GinBaby

Thinking Positive

nobody@vox.com(GinBaby) — Thu, 08 May 2008 03:53:13 -0700

I just wrote several paragraphs flaying some idiotic bitch that I randomly saw on TV today, but then I lost interest. Yes, she was an idiot. She was an idiot of a variety that I have met very commonly, namely the idiot who thinks that having friends who are gay and/or Hispanic wins her the Tolerance Merit Badge, despite the fact that said friends grew up in similar conditions, were similarly educated, read the same books, and hold entirely the same political opinions as she does. Because diversity is all about the skin color or sexual orientation. Right. Idiot.

But then, as I said, I just lost interest. Idiots are a dime a dozen. She was certainly not an exceptional idiot--half the college students in Missoula think exactly the same way (and the other half are too drunk to notice such a subtlety as someone's race). So. Let's pass her over for more interesting and non-idiotic topics.

Namely! The asparagus! It hath risen! So, fuck you, Californian asparagus! It's nothing against California or its asparagus, but I'm so excited that the asparagus I tediously planted and laboriously tended last year is coming up this year. As yet, the stalks are barely peeking above ground, but we will actually be able to harvest and eat some of this year's crop. Sweet mother Mary!

Oh, and the radicchio overwintered very nicely, and we harvested our first radicchio today! Hurrah for fresh greens (or reds, as the case may be). They are calling out to me for some bacon and cream, because nothing enhances healthful greens like a giant dose of heart attack. Yum.

I don't know if I told you, but I developed an elaborate garden plan this year to milk as many nutrients out of our backyard as possible. First, there are the cool-weather, spring things like peas and fava beans and spinach. We basically turned our entire garden space over to these things with the understanding that they will be mostly kaput by the time we need to begin insertion of nightshades (tomato, pepper, eggplant). In other words, we expect to have approximately one gazillion peas. The first couple of weeks after planting, we had terrible weather with snow and lots of freezing, and the peas refused to sprout, and I had begun to despair that, as so often in the past, all my plans had come to nought. But they sure the hell are sprouting now. We have rows and rows of peas (only two rows of favas, because we do love favas, but last year they failed miserably, and we couldn't see giving a lot of space to something that failed so completely). We have Alaska bush peas, Green Arrow, Blue Pod Capucijner, and god knows what else--name a variety of pea, and we likely have it sprouting out there. Some will get frozen. Some will get dried. Many will be eaten right there in the garden. Yum.

The spinach is going nuts! The kale! The daikon! I am so pleased. Despite the batty weather, things are going according to plan.

We did also get some tomatoes this year that are supposed to have some cold hardiness. Specifically, we have Beaverlodge, Oregon Spring, and Stupice tomatoes. All of those do need protection from frost but should otherwise be OK in the cold. I'm a little skeptical. I learned to garden primarily in Arkansas, and the heat and humidity down there just make this a much different ballgame. We did bite the bullet and go ahead and plant the Oregon Spring seedlings, though, and so far they look fine. We're also putting in the potatoes. Ack! The potatoes! What a fiasco!

See, my parents have recently purchased 5 acres where they are building a new house, and I had received permission to plant my potatoes on their land, so I ordered....ohhhh...about 27 pounds of seed potatoes. That's actually 27 different varieties, one pound each. I got them from Ronniger's, a source I highly recommend. I have every color of potato known to man, I'm fairly sure, and I believe we have three different varieties of purple potato (my favorite!). As it turns out, the water is a long, long way from being hooked up at my parents' new house (the city is dragging their feet--long story), so if I planted the potatoes there, I'd have no way to water them and so would have to just pray for rain everyday. So, we planted them here. It's going to be tight to get everything in this year.

I thought earlier that I should list all the varieties of veggies that we're growing to give you a sense of the scale of the enterprise here, but I realized that that was a bad idea. We have more than 20 varieties of tomatoes alone. Hell, we probably have more than 40 varieties of tomato, and then there's the peppers and the eggplant and the potatoes and the brassicas! The brassicas!

Perhaps I can give you a sense of the stupid overreaching of my plan by telling you we have two different kinds of sesame (kin, which is tan, and kuro, which is black). Four kinds of scallions, in addition to the chives, shallots, leeks, and onions. Three types of kale. Two types of salsify. Salsify, for chrissakes!

Lord, I cannot wait. It's all so delicious.

OH! OH! I have to tell you about this new book I got. Obviously, since I do the home canning, I am always on the lookout for good cookbooks for that activity. Canning is not a subject that gets a lot of play in contemporary cookbooks, as you can imagine. I suppose it is out of style, but it's really something you need a good cookbook for since it is really one of the most scientific and potentially hazardous of all kitchen tasks. You can't half-ass it when you're dealing with pH and pressure--it's serious business. Anyway, so I happened upon this book called Pickles to Relish. It was written by a scientist/home canner who apparently is inhabited by a semi-fictitious alter ego known as "Jamlady." And both of them are serious. The first part is a rant about the failures of modern education, the failures of modern society, and a call for a return to the art and science of home pickling. It gave me goosebumps. I mean, she is preaching to the converted, but I was so pleased to know that someone (anyone! even a questionably mentally ill woman!) else thinks this way. I have no named alter ego, yet I have long felt crazy and isolated by my pickle-making. It isn't just a hobby, dammit. It's a way of life! God, I love crazy pickle-making ladies. Maybe later this summer I'll have another contest to give away some pickles.

Also, later this summer, I'm going to start getting with some recipes and processing and storage information for all the vegetables.

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Meh

nobody@vox.com(GinBaby) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 13:36:19 -0700

Hi, people. I know I haven't been around and some of you have chastised me for it. There are a lot of reasons I haven't been coming online I suppose. One of them is that the weather has (finally!) been nice, so we've been outside every minute that we can be and we're undertaking a big yard-improvement project which, along with the veg garden, has been sucking every spare minute and bit of energy. We also went fishing--we got our son his own fishing pole (I don't fish, but my boys do)--and it was a blast. I do have to apologize, though, to the people and pelicans of Roberts, Idaho: We deeply regret that one of our drink bottles flew off the pier while we were preparing to leave and we were unable to retrieve it before it got way out in the middle of the lake. My son couldn't go to sleep that night worrying about that bottle; he was especially disturbed by the thought that one of the pelicans might mistake the shiny bottle for a fish and eat it and damage his bowels. Seriously. I'm pretty impressed that a 3-year-old went through that thought process. I promised him that next time we're there we will pick up any stray bottles we can find--he's big into picking up litter.

