#104: In case you haven't heard already, a prominent member of the Republican Party, candidate for party chairman Chip Saltsman, sent out a Christmas CD to fellow party members that contained a track of the "Puff the Magic Dragon" parody (to use the term "parody" very loosely), "Barack the Magic Negro," first discussed in Part 16 of this series.
That the GOP has racist assholes among its ranks is not particularly newsworthy; what is fairly amazing, however, is that, despite Saltsman's being in the running to lead the Republican National Committee, reactions among prominent party members has been mixed. There are actually people who are publicly defending this guy. Just wow.
I mean, even Newt Gingrich has the brains to call this one right.
I don't even know what to say anymore. Go see Kevin and Matt, who are way more lucid on this subject than I appear capable of being at the moment.
* * *
#105: Shaker Quixotess gave me the heads-up about this content-generated banner currently running at FiveThirtyEight.com (
screen cap):
If you can't see the image, the ad conflates Obama with Fidel Castro and the two surviving leaders of the "Axis of Evil." Just four brown-skinned terrorists, hanging out and shit!
(And just to be sure you understand that Obama's
really eeeeeeevil, he's SMOKING, too!)
The site for which the ad is running (which has been blacked out in the above image) is promoting its survey, which asks: "Barack Obama Presidency: Are you ready to rumble with terrorists?" then goes on to recount Obama's alleged "connections with bad seeds, such as Bill Ayers."
It's just so
sad, and would be laughable if it weren't dangerously wrong.
[Obama Racism/Muslim/Unpatriotic/Scary Black Dude Watch: Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen, Seventeen, Eighteen, Nineteen, Twenty, Twenty-One, Twenty-Two, Twenty-Three, Twenty-Four, Twenty-Five, Twenty-Six, Twenty-Seven, Twenty-Eight, Twenty-Nine, Thirty, Thirty-One, Thirty-Two, Thirty-Three, Thirty-Four, Thirty-Five, Thirty-Six, Thirty-Seven, Thirty-Eight, Thirty-Nine, Forty, Forty-One, Forty-Two, Forty-Three, Forty-Four, Forty-Five, Forty-Six, Forty-Seven, Forty-Eight, Forty-Nine, Fifty, Fifty-One, Fifty-Two, Fifty-Three, Fifty-Four, Fifty-Five, Fifty-Six, Fifty-Seven, Fifty-Eight, Fifty-Nine, Sixty, Sixty-One, Sixty-Two, Sixty-Three, Sixty-Four, Sixty-Five, Sixty-Six, Sixty-Seven, Sixty-Eight, Sixty-Nine, Seventy, Seventy-One, Seventy-Two, Seventy-Three, Seventy-Four, Seventy-Five, Seventy-Six, Seventy-Seven, Seventy-Eight, Seventy-Nine, Eighty, Eighty-One, Eighty-Two, Eighty-Three, Eighty-Four, Eighty-Five, Eighty-Six, Eighty-Seven, Eighty-Eight, Eighty-Nine, Ninety, Ninety-One, Ninety-Two, Ninety-Three, Ninety-Four, Ninety-Five, Ninety-Six, Ninety-Seven, Ninety-Eight, Ninety-Nine, 100, 101, 102, 103.]
Open Wide...
Shut Up!
Congratulations to Kate Harding and her new husband Al, who spent Friday night
getting hitched in Vegas. More notes and pictures on the big event
here.
Many years of happiness, you crazy kids!
Open Wide...
Shut Up!
While we're updating agendas, all the teenage girls and young women reading Shakesville should update theirs to include: Convince violent young men who are boyfriends, friends, classmates, or otherwise your peers that they shouldn't use guns.
Shaker Broce passed this along under the subject line "Girls are supposed to stop violence. Again." which pretty much sums it up. I guess when they're not busily trying to stop domestic violence, girls are now expected to put themselves in between gangbangers and their guns and stop street violence, too—which, let's face it, leaves them precious little time to stop rape and also prevent unwanted pregnancies on their own.
