The Powerful Arms of Nature, or Else God

What a heartbreaking story.

MEXICO CITY - Five Mexican children were killed when a large metal cross they were praying at was struck by lightning in central Mexico, local media reported Monday.

Five children between 9 and 16 years old died and several others suffered burns when lightning struck a white-painted metal cross set on a hill in the town of Santa Maria del Rio early on Sunday, according to two newspaper reports.

“The lightning went straight into them and killed them instantly,” local Red Cross chief Eduardo Suarez told the daily El Norte.

[.....]

A photo showed charring on the cross’s turquoise-painted cement base, although the cross was still standing.

Several families had been participating in a midnight ceremony as part of a local religious festival that centers around the cross.

This is a tragedy recounted image by image: the excited children squirm; the solemn adults bow their heads; the prayer begins; the storm gathers; Armegeddon.

Because that's how it is for those who loved the lightening victims. For those parents and those families, no other Armegeddon exists now.

And what of the terrible, brute irony suffusing this story? The worshippers became the stricken; their beloved symbol, the flaming sword that took their children. Children of an ancient culture that, in these mad and modern times, clings ever more staunchly to its rituals.

Children who mattered and whose loss under any circumstance is tragic.

(Hat-tip to blogenfreude).

Armbands for Peace

Shakes' Sis just forwarded me an email from a newly-assembled group called Armbands for Peace.

On April 17, 2006 Randi Rhodes (syndicated Liberal talk show host) made the suggestion that we need to start a wearing armbands to show our resistance the dangerous warmongering Bush administration. We are all terrified he's about to start a nuclear war with Iran. It's past time to protest daily. So a few of her listeners got together and we decided to start the Armbands for Peace movement. A silent daily protest by wearing a simple black armband that says "NO WAR" on your arm.

[---]

We hooked up with an embroidery house and have ordered these fabric armbands that are stitched in white thread. They are available on our website for $5.00 (proceeds will benefit Goldstar Families for Peace & Paralyzed Veterans of America).

Members of the movement also suggest making your own black armband if you wish, but nonetheless urge everyone concerned about the possibility probability that the United States will begin another war Operation Freedom Exercise in the Middle East to join the silent protest by wearing a No War armband.

W Plans Test of Potent New Bomb; Media Discuss Baby Names

Randi Rhodes speaks to Lou Dobbs about the bomb detonation that's planned for June 2nd at a nuclear testing site in Nevada. See the clip on Crooks & Liars. Just go and watch it.

Rhodes: What do we do? If every single camera that's available in the media -- cable-wide, network-wide -- is not in Nevada at the nuclear test site on June 2nd to watch 1.4 millions pounds of explosives be blown up so they can do the math and figure out how to make a tactical nuke, a smaller nuclear weapon that will represent that much firepower for Iran -- if we don't show America this mushroom cloud that will explode in Nevada on the 2nd of June, there is no hope for the American people, there is no hope for the media.

You asked me last time I was here, Who's fault is it? And I said, "It's our fault; it's the media's fault." We have to tell this story. This president is manifestly insane. Donald Rumsfeld is insane.

I urge anyone reading this to forward the information to members of your local media*. Just in case they were, you know, distracted by other important issues.

*Especially if you live in Nevada.

(Hat-tip to my buddy NB in Tampa)

UPDATE: I am informed that the bomb to be tested on June 2 is actually a new, extremely powerful conventional bomb called Divine Strake, as opposed to a nuclear weapon, as one might infer from the discussion on Lou Dobbs' show. Please refer to The Dark Wraith's story Currencies of War for in-depth information about this bomb, its capability to collapse large structures (like nuclear facilities) without using nuclear components itself, and its implications in America's ongoing saber-rattling match with Iran.

UPDATE 2: According to an April 14, 2006 statement on the Website of the Las Vegas CBS affiliate, the explosion of Divine Strake will go on as planned.

State regulators raised questioned about pollution and hazardous material from the Divine Strake blast, but state officials say they will meet Nevada's air quality regulations.

The Nevada Test Site has a blasting permit to set off a 700-ton non-nuclear explosion.

State officials say they will not block the Defense Threat Reduction agency from the experiment, which is scheduled for June 2.

Halliburton: Let Us, um, Detain You

In the past few weeks, we've seen plenty of people protesting the low wages, low status, and unfair treatment suffered by those who come to the United States "under the radar" (as in, illegally) because they're desperate for work. They toil in our fields, clean our houses, mow our lawns, and generally do anything and everything for low pay and no benefits, often working outrageously long hours. They want to be here legitimately; that's mainly what they're asking for. Acceptance, the opportunity to work without fear, and the chance to dream the American Dream. They often pay taxes and social security contributions into the system using false numbers, knowing they'll never be able to receive that money when they're older and figuring they'd rather pay it anyway if it means they can work in the States. Because they'll still make more money than they would in their home countries.

But there's an immigration issue that few are talking about: detention. What happens to those who are rounded up en masse and held before they're sent home, wherever home is?

Large facilities, such as Krome Detention Center in Miami, already exist, of course. And should our government see the need to round up even more humans, they're busy making plans to build more. Writing for the The Progressive, Ruth Conniff reports:

While thousands of people were celebrating the contribution America's undocumented immigrants make to our economy, and demanding justice and recognition for workers who are denied basic rights, the government was making plans for large-scale detention centers in case of an "emergency influx" of immigrants.

KBR, the Halliburton subsidiary recently reprimanded for gross overcharging in its military contracts in Iraq, won a $385 million contract to build the centers. According to the Halliburton website--www.Halliburton.com--"the contract, which is effective immediately, provides for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities to augment existing ICE Detention and Removal Operations Program facilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs."

There is so much to question here, one's head spins. Let's start with this: what are we doing awarding $385 million contracts to Halliburton when there are still so many unanswered questions about the colossal waste of taxpayer dollars and overbilling (fraud, anyone?) perpetrated by this company, on America's behalf, in Iraq?

And I'm really curious about something else: why large detention centers, and why now? Then there is the disturbing issue raised by that last sentence in Halliburton's message: "...rapid development of new programs."

What new programs might those be?

The web was abuzz with speculation after the contract was awarded on January 24. Pacific News Service gave the most detailed analysis.

It connected the new "immigration emergency" plans with older plans that involved imposing martial law.

Certainly the detention centers raise the specter of WW II Japanese internment camps.

The new facilities could be used for round-ups of Muslim Americans or other American citizens tagged as "enemy combatants.”

The use of military personnel and military contractors in the event of a Katrina-like disaster, which the Halliburton contract provides for, brings us closer to martial law, whether it is officially declared or not.

It also means record profits for Halliburton, which declared 2005 "the best in our 86-year history." David Lesar, Halliburton's chairman, president and CEO, declares on the company website, "For the full year 2005 we set a record for revenue and achieved net income of $2.4 billion with each of our six divisions posting record results."

Not bad for a company that has been repeatedly cited for inflating charges and wasting taxpayer money in Iraq.

The immigration detention centers ought to raise a red flag, not just about nepotism and waste among military contractors, but about what our government has in store for us.

A note to those in the mainstream media: we're all a little tired of hearing about cheerleaders disappearing in Aruba and strange, cult-following celebrities giving birth in silence. Would you kindly do your jobs and tell us what the hell is going on lest Orwell himself rise up from his grave and bonk you on the collective head with a first edition hardback copy of 1984?

Hat-tip to my friend Lisa in DC.

UPDATE: I visited the Halliburton Website at 4:30pm EST today, and found the KBR section (where information about the detention center contract would appear) to be "temporarily unavailable".

On Dead Geraniums and Imaginary Spiders

Twelve o'clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

- T.S. Eliot, from Rhapsody on a Windy Night

Like millions of other adults, I faced this Monday morning with puffy eyes and a slightly foggy head, wishing I’d been able to get a bit more sleep last night and feeling mildly annoyed that I didn't force myself to get in bed two hours earlier and turn out the lights right then and there.

