Don't Get Me Wrong

The top photo was taken today.

The bottom photo was taken at Thanksgiving.

Where the waves came from, I can't say.

Landmarks in child development

Everyone "oohs" and "aahs" over stupid bullshit like "baby's first steps" and "first day of school." Some of the traditional Big Moments actually are important, like "sleeps through night." But there are some vital rubicons that get no attention, and I am here to tell you, they are huge.

For instance. Potty training is nice and all? But what really matters is the day the kid starts to wipe its own ass. No longer having to get up in the middle of every damn meal to the cry of "Mama! Come wipe my butt!" is the moment when you've really transitioned out of babyhood.

Next up? Either "reads for pleasure" or "can make own lunch." Of the two, "reads for pleasure" is a much bigger deal. Being able to tell the kid to make his or her own damn sandwich is pretty fucking sweet, but nothing beats a kid that will sit quietly for hours on end without the accompaniment of that insidious music from the Mario games.

Another nice one is "bathes self." No more aching back from bending over the tub. No more having to share your shower with someone who thinks it's fun to spray you in the face with the detachable showerhead. Having to wipe up the bathroom floor with the mat is a small price to pay for an hour of the kid playing in the bath while you read a book.

"Bikes to and from school" is a little anticlimactic. While it's awesome to be able to kick the kid out the door in the morning and go right back to your coffee cup without having to do the roundtrip drive, it's really annoying to realize that you're the only parent who thinks her kid is capable of navigating the big bad world on his or her own. While the kid gets a big boost of confidence from being the first in her or his class to do this, we all know that developmental milestones are really about parents regaining our freedom step by step. I can't wait until Pseudonymous Kid's peers also have permission to transport themselves around town and I'm freed from the burdens of "schlepping kids to and from playdates" and "mama, I'm bored, there's no one to play with, let's DO something."

This post brought to you by my having solved PK's boredom problem by reading him half of the first chapter of Neil Gaiman's Graveyard Book aloud, then handing him the book and telling him I wasn't going to read him the rest of it.

dear GOP: help my friend get healthcare

Dear GOP:
I'm so glad you're concerned with the plight of the millions of American people (especially women) who are either under-insured or uninsured. Seeing your concern during the Healthcare Summit yesterday prompted me to write you. I'm actually hoping you can help a friend of mine.

She's a very hardworking woman and a rather wonderful friend. (She makes the best hummus, ever!) Like others in the financial services industry, she was laid off a few years ago from a global multi-billion dollar financial services firm in Chicago and she has only recently been able to find steady work as a sub-contractor for a federal gov't office. In the years between her initial layoff and her contract work now, she went back to school and started her own business. But when her rather generous severance package ran out, she had to give up COBRA coverage (it's really expensive!) and purchase an individual healthcare insurance policy.

Then she ran into a few issues. The economy got very soft and she needed to supplement her small income by working some uneven retail jobs. (Did you know that retail only pays about $9-10/hour? And that they don't have regular schedules?) Her business wasn't really taking off and her savings were dwindling. Retail only paid her several hundred dollars a month and her expenses (rent, food, utilities, insurance) were eating the majority of her savings. Pretty soon, her savings were gone. So last year, she went on food stamps and reluctantly canceled her individual health insurance. Later that year, she was late with her rent and when her landlord started to make noises about eviction, she moved in with a friend with a spare room because she was literally steps away from being homeless.

You should know she discovered a lump, too. She's had this lump for about a year now and has never had it checked. Breast cancer gallops through her family history. She's working a full time job with this federal government office but only as a contractor, which doesn't offer benefits of any kind. (What's up with that?) So even though she's earning some money, she has to put a lot of it into savings in order to get ready to move out - she can't live in her friend's spare room forever - and she just can't afford anything like an HSA or another individual health insurance policy. Anyway, the point is she hasn't gotten her lump checked. It's still there.

I keep telling her there are public services in Illinois for free breast screenings for low income women (since she earned something like $16,000.00 last year, I think she qualifies as low income.) But she stubbornly refuses because she doesn't want to get slammed with a preexisting condition when she finally gets managed care. And since flu season is still kicking around in Chicago, she's got this bad cough and her federal contract job won't let her take any days off so she's going into work sick. It would be great if she could get a few antibiotics into her.

Can you help her? It would be great if you could let her know that you guys have a plan to resolve her situation.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

A Concerned Friend

Round the House and Mind the Dishes

Yesterday, I received one of those dread phone calls.

My friend Rey called me to tell me of the death of our mutual friend, B-. He did away with himself. He was 42 years old.

Out of respect for the departed, I can't go into details. I will only say there will be no viewing at the wake or funeral.

B- was found by his partner under the most ghastly circumstances. As a result, B-'s partner is now in the hospital. Himself is presently the source of much worry to Rey and Angela. He is refusing visitors and food and seems to have given up on life, at least for now.

Rey and Angela were much closer to B- than I was. He was a frequent visitor to their home and that's where I got to know him. He doted on their grandkids and the grandkids on him. He took them on all kinds of outings and always had some toy or trinket for them when he came to visit. Their shrieks of delight as they searched his pockets and person for treasure never failed to set the grownups themselves into shrieks of delight. He stood up for Consuela, Rey's oldest grandchild.

I'd like to post the sympathy letter I sent to Rey and Angela this morning on behalf of my family. I don't know what else to say about all this. I feel I should say something but I'm still in a bit of a shock. Writing to Rey and Angela was very soothing for me. I hope it will bring them some shred of peace.

Dearest Friends:

Our hearts ache with yours.

We send you our profound sympathy and condolences at the loss of B-.

We know how loss devastates, especially a loss so inexplicable. There is a paradox in times like these. Just as it seems events have slipped from the control of the Master of the universe, our sorrow compels us to believe even more firmly in the power of our Master. We pray you will be delivered His peace and His understanding.

While no words can bring perfect consolation, we hope you may take comfort in the familiar tone of the Psalms -
"Weeping may endure for a night,
but joy cometh in the morning."

Peace be with you, Angela and Rey, just as we are with you. Always.

The older I get, the more practice I have in writing letters of condolence. Now, I can toss them off in the time it takes to finish off a cup of coffee.

That doesn't mean they aren't sincere or genuine, just that the emotions of grief and loss and sorrow are very close to the surface now.

I've even thought about the music I want played at my funeral. My father was not much older than I am now when he passed and I can't tell you what a load he lifted from us with the arrangements he'd made for his wake and funeral. I'm sure it will sound strange to hear this, but we had a ball at his wake. And at his funeral there was the weeping and wailing and rending of garments so familiar to the Irish funeral-goer, all of it foreseen and allowed for by my Dad's estimates.

Also, three fights in the parking lot, beating the previous funeral record by one fight.

So, my friends, let there be no tear-dimmed eyes. Lets dance and drink and make the little kids shriek. Who knows when we'll come this way again?

What is "really" rich?

Saw this article linked by someone on twitter, with the comment "you're rich." Which, in a sense, is both true and DUH-level obvious: yes, even in America, even in NYC, $300k/year is rich. Don't be an ass.

On the other hand, once you read the article, the ass in question has a point.

“I’m not a ‘trust-afarian.’ That, to me, is rich: People who aren’t producing something but have wealth. We go to work every day to get that income, so I think of myself as upper middle class.”

The traditional meaning of a "gentleman" (or woman) was a person who did not have to work for money. I explained this to Pseudonymous Kid recently, and he found it very revealing, which it is: think about it the next time you criticize someone for acting "trashy."

