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Sent to me by my gal pal Sal a while ago:
Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate in one hand, wine in the other, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming ~ WOO HOO what a ride!
My sentiments, exactly.
After yesterday's all-day and -night chilling rain/sleet, it's beautiful and blue and brisk out, so what am I going to do today? Write!
With chocolate.
Laurie sent me a very funny little piece of humor last night: a parody of the Banana Republic catalog featuring the current regime as models, posted over at Jest, which bills itself as "humor for the irreverent." I'm particularly delighted by this parody because it has a double edge, at least for me. When I first encountered Banana Republic stores after moving east, I was really appalled by the name. My Dad, who was in Panama during WWII, used to tell me disdainful stories about United Fruit, who were part and parcel of the labor-busting Gilded Age fortunes built on the back of exploited workers. Banana Republic's early faux-safari bwana style only perpetuated the Manifest Destiny image. Revolting. Since then, I've always referred to them as Banana Repulsive. So this "catalog" of capitalist fascists (is that a contradiction in terms?) Banana Republicans cracks me up. They're just, after all, exploiting a different part of the world. Hmmm, somehow the phrase Oil Republic springs to mind . . . except there's no republics involved.
In a previous post, I linked to the SorryEverybody.com site, which is in the same vein but has the slight stench of also serving as a venue for people who just want their picture on the Web, sort of like the Human Clock with political ambitions. Nonetheless, I find it both amusing and a stinging rebuke to the benighted 51% of voters who chose to believe the lies of the Bush regime. I mentioned this to Em who's still so enraged by the vote result that her reaction was (I'm paraphrasing), "with the time and resources they've expended on this effort they could have done something constructive." It seems to me, though, that "something constructive" is in the eye of the beholder.
I've always thought humor was a really good weapon in any battle. In verbal warfare, humor keeps most political arguments from becoming nothing but propaganda, which is notoriously lacking in humor. It's sort of the Stealth bomber of rhetoric: it sneaks in under the radar and before you know it, you're laughing at something you might not have agreed with otherwise, like a critique of Dick Cheney's dubious ethics:
You’ve got a weak ticker, a gay daughter and you do all the work while your boss gets all the credit –- so why not unwind by awarding government contracts to your old employer? The business deals may be questionable but good cotton never is.
Conflict of interest cotton tee $18.50
No one will ever catch you embroidered striped shirt $47
Go fuck yourself belt $36
It's not unlikely that the latter phrase would be Cheney's response to this parody, but that's to be expected. That particular phrase is the last resort of the person who senses they're losing the battle. And as that old ultimate cut-down goes, you can't have a battle of wits with an unarmed man.
The beautiful thing about fighting with words is that nobody bleeds, nobody dies, there's no property damage. Really, this is what diplomacy is all about: fighting with words, aiming to keep it from coming to physical blows. I'm not saying that words can't wound; any verbally abused child or spouse will tell you otherwise. And remember those cut-down fights you had when you were a kid? The adult versions of those often end up in court; there are libel and slander laws for a reason. But in the public arena, it's so much better to slap each other with insults than with a fist or even an open hand. Certainly it's better than lobbing bullets and bombs at each other.
In Robert Heinlein's Number of the Beast, one of the main characters calls a minor one an "over-educated, obstipated, pedantic ignoramus." Once the threatened physical scuffle is headed off by another main character, a third says, "Shout right back at Jake Burroughs if you like. If your command of invective equals his, we'll enjoy hearing it." We do enjoy hearing good invective. It's one of the things that makes celebrity bitch fests so fascinating. Elton John called her what? Even better if it goes on for years, like Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy's famous and litigious bitchfest. (McCarthy said of Hellman: "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'") Better yet if it involves witty intellectuals who really do have a good command of invective (see above).
Shame, which plays a major role in much humor, is a powerful tool. McCarthy's accusation against Hellman was that she was, if not actively covering up Stalin's crimes against humanity, then certainly ignoring them for the sake of her political support of Communism (McCarthy was a Communist too, but not a Stalinist). When you know the context of McCarthy's remark, it seems less like invective than exposure, though certainly of an exaggerated kind. I'm not certain it's possible to shame this regime (it's hard to shame the delusional, after all), but it presents their lies in a totally different light to others who might yet be persuaded to realize they've been lied to. And at least it reminds the rest of the world that at least some of us know what's going on. That seems constructive to me.
