Power to The People

A comment left on my FISA-Obama post just a few days ago:

You mean Barrack Obama is a mortal human? No Way! Get right out of town! ... These people who were surprised by his FISA support have not done their research. He confirmed John Negroponte and Condoleeza Rice for their respective roles in the bush administration. He voted for the USA patriot act, too. Guess What? He would still make a better president than McSame.

Which, while funny and true, goes only partway there. Let me take you down (the Beatles said that) ... the rest of the way.

Keith Olberman's recent memo to Barack—this whole thing is so under my skin. And you know what that means. Yes ... someone is deceiving themselves. Someone is telling less than the truth—many someones. Not that I'm suggesting they've got a clue.

One reason, I supppose, it's quite so rankling is, I live in Berkeley. That's right, Left Wing Central, USA. But really, it's more than that. My own politics are completely radical. But Leftie behavior can be so damn noxious. 

What is is, bro. And what it is, is Entitlement. Hey, you wanna live in this nice little city by the Bay, comes with the territory. And what a territory it is. The Sixties having if not birthed the thing, certainly boiled and distilled entitlement down to this oily essence.

I mean, we were the world, far as we knew. Not that there wasn't something to be said for hippie life. One co-op delivered fresh food, another real milk. People bartered, people gave away valuables. Things just kinda worked. You know, like the Mac. Until the drugs got heavy and the lowlife discovered all that Free-ness. By 1970, it was time to leave, ideally for the mountains, and I did.

Where the fuck was I. For one, back in Entitlement City, now. There is no thing you can do, in this town, not so much as tack a sign on your front door, that someone won't protest. That is what it comes to, in the end. Activism unchanneled and untrained. Just a pain in the ass, and highly entitled to be so.

How this applies to the blogging multitudes, I'll let you figure out. Hint: many people writing with more desire to be hotly political (and highly page-ranked) than talent, perspective or common sense. But isn't that the times. Thank you, Blogger. A whole new level of clamor.

She's saying something here—and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. (Bob Dylan said that.)

Here's a little present. From me to you. Watch it, and then tell me, does this man look like someone who ever intended to serve only the Left? I'll tell you in advance, I think this is cool as hell, and have not a shred of doubt he knows what he is doing. Because he does not strike me as someone who would take this monstrous risk or undertake this monstrous effort without having thought it out. 

But if you feel betrayed, that's what matters.

As if.

Big Stink In Little China

Yesterday (Tuesday, now that I post this) was kind of a gaggy day, in this little corner of the web. And it is little. I'm not sure some of the well-known bloggers involved really comprehend that. Least of all, the perps of Tuesday's big stink.

I'm not even going to bother to preface this with all the "I identify with you as a woman" crap, because that should be a given. Not that there were many givens—which are, after all, the product of trust—around yesterday.

What showed up instead, en masse, was a lot of ego-underbelly. The dark side of narcissism. Disowned, projected content, with that fabulous mob-mentality willingness to point the finger.

Finger, what am I saying. They named names, numbers, URLs. People, read my lips: this is something healthy adults do not do.

And you could count them on one hand, the adults.

As to the many "friends" who rushed to defend Kathy ... WTF were you thinking? Are people so bloody eager to belong, so profoundly immature ... it disheartens me. That's not support, it's not friendship, and certainly not what a person in trauma needs. Idjits! Get a clue, read a book, something!

Apparently, we must also review basic civil rights: No one is free to accuse a suspected other in public this way, name names, organize vendettas or any other similar damn thing ... unless, of course, you believe in vigilante justice. So crude, so not nice.

No matter how very special you are. No matter, even, if disgusting things have been posted about your wife—outrage, yes. Posses, no. Let me see, also bandied about by some leading lights were: vilification,isolation, shunning ... prison, FCS. Them's some mighty big underbellies. Some mighty brave pajama people.

Now we come to the nub of things. Miss Tara Rogue Hunt's blog, where I had wandered onto the comment thread that fateful afternoon.

"If you are part of the swarm of mean kids that come around to just be disruptive without making a point, you will be deleted. Say what you came to say … you aren’t clever. You are mean."