But I digress. Among the many life lessons we oughta be taking from the Great Recession is that if your ability to feed, clothe, and yourself and/or your family--and your ability to see a doctor and get needed medical care--depends on your job, then your relative wealth is, in a real sense, not actual wealth. This is why back in the day, gentlemen who didn't have to work for a living freaked the fuck out about the shift from land-based to moveable wealth and encumbered their children for generations with expensive estates that forced them to start marrying the children of dirty merchants: because they knew, on some inchoate level, that the shift to a merchant-centered economy destroyed wealth as they knew it. It's also why the rich-as-shit live off income from investments, rather than spending their capital, invest broadly and internationally, and sure as shit spend $ on political donations and lobbying--because if your wealth depends on what is, when you boil it right down, a global fiction, you want it to be as "diversified" as possible, lest any one part of the fiction fall apart, *and* you want to make goddamn sure that the fiction continues to function.* (As, anger at banker bailouts notwithstanding, do we all; capitalism may piss you off, but it's nonetheless the water we all swim in, and if it dries up, we're all gonna be gasping.)

It's also why people like the asshole in the article and yours truly sometimes bitch and moan about tax rates. I don't ever bitch and moan about taxes--as a patriotic bleeding-heart-liberal with the instinctive risk-aversive conservatism of the first child, I'm completely down with the idea that you need revenue, goddamnit, in order to spend, and that spending to maintain important liberty-and-equality-fostering institutions like libraries and the ability to dial 911 in an emergency (warning: that link is to Free Republic. But it's worth it because the commenters are bitching about the very effects of their own anti-tax beliefs). But a lot of my socio-economic peers do, and they're not entirely wrong, because if your income comes from your job, then it's, well, taxable income--whereas people who are "really" rich (from this pov) may well be paying lower income taxes because a lot of their income is taxed at a much lower rate.**

Now, I'm sure as shit not a tax expert, and my parents were fully the kind of "stupid" people that conservatives (and plenty of liberals) just love to look down on: they lived hand-to-mouth, they had credit card debt they shouldn't have had, they didn't even teach their kids how to balance a checkbook. Mom has untreated mental health issues, hasn't worked in years, lives in poverty with her property-owning Freeper brother, cashed in her CA teachers' retirement and spent it all years ago, has credit card debt I don't even want to think about, and I'm not even kidding when I say that I hope she will die of some kind of smoking-related illness before she manages to run through the tiny inheritance she got from her father, whatever she inherits from her brother (which I guarantee you is what she's counting on supporting her once grandpa's tiny legacy runs out), and runs up against the limits of her ability to borrow. Dad's a little better off, because he is perfectly content to live on his CA state retirement (as long as it keeps coming, touch wood) and social security; but he also has a wife with health problems and the consumerist habits of the lower middle class, some debt, and would have nothing at all if his state and federal entitlements were to disappear.

In other words, my parents were pretty average. And I'm pretty average in my above-averageness: I know a little bit about managing money, not much, and I don't really understand tax laws, and I know just enough that, depending on my personality, I could either go with "thank god we've been lucky and let's do what we can to help those less fortunate than ourselves" or "hey, my husband's worked hard for everything we have and why are our taxes so high?!?" Which really, I suspect, is the basic difference between "liberals" and "conservatives" in America.

All of which is to say that I suspect the truth isn't that people like us--or those who make even more than us, like the asshole in the article--aren't, in fact, "really" rich. What I hope is that we realize what that means: that we have a lot more in common with our trailer-park neighbors (I really do live a few blocks from a trailer park) and the folks standing by the mall entrance with a cardboard sign saying "Anything Helps / God Bless"--and, for that matter, with the asshole investment bankers who made six-figure bonuses from the jobs they do to make a (comfortable, to be sure) living*--than we do with the invisible folks who actually *own* the banks and insurance companies, and who are the only ones that will "really" benefit from drowning the government so that it can no longer hand the rest of us life preservers when we need them.



*Obviously I have zero expertise in global finance or real wealth. But this is how it seems to me, and I *do* have some expertise in the whole land-vs-$ historical shift. Doubtless, however, there are actual historians reading who are cringing at my oversimplification.

**Again: NOT AN EXPERT ON THIS SHIT. I pay H&R block to do my taxes, because I don't get this crap. But it looks to me like, with a 0% tax rate on long-term capital gains, and a rate as low as 10% on short-term gains, based on which tax bracket you're in (and since tax brackets are based on income), if you didn't have a job but did have a good investment portfolio, you'd be an idiot to pay the 28% tax rate that Mr. B. and I and our peers who are effectively but not "really" rich pay.

***God yes there are real material differences between investment bankers and day laborers. But they're differences of degree, rather than of kind.

the woods apology: asian mothers and ethnic programming for the win!

When Tiger Woods' infidelities broke into the public sphere last year I joked with some friends that when straight-laced, boring, repressed folks crack, they go big or go home. On some smaller, deeper level, I even sympathized with his crack up: when a revered father dies, the mooring that steadied you disappears so, of course, you go off course. My own personal experience mirrored his, in a way; when my mother died, I went through my own 'grief sex' period - years where I slept around like a sailor, to feel anything that would break through the white noise of my mother's death.

But it took an offhand comment from an old college friend about Woods' press conference on my Facebook page to look at Woods through a very familiar, and particular, cultural lens- a lens that those in the media have, of course, overlooked.

From my friend on Facebook:
"Tiger Wood's apology (and his mother's reaction during it) made him seem more Asian American to me...

Suddenly it all clicked: brother may look black (to some people) but, if there's one thing I know about mix-raced asians, if the mother is asian, you are gonna get a huge dose of asian culture exposure (read: guilt) and it will be hardwired into you even if you have to adapt to other cultures (whether you like it or not, mama's gonna rig it)...so his cultivated characterless-ness, the extreme privacy and (surprise!) the lapsed Buddhism angle, coupled with the public self-shaming in front of family (not wife but elders)...hmmmmm...this all sounds very familiar. Stern mommy in the front row completed the scene.


All the media asked: why the hell did he feel he need to do that public apology? Because every bit of his asian upbringing told him this was the proper thing to do!

Once I saw him in that all too familiar formation with his mother who is so often un-present in his media representation, I suddenly realized who was responsible for the daily grunt work of making him into a man: the feeding, the schlepping and the occasional (or not so occasional) slap. I saw him in a room full of aunties, sitting in a corner and being told to be quiet while they talked business. This is a bound to be an intense part of his psychic make-up...and probably more crucial to a private sense of self, given the fact that American media wants to produce a public image of blackness for him.

The media didn't understand the mom's stern posture, followed by hug gesture...they thought she was cold...and maybe in their eyes she is...but what I saw was a reversion to certain basic childhood patterns. Nugget from my childhood: Southeast Asian moms always make you tell them what you did wrong before they tell you never to do it again.


So, this explains why Tiger Woods would not let go of his Asian-ness, despite the criticism by whites and blacks that he was trying to shirk his blackness. His attempt to multi-identify was seen as a cop-out by people who only saw obsessively in terms of black and white...but his core sense of self was constituted by rituals of pain and pleasure that came from some powerful asian american mother-son bond(age).


When mom gets to handle the discipline, she also gets to handle the ethnic programming. With my sisters who have married outside of the race, I have noticed that they excessively program vietnamese-ness into their children's early self-constitution (like a trojan horse computer virus) just because they know that at some point, some other culture will "claim" their children.

Case in point: Throughout my early adulthood, I would encounter my eldest sister's children taunting me because they could speak better Vietnamese than me and felt themselves better attuned to Vietnamese-ness. Now, they hardly ever want to speak Vietnamese, because they're blond and nordic-looking...but almost always, especially at emotional moments, they revert to classic patterns of vietnamese behavior."

I responded:
"Oh my god, yes! My mom was far scarier than dad when it came to discipline - and the stealth bomb she would pull out was 'you're a bad daughter.' (It was understood that this meant I was a bad Filipina daughter.) Responsibility, obligation, duty, protecting the family name and upholding family integrity. Seen as an asian son-almost every aspect of his behavior is understandable."

