Judith Blue stands out in the parking lot and watches as two women scream at each other out their car windows. “Jesus! Will you learn to drive that thang!”
“I was here first.”
“So the fuck what! You can’t drive worth shit!”
She turns and looks at the line of women that snakes out the door and down the sidewalk in front of the small specialty stores that share this rather large strip mall with The Beefeater, the restaurant, bar, and disco she manages for Chuck. Women are beginning to push each other in front of Yin Lee’s.
“Oh god, what am I going to do now?” She thinks this aloud and the sound of her own voice startles her. A very pregnant woman gives a mighty shove at the woman in front of her, who goes down, hits the pavement on her knees, and as her hands come down on the concrete she screams, “What the…….” Judith turns toward the restaurant and starts moving as fast as she can, considering her high heels and the slope of the parking lot. She keeps thinking, ‘I didn’t know this many women lived in Springfield. Oh god, what am I going to do?’ When she gets to the doors she slips past a trio of women waiting to get past the two men stationed at the door. One of the guys guarding the door whispers in her ear as she squeezes through, “We need more wait staff.” It’s 5PM of a Tuesday night. The show doesn’t start for two hours and the place is packed already and the only men inside the place work there. Them and the cops guarding the stage in the disco.
A month ago she took this job as a lark. She needed a distraction from the faculty wives parties. When they first arrived she’d amiably gone along with the suggestions that she “participate.” The first abomination was a tea for faculty wives. Full dress regalia, it looked for all the world like the Junior League and the DAR all wrapped into one. Then there was the Gourmet Club. What a fucking joke that was. Someone actually brought a green bean casserole, with canned green beans and Campbell’s mushroom condensed soup. Gawd, it was so funny and so sad all at the same time. After that she knew she had to get a job.
During her interview with Chuck she asked all the questions while Chuck’s girlfriend/accountant gave her the skunk-eye. Both Chuck and his girlfriend came from Paducha where Chuck’s daddy owns the Caddy dealership. Must be a lot of pimps in Paducha. Chuck and his accountant are in their late twenties and have no idea what they hell they’re doing. She must be his first interview. When she’s through asking him questions, she asks one more. “Do you want to ask me any questions?” He stands up and giving her his most charming look, which is an Elvis lip curl, sticks out his hand and says, “Welcome aboard.” She shakes his hand and asks one last question. “What do you plan to pay me to make this into a profitable venture?” His left eyelid flutters a little and he says, “$800. 00 a month” and beams. She says without batting an eye, “Thanks, but no thanks,” and turns toward the door. He says, “Whoa, not so fast, that’s just base salary. If you can turn a profit, I’ll give you 2% and of course, you eat and drink for free.” She pauses for a couple of seconds and says, “I’ll think about it and get back to you.”
“4%?”
“Make it 5%, and and don’t hassle me about the changes I want to make. By the way, what’s your advertising budget?” She looks at the accountant who looks at Chuck who says, “Let me know what you need to spend, and we’ll pay the bills.”
“On time?”
He looks at her sideways and says, “Sure. Is that it?”
“No, I need to spend a week or so assessing staffing. Supplies, talent. Any changes I want to make, You’ll OK?”
“You’re the boss.”
“If I find that you have not paid staff, or vendors, or advertisers on time and in full, I’ll quit. Are we clear on all of that?”
“Yes mam.”
Walking to her car she knew she had just made a huge mistake, not asked for enough, got nothing in writing, but what the hell, she could always quit.
When she got home Henry was there, smoking, drinking straight lukewarm vodka in a half full ice tea glass, reading student papers. If you were a lucky student, he got to your paper just before that ice tea glass was empty. By then he didn’t even bother to read them. He just gave these last four or five A’s and left it at that.
“I got a job.”
Silence.
“Have you eaten?”
“NO.” He says this rather too loud for her taste, and she wants to say, “Henry, go fuck yourself,” but refrains for once because she really doesn’t give a shit if Henry’s eaten or not, she’s not cooking for him, so, why engage?
She heads for the shower. An hour later, after the shower, drying her hair, and getting dolled up a little, she grabs her handbag and starts toward the living room. Henry says in his whiniest voice, “Aren’t you going to fix dinner?”
“How astute, Henry. Was it the click click of my high heels?”
“Yes.”
“Want to have a conversation, Henry?”
“NO. Are you going out?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I got a job, Henry. I told you, but it didn’t seem to register. I thought maybe you’d nodded off. I’d take you to dinner, but I doubt you could walk, and really, I want to see what the dining experience is like for a woman alone.”
“Why.”
“Henry? Are you in there? Why, to what? Are you so obtuse in class?
“A restaurant? Really? Will you bring me something back?”
“Probably no, since you’ll be asleep before I get back. Stay sober and I’ll buy you dinner tomorrow night. Good night Henry.”
As she drove to Beefeaters, Judith thought about the possibilities. The place was huge. Restaurant seated two hundred. The bar was another hundred and fifty. Fire code said the disco could hold a maximum of five hundred. She did not know the population of Springfield, but thought keeping this place busy was really going to be a challenge. It was Thursday evening, just past 6 Pm when she pulled into the parking lot. Stores were still open, but even so, the lot was almost empty. Oh God,
That first week she felt she had located all the major staffing changes she would need to make. She spent most early afternoons meeting with the back of the house— mostly the three cooks, one of whom had Culinary Institute training. They revamped the menu with specials that would not necessitate reprinting menus. Added dessert specials, everything was made in- house, bread, desserts. They worked on a new wine list. Not necessarily more expensive, but better. Printing costs would be small. She got rid of the English serving girl dresses with all the cleavage exposed, and the long skirts that were a tripping hazard, and put everybody in black pants and white shirts.
She spent her evenings in the bar. They had a cowboy quartet that started playing at six. She gave them two weeks notice and put up posters at the University’s music department and an ad in the classifieds of the News-Leader asking for jazz musicians. On a Wednesday afternoon she auditioned three groups. Hired a band called Entropy. Judith thought the bands name was pretentious and not apt, since they played quite swinging or soulful Jazz standards but decided it wasn’t worth arguing about, since very few bar patrons would have the slightest idea what the fuck it meant. She hired a great looking female bartender and kept the one male bartender who didn’t hit on her right off. She asked everyone to put out the word that she’d be looking for another bartender. She had three cocktail waitresses to start with. She’d add them as she needed.
Judith Blue was now on mission to poach talent from restaurants and bars in the surrounding counties, since she’d stolen all the good ones in Springfield. She’d left Horton’s alone because it was her only refuge from the Beefeater, so Larry and his staff were safe for now. Henry was too deep in his cups to really notice her absence.
Now she was concentrating on the disco. It’s days as a disco were numbered. Donna Summers was sort of old hat now, and it was time to transition to another incarnation. And what the fuck would that be? The place had a stage and dance floor and was too big by half. One morning in Fayetteville she stopped for breakfast at a coffee shop near the the UAF campus, and while reading the paper, noticed a small piece on page four about a club in Kansas City that sparked her interest. This little club, the Plug Nickel, had made news by offering the ladies a male strip show. The reason it made any news at all was the huge crowd it drew—all women. Fancy that. She finished her coffee, put out her smoke, and tucked the paper under her arm and headed for the parking lot. She climbed into her Grand Torino and lit another cigarette before she turned toward Springfield. It’s a beautiful drive once you get past the strip malls that blight the landscape around Fayetteville, Benton, Rodgers, then she’s off the beaten track and on to Cassville, then Monett. Gorgeous farmland, no strip malls here. And she’s thinking all the way home.
She spreads the word among her staff of mostly S.M.S.U. students, that she’s looking for male dancers, real dancers, for an all female audience. Within a week she has fifty eight names on an audition list. And Beefeaters is buzzing. Business is picking up at a steady rate. Sometimes on Friday and Saturday nights there is a waiting list for dinner and the overflow is enjoying the jazz in the bar. Everybody’s making money and bickering and backstabbing is at a minimum. Even Chuck and the accountant are pleased.
So far the disco is a cavern still mostly empty, despite the sound of Donna Summer, Grace Jones, Gloria Gaynor, and Chic blaring from the huge speakers, and the glittery disco ball still twirling in the darkly lit space. She has banned the Bee Gees from the playlist, but there is always a small crowd late at night around the long bar, and a few diehard dancers still making the most of the big dance floor. But the times, they are about to be changing.
For three mornings she held auditions in the empty disco. There were the dancers, the cocktail waiters, and the female DJ’s all in separate lines. Judith stood on the bar platform and told them her plan. DJ’s had always been guys, but that was going to change on Tuesday nights. The women auditioning for DJ headed to the booth. Dancers were limbering up down by the stage. And the first players in this performance were the cocktail waiters. Sixteen guys begging for ten spots. Mostly college athletes and frat boys, thinking this was going to be easy. They had to audition just like the dancers. She was going to turn the night-life gender roles upside down and see what fell out just one night a week for a month. She told everyone exactly what her intentions were and what she expected of them. She would be the choreographer, and majordoma of this whole shebang. An experienced cocktail waitress from the bar gave lessons to the waiters auditioning. They had to be able to carry a heavily loaded tray high above their heads, arm fully extended, weaving their way through closely placed tables, with a certain grace and agility without spilling a drop. Almost every guy failed his first try. Our regular DJ was demonstrating in a showoffy way the inner workings of the booth. Music would get going and then stop abruptly. She left the bar tournament to the cocktail waitress and female bartender who would now make Tuesday night a regular part of her schedule. She was filling fake orders and loading those trays for those desperate waiter wannabes. Judith headed for the dancers.
This was going to be the tricky part of the whole deal. So they need to have a little sit down. “Hi, I’m Judith Blue." She notices a couple of guys give knowing looks at one another. "Nice of you boys to show up, but this might not be exactly what you understood from the ad and posters. We are going to put on two shows a night one night a week for an all female audience. Women only. And you guys will be the entertainment.” There is a slight rise in the energy level of this group of attentive young men. They look at one another and smile. “I want to incorporate several elements to this performance, but I know this is a highly religious community, so to be fair to all of you, I must tell you first off, that there will be a little stripping involved. Anybody object to taking off you clothes while dancing and ending up nearly naked ought to leave now. We’re not doing anything illegal, but…” She shrugs, and sits at a table looking at the handsome, eager faces arrayed before her, spread out in repose on the dance floor, languid and muscled young men. Not a sound. No one moves to leave or even shifts his weight. “Is there a choreographer among you?” Three hands shoot up. She motions them over. They take chairs flanking her. “Will the remaining fifty or so of you break into groups of ten or eleven”? She waves her arm in the direction of the DJ booth. “Keep the volume low for awhile. We need to be able to talk in a normal tone, OK?”
There is a low murmur taking place in every part of the room now, then a large crash as one of the loaded trays hits the concrete floor. Dead silence for just a long moment, then the murmur starts again.
She has a powwow with her three choreographers and sketches out what she wants to see tomorrow, same time same place with some rough costuming. Is this possible? Yes, it turns out, it is.
Everywhere she goes she tells the women, in hushed and whispered tones that they might want to come for a special night just for women at the disco. At the bank, the grocery store, the doctors office, and throughout her strolls through the halls of academe.
By the following Monday morning they are ready for a dress rehearsal. She has ten well-trained waiters in short, tight, black shorts and white wife-beater t-shirts., that are wearing white tennis shoes on their feet. She was tempted to make them wear high heels, just for the object lesson, but decided against it in the end. Her DJ is not only a hot babe, she has great taste and timing. Judith’s strippers are dressed up and ready to go. The only thing missing is the audience, but it all works flawlessly in practice.
By six, the restaurant is full and the bar is overflowing. Women all over the place, and the excitement of anticipation is palpable. Conversation is decidedly more animated this evening. Judith surmises that without the sobering influence of the menfolk, the women are a little more uninhibited. She opens the disco doors and there is a near stampede from the bar. Women are running for the tables up front. Oh my god. Judith has the first of what will be many moments of dismay this evening. She stands inside the huge room and watches it fill in minutes. Her waiters are in full swing fast. She slips into the stock room behind the disco bar and uses the wall-phone to tell the boys bar-tending in the bar to come into the disco and assist the waiters at either end of the bar. This frees the two women bar-tending to mix drinks for the female customers three deep the length of the disco bar. Oh shit, this is not going to work as planned, there are just too many of them. Not one single ad and this is what has happened? There is a half hour to go and she already senses the chaos that might ensue if the bar fills with men waiting for the end of the shows and the emerging women. She checks with the wait staff in the restaurant. All the waiters agree that they will help out in the bar or disco when their tables empty. The waitresses express their displeasure at being left-out. Judith says, “Check your pockets at the end of the night and then tell me how left-out you feel.”
The show is perfection. But it is not the show that concerns Judith, it is the audience. This is like a fucking rock concert. Women are screaming and jumping up and down, throwing their panties. Waiters have come to her saying women are pulling their shorts down when they bend to take an order. These guy are getting groped. What the hell’s going on here? She gets goose bumps on the back of her neck. But gives a quick demonstration on how to squat at a table to take an order so as not to get ones shorts pulled down. This does not however solve the groping behavior. These guy are going to get groped. Nothing she can do about it now.
There are obviously kinks to be worked out, but there is no denying Judith is on to something here. Just what, she is not sure. She decides right then and there to do a fashion show on Wednesday night. She wanders into the bar and sees a milling mob of men. They are waiting almost patiently.
After a month of strip shows with an ever growing mob of women and the men who follow them, she has received television news coverage as far away as Kansas City. Now she gets a visit every Tuesday evening from the fire marshal to make sure they do not exceed capacity. Two burly cops flank the stage. Boys are coming out of the woodwork begging to cocktail for free, claiming all kinds of experience. But the crowd of screaming women of all ages and in all kinds of conditions, like hugely pregnant, or swooning and falling from the arms of their chairs where they stand to get a better view? This she cannot deal with. So, once the first show starts, she heads for Horton’s for a drink and a quiet dinner.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Monday, April 7, 2008
A Strange Woman
"I was born with a flair for the dramatic but it was ridiculed out of me young. Not eradicated entirely, just driven under the bone, deep into the heart and spleen.” She pauses as if that’s all there is, finishes her Old Fashioned, plucks the cherry out with two long, slender, well- manicured fingers, tilts her elegant head back exposing a long supple neck and plops the glistening cherry in her open mouth. After she chews her cherry she continues, staring into her empty highball glass. “As I grew teeth, I ground them into cracked and splintered nubs. I eventually made tourniquets of the muscles surrounding my head, which I’m sure must feel like the binding of Chinese women’s feet in the old days. I only got to perform when I was assured of privacy. And there was precious little of that. Not that we were a big family. No, there were only the three of us. But there was only room for one performer in that small audience.”
She says this with a straight face and in a fairly convincing southern accent. Her voice is husky and deep, a whisky voice with that rough edge of a smoker. The whole thing sounds like something from a play. She’s addressing this load of crap to some big old John Wayne clone who’s muscled himself into the narrow space next to her at the bar. She’s responding to something he whispered into her right ear. He looks frankly bewildered, furtively glancing around for less complicated prey.
You can tell by the way she looks that what she says just might be true, but she tells it like a bald-faced lie. She’s a head-turner. Not flashy-dramatic, but eye-catching. Classy, chiseled face. Even if she isn’t terribly thin or young, she’s got great bones. Her clothes are expensive—quality, well-tailored, good fabrics. Her dark brown hair is cut about shoulder length and it gleams. It sways when she turns her head. Everything about her is striking, but quietly so. She’s the sort of woman everyone will turn to look at, but won’t approach. She looks self-contained and needing no one. Part of it’s her age. She’s not young enough to hustle. Not old enough to con. And despite that line of bullshit, and her age, she’s sexy.
The man who sits next to her at the bar wears a huge silver and turquoise watch and matching belt buckle. He’s tall, balding, and beer-bellied. She isn’t wearing any jewelry, no ear rings, no wedding band, no watch. They don’t even come from the same planet.
A tall, slender man in his thirties sits at the far end of the bar where it curves around and ends in the wall--something to lean on if need be. It’s the opposite end from where the bartender takes orders from the cocktail waitresses. It’s a good place to watch the waitresses and the rest of the bar clientele. He watches one of the cocktail waitresses for a few minutes. She smiles at the bartender as she rattles off the list of drinks she needs, and the second he turns away and starts working on her order, her face is a total blank, completely losing it’s warmth, as if a light went off. And just then she catches the slender man watching her. Her eyes lock on his, and he finds it impossible to look away from that completely expressionless stare, as if it were a dare. When she finally turns away from the bar with her two vodka tonics and three 7&7s loaded on that tiny tray, he looks down the bar at the dark-haired, older woman who is watching him with a bemused expression on her very interesting face.
She raises one eyebrow and lifts her highball glass in a salute. He lifts his drink to salute her back and feels his face flush. He signals the bartender, and when he looks back up at her, she’s looking in the mirror behind the bar bottles. At first he thinks she’s looking at herself, but her face is completely unstudied, and it occurs to him she’s watching the table behind her. She has the rapt expression of a voyeur. When the bartender takes his order, the slender man also order’s one for “the great broad drinking the Old Fashioned,” he nods in her direction.
A small, aged, black man at the piano finishes “‘Round Midnight.” The slender man at the bar pays for both drinks as the bartender sets his in front of him, and leaves his stool to walk over and put a dollar in the pianists tip jar.
When he passes the back of the aging beauty’s barstool, she’s still watching the table behind her in the mirror. She sees him pass in front of them. When he walks back, after delivering his compliments to the pianist whose name turns out to be Bill Bailey, she turns her head and flashes him a high voltage smile. He smiles back. She says, “Hard to beat ‘Round Midnight' isn’t it?”
“It’s one of my favorites.”
“Thanks for the drink. Care to join me?”
“Sure, for a minute.”
Still smiling she says “My name’s Judith,” and extends her hand. She has long slender fingers. Her hand is soft but looks like it’s done some work in it’s day. There’s a small round scar just above her little finger. She has what’s called a French manicure.
