Archive for the 'politics' Category

lame

Claire and Julia have a money box that is a tin with a coin slot in the lid. It is stuffed full of coins of various currencies. I had watched without necessarily registering that this money box joined mama and baby polar bear, green snake, rainbow monkey, kangaroo and the rest as they travelled on a sled made of a throw rug into the bedroom. When I went to clean the toys out of the bedroom just now, I picked up the throw rug and tossed the animals into the toy corner.

The money box, of course, fell out and landed on its edge on my left big toe.

Wow! Pain! It is so large when it comes at you like that with no warning. I bit my hands trying not to scream. It was so big and sparkly and painful! Like a fire that grew and grew. Most shamingly, there’s not a mark on me. It didn’t break the skin and no bruise has come up yet. Jeremy thinks I may have broken the bone. I doubt it, because I can move the toe, but dear God it really hurt.

Julia was most anxious. She looked into my face trying to understand what I was feeling, and then she started to cry and hold her own big toe. The origins of empathy; mirroring my body with her own. Which of course makes me wonder where the mommas of McCain and Palin’s most rabid supporters went wrong. I’m not a particularly nice woman, and I am lazy, but if my not-yet-three-year-old can already grasp theory of mind, why can’t the Republicans knock it off with the death threats?

Do they really not care about other people?

The election has been excruciating, of course, with occasional glimmers of exhilaration. One of the most frustrating aspects is that I feel I can’t fully revel in the professionalism and elegance and grace and style of the Obama campaign while I am still so deeply afraid that Obama might lose. If you’re overseas I am not sure I can convey just how gut-wrenching and painful and terrifying the last eight years have been in the USA; how impossible it is to forget the dust and ash of the terror attacks, and how unbearable it is to read about Americans torturing their prisoners.

Right now everyone’s obsessed with the economy, including me, and I can talk at lucid and informed length about the ways in which Bush and McCain and Gramm are directly responsible for the banking disaster. But the issue for me is always the war. It was the war in 2004 and it is the war today. Stockbrokers may be losing their shirts but soldiers and civilians are losing their limbs, and their sight, and their sanity. And their lives.

I hoped but did not really believe that Kerry could win in 04, and I hope much more fiercely that Obama will win this year, because while Kerry would have been a decent president I think Obama can be a fine one, a great one. Empathy again: I look at him with his fantastic wife; I look at how tender he is with his own children and those of other people; I admire his cool strategy and steely nerve; and I want so badly for other people to see in him what America is capable of, what people here can be.

He is from my America, my California liberal arts colleges and East Coast Ivy Leagues, the Chicago I love, the community organizers I’d like to be when I grow up, my whole mixed-up muddled-up shook-up world. I know that in Australia and England and elsewhere you all look at what goes on here with horror. I completely understand. I am horrified myself.

But Cheney shooting a man in the face, and making the victim apologize – rich men whining about selling their private jets, when poor people have no health insurance – when cancer spells bankruptcy for even affluent families – that’s not all America is. It’s also a nation of Sanctuary Cities and the Winter of Love and eighteen million cracks in the glass ceiling. It is a moneybox stuffed with coins, and it is an unprotected toe.

or give ME the money and i’ll buy you all a pony

The first entries in my delicious stream under the keywords “subprime” and “crash” are dated 21 August 2007. I’m not bragging, believe me. I saved those bookmarks because I’m kind of dumb about this stuff. Most of the time I am thinking about my kids, horses, books or food. But the shape of the mortgage crisis was obvious thirteen months ago even to a self-absorbed idiot like me.

Which means that anyone on Wall Street or Washington who says they didn’t see this coming is lying to you. Specifically, John McCain is lying to you; he’s been through this twice already, with Enron/Worldcom and before that, the Keating 5.

This is par for the course; and indeed the $700bn bailout is just the latest (and the most egregious and appalling) step in this Republican administration’s campaign to nationalize risk and privatize profit.

Let’s be clear: the real cost of the toxic mortgages is probably between $100-200bn. The other HALF TRILLION dollars covers the bankers who made the wrong bet on those mortgages. These are the bankers that took home $120bn in BONUSES over the last five years. (All numbers are from Devilstower on Daily Kos except for the $700bn, which the Fed pulled out of its ass.)

The history of the last eight years in this country has been a deliberate process of robbing the poor to buy private jets for the hyperrich.

It is unconscionable.

My advice: don’t bail them out. Restructure the mortgages for the homeowners who are facing foreclosure; we know that many (most?) of them were lied to by predatory lenders. Oh, and vote the GOP out of office.

Children learn from their mistakes by accepting the consequences. Why shouldn’t grown men?

the weather report

I’m always a bit emo when I have to get on a plane and leave the tiny smalls behind. (Claire is the same. Jeremy reports that tonight she was looking broodingly at the bookshelves and saying “All these books make me think about how I miss mummy.”) I flew out of San Francisco in one of those sort of robotic moods imposed where you try to cope with the indignity and discomfort of commercial travel by completely dissociating. “The toothpaste is too big? Okay.”

