?. The article is more than worth reading (that goes without saying) but I would like to offer some additional historical and other perspective. It goes without saying that I think he missed something: the crisis of masculinity that I think permeates American politics.

Frank offers his brilliant analysis of the populist politics of the past thirty-five years: the Republicans' mastery of convincing working class people to vote against their economic interests in order to stick it to elitist liberals who seek to destroy the working class's values. By manipulating religion, the right--the party of elitist business concerns--makes an unholy alliance with fundamentalist Christianity.

an aside(For those seeking further historical parallels, study the history of the English Civil War. The Roundheads, Cromwell's armies, were the product of years of propaganda campaigns in the countryside that sought to equate the peasants/small tradesmen/budding bourgeoisie with their Calvinist embrace of severity and simplicity against a Court/City culture of extravagance, sexual corruption, and secret Catholicism. But this analysis is for another diary.)

Conservatives generally regard class as an unacceptable topic when the subject is economics—trade, deregulation, shifting the tax burden, expressing worshipful awe for the microchip, etc. But define politics as culture, and class instantly becomes for them the very blood and bone of public discourse. Indeed, from George Wallace to George W. Bush, a class-based backlash against the perceived arrogance of liberalism has been one of their most powerful weapons. Workerist in its rhetoric but royalist in its economic effects, this backlash is in no way embarrassed by its contradictions. It understands itself as an uprising of the little people even when its leaders, in control of all three branches of government, cut taxes on stock dividends and turn the screws on the bankrupt. It mobilizes angry voters by the millions, despite the patent unwinnability of many of its crusades. And from the busing riots of the Seventies to the culture wars of our own time, the backlash has been ignored, downplayed, or misunderstood by liberals.

I don't disagree with Frank. I think he's right. But where he sees "class," in his analysis, I see "gender."

A newcomer to American politics, after observing this strategy in action in 2004, would have been justified in believing that the Democrats were the party in power, so complacent did they seem and so unwilling were they to criticize the actual occupant of the White House. Republicans, meanwhile, were playing another game entirely. The hallmark of a "backlash conservative" is that he or she approaches politics not as a defender of the existing order or as a genteel aristocrat but as an average working person offended by the arrogance of the (liberal) upper class. The sensibility was perfectly caught during the campaign by onetime Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer, who explained it to The New York Times like this: "Joe Six-Pack doesn't understand why the world and his culture are changing and why he doesn't have a say in it."[3] These are powerful words, the sort of phrase that could once have been a slogan of the fighting, egalitarian left. Today, though, it was conservatives who claimed to be fighting for the little guy, assailing the powerful, and shrieking in outrage at the direction in which the world is irresistibly sliding.

I have commented on this before. Part of the chaos that is being reacted to is the shifting world of gender politics. No longer confined to home and babies, no longer economically dependent on men, women occupy a nebulous, borderless, threatening position in our culture right now. I used to reject notions of patriarchy and archetypes: now, as I have postulated before, the past forty years have brought with it

I find myself wondering if America doesn't long for Daddy's spank. So many people bemoan the loss of order in this culture: the hard, unyielding discipline meted out by daddy, the kind that scared us, the kind that made us behave ourselves for fear of getting into trouble. In the last forty years, things have been more fluid, more yielding, more liquid, and increasingly, covered by the mucus of borderlessness, some in our culture seem genuinely grossed out. Female bodies are icky for some, and perhaps they feel as if they've been living inside a cunt. The shapeless feminine.

Class gives boundaries, markers, borders within which individuals feel safety. It is possible to leave your class in an upward bound trajectory, but for many of us who grew up in working-class families, there is a certain stigma that comes with such a move. A sense of class betrayal. Of going to the other side. As class has broken down: the destruction of the working class, the destruction of the middle class, the triumph of a two-class system: rich and poor, class no longer serves as identifying marker. What's left? Gender and Religion. And gender isn't in great shape right now.

