On The Occasion of Our Twenty First Wedding Anniversary

 The Second Day of July... will be the most memorable Epocha in the History of America--John Adams to Abigail Adams

Mixed Media Anniversary Gift.  Aimai to Mr. Aimai

Hand Made Pryographia Glove Box (1906), Ketubah Poem, Carved Shell Buttons, Gilded Vintage X, Found Iron, Antique Postcards, Found Images, Tin Hand, Hand Made Book, 19th Century Newspaper Clipping on the Duties of Husbands

Left Hand: 13th Century Hebrew Poem from Our Ketubah

Right Hand: Meditation on A Midsummer Night's Dream

I have had a most rare

vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to

say what dream it was... The eye

of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not

seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue

to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream

was.

SaveSave

My Grandfather!

  This is a link to a Vimeo which has just appeared.  I'm not sure whether its a clip from Jerry Bruck's film about Izzy, or where it comes from. The person who posted it on Vimeo isn't sure either.  There's only so much footage out there about Izzy and though I've seen bits of this before I haven't seen any film of him in a long time.  I want to thank the person who put it up on Vimeo.  I miss my grandfather very much, and wish he were here to comment, pungently, on the current state of US politics.

https://vimeo.com/172233617

These comments are in support of Betty Cracker's brilliant blog post today "Quibbling Over The Script." 

"Christ! Between the bernie leftists for whom no democratic initiative is effective if it doesnt involve birds, giant puppets, or farting and the ACLU’s crack team of concern trolls worried that the democrats will lose the commanding heights of the moral hillock if they once stoop to noisy street theater, cruel manipulation, broad strokes, politics even (faints!)Or anything that smacks of stooping to conquer its no wonder we can’t have nice things. if the various flavors of left purity trolls could stop stabbing us and each other in the back perhaps hillary clinton and the kick ass dems could start to commit some god damned political winning up there. Oh, ok, I think I should take this one. I referred to the ACLU (and I’m a member, by the way) because djw, over at LGM, in a staggeringly stupid thread, referred to himself as an ACLU’er at heart. The ACLU are not concern trolling us here–but concerned citizens are behaving like concern trolls and using the ACLU’s issues and concepts as the method by which they do it."

"Here’s the thing–and stay with me for a moment–the ACLU does a very specific kind of legal work. Their opinion on a matter of politics, and especially electoral politics, is not dispositive. For one thing they tend to think in terms of end products (a law) with a specific set of possible precedential outcomes in a court battle. But a politician, even one who is engaged in potentially writing a law has a different set of priorities, a different understanding of the stages by which an idea becomes a law and then gets submitted for review when challenged in a court case. For one thing a legislator has to deal with time, committees, negotiations, trade offs, gestures, outside pressure, tv, as well as the bald language of the legislation. All of these things intervene between the proposal (we should do something about something) and the execution (this is the thing we are going to do). Short circuting that process for fear that the Democrats are going to turn into the Republicans on minority or muslim rights, or that their very proposal gives aid and comfort to the Republicans is absurd and, frankly, insulting.
And the proof of the pudding, by the way, is in the eating. The Republicans are so terrified of linking gun rights (constitutional right, fetishized idol) to the NFL and the Terrorist Watch List that they literally had to shut down congress to escape debating it. I always know when a thread is over–because that’s when I really get started posting! I want to say something else about the ACLU/naysayers group of commenters. There’s a whole lot of accusations floating around that people who applaud the Dem sit in are “acting like Republicans” and “using Cheneyite” language, or blurring a necessary distinction between our essential Democraticness (goodness, honesty, openness, purity of speech and deed) and their essential Republicanness (ugly, lying, mean, etc…). Politics–the art of the possible, always local, etc..etc..etc… is, in this model, irremiediably filthy and therefore not becoming to Democrats. Because politics always involves a lot of stuff that seems kind of wrong. Like accusing your opponent of pig fucking just to make him deny it. Or putting your oponent into the position of telling you when he stopped beating his wife. Or drawing his policies out to their absurd conclusion and making fun of him. All these things are certainly very messy, and involve passion (and faking passion) and involve arousing the passions of the voters. They are not the platonic ideal of rational debate of a subject on the merits.
Well–boo fucking hoo. If that is what it takes to get stringent gun laws passed I’m for it. I’m not for extra scrutiny for Muslims, the no fly list, or stripping my fellow citizens of their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness but I am for damned sure pro getting guns out of the hands of ordinary citizens.
Time is what makes kittens into cats, and what keeps everything from happening all at once. The Democrats are fighting just to get the chance to talk about gun laws at all. After that we can argue about how new legislation gets drafted. And if you think anyone is listening to the details and will throw in the Democrats faces that they once, for a day, argued that “terrorists” should not be able to buy guns, well–you really don’t know the first thing about the American Public which would have to be hit in the face with a two by four, repeatedly, day after day before they woke up and said “huh? Whuh hoppen?”

These comments are in support of Betty Cracker's brilliant blog post today "Quibbling Over The Script."  ">Christ! Between the bernie leftists for whom no democratic initiative is effective if it doesnt involve birds, giant puppets, or farting and the ACLU’s crack team of concern trolls worried that the democrats will lose the commanding heights of the moral hillock if they once stoop to noisy street theater, cruel manipulation, broad strokes, politics even (faints!)Or anything that smacks of stooping to conquer its no wonder we can’t have nice things. if the various flavors of left purity trolls could stop stabbing us and each other in the back perhaps hillary clinton and the kick ass dems could start to commit some god damned political winning up there.

June 23, 2016 at 2:25 pm

@Halcyon: 

Oh, ok, I think I should take this one. I referred to the ACLU (and I’m a member, by the way) because djw, over at LGM, in a staggeringly stupid thread, referred to himself as an ACLU’er at heart. The ACLU are not concern trolling us here–but concerned citizens are behaving like concern trolls and using the ACLU’s issues and concepts as the method by which they do it.

