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Okay, yeah, once again I’ve been terribly negligent about updating this blog. Frankly, I had hoped that the need for this blog would go away after the shrub left office. I thought I’d feel better about things once the grown-ups were back in charge.
Silly me.
But where to start?
Dick Cheney’s All-Torture, All-The Time Tour?
The Obama White House’s insistence that we just accept that we don’t torture anymore so we should just move forward?
The whole same-sex marriage issue?
The screams of “Socialism!” from the far right in response to just about everything that Obama proposes?
The murder of Dr. Tiller?
So many things worthy of comment, I hardly know where to begin…
Okay, I’d written this whole thing about how the wingnuts who want to teabag the White House really ought to consult UrbanDictionary.com before they embarrass themselves further, and pointing out the logical failings behind this supposed grass-roots protest, but really, David Shuster did a much better job last night on Countdown, so I’ll just let him say it:
Over at Huffington Post, John Cusack has a very nice blog post, told almost entirely in video clips, about the need for war crimes trials against Bush administration officials who participated in decisions to torture prisoners. Check it out.
-jane doe
Note: title changed because the blog post cited is not so much something to read as it is something to watch and think about…
No, wait. Stop laughing.
Yes, I really did go to a gun show. No, I was not forced at gunpoint by someone else.
See, here’s the thing: I’ve been wanting to get some pictures of guns for a painting I’m thinking about. Sure, I could go to Google images for photos, but (a) that’s taking someone else’s work and (b) one can’t be assured of finding exactly what one wants that way.
Anyway, I was driving down one of the main streets in town here yesterday when I saw a sign for a gun show.
So I went in.
Well, no. That’s not exactly true. First I did a quick wardrobe check to make sure I wasn’t wearing anything that would get me shot in such a venue. I wear a lot of snarky t-shirts when I’m not trying to dress like a grown-up, and some of them are pretty political (I know, what are the odds?) and would not go over well with the gun show crowd. But as luck would have it, I was wearing an over-sized denim shirt, which I figured would be unobjectionable. If I were anywhere but Colorado, my Birkenstocks might have been a problem, but here, even some Republicans wear them – though most Republicans don’t, to my knowledge, wear blue toenail polish…
I decided that I was probably safe.
It was…how shall I say this…interesting. From, kind of, a sociological perspective, I guess.
You know that 28% that still apparently approves of George Bush, no matter what he does? Well, I found them. They’re all at gun shows, apparently. And they all loves them some John McCain, too:
No, this is not Photoshopped. This is the only covert picture I took at the gun show, because I couldn't stop myself.
I do not like guns. Guns were intended for one purpose: killing someone or something. This is something that makes me exceedingly uncomfortable.
I do not own a gun, though for several years I was in possession of one that was foisted on me by my father when my parents left Los Angeles to move to Colorado. They moved away about one year after the 1992 riots, and my dad didn’t like leaving his little girl unprotected in the big city. I accepted the gun from him because it increased his peace of mind, knowing that I had it. It stayed at the back of the top shelf of my closet, behind lots of other stuff, for the entire time I had it, so I wouldn’t have to look at it. When I left California, I gave the gun back to my dad, and I am happy to say that I have no idea what he did with it after that.
Guns creep me out.
So you can probably imagine how I felt as I wandered around the gun show, trying not to look like a liberal.
It was a little weird.
Of course, everyone wanted to sell me a gun. Or ammo. Or various army-surplus paraphenalia, like ammo cans and MREs. Or medals or ribbons or badges from some war or another. Some with Nazi insignia. Really.
Obviously, I couldn’t just wander around the place taking pictures, even though that was what I desperately wanted to do. I think the, um, merchants would have rustled me out the doors right quick if I had done so, and I doubt my camera would have survived the experience.
After wandering around the floor once, I decided to go with the honest approach.
“Um, hi, I’m an artist, and I’m trying to get some pictures of some guns for a painting I want to do. Do you mind if I take pictures of your display?”
