Corsicating White Knight of Ignorant Colonialism? You're In Like Flynn.

Disclaimer:  I am woefully ignorant on a vast number of cultural topics.  I get things wrong.  I screw things up.  Right here, I am reclaiming the sentiment from the hands of thousands of racist diatribes over the years - "At least I'm not THAT guy."

It's been a month of excruciating WTFOMETER needle burials.  The only thing we were missing was Eve Ensler's declaration of her new Tribal Art collection... but wait!  What's this?

New Internet Dumb Guy, Kevin Flynn, took to the twitters to respond (well, "Nope" isn't really a well reasoned argument - but it's all he had when presented with them) to the slanderous, Oh, right - Not Slanderous - accusation that he wrote an Op/Ed in the University of Saskatchewan newsletter in the name of not knowing a single thing about what he was discussing.

Warning:
Kev is a White Savior Cowboy sporting two pearl-handled revolvers of "Save-you-from-yourself, Lil' Derogatory Nickname For A People Lady," and he's happy to use them.  I only have Triggers.  Many Triggers.  Trigger warnings for Triggers. It gets uncomfortable.  How could it not?

A little Background:
Kev is head of the U of SK English Department.  I am fairly 110% sure that he is on the game show life-line speed dial list for neither the Social Anthropology department, nor History.  Pretty sure Sociology is out as well as Psychology while we're at it.  As for his SOLID feminism credentials, one tweet exchange offers a dictionary explanation of the word "Excellent" in response to someone asking why Kate Middleton was called this for having a boy "first try." 

A misogyny observing tweeter responded with, "I think he gets that. Point is why is she "brilliant" or awesome or excellent for producing a boy."

Some time later Kevin responds with "Oh.  Yeah.  Good question."

So, I offer a link to the piece in question:  Page four, "Honour traditions but with inclusive ceremonies."

Kevs takes the bold stance of being a white nobody in a line of white nobodies who approach Native People for the last two hundred plus years and tell them how their culture works, and how it's wrong, and how it should run the way the white mans tells them it should.  Oh also he doesn't like Jews.  But that's not our focus here...

No my focus is that it is very, very ballsy of Kevin to be protecting the rights of Native Women who need the white man to come tell them how to be honored properly because they can't clearly do anything for themselves.  That's what white people are for.

Sandy Creek.  It's one example.  There are so many.
700 US soldiers descend on the camp of Cheyenne peace envoys coming to negotiate in good faith.  Such good faith in fact that all the soldiers get to start murdering are women, children, and elderly when they first open fire.  John Chivington gets the men good and drunk the night before, and after the dawn they set about committing genocidal butchery.  The specifics are horrific.  They are indefensible.  They are enraging.  Among the callous hatred and inhuman carnage is the most vile trophy collecting of fingers, toes, ears, scalps, and genitalia - any body part the Soldiers fancy.  They sever the genitalia from men and women, using the women's genitalia as saddle decorations... as hat bands.  They parade genitalia on sticks, and hunt those who flee into the brush, killing as many as they can chase down.  They throw infants around like balls to land in the road and leave them for dead.  Eventually they put on their newly decorated hats and leave.
When John Chivington goes home, he tells tales of a fierce battle and heroism on the part of the brave soldiers, because that is what the oppressor always does - tell you how things were.

Truth comes out fairly quickly, because even then people knew how things actually were, and in two years the US Government is apologizing with a treaty of restitution it does not let dry before breaking.

So please, Kevin Flynn...  Sit your entire body and soul down, shut up with every fiber of muscle in your being, and learn a damned something.  I am not going to speak for Native Women, because as they have said they do very well on their own.  But I can reflect on some history.  When the European met the Indigenous person, first he stole North America, then he stole the men, the women, the children, and often made disgusting ornament and toy out of their dissected bodies.  Now he steals their culture to wear, as he wore their body, and tells Native People how to do it right.  For the women's sake.  Kevin doesn't ask anybody about it, because he's white...so he was born perhaps "knowing better." A POC asks him if he has ever actually talked with the "diverse community" around him that he finds" the most rewarding aspects" of his job - and he literally tells them he never had time to talk politics with any of the Native Women because he was "too busy helping them!"

The modern history, from the outside (as might be argued it should be viewed) is of a culture that is continuously invaded even in the small space it is left - one which is attacked for it's "otherness" while being fetishized for it's "exoticness" and never for it's humanity.  Native women suffer rape at roughly double the rate of non Native women, and often it is White men.

Flynn leaves a Twitter trail of denial of white privilege while discussing the cultural inferiority of Native men and traditions in nurturing and supporting women.  "Learn how to spell "privilege" right and then we'll talk" is one tweet.  Another deals with his insistence that he doesn't come from a place of privilege, "I don't have it!"  Throughout is the New White Male Ally Script.  It starts with attacking the group you purport to be allied to (on the topic of native spiritual beliefs, "It is time we moved beyond superstition and fully embraced the modern world"), mocking dismissal of protest follows in every imaginable patriarchal, racist, classist way, (one tweet establishes that any POC who challenge him are "not up to the intellectual" caliber of FN that agree with him, so he "prefers" to talk to them). 
Finally an inability to handle all the mean accusations of White Savior meaning exactly what White Savior says erupts into their furious departure.

This time it was a matter of hours.  @ProfessorFlynn is no more, the account deleted to pop up as another sock savior sometime later.  They should all be so brief.

The Uncensored Diologue of Betsy Karasik

48 hours ago I read something which stupefied and infuriated me in a way which I had thought years of reading mainstream news and general internet fuckery had divorced me from.

I was wrong.

It wasn't just that "Fire!" had been called in a crowded theater, but that the Washington Post had loaned the caller its bullhorn. No, more... had paid the architect of this outrage - for promotional interest - for a brazenly damaging piece.

The Washington Post had willfully committed an act of social terrorism against every woman in my life that I cared about, would ever care about, had ever cared about, would ever even have opportunity to meet. Certainly against every woman who died from domestic violence or rape (at her own hands or at the fingertips of others)before we would ever get a chance to say hello. Anyone who is a woman, anyone who is a man who knows three women beyond their mother? Hey this statistic is you too.

It's days later, and while my demanding accountability and calling out came nearly as quickly as my outrage, I did not take the time to put anything down longer than 140 characters. Not only am I a middle aged, white, cis, hetero male who is probably an inappropriate voice to be any authority on the experience of American women and the marginalized subsections of WOC, gay, and transgender within them, but I was filled with the dueling and mutually exclusive desires to both aggressively kick the thing to watch it die and to scrape it from my shoe.

Betsy has changed and modified her position in a deft display of moving goal posts in a number of ways, but she has maintained from the start (the very first paragraph in fact) that we require an "uncensored dialogue about the reality of sex in schools." Her dialogue. Her reality. One type of sex - Teachers fucking underage children. So here it is. Let's dig deep...

Betsy begins her opinion with a thought construct from Louis C. K. in which he suggests that perhaps more abducted sexual assault victims would survive if the penalties for sexual assault were less severe. Already we've hit our first untruth and we're not even to our second sentence. Lets run to the Google machine and randomly pull up the first hit. "Sexual Assault is a Class C Felony punishable by a prison term of up to 10 years, a fine of up to $10,000 or both. By Federal guidelines, anyone convicted of the crime must serve a minimum of at least nine months. The court may suspend all or part of the balance of the sentence." Kidnapping carries a Federal sentencing guideline of any number of years or life. Stop and consider - Kidnapping carries a harsher base sentencing guideline than rape. In the link above to CT averages for a given time frame, the average sentencing for Sexual Assault was around 40 some months. Considering penalties for murder, that's a hell of a roll of the dice.

All of this presumes you actually get convicted, much less tried, much less even have charges pressed... as Elyse writes very candidly at Skepchick there are almost as many reasons a rape may not be reported or charges pressed as there are rapes. As RAINN details, an estimated 54% of rape cases go unreported, chasing the data down further, of every 100 rapes, 46 get reported, 12 LEAD TO AN ARREST, 9 get prosecuted, 5 lead to a felony conviction and of those 100, 3 will spend one day or more in prison. That's 3% conviction rate (for a minimum of 9 months) everybody. God Damn, but isn't that just harsh.

