More on Brokeback

This blogger hasn't even seen Brokeback Mountain, and he's still got it:

http://www.iknowiknow.org/archives/000659.html

My New Year's Resolution

I'm only making one: one's all I can handle.

I'm going to try to be kinder to those who love me.

Which -- yikes -- is a tough one for me.

I'm not too good at being kind.

Or, as the kid told me not too long ago: "You can go from being a cotton ball to an spiked iron ball in one second flat."

A New Year

The kid has gone back to school today -- a good thing from my perspective, and from hers: mine, since now I have a whole week before I go back to school, to get some serious writing done, without kid-interruption; and hers, because whole days with nothing planned just don't mix well with the kid.

I've been getting by since we got back from New Orleans with a mixture of wheedling and bribes -- "Just let me write two more hours and I swear, we'll do whatever you want, just leave me alone two more hours, anything, anything is yours--"

But two hours for a seven year old, well. That's asking a lot.

Also it meant I had to spend many hours at Books-A-Million or the park, watching her bury dinosaurs in the sand. Not that I minded much. It's been interesting weather here -- sunny and about seventy. And thanks to all y'all who sent me reading suggestions, I have things to read again. (Send more! The stack is getting low!)

Now that she's back in school, though, I can work without bribes or threats. Seven straight hours. Paradise.

And book four is unfolding like a flower, by the way. How bizarre is that?

Supernanny

The kid and I watched Supernanny last night, one of our favorite Friday night treats -- we love to get appalled together by how bad the parenting is, and how Jo Frost makes the parents act right.

Last night was particularly appalling: a stay-at-home mom (I love how folks think that's a cure-all: so long as mom is at home full time, that's ALL she has to do! Be there! Nothing else is necessary!) with three boys; Dad was deployed in the Iraqi war.

Home was chaos. Why? Mom's solution -- to everything! -- was to hit the boys. Wallop them, for everything. Hit them, with her hand, with a belt, or threaten to hit them, for every transgression. And? Ignore them otherwise.

What did the boys do, when they weren't getting hit? Well, they beat on each other, of course, and they screamed and attacked their mother. What else were they going to do?

Mom didn't talk to them, or play with them, or read to them (no books in the house -- that's one thing I've noticed about every household Jo Frost gets called to: not a single bookshelf in any of them, not a single book: hmm!): the four year old watched TV all day, the school-age kids came home from school and started beating each other up right away, until Mom, literally, locked them out in the back yard.

Jo's solution? She established a no-hitting rule. Not only that the kids could not hit each other -- Mom could not hit the kids. No yelling either. What a concept!

She also established rewards -- a pie chart thing -- for following the rules, and got Mom to start talking to and hanging out with her kids. (Reading to them too, I noticed. Heh!)

Astounding transformation.

She also taught Mom to compromise with the kids -- not do this or else, but, okay, you don't want to do this: what about this?

In other words: not perfect obedience or I'll beat you, but let's see how we can work things out, why don't we? Let's treat our children like human beings.

That Jo. She's clever.

Prager's Divorce

Dennis Prager is getting a divorce. Apparently he announced it on his radio show. His beloved fans insist this doesn't make his advice on marriage any less valuable.

(http://christianconservative.blogspot.com/)

Cause, you know, that's who you want advising you about marriage -- someone who can't do it -- and that's who you want advising you about raising you kids -- someone like Dobson, who ain't got it right once -- and that's who you want teaching you to build bridges, an engineer whose bridges keep collapsing, and that's who you want running the country, someone who...uh....

Well, you know these conservatives. I guess they actually do prefer someone who doesn't know how to do the job.

Sigh

I suppose it's no shock that I'm dying to see Brokeback Mountain.

Which, BTW, according to Ted Baehr, who reviews films for the Christian Film & Television Commission, is "abhorrent" and a "twisted, laughable, frustrating" bit of "neo-Marxist homosexual propaganda" --- high praise indeed!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051229/ap_on_en_mo/film_brokeback_mountain

It's also been doing pretty well at the box office, out-selling that bit of neo-Christian propaganda, The Chronicles of Narnia, earning $13,599 per theater, while Narnia earned $8,225 per theater. Wondering how Ted feels about that?

