Commonplace Book

I've decided to start using my blog as a commonplace book (some of the time), meaning a place where I record what I'm reading, some relevant quotes, and my comments.

Self-Segregation:  Why It's So Hard for Whites to Understand Ferguson by Robert P. Jones in The Atlantic.

"Clearly white Americans see the broader significance of Michael Brown’s death through radically different lenses than black Americans. There are myriad reasons for this divergence, from political ideologies—which, for example, place different emphases on law and order versus citizens’ rights—to fears based in racist stereotypes of young black men. But the chief obstacle to having an intelligent, or even intelligible, conversation across the racial divide is that on average white Americans live in communities that face far fewer problems and talk mostly to other white people."

"Overall, the social networks of whites are a remarkable 93 percent white. White American social networks are only one percent black, one percent Hispanic, one percent Asian or Pacific Islander, one percent mixed race, and one percent other race. In fact, fully three-quarters (75 percent) of whites have entirely white social networks without any minority presence. This level of social-network racial homogeneity among whites is significantly higher than among black Americans (65 percent) or Hispanic Americans (46 percent)."

"Widespread social separation is the root of divergent reactions along racial lines to events such as the Watts riots, the O.J. Simpson verdict, and, more recently, the shootings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. For most white Americans, #hoodies and #handsupdontshoot and the images that have accompanied these hashtags on social media may feel alien and off-putting given their communal contexts and social networks.
If perplexed whites want help understanding the present unrest in Ferguson, nearly all will need to travel well beyond their current social circles."

I both find this hard to believe and know that it is 1) important and, 2) true. It explains so much that encounter on a regular basis. Not only do I have "black friends" I have several people who are significant figures in my life.  This makes a difference.

What it feels like to be the last generation to remember life before the Internet by Leo Mirani

"Harris, like your correspondent, grew up in a very different world, one with limited channels of communication, fewer forms of entertainment, and less public scrutiny of quotidian actions or fleeting thoughts. It was neither better nor worse than the world we live in today. Like technology, it just was."

Slightly hyperbolic. We have no idea what new technological revolution is just around the corner.  People were saying the same stuff about telegraphs and later telephones, I'm pretty sure. 

Metaphors for Graduate School: a post-lette  by Outside Higher Ed 

"God help me if we’re in metonymy; that would be bad indeed."  
Snarky commentary on the state of academia

What Lies Beneath Stonehenge? by Ed Caesar, Smithsonian Magazine

"The researchers have found buried evidence of more than 15 previously unknown or poorly understood late Neolithic monuments: henges, barrows, segmented ditches, pits. To Gaffney, these findings suggest a scale of activity around Stonehenge far beyond what was previously suspected."

"Gaffney’s voice lifted. He spoke about Jerusalem Syndrome: the feeling of intense emotion experienced by pilgrims on their first sighting of the Holy City. In the prehistoric world, there was no conception of God as he was understood by the later Abrahamic faiths. But, said Gaffney, as Stonehenge reappeared before us, 'whatever the ancient version of Jerusalem Syndrome is, that’s what you’re feeling now.'”

So, You Want to Be a Mother!

Or maybe it snuck up on you.  How would I know?

Since it's almost Mother's Day and I received some very slight encouragement from my friends, I decided that I would write about another one of my occasional hobbies, parenting.   My son is about to graduate high school, and I feel a sense of accomplishment and pride in the fact that I have reared him nearly to legal adulthood without him either going to jail or becoming a Republican.  Since I know that any new or incipient parents with a lick of sense are flailing about in a hysterical panic wondering how they are going to get through this...and if you haven't reached that stage yet, dearie, you will....I will share some of my tips and secrets right here on the Internet for the benefit and edification of all.

Photographic evidence that I know what I am talking about. Note hippietastic skirt, homemade Plains-style choker and general air of blissful, youthful ignorance. Also not-yet-freakishly-ginormous belly.

Let's start at the beginning, shall we?

Oopsie, I'm Pregnant!

