winding road in urban area

woman sees Jesus on iron; another woman sees billy mayes

2009-11-28T00:42:58-06:00

METHUEN, Mass.— A Massachusetts woman who recently separated from her husband and had her hours cut at work says an image of Jesus Christ she sees on her iron has reassured her that “life is going to be good.”

Mary Jo (the woman's full name has been deleted to prevent phone calls) first noticed the image Sunday when she walked into her daughter's room. The brownish residue on the bottom of the iron looks like the face of a man with long hair. The 44-year-old ... was raised Catholic. She and her two college-age daughters agree that the image looks like Jesus and is proof that “he's listening.” ... tells The Eagle-Tribune she hopes her story will inspire others during the holidays. She says she plans to keep the iron in a closet and buy a new one.

And to think we let people who see Jesus in the build-up on their irons actually iron without supervision.

My uncle once told me, when I was about eight years old, that he burned his stomach when he was ironing his shirt. I asked him why he didn't take his shirt off when he was ironing it. He said he really shouldn't iron when he wasn't wearing anything and I asked him how did he burn his stomach when he was ironing his shirt if wasn't wearing the shirt when he ironed it?

Both of these stories are about the same thing, two people having a conversation when they don't understand what the other person is trying to communicate.

She hopes her story will inspire people over the holidays. To do what? Iron? Buy each other irons? To leave their spouses? To ask for a cut in hours? To get their names in the paper?

I don't understand what she means that 'life is going to be good." When will we get to the good part? When the story runs in the paper and her run away husband, who may have left because the house was messy with small electrics out in the open and an improperly stored ironing board in the college age but still at home sponging off her parents daughters' room, the husband sees the error of his ways and returns home to domestic bliss and no more ring around the collar? May be he really wasn't leaving for good, but merely a weekend and didn't need to take the iron with him? Why would a man leave his home and not take the iron? May be life will get better when the daughters remember to turn off the iron and not leave a hot iron unattended? May be life got better when the Eagle-Tribune printed this story. Perhaps life gets better when she markets the Iconic Iron© with the Holy Water/Steam chamber and Jesus image to remind you that life is better when you iron, unplug, and put away such domestic things. Perhaps she shouldn't keep the Iconic Iron© in the closet but on an alter in the front yard and charge people to see it. Or she can have a commercial where she screams at people at all hours of the night like the recently departed Billy Mayes about the bliss that is ironing. Billy and Jesus both have beards. But will she take advantage of this business plan/marketing opportunity and strike when the iron is--er--hot.

That doesn't look like Jesus on the iron to me. What is He "listening" to? When did He start listening--before he was emblazoned on the iron or after? Why isn't He ironing? What has He got against laundries and dry cleaners? And I wonder how life is going to be good for a woman who first, noticed an iron when she walked into her daughter's room. At this moment, I can't tell you where my iron is, but it sure as hell isn't out where I can see it. It isn't in my room. Did Mom run out of the daughters' room and alert the media that Jesus had appeared to her on her iron? Why the iron and not the bathroom mirror, or the toaster oven, or the refrigerator? (Our cat loves it when the ice falls out of the ice maker in our refrigerator's freezer. She goes wild and puts her paws all over the door and meows really loud. She hangs out around the refrigerator--listening for falling ice.) Second, if people are doing their own ironing, life isn't ever good. Third, if your husband has left you and your hours have been cut at work, you have no time to publicize your domestic disorder. You should be noticing other things like perhaps you didn't marry well and you need a better job. May be you can take in ironing. If you buy a new iron you can have two people ironing. That is practically a business plan.

The Lord, who works, as you know in mysterious ways, and has not had His hours cut has indeed provided her an opportunity. An opportunity to be famous, get your name and iron in the paper, have a prime time reality show called Housework!, perhaps crash a White House State Dinner, and get someone else to do the laundry and ironing. And He doesn't like starch in His toga.

my Thanksgiving Day with Det. Robert Goren

2009-11-26T08:50:30-06:00

My husband bought the fourth season of Law&Order: Criminal Intent for me for Thanksgiving. I can't watch the traditional parade programs. I wasn't in marching band so I don't find those things fun although I did ride in a parade once. So I will watch the fourth season this weekend. I semi watched the first "reel" or DVD while I made my famous three cheese lasagna early this morning for our lunch/dinner/supper Thanksgiving festivities. Calvin Trillin has a grand essay on how spaghetti marinara should be the national dish so my lasagna saves us from turkey for days upon days.