Here’s the thing–and stay with me for a moment–the ACLU does a very specific kind of legal work. Their opinion on a matter of politics, and especially electoral politics, is not dispositive. For one thing they tend to think in terms of end products (a law) with a specific set of possible precedential outcomes in a court battle. But a politician, even one who is engaged in potentially writing a law has a different set of priorities, a different understanding of the stages by which an idea becomes a law and then gets submitted for review when challenged in a court case. For one thing a legislator has to deal with time, committees, negotiations, trade offs, gestures, outside pressure, tv, as well as the bald language of the legislation. All of these things intervene between the proposal (we should do something about something) and the execution (this is the thing we are going to do). Short circuting that process for fear that the Democrats are going to turn into the Republicans on minority or muslim rights, or that their very proposal gives aid and comfort to the Republicans is absurd and, frankly, insulting.
And the proof of the pudding, by the way, is in the eating. The Republicans are so terrified of linking gun rights (constitutional right, fetishized idol) to the NFL and the Terrorist Watch List that they literally had to shut down congress to escape debating it.

Reply

287

aimaisays:

June 23, 2016 at 2:38 pm

I always know when a thread is over–because that’s when I really get started posting! I want to say something else about the ACLU/naysayers group of commenters. There’s a whole lot of accusations floating around that people who applaud the Dem sit in are “acting like Republicans” and “using Cheneyite” language, or blurring a necessary distinction between our essential Democraticness (goodness, honesty, openness, purity of speech and deed) and their essential Republicanness (ugly, lying, mean, etc…). Politics–the art of the possible, always local, etc..etc..etc… is, in this model, irremiediably filthy and therefore not becoming to Democrats. Because politics always involves a lot of stuff that seems kind of wrong. Like accusing your opponent of pig fucking just to make him deny it. Or putting your oponent into the position of telling you when he stopped beating his wife. Or drawing his policies out to their absurd conclusion and making fun of him. All these things are certainly very messy, and involve passion (and faking passion) and involve arousing the passions of the voters. They are not the platonic ideal of rational debate of a subject on the merits.
Well–boo fucking hoo. If that is what it takes to get stringent gun laws passed I’m for it. I’m not for extra scrutiny for Muslims, the no fly list, or stripping my fellow citizens of their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness but I am for damned sure pro getting guns out of the hands of ordinary citizens.
Time is what makes kittens into cats, and what keeps everything from happening all at once. The Democrats are fighting just to get the chance to talk about gun laws at all. After that we can argue about how new legislation gets drafted. And if you think anyone is listening to the details and will throw in the Democrats faces that they once, for a day, argued that “terrorists” should not be able to buy guns, well–you really don’t know the first thing about the American Public which would have to be hit in the face with a two by four, repeatedly, day after day before they woke up and said “huh? Whuh hoppen?”

Cargo Cult Campaign

John Frum, He Come

Donald Trump, reports Maggie Haberman, has fired Corey Lewandowski in what could be seen as either the most recent campaign shake-up, or merely the latest iteration of an endless power struggle that has seen figures like Lewandowski, Roger Stone, and Paul Manafort cycle in and out of the candidate’s earshot. When the operation in question is a garbage fire like the Trump-for-president operation, terms like “campaign manager,” which imply a cohesive entity that is managed in some hierarchical fashion, may not even apply.

Trump’s campaign, reports the Associated Press, has 30 paid staff on the ground across the United States of America. That is a smaller number than the Hillary Clinton campaign has in many states. Clinton’s massive ground advantage is supplemented by an even more massive television-advertising advantage. The current ratio of Clinton to Trump television-ad spending in battleground states is one to zero. (Data via NBC News, chart via the Washington Post.)

This sounds oddly familiar to me.  I wonder...wonder...where we've seen behaviors like this?

Cargo cults often develop during a combination of crises. Under conditions of social stress, such a movement may form under the leadership of a charismatic figure. This leader may have a "vision" (or "myth-dream") of the future, often linked to an ancestral efficacy ("mana") thought to be recoverable by a return to traditional morality.[1][3] This leader may characterize the present state as a dismantling of the old social order, meaning that social hierarchy and ego boundaries have been broken down.[4]...
Cargo cults are marked by a number of common characteristics, including a "myth-dream" that is a synthesis of indigenous and foreign elements; the expectation of help from the ancestors; charismatic leaders; and lastly, belief in the appearance of an abundance of goods.[7]
The indigenous societies of Melanesia were typically characterized by a "big man" political system in which individuals gained prestige through gift exchanges. The more wealth a man could distribute, the more people in his debt, and the greater his renown. Those who were unable to reciprocate were identified as "rubbish men". Faced, through colonialism, with foreigners with a seemingly unending supply of goods for exchange, indigenous Melanesians experienced "value dominance". That is, they were dominated by others in terms of their own (not the foreign) value system; exchange with foreigners left them feeling like rubbish men.[8]
Since the modern manufacturing process is unknown to them, members, leaders, and prophets of the cults maintain that the manufactured goods of the non-native culture have been created by spiritual means, such as through their deities and ancestors. These goods are intended for the local indigenous people, but the foreigners have unfairly gained control of these objects through malice or mistake.[9] Thus, a characteristic feature of cargo cults is the belief that spiritual agents will, at some future time, give much valuable cargo and desirable manufactured products to the cult members.[9]
Symbols associated with Christianity and modern Western society tend to be incorporated into their rituals; for example the use of cross-shaped grave markers. Notable examples of cargo cult activity include the setting up of mock airstrips, airports, offices, and dining rooms, as well as the fetishization and attempted construction of Western goods, such as radios made of coconuts and straw. Believers may stage "drills" and "marches" with sticks for rifles and use military-style insignia and national insignia painted on their bodies to make them look like soldiers, thereby treating the activities of Western military personnel as rituals to be performed for the purpose of attracting the cargo.[10] (From the Wiki on Cargo Cults)

The Dogs Bark But The Caravan Moves On

I really just felt like using this as a blog headline. I also considered

"There is a Tide..."  and "Bernie Or Bluster." I was really hoping to be able to use "Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it..." but, alas, he won't go.

