I am sorry to say that I will have to make this blog temporarily private, beginning this Friday, January 21. I am currently looking for a job and worry that content I write about here will interfere with that process. We all know how people can be.

UPDATE: Awww, to hell with it. I’m just going start blogging under a pseudonym here:  http://almostverbiage.wordpress.com/

Problem permanently solved.

This blog will still go private, but you can look for stuff I’m writing about at the new place going forward.

So, until I find that job, whatever is posted on this blog will only be available to people I approve. WordPress currently allows 35 users to be added to a free private account, so the first 35 folks to e-mail me asking to be added will be my very small audience for a while. You can e-mail me at peacocksandlilies AT gmail DOT com if you want to be added to the list.

I’ll open up the blog to the public once a job is secured.

Thank you, and sorry for any inconvenience.

Anna Belle

Obama and his Economic Advisors

Graphic compliments of Optixmom.

Today we protest the gender imbalance within the Obama Administration. As TNA president Amy Siskind rightfully notes, the President’s scorecard when it comes to women is very poor:

• Obama’s cabinet picks are just 25% women.
• Obama’s czars are only 12% women.
• No women have leadership roles in running our country’s economy.
• Obama has only one woman in his inner-circle:  Valerie Jarrett.

Let’s start with discourse and President Obama’s speech. I liked it. While I’m no fan, it did satisfy some of my craving for reason in the madness of our current national dialogue. Unlike the television pundits and some on the right, I did not have a problem at all with the setting or the tone of the crowd. Tucson gets to react however they see fit, and if they needed to release some positive energy that others interpreted as having a “pep rally” feel, so be it. His speech and my own reflection these past few days about this country, its rhetoric, and where I stand politically are weighing heavily on my mind tonight.

I know where I stand, but it’s a rough place to be, and many others don’t get it. I no longer belong to anybody. It’s a very lonely feeling. For nearly 20 years I was a happy, if ignorant, liberal. My political life really started with the Clinton election of 1992, the first election in which I could vote for president. It seemed then that everybody hated the man and his wife, both of whom I loved. I slowly backed into a defensive crouch as the decade marched on and the Clintons came under attack from nearly every quarter, even from within their own party. I did not understand then that privilege and class had a lot to do with it, nor did I understand until recently our partisan history. Once you understand those two dynamics, the Clinton years, and so much else, comes into sharp focus.

The corridors of power in Washington are full of the elite. It’s the place the very rich send talentless sons and the place the children of well-off, well-connected, but not technically rich people buy their children the right educations to get into. Certainly they held a grudge against the product of a working class family, from a single mother to boot, who had worked his way up on mere wit and charm, no credentials needed to enter their Ivy League institutions. Oh, they were happy to give him an education, but then the fucker had the gall to jump to the front of the line, in front of the babies of countless powerful people who felt it was Junior’s turn. That was easy enough to understand, and by the time Clinton left office, my political mind was mature enough to realize it.

Putting our partisan history in context took quite a bit longer, and has been much harder work. If not for 2008, I’m not sure I could have done it. I had bought the rhetoric of the left hook, line, and sinker.

I don’t anymore because the way Obama ran his campaign, from McClurkin, to the character assassination of Hillary Clinton, right on down to the attacks on Sarah Palin, was at odds with what I knew to be common liberal values. We supported gay rights and the rights of women, we were proud of our history of civil rights pursuits and working class roots, we thought every vote counted and that election rules shouldn’t change in the middle of the process just because a small group of powerful people wanted a certain candidate. 2008 upended all of that.

What that break did was free me of party affiliations forever. I never forgot that, like many Americans, I gave George W. Bush a fair shot after 9/11, and he repaid that by doing things like outing a CIA agent and taking us to war in Iraq. I wasn’t going to become a Republican, even if I could occasionally vote for one. But I couldn’t be a Democrat anymore, and after the treatment I received from liberal and progressive “friends” because I chose to honor the ideas I held and not the party I had belonged to, I couldn’t really claim identification with the left at all. This freed me up to ask a lot of questions I had not previously had the courage to ask myself.