Also, and I've said this before I know, but when I come online I end up getting angry about something or another. If I avoid the computer, I'm really quite a happy and contented person--I cannot say I'm even-tempered because that is sooo not like me, but happy anyway. That's no small thing.

I'm going to try this summer to keep up blogging about my gardening and canning and all that, but I can't do the rest of it. I can no longer waste my energy reading crap that is poorly argued and is bound to upset me. I was already thinking along these lines, but the other night I chanced to comment on someone else's blog (someone I don't know) and I posted this response to someone who stated that Americans don't apparently care about other nations:

Part of the problem seems to me to be that the mainstream media inflate certain things and completely de-emphasize others. Most of my American friends are well aware of this, and shows like The Colbert Report make it pretty freakin clear. But people in other countries are less likely to see that than they are the Fox/CNN crap which emphasizes the standard government line and doesn't focus on war protests or really anything that gets far away from the press releases they get from government and Pentagon officials. If that's all you know about America, then your view of it is pretty well screwed. But that's what you get for trusting the news. Meh.

And I have to say to karlos that I find it absurd that you think America does not care about the existence of other countries and yet more absurd that you think American voters should care more about other countries than they do about themselves. First, America--both the government and its citizens individually--is involved in projects to help other countries all over the world (in the Middle East, granted, it's only Israel). Even some liberal commentators have acknowledged how much aid the Bush administration has given to Africa. American NGOs, too, such as Habitat for Humanity and the Peace Corps are also involved in other countries throughout the world. The CDC does huge amounts of disease prevention work overseas. So, I don't think you have any substantive case that America in general does not care about other countries in general.

And I know that a lot of foreigners think that when we vote, it should be with other countries foremost in our minds. But give me a break. What country's people do this? Certainly foreign policy is an important part of this election, and we all know it. But it is just stupid to suggest that we shouldn't care about our economy. For one thing, our economy, being so big and tied to so many others, matters to the rest of the world, less now than it used to, but it still matters--China needs someone to buy all that crap. For another thing, nobody--I don't care what nationality--is going to vote for something that hurts them personally, and a lot of Americans are being personally hurt by the current state of the economy. I'm having a hard time thinking of another nation so beneficent that when some sectors of its population had longstanding 20%+ unemployment, they would care more about their nation's reputation in other countries than about economic policy. Perhaps there is one, but nothing jumps out.

Of course, we don't necessarily have to choose. Ideally, a politician will step forward with a decent economic policy and a decent foreign policy. I doubt that person is John McCain from what I've seen so far; however, so far, the Democrats are not looking like the shoo-in party that they should be. This should have been a cakewalk for them, but it isn't going to be now, unless I am much mistaken.

I then received a private message from the person I was responding to that indicated that he (I'm guessing from the name, but possibly she) stopped reading my comment after I started turning it into a personal attack. I realize I don't always get a lot of sleep, and I'm lazy about proofreading, but I don't see personal attacks. I did refer to his statements as "absurd" and "stupid" but unless his statements have taken on bodily presence (in which case, someone should alert the tabloids!), that isn't a personal attack.

I do understand that the third paragraph isn't particularly strong argumentation, but lately I have been especially bothered by this notion some people seem to have that America should be held to requirements that no other nation is. A lot of people talk about how racist America is as if racism existed nowhere else or talk about slavery as if America invented it. I am to suppose that we are also the only nation with any other kind of bigotry, too. I am also given to understand that we are the only people who get do or would get testy at illegal immigrants or that we are the only people in the history of the world who get testy, period. We suck. We get it. We suck, we're the worst people ever, and you hate us. Fine. I don't personally give a crap anymore. We're selfish, we're ungenerous, we're crazed fundamentalists, whatever. Oh, right, and we hate the environment. Are we done here?

Yeah, so, like I said, I'm tired of that, and I meant to point out that a) the US does sometimes do good things, b) we do actually sometimes as a nation demonstrate caring towards other nations, c) if you believe that the US is entirely defined and delimited by what you see on CNN, then (and here's your personal attack) YOU ARE STUPID. There I've said it.

Anyway, so then this person wrote me another message indicating--I don't remember. If Fight Club taught me nothing else, it taught me that sometimes you have to say, "This conversation is OVER" and walk away, so I deleted it. I did read it, but I gave it no further thought, although I believe he did ask what I thought "absurd" means causing me to violently roll my eyes.

So, today I check in with the old Vox to find yet another message from this tenacious little person that went a little something like this:

I was going to tear everything in your reply apart in the post but a] i was tired. b] i thought it polite not to c] i stopped reading when i found the insults and your comment got off the subject and became a personal attack

d] i noticed those in your neighbourhood and i am sure that had a bearing on your desire to insult me

that's that i suppose

OK then. I hope that is that. I still am apparently too bleary-eyed to figure otu where my comment "got off the subject and became a personal attack," and I spent entire minutes wondering who in my neighborhood was so unsavory. I guess this person is from the UK, so maybe it's all the Aussies in my neighborhood --or the Canadians?--that are upsetting. Maybe he's still upset about the decline of the Empire.

I did indicate in my first and only response to this joker that I thought the way he responded to my comment said a lot about his character, and this is what I mean. Instead of finding a way to politely "tear [my] reply apart," he instead has to resort to the "OMG you're attacking me personally!" line of non-defense. It says a lot about you when you refuse to read what someone said or to argue with it politely if you disagree and have reason to disagree.

But, whatever. This conversation is OVER.

Oh, except, I do want to say one thing. Yes, I am WELL aware that the USA has also done a wide array of horrific things to the world, and I know we are crapping on Kyoto (nice visual, eh?) and all that. The point wasn't to put forth a defense of every single thing the US or its citizens do. It's just that the bad things aren't the entire story either, even though that's how it is often portrayed these days. Not that I care. I have a garden to tend to and a 3-year-old who is worried about pelicans.

And we're getting a goat. Ha. Take that, foreigners!