Sentence two: Betsy says it's pretty horrible, but there's a kernel of truth in what C.K. says. ...Yeah. About that. Here is where our real troubles begin...
Sentence three: Betsy states that she has "a similar ambivalence about the case involving former Montana high school teacher Stacey Dean Rambold." Ok, get comfortable because this will take a minute. Ambivalence not really the word I'd choose for a case involving a 49 year old teacher grooming and then repeatedly raping a 14 year old female student of his over several months. Particularly when this 14 year old child committed suicide at 16 while the case was pending. Particularly when the child molester dodged a bullet with a plea deal and got a ten year suspended sentence on the terms that he attend a support group and not engage in sexual activity with or have unsupervised visitation with minors. Particularly when said Child Rapist was back in court only because he could not fucking keep to that plea deal, and the judge gave him 31 days, minus time served, leaving him with a 30 day sentence for the multiple sexual acts he perpetrated on this little girl who then killed herself. Particularly when the judge in the case made the bold sentencing statement he did (*more on that later). Particularly when the Montana Statutory laws carry stepped minimums depending on victim age, age spread between victim and rapist, and special circumstance clause for rapists in positions of authority over victim, specifically mentioned are educators/school faculty due to their inherently elevated position and because rape is always about power. The minimum is 8 years for this. But we're not done.
Look again at the sentence. One word not there? Rape. It's "the case" not "the rape case." What did make the cut? The rapist's resume, and his now shamed "former" status (which, coincidentally, is identical to how Betsy describes her Lawyer background. Parallel structure anyone?).
What else is missing? Oh... yeah... of course, the victim.
Cherise Moralez is the dead girl not in evidence because this case is about Stacey Dean Rambold. He's the face that this former trial lawyer wants us to put on this case. He's the one to humanize and give focus to. Not Cherise Moralez (*Who has her name misspelled by Betsy throughout as Morales, but to really explore the concept of Devil's Advocate, that is how many news agencies outside of her home town have been spelling it, and hey, she is just some dead, raped little brown girl anyway. Plenty of those, right?)

Sentence four: Betsy ties up her Louis C.K. intro with a paraphrasing of his end note that stated he didn't know what to do with that information. And here Betsy misses a critical point... If the premise, that rape penalties are harsh, were true for sake of argument - C.K. says that he has no answer for that. That this information cannot be used, cannot be processed, because there is no resolution for it. C.K. says in essence, that even if it were true, the depravity and horror of rape is such that the penalties against it may perhaps not be lessened in clear conscience even under the threat of death for the victim, and therein lies an intractable conundrum. It is a damning statement. One which Betsy co-opts to opposite effect.

Sentence five: Something, something, our social expectations are failing us - we need to have an "uncensored dialogue about the reality of sex in schools." But uncensored with a twist, if you will. Because we're not talking about children's development, or of sexual negotiation or confusion among peer groups, or even - Dear God - of making sure our children learn in a safe place. No. We are talking about 50 year old men fucking 15 year old children and making that more socially acceptable, and that is the start and the end of the possibilities Betsy has on tap.

Holy shit paragraph two... "As protesters decry the leniency of Rambold's sentence - (case details intercut) - I find myself troubled for the opposite reason."
Hold me back.
Things Betsy will later say: She didn't mean he shouldn't be punished. She didn't mean he wasn't guilty (she notes in the trial details that he pleaded guilty). She wasn't even talking about him. She wasn't even talking about Cherise. She wasn't talking about this case at all, it was just a prompt. That what she meant was something magically different than the actual words she actually typed, and GOSH YOU GUYS why could you not see that? Just read it!! (through social media she will demand that her detractors have not read, or perhaps could not understand her writing due to implied lack of comprehension skills in a stunning display of casual classism and white privilege at various times, and repeatedly urge that protesters refer back to the original document to adjust their understanding of it and of this sentence in particular. Her cognitive dissonance that demands anyone not sharing her viewpoint must not have even heard it yet may suggest she really is not faking this for a paycheck.)

Something she does (sometimes)say people get right, and is largely the point of her piece: Sex between adults and children should be decriminalized. In fact, the original title (which she later protests and is changed) is "Sex Between Students and Teachers Should Not Be a Crime." Betsy will also say that this title was inflammatory and nothing she would have chosen, opting instead for suggestions of the same exact concept rephrased. She affirms that yes, she does mean that, simultaneously she does not mean that. This will be a theme.

Oh look, her very next sentence: "I don't believe that all sexual conduct between underage students and teachers should necessarily be classified as rape, and I believe that absent extenuating circumstances, consensual sexual activity between teachers and students should not be criminalized."

Well, here we see why "the rape case" became "the case" up top (via social media Betsy will later assert both perspectives on that) and pretty clearly it is established not only that she does not think teachers who choose their own students as sexual objects over the entire biomass of humanity available outside that ridiculously small sample group should be made criminals, but also that children below the age of sexual consent can consent. She believes the law is wrong, and presumably should be struck down. Here is the first step to her explanation of Hot Blooded Latina 14 year old victim as natural born Harlot. Pay attention, because she disowns this statement too...

Second paragraph, third sentence: Betsy says that while she isn't defending the judge's statement that Cherise was "as much in control of the situation" as the rapist (rapist is my word, not hers) which the judge "appropriately" apologized for, "tarring and feathering him for attempting to articulate the context for this sentence will not do much to advance this much needed dialogue."
Take note, Betsy has just stated previously that she does not take issue with the brevity of the sentencing (quite the opposite, she is "troubled for the opposite reason") Now she doubles down on the doublespoken gas-lighting by saying that she doesn't defend the judges statement, and throws out the obligatory spoonful of "appropriately" apologized sugar, to better aid the bitter medicine of completely agreeing with the sentiment and logic that drove it.

She won't own his statement herself in the harsh light of day, but she fully supports the context he's articulating and believes he was unfairly maligned for speaking it. Betsy refers back to this line several times on Twitter later, to show how much she meant/didn't mean the same thing. A point which should be observed - the judge made several horrific blunders in the statements he gave regarding sentencing, and even more (worse?) about "legitimate rape" in his apology. But one thing I do not see a lot of comment on is that many stories copypasta media bits to include that he said "old beyond her years" of the victim (a trope that Betsy also echoes in concept) though many reports include the phrase "looked" not "acted" before his statement... she "looked old beyond her years," which underscores the physicality, the disposable sex-object idea which this dead girl is being viewed under.

Let's take a paragraph break to recap. She's upset that the rapist got a sentence as lengthy as 30 days? Check. Believes children who have neither the experiential nor developmental skills to process sexual encounters with adults should be legitimately groomed as sex toys and refuses to address power differential in belligerently obtuse narrative of victim culpability? Check. Believes that 14 year old victim who became withdrawn, sullen and academically challenged according to family and friends, then killed herself, was in as much control as the 49 year old teacher who set this downward spiral in motion and has been to this rodeo (I promise you) multiple times? Check. She was asking for it? Oh, Check.

Here Betsy throws us a bone... just when we thought she might seem unreasonable she offers this gem: "I do believe that teachers who engage in sex with students, no matter how consensual..." Oh. Oh, I see what you did there. You've made the reader the agent asserting that the act is consensual in the narrative. You are the lady protesting too much to strengthen the myth. Sly. "...should be removed from their jobs and barred from teaching unless they prove that they have completed rehabilitation." Wow. Sabbatical then? That's sure a hard line. She then goes on to call anyone upset about adults fucking children "utterly hysterical" in their reactions, and generally self-serving tragedy-porn junkies in so far as it's all about the need to make us feel like we've done something good for the kids, their actual welfare be damned. Because getting assaulted, manipulated, groomed for a lifetime of abuse and dysfunctional, destructive interpersonal relationships is clearly in their best interest.

Betsy says she doesn't know what triggered Morales's [sic] suicide, (I will give you one guess) but that she finds it tragic and deeply troubling that it happened as the rapists case was working through the justice system. BK can't help but wonder if the pressure from the case played a role. Let's look at what she's just done here - we've established that (sorrynotsorry) Betsy considers Cherise an active and equal, curious participant. She wonders if the exposure of the trial, the prosecution of her abuser - not the emotional after effects of the abuse - drove her to kill herself.