I questioned and searched and discovered that I had been wrong about much of what I’d previously thought. I had an understanding of many things that had to be questioned, and not just about the current political climate. I had certain ideas about history that needed to be challenged as well.

I thought the New Deal, for example, was a brilliant liberal achievement that was just awesome for everybody but the wealthy. I also thought the Civil War was fought by noble Republicans who acted with 19^th century poise. Naïve, I know.  So I dug into that history and came to realize that for much of our history, one dominant party or another has been violently chasing the other side into a proverbial corner, until that one ascends and the whole cycle is repeated in reverse.

Republicans treated Democrats terribly after the Civil War. Democrats treated Republicans terribly during the New Deal, and even after, into the war. Republicans chased the more liberal among us for a decade with fear of communism and fascism until the boomers became young adults, and the liberal side had a political machine the likes of which had not been seen before. The Silent Majority and the Reagan revolution paid them back by building machines of their own. The cycle keeps repeating, a sickening and sad cycle of intolerance as each side seeks only to conquer and disempower the other side. It’s hopeless.

And that’s where I find myself today. Every step into enlightenment seems to bring with it more futility, more alienation. See, I’m human, and I really want to belong. Most of us do. I like to talk a good game about political independence and logical consistency, and I do value those immensely. But I’m now in an unmapped place, and there just aren’t a lot of people out here. And I think my anger over my forced disassociation from the political life I knew, as well as family and friends, hell even readers of this blog who have made assumptions about where I stand politically and have thus written me off (even though those assumptions are wrong) is partly to blame. Honestly I haven’t had the time or the inclination to correct people, so frustrated am I by the uncreativity of such thought processes. I forget I was once just as uncreative myself.

I was very surprised recently to find one of my posts being discussed on another site, a site I thought was friendly. Not only was my post being discussed negatively, the conversation was punctuated with comments about me being “too right wing” for some readers. Now, these are blog comments, so I take it with a grain of salt. And I’m aware that a lot of the people who woke up in 2008 have slipped back into an unquestioning mindset, and the equation is simple for them. I’m not bashing Sarah Palin, and I defend conservative women, even that witchy bitch Christine O’Donnell, so I must be right wing.

Fine, I never wanted that kind of audience anyway. But there were a couple of commenters who I really liked, and it was painful to see my character disparaged by them in the pile on. I steeled myself against it. My work here is important to me, and this was a case of catty faux outrage that I refused to buy into, and because I wouldn’t toe that line, I was being othered. I try not to be pulled into stuff like that, and it’s happened a lot since I started this blog. I could tell you stories about some of your favs, but I haven’t. Gossip is just as bad.

But the work can’t be important just to me. It has no place if it has no or few readers, and this blog has really died in the last year. Sometimes I feel like I’m talking to myself. So maybe I’ve miscalculated in not responding to the criticism. Maybe it hasn’t worked, this idea that if I just double down and continue being me, it’ll all work itself out. Maybe I have steeled myself into this alienation. I really want to be part of a dialogue, not writing monologues, and I guess I have to rethink how I’m doing this. But how?

One thing I’ve got to do is let go of some of the defensiveness. A lot of Americans do, and I guess it’s ironic that I find myself here again. I don’t want to be chased into a political corner, and I don’t want to chase anybody else into one either. I kind of feel I have been, and that’s led me to defensively posture my anger, as opposed to my grief, over our current state of affairs. In turn, my rhetoric has reflected this anger at times.

Grandpa used to tell me this story about his father. They lived on a little farm in Southern Indiana, two bedrooms, six children, and the parents. Mother used to walk half a mile to pail water up a hill to boil for the laundry. You get the idea. Poor, but earnest country folk. His father’s family had been registered Republican ever since the Civil War. Their family really suffered, as did the whole area, during the Depression. Suddenly the WPA opened up some job near their town, but you had to buy your own tools. His dad spent the last of their money to buy those tools, but was turned away at the job site on account of being Republican. Before he left home that day he was reported to have said that he might even vote for FDR if things all worked out.

