King Canute Commands the Sea to Cease It’s Roiling and Tidal Surf

Posted September 25, 2013 by Radha
Categories: Community

The discussion was on the Facebook post of a friend, Gillian, who was bemoaning the ways that movies changes short stories and books. I actually think it was likely to have been occasioned by the new FOX television show, Sleepy Hollow. Which soon led into a diatribe contra Burton, worthy of come of Augustine’s best contra dances with truth and damnation. 

But, as the venom toward the new got more intense with other of her friends adding to the gleeful impossible attempt to have the sun stand still over Gibeon I got rather tired of reading the babble and decided to overwhelm the lot with brilliance and fact. 

An open letter to my dearest Gillie. 

Golly, all this chatting about finding “a way to break the static unchanging nature of the written word – or at least ignore it.” and more about “sacred words” leaves me with a definite urge at 9:54 a.m. to go mix a margarita and wait to see if the world doesn’t perhaps implode today. 

Prithee, beloved friend, tell me exactly how one goes about determining “the author’s original intent?” Spoz that we’ve anything extant that even approaches anything Homer might have sung in the hall of the rulers in Argos or Sparta? Or likelier  the old goat never sang in those towns at all, but perhaps on Lesbos or the Ionian Shore. How about the original intent of the “Framers” of the U.S. Constitution in Philadelphia in 1787 or the scribblers and folk-tellers who composed what we quaintly refer to today as the Christian Bible? 

Suppose any of us that anything like original intent or wording is feasible? Even more to the point: I began reading this morning Chalmers Johnson’s, The Sorrows of Empire. Given the vicissitudes of the publishing trade I wonder how much of what I am reading fits exactly with what he wrote in his early drafts? Let alone after some editors at Henry Holt had ministered gently to the manuscript. Alas, like Job, Moses, Ezekial, Isaiah, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, James and “the Framers” Mr. Johnson has sailed to the West, entered the Somerlande, gone through Sleep’s dark and silent gates, taken Charon’s pirogue to the nethershore. In short, he’s dead and cannot any longer be asked about the current accuracy of his work. 

I know you know as well as I know that there is only words that we decide are sacred. No one gives much of a flip if I am accurately reciting the “original” version of “London Bridge” or “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary.” All else is posing and pedantry. Or so it seemth to me. 

Okay, or should I write that word differently? OK? I rather like Tim Burton’s “Sleepy Hollow.” Although I am fully cognizant that it hews not at all anything like closely to Irving’s short story. But, then Irving no doubt took more than a bit of license with some old knickerbocker’s tales of the Hudson Valley and most assuredly did so when he presented us with his Moorish and Spanish tales. Yet, in spite, or because, of that, I quite enjoy all those works of Washington Irving. 

Language is never crystalized or solid, ever. Never has been and you, of all my friends must, in your great erudition, know that. (None of this is sarcasm, btw, but some is exasperation.) Augustan Latin becomes Aurelian Latin, becomes the Latin of Odoacer, becomes Gothic, becomes, Lombardic, becomes Milanese becomes Italian or something of the sort, but whatever the track it becomes other than it was. 

Depp and Burton, fr’instance, work in the medium of sight and sound, pictures rather than words for definition and nuance. How often have I tried to paint portraits or pictures of people and places with the written word and bemoaned the fact that I am not a plastic artist? Yet, words can paint pictures and language is nothing if not a plastic art. Damn near, it’s as plastic and fluid as water itself. 

So, if we might could we sound somewhat less like a chorus of old blue-haired ladies sitting at tea of a Saturday morning bemoaning the passing of the dashing Gen. Robert E. Lee and his Army of Nawthuhn Vuhgeneeah? You know better. 

If you don’t then drive out to Malibu or somewhere approximate and drag Canute’s chair along with you. Place it at the edge of the waves and command them to recede. But, first, message me with your wager on your ability to have them obey thee.  

I miss stuff from my childhood as well. I also think it’s absolutely imperative that Layamon’s Brut and Malory’s “L’Morte” are preserved as they have come down to us. I want my children to appreciate Chaucer and Homer. I think schools of economics and MBAs ought be dismantled and ground into dust and everyone be taught from cradle to grave the liberal arts whose Queen is literature. More o’ humanity can be taught in a Shakespearean sonnet than will ever be taught in any depratment at Georgetown or George Mason, Columbia, Penn, Princeton, Harvard, Oxford or Cambridge, except in their faculties of Literature. 

I know, as well, that the sea will not stop roiling at my command and that the rose’s bloom is soonest blown when I determine to preserve her. For what is a rose encased in plastic or concrete or melted glass? I know not; but, ’tis something with a name other than rose. Any attempt to halt creative use/s of the past by those alive in this moment are doomed to fail. And should. 

Much love, 

Radha

Comments: 3 Comments

Let Freedom Ring and Why It Doesn’t

Posted August 30, 2013 by Radha
Categories: Activism, Authenticity, Community, Connection, Intersectionality, Otherness, Social Justice
Tags: , , , ,

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be engulfed, every hill shall be exalted and every mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plains and the crooked places will be made straight and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.

This is our hope. This is the faith that I will go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.

With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.

With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to climb up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning “My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my father’s died, land of the Pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring!”

And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. So let freedom ring from the hilltops of New Hampshire.

Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.

Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.

Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.

But not only that, let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi and every mountainside.

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every tenement and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old spiritual, “Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”

So, there it was, the last three minutes of a speech that was heralded fifty years later as somehow the accomplished end of American progress toward the freedom of its citizenry. Yet, after fifty years there is still so much to do to end discrimination, so much to do to end the hatred of men and women for other men and women who are “othered” in the fashion that we other those we are afraid of, jealous of, ignorant of and distant from. There is so much to do to give folks a chance to reach the heights they are capable of scaling.

People don’t care much for the alien to themselves. We find comfort in sameness and the quotidian reality that we first call boredom and then call real life. Likely enough, that’s one of the reasons that the topic of conversation at work places and in bars and parks or between classes at school is the latest sending offs from America’s Got Talent, American Idol, Dancing With The Stars, etc. ad infinitum.

We watch the same television programming, have many of the same interests, find many of the same things exciting, many of the same things irrelevant, or boring. Our interests, dreams, fears, and habits have become predictably similar over the past fifty years. We continue to fear foreign tyrants, but how they have shrunk. Nikita Khrushchev had substance and Bashar Al-Asaad hasn’t. Bashar doesn’t seem the sort of fellow who could have been a part of the Soviet Army that fought brutal and terrible actions against the German Army in order to save the world from Fascism in World War II.

He is likely more cultured and at home with the nuances of western etiquette than Khrushchev was. I cannot imagine Mr. Al-Asaad removing his shoe and banging it on a desk in order to gather attention to himself. All in all, Bashar Al-Asaad isn’t even a quarter as scary as was Saddam Hussein; he makes the puniest villain USA has come up against since the Grenadian Prime Minister Maurice Bishop. Seriously? Are we to believe that Al-Asaad is the predicted MENA Antichrist?  The very idea is laughable. Resurrect Slobodan Milošević instead! Send him to MENA and I shall believe in the Antichrist.

Even Miley Cyrus appears a larger threat to western civilization than poor ole Bashar. Her loose tongue, inadequate twerking, skimpy bikini, and appropriation of black culture, however, seem far less fearful than the platinum wave and curls, the voluptuous and sensuous body and lips of Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn seemed much more of a threat to the sexual purity and the suburban white mores of teenaged children than the sad commercialized late-teen rebellion of Ms. Cyrus is ever likely to be.

Those sorts of things are what I am taking from this week. Pageants of outrageous (really?) singers and dancers, a churning of rhetoric that attempts to turn a sad man fighting for his ongoing rule of a country most Americans cannot find on a map that isn’t in the back of their King James Bibles, and the sublimely ridiculous ringing of bells on California mountains, Mississippi molehills, Stone Mountain, Lookout Mountain, somewhere in the Adirondacks and in the Alleghenies (one presumes) to mark, yesterday, August 28th, 2013, to mark how we now let freedom ring in USA (just as Dr. King dreamed of.)

Really?!!  Are we seriously tempted to believe that the nakedly “made for media” displays of Miley Cyrus, the proposed neoliberal Syrian debacle, and the ringing of bells are hallmarks of USA freedom? If so, then the Wal-Mart-ization of USA is complete.