His dead enders are still squalling around in the dkos diaries explaining to everyone how Bernie's genius plan is receiving plaudits and accolades from President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer (they have put a ban on mentioning Raul Grijalva and Elizabeth Warren who have become unpersons. Much the same way Hillary Clinton's actual name and status were treated as if she were Voldemort by Bernie himself). The obvious fact that the Democratic Party is regarding Bernie like the crying tantruming toddler at someone else's birthday, who must be offered the first piece of cake and an extra present just for showing up, is apparently beyond them.  But the entire discussion of political strategy and tactics in this election, if Bernie comes up,  has devolved into the kind of analysis and fatuous teen snark that enables the same people to tell you Hillary Clinton is a corporate whore of a war monger and also that she is a skilled and gracious politician whose lead should be followed by her voters because she has recognized Bernie's superior power, worth, and historical importance.  Some poor, innocent, soul put up Hillary Clinton's 2008 concession speech to Obama, with a few words changed so it could have been Bernie speaking, and his fervent fans swarmed it attacking the guy for having the temerity to suggest that Bernie would ever have any need to be gracious, that no person would ever have given such a speech, that Bernie's world historic run means he is above and outside the normal rules of good sportsmanship or campaigning.  The teenage snark part comes in when several Bernie supporters swarm the comments to chant "if she's won why are you still talking about him???"

Really the best comment on what is going on was written by some Clinton supporter with a long history with environmental groups. Unfortunately I can't locate it but he or she pointed out that the politics of the environmental groups can be split into those who followed the philosophy of Rachel Carson (we all want basically the same good things for each other and the planet and we need to make coalitions to get what we want together) and the Edward Abbey-niks who organized around the principle that most people were lazy, apathetic, ill informed, or indifferent and that environmental protection would happen only when a committed, aggressive, revolutionary band made it happen.  I'm paraphrasing, of course.  I think its obvious that the Bernie people, at least the most noisy of them, fall into the Abbey style of politics.  People from these two wings of political thought just can't really do politics together. For the Carson-ites/Hillary people, politics is about creating coalitions, discovering people's needs, working short term and long term to satisfy those needs while the Abbey/Bernie people are about big visions, large society wide changes, little attention to detail, no coalition building and no deviation from the original vision.  Hillary people prize winning and governing, Bernie people prize being right and staying on message, whatever real world events interfere. What strikes me about the Bernie people and their attitude towards the electorate is that they are simultaneously elitist and pseudo populist--they represent themselves, to themselves as being by and for "the people" but when the people reject them as they have in this primary, the people are found wanting and need to be dissolved. **

In the short and long run I don't think Bernie matters very much.  Sad to say because I am extremely progressive, myself, and I love the idea of an out and proud progressive Democratic Party, pursuing dominance in all fifty states.  But Bernie didn't have a clue how to make that happen--he's a visionary curmudgeon not a hard worker, down in the weeds, paragon of organizing.  Even his latest attempt at revolutionary relevance is nothing more than a rehash of Dean's 50 state strategy with added griftiness.  Is he fundraising off this page and off this gesture?

Bernie is announcing that he managed the incredible feat of putting up a web page that enables his supporters to click "I will run for office" or "I will volunteer" and he got 6,700 people to click a button.  This is all of a piece with earlier revolutionary acts by his supporters like "liking" Bernie's facebook page and keeping tabs on how many more likes they had than Hillary's facebook page. So who are these 6,700 people and what did they really "sign up" to do? Because if its 100 people in 67 college towns, all proposing to run for the same offices, they rather cancel each other out.  Don't get me wrong--I think its critically important that progressives commit to running for office, support each other, and build a better Democratic Party from the inside out.  But I don't think Bernie's "new" Congressional initiative is going to be the way it happens because I just don't think Bernie or his team can herd their own cats.  (I give Bernie and his team props for running a very successful campaign, but history is littered with pretty good campaigners and their teams, just as the cemeteries are full of indispensable men).

Bernie doesn't matter--or won't by the time the convention rolls around, because he sold the most excitable and unreliable and least informed voters in the country--young people--a bill of goods. He taught them that passion mattered more than strategy, that long distance goals were more important than short term goals, that attacking your allies and co-workers was a viable way to build alliances, that intensity matters more than numbers, that people who don't agree with you on tactics are identical to enemies who don't agree with you at all, that everyone but Bernie is corrupt and deceitful, and that ideological rigidity and boorish behavior is the same as honorable authenticity.  Its being reported that as we head into the convention Democratic voters are "coming home" to Hillary and that Bernie's own delegates are no-showing at the meetings where they would be helped to get housing and information about the convention.  If the rest of Bernie's campaign is any indication Bernie himself probably doesn't have the slightest idea how many of his troops will follow him into battle at the convention.  I wouldn't be surprised if Bernie ends up not showing up, for one specious reason or another, and if he doesn't his delegates won't either.  The purity pouting will be epic, biblical, and if his online supporters are any indication of the generally spiteful attitude towards the Democratic Party if Bernie sulks at home so will his delegates.  Its all of a piece with the "you'll miss me when I'm gone!" arguments the Bernie/Jill Stein wing has been making.


**The strong conviction that the Bernie voters (at least on Kos) have that they are both identical with "the people" and embattled against the people who actually voted, in a landslide, for Hillary Clinton, is what makes them simultaneously mawkish and aggressive.  They are, as I've observed elsewhere, perfect examples of Fred Clark's "persecuted hegemon."  They see themselves as a majority, or at least a majority of righteousness, and simultaneously as persecuted, misunderstood, and vulnerable.  Once you recognize that this is how they understand their position in US society and the Democratic primary everything that they do and say as they follow Bernie down the garden path makes sense. Especially their viciousness against Hillary and her voters.

Cross Posted at No More Mr. Nice Blog

On Herd Immunity

I've been reading over at Kos for the last few months--I know, I know! Crazy.  But I can't stop myself. I had to abandon other sites where I usually chew the cud with my internet friends because of all the Bernie Love and Hillary Hate.  Now that we are at the end of the primary, although apparently we need to hush until Bernie accepts reality, women and AA voters, and especially women AA voters, are coming out of the woodwork to celebrate and to express how angry they are that their votes and their voters have been attacked, harassed, doxxed, insulted, and ignored throughout this primary.  Its not going away.  Just today I was listening to Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me and Peter Sagal was doing some shtick about how boring, old, tedious, and lacking in charisma Hillary Clinton was. He paused for a moment and then said, pro forma "Of course, it was a historic moment" and the lone woman on the panel shouted "Hell yeah!" and the audience roared its approval of her.  They all then joined in to talk about marketing "clothespins" for people to wear on their noses when they "have" to vote for Clinton.

