Faerie Fire

“fairy-stories are not in normal English usage stories about fairies or elves, but stories about Fairy, that is Faërie, the realm or state in which fairies have their being.” JRR Tolkien

We are taught somewhere that people have a “sexual orientation” and a “gender.” We are taught that some people are “gay” and others “straight.” We are told these are facts. And endless arguments come about from these supposed facts. But that’s not in fact the truth.  Read more 

Remember when there was a burst of hope when a woman ascended to the Speakership of the House, and Hillary was the front runner? Remember when Barbara Boxer was beloved of progressives, before endorsing the Connecticut for McCain party candidate? Remember when Jackie Speier was the valiant survivor of a shooting incident that took the life of her employer and mentor Congressman Ryan?

You know why the public sours on Democratic Women politicians? Because the have a sense of entitlement, and they turn on the people who support them. Hillary is suffering not just because of her own sins, or the sexism of present contemporary society, a fact I get presented with every single day, but because of the arrogance of her cohort, the pure sense that the argument is over because of a kind of ownership built up by relationships. They can’t open their mouths without telling everyone that they do not care what other people think, that the girl’s tree house is closed and that anyone else will be clawed instantly for even looking at the rope.

That’s why the “B” word and even the “C” word so easily cross people’s lips, because everyone recalls back to the cheerleaders and class presidents of high school days.  Read more 

Second Life as preparation for higher office? Perhaps so.

Is America ready for a digital politics?

There are certain phenomena, inherent in true revolutions, that cannot be understood in terms of the criterion of rationality of action… To account for them, we have to come to view societal change as essentially a “religious” transformation. By this is meant a very fundamental and dramatic form of religious experience, essentially one of death and rebirth.

Edward Tiryakian, A Model of Societal Change and its Lead Indicators 1967

Dark destinies deep departed. And it is I who knocks upon the door of the future. I have heard from our would be leaders and they have told me nothing except that they promise to do thing that have not been done, when the people who will have to do them will not even start to do them now.  Read more 

I cannot bring myself to care
for promises that are not there.
I cannot bring myself to love,
to little blessings from above.

I cannot bring tie myself in rope,
and hang my future on some vague hope.
I cannot bring myself to cry,
I only want to say good bye.

Billary, Hilbama, Obinton, no,
there is not nothing there to know.
McRomney, Huckles, chuckles, for
I just want an end to this stupid war.

It’s not for nothing, or anything,
that makes someone’s hear melt and sing.
So all that’s left to do is wait.
Watching how early it has gotten late.  Read more 

In honor of “Liability Relief.”

Compliance Relief: People who choose to channel their money into the economy rather than wasteful income taxes should be relieved of having to do so.

Regulation Relief: Companies that enhance the climate by increasing global temperatures should no longer be monitored as they continue their important work of improving property values on the Alaskan Riviera.  Read more 

Why is it that the media suddenly thinks that the Democratic Party has a race problem? This is a right wing frame. Shouldn’t we all know about frames by now? Maybe the Democratic candidates have played the race card, but we know which party has a whole race deck, don’t we? That’s right, it is the Republican Party. The reason their candidates aren’t fighting over the votes of Latino, Black or Women voters, is that those groups don’t matter in the Republican Party, and they aren’t who the Republican Party is going to want on election day.

Race card? Gender card? Ron Paul, the so-called libertarian, is against equal rights for gyno-Americans. All the others are tripping over each other to be more in favor of a civil war against not white enough people, and none of them are going to win enough of the “Black Vote” to be elected to the Senate from California, let alone President of the United States.

Need some examples?  Read more 

The Compassionate Conservative will surely pay us a final visit tonight. He remains an appealing character, but a largely fictional one. I wonder how the last seven years might have turned out if he had actually existed. In the final year of a failed presidency, I bet Mr. Bush does too.