He turns to her and says, “Would you like to share an order of escargot?”
“I’d love to.” Her lips are red and shiny. Her teeth are white and even. He asks her if she minds if he smokes.
“No, not at all, I used to smoke and I’ll enjoy yours vicariously. It’s one of the reasons I still come here. Most places are so sanitized these days. Lord I love Larry Horton for keeping his bar properly smoke-filled.” Again the almost southern accent.
“You know the owner?”
“It’s a small town. Everybody knows everybody else and their business. So, since I don’t recognize you, you must be new in town or passing through. There are few strangers at this restaurant, since it’s small and far off the interstate. How did you find our little treasure?”
“I spent the day at Dillard’s today and asked the manager where to eat. She recommended Horton’s, so here I am. Sorry I’m so rude. My name is Martin. Martin Laterite”
“How very French.”
“The name, yes. I’m named after a great-grandfather.” He waves the bartender back and ask for the escargot. He says it will take about fifteen or twenty minutes.
“I noticed that you’re wearing a wedding ring. I find that so touchingly sweet in a man. Were you shopping for your wife?”
“No, I was selling. It’s what I do for a living. I sell women’s designer sportswear.”
“God! What a hellish job for a man.”
“Most women think it would be a great job.”
“Well, unlike most women, I hate stores and shopping. Did you like Lilly?”
“Lilith Jacobson? The store manager?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Yeah, I do. She’s a strait shooter. I like her directness. And I’m grateful to her that I’m not eating at Howard Johnson’s or the golden arches.”
“I play bridge with her once a month. And she does my shopping. God bless her for that. She’s a terrific friend.”
“And a wonderful job she does if the outfit your wearing is her handiwork. It’s Ann Klein Couture and they don’t carry the couture line in-store. So you must be a very special customer.”
“Just a picky friend. Besides, I only buy a few pieces each year. It’s not that much more work to buy special things for me. She knows my wardrobe and only adds what’s missing. I’ll bet she’d be here with you if it weren’t for her husbands business party.”
“Why aren’t you at her party?”
“Because I’m here having a drink with you Martin.” she raises her glass and sips her drink.
Bill Bailey starts “Straight No Chaser”, and the bartender heads toward them with a plate of escargot. When they’re finished with their appetizer, the hostess comes over and tells him his table is ready whenever he is. He asks Judith to join him for dinner and to his surprise, she accepts. This scares him a little.
They are escorted by the hostess in her long black dress to a table by the only bank of windows in the crowded room. As the two women lead the way he watches them whispering to each other. They bump hips and he notices Judith’s ass. The bias cut of her silk-jersey skirt pulls slightly as she moves from foot to foot and her hips rock from side to side. Martin balls his dangling hand into a soft fist.
They don’t talk much during dinner, but he does find out that she’s married to a college professor at Southwest Missouri State who doesn’t have time to go out, so she goes out by herself. He notices she doesn’t wear a wedding ring and says, “Women who don’t wear wedding rings scare me.”
“They ought to scare you. You are married to a woman I presume. What’s she doing while you’re on the road?”
“Staying home with the kids, I hope.” When she laughs he notices her neck is long and white. She eats with relish and makes slightly sexual noises with her first few spoons full of lobster bisque. It is a soft moaning noise deep in her throat. He wonder’s why she and her husband aren’t at Lilly’s party. “Do You work?”
“You mean, do I work outside the home, honey? Yes I do. I’m the wife of a poor college professor, remember? I have to work so I can buy my Ann Klein Couture.” She throws back her head and laughs. Martin thinks about his penis.
After dinner he asks for the check and the waiter says the check has been taken care of. He says, “No, I’ll get the check! Judith, I travel on an expense account. Please let me get the check.”
She says, “I have nothing to do with this. It’s probably Larry or the guys in the kitchen.”
“Who was it? I’d like to thank him if it was the owner. And I’d want to thank the kitchen anyway for a great meal.”
The waiter says. “I’ve been asked not to say. I’m sorry.”
Martin pulls a twenty out of his wallet and leaves it on the table. He says, “Judith, would you like to have a cognac in the bar and maybe some dessert?”
“Yes, thank you. I will join you for an after dinner drink.”
The waiter, still hovering, pulls her chair out just as Martin reaches for it.
When they head back into the bar, the pianist is playing “For All We Know.”
They order cognac and sip it warmed. The crowd in the bar is thinning. Soon the kitchen crew starts coming in through the restaurant. It’s almost eleven. Before he gets a chance to invite her to his room, Judith stands up, nods to the two tall very-young men from the kitchen, and says to Martin, “My dates for the rest of the evening are off-duty and ready to escort me to my job.”
One of the two young men looks like Mick Jagger when he was twenty-something. The other looks like Jim Morrison alive. They hover a discreet distance from the drinking couple.
Judith leans over and whispers in Martin’s ear, “Our meal was comped by one of those two characters. They’re the chefs, and we’re going to the club I run for this rich boy who lives in Paducah. These guys want to go for the last strip show of the evening. They’d be very cross if I invited you. But I had a lovely evening with you Martin. Maybe next time you’re in town we can do it again.”
She says this with a straight face and in a fairly convincing southern accent. Her voice is husky and deep, a whisky voice with that rough edge of a smoker. The whole thing sounds like something from a play. She’s addressing this load of crap to some big old John Wayne clone who’s muscled himself into the narrow space next to her at the bar. She’s responding to something he whispered into her right ear. He looks frankly bewildered, furtively glancing around for less complicated prey.
You can tell by the way she looks that what she says just might be true, but she tells it like a bald-faced lie. She’s a head-turner. Not flashy-dramatic, but eye-catching. Classy, chiseled face. Even if she isn’t terribly thin or young, she’s got great bones. Her clothes are expensive—quality, well-tailored, good fabrics. Her dark brown hair is cut about shoulder length and it gleams. It sways when she turns her head. Everything about her is striking, but quietly so. She’s the sort of woman everyone will turn to look at, but won’t approach. She looks self-contained and needing no one. Part of it’s her age. She’s not young enough to hustle. Not old enough to con. And despite that line of bullshit, and her age, she’s sexy.
The man who sits next to her at the bar wears a huge silver and turquoise watch and matching belt buckle. He’s tall, balding, and beer-bellied. She isn’t wearing any jewelry, no ear rings, no wedding band, no watch. They don’t even come from the same planet.
A tall, slender man in his thirties sits at the far end of the bar where it curves around and ends in the wall--something to lean on if need be. It’s the opposite end from where the bartender takes orders from the cocktail waitresses. It’s a good place to watch the waitresses and the rest of the bar clientele. He watches one of the cocktail waitresses for a few minutes. She smiles at the bartender as she rattles off the list of drinks she needs, and the second he turns away and starts working on her order, her face is a total blank, completely losing it’s warmth, as if a light went off. And just then she catches the slender man watching her. Her eyes lock on his, and he finds it impossible to look away from that completely expressionless stare, as if it were a dare. When she finally turns away from the bar with her two vodka tonics and three 7&7s loaded on that tiny tray, he looks down the bar at the dark-haired, older woman who is watching him with a bemused expression on her very interesting face.
She raises one eyebrow and lifts her highball glass in a salute. He lifts his drink to salute her back and feels his face flush. He signals the bartender, and when he looks back up at her, she’s looking in the mirror behind the bar bottles. At first he thinks she’s looking at herself, but her face is completely unstudied, and it occurs to him she’s watching the table behind her. She has the rapt expression of a voyeur. When the bartender takes his order, the slender man also order’s one for “the great broad drinking the Old Fashioned,” he nods in her direction.
A small, aged, black man at the piano finishes “‘Round Midnight.” The slender man at the bar pays for both drinks as the bartender sets his in front of him, and leaves his stool to walk over and put a dollar in the pianists tip jar.
When he passes the back of the aging beauty’s barstool, she’s still watching the table behind her in the mirror. She sees him pass in front of them. When he walks back, after delivering his compliments to the pianist whose name turns out to be Bill Bailey, she turns her head and flashes him a high voltage smile. He smiles back. She says, “Hard to beat ‘Round Midnight' isn’t it?”
“It’s one of my favorites.”
“Thanks for the drink. Care to join me?”
“Sure, for a minute.”
Still smiling she says “My name’s Judith,” and extends her hand. She has long slender fingers. Her hand is soft but looks like it’s done some work in it’s day. There’s a small round scar just above her little finger. She has what’s called a French manicure.
He turns to her and says, “Would you like to share an order of escargot?”
“I’d love to.” Her lips are red and shiny. Her teeth are white and even. He asks her if she minds if he smokes.
“No, not at all, I used to smoke and I’ll enjoy yours vicariously. It’s one of the reasons I still come here. Most places are so sanitized these days. Lord I love Larry Horton for keeping his bar properly smoke-filled.” Again the almost southern accent.
“You know the owner?”
“It’s a small town. Everybody knows everybody else and their business. So, since I don’t recognize you, you must be new in town or passing through. There are few strangers at this restaurant, since it’s small and far off the interstate. How did you find our little treasure?”
“I spent the day at Dillard’s today and asked the manager where to eat. She recommended Horton’s, so here I am. Sorry I’m so rude. My name is Martin. Martin Laterite”
“How very French.”
“The name, yes. I’m named after a great-grandfather.” He waves the bartender back and ask for the escargot. He says it will take about fifteen or twenty minutes.
“I noticed that you’re wearing a wedding ring. I find that so touchingly sweet in a man. Were you shopping for your wife?”
“No, I was selling. It’s what I do for a living. I sell women’s designer sportswear.”
“God! What a hellish job for a man.”
“Most women think it would be a great job.”
“Well, unlike most women, I hate stores and shopping. Did you like Lilly?”
“Lilith Jacobson? The store manager?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Yeah, I do. She’s a strait shooter. I like her directness. And I’m grateful to her that I’m not eating at Howard Johnson’s or the golden arches.”
“I play bridge with her once a month. And she does my shopping. God bless her for that. She’s a terrific friend.”
“And a wonderful job she does if the outfit your wearing is her handiwork. It’s Ann Klein Couture and they don’t carry the couture line in-store. So you must be a very special customer.”
“Just a picky friend. Besides, I only buy a few pieces each year. It’s not that much more work to buy special things for me. She knows my wardrobe and only adds what’s missing. I’ll bet she’d be here with you if it weren’t for her husbands business party.”
“Why aren’t you at her party?”
“Because I’m here having a drink with you Martin.” she raises her glass and sips her drink.
Bill Bailey starts “Straight No Chaser”, and the bartender heads toward them with a plate of escargot. When they’re finished with their appetizer, the hostess comes over and tells him his table is ready whenever he is. He asks Judith to join him for dinner and to his surprise, she accepts. This scares him a little.
They are escorted by the hostess in her long black dress to a table by the only bank of windows in the crowded room. As the two women lead the way he watches them whispering to each other. They bump hips and he notices Judith’s ass. The bias cut of her silk-jersey skirt pulls slightly as she moves from foot to foot and her hips rock from side to side. Martin balls his dangling hand into a soft fist.
They don’t talk much during dinner, but he does find out that she’s married to a college professor at Southwest Missouri State who doesn’t have time to go out, so she goes out by herself. He notices she doesn’t wear a wedding ring and says, “Women who don’t wear wedding rings scare me.”
“They ought to scare you. You are married to a woman I presume. What’s she doing while you’re on the road?”
“Staying home with the kids, I hope.” When she laughs he notices her neck is long and white. She eats with relish and makes slightly sexual noises with her first few spoons full of lobster bisque. It is a soft moaning noise deep in her throat. He wonder’s why she and her husband aren’t at Lilly’s party. “Do You work?”
“You mean, do I work outside the home, honey? Yes I do. I’m the wife of a poor college professor, remember? I have to work so I can buy my Ann Klein Couture.” She throws back her head and laughs. Martin thinks about his penis.
After dinner he asks for the check and the waiter says the check has been taken care of. He says, “No, I’ll get the check! Judith, I travel on an expense account. Please let me get the check.”
She says, “I have nothing to do with this. It’s probably Larry or the guys in the kitchen.”
“Who was it? I’d like to thank him if it was the owner. And I’d want to thank the kitchen anyway for a great meal.”
The waiter says. “I’ve been asked not to say. I’m sorry.”
Martin pulls a twenty out of his wallet and leaves it on the table. He says, “Judith, would you like to have a cognac in the bar and maybe some dessert?”
“Yes, thank you. I will join you for an after dinner drink.”
The waiter, still hovering, pulls her chair out just as Martin reaches for it.
When they head back into the bar, the pianist is playing “For All We Know.”
They order cognac and sip it warmed. The crowd in the bar is thinning. Soon the kitchen crew starts coming in through the restaurant. It’s almost eleven. Before he gets a chance to invite her to his room, Judith stands up, nods to the two tall very-young men from the kitchen, and says to Martin, “My dates for the rest of the evening are off-duty and ready to escort me to my job.”
One of the two young men looks like Mick Jagger when he was twenty-something. The other looks like Jim Morrison alive. They hover a discreet distance from the drinking couple.
Judith leans over and whispers in Martin’s ear, “Our meal was comped by one of those two characters. They’re the chefs, and we’re going to the club I run for this rich boy who lives in Paducah. These guys want to go for the last strip show of the evening. They’d be very cross if I invited you. But I had a lovely evening with you Martin. Maybe next time you’re in town we can do it again.”
Frivolity?
Some of you might think I've lost my marbles, but you would be wrong. I have them in a bowl on the kitchen windowsill. I am just too tired of the crap that's coming out of the Clinton campaign to even comment. A toast to judgement anyone? So I have taken to entertaining myself, and in the process, perhaps a few of you. Before I became a blogger who stuck to politics and almost never swore on line, thanks to my administrator Phillip, I was a fiction writer, amassing thousands of pages of unpublished poetry, short stories and a big fat autobiographical novel. So I just might dip into the golden oldies of my prior incarnation. For those of you political purists, sorry. When Pennsylvania is over, I'll probably start writing about politics again. Or until Hillary does something I just can't take without a comment.
Love Comes Late To Some
Oh my god, I’ve fallen in love with a female blogger. I’m going to offer to sell my house and take her and her two Jedi to Mexico. She yearns for a warmer climate. Me, I’d rather go to Canada, because I heard they give health care to anybody who needs It, and god knows I need it. But if it’s a warm climate she wants, OK.
I kind of think that between Scarlet and me, we could probably even squeeze out a living writing snarky shit for fun. She has two Masters Degrees. I’m so dumb I’m not sure whether you have to capitalize Master’s Degrees or not, but I’m so impressed. One question, Scarlet. Why not just one Master’s Degree and then get a PhD. ? It’s like, every time I hear a perfectly smart woman say she’s going to get a Nursing Degree I want to ask, “Why not the MD?” Oh, who cares. Scarlet, start packing.
Dcup, darlin’ want to come?
I kind of think that between Scarlet and me, we could probably even squeeze out a living writing snarky shit for fun. She has two Masters Degrees. I’m so dumb I’m not sure whether you have to capitalize Master’s Degrees or not, but I’m so impressed. One question, Scarlet. Why not just one Master’s Degree and then get a PhD. ? It’s like, every time I hear a perfectly smart woman say she’s going to get a Nursing Degree I want to ask, “Why not the MD?” Oh, who cares. Scarlet, start packing.
Dcup, darlin’ want to come?
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Pligs
Pligs are in the news again! “Pligs” is kind of like the word “blog.” It’s Utah slang, and is short for polygamists. We practice Big Love in Utah. And the Plig Prophet, Warren Jepps running from the FBI took a band of Pligs to Texas where odd ball religious practices and patriarchy find rich and welcome soil. That’s where the news was yesterday and today. Little Plig girls were rescued and placed in protective custody and the rat bastard daddy/husband/brother/grandfather patriarch of this little band of fertile girls was arrested for having sexual relations with kids—who knows, maybe his own. It’s such a common story here that it surprises me it’s received front page coverage in the Salt Lake Tribune for two days. Top of the fold!
I grew up an outsider in Utah, and so will always have the outsiders curiosity and morbid fascination of the things I shouldn’t know about the strange practices of Mormons and religious wierdos of every stripe.
One of my friends when I came back to Salt Lake after my first foray abroad at the ripe old age of twenty one, told me about the young woman who married the worst schmuck from my high school. He was the son of a high-up, muckety-muck Mormon historian and professor at the University of Utah. And this insufferable dick’s mother was some paragon of Mormon womanhood with a title like Relief Society President, but really President in this context means Princess. The son of these two elevated and cultured Mo’s, as we called them (that we would be me and my atheist parents), was a truly creepy pedant, Philosopher king in his own mind, and nasty teasing prick. Because I was a loner, and pretty, in an odd sort of way, and because I smoked and hung out with his best friend, Lyndon (who was a great guy, artistic and mechanical, who taught me to drive his Austin Healey Sprite the right way, accelerating into and drifting corners on the narrow, steep winding roads of the many canyons on the outskirts of downtown Salt Lake) I ended up having to suffer the company of Lyndon’s friend, that rat bastard Bob.
So I come back from Italy to find that Bob has taken a wife. Not just any wife, but a sweet young thing, April, barely of age, youngest child of a Plig family. Lyndon and I had started hanging out again. This most likely is where I got the low-down on Bob’s young wife. Philosopher Kings do not do well with equals, they need student’s who worship them. A Philosopher King will never marry an equal, he also needs a servant. And isn’t this the very definition of a wife?
So, the story goes in April’s family, that the first time we met, I just showed up and knocked on their door. She answered, of course, (Philosopher Kings do not answer doors— that’s what servants do) and the first thing out of my mouth was, “I just wanted to meet the woman who was stupid enough to marry Bob Jacobson.”
