Gut feelings

I recently spotted a local celebrity in the flesh, a woman who is a regular on the local fundamentalist religious TV station. She is something else, and her old-school bouffant hairdo is hard to miss. She was getting food and sitting down for a quick afternoon meal with her family.

The overhead music was playing, and I heard Lou Rawls' old 70s hit, "You'll never find another love like mine"... and just as I passed her, as we both gathered our napkins and silverware, I heard her singing along with Lou, "You're gonna miss my lovinnnnnnn"... and I was momentarily startled. She likes old disco, I thought, surprised. Did I think all the fundies were raised in caves or something? They share the same pop-culture as the rest of us, as separatist as they sometimes are.

As I heard the TV-evangelist sing along with Lou, I was filled with a sudden, unaccountable affection, possibly because I had previously only heard her sing bad gospel songs.

I also realized that being a professional fundie was her job, and it is possible she gets as tired of her job as the rest of us get tired of ours.

I turned and smiled at her, as she was singing the old Lou Rawls song, and she smiled warmly back at me. It was a nice moment.

~*~

My second recent realization is one that I need to chew on awhile... but I will share it with all of you nonetheless. You can help me nail it down, so to speak. To wit:

I live in a very conservative area, and as someone with radical politics and personal style, this means I have to possess a pretty strong personality to go against the grain of the majority.

If someone lives in a very liberal area, and has very conservative politics and personal style, they will also have to possess a strong personality to go against the grain of the majority.

My realization: I may be temperamentally more similar to the minority-conservative-in-liberal-area, than I am similar to the liberals around them. In a majority-liberal area, people can easily take liberalism for granted and don't often get very spirited about it. Thus, the liberals may be lukewarm liberals that in a conservative locale, would be lukewarm conservatives.

When conservatives emigrate to the upstate (and yes, they do, as if there weren't enough of them here already), they are excitable and revved up, like new converts. You can spot them. They take nothing for granted. They have arrived at Ground Zero of Tea Party Central--the Promised Land--and they are raring to go.

They remind me of myself, back in the day, when I got to Berserkley and thought I knew everything.

It's an unnerving realization that I first got whacked with upon reading Eric Hoffer's brilliant book, The True Believer (that all fanatics and extremists are more alike than different). But I never made the connection about geography before, and the concurrent personality types.

In a place where 'everyone' is liberal (Seattle, San Francisco), then an individual's liberalism will mean something very different that it does in a place like upstate South Carolina, where they will try to run you over for having pro-Obama/vegetarian bumper stickers on your car. Thus, the individual's response to political challenges will be very different. There is no need to be defensive when you are in the majority. It is interesting (and telling) to note how this political defensiveness is exhibited. What happens in one place, as standard and typical, would never happen in the other.

Example: During a recent group-conversation, I used the word "evolved." (Correctly, as in, "We evolved to crave fat and carbs"--this may have been, in fact, my exact phrase.) I used the word in a dietary context a number of times, and in each instance, two people in the room corrected my word choice, "created." We were not evolved to crave fat and carbs, we were created that way, by God Almighty. (Well, if we were indeed CREATED that way, why bother to fight it?)

I did not want to start a fight over Darwin at that particular juncture and in that social setting, so I allowed them to correct me, but kept right on using the word, too. And I realized, that kind of shit annoys me, and it's the type of thing that people living in liberal areas don't realize we have to put up with. And the conservatives don't realize it either. (I always wondered what William F Buckley thought of the dopey-fundie brand of right-winger, which he surely knew existed? Or did he believe all conservatives were yacht-club members in good standing?) In the same social situation, would the radical atheist from San Francisco just drop everything and jump in whole hog, and start preaching the Darwin gospel? I only know a couple of radical atheists here in the upstate, and neither behave in this fashion; I think the new arrivals might let a few things slide, the way the rest of us have learned to do.

And how does this influence us and our approach to what we do? Our politics? Our writing? The way we frame the issues?

Can you tell when a blog is written in a conservative or liberal area? How can you tell?

Just some ideas. Discuss amongst yourselves!



~*~


And of course you know I have been earwormed with the damn thing ever since, right?


You'll never find another love like mine - Lou Rawls



~*~

I heard the first two minutes of this old Devo song on the Weather Channel (!) of all places, played over and over during the weekend whilst announcing rain, and now I am earwormed to death with this, too.

And so, it magically becomes our blog post title for today.

Gut Feeling - Devo

Stubborn old goats

No matter what I did, they resolutely refused to look at the camera.




My post on women going shirtless got major hits from Reddit, StumbleUpon and other link-sites. I think I hit a nerve, particularly in this kind of heat.

This also means, if I may borrow a line from Rancid: And out come the wolves. Trolls, trolls, everywhere. As I've said before, I used to be jealous of the Big Bloggers, until I fully understood what-all they have to put up with. Yech.

