FOR THOSE OF US WITHOUT A GATED HIDEAWAY

Jill Cozzi's post at Brilliant at Breakfast acted as a final spark for me today. In "So Long [Gulf of Mexico], And Thanks For All The Fish", she begins:

I hope you all have had a chance to enjoy a tropical beach at least once in your life, because the days of sitting on pristine sands, looking at turquoise water and enjoying a dinner of fresh-caught fish are over, thanks to the oil-soaked greed of the Bush family and their cronies, the complete selling out of America to corporations, our own sense of petroleum-based entitlement, and Barack Obama's insistence on playing nice with greedy bastards.

Read her post for the details.
So I'll share here some of my not-quite-all-the-way-finished thoughts:

If you ardently believe in imminent Endtimes (count on it, in fact)

AND/OR if you ardently believe wealth is meant for only the elite few and there is not enough to go around, certainly not for the unworthy

AND/OR you are hopeless about human nature being inherently decent

AND/OR you secretly know climate change means hundreds of millions will die before the end of this entury unless a stop is put to the lifestyle which accrues you and your friends wealth and power

If you have this kind of damaged, defeated, christianist, white supremacist, male dominated worldview, you will easily decide to loot what is available for looting as you prepare your compound in Paraguay with its own private and pristine water source that will not be affected by the desertification of much of the globe.

You will easily decide rendering our own ocean unfit for anything BUT drilling is a logical step, a hedge against coming oil wars, because those who depend on fishing and nature are expendable segments of the population.

You will all speak the same language -- which we can interpret, if we are only willing to admit it -- and you will slyly allow things to go past the point of remedy. Beginning with the more unbeloved of our national coastlines.

Katrina and Rita response now appear as dry runs.

This is what I'm thinking. And I can read it also in the post of Jill, whom I trust.

But I am not hopeless, and I will not give up. They are wrong in ALL their beliefs, and I will not let them frame the question or close my mind to possibility. It can just as easily become the event that sweeps our elite from all decision-making over our lives. We can imagine that occurring, and whatever we can honestly imagine is a potential reality. Because, in fact, WE are in charge of our own perspective, and we are not stupid. Deceivable but not stupid, and that is the critical difference their class training has missed.

Not stupid, and we have a means of speaking to each other from the heart.

Rest up, allow yourselves to have a truly joy-filled weekend if you can, but rest up in any event. Talk with you soon.

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MINSTREL SHOWS

("Drinking melted snow water in Richmond, Vermont", photo by Oak LoGalbo)

A day with physical limits at the forefront, so I will push elsewhere.

The whole question of "should white people do art based on/coopted from POC culture" is on folks' minds today. It's a big question with a complicated answer. As a writer myself who creates nonwhite characters (main characters), I constantly revisit my assumptions, my sense of entitlement, my intentions. Who am I writing for? What would (insert various friends) think or say about this scene? Am I challenging the status quo, raising the energy, or simply perpetuating existential hopelessness? Can I find a similar lesson from my OWN culture and use that instead, with more integrity?

After watching the first episode of White Teeth this weekend, I assumed Zadie Smith was Jamaican, i.e., the character Clara. Turns out, she is more or less Irie, the daughter of Jamaican Clara and white working class British Archie. I haven't finished the series, but it has thus far gone off into Pakistani culture as experienced by Irie's family friends Magid and Mallat. The writer clearly knows it inside out, and thus far I'm willling to trust her as the voice bringing us this other world.

But is that because I'm white and my ability to experience "the other" is most comfortably brought to my doorstep by border crossers?


I have noticed that Archie's character is rather one-dimensional, and benevolently dim despite his early suicide attempt and history of a war crime.

In my scifi world, I slice through the Gordian knots of gender, race and class by constructing a post-cataclyscmic, isolated culture where values attached to physical differences have been eliminated. The productive tension of diversity comes from elsewhere. The feedback I'm getting is that it works. But it is serious internal work to give authentic voices to these characters, and I'm well aware they may be off in ways I cannot imagine. The fear of all writers.

In Ginny Bates, my POC characters are frank border-crossers who have picked some "good white folks" to make family with but never entirely lose their irritation with the conditioned whiteness of Myra, the character based on me. I modeled this after how I approach gender, how the men I love and trust must still occasionally encounter in me a wall put there by our different gender upbringing and I expect them to do at least half the work of scaling that wall. At LEAST. It's the lesbian-feminist in me that won't make excuses or cut extra slack. I find it an ethical, if challenging, way to live, and I respect that mirrored choice in the POC I know.

I agree with Jill Cozzi that the ice dance pair doing a traditional Indian dance showed smarts and ethics by having it choreographed by an Indian expert. But the show itself, especially the judging, is overwhelmingly white -- how does that not make it a sophisticated minstrel show? My gut rebels, in the same way that watching middle-class drag kings portraying their take on the brutish masculinity of working class males for sexual arousal of screaming mostly middle class (or aspiring thereto) women struck me as sick-making cooptation.

"Queering" or "subverting" in contexts where permits have been issued and "we're all the same really" is the mandatory message is not contradiction enough, and almost always tends to reassure the imagined liberal default, instead of fomenting actual thought-provoking discomfort.

The route to actual parity of voice will not be found by white folks going on travel adventures or Avatar-like saviors who become Lakota because they can't bear their own culture any longer. It will mean ripping out at the root (i.e., radical) all the gender, race, and class-based constructs of our current "reality" and shivering naked in the floodwaters that come to reshape our social terrain.

Some art takes us in that direction. Some does not. I can only tell you what works for me, and share it with you here.