To quote Frank again:

James Dobson, chairman of Focus on the Family, endorsed a presidential candidate for the first time ever and, proclaiming that "everything we hold dear is on the line" because of the threat of gay marriage, addressed gargantuan political rallies of evangelical Christians around the country.

"Everything we hold dear." Gay marriage threatening everything we hold dear. The penetration of the family, of gender roles, of men acting like (heterosexual) men--and the equation of John Kerry, the war hero, with a "girlie-man."

More Frank:

The backlash narrative is more powerful than mere facts, and according to this central mythology conservatives are always hardworking patriots who love their country and are persecuted for it, while liberals, who are either high-born weaklings or eggheads hypnotized by some fancy idea, are always ready to sell their nation out at a moment's notice.

[7]

Weaklings. Eggheads. Traitors. The treacherous feminine. The archetype of feminine danger, of Eve, conspiring with the serpent to bring Adam down.

Frank:

War casts in sharp relief the inauthenticity of the liberals, the insincerity of their patriotism, and their intellectual distance (always trying to "understand" the terrorists' motives) from the raw emotions felt by ordinary Americans—each quality an expression of the deracinated upper-classness that is thought to be the defining characteristic of liberalism.

The reason conservatives are always thought to be tough and liberals to be effete milquetoasts (two favorite epithets from the early days of the backlash) even when they aren't is the same reason Americans believe the French to be a nation of sissies and the same reason the Dead End Kids found it both easy and satisfying to beat up the posh boy from the luxury apartment building: the cultural symbolism of class. If you relish chardonnay/lattes/ snowboarding, you will not fight. If you talk like a Texan, you are a two-fisted he-man who knows life's hardships and are ready to scrap at a moment's notice.

Before 2006, before 2008, progressives have got to figure out how to appeal to the wounded masculine in this country. It is not to be accomplished by destroying Roe v. Wade, denigrating women, repealing the small steps that gays have made toward full citizenship. We cannot go backwards on that. But we can realize that there are a lot of alienated males in our culture right now. Without their jobs, their traditional jobs that gave them identity, they need a new way of understanding their manhood.

George Bush has stirred up patriotic fervour in this country. (Patriotic: from patria or father). He has tapped into and his advisors have manipulated a warrior ethos in which it is unpatriotic to not support the troops and the war, where to oppose the war is to be sissified. The right has stirred up resentment against elitism as the provence of effeminancy, borderlessness, the world of sexual depravity. The Christianity that has emerged to combat these evils is not the gentle Christ; it is the manly, take-no-prisoners, I'll-kick-your-ass Christ.

The culture war we are engaged in is one of class, yes. But it is framed in notions of wounded masculinity that seeks to destroy the feminine in oh so many ways. As a woman, I'm terrified. But it's not about males versus females. Gender here is about more than that here. It's about rigidity versus fluidity, it's about authoritarianism versus freedom.

We must find a way to address these issues.

Come To Mama

2005-04-22T14:51:00.000-04:00

The SPONGE is back.

Where I'll Be on Sunday

2005-04-21T14:41:00.000-04:00

More details: BlogSheroes

More Dead Women courtesy of USA

2005-04-20T22:38:00.000-04:00

The Guardian is reporting that despite approval by a panel of medical experts, the World Health Organization has not, as yet, moved two medications onto an "essential medicines" list. Guess what those two medications do? Replace surgical abortion.

The Guardian understands that the US department of health and human services has been lobbying the director general's office at the WHO to block approval of the pills, in line with President George Bush's neoconservative stance on abortion.

While the availability of pills might make abortion easier and could increase the number choosing it, the experts want them listed to reduce the deaths and damage caused by surgery. Every year, 19 million women have unsafe abortions - 18.5 million of those take place in developing countries. An estimated 68,000 women die as a result of botched or unhygienic surgery, while many others suffer long-term damage, including sterility.

The WHO's own department of reproductive health proposed the addition of the abortion pills to the list.

