Bitch. Ph.D.

calling all brainiac word people

2009-07-05T13:00:00.000-07:00

Is not today the perfect day for lounging around doing puzzles?

Blog buddy Orange Tangerine wrote today's NYT crossword. So if you don't have the NYT in hand, run out and get one (or better yet, ask someone else to do it for you). If your near and dear are lazy ingrates, you can surf over to the NYT crossword site, which (speaking of ingrates) costs money. But then apparently a month's worth of access costs .95 more than a hard copy of the NYT anyway, so.

I'm not smart enough to even tackle the thing, but I'll bet a few people reading here are. Especially if you've read her book. You guys might also wanna follow her crossword blog.

Happy 4th

2009-07-04T12:56:00.002-07:00

I heart the 4th. Summer weather, outside food, and fireworks. It doesn't get any better.

Enjoy.

IOU

2009-07-02T14:35:00.003-07:00

Hi, everybody. We're fucked. Just wanted you all to know that.

OTOH, it really is beautiful weather outside. And if you're inclined to want to get out into it and skip reading a longish blog post, then I recommend just scrolling to the bottom and marking the five numbered posts, which I didn't write, for reading later.

I have been not-blogging the CA budget crisis because really, what is there to say? The state is generally agreed to be ungovernable, so much so that I'm ashamed to say I've done basically nothing calling-representatives-wise about any of it. It sucks that the parks are going to be closed,* and I understand the damage that'll do, but I also know that the money situation is acute and it's gotta give somewhere. Ditto cuts to education funding, health insurance for the poor, broader social services, and all the rest of it. So I haven't bothered to do anything other than shrug my shoulders and wonder what the long-term effects are going to be.

My uninformed predictions are that as state workers continue to take huge pay cuts (currently at 14%; 8%, I understand, for University of CA faculty), teachers don't get re-hired (including, I predict, the teacher Pseudonymous Kid was to have next year, which is a pity because she has a ton of energy and did some awesome stuff with her class this year and because I like her a lot), and state contractors have to start laying people off, we'll see more people being unable to pay their mortgages, hence foreclosures, hence an even further drop in real estate prices, hence more people ending up underwater and more businesses shutting their doors, hence even further drops in state revenue. Catch-22.

And of course, even if state workers continue working for free because there is already too much work and not enough staffing, the demand for state services will only increase. It's not hyperbolic to say that there will certainly be people who will die because of all this: nearly one million children will lose health coverage (.pdf), 10% of the state's spending on child welfare will go (.pdf),** the elderly are losing health care services.

So, given that I believe all this but haven't gone up to Sacramento this summer to protest or lobby, am I part of the problem? You know, I'm really not buying that I, or that "Californians" as a group, are responsible for this bullshit. Yes, the voters have passed a lot of bullshit propositions without clearly understanding their impact on budgeting and running the state--but come on, you can't honestly expect individual voters to be experts in state funding.

Yes, we passed (among other things) Prop 13, which has crippled our revenue stream for the past forty years, and people continue to resist the idea of repealing it because we feel that our property taxes are too high. But ironically (and almost certainly intentionally on Jarvis's part) we're right: the biggest effect of Prop 13 is that corporate real estate taxes are astonishingly low and individual homeowners' property taxes are actually higher, because corporations hold onto property much longer than individuals do. But again, it's not really reasonable to expect individuals to think about that sort of thing, since the property taxes the voters have to deal with are the ones on their homes. (Which by the way, the lower real estate prices get, the lower the property tax rate that gets locked in by anyone buying now--whether homeowners or corporations--another hidden effect of the crisis that's going to have repercussions for years to come.)

And yes, an even worse problem is that we--or rather our legislators--can't pass a budget without a 2/3rds majority, *and* they're required to balance the budget. Both of which, again, sound like good ideas if you don't know a lot about state funding issues: after all, a 2/3rds majority suggests that any budget that gets passed will be broadly acceptable to the majority of the voters who elected the legislators, right? And a balanced budget always sounds like a good, responsible idea. Or so one would imagine.

But we have these budget crises over and over and over again. It's not surprising, then, that the voters feel like "the government" is broken (it is) and that somehow the legislators are to blame (they're not, really, despite the fact that the Republicans are being intransigent assholes). Or that this feeling leads to our voting for even *more* propositions that tie the legislature's hands, or voting against necessary suspensions of mandates, even though passing them might have helped. Or that it buttresses both anti-government reactionaries and passive bystanders.

It's some catch, that Catch-22.

The only solution that will work, some say, is a constitutional convention to rewrite some of those rules. I think this is probably right. Not that there's any guarantee that a new constitution would be better, and god knows the fear that it might be worse is terrifying.

If you're still reading, and have any interest in understanding how CA's legislature works and what the entrenched problems are, I strongly recommend the CA budget-related posts over at the Edge of the American West. Which I provide here in chronological order (that is, reverse blog order) for your reading . . . pleasure.

1. Decline and Fall
2. "This State is Days Away from a Budget Collapse" (note that this was written back in February)
3. Partisanship and Budget Crises (This might be the most interesting for those who are interested in partisanship and governance. It also makes a good case that Prop 13, which most of us like to say is *the* biggest problem in CA, isn't.)
4. How We Got Here: Thoughts on the State of California
5. California's Crisis and the Collapse of the Republican Party (I found this one really interesting by way of understanding what the hell has happened since the days of my grandparents' Eisenhower Republicanism.)

*Though maybe not.

**Both pdfs taken from the California Budget Project, which is a pretty good site for the wonkily-inclined.

Mawiage

2009-07-01T17:24:00.005-07:00

It's sort of ironic that the reason I'm actually sitting down to write this is because I'm not running an Important Errand because Mr. B. left the lights on in the car (again) and it didn't start, and of course I wasn't leaving on Important Errand until fifteen minutes before the destination location closed, so I am basically fucked, which actually I would be okay with but Mr. B. has a bug up his ass about how Important Errand HAS to be done TODAY.

So, instead, I have time to finally talk about why I loved Sandra Tsing-Loh's piece about her divorce, and why all the gossip and schadenfreude about Mark Sanford kind of depresses me and, while we're at it, why I thought it was really crappy, the criticism that Edmund Andrews got a while back because, in his book about the subprime mortgage crisis and his own bad mortgage, he didn't talk about his wife's bankruptcy.

Look. Anyone who has spent five minutes on the internet knows that any time someone writes honestly about their personal life, everyone and their dog is going to jump up and down and DEMAND to know more, or pontificate about why the author is CLEARLY a BAD PERSON. Or, what's worse, how the other people in the author's life--their wife, their husband, their children--are either idiots or victims or both.

(Which that last is really obviously shitty, people. I mean, even if you think that by virtue of writing about one's life one is inviting criticism, *clearly* the non-authorial characters aren't.)

But let's be honest. If you are an adult, and you have ever in your life had a relationship with another human being, you know damn well that you have made mistakes, that the other person has made mistakes, that people get hurt and friends have tiffs and partners have problems. (And if you don't know this, then I don't care how old you are, you're not an adult.)

And the point of that kind of writing, or one point, is that it is beneficial to be honest about the human condition. Especially if, like Tsing-Loh, you can do so graciously. Because life *isn't* a crystal stair, dammit, and Cinderella stories are fantasies. This is a feminist point, though you don't need to be a feminist to embrace it; which is why I think it's extra-shitty of feminists to crucify people for this kind of honesty, by the way. We know that the Ideal Mother doesn't exist; and most of us, though we adore our children, definitely have moments (or months) when we loathe everything having to do with them.

And marriage is the same way. I mean, really: is anyone surprised to hear Tsing-Loh say that many of her friends in long marriages with children are finding that "the passion" is on the back burner?? That after twenty years, she

can pick up our girls from school every day; I can feed them dinner and kiss their noses and tell them stories; I can take them to their doctor and dentist appointments; I can earn my half—sometimes more—of the money; I can pay the bills; I can refinance the house at the best possible interest rate; I can drive my husband to the airport; in his absence, I can sort his mail; I can be home to let the plumber in on Thursday between nine and three, and I can wait for the cable guy; I can make dinner conversation with any family member; I can ask friendly questions about anybody’s day; I can administer hugs as needed to children, adults, dogs, cats; I can empty the litter box; I can stir wet food into dry.

Which is to say I can work at a career and child care and joint homeownership and even platonic male-female friendship. However, in this cluttered forest of my 40s, what I cannot authentically reconjure is the ancient dream of brides, even with the Oprah fluffery of weekly “date nights,” when gauzy candlelight obscures the messy house, child talk is nixed and silky lingerie donned, so the two of you can look into each other’s eyes and feel that “spark” again. Do you see? Given my staggering working mother’s to-do list, I cannot take on yet another arduous home- and self-improvement project, that of rekindling our romance.

