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I reacted strangely to the news of Osama bin Laden’s death. I was not inspired to dance in the streets, but I was also not inspired to post quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr. on my Facebook page. While I don’t think that one man’s death is ever a cause for jubilation, I guess it’s impossible to have any kind of nuanced discussion about this in the American political climate. And maybe I would feel differently had I been personally affected by the attacks of 9/11/01.
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There is nothing that annoys me more than waking up on a Saturday morning and realizing 1) I failed to rinse out the coffee pot the day and now have to WASH DISHES before I’m fully caffeinated, which is a buzzkill and 2) I’ve turned on NPR just in time for the worst radio program in the history of ever, “The Splendid Table.”
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Ode to History
Had she not lain on that bed with a boy
All those years ago, where would they be, she wondered.
She and the child that wouldn’t have been but was now
No more. She would know nothing
Of mothering. She would know nothing
Of death. She would know nothing
Of love. The three things she’d been given
To remember. Wake me up, please, she said,
When this life is over. Look at her–It’s as if
The windows of night have been sewn to her eyes.
-Mary Jo Bang
I have been without a television for nearly a year and a half now, and while my immunity to its powers is pretty impressive (not counting the recent Saturday during which I watched the entirety of “True Blood” season 3 on a friend’s laptop), my incredulity at what increasingly counts as television is growing. Take “One Born Every Minute”, for instance. I recently watched an episode of this Lifetime network show, which is filmed on an obstetrics ward in a very busy birthing hospital. That’s right: a reality show about babies being delivered, blood and shit included.
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Whenever Guatemala is in the news I get excited–partly because I spent a little bit of time there and find others’ takes on the Maya and the country’s level of development fascinating (e.g. I was overheard saying to my cats a moment ago, “Holy shit, they’re talking about Nebaj on NPR!”), and partly because it seems that Central American countries like Guatemala are rarely in the news for anything other than revelations of tragedies: hunger, syphilis experiments, tropical storms with ensuing mudslides and/or gaping pits that swallow entire villages. But mostly, because, despite the lack of many a creature comfort to which I am accustomed, I really miss it.
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I know I shouldn’t be getting so riled up about Glenn Beck.
I know he is just doing it to piss me off.
I know that when I become incoherent with rage at the slop that spills from his jaws, it makes him all the more pleased with himself. (As if he could be even more pleased with himself.)
I know that I’m just playing into his hands, feeding the machine, while he is laughing all the way to the bank.
But seriously–this woman, a 78-year-old sociologist who has advocated tirelessly for the poor, the working class, the indigent, the homeless–is receiving death threats by the dozens, all because Glenn Motherfucking Beck can’t keep his mouth shut about an article she co-wrote in the ’60s about economic justice and calling for the redistribution of wealth.
Undoubtedly the years encased in constricting Mormon chastity-wear have begun eating away at his soul. But even that is no excuse for relentless hate speech.
People for the American Way are asking major advertisers to pull their sponsorship not just during Beck’s broadcasts, but from Fox News altogether. It won’t happen. But it may be worth gathering a critical mass to demonstrate to big companies like GlaxoSmithKline and the Tide Foundation just how polarizing Fox has become. You can sign the petition here, if you don’t mind being hounded for tax-deductible donations from the PFAW for the rest of your life. The New York NASW and Hunger College of the City University of New York will soon be circulating petitions of their own calling, I hope, for Beck to call off his dogs*.
*Although I think equating dogs with the kinds of people who send death threats to elderly Marxists is doing a major disservice to dogs.
Among the many “I coulda told you that” recommendations in the government’s apparently groundbreaking report on dietary guidelines was, essentially, “Eat less.” You really want to lose weight or prevent obesity? Move more, practice fork-downs and table-pushaways. (And go vegan.)
I know Americans as a group are a bunch of fatasses. I grew up in the Midwest, in one of the fattest states, actually. However, no one in my family (excluding a few in-laws here) could be considered obese, despite the fact that they all like to eat. A lot. Myself included. My friends are svelte and active, and the majority of the people closest to me are vegetarians. So, even though it’s self-righteous of me, I never considered myself truly part of the U.S.’s, ah, huge problem with obesity–and to a lesser extent, all the larger psychic sins which are implied in any discussion about obesity, like over-consumption and greed.
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Thanks to my cousin, who because she is family, does not charge me the scads of money to which she is normally due for fixing website problems of unknown etiology, I am once again able to vent my rage in cyberspace! Maybe someday I will have a useful skill with which to return the favor. For now about all I can do is send peanut butter care packages to Asturias, but it’s all done with love.
What has happened since I’ve been gone? Well, I went back to school. Again. This time for my PhD in social work. I moved to the same city where I was born and where most of my extended family still live, except this time around I can get into bars. It’s a completely new life, tinged with the familiar: my parents and sister live only 45 minutes away. I vaguely remember certain aspects of the city where I lived for my first decade, like the rusted Pevely Dairy sign towering over South Kingshighway and the guy selling pretzels on weekends in Tower Grove Park. Although I don’t know it well, there is a definite feeling of belonging that is not complete but is definitely more pronounced when I am in St. Louis than in any place I have lived before. Things that people in other places have pointed out to me as peculiarities, like my accent and fondness for atrocious cheese hybrids such as Provel (I have eschewed this in the six years I’ve been vegan, but at what cost?), fit right in here. I’ve already been asked by more people than I can remember where I’ve been to high school. I bonded with someone recently over our mutual remembrances of now-shuttered clubs like the Galaxy, the Creepy Crawl and the Side Door, where high school kids from Jefferson County escaped for punk rock therapy.
Knowing that I will probably move away when I’ve either completed my PhD or dropped out of school tinges the experience with something akin to regret, but not really. Longing, maybe. In the last decade I have never considered myself as belonging to anyplace at all, even though I identify strongly as a Midwesterner. I have been pleasantly surprised by my grown-up return to St. Louis, grit and humidity and all. I am from this place; I know it well, even though I have been gone for longer than I was ever here. At some point I will be an outsider again, and that fills me with a mixture of anticipation which I’m not sure is excitement or resignation.
Although I cannot stomach the thought of living in one place my entire life–at least, not in the same place where I was born–I think I am starting to understand why most people do it. The tug of the familiar is persuasive. The people here sound like me, are thrifty like me, buy their Jack Daniel’s down to the gas station like me. Everything’s cheap and the people are fun and living here would be easy. If I could find an outlet for my wanderlust, I think I could grow old in a rocking chair overlooking Cherokee Street. Assuming I wasn’t shot.
There’s nothing like being in a room full of social workers and overhearing everyone else’s research interests, job experiences, or areas of specialization. I can’t think of any other situation where I could state my actual research without reservation, explanation, or tempering the terminology to make it seem less galling to the listener. Too many times I have been asked what I’m interested in studying (by non-social workers/non-public health workers), only to watch the person’s face crumple into a sort of confused sympathy before the all-too-familiar flicker behind their eyes indicating the unspoken question: “What the hell happened to you that you would want to study such a thing?”
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For as long as I can remember I have been told that I “look angry”. This puzzles me, because once I got my braces off and grew out of my adolescent punk rock rage–which really wasn’t even that severe (I am one of the only people I know that actually smiled for my senior pictures), I became a more or less well-adjusted person with a wide capacity for humor, amusement, and laughter. However, the one thing I do not generally do is smile when something is not funny or pleasing to me, and this bothers certain people. Certain people who are men.
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