I think often of the missed opportunity that was lost to corruption. I don’t want to be that kind of person. I don’t want to hold a grudge my whole life because of political betrayal. But I still can’t join parties. I still can’t identify with the left or the right. I see too clearly now that the left has massive problems, as massive as the right. And I also now see that not every idea emanating from the right is bad. Finally, I see that the left sometimes has good ideas, and generally says it has some values I agree with, even if it rarely actually acts upon those values and sometimes betrays them. Like I said, this is unmapped territory for me. Maybe I don’t know where I stand. Maybe there’s no chance for me to belong. I don’t want to believe that, but I’m pretty tapped for ideas.

Gosh, there’s so much more, but I have to stop. I’ve gone on too long already, and bless you if you made it this far. I’m not sure I remember why I started this essay anyway, except I was feeling reflective after Obama’s speech. I’ve talked about some things I’ve wanted to talk about for a while, but couldn’t find the context for. I guess I’m hoping I’m not alone in feeling this political alienation, futility, and misunderstanding. And I’m hoping for some creative ideas about how to move it all forward.

From The Arizona Tragedy and the Politics of Blood Libel:

So as the usual talking heads begin their “have you no decency?” routine aimed at talk radio and Republican politicians, perhaps we should turn the question around. Where is the decency in blood libel?

This is yet another example of how we hate political women more than political men for the same things. If the left wants to talk about heated political rhetoric, it need look no further than itself for the disgusting displays of verbal misogyny that drive mad men to action. It is not alone in deserving blame. The judicial record is littered with countless examples of how our collective hatred of women so often ends in violence.

I’ve been looking everywhere for a voice of reason, and coming up empty-handed. The left continues to indict the right, while the right continues to ratchet up its defensiveness as it seeks to provide examples of hateful/violent political rhetoric from the left akin to the examples used by the left. And to be fair, these examples match up—it does look like both sides have their own insensitive, thoughtlessly judgmental jerks.  Too bad it all misses the point, and is another exercise in futility.

Lost in all this is any chance at a national conversation about what really matters. The victims. Guns. Mental illness. The lack of opportunity for our youth. Our own judgmental natures. It is terrible to see these topics subsumed by the opportunism of tasteless partisan posturers.  And it is frustrating to realize that this partisan posturing is actually a reaction of hurt, moving directly to the anger stage of grief. That is what it is, and I suppose we would do well to remember that, and point that out as we attempt to navigate conversations about “political rhetoric.” It is easy to get frustrated and argue back, or to try to tune the whole thing out, but fighting and ceding the narrative aren’t going to help. In fact, I think they hurt us more.

I, along with millions of other Americans, have shed tears over Representative Gifford, Judge Roll, Christina-Taylor Green, the Stoddards, and the rest of the victims. We are hurting, just like the left and the right, we are just searching for a different mode of expression. 57% of us don’t think “political rhetoric” had anything to do with this shooting. This is a bright spot of hope in what can otherwise be characterized as a verbal melee. It seems the American public can be trusted to intuit the truth in the midst of partisan mud-flinging designed to twist their opinions away from that truth.

Personally, I think this man was most likely mentally ill. I am not a doctor, so I will refrain from attempting to offer a diagnosis. But I have seen this same story play out time and time again over the course of my life. I have known more than one young man whose story echoes that of Jared Lee Loughner, not to the point of a shooting rampage, but in other ways. According to what I’ve been able to piece together, this was a smart young man with a need to belong and a budding mental illness that served to alienate him from those around him. The conflict here is evident.

And, it seems, he fell through many cracks.