Criminal Intent is like a night light at our house. If you have had a bad day, Eames and Goren will catch the bad guy or gal and reassure you as fairy tales only can that tomorrow is another day. Eames is so underrated. While all the show's men are in a near panic she sardonically relaxes in the chaos and holds them all together. Goren, however, is my television crush and I must stock up on all the show's seasons with him as he is leaving the program this season. The male gaze of popular culture keeps the focus on Goren, but Eames is the counterbalance and thus her own force majure.

Of course there is always Det. Mike Logan and ADA Ben Stone from the original Law & Order. Oddly comforting, too.

We have a lot to be thankful for this year. Usually more thankful than disappointed.

with liberty and justice for all

2009-11-18T19:18:34-06:00

Have you seen tonight's on line edition of the Houston Chronicle? It is as confused as a Mexican television network soap opera--sort of a male version of the whore/madonna complex with Johnny Depp as the "Sexist Man Alive" next to "Which Bible Hero Are You?--take the quiz to see who you'd be." No wonder religious teenagers have a high pregnancy rate. The Chronicle has got to sex up the news and tweak it with religion to be all things, except a real newspaper, to all people.

But there is one young person who isn't confused. Will Phillips refuses to say the Pledge of Allegiance. His parents have gay and Lesbian friends and until there is "liberty and justice for all," he is not going to say the pledge.

Good for you, young man.

Did the Chronicle report that Dr. Steven Holtz and friends want to make ugly comments about City Comptroller and next mayor of Houston Annise Parker's sexuality. I don't care if Ms. Parker is a Lesbian. I don't care if any politician as carnal knowledge of a John Deere tractor as long as they can deliver city services and pave the streets, keep the cops from shooting every thing that moves, ensure the fire department has water pressure and has the guts to raise taxes when we need to do something important other than build a stadium so rich people have a place to congregate.

If Ms. Parker wants to put the Lesbian issue to bed, so to speak, she should take a cue from Boston Legal's main man Allan Shore. Shore in one episode found a law firm colleague's inability to say "Lesbian" comfortably quite amusing. He followed the straight arrow character Brad Chase around with a chorus of law firm associates and partners saying "Lesbian" just to watch Brad crawl.

Ms. Parker should fill Rice Stadium with people with perfect diction and record five second television spots saying "Lesbian" at the top of their voices. Get over it. We have.

driving the golf cart right up to the line

2009-10-10T07:40:38-05:00

There is a certain radio "personality" or "entertainer" who shall remain nameless on these pages. You know him. Not the one with the new book on store shelves depicting his visage dressed in an old Soviet Army uniform--how that is anti-totalitarian escapes me--but the other one. The one which makes all the other ones possible. The one that makes this WASP-y appearing writing woman of Scots-Irish stock wish she had stock in Glenlivet and it flowed from her kitchen tap like chlorinated, fluoridated water. (San Antonio, Texas finally joined the 20th Century and began adding fluoride to the public water supply and precious bodily fluids in 2002 whether the John Birchers liked it or not.)

Well, that fascist and yes, he is certainly that, said that he and all the other Americans who did not think that President Obama should not receive or did not deserve (Henry Kissinger didn't actually deserve the Nobel Peace Prize for but he did receive it) to receive the Nobel Peace Prize agree with the Taliban and Iran who also think Obama should not be award the prize.

The Taliban and Iran? The people who are killing our soldiers and want to wipe Israel off the face of the earth? Totalitarians like to hang out together and deeply hate socialism, communism, and freedom. These are the people that put the "fun" in fundamentalism.

It would be ahistorical to call this "most dangerous man in America" a McCarthyite. He is not an elected junior Senator. But they probably would play golf together today if McCarthy golfed. Visualize them in some "go to hell" polyester plaid golf pants and in a little white golf cart. (While researching whether Joe golfed--look at what I found over at UPI.com The cartoon depicts Senator Eugene McCarthy not Senator Joseph McCarthy. "One hundred years of excellence" is their motto. That is another blog entry for another day.) But the de facto head of the Republican Party and a 2010 judge of the Miss America pageant has driven his audience right up to the line. The line of where we don't shout fire in a crowded theater. The line of good taste. The line that General Edwin Walker marched in Oxford, Mississippi leading the towns' folk there in a shoot-out against federal marshals trying to enroll James Meredith in college. Yes, that General Edwin Walker. The one someone took a shot at in Dallas, Texas in April, 1963. Walker said about Meredith and Mississippi and the use of federal troops to quiet the riot he started:

This is Edwin A. Walker. I am in Mississippi beside Gov. Ross Barnett. I call for a national protest against the conspiracy from within. Rally to the cause of freedom in righteous indignation, violent vocal protest, and bitter silence under the flag of Mississippi at the use of Federal troops. This today is a disgrace to the nation in 'dire peril,' a disgrace beyond the capacity of anyone except its enemies. This is the conspiracy of the crucifixion by anti-Christ conspirators of the Supreme Court in their denial of prayer and their betrayal of a nation.

