I was watering my garden when my sweetie ran out to told me there had been a bridge collapse.
“Where?" I asked.
“In Minneapolis, the bridge over the river.”
There are two major rivers in the Twin Cities (the Mississippi and the Minnesota), and countless bridges crossing them. I assumed that one of the derelict bridges crossing the Minnesota had finally given out, possibly taking a pedestrian or cyclist with it. It took me a while to process that the I-35W bridge across the Mississippi had gone done. Back when I was in college, I had crossed this bridge twice a day. I had countless friends and relatives in the area. This was stunning.
One interesting realization that came out of this was the way that the media and society treat “local” events. The collapse of the World Trade Center's main towers is, in a sense, a defining moment for my generation. There are good reasons for this. But outside of New York City, I daresay the media and politicians (and marketers) have marketed and branded the tragedy. People with no real connection to the collapse have internalized it, and taken it as their own personal tragedy.
There's nothing wrong with this, of course. What's interesting to me is the way in which we, as a whole, have not personalized other tragedies, including those that happen to have touched me. I'm from Minneapolis. I also know people who lived blocks from the Seventeenth Street Canal in New Orleans. I know people who were in the Superdome during Katrina. The I-35W bridge collapse and Hurricane Katrina were intensely personal for millions of Americans, yet I'll claim that many (if not most) Americans have yet to internalize, let alone learn from them.
There is a new, functional (if not fabulous) 35W bridge in Minneapolis. Stimulus money has paid for lots of new bridges and civil engineering projects. However, the US hasn't addressed the political, philosophical, and economic issues behind its crumbling infrastructure. It's built new and improved roads and bridges in certain neighborhoods, while leaving others in decay.
There's a gas leak in front of my apartment; the utility company has known about it for years. A couple times a year the smell gets really bad and they send someone out to look at it. Nothing gets done, though. The cost of fixing the pipe outweighs the cost of venting gas into my neighborhood.
Every fews weeks a water main breaks. Sometimes this floods buildings and shutters local businesses. Especially in the US' eastern urban centers, underground pipes are often well over a hundred years old. Replacing them all would cost billions, if not trillions of dollars. Yet, many US cities are broke. However, money goes to war, not to cities. Tax structures and politics shuttle what does get spent on infrastructure to suburban and rural areas.
The United States cannot afford to forget that infrastructure matters. It also can't forget the many lessons of Katrina; among others, the dangers of ignoring the needs of the US' poorest (and in many cases, least white) neighborhoods. We all need affordable and safe transportation, water and schools.
Alas, I fear this neglect is at worst intentional, at best a product of political and economic expediency. I wonder if my nation's leaders want some of us to stay in poverty, for the benefit of others. It is, I feel, particularly cruel that many of my leaders are, from my perspective, using a third tragedy, that of 9/11, to distract us from the lessons of horrors taking place in hometowns across the country.
---
I'm well aware that the tragedies I'm discussing are incredibly different (among other things, they differ by orders of magnitude in the numbers of causalities. I'm not interested in discussing which tragedy was worse, as much as the differences in how politicians and leaders have responded to each, and how those responses intersect.
Three years and one day ago today...
This is so the worst thing you're going to read all day.
[Trigger warning for stalking/predatory behavior.]
Persistance Hunting in the Park—an article about how you can make jogging fun by pretending you're a hunter and another jogger is your prey.
I particularly love the update in which the author expresses his mystification that everyone was getting all bent out of shape about his awesome workout idea ridiculously clueless article written from the deeply privileged perspective of someone who is vanishingly unlikely to actually be stalked and victimized while running, and notes:
I thought it went without saying, but don't invade anyone's personal space and don't do anything else that common sense tells you not to do. I took out the line "Hide behind a tree for a second or two." just so no one gets the wrong idea. Happy hunting!Wow. As Shaker MelissaRel, who sent the link, observed, one might imagine common sense to dictate not endorsing "a predator/prey workout in the first place."
Meanwhile, over at Traxee, a website for female runners, contributor bmoore sighs: "As the member of a gender that frequently IS hunted down while running in the park (sometimes with heartbreaking consequences) I just really have to wonder what goes on in Mark's head."
I have a few ideas about what's going on in there, but what's definitely not going on in there is empathy with the runners who are turned into "prey" in his workout scenario, particularly the female runners (although I believe any man who became aware of being stalked by another runner while jogging would be uncomfortable at best—and quite possibly terrified—too).