This was met with one of three responses:
- “Yes, absolutely. Go right ahead.” Sometimes followed by, “Do you need to see different angles of the gun(s)?” or “Is there a particular type of gun you want a picture of?” These were the people who were gun enthusiasts. They were all about the second amendment, they were proud of their collections, and they were happy to have someone take an interest in the craftmanship of the different styles of guns.
- “Um, I guess that would be okay. Just of the guns? But, please not of the people looking at the displays or anything.” Okay, I could respect that – and did. They didn’t know who I was, or what sort of art I was talking about, after all, and certainly I could understand their concern that their customers might not be wild about being photographed looking at weapons. Plus, of course, someone taking pictures at a gun show looks out of place. This is not a place where cameras are much in evidence. So, I kept it low key.
- “No, I’m pretty sure you’re not allowed to take pictures in here. I think that’s the rules of the convention place.” Really? I didn’t see any signs to that effect. And hey, why do all your guns have tags that say Not Legal in California, anyway?
Anyway, I took pictures where I could, and, as they say, got the hell out of Dodge.
But not before an earnest man in his mid-forties pressed an “Obama and the 2nd Amendment” flyer and a McCain/Palin sticker into my hands. “Really,” he said, “Make sure you read this. It’s important.”
I tossed the flyer. Second amendment concerns are WAY far down on my list of worries when it comes to presidential candidates, frankly.
But I’m still trying to come up with a good use for the McCain/Palin ‘08 sticker….
-jane doe
I’ve been working on a post about our potential next VP, but in the mean time, there’s this:
Zack de la Rocha and the rest of the boys from Rage Against the Machine give an impromptu, a cappella performance in St. Paul. There is something inspiring about getting a big crowd of people to chant in unison, “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!” (h/t to Crooks and Liars for the video clip)
-jane doe
Everywhere you looked on Monday, someone was trying to sell you something with Barack Obama’s name or picture on it.
Vendor's booth at the DNC
One of my favorites (as I noted in one of my posts on Monday) was the guy who was selling Barack Obama watches “guaranteed to be more accurate than George Bush.” I pointed out to the guy selling them that this was hardly difficult, as even a stopped watch is right two times a day, which would still be more accurate than our beloved alleged president. He just kind of looked at me funny.
Write your own caption
Besides the usual junk one would expect at this sort of event, I saw the following items offered for sale:
A Barack Obama action figure:
"An action figure we can believe in"
Obama in a Bottle:
Barack in a Bottle
And Obama or Denver shot glasses, beer steins, mouse pads, towels, bottle openers, keyrings, and/or plush donkeys:
Do we really need the commemorative mouse pads?
I have a fondness for the ridiculous, so naturally I couldn’t resist picking up a few things that struck me as truly silly:
The Obama breath mints were nice…
Breath mints we can believe in
But I have to admit I like the playing cards better. Both the aces and kings show Obama:
Obama is aces
The rest of the cards show other people, including politicians:
Leahy, Pelosi, and Hillary
…news (and fake news) people:
The Liberal Trinity: Stewart, Colbert, and Olbermann
…and of course, these two jokers:
Pair of jokers
Before you ask: no, I didn’t buy one of those famously accurate Obama watches. I stopped wearing a watch when I left my old law firm and no longer had to justify my existence in six-minute increments.
I did, however, buy one of those plush donkeys with a Denver 2008 t-shirt on it, though. But it was a gift. For my baby nephew. And if he’s a very good little boy, he might even get to play with it some day.
-jane doe
…because the police were doing everything they could to keep the protesters away from the people the protesters wanted to communicate their opinions to.
It was not for lack of trying on my part. Over the course of the day, I basically walked a grid through the downtown area near the Pepsi Center and the Convention Center. But I didn’t see any large groups of protesters at all.
I saw a few people who looked like they planned to take part in some sort of protest. These people were mostly wearing Birkenstocks or Chuck Taylors, snarky political t-shirts, and backpacks, and spent a lot of time shaking their heads (in disgust, I assume) at all the police in riot gear everywhere you looked.