Walker was the inspiration for the general and coup d' etat leader in Seven Days in May. President Kennedy was reportedly tremendously impressed with the book and allowed filming in front of the White House for the motion picture.

Power, force, militarism, is legitimate, but diplomacy, discussion, peace itself is somehow illegitimate. Black men going to college, going to the White House, getting above their "place" is illegitimate and dangerous to the order in which these desperate people cling.

The radio talk show host, with no actual military record, but issues "marching orders" by his own admission to his faithful, has not self destructed. His drug addiction didn't hurt his broadcast program's ratings. Fitzgerald was wrong, it does not take a genius to hold two different ideas in their heads at the same time. Delusional people can do it, too. Television has been as effective against him as it was McCarthy--Monday Night Football dumped him and he couldn't hold down a television audience as a summer replacement.

Television, however, has now spawned other little tin generals because they have their own network and the other news networks so fear the loss of a ratings point they allow their programs to have imitators. Television, even Fox, is not this agitator's metier. He functions best in the lonely car radio or office cubical where rage is at a slow simmer over some perceived slight by the ex wife, the boss, the courts, over child support, a childish reprimand, an "undeserved" speeding ticket. Television magnifies every twitch and drop of sweat. Radio stimulates the mind to run to its own darker places.

Those darker places were vividly on display at the prayer breakfast attended by the local business men where my husband and I ate breakfast yesterday as the news of the prize broke. These men shouted their disbelief and anger at higher taxes and socialized medicine. And then they prayed. They looked like my neighbors. And your neighbors, too.

This situation, this open hatred of the president in particular and liberals in general where every new idea is branded as "socialism" while the government bails out banks and car companies and Medicare is seen as an earned privilege and not as a government program, as Frank Rich, and other reasonable social observers have noted, could cause a national and global tragedy. And if it does, these "ditto heads" will have distanced themselves from the inferno but not the igniter.

since we fighting for truth & justice...

2009-10-09T03:44:53-05:00

This has been an odd week in the "same old story, the fight for love and glory." Powerful men and the staffers who love them. Or the inequality that is often built into the fairy tales and myths that we call real life. Or the romanticizing of inequality in our sexual relationships.

Roman Polanski, convicted rapist of a 13 year old, arrested after 30 years of living in Europe. David Letterman, witness for the prosecution, tells a grand jury that he had sex with his female staff members and a producer was attempting to extort $2 million from Letterman because inquiring minds want to know. MoDo in the New York Times manages to make this all about Bill Clinton and his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

MoDo says the difference between Letterman and Clinton is that Clinton lied and Letterman told the truth. Only before a grand jury otherwise he could have continued those relationships while he continues to talk about President Clinton's extramarital affair and his sexuality ever chance he gets. At least he waits until the guest chair Clinton got out of two weeks ago had cooled before returning to his wink-wink sophomoric frat boy humor.

Did Letterman tell the truth to anyone before the lawyers got there? May be his wife knew since she used to work for him, too.

MoDo doesn't see that there was something else on the line for Mr. Clinton? Like the presidency verses a television show? Like a special prosecutor and an assistant district attorney? Ms. Lewinsky had denied an affair to the Paula Jones lawyers. But after her interrogation not in a grand jury room but in a hotel room she was ready to tell anyone that she had a relationship with Mr. Clinton. Did she already know that anyone who could harm her already heard it from her "friend" Linda Tripp. David Letterman or his girlfriends were not treated as journalist Martin McLaughlin wrote about Ms. Lewinsky's treatment at the hands of Kenneth Starr, an attorney and an officer of the court: ... Lewinsky was threatened with up to 27 years in prison.

Starr's deputies threatened not only Lewinsky, but also her mother, Marcia Lewis. During Lewinsky's 12-hour interrogation on January 16, 1998, after she had walked into the trap sprung by Linda Tripp, Lewinsky was told that her mother could face charges of obstruction of justice.

