Action items re: Pfc. LaVena Johnson

As the blogosphere awakens to the story of Pfc. LaVena Johnson's death, it's important to remember that this story is much larger than Blogville. Weblogs obviously have their importance in comminicating this story, but you don't have to be a blogger to be concerned over the anguish of LaVena's family and the inflexibility of the Army in refusing to reopen its investigation of her death. And you don't have to be a blogger to act on that concern.

One very important and helpful act: commend the reporter and television station that brought this new information about LaVena to light: Matt Sczesny (pronounced says-nee) of KMOV-TV in St. Louis. Please contact the KMOV newsroom at news@kmov.com. It would be helpful to mention the name of Lavena Johnson in the subject header. If you'd rather contact KMOV another way, here's the info:

KMOV-TV
One Memorial Drive
St. Louis, Missouri 63102
Main Switchboard: 314-621-4444 (8:30 a.m. - 5:30 p.m., Monday - Friday)
News: 314-444-6333

Other steps you can take involve:

The media close at hand. LaVena's story is no more a local concern than the war in Iraq or the concern families have for their loved ones overseas. Share that concern in the letters column of your newspaper, or on open line discussion on that radio talk show you listen to.

The media far away. LaVena's story won't enter the minds of the professional opinion-makers unless it is brought to their attention. It could be a national-level print columnist (a Nick Kristoff, possibly), a television personality (a Keith Olbermann, perhaps), a talk show host (an Oprah Winfrey, maybe). If you feel that a particular media personality would be sympathetic to the story of Pfc. Johnson and her family, please share that story with him or her.

Those who have written or talked about LaVena before. Our attention span is narrow; we have to work to remember things, even important things. There are news outlets that have mentioned LaVena's death once and then moved on because that's the way of the world. Find out who they are (Google, Lexis Nexis, and the like). Help them remember. Remind them of LaVena.

Friends, family, plain old people. I look at the links that are bringing people to the posts on LaVena and see that several originated from emails. People are sharing the story. It takes just a moment to spread the word via your address book. Or over dinner.

Politicians. Frequent reader Bitty gave me the idea of contacting members of the Senate Armed Services (direct contact info at the bottom of that linked post). Both of Bitty's senators sit on that committee, as does one of mine (which reminds me: I haven't yet seen a response from Claire McCaskill's office). There's a corresponding committee in the House, however, and I would suggest that concerned constituents contact those members. I will post contact info for them on this blog tomorrow, time allowing. House member email addresses are now posted along with Senate member info.

Also: I have heard that a few politicians are running for president, and that they occasionally mention Iraq and the US troops stationed there. It would be useful to know (1) if they are can be helpful to Pfc. Johnson's family in this matter, and (2) if not, why not.

Those who have served. I saved soldiers for last here when they might easily have been first; I did so because I believe it's important to go away from this thinking primarily about the men and women who have served us in dangerous places. Our thoughts are with them and for them and their families, regardless of personal feelings about the current war. If you have a loved one or a friend who is is serving now or has served, share LaVena's story with that soldier.

The only thing I'd add right now is that even though feelings on this subject will run hot, it's important to be decent in your communications with people from whom you are asking help. After all, you're acting not in your name alone, but in someone else's.

Any suggestions that can be added here would be welcome.

Thanks very much for your attention, and your help.

(Cross-posted. Thanks very much to Melissa for the heads-up.)

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Question of the Day

If you were an actor, whose career would you most want to have?

I'm not talking about the extraneous stuff, like an excessive amount of tabloid coverage, or even the personal stuff, like drug habits—just the résumé (and, presumably, the talent to match).

It's tempting to choose someone older, because I have a clearer picture of a total career, but I think I'd choose Kate Winslet (even though I blanche at having Titanic even on my hypothetical résumé). Yeah, probably Kate—who just edges Diane Keaton, because making out with Woody Allen actually seems worse than doing Titanic.

If I were a dude, no question: Johnny Depp.

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Some Thoughts

I am obsessed with Karl Pilkington.

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Caption This Photo

First Lady Laura Bush speaks to U.S. President George W. Bush
during a performance in honor of the Nation's Governors in the East
Room of the White House in Washington February 25, 2007.
REUTERS/Joshua Roberts (UNITED STATES)

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Who's Your Mommy?