I have no recollection of this supposed first meeting. It may not have happened at all, but the story has gone round so many times in exactly the same way for forty two years it has come to stand for fact. Sounds implausible to me for so many reasons, not least among them, the fact that I would not have wanted to risk having to spend even a second in that prick Bob’s presence, so unless I was positive he wasn’t there, it’s unlikely I’d just drop by. And that I could say such a nasty thing to a sweet young woman I’d never met before, is too horrible to contemplate. But it has come to stand for the kind of take-no-prisoners bitch I am, or was, or might have been, and when you’ve got a bad reputation, if you just can’t shake it, I say, run with it. In the final analysis, it explains a lot about how certain people react to me. So as you might guess, a lot of people claim to know me well, but I don’t really have a lot of close friends.
I grew up an outsider in Utah, and so will always have the outsiders curiosity and morbid fascination of the things I shouldn’t know about the strange practices of Mormons and religious wierdos of every stripe.
One of my friends when I came back to Salt Lake after my first foray abroad at the ripe old age of twenty one, told me about the young woman who married the worst schmuck from my high school. He was the son of a high-up, muckety-muck Mormon historian and professor at the University of Utah. And this insufferable dick’s mother was some paragon of Mormon womanhood with a title like Relief Society President, but really President in this context means Princess. The son of these two elevated and cultured Mo’s, as we called them (that we would be me and my atheist parents), was a truly creepy pedant, Philosopher king in his own mind, and nasty teasing prick. Because I was a loner, and pretty, in an odd sort of way, and because I smoked and hung out with his best friend, Lyndon (who was a great guy, artistic and mechanical, who taught me to drive his Austin Healey Sprite the right way, accelerating into and drifting corners on the narrow, steep winding roads of the many canyons on the outskirts of downtown Salt Lake) I ended up having to suffer the company of Lyndon’s friend, that rat bastard Bob.
So I come back from Italy to find that Bob has taken a wife. Not just any wife, but a sweet young thing, April, barely of age, youngest child of a Plig family. Lyndon and I had started hanging out again. This most likely is where I got the low-down on Bob’s young wife. Philosopher Kings do not do well with equals, they need student’s who worship them. A Philosopher King will never marry an equal, he also needs a servant. And isn’t this the very definition of a wife?
So, the story goes in April’s family, that the first time we met, I just showed up and knocked on their door. She answered, of course, (Philosopher Kings do not answer doors— that’s what servants do) and the first thing out of my mouth was, “I just wanted to meet the woman who was stupid enough to marry Bob Jacobson.”
I have no recollection of this supposed first meeting. It may not have happened at all, but the story has gone round so many times in exactly the same way for forty two years it has come to stand for fact. Sounds implausible to me for so many reasons, not least among them, the fact that I would not have wanted to risk having to spend even a second in that prick Bob’s presence, so unless I was positive he wasn’t there, it’s unlikely I’d just drop by. And that I could say such a nasty thing to a sweet young woman I’d never met before, is too horrible to contemplate. But it has come to stand for the kind of take-no-prisoners bitch I am, or was, or might have been, and when you’ve got a bad reputation, if you just can’t shake it, I say, run with it. In the final analysis, it explains a lot about how certain people react to me. So as you might guess, a lot of people claim to know me well, but I don’t really have a lot of close friends.
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Aging Barbie Takes On EST
I have a friend whose husband, Joe, went to EST. He became convinced that if she went to EST, too, she would learn that their problems were of her making. His issue was the death of their son following a horribly difficult birth. Despite the fact that the attending physician settled the malpractice suit against him for two million and change, Joe wasn’t satisfied. Mere millions could not compensate his loss or heal his grief. He began to obsess, looking for a place to heap more blame, enraged at his helplessness. He was rich and handsome, surrounded by a large and supportive Irish family. He was powerful and virile. This could not have happened to him, unless it was someone else’s fault.
Judy went through all the normal stages of insanity that the death of a child brings to a woman. It was her first child. A son. She was madly in love with Joe, and had moved back to Salt Lake, leaving New York and giving up her modeling career, to marry him and have this child. It wasn’t a difficult decision. Love does that to women. It was the real stuff— heart, mind, and soul. After months of grieving, she decided to go back to work here in Salt Lake, thinking it might bring her back to life. She quite simply needed to be among the living again.
And that’s when Joe snapped. That’s when he became convinced it was really her fault that their son died. It didn’t matter that her grief was as real and as intense as his own. Blaming the doctor wasn’t enough. He began to accuse her of every sort of carelessness in the gestation of his son. He even hired a private investigator, trying to prove that she smoked a cigarette or drank a martini while she was pregnant, to no avail. That’s when he went to EST. Then he seemed to think by making her go to EST she would see things his way. But it was presented as an ultimatum. Go, or get out. (If it had been me, I’d have packed and been gone in under a half an hour.) But Judy is a hell of a lot nicer than I am. She went to EST. She stayed for hours. She has described it to me, but the only thing that stuck in my mind was the name tags they made everybody wear, once they thought they’d found your button, the soft underbelly of your secret shame, your deepest hurt. One grossly obese woman had to wear the name tag FATSO. A woman with bad acne scars was tagged PIZZA FACE. A tall, thin, painfully shy man with a natural tonsure was stuck with CUE BALL. You get the idea. What I don’t get, is the purpose of this, but no matter. They gave her a name tag that read AGING BARBIE. She tore it up, threw it on the floor, said “Fuck you, EUNUCH!” and walked out.
Finally Joe drove Judy away. She left him in his fancy house with his fancy swimming pool and his fancy Jaguar and moved into the apartment of a model friend who was spending the winter in Italy. She kept her Volvo Sedan, but that’s about it. And her lack of interest in fighting for his things was so insulting to him he tried to sue her. Breach of Promise, or some bullshit like that. He did file for divorce on the grounds that she deserted him. But he kept hauling her into court for one frivolous bit of nonsense after another. Finally his lawyer told him he was going to get his ass thrown in jail if he didn’t stop harassing his ex-wife.
Joe’s rolling in dough and still miserable. Judy is working her ass off to pay down her attorney’s fees, and has managed to thrive. She works in an industry where the money’s pretty good. Judy and I know each other because we both work in the fashion/entertainment industry along with a large group of smart, funny women, and we have known each other for at least fifteen years. I am the oldest.
We have always worked in this industry, though most of us have college educations and other skills and talents. But we have the genetic make-up, and the right temperament. We are tall, thin, well muscled, long legged. We all have pretty or photogenic faces, we have good posture and carry ourselves well. That’s the basic material. I know plenty of women with the basic material who lack the nerve. It takes the ability to move like a good female impersonator, hutzpah enough to get up on a catwalk and strut your stuff, and that certain something that comes through in a photograph or on film. But despite the blue blood educations and the multilingualism, the great bones and the magazine covers, not one of my professional beauty friends feels beautiful. They are all flawed, imperfect, not good enough. Will never measure up to the standard they themselves have helped to set.
Barbie is forty nine this year, or so I’m told. I’ll be sixty four. That would have made me fourteen the year Barbie made her famous debut. Too old to have much interest in dolls. What I did notice about her was her remarkable resemblance to the fold-outs in Dad’s Playboy Magazines. She also had a striking resemblance to the cartoon women I used to doodle in boring classes when I was eight, nine, and ten. Carl Jung would have been proud of that child’s tapping into some collective unconscious, brewing a life-warping icon.
Judy has been working very hard and quite successfully at paying off her attorney’s fees. She has gone from model, actor, make-up artist and stylist to Art Director, and Producer. Once she is free of the debt, created by Joe’s wounded ego because he couldn’t break her, her next major purchase is going to be some very fine cosmetic surgery. She has just turned forty-five (though most twenty year old men see her as maybe thirty, and would give their right nut to have one hot, sweaty night with her).
Judy was five the year Mattel made Barbie. She was the perfect target. I started modeling the year after Barbie appeared on the scene. Too old to recognize the influence she would have on the next generation of women, beautiful or not. But you’d have to be lobotomized in this day and age not to see the damage she’s done to four generations of boys and girls, and the vast fortunes that have been made as a result of that damage. Think anorexia, bulimia, anti-depressant, shrink, breast implants, facelifts, liposuction, cosmetics, clothing, shoes, podiatrist, manicurist, hairstylist, subscriptions and prescriptions. And on and on and on it goes. None of us ever quite perfect enough. The world’s economies rise and fall according to the magnitude of our need to please, and how far below Barbie’s standard we have sunk.
When I was a young woman, women’s bodies were supposed to be soft and yielding. Remember Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren? Since Barbie, the word hard-body has come into common usage when referring to the ideal for all female bodies. If it were not related to some seismic shift in our collective unconscious, it would have gone out of fashion ten years after it came into fashion. It is only post-Barbie that eating disorders has become an epidemic among teenage girls. It is also post-Barbie that the term hard-body came into the lexicon. It isn’t even a code, for Christ’s sake, it’s literal. In order for a young woman today to be OK in her own skin, she must have lean muscle over bone, breasts too large for her rib-cage and shoulders to support, hips too small for her frame, and golden highlights and a perfect cut to her long, lustrous hair. If she’s Asian, she won’t feel pretty because she isn’t tall enough, and she thinks her eyes need surgery to correct the fact that she’s not Anglo. She will also, most likely, have permed and/or colored her gorgeous, shiny, strong, straight black hair. It will, by the time she’s twenty one, have become dull, lifeless, frizzy, with a reddish cast to it. Ditto Hispanics and African American women.
I know it’s a stretch to blame the mass neurosis of our entire sex on Barbie, and that’s not exactly what I’m doing. Some evil genius at Mattel was operating in the same conflux of cosmic consciousness as the doodling girl and Heff, mindlessly following some lame melange of images swirling around in post-war, nuclear, suburban, pre-feminist Madison Ave. America to all create the same vision at once. And out of thin air, we have Barbie, icon. She’s no queen of the universe, has no magical powers, unless having huge tits counts. So now, instead of trying to fight it, I embrace it, this brain drain, this tasteless, tacky, permanently tip-toed, tit’s ahoy, cotton- candy haired freak. You go, girl!
Just last night, I asked a very intelligent, handsome, and charming man what the icon, the role-model, for his generation of boys was, and he said, “Probably some super-hero, some action character, like GI Joe or Conon the Barbarian.”
“Do you carry that image into adulthood?”
“Shit yes.”
Judy went through all the normal stages of insanity that the death of a child brings to a woman. It was her first child. A son. She was madly in love with Joe, and had moved back to Salt Lake, leaving New York and giving up her modeling career, to marry him and have this child. It wasn’t a difficult decision. Love does that to women. It was the real stuff— heart, mind, and soul. After months of grieving, she decided to go back to work here in Salt Lake, thinking it might bring her back to life. She quite simply needed to be among the living again.
And that’s when Joe snapped. That’s when he became convinced it was really her fault that their son died. It didn’t matter that her grief was as real and as intense as his own. Blaming the doctor wasn’t enough. He began to accuse her of every sort of carelessness in the gestation of his son. He even hired a private investigator, trying to prove that she smoked a cigarette or drank a martini while she was pregnant, to no avail. That’s when he went to EST. Then he seemed to think by making her go to EST she would see things his way. But it was presented as an ultimatum. Go, or get out. (If it had been me, I’d have packed and been gone in under a half an hour.) But Judy is a hell of a lot nicer than I am. She went to EST. She stayed for hours. She has described it to me, but the only thing that stuck in my mind was the name tags they made everybody wear, once they thought they’d found your button, the soft underbelly of your secret shame, your deepest hurt. One grossly obese woman had to wear the name tag FATSO. A woman with bad acne scars was tagged PIZZA FACE. A tall, thin, painfully shy man with a natural tonsure was stuck with CUE BALL. You get the idea. What I don’t get, is the purpose of this, but no matter. They gave her a name tag that read AGING BARBIE. She tore it up, threw it on the floor, said “Fuck you, EUNUCH!” and walked out.
Finally Joe drove Judy away. She left him in his fancy house with his fancy swimming pool and his fancy Jaguar and moved into the apartment of a model friend who was spending the winter in Italy. She kept her Volvo Sedan, but that’s about it. And her lack of interest in fighting for his things was so insulting to him he tried to sue her. Breach of Promise, or some bullshit like that. He did file for divorce on the grounds that she deserted him. But he kept hauling her into court for one frivolous bit of nonsense after another. Finally his lawyer told him he was going to get his ass thrown in jail if he didn’t stop harassing his ex-wife.
Joe’s rolling in dough and still miserable. Judy is working her ass off to pay down her attorney’s fees, and has managed to thrive. She works in an industry where the money’s pretty good. Judy and I know each other because we both work in the fashion/entertainment industry along with a large group of smart, funny women, and we have known each other for at least fifteen years. I am the oldest.
We have always worked in this industry, though most of us have college educations and other skills and talents. But we have the genetic make-up, and the right temperament. We are tall, thin, well muscled, long legged. We all have pretty or photogenic faces, we have good posture and carry ourselves well. That’s the basic material. I know plenty of women with the basic material who lack the nerve. It takes the ability to move like a good female impersonator, hutzpah enough to get up on a catwalk and strut your stuff, and that certain something that comes through in a photograph or on film. But despite the blue blood educations and the multilingualism, the great bones and the magazine covers, not one of my professional beauty friends feels beautiful. They are all flawed, imperfect, not good enough. Will never measure up to the standard they themselves have helped to set.
Barbie is forty nine this year, or so I’m told. I’ll be sixty four. That would have made me fourteen the year Barbie made her famous debut. Too old to have much interest in dolls. What I did notice about her was her remarkable resemblance to the fold-outs in Dad’s Playboy Magazines. She also had a striking resemblance to the cartoon women I used to doodle in boring classes when I was eight, nine, and ten. Carl Jung would have been proud of that child’s tapping into some collective unconscious, brewing a life-warping icon.
Judy has been working very hard and quite successfully at paying off her attorney’s fees. She has gone from model, actor, make-up artist and stylist to Art Director, and Producer. Once she is free of the debt, created by Joe’s wounded ego because he couldn’t break her, her next major purchase is going to be some very fine cosmetic surgery. She has just turned forty-five (though most twenty year old men see her as maybe thirty, and would give their right nut to have one hot, sweaty night with her).
Judy was five the year Mattel made Barbie. She was the perfect target. I started modeling the year after Barbie appeared on the scene. Too old to recognize the influence she would have on the next generation of women, beautiful or not. But you’d have to be lobotomized in this day and age not to see the damage she’s done to four generations of boys and girls, and the vast fortunes that have been made as a result of that damage. Think anorexia, bulimia, anti-depressant, shrink, breast implants, facelifts, liposuction, cosmetics, clothing, shoes, podiatrist, manicurist, hairstylist, subscriptions and prescriptions. And on and on and on it goes. None of us ever quite perfect enough. The world’s economies rise and fall according to the magnitude of our need to please, and how far below Barbie’s standard we have sunk.
When I was a young woman, women’s bodies were supposed to be soft and yielding. Remember Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren? Since Barbie, the word hard-body has come into common usage when referring to the ideal for all female bodies. If it were not related to some seismic shift in our collective unconscious, it would have gone out of fashion ten years after it came into fashion. It is only post-Barbie that eating disorders has become an epidemic among teenage girls. It is also post-Barbie that the term hard-body came into the lexicon. It isn’t even a code, for Christ’s sake, it’s literal. In order for a young woman today to be OK in her own skin, she must have lean muscle over bone, breasts too large for her rib-cage and shoulders to support, hips too small for her frame, and golden highlights and a perfect cut to her long, lustrous hair. If she’s Asian, she won’t feel pretty because she isn’t tall enough, and she thinks her eyes need surgery to correct the fact that she’s not Anglo. She will also, most likely, have permed and/or colored her gorgeous, shiny, strong, straight black hair. It will, by the time she’s twenty one, have become dull, lifeless, frizzy, with a reddish cast to it. Ditto Hispanics and African American women.
I know it’s a stretch to blame the mass neurosis of our entire sex on Barbie, and that’s not exactly what I’m doing. Some evil genius at Mattel was operating in the same conflux of cosmic consciousness as the doodling girl and Heff, mindlessly following some lame melange of images swirling around in post-war, nuclear, suburban, pre-feminist Madison Ave. America to all create the same vision at once. And out of thin air, we have Barbie, icon. She’s no queen of the universe, has no magical powers, unless having huge tits counts. So now, instead of trying to fight it, I embrace it, this brain drain, this tasteless, tacky, permanently tip-toed, tit’s ahoy, cotton- candy haired freak. You go, girl!
Just last night, I asked a very intelligent, handsome, and charming man what the icon, the role-model, for his generation of boys was, and he said, “Probably some super-hero, some action character, like GI Joe or Conon the Barbarian.”
“Do you carry that image into adulthood?”
“Shit yes.”
Friday, April 4, 2008
Thanks for the 3 AM Phone Call Hillary
Well, thanks to Clinton’s famously stupid 3 AM phone call ad John McCain gets to save a bunch of money on the labor of creative types and production costs and the work of tots paid once eons ago. Ready made ad to clomp right into. McCain for Pres at 3AM answering the phone. Jesus, didn’t we just see this? Yes, this is the third go round for this photo file ad. Poor kids only got paid once and their innocent little faces have been whored around for free for at least a decade. There should be a law against politicians stealing babies they haven’t paid for in the service for a candidate they won’t vote for. And then to have their little pretend to be sleeping faces used in the service of some bitches Birth of a Nation, KKK, scare the bejesus out of us ‘cause of the boogie man hiding in the bushes bullshit. What the hell? Doesn’t anybody have any ethics anymore?
Thursday, April 3, 2008
Ick! Harold Ickes is Whispering
Where do the Clinton’s get these guys? Harold Ickes is a weaselly looking man, who is whispering in the ears of any greatly connected democrat he can corner. Oh god the thought of that just made me shudder and mouth-puke a little. Sending in the thugs to stir the tiny amount of crap they have on Obama—his pastor said bad things about America, and he can’t bowl for shit, man. That’s it??? Well, let’s all take a bowling lesson, and spend some time in a predominantly black church in America (hell, go to the grocery store and you might hear a little grousing about what is being done in the name of America that shames us all, right now). Go anywhere this Sunday and talk about what makes us proud to be Americans.
