Olivia.
Dudley.
Sophie.
Matilda.
Crazy Does Not Equal of Poor Character or Weak-Willed
by Shaker DesertRose
[Trigger warning for brief mentions of sexual violence and more detailed mentions of self-injury.]
(Part Four of the series "Crazy Does Not Equal..." Part One, "Crazy Does Not Equal Violent," is here. Part Two, "Crazy Does Not Equal Stupid," is here. Part Three, "Crazy Does Not Equal a Joke," is here.)
Full Disclosure: I have schizoaffective disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. I have suffered from one form or another of mental illness for most of my life, mostly depression in one form or another, anxiety, and various manifestations of PTSD. I am 33 years old, a ciswoman, white and Cherokee, divorced, mother of one completely awesome daughter, owned by two adorable tabby cats, bisexual with polyamorous tendencies, a proud bleeding-heart liberal, an eclectic pagan, and completely out of my tree.
I've always been hesitant to be open with people about my mental condition. Mental illness is still hugely stigmatized, and I don't want to be treated as if I'm somehow less than other people because my brain and mind are funky. But I've come to the realization that mental illness will remain stigmatized unless people with mental illnesses are open about their conditions and show the world that we're not what society would have the world believe.
People with mental illnesses are often stereotyped as violent, or, in contrast, figures of fun, to be mocked for "abnormal" behaviors. And if we're not to be feared or made fun of, we're childish and incapable of making our own decisions. Failing that, we're weak-willed or of poor character, often therefore leading to the conclusion that we're responsible for our conditions and could be "normal" if we'd just decide to be. On top of all that, we're often considered lacking in intelligence, which can be part and parcel of the "childish and incapable of making our own decisions" or "weak-willed" or "of poor character" tropes.
Someone who is genuinely of poor character is deliberately cruel, lacks compassion, harms the weak, engages in other behavior that reflects a lack of empathy and ethics. There are people with mental illnesses who are of poor character, just as there are people who do not have mental illness who are of poor character. But poor character does not go hand in hand with a psychiatric diagnosis. Nor does being weak-willed, which is often conflated with poor character at the intersection of mental illness.
People with depression often hear things like, "Cheer up" or "Look on the bright side" or "Why are you so negative?" or worse yet, "Count your blessings." I don't know about anybody else who's struggled with depression, but all of the above drive me crazier than I already am. If, in a depressive episode, I could cheer up or be more positive, don't you bloody well think I would? Nobody chooses to be depressed. Nobody wants to feel like that. Depression feels like pure hell, and if we could just cheer the fuck up, we would. It's just not that fucking easy.
People with PTSD hear similar things. "Why do you have to dwell on the past so much?" drives me right up a wall. I don't want to have flashbacks of being sexually abused (as a child) and raped (as an adult). I don't want to relive terrible, horrific events in my life when the thoughts come unbidden.
Frequently the implication is that people with mental illness who have the temerity to show evidence of that illness are acting out for attention. But I know how to get attention. It's called talking. I talk to my family. I talk to my friends. I talk to my therapist. They all pay attention to me when I'm talking. I blog. People read my blog (and my guest posts at Shakesville) and make comments. That's attention.
But nonetheless persists the trope that people with mental illnesses (and I've just mentioned the two with which I have the most personal experience) are weak-willed and/or "doing it for attention," neither of which says much for a person's character. Nor does it reflect an understanding of the strength of will it takes to get through life with a mental illness, how hard the day-to-day can be. And believe me, the attention you get when your mental illness symptoms are out of control is not the kind of attention people want. Nobody likes to be watched constantly, or committed to a psychiatric ward, or drugged or restrained, all of which have happened to me. Nobody would do that to themselves on purpose, not even someone who is seriously mentally ill.
To clarify, I have put myself in psychiatric wards before, because I could feel things getting out of control and I knew I needed help to regain control. But being involuntarily committed is a world of suck.