I never understood the “compassionate conservative” thing. I think it is a parental unit fiction, you know, I have compassion for my kids, I will just kill them if they have sex. I think that’s really the paradigm from which the whole gayplaguedarkperilmoralupbringingtaxcutswithmassivemilitarydiscipline thing makes some kind of sense. Surrounded by the perils of sex, media and people trying to take hard earned money away, but filled with an abiding love for progeny, parents do some really evil things. And feel justified. I intend to be a parental unit someday, I hope what ever the syndrome is doesn’t affect me. I know it will, no one really escapes the clutching my baby thing.

But it’s why the center-right goes to bed counting unity ponies and pretending to be the left. Such a tragedy that they trusted the far right. Such a tragedy that they couldn’t get together.  Read more 

Ian Welsh over at the agonist argues that it is about race and gender in the Democratic primary far more than we would like it to be. That’s because race matters out here too. For getting a job, for getting a loan, for how people treat you. I’m betting that not too many people have tried to peer down the front of Ian’s blouse lately while implying that things will go so much easier if he’d be friendly.

I’ve been told by other people that this election is more about identity and media than the last one. But then the every day world is about race and gender. Given a choice of people who are saying to us that we aren’t going to get what we want, need or deserve, why not one who at least shares some experience of our day to day realities and experience with the indignities that go with it?  Read more 

Sing a song of suspense
a pocket full of lies
four and twenty bodies
flown through through the skies.

When the lies were opened
the sellouts did their thing.
Wasn’t that a dainty dish,
to put before the king?

Children’s nusery rhymes often started out as political jingles. Twenty-Four official fatalities in December means “the surge is working.” But if that is so, why is the support for the war in Iraq, according to the Wall Street Journal, below where it was when the Republicans lost Congress?

I’m going to let other people debate the big issues, instead I’d like to talk about what I am seeing.  Read more 

One problem I have with slate is pretty simple, endemic cluelessness about racism and sexism. Their critics, by and large, wander around in a haze where privilege, which can be defined as not having to care about what those other people think. Today’s example is on Spencer Tunick and is written by Mia Fineman.

Spencer isn’t a racist, there just aren’t many brown people in the planet he lives on. Mia isn’t a racist, she just lives on the same planet.  Read more 

I study art. This means that the prefix “post-” appears a great deal in the things I read and write about. This is because great landmarks create a wake, and every critic or artist often wants to argue that everything is different. Either because the artist or art work or moment that they love has changed everything, or because the thing they hate the most should be consigned to the closet of obscurity, or because they want to keep some things about the revealed word they were taught, but not others. We have post-minimalism, post-modernism, post-impressionism, post-holocaust, post-video, postwar consumer culture, post-depictiion.

So I get the desire to post- something. So let’s call Washington DC what it is, the center of the post-reality movement.  Read more 

I beat my drum for the time has come,
the fever has still a few years to run,
the country is still drunk on rum.
But the time has come, to beat my drum.

I’ve seen a man who started Right,
he was so wrong when he was in the right.
He voted for this stupid war,
but he doesn’t believe that anymore.
Was it shining eyes and flaxen hair,
that made him see that this world is not fair.
While the President he may not become,
he picked it up, and beat his drum.  Read more 

Liquid pain. The war against women starts young.

Studies have shown that in some parts of Indonesia, female circumcision is more ritualistic — a rite of passage meant to purify the genitals and bestow gender identity on a female child — with a practitioner rubbing turmeric on the genitals or pricking the clitoris once with a needle to draw a symbolic drop of blood. In other instances, the procedure is more invasive, involving what WHO classifies as “Type I” female genital mutilation, defined as excision of the clitoral hood, called the prepuce, with or without incision of the clitoris itself. The Population Council’s 2003 study said that 82 percent of Indonesian mothers who witnessed their daughters’ circumcision reported that it involved “cutting.” The women most often identified the clitoris as the affected body part. The amount of flesh removed, if any, was alternately described by circumcisers as being the size of a quarter-grain of rice, a guava seed, a bean, the tip of a leaf, the head of a needle.