She has just post slut-shamed a dead under age brown girl she doesn't properly know the name of for her own rape and suicide. You know where you can go, Betsy? Rape being taken seriously equals less suicides. Rape not being tolerated. Rape not happening. Betsy has suggested a legal ramification which is the only possibility more insulting than the actuality of this case - paid vacation.

Words have consequences, any survivor will tell you that. Data will tell you that. In international programs in which offenders are partnered with groups that do not take any bullshit from them, like this one reported by the Independent, recidivism rates are lower. Tell a sex offender what he or she does is OK? Let them hide under the rock? The problem multiplies, and they get bolder.

Betsy throws out a few anecdotal and completely unbelievable statements like that she had multiple friends who were molested by teachers *(not her phrase, natch) and they certainly seemed undamaged in her opinion. What her basis for that description is is anyone's guess, but I'm sure she might have checked them for adequate number of fingers and toes. This is a woman who would seem wholly unable to properly diagnose her own psychological state, much less anyone else if we are to believe her regular assertions of self-contradictory statements.
She makes the claim that when she was growing up in the 60's and 70's, the sexual boundaries between teachers and students were much different. We are left to understand that times were different then - that everything is more rigid and shallowly politicized now and that we've lost a natural sexual freedom which left teachers to molest their students not yet half way through their teenage years in peace. And that it worked. Betsy makes a point to underscore that high school students are sex crazed hormone gutters (and presumably what they want more than anything is likely an unhealthy, emotionally damaged relationship with someone not their equal to use them as sex workers to be discarded, confused, in their search for validation and approval that they find no where else). She says that the idea that high school students can't consent to sex is a fantasy.
The legal position for Statutory Rape laws are that under age children are not capable of making equal consent because of their years. Let us be clear - what BK is stating is that children are not children.

Tellingly, from the link above, we might compare here her fond memories of the halcyon days of public educational orgies with the following statement given by a man who served time for molesting young children including his own son and stepson for three decades:

At one point in the meeting attended by The IoS, Barry tries to suggest that "times were different" when he committed his offenses and "it was viewed more casually in society". But his new friends are quick to interject. "No, I don't agree," a retired probation officer, Colin Robson, 59, interrupts. "That's just not true."

Betsy talks in the language of, and makes the same points as sexual predators, and that is alarming. She makes the claim that painting the nuanced continuum of sexual predatory behavior between adult and student with the same brush is a mistake. It "sends a damaging message to students and sets the stage for hypocrisy and distortion of the truth." Betsy here says that giving students the idea that they might enter into a learning environment in which one wouldn't expect glances down the blouse, or a random penis in a given orifice is actually somehow dangerous. That they shouldn't learn boundaries by grown ass peoples who say, "You know what? No." Because, paradoxically she argues, if they aren't exploited and abused by an adult they trust, they will somehow not then trust an adult to approach with questions about their bodies.

There is a sick sexual culture which America fosters around the school girl. Catholic schoolgirl Halloween costumes are not worn by girls who go to catholic school, they are inherently a perverse power dynamic of older men vs the concept of sexually exploitable underage girls. The element which made American Beauty a work of obvious fiction was that when the moment presented itself for the lead character to engage sexually with the underage object of his fetish, he stopped. He looks at her and thinks "holy shit, this is a child" and did what Betsy is arguing should be rarer than already is - he said no thanks.

Betsy descends into the cesspool of "If priests can't keep their pants on," why can't teachers hump students? Because to Betsy, Not Fucking Your Student is a highly unrealistic level of expectation to demand. Her approach to the inevitability of pederasts acting on impulse despite legal ramifications sounds as if she were making an argument against Prohibition. Child molesters don't get soft because suddenly now it's legal. You're not instituting a state student sex tax to pay for awareness courses Betsy.

She alleges that a more realistic approach would be to remove the offending teacher in a way that would not traumatize the student as much as having an actual rule of law. Yes that's right - make the process even more arbitrary. Let the PTA decide? Cafeteria staff? How does the victim report it without reporting it anyway?

The intensity of criminal proceedings, with all the pressure they put on participants, the stigma, the community and media scrutiny, and the concurrent shame and guilt they generate, do the opposite of healing and protecting the victim. Laws related to statutory rape are in place to protect children, but the issue of underage sex, and certainly of sex between students and teachers, may be one in which the law of unintended consequences is causing so much damage that society needs to reassess.

She loves that slut-shaming.  But notice that she rates comparative value of sex between teacher and student ABOVE sex between similar aged students.  How would reporting it within a system of "no consequences" make it more likely that reporting would occur and the victim would receive the closure needed for healing? Betsy is wrong on every count as 20 year child abuse investigator Patrick recently wrote up here. Why are we to think that absent a legal system, predators would suddenly shrug and say, "ok, you got me!" when abuse is reported?

Betsy's argument, and her platform given to her by Washington Post have real victims right now - in every person reading it in rage and being denied the voice of their abuse. It has real victims in the future, in the moral approval that she offers like candy from a stranger to every would be pederast further relaxed into victimizing someone by her stamp. It is visible already throughout the collection of sympathizers that she has attracted. people who allege that rape simply doesn't happen - ever, anywhere. Rape deniers. Misogynists and Homophobics.

This travesty will have a body count, in souls, in scars, and it will cost some men, women and children their lives.

In Which We Bury Someone's Kid

I went to a funeral today. 

Leaving Cali we got a phone call that a cousin-in-law had died. Waking up the next morning I got the call that a boy wrote a note and grabbed a gun. I let everything go to voice mail for the next week. Because really, that was enough of that. The boy in question wasn't someone I knew. At first I was like, wow, that's sad but luckily we don't… and then it hit me. I know the mother very well. She would say "My son" or "My daughter" and I never paid much attention to their actual names. Her son went to the same school as my older kid, a year ahead. He was 14 when he died. He was popular, academically advanced and athletically gifted. Despite a truly unfortunate yearbook photo he was conventionally attractive with a winning and frequent smile. His reputation was of a kind and considerate young man with an assured future. His father was in medicine, his mother was one of my younger kid's teachers. She took it much harder than her sibling. 

"I would be MUCH sadder" she said "if he died from a good reason instead of a stupid one. I would be MUCH more sorry for him if he hadn't done this to his mother, because she is a VERY GOOD person and I do NOT agree with hurting her."How do you explain depression and suicide to a nine year old? You just do. You talk about momentary impulses and malfunctioning brains and proximity to methodology and you never ever, not for a single second introduce the concept that you understand what he was thinking very well indeed. Because she is nine. So you tell her that he is very sorry, that he didn't know how much he would hurt his mom, that he would take it back if he could (even if, perhaps, he would not) and that she has to try very hard not to be angry at him. He didn't do it to hurt other people, he did it because he didn't know how to do anything else. 

"Well, I didn't know him so it doesn't matter to me." Explaining suicide to a 13 year old isn't much easier. The boy is only a few months older than her. Her favorite teachers cannot speak for their grief. Some of her friend's parents can't stop asking their children to promise that this will never, ever be them. It is everywhere in town. It is in the chat rooms, in the gyms, in the shops that are running out of black dresses. You take her to find your outfit so she will know, one day when she has to know, the appropriate things to do and say and wear when inappropriate things happen. You talk to her about how people will do anything to avoid using the word suicide, how they fear the contagion of it spreading to the point that they won't discuss it at all. Suicide is the death that must not ever be named. You remind her that if she ever has any doubt, any concern, any inkling at all that she knows someone considering it she must tell you. Then you tell her that it's very common for there to be no warning caught at all. You talk about suicide prevention in a dozen dressing rooms. Because it is, she continues to tell you, not at all important. You say ok. But just in case it is one day, listen to another thing. Let's not whistle in this dark. 