She says that this is a "failure," and so it is. It's a failure in terms of our idea of what A Good Marriage is Supposed to be. But maybe that failure isn't, in fact, a personal one.

The Good Marriage is Supposed to be:

sexually monogamous
between one man and one woman (even though, or rather because, men and women Are Different)
for their entire lives
begun early enough that they can have children, plural, (if they want to), without having to go through infertility treatment
passionate, again, for their entire lives
respectful at all times
mutually supportive, at all times
economically successful
able to accommodate two careers, if so desired
a friendship
something you "work" at, but it's not supposed to feel like work
flirty--but only with each other
not jealous
a PIllar of Society

Marriage should be like the early days of dating + the settled feeling of being "a couple" + a true partnership + a friendship + exciting + comfortable + productive (of kids, of material goods). People shouldn't get married "too young," but they certainly shouldn't wait "too long." They should both want to have passionate sex with each other whenever the other person wants to, but not when the other person doesn't, and god knows we don't want to see married people acting like teenagers in public places: holding hands is cute, and so are sweet chaste kisses, but come on! Especially if you already have children!

You mustn't fight--not in public, not in front of the children, and not so the neighbors can hear you. Certainly not in front of guests or friends. In fact, not only mustn't you fight, but you mustn't even act tense lest it make others uncomfortable. If one of you is abusive, then why does the other one put up with it???--but divorce, of course, is a Terrible Thing. Unless we've known all along that that person was bad for you, or that you were a terrible couple, or that the relationship was doomed, in which case for god's sake why didn't you divorce years ago? In fact, why did you get married in the first place?? We tried to tell you.

We also tried to tell you that that two careers thing wasn't going to work--you hardly spent any time together. It also doesn't work when one of you subsumes your life in the other person's career, though--I mean, don't you feel your masculinity is threatened? Isn't it your own fault that you don't have any savings or retirement or interests of your own now that he's left you/died/the children have moved out? Anyway, marriage is a total tool of patriarchy. And while we're at it, are you going to change your name or not?

If you're gay and you (want to) get married, you're just being assimilationist. And if your marriage ends, then not only are you a personal failure, but you've Undermined the Cause. Anyway, given how fucked up marriage is, why do you want to have anything to do with it? Except that oh right, we want you to save it for us, because god knows we've fucked it up. Unless of course your getting married is going to fuck it up even worse, in which case, forget it.

Marriage is a sacrament. It was ordained by god. It's a secular institution, which should include tax benefits and health insurance because it promotes stability and because financial benefits not only incentivize marriage but make it easier for spouses to support each other in hard times. But that's not fair to single people! So really, marriage shouldn't convey any benefits whatsoever--but you don't get to complain about the emotional or financial burdens of marriage, because after all, you chose to do it.

NOT that that means you can choose *how* you do it. Because your weird, unconventional marriage makes other people uncomfortable, and plus it sets a bad example for the children, who might think that it's okay to live that way. Which it isn't.

....

So yeah. I loved it that Sandra Tsing-Loh had the huevos to write about the end of her marriage, and to do so in a way that "depressed" people by saying that (duh) even really good marriages sometimes end, in part because maintaing a Really Good Marriage is virtually an impossible task.

Which isn't to say that staying married, or having a good enough marriage, or loving someone your whole life is impossible. Just that by and large, when it happens, it doesn't usually look the way outsiders--or even the people in it--expect it to.

And you know, if some of us can admit that about our own marriages? Maybe the rest of you could have the manners to admit that you don't know everything, too.

ding and doom

2009-07-01T06:55:00.004-07:00

I couldn't sleep last night.
At M-'s place, I tossed and turned, waking up at 2, 3, 4 and finally 5 am. I dressed, got my bag together and sat back on the bed waiting for M- to turn over. He walked me downstairs and gave me a big hug, whispering, 'Things will be ok today. They'll be ok.'

I think I mumbled 'I know,' or something inadequate, and walked to the bus that would take me to the train that would take me home.

I'm at work now and everyone is silent. There's no chit chat. No 'Hey, what did you do last night?' Just silence.

I hope I get my pink slip by noon so I can go home and cry in private. (I haven't cried this whole month; I've been tamping down my emotions just so I could get through this and get the work done. Rather, I've been letting my anger float up. But something's bound to crack.)

I've also decided that I'm done with the non profit sector. My search strategy will be to Embrace Evil, to identify and work for the most badass corporate entity I can find in the region, make an obscene (for me) amount of money and not look back. Maybe I'll even change my political party and sell out completely. Hell, I'm almost 40; time for a change.

Really. I'm done.
Suggestions welcome.

For the win

2009-06-30T14:03:00.003-07:00

FDL has the best Franken/Coleman post.

Love and Chemistry

2009-06-30T10:15:00.008-07:00

Like a hair floating in the rich broth of Dr Sybil Vane's satisfying post, S. Tsing Loh's article put me right off my feed. Could have been the chemicals, I guess. The chemicals in me, I mean, not the chemicals in Loh's article.
I've been taking on a lot of chemicals lately, lowering pails of compounds and distillates. The procedure is to take on chemicals for a few days. Then discharge chemicals for a few days.
Then, follows a period of reflection where I spend a few days reviewing my sins and thinking about naked women.
Then the cycle begins again.
There's a posset made from craisins and spent uranium fuel rods that is particulary ghastly.

There's another of ball bearings marinated in a sauce of potato squeezings and evaporated rocket fuel drained from Titan missles dismantled under the terms of the Salt II agreement, pureed and filtered through an old Robin Hood flour sack, boiled in a pot of radioactive algae, then forced through my kidney by a bicycle pump run by the power-take-off of a 1949 Model M Farmall tractor.
Tasty but it leaves a glick in the mouth. Jackets the tongue in fur. Or hair.
There are some other compotes brewed from the table of elements but they're all named for various Greek gods of sodomy and hair so we'll skip over them for now.
Hair is the hostage of these shocking cocktails. I buzzed mine off to spare all the shock of it falling out in hanks before the long bar of alchemy. A homlier sight you cannot imagine.
Naturally, this is a source of hilarity for my so-called friends and family. Poco claims he can see a likeness of some cartoon figure on the top of my pate. I would whip that child if I had the strength to chase him down. And get aholt of him. And whip him.
So, you will understand that I am sensitive on the topic of chemicals. And hair. Especially hair.

Side Note: I'm told the hair grows back differently after the chemical sluicing. Thicker. Different colors, even. My hair is (was) a salt and pepper hue. Mostly pepper.

OK, OK. Mostly salt. I've requested that it be restored in a chestnut or russet tint. Lots of waves. I'll let you know how that works out.

Which brings me back to Sandra Tsing Loh's article. And the chemicals of love.

She lists a taxonomy of types of attraction and their associated chemicals. You've read the article. I won't go over it here. I would only ask; what chemicals are being fed to the lads in the Loh circle? Cause they are not doing the trick. All the married men of her acquaintance have stopped making love to their wives. Or anybody, so far as can be known. I'd call that bad chemistry.
She concludes that domestication is the enemy of copulation and offers certain proposals, none of which I disagree with, for improving contemporary household arrangements. I especially endorse her tribal proposal for child-rearing; turning the kid over to a household of related women-folk. That's the scheme we've hit on here and it works pretty well, not only for the little kid but for me, too.

Suddenly, I feel a deep fatigue. And all this talk of chemicals is making my stomach lurch.

If you don't mind, I'm going to post what I have so far and take a nap. I know I should wait to post till I have this piece completed but, you know, life is uncertain.
I'll holler.

Infinite Fluff

2009-06-30T09:03:00.007-07:00

1. I was just in the cafe downstairs getting breakfast. Usually I get a sandwich and take it to go, and eat it at my desk upstairs. But I decided to get an omelette, and since I idiosyncratically hate eating off plastic when the food in question requires a fork, I answered "for here" when the guy asked me "for here or to go?" Several minutes later, I noticed that he was prepping the to-go plate, probably because I always get my food "to go" and so he heard "to go" even though that's not what I said. Not wanting to embarrass the guy or express displeasure as it was a reasonable mistake, I said "actually, I'd like to get it "for here"--can I?" as if I'd changed my mind, though I'd wanted it that way all along. The guy said sure. The woman next to me, turned to me, smiled, and said in a conspiratorial tone: "You're a woman, you can change your mind." I looked at her quizzically, gave a fake half-hearted chuckle, and turned back toward the guy preparing my food. Not content with my brush-off, she repeated herself. "You know, you're a woman! You can change your mind!"

"Uh. Men can't?"
"Nope, only women!" (Laughs loudly)

What in the flying fuck, people? What on earth was this supposed to mean? Was I supposed to laugh at this mutual dig at our gender--oh, those women, so indecisive! Was it supposed to be some kind of shared joke pointing the finger at the invisible men who get irritated with indecisive women?

The cafe never fails to entertain.