This is by way of observing that it is going to take a really long time--if ever--for liberal and progressive white men to grasp what is going on.  If dKos is any example we are going to have to endure a whole lot of white male gnashing of teeth, sobbing, special pleading, and complaints about how dull she is, and how frumpy, and how stiff.  And that's just from people who are going to support her!  As for the Bernie dead enders they are even worse--I could pull up some of these comments but what would be the point?  They go like this "I'm a white man who lives in a safe blue city in a safe blue state and I am personally offended by drones/climate change/rumor about Hillary/wall street and I must withold my <strikethrough>precious bodily fluid</strikethrough> from her and her minions.  You people--you other people--do what you have to do but I never will.  You can imagine this said either from behind the walls of a pillow fort or from atop a fainting couch.

I dislike both types--both the ones who are grudgingly giving her the vote, or acting like its just tacky to be uncool enough to vote for her wholeheartedly, and the Bernie or Buster single issue voters.  These people are relying on a kind of political herd immunity. They are like people who don't get a vaccine that might save their life from an epidemic illness and who simply count on everyone else getting the vaccine to lower the danger to themselves.  They know that Hillary and Bill and Obama and everyone else in the Democratic Party is going to raise the money, fight the fight, do the GOTV, and then fight to run the damned country regardless of their single vote.  And they either believe that Trump getting in won't affect them, or that the rest of us will work our hearts out for Hillary and get her over the finish line and we will keep fighting for progressive causes and they can bitch from the sidelines.

Years ago, when I was considering moving my family to Canada to save my children from having to grow up complicit in Bush's war crimes, someone on a blog pointed out that doing so was abandoning everyone else in the country, who couldn't move, to their fate.  That withdrawing might be possible, it might be convenient, it might be good for me and mine--but it was an abdication of my responsibility as a citizen and as a neighbor to all those who couldn't afford to move.  I have never forgotten this post, and this insight has informed my political attitude ever since.  I have to vote, and I have to vote in every election, not just on my own behalf, or on that of my children, but for people who are not able to vote here (non citizens in the US, the rest of the world, people in the US who are being denied their vote).  And I have to vote, specifically, with their needs in mind.  Because there are many of them, and they come in many kinds--my vote can never be all about any single issue. Certainly its not just going to be about the Oligarchs or the economy.

In this election season so far we have seen women and African American voters come out and vote solidly for Hillary Clinton.  She is running an intersectional, progressive, campaign that puts women's issues, and LGBTQ issues, and AA issues, front and center.  That is the fact of the matter.  People are telling us the are experiencing existential dread--I know I am!--if Donald Trump gets in because he is going to be horrible for all the kinds of people who make up this coalition.  And yet I see things like this all the time:

Democrats and progressives would be wise to listen to Tiabbi’s warning, but they won’t.  The nomination of Hillary Clinton and her Wall Street coterie will only be another 4 years of paying lip service to progressive reform.   Worse, it will stunt the youthful idealism that Bernie tapped into, which is the future of the party.
Rather than treating Trump’s destruction of the GOP as an opportunity to continue the status quo, the Democrats should learn a lesson from it. The old, toothless GOP is gone, and in its place is something far more formidable — a re-awakening American nationalism and an awareness that the American worker has gotten a raw deal from corporate globalism.    Rather than dismissing Donald Trump with tired accusations of bigotry , why not address some of the real issues he has raised affecting national security and the economy?   Bernie was trying to do this, and Clinton, for many reasons, is incapable of it.  Ironically, with Bernie gone, the best outcome for progressives may be a Trump victory in November.    

This guy may be a troll but there are plenty of others, including Matt Taibbi who he is riffing off of, who make essentially the same argument.  I think it is because right wing has done a great job of causing people to forget 8 years of Bush.  And the left wing has helped by concentrating fire on Obama and on Clinton rather than on Bush and the Republicans.  Obama was castigated for not being able to fix all of Bush's mistakes, Hillary for being SOS to Obama (and thus part of the establishment cabal) and for participating in Bush's Iraq War.  But everything else that happened under Bush--the economic dislocation, the racism, the war on women is ignored in this story as it is ignored as it is happening right now.   We can't let the soi disant progressive left or last bastion of hipster white boy power do to Hillary Clinton what they have happily done to Barack Obama.  That is: support them (whether weakly or strongly) during the campaign when it is expedient to do so and then sabotage them immediately upon election.

So I'm going to go back to this notion of herd immunity and beg people to think before they selfishly vote their ego.  For herd immunity to work, for the most vulnerable parts of our body politic to be protected from disease, everyone who can get the vaccine must get the vaccine. Babies, children, old people, pregnant women, sick people--these are all people who have compromised or vulnerable immune systems. Often they can't get the vaccine.  They rely on herd immunity to protect them from epidemic diseases sweeping through society.  Anyone who is healthy enough to receive the vaccine owes it to everyone around them to take it.  Anyone who has the freedom to vote, the ability to vote, the luxury to vote owes it to the rest of us to vote in this election, for the Democratic nominee. The health and safety of the entire country depends on it.

