maeve66 | Entries tagged with politics

I don't write a lot in here about the socialist group I am in. But I am going to right now. I am in Solidarity, a socialist feminist organization (we could use -- and are trying to do -- some work on the latter) founded by a regroupment (rather than a split!) in 1986. I think. I should know; I was the youngest founding member, at the time.

We're a good group, as American socialist groups go. We try to walk the tightrope in between the abyss of sectarian nuttiness and the vast swamp of reformism. Or some metaphor like that. We're small -- who isn't, these days? Except the ISO. I'm glad the ISO is big; no dog in the mangerhood here. We put out a fairly well respected journal, Against the Current, but it is not a line magazine, meaning that our elected leadership does not vote on political positions and then tell ATC to write articles supporting those positions. Sometimes we publish stuff we strongly disagree about. Our organization, in fact, was founded agreeing to disagree on a few things -- most especially (back in the day) the question of the USSR, and (still relevant) Cuba.

I think we're probably known on the American Left for being pragmatic and realistic, almost pessimistic. Sort of optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect style. We emphatically do NOT look at situations and trumpet triumphalist analyses of them. Sometimes that is a fucking downer, to be honest. But it's also ... well, realistic.

The organizations which formed Solidarity were all sort of refugees from extremely centralized democratic-centralist, Leninist, vanguard organizations. Therefore, the people who founded Solidarity bent the stick pretty far in the opposite direction, to the point that we don't really have "unity in action". If people don't agree on a political question or an orientation, it's a bit like herding cats to get Solidarity members to act in common. They're (we're) more likely to vote with our feet. Anyway, here's the exciting thing: Solidarity is entering the New World of teh internets! I mean, obviously, we've had a webpage for ages. It was redesigned a while ago, and is nicer looking than it used to be. But the really new thing is that we have launched a blog. I am on the webzine editorial committee, and so far it's been the most fun I've had in ages. Somehow it doesn't seem like an effort to write for a webzine, where it DOES seem like an effort to write for ATC... I am one of a bajillion editors for ATC, too, but I hella don't deserve it, of late.

I am very hopeful that the Solidarity Webzine will have live, interesting, and more informal discussion. I also am hopeful that there will be at least some amount of semi-frivolous, pop-cultural posts. I will do my best to ensure that.

Please, drop by and take a look. Comment if you feel so moved.

Solidarity's new Webzine, Click Here

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket

So. I think that this might be the first in a series of posts based around photos. This scanner is just so fun to play with. I knew I'd like it.

I'm also accompanying this particular memory and image with music.

I was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and lived there until I was eight. I was born as the antiwar movement started picking up steam: my first demonstration was at eight days old, being rolled along in a huge old black baby buggy outside the local Dow Chemical plant, which produced napalm for the war. My father tells me that this was also the day that my Red Squad/FBI file was started, as there were obvious agents there, taking photographs of everybody in order to intimidate them. In particular, that this not be seen as a flight of paranoiac fancy, there were men in dark suits with narrow lapels and dark glasses perched in cherry pickers, those weird trucks with extensible ladder-and-bucket arrangements for lopping off tree limbs, or whatever. And the men in the cherry picker maneuvered it directly over my buggy and down so that they could take a picture of me, my parents furiously yelling at them the whole time.

This picture is from six or so years later. It's our dining room. My father is the man with the overlong hair (I LOVE long hair, don't get me wrong, but... my dad had a hard time keeping it from getting greasy at that length. It wasn't a good look for him. There are other photos of him in this journal various places, and he's a handsome dude, in my biased eyes) smoking a pipe. The other guy is some friend and chess buddy of his. I am the solemn looking child with brown hair, wearing the red Wisconsin Badgers tee-shirt. My sister is the younger blond girl. She reminds me very much of my older niece in this photo. The cat is named Inessa, after Lenin's lover, Inessa Armand.

On the wall behind us -- well, first, there is the ubiquitous presence of endless books, which overflowed bookcases all over our one-bedroom apartment. Then, there are the images. In order, there is an antiwar poster of a woman being napalmed, drawn by a local artist and friend of my dad's, Paul Hass. Then, there are Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebnecht, and Karl Marx in quick succession. Then there's a poster of Bill Monroe, and one of a worker of some kind -- it's an OSHA poster. When I was six, though, I didn't know that. I assumed that all of those people were revolutionary heroes. I thought Bill Monroe was a revolutionary. Maybe a Wobbly. Maybe in the SP, with Debs. I think the display continues on the rest of the wall, after the large poster (which I don't remember) with Trotsky and Debs. Rosa Luxemburg was the only woman. Her image was as iconic for me as Che Guevara (who was probably also up there, along with a Black Panthers poster -- for years, the black panther was my automatic answer for "what's your favorite animal?").

I loved my early childhood. I was a kid who was pretty intensely focused on the adults around me. I recall getting out of my crib (I slept in an iron barred crib until I was four, and my sister was in a wicker bassinet, both of these in the same bedroom as our parents) late at night, when I was four years old and sneaking into the living room where my parents and their comrades would be up late, arguing passionately and drinking and smoking. I'd try to sit inconspicuously behind one of the many hanging india print curtains, picking up what I could and trying to understand what imperialism was, and genocide, and reformism. My niece Ruby does the exact same thing, although the politics she ear hustles often have more to do with teachers' strikes and No Child Left Behind and the war in Iraq and immigrants' rights. This photograph brings back those memories. My parents weren't hippies exactly (despite my dad's short-lived long hair) but socialists and revolutionaries. They've remained that, thirty-three years later. It's funny -- this iTunes set started with "American Pie" by Don McLean, which is a song I loved when I was five years old. And now it's on something from Hair. The other song I loved when I was five was the lushly sentimental "On Top of the World" by the Carpenters.

Current Music: "On Top of the World" The Carpenters

springheel_jack posted this in his LJ today, and it's fucking right on.

Ghostly Terror

nihilistic_kid also wrote an excellent short thing, when asked by some sci-fi source whether the War on Terror^tm is really World War III. Scroll down until you get to Nick Mamatas:

Is this WWIII?

I don't usually go linkariffic (because other people do it much better than me), but these are so well worth it.

