So one of those nutty misogynist douchebags who sues clubs for having “Ladies Nights"---which said misogynist douchebags always paint as a feminist conspiracy to relieve them of their money---lost his case on the grounds that he’s full of shit. Though, to be fair, the judge used more legalistic language to express this idea. Feminists chortled, because we don’t like men who carry on about how they’re victims of an oppressive matriarchy because they don’t currently have a submissive 18-year-old attached to their cocks while another brings them a beer. Those men are often a pain in our asses, because they literally have nothing in their lives but hating women, and so they look for various ways to be a pain in your ass. Also, a lot of them have an ex-wife or three that they torture by constantly suing them (using the children as an excuse) to get out of child support or to gain the right to control their ex-wives’ lives. They suck. Watching them fail is a pure, unadulterated pleasure.
Which is why I was sad to see Tracy Clark-Flory give into the centrist urge by creating a strawfeminist to attack.
I’m surprised there haven’t been more feminists arguing against ladies nights in the wake of this ruling. Roy Den Hollander, the man who brought the suit, is not the most sympathetic character—Jezebel’s Irin Carmon referred to him as “Russian wife-abusing, Women’s Studies’ program-suing, young-lady-preying Roy”—but there is so much about ladies nights that runs counter to feminist philosophy. Gender-based pricing, really? If the roles were reversed, we would be in full-on protest mode. Clearly, women’s rights activists have bigger fish to fry—but this is a golden opportunity to disabuse the Roy Den Hollanders of the world of their distorted view of feminism.
There are so many misconceptions in that paragraph. First of all is the idea that feminists could disabuse Roy Den Hollander of any notion he has about feminism. As far as I can tell, Hollander thinks any woman who uses her mouth for anything but sucking his cock and uses her hands for anything but making him a sandwich is a “feminist"---a group that encompasses exactly 100% of women in the world. Which is to say that Hollander is just a very pure misogynist, and he simply attacks feminism to create some plausible deniability about that. Also, he’s not the sharpest pencil in the box. Hollander went to Russia and married a young Russian woman (I’m unclear if he found her through a mail order bride business, but he’s definitely the kind of guy who is drawn by their deceitful pitches that make Russian women out to be their fantasy of woman-as-submissive-doll), and was shocked---shocked I tell you---when she, upon getting her green card, divorced his ass faster than you can say, “Hey, maybe those stereotypes of Russian women are a load of horseshit created to relieve American misogynists of their money!” There’s much we can surmise from Hollander from this story and its aftermath (a series of lawsuits aimed at what he perceives are feminist institutions, from women’s studies programs to ladies night). For instance, we can guess that Hollander is the guy who thinks the stripper really likes him.
But Tracy’s argument that feminists should make a case out of ladies night in general also doesn’t compute. It’s not like feminists are for ladies night. Most feminists I’ve seen who’ve bothered to register an opinion on this point out truthfully that ladies night is about getting more women to the bar in order to get more men to the bar, and is just generally insulting to everyone. Why we’re not protesting in the streets over this fact is due to a couple of factors. One is that this entire thing is stupid. It is literally beneath our attention, even the attentions of feminists who have blogs to fill and enjoy doing pieces on some more light, pop culture stuff.
Feminist usually only have the mental bandwidth to address this stuff when there’s someone out there who needs advocacy and we’re in the position to offer that advocacy. Because of this, it’s often important to distinguish between when the patriarchy results in actual harm and when it’s just producing tastelessness. And ladies night is firmly in the latter category. It’s a victimless crime. Bars that find they’re turning into sausage fests rely on ladies night to bring more women in for their douchebag clientele to leer at and hit on. The men aren’t victimized because they have to pay more. They’re the intended beneficiaries of the system. The women actually get the short end of that stick, because the price they pay for the cheaper drinks is getting leered at and hit on by douchebags, which is why many women that might find themselves as feminist commentators quickly learn to avoid those bars. But most of the women in this situation have the agency to leave the bar is they’re not willing to pay the douchebag price to get cheap drinks. I’d probably be more concerned if there weren’t other places for women to go to get their drink and dance and flirt on with their friends, but in the real world there are often many options. I actually think it’s good for bars that are like this to advertise ladies night, because that’s as close to hanging a sign outside your bar that says, “You’ll probably get sexually harassed here, so please take that into account before patronizing our business.” Since sexual harassment hasn’t come to an end in our society, fair warning has to be seen as a step in the right direction.
I’m not making the tedious argument of, “Don’t you have more important things to worry about?” That argument is usually whipped out by someone who is uncomfortable with the issue and is trying to shut you up. I’m just saying that it’s genuinely hard to care about a situation where everyone involved is not only a grown adult, but also not really experiencing much in terms of social pressure or coercion. This isn’t like critiques of businesses that sexually objectify their employees, because those employees are in a position where they need to make money. This isn’t like critiques of oppressive beauty or fashion standards, where women often feel like they have to comply in order to get along in society. The people being exploited here have every right and reason to say no. The pleasure incentive at those bars is questionable, unless you enjoy trafficking in retrograde sexist stereotypes, bad music, and crappy cocktails. There’s no cost incurred by the public at large because of indulgence in these questionable pleasures. They’ve been given fair warning. At a certain point, you have to say that’s their business and not ours.
Missed a week of traveling, so I rolled some stuff I made that week into this. Sadly, because of all the chaos, I didn’t keep as good a track in pictures as I wished, but there is some stuff here to look at.
Dinner #1
We were having friends over for a not-“Mad Men” double header (“The Sweet Smell of Success” and “The Apartment”), and I was cooking dinner. I thought it wise to get as much work done ahead of time, mostly so that I could get dishes done and not have to sweat it.
1) Made pie crust, using the Bittman recipe. It requires a half hour of sitting as a ball, and then an hour sitting in the pie plate, so that meant that I really had a lot of time to clean and putter.
2) Made cucumber juice for the cucumber cocktails by pureeing two cucumbers in the food processor, putting the puree in a strainer, and pressing on it.
3) Peeled, cubed, and salted some eggplant.
4) After the pie crust had gone through its waiting periods, made a peach-berry mix using one of Bitman’s basic recipes. (Basically, just a little sugar on berries and sliced/peeled peaches.) Berries were really discounted at the farmer’s market, so I had a ton of them.
5) Boiled spaghetti. Had some extra time, so cut up what was left of the purslane.
