Politics. Pop Culture. Basketball. Dog Stuff. Queer Stuff. Higher Ed. New Media. Pretty Pictures. Puns. Books. Righteous Anger. Cock-Eyed Optimism. Persistent Irreverence. From a Queer, Feminist, Critter-Affirming Perspective.
Why? Because Dog Is Love, and Tenure Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry.
Or, you know, that's how we would translate this most excellent comment from poli sci prof Stephen Farnsworth on VA Governor Bob McDonnell's sudden reversal on a bill that would have required women to have, at their own expense, an unnecessary and invasive medical procedure before having an abortion:
Yes, it's only February, but can we declare this the Best Understatement of the Year and be done with it?
Also, can we say how delighted we are that this tiny victory against the GOP forces leading Virginia's war on women was secured, not only by the heroic efforts of Jon Stewart and Saturday Night Live, but by lobbyists and legislators who screwed up the courage to use words like "vaginal" and "probe" in House hearings on the bill? Read to the end of that WaPo story for the details on how opponents of the bill moved from being indirect and delicate about what it would actually require -- "We had a hard time messaging why it was so bad," says the executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia -- to being so clear that even people without vaginas began to grasp the intrusive nature of the procedure.
Another thing we love: Virginia sounds so much like vagina that, after all this hullaballoo, we will never again be able to think of one without thinking of the other. Thank you, Gov. McDonnell, for forging that link in our admittedly immature brains. You say Virginia, I say vagina. Virginia, vagina, vagina, Virginia, let's call this whole politically inconvenient thing off!
What a world, what a world. Be careful out there, my pretties, especially if you've got the lady parts.
Srsly. More than a week of radio silence around here, and my typist still insists she doesn't have time for a proper post. Dammit, Moose, we gotta give 'em something! I don't want to become known as the Grover Norquist of East Blogistan, starving the beast of my vast readership because you're having a hard time keeping up with yourself these days. Fine, Moose grumbled as she struggled to stuff all the balls she'd been juggling into her book bag before heading off to campus. Here, Rox. Throw 'em a bone. Let 'em watch the adorable vid I shot of the Norwood School orchestra earnestly sawing away on "The Star-Spangled Banner" at Sunday's game against Duke. It's cute, even if I didn't get the whole song, very nearly as cute as a damn cat video, and it proves that our national anthem is very nearly as hard to play as it is to sing. Throw in a Whitney Houston tie-in, and we're good to go.
Desperate times, desperate measures, people. Sometimes you go with the post you got, not with the post you want. These kids really are cute, and the Lady Terps snatched victory away from the Blue Devils with brilliant play in the final minute. The hearty "woohoooooo" you hear as the little fiddlers finish off the anthem is of course Moose, beside herself with excitement as tipoff approaches. She was so psyched for the big game that she even indulged in a bit of face-painting -- and learned by halftime that the reason face-painting is for kids and not for grownups is that grownups get stressed out when their team falls behind by 12 points early in the game, rub their faces, and turn a pretty red "M" into a big schmear that starts at the cheek and runs all the way up the forehead. Oops.
In any case, here, for your mid-week pleasure, are the little fiddlers of the Norwood School, forcing us to wonder, yet again, why we have marching bands but not marching orchestras. Don't say we never gave you nothin', people. Peace out.
I'm sure you've been wondering what the breast-equipped humans of Roxie's World have been thinking about the epic smackdown this week between the Susan G. Komen Foundation and Planned Parenthood over grants, mammograms, and the apolitical politicization of women's health. Frankly, we've never been fans of pink, and Moose has been skeptical of the whole cancer industrial/fundraising complex since her beloved father's death from colon cancer in 1991. "Dad," she said, shortly before he died, "I promise you I will make it my mission to find a cure for this disease. Maybe I'll set up a charity race to raise money for colon cancer. Yeah, that's what I'll do. We'll call it the Run for the Bowel." Moose and her dad cracked up and spun out a crude, elaborate fantasy about all the brown products that might be marketed to promote the cause. Yes, Moose and her dad did that sort of thing.