2. I'm so in love with this video and I want you all to see it.

3. Last night I cleaned out my purse-messenger-bag-thingy in preparation for my trip today. It's this ritual I go through every time I travel--somehow, carrying around tons of random crap every single day for months while I'm at home in Chicago is just fine, but I have to pare down to the bare essentials the minute I leave the city. And lately, I've been obsessively writing lists. List of jobs, lists of things to do, lists of purchases I've made, lists of my favorite blogs, lists of items in my pantry (a post I never put up). And so I did a bag inventory, and it's a fascinating picture of the general discombobulation that my mostly professional exterior hides. I like looking over each item, examining it, sorting everything into three piles (essential--keep in bag; trash--throw away; important--put somewhere that's not in my bag), having memories. Even from the last two months. And so, without further ado, I bring you the most boring thing that has ever been published on this blog: these are the belongings I've been carrying every day, on my person, for the last several months since the last time I did this. Think of it as a companion piece to Sybil's meditation on place and home--this is a meditation on things.

1 black wallet
1 Canon A550 digital camera
1 Sony Digital Voice Recorder ¹
1 bottle allergy eye drops--generic ²
1 bottle generic ibuprofen--200 mg tablets
21 individual 200 mg ibuprofen pills, scattered in bottom of bag ³
4 tampax pearl regular tampons
3 generic walgreens-brand tampons
$2.87 in change
$1 in bills
1 sharpie; 1 yellow highlighter ⁴
1 lighter (purple)
1 doctor's referral to dermatologist ⁵
1 3-way Radioshack adapter
2 traffic citations, dated 4/11/09 (illegal u-turn; failure to produce insurance)⁶
1 parking ticket, dated 5/11/09 (expired plates) ⁷
1 notice from gas company ⁸
4 nametags bearing my name ⁹
1 business card from court reporter from deposition, 6/25/09
1 business card from veronica, "bra fit specialist"
1 yellow legal pad with 14 pages of notes from deposition, 6/25/09
5 plastic thermometer covers ¹⁰
1 Minneapolis bus schedule #540
1 bus ticket, Minneapolis to Chicago, 6/21/09
1 file folder with 2 federal complaints and 3 motions for class certification ¹¹
1 petition for a refund signed by 47 bus passengers ¹²
3 earrings (2 which match each other)
1 cherry chapstick
1 deconstructed red pen in 6 pieces
1 Tide stain remover pen (purchased 2007)
1 pair headphones
1 Washington Mutual checkbook with 10 checks and an empty ledger ¹³
2 dead batteries
Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor by Sudhir Venkatesh ¹⁴
The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon ¹⁵
1 6x9 spiral notebook in which I am writing this list
1 mini 3x4 notebook containing: various addresses in Dearborn, MI, to-do list dated 4/14/09, notes from Rogers Park town hall meeting.

¹ Which I have used only once since I bought it, but keep carrying in hopes that I will.

² The first eyedrops I have ever taken, purchased when I broke down after 5 days of cat-and-makeup induced puffy eyes. They work.

³ Spilled on approx. 5/10/09

⁴ Highlighter stuck in there to use highlighting those briefs that come later. Dunno what the Sharpie's for.

⁵ When will they stop insisting on biopsy-ing my fucking moles? I don't have cancer, yo.

⁶ Total fines: $135. Dignity loss: infinite.

⁷ Shit, I need to pay this. They got me while my car was in the O'Hare parking lot while I was on vacation.

⁸ See.

⁹ From various functions and conferences and receptions I am required to attend.

¹⁰ Came with the basal metabolic thermometer I purchased to attempt to track my ovulation. Did you know that BBT is remarkably consistently? Nearly every single morning at 6:00 am, my temperature is exactly 97.18 degrees. It's freakishly uncanny.

¹¹ Can you see what's missing? Yup, that's what I'm supposed to have been writing for the last 3 weeks or so. I keep planning on doing research on the train or at night when I can think. It keeps not happening.

¹² The bus must have been over 90 degrees. The air conditioning wasn't working. It was a warm day. There was no ventilation, you couldn't open the windows. It was one of the more hellish experiences of my life. I am not pleased with you, MegaBus. Not pleased at all. That shit was dangerous.

¹³ Does anyone write enough personal checks to even need to keep track of them anymore?

¹⁴ Book's a few years old, but goddamn is it good. It sounds like some very heavy sociological tome, but it's just a big book full of stories about the way people make a living, get by, forge alliances, and deal with the total abdication of responsibility by the government in a poor south side Chicago neighborhood.

¹⁵ Been carrying this in my bag for a month, just started reading a couple days ago. Not only do I have a massive crush on Hemon, but holy crap this is the perfect plane read book for someone who generally hates plane-reading books. Gripping, intelligent, artfully written without being too Eggers-y. Prediction: finished by 8 pm tonight.

Not with a bang but a wimper

2009-06-29T12:21:00.003-07:00

Dear Universe -

Are you a regular reader here? I like to think so. If so, you should know, there went my house. It's not mine anymore. It belongs to some nice people who seem to do a lot of good deeds and who work for non-profits. I don't know if they recycle, but they seem decent. And eager.

Universe, I am exhausted. I can haz sleep now? For a month or more?

It's only been 4 years and change in this house. Not much in the scheme of, well, you. But it's my daughter's whole life. We made her in China, in the most clinical sense, but she made who she is here. She learned to talk and to walk and to annoy the ever-living shit out of me, as well as to make me giggle like a preschooler. And we made another life-potential here, but that one got stuck in a fallopian tube. I wrote a mediocre dissertation here. I fought with my husband and my parents and my girlfriends here. I loved all those people here. I made my friends play Wii games on New Year's Eve. I made them lots of chili and made them root for the Steelers. I watched Andre Agassi's last match. I made a lot of promises. I made disastrous carrot muffins once. I also made some Thanksgiving dinners and woke up to Christmas morning. I spent a lot of hours burning my crotch with a laptop, making internet friends. I made a lot of syllabi. I made travel plans. I made decisions. I made some bad decisions, but I made everything I recognize as my adult life right here.

I made, I made, I made.

But not 'I am.' If, Universe, you have some free energy, help me remember over the next few weeks that it's not that I am this space. I just made it something. And I can make the next one something. And I can let the next one make us into something a little older, maybe a little fatter, but still recognizable.

Now: do I dare to take a nap? Or do I have to start braving boxes again?

ding in the land of asshats

2009-06-26T07:17:00.002-07:00

It has been a while, poppets. If you've been catching my apoplectic Tweets, you know I can't even get myself together enough to craft a fine piece of writing. Instead, I'm going to vent:

1. Our state legislature is a collection of ignorant, do-nothing boobs who'd rather protect their election prospects than actually get some work done. Unfair characterization? Perhaps. But when you have a budget crisis and only spend ONE frakking day during an emergency session at the capitol and you STILL haven't come to a resolution, then you're frakking useless and incompetent.

(I’m looking at y'all, Governor Quinn, Sspeaker Madigan, Leaders Cullerton, Radogno and Cross! Swear to god, you all deserve a flaming bag of poo.)

2. When they're tired, elected officials can be alarmingly candid. From a GOP legislator: 'Every organization in the state could call us but it still wouldn't matter. People who work in social services vote Democrat; people who use their services tend to vote Democrat. What's in it for us to go your way?' Niiiiice. Frakking useless.

3. The women I work with are awesome. For a month, I’ve been holed up in our 'situation' room, hammering out implementation strategies to save our agency with two other women who are, frankly, awesome. They're smart, feisty, no bullshit and when we disagree we always find a workable compromise. (I’m so angry I advocate more for the 'scorched earth' strategy and they're more for the 'let's work this out' strategy.)

We swing wildly from hope that all this work will bear fruit and we will successfully lobby our legislators to get off their asses to do the right thing to despair that everything we're doing still isn't enough to counteract the massive amount of apathy and partisan bullshit in Springfield. We are not pros at grassroots organizing but I find it amusing to see us suddenly adopting some of its practices.

Our COO worked on the Obama campaign and she comes into the situation room at least a couple of times a day to give us some coaching, some encouragement and tell us stories from the campaign to inspire us - and it works. She rocks. I've already told her, 'When I lose my job, I will need your advice on what to do next and how to get in someone's office.'

She said, 'When folks hear you're on the market, you won't need my help.'

If we're all laid off in the next week or so, we've all promised to convene regularly as Ladies of the Day - slightly bitter, exhausted, depressed, over-educated women who kick ass while being momentarily at loose ends.

4. The people who inhabit our political process are the worst things about it. This isn't some fake cynicism on display here. This is what I’ve honestly seen during the past few months. I used to love watching politics; I loved the drama, the snark, the 'gotcha'-ness. But it's only when you connect the dots, and see that what happens in the political arena actually trickles down and materially impacts a life (or hundreds of thousands of lives), that you realize the people we have elected have cheapened the whole process.

