season of the bitch

Yeah, I’m nominally Jewish, but Christmas is the one day a year my family shuts the damn business down and hangs out around the house eating breakfast at noon, drinking wine at 3:00, watching a big Hollywood movie, and then eating a huge dinner.

My co-blogger at Alterdestiny, Erik, pointed out that among many famous folks, Shane McGowan was born on December 25. That’s certainly another reason to drink today, so here you go: my favorite Christmas song.

Well, maybe not.

But I’ve never been huge on major organized religious ceremonies. There’s nothing ecstatic about them. I prefer the ceremony, the bacchanal of a rock show.

And Nick Cave is high priest of my religion. He even dresses the part, in skinny black funereal suits that cling to his scarecrow’s frame, his white shirt unbuttoned, now with that faintly ridiculous mustache that can be seen even from the cheap seats.

He stalks the stage, high-kicks and gyrates, hips and legs in trousers stretched taut, gets grown men to shout “I love you Nick,” and laughs at them.

He plays all the great, dirty, sacrilegious, profane classics–”Deanna,” “Tupelo,” “Red Right Hand,” “Papa Won’t Leave You Henry,” and closes with possibly the filthiest track ever committed to CD: “Stagger Lee.” His chorus of black-suited backups with their clanging instruments howls along.

Nick is emblematic of one of my biggest beliefs about art: that it should be beautiful, strange, and frightening at times. That the messy is better than the perfect. The fuckups are more interesting than the stories that work out right.

“Only conflict is interesting” a thousand writing teachers have intoned, but it’s more than that. It’s that only a willingness to abandon oneself to the scary, the weird, the impossible, the heartbreaking is interesting. Is more than interesting.

So I love Nick Cave and Jean Genet, Mishima and Diane Arbus, Tom Waits and Lydia Lunch. I love crazy stories and things that fall apart. I think Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the best love story ever committed to film, and I keep falling in love with the wrong guys.

But a great rock show leaves me feeling cleansed, focused, and happy.

And isn’t that what people go to church for?

Female, Muslim, and Mutant: A Critique of Muslim Women in Comic Books at Racialicious.

..up at Racialicious. Thanks to Latoya for running it. If you aren’t reading that blog regularly, you really should be.

This video will change your mind.

Adorable.

…when my parents are Republicans.

1. My parents. I know this may seem counterintuitive, but I never went through a serious rebellion against my parents that led me to the other side of the coin. Instead, I am a direct result of the values they instilled in me from the time I was little. They taught me to read when I was very young and they did all sorts of crazy things like have flash cards for all the countries in Africa and suchlike. They wanted a baby genius, I guess. What they got, 28 years later, is a sassy feminist politically active tattooed writertype. I think they’re mostly happy with it.

But seriously. They answered my questions honestly when I watched the news with them and wanted to know what was going on in some part of the world, or when I read about someone like Pol Pot and wanted to know who he was and why he was bad. My father would tell me, “He was a dictator that we basically supported for years while he killed his own people.” My mother explained that she left the Catholic church because she disagreed with its views on abortion and women. And they always told my sister and I that we didn’t need a man for anything, and explained sex to us and at least attempted to tell us that using protection was more important than some mythic virginity pledge.

2. My grandparents. My Jewish grandparents, who insisted that my sister and I go to Hebrew school and learn about our Jewish heritage. Being aware that you are part of a group that has seen such hate makes you more aware of the suffering of others, even though I certainly cannot claim to be marginalized as a Jew–I don’t think it’s ever been an issue, and I’ve blogged about it more than once. My grandparents took us to museums (and who I think voted Democrat) and when I was nine and had seen the musical Les Miserables for the first time (after begging my parents when my mother played the soundtrack over and over again), dared me to read the book. Which I did. Unabridged.

Which brings me to 3. Les Miserables.  Some people read Ayn Rand and became Republicans. I read Victor Hugo and fell in love with revolutionaries and poor people and prostitutes and such. In fact, I probably learned what a prostitute was from reading Les Mis. Which I have tried to read once a year since high school, since I always get something new out of it. I have probably mentioned that I tattooed a quote from it across my back, something to carry with me always. If you don’t understand, you probably haven’t read it. It’s the single most important clue to how I think about political issues.