You find a black dress. You've made her crazy looking for the right black dress. No one will care. No one will notice. Some people will wear ridiculous things. You tell her about wearing a ridiculous thing yourself once, to your grandmother's service when all the stores were closed and the options were small but the grief immense. You ran in late, in a spring confection, and you told every person in the receiving line how much your grandmother loved florals. She asks if it's true. You tell her that her great grandmother didn't give a crap about florals but she would have loved the straight faced fiction as much as she wouldn't have cared what you wore. She tells you that when she dies she wants everyone to wear party clothes and throw a happy event where they drink and laugh and shoot fireworks. You tell her that you hope very much to be long gone before that day, but if you're not you will absolutely make that the case. One day. Eventually. When you can breathe again. She agrees it might be easier if she lives to one hundred and eighty. 

The day of the service your car acts up. You're not going because you are bereaved. You're going because so many people you know are. You are going because just thinking of the mother makes you so sad. You are going because your nine year old made a card reading "Thinking of you" with "A drawing of my signature cats, but sad, but not all the way sad, to help her feel better" and wrote everything in her best, most careful cursive. So you wave off the neighbor who tells you to skip it and you go. The line is around the block. It's a big church, but a bigger crowd. Three schools of teachers. Four sports worth of teammates. Coworkers, friends, family, the parishioners. In one of he rudest, pushiest towns you've ever lived, no one fusses. You all drive in a neat line. You park in a neat line. You walk in a neat line. You wrap around the entire church twice in a neat line. The first person you see is the mother's co-teacher and she embraces you. You realize what a small town you live in, that there are hundreds of people here but you know almost every one. There is a crisis staff set up at the middle school directly following the service. It gets whispered down the very long and slow line. You realize you forgot to wear hosiery. No one cares. 

The 14 year old girl in front you is playing it off like she does this every day. She breaks your heart because once you were 14 and your friend died and you stood in line in an inappropriate dress pretending you didn't care. She is wearing a party frock. She is alone. Other girls join her in line and she says "My mother is in the car. She has a book and I asked her not to come in." It's a scorching hot day, You're pretty sure she came alone and her parents are not here. She hugs a teacher and hears about the crisis team. She tosses her head like it's stupid but tells everyone she passes about it, just in case they care. Suddenly, almost to the door, she stops with a panic that betrays her age. "How much is it to pay your respects? Like, do you really PAY them? I haven't any money and I'm broke." The girls with her say they don't know - sometimes there is collection at church but this is their first memorial service. You want to hold them and call them baby and tell them the things an adult should have told them long before they approached today, but you can't. She is so very brittle, this girl who does this every day, and you remember how quickly she's going to shatter when the service starts. 

Then you're inside and you take the last seat in the last row of the farthest corner of the church. Soon all the pews are full and the walls are lined. You wonder, if half the town wasn't away for the summer, how they'd ever have dealt with the crowds. As it is they had to suspend signing the guestbook to rush everyone inside. You offer your seat to kids you know but they refuse to take it. Folding chairs begin to appear and the family files in. His mother isn't walking the confident stride you associate with her. She looks a hundred years older and vaguely far away. Someone whispers that they heard she was at a conference when it happened. You wave it off. The details are just details, the whats and the whys and the wheres change nothing. Her life is shattered and nothing can help her. The pastor beings to speak and you hate him. There is a slide show of a recent family vacation where this golden boy appears effervescent in his happiness, a cruise taken a few weeks before. You wonder if he'd already decided, if this joy was his relief at the choice made and the plan formed. The pastor says what might be the stupidest thing you've ever heard at a memorial service.

"He was fine Monday and gone Tuesday." That's not how it works. If he was fine Monday he wouldn't have died Tuesday. You're looking at the faces of all the kids here and you want to stand up and shout "Don't tell them that. That's a lie!" This is the family's church. This is their pastor. This is the man who comforts them and celebrates with him and you are not the audience. It's just as well. Because you want to punch him in the face. He talks about insane things. There are stories about 9/11 and how just like we couldn't stop 9/11 and must live with it, now too we must live with this. He talks about the bombing of London in WW2 and how we will never be able to answer the whys of this until we face God and ask. He tells a story about another pastor and that pastor's son's suicide and the failure of steel to float until assembled to completion. He says that because Jesus still lives, so too does this boy. He gives the most bewildering sermon after a young suicide you can imagine. You feel he's blaming the boy as he talks about our shared desire for just five minutes with him on Tuesday to prevent this, that five minutes would have changed the choice. He talks about facing, accepting or changing yourself through communion with others. You start to wonder if the boy was gay. You hope he wasn't. But then you can't find anything to hope he was and go back to reminding yourself the details don't matter. 

The pastor says he will explain it, that he heard a story that explained this, the unexplainable. He launches into a theatrical tale about dodgeball. You pray this is helping the family because you can't think it's helping anyone else. His dodgeball tale conveys the evil excitement young men get at the chance to strike helpless young women. You think this dude is twisted. He goes on to say but not the dead boy. He would get the same gleam, have the same impulse, but his balls would always hit the ground first, and then the girl. He always minimized the impact on others, he always thought of other people. This seems a surreal way to explain a suicide but perhaps it means something to the family. The pastor talks about the famous athletic coaches the boy met, the opportunities he had. He is older, probably in his sixties, and suddenly he slips into his version of Youth Speak. He's planning, at 4 pm next week, a meeting of teens and he wants everyone to come, all the kids present. "Nothing negative man, just a hang. Our best two counselors and some special ways to celebrate and remember this life, man. All positive stuff." He hits the man note several times while urging you to recall the time and place. It's next week because most of the dead kid's friends are up at the church's summer retreat. You wonder who he thinks the sobbing kids in the pews are. 

And that's it. There's a miked singer for two songs and some piano instrumental and four long pieces by the pastor and then he tells you the family will file out after the benediction. There is a map with directions to a wake, if you are so inclined, at a private home. Please sign the guest book so this wonderful family knows who was here. Benediction and goodnight. You watch the family slowly move up the aisle, his older sister rubbing her mom's back then striding ahead of everyone else, ramrod straight. His mother is a thousand years old, wearing a sweater in crippling heat and leaning on her husband to walk. The family is dozens strong, a thin line through a massive crowd of completely silent people, people who generally jostle and bitch and rush and push and hustle. Not today. Today, even after the family is gone, there is silence and proper conduct in every corner. Because they came here to give comfort and seek answers and a boy is dead. 

I walked outside and sat in my car to process everything. I texted a distraught out of state friend the details. I dropped my car at the dealership and took the kids to their appointments and we went to the late showing of Despicable Me 2. We needed to laugh after today because I didn't cry. I've never been to a memorial where no one spoke. No one offered the family and friends a fresh story, a new perspective, a new lifeline to grab for a second, a moment of their loved one's life they hadn't seen. There was just a hall full of people and the pastor. Every faith is alien to an outsider. The church I was at today is one of those lifestyle Christian places that offer vague fellowship brochures that read like singles ads. Looking for a family? An embrace of positivity? Jesus working it? Look here, with us. The church was new and expensive and well appointed but I walked out it's doors emptier than I have ever left any church I've ever stood in. 

At one point the pastor urged that it is not the words he was using that were important. The words of the scriptures are not the words, it is by existing in those words that the Holy Spirit can work in you, let the words exist around you and they will become power. (The last time I heard that it was Transcendental Meditation night at the UU church.) He told the family they were awesome, and not to blame themselves, that no one there should blame themselves as they didn't cause this. Who then, to blame? I waited through the entire service but he never said not to blame the boy. He only used the word suicide once. He used various permutations of choice a lot. I wanted him to tell the children present not to be angry, not to blame their friend. He never did. It was proof that no matter how big you build your house, no matter how carefully you study your theology, the essence of the Divine can still elude you. Those kids didn't need next week's positivity outreach pitch. They didn't need to hear about WW2 or 9/11. They needed someone to tell them that it's okay to be angry but depression is an awful disease and sometimes it kills you. 

That's not the victim's fault.

Don't Worry, You're Not Racist.

Except, you totally are. I am too. If you're American, then I can speak to our form of institutionalized racism and the cultural assumptions that surround them. If you're not, then trust me when I say you're a racist as well. Your culture has it's own biases and bigotries, it's own unspoken assumptions about the non ruling class or color of your land. This is not a judgement on you, this is a statement of fact. When you live in a racist society, you will have racist views. It's like gum on your shoe - you only see it if you end up stuck to something. 