[Cross-posted at Group News Blog]

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TIDAL MONDAY

Contending with a headache that keeps coming back. Probably linked to hormonal crap, as there are other signs of that. Behind on work. Not enough money to buy medications. But wanted to say a few things...

Yesterday it never reached 90 degrees as a high. Last night the low was below 70 degrees. This is the first time in months and months that either has occurred. Plus, we got Rain. Even so, with the relief, I kept thinking about it being the anniversary of Hurricane Ike all weekend. Galveston has nowhere near recovered, may never recover. All the lives and livelihoods lost.

During my coverage of the aftermath last year, I looked through hundreds or thousands of photographs online. And there was one -- I'm not even going to tell you what it was about, except it showed what must have been a long, agonizing death. I wish I hadn't seen it. I wish I could wipe it from my mind. It haunts me still.


One of the "hormonal signs" is that my sleep is all awry. I keep dropping off at odd times and not sleeping through a complete cycle. This plays havoc on an already challenged body. The new TV season is not yet arrived, and I'm not sure it will be much good when it does get here. Except for those PBS documentaries and science shows, g*d bless them.

I watched one last night about the history and impact of Helvetica. Yeah, the font. It was utterly fascinating and raised more questions than I know how to answer. It's yet another source of brainwashing and homogeneity. Will we ever throw off corporate control of our lives? Postmodernism can go FUCK itself. Clarity does not equal communication or respect. Reacting against something does not produce new ideas or energy if that's all you're doing. These are a few of my sub rosa reactions.

(Dinah as a kitten in November 2001)

Tomorrow Dinah turns 8 years old. She usually comes and sits by me when I create the LOLCats weekly round-up, which is a little unsettling because I know she's not registering the photos, it must be something I'm generating energetically to attract her. Or the occasional zany laughter. I'd give her a special treat tomorrow except she doesn't like wet food or human food, only kibble and Whisker Lick'n treats, both of which she gets on demand. I guess I can pick up some of the red rings scattered around and throw them all day so she can run around like a maniac, that will make her happier.

("States United" map from Strange Maps

I've noticed that in the blogs I like to read first/most often, there's a serious collective movement underway to unroof the bedrock racism of what's being aimed at Obama in the name of "anti-socialism" or the teabagger reactionaries. A solid group of us are naming names and making a list, and I feel good being part of this effort. A few of them have written me private e-mails or linked to me. More are using ideas I raised without credit, but perhaps it was their idea simultaneously, that happens when an inevitable realization sweeps the minds of thinking folks. There is also a concurrent decision to call out crazy where crazy appears, differentiating delusion from those who foment and prey on delusion. It has libertarians very, very upset out there. My name has been bandied about with extreme negativity. Oops.

It reminds me of how outraged hippie and counterculture boys were when women started demanding equal rights. Like, we were trashing their good times by pointing out what THEY were doing that was sinking the possibility of real, enduring change.

I never enjoyed "Happy Days", just like I find "That 70's Show" unwatchable. You have to ignore huge segments of the population to pretend like the 1950s or the 1970s were lighthearted, with only rock and dope added to what is (in Hollywood-land) still all about white boys looking for sex.

Here's some of those fighting the Very Good Fight: Jill Cozzi at Brilliant at Breakfast; Richard Blair at All Spin Zone; Crooks and Liars in general, but especially Mike Finnegan's daily blog round-up and DO GO READ Nonny Mouse's recent post Stoopid Peepul ; Hullaballoo in general but especially Digby, Tristero and DDay; Batocchio at Vagabond Scholar; Michael's incisive analysis of current images at BAGNewsNotes; Echidne (24/7) for Real Feminism and astute take-downs of pseudoscience; and, while I always read my friend Kat's BitchCraft, her latest post (Challenging Art and Our Educations) promoting her friend -m-'s reaction to seeing Judy Chicago's "Dinner Party" for the first time is extremely good.

(The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago)

Yeah, Kat and -m-, we been robbed. We coulda been a contender. However, unlike Marlon Brando, we are still alive and still able to lace on gloves. Even with this damned headache, I'm not dead yet.

To give thanks in another direction, I'm a big fan of the adventure games produced by Sandlot Games, which assuredly must have some really really smart women designing product. The entire Tradewinds series has been female-friendly and good on a number of oppression issues -- for instance, when you have the option of creating your own character, some of the images you can select from are actually fat. And the people of color are not Cosby-women-light. However, their latest, Tradewinds Odyssey, set in ancient Greece, is outstanding in its non-sexist portrayal of genders, its inside humor, and its clever rethinking of myth and history. For instance, when one dimwitted god or king (can't remember who it was) says he wants something sparkly to get himself a woman because "Girls like shiny things, right?", the hero replies "I think you're confusing girls with crows". Zing!

Even better, during one quest the Minotaur's sister is trying to help her discriminated-against brother (lots of disabled-rights messages in this one), and she turns to the Amazons for assistance. Once she's done with her part of the story, she announces that Hippolyta has created a "women's commune" that she's going to join because she's decided to come out. It's couched in other language, but the message is clear. Right ON!

(Tradewinds Odyssey screenshot)

Okay, back to typing emergency room reports of people who've arrived with far progressed conditions because they don't have insurance and couldn't afford to see a doctor back when a simple prescription or low-cost treatment would have interrupted a downward spiral. We can't afford NOT to have universal health care any more. Do the math, stoopid.

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ANOTHER WORD NOW RENDERED MEANINGLESS

Overheard in Buenos Aires: "Yess, yess, he vass my SSSOULMATE!"


For more reading, check out Jill's post at Brilliant at Breakfast. What she said. Plus, I'm so glad Republican Christianist heterosexuals are preserving the sanctity of marriage for all of civilization, aren't you?


[Cross-posted at Group News Blog.]

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