There's an important life lesson here about laughing in the face of death, but there's also an important point to be made about the weird economics of disease-focused fundraising. Breasts are, as Gail Collins points out in a column today, "America's most popular body part," and so Komen has raised f*ck tons of money since its founding in 1982. Nobody loves the colon, useful as it is, and so the poor little Colon Cancer Alliance toils on in relative obscurity, offering a modest array of blue products (because colon cancer is a guy thing?) and sponsoring a 5K race called "The Undy 5000" because foundation garments are apparently as close as anyone wants to get to the yucky, unloved, indispensable colon. "You can die from not pooping," Moose is fond of saying. "I've seen it happen." Perhaps you understand now why Moose is an English professor and not a marketing genius. She still worries that her dad is up in Heaven waiting for her to organize a Run for the Bowel. It's OK, I tell her from my perch in the great beyond. He's moved on.
Anyhoo: the Komen kerfuffle.
(Image Credit: Saw it on Facebook; picked it up at MoveOn.)
Other people, with and without breasts, have weighed in on this issue thoroughly and brilliantly. Go read them. It's nearly 9 PM and the Moms haven't eaten dinner or finished a scholarly article that has to be out the door by Monday. Oh, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is on the teevee tonight, too, so we'd best be moving along.
Marcy at emptywheel (which we've never read before -- check it out!), a breast cancer survivor who also hates pink, offers some great insights about the cancer industry turning patients into consumers. She says it's time to start putting more money into prevention rather than on diagnosing and curing the disease, which has been Komen's primary focus.
Amy Schiller has a wonderful piece in The Nation on why the Komen/Planned Parenthood breakup, brief as it appears to have been, was good for feminism. Nutshell? It exposes Komen as "the most visible symbol" of "the rise of a nominally apolitical marketing campaign masquerading as feminism." Money quote? "As the infantilizing blush-hued gear has proliferated, the pink saturation has merged the medical industrial complex with the Disney princess-industrial complex, making women’s health policy some sort of adult dress-up game."
Journalism prof Jay Rosen is fascinated by Komen's spectacular communications/PR failure throughout the debacle. He has a detailed reading of an interview NBC's Andrea Mitchell did with Komen CEO and founder Nancy Brinker aptly titled "Interview as Trainwreck." Moose watched that interview. Mitchell has had breast cancer and worked with the Komen Foundation and Brinker. The trainwreck is a sight to behold.
Share your links and insights in comments. We know there's a lot of stuff out there -- So much that, you know, it's hard to keep abreast of it all.
See? No one makes jokes like that about the colon. We don't even love it enough to laugh about it. Maybe Moose should try to organize a Run From the Bowel. Whaddayathink, kids? Would you want that tee-shirt? Yeah, I didn't think so. Peace out.
(Photo Credit: Linda Davidson, Washington Post, 1/30/12. Newt Gingrich's campaign bus Sunday in Florida.)
He does look a little wizard-ish, doesn't he, all smiling and soft-eyed and puffed up even larger than he is in his natural state? And those hand-waving Floridians make perfect Munchkins, standing there in the bright sunshine as the balloon lifts gently away from Earth bus pulls away.
Oh, good lord, will it never end, this campaign from Hades? Apparently not.
Meanwhile, out by the bus, here's a toxic little snippet, from Stephanie McCrummen's report in WaPo, of what Gingrich's followers appear to want:
“Oh yeah, I can’t wait — I’m ready for Newt to debate Obama,” said [Claudio] Klestel, 49. “I’m an NFL fan and now that the season is over, this is what I’m going to watch . . . Newt putting Obama in his place.”
No dog whistles or secret decoder rings needed to figure out the basis of Gingrich's populist appeal, eh? Of course, the diabolical genius of the former Speaker of the House is that he has the audacity to promote himself as the Smartest Man Alive while tapping into the basest political emotions: racial resentment rooted in ignorance and economic insecurity. That's what he's doing every time he refers to Obama as a food stamp president, which writer Walter Mosely rightly describes as an example of Gingrich's "poetry of hate."
It is poetry, yes, but it is poetry that sickens the soul. One can only hope that the author of such despicable poetry will board his well-appointed bus for nowhere soon and leave us to ponder why we tolerated him in our midst for so long.
Happy Monday, darlings. Wake this dead dog when it's over, will you?
Or, Another Damn Post on Marriage Equality. We'll stop writin' 'em when the homophobes give up the hate and extend the ball and chain the right to wed to all citizens.
