sorting and labelling

I’m not what you would call the ultra-organized type but today I felt my creative juices running low, replaced by a desire to clean up my office, put papers in folders and files and (most likely) the recycling, and even organize my email address book.

When the larger world seems to be most spiraling out of control is when I get the impulse to control my little personal universe.  After September 11th, I spent several days printing out labels for grains, spices, and other household supplies.  Now it seems like our entire country is in collapse–even the weather!  Republican ideology is being proven so definitively and disastrously wrong that it shocks even me.  You’d think the silver lining would be that Obama is leading by a landslide–but no, he and McCain remain essentially even in the polls, which we all know is a prescription for all kinds of chicanery at the polls come Election Day.  It seems, according to a recent poll, that thirty percent of Americans actually distrust Obama because of his black skin, a fact that is practically too disgusting to contemplate.  I thought we’d outgrown that kind of blatant and ignorant racism in our country, but I guess not.  If you reference back to my blog about Hilary Clinton’s win in West Virginia–Mc Cain may be a temperamental old man who doesn’t understand the internet, with a wolf-shooting hockey mom for a running mate–but hey, at least they’re white.

Think I’ll go reorganize my recipe file now.

dirt on the Palin family

It’s a sad day when the National Enquirer becomes a valuable news source, but with fodder like the Palin family, the Enquirer is a far superior vehicle to the New York Times.  I passed an enjoyable few minutes in the supermarket line reading up on the following dirt on the Palin family which I happily share with my readers:

–some of Bristol Palin’s “friends” have turned over video of Bristol smoking pot with her friends on the night of her mother’s election as governor.  She grins and giggles into the camera as she inhales.

–her boyfriend is into harder drugs, like cocaine and oxycontin.  He sells them, too.  Contrary to the Palin family’s wishes, he is not overly eager to marry the seventeen year old mother of his child and has been dragging his feet.

–Todd Palin’s brother was arrested some years ago for a hit and run accident.  Driving drunk, he hit and severely injured a woman, dragged her from underneath his vehicle, then left him lying on the road.

–he also filed a charge against his girlfriend at the time for domestic violence, claiming she was “punching him around”, or some such.  He has a child with this woman.  Apparently he wasn’t too great a father for awhile, but has come around recently.

Now, I’m sure there isn’t much to do in Wasilla, and I can’t fault Bristol for thumbing her nose at her sanctimonious mother.  But it sure sounds like the family values Republicans are the bad girls and boys, while the Democratic Party produces student council president, Harvard educated straight arrows like Gore and Obama.

This isn’t a high school popularity contest.  Who would you rather have as president?

life imitates art

I’ve been re-reading Margaret Atwood’s brilliant book, Oryx and Crake.  For those unfamiliar with the novel, one of its central premises is uncontrolled bioengineering projects–pigs that grow human organs for transplant, featherless chicken “nobs” that grow only parts, palm trees that can thrive in the arctic, you get the idea.  All of these advances are touted as having beneficial applications.  Predictably, things get out of control and have disastrous consequences, but if you want to find out what those are, read the book.

Oryx and Crake is what’s known as “speculative fiction”.  Atwood takes trends that already exist in today’s society and expands upon them.  Problem is, Oryx and Crake, only a few years after its publication, is already losing its speculative character.  Today I read in the paper about proposed government approval for fish that grow twice as fast as normal, pigs with high levels of omega 3 acids, goats milk with “healthy” proteins, farm animals that will produce human hormones such as insulin, and yes, pigs that grow human organs.

the corporations producing this frankenlife are touting their beneficial applications.

Right.  Read to the end of Oryx and Crake, please.

why do we keep apologizing?

I’m sorry, but I can’t get off the Palin topic –her and her herd of pigs, lipsticked or otherwise.

Why has the Democratic party allowed the religious right to usurp the concept of values?  I am so sick of hearing Democrats defend themselves , insisting that they too believe in “family” or “faith”.  I am sick of how no one can criticize the war in Iraq without reminding us they “support the troops”.

Yes, I believe in family.  I have four children and have stayed at home to raise them.  I grow my own vegetables and knit my own sweaters.  These are my own, deeply felt, but personal decisions and I feel no compulsion to force them on everyone else, some of whom may perfectly validly have a differing definition of family.  And yes, I have faith.  I have my own personal spiritual predilections, but I do not feel a compulsion to force on anyone else, and I believe in the right of everyone to express their own faith, whatever form it may take.  I do not use these words as code to support a political agenda.