As I stated in an earlier diary, "the World Health Organization reports that 500,000 women still die in childbirth every year, and 10.6 MILLION children die before age five."

Maternal health is supposed to be a priority. WHO has proclaimed this year as "make every woman and child count." But for those who will die in childbirth because they could not safely have an abortion, those women don't count. For those women who will die having a surgery in unhygienic conditions, when they could have safely taken medication, they don't count either. For those who are pregnant as the result of campaigns of rape--and such campaigns are being carried on now, as I type, they don't count either. For some of those babies, brought into the world against their mothers' wills, who will die of starvation, malaria, AIDS, diarrhea, they don't count either.

Our government would rather watch women DIE than admit that maybe, just maybe, abortion is the right option for some women.

Liza shines some light

2005-04-20T07:56:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was a black day. But CultureKitchen has a great piece on yesterday's papal election and Mario Cuomo. Go read it.

I am in mourning

2005-04-19T12:55:00.000-04:00

The cardinals could not have chosen a worse person to elevate to Pope. Hatred is now the Catholic church's official doctrine when it comes to gays and women. Paint it black.

The Joy of Teaching

2005-04-18T21:27:00.000-04:00

Okay. I just got caught "googling" myself, and one of my old, shitty short stories popped up. I swear I'm a much better writer now, but if you want to see what I wrote when I was really pissed about something, check this out.
Giggle. And there was even a review.

Scalia didn't deserve privacy

2005-04-18T19:32:00.000-04:00

As many of you know, Justice Scalia was asked if he sodomized his wife. The student who asked the question defended himself beautifully in this letter. And it goes without saying, his question if fully in line with my insistence that we have to ask embarrassing questions of those who seek to destroy our right to privacy.

Sex Positive Shout-Out

2005-04-18T13:36:00.000-04:00

Looking for a perfect gift? How about a handcrafted piece of erotica written specifically for your loved one? It's spring; everything is thrusting itself forward, upward, outward. The world is fecund and receiving. Time to shake off the winter doldrums and fuck like bunnies. If you're looking for that perfect gift for that certain someone, check out The Literary Courtesan. She has many happy clients who can attest to her abilities--I'm one of them.

What the Theocrats Want

2005-04-18T13:00:00.000-04:00

The Seductiveness of Death

This is what the theocrats in this country want. To lead the female body back to the darkness, to shut us up in the tomb, to deny us our humanity.
I'm haunted by this image.

My Privacy Manifesto

2005-04-10T18:20:00.000-04:00

Cross-posted at CultureKitchen

I, Lorraine Berry, assert my right to privacy as a basic human right that I will not allow to be compromised by my political party, which has allowed notions of privacy to be hijacked by those who call them “moral” values.

We are allowing ourselves to be dominated by a Republican ruling party of scolds, prudes, and control freaks, who believe, somehow, that their claim to eternal life is tied to their control of all the chaotic elements that make us human. They want to regulate in others what they consider to be sin: sin, for them, separates them from God, it is the source of suffering, it is our very humanity they seek to tame and take away. Why? Well, because I am prone to meta-explanations, I would argue that they’re seriously afraid of death, and think, somehow, if they control other people’s behaviours, they won’t have to die. I know that sounds horrendously illogical. But I’d like you to think about it.

Bernardino da Siena, the Franciscan Observant preacher, went from town to town in the 1420’s, warning inhabitants of each of the towns he visited that those who tolerated sin within their city walls would be punished by God for allowing that sin to exist. “So will I destroy the cities” is foretold in the Book of Malachi, and so it would be for Christians, thundered Bernardino to his flocks. Who did he urge them to root out? Sodomites. Usurers. Witches. Later in the century, fellow Franciscan Observants such as Bernardino da Feltre would add Jews to this list.