I'll just quickly add that the author begins his piece with a note about how more people are outdoors during the summer, making it the perfect season for stalk-jogging. So far today, by coincidence, I've now written three pieces, including this one, that use summertime as a pretense for talking about ogling/stalking people—primarily women—just because they happen to be outdoors, wearing or doing something related to the nice weather.
Quote of the Day
[Trigger warning for dehumanization.]
"To be a gazer, some say, is to place oneself superior to the gazed, which works fine as a tenet of film theory and feels notably more dubious as a premise of girl-watching analysis. The girl may be an objectified being, but it is practically a subclause of the social contract that we all objectify ourselves in the mirror every morning. Meanwhile, the girl-watcher is subject to the absolute rule of his powers of vision and carries a distinct whiff of comic pathos. Figure, carriage, finish, charm, flesh, cool—these are omnipotent. It is the nature of beauty that the girl-watcher is helpless before the wonders of nature."—The concluding paragraph of Troy Patterson's " A Dandy's Guide to Girl-Watching," a treatise on objectifying women published in Slate and subtitled "Checking out girls in shorts…tastefully."
I remember when Slate used to be worth reading. Now it's just another smelly internet receptacle into which garbage-brained writers can dump embarrassingly florid exposition waxing romantic about the dehumanization of women, justifying it with some yawn-inducing codswallop about how women "girls" are really the ones holding the power because men are just goofballs who can't resist looking, and a well-rounded ass reduces them to comic helplessness, or similar nonsense that boils the blood of every woman who's ever been sexually assaulted, harassed, cat-called, or ogled by a man who considers that shit some kind of goddamn compliment and blames his victim for being so irresistible.
[H/T to Shaker Julie. Related Reading: The Magical, Mysterious, Mighty Power of Uncovered Meatdom, Rape Is Not a Compliment, Today in Rape Culture.]
Fixed That For You
Men's accident rates climb with women's hemlines: U.K. study finds skimpy outfits distract male drivers—"The London Telegraph said the study by car insurance company Sheilas' Wheels claims men get into more accidents in the summer because they are distracted by women's skimpy outfits."
Provided the claim is true (about which I have grave doubts) that (straight/bi?) men get into more accidents in the summer because they're too busy ogling women wearing skimpy outfits perfectly acceptable clothing for hot weather, the appropriate framing here would not be "Study finds skimpy outfits distract male drivers" but "Study finds straight male drivers' objectification of women has dangerous consequences."
Suffice it to say that it is no coincidence the passive framing ("skimpy outfits distract male drivers"), which tacitly blames the (wearers of) the outfits, is reminiscent of the passive structure we use to speak of sexual assault ("she got raped"). It's the same old shit used to disappear male accountability and implicitly blame women for, fuck, everything.
[H/T to Shaker Jean.]
Target: Backlash
Last Thursday, I wrote about Target's $150k contribution to MN Forward, a Republican front group run by former staff of outgoing Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty which actively supports anti-gay State Representative Tom Emmer as the GOP nominee to succeed Pawlenty. Target's CEO Gregg Steinhafel has been spinning like a record baby, right round round round, trying to justify the donation, but LGBQs and their allies aren't having it—and the backlash has begun, including a Facebook group called "Boycott Target Until They Cease Funding Anti-Gay Politics."
And Randi Reitan, a mother and grandmother from Eden Prairie, Minnesota, staged her own protest over the weekend by doing her regular shopping trip to Target, and then returning all the items, telling the manager why she bought each item, who it was for, and why they wouldn't want her giving her money to a store that supports institutionalized homophobia.
[Transcript below.]
For his part, Emmer, who supports the continued denial of LGBQs their equal rights, whines: "The sad part to me is, I thought we were supposed to be able to exercise our rights of free speech. We're supposed to celebrate the fact that we have different perspectives. And it doesn't seem like that's what this is about. This seems to be more personal and we've got to get over that."
No matter how many times I run headlong into it, I cannot wrap my head around the staggering fuckloads of unexamined privilege that allow someone to argue that denying people equality based on their intrinsic characteristics shouldn't be "personal."
[Via.]
[Footage of the exterior of a Target store, labeled "Target Store: July 27, 2010." Footage of a middle-aged white woman, Randi Reitan of Eden Prairie, Minnesota, holding a cut-up Target card in her hands, labeled "$226 Target sale ends like this." As the camera zooms in on the shredded card, she says, "Now I'll go home and call them and make sure that that card was cancelled. The camera cuts to Reitan's face as she stands outside the store. Across the bottom of the screen, the following text scrolls: "One woman's protest of a $150,000 contribution given by Target to a group supporting Tom Emmer's gubernatorial campaign."]
