Belatedly

R.I.P. Yolanda King.

51 is too damn young.

actually

since you led me back over there, mandos, and induced me to read for a bit, I am going to say something, although not probably what you expected.

simply this:

fuck cancer.

oh, and by the way:


fuck cancer.

fuck cancer.

fuck cancer.

fuck cancer.


fuck the legacy of it and its treatment. fuck existential terror bright and beneath the surface, fuck other people demanding a "normal" performance so as to be reassured of their own existential terror, fuck scars that still hurt, fuck our health "care" system that makes "your money or your life" a serious question and often ends up saving neither. fuck the premature loss of good people, of bright stars and loved ones. fuck "survived by," fuck hospitals, fuck that drop in the gut brought on by the phrase "it's probably nothing, but..."

did I mention fuck cancer?

She's got a point there, kids.

I have very ambivalent feelings toward the whole glass half full/half empty thing these days. I come from a long line of Chicken Littles, I am well aware of my own hereditary and learn'd response to immediately start projecting the direst possible outcome for, like, a hangnail. What I've firmly come to believe: most of the time, That Doesn't Help. (which does not, please note, mean that I won't do it anyway a fair percentage of the time. I'm working on it.)

but, as Liz reminds me, there -are- times when just melting down into an incoherent primal puddle is really the only -sane- response. And:

Another common response to a meltdown was for a concerned onlooker to try to silence my uproar (or end my silence) by trying to rope me into denial, minimizing the problem. "Oh, it's probably nothing!" they might chirp gaily, gazing past the swollen lymph nodes that had ballooned up overnight to the size of hens' eggs. Or, "A 104 degree fever's not so high! Six weeks isn't such a long time to wait for treatment! That enormous needle they're about to stab straight into your bone could be a lot longer! You're going to be fine, you've just got to quit being so negative."

I've bitched about the whole bootstraps-happyface attitude thing repeatedly, but let me sum it up here by saying this: It's tantamount to an American sitting in a nice safe suburban living room offering glib advice to somebody who's screaming and cowering in burning exploding Baghdad basement. "Don't you think you're overreacting just a bit?" the glib American says. "Sure, another bomb could fall on you any minute, or armed soldiers could rush in there in a blast of gunfire and wipe out your entire family. But you know what, a meteorite could also fall on me any minute, and I could die too. But you don't hear me screaming, do you? You just can't spend your whole life being upset and freaked out! Now get out there and enjoy every minute you have left with a positive attitude, and stop subjecting us to these annoying meltdowns."

Help out a friend: Kevin of Slant Truth

his brother is missing, and he's putting the call forth for anyone on the West Coast to keep an eye out. Thoughts and prayers are also appreciated. See his post here for details.

peace and strength, Kevin.

R.I.P.

to the Virginia Tech massacre victims. some profiles here.

fuck.

aw, hell.

R.I.P. Kurt Vonnegut.

Continuing updates on the Shaquanda Cotton case

Chittlin's and Chopsticks seems to be doing the most extensive coverage; lots of links over the last x days. A couple of highlights:

"Shaquanda may be released soon!"

[from the Chicago Tribune]

The sentences of many of the 4,700 delinquent youths now being held in Texas' juvenile prisons might have been arbitrarily and unfairly extended by prison authorities and thousands could be freed in a matter of weeks as part of a sweeping overhaul of the scandal-plagued juvenile system, state officials say. Jay Kimbrough, a special master appointed by Texas Gov. Rick Perry to investigate the system after allegations surfaced that some prison officials were coercing imprisoned youths for sex, said he would assemble a committee to review the sentence of every youth in the system.

The goal, Kimbrough said, is to release any youth whose sentence was improperly extended without justification or in retaliation for filing complaints. In his initial review of sentences, Kimbrough said, he had found many questionable extensions, adding that some experts estimate that more 60 percent of the state's youthful inmates might be languishing under wrongful detention.
Among the leading candidates for early release is Shaquanda Cotton, a 14-year-old black girl from the small east Texas town of Paris, who was sent to prison for up to 7 years for shoving a hall monitor at her high school while other young white offenders convicted of more serious crimes received probation in the town's courts....

On a grimmer note, however:

Shaquanda's father dies

I spoke to Paris, Texas, civil rights activist, Mrs. Brenda Cherry tonight, and she informed me Shaquanda’s father died approximately a week ago in Oklahoma.
The funeral was this past Saturday.


