IDYLLOPUS PRESS IS A VALIANT LITTLE ROWBOAT

There was even hail. Then drizzle. H.o.p. went to the toy store with Marty then the studio. The toy store was a ploy to distract and make him not worry about mom visiting at the hospital. H.o.p. said just this once and I explained I may be spending some evenings keeping company there over the next few weeks. H.o.p. didn’t cherish the idea.

I hadn’t wanted to bother with my knap sack in which is my scrawled list of must know numbers. I realized I needed to test my husband’s phone number on him as I reverse numbers and I was going to need to call him when I was done. Stress and being tired can exacerbate so I wanted to write the number down. “Your phone is…?” No, he said I had reversed numbers. He told it to me. I repeated it back, again reversed. He handed me his business card.

Unless you’re pregnant and alternating smiles with grimaces, or wearing a name tag, no one knows what business may have taken you down to the hospital and people are generally friendly in the speak-softly-give-nod friendly ways of buildings where individuals of a variety of races, cultures, ages, politics, fashion preferences, and economic status are brought happenstance together by disparate concerns which are same-boat enough to have you brushing shoulders at the entrance, the information desk, riding the same elevator together. If you ask directions a friendly woman in a flowered hospital smock and crayola cornflower blue pants may tell you three times over in as copious detail as she can because she’s assuming nothing other than significance has brought you here, has you asking, significance is stressful, good or ill, and she wants to make sure your trip through the maze of hallways is smooth.

Her husband had told me go to labor and delivery, through those doors and then at a second set of doors, the perinatal, there’s a phone and they’ll let you in. The room I wanted was the last on the right where the hall cut to the left. I had to reorient as the perinatal doors opened for me and I saw what he’d described for I’d envisioned it reversed.

On the way up, I had passed the cafeteria which looked more like a restaurant, smelled like a restaurant rather than a cafeteria, and in which the decibel levels were elevated above the church-going quiet of the halls. A hospital is a hospital. The food on the tray beside the patient’s bed had the same weary, overcooked, industrial look hospital food always has. She was too ill to eat anyway. I cut half a small soggy baked potato into small pieces. She needed at least a few bites of something with her medicine. It was the largest hospital room I’ve ever seen. She too, and eventually voiced concern over that. Her labor, far too early, had been, it was hoped, successfully quieted–again. Why the big hospital room, she wanted to know. In case something went wrong? No, they said. She was just the lucky one to get the large corner room, the room you wanted to be in too if you were going to be there several weeks. I realized how large the two windows were. Edward Hopper windows, the big, urban, life is a stage kind, cut clean out of the walls without a lot of finishing detail. “Wow, would you look at the windows! These are incredible!” A corner of sky out one if you strained to look around the neighboring building.

She was exhausted, hollow-eyed when I arrived. Her husband left to go home to the kids, one of whom had bemoaned to me on the phone earlier just how far far away mom was.

Four hours later she looked better, I hoped and thought. By then we were laughing but sometimes when she did she touched her stomach and grimaced and I felt guilty for laughing and causing her to laugh, for coaxing funny tales. We explored a little. “Look, you’ve got a VCR!” She had two whole trash cans. Huge white trash cans. She asked me to maneuver one over next to her bed so she could reach it if she needed, which I did, careful with the IV’s and miscellaneous lines to things that were hooked up to her.

I felt bad about leaving after four hours. It was ten. She’d had two hours sleep the night before. I reasoned she needed her rest and wasn’t likely to sleep while I was there.

Another relative had wanted to come several hundred miles to help take care of the children this weekend, who was also pregnant, had canceled her plans as problems suddenly arose, and I went home to receive the sad news she had miscarried.

Found through Billmon. This new Neely O’Hara which is based on the girlfriend of creator, David Hanson.

OK/cancel makes note of what is called the Uncanny Valley, a principle of “robotics concerning the emotional response of humans to robots and other non-human entities.” The idea is the more human in appearance the robot is, the more positive and empathetic human response is, but as the robot approaches pinch me perfection then humans want to thrash the data out of it.

The side view of the robot is quite convincing, at least in this video, the lighting, and my inner chimp response is to want to take apart the black box she’s sitting on and find the rest of the human mannequin-mime. I consider how frustrated I get with attempts to take care of any business on the phone with companies that are supposedly providing me a service, but after the contract is signed the humans disappear and from then on one negotiates recordings prompting button pushing. I don’t get mad at the voice but I do get infuriated with the “Apply considerable aggravation so they leave you alone and forget you’re there” policy of “Buy but please don’t use our service!”

Humans being humans, set Neely up at the rail station directing traffic and whether she antagonized or not, she would be an uncomfortable sight in at most a couple of weeks.

Hopefully David has a solid relationship with the girlfriend who served as model. If he doesn’t, I envision him some night listening over and over to (download at Top Quality Rock & Roll!) Patty Duke singing the Valley of the Dolls theme (which assumes a pathos before lacking) and Duke’s Learn to Live with your Heartbreak, in which she chastizes him to y’know, learn to live with the heartbreak because she’s leaving. There’s no furniture in his apartment, he never having needed any because he had Neely. He’s drunk, mumbling at, berating, screaming at then crying over his Neely whose heavily made-up eyes, in a parting close-up, are running a teary mascara down her cheeks.

Or maybe she’s biting him. I haven’t decided yet.

Is this a dream, am I here, where are you, help me
–Patty Duke “Valley of the Dolls”

My seven-year-old son heard, from the other room, Patty Duke singing the VOD theme and thinking it’s some new CD asked me to buy it. My husband said it made him want to gnaw his leg off. Son comes in and I was playing the robo-mime girl for Husband, had told him robo-mime looked oddly convincing from the side, not right but not right in the kind of way where she looked like a movie version of the not right robo-mime played by an actor made to look not right. Son took one glance at the video and turned and closed the door, freaked by it.

Not doing the Hooters jiggle

This is a long post. As long as it is because it’s a subject I didn’t want to occasion any sense of trivialization, which I felt was happening in an initial shorter version.

The Maidenform dream and the election train

Alicublog makes the post Guy Thing in response to Sex, Women and Conservatism by Dallas Claymore at the Citizen Journal.

In the meanwhile, that Internet philosopher, “Free online casino” attempted to comment on this website,

When women forge their own ‘gender identity’, in the way the feminists recommend, they become unattractive to men - or attractive only as sex objects, not as individual persons. And when men cease to be gentlemen, they become unattractive to women. Sexual companionship then goes from the world. by free online casino game

The Free Online Casino philosopher is exceedingly prolific. It’s also got an unnerving bit of oracle bot to it that at the crankiest of times anticipates where the brain is wandering and plunges right through the looking glass dragging along PKD, John Cage and Timothy Leary into electric lands of internet potshot I Ching where Satan as opposer says “J’accuse” pointing at yon mountain which is you of course, all being you, you being god is all, and Satan having a high old time crashing every righteous brain party it predicts in your future. Up conjuring down, left conjuring right, in conjuring out, the bases are covered and what’s frustrating is Anti doesn’t believe a word of it, Anti’s just there for sake of making sure there’s a position to be established. If Anti believes in anything it’s making maps.

I’ve been working on this sorry post several days only to have it twice destroyed by my not saving and my DSL going down and taking my work with it. I thought maybe I should drop the post entirely but I kept going back and looking at the graphic of Ms. Snake Minoan I’d made and thinking what would your typical Hooters customers do if this woman walked in the door, and what would she do if handed a Hooters t-shirt and shorts and told to sing “I wish I was an Oscar Meier Wiener” for her supper. I’ve no idea what her response would be as little is known about the Minoans, but she doesn’t look the cheery and reassuring Malibu Barbie performing a snake goddess dance.