Which means we're talking about Paula Deen. Look, I don't care about her. If the allegations in the lawsuit against her are true (and she's given us every reason to believe they are) then she should be forced to make reparations. My issue today is with her sons. Paula's boys are out swinging, understandably, to defend their mother from the consequence of her words. She didn't know any better. She's ashamed. She's the product of different times. She's not racist. To listen to my fellow white folk, no one is racist. There is no racism. Things just happen and they aren't fair but it's for reasons and these reasons have nothing to do with racism. They feel these ways about most black people because most (or some, or this one) are just like that. They aren't racist because they know these other black people (or employ them) and they are good to them and respect them and maybe they even voted for Obama because of how not racist they are. Let's listen to Paula Deen in her own words.

“Remembering now, it just shocks me,” she said of Jim Crow. “I’m plain horrified that things could have been that way and I was so blind I didn’t get that it was wrong.” - Paula Deen

Guess what boys? Those shoes are on your feet today. This doesn't make you special, it makes you American. Just yesterday my teenager turned to me and said "Wow, grandpa is really racist!" I said yes, yes he is. She is the only grandchild to notice because however the others define racism it includes the concept of a bad person doing bad things. It does not include upholding the status quo. It does not include making assumptions about people based on their class and color. The standard isn't even not to kill people of color because every day in every way people who are golly gee not racist murder innocents and walk away. Shoot a kid in their classroom, the president comes to town. Shoot a kid in a park, on their living room couch, on a subway platform, walking home with Skittles - well it takes a lot to get anyone to notice. It takes marching in the street because those kids aren't white so what do you expect? Having these unspoken double standards is racism, it's our racism and it's invisible to us white folk. (The tragedy of Sandy Hook is realizing that the safety of rich white kids is ceasing to matter. We are beginning to feel the pain of what our fellow citizens have always known.) 

Hey, you know that story your mom tells? The one where she beat a black girl for the sheer pleasure of it and the girl's mom ended up in jail? When your mom tells that story, gosh she feels bad. How did she not see? It haunts her, what she did. It haunts her so much that she tracked that family down and... oh wait. I don't think she has. Or if she did, she leaves it out of the story, because the point of the story is that Paula Deen felt bad about her actions because she came to see that they were wrong and she is not a racist so it hurt her soul. 

That she tells the story that way, that her pain is at the center of her shame, is racist. It places her above the harm she did. It prioritizes her experience over the experience of her victim. And it's hardly the only example of her unexamined racism. Look, I'm sure she was a good mom. She is probably, by most yardsticks, a good person. She may have given you the whole It's Not Easy Being Green and Free to Be You and Me education of your era. That has jack all to do with whether or not she's racist. 

And I remember telling them about a restaurant that my husband and I had recently visited. And I'm wanting to think it was in Tennessee or North Carolina or somewhere, and it was so impressive. The whole entire wait staff was middle-aged black men, and they had on beautiful white jackets with a black bow tie. I mean, it was really impressive. And I remember saying I would love to have servers like that, I said, but I would be afraid somebody would misinterpret. - Paula Deen

Paula Deen is not an android. Black people are not electric sheep. That she dreams of a room where the wait staff is one ethnicity means yes, she is racist. She held back not from a recognition that her love for middle aged black men happy to serve her is a racist security blanket, but from a fear that her internalized racism would be exposed. When you think "Oh, everyone says that." or "Oh, everyone feels that way." You are wrong. You are racist and you are seeing the gum on your shoes but you haven't figured out it needs to come off. 

 "I want people to understand that my family and I -- we're not the kind of people that the press is wanting to say we are." - Paula Deen

What Paula is failing to grasp, what her boys are swinging against, is that it is not the press saying these things. It is the Deen family exposing the soles of their shoes and not realizing what they're stuck on. You are not, to my knowledge, evil. But you're racist. And I'm sorry learning it is proving to be a painful experience. I hope you look back on these days the way your mother does on the girl she beat and I hope you tell the story differently. I hope you understand that all pain is not the same, some is self inflicted.

You Ain't Even White Tho

*This post contains racial slurs

In America "white" is a social construct meant to denote a position of supremacy and privilege over others. The word "American" is most often used to mean "White American" as it is the only non-hyphenated common use of the word. You are American or you are something else. I am currently a white American and this has conferred many advantages despite my origins in American's lowest classes. I get this, and that things I say often need to be examined for hidden assumptions born from my less than universal experience. It's not a judgement on me when this happens, it's a evaluation of why I believe the thing I have said.

My mother was mostly white. Her father is from a line of very white and very economically and socially privileged people. Her mother was of Bohemian descent. The Eastern Europeans were only marginally white when her parents met, meaning that in infancy my mother would have been perceived as slightly less white than her cousins. Her social class conferred additional white markers on her (such as black housekeepers and personal affluence) that mitigated the effect of a marginally white parent. Therefore, my mother grew up secure in her white identity.

It is the ever evolving definition of white that marks it for it's artificial nature. When Susan Lucci was hired for the soap opera All My Children, she was not intended to be the core character she became. If you ask a modern viewer what ethnicity the actress is they would reply white. They would also say her character, Erica Kane, is a white woman. When Agnes Nixon hired her Lucci was considered "too ethnic" to be a female lead. She was not white. In the 19th and very early 20th century the lynching of Italian immigrants was not unheard of. Now most circles would identify an Italian-American as a white American.

All of this arises from two recent events. In the first event I was at WDW waiting for a tram with my family. The tram operator had a strong (but not difficult to understand) accent. If I were to guess, I would assume he was South American. Behind us a woman and her young daughter were also waiting. The woman began complaining that she could not understand the man. Her language was derogatory and her voice raised. She thought it was a shame he didn't speak her language. My sibling began asking her insulting questions in various languages. I stayed out of it. We all pick our battles and I wasn't in the  mood for that one. (Being white, I get to choose which bigots I interact with.) When we excited the tram I asked him to point out who the speaker was. I had expected him to point to some heavily tattooed and very pale people from the row in front of me. Instead he singled out a woman of apparent Italian descent. I said the first thing that came to my mind. "She ain't even white, tho." I didn't mean it sincerely, I meant it sarcastically. I meant it as an illustration of how absurd her insistence on accent free speech was in a country of immigrants. But maybe I didn't. Maybe I was making a snap judgement on her ethnicity from a place of class and color comfort. Because in this second incident, I absolutely meant every word.

In the area I live white is the default norm. We are so lightly integrated that neighbors feel free to complain when I have non white guests in the pool and have actually caused scenes if those guests are black. South Asian children are often referred to as "the negro kid" while the "good" Asians (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) rarely stay in town long. (On the other hand, residents brag about black celebrities who have vacation homes here. Wealth trumps all.) For the last decade or so I have had a close friend who is pale skinned but visibly of Iranian and Indian descent. She has lived here most of her adult life, with her visually white but English and Indian spouse. We have talked many times about the racism accepted in our town. Her child has been one of the children objected to by my neighbors. Life in the White American gaze is something she knows well. Unlike some of our other South Asian friends she has never reacted rudely to gatherings including African Americans. I thought I knew her well and I would have said she was fairly free of bigotry (while adding the caveat that none of us are free of internalized or assumed bias).

Referring to a new employee that had made a minor mistake my friend vehemently said "Ah god, that fucking nigger."  She then doubled down in the face of my shock to assert that we'd be better off without "every one of them, fuck them all" as casually as she would call me Baby Girl or order lunch. I walked out in shock. How could someone I thought I knew well have such deeply felt bigotry? As I processed my feelings I found myself examining why my emotional reaction was one of rejection. I have white friends who are deeply racist. We have passionate conversations about race in America. I've actually, if enough wine has flowed, been referred to as "the nigger lover" at parties. Why did this reaction from her bother me more than the same reaction from them? I realized it was because "she ain't even white, tho." Without examining it I was operating with two sets of standards. There were the views I required my white friends to listen to and the views I required my South Asian friends to actually hold. I had compartmentalized the intricate issues of South Asian color and class as their own concern while expecting adherence to my views on American color and class. I was viewing the conversations I have with my white friends as a need for education but viewing bias in my South Asian friend as a character flaw. "She ain't even white tho."