Excellent post by Terrance on the lengths to which same-sex couples have to go to protect themselves in the absence of marriage equality, including some details of a particularly fascinating case in which one half of a lesbian couple adopted the other half, but then they broke up. Thing is, adoptions are generally considered permanent. Anyway, just go read the whole thing. It's very interesting.

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Misogyny is so odd!

I love looking at what stories Yahoo News pulls for its Odd News section (or what stories are submitted; I don't know how it works), because, with alarming frequency, they are news stories, often international, about the mistreatment of women. Today's line-up, for example, includes these three stories:

Stand-in mistress sought to take wife's abuse: "A Chinese businessman has advertised on the Internet for a stand-in mistress to be beaten up by his wife to vent her anger and to protect his real mistress, Chinese media reported on Monday."

Girl lost in poker game pleads for help: "A teenage girl in southern Pakistan, whose late father lost her in a poker game when she was 2 years old, has asked authorities to save her from being handed over to a middle-aged relative. Rasheeda, 17, said she has filed applications with the police and a local councillor asking them to prevent Lal Haider, 45, from taking her to his home."

Jealous husbands may face trial in court: "Mexican men who display extreme jealousy or avoid sex with their wives could be tried in court and punished under a new law, the special prosecutor for crimes against women told a local newspaper on Friday. Men who phone their wives every half hour to check up on them, constantly suspect them of infidelity or try to control the way they dress are committing the crime of jealousy, special prosecutor Alicia Elena Perez Duarte told Excelsior newspaper. … In Mexico, about 75 percent of all murdered women are killed by their husbands, Perez Duarte said."

In recent months, I've read under the heading of "Odd News" stories about a man branding his wife with a hot iron, a man coercing his wife into having plastic surgery to look like his deceased first wife, wives/girlfriends/exes being held against their will in various "odd" places including a coffin, women being traded for "odd" objects or offered as reparations for "odd" transgressions (along the same lines as the daughter lost in the poker game), and all other manner of outrageous indignity which is reported alongside such frivolous fare as online dating sites designed specifically for pet-owners (which itself gets in on the misogyny action by quoting the site founder asserting "there are more women than men who have several pets, as men tend to work full time and have less time for animals").

Aren't the travails of womanhood just so gosh-darn odd?

This strikes me as one of those nuances of sexism that many men don't notice or understand. To have women's experiences like this trivialized as "Odd News" is just infuriating, and being obliged to think about someone chuckling over the hilarious oddity of a girl being used as a chip in a poker game by her father can make a gal angry as fuck, particularly as she recognizes that the constant positioning of humiliated women as the butt of jokes humiliates us all. This shit is important, and even as I say it, I know why it doesn't seem like it is, or should be.

The thing is, the real cost of sexism to women is not in our paying a single emotional penny here for this insult and a single emotional penny there for that disgrace, but in the cumulative negative balance it leaves inside each of us. Even if we let this thing or that thing roll off of the thickened skins of our backs, we pay another penny each time; letting it roll off your back is just another way of saying keep your complaints to yourself, but it doesn't change the reality that sexism takes its toll, whether one has the ill manners of mentioning the offense or not.

As I've said before, the word that comes to my mind when I try to explain how sexism affects me is history. And I don't mean history in an academic sense, as in the history of the feminist movement, but as in my own history—a thousand threads of experience that come together to weave the fabric that I regard as my life. That history contains lots of wonderful and not wonderful things, related and unrelated things. Little things, things like seeing so many stories about the mistreatment of women culled under the heading of "Odd News," prick at a particular thread as though it's a guitar string, but instead of producing sound, it produces memory, memory of all the other times I have seen women or their stories belittled for others' amusement, memory of all the times such degradation has been used to mask the need for helping women in real need of assistance, or even just in need of being regarded with some basic fucking dignity.

I don't carry these memories with me because I want to. I carry them with me because they have left indelible prints upon me, affected my understanding of who I am to other people. I don't want to be bothered when I notice things like the treatment of women in "Odd News" features. But it doesn't matter what I want. To protect myself against this reaction is to deny my experience, to deny part of myself.