It’s just that I regard the night as such a seductive time, and while I mean that in every sense, I’m referring in particular to the heady sensation one feels, the pure freedom one experiences, when those who normally need something from you all day long are now slumbering peacefully, not needing anything. The dark world is your oyster. The possibilities suddenly seem endless: there are books to read, magazines to sort through (and toss), online articles to peruse, laundry to fold, a cable TV movie to watch all by yourself, a box of black Panda licorice that was nearly full when you last looked.

And there is always work. In fact, I get my best writing done “When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table”, to once again quote Mr. Eliot, surely a Night Owl if ever there was one. I absolutely adore the nighttime, its forbidden fruits and hidden endeavors, its grainy take on everything. Let other souls curl up in bed and wait for the sun’s permission to spring into action: I’m inspired right now.

Of course, this Night Owl proclivity of mine simply doesn’t work in a society where nine-to-five generally means starting in the morning and has been, for as long as I can remember, the standard template of American productivity against which just about everything to do with work and the hours in which one does it invariably get judged. And our culture’s attachment to residual Puritanism (thanks, Founding Fathers!) translates into those all-too-recognizable judgements about Other People.

It’s the middle of the night! Who on Earth is out and about now? What sort of things are going on at this hour?

Oooh, illicit, naughty things, that’s what.

Oh, come on.

-----

When we were small, my brother and I were tucked in and read to while it was still light outside. We did not know to complain, and if we had known about things like nighttime television shows being infinitely more interesting than afternoon cartoons, or how the conversations of wine-drinking parents unencumbered by children could be educational—or even, I’m guessing, wildly revelatory—we’d have been much too afraid to rally for a later bed time anyway, since we were completely convinced that if we ever acted on the urge to challenge our parents about such carved-in-stone matters, enormous lightening bolts would rip through the roof of our house, setting fire to the naugahyde couch and ruining the pretty new wallpaper. So after our tea and baths, we did as we were told and went to our rooms, sneaking the latest installments of our respective book addictions under the covers and reading by flashlight (we called them torches—ha!) until we were caught.

But after a lifetime of this early-to-bed, early-to-rise routine, things changed. It was the summer that fell between my freshman and sophomore years at UF, and I decided I could no longer live without a car. Specifically, I wanted something used, small, and cheap, but solid enough to safely carry me back and forth from Miami to Gainesville. I would need to earn the money in a relatively short period of time, so I took a job as a waitress at one of my favorite places to eat, a semi-fancy Jewish deli restaurant in Coral Gables. There, I learned how to serve matzoh ball soup (the ball goes in the bowl first, then you ladle the hot broth over it), Reuben sandwiches (if you try to carry more than one at a time, chances are good the lofty stacks of corned beef will topple, making your customer very unhappy), and borscht (ask another waitress to serve it for you, because the crimson soup has this horrifying way of curdling the moment it hits the wad of sour cream and I, for one, do not have the stomach to hand someone a bowl of cold pink and white floaty bits and say Enjoy!).

I’d get to the restaurant at four in the afternoon and start in on the thrilling tasks known as “side jobs”, which could be something mind-numbing-but-easy, like stuffing the sweetener packets into their Lucite cubes, or mind-numbing-and-nauseating, like taking the tops off all the sticky mustard and ketchup bottles and scraping the clumps of dried product out of them with a bamboo skewer.

There were bright spots in my workday, though: the people. For example, there were Alex and Reggie, two warm, hilarious waiters—they’d been at the restaurant a record eighteen months—and Myra, a New York transplant and veteran “table banger” who taught me how to multitask as well as how to remember what everyone had ordered without peeking at my notes. It was Alex, Reggie, and Myra who took me out dancing in Coconut Grove one night. One entire night. The sun was actually coming up as I pulled the lime-green Volkswagen Dasher—Brought to you by...Borscht! The Other Red Soup—into the driveway of our house. My parents were none too thrilled.

But I had seen the night, and I had fallen for it in a big way. Music sounded better at night, I decided. The shrieking colors of disco fashion, clothes you’d never wear in the sunlight for fear of blinding oncoming traffic, brightened the cigar-smoke heaviness of Miami’s dark nightclubs. Night was exciting, night was exotic, night was right. We’d eat dinner outdoors because if you waited (or, like us, worked) until midnight, the air was agreeable and the cover charges were usually dropped. I discovered my Night Owl roots that summer in 1978, a while before hot old Miami became hostile (riots, anyone?) old Miami, and later, officially hot Miami (Vice, anyone?)

I never got over them—the Night Owl roots, I mean.

I’ve always loved to study at night, work at night, paint at night, and talk on the phone at night. If you'd asked me, back then anyway, I'd have said that days were really only good for sleeping, hitting the thrift stores, or getting a tan at the beach (at night there is no sun, you see...). And perhaps an occasional “hello” muttered to one or both parents when coming in or going out. So imagine the shock to my system when I found part-time work as a substitute teacher and had to completely rewire myself in order to simply wake up in time, never mind figuring out how to take the attendance, refer any transgressors to the office, and run the projector—invariably loaded with movies like Getting to Know Your Digestive Tract—that beamed the day’s moving lesson onto a roll-down screen behind the lecturn. It was outrageously difficult. I’d become a Night Owl, and here I was trying to play Ms. Responsible-Day-Job-Girl with the Larks. Office-going Larks. Tie-wearing, pantyhose-tugging, early-to-bed Larks.

I never got into it.

-----

One thing I learned about sleep, though, is that you can’t get too hung up on the actual time; rather, you must listen to your body, meaning you eat when you’re hungry and sleep when you’re tired. This was reiterated in what was probably the ninth baby-readiness book I read while awaiting Son One’s arrival (he turns 14 tomorrow). Sleep when you’re tired. Don’t worry about the housework—if the baby is asleep, you should be asleep. Oh, how I nodded with approval when I read that. The symmetrical logic of it! The Be Kind to Mothers approach! The permission to blow off housework!

And I truly was prepared for a bout of rough nights, really I was. Just not ten months worth of them. Ten months during which the longest spell of sleep permitted me was two and a half hours, and that felt luxurious.

It’s not for nothing that sleep deprivation is a favored torture technique used by interrogators. I do believe that in those days when I stalked about the Earth and hearth as Zombie Mama, you could have offered me nothing more than a soft pillow and a promise of babysitting and I’d have told you anything you wanted to know.

And sleeping so little not only gives you the dark under-eye circles of a Tim Burton caricature, it also makes you crazy. No, really. Crazy in ways that are, at first, subtle; later, though, the lunacy goes big and there’s no denying that something must be done.

One evening, when Son One was about nine months old and still cried on cue for his feeding every couple of hours, I saw a spider on the kitchen wall—a big, four-or-five-inches-wide bird spider. I asked Mr. Litbrit to come and take the spider outside (they’re harmless and beneficial; I just don’t need one to climb into my hair when I’m stacking the dishwasher, thank you). But when he came into the kitchen, the spider was gone. Nothing unusual—spiders are mobile little (or not-so-little) buggers; all the same, it bothered me that it had been right there five seconds ago, and *pouf*, now it was gone. A little later, the spider reappeared, this time over the stove. Ah! I called out to Mr. L: “I’m not moving this time. Come in here now, please!”

Of course the thing disappeared again. And after a half-dozen more sightings, my dear husband informed me that I had probably hallucinated the spider and would I please, please listen to the pediatrician and stop running to the baby every time he cried, all night long, because, you know, a mind is a terrible thing to waste and everything.

-----

Exhaustion. Depression. Weight gain. Foggy-headedness. Short attention spans. Quick tempers.