Yes, a serious feminist argument should be pursued, maybe, to examine the cultural appropriation of black indigenous art by white girl entertainers like Miley Cyrus, Gwen Stefani and Madonna Ciccone. But, I prefer those deconstructions come from women of color about their own feelings on such appropriations. So far only one I have read has been by a woman of color. Maybe that’s not the place just now to have my eyes locked on. [But, I have found one that reads like twenty, here: http://tressiemc.com/2013/08/27/when-your-brown-body-is-a-white-wonderland/ ]

On the other hand if we can carry forward a serious discussion of Dr. King’s notion of freedom and how it will ring (please, no choreographed bells on various hilltops or mountains, again) in these states; then we also begin a discussion that may bring, sooner rather than later, us to the end of spectacles that distract us, like that of Miley Cyrus.

That discussion might also bring us to the end of this ridiculous notion that American businessmen like the laughable Koch brothers and the even more ludicrous Sheldon Adelson should be making policy for the country either domestic or foreign. Toss in Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Jamie Dimon, and Lloyd Blankfein. In fact, we might even come to the point where there is no longer work for the neolibs like Bill Kristol, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and his marionette daughter to advocate the use of national resources for private gain and the enslavement of the world for the gain of the very few.

Such an end would mean the end of interventions like the proposed rocketing and bombing of Syria and the resulting mess that will make Benghazi look like a Ripon Society picnic.

What I find missing in all of that mire above is this: “The greatest purveyor of violence in the world : My own Government, I can not be Silent.” That’s the Dr. Martin Luther King that we don’t hear about anymore.

But, that too was Dr. King, in the final year of his life. That was the Dr. King that stirred hatred within white folks and within the business establishment who were all white males. That was the Dr. King who intersected the lives of all those who sought liberation from the great oppressive beast of American hegemony. That was the Dr. King who the pundits and talking heads could not look in the eye and maintain contact with. That was the Dr. King who still inspires not simply members of his own race, but those of us who intersect with his sense of justice and dignity for all people. That was the Dr. King who could have lead women, lesbians and gay men, transgender folk, the poor, the working class (forget that silly bourgeois idea that we are now all part of the bourgeois if we have a job of any kind.) That was the Dr. King who had to die before he started something that would sweep the country like a great tsunami and wash clean the Augean Stables of Wall Street and Washington D.C. Except that great flood has not yet been unleashed. That flood of clean water still awaits all of us or all of our children to unleash it.

That was the Dr. King who may have been the first child of the promise evoked by Lincoln when he said “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

There is our charge. There is the work that we must do. We must see that our country stops being the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. We must bind up the wounds of the nation that accrue from the materialistic amorality of capitalist dominion and propaganda. We must comfort the woman or man who bears the battle against the death-dealing rejection of the community of all humanity. We must soothe the ones who have fallen beneath the wheels of the fine-grinding machine of competition rather than into the soft embrace of empathy.

It is our duty on this fiftieth anniversary week of the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom in DC to dedicate ourselves to a renewal of human compassion and to the beginning lessons of the human reality that we must have one another in order to thrive. We all face defeat when we compete rather than cooperate. We must draw those lessons into each of our lives and learn to live to embody the better angels of our beings rather than the devils that call us to the slaughter and enslavement of the other. That will be when we reach the point where we are all on the road to find the best in ourselves and others. When we reach the knowledge that humans aren’t on the planet to make the phantasmagoric will-o-th’-wisp of money, but to reach the hearts and souls of one another. It will be then that we can all raise voices as one in the words of that old Negro spiritual, Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”

Comments: 8 Comments

Getting Down To The Quick (And The Dead), Or, Send Me An Expert

Posted August 26, 2013 by Radha
Categories: Authenticity, Communicating, Expert Opinions, Imperial Decline, Neoliberalism
Tags: , , , ,

Recently I had occasion to once again be in the midst of a discussion of Chelsea Manning and, once more, I found myself defending her against someone who seemed to me to be not only pedantic and pompous, but who also carried herself as though she was to the upper classes born. (I grow rather tired of the discussions at this point and do not see why my interlocutors refuse to admit their stubborn adherence to untruth and unreason when all they need do is to agree with me!) Ah, if only the world were a better place. 🙂

The friend who was acquainted with us both later informed me that the person I had been engaged with was considered an expert on military matters and taught in a school like West Point, or the Army War College. If not at either of those places then perhaps it was Citadel or VMI. Honestly it’s difficult to recall.

I wasn’t quite sure what to do with that information. Nor was I certain at all why my friend was telling me that. She sounded as though I had, perhaps, not respected the expert opinion enough. (Or perhaps, likely enough in fact, I was simply misreading her intention. Perhaps she was struck that I’d have the piss and vinegar to argue with someone certified by the television newsy opinion makers as a bona fide “member of their club of experts.”)

My thought both during the discussion and afterwards was, “So?” Yeah, I suppose that I am irreverent and certainly lack deference to authority. Most any authority, in fact. I think I must have inherited that from my Daddy. We both fit the profiles of the Meyers-Briggs Personality Inventory INFP person. Which means we have an internal sense of morality that doesn’t always track with what the traditional sense of that is in every instance.

After my friend had given me the information about this maven of the national security/military/foreign policy establishment I started to consider what her genuine expertness meant in the larger frame of human relations in general and more exactly what that means in terms of Anglo-American culture. (I think when I say that I am thinking of white Canadians, Britons, Aussies, New Zealanders and Americans. Insofar as as non-white persons have been inducted into white culture it would also apply to them: think Barack Obama, Condolezza Rice, or Oprah Winfrey as examples.)

Our culture authorizes experts. They manage to get vetted in the same way that the CIA, NSA, FBI, GCHQ, MI-5 or MI-6 vet their agents or collaterals. These women and men get tested frequently and the result is an almost uniform support of neoliberalism and its place as the “sensible” way to proceed in the world. You see that example in David Petraeus and Matt Lauer as well as with all the newsy talking heads whether they be employed by Fox News, MSNBC or BBC. There seems to be a level of belief in the current paradigm that’s required to become or be seen as an expert in any particular area of concern.

Upton Sinclair famously said: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” Thus, the expert with whom I was engaging and why afterward I saw nothing at all except that she has her prejudices and I have mine. Mine aren’t currently hinged on maintaining a particular lifestyle or level of income. However, we both are confirmed in those prejudices by the people we tend to speak with daily.

When I am in a milieu I tend to conform consciously and unconsciously to that milieu. If the people with whom I discuss foreign policy or the trial of Chelsea Manning have a neoliberal cast of mind they are likely going to see her conviction as something that was good and meet and pretty much a foregone conclusion. After all, she was emotional in the ways that she acted and rather naive in the way in which she carried out her mission of disclosure. She didn’t cite the proper values and they will also, perhaps, inform us that the releases she made were not the important releases that she might have made with better skill and organization.

See, that last bit. They will be THE ONES WHO KNOW. They have all the relevant data and their minds work in that military-industrial complex-y fashion. They are perfectly at home discussing Iran with Bill Kristol. The entire pompous ass image is cultivated, not discarded. The expert HAS to say: “I know better than you. That’s why they pay me the big bucks.” “I have the lifestyle I maintain because the other very important people in the Anglo-American establishment credentialed me to be an expert.” (OMG! Henry Kissinger leaps to mind. I sincerely hope that my interlocutor doesn’t have the hopeless track-record of Kissinger who has basically gotten everything that’s happened in the world since 1964 wrong, wrong, wrong.)

Yet, he is credentialed and continues to hold those credentials at all the chic Manhattan and Versailles-on-the-Potomac shindigs. Gee whiz, he even still feigns to “advise” Republican presidential hopefuls. They feign listening to him.

The experts never step down, just as they never back down or admit abject failure. They don’t need to. Their masters only mostly need the public experts to, like my interlocutor, make intelligent-sounding noises for the television in order to maintain the faith of the masses that America is the greatest nation, the greatest people, who ever were. (And by extension that applies to the rest of the grand Anglo-American white folks leadership ranks.)

Lived experience isn’t usually a requirement for becoming an expert. Maintaining the party line is. It’s very hard for an expert who doesn’t maintain the party line to get their credentials for television and policy-making. I think of Noam Chomsky or Buckminster Fuller. Both are/were, rightly, famous and praised; but neither were ever taken to the breasts of the elite.

When one gets down to the living tissue of the imperial venture, the quick, one sees readily that the accuracy and the prescience of the expert isn’t at all what’s required of them. If they present both accuracy and prescience I am sure that’s appreciated. But, what is most serviceable to the powers that be is the ability of the expert to bowl over the opposition in whatever manner they can. Preferably some way that will preclude that opposition from ever opposing the status quo again.