But nevertheless I'm not going to get to see it, because I live in this rustiest piece of the buckle of the Bible Belt, and the Christian Coalition will make GOT-damn sure no homosexual movie evah shows its flickering ass he-ah.

More Stuff About New Orleans

The labor shortage: restaurants and shops and everything from theaters to offices can't hire sufficient employees. Signs are up all over town, wheedling for workers.

Outside the Krispy Kreme: "High Wages, Great Benefits, Flexible Hours, Free Donuts!" Outside the Steak N Ale: "We'll Start you at $15.00 an hour!" The Burger King promises a $6500.00 a year commitment bonus; McDonalds promises a bonus of $250.00 a week. Some other place (I forget which) offered a five hundred dollar signing bonus.

Even so, few restraurants and few stores or shops can run a regular schedule -- no restaurant is open more than five or six days a week, or later than nine o'clock at night; most fast food restaurants are only working their drive-through windows. You can't rely on any place to be open on a given day -- if they have the workers that day, they're open that day. If not, not.

And in stores, shelves often don't get stocked. Bare spots are common-- not because goods don't exist, but because workers don't exist to stock the shelves. And lines are often appallingly long -- like winding through the store long. Stores have marked out trails on the floors with tape, so that customers know where to stand when the line gets really long, that's how customary this is. It's like post-war England, these lines.

"I should tell my students about these jobs," I told mr. delagar, since all my students are working for six bucks an hour at the Wal, here in the Fort.

"Right," he said, "Except where would they live? Under a bridge?"

Which is a good point, because housing is a problem in the city. Many stores and restaurants and businesses have put trailers in their parking lots and are letting their employees live in those; and lots of people live with their relatives, as my youngest brother and sister-in-law are doing -- four months after Katrina, they're still refugees, moving from house to house, waiting for a FEMA trailer, staying right now with my oldest brother in Destrehan: we heard about lots of people like this, living with a brother, living with an aunt, whole extended families living in the apartment of an uncle -- but if you aren't that lucky, if no one in your family had a house that survived, then what do you do?

Whole vast areas of the city did not survive and are not going to be able to be rebuilt. They'll have to be razed. The 9th Ward. Much of Gentilly. Most of Lakeview and Araby. That's housing for hundreds of thousands of people. Where are they to live, if they return, while they work, while their houses are rebuilt?

FEMA has trailers for some of them-- but down in the city, apparently, lots of folks don't want those trailers around their neighborhoods. Trailers in their neighborhoods, they say, willl drop their property values.

Like a dead city wouldn't, I guess.

Other folks claim its who would live in those trailers (ahem, dark folks, from that wicked 9th Ward) that really are worrying those who object.

In any case, finding anywhere to live in New Orleans at the moment is next to impossible. But finding a job ought to be a snap. In case anyone is interested.

Amen

Go see what the ACLU has to say:


http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/12/29/05855/837


And pass it on!

Back From the Holidays

Which I spent visiting my parents in Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans, as some of you may know.

Driving into the subdivision where my parents live was startling -- it's been four months since Katrina: piles of rubble stripped from the insides of houses are still heaped on every street corner and along all the gutters; downed trees are everywhere. Only about half the houses, my father says, in the neighborhood he lives in, are currently being lived in, and that's a pretty good average, a good neighborhood, one that didn't get hit very hard. People were working on the houses everywhere we went in that neighborhood. FEMA trailers were in many yards. Almost no houses there had simply been abandoned.

My mother took us, on the second day, driving through Lakeview and Gentilly -- these are areas that were hit bad. Lakeview is where the 17th Street Canal levee breach was, where the water came through so hard it pushed houses off their foundations. Gentilly is where my youngest brother's house is. In both of these neighborhoods, although some people are at work on the the houses, many more -- even most -- of the houses are still standing abandoned. Abandoned cars, whitened by flood waters, are everywhere. Boats, too, washed up on the neutral grounds and in empty lawns. Most of the trash left by the flood (my brother said the original piles were forty feet high in the neutral grounds) has been cleared away, but new piles are forming. Not many people are in these areas of the city.

