The house is rockin, still I gotta go in

It has been a somewhat hellish weekend so far, but unfortunately, can't blog about any of it. (If you're my friend, send me a Facebook message and I will be more than happy to vent privately!) I'll just say: apartment living has its definite drawbacks, as I have previously written in this space. (And I will leave the rest to your feverish imaginations.)

This afternoon, went down to the Grand Opening of the new Yoga place. Now, why did I drive to the old Yoga place? ((sigh)) Not paying any fucking attention ... see aforementioned description of hellish weekend. Obviously, if it's a GRAND OPENING (duh!) it's a NEW place... but I was momentarily confused since it's the 6th anniversary of the old place, too, and they were doing special events there as well.

So I finally get to the new place, just in time for them to be all done. :(
My personal yoga instructor-friend was finished, and yes, I want my FRIEND, please. It's not a lot to ask! (If I ever move to a large city, I will miss knowing everyone in town!) So, drove home and waited for more shit to hit the fan, as it undoubtedly will.

I practiced breathing while I drove, so that should count for something.

Decided to share some recent favorite reads:

:: The Tea Party's anarchist streak, by Jacob Weisberg in Newsweek:

What’s distinctive about the Tea Party is its anarchist streak—its antagonism toward any authority, its belligerent self-expression, and its lack of any coherent program or alternative to the policies it condemns.

In this sense, you might think of the Tea Party as the right’s version of the 1960s New Left. It’s a community of likeminded people coming together to assert their individualism and subvert the established order. But where the New Left was young and looked forward to a new Aquarian age, the Tea Party is old and looks backward to a capitalist-constitutionalist paradise that, needless to say, never existed. The strongest note in its tannic brew is nostalgia. Tea Partiers are constantly talking about “restoring honor,” getting back to America’s roots, and “taking back” their country.

How far back to take it back is one of the questions that divides the movement. The tricorn-hat brigade holds the most extreme libertarian view: a constitutional fundamentalism that would limit the federal government to the exercise of enumerated powers. The Roanoke Tea Party, for example, proposes a Freedom for Virginians Act, which would empower the state to invalidate laws it deems unconstitutional. It’s been settled business that you can’t do this since the Supreme Court decided McCullough v. Maryland in 1819, but never mind. [Glenn] Beck, a century more modern, feeds his audience quack history that says the fall from grace was the progressive era, when Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson introduced socialism into the American bloodstream.

Other than nostalgia, the strongest emotion at Tea Parties is resentment, defined as placing blame for one’s woes on those either above or below you in the social hierarchy. This finds expression as hostility toward a variety of elites: the “liberal” media, “career” politicians, “so-called” experts, and sometimes even the hoariest of populist targets, Wall Street bankers. These groups stand accused of promoting the interest of the poor, minorities, and immigrants—or in the case of the financiers, the very rich—against those of middle-class taxpayers.

Anti-elitism is hardly a fresh theme for Republicans. But here too, the Tea Partiers take it to a new level. The most radical statement of individualism is choosing your own reality, and to some in the Tea Party, the very fact that experts believe something is sufficient to disprove it. The media’s insistence that Barack Obama was born in the United States, or that he is a Christian rather than a Muslim, merely fuels their belief to the contrary. Other touchstones include the view that Obama has a secret plan to deprive Americans of their guns, that global warming is a leftist hoax, and that—according to Delaware’s Christine O’Donnell—there’s more evidence for creationism than for evolution.

As I said in my piece on GOING ROGUE, the mainstream media's trashing of the Tea Party just continually backfires, and I think that is a good analysis of why it does.

:: Gleen Greenwald takes this a bit further in his Salon piece on Christine O'Donnell (Tea Party candidate for Senate; surprise-winner of the recent Delaware primary) and the outright classism in the mainstream media's attacks.

For example, Karl Rove mounted his platform to detail O'Donnell's lifetime of financial difficulties and why that means she is not a good candidate. On the contrary, as Greenwald writes, that might be her only characteristic that most people could readily identity with:

Most people are not like Rove's political patron, George W. Bush, who was born into extreme family wealth. O'Donnell's financial difficulties, which Rove [described in detail on TV], and [was] implicitly condemning, are far from unusual for ordinary Americans. In 2009 alone, there were 2.8 million home foreclosures. Contrary to what Rove is trying to imply, an inability to pay one's college tuition bills or a struggle with taxes are neither rare nor signs of moral turpitude. Those are common problems for a country whose middle class is eroding as the rich-poor gap rapidly widens. If the kinds of financial struggles O'Donnell has experienced are disqualifying from high political office, then we will simply have an even more intensified version of the oligarchy which our political system has become.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion, at least for me, that, claims to the contrary notwithstanding, much of the discomfort and disgust triggered by these Tea Party candidates has little to do with their ideology. After all, are most of them radically different than the right-wing extremists Karl Rove has spent his career promoting and exploiting? Hardly. Much of the patronizing derision and scorn heaped on people like Christine O'Donnell have very little to do with their substantive views -- since when did right-wing extremism place one beyond the pale? -- and much more to do with the fact they're so . . . unruly and unwashed. To members of the establishment and the ruling class (like Rove), these are the kinds of people -- who struggle with tuition bills and have their homes foreclosed -- who belong in Walmarts, community colleges, low-paying jobs, and voting booths on command, not in the august United States Senate.