But, Hell, some of us are just too stubborn to know better. We move the pins while the ball rolls down the alley.

Comments: 8 Comments

Know When To Hold ‘Em And Know When To Fold ‘Em; Or, Sometimes I Just Gotta Know When The Game’s Past My Ability to Argue It.

Posted August 25, 2013 by Radha
Categories: Chelsea Manning, Community, Transitional Dichotomies, Transsexuals
Tags: , ,

I just managed to read this http://www.transadvocate.com/thoughts-on-chelsea-mannings-coming-out.htm over at The Transadvocate.

I have to admit I am happy that Autumn Sandeen has decided to be supportive of Chelsea Manning in spite of Chelsea having released 700,000 documents, cables, films, and other classified material and her having been convicted under a few Espionage Act of 1918 charges and sentenced to 35 years at Leavenworth United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, KS.

In her essay-long peroration Autumn’s managed to exculpate herself in what has been in some quarters (especially ex-military quarters) of the trans community a withering display of hate that could be called internalized transphobia. I cannot say for sure what is in the hearts of those of my sisters (as my experience has thus far been of women using masculine pronouns to refer to Ms. Manning) who have relentlessly used intentionally demeaning pronouns in reference to Ms. Manning.

But, there seems to be an odor that one might identify as either 1) a deep indoctrination into “my-country-and-military-right-or-wrong-or-on-the-way-to-Hell behaviors and thought-processes, 2) an intense hatred of someone none of them have ever met or gotten to know in any way at all, or 3) something else.

Ms. Sandeen makes it rather obvious that she dislikes Ms. Manning, but will (perhaps reluctantly?) honor her request to be called Chelsea and use appropriate pronouns and sex designations. Like I said, I am happy with that. Good on you, Autumn.

But, … (of course, isn’t there always one of those lurking?) But, Autumn doesn’t stop at that. She also feels the need to suggest that Ms. Manning’s timing of her very public announcement was inconvenient for trans-veteran rights groups and perhaps as well for the trans community. Plus, Ms. Manning didn’t run through her announcement with the “Leaders” of the trans community.

I’m sorry, I am aware that my friend Toni D’Orsay has made a list of 100 important folks in the campaign for trans rights. But, I wasn’t aware that Toni had invented a kind of “Elders of Zion” or “Exalted Masters in Zhang-ree-la” council that meets to discuss the moral, physical, and psychological fitness of people who are coming out as transgender.

I will assume that the committee or council is of recent founding as no one ever informed me back in the day at Gender Life or any of the transsexual bulletin boards that such a council existed and would have to pass on whether or not I could be thought of as a woman or a transsexual or any other sort of human being. I just took upon myself the task of transitioning.

Gosh, will I have to pay a fine? Give up my private bits? Serve time under one of the Himalayan peaks for having not inquired as to whether I could or could not ease my condition?

I have to admit, that I imagine that the entire exercise is just plain ridiculous from the git and that Autumn, although entitled to her opinions, has ultimately flunked the test of whether or not she could write about Ms. Manning with even-handedness and equanimity.

That she cannot do so isn’t at all problematic, except insofar as she declines to admit that from the off in this essay.

There’s no doubt that Ms. Manning’s announcement of something that’s been generally known for the past couple of years and has even gone through at least one set of debates and arguments in parts of the trans community has tossed a boulder among the dragon’s-teeth soldiers of the community. Once more the fur flies and people have decided that they get a say-so in whether or not someone else gets to be in the group.

It’s been pointed out to me that this sort of brouhaha is rather usual among people who have a history of being outcasts from the mainline communities of societies/cultures. Yes, it’s true. The most vicious judges of purity and morality are often those who have been lambasted the hardest on their own morality and purity. But, (again) that don’t make it right.

We don’t need the arguments to get hotter and more ferocious, that will avail nothing except the dividing of us into ever smaller groups within the larger community of men and women who are seeking to establish 0.003% of the population as citizens of our various countries, entitled to all the rights and privileges of such folk.

It’s not an easy row to hoe. But, then I have got to realize that I don’t get a say in something that is as intensely personal and anguishing as the realization of one’s trans existence. I have had my opportunity already in regard to me. I don’t get a bite of anyone else’s apple or get to plant their dragon’s-tooth in the soil. All I can do is understand that they very likely have had the same difficulties as I have had, although in this case compounded by trial, prison and an all-too-public outing that was a product of the defense establishment and the governmental establishment that was trying her.

Yep, contrary to the righteously angry who believe that Ms. Manning has divulged her gender identity in order to special plead in her defense; it was the government that released the trans information two years ago, likely in an effort to do exactly what the trans government supporters have done: to discredit her for who she is rather than to discredit her defense.

If you want to think that Chelsea Manning should rot in the bowels of a federal prison, by all means do so. If you wish to believe she is a hero who deserves a Medal of Honor, please believe that and advocate for it. If you believe something between those two poles then, please, do so and be glad that you have done.

Just respect the fact that Ms. Manning’s journey is as personal and intensely held as your own is/was/will be and act that way.

And, seriously, will someone please let me know about the Exalted Masters, the Elders, or the Council of the Trans 100 so I can get my permission slips in order, albeit tardily?

Comments: 6 Comments

Ya Ain’t Gonna Succeed When The Other Lobsters Are Pulling Ya Down

Posted August 23, 2013 by Radha
Categories: Community, Gender, Transgender

For the past week or so I have been the stunned observer of something that 1) pisses me off, 2) astonishes me, 3) causes me to throw-up just a bit in the back of my mouth when I have seen it.

Perhaps it’s not been much noticed by others. A lot of you may have had neither the occasion nor the inclination to be observing what I have observed. That is just fine, after all there’s no reason for something like 99.007% of the populace to pay any attention at all. That 0.003% of the populace is an infinitesimal percentage of people to be affected by the events. Why should anyone feel some sort of deep obligation to be concerned about behaviors or words (insofar as words aren’t a behavior) that affect so few?

I suppose that there is no deep obligation and that one shouldn’t be very much concerned with such things. Unless, of course, one just happens to be transgender, transsexual, trans, trans* or among some other designation of gender non-conforming folks around the world.

Just like schizophrenia has a very firm floor and ceiling among the general population of the world, so does gender non-conformity. For schizophrenia the incidence is between 0.5% and 1% of population, regardless ethnicity, socio-economic cohort, climate, or any other situational reason one might think of. In the same fashion gender non-conformity occurs the world round, in every culture and climate, through every religious group, every ethnic group, every economic group (although one will hear more about caucasian, relatively wealthy females more often that one will hear from or about groups in the group.)

That last bit is likely due to the fact that that demographic is generally, not totally, but generally, best equipped to be able to spend the necessary amounts to “transition” quickly to the gender to which they were born, but couldn’t join with due to body incongruence.

Now, given such a small number of folks one might think that such a group of folks would try to 1) find allies for support and assistance and 2) develop a very tight-knit sense of solidarity with one’s brothers and sisters. One might expect such a group to understand that in a very small herd the culling of three or four could be devastating.

Yet, as I have observed trans groups over the past two-three days I have seen a rather curious spectacle. I have seen a vitriolic and highly toxic wave of poison gas directed toward the coming out of one Chelsea Manning. From the reactions of some one might imagine that they had been personally affected by the revelations that Ms. Manning released through Wikileaks sometime after November of 2009 and prior to May 2010 when she was arrested.

Over the past few days I have read women who have a history of transsexualism accuse Ms. Manning of being a traitor. That isn’t at all accurate for anyone who understands treason as a particular criminal charge with which the government never charged Ms. Manning. However, they did charge her with a few violations of the Espionage Act of 1918. That was a tool that used to facilitate the Palmer Red Raids in November 1919 and January 1920.

Those raids resulted in the detainment and deportation of 249 people, most prominently, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman aboard “The Soviet Ark” (The U.S.S. Buford) on December 21, 1919. The deportees were anarchists, anti-war resistors and assorted radicals that the federal government wished to see out of the country. None were ever convicted in a court of law of any charge resulting in their deportations. They were merely immigrants who were never naturalized.

My, my how familiar this is all sounding. A lot of the same themes continue to froth to the surface throughout United States history: a hatred and exploitation of minority populations, the use of fever-dream accusations rather than evidence to convict people of emotion-laden charges, the use of dictatorial fiat rather than “the rule of law” or democratic election to decide matters of security and propriety.

One could, given the time, likely drawn a good many parallels between Emma Goldman and Chelsea Manning. But, that isn’t what I am aiming to accomplish here.