I write posts like this in the hope that they will speak to a man who has never had to think about what it means to be a woman in the world, who doesn't understand what women are "still complaining about," or wonders why we can't just let pass without comment, without anger, a sexist t-shirt or a misogynist slur or our irritation at the way stories about women are presented in the news. But mostly, I write posts like this for other women, who see things like this every day, and feel it chipping away at them, and whose pain is assuaged only by knowing that other women share it. In other words, I write posts like this for me.

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Quotes of the Day

"God our almighty Father has given married love, its faithfulness and its fruitfulness, a special significance in the history of salvation." — From the Prayer of the Faithful, a prayer read in parishes across New Jersey yesterday at the behest of the state's seven Roman Catholic bishops; "the prayer is intended to remind Catholics that the church opposes gay marriage, according to Patrick R. Brannigan, executive director of the New Jersey Catholic Conference."

"If you believe that married love is a gift from God imbued with special significance in the history of salvation, why would you see it denied of anyone?" — Shakespeare's Sister, a vulgar, trash-talking, anti-Catholic bigot, on her blog, just before pointing out that some Catholics wonder the same thing.

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Language Geekery

I always find it fascinating when I read something about an English-language (or related) dialect that's about to die out. Over the years, I've read about the last, aging speakers of German-English or Swedish-English dialects, for example, in the US and Canada, but the ones that really capture my fancy (and always have, even pre-Mr. Shakes) are Scottish dialects, which are rather shockingly vast and varied considering what a small country it is—and are often given names ("tchucter") by other Scots that appear completely nonsensical to non-Scots.

In this case, the name makes perfect sense, anyway.

A rare dialect that is only spoken by two elderly brothers is to be recorded for posterity before it disappears.

Bobby Hogg, 87, and his brother Gordon, 82, are believed to be the last fluent speakers of the "Cromarty fisher dialect". It is said to be the most threatened dialect in Scotland and is to be recorded for an internet-based cultural archive.

It evolved when local fishermen in the town of Cromarty, on the Black Isle north of Inverness, picked up words from English soldiers based in the area in the 17th and 18th centuries.

… Bobby Hogg said: "You hear the odd smattering of it in some of the things people from Cromarty say, but nobody speaks it fluently these days but for us two."

His wife Helen added: "My husband is fluent in the Cromarty fisher dialect. I understand it, but his brother is the only other person who can speak it."

A spokesman for Am Baile, a Highland internet archive, said it was important to capture a recording of the last two speakers. Robin McColl Miller of Aberdeen University's English department said the Cromarty fisher dialect was the most threatened in Scotland, and one of five different dialects once found in the same small area.

Some examples of Cromarty fisher dialect:

Thee're no talkin' licht: You are quite right.

Ut aboot a wee suppie for me: Can I have a drink too?

Thee nay'te big fiya sclaafert yet me boy: You are not too big for a slap, my boy.

Pit oot thy fire til I light mine: Please be quiet, and allow me to say something.

You can hear Bobby Hogg doing an interview about the dialect here, although it's not great sound quality on his end of the line. I'm looking forward to the online archive, which I presume will have better audio.

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I Can't Begin to Imagine

A boy stands in a street after a roadside bomb went off in central Baghdad, Iraq, Monday, Feb. 26, 2007. The bomb targeted a U.S. army convoy, police said. (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed)
I can't begin to imagine what it's like to live like this, in constant fear of explosions, with thoughts of the future seeming a luxury:

Iraq's Shiite vice president escaped an apparent assassination attempt Monday after a bomb exploded in municipal offices where he was making a speech, knocking him down with the force of the blast that left at least 10 people dead.

Adel Abdul-Mahdi was bruised and hospitalized for medical exams, an aide said. Police initially blamed the attack on a bomb-rigged car, but later said the explosives were apparently planted inside the building.

The attack sent another message that suspected Sunni militants could strike anywhere despite a major security crackdown across the capital.

… At least 10 people were killed and 18 injured in the blast, police said. An earlier explosion elsewhere in Baghdad killed at least three policemen.

And on Sunday, a suicide bombing at a predominantly Shiite business college killed at least 42 people.