Ahem.
[S]ome who work to prevent violence against women questioned whether the effort skirts close to blaming women or places a large burden on people who often are victims themselves.
"There is a fine line that we ask everybody to be mindful of, between empowering victims and placing the responsibility on them to end the violence," said Toni Troop, spokeswoman for Jane Doe Inc., a statewide coalition of organizations that combat domestic violence. "Ultimately that responsibility is on the entire community. Raising awareness, empowering young girls to believe in themselves, in each other, has to go hand in hand with ... talking to the young boys who are primarily the perpetrators of this violence."
[Michael Hennessey, the assistant chief of the Boston School Police] said a similar campaign will be geared toward high school boys and that the goal is eventually to have both male and female students in the same room exploring the causes of violence.
Eventually.
But presumably long after the girls have already taken on board important messages like:
"Females do have a lot of say. ... A lot of the drama that happens on the street is over a female," said Samantha Allen, a 17-year-old senior with short brown hair that sloped over her forehead.
Allen said there is a name for girls who, either wittingly or unwittingly, initiate conflicts through their boyfriends, brothers, or male friends. They're called "set-up chicks," she said.
"They're chicks that run their mouths to other parts of the city," Allen said. "They cause a lot of violence."
Of course they do. It's the chicks "running their mouths" that cause the violence, not the fact that men with guns react in a wildly inappropriate way.
Open Wide...
Shut Up!
I haven't posted about the conflict, which began this weekend, because I quite honestly don't even know what to say. So I'm just going to offer some recommended reading, and then open up comments for discussion:
The Guardian: Six months of secret planning - then Israel moves against Hamas.
BBC: Israel strikes key Hamas offices.
CNN: Israeli airstrikes in Gaza enter third day.
AP: Across Mideast, Thousands Protest Israeli Assault.
New York Times: Israel Reminds Foes That It Has Teeth.
New York Times: Obama Defers to Bush, for Now, on Gaza Crisis.
LA Times: Obama's Mideast peace plans face tougher road, experts say.
Also see: Spackerman.
And a lot of Hilzoy's post here resonates quite strongly with me, if you want to know my position. It's not that I don't care (or have an opinion on) who's intrinsically got the more principled position; it's that sometimes, at a certain point, being right becomes less important than doing the right thing.
Open Wide...
Shut Up!
Study: Teenage 'virginity pledges' are ineffective. Really?! ZOMG. What a fooking shocker!
Sniff.
In fact, I haven't been this gobsmacked since '06 when it was reported that virginity pledgers frequently lie about not being virgins in the first place, or lie about having taken the pledge when they later get their sex on before a ring gets put on someone's something [/Beyoncé].
As far as I know, the only thing for which virginity pledges are really useful is creeping the hell out of sensible people when done as part of a Purity Ball.
Open Wide...
Shut Up!
This has been on my mind since reading the post Liss published last week.
Shall we?
The first time I was gay bashed I was seventeen. I was in college and walking to the T in Boston with a girl friend. We had gone to a club and were returning to campus…we held hands, even though we weren’t a couple…and, as we rounded a corner to approach the T station a group of men came towards us down the sidewalk.
It flashed though my mind…that sense that something wasn’t right or cool…that I should call out “fire!” or something to scare them off of whatever they were about to do. I think it was the look of them…their posture or the pace of their walk…or maybe hate has a scent that I was already familiar with.
Before I could do anything we were surrounded and they were all talking at once and calling us freaks and telling us we just needed one good fuck and that’d straighten us out and following that up with taunts that maybe they should take care of that for us and fuck us straight.
Hands shot out…their hands were on us, touching us and pushing us…and the blur of their leather coats was like a wall surrounding us.
My heart was beating so fast and then one of them grabbed me by the throat, lifted me off my feet and slammed me against the side of the building.
“Yeah, this one needs some good fucking. Dyke bitch.”
He believed it...he would do that to me.