6) Cooked the eggplant with some garlic, olive oil, the purslane, white wine, and of course, salt and pepper. Chopped up three Jersey tomatoes from the farmer’s market, tossed it in, turned off the heat, and added the basil and a sprinkling of breadcrumbs. Poured over the spaghetti, and of course, parmesan cheese.
7) Served with a spinach and tomato salad. Pie for dessert! Sadly, the pie filling wasn’t thick enough, but it was still quite tasty.
8) Used the cucumber juice to make cocktails with it, gin or vodka, lime, a little sugar, and mint.
So, yesterday was my 33rd birthday. In the proper form, it was celebrated with much vinyl. I bought some records at a very nice little local store in Brooklyn, and Marc bought me some more, along with some books. It was an excellent haul: She, REM, Wire, the 45s, PIL, the Rezillos, and, much to my great delight, the Beastie Boys. Specifically, their first grown-up album, and what many of us deem their best album, Paul’s Boutique. It was the perfect gift for a newly minted Brooklyn-dwelling New Yorker, and I even know what intersection the cover is at! In honor of me being so old and this being Labor Day weekend, I’m taking the rest of the day off from blogging. Until then, enjoy this mix made off the Beastie Boys. Leave your own mixes in comments. Or comment about whatever you like. Open thread.
Original song: “Hey Ladies” by the Beastie Boys
I was sad that the original video, which is hilarious, was not embeddable. But you can still play the song from this webpage.
1) “Award Tour” by A Tribe Called Quest
2) “Let Me Ride” by Dr. Dre, feat. Snoop Dogg & RBX
3) “Who Am I?” by Snoop Dogg
4) “Fight The Power” by Public Enemy
5) “Express Yourself” by NWA
6) “Me Myself & I” by De La Soul
7) “Ready Or Not” by the Fugees
8) “C.R.E.A.M.” by Wu-Tang
9) “I Get Around” by 2-Pac
10) “Sure Shot” by the Beastie Boys
Videos behind the fold. Dance your asses off! It’s a long weekend. I know I plan to. (Even though it’s New York.)
So there’s been a dust-up between a guest blogger named Monica at Feministe and fat activists (mostly on Twitter that I’ve seen), with Maia actually posting on it. I’m not interested in getting in the middle of it. I think both sides make good points. FAs are right that Monica is out of line suggesting their negative experiences with health care providers are figments of their imaginations, but Monica is right that the “but some highly muscular people are technically obese!” is a disingenuous argument. I think people were too hard on Monica, but also that she was incredibly unfair in some ways. I want to talk about the most glaring unfair assertion she made, one that was pulled out by Kate Harding on Twitter in particular.
Weight can signal a lack of activity or too many donuts, and that shouldn’t irk anyone. Yet, it does.
This was unfair, for the very simple reason that fat activists are 100% right that 95% of fat people are going to stay fat. Drastic weight loss that stays off is incredibly rare, and is usually the result of weight loss surgery or a complete 180 in personal habits that is the sort of thing that is really not in human nature. And when I say “180”, I mean 180---the only fat people I’ve ever known to get un-fat without WLS went from being people who didn’t get much exercise to people who turned into jocks. Moderate exercise---which I still have no idea what that supposedly means anyway---just isn’t going to cut it. Losing weight is really, really hard. I put myself on a gym regime when we moved to New York, on top of all the extra walking you do here, and I’ve lost weight, sure, but it wasn’t the kind of weight loss rate that would turn a fat person thin. I can’t imagine what it would take to lose 10 times as much weight as I’ve lost, much less the 20 times that some people would have to lose to go from being fat people to not-fat people. I hear people make cracks about soda and donuts all the time, as if merely giving up overindulgence would magically turn a fat person thin. If you sit down and calculate the calorie shortages someone would have to endure to lose a whole lot of weight, you should see the mathematical issues in play.
But it wasn’t just the “drop the donuts, lose 100 pounds” simplicity that was off here. It was also the invocation of the concept of personal responsibility that makes me more than a little queasy. Not to say that I think that people don’t have personal responsibilities to look after their own diets or exercise regimes, but to write it off to that and not look at the big picture is to miss the point. Americans have been getting fatter in recent decades, and there have been rising rates of diabetes and heart disease to go with it. To imply that the cause is simple lack of self-control is to suggest that Americans have magically become lazier or more impulsive. I would argue that the culture has changed dramatically and puts immense amount of pressure on people to have habits that are simply counter-productive to their diet and exercise goals.
Is it just me, or are conservatives feeling more emboldened than ever to lie their asses off? For years, many of us pro-science types have been raising the alarm about the Republican war on science---denying global warming, lying about the medical realities of women’s health care, denying evolution, and now even attacking the theory of relativity. And of course, there was the usual political lies, especially the brazen way that the Bush administration lied about WMDs in Iraq. But lately, it seems like they’re not even interested in hat-tipping the truth when they assault basic reality. And part of this new, brazen, “fuck the truth” strategy is an assault on basic historical facts.
Glenn Beck is the king motherfucker in this department, with his “university” nonsense. I’ve watched some of it, and basically it’s just a matter of rewriting history. The wingnut obsession with history is nearly as fascinating to me as their obsession with claiming that they’re just speaking for god or the upswing in interest in combining a sort of self-help speak with hyper-right-wing politics. I asked Will Bunch about it in an interview that’s going to be released on Tuesday on the podcast---he’s got an awesome new book out called The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama---and he pointed out that it relates to the notion that they want their country “back”. In order to establish their claim that the country belongs to angry white conservatives and not to everyone, they need to make appeals to history. Thus the powdered wigs and nostalgia for a time when slavery was legal but women voting wasn’t. But the fact of the matter is that most of American history isn’t really conducive to the incoherent arguments they want to make about how they’re both totally not racist and yet they want to claim that controlling all the reins of power is the birthright of a group of people who just so happens to be super-white. So, they rewrite it.
In 1981, during the first year of Mr. Reagan’s presidency, the late Lee Atwater gave an interview to a political science professor at Case Western Reserve University, explaining the evolution of the Southern strategy:
“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger,’ ” said Atwater. “By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.”
