While we're all enjoying our quiet weekend, I wanted to bring to your attention this post over at BC Holmes' place on Livejournal. BC's been involved with Haitian activism for several years now. She has posted there a sample letter, and a request for Canadians to send something similar, to Canada's Minister of State for Foreign Affairs (Americas), The Honourable Mr. Peter Kent, regarding the detention without trial of Ronald Dauphin in Haiti.
Mr. Dauphin, briefly, was a grassroots activist for the Lavalas party in Haiti, and was arrested after President Aristide was ousted from power in March of 2004. He has since languished in a Haitian prison, awaiting a trial which isn't even scheduled at the moment.
I encourage Canadians in particular to write to Mr. Kent, in his position as Minister, and ask that he express Canada's concern for the fate of Mr. Dauphin to the current government of Haiti, and press for his release while awaiting resolution of the case. Mr. Dauphin is suffering medically documented long-term damage to his health, and should be in a hospital, not a prison, particularly given the shaky grounds of the charges he is nominally being held on.
Citizens of other countries could well consider writing to their own governments' foreign affairs departments, and expressing their own concern, as well as to the government of Haiti itself.
This link will take you to a page of Haitian consulates and embassies abroad; follow them to get the address of the Haitian consul or embassy nearest you, and write a polite but firm letter telling them the eyes of the world are on them.
Teaspoons up, Shakers, there's an ocean to be bailed here. o.oP
Extending the word
Quote of the Day
"The NAACP is appalled that an organization like Bonner and Associates would stoop to these depths to deceive Congress. In this case Bonner and Associates are exploiting the African-American Community to achieve their misdirected goal. These tactics illustrate that discriminatory tactics normally used to deceive voters are now being used to deceive the Congress."—Hilary O. Shelton, Senior Vice President for Advocacy and Washington Bureau Director of the NAACP, on the discovery that an employee of DC-based consulting firm Bonner & Associates had forged letters purporting to be from members of the NAACP and the nonprofit Latin@ group Creciendo Juntos. The letters, sent to Congressman Tom Periello (D-VA), urged a vote against clean energy reform.
Baby's First Blog
[This post was originally published August 24, 2006, and I was put in mind of it by this post by Dodai at Jezebel today.]
Recently, Mama Shakes has, in cleaning out various parts of Parental Manor, unearthed some rather amusing stuff from my childhood, like a first- (or second-) grade essay called "My Mom is Sexey," featuring the memorable couplet: [Mama Shakes] is her name / And loving is her game. Apparently, I was suffering under the misapprehension that my mother was a prostitute.
She also found an old diary that had been a Christmas present from her and my dad, which I began on January 1, 1984. The last entry is March 19, and it had gotten pretty sporadic around February 5, but the solid month of sharing my thoughts at age 9 provided me with no small amount of amusement while re-reading it in my 30s. The funniest thing was seeing my adult personality already taking shape. Here are some of my favorite entries, in their entirety, with the original spelling and punctuation. See if you can find where I might reference "a case of the vapors" or the need for a fainting couch, if only my vocabulary had been a bit more sophisticated!
January 3, 1984: It's 7:15pm. Today was a good day. It was back to school day though. And I haven't done my homework! Oh boy. Gotta go. Get back to ya later. PS. My homework assignment was Math, p. 130.
January 11, 1984: Today was fun. Before bed we watched a show about monkeys. It was good.
January 15, 1984: Today was a good day. I found out Webster is really 12 years old. I can't believe it! He's only 40 inches tall! His older brother was 40 in. tall until he got in the middle of 9th grade! I also watched Knight Rider tonight. It was stupid, and about people getting killed (what else), and sex (between Michael & Lorin), and jewelry. Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb! See ya tomorrow.
January 17, 1984: Today was a good day. As I—oops, I forgot to tell you, I quit Girl Scouts. Well anyway, David, he gets hurt every single day in school. I just about fainted when I heard the news today. HE DIDN'T GET HURT! I couldn't believe it. I think I'll talk to ya later. See ya. P.S. [My little sister's] first front tooth came out today.