I could see it in his eyes.
And then...
“Hey! What the fuck are you doing?!?” a voice yelled out from far away.
Just like that the hand around my throat was gone.
The group took off running down the street as two men…I don’t know where they came from…ran after them for a bit.
I sat on the ground…gasping and looking into my friend’s dazed eyes…and saying nothing.
The bruises on my neck faded but that memory is as clear as glass.
That was the first time I was gay bashed.
I reported the incident.
My friend didn't.
She wasn’t out and she was terrified that it would get back to her family or friends.
Nothing came of my report, which was filed away as an attempted mugging.
Years later, I met a young woman at the local shelter where I volunteer who was pregnant as the result of a gang rape. She was an out lesbian and her attackers had bragged that they were going to fuck her straight.
As we faced each other in rocking chairs she sighed and wondered out loud… “Why did this happen? What difference does my being a lesbian make to them?”
What difference?
And that hand was around my neck again.
When we are portrayed as diseased and in need of a cure.
Gasping for breath...fighting for air.
When those who equate our love to pedophilia are given the honor of speaking the word of God before the nation while we fight for our history to be acknowledged.
Heart racing...so fast, how can it beat that fast?
When laws are passed by our neighbors to deny us parenting rights, housing rights or employment rights...when we are so intolerable no one should be forced to endure our company and no child should be entrusted to our care.
The bruises that take so long to fade.
When a man is beaten to death in front of his brother…when a lesbian is gang raped.
When those who would deny us equality are lifted up…
…and the masses cheer as heaven is dragged down into the gutter.
It makes all the difference in the world.
And the struggle continues...
Open Wide...
Shut Up!
My neighbors get a visitor...
What do you say when an egret comes calling?
Open Wide...
Shut Up!
About a month ago, I observed at dinner at my parents' that there hadn't been many presidential sons in the White House in my lifetime, but lots of presidential daughters: Tricia and Julie Nixon (whose father resigned three months after I was born), Susan Ford (whose three older brothers were adults by the time their father assumed office), Amy Carter (whose three older brothers were also mostly absent during their father's presidency), Chelsea Clinton, Barbara and Jenna Bush, and soon Malia and Sasha Obama.
Even the also-rans tend to have daughters: John Kerry's daughters Alexandra and Vanessa were two of his closest advisers, and John McCain's daughter Meghan campaigned with him constantly. (Both of them have stepsons, and McCain also has two sons with wife Cindy.)
My mom got out the encyclopedias, and we paged through history to see how far back the trend stretched. Not very far, as it turned out. The preponderance of daughters is a recent event.
My lifetime, as it happens, also overlaps most of the mainstream feminist/womanist movement.
I proposed a theory based on the finding that male legislators with daughters are more favorably disposed to support women's issues, especially reproductive rights: My thought was that male presidential candidates with daughters are more empathetic toward women generally—that they learn to listen more closely and relate to girls and women better than male presidential candidates without daughters—and that seeing them interact with their daughters communicates something to female voters, in no small part because the relative dearth of women in politics provides little opportunity to female voters to see male presidential candidates interacting with female peers.
Maybe daughters, so went my theory, are giving male presidential candidates the baseline understanding of women and women's issues required of any candidate in modern era of feminism.
It's a theory, I like to think, that's complimentary to both fathers and daughters, without being hostile to mothers and sons. And it doesn't rely on tired stereotypes about the sexes.
I'm going to guess you will not be surprised to hear that when Time's Belinda Luscombe noticed the same quirk of presidential families, her theory was slightly different.
I have a theory, born of careful historical analysis and solipsism: It's impossible to be elected to the White House if you have young sons, because that would mean you have to campaign with them.
Campaigning and raising sons are mutually exclusive. Campaigning requires lots of travel, enormous amounts of time in the public eye and months and months of sitting down quietly listening to the same guy talking while wearing your good clothes. It's like 11 straight months of being in church when you're the preacher's kid — with long car rides in between. It's torture on adults, let alone children. But it's worse for boys. Try this experiment: next month ask your son to be on his best behavior in front of other people, from now until November 2009. See how far you get.
