My friends’ faces are anxious, concerned. “Come help!”
Who’s stuck? I wonder. Suddenly I notice my parents’ old television set, the huge console TV we had in the 1960s. It’s about five feet long, a wooden case, with a turntable on one side and a radio on the other, giant speakers flanking the TV screen. State-of-the-art for 1965.
The console is up against the wall, of course, the way it always was in our house. I step to the side and peer behind it.
There he is.
William Shatner is trapped inside the wall behind the TV set, crouched in a cratered opening that looks like bomb damage. He gazes up at me, flakes of plaster in his toupee.
I remember now that we’re married, or used to be. I reach down to help pull him from the wall.
Then I wake up.
Posted by Violet under Holidays on October 31, 2006, 6:03 am EST
Tangentially, I decided I’d be a helpful pedant and provide a link to Hitler’s Table Talk. You know, just in case your interest is so piqued by the Billmon reference that you think, Damn! Hours and hours of brain-liquifyingly tedious monologues from Hitler? Yes, I do want to inflict that on myself!
Anyway, I was over at Amazon grabbing that there linky-poo, when my eye was drawn to the reader reviews. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present Anna from Stuttgart:
This is a rather large book, but I devoured it literally overnight. The intelligence Hitler displays in his conversations is almost overwhelming. Even his harshest critics cannot deny what a brilliant mind he had. A self-educated man, he possessed knowledge of a broad range of subjects, sometimes knowing even more about certain things than men who were educated at universities. Before I read this book, I knew he was smart. After having completed the book, I was convinced of his genius.
Anna is 21 and has been studying der Führer avidly since she was 13. Here’s her review of Mein Kampf:
I have read this work half a dozen times and each time I discover something new. The Hitler who wrote Mein Kampf was not the Hitler who later went on to rule the Third Reich and most of Europe. He was still developing.
Hitler was, naturally, a better public orator than he was an author, nevertheless this book can be compared with his “Table Talk” conversations (which were published after his death), as Mein Kampf is filled with Hitler’s thoughts, opinions, ideals, and plans. He also gives an interesting, albeit brief, account of his childhood and young adulthood as well as an especially fascinating first-hand account of his experiences as a soldier in WWI.
One is stunned at this man’s great intelligence, despite what popular opinion would have us believe.
It is certainly not light reading, but anyone in search of truth about Hitler and his way of thinking, not to mention his countless critics and would-be judges, must first have read this fine work.
Adolf Hitler: Misunderstood Genius.
In fact Hitler was not a stupid man, though he was by no means the genius starry-eyed Anna thinks he was. Evil and wrong, yes, but not stupid. I daresay he was streets ahead of George W. Bush in terms of brainpower, but then most of us are. Bush is more like Himmler: a failed chicken-farmer with repressed homosexual inclinations, vacuous but viciously canny nonetheless. Or maybe Goering — an aristocratic pill-popping drunk who’s unable to believe he’s done anything wrong. No, maybe Rumsfeld is Goering. The makeup and the nail polish, you know.
We could play this game all day. Karl Rove — is he Bormann or Goebbels?
Posted by Violet under Various and Sundry on October 30, 2006, 7:54 am EST
After approximately 30 hours in various states of fucked-upedness, I’m pleased to announce that www.reclusiveleftist.com is once again fully reclusive and leftist.
I wish I could report some thrilling reason for the downtime — say, that I’d been hacked by Diebold, or that Bill O’Reilly had detonated my blog with a hand grenade — but the truth is far less glamorous. It was just a problem with the MySQL server.
Many, many thanks to the nice tech people who sorted things out. And a special big thank-you to the incredibly kind friends who emailed me to offer assistance. I am so touched by your generosity, so grateful for your friendship. What kind, sweet, giving people you are. Thank you.
Posted by Violet under Reclusive Leftist on October 29, 2006, 10:10 am EST
Apologies to everyone who’s tried to comment and found that obviously something’s wrong. I’ve had a Help Desk ticket in for 10 hours and am waiting for resolution. I’m sorry!
Posted by Violet under Reclusive Leftist on October 27, 2006, 11:39 pm EST
The outrage Wednesday about photographs of German troops posing with a skull in Afghanistan swept through parliament just as Chancellor Angela Merkel’s administration announced a major restructuring of the military to handle increased international missions.
The five pictures appeared in Bild, a paper known for titillating scoops, under the headline: “German Soldiers Desecrate a Dead Person.” They show the skull in various positions, including mounted on a jeep and held near the waist of a soldier with his fatigues unzipped. The newspaper blocked out the troops’ faces.