All of these things, and more, are brought on, and then exacerbated, by sleep deprivation and sleep deficit, the latter of which is an insidious accumulation of “sleep debt”—night after night—that results in a chronic state of tiredness, high levels of cortisol (a stress hormone linked to obesity), and impaired mental function. When a human is awake for long periods of time, the body shifts into starvation/crisis mode, storing fat for some impending famine or natural disaster. The remedy? According to recent research on what British wags call “The Duvet Diet”, simply getting the right amount of sleep (as in, at least eight hours for adults) can restore healthy hormone levels almost immediately.

Thus ends Day One—and begins Night One—of my new regime. I’ll call it The Pillow Prescription. The lads must be in bed—as they are right now—with lights out, by 8:30pm. And I must be allowed to stay up all night writing and reading to my heart’s content.

Kidding! In reality, I have a ten o’clock date with my blanket and a Teddy Bear borrowed from Son Three. Okay, so maybe eleven is more realistic.

In any case, Sweet Dreams...

Immigration Cartoon

By David Mamet for the Huffington Post:

High Crimes and Chimp's Demeanor

His evil laugh is well-known: Heh...heh heh.

His suits are always the finest: they're cut from the costliest (and always dark) wools; there are winter-appropriate and tropical-weight versions, and all of them are custom-tailored down to the last angstrom of thread.

He never does the driving, preferring to let one of the posse he travels with handle it. In fact, there is someone else to handle just about every job, the mundane and the dirty alike, so he doesn't have to.

The President needs a Panama hat and a big cigar, though. Dead Eye Dick has the weapons prowess (sort of), and he's got the menacing snarl down cold, but he ought to have much better shoes--something in a hand-made snakeskin boot sounds about right. And Karl Rove, well, the guy's gotta have a monocle and a fluffy white cat somewhere, and if not, let's find them for him.

Because really, when you think about it, our President is nothing if not an organized criminal of the highest, and therefore most terrifying, order. And if costumes and props will help underscore this reality for a TV-and-movie-influenced culture that needs for its bad guys to look like Bad Guys, I'm all for it: it's high time the nation saw Don Dubya and his crew for what they really are.

Writing at Buzzflash, Greg Palast notes (bolds mine):

On February 10, 2004, our not-so-dumb-as-he-sounds President stated, "Listen, I know of nobody -- I don't know of anybody in my administration who leaked classified information. If somebody did leak classified information, I'd like to know it, and we'll take the appropriate action. And this investigation is a good thing. ...And if people have got solid information, please come forward with it."

Notice Bush's cleverly crafted words. He says he can't name anyone who leaked this "classified" info -- knowing full well he'd de-classified it. Far from letting Bush off the hook, it worsens the crime. For years, I worked as a government investigator and, let me tell you, Bush and Cheney withholding material information from the grand jury is a felony. Several felonies, actually: abuse of legal process, fraud, racketeering and, that old standby, obstruction of justice.

If you or I had manipulated the legal system this way, we'd be breaking rocks on a chain gang. We wouldn't even get a trial -- most judges would consider this a "fraud upon the court" and send us to the slammer in minutes using the bench's power to administer instant punishment for contempt of the judicial system.

Dubya and Darth Cheney breaking rocks on a chain gang. Though many of us would love nothing more than to watch that fantasy come to life, I think the best we can hope for is impeachment and removal from office. And on those fronts, Palast uncharacteristically holds out quite a lot of hope:

Statements aimed at misleading grand jury investigators are hard-time offenses. It doesn't matter that Bush's too-clever little quip was made to the press and not under oath. I've cited press releases and comments in the New York Times in court as evidence of fraud. By not swearing to his disingenuous statement, Bush gets off the perjury hook, but he committed a crime nonetheless, "deliberate concealment."

Here's how the law works (and hopefully, it will). The Bush gang's use of the telephone in this con game constituted wire fraud. Furthermore, while presidents may leak ("declassify") intelligence information, they may not obstruct justice; that is, send a grand jury on a wild goose chase. Under the 'RICO' statute (named after the Edward G. Robinson movie mobster, 'Little Rico'), the combination of these crimes makes the Bush executive branch a "racketeering enterprise."

So, book'm, Dan-o. Time to read The POTUS and The Veep their rights.

After setting their bail (following the impeachments and removals, of course), a judge will have a more intriguing matter to address. The RICO law requires the Feds to seize all "ill-gotten gains" of a racketeering enterprise, even before trial. Usually we're talking fast cars and diamond bling. But in this case, the conspirators' purloined booty includes a stolen election and a fraudulently obtained authorization for war. I see no reason why a judge could not impound the 82d Airborne as "fruits of the fraud " -- lock, stock and gun barrels -- and bring the boys home.

Hear, hear. Pass the popcorn.

Hey, McCain, Get Off of My Cloud (and Bush's Leg)

Why don't I like John McCain?

Because when it comes to a small handful of things in life, I believe there are no gray areas. One such black-and-white issue for me is this: if you bring harm to my family in any way, whether it is by assaulting one of them (God forbid) physically or verbally, stealing from one of them, or committing any other heinous act toward any of them at any time, I will do everything in my power to prevent your attack and, barring that, to set things straight immediately. Thereafter, I will make sure you are punished appropriately, including, but not limited to, guaranteeing that your very existence on this planet, from that day onward, will become an exercise in pure misery, day in and day out, until Death herself becomes less a force to be feared and more a merciful bearer of relief for which you will hope with every fiber of your being even as you wallow in your suffering.

Some people apparently don't see things quite that clearly, however. From a September 2004 Democracy Now interview:

Amy Goodman: Do you think this is similar to the attacks on you in 2000?

John McCain: No, I have put the attacks behind me. The attacks that were made on me are long ago and far away. I don't ever think about them or dwell on them.

Amy Goodman: They were very personal, very harsh and they questioned your war record.

John McCain: And I had to get over it, and I got over it, and I don't look back in anger. I look back at running for president as the greatest experience in my life.

Amy Goodman: It's one thing to get over it. It’s another to stand with and campaign with the man who did it to you: George Bush.

John McCain: I put it behind me. I put it behind. No, actually, we have a very good, friendly relationship.

Amy Goodman: Has he ever explained himself to you, why he attacked your wife, Cindy, and your kid?

John McCain: You know, my discussions with the president are private. Okay?

The mainstream media are all over McCain like a marked-down, oversized Goodwill tuxedo. They call him a maverick. They call him forward-thinking. They call him a true conservative.

Oh yeah? The last time I heard, conservatism was pretty much defined by a series of hands-off positions. Government should keep its hands off our wallets. Government should keep its hands off business and let the market decide if something will prosper or flounder. Government should stay out of people's personal lives.

*Cough...bullshit...cough*

Look at what our current "compassionate conservative" leaders have wrought: record deficits, greater burdens and ever-more-complicated regulations for small businesses, and a historic and ongoing interference with, and intrusion into, our private lives at levels that defy belief.

And John McCain is fine with this. He cozies up to Bush at every opportunity, despite the fact that Bush and his Evil Architect Karl Rove spread outrageous rumors—about McCain himself, his mental fitness after being a POW, his wife's struggle with alcohol, and his adopted daughter's mixed racial makeup and "legitimacy", whatever that means—during the 2000 campaign. And McCain actively praises the President, appearing onstage with him during the 2004 campaign, and throwing his weight behind anything Dear Leader says, no matter how ill-considered, no matter how unintelligible. Disgustingly, and equally disingenuously, he turns around and befriends such Religious Right stalwarts as Jerry Falwell after previously decrying their intolerance. Crooks and Liars has a clip of (and brief commentary about) Tim Russert's interview with McCain:

Russert: Do you believe that Jerry Falwell is still an agent of intolerance?

McCain: No, I don't. I think that Jerry Falwell can explain his views on this program when you have him on.

Russert actually questioned McCain pretty hard in the segment pointing out all his recent flip flops and showed that he is no longer the "maverick" that he's been portrayed to be. Russert used Pinkerton's quote calling him a: "born-again Bushophile" to describe his relationship with the President now.

One more thing. John McCain favors allowing government to control women's bodies and supported the dreadful, dangerous, anti-women legislation that was recently passed in South Dakota. In short, he is anti-choice.