I'm fascinated at the way our mainstream culture is perpetually tone-deaf to the nuances of multiple cultural identities. When I looked at his press conference again, the whole thing screamed Asian family discipline and apology. The focus on self-respect, restraint, the ultimate importance of family and the lessons that family can teach, rather than the 'lessons' taught by over-indulgent celebrity and vice; for those of us who grew up with an Asian parent, these are familiar themes that were pounded into us throughout childhood. But then, also, the discipline of the public apology, the ritual of apologizing to those you've shamed: the inner family first, then outward. His public, and the media, is last. Who's first? His mother and wife (and the presence of the wife is immaterial - the presence of the mother is primary.)

The press was miffed there was no Q&A - well, the press was just a minor necessity. The real focus were those people sitting in the front row. The apology was less a PR stunt (though it served as one, too) than a necessary step in repairing his bonds with his Asian identity and upbringing - embodied by his mother, in particular. Seeing him like this, almost like a brother, made Woods less of a joke to me; family traditions and cultural obligations are never a joke.

At the Time of Which I Speak I was tending bar up in Medicine Hat

Antedeluvian Wave.

There is No Terrorism But Islamic Terrorism

Every Arab-American knows what I'm talking about: when you heard about someone flying a plane into the IRS building in Austin, you thought "Oh god, I hope it's not a Muslim."

Just like every other time something like this happens.

But no, it was an aggrieved white dude with a private plane. And the reaction from the administration was predictable. This is Not Terrorism. It's a criminal act. As Glenn Greenwald says: "The term now has virtually nothing to do with the act itself and everything to do with the identity of the actor, especially his or her religious identity. It has really come to mean: "a Muslim who fights against or even expresses hostility towards the United States, Israel and their allies.""

This is absolutely right. But as he notes, the problem isn't that we should call more things terrorism; the problem is that too many things are called terrorism. And criminal acts that are perpetrated by people in that weird Arab-American/Muslim nexus. Which means, being non-Anglo and Muslim is sufficient to make you a Terrorist, but being Muslim isn't really a requirement. If you're from that blob of the world that has expanded from the bonafide middle east into countries like Pakistan that are practically seen as Arab countries because they're predominantly Muslim, you qualify. Does that make sense? It's like "Muslim" has become an ethnicity almost.

Which really scares me, even not being Muslim.

And the reason we call it terrorism when the acts are perpetrated by people from that nexus of Arab-non-Anglo-Muslim-otherness,is because, for racist reasons, we are more afraid for our safety when they do it. That's what terror is about, right? Striking fear into people's hearts. And we just simply are more afraid when the Brown/Muslim people do it.

Why is that?

I continue to adore Pseudonymous Kid

Poor PK has been quite neglected since we returned from our President's Weekend snow vacation, because Mr. B and I are both sick-sicky-sick-sick. Yesterday he made his own dinner (salami sandwich).

Today he asked if he could distill essential oils from tangerine leaves.

Me, from a prone position on the couch: Yeah, sure.
PK: Let me tell you how it's done before you say yes.*
Me: okay.
PK: (long overly-complicated explanation, the upshot of which is that it involves boiling water)
Me: Sure.
PK: But I'm not allowed to use fire.
Me: You can use the stove if I'm home.
....
Later he showed me his setup and I suggested using the alcohol burner from his chemistry set instead. Did I mention that he got the idea from a novel he's reading, _The Sweetness At The Bottom of the Pie_, and inferred how to build the apparatus?

He wanted to do it because a character distills something to add to someone's lipstick in order to make them get pimples on their lips.**








*What kind of kid says this?!? I heart him.
**I wish his teachers could realize how good he is at distinguishing between fun naughtiness and real danger. Sigh.

ready, set, go! maybe.

From the House chamber gallery yesterday, I watched my state reps chit chat, talk on their iPhones, surf the web, eat lunch, snooze, doodle, confab and a few of them were even paying attention to the bill debate going on.  What follows is a very paraphrased version of the proceedings:

Dem Rep: ...and so I think my Baby-Daddy registry amendment to bill Such and Such is a good idea.

GOP Rep: Uh, I don't get it.  I'm sure my esteemed colleague knows his community best but I'm not sure I get the point.

Dem Rep: Well, there are baby daddies - or maybe not. But we won't know unless there's a list of them. A list of Baby Daddies.

GOP Rep: I still don't get it.

(And the debate continues like this for a while. Then - )

Dem Majority Whip: (standing) This amendment makes no sense; pull it.

Dem Rep: (sigh) I respectfully withdraw my amendment.

GOPRep: I still don't get it!

Sith Lord of the House (aka, Speaker): Next bill, Clerk.

Clerk: On a resolution protesting terrorism, Miranda rights, the use of the super max prison for terrorists who have been Mirandized and extolling all things good about America.

Sith Lord: Who wrote this?

Patriotic GOP Rep: That would be me; I really think it's important to protect our state and read this resolution on the floor because the Obama administration is going to destroy everything we hold dear and this resolution will somehow be meaningful.

Sith Lord: (hard stare and sigh) Why can't this go to committee?

Patriotic GOP Rep: Because I want to read it on the floor. My colleagues agree with me.

(tiny GOP minority cheers)

Sith Lord: Are you sure you don't want this to go to committee?

Patriotic GOP Rep: No. Read it.

Sith Lord: I say we don't read it and I have this handy procedural rule that will allow me to kill it. Duly killed.

Patriotic GOP Rep: I protest!

Sith Lord: I call for a vote: shall I be Sith Lord and have the right to kill this puny resolution or shall I not?  Finger vote!

(computer screens all light up)

Sith Lord: 69 votes for me and none for you. Everybody, to my chambers! (exeunt)

And so on for the next hour.  I had to give it to the scrappy Patriotic GOP member; while Sith Lord was conferring with his leaders, he tried to reintroduce his resolution but the Sith Lord's second just repeated the procedural vote results from a paper and ignored him over his protests.  Up in the gallery, a woman leaned over to me and whispered, "That man over there just got dissed, didn't he?"

I whispered back, "Big time."
She sighed. "This is why nothing ever gets done."

My COO, who was waving to her aunt on the floor, leaned over. "After seeing this, don't you want to be down there?"
"No. I would lose my shit."
She gave me a hard glance. "You know you love it. This is all a show, and you know that. The real work happens in those committee meetings. That guy knew he wouldn't get his amendment. And he knew his resolution wouldn't make it out of his mouth." Nodding down at the now silent Patriotic GOP member.
"And that makes me want to do this, why?"
"You're still young enough to try this and either make it or not.  But you have about 3 years to plan.  You should make a decision soon. My aunt can help."

Later, at the train station to return to Chicago, my COO introduced me to her uncle, a retired blue collar worker whose main job is to make sure Rep Auntie X made it to her meetings in Springfield from the south side. 

As we were shaking hands, the COO said, "She's feeling the call."
Uncle X gave me a look and said, "Well now."
"We'll see," I said. "I'm interested but ..."
"Well," he said. "My wife won't tell you this, but I'm not anybody's elected anything. With every election, the quality is going down. They're getting stupider and stupider. If you're worth it, and my niece doesn't back people who aren't worth it, then you should do it. You'll be needed."

On the train, my COO said. "You'll need 3 years to get a mortgage, a fundraising base and a network.  You have a strong network already partly in place. And you need a target.  Westside districts will be hard; northside might be doable; southside would be easier. My aunt's would be ideal."

"I don't want to move to the south side!"
"Delia Christina, you need to be serious.  If you're going to do this, then DO THIS."

This was still on my mind when I got home, exhausted. If one day of basically nothing exhausted me, what would a whole job do to me? If one session made me disgusted, what would hundreds of them do? If I secretly thought elected official X was an asshat, what would prevent me from calling him that to his face?  And if people like me (or you) don't step up, what then?  What about my writing?  What about the book that's been growing inside me?  What about my relationship?  I don't want a frakking mortgage!