Talk about riveting. Instantly, the discussion became like one of those accident scenes where everything unfolds in slow-motion, with sirens and flashing lights just around the corner.

And Miss Tara Rogue soon got down to her nub.

"I don't want to sound like Oprah or any of these really slimy things the "guffaw brigade" is indicating below (they remind me of the mean kids in high school who used to draw pictures of me with zits all over and laugh at my expense) ... I guess I want us to get real and human."

A many-headed nub, as nubs so often are, and we ought not to be surprised. That is compassion, not the rush to fawn, but letting people speak for themselves—and listening. Carefully.

Tuesday night's Dan Fost Tech Chronicles column: (revised, small mercies, for Wednesday's paper)

"Tara Hunt, of San Francisco, who had been the original target of Locke's 'Mean Kids' site (she had coined the term after getting flamed for suggesting that companies need to find a 'higher purpose') ..."

Which isn't quite true. Is it. Clearly that's how you felt; the astonishing thing (do I need to say this?) is the latitude you cut for yourself as a result.

"'Chris Locke is a sad soul who blames the world for his lack of success,' Hunt said when I reached her on the phone today. 'He's constantly broke and angry. He calls himself rageboy. All that anger makes him very hard to work with.'"

Without condescension, Tara Rogue, but because this is somewhat within my purview, I offer you one thought: Stop all that fucking Twittering and get your ass into therapy.

No one acts out that dramatically and harmfully to another who has integrated their dark side ... and the dark side is what this is really all about.

N.B. This post actually follows upon this one, unbeknownst at the time.

Argggh v.3

Behind Every Great Male Writer , a review by Hadley Freeman:
Many of the most esteemed authors in history have relied on their wives—or if not, conveniently placed women such as sisters or daughters—to help them knock out their tomes: Wordsworth, Nabokov, Carlyle, and, er, Dick Francis, to name but a few ... sometimes a wife's contribution has simply been to smooth the life around her husband as much as possible, clearing the way for him to work, undisturbed, as Jessie (wife of Joseph) Conrad did, ditto Nora Joyce. Both of them, according to Jeffrey Meyers in his book Married to Genius, provided a kind of stability for their highly strung husbands.

Fine. I can take it. Ancient history and all that.

Nabokov is probably the most illustrious example of this type. His wife, Vera, was his typist, proofreader, editor, agent, business manager, chauffeur and, somewhat intriguingly, the person who would cut up his food for him at every meal.

Knew that.

Vera was not, however, his bedmate, according to Nabokov's biographer, Brian Boyd—in this one activity, the author preferred to go it alone.

OFCS. Could we not be spared? Anything?

Everyone has to go just a little too far. Nabokov. The great, great beauty of Lectures on Russian Literature. Did you know that Kitty and—the name of that noble, farming clod momentarily escapes me—(Levin, of course. What a dull name.) are, for whole periods of the book, running six months ahead of Anna and Vronksky?

Well yes, all that making like bunnies. Slow, tragic bunnies. Death? Beneath a train? Feh! Stinkers to Brian Boyd, who just could not wait to issue this lifetime spoiler. Oh, hell. What do I care. Speak, Memory is a tad onanistic, come to think of it.

It's just that there is no more odd a sight—from a purely objective point of view, you understand —than the male, what is the clinical term ... jerking off. Do you suppose it was also Vera's duty to watch? From what I've heard, this is something boys like to do. In groups. Working out, I suppose, their latency issues. The poor sods.

Really. Beneath all the attack and dismissal, girls are rock solid, in that we do not agonize in such manner. It is apparent to us that we are female, and, well, it's the whole Object thing all over again, isn't it. It fucks up their minds, and while many a valiant attempt is made to project this obsession onto women and breast size, try as they might, I'm sorry, there is no female equivalent to a hard-on gone limp. Which I gather to be the ruling fear of this or any other time. Believe me, the fact that you plaster your anxieties all over women, children and weaker nations is the real crime. That's what we're charged up about, not you. It's your goddamn unlived life.

Occasionally, too, it is husbands who have provided support to their writing wives. Leonard Woolf is widely credited for creating a sufficiently comforting atmosphere in which his wife Virginia could, occasionally, find enough solace to write.

Oh, right. And what year did he die.