We like the rhetorical moves Mizeur makes in this brief clip, the calm yet righteous eloquence of her assertion that the bill's opponents cannot stop LGBT people from establishing marriages and families, from loving each other and declaring their love before the divine entity referred to around here as Dog. The repeated "you can't stop us from . . . " serves as a powerful anaphora that reminds listeners of how dramatically social and legal conditions for same-sex relationships have changed in the decades since Stonewall. It taunts those who would vote against the bill by suggesting that the war is in some sense already over and queers have won -- but then it pivots back to the painful reality of what the lack of full legal equality can mean for same-sex couples: "You can't stop us from loving each other," Mizeur intones. "You can't stop us from getting married. You can't stop us from pledging to forever to our God and to each other and to support each other in the toughest of times. You can't stop that. All you can do is make it really, really, really difficult for us in the worst, most challenging times."
Goose has long maintained that what fuels the right-wing hysteria about marriage equality is the recognition that teh Gayz Agenda has already captured the hearts and minds of the vast majority of Americans. As a generation of kids raised in and around and on Modern Family comes of age, the idea that civil marriage has to be protected from the assaults of creepy scary queers is losing whatever power it has left as a wedge issue. A November, 2011 Pew poll found that support for marriage equality was strongest among Millennial generation voters (born from 1981 to 1993), at an impressive 59%. Of course, Millennials seem far less invested in marriage than previous generations have been. The same poll shows that they are far less likely than earlier generations to marry when young. Currently, just 23% of 18- to-30-year-olds are married. By contrast, 49% of the Baby Boomers were married at that age. There is considerable irony in gays clamoring for access to marriage in a period when its power as a social institution seems to be declining precipitously. If conservatives had a lick of sense or objectivity, they'd realize that modernizing marriage and expanding access to it will do more good than harm. David Brooks, who has such sense, has been making that case since 2003.
As the Moms approach the 28th anniversary of their commitment to love without marriage, they are keeping a close eye on what's going on in Annapolis. They are still not chomping at the bit to run down to the courthouse and get legally hitched, but they respect the desires of those who are and they believe right down to the bottom of their ornery radical hearts that queers should have the same rights to legally wedded bliss or catastrophe that everybody else has. Mizeur is right: You can't stop us from loving each other and building lives together. You could if you wanted to build other ways to grant legal protection to relationships and to distribute the 1038 rights and benefits currently available only through marriage, but until that day comes, a lot of us want and need marriage. You can't stop us, but you can hurt us and slow us down and make the darkest days of our lives darker still by setting up legal obstacles that make us vulnerable at moments of illness, injury, or death. You can't stop us, because the genie is out of the bottle closet. You can only make us continue to pay the price for your bigotry. Don't kid yourself that the creator of the universe is on your side in this fight. Whatever S/He is, Dog is assuredly on the side of love. Why aren't you?
Oh, we know you are on the side of love, my pretties, and we reckon some of you might also be interested in the drama unfolding in Annapolis. Want to help? We've got some ideas.
Make a donation to Equality Maryland, the state's largest LGBT civil rights organization, which is working hard under new leadership to pass the marriage bill and a gender-identity protection bill during this session. Full disclosure: Moose is on the Board of Directors of the Equality Maryland Foundation, but if you contribute there your donation is tax-deductible. Do it -- and tell 'em Moose sent you!
Get on the phone. Marylanders for Marriage Equality (a coalition, which includes Equality Maryland, set up to work for passage of the marriage bill) is holding weekly phone banks throughout the state to rally support. Find one near you, and start practicing your very best phone manners.
Sign up for Lobby Day in Annapolis. It's Feb. 13. Go march around in the cold, then head indoors to give your representative an earful or a pat on the back. The Moms can't be there, because Moose is hosting a shindig on campus that day (which you should totally attend if you are not able to go to Annapolis).
All right, rabble rousers, it's time to step away from the laptop and go enjoy what's left of this lovely afternoon. We hope it's pretty in your neck of the woods and that you'll do some fighting for joy as well as justice on this last weekend of January 2012. Peace out, and play fair.
Moose snapped this moody shot on her way off campus this evening. (No, it only looks like she was the last person to leave the joint.) Campus was enveloped in a thick mist all day today, which deepened the quiet of the still largely student-free zone. Spring classes begin on Wednesday. (Yes, that's ridiculously late. You won't hate us so much when we're wrapping up the semester around, you know, the Fourth of July.) There is still a lot to do because Moose has gota lot going on this term and still hasn't finished tweaking her syllabus for the third iteration of her blogging class.