So go make fun of a NeoCon. Just be witty about it.
From the 176 pages of apologies to the world. Meanwhile, a city the size of Miami burns . . . It's a nice gesture, kids, but nobody's more sorry than the women and children of Falluja who're under fire tonight. (Courtesy of my friend Livy, who, like me, doesn't vote because it's all so tainted and ungodly. Bad enough our taxes are buying bombs and ammo.)
And from Roger, in Georgia, who did vote and is more than a little disgrunteld about the outcome (and no wonder): Turn Your Back on Bush.
One thing about politics: it makes for some great humor and irony.
Here's my friend Marcia's take on King George. There are days when I think she'd make a really good political cartoonist. The difficulty is keeping her worked up enough.
Or, "What a wonderful smell you've discovered!"
Guess what? Yet another election is starting to smell funny:
You can't make this stuff up, and I'm not. Check out Keith Olbermann's investigative blog over on MSNBC. And thanks to George Paine at Warblogging for spreading the news.
Went to the the Editions/Artists Book Fair today with Marcia, the first I've seen her in a good long while. The show itself was something of a washout from a bookmaker's point of view, since it was mostly prints, and what few books there were were mostly boxes to hold prints. There were a few interesting things, but nothing that really took the top of my head off it. It was great seeing Marcia again though, and we had a great chat over food and drinks at the Half King Cafe on 23rd & 10th Avenue. Sadly, much of the chat was about her impending break-up with her wonderful singer girlfriend, largely due to the fact that they're just not making each other happy anymore.
During the course of our chat, MG told me a long sad story about a particular missed artistic opportunity, one which was all too familiar. I can't tell you how often this has happened to me, or artist friends of mine, where we've been given this gift of opportunity and gotten so scared of success that we fail to follow through on it with just the minimal effort that it would take to get it off the ground. It's almost always my female friends who do this to themselves too. Most male artists, presented with such opportunities, snatch it like the brass ring it is and run like hell with it.
What the heck is wrong with us that women can't do that? What? Are we waiting for permission? Well, yeah, actually. I think a lot of us are. And this is something men, in their entitlement to the world, do not wait for.
For instance, I was astounded at how easy it was to sell our first book to the Detroit Institute of Arts. They were as excited to have it as we were for them to have it. And yet, when time came to send it out to MoMA, I could hardly make myself do it (and thanks to Marcia for kicking my butt over it), even though there was far less chance of it being rejected (we were giving it to them, for an artist's book collection that has an open submission policy) than there had been with Detroit, which isn't known for it's artist's book collection, unlike, say, Toledo. To which, incidentally, I haven't submitted the book either. It's a stupid paralysis, consisting of a combination of evil thoughts like "how dare I? What if it's rejected? what business do I have doing this? I'm a fraud." I don't think any of my male artist friends think in those terms. They believe in their work, even when no one else does, like my friend Adam, who's finally hitting it big again. Even when no one was buying, he kept painting. It's not making the art that's the obstacle. That's usually an irresistible force. Then the piece turns into the immovable object. That's the problem.
After the show, Marcia was trying to explain to me why going to see a show like this is sometimes validating for her. She said something like, "If Julian Schnabel can print badly on broken plates and still make a shitload of money, it somehow makes my"—and here we got hung up on the right adjective or noun, whether it was fussiness, perfectionism, worth, validity or what, whether it was about the idea or the execution or the product—but somehow seeing a "real" artist who still produces mediocre or even less than perfect work being validated for it validates what she's trying to do. In short, it's okay to be "good enough," to settle, to not be perfect. I often feel the same way, that somehow, women have to try much harder, produce a better product to get the same amount of consideration or notice, let alone validation.
At the same time, it's the art itself that's important, not the—"validation," I was going to write, but that's the crux of the problem, isn't it? You plod on and plod on and whether you put it out there or not, is the art itself validation enough? If you put it out there, and nothing happens, or very little happens, is that enough? Yeah, sometimes. I'm thinking of my friend Mel, who's a pianist, someone else who had passed up opportunities for artistic advancement, but who still practices her art in public, and plays because she wants to make people happy. The greatest validation she gets is when someone in the audience comes up to her afterwards and says that they loved hearing her play, that what she played made them smile or laugh or even cry, if it pulled some tangible emotion out of them. But even she craves some kind of an audience, some sort of feedback.