At the Assalaam Foundation, traditional circumcisers say they learn the practice from other women during several years of apprenticing. Siti Rukasitta, who has been a circumciser at the foundation for 20 years, said through an interpreter that they use a small pair of sterilized scissors to cut a piece of the clitoral prepuce about the size of a nail clipping. Population Council observers who visited the event before the 2003 study, however, reported that they also witnessed some cases of circumcisers cutting the clitoris itself.

I’m going to warn people, many of the links that follow have graphic images, because seeing isn’t just believing.  Read more 

Hi. Here I am again, blogging under the influence. But here goes. You may or may not have heard of Second Life. Second life is a virtual reality that has several thousand people on line at one time. Unlike games like World of Warcraft, it is not about finding computer driven monsters and throwing bits at them until they byte it, but about building things and meeting people. It uses real money, and people make over a million dollars of transactions a day in Second Life.

Recently a group of people got together to do a performance of The Vagina Monologues in Second Life. The report is, and I will call on Monday to find out whether this is true, that HBO claimed that Second Life is a “broadcast” not a “performance” and that they can stop the production.  Read more 

A lilting cold wind now whispers in my ears
the sum and the total of the wasting years.
The pain that blossoms upon my cheeks,
flowers of scarlet and petals of despair,
brought, brung, and bribed by the blistering air.

I am, I am, I am the land of ice,
made frigid by temptations.

Along with my country one late night I slept,
Slipping through tender fingers the gifts,
that turbulent past had thrust upon us.
A greatness elusive and eluded,
how often alluded to and allegoried of.

Along with others, many others,
too many others,
so many others,
I had combined to trade a night’s sleep for a decade’s pain.
It now falls upon me, a sleet, a soaking, a thundering rain.

These, this wishes of having once and again,
gone back to those other times,  Read more 

Lee Siegel is a writer with a thinking problem. As with many critics, he’s really good at understanding that “the mob” is a tragic thing that rips apart the good as well as the bad in a Dionysian frenzy. The problem is that Lee Siegel isn’t all that smart. He’s been granted just enough insight to understand his own lack of intelligence, and just enough intelligence to offend people who are just a bit farther down the slippery slope of not being paid to type.

I’m not going to defend the trolling masses. But Lee Siegel is one of them. Believe in elitism? To the bottom of my silk undies yes. However, as I’ve heard it put, Siegel doesn’t believe in elitism, but effetism. Effetism, to paraphrase former Texas Governor Ann Richards, is the club of people who are born on third base and talk about how to hit triples. Or rather, the club of people who are capable of feeding the beast, and complain about its taste in fingers.  Read more 

I have a little shadow, who goes in and out with me.
And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
He is very very likely to examine me from my heels up to my head.
But he also will push me out, when I go to hospital bed.

The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow.
It’s because he doesn’t pay like proper business, instead it’s very slow.
When I need a doctor, he is very very tall.
When I need to pay for it, there’s none of him at all.

He hasn’t got a notion of how children ought to play,
And can only make a fool of me in every sort of way.
He stays so close to K Street, he’s a coward you can see;
I wish Tweety would stick to facts as that shadow sticks with Cheney!

One morning, very early, before the son was here,  Read more 

There I was one day at the major hang out in my undergraduate college, where spring had hit with full flowering force. Tops had shrunk and if you’ve got it flaunt it was the rule of the day.

Ah yes, the first warm day of April and the annual outbreak of the bimbonic plague. A few days later word spread through campus of a girl being raped at a spring fling party. Nothing was done formally, and no charges were filed, since she was the gf of a guy on the same sports team, and rocking the boat was not her style. It wasn’t rape exactly, she was drunk. It wasn’t rape exactly, she later had sex with the same guy. It wasn’t rape exactly. She was blonde. Was it truth or not? I don’t know, it is what people said. She dropped out over the summer. I don’t know what became of her.