My reaction to this story, aside from the obvious revulsion and outrage, is three-fold:
Fold the first: War dehumanizes. No news there. Soldiers become inured to the spectre of death, callous to suffering and indignity. See Abu Graib, the Haditha massacre, and, well, basically the entire history of warfare.
This desensitization can also take the form of morbid humor, the purpose of which is to provide the soldiers with some kind of psychological anesthetic to the horror that surrounds them. I’m reminded of how trenchmen in World War One adapted to the constant presence of corpses, skulls, and assorted body parts by making gruesome jokes. In one British trench a hand sticking out was dubbed “Jack,” and all the men routinely shook “Jack”’s hand whenever they passed by.
Fold the second: War and sex go together. Again, not news. A comment made at Twisty’s the other day is apt:
Ron, Mandos: For some reason your discussion is making me think of an article I read not long ago. The reporter was interviewing a soldier about “how does it feel to be here” or something like that. The soldier commented, “Fucking and shooting, it’s the same thing, right?” He felt good, I guess.
The thread in question is a wide-ranging discussion on Halloween, war, and whether someone named MaggietheWolf is an asshole, with no reference to this German business. But the comment sums up the fucking-shooting nexus with admirable brevity. Stan Goff’s Sex and War explores the connection at length, building on both the 30-year radfem critique of war as sexual conquest and Goff’s own Special Forces background. It’s no coincidence that the link page for the book features a photo from Abu Graib.
Fold the third: It’s interesting that the soldiers’ sideline in corpse desecration is somehow more disturbing than their main job, which is to create corpses in the first place. To desecrate living bodies, as it were, and turn them into dead ones. It’s curious, isn’t it? It’s as if the response is something like, “Oh, sure, killing people is understandable — but don’t mess with the bodies afterwards! That’s just sick!”
It’s powerful, this taboo against defiling a person’s physical remains. And transgressing that taboo is, historically, an effective way of expressing extreme contempt for the vanquished: traitors’ heads on pikes, enemies’ skulls made into drinking cups. Somehow these acts obliterate the human being even more than the actual physical death. You’re not just dead; you’re no longer even human. You’re somebody’s drinking cup, somebody’s lampshade, somebody’s — god help us — sex toy.
Posted by Violet under Gender Issues, War on October 27, 2006, 6:24 am EST
Catholic leaders in Nicaruaga are pushing through a law to block abortion in all cases, including those where the life of the mother is at stake:
“The current law allows a small door in which abortions can be performed, and we are trying to close that door,” said Dr. Rafael Cabrera, an obstetrician and leader of the Yes to Life Movement. “We don’t believe a child should be destroyed under the pretext that a woman might die.”
That’s because the Catholic Church is pro-life, you see. Every life is sacred…unless it’s a woman’s.
“If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it . . . whose fault is it, the cats’ or the uncovered meat?
“The uncovered meat is the problem.”
The sheik then said: “If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred.”
Stories like this fill my heart with hope that someday the great world religions will be able to put aside their differences and join hands in peace and brotherhood, united by their common hatred of women. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Think of it: no more fundamentalist terrorists, no more quarrels over holy places, no more sectarian disputes. Just a world of devout men working together happily and quietly in the name of God to abuse, rape, and/or murder every woman they can get their hands on.
If you hang around the lefty-feminist blogosphere long enough, sooner or later you hear about Zeke. He’s our blog dog. Sure, he has his real life there in Pinole Creek, with his walks and his pig ears and god knows what Chris and Becky are feeding him. But he also exists here, in this series of tubes we call the internets, where everybody who knows Chris Clarke (which is everybody, independent studies have confirmed) knows Zeke.
Zeke is the store dog, the grizzled old guy taking a nap in the doorway. He’s the dog down at the end of the counter — the far left end — sitting rapt and patient as Dr. Bérubé feeds him cheese treats. The folks from Feministe and Pandagon and Pharyngula pat his head whenever they stop by, and Hank Fox always gives him a good ear scratch. Carl Buell has even painted his portrait. We love us some Zeke. He’s our blog dog.
Welcome back, Zeke.
Him a good dog. Him the bestest dog.
Posted by Violet under Various and Sundry on October 25, 2006, 1:43 am EST
I’ve been running from this picture for a week now.