Lewinsky [gave] many details of this interrogation in her book, written for her by author Andrew Morton. One chapter, entitled "Terror in Room 1012," describes the events at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, where she was held by nine armed men. Though terrified and shocked, and even at one point driven to thoughts of suicide--she considered throwing herself out of the tenth floor window--Lewinsky refused to carry out their instructions, repeatedly demanding that she be allowed to speak to her mother and a lawyer.

There are several details of that day's events, recounted in the book, which give telling evidence of the illegal coordination between the Starr investigation and the Paula Jones lawsuit that was at the heart of the destabilization campaign against the Clinton administration.

At one point FBI agents told her she could not call her lawyer, Francis Carter, because their case was "time sensitive." This was a clear reference to Clinton's deposition testimony in the Paula Jones lawsuit, which took place the following day. Starr's office wanted to make sure that Clinton went ahead with the deposition without advance warning from Lewinsky, so that he could be surprised with questions about their relations.

Clinton did eventually apologize to the nation, although not to Ms. MoDo personally, and he was impeached and not convicted. In other words consensual sex and lying about it before the president has had a chance to tell his wife and daughter does not rise to the level of impeachment and conviction. Having testimony given in a deposition that was thrown out of a civil law suit, which means it didn't happen in that civil law suit, did not mean that Mr. Clinton was unfit to be president. How hypocritical are we and Congress and Ms. MoDo and her office mate William Safir and the other members of "murders' row" at the Times and the rest of the press when we did not impeach and convict George W. Bush for sending young people to die in some Oedipal escapade in Iraq while telling us, looking somewhat stoned on national television that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction? Where were the cries for impeachment and conviction? Oh wait, he didn't have sex with anyone on his staff that we learned of on television!

Salon.com has a story in today's edition about how much of the scandals the press reported about the Clintons were simply made up and then printed.

As for Mr. Polanski; he feared prison because the judge had been acting oddly, telling people he had no intention of honoring the prosecution's deal with Polanski in exchange for the guilty plea. Mr. Polanski could have gone before the unjust judge and taken his punishment like a man, since he did admit he punished the young woman for being no more than a young woman under his supervision and in his camera view finder, giving her drugs and raping her vaginally and anally. And he could have appealed his unjust sentence from prison like everyone else in our system of due process and equal protection.

And speaking of protection, why would the young 13 year old's mother allow her to return to Polanski's in loco parentis care to have photos made for Vogue after she told her mother she didn't want to see him? Was she investigated for her role in making this nightmare possible? Why was she not there when these photos were taken? What woman would feed her daughter to a possible beast?

Must men behave so badly when issues of consent or no consent are in play? Does anyone ever really consent when the relationship is based on power and the absence of it? How can anyone ever truly waive their rights? Especially when we have to fight to get them? Mr. Starr knew Ms. Lewinsky had a right to an attorney. Mr. Clinton knew he was married and Ms. Lewinsky's employer, even while she consented to their relationship, it was a relationship based on unequal power. And Mr. Letterman had the power, and apparently did not act upon it, to fire any woman who did or didn't consent to sleep with him.

Michelle Robinson mentored Barack Obama when he joined their employer's law firm. They fell in love. Is there something so alluring about the relationship between mentor and mentee? Boss and employee, professor and student, doctor and patient, priest and parishioner. The rescuer and the rescued. The hunter and the hunted. Something about the power and the influence, the ability to wound and to praise that is built into our unequal, power oriented relationships? Are men and women ever really equal if men make more money than women and if women leave their husbands their income and standard of living, and that of their children, will never recover?

have we just abandoned all responsibility for anything?

2009-09-29T03:47:06-05:00

Honor student Derrion Albert, 16, was beaten to death after walking into the path of a gang fight. His murder was videotaped. Of course it was or you wouldn't hear about it. His murderers were watched, by other people, while they savagely kicked and beat Mr. Albert to death. No one tried to stop the alleged killers. Silvonus Shannon, 19; Eugene Riley, 18; Eugene Bailey, 17; and Eric Carson, 16, were charged with first-degree murder on Monday and held without bail.

The overpaid, over rated. over exposed Anderson Cooper wondered over and over again as he teased the video and murder on the television show that bears his name, why no one stopped the attack and why "the system" failed Chicago's dying youth. Anderson Cooper is forever associated, for me at least, with the morbid fascination his brother's suicide--jumping from his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt's 14th floor apartment, holds for many. Anderson Cooper enjoys his celebrity and the desire many of his viewers have to dry his tears.