Mrs. Creola Cotton did not tell Shaquanda of her father’s death until today. She delayed breaking the news to her until she could do it in person, rather than by phone.
According to Mrs. Cherry, Shaquanda took her father’s death quite hard.



Shaquanda has received a blizzard of cards and her family sends their thanks.

God love her. Yep: there're those family values in action all right. stick the kid to languish away from her parents, and her father DIES and she misses the funeral, without having seen him or even known it was happening. I'm sure that'll learn her...whatever it was she was supposed to be learning. for FUCK'S sake.

People with dogs and/or cats, heads up:

There's been a big multi-brand pet food recall.

...and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones...?

You know, Dan Savage is, generally speaking, not my favorite columnist. On occasion, though, he can be very right-on. This would be one of those occasions.

h/t The World on a Slant

I don’t have thin skin, god knows—how could I after reading the mail that comes in to Savage Love for the last 15 years? But there’s something new and ugly in the air. The efforts of right-wing Christians and the true believers and/or useful idiots that run the GOP—hi there, Mary Cheney—to demonize gays and lesbians haven’t taken place in a vacuum. It seems to me that we may now be seeing the real-world consequences of the right’s efforts to characterize gay marriage—hell, gay existence—as an attack on straight marriage and families. Convince enough drooling idiots in the dominant group that the existence of another group represents some sort of existential assault and, predictable as pogroms, idiots will begin to lash out violently.

I’m reminded of a line in a New Yorker essay written after the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. I can’t find the essay online anywhere, so I’m going to do a bad paraphrase here. (If anyone can find the actual quote, please send it my way.) For two decades right-wingers had encouraged their ever-terrified followers to fear and despise the federal government. It was a campaign that began with Ronald Reagan’s “10 Most Frightening Words in the English Language” joke (“I’m from the federal government and I’m here to help”) and ending two decades later with the NRA calling federal agents “jackbooted thugs” and Watergate felon G. Gordon Liddy reminding his listeners that, since federal agents wear bullet-proof vests, it was a waste of time to shoot federal agents in the chest. “Head shots! Head shots!” Liddy said. “Kills the sons of bitches!” (Gee… could you imagine what would happen if someone on the left said something like that now?)

...

And so here we are again. Prominent figures in the Republican Party are encouraging a poisonous hatred of gays and lesbians. And in what is surely a series of completely unrelated developments, old gay men are being beaten to death on their doorsteps, transsexuals are being fired, men in pink pants are being bashed, gay business are being harassed, and prominent right-wing commentators feel free to throw the word “faggot” at their political opponents.

Well and let's see: we foment hysteria about illegal immigrants, next thing you know, we've got self-formed militias, bored suburban kids join white supremacist gangs,
and oh yeah the Klan is growing.

I'm sure there is a better response to all of this than "let's all mobilize to shut down Fox News and Ann Fucking Coulter...

well, actually, no, i'm not really sure about that, in fact.

On the one hand, people like this don't get play unless that kind of unconscious insane hatred resonates with people; that is, they were already feeling or thinking that way, to one degree or another. Or had a "it's all THEIR fault" button just ready to be pushed.

On the other hand: they don't exactly help, either, do they?

Oh, *no.*

Molly Ivins, R.I.P.

goddam goddam goddam.

pass the torch. -someone- needs to carry it.

goddamit.

sigh

from the Boston Globe:

It appears that Ethiopia, long ruled by Christians, does not want to see Somalia ruled by radical Islamists, and is therefore hard at work putting Somalia's warlords back in power. America's role in this conflict has not been adequately explained.
Long antagonists, Ethiopia and Somalia were divided during the Cold War by the ideological fault lines of the American-Soviet rivalry. "During the Cold War a country could be nonaligned, as many were, or it could, as some did, change its alignment from one side to another," Samuel Huntington wrote 10 years ago in his eerily prophetic book "The Clash of Civilizations." Ethiopia and Somalia were classic examples of the latter, abruptly changing alliances. Ethiopia switched from being America's ally to the Soviet bloc, inviting in Russian advisers and Cuban soldiers to help fight Somali rebels.

Today, the fault lines are more cultural and religious, as Huntington predicted. "In the new world order . . . cultural identity is the central factor shaping a country's associations and antagonisms. While a country could avoid Cold War alignment, it cannot lack an identity. The question, 'Which side are you on?' has been replaced by the much more fundamental one 'Who are you?' " Thus Ethiopia sees its war against its old antagonist as a fight against militant Islam, and therefore is helping the old lords of Somalia, who are thought to be more moderate in their religion if not their murderous behavior.