And as for the Clinton’s and the company they keep? Well, less said the better, or I really might lose my cookies. But she is bleeding super-duper-delegates, slowly but inexorably. Now Ickes is looking for a fix. Shudder.
And as for the Clinton’s and the company they keep? Well, less said the better, or I really might lose my cookies. But she is bleeding super-duper-delegates, slowly but inexorably. Now Ickes is looking for a fix. Shudder.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
The Myth Of Manliness
A few years ago a man was hiking and camping in (I think) the canyon-lands of Southern Utah. He found himself pinned by his own perilous machismo. His arm or hand trapped under a rock too large for him to move. The reason this story got big headlines, was his cutting off of his trapped limb to free himself. I remember at the time thinking that his “heroism” should really have been called “stupidity,” and the story would have been about what not to do in the wilderness, instead of deifying this reckless man. Mostly male reporters and pundits told this story with slavish admiration for such a manly man. I feel far more sympathy for the wolves and coyotes who gnaw off their legs to free themselves from traps set by cattlemen and ranchers on mostly forest service lands leased out for chicken feed. But that’s another story.
I have, over the past couple of years, heard Tucker Carlson whine on TV about his fear that we, the America people, would see ourselves as “unmanly” if we leave Iraq before we’ve finished “the job.” And the first thing out of my mouth as I sit there listening to him say this crap, is “Jesus Christ Tucker, are you so insecure in your manhood, your manliness that you would continue this stupid slaughter just to protect your notion of yourself as virile? “ Tucker, your fear and loathing of the feminine is showing. Wouldn’t we be better served in the world, and in our own eyes, if we were seen as smart and careful with our awesome might, not just reckless and blundering as we have been in our nearly eight years of macho politics and policy, led by the “manly” “cowboy” “from Texas?” I put those last three in quotations because they are inventions, designed to make a rich boy from Connecticut, sent to the best schools money buy can buy, (and who claims to be proud of his gentleman’s C’s or B’s and his inability to speak the English language with anything amounting to grace or intelligence), who was reckless and foolish in youth, avoided real military service during The Vietnam War, a man who never succeeded at anything without the connections his family and his class provided to keep him from being a total embarrassment to them and their peers, steal an election and put him in office as the PRESIDENT OF THESE UNITED STATES! !?? Where the hell is the manliness in any of that. That looks like cronies making sure cronies get richer and stay that way.
Tucker, I’m not picking on you. I just happen to prefer MSNBC over CNN, but other than Keith Olbermann, you have all become unwatchable. Chris Matthews can’t ask a question of one of his guests or panelists without interrupting or talking over the guest and answering the question himself. He is so damned rude and dismissive of anyone who doesn’t share his own prejudices that he has become a joke. I got so sick of having him describe our only female candidate running for President as “strident” and her laugh as a “cackle” that I had to stop watching him. Do either of those things have anything to do with her fitness to be President? Are we really that shallow? His manliness is showing a little too much, and it’s embarrassing to look at. Ditto Lou Dobbs on CNN with his rabid hatred of “illegal immigrants.” Is Lou Dobbs descended from Native Americans? I am. And I look at all you white guys as Illegal Immigrants. A pox on all your immigrant ancestors and their manliness behind a gun, spreading “Democracy” and calling it Manifest Destiny (just a code word for pillage and plunder, as far as I can see) in their quest to rape the world of all it’s gifts. Take your manliness and shove it.
I’ve been married three times and when I wasn’t married I usually had a lover. I can speak with some experience about men and their strength. Let’s take illness and the way we cope with it as an example. Every man I lived with and/or loved has taken ill at one time or another. Their illnesses have, for the most part, been minor—colds and flues. But my last husband had serious illnesses throughout our relationship. But in all the relationships there is a common thread when it comes to nurturance. When my loved one is sick, I provide the comfort and care. I get the pail for my love to puke in and put it beside the bed for him. I get the cool damp cloth to soothe his fevered brow. If he needs and wants bathing, I run the bath, wash his back and shampoo his hair and whatever else needs washing. I provide the clean bed clothes. I change the sheets that I washed. I fix the broth or chicken soup. I serve it to him in bed. I do these things out of love and simple human kindness. But God forbid that I get sick and need care and comfort. If I’m sick enough to need that pail beside my bed, you can bet your ass I’m the one who gets it. I have never been nurtured by a man. Not one.
This is not to say I haven’t been treated with kindness or generosity by a man. There’s a difference. I have observed that, in illness and pain, women are far manlier than men. Women take care of themselves, and their family members, and their friends. Women seem to see themselves vitally, profoundly connected to a larger world outside themselves in a caring, careful way. Men seem to see the world as an extension of their egos. Are they manly enough to control it, shape it to fit their image of themselves? Conquest and acquisition seem to be the male model for manliness. Capitalism is the perfect model of a manly economic system. It is brutal, has little regard for any value other than the acquisition of wealth, and it requires an underclass to do the work. It also relies on Family Values (code words for unpaid labor by women, and control of women’s bodies). Capitalism would come to a screeching halt if we gave a monetary value to the slave-labor of women in families. And now that it takes two or three incomes for the working poor to survive in this brutal system, most of these women (so cherished by the right-wing fundamentalist white males who have been our ruling class) now get to work for nothing at home, and for minimum wages in the work place, usually without health care, unless their husbands are lucky enough to have some kind of benefits package that covers family members. That is, if their husbands have not abandoned them and moved on to their trophy-wife phase. Think of the fine example set by Rudy. Think Newt. Think Fred (Law and Order) Thompson. Think McCain. These are manly men. Yeah, right.
I have, over the past couple of years, heard Tucker Carlson whine on TV about his fear that we, the America people, would see ourselves as “unmanly” if we leave Iraq before we’ve finished “the job.” And the first thing out of my mouth as I sit there listening to him say this crap, is “Jesus Christ Tucker, are you so insecure in your manhood, your manliness that you would continue this stupid slaughter just to protect your notion of yourself as virile? “ Tucker, your fear and loathing of the feminine is showing. Wouldn’t we be better served in the world, and in our own eyes, if we were seen as smart and careful with our awesome might, not just reckless and blundering as we have been in our nearly eight years of macho politics and policy, led by the “manly” “cowboy” “from Texas?” I put those last three in quotations because they are inventions, designed to make a rich boy from Connecticut, sent to the best schools money buy can buy, (and who claims to be proud of his gentleman’s C’s or B’s and his inability to speak the English language with anything amounting to grace or intelligence), who was reckless and foolish in youth, avoided real military service during The Vietnam War, a man who never succeeded at anything without the connections his family and his class provided to keep him from being a total embarrassment to them and their peers, steal an election and put him in office as the PRESIDENT OF THESE UNITED STATES! !?? Where the hell is the manliness in any of that. That looks like cronies making sure cronies get richer and stay that way.
Tucker, I’m not picking on you. I just happen to prefer MSNBC over CNN, but other than Keith Olbermann, you have all become unwatchable. Chris Matthews can’t ask a question of one of his guests or panelists without interrupting or talking over the guest and answering the question himself. He is so damned rude and dismissive of anyone who doesn’t share his own prejudices that he has become a joke. I got so sick of having him describe our only female candidate running for President as “strident” and her laugh as a “cackle” that I had to stop watching him. Do either of those things have anything to do with her fitness to be President? Are we really that shallow? His manliness is showing a little too much, and it’s embarrassing to look at. Ditto Lou Dobbs on CNN with his rabid hatred of “illegal immigrants.” Is Lou Dobbs descended from Native Americans? I am. And I look at all you white guys as Illegal Immigrants. A pox on all your immigrant ancestors and their manliness behind a gun, spreading “Democracy” and calling it Manifest Destiny (just a code word for pillage and plunder, as far as I can see) in their quest to rape the world of all it’s gifts. Take your manliness and shove it.
I’ve been married three times and when I wasn’t married I usually had a lover. I can speak with some experience about men and their strength. Let’s take illness and the way we cope with it as an example. Every man I lived with and/or loved has taken ill at one time or another. Their illnesses have, for the most part, been minor—colds and flues. But my last husband had serious illnesses throughout our relationship. But in all the relationships there is a common thread when it comes to nurturance. When my loved one is sick, I provide the comfort and care. I get the pail for my love to puke in and put it beside the bed for him. I get the cool damp cloth to soothe his fevered brow. If he needs and wants bathing, I run the bath, wash his back and shampoo his hair and whatever else needs washing. I provide the clean bed clothes. I change the sheets that I washed. I fix the broth or chicken soup. I serve it to him in bed. I do these things out of love and simple human kindness. But God forbid that I get sick and need care and comfort. If I’m sick enough to need that pail beside my bed, you can bet your ass I’m the one who gets it. I have never been nurtured by a man. Not one.
This is not to say I haven’t been treated with kindness or generosity by a man. There’s a difference. I have observed that, in illness and pain, women are far manlier than men. Women take care of themselves, and their family members, and their friends. Women seem to see themselves vitally, profoundly connected to a larger world outside themselves in a caring, careful way. Men seem to see the world as an extension of their egos. Are they manly enough to control it, shape it to fit their image of themselves? Conquest and acquisition seem to be the male model for manliness. Capitalism is the perfect model of a manly economic system. It is brutal, has little regard for any value other than the acquisition of wealth, and it requires an underclass to do the work. It also relies on Family Values (code words for unpaid labor by women, and control of women’s bodies). Capitalism would come to a screeching halt if we gave a monetary value to the slave-labor of women in families. And now that it takes two or three incomes for the working poor to survive in this brutal system, most of these women (so cherished by the right-wing fundamentalist white males who have been our ruling class) now get to work for nothing at home, and for minimum wages in the work place, usually without health care, unless their husbands are lucky enough to have some kind of benefits package that covers family members. That is, if their husbands have not abandoned them and moved on to their trophy-wife phase. Think of the fine example set by Rudy. Think Newt. Think Fred (Law and Order) Thompson. Think McCain. These are manly men. Yeah, right.
Smokin'
I’m sick of all the pious bullshit I have to take everyday from almost everyone because I smoke. I’m sick of the righteous, zealous indignation of non-smokers who know I’m addicted to a dangerous legal substance (that was pushed on me from every corner of my society since birth to fifty) yet still expect me to STOP! because they think I should. Why not the same kind of fascistic attack on the civil rights of drinkers? No drinking in public places. No drinking in the presence of children. No drinking in your own apartment! Thank God I own a house. I hate cell phone users who talk on the phone non-stop when they are out to lunch with a friend or sweetheart. Should we prohibit this noxious behavior because it offends me?
I was born in 1944. My dad was fighting in France when I was born in Paris, Texas in the hospital on the Army Base there. I’ll bet the doctor who delivered me was smoking while he whacked me on the bottom. My mother was smoking in her hospital room while she fed me from a bottle while her perfect breasts pained her no end as her milk began to dry up. It was the thing to do in 1944.
We moved to Salt Lake City before I was three and the years went on. I survived in our turbulent family, and just before it split into it’s sad little parts, my mother taught me to smoke. I was remarkably good at it. Granted, smoke is always better fresh than second hand. I learned to French inhale in short order and was amazing her friends at cocktail parties. I could do plenty in the smoking department. It’s the only thing I was ever praised for. Well, at least the most normal thing I was praised for.
I was five when our family flew into it’s individual pieces. I got sent to Sherman, Texas to live with my mother’s brother and his wife. They were childless and happy to have me, so made no objections to my smoking. Everybody smoked everywhere, anyway. And it was kind of cute. I was well cared for at my aunt and uncles. Taught things, too. Like, how to shampoo my own hair, roll a pin curl, scrub my ankles with soap and water. My mother never showed me anything except how to smoke and she groused about all the work I was for her. When she came to visit me on my birthday, she called me a prissy little thing. Said I looked like a poodle. Then when she whirled me around playing airplane with me, my sweaty hands slipped out of hers and I went flying into the backyard table and broke two ribs. We smoked a cigarette together and then she left.
Six months later, just before Christmas she came and got me and we rode the train to Salt Lake smoking all the way. There was even a special car on the train called the smoking car. That didn’t mean you couldn’t smoke everywhere else. We smoked in the dinning car. We smoked in the toilet, we smoked everywhere. Everyone did.
She married into a well-to-do family, and everybody in that family smoked. My new grandfather was one of Salt Lake City’s most prominent physicians. Chief of Staff at St. Marks and Holy Cross Hospitals. He was a general practitioner and surgeon. He smoked. Everywhere, all the time. While he was examining you in the office a smoke dangled from his fleshy lips. He probably smoked in the operating room.
In every car we rode in everyone smoked summer and winter. Every time we ate, someone had a cigarette going at the table. We smoked at the movies.
Now I’m 63 and remarkably healthy. I have high blood pressure. Everyone In my family did. No one died of cancer. All the men died of heart attack and all the women in my mother’s family died of vascular dementia. I took care of my mother once she couldn’t care for herself anymore. She was incontinent, didn’t recognize anyone, not even herself. She quit smoking in her fifties. She died in her early eighties when her brain stopped sending the signal to her mouth to chew or swallow. She died on Christmas morning, two days after her birthday.
My doctor, who sees me seldom (because of my relative good health), never fails to lecture me about the dangers of smoking. He listens to my lungs and shakes his head, unable to look anything but disappointed that they are clear. No, cancer doesn’t scare me.
I was born in 1944. My dad was fighting in France when I was born in Paris, Texas in the hospital on the Army Base there. I’ll bet the doctor who delivered me was smoking while he whacked me on the bottom. My mother was smoking in her hospital room while she fed me from a bottle while her perfect breasts pained her no end as her milk began to dry up. It was the thing to do in 1944.
We moved to Salt Lake City before I was three and the years went on. I survived in our turbulent family, and just before it split into it’s sad little parts, my mother taught me to smoke. I was remarkably good at it. Granted, smoke is always better fresh than second hand. I learned to French inhale in short order and was amazing her friends at cocktail parties. I could do plenty in the smoking department. It’s the only thing I was ever praised for. Well, at least the most normal thing I was praised for.
I was five when our family flew into it’s individual pieces. I got sent to Sherman, Texas to live with my mother’s brother and his wife. They were childless and happy to have me, so made no objections to my smoking. Everybody smoked everywhere, anyway. And it was kind of cute. I was well cared for at my aunt and uncles. Taught things, too. Like, how to shampoo my own hair, roll a pin curl, scrub my ankles with soap and water. My mother never showed me anything except how to smoke and she groused about all the work I was for her. When she came to visit me on my birthday, she called me a prissy little thing. Said I looked like a poodle. Then when she whirled me around playing airplane with me, my sweaty hands slipped out of hers and I went flying into the backyard table and broke two ribs. We smoked a cigarette together and then she left.
Six months later, just before Christmas she came and got me and we rode the train to Salt Lake smoking all the way. There was even a special car on the train called the smoking car. That didn’t mean you couldn’t smoke everywhere else. We smoked in the dinning car. We smoked in the toilet, we smoked everywhere. Everyone did.
She married into a well-to-do family, and everybody in that family smoked. My new grandfather was one of Salt Lake City’s most prominent physicians. Chief of Staff at St. Marks and Holy Cross Hospitals. He was a general practitioner and surgeon. He smoked. Everywhere, all the time. While he was examining you in the office a smoke dangled from his fleshy lips. He probably smoked in the operating room.
In every car we rode in everyone smoked summer and winter. Every time we ate, someone had a cigarette going at the table. We smoked at the movies.
Now I’m 63 and remarkably healthy. I have high blood pressure. Everyone In my family did. No one died of cancer. All the men died of heart attack and all the women in my mother’s family died of vascular dementia. I took care of my mother once she couldn’t care for herself anymore. She was incontinent, didn’t recognize anyone, not even herself. She quit smoking in her fifties. She died in her early eighties when her brain stopped sending the signal to her mouth to chew or swallow. She died on Christmas morning, two days after her birthday.
My doctor, who sees me seldom (because of my relative good health), never fails to lecture me about the dangers of smoking. He listens to my lungs and shakes his head, unable to look anything but disappointed that they are clear. No, cancer doesn’t scare me.
A Man We'll Call Ted
I know a man. Let’s say his name is Ted. And he works for a big multi-national conglomerate like Microsoft, or IBM. Let’s say his salary is a nice simple number like $300,000.00 , plus bonuses, stock options, commissions, and a great retirement and benefits package. He owns his own home, and it was paid for twenty years ago. He drives a nice conservative, understated little silver sports car. According to Ted, he’s played the Market since he was in his teens, at an average annual rate of overall return on investment at 22%. But he hates to spend money that won’t have a tangible, predictable, advantageous (preferably monetary) rate of exchange. He is both so cheap and fussy, he takes his laundry to a Laundromat and irons his own shirts, which despite the fact that they are clean and well pressed are hopelessly outdated.
He wants what he fantasizes the love of a good, pretty woman with long hair, of child bearing age, will bring to his cold, emotionally impoverished and affection starved life. He’ll never get what he craves, because he places no value on those very things that will transform his life--the labor and love of a good, pretty woman with long hair, of child bearing age. And Ted, while we’re talking here, take a look in the mirror. You may be a nanosecond under fifty, but you’re bald and gray and wrinkled, honey. If I were you, I’d be using a good (and therefore expensive) exfollient daily and consulting with a good plastic surgeon for those dark bags under your eyes, and that incipient double chin. And as long as you’ve undergone the risk of general anesthesia, why not get the small pot-belly and that spare tire you call “love handles” liposuctioned. He needs an image consultant, and if I were Ted, I’d pay a top notch interior decorator to make the college-guy-apartment-style house of his into something inviting.