How did she come to mind? A how’d we get from here to here kind of thing, from her to Maidenform to Hooters. She came to mind because of all the “I dreamt I was” Maidenform ads that are popular for blog headings, and which do beg reflection as to their meaning, suggesting a secret almost mystical strength via the magic cups or what’s contained, while also back-slapping with the contorted gender politics of the time, such as if there’d been a Maleform man he would never have dreamt adventures in his jockstrap, he would have declared them done. Ida Rosenthal’s “I dreamt” was not only a great ad campaign that made every woman a potential star in her own life, one could argue or suppose it was pretty future feminist, the ads acting upon the notion women wanted other roles than what post WWII suburban America had been offering them after the soldiers came home and they were retired from the work force. The WWII posters showed Rosie the Riveter with her hair bound to keep it out of the production line machinary. The women may not now have been adventuring, but they were dreaming, maybe they would get past the production line and not only would the bra not get in the way, hey, Maidenform will make sure you’re comfortable enough to be a contender (comfort was a selling point and can’t be overlooked).

But the campaign got it wrong,wrong, wrong in the way the boob wars are going to go wrong when you drape a dreamy Maidenform mannekin FDR style over the caboose rail of a campaign train declaring that her bra won her the dream election.

When women burned their bras

I’m obviously not real bright. Because I gotta tell you, when I was ten years of age and saw, in the World Book Encyclopedia, under “fashion”, Ms. Minoan without a bra, I was surprised. She was an illustration and held no snakes and the only thing on her head was hair. No poppies, no owls, no lion cubs, or whatever is supposed to be perched up there or not (though the poppies I believe are part of the package). Being a child of the 60s I had the idea that bras in their then present form were probably as old as civilization. No one had ever told me otherwise and as I was not yet of age to wear a bra I honestly hadn’t given them much thought. Then when I was eleven or twelve, my then best friend Danielle and I were watching our favorite show, “That Girl”, which was our favorite show because it was about a woman living in New York trying hard to land a real job as an actress. What can I tell you, television didn’t have much to offer and this was a pass at a “liberated” female who was always getting in trouble and breaking down in tears kinda but not like Lucy Ricardo. Danielle’s parents owned a clothing boutique that they stocked via frequent trips to New York (may as well have lived there), so this show was something with which we could quasi connect because the focus of the show was on New York and on clothes, which I didn’t have but I appreciated how they were central to Danielle’s life, being how her parents stocked the refrigerator, though “That Girl’s” focus on clothing didn’t sink in until I was older and caught a rerun and saw how Marlo had a new and completely detailed outfit on in nearly every scene, shoes and hat and gloves.

Anyway, we were watching the season opener on Danielle’s very own television in her room and Danielle shrieked and covered her eyes and I stared hard at the television screen wondering what had her so grossed out. Whatever it was, it was one of the most horrifying things Danielle had ever seen in her life because she said she couldn’t watch, that’s how horrible it was. “It” being, I realized, Marlo’s untethered breasts bouncing under a tight sweater as she ran toward the camera. I’d observed but hadn’t appropriately grasped how horrid this was, how udderly depraved Marlo was, how she had sunk to the lowest of get me my Neilson ratings lows unsheathing herself in that manner. Danielle said she couldn’t watch. I’d never observed a woman bouncing around like that and was curious to see more. Observing how breasts behaved unsheathed, when you’d never seen it before, was quite a revelation. You bounced down and they vigorously bounced up. Indeed, they were like monster twin children who are determined to have their own say. At least, that’s what I realized Danielle and some other saw it as. Breasts without controlled management be sea monsters grappling with the maiden ship. Danielle burrowing under the blanket in response to Marlo’s breasts, I thought, Gads, that’s powerful in the way of the repercussion it generates.

I also thought “Marlo has surprisingly large breasts” and knew “That Girl” was going down the tubes. Marlo looked chock-full-o’-proud in a way Marilyn Monroe never had. For it was one thing to be appreciative of the sway of your assets. Another thing to say they were yours. Because I have to say this, at least to an eleven or twelve-year-old, the flags Marlo was joyfully waving had “Don’t tread on me” stamped on them in the way Ms. Minoan looks like she’s unlikely to be pinched without delivering a mean return bite that atrophies the offending hand. “That Girl” had grown up and was bound for the dust bin.

Plus, it wasn’t a very good show. Not to me, at least, when I was older (or maybe it was and I caught a couple particularly bad episodes in rerun). When I was eleven, I loved it. But even I knew the breasts meant “That Girl” was a goner.

Marlo took off her bra (and her hat and gloves and car coat) when I was putting my bra on. You don’t grow up with a bra dangled in front of your face daily and have it not become an initiation rite. Danielle and I didn’t compare progress daily, and I assumed it was because she was Danielle and not because she was Jewish (maybe, I wasn’t sure), but a breast fanatical Roman Catholic friend of mine who didn’t believe in god as much as she believed in the pope had no such reservations and we did measure. Religiously (indeed) we took our measurements for at least a week, which is a long time when you’re that age, long enough to mark a stage. The bra meant you were on your way to womanhood because it was time to cover it up. Menstruation meant that too but it was a shameful, bloody business you did your extra best to hide–though I was over that by the time I was fourteen and some girls pulled me aside to tell me not to go to my fringed leather bag because some boys had been through it looking for gum and found gasp y’know the artifacts of bloody business, so of course I wouldn’t want them to know it was my bag, and I thought screw the baby shit they’re the ones who ought to be embarrassed for invading my privacy and I picked up my bag and walked off and instead of the guys guffawing there was dead silence.

Really, it was one of those long walk moments. My bag was all the way across the room. There was this side of the room where everyone had rushed to upon the opening of the bag while I was somewhere where school policy had it you couldn’t take your bag along. The girls didn’t want anyone thinking it was theirs. The guys were embarrassed but also ha-ha and waiting to lacerate with barbs the girl who claimed the bag. As I began to enter the room I was pulled out by peers hoping to protect me. I instead walked all……that…….long……way…….across……the……floor……to my bag and its tampons and took ownership of it.

The Sacred Wisdom

I submitted to the bra until I was sixteen and then shed its pinching ways. No matter how comfortable the then new “natural” bras were supposed to be, which were supposed to look like no bra, they weren’t like no bra. I thought surely all other girls my age would be shedding theirs too as it seemed the most sensible thing to do. But culture still wanted bras, still identified girls who didn’t wear them as possibly loose as the bra they’d shed. And, even worse, there was the specter of sagging.

Yes, I remember a teacher, who read every issue of Ms. magazine, who had a Gloria Stienem hairdo, having an earnest Episcopalian talk with a friend of mine and telling her one thing she greatly regretted was ever removing her bra for a moment because her breasts now sagged, and so would my friend’s breasts if she took her bra off for a weekend. “Don’t do it!” There was nothing worse in the world than sagging, a condition which bras prevented. Once you sagged you could never get the unsag back. Which was sinful. How was it sinful? The same way tattoos were sinful back then. God had given you plain old skin and if it was meant to be tattooed he would have tattooed it. It was blasphemy against god’s creation to stick holes in it and alter it. If you didn’t wear the bra you weren’t doing your part in preventing god’s creation going awry and sagging.

That was the fundamental rationale. It was the dividing line between xtians and heathen savages who played with their bodies in all kinds of undoable ways, piercing and tattooing. My thesis is that it was sinful to pierce and paint because piercing and painting are largely clan identifiers historically, and xtianity’s business was to kill clan-ways which had often enough what xtianity identified as ancestral “gods” attached to them. Piercing and painting got in the way of xtianity’s homogenization of “god”, promoting clan over the body of christ.

Eventually, the secret wisdom was passed along that if you could put a pencil under your breast and it dropped then you could go braless if you were the type to do it. I passed the test in what many would consider the wrong direction. What can I say but I never had to worry about a bra, which was good because I hated them, plus they were just another clothing expense and who had the money to waste.