Although these same Somali warlords humiliated the United States during the Clinton administration, the Bush administration is backing them against the Islamists. But, as Jeffrey Gettleman wrote in The New York Times, since the United States became bogged in Iraq, there is the "Africa-wide sense" "that the United States is not the kingmaker it once was."

...The late president Gerald Ford put America's pretensions into perspective when he said: "I just don't think we should go hellfire damnation around the globe freeing people, unless it is directly related to our own national security." He might have added, especially if the hellfire and damnation is going to make us less secure.

So. Here we are.

Just repeating a post i made in the comments box over at Ilyka's, where she was talking about the Kubler-Ross stages we may or may not have finished going through since That Day five years ago.

well. and here we are five years later with even yet more a fuck of a lot more to be angry about.

as someone who's been living in NYC, i think, you know, a lot of us may even have more processing to do (didn't lose anyone personally thank God, but: yeah, close to home, you'd say). those days and weeks and months afterward--well, maybe it was the same all over. anthrax! duct tape! spasms of outrage and loopiness and paralyzing numbness and terror and black pits of despondency and then start all over again!

and now, what is the word? disgust? is that a good word? yeah, i'd say.

impotence, howling frustrating hand-clawing-at-empty-air....gahhhhhhh.

existential bleakness.

shame, yes.

tiny little saplings of hope which keep getting crushed, it feels like.

feeling like the ground has been pulled away.

and much much more!

so: fuck this administration with their grandstanding and their posturing and pulling away the football and trampling all over the fucking place for photo opportunities "hey, let's take it out on the completely wrong country 'cause we were gonna do that at some point anyway;"

fuck the "loyal opposition" for acting like a sack of wet pasta in the face of all this and then wondering why o why don't people have faith in them anymore.

fuck the myopic fucks who simply can't understand -why- anyone in the rest of the world might have any sort of general problem with U.S. policy, particularly -now-;

fuck cynical exploitive sociopaths like Bin Laden (who, again?); fuck our own cynical exploitive sociopath Fearless Leaders; fuck zealous brainwashed ideologues who'd rather be right than live, much less let live; fuck puritans, fuck theocrats of all stripes, fuck Rush Limbaugh and his ilk and their endless hard-on for the Clintons, oh my GOD fuck that noise, fuck Oliver Stone and his bombastic crap and Kevin Bacon as well, fuck heartless corporations, fuck oleaginous whited sepulchres, fuck vile mouth-breathing keyboard warriors endlessly wanking to other peoples' misery and suffering and death and caling it "patriotism," fuck so-called lefties who spend more time on bullshit conspiracy theories and filleting each other in a splendid re-enactment of the Peoples' Front of Judea than actually coming up with something helpful, and yes, fuck me too for sitting on my ass in a state of paralyzed numb rage and grief and "ooh, shiny thing" instead of doing anything about it or even beginning to wonder what i -could- do about it, for the vast majority of the time.

"God fuck us, every one."

and happy fucking anniversary to all y'all too, fuckers.

ON EDIT:

I am in the mood for some sweeping generalizations, today.

So:

and, well, you know, i will say this for My People, if that is what we are (i.e. the loosely-defined left or at least liberals): we tend to have, my theory by me, "issues" wrt anger. in general, i mean.

you know: it's destructive. it leads to violence. it's IRRATIONAL, and the thing about the loosely-defined...well, a lot of us, really, not actually sure where the ideology markers break down, in fact...but, we have our ideological roots in the Enlightenment. which, lord knows it's not like any of the dudes back then never got angry--witness Voltaire or any of the Founding Fathers--but, you know. -Rational.- Let's all take a deep breath and really examine this in the calm light of day. At least. and, too: we root for the underdog, and, well, it's hard for a lot of people to completely get behind bombing the crap out of people "back to the Stone Age" when they're ALREADY more or less in the Stone Age.

and yes, sure, you get a LOT of anger at the proper targets, esp. among your more radical factions, but you notice it's always directed (in peoples' minds at least--hey, maybe this is a universal thing, at that, who knows)--upward. Fight The Power. not each other. except when we do, and we just can't understand how this happens, can't we all just get along?

so that's one thing.

and then, not to let the rest of y'all, the loosely-defined right, off the hook here, yes, it is true, there is i would say on the whole an over-reliance on that particular emotion, anger, to the exclusion of more vulnerable-making emotions. grief, "terror," shame. compassion. heartbreak. despair. pity? love, even? yeah, believe it or not.

and hey: anger feels PRODUCTIVE. it feels like you're DOING something. and oh yeah: that feeling, it can also be rather ADDICTIVE. adrenaline rush: duuuuuuude. nice.

but christ forbid we ever break down and see what's BEHIND all that rage.

"Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord."

yeah. terrific. that's been working out so well.

oh, yes, and: Go shopping. Buy something. That, too. That always helps.

"The lights must never go out.
The music must always play,
Lest we should see where we are;
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the dark
Who have never been happy or good..."

When seriously fucked up shit happens to awesome people, part #425,341,987,372: Grannyvibe

...has apparently pulled her blog, at least for now, "Granny Gets a Vibrator," because--or at any rate concurrent with--she has apparently developed lymphoma.

And no insurance. Her son (Finnegan's Wake-Up Call, heh) has started a PayPal account: if ever there was a good cause, i truly think this woman is one of them.

Thanks to alphabitch via Twisty Faster and two regulars thereon for the heads-up. That counts for something in my book.

So, you know, people caring, giving a crap, that is somewhat of a consolation;

i am trying not to let this one send me too far into the dark fog, but goddam.

another by all accounts and from what i knew of her online (oh yes: and quite young, mid-forties) woman just recently passed. From fucking cancer. Goddam motherfucking shitsucking cancer. after--no, i won't go into it. not really my story, of course. yeah, my mom had it too. is currently in remission (knock wood). oh yeah: is currently awaiting the results of that same genetic test TF took, btw.

but fuck i'm depressed about that, Liz. of ALL people. and people like motherfucking Dick Cheney just go on and on and on, and get the best of doctor treatment for their non-existent hearts because, well, that's how it is.

and all--or well most of them-- the coolest and most interesting, kindpeople i know are either out of work or otherwise struggling to keep their head above water to one degree or another, and what end in sight? what the fuck? and we are keeping this whole monolithic creaky countrysystem-whatever "number One" so that, what? "Coca-Cola, sometimes war." yepper. corporations are persons, is it? a handful of sociopathic fucks can continue to feed their gaping black hole of a soul with the wrong food (i.e. everyone else) and STILL never even be satisfied?

yeah, maybe revolution doesn't sound so bad at that. sure, put me up against the wall, what the fuck.

sorry, guys. anyway, if you can: go over to FinWake and maybe give some help or at least love. i'll be back to posting about spiritual uplift and kittens and shit shortly.

stunned. no words.

reading "My Private Casbah," her poem, and the posts below.

Palestine: making the political personal.

Raising Yousuf: A journalist's online account of trying to live and raise her toddler in occupied Gaza.

An excerpt:

"They try different combinations each day-25 tanks shells in a row; a gunship rocket attack; 5 more shells at eastern Gaza; drones whirring incessantly at varying speeds. 10 shells; 10 minutes of silence; sonic boom; 20 shells, with more firepower, in northern Gaza. 10 shells; one hour intermission; Shoot at someone near the fence. Stop to make sure there is no outcry and promise an investigation.

Then it continues.

Yousuf is at a very sensitive stage, where he doesn’t quite understand what’s going on-and looks to me for confirmation of whether or not he should be scared when the shelling starts. Following the advice of a friend, I continue to re-assure and distract him.

Today, I tried a new technique. Yousuf loves to sing and dance, so as the shelling started, we listened to some music my friend gave him as a gift- Suheil Khoury’s Bass Shwai, a children's CD from the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music (ESNCM), where four children, ages 9 to 11 sing songs composed by Khoury using lyrics written by various Palestinian poets and writers. Each song deals with a theme relating to children.

We listened to a song that imagines how the world might be like in different forms; a song I think can be read in many way. Needless to say, it was very therapeutic, perhaps more so for me than him. Sometimes, you need to take a step back and look through the eyes of children. Strange is what you make it I guess.

What if the world was made of wood
Birds of wood
Flowers of wood

What if the world was made of wood
Moons of wood
Stars of wood

How might it be, I wonder?
How strange…how strange
How would it be, I wonder?
How strange, how strange…
..."