So that's what's on my mind: trying to plan the next three years to maybe be ready for a go in '14.  Or not.

im in ur handful of dust

How is it possible that most academic blogs are started by junior faculty in their first year? Is that even true, actually? Maybe that's just the originary story with this would-be academic blog. Anyway I don't know how the fuck anyone does it because I am effing tired and busy all the time. Which also means I am boring.

I am wanting to be back on the blog regularly, but am having trouble keeping my head focused on content. Or anything. I mean, LOLcat Wasteland is fantastic. So much better than you could've imagined. So that's content. But it's also required the longest sustained focus I've had in awhile.

Here's something that is precisely the sort of thing that is not interesting to anyone: I adore my husband anymore. Not in a cheesy way I don't think, but definitely in a way that is unlike any other period in our 11 yr relationship. We are way happy a lot of the time. It's not that the commuter marriage is idyllic, we are also way sad a lot of the time. But we are almost never unhappy; know what I mean? Or that's my reading of it anyway. And I vastly prefer happy/sad to unhappy.

I also suspect this crowd is uninterested in the fact that I watched This Is It this weekend and was way into it.

An unsympathetic portion of you are interested in the unsurprising news that I officially have an inside CAT now and having moved beyond my emotional projection about her (expensive) late term abortion, am back to not caring for her much. She has not had the sort of personality change to aloof and elusive that many of you promised (fingers crossed) after the late term abortion. She is, instead, as needy as ever, always right under my feet and ceaselessly cleaning herself. She has perhaps watched a lot of movies or read a lot of blogs to develop her ideas about how to behave with the woman of the house and wants t be all up in shit like my purse or my fruit bowl or right on my goddamn keyboard. If she had adapted The Waste Land that would be one thing. She doesn't even chase or kill birds when she is outside, which I had thought, from all the freaking out, would be the one sporting thing about her. No. She apparently respects her place in the ecosystem and contributes only farts, turds, and little litter trails to my local food chain.

I do have this job, and there is stuff going on, but nothing I feel really comfortable blogging about, which makes for a kind of shit position for the academic blogger on the erstwhile academic blog. I will write a teaching post soon as I've made some successful adjustments this semester. I also think I am a better teacher because I now eat an avocado for lunch every day. It goes straight to my brain.

Finally, a story:
Mr. Vane has this coworker who regularly sends out to a handful of coworkers emails that present her hyperbolic and hysterical fiscal conservatism in reductive bullet points. Copied and pasted from some mass email type thing. E.g. "The free market did not create massive budget shortfalls, big gov't did! The free market did not create ineffectual public schools, big gov't did!" That sort of thing. Mr Vane generally ignores, because there's really only one confrontational type in the family, but the other day she sent one that was all about big gov't and the big banks and the Fed, etc. So Mr. Vane, who has just finished reading Ron Paul's End the Fed [which yes I know, is it's own thing], writes her and says, "You might be interested in reading this, I feel like you might be surprised to learn about the connections b/n the Fed and some of your favorite old timey free market capitalists." And so she writes back and says, "How could I take anything that guy says seriously, he doesn't even believe he is who god made him to be."

And so Mr. Vane thinks, ummmm, ok. I mean, Ron Paul is a Bible thumper, right? Whatever this woman is clearly loony.

And then 2 hours later she emails him to say, "Oh man, I have to apologize, I was telling my husband about the book you recommended and he pointed out that I was thinking of Ru Paul."

The end.

What Time it Is?

If you love your country, if you love your American people, if you love music, set your TIVO, check your TV Guide, clear your schedule, roll up the rug and push back ALL the tables and chairs. Do. Not. Miss. This.

Here is a bit of the flavor of the program. Just a taste. It is to the whole production as a dab of hot sauce is to your luncheon beans and rice. You really have to see the entire show if you're interested in understanding where me and my generation are coming from.

Note especially Shotgun, starting at 2:50.

I can't imagine we'll see the likes of these artists again. That's not just old fogeyism. That's a fact my brothers and sisters.

The Hypocrisy Strategy

I trust Rachel Maddow. I trust her a lot. I don't always agree with her choices as a host, but as a commentator? I've never seen anyone on television who reliably speaks my knee-jerk reactions in such a clear and compelling way. She's phenomenal.

So it's been a little jarring this week to find myself disagreeing with her over and over again. I've been watching her show a lot this week, and just saw her on Meet The Press. And I am still confused by why she is pushing a strategy that I think is wrong-headed and ineffective.

I call it the Hypocrisy Strategy.

I should say as a preface that I've been lukewarm on hypocrisy for a while now. I think it's completely taken over the political discourse as a rhetorical tool, and that makes me angry. Because focusing on hypocrisy--assailing your political opponents by pointing to discrepancies between two actions they take--ignores the lived reality of human experience, and it ignores truth. Lived Reality and Truth: two things that are vitally important to any effort to improve the lives of actual people.

Rachel has been hitting the hypocrisy strategy hard this week. Her argument is this: Republicans voted against the stimulus package, and publicly railed against government spending. Then, when the money from the Recovery Package flowed out from Washington, those same Republican congressmen and senators praised the spending in their own states. Allegation: hypocrisy.



After the litany of examples of Republicans praising the spending in their own states, Rachel's ultimate conclusion is a sound one: "Republicans don't care about policy." That is true. That is, in fact, the point. But I'm skeptical of the hypocrisy argument as a way to get there.

Come on. Of course Republicans are going to praise stimulus spending in their own states. They want the government to spend money on their state. Any senator who doesn't aggressively lobby for appropriations to his state is doing a horrible job of being a senator. The point is that they don't want the government to spend money on other states. It's a classic example of the "I got mine"-ism that animates everything the Republican party does. It animates their hostility to public aid, welfare spending, health care, poor people, and minorities of all kinds. They view government as a mercenary operation designed to keep privilege, wealth, and opportunity in the hands of those who already have it.

There's nothing hypocritical about what the Republicans are doing. I thought then, and continue to think, that the "gotcha"-ism of trying to get Republican governors to say they would reject the stimulus money was misguided. In fact, their world view is completely coherent if you look at what they do, rather than what they say. What they say is a string of platitudes that pretend that they actually care about the health and well-being of Americans. They have to do this, because they're politicians. And Democrats let them get away with it, because they're politicians. We have a government that's overtaken with a gentlemen's-agreement/gentlemen's-club mentality where we a) can't accuse people of lying; b) can't accuse people of having bad motivations. Instead, we pretend that we're merely arguing about how to go about doing what we all want to do, which is make life better for all Americans.

But Republicans don't want that, and they haven't wanted it at any point since I've been paying attention to what they're doing.

This morning, Rachel was making the same argument on Meet the Press. When Rep. Aaron Schock (R-IL) railed against the stimulus bill, she called him out for having also praised the stimulus spending in his home district. Crooks and liars has the video here, and the exchange starts at about 1:08. A transcript:

MS. MADDOW: ...just this week you were at a community college touting a $350,000 green technology education program, talking about how great that was going to be for your district. You voted against the bill that created that grant. And so that's happening a lot with Republicans sort of taking credit for things that Democratic bills do, and then Republicans simultaneously touting their votes against them and trashing them. That's, I think, a, a, a problem that needs to be resolved within, within your caucus, because, I mean, you seem like a very nice person, but that's very hypocritical stance to take.

REP. SCHOCK: Well, Rachel, with all due respect, I can assure you Republicans were not consulted on the stimulus bill. That bill was filed at 11 PM the night before the 10:30 AM we began debating it. None of our amendments were considered. There was no debate and no bipartisanship on that bill.

MS. MADDOW: How about the...(unintelligible)?