And that is another one of my black-and-white issues: a politician either sees women as perfectly capable of making their own decisions with regard to matters concerning their own bodies, their own families, and their own lives, or he doesn't.

For the love of God, for the love of the country, or simply for the protection of Dubya's new trousers: Get down, boy. Step down, boy.

Please.

Scooter Libby's Aria Debuts

This just in (bolds mine):

WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney’s former top aide told prosecutors that President Bush authorized the leak of sensitive intelligence information about Iraq, according to court papers filed by prosecutors in the CIA leak case.

Before his indictment, I. Lewis Libby testified to the grand jury investigating the CIA leak that Cheney told him to pass on information and that it was Bush who authorized the disclosure of information to reporters about prewar intelligence on Iraq.

The authorization came as the Bush administration faced mounting criticism about its failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the main reason the president and his aides had given for going to war.

Libby’s participation in a critical conversation with Miller on July 8, 2003, “occurred only after the vice president advised defendant that the president specifically had authorized defendant to disclose certain information in the National Intelligence Estimate,” the papers by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald stated. The filing did not specify the “certain information.”

Curioser and curioser, no? Not that this is any news to most of the reality-based community who suspected all along that Libby was merely carrying out the wishes of his higher-ups.

BRAVO! BRAVISSIMO, Fitzy! And to Congress, I say: Can we go ahead and start those impeachment hearings now, please? Let's put on that rare opera in which the ending is not tragic; instead, we'll have an Act II in which the villains get taken out and the hero is hoisted onto the shoulders of a grateful, cheering people.

(Hat-tip to my pal Lisa in DC, who sent me the AP lowdown on this story hot-off-the-wire, before it even hit MSNBC et al.)

Shakespeare's Sister Wins Best Group Blog

And the Koufax Award for Best Group Blog goes to...Shakespeare's Sister! Congratulations to Melissa, aka Ringleader of the Tormentors, a gifted political writer who, day after day, produces a clever and compulsively readable site while also offering the works of a magic mix of contributors, to which group I am very proud to belong.

A Naughty Alternative Slogan for Dems

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Running Away and Back Again

It is beautiful outside today, too beautiful. Because it is a Wednesday, and because I am a grownup with a list of things I’m supposed to accomplish, I keep turning my head away from the raging glitterfest that’s going on outside my window.

A soft breeze has the jasmine leaves fluttering; two small butterflies hop and dart: this flower, no this one. Sunbeams keep swirling around on the quiet greenery—there’s all this distracting sparkling going on, and working at my desk seems a tragically leaden, light-deprived activity for such an ethereally lovely day. I would liken the feeling to the dread I face when having to do something quotidian and unavoidable: if milk and eggs and laundry soap are in short supply, for example, it means Off I go to the dull old supermarket; add to this that on days like today, doing so requires me to stare straight ahead and march past a jewelry store window full of emerald bracelets.

“I want to say, To Hell with it, let’s go to the beach,” I grumble into the phone.

“Yeah, it would be nice…” my husband says, distracted too. He’s not really listening to me, and I know this because he never normally uses neutral words like nice, okay, or fine. Never. Not unless he’s concurrently reading an email, sautéing tomatoes, or stretching out a tight hamstring. Right now, I would not be surprised if he were doing all three, in addition to talking to me.

“Where are you?” I ask.

“Just over here, making some lunch.” (Aha.)

I say goodbye and think about my own lunch for a moment. You know, I do need to eat something. I could easily take a little outdoor break, head for the patio with a cup of tea and a tomato sandwich. Yes! That’s what I’ll do. Perhaps I’ll put on a swimsuit top and get a little sun on my shoulders. I’ll need my straw hat, too, and the sunblock and big old glasses. Might as well read a page or two while I’m out there. And take my iPod, which needs charging, so I’ll do that while I make my sandwich and tea.

My desk, which also serves as my office and meditation room, is in the corner of our little living room and is hardly an austere environment: its surface is festooned with the boys’ art projects as well as several unstable stacks of mail, magazines, and paperwork, any one of which my boy Marley could send southward with the flick of a mischievous paw. And as I walk to the kitchen, feeling guilty once again, I turn and look at my dark little desk in its shady little spot, feigning, for no-one’s benefit but my own, a soupcon of concern for that which I am about to abandon for a while. I ought to feel the way a grownup is supposed to feel, which is to say, obligated. But I don’t want to. Not really. Not today.

-----

In my house, now as always, the urge to flee for the open air kicks in around the same time every year. The breeze is still quite cool, but its bite is offset by the sun hitting a certain level in the sky with no clouds obscuring it. This results in a delicious contrast, something like having warm strawberry tart with a mound of cold whipped cream alongside it, or stretching out in a freshly-changed bed, feeling the pleasant snowflake-chill of sheets landing on your skin as a purring heat-bomb of a cat wedges himself against your ribcage. Take this intoxicating mix of sensual treats, throw in some visual lures like skittering sunbeams and fluttering leaves, garnish with a general sense of frustration with the here and now embodied in the growing To Do lists stacked up in my head like so many planes circling in the skies above Miami International, and here you go: one full-blown serving of Spring Fever, coming up.

When suffering a fit of pique, umbrage, or ennui—or, as author Ursula LeGuin called them, the French diseases of the soul—I usually like to lace up my trainers and run away from it all. I started doing this about a year ago, when the depression I’ve suffered on and off since my teenage years had taken especially fierce hold one evening. It had been a typical day of ups and downs with the boys, and if anyone were to ask me what was making me so sad right then, I doubt I could have answered him. To put it in general terms, I felt a non-specific, pervasive sense of doom. More pointedly, I wanted nothing more than to find a dark corner of the garage in which to curl up, and then I’d weep and wail until every foul, beastly demon, every terrifying image of rope or rooftop or fistful of pills, was purged once and for all.

So that is what I did. I got the children bathed and kissed them goodnight, and I went into the garage, more accurately known as the overflow storage room. I crawled behind a tower of Rubbermaid boxes and cried so hard, I thought my heart might explode. I didn’t feel better, so I kept on; I became a perpetual emotion machine of wailing and guttural sobs that gave way to raspiness and croaking as I lost my voice against the soaked knees of my jeans.

“Have you lost your mind?” my husband was demanding from the doorway. “What is wrong? What on earth is the matter?”

And I thought, I can’t begin to tell you. I can’t even begin. I said nothing and kept crying.

Because I couldn’t point to anything in particular that was wrong. It was as if each sad thought, each bittersweet memory, regretted moment, rued relationship, and heartbreaking loss residing in my mind suddenly joined hands and started inviting all the other bits of my brain to come to the wake. The sorrow was overwhelming, like a vicious flash flood, and I was completely caught up in its currents.

And this was not the first or even the fortieth time, alas.

“Listen. You need help. Either get a doctor, or get a lawyer.”

Tough love and tough words, neither of which I have ever responded to very well in my semi-long life. I stayed put, and eventually, I hauled my exhausted self back through the door and into the kitchen, where the light was still on, along with the dishwasher. At least there was that: a clean kitchen. And a sleeping family. I sat on the sofa and waited for my own slumber, but it never came.

-----

The boys’ doctor had been telling me to exercise. “There’s nothing wrong with anti-depressants, Deborah; with the modern ones, you can even take them for a while just to get through this difficult phase,” he said. Difficult phase. To my mind, the whole thing, the entire “phase” known as Life in These Times struck me as difficult, to use a woefully weak adjective. “There aren’t as many negative side effects to them, and I think you ought to talk to your doctor about giving them a go.” He’s assuming I ever find time to make appointments for myself, much less keep them. “But try doing this,” he continued, “Go outdoors tomorrow and run for a little while. Or take a long walk. Do it four or five times a week.”