I used to self-injure, which is one of the most likely outward expressions of mental illness to garner the accusation of acting out for attention. It's not. The attention you get when someone finds out you've been cutting or burning or whatever the hell is similarly not the kind of attention anyone wants. I hid my cuts. I tended to make shallow, small, but painful cuts that could be passed off as cat scratches if anyone saw. I picked at them to keep them from healing too soon, but I never let on what I was doing. I did it because the physical pain made the emotional pain easier to bear. It was cathartic. I haven't cut in over a year, and I don't see myself cutting any time in the foreseeable future, but I remember the relief of physical pain and bleeding. It just made the emotions easier to manage.
I've known quite a fair few self-injurers, and I don't think any of them does/did it for attention. They did it for the same reasons I did—to make the emotional pain easier to take, for the catharsis. People who self-injure are trying to cope with phenomenal loads of pain, often burdens they've borne for their entire lives or close to it. These are not weak people. These are not attention hounds. These are people dealing with huge problems, and they're doing the best they can.
People with mental illnesses are not weak. On a day-to-day basis, they are dealing with the day-to-day bullshit we all deal with, and with a whole lot more.. They may be dealing with what I like to call musical meds (when one's psychiatrists are trying everything under the sun and then some to find a medication cocktail that works). They may be dealing with symptoms that, like some kind of monster out of Greek mythology, try to drag them down every time they pick themselves up. They may be dealing with loads of pain from childhood or adolescence that would break someone who was weak.
Suicide, which has so recently and horribly been in the news, is also not reflective of a lack of strength of character or of will, but of someone overwhelmed and under-supported.
A weak will does not go hand in hand with a psychiatric diagnosis, nor does poor character. It takes strength to live with mental illness. I am a person with mental illness, I am strong, and I am not alone.
Friday Blogaround
This blogaround brought to you by Shaxco, proud distributors of Deeky Brand Pest Repellent Overton-Away.
Recommended Reading:
Andrew: Shirvell Taking Leave of Absence Over Anti-Gay Blog
Todd: Students, Community Activists Protest Ingham County Prosecutor [A follow-up to this story; trigger warning still applicable.]
Latoya: Political Confessions and Questions
Susie: Pop Quiz
Brad: Eleanor Roosevelt Liveblogs World War II: October 1, 1940
Renee: Star Wars Saga Goes 3-D
Leave your links in comments...
Big Girls Don't Cry
The first time I entered a voting booth I was nine years old. It was 1984, and my parents had brought me with them so that I could pull the lever for the first woman ever to run on a major party ticket for vice president of the United States…Thus begins Rebecca Traister's book Big Girls Don't Cry, her account of the 2008 election and thesis arguing that, ultimately, it was good for feminism, because if you loved or hated Hillary Clinton, or loved or hated Sarah Palin, or loved or hated Michelle Obama, and expressed that love or hatred in any way, or if you were "a young progressive guy who wished the Hillary supporters would shut up, a Hillary supporter who wished the PUMAs would go away or a PUMA who wished that everyone would just choke on it already, then you were talking and thinking about and making women's history in America."
Almost twenty-four years later, on Super Tuesday in February 2008, I walked into a cavernous school gymnasium in Brooklyn to cast my primary vote on Super Tuesday, for the first time in my voting life unsure of which lever to turn. It was the moment that could bring me closest to fulfilling my father's wish: I could put the X next to the name of a woman and bring her closer to the top spot on the Democratic ticket. But I had spent months saying I would never vote for her, that she was not my kind of candidate, not my kind of woman. Even though I was beginning to change my mind, my distaste for her felt entrenched, and perhaps self-defining.
I spent fifteen minutes behind the curtain, shoving levers back and forth. I considered the other name on the ballot, a man who was also not exactly my kind of candidate, but whose potential place at the top of the Democratic ticket would put him close to becoming the first African American president, a possibility just as thrilling as that of electing a woman. I wished that I didn't have to choose between them. I wished that I could vote for them both. I wished that I could vote for someone else altogether. I mostly wished that it was a different woman's name in front of me, one that didn't fill me with ambivalence and vague foreboding.
