Rockin' the Congress

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

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

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

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!

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

For more La Cucaracha.

Shame

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

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

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

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?