"Boys are generally more competitive, risk-taking and defiant, which makes them less manageable," says Meg Meeker M.D., author of Boys Should be Boys and Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters. And the 24/7 scrutiny of the modern campaign makes every small risky and defiant act a public affair.
...Young girls, on the other hand, can be an asset to a candidate's image. "There's definitely something in the father daughter-relationship that makes being in the public eye much easier," says Meeks. "Girls want to please their mothers and particularly their fathers. Their dads can take their daughters places and do things with them and the girls won't act out."
Of course. Of course it just comes down to "boys are animals; girls are servants." Doesn't it always?
And because that just wasn't offensive enough, Luscombe ends the piece suggesting that the Obamas ought to try for a son while they're in the White House.
And the Obamas are still a young couple. With ready access to government-sponsored childcare. No pressure of course, but would it be too much to ask to give the ol' dice another roll? Maybe you can't campaign with a son, but it sure sounds like fun to try and govern with one.
Sure, because Malia and Sasha are chopped liver—and because Michelle Obama's got nothing better to do than submit her body to the project of producing a boy, since "In some countries, being son-less would be considered a weakness, especially in a leader." Yeah, those countries are called monarchies.
And Time continues its slide into total fucking irrelevance...
[H/T to Renee.]
Open Wide...
Shut Up!
lol your gay blogaround
Leave your links in comments...
Open Wide...
Shut Up!
Harold Pinter died on December 24, 2008 after a long battle with cancer. He is remembered in the New York Times by Mel Gussow* and Ben Brantley:
In more than 30 plays — written between 1957 and 2000 and including masterworks like “The Birthday Party,” “The Caretaker,” “The Homecoming” and “Betrayal” — Mr. Pinter captured the anxiety and ambiguity of life in the second half of the 20th century with terse, hypnotic dialogue filled with gaping pauses and the prospect of imminent violence.
Along with another Nobel winner, Samuel Beckett, his friend and mentor, Mr. Pinter became one of the few modern playwrights whose names instantly evoke a sensibility. The adjective Pinteresque has become part of the cultural vocabulary as a byword for strong and unspecified menace.
An actor, essayist, screenwriter, poet and director as well as a dramatist, Mr. Pinter was also publicly outspoken in his views on repression and censorship, at home and abroad. He used his Nobel acceptance speech to denounce American foreign policy, saying that the United States had not only lied to justify waging war against Iraq, but that it had also “supported and in many cases engendered every right-wing military dictatorship” in the last 50 years.
His political views were implicit in much of his work. Though his plays deal with the slipperiness of memory and human character, they are also almost always about the struggle for power.
The dynamic in his work is rooted in battles for control, turf wars waged in locations that range from working-class boarding houses (in his first produced play, “The Room,” from 1957) to upscale restaurants (the setting for “Celebration,” staged in 2000). His plays often take place in a single, increasingly claustrophobic room, where conversation is a minefield and even innocuous-seeming words can wound.
My first encounter with Mr. Pinter's work was working on a production of The Birthday Party at the University of Miami in 1973 (included in the cast was Ernie Sabella). I remember thinking that there had to be something more to the play than just the plot, and the more I saw it in rehearsal and in performance, the more I got to think about it. But what intrigued me was the reaction of other people who were watching it; some were repulsed by it while others were fascinated, but no two people had the same reaction. They didn't know if it was a horror story or a farce. But that's what the playwright wanted:Few writers have been so consistent over so many years in the tone and execution of their work. Just before rehearsals began for the West End production of “The Birthday Party” half a century ago, Mr. Pinter sent a letter to his director, Peter Wood. In it he said, “The play dictated itself, but I confess that I wrote it — with intent, maliciously, purposefully, in command of its growth.”