You want to know why it's so unusual for a U.S. Senate candidate to have what Rove scorned as "the checkered background" of O'Donnell, by which he means a series of financial troubles? In his interview with me earlier this week, Sen. Russ Feingold said exactly why. It's not because those financial difficulties are rare among Americans. This is why:

It's not a new thing; it's been going on for a couple of decades. If you look even in the Senate, I'm one of the very few people in there who doesn't have a net worth over a million dollars; my net worth is under half a million dollars, after all these years.

And as poor as Russ Feingold is relative to his colleagues in the Senate, he's still a Harvard Law School graduate who owns his own home and has earned in excess of $100,000 as a U.S. Senator for the last 18 years. People with unpaid Farleigh Dickinson tuition bills and home foreclosures just aren't in the U.S. Senate. And there are a lot of people -- those who see nothing wrong with the U.S. Senate as a millionaire's club and as an entitlement gift of dynastic succession -- who want to keep it that way.

And this ethos is hardly confined to admission requirements for the Senate, but extends to the entire Versailles on the Potomac generally. The Washington ruling class is embodied by the vile image of millionaire TV personality Andrea Mitchell, wife of Alan Greenspan, going on GE-owned MSNBC and announcing that it's time for ordinary Americans to "sacrifice" by giving up Social Security benefits (that she, of course, doesn't need). All sorts of right-wing extremism is tolerated and even revered in Beltway culture provided it comes from the Right People. A Washington political/media culture that rolls out the red carpet for every extremist Bush official is now suddenly offended by these Tea Partiers' extremist views? Please. What's most frowned upon is the inclusion in their circles of those Who Do Not Belong. Hence, the noses turning upward at Christine O'Donnell's lower-middle-class struggles and ordinariness as though they disqualify her for high office. If anything, one could make the case that those struggles are her most appealing -- perhaps her only appealing -- quality.

These socio-economic biases have been evident for many years. Bill Clinton's arrival in Washington caused similar tongue-clucking reactions because, notwithstanding his Yale and Oxford pedigree, he was from a lower-middle-class background, raised by a single working mother, vested with a Southern drawl, and exuding all sorts of cultural signifiers perceived as uncouth. Much of the contempt originally provoked by Sarah Palin was driven by many of the same cultural biases. As I wrote at the time, the one (and only) attribute of Palin which I found appealing, even admirable, when she first arrived on the national scene was that she came from such a modest background and was entirely self-made (Obama's lack of family connections and self-made ascension was also, in my view, one of the very few meaningful differences between him and Hillary Clinton). So much of the derision over Palin had nothing to do with her views or even alleged lack of intelligence -- George Bush, to use just one example, was every bit as radical and probably not as smart -- but it was because she hadn't been groomed to speak and act as a member in good standing of the elite class.

I'm not defending Palin or O'Donnell; they both hold views, most views, which I find repellent. But it's hard not to notice the double standard which treats quite respectfully many politicians with the right lineage who espouse views every bit as radical. This is the kind of condescension that causes Sarah Palin's anti-elitism screeds to resonate and to channel genuine resentments.

Amen, amen! Preach it! (I sorta said the same thing, not nearly as well, here.)

And what do you think of the Tea Party's rising popularity and the reasons for it?

~*~

Today's blog post title comes from my favorite Cheap Trick song.

Now, ladies and gents, this is how it is supposed to sound.

The house is rockin (with domestic problems) - Cheap Trick

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My world is in a spin, you wanna come on in?

Religious appropriation, revisited

Infant of Prague and Sacred Heart of Jesus candles are from my Flickr page.




I have written of religious appropriation before, and how very difficult it is to define. It usually starts some pretty good arguments, so let's get down to business!

I recently discovered someone on Twitter named phyrecracker, who believes Westerners practicing yoga is a racist act. She doesn't simply propose the idea, she endorses it as a fact.