So Ted, please, pull your bloated wallet from your sagging back pocket and stop asking your good, pretty, women-friends with short-hair, who are over child-bearing age, and have too much to do already, to re-decorate your fucking house for free. Grow up fellows. Get a clue. If you aren’t as pretty as the women you want to date, offer something else of equal value. This is capitalism! This is America! Why the hell shouldn’t she prosper? Buy her a car! Set her up in an condo! Buy her big-carat diamonds set in platinum. This isn’t Rumania, and it isn’t 1950 for Christ sake.
He wants what he fantasizes the love of a good, pretty woman with long hair, of child bearing age, will bring to his cold, emotionally impoverished and affection starved life. He’ll never get what he craves, because he places no value on those very things that will transform his life--the labor and love of a good, pretty woman with long hair, of child bearing age. And Ted, while we’re talking here, take a look in the mirror. You may be a nanosecond under fifty, but you’re bald and gray and wrinkled, honey. If I were you, I’d be using a good (and therefore expensive) exfollient daily and consulting with a good plastic surgeon for those dark bags under your eyes, and that incipient double chin. And as long as you’ve undergone the risk of general anesthesia, why not get the small pot-belly and that spare tire you call “love handles” liposuctioned. He needs an image consultant, and if I were Ted, I’d pay a top notch interior decorator to make the college-guy-apartment-style house of his into something inviting.
So Ted, please, pull your bloated wallet from your sagging back pocket and stop asking your good, pretty, women-friends with short-hair, who are over child-bearing age, and have too much to do already, to re-decorate your fucking house for free. Grow up fellows. Get a clue. If you aren’t as pretty as the women you want to date, offer something else of equal value. This is capitalism! This is America! Why the hell shouldn’t she prosper? Buy her a car! Set her up in an condo! Buy her big-carat diamonds set in platinum. This isn’t Rumania, and it isn’t 1950 for Christ sake.
Monday, March 31, 2008
Aging Barbies Take On Capitalism
Beauty is to certain women what money is to certain men. One can never have enough. You know who you are. If you’ve spent more on cosmetic surgeries and Botox injections over the last five years than you did for your college education, I’m talking about you.
I have a problem with the fact that not one single woman I know is really secure that she looks all right. And I plan to make the case that it’s because of gluttonously rich men, and the culture created by their wild, unchecked, gluttonous greed and their need to objectify women and turn them into commodities, that keeps my friends, and women everywhere, insecure in their very skins--not good enough on a cellular level. I think it’s time for us to make those really big bucks, capitalizing on the potbellies, saggy man-boobs, lap flaps, wattles and jowls, baldness, crotch rot, stinky feet, pee stains, flaky, dry, itching skin, actinic keratosis, weak chins, beady eyes, bad teeth, bad breath, terrible wardrobe and all the other plagues of carbuncles and adult on-set acne that men are prone to after a certain age, after the testosterone levels start to drop off, and the prostate starts to swell and those pesky seminal vesicles start plugging up. After they’ve reached that famous sexual peak--right around twenty or so, when mommy stops buying their clothes, they should be just the right age to start to capitalize on their most secret fears and insecurities. I’m sure we can come up with a few they haven’t even imagined yet.
I’ve spent my entire working life, some forty years, in the fashion/beauty/entertainment industry. In the late-sixties I suffered a brief crisis of conscience and got a job in an inner-city community center as an organizer of programs for disadvantaged (a euphemism for minority) girls and women. Before I organized any programs, I thought I ought to get to know the women who used the center, and find out what programs they wanted organized. After a month of meetings and polling, the vote was in. They wanted beauty pageants and fashion shows. They wanted modeling classes and lessons on how to apply cosmetics. They wanted classes and seminars on how to make the most of the way they looked. Their whole lives were focused on how they looked. It was what I was running from, and all they wanted. It woke me up to the real power of advertising. I had to think long and hard about that one. And even I had to admit, that for most of them, the only way they were going to escape the poverty that surrounded and invaded their lives, was to look acceptable, or better yet, good, to (mostly male) white folks who shared the white, male values and appalling lack of taste of the predominant culture that did the hiring. It meant the difference between getting out and up or getting left behind.
I’ve heard the most beautiful women agonize about some imagined imperfection in their appearance that will make them forever second rate, a virtual failure, not good enough. I can feel you assuming that I’m talking about some air-head bimbette. But, I assure you, that I am not. In my group of fashion-model friends who, for the most part, represent the advertised ideal; there are, out of eight women, two Ph.Ds., one MBA, one Masters in Social Work, a successful advertising executive, and the other three are all college graduates successfully working in creative fields. We appeared in the very ads that made the rest of you realize you were too fat, and you had no taste. Despite the fact that we had been given enormous power because we were perceived as beautiful, we didn't really believe we were. And beauty is a double edged sword, much like great wealth. You never know whether someone who professes to adore you, can see past your obvious assets.
Beauty is like money, and then again it isn’t. It can come and it can go. But you can’t horde it like Midas. There is not enough collagen or Botox in the world to hold back the social and professional black hole that reaching the age of fifty, for a woman, sends you to forever. Who knows how much you’ll need as you get older, and what happens to the Botox when it’s been injected between your eyebrows every six months for twenty years? Apparently for certain men, say, someone like The Donald, there isn’t enough money. For Ivana and Marla I’d bet the money is only a means to an end. Enough trips to their favorite Paris couturiers and cosmetic surgeons to keep them desirable long enough to marry the next tub-of-lard in a bad toupee with more money than The Donald. I long for the day when Ivana and Marla don’t give a rat’s ass how they look, and are famous and recognized for their brilliant and visionary investing strategy in new male potency products. I want to hear that they have endowed a new department of research at Johns Hopkins devoted to elongating the bones of men who have been born with the unfortunate affliction of diminished height, or DH.
I know far too many professionally successful women who fall in love with seemingly appropriate men, and within the space of a year they are still working a full time job, still juggling a shared custody arrangement with their ex-husbands, still keeping their own homes livable and attractive, while also playing pretend corporate wife to the new boyfriend. Pretty soon he starts complaining because she forgot to pick-up his cleaning on her way from day-care to work. Nine out of ten of these women require antidepressants, psycho-therapy and/or other medication.
Viagra, and it’s many siblings, gives me hope that equality of capitalist opportunity is about to arrive. We have located the very mother lode, the throbbing, needy heart of male insecurities, and it is just the beginning. Any new product, drug, or procedure that will give a man a bigger, harder dick will sell at any price. Start investing, girlfriends. The future’s looking bright.
I have a problem with the fact that not one single woman I know is really secure that she looks all right. And I plan to make the case that it’s because of gluttonously rich men, and the culture created by their wild, unchecked, gluttonous greed and their need to objectify women and turn them into commodities, that keeps my friends, and women everywhere, insecure in their very skins--not good enough on a cellular level. I think it’s time for us to make those really big bucks, capitalizing on the potbellies, saggy man-boobs, lap flaps, wattles and jowls, baldness, crotch rot, stinky feet, pee stains, flaky, dry, itching skin, actinic keratosis, weak chins, beady eyes, bad teeth, bad breath, terrible wardrobe and all the other plagues of carbuncles and adult on-set acne that men are prone to after a certain age, after the testosterone levels start to drop off, and the prostate starts to swell and those pesky seminal vesicles start plugging up. After they’ve reached that famous sexual peak--right around twenty or so, when mommy stops buying their clothes, they should be just the right age to start to capitalize on their most secret fears and insecurities. I’m sure we can come up with a few they haven’t even imagined yet.
I’ve spent my entire working life, some forty years, in the fashion/beauty/entertainment industry. In the late-sixties I suffered a brief crisis of conscience and got a job in an inner-city community center as an organizer of programs for disadvantaged (a euphemism for minority) girls and women. Before I organized any programs, I thought I ought to get to know the women who used the center, and find out what programs they wanted organized. After a month of meetings and polling, the vote was in. They wanted beauty pageants and fashion shows. They wanted modeling classes and lessons on how to apply cosmetics. They wanted classes and seminars on how to make the most of the way they looked. Their whole lives were focused on how they looked. It was what I was running from, and all they wanted. It woke me up to the real power of advertising. I had to think long and hard about that one. And even I had to admit, that for most of them, the only way they were going to escape the poverty that surrounded and invaded their lives, was to look acceptable, or better yet, good, to (mostly male) white folks who shared the white, male values and appalling lack of taste of the predominant culture that did the hiring. It meant the difference between getting out and up or getting left behind.
I’ve heard the most beautiful women agonize about some imagined imperfection in their appearance that will make them forever second rate, a virtual failure, not good enough. I can feel you assuming that I’m talking about some air-head bimbette. But, I assure you, that I am not. In my group of fashion-model friends who, for the most part, represent the advertised ideal; there are, out of eight women, two Ph.Ds., one MBA, one Masters in Social Work, a successful advertising executive, and the other three are all college graduates successfully working in creative fields. We appeared in the very ads that made the rest of you realize you were too fat, and you had no taste. Despite the fact that we had been given enormous power because we were perceived as beautiful, we didn't really believe we were. And beauty is a double edged sword, much like great wealth. You never know whether someone who professes to adore you, can see past your obvious assets.
Beauty is like money, and then again it isn’t. It can come and it can go. But you can’t horde it like Midas. There is not enough collagen or Botox in the world to hold back the social and professional black hole that reaching the age of fifty, for a woman, sends you to forever. Who knows how much you’ll need as you get older, and what happens to the Botox when it’s been injected between your eyebrows every six months for twenty years? Apparently for certain men, say, someone like The Donald, there isn’t enough money. For Ivana and Marla I’d bet the money is only a means to an end. Enough trips to their favorite Paris couturiers and cosmetic surgeons to keep them desirable long enough to marry the next tub-of-lard in a bad toupee with more money than The Donald. I long for the day when Ivana and Marla don’t give a rat’s ass how they look, and are famous and recognized for their brilliant and visionary investing strategy in new male potency products. I want to hear that they have endowed a new department of research at Johns Hopkins devoted to elongating the bones of men who have been born with the unfortunate affliction of diminished height, or DH.
I know far too many professionally successful women who fall in love with seemingly appropriate men, and within the space of a year they are still working a full time job, still juggling a shared custody arrangement with their ex-husbands, still keeping their own homes livable and attractive, while also playing pretend corporate wife to the new boyfriend. Pretty soon he starts complaining because she forgot to pick-up his cleaning on her way from day-care to work. Nine out of ten of these women require antidepressants, psycho-therapy and/or other medication.
Viagra, and it’s many siblings, gives me hope that equality of capitalist opportunity is about to arrive. We have located the very mother lode, the throbbing, needy heart of male insecurities, and it is just the beginning. Any new product, drug, or procedure that will give a man a bigger, harder dick will sell at any price. Start investing, girlfriends. The future’s looking bright.
Saturday, March 29, 2008
War Stories
Like John McCain, Hillary is remembering her War. And just as her war is turning into a senior moment or worse, we have the first McCain for President ad. So there’s McCain, looking youthful and handsome, like a matinee idol an old black and white movie—it could be World War II, the romantic hero in the film has a raged smoke dangling from his lips, reclined, smudged and dirty faced, his is the face of the young warrior hero, handsome, captured, tragic, tortured, and still giving rank and serial number. He looks nothing like the old walnut jowled, pal of the lobbyist, foe of the lobbyist, Maverick, courting the worst of the Christian right wing, hugging George Bush, Washington insider with nothing much going for him except longevity and that same fierce desire to survive we see in the eyes of the handsome young soldier.
And to our mortification, we have Hillary Clinton, on several occasions and over a significant period of time, retelling a war story, scripted, and yet off the cuff. The details so eerily similar, it is as if we are watching an actress rehearse her role. Getting the gestures and cadence down, changing the rhythm to find just the perfect timing, to make us feel the danger, see her bravery, realize she really does have the right stuff to be our War Time President. Thing is, we don’t want a war time president. We want a leader with good judgement who can get us out of this mess, not keep us in it forever. That’s John McCain’s essential problem, too. That and the fact that he is wooden before the camera and will not do terribly well in debate with either Hillary or Barack. That either one would make him seem feeble and befuddled by comparison. But on this one issue, in this particular point in our history we can't afford to loose this election. It’s too important. too important for anyone’s personal political ambition to override the will of the people. It is time to let our votes count. It's time to engage our real opponent and Hillary has her priorities wrong. It is time for her to rise above her own desire to make history. It's my sincere belief that unless she withdraws from the primary contest and wholeheartedly supports Barack Obama, we can kiss our children’s future good bye. She cannot run against McCain after the news footage that gives the lie to her “memory” of an actual event in the not that distant past. Is it early onset Alzheimer‘s? Tired once, maybe……. But this story was told at least three different times and covered by the press. So was the arrival in Bosnia. It was a lie. And now she is sending in the big money muscle to strong arm Nancy Pelosi, making veiled threats. It sickens me, because I, who have no talent or experience and certainly have no desire to do so, have just written John McCain’s first ad of the General Election. If Hillary steals the nomination, a monkey could write it.
And to our mortification, we have Hillary Clinton, on several occasions and over a significant period of time, retelling a war story, scripted, and yet off the cuff. The details so eerily similar, it is as if we are watching an actress rehearse her role. Getting the gestures and cadence down, changing the rhythm to find just the perfect timing, to make us feel the danger, see her bravery, realize she really does have the right stuff to be our War Time President. Thing is, we don’t want a war time president. We want a leader with good judgement who can get us out of this mess, not keep us in it forever. That’s John McCain’s essential problem, too. That and the fact that he is wooden before the camera and will not do terribly well in debate with either Hillary or Barack. That either one would make him seem feeble and befuddled by comparison. But on this one issue, in this particular point in our history we can't afford to loose this election. It’s too important. too important for anyone’s personal political ambition to override the will of the people. It is time to let our votes count. It's time to engage our real opponent and Hillary has her priorities wrong. It is time for her to rise above her own desire to make history. It's my sincere belief that unless she withdraws from the primary contest and wholeheartedly supports Barack Obama, we can kiss our children’s future good bye. She cannot run against McCain after the news footage that gives the lie to her “memory” of an actual event in the not that distant past. Is it early onset Alzheimer‘s? Tired once, maybe……. But this story was told at least three different times and covered by the press. So was the arrival in Bosnia. It was a lie. And now she is sending in the big money muscle to strong arm Nancy Pelosi, making veiled threats. It sickens me, because I, who have no talent or experience and certainly have no desire to do so, have just written John McCain’s first ad of the General Election. If Hillary steals the nomination, a monkey could write it.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Bordello In A Gold Rush
I just heard David Brooks say on NPR that the democrats are starting to look like they can’t manage a bordello in a gold-rush. This sound bite came minutes after I got another letter from Howard Dean telling me how desperate the DNC is for money to help us run against John McCain. The gall!
Sometimes It’s hard to be a democrat.
Sometimes It’s hard to be a democrat.
Yet Again, A Letter to Howard Dean
Dear Howard Dean
Perhaps you have not received my last several letters to you. Allow me to reiterate my position on making contributions to the DNC. I am not pleased that you are allowing the Clinton’s to strong-arm super-delegates along with the Speaker of the House. I know that the Clintons are powerful and have some powerful people— those all important big donors—backing then. But we, the little people, are giving what little money we have available to us to the candidate of our choice. Until you , the Chairman of the DNC, do something to end this nasty primary season, we will continue to give to the candidate of our choice, and the DNC can go to hell. It is this absence of leadership that has soured my support for the organization of which you are Chairman. Please act like a leader. In the meantime, stop asking me for money.
Perhaps you have not received my last several letters to you. Allow me to reiterate my position on making contributions to the DNC. I am not pleased that you are allowing the Clinton’s to strong-arm super-delegates along with the Speaker of the House. I know that the Clintons are powerful and have some powerful people— those all important big donors—backing then. But we, the little people, are giving what little money we have available to us to the candidate of our choice. Until you , the Chairman of the DNC, do something to end this nasty primary season, we will continue to give to the candidate of our choice, and the DNC can go to hell. It is this absence of leadership that has soured my support for the organization of which you are Chairman. Please act like a leader. In the meantime, stop asking me for money.
Tort Reform (sic)
Well it passed, quickly and quietly. Now juries are prohibited from awarding punitive damages if the local chemical company poisons your little town and gives everyone cancer. This legislation was pushed by the Bush administration and sponsored by my senator Orin Hatch. Senator Hatch you’ll be hearing from me. So will every democrat who voted for this vile legislation. Sadly this includes Senator Obama, and Senator Feinstein. Oh god, won’t someone say it isn’t so? Clinton was not listed. Perhaps this is another vote she choose to avoid. If only Obama had skipped this vote. Usually I’m in favor of everyone showing up to vote, but this one breaks my heart. What are they thinking? The only ones helped by this legislation are corporations—the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the tobacco industry, the chemical industry, and on and on and on. Once again the fat cats screw the working class.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Hillary's Hit List
Hillary is mighty Nixonian these days. She lies about her “experience” and say’s she’s sleep deprived. On three or four occasions??? Scripted and over many months? Then Bill comes out today and says, “Come on, y’all. This isn’t tough, you haven’t been in a presidential race before. This is just a little dust up. If you can’t take a lil’ ol’ skirmish like this……” Charming Billy. God, I did fall hard for that man when I didn’t know him. Than sadly, I got to know him too well. Yes, the early Clinton years, those were the most prosperous time in my odd career as an aging barbie. I even had a stock portfolio. Those were the days, before Hillary messed it up with her opaque approach to single payer health care for all Americans. She is stubborn about letting us know what she’s really up to. She could have had help, it was offered, but no, Hillary knows best. Then when the vast right wing conspiracy was investigating every aspect of her life, she stonewalled releasing papers. It kept the fire raging to know what she was hiding and why. I got real tired of it. And after Monica, et al, things just seemed to trail off into pardons for Bill’s criminal friends, and packing.
