Maybe I’m still woozy from the flu, but the news from Washington seems particularly high in comedic value this week. Yesterday the headlines were full of Donald Rumsfeld telling us that we’re in danger from “a new type of fascism.” Why yes, Don, we are, though I’m surprised you would come right out and admit it like that. Oh wait, he’s talking about somebody else.
Today I learn that Torture President is starting a big speechmaking tour around the country to convince everyone that Iraq is a huge success. This gives me an idea on what to do about that $50 rhododendron I planted in my parents’ yard and then forgot to water so it died: I’ll draft a kickass speech announcing that, all appearances to the contrary, the rhododendron is actually alive, and that what may have looked like my failure to water it was in fact a finely-tuned strategy to coax the shrub into building its own inner strength. I’ll deliver the speech at key locations in the yard, in my parents’ living room, possibly in their kitchen. That’ll do it.
Posted by Violet under Politics, Just Impeach the Stupid Freak on August 31, 2006, 9:33 am EST
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This is one of those posts where the title pretty much says everything I want to say. Take all the headlines over the Karr clusterfuck, add crushed ice, top off with Montebello Original Long Island Iced Tea Cocktail®, and that’s what you get.
Posted by Violet under Various and Sundry on August 30, 2006, 4:13 am EST
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The only reason to read Rolling Stone is Matt Taibbi (whose sublime smackdown of The World Is Flat in the New York Press remains the single funniest book review I’ve ever read in my life. Alas, the link is dead. Long live the link!) Actually I still don’t read Rolling Stone, even for Taibbi: my bonus subscription issues pile up in the wing chair in the kitchen, the half-naked women on the covers (why oh why oh why) leering at no one but the cat. But Taibbi’s recent column on the DLC showed up in the Daou Report, so I read it online: Democrats walk themselves to the gallows.
His central thesis, buried appropriately in the center of the article, boils down as follows:
“The Democratic Party has been operating for two decades without the active participation of its voters.”
“It raised money by appealing directly to companies in private fundraisers, and it used the commercial media to enforce its policy positions, in particular its desire to ‘clearly reject our antiwar wing,’ as Al From put it a few years back. It’s a simple formula for running one-half of American politics; you decide on John Kerry two years before the presidential vote, raise him $200 million bucks, and let CNN and The New York Times take care of any Howard Deans who might happen to pop up in the meantime. The same greased track is being prepared for Hillary Clinton right now, and we can be quite sure that guns are already being aimed at Russell Feingold.”
“The unspoken subtext of this increasingly bitter debate between the Democratic Party establishment and the supporters of people like Ned Lamont and Hillary Clinton’s antiwar challenger, Jonathan Tasini, is a referendum ordinary people have unexpectedly decided to hold on the kingmaker’s role of the holy trinity of the American political establishment — big business, the major political parties and the commercial media. “
Of course you could argue that the Republican party is also run by power brokers who dictate to their voters, but the difference is that their voters like very much what’s being dictated. They totally get off on that godbaggism and racism and xenophobia. And they definitely get involved — they worship Bush in church and have meetings in the Christian fellowship hall about how important it is to vote for torturers and war criminals so that Amurka will be protected from the evil brown demons.
Democratic voters, on the other hand, mostly vote Democrat because it’s better than voting Republican. That’s pretty much the rationale right there. It’s not like the party actually stands for anything or the leadership actually reflects anything people care about. In fact, they ought to just change the name: instead of the Democratic Party, it should be the Not-Republican Party.
My question is about what Taibbi refers to as the “referendum ordinary people have unexpectedly decided to hold.” He’s talking about bloggers — hey, I’m a blogger! — and other grassroots movements, though I’ve noticed that there’s a disturbing Invasion of the Body Snatchers effect at work. One excessively popular Democratic blogger (and you know who I mean) has been entirely co-opted by a pod from the DLC, and my emails from Move On are increasingly indistinguishable from the emails I get from Howard Dean, who used to be a rebel but is now…the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. One of these days I’m going to open my email and see Donald Sutherland’s face with his mouth open in a huge scream.
