Today is Cesar Chavez Day

"We draw our strength from the very despair in which we have been forced to live. We shall endure."

"It starts with your heart and radiates out."

Chavez

Godforsaken

I have been working on a theory over here. And inspired by the "all god's children deserve feeding tubes" fervor of the religious right, it may be time to share it.

One of the reasons I've always had trouble believing in a capital-G God--the creator and all that--is that the world is pretty damn fucked up. (News flash, I know.) How can this be the result of "intelligent design" has always been my line of thinking. But of course, there are those moments one wonders. The Northern Lights, Yeats' poetry, babies' fingernails, crème brûlée;... can it all be an accident of biology and mutation?

And then it came to me recently: We are the Beta test.

Wouldn't any intelligent design include a prototype, a little preliminary testing? I figure god was like "Hmm...separating heaven and earth...great innovation. Separating light and darkness...another good one. Biological diversity and nifty creatures...gosh I'm brilliant. But free will...nope. So much for that idea."

Somewhere out there in the cosmos is god's VHS. They have no pope, they let people die when it's time, the old are taken care of, no one is hungry, everyone is a leftist, and the chocolate is delicious.

Coolest gift item ever

Okay, I have a "big" birthday coming up this year and anyone who's wondering what to get me can forget about the knife rack idea and instead, get my image remade as a velvet Elvis. I'm not quite sure whether I favor the fat Elvis approach or the young hipster Elvis, but I'll give it some thought.



(many thanks to eponymous for this fine find)

Say it, Gordon!

Gordon over at the Alternate Brain tells the religious fanatics what's for. The lather is so articulate, it's worth reprinting in its entirety:

The thing that pisses me off the most in the case of Mrs. Schiavo is this:

The misleading and flat-out wrong assertion by the pseudo-christians and the media that Mr. Schiavo and the legal system are murdering Mrs. Schiavo by "denying" her food and water. This makes it sound like the docs are keeping a plate of Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings just out of her reach and cackling like fiends.

Listen up, you heartless motherfuckers.

That tube didn't have no fucking Happy Meals being shoved through it, of that you can be sure. She's been kept alive by the medical intervention of nutrition and hydration very much like, and I use these carefully chosen following words, growing a hydroponic carrot. If she could eat or swallow on her own, she would, and no one would think of denying her anything. If anybody had gotten through to her with a cup of water like they were trying to do, it would have probably drowned her, and that's murder.

Will all you retarded assholes please let the lady's soul fly out of its meat prison and quit using her for your Satanic retardiligious right-wing ends? All you're doing is showing the rest of us how fucking stupid and cruel you are, and we already knew that. May my God have mercy on your worthless empty souls.

But how do you really feel, Gord?

Schindlers List

Yella tells us that Terri Schiavo's parents are selling the list of their supporters to a direct mail campaign.

For fuck's sake. Do you think they'll auction the feeding tube on Ebay after she finally dies?

When the world blows up, we'll all have gotten what we deserve, you know?

Not that it's any of your business

North Carolina's Sheriff Carson Smith wins the "fascist chutzpah" award for the week for his ultimatum delivered to former employee Debora Hobbs. When Smith discovered Hobbs lives with her boyfriend and they are, gasp, not married, he told her to "get married, move out, or find another job." She chose the latter option and now the ACLU is representing her in a lawsuit that:

seeks to abolish the nearly 200-year-old--and rarely enforced--law that prohibits unmarried, unrelated adults of the opposite sex from living together. North Carolina is one of seven states with such a law.

Convicted offenders face a fine and up to 60 days in jail.

I mean really. It's not like we don't live in a world with actual problems to solve. I'm just thinking with Robertson and the Pope failing maybe Carson Smith won't be far behind.

(Big Brass Blog has more)

Standing in front of a bus, staring at the moon

It's apparently quiz day here at NMTE. Though again, this one struck me as more interesting than the usual "what flavor of ice cream are you"-type things I get spammed with. This morning's quiz? The 4Cs values classification. It's longer, but the results--at least in my world--are pretty interesting. According to Young and Rubicam, the quiz's authors, 4Cs stands for "Cross Cultural Consumer Characterisation"--pretty funny. The quiz results tell you how important each of the following are to you: security, control, status, individual, freedom, survival, and escape.

Here's the funny part: I scored highest in enlightenment and lowest in survival. Thus my status as someone who is likely to get hit by a bus because she's too busy staring at the moon.

Apostle of destruction

Never mind quizilla, voline.org's quiz tells you which radical thinker you are most in tune with. You've got to love a quiz that asks, "If you admired one of the following, who would it be?"

Bob Dylan.
Thomas Paine.
Fidel Castro.
Lenin.
Albert Einstein.

or "Which method fosters social revolution the most?"