I do not want any family to become a political dynasty. If your daddy was president, become a great governor and retire to write a book about your daddy. No more sons, or wives of former presidents. Instead, if you are so ambitious and inclined, become the Speaker of the House, and make sane laws, but do not run for president. We have an excellent example of the reason dynastic presidencies are a very bad idea currently occupying the White House.
Hillary is just the kind of stubborn fighter, the kind who holds a grudge and never forgets anything, (except her memories) who would keep a hit list. She has surrounded herself with questionable advisors, people I don’t ever want to have to see interviewed on the evening news again . I am so sick of Mark Penn, Howard Wolfson and Terry McAliffe.
Talk about Rovian. This trio is Rove tripled.
Now the big monied insiders, the real muscle within the Clinton machine is trying to strong-arm Nancy Pelosi. In a letter these Clinton insiders sent to the Speaker of the House, they issued a thinly veiled threat. Back Obama and lose our support. You will regret it, seems to be the real message of the letter. You will really really regret it. Is Pelosi about to be added to the Hillary hit list?
I do not want any family to become a political dynasty. If your daddy was president, become a great governor and retire to write a book about your daddy. No more sons, or wives of former presidents. Instead, if you are so ambitious and inclined, become the Speaker of the House, and make sane laws, but do not run for president. We have an excellent example of the reason dynastic presidencies are a very bad idea currently occupying the White House.
Hillary is just the kind of stubborn fighter, the kind who holds a grudge and never forgets anything, (except her memories) who would keep a hit list. She has surrounded herself with questionable advisors, people I don’t ever want to have to see interviewed on the evening news again . I am so sick of Mark Penn, Howard Wolfson and Terry McAliffe.
Talk about Rovian. This trio is Rove tripled.
Now the big monied insiders, the real muscle within the Clinton machine is trying to strong-arm Nancy Pelosi. In a letter these Clinton insiders sent to the Speaker of the House, they issued a thinly veiled threat. Back Obama and lose our support. You will regret it, seems to be the real message of the letter. You will really really regret it. Is Pelosi about to be added to the Hillary hit list?
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Reckless Abandon
I am in favor of legalizing prostitution. I think sex workers deserve respect and admiration. No, I am not being arch, ironic or sarcastic. I mean it. I believe women and men should have complete control of the commodity that is their bodies. I have been reminded, in a recent comment to a piece I wrote, that the political candidates are “marketed like perfume.” And lest we forget, it is usually women’s bodies that sell all the products, and it is men who make the big bucks off the product, legal or otherwise. So I’m looking forward to the day when women really do claim the power that is theirs to take.
In the meantime, we live in a country governed by laws and rules. We have agreed to live by these laws until we get to vote again to make the laws conform more to what we believe to be in the nation’s best interest. Until then, men who make the laws, vow to uphold the laws, enforce the laws, and then break those laws, should be held to the same standard that we hold the least lawbreaker among us. I break the law. You break the law. We all break the law now and then. But if you are ambitious enough to become an attorney who becomes a prosecutor and then an attorney general, and then a governor, or even a mayor, and you break the laws you punished in each of those positions after having vowed to uphold the laws, you should lose your office, and go to jail. If you purger yourself in front of a Grand Jury, it isn’t your hypocrisy, it’s your getting caught. It’s your recklessness. It’s a little like have a sibling who is a meth user. As long as she doesn’t steal from you to support her habit, obviously endanger her kids or yours, or get caught and go to jail, you can maintain the illusion that everything is fine in the family. But once her damaged kids are loosed upon you and your husband, and her trial has become a media circus that makes the carefully crafted fiction that is your life unravel before your eyes, well then, maybe you’ll decide it’s time to get real.
I have never known a man who was faithful. I do not claim to be representative of all women. I know my experience with men is not everywoman’s. But I think testosterone drives them to it. Odd that it is men who make the laws that are so intolerant of the very behavior that they are driven to engage in. There is much science to back up the claim that men are literally led around by their gonads. Helpless to the wants of their little-brain’s desires. It certainly was my experience with men. My observation of the husbands of friends and coworkers.
And it is mostly men who control the industries that continue to market women in the advertising and entertainment industries as objects. So completely has internet porn taken over the zeitgeist, that almost every image depicted of “woman,” is of a woman so far removed from the reality of the normal range possible for women, that she is almost a separate species, one we cannot join. And we, the consumers of this icon, are willing to carve ourselves up with the help of our plastic surgeons, so we can bear to even glimpse ourselves in the mirror for more than a second or two without a shudder. Too fat, too old, too ugly to keep your mate. And he is ever driven, and always will be, to mate wherever and whenever he can, even in the anonymous stalls of men’s rooms in airports. Which is fine, I guess, if you don’t take your six year old son into the airport stall with you when Larry Craig, or Pastor Haggard is trolling. So let’s free the men’s rooms and legalize prostitution for both men and women. But, if it wasn’t a crime would it still be as exciting?
So, once again, I come down on the side of having some expectation that if you hold any position that calls for you to take an oath to uphold the law, don’t get caught breaking it. If no one gets injured as you break the law, and you don’t get caught, I say it’s nobody's business but your own. In the meantime I’ll keep voting to change the laws to reflect our realities. And sex workers of both sexes should work in legal, safe, taxed and represented industries that they control. Sex Workers of the World, Unite!
In the meantime, we live in a country governed by laws and rules. We have agreed to live by these laws until we get to vote again to make the laws conform more to what we believe to be in the nation’s best interest. Until then, men who make the laws, vow to uphold the laws, enforce the laws, and then break those laws, should be held to the same standard that we hold the least lawbreaker among us. I break the law. You break the law. We all break the law now and then. But if you are ambitious enough to become an attorney who becomes a prosecutor and then an attorney general, and then a governor, or even a mayor, and you break the laws you punished in each of those positions after having vowed to uphold the laws, you should lose your office, and go to jail. If you purger yourself in front of a Grand Jury, it isn’t your hypocrisy, it’s your getting caught. It’s your recklessness. It’s a little like have a sibling who is a meth user. As long as she doesn’t steal from you to support her habit, obviously endanger her kids or yours, or get caught and go to jail, you can maintain the illusion that everything is fine in the family. But once her damaged kids are loosed upon you and your husband, and her trial has become a media circus that makes the carefully crafted fiction that is your life unravel before your eyes, well then, maybe you’ll decide it’s time to get real.
I have never known a man who was faithful. I do not claim to be representative of all women. I know my experience with men is not everywoman’s. But I think testosterone drives them to it. Odd that it is men who make the laws that are so intolerant of the very behavior that they are driven to engage in. There is much science to back up the claim that men are literally led around by their gonads. Helpless to the wants of their little-brain’s desires. It certainly was my experience with men. My observation of the husbands of friends and coworkers.
And it is mostly men who control the industries that continue to market women in the advertising and entertainment industries as objects. So completely has internet porn taken over the zeitgeist, that almost every image depicted of “woman,” is of a woman so far removed from the reality of the normal range possible for women, that she is almost a separate species, one we cannot join. And we, the consumers of this icon, are willing to carve ourselves up with the help of our plastic surgeons, so we can bear to even glimpse ourselves in the mirror for more than a second or two without a shudder. Too fat, too old, too ugly to keep your mate. And he is ever driven, and always will be, to mate wherever and whenever he can, even in the anonymous stalls of men’s rooms in airports. Which is fine, I guess, if you don’t take your six year old son into the airport stall with you when Larry Craig, or Pastor Haggard is trolling. So let’s free the men’s rooms and legalize prostitution for both men and women. But, if it wasn’t a crime would it still be as exciting?
So, once again, I come down on the side of having some expectation that if you hold any position that calls for you to take an oath to uphold the law, don’t get caught breaking it. If no one gets injured as you break the law, and you don’t get caught, I say it’s nobody's business but your own. In the meantime I’ll keep voting to change the laws to reflect our realities. And sex workers of both sexes should work in legal, safe, taxed and represented industries that they control. Sex Workers of the World, Unite!
Another Letter to Howard Dean
Dear Howard Dean,
You have sent me an email asking for money for the general election. Until you put a stop to the bloodletting that’s going on in this artificially prolonged primary season, I will continue to give the ten dollars a month I can squeeze out of my disability check to Senator Obama. It is in the interest of the democratic party that this trumped-up horse race—a great boon for the news pundits and the republicans—be brought to an end. Barack Obama has won twice as many states, has the lead in both pledged delegates and the popular vote, and he is gaining on Senator Clinton in the super- delegate support.
You are the party chairman. You are behaving like the democrats we are all so angry with in the Senate—unwilling to take a strong stand and work it like you mean it. I understand that the Clinton brand has cachet. I understand that it won’t make you popular with the Clintons to twist her arm to step aside. But it must be done. Otherwise you risk going into a general election with nothing in the coffers. Granted, I am a small donor, but there are millions like me, giving ten dollars at a time to Senator Obama. It is the reason he has raised so much money online. He has a very strong, grassroots, bottom-up organization. I know—I’m one of the many volunteers who helped him win Utah.
Please do your job, so we might have a chance of uniting the country to win the general election.
You have sent me an email asking for money for the general election. Until you put a stop to the bloodletting that’s going on in this artificially prolonged primary season, I will continue to give the ten dollars a month I can squeeze out of my disability check to Senator Obama. It is in the interest of the democratic party that this trumped-up horse race—a great boon for the news pundits and the republicans—be brought to an end. Barack Obama has won twice as many states, has the lead in both pledged delegates and the popular vote, and he is gaining on Senator Clinton in the super- delegate support.
You are the party chairman. You are behaving like the democrats we are all so angry with in the Senate—unwilling to take a strong stand and work it like you mean it. I understand that the Clinton brand has cachet. I understand that it won’t make you popular with the Clintons to twist her arm to step aside. But it must be done. Otherwise you risk going into a general election with nothing in the coffers. Granted, I am a small donor, but there are millions like me, giving ten dollars at a time to Senator Obama. It is the reason he has raised so much money online. He has a very strong, grassroots, bottom-up organization. I know—I’m one of the many volunteers who helped him win Utah.
Please do your job, so we might have a chance of uniting the country to win the general election.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
So..? I Made a Mistake.
It’s not the only one. I’m not going to list them here, I don’t have that much time. But this one is in the McCain category. Remember when he and probably Lindsey Graham among others went strolling through a market in Baghdad claiming it was perfectly safe, bla, bla, bla. While they were body armored up and covered by a battalion or so, on the ground and in the air. It was all BS, manufactured to sell the “Surge,” or escalation as I prefer, and believe to be more accurate. Hillary Clinton has said several times in scripted speeches that she had a dangerous, “under sniper fire” moment in Bosnia. “A trip too dangerous for the President.” She said it quite awhile ago and again recently on more than one setting and covered by the press. It has been You Tubed to death, I am sure. It will be used in ads against her if she gets nomination. It was not a misstatement, it was a lie. The kind of lie that makes me cringe. She is conflating all kinds of “experience.” And even though it has been proven to be a lie, unlike Bill, at least, she just shrugs and says, “So..? I misspoke, I’m human.” Does this response remind you of anyone?
Cheney Wants To Nuke Someone, Guess Who
As Cheney, McCain, Graham, and Lieberman leave the Middle East, the Saudi’s start trying to figure out how to protect themselves from nuclear fallout. Sounds to me like we’re getting ready to Nuke Iran and the pesky Al-Qaeda they are training and sending into Iraq. (See earlier post—-Yes, Iran Has No Al- Qaeda). Never men to be deterred by mere facts, it’s just a matter of repeating the lie over and over until enough of us believe it. Then it’s bombs away, and we’re off to the End of Days.
Lieberman is functioning as McCain’s handler—do I see a McCain/Lieberman ticket on the horizon? And if we continue spreading our excellent democracy (on the tip of a missile) in the Middle East, we’re going to need a Draft. This odd quartette is bent on spreading Wester Religious Freedom in the heart of the Muslim World. Stirring the hornets nest of “Radical Islamic Terrorism” to justify bombing the whole damn place back to the stone age. It will also reinforce the lie at the heart of the Iraq War, in part, because it’s going to make all Muslims hate us forever. “See, they do hate us, we were right all along!”
It will also give Reverend Wright and me something else to add to our long list of atrocities committed in the name of America.
“And it’s five, six, seven
Open up the pearly gates
Well, there ain’t no time to wonder why
WHOOPIE! We’re all gonna die….”
Special thanks to Stella for the lyrics to that excellent song of protest from the Vietnam War days, by Country Joe and the Fish.
Lieberman is functioning as McCain’s handler—do I see a McCain/Lieberman ticket on the horizon? And if we continue spreading our excellent democracy (on the tip of a missile) in the Middle East, we’re going to need a Draft. This odd quartette is bent on spreading Wester Religious Freedom in the heart of the Muslim World. Stirring the hornets nest of “Radical Islamic Terrorism” to justify bombing the whole damn place back to the stone age. It will also reinforce the lie at the heart of the Iraq War, in part, because it’s going to make all Muslims hate us forever. “See, they do hate us, we were right all along!”
It will also give Reverend Wright and me something else to add to our long list of atrocities committed in the name of America.
“And it’s five, six, seven
Open up the pearly gates
Well, there ain’t no time to wonder why
WHOOPIE! We’re all gonna die….”
Special thanks to Stella for the lyrics to that excellent song of protest from the Vietnam War days, by Country Joe and the Fish.
Monday, March 24, 2008
Should Philandering Matter In Politics?
I vote yes on this one. It is an indication of character. I know people, mostly men I have to admit, who have convinced their mates to engage in “open” marriages. I have always wondered why these people decided to get married in the first place. If you want to screw around, why not stay single? What’s in it for the women? I suppose if your husband is stinking rich, and you enter into a marriage with an iron-clad prenuptial agreement that he will pay you for giving him the illusion of respectability that marriage confers in certain types of professions, then that’s your business—business being the operative word. But if you are a politician, get your wild oats days firmly in your past before you ask us to trust you.
If you will lie to your wife, you will certainly lie to me. If you cheat your family, squander the kids college fund to pay for high priced hookers, you will lie to me and foolishly spend my tax dollars. It goes to character. It goes to accountability. If you believe the rules don’t apply to you because you’re so damn special, become a hedge-fund manager.
If you will lie to your wife, you will certainly lie to me. If you cheat your family, squander the kids college fund to pay for high priced hookers, you will lie to me and foolishly spend my tax dollars. It goes to character. It goes to accountability. If you believe the rules don’t apply to you because you’re so damn special, become a hedge-fund manager.
Hillary Clinton, Friend of the Little Guy??!!!??
There is this myth, reinforced each day in the news world, that Hillary Clinton is a friend of the working class, the blue-collar, Joe six-pack kind of guy. Since when? The only way she can keep this myth going is to dodge the tax return issue.
What Hillary learned during her bungled attempt to give us single payer universal health care for all Americans, was not to mess with the insurance lobby. So now her health care plan is not a single payer plan, but, like the new prescription plan, medicare part D, is run by the insurance companies to the detriment of the taxpayers and the people getting the help. I am one of the people benefiting from the plan, but that is because my income is below the poverty limit and puts me in a special category. Most retirees don’t get that good a deal. Hillary Clinton is so well plugged into the big business loop she will never find her way out. She is connected up the wazzoo.
So where did this reputation for feeling the pain of the little guy get started? It is one of the many faces of the new and improved brand that is the Clinton myth, created for this particular time and just for Pennsylvania’s poor under-educated working class. It is being patched together out of thin air for the most cynical of reasons.
What Hillary learned during her bungled attempt to give us single payer universal health care for all Americans, was not to mess with the insurance lobby. So now her health care plan is not a single payer plan, but, like the new prescription plan, medicare part D, is run by the insurance companies to the detriment of the taxpayers and the people getting the help. I am one of the people benefiting from the plan, but that is because my income is below the poverty limit and puts me in a special category. Most retirees don’t get that good a deal. Hillary Clinton is so well plugged into the big business loop she will never find her way out. She is connected up the wazzoo.
So where did this reputation for feeling the pain of the little guy get started? It is one of the many faces of the new and improved brand that is the Clinton myth, created for this particular time and just for Pennsylvania’s poor under-educated working class. It is being patched together out of thin air for the most cynical of reasons.
Sunday, March 23, 2008
John's Excellent Adventure
Oh never mind that his trip around the world spreading misinformation and lies is being paid for by us, the impoverished taxpayers. It’s the photo opps, stupid. John is looking Presnitential. Isn’t that all we need in a Presnit? The fake war hero status, the ignorance on the economy, the total lack of knowledge of the Middle East, the nasty temper, the decrepitude, the fact that he just might keel-over at any moment, dead of old age, that makes him so exciting? How badly can we ruin this country before the slumbering populous wakes from the dream that it’s all just peachy?
Saturday, March 22, 2008
One, Two, Three, Four...
I’m old enough to remember the rallying cries of the sixties, and they are making a comeback. I heard today on CNN, demonstrators in Washington chanting “One, two, three, four. We don’t want your oil war! “ Lacks something of the passion I remember as the original was “One, two, three, four. We don’t want your fucking war!” But to quote another inspirational line, “It doesn’t take a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Ah yes, “The times they are a changin’.”
Yes, Iran Has No Al-Qaeda
Probably no bananas either. And the women are forced to wear traditional Islamic dress, not the burka, but the head scarf and a long dark coat or robe thingy. No makeup, no nail polish. Not encouraged to do much of anything but make her family’s life a “paradise.” But the lights are on, the water’s running, bombs are not going off in the cafes or markets. It is not impossible for a woman to get an education and they are not prohibited form working, just strongly discouraged. Is Iran training Al-Qaeda or even supporting Al-Qaeda elsewhere? It’s highly improbably, most unlikely, and not in Iran’s self interest.
John McCain’s “misstatement” or as I’d call it, “oft told lie”, shows one of two problems. He is either senile, stupid and arrogant like Bush the Younger, or he is a propagandist like Bush the Younger, et al. It is a Rovian tactic to repeat the lie over and over in various settings with much press coverage, until it has been heard so often by the populous that it is perceived as truth.