One of the most troubling aspects for me in media reports is the way his community college handled the situation, and how it continues to handle it. It’s a problem schools have grappled with since Charles Whitman took a modified shotgun up into the clock tower at the University of Texas one fateful day in 1966 and started shooting. The dynamic was complicated further by the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007. Scared no doubt by those events, the school chose to play it safe and wash its hands of Loughner, even though all he had done at that point was make people feel creeped out. He had broken no law, violated no campus code. He was exhibiting symptoms of instability, so the college locked him out.

If nothing else, this CYA reaction was another rejection to a young man who, by most accounts, had earnestly sought opportunity. He had apparently attended college before, and hadn’t performed well. He attempted to enlist in the Armed Services, yet was shunned there too. Add to that his treatment at the college where he was seeking additional opportunity a second time. All of this happened in the medium-sized town, in the neighborhood where Loughner grew up, where people had known him since he was a child. One wonders how a stranger with this behavior pattern might have been treated.

None of this is to suggest that anyone in that town or neighborhood is to blame for what happened. That is important to note in all of this. But what if it could have been prevented by a different approach? Shouldn’t we dare to consider that? If we are to be honest, we as a culture and nation really have no pathways for mentally ill young adults to find their way to treatment and to build meaningful lives where they can contribute as citizens. Perhaps it’s time to talk about ways to build those pathways.

I’ve taught in higher education and, as an instructor, the most troubling part of the reporting on his educational pursuits has been the willingness of his instructors to talk to the media, and the way they are discussing their experience. I would never be able to talk to the media if one of my students found themselves at the center of a media storm due to crime, or any other personal event, certainly not without their permission, which I think it’s safe to say these instructors did not have. It’s a matter of confidentiality, and every instructor who has spoken out has broken their pledge to maintain it. It turns my stomach every time I run across another report. But the way they are talking about him is much worse. I am exasperated that the college is not calling these instructors to task.

What’s evident throughout most of the reporting from those who knew him is that the society he lived in had assigned to him a status of “other,” because they were afraid and because they did not have other recourse to address the situation. Now that practically the entire nation is aware of him because of his monstrous actions, the culture at large is busy with more of that othering. The push by the left to assign this guy to the right, despite incoherent political ramblings that have far more markings of left-wing ideology than right-wing ideology is part of this attempt. So is the push back by the right. Both sides are horrified that they might have something in common with the killer. The truth is, they both do. All the actors here are Americans. So are all the victims.

I do not mean to imply that I am defending Jared Lee Lougner. I am not. His actions where reprehensible, and far more sympathy should go to his victims than to him. Let’s not forget that he took aim at the heart of a child and didn’t hesitate to pull the trigger. But why can’t we examine the facts and muster compassion where it is called for? If nothing else, perhaps we can come to some consensus for a better way forward, one that can prevent this from happening again.

What I am trying to get at with this essay is that perhaps it’s time to take that step back and try a little tenderness. Perhaps we should turn to whatever it is that drives us each to compassion, to understanding that thread of humanity that ties us all together, with our friends and family, within our own political groups and across political lines, with the victims of this horrible crime, and even with the perpetrator of it. We will learn nothing if we continue to try to shift the blame out of opportunism, or because we might feel uncomfortable if we share some commonality with the killer.  We can’t get out of this mess by “othering” Jared Lee Loughner away. We have to bravely examine the facts and come to unemotional conclusions about what went wrong and how we can fix it.

Christina-Taylor Green

I will never forget the day of Oklahoma City Bombing. My daughter was 2 at the time, and was at her on-site daycare when I heard the horrific news that The Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City had been hit, including their on-site daycare. Watching the news as the emergency responders pulled so many toddler bodies out of the wreckage really hit home. I wept and immediately left work to gather my baby in my arms, filled with the bittersweet knowledge that but for the grace of something, we were spared. I could not believe that so many parents were hurting because their children were murdered during the most routine of activities.