Five days later I still don't see resuming my relationship with her. There was a degree of hate in her voice that would also cause me to drop a white friend exhibiting it. (Trayvon Martin's death cleaned my address book right the hell out.) There is also a lesson here that I have not finished learning. Do I need to raise my standards for White American conduct? Probably. (Almost certainly. There are a lot of Roger Sterlings in my life.) In the moment that she said "nigger" a new reality formed, one that requires me to examine quite a bit about myself and my operating principles. Learning that I had different expectations for different groups is going to require long contemplation.

Bear Control

I just read a tragic news story... Apparently a 5 year old in Kentucky had his entire family eaten by his pet Kodiak Bear. Well, not his entire family - his Grandmother was able to give a brief statement to the press:
"He just slathered them in raw beef before he knew what was happening. No one could have known it would happen."
The family kept the bear in what they considered a safe location - with one leg in an umbrella stand by the dining room table, surrounded by pokey sticks. The family bought the boy the Kodiak Bear from a website that specializes in selling Bears for younger children, as well as shorter poking sticks in primary colors and tiny leashes designed for smaller users. The company's website has a charming animated character, Kenny the Kodiak, and their motto is "My First Man-Eater."

"This is an area of the country where a lot of 5-year-olds own full grown Bears, Lions, Tigers... it's not uncommon for them to receive Boa Constrictors covered in poisoned glue and broken glass fragments for Christmas. This is just one of those complete accidents... 100% unavoidable and entirely unexpected. You just can't do anything about it," said the responding officer, who judged the incident an accident.

"We're still holding the Bear - we'll want to make sure the incident didn't damage any of its teeth and that the jaws are in good working order before we return it to what's left of the family."  
Getting it back in healthy condition will surely bring them closure.

You Must Be This Tall To Ride

Ever since the Marathon I've been holding down the impulse to write about the concept of Enough. Regardless of the situation, you are never doing Enough. In the wake of the Marathon bombings I saw a flurry of activity from people who wanted everyone upset about Boston to know that they hadn't been upset Enough about Syria, or Afghanistan, or India, or the Sudan, or whatever topic that particular person is upset about and wishes everyone else would get upset about too. I see this version of Enough all the time and it makes me feel vaguely violent. It's the political equivalent of walking into a wake and screaming "Do you know how many people die each year? Why didn't you cry this hard for them?" There is a scale of grief. You care about the neighbor dying, but you care more when someone in your house does.

I can't stop hate in the world. I can't even stop it in my HOA. Society is a boulder we continually push uphill. If enough people stop pushing, it crushes those remaining. Sometimes, you get a miracle. Sometimes the boulder clears the top and you can breathe for a second before it starts rolling backward. Trayvon got that breath of relief. Rekia did not. They're still dead. Hate can't push a pebble so we tap it down to push on. If you tell me there is no point to my effort I have to wonder why. How have you defined Enough? Since you are obviously doing it, is it working? Have you solved what you wanted to solve?

I didn't think so.

Some define Enough as a constant engagement with those around them. Some define Enough as an abdication of their daily life in favor of continual activism. Some define Enough as radicalizing and joining a militant group. But the struggle continues. Enough isn't even enough. The Sandy Hook Parents and 90 percent of the American people united to call for a bill making tiny commonsense restrictions to our gun laws. It wasn't Enough. Like Gold Star Parents or the 9/11 Widows the Sandy Hook Parents are now accused of doing too much. If they had just done things differently, then magic would happen and our efforts would be Enough. Bostonians defined Enough as staying indoors while their first responders responded to bombings, murders, carjackings, and shootings. To many people who don't live in Boston, this wasn't Enough. The city of Boston exists because the native people of the area didn't do Enough to repel the invading force of European settlement. In 1642 my ancestor was granted a farm of 92 acres in Watertown (an upgrade from his previous 10 acre homestall). To the people who lived in Watertown before it was Watertown, before he arrived, was there the same inability to define Enough? The struggle is the struggle is the struggle.

To the people who are upset when I don't care Enough, when I don't march Enough, when I don't define Enough the same way they do I say I am out here. I am pushing. We are all together in wanting peaceful coexistence. We are all together in rejecting extremism and radicalism. We are all working on our side of the boulder. It's going to crush us all. Look for those moments to breathe. Make them enough to push you forward. America is largely safe of bombs in public spaces. I'd like that to be true for every nation. I won't squander the privilege of that safety by accepting it may end. There are struggles all over the world. The boulders will always be rolling. I don't deny our part in them, but push on the surfaces I can touch with the strength I have. It might not be Enough for you, but it will have to be enough for me.


*The tipping point for this rant was this Salon article, more specifically the passage: "Don’t look the other way and tell me that you signed a petition or voted for John Kerry or whatever. The fact is that whatever dignified private opinions you and I may hold, we did not do enough..." without then defining what Enough looked like. 

Too Big To Fail

I've been waiting for J.C. Penney to replace Ron Johnson since shortly after they hired him. He had a fundamental failure to understand the J.C. Penney customer. While I was not the Penney's customer, I've worked for them and my great-grandfather was friendly with their founder. Actually, let's hear from the man himself.

“We told store managers that, unless they knew their communities and unless they were prepared to enter sympathetically into community life, they could not make a success of their stores.” - James Cash Penney

Penney believed in meeting the customer on their own level. He believed strongly in individual service as a path to success. This is a basic truth of retailing that I rarely see deployed. Even this otherwise spot on article misses that point. The best tool a retailer has is not pricing but staffing. Current trends in retail are to reposition payroll hours into stock and cashier positions while expecting stockers to do double duty as service persons. In some retailers this works. Target has a customer who expects little to no service and a call button system that loudly reminds those in the store that floor personnel are timed in their response. Some retailers staff adequately but train and deploy that staff poorly. (Looking at you, Best Buy.) Staffing is an art, best handled by the store manager, not by a chart from the home office. Retail workers wages have declined steadily. Walking into a store I can tell you who makes what. The paycheck shows in the performance.

Penney's customer is a service driven budget shopper. Their shopper can't (or chooses not to) pay high end department store prices but wants to have the same shopping experience. The Penney's customer is not a person of leisure. They're busy. Generally they know what they want but they are also willing to add purchases. They prefer to order things that are out of stock rather than waste time hunting sizes or styles down. If they like an item, they may order the full color range.  Before Johnson came in Penny's was losing customers by increased centralization of ordering and reduction of staffing. If the Penny's customer has to hunt down their own purchases, they might as well shop at Target. It's not a surprise to me that Johnson wanted to reposition Penny's as Target without the groceries. The problem is that Target already does Target, and quite well. That customer is being served. 

At the top of retail choices are made that lose sight of what those at the bottom of retail know. The key to success is not focusing on the customer you don't have, it's increasing the amount of money your customer spends. Find out what your customer likes and give them more of it. As James Cash Penney knew, this requires local involvement. School event with specific dress code coming up? Let the stores order for it. Lots of size 5 feet in the area? Stop shipping them size 14. When the customer walks into a Target in Miami and sees a wall of ear muffs you might as well throw that merchandise away. The widget model cuts costs and excites Wall Street but it's the retail equivalent of telling the customer you neither understand them nor care to. You see a shipping model with a loss threshold offset by  organizational practice savings. The customer sees a bunch of idiots running this place. 

Penney's is a common tale. (I play a game with former coworkers called "Months Till Closing" where we put major chains on deathwatch.) I've worked for or shopped at any number of retailers who were once Goliath but are now gone. They fail because failure seems impossible to them. They are too big to fail. For part of my career I worked for Service Merchandise. It was a great job with a highly profitable company. We had real benefits, real wages, respect from corporate and a fair amount of local control. They hired a new CEO. This guy was already known to rank and file as the dude that broke Dalton's. He gave his first internal broadcast briefing. I gave notice and sold my stock holdings. It was clear he didn't understand our concept or our customer. In the broadcast he showed serious class blindness by using Spam as the prop for a series of jokes about low profitability. To much of his audience Spam was a luxury purchase, not a punchline. His opening move was to show contempt for the people he was trusting to execute his vision. You know who made a fortune by taking over the Service Merchandise concept? Amazon. 