Actually, that’s also probably a pretty good description of how I looked yesterday.
Maybe they were all bloggers…though now that I think about it, aren’t political bloggers often protesting various government actions?
I did see a few small groups attempting to protest. First, a few women who were apparently in Code Pink, looking like they were waiting for a few more of their friends before getting started:
Code Pink? Or merely fashion disasters?
There were the die-hard Hillary supporters who apparently were hoping for some sort of coup at the convention:
Hillary supporters
Some die-hard Hillary supporters
Then, of course, there were the people who claimed to be disaffected Hillary supporters planning to vote for McCain:
Ass-hats in a Hummer
But I’m always a sucker for the religious nutcases who insist that I am going to burn in hell for being a liberal:
Right-wing religious wackos...
...practicing intolerance...
...just as Jesus commanded.
They protest, as is their first amendment right. I mock them, as is my first amendment right.
-jane doe
Just got back from seeing War, Inc. for a second time. It finally opened in a city that was less than a day’s drive from Redstatesville, so this evening I grabbed a friend who I knew wanted to see it and off we went.
I liked the movie the first time I saw it (my original review of it can be read here), but if anything, it was actually better on the second viewing. For one thing, I could watch for the things that went by too quickly to really catch the first time through. But there were also some more subtle nuances that I just missed the first time I saw it. Scenes that brought up memories of other movies (or specific styles/types of movies) I’ve seen over the years, which added new layers to the film. It makes me wonder what else I’ll see the next time I watch it.
Nearly as entertaining as watching the film a second time was watching the way my friend reacted to it. The friend in question is…well, he’s an interesting guy, one with an…interesting past (about which I know only a little, though I probably know more than most) and some…interesting friends. Let’s just say that he probably identified a little too well with one of the characters in the movie (I’m not saying which one), and leave it at that. At any rate, there were several points during the film where I thought he was going to fall out of his chair from laughing so hard, and he spent most of the drive back to Redstatesville raving about what a great movie it was and speculating on where he might be able to pick up one of the movie posters to frame and hang in his apartment.
I’m not entirely sure whether I should be amused or disturbed by my friend’s reaction. He occasionally reads this blog, though – or says he does, anyway – so I think that’s all I will say on the topic of his reaction to the film.
As for you, my dear non-existent readers, do try to catch this movie if it is showing anywhere within a reasonable driving distance from where you live.
It’s late here in Redstatesville, and I’m tired, so I think I’ll end here.
-jane doe
Update: I made a minor, non-substantive change to the wording. Sorry for the repeat post, RSS readers.
I had planned on writing a post today, but my time has been taken up by watching a 2006 program from the BBC called The Century of the Self (h/t to Mike’s Blog Round Up over at C&L). I literally have not been able to stop watching, and am now only pausing between episodes to post this.
Regular readers of this blog know that I often focus on the intersection between psychology and politics. I have written at length (probably way too much) about how I believe terror management theory is being used by certain politicians and others with an interest in maintaining the status quo in order to manipulate the American public, particularly at election time, but also on an ongoing basis to distract the public from the extremely long list of scandals flowing from the alleged president’s office. I have also written on the nexus between politics and psychology in other contexts.
What a lot of it comes down to is how the people in power (in government and the corporate world) use psychological research as a means of, if not precisely controlling, at least manipulating or occasionally anesthetizing the masses.
The BBC program focuses on similar themes, but starts at an earlier point in time. It begins with the early works of Freud and how those works were used to manipulate people in the early part of the twentieth century, in the then-developing field of public relations. It is both fascinating and disturbing, and I strongly encourage you, my dear non-existent readers, to take the time to watch it.
I’ll even make it easy for you by embedding the first episode (there are apparently four) below.
-jane doe
Ever get a song stuck in your head?
One that cycles through over and over and over whenever you aren’t actively using enough of your attention and working memory on other things to keep it suppressed?
It’s a pretty common phenomenon, actually. Happens to most people occasionally.
Lately, it seems like it’s happening to me nearly every day.