The fifteenth century bears strange similarities to our own century. The greatest threat to Christian Europe was the Turk, Muslims, who, it was thought, would overrun Christian Europe, slaughtering the men, making women their concubines. In absolute terror that the advancing Turks were the scourge inflicted on Christians by an angry God, communities looked inward for their enemies, and started offering up their friends and neighbors for private acts that were seen as publicly dangerous. Sometimes, I don’t think that rhetoric sounds any different than what we hear coming from right-wing pundits and preachers. We’re marching lock-step back into the Dark Ages.

So, here’s how I intend to counteract the attacks on privacy. Perhaps if enough of us were to do it, we can change the nature of the debate. This is not about moral values. This is about insecure people hoping to somehow gain eternal life by destroying the lives of others.

So, the next time someone calls abortion a moral choice, I will ask him the results of his last prostate exam, or her the results of her pelvic exam. I expect they’ll tell me it’s none of my business. To which I’ll reply, “exactly.”

The next time someone argues against gay marriage, I’ll ask him or her when the last time he or she made love with their spouse. I expect they’ll tell me it’s none of my business. To which I’ll reply, “exactly.”

The next time somebody defends pharmacists refusing to dispense birth control pills, I’ll ask them what prescription medicines they are currently taking. I expect they’ll tell me it’s none of my business. To which I’ll reply, “exactly.”

The next time someone says that Terri Schiavo was murdered, I’ll ask them if they’ve made arrangements for a local government official to be in their loved one’s hospital room making final decisions. I expect they’ll tell me it’s none of my business. To which I’ll reply, “exactly.”

The next time some legislator proposes banning sex toys, I’ll ask them what method of masturbation they prefer. I expect they’ll tell me it’s none of my business. To which I’ll reply, “exactly.”

The next time someone talks about family values, I’ll ask them to tell me what the last thing they disciplined their child over. I expect they’ll tell me it’s none of my business. To which I’ll reply, “exactly.”

We cannot allow our panic at being out of power to lead us to separate abortion rights, gay rights, end-of-life-decision rights, parenting rights, medical rights from the basic human right to live free of someone else butting their nose into our personal lives.

We need to explain that even if they could live in their perfect world where human beings lived the types of lives that the moral scolds imagine, the moral scolds are still going to die. If they control everything, they’re still going to die. It is the ultimate form of addiction to think that if you control-freak yourself all over other people, you can be happy. But it doesn’t work for addicts, it won’t work for them, and it makes the rest us pretty fucking miserable. Can we please stop enabling the control freaks? Please?

Snark Attack

2005-04-06T16:17:00.000-04:00

Proof that Homo Erectus was a Progressive:

According to the New York Times, scientists have gone public with their findings regarding fossil evidence that compassion is an evolutionary trait.

The toothless skull of an early human ancestor, discovered in the Republic of Georgia, may attest to evolution's oldest known example of some kind of compassion for the elderly and handicapped in society, scientists are reporting today.

In interviews and the current issue of National Geographic, the paleoanthropologists said caring companions might have helped the toothless man in finding soft plant food and hammering raw meat with stone tools so he could "gum" his dinner. If so, they said, this was evidence of a kind of compassion that had been absent in the ancestral fossil record before the Neanderthals 60,000 years ago.

In the survival of the old man, Dr. David Lordkinidze said in National Geographic, "We're looking at perhaps the first sign of truly human behavior in one of our ancestors."

Having just argued that compassionate politics do not have to be reliant on notions of God, that we do not have to cede ground to the Right on this, reading this article presents proof that caring for other human beings is a human impulse, a late impulse that contributed to our evolution, the thing that, gasp! makes us human.

So, long, long ago, our ancestors kept a toothless old man alive. For what reasons and at what cost to themselves? At some point, humans developed the notion of a common bond, of an empathy for their fellow travelers.

Do we have any doubt which party can claim that as our lineage?