January 18, 1984: Today was nice. Like yesterday, though, a miracle happened. Ha! A miracle at Central School. I never! Whoo. Well anyway, here's the other miracle. Me, Amy, Sarah, Jennie, all of us were ready. Usually (see Jan. 5) Jennie is late or both Sarah and Jennie are late. Neither of us, Amy and I, are ever late! Well, maybe once in a blue moon! But otherwise, never! I couldn't believe it today! After school, it was the talk of the day.
January 20, 1984: Today after school was fun trading stickers with Mrs. Martinsen. I got some good stickers and gave her some good ones. Today I also wrote a story so stupid, I threw it away. So as you can tell, a day is never quite perfect. In PE today, I went against Marci in Steal the Bacon. We were number 8. I smeared her. Our team won of course. Marci was a brat in gym to Jennifer today. When I find out where she lives, I'll smear her face in!
January 25, 1984: Today was a good day. I played "Star Wars." It's the darkside and the, I guess, lightside. You know, stormtroopers and Luke Skywalker's side. I was on the Darkside. I think tomorrow I might play on the Lightside.
Total Geek.
Charming
The only thing better than two white dudez sitting around making gross sexist jokes is when those two white dudez are prominent members of a major media outlet making sexist jokes about the Secretary of State:
Washington Post reporters Dana Milbank and Chris Cillizza regularly do a political commentary video series called "Mouthpiece Theater." In the newest segment, Milbank and Cillizza discuss President Obama's "beer diplomacy," and what types of beer various public officials should drink. They suggest a "Happy Ending" beer for Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) and a "XXX Porter" for Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC). Their suggestion for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, however, is considerably more offensive — a "Mad Bitch" beer.
[Jump to 2:35 if you don't want to watch the whole thing.]
I'd love to hear the Washington Post explain how they feel confident their reporters are giving balanced coverage to female public figures when they're willing to unabashedly use sexist slurs in public.
Contact the Washington Post's ombudsman.
Get Well Soon, Senator Dodd
Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT) has been diagnosed with early-stage prostate cancer:
Dodd is scheduled to undergo surgery during the Senate's August recess and said he expects to be back at work after a "brief recuperation" at home.Best wishes for a speedy recovery, Senator.
"It's something that's very common among men my age," said Dodd, who is 65 and the father of two young daughters. "In fact, one in six men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer at some point during their life."
Dodd, a Democrat, said he feels fine and intends to run for re-election in November 2010. ... As the ranking Democrat on the Senate's Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Dodd is one of the key players in the effort to overhaul the nation's healthcare system.
The Dodd abides.
More New Specs
Iain, who is taking a vacation day today, also just got new specs—and his are totally new, as he's never worn specs before. But he's gone a little far-sighted, so it was time to get some.
And they've apparently made him crazy.
I'd also like to report that he's used his day off to open a Twitter account from which his first missive was: "My first tweet! Off to take a poop, now."
Which, naturally, made me laugh, call him an idiot, and kiss him. In that order.
International Blog Against Racism Week
This week is International Blog Against Racism Week, and, as the week slips away, I'm reminded of my post on the final day of 2007's 16 Days of Action Against Gender Violence leading up to International Human Rights Day, in which I first mentioned my proverbial teaspoon: "Today is the final day of the 16 Days of Action Against Gender Violence, during which I suppose I have blogged exactly as often as always about violence against women, in America and abroad. Sometimes it feels like it's all I ever write about; sometimes it feels like I can't possibly write about it enough to do the issue justice; often, those feelings exist within me simultaneously. All I ever do is try to empty the sea with this teaspoon; all I can do is keep trying to empty the sea with this teaspoon."
We write about racism every week; this week was like any other, in that there were a bunch of posts, in part or whole, about racism, and in that there weren't enough, in the way that there can never be enough—no minimum, no maximum, no perfectly adequate average—because you cannot put a number on such a thing. You can't just pay your dues as an activist or ally; you can't quantify your work in measures of sufficiency. You must always, always, expect more, especially of yourself.