Preparation.
Direct action.
Depends on the situation.
Sedition.
Propaganda.

Turns out, I am Mikhail Bakunin:

Bakunin, it is evident, was rather the stimulator than the organiser. He wrote wonderful letters, arousing the torpid and nerving the timid. Fertile in suggestion, his writings were of the nature of fragments cast off red-hot from the fiery furnace of his mind.

"My life," he used to say, "is but a fragment." Most notable of the aforesaid fragments is his booklet on God and the State, in which those twin instruments of oppression are attacked with equal vehemence and vigor. It is on the pretence of divine authority that human authority is founded, and Bakunin, "apostle of destruction" as he was called by the Belgian economist Lavaleye, looked forward to the time when "human justice will be substituted for divine justice."

Which probably explains why I am constantly lamenting the absence of hell (see below). I think I want to get a tattoo that says "apostle of destruction."

(Via The Guardian's newsblog)

Slogger

That's what they should call it. I have been utterly thwarted in my desire to spout off today about all manner of things. I have composed posts in my head about the niche market I inhabit, Jesse Jackson's ubiquitous presence at all media events (lurking like a ghastly spectre at Schiavo's bedside), and David Byrnne radio among other things. But noooo.... stupid Blogger.

Must go to Pasadena tonight. If I'm not too wiped out and it's not too late maybe I'll try flinging myself at the wall a few more times in the wee hours.

It's all relative

Take the phrase "best seller," for example. While for some of us, that may conjure images of oiled sunbathers reading our books at the beach or commuters clutching mass markets on the subway, that's not always the case.

For example, you may never have heard of the best seller "Harry T. Burleigh and the creative expression of bi-musicality: A study of an African-American composer and the American art song." And yet, it's 2003's number one seller--dissertations sold through ProQuest that is. I can't really tell you why this tickles my funny bone, but it does. I guess it's that thing: even when you are top of this particular heap, you're languishing in obscurity.

Press release via the incomparable ResourceShelf.

The little things mean a lot

Can I just share how much it pleases me that, if you search for "junky mentality" in Google, I am number one on the hit parade.

Getting caught up

Having spent some time distracted from blogging by the bothersome work I do for a living as well as the other creative pursuits I do for nothing, I am just now getting caught up reading some of my friends' blogs. Via e p o n y m o u s comes the image from Banksy below


The site is really worth a stop. Here is part of the manifesto page, which quotes the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO, one of the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen:

I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. . . . It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. . . . I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.

Easter madness

So Saturday I spent most of the day holed up working on this article I am writing for a collection on collecting. Sometime shortly before midnight, I ran out of cigarettes and made an addict's run to the RiteAid. Holy mother of God! I walk in there and there are a fucking gazillion people. It was so surreal. It was like 11:45 at night and there are hoards of shoppers milling around clutching stuffed bunnies and bags of pink cellophane grass and boxes of peeps. Right, Easter. I had horrifying visions for just a moment of being trapped in some sort of George Romero Easter movie--Resurrection of the Living Dead or something.

Anyway, it was just one of those total Man Who Fell to Earth moments. Those of you who write/make movies/etc may know what I mean--that feeling of other worldliness when you emerge from the den having just communed with the keyboard for way too long. It's like coming up from deep sea diving without enough decompression time. And that's under the best of circumstances. Then to be confronted with teeming masses of "he is risen; let's eat chocolate" consumers. It was intense, I tell you.

Tom DeLay

So I've been thinking for days about how to express my feelings about Mr. Culture of Life (that is, Tom "do as I say, not as I do" DeLay), and thanks to Netdisaster, I don't even need to come up with the words. This pretty well captures it for me. (Site via Poynter Online's E-Media Tidbits

Worth repeating

One of my former students (in one of my last lives as a perennial grad student, I taught college) sends a regular email update about what's going on in his life. This is from his email this weekend about life in Armenia, where he just arrived:

I'm going to close here with a little story that has made A laugh about thee times a day since it happened. I am not a short man, which is one of my few redeeming features, and in Armenia I am a flat-out giant. In addition to being white, and blue-eyed, and not having jet black hair, my 6'3" really makes me stand out here. People here stare at me, even before I do something totally outrageous. I don't mind at all of course, being quite used to it in America.

Well, on our second day here, we were walking through the main square where a giant statue of Lenin once stood, and I was looking around at the buildings and architecture and such as I strode (how about that word) across the plaza. I was kind of close to a couple of little kids who were looking the other way and when I got near, the older one (about 6 years) turned, gasped, grabbed his little brother and pointed up at me and chattered in Armenian, "Godzilla!!" And then they both ran off. I am not a real good-looking guy, but "Godzilla?" Ouch.