Instead, I’d like to iterate my cognizance that people of goodwill and placid dispositions can intelligently and logically disagree over the criminal or heroic nature of Chelsea Manning. Just because someone chooses to accept the government argument and be for her conviction on the espionage charges doesn’t make me think of them as “enemy.” In fact, I suppose that what I see as the wonder of it all is that practically any citizen can accept her innocence of the espionage charges in light of the deep indoctrination all of us have had in the great American propaganda machine that basically accepts whatever actions are taken by the government as being justified and divinely-inspired.

My gripe is with women and men who are in some fashion or may be thought of in some fashion as being, having been or possibly might become gender non-conforming and thereby enter into the general and amorphous designation of “transgender.”

Why have I read words in the past few days that proclaim that Chelsea Manning, alone of all her group, should not be granted required medical treatment for body dysphoria while imprisoned at Fort Leavenworth, KS? These thoughts emanate from people who have experienced the torture of having that self-same body dysmorphia. They know the frustration and anguish of trying to live a life that one knows from a place deep inside his or her soul that he or she is not meant to live. They know the release and relief provided even by the initial hormone treatment. Now, how could they, the knowledgeable, decide that this woman is to be tortured as well as imprisoned? How could they, of all human beings, take delight in the thought that she would spend as much as 33 more years in a hell that they have themselves been in before.

But, perhaps the cruelest cut of all is that having not yet exacted what they thought was a fair measure of second-hand revenge these same folks, mostly women, decided that they have every right to willfully mis-gender Chelsea in ways that I know some of them have been mis-gendered.

There’s nothing that hurts any more, verbally, that that mis-gendering. I suspect because each of us has the deep fear than regardless of transitioning that we shall not be accepted by others as our transitioned gender. To hold that breathless fear, sometimes for years, waiting for someone to drop that dreaded “he” or “she” is relentless torture, not lessened at all by the fact that it’s internal rather than external.

I find myself thinking of that story about how the lobsters keep pulling one another back into the bucket for later boiling as one nearly escapes she’s dragged back down by the claws of one beneath her.

I am ready, almost to name names, but then I wonder if that would do more good than harm. If putting a couple of so-called leaders, one a prominent tans attorney and another a prominent trans military service advocate, under scrutiny for their hate-filled actions and words is best for the vast majority of trans folk. Thus, I have decided to simply name their occupations. If you recognize their credentials then perhaps you can write them and tell them what you think of their behaviors.

Suffice it to say that for me they have relinquished any standing either had to be called “leader.” Instead they have shown themselves to be petulant and unthinking self-haters as they poured vitriol and the wish for torment on a sister.

As a community of people — We CANNOT DO THIS SHIT! So stop, repent and make amends. SOON, please.

Comments: 5 Comments

Throwing Away My Vote

Posted January 11, 2012 by Radha
Categories: Authenticity, Barack Obama, Community, Parenting, Women, Women and Men, Writing, WTF!!, Yes
Tags: , , , , ,

“The wealthy, not only by private fraud but also by common laws, do every day pluck and snatch away from the people some part of their daily living. Therefore, when I consider and weigh in my mind these commonwealths which today do flourish, I perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men in procuring their own commodities under the name and authority of the commonwealth.

They invent and devise all means and crafts, first how to keep safely without fear of losing that which they have unjustly gathered together, and next how to hire and abuse the work and labor of the people for as little money and effort as possible.”

Thomas More, Utopia

We have two parties because at the beginning there were Republicans and Federalists. Each represented two different types of wealth: 1) agrarian 2) merchant/industrial.

That moved things along nicely until by 1826 and J.Q. Adams you had the son of the Federalist president being elected as a Republican with the competition from a couple of agrarians, Jackson and Clay.

Then the Democrats from the party of Jefferson for a term unopposed until the banksters of the time managed to invent the Whigs in opposition to King Andrew I and the agrarians.

Eventually the Whigs declined and the Republicans were reinvented as a party of banks, railroads, industry & merchants over against the Democrats who were still agrarians.

The heritage of two parties has been enthroned in USA as something that must be observed. Two choices must be all one gets. There are two parties as there are often two types of wealthy (historically) in USA that often clash. Until one gets subsumed into the other. Then one party temporarily disappears until the elites start battling yet again over what sorts of wealth to privilege.

Currently we have one of those periods where the parties merge and support the only privilege : pirate finance. Every other form of wealth takes third place and the “people” take very little indeed.

Actually the best hope seems to me to found and pick multiple political parties that divide the vote unmercifully. I’d like at least five and probably more like ten parties to exist viably and have anywhere from 20-120 Members of Congress each and the Senate to be divided with no party over about 25 votes, 5-10 parties.

I imagine that would be the perfect scenario for dividing and conquering the 1%. The more the merrier. The more chaotic and in need of coalition the legislative and executive and judiciary branches are divided the better off for those of us who haven’t much wealth at all.

Just look at the history. The turning point of the past century was when Eugene Debs, although jailed drew huge numbers of votes and that was crushed by the red raids and his own incarceration followed by the “prosperity” created by Wall Street to cover their own taking of the country.

The morons today are too greedy and vicious to even feel the need to hide their cupidity and crassness. Yet, one might ask, why should they? They have given the majority of the populace enough drugs and entertainments to mesmerize and anesthetize them and make them insensible of the loss of anything that may have once been termed “democratic” in the piratical and vampiric oligarchic culture of USA.

There exist alternatives to both Obama and whichever clown, seemingly Romney, manages to drive the Republican clown car to the 2012 general election. There are at least these alternatives: Stewart Alexander of the Socialist Party USA, Jill Stein of the Green Party USA and Ross “Rocky” Anderson of the Justice Party. There are alternatives.

Of course what I expect to hear is something like this that I have heard repeated ad infinitum since I was first eligible to vote back in 1972. “If you vote for someone not in the two legacy parties you’ll just throw away your vote.”

I’m not certain how that occurs. How I throw away my vote. For me to vote for Mitt Romney. Ron Paul or Rick Santorum or Barack Obama seems to me to cast my vote, quite literally before and to swine. I voted for Obama in 2008 thinking that nothing could be worse than Bush and the Republicans, only to come to reality sometime during 2010-2011 and see that something could be worse. What was worse was having an ostensible “progressive” push forward not only the practices of Bush-Cheney, but to carry many of those practices further than Bush-Cheney had pushed them.

It seems to me to cast a vote of any sort for any of the bought and paid for supporters of status quo is unacceptable. I also find it unacceptable to cast a vote for Ron Paul who may not be bought and paid for as yet. Why? Because Mr. Paul’s ideas about “liberty” will almost surely mean that he will make an end to civil rights legislation as he may be able and that he will tend to “even the playing field” by making those who have no power “compete” with the oligarchs who already have more power than they or their henchmen know how to use either effectively or for the benefit of anyone other than themselves.

Mr. Paul is a dangerous sort of creature. He’s a true believer in the nonsense of libertarianism which is, at base, a religious view that declares that with “freedom” in “markets” all good things come to exist in abundance. The credo of that religion sorely lacks a grounding in current reality, or any reality. It is a theologically premised politics that imagines purity and ideal as actually existent in the mucking about of legacy wealth, survival of the meanest and most ruthless, and a criminal syndicate in-charge of the country.

That religion never seems to see that it privileges those who are “already-have-more-than-enoughs;” and refuses to see that “markets” are never free but are front-loaded to favor those who control the “markets.”

Molly Ivins telling commentary about George W. Bush that “He was born on third base and thought he’s hit a triple” applies to most of who we term the 1%. I’d suggest that sending the inherited rich to the rooms in Den Hague where Milosevic and others have been tried would make a decent start to unraveling some global problems in order to effect solutions.

Libertarianism continues to promote such privilege and other forms as well, most particularly privileges that affect ethnicity, gender, wealth, countries of origin and various other privileged qualities that exist in USA.

Mr. Paul is positively against war against Iran and against the current monetary system, but he doesn’t seem to be against the military-industrial establishment. That being so, how would he propose to keep wars from occurring? Mr. Paul is short-sighted and doesn’t seem to imagine a world where the current shibboleths do not apply. His religious intensity is both amazing and somewhat frightening.

Thus, we should search out other options. For me to not do so is for me to concede that there are only the two choices that will be given me by the oligarchy. For me to vote for one of those two to “not throw my vote away” would be for me to throw my soul away and surrender meekly to the notion that there is nothing I can do.

Perhaps whichever candidate I chose to grant the privilege of having my vote this year will not win. But, I will also make bold to say that those who vote for either Obama or Romney will, for the most part, have cast their souls and their yearnings away. I’d rather “throw-away” my vote than “throw-away” my heart and soul.

