The Franken/Coleman recount is still not over, and let’s face it, it might not be over for some time. But it’s closer to over now that the three-judge panel hearing the case has limited Coleman’s universe of ballots to 400 — a number that is, quite simply, way too small to work for him.

The ruling sets the stage for the promised appeal to the Minnesota Supreme Court, and that’s where things will, I think, finally get resolved. Yes, yes, John Cornyn has threatened to drag this out for “years” by getting this shunted into the Federal courts, and I have no doubt that the Coleman camp will try it. But the Minnesota Supreme Court tipped its hand earlier, and indicated that they will require the issuance of an election certificate once they’ve handled the case.

Coleman’s best bet at that point is to ask for a stay of that certificate from the Federal courts. But such a stay might not happen. To get a stay, Coleman needs a substantial likelihood of winning and to prove he’s being irreparably harmed by the stay not going through. Coleman has a weak case, according to pretty much every impartial observer. More important, though, Coleman is not irreparably harmed by Franken being seated. Presumably, if the U.S. Supreme Court vacates the election, Franken will be kicked out of the Senate, and a new election will be held, but under no circumstances will Coleman be seated between now and a hypothetical, unlikely new election.

Given that, Coleman’s situation now (not a Senator) is materially unaffected by the issuance of a certificate. Franken, however, does suffer irreparable harm from the issuance of a stay — something that the court also will have to take into account.

If a certificate is issued, and Franken is seated, all of this will come to an end. At this point, given the extremely weak hand Coleman has, the appeals are basically a cheap way for the NRSC to keep a Democrat out of office. But once a certificate is issued, and Franken is seated, appeals will hold no real value. Coleman’s funding will dry up, and the long, winding road will end.

More to the point, I think most Minnesotans — myself included — have been willing to allow Coleman to see the process through state courts. I don’t agree with his decision to contest the election (especially with such weak evidence), but it’s his right to do so. Once we get to the Minnesota Supreme Court, though, I think that patience will run out. For Coleman to essentially argue that Minnesota is a corrupt, incompetent state whose courts don’t know enough to give him the election — that will pretty much destroy Coleman’s image with a majority of Minnesotans. After all, if there’s one thing that animates Minnesotans, its our pervasive sense of inadequacy; we like our politicians to praise the state up one side and down the other. If Coleman essentailly slimes the state, he will be ending his political career. (Gov. Timmy is also in jeopardy should he try to foot-drag on signing an election certificate; if the Minnesota Supremes give him a directive to sign, he fails to do so at his peril.)

At any rate, it’s not over yet, and there are probably a few more twists and turns in this road. But at this point, it’s all but certain that at some point, Al Franken will be seated as a Senator from Minnesota. The only question is when.

UPDATE AGAIN: Here it is.

Live video chat by Ustream

UPDATE: This is still going on, but we’ll be starting late — perhaps 7:45ish, perhaps later. Keep checking in!

I’ll be on Erika Moen’s weekly video podcast tonight — you can watch it here, starting at 7:30 west coast time. We’ll be talking about Hereville and whatever else comes up. And you can also type in questions for me live. (There’s an archive of Erika’s past shows here.)

Erika’s a terrific cartoonist, by the way; I’m a fan of her autobiographical comic strip “DAR: A Super-Girly Top Secret Comic Diary.” (But be warned that Erika’s comics include lots of nudity and jokes about genitals and farts, so willing adults only should check out her comics.)

In all the discussions about Same Sex Marriage, the rarely-acknowledged elephant in the room is that there is no coherent non-religious opposition. The religious opposition, of course, boils down to “people who are not members of my chosen religion should nto have the same civil rights as people who are members,” so it makes sense that opponents of SSM would cast about for a reason beyond the sexual orientation of Paul. When I tried to bring attention to this lately, there were quite a few protests, and cries of, “but my opposition has nothing to do with religion! I just don’t see SSM as part of the American legal tradition,” or, “I just think that past examples of SSM in other cultures have been transient.”

But here’s the thing. Those reasons are religious.

There was gay marriage in ancient Rome. When did it stop? When Christianity took over the empire.

There were socially sanctioned same sex relationships among many indigenous North American civilizations. When did they stop? When they were converted, often forceably, to Christianity.

Every (or nearly every … I’m not encyclopedia-man here) post-Roman Western European  civilization was officially Christian. The legal tradition they handed down to us was a Christian legal tradition. Christian morality became inexorably bound up in the law, to the point where things like blasphemy were considered crimes.

Thus, when someone says, “Hey, those traditions of Same Sex Marriage in other cultures sure seemed temporary,” what they’re really saying is, “Hey, those traditions of Same Sex Marriage in other cultures sure are part of a non-Christian tradition that ended when we made them convert.”

