Front 242: "Headhunter"
What the Hell, Arizona?
Both houses of the Arizona state legislature have passed SB1070, a truly frightening piece of "immigration legislation":
Arizona's bill orders immigrants to carry their alien registration documents at all times and requires police to question people if there's reason to suspect they're in the United States illegally. It also targets those who hire illegal immigrant day laborers or knowingly transport them.As a historian, I don't like to hear people say "If we don't learn history, we're doomed to repeat it." We learn history all the time, and still do much of the same, hateful stuff that's always been done.
In reading the provisons of the bill, I wondered, how different was it from the Geary Act of 1892:
The law required all Chinese residents of the United States to carry a resident permit, a sort of internal passport. Failure to carry the permit at all times was punishable by deportation or a year at hard labor.or the 1954 INS-sponsored operation that
coordinated 1075 Border Patrol agents, along with state and local police agencies, to mount an aggressive crackdown, going as far as police sweeps of Mexican-American neighborhoods and random stops and ID checks of "Mexican-looking" people in a region with many Native Americans and native Hispanicsor, in Arizona's own more recent history, the actions of Joe Arpaio?
Historical comparisons are not the only things circulating in my mind, though. The point is this law codifies racial-profiling and harrassment and criminalization of Latino/as (because, really? what is likely to be the basis for "suspect[ing] they're in the United States illegally"?). Isabel Garcia, an Arizona legal defender, offered this description:
[T]his bill represents the most dangerous precedent in this country, violating all of our due process rights... We have not seen this kind of legislation since the Jim Crow laws. And targeting our communities, it is the single ... largest attack on our communities.
According to CNN, Latino/a* lawmakers are entreating Republican Governor Jan Brewer not to sign the bill into law for fear that it will "authorize discrimination."
Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce shrugged off those kinds of worries:
You know, this is amazing to me. We trust officers, we put guns on them, they make life and death decisions every dayThe casual assertion that everyone lives in communities in which police and their decisions are respected and trusted?
Pri-vi-lege.
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*I sincerely hope Latino/a lawmakers are not standing alone in protest of this travesty.
But It Works in Meg Ryan Movies!
The only thing I can imagine that's more selfish than trying to stop the wedding of a woman whom you "expected" to "follow" you when you moved across the country (but didn't), is inserting oneself into that emotionally manipulative clusterfuck by volunteering to write a love letter for the entitled young man because you're fucking bored.
You know, life isn't a romantic comedy movie. If a woman didn't follow a man across the country to be with him, there was probably a damn good reason. And if she got engaged to someone else, there was probably a damn good reason for that, too. And if the man doesn't have any clue if the woman will be happy to see him, that's a pretty good indicator that she probably won't be, even if he is bearing a love letter waxing rhapsodic about their future kids (!) that a stranger wrote but he totes copied into his own handwriting.
Just UGH.
Today in Totally Not Terrorism
Federal agents and local police raided 35 homes in rural Southern California this week in response to the totally-not-terrorist attacks on local police by white supremacists.
The Hemet Police Department has been the victim of several attacks this year including: four city trucks set ablaze, an explosive device attached to an unmarked police car, a ballistic device strapped to a fence at a police compound, and a rerouted natural gas line at the same compound which filled a building with flammable vapor.
"A fire at a police rifle range was being investigated as a possible arson."
Yup, that is totally not terrorism. Because that doesn't happen here.
[H/T to Shaker Lena D.]
Death Fat on My Mind
by Shaker TheLadyEve
In the past year there have been several studies covering the alleged connection between body fat and dementia. Melissa and Quixote covered the implications and scientific aspects of the some of this research last year. I read Olivia Judson's April 20th opinion article "Brain Damage" in the New York Times half-heartedly hoping that it would call into question some of the assumptions that have been made about the alleged connection between body fat and dementia. How predictably wrong I was!
Dr. Judson is an evolutionary biologist who earned her doctorate from Oxford and has published the unfortunately titled book "Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex." Okay, I have not read her whole book, so I can't really critique it—but the first chapter is titled "Let Slip The Whores of War!" and it repeatedly refers to the "battle of the sexes" with regards to evolution. So that provides a bit of context to frame where she's coming from.