The last time I wrote about books that have influenced me (a daunting topic, considering how many books I absolutely love and have read and reread) was in 2004. This was the post:

http://maeve66.livejournal.com/16360.html

But in that post, Alexandra Kollontai was an afterthought. I don't know how that's possible, really. Reading her novel The Love of Worker Bees was one of the formative feminist moments of my life, and that's saying something, because I resisted feminist politics for quite some time, weird reductionist orthodox marxist that I was, as a teenager.

What's bringing me to writing about her at the moment is partly running across that old entry, and partly finding a new icon (of her) that I like, see above, and partly having talked with a friend about her, and looking at Wikipedia and being pissed off that her entry is so short and doesn't discuss her writing. The assholes. Or, I guess, asshole, whoever wrote it. Maybe this will motivate me to learn how to suggest edits for Wikipedia? I do dearly love that people's encyclopedia.

Here's a link to that wanting Wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Kollontai

Anyway... when I was about fourteen or fifteen, a bunch of adult comrades from the oppositionist current in the Socialist Workers' Party that my parents belonged to, and that I was not allowed to join*-- a current that aligned itself with the Fourth International majority, thus a great deal less orthodox and less dogmatic -- led by Ernest Mandel, etc. ANYWAY (like any of that means anything to most people who chance to read my LJ), several comrades gave me her novel, The Love of Worker Bees, for my birthday. I've read her other major novel, A Great Love, which is purportedly a roman à clef about Lenin's affair with Inessa Armand, too, but not as frequently.

The Love of Worker Bees was a deliberate attempt by Kollontai to write a novel that was accessible to the masses of Russian working women which could set out the problems of building a new society, and especially the gendered difficulties in doing that.

Her main character is a factory worker (I'm working from memory here, as I cannot find any of my three copies of this book) named Vasilisa, aka Vasya, Vasyuk (oh, I have sympathy with that nickname), etc. She's an active cadre in the Bolshevik Party, and a leader of her women's sections, and her companion is assigned somewhere else in the Soviet Union -- he turns out, if I'm not mistaken, to be a NEPman, and thus repellent to her. She's trying to set up a communal household where women will be able to collectivize the necessary childcare, etc. There are explorations of nonmonogamy, and of women's work, and of the whole notion that even in a revolutionary context, or maybe especially in one, the personal is political. I'd never encountered that idea before, and it still took several years before it sank in deep enough.

But the book's passionate -- and, ultimately, disappointed -- argument for socialist feminist vision was amazing to me. I really need to get another copy and reread it. And I wouldn't mind finding A Great Love, too. God, it's annoying that so many of my most important books are STILL in my father's house. His basement, anyway.

*that is, the majority current would not allow me to join the SWP (or the "youth" group, the YSA) because it was perfectly obvious that that would be double recruitment, as I would have instantly joined the minority/opposition current. Well, yes.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: "Promising Light" Iron&Wine

I love Boots Riley and the Coup. His songs are so immediate and local and fucking true about Oakland and about politics and about race. And then, on top of that, he's fucking quite good on gender, often. He has the best song from a daddy to a little girl that I know. I've just been listening to the new album, and this is the song that has brought me to tears. Go download it. Also, Boots is motherfucking HOTT.

Tiffany Hall

Tiffany Hall
It appears we didn't know you at all
Hey hey hey hey hey
With this song I write your name on the wall
Tiffany Hall
It appears we didn't know you at all
Hey hey hey hey hey
With this song I write your name on the wall
Tiffany Hall

[Boots]
You was all smiles and no games
Teeth white as cocaine
Dark skin, knew about the struggle and the dope game
Quick to spark a convo into flames like propane
Filled the air, and I was thrilled you cared
In summer bridge hiding from the tutors
Bumpin gums about the future
You claimed that one day we'd be ruled by computers
I said, "It's like that now cause we all machines"
And you replied, "But I'm a robot with dreams"
Which I thought was clean
And all the fellas used to talk about ya
How you had a joyful aura and a walk about ya
Necessitated by a beautiful backside
We thought you was fine
And we didn't let the facts hide
Nevertheless we would call you "waddle waddle"
Somebody shoulda slapped us with an old hot water bottle
Could called you "talky talky" or nothing at all
I was crushed when I got the call

[Chorus]

[Boots]
You had warmth and sincerity, a heart with no barriers
A laugh that made slightly funny turn hilarious
While everybody else mouthed off about answers
You get up and started workin with some ex-Black Panthers
Leadin campaigns and writin in they newspaper
You always seemed happy, an idea that I would lose later
We would see each other sayin stay in touch
But I was just like you - always busy, in a rush
Told yo' mama I was writin this, she said it was blessin
I'm just chantin your name out loud and confessin
That maybe I was part of your demise
You want and got liposuction on your ass and thighs
Came straight home as you slept that evenin
Bloodclots from the operation stopped you from breathin
Your shape was great if I may say so, way before J-Lo
Whoever told you it wasn't had horns not a halo
Or is it just that your behind was up to discuss?
Cause as a man, mine ain't talked about much
Dear Tiff, I wish the world wasn't missin ya vision
Sincerely, one mo' robot with a dream and a mission

[Chorus]

Hey Tiffany! We love you! {*8X*}

Current Music: "Tiffany Hall" The Coup

Not that that's amazing or anything, but the historical link below is. It's probably obvious that I tend to prefer political figures -- icons of my own admiration, in fact -- as user icons for this journal. And one of my recent favorites is Louise Michel, partly because she's a heroine of the Paris Commune and partly because she was a single independent woman her whole life, and a public school teacher -- even in exile in Kanaky. Projection and identification, much?

Anyway... when I was growing up, I got Louise Michel confused with THIS woman, the one in my current icon, who was an auxiliary member of the Commune Defense squads, if I'm reading her beret right. She's called a "Pointeuse" in the album that holds her carte de visite, and her name is either Marie-Christine or Christine Dargent.

I've been looking for an image of this cigar-smokin', beret wearin', military-belted female for years. I had it on a huge poster, where it was superimposed on a tricolor flag, in my bedroom, growing up. That poster was the show poster for the premiere exhibit of a whole collection of photo albums from the Paris Commune, held by the Northwestern University Special Collections Library, which has a specialty in women's history. Many of the cartes de visites, or small studio portraits taken to exchange and collect, just like the ones from the American Civil War, are portraits of women. They're labelled variously: femme de, pointeuse, cantinière, and incendière. Often the women are wearing the same costume; I noted about four or five different "looks" that were identical, but worn by different women. Most of the women have a set expression that looks pissed off and stressed out. I know all the arguments about early photography and having to sit still, and how that leads to the common clenching of the jaw. These women... it's more. It's more a kind of deep anger, I think, and resolution, and knowledge that their revolution is going to fail. It only lasted two months, about.