And, to that end, I don't find my anti-racism blogging to be the hardest (and probably not the most important) thing that I do as an ally. Frankly, it's easy to be a privileged white person who calls out other privileged white people for being racists on a blog*; what's harder is: 1. Examining my own privilege and trying to unweave the lifetime of internalized racism that accompanies it; 2. Challenging racism in my everyday life.
What I don't want to provide, ever, is a harbor for racism. I don't want to let a single racist remark, joke, stereotype, slur, or any other expression of racism go unchallenged in my presence. Nor do I want to evade or rebuff a challenge to any racism I may intentionally or unintentionally express. I want to be vigilant.
Every week.
Because not being vigilant, giving myself the permission to not care about racism, to let my attention drift or my energy wane, is the ultimate expression of my undeserved privilege. If I don't want to be part of the problem, it's got to be my problem all the time. All in.
o.oP
UPDATE: Please visit the International Blog Against Racism Week community here. Also find more here. [H/T to Anna in comments.]
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* Which isn't to say it has no value; I've learned more than I can say from the threads here and elsewhere started by privileged white bloggers, which is to say nothing of what I've learned from bloggers of color over the last five years, like Elle (and her co-bloggers), Shark-fu, Renee, Pam, Kevin, Matt, Resistance, Tami, The Angry Black Woman (and her co-bloggers), Chello, Veronica, Mar, Pizza Diavola, Latoya and Carmen (and guest bloggers), Reza, Ta-Nehisi, and Jay Smooth, among many more.
Please feel encouraged to leave links to other bloggers of color you like reading—and bloggers of color should, of course, feel invited to toot their own horns!
Friday Blogaround
This blogaround brought to you by Shaxco Productions, makers of the upcoming film Shakesville: The Movie.
Recommended Reading:
Resistance: Welcome to America
The Red Queen: Middle Class Values Don't Solve Poverty
M. LeBlanc: The Fantasy of Staying Exactly As I Am (or, This Far and No Further, This Fat and No Fatter)
Avedon: A Moldy Slice of Bread Is Not "Half a Loaf"
Danielle: All Obama All the Time
Kyle: O'Reilly to Receive "Media Courage Award" At Values Voter Summit
Leave your links in comments...
Blog Note
It's not just you. Disqus is down at the moment.
We're not sure what's up yet, but I'll update this post if/when I have more information or commenting comes back online.
My apologies for the inconvenience.
UPDATE: Looks like we're back up! Carry on, Shakers.
Apatowcalypse Now: Party Like It's 1899
Gee, let's crack open the bubbly:
On the eve of the release of his latest movie, "Funny People," Judd Apatow has signed with Universal to write and direct three films.I don't know what I find more hilarious: That Universal has identified Judd Apatow as "a cornerstone" of what they pride themselves on, or that they've identified him as a responsible filmmaker.
..."He has become a cornerstone for what this company prides itself on, which is excellence in comedies," [Universal Pictures chairman David Linde] said. While "Funny People" is a more ambitious production than Apatow's more modestly budgeted movies, Linde called the him "one of the most responsible filmmakers that this company works with. He is always on budget, he is always on time."
When I think "pride" and "responsibility," I absolutely think of the guy who had the courage to include a gratuitous "crowning" shot during a childbirth scene.
[Previously in the Apatowcalypse: Man-Child-Rising, Rise of the Dudebros, Dawn of the Dudebros, Lord of the Dudebros, When Dudebros Collide, Methinks the Dudebro Doth Protest Too Much.]
Have Another
Well, the little get-together over beer and peanuts is over. You would think that the way the cable news outlets built it up, it was the most important meeting since Nixon went to China in 1972.