It’s a photograph of the signing ceremony for the new torture bill. The bill legalizes torture, including rape, and denies due process to anyone the President declares an enemy of the state. Which, of course, could be anyone.
Look how happy they are. Look at their smiles. What are they thinking? Deutschland über alles?
Notice the sign attached to the front of the desk: Protecting America. I think this is the first American administration to use captions. Obviously the hope is that people will believe the caption and not what’s actually happening, which is almost always the exact opposite of what the caption says.
Like “Work Means Freedom.” That sort of thing.
My friends and readers, this picture depresses the living shit out of me. It captures in a single image the essence of banal evil that has gripped our nation. Not banal if you’re strapped to a torture table, of course, but banal for the millions of Americans who slap flag decals on their cars and wear Support Our Troops pins and believe, somehow actually believe, that George W. Bush is a nice man. A patriotic man. Just protecting America.
So a week ago I looked at this picture, and tried to write something, and couldn’t. I fled, instead, to France. (Where else?) Thank you all for accompanying me on that little divertissement. It was fun, wasn’t it? The guessing game, the prizes.
Over the weekend I continued to escape by hanging out on other feminist blogs, hoping for a little emotional solace. Mistake. I love and respect my sister bloggers, but for some reason the feminist-leftist blogosphere has been beset with nasty infighting for months now. The nastiness culminated a few days ago in a bizarre episode at Feministe that was so wrong in so many ways I thought we’d reached some kind of blogular nadir, our own digital Death Valley.
The winners of yesterday’s guessing contest are Spicy, Viveth, Jimmy Ho, nina, Dlunch, and love2all. (Yes, I realize Jimmy didn’t actually say “that’s Paris,” but of course he knew, and I knew that he knew, and he knew that I knew that he knew.)
As your prize I herewith present this delightful film of Edith Piaf singing “La Vie En Rose” — live! (Or else she was doing a hell of a job of lip-synching.) Because really, nothing says Paris like Piaf.
If you’d rather not watch Edith sing, here’s a visual tour of the city set to a recording of the same song. Frankly I think the compiler of this video chose some rather ugly pictures of Paris, but we can’t just live our lives inside a Monet, can we?
That’s not much of a prize for Jimmy, though, since he’s already in Paris and wants to leave. So instead, and just for Jimmy, here is “Belleville Rendezvous” from The Triplets of Belleville. Because, see, in the movie Madame Souza leaves France for Belleville. Yeah, I know that’s lame, but I frickin’ love this song.
Now, here’s the promised metaphysical part: does it cheapen the prizes that they’re available like this to people who didn’t actually win them? (See Workers in the Vineyard, Parable of.)
Posted by Violet under Various and Sundry on October 19, 2006, 9:55 pm EST
Yesterday’s mystery city was, of course, Paris. Congratulations to everyone who recognized it! (I’m still musing over what the prizes should be.)
For those of you who failed to identify the City of Light, be not bummed. Dr. Socks is here to help. Are you wondering what it is about Paris that’s supposed to be so distinctive? Wondering why it’s called the most beautiful city in the world? It’s not the view of Notre Dame in the distance or the Tour Eiffel on the skyline. The key, as I hinted yesterday and as a couple of commenters noted, is the street architecture. It’s all down to a dude named Baron Haussmann, whose 19th-century urban planning created modern Paris.
If you want to get a feel for why Paris looks like Paris, check out Streetwalls of Paris at the Cyburbia urban architecture forum. It’s full of high-quality jpegs and so may take a little while to load, but it’s worth the wait. The writer takes you on a tour of Haussmanian architecture, showing how it works and why it works — and why the result is a streetscape that is livable, harmonious, and of course très, très picaresque.
Posted by Violet under Various and Sundry on October 19, 2006, 1:09 pm EST
Sometimes Dr. Socks gets so upset with the torture-legalizing woman-hating dog-killing news that her nerves start to get a little shaky and she has to think about Something Completely Different for awhile. You can always tell when Dr. Socks is having one of these episodes because she begins referring to herself in the third person. It’s kind of a psychic disassociation thing. Anyway, here’s today’s diversionary tactic: Can you identify this city? The images I’ve chosen have no legible signs or famous monuments; I’m just curious to see if people recognize the characteristic street architecture.
Posted by Violet under Various and Sundry on October 18, 2006, 12:50 pm EST
Today Torture President signed the bill legalizing torture (including rape) and rescinding habeas corpus.