I would never have imagined, as I stalled and fidgeted in that booth while a line of voters formed behind me, that four months later I would be ducking out of a cordoned-off press section in the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., pushing my way through throngs of people in search of a place where I could cry in private. Behind a soaring column I gulped out sobs of exhaustion and disappointment at the end of the campaign of the woman for whom I had not been sure I could vote, even seconds before pulling the rubber-covered bar to seal my choice.
What makes the book great is that it not merely a keen portrait of an election season largely defined by female trailblazers and the misogyny flung at them (although it is that), but it's also a memoir, tracing Traister's own journey through a campaign that made her reexamine her own feminism.
It's this part of the book that is particularly meaningful to me.
It's no secret that I was not a fan of Hillary Clinton back in the primordial ooze of the '08 election (circa 2006) when Clinton was presumed to be the inevitable (and unstoppable) nominee, and Barack Obama was just some senator from Illinois who gave good speech. I wrote posts explaining why I didn't want her to be the nominee, and why I didn't think she should be. They are embarrassing, regrettable stuff—reeking of the evidence that I had internalized media narratives about Hillary Clinton. I was uncharacteristically uncritical of information delivered to me about Clinton from the same media whose pernicious narratives I spent my days deconstructing and dismantling.
I was wrong about Hillary Clinton.
And that was not the only grim realization I had during the 2008 election.
Traister interviewed me in the course of writing her book, as Amanda Marcotte's and my lamentable stint with the Edwards campaign was "one of the first campaign scandals of the election cycle [and it] involved young feminists." I spoke with her at length about my experience with the Edwards campaign, about Shakesville's Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and Michelle Obama Sexism Watches, about my own evolving regard for Clinton, and about how my being so wrong about Clinton revealed to me the cracks in my own feminism to which I needed to tend. From page 45 of Big Girls Don't Cry:
Two years after the campaign McEwan recalled how much she had loved Elizabeth (Edwards), before and even after she had called to dismiss her from her job. "I liked Elizabeth even more than John," she said, mentioning the most obvious comparison: "The two of them together—[John] would talk about the economy, and [Elizabeth] would talk about health care—in a weird way, it was Bill and Hillary all over again, wasn't it? It was two for one. God, the irony." She paused, and I assumed that she was referring to what would become John Edwards's own turgid sex scandal. But she was talking about something else: "I suspected that Elizabeth was the brains of the operation, and I'd thought the same thing about Hillary. But when I had the chance to support the brains of the operation, I chose the partnership. I literally went for the team that still had the dude on it."I share that particular excerpt not just to underline why Traister's own journey traced in Big Girls Don't Cry is meaningful to me, but also because Traister captures that moment in our conversation so perfectly—and I cannot more convincingly convey her talent and integrity as a writer than by sharing her accurate rendering with an audience who knows me.
I've not finished the book yet, but it is captivating, infuriating, exhilarating, and brilliant. I cannot say it more plainly: Buy this book.
I'm Surrounded
Sophie is on my monitor. Olivia is sprawled across my desk. Matilda is on my left, rubbing up against my leg and purring so loudly she's rattling the windows. And Dudley is on my right, sleeping hard with legs akimbo.
This has been the Official Shakesville Cute Status Report, for everyone needing heaping doses of cute this week.
Quote of the Day
"We can't let intolerance and ignorance take another kid's life."--Ellen, in a message she recorded yesterday. Video below, transcript below the fold.
I am devastated over the death of eighteen year old Tyler Clementi. If you don't know, Tyler was a bright student at Rutgers University whose life was senselessly cut short. HE was outed as being gay on the internet and he killed himself. Something must be done.
This month alone there have been a shocking number of news stories about teens who have been teased and bullied and committed suicide--like thirteen year old Seth Walsh of Tehachapi,, California, thirteen year old Asher Brown in Cypress, Texas, and fifteen year old Billy Lucas in Greensburg, Indiana. This needs to be a wake-up call to everyone that teenage bullying and teasing is an epidemic in this country and the death rate is climbing.