The day after the garage-crying incident, I pulled out a pair of running shoes I’d bought months earlier and to date had only worn when traveling (they don’t set off the metal detectors). I dug through one of my husband’s drawers and found a pair of long, voluminous nylon basketball shorts—there was no way I’d be seen dead in short-shorts, not while actually moving—and an old Rolling Stones t-shirt. I hid my house keys under some shrubbery and off I went. Two blocks later (and by block I mean four houses, tops), I folded over like a human paperclip and threw up in my neighbor’s front garden. This is supposed to make you feel better? I thought.

The next day, I gave it another try. I made it to the previous day’s Vomit Point, glanced around to see if there were any horrified faces peering through windows, any small children running in the opposite direction having been warned about the Scary Throw-up Girl in the baggy hip-hop outfit, and managed to run for two more blocks before the stabbing pain in my side grew unbearable. I walked to the half-mile point I’d ambitiously predetermined using my car’s odometer, and walked back. I had just traveled an entire mile by foot—four blocks of which I’d actually run—and there had been no vomiting whatsoever.

Nothing exceeds like excess.

“How’d you do today?” asked my husband.

“I made it past Holli’s old house and walked all the way to the bridge and back,” I said proudly. In order to have an idea of the sort of accomplishment this was (in my estimation anyway), please know this: I have never, ever been any good at any sport or physical activity whatsoever.

Ballet, modern dance, jazz…those are the things that have always moved me, so to speak. That’s what I loved, that’s all I loved: dancing and tree-climbing, both of which are nothing short of deliriously enjoyable; neither of which are doable when you live surrounded by palm trees and a non-dancing husband. If it requires running, swinging a bat, or ball-throwing, count me out, or do as my classmates always did: choose me last.

Eventually, I ran a whole mile. Then I ran up a monstrous cell-phone bill calling everyone I knew to brag about it. A few weeks after that, I ordered myself a little iPod and a neoprene armband. Then I learned how to download songs onto it, nice thumpy songs with rhythm that helped me keep moving. Songs that let my mind drift ever further from the dark weight I’d been clinging to like a boulder because even as I fell off the cliff and plummeted, holding on to something felt better, or at least, more familiar to me, than letting go and floating.

-----

So instead of lying in the sun today, I run. Run first, then you can blow off everything else and not feel quite as guilty, I lie to myself, knowing I’ll never make it to the swimsuit drawer, much less the sunny patio; there aren’t enough hours in a day.

I set my iPod to a random mix, Serve me what symphonies you will, O Tiny Electronic Goddess, and I will run to them. I run past the bayou, breathing through my mouth because when the tide is low, it gets a bit smelly there. Guns-n-Roses welcomes me to the jungle as pelicans hover over the water; Public Enemy cheers me over the bridge; David Bowie whispers in my ear as other runners wave at me, pretending to care as I pretend to care in return (I mean, get back to me later, everyone—David Bowie is whispering in my ear!).

I imagine myself as the cleverest copywriter ever. In fact, I’ll email the running shoe company the minute I get home:

Dear Sirs,

Here is your new slogan: New Balance, for Your New Balance.
You’re Welcome.

Sincerely, Deborah

I love the random associations afforded by this selfish sliver of aloneness and indulgence, this interlude of actual running away from it all that has, I believe, saved my life.

What's best, though, is the joy—extraordinary in its ordinariness—that I feel when I'm outside in the light, in the world; I am moving my limbs, breathing the crisp air, and appreciating the gift of being alive. Later today, I won’t be quite as irritable when someone plasters peanut butter all over the countertop or throws a magazine at his brother or fumes about missing a favorite show because he has a project due tomorrow. When I return to my house after three or four miles, I’ll be better equipped to mount some sort of attack against the dragons and dustbunnies therein. And I’ll sit at my desk and draw new inspiration from the bouncing butterflies of distraction that meant no harm in the first place.

And the People, Recovering Their True Sight

At the end of a very interesting week during which we saw the President stand in front of colossal blue plastic panels boasting of his "Plan for Victory", even as improvised bombs continued to explode and further destroy the already-devastated country he illegally invaded; during which we learned that the Vice President demands his hotel rooms have their television sets pre-tuned to the network that, in an ongoing feat of irony to which it alone remains oblivious, contradicts its own slogan--"Fair and Balanced"--by broadcasting only that which the Administration approves; during which conservative, Oooh-look-at-my-Christian Values "writer" Ben Domenech was exposed as the thieving, talentless plagiarist he is, I thought it would be nice to wind things up with the inspiring thoughts of a former American President, one who was not without flaws or sins, but whose words carved some of the most exqusite contours of what would become the sculpture-in-progress that is our democracy:

"A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt. If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake."

Thomas Jefferson, in a letter, 1798

(Hat tip to Queen Mum II for the excerpt from President Jefferson's letter)

I Heart Keith Olbermann

Did anyone catch MSNBC's Countdown With Keith Olbermann last night? NBC's Today Show yesterday morning featured an interview with broadcast personality Laura "I'm just as hot and edgy as Anne Coulter" Ingraham, who spewed some pretty jaw-dropping verbiage that insulted journalists in Iraq, NBC's journalists in particular. Ingraham accused these brave souls of reporting from their fancy hotel balconies and focusing on all the nasty bomby-things going off instead of venturing into Iraq proper and talking about what she apparently thinks is the real, rosy truth of the situation there: freshly-painted schools and newly-opened supermarkets.

Well, later in the day, Keith O. came out swinging:

A note about Laura Ingraham's comments. I've known her a long time. I'll in fact give you the caveat that I've known her socially. But that hotel balcony crack was unforgivable. In was unforgivable to the memory of David Blum, it was unforgivable in consideration of Bob Woodruff and Doug Vought, unforgivable in light of what happened to Michael Kelly and what happened to Michael Weiskopft. It was unforgivable with Jill Carroll still a hostage in Iraq. And it was not only unforgivable of her; it was desperate and it was stupid.

Crooks & Liars has the video.

My hero. *Sigh*.

Steal This (Nudge, Nudge):

I think all that Al needs is a little nudge. I'm going to show him some love with every email I send out:

What's Subversive 'bout Peace, Love, and Understanding?

My lovely younger sister, whom I’ll call Princess for her own protection (hey, you never know), teaches English at one of Florida’s public schools. She is a devoted mother herself, someone who, like me, looks at this country’s open-ended entanglement in the Middle East with great alarm. Neither of us can imagine what mothers of soldiers must go through when their children are put in harm’s way for any reason, much less for reasons that, as time goes by, are proving increasingly nefarious. That, in my opinion at least, have far more to do with oil, and the control thereof, than noble concepts like freedom and democracy.

In her email to me the other day, Princess told me about a recent meeting at her school during which a fellow teacher raised an objection about the language of the school’s mission statement. The offending word in question? Peaceful.

That’s right: Peaceful is the new Communist.

My sister wrote:

I was compelled to speak out on this travesty, this utter nonsense. When another colleague and I questioned, "How is that?" she responded that the offensive word somehow suggested "un-American".

Goodness. Who knew?

Or perhaps I am in good company...

"Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind...War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today."
- John F. Kennedy

Being a bit of a word-wonk, I pulled out my trusty old OED and looked up the word peaceful, derived from peace, to see if it might have some lesser-known definitions attached to it, ones that might be construed as unpatriotic or subversive. I already knew it came from the Latin pacem (nom. pax). The adjective peaceful means ”Characterized by, belonging to a state of, peace.” (Sounds like a rather desirable state for a school, if you ask me). The noun itself, peace, means “Freedom from, cessation of, war; a treaty between two powers at war; freedom from civil disorder; quiet, tranquility; mental calm; in a state of friendliness, not at strife (with)."