Events like these are like Rorschach tests; you take away from it what you want to see. Some saw it as a cynical attempt by the president to recover from his "acting stupidly" moment at his press conference where he lifted the veil on his anger and hatred for white people (if you listen to someone like Glenn Beck); some saw it as just another photo op on the White House lawn -- like when Arafat and Rabin shook hands -- that papered over the real differences between the parties and nothing's really changed; and some saw it as one more way that Barack Obama has confounded the conventional wisdom and demonstrated that no matter how smugly convinced you are that you think you know what he will do, he goes and does something that is completely unexpected yet lands him on his feet with a gentle "ta-da!" It's a touch of grace, self-awareness, and political savvy that I haven't seen in a president since JFK. And it answers the perpetual and blindingly irrelevant question that pollsters whip out every election cycle: who would you rather have a beer with?The much-anticipated “beer summit” of President Obama, the Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department in Massachusetts took place Thursday night, accompanied by minute-by-minute reporting from the White House press corps, countdown clocks from the cable news networks, and a last-minute addition by the White House in the form of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
After 10 days of near nonstop news coverage of a case that prompted a thousand news stories about race, the men sat down for less than an hour at a table across from the Oval Office under a magnolia tree.
“What you had today was two gentlemen who agreed to disagree on a particular issue,” a poised and smooth Sergeant Crowley said in a 15-minute news conference after the session. “We didn’t spend too much time dwelling on the past, and we decided to look forward.”
The president tried to make it look like no big deal, which strains credulity on several levels. First, just by definition, nothing the President of the United States does is not a big deal; that's a hazard of the job Mr. Obama is ruefully finding out. Second, if it wasn't a big deal -- or at least played up by the West Wing -- we would not have had a tick-tock on everything from the location to the choices of beer brands. (You don't think the brewers whose bottles made it to the table aren't going to exploit it? Ha.) And we would not have had the instant analysis that caused MSNBC to go into "Breaking News" mode and spent hours with Chris Matthews and his pundit pals analyzing the body language of the president of his guests. (Actually, that tells you much more than you really want to know about Mr. Matthews and the thrill that runs up his leg.)
Staged events like this rarely accomplish anything in themselves, but it does set an example. Take away the hype and the artifice of the lighting, sets, props and costumes (notice that the most casually dressed people in the picture were the most powerful) and what you have is, to coin a phrase, a "teachable moment" that goes beyond the issue of race and profiling and a presidential Kinsley moment: committing a gaffe by speaking the truth. We Americans can accomplish a lot more by sitting down and actually getting to know each other than we can by relying on preconceived notions of race, class, and profession. So if this little beer bash accomplished anything -- besides boosting the market share of Bud Light, Bucklers, Sam Adams, and Blue Moon beers -- it may get the cop and the prof in other places like Toledo or Albuquerque or Miami to sit down and talk.
Crossposted.
Birthers
Steve Benen:
A new Research 2000 poll conducted for Daily Kos asked respondents a rather straightforward question: "Do you believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States of America or not?" Since the president was born in the U.S., ideally, the results would be around 100%.Heh. Naturally, they weren't, however—and, predictably, there was a partisan gap in the results. While 4% of self-identified Democrats are "birthers," and 8% of independents are, 28% of Republicans believe President Barack Obama was not born in the US, and, hence, not eligible for the presidency. Says Steve: "For a crazy, demonstrably false, racist idea, these are discouraging numbers." Indeed.
But I was especially surprised by the regional breakdowns. In the Northeast, West, and Midwest, the overwhelming majorities realize the president is a native-born American. But notice the South -- only 47% got it right and 30% are unsure.If I were the Republican leadership, I would be very worried indeed about this. Of course, it's nothing less than they deserve, given that this is precisely the base they cultivated.
Outside the South, this madness is gaining very little traction, and remains a fringe conspiracy theory. Within the South, it's practically mainstream.
[Commenting Guidelines: No nasty broad swipes at the South. Which is not to say that we can't discuss cultural differences that may explain this disparity. If you don't know into which category a comment like "The South is full of racist assholes!" falls, don't comment. If you do, as I suspect most Shakers do, carry on.]
What The Hell?
Shaker Cheezwiz, right
What the hell is the "Golden Trout Wilderness"? What the hell is with that headband?? What the hell is with that top, and that sweater around your waist??? What the hell????