It’s a sad state of affairs when womanly wisdom amounts to a pencil test.

I was not a feminist. Though I came of age in the 70s, Feminism seemed old, out-of-step and irrelevant to me. Issues did not. Feminism did. Where I was, Feminism was Gloria Steinem in a particular pair of cool glasses and a particular cool hair style. The librarian at the high school was feminist. She loaned me her feminism magazines thinking I’d enjoy them. I have a way of losing books, but I lost those magazines in a legitimate way that should have had her more concerned about the how of my losing them than my having lost them. What she cared about was that I couldn’t give her back her Ms. magazines. She yelled at me. “Fuck you,” I thought. And the hair and the glasses and Feminist babes telling teens we too could be all that if we had, once again, the just right assets. Fuck feminism. I had the idea it was just plain abuse of power that was the primary problem and feminism seemed to me environmentalists worrying about the water quality of a pool a step away from a problematic polluted fountain head. I failed to credit what feminism had done, but I was one of those teens who didn’t like a group-id and had honestly no idols that weren’t ideas. I didn’t like the cult of personality. Academia and publishing and the arts seemed to me all about the cult of personality and selling yours over someone else’s. I didn’t want a contest. I didn’t want to put on anyone’s buttons or wear anyone’s slogans.

I was a really pissed off, cocky teen who didn’t trust anyone. (Husband–who knew me then–peeks over my shoulder and says I’m exaggerating, that I wanted to trust people but didn’t and that I was cocky because I had to be to survive. Never-the-less, I was still a cocky teen who didn’t trust anyone.)

But I had my line of reasoning. Thank you, yes, I could have an abortion if I ever needed/wanted one but I saw everything in terms of individual, personal rights rather than feminist issues.

I didn’t see it in terms of sex rights, of academic rights, just another people power drama

When one of my college professors called me into her office to tell me she thought I ought to be aware that she’d heard another professor of mine telling my other professors that I’d had it too easy and it was time to come down hard on me, she said she didn’t know what had happened but she was prepared to go to the Dean for me, though she wasn’t sure if that would do anything to help as she was being pushed out of the school because of a divide as to what they believed constituted an education and what she believed was an education.

I didn’t tell her what had happened, which was my saying, “No” to professor in question, and his saying, “Let’s forget this ever happened”. It had been an intense event emotionally and had taken me two months to be able to hear his voice without becoming nauseated, without stopping breathing, without breaking into a cold sweat. It was an intense event because I’d known him for years and two weeks before when his shod foot had brushed against my shod foot under a desk I had thought, “Is he coming on to me?” and then thought, no, couldn’t possibly be, I moved my foot back and his foot didn’t pursue and I decided it was my imagination. It had been tough enough finishing up an independent study under him (which is when Main Event happened, when he went from being on the other side of the room one moment to suddenly on top of me, which I avoided by turning, was petrified and stared at the door for fifteen minutes until he quit trying to convince, until he realized I was not going to be convinced and said “Let’s forget this ever happened”, and I nodded my head yes that I would forget this had happened and made my break for it when he stood and let go my legs which he’d not been feeling up but had been holding while trying to talk me into things), and I’d been thinking well I’m home clear because he didn’t go outrageous on me and give me a low mark (which would have been, I realize now, a sure sign something had gone wrong as I made only top marks in English Lit), thinking well I was home clear because I didn’t have any more studies under him. In the meanwhile I’d quit my editor position on the college lit mag as he didn’t forget and he was the advisor and had started playing rough in a sneaky underhanded way. Index fingers and thumbs forming a triangle, the apex of which he tapped against his you’re-eating-shit-now grin, that’s how I remember him and his smile when I stood and walked out of the staff meeting where I felt I’d two choices, either walk or uncover the game he was playing, that he was speaking in double entendres that no one else understood, that he was playing a mental footsie with the repeated, hammered tag-line of “You may have said no but I’ve got other ways of getting my jollies off of you until you decide you’ve had enough of it and leave”. It’s no kudos for me that I walked. Then I noticed attitudes of teachers shifting on me and wondered if it was my imagination until my French professor called me in to speak with her. I thought A event happened a couple of months prior and if I went to the Dean how could I prove B event had anything to do with it all. I knew the man’s wife, knew his kids, and was concerned about their being hurt. This was back in the late 70s and teachers and students and ethics concerning woudn’t be hot news for another few years. I didn’t think of it in terms of sexism, feminism, student’s rights. I thought of it in terms of power brokering, of an individual determined to beat me down and out. I thought too if he was willing to play such hard ball he must not be worried about what the Dean would say if I went to him.

I was an idiot for not going to the Dean.

I was an idiot because he had said “Let’s forget this ever happened,” and I had promised him I would. And because I had promised him I would forget I stupidly had the idea that I had made that promise and couldn’t break it, that I’d agreed to blot it out of my mind. My lung capacity must have been significant in those days because when I’d made the promise I’d gone without taking a full breath for five minutes, knew if I’d taken a full breath I would gasp as my body desperately wanted air, and I didn’t want him feeling or seeing or hearing me gasp, I wanted to be as physically invisible as possible, I was just struggling to maintain as much physical non-presence as I could until he let me loose and I could get out the door and breathe again. The stress of the moment certainly nullified that agreement. A thousand things nullified that agreement.

It was the late 70s and I had the idea that since he’d backed off nothing had happened and didn’t understand why I was as physically frightened as I was, that afterwards I was unable to breathe when around him, that his voice made me feel violently ill. I still had a bit of that “You’re not a complete person as long as you’re a student” thing going, which I’d fought all the way since elementary school, which had kept me in such trouble in school. It was still there.

Two days after my French Professor spoke to me I quit college. I thought maybe one day I’ll go back but knew I had no intention of ever doing so, that I was done with it. I decided I never wanted to be in the position of being student to teacher again. I thought in terms of power over and that the language and set-up was ripe for abuse of power.

Before he’d let me go, by then kneeling at my feet Mr. Professor had said I was strong, “what made you so strong”, which I didn’t take as a compliment. He cried. Some may think, “Poor guy” as if this was an honest moment, except it was my legs he was holding, I have no doubt I wasn’t the first or last this happened to, and this was no swing moment of revelation as in “Holy Smoke” where P. J. Waters puts on a dress and goes screaming into the desert, is released of his demons, becomes whole and no longer a servant to his cowboy boots. I thought about this for years, authoritarianism and its cousins, and the way the authoritarian Nurse Ratchet in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” never gives the sense that her personal integrity had ever been violated, when there was simply very little left but Dogma having long-since trumped any shred of the spontaneous individual. What I walked out of college with was a conviction that at the root of all power over politics, of all negative, separationist -isms, was a desire to debase. Rape had nothing to do with sex. Abuse had nothing to do with sex. Instead it was power. You are mine, I control you, was expressed in many ways. The broken horse syndrome. Dominate, make it yours, own it and eat its magic. When the deed is done the magic is never entirely gone. However degraded, a breath of heat of the moment adrenaline remains, possession and repudiation, a peculiar hormonal dinner to be hashed and rehashed.

Initiations are grueling, but initiations into self-power and knowledge are not the same as initiations into group power. Rush Limbaugh was able to say of Abu Ghraib, “”I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You heard of need to blow some steam off?…This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time.” He was not just saying, “It doesn’t look that bad to me,” he was admitting that this is, indeed, the status quo, acceptable American authority, its construct and maintenance.

Then they went out and got boob jobs

When I was about 25 I was driving down the highway and I saw my first Hooters sign which was between the Atlanta airport and downtown. “This has to be a joke,” I thought. “This can’t be for real. Are women really going to waitress in a restaurant where men go just to ogle their boobs? Won’t they feel slimed? Won’t they feel debased? Won’t women say no I’m not going to serve my breasts up in order to earn a living?”