Serendipitously, on the way in I was reading an essay called "Envy" by Kathryn Chetkovich, which is about living with another writer who's not only more successful but, worse, more talented than oneself. This is what that validation is all about. Is the other person better than you, just because their stuff gets an audience and yours doesn't? One of the cruelest things my mother ever said to me when I was a kid just learning to write stories and peoms was that I couldn't really call myself a writer until someone had paid me for my work. Eventually, I figured out this was bullshit (Nobody ever paid Emily Dickinson, did they?), but it left me with that niggling fear that I wasn't good enough unless somebody told me I was.
I've been lucky enough to get a fair amount of validation of my work in my life: a few nice if small prizes; fairly steady publication of my individual poems; some good feedback from workshop leaders and editors, even when I've been rejected; a couple of sales here and there. I suspect that even when I do manage to sell a novel (and I'm pretty sure I will) it won't set the New York Times Book Review on fire, and probably won't make me nearly as much as my friend Jen is making on her two non-fiction books. I doubt I'll ever be able to live off my writing. On the other hand, that allows me to make cool artist's books with Marcia.
In the end, you have to believe in the work you're doing, whether anyone else does or not. Otherwise, why get out of bed?
Over dinner with Roz and Eva tonight, we observed that in the city actually hardest hit by terrorists, something like 90% of the vote went to Kerry, not Bush. I think this harkens back yet again to earlier observations I've made about people who've already been victims of violence not wanting to inflict more of it on other people. People elsewhere, like Ohio (and oh I've said for years someone should bomb Ohio; it's the most boring state in the country to drive across), seem to be afraid they're next. Now, LA, I could see, or Houston or possibly Chicago, but Toledo? Cleveland? Columbus? Cincinnati? What's the point? The Bush propaganda machine did a great job of whipping up the terror of terrorists in places unlikely to be targets and then bamboozling those people into thinking that he's doing a great job of protecting them from said terrorists.
The Power of Propaganda
Meanwhile, back in the real world, very few prosecutions of alleged terrorists have been successfull in this country since 9/11; Osama bin Ladin, who actually is a terrorist, is still at large; and the U.S. is deeply embroiled in a war whose leader was never proven to have either truly dangeorus weapons or ties to terrorist organizations. And yet, most Bush supporters still believe Iraq before it was invaded was a hotbed of terrorist activity with a stockpile of chemical, nuclear, and conventional weapons waiting to be given to terrorists or turned on the US and its allies. Despite this, New York, which you'll remember has already been a terrorist target not once but twice (remember the first World Trade Center bombing?) was getting less money to protect itself than Wyoming. Can you say "pork barrel," boys and girls? Sure you can! And the Office of Homeland Security is so underfunded as to be virtually hogtied. As a result, more than 1,100 occupying soldiers and more than 10,000 civilians, most of them women and children, have died in Iraq since the war started (remember, this is a country in which 40% of the population is under the age of 15); and most of the US's former allies are so disgusted at the least and alienated at worst that they're pulling out. The Coalition of the Willing is becoming what it was in the beginning: The Coalition of The One—and I'm not talking about Neo here.
Safer? If one of my relatives were as delusional as this administration and the people who support it seem to be about reality, I'd be looking for a good treatment program for them. But when people are afraid, they believe what makes them feel better, not what's necessarily true or logical. Masters of propaganda (also known as "spin") understand this and exploit it. Bush is the Great and Powerful Oz and Karl Rove is pulling the curtain shut to keep the illusion safe.
In actuality, this is a team that, in the the immortal words of my Canadian-Irish Cousin Mike, could not organize a one-man rush on an outhouse. I know I go to bed at night feeling safer because The Shrub and His Minions are On It.
A late-breaking, hilarious addendum from my resourceful pals at Two Stools:
I'll have to polish up my Canadian vowels and remind myself to say "eh?" again.