When someone says “I just don’t see examples of legally/socially sanctioned Same Sex Marriage in western civilization,”¹ what they’re really saying is, “I just don’t see examples of legally/socially sanctioned Same Sex Marriage in civilizations with enforced Christianity.”

When someone says “I just don’t see examples of legally/socially sanctioned Same Sex Marriage in the United States,” what they’re really saying is, “I just don’t see examples of legally/socially sanctioned Same Sex Marriage in a country whose legal code grew from laws based on Christianity.”

And of course, when someone says, “I’m opposed to Same Sex Marriage because marriage has always been between a man and a woman,” what they’re really saying² is, “There was a time when it was against the law to follow another religion, and I sure miss that.”

There was a time when it was illegal to do business on a Sunday. There was a time when adultery was illegal. That was because of this. There was a time when sodomy was illegal, and that was because of this. As time has gone on, those things have been jettisoned from the American legal tradition, in part because of the understanding that there ought to be a distinction between the legal and the religious. The same is true here.

Beyond all that, of course, argument from tradition is a logical fallacy. Knowing how people used to do things ‘way back when’ doesn’t hold any logical or moral weight. If it’s a good idea, we should do it now. If it’s a bad idea, we shouldn’t. Whether or not the Hittites, the Franks, the Normans, or the Aztecs allowed Same Sex Marriage or not is a hell of a red herring.

Please do not comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people.

1. And by the way, even phrasing the argument in such a way that you talk about ‘western civilizations’ is really very racist. In order for it to make a lick of sense, I would have to be convinced that we somehow have more in common with the 11th century French than we do with the Iroquois Confederacy whom we based much of our Constitution on. More in common beyond “but America’s supposed to be white,” I mean. (back)
2. Aside from, “I am ignorant of history and other cultures” (back)

When I watched the preview for ‘Echoes’ the first thing I said was “Oh God, I hope they don’t turn Caroline into an animal rights activist. I liked Caroline.” This clearly says more about my issues than it does about the show. I had assumed that Caroline was an activist who had got into massive legal/other trouble, but I hadn’t actually expected to be right.

Read the rest of this entry »

Remember Dr. Mike S. Adams? Sure you do! He’s the misogynistic, anti-feminist douchebag who somehow teaches at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

At any rate, one of Mikey’s friends sent him an email the other day — allegedly, anyhow — about how his once God-fearing, Republican daughter had gone off to college and become a damn socialist. Dr. Mike, being the massive tool that he is, decides that this is awful, and he wants to cure her “STD” with a three-point program of pure wingnuttery.

This will all end in tears.

Thanks for writing me with your concerns about your daughter’s recent visit home from college. I don’t have a daughter but I can understand the concern you have after seeing such dramatic changes in her after just six months at a public university. After all, you didn’t save money for eighteen long years in order to pay someone to teach her to despise the values you taught for, well, eighteen long years.

First of all, I want you to understand that many of the crazy ideas you hear your daughter espousing are commonplace on college campuses. Nonetheless, it must have been shocking for you to hear that she supported Barack Obama in the last election principally because of his ideas about “the redistribution of wealth.” I know you were also disappointed to hear of her sudden opposition to the War on Terror and her sudden embrace of the United Nations. Most of all, I know you are disappointed that she has stopped going to church altogether.

Awful, horrible stuff. The man’s daughter went off to college and actually learned to think for herself. Now that she’s an adult, she’s making her own decisions about who to vote for, what church to belong to (if any), and what policies are important to her.

Now, you may say, “Jeff, isn’t that actually what we want? Our children to grow up into people who can think for themselves, people who can stand on their own two feet?”

That’s what I want. But not everyone feels that way:

Now that your daughter is not going to church it will be easier to get her to accept other policies based on economic and cultural Marxism. Socialist professors like the fact that average church attendance drops dramatically after just one year of college. God and socialism are simply incompatible. One cannot worship both Jesus Christ and Karl Marx.

Absolutely true, Dr. Mike. After all, Jesus is the guy who said (in Luke 18:24-25), “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” There’s nothing there compatible with the idea that workers should own the means of production, and that wealth should be distributed fairly!

More seriously, this is an unintentionally telling paragraph. Most liberal parents I know expect that when their kids are older, they’ll disagree on some things in politics and philosophy. I don’t expect my daughter to end up in exactly the same place as I am politically, and while I think she’s likely to end up a feminist and reasonably humanist, I also expect her to take her own journey to those beliefs. Indeed, if my daughter doesn’t question what she believes in, doesn’t look for opposing views, doesn’t veer off in odd directions once in a while, if she simply takes what I’ve said as gospel and parrots it back — well, she won’t believe it at all, in my book. To believe, you have to have questioned.

For conservative parents, contrawise, the idea of questioning is abhorrent. Conservatism is, at its very core, authoritarian. A leader speaks, followers obey. A patriarch is not supposed to be questioned, especially not by his daughter. That way leads chaos. Destruction. Liberalism.