Cross posted at No More Mr Nice Blog

Many Great Changes At the Last Possible Minute

SO: I'm going to Social Work School for my Masters.  It seems like I'm going backwards since I already have a Ph.D. But I could not be more excited. Yesterday I walked six miles in to town to my new future school, and by dint of wandering walked the rest of the way home for a grand total of 11.5.  I've been drivin in and out taking my daughters to events at Aimai's New Future Alma Mater (ANFAM) for years but as I walked the extremely windy streets yesterday I saw everything with new eyes.  Imagine! Soon I'll be one of these scurrying hordes!  I'm very, very, excited.  I feel like I'm coming out of a period of hibernation.  At the same time today I had baby group and I realized that I might have to give it up. It will probably conflict with my internship next year.  I've been doing this group for four years and, increasingly, the work has gotten more intense and more meaningful as the women in the group (especially those on their second child) have really come to rely on the group and on my co-facilitator and myself for advice and comfort.  I am having a hard time figuring out how to write about the issues that come up in group, since they are quite private.  I think I'll have to take all that offline.  But today a parent came in who had disclosed to the group a few weeks ago just how hard a time she'd been having with her child, just how frustrated she was. We--well, I because I was soloing--gave her the best counsel I could. Everyone pitched in and really kicked the issues around with her.   This week she came back alone, since her mother-in-law was looking after her children--just to embrace me, sit next to me, and give back to the group some of her experiences since she had broken so many barriers and taboos and confessed her problems to them. She told us that she had been afraid that she had crossed a line and told us too much.  But that our response to her had enabled her to really talk to her husband and start to advocate for herself to get the help she needed.  And though she'd been afraid even to come back to group after being so exposed she knew she could trust us to welcome her back.  I was really surprised and touched because she walked into the room as group had already started and I waved to her and she came all the way around and just threw her arms around me, passionately, and told me how much it meant to her to be in group with us.

Where Hillary is Really Going With All This Loving Kindness Stuff

So, its going to be Trump (angry white people spoiling for a fight and desperate for security) and Hillary (a mixed group of Obama voters and depressed/angry/selfish self proclaimed leftist purity trolls and Sander's voters).* Trump is going to be wildly successful. His patented combination of fascist seduction and prosperity gospel makes him very, very, hard to beat.  He's not only promising to "make America Great Again" but to bring back jobs galore. I've heard him exhorting his fans to "get greedy!" because he's "going to make them all rich."  

This, needless to say, is not so much a political argument so much as it is a double helping of cake and ice-cream, laced with quaaludes and coke, and the promise that there will be no headache or vomiting tomorrow. Because its all promise and no policy it can't really be rebutted by another political figure. It doesn't resolve itself into an argument such as I will/will not build a wall at Mexico's expense. Or I will/will not raise taxes to pay for my policies. 

Trump doesn't have to say anything specific, or at any rate his voters don't want him to and will instantly forget anything he does promise.  The thing is that Trump, like Disney, is a <i>destination event</i>.  Being a Trump voter <i>is</i> the achievement. What Trump himself does or promises to do isn't relevant. Its how he makes his voters feel about their future and the future of the country.  

Steve M. made this argument with reference to anti Trump advertising and I think he is absolutely correct. You can't undermine Trump by referring to him or discussing him. His voters adore him, and they feel good just looking at things that remind them of him. His name, his hats, his ridiculous hair.  You have to expect that, like any addict, his voters are very well defended against anything that undercuts their addiction. That even the shabby opium dens and crack filled streets where they get their fix is, in its own way, a triggering and pleasurable memory for them.  They will wallow in their own vomit while congratulating themselves on having the time of their lives.  I have no doubt that in the long run people will remember the way they felt at Trump rallies very happily, whether he wins or not. Its a peak experience for his voters--finally a feeling of being spoken of, being spoken for, after what feels like a lifetime of being ignored and silenced. Trump's voters are like the miserable kids who got beat up every day at school when the jock finally adopts them as a pet.  They will put up with any amount of bad treatment from Trump or whoever Trump appoints as a surrogate, and they will protect Trump with everything they have.  

I think that HRC can beat Trump with the Obama coalition, and she seems to me to be on track to hold it together. After all, as I have to keep explaining to people who are not keeping up, Clinton and Obama both lost the white male vote (or the white vote entirely I keep forgetting).  HRC can win just with the Obama coalition even if she loses most of the white vote again. But she can't lose it all. And she probably still has to play for some portion of the Republican vote--those mythical people who are supposedly repulsed by Donald's racism, jingoism, intemperate behavior, boorishness, and recklessness. Of course for the most part they don't actually have a problem with the racism, jingoism, militarism or even the anti elitism.  But Trump is going to ratchet tension up until there is literal blood in the streets between his supporters and any minority person out there. And then he is going to gin up a race war to be the retroactive excuse for his racist pandering. Its going to be all “see what you made us do” all the time. He's got nothing to lose with this strategy.  Trumps voters will never abandon him--they will rationalize away whatever they have to in order to keep getting their fix from Trump.  Accusations that his campaign or his voters attacked some Black Students? It will all be seen as a lie or just Hillary's brand of bare knuckles partisanship.  These people are skilled at ignoring any reality they don't like. And they don't want to be unsold from the Donald experience.  

But there are probably a few Republicans who are not going to be able to stomach that. Some of them are old line Republicans, actual conservatives, or people with a stake in the system. Still others might be those recently flipped Democrats in MA who might end up coming back to the fold after the fever passes.  The thing about Trump is he's an acquired taste. He's like a virus you catch if your immune system is already weak.  If you've been powerless so long that this looks like success to you, you are a gonner. But if you come from slightly higher up the social scale, or you are not so scared, you never fall for this stuff at all. So for those on the fence, or possibly in recovery from the Trump fever, what do we need to do? They need a reason and a socially acceptable method to refuse to vote for him. 

Our only hope is if HRC can hold on to the Obama coalition, and ride a wave of specifically anti trump fervor, while also assuaging the fears of the sliver of Republican voters who will sit out the election even if they don’t cross over. In other words regardless of the provocation or the cries from the most left fringe that she become abusive to Trump or his voters she has to take the position (which, btw,she is already taking) of welcoming defectors and promising good treatment to everyone.

Trumpers are in the throes of a self justifying fury–every single thing that rebuts their love affair or attacks their love object is going to just harden their determination to crawl over broken glass to defend him and vote for him.  Trump is like some mythic monster who only grows stronger the more you throw at him.  Only by lowering the tension and fear for (some) of them can we overcome them.  And this, of course, is exactly what Hillary is doing with her "make America whole" and a return to purpose and kindness. This is not an argument from weakness--its extending an olive branch to Trump voters in the same way that promising not to torture and kill captured soldiers encourages them to surrender. 

