Captured US soldier Pfc. Jessica Lynch is from, of all places, Palestine, a small town in West Virginia.
Observation of the moment: a single man drinks from the bottle of milk when nobody is looking. A single man who will stay single drinks from the bottle of liquor when nobody is looking.
Abstinence-only education has always struck me as a bad idea. It’s ideologically biased and doesn’t present children with all the information they deserve. And it’s going to make abortion illegal down the road.
When I was a clinic defender for Planned Parenthood, a nearby Catholic church organized protests every weekend. There were no abortions performed on weekends, but that was when that protestors and defenders were free, so it worked out OK. In an equally odd arrangement, the Protestant churches in the area protested at the Blackwell clinic, a few blocks away. The two clinics were the only ones within hundreds of miles– everything else had been protested or zoned out of existence– so this was the division of labor for all anti-abortion protesting in eastern Pennsylvania and significant portions of Jersey.
The typical crowd was five or ten elderly white suburbanites hassling the largely young, urban, black and latina women coming into the clinic. Plus of course five or ten defenders, a paddy wagon, a police car, and three or five cops standing around bored and wary. We all knew the rules: touch somebody and you get arrested, but you can yell all you want. The defenders were instructed to ignore the protestors, and just stand between the protestors and anyone trying to get into the clinic.
It was mostly a gay neighborhood, and there was one guy, with perfect hair and cute sweats and a teeny dog and a really stereotyped lisp, who would get really mad and try and engage them in… well, not debate. He’d just yell in his “I moved to a gay neighborhood so I wouldn’t have to deal with people like you” moral outrage, and they’d yell about hellfire and brimstone, and meanwhile his dog would inspect the lamp-post and women would sneak around them both and go on into the clinic to get pap smears or birth control pills or prenatal care or whatever nonsurgical services were performed on weekends.
The third weekend of each month there was mass in the street. This meant a turnout of about one or two hundred, including people’s kids and grandkids. I was angry that they brought babies in strollers with pictures of aborted fetuses and signs saying “Survivor of Abortion Holocaust.” But what got me was the teenagers in hip clothes. It was 1996 or so, which meant baggy pants, suede skate shoes, and big t-shirts with big silver-ink slogans. The slogans said things like “Jesus has a Posse” or “Look Don’t Touch” or “Proud Virgin.”
One other guy who’s a defender looks over at these abstinence-only, anti-abortion teenagers, who were looking cool and sullen like any other teenagers except for the whole “no sex, drugs, or fun” bit, and he says, “Why is it always the ugly chicks that are in favor of abstinence?”
You may see protestors out there protesting and think, do they know what they’re doing? We can’t let the Iraquis know we don’t have the heart for a real fight. And look at them. They’re not organized. They haven’t bathed. White kids with dreadlocks! They think they can change the world by pretending to throw up at city hall?
Well, I’m glad to let them shout. This is my shout right here. I don’t give a damn about Mumia. I don’t want to smash capitalism. I think “globalization” is a a word and not an evil. I’m all for free trade and free movement of goods services and people around the world. And I’m opposed to this war.
So is George Soros. Yes, that George Soros. The billionaire financier and philanthropist is the latest to object, sanely and forcefully, to the Bush policies.
I call on moderates and conservatives, preppies and yuppies and button-down shirt wearers, to reject this war! Join me, and the fiscal-responsibility lobby, and the soverign-international-law advocates! Take common cause with the Pope and the WTO and the godless anarchist hippies!
I consider myself a patriot, I really do. And I do not object to all war or all violence. I know a bit about other countries and I like this one because it is my home. But because I love it I can acknowledge its flaws and mistakes (e.g. Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973) and speak out against repeating them. I love my country and I would be willing to die for it, and I appreciate the valor of the soldiers who are out there fighting for … whatever it is. But I know this: The US Armed Forces are not in Iraq to protect me or to promote freedom. They’re pawns bleeding for someone else’s empire, or madness, or blind rage. And all the while our executives in the White House and the board room stay home undermining everything we stand for, dividing us, tearing us apart.
I know it’s too late to stop the war, really. It’s obvious by now that a fair number of the Iraqi people support Saddam despite their dislike of him, just like a lot of Americans hold their noses and support Bush in wartime. Bush is our leader, we have to support him, for national pride and for strength in unity. Saddam is their leader, they have to support him for just the same reasons. People have begun to make comparisons with Stalingrad: as awful as Stalin was, and as much as the Russians hated him, they fought to the death to defend their country because Stalin was their evil and they would not trade him for another.
Well, we’ll see be fighting house to house, and civilian bombardment, and we’ll level Baghdad and Basra, and send another half a million troops and quarter trillion dollars before it’s over. We’ll all suffer for this folly. And because I am a patriot I I will suffer with the rest of my country. But I’m not going to just lie down and take it, and I have no intention of letting George W. Bush escape the consequences for what he’s done.
Things I have learned from watching the Oscars:
Last night I was on the T making jokes with some friends and three women nearby overheard and laughed at us. Not really at the jokes, they were laughing at us.
But we started talking with them, and one turned out to be from my home town, Charlottesville. And in fact she was the younger sister of this guy Terence I went to high school with. We were on the quiz team together but I haven’t heard from him in years.
He’s apparently in law school at BC, but the only information I can find on him is that in 1998 he liked the television show Felicity, “because I feel like I can relate to it.” I don’t know much about Felicity, but Terence was always a cipher to me– one of the smartest, most dedicated students in the school, well-dressed, intensely private. I always sensed that he disliked me, but of course at that age I was both paranoid and intensely dislikeable, so who knows.
Not that I’m any more likeable now, given the threatening phone calls I’ve recieved about the site.
Sometimes people are surprised by the bile that people have inside them. I’m not usually surprised by that. I know everyone’s got it in them to be really, really awful to someone else. But sometimes, I get surprised by the way it combines with cruelty to form something laughably horrific: arson and vandalism at the French Cleaners laundromat in Modesto.
I hate everybody. I hate overly sincere leftists who think the word ” phallus makes them smarter than anyone. I am particularly annoyed by stupid knee-jerk right-wingers and their Gipper-loving, France-bashing, not-very-funny sense of humor. Oh, sure, garden-variety stupidity always pisses me off too. But there’s nothing like a war to bring out my dislike of humanity.
I may have said this before, but I distrust human nature so much it’s almost Catholic, except without the redemption part.
My friend Luke has a piece in a MassArt auction, and one of the other items is this oil painting of Dunkin Donuts coffee. Obviously I had to send the link to Kitty Bukakke. Who rules. And who actually wrote back to me! I feel like I’ve been touched by the A-list!
“I’m a uniter, not a divider. I refuse to play the politics of putting people into groups and pitting one group against another.”
“You’re either with us or you’re with the enemy.”
“If we are arrogant, they will resent us. If we’re humble, but strong, they’ll welcome us.”
You may argue that I’m quoting him out of context. Not at all. This is quoting out of context (from complete speech transcript here):
“The regime has a history of reckless aggression in the Middle East, and it has aided, trained and harbored terrorists… Instead of drifting along toward tragedy, we will set a course.
We’re obviously dealing with a clash of madmen seeking the end of the world. I figure the best way to do this is to have them both step down, or just have a cowboy-style shootout. Fucking maniacs.
Secretly Ironic 