It's a wonderful thing when a farmer downstate can walk into his state rep's office and say his piece and that aide or rep will listen to him. This is the beauty of our state political process. It really is that down home. (By the way, how many of y'all have visited the district office of your local rep?)

But there's another side to it that infuriates me. In Illinois, at issue is a now $9.2 billion deficit budget that the general assembly has chosen not to address. Instead, at the end of the regular session it ignored its responsibility and chose to send a 50% lump sum budget to the governor that basically decimated all of human services. The budget solves nothing, except to put the governor in the uncomfortable position of signing a budget that will turn Illinois into Mississippi.

Here's the infuriating part: they know that.

They know the 50% lump sum budget is a bad idea. They know it doesn't solve the deficit; they know that without revenue, the deficit gets worse; they know the impact of a decimated human services sector on their districts. They know there are structural problems that need to be fixed in this budget and still no one makes a move. For some reason, they think the veto session will bring a magical Resolution Fairy and then they'll find the money to solve the problem.

What they're really doing is keeping their eyes on the 2010 elections and hoping to do nothing that will endanger their seats.

Ask each side what they're going to do about this crisis and they shrug and say the same thing. 'We have ideas,' they say. 'But the other guys don't want to hear them.'

They know the human collateral this budget will cause and they look at you without blinking and say, 'There's nothing i can do. You all will have to call my colleagues and convince them.'

At which point someone grabs my wrist and I clamp down on my tongue so i don't scream, 'Swinging your colleagues is YOUR FUCKING JOB! WHY CAN'T YOU DO YOUR FUCKING JOB?!'

This is an abdication of responsibility that is unacceptable. And I’m not just talking about the GOP here, either. It's the Dems, too. They act like giving a Yes vote was the height of their duty, like voting Yes was a shining gift to the people of Illinois.

Last week, Cynthia Soto, my rep, was in a budget briefing the governor's office had invited us to attend. She stood up and said, 'I voted yes to raise revenue! I did my part! Now do your homework - it's your turn to make those calls to the No votes and get this thing turned around!'

I turned to the woman standing next to me and whispered, ‘What bullshit. What the fuck does she think we've been doing for the past month? When is she going to get off her ass and do her fucking job?'

The woman whispered, 'Unbelievable, isn't it?'

You wanna give us a gift, elected officials of Illinois?

We, the people of Illinois, would love to see you take your jobs seriously and work as hard as we do. Really. We would. Earn your paycheck, you apathetic motherfuckers.

Don't Stop Till You Get Enough

2009-06-25T17:40:00.007-07:00

My favorite Michael Jackson song.

Yours?

It's way more rambling than this inside my head

2009-06-25T04:40:00.004-07:00

My co-Bitches have been doing such meaningful writing about foreign affairs, education, domestic politics, etc. As one would expect. I keep wanting to check in here with some updates about my own small life, which I actually have been trying to not think too much about, and then can't bring myself to bump a post on Iran. A few weeks ago, LeBlanc and I were talking about doing a series of 'Using up the Shit in our Pantries" recipe posts, and then the next time I look she's Christiane Amanpour. It's intimidating.

Anyway. Moving next week. Sold our house (2 contracts in under a month, in fact), about which we feel obviously fortunate and ambivalent. The 4 yrs we lived here is the longest I've lived anywhere and this is certainly the place where all the adult events of my life have been centered. But, as anyone who has moved knows, it's hard to even make space for the emotional challenges in the face of the logistical ones. I get swept up in emotion in off moments, when the packing tape roll runs out or some such. I've been trying to hold off packing any of the kid stuff so my daughter feels as little alienated as possible and, more importantly, so she has shit to play with while I ignore her all day long. A good idea, but at this point, it means her shit is pretty much the only non-boxed shit in the house which makes for a heinous adult living environment.

I know people for whom this is not the case, but for me and most of my close friends, graduate school was the period in which we undertook a series of canonically adult things - buying homes, getting married, having kids. My close friends and I have all been far from our families while at grad school, and I feel these friends as my family. It's very hard for me to believe that I am about to go and do something that is coded as the beginning of my adult career. I expect, in fact, the environment and challenges and responsibilities of this job at this school to be so widely different than the challenges and environment I dealt with in grad school, it feels more like a career change than anything else.

And that's to the extent that I even think about the job, which is rarely. Moving grown-up lives is so totalizing. It's that much more difficult to think about the realities of having this job when my closest friends are still interviewing for positions for the 2009-2010 year. Still. For mediocre jobs. That are temporary. The honesty and healthy cynicism with which they try reminds me not to be an asshole who dwells too much on imagining the philosophical challenges of her new role.

Still no job for Mr. V in the new town, so he'll be working in our current town M-Th every week. When I tell people about this arrangement, they all get a sort of awkward look on their faces, a mix of discomfort and pity. Im pretty sure they largely assume we are getting divorced - either that this is the initial stage of an acknowledged separation or that a scenario like this can only end in divorce. People seem sad for us. That response makes me sadder than the situation itself, which is hardly ideal but also not that heinous. I worry about it: I worry he will never find a job there, and that I will not like mine so much, and we'll end up bailing on the whole thing after a year. I worry that I don't have nearly the amount of patience required to take care of my daughter during the transition on my own for most of the week. I actually don't worry about divorce over this, and I'm not one of these people who has never thought about divorce. I've thought about it. But not about this. I don't see the physical distance as the kind of obstacle people seem to, whereas I think if Mr V had quit his job to go with, making our money really tight and making him antsy and restless and second-guessy, THAT, i think, in our particular marriage, could have been the death knell.

I have a funny story to tell about the woman working at my storage unit who, yesterday, after asking me how long I have been married, pitched me her book on spicing up the married sex life. I didn't look my best, obviously, as I was hauling things to and from a dusty storage unit, but I don't think I had my "I love the MIssionary Position" tshirt on. And yet. This storage unit professional is, as it turns out, an ex-lesbian. Having been "delivered from that sin by God," she now focuses her expertise and experience on saving and strengthening heterosexual marriage by providing tips about what women want. The premise seems to be that if you both have the equipment and have serviced similar equipment on another person, you are the most qualified to advise. I wanted to note that I feel like my own expertise about my own person seems like it should provide credibility enough for advising, but that was really the least of the problems.

Her credibility more exactly emerges from her former "specialty" as a lesbian (I love the way it was posited as a former career of sorts)" 'giving women 10 orgasms in an hour using penetration.' The penetration part seemed very important to her, as it demonstrated that hetero-sex was clearly the approved mode of engagement. Further, she noted that if men could last long enough, she could teach them to far exceed this benchmark. "The only reason," she told me, "I shot for an hour was because I couldn't stay up in there any longer"' This was cited as evidence that she was not, in her heart, a true lesbian. I wanted to ask her if she was into sucking cock for longer than an hour, but couldn't get the right break in conversation. As a person who has given both a good college try, my suspicion is that her problem was more the expectation about duration than the object in question. I mean, I would get tired of eating ice cream after an hour.

Anyway, she went on to explain that the book was "not at all vulgar." She cited as evidence the fact that many ministers have bought the book and shared with their wives (did I mention it is available on audio CD because "men don't like to read"?). In this way, my storage professional have saved many Godly marriages that might have otherwise caved to the temptation of the "dirty girls who come to church and sit in the front pew just to tempt the minister." With the help of this text, men the world over could teach their Madonnas to be whores in the bedroom (my language now), thus making the family the keystone of society and saving heterosexuality (her language).

She wanted to give me a free copy of the book/CD. So we could write a testimonial for her website. There were so many possible ways to respond really, but I was tired and hot and decided to just gently point out that people renting storage units and coming in to buy moving boxes are perhaps not the best test case for any instructional on hott sex. We wouldn't want to skew her results.

So that was the highlight of yesterday. That and the ice cream.

Bodies

2009-06-24T09:35:00.003-07:00

There are a few stories I've read recently that have got me thinking about the way we use the bodies of less-privileged people for our own personal and political satisfaction. We use them as artifacts, we use them as objects, and we thoughtlessly invade them as if they were not truly human.

The most disturbing of these stories is well-covered Kate Harding at Salon, writing about why she doesn't want to watch the video of Iranian student Neda Soltani being shot in the chest and dying in the arms of her father, in the middle of the street. Kate captures what I think is a real problem with the assertion that it's somehow required revolutionary viewing to watch what is, essentially, a snuff film:

Watching a violent death caught on tape seems so ghoulish and exploitive to me; are people really watching to bear somber witness, or merely because it's so shocking -- perhaps even perversely thrilling, in a tiny, shameful way -- that we can watch? (Is it even possible to answer that question honestly?) My feeling yesterday, as it was in 2004, was that I could read the many graphic descriptions available and understand perfectly, painfully well what happened. What further purpose would watching the footage serve? Would I be honoring Neda, or just using her tragic death to feel better about myself for doing something a little more emotionally draining than putting a green overlay on my Twitter photo? Would it really teach me something important I wouldn't otherwise know?