I had a flashback to that feeling Saturday as reports came in  that a 9-year-old little girl was shot in the chest and killed by gunman Jared Lee Loughner at a political event for U. S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords. I have taken my own daughter to political events. I’ve integrated her into my own political activism where she has shown interest, because I believe that exposure to that process is important as a citizen and a future woman. Christina-Taylor was there for similar reasons, lovingly escorted by a family friend who had her future in mind and best interests at heart. She was reportedly attending the event to ask Gifford how she could get involved in politics.

According to her mother, Roxanna Green, Christina-Taylor “talked about getting all the parties to come together so we could live in a better country. She was going to Giffords’ event to ask questions about how she could help and to learn more about politics in our country.” She was recently elected student council president at Mesa Verde Elementary School, where she attended 3rd grade.

Christina-Taylor Green was also a 9/11 Faces of Hope baby, one of many infants born on 9/11/2001 whose pictures were collected in a book, Faces of Hope. Her grandfather is legendary baseball manager Dallas Green, her father, John Green is a scout for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Christina-Taylor was herself the only girl on her Little League team. Frank McCourt, owner of the Dodgers, released this statement Sunday:

“We lost a member of the Dodgers family. The entire Dodgers organization is mourning the death of John’s daughter Christina, and will do everything we can to support John, his wife, Roxanna, and their son, Dallas, in the aftermath of this senseless tragedy. I spoke with John earlier today and expressed condolences on behalf of the entire Dodgers organization.”

In many ways, this little girl was a symbol of American tradition and resilience. She was a little girl interested in politics and governance, the oldest of our nation’s traditions. Her birth on 9/11/2001 and inclusion in Faces of Hope meant her life was forever framed by the tragedy that day wrought. By her family’s account, the fact of her date of birth empowered her culturally and politically, and caused her to want to unify our country in ways only children seem to dream of anymore. Her connections to baseball, our beloved national sports pastime, remind us of the crossroads that map American life, how we are constantly intersecting. Her death in this context is deeply troubling, a bright flame of hope snuffed out by madness.

I can’t believe that John and Roxanna Green, and the rest of their family, have live through this heartache. Our heartfelt condolences go out to them in these dark hours. We will never forget Christina-Taylor Green. Her work will continue through people like me and my daughter, who will not be intimidated by this act of violence.

Not in Obama’s inner circle.  And we’re doing something about it!

The New Agenda is organizing a blogosphere protest:

ATTENTION WOMEN BLOGGERS!!! (and men bloggers who love us) – on 1/11/11, please join The New Agenda in expressing your public displeasure with Obama’s choices of Daley and Sperling – an inner circle *still* composed almost exclusively of men.   Every major leadership position in running our country’s economy is held by a white men. THAT IS NOT OKAY! Please blog on 1/11/11 and spread this to other enlightened Americans.

WANT TO BE INVOLVED?

1. Please post this or the verbiage above to your Facebook page.
2. Please forward this alert to women bloggers (and men bloggers who love us).
3. Please tweet this.
4. Please write a piece for your blog, or a friend’s blog.
5. Please submit a piece to be posted at The New Agenda blog (blog@thenewagenda.net).

Together, we will ensure that on 1/11/11, our voices will be heard!!!

***

If you believe that Obama needs the voices of more women–any women!–in his inner circle, then you should blog about it Monday. We need to amplify the noise on this one!

Raymond Carver (1938-1988)

I know, I know. I haven’t posted in a while. I’ve been sick and having family problems, the combination of which has zapped my energy.

Also, there’s just not a lot to analyze politically these days. Politics seems to have devolved even further, and less and less information gets through. The blogosphere has changed journalism for the worse, its amateurisms and reactionary thought processes infecting the fourth estate at nearly every level. It was bad enough when journalists were buddy-buddy with politicians, but hid it. Now they’re out in the open with it, writing naked defenses of what should be indefensible, picking fights with readers on Twitter, and the content is all he-said-he-said-Palin-said bullcrap. I’m so frustrated by that!