Perhaps you planned, waited, prayed, and, er, tried very hard for this day.  Or perhaps you woke up one day feeling a little weird and went on a mildly embarrassing shopping trip to the drug store.  Either way, you should realize that you have no idea what you're getting into and that there are very sound evolutionary reasons for that.  

To begin with, eat whatever the hell you want. 

I mean...sure you should probably avoid alcohol, though the latest latest research suggests that small amounts are not going to do you or your baby any harm, so don't freak right out if you drank a beer the day before you learned you were pregnant.  Follow your doctor's advice, etc. etc.  But the reality is that during the first trimester, pregnant women come in two flavors:  completely, unbelievably, ravenously hungry, and barf-o-rama.  What this means in practical terms is that either you are going to eat whatever is available, including whatever you see in your refrigerator, your pantry, your friend's refrigerator, on the sample tray at the grocery store, on the plates of strangers in restaurants who look like they aren't really that hungry...or you are not going to be able to hold any kind of food down except some exceedingly weirdo combination of very bland nothingness...tofu cubes and soda crackers, or snowflake-shaped ice cubes and Sprite.  Either way, it isn't really going to matter what it says on those lists of healthy foods and recommended preggo diets. You aren't going to follow them.  Plus...

Fun fact #1:  Your sense of smell is about to become your first Mom-related super-power.

Pregnant women are about a bazillion times more able to detect spoilage and toxicity in food than a normal person.  This is because some substances which would merely cause discomfort or illness in an adult will cause serious damage to a developing embryo.  In a very few cases, things that we normally eat with no problems whatsoever go on the OH HELL NO list.  At any rate, your whole system goes on high alert for anything potentially threatening, at least anything potentially threatening that our ancestors a few hundred thousand years ago were likely to encounter.  This reaction kicks in so fast that revulsion for foods they previously enjoyed is often the first tip-off some women have that they are in fact pregnant.  Viva la evolucion!

The urge to stab people who are smoking anywhere near you or wearing too much perfume is just a bonus, really.  Considering how weird people are about pregnant women. if you are far enough along you might even get away with it.  Which leads us to...

People are freaking weird about pregnant women.

They either want to scrunch you up in a big fluffy rainbow of kitties and puppies and bunnies and pastel icing, or they are terrified of you.  Possibly both.  Sometimes they resent you.  They want to touch your belly.  They offer you unsolicited advice, including opinions about how you could have not become pregnant and where you should send your as-yet-unborn child to college, when they haven't even seen his or her SAT scores.  They edge away from you or treat you with exaggerated, slightly demented, patronizing courtesy.

And that's just strangers.  The people closest to you are likely to be either hilariously, ecstatically happy or freaking out.  Usually both.

All of that can be very irritating.  My best advice to you is to realize that people are frail creatures who don't really like reminders that they are physical beings with a start date (and by implication, an end date). It tends to throw them off-kilter.  Also, everyone on the whole entire planet has Mommy issues, and you tweak them by your very presence.  Try to maintain an attitude of serenity about it all, and also realize that if you are just a little bit ruthless you can turn it to your advantage.  Enjoy it while it lasts, because no human is more invisible or disdained than the mother of a toddler.  People like reminders that they too were once imperfect little barbarians with dirt and snot all over them even less.


Fun fact #2:  Stretch marks are forever.

I still have mine, seventeen years later.  Just deal with it.   You can rub some shea butter on your belly and, er, lower abdomen, but it will only delay the inevitable.  You are about to become the hugest giantest walking beach ball that has ever been.  Except for every other pregnant woman who has ever lived.  Just roll with it.  Um, not literally, because that will be very uncomfortable.   Eventually, you are going to be able to use your belly as a convenient horizontal surface:


Your feet are likely to grow half a size as well, permanently, so don't buy any really expensive shoes until after your baby is born.  At which point you will not be able to afford them.

The good news is, your tits will also gain a lot of volume temporarily and at least some of the effect will be permanent.  Your ass will also get bigger, which may be good or bad news, depending. 

Basically, your body is about to go through a transformation and while you will not always be a freak of nature, it will never be quite the same.  This is not a bad thing, though it's definitely a little unnerving at times.