I’m an idiot.

Hooters was born in Clearwater Florida but Atlanta was its corporate base. Atlanta jumpstarted Hooters into the mainstream. Eventually, Hooters’ waitresses would be making a stellar $13 an hour (I read) as flight attendants, entertaining business class with rousing renditions of “I’m a little tea pot…when I get all steamed up…. pour me out” and “I wish I was an Oscar Meier Weiner”. Tease tease. The Hooters girls would pose in PlayBoy. Be perky for calendars. Tease tease. Walk en masse in Washington for their exclusive rights to be Hooters Girls. I wondered how many Hooter’s girls were told “You do as part of your job or you out of here.” I wondered what kind of contracts they were having to sign. If they got pregnant, what happened to them?

Around that time, a friend of mine went to work for a plastic surgeon. She got a boob job that boosted her to a D cup. Her mother got a boob job. Her sister-in-law got a boob job. My friend later got another boob job that boosted her to a DD. She was in agony, cracking her breasts all the time to make sure they didn’t torn into cement, she described it as torture, but she still went in for the DD. This was somehow empowering. She felt better about herself.

I didn’t get it. Something was going wrong. I’d never once felt inferior because of my breast size. I never once felt deprived because I didn’t have cleavage. I had my own problems with self-image but I knew they were my problems. I suspected if I had been a person with cleavage problems then getting myself some might help short term but not long term or in the way I might need to readjust my attitude about self. I realized I could be wrong but it was disturbing, all these women going under the knife so they could fill out a t-shirt in a way that would make men go “Wow”. I was told they were doing it for themselves, and I understood how that could be true, so they could go “Wow”–but wasn’t it so they could go “Wow” anticipating the men who would go “Wow”? If you didn’t want someone valuing you for your breasts why enhance them? Did being “powerful” mean becoming the play girl in the magazine next to someone’s toilet? Did “They want to have sex with me” mean you’d made your day? Your life?

What had happened since the bra burnings that was driving all these demi-cup women in for breast augmentation? I know I am now being labeled a prude. But for a woman to be somebody it seemed to wind back around to being some body.

A wife of one of the Hooters pioneers created the Hooters logo. In other words, isn’t that grand, they’re all in on it, the women and the men, each want it as much as the other. And perhaps some of them do. And perhaps some of them don’t. The “We enjoy sexism” Hooters creed.

Sex sells, no doubt about it. And people sell sex.

But I haven’t been talking about sex here. I’ve been talking about power and abuse of power.

Sexist jerks or jerks?

When I was 29 I got one of those first-class jobs as a waitron (we called it) in a night club/neighborhood bar. It was not a jiggle job. It was in an art/music/alternative lifestyle area. One of the bartenders was lesbian, as was the hostess. Another bartender was an artist. Almost all the bartenders and waitrons were artists, musicians or writers and the majority had degrees and bitter complaints over not finding work in their field or just needed the extra money. You could wear what you wanted. It was ferociously hard work, as waitressing is but it was much better than when I was 15 and worked for two weeks one summer at Shoneys until I got whipped cream from some med student’s strawberry pie on my elbow and he made a raunchy crack that had everyone at the table laughing about what they might do with a fifteen-year-old.

The job had its demeaning moments despite my being 29 and better equipped to deal with the patrons. There were a few twenty-three year olds who had some serious cute factor going and made better tips but so did the lesbians who styled no cute factor and what can I say but I’m not a talk-it-up type. I’ve always been the one that men (and women) would say to, who died and why wasn’t I smiling, then get my smile and back off and say, “Oh, sorry, ok.” But I did all right there and became head waitron. I was well-covered, as was a friend of mine who was taking a break between trips abroad to play in symphonies in countries that supported the arts and were eager for musicians. The hassling I did get was still from hell and it seemed to me that these were men and women who probably got off their up-and-coming tech job and took pride in how fast they could verbally hack up a grocery clerk or waitron, anyone in a position of “serving” them, who was thus an inferior and merited no respect. Give a customer their small change and they’d say you obviously didn’t want a cash tip, what did they want with pennies. Neglect to give back a penny and that too was going to cost you your tip. We all hated the kids who went to the really expensive university who would come in and eat and make a game of running for it the minute your back was turned. With both men and women there was a lot of, “You’re only a waitress” prejudice and seemed they were going to rub your nose hard in it that you were a service worker and subhuman.

It was an unspectacular career. There was the regular who got really drunk and sized me up as not having the kind of long legs he liked but I reminded him of his exwife and he wanted to tip me $50 and I said no and he never came back. There was the guy who wanted to pay me $50 to pour hot gumbo in his hands but things like that were rare. The place had usually a good feel to it, customers just enjoying the music. It had a congenial all knew each other feel as we all lived in the area and if we hadn’t known each other we knew some of the same people. Up until 8 pm when the night crowds started coming in, it was neighborhood people, some of whom were yes asses but that’s the way things are. I do have to confess I was probably the least liked waitron there. The owners liked me because I was responsible. When I was head waitron and the place was expanding and I was hiring for the expansion, the people I hired all complained when I quit because they said they’d taken the job in order to work with me. I thought as head waitron it was my business to make things run smoothly for them and be an intercessor between them and the owners and make sure they were taken care of and crazy things not demanded of them. But, no, I don’t think I was at all the most liked waitron with the customers. Some customers who were jerks and had been coming in for months I managed to immediately send packing. All I had to do was wait on them a couple of times and they’d be yelling, as they drunkenly stalked out the door, that they’d never had worse service, that they’d never met anyone as stupid as me, that either I was gone or they were never coming back. The bartenders would shrug and say well, they were jerks but they’d never had that much of a problem with them before, they were yeah jerks but, sigh, well, whatever, good riddance they guessed.

Here’s a tip, I own you now

Working for tips is not like a wage job, a salary job. A wage job you know what you’re going to make for what service usually. Same with salary. With tips you’re entirely vulnerable to the whim of the customer. Their peon empire is the tip jar where the customer gets to praise or flog for whatever reason. A fair number of people look at tips as wages and that they’re responsible for paying a certain amount, like a co-op agreement with the establishment to pitch in their share. (Never mind why the restaurants or clubs don’t do it. They don’t. That’s the way it is.)

Some want a show, and one day the resident owner did at a waitron meeting give a talk about the “show” we should put on, and to a degree I understood because my husband’s a musician and you do your “show” and there were theater people working there and I was writing for theater at the time. When you’re in entertainment you’re surrounded by “show”, you are “show”. But, to make it clear, we’re not talking Hooters show. “Show” meant something different. There was still some good heated discussion on the idea of “show” and the owner deflated a bit and the meeting stalled out, he flapped his hands some in bewilderment realizing he’d gotten in over his head and that was that.

There are those who think no waitron is deserving of a tip. In their peon power empire, when they pay, you don’t earn a living.

There are the people who penalize and praise with tips in ways that have nothing to do with expected labor. In their peon empire, money is especially fickle and inseparable from power. Transacting A for B service is not what it’s about. Making you feel their money is, which is teaching you their power.

While on the job I had met some people who had become friends and I’d sit and talk with them when things were slow. My husband was/is a musician and I was used to fuzzy lines as far as waitress and customer went because often times a people who follow bands consider themselves as friends with both band and night club staff. Sometimes if some drunk guys said hey sit with us a minute, if they were jovial enough and I knew they were just having fun, I’d sit a minute then get back to work and no hard feelings.