The reason to rewrite history is that the Southern Strategy is still in play. The Tea Party is the Southern Strategy, exactly as outlined by Lee Atwater. But the new wrinkle is denying this at the top of their lungs, in hopes that a few morons will be swayed into buying their bad faith arguments. Sadly, I think it’s working---I’ve seen a few ostensible “liberals” get all upset when some of us suggest that the use of the Southern Strategy is as racist as it ever was, and the intensity of it now might have something to do with our black President. Which makes me wonder what their grasp on history must be. After all, mowing down civil rights protesters with hoses happened within the lifetime of the majority of Americans. Granted, as the years go by the people who openly supported segregation are becoming fewer in number. But still. Do people really think that Dr. King made a speech and suddenly all those mean racists just evaporated into thin air?
In reality, those mean racists stayed right where they were. They got quieter about it. They only started saying what they really thought in private to white-only audiences. Their ugliest opinions may have softened up some. Some may even start to convince themselves they were never really that racist to begin with. But they didn’t go anywhere. And the Southern Strategy still works its magic on them.
The good news in all this is that the Tea Crackers aren’t a particularly young crowd. The average Tea Cracker is a Baby Boomer.The average Fox viewer is even older than that. One thing I do get from this is that the civil rights movement did more to racists than make them more circumspect about their racism. It also made it that much harder for them to pass their values down to their children. The folks who were born during a time when segregation was still legal were apparently still ripe to absorb the values of a previous generation, but then there’s a break. I’ve seen a lot of this with my own eyes---white Generation Xers and millennials who are openly at war with their older relatives about these issues. I honestly do think time will fix a lot of these problems. But let’s be clear about one thing. Just because the civil rights movement made it more taboo to be openly racist doesn’t mean the people who opposed the civil rights movement just up and went away.
I haven’t written about MRAs (men’s rights activists) in awhile, because what is there to say about a group of men organized around the principle that women shouldn’t have the right to say no? Because that’s basically what pisses them off: women who think they get to say no to sex, to staying in abusive marriages, to having their time occupied by any man who demands it, to having a baby when they don’t want. And they hide behind patriarchal sentimentality to justify their strong desire to control women. Not much else to say, because going at it with them is a lesson in hearing undeserved self-pity from those who were dumped for reasons obvious to everyone but them, and who have endless amounts of time and energy to dedicate to throwing their own pity parade.
I bring it up, because while most people who play this game are men, some women do it, too. And by “it”, I mean specifically the game MRAs play and teach each other through their organized movement, which is to cling to control over your ex-wife as long as possible by exploiting the court system. Just because she has a right to leave you doesn’t mean you’re going to let her go without punishing her over and over again! And Lindsay linked to an article from one of them. Beverly Willett is protesting New York adopting no-fault divorce because if there had been no-fault when her husband broke it off with her, she would have had fewer options to punish him for rejecting her, and dragging out the pain for years.
It’s interesting to consider how Willett makes exactly the same arguments about marriage that MRAs make, without the whining about imaginary “reverse sexism”, but the audience for it sees through her a lot more quickly than audiences tend to see through MRAs. When a woman hides behind patriarchal nonsense about the sacredness of marriage, she doesn’t bring any male authority to bear to the situation and just sounds like an abusive control freak. I humbly submit that anyone who uses the courts to punish a spouse for years after leaving them is an abusive control freak, regardless of gender. Indeed, I’d say that’s a tautology to say so. What I think is interesting is how these abusive control freaks make appeals to “family values” to justify their own damage.
Willett’s husband left her. He was with someone else. It was abundantly clear that he wasn’t coming back. For all intents and purposes, they weren’t married, except in name. But Willett carries on in her justifications of what she did as if she had a chance to change the facts on the ground. Example:
One night when I was up reluctantly working on the divorce papers, my eldest daughter appeared by my side. “I don’t want you to get a divorce,” she said. I didn’t either. Yet until this moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that I had the power to stop this from happening. I realized perhaps the break-up of my marriage wasn’t inevitable and that by standing up, maybe I could also help others.
The invoking of the children is a classic MRA ploy, and despicable. It’s using your own children as cover for your own inability to act like an adult when a relationship cracks up. But the next part about how the break-up wasn’t inevitable? This is a note she plays over and over in the piece, and it never once makes sense. What did she think would happen if she found a way to keep her husband from actually divorcing her? That he would break up with his girlfriend, move back home, get into bed and make sweet love to his legal wife? Does she think that if the state just forced people to stay legally married, especially in this day and age, that would mean love would flourish? Or is she being disingenuous about the real reason she dragged this fight out for five years and thousands of dollars---to punish her husband for leaving her and to throw a multi-year pity party for herself? My guess is the last one. She lets the truth slip out a little in all the self-martyring language about “saving” a marriage where one person unilaterally would not participate in spirit even if forced to have this single legal binding.
“Divorce is about money,” Saul said. No one cared about right and wrong.
Right and wrong. Her husband cheated and left; she felt this was wrong. But there are no legal punishments for breaking a person’s heart. So, she decided that if the criminal system wouldn’t punish her husband, she’d punish him. Through 5 years of divorce hell and many judges trying to tell her to grow the fuck up. Her stated desire to “save” her marriage failed, of course. Her mostly unspoken but far more real desire to exact punishment worked like a charm. Except, of course, she did it to herself as much as to her husband.
All of this is why I rolled my eyes when I read this part:
When I refused a quickie divorce on his terms, he served me with divorce papers filled with baseless complaints.
“The whole thing is a pack of lies,” I said to my attorney, sobbing. “He’s the one committing adultery.”
“Then deny it, and sue him for divorce,” Saul said.
“But I don’t want a divorce,” I cried. “I love my husband.”
She loved him so much she was willing to spend the next five years of her life trying to exact punishment. That’s not love. That’s hate.
Twenty years wasn’t something I wanted to chuck overnight. Made of strong Southern female stock, I grew up believing the words “until death do us part” were non-negotiable. Family was paramount, and divorce virtually unheard of. “I don’t think there’s anything in life that can’t be forgiven,” my aunt said when I asked for her advice. To me, that pretty much covered the whole territory.
There’s nothing strong about being a clingy, vindictive control freak. That is cowardly and weak. I want to drive this home, because like this woman thinks of her weak, childish behavior as evidence of some strength, so do MRAs tend to pride themselves on being Big Men, even as they act like toddlers throwing tantrums because other human beings don’t submit completely to them. All of these people are 100% wrong in their self-assessment. Strong people don’t need to exert control over others to feel strong. Strong people don’t waste their lives on revenge. Strong people have the strength to get up and move on. Strong people don’t throw good money after bad.