Questioning and learning are bad. Rote memorization and recitation are good. This is the conservative way.

But don’t worry. Mike Adams may not have a brain, but he has an idea.

But there is good news, Steve. I think I can implement a program that will cure your daughter’s Socialist Teaching Disorder (STD) in just a few short days. In case you were wondering, I define STD as the sudden infatuation with socialism brought on by exposure to pro-socialist ideas without a corresponding exposure to anti-socialist ideas. Although not recognized by the APA, this emotional disorder is running rampant at American universities.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Mike S. Adams wouldn’t have made the STD joke if we were talking about the guy’s son. (We’ll get to the guy’s son in a minute).

The solution to your daughter’s STD is to be found in your decision to award her a sum of $4000 if she returns from her freshman year with a 3.5 GPA or above. Previously, you explained to me that you decided to do this for two reasons: 1) Your daughter had earned a $4000 scholarship, which meant you had the extra money, and 2) Your only son had gone to college five years ago and flunked out after one year.

And, you know, thank God, because otherwise the guy’s son might have become a liberal, too.

Now that your daughter has maintained a 3.6 GPA (so far) you are happy. But you are unhappy that you are about to reward her newfound love of socialism when you had only intended to reward her studiousness. I have a solution that involves three steps. If you follow these steps (in order) we’ll have this little problem cured in no time:

1. When your daughter returns from college in early May (presumably with a GPA over 3.5) I want you to tell her that you lied. Put simply, when she asks about her $4000 just tell her that you never really had any intention of delivering on your promises.

This revelation will, no doubt, cause significant consternation and outrage. But when she protests, simply point out that her choice for president, Barack Obama, also lied to her. Note that his lies about earmarks and line-by-line analysis of the budget will probably end up costing her more than $4000. She might say, “But you’re my father.” If she does, respond by saying “But I’m not your president.” If things get too uncomfortable, just tell her the $4000 promise was technically “last year’s business.”

Oh, yeah. That will sure do it. I’m sure your daughter will be totally convinced that your decision to withhold the $4000 you promised her is no worse than Obama having signed a budget into law that has earmarks, unlike every single budget passed in American history. Also, she can’t possibly fire back that the Iraq War has already cost her that $4000 and then some. Additionally, there’s no better way to prove the inherent superiority of the wealthy than to show them to be liars. (It is, I will admit, a good lesson of how America’s wealthy operate, but let’s not even mention that.)

2. When your daughter has cooled down somewhat from the realization that her father is a confessed liar I want you to strike again. Since your son, now 23, still lives at home it will be possible for you to implement step two in the presence of both children. This step will involve simply taking out your wallet and writing a $2000 check to your son.

This action will, no doubt, cause even more consternation and outrage for your daughter. She may well point out that her brother is unemployed. She may also point out that he has been in rehab twice and that he once punched you in the face while under the influence of drugs. But, when she protests, simply say that it was Barack Obama who taught you to reward failure.

She may well say “But that’s half of the money I was supposed to get.” If so, point out that it is Barack Obama who would like to take other people’s money – at least half, if not more – and use much of it to reward bad behavior. By this time, she will probably hate socialism and the lesson will have saved you a lot of money.

Oh, Christ, it’s like the not leaving a tip thing, only dumber.

Look, in no universe is half of the money the rich people make going to the poor. Barack Obama isn’t proposing taking most of rich people’s money and giving it to the poor. Barack Obama is proposing taking 39 percent of the money rich people make above and beyond $250,000, not counting deductions, of which rich people usually have many.

Certainly, in no universe is all the money the rich people make going to the poor. This analogy is patently stupid and completely intellectually dishonest, sort of like Mike S. Adams. Not to mention that if I had two kids, one of whom was a violent drug addict, the other of whom was an honor student whose political views had shifted in the past year, I think I can tell you that the honor student would be getting the $4000 with gratitude.

Now, Mike S. Adams is pretty sure that he’s convinced this woman that socialism is teh suck, rather than convincing her that her father is a lying asshole. But just in case this hasn’t worked, Mike’s going to get actively involved:

But, just in case the point is not yet made, there is a third step to my plan. And this is where I get actively involved.

Yeah, that’s what I said.

3. I’m going to take your daughter and the remaining $2000 - in the form of one hundred $20 bills – to the “hood.” Specifically, I am going to take her to places where crack cocaine is sold here in Wilmington in the middle of the afternoon. This will include grocery stores and actual crack houses.

So, guy who wrote Mike Adams for help, just for the record, Mike S. Adams has proposed taking your 18-year-old daughter and a fat stack of $2000 to a crack house.That alone should be enough to persuade you that Mike S. Adams has the worst ideas in the universe. But don’t worry.

Don’t worry about your daughter’s safety as I will be armed with a .357 magnum loaded with 145-grain silver tipped hollow point bullets.