*Too bad they didn't adopt the profit sharing model of Service Merchandise's founders.

Cheesecake And A Fork

Magritte, a photo by The Physiognomist on Flickr.

There's this actor named Jon Hamm.  Every so often it's pointed out that he's got a rather large dick. Being a slow news week, the latest acknowledgement of his package led to a media frenzy. Knowledgeable sources were quoted talking about on set reaction to the The Full Hamm. Quotes popped up in the usual places from friends of friends who know this guy who walks this dog that once passed by Jon Hamm and wow did that dog react! Reporters asked Hamm to discuss his endowment. Understandably, the actor was not amused by this sexual harassment.

Thus more ink was spilled. Should Hamm expect pants privacy? What does it mean that the age of junk measurement is upon us? Some excellent satire was written using the language usually applied to women's bodies. Discussions are underway about how we objectify women (That new hairstyle is not doing John Kerry any favors. Staffers hide his styling products but he just buys more!) while allowing men bodily autonomy. Except, you know, not really. There was something missing from the last few weeks for me. I did not feel any piece had a real sense of regret for Jon Hamm, the man. While I understand the impulse to come from a place of "How do you like it now, male members of society!" the man has been violated. He has been victimized and I will be happy to cry him the appropriate river.

As a society, we should absolutely not be so obsessed with policing each other's bodies. That includes the bodies of men. The recent focus on Hamm brings to mind an internet conversation I once had with Mark Consuelos. At the time, he was better known than his wife (Kelly Ripa) and was holding a chat for whatever project he was promoting. I asked him about his stint as a romance novel cover model. Consuelos was uncomfortable with it. It's been far too many years for me to recall his exact words but it was obvious that this was a career choice he was not happy to have made, one that he would prefer to forget. We talked briefly about the Cult of Fabio that was in it's heyday and the odd objectification of these cover models by book fans. I hope, and believe, that he understood I was speaking from a place of curiosity (which turned to empathy) and not from fandom.

I am uncomfortable with the way we depersonalize humans once their image has been captured. It might be Man Titty Monday, it might be Turkish Oil Wrestling, but women who would rail against soft core galleries of female celebrities are completely at ease objectifying their male counterparts. The answer of objectification is not more objectification, and yet as Jon Hamm has discovered - that's how we roll. If your coworker came home, cracked open the laptop and began composing explicit sex scenes about you and the boss it would freak you out. It would cross boundaries. It would be very not ok. Yet this is an accepted practice in fan fiction - to write about sexual relationships between actual people. Actors and actresses are told that they have to expect these objectifications as part of their employment. By going to work, they have invited this.

I can't agree. I have never agreed. There is a privacy we should each be afforded as humans, a line that is crossed so often we forget it exists in their lives, as it does in our own. Finding an individual attractive, admiring their publicity shots or collecting a gallery of ridiculously photogenic people is normal. Viewing other humans as something consumable, something to be examined and used in whatever way the viewer feels appropriate is simply wrong. When we encounter it, our reaction should always be the same. Regret. Sorrow. An understanding that something undesirable has taken place.

I wrote this piece earlier today. I was thinking in terms of celebrity and online culture. A man I've known casually for almost two decades told me something I'd never known about him. For 16 years he moonlighted as a male stripper. It was, he said, degrading dehumanizing physically painful work he would never wish on anyone. Men were generally respectful, possibly as a result of the homophobia of the time. Women, especially once drunk, became frighteningly aggressive. It was routine for them to yank on his dick, to tug his concealed sexual organs into the open without warning or permission. Stripping was a life that once he started, he had trouble leaving. If he knew now how he would feel about it, it's not a life he would have chosen. But at the time, it seemed an ideal second job. The days turn to weeks to months to years to decades to bad memories that you don't shake. Those women saw their fantasy, not the man in front of them. Fantasies don't require consideration. By showing up for work, their consent is presumed. To all of them, whoever they are, my support.

Fair Rarely Means Balanced

This is about specifics and about generalities and about all points in between. Really, it's about the life cycle of an open mind. I've lived on the internet for enough years to know better but I always hope. I hope that whatever community I wind my way into, on whatever topic, will resist the quiet whispers of the Civility Police. You would think, as a person that moderated boards for AOL before that was a badge of shame, that I'd know better.

Here's how it goes.

Someone (or a group) decides the problem with their current habitat is an excess of moderating. They decide to form a new group where open conversations are the rule, not the exception. Big girl (and boy) pants are handed out. The community grows because people enjoy open conversation. Fervent disagreement educates as much as it link baits. Eventually, the community faces a crossroads. Are they chicken, or are they fish?

Always, the question comes couched as the question of civility. It's the tone argument. The strong voices, the ones that build the community, attract conversation, and distinguish it from the bland, are undervalued. There are important people not being heard. Fearful people. Quiet people. People who send emails and whisper in ears and quake in the self satisfied boots of the pious. It doesn't have to be a book community. I've seen it play out in places as absurd as travel communities. On the face of it, it seems so reasonable. Rather than institute an ignore feature or tell people to man up, the choice is made to change. To become more like the place they fondly remember as great, before the moderation drove away the strong voices and the self policers.

The thing is, I've never been interested in people who hold civility up as a goal. The poison they drip is far more vile to me than the frontal assault of a true believer. When asked "You don't want to make people uncomfortable, do you?" I say yes. Yes I do. I want the gays to marry, the people of color to party at the beach, the country club to celebrate Purim, the headscarf to be worn at the school play. Yes. I want people to be uncomfortable. I do. When you are uncomfortable you are forced to examine if you are right.

Then the argument is made that passionate debate is still welcome. Just not with that voice, not in that tone, why are you taking it personally? Yes, these people may be directing their words at you but... and but.. and but. Wait your turn. Raise your hand. Think about the other person but don't expect them to think about you because you, you're loud. You make people uncomfortable. You want them to defend their words instead of bask in them. Often those who are most vehement in their tone arguments are the most hateful, the least inclusive, the quickest to uphold the status quo and wave away the dissent. Class issues? Race issues? Pish and tosh. Pish and tosh, we say! How you speak becomes more important than the content of your speech. More important than the content of your character.

Civility goes hand in hand with solidarity. Trust in us! Support this feminism and that feminism will follow! Believe in the past instead of the present! Every book is a good book for someone! Toxic messages are in the eye of the beholder! If that fails, then it is generally pointed out that the ball is owned by the rule maker, and the rule maker makes the game. Which is why I run a series of blogs instead of communities. I believe that communities belong to those who populate them, not those who begin them. A lack of civility is not abuse. People no longer sharing your taste is not disdain.

Some of you have been in communities with me for ten, twenty, maybe even thirty years. You know that nothing I say here is inconsistent with any position I previously held. Some of you don't know me at all, and that's fine. Choosing to honor the whispering horsemen of the nicepocalypse isn't a crime. Having the right to take an action is not the same as being right in your actions. Communities rise and fall, they struggle on or enjoy rebirth. Somewhere there is someone thinking about building a new one. It may be six weeks, it may be six months, but one thing I know about the internet is a new home is always under construction. My choice forever is to go with the loud girls, the proud girls, the girls we say we want but almost never support.

Social Media - "Dear God You're Doing It Wrong"

Look at how I mess people's feeds up.  Land sakes.

"Ok, cool. Thank you for the Magpul background, I had none of the Colorado information.
So, I'll try to keep my response thoughts orderly but I will be long winded and I apologize...

Weaponry:   I gotta go back to flashbangs.  Or for hyperbole myself - I am not taking a ride in Air Force One any time soon, but in a literal sense you and I both own it.  Sure, I could drop insane money and buy my own fancy plane, crew, and bodyguards, but not unrestricted secure communication, prioritized air space clearance, military fighter pilot escort, unrestricted landing clearance... the president is The President, but he's a citizen too.  I'm not put off by any of that.  His function and role is different than mine.
So to scale it back down to police - I am not doing what they are doing.  I am not kicking in crack-house doors, or serving warrants to child prostitution ringleaders, or detaining a bank robber in LA wearing body armor.  I don't have that beef.  The only time I would legitimately need the muscle (because let's face it, MS13 don't give a crap about me and if enough of them did that I would need a full AR15 mag to balance the issue I would already have bigger problems than a rifle would be solving) is if my beef were with the police/feds.  Besides "I enjoy having them" which is a fine consideration in a free society, I don't honestly see another driving reason for mass sale beyond the argument that is often brought up about keeping fascism back. 