The Commune fell on my birthday (honestly, I have nothing but bummer anniversaries linked to my date of birth), May 21, 1871. And as most folks who read my journal from time to time know, the repression was vicious and extensive. Estimates of the dead, in the immediate term, and executed later, stay in the 80,000 range. Sacré Coeur, that beautiful lacy church in Montmartre, was built to expiate the sins of the Communards. I've never been able to enjoy how gorgeous it is, because of its purpose.

Here's a quote from the Jean Ferrat song about the Commune, written one hundred years later in 1971:

Il y a cent ans commun commune
Comme artisans et ouvriers
Ils se battaient pour la Commune
En écoutant chanter Potier
Il y a cent ans commun commune
Comme ouvriers et artisans
Ils se battaient pour la Commune
En écoutant chanter Clément

Devenus des soldats
Aux consciences civiles
C'étaient des fédérés
Qui plantaient un drapeau
Disputant l'avenir
Aux pavés de la ville
C'étaient des forgerons
Devenus des héros

( And here's the English, sort of )

Anyway. Clicky click on the link -- go look at the faces of desperate revolutionary citizens. It's cool.

Current Mood: relaxed
Current Music: "La Commune" Jean Ferrat

This is a great meme. I saw this on

substitute's journal, and thank him for it.

I nominate everyone who likes music (um, and for sure

annathebean who mentions cool contemporary antiwar somgs to me, but then I never hear them, and

gordonzola, and

jactitation, and

oblomova, and

mistersmearcase and lots of people I'm not thinking of, including

redlibrarian39) to choose an antiwar song and post its lyrics. I already alluded to this Steve Earle song, but still -- it's the most recent antiwar song I've heard:

Rich Man's War

Jimmy joined the army ‘cause he had no place to go
There ain’t nobody hirin’
‘round here since all the jobs went
down to Mexico
Reckoned that he’d learn himself a trade maybe see the world
Move to the city someday and marry a black haired girl
Somebody somewhere had another plan
Now he’s got a rifle in his hand
Rollin’ into Baghdad wonderin’ how he got this far
Just another poor boy off to fight a rich man’s war

Bobby had an eagle and a flag tattooed on his arm
Red white and blue to the bone when he landed in Kandahar
Left behind a pretty young wife and a baby girl
A stack of overdue bills and went off to save the world
Been a year now and he’s still there
Chasin’ ghosts in the thin dry air
Meanwhile back at home the finance company took his car
Just another poor boy off to fight a rich man’s war

When will we ever learn
When will we ever see
We stand up and take our turn
And keep tellin’ ourselves we’re free

Ali was the second son of a second son
Grew up in Gaza throwing bottles and rocks when the tanks would come
Ain’t nothin’ else to do around here just a game children play
Somethin’ ‘bout livin’ in fear all your life makes you hard that way

He answered when he got the call
Wrapped himself in death and praised Allah

A fat man in a new Mercedes drove him to the door
Just another poor boy off to fight a rich man’s war

One of the reasons this particular song resonates so much for me right now is that teaching in this new working class Bay Area suburb, instead of Oakland, I have a lot more contact with both heavy duty Christians and people whose patriotism is unquestioned and sort of knee-jerk. My school has the Pledge of Allegiance read by a student during announcements every morning, and students are mildly exhorted to stand and deliver. I have not (well, duh) myself -- just quietly continued whatever I'm doing to get ready for class that morning. Most seventh and eighth graders omit it, too, or are perhaps following my passive aggressive lead? I'm a bit worried, because next year I will very likely be teaching a sixth grade humanities core class -- the morning one -- and may be expected to inculcate this patriotism. I am not looking forward to making it an issue, but obviously it is one for me. Public school teachers have to sign a loyalty pledge left over from the fifties -- I don't know whether the administration could make an order out of the Pledge. Ughh.

Anyway, also, I thought of this song when I was getting tea on the way to work last week. I usually stop at a place a block from the school, and there are some regulars from the neighborhood who sit outside and bullshit most sunny mornings. In the old days they would have been sitting on the tin-roofed porch of a general store, tipped back on wooden chairs and whittling, or hunched over, playing checkers. Now they sit on molded plastic resin chairs and gossip, their Chevy Blazers with yellow ribbon decals parked within sight.

So, last week, I was getting my tea, and decanting it into a thermos, when I eavesdropped on the woman who was talking to someone else beside me. She was local. She had one young kid and was inquiring about other friends' children. She reported on her older three. All three of them are in the military. All three, including her daughter. The last one just joined the Marines. She sort of laughed nervously and said that it was a job, it was good career training... and then tailed off. She did not ssay a word about where her son would be posted at the end of his training.

It's not that this wouldn't occur in West Oakland -- ROTC is the most popular extra-curricular program at McClymonds' High School, and many of the kids with the most drive and skills and desperation to actually live a broader life throw themselves into ROTC and eventually into the military.

It's that it seems different with these white and largely Christian families. I don't know why. I guess I do, though. In West Oakland, there are more basic politics that include an automatic questioning of any policy of any level of the government, and a basic rejection of America's foreign policies. That coexists with the magnetic economic attraction of the armed forces for a lot of West Oakland teenagers with aspirations.

Current Mood: about to go to bed
Current Music: What you'd imagine -- "Rich Man's War", Steve Earle

For March, as Women's History Month, I am telling students about various women in French history, in chronological order. The first woman the internet told me about (more than I already knew about her, which wasn't much) was Sainte Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris. She's actually much cooler than most martyred-by-violent-rape saints.

The semi-firm dates: 422 - 512 CE. Here's my mangled version of her story: she was apparently the daughter of an educated and well-off couple in Nanterre, only what, 200 years since the fall of the Roman empire? People in the Gallic regions spoke Langue d'Oc and Langue d'Oeil still, and had names that sound more Latin than anything else, though hers is derived from the Gaelic for "the white wave" -- genovefa, according to the internets. It was a site about Celtic saints, so who knows.