I’m also frustrated by indicators that things are getting worse for us Main Streeters. The market recovered. Gas Prices are going up. Commodities (the shit we need, as opposed to want) are going up. In other words, business is booming once again, but no jobs are being offered. Who needs us when you’ve got China, Malaysia, etc.? There’s so much more, but I just don’t want to think about it.

The point is, I feel powerless. I am powerless. And that, too, zaps the energy.

Raymond Carver wrote about this, the working class condition, the view from the outside, with such tenderness and beauty. In his short stories he captures the futility, the shamelessness and blamelessness of a life with fewer options, marked as it so often is with poor choices. He understood that redemption could be found even here. Sadly he lost his life due to lung cancer at just 50 years old. Carver was a life-long smoker.

That’s where I’m calling from today. Facing down 40 in six weeks, feeling pretty hopeless about the world, and quite frankly feeling the urgency to reform my own poor choices. Like Carver, I often turn to writing to ease my aching heart. Here’s a poem I wrote, inspired by Carver and my own poor choices.

Christmas Tree Ashtray

Once in a while I clean our Christmas tree-shaped ashtray.
We use it year-round, and its glossy whiteness, speckled with
70s-style green and orange craft paint is usually hidden
by the densely packed ash of our countless cigarettes.

It was a gift from a friend, upon the death of his grandfather,
one of dozens stacked in the basement of the dead man’s house
and since forgotten. That friend himself has long now given up smoking,
and as I clean, I ponder quitting. My friend tells me how much better he feels,
how much more he can do, now that he’s kicked his habit. I want that feeling.

I am going to be 40 next year.
I have smoked for twenty-seven years. Do the math; I have.
I will not be a 40 year old smoker.
I cannot be a 40 year old smoker.

I’m too smart to be a 40 year old smoker.
I know the risks, every single one. How could I not?
I read voraciously, even the warnings on packages,
And my daughter has inundated me with the statistics for years.
I guess if I am to do this right, and to give them up for good
I must confess that I have not been careful with her health,
that I have selfishly clouded her childhood memories
with my smoke. And I will not make excuses for that.
It is inexcusable.

My lungs are, no doubt, blacker than black dirt by now,
and I worry constantly that cancer is setting up rows
in that fertile soil. I have a permanent cough, too,
the first vestiges of what will develop into full blown COPD
if I keep smoking. Already a squirt of piss escapes my bladder
every once in a while, and no doubt the shits will follow
if I keep smoking. I must face this.

I know all this, and yet
still the ashtray sits this December 23,
a knick knack that’s finally found its season,
clean and white and speckled,
with a freshly lit cigarette, wafting up smoke.

But I will not be a 40 year old smoker.
You watch.
The New Year is just a breath away.

***

*Where I’m Calling From is the name of a short story by Raymond Carver, and the name of the collection of stories in which it appears.

The reason for this endurance is because UCONN’s coach, Geno Auriemma, trains his players like the men’s teams do, with weight and endurance training. He started that practice in Women’s College Basketball, and the trend is growing. It’s changing the women’s game all over.

There’s been a lot of talk about how the women’s game is different than the men’s game, and as a hardcore fan of basketball in general, I can tell you this is true. But there are reasons for that. WCBB is relatively new, and unlike the men’s teams, the players don’t get the benefit of a lifetime of practice. Women usually start playing in high school, so their curve is longer. That is changing, though, as the women’s game grows in popularity and more scholarship funds go to women players.

What’s amazing about UCONN is that their game is every bit as good as the men’s game. They dominate because they are that good. They are changing the face of women’s basketball and because of their work, very shortly I think we will see a whole conference with skill as good, if not better, than the men’s.

And let’s not forget most of these women are doing this with GPAs of 3.5 and higher. You don’t see that in the men’s game.

Congratulations UCONN Huskies on your historic win today. Now it’s on to Tuesday and an attempt to BEAT UCLA’s record (airing on ESPN2!). Go Huskies!