No one stopped the thugs from murdering their classmate because no one is going to cross gang wars unless more heavily armed than the gang members. Also, legally speaking, no one has a legal duty to endanger themselves to stop violence against another person unless the person has a legal relationship to the victim. Cooper would better serve his viewers by explaining that little fact after someone--say an editor or producer--explains it to Cooper.

"The system" has failed these youths. What system? The system of parents who produce these psychopaths, or the school system that does not separate school yard bullies, who are "mere" children, from assaulting their classmates? Kids who beat other children on the play ground or grope young women in the school hallways are socio- or psychopaths. Expel them from school, try them in the legal system for assault and put them in jail-treatment programs to either find out if they are a continuing threat to society or if they can be redeemed. If these youthful offenders mention that their parents beat them or rape them or have drugs in their homes, then bring the parents in for questioning after getting a warrant and searching their homes. If the children's allegations are supportable with evidence, then arrest the parents for harming their children.

This type of violence starts before the children start school. They are exposed to tremendous levels of violence in their homes and in their neighborhoods. Sweet posters and songs and warnings do not stop murderers. Jail will keep them from killing other children on the outside.

It is a narcissistic, violent culture, in a ridiculously delusional world. From delusional Middle Eastern leaders at the U.N. last week--how is it that so many psychopaths and men out of touch with reality lead nations?--to television "reporters" asking "probing" questions between being primped and polished for their close-up, to female entertainment host screaming at silent videotapes of alleged "child-killers" between pictures of her own twins, taking calls from older women who make the host's babies toys, clothes, and bed linens. You know which one, the one that the infamously misogynistic Boston Legal had a prissy murderer--those murderers can't really be too much like the rest of us or we will be uncomfortable--hit in the back of her head with a shovel to permanently shut her up--ah violence against the loud mouth broad--was screaming at Hollywood actors and directors who voted to give child rapist Roman Polanski--concentration camp survivor,undead victim of Charles Manson who ordered the murder of Polanski's very beautiful, pregnant Sharon Tate, director of Chinatown and The Pianist--an Oscar.

How dare they listen to the facts that the judge was not behaving very judiciously and the trial and guilty plea was a farce. Damn those Hollywood people connected to the complicated reality of Polanski who spent over a month in a psychiatric prison for evaluation which is more mental health care that anyone else mentioned here will ever get. Polanski's 13 year old victim had complained to her mother about Polanski's sexual advances in their first photo shoot. But being in Vogue, a misogynist's wet dream, was important so her mother allowed her to attend the second shoot where she was raped and sodomized. Why would a woman leave her 13 year old girl with a grown man? The victim has no desire to continue her role as a victim and prosecute the 30 year old case.

It is more complicated than "the system" whatever the hell that means--the parents, the schools, the narcissism, the celebrity, the violence, the gangs, the judges, prosecutors, the thirst for the lurid, and the nauseating shorthand we use to try to understand it all. There is so much damage that we have come to accept--the damage that wears away all proportional outrage that compares this crime to that as if comparison does anything other than confuse us--that everyone goes blameless until they get the chance to point their fingers away to someone else.

Will someone, somewhere recognize that lurid violence, misogyny, and sexuality makes people famous. The judged and the judge?

Obama speaks, treats children as people, world doesn't end

2009-09-08T14:22:29-05:00

Obama spoke to school children today. The world as we know it did not grind to a halt. He made a speech that wasn't so much about politics, but was about something at least as important if not more so. He talked about students' feelings about themselves.

Thomas Jefferson, it has been stated with considerable authority, was the first political philosopher concerned with the mental state of Americans. He said the purpose of these United States was "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

Psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, not overtly political, but, an indispensable contributor to our understanding of political man, said "Love and work... work and love, that's all there is."

Franklin Roosevelt was also concerned with our mental health. In his first speech to the nation as president, he said:

"Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.

"Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live."

Barack Obama addressed our children and all of us today and said:

"We need every single one of you to develop your talents and your skills and your intellect so you can help us old folks solve our most difficult problems. If you don't do that -- if you quit on school -- you're not just quitting on yourself, you're quitting on your country.

"Now, I know it's not always easy to do well in school. I know a lot of you have challenges in your lives right now that can make it hard to focus on your schoolwork.