(If you've a ridiculous and/or embarrassing photo of yourself from your youth, please send it to shakerwhatthehell_at_yahoo_dot_com. I'll post them up as part of our series called What The Hell? so everyone can laugh at with you.)
[See also: Deeky, Liss, evilsciencechick, katecontinued, ClumsyKisses, Mistress Sparkletoes, Liiiz, Reedme, Mama Shakes, Mustang Bobby, RedSonja, MomTFH, Portly Dyke, SteffaB, Icca, Christina, Orangelion03, Car, Siobhan, InfamousQBert, Maud, Rikibeth, MishaRN, and CLD.]
Question of the Day
Is there any word you compulsively mispronounce, because you got it into your head it was pronounced one way, and even though you've found out it's totally not pronounced that way, the mispronunciation refuses to unstick?
Capillary. Which is correctly pronounced KAP-uh-ler-ee, but which I persistently mispronounce ka-PILL-er-ee.
Iain is famous for these. He has one of the most prodigious vocabularies of any person to whom I've ever spoken—it's genuinely impressive. It was also gleaned almost entirely from a voracious reading habit, so he's often never heard these words actually spoken by anyone but himself, and it turns out he's not the greatest pronunciation-deducer of all time. My favorite ever was you-BICK-tchoo-us, which is how ubiquitous tumbled out of his mouth.
I should note, in case it isn't obvious, that I find this habit to be one of the most charming, utterly endearing things evah about him.
Oh, Crap
Rainn Wilson conspires to make me dislike him, too.
The Model UN chicks are "wildebeests" (translation: fat) shtick is bad enough, but his anecdote about giving up on feminism because one woman didn't read his mind to figure out they were doing dutch on a first date makes me wants to smash things. (It also pegs my bullshit meter in a big way. I don't know any woman who doesn't bring money on a first date. Or any date, for that matter.) What the world doesn't need is yet another story where some dude uses a random individual woman's failure to adhere to his unspoken expectations to discredit the entirety of feminism.
Meanwhile, I really don't get Lindsay's attempt to justify Wilson's horseshit on the basis that he was telling it from a place of still feeling "like a nerdy teenager."
So his nerdy teenager brain told him that it was okay for him to call those girls wildebeests, because it's coming from him, Rainn Wilson, the harmless, ignored outcast, not from some handsome evil bully. If a handsome evil bully said it, it would be bad, but it was just little old Rainn Wilson! He can't hurt a fly. That's probably what was going through his head on a subconscious level when he [referred to unattractive/nerdy girls as wildebeests, twice].The whole reason feminism/womanism is necessary is because of the institutional inequity between the genders—which means that even guys who are relatively powerless compared to "handsome evil bullies" are privileged over women. Which is exactly why a nerdy guy picks on girls—because at least he's got a better position in the hierarchy, thanks to his undeserved male privilege, even if it is less than the quarterback's.
Point being, if he delivered that insult from a place of erstwhile nerdiness, that doesn't suggest he feels harmless; it suggests he still views girls (especially fat/ugly girls) as a target that can't hit back. That is, he's being harmful in a very specific direction.
All of which is ultimately irrelevant, anyway, because I know a nerdy teenage boy or two who knows better. And excusing or mitigating Wilson's nastiness on that basis is pretty insulting to them.
The Siren Songs of Smiths and Sweaters
Last night, Kenny Blogginz and I saw an advert for 500 Days of Summer.
The Smiths bit naturally piques me ("There Is a Light That Never Goes Out" is, in fact, Iain's and my song)—but I pay attention to the hints of what's really there, and I fear the film is ultimately fodder for Dr. Sady. Heart says yes; brain says no.
I'm hanging out on the fence, when KBlogz joins me and says: "You know what sucks? When indie films are the same as mainstream films, except they've got hand-drawn titles and the main characters wear fun sweaters. It's like—I like the sweaters; that's not the problem. It's that the sweaters sometimes try to trick me into seeing some tired, sexist rom-com shit."
I LOL'ed for ten years. 'Cuz, like, yeah. Exactly.
[If you've seen 500 Days of Summer, please leave your review in comments.]