P.S. Confidential to Noam Chomsky: Dude, I'm reading Failed States now, and I've read a bunch of this before. You need to start putting out two versions of each of your books. One version, the longer, could be for people who have never read any of your political work. The other, much shorter, could be for those of us who are pretty familiar with your work, and it could probably just say, "Our foreign policy remains fucked up." Then a huge list of references. Talk to your editors about it.

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QotD: I Left My Heart in...

nobody@vox.com(GinBaby) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 04:27:34 -0700

What do you love about where you live?
Submitted by Emu with a Clue.

Well, for one thing, when we hang up our clothes to dry the old-fashioned way in the backyard, no one cares. There is very little traffic here, and anyway I walk to do all my errands since it's only half a mile or so to the places I need to go. We have this big backyard, and, again, what we do with it (in our case, turning it into a huge vegetable garden and getting some chickens later this year) is a matter of no one else's concern. My son runs wild and free in our backyard and, while he's not allowed to run into the road or anything, we do not have to restrain him most of the time. He has an amount of freedom here that I think would be impossible in most places, certainly in urban areas. In fact, in preparation for our trip to Texas, we realized we need a stroller or some other means of containing him--in airports, at Sea World, along the Riverwalk in San Antonio, he's going to need to be kept under control, and he's too heavy to carry. Our lab ate his last stroller, but we never use it here anyway, so we hadn't replaced it. Considering he is also almost never in a car seat, he really doesn't understand the concept of being physically restrained by belts and so forth, and I'm glad.

Idaho potatoes are really quite good.

We have a great view of the Tetons from our front porch. There is a fantastic and dirt cheap Mexican restaurant in town. There is soon to be a community store downtown, an old-fashioned mercantile. My parents live here, so my son gets to see them all the time, which is great. There is good fishing--I don't fish, but my husband does, and I love to eat trout. Real estate is freakin cheap. Just all around, from a libertarian point of view, it's great here--people talk about you all the time, yeah, but nobody really cares that much what you do. Also, our next-door neighbor Vic is a classic small-town old man type, knows everything, always helpful.

Hate the fucking weather here, though. This town has the worst weather of any place I've ever lived. It has the wind of Great Falls, dry heat in summer, dry piercing cold in winter, and very little summer or spring. The only way it could be worse is if one season also had high humidity. Instead it's just bone dry all the time, and we're going to run out of water. Then we'll have to kiss those delicious Idaho potatoes goodby!

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I Missed this One

nobody@vox.com(GinBaby) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 04:22:50 -0700

The first time around, I somehow missed this:

When it comes to the environment, our new policy is this: Let the heartland live with the consequences of handing the national government to the rape-and-pillage party. The only time urbanists should concern themselves with the environment is when we are impacted--directly, not spiritually (the depressing awareness that there is no unspoiled wilderness out there doesn't count). Air pollution, for instance: We should be aggressive. If coal is to be burned, it has to be burned as cleanly as possible so as not to foul the air we all have to breathe. But if West Virginia wants to elect politicians who allow mining companies to lop off the tops off mountains and dump the waste into valleys and streams, thus causing floods that destroy the homes of the yokels who vote for those politicians, it no longer matters to us. Fuck the mountains in West Virginia--send us the power generated by cleanly burned coal, you rubes, and be sure to wear lifejackets to bed.

Interesting. Because I would think that coal, whether cleanly burned or otherwise, is going to be uncleanly mined, and it's going to be mined in places where it exists and can be accessed, rather than under metropolises. And West Virginia needing jobs doesn't *want* to elect these people but someone's got to work to get food on the table, right? So they mine coal, so that you can have your "cleanly burned coal." I like how the cities are now going to exploit the yokels. Ah, when Democrats show their true colors...

I wish this were Jonathan Swift and I wish the people of West Virginia would stop allowing coal mining (as some of them are already trying to do, but they're fighting a losing battle because, again, that tetchy job thing) and you won't have anything to burn, cleanly or otherwise.

You should go read this Urban Archipelago thing, seriously. It's rich. If I keep reading it, I may never vote Democrat again.

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So, Yeah, I'm Angry Again

nobody@vox.com(GinBaby) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 04:07:58 -0700

Big surprise. I know. Nobody makes you read my vitriol.

Anyway, so Barack said some stuff in front of a wealthy audience "behind closed doors" in San Francisco, and it's a pretty big deal. You know what I'm talking about, or else you live under a rock or possibly in the Southern Hemisphere.

Let me start by saying that I'm white, we are definitely working class (though I have a postgraduate degree *sniff*), we make *significantly* less than the median household income in this country, we are married with one kid and two dogs, and we live in a small, religious, Republican town. For my part, I have almost always lived in small towns, though never in Pennsylvania.

And the thing that makes me bitter is the way the media is talking about what Barack said. First and foremost is that the "guns, god, and xenophobia" part of it is really taken out of context. I didn't know that until Joan Walsh wrote a nice little blog entry about it. If you want to know more of what Obama said, go there. When you read the whole thing, it comes off *a bit* different, no?

Second, the vast majority of the talking/writing class who are accusing Obama of elitism and being disrespectful to the working class are NOT working class. So, you live in Manhattan and work for a major news network and have stylists do your hair everyday, and you want to tell ME how I think about what Obama said? You want to tell ME that I'm being disrespected? No thanks--I can read, and I can decide for myself if what he said is offensive, OK? I don't need you, some asshole pundit, to tell me what I think. Thanks. Slate ran, like, 4 or 5 pieces about it, all of them blasting Obama but in different ways, all of them assholish.

Third, are they deliberately misunderstanding what was said? They have to be deliberately misunderstanding this, just to make hay from it because that's what they do. For example:

To judge from Obama's several statements on the subject, he sincerely believes that working-class whites, lacking the self-awareness to recognize the actual economic origins of their distress, seek relief from their pain by praying in church, slaughtering deer, and making illegal immigrants and imports from foreign countries scapegoats for ills that have nothing to do with immigration or trade. They may not be racists, they may even be sympathetic victims, but they are too irrational to understand their genuine problems and their true interests, which are chiefly economic, a fact that university-educated progressives in big cities and college towns can readily perceive. Source.