Do you suppose this is being reported accurately in the national news? If you do, then is there room under that rock for me too? Here are the headline phrases used to describe this bill, piping hot and fresh from my Google news feed:
“Bill Setting Rules for Questioning Detainees” - New York Times
“Military Commissions Bill” — UPI
“Law on Terror Suspects” — ABC News
“Terror Detainee Bill” — CBS News
“Bill to Interrogate and Prosecute Suspected Terrorists” — USA Today
“Military Tribunal Law” — Wall Street Journal
“Law Creating Tribunals for Terror Suspects” — Bloomberg
“Law on Detainee Questioning” — Voice of America
No torture here, nope, none at all. No rapes. Nobody’s rights being denied. No revocation of that funny “haybee” thing that’s supposed to be important for some reason. Nope. The government just wants to detain some terrorists and ask ‘em a few questions, all nice and legal like. What’s wrong with that?
Bob Herbert seems to be channeling the Great Spinster Aunt (though not, alas, her superior writing ability). This is his column from yesterday, which I’m going to release from its gilded Times Select cage and reproduce here in its entirety.
“Who needs a brain when you have these?”
— message on an Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt for young women
In the recent shootings at an Amish schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania and a large public high school in Colorado, the killers went out of their way to separate the girls from the boys, and then deliberately attacked only the girls.
Ten girls were shot and five killed at the Amish school. One girl was killed and a number of others were molested in the Colorado attack.
In the widespread coverage that followed these crimes, very little was made of the fact that only girls were targeted. Imagine if a gunman had gone into a school, separated the kids up on the basis of race or religion, and then shot only the black kids. Or only the white kids. Or only the Jews.
There would have been thunderous outrage. The country would have first recoiled in horror, and then mobilized in an effort to eradicate that kind of murderous bigotry. There would have been calls for action and reflection. And the attack would have been seen for what it really was: a hate crime.
None of that occurred because these were just girls, and we have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that violence against females is more or less to be expected. Stories about the rape, murder and mutilation of women and girls are staples of the news, as familiar to us as weather forecasts. The startling aspect of the Pennsylvania attack was that this terrible thing happened at a school in Amish country, not that it happened to girls.
The disrespectful, degrading, contemptuous treatment of women is so pervasive and so mainstream that it has just about lost its ability to shock. Guys at sporting events and other public venues have shown no qualms about raising an insistent chant to nearby women to show their breasts. An ad for a major long-distance telephone carrier shows three apparently naked women holding a billing statement from a competitor. The text asks, “When was the last time you got screwed?”
An ad for Clinique moisturizing lotion shows a woman’s face with the lotion spattered across it to simulate the climactic shot of a porn video.
We have a problem. Staggering amounts of violence are unleashed on women every day, and there is no escaping the fact that in the most sensational stories, large segments of the population are titillated by that violence. We’ve been watching the sexualized image of the murdered 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey for 10 years. JonBenet is dead. Her mother is dead. And we’re still watching the video of this poor child prancing in lipstick and high heels.
What have we learned since then? That there’s big money to be made from thongs, spandex tops and sexy makeovers for little girls. In a misogynistic culture, it’s never too early to drill into the minds of girls that what really matters is their appearance and their ability to please men sexually.
A girl or woman is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes or so in the U.S. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is far beyond the ability of any agency to count. We’re all implicated in this carnage because the relentless violence against women and girls is linked at its core to the wider society’s casual willingness to dehumanize women and girls, to see them first and foremost as sexual vessels — objects — and never, ever as the equals of men.
“Once you dehumanize somebody, everything is possible,” said Taina Bien-Aimé, executive director of the women’s advocacy group Equality Now.
That was never clearer than in some of the extreme forms of pornography that have spread like nuclear waste across mainstream America. Forget the embarrassed, inhibited raincoat crowd of the old days. Now Mr. Solid Citizen can come home, log on to this $7 billion mega-industry and get his kicks watching real women being beaten and sexually assaulted on Web sites with names like “Ravished Bride” and “Rough Sex — Where Whores Get Owned.”
Then, of course, there’s gangsta rap, and the video games where the players themselves get to maul and molest women, the rise of pimp culture (the Academy Award-winning song this year was “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp”), and on and on.
You’re deluded if you think this is all about fun and games. It’s all part of a devastating continuum of misogyny that at its farthest extreme touches down in places like the one-room Amish schoolhouse in normally quiet Nickel Mines, Pa.
Posted by Violet under Various and Sundry on October 17, 2006, 2:13 pm EST