Highly amusing was watching the anti-feminist trolls try to figure out what they should be fussing about. Ordinarily, men are lusting for women to be naked, so....what exactly is the issue? Unfortunately, the thread's Head Troll has deleted all of his convoluted comments in a huff, or you could chortle at the logic: We shouldn't be showing our breasts because.... men like breasts. In other words, they might see some breasts they don't like! Another fascinating argument was all about hard-ons: Men have involuntary reactions to breasts! And of course, this means women should live their lives to make men's penises more comfortable at all times. When they want hard-ons, we should be stripping. When they don't, we shouldn't.

That seems easy enough to figure out, huh?

Meanwhile, let's hope some hearty gals out there start organizing some shirtless-days for women... as several posters noted on Reddit, they can't arrest everyone. This is the same way women started wearing pants: en masse. The only way.

It was the 8th grade. The note was passed: JEANS ON FRIDAY. That was all it said. We all knew, yes. Jeans on Friday. Only a couple of goodie-goodies primly preferred to continue "dressing as ladies"--although I noticed that a few years later, they were wearing jeans with the rest of us.

And so, we wore the jeans on Friday. Fat, thin, middle-class and poor. Rich jeans, poor jeans. And I remember that day very well, because all the girls grinned at each other: haha, look at us!

We just kept wearing them. We didn't stop.

About a month later, an official school announcement was read: Girls can wear pants now! We laughed our blue-jean-clad butts off; we were already wearing them! And then we learned something important (also applicable to laws like jay-walking and pot-smoking): Your "law" means shit if nobody follows it. [1]

We might do the same with the laws governing the exposure of women's chests. Can they arrest hundreds of women on a beach at the same time?

Actually, that might turn into quite a party!

~*~

Speaking of pot-smoking, the New York Times ran a big Reefer Madness pot addiction story last week. We were even warned that legal ganja would result in a rise in "fatalities"--and silly me, I wasn't aware there was ever ONE fatality from marijuana-overdose in the entire history of the known world.

For those of us who know from addiction, the NYT article was like the proverbial fun-house mirror, as they offered the example of someone who kept a residence, job and dog for 20 years as an "addict"... say what?

Can somebody say raise the bar?

One of the problems with AA turning everybody into an alcoholic in the late 80s (no, everyone isn't, even if you were barfing into the toilet a few more times than you intended), is this kind of nonsense. Addiction is something very specific, and there are signposts. When you are homeless (I was), can't keep a job (I couldn't), systematically drive away everyone who cares about you (I did), start getting sick all the time (oh dear God)--then you got trouble. [2]

Just being extremely bummed out? No. That is called depression, and self-medicating is a symptom.

I have no college degree and nevertheless, I understand this distinction. As they say, it isn't rocket science.

What it is: AA was colonized by the middle classes in the late 80s/early 90s. In these suburban enclaves, if someone dared to speak honestly about something like sleeping in their car for months at a time, or jacking mama's last 3 bucks, the middle-class, still-gainfully-employed types would shift uncomfortably in their seats. [3] If you wanted gritty reality, you had to go to the meetings with names like Darkness on the Edge of Town (apologies to The Boss). Alcoholics Anonymous and the 12-Steps became transformed into a lifestyle-thing, rather like eating organic.

For some reason, the 12-Steps seemed tailor-made for the narcissism of the affluent. They jumped into the process with aplomb, as if it was psychoanalysis. And in the meantime, you couldn't get a genuine addict or alcoholic to even read the 12-Steps out loud without pausing to argue with you about them.

And the 12-Steps changed, and AA changed... and someday, I will attempt to grapple with the whole subject, and my feelings about that. And why I stopped being an active member, as my beloved late sponsor also did (for religious reasons of her own).

I heartily recommend Elayne Rapping's book, The Culture of Recovery, Making Sense of the Self-Help Movement in Women's Lives, a feminist reading of this whole phenomenon. And I hope to revisit the topic at a future date.

~*~



[1] William F Buckley was (believe it or not) in favor of legalizing (and taxing) marijuana for that reason. He believed marijuana laws turned regular, law-abiding people into criminals. He said law served people, people do not serve law, and if a majority of people want pot, keeping it illegal eroded respect for authority and law. (Ya think?)

[2] Notice the very dramatic addiction-themed TV show Intervention doesn't bother with "marijuana addicts"--which as one of my friends said, would consist of an entire hour of potheads watching TV and eating bags of Cheetos. (The "intervention" would be someone's kids complaining that they had to change the kitty litter: Do you ever think of MY feelings?!?)

Not exactly cutting-edge reality TV. And the proof is in the pudding.

[3] An AA friend once told me about attending a "rich" AA meeting in Hollywood. One woman's idea of "hitting rock bottom" was the day she was forced to take the kids to McDonalds for supper. (People shook their heads, wow, that is terrible.)

Lord have mercy, can you believe anybody would FALL SO FAR?

William F. Buckley 1925-2008

William F. Buckley on the cover of TIME magazine, November 1967.




For a period of time in the late 1980s, I became obsessed with William F Buckley. I had never met such a person in real life, and I was convinced that this was part of my problem: I had no proximity to privilege and didn't understand the privileged mind. His aloof, haughty manner of speaking was utterly strange to me; his bored facial expression was also very odd. Why have a TV show or write books if you are so bored with everything? The upper classes are foreign to me, and he was as close as I was ever going to get. So, I studied him carefully, like an exotic butterfly under a microscope.