He added: “The play is a comedy because the whole state of affairs is absurd and inglorious. It is, however, as you know, a very serious piece of work.”
The next time I saw the play was a few years later when it was staged at the University of Minnesota, this time directed by Emily Mann. It was a completely different production -- intimate and thoroughly chilling. The long pauses that Mr. Pinter is so famous for were actually punctuated by the tension felt in the audience and the menace of the unspoken word. It's a lesson some playwrights and directors need to learn, and Harold Pinter is the one who taught it.
By the way, a lot of conservatives are remembering Mr. Pinter more for his stand against the war in Iraq and his Nobel speech against it in December 2005 than his life's work as a playwright and director. These commentators seem to think that somehow playwrights or artists aren't allowed to speak out on things like war and inhumanity unless, of course, they agree with them. What these people don't understand is that playwrights have been speaking to the human condition since time out of mind -- it's what we do. And even if you don't agree with the writer's point of view, it doesn't lessen the importance or the impact of their work and the insight they may shed on humanity and civilization. And anyone who would dismiss or shun a writer's work or an actor's performance because of their political views is depriving themselves of the opportunity to understand themselves and the people around them. But then, people who do that probably don't want to leave their narrow little world in the first place.
*Mr. Gussow died in 2005.
(Cross-posted.)
Open Wide...
Shut Up!
In a new USA TODAY/Gallup poll, Americans have chosen President-Elect Barack Obama as the man they most admire and Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton as the woman they most admire in the world.
Obama got 32% of the vote, with George Bush coming in second at a distant 5%.
It's the first time a president-elect has topped the annual survey in more than a half-century.
...Dwight Eisenhower scored first [in 1952], the only other time a president-elect has led the list since Gallup began asking the question in 1948.
Clinton won with 20% of the vote; she's held the top spot
for 13 of the past 16 years. Amazing.
Open Wide...
Shut Up!
A lot of virtual ink has been spilled (and often rightfully so) about the bad bits of the blogosphere—the bickering, the stupidity, the ubiquitous trolling and hacking and attacking and harassment. But there's so much good stuff about the blogosphere, too—to much to list, really, but one of its best bits is the ability of bloggers and blog readers to pull together to help someone out.
This is one of those stories.
"This is our Christmas story," said Ebony Sampson. "It's going to be told for generations and generations to come."
Sampson, who lives in Aberdeen, Maryland, with her husband, Daniel, and their two young children, has overcome more hardship than one person should ever have to face. When she was in the 10th grade, she lost her entire family in a horrific car accident. Raised by a grandmother in New York, Ebony eventually used some life-insurance money from her parents' death to buy the home in Aberdeen, near where she grew up.
But in June, Daniel got sick.
He had contracted a terrible case of salmonella from a bad tomato, and, because he'd just stated a new job, he hadn't accrued enough sick time to miss the work he needed without losing his position. He lost his job, and the proverbial snowball started rolling: Utilities got shut off, their one working vehicle was repossessed, and eventually their house was scheduled to be foreclosed unless they could come up with $10,000 to bring the mortgage up to date.
One of Ebony's friends, Jaki Grier, posted about their plight on her blog, along with a donation link.
At the most, Jaki thought she could raise enough money to help the Sampsons pay a security deposit on an apartment after their home was auctioned.
But donations started pouring in. Within 24 hours, Grier's blog had raised $1,000, far exceeding her expectations. People started linking to Grier's blog from sites across the Internet and around the country.
Attorneys posted legal advice. Others in similar situations offered sympathy. One woman sent a donation with a note that said she had just lost her own home but wanted to help anyway. Another woman wrote that she didn't have a car but would walk to her grocery store with a jar of change and donate it to the cause.
Yet another e-mail came from a woman who was unemployed, with no job prospects. She donated a dollar.
With every donation, the total raised ticked higher and higher on Grier's blog.
"Everybody wants to give to a charity, but so many times when you give to a charity you don't really see where your money goes," Grier said. "At least with this, you saw the little [donations] ticker go. I think that made people excited."