There's plenty more already, but that's going to wait for the next Update. I was on TV and made a lot of friends on the bus and apparently feeding me is some kind of sport here. Wait and see.

As for me, I am still alive out here--feeling marginally challenged balancing all of my life stuff right now, which is why the theater was dark this weekend. But I'm brainstorming other phrases for "hypocritical dickhead" so that I can post my feelings about DeLay later.

¿cómo pronto ahora está?

The blazingly white Morrissey appears to have garnered a large Latino/a fan base here in Los Angeles, a phenomenon now the subject of a documentary Is It Really So Strange?, says The Guardian. One of the things I love so much about LA is the ways in which it defies expectations--something that it's easy to miss about this place if you're not paying attention. And I love this bit from the Guardian article:

One lasting impression Jones's film leaves is that, for many fans, a meeting with Morrissey can mean a dry mouth, clammy palms and, ultimately, disappointment. All relate tales of his politeness and willingness to sign various body parts, but you can't help but feel that, in their eyes, Morrissey the Man does not live up to Morrissey the Icon. Only those fans who merely snatched a touch of an arm or managed a sweaty wordless embrace on stage are still beaming about the moment.

God, isn't that a metaphor for way too much of life.

Make your own

Who doesn't hate these things really? I consider them right up there with mullets for a mark of the aesthetically challenged.

Pro-life killers

Today's Salon has the latest from America's Christian Taliban. Indiana's Congressman Souder is leading the pack in an attempt to institute a gag order similar to the one that governs discussion (or lack thereof) about abortion to pregnant women through US-funded aid organizations. The proposed new prohibition would mean those organizations could not tell IV drug users about where to get clean needles or even why one would want to do so.

It's overstating the obvious, I know, to meditate too long on the grotesque hypocrisy of folks who will fight to the mat to keep a feeding tube in Terri Schiavo but would just as soon throw addicts under a bus. I know it's my continuing refrain here, but I really do wish there were such a thing as an afterlife so that we could look forward to justice in hell. Oh well.

While we're on the subject...

...of the right-to-lifers' hypocrisy, Marjorie Cohn mulls the issue at Truthout:

What is the "right to life"? Does it simply include unborn fetuses, stem cells, and people in persistent vegetative states? Or does it also refer to health care for the 40 million Americans who don't have it; aid to children whose single moms can't make ends meet; and billions of dollars in Medicaid - a virtual lifeline for millions - that Bush tried to cut? What about the 1524 American soldiers and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis who have died in a war that never should have happened? Didn't they have the right to life?

Um...in a word, Marjorie, that would be "no." In fact, those American soldiers should be proud to die martyrs, let's not leave the worship of that status to the Muslims. God knows, we love our martyrs as well. (Thanks to Colin for the forward.)

Pro-selected-lives

The Family Research Council continues to milk the Terri Schiavo case for all it's worth. In their latest opportunistic essay, they compare Schiavo to Bin Laden, who has also become something of a free-floating metaphor, albeit for all that is unholy:

Imagine terrorist Osama Bin Laden being put on trial in the United States and sentenced to die a slow, painful death. Now imagine during the appeals process a presiding judge saying, "continue with the death sentence. If Mr. Bin Laden dies or suffers while I am thinking, then so be it." Death penalty opponents would be rightfully outraged. Any human being, no matter how despicable, has certain rights - especially in the U.S. court system. . . .

There is compelling evidence that key facts of Terri's case have been ignored by the judicial system. . . . Until these troubling questions, and numerous others, are answered, to err on the side of life is a good motto to keep in mind.

I really wouldn't take such issue with the wackadoo pro-life people if they were consistent in their doctrine. But it does seem to boil down to "those we deem 'innocent' are deserving of life and rights.

Here is an excerpt from a FRC piece on terrorism from last September:

The growing brutality of the cowardly Islamic jihadists, who behead unarmed civilians in the process of making videos of their rantings, is designed to weaken America's resolve and put questions in the minds of Americans about the leadership of George W. Bush. The terrorists are endeavoring to create an environment of fear and uncertainty. However, America must stand firm in its resolve to confront this evil. On this issue we should take our cue from our Israeli friends and stand firm against the jihadists, who not only want to rid the Middle East of westerners, but also to bring every Christian and Jew under the subjugation of radical Islamic rule.

I know this is the sort of hypocrisy that used to make me crazy when I was a teenager and I should be more inured to it by now, but I can't help but still get infuriated by the notion that one poor woman with a feeding tube who just wants the right to die becomes the ground of a holy war here at home while thousands are dying as we prosecute a crusade abroad. I'm way too logical for this point in my country's history.

Err on the side of life, indeed. Stupid fuckers.