Comments: 3 Comments

Community When We’re Safe; Alienation When We’re Fearful

Posted December 22, 2011 by Radha
Categories: Community, Connection, Fear, Transsexuals
Tags: , , , ,

 

 

Each must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, and which course is patriotic and which isn’t. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your convictions is to be an unqualified and inexcusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let man label you as they may.
                               — Mark Twain

 

I became involved with a rather interesting conversation yesterday on the web. The conversation was among TLBG folk or at least folks who didn’t mind being on a bulletin board with TLBG folk.

I noticed as I read that what might have been a wide open discussion sort of turned into a very closed discussion that obeyed the rules of limits with an almost enforced quality.

As usual, I tossed a few Molotov cocktails, having my own difficulties (as some of you know and others of you know quite well) in coloring within the prescribed lines when it comes to USA, USA society and whatever passes here for culture. We have a kind of casserole culture in USA, USA and it seems to be ruled to a great extent by fear of the imperial storm troopers we refuse to acknowledge exist.

Such lack of acknowledgement in words but strict acknowledgement in actions and speech seems to be a part, most especially, among minority groups in the Empire. The smaller the minority the more acutely aware it seems to be as a group of being able to “Tawk thuh raiht whay, Jeb.”

The topic that was both so very heated and at the same time so very demure was this: “Hey peeps. Any thoughts on the Bradley Manning case’s trans element?”

Seems simple enough, eh? Apparently, it wasn’t, but more on that later. For now let me provide a small background for those of you who are unaware. Pfc, Bradley Manning was a USA USA soldier stationed in Kuwait and stateside during her term of service and prior to being brigged at Quantico, Ft. Leavenworth and, now, Ft. Meade, Md., for her trial.

The takes on the so-called “trans-defense” appear to revolve around a rather common tactic generally called something like “gay panic” “trans panic” or the “twinkie” defense, Basically the defense will argue that some outside force “made” the defendant perform the act under prosecution.

Aside: Warning!! Just to reveal my inclinations at start: I think Pfc. Manning is a heroine and should be released, feted and allowed surgery if that’s what she wants as a reward for possibly single-handedly ending the farce known as Iraqi Liberation this month. USA, USA lost thousands of military and civilian persons, and Iraq lost tens of thousands of its citizenry in this disgraceful imperial escapade. All in a bid to reap the wealthiest and easiest to reach oil field left in the world for Halliburton, Exxon-Mobil and other USA, USA corporate interests. (Among those would be the investment interests of former Veep, Dick Cheney and other administration officials of Bush II who profited, or felt that they would profit, from said invasion and occupation.

That conversation gave me some causes for concern.  For, when I involved myself in it I read things such as these.

“Finally, it should be pointed out that past history shows that traitors come in all varieties of races, religions, sexes, ethnicities, educational and socio-economic levels.” “I also think this is going to hurt us.” “I have to admit that I’m somewhat skeptical about the legitimacy of Manning’s claim of GID.” “I still think he’s a traitor and people have died because of his actions. I’d rather he wasn’t associated.” “Bradley Manning’s gender identity or sexual orientation has nothing to do with the case. They’re using it in as a form of trans panic.” And “Manning’s deplorable defense strategy of exploiting false stereotypes of trans and especially transsexual people brings a teachable moment and an opportunity to point out that gender identities and expressions that differ from birth sex are not mental pathologies.”

 Now, I was born and raised in the American South. I’m pretty well aware of the unthinking patriotism (see Dr. Johnson on patriotism and scoundrels) and gung-ho homer-ism of vast tracts of USA, USA populace. So most of the comments didn’t really singe my bangs. But, those last two came from 1) a friend who surprised me with hir decision that GID had nothing to do with the case and 2) from an activist, who, as you may be able to tell from the quote has done grand work trying to de-pathologize trans lives in terms of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illnesses, V, to be released in future by the American (perhaps USA, USA as they have a number of members in the pay of the government and large corporations that own the government) Psychiatric Association (APA.)

Personally I’d have expected a more wait and see response to both of these folks. Alas, that was not to be, although the second has written me since in a personal letter to correct her notion that she already knew what the defense strategy was going to be, having read it. I continue to admire her, now I shall add her ability to admit she was wrong to the list of her positive qualities.

She was gracious enough to admit both publicly and privately that she had, indeed, jumped to a conclusion.

Which, of course, was my argument all along.

What I thought I was seeing in the thread was the reaction of members in a small and embattled minority strive gallantly to distance themselves from what they expect to be yet another waxing from the professional bigots at American Family Association (AFA,) Americans For Truth About Homosexuality (AFTAH,) Focus On The Family (FOTF) and other right-wing, evangelical, pogram-propagating organizations around USA, USA.

It’s not like there’s no substance to the fears. All of the above and lo, many others as well, have again and again heaped abuse and worse on women and men who have transsexual or transgender conditions in their immediate lives or in their past lives. Even purported allies in TLBG circles like Barney Frank and Cathy Brennan have at best been hateful and dismissive. 

For those other, non-TLBG, folk we are abominations and some of the evilest of the evil. When you’re less than 1% of the population there may be some cause for fear at hatred directed at the group.

 But, back to the intrusion of other transsexual and transgender folk into the defense and life of Pfc. Breanna Manning. (I use that name because of the following excerpt from the chat logs of  Manning and Adrian Lamo.) “ I wouldn’t mind going to prison for the rest of my life, or being executed so much, if it wasn’t for the possibility of having pictures of me… plastered all over the world press… as boy…” 

Breanna, on this blog you will be referred to as who you are. Be aware commenters.  

Thus, seems to me that the defense may well be trying to run a defense that revolves around the fact that Pfc. Manning was under a good deal of stress and that her reactions to that stress were of the sort that may well have caused a reasonable person to believe that she was perhaps medically and psychologically unfit for duty at the top secret codeword shop in which she was employed.

No “twinkies” there at all. Instead a rather usual practice that the military has used for decades if not centuries in persecuting and prosecuting soldiers under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. To wit, when we need your expertise and/or your body because we are desperate for them, we will hardly deign to prosecute you or relieve you of your duties. On the other hand, when it’s convenient, we will use this against you when we realize we no longer require your services and that we need to cover our on asses.

Breanna Manning will not reap the accolades I suggest that she should gather from all of us for hastening the departure of the Imperial Army from Iraq. I find it too bad, in fact, that someone else doesn’t have her fortitude when it comes to stopping this insane Israeli-led Iran bashing and threatening that almost is surely leading to bombs in Iran shortly.

What she does deserve is better from her peers, those of us who have or will transsex because we can no longer manage successfully the noise in our brains and the pain of living our lives as someone not our self.

That is where I was much disappointed in my peers on that thread. They sounded so very much like the very people they fear. We cannot overcome prejudice, overcome the denigration of our selves by becoming the carbon copies of our oppressors. We must appeal to the better angels of their, and our, natures and most especially to a sister or brother.

As I said on the thread, following that first evangelical, Martin Luther, “Here I stand, I can do no other.” 

Comments: 6 Comments

Sexual Objectification and Women Born Transsexual: Finding a Common Language and Learning To Speak Together

Posted December 21, 2011 by Radha
Categories: Authenticity, Connection, Conversation, Feminism, Language, Psyche, Relationship, Transgender, Transsexuals, Women and Men
Tags: , , , , ,

I will warn you before you being to get into the meat of this that it could tweak places in your psyche that will leave you feeling angry, or hurt. Some might feel that I am supporting their views, or standing beside their cause, when I am not. Others might feel that I am disparaging their views, or themselves, when that is certainly not my intention.

But, there I was this morning on that inevitable, it seems, “social network,” Facebook, when I began to look at some pictures posted by a “facebook friend” (this one I know actually, or at least knew, as an embodied acquaintance some time ago.) The pictures were of a party held in a public place. There were a lot of people there.

The party seemed to have a Christmas shindig kinda atmosphere, from the pics, and everyone was dressed fairly formally. It was definitely not a sweatshirt and jeans sort of affair.

A number of the female participants, the pictures were mostly of females, not males, were dressed in some remarkably revealing and short skirted dresses. Just absolutely gorgeous outfits were on display. The group of people seemed very festive. The party appeared to have been at a bar.

I’m intentionally setting a stage and am intentionally hesitant to wade into the deeper end of the pool I am trying to examine. I hesitate, because there are perfectly lovely people who may read this who will believe that I look down on them, I am almost certain of that.