A good read on the shifts in the culture of Iran is the wonderful book “Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir.” This excellent book was written by Azar Nafisi, and published in 2003. It give us a very good look at the hostilities between Iran and Iraq, told by a female academic teaching at one of the universities in Tehran. Set in the 1980’s, after the revolution that put the Islamists in control in Iran, with the strongman, thuggish Saddam Hussein, a nasty Sunni neighbor, looking for trouble and getting it. Iran is pretty much the only Shia country in the neighborhood.
John, old boy, take a history class, read a book, get an advisor, someone who knows his ass from a hole in the ground.
John McCain’s “misstatement” or as I’d call it, “oft told lie”, shows one of two problems. He is either senile, stupid and arrogant like Bush the Younger, or he is a propagandist like Bush the Younger, et al. It is a Rovian tactic to repeat the lie over and over in various settings with much press coverage, until it has been heard so often by the populous that it is perceived as truth.
A good read on the shifts in the culture of Iran is the wonderful book “Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir.” This excellent book was written by Azar Nafisi, and published in 2003. It give us a very good look at the hostilities between Iran and Iraq, told by a female academic teaching at one of the universities in Tehran. Set in the 1980’s, after the revolution that put the Islamists in control in Iran, with the strongman, thuggish Saddam Hussein, a nasty Sunni neighbor, looking for trouble and getting it. Iran is pretty much the only Shia country in the neighborhood.
John, old boy, take a history class, read a book, get an advisor, someone who knows his ass from a hole in the ground.
Friday, March 21, 2008
I Used To Love Her, But It's All Over Now
Bobby Womack wrote “It’s All Over Now” in 1975. I’ll bet Bill Clinton knows the lyrics and can play it on the Sax without charts. And it’s, in part because of Bill, that I feel that way about Hillary. Though honestly, I hate to admit it, I still kind of have the hots for Bill. But he is beginning to be pretty embarrassing again. And that makes me want to ask her, “Why can’t you control you husband?” He’s off the reservation again. No, not poaching interns, but running his mouth and putting Hillary and McCain on the same ticket. Do they aim to arm wrestle for the top spot, I wonder?
Boomer Nation, Move Over
I’m a leading edge Boomer. Born before World War II was over by a few months. I came of age in the early 1960’s. And was passionately involved in the movement to end the War in Vietnam. I joined the rallies and demonstrations to end the war. We marched to the Utah State Capital and demonstrated. We marched to the University of Utah and briefly took over the Administration Building. We joined forces with anyone against the war, including the Black Panthers. We raised money to bail-out anyone picked up and jailed during any demonstration. We were glued to the news coverage of the mounting casualty numbers. And we knew that there would be a tipping point at some point when middle America, that famous Silent Majority, would become so sickened by the carnage that they too, would join us. It only made them angrier at us. We thought there would be a revolution. We rooted for the Students for a Democratic Society, the Free Speech Movement, Youth International Party, The Chicago Seven, the Weather Underground. In the end they shot a bunch of kids at Kent State, they jailed and prosecuted just about everybody in a leadership role in any of those organizations. They called us communists. And it all fell apart in disgust and alienation.
During the decade of the sixties I moved from Salt Lake to San Francisco, and a year later I sailed on the Michael Angelo to Italy for a year. During a demonstration against the war, in Milan in 1965, I was with the chairman of the Communist Youth Organization (a kid whose father was a wealthy shipping magnate) when someone in the crowd behind me, grabbed me and pulled me into a cafe, whispering in my ear, “Don’t speak English, they’ll kill you if they know you’re an American. If anyone asks you where you’re from, say you are Canadian.” I looked around to see who said this, and he was gone. I never planned to return to the United States. I was working as a model and making plenty of money. My friends were famous artists and writers. Life was good. And by the way, communists are allowed to vote in Italy. Pretty much all artists and intellectuals in Italy were communists in those days. It was about as radical as voting democrat in Utah. But at the end of my first year, my mother sent me a telegram telling me she needed me to come home. She and my father had divorced. She had moved back to the family home, and wanted me to come back to the States for awhile, to keep her company.
Returning to Utah was one of the worst decisions I ever made. The real reason my mother wanted me to come home was her “friendship” with a man who worked as a covert agent for the FBI. Due to their relationship, he told her to get me back here, to keep me from my “dangerous” associations. This is how I found out there was a file on me at the FBI. Those were the good old days of J. Edgar Hoover. That cross-dressing hypocrite bastard! Sorry, not meant to insult cross-dressers anywhere. Really, I’m all for it. It’s the hypocrite bastard part I find objectional. That’s when the spying on all of us began. You guys remember Nixon, Watergate and that Great Senate Hearing? Ah, those were the days.
Now we all know the government is spying on all of us all the damn time. We’re getting used to it. Common place. We have let them take our civil right’s away without a peep. They can come into your house and do a sneak-n-peek with impunity. Fancy that. Move over boomers, we’ve fucked it up. It’s time to retire from the leadership roles we’re hanging onto, and leave the podium after we’ve handed over the keys to the crumbling, about to collapse kingdom. Good luck, Generation Obama.
During the decade of the sixties I moved from Salt Lake to San Francisco, and a year later I sailed on the Michael Angelo to Italy for a year. During a demonstration against the war, in Milan in 1965, I was with the chairman of the Communist Youth Organization (a kid whose father was a wealthy shipping magnate) when someone in the crowd behind me, grabbed me and pulled me into a cafe, whispering in my ear, “Don’t speak English, they’ll kill you if they know you’re an American. If anyone asks you where you’re from, say you are Canadian.” I looked around to see who said this, and he was gone. I never planned to return to the United States. I was working as a model and making plenty of money. My friends were famous artists and writers. Life was good. And by the way, communists are allowed to vote in Italy. Pretty much all artists and intellectuals in Italy were communists in those days. It was about as radical as voting democrat in Utah. But at the end of my first year, my mother sent me a telegram telling me she needed me to come home. She and my father had divorced. She had moved back to the family home, and wanted me to come back to the States for awhile, to keep her company.
Returning to Utah was one of the worst decisions I ever made. The real reason my mother wanted me to come home was her “friendship” with a man who worked as a covert agent for the FBI. Due to their relationship, he told her to get me back here, to keep me from my “dangerous” associations. This is how I found out there was a file on me at the FBI. Those were the good old days of J. Edgar Hoover. That cross-dressing hypocrite bastard! Sorry, not meant to insult cross-dressers anywhere. Really, I’m all for it. It’s the hypocrite bastard part I find objectional. That’s when the spying on all of us began. You guys remember Nixon, Watergate and that Great Senate Hearing? Ah, those were the days.
Now we all know the government is spying on all of us all the damn time. We’re getting used to it. Common place. We have let them take our civil right’s away without a peep. They can come into your house and do a sneak-n-peek with impunity. Fancy that. Move over boomers, we’ve fucked it up. It’s time to retire from the leadership roles we’re hanging onto, and leave the podium after we’ve handed over the keys to the crumbling, about to collapse kingdom. Good luck, Generation Obama.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Reverend Wright Was Right
Maybe we need to take a trip down memory lane and reexamine our history. There is now a new series on HBO called John Adams. It is a stirring look at the beginnings of our “Democracy.” I watched the first installment and there was not one mention of the “Native Problem” or slavery. That first episode showcases the lovely relationship between Adams and his wife, Abigail. It’s a nice devise, and is documented in years of letters between Adams and his wife over the long course of their marriage. And frankly she seems the more thoughtful and intelligent of the two. It’s interesting for me to imagine how different our history might be if Abigail had led the revolution and helped to write the Declaration of Independence. Might it have read instead, “…..conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal.”
So for me, descended from the Choctaw, our history of “Live Free or Die America,” begins with invasion and slaughter, removal from our lands to concentration camps, and the deliberate destruction of our culture and language. For the descendants of slaves, it begins in invasion of their native lands, capture, kidnapping, a perilous and mostly deadly journey to a place where they were auctioned off and made to labor often under the lash and for no stake in anything except survival. That any of us survived your damed “democracy” is a bloody miracle. So for starters, I’m not sure Reverend Wright’s list of atrocities you have committed in the name of “Democracy and America,” is half long enough. But just so we’re clear on this, let me innumerate for you a few.
Manifest Destiny is the term that was to justify the expansion of the United States from the original thirteen colonies westward across the continent, gobbling up other people’s land all the way to the Pacific and then south into Mexico. It is the religious zealot’s justification for taking what does not belong to him. God wants me to have “it,”—land and everything on or under it, or in the case of certain classes of people, “you,” especially if you are not the same color or speak the same language, as I, because He favors me. I am chosen and you are not. Sounds pretty stupid, doesn’t it? What is it that makes you immigrant descendants of Europeans think you are so very special that God favors you above all other’s? Even your Christianity is a child among the world’s religions. Now again Manifest Destiny is a term Bush used recently to justify our occupation of Iraq and our permanent presence in the heart of an ancient culture we know almost nothing about—such is our arrogance. God wants us there!
And in between, we have so much carnage, the fire-bombing of Dresden, the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the My Lai massacre, the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. I think the Reverend might have touched upon a few, but I could go on and on. The real reason we want Cuba back is to turn it back into the whore house it was before Castro’s revolution. Our little brown Las Vegas in the soft, warm waters just ninety miles from Miami. Did I mention our guy Pinochet? Our little CIA operations to topple democratically elected socialist governments throughout our hemisphere and replace them with military dictatorships—so common, so uniformly disastrous to the ordinary people in those countries. Remember the Disappeared? Remember Haiti?
And here at home we are using religion to justify denying full civil rights to certain classes of citizens because God doesn’t approve of them for some reason. Here the Reverend and I part company. I cannot believe in such a god.
So for me, descended from the Choctaw, our history of “Live Free or Die America,” begins with invasion and slaughter, removal from our lands to concentration camps, and the deliberate destruction of our culture and language. For the descendants of slaves, it begins in invasion of their native lands, capture, kidnapping, a perilous and mostly deadly journey to a place where they were auctioned off and made to labor often under the lash and for no stake in anything except survival. That any of us survived your damed “democracy” is a bloody miracle. So for starters, I’m not sure Reverend Wright’s list of atrocities you have committed in the name of “Democracy and America,” is half long enough. But just so we’re clear on this, let me innumerate for you a few.
Manifest Destiny is the term that was to justify the expansion of the United States from the original thirteen colonies westward across the continent, gobbling up other people’s land all the way to the Pacific and then south into Mexico. It is the religious zealot’s justification for taking what does not belong to him. God wants me to have “it,”—land and everything on or under it, or in the case of certain classes of people, “you,” especially if you are not the same color or speak the same language, as I, because He favors me. I am chosen and you are not. Sounds pretty stupid, doesn’t it? What is it that makes you immigrant descendants of Europeans think you are so very special that God favors you above all other’s? Even your Christianity is a child among the world’s religions. Now again Manifest Destiny is a term Bush used recently to justify our occupation of Iraq and our permanent presence in the heart of an ancient culture we know almost nothing about—such is our arrogance. God wants us there!
And in between, we have so much carnage, the fire-bombing of Dresden, the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the My Lai massacre, the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. I think the Reverend might have touched upon a few, but I could go on and on. The real reason we want Cuba back is to turn it back into the whore house it was before Castro’s revolution. Our little brown Las Vegas in the soft, warm waters just ninety miles from Miami. Did I mention our guy Pinochet? Our little CIA operations to topple democratically elected socialist governments throughout our hemisphere and replace them with military dictatorships—so common, so uniformly disastrous to the ordinary people in those countries. Remember the Disappeared? Remember Haiti?
And here at home we are using religion to justify denying full civil rights to certain classes of citizens because God doesn’t approve of them for some reason. Here the Reverend and I part company. I cannot believe in such a god.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Ancestry And The American Dream
I just got off the phone with a young man from one of the small North Dakota Reservations. The People are out of wood for wood-stoves, utilities cut off for non- payment. It’s a long hard winter and the People are freezing. The People are a tribe of Sioux and they are living the life of people in every part of the world where the local government views a tribe or class of human beings as unwanted, disposable, and so they are rounded up and put in concentration camps. This is happening in Africa, it’s happening in the Middle East, it’s happening here, in the United States of America, only here the camps are called “Reservations,” and we have turned our backs on all such people everywhere because it shames us to know, and so we do nothing.
My mother’s family is descended from the Choctaw who lived in Mississippi, prior to their forced march to Oklahoma where they were given a small parcel of uninhabitable land. Oklahoma territory was nothing like Mississippi with it’s rich delta, green and lush with plentiful game and soil that anything would grow in. No, Oklahoma is dust. The Oklahoma concentration camp was…… I can think of no other word than inhospitable. We were a proud nation, part of the Muskogean linguistic group, called the Five Civilized Tribes. A people with a rich language and culture, a people who were cooperative and generous toward the new immigrants who came to our lands. And we were nearly slaughtered into extinction. Under Andrew Jackson’s administration we were made a model of his “Indian removal plan.” We were the first tribe to be marched to Oklahoma. This mass forced march is know as The Trail of Tears. Do you remember this from your history books?
In the beginning it was call the Office of Indian Affairs and was formed in 1824, created by the Second Continental Congress . The esteemed Ben Franklin and Patrick Henry were early commissioners of the OIA charged with negotiating treaties. Treaties which were broken over and over until we get to the Oklahoma part of my family’s history with the newly changed OIA to the BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) run entirely by white immigrants whose job it was to indoctrinate a proud and ancient people in the ways of Christianity, in the ways of white culture. My mother’s people were forced to send their children away to schools run by the BIA, where they were made to be ashamed of their own language and culture. And that shame grew into such self loathing that four generations back from me the women in the family married white men who then owned their lands. Three generations back those women moved off the Reservation and started passing as white. They lived in various parts of Texas, married to ignorant cracker men who treated them like shit. So now we have my mother who could not get far enough away from her families past. Smart, good looking, determined to live a better life, she married an Army man with three boys of his own. She got pregnant with me and he went off to fight in the Second World War. While he was fighting in France, I was born on the Army Base in Paris Texas. When he came home we packed up and roamed the country in a new Ford, pulling a new Airstream trailer, which we lived in for over a year. When my mother could stand the nomadic life no more, we happened to be in Salt Lake City, camped on the outskirts of the city in a trailer park. She took my father’s remaining cash and found a big stone house on the upper avenues and bought it. He never got over being furious at her, and their marriage ended in loud, violent fights. She took me and fled in the early morning dark of a cold Utah Spring. And I was sent to live with my mother’s brother and his wife in Sherman, Texas. They tried awfully hard to give me a good life for the year I was their child. But the one thing that I could not get, could not ever understand, was their hatred of indians and black people. I could not learn bigotry. I don’t know why. Everyone else in my mother’s family got it. What was wrong with me that this very important lesson didn’t sink in? In truth I think it’s a Jungian thing. The collective unconscious. I identify with the oppressed. I personally have never experienced oppression unless being female and married counts. But I will not listen to anyone spout that kind of race or identity hated. It enrages me.
I am too far removed from my heritage to go back, go native. Everyone sees me as white. But deep in the bone I am not. I am not white. I am Choctaw. I will not give up my small, inherited plot of land. Like the Native people in North Dakota, I have a hard time paying my utility bills. I keep it cold to save money. I have moved out of the main house to live in the little house—a renovated garage at the back of the property so I can rent the main house. I try to stay out of sight. I am an old recluse living in my garage to save money so I can keep my land. But hearing about the plight of those native people in North Dakota this morning made me sob. And I can’t stop. I told the young man that I thought it was very important to make sure that all native people are registered to vote in the Presidential Election. If we make the effort to vote, we just might have a President for the first time in our nation’s history who can understand our complicated history and listen to our story. A man who looks more like us than the old white men who have ruled us since the early 1800’s. A man who just might be sympathetic to our plight.
Barack Obama gave the most important speech in American political life since the Gettysburg Address. And like Michelle Obama, for the first time in my lifetime, I am proud of my country.
My mother’s family is descended from the Choctaw who lived in Mississippi, prior to their forced march to Oklahoma where they were given a small parcel of uninhabitable land. Oklahoma territory was nothing like Mississippi with it’s rich delta, green and lush with plentiful game and soil that anything would grow in. No, Oklahoma is dust. The Oklahoma concentration camp was…… I can think of no other word than inhospitable. We were a proud nation, part of the Muskogean linguistic group, called the Five Civilized Tribes. A people with a rich language and culture, a people who were cooperative and generous toward the new immigrants who came to our lands. And we were nearly slaughtered into extinction. Under Andrew Jackson’s administration we were made a model of his “Indian removal plan.” We were the first tribe to be marched to Oklahoma. This mass forced march is know as The Trail of Tears. Do you remember this from your history books?
In the beginning it was call the Office of Indian Affairs and was formed in 1824, created by the Second Continental Congress . The esteemed Ben Franklin and Patrick Henry were early commissioners of the OIA charged with negotiating treaties. Treaties which were broken over and over until we get to the Oklahoma part of my family’s history with the newly changed OIA to the BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) run entirely by white immigrants whose job it was to indoctrinate a proud and ancient people in the ways of Christianity, in the ways of white culture. My mother’s people were forced to send their children away to schools run by the BIA, where they were made to be ashamed of their own language and culture. And that shame grew into such self loathing that four generations back from me the women in the family married white men who then owned their lands. Three generations back those women moved off the Reservation and started passing as white. They lived in various parts of Texas, married to ignorant cracker men who treated them like shit. So now we have my mother who could not get far enough away from her families past. Smart, good looking, determined to live a better life, she married an Army man with three boys of his own. She got pregnant with me and he went off to fight in the Second World War. While he was fighting in France, I was born on the Army Base in Paris Texas. When he came home we packed up and roamed the country in a new Ford, pulling a new Airstream trailer, which we lived in for over a year. When my mother could stand the nomadic life no more, we happened to be in Salt Lake City, camped on the outskirts of the city in a trailer park. She took my father’s remaining cash and found a big stone house on the upper avenues and bought it. He never got over being furious at her, and their marriage ended in loud, violent fights. She took me and fled in the early morning dark of a cold Utah Spring. And I was sent to live with my mother’s brother and his wife in Sherman, Texas. They tried awfully hard to give me a good life for the year I was their child. But the one thing that I could not get, could not ever understand, was their hatred of indians and black people. I could not learn bigotry. I don’t know why. Everyone else in my mother’s family got it. What was wrong with me that this very important lesson didn’t sink in? In truth I think it’s a Jungian thing. The collective unconscious. I identify with the oppressed. I personally have never experienced oppression unless being female and married counts. But I will not listen to anyone spout that kind of race or identity hated. It enrages me.