Michelle Goldberg has an interesting piece up at The Daily Beast about how Glenn Beck is using his haterade to create unity between Mormons and the traditional Christian right, which is mostly populated by evangelical Christians. If you really step back and look at what he’s done, it’s pretty amazing. Beck is Mormon, but you honestly wouldn’t know it from the general way he carries on, which is to imitate the tropes of right wing evangelical Christianity, with the weeping and the ranting and confessions. I don’t know a lot about Mormons, but I think they’re generally a little more buttoned-up than that. I’m sure much of his audience would agree. They probably think Beck is like them for weeks or even months of watching him before they find out that he’s a Mormon, and by then, they’ve decided he’s in the tribe. So they’re probably warmed up to Mormons by default.
I’ve always thought it was strange that right wing evangelicals and Mormons couldn’t set aside their differences when it came to whose made-up bullshit was the right made-up bullshit. After all, their actual real world beliefs that the made-up bullshit was made up to rationalize are identical: that men are superior to women, that white people are superior to non-white people, that patriarchy is good, that gay people should cease existing, at least out in the open. Also, they share a hostility to science and rationality that threatens the authority of their made-up bullshit, and a general suspicion of government policies that might undermine their core beliefs about the hierarchy of humans. But I suppose people that subscribe to different flavors of made-up bullshit are wary of each other. The existence of other religious beliefs is pretty much de facto proof that it’s all made-up bullshit. After all, most religious people believe that other religions are a bunch of made-up bullshit. If they ponder that too hard, they may be forced to conclude that their own made-up bullshit is also made-up bullshit. I’ve long suspected American evangelicals dislike Mormons because Mormons hold a mirror up to their face and they don’t like what they see. Evangelicals like to pretend their various theological beliefs are ancient and go back to Jesus, but in reality much of what they believe is recent and made up by Americans spinning bullshit. For instance, the belief in the Rapture is quite American, as is the general assumption that it’s Americans that are so important in their theology that the end of the world must be related to our empire’s peak.
Still, all along there’s been a strong potential for an alliance, because while the made-up bullshit part of the program causes animosity, the actual real world beliefs are there. It takes someone like Glenn Beck, who is such a charlatan that even he probably doesn’t realize that he’s a charlatan, to conclude that there’s no reason for fairy tales to get in the way of a political alliance.
In a way, this all was inevitable. It’s hard to say if the erroneous initial reports that the teabaggers were a secular movement were just mainstream media wishful thinking or a snow job being played by the teabaggers themselves. I think it was a little of both, honestly. Far from all teabaggers are religious, much less the religious right, and so the teabaggers were happy to play along with the “secular” narrative to reflect their bona fide secular members. However, the religious right will always be the backbone of these kinds of movements, because without the organizing power of the churches, you mostly have a bunch of individuals sitting in their houses stewing. Beck gets this, and I think he specifically set out to make the Jesus talk more explicit to pay tribute to the leaders of the religious right. Now that they’re fattened up with flattery, they’re ready to do his bidding and start moving their people where he wants them to go.
Coddling the religious right is really important, because I don’t think the workaday believers are necessarily a sure thing when it comes to political movements. They need constant care and feeding to give a shit. Evangelical churches recruit from two major populations, which are people who already have right wing beliefs they want to justify and organize around, and people who are emotionally needy and are attracted to the self-help and sob-heavy emphasis of the evangelical church. The latter group are your loose cannons. They’re reliable followers, which is good for the right, but they aren’t necessarily hateful and ready to respond to naked racist/sexist appeals, like you get with someone secular like Rush Limbaugh. If tomorrow their pastors started to go old school with talk about how they don’t need to be involved in politics, because that’s of the world, these are the folks that would probably not only burn their voter registration cards but be a little relieved to be out of it, so they can dedicate 100% of their time to loving Jesus and chasing kids around. So, these folks need constant flattery and feeding. The Tea Crackers can’t keep the momentum going at the ballot box without them.
So, I was gone Friday-Monday, and away from the internet. I was in the city of my birth, El Paso, TX. I occasionally get to go back to my second favorite city in Texas (with Austin being an easy first), though I rarely get to stay long enough to do what I really love doing there, which is hitting downtown and thrift shopping. Still, a little listening and looking, and I got a taste of what life’s been like these past few years there, and how much things have changed while everything continues to look the same.
See, geographically, El Paso is part of a bigger metroplex area---it’s all one big city with Ciudad Juarez, with a very thin Rio Grande and the mountain pass it cut (the Paso that gave El Paso del Norte its name) separating the Mexican side from the American side. Juarez is the much bigger city, but both cities sit in the valley of their little spate of Rocky Mountains. The entire area suffers from dryness, hot sun, and unreal amounts of smog that is trapped by the mountain range and hangs over the city, giving me a sore throat by day #3 there. Most of my life, I felt like the fates of Juarez and El Paso were intertwined in such a way as to be functionally inseparable. People traveled back and forth with ease, both commuting for work (as my Spanish professor for summer courses at UTEP did), and for fun and shopping. That changed a little after 9/11, when the government revoked the right to cross the border without a passport. But things didn’t really get weird until this functional civil war with the drug cartels broke out.
Now it seems like El Paso and Juarez are worlds apart, even as they look even more like one city. (In the past, at night, you could see a clean border between the cities because Mexico had a different standard light bulb than the U.S., which led the lights in El Paso to be a light yellow but the lights in Juarez to be a greenish white. Now they all look the same, though the Mexican side of the border still twinkles because fewer people have their lights on.) El Paso is peaceful and quiet, and it’s consistently in the top 5 safest large cities in America. This, despite its outrageous poverty, the ability of criminals to border hop to escape detection, and of course, the fact that it’s in the same spot on the globe as what is becoming the most dangerous city in North America.
You can hear from a distance how bad Juarez has gotten, or you can hear it up close. The murder rampage is simply on people’s minds. What used to be a regular part of visiting El Paso---going to Juarez for a drink and some shopping---is basically unthinkable now. The people of El Paso are as content as the people of Juarez are fearful, and that feels dramatically off, almost impossible, really. But what really blew my mind was when we were standing in the hotel lobby waiting for our cab to take us to the airport, and I saw they were giving away copies of the El Paso Times. I casually picked one up and saw this story.