Then I also hesitate because there are certain characters that might also read this and somehow imagine that I have changed my mind and now hew a course more closely aligned with their own political brand.

The truth is rather more complex. (Isn’t it always?) Brief and partisan “takes” are generally not quite so encompassingly valid as we would imagine when our emotions are tweaked. The truth is that through the years I have changed my mind a couple of times about the following subject matter. This particular post isn’t a change of mind; it’s an examination of something I hadn’t consciously noticed. It is an essay about something I’ve noticed and had a sort of visceral reaction to. But, as the reaction has been visceral, I have, of course, not examined it in any depth. I have merely felt it.

[A brief aside, my partner and I discussed feeling and examining this morning over breakfast in terms of practitioner resistance to dialectical-behavioral therapy vis-à-vis client interactions. One cannot continue to talk in opprobrious terminology: “splitting, attachment, borderline” while working with clients who have been so-designated. Why? Because the language one thinks she knows and can “handle” is merely a group of code-words that tack on alleged qualities that do not describe behavior, or even feeling, unless it is the feeling of the therapist herself that’s described by the absence of any sort of clear description. In other words, I can label you a sociopath or a fetishist, but those words tend to show my own prejudices and when I use them they mayn’t relate at all to what you may be talking about while using the same words. Human communication is a dicey game indeed.]

Aside, aside, I’m ready to continue. The party appeared to be one that had a number of transgender people were in attendance. How could I tell? Well, how could you tell? Just accept that I know what I saw, alright? Now, it wasn’t easy to winnow further and “know” whether there were transsexuals and cross-dressers and the so-called genetic women among the party-goers. (Oops, that word almost led to another aside about, Nell, the 1994 Jodie Foster vehicle!)

Anyway, I realized that I was having some sort of reaction. It wasn’t a horrified one, or a dismissive one. It was simply a reaction to some of the dress and some of the motions that I saw in the pictures. Then, I also knew that many of the participants had gotten drunk and that added to the reaction.

Some of you are prolly already aware of the reaction I am about to describe. Hell, you may be having it yourself as you read. The reaction was something like “Damn! Don’t they know how unsafe it is to get drunk and go back out dressed like that? Think of what might occur!”

Ah-ha. Wait for it, I’m getting there.

Preface: I have, on occasion worn skirts that show off what have been a really nice set of legs. I know, “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful!” 1980s, Pantene, Kelly LeBrock: But, how many of us went right out and tried the shampoo and conditioner and still use it, perhaps? Memes are effective, aren’t they? But there is also this fact, anytime I decide to show off some leg I also have this alarm that sounds within me. Actually, two alarms.

Alarm one is: “damn, girl, is that going to be safe to wear?” Alarm two is related but slightly different, “Is this more of the reaction to rape syndrome you struggled so hard to get past?” sigh And here we begin to descend into the matter at hand.

My reaction to the pictures was something like: it must be nice to not have to consider the reaction of men to your dresses.

The second was more like, well, perhaps that’s just the reason, men don’t notice such things. They will dress in ways that do attract attention, do attract those who might not otherwise incline themselves to attraction to that person. In other words, this is just a bunch of men dressing up like women. BAM

There it was. It rose up, that resentment and the “they’re really men” meme. And, perhaps, most of those in those pics would agree that they are men. Crossdressers are not the same as women, right? I think most of them would agree that that’s prolly true. But, they and I both also agree that they are fully human and deserving of every consideration I grant to other human beings.

Of course the rub comes when people who’ve been dysphoric for decades inside of bodies they do not want and don’t feel comfortable with look at those pics and react in some fashion like: “they’re not like me, they’re disgusting and need to be alienated from transsexuals because they will queer the pitch for us.” There are many women born transsexual who would have such a reaction. Yep, I’ve had it as well.

I have both embraced the separatist ideals and have rejected them as well. But, I also have that reaction when I see what I see. And it does strike me very deeply as being exactly what many movement feminists from the 60s and 70s have called it: a sexualization of women’s bodies by men.

But, were it simply that simple, then I’d hardly need to write an essay and try to work out for myself what was and is going on. I think this isn’t as simple as separatist of any sort and Prince-followers on either side are willing to try to make it.

Humanity finds it easy to make wars. Most of us don’t want to work hard enough to make peace. Prolly why divorce rates remain high among heterosexuals and relationships are so hard to come by for many of us. The work can be excruciating. Hence, it’s much easier for Mary Daly to have made hateful statements about a group of women she never took time to know, than it would have been for her to actually get to know transsexuals and crossdressers. Hence, it’s easier for some transsexuals to dismiss crossdressers than it would be for people to work at relationship. (yes, I know, “years ago I was betrayed by crossdressers, transgenders, men, whatever and I will never put myself in that position again.” I respect that, but since your reaction is PTSD-related: the trauma of those betrayals such that you continue to live them, perhaps you could speak with a therapist about working through this ideation?

It’s not that the event was imaginary, or that it didn’t hurt me. The problem was that for years I relived those hours in my mind and acted as if, many times, they were still occurring. Working them out with a therapist wasn’t a sign that I was insane. It was a sign that I was willing to get better and take more charge of my life and who I am. Those are good things, not shameful ones.

Perhaps, there is a more simple answer and perhaps it’s already “out there.” Perhaps we haven’t looked at all deeply into the answer.

Perhaps the answer is, indeed, that it’s a much easier thing for men to sexualize women than it is for women to sexualize our selves. Perhaps the millennia of patriarchal oppression and training have given us a wariness of our own sexual selves.

Perhaps, being “taught” by means of sexual assault or rape of children have made sexualization of one’s self a frightening prospect and to view those who don’t seem to know the dangers is to have a deep and lasting resentment rise inside of one’s self. And just maybe I resent the fuck outta the men who wanna dress in femme garb and flaunt their sexual selves and lead others to think that women are just as fearfully sexual as church fathers and lineages of rabbis have said!

Perhaps, when I can remove the clothing, or remove the light voice or remove the perfume and make-up and the next morning dress in a white shirt, a pin-striped suit, a tie and shoes and then splash on Old Spice and meet the guys at the gym after work. Well, perhaps it IS easier for me to forget just how dangerous it seems to have dressed as a woman the night before and worn a very sexy outfit.

There is resentment. Isn’t there? I can feel it. “Why can’t I?” “Why should I live in trepidation and you don’t have to?” “Doncha know that dress could lead to rape?” — Even among those of us who know better, it becomes so easy to blame the fact of sexual assault on the way a woman dresses, eh? –That training runs deep, doesn’t it? How long is that train you’re trying to brake? That makes a difference in stopping times, doesn’t it?

Layers and layers to uncover and many of us don’t take the time to analyze, to find vocabulary that describes behavior that we can observe and come to some agreement that we can share a common vocabulary. Instead too many of us are involved with sharing our feelings, our reactions, our PTSD with others. Thus, the conversation never gets started because we are at the Tower of Babel and we’re all speaking in different tongues.

I think that if women can embrace our sexuality that would be a very good thing. Instead we have millennia of training and repression that say things like “she brought that on herself.” Did you see what se was wearing.” “How could she get that loaded?” Recriminate, fulminate, enrage.

Those are the contents of too many of our conversations, too many of our attempts to communicate are attempts to communicate instead an incoherent rage and anger at experiences. I understand that, quite well.

I have felt the alienation and rejection of transitioning from the outward appearance of one sex to the outward appearance of my own sex. I have felt the horror, the self-condemnation of the aftermath of rape. I have felt the demeaning sense of having my mouth shut for me by others. I have felt the fear of when will a beating stop and the fear that the next minute would see my death. Those feelings are basically beyond quantification and observation and rational expression while I am enmeshed with them.

When such feelings rule my quotidian existence I cannot conceive of any idea or behavioral expression that might not place me back into fear of immediate death. It’s only when I come to a place where I realize that I may or may not die in the next moment, but I will not die of a rape that isn’t happening any longer. … Then I become more able to find a common language with another.

But that language will not come about through fear mongering about the never before occurred becoming commonplace, nor will it come about through belaboring the obvious: “you are not like me.” It comes only when I see the obvious with the fear of death.

Au contraire, Radha, you are human and so am I. I bleed; you bleed. You desire connection; I desire connection. Perhaps we can attempt to make connection with each other? Perhaps we can, indeed.

But first, we must find a language we can all speak and dismiss the notion that I can somehow quantify the person you are by labeling you in ways that are demeaning and painful and dismissive. None of that behavior makes my point. It only leads to more alienation.