I should add that my Oxford English Dictionary is a beautiful old hardcover version that I found in a used bookstore when I was in college; it was printed—and dedicated to its original recipient in fountain pen ink—in the year 1942, during which time World War II was raging on several fronts. Both of my grandfathers were fighting for Britain; my future father-in-law was in the U.S. Navy. All of them lived to see their grandchildren born in peaceful times. Were any of them alive today, I wonder what would they think of that Neocon teacher's perversion of the meaning of a cherished ideal—the labeling of the term “peaceful” as un-American. Especially since they all risked life and limb so their descendents might enjoy that ideal and, indeed, saw their own colleagues die in the process.

(Hat-tip to Princess for the story and the wonderful JFK quote).

Travels With My Angst

In 2001, I was among the planeloads of optimists who flew into Manhattan on commercial airlines shortly after September 11th. The airports had only just re-opened. Mine was to be a simple day trip from Tampa, a meeting-followed-by-lunch junket that I’d arranged in late August. I arrived at Tampa International shortly after 3:00 am, fully expecting a lengthy interrogation, if not a flat-out Spanish Inquisition.

“We have ways to make you tell us about the contents of that carryon bag…bring on…the comfy chair!”

Oh no, not...the COMFY CHAIR!

All I encountered, however, was a near-empty airport peopled with dozens of uniformed security personnel. There were approximately three such officials for every one passenger. They x-rayed my bag and waved me through the scanner, just as before. No-one said anything about my stiletto pumps, lethal on so many levels; no-one made me remove the chopsticks that were holding my hair in a fat bun (and as martial arts movie fans—as well as their mothers—will tell you, a swift chopstick-to-the-jugular move can take someone out very nicely, thank you).

No, it was smooth sailing, so to speak, all the way to the deserted Starbucks kiosk, where I spent the next three hours reading before boarding my plane.

Within minutes, a dark-haired, olive-skinned and muscular-looking man in a black jacket glanced around the cabin and sat down right next to me.

“Bon jour, Madame,” he said, before launching into several sentences of rapid-fire French. He couldn’t have been talking to anyone else: there were only fifteen-or-so passengers on the Boeing 727, and the others were scattered throughout the cabin after having laid claim to entire banks of seats and stretched out to take advantage of the unprecedented luxury. The pleasant-sounding French seemed to be directed at me, and I wasn’t sure why—I wasn’t reading A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu or even Paris Vogue, nor were there croissant crumbs on my lapel (if I’m going to splurge my meager middle-age calorie allotment on a croissant, it bloody well won’t be one of those Starbucks cardboard imitation croissant-flavored products).

“I’m sorry, I don’t speak French very well…” I was scrutinizing him now, having suddenly remembered all the French-speaking countries where Muslim extremists were said to be lurking.

“You’re English!” he said, in very good English. “Only we foreigners are flying right now. The Americans are too scared.”

“Aren’t you?” I said. “I am. A little bit. Worried, anyway.”

“It’s probably safer to fly now than ever before,” he declared. Then he promptly contradicted himself: “Yesterday, when I fly from Africa to Miami, I sit next to a Bin Laden.”

“Really?” I said, not sure what to make of that bit of information. I looked at the man’s briefcase, a slightly worn and extremely beautiful Hermes. The engraved nametag read “___ Mercier”. Perhaps he was related to Laura, creator of one of my favorite lipsticks. I decided not to ask.

The engines began revving, and the plane wound its way around the runways until it reached the long stretch used for speeding up and taking off. As is my habit, I closed my eyes and said a silent prayer. Call me a hypocrite, call me a fox-hole convert; I won’t mind. For in my case, years of childhood Catholic school indoctrination were followed by a couple of grades’ worth of Mennonite Missionary dogma which, in turn, was replaced with a bout of college atheism that later, when I felt my first son’s first embryonic kicks, morphed into a grudging, if vague, belief system involving an unnamed but benevolent and (probably) genderless Creator with limitless patience and no small sense of humor. And the magical thinking encouraged by this Church for One dictates that during the takeoff process, I must always ask God to bless the pilot and deliver us safely to our destination. So I did, and still do, despite the likelihood that every doomed flight in the history of aviation surely had at least one such favor-requesting believer, or quasi-believer, on board.

The flight was uneventful, as they say. Viewed from thousands of feet in the air, the smoldering World Trade Center’s remains were surreal and horrific. Everyone on board gathered on one side of the aircraft; no-one said a word. We just looked and looked, stunned by the enormity of the devastation.

Later that day, I flew home and unpacked my tote bag. There, beneath the notebook and files, lay my trusty Swiss Army knife. I had completely forgotten about it, and it had escaped the notice of not one but two gauntlets of security experts—most disturbingly, that of Newark Airport, the departure point of one of the doomed 9/11 flights.

-----


I recently purchased a new Swiss Army knife—the sixth one in four years. Having them taken away (and, I’m certain, sold en masse by some entrepreneurial eBay merchant) is as predictable as it is annoying. Everyone I know travels with the little red-enameled gems; they come in handy for all manner of travel emergencies: zip-tied suitcase zippers (“This is to notify you that your luggage was opened and searched by TSA personnel…”) that need to be snipped open; wine bottles that need uncorking; eyebrows you forgot to tweeze before leaving; magazine pictures that need to be cut out for collage projects that are due the day of your return and that someone was supposed to finish last week, but didn’t.

I always forget to put the damned pocket knife in my checked luggage, and the TSA goons find it in my handbag and confiscate it about 50% of the time.

Sometimes they make me take off my shoes and shuffle barefoot through the scanning machine; sometimes they let me keep my dignity—mine are not the prettiest feet in the world, though looking around me at airports, I often wonder whose are? More often than not, and more often than I think is fair, the officials pull me aside for what some of them call Additional Scrutiny. I haven’t been asked to strip completely, but I have had to remove everything except my jeans and camisole and endure lots of patting and prodding. This begs the question, Are blonde, fortysomething English mothers suddenly being recruited to hijack planes? Did I miss a memo or something?

“They think you’re a Terrorist’s Bitch,” said my husband after having to wait while I submitted to yet another Additional Scrutiny session. “They watch all those Bruce Willis movies where the guy with the bomb gets helped out by his tall blonde girlfriend in leather and boots.” He pointed to my beloved motorcycle jacket and spike-heels.

“I always get cold, and besides, if I try to squash this jacket into the checked bag it gets all creased and nasty,” I sniffed.

“I’m just saying…”

“It’s ridiculous,” I countered, my caffeinated self-righteousness now fully awake. “They’re wasting time they should be spending looking for the real evildoers. I’m the biggest pussycat in the world; hell, I don’t even eat hamburgers,” I said, logically distancing myself from the probably-carnivorous terrorist bastards who, I was certain, practiced their knife skills on big slabs of red meat.

“No, darling, you’re ridiculous. It’s all part of traveling now; get used to it.”

-----

We’re flying to Los Angeles for the boys’ Spring Break. The plan, insofar as we have any plan, is to stay in the city and make sorties to outlying hamlets like Fontana, where my husband will oversee the loading of plants he has purchased onto climate-controlled tractor-trailers, and Carlsbad, home of the fabled Lego Land.

“When we get there, we’re going to Lego Land?” Son Three is asking.

“No, my love. When we get there, we’re going to the car rental place,” I tell him.

“Then we go to Lego Land?”

“Then we go to the hotel.”

“And then…”

“And then, the hotel bar. Followed by THE COMFY CHAIR!”

Would that it were that easy. When we arrive in L.A., it’s only 9:30 am, thanks to the miracle of time zones. The boys are hungry. The rental agency’s shuttle bus is nowhere to be seen. Finally, it chugs toward us, and though it’s as tightly-packed as a rush hour subway car, we somehow manage to fit three boys, their parents, their nanny Jade, and six massive suitcases on board.

“The computers are down,” said the young, uniformed man standing outside the sliding doors. “It might take a while.”

When people in L.A. tell you something might take a while, you must listen to them. It’s not for nothing that the nickname La-la land has stuck: Type-A Manhattan-born souls like my husband cannot believe how laid-back and, well, relaxed the pace is here. Today, a while translates to over two hours as the line of people seems stalled in front of us even as it grows visibly behind us, spilling out into the parking lot and toward the street. Eventually, though, we get our vehicles and make tracks toward the hotel, a refurbished Mid-century building on Sunset Boulevard.