Some of her tweets:

I need 2 say again: if u participate in the fuckery of yoga, our religious practice, Kali Ma will shit on you. Consider yourself warned.[1]

I'd like to c ppl RT that flaming morsel of truth rather than the pretty white smiling families

I'm sure she'll be happy she got a whole blog post, rather than a simple RT (retweet).

[to the woman practicing yoga] last thing: 4 u and any1 else who does this wack ass white ppl yoga know that u cannot achieve inner peace on a basis of racism

sweep the criticism of the Indian under the rug while you go enjoy the religious practice that white ppl steal from us

Hm.

I tried this on for size, to see how it fit...especially with Christmas looming over the horizon:

I need 2 say again: if u participate in the fuckery of Christmas, our religious practice, Mother Mary will shit on you. Consider yourself warned.[2]

Interesting.

Of course, they will then say nothing is authentically Catholic... they will say we "appropriated" Mary from an amalgam of European goddesses, too. But of course, we can continue that particular game back to the beginning of time, can't we?

Who's on First?

I am disturbed by phyrecracker's comments because I actually adhered to some version of them myself once. As I've written before, I briefly passed through a rather hard-core Catholic phase (for me, anyway), during which I became furious when (for example) non-Catholics would listen to Mozart's Requiem Mass in D Minor... and when atheists or anti-Catholics listened? It would send me through the roof.

And if they actually PLAYED the music, as in, played instruments in an orchestra? LIVID. It enraged me, exactly as phyrecracker is enraged. I felt the appropriation and I felt the disrespect: IT'S A MASS, do you know what a MASS IS? It's a HOLY PRACTICE, THE REAL PRESENCE OF GOD ALMIGHTY... it is not simple entertainment, you fucks! Etc etc etc and I would inevitably hold forth in a most self-righteous fashion. (Dead Air regulars probably have some inkling of what that sounded like.)

And damn, I remember how good that felt.

I often wish I could corral me some good old-fashioned fundamentalist self-righteousness these days... but I seem to be all about compromise. (I always heard this happened when you got old! Shades of GRAY predominate, God help me!) Now, you could play the Requiem Mass in a strip club and I wouldn't raise an eyebrow. (And if the stripper in question was creative enough to DRESS like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? I'd likely enjoy it myself.)

Seriously, though... at least once every Christmas season I am somewhat peeved when I see non-Christians singing OUR songs and participating in OUR holiday. [3]

But you know, that's how it is in our global times; I don't assume everyone who eats Halloween candy is a pagan. I don't assume everyone who participates in Thanksgiving dinner, believes the accompanying just-so story about pilgrims and Native Americans sitting down to a common meal together, giving thanks to God/Great Spirit. I don't assume everyone who paints Easter eggs is pagan OR Christian. Some of them just want to paint eggs. The egg-painting has no additional meaning if the person painting them is simply doing this for the kids' Easter egg hunt. Playing Beethoven, Bach, Schubert and other classical music originally written for the Church, does not make you a Christian. Even though this music was created as part of Mass/Eucharistic Adoration/Benediction, most musicians nowadays (and certainly, most musicians in non-Western countries) play these pieces of music while not fully understanding what they are for and what they represent. And they can play them VERY WELL. Likewise, one can practice Yoga asanas without being religious too.

One can strike yoga poses, like musical notes, with no understanding, and still reach the desired goal. To the religious person, it may not seem exactly fair, but it is indeed so.

And does phyrecracker take December 25th off or eat candy canes? If so: How dare she participate in the fuckery of Christmas.

As one of my favorite Bible verses says, there is not one righteous, no, not one.

And what are your thoughts?



~*~



1) Kali Ma refers to the Hindu Goddess Kali.

2) A friend reading over this post offers the observation that Kali tends to be an avenging sort, while the Blessed Mother is not. In reply, I offer the fact that Mary has morphed to suit various purposes throughout the ages, including (a close second to Kali) Our Lady of Victory, popularized by scary Simon de Montfort during the Crusades.

3) Certain traditional hymns can set me off, such as Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming or O come, O come, Emmanuel--both of which seem almost blasphemous in a shopping-mall setting. Any time I hear them outside of Church? Makes me ineffably sad.

Cookbooks you should meet

The Gluten-Free Vegetarian Kitchen by Donna Klein

This is a great cookbook! Lots of people are attempting to go gluten-free these days, and Klein is a veritable pioneer in that direction:

Gluten, a combination of proteins found in various cereals, is what "gives bread its elasticity and cakes their spring," according to the author of this wonderful vegetarian resource. But for people suffering from celiac disease or wheat allergies, gluten can cause painful cramping, nausea and worse. Although gluten-free baked goods will never taste quite as supple as their refined wheat counterparts, Klein's offerings hardly taste like deprivation. Spiced Basmati Rice Pilaf with Peas is a spicy, filling supper, easy to prepare and high in fiber. Mushroom, Pea and Pearl Onion Pot Pie with Herbed Potato Topping is more involved, but worth it: slightly sweet vegetables in a creamy sauce under a thick potato crust brightened with herbs. A surprisingly well-rounded selection of breads features recipes for dense, soft Irish Potato Bread, thickened with more than a pound of potatoes and a quarter cup's worth of potato flour, and a Rice Flour Pizza Crust that's a close-enough approximation of the real thing.

