Election Night

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!