Then there was the one guy didn’t look at all the type to cause trouble. He also didn’t look drunk. He was already seated at a table with friends when I came on my shift. The waitron before me had just closed them out and said they seemed about ready to leave but they were waiting on some coffee that was brewing. I went over when it was brewed and refilled cups and said did they need anything and he said yeah, sit and talk, and I said no I’m busy. He said no wait I mean it, sit and talk, and it was an order, it was a battle of wills from the first moment he caught my eyes and I said no thanks I’m busy. He said I didn’t look so busy, he’d seen me talking. I said I’d just come on shift. He said they’d wait. I said it’s my job to get you your drinks and I didn’t sit and talk unless I knew you. You’re not going to know me unless you talk with me, he said, sit and have a drink. I don’t drink, I said and I’m busy. I was in a good mood and trying my best to defuse without antagonizing. Plus it was perplexing because he looked ok but he was staring me down, and perplexing because he was with people who frequently came in, though I’d never seen him, they were obviously friends and I’d overheard a bit of conversation and seemed he had something to do with one of the other businesses nearby, which surprised me as I’d never before seen him. He just didn’t look the type to pull this kind of shit. Have coffee, he said. All I want you to do is have some coffee with us. Nope. I’ll give you $5 to sit and talk for a minute, he said. I said no. I’ll give you $10, he said. I said no. I bet I can make you sit and he pulled out a $20 bill and said if I didn’t sit he was going to leave this tip for me. I said I was getting someone else to wait on him. He wouldn’t let it drop. Wouldn’t let the other waitrons wait on him. Someone like this is unavoidable when you’re running drinks back and forth by their table. He said he wouldn’t leave until I sat. I was trying to keep things as even keel as possible since his friends were friends of the owner. They looked embarrassed. The waitron who had been waiting on the table said he’s not normally like this, he’d always been fine with her, she didn’t know what was up. Great, I thought, I’ve somehow created an issue if he was usually ok. I promise, all I want you to do is sit and have a cup of coffee, he said. His friends said come on, sit, just for a minute, he won’t stop until you do. And I finally thought hell, sit, it’s not worth it, sit at the booth for a minute. It was a tense couple of minutes. I’ll buy you a beer. I don’t drink, I reminded him. When do you get off work, I’ll come back and we’ll go out. I’m married, I said. What did that have to do with anything, he said. Did he say he wanted to be anything but friends, he said. I reminded him he’d promised he only wanted me to have a bit of coffee and he’d stop this game. He said it wasn’t a game. I don’t remember what else he said or what I said but I finally raised my voice and had my finger pointed at his face, not realizing it, while I said whatever it was I was saying and he took my finger, which took me off guard, and he pointed it to the side and said hadn’t I ever been told not to point my finger in someone’s face.

Damn.

I thought you ass you’re right for all the wrong reasons–I shouldn’t have let the situation get to me, I shouldn’t have pointed my finger in his face. He wouldn’t stop staring and I was finally flustered. His chastising me for pointing my finger in his face, did it. I felt like it was a decided, “I’ve succeeded, you’re out of control” maneuver. And he was right. I got up to leave. He said he was going leave the $20 anyway and that there was nothing I could do about it. He left. He left the $20 on the table. He had me pegged as someone who did not want that twenty dollars, had me pegged as someone he knew it would offend if he left that $20. And he was going to leave that $20 no matter what. He was going to make some kind of hell of a point with it. Weeks later, someone mentioned he’d been drunk and was embarrassed. He never did come back in while I was there.

It was a little incident. A minor incident. Rates 0.1 on a 1 to 10 scale of Life Sux. But it’s many many years later and I still remember it and it surpasses most other incidents in memory on that job. When he said he was going to leave the $20 I should have said, great, wonderful, which would probably have closed the matter right then but it didn’t occur to me.

When I left, a refugee from some small town even further south had been working in the kitchen as the cook and we’d play cards on slow afternoons and he started drinking way too much. His pregnant punkette girlfriend one day came in adorned in a punkette wig and make-up and new punkette clothes and flashy nails. A side of her I’d not seen. She’d always been rather quiet. Now she was working as a lingerie model at one of those rather frightening looking lingerie model houses that look like a residence and had money to burn on new clothes. She was making enough that the boyfriend quit his job as a cook. It’s not a job that I could have done.

It isn’t that waitressing is “bad”. Though, indeed, the waitron is absolutely lower than you if their earnings depend on your gratuity and money is how you establish worth, and then yeah being a waitron is “bad”. Outside of that, being a waitron dependent on tips just puts one in a position of getting a true read on how many people feel about money and about power.

It is an odd job where power comes wrapped in $20 someone insists they will leave for you, that you can’t stop them. Later, for some reason, when reviewing the situation, I wanted to go, “It’s all about damn sex. Sexism. I’m female, he was male. Sexism.” But he could have done it to a male waitron. He could have been a she and done it to a female or male waitron. Pushing power is pushing power.

And, so?

People aren’t property. The older one gets the more one hopefully comes to comprehend how one’s endowment is of nature, as nature takes back little by little those things one imagined one possessed, a governance which should have been evident from birth and with which xtianity is at odds, viewing nature as in a fallen state, a thing to be subdued, dominated, controlled, improvements being one’s stamp upon it. If money is as wrapped up in power as it is, it’s mistaking nature as one’s own property, produce as personal wealth, and transmuting controlled substance into status. Law is war’s camp follower, legitimizing spoils.

After I finish writing the above, a friend of mine emails me tonight of her experience this week at the Carlos Museum at Emory, where she works, and watching Tibetan monks construct the Compassion mandala. Watching it assume form and depth with the additions of sands. Watching it swept into a pile of gray at the end, impermanence, sand taken to the nearby creek and pouring it in, returning it to the flowing water, representing a gift of the compassion contained within the days of the drawing meditation. The sand returns to the ocean.

My friend’s a gentler soul than I am. She writes of events such as this, her thoughts on them, reflections on what she views in nature on frequent walks in her semi-suburban neighborhood where there is a creek and hints of wildlife. She meditates and doesn’t go around making judgments. She writes some beautiful things.

I was thinking of dysfunctional property rights today and wealth and controlled substance as status as people as property and people working hard in different ways to make themselves desirable properties of power brokers, things that suffocate compassion and fruitlessly but tirelessly battle impermanence. She was meditating on impermanence and mandalas in her life and participating in a ritualized act of compassion.

If we both ended up at a stream today, she will feel better about the meditation sands poured into hers than I do about mine.

Elayne Riggs wraps up Estrogen Month with an announcement at Blogsisters and her website which has a table of links to women bloggers for those unable to locate.

Following up Revolution and
Happiness is a Warm Gun…

Thought I’d go with Lennon’s Gimme Some Truth.

Again 90’s production, Marty doing music and me vocal. Was a fun one.

And they want to!

Via feminst blogs
via Modulator
via Politech

the news that “North Carolina cities and other government agencies are pursuing the authority to sue citizens who ask to see public records.”

Supremes (state) due to hear on the 19th of April.

The problem with commenting on the news is what in the world is there to comment on when it comes equipped with a built-in Gasket Blaster? It’s like being handed a card in a diner that wants your comment on a meal but the menu already lists the entree as “Shit Sandwich”. All you can reply is that isn’t what you ordered but that’s what was indeed delivered.

First off. Despite the fact I was over at Stone Bridge lamenting the fact I used to love movies and how I hate Hollywood movies and how most have no substance, I got all way too excited when I came upon Arvin Hill’s Carnival of Horrors and his profile giving him as liking “Shakes the Clown”. Sure I was enjoying the posts too and saying “yes, hmmm, yes” but I’m hopeless because Monday night if I was going to get excited about anything it was going to be about “Shakes the Clown”. Which no one I know likes. That had me feeling so good I had to go over to Ratsboy Anvil and confess how a real event had melded with fiction in my mind about a bass guitarist’s confrontation with electrical forces, and so I set that right. I’m a sucker for road stories.

Now I’m feelin’ been-to-the-river righteous and that’s bad because I’m bound to wake up in the morning regretting I got all public and confessional.