That is not what Obama said or even really implied. You, elitist bastard, are putting that whole "lacking the self-awareness" part in there yourself. The point was not that we quaint Li'l Abners don't know where our misery comes from--the point was that administration after administration, it just keeps getting worse, to the point that we don't believe any administration gives a shit about our situation (and we are *quite* aware that urban Democrats don't) or that we have any power to change the economic situation. Obama didn't say or imply that we're too stupid to figure out what's wrong in our towns. He said that when the economic situation is persistently dismal without real hope for a solution, well, people hold on to their traditions and culture more tightly than people whose economic prospects are good.

Obama furthermore did not state or imply that "Once the Pennsylvanians get some jobs back, they'll change and become as enlightened as Obama or the San Franciscans to whom he was talking" (Kausfiles). Say what? He didn't say this because he didn't say that they were unenlightened. He said they were "bitter" and by that he meant "angry" not "unenlightened." He meant they were angry about the severe economic screwing they've got in the past couple of decades. He has never said or implied that religion is backward or that hunting or other sporting uses of guns are backward or unenlightened. (And, fortunately for all of us who hate being pandered to, he has also not regaled us--all of a sudden!--with tales of how his grandfather took him behind the barn and taught him to shoot when he was just a little boy--oh, fuck off Hillary. Just fuck off.) He didn't say or imply that Pennsylvanians need enlightenment--he said they need jobs or reasonable hope of jobs and economic development in their towns, and he implied that once they have those things, perhaps they won't feel so angry and hopeless.

What are the real economic differences between the two parties, anyway? Both seem to support NAFTA, "free" trade, most elements of the Farm Bill, and so on down the line. Does either party have a plan for bringing decent jobs back to rural America? No. Rural people don't typically support welfare, mainly because they think that if jobs are available, it's better to work. But, it is no great comfort to be asked to give up a factory job that had benefits for a service job that pays half of what you were making and has no benefits, all in the name of the great economic theory people in Washington and the universities like to dream up.

On the other hand, I've been trying to warn my similarly well-educated liberal-ish friends for a long time that the rhetoric coming from the left was severely and possibly permanently alienating a core set of voters that basically agree with them but get turned off by being called names. Seriously, check these quotes out:

"This quote and the resulting feeding frenzy are a huge opportunity for Obama to get the attention of low-information small-town voters who are skeptical of him and convince some of them to vote their pocketbooks instead of their culture." (ah, okayyyyyy...we're "low-information?" Really? I consider myself pretty high information, too high most of the time. And you will probably never convince most of us to vote our pocketbooks over our culture--sorry, but some of us actually care about our culture.)

"Obama spoke artlessly, forgetting that the first law of American politics is: Flatter the rubes." (And that is from Todd Gitlin, Ph.D. in dumbassery. Yes, we're rubes, and low-information rubes. The only thing we can understand is flattery and pandering, which is why NONE OF US are completely irked at Hillary's recent embrace of her gun-related past. That NONE OF US there is totally sarcasm. You didn't know rubes could be sarcastic, did you?)

In an essay titled "The Urban Archipelago" a few years ago, the editors of Seattle's alt-weekly the Stranger wrote: "It's time to state something that we've felt for a long time but have been too polite to say out loud: Liberals, progressives, and Democrats do not live in a country that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. We live on a chain of islands. We are citizens of the Urban Archipelago, the United Cities of America. We live on islands of sanity, liberalism, and compassion -- New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, St. Louis, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and on and on ... And we are the real Americans. They -- rural, red-state voters, the denizens of the exurbs -- are not real Americans. They are rubes, fools, and hate-mongers ... We can secede emotionally ... by turning our backs on the heartland ... We're everywhere any sane person wants to be. Let them have the shitholes, the Oklahomas, Wyomings, and Alabamas. We'll take Manhattan." (OK. Deal. You take Manhattan, and you go ahead and secede. I will remind you that, while much food is eaten in Manhattan, none of it is grown there. Perhaps you can import it from the Republic of California, but only if we let you transport it through our territory. What is this "real Americans" bullshit anyway? Sanity? What? From what I hear y'all have high violent-crime rates, a great deal of poverty and racism of your own, and insane amounts of traffic--that's "sanity" and "real America?" OK, man, if that's what you want. Fortunately for us, this deal also means we get virtually all the National Parks and Forests, most of the bizarre roadside attractions that make American roads so great, and all the corn we can eat. Sweet. Keep your Manhattan and your Los Angeles--they don't have anything we want anyway. Also, St. Louis? Really?)

Yeah, and I haven't even started on the specific comments in which liberals take on gun owners (my penis is so small, in fact, that it does not even exist--and that is exactly why I own guns! Facile Freud, at your service), trucks (ditto! god forbid we should find either trucks or guns to be useful tools), child-rearing (I'm going to spank my kid just to spite you!), and, well, it just goes on and on. Liberals constantly say they are the party of the working class, the party of compassion. But where is this evident? Hillary, who once did genuinely show compassion, has become such a cynical tool that she apparently cannot see why someone would care about the sniper fire thing or the Mark Penn thing or that whatever fond memories she has of shooting with her grandpa she consistently votes for gun control, and it is not clear where she draws the line of Enough Gun Control. For all we can tell of her, she will pry the gun from Charlton Heston's cold, dead hands.

So, I ask again, where is the compassion, enlightenment, and care for the working class evident? When was the last time the Democratic party had a really good idea for how to help small-town, working-class people? ...I'm waiting... It does not follow that simply because you oppose tradition that you are enlightened, either, so don't tell me that because you support gay marriage, you get an automatic enlightenment badge. Yeah, yeah, "universal health care," SCHIP, blah blah. Any rural person will tell you that it's not about welfare systems--people want jobs, they want to keep their farms, they want their downtowns to start looking alive again. A lot of small towns in the West are organizing community stores as a way to begin the revitalization of the downtown--we're starting one here, for example. Not that the typical Democrat knows or cares. And neither Hillary nor Barack is currently offering a health care plan that actually insures everyone, at least not without forcing them to buy insurance that they may or may not be able to afford. I tell you, we can barely afford ours, and it's cheap from what I can tell (my husband's employer is one of the last great manufacturing employers, I am convinced--seriously, he has all kinds of benefits, they pay well for this area, they are very ethical and organized in all their dealings with their employees. So I guess what I'm saying is eat more instant potatoes, because that's what they make, and they treat their employees remarkably well, and we are very fortunate. Eat at KFC because then you're eating my husband's potatoes. Wow. That sounds kind of nasty. Anyway...).