The houses are empty and bleached gray or white by the flood. The windows are broken. Some have blue tarps on their roofs -- FEMA roofs, these are called, even if they're not really from FEMA -- and some have FEMA trailers in front of them. These are the houses being worked on. Not many of them, not in this part of town. My brother and his wife are up for a FEMA trailer. Once you get a trailer, you can start rebuilding the house. Plumbing and power and water are all available, but not, obviously, until you have pipes and wiring and walls and a roof. And the material all that calls for. Which is all in high demand in New Orleans at the moment. I'll get to all this later.

Down near the Quarter and in downtown itself, in the Garden District, and near River Road, where it never flooded, things are much better. We went down there -- took the kid to the zoo, walked around. Lots of people down there. People are back, down there. Lots of them. The zoo is open on weekends, the restaurants are open, when they can find workers (more on this later too), the shops are open, when they can get staff (ditto), some of the populations is back (100,000, my mother said, but I'm wondering if this is all real population, or does it count FEMA and insurance folk and people that have come to do construction?).

The roads are battered. The street lights don't work -- it's a charming and amusing experience, with the way folks in New Orleans drive anyway, coming up on a street with traffic approaching from all four directions and who knows who's supposed to go now? Obviously it ought to be treated like a four-way stop, but, hey, this is New Orleans! "It's like a roller coaster," I told mr. delagar, "only real."

Also, very few of the street signs survived, so often you don't really know where you are, driving about. Luckily it's very hard to get lost in New Orleans. Eventually you either hit the river or the lake, and then you know where you are.

And the city is keeping its sense of humor. At the zoo, one of the exhibits was the Louisiana Swamp: on the swamp was a houseboat, with a blue roof, and on the porch a taped-up refrigerator, and a box of MREs, and, spray-painted on its door, the symbol that marks most of the abandoned houses in the city: the big X, with the date of when the house had been checked, and the initials of who checked it, and other bits of code, and underneath it, information about whatever pets had been found inside (I saw, as we were driving around the city, things like: cat not found; dogs pawprints seen; kitten recovered; cat outside): this one said: GATORS FED. There's also a hot song in the city right now called "Temporarily Not There Anymore," which is basically a list of all the places in the city that are closed or don't exist at the moment.

More tomorrow.

Sigh

Went out yesterday to the public library and to the other useless bookstore in this town, desperately hunting something, anything to read -- I'm out of things to read -- and could not find a thing.

I was always afraid this day would come. And here it is.

I'm a book junkie. I suppose y'all already know that. I need books. I have needed books since before I could actually read. One of my first memories is sitting on the floor with a book in my lap, staring down at the print, trying furiously to make the letters coalesce into meaning. I might have been three. I didn't learn to read until I was six. I remember my first word: TOY. I remember reading it, I remember how it looked, printed in yellow chalk on the blackboard. I remember suddenly being able to read everything.

I remember getting hit across the face with a math workbook by my first grade teacher, also, for reading in class. (I was reading Lassie and the Mystery of Blackberry Bog behind the workbook, and she took it amiss.)

I remember being banned from reading for six weeks by my 4th grade English teacher, if you can imagine such a thing. She thought I read too much. Yes, my English teacher. She thought all that reading I did interfered with my school work. Ah, the Jefferson Parish education system. How I loved it.

Anyway, I'm a print junkie. I need books. I've read them ALL.

No, not really. There are many, many books about football and hunting and Rush and many Western novels and many Romance novels and many books of Christian fiction and so on out there which I have never read and never will. Also many novels of Alternate history. And Men's Adventure. And shelves and shelves and shelves of the Left Behind novels.

So yes, there are, in fact, lots of books I haven't read.

But no books left I can find that I want to read.