"I get it. I know what it's like. My father left my family when I was two years old, and I was raised by a single mom who had to work and who struggled at times to pay the bills and wasn't always able to give us the things that other kids had. There were times when I missed having a father in my life. There were times when I was lonely and I felt like I didn't fit in.

"So I wasn't always as focused as I should have been on school, and I did some things I'm not proud of, and I got in more trouble than I should have. And my life could have easily taken a turn for the worse.

"But I was -- I was lucky. I got a lot of second chances, and I had the opportunity to go to college and law school and follow my dreams. My wife, our First Lady Michelle Obama, she has a similar story. Neither of her parents had gone to college, and they didn't have a lot of money. But they worked hard, and she worked hard, so that she could go to the best schools in this country.

"Some of you might not have those advantages. Maybe you don't have adults in your life who give you the support that you need. Maybe someone in your family has lost their job and there's not enough money to go around. Maybe you live in a neighborhood where you don't feel safe, or have friends who are pressuring you to do things you know aren't right.

"But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life -- what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you've got going on at home -- none of that is an excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude in school. That's no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. There is no excuse for not trying.

"Where you are right now doesn't have to determine where you'll end up. No one's written your destiny for you, because here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.

"That's what young people like you are doing every day, all across America."

If every word he says in public is political, then everything we say in our day to day lives in our community is also political.

But I don't see anything particularly political in the president's remarks unless we accept that we are all political actors. And I doubt that people avoided his speech because of politics--theirs' or his. People avoided the speech for psychological reasons. They don't like him. Perhaps because they are afraid of change, afraid that he is different. Afraid of the power a black man can achieve in America. The fact that he is different doesn't make them happy.

But how is he limiting their ability to pursue happiness? By discussing the importance of education? It doesn't make some parents happy that a black president may influence their children?

It may not please some people that a Democrat speaks to their children. But I doubt that it is it. And please don't suggest that the president shouldn't address school children. School children are citizens, too. And oddly enough, parents do not have exclusive rights to their child's political views, their personal hopes and their lives, liberty or pursuits.

May be the world didn't grind to a halt today after Obama's speech, but perhaps we did start to discuss our children, their education, our bigotry, our education. It was impressive to note that the president noted that children might not feel safe, that their parents don't support them. The president talked to our children as if they are people. When was the last time a president was actually concerned about children and their feelings, their safety, peer pressure? When was the last time a president treated children as if they are part of our real world?

Why can't people just be pleased that the President of the United States of America cares enough about school children and their self esteem--their happiness--to take the time to speak to them? Because it isn't the message, but the messenger that offends.

the magical president

2009-09-06T17:27:41-05:00

As the list of school districts refusing to allow students to watch President Barack Obama's address to the nation's public school children grows, two elements of this controversy come to mind. Federalism and conformity.

It is interesting to note that some say that Obama is using this address, not too dissimilar to one given by President George H.W. Bush while he was in office, (Stay in school, don't do drugs, tattle on trouble-makers...), to politically indoctrinate students.

Isn't that the job of state run schools? To give the state's version of reality? In Texas, local schools are run by locally elected school boards, the curriculum is chosen by the Texas Education Agency and the State Legislature. They don't adopt many books critical of the state's version of historic or political events. There are color cut outs of Washington and Lincoln and sugar cube models of the Alamo.

All governments, whether they are democratic or totalitarian, propagandize. If telling school children to take responsibility for their grades and help the president, i.e., be a good citizen, is propaganda, then so is requiring by law the Pledge of Allegiance every morning and holding school elections.

But these same school districts that depend on federal dollars to operate refuse to acknowledge that this President is the legitimate president of these United States. That this president has the legitimacy to address the state school children. This is an amazing turn of events in the history of the development of federalism. The school districts are questioning the legitimacy of this address by a black man in authority. They are asserting state school district rights to simply ignore the president. They didn't question George H.W. Bush. They didn't question George W. Bush's reading of My Pet Goat to Florida students. They didn't question Dan Quayle spelling "potatoe."