I have the same feeling as I watch with sickening déjà vu the chattering classes obsession with a dead young pregnant marine. Nothing enough was done before. When it would have meant something.  Read more 

We’ve all seen CSI, where within an hour two or three impossible cases are pieced together and there is an arrest headed for conviction. Or Law and Order, where they usually limit themselves to one case. The reality is different. Despite decades of law and orderism breaking out all over the United States, it is more possible to get away with a murder now than before.

Well it is a myth, and one which favors the right wing, because it creates the impression that modern police work is better. It’s not, the old police departments had more murders to deal with, and they had a better rate of clearing them by arrest. Now some of these clears as we find out later, was because they arrested the wrong person, but not by the proportion that we see a drop in solving crims.  Read more 

Alright, maybe I should ahve been more bloggy and said fuck off. But I think “Go to Hell” is literalistly more correct. The New York Times publishes a long apologia by Noah Feldman which contains a string of lies and implicit assertions about fact which are verifiably untrue. These assertions, were a blogger or Democratic nominee for President make them would get a stern warning from teh serious people and the Village Idiots about sticking more closely to truthiness.

For example:  Read more 

Maybe Led Zeppelin isn’t your music, it isn’t mine. Maybe you aren’t a professor someplace or other, I am not either. But this morning’s twofer is how Andrew Goodwin and Slate magazine show us why the top down media is simply a vehicle for the puerile fact free rants of a small group of people whose talent is worming their way in, like a grub, rather than anything that could be taken for, well, thinking. Let alone writing.

Andrew Goodwin is not a serious scholar, and he is a smug fool who obviously hates a particular song. He’s entitled to hate the song, write about hating the song, and agitating for it not being played at a concert. I think there are whole groups of recording artists who the world would be better off without. But what he feels he is entitled to get facts wrong, engage in bad scholarship, and a… hmmmm… crass? I like crass here… crass misreading of texts from a patriarchal point of view. Let me say it, Andrew Goodwin is a sexist.  Read more 

It came to waking that there was a bright searing darkness in her head. And she awoke screaming silently. In the night the colorless black ideas had slept furiously. Shun the fruminous bandersnatch. One bandersnatch, two bandersnatchi.

It had been a year since the war had taken the warmth from her life. She huddled on the bed, her knees against her cheek, rocking back and forth staring at the last smiling picture she had of him, his hair buzzed short, his teeth slightly sparkling behind thin but pink parted lips. Bright blue eyes. He’d been washed away, washed away by the black rain. Driven by the blackest rain.  Read more 

Systematic rapes to destroy women in the Congo.

“We don’t know why these rapes are happening, but one thing is clear,” said Dr. Mukwege, who works in South Kivu Province, the epicenter of Congo’s rape epidemic. “They are done to destroy women.”

Eastern Congo is going through another one of its convulsions of violence, and this time it seems that women are being systematically attacked on a scale never before seen here. According to the United Nations, 27,000 sexual assaults were reported in 2006 in South Kivu Province alone, and that may be just a fraction of the total number across the country.

“The sexual violence in Congo is the worst in the world,” said John Holmes, the United Nations under secretary general for humanitarian affairs. “The sheer numbers, the wholesale brutality, the culture of impunity — it’s appalling.”

Just to remember. War is a moral force.

That.
Gives.
Us.
Meaning.

5

I had been stirred after only shreds of sleep, I was woken up by the persistent piercing chirp of a beeper. I was up and on the phone shortly, a guest at the Ghraib was about to get some quality time. They needed me to be on hand. I was out the door in 15 minutes and to the Zoo in record time. They had choppered him in.

Before the coffee had even begun to work on its consciousness, I was in the “White Room,” the tiled cold place where people are talked to at the Zoo. An arab man with a long beard growth is brought in. He is in an orange jumper, and is earing arm and leg irons. He has not been badly beaten yet, and does not look like he’s even been roughly questioned.  Read more