Because if there’s one thing crack dealers are totally unfamiliar with, it’s guns. They’ll never expect the white douchebag college professor to be packing heat.

Also, and I’m just speculating here, but Mike, you really might want to see a psychologist about that. Most enlightened men come to realize that it doesn’t really matter how big it is, and frankly, partners are usually willing to accept almost any size as long as you’re willing to take other steps to satisfy their needs. With therapy, hopefully you can come to accept yourself as you are, and stop looking to compensate for your perceived inadequacies.

When I approach a crack head I will first ask whether he paid income taxes last year. If he says “no” I will hand him $20.

If he says “yes,” I will kill him.

If your daughter asks me why I give money to people who don’t pay taxes I’ll remind her that this is what President Obama does.

Of course, even crack dealers pay taxes — sales taxes, property taxes, bribes to local officials, business taxes on their shell companies — but let’s not complicate the matter.

Also, I wasn’t aware that Barack Obama’s fiscal plan was handing out $20s to crack dealers, but it’s a start.

Then I’ll ask her if she still believes in “spreading the wealth” without regard to individual merit.

And she’ll say “no,” because she’ll realize that Dr. Mike S. Adams is a professor at a state school, and therefore gets money from the state of North Carolina, clearly without regard for merit.

By the end of the afternoon, I can guarantee your daughter will be cured of her STD. Sorry if I sound overly optimistic, Steve. I got my optimism from the same place I got my love of capitalism. I learned it from Ronald Reagan, not Barack Obama.

Nobody tell Mike S. Adams that the top marginal tax rate was higher under Reagan than it is under Obama. His head might explode.

Oh, and near as I can tell, Mike S. Adams has proposed giving $4000 to drug dealers as a way to prove that socialism is bad. Adams is doing this to prove the inherent superiority of conservatism. But conservatives came up with that idiotic plan. Which pretty much proves, once and for all, that this guy’s daughter is right.

And fortunately, she’s smart, and when she decides once and for all to leave her druggie brother and asshole father behind, she’ll do very well for herself, whether or not her dad decides to give her the money.

(Via Sadly, No!)

I don’t really know anything about Andy Hallet, except that his performance as “Lorne” on Angel made me very happy. And although this may be irrational, my instinct is that anyone who could project such a kind soul on screen, probably had a kind soul in real life. And 33 is really far, far too young. 

From E Online: “Andy Hallett, who starred as Lorne (”the Host”) on the TV series Angel, died of heart failure last night at age 33, according to his longtime agent and friend Pat Brady. The actor passed away at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles after a five-year battle with heart disease, with his father Dave Hallett by his side.

Hallett, from the Cape Cod village of Osterville, Mass., appeared on more than 70 episodes of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer spinoff, Angel, between 2000 and 2004. The accomplished actor was also a musician and sang two songs (”Lady Marmalade” and “It’s Not Easy Being Green”) on the Angel: Live Fast, Die Never soundtrack, released in 2005.”

(Photo via Buffyfest.)

Dear Gambling Debt Consolidation, Ways to Make More Money Now, Naked Porn Naked XXX, and others,

We thank you for your comments about how “you just found the blog” and “i think ur right about that” and “wow what a post” and so on, but we are not fooled by your clever deception, particularly when you include a textual description of your link either before or after your sly camouflage.

You may, therefore, stop encouraging us that “i never thought of it like that b4 u r so right” and that your “brother has a blog like this but frankly i like this one better.”

We aren’t immune to flattery, but we do appreciate a semblance of sincerity.

Respectfully,

The Blogosphere

In a couple of posts in January, I touched on the topic of “male-bashing.”

“Male-bashing” is an inaccurate phrase, since — as Hugo says — words are not fists. (And see this post by Mandolin, as well.)

But in general, I understand the phrase “male-bashing” to mean not literal bashing¹, but “unfair criticism of men, rooted in prejudice against men.”

Well, unfairness and prejudice — how could I defend that? Really, I can’t. I don’t believe that anyone should be judged or treated differently based on what’s between their legs.² There have been times when I’ve encountered outright anti-male bigotry on feminist boards, both directly and indirectly (such as women who agreed with a man in argument having their positions dismissed as “male-coddling,” which is sexist against both sexes).

That’s prejudiced, and it sucks. No doubt about that, at least in my (male) mind. On the occasions I encounter stuff like that, sometimes I object, and sometimes I roll my eyes and mutter under my breathe about picking battles.

But I still think that male-bashing — or, rather, the intellectual space for male-bashing — is necessary.