One life lost in this senseless way is tragedy; four lives lost is a crisis. And these are just the stories we hear about. How many other teens are lost? How many are suffering in silence? Being a teenager is hard enough figuring out who you are without someone attacking you.
My heart is breaking for their families, for their friends, for our society that continues to let this happen. These kids needed us...and we have an obligation to change this. There are messages everywhere that validate this kind of bullying and taunting and we have to make it stop.
We can't let intolerance and ignorance take another kid's life.
And I want anyone out there who feels different and alone out there to know that I know how you feel. And there is help out there and you can find support in your community. If you need someone to talk to or you want to get involved, there are some really great organizations listed on our website. This will get easier, people's minds will change. And you should...you should be alive to see it.
What's Wrong With Our Culture
That's not a question. It's a statement. About this screencap, taken from a prominent site featuring all the BEST paparazzi photos of celebrities doing FUN celebrity things. Like seeking treatment for a terrible addiction.
If you can't view the image, it's a headline reading: "X17 EXCLUSIVE - First photos of Lindsay Lohan in Rehab at Betty Ford Center" followed by the first in a series of images taken of Lohan walking across the grounds at, presumably, the Betty Ford Center.
I really hate the world this week.
Parts of Canadian Prostitution Laws Declared Charter Violations
In an Ontario court on Tuesday, Justice Susan Hamel issued a decision in a case where a group of sex workers had argued that restrictions against "keeping a common bawdy house" (i.e., brothels) were making their lives unnecessarily more dangerous, by forcing them to work on the streets.
Justice Hamel agreed with their argument that such restrictions violated the "security of person" and "freedom of expression", both guaranteed rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (aussi disponible en français ici).
The consequences of the decision are far-reaching - though it's suspended for 30 days to allow the various levels of government to respond (and the Feds, at least, indicate they may well appeal, because of course a Tory government couldn't possibly allow women bodily autonomy or agency, or sex workers to have safety or security) - including the possibility of forming unions or associations, paying income tax on proceeds of prostitution, reporting dangerous clients to police, hiring security workers, and setting healthcare policies in place.
The repellent right-wing group REAL Women had some pointless things to add, but nothing anyone here would be surprised at nor interested to hear.
Tip of the CaitieCap to Shaker PerfectlySkewed (sorry about the delay - I'm actually on a short vacation in Baltimore this week)
Mike Tyson is no Betty White
[TW: Discussion of people who rape and abuse women]
So Mike Tyson and Bobby Brown are in this new video. Some guy thinks it's the greatest thing ever, and he's even got a job at CNN. Good for him. And for some reason this involves Wayne Brady, too. I mean, Wayne Brady's funny, but he sure as hell ain't "often negative history" funny.
Anyhow, after I saw the story, I sent out a quick e-mail and took a shower, during which I proceeded to think about Betty White. (See, that's supposed to be funny, because it sounds vaguely sexual and Betty White is old! and a woman! and does this hilarious thing where she displays sexual agency!)
Betty White is increasingly visible, and it's likely because there's kitsch value in having an actress who's been out of the spotlight for a while hanging out and being old n' shit.
The same goes for Mike Tyson. Except Betty White was out of the spotlight because Hollywood and TV don't know what do to with funny women, let alone women over the age of 25-ish. Oh, and she's one of the funniest people on the planet, and is amazingly good at her job, irrespective of whether folks are laughing with her or laughing at her.
Tyson was out of the spotlight (to an extent), because he raped someone. And Bobby Brown abused a famous woman. And Maude knows what else-- I haven't really followed their rap sheets. Tyson never was funny-- he was a boxer. Like Betty White, he's had [TW] a resurgence in his career of late. But his resurgence is based in part on being a rapist. Ha ha ha remember that guy who raped that lady and bit that guy's ear back in the day? Now he's back and it's not the least bit disturbing. How retro n' shit.