I try to comprehend the destruction, the loss of life, what it's like to live in a country where dozens of people die at a time and the stark, grim reality of that circumstance seems to stretch endlessly into the future, no end in sight—and I just can't do it. I can't understand. I've never felt so hopeless as I imagine an average Iraqi to be right now; I've never lived in such turmoil. There are Americans who can better relate to living in a state of constant fear—amidst violent eruptions between warring factions, to whom crossfire has a literal and immediate meaning and isn't just the name of some silly show where a silly bow-tied manboy says silly things—but my suburban-raised self isn't one of them. And it doesn't really matter whether I can wrap my head around what life is like in Iraq, or even whether I bother to try. Nothing's going to change based on my willingness or ability to empathize. But still I do—I stare at pictures like the one above, and pictures of shattered buildings, and pictures of broken or tired or legless or faceless American troops, and pictures of broken or tired or legless or faceless Iraqis, and I try to make sense of it, try to understand what it must be like.

I recall a comment left here long ago on a post I wrote about the nightmare in Iraq, a comment from a conservative war supporter accusing me of "liberal guilt," the implication being that any sense of regret I feel about my privilege shielding me from dreadful realities is puerile and pathetic—which I suppose it may be, depending on one's perspective. But the guilt I feel is not just about being undeservedly protected from much of the ugliness the world has to offer; it's the guilt of a patriot whose country has done something for which she feels deep and abiding remorse. And because I am neither a cheerleader of the war, nor am I the rightwing's celebratory strawman, giddy with the horror of things going so terribly wrong, and because I am not a person of great influence, I have but two options: I can sink into apathy, or I can be arsed to bloody care. Because I choose the latter, I wonder what it's like to live like this, in constant fear of explosions, with thoughts of the future seeming a luxury… And I weep for the tragedy we've wrought.

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Libby Mistrial?

Maybe.

UPDATE: The juror has been dismissed.

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The Jokes…They Write Themselves

WaPo:

Dozens of high-level officials joined in a White House drill yesterday to see how the government would respond if several cities were attacked simultaneously with bombs similar to those used against U.S. troops in Iraq.

White House homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend and the Homeland Security Council that she heads mapped out in advance a massive disaster involving improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. The attack targeted 10 U.S. cities, both large and small, at the same time, said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Townsend presided over the three-hour exercise, which brought the government's top homeland security officials to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House. All Cabinet agencies were represented by their secretaries or other high-ranking officials, with about 90 participants in all, White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said.

[…]

President Bush went on a bike ride yesterday morning and did not take part in the test.

Via Jill.

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Congratulations, Al

Shoulda been president:



Is president:



Sob.

Crooks and Liars has the video of Al's big, and much deserved, win.

And congratulations to Melissa Etheridge for winning Best Song
for the piece she wrote for An Inconvenient Truth, too!

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Two-Minute Nostalgia Sublime

Only Fools and Horses



For the Brits among us...

This was one of Mr. Shakes' favorite shows.

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Song for a Sunday Afternoon

"The Dolphin's Cry," by Live



Dedicated to Doug Giles.

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Damn the Radical Limp-Wristed Flipper Agenda

Egad, Townhall is such a honking sewer of shite. Just days after Medved disgorged a massive puddle of homophobic and misogynist bile onto its pages, Doug Giles has assumed the mantle for keeping that particular flame alive with I'm not Homophobic; I'm Chick-O-Centric.

The stupendously ingenious premise here is that Giles loves Teh Chickz so gosh-darn much that he just can't relate to guys who love Teh Dudez—a framing reminiscent of that used by "white pride" groups, who will insist publicly, despite their histories, that they don't hate people of color; they just want to celebrate being white, is all. Similarly, it's not that Giles hates gays; he just really loves being straight! So much so that he's hopelessly Chick-O-Centric!

Sigh.

Anyway, his column opens with the fateful words, "I think I speak for most heterosexual males…" which is always bad news—and it only gets worse from there.

I think I speak for most heterosexual males when I say I'm not homophobic but chick-o-centric. Let's keep it positive, okay? It's not that we dislike you, the gay guy; it's just that we really like girls. It seems no matter how long we compliantly spend in rehab undergoing the most stringent psychotherapy to rid ourselves of our knee-jerk to your mate choice, the simple fact is . . . heterosexual guys don't "get" gays. Period.