You might as well have fun with it.  Also, long before your belly gets this big...along about the fifth month for a first pregnancy...you are going to have a weirdest experience of your life, which is when you realize there's a tiny little being moving around in there.

Congratulations, you are now a host for an alien life form!

Except it's related to you.  (Isn't being a mammal fun?)  And it will not, I am almost 100% sure, pop out of your chest.  It's possible that when you contemplate what it will pop out of, you may wish that it would. 


At some point, that tiny barely perceptible flutter that is so cute and groovy and miracle-of-life will turn into very noticeable rolling around.  And kicking. And thumping. There is nothing quite like losing your breath mid-word because someone has punched your diaphragm.  From the inside. Let us not discuss what happens when the little freeloader kicks your bladder.

You should also know that fetuses have sleeping and waking cycles in the womb.  Which will not, I repeat NOT, coincide with yours.  Guess who keeps who up?  This is of course practice for later, and to toughen you up.  The first three or four months after the child is born is one long sleep-deprivation experiment.

Many mothers give their unborn children nicknames.  My son's pre-birth name was "Wiggles."  He earned it, with a single-minded dedication awe-inspiring in one so young and not even breathing yet.

There is such a thing as a "nesting instinct."

This is the cute, Victorianesque phrase, evocative of little birdies and interior decoration with feathers, that  we use to refer to the fact that at some point along about the beginning of the second trimester (after you quit barfing.  If you do quit barfing) you are going to look around at your house, neighborhood, country and planet and say, in emphatic tones and with a glint of determination in your eye,  "This will not do at all."

What you do next is largely determined by your temperament, inclinations, and what resources fate has put at your disposal.  Some women make booties.  I built a counter and...stuff.  Anne Bonney busted out of prison.*

Just go with it, for as long as the impulse lasts, but try to break your projects down into small, manageable chunks and don't let them get too far-reaching.  That is because at some point, just as suddenly, you are going to decide that you'd rather take a nap every day.  You are also going to reach a point (as I mentioned) where it is hard to reach around or see over your own belly.  

My suggestion for any non-pregnant persons reading this is that your best bet is to just go along with whatever Preggo has in mind.  At the very least, get out of her way.  There is no stopping her, so do not attempt it.  You will get hurt.

Advice for expectant fathers, non-pregnant-girl-partners, and concerned friends: 

I realize most of this is aimed at the pregnant mother.  There is a reason for that, which is that for now, she is the star of this show.  Remember, couvade isn't cute.  Also, rest assured that the narcissism, obsessiveness, hysteria, sudden mood swings, and weird changes will subside some time after the baby is born.  A year or two at most...well, that really depends on how long you leave her alone with a toddler.  If it persists much beyond the child's entrance to middle school you should consider the idea that perhaps that isn't a mood swing, that's her personality, and adjust accordingly.

Possible future topics:   why you don't need to buy a bunch of baby crap, toddlers are the devil, middle-school Machiavellis, and other stuff as it occurs to me.

*This may or may not actually be true.  However, it is a fact that she and fellow pirate Mary Read both "pled their bellies," ie claimed to be pregnant which meant they would get a stay of execution.  Mary Read died of a fever.  Bonney was not executed, and nobody seems to be sure exactly what happened to her.  But she was never hung for piracy. I draw my own conclusions.  

Poverty, folk songs, culture, and the Just World Fallacy

All discussed in my article which came out in Flagpole Magazine today, Hard Times Everywhere.

Don't Bring Your Hoodie to Town

Geraldo Rivera made an ass of himself on TV today.  This is, alas, not news, which would explain why it was on Fox. He misquoted Johnny Cash.  That wasn't even it, but I had to put that out there.  Sometimes the enormity of a thing is so vast and incomprehensible, you have to pick at something small to try to wrap your head around it.

I mean, yes, Rivera.  On what day is he not a fool? Fox "News," yep.  And yet...just when you think there is no possible way people can be more venal, more callous, more epically and outstandingly vile, they outdo themselves. It was an epiphany of sorts.  Rivera has had a long and storied career as a mystifyingly famous idiot. Today he reached an apotheosis, at least I devoutly hope that's what it was.  That he might have worse in him is too terrifying to contemplate.  It's enough to make a person believe in R'lyeh.