Despite the now-late afternoon hour, the rooms aren’t ready. “It might take a while; we can store your luggage, and if you like, you can sit outside, you know, have some lunch and cocktails….”

We like.

-----

Apparently, driving south to Carlsbad on a Monday would be a bad idea. Everyone—well, everyone to whom my husband has spoken, at least—says the freeway traffic on Monday is Pure Murder. Fair enough.

“Today we go to Lego Land?”

“Uh, no sweetheart…today we, um, go shopping. New sneakers for everyone!” I say brightly.

The Puma Store in Santa Monica is great fun, but Lego Land it most certainly isn’t. All the same, Sons One and Two find great shoes and pretty girls with whom to flirt; Son Three chooses a pair of royal blue suede sneakers that are heartbreakingly cute. Jade snaps up a wonderful retro-styled racing jacket. Even I, a woman who regularly promises They’ll bury me in my high heels, am enjoying walking around in a new pair of extremely cool-looking sneakers with Velcro closures that remind me of the boys’ multi-colored toddler shoes, only considerably larger.

On Tuesday, we pile into our politically incorrect rental-SUV and head for Lego Land. The southern California sky is Windex-blue, as always, and there’s a gorgeous breeze. Of course, the traffic is breathtakingly dreadful, in every sense of the phrase, and by the third hour, the three adults are more than a little weary of answering the same questions over and over.

“Yes, we’re almost there.”

“Yes, Lego Land is in California.”

Finally, we take the Carlsbad exit, cheering wildly, and turn into the amusement park’s flowery driveway. There are two steel gates in front of us, and there is a sign on one of them.

The park is closed on Tuesday and Wednesday.

No. NOOOOOOO! I close my eyes and picture the colorful Lego Land Website I’d visited when we first discussed this trip.

“There was nothing on the site about the park being closed…” I say.

“No way. No way. This isn’t for real…" said Son One.

“What was that National Lampoon Vacation movie, you know, the one with Chevy Chase?” I ask.

“Fucking Wally World,” the husband is grumbling. Everyone else is either crying or swearing. We are not exactly a laid-back, accepting kind of family.

Quick…think….what to do, what to do….

I dial Jo, also known as Tart, who lives nearby and whom we’d planned to meet for dinner post-Lego Land.

“Jo…Hi! It’s Deborah. We’re outside the gate at Lego Land, and the place is closed. It’s unbelievable; I mean, who ever heard of an amusement park being closed for two days, and in the middle of Spring Break…”

“Oh no! I’ve never heard of that, either. That’s terrible,” she says, as the din behind me grows.

“It’s like that National Lampoon movie…”

“…Wally World!” Jo/Tart says, laughing.

“Wait, didn’t they bribe the park owner to open the place?” I say, gesturing toward my husband’s pocket.

“No,” say my husband and Jo simultaneously.

“The Chevy Chase character pulled a gun on the guy…” remarks my husband.

The crying and screaming is now deafening. “Well,” I say, “Are you packing, darling? I mean, of all times to be caught unarmed.”

Finally, we decide to visit the San Diego Zoo instead; Lego Land will happen later in the week, sans our Patient Patriarch.

-----


One panda, two crocodiles, and several orangutans later, we meet Jo for dinner in a part of San Diego known as Little Italy. As soon as we open the doors of the SUV, we’re feeling much better: the sun is setting behind the harbor and the scent of garlic floats on a light breeze. Heaven.

“Tomorrow we go to Lego Land?” Son Three is asking me between mouthfuls of pasta.

“We’ll go to Lego Land, pumpkin. I promise. But it might take a while.”


Tart and Litbrit share stories and sauteed eggplant.

There's Got To Be A Morning After

Wal-Mart, those loveable builders of cozy little shops that house real, honest-to-goodness Mom-'n-Pop-style pharmacies (if your Mom and Pop were the sort whose idea of birth control was an aspirin held between the knees, that is) have announced an interesting reversal of their emergency contraception ban.

They're now going to sell it (bolds mine):

The announcement comes after Massachusetts last month ordered the world's largest retailer to stock the so-called Plan B pill, following a lawsuit by three Boston women against Wal-Mart.

Illinois also requires pharmacies to carry the prescription drug, and those are the only two states where Wal-Mart has so far stocked emergency contraception.

"We expect more states to require us to sell emergency contraceptives in the months ahead," said Ron Chomiuk, vice president of pharmacy for Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart.

"Because of this, and the fact that this is an FDA-approved product, we feel it is difficult to justify being the country's only major pharmacy chain not selling it," Chomiuk said in a statement.

It's about the money, as always. Still, it's a bit of good news for women who live in areas where Wal-mart is literally the only game in town.

I used to live in such a place, and although I absolutely hated doing it, I bought many a packet of diapers at Wal-Mart after the Publix supermarket, like the used bookstore, the tiny fabric shop, and the vitamin outlet before it, closed its doors and left our little hamlet with nowhere to buy essentials. Nowhere nearby, at least. And when the spate (covey?) of hurricanes sent us into hiding back in 2004 and we were forced to spend an awful lot of time indoors with only enough generator power to run the refrigerator, a handful of lights, and the DVD player, Wal-Mart was the go-to place for the family-friendly-yet-still-tolerable-by-adults Mike Meyers movies that got us through.

Weird, isn't it: just when you think the Almighty Dollar has hammered its last nail into the lid of optimism's coffin, it turns around and redeems itself, if only ever so slightly. I keep hearing Wall Street's Gordon Gecko: Greed is good....greed is good.

The Adverb is Dead; Long Live the Adjective!

A quick, one-question quiz: which of the following statements was uttered by a college-educated and internationally famous newsperson on a network television show?

“You did good!”

“The hot weather kind of snuck up on us.”

“People are debating whether the United States should have went to Iraq.”

Correct answer: all the above. (And yes, I am quoting from memory, but the trauma wrought by these dreadfully ungrammatical statements—ones that were made by people who should not only know better, but also recognize their responsibility to be good examples—has rendered me unable to recall exactly who said them, and when. Very well, the first one was Katie Couric speaking…)

And while we’re talking about English grammar, can anyone tell me what’s going on with the adverb? Lately, it seems the adjective has been creeping ever closer to the verb in what can only be described as a nasty, aggressive manner; its nefarious intent, obviously, is to completely displace, if not outright murder, a useful and descriptive part of speech.

Drive slow
Think quick!
The economy is real good right now.

No-one likes a smartie-pants. How many times did I hear that growing up? For most of my life, I’ve felt the need to apologize for speaking properly—or, at least, striving to—as if using good grammar and having a healthy respect for what is, arguably, the most richly variegated, broadly expressive, and flat-out beautiful language in human history is a bad thing. As if an appreciation for English and its amazing ability to remain steeped in tradition while still throwing open its muscular arms to embrace fresh, new words as regularly as fresh, new objects and ideas are conceived, is the hallmark of a nerdy word-wonk. Or worse, a snob.

Listen: it’s entirely possible to play by the rules and still understand, and use, colloquial and slang phrases, which I consider the growth hormones of the English language. As humans invent, discover, and ponder things that heretofore had not crossed the linguistic radar (radar! Now there’s a perfect example…), we’re compelled to come up with something to call those things. A new word is born, then its use becomes widespread, and in due time, Webster's and the OED come knocking.

Awwww…isn’t she adorable? So perfect, so unique—I’ve never heard one like it!

No, I’m all for new words, new phrases, and new ways of putting them together—if, and only if, the old way isn’t working any more, or if the new way injects a sentence with meaning or power beyond the reach of the former word, phrase, or arrangement.

Some of my favorite “new” words and terms:

Pimp my ride

Talk to the hand

Trash, used as a transitive verb: “That article completely trashed the Governor.”

