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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.