So basically the only means for Betty White to revitalize her career (retro-hip-kitschy-viral-nougat) is something that's available to any guy who was the least bit famous, provided he raped someone. Neat.
We're Sorry All Right
[Trigger warning for dehumanization, exploitation, indifference to consent, medical malfeasance, classism, disablism, and racism.]
Today, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius apologized for experiments undertaken by US government medical researchers in Guatemala 60 years ago, and sanctioned by the Guatemalan government, in which hundreds of male prisoners and female patients in the National Mental Health Hospital were intentionally infected with gonorrhea and syphilis, without their consent or knowledge.
"The sexually transmitted disease inoculation study conducted from 1946-1948 in Guatemala was clearly unethical," [says] the joint statement from Clinton and Sebelius. "Although these events occurred more than 64 years ago, we are outraged that such reprehensible research could have occurred under the guise of public health. We deeply regret that it happened, and we apologize to all the individuals who were affected by such abhorrent research practices."The Guatemala experiment was begun in 1946, fourteen years after the Tuskegee experiment began, but ended after only two years. It "never provided any useful information and the records were hidden," but were unearthed by Wellesley women's studies professor Susan Reverby, who "notes that it is unclear whether [the subjects of the study] were later cured or given proper treatment."
The apology was directed to Guatemala and to Hispanic residents of the United States, according to officials.
I wonder what secret horrors going on now President Malia Obama and Vice President William Jefferson Mezvinsky will be apologizing for in fifty years.
Prosecutors Investigating Bias in Clementi Case
[Trigger warning for sexual assault, homophobia, and suicide.]
Prosecutors are investigating "whether additional charges, including bias, may be brought against two Rutgers University students accused of invading the privacy of fellow student Tyler Clementi," the young man who took his own life after his roommate filmed and broadcast a private sexual encounter without his consent.
"The initial focus of this investigation has been to determine who was responsible for remotely activating the camera in the dormitory room of the student and then transmitting the encounter on the Internet," Middlesex County Prosecutor Bruce J. Kaplan said.Intent is difficult to prove, and, while I think Dharun Ravi's tweet about his electronic spying—"I saw him making out with a dude. Yay."—is pretty obviously homophobic, I'm not sure it's going to meet the threshold for a bias charge. Still, it's reassuring to know that the possibility is being considered and thoroughly investigated.
"Now that two individuals have been charged with invasion of privacy, we will be making every effort to assess whether bias played a role in the incident, and, if so, we will bring appropriate charges," Kaplan said in a statement.
Under New Jersey law, a person is guilty of bias intimidation if he or she commits a crime with the purpose of intimidating someone because of race, color, religion, gender, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin or ethnicity; or if the victim or victim's property was selected as a target because of the same factors.
In less good news, there's still a lot of "but they're so nice" stuff, in reference the two people charged with invading Clementi's privacy, being inserted into news articles.
But Raj Ardeshna, 17, a senior at West Windsor-Plainsboro High School North in Plainsboro, N.J., and a former classmate of both defendants, told CNN that the two were "terrific people."Super.
"To know that two intelligent kids could get caught up in something like this is shocking to me," Ardeshna said. "The only rationale I've been able to come up with is that they thought they were being funny -- but I really couldn't tell you.
"Without a doubt they must both be filled with regret and are distraught over what happened to Tyler, and as cliched as it sounds -- they are both good people," Ardeshna said. "And they just turned 18 and they just went to college, and everyone slips up without understanding the consequences."
Kirbi Marquez, a Rutgers student and a classmate of Ravi and Wei in high school, told CNN "had they known the consequences of their actions, they would not have considered doing this."
"I'm sure they're bearing the guilt, they're both sympathetic people and good kids and they didn't mean for any of this to happen," said Marquez.
Why it's considered newsworthy that friends of people who did something terrible think they're "good people" is beyond me.
Meanwhile, I continue to *rage*seethe*boil* at the lack of discussion in major media about how Clementi's suicide would have been entirely preventable if we didn't live in a fucked-up culture in which it's considered a "fun prank" to film someone else's sexual activity without hir consent.