Ever since the video came out, I've resisted watching it and have quickly clicked away even from posts that have the video embedded. Because I do not want to be witness to the very moment that a woman's life is leaving her body, quickly and unexpectedly. That is a private moment. Whatever the cause, when people die, they should be able to do it with dignity. The fact that the the Basiji who shot her (and the dictatorial government who gave the Basiji their guns) took away her dignity by shooting her in the street, does not mean that we can somehow give her back her dignity by watching it over and over again.

I think Megan makes a false analogy when she compares the Neda video to the photos of the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib. Witnessing those photos is important because it actually does serve a political purpose; like I argued in this post about torture, it serves to produce the emotional reaction that underlies our commitment to banning torture, and reaffirm that commitment.

There is no such necessity here. Our commitment that people should not be shot in cold blood in the middle of the street is not in need of affirmation. In contrast, the pictures and videos of torture aren't just emotional, they are educational, they do a better job than any description could of telling us what torture is. We all know what murder is. Most of the people on this earth have lost a loved one, and wrestling with our own mortality is perhaps the greatest philosophical-religious-artistic endeavor of the history of human culture. We understand the pain and suffering and existential angst that attends the fact that a living breathing human being could be there and, just moments later, not there.

To assert that watching the video of Neda Soltani, bleeding and perishing on the pavement, is going to somehow enlighten us about the plight of the oppressed, repressed, and politically disenfranchised people of Iran, is patently intellectually dishonest. No, as Harding says, we watch because we can. We watch for the same reasons we watched the video of Nick Berg's beheading and Saddam Hussein's hanging. We watched to gloat or to cry, to experience emotional release, epiphany, and to stroke the erections of our hatred of the violent other, while simultaneously experiencing a vicarious thrill at witnessing violence.

And it's just too much of a coincidence that the bodies that we use in this way happen so often to be female, brown, or both. As Tami at Racialicious said

We did not need to see bloodied bodies to understand the horror of Columbine. After the first live footage of people in the World Trade Center jumping to their deaths, those gruesome images disappeared. It was too much. We don’t need to see carnage to understand horror when the bodies involved are mostly white.

When it comes to white bodies, especially white male bodies, it seems to disrespect their dignity to broadcast the violence done to them. Recall that not only were networks not broadcasting the beheading video of Nicholas Berg, two DJs in Oregon were actually fired for playing just the audio.

Meanwhile, CNN links to the Neda video right from its website. Think about that.

A once and future teacher, and a heroine of the week

2009-06-23T16:17:00.007-07:00

So I am going through boxes and boxes of paper in my study. Boxes of paper I've had for almost 20 years, some of them. Mostly stuff related to academe, and mostly mostly stuff related to teaching.

Two things.

(1) The small, easy one: if you are an academic sort, for god's sake and your own, MAKE TIME to go through and sort your papers AT LEAST every time you move. Because the temptation--and I know you do this--is to just dump everything into a big folder or box labelled "teaching materials" or maybe "English 101" or whatever, and then shove it into a filing cabinet or a corner or something. And if you do this every semester--and who wants to cap off a week or two of marathon grading with sorting paper for another couple days??--then after a few years all that awesome material that you xeroxed or typed up--handouts about how to write conclusions, or how to assess the merit of online materials, interesting assignments, good lectures--is buried somewhere in a dusty pile that you DON'T HAVE TIME to go through because you have to prep for class!

I swear to god that my teaching started getting worse when I took my first job and stuffed all the things I'd developed in seven years of graduate teaching into boxes. The up side is that now that I'm finally going through this stuff, I'm remembering what it's like to actually be prepared for, and hence good at, and hence enjoy, teaching. Which might spur me to Get a Real Job. You never know.

(2) The big universal lesson. So I took a break from dusty paper-sorting to read blogs, and found this piece on PostBourgie, and this must-read article about Khadijah Williams.

Khadijah just graduated high school and is on her way to Harvard. She has also been homeless since she was Pseudonymous Kid's age.

If you want to learn more about her, read the linked piece; most of what I have to say about her isn't about her, specifically. It's about the educational system, and whether or not we should be doing a better job of teaching her peers.

Now, along with sorting my papers, I'm also supervising PK, who is on summer break. Which means asking him for help, occasionally, around the house (which he's not too bad about); getting mad at him for making messes/destroying things (like, oh, say, TURNING OFF THE REFRIGERATOR last week); occasionally "going out" to the beach or a movie or the garden store or the library. Mostly, though, it involves neglecting him while he plays with legos (which he's doing right now) or reads comics in the hammock or makes things out of cardboard and duct tape.

Now, PK freaking loves summer vacation. Largely because, as he puts it, he is left alone to "do what he wants" and doesn't have to go to school, where other people tell him what to do all day. This is ironic, because his school is amazingly hands-off, as schools go: the sit-down-shut-up-and-do-this-worksheet stuff is minimized almost to the point of non-existence, and he has virtually no formal "homework"--and part of why he hates it is because he feels like he's not "learning" as much as he'd like to.

I worry a little bit about how to get him to be more academically challenged. But not much, because the facts are that his academic knowledge is completely on schedule for his age and in some areas way above grade level. Because, duh, his parents are hypereducated.

What I worry about more is that his damned independent streak and hatred of doing anything in a group is (going to be) a social and professional handicap. And I just don't know, really, where the line is on that front. There's plenty of research about the academic and work achievement of the kids of the educated umc to reassure me on the schooling front; less so on the "kids who actively resist being part of a group" front. Or at least, since I know more about education than I do about non-education-related childhood development, if such research exists I'm not familiar with it.

But I am pretty up-to-speed on education, both as a (former?) professional and as a research-minded educator parent. Hence, some thoughts about the linked essays above.

Going through my files is making me realize that one of the biggest factors in my own teaching success was having prep materials readily to hand. Once I’d moved offices often enough that my files were all dusty and disorganized and finding specific things was a pain in the ass, as I said, my teaching started to go downhill. But rediscovering all this old material and realizing that oh yeah, I *do* have lots of resources to teach a, b, and c is making me feel a lot better about maybe teaching again than I have in a long time.

I'm also realizing that getting paid 6 figures would make it a SHITLOAD easier to afford to buy the materials/afford the space for a decent filing system. Or to replace my dead laptop, which has a lot of old teaching materials on it that I can’t access. Or to even hire someone to file my shit for me. Plus subscriptions to teaching journals, buying teaching books, joining professional organizations and maybe going to conferences–all the stuff that costs money but also has a lot to do with not getting stale. While I was teaching, a lot of my crappy filing was about my own enormous anxiety and my sense that I should be Doing Things, not Wasting Time Shuffling Papers. (And yes, I realize that Doing Academic Things = shuffling papers. But as all anxious academics know, Important Papers involve Research, not Teaching.) But part of it was also about not being willing (or able) to spend money on keeping filing systems up to date, whether that means boxes, cabinets and storage or computers and hard drives. In restrospect, I could have--and should have--prioritized my time and money differently; but I also realize, now, that the credit crunch and money anxiety of having a family on $45k/year was extremely unconducive to thinking clearly enough to do so.

So yeah, I'm no Khadijah Williams. Getting past distractions, setbacks, bad habits, and poor filing to focus on high achievement is something I can only do up to a point. If I were a more remarable human being, I'd have developed better habits despite all the reasons not to. But I'm not. I am, I think, fairly typical in my tendency to undercut myself when I have a choice between the easier, unremarkable path (sloppy filing) and the harder, more impressive one (laser-like focus on a goal).

Which is why arguments about education frustrate me so much. Sure, there are great natural teachers who do amazing things despite mediocre salaries, piles of administrative trivia driven by legislatures and/or fears of litigation, and the broad popular belief that teaching is easy and that therefore everyone and their dog is entitled to second-guess what happens in the classroom. And sure, there are also brilliant, driven students who can get into Harvard despite a lifetime of homelessness.

But that's the exception, not the rule. Nor, I hasten to add, is the rule that most teachers are complete idiots who teach because they can't do anything else, or that most students are lazy morons with indifferent parents who we ought not waste resources on.

The rule is that, by and large, students and teachers (like parents) do the best they can. And that, given certain facts of human psychology--like our tendency to be more motivated by people right in front of us than by abstractions--the best they can is often, perhaps usually, better than one would predict. Most people, even the best of us, make parenting up as we go along. Because of this, most kids have things going on at home that distract from (at best) or damage (at worst) healthy intellectual (and psychological) development. Because of *this*, most teachers have stuff going on in the classroom that distracts from (at best) or counteracts (at worst) good teaching: kids whose parents are going through a divorce, kids who hate working in groups, kids who are more interested in looking out the window or going outside than finishing an assignment, kids who are gay, kids who the other kids make fun of for being or "acting" gay, kids whose hair or clothes or personal mannerisms are "weird," kids whose parents just got laid off or have drinking problems or are emotionally or physically abusive, and so on and so on. That shit is NORMAL.