I am too far removed from my heritage to go back, go native. Everyone sees me as white. But deep in the bone I am not. I am not white. I am Choctaw. I will not give up my small, inherited plot of land. Like the Native people in North Dakota, I have a hard time paying my utility bills. I keep it cold to save money. I have moved out of the main house to live in the little house—a renovated garage at the back of the property so I can rent the main house. I try to stay out of sight. I am an old recluse living in my garage to save money so I can keep my land. But hearing about the plight of those native people in North Dakota this morning made me sob. And I can’t stop. I told the young man that I thought it was very important to make sure that all native people are registered to vote in the Presidential Election. If we make the effort to vote, we just might have a President for the first time in our nation’s history who can understand our complicated history and listen to our story. A man who looks more like us than the old white men who have ruled us since the early 1800’s. A man who just might be sympathetic to our plight.
Barack Obama gave the most important speech in American political life since the Gettysburg Address. And like Michelle Obama, for the first time in my lifetime, I am proud of my country.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
I'm Here Because of AshleyPlease go to Swiftspeech! Stella’s marvelous site. There you will find the text for Barack Obama’s beautiful speech today.
Please go to Swiftspeech! Stella’s marvelous site. There you will find the text for Barack Obama’s beautiful speech today. If you can’t find Swiftspeech on your own, go the comments section on any of my posts, find Stella’s intelligent and insightful comments and click on her name—that will lead you to her.
Monday, March 17, 2008
Rare Kudos to MSNBC
For the most part I have liked David Gregory. And only for a second or so did I ever like Tucker Carlson. What the hell good is a liberal media if the only liberal on the air is Keith Olbermann, with the occasional brief appearance of Eugene Robinson and Rachel Maddow? Otherwise it seems to me that Pat Buchannon is the voice of MSNBC. But I digress. It was David Gregory we’re talking about here. Today was the debut of his new show, with a panel of my two favorites, Rachel Maddow and Eugene Robinson. I’m glad both Rachel and Eugene will also stay where they are, Air America and The Washington Post, respectively. They have a token Republican, Morning Joe Scarborough, but it could be worse, it could be, well, Tucker Carlson for instance, or worse yet, Petrified Pat Buchannon.
It was a very fast hour. Unlike Hardball which is the slowest hour of my day. Gregory’s taking email comments and questions. Bloggers, start your engines.
PS Loved the new SNL clip
PPs Also looked like MSNBC dialed down the bells and whistles and all the fancy flashing graphics. Classy move guys. If you can do it for David why don't you do it for everybody--then they might not look so stupid.
PPPS Waiting for Barack's speech tomorrow.
It was a very fast hour. Unlike Hardball which is the slowest hour of my day. Gregory’s taking email comments and questions. Bloggers, start your engines.
PS Loved the new SNL clip
PPs Also looked like MSNBC dialed down the bells and whistles and all the fancy flashing graphics. Classy move guys. If you can do it for David why don't you do it for everybody--then they might not look so stupid.
PPPS Waiting for Barack's speech tomorrow.
It's Not Because You're White, Geraldine.......
It’s because you’re irrelevant. I was going to say stupid, but thought it was unkind. When you were on the Democratic ticket to be our first female Vice President it had little to do with your qualifications, Ms. Ferraro. It was because you were a woman. I refuse to research this, my memory serves me pretty well. Part of the reason you and Mondale had such a rough time was the shenanigans involving the promised but delayed release of your husband’s tax returns. And once released they were hinky enough to cause serious damage. You were a token, and not a very helpful token, at that. Once the race was over and Reagan reelected, you tried a couple of times to win a Senate seat and never made it. And your problem in the tax return area ought to be instructive to Senator Clinton. The days of secretive politicians who want to gain the public trust are over. But for you, an old, irrelevant white woman, to claim reverse racism because your comments about Barack are offensive to everyone, except maybe Hillary and the Republicans, is absurd. Your timid feminism after the heavy lifting was mostly done, made you an almost daring but, in the end disappointing choice for a running mate for Mondale. Barbara Jordan would have been a far better choice. At least she would have won the VP debate with Pappy Bush.
Better Late Than Never
Ferraro Leaves Clinton Campaign. Good news, but a little late. Hillary has a mighty strange rule book. If an Obama surrogate says something remotely disparaging about Hillary, it’s an outrage. The unfortunate surrogate must be fired, immediately. Remember the “monster” comment? Off with her head. And she is gone the moment the words are out of her mouth. The Clintons have a double standard, and they make the rules. Now they keep changing the rules and moving the goal posts.
If Hillary had not married Bill Clinton she would not be an elected official with any record at all. The Ferraro comments could have been made about Hillary. And while we are all engrossed with the spectacle of another long suffering political wife standing by her lying, philandering husband, isn’t that the reason we now have Hillary running for President? We would not know who you are, babe, if your husband had not been President. But now that we are talking about philandering husbands again! Let’s talk about yours. I do not want Bill back in the White House. I can’t imagine any mother allowing her daughter to go work as an intern in the White House while Charming Billy is around. Would you let your daughter work with Bill Clinton? Will it be a girl-free zone?
I have heard women say with a straight face that the Spitzer case is a good reason for electing a woman to be our next President. Maybe, but not Hillary. If she had divorced Bill and married someone else, maybe. But sadly, she’s the wrong woman. Of course I’d like a female President. But it would have to be a woman I respected and admired in order for me to enthusiastically support her. I’d go for Barbara Boxer.
If Hillary had not married Bill Clinton she would not be an elected official with any record at all. The Ferraro comments could have been made about Hillary. And while we are all engrossed with the spectacle of another long suffering political wife standing by her lying, philandering husband, isn’t that the reason we now have Hillary running for President? We would not know who you are, babe, if your husband had not been President. But now that we are talking about philandering husbands again! Let’s talk about yours. I do not want Bill back in the White House. I can’t imagine any mother allowing her daughter to go work as an intern in the White House while Charming Billy is around. Would you let your daughter work with Bill Clinton? Will it be a girl-free zone?
I have heard women say with a straight face that the Spitzer case is a good reason for electing a woman to be our next President. Maybe, but not Hillary. If she had divorced Bill and married someone else, maybe. But sadly, she’s the wrong woman. Of course I’d like a female President. But it would have to be a woman I respected and admired in order for me to enthusiastically support her. I’d go for Barbara Boxer.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Creating The War On Terror
First there is a real threat. 9/11 was a real event. We know who the actors were, and where they came from. It was mostly Saudi Arabia, whose princes are close friends of the Bush family. The terrorists in training had been taking flying lessons, getting ready, soaking up the delights of our culture, like strip clubs, for instance. We knew who they were at the time, we were watching. You, President Bush, and all your advisors knew, and were briefed. Condoleeza Rice wasn’t worried, neither was Cheney. It was your administration’s decision that 9/11 was just the thing you needed to revive your plan to take us to war with Iraq. You manufactured intelligence, cherry picked what worked for you, and then tried to scare us to death with images of mushroom clouds. While backing off the wealthy and well connected son of a Saudi mogul, Osama Bin Ladan. Why do you in Congress go along with this tactic destined for such tragedy for the people of Iraq, for our sons and daughters sent from their National Guard assignments here at home where we need them, to Iraq over and over?
Mr. President, and you, all of you, Republicans and Democrats alike, who voted for the Iraq War Resolution, owe us—We The People—an apology. It is you, all of you, who started “The War On Terror” that now, since you took the terror to the “terrorists” in Iraq, (who, by the way, weren’t there prior to our arrival in Iraq) have created the best and biggest advertisement and recruiting scheme in history for every young discontented and alienated misfit in the world to join the jihadists, because now they do really believe that we are The Great Satan. Thanks a lot.
And this war on terror has given you the excuse you were looking for to change the rules and strip us of our constitutional rights one by one. Stack the Supreme court to take choice away from women (the better to control them), and to prevent the carriage of justice for anyone detained illegally, transported to a foreign country for torture and then disappeared to Guantanimo, without representation or a hearing. Where did Habeas Corpus go? Has it moved to Canada to join the hordes now fleeing your ruinous governance. We are losing everything, our houses, our civil rights, our sons and daughters, our bridges are falling down and you tap dance on the porch waiting for your successor to bring us more of these good old days. Thanks a lot Congress. Thanks a lot Mr. President. Isn’t it Romantic?
Mr. President, and you, all of you, Republicans and Democrats alike, who voted for the Iraq War Resolution, owe us—We The People—an apology. It is you, all of you, who started “The War On Terror” that now, since you took the terror to the “terrorists” in Iraq, (who, by the way, weren’t there prior to our arrival in Iraq) have created the best and biggest advertisement and recruiting scheme in history for every young discontented and alienated misfit in the world to join the jihadists, because now they do really believe that we are The Great Satan. Thanks a lot.
And this war on terror has given you the excuse you were looking for to change the rules and strip us of our constitutional rights one by one. Stack the Supreme court to take choice away from women (the better to control them), and to prevent the carriage of justice for anyone detained illegally, transported to a foreign country for torture and then disappeared to Guantanimo, without representation or a hearing. Where did Habeas Corpus go? Has it moved to Canada to join the hordes now fleeing your ruinous governance. We are losing everything, our houses, our civil rights, our sons and daughters, our bridges are falling down and you tap dance on the porch waiting for your successor to bring us more of these good old days. Thanks a lot Congress. Thanks a lot Mr. President. Isn’t it Romantic?
Friday, March 14, 2008
Isn't It Romantic?
Anyone remember the lyrics to that song but me? Well, no George, it isn’t. Vote Vets isn’t going to think so either. Not unless you think it’s romantic to see little kids starve or die in car-bomb attacks at their local market is romantic. How romantic is a traumatic brain injury? PTSD? How about an amputation by roadside bomb? See your buddy blown to bits? We would be only so happy to facilitate your early retirement so you can go—Air National Guard, Right? Still got that romantic flyboy outfit you wore the day you gave your Mission Accomplished speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln? Why don’t you do your duty and take somebody’s son’s place since it sounds like so much fun to you. As a former Commander In Chief, I’m sure they’d extend the age limit. I hear the Armed Forces are stretched pretty thin, and have relaxed a lot of standards, maybe even I.Q. Take the girls with you too. Aren’t they longing for a little adventure and romance?
World War Three?
Word is, Admiral Fallen was retired early because he isn’t in favor of a war with Iran. Remember all the times Bush said he listens to the Generals? Well, if anyone thought that was the truth then, they know it’s bullshit now. Bush seems determined to make the Rapture inevitable before he leaves office. And since we don’t have the numbers of cannon fodder soldiers at the ready, there will have to be a Draft to carry out this scheme.
When we had a Draft, during the Vietnam war years, the only refuge for the children of the rich and powerful was the National Guard—you all remember the pictures of young George in his uniform, proudly grinning at the camera as he thumbed his nose at guys like John Kerry, Max Cleland and John McCain. Well, under Bush, Chenney, the National Guard is no longer the refuge of anyone, and is no longer available to do the very real work the National Guard was designed to do—protect us here at home. Now it’s a ticket to Iraq. Soon to be a ticket to Iran. With the removal of Admiral Fallon no one stands in the way.
When we had a Draft, during the Vietnam war years, the only refuge for the children of the rich and powerful was the National Guard—you all remember the pictures of young George in his uniform, proudly grinning at the camera as he thumbed his nose at guys like John Kerry, Max Cleland and John McCain. Well, under Bush, Chenney, the National Guard is no longer the refuge of anyone, and is no longer available to do the very real work the National Guard was designed to do—protect us here at home. Now it’s a ticket to Iraq. Soon to be a ticket to Iran. With the removal of Admiral Fallon no one stands in the way.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
The Rich Are Richer and I Can Barely Afford To Eat
Do you think rich Republicans know that lemons are seventy nine cents apiece? Do you think it matters? And why does writing this make me cry? I live on roughly $1,000.00 a month. I could only pay half my property tax on time this year. Now the interest and penalties are mounting and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. My twenty two year old Jetta has finally given up the ghost, each past repair has cost at least $500.00. I can no longer afford to keep it running. I’m disabled and have high medical costs. My teeth are crumbling and I have no dental insurance. I need to see my primary care physician, but keep putting it off because I can’t afford the twenty percent medicare doesn’t pay. And I’m lucky. At least I qualify for medicare. I was dropped by my insurance carrier years ago because I actually needed insurance. Get a diagnosis that might cost them something and they’ll drop you in a New York minute. My premiums went from $500.00 a month for a single self-employed person, to $1,000.00 in the space of two months.
An old friend came to visit me one day last fall to tell me that I couldn’t afford to live in my house anymore. It made me so angry that I told him to go take a flying f***k, and haven’t spoken to him since. How is it that an old woman living in a home that is completely free and clear of debt cannot afford to live in her house? And because my income is so low, I don’t qualify for a loan on the property even though the property is worth nearly half a million. I grew up in this house and know everyone in my neighborhood. They are my only contact with people. I love them and don’t want to sell the house and move into a condo. Winters are harsh in Utah and this year, especially long. I keep my house at 60 degrees trying to save money on utilities, and still the price goes up and up on gas every month.
Writing about the political race has been a way for me to think about something other than the grim realities of my life, but this election is about the huge disparity between the haves and the have nots. And I am just one of the millions of have nots. At least I have a roof over my head. I should be very grateful for that. But to think I have to budget for a lemon? This makes me sob. It is such a small symbol for the gulf that divides us.
An old friend came to visit me one day last fall to tell me that I couldn’t afford to live in my house anymore. It made me so angry that I told him to go take a flying f***k, and haven’t spoken to him since. How is it that an old woman living in a home that is completely free and clear of debt cannot afford to live in her house? And because my income is so low, I don’t qualify for a loan on the property even though the property is worth nearly half a million. I grew up in this house and know everyone in my neighborhood. They are my only contact with people. I love them and don’t want to sell the house and move into a condo. Winters are harsh in Utah and this year, especially long. I keep my house at 60 degrees trying to save money on utilities, and still the price goes up and up on gas every month.
Writing about the political race has been a way for me to think about something other than the grim realities of my life, but this election is about the huge disparity between the haves and the have nots. And I am just one of the millions of have nots. At least I have a roof over my head. I should be very grateful for that. But to think I have to budget for a lemon? This makes me sob. It is such a small symbol for the gulf that divides us.
Snatching Defeat From The Jaws Of Victory
Here we go again. If anything could make it possible for John McCain to win the Presidential election it just might be the kind of campaign the Clintons are engaged in. I’m still pissed off about the ringing phone ad. Even if I were still a supporter of Hillary, that ad would have change my mind. It’s a play worthy of Carl Rove. I wonder if Rove is working for the Clintons now that he’s a free man. You must be scared, very very scared! My God, how cynical and stupid do they think we are? How stupid and cynical are they to run such an ad? At this point there’s nowhere to go but up for Hillary. Gerry Ferraro’s comments were stupid beyond belief. What the hell were they thinking? Why not just hire a hit-man to knee-cap the guy. My God, what have we become as Democrats that we would destroy our chances to take back the White House by running so nasty a primary campaign? Both Obama and Clinton are qualified, otherwise neither one would have gotten this far. Please Senator Clinton, stop the snide and nasty comments about Obama. It should be beneath you. That you seem to be willing to win at any cost to the Party is a dangerous game to play. Lets raise the level of discourse. Let’s focus on the right opponent. Unless it’s really John McCain you want to share the ticket with. Is that your dream team? Clinton and McCain on the same side? Stop it now, before we’ve lost any hope of winning anything but a reputation for complete self-destruction.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Spitzer's Fall From Grace
I thought her name was Kristen. Grace, Spitzer? I don’t think so. Not unless Grace is a hooker from his past that we don’t know about yet. I don’t think even Democrats in New York would call the high ledge Spitzer has been teetering on, graceful. The worst thing for me, as a woman, is to see another woman having to “stand by her man” while he tries to back away from the edge. I want, just once, to see the wife, standing beside the philandering, lying bastard she’s married to, haul off and deck him, in full view of cameras, and call him the names he deserves.
Why do political wives agree to make the perp walk with their lying, hypocritical, stupidly arrogant, just plain dumb husbands? Does Mrs. Spitzer have secret ambitions to run for President? What’s up with that? How can you love someone who has lied to you for ten years or so? Doesn’t love require some trust? Isn’t complete betrayal a good reason to dump the bum? Isn’t having teenaged daughters a good reason to say, “No, girls, you never have to sacrifice your own ambitions for a career to keep a man. And no man is worth losing your own integrity. No man is worth this kind of humiliation. Not even your daddy.”
Why do political wives agree to make the perp walk with their lying, hypocritical, stupidly arrogant, just plain dumb husbands? Does Mrs. Spitzer have secret ambitions to run for President? What’s up with that? How can you love someone who has lied to you for ten years or so? Doesn’t love require some trust? Isn’t complete betrayal a good reason to dump the bum? Isn’t having teenaged daughters a good reason to say, “No, girls, you never have to sacrifice your own ambitions for a career to keep a man. And no man is worth losing your own integrity. No man is worth this kind of humiliation. Not even your daddy.”
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