Ordinarily, this doesn’t bother me much. It’s just one of those things my brain seems to do. And it usually does it with long enough segments of the song in question that at least it’s not the same line from the chorus being repeated endlessly on a loop. One day last week, for instance, I had about forty seconds of Lost in the Supermarket running through my head. There are worse things in life.
Sometimes, if I concentrate, and if it’s a song I know well enough, I can actually get the complete mental playback, start to finish. Complete with guitars, drums, and backing vocals. I find that the process of doing this often works to help my brain finally put the song aside.
Actually playing the song on the stereo or my computer can also work to get it out of my brain, if I sit and listen to it attentively.
And then there are the times when the song that is stuck going through my head is some sort of novelty song. These can be particularly bad.
Once, several years ago, I had a three day stretch where I couldn’t get the chorus of Nellie the Elephant out of my head. It was awful, particularly when I was trying to fall asleep. It was just, “Nellie the elephant packed her trunk/and said goodbye to the circus,” over and over and over until I thought I would go mad. I still cringe when I think about it.
That’s kind of where I am today.
Today’s song has been Roy Zimmerman’s song about Dick Cheney. Just a few lines, over and over. It’s very disturbing.
I actually really like Roy Zimmerman’s music. He is kind of a present-day Tom Lehrer, which is nice, since the real Tom Lehrer doesn’t find the news funny enough to be writing songs about it any more. I’ve even purchased several of his albums from iTunes.
What I do not like, is having the chorus of the Dick Cheney song going through my head.
So on the theory that misery loves company, I’ve decided to do something I don’t ordinarily do in this blog: I’m going to try to post the YouTube video of it here, so the rest of you can suffer along with me.
If this works the way I think it’s supposed to work, the video should appear right below my signature. Wish me luck.
-jane doe
I’m going to say right up front that this post is aimed at the women among my non-existent readers.
Guys are welcome to stay around and read the rest of the post if you want to. I’m not planning on talking about chick flicks, or shoes, or any of the other things men seem to think women talk about when no men are present. It’s just that the things I have to say will more likely be of concern to women than men.
I want to talk about John McCain and women today.
Perhaps, I should be more specific, though. I don’t want to talk about the fact that he cheated on his former wife with the woman who is now his wife, or the fact that he divorced her after a serious car accident apparently left her not pretty enough for him. Though I think both of those facts say rather a lot about the kind of man John McCain is.
Neither do I want to talk about McCain’s positions on women’s issues, atrocious though they may be. Although I would caution any Hillary Clinton supporters who are thinking about voting for McCain because they are angry that she didn’t get the Democratic party nomination to look carefully at his positions on matters like abortion, family planning, and equal pay before revenge voting in November.
No, I don’t want to talk about McCain’s position on women’s issues. I want to talk about his issues with women.
This past week, a story surfaced about a joke McCain told back in 1986. A wildly inappropriate joke regardless of the setting, involving a woman and a gorilla.
It’s hardly the first wildly inappropriate joke the man has told – witness his singing of “Bomb, bomb Iran,” and his comment about the cigarettes the United States is exporting to that country being “one way to kill them.” But this one is part of a subset of his inappropriate jokes and comments that suggest some troubling things about McCain’s character.
I think that John McCain is a bully.
More specifically, I think that he is the kind of bully who gets off on making women feel powerless. Vulnerable.
Let’s examine the evidence, shall we?
We’ll start not with the story that surfaced this week, but rather a joke the man told during the Clinton presidency. I don’t feel like googling the thing to get the exact words, but the gist of the joke – and here I am stretching the word joke well beyond its definitional limits solely because that is how others have described the remark - was that Chelsea Clinton was ugly because Janet Reno was her father.
What a breathtakingly cruel thing to say of a teenage girl.
Having been a teenage girl at one time in my life, I feel comfortable in saying that there was probably very little he could have said of her that would have hurt her worse than that casual remark. Most teenagers, and particularly most teenage girls, are insecure about their appearance. It comes with the territory. They are in that awkward transition between childhood and young adulthood, when hormonal changes and social pressures and the process of growing into independent individuals separate from their families tend to combine to produce a perfect storm of angst.