Something else I (still) get a kick out of is this. THE STEALTH CURRICULUM! I ranted about it back on 14 April 2004 on my son’s blog which was more-or-less a private blog recording some of his favorite internet sites that we come across doing our loose, eclectic homeschooling.

The Stealth Curriculum, by Sandra Stotsky

Put out by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, listed on their website on 4/13/2004, the PR is/was:

Widely-used instructional materials that teachers rely upon to supplement their textbooks and their own knowledge may be dangerous to children’s educational health. The creators of such materials (and “professional development” programs for teachers) often inject bias and political manipulation into the minds of teachers and, subsequently, their students. The latest Thomas B. Fordham Foundation study, The Stealth Curriculum: Manipulating America’s History Teachers, casts wary light on resources that teachers frequently use but that seldom come under public or expert scrutiny.

The Stealth Curriculum was authored by Sandra Stotsky, veteran education analyst, scholar and former senior associate commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Education. It takes a close look at some prominent supplemental materials and workshops in the social-studies field.

Published by all manner of organizations and interest groups, these materials mislead teachers, distort the curriculum, and deflect classroom attention from the content that students should be learning. Worse, such materials are reinforced by a network of teacher workshops that focus more on propagating political and social ideas than imparting actual historical knowledge. At best, these materials offer a one-sided biased view of complex issues. In many cases, they go farther, omitting events that paint an interest group in a negative light or fabricating facts altogether.

“Under the guise of heightening teachers’ and students’ awareness of previously marginalized groups, they manipulate teachers (and, thus, their pupils) to view the history of freedom as the history of oppression and to be more sympathetic to cultures that don’t value individual rights than to those that do,” says Fordham President Chester E. Finn, Jr. in the report’s foreword.

This stealth curriculum tends to fly under the radar of historians and other experts as the sheer amount of materials makes any sort of tracking and reviewing process next to impossible. Little is known about the direct effects of these materials on teachers and their students because of the lack of research on them…

The “Stealth Curriculum” book has been out there a year now, but it’s interesting (to me at least) how I came by it.

Only natural for the Bush admnistration to want to correct a ‘liberal bias’ in American education by giving grants to groups that share its philosophy

It was via an Alfie Kohn article noting that the Bush administration has funneled more than $75 million in taxpayer funds to (educational) pro-voucher groups and miscellaneous for-profit entities. Among them is William Bennett’s latest gamble, known as K12 — a company specializing in on-line education for homeschoolers. (Finn sits on the board of directors). “Standards” plus “freedom” may eventually add up to considerable revenue, then. In the meantime, the Department of Education is happy to ease the transition: A school choice pilot program in Arkansas received $11.5 million to buy a curriculum from Bennett’s outfit, and a virtual charter school in Pennsylvania affiliated with K12 got $2.5 million. Continuing, Lisa Graham Keegan (a former Arizona school superintendent, now Education Leaders Council exec director, on favoritism exhibited in the grants said it was
“only natural for the Bush admnistration to want to correct a ‘liberal bias’ in American education by giving grants to groups that share its philosophy.”

K12 offers homeschooling curriculum and the “Virtual Academy”. Homeschooling through K12 will cost you about $1600 a year. Expensive by some standards and cheap by others. They don’t give a good overview (what publisher really does) of materials so who knows what’s on the plate, and what little they do show as samples still doesn’t give you much of an idea, except I think hmmm that was a lot of hooplah and pages to go through for not much info on a topic and much more complex navigationally than it needs to be (the kind of thing that made me wonder if the complexity was supposed to make you feel you were getting more than you were). But for people who want to homeschool it offers an attractive deal of not homeschooling by doing a virtual school at home through the academy as part of the public school system (if you live in a state where it’s currently offered), curriculum for free, computer for free, free supplemental materials not included in the homeschool package, state assessment tests (some districts require homeschoolers test at different grade levels and it costs money to do the tests), a virtual academy community and access to a certified teacher, plus internet reimbursement program. They offer grade and middle school and will eventually offer high school.

Imagine some of the grant money received has gone into the free K12 “Patriotism lesson” offered. And there’s the K12 “Virtues” program for which you can shell out $79.95 if so inclined. The Virtues program “provides a range of tools to support your family’s moral education. With books, videos, and fun worksheets, the program introduces your student to” our common culture, shared ideals, and cherished values.”

I was very curious of course what those shared ideals and cherished values are, not to mention what they offer as the common culture.

Before taking a look at K12’s Patriotism Program, here’s some more info on William J. Bennett. He is the founder of Americans for Victory over Terrorism (information on AVOT at Disinfopedia); founder of Empower America (America needs more power?); Founding member of Project for the New American Century ( Truthout’s William Rivers Pitt on the PNAC click here); an Advisor for the “Center for Security Policy”. He was G. W. Bush’s speech writer and editor in 1999. The Secretary of Education from 1985 to 1988. Chairman of the National Endowment of the Humanities from 1981 to 1985.

Media Transparency gives William J. Bennett, Distinguished Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, as a prime mover of the new right wing movement. He once said of Rush Limbaugh that he was a symbol of encouragement. “Adventures from the Book of Virtues”, based on William Bennett’s “The Book of Virtues”, airs on PBS. A friend of mine, who would have no idea as to its origin, sent H.o.p. a tape. I have never been able to sit through five minutes of it. If my friend knew it was based on William Bennett’s book she’d be mortified that H.o.p. might have watched a moment of the tape.

Teaching Patriotism the K-12 way

Gaining entrance to the K12 Patriotism Lesson requires you give name and phone number, whereas usually at sites one must give a name and email address.

Once in, the eye is greeted with,

Now, more than ever, we’re focused on America — on what makes this nation great, what unites us all, and why we enjoy the freedoms we have today. In the spirit of patriotism, we invite you to teach your child more about this beautiful land that stretches “from sea to shining sea,” the daring of early explorers and settlers, the wisdom of our Founding Fathers, and our enduring commitment to “let freedom ring.”

Looks like the NDN community is already out of luck. Lesson plans include an ultra basic account of a spotless Christopher Columbus. Included is a song you sing (to the tune of “Clementine”) about Columbus, the last of three verses being “Oh, Columbus, Oh, Columbus, Was so brave and wise and true, He sailed from Spain to the Americas, In fourteen ninety-two.”

Right. Brave, wise and true promoted the West Indies with its super cheap labor (lots of NDNs). Millions were dead in a short few decades. The cruelties were a stunning piece of barbarism. “Lies My Teacher Told me” explores the Columbus myth in depth, reporting,

“…Having as yet found no fields of gold, Columbus had to return some kind of dividend to Spain. In 1495 the Spanish on Haiti initiated the great slave trade…Columbus was excited. “In the name of the Holy Trinity, we can send from here all the slaves and brazil-wood which could be sold,” he wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella in 1496…

In the words of Hans Koning, “There now began a reign of terror in Hispaniola.” Spaniards hunted Indians for sport and murdered them for dog food. Columbus, upset because he could not locate the gold he was certain was on the island, set up a tribute system.

Ferdinand Columbus described how it worked:

[The Indians} all promised to pay tribute to the Catholic Sovereigns every three months, as follows: In the Cibao, where the gold mines were, every person of 14 years of age or upward was to pay a large hawk's bell of gold dust; all others were each to pay 25 pounds of cotton. Whenever an Indian delivered his tribute, he was to receive a brass or copper token which he must wear about his neck as proof that he had made his payment. Any Indian found without such a token was to be punished."

With a fresh token, an Indian was safe for three months, much of which time could be devoted to collecting more gold. Columbus’s son neglected to mention how the Spanish punished those whose tokens had expired: they cut off their hands.