MR. GREGORY: But, but answer--all right, let me, let me...(unintelligible)...Rachel, which is that the, the question about you--you've called for spending caps out of Washington.

REP. SCHOCK: Sure.

MR. GREGORY: But to Rachel's point, does that mean that you will not accept any federal money that comes the way of your district?

REP. SCHOCK: No. I think that argument that liberals are making is absolutely ridiculous. With all due respect, Rachel, does that mean you're going to give back your Bush tax cuts that you continue to rail against?

Everything else that Rep. Schock says in the fifteen-minute segment on MTP is either a lie or wrong, but in this exchange he's absolutely right. The Republicans were against the stimulus because they a) consistently run on a platform of being against government spending, mostly because this polls well and appeals to people b) don't want taxpayer money spent on other states c) hold incorrect beliefs, against scientific, economic, and sociologic evidence, that government spending can't improve the economy.

In the face of how overwhelmingly wrong, ignorant, and indifferent to the needs of their constituents and residents of other states they are, their hypocrisy isn't even worth bothering with. And focusing on it does damage to the political discourse. We've seen a hypocrisy-focused strategy for years now, from the Republicans assailing John Kerry as a "flip-flopper" to Biden's assertion just this morning that the Justice Department under Bush had no problem mirandizing suspected terrorists.

When Biden was presented with Dick Cheney's commentary about the dangerousness of mirandizing Abdelmutallab (the Christmas Day bomber), he didn't talk about how Miranda rights are important, constitutional, and how Andelmutallab was entitled to the protections of the Constitution. Instead, his argument was that DOJ mirandized terrorist suspects under Bush, so Dick Cheney is a hypocrite.

Which is true. But it's not enough. This is one of the primary problems with having lawyers (I am one, so I speak from experience) running the government. What Joe Biden is doing is called "impeachment," and I'm not talking about what they did to Bill Clinton, but the legal strategy of discrediting witness. If you have a witness on the stand, and they say "I didn't talk to anyone about the car accident," you read to them from the deposition transcript where they said "And then I called my wife and told her I crashed the car." The point being not to show that they did, in fact, talk, but to discredit their reliability as a witness.

And that's great for trials. But "you said something different before" is not enough when we are talking about millions of lives, health care, civil liberties at stake.

We need to keep our eyes on the prize, focus on the merits, and the facts. And lord knows Democrats are far from immune to the lure of talking out of one side of your mouth and spitting on your constituents with the other.

I'm just gonna say it

For mysterious reasons of her own, Sybil was asking on Twitter about this study: how Americans perceive science, blah blah. Her issue was being shocked that only 87% of scientists "believe" in evolution, which, you know, is shocking and all. But mine is, wait a second, THE profession that people most think contributes to society's well-being is... soldier?

Are you fucking shitting me?

Look, I "support the troops" and all. Long-time readers know that Mr. B. was in the military for twelve fucking years, and that he was in ROTC when we started dating. So even though Sybil's immediate response was to accuse me of hating America (because she's jingoistic like that), I am not some cartoon straw-leftist who thinks all soldiers are babykillers.

What I do think, though, is that we have not had a war on American soil since the goddamn Civil War. The closest things since then have been Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and our sending troops into Mexico during their revolution. And yeah, I'm glad the Allies won WWII, and yes, American help was necessary there, so yay us. And yes Pearl Harbor was an act of war. 9/11, not so much, given that "war" = conflict between nation-states, and Al Qaeda isn't a nation-state, but even there I'll grant for the sake of argument that an armed response on our part wasn't unjustified.

But come the fuck on. 9/11 wasn't a threat to "our freedom" or our continued existence as a country. Possibly in the sense that our reaction to it has curtailed our freedoms, what with wire-tapping and indefinite detention and torture and execution orders against American citizens and the like. US soldiers haven't been protecting "our freedom" since . . . well, the Civil War. They've protected Europe's freedom, and good for them. They've protected the freedom of Albanians in Kosovo. They've protected the border between North and South Korea, they tried to protect UN peacekeepers in Somalia, they've protected Israel indirectly.

They've protected U.S. interests--which are not the same as U.S. freedoms--in Grenada and Beirut and Panama and the Phillippines and the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua and China and Russia (way back during the revolution), and we've been all over Latin America. And we're in Iraq and Afghanistan, of course. But none of those countries or wars really threatened our freedom, except by some fucked-up definition where "freedom" means "right to do as we damn well please and get cheap oil while we're at it." None of those actions threatened anything in the Bill of Rights or the U.S. Constitution.

God knows I respect military folks, who by and large I think really do believe that they are serving their country, and that they *are* protecting us. I know that Mr. B. truly believes that his work in the military (and today, for the DoD as a civilian) protects us and helps perpetuate peace (by giving us the knowledge and strategic advantage to deter any possible threat). I'm not 100% there with him on his thinking, but I don't think he's crazy or flat-out wrong, either: geopolitics are some complicated shit, and we're a superpower (like it or not), and this is the Way The World Works.

But it is just false fucking patriotism to think that the military is beyond reproach, or that soldiers are the only things standing between two-cars-and-a-white-picket-fence and Utter Chaos. Or that two-cars-and-a-white-picket-fence are the same as "freedom." Yes, the military protects our position at the top of the global heap, and I for one am goddamn glad that I was lucky enough to be born there. But my comfortable house and my two cats and my car that runs just fine, thank you, and my clothes that I don't have enough room to store, and my grandmother's china, and my trip to Colorado this weekend are not the same as my ability to vote, or to speak my mind, or to lobby my government to do things that I think are important.

I mean, even while I acknowledge that my own relative wealth sure-as-shit gives me more ability and leisure to do those things (money, after all, = speech!), I think even the most cynical lefty will acknowledge that my rights under U.S. law aren't protected by the U.S. military. My ability to exercise those rights depends to some extent on things like my own personal wealth and education and social status, sure, and my own personal wealth and social status depend, obviously, on my husband's secure DoD employment and nice paychecks--but that's idiosyncratic, and my freedoms as an American aren't contingent on it, even if my own personal comforts are.

Moreover, even on the "way of life" front I don't see why the military should get more credit than (say) oil companies, or bankers, or sweatshops. None of which, I think, are popular candidates for sainthood. Nor am I saying they should be. What I'm saying is, be fucking honest: acknowledge that our Way of Life is founded on violence, if it's our Way of Life you want to espouse--and as I said, I'll be the first to admit that I am enormously lucky to have be born at the top of the global/historical food chain. If the price I have to pay for my comfortable life is the moral queasiness of realizing that my material comforts are based on some pretty abhorrent shit, then I can at least skirt up and admit it.

But my freedoms? Not so much. This is where I'm a patriot, and where the false patriotism of "thank a soldier" really galls. I don't, as a matter of fact, believe that things like the right to vote, to travel, to form and express my opinions; to choose my religion (including the possible choice of "no thank you") and my companions; to demonstrate or run for office; to habeas corpus and a trial by jury, to decide who gets to come into my house, to protect myself property and my body--none of those things stem from war (not even from the American Revolution, inasmuch as Brits have them too, y'know). If I were African-American, then yes: my right to some of those things would be the direct outcome of the Civil War, and god bless the Union soldiers who died in droves to get it for me. But in point of fact, I'm not black, and the rights that I have were by and large won in the courts and in street demonstrations. (And even if I were African-American, most of my rights would have been won in courts and demonstrations, given the failures of Reconstruction, but that's a whole 'nother discussion.)

So yeah, as an American and a patriot, I would like us to quit with the soldier-worship. Respect them, as one should respect all professions, and respect their devotion to public service, as we damn well ought to respect the devotion to public service of all state employees. And yes, people whose work puts them in danger deserve a hell of a lot of sympathy and support. But until I start seeing "I support our mail carriers" or "thank a garbage collector" bumper stickers on the backs of people's cars, I'm calling bullshit on the notion that a military uniform = a halo.