Juárez cancels Sept. 16 celebration
For the first time since the Mexican Revolution, Juárez city government has canceled the festivities of one of Mexico’s most patriotic holidays.
“First comes the safety of the population,” said Juárez Mayor José Reyes Ferriz. “Because of threats, because of criminal activities that exist in Juárez, we don’t want to take any risks.”
On the eve of Sept. 16, mayors in Mexico lead crowds at city hall esplanades in the traditional ceremony of grito de independencia, or call to independence.
¡Viva México! were the words shouted the same day by Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla in 1810, when he launched the rebellion against the Spanish crown.
It’s basically like canceling the 4th of July. But it’s understandable, of course. Since 2008, there have been 6,200 murders in a city of about 1.3 million people. I know intellectually about the murders, the curfews, the kidnappings, and the general climate of fear. Still, seeing this simple story about the cancellation of the Sept. 16th celebrations really drove home to me how much Juarez has really fallen to pieces, and is basically a war zone. We would stand on the hotel balcony and overlook Juarez and it was almost impossible to believe. Obviously, it looks as quiet and normal as it ever did. Only at night do you even get a hint of it, as the city looks darker than it should.
Of course, the way this tends to translate into American self-centered craziness is by reinforcing the hysterical racism in places like Arizona. Passing laws to antagonize immigrants and people suspected of being immigrants---or beefing up border security to pander to racists despite the fact that there’s no real reason to believe the war is leaking over in anyway---is straight forward asshole behavior. The worst part about all this is that the United States does play a role in all this, but it’s in a way that we, as a nation, don’t want to talk about. The reason this kind of stuff concentrates on the border is because Americans exert such a powerful demand for illegal drugs that are either manufactured or at least routed through Mexico. Conservatives are keeping us busy with their screeching about non-existent crime on the American side of the border and non-existent threats from illegal immigrants, but no one is talking about what we could do to relieve this horror show in Mexico that we played such a major role in creating. Which isn’t to say that Mexico doesn’t have its own problems with waging a pointless War on Drugs as a bit of moral showboating and a form of control exerted on disenfranchised citizens. But again---border town, American demand, and the criminal element has everything to do with the fact that Americans are so hellbent on keeping drugs illegal and dedicating outrageous amounts of resources towards attempting to stop the flow.
We should be ashamed of ourselves. Deeply, deeply ashamed of ourselves. It’s amazing to me that over this past weekend, the Glenn Beck rally was only the second biggest reason looming in my mind for why Americans should be ashamed of ourselves. Of course, part of that is because Tea Crackers are such a clown show, but the War on Drugs is something even supposedly smart people mindlessly keep backing.
Glenn Beck has launched a new news site called The Blaze, which is a truly fantastic news source for Glenn Beck.
It’s got such stories as why Al Sharpton doesn’t like Glenn Beck, why some guy at the New York Times likes Glenn Beck, children who came to see Glenn Beck, clergy who came to see Glenn Beck, Howard Kurtz on Glenn Beck and a message from Glenn Beck.
What I appreciate most about this influx of Glenn Beck, which is an alternative to such websites as glennbeck.com and foxnews.com/glennbeck, is that this one uses different fonts. And that, my friends, is the most important innovation of all.
Sorry that “Mad Men” blogging is late yet again. We were traveling to El Paso, where it’s still 1996 in many ways (especially according to the music in the bowling alley), and internet access was spotty, if available at all. I didn’t even get to see the show until last night! So, it’s yet another Tuesday. Hopefully, next week, things will be back on schedule.
As I’ve noted before, I’m wary of alcoholism as a plot device in the same way I don’t love inflicting any kind of horrible disease on a character to raise the stakes. I don’t mind having characters that are alcoholics, just if that’s being used as a cheap plot device. I feel, on “Mad Men”, that we had alcoholic characters all along, but it was played with a bit of subtlety. Now, we’ve had another episode about how Don has gone way past “functional alcoholic” and deep into “blacking out and losing entire weekends” territory. Alcoholism is an easy card for drama writers to play, but it rarely means much onscreen besides a stern message about the evils of excess and the horrors of addiction, both of which amount most often to as much as saying, “Cancer sux.” Are the writers of “Mad Men” going to give us more than that?
So far, I’m still feeling good about this storyline, for a couple of reasons. One is the usual ability of the “Mad Men” writers to take a done-to-death topic (like, say, “The 60s were a time of tremendous social change!") and breathing new life into it, often by employing a heavy dose of bluntness that usually makes most writers fearful they’ll scare off the audience. And they usually do a good job of making the shocking stuff onscreen mean something, something more than, “Would you look at that?” And so far, we’re getting that with the alcoholism storyline.
Don’s low points aren’t being rendered in quite the same cliched terms that you usually get. He’s not screaming and throwing things, getting into fights, or getting in accidents. His personality doesn’t change, but he just becomes less inhibited when he’s drunk. At the end of the episode, you get the impression that the biggest losses are his ability to control his situation and his mental capacities. We discover that, since he’s really been hitting the sauce, he’s basically not had a really good idea since they started SCDP. On the contrary, his big Clio-winning coup was actually created by Peggy, who gets no credit for her work. And worse, Don gets wasted and steals a crap idea from a crap applicant that he then has to hire.
Which leads me to my biggest question about the comic parallels drawn in this episode. We’re led to believe that Don basically used Roger’s alcoholism, albeit in a more crafty way, to get a job. And Danny stumbles into this job because of Don’s alcoholism, though he doesn’t actually do anything to make that happen. So, what are we to make of this? We’re led to believe that Don deserved the job he got, that he was entitled to exploit Roger a little because the Rogers of the world don’t just let the working class Dons of the world in the door. Roger didn’t even look at his work! But there’s no reason to think Danny actually deserves the job. In most ways, he’s the opposite of Don---he’s a hack who is using his connections to get in the door, instead of a talented person who has to use cunning. They’re not the same at all, really. So why the parallels? To draw attention to how useless Don has become? Is Danny a symbol of the mediocrity Don has invited into his life by getting wasted every night?