Or, the Loud Silence
No outraged e-mails from my politically minded friends today, i.e., the ones who voted for Kerry. (I don't think any of my friends voted for Bush, though I'm sure many of my relatives did, which tells you both what my friends are like and why I left my relatives in Michigan.) No funny, mean, or clever political jokes either. In fact, no emails at all. Apparently nobody's laughing, except the Bushies. I suspect there's too much horror going around. And surprise that so many people would vote for a regime that's taken away inalienable rights, bankrupted the nation in less than four years, and has already killed many of their sons and daughters and is poised to kill more in the years it will take to extricate the Armed Forces from Iraq. And sadly, it wasn't even a coup this time. I don't know whether that's good or bad
I don't have much to say about it either, though I'm probably less surprised than my friends. I don't have much faith in the common sense of people who'd allow themselves to be whipped into open bigotry by 9/11 and lies about other people who don't look like us. Nor do I have any great insights on why Bush won (rather than why Kerry lost, which is because he wasn't a convincing enough liar), except that Bush had a better propaganda machine in the end: well-oiled, ruthless, cunning, and utterly amoral (also known as Fox News). You almost have to admire it, in a Machiavellian sort of way. Karl Rove must be so proud.
Late in the day, finally, a lone, pithy quotation arrived from my friend Laurie, who, given her economic background, should be a Bushie and isn't (so much for stereotypes):
"Most people would rather die than think. Many do."
-Bertrand Russell
The quotation that's been running through my head all day is W.B. Yeats, from the "The Second Coming":
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Brace yourselves, folks. The fan's already on and the shit is incoming. And here's a prediction: those of you under 32, expect a Draft Notice coming to a mailbox near you soon.
Wonder how I'd like Vancouver?
Usually, when things like this happen, I do one of two things: write or do something domestic, like cleaning or cooking. I'm sitting here really torn right now between the two of them, even though I've got fresh basil draining in the sink for pesto. I'm hungry, but I don't really have an appetite, meaning the flesh is willing but the spirit couldn't care less.
This is because we just found out today that my mom's favorite niece has bone cancer in her spine and is already in the hospital, from which she's not really expected to go home. She's had a couple of compression factures in her spine already that were originally attributed to osteoporosis and has been in a lot of pain. At least in the hospital I hope she'll get some decent pain relief. I also hope she doesn't suffer for long, that they don't drag this out and make the remainder of her life hell. Nobody deserves that less than Ginny, whose nickname should have been Sunny. I can't ever remember her saying a mean thing about anybody, and that's not just beatifying the dying either. No matter how smelly the crap that hit the fan—and some of it was pretty odiferous—Ginny managed to get flowers out of it, and not in a pollyanna way. She just tucked in and soldiered on in that "what cannot be cured must be endured" way.
There's something particularly awful and enraging about cancer, too. It's a sort of ultimate betrayal of the body, having the repair and replacement mechanism go so insanely haywire that it pushes out anything normal and healthy. Your cells become alien, turning against you, or eating you alive.
Ginny's only about 10 years younger than Mom, the daughter of Mom's older brother, Art, who died in his fifties of an aneurysm. I used to have a crush on Ginny's son Keith. Her husband, Sonny, a 6'8" former construction worker (who at one time had both legs run over and crushed by a bulldozer) has just been diagnosed with mild epilepsy, on top of that. She and Mom have been good friends for years; she's one of the few people that Mom actually made an effort to keep up with and write and call. A couple of years ago she went out to see Ginny in California, and now I'm doubly glad she did, even though it was a hard trip. Doesn't look like she'll get another chance, now.
And what else is there to say? It's always wrong. It's always unfair. It always leaves a big hole in somebody's life. As I was coming in to work today Mom called and left a message that was just her trying to catch her breath while crying. Thankfully, I didn't hear this until after I'd talked to her, since I was in the subway when she called. I would have thought it was her having a heart attack by herself and trying to reach me. This is the most broken up I've seen her, and that hurts me. There's always a widening circle of fallout when someone dies or is dying, especially when it's as painful as this is likely to be.
The outcome of the elections seems irrelevant in the face of death. In the end, what most of us really care about is our families and our friends, that they be safe and healthy. Power struggles demean the lives of ordinary people and how they live and die. In my very ordinary way, I'm going to make pesto while the despots struggle for the throne and GinnyMae's spine consumes itself. 