4. Punk rock. I didn’t have that much of a rebellious phase, but when I did get into one, the music I found was expressly political and I had much to learn to catch up. Thanks, Jello Biafra.

5. The GSA in high school school. This happened almost by accident. I became friends with the people who ran the gay-straight alliance. I had probably not thought about it much, other than when I was the subject of one of those awful middle-school rumor campaigns that I was a lesbian, but I didn’t see why anyone would have a problem with gay people, so I joined up. The one detention I ever served in high school was for skipping math class to sit at the GSA table at lunchtime during awareness week. Which we technically had permission to do, but the school didn’t like. Wonder why…

6. Dr. Arrington. I took a class in Marxist theory freshman year at Tulane for the hell of it, because I was curious. I came out with a broadened viewpoint on social ills and a deep distaste for the kid in the class who kept finding ways to talk about his Porsche. Oh, I hate you, bourgeois college students.

7. Dr. McKay. Opened me up to feminism, which like gay rights I had never seen as much of an issue. Of course women could do anything men could, who’d ever said they couldn’t?  And the Wendy Kaminer essay I’ve already mentioned a million times.

8. Sara, my riot-grrrl roommate and goth-club buddy who made me think about women’s issues.

9. Khristina, my fabulous roommate. Khristina and I bonded during the aforementioned Marxist theory class, became roommates our sophomore year, and shaped our political consciousness together. We didn’t like the same music or the same boys, so what we had to talk about was school and politics and world affairs. A brilliant black woman, she made me think about race and racism directly rather than that same aforementioned attitude, “Of course I’m not racist.”

10. Religion. Though I went to Hebrew school, our family never went to religious services. I grew up with a deep curiosity about religion itself, what made people believe, practice, think about religion. Because I wasn’t really indoctrinated into any one faith, I explored many of them, learning and picking up bits and pieces of things that made sense to me in a way that I couldn’t have had I been raised and trained that one way was the only right way. Having one Jewish parent and one Catholic parent didn’t hurt, either–nor did the knowledge that my parents were forced to marry at City Hall because no church would accept their interfaith relationship. I identify as Jewish, but my Judaism is so much more than just that. (that Feminism and Theology class at Loyola was pretty rad, too.)

11. Chris. My high school sweetheart, my first love, the one that got away. No one understood why I couldn’t let go. Because that beautiful, loving, open-minded person, the one who had fierce pride in being Jewish and would knock you out if you said anything racist, the one who screwed up but never meant any harm and taught me to look at people who commit crimes not as Other but as very real people with very real problems that aren’t solved by jail, taught me more than I ever taught him about what kind of person I want to be. And he still does, though I almost never see him and we almost never speak.

12. New Orleans. If I can credit one place with truly shaping my adult self, it would be New Orleans. I grew up in liberal Massachusetts, but left it when I was 16. I lived in South Carolina but never really felt at home there, went to Denver after college, and now I’m in Philly. When people ask where I’m from I never really know what to say, but I should say New Orleans because without it I would not be who I was. I transferred from Tulane after two years because I hated it, but I ultimately could not leave that city and ended up just next door at Loyola (which I loved). New Orleans was a mix of black and white, very rich and very poor, and drag queens, strippers and transpeople were part of my everyday experience in the city. I befriended jazz musicians three times my age and went from their shows to a rockabilly band at the Dragon’s Den to hip-hop night at the long-lost Matador. Everything was acceptable, everything was cool, everything was beautiful–except, of course, the poverty.

It was in New Orleans that I first had a child fear me because I was white and was confronted with the hard facts of my own privilege, not in a classroom or in a text, but in the real world. It was in New Orleans that I went to a fund-raising party for a transwoman to get her surgery. It was in New Orleans that Khristina and I decided to support Ralph Nader because Al Gore wasn’t on the right side of any of the issues we really cared about (Oh, looking back…) And it was there that I really learned to see everyone as human.

Sorry if this isn’t the most organized. It was more of a therapy session for me, trying to tease out the reasons why I am who I am, why I think as I do, and why I’m so passionate about it that I will give up my free time trying to fix this screwed-up system.