I respect the courage of those who serve in Iraq and I’m sure most of them conduct themselves with decency and honor.  But unless I’m going to condescend to them as helpless dupes, I have to hold them accountable for the arena in which they choose to exercise their bravery.  And that war is wrong, wrong, wrong.  They are doing nothing to protect us from terrorism, and they are sacrificing their lives for the greed of multinational corporations.

And why define values so narrowly?  What about other values?  My parents instilled in me the value of education and critical thinking.  I disagreed with my father, a political science professor, profoundly on many political issues, but before I was five years old he taught me the name and location of every country on the globe.  Getting into a good college was something to aspire to, not something condemned as elitist.    I find it disgusting how Barack and Michelle Obama are condemned as “elitists” when they have risen from modest backgrounds (in Michelle’s case, very modest) to become Ivy-league educated professors by dint of their intelligence and hard work.  when did it become a bad thing to speak articulately?  When did it become a bad thing to be a class act instead of a candidate for the Jerry Springer show?

I am so disgusted.

don’t know much history

The Republican party has been railing against the intellectual elite ever since Spiro Agnew railed against the “nattering nabobs of negativism”  .  But they’ve reached new lows in the current campaign.  As a start, consider if Sarah Palin even knows the definition of nattering or nabob.

Republicans are so down on intellectuals for the same reason Stalin sent writers to Siberia and Mao sent them to do manual labor as part of the Cultural Revolution.  Intellectuals are dangerous to totalitarian states by definition:  they think, therefore they question conventional wisdom and government propaganda.  Conservative Republicans (is there anything else these days?) blather on about “freedom”, but the freedom they are talking about is the “freedom” to believe exactly as they do. You could call it Orwellian, if you had any confidence that Palin knows who Orwell was.  They have become masters of the big lie, promulgating falsehoods so egregious it doesn’t take much knowledge or research to refute them–but amazingly, very few people do so.  Journalists–whose first responsibility should be to research and investigate –have been appallingly silent, at least in the mainstream media.

Sarah Palin’s television interviews illustrate her utter ignorance of foreign relations as well as domestic issues beyond Alaska.   But what they illustrate that’s even more frightening is her ignorance of what she DOESN’T know.  When I was in college I took a graduate neurochemistry class at MIT.  What struck me the most studying science at this advanced level was that the ”certainties” we were taught in introductory biology, chemistry, and physics were at heart convenient fictions–simple ways of attempting to grasp the ungraspable.  We don’t know why the brain works as it does.  We can’t even pinpoint an electron in space.  We can observe, we can try to make sense, but we are only skimming the surface of the vast mysteries of the universe.

Liberal arts provide lots of opportunities to become aware of your own ignorance as well.  You can read a zillion books; a zillion plus more books have been written.  Cultures different than ours live all over the world, satisfying their basic human needs in incredibly diverse, but equally valid ways.  There’s more art out there than you’ll ever see; more music than you’ll ever listen to; vast segments of the world’s history that are lost, that we will never know. 

I’d like our President and Vice-President to feel that sense of humility.  But Mc Cain and especially Palin are riding astride their American/Christian high horse, convinced of the exceptionalness of their nationality and their religion.

Mc Cain at least had his experience as a POW to deepen his character and perception, though it seems to have frozen his worldview in the Vietnam era.  As for Palin???  She didn’t even graduate from college.  She’s never travelled beyond NOrth America. 

But wow, she’s a hockey mom.  And she knows how to shoot a moose.  That’s enough to make her a pandering puppet of positivism.

sarah palin warning

I have a well connected friend in DC who is fond of making ominous pronouncements (say, of imminent terrorist attacks) that fortunately usually do not come true.  However, something he said last spring is resonating creepily in my brain.

The pronouncement was to WATCH MCCAIN’S VICE-PRESIDENTIAL PICK VERY CAREFULLY. He believes that McCain’s melanoma has metastasized (witness his swollen left cheek) and that he is unlikely to live out his term if elected.  That leaves us with Palin, folks, and I see no need to reiterate her bellicosity, Fundamentalist religious views, and basic ignorance of constitutional rights, scientific method, and the basic tenets of Western culture.  Not to mention her complete lack of political experience.

THIS IS SERIOUS.  AS A COUNTRY WE HAVE BEEN SLIDING DOWN A SLIPPERY SLOPE FOR EIGHT YEARS NOW, AND WE’RE GOING TO REACH A POINT WHERE WE CAN’T GO BACK.  DEMOCRACIES HAVE BECOME TOTALITARIAN STATES MANY TIMES BEFORE, CIVILIZATION HAS SLID INTO DARKNESS MANY TIMES BEFORE.  AS AMERICANS WE ARE NOT IMMUNE.

 

Use your voice. Speak out.  Vote.