The piece is correctly labeled as opinion, as it's riddled with bias, judgment and terminally cute bon mots about Deathfat; yet it reads like a faux-rational attempt at a science article:FTO, as the gene is known, appears to play a role in both body weight and brain function. This gene comes in different versions; one version — let's call it "troublesome"— appears to predispose people to obesity. Individuals with two copies of the troublesome version tend to be fatter than those with only one copy of it, who in turn tend to be fatter than those with two copies of the "regular" version.
Dr. Judson's narrative tone—let's call it "annoying"—is similar to so many of the editorials, essays and interviews about the alleged "problems" posed by fat. She comes off as smug, someone who has never been discriminated against based on her size and, what's more, someone who is proud to have never been counted as such. She sets up the predictable polar relationship between "regular," and "troublesome," or, if you prefer, "normal" and "other." If you do not fit into the "regular" category, then you are an inconvenience to all the "normal" people. And what should you do if you're an inconvenience? Why, starve yourself and get a gastric bypass, of course!The possibility that obesity today will lead to higher rates of dementia in the future is, therefore, deeply alarming. The obvious question is: can obesity-associated brain damage be reversed? No one knows the answer, but I am hopeful that it can. Those two old friends, a healthful diet and plenty of exercise, have repeatedly been shown to protect the brain. Foods like oily fishes and blueberries have been shown to stimulate the growth of new neurons, for example. Moreover, one study found that dieting reversed some of the changes to brain structure found among the obese. Which suggests an interesting study. The most effective — and radical — treatment for obesity is bariatric surgery, whereby the stomach is made much smaller or bypassed altogether. Do people who have taken this option show a reversal, or at least a slowing, of brain atrophy?
Lecturing about diet and exercise? Check. Jumping to conclusions about causality without supportive data? Check. Use of unbearably moral language? Check. There are many individuals in the U.S. who have been diagnosed with various forms of dementia. The U.S. also has impossibly high body standards, a proliferation of fad diets, and rising eating disorder rates. Advising people to go on diets and lose weight to reverse brain atrophy is beyond irresponsible. And suggesting that dangerous surgery can slow or reverse brain atrophy is downright reprehensible.
Today in "We've Got a Democratic President, Right? Just Checking."
Obama suggests value-added tax may be an option:
President Barack Obama suggested Wednesday that a new value-added tax on Americans is still on the table, seeming to show more openness to the idea than his aides have expressed in recent days.Yes, yes it would. That's because a VAT, which is essentially a national sales tax, is a regressive tax, meaning it's more of a burden the less money you make, because the 10¢, say, added to a gallon of milk is a bigger percentage of the income of someone making $15,000/year than someone making $100,000/year.
Before deciding what revenue options are best for dealing with the deficit and the economy, Obama said in an interview with CNBC, "I want to get a better picture of what our options are."
After Obama adviser Paul Volcker recently raised the prospect of a value-added tax, or VAT, the Senate voted 85-13 last week for a nonbinding "sense of the Senate" resolution that calls the such a tax "a massive tax increase that will cripple families on fixed income and only further push back America's economic recovery."
The US has regressive taxes now in the form of state sales taxes, in the states that impose them, although the tax percentage varies between states—and frequently even within states, with different counties or cities charging different rates—in order to reflect the average standard of living and thus mitigation the regressive nature of the tax. Still, the heaviest burden always falls on the poorest people in any principality.
In the CNBC interview, Obama said he was waiting for recommendations from a bipartisan fiscal advisory commission on ways to tackle the deficit and other problems.Of course he is.
When asked if he could see a potential VAT in this nation, the president said: "I know that there's been a lot of talk around town lately about the value-added tax. That is something that has worked for some countries. It's something that would be novel for the United States."I'm quite genuinely not sure what details he needs to understand this is a terrible, terrible idea.
"And before, you know, I start saying 'this makes sense or that makes sense,' I want to get a better picture of what our options are," Obama said.
Question of the Day
What was your favorite magazine when you were a child?
Your answer doesn't necessarily have to be a children's magazine.