Anyway, she was a bright and brainy seven year old when Germanus, the Bishop of Auxerre, stopped in Nanterre, spoke with her parents at Mass, and tried to entice her into the only career open to women who didn't want to marry and have kids, the Church. Several years later, around age 15, she travelled the short-ish distance to Paris and took the veil.

She's famous not for miracles, per se, (a relief to me, atheist that I am, reciting this stuff to credulous thirteen year olds) but for rallying women to prayer (twice) in a war-threatened city. The first time, Attila the Hun was nearing Paris, and the men of Paris were fleeing, and she rallied women to the church to pray to god, and the men were so shamed that they stayed. At the last minute, the Magyars (or whatever -- the Huns?) swerved south to Orléans and were stopped before they got there.

The second time, Childeric of the Franks was beseiging Paris and supposedly she gathered some laymen and organized boats on the Seine, under cover of darkness, to get through the enemy lines to outlying villages, where they collected grain to bring back to the city the same way, thus breaking the siege, in part.

Childeric won anyway, but was impressed with her and lenient to the city. She tried to convert him to Christianity and failed, but is credited with converting his son Clovis, who was then the first Christian King of the Franks.

Apparently she was known from Ireland to Byzantium during her lifetime, and all of it without magical intervention.

Next week, I'll do Eleanor of Aquitaine and Jeanne d'Arc, and the week after that, I'll leave behind the church and royalty, and do Charlotte Corday and Manon Roland, and the week after that, Louise Michel (my absolute favorite) and Marie Curie.

If anyone has other suggestions, I'll be glad to hear them. I don't want to do Marie Antoinette except to curl my lip at her. I am considering George Sand, but I've never read any of her work. Camille Claudel is depressing as hell.

Current Mood: cheerful, but avoiding work
Current Music: "Le bonhomme derrière" Zebda

Not that I am leaving the Dems off the hook, but this article from CommonDreams about a particular disservice to International Women's Day just makes me so fucking angry. This link is thanks to

rootlesscosmo.

Fuck.

An event with these Iraqi women would have been an absolutely classic, and useful, antiwar event for March 8th, International Women's Day.

By the slightly relevant way -- I saw Nine Parts of Desire with a friend last week and it was nowhere near as good as I wanted it to be. A one-woman show made up of interlocking stories of Iraqi women gathered over ten years. The politics were very muddy; the question of the current war was barely addressed -- just by the character who keeps vigil over a bombsite from the first Gulf War, where her family and more than 200 other civilians died in a bomb shelter/bunker which was hit by an experimental bunker-busting bomb. Parts of the play were affecting and/or interesting, but the acting was pretty weak, which is a severe problem for a one-woman show. A shame.

IWD (not to be confused with WMD) is one of those American holidays celebrated far more internationally, I think, like May Day, aka International Workers' Day. International Women's Day was a major holiday for me in my youth -- peñas, panels, parties, potlucks, political plays, fundraisers. More celebrated on the left than May Day, actually, or at least productive of more competing events. I miss that.

One of my students last week (we were learning days of the week, months, numbers, and thus, birthdays) revealed that her birthday was May 1st, and then surprised me by telling me it was an international holiday for workers, but it always made her angry because her father has to WORK that day! Oh, I love the Mexican diaspora.

Yeah, I think I'm doing that "X" thing to be rude... sorry, to any who are Christians who might read this. It's just that this particular religion's loudest proselytizers piss me off so much. Even fluffy confusing Christians who are famous guitarists -- that would be "Edge" from U2, also Bono -- come up with these wacky quotes that want to be all politically radical and revolutionary, but then invoke the notion of the Saved and the Rest.

I don't mind admitting that many of the central tenets of the historical Jesus were radical in their time, and still are, and can legitimately be part of politically liberatory arguments. But that's true of lots -- maybe even all religions. Humans are basically capable of great compassion and empathy; I believe that, so it is only sensible that human religions should aspire to that human capacity. Islam has some excellent core beliefs and principles; so do Buddhism and some of Hinduism, and Judaism, ad infinitem.

What pisses me off about Christianity is that it rigorously excludes any Truth but its own, and mentally condemns those who are not Christians. I don't know if Islam is quite the same in that. Historically, I think that many Islamic states were fairly tolerant of other religions, or at least those "of the book". But this exclusion/condemnation thing*... it pretty much eviscerates all the nice claims for me.

Anyway, the quote that kneejerked this tirade out of me is the following:

"I really believe Christ is like a sword that divides the world, and it's time we get into line and let people know where we stand. You know, to much of the world, even the mention of the name Jesus Christ is like someone scratching their nails across a chalkboard." -- The Edge (CCM Magazine, August 1982)

My kneejerk reaction was set off by the notion of drawing a fucking line in the sand with a sword, Christians on one side and presumably everyone else on the other. I am sure that that guitarist meant that the politically radical, tolerant, COMPASSIONATE, Christ-like Christians would be on one side, not the intolerant, rigid, condemning ones. But it doesn't play like that in today's religious/political rhetoric. And anyway, it doesn't matter, because on the other side of the identify-as-Christian line is all the rest of the non-Christian world. Then I looked at the date, and am slightly less pissed off, because at least when he said it, fundamentalism was just beginning its long climb to the political top, it wasn't already enthroned. Even so.

As a result of the current politics, sometimes even the name of Jesus Christ is like someone scratching their nails across a chalkboard. For me.

As an atheist, it's fair to ask, "why should I care?" Only because of the current political and cultural weather. I love many people who are Christians or Jews, and I've loved a few people who are Buddhists or Hindus. I don't think I've known any people of other religious persuasions, except Pagans, I guess. Anyway, /end rant.

*as I say, of any stripe, not just Xtian -- just, in the West, these days, the loudest fundamentalists are the Xtians, and it's the culture I grew up surrounded by, so the majority of my ire goes there.