And check out the desserts, including Klein's famous Hawaiian Coconut Cake and Blueberry Cheesecake!

Best Quick Breads by Beth Hensperger

The author of The Bread Bible has ferreted out the quickest of her trademark bread recipes, for those of us too impatient (or busy) to wait. There are 150 bread recipes in all.

I particularly recommend her fabulous Cornmeal-Orange biscuits!

Entertaining for a Veggie Planet by Didi Emmons

You haven't lived until you've tried Emmons' sweet potato soup! MMmM-MMMmmMM!

A Taste of Africa by Dorinda Hafner

Hafner, a native of Ghana, hosted a well-loved cooking show on Kentucky Educational Television, and this was the accompanying cookbook. This is not vegetarian, but still notable for the sheer variety of recipes and ingredients. I highly recommend the Toogber (called "poff-poff"), aka Nigerian sweet puffs, which are wonderful.

Toogber literally translates into "sheeps' balls"--don't tell your friends what they're eating! (LOL)

Serene Cuisine: Traditional Yogic Recipes for the Mind & Body by Nicky Moona

I love this cookbook! The Yogic philosophy is mirrored in these traditional recipes:

Yoga and the right foods make a deliciously healthy combination. These easy-to-prepare recipes have their roots in ancient principles, but they’ve all been revamped for the modern diet and illustrated with beautiful color photos. Every dish feeds the body and spirit as well as the mind: it’s a high fiber, high in antioxidants, vegetarian diet for people who want to eat well and be happy, and it can help manage weight, boost energy, improve concentration, strengthen the immune system, and even ease stress. Above all, these recipes taste fantastic, thanks to infusions of therapeutic spices. There’s no guilt when you dig into a rich Strawberry Lassi; Lentil Spinach Soup; Corn, Tomato, and Cucumber Salad; a variety of chutneys and curries; Green Lentil and Rice Kichdi; and Honey Fruit Delight. A bonus appendix shows yoga postures, and explains the links between the poses and the recipes.

Vegan Planet is the name of my favorite cookbook by South Carolina's own Robin Robertson, who has authored 17 ground-breaking vegetarian and vegan cookbooks. (Vegan Planet is also the name of her first blog; the second is titled Global Vegan Kitchen.) Her other books include Quick-Fix Vegetarian: Healthy Home-Cooked Meals in 30 Minutes or Less, Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker: 200 Recipes for Healthy and Hearty One-Pot Meals That Are Ready When You Are, Carb Conscious Vegetarian: 150 Delicious Recipes for a Healthy Lifestyle, and the totally indispensable and fantastic soy-bible titled The Soy Gourmet.

From Robin's tasty book titled Vegan Fire and Spice: 200 Sultry and Savory Global Recipes, this is an Indian recipe for those of you who need some spice in your life!



Anshu's Red Lentil Sambar

1 cup red lentils
3 1/2 cups water
2 tablespoons cold-pressed canola oil
1 teaspoon black mustard seeds
1 onion, chopped
4 garlic cloves, minced
2 hot green chiles, seeded and minced
1 teaspoon grated ginger
1 (14.5-ounce) can diced tomatoes
2 1/2 teaspoons sambar powder
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
1/4 teaspoon cayenne
1/4 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup chopped carrots
1 cup chopped cauliflower
1 cup green beans, cut into 1-inch pieces
1 cup chopped eggplant
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1/4 cup chopped cilantro

1. Combine the lentils and water in a pot and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to medium, cover, and simmer until soft, about 30 minutes. Set aside, but do not drain.

2. Heat the oil in a skillet over medium heat. Add the mustard seeds and when they begin to pop, add the onion, garlic, and ginger and cook until softened, about 5 minutes. Stir in the tomatoes, then add the sambar powder, coriander, cayenne, cumin, and salt. Stir in the carrots, cauliflower, green beans, and eggplant. Cover and cook for 5 minutes to soften.

3. Add the vegetable mixture to the reserved lentils, cover, and simmer until the vegetables are very soft, about 20 minutes. If the mixture becomes too thick, add more water. Stir in the lemon juice and cilantro and cook 5 minutes longer. Taste and adjust the seasonings.

Serves 6