Yeah, I don't know, but I don't think Obama is the one disrespecting rural voters. He perhaps did not say it in the most elegant way possible, but at least he has a grip on what the problem is. It's too bad the media and most other Democrats don't.

(oh, right, I know, our culture is mere nostalgia for a "past that never really existed" and we have no right or justification to want to hold onto it and anyway all country music is shit now. right. got it. blah blah blah. watch as the democrats shake their heads in confusion after they lose to McCain...just go ahead and secede)

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Twice Bitten

nobody@vox.com(GinBaby) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 04:27:49 -0700

Grr. Twice tonight. Twice in one night I have, showing my characteristic lack of luck and poor work ethic (I'm supposed to be working, not trolling the archives of the Atlantic Monthly, but anyhow), stumbled upon an article that has outraged me.

The first one was a review of The Omnivore's Dilemma written by some Atlantic editor who is clearly a vegetarian, although he failed to come right out and say that, and is the sort of vegetarian who is never going to accept for any reason under any circumstance that anyone might have a decent reason for eating meat. His decision that, in the facile words of The Smiths, "meat is murder" puts him on a higher plane than the rest of us, those of us who are clearly in denial about what it means to take a life in order to sustain our own, those of us too ignorant and immoral to follow him. Well, you know what, buddy? Fuck off, alright?

Yeah, I know, that's not a good argument, but the minds of people like this (which by no means includes all vegetarians, thank heavens) are closed already. There is no argument that I can make, no amount of elegant prose I can assemble, no moral justification I can muster to convince someone like this that eating meat is not the original sin. I do want to point out, though, that Michael Pollan (and others--most hunters will tell you this) says that killing for your food puts you in a different relationship with death, makes you face the inevitability of it and the cycle of life in ways that can be disquieting, humbling, and profound. Vegetarians never seem to believe this, probably because you don't get quite the same shock of our fragility and the eternal cycling of nature by uprooting carrots, but it's true. Anyway, the fuckwit reviewer says that actually (because he is so much smarter and well read than Pollan, of course!) psychologists tell us otherwise (since when do psychologists know shit?): As Otto Rank put it, "the death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the sacrifice, of the other." Our reviewer does not see, apparently, that this is not the opposite of what Pollan said. The death fear of the fucking ego (sorry for the cursing--if I don't do that, seriously, the pomposity here will make my head explode) comes from our belief that we are separate from nature, that we are above and outside of the circle of life that makes life possible. Our fear of death is based largely on the fact that we are in denial of it. When you face the inevitability and even elegance of it, you lose the fear, certainly. Am I totally wrong here or is this not one of the teachings of Buddhism? We fear death because in our self-consciousness we see ourselves from outside as if we were outside of the systems and cycles of nature that, honestly, bring death to all--without exception. We think, in our great big fucking narcissism, that we are so great that we are the exceptions, that our "souls" are so special that they cannot possibly perish. Whatever you think about the immortality of the soul, though, the bare, ugly fact is that your carbon-based ass is doomed.

The person who kills her food already admits this and thus, either gradually or suddenly, loses the fear of death and admits, as Heidegger would say, death into her home. Are people better off when they fear death or when they accept it as natural and right? You be the judge.

The second article made me draw one primary conclusion: Maybe we should just elect Hillary Clinton so that feminists will shut the fuck up. Good Christ. If you're a man and you dislike Hillary Clinton, then you are a misogynist because a bunch of youngish women say so. Period. If a woman *feels* like your remarks are sexist, then you are a woman-hater. I love how the author marshalled this evidence primarily from among her friends and none of them can *quite* put their finger on where the sexism is in the remarks of their male, Obamaniac friends--they just kind of feel it's there. She admits that Hillary's actual policies and positions are sometimes objectionable--the more you look at Hillary's record, the more like a freakin warmonger she seems--but there is a certain rabidity, maybe, that these incredibly sensitive young women are picking up on that just has to be rooted in misogyny. Not that they have any evidence! Just their hunches! Not that their male friends who hate Hillary treat actual women in their lives with any hint of misogyny. But, obviously, the standard line is that men fear and hate powerful women, so that must be what's going on here. Right. Case closed. Brilliantly reasoned.

Listen, there have been very real cases of sexism directed at Hillary throughout her career in politics. But not everything is. Some people have strong dislike of Hillary because they don't feel she's honest, and that is going to draw moral fervor out of some people. Some people retain intense dislike of Bill that gets transferred onto Hillary, not least because the prospect of Bill back in the White House is unsettling as hell for a lot of us (yes, "us"--ever since NAFTA and welfare reform, I have not been a fan--that's right, I don't support NAFTA). A lot of people believe that the Clinton White House will again be plagued by scandal and meet resistance from Congress that will hurt their chances of getting anything done--not an unreasonable fear--and this also causes some of the strong anti-Hillary sentiment. Some of us who were against the war at the start and never believed in the "intelligence" and wept a little at watching poor old Colin Powell prostitute himself by delivering it as fact have a very strong distaste for her because she was apparently too willing to go along and believe--that isn't who I want answering the phone at 3:00 a.m. So, there's actually quite a lot going on here.

The problem is that the first serious bid for presidency by a woman is Hillary Clinton, one of the most divisive figures in the current political scene who happens to be married to one of the other most divisive figures. The problem is that *some* feminists are using Hillary's run as a test case against which to judge how sexist America still is as a nation. But not all Hillary-hatred has anything to do with her vagina, and indeed much of it has to do with her husband and his Wandering Penis, the investigation of which thoroughly distracted the nation for so long. This isn't a fair test case, because she isn't some abstract Platonic form WOMAN--she's Hillary Clinton. It is fair to dislike, even hate, her and still not be a misogynist. (Yes, again, I do realize there have been sexist comments directed at her, just as there have been racist or at least racist-ish comments directed at Barack. The question here is really whether those represent the views of a majority, and I think the overwhelming answer is that they do not. If McCain wins in November, it is not going to be because the Dems had a woman or a black candidate--it's going to be because the Democrats will take whatever advantage they have and piss it away. I have a silly notion that being fingered as a sexist, not for anything you said but just kinda for the way you said it maybe?, is not going to win over the white male vote. Call me crazy.)