This is such a disgusting minor anecdote that I want it to have a wider audience than just Oakland. In general, I'd say that teachers' unions have done a poor job of arguing politically either about school reform or about contesting student testing via standardized tests. We seem to have conceded the terrain. And whenever a workers' group does that, the media is all too happy to step into the vacuum and fill it up with offensive, nauseating, contemptibly slanted coverage. That role, in Oakland, was taken for years by a prick named Alex Katz. But he's no longer the main Education reporter for the Oakland Tribune. No, he has a new job. What's his new job, you ask? He's the PR liaison for the Oakland Unified School District. Never has there been a more fitting, if overdue, transition.

And no, I haven't read The Screwtape Letters. But this semi-rant comes out of the general floating cultural reactions to the Narnia movie, as well as to many people who've counterposed it to Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. As such, it's in part a reaction to

mistersmearcase's recent discussion of trying to read Pullman and his general distaste for fantasy novels, YA or otherwise, and in part a reaction to

flowerlane's post about the Narnia movie. A lot of it is directly the comment I tried to make to

flowerlane's post, but couldn't because of my mother's clunky old computer (no more -- now, she'll have DSL and a shiny new itty-bitty iBook).

So, for background: I like fantasy. I don't mind allegory, as long as I understand the allegory I'm being presented. I don't mind not understanding how everything in a fantasy works (this is to

mistersmearcase, because it just seems like an extension of the "willing suspension of disbelief" notion. I do love Diana Wynne Jones, and loved most classic YA fantasy, from fairytales (Grimm Bros., Hans Christian Anderson*, the Fill-in-the-blank Color Fairytale books, to multicultural anthologies of same -- to mythologies from Greek to Norse. As an atheist child, I didn't distinguish between mythology, fairy stories, and religion. Seriously.

But C. S. Lewis is a special case, because to me, his work is only a slightly more polished version of exactly the sort of brainwashing he decries in his sci fi books, and to an extent in the Narnia books. Judging only from his young adult fiction and sci-fi work, he was very concerned that the secular humanists and commies and, secondarily, fascists, were taking over the world and destroying both the simple faith in a not-so-simple religion, and the irrational pleasure in "magic" that is the birthright of children. His is propaganda work, in other words, and it is propaganda work that is working really hard in exactly the areas that

flowerlane identified in the movie, which (not having seen it yet) does seem to be pretty faithful to the book. His specific targets were: create a sense of wonder in children in the central tenets of Christianity, through surrogate figures; reinforce a basic system of Western "morals" and "ethics"; and reinforce standard Western gender roles for women.

Now, I will type the above (and the below) knowing full well that I liked the Narnia books AND his sci fi, as a child, though always with a twitching sense of unease. I could at one and the same time enjoy the stories and shudder at them slightly, knowing what I felt I was also seeing in them.

flowerlane's entry is a reaction to the movie, which she walked out of. And this was my response:

The worst thing I've read here (not having seen it yet, and somewhat dubious about doing so) is the change in the faun Tumnus. That's gross. For the rest of it, it's exactly the subtext and surface, too, of the book. Lewis was going (I think) for the pretty highly sadistic and sexualized Passion of the Christ with Aslan's sacrifice, and the shaving is just the Crown of Thorns, the binding is the scourging, etc. The first time I read it as a child, I cried and cried, and it was a pretty reliable weeper until my most recent rereading, which was last week. But I got the Christian allegory I think even the first time through it, when I was ten or whatever, and it made me very ambivalent and conflicted. The whole series did.

If you dislike this one, you should (well, should not, I guess) read The Last Battle, which is the final book in the series and an allegory of death and the hereafter, featuring the contrasting fates of faithful believers in Aslan, faithful believers (not their charlatan priests) in Pagan gods (in this case, a thinly disguised Islam), and atheists -- the grossly and curmudgeonly materialist dwarves. Guess who gets the worst of it? There's a scene at the end of the book when the rest of the (dead) characters are locked in a stable, but escape out the back into a purer, more "real", deeper Narnia. The dwarves refuse to leave the filthy stable and muck, because that's all they can perceive. NICE. C. S. Lewis was nothing if not theologically consistent.

For his adult version, see the sci fi trilogy Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength, all of which feature bonus anti-Communist plots, identification of Communism with Totalitarianism, and the worst, most awful essentialist gender stereotyping imaginable. Yes, I've been known to read stuff that horrifes and angers me. More than once. If I'm not mistaken, That Hideous Strength (which features a reawakened Merlin defending the Real Britain against modern scientific totalitarianism) has a nod to Louis Althusser in its arch-villain, a head-in-a-box who is a famous scientist who went mad after murdering his wife. I don't know. Maybe I'm making that bit up, in part. I know I read the book not long after learning that about Althusser (that he'd murdered his wife and gone mad)... he of the "base and superstructure is right ... in the final analysis", a construction I've always been fond of.

* and speaking of insinuating Christian ethics and morals in fairy tales; Hans Christian Anderson is the originator of that trope, I swear to god. His stories are horrific in their guilt-steeped and sadistically fitted punishments for failing one or other of the commandments. "The Red Shoes"? "The Little Girl Who Trod on a Loaf"? YIKES.

Current Mood: on vacation
Current Music: "In Dulce Iubilo" Chanticleer -- Christmas Music

I am reading a book I am liking enormously. It's pretty mainstream lit crit, if it can even be called that. Literary biography, really. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt. The method -- of weighing both the hard archival evidence, which is scanty, and piecing it out with likely might-have-beens based on other contemporary archival evidence of people Shakespeare very likely knew, and then measuring both against textual evidence and especially metaphor in his plays -- I like very, very well.

And as for the language -- OH, I like the language. I always have. The first time I ever read a word of Shakespeare, which was when I was 10, on a family vacation and most likely in Québec, having another life-changing experience, that of encountering French, I was immediately drawn in. I read The Tempest, which is now not a play I like very much at all, but at age ten it gripped me, and I drew pictures of Ariel and Miranda and Prospero in my journal, the first diary I ever owned, or wrote in, the summer after I'd first found it.

Then, I must have loved the imagery, to draw it... but I can't believe I didn't also read it aloud to myself in the car, tasting the words. They're so amazing, spoken aloud. They're the verbal equivalent of physical drunkenness. Dizzying wordplay and delight in metaphor, oh, man, I love it.