Here's what I like to read:

Science fiction that's actually SF and not fantasy (I don't like fantasy because I can't seem to believe it, sorry, I know it's a failing, but there you are)

Mainstream fiction that isn't about some guy/woman trying to decide whether or not he/she is going to have an affair/baby/get married because? Really? who cares? I like fiction about people who actually do have lives and are actually living them.

Gay fiction/feminist fiction

Some mysteries, some westerns, but only if they're about really interesting characters and are really well written

Young adult & children's lit, same as above

So -- who has book recommendations for me?

I'm desperate. Seriously!

Say It Again

Over at Red State and on the other Rightist blogs, they're banging the drum and saying Bush has the right to do what he's doing, it's fine because it's the War on Terra and look at those silly Leftist Moonbats crying Impeach Impeach when all Bush is TRYING to do is DEFEND our country --

And mr. delagar reminds me that Lincoln also suspend habeas corpus and that we tortured prisoners plenty during the Philippine war, and DED Space notes that Nixon also spied on citizens (http://www.dedspace.blogspot.com/), so it's not like this is all new --

I know all this is true.

What Bush is doing is still a criminal act. What he is doing still violates his oath. What his administration is doing still is a disgrace to our nation. What he and his people and his party are doing is still destroying what America ought to be.

Here is Katherine at Obsidian Wings:

I was shocked by the brazen defense of the wiretapping thing like anyone else, but when I thought about it for a moment...it's not like this should be news to us.

Look. We have a President here who is making a claim of unlimited power, for the duration of a war that may never end. Oh, he says it's limited by the country's laws, but they've got a crack legal team that reliably interprets the laws to say that the President gets to do whatever he wants. It amounts to the same thing.

I am not exaggerating. I am really and truly not.

September 11 started the war. When will it end? Maybe never. Where is the battlefield? The entire world, including the United States. Who is an enemy combatant? Anyone the President says is an enemy combatant, including a U.S. citizen--no need for a charge, no need for a trial, no need for access to a lawyer. What if they're found not to be an enemy combatant? We can keep them in prison anyway, and we don't have to tell their families they're alive or their lawyers that they were cleared. What can you do to an enemy combatant? Anything you want. Detain him forever, for the rest of his life, because this is a war like any other and we have always been able to detain POWs for the duration of the war. But you don't need to follow the Geneva Conventions, because this is a war like no other in our history. And oh yes--if the President decides that we need to torture a prisoner for the war effort, it's unconstitutional for Congress to stop him. They took that position in an official memo, and they have not backed down from it. They have said it was "unnecessary" but they have never backed down from it.

They are not only entitled to do these things to people; they are entitled to do them in secret. When Congress asks for information about them, they can just ignore it. And they are entitled to actively deceive the public about all this.
That's the power they claim. At what point are we going to take that claim seriously?

At some level, I think we read these things and think: well, they can't really mean that. But by now we know that they mean it enough to have shattered a number of lives. Right now there are a limited number of people who have gotten to experience the absolute powerlessness that is the flip side of the president's assertion of absolute power. I would guess there are relatively few of them, compared to some other wars in our history. But they certainly exist; I can rattle a litany of the worst cases off the top of my head by now. Maher Arar, A'del Abdu al-Hakim, Saddiq Ahmad Turkestani, Sean Baker, Muhammad Saad Iqbal, Sami al-Laithi, Dilawar and Habibullah, Abed Hamed Mowhoush, Manadel al-Jamadi, Benyam Mohamed, the Salt Pit case....This is nowhere, nowhere close to exhaustive. Again, this is only a partial list of the cases that I could name off the top of my head. Read those links, and think of the stories I could tell after an extra half hour on Google, let alone a thorough look through the relevant news stories and government documents. And for every case we know about there are probably many more that have never been publicly reported.