Reitan: Hi, I'm Randi Reitan, and I'm here today to go shopping at Target for the last time. I'm a mother, and I'm a grandmother, and I use Target a lot; I've enjoyed shopping at Target. But last week when I heard that Target decided to give a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to Tom Emmer for his political race for governor, I just [shakes head] was shocked. The Target I knew was a Target that embraced its gay employees. It was, um, the Target that showed up at Pride.
[Footage of Reitan walking into the store; pushing a red Target cart around; checking out with a cartful of items including laundry detergent and children's clothes; running her Target card through at check-out, labeled "The sale. $226 charged to Target card."; walking out of the store and swinging her cart around and walking back in, labeled "Merchandise returned in protest."; speaking to a Target employee, a young white woman, at the returns counter.]
Reitan: Um, you sponsored Pride in June— [edit] Every year, HRC has a wonderful dinner—
[Another Target employee, a middle-aged white woman, interrupts and says, "To take pictures at Target, you have to have, um, an approval." Reitan continues to speak to the other employee at the returns counter, waiting for the manager. Edit. Footage of Reitan returning items, followed by footage of her walking out of the store. Cut to Reitan standing outside the store.]
Reitan: It took a long time for the manager to actually come, uh, to visit with me, but I didn't want to return the items until she was there so she could see what I had purchased. I shared with her why I had bought each item, and who they were for, and why that person wouldn't want me to have bought them at a Target store. Um. A number of the items were for my grandchildren, and they love their Uncle Jake so much, and Jake is gay. And they wouldn't want to have things coming from a store [gets choked up; takes deep breath] that contrib— contributes to a campaign [pauses] that would have a governor candidate with the anti-gay views that Tom Emmer has.
[Cut to Reitan explaining the cut-up Target card in her hands.]
Reitan: —a pair of sewing scissors out of my purse, and I cut it up. [edit] Today I went in and I spent two hundred and twenty-six dollars and thirty-two cents. They've lost that two hundred, twenty-six dollars and thirty-two cents, and they've lost every purchase from my family. [edit] What's important in life is people. I love the people in my life. I love them more than any thing that I can buy at this store. I'm going to boycott Target until they make this right.
Facts Schmacts
House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Eally?!), who appeared yesterday on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, doesn't need your stinking facts:
WALLACE: Congressman — a number of top economists say what we need is more economic stimulus.Boehner, along with many of his Republican colleagues, who also don't go in much for facts, believe that the key to job growth is extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.
BOEHNER: Well, I don't need to see GDP numbers or to listen to economists. All I need to do is listen to the American people, because they've been asking the question now for 18 months, "Where are the jobs?"
He is incorrect.
A Fishing Stream Runs Through It
I'm on vacation in Ohio visiting my parents. Note: This post contains descriptions and images of fishing. We catch only what we will eat.
Dad and I went down to his little fishing club near Fremont yesterday. It's an old club with a well-established creek system that snakes through the property, so basically all you have to do is step out onto the shady banks and cast your line in.
Fly fishing is a delicate skill that requires a lot of experience to get it right. I have tried on several occasions to master it, but I lack both the fine motor skills and the depth perception to get it right. The most I've ever caught with a fly rod is a tree, my leg, and my dad's hat. So this time I went along as the creel-bearer and the photographer.
My father's fishing rod is a work of art; a split bamboo pole with delicate features but the flexibility and strength far beyond its appearance. My father also has many years of fishing, first as a boy with his father, then in places like Colorado, Idaho, and Michigan where it is more than just a sport but a ritual of art and strategy. Casting the line just so the fly lands exactly where you want it requires the touch and skill of a conductor coaxing the music from an orchestra, and even tying the fly on the leader requires a jeweler's touch, not to mention the magnifying glass.
My father is color-blind and I have no depth perception; plus, I am nearsighted even with reading glasses. The leader we were using was the thickness of spider-web. Much hilarity ensued, but we did eventually get the fly tied on and went out to the stream.
On the second or third cast, a good-sized trout struck the line, and me being the assistant, promptly stepped in with the net and we landed it. Within moments it was in the creel, the fly cleaned, and back to the water went the mighty fisherman.
An hour or so went by without any further interest evinced by the fish in our lure. Even appeals to the Fishing Gods didn't work.