One of the stranger experiences I had in that regard was when those two verbal worlds -- my desire for French and my love of well-made and fashioned English -- collided: when I worked in the Northwestern University Library, shelving ("Stack Control", we were called) on all my high school vacations, I found a whole shelf of French translations of Shakespeare. God, they were awful. Awful. Leaden and plodding and bereft of everything that makes Shakespeare amazing. The strange thing -- and maybe this only speaks of my hard-to-eradicate linguistic chauvinism... -- is that I've read English translations of, for example, Molière, and thought they were excellent. And they were verse translations of drama written in verse. I can't explain it. I tend to feel like French verse can be enjoyed for itself best in French, but to be able to enjoy it in English if it is a good translation. Not in terms of how it SOUNDS, no, but in terms of its sentiment and ideas. Not its imagery. But I've rarely seen English transformed into French that I liked very well at all. Maybe it's just also an indicator of the fact that English is my native language, however good my French has gotten.

So, this biography is really enjoyable. I like textual readings anyway, trying to imagine what elements of a life make it into fiction, or to extrapolate from fiction, biography. I am also utterly enamored of the Elizabethan period, the late Tudor period. Greenblatt does a good job of analyzing what makes it compelling and also alien, of looking at the material basis for the rise of capitalism, and also the interweaving of religion and politics. I had never considered the Catholic/Protestant struggle as a context for Shakespeare before, but it makes good sense, particularly as Greenblatt describes Shakespeare's possible brush with those politics, and quick evolution away from a personal engagement with either of them.

In other news... ugh, I have a cold, a horrible head-stuffing head cold that is making me feel cloudy and tired and out of it. Yechh.

I love this job still, by the way. Love it. It is so strange to feel pleased to be on my way to work every morning. I made the disastrous mistake of trying to teach stuff that is too coneptually difficult for elementary students last week... I reasoned that yeah, *I* hadn't been exposed to verbs in their rote-memorized form until I'd had a year of the ephemera under my belt -- colors and numbers and letters and days of the week and months of the year, etc... but that these kids are being really good at that, and quick, so why couldn't we just start with être, avoir, and aller? Ummm, no. I can't wait until the East Bay Foreign Language Project starts, this year, so I can get some ideas for how to begin incorporating grammar other than simple memorized sentences that use one form of a verb...

Is there any other news? I haven't been writing much, I know. And this is hardly a scintillating entry, though I excuse myself on account of my head. Hmmm. I'm also enjoying my college history survey class -- the section of US History to 1865 that I'm teaching online. I manage to keep up with it, week by week, and sometimes the discussions are interesting. I set them a question for a journal entry two weeks ago (when we were on the reasons for the American Revolution) that asked them to read not only their chapter but the text of the Declaration of Independence, and to consider both sides of the colonists' protests -- how was their destruction of private property (the Boston Tea Party) and violence (treatment of various tax collectors etc) viewed by the lawful authorities, as well as by the patriots? How would people who wanted political change NOW, and used similar tactics, be treated under the Patriot Act? Could such actions -- could revolution -- be justified NOW, as it was then, and as it is a right declared by Jefferson in the Declaration (which, for that reason alone is not part of the legal framework of the United States)? I got answers as varied as "this country has fallen away from God, and as Jefferson clearly invokes God all the time in the Declaration, obviously he wasn't in favor of the separation of church and state, and neither should we be... right now the United States is engaging in leading a new revolution, in Iraq" to "a revolution today in the United States would be stamped on ruthlessly just as the British attempted to crush the American rebellion, but a revolution in the United States seems more and more necessary when we look at how the government has acted in invading Iraq and in business corruption." Both of those answers have been paraphrased slightly. Both come from rural Missouri.

Current Mood: achy, tired, stuffed up
Current Music: "Night Comes In" Richard and Linda Thompson

Well. I haven't updated in ten days. Once, in the life of this blog, that would have been quite normal. It may become quite normal again, if I get into a classroom by September. That's not a job that has room for daytime journalling. Even in terms of e-mail, my old pattern was to get up early enough to check messages, and quite often get sucked into writing people early in the morning before leaving for work, and then to do whatever I could in the evening. Over the last few months, I've had enough laxity that I've definitely been drawn into internet-dependency. It's not that I feel exactly guilty about that, or annoyed with myself... just that I doubt it will remain as possible. Maybe not, though. People are always telling me they can't ever find time to read, and I have never in my life managed not to find time to read. The one circumstance I can imagine limiting that is parenthood. From all I observe, I would imagine that parents almost never get a chance to start a book, much less finish one.

Otherwise, I've had almost a week of intensely enjoyable and energizing and hopeful interactions with comrades of mine in my socialist organization, Solidarity. The cadre school I got to participate in from last Friday night until Wednesday afternoon was the same sort of touchstone for me as our Socialist-Feminist Queer Liberation retreat more than two years ago. The experience of this cadre school was made up of both the formally structured parts and the informal connections made and reforged, of course. And the formally structured parts were quite excellent: I think this is the first time that the feminist process that Solidarity has struggled with WORKED, and worked almost seamlessly, and worked to undergird and make more accessible the actually quite rigorous theoretical and political discussions. It worked at the aforementioned SFQL retreat, too, in fact, but possibly it wasn't as self-conscious. Also, the task being undertaken was different in each case, I think. The conscious attempt to grapple with generational transformation and building cadre is a strange and different goal.

You don't HAVE to drink, to be a revolutionary... but it helps

Cheers, Comrade I. I thought of titling the above photo "You don't HAVE to drink to be a revolutionary... but it helps", sort of along the lines of the Emma Goldman quote. There WAS a conspicuous lack of dancing at this thing, and that needs to be rectified next time. It's really the only kind of rectification I am into.

( Everything from theory to sex, at least sex in theory )

As a result of a week of intense education and conversation, starting around 8:30 AM and ending between midnight and 2 AM most nights, and then of a fair amount of babysitting of my nieces, I am absolutely wiped out right now. I have a number of things I want to be working on politically, some of which overlap with LJ, actually -- in terms of annotating various lists of novels with utopian aspirations or visions, and of making that list of Books the Christian Right Aren't Banning But Would If They Had Any Brains.

And I have a job interview on Monday, from out of the blue. I don't know what my chances are, but I feel much better about getting OTHER interviews on the basis of my applications (all those annoying fucking papers and forms I have been juggling in frustration, and cover letters and resumes, etc.), having gotten one, you know?