I’ve had that a-plenty in my life. I’d rather not continue to build walls that keep me away from others. The first step for me is learning to be authentic and to demolish the poses I wish to replace the poses I lived before. Blessed be.

Comments: 7 Comments

Syd’s Dragon

Posted December 7, 2011 by Radha
Categories: Alchemy, Children, Communion, Daily Life, Environment, Love, Magic, Relationship, Soul
Tags: , , , , ,

I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children,

you will never enter the kingdom of heaven,

Matthew 18:3

 

 

Sometime last night a facebook friend published the following status.

 

My daughter asked Santa for a dragon again this year. This time she was more specific due to some confusion last year. She got a stuffed animal dragon. This time she has clearly stated that she wants a REAL dragon and it should be as big as our house. Clear specs, but I suspect that Santa will not be able to deliver.

 

What a smart child! And how foreign, it turns out is her way of thinking to so many of us adults who responded to the status. Here’s a sampling.

 

That’s a paradox. Any kid who asks for a dragon clearly has not been good enough to receive a dragon. — Anon.

I’m thinking a video of your house, with CGI dragon.

That or a lump of coal… at least it breaths real fire. — Anon Again


Ask her why does she need a dragon to protect her or fight against. — 3rd Anon

1. Doctor a video of a dragon and your house. 2. Show it to her. 3 Take her outside and show her the coal “droppings” that the dragon left. 4. Explain that Santa is keeping the dragon until she is old enough to care for it (16?, 18? 21?) Good luck! — 4th Anon

Maybe the dragon that you find might have some problems controlling his invisibilty. — Anon Five

There is that facebook game,
Dragons of Atlantis — Mine

I think she wants the dragon as a pet. Maybe something she can fly on occasion.– Mother of Child In Question


That response pulled me up short as I thought of this precocious little girl, arms and legs wrapped around the neck of her dragon as she and it fly north along the Delaware River Valley gorge. Sometimes they’d rise high on summer thermals. Other times they’d glide through whipping wet snow as it falls. They’d visit exotic lands north of here and bring wonder and awe to children and adults watching with opened mouths far below.

Perhaps, I thought, they’d even inspire a return to peaceful pursuits: gardening, small farming, neighborhood barbeques and tramps over hills and through dales. Perhaps the awe and wonder of seeing a little girl and her dragon flying would bring us to our senses and stop the destruction inherent in our American way of life.

What struck me about my own and other adults responses to her request of Santa was the innate inability most of us had in even grasping what this child was about. Our thoughts were about possible “bad touching” or use of the only magic we any longer can believe in: the development of electronic cyber-images. We imagined games or sleights of hand like those of David Copperfield or some backyard magician who performs at birthday parties in the summer.

Or, being thoroughly adults, we stooped to that most adult of responses to our children: the strangulation of imagination and creativity, by passing off what our children see as though what they see isn’t there. Trust me, by the time they are seven or eight it will no longer be there. We’ll have crushed and extracted the wonder from their lives and they will have withdrawn those dreams into the inmost recesses of their souls. Where they will remain; eventually becoming forgotten except to the soul. 

In other words we saw a world without magic and wonder, a world with no peace, no beneficent Nature. We saw only the world we’ve been conditioned to see: bloody in tooth and claw and there to have the last ounce of profit and affluence squeezed from it. We saw trickery rather than relationship and magic. And, of course, we do such things for the best of reasons: we want our children to live in the real world. But is that the world we push them toward when we extinguish creativity and wonder, their abilities to feel awe? 

We as adults have trained out of ourselves the inherent ability to conjure metaphor and creativity and to invent a possible life by seeing quotidian reality a bit off-kilter through the lens of wonder and awe. That’s a human quality that children grasp instinctively. Which leads me to think that since we were all once children that perhaps we once had that same quality and that it didn’t just begin with the children of Gen X. In fact I can distinctly recall the vivid and magical imaginations of a couple of Gen X daughters and of one Gen Y daughter and a couple of Gen Y sons. (Yeah, yeah, they’re all Gen X in relation to me, but they are all also scattered in relation to time.)

So my final response to the parents was this: More of us need dragons so we can fly on them occasionally. Not only would the world be a safer place, but the planet would be full or wonder and awe that we could all see. Rather than just being full of wonder and awe that we seem to miss all too often.

That’s what strikes me as true. Perhaps Syd is that little child who can lead us. Perhaps the memories of my daughters and sons and their own imagination and their own offerings of wonder and awe so long ago can help me recall again the times when I was subject to wonder and awe as well. Recall when the gods and goddesses actually walked the earth and spoke to me. I do remember then. Am I insane for having had the experiences? I rather think not. Nor were you. 

Instead as we, I, “become adult” we, I, am/are expected to replace wonder and awe with shock and awe. Something that also occurred to me as I was making that final response.

We ask for creativity and imagination even as we choke it in the coils of its own beauty and magic.

Americans are rumored to be “hard-headed realists.” I see almost no evidence of that. Instead I see plenty of evidence that our “hard-headed realism” is actually a “head-buried-in-sand fantasy” that allows us to believe less frequently than any other nationality on planet Earth that human caused global warming exists and threatens the very life of all human beings.

Our exemplar of “hard-headed realism” is that of the Koch brothers using their billions to see to it that media and politics steers Americans swiftly toward some terror fantasy world where the last human suffocate, drown, or burn to death in an apocalyptic destruction brought on by greed, gluttony and addictions so severe that we deny their existence at all. Yeah, “hard-headed” means mining the very last dollar out of the planet while the planet itself dies.

Syd, I hope you get that dragon for Christmas. I hope you sit in your yard and converse with that wise old beast. I hope you learn to fly with it and become aware of just how magical the world really is. Unlike Puff, who disappeared as Jackie grew older, I hope your dragon stays with you for the rest of your life and that both of you go on inspiring imagination, wonder and awe in old women who sometimes forget just how gorgeous, amazing, aswesome and wonderful this world is.

You and your dragon keep watch over small farms, farmer’s markets, heritage crops, poetry, music, finger paints and the warmth of a kitchen in the summer when the light stays long and friends gather at the hearth to trade stories and feel how good and awesome it is to be human, and together. *kiss*

Comments: 11 Comments

The War At The End Times, Redux

Posted December 5, 2011 by Radha
Categories: A Life, Authenticity, Connection, Family, Memory, Relationship, Soul
Tags: , , , , ,

I received a notice today in email from some jerk who had read this on another blog. Prolly couldn’t find this one anymore as I have pretty much decided to do without any sort of search engine publicity for the blog. I have pretty much decided to stop writing it altogether. But, recent events have changed my mind.

Although I have the percolation going for something new and will, hopefully, revive my writing (my partner encourages that as she believes it will strengthen my current weak grip on balance.)

So today on this post at that other site I get an email from the site telling me I have a comment awaiting moderation. That site’s been abandoned as well. Except, for some reason this one jerk who’s taken the time to sign themselves up for an email addy at “fuck you.”

He also came by here. After receiving the “Bitch, shut the fuck up” comment I now figure a male, prolly a teenager or a 55 y/o who thinks like a teenager still. Anyhow the IP addy at 98.218.49.235 indicates they are holed up in Baltimore, MD.

I figure they followed me from YouTube comments I made about trolls to Jonah’s “Whats Goin On” vlog, that’s here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdkNn3Ei-Lg&feature=share . Before you decide to troll Jonah, come back here instead and call me a bitch or tell me to “fuck myself” it’ll be okay. Better me than a thirteen y.o kid who hurts already.

Needless to say the moron at the other end of that addy apparently was unable to express her or him self with anything other than “fuck you.” I sent it to spam and then decided, “why the heck not.”

Just republish this item with a slightly re-adjusted title and figure the comment and the things I’ve been reading lately; military detention for Americans in USA if the military deems them to be “terrorists.” (I pretty much agree with Noam Chomsky here that we are all terrorists in USA anyhow as long as we support this imperial government and its oligarchic masters in spreading terror with drones and invasions and shock and awe bombings and assassinations all across the world.)

Terrorists seldom crap in their own beds. Consequently the complete shock of OK City and then 9-11. I mean, heck! That kinda stuff doesn’t happen in America. Well, it’s not supposed to. Kinda makes you wonder who ran those particular shows. Maybe the 9-11 Truthtellers and those who argue that Tim McVeigh and brother were pawns who acted due to reasons other than those they gave for the OK City bombing maybe aren’t as wildly insane as we have been led to believe. Perhaps there is some truth at the bottom of all that so-called conspiracy theory. Maybe we are being scared into giving away the last vestiges of our democratic republic in the name of some sort of “safety” that cannot be given anyhow.