Posted by Violet under Politics on August 27, 2006, 4:29 pm EST
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So, I’ve been sick. (Yes, it’s me, Violet. I’ve wrested control of my body from The Virus, which has retreated to my lymph nodes where it is lurking quietly.) I got online again today for the first time in awhile, and lo and behold if Forbes (the Home Page for Rich White Assholes) hasn’t launched a shitstorm by publishing an article entitled, quaintly, “Don’t Marry Career Women.” The gist of the piece is that women with their own incomes are no good at fulfilling those essential wifely functions of valet, maid, cook, nurse, and personal sex servant to their owners husbands (the same author also has a piece up doing a cost benefit analysis on wives versus prostitutes). Forbes’ advice is that the savvy man should avoid those uppity career gals and get himself somebody who has no recourse but to barter her body and labor in exchange for a roof over her head. The unspoken message to any little ladies who might pick up a copy of the magazine after the menfolk have finished reading it is that if they want to catch a man, they’d better be as dumb, pliant, and dependent as possible.
Now, here’s the fucking thing, if you’ll pardon my language: I was reading this exact same crap while I was sick — except it was in a book called Inside the Victorian Home.
In 1844 Ann Richelieu Lamb summarized the purpose of marriage: “Man…seeks to find in his wife, a sort of upper servant, or female valet, who is to wait upon him, attend to his wants, instinctively anticipate his wishes, and study his comfort, and who is to live for the sole purpose of seeing him well-fed, well-lodged, and well-pleased!”
Countless books and articles reinforced the notion that this was what women were for, and that the great danger of education for women was that it would render them fundamentally unfit for life — or rather, for wifehood, which was woman’s destiny. Charlotte Yonge’s novel The Daisy Chain hammered the point home with the tale of an intelligent, bookish girl who devotes herself to her studies, neglecting the all-important housework that is her proper focus as a female. Her concerned family nips this in the bud. Afraid that she will become “odd, eccentric and blue,” they command her to give up Latin and Greek. Her own brother tells her, “I assure you, Ethel, it is really time for you to stop, or you would get into a regular learned lady, and be good for nothing.” Ethel sees the light, gives up her aspirations, and devotes herself to sewing.
In the same era, William Rathbone Greg railed against women who earned their own living, arguing that this was contrary to woman’s proper function of “completing, sweetening, and embellishing the existence of others…” Servants were exempt from his criticism, because “they fulfill both essentials of a woman’s being; they are supported by, and they minister to, men.”
Apparently the Forbes article was originally illustrated with an image of an unkempt house, showing what happens when wives get all uppity: they sleep with other men, they refuse to do the housework, and the goddamn potato chip crumbs just pile up. The Forbes people have removed the illustration, but this color plate from Inside the Victorian Home does just as well:
The painting is from the triptych Past and Present (1858) by Augustus Egg, depicting the downward trajectory of the adulterous woman. See what a mess the house is? Food on the floor, kids playing with cards, probably potato chip crumbs somewhere.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. I tell you, folks, this kind of shit just makes me want to go right back to bed.
Posted by Violet under Various and Sundry, Recommended on August 24, 2006, 4:57 pm EST
13 Comments »
Your host, The Virus.
Greetings, humans!
Last night, as I was lying in bed waiting for Socks to die, I began planning my first post as the new owner of the blog. I wondered how it would go — would people welcome me? would they resent me for killing Socks? — so you can imagine how encouraged I felt when I went to the computer today and saw that people had already anticipated my debut and were actually waiting for me to appear. Cool! So, here’s the new plan for the blog:
Less feminism, less politics, more posts on Mass Murderers in Viral History. First up: Jonas Salk. What was with that guy? What motivates a person to want to kill millions of innocent viruses? Was it his upbringing? A bad mother? Repressed homosexuality? Discuss.
I’m hoping you’ll all enjoy the new focus. I’m probably not quite as snappy a writer as Socks, but she’s dead* so who cares.
*Almost.
Posted by The Virus under Reclusive Leftist on August 19, 2006, 8:10 pm EST
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To those of you who have kindly inquired about my continued existence: I’m delighted to report that I’m still alive. Unfortunately, the same is true of the virus that has infested my body and is currently locked in a death match with my soul for ultimate possession of the physical host. I’ll try to post something tomorrow. Assuming I win.
In the meantime, Richard asked for another weird picture of a ballet dancer, so here you go:
Posted by Violet under Various and Sundry on August 17, 2006, 3:36 pm EST
8 Comments »
That’s the question on my mind as I contemplate this news of an astounding plot to blow up the Concorde with a giant carry-on bag full of nail polish remover white-out some unspecificed dangerous liquid. Or whatever the plot was. Anyway, the reason I ask, of course, is that last month our government pretended that it had foiled a plot to flood Manhattan with nail polish remover white-out the Hudson River, which wasn’t actually, you know, true. So I’m just wondering.
Posted by Violet under Politics on August 11, 2006, 8:50 am EST
10 Comments »
or Why Dr. Socks is in a Bad Mood.