Contemplating the Rock

2005-04-06T14:11:00.000-04:00

Sisyphus

Going to Jail for Indecency

2005-04-05T10:06:00.000-04:00

Christ. We've got Texas senators threatening judges, and now we've got Representative Sensenbrenner (R-Wi) saying that indecency standards on television should be enforced with criminal prosecutions.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Violators of federal broadcast decency standards should face criminal prosecution, U.S. House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner said on Monday.

``People who are in flagrant disregard should face a criminal process rather than a regulatory process,'' the Wisconsin Republican said at the National Cable & Telecommunications Association annual convention.

The problem I'm having is I can't quite figure out what the fuck he's talking about.

From another report:

"I'd prefer using the criminal process rather than the regulatory process," Sensenbrenner told the executives.

The current process -- in which the FCC fines a licensee for violating the regulations -- casts too wide a net, he said, trapping those who are attempting to reign in smut on TV and those who aren't. note: 'reign in' is sic. and journalists wonder why we think they're idiots.

"People who are in flagrant disregard should face a criminal process rather than a regulator process," Sensenbrenner said. "That is the way to go. Aim the cannon specifically at the people committing the offenses, rather than the blunderbuss approach that gets the good actors.

"The people who are trying to do the right thing end up being penalized the same way as the people who are doing the wrong thing."

It's the last paragraph that's got me totally confused and for which I'm seeking help from those more familiar with Sensenbrenner's idiolect.

There's good swearing and bad swearing? There's good violence and bad violence? There's good nudity and bad nudity? Who gets to decide the rules? And why, when there is a shitload of really important things going on in the world, is Sensenbrenner deciding to criminalize the censorship process? Isn't that a hair scary to anyone?

Of course, I have my theory of what he's talking about in terms of the "right" people and the "wrong" people. See, when they show Mel Gibson's The Passion, which is absolutely full of indecent violence, on tv next Easter, that will be okay to show on t.v. because those will be the people doing the right thing. Those people trying to show Saving Private Ryan, which is also full of indecent violence but which suspiciously looks like a criticism of the Iraq war, will be doing it for the wrong reason and should go to jail.

In the words of Humpty Dumpty, Chapter 6, Through the Looking Glass
`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'

`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

`The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master -- that's all.'

Does the Bible Make Me Look Fat in this Dress?

2005-04-04T11:43:00.000-04:00

My latest post at CultureKitchen.
In case you were wondering what I'd been doing recently.

A big fat advertisement for myself

2005-04-02T16:24:00.000-05:00

Someone suggested I post my resume if I want potential employers to see me. So here it is:

Lorraine Berry

lorraine_berry@yahoo.com

EDUCATION Cornell University
Master of Arts in History (ABD); January 1997

University of Washington
Master of Arts in History; June 1993
Bachelor of Arts, with honors, in Comparative History of
Ideas (CHID); 1987.

HONORS Mellon Fellowship
Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship
Beatrice Brown Award
Arthur Denny Memorial Fellowship

EXPERIENCE Project Director 2003-present
NeoVox http://neovox.cortland.edu
Established Web magazine that publishes articles from students
at SUNY Cortland, the University of the Sunshine Coast
(Australia), and universities in Costa Rica, Peru, Slovakia and
Romania.
Teach “global journalism” and supervise a staff of 25 writers and
designers each semester.
Edit article content and supervise art director.
Establish monthly themes for commentary.
Work closely with SUNY and international faculty to integrate
magazine into curriculum.
Research political, cultural, and intellectual issues in order to keep
content current and cutting edge.
Supervise interns.
Manage budget.
Supervise “Indie Media Club” on campus.

Assistant Editor 1998-2001
Momentum Media Sports Publishing; Ithaca, New York
Athletic Management, Training & Conditioning, Coaching
Management, and Gball magazines.
Conducted interviews and research in the preparation and writing
of articles that covered the NCAA and its policies, college sports
administration, social issues that affected athletics, high school sports administration, sports medicine, athletic training.
Became expert on legal issues in sports administration, especially Title IX, women’s sports, and the First Amendment . Wrote a number of articles in which I explained Supreme Court and other judicial rulings to a lay audience. Developed network of legal-network contacts as regular commentators on such decisions.
Managed the production of various editions of Coaching
Management, including developing article ideas, assigning articles,
supervising editing process, working with art director and production staff.
Produced one young adult-book review per week for
http://www.gballmag.com.
Edited a variety of articles written both in-house and by freelancers.