Mainly because what male-bashing is, is contested territory. If a feminist scholar says that rape is extreme behavior, but part of the spectrum of normal male behavior, is that male-bashing? That’s pretty clearly what Christina Hoff Sommers insinuated when, seeking to discredit Mary Koss’ rape prevalence research, she wrote (emphasis Sommers’):

In 1982, Mary Koss, then a professor of psychology at Kent State University in Ohio, published an article on rape in which she expressed the orthodox gender feminist view that “rape represents an extreme behavior but one that is on a continuum with normal male behavior within the culture” (my emphasis). Some well-placed feminist activists were impressed by her.

So is Koss’ statement anti-male? Apparently Sommers thinks so, but I don’t know why. Koss isn’t saying all men are rapists; she’s not saying that for men to rape is normal; she’s saying that there is a continuum of male sexual behavior, and rape is an extreme on that continuum.³ You might disagree with that, but should the very thought be off-bounds for those of us who want to avoid being bigoted against any sex? I don’t think so.

Similarly, I’ve more than once seen critics of feminism suggest that being critical of masculinity is anti-male. From my perspective, nothing in this world is more harmful to men than cultural norms of masculinity, and nothing more profoundly anti-male than the idea that the ideals of “masculinity” should not be criticized or changed (or, preferably, done away with). Every person who is against challenging the idea of masculinity, is in favor of boys being beaten and bullied in schoolyards; is in favor of men going off to stupid wars where they can be shot and blown up, mainly by other men also trying to be masculine; etc, etc. But for other people, my entire line of thinking is somehow “anti-male.”

Historically, the idea that women needed the vote — (”What are you saying, that men don’t vote in the best interests of their families?”) — was once considered anti-male. I’ve more than once been told that thinking that men and women should be equally represented in government, was anti-male and sexist, because I was claiming that male politicians can’t represent women. (I do think an individual male politician can represent women. I’m not sure a governing body that’s 85% male can adequately represent a population that’s 51% female). I’ve also been told, again and again, that my belief that children of lesbian couples turn out fine without a father is anti-male (never mind that I’d say the same thing about motherless children of gay male couples).

The intellectual freedom to be anti-male is necessary, because today’s common sense was yesterday’s anti-male screed, and today’s screed tomorrow’s common sense. It would be bad for both women and men if all of feminism’s good ideas were dropped because they were labeled anti-male.

* * *

There’s another reason, which I believe but am having difficulty articulating: I think that when fighting an entrenched, unjust system, radical ideas are valuable as a “shock to the system.” (Credit to Mandolin, who discussed this with me in IM a while ago, for influencing my thinking on this.) There is a value in fiery rhetoric; there is a value in saying “fuck all that shit.”

1. Of course, some men are literally bashed, but this is usually called “violence” or “abuse,” not bashing. (back)
2. I can think of a few very narrow exceptions to this, in cases that either have to do with genuine physical differences, such as having urinals in men’s restrooms but not women’s, or that are intended to mitigate the effects of already-existing sexism, such as affirmative action. (back)
3. In context, Koss’ paper (published in The Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology) argued that a spectrum approach is a more useful way of categorizing “sexual aggression/sexual victimization” than a typological approach, which says a “subject is either a rapist, a rape victim, or a control subject. Recently, several writers have suggested that a dimensional view of rape be adopted. In this framework, rape represents an extreme behavior but one that is on a continuum with normal male behavior within the culture.” (back)

In Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster argues that there are essentially two types of characters: flat and round. (I’m describing this from memory, since for some unfathomable reason I’m a novelist who doesn’t own the book, so correct me if I get anything wrong.) A round character is a fleshed-out character. A round character has a history and a fully developed personality. A round character has contradictions - they long to be the center of attention, say, but when they get their wish, they want to escape back to obscurity. A flat character, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to rise up off the page. Rather, they’re tagged with one or two traits, often recurring lines or verbal tics, and those define them. If they spend the novel talking about how they can’t wait for spring break, then they’re the character who can’t wait for spring break. Nothing they do will ever call that into question. Note that there’s nothing wrong with a flat character; fiction mimics real life, even when it claims not to, and real life contains people you meet only a few times and never learn a whole lot about. The only time a flat character becomes problematic is when their flatness starts to feel constrictive or artificial to the reader.

In Dollhouse, Echo, to some extent, is a round character. (Spoilers below!) Read the rest of this entry »

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Kung Fu Monkey.

Blame Andrew Sullivan for this.

Cross-posted from The Mustard Seed.

I can’t believe I didn’t catch this sooner, it wasn’t until I read it today on As’ad AbuKhalil’s blog.

John Hope Franklin, a prolific scholar of African-American history who profoundly influenced thinking about slavery and Reconstruction while helping to further the civil rights struggle, died Wednesday in Durham, N.C. He was 94.