So. Does the current state of affairs, in some places at least, need improvement? If you think that, given social realities, having most teachers doing the best they can for most of their students most of the time, is fine--and that it's okay that, by and large, "Them thats got shall get / Them thats not shall lose / The strong gets more /
While the weak ones fade / Empty pockets dont ever make the grade," then I guess the answer is no.

If, otoh, you think that the Billie Holiday tune, gorgeous though it is, describes things that you wish would change (and that, by the way, are at odds with most people's ideals of equality and justice), then let's talk about how to improve things. And like Billie suggests, a big, big part of the problem is money.

Not for the Khadijah Williamses. Young women (and men) like her will be fine no matter what. God bless them for it, and we should all honor them as well. I, personally, don't think that even the superstars should have to go through some of the things she's undoubtedly had to deal with during her short life, but clearly she's made it regardless. And I'm sure everyone reading this can think of at least one outstanding teacher whose success suggests that good teachers are born, not made.

But, exceptions aside, good teaching is something that people can be trained to do-–or at least trained to be better at. It *is* a profession, after all, much like medicine. And good students, too, can be trained: that's the entire fucking point of education, after all.

Now, that doesn’t mean that you can treat teachers like widgets and just “train” them in lieu of providing professional salaries. Or that any old teacher in front of any old student can do the kind of excellent job that we want every student to have access to. If you want people to adhere to professional standards, you need to pay them like professionals. And one important reason for that is that maintaining professional standards actually *does* cost money. Not just at the level of "the system," either.

If the job is easy enough that people who are half burned out and/or not really paying attention can “go through the motions” and do it “well enough,” then fine; pay $40k/year. Your employees will be average, won’t be able to pay for ongoing training, won’t be able to take vacations very often to recharge, and won’t be willing or able to take their work home to a reasonably-appointed office space, since they won’t be able to afford the childcare, rent, equipment, or mortgages that make working at home possible. They won’t be able to afford the “networking” opportunities that keep them in touch with other professionals, who can alert them to new and interesting developments in various fields that can be brought into the classroom as examples, opportunities, or curricula (including field trips). They won’t be able to afford to provide students with the things that rich parents can afford to provide their children: educational games, toys and software; the ability to “try out” new, unfamiliar hobbies; the ability to experiment (which sometimes involves breaking or wasting materials) without being punished. They won't be able to afford the "down time" that lets them come back every day and juggle not only the day's curriculum, but all the emotional and psychological events that come up in any group of 20-40 (or more) young people every single day.

And yes, if they are bright, ambitious, and creative enough to be able to command six-figure salaries in other professions, they are unlikely to stick around teaching for more than a couple years because (1) teaching well actually is really hard work; and (2) we do, as a society, measure status in large part by income and lifestyle, and few bright, ambitious people really are going to feel happy for long living and being treated “lower” than their intellectual peers.

If the job actually demands ongoing attention, engagement, and interest, then the individual has to foster and develop those things. Which costs money. Which is part of *why* the children of professional parents are--not always, obviously, and not inevitably, but on average, “brighter” and far, far more likely to become professionals themselves. Their parents can afford to provide them with things that other kids don’t get, things that develop the qualities that one needs for “professional success.” A broad knowledge of lots of things, willingness to experiment, a fairly wide range of acquaintance, money to “keep up” with new technologies and information (books, magazine subscriptions), time to do “wasteful” things like sit around and read, or play with legos, or build shit out of cardboard–rather than helping around the house because mom and dad can’t afford to pick up pizza or hire a cleaner or replace shit that gets worn out or broken. Opportunities for networking and learning like summer camp, or arts programs. A stable home with space to do homework. The ability to develop relationships with teachers, so that you can get good letters of recommendation.

Poor parents who are ambitious for their kids will manage to provide a lot of this stuff for their kids anyway. And many kids, even if their parents can't manage to provide material support, will do better than you might expect if their parents provide emotional support and encouragement. Most parents, simply by virtue of human nature, will do their best to support their kids, no matter what. Sometimes, "our best" is pretty shitty. Sometimes we might not even try. Some truly outstanding kids will be world-beaters even so.

But even for your average loving middle-class parent–-hell, even for upper-middle class parents, loving or not-–this stuff costs a lot of time and money. And if we want teachers to teach all kids the way that we hope to raise our own kids, then we need to be intellectually honest enough to admit that if parenting "well" costs time and money, then teaching *other* people's children well does, too.

Update: if you're really interested in this sort of topic, PB's book of the month is Whatever it Takes. (Not out yet in pb, but there's always the kindle option, if you have one, or an iphone/pod.) I've yet to actually engage in one of the book discussions over there, but I've read some great books on account of 'em.

By the Rivers of Babylon

2009-06-20T05:17:00.000-07:00

What does the Iran election crisis mean for Iraq? Specifically, what does it mean for our people in Iraq? Specifically, our soldiers and marines and aircrew. Specifically, the 1/128th of the Wisconsin National Guard.

I'm asking. I really have no idea.

I expect it makes things more dangerous for our people because it makes the situation more complicated. I would guess the decisive influence of Iran in Iraq means the Iran election crisis will also be a crisis for Iraq.
The GOP, laughably, is trying to take credit for democratic ferment in Iran. Of course, these people cannot be taken seriously on any subject, particularly events in Southwest Asia.

Someone I do take seriously about events in the region is my nephew. He's a member of the 1/128. We've exchanged e-mails the last couple days and he's had some interesting things to report.

He's very guarded. Won't say where he is or what he's doing.
South of Baghdad, he says. Driving people around, he says . That's about it.

Mufti is the uniform of the day, he says. Has been for a couple weeks. He doesn't think that has anything to do with the Iran election crisis. Its just kind of odd.

The Revolutionary Guard have disappeared from the area, he says. He thinks that may have something to do with the election crisis.
They recruit in the area. They collect taxes in the area. They operate schools and dormitories and a clinic in the area. They have a couple big office buildings in the area.

The Guard stand out in the Iraqi communities where they operate, he says. They are much better dressed than the average Iraqi and travel about in Mercedes 350GX SUV's. They don't bother Americans and my nephew thinks they are actually beneficial to keeping order in the area of his unit's operation. He doesn't really like the Iraqi's and refers to them in the most contemptuous terms.
In the last several days, he reports, the Guard has vanished. I asked if they could have submerged themselves in the local population but my nephew thinks not. As I said, he doesn't think much of Iraqis and doesn't think the Guard does either. Consequently, he doesn't believe they could hide among the locals as the local militia fighters do.
What will happen now? As of this posting, it appears today's demonstrations are called off to forestall further attacks from the regime's storm troopers. Whether the drive to recast the election will succumb to the storm troopers remains to be see:15n.
Whatever the outcome, my nephew hopes it will permit the return of the Revolutionary Guard to Iraq South of Baghdad. He thinks they are necessary to keep the local militia/gangs in check.
Keeping the local militia in check is the only way he sees that US forces can exit and a speedy exit from Iraq is what he devoutly wishes.

Narcissism [Iran]

2009-06-17T13:05:00.004-07:00

Here's Ledeen at The Corner:

[Obama], [y]ou're going to be accused of meddling anyway, since out there in the real world you are believed to be the leader of the forces of freedom and democracy. So stop pretending to be a sweet innocent, and get in there and fight for people who are dying in the name of our values, and who want to be part of our world.

Dear Michael Ledeen:

It's not all about you, and it's not all about us. The people in Iran are not fighting for "our" values. We do not own freedom, we do not own democracy, we do not own freedom of the press and freedom of association and fairness and honesty in elections. Ahmadinejad, Khomeini, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard are not accusing the Americans of meddling because Obama is the "leader of the forces of freedom and democracy," and Iranians are fighting for freedom and democracy, therefore Obama must be leading them. They are accusing Obama and the Americans of meddling because they want to discredit the opposition. For better or worse, saying that a movement is backed by the Americans is pretty much a death sentence for that movement. Not to mention that individuals whose power was encouraged or increased by the meddling of Americans {cough cough) can come to be truly hated.

This is why I'm contemptuous of conservatives' supposed concern for human rights in Iran. Because they show almost every time they open their mouths that they are patronizing and ignorant. The reason that thousands of young people are risking their lives to protest in the streets is because they "want to be part of our world"? First of all, what world is that? They already are part of "our world," insofar as the word "world" has any meaning. Second of all, you're completely ignorant about what they're fighting for. I know it must be fun to think that what they're agitating for is American-style democracy, but it isn't.

Don't flatter yourself. It's not about us, except in the very limited sense that the opposition supports a more normalized relationship with the United States. But they also, like most Iranians, support Iran's development of nuclear energy and the development of nuclear weapons.