Pre-Columbus there were an estimated 8,000,000 Indians in Haiti. By 1496 a census, not counting children under 14 or those who had escaped, came up with 1,100,000. By 1516, “thanks to the sinister Indian slave trade and labor policies initiated by Columbus, only some 12,000 remained.” It was after 1516 that the Black Plague struck the Indians in Haiti. By 1542 there were 200 left. By 1555, they were all gone.

The numbers of Indians on Haiti withered, the slave trade moved on to the Bahamas. The Spanish historian, Peter Martyr, wrote in 1516 that a ship needed no compass from the Bahamas to Hispaniola, as one could follow on the ocean the dead bodies of Indians who had been thrown from ships into which they’d been densely packed.

And still, can you beat this, by Jefferson’s time the Spanish were getting apologetic and outlawing NDN slavery and a number of NDN nations would have taken the Spanish any day over the Americans by then.

They are handsome. They do not have weapons.

K12 only notes, on Columbus’ relationship with the Indians, that he wrote “They are handsome. They do not have weapons.” K12 says these words show Columbus had found people who were gentle and kind. It’s not noted that Columbus wrote about their not having weapons in relationship to their inability to defend themselves against the weaponry of the Spanish. And of course doesn’t note that he enthusiastically wrote about Haiti being a prodigious resource for all the slaves that could be wanted.

Another part of the Patriotism lesson is “The Pilgrim’s First Thanksgiving”. They lead one to believe that Squanto visited from a neighboring tribe when in fact Squanto had been stolen as a child and taken to England (for which reason he knew English) and was also sold into slavery. Returning to America, Squanto found his tribe wiped out by the plague and he the sole survivor. Indeed, many of the first settlers moved directly into villages left by NDNs killed by disease and were able to take advantage of their crops, and not having to clear the land. A record from the so-called Pilgrim’s second day gives brief testimony to this:

We marched to the place we called Cornhill, where we had found the corn before. At another place we had seen before, we dug and found some more corn, two or three baskets full, and a bag of beans. ..In all we had about ten bushels, which will be enough for seed. It was with God’s help that we found this corn, for how else could we have done it, without meeting some Indians who might trouble us. …The next morning, we found a place like a grave. We decided to dig it up. We found first a mat, and under that a fine bow…We also found bowls, trays, dishes, and things like that. We took several of the prettiest things to carry away with us, and covered the body up again.

There are some NDNs of course who have a problem with this, with the desecration of burials and the thieving of burial goods.

Anyway good Squanto helped the pilgrims survive (he had no home) and then the pilgrims invite the Wampanoag to a feast, the First Thanksgiving (Thanksgiving didn’t exist until 1863). Oh joy. And you know how the story goes, the Indians and Pilgrims lived happily beside each other ever after. This is attested to by the number of Indians still residing in the East.

Exploring geography of the U.S., you get to clap and chant, “Atlantic to the East, Pacific to the West, U.S.A. is in between, That’s the country I like best!”

Got rhythm, don’t it? And is almost tearily poetic. There’s a folk song wandering around in there somewhere if you nudge around the lyrics a little. Maybe add some majestic purple mountains.

Other short subjects include The American Revolution, Betsy Ross and the First American Flag, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Statue of Liberty, Immigrants to America, and Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (Nothing about NDNs.)

The majority of historians regard the Betsy Ross story as a myth but K12 presents it as true, making prominent mention that Betsy was a widow but had no time to think about feeling sorry for herself, she was just going to continue sewing to put food on the table. I reason that was put in there for children of single mothers on welfare, though what they would be doing schooled at home I don’t know as who is there to take care of them when moms are out working minimum-wage jobs in order to earn their welfare check.

George Washington being unable to tell a lie (the cherry tree story) as a lesson in telling the truth

One of the two stories given in the Patriotism lesson about George Washington is that of his chopping down the cherry tree and that when his father inquired who had done this, G.W. said that he couldn’t tell a lie and that he did do it. A myth. A story invented by an early biographer and is even given as myth on the Mount Vernon website. But K12 presents it as truth. And the question and answer session? The child is asked why was George’s father proud of George. And the answer is, “Because George told the truth.”

Ten great patriotic places are given as a must visit. Included on the roster is Mount Rushmore. It’s not mentioned that Mount Rushmore was blasted out of the Black Hills by KKK member Gutzon Borglum who also initially worked on Stone Mountain, and that the Black Hills, sacred land promised by treaty to NDN peoples, was within a short few years after those treaties taken back with the discovery of gold. Not a single treaty made by the NDNs with the U.S. was honored.

Included in the Patriotism lesson is then a prominent link to the Fordham Foundation “September 11: What your children need to know.” What do the children need to know?

In April 2004 at the top of the page was the sinister Stealth cover. Behind falls from the sky a litter of papers that I can only take as meant to recall the papers from the Twin Towers that fell on New York on 9/11.

The Stealth Curriculum begins with a flurry of indignant rage that supplementary resource books, “Holocaust and Human Behavior” and “Race and Membership in American History: The Eugenics Movement” make comparisons between white racism in American and Germany, and suggest a link between the American Eugenics Movement and Hitler’s Final Solution. The argument is the materials obliterate the distinction between bigotry and genocide, seeking to reduce the moral status of the United States to that of Nazi Germany.

Well, sorry, but the U.S. did influence the genocide in Europe. Hitler is known to have studied Andrew Jackson’s removal of the Indians to reservations.

I once read through the entire thing. The below excerpt pretty well covers it (except for the furious dramatics over teaching pre 16th century Islam history and the fury over the delving into American eugenics which some connect with the interest in German eugenics i.e. Hitler).

The traditional history curriculum has been criticized for decades for dwelling on political, military, and constitutional history, highlighting only ‘important men,’ and ignoring the daily lives of ordinary people, women and others who did not loom large in political, military and constitutional affairs. Anthropological approaches in curriculum materials address this criticism. However, in doing so, they expand the curriculum to include topics with which most teachers have no familiarity–and which ususually have little or no relevance to the evolution of democratic institutions and individual freedoms. One example in many elementary and middle school curricula is a comparison of River Valley Civilizations…The daily lives and dates of the many Native American tribes have been perhaps the greatest beneficiary of this socio-cultural approach, which now occupies much instructional time. With it, however, comes a strongly negative view of the Europeans who explored and colonized America. Supplemental resources now guide teachers to downplay or ignore altogether what students should be learning about the origins and development of our civic culture.

The critical sentence is “they expand the curriculum to include topics with which most teachers have no familiarity–and which ususually have little or no relevance to the evolution of democratic institutions and individual freedoms. “ The view imparted is that anyone that was crunched by America’s Democratic Evolution Machine needn’t be a concern.

Stotsky doesn’t like it that the Plymouth Pilgrims are portrayed as weak in their reliance on the Wampanoag for the first “Thanksgiving”.

The Stealth Curriculum says one can’t judge the past by today’s standards. Says all this does is rouse affect (was that the phrase used) but does nothing for building the mind. Oh, yes, the phrase used was “affect-forming but intellectually empty assignments”. That teachers teach these things shows they aren’t schooled in history and need to be appropriately re-educated.

Guess the students need instead to be taught that G.W. chopping down the cherry tree is true, and that he always spoke the truth. If this is what passes for history or social studies in the K12 curriculum you’ve gotta wonder what else is taught if setting forth as true a known myth, expecting children to believe it (and thus believe for the rest of their lives for those who never question) is conceived of as sharpening and building a discerning intellect.

Sorry, self-correcting, it’s Ratboy’s Anvil. I keep writing Ratsboy Anvil. Damn.

Dorothy is nearly to the Emerald City, she can see it glittering green cross the poppy fields, its architecture that of an hopeful congregation of grain-filled silos. She and her friends rush into the blaze of scarlet blossoms carpeting the broad, open hills and the Wicked Witch appears, waving her arms as if to rouse the blossoms, alert her most beautiful of armies to the strangers in their midst so they will release in profusion their heaviest, sweetest, captivating scent. Dorothy becomes drowsy. She is encouraged to continue but is unable. Her eyelids grow heavier than ever they have before, her legs drift away from her so she is unable to stand. Down to the ground she slips and falls into a deadly, satisfied sleep, her friends crying out for help. Eventually a rescuing light snow falls, dispelling the soporific effect of the poppy.