"I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trevon Martin's death as George Zimmerman was...I'll bet you money, if he didn't have that hoodie on, that nutty neighborhood watch guy wouldn't have responded in that violent way."

Yes, my friends and fellow citizens of Earth, he thinks that an adult man chasing a seventeen year old boy down the street after having been told by a 911 dispatcher not to do so and shooting said child is only partially that man's fault.   The wisdom of neighborhood watch carrying a gun in the first place, or the bizarre application of  "stand your ground" to include a public street and an unarmed opponent doesn't even enter into it.  The hoodie made him do it.

He went on to say that when people see a dark-skinned kid in a hoodie, they think that child is a menace and that we should all be aware of that.  You can't rehabilitate the hoodie, he says.

Oh, Lord.  You know what I think is a menace?  White guys with guns.

I mean, really.  Look at history.  The Chinese invented gunpowder and made fireworks.  Europeans invented gunpowder and made muskets, pistols, cannon, rifles, mortars, derringers, Thompson machine guns, howitzers, and 75 mm anti-aircraft guns.  For five hundred years and counting, the spectacle of some white people coming over the hill or sailing into the harbor or showing up on the doorstep in suits has made people the world over think, "Aw, shit.  Here they come. Are they armed?"

And nine times out of ten, when you hear on the news that someone has killed someone else in a completely bizarre whacknut vigilante way, with or without lengthy manifesto, it's a white guy.  With a gun and a lethal sense of entitlement.  I'll bet you money, if George Zimmerman hadn't gone out wearing a gun, he wouldn't have been able to react in that violent way.

So I'm urging all of you...don't let your white guys go out wearing guns.  Tell them people will look at them as a menace.  After five hundred years of history, you can't rehabilitate the white guy with gun look.  I'm just trying to save lives here.

Feline Philosophy, Anarchy, and Art

"Of all God's creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat." - Mark Twain

A side-effect of hanging around Occupy is that one winds up having to explain patiently to people that having a penchant for breaking things and wearing clothes you found on the bargain rack at Hot Topic does not make you an anarchist.  Sometimes you have to explain that to people who call themselves anarchists.  I don't look like I know anything about it, apparently.  I am middle-aged, chose to accord punk a decent burial rather than take up necrophilia,  and have a job, more or less, as an educator.   I vote, among my other peculiar habits, and my clothing comes in other colors than black.  That's all right; I reject the notion that political and philosophical ideas require membership in a subculture.  I also reject the idea that it requires a certain set of lifestyle choices, ideological catechisms, or a reading list.  Although I do habitually think about the systemic consequences of my personal decisions and I love a reading list, those are voluntary choices on my part.  (See what I did there?)  In other words....don't tell me what to do.

Let's start with a fundamental attitude.  Deep down in my bones, I believe that all power must justify itself to those it would exert influence over, rather than the other way around.  The power to pass laws or enforce them, to allocate resources or use them up, is always conditional and open to question; no other state of affairs is acceptable, or even possible except through manipulation, coercion and failure of the imagination.  When you put it that way, it sounds strangely like the Declaration of Independence ("....Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed")  and therefore ought to have the stamp of the hoariest true-blue American sentiment about it.  And yet in practice that fundamental world-view tends to bother people.  I have been told more than once in indignant tones that I have no respect for authority; I can only agree cheerfully, which seems to upset people even more.  I do not have respect for authority.  I barely recognize authority as a concept, except in the specific narrow academic sense of an authoritative source (and I'm well aware of how subject to debate that is). My compliance is never to be assumed, and my respect beyond that which I accord to all living beings as a matter of fundamental ethics has to be earned.  I do respect integrity, knowledge and logical sense, and will amiably ask that they be demonstrated before I put my full trust in a person or institution; I will less amiably point out when they have been breached.  This makes me a rebel, apparently, and very upsetting. 