Finally, I have to take up with this particular sentence for a minute, or many minutes:

"Especially white and well-educated women, who are catching up to their male counterparts, if not in terms of equal pay or domestic expectations or secure reproductive options, at least in their ability to pursue the education and vocation they desire."

Let's take a minute and reflect on those three things she mentions as places where women have not "caught up" to their male counterparts. Equal pay? Well, first, a lot of economists don't agree that it exists, once all variables are accounted for. Variables includes things like the age of the workers (since the Census data includes all workers, and most senior ladies did not build up a career steadily over time, they make less money than men of the same age who put in more work years), time off for parenting (you could argue that gender inequity still exists there, sure, and I will argue that it is going to remain the case that women will more often take/need time off for parenting than men do until such time as we are either all hermaphrodites [which could happen in this great age of plastics] or that we get a kind of Handmaid's Tale society going, where some women do the reproducing and child care for other women so that they don't have to--the more nannies and surrogate moms we get, the closer we come to Margaret Atwood's fantastic utopian novel! Wait--it is utopian, right? Only, in our nanny version, the women aren't literally forced to do it, it's just that they have no other options due to the severe economic stratification that has resulted, let's face it, in large part from the lifestyle of the white privileged overclass, women and men alike), career choices (with more women choosing careers in lesser-paid fields and men typically doing more dangerous and rat-racey type work), and so forth. If you look at the youngest workers in the Census data, the gap is 5 cents, i.e., women make 95 cents for every dollar a man makes, and considering some of those women are most certainly nonworking women and/or mothers, well, it's probably not as big a deal as we're meant to believe it is. Five cents won't even buy a damned Atomic Fireball anymore.

The other issue here is another kind of economic disparity. Men still earn most of the money, but women still do most of the spending, possibly as much as 80% of the discretionary spending. So...so...well, I'll leave it up to you to decide what that means, because I'm once again on the verge of one of my "so, if I was a man, I would be drunk every night and would totally get hookers!" proclamations.

OK, so the second claim about "domestic expectations." Well, we've already pretty thoroughly hashed out the division of household chores bit, no? I think I beat that one into the ground already. Is there something else that is included in "domestic expectations?" I don't know--I think it's a bit vague. Women are expected to be more prettified and take more time with appearances, true, although men are doing it now too, and these days a lot of women are *choosing* this, so...well, so...

And finally--reproductive options. Right! Women are so far behind men on this one! Let's see here: Men have abstinence and condoms as methods of birth control--ah, and the vasectomy, let's not forget. If pregnancy happens anyway, they have no choice about what happens to the fetus but will be legally obliged to pay child support, and if you live where I do, will be morally obliged to marry the mother. And women have--well, it must be fewer options than that, right? That's the implication. Yet women also have available to them abstinence and condoms...and also pills and injections of various sorts, IUDs, tubal ligations, sponges and foams, the biorhythm method, the diaphragm, that new vaginal ring thingy, and heaven knows what else. If unwanted pregnancy occurs, she can choose abortion, she can choose to keep the baby, or she can choose adoption. Am I wrong? Am I missing something here? I think we're way ahead of men in terms of having reproductive options--we're just not necessarily any better than men are at using them. Oh, right--she does say "secure" reproductive options. And birth control is not securely available to every woman equally, admittedly, but with Planned Parenthood and public health clinics, it comes pretty close. We need to close that gap, but women, it should be noted, do still have abstinence and condoms just as securely as men have them. Available even at Wal-Mart!

So. I know and understand that there is still sexism (and racism). But a) her argument admits of no rebuttal--she knows you're going to say that it's just Hillary you're opposed to, not a woman president in general, and she just says that that's just the sort of thing feminism has been trying to fight, because if you really like women in power then I guess you have to accept any woman in power, right? That seems to be the end of her story, even though she says otherwise earlier in the piece. And b) these arguments are Simple Simon(e). When the pay gap is diminishing rapidly, when women are attending college at the same rate as men and getting better grades, when women now share something like an equal amount of the domestic obligations with their husbands, when women no longer *have to* get married and have kids, when most women have a banquet of reproductive options open to them, maybe it's time to reassess what we talk about when we talk about sexism and misogyny. I would have thought by now that Democrats would have fucking realized that the constant complaints at this very facile, very (let's say it) bitchy level is incredibly alienating to, wow, a lot of people.

To some of us it seems whiny, elitist, way too feely, and essentially untrue in its major points. There is nothing like listening to privileged white chicks gripe about the pay gap and their reproductive options to make my blood boil. Just shutup already. It is especially irksome to me given the fact that American feminism has little or nothing to offer to women who don't work and almost nothing for working-class women. I didn't really notice this (I did notice the extreme elitism in most feminist writing, but not the ignoring of mothers) until I became a mother and faced the feminist wrath. American feminism is not interested in mothers, and some strains of it are extremely hostile to mothers, unless they also work for pay. Unfortunately, women were mothers long before money was even conceived of, and there is a fundamental bio-logic going on here that you're not going to convince most women to abandon. That some feminists have become haters of mothers and children only serves to point up how very un-feminine American feminism often is--that you would not only deny but hate that part of who we are as women is misogyny of a far more disturbing sort than a Hillary nutcracker. The Hillary nutcracker, at least, is meant as a joke--it is crass and unfunny, yes, but the women (and occasionally men) who loathe mothers and children are not even joking. That's the sexism I worry about.

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Good God!

nobody@vox.com(GinBaby) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 02:45:08 -0700

People, I had somehow never seen this until just today. Just today! How could this have happened? If you haven't seen this, I command you to watch it this instant! Right now! Whatever else you're doing (probably looking at porn, aren't you?), this is more important.

I cannot think of another singer who could have brought this many totally different famous people together for a video. It's fun to identify them all. I have newfound love for Chris Rock. I will totally forgive the lactose intolerant thing.

God Will Cut You Down, if Kanye West doesn't do it first

Have you watched it yet? I can't talk to you until you watch it.

Of course, this one's pretty cool, too.

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Housework, Time, Food

nobody@vox.com(GinBaby) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 23:59:24 -0700

This is why I should never, ever come online.

So, there's this article rehashing the old complaint that women do sooooo much more housework than men do and so this is proof that women are ...well, whatever. You know, because it gets said all the time.

I have a lot of problems with this. Let's examine just this little blurb, a little blurb on which I'm sure much blood of men is going to be spilled.