We support them because we support fairness, not because they want to join "our world." Christ.

[Via Spencer Ackerman at FDL]

Process and Speech [Iran]

2009-06-17T07:54:00.008-07:00

One thing that I, and many other people who are riveted by what's going on in Iran, have been truly heartened by is the extent to which global information sharing means that authoritarian governments and dictatorships can't exercise nearly as much power as they once did. Because of the existence of a [mostly] free press in places like Britain and the United States, and mobile phone technology and the internet, activists and protesters in Iran have been able to get their information out of the country where not only the rest of the world can see it, but other people in Iran can as well. The regime has shut down Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo, access to news sites, and more, but they can't shut down everything. People are still sending pictures and video to the BBC, and Twitter, a home-grown American service, has been indispensable for the resistance.

Here's some good reporting on the censorship and supression of information that has taken place, not just of individuals trying to communicate, but of newspapers, foreign journalists, and even the state's own sources ["Even governmental news sources have been targeted in the crackdown. Four interior ministry officials have been arrested for given results that were different from those announced by Ahmadinejad’s allies."]

The regime is trying to combat the flow of information from the protestors with its own flow of information. Unfortunately, they're making some of it up. Here's just one example, an explanation of how the state-run newspaper photoshopped images of a pro-Ahmadinejad rally to make it appear larger.

But the story's not over. I can't claim to know when or how this will die down, but a lot of people seem to think that Ahmadinejad will be president. The question is--how will the regime deal with dissent? So far, it's not looking good. Young people who have tried to access or send information to outside sources have been threatened:

"Anonymous" from Norway emailed to say a friend in Iran had rung BBC Persian, without getting through.

"Now she has received a message on her answering machine from Sepah [Revolutionary Guards] saying they know she has been involved in criminal activity - and now she has to report to the police."

Fahimeh emailed BBC Persian TV from Shiraz, dismissing such warnings as random scare tactics.

The words she described finding on her answerphone: "We know you went to the rally on Monday, if you repeat that again, we will deal with you" match those described in an email by Parinaz.

Here's some reporting from an Australian journalist who's defying the government ban on foreign media. He says "You've got to realise that what's happening at the moment is that the actual authorities are losing control of what's happening on the streets and that's very dangerous and damaging to them." He also has some interesting information about the security forces becoming more sympathetic to Mousavi supporters--read the whole thing, as they say.

The point of all this is that it matters when people have a right to speak, a right to dissent, a right to access information. People have misinterpreted my and other liberals' anger about what is happening as support for Mousavi. I actually don't know much about him or his platform. No one has any illusions that he would suddenly change the course of Iranian foreign policy to make everything all better. The problem is that it may have been the will of the Iranian people that he be elected president. And if that will was defied, if the election results were fabricated, rigged, inflated, or otherwise doctored, that is a miscarriage of justice. Perhaps Ahmadinejad did win. But it's rather likely that if he did win, he won by a much smaller margin, or won without obtaining a majority of the votes, which would have forced a runoff.

The regime didn't want a runoff. They didn't want a win by Ahmadinejad with 52%. Because with a small margin, they'd have deal with accusations of irregularites. Unfortunately, it seems that they seriously miscalculated the reaction they'd get by rigging the entire thing.

Some Links:

Robert Dreyfuss has some great insight about the kinds of people who are against Ahmadinejad:

The anti-Ahmadinejad coalition is deep and broad. It includes conservative, Old Guard founders of the Islamic Republic, who view Ahmadinejad with disdain and who resent the coming to power of his coterie of Revolutionary Guard commanders; the large and growing majority of Iranian clerics and senior ayatollahs, many of whom have long viewed the Leader, Ayatatollah Ali Khamenei, as an upstart and usurper since he was elevated to his position 20 years ago; nearly the entirety of Iran's business class, especially those involved in high-tech, aviation, oil and gas, and heavy industry, who blame Ahmadinejad for his catastrophic mismanagement of the economy and for the crippling economic sanctions; the entire class of Iranian reformists, from more liberal-minded clerics like former President Khatami to more centrist ex-officials such as former Prime Minister Mousavi, the presidential candidate; a large contingent of Iranian women, energized by the role of Zahra Rahnavard, Mousavi's wife, who I met in Tehran, who campaigned vigorously for her husband and for women's rights; and of course, the educated elite of Iran, including students, artists, filmmakers, intellectuals, writers, and musicians.

Today's NYT reporting of events in the last 24 hours, including threats of execution by a government lawyer:

Reuters reported that Mohammadreza Habibi, the senior prosecutor in the central province of Isfahan, had warned demonstrators that they could be executed under Islamic law.

“We warn the few elements controlled by foreigners who try to disrupt domestic security by inciting individuals to destroy and to commit arson that the Islamic penal code for such individuals waging war against God is execution,” Mr. Habibi said, according to the Fars news agency. It was not clear if his warning applied only to Isfahan or the country as a whole, Reuters said.

More Robert Dreyfuss on the the effect of American rhetoric about Iran:

Right-wingers in the United States are already comparing the Iranian unrest to Hungary, 1956, and calling on the United States to give its full support to the Green Wave. Nothing could be stupider. What they miss is that President Obama's outreach to Iran, including his Cairo speech — which got a word-by-word exegesis prepared for Khamenei and was widely viewed by many Iranians — is in part responsible for the sudden upsurge of support for Mousavi. And it happened not because Obama called for military action in Iran, and not because Obama backed Mousavi, but precisely because he didn't.

Here's Dan Rather (I know!) with a surprisingly good piece about the importance of a free press:

It is too soon to know or to say how the situation in Iran will turn out, but there are lessons in this for our own country, for a democratic system more fragile than we at times like to believe. One of these lessons is the centrality of freedom of the press to the entire enterprise of democratic government: You cannot have the latter without the former. And the other is the lesson that citizen journalism is a way for the people to hold on to freedom of the press, even in times of oppression. In a turn of phrase that seems to be cropping up everywhere, the revolution may not be televised…but it very well could be Twittered.

UPDATE: Here's Ken Ballen reiterating that even Ahmadinejad supporters support a free press and free elections:

Put all together, our polling shows that Ahmadinejad, running a competent campaign, may have had enough support three weeks before the vote to possibly win the election under the electoral rules as they stood. With Ahmadinejad's early lead, it is possible that the vote reported did actually reflect the will of the Iranian people, though now, it is impossible to know...

Yet the government's actions since the election may have changed the debate in Iran from being about candidates to being about democracy. While we do not know whether the election results were rigged, the government's handling of the election itself runs counter to principles of democracy, free press and free elections -- goals our polling shows almost all Iranians, whether or not they support Ahmadinejad, strongly support.

UPDATE II: Here's Yglesias with an excellent point about Obama's role in the Iranian election crisis:

Something I think people don’t always get is that the President is not the columnist-in-chief or the National Blogger.

On those Republican calls for Obama to support Moussavi

2009-06-16T09:22:00.006-07:00

Attackerman brings us this succinct commentary from NIAC (National Iranian-American Council) head Trita Parsi:

"[N]o serious human rights actvist has gone out and supported making the U.S. the issue in the election," since real human rights activists support "condemning the use of violence" by the regime. "What these conservatives are saying -- they've got no track record of supporting real human rights in Iran, and are only seeking to advance their own agenda" by making "the U.S. part of the issue," Parsi said. "They pretend to speak in favor of the protesters without ever considering what the Iranian people want. And the people who brought us the Iraq war don't have a leg to stand on on this issue."

It's amazing that Republicans consistently don't give a shit about human rights until they get a whiff of something that makes them think that braying about human rights will give them a good excuse to shoot, bomb, and kill people.

A brief moment of happiness

2009-06-15T10:15:00.003-07:00

I hope LeBlanc keeps up the Iranblogging, but couldn't resist interrupting briefly to post this from ObWi.

"After almost eight years of captivity, each step of Khelil Mamut's [right] freedom is a little overwhelming.

The ocean, which he could hear only on windy days when the waves crashed beyond Guantanamo's razor wire rimmed fence, is now something he can wade into.

People call him by his name, not 278, his internee serial number.

Then there was the horse he saw while walking one of the island trails on Thursday, the day he and three other Chinese citizens of the Muslim Uighur minority arrived in Bermuda. The animal made him stop suddenly, just to stare.

"How can I express it," he said yesterday, describing the new tropical home where he now lives with the three other former Guantanamo detainees. "It is so great, so beautiful."

"This may be a small island," added Abdullah Abdulqadir [not pictured]. "But it has a big heart.""

Click over for full credits.

What the Riots Tell Us [Iran]

2009-06-15T07:30:00.005-07:00

The New York Times has an excellent editorial out today that succinctly lays out the case that the election was rigged, and hits the all the right notes with respect to Western negotiations with Iran. I want to draw your attention to a point they make rather quickly, and that I think needs more attention:

If the election were truly “real and free” as Mr. Ahmadinejad insisted, the results would be accepted by the voters and the government would not have to resort to such repression.