History: we have 200 years of that type of fascism pretty much not being how things are done here.  I mean we brutalized the African and Island population we brought over, we cheated and murdered the Native Americans,  Mexico?  I mean hello.  We wage financial and cultural fascism all over the place, but actual dictatorship?  The Civil War was initiated by the states - not really citizen soldiers, but actual government against itself - essentially Sequestration with cannon fire by the people who liked living off free labor.   I have said before but will again that if that type of dictatorship/fascism which proponents claim amassing guns would solve were to start, no number of private citizens would do anything here but get themselves killed in tank/jet/howitzer/drone blasts.  Our culture is not the fragile banana republic type of culture in which the results of armed conflict would ever be in doubt.  If there were division in the military, well, they'd already all have guns and I promise there would be an unequal access to firepower there too. 

Now, I am passingly familiar with what a d-bag Castro, Raul, Ernesto  and their buddies were/are.  My real historical base is the internet trope of the Nazis, because I've studied it and have family members who lost staggering numbers of ancestors in camps.
I would never say it can't happen here.
In fact, it's very easy to happen (or something functionally identical as far as political control goes) here if there were any kind of gain by doing it, but it would be with the frog slowly brought to boil by changes in legal process, like extraordinary rendition, harsh legal penalties for whistle-blowers and cognitive dissidents, obfuscation and marginalization of political protest free speech, removal of habeas corpus, military strikes on US citizens, censorship and anonymous monitoring of communication...
Note that ALL of this has already happened and continues to at this moment.  For me, lefty idealistic rationalist that I am, it's about corporate control.  The occupy movement illustrated what many born of a certain color already knew from experience - that the police are not here to protect us in terms of life or liberty (court cases have ruled that explicitly, actually) - they are here to protect the societal norms and to protect industry and property. 
So yes, Virginia, we're a nation that's owned, but the fascism comes in terms of capitalistic trade-off.  Eli Lilly keeps my diabetic butt alive at the retail cost of $300 a month just in insulin, and that's criminal, but mostly because of how our political system is paid for by people working for Eli Lilly. 
From my position the NRA is very similar, in that it's their paycheck to sell guns and to make gun sales more common.  The only difference for me between the two is that Pharma pays dollars to keep their costs high because they're not able to increase market by convincing people to become diabetic (ambien/adderall different story), which causes people to die from financial hardship and lack of medication or care.  The gun lobby pays dollars to keep their volume of transactions high and as unfettered as possible because hey - government might take you in the night, buy more guns.

 I might think that the astoundingly high gun death rate the US enjoys compared to other industrialized nations is reason enough to do something (new law or just changes in existing practice) to curb that pattern.  You should check out that slate.com crowd-sourced running tabulation of gun deaths in the US since sandyhook.  The numbers are fantastic and the data is hard to compile by design. 

To bottom line my position - if the reason for arguing equality in all gun type access is sport and a general argument for Constitution, I would not dismiss that out of hand, but I would strongly weigh the totality of gun violence which no other sport enjoys against specific subsections of the hobby if any strides could be made in curbing the death toll. 
If the reason is tactical from a law and order position, I think the position is worse, perhaps more damaging than redundant..  I strongly believe that just as knowledge of language structurally changes our brains and modifies the way we literally think, there is a demonstrable effect of culture on a society's expression and even our understanding of possibilities.  If we earnestly look at gun ownerships and accept increasing militarization as our option for political voice, then guns will ultimately become the only option we can imagine... and I think that if that were to happen, we'd have nothing left to fight for but real estate and empty slogan, because our sense of political, and cultural identity would already be forfeit. "

Good Intentions Gone Wrong

My third grader was assigned a black history month project. Kids were instructed to write six letters as though they were friends with a major historical figure, who did not have to be black but had to be of some general cultural importance. Whitesplaining and bootstrapping follows. It is hardly Z's fault that at eight years of age she still has cultural baggage to unpack. It's a big culture and she's a little girl. Let's check this thing out without her.


Dearest Zee,

Life on the plantation has been very unusually hard this time, but I'm hoping it will stop. All the fuzz and lint in the air is making me cough. I can't concentrate, so I keep getting whipped. Tomorrow I hope I get to work with Mrs. Cook's husband and not her.

Sincerely, Harriet.


Here I give Z a few points. It's not Harriet's fault she's being whipped, it's a result of external forces. Harriet is not defined as lazy. Z can't be expected to realize a young female slave might avoid the master.


Dearest Harriet,

I am so sorry that you have to deal with that. I hope that you get to work with her husband instead also. Please have some good news next time!!!!

Sincerely, Zee


Here things start to go, um, South. While Z is appropriately sorry she doesn't really get what whipping is. Harriet is encouraged to be less of a downer. After all, mail should be happier.


Dearest Zee,

Well I can tell you that I have some good news. I got to go back to my family, but I have to work in the field. I just helped a runaway slave but got hit in the head with a weight. It left a scar, but I'm ok now.

Sincerely, Harriet


Whew, at least Harriet isn't always going on about her problems. Because Z is not here for that. I give her points for bringing in family separation and the risk involved in helping a fugitive.


Dearest Harriet,

I hope you don't have an aching head too much. I hope you get treated with respect by not just other slaves, but by slave owners too. I would also like to find a way to help you keep your hope that you will find a way to be a free person.

Sincerely, Zee


At the beginning of this letter I thought we were headed up. Z shows compassion for Harriet and a desire to improve her life. Unfortunately, while acknowledging her own helplessness she accepts the reality of slave owners. Z stops short of wishing slavery would end, because that's radical. Z wishes for her friend's freedom, but not an end to slavery. This is an interesting bit because it falls into Having A Black Friend. Z has inadvertently shown the typical response of a white friend to injustice suffered by a person of color; a desire for the specific person to be well treated rather than an end to the system that mistreats.


Dearest Zee,

You are the best friend ever! And thanks to you, I am finally free! There was a man who worked on the same plantation as I did named John. He was a free slave so he wanted to stay but I didn't want to keep being a slave. I used the skills my father taught me and got help from a Quaker woman. Now I am free! I have money! Thanks!

Sincerely, Harriet


Where do we start? Z has given a few encouraging words and some empty wishes to Harriet and in return Harriet has ceded all the credit for her escape. Without that lightbulb moment, our fictional version of Harriet might have stayed under the whip. Instead she bootstrapped her way over to the Quakers and increased her economic standing. This is where I realized how deeply ingrained cultural fictions are in historical lessons at the grade school level. Because dude. Z wrote this. With sincere intent.


Dearest Harriet,

That's great! I hope you can get your family and friends to freedom too. I'll try to meet up with you sometime soon! Hey, you know, you should help other slaves too!

Sincerely, Zee


This is just so brilliantly dominant culture that it could be satire. Z blithely accepts the credit then offers to party. As an afterthought, she creates the Underground Railroad. The fictional version of Z doesn't offer to help the fictional version of Harriet Tubman because anti-racism work is hard and it's something that should be done by people of color. I'm not sure how Z sees the fictional version of herself or what she considers her obligations to be in this relationship. I'm going to ask her when she's ten.

High Finance

Pictures and Words (XKCD is out sick today)

Bank: I stole a slice of pie.
USGVT: We could arrest you but we won't, give us a bite instead.
Bank: I just stole another.
USGVT: GDit! You owe us another bite.
Bank: No, dude seriously... I just stole a third piece and legit I think I'm going to be sick.
USGVT: It's OK, Bra. We've got a third fork.
Bank: I got a fourth slice, but I pulled it from that baby murderer's pie you said I wasn't allowed to give pies to. I gave him the rest.
USGVT: You are seriously too big to jail. Like, I don't think we have a prison wide enough. Fat ass. Come here and give us another bite.

Then they tousle each other's hair and have sex.
The End.