Current Mood: socialist and geeky
Current Music: "The Killing Moon" Echo and the Bunnymen

So... I'm a little bouncy and okay and a little morose and miserable, also period-ridden and PMSing, and all in all, it's a strange day in the neighborhood. I've got the Beatles playing, which ordinarily has the bouncy effect. But when you're doing Heavy Emotions, pretty much ANY lyrics seem deeply meaningful -- if you're happy, they underline that and seem to be mysteriously perfectly applicable and appropriate (think of falling for someone and how EVERY SONG ON THE RADIO seems to be singing to YOU, about THAT); if you're wretched, they arrow into THAT place in you...

Have y'all ever thought about the LYRICS of the song I'm listening to? Sing along to it; I'll write it here:

Try to see it my way; do I have to keep on talking 'til I can't go on?
While you see it your way; run the risk of knowing that our love may soon be gone
We can work it out; we can work it out
Think of what you're saying; you can get it wrong and still you think that it's all right;
Think of what I'm saying; we can work it out and get it straight or say good night
We can work it out; we can work it out
Life is very short and there's no time, for fussing and fighting, my friend
I have always thought that it's a crime, so I will ask you once again:
Try to see it my way; only time will tell you I am right or I am wrong
While you see it your way, there's a chance that we might fall apart before too long
We can work it out; we can work it out
Life is very short and there's no time, for fussing and fighting, my friend
I have always thought that it's a crime, so I am asking once again:
Try to see it my way; only time will tell you I am right or I am wrong
While you see it your way, there's a chance that we might fall apart before too long
We can work it out; we can work it out

That seems like a completely intransigent song. Whoever is singing it is him or herself NOT BUDGING, while accusing the other person of not budging. What compromise is possible?

Okay, I've never really sat around and applied great amounts of analytical effort to Beatles' lyrics, and I'm not going to do that now, or any more than I have.

On the other topic of this entry... the wonderful "Fuck You, Ronald Reagan, We're Dancing on Your Grave" party is CANCELLED. Damn. Damn. I understand all the reasons for making it a non-starter, after all. But I'm sad, not only for the demise of my Saturday night plans (and it IS that, an it is also making me sad for that reason) but also because it is missing a historic opportunity for closure with that period, and with the individual who encapsulates the end of the 1960s revolutionary moment for the United States, the way that Maggie Thatcher does, for Britain.

I can imagine how it could have been, that party, so clearly. Damn. Crap 80s music from all over the spectrum playing. People dressing in the truly hideous styles of the day -- well, maybe that would have been hard to combine with the drinking and dancing. Much spewing might have ensued. I really cannot appreciate the 80s silhouette and fashion icons. Just about any other decade, yeah. But shoulder pads and teased hair and upswept peroxided dos, especially when they were sculpted, solid with hairspray, spiky short on the sides and quiff-like at the top? Ripped sweatshirts and bad makeup? Pastels? Anything Madonna took it into her head to wear? (I was as guilty of that as anyone, though I thought I was original as a HS freshman dressed in an army coat, tee shirt and jeans but decked out with six different sets of Mardi Gras beads and buttons on the jacket and huge earrings and a shiny, gaudily patterned scarf tied in my hair.)

Later in my High School career, I decided on the stealth approach, given my politics (which were absolutely already a highly arrogant variety of pretty orthodox marxism and trotskyism at the time). I wore classic wool sweaters in deep colors, often with a lace collar or fake pearls. I had long, straight hair and bangs. I looked as sweetly conservative as possible. Until I opened my mouth. This look didn't often fool anyone my own age, since I opened my mouth ALL THE FUCKING TIME. Adults, however... there the stealth approach was very effective.

Gosh, I'm babbling. I warned y'all that I felt bouncy, alternating with deep gloom. Uggghhhh.

'Kay. Time to make some other plans, depending on how I feel at the moment. Though I hope that J. will come hang with me ANYWAY, pretty please, pretty please? I love how you described the bar-hopping evening and how powerful and unstoppable you felt we all were. Yes. That IS cool. Totally reminds me of some of the new poems in Sandra Cisneros' Loose Woman. She dedicated a lot of those poems to women friends, some of whom are also apparently drinking buddies.

What should I wear to Pride? I don't have any "fabulous" clothes. Especially since my Madonna gear is long thrown away. Erk.

Salut, maeve66

Current Mood: moody
Current Music: The Beatles, "We can Work it Out"

So. I am cheerful because I finished the program (all hail Aldus PageMaker) and the hand-drawn cover for the program, for the 8th grade Promotion Ceremony tomorrow. And I am pleased with it. However, that's not why I'm trying to write in here before going to work.

Last night, on a forum where I use the same username as this place, I ended up posting a rant on Reagan, because I actually encounter (so to speak, electronically or whatever) not only liberals but libertarians and the occasional Republican there. I was glad to write it, and it can stand as my eulogy for that jackass.
-------------------------------------
Well, I'll say my own ranting words about Reagan. And no, I don't care to cut him any slack at all just because he died. Everybody dies. And I don't believe in "nil nisi bonum". Fuck that. If someone was politically rancid and horrible and used American tax dollars (which ordinarily many writers in this particular forum are so very concerned to preserve in their own pockets) to fund TERRORISTS (real ones, actual terrorists, who received a-b-c terrorist training from ANOTHER tax-funded American initiative, a training booklet put out by the CIA) in this hemisphere... then in my book, there is nothing good to say about him after his death. There are a few political deaths I won't mind hearing news of (Margaret Thatcher and Henry Kissinger come to mind... unless I missed Kissinger's... but I don't think I did).

I was a freshman in high school when Reagan won the election against Carter. I remember being shocked and surprised. It was the first time I realized how shortsighted and shallowly influenced the American electorate could be. I wore black, the next day, to school.

And I remember clearly the John Hinkley (sp?) assassination attempt, too -- the news was announced over the loudspeaker in the field house and dozens of kids cheered and whistled, until the correction came out that he was still alive, when the cheers changed to disappointed catcalls. Why? Half of my high school was black, and students were all too well aware of the lying nature of "Reaganomics" and the opening salvos of the federal war on welfare. Trickle down, my ass.