The graph doesn't match the data in the lede. The graph indicates that single men in 2005 do considerably less housework than married men, yet the accompanying text says that marriage saves men an hour of housework a week. Then the text later goes on to say that married men do more housework than single men. So, I'm guessing the graph is the correct version, in which case the opening of the article is just false and unfortunately reinforces the impression that, again, women have it so bad while men have it so good.
They say it's based on a time diary, yet they also did one of those fiercely unreliable surveys asking people to recall how much time they spent in the previous week doing whatever activity. People's memories on this front are crazy unreliable. Most Americans, for example, underestimate the amount of TV they watch per week by at least a couple of hours per day, and we know that from time diaries.
If you look at the graph, assuming it is the correct representation of the data, the amount of housework done by married women and married men is getting pretty close to equal--that is NOT a 7-hour difference on the graph. Time diary data I've seen before--as opposed to the surveys from memory--suggest this is true. Bear in mind that this sample probably also included some people, most likely women, who do not work outside the home and it seems natural that they would do more housework than their spouses, no?
Why isn't gardening, lawn care, vehicle maintenance, and home repair counted? Is that not housework, of a sort? I know my husband does most of the vehicle maintenance and home repair, and I count that. It's as integral to the running of our household as doing the dishes, possibly more so (If the furnace is on the fritz, we're fucked--if all the dishes are dirty, which is unlikely, we can always use paper, ya know?). In my experience, most women do not count these activities as housework, and so when I hear them bitch about how their husband doesn't do the dishes, I'm all, "Oh, do you split the wood? Do you fix the drippy faucets?" Yah, some women do (I do, if I have to) but most don't. Most seem to want their husbands to do all that work and an equal amount as they do of what they consider housework and also be sensitive and romantic and not watch football and also take them out to dinner because they are so oppressed by their housework. God almighty. It's a wonder more men don't crack. And of course most men are still the primary breadwinners and expected, by society yes, but also very often by their wives, to put in long hours to make a brilliant career and pay for that goddamned mortgage. It would drive me to drink. (I am suddenly so reminded of some men I met in Japan, mostly Aussies but also Japanese and other nationalities who asserted boldly that marrying an American woman is akin to death. It's not just that we have goals. It's that we will slowly kill you with sudsy liquids.)
And finally, why is no attention paid to the fact that while the amount of time women, single or married, spend on housework has greatly decreased (by 10 hours a week or so for married women--and I would wager they fill almost all those hours watching Oprah), the amount of housework done by married men has increased by almost the same amount. What sort of tragedy will befall the nation if we are forced to admit that men are actually stepping up and doing housework? If we totted up the amount of time spent doing household repairs and lawn maintenance and so forth, I would hazard a guess there would be absolute parity here. I also hazard a guess, though, that this survey was done at least in part with the old received wisdom that women do much more housework, even today, than men informing the survey--I am guessing, from what I've seen, that the theory drove the collection of the data, and I know for a fact it drove the way that reporter wrote the story up. NEVER LET YOUR THEORY DRIVE YOUR DATA; IT SHOULD ALWAYS BE THE OTHER WAY AROUND. ALWAYS.

I know I used to take it as truth that women today still do much more housework than their husbands. I took that as fact, without any evidence to back up my belief, until I took a seminar called The Philosophy of Daily Life. It was inexpertly named, but expertly conceived and taught. Albert Borgmann wanted us to think about daily life in philosophical terms, to use philosophy as a way of thinking about quotidian and pedestrian things, to talk about the Good Life and what it meant and how to get there in terms of actual life. He was distressed that philosophers tend to ignore the philosophical meanings, for example, of central heating (without a hearth, the focal point of the home has become the television, and the television tends to discourage familial interaction, while the hearth encouraged it) and the absolute state of disrepair that the family meal has fallen into. One of the books we read was a survey of how Americans actually spend their time, and it was based entirely on time diaries. That means that for every, say, half-hour segment of every day, as they were doing it, people wrote down what they were doing. One thing they found was that, by and large, women are not doing nearly as much housework as they fancy they are, and in general, everybody has vastly more leisure time than they think they do. They also, naturally, found that most people spend most of that time watching TV but think that they do not. It's an interesting book and, no, sadly, I cannot find it anymore and cannot remember the name. But I was shocked. A theory I had held forever had been undermined by data. I found myself forced to give up my belief. If only others would follow suit.

No, ladies, I think it's time we moved on from this and found some new drum to beat. This one is old and stinks really badly. Unfortunately, articles like this one just perpetuate myths that we apparently desperately need to believe in.

You people have no idea. This kind of thing suffocates me. That's why I started the Vox, that's why I come across with so much vitriol sometimes, because when I read things that I know from data and from checking out the world around me to be totally untrue and ultimately harmful, the rage smothers me. If I don't get it out, I can't breathe, until all of a sudden out will come a huge, explosive breath of anger, probably at T, and he doesn't need that. He's certainly not responsible for this shit.

I admit to also being greatly frustrated by the fact that when you actually try to converse with quotidian people about their pedestrian lives in philosophical terms, they typically become bewildered and hostile. No one cares, no one wants to talk about it. The only thing they can offer up is the accusation that you hate modernity and want to turn back the clock. When you assert that actually what you want is for humanity to find new ways to keep what is valuable and adapt both modern life and tradition to each other so that we can retain the good things from both, eyes glass over. Seriously. It's frustrating and kind of soul-deadening.

Actually, since I'm here and roughly on the topic, I'm going to write about Heat by Bill Buford. Why is this topical? Hang on. I just finished that book today, and I enjoyed it, although frankly it did nothing to ameliorate my opinion that Mario Batali is a bit of a prick (a prick who constantly mispronounces 'piquant' which irritates me). But it's a good book, and I heartily recommend it. Stephens, I believe I will be sending it your way.