Heck, we don't understand women. What makes you think we'll ever understand a man who doesn't like women yet wants to be a woman? You just rifled right over our heads. In addition, not only are most men incapable of comprehending what a man sees in another man, we also don't care to try to because football is on—so can we all just shut the hell up with the gay stuff and watch the game?!?

So much bullshit, so little time. Disregarding its patent falsity, the idea that gay men want to be women nonetheless implies that gay men thusly "other" themselves, and in such a way as to make them incomprehensible to straight men, to make them not real men at all anymore. As Jill notes, "a lot of the conservative hatred for gay men seems to come from the idea that gay men are lowering themselves to the status of 'female,' and that is entirely unacceptable." Absolutely right—and, as an added bonus, this thought reveals Giles' misogyny and belies his assertion that he just loves women too much to understand gay men. At least, he doesn't love them as equals. (Shocking.)

Giles might insist that he views woman and gay men as his equals, just different from him. Separate but equal, perhaps, ahem. But if some level of loathing for women/gay men isn't informing his opinion, then a sort of Groucho Marxian "I wouldn't join a club that would have me as a member" self-loathing must be at work when Giles refers to his "knee-jerk to your mate choice," and, later in the piece, waxes confounded about enjoying his "fun, entertaining, and creative" gay friends as he enjoys dolphins, but being unable to understand "what they get out of eating mullet."



From the same seas as the Right Whale.
If Giles can't begin to comprehend what dolphins see in mullet, or—back in English—what gay men see in men, that seems to be a rather dire commentary on men, no? Then again, maybe Giles is just talking about being attracted to "men who want to be women," in which case, it's a rather dire commentary on the feminine. Either way, he needs a box of tissues for all those issues.

Past the illogical contortions he's making about loving women so much he can't understand men who want to be like them, or men who are attracted to men who want to be like them, or whatever lesson one is meant to extract from this mess of execrable swill, we arrive at Giles' real problem—it's still all about shoving Teh Gay in his face. But because he's a magnanimous sort of fella, he doesn't mind if you're a butch gay; it's only the girly men who get his dick haunches up.

Now, let me help you, the gay constituency, to understand us girl lovers a tad. Most Chick-O-Centric males would not raise an unwaxed eye brow at a homosexual man if he would not shove his gayness in our faces. It's the flamers that freak out most heterosexuals. Case in point: Bobby Trendy and Jay Alexander. They seem like nice guys, but the pink hair, lip gloss, heavy eye liner, constant limp wrist and lisp is overkill. Why not, instead of emulating a TBN host, you follow Rob Halford's lead? That would make it much easier for us to have a beer with you. C'mon . . . work with us, we're trying to get along.

What's that about loving women again? When the accoutrements of womanhood and the overt expression of femininity in men is what makes you despise them, there's just no way to argue that this is about loving women too much to understand gay men. Giles helpful "advice" is, essentially, to stop behaving like a woman; otherwise he can't be expected to tolerate you. You see, womanliness isn't to be respected; it's to be fucked. And if you queers were Chick-O-Centric like he is, you'd know that.

(Meanwhile, what self-respecting queer wants to have a beer with an asswipe like Doug Giles, anyway?!)

If it weren't clear before how commonsensical—and necessary—it is for straight feminists to be allied with the LGBT community before, this week has made it perfectly clear, from Medved's diatribe conflating gay men and fat chicks, to Glenn Beck's encapsulating use of "promiscuity"— which, as I mentioned, is a word that, for conservatives, draws a line straight from the genesis of women's lib through birth control, legal abortion, premarital sex, and casual sex, right on to sodomy and the Supreme Court, LGBT equality, and the catastrophic culmination of the hideous mess in same-sex marriage—to this idiocy from Giles. We are natural allies, because we are hated by the same people, for much the same reasons.

[H/T Jill.]

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Wow

The Times of London has what, if true, is an absolutely enormous intelligence scoop: "Some of America's most senior military commanders are prepared to resign if the White House orders a military strike against Iran, according to highly placed defence and intelligence sources."

Tension in the Gulf region has raised fears that an attack on Iran is becoming increasingly likely before President George Bush leaves office. The Sunday Times has learnt that up to five generals and admirals are willing to resign rather than approve what they consider would be a reckless attack.