I loved Mad Magazine, Highlights, and National Geographic when I was a kid, but my favorite magazine, hands-down, was Ranger Rick, to which I had my own subscription, and it always made me feel so grown-up to get my magazine with my own name on the label.
An issue of Ranger Rick, from back in the day. Click to embiggen.
A Republican Is Ignorant; Democrats Respond With Ignorance
So, there's this lady named Sue Lowden. She's the Republican Senate candidate challenging Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for his Senate seat in Nevada. And, like every other Republican in America, one of her pet issues is the healthcare legislation–namely, how it is the Worst Thing to Happen in the History of America Since Jesus First Landed His Ark on Its Wheat-Filled Shores. Or whatever.
Recently, candidate Lowden proposed that one good way (spoiler alert: this is not a good way) to bring down spiraling healthcare costs is for Americans to barter with their doctors. And when some people suggested that this is not actually a good way at all to address what is a massive institutional clusterfuck exacerbated by several other major industries related to healthcare, including the very powerful insurance industry and the very powerful pharmaceutical industry, Lowden, blithely resistant to facts as is required by the Republican charter, insisted:
I'm telling you that this works. You know, before we all started having health care, in the olden days our grandparents, they would bring a chicken to the doctor, they would say I'll paint your house. I mean, that's the old days of what people would do to get health care with your doctors. Doctors are very sympathetic people. I'm not backing down from that system.Now, this is very silly, because our medical system as a rule doesn't look like that anymore, and hasn't for quite some time.
BUT.
Never afraid to pass up the chance to play directly into the stereotype of the urban elite who are totally out of touch with the reality of middle American lives, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) has announced plans to unveil a new website called "Chickens for Checkups," which
will allow people to send Lowden a "personalized message asking for her help in finding a doctor for their 19th century illness," DSCC spox Deirdre Murphy says. It will include a menu of stuff you can choose to barter for treatment.True. But Democrats (and progressive bloggers picking up this particular torch) are completely out of touch with reality if they don't recognize that their kneejerk reaction has a rank whiff of classism to it.
"You can't make this stuff up," Murphy says. "Sue Lowden is completely out of touch with reality if she thinks trading chickens for checkups is smart health care reform."
Especially in smaller, rural (read: poorer) communities, bartering for an exchange of services still does happen a lot—and it's probably only increased since the economy hit the skids.
As is often the case with class issues, there are tangential elements of racism and sexism embedded within: Bartering of services is not uncommon in communities of color—particularly impoverished communities and/or immigrant communities from cultures in which bartering is more ubiquitous than it is in privileged US culture(s). And there are a lot of women's healthcare centers whose practitioners charge on a sliding scale, and women pay what they can; many of those patients will also supplement their below-market payments with an exchange of services, or a handmade knitted blanket, or a homemade pie.
Laughing at how RIDICULOUS the suggestion of bartering is really disappears those people's lives and experiences. Or, perhaps more accurately, continues to ignore them, which Democrats and fauxgressives have turned into an art form.
Mind you, I don't think Lowden was approaching the idea of bartering from an angle that is sympathetic to that reality, either. But responding to her like her suggestion is laughable really isn't covering Dems/so-called progressives in glory, not to mention that alienating women and/or people of color during an election year (again) ain't a great strategy.
All About the Benjamins
The US$100 note has been redesigned. But don't worry—Ben Franklin still looks pissy.
"You're not going to spend me on THAT, are you?"
Today's Edition of "Conniving and Sinister"
See Deeky's archive of all previous Conniving & Sinister strips here.
[In which Liss reimagines the long-running comic "Frank & Ernest," about two old straight white guys "telling it like it is," as a fat feminist white woman and a biracial queerbait telling it like it actually is from their perspectives. Hilarity ensues.]
Someone Get This Guy a Cookie
[Trigger warning for sexual assault and clergy abuse.]
Pope Promises to Confront Sexual Abuse Crisis:
Pope Benedict XVI pledged Wednesday that the Roman Catholic Church would take action to deal with the widening scandal over sexual abuse by priests, making a rare direct public comment on the crisis.The unmitigated temerity of a man claiming to have "shared their suffering" with survivors whose suffering was caused by people whose actions he abetted and concealed is truly breathtaking.