And anyone who comments along the lines of "thank a soldier for your right to say this" can kiss my ass.

The Great Recession

I've repeatedly recommended this blog over on Twitter, but haven't done so Officially on my Own Blog yet.

So, allow me to recommend TheBoxCarKids: a homeless "Mom, 4 kids, 2 dogs and a cat" living in a 26-foot trailer--so maybe not "homeless"; the author prefers "alternatively housed." Apparently over the summer they were living in a tent. In any case, one of the things I like about the blog is the way it raises the question of what "homelessness" actually means--do you have to be living on the street or in a shelter? What if you're living in a motel? Or a tent? Or a travel trailer? Or your car?

One of my favorite recent posts talks about something I've been thinking about myself lately (and was asked by a friend in Minnesota, a financial planner, when I visited there)--what does the recession *look like*? Is there visible evidence of what's happening--and does what people see day-to-day really give those of us who haven't been directly affected by layoffs and foreclosures a sense of what's actually happening?

I ask this as someone who is lucky enough that, if it weren't for Pseudonymous Kid's school and my online friends & acquaintances, wouldn't really notice the economy much beyond what I hear on the news. Mr. B. works for the Department of Defense: his job is about as secure as jobs get. My dad is retired. My mom hasn't worked in years anyway. Mr. B.'s mom is retired. My sister hasn't lost her job, nor have Mr. B.'s siblings or their spouses--he has one brother who is having a really hard time finding employment, having moved to East Lansing, MI, but that might be writeoffable as an anomaly, or as somehow a function of said brother's lack of a college education, if I didn't know better.

Mr. B.'s schoolmates, though, clue me in a little more. Lots of the kids' dads work construction, and I've heard plenty of stories about lack of health insurance, lack of work, money being really tight. I know single moms who are on foodstamps, who are living with their parents. I know families with two jobs who are not-quite-making-ends-meet, families whose kids get pulled out of class to go "shopping" (i.e., the district has a program to give clothes to kids who are below certain income levels), families who have gotten boxes of food donations, also from the school district. Pseudonymous Kid is pretty aware that we are economically fortunate, and that some of his friends aren't--which by the way is one of the things I love most about public schools, the fact that "the less fortunate" aren't just an abstraction or a charity--they're friends.

In any case. You should check out that blog. The author is a displaced professional, obviously well-educated. (You can find out how she ended up homeless in the archives--among other things, it involves a kid with health problems. Quel surprise.) "One of us," as it were. Only, as she points out a lot, the line between "us" and "them" has pretty much vanished. If, indeed, it ever existed.

Mamas, Don't let your babies grow up to spread cervical cancer

So. Psyched. The HPV vaccine is finally available for boys and men aged 9-26. I've been waiting for this. As soon as our doc has it available, Pseudonymous Kid will be first in line.

Caught Me Dreaming Like A Fool

I have to tell you, this percocet is the shit.

It takes away the aches and pains, of course. It douses the heat of flayed tissues sliding over each other like fleshy tectonic plates. It tames the sensation of being pulled apart by wild ponies flogged east, west, north, and south.

Unexpectedly, it triggers the most vivid dreams. If I hadn't woken myself up soaking in my own sweat so many times in the middle of these opiated dramas, I would think I was hallucinating. That would really freak me out, though. To have wierd dreams is one thing. To have wierd visions while in the waking state would not be fun, I don't think.

I had a dream, about 2 in the morning, that all my brothers and cousins were sitting round my bed, talking and drinking. I knew everything they were going to say. That made me suspicious right in the middle of the dream and caused me to wake up. That and the liters of perspiration which chilled me.

When I woke up and they had all disappeared, I was struck with a feeling of such loneliness, such profound loss and grief that I couldn't stop myself from crying. And I mean bawling. Deep sobs. I cried so hard that I woke Meche. She came running into the sick room and held me until I got myself together.

Lately, I've found I can kind of direct my dreams. I look forward to many breakthroughs in this area.

I've been dreaming about things that made my happy when I was a kid. Here's one element that keeps recurring in those dreams.

Good times. Never forget them.

Feminist Weddingblogging Update

I know you guys are like, freaking out, right? Okay, you're not. I'm getting married in about 5 months now. Am I FREAKING OUT?!?!

No.

I think the last time I blogged about the wedding I was faux-arguing with my dude over entrances and cake. And people really wanted to give me advice about entraces and cake. Even though, really, I posted because I thought I'd said something clever. As everyone knows, the whole point of blogging is to increase the number of people who are exposed to the clever things that you say. Duh. Since then, things are moving along swimmingly, with me doing shockingly little. I was worried that everything everyone said would turn out to be true, and I would be FREAKING OUT. And OHMYGOD is everything going to be perfect for MY?! SPECIAL?! DAY?!

So, to plan I have...uhh...looked at dresses online. Uhhh. Looked at some hotels. Asked my dude's parents to take pictures of the place we're getting married in because I don't even know what it looks like. And when B. was on the phone asking for said pictures, his mom started talking about doing X or Y in a different location, and I was thinking, oh god, they think I want the pictures because I want to make sure that it's up to scratch. Nonono. I don't care what it looks like. But since I don't think I'm going to get away with not decorating, I'm going to have to figure out what the decorations will be and it would be nice to know what I'm working with. But no no no it could be a linoleum floor with those styrofoam tiles on the ceiling? And I wouldn't care. I actually would kind of love to not decorate at all but if I don't someone else will and I hate things that are cheesy. Which is, anything involving flowers, anything "romantic", and basically anything thought up by someone who is not me. Of course, I may just end up not caring and not doing anything.

There will be three live bands. There will be a smorgasbord of food from local restaurants. I will not have to do anything on either of these fronts, which is awesome. I hope that no one will ask me about place settings. Because I hope people use paper plates. I want it to be that kind of shindig.

And the cake? I don't know. I think my dude's sister has volunteered to make cake. But there might end up being a ton of people who show up so maybe that would be too much cake for one non-pro to handle. I plan to leave cake ministrations to others.

The one thing that I know will not get taken care of by someone else is the damn dress. Since I don't want a "wedding dress", just a dress, honestly, I just want to buy something off the rack and (maybe, if it needs it) get it altered. I just don't care! Is that wrong? I do not understand the sentiment of brides everywhere that this is your ONE CHANCE to do it EXACTLY HOW YOU WANT and go totally nuts. But the problem is that, being a Woman of Size and all that, I can't find anything suitable. I have found plenty of lovely off the rack dresses in prices I want to pay (read: $100-$200) in straight sizes. Having someone custom-make a dress for me just seems...awfully fussy? And what if I don't like it? And I have shelled out five hundred bucks for something I don't like and a headache? Plus, what if the design I pick is total crap and won't look good on me, but only looks good on the waifish model who's wearing it in the picture? How will I know?

I wish I could just wear a tux. But I don't look that great in menswear.

Here are the things I care about: I want my family to be happy and comfortable. I want everyone I love dearly to be there. I want to not develop any strong opinions about things that don't matter, because that will make me lose my mind.

Should I hire a photographer? I'm torn. On the one hand, it is borderline sacrilege not to. I swear everyone hires one. And I like well-done photography. I like it a lot. But at the same time, it seems like people just end up living for the photos. Like you have to lose weight have the perfect dress get the perfect accessories decorate it just right have your hair done makeup done have a photo session on the beach....FOR THE PHOTOS. Has anyone else noticed how freaky it is that wedding and/or bridal-related websites call the photos "wedding porn"? I mean, really? Porn? I do not get off on it. It only makes me feel anxious. Plus a lot of the photos suck. It's all about celebrating the precious femininity of it. The dress, the heels, the ring, the flowers, the veil, the...vomit.