Freelance Editor and Writer 1998-present
Wrote "God and Football," an 8,000 word
exploration of the repercussions of Doe v. Santa Fe Independent
School District, a Supreme Court decision handed down in June, 2000, which ordered that Texas high schools desist from opening
football games with a prayer. Article was cited by the Guardian, in
its Web log, as one of the best articles published on that date.
http://www.sportsjones.com/sj/198.
Edited book-length manuscript for Pat Toomay, author of Any
Given Sunday.
Frequent contributor to Ithaca College Quarterly.

Book Tour Coordinator 2000
Organized a series of promotional events for Karen Novak, author of Five Mile House.
Contacted book stores to set up readings.
Served as liaison between Ms. Novak and the local press.

Instructor 1997
Cornell University
Taught a Freshman Writing Seminar on the History of the
European Witch Panics. Determined the content of the
course, facilitated discussions, taught analytical skills, and
evaluated student performances.

PUBLICATIONS Published clips available upon request.
Published academic articles also available.

LANGUAGES French, Italian, Latin

REFERENCES available on request

Knock That Shit Off

2005-04-02T10:28:00.000-05:00

Finally. Someone stands up to the Fundies and tells them to knock that shit off. The Governor of Illinois has issued an executive order telling pharmacists that they don't get to make moral decisions about whether they're going to fill birth control prescriptions.

NO HASSLES, NO LECTURE, JUST FILL THE PRESCRIPTION. That's what the Guv said.

Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich is my new hero. If you want to send him a thank you card--here's the information.

Send correspondence for Governor Blagojevich, to Governor or to the Office of the Governor, 207 State House, Springfield, IL 62706; (217) 782-0244 or (312) 814-2121 [TTY (888) 261-3336]. (NOTE: Should a response be required it will be mailed to you via the United States Postal Service, so it is important that you include your name and complete mailing address.)

S.O.S.

2005-03-31T11:32:00.000-05:00

So, I have a very wise friend who always tells me that if you let the universe know what you want, and make room in your life for the universe to be able to send it to you, that eventually, the universe will find a way. So, I'm trying this.

I don't want to work at the job I have anymore. So, I'm sending out there this message: I have a long resume full of editing/writing/researching experience. I'm good at what I do. I'm looking for work. If anyone out there is reading this and knows of people who are seeking help with any kind of writing/editing project, please feel free to steer them my way.

And now, back to my other job.

Thank you in advance.
Oh, they can contact me at lorraine_berry at yahoo.

Distractions

2005-03-20T20:55:00.000-05:00

So, my poor personal blog is getting neglected because I've been asked to post on CultureKitchen, which I consider a big honour. I've also been posting alot at DailyKos, and perhaps most important of all, I've been working on the novel. But I will try to post something interesting here soon.

Go Huskies!! University of Washington men's bball team has made it to the Sweet 16!

Fuck your SUV

2005-03-16T14:34:00.000-05:00

Maybe you can drive your oversized, gas-guzzling status symbol that FUCKING FLIPS in the snow, up to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and show your children all that pristine wilderness that is now being drilled so you can continue to drive your behemoth. And while you're there, why don't you meditate on the 1500+ dead in Iraq who have died for that same thing you insist on driving.

But, if you want to do something more productive about the vote on ANWR today, here's a damn good idea.

I have to go scream into a pillow now.

Stregas in Michigan

2005-03-15T11:14:00.000-05:00

I posted this on DailyKos today. Don't read it if reading about right-wing nutjob bigots is going to blow your day.