…

In an article in The Atlantic Monthly in 2007, he wrote, “If the American idea was to fight every war from the beginning of colonization to the middle of the 20th century with Jim Crow armed forces, in the belief that this would promote the American idea of justice and equality, then the American idea was an unmitigated disaster and a denial of the very principles that this country claimed as its rightful heritage.” (Read the rest of the obituary here)

Images from:
Sam Litzinger
New York Times

I first called myself a poet, though only to myself and only in the pages of the journal I was keeping at the time, when I was 22 years old, and it was one of the most frightening moments of my life. I knew I was making a commitment to something much larger than myself, but also that I was making a commitment first and foremost to myself, because no one else in the world really cared whether or not I lived my life with the making of poetry at its center. I suppose I had ideas that I might one day publish books that would matter to people and, indeed, had been given some intial encouragement to think that way by June Jordan, my first poetry teacher, whose workshop I took when I was a junior in college, a year before I declared myself a poet. A poem that I wrote criticizing what, in my opinion anyway, was the very cynical and manipulative approach to the Holocaust taken by the Jewish center my family went to at the time and insisting that any approach to confronting oppression had to make connections between and among all oppressions, had been accepted by a literary journal published, I think, by the University of Alabama. I shared the good news with my class, of course, but it was not until later that semester, at an awards ceremony we were both attending, that June pulled me aside and told me she’d thought I’d written an important poem and that it was important for me to keep writing out of whatever place that poem had come from. That kind of affirmation, of confirmation, is so important in a young writer’s life, and it is one reason why the poems that mean the most to me, both the ones that I write and the ones that I read, are what I call politically engaged, not in the narrow sense of the politics of any given moment–though those poems are important too–but in the sense of consciously engaging the politics of power that are inescapably part of how our lives are shaped, informed and motivated.

Still, it would be another year before I could bring myself to write the words I am a poet in my journal and fully own them, and even then the commitment I was making was more about making than it was about publishing or trying in any way to garner any sort of reputation for myself. Giving myself to language, claiming language as mine to work, was a paradox I did not even understand that I was entering, and yet entering that paradox gave me back my voice, which is what I mean when I say - and I am not being melodramatic - that being a poet gave me a reason to live. I think I might have become a writer even if I had not been sexually abused by two different men, each at a different time during my teens, but I don’t know that I would have become a poet, because it was through reading and writing poems–not novels, not essays, not memoirs–that I discovered language as a way of, and a language for, giving voice to the experience of having had my voice taken away. One of my abusers, the first to decide that I was his to use sexually, silenced me, literally stopped up my mouth, with his penis; the second used his language, his voice, to shape what he was doing to me, to construct the context in which he was doing it, such that no words I might utter would mean the no I only half understood that I could say, given how deeply the first man had stuffed back into me the no I’d wanted to say to him. In a sense, I suppose, every poem I’ve ever written has been an articulation and rearticulation of those unuttered no’s.

I stopped writing poetry-as-therapy a long time ago, poems that resembled the self-indulgence of TV-talk-show rants more than anything else, but I remember well how liberating it was to write them, to name my experience in them; and I remember as well the very different and deeply satisfying sense of accomplishment I felt when I wrote the first poem about my experience of abuse that was not merely a cry for people to hear me, to see me, to acknowledge that what had been done to me was real, but was rather my own fully conscious attempt to give that experience a meaning that was entirely mine, that had nothing to do with how the men who abused me had tried to make me theirs; and I remember also the moment I realized that every poem I had written to that point was what had brought me to that point, even the ones that had nothing to do with sexual abuse. I understood then that every poem I would write from that moment on, if it was going to count, needed to come from the same place that those other poems came from; and I thought this too is political, is resistance, not just going to protests and writing letters and organizing–all of which are deeply important work–but living consciously, purposefully, in such a way that you bring to language, that you find language for, give language to, all the ways in which that no manifests itself over and against acquiescence to the status quo, however that status quo is defined. I was beginning to see that this no, once it has a voice, will ultimately manifest itself as a yes, an affirmation, a confirmation, that this is who you are, and that this is something you will fight to keep free and whole until you cannot fight anymore.

So I have been thinking about this because I have been thinking about Shahnameh, Book of Kings, the Iranian national epic, which was written by Abolqasem Ferdowsi in the 10th century CE. As I have just explained, I know what it’s like to be invaded, to have my voice taken away from me, and I know what it’s like to write in resistance to that invasion, but it is hard for me to imagine what it would mean to live through the military conquest of my country, to have my country’s language supplanted by the language of my conquerors, my nation’s religion replaced by theirs, my culture’s stories and traditions supplanted by those of the conquering culture. Indeed, I think that unless you are Native American, if you were born and raised in the United States, it’s hard to imagine what that would be like. You might be a member of a group whose culture and history, and even language, are erased, denied, ridiculed or otherwise derogated by the dominant culture, but that is not the same thing as watching an army march onto the land that is your homeland and take it over. I am, of course, painting here with a very broad brush–and I do not mean to imply a hierarchy, i.e., that military invasion is somehow essentially worse than any other form of oppression–but I want the distinction I am making to serve as an introduction of sorts to the circumstances in which Ferdowsi composed Shahnameh, because his writing of that text constituted a kind of literary resistance at the level of national consciousness that we don’t have in the US and that, because we have not been invaded and occupied, we have never had to have.