From Politico:

Now, I disagree with getting into the oppression Olympics, as he sort of does here, but he is right that Jews have been marginalized for a long part of their history, and that we should be extra sensitive to libelous, gross character assassination like the Obama-is-a-secret-Muslim BS.

(And yes, I know that being a Muslim is not a bad thing, I was engaged to a Muslim for almost two years.)

Lately I’ve been paying attention to intra-feminist debates on the inclusion of different issues into the feminist sphere. (Be patient, I swear this is relevant.) To me, all social justice issues are feminist issues. I cannot understand how one marginalized group can turn around and perpetuate the same injustices on another marginalized group. I can’t comprehend Jews who don’t like black people or feminists who are angry at immigrants (or worse, feminists angry at transgendered people or at sex workers), or Latinos who don’t like gays. And these are all different groups and of course they intersect, overlap, and the boundaries blur.

Obama may be threatening to some people simply because he cannot be quantified or pigeonholed. He is not black or white or rich or poor or liberal or centrist. To some degree he, like all politicians and especially presidential candidates, who run for an office that is as much about our national identity, our view of ourselves, is a scrim onto which we project what we want to see, or what we fear to see.

He must be hiding something behind these multiple identities. That seems to be the thought process behind these email campaigns. We can’t simply accept that he is who he appears to be, as much as any politician ever is and far more than the people he’s running against.

As a feminist, as a Jew, as a human being who sees that all of us are connected in ways we can’t quantify, I consider all issues of justice, of human rights, my issues. If you perpetuate slurs against someone because of their race, their religion, their sexual orientation, their gender, their size, their nationality, their choice of work, you do it to me.

Alice Walker on the election.

Fresh Air’s absolutely excellent show today on black liberation theology. I’m not a Christian, but I knew a little bit about  liberation theology from a class I had to take at the Catholic university I attended, but this show today really informed me. Listen to it here.

So despite Hillary Clinton’s conspicuous silence on the Wright matter in public–aside from a snotty comment when the picture of Bill Clinton shaking hands with Wright surfaced–I wanted to find out about her own religious beliefs. It’s hard, even with free access to Lexis-Nexis, to dig up anything on “Hillary Clinton AND religion” that actually tells me anything. But a Barbara Ehrenreich article in The Nation finally gave me the info I was looking for–or rather, referred me to a 2007 Mother Jones article on her seriously creepy right-wing religious associations.

For those of you who don’t want to bother clicking links, I’ll fill you in: Clinton joined a prayer meeting group as First Lady that has a long history of affiliations with right-wing, even Fascist causes and is far heavier on Republicans than Democrats.

The Mother Jones article goes into her early religious life, a faith that led her to the Young Republicans at Wellesley before finding a more liberal streak. And then it digs deep into the Fellowship, or the Family…

“a network of sex-segregated cells of political, business, and military leaders dedicated to “spiritual war” on behalf of Christ, many of them recruited at the Fellowship’s only public event, the annual National Prayer Breakfast. (Aside from the breakfast, the group has “made a fetish of being invisible,” former Republican Senator William Armstrong has said.) The Fellowship believes that the elite win power by the will of God, who uses them for his purposes. Its mission is to help the powerful understand their role in God’s plan.”

Doug Coe, the Fellowship’s leader, has been described as “the guy in the smoky back room that you can’t even see his face. He sits in the corner, and you see the cigar, and you see the flame, and you hear his voice—but you never see his face. He’s that shadowy figure”–and this from an admirer!

Coe’s friends include such winners as John Ashcroft and Sam Brownback, those bastions of liberal integrity.

“According to the Fellowship’s archives, the spirit has in the past led its members in Congress to increase U.S. support for the Duvalier regime in Haiti and the Park dictatorship in South Korea. The Fellowship’s God-led men have also included General Suharto of Indonesia; Honduran general and death squad organizer Gustavo Alvarez Martinez; a Deutsche Bank official disgraced by financial ties to Hitler; and dictator Siad Barre of Somalia, plus a list of other generals and dictators.”