Over at Salon the letter writers are discussing men’s increasing demand for women to shave their vulvas.
If you’re a woman, you know that this is true:
It *is* a big deal to get waxed if you don’t want to do it…it hurts, it’s invasive, it’s expensive, and I don’t feel like doing it.
If you’re a man, on the other hand, you probably think that spending $50 to have some stranger rip your pubes out by the roots and leave you with boils and a rash that won’t go down for weeks is as simple as putting your hair up in a ponytail:
You wouldn’t dump a guy who asks you to put your hair up instead of wearing it down. Why dump men who prefer a closely groomed pubic region over a haphazard, wild bush? It’s a simple personal preference. Your extreme reaction to their preference suggests that more may be going on in your mind than explained in your letter.
So, my question is: why are men so fucking stupid? Well, as that first letter-writer points out:
I think what bums me out the most is that women permit this to happen because they keep the means of production completely obscured and make things seem easy and low-maintenance that aren’t even remotely easy or low-maintenance.
True enough; concealing the means of production is what women have been doing for thousands of years. And we’re still at it. Though I gotta wonder: if I can read articles and learn that Brazilian waxing is a torment worthy of Torquemada, why can’t men do the same? Does their reading comprehension drop to zero when the subject is the pain women endure in order to be suitable sexbots?
And then of course there’s this:
I have a friend who is one of the few women I’ve known to dally with much younger men (she’s gorgeous, rich, late 40’s). Her boy toys are in their 20’s. She has reported to me that she detects the influence of porn in the younger generation. The sex is more like performing an imitation of the visuals in your head. The men are less present, she says, then they used to be. The preference for shaved pussy goes along with this.
I swear to God, it never fails to amaze me how much men hate women. Women want love, passion, and relationship with other human beings; men want inflatable dolls. Jesus.
Posted by Violet under Gender Issues on August 9, 2006, 2:22 pm EST
74 Comments »
Last week we learned that alcohol can transform a saint into a Nazi, causing him to suddenly embrace hateful shit that he’s never ever believed in his entire life, ever. Mel actually loves Jewish people, you see. He would never dream of blaming them for all the wars in the world. Why, he doesn’t have a drop of anti-Semitic blood in his whole body! It’s just that crazy vodka, working its voodoo mind-control magic.
Now we learn that alcohol can transform good soldiers into sadistic rapist-murderers:
The attack followed a session of whiskey drinking and card-playing during which five soldiers plotted the March 12 assault, criminal investigator Benjamin Bierce said.
The whiskey is very important, you see. Without the whiskey these guys were just good, brave, upstanding American soldiers. They would never dream of raping a girl. They totally respect women. It would never in a million years occur to them to treat a female as if her body were some sort of battlefield trophy. Heck, they’re probably feminists. And of course they love the Iraqi people, wishing only to bring the gifts of democracy and peace to that ancient land.
But with the whiskey — voila! Look what they did:
At some point, they decided to go to the house of Abeer, whom they had seen passing their checkpoint.
Barker said the soldiers found the girl and her father outside their home. Spielman grabbed the girl while Green seized her father and took them into the house, Barker’s statement said, and Cortez and Barker followed them inside.
Green led the father, mother and younger sister into the bedroom and closed the door, while the teenage girl remained in the living room with the others, Barker’s statement said.
Cortez pushed the girl to the floor, lifted her dress and tore off her underwear while she struggled, Bierce said, citing Barker’s statement. Cortez appeared to rape her, then Barker tried to rape the girl, according to the statement.
Suddenly, the group heard gunshots, and Green came out of the bedroom holding an AK-47 rifle and declared: ‘”They’re all dead. I just killed them,”‘ according to the statement.
Green then raped the girl while Cortez held her down, Barker’s statement said. Green picked up the AK-47 and shot the girl once, paused, then shot her several more times, Bierce said, quoting Barker’s statement.
Barker said he poured fuel from a kerosene lamp on the girl’s body but did not say who set it on fire. The soldier’s statement did not say whether Howard or Spielman participated in the rape, Bierce said.
Another investigator, Gary Griesmyer, quoted Cortez as telling him that the teenage girl was weeping and speaking in Arabic and that Barker told her to “shut up.”
Also Monday, another soldier, Pfc. Justin Watt, testified that Howard told him before the incident that Green, Cortez and Barker had planned to rape a girl, and Howard was to be the lookout.
That alcohol’s some amazing shit.
Posted by Violet under War, Various and Sundry on August 7, 2006, 9:11 pm EST
6 Comments »
The entire purpose of this post is to get the South Park image below the fold. Happy? Happy now?