Really, I'm no different from a cat, except that I talk more.  Cats are inherently anti-authoritarian.

So are artists, a species of which I am a member, cultivar writer.   While it's true you will occasionally find an artist espousing some authoritarian philosophy or another, they always mean it for other people.  (Nobody said an artist can't be a hypocrite.  We are like other mortals that way).  I never met a creative person though who took authority seriously as applied to herself.  That is because real art requires freedom and is governed by constraints the artist understands to be arbitrary even when she believes in them passionately, with the same total conviction that a six year old will lend to the rules of a game she and her friends just made up on the spot.  Even reality is bendable in spots.

Don't get the idea that just because I think rules are the product of fallible human minds it means I also think there shouldn't be any.  That kind of person always believes that there's such a thing as ultimate truth in human affairs, and that he or she knows what it is.  What I do think is that, acknowledging that rules are often arbitrary (a word with roots in the concept of rendering judgment), they are also functional in that they provide a container, a vessel for human interactions.  They can be useful, but they must also be subject to criticism and revision on the basis of how functional they really are, and that extends to all levels, the philosophical, the social, and the practical; local, national, and global.  This is also the business of the philosophical or theoretical arms of social justice movements:  feminism, anti-racism, queer activism, disabilities activism, etc.  That is not a coincidence.  As tiresome as that can sometimes be....like a four year old asking constantly "why? why? why do we do things this way?  why don't we do them another way?" it is essential.  All true and valuable change begins with a question.

Question authority.

On consensus process and the goals of the "Occupy" movement

Author's note:  I wrote this for the Occupy Atlanta group, but it is not an "official" statement from that group. It is my own viewpoint.  When I say "we," I am speaking to, rather than for, other participants in the group/movement.  Which could be you, if you like.

"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." - Audre Lorde

We can't do things the same way and expect different results; that way proverbially lies madness. If you want to change anything for real you have to change culture, and culture change begins with people. Culture is people.

I've been around for a while; my first job was working for the Atlanta Greenpeace office, back when there was such a creature. I have been in a number of activist and religious groups over the years which were governed by consensus, and believe me I know the frustration that the slow messy operation of it can produce. And yet, I want everyone to understand that consensus is not just an awkward caltrop in the path to "real" action. In a very real sense, consensus process is the doing of the thing we wish to accomplish.

We aren't just pointing out the inequities of our society, or that corporate greed has brought us all to the brink of the abyss, or that the lobbyist system of government is corrupt. We might say all of those things, and a great deal more; we are a diverse bunch of people with a lot of opinions. And we're ok with that.

We aren't just here to speak a message; there are a million other organizations out there who have said what we are saying before. They are much more polished and orderly than any Occupy group probably ever will be. They are effective in various ways and to various degrees. Direct actions have also been tried before. They sometimes work, and sometimes don't. The elements of Occupy Wall Street are not really new, and yet they have captured people's imagination. Some of it is the historical moment. Some of it is another thing; the bracing shock of real freedom. We are so used to conversations that are carefully measured and weighed, calculated and manipulated, that the spectacle of a bunch of people speaking their minds about things they find important in raucous discord and occasional harmony is confusing. The news media certainly seem confused.

What we are doing is not just trying to prove a point, or challenging authority. We are demonstrating an alternative. Look around you. This is radical equality...never perfect in the moment, but in the next moment it can always be better. There is something magical about it even when it's tiresome and painful and awkward. This is what democracy looks like when you strip the motor down.

We are building the beloved community literally as we speak, and in our speaking. If you disrespect the process, or dismiss it, or look for too much focus in a polyphony of voices, you are missing a crucial aspect of the point.

Information you may not have

Especially if you are a TV journalist, apparently.

Definition of terrorism:  Violence carried out primarily to make a political point or for political ends including intimidation

Examples of terrorists:

The right-wing anti-Muslim conservative who blew up the Prime Minister's offices in Oslo
The man who shot Dr. George Tiller, along with all of the other anti-choice murderers
The KKK members who blew up the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL in 1963
Eric Rudolph, ie the Centennial Park Bomber who also bombed two abortion clinics and a lesbian bar
Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber
Timothy McVeigh

All of these individuals, except for the Norwegian, were native-born Americans.