*Which, to the extent they post furiously over at dkos about how Kissinger or the TPP or her imminent arrest by the FBI will doom Hillary, probably will still be typing furiously on election day and not bother to get out to vote anyway. Hillary is going to have to go after the disaffected Republican voters, those for whom the open racism and jingoism of Trump is kind of too much, even though they probably agree with a lot of what he is saying (the racism and the jingoism and the anti elite stuff). 

The Clockwise Solution

When my groundbreaking, best selling, future masterpiece "The One Secret of Extremely Successful Aimais" hits the stand I want you all to know I've shared it with you here, first.  I am experimenting with what you might call a Clockwise solution to a linear life. Here's the method.  When you get up from whatever you are doing (writing, lunching, doing laundry, answering email) simply proceed in a clockwise direction.  After lunch I pick up my bowl and go to the kitchen, rinse the bowl and pick up something that needs to go upstairs, take it upstairs and throw in a load of laundry, pick up the thing upstairs that needs to do downstairs, bring it downstairs and move something from the front room to the dining room where I'm working, sit down and do twenty minutes of work before getting back up and wandering on to the next thing, repeat until I've circumnavigated the house and completed all my tasks.

Better To Reign In Hell

 Recently someone sent me one of those articles that circulates on each side of the divide Sanders/Clinton meant to show that one candidate is full on evil, or has no chance of winning the general election.  These, of course, are two different arguments although they can begin to blend together.  Will Hillary lose the general election because she is so evil and stupid that she took money for speeches from Goldman Sachs?*  Will she be a terrible President because she, like Obama, was in the position of trying to clean up the uncleanable mess that the Bush regime left us in the Middle East? The person who sent me the article is really on the fence about the two candidates, seeking insight into both who they are, in an existential sense, and how other respected people view them. The article in question was Sachs' attack on Hillary for failing to do the obviously right thing in Syria.  Apparently there was no one else involved in our decisions about Syria, no Obama, no France, no Turkey or everyone else who was involved was already lined up along an obvious cline from evil to good and we should have known better than to work with X country because they were more malevolent than Y country.

Syria is not my beat and I'm not interested in refighting this fight or even discussing the ins and outs. I want to talk about what is behind the forwarding of these emails and this kind of information.  The person who forwarded this email to my friend is virulently opposed to HRC.  Reading this kind of article is meant to tell us that HRC is irremediably evil, that she made the wrong decision in Syria because she is malevolently disposed to be pro Israel, pro Saudi, and anti Iran.  Therefore, she can't run the US.  Because: evil.

I must be the most evil person in the world--and I quite possibly am--because I don't think that anyone who gets elected to be President of this country isn't, on some level, going to be evil to someone.  The whole fucking country is evil.  We are an empire and every decision we make--whether opening our borders or closing them, shipping jobs overseas or keeping them here, zoning laws no zoning laws, amnesty or no amnesty, will end up harming some non negligible number of people.  Every decision has its downside.  I'm not making a reactionary argument against progress a la A. O. Hirschman-that is that every progressive action brings about the potential for a perverse, futile, or dangerous backlash.  I'm simply observing that even an apparently benign decision or choice, when it affects 300 million people, has enormous costs and knock on effects that can, because of sheer quantity, have some deleterious results.  The overproduction of Greek Yogurt, for fuck's sake, has resulted in metric tons of whey being thrown into a sewer system that can't handle it.  There are basically no innocent actions in an overpopulated world.

Every election cycle, for some number of people (however tiny) there is some savior figure who offers us the chance, supposedly, to set the world aright, to fix what is broken, to move forward in a way that fundamentally changes things for the better. On the Republican side, right now, that's Trump.  On our side right now that is popularly supposed to be Sanders.  I think Trump has a better shot at it than Sanders because Trump's America is pretty much the one we've got: a dangerous, imperialistic, globe spanning, Gargantua of a state with limited empathy for it own citizens, and almost none for people who are non citizens.  A state riven with racism, sexism, ageism, contempt for the weak and for the ill.  A state run by oligarchs for the benefit of the wealthiest while the lower class struggle for scraps and crumbs from the table and fight each other using race, religion, sexual orientation, and personal history.  Trump has an excellent shot at giving his voters something of what he promises them--bread, circuses, and lots of people thrown to the lions.  I less certain about Sanders' chances.

 I suppose I sound like Sanders speaks for me, don't I?  Absolutely. I agree with Sander's assumptions about the US.  But I don't agree that the presidency is the place where decisions that can change that get made.  I don't think that Sanders is the guy to make any kind of successful change in the composition of the State.  At best he can stand athwart it and shout "stop" but its not designed for the President to be able to do much more than let his own moral impulses speak on things under his executive control.  And, perhaps, if he's very skillful and very persuasive and plays well with others he can influence enough down ticket races to have a chance to make some bigger, more long term, changes.

We've actually had one of the most moral people in our history as a people as President for the last seven years. In year eight how is that working out for him and for us?  He's done enormously important things--things for which I regard him as a second FDR.  He's been enormously patient with his attackers, and he has fought them strategically to get whatever he can get done, done.  He has brought thousands of good people into government through his appointments (when they weren't blocked), and he has inspired millions to vote and to engage with government at every level.  Is Sanders going to do that?  Is he going to do it more effectively than Obama?  I doubt it. Because neither Sanders nor his supporters grasps that in between all that inspiring and executive actioning falls the shadow of just keeping this enormous, craptacular, imperium, running.

OK, sez my emailing friend of a friend, by why take dirty, worn out old Hillary who has had a finger in the evil empire pie all these years?  Will she do any better? Well, yes, I think she will.  Syria won't stop blowing up because Sanders gets into power and I don't think he has any better ideas of what to do next than she does.  In fact I think he has less.  I don't share my friend's Manichean thinking on foreign policy--there are many wrong things to do that seem right, or seem necessary, at the moment.  And decisions have to be made in the moment.  Will she do better for our citizens (and non citizens) here at home?  I am pretty sure she will.  She has already advanced concrete plans on both health care and crises like Flint that are achievable, measurable, doable.  Call me a small bore person but I'll take small steps to a better world over large pratfalls.