I kind of don't want to hire a photographer, because I don't want to care how the photos come out. And I will care, if I'm paying someone a bunch of money to take them. Unlike the food. Food is food. As long as it tastes pretty good I will be happy, because people gotta eat. But when things come to my aesthetic sensibilities I can be picky. And consequentially, I don't usually spend much money on things. Not dresses, accessories, shoes, art, furniture. Spending money on things makes me anxious, because I feel like I have to love it. So that's why I don't want to spend a bunch of cash on a photographer or a dress, because I don't want to care that much.

Am I making any sense? Or am I just totally insane?

Can I wear jeans and a tank top to my wedding?

Black History Month

Long-time readers of this blog may remember that one of my priorities in Pseudonymous Kid's public school education is the importance of diversity--ethnic and racial, to be sure, but economic as well--and that my beliefs about education and public schooling were heavily shaped by my own experience at a school that deliberately made civil rights, integration, and social justice central to its curriculum.*

Since at PK's school the parents are expected to do a lot of helping in the class, I asked his teacher the other day what he had planned for Black History Month. I know that the 5th graders are doing report/presentations about Famous African-Americans (and was glad to see that the list was pretty comprehensive, including people like Stokely Carmichael and Barbara Jordan as well as George Washington Carver and MLK himself). So you can probably imagine my . . . distress when the teacher said that frankly other than the reports he doesn't intend to do anything and that his own personal opinion was that while it's important for the kids to know about slavery and the civil rights movement, "it's time to stop making excuses."

Ooooooookay.

Now, I work with this guy and want to actually get some good material into this classroom, which isn't going to be easy to do if I get written off as that p.c. bitch with an axe to grind. And if his sense of black history is that it's about "excuses" then frankly I'm just as glad that he isn't passing that along to the kids. But clearly *he* needs some educating along with the students.

So, knowing that he actually really likes history and social studies I kind of ignored the "excuses" remark and said that, to me, the reason I felt it was really important for the kids to get black history--as well as Latino history, and the history of indigenous Americans** and Chinese immigration and so on--because Black History is American history. I offered him one of my favorite illustrative anecodtes about this, PK's 4yo observation that Bugs Bunny is African-American. I got him to agree in principle that yes, African-American history = American history, and that "American history" still generally doesn't acknowledge that, and that this is something that should be part of public education.

And then after school I went and had a brief meeting with the head teacher to discuss the current work the school is doing on revisiting our philosophy, which it says includes issues like social justice and diversity right there on our web page (hence PK's presence in the school). Which without my prompting the head teacher, who has done some great work in the last couple years de-lilifying the parent and student body, said has "pretty much been forgotten about" and needs to start being brought back in. (Our current "social justice" focus is pretty much limited to environmental awareness, which is fine, but.)

So I said, well, look. There's been discussion of creating a teacher library of sorts, with books on pedagogy and the like, yes? And he agreed, and said, also books about parenting by the way. And I said, what would you think of including in the library files with curriculum plans and individual lessons? Things that subs, or parents who are helping in class could pull, or that teachers could use so they're not having to invent an entirely new curriculum from scratch? (Short version of long story: 3 out of our 5 teachers are new this year, and the school prefers to rely on non-packaged curriculum. Class instruction is offered in "parent-led centers," where 2-3 parents plus the teacher each lead groups of 5-7 kids, rotating every half hour, so that the students do a lot more hands on stuff than is practical in a standard classroom.) And he agreed that that would be an awesome idea.

So I have both the classroom teacher and the head teacher's "permission" to develop some material for Black History month (and anything else I think the school oughta be teaching, goddammit--I've already done some lesson plans for reading/writing, and am going to do a unit on Scott O'Dell's Island of the Blue Dolphins for next month in the 4/5 class). Since at the moment I'm doing the bulk of the writing and literature instruction in PK's 4/5 class, and the teacher has been asking me to teach "Responding to Literature" (which is part of the CA curricular standards for this age group, hence the O'Dell plans), I figure next week I'll do a stand-alone lesson about Bugs Bunny and Bre'r Rabbit, which will let me show the kids the African roots of an important part of their sense of American culture (as well as talk about literary influence and oral traditions and characterization, which we were already working on).

Then I think I want to do a couple lessons, maybe three, about Haiti. Like with Bugs, the genesis is starting with what the kids already know (what with Haiti being in the news and all). I figure I can counter some of the "excuses/victimization" associations with blackness that the TV coverage has been offering by talking about the Haitian revolution, and I know that doing some "here's the real facts about pirates and voodoo and zombies" stuff will keep their attention, and again reinforce the African-roots-of-Americana idea. (I'm using Bob Corbett's Haiti links to prep for this stuff, btw: anyone who has some *quickly digestible* sources you want to point me to, I'd be v. grateful.)

And I figure that's a good start for a seat-of-my-pants curriculum this year. But in preparation for next year, I'm finally reading the Taylor Branch series, starting with Parting the Waters (omg, have you guys read this? Vernon Jones is my new fucking hero.***). I picked up Ira Berlin's The Making of African America, which the cover copy says "challenges the traditional presentation of a linear, progressive development of black America"--IOW, the story of American history that I was taught. I ordered the one-disk version of "Eyes on the Prize" from Amazon (god I wish I could justify the $200 educators complete edition--maybe I'll recommend it for the school teacher's library).

I'd picked up for PK a couple biographies--Ruby Bridges, on the grounds that kids best identify with other kids, and Nat Love, because he watched Blazing Saddles the other day for the first time and I figured some actual history of actual black cowboys might be good to have there--and I'll take those in, along with the book he has with brief biographies of abolitionists white and black. The latter, I think, is important because the school is about 75% white with the remaining 25% being Asian/Mexican/mixed race, and I want the Anglo students to have role models for some approach to the subject matter other than white guilt.

If I can't find my own copy of the Anti-Bias Curriculum Handbook, I'll order one for the school--among other awesome things about this short, practical manual, it points out that "diversity" includes people with disabilities and gender as well as color, and that the way to teach this stuff to young children is to start with the kids in front of you, rather than talking as if diversity were about "those other people," which at best leads to pity and at worst gives rise to the "making excuses" paradigm. I've already laid some groundwork there by having the kids talk, at Xmas time, about their different winter holidays: we have kids in the classroom that celebrate Chalica, Solstice, and Christmas (no Jews), PK's family puts candles on our tree because his father's family is from Germany and they still do that there, etc. (The ABC handbook also emphasizes the importance of having white anti-racist role models, by the way.) It's also helpful that my best mama friend has been bringing in lessons to practice 64 days of non-violence with the kids--hopefully the kids will make some connections between what she's teaching about respecting each other's differences with some of the things I'll be doing.

One of the passages I highlighted in my copy of Parting the Waters is the description of Vernon Johns, who was the preacher at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church before MLK Jr. came in, as scolding his (relatively affluent, bourgie) congregation for not recognizing that "oppression, not labor . . . demeaned them." In the margin, I wrote a note: "Reflect on this in re. feminism & housework: oppression, not labor, =demeaning"). Certainly I'm starting to learn, vis-a-vis my own feminist life, that being an "unemployed housewife" doesn't preclude teaching, and needn't be a "failure" of my feminist ideals. And that my education, research skills and teaching background definitely make me better at my unpaid jobs as Mama and school volunteer. I look at my hands, and I'm still the same person.





*I recently got an email from a fellow King alum who had found my writing about the school online and wanted to say that s/he too remembered the school with great fondness and had memories exactly like mine. Awwww.