My theory is that word spread quickly among the piscean population: "Hey, Fred got snagged by the little yellow bug! Stay away!" So we changed the lure to a black ant and a thicker leader. This one was a rope compared to the first one, and we were able to get it tied on with only one of us embedding the hook in our thumb. True to form, on the second cast, we had another good-sized trout, and the creel was now carrying two home from the quest.
And that was it. More casting, more disinterested fish, so after three hours on the banks of the stream, we had a very pleasant lunch and conversation with some fellow fisherman and came home. And tonight we will dine on the catch.
I'll let you in on a little secret. I'm not much of a fisherman, but I don't go for the fishing. I go to be with my dad and doing something that he loves.
Cross-posted.
Open Thread
Hosted byThelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins and SKM.
This week's open threads have been brought to you by more favorite album covers
of the Shakesville contributors.
The Virtual Pub Is Open
[Explanations: lol your fat. pathetic anger bread. hey your gay.]
TFIF, Shakers!
Belly up to the bar,
and name your poison!
Summer in Indiana
[Northwest Indiana, July 2010.]
There's an amusement park in Monticello, Indiana whose slogan, and jingle in the adverts they've run every summer since '85 or so, is: "There's more than corn in Indiana!" This is a True Fact. There are also soybeans.
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 (Liss) and a biracial queerbait (Deeky) telling it like it actually is from their perspectives. Hilarity ensues.]
Priorities
Ezra:
In order to get less Medicaid and teacher funding than we actually need, we're cutting food stamps by $6.7 billion (and closing some foreign tax loopholes, rescinding some spending decisions and changing Medicaid's drug pricing).Current Department of Defense budget, including spending on "overseas contingency operations" for Fiscal Year 2010: $663.8 billion.
…Democrats needed to offset spending on two worthy, important programs. So they're cutting another important, worthy program [the cost of which, during the recession, has ballooned from an expected $20 billion to about $65 billion because the number of people who needed help skyrocketed to more than 40 million]. But you really can't think of a worse program to cut than SNAP. SNAP is an extraordinarily well-targeted stimulus. It goes to poor households, for something they need to buy. According to Mark Zandi's numbers, it's literally the most stimulative way to spend a dollar: Better than state and local aid, or unemployment insurance. You get more than $1.70 of economic activity for each buck you put in.
There's a part of me that wants to use this to knock down the canard that government is full of obvious waste and inefficiency. Democrats don't like to cut food stamps, and they'd avoid it if they thought they could. Budget rhetoric is full of easy choices, but budgets are about hard choices, and this is a hard, and ugly, choice.
But this is also a question of priorities, of what gets cut. Bernie Sanders put up an amendment last month to cut about $35 billion in oil and gas subsidies. It failed. Republicans are arguing to extend Bush's tax cuts for the rich with no offsets, and they may well succeed. But food assistance for poor families? You can get the votes to slash those.
If defense-related expenditures budgeted by departments other than Defense are included, the US will spend, in total, between $800 billion and $1 trillion in FY2010 on defense.
And we're slashing the budget for food stamps.
Daily Dose o' Cute
Video Description: Dudley being silly and playful, doing the greyhound spin. He does this almost every day when Iain gets home, before they go on their evening walk, and occasionally before we head out to the dog park. He won't do it at the dog park—only in a small space, which apparently makes it much more fun!
Also more fun: When I march in a circle and hum. When I act like he's not even there (i.e. not looking at him, sans camera), he goes absolutely wild play-bowing and trying to get my attention. Loop-Chase with Iain is also a huge hit.
Olivia watches this all with great interest (from her perch in the background). Matilda usually strolls away disgusted by such a display of undignified buffoonery, and Sophie is still trying to figure out how to get involved in all the fun spinning!
Still pix of doggie-boy and the girls are below the fold.
"Welcome to my cat condo. May I offer you a mimosa?"
"What the fuck is he doing?"
"I have no idea."
Sophs and KBlogz confab about an important business venture.
"Hi!"
Emergency Care While Trans
[Strong trigger warning for transphobia]
A few days ago, Bilerico posted a [TW for discussions of transphobia in the post and problematic comments]disturbing interview with Erin Vaught, an Indiana woman who had the turpitude to go to the emergency room, on account of how she had "coughed up almost a cup of blood."
The woman in question is a trans woman, so her story takes a depressingly predictable turn:
On Sunday I coughed almost a cup of blood and decided to go to the E.R. The doc told me if I had to go to the E.R. to go to Muncie rather than New Castle, as they would be more tolerant being a bigger city and a university hospital.