Anyway, at the end, after his apprenticeship in meat with the butcher of Tuscany, Buford finds himself lamenting what has become of food in our modern times. He laments the demise of the great Tuscan beef, the disappearance of great handmade pasta, the disappearance of certain traditions and foodways. He also keeps asserting that the romantic Tuscans are somewhat insane, living without electricity and so forth, to pursue these nutty ideals. He also goes on to say that he is totally not against global capitalism and blah blah blah. It's just the food that worries him, how few people will know in succeeding generations how great food is supposed to taste, how it is supposed to connect us with ancestors and landscapes, how it is meant to communicate stories, legends, great epics of life to the eater. It is not just dinner, and he seems like he's starting to get that...but then he doesn't really. He doesn't seem to get that it's all connected. No, you don't have to give up all the trappings and conveniences of modern life, but certainly the global economy and the constant striving for money above all other things of value are major forces in the undoing of food. He's right that you can't simply blame the supermarkets--it's much more complicated than that. But he is misguided in judging that people who care more about the culture of food (what Borgmann always calls the Culture of the Table) than they do about money are insane or deluded. The pursuit of money above all other things means food--and other things, like family--take a backseat. In the American case, it's not just a backseat; it's been dumped out onto the highway. Oh, sure, we worship our celebrity chefs, but this is just a symptom of the problem. We worship them because food has become mysterious to us, handed over to professionals whether they work for Kraft or Babbo or the school cafeteria. It is only one of the many things we no longer seem to know how to do for ourselves, but it is among the greatest of losses, perhaps the greatest. We can't get it back by visiting and deifying a great butcher in Tuscany but simultaneously saying that we still want everything else to be the same, with the McMansions and the cheap Chinese imports and the commitment to television. That is unrealistic and fundamentally misses the point. If food is culture, then this culture is getting the food it deserves, which is "convenient" and processed and generally pretty cheap (contrasted to the very expensive food in great restaurants) and disconnected from culture and landscape and reality and overall kind of disappointing, if you know how really great food can be.

That's why I don't think that becoming a proficient home cook is merely a matter of cooking being one pasttime among many and those who enjoy cooking should do it and those who don't shouldn't. It's more important than that. More is being rejected by those who don't cook and more is being lost--the stakes are much higher here than they are if someone doesn't like football, say, or parades. That's one place, too, where I agree with Tony Bourdain: To say up front that you will never eat meat is to reject a vast array of cultures and their traditions and their soul, often including your own--in many cases it is to reject your own family, though it is perhaps not surprising given that we are already often disconnected from our families in profound ways. It is to assert yourself, as an individual, over the social (except in cases, such as in India and among Buddhist monks, where the society is overwhelmingly vegetarian). Imagine someone going to stay in monasteries in Japan and refusing to eat vegetables--it would be offensive, an outrage.

I know. I'm hyperbolic, I'm judgmental, I'm no doubt making too much of it all. I'm the one standing on the deck of the Titanic asking why people don't care about saving this incredibly beautiful heirloom deck chair. I know. But you know, in my little corner of the world, I'm going to keep that deck chair. Hopefully, it floats.

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Vox Hunt: Get Comfortable

nobody@vox.com(GinBaby) — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 22:34:05 -0700

Show us your favorite comfort food.
Submitted by nosa.

I give you the intensely satisfying and comfortingly robust pozole rojo--all the delicious that one bowl can handle. Also a good hangover cure, as are most comfort foods. Mexicans usually argue menudo is a better hangover cure, but let's face it, people: Tripe tastes like ass, and not without reason. And who wants to eat ass when they have a hangover?

When I'm hungover or sick or feeling a little blue, what I want is most definitely loads of chile and pork fat. Yum.

Avgolemono, though, or even pho, will do in a pinch. I wonder how often people find themselves in a pinch that can be alleviated by the addition of soups of Greek and Vietnamese origin. I'm guessing not that often.

(The linked recipe for pozole looks roughly adequate to me--I don't use a recipe when I make it, but this is at any rate the right ingredient list. The only thing I do different is I usually use pork shoulder rather than ribs, but I don't see why ribs wouldn't be equally good. Anyway, since I haven't actually used that recipe, though, I vouch not for it. Ditto the pho recipe--it seems about right to me, and I learned to make pho in a Vietnamese restaurant, but I don't ever use an actual recipe. I can assure you, though, that the charring of the ginger and onion is crucial. Pho broth that has uncharred aromatics is bleh, very bleh.)

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QotD: Saturday Night

nobody@vox.com(GinBaby) — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 22:27:32 -0700

How are your Saturday nights different now than they were five years ago?

In about every way possible. Let's see...5 years ago...I was 28, my boyfriend (now husband) was 22. We didn't live together yet, and he was still in the Jieitai (Japan Ground Self-Defense Force). We only really saw each other on weekends, and he would come and stay with me on weekends, then live on base during the weeks.

Typically on Saturdays we would go somewhere, usually just to Nagoya but sometimes over to Osaka, and walk around and check people out and talk. Then we'd nearly always go to some izakaya and eat a load of food and drink ourselves to oblivion (that is 2 drinks for T, *somewhat* more for me) and then (barely) catch the last train home (or not--love hotels ROCK) and then crash on my futon. Neither of us individually made a huge amount of money, but we were both without much in the way of obligation either. T is a frugal fellow by nature, so usually the wild spending (love hotels, etc.) was on my part, but still, we spent a lot of time out of the apartment, being sort of aimless, drinking and doing whatever we wanted. Some weekends we'd have parties for his army friends at my apartment, in which case his friend Ichiro would inevitably end up sleeping at my place and turning the air conditioner to "arctic." Ha. Ichiro! I'd almost forgotten him. In all my life, I have met few people more utterly boring than Ichiro, but I swear to you, he will make a good husband and father someday. Any interested ladies out there?

Anyway, so that was 5 years ago. Today, we're married and we have a 3 year old. We also don't have much money anymore and we have major financial obligations (mortgage! woot!). We have these bizarre work schedules that generally mean that we don't see each other, let alone get drunk and sleep together. We live in the middle of nowhere in a very Mormon part of Idaho (my husband recently joked that while my son and I are away on a trip in May he's going to go to a strip bar, and I had to remind him that there are no strip bars), which means that even if we had a babysitter, there's nowhere really to go. We spend our nights almost always in the house. If the kid is in bed and we both happen to be off work, generally we watch a movie while he scratches my back. That's not a euphemism of any kind--I have a very itchy back. Probably dry skin, I know. We might each have a beer, and if we're feeling particularly spunky, I might boil up some edamame to go with it.

I know how it all sounds--pretty pathetic and very senior citizen. But it's not. Don't feel bad for us. We're both quite satisfied with it, happy even. We are exactly the people for whom Netflix was invented.

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