But questioning the legitimacy of Democratic presidents since 1960 is an interesting dynamic in education. When I got my first full time job as a college professor, I was hanging a photo of Jack Kennedy in my office on campus. The junior college president dropped by to say hello. As I was standing on a chair, hammer in my hand, hanging my Kennedy photo, he said, "We were so relieved when he was killed." Stories of cheering Texas school children gleefully screaming in their classrooms at the announcement of the assassination are not exaggerated. The Catholic Kennedy was cool, nonconformist, and pro civil rights at the end of the uptight, uncool anti civil rights 1950s where Senator Joe McCarthy named President Eisenhower a communist. JFK's successor Lyndon Johnson was hated by his own party, hated in Texas and labeled a co-conspirator in Kennedy's murder. LBJ was hated for the Great Society, Vietnam, and the Civil Rights Act.

The Republicans sought to negate the election of Bill Clinton with a ridiculous impeachment. He and his wife were called murderers, crooks, their marriage a sham, their daughter ugly; Hillary was called a Lesbian, unfaithful to her husband with women and Vince Foster. Bill was called a rapist, a sex addict, illegitimate, and had committed treason with China.

Democrats seem to represent non-conformity for some Americans. From Kennedy to Clinton to Obama they question the status quo rather than support the Establishment. And if the president doesn't represent the Establishment what is he for? Even Johnson's aids told him not to put the prestige of the presidency on the line with the civil rights movement. What's it for if it isn't to be put on the line, he replied.

The ban on the education speech by school districts has become today's moral equivalent of the ban on blacks from Woolworth's lunch counter. School districts and teachers who dare to show it may be committing an act of civil disobedience. Students who stay home rather than watch it are being told that watching it will essentially unravel all their parents' teaching. That is one magical president. He can break down the bonds between parents and children? Perhaps he can if those bonds are tied up in racism.

But it isn't just that he is black. It is that he was raised, like Clinton, by grandparents and at times a single woman. Like many poor children are today. It is also that he wasn't wealthy, that he benefited from affirmative action, that he made something of his life rather than accepting the role assigned him by many whites. Both Carter and Johnson were not wealthy as children and Kennedy seemed to be so wealthy as to not care about class. Later, as he was more influenced by his brother Robert, race didn't seem to matter to him, either.

It is these Democrats who symbolize non-conformity, sometimes illustrated a kind of higher morality in race relations, in their compassion for the poor, and their curious minds. Sometimes, much to there own self destruction, these Democrats illustrated a kind of careless disregard for personal morality. But always deeply human individuals who marched to their own drummers, who did not shy from the struggle for equal rights for all Americans.

How dangerous is that? Obama is called both a socialist and an elitist. So was Kennedy. It is certainly better to be your own man than the Establishment's man. Both Bush men, Reagan and even Nixon are taught more respectfully in some schools than Democrats. Nixon may have been a crook but he was safer than his opponents. Watergate, after all, was simply an attempt to protect the power that protected America's military and financial interests.

Non-conformity is scary to parents who don't want the muss and fuss of a child who questions authority, who protests, who asks, "why not?" They must not have much faith in the institution of education to which they have obviously granted all the ability and power to influence their children and if they have given the schools that kind of power they want those schools to reflect their own conservative, conforming, comforting values. No controversy like evolution, equality, or the history of race relations. Teaching Thurgood Marshall and Ceaser Chavez is not considered a priority in Texas schools. It has been suggested that they have been given too much space in our textbooks. Why? Because they too were powerful individuals. Not smiling, happy conformist and protectors of the status quo.

Rush Limbaugh and his copy cat commentators are writing the curriculum for our schools. They are terrified that Obama doesn't conform, isn't the Establishment's man even though he entered the Establishment's protective profession, the law, went to the Establishment's schools, and sits in the Establishment's highest office. He doesn't belong to them, he belongs to all of us. I voted for Hillary, but he is my president.

The history of this country as taught by the public schools is a history of either powerful wealthy white men or powerfully influential individualistic men who thought there had to be another way. Women and minorities are still listening for their story.

bullet whole

2009-09-02T13:46:03-05:00

We have a 9mm bullet hole in our two car garage door. It went through the door at my eye level. The police said it was fired from the gun range about a half mile from our house. This bullet traveled through several acres of land through a few back and front yards. The police said they travel downward as they move. This was completely random, not fired at our house not fired by someone standing in the street or driving. Just random. Like a car accident.

The bullet hole in the garage door has focused my attention. My husband could have been in the garage getting something, feeding the cats, anything. I could have been standing there when the bullet hit the door. My neighbor was standing in his yard and heard what he described as a metal cable snapping. He didn't hear gun fire. He just heard it pierce the door.