Many of those men have been accused of horrible crimes. Some of them are probably guilty. But we know for a fact that some of them are not, so innocence is not any kind of protection. U.S. citizenship works a hell of a lot better, but it's not foolproof. You could ask Sean Baker about that; you could also ask James Yee, Jose Padilla, Yasser Hamdi, Omar Abu Ali.

http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2005/12/sos.html

This is wrong. It is wrong, wrong, wrong.

These are criminal acts and they should be stopped.

The Kid's Poetry

Here is another poem from the kid (not appalling like the last one, sorry):

Black cat intuition
Nighttime and meadowlark .
White Cat
Superstition
She's
Got
Medl Claws
Brown Cat
On A Mission
To Find night time paws


Isn't she brilliant?

(You must say yes now.)

War on Christmas

This is depressing -- last night we went to the Harp's, the employee-owned grocery store we like to go to, here in the Fort because it isn't Wal-Mart, and also because it sells free-range chicken and organic eggs organic vegetables and milk from cows raised on an actual dairy farm, cows that live in pastures and aren't given hormones, milk with "nothing in it but milk!" -- anyway, what do we find when we show up at our beloved Harp's last night but a GIANT sign boasting "Welcome to Harp's! Where Christmas is STILL Christmas!"

You know: as opposed to that evil Winterfair or whatever, where instead of celebrating the birth of Jesus we celebrate the sacrifice of Virgins. (Oh. Wait.)

Gays in America

So I just finished grading the exams for my Diverse Cultures class, and they were surprisingly good, in that several of them surprised me by showing actual insight and depth -- most of them were the usual undergraduate stuff -- and none of them, not a single one, said gay guys were evil and should burn in hell, which was nice, and not at all what I was expecting. (I guess they knew they better not, though.)

And I also got two or three essays from students saying things like, "After I read that story "Billy," it changed the way I thought about gay people, because it showed gay people weren't disgusting at all, just people wanting to have lives, so even though I'm not gay myself, I think gay people should be allowed to have rights like anyone else." I liked reading that, I admit. That was cool. Literature at work.

One student did tell me, privately, that her uncle had committed suicide recently, as in a few weeks before, because he had lived all his life in a nearby small town -- an Arkansas small town -- as a gay man, and couldn't take being treated the way gay guys get treated in small Arkansas towns anymore.

Which brings me to this:

FORT HUACHUCA, Ariz., Dec. 19 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Private Kyle Lawson, a 19-year-old Tucson resident, was physically assaulted and threatened at Fort Huachuca Army Base after fellow soldiers learned he is gay, according to a report in Sunday's Arizona Daily Star. Fearful for his safety, Private Lawson is leaving the Army, while the soldier accused of his assault appears to remain unpunished. Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN) today called on Army officials to hold the responsible party accountable for the assault and called on the Pentagon to implement an Anti-Harassment Action Plan originally adopted in 2000. The plan, SLDN has reported each year since, has never been implemented.

"Pentagon leaders have consistently refused to take harassment seriously, and our men and women in uniform continue to pay the price," said Sharra E. Greer, SLDN's director of law and policy. "The Pentagon has found, in its own survey, rampant anti-gay harassment in the armed forces. Service members report harassment, violence and threats to SLDN on a regular basis. At least two service members have been murdered because of unchecked anti-gay harassment. Yet military leaders have utterly failed to send a strong, clear message that anti-gay harassment is unacceptable or that those who harass will be held accountable for their actions. The result is yet another anti-gay assault."

http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=58380

Hurrah!

I have finished grading EVERYTHING and have entered my grades into the school's e-system and so I am, at last, officially done for the semester. This means I have the next four days to do nothing but write. Yay!

I've finished revising the trilogy, essentially -- I'm still reading it to the writing group, and so I'm still messing about with fine-tuning it -- but something odd has happened over the past two days: I've started writing Book Four in the Trilogy. Which makes it Not A Trilogy anymore, I know. Book Four has an actual plot, as well. My books almost never have plots when I start them, though they always have plots when I'm done, so this is an odd an interesting development.

Anyway, given that the kid is in New Orleans, the next four days ought to be blissful.

Given that I don't develop a migraine. Knock wood.