Reading his books, I finally learned what it was to be a wealthy, educated and erudite white man with plenty of family connections. I learned that to such a person, the New Deal, the Civil Rights movement, the Great Society, feminism, liberalism, equality (the very concept of which he openly jeered at) were quite simply RUDE. Who were these ruffians, encroaching on decency? I watched his TV show Firing Line religiously, as he argued with everyone in the world, using words I had never heard anyone actually use in conversation. I can still remember a conversation he had with Lynne Cheney, when she was chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. At one point, she said democracy demanded all people in the republic be educated, and I can still remember Buckley's answering snort of derision. She paused, flummoxed: "I don't know how else we can function in a democracy," she said. He rolled his eyes, in one of his trademark expressions of disgust. The idea of educating everyone? Obviously, you could see that he thought it was a charming notion, like pixies or elves, but it simply wasn't, you know, something that really happened, or should happen.

Despite his ongoing proud, arrogant snootiness, Buckley managed through his influential magazine The National Review, to unite the Old Right (then consisting mostly of croquet-playing, yacht-club types like himself) with the new Goldwater/Reagan, wild-west Republicans, and together, they would kick the nation's ass come 1980 (although it took them 16 years after the crushing defeat of Goldwater in 1964). Tenacious, well-oiled, well-connected and plenty loaded, they stood ready to grab the reigns when Jimmy Carter stumbled, and grab the reigns they did. Buckley saw his right wing become the big tent, bringing together in a coalition the southern evangelicals and paleocons, Jewish neocons, and loudmouthed talk radio riff-raff like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. If he privately had contempt for any of these people (who were remarkably like the 60s ruffians he used to sneer at on TV), he never said so. His only public disassociations were from the ultra-right, looney-tune John Birch Society, and columnists Joseph Sobran and Pat Buchanan, whom he accused of anti-semitism. Racism, sexism, homophobia, imperialism, war-mongering, all the rest were broadly winked at. He even called Gore Vidal a queer on network TV, during a celebrated feud, one of the few times he publicly lost his temper:

Buckley appeared in a series of televised debates with Gore Vidal during the 1968 Democratic Party convention. In their penultimate debate on August 22 of that year, the two disagreed over the actions of the Chicago police and the protesters at the ongoing Democratic Convention in Chicago. At one point Vidal called Buckley a “proto- or crypto-Nazi”, to which Buckley replied, “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I will sock you in your goddamn face, and you will stay plastered.”

This feud continued the following year in the pages of Esquire Magazine, which commissioned an essay from both Buckley and Vidal on the television incident. Buckley's essay "On Experiencing Gore Vidal," was published in the August 1969 issue, and led Vidal to sue for libel. Vidal's September essay in reply, "A Distasteful Encounter with William F. Buckley," was similarly litigated by Buckley. The presiding judge in Buckley's subsequent libel suit against Vidal initially concluded that "[t]he court must conclude that Vidal's comments in these paragraphs meet the minimal standard of fair comment. The inferences made by Vidal from Buckley's [earlier editorial] statements cannot be said to be completely unreasonable." However, Vidal also strongly implied that, in 1944, Buckley and unnamed siblings had vandalized a Protestant church in their Sharon, Connecticut, hometown after the pastor's wife had sold a house to a Jewish family. Buckley sued Vidal and Esquire for libel; Vidal counter-claimed for libel against Buckley, citing Buckley's characterization of Vidal's novel Myra Breckenridge as pornography. Both cases were dropped, but Buckley's legal expenses were reimbursed by Vidal, and Vidal's were not. Buckley also received an editorial apology in the pages of Esquire.

And plenty more, of course. His was a life filled with controversy and attention-seeking. He wrote spy-novels and ran for Mayor of New York City. He was a fixture of the times.

And now he is gone. Michelle Malkin (the type of uppity-gal-of-color he would have sneered at in those Days of Yore) is gloriously praising his holy name, as is Rush and the whole Hee Haw Gang.

We'll be hearing a great deal, no doubt, about what a "gentleman" he was, as of course, rich white privileged men can usually afford to be.

~*~

From Buckley's book ON THE FIRING LINE, published in 1989, he reproduces a 1965 column in which he continues an unpleasant row with James Baldwin, after their debate in Cambridge. The two appeared on David Susskind's TV show Open End, and fought some more. Finally, Buckley had enough, and writes a column about Baldwin:

The objective of those who seek equality for the Negro is equality within the American system. If Mr Baldwin and his coterie of America-haters continue to give the impression that such as Roy Wilkins go along with their indictments, then they may very well wind up satisifying the American people that identification with the civil rights movement is an alternative to maintaining the American system. How long, one wonders, before the Baldwins will be ghettoized in the corners of fanaticism where they belong? The moment is overdue for someone who speaks authentically for the Negroes to tell Mr. Baldwin that his morose nihilism is a greater threat by far to prospects for the Negroes in America than anything that George Wallace ever said or did.

And he really believed it, too.