Well, today, I might have been shot out of a cannon. I cleaned out the garage looking for the bullet. I didn't find it but I did find myself thinking about my mortality. I am indeed going to die someday. It might be sooner, it might be later, but it will be.

I suppose somehow I thought I could avoid that like I have been avoiding living.

It is an odd feeling, knowing with certainty about the uncertainty of life and death. Someone fired their 9mm pistol into the air or passed their target and the round came down into my garage door. The police report said, "Deadly Conduct." It sure was.

It made me feel like I was alive and my life was burdened by attempting to control what is beyond my control. I feel that it is important to take risk, even if I am afraid of the consequences. Not reckless but open, not blindly but aware.

My aunt died this summer of the same type of brain tumor Edward Kennedy had. Childhood friends died young. I just never thought I would. Like I would get a note from someone and get out of it. Or an excused absence from making the most of living everyday as if a bullet could not come through a door, a window, a wall. I thought those things happened in drive by shootings when someone didn't pay their connection or bookie.

It gives me pause. It made me consider what I was doing with my time. I cleaned the garage, had some junk removed, picked up Hanna from the vet, and she helped me pick out carpet at the carpet and flooring store. We came home tonight. My husband came home tonight. We are safe tonight.

While driving, we have both had dangerous accidents. Road debris hit his car twice. I had a minor accident. We were both involved in a more serious accident. But I never thought we would die. Yesterday I realized that someday we will. Have I paid attention to my life? Have I contributed, experienced, moved, reached, sought meaning?

My neighbor was telling me that she had a beer bottle thrown over her fence from a neighbor's yard. There are pool parties there. A street over they are running an auto body shop out of their residential three car garage. Is it time to move? My neighbor thought that the world had changed, I said, well, the bullet hole is what it is. The beer bottle is what it is. Feeling the world is out of control or that life is cheap or there is some larger meaning to these "signs" is to miss the cosmic randomness that is life. And when we don't understand we look for signs, read our horoscopes, study tea leaves, play the lotto, build paranoid conspiracies.

There are no larger meanings. There is only the human condition and it is neither disgusting or alien. It just is. Life is what we make of it, waste of it, experience. No need to trade one delusion for another, trade one form of denial for one easier to conjure.

would you like to step outside?

2009-07-25T01:59:17-05:00

By now, most everyone has formed an opinion, whether it is an informed opinion or not, on the arrest by Sgt. James Crowley of affluent African-American scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. after he broke into his own home and ignored warnings from police to stop haranguing them. Evidently, Gates told Crowley he would like to talk it over with Crowley's "mama outside."

For the uninitiated, that means, "I am at your service, sir," or "I will kick your ass out in the yard."

It depends from which neighborhood you hale as to what sort of invitation to fight the police you send.

Whether it is race or class that brought us to this distraction from the health care debate, submitted for your consideration is this: women are beaten and raped in their own homes every day and it does not make the news, get the president's attention, or light up the blogosphere. Shouldn't domestic violence get the attention of Gates' bust? Professor Gates thinks he got busted because he is black in America. Women get raped and beaten in our neighborhoods behind doors every night for being female and it does not get this attention. It is a national epidemic.

Professor Gates is embarrassed but not too embarrassed--he is talking to anyone who will listen to him. Shouldn't we be listening to women? How many of them are too embarrassed to report rapes and beatings they suffer. Why are his problems with the police worse than any woman's problem reporting rape to the police, the hospitals, the local women's shelter? How many women do not get to heal their indignities on the talk show circuit.

Of the 254 counties in Texas, 54 of them do not have rape crisis centers. Women do not go on television talk shows and talk about being raped in their own homes. They do not get invited to the White House. Hospitals in some states actually charge rape victims for rape kits used to collect evidence against rapist.

Race relations between the police and black men are infamous. Gates did, according to police reports, threaten to assault a police officer and the disorderly conduct charge was eventually dropped. Obama joked with the press, called a cop's actions "stupid" and had everyone up to the White House for apologies. Not to take anything away from Gates, the police, the problem of people breaking and entering their own homes in the middle of the night, but what about violence against women in their own homes in the middle of the night? The Gates' Arrest will be on the best seller's list in a few months and domestic violence will not. Real issues get no notice while we look in magnetic horror without context or perspective at articulate celebrities weeping at injustice while these new media stars can't possibly relate to the real suffering of people without the means to overcome their surroundings. They don't have an agent, an editor, a book deal, a safe house and home. They simply continue to wonder why it happened when they didn't offer to step outside to settle the score.