For me, though, it was his revolting projection of his Cold War fantasies, left over from the McCarthy period, now being defrosted and put into a political microwave, reheated into constant, unremitting interventions into "hot wars" in "Our Back Yard". The Monroe Doctrine updated for the 1980s. Mine harbors. Support Contras (with drug money funneled through Iran, no less). Ignore any UN or World Court decisions or votes which condemn your actions. Support dictatorships from El Salvador to South Africa (remember "Constructive Engagement"?) just because any enemy of communism is a friend of the USA.

That's what makes him hateworthy, and the fact that he's dead doesn't change that. I won't laud him. I see nothing to laud. The "Great Communicator", FAUGH. All I can think of when I hear that is that insane press conference when he stuck up charts and blurry photos claiming that Cubans in Grenada were building military landing strips for bombers which could attack the US -- with nuclear bombs, no doubt. And used that CRAP to justify overthrowing a government and murdering hundreds of Grenadans. I met a veteran of Grenada, in grad school, a Marine. He shot a ten year old dead, because he thought the boy had a grenade. Uh huh. Turned out to be some piece of fruit. He still had nightmares about it.

And I knew a right wing FREAK at my own college -- Northwestern University -- who became famous for 15 minutes in 1985 or so, Frank Wohl, who had a hard briefcase with a bumper sticker saying "I'd rather be killing Commies" on it. It would be laughable, except that Wohl actually meant it, and not only meant it, DID it -- he went to Honduras and traveled with some Contras and helped them kill Sandinista soldiers. He photographed them kidnap a Sandinista soldier, an older man with a white beard, force him to dig his own grave, and then cut his throat, so there wouldn't be the sound of a shot. And Wohl sold the photos to either Time or Newsweek. The rumors on campus were that he got $50,000 for it, and intended to start his own arms trade business, on a small scale.

That attitude and those politics -- those are Reagan to me. I don't want to hear about his kindly nature or his penchant for fucking jelly bellies. I'm glad he's dead and I wish people would stop whitewashing his career and tell the damn TRUTH about him.

Anyone in the Bay Area who agrees with me should feel free to stop by my brother-in-law's place this weekend, where we're having a combined "We're Dancing On Your Grave, Ronald Reagan*" and Greens fundraising party. Write me via my profile (or via this entry, or via e-mail) for details.

Okay. I know this was a rant. But it was MY rant, and my personal, first person feelings and experiences of Reagan. I stand by it. Feel free to flame away.

Maeve66

*Yeah, that event name has been bowdlerized a bit.

Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: None -- I'm barely out of bed

Okay, so I go to Curves. I know, I know, they're the Dominos Pizza of the fitness world, and Gary Heavin (come on, now, surely he didn't get born with that name?) funds antiabortion forces with 10% of his profits... But that works out to four cents of my money a month, and I give more than that to pro-choice activist groups, not to mention having been active in the movement for ages. So I'm not quitting, make of that what you will.

Meanwhile, I've given some thought to what it is that is so damn appealing about Curves. I've only been a member for a month, now, almost. But I haven't missed one single workout, and I haven't had to struggle for it, either. And before I joined, from the little I vaguely KNEW about it, it sounded pretty rigidly fascist: go around a circuit of machines, in the exact order prescribed, for the exact length of time prescribed, doing the exact range of motions prescribed. Plus a lot of rah rah, sis boom bah cheerleading which generally makes me ill.

But. But its appeal may in fact BE that lack of a need for independent thought. To be honest, after work, the last thing I want to do is consider in depth HOW I want to exercise. It's exhausting, and I'm exhausted, and stressed. Curves requires absolutely no thought at all. You listen to a tape played over some pounding soundtrack purchased from late night TV for three easy payments of 29.99 -- the fifties, the sixties, the seventies, eighties, and nineties. The recording tells you when to start, stop, check your pulse, change stations, etc. There are no decisions to make, except perhaps which machine to start with.

It's relaxing. It removes stress magically. It only takes 30 minutes. It's really that last thing. As a teacher, I can get there by 4 PM, and be home by 5 PM. That rocks. It removes all the toxins of stress and tension and anxiety, it makes me loose and relaxed and endorphin-filled, and it does it all in a Taylorized fashion that is efficient and fits into our sped up, downsized world. There are no lockers or showers, just two curtained changing booths and cubbyholes for your gym bag.

Anyway, the franchised mushroom growth of this niche-filling gym fascinates me. I can easily imagine that men might like something equally easy (and cheap) as a fitness routine.

And voila, I was told today by the franchise owner at the Curves I go to (because I asked her) that there IS such a thing. There is a Curves for men.

It's in Chicago, apparently. Instead of being called "Curves," which men don't want, it's called "Cuts," which is appropriately muscle-focused and MALE. Instead of being a circular arrangement, it's a horseshoe (connotations of racing? Of luck? Of an escape route?). Instead of facing inwards, towards the other women working out, the machine stations on this horseshoe shaped circuit face OUTWARD, the better to avoid any guy LOOKING at any other guy. Instead, there are TVs around the perimeter, overhead. Instead of a gentle stretching routine at the end of the timed circuit... there are punching bags.

I couldn't MAKE this shit up; it's really true -- well, actually I am taking it on faith, not having been to one or read an article about it myself. But I trust the woman who told me about it. I think the gendered implications are hilarious, myself.

maeve66

Current Music: Lucinda Williams, "Righteously"

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Explicit political promotion, yeah, baby.
Madison 1973
Everyone should read this
Books, or a book, anyway: The Love of Worker Bees
man.
New icon
antiwar song
Happy International Women's Day
Fucking US Criminal Fucking Administration
mini rant on xianity
Oh, one extra thing on Oakland Unified
C. S. Lewis
Shakespeare, French, and a miscellany
Organizational cadre school ramblings
The lyrics of songs and cancelled plans
Rant on Ronnie
Curves for Men

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O Brave New World...

...that has such unblushing blogging in it

Entries tagged with politics

Explicit political promotion, yeah, baby.

Madison 1973

Everyone should read this

Books, or a book, anyway: The Love of Worker Bees

man.

New icon

antiwar song

Happy International Women's Day

Fucking US Criminal Fucking Administration

mini rant on xianity

Oh, one extra thing on Oakland Unified

C. S. Lewis

Shakespeare, French, and a miscellany

Organizational cadre school ramblings

The lyrics of songs and cancelled plans

Rant on Ronnie

Curves for Men