Where larger context is being discussed, the scenario is frequently being misrepresented as "cyberbullying," but this case does not appear to be about two people who set out to hurt another person with malicious intent; it appears to be about internalized biases making them regard evidence of homosexuality as "funny" and socialized indifference to consent making them regard broadcasting that evidence as acceptable.
Institutional homophobia meets the rape culture.
Too many people will read that line and feel inclined to argue that they see proof of neither homophobia nor the rape culture in this case, which underlines exactly why both are important to publicly explore. Just as the rape culture does not exclusively manifest as demonstrable sexual violence, homophobia does not exclusively manifest as physical violence against queer people, or even expressed hostility toward queer people.
It's eminently possible that Ravi and/or Wei even expressed support for LGBTQI peers, and, in the abstract, meant it. But when faced with the knowledge that he was going to be living with a gay man, Ravi reportedly tweeted: "Found out my roommate is gay?" and then secretly filmed Clementi and broadcast it, making note that he "saw him making out with a dude." Ravi may well have been not homophobic in theory, but in actual practice, he appears to have had issues with his gay roommate.
That's not the kind of thing for which we should be trying to find excuses, despite what nearly every comment thread in the world on this story suggests to the contrary. That's the kind of thing we need to call out for what it is, and not hide behind quotes from friends about what "good kids" Ravi and Wei are.
Good kids can do terrible things.
Frankly, given how comprehensively our culture is steeped in virulent homophobia (and other biases) and antipathy to consent, it's shameful that we act surprised when they do.
"Feeding People Is an Act of Love, an Act of Kindness"
That I totes fancy Chef Tom Colicchio is, of course, not news, not even close, and not a secret, not even a little. As if there's still any wonder why, he continued his crusade against hunger this morning on CNN, and, despite the fact that this interview is part of a week-long focus on the "childhood obesity crisis," note that Chef Colicchio doesn't mention obesity once during this interview, nor does he even obliquely equate weight with health. He simply makes the point that fresh food with meaningful calories nourishes children's minds and bodies, making them better able to learn. And he doesn't put that responsibility on "moms," or "parents," casually ignoring the profound structural flaws that contribute to kids eating processed food at school and home. He flatly explains why a fast food hamburger costs less than a peach, and lays out why it's a social issue, a collective responsibility for the richest nation on the planet to nourish its children.
No shaming, no alarmism, no hyperbole. Just facts and compassion.
This is how it's done, right here.
[The transcript will be posted here when available.]
Question of the Day
What are your favorite and least favorite fast food restaurants?
Generally, the question is about the food, but please feel free, especially if you don't eat fast food, to use some other criteria, like advertising or sheer ubiquity.
I don't know if it's technically fast food (there is some specific criteria to warrant that designation and render a place distinct from casual dining, e.g. Applebee's, though I don't remember what it is), but my favorite place that I consider fast food is Panera Bread. Worst has got to be Hardee's; its food sucks and its advertising sucks. Blech.
The Overton Window: Chapter Eleven
There is a downside to making a pit stop. As much is I love the proverbial Slim Jim and Fanta, slowing down means you get to your destination later. And as fun as the last post was, I still have to actually slog through chapter eleven properly.
If you didn't get enough speechifying in chapter ten, well, hold on, chapter eleven is the headline act. Danny Bailey, Youtube sensation and mavericky straight-talker!
Before he hits the stage, Noah is getting the metaphoric tear in his beer on (is that metaphoric or proverbial? Nevermind) at his otherwise empty table by the stage. "He'd briefly considered playing a drinking game with himself, wherein he would pound one back each time he heard one of the dirty words progressive, socialist, or globalism, but by those rules he'd have drunk himself under the table within a few minutes." It's actually an interesting observation, as if Beck is acknowledging just how ridiculous the movement is.