Entitled hacks were a real theme of the show, which I enjoyed. The writers took a swipe at the very kind of writing I criticize at top, which is to be shocking for its own sake. The new art director is pretty much idea-free, but he gets away with it by adopting the persona of a shocking, belligerent artist who is constrained by stupid middle class mores inflicted on him by a sex-withholding matriarchy. He’s simply ahead of his time, of course---born a couple decades later and he could go on to found American Apparel and then run it into the ground. As usual when something on the show is as over the top as this, there’s a conflict. It seems to buck the norms of restraint that we expect on a critically acclaimed show like this, but on the flip side, to be less than over the top is to sacrifice accuracy. Douchebags like that are, in the real world, like a million times worse. Probably more so in the 60s.
Below is a photo from TaniaGail, taken at the 8/28 “I Don’t Have A Dream” Rally.
Jim Treacher, on behalf of all tolerant conservatives everywhere, posts a list of news articles talking about the startling whiteness of the rally, followed by the single most predictable line in the history of writing:
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.
OOOOOOOHHHHHHHH! He GOT them reporters! Fuck those people, they ain’t got shit, because they mentioned race! And Glenn Beck purposefully forgot he was invoking Martin Luther King, Jr. (but still invited MLK’s niece) because he believes in the same colorblindness that Martin Luther King, Jr....er, didn’t.
Notice (if you click through to the list) that Treacher doesn’t link to the text of the speech. That’s because it says stuff like this:
One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.
It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.” But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check — a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now.
This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights.
We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating “For Whites Only”. We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.
As much as it’s comforting to believe that the I Have A Dream speech began 80% of the way in with King’s sonorous voice ringing out parallel exhortations over the Mall, there exists one small problem. He said a bunch of other things that really, really mattered.
The point of King’s work wasn’t that one day two dour white dudes would find the rarest black man of all - the one with a fanny pack - and take a picture with him in order to show other black people that they were angry and terrible. The point was that black people had legitimate and substantial grievances, and that they should be willing to take drastic steps to rectify them. The “content of their character” line was not a call for colorblindness, it was a call for progress with full cognizance of America’s sordid history and relationship with race.
There’s a reason none of the conservative “heirs” to King’s legacy can ever be bothered to read any but the last few lines of that speech. It’s because if they did, they would legitimize every person they’ve called a race hustler and poverty pimp since the march on Selma.
Sorry for no posting last night. Running around like mad, trying to get shit done before we head out to El Paso. In fact, we’re on our way now. There won’t be a CSA post tomorrow, and posting may be light until Tuesday. The town of my birth is one that often pops up in rockabilly and in country western songs, often to represent the Wild West, the crazy middle of nowhere, or the border. Think Marty Robbins’ “El Paso”. With that in mind, this song is one of my favorite that name drops El Paso. Aerosmith’s cover ruined it, but just ignore that.
Original song: “The Train Kept A-Rolling’” by the Johnny Burnette Trio
And here’s the list! Leave yours in comments, or comments about whatever you like.
1) “My Boy Elvis” by Janis Martin
2) “Rockin’ Bones” by Ronnie Dawson
3) “Red Hot” by Billy Riley & His Little Green Men
4) “Crazy Legs” by Gene Vincent
5) “Let’s Have A Party” by Wanda Jackson
6) “Somethin’ Else” by Eddie Cochran
7) “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” by Buddy Holly (cover of a Chuck Berry song)
8) “Bad Reputation” by The Reverend Horton Heat
9) “That’ll Be The Day” by Buddy Hollly & The Crickets
10) “Justine” by The Righteous Brothers
So, the NY Times runs a piece about why female politicians love a specific pair of Kate Spade shoes. The author admits in the piece that it’s sexist to focus on the fashion choices of female politicians so obsessively, while male politicians can expect their footwear choices to largely go unmentioned. Jill points out that this hedge should protect the Times from criticism for thinking this is such a great idea. Irin at Jezebel collects the opinions of women in politics who do think this is a story, because ease of footwear is a legitimate advantage male politicians have over female politicians, because men’s shoes don’t actually put their health at risk when they’re on their feet all day.
I think we can split the difference here. The politicians are right that the fact that women have to sacrifice their health where men don’t to have a career in politics is a story. But it’s not the story Susan Dominus wrote. Dominus might as well have been writing copy for Kate Spade, implying that their $300 wedge heels do a sufficient job of battling the long list of health problems and chronic pain that women’s shoes---particularly high heeled shoes---given them. A real story about this issue would question why female politicians feel they have no choice but to destroy their feet in order to win, and why our society turns a blind eye to the fact that huge percentages of women suffer entirely preventable health problems due to their shoes.
It’s a question that I’m kind of surprised isn’t dwelt upon more by feminist writers, honestly. I see more articles about the potential health effects of untested cosmetics than I do the actual, proven health effects of fashionable shoes on women. That’s why I was glad Leora Tanenbaum wrote Bad Shoes and the Women Who Love Them, and why I had her on my podcast for an interview. Neither she nor I am denying that high heels are sexy or fun to wear. But the problem is that they’re not relegated to those rare occasions when you really want to go with sexy and fun to wear, occasions when you make other over the top sartorial choices like funky headwear, microminis, or your fancy jewelry. High heels, even scarily tall high heels, are considered a regular part of everyday wear for women. In fact, many women feel they have to wear them to look professional. Even if they’re standing on their feet all day.
Patriarchy loves to mutilate women’s bodies, that’s for sure. Corsets, foot-binding, female genital mutilation---all sorts of traditions have arisen, and all of them have some relationship to the twin demands on women to be modest yet sexy. The thing is, we like to pretend we’re not a society that puts such health-damaging demands on women. And yet, if you look at the actual evidence of what women’s shoes do to women’s feet, we are exactly one of those societies. (Because I will immediately be accused of creating equivalence between foot-binding or FGM and high heels, I’m not. I’m talking about kind, not degree.) A lot of women experience chronic pain because of their shoes. A lot of them have to get foot surgery to reverse some of the effects. And for what? A slightly better calf shape under a knee length pencil skirt? Why is it so hard to relegate high heels to special occasions, and view flats as the only appropriate everyday wear?
“Ken Mehlman is not gay,” Steve Schmidt, a senior official of the Bush campaign and a friend of Mehlman’s told Jake Tapper, an ABC News correspondent who wrote the piece for the magazine.
...One staffer tells Tapper a fact known inside the beltway but not widely reported-that some members of Congress posture as being more anti-gay than they actually are to please constituents. “We’re a representative democracy,” the staffer told GQ. “And while members may not have personal problems with having gay staff, they vote the way their constituents want them to.”