Anyway, the Iranian Empire was conquered by Muslim Arabs in the 7th century CE, and over the 300 years that separate that conquest from Ferdowsi’s life and times, Arabic became the official language of the empire, replacing Pahlavi, or Middle Persian; and Islam became the dominant religion, replacing Zoroastrianism. Indeed, what we know about Pahlavi comes from about a hundred or so surviving Zoroastrian texts, though evidence suggests that they were part of a considerable literature. The Shah who ruled Iran before the Islamic Revolution in 1978-79 took Pahlavi as the name of his dynasty in a very conscious attempt to reclaim Iran’s pre-Islamic past, which is precisely what Ferdowsi did when he wrote Shahnameh. First, and perhaps most importantly, he wrote his poem–and it is a very long poem, about 50,000 couplets, longer than the Faerie Queen–using almost no Arabic loan words. The consequences of this linguistic accomplishment continue to be felt to this day, because if Ferdowsi had not written Shahnameh almost exclusively in Persian, neither Rumi nor Hafez–to name the two classical Iranian poets best known in the United States–would have written the way that they did. Omar Khayyam, whom many people know through Edward Fitzgerald’s translation, The Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam, would not have produced the work he produced; neither would Sa’di nor Attar, two of the other poets whose work I have translated. Indeed, it is possible to draw a direct line from the fact of a contemporary literature written in Persian all the way back to the reemergence of Persian as a literary language that Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh catalyzed. (An analogy to our own literary time, though it is an imperfect one, might be to the African American writers who wrote, and continue to write, in what, when June Jordan wrote His Own Where and when Alice Walker wrote The Color Purple, was called Black English. There have been at least three other names attached to this dialect since then: African American English, African American Vernacular English and Ebonics. I don’t know what the proper name of this dialect of English is now understood to be.)

Another way in which Shahnameh constitutes literary resistance is the fact that Ferdowsi ended the poem at the moment of the Muslim conquest. All of the kings whose reigns the poem explores and in many ways celebrates, in other words, the mythopoetic ones in the first half of the epic and the ones in the second half that are at least rooted in historical fact, are pre-Islamic. More to the point, the values held by those kings and their subjects and the values explored throughout are pre-Islamic as well. Even Ferdowsi’s account of the creation of the world in the poet’s preface, where one would expect him to lay out his “credentials” as a good Muslim and a loyal subject, so to speak, draws quite explicitly on Zoroastrian texts. Not that Ferdowsi was a revolutionary, at least not in the sense that we mean it today. He was a Muslim, and his preface to the poem does contain praise of Mohammed and of the king who was his patron, but in recovering for posterity the pre-Islamic stories, values and traditions of Iran, Ferdowsi produced a poem that is a prime example of literary resistance to occupation, not just because it is a successful poem in and of itself, but because it has survived all these centuries as a means of cultural transmission. That alone makes it a poem worth paying attention to.

The next posts on Shahnameh may be a little slow in coming, but in them I will go into more detail about the poem itself and the parts of it I am working on.

Cross posted on It’s All Connected.

You listen. Seriously. Go now.

Matt Yglesias has the goods, but what it comes down to, basically, is that Michele Bachmann does not see the difference between China making an internal decision about what currency to use as their reserve currency and the institution of a sinister One World Currency, outlawing the dollar.

Not to harp on a point, or anything, but in my last post I talked a bit about how fundamentally unserious the Republican approach to government has become. This is like that times a bajillion. It’s either profoundly ignorant or profoundly deceptive, and I’m not sure which would be worse for the country and her constituents.

After Jeff Fecke wrote his “Once Again, We’re Sorry About Michele Bachmann” post, there were some people in the comments who tried gamely to defend her argument … and actually, hey, maybe that argument had some tiny kernel of truth buried deep within it that could be teased out into the light. Maybe.

As far as I can tell, this simply doesn’t.

Please do not comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people.

Okay, so the new Republican budget proposal has come in for a lot of mockery lately, and rightly so. Much has been made of the utter lack of numbers attached to their proposal¹, and I enjoyed Robert Gibbs’ reference to the ‘windmill picture:chart with numbers‘ ratio of the proposal (1:0, for those who are keeping score). Neither of those, though, are what caught my attention when I read through the proposal². 

No, what caught my attention is how consistently, throughout the entire proposal, they refuse to refer to the Democratic Party by its proper name. It’s there in the very first paragraph (the one that’s double size and blue, so you know they mean business), “Democrat Budget” and it continues throughout. It’s even in large print on the front page of their website.

