A Few Good Memes

Here are some pics from skating with Barack Obama. I hope he does well today. All you Hoosiers and Tar Heels, get out and vote! And vote for Barack! I think he’s a regular guy trying to put America’s best interests above his own. And he stands by his principles; he opposed the war since before it started. Vote early! Vote often!

Fuck the news. Fuck history class. Just read Bossy. Obfuscation eschewal abounds.

A rarity on the net, there has been a thoughtful and interesting discussion about abortion happening at the vomit comit. I can’t really write about some of the personal stuff happening right now, so I’m resorting to politics again.

I have rallied and tried to work and live by reasonably high feminist standards (where feminism could be defined as the radical notion that women are people). That said, I lived for years with the skeleton in the back of my mind that I hated abortion and secretly believed that it should be illegal. As a vegetarian for 12 years and as the guy who literally escorts spiders and even mosquitoes out of the house, it seemed consistent in terms of preserving life.

The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve come to the perspective of Melanie and Kimberly in the aforementioned discussion. It’s all terribly grey. My current perspective is that we need to work for gender equality. Equal pay, equal opportunity, equal rights, equal healthcare access, equal everything. Once we get to that ideal, and women have the opportunities and resources they need, ideally abortion won’t be all that necessary anyway.

It’s clearer to me now that the right uses the abortion issue as a ruse, a distraction. An Oz to fixate on while they sit behind the curtain and continue to try and erode all the rights and gains women have made in the last century.

“Ive been to hell. I spell it…i spell it DMV
Anyone thats been there knows
precisely what I mean
Stood there and Ive waited
and choked back the urge to scream
And if I had my druthers
I’d screw a chimpanzee-call it pointless”
- Primus, DMV

Indiana now has these “In God We Trust” license plates. They’ve had them since the beginning of the year. Seeing them around town, I’ve had a bit of trouble with the idea that separation is accomplished via a couple of steel bolts. Wouldn’t that be the fastening of church and state? But hey, if people want to profess their love of God on their cars, well, it’s free speech, right? There’s just one hitch. To get any other custom plate in Indiana, you pay $40. Custom plates like Support Our Troops, Purple Heart, the Boy Scouts, and the Colts football team. That $40 goes toward a $15 administration fee and a $25 donation to the organization you want to support. The God plates, however, are free. The $15 fee is waived. With a manufacturing cost of $3.69 a plate and almost a half million of them out there now, that means Indiana taxpayers have paid about $1.8 million to Trust God. Sounds to me like Indiana’s legislators have quite clearly made a law respecting an establishment of religion. Perhaps Rep. Woody Burton was too busy keeping my gay friends away from the altar to have read the damn constitution.

I was down at the BMV this morning to get plates for Hotaru (and found my personalized plate with her name won’t be here for just over a year). They were definitely promoting the God plate. I was shown the regular plate, the God plate, and no other custom plates. The ACLU is suing the BMV over this bit of political theatre. Good for them. I should send them a few bucks. When will these legislators either a) stop wasting our money passing these laws promoting their favorite religion? or b) just come out and try to repeal the first amendment outright?

I suggested to the editor of our paper this morning that perhaps they could continue to waive the fee if they also offered “In Krishna We Trust”, “In Allah We Trust”, and “Are You Kidding Me?” plates. I’d pay $15 for one of those.

Alyssa got a letter in the mail this weekend addressed to “The Daughter of Anna Dufair”. It appeared to be hand addressed. She opened it up and it turned out to be an invitation for her to be in a beauty contest. Yep. A beauty contest. Being reflexively repelled by the idea of Alyssa going the JonBenet route and living with the illusion that my kids just naturally absorb my generally progressive values by osmosis, I assumed she’d look at it and it would go in the recycle bin. Imagine my sheer joy when she announces that she wants to participate in said beauty contest.

Now, I’m not the type to just outright ban something that doesn’t put my kids in immediate danger. I think it creates the Salman Rushdie effect. I’d rather discuss, investigate, and gently guide them toward the only right way of doing things: my way. So I decided it was time to take this as a learning opportunity. Sometimes life’s gifts come in unexpected packages.