-- GQ Magazine, 2005
How quaint that quote is! This the worst kept secret in DC. I’ve been blogging about Ken Mehlman being gay for several years now. That he’s just “coming to the conclusion fairly recently” is, to put it mildly, challenging.
Ken Mehlman, President Bush’s campaign manager in 2004 and a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, has told family and associates that he is gay.
Mehlman arrived at this conclusion about his identity fairly recently, he said in an interview. He agreed to answer a reporter’s questions, he said, because, now in private life, he wants to become an advocate for gay marriage and anticipated that questions would arise about his participation in a late-September fundraiser for the American Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER), the group that supported the legal challenge to California’s ballot initiative against gay marriage, Proposition 8.
“It’s taken me 43 years to get comfortable with this part of my life,” said Mehlman, now an executive vice-president with the New York City-based private equity firm, KKR. “Everybody has their own path to travel, their own journey, and for me, over the past few months, I’ve told my family, friends, former colleagues, and current colleagues, and they’ve been wonderful and supportive. The process has been something that’s made me a happier and better person. It’s something I wish I had done years ago.”
While it’s nice that Ken has finally come out of the closet as an advocate, it’s really hard to forgive him for the damage he did to the community by working actively against it for pay for years. That he can coast on the gains for our community by supporting AFER’s stellar work on Prop 8 on the backs of many during his tenure at the RNC who bore the brunt of homophobia, those who died as a result of hate crimes, the activists who were assailed professionally is unbelievable. Yet here we are in 2010 watching it unfold.
As a human being Mehlman owes the community a serious apology for fomenting homophobia for political gain. This is how he addressed that point:
Mehlman acknowledges that if he had publicly declared his sexuality sooner, he might have played a role in keeping the party from pushing an anti-gay agenda.
“It’s a legitimate question and one I understand,” Mehlman said. “I can’t change the fact that I wasn’t in this place personally when I was in politics, and I genuinely regret that. It was very hard, personally.” He asks of those who doubt his sincerity: “If they can’t offer support, at least offer understanding.”
If I had to say what one thing really moved me to create this site it would be the 2004 reelection campaign of George W. Bush, the most homophobic national campaign in history. That campaign was run by one of the nation’s worst closeted individuals, Ken Mehlman.
It’s always nice to know that my reporting is validated as correct, even if the media has been hiding it for six years.
...The three people most responsible for the anti-gay actions of the Bush reelection campaign are Mehlman, Karl Rove and Bush. In addition to his role at the RNC, Mehlman served in the first Bush Administration as White House Political Director. In 2004 he was the general chairman of the Bush reelection campaign.
...In 2006, Mehlman told the New York Daily News, “I am not gay, but those stories did a number on my dating life for six months.”
It’s so nice to be proven right, me that is, not Ken.
If this move doesn’t call for a Roy Cohn Award, I don’t know what does. Ken Mehlman is horridly homophobic and no matter how orchestrated his coming out is, our community should hold him accountable for his past.
Mehlman, as is typical for quite a few gay Republicans, attempts to focus on the fact that he is not a single issue voter or activist. I find this view, particularly by someone who worked every day to make life for LGBTs in this country intolerable on so many levels, a position that is hard to defend.
He said that he plans to be an advocate for gay rights within the GOP, that he remains proud to be a Republican, and that his political identity is not defined by any one issue.
“What I will try to do is to persuade people, when I have conversations with them, that it is consistent with our party’s philosophy, whether it’s the principle of individual freedom, or limited government, or encouraging adults who love each other and who want to make a lifelong committment to each other to get married.”
“I hope that we, as a party, would welcome gay and lesbian supporters. I also think there needs to be, in the gay community, robust and bipartisan support [for] marriage rights.”
I’m willing to move forward and appreciate that change can come, no matter whether personally or politically motivated. We need both parties to be strongly pro-LGBT. Witness the ineffective, lame-ass, slow-mo “support” for LGBT rights shown by the Dems in charge (in the WH and on the Hill). The power of Mehlman’s coming out and the recent desire by prominent conservatives to move away from gay-bashing in the wake of the Prop 8 ruling should concern the DNC about keeping a slice of LGBTs in the fold over the long haul.
Only time will tell if and when Mehlman and the rest of the pro-equality conservatives can truly boot the hardline anti-gay leadership—as well as show willingness to jeopardize losing the base that mans the phone banks, responds to direct mail appeals re: social issues, and uses the church to get out the vote.
I’m not certain they can do this anytime soon; we know we are going to win this fight, it’s another thing for a party to turn itself around to attract the very demographic it sh*t on for years based on a few powerful homos and conservatives with little to lose and the legal wind behind their backs deciding to come out for marriage equality.
NOTE - My pad was cited by the swamps of the Free Republic today in its reactions to Ken’s coming out.<
NOTE 2: Look at this shite, the twisting of history begins. The media is running from the truth - it covered for Mehlman and is trying to whitewash his record. Word’s getting around on Twitter:
RT @msignorile: It’s clear: Media will downplay Mehlman’s role in antigay efforts to cover for their own refusal to expose his hypocrisy for years. NYT already puffing up Mehlman, claiming he “avoid[ed]” social issues (!!!), is now “working his thick Rolodex” for gays http://nyti.ms/9T85Du
The quote in question:
Mr. Mehlman was in Mr. Bush’s inner circle in both presidential campaigns, and ran his campaign in 2004. But Mr. Mehlman, in his work as chairman of the Republican National Committee and as head of Mr. Bush’s campaign, tended to avoid social issues, arguing that they would undercut the Republican Party’s efforts to expand its appeal.
NOTE #3: From Change.org—Mehlman, as he says, is not a one-issue voter. And he proves it by supporting anti-gay Republican candidates for office. To truly show he’s for equality, he’s going to have to make some changes in his donation targets.
Look him up on opensecrets.org, and you’ll see that Kenneth Mehlman has given money to a wide range of politicians working to take away rights for LGBT Americans.
There’s $2,400 to Missouri Republican Roy Blunt, who has voted to add a marriage amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning gay marriage, as well as to ban gay adoption.
There’s $2,400 to Sen. John McCain, who wants to keep gay servicemembers out of the military.
There’s $1,000 to Ben Quayle, who is running for Congress in Arizona and who just labeled Barack Obama the worst President in history, and who just sent out a mailer to voters touting his opposition to marriage equality.