So when we came over a mountain range into Phoenix just before sunset and I saw a huge perfect fluffy white storm cell, I caught my breath; and when it lit up with lightning I put down my book. I leaned into the porthole and watched the pink bolts firing up and down the column of cloud, blazing on the outside and lighting up the inside. As we began our descent I watched the sun setting behind the storm in a band of red fire, and the huge cell turn steel grey and then black against the night sky.

I get superstitious when I am emo. Much of my adult life has been an excruciating process of learning detachment, of trying to let go. I’ve deliberately and consciously wanted very few things very fiercely over the last few years: for the girls and my parents to be healthy and safe, for one or two friends who had stopped talking to me to start again, for Jeremy to be near.

And for Barack Obama to win this election. A few nights ago I dreamed I went on a blood-drenched Celtic-Wiccan passage through the underworld on his behalf, emerging like a muddy banshee from a church basement in Philadelphia. And as I watched this mighty electric storm over Arizona, I decided that if I saw another lightning flash out in the open, Obama would win.

I saw two.

I’m having a rather unexpectedly nice time here. I spent dinner chatting about haute cuisine, which I can do for days at a stretch, with Frank Artale who is part-owner of Lampreia in Seattle. He had me in stitches with scurrilous tales of Charles Simonyi’s engagement party and Melinda Gates’ aesthetician. Afterwards he introduced me to a woman who had three sugar gliders in her purse. I snuggled one of them and he purred! Who knew that sugar gliders purr?

All the while, lightning was firing the cloudy night above the golf course. So when I got back to my room I donated to Obama’s campaign.

sarah palin and tall (or, talking about politics in cars)

I was driving to Salome’s place in the Bakery Lofts when I heard Barack Obama’s 2004 DNC speech on NPR. I had to pull over and cry. It was a bad time, then, to be a progressive in America, and of course things have gotten much worse since. But I read and very much liked Obama’s book a couple of years later, and had the feeling I usually have about candidates I like; if I like them that much, they must be unelectable.

I had the same feeling about Hillary. Around the same time I read Obama’s book, the end of ’06, I shared a taxi from Manhattan to JFK with a very nice man, a fellow Democrat. We chatted about the candidates; I said I loved Hillary and thought she would make a great president, but I didn’t think the country was ready for a woman president. He said (and he really was very nice, so I feel guilty relaying this piece of thoughtlessness on his part): “Oh! I didn’t even think about the fact that she was a woman. I guess I’m a better feminist than you are!”

And that’s been kind of the theme of the last few weeks; lots and lots of advice, much of it from very nice and well-meaning men, on how to be a better feminist. I watched Michelle Obama’s and Hillary’s speeches avidly, and I kinda skipped the others. I’m pretty sure none of them would have passed the Bechdel test. It turns out I really do want to see women in positions of power. I’m not the only one, either. Driving to Santa Cruz:

C: Who is the mayor?

R: Gavin Newsom.

C: Is Gavin a boy’s name?

R: Yes.

C (sigh): Girls can never be mayor.

So to be perfectly honest with you, McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as running mate this morning felt like a knife in the gut. I know he’s pandering. I know she’s pro-gun, anti-choice, inexperienced and corrupt. She stands for the opposite of everything I hold dear, and I wouldn’t vote with my poontang even if I could vote. But I do want to see a woman president of the United States. Not Sarah Palin. But someone.

In fact, how about we get the next 43, and you guys sit out a couple of centuries? Wouldn’t that be cool? No? Why?

sumerian literature for fun and profit

I just learned that the first writer in recorded history was a woman who wrote political poetry: her name is Enheduanna. I thought her hymn to Inana seemed very fresh, so I had a go at translating it into the vernacular:

The good ole boy, the maverick, holding his own in the Beltway set and a world leader, son of 41, darling of the Grand Old Party, the consummate politician who has transformed the executive branch in ways even Reagan would admire, is President, and the buck stops with him. Congress grovels at his feet. He does whatever he wants. He’s got political capital and he intends to spend it. He’s got the country on a leash.

He is the War on Terror and he is the Terror. We’re all scared shitless down here, I can tell you. Everything he says frightens the crap out of us. There’s no accountability, and God knows what’s going to happen. Who can stand up to him? Meanwhile fire and death rain on New York, and New Orleans drowns in a sewer.

Something about him makes the Democrats unable to tie their own shoes. Pratfalls galore, but it isn’t funny. People burn and drown and he arrives in a very nice suit with spin doctors and cameras and a crack security detail, for a press conference. Wherever he holds a press conference, there is despair. He believes in his own virtue, which makes him more evil than we could ever have imagined. Compassionate conservatism! Remember that? Anyone, Bueller?

He has been the single worst catastrophe of this last tormented decade. Yet to oppose him is to invite censure! Those who speak up for the suffering and the dead are scorned as vicious fools. He does not lack for toadies.

In his mouth language turns to lies. When he speaks of life he means death. When he promises tax cuts he means that the poor will pay for the greed and stupidity of the rich. In the face of defeat he says, Mission Accomplished. He baptises the nation’s children with blood, and looks at what he has done, and says that it is good.