Now here’s the thing. I understand that there’s a place for juvenile mockery. Hell, I’m a blogger, juvenile mockery is kind of what I do. And I understand that pretending not to know how the English language works is a proud and long lasting tradition within the Republican Party … but c’mon, guys. Isn’t this supposed to be a serious policy proposal? Should you have maybe considered that it was neither the time not the place to regress to Junior High?

I’m not sure what the equivalent would be, really . . . Obama releasing a budget with monocles and top hats photoshopped into any photos of republicans? No, maybe there isn’t an equivalent. Good. This isn’t a race to the bottom that the Democratic Party (see?) ought to join.

It’s not a big deal, really. It’s just a silly little tease that Republicans never got tired of. It doesn’t infuriate me or anything, it just reminds me once again that the Republican Party is fundamentally unserious. If you want your ideas to be taken seriously, you present them seriously. It’s striking that in the midst of the greatest financial collapse of my lifetime, in the midst of rampant unemployment, in the midst of the utter disintegration of the financial sector, presenting serious ideas in a serious way is something that this current collection of jokers and fools is frankly unable to do.

It’s sad.

It would be nice to have an opposition party worth a damn.

Please do not comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people.

1. On a quick read-through, though I saw a lot of numbers included, they were all numbers taken from, or referring to, the Democratic budget. (back)
2. Feel free to check it out for yourself, by the by. It’s a quick read. (back)

I have been trying not to use ‘mad’ as a metaphor in my writing, but some posts are harder than others. I found it really challenging to write a post about holocaust deniers without saying “these people are batshit crazy”. There’s been some discussion of this and Donaquixote articulated the reasons for avoiding madness as a metaphor very well:

I also get the insane = disconnected from reality definition you were going with. But there’s a huge difference between an illness that disconnects you from reality as a result of neurochemical processes and the condition of being willfully disconnected from reality because you don’t want to have your opinions challenged. One is an illness, the other is a character flaw, and the two ought never be confused. The problem is a lot of our terminology quite purposefully does confuse the two.

Many of the derogatory metaphors that come most easily to us are about comparing something we don’t like with the powerless.

Metaphoric language is powerful - even as cliched metaphoric language as ‘batshit crazy’. I don’t think we should give up metaphors, I think we should be creative, more precise and more true in the metaphors we do use.

I thought a way of doing that would be to open a thread for discussion so people could post their metaphors, and other derogatory language, that don’t pathologise powerlessness.

I’m not suggesting we start calling everyone we dislike a futures trader, but I think there are lots of smart articulate people who comment on blogs I write on. We can do better than the derogatory terms we do now.

I’m posting this on Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty, Alas and The Hand Mirror, for maximum discussion.

Please don’t post in this thread unless you’re actually interested in developing new metaphors. If you’re doubtful about the usefulness of new metaphors then go talk about that somewhere else.

Congresswoman Michele Bachmann is one of Minnesota’s most effective spokesmen for conservatism, so our local media have collaborated with Democrats in trying to defeat her.

–John Hinderaker

It is tempting to lampoon The Blogger Formerly Known as Hindrocket here, to suggest that this ranks with his fellating of George W. Bush for sheer insanity.

But I think that’s wrong. Because truthfully, Michele Bachmann is about as effective a conservative voice as exists in Minnesota today. This is why DFLers have a veto-proof majority in the State Senate, are four votes shy of said majority in the State House, why the Dems control 100% of our U.S. Senators and over half our U.S. Reps, as well as three of the five state constitutional offices. Indeed, if I did not believe that Michele Bachmann’s continued presence in the House of Representatives was an affront to not just my country, but to the time-honored tradition of Minnesota Republicanism as practised by decent Minnesotans like Al Quie, Arne Carlson, Joanell Dyrstad, Jim Ramstad, and Harold Stassen, I would be happy for her to stay in elective office forever, reminding Minnesotans on a semi-monthly basis that the modern Republican Party is bereft of ideas, barren of ideological heft, and so incoherent as to be incomprehensible.

Unfortunately, I love my country more than the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, and the continued presence of Bachmann in the House of Representatives is preventing a saner, smarter, better conservative from taking office. If I were a Republican, I’d be embarassed about that. But John Hinderaker gave up his capacity for embarassment somewhere around 2003. As for me, let me encourage Republicans to make Rep. Bachmann — their most effective spokesperson — the face of their party. Let her speak regularly. Maybe hold one of those town hall meetings she refuses to hold. Put her on the air weekly. Have her give the next Republican Response to President Obama. Have her run for Governor in 2010.

By all means, keep promoting Michele Bachmann. Seriously. We want you to.

Wow. Wow. Wow.

If you haven’t watched “Man on the Street”, the sixth episode of the Dollhouse, don’t read another word. This episode is available on Hulu and itunes for those in the US (and through less legal means for those outside), go watch it and then come back. You really don’t want to be spoiled. Read the rest of this entry »