There’s $2,400 to Illinois Republican Mark Kirk, who voted to keep “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in place (and who himself is subject to lots of rumors about his sexual orientation).
There’s $2,400 to Utah Republican Sen. Robert Bennett, who tried to stop marriage equality from becoming a reality in Washington, D.C.
And the list goes on and on and includes Republicans like Rob Portman, Kelly Ayotte, Bob Corker, Richard Shelby, and Johnny Isakson, all of whom have taken positions completely contrary to full equality for LGBT Americans.
You may want to put whatever you are drinking down before you click this link to a series of pix on Capitol Buzz, where the RNC head is showing the ladies his groovy hetero vibe in a DC bar/club called the Guards.
Reactions, including that of National Organization for Marriage’s pathetic Brian Brown, are below the fold.
Via Digby, I see Michael Tomasky has a theory as to why the Democrats let the Republicans set the media agenda, lie like motherfuckers, and basically act like they do without Democrats fighting back sufficiently.
But the bottom line is this: the Democrats are afraid of the Republicans. They – all of them, from Obama on down – are afraid of Rush Limbaugh and Michele Bachmann and you name it. You hear Democratic operatives talk strategy, and there’s always a “logical” reason why this or that aggressive attack might not work. But it’s nothing to do with logic. They’re just afraid. Bachmann, the Minnesota congresswoman who wants the government out of everything, is a good case in point. It’s been revealed that her family farm has received $250,000 in federal subsidies. If she were a Democrat, the Republicans would make sure the entire country knew it.
It’s tempting to believe this, but it does make you ask, “Why?” Really, what is the basis of the fear? Michael chalks up to irrationality, but I don’t think that’s sufficient. After all, some Democrats are less afraid, and it’s usually because they’re in such safe seats that a media that panders to the right wing can’t touch them. I think the fear is that they don’t have sufficient whatever it takes to get the media to treat them fairly whenever these right wing attacks come out. I think, at the end of the day, they’re afraid they don’t have what it takes to fight back because of an inherent personality difference between typical liberals and typical conservatives.
Conservatives basically have no compunction about the use of force, dishonesty, or lies. This is incredibly hard to fight back against when your toolbox won’t allow you to access any of these. And liberals can’t really just devolve into mean-spirited lying bullies, because it’s illiberal. In fact, it’s so illiberal that it creates a double standard, where those who do cross the line are held accountable in a way that conservatives just aren’t. No one gets upset when conservatives are villains---they’re supposed to be! That’s their main appeal to their bully-loving base. They like to think they’re showing those stupid liberals what for. Like Sarah Palin likes to imagine, they want always to be reloading.
Meanwhile, for liberals, even if you play by all the rules, you’re still in for a world of hurt if you dare speak the truth too forcefully or call an asshole an asshole. Why so mean? Shouldn’t you always be giving them a chance? Sure, Andrew Breitbart is a proven liar, but is that really a reason not to take his next shit storm seriously? Isn’t it less than nice and liberal to believe that some people in this world are simply full of shit?
The problem is that liberals often conflate softness and endless forgiveness with justice. The problem, of course, is in the endless attempts to be generous and giving to conservatives, we allow the truly vulnerable, the people who really need generosity, to go wanting. For instance, to draw from the wellspring that is the abortion example, the harder we try to be accommodating towards conservatives’ “moral” qualms about abortions, the more women who actually need some real help go without it. But those who need justice tend to be invisible, whereas loud-mouthed angry conservatives tend to be up in everyone’s face.
I don’t know what to do about it. The blogs have helped some, since bloggers often come to this because we’re sick of it all and want to fight back. But we’re often the example of “bad” liberals who get all noisy and act like our agenda actually matters. Until Democrats start learning to tell the difference between being soft and being good, we’re going to have this problem.
So one of those nutty misogynist douchebags who sues clubs for having “Ladies Nights"---which said misogynist douchebags always paint as a feminist conspiracy to relieve them of their money---lost his case on the grounds that he’s full of shit. Though, to be fair, the judge used more legalistic language to express this idea. Feminists chortled, because we don’t like men who carry on about how they’re victims of an oppressive matriarchy because they don’t currently have a submissive 18-year-old attached to their cocks while another brings them a beer. Those men are often a pain in our asses, because they literally have nothing in their lives but hating women, and so they look for various ways to be a pain in your ass. Also, a lot of them have an ex-wife or three that they torture by constantly suing them (using the children as an excuse) to get out of child support or to gain the right to control their ex-wives’ lives. They suck. Watching them fail is a pure, unadulterated pleasure.
So there’s been a dust-up between 
I haven’t written about MRAs (men’s rights activists) in awhile, because what is there to say about a group of men organized around the principle that women shouldn’t have the right to say no? Because that’s basically what pisses them off: women who think they get to say no to sex, to staying in abusive marriages, to having their time occupied by any man who demands it, to having a baby when they don’t want. And they hide behind patriarchal sentimentality to justify their strong desire to control women. Not much else to say, because going at it with them is a lesson in hearing undeserved self-pity from those who were dumped for reasons obvious to everyone but them, and who have endless amounts of time and energy to dedicate to throwing their own pity parade.
Michelle Goldberg has an interesting piece up at The Daily Beast about how Glenn Beck is using his haterade to create unity between Mormons and the traditional Christian right, which is mostly populated by evangelical Christians. If you really step back and look at what he’s done, it’s pretty amazing. Beck is Mormon, but you honestly wouldn’t know it from the general way he carries on, which is to imitate the tropes of right wing evangelical Christianity, with the weeping and the ranting and confessions. I don’t know a lot about Mormons, but I think they’re generally a little more buttoned-up than that. I’m sure much of his audience would agree. They probably think Beck is like them for weeks or even months of watching him before they find out that he’s a Mormon, and by then, they’ve decided he’s in the tribe. So they’re probably warmed up to Mormons by default.
So, I was gone Friday-Monday, and away from the internet. I was in the city of my birth, El Paso, TX. I occasionally get to go back to my second favorite city in Texas (with Austin being an easy first), though I rarely get to stay long enough to do what I really love doing there, which is hitting downtown and thrift shopping. Still, a little listening and looking, and I got a taste of what life’s been like these past few years there, and how much things have changed while everything continues to look the same.
So, 