Perhaps we’ve just become too jaded and obese in our material concerns to ever realize that at our hearts we are human beings as are those we interact with. Hell, we even share humanity with Charles and David Koch, the Walton Family of Arkansas, Jamie Dimon, and Lloyd Blankfein. (Maybe I need to not say that. I think those people don’t realize that truth. I think there’s a possibility that it may shock them to the core of their beings to discover that they are human as well as all of us great unwashed they feel they should hold in servitude.)

Anyhow, now that this introduction will run the original post of 1/29/2011 to almost 2300 words I better say adieu.

“It’s been awhile. I’m one of those folks who sometimes takes long periods of hiatus because … because, at times, depression covers me like drifted snow covers the woodland across the road from my house. Depression’s a black-lace mantilla covering my face as I kneel in the temple. It wraps me in a thick robe. It covers my face lest I see sunlight and burn to ash with the heat of my longing. (Not smoking for the past 16 days, Goddess, these cravings!)

A birthday and the longing has become oppressive in how far away it seems. Child of the first completely indoctrinated American imperial regime ( just a little girl when Ike gave way to JFK) beneath this bold and brilliant sun.

It was an American sun. We were the best and golden generation, children of the best generation.

Well… after our parents supplied the raw muscle and bodies to crush the Japanese Empire; and the Russian people expended themselves on crushing the Nazi death-machine by waging a war so vicious and bitter against one another that Americans are well advised to remember that we didn’t have to battle much against either.  Best, for us, no doubt. That way we could reap the benefits of imperial dominance without having to bear the price in the cost of our lives and infrastructure. Although those island-hoppers left a lot of themselves in caves and along beaches and among the palms of a thousand islands between Australia and Tokyo Bay.

Instead we could take our privileged and scrubbed white faces to university and learn to do the bidding of the oligarchy that now has been rescued from itself in the decades of the 1930s and 1940s and re-drawn the narrative of that time in such a way that they no longer are known to be the direct Fascist and Nazi fellow-travelers that they were.

So much so, in fact, has the narrative been re-directed and propagandized effectively that by 1980 we had been taught to think of the common good as a thing that Americans couldn’t think about at all. It was communist, socialist, against god, a sign of the mark of the beast.

The notion that banding together for a common cause to the benefit of the many who have had no silver spoons in their mouths, who weren’t born at third base and never hit a triple during their lives either, became something one could never support. To do so is un-American! Crime is the law. Honor is Dishonor.

A union is a plot to help the lazy under-achieve.

Jefferson never meant what he said about the value of people being individual landholders and not mere paid help when it came to retaining and building a democracy. Just ask the world’s current chief whore, Glenn Beck. It’s enough to depress a radical gal consistently. Will it truly take a Tunisian or Egyptian paradigm to guide a revolution in USA? Will it take Greek laborers to teach American workers? Yeah, I think it prolly will.

The girl was dressed last Saturday … in the gifts her birthday had provided. Sharp, sexy even. All the important stuff, ya know.

Hence, last weekend the drive after Cat said “let’s go” was … amazing. West we went, but not direct, not by a long shot, to Honeybrook, PA. We drove there through villages and towns from New Hope to Line Lexington, Montgomeryville, Norrisville, Phoenixville, Morgantown and a few score country roads that linked all of those places and many others.

Coffee, first our own and then Starbucks (inevitably) and The Decemberists latest album, The King Is Dead, in the CD player. The chats all morning and afternoon about the writings of Wendell Berry and Gene Logsdon. Travel to Southeast PA or to Middle Tennessee? Your ancestral home or mine?

But, haven’t we, I mean we all, scions of the last great exploitive empire on the planet, mined through our inheritance and left it all for a handful of beans that might, for all we know and have been told by Charles G.Koch, David H. Koch, Tom Delay, and that parade of shills at F(aux) Ox News, grow overnight into a limitless powerful and energy-producing gold mine and we sha’n’t have to change our style of life an iota. Not even a dust mote ….

Until we are dust motes. Ah, the joy of piling up new sweaters and shirts and that pencil skirt? The slacks that are simply to die for? OMG! Yes! Let the good times roll. Except … how long do they roll?

How much longer will we be able to afford to buy food that Monsanto holds the patents for? How much will we pay for Chinese and Indian made goods that have been re-imported to the USA by GE, Walmart, Big KMart when no one here works and to be paid is not to be paid enough to continue the consumer-culture our economy was based on until the financial ponzi criminals took charge? And those two Westinghouse gigantic reactors off in the northern distance under their enormous plumes of steam? How long for the Schuylkill to dry from pumping water to cool them?

How many other rivers will we need? And what’s more needful, drinking water or cooling water and water to crack the natural gas seams in the Marcellus Shale? Will Trenton still have drinking water after the shale cracking liquids roll down the Delaware, the Susquehanna? Will lawns in Phoenix be viable or is the California Central Valley, San Francisco, LA or the high country of Colorado most in need of water and who will have the rights to sell that water, that oil, that nuclear energy. All the problems are solvable. They (the elites) have just the things. All you need do is give the banks title to all the property they claim to have under ownership and everything will be alright.

Strangle government, social morality and social cohesion in one of Grover Norquist’s bathtubs, or toilets, whatever. Then the world will have been properly prepared for the brilliant golden sunset brought about with the purple and green explosions of nuclear payloads over Palestine and the clash of God’s Army versus those of the anti-Christians. *sigh* Afterall, God has to have help. We need the Air Force Academy to be the provocateurs who will catalyze the Armageddon so fervently awaited by the lost sheep of the House of Israel.

Maybe sheep, five to twelve acres, heritage seeds, a son who wants to run a restaurant, two women willing to learn to grow and spin, can, knit, repair mechanical failures. Becoming Amish, calico dresses and bonnets. Crooks to preside over the sheep? Sheep, a couple of cows, some goats and chickens. The acreage to grow small harvests that can be distributed to our neighbors for goods we need from them.

Finding, like the Amish that one doesn’t have to eschew technology at all. (Yeah, I know most of you think that the Amish live without lights at night and beat clothes against rocks to clean them. They don’t.) They merely judge whether the technology will change their way of life and their abilities to keep up their moral compass. If they can control the technology and not have it control them … well, then they use it. One might wish to be that way herself, to use and not be used.

One might find that she should merge herself into a community, even if her definition of community has to include urban folk and Muslims (hell, even if it must include the crazy Christians, you know which ones you are and what sects get that designation.)

It prolly means the end of Starbucks, maybe coffee will have to be shipped from Louisiana and not from Ceylon or Uganda. Maybe life will have to withdraw itself back to the basics. Back to the dreams of Rufus and Kate Smith when they moved out to Oklahoma just ahead of the dust bowl, and so returned to Middle Tennessee and, eventually, I was born there, Nashville.

Maybe back to the strength of Catherine Macklin when she said she didn’t wanna live in Newark any more, couldn’t live that city life any more and betook her vaudevillian husband off to Honeybrook where he became a harness maker for the farmers around about. There they raised their children until one eventually migrated to Philadelphia. And there they stayed until, years after my birth in Tennessee, Catherine was born in the Philly ‘burbs.

So, yes, here we are, love. You and me in the war of the end times. But there needn’t be a cataclysmic holocaust where we all burn and wallow in lakes of fire and brimstone. No need to partake for every one of us in the deadly and nihilistic capitalist nightmare pushed as our only option by the Kochs and Murdochs and the glitterati and on-hanging ornaments who have risked their lives to be house servants for the corporate overlords whose times are ending as fast as they can bring the house down on their own heads.

It wasn’t one hundred years ago when her ancestors and my own grew, spun, canned and plowed, bore children and moved across country to better, richer lives. There’s something to be said for harness-making and quilt-making. Something to said for wash drying in a summer breeze on a line. Something to be said for broken nails on hands that know the earth and touch it daily, feel its life and possibility as more than “dirt.”

Time to understand … life. Time to wake from the dreams we were born into. Those were never our dreams, the dreams of our parents, grandparents and great grandparents. The imperial dream was the dream of the Bushes, the Morgans, Dukes, Harrimans, Rockefellers, Stanfords and Mellons. Leave it to them and leave the winning of that empire to their scions. That’ll stop it all easily enough.

Turn our heads to the changes of seasons and to the burdens we are able to bear for our neighbors without killing ourselves. They’ll do the same. “We are all our hands and holders, beneath this bold and brilliant sun.”

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