 When I look at the choice between HRC and Sanders I'm actually agnostic.  I'd be happy with either. But I'm not unhappy with HRC because she's been to this rodeo before and she isn't promising to wave a magic wand and make America something it has never been: just, fair, and running on renewable energy.  I see the person who takes the presidency as someone who is agreeing to run Hell for a term that shall not exceed 8 years.  Perhaps I should leave it at that.









*Campos,  Booman and John Cole all seem to believe this was some kind of screaming fatal flaw because "she should have known" that working with the power elite in this country for the period between being Secretary of State and running again for President would be used against her.  I think this is the dumbest argument I've ever seen advanced against a major political actor--one who has famously used the money raised at these things to back the Clinton Foundation and to support down ticket races.

8 Years Ago Tomorrow. It Still Seems Relevant.

Your Mumia sweatshirt won’t get you into heaven anymore

A comment left over at digg regarding Ralph Nader:

The Democrats really hate Nader because he points out the fact that they are asking those of us on the left to vote for them but they aren’t doing anything for us. Did they end funding for the Republican’s crime spree in Iraq? No. Have they moved for UHC? No. Have they tried to stop corporate crimes? No. Have they tried to reform the tax code to be progressive? No. Have they tried to protect homeowners from predatory lenders? No. Have they defended our constitutional rights? No. Take back the FDA from the corporations? No. The FCC? No.
The Democrats don’t deserve my vote. They aren’t helping the left, why should the left help them?

Let me see if I can explain it this way: 

Every year in Happy Gumdrop Fairy-Tale Land all of the sprites and elves and woodland creatures gather together to pick the Rainbow Sunshine Queen. Everyone is there: the Lollipop Guild, the Star-Twinkle Toddlers, the Sparkly Unicorns, the Cookie Baking Apple-cheeked Grandmothers, the Fluffy Bunny Bund, the Rumbly-Tumbly Pupperoos, the Snowflake Princesses, the Baby Duckies All-In-A-Row, the Laughing Babies, and the Dykes on Bikes. They have a big picnic with cupcakes and gumdrops and pudding pops, stopping only to cast their votes by throwing Magic Wishing Rocks into the Well of Laughter, Comity, and Good Intentions. Afterward they spend the rest of the night dancing and singing and waving glow sticks until dawn when they tumble sleepy-eyed into beds made of the purest and whitest goose down where they dream of angels and clouds of spun sugar. 

You don’t live there. 

Grow the fuck up.

--Tbogg!

Why I'm Voting For the Nominee

Why I'm Voting For the Nominee

Before its too late I thought I'd get my licks in.

Why I'm voting for the Nominee. I am avoiding watching any TV, or attending any rallies for any of our candidates, because I really don't care which of them gets the nomination. I will vote for the nominee, donate to the nominee, work my heart out for the nominee. I'm actually agnostic as to which I prefer because I don't think either of them is as good as they say, or as bad as their critics pretend they are. But having said that, because I'm voting for the nominee, I'm also, in essence, voting for the Democratic party as it is currently consistuted. Not as I wish it were consituted. Not as a perfect liberal dream of a Democratic Party, but also not as an obstacle to be overcome. You go to an election with the party you have, not the party you wish you had. I need my future President to share my values and goals, and to promise to work hard for women's rights, minority rights, climate change, and a whole lot of things. But I also need a savvy infighter, someone who knows the ropes and knows where some of the bodies are buried. Because in the best case scenario, the one where we manage as a party to retake the House and Senate, or just the Senate, even a holding action is going to require some incredible negotiating skill, parliamentary maneuvering, and ability to lay off the slagging and trash talking. Is that too small bore? Too merely “liberal” and not progressive enough for you? Sorry to be so practical and down to earth. Sorry to talk in prose when some want poetry. Sorry to be an incrementalist. No doubt these are all dirty words. But the reality of our political system is that no savior from outside of the party, no holy fool* with excited rallies but no tolerance for minutiae is going to be able to wring anything from the choked sewer that is our political system. You need a forensic plumber (hat tip Miles Vorkosigan) not a hand grenade. I'm reminded of something some commenter said to Ralph Nader during his run for the Presidency. “Ralph,” she said (and I'm paraphrasing here) “You are like a great pair of shoes that I really want, but which are too expensive and I know they are going to pinch if I buy them. I want them, but I can't afford them.” If I imagine that the Presidency is like being King for four years, I'm excited for Bernie. When I remember that a far more skillful political actor, a deeper political thinker, and a younger and stronger person named Barack Obama just tried to run the actual office of President for 7 years, and what happened to his attempts, I despair for the Bernie victory. I think he can win. But I don't think we can afford him. But I don't think he has the temperament or the skill to work with the party apparatus, state by state, congressional district by congressional district, to get anything done. Not a few limited things. Anything.

Cross Posted at No More Mr. Nice Blog

What I'm Reading

I'm still in process with a few things that I pick up and put down.  On the side of more serious reading on race, history, and ethnicity I'm also reading some kinds of pop psych books on the brain or the emotions.  I'm having a hard time reading some books in public, in the age of Trump, because I feel like anyone seeing me will think I'm reading things like "The Rise and Fall of the White Republic" or "Whiteness of a Different Color" because I'm a proponent of white supremacism.  On the other hand the pop psych books I've been buying have caused Amazon (the only artificial intelligence that actually knows what I'm buying and reading) to think that I'm an abused child who needs a divorce.  Right now I'm reading In Sheep's Clothing: Understanding and Dealing with Manipulative People which is surprisingly thought provoking, Lundy's Why Does He Do That which is a really famous book about abusive relationships, and He Wins/She Wins which is a thin, shallow, book about negotiations within marriage.  These are all issues which come up in the baby group or when you are talking to new parents or even when you are talking to your teenagers and thinking about how to help them understand other people's motivations.  Oh, I'm also reading a book "Difficult Conversations" by the Harvard Negotiating Project, the people who brought us "Getting To Yes."  I don't have much to say about that right now except that I think the very premise that discussions between business or contract partners can be understood in the same terms as discussions between family members is absurd.  They just don't belong in the same book because the moral terms that apply between the parties are so very different.