To have someone, some senator, say she was ugly in such a public way just to get a laugh could not have felt good. Even if she could shake it off, and shrug to her friends and say, “What an asshole,” that sort of comment initially hits you like a punch in the stomach and can linger to eat away at your confidence for years.
So, strike one against John McCain.
There have also been reports that McCain called his wife – his current wife, that is – a cunt.
Guys, if any of you are still reading this, let me give you a hint:
Never, ever call your wife or girlfriend a cunt.
Just, don’t.
It’s okay, if crude, to use the word to refer to that portion of her anatomy if you find the term vagina too clinical. (“The gynecologist sticks this thing into your cunt? EWWWW.”) And it’s not completely off-limits during an argument (“What crawled up your cunt and died?”), though its use will probably have you sleeping on the couch for a few nights. Used judiciously under the right circumstances, the word can even be arousing. (“When I touch you like this, can you feel it down in your cunt?”)
But when you call a woman a cunt, when you say the words, “You are a cunt,” or “You cunt,” you are verbally reducing her to nothing more than that portion of her anatomy. Not a human being, a person with complex hopes and fears and dreams. Not a partner in your life, someone to walk through the world beside you, to share your laughter and sorrows. Just a receptacle for your sperm, to be used when the urge hits and otherwise ignored, unimportant.
Some might argue that calling a woman a cunt is no different than calling a guy a dick, but I strongly disagree. It’s about power dynamics in society. The men are the ones who have most of the power in the world. They build war monuments that are really nothing more than huge phallic symbols, and don’t even get me started on the whole Freudian thing with guns and missiles and other weapons. So to call a guy a dick doesn’t carry the same simultaneously devaluing and threatening overtones toward the guy that calling a woman a cunt does toward her. If anything, a guy who is a dick would be more of a threat to the people around him.
But when you call a woman a cunt, you are reducing her to that one function. Something that exists solely for a man’s pleasure, something that is interchangeable with some other cunt should the man tire of this one.
When you call a woman a cunt, you remind her that in a world full of men who are dicks, she is vulnerable.
Men are the conquerors, the invaders, the destroyers. Not all of them, maybe not even most of them, but enough of them that we know that they are there, a threat to us. Our bodies are literally open to the threat of invasion against our will.
Which brings me around to this week’s revelation about that “joke” that McCain told, back in 1986. The one that his campaign staffers are trying to shrug off with statements about McCain’s “bad boy” side.
I’m not sure why one would even call it a joke, or find it funny. It apparently involved a woman who was beaten and then raped repeatedly by a gorilla. The punchline is that when she wakes up after the attack, the first thing she asks the doctor is, “Where is that marvelous ape?”
As if a woman who was beaten and then raped repeatedly (and apparently those were the terms McCain used when telling this wonderful joke) would ask longingly about her attacker.
As if this were matter worthy of a few chuckles over dinner.
Women don’t generally find much to laugh about when talking about rape.
For one thing, far too many among us have been raped. It’s hard to say how many, because so many go unreported, for a variety of reasons. Date rapes, girls who get too drunk at parties and wake up with memories of things they would never have consented to when sober, things that fall into a gray area where the woman or girl is afraid of reporting it because people will somehow say or think that they deserved it, because they wore short skirts, or got drunk, or went to a guy’s apartment, or let themselves be alone with the wrong guy.
And before you ask, no, I have not been raped. I consider myself rather fortunate in this respect because there were a couple of situations in my undergrad days that could have turned ugly for me but didn’t. I have many female friends who were not as lucky.
A friend from law school once posited, as we sat around a table eating horrible fast food between our classes, that in our society, every woman, or nearly every woman, has some experience, some moment in her life that forces on her the awareness of her vulnerability on a physical level. When that moment comes (usually in one’s late teens or twenties, though it can come earlier or later), it is a very shocking awakening for the woman or girl who previously felt relatively safe or protected in the world.