I mean, Socialism? Really? Does anyone truly believe we, as a country, are on the verge of, heading toward, or anywhere remotely near Socialism? Because, let me tell you: We're not. And if you think we are, you have no idea what Socialism is.
Hollis sits down with Noah, because he looked kind of sad, according to the big man. How nice of him. Or maybe Hollis is just keeping an eye on Noah. Nah, if that were the case, Noah would have noticed, what with his "almost supernatural ability to tell when a person is hiding something."
Noah's night goes from bad to worse:
Tonight's headliner, the illustrious Danny Bailey, now took to the stage in a swell of heavy-metal music and an ovation that rattled every shelf of glassware behind the bar.
"Hello, New York!" Bailey shouted, like an aging rock star kicking off his annual farewell tour. He held out the microphone to pump up the roar of the answering crowd and made no move to settle them down. On the contrary, the clamor continued until he produced a piece of paper and took back the mike almost a full deafening minute later.
God damn if people just don't love Youtube stars! Anyway. If you listened to the audio of the speech, you'll already know something about Bailey's speech: It reads better than it it sounds out loud. Which is really saying something. This only goes on for a few pages, and I am going to spoil the end here, because Bailey is interrupted before he can finish. Oh, what thrilling thing happens, you ask? Does Blackwater storm the place? Does the fire marshal shut down the bar? Does America's crumbling infrastructure lead to a sudden power outage? Oh, just you wait. It's even better than all of those ideas!
Bailey continues:
Watch what they name things. If they call something the Patriot Act, you can bet it won't be long before they're using it to hunt down us patriots. If it's called Net Neutrality, it's going to be used to neutralize their enemies. If it's called the Fairness Doctrine, it's meant to un fairly put free speech under government control and create a chilling effect on your First Amendment rights.
That's right, kids, in an Orwellian twist, those bills are all named the opposite of what they really are! The Patriot Act is for rounding up patriots! Net Neutrality is for neutralizing dissenters. (Okay, that's not really an opposite.) The Fairness Doctrine is to unfairly do something to the First Amendment. God damn if Danny Bailey isn't a genius.
Plus, he has lots of paper. Like Beverly before him, Bailey makes his point by dangling papers in front of his audience. He's sort of a patirotic prop comic, but not funny. Like Carrottop.
Blah blah blah... Bailey goes on about unemployment ("almost forty percent if you're a young black man") and prisons ("of all the world's prisoners, we've got twenty-five percent of them right here in this country"), yet fails to make the connection between poverty and crime.
He does however note that the government is hiring Internment and Resettlement Specialists like nobody's business. There's more papers, more factoids, more statistics.
"And here"—he squinted as he read briefly from the document on top of his stack—"United States Air Force Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2 will authorize and direct the secretary of defense to use the U.S. armed forces to restore law and order in the event of a crisis. Under this umbrella plan they ran an exercise in 1984—so you see they do have a sense of humor—and that exercise was called Rex-84. The purpose was to see how efficiently they could pick up and corral all those disobedient Americans on their lists."
Bailey held up document after document as he continued. "What lists, you ask? All kinds of them. The FBI's ADEX list from the late 1960s—ADEX, that stands for Agitator Index—it was full of dangerous intellectuals, union organizers, and people who spoke out against the Vietnam War. Now there's almost a million and a half people on the DHS Terrorist Watch List, and it's growing by twenty thousand names every month.
"Have you registered a firearm? You're on a list! Have you made a political contribution to a third-party candidate? You're on a list! Have you visited my website? You're on a list! Have you given a speech about government lists to a rowdy group of patriots? You're on a list!
So, yeah. Big Brother is watching you, and making lists, and checking them twice (sorry) and you better be careful. They're hiring Internment Specialists to round everyone up. (Not really.) It would seem grim. If you lacked critical thinking skills.
It's interesting how Beck throws out all this random data, never really ties any of it together, not sufficiently anyway. Take that bit about the ADEX from the Sixties. What the fuck does that have to do with the DHS Terrorist Watch List? It is implied there is some connection between the two. But that's all it is. They are mentioned in the same paragraph, so I think we're to infer there is some credence to the plot fifty years in the making. But vague innuendoes aren't facts.