Posted by Violet under Various and Sundry on August 5, 2006, 12:54 pm EST
4 Comments »
This piece on the odious Mel Gibson is actually rather good:
I also think that the difference between the blood-alcohol levels — and indeed the speed limits — that occasioned the booking are insufficient to explain the expletives (as Gibson has since claimed in a typically self-pitying and verbose statement put out by his publicist). One does not abruptly decide, between the first and second vodka, or the ticks of the indicator of velocity, that the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion are valid after all.
Exactly. And Hitch is a guy who should know — about the vodka, I mean. I think he’s an expert on the effect of blood alcohol levels.
Posted by Violet under Various and Sundry on August 1, 2006, 2:06 pm EST
3 Comments »
A friendly reader has asked my opinion on yesterday’s Salon piece about the womenpriests movement in the Catholic Church:
The hierarchy insists that the church has a constant tradition of ordaining only men. But what about Junia the apostle and Phoebe the deacon, in the Epistle of St. Paul to Romans? What about those tomb inscriptions for “Leta presbitera” and “Guilia Runa, woman priest”? What about Bishop Theodora, über-apostle Mary Magdalene…?
To which the diehards respond by putting their fingers in their ears and saying, “I can’t hear you”:
Not surprisingly, church spokespeople vigorously denounce the movement for women’s ordination. William Donahue of the Catholic League has dismissed the ordained women out of hand and declared their supporters to be “mad feminists” from “the asylum.” In an e-mail response to my specific questions, director of communications Robert Lockwood called the rich concrete evidence of women’s ordination “archaeological myth-making of the Da Vinci Code variety” and “hardly relevant.”
Aside from the fact that members of the batshit-crazy ultra-conservative Catholic League are not “church spokespeople,” this pretty well captures the controversy. So who’s right?
The pro-women’s ordination people, of course. Modern scholars recognize now that early Christianity had a remarkably radical gender-egalitarian component. (Well, as much as anything can be “recognized” about the lost past; what I’m going to say here represents the best historical reconstruction.) Probably Jesus’s core followers consisted of his brother James, Mary Magdalene, some guy named Cephas/Peter, and a few others — possibly more women than men. (The quaint notion of the Twelve Apostles is considered a late invention of the Gospel writers, created to provide a match with the Twelve Tribes of Israel.) At this remove nobody can really be sure what Jesus was about, but something that comes through pretty strongly in the earliest relics of his movement is an extreme leveling of traditional distinctions: between rich and poor, between male and female, between Jew and gentile.
For quite awhile after Jesus’s death women continued to be treated as equals — Paul refers to women as apostles, and their names are prominent in the fledgling religion. When the inevitable splintering of the movement began, different trends emerged: certain groups reverted to a more traditionally Jewish male-dominated structure, while others continued to embrace a philosophy of gender equality. There was, by the way, quite a bit of divergence in early Christianity, with many competing sects and great disagreement as to what the whole thing meant, who Jesus was, how followers should behave, and so forth.
Towards the end of the first century, the mainstreaming of the religion began in earnest. It had become clear that, pace Jesus and early Paul, the world was not actually going to end anytime soon, and so the most prominent Christian groups began shedding their radicalism and accommodating their religion to life in the Roman Empire. That’s really what spelled the downfall of women in the church, because gender equality was simply too radical for the mainstream culture. It had to go — think the Mormons jettisoning polygamy as the price of joining American society.
In the second century there continued to be a plethora of competing Christian sects, but the gender-egalitarian groups were becoming more and more marginalized. The mainstream church fathers, who strongly favored male supremacy, were positioning themselves as the voice of orthodoxy, and they did not hesitate to criticize all other forms of Christianity as “heretical.”* The war continued on paper, with the canonical gospels and the letters of Paul being re-worked to downplay women’s roles. Virtually all of the anti-woman passages in Paul are late forgeries created to justify the new policy of subordinating women. Other texts were also edited — and paintings even effaced — to remove the evidence of female apostles.
By the time Christianity was adopted as the state religion of the Roman Empire, 300 years after Jesus’s death, the evidence of the early days had been sufficiently suppressed that the few remaining egalitarian sects could be safely ridiculed as freakish heretics. Or as William Donahue says, “mad feminists” from “the asylum.”
*There was more at stake than just the role of women. The struggle to define what was “orthodox” and what was “heretical” encompassed many issues, ranging from the profound to the prosaic.
Posted by Violet under Random Pedantry, Godbags, Religion on August 1, 2006, 2:39 am EST
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