I’m about as informed on beauty pageants as I am on, say, the Lvov-Sandomierz Offensive. So I read the pamphlet. It’s cleverly engineered to pull at every insecurity a girl can have. Make friends! (You don’t have many now, do you?) Show your pride! (You’re not one of those insecure girls, are you?) Get ahead in life! (Or are you a loser?) They even play lip service to the deepest fear of every progressive parent: No makeup allowed on participants under 12! Except that every photo of every child of every age in the pamphlet was wearing makeup. And the entry fee is a mere $440. They provide many helpful hints on how to raise that entry fee. Ask local businesses to sponsor you, for example. They neglected to mention a plea to the blogosphere.

What I’d like to do is have Alyssa come to the type of understanding that Amanda Angelotti did when she re-entered the pageant world after a progressive-politics epiphany in late high school: “And I remembered the subtle dishonesty of it all.” I guess that’s the rub. Subtlety is a bit lost on 9 year olds. So I’ve decided to take the Zen approach and counter subtle with subtle. We got a copy of Little Miss Sunshine, the best movie I’ve seen in quite a while. There’s plenty of swearing and other adult themes in it, so we’re watching it together and talking about it. Hopefully the vapidity of the average contestant will impress upon her and demotivate.

She said she wants to be in the spotlight and to hear her name called. That’s pretty understandable, for sure. I’ve encouraged her to get involved in community theatre in the past. Perhaps it’s time to push that one again. Dear readers, I’m open to other suggestions of how to navigate these piranha-infested waters with a minimum of blood loss. Where’s Anna when I need her?

If all else fails, I guess we’re going to have to work something up for “Superfreak”.

(Seconds, mere seconds after the beauty pageant discussion wraps up, “Dad, is the tooth fairy real?”)

I’ve been trying to crystallize this idea for years now and it appears that Esquire has done so with great aplomb:

The rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise. It’s not so much antimodernism or the distrust of intellectual elites that Richard Hofstadter deftly teased out of the national DNA forty years ago. Both of those things are part of it. However, the rise of Idiot America today represents—for profit mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power—the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they’re talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a preacher, or a scientist, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

It’s all the dumb kids in school who want to get back at the smart ones for actually being able to understand biology, calculus, and physics.

Thankfully, the bible has nothing to say about the theory of relativity, number theory, or electromagnetic theory. Though they are apparently working on gravity

Fuck the South. We’re part of the new Urban Archipelago.

Found at Christion Exodus:

ChristianExodus.org is coordinating the move of thousands of Christians to South Carolina for the express purpose of re-establishing Godly, constitutional government.

Hallelujah, I say! Put all the fundies in a box, I say. Then I don’t have to vote for them, read about them in my newspaper, or even recognize their nation in international treaties. I can even block their country code from my DNS lookups!

And, we’d finally get some of that cheap labor I was hoping for.

My brother- and sister-in-law would have to move elsewhere to sail and live on the ocean, but I suspect they’d make that kind of sacrifice to get the fundies out of their hair too. I’d miss visiting Charleston, but the USA has plenty of other beauty. Give it a few years and tourism to the United State of JesusLand, South Carolina would be cheap anyway.

I think about this issue a lot, so even though the debate is a difficult and over-done one, I feel a need to get my thoughts out, especially since I do feel fairly alone in my thoughts on the issue. I decided to write this after reading a post at Pensieri di un lunatico minore where he talks about 2 “camps”.

The post left out a “camp”. Those who feel women should be free to do whatever they want to their own bodies as long as it brings no harm to (and certainly doesn’t kill) another person. The person inside a woman’s uterus is alive. No one has a right to kill it. Even if it is going to be born into a life of poverty and despair, it should not be killed.

I agree that unwanted pregnancy leaves women (and others) with two horrible choices - to raise an unwanted child or to kill it. I have been unable to come up with any justification for the latter (other than self-defense in the case of immediate danger to the woman). I wish I could come up with some justification as I feel like a pariah amongst people whom I would consider “progressive” otherwise.

I am not a Christian, so I can’t address that perspective. As far as adoption, I was in the process of filling out (and paying for) an adoption when our son came unexpectedly (and after a great deal of effort that we had nearly given up on) two years ago. I still hope to adopt at some point.

I agree wholeheartedly on tackling the underlying causes and making the debate, if not moot, at least somewhat less pressing. Unfortunately, our nation (and it seems the entire planet) is lurching to the right and an end to poverty is nowhere in sight.

It’s a shame that so many other rights have been witheld from women (and still are) that those who support women’s rights but oppose abortion are left with not much of a platform upon which to stand.