At the end of Altman’s “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” as McCabe is buried by snow in the desperate, poisonous gold rush town where he went to make his final fortune, the prostitute Mrs. Miller, a customer in an opium den, reclining on her bunk, reveals at last to the viewer the treasure that has captured her heart, her devotion, her soulful companionship. Withdrawn from the world, eyes reaching far beyond the town, unaware of McCabe’s death, she emerges from herself into an isolated, exclusive landscape that steals her away from her surroundings and us.

Meanwhile, the town saves the Protestant church from burning.

In the book, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”, there is no snowfall. Instead the Scarecrow and Tin Man carry Dorothy out of the field. Not long beforehand, in the grasp of another contest that threatened to keep them from the promise of the Emerald City, the Tin Woodman had said, “This is bad, for if we cannot get to the land we shall be carried into the country of the Wicked Witch of the West, and she will enchant us and make us her slaves.”

I’m thinking of Dorothy and Mrs. Miller because of Alternet’s posting of Peter Thompson’s article, “Confessions of an Ebay Opium Addict”. A contributor to Hustler and the Reno News, he describes his hunger for the ultra-mundane, an appetite that is for a time appeased by Ebay poppy pods sold as craft items. In the end, quest becomes another kind of slavery to habit, and he writes that he is undoped two weeks but will succumb again.

I wonder what is it that makes the swell of poppy pods culminating in a star-burst lock so exotic-beautiful and consider if millenias of use have made them a part of us in the way that a snake’s hiss is seeming born resident memory to some mammals. Devoid of blossom, their form, however ancient an acquaintance, appears alien to all that is normal and everyday. And yet it speaks. A womb of seeds of eclipses of dreams that beg your presence for their coming to consciousness. They once crowned the heads of goddess icons, promised prophecies and medicinal aid. They were sacred to Demeter, whose daughter Persephone ate the seed of a pomegranate in the underworld and thus had to spend a portion of every year there. The story has never made sense to me, the why of the pomegranate being the culprit seed, and I wonder if it was originally a seed of the poppy. The pomegranate recalls the poppy pod.

If the poppy was popular into the Middle Ages, and yet 19th century writers were extolling its praises as if its transcendent properties were novel, then somewhere along the way its place as a sacrament was lost, perhaps with the Roman Catholic church’s emphasis on the wine and wheat. For at least 3000 years the poppy, a companion plant to wheat and barley, was welcome in civilization despite its dark side, then became a taboo subject by the time of the Spanish Inquisition from what I read), and (from what I read) when revived had effect intensified via the new practice of smoking, and from then on people insistently probed its properties for faster and more intensified exercise.

Medicine, experiment and novelty is not the same as sacred consumption and by sacred I mean, at least in my personal lexicon, a general attitude toward life rather than religion. With sacred consumption comes parameters established by tradition.

Disregarding any AA or NA belief or jargon, science or medicine, I am thinking of all this because of the contrast of the contrast of Protestantism with mystic sojourns (”McCabe and Mrs. Miller) and Peter Thompson’s speaking of how before experience of any type with mind-altering substances he desired them and was looking for them by the age of 12, about the onset of puberty, which is also a fairly traditional age for acceptance into the body of a church as an adult. What is missing? Is it just the sense of being different (as some say), or a matter of chemical constitutional difference (one may then ask how does the mind and body sense it is different and begins the search for “alteration”) or is it something more?

I can see where there would be room for considerable disagreement made by some, but it seems to me that the majorty of Protestant Christian sects don’t afford much room for mystic exploration that takes within. The Protestant evangelical and charismatic experience is largely outgoing, reliant on community experience and the individual slipping into their appropriate place. The mystic, inner search is largely abhored as too independent, dangerous.

Are mind-altering substances the only means to transcending the mundane, a means of turning and looking and appreciating it more? No, but they have had a place traditionally in numerous societies. So why not Western culture? Why the emphasis on outgoing, community experience to the denial of any other, with the exception of alcohol which is state-approved, accepted by most clergy?

I’m thinking of this because in his article Peter Thompson mentions watching, in dull, finally complacent reveries, his wife browsing through her “Lucky” magazine, placing “wish” stickers on wanted items. My senses are already reeling with Thompson’s description of desperate gluttony, a few steps removed from his cooly-expressed but naive remarks in Weird scenes inside the drug mine , written in 2003. At the Lucky website there’s more assault. A barage of ads, of hot colors cascading off the screen, a magazine about shopping conjuring a universe of unappeased desires, forums bulging with thousands of messages on what shirt what shoes what skirt did you buy what goes with what what should be worn with what. Lucky discounts and giveaways. Lucky breaks. Get Lucky. A Las Vegas style roll of the dice shopping excursion, pull the lever, pull the lever again again, pull and paste wish stickers as one seeks the winning combination, delights from around the world, the more there is the more one wants.

Peter Thompson wrote in his 2003 article,

New myths are created every day. Banning substances or banning books, all I see is a blur. Corporate drug cartels, depression, enervation. There is a certain risk people are always going to be willing to run. Everything is the next big thing, readily replaced by the next big thing, which is bigger and ostensibly more “thing” than the last. The same old arguments and malaise always follow. We are complex chains of chemicals searching for reactions. Whether it’s a middle-aged woman in 1903 guzzling “Doctor Smitty’s Feel-Fine Tonic, Good For What Ails You,” a Pontiac salesman gobbling Dexedrine in the 1950s, or some bored teen in 2008 snorting a tube of Preparation H and banging himself on the head with a piece of plywood, somehow, somewhere, somebody will find a way. What are we so afraid of? Feeling somewhat resolved, I puke into Harry’s trashcan, get up, and go get a sandwich.

The Lakota-Dakota-Nakota have a word which some take as meaning only “white” and others as meaning something more. Wasichu, the fat-eaters. The story is that the trickster spider, Iktome, warmed of the coming of the Wasichu. Iktome said, “There is a new man coming; he is like me, but he has long, long legs and many new things, most of them bad. And he is clever like me. I am going to all the tribes to tell about him.” And so he went and told of the coming of the White Long-Legs who would steal the grass, the trees, the animals, even the air. He would give many new things including sickness, hate, prejudice, greed.

A great, dark, insatiable hunger takes in more, more, never satisfied. Perhaps the hunger that was doomed to subdue the earth, to conquer it, to take all–the grass, the trees, the animals, the air–and refashion to fulfill its own desire, forgetting the integrity and sacredness of what it was eating. The spoils of war against the earth, against nature.

Which is where Peter Thompson has gotten it wrong. Not every way of being is a matter of the next big thing, a complex chain of chemicals searching for reactions, a constant attempt at remaking self and the world around one.

But it’s difficult to find the way back to the point where one can begin to seek balance, if not impossible while the Spirit of the Romanus Pontificus Bull of 1455 roams the world:

We [therefore] weighing all and singular the premises with due meditation, and noting that since we had formerly by other letters of ours granted among other things free and ample faculty to the aforesaid King Alfonso — to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and , and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate to himself and his successors the kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, principalities, dominions, possessions, and goods, and to convert them to his and their use and profit.

Separation of church and state is impossible when religion is confused with spirituality, especially religion focused on external assurances and rewards. Religion which conceives itself as god’s great government and has as its essential mission the mandate to conquer and divest. The politicians it produces are more than secular mediators. They are, no doubt, its clergy. There is no difference between them and its missionaries.

An alarming thought, that Bush is a twenty-first century Sun King.