Not examples of terrorists:

Muslims raising money and applying for permits to build a mosque
People who are standing around minding their own business who kinda look Middle Eastern
99.99999% of airplane passengers
My cat

I'm so glad I could clear this up for you.  You're welcome.

Right Wing Freak Show

I've been observing the soi-disant "conservative movement" for some time now, and I think I should say something.

Y'all do know the rest of us think you're crazy, right?

I should preface this by saying that I'm specifically not speaking of the self-identified Republicans or other conservatives who still have a lick of sense. I wish to praise and encourage, not disparage you, poor beleaguered souls. Though we might have a word or two about the company you have been keeping.

That's actually just what I want to talk about. Your fellow-travelers. You know. Them.

The birthers. The wingnuts. The people who think Obama is a radical leftist, or an Arab, or a citizen of Kenya. The ones who claim that there's no such thing as separation of church and state, and that the Constitution, against all tradition and the words in the document itself, is based on "'God's law. " Or that global warming is a hoax. I could go on in this vein for a while. Far too long. Lately, there's been this brick-throwing problem. Not metaphorical bricks; literal ones.

We have our own crazies, it's true. God love 'em. But we keep them where they will do the most good, out on the range and off the grid experimenting with alternative sources of electricity and fuel, working out the bugs so the rest of us don't have to turn off the lights to take a shower when we finally get our solar-powered home.

You run yours for office. Worse, you vote for them. Just for one example, Mike Huckabee sincerely believes that the Constitution should be altered to conform to the Bible. He is not only not automatically disqualified, he is considered a serious contender. And, well, Sarah Palin. Michele Bachmann. Need I say more?

Barack Obama is not a radical, by the way. You can tell because a real leftist radical wouldn't be caught dead in a suit. Or running for President. Or voting. They think the whole system is corrupt and the only way to transform society is through making their own clothes, growing their own pot, and barter. You see, I have met actual leftists, and actual radicals, and hung out with them quite a bit. They are more fun than your radicals because they are often stoned, and less worrisome because they think guns are categorically wrong rather than thinking of them as accessories. You should try hanging out with some, yourself. Then you will know better than to mistake Barack Obama for one.

He is also no kind of socialist. He's a moderate Democrat just perceptibly to the left of Bill Clinton. Try not to hyperventilate.

You have been listening to your own talk radio too long. You've lost perspective. You gave up facts and truth and reasoned debate for hostile polemic, and now it has come home to roost. You're just lost, and you're following the loudest voices, because they got you some air time and traction a couple decades ago, and it has worked so well for so long, so you thought, because you weren't noticing while the bozo you elected was running the country off a cliff. But the problem with letting the shouty people do your public relations is that they attract more like themselves, and the next thing you know you're losing the middle and kissing Rush Limbaugh's ass. It is not a good place to be. And...it's getting worse.

Don't tell me I don't know what I'm talking about. I live in Paul Broun's district*, and I know crazy when I see it in my mailbox. In addition to the cracktastic screeds he likes to send his constituents, have you seen his website? This is what you have wrought.

It pains me to bring this up. I love freaks. I live in Athens. But, dang, baby.

*Half of Athens got gerrymandered out of John Barrow's district and now shares a Congressman with Habersham County. Do not speak of it further.

The Imaginary American

My family, the part from Europe, came to these shores very early. Pretty much as soon as there was a boat to Virginia, they were on it. I'm a descendent of two Revolutionary War captains (Capt. Thomas Amis and Capt. Thomas Austin) and also, via my great-grandmother, of one Thomas Pitman. Pitman was involved in Bacon's Rebellion, which was sort of the seventeenth-century practice run for the Revolution, except that it didn't go so well. Many of the participants were hanged; my progenitor was pardoned by King Charles II, and thus I am here to talk to you today and carry on the family tendency towards troublemaking. I am a tenth-generation American...not including the ones who were already living on this continent and whose generations are uncountable. I don't think this makes me better than anyone else, mind. I think America is something you show up and participate in, and what you do counts far more than how long your history here is. Nonetheless, I do have history.