Across the wide and bewildered nation, his deeds blot out the sun. He turns midday into darkness. Brothers turn on their sisters, and parents attack their children. His words frighten not only his own people, but everyone on earth. This man rules the only superpower in a unipolar world! People from every nation look at Iraq and think: Are we next? He leaves no bad deed undone. The Grand Old Party is filled with pride.

and while we’re on the subject…

Can we impeach Cheney now? Please? What’s it going to take?

introducing armistead

We got Claire’s school assignment! We didn’t get our first two choices, the adorable schools that are within walking distance.

We got our third choice. It’s a short bus ride away. It has a great campus, with all the kinder and first grade classrooms opening off a library, and an organic garden out the back. The principal is a woman about our age, totally kickass (and parenthetically, hawt!) Claire got into Spanish immersion but there’s also a Chinese bilingual stream and English general education, so the school is a veritable crazy quilt of cultures. The kids all do Carnavale and Chinese New Year.

It’s so ridiculously charming and San Franciscan that I have taken to calling it Armistead Maupin Elementary.

Because this is me here, and I am incapable of doing anything in a gracious and straightforward manner, I have had moments of eating my heart out over my first choice school, especially as two of Claire’s close friends got into it. And yesterday, ambivalently, I dropped off an application to get on the waitlist for that school.

Ambivalently, because Armistead Maupin is actually a better school in several respects. There’s that library! And the test scores are higher, not that I care about test scores, which usually just measure white middle-classness, but Maupin is the very opposite of a white middle-class school so high test scores mean it is doing something surprisingly right. And as Jeremy points out, there are significant advantages to having school friends and then other friends who do not go to the same school as you. For example, you have more friends.

What’s more, we were lucky to get ANY of our choices: about a fifth of families went zero for seven in the first round. My first and second choice schools both saw triple-digit growth in demand this year, and demand for Maupin itself was up double digits. (I never think about my second choice school, oddly enough, which suggests that it should have been my third choice.) (In fact our little cohort was ridiculously lucky. All four families got fourth choice or better, and we all got Spanish immersion. Holidays in Sayulita, anyone?)

It’s not very likely that we’ll get into our first choice school off the waitlist. I’m actually pretty okay with this now, as I get more and more attached to the thought of Claire attending Maupin. The surprising thing about this is that a few years ago, my first choice school was underenrolled, meaning if you made it your first choice you were bound to get in.

In other words, demand is going up, and this is because more parents are applying to public schools, and this is because the schools themselves are getting better. Which means? That crazy terrifying Diversity Lottery, the one that makes it impossible for us Type A moms to control exactly where our precious darlings will go to kindergarten, is doing precisely what it was intended to do: mixing things up, challenging everyone to improve all the schools, and helping give all the kids in San Francisco a better education.

None of which is any comfort to the families who went zero for seven. My heart goes out to them, and I wish them every bit of luck in Round Two. And to the parents who have yet to go through the whole messy process, I say what wise parents from (the awesome, the essential) PPS kept saying to me: Yeah, it sucks and is labour-intensive and stressful and startlingly painful. But we ended up with a great school where our kids can thrive.

For an incredibly funny and reassuring perspective on the whole mess, go read Sandra Tsing Loh.

but before we get to that

…let’s look at some of the predictions the Monterey Institute made five years ago, for what they called even then this “Imprudent and Unnecessary War”:

  • Al-Qa’ida conducts terrorist attacks to coincide with war
  • U.S. viewed as causing high casualties among Iraqi civilians
  • Inadequate U.S. and international support for reconstruction of Iraq
  • U.S. must occupy Iraq for years to maintain stable and pro-U.S. regime
  • North Korea exploits U.S. and UNSC focus on Iraq to build nuclear arsenal
  • Enduring outrage among Arab and Muslim populations broadens social base for terrorism against Americans
  • High U.S. military casualties in urban fighting

Seven for seven. Whee.

my country, right or left

“It’s as if the whole place was stuck in amber for eleven years, under Howard, and now everything is moving again.”

“I think all the lefties are recovering from a decade of clinical depression.”

sorry business

I haven’t written much about when I lost Claire last year, and had to get her from the police station twenty minutes later, because it was the single most painful experience of my life. Worse than migraine or labour or a broken leg, worse than heartbreak or depression. I would have torn myself apart if it would have done any good, turned back time, brought Claire back. Just thinking about it makes me ill.

When the bookstore owner came to say that Claire had been found and was safe, my knees buckled. I fell into a stranger’s arms, weeping. (She was a mum and completely understood.)

It dawned upon me only a few weeks ago that that is how the mothers of the Stolen Generation felt, but not for twenty minutes: for ever.

Sorry doesn’t begin to cover it. But it’s a start.

circling back

Seth points out that the dances-on-fabric are an established circus art called aerial tissu, or silks.

Lilysea and her partner have two daughters through domestic adoption. Not surprisingly, her perspective on Juno is a lot deeper than mine.