"There are four or five generals and admirals we know of who would resign if Bush ordered an attack on Iran," a source with close ties to British intelligence said. "There is simply no stomach for it in the Pentagon, and a lot of people question whether such an attack would be effective or even possible."

A British defence source confirmed that there were deep misgivings inside the Pentagon about a military strike. "All the generals are perfectly clear that they don’t have the military capacity to take Iran on in any meaningful fashion. Nobody wants to do it and it would be a matter of conscience for them. There are enough people who feel this would be an error of judgment too far for there to be resignations."

A generals' revolt on such a scale would be unprecedented.

No shit.

Meanwhile, Seymour Hersh has a new piece in The New Yorker on the administration's "redirection" of its Middle East strategy, which "has brought the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran and, in parts of the region, propelled it into a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims." Another must-read from Hersh, which also gives perspective to the Times piece.

(Commentary on both of these stories will no doubt be plentiful. Keep your eyes on Memeorandum, if you're interested in seeing what folks are saying.)

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2,000,000

Sometime yesterday, we reached quite a milestone here at Shakes. The Site Meter hit two million visitors—which, of course, means a toast is in order.

Slainte Mhath!
When I first started Shakespeare's Sister, I just wanted a place to air my thoughts about politics and culture. I felt really frustrated by the direction in which the country was headed on one hand, and on the other encouraged by the passionate, progressive voices I'd found in the blogosphere. I wanted to be a part of that, in my own little way.

That two years later, this amazing community has emerged just absolutely blows me away. Being a part of it brings me enormous amounts of joy; I feel excited to get started when I sit down at my desk in the morning, and, although I always try to write something meaningful, or funny, or thought-provoking, there are some days I'm just bitching, and some days I'm just info-sharing, and some days I'm just not all that interesting, and I know it, and I'm grateful you hang with me even when I suck.

Cheers to all of my co-bloggers, especially Paul the Spud—who literally has to entertain calls from me like "In how many different ways does the rightwing intend to make me describe how much I loathe them?! They're making me feel repetitive and uncreative!"—and all the Shakers. I adore you to bits.

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Reason #2,675,932 Why I Hate the Media

They make me defend Mitt Romney.

While Mitt Romney condemns polygamy and its prior practice by his Mormon church, the Republican presidential candidate's great-grandfather had five wives and at least one of his great-great grandfathers had 12.

SO WHAT?

LeMew calls this "a bullshit smear piece on Romney" and "straightforward religious bigotry," and I totally agree. Romney doesn't practice polygamy, nor does he support it; that his ancestry did has zero fucking relevance to his presidential campaign. Even as so far as one's personal life is relevant to a campaign, this "news" doesn't pass the smell test; as Romney's wife, Ann, to whom he's been married for 37 years, has pointed out, "he's only had one wife," unlike McCain, who's been married twice, or Giuliani, who's been married three times.

Look, I have no—none, zero, nil, zilch, nada, nought—love for Mitt Romney. If he were the last candidate on earth and I the last voter, I'd write in myself sooner than vote for him. But this kind of juvenile, he's-got-cooties, smear-by-association faux-journalism has to stop. It's pathetic; it lowers the public discourse; it insults us all. And it reinforces the privilege of one specific faith. The message, yet again, is that it's not just enough to be religious; you've got to be religious in a certain way—which is to say that you've got to preach that you're from an accepted Christian denomination, and practice intolerance of gays, uppity women, and people with "weirdo religions" (i.e. not privileged) or no religion at all. (See: Bush, George W.) That every last person reading this post will know precisely what I'm talking about (failing willful ignorance) is evidence of that very privilege.

And I would bet good money (and so would Richard Blair) that it was a person of that privileged faith who ghost-authored this hit piece—just some friendly rivalry between candidates, good men of faith all. A little thank-you note to Romney for his recent burst of religious intolerance: "We need to have a person of faith lead the country," said he, as if all "people of faith" are the same (ask Keith Ellison about that) and de facto superior to "people not of faith." It's always most helpful to the privileged lot when people from the weirdo religions denounce the faithless. Are you paying attention, Mr. Mormon Candidate?

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The Virtual Bar Is Open

TFIF, Shakers. What's your poison?

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Meow

Shakespeare's Sister: Read by the most discerning felines since 2004.

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