Members of my family have served this country in various wars (well, some of them were technically fighting against the United States, but we will gloss over that.) My father was a decorated hero in World War II and four of my five brothers served in Vietnam. Many members of my family have served their communities and people as educators, from my great-grandfathers on two sides of my family, my grandmother and great-aunt, my mother, my aunt, my sister, and myself.

I was born and raised in a small town in north Georgia, at the southern end of the Appalachians, and have lived in Georgia all my life.

And yet, I have a sneaking feeling Sarah Palin and her ilk would not consider me a "real American." This in spite of the fact that my family gave up secessionist tendencies over a hundred years ago, unlike some people.

It seems you are only a real American, according to the Republicans, if you live in the states or rural areas where they have the most support, and you agree with the majority there. In other words, if you vote Republican. Being a citizen and knowing what the Constitution actually says don't count any more. Being a part of this country's two-hundred-year tradition of volunteerism and "community organizing" is obviously right out.

I now live in the liberal hippy-dippy freaktastic indie-rock epicenter of Georgia, described by comedian Patton Oswalt as a "weird bubble dream city of goodness," which lies along the axis of woo running south on US 441 from Asheville, NC...that is to say, Athens, GA. Athens, a city of about 100,000 people, has its own Human Rights Festival and its own drag king troupe, more independent record stores than corporate ones, and a Tree That Owns Itself in defiance of human-centric notions of property rights. The University of Georgia is here and while we do have the Cult of the Bulldawg and a thriving population of rednecks (smile when you say that, bubba), we also have suspiciously liberal-sounding educational practices such as the only School of Ecology in the country. I personally have an MFA in Creative Writing with a graduate certificate in Women's Studies, and I work in the English department. I recycle and eat organic, locally grown food. I have been known to organize in my community. I even worked on the campaign of a local Democrat...which around here, I might add, makes me a political moderate.

Apparently all this means I am not a "real American." I guess that makes me an imaginary American.

All right, then. I will imagine. America.

I imagine an America where everyone can get health care, and we have the lowest infant mortality rate in the world...instead of the highest among industrialized nations.

I imagine an America where the government does not issue slithery and putrid justifications for the torture of prisoners, because no one in any position of authority would ever condone such a thing.

I imagine an America where we do not allow children to go homeless or hungry, because we recognize our obligations to each other as citizens of a common society.

I imagine an America where the Constitution is both well-understood and well-revered by those who vow to uphold it and whose authority to govern flows from it.

I imagine an America where no one suffers from the delusion that one can bestow democracy or freedom at gunpoint.

I imagine an America where I, as a woman, get paid equally for equal work, and no one questions that my health is a legitimate concern, even when it conflicts with the desire of others to impose their religious mores on everyone or to avoid being grossed out by the facts of reproduction.

I imagine an America where dissent is as patriotic as Thomas Paine, and not only when you agree with conservatives.

I imagine an America that lives up to its better self. I imagine an America that is not divided. I imagine an America that remembers who we really are.

I like that America. I want to live there. It's not where I have been living, to be sure, but it seems like a place that is possible.

Let's go.

On the resurgence of Ayn Rand

The Bitch is Back

Goddamn, the experience of being 19 years old and reading Ayn Rand! The crystal-shivering-at-the-breaking-pitch intensity of it! Not just for that 19-year-old, but for everybody unfortunate enough to be caught in his psychic blast radius. Is "experience" even the right word for The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged? Ayn Rand's idolization of Mickey Spillane and cigarettes and capitalism—an experience? Her tentacular contempt for Shakespeare and Beethoven and Karl Marx and facial hair and government and "subnormal" children and the poor and the Baby Jesus and the U.N. and homosexuals and "simpering" social workers and French Impressionism and a thousand other things the flesh is heir to: experience?