Where do you get off? (Which, as opposed to inquiring about train stations, is simply a fresh way of declaring How dare you?)

Way, used as an adverb in place of “so” or “extremely”: “I am way sick of your pedantic, arrogant posturing, Deborah. Where do you get off?”

I confess: I harbor much fondness for new words and phrases that spring forth unabated from the exciting, energetic population segment that advertisers like to call “youth”, “immigrant”, and “urban”. I’ll also admit (or cop) to a deep-seated loathing for business-speak and marketing jargon. Illogical perhaps, and biased, I know; but all the same, I have to salute the originality of the former—a new word or phrase, or a new use for the same, arises when no appropriate alternative exists—and stick my tongue out at the mind-numbing corporate-sponsored (and, therefore, government-adopted) oversimplifications of the latter.

Some example of cringe-inducing business-speak:

Repurpose

Impact used as a verb: “How will the high unemployment rate impact the voters’ decisions?

Fun used as an adjective: “That was a fun convention!”

Reset, used as a noun: “You can’t find the rosemary shampoo because we did a reset on that shelf when all the herbal products were discontinued.”

Prioritize

What I most dislike about these words is their pretentious way of replacing perfectly good English words—words that were doing just fine, thank you—with ones that would seem to exclude, either unwittingly or knowingly, those who might not be part of the corporate world. Why, for example, would you resort to using impact as a verb when you can choose from the far superior (and often more specific) affect, influence, disturb, improve, or transform?

Whereas the other sort of new words, the ones with youth/immigrant/urban roots that I do like, are inclusive, illustrative, witty, and indispensable. I mean, what long-existing English phrase packs the wallop of Talk to the hand while also conveying the speaker’s utter indifference toward, and disdain for, his target, and offering a splendid visual to boot? Was there, is there, a better way to say stugats, which is an Italian-American corruption of the Italian words stunatta and cazzo that literally means stupid dick?

Returning to my original complaint, though, in matters of language, I think we really ought to learn the rules before bending them for fun and profit. And we should consider declaring certain territories—I’m thinking about news stories, both broadcast and print, as well as lessons, legal briefs, and complicated instructions for complex electronics—off-limits to million-dollar language-manglers, if for no other reasons than to set good examples for us all and reduce the frustration levels of my fellow word-wonks and Luddites.

After all, some of the current trends in communication, if followed to their logical conclusion, would have us winding up where we started as cavemen: pointing and grunting. Point-and-grunt…point-and-grunt…point-and-click.

Oh dear.

Summer's Evening on the Potomac

This weekend we were having one of those glorious, adults-only dinners, Mr. Litbrit and I, and somehow the conversation wandered into the area of health care—specifically, the outrageous cost thereof and the increasingly paltry benefits provided to those who can even afford it in the first place.

litbrit: They don’t cover this; they don’t cover that….

Mr. L: Yeah, so what else is new?

litbrit: They tell your doctor what medicines he should be prescribing based on what deals they’ve made with pharmaceutical companies! And if you want the actual medicine your doctor prescribed, you have to pay for it out of pocket. And then they have the nerve to send us bills for massive bloody premiums that keep going up...

Mr. L: And your point, my darling?

litbrit (bristling): My point is that this is bullshit. This is the United States. The only developed country in the world in which the government doesn’t provide its citizens with basic health care. I mean, you’re completely on your own here. And a lot of the time, ordinary, working families can’t afford insurance, so their kids don’t get shots, or they don’t get taken to the doctor ever, and then they get desperately sick and have to go to the Emergency Room at the nearest hospital, who by law must treat the child regardless…and the cost of that gets passed on to those who are insured, and use the ER or hospital, in terms of the ridiculous charges for anything and everything that get billed to the insurance companies. You know, the famous forty-dollar aspirin thing…they have to make the difference up somewhere, or they can’t keep their doors open. And of course, the insurance companies, in turn, charge higher rates to families like ours, who in turn are less and less able to afford insurance at all.

Mr. L: All true. And?

I’ll leave our dinner conversation for a moment. Let’s go back in time a little…all the way back to 2004. During his campaign, President Bush made all manner of promises to America. He led his supporters to believe that small businesses would realize a reduction in the cost of providing health care coverage for their employees. At a September ’04 rally in Wisconsin, he said:

In a time of change we must do more to make sure quality health care is available and affordable. More than one-half of the uninsured in America are small business employees. Many small businesses are having trouble affording health care. In a new term, we must allow small firms to join together to purchase insurance at the discounts big companies get.

Last night I proposed new steps to encourage small businesses and employees and low-income Americans to set up health savings accounts.

[…]

What I'm telling you is, there are ways to hold down costs, ways to help small businesses, ways to make sure people have got insurance. And we have got a plan to do that.

And we have got a plan to do that. Ah yes, the man with a plan. Again. Don’t you love it? Hey, how’s that plan working for you, America?

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, who base their data on figures supplied directly by the Census Bureau, the number of uninsured Americans continued to rise in 2004. Here are a few more unsettling figures (bolds mine):

…The percentage of working adults (18 to 64) who were uninsured climbed from 18.6 percent in 2003 to 19.0 percent in 2004 (an increase of over 750,000 people in 2004).

[…]

Lack of insurance was much more common among those with low incomes. Some 24.3 percent of people with incomes below $25,000 were uninsured, almost triple the rate of 8.4 percent for people with incomes over $75,000

[…]

Private employment-based health insurance coverage fell again in 2004, for the fifth successive year. The share of Americans with job-based coverage stood at 59.8 percent in 2004, significantly less than the share in 2003 (60.4 percent) and in 2000 (63.6 percent). Over the years, the primary cause for the decline in job-based health insurance has been escalating health care costs, which has led some employers to stop offering coverage and many others to shift more costs to employees, making it more difficult for low- and moderate-income workers to afford insurance for themselves or their families.

We’re all paying taxes. Oh yes. Meanwhile, we’re pounding our chests about what a great country this is—and in many ways, America is great, in all senses of the adjective. But people can’t afford to go to the doctor, military veterans are seeing their benefits slashed, fixed-income seniors—like the lady in front of me at the Target pharmacy last week—have to pay $75 out-of-pocket for crucial antibiotics not covered by Medicare or risk keeling over from a bronchial infection…none of this strikes me as particularly great.

Back to our dinner conversation:

litbrit: What it amounts to is taxation without representation. I mean, what is more basic, more vital to human health, than being able to get the medicine you need when you’re sick? That elderly lady at the pharmacy peeling dollar bill after dollar bill off a stack she probably had hidden away for emergencies, and now she's down to next-to-nothing...it's so fucking wrong.

Mr. L: Taxation without representation. Interesting.

litbrit: Didn’t you guys protest that, once? In Boston? Our King was charging big taxes on tea, but the colonies weren’t getting anything out of the deal—no sugar, no love, no nothing….

Mr. L: It was called the Boston Tea Party. Some ballsy guys climbed onto the cargo ships and dumped all the tea they were carrying into Boston Harbor. Tons and tons of it. It made a pretty strong statement, since everyone including me remembers it hundreds of years later.

litbrit: We need a to do something similar today, you know, to protest the fact that we’re paying taxes yet we’re still the only developed nation without universal health care. It’s ridiculous. We need a health care tea party. Yes! We need to think up a symbolic thing that people could throw into the Potomac, say, in protest of this travesty. Like tons of syringes, maybe.

Mr. L: What, make DC look like Jersey?

litbrit: What could we throw…hmmmm…I wonder what would say, “This administration doesn’t represent ordinary Americans and won’t address our health care crisis, so take this!"

Mr. L: I’ve got it! Douchebags! We organize the Washington Douchebag Party of 2006, get thousands of Americans to throw the things into the Potomac. A media event! Think about it: a douchebag is the perfect symbol because it’s a health-care item, and it also represents the people who should have dealt with this crisis long ago.

litbrit: I love it.