During his weekly audience here, Benedict told pilgrims and tourists in St. Peter's Square that he had met with abuse victims during a recent trip to Malta and had "assured them of church action."
"I shared their suffering and emotionally prayed with them," the pope said.
Wednesday Blogaround
This blogaround brought to you by Shaxco, proud distributors of McEwan Brand Fuzzy Robes for Fatties and Not-Fatties.
Recommended Reading:
Echidne: You Are to Blame for Your Grandkids' Cancer!
Bluemilk: Perspective, You Are Lacking It
Resistance: Being "Different"
Andy: Proposed Louisiana Adoption Law Would Recognize Gay Couples
Melissa: Quotable America Ferrera
DougJ: And Nero Fiddled...
Leave your links in comments...
Roethlisberger Benched
[Trigger warning]
Alleged rapist Ben Roethlisberger had been suspended by the NFL for six games following the latest round of accusations of sexual assault.
Word is his suspension could be reduced to four games if he doesn't rape anyone else in the meantime. I mean, "for good behavior." Terms of the suspension also require a "comprehensive behavioral evaluation by medical professionals," whatever the fuck that means.
As an interesting aside, where interesting equals rage-inducing, I will note that raping a woman will get you suspended for four to six games, but killing a dog results in an "indefinite" suspension. What a wonderful world we live in.
Quote of the Day
"One of the things that's flummoxed [I Dream of Jeannie] writers is how to update the 1960s sitcom, which incorporated more than a few pre-feminist ideas, for anything resembling the modern age. It's hard to imagine that too many stories about an astronaut who keeps a subservient woman in a bottle would play on a contemporary screen, at least those outside a certain kind of movie theater."—Steven Zeitchik, in the LA Times, on the difficulties Officially Given-Up Hollywood is having remaking the classic television series about a 2000-year-old female genie who falls in love with and marries her master.
Well, I for one fervently hope that Officially Given-Up Hollywood solves this conundrum, because there just aren't enough films about the whimsical magic of sexual servitude these days. BRING ON THE LAUGH TRACK!
Two Days in the Life of Fatty Fatastrophe
A couple of weeks ago, I went to the doctor to get a pap smear.
The appointment started, as usual, with a weigh-in, followed later by the requisite fat-shaming from my GP, who scolded me she wants to see me "losing a pound and a half a week!" because I'd been exactly the same weight when I'd been in the office a week before for acute costochondritis.
So, I was supposed to lose weight, apparently, exclusively by starving myself, since I was meant to be on almost complete rest to heal from the chondritis which made exercise out of the question. Um. Was my doctor really recommending something so absurd? Well. It was no more absurd than the contention that weighing in at the same weight two weeks in a row meant I hadn't lost a pound and a half, or gained it, or a little more or less, and then arrived back at the same place again on that particular day, since weight can naturally fluctuate a couple of pounds every day, anyway.
I was aggravated more than anything about being talked to like I am a stupid person. I thought: I need a new doctor. But this doctor is the only one in town who's in my insurance network. So.
But back to the pap smear.
The nurse gave me two sheets of material that was something between the butcher block paper they put on the tables and a giant paper towel. "One for your top and one for your bottom," she said. "Just kind of cover yourself up with them." She avoided my eyes. The offices that use those disposable paper "gowns" never have them in a size big enough for me. I know this. But instead of her saying to me, honestly and forthrightly, "I'm sorry—we cannot accommodate your body with the covers we have," she awkwardly avoided the subject altogether. As if I couldn't figure it out. As if her embarrassment for me was not evident.
When the doctor came in and looked at me, she asked the nurse, "Where's the top gown?" The nurse quietly stammered, "Those ones are too, um, flimsy—I just gave her two of the bottom ones." They both looked at me, lying on the table, naked, but the two giant paper towels laying over me. I would have preferred to just be naked, instead of lying there, feeling obliged to cover my fat body for the comfort of my nurse and doctor. The proverbial lightbulb went on. "Ah," said the doctor. They exchanged a look.