My friend wasn’t talking about the kind of awareness that one gets when one hears lectures on the subject of date rape at freshman orientation, that abstract sort of awareness that, yeah, okay, this is something that can happen, but it probably will never happen to me.
She was talking about the kind of awareness that grabs hold of one with an icy fist and says, “You are vulnerable. You can be beaten, or raped, or killed, and there’s not much you can do to defend yourself, because they are men and you are a woman. You are weak, and they are strong.”
Sitting at that table on the day when my friend talked about her theory were perhaps seven or eight other young women, myself included. All well-educated, mostly self-assured, secure in our knowledge that we could do just as well as our male classmates when we went out into the business world. All women with the sort of forceful personality it takes to even consider entering the field of law. We were ready to take on the world, and no one was going to stop us.
And every single one of us started nodding when she finished telling us her theory.
Each one of us had some definite moment in time that she could point to, some event that happened or very nearly happened, and say, “This is when I knew.”
And every woman I’ve discussed this theory with since that day has had that moment experience at some point in her life.
After that moment, the little reminders are there, popping up in random places as you go about your life, just in case you should forget your vulnerability. Little things that say, “You are weak.” And no matter how much you work out at the gym, or how many self-defense classes you take, those reminders never quite lose their power.
There are men in the world who play on that vulnerability. I don’t mean the obvious ones who do it within the context of intimate relationships, though certainly there are plenty of those running around.
I’m talking about the type who wear business suits, and spend their days working on business deals, negotiating, trading, bargaining, arguing, walking the corridors of power and getting stuff done, who welcome women into the board rooms and conference rooms and offices because the law requires them to, but still use their physical presence as a way of asserting their dominance over women. They are particularly likely to use it when it gains them a business advantage, but also sometimes when it doesn’t, just because they can.
You usually see these men, and they are usually among the taller men in the room if they are playing this particular game, looming over the women who are present. One I knew of would stand nearly toe-to-toe with a woman when negotiations became particularly heated, forcing the woman to tilt her head back and look up at him, trying to take advantage of that feeling of vulnerability.
Sometimes this works rather well for the men. They get concessions in the negotiations as the women both literally and metaphorically back away from their original position.
Sometimes it works…less well. I ran into a few guys back in my lawyer days who tried to use this tactic on me. The thing is, I am 5′9″ – six feet tall in heels (and back in my lawyer days I almost always wore heels). Relatively few men are able to truly tower over me, and a good percentage of the ones who can play basketball professionally. More often what happened was that they would stand up to start the game, and then I would stand up and look them more or less directly in the eye, no head tilting required, which led to a few priceless facial expressions when they realized they weren’t going to win that particular game.
But I digress.
Men who lack the physical presence to play these power games so blatantly in the business world often find other ways to remind women of their vulnerability, however, as a way of asserting power in social situations.
Some of them tell off-color jokes, or at least say words in a voice that suggests that they are joking. Sometimes those jokes are about rape or physical violence directed at women.
Which brings us back to Senator McCain.
His staffers have tried to play off the gorilla joke as something that he doesn’t remember telling, but certainly might have said, and claim that it’s just a reflection of his “bad boy” side.
Because he’s a maverick, that McCain is, no matter how many times he’s supported Bush’s proposals over the past eight years. You just can’t control a maverick. It’s part of his charm.
News flash, guys. Picking on teenage girls, calling one’s wife a cunt, and making jokes about rape don’t make one a maverick or a bad boy.
In my book, things like this say bully. And that’s what I think McCain is.
There are other examples of this sort of behavior from the man, abuse directed at people less powerful, that I could have cataloged here but chose not to. A little googling would turn up several of them within minutes. But I think that, at least for my own purposes, the three incidents I’ve written about are sufficient for me to draw the conclusion that I have.
John McCain is a bully.
And if there is one thing this country does not need right now, after the last eight years, it is to have another bully in the White House for the next four.
-jane doe
Update: I wrote this post yesterday, but found this site today. It’s a much lighter take on John McCain and women’s issues.