The Bible of right wing losers sound bite The Simpsons sound bites

"Isn't that book the Bible of right-wing losers?" - Lisa Simpson

Ah, Ayn Rand. Human beings don't work the way she says they do. Societies don't work the way she says they do. Economies don't work the way she says they do. Her books are painfully awful and warp the term "literary art" even as one hesitates to apply it. Yet her ideas and novels persist because they feed the most indestructible and gullibility-producing force in the universe, human egotism.

I do grant, as a reviewer on Goodreads said, that the books are useful. Anyone who is a fan of Ayn Rand is someone to avoid. It's good to know that before you get too involved. And unlike more personal questions, it's easy to work into casual party conversation: "Hey, what do you think of Ayn Rand's books?" If the person's eyes light up and they declaim upon their admiration of Howard Roark or John Galt, you have the opposite of a keeper. You know to throw that one back.

I, like many people, read The Fountainhead as a teenager. I intended to enter the essay contest the Ayn Rand Institute runs every year. They offered a lot of money, and I'd already won a couple of state-level writing competitions. I was seventeen or eighteen, and no less arrogant than bright eighteen-year-olds generally are: the target audience.

I couldn't bring myself to write anything that wasn't scathing.

"This is not a book to be set aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force." - Dorothy Parker, on Atlas Shrugged.

The books are terrible in all respects. They are bad art, bad writing, foully mis-representative of human behavior, laughably improbable, bone-headedly self-contradictory, morally putrid, and pragmatically incoherent. Even the supposed free-market ideals which Rand espouses with such Darwinian cheer don't actually appear in her books. There is something the characters call that, but even they don't actually believe that it should apply to them. For example, Roark's clients don't like his work and he can't make money as an architect. This is seen, incomprehensibly, as evidence that they are stupid and he is a genius, instead of being the only real example of the free market winnowing someone out that actually happens. When he blows up his own building this is proof of his ideals instead of an appalling waste of resources; instead of being rightfully excoriated as a trifler and an inefficient wastrel he's a hero. Why? We don't know. There is no sensible reason given. Nothing any of her characters do in The Fountainhead makes any sense, or bears any resemblance to how actual persons behave. If you dare ask why of a Randroid, you will be told that you just don't understand.

They are all like that, her books. They are brick-sized cesspools of badness held together with binding glue. They are wastes of ink, and of the effort required to lift them from the shelf and turn the page. You could spend those calories and that time watching Wife Swap re-runs.

If it were only that. If only...a waste of time is perhaps not a good thing, but it's your own business. You might read Ayn Rand, or watch Fox News, in perfect peace for all of me if you would just exhibit a moderate degree of decency and decorum and keep it to yourself. I myself like to read textsfromlastnight.com and chuckle with schadenfreude. It is a perfect waste of time, and not nice of me, but essentially harmless.

Alas, no. Rand devotees are right, they know they are right, and they have to share, with, as noted in the GQ article, a grim impervious defiance of logic rivaled only by Fundamentalists.

And that points to the real, true and basic contradiction of the Randroids. They declare, with that special dollop of Nietzschean contempt, that they are free and the rest of us (of course) are sheep. But if you cannot ever reflect upon an ideology, if you can't evaluate its limits or especially admit when it fails (and the Randian philosophy has spectacularly failed on all levels and by all measures; even its name, Objectivism, embeds a lie), if you not only can't admit that it might be wrong but believe anyone who dares to disagree is actually evil, then you aren't free at all. You are ideology's slave.

And I have a little secret to tell you. You aren't the genius you think you are, either. All of the Randroids I know are kind of mediocre, maybe a little brighter than average but not all that. All the most brilliant people I know, and I know several truly brilliant people, are altruists.

I've heard of some people threatening to "go Galt," that is, to withdraw from participation in society and their imagined contributions to it. To which I say, God I hope so. Go Galt and get the hell out of the way. It's actually possible, I deem, that if all the people who actually produce and do and accomplish things in the world left or quit doing what they do, society would crumble. However, if all of the self-absorbed, self-aggrandizing, Rand-addled egomaniacs with a firm belief in their own superiority and entitlement left, there would be nothing but a huge sigh of relief.