The Mother Jones article doesn’t blame Clinton for any of these things, but it does note that:

“Clinton has also joined the GOP on legislation that redefines social justice issues in terms of conservative morality, such as an anti-human-trafficking law that withheld funding from groups working on the sex trade if they didn’t condemn prostitution in the proper terms. With Santorum, Clinton co-sponsored the Workplace Religious Freedom Act; she didn’t back off even after Republican senators such as Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter pulled their names from the bill citing concerns that the measure would protect those refusing to perform key aspects of their jobs—say, pharmacists who won’t fill birth control prescriptions, or police officers who won’t guard abortion clinics.

 Clinton has championed federal funding of faith-based social services, which she embraced years before George W. Bush did; Marci Hamilton, author of God vs. the Gavel, says that the Clintons’ approach to faith-based initiatives “set the stage for Bush.” Clinton has also long supported the Defense of Marriage Act, a measure that has become a purity test for any candidate wishing to avoid war with the Christian right.”

The Defense of Marriage Act, if anyone–including those supporters of Clinton that I saw yesterday in Philly’s gayberhood–has forgotten, is a lovely little bit of legislation signed by Bill Clinton that says that no state must recognize a same-sex marriage conducted by another state, and that the Federal government may not recognize same-sex marriages for any purpose.

Evangelicals may think this is all just great, but it freaks me out–and it explains a lot.

Well, I just got off the phone with my mother, who recently rejoined the Catholic church after years of being estranged. And of course, I got her to admit that there are plenty of things that the Catholic church and Catholic priests have done that she does not agree with, but she goes to church because she believes in God and she likes the community and she gets involved and it makes her feel better.

So, y’know, if I can win that argument with Mom, the Republican…

As many people have pointed out, there are plenty of seriously offensive things that have been said by Republican-associated ministers and suchlike. Of course, the immediate beneficiary of all this bullshit is, of course, Hillary Clinton. And we all know how it mysteriously found its way to the surface right now when the comments were made months and even years ago.

So again we have a choice. We have a choice between someone who is willing to completely destroy her party’s likely nominee because, essentially, she has to have it that badly, and someone who did not try to back away from his past or hide it or diminish it, but to put it into context, to explain it, and while he’s at it elevate the discourse about race in this country from something ugly hidden under the rug to something we can have intelligent conversations about without being hateful and angry.

Who the hell do you want running your country?

On the lighter side, I’m looking forward to voter registration efforts this weekend. I’m looking forward to meeting strangers and telling them how much their vote means to me and to all of us who refuse to be divided by scare tactics and sound-bite fever. I’m looking forward to winning that argument again.

I told an old story today for the first time in a while, and I think it’s important so I’m going to share it here.

When I lived in Denver, I worked for a nonprofit literacy organization run by a wonderful, amazing black woman, Madera Rogers. Ms. Rogers inspires me to this day, even though politically sometimes we disagreed, because she was dedicating her life to educating kids, and she did not take no for an answer.

We had a huge event planned with Miss America (not my choice for a keynote speaker, but it was a draw) and a day of fun, learning events for kids from all over Colorado. We had spent months killing ourselves to rope in schools from hours away to bring their students to our daylong workshop. I hadn’t slept right in weeks and had worked thirteen-hour days at least up until that day.

A school group from somewhere south of Denver showed up with their load of kids. The teacher/chaperone came inside and met Madera and saw the kids who were already there.

And that chaperone turned around and drove back the hours that they’d came with those kids because they hadn’t realized that Madera was black. They said “We didn’t know this was for black kids,” and they left.

My boss, God bless her, didn’t back down from this moment. She talked to the kids who were still there about it. She made the point that it was racist. And those kids had to think about that. It wasn’t only black kids. It was for students all across Colorado. We had kids of all races and religious backgrounds.

In one of the events for the day, the students wrote little skits to demonstrate values. One of the groups wrote a skit about the “good” kids teaching the “bad” kids not to do drugs.

The group had divided itself along racial lines. Let’s just guess who had placed themselves in the part of the “bad” kids. (There was no teacher there to tell them who should play which role. They did this by themselves.)

And again, Madera didn’t let that pass without commenting on it. She pointed out to those kids, fourth and fifth graders, that they had subconsciously decided that the white kids were the ones who would behave well, and the black kids were not.

I think of her all the time, of that woman who had the courage to stand up in front of a roomful of parents and teachers and point out the racism that we all had internalized and to make us look at it.

Barack Obama gave us that kind of moment as a nation this week.