And this is when things start to get personal for Noah.
"Oh, and this just in, thanks to our friends on the Internet—a place where, at least for now, we can track them as easily as they can track us."
Noah felt his face getting hot. In Bailey's hand was a printout of the leaked government memorandum from that afternoon meeting at the office, the one he'd spent his entire morning trying to nullify. It was effectively harmless now, it was a nonissue, and he repeated that to himself, but the smug look coming from the guy onstage had already gotten under his skin.
"... if you speak out against abortion," Bailey continued, reading from the memo, "are a returning veteran, are a defender of the Second Amendment, oppose illegal immigration, are a homeschooler, if you've got a bumper sticker on your car that says 'Chuck Baldwin for President' or, heaven help us, if you're found to be in possession of a copy of the U.S. Constitution, then you good American patriots, you moms and dads and grandmas and grandpas, you guardians of liberty are to be approached with extreme caution and guns at the ready, because you may be a terrorist!"
Whoops! The leak that Doyle and Merchant thought they had fixed? Turns out: Not so much. They better check with HR, make sure no teabaggers are on the payroll. First place to look: The copy room. Or the mail room. Yeah, check the mail room! Also, see if anyone's been hanging up flyers aroung the office. Just a suggestion.
Oh, and about the line "heaven help us, if you're found to be in possession of a copy of the U.S. Constitution..." Wasn't Beverly jsut telling everyone to carry a copy with them at all times? But Bailey says that'll get you "on a list." Which is it? Maybe this is why I don't know what the teabaggers want: They don't know what they want.
There stuff about the Enduring Constitutional Government, Constitution Free Zones, a "continuous state of national emergency" blah blah blah.
"It looks bad, I know it does," Bailey began. "But do you know why we're going to beat them? We're going to beat them because once the truth gets out there'll be no stopping it. When enough people wake up they'll have no choice but to come out of the shadows and fight, and then we've got them. Remember what a great man once told us: First they ignore you—then they ridicule you—then they fight you—"
"And then they win," Noah said.
Uh oh! All eyes on Noah! Then the chapter wraps. Dang, what will happen next? Oh, the thrills! Chapter twelve, here I come!
Oh, and if anyone can guess what happens in chapter twelve, you get a prize.
Earthish
Take us to your leader, or just lie there like an adorable single-celled organism, or whatever:
A team of astronomers from the University of California and the Carnegie Institute of Washington say they've found a planet like ours, 20 light years (120 trillion miles) from Earth, where the basic conditions for life are good.Does Richard Branson really have anything better to do? I think not.
...Dr. Elizabeth Cunningham, planetarium astronomer at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, says the discovery [of Gliese 581g] is a huge deal. "It could have liquid water on the surface," she said. "That's the first step to find life."
There are hundreds of known extrasolar planets that have been discovered in the Milky Way, but this is the first that could support life.
Earthlings won't be traveling to Gliese 581g any time soon unfortunately. Scientists say a spaceship traveling close to the speed of light would take 20 years to make this journey.
Today's Edition of "Conniving and Sinister"
[Trigger warning.]
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.]
Quote of the Day
"Democratic leaders must recognize that the nation's views on women and power are changing. They might also consider it a moral and social imperative for the party that relies on women, and to which women's progress has been historically tied, to treat its women as a fundamental asset rather than a vaguely irritating embarrassment."—Rebecca Traister, in "Democrats: Remember the Ladies!" for The Nation. A must-read.
Today's Extra Dose o' Cute
Someone* in one of today's threads called for a double dose of cute today. So here's Swatch (canine mascot of Mood Fabrics in NYC) to the rescue:
Swatch says: "This day is pushing my buttons"
Image description: a small black-and-white dog with a bemused expression. Zie sits on a gray carpet in front of a display wall of sewing buttons on cards.
*ETA: for shaker intransigentia.