Been there, done that. It our case, it's because the nearest hospital has repeatedly demonstrated its suckitude when it comes to treating lesbians (at least my partner and I) with health conditions. Thankfully, there are other options reasonably nearby. Such is the privilege of owning a car and living in a city of 150,000.
Sadly, going to Muncie didn't appear to help things for Ms. Vaught and her family. Believable but extraordinarily disturbing transphobia after the fold.
More from Ms. Vaught:
One nurse finally asked, "So is it a he or a she? Or a he-she?"
So my wife said to the nurse, "She is my wife, not an it."
To which the nurse replied with a chuckle, "Well, what do you want me to say? I can't tell. Until I know then he is an it. Now I know, and I know he is a he."
[The nurse later]...asked a series of bizarre questions. "Do you ever feel so angry you might lose control?" "Are you able to buy groceries every week?" "Do you ever feel overwhelmed?" "Have you ever thought about suicide?" We were confused and still are.
She said, "Well, we don't know how to go about treating someone with your condition."
I responded, "I don't even know my condition. That's why I'm here!"
She replied, "No. Your other condition. The transvestite thing."
Rage. Seethe. Smash.
If only this was a unique story. Robert Eads and Tyra Hunter are two trans people whose stories are widely told in trans circles, but only because they died as a result of transphobia. I pretty much expect medical providers [strong TW for transphobia and violence]to hesitate before giving me emergency treatment, should they discover I'm trans. It's something I'll try to block out of my mind tonight when I go to enjoy a dangerous hobby of mine in small town Upstate New York. Of course, it's something I always try to block out of my mind.
I really can't say anything else that hasn't been said a bazillion times before; it's just too tiring to keep addressing the issue of why people shouldn't kill my trans family. We don't have a choice on when and where we need medical care, and as long as incidents like this one are common, none of us is safe.
Via. Article from today's Muncie Star Press.
Today in Don't Give A Shit
Know what I don't care about? Chelsea Clinton's upcoming wedding (apparently tomorrow). Know what else I don't care about? How much it costs total and/or what every item they have for it costs.
I am, however, fairly sure that if the Clintons (and, really, it's only about the Clintons in this case isn't it?) did not choose to do/say/pay for whatever they are, they'd be raked over the coals for not doing it, too.
Friday Blogaround
(Strong trigger warning for violence on the first two links. Both posts show the same photo of a victim of vicious brutality, and the second briefly describes the violent acts against the woman pictured.)
Matthew Yglesias takes issue with the dubious premise of Time's cover story in Nobody is Helping Aisha.
Scatx of Speaker's Corner has further thoughts about both Time's handling of the cover, and the idea that the U.S. is conducting its war policy in Afghanistan with women's rights in mind: The Cover of TIME: What's Shocking?
While you're over at scatx's place, you might as well check this out: In Texas, Be a Man, because, um, no, thank you.
Ansel Herz at mediahacker has some advice for journalists who drop by Haiti for their earthquake aftermath story: How to Write about Haiti
Phil Cohen of Family Inequality points out two errors: treating the results of a statistical study as specifically applicable to all individuals, and depriving teens of the opportunity to hang out due to generalized fears that They Are Just Trouble Waiting to Happen: Police Your Teens, Or Else?
Bruce Dixon of Black Agenda Report reminds us — and specifically today's black political leaders — that the economic marginalization of communities of color which links violence at home and violence abroad must still be addressed: You Can't Stop the Violence in Ghetto Streets Without Stopping the Violence in Iraq, Afghanistan and Elsewhere.
Andy has the sweet and happy pix at towleroad. Congrats to José y Miguel, and to Ernesto y Alejandro! Photos: First Gay Couples Wed In Argentina Under New Law
Please share your links, to your own posts or others', in comments.
This is so the worst thing you're going to read all day.
From the Psychology Today blog "The View from Venus" (ugh), the tagline for which is "Beyond spanx and stilettos" (ugh), comes the delightful piece "Trading Roses for Weeds" (ugh), which is subtitled, I shit you not, "Figuring out what women really want may require ignoring what they actually say." UGH.
There is a metric fuckton of ugh-inducing ughery in this piece, but my favorite, ahem, sheerly by virtue of its serendipitous nature, is its author's curious (but not unusual) inability to discern the difference between romance and stalking.
[H/T to Shaker Somebodyoranother.]