If you have a free, fair, and legitimate election where the incumbent wins with 62% of the vote, a truly decisive and staggering victory, there are no riots. There is no blood in the streets. There are no rallies with tens of thousands of angry people. There is no tear gas, there are no raids on University dormitories (warning: graphic photos in that last link). There are no motorcyles on fire. There are no beatings. The government does not need to shut off text messaging services to prevent people from communicating.

A candidate who gets only 32% of the vote is not a candidate with enough support to generate the kind of energy and willingness to face violence that Mousavi's supporters have shown. And an incumbent who wins with 62% of the vote does not need to arrest, beat, and detain the opposition.

Here are some examples of basically fair elections where the incumbent won with 60% or more:
The 1972 US election, where Nixon won with a landslide victory of 60%.
The 2002 run-off election in France, where Jacques Chirac won by 82%.
The 2006 Venezuelan elections of incumbent Hugo Chavez with 62%.
The 2004 re-election of Vladimir Putin in Russia with 71% of the vote.

And here are some examples of not-fair elections where there were riots:
The riots after the 2007 Kenyan election of Mwai Kibaki, where the margin of victory was less than half a million votes.
The 1969 Malaysian election.

Add more in comments.

UPDATE! Side-note to the Twitter-haters of the world: How do you like them apples?

UPDATE 2: An awesome aggregator of images from Iran coming real-time through Twitter. Also see some analysis and background at the NYT about Ahmadinejad's rise to power and what this means for his regime. Money quote:

When he was first elected president in 2005, Mr. Ahmadinejad showed his fealty to the leader, gently bending over and kissing his hand.

On Saturday, the leader demonstrated his own enthusiasm for the re-elected president, hailing the outcome as “a divine blessing” even before the official three-day challenge period had passed.

Iran Links

2009-06-14T13:58:00.005-07:00

I'm increasingly distressed over what's going on in Iran. If you've been living under a rock for the last 48 hours, here's the deal: There was an election on Friday. This go-around, many international observers and people within Iran thought that Mousavi, a moderate challenger to Ahmadinejad's hardline presidency, had a decent shot at winning. At the very least, it was going to be a close race, and many seemed to think there was a not-insubstantial chance he would actually win. Iran's economy is not doing well, just like economies all over the world, and as everyone knows, the incumbent doesn't tend to fare well in an economic crisis. I've seen many people cite the figure that inflation in Iran has gone from 10.7% four years ago to 25% today. That's just one index of the effects of the recession that are affecting people every day.

According to several reports, the Ministry of the Interior, who is responsible for running the elections, called Mousavi on Friday Night soon after the polls closed and told him he had won the election. Which is weird, since we're talking about 45 million votes which have to be hand-counted. So Mousavi claims victory. But by the next morning, now Ahmadinejad is claiming victory with 62% of the vote total. Which, again, I don't know how on earth even a substantial portion of the ballots could have been counted by then. Not only does the Ministry of the Interior claim that Ahmadinejad has won, but it's by a huge margin, and he is even claimed to have won Mousavi's hometown by 60%. Can you imagine if, in the 2004 Election, Bush won by 62% and won Massachusetts with 60%? Right.

Meanwhile, SMS (text messages) were shut off for the entire country. Facebook and Twitter were blocked. Cell phone service were down. Reports emerge that Mousavi has been placed under house arrest. And people are rioting in the streets.

It's not looking good.

Here are some links to stuff I've found helpful.

-Juan Cole with a list of facts suggesting that the results were rigged.

5. Ahmadinejad's numbers were fairly standard across Iran's provinces. In past elections there have been substantial ethnic and provincial variations.

6. The Electoral Commission is supposed to wait three days before certifying the results of the election, at which point they are to inform Khamenei of the results, and he signs off on the process. The three-day delay is intended to allow charges of irregularities to be adjudicated. In this case, Khamenei immediately approved the alleged results.

-Gary Sick has some great analysis, including some thoughts about implications for the US:

3. With regard to the United States and the West, nothing would prevent them in principle from dealing with an illegitimate authoritarian government. We do it every day, and have done so for years (the Soviet Union comes to mind). But this election is an extraordinary gift to those who have been most skeptical about President Obama's plan to conduct negotiations with Iran. Former Bush official Elliott Abrams was quick off the mark, commenting that it is "likely that the engagement strategy has been dealt a very heavy blow." Two senior Israeli officials quickly urged the world not to engage in negotiations with Iran. Neoconservatives who had already expressed their support for an Ahmadinejad victory now have every reason to be satisfied. Opposition forces, previously on the defensive, now have a perfect opportunity to mount a political attack that will make it even more difficult for President Obama to proceed with his plan.

-Laura Rozen at Foreign Policy has a roundup of updates on Sunday happenings.

-The Twitter feed of a student holed up at a University in Tehran.

-A blog tracking the events in pictures and video, Iran 101.

-The Daily Kos diary of Electronic Maji, who is communicating with sources inside Iran:

Every single agency, in and outside of Iran, and practically everyone who knows anything about the nation has declared this thing a Sham. The vote wasn't stolen, the vote wasn't EVEN COUNTED. It was invented. This coup has been bought around by the guard, and supported by the Ayatollah. The actions take are indefensible, and a group of hardline radicals are ignoring the will of the Iranian people.

-This Huffington Post blogger has up to the minute updates, video, and breaking news. Right now, the top story in the post is that a member of the German media trying to report on the election is missing and/or arrested.

-Also at that HuffPO link, apparently Ahmadinejad got on tv and stated that Iran is "the most stable country in the world." Yeah, tell that to the people who have already died and those who are getting the shit beat out of them:

The situation in the country is in a very good condition. Iran is the most stable country in the world, and there's the rule of law in this country, and all the people are equal before the law. And the presidential election has witnessed people's massive turnout. As I said, even in a soccer match, people may become excited and that may lead to a confrontation between them and the police force. This is something natural. A person coming out of a stadium may violate the traffic regulations. He wil be fined by the police no matter who he is, an ordinary person or even a minister.

-An interview with the former foreign minister of Iran, talking about some other very suspicious events, like the fact that they didn't release vote totals from specific districts and forbade Mousavi's supporters from serving as pollwatchers.

-The blog niacINsight has some great coverage of the events. I see there that apparently western media outlets have had their cameras confiscated and have been ordered out of the country.

-Now comes the NYT with confirmation that members of the opposition have been detained and beaten:

He opened his shirt to show long, red welts on his chest where a Basij militia member had whipped him with a chain. Next to him, a female friend dressed in a black chador stood with a bloody scar on her forehead; she said she had been attacked by the police.

I'll be updating tomorrow with more links to good coverage.

guess where i am?

2009-06-13T11:49:00.003-07:00

I know you're tired of hearing it (or reading my Tweets about it,) but I'm at WORK right now.

One would get the impression, reading my blog, that my career is Very Important to me and that I am a Career Woman. One would be partially correct.

Indeed, I enjoy earning my keep and I love doing something at which I excel and which contributes to the general Good. But I do not like having stomach aches, stress headaches, heart palpitations and general feelings of free-floating panic and fear.

I also do not like having to deal with the prospect of updating my resume and finding another job at which I excel, will pay me enough, allow contributions to my savings, and which would also contribute to Goodness - all in an economic environment where barista jobs have become highly coveted.

You know??
(Not that there's anything wrong with being a barista - I'm just not very service oriented and, in general, am not made for jobs that require touching food or money.)

I also do not like not having seen NewGuy for more than two days in the past 2.5 weeks and this is...different. LTF could've incinerated himself in his own apartment and I wouldn't have noticed for weeks.

(I'm sure these comparisons between NewGuy and LTF are boring but it's an interesting exercise for me.)

This week was so bad at work I'd wake up in the middle of the night with my heart pounding and stomach cramps. The only way I could get to sleep was to imagine NewGuy hogging the comforter and snoring next to me.

Huh. I just made myself uncomfortable admitting that.

*shaking it off*

Bleak House

2009-06-12T19:04:00.003-07:00

Good news: Today was the court date for the dead cat people! Hurrah! Finally!

Bad news: Nope, not finally at all.

Good news: They didn't show up, which I was certain would mean it would be a gimme.

Bad news: Turns out that because they live out of state, they have to be served twenty, not fifteen, days before the court date. AND that, because Mr. Dead Cat wasn't home at the time and the process server gave the papers to his wife, HE was "substitute served," which means an extra ten days on top of that for him.

So we have another court date. At the end of frikkin' August.

Friday Cat Blogging

2009-06-12T10:04:00.003-07:00

Pussy don't play.

infinite summer

2009-06-11T09:04:00.000-07:00

So totally doing this.

Post about health care coming up soon, I hope. Short preview: now would be the time to call your members of congress and make some noise about the importance of a true public option.