**I ought not to have been so surprised about his views on race, given that when he had the kids do projects on American Indians around Tgiving he had them do crafts that reflected the "all Indians lived on the plains in teepees" view of aboriginal folks. Luckily, however, because the 4th grade curriculum includes the mission period in California and the CA state standards are pretty right-on about including good information about the first contact and different CA tribes--and because I sort of pushed the school a couple of years ago to start correcting its lefty "Native Americans protected the earth" vagueness (shudder) by, among other things, regularly inviting a local Chumash educator to come speak to the kids a couple times a year--the kids by and large know better.

***Representative and totally awesome quotation, from when Jones was talking his way into Oberlin: "I want to know whether you [the Dean] want students with credits or students with brains." I intend to tell PK about this statemet, b/c he loves that kind of "screw your boring hoop-jumping" attitude.

Contrarian Opinions I Hold

Is it just me, or are people missing the boat a lot lately? Maybe everyone is still down in the dumps since Scott Brown won the election. Or we're all getting a little antsy since health care reform is in serious danger. What's that pain? IS IT A TUMOR?

Without further ado:

1. The Citizens United decision was rightly decided. Read Glenn Greenwald. Before you get all in a tizzy, let me say a few things. First, the notion that corporations are individuals was not under attack and was not the issue being decided. Treating corporations as individuals has a long, long legal precedent. The issue was whether there was a "compelling state interest" serious enough to override the rights of corporations. Not whether they are entities who are, in general, entitled to those rights. Second, the question of whether money is speech was also not under attack and not the issue being decided. Again, long legal precedent. And as a practical matter, money is speech. It's not just speech for huge corporations. It's speech for me when I give campaign contributions. And it's speech for Planned Parenthood when they do, too. Third, like Greenwald said, the fear that the decision will make corporations take over elections is misguided. They already have a vast amount of influence, because they have the money to hire lawyers to figure out how to comply with the laws and still wield influence.

2. There was nothing wrong with Justice Alito's shaking his head and mouthing "not true" during the State of the Union. Lest you think I am some Greenwald flunkie, he is, as it turns out, dead wrong on this one. Look, Justice Alito's break with "decorum" was incredibly mild. Also, President Obama was criticizing their decision directly. Which, apparently, is rather unusual. Not that there's anything wrong with what Obama did. Similarly, I see no problem with Alito's momentary breach of the "Justices must sit silently and show no expression" rule. Did it cause any harm? Did it even give us any new information? We already knew what Alito thought about the case because he already ruled on it. Anyway, what Dahlia Lithwick said.

3. I fail to see what the big deal is with the CBS/Tim Tebow ad. Yes, the ad is stupid. The argument it presents is offensive and ridiculous. Look, when even William Saletan comes out against you, you know you're doing a shit job at being pro-life. But! Do we really want to say that it shouldn't be aired? No, what we want is for our ads to be aired, too. But saying that the Tebow ad shouldn't be aired doesn't further that objective. All it does is give fuel to the pro-lifers' whiny "they're trying to censor us!" fire. As Amanda says, things are actually a lot easier for them when they get censored. They get to raise a bunch of money, without having to spend a bunch of money. Finally, there's been a lot of talk on Twitter today about Dana Goldstein's reporting that CBS "collaborated" with Focus on the Family in the making of the ad. Color me skeptical. As I tweeted earlier today, it sounds like what was going on was a standard negotiation about what would be in the ad. Just like when CBS Dante's Inferno ad because it contained the tagline "Go to hell," they didn't just say "Ad rejected! Go away!" Instead, it looks like EA changed their commercial slightly so CBS would accept it. It looks like the Tebow ad has been in the works for a long time, which means that they had plenty of time to make sure that CBS would accept their ad. So I think people calling foul here are off base.

A little perspective

From Leslie in CA, a couple of comment threads back: an awesome somewhat interactive animation of The Scale of the Universe.

I'm proud to say that Pseudonymous Kid knew not only the site on which the thing's hosted ("hey, that's a video game website!") but also most of the actual objects pictured, from neutrinos and quarks to the names of moons and stars and galaxies. I told him Leslie had told me about it because "she's a scientist too," and thought he'd be interested. He says, "wait, are you saying I'm a scientist?" I told him yes.

Healthy Sexuality is a Human Right

It's Monday, which means we have a new column from Ross Douthat. Douthat apparently doesn't read Bitch, Ph.D., because dude I told you to stay away from any topics involving sex, women, and abortion.

Douthat's column is about sex ed. His argument: sex ed makes no difference one way or the other. But, teen pregnancy rates rising is the fault of Bill Clinton's abstinence-only agenda, not Bush's. But nevermind. Since sex ed makes no difference, Washington should stay out of it and local communities should do what they wish, which is to tell kids that contraception is a hoax in Mississippi, and give masturbation demonstrations (or whatever they do) in San Franscisco.

In “When Sex Goes to School,” her thoughtful history of the sex education debate, the sociologist Kristin Luker concluded that it is “surprisingly difficult to show that sex education programs do in fact increase teenagers’ willingness to protect themselves from pregnancy and/or disease.” This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s attended high school. What is taught in the classroom is vastly less important than the matrix of family, culture and economics: the values parents impart and the example that they set, the friends teenagers make and the activities they join, and the cross-cutting effects of wealth, health and self-esteem.

That is, of course, true. If you put something as meaty as "family, culture, and economics" against "what you learn in school," of course the former is going to come out on top. But where Douthat goes from here is absurd. If what kids learn in school is so unimportant, why is it so important that you and yours have the right to teach them falsehoods? Throughout Douthat's column, he never refutes his initial description of abstinence-only education as "contemptuous of experts, careless about public health and captive to religious conservatism."

His main point is a classic conservative one, which is that the federal government shouldn't get involved in such issues. Perhaps maybe he thinks that the federal government shouldn't be involved in education at all. But tell that to all the school districts in the country who rely heavily of federal funding to keep their programs running. As it turns out, kids have a right to a meaningful education. I can think of few things more important (besides, perhaps, learning to read) in an education than learning about one's own body, both in biology classes and health classes. Douthat is dishonest about what's on offer besides abstinence-only education. He represents that it's somehow encouraging kids to have sex. What non-abstinence only education does is not lie to kids. That's all. In my high school, we talked a lot about abstinence. A lot. But they didn't tell us lies, either. They taught us about contraception. They told us that a lot of cultures and religions believe that masturbation is wrong. And yes, they said, masturbating may cause you to feel conflicted because of your religious or cultural beliefs. But it won't, in fact, cause you any physical harm. Which, again, is true.

What Douthat and other conservatives want to do is lie to kids, to tell them that contraception doesn't work, so that they'll be so scared that they won't have sex at all. After all, if you can't avoid pregnancy and STIs no matter what you do, better abstain, right? Wrong. Because kids will always, always hear much more about sex than what they learn in class. And the extracurricular education they get about sex will always, always be chock-full of misinformation, because they're getting it from other kids and misinformed adults. But here's where I really get angry at Douthat:

But we should understand it more as a battle over community values than as an argument about public policy.

Seriously? I'm disgusted. And, I'm also surprised that he's willing to make it this plain. He's willing to admit that conservatives are more interested in using the bodies of teenagers to make political, religious, and cultural points than actually encouraging the well-being of those bodies. To Douthat and his ilk, teenage boys and girls might as well not be people. Instead, they are edifices that represent what we stand for. As Amanda Marcotte astutely noted, he subscribes to the conception that children are property, and we get to do with them as we wish, which includes telling them lies that may gravely impact their health.

UPDATE: Monsieur Bouie has a similar, but better-written take on Douthat. Here's what I was trying to get across with the "other kids and misinformed adults" bit:

Teens need to know how their bodies work, and they need to have accurate information about sex and contraception. There is a wealth of misinformation about sex — a lot of it spread by abstinence-only programs — and in the absence of any countervailing information, teenagers will turn to misinformation and distortions to inform their choices. The practical effect of de-federalizing sex education is that some kids will be given the truth about their bodies, and other kids will be lied to.