Later, I would consider with bitter amusement that the USian medical community constantly howls about the Obesity Crisis!!!eleventy! and all their OMGFAT!!!eleventy! patients, and yet despite servicing a fat clientele they can't shut up about, they can't find a fucking paper gown to fit me.
As my doctor began the procedure, she gave me the same line I always get from doctors doing my pap smear, the "sometimes smears are hard to get on obese patients" disclaimer, to which I responded, as I always do, "You won't have any problem. No one ever does." Which naturally elicited a dubious rejoinder, just to make sure I felt good and shamed, before the sample was retrieved instantaneously and with no problem whatsoever.
Afterward, my doctor began to give me a breast exam. She sighed and told me my breasts are too big. She wrote me a prescription for a mammogram. She told me to lose weight.
"Okay," I said miserably. As she swept out of the room, one of the giant paper towels slid off and fell to the floor.
On the way home, I felt like shit. I thought about all the fat women who have experiences like that and decide that preventative care just isn't worth it. I thought about the fat women (and men) who have died, because of the emotional toll going to the doctor can take. I considered that I hadn't had a pap smear in several years, because I dreaded having the day I'd just had. I'm still waiting anxiously for the results.
I made a mental note to bring my own robe from home next year.
Yesterday, I had my mammogram. I went to the same place I'd been five years ago, when I'd discovered a lump in my breast that had turned out to be benign—the Breast Care Center at St. Anthony's in Crown Point, Indiana.
It is a space designed for care. Medical care, yes—but not just. When you walk in, you are greeted by a nurse who signs you in and then directs you to a table with coffee and tea and water, and into the waiting area, which looks like a living room. There are upholstered couches and overstuffed chairs, an area rug, and a cherry-finished armoire and shelving, holding a television tuned not to Fox News, but the Food Network. In the corner is a game table with a glass chess set. It is bright and warm and cozy.
It is the opposite of clinical.
I wait and watch a female chef whose name I don't know make a strawberry torte. After only a few minutes, a nurse-technician calls my name and introduces herself to me as Jennifer. She leads me back to a changing room, which is appointed like a small guest bathroom in someone's home might be, where she hands me a cloth gown. "Just for your top," she tells me. "You can leave your jeans and shoes on. Just walk through the door at the back when you're ready."
I close the door and put on the gown. It is loose. I am swimming in it. It could accommodate a woman much larger than I am, women who are not used to being accommodated.
There is no weigh-in.
When I open the door at the back of the small room, it opens into the mammography room, where Jennifer is waiting for me. She smiles and reminds me to make sure the front door in the changing room is locked.
And then we begin.
I slide half out of the gown, and I position myself beside the machine as instructed by Jennifer. She lifts my breast into position. She helps me get my arm just right, my torso turned just so. She is gentle, and she is comforting, chatting to me about the beautiful weather and this and that, manipulating my body, my fat body, with care and ease.
She explains what she's doing, what each different angle will capture. "This one will be from your nipples backward." She talks to me like I'm an intelligent adult woman who is engaged in her own care. She touches my body, my fat body, with the casual confidence of someone who is familiar and comfortable with fat bodies, even though she is thin—I am not an alien, but just another woman with breasts that need imaging.
She guides me through four images on one side, and five on the other—because one turned out a bit fuzzy and she is a perfectionist, she tells me, laughing.
I am so grateful to her for allowing me to just be another human in her care and not a grotesque monster whose body makes her uncomfortable, for letting me feel safe and respected in this very vulnerable moment.
I want to tell her all of this. But instead I just say, "Thank you for making this so easy. I really appreciate it."
Which is all I can muster, because I am overwhelmed with brimming gratitude—and a slowly boiling anger at the world outside the Breast Care Center that I should be so grateful to have been treated with basic dignity.
Lost Open Thread
SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! BLUB.
Last night's episode will be discussed in infinitesimal detail, so if you haven't seen it, and don't want any spoilers, move along...
Seen
On a church sign on the way to the doctor yesterday: Enjoy this beautiful day courtesy of God.
So, remember: Next time it pisses down rain on your picnic, God hates you.