Today in Babeez 1

I have been co-facilitator of a drop in New Parents Group for about four years.  This is a surprisingly interesting thing to be doing and is the catalyst for my decision to apply to Social Work school.  Recently I've noticed that things that I've said to our parents, as they are wrestling with some classic new parent issues, have really resonated and I decided I should start marking them down in case I need them again.  Feel free to skip these posts if they are not your thing.

A week or so ago we were having a discussion of breast feeding and baby led weaning.  This is a remarkably stressful process for some people because you are sometimes just getting the hang of nursing when society, or the baby, or both, start pushing you to substitute solid foods.  Sometimes this is before you are ready, and sometimes this is after you are really ready to drop the whole breast feeding on demand thing.  But its a very difficult moment for a lot of parents because there is so much emotion attached to this new relationship of dependence and interdependence.  Usually we let the other parents take the lead in discussing these things but I decided to throw in my two cents which was this.  Its all about weaning. Its always about weaning.  From the moment the child is born right up through their adolescence and, indeed, all the way up to your own senescence.  We think its all about feeding and caring for the child, and it is largely about that. But almost from the middle of the first year it also becomes about weaning.  In the Kabbalah there is a midrash about how the world comes to be. Before the world was created there was only the creator, filling every corner and every available space with its own divine being.  In order to bring the world into existence the creator had to withdraw into itself and create an empty space, a womb, in which a new kind of creation could come into being.  Just the way we have to create a space for the baby to grow.  And once the new being comes into existence we have to keep up this process of encircling and withdrawing, protecting while creating space, so that this new being can grow and thrive apart from us.  This was an enormous hit with all the mommies and we all had a good cry.


This week we were talking about one woman's struggle with her spouse over breast feeding--there is definitely a theme here.  She had just mastered it when they went out to dinner and had spicy food. The next two days the baby has fought the breast and been very uncomfortable and unhappy when nursing.  What had been a very joyful, intimate, experience has suddenly become fraught with anxiety for her.  When she told her husband she was worried about breast feeding, concerned about the baby, she said he became "very logical" and instantly explained to her that "in the worst case scenario" they would "just switch the baby to formula" and the baby would be "just fine." Inexplicably she was both furious with him (since it was a perfectly reasonable thing to say) and also very discomfited and embarrassed.  She kept excusing herself to us saying he "was so logical" and "rational" and her concerns were so "emotional" and came from "inside" somewhere "deep" and (perhaps) beyond words or irrational.  Since she divided things up in this way she was at a loss in how to address the issue.  I'm pretty familiar with this dynamic and we see it very frequently in this parents group where many of the women are married to engineers or scientists who self identify as (supposedly) relentlessly "logical" and "rational" which leaves the women (who are often themselves scientists, mathematicians, and engineers) somehow left holding the short end of a binary stick.  Its also a discussion I have had with my own spouse (blessed be his name) when he tries to problem solve for me.  In fact we just had this discussion when he remarked to me that his own mother had rejected his perfectly reasonable suggestions for how to deal with a knotty problem.  "Why," he said, somewhat wonderingly "she said the same things you always say to me...if it were that easy I would have solved it already myself!"

Its harder than you think when you start writing these things, by the way, to capture the back and forth--I told the woman in our group that it was not accurate to label her position as "emotional" and his as "rational" or logical. And not correct for her to self label her position as responding emotionally or inappropriately to a logical problem.  Nor was it correct to say that he had a rational/logical response to the same problem.   They have each diagnosed a different problem: he sees the problem as purely nutritional and it can be "fixed" (he thinks) with formula. She sees the problem as one of a relationship between herself, the breast milk, and the feeding of the infant.  There's a possibility that there is something wrong with the baby that the discomfort and discontinuing of the breastfeeding relationship is a sign of.  To "fix" this problem you don't just switch the kid to formula (breaking off the breast feeding relationship and possibly damaging the supply).  You'd need to investigate different aspects of feeding first.  

Its not correct to divide these two arguments into rational/irrational, non emotional/emotional, or logical/illogical.  Both parents are afraid that the child is sick or the feeding situation is untenable.  One member, the father, is trying to handle his fears by retreating behind a simulacrum of "logic and rationality" and the other, the mother, was using a different but perfectly logical and rational approach to resolving her problem (the feeding situation in totality).

One of our second time around mom's then pitched in to the discussion to point out that breastfeeding has a kind of urgent quality to it--as you get more and more engorged you become frantic and finding some way to relieve that feeling through feeding or pumping becomes necessary.  I pointed out that it was more like a ticking time bomb scenario than a purely cut and dried restaurant situation.  Which goes back to the difference in the original husband/wife approaches to breastfeeding problems.  Only one of the two experiences a sense of physical urgency and relief during the feeding process.  Although they can both, of course, be anxious and fearful about how its going.

So many women came up to tell me how great these analogies were after group that I thought I'd better write them down before I forgot them.

Where I've Been

Well, I've been very busy. In a slow, almost catatonic way.  Imagine a pacarana slowly lumbering up to near running speed.  Recently my youngest child has been diagnosed with both anxiety and depression as well as a specific phobia for bugs.  Managing her anxiety, and my anxiety over her anxiety,  has become almost a full time job.  And at the same time the iron has entered my soul and I have realized that I need to get a move on, as a post maternal person, and begin life outside the house and outside my role as parent.  So today I have all but completed and submitted my application to an MSW program.  This has revealed a huge rift between Mr. Aimai and myself on an important subject: commas.  The poor guy has been editing my work, and falling asleep over it, since graduate school when I found him passed out on the couch having tried to read and edit my 540 page dissertation.  This time around he only had to read an eight page "personal statement" and he was kind enough to actually look up the rules on commas.  He painstakingly put them in only to have me reject about a quarter of them as just wrong. Even though, presumably, he is correct.  So if I don't get into the SW program of my choice I will have no one but myself to blame.  However, I intend to blame him. And his commas.

Oh Frabjous Day! I'm back in my own account.

This doesn't mean anything to anyone but me but thank the google gods and I am back in my blog account and can start blogging again.