Four days after Grier's blog post, she had raised $3,400 -- enough to repair the Sampsons' car. That night, Grier went to bed ecstatic. The next morning she checked her PayPal account and was stunned to find the balance had ballooned to $10,900.
In the time it took Grier to take the donation link down from her blog, the balance had reached $11,032. In just five days, she had raised enough money to save her friend's home. A Baltimore TV station, WBAL, caught wind of the story and put it on the air. Someone contacted Daniel Sampson and offered him a job interview.
"It's been overwhelming," Daniel Sampson said. "For me, out of all the donations [we] received, it was a little kid [who] came knocking on the door early Saturday morning ... with a five-dollar bill in his hand. He just came up to the door and said, 'Here you go, mister.' Then he just walked away. I was, like, speechless. He couldn't have been more than 8 years old."
..."It doesn't seem real to me, and so I just thank everyone out there that cares," Ebony Sampson said. "There really was no hope for us. Then, out of nowhere, just the kindness of strangers, just people that came and, you know, provided for us. Jaki was our beacon of light that led them to us."
(Some of those strangers are among us. I linked to Ginmar's post linking to Jaki's post around Thanksgiving. Teaspoons.)
I wish the Sampsons had never had to be in that position in the first place: I wish Daniel hadn't gotten sick, I wish we had workers' rights laws that protected him when he did, I wish they hadn't had to go through the stress and worry and struggle of financial catastrophe.
I wish they hadn't had to experience a moment of being scared before they were given the help they needed, that all of us deserve—because I'm keenly aware that there is real suffering with being that close to going over the cliff, even as being so close to the precipice is what made their story compelling and elicits such huge waves of joyful relief now that they are on solid ground again.
I wish we were all a little quicker to help.
Of course, sometimes it's hard to ask until we're on the edge, and hard to really hear others' need, until the echo is reverberating in the canyon below. Funny creatures that way, we humans.
Still: Blub.
It never ceases to be thrilling and inspiring to see people rise to the occasion for each other, and, most importantly, I am more happy for the Sampsons than I can possibly say.
Open Wide...
Shut Up!
OK -- So my final Caganer for this year . . . . includes an Easter Egg (because what's a religious holiday without a symbolic implantation of the whole cosmic birth/death thing -- ammaright, or ammaright?)
Find and click the Caganer in the Nativity Scene below, and you will be treated to a bit of helpful Holiday Advice from PortlyDyke which addresses what many of us experience as one of the thornier aspects of this season.
Hint: Use your mouse.
Teaser: The Easter Egg is Close-Captioned.This is your Daily Caganer reporter signing off for the 2008 Caganer season.
(Thank Maude -- the Caganer spirit got so intense around here that my cat crapped on a bed, my Beloved stepped in dog-dung this morning, and there were even reports of Caganer-related REM cycles. All Hail! the Power of the Poo.)
Open Wide...
Shut Up!
My Christmas greeting for The Guardian's Comment is free America, "Merry Christmas, Mr. President!" is now up:
In December 2000, just as George Bush was preparing to stroll into the White House for what would become a two-term presidency, parents all over the country were scrambling desperately around toy shops trying to locate the year's hottest items on their kids' Christmas lists: razor scooters and Teksta, a robotic puppy who had become the de facto mascot of the next generation in animatronic interactive toys – complete with a collection of responsive sensors and a programmable mode, Teksta responded to stimulus and could even be "trained."
Heeling at the feet of the tech boom, reflective of both cutting-edge scientific advancements and a vibrant global economy, Teksta was a perfectly suited symbol and homage to outgoing President Clinton's presidency, even if Teksta were slightly better behaved.
Eight years later, as President Bush prepares to stroll back out of the White House and head back to Texas, this year's hot toy is a doll that shits all over the place.
Read the whole thing
here.
Schmerry Mishmosh, Shakers!
Open Wide...
Shut Up!
The Power of Teaspoons
