DEBRADICKERSON.COM

Take a tour through the foreclosure slums of Las Vegas

2012-02-04T18:45:09Z

HuffPo has the latest 'journalist talks with cabbie' piece but it's worth a read because I want to make sure everyone knows Vegas is both the unemployment and foreclosure capital of America. The blight here is unbelievable. I often forget I'm supposed to be applying for jobs, it's such a joke. The piece includes a cabbie-led video through the abandoned neighborhoods festering all over the city. Enjoy?

The Nudies Did it First: Zefrey Throwell's 'Ocularpation' of Wall Street

2012-02-04T18:33:05Z

The Daily Beast: "That August morning, he got 50 performers, of all ages and races and body types, to pretend to be part of the street’s normal working-age population. Then, at the stroke of 7, they all began to undress down to zero, without ever stepping out of their roles as financier or street sweeper or exercise freak."

I have it on good authority that cops do not like to dealing nekkid folks. Pisses 'em off..

Do the Russians Know how to March or What?

2012-02-04T18:20:16Z

100,000 Russians march against the regime in -4F weather. I'm struck by the pageantry, especially given Occupy Las Vegas's bedraggled signs and its ever dwindling protesters. Long story.

He’s Dead to Me Now: Eulogy for an Asshole

2012-02-03T21:38:07Z

While requiring myself to read all the grave-dancing that pummeled my friend Christopher Hitchens’ still warm flesh, I superstitiously passed on adding my voice to the chorus celebrating what a magnificent bastard he was. Beyond a tweet or two, I couldn’t bear to eulogize him and, as any thirteen year old knows, if I never did so he wasn’t really dead. I just drifted along on all the fond remembrances and hero worship that comprise the first wave of any celebrity death. All too soon, the second wave hit.

Impossible as it was to avoid the ‘glad ya dead’ articles, it wasn’t impossible enough. I found myself bitter and narrow-eyed as the DMs and links to savage takedowns began arriving in my various inboxes, none from actual friends (that’ll show me to tweet my sorrow). Interesting, I thought, how it isn’t enough for them to hate him; those of us who’d been foolish enough not to have done so now had to renounce him. We had to be made to know, really know, the full extent of his crimes. When you’re not one of the piranhas for once, it’s amazingly easy to see that this exercise, and presumably many such exercises, was more about the gargantuan egos of journalists than the subject at hand: ‘Look at how brave I am and how wrong you are! Betcha didn’t know he’d once kicked a puppy.’ Not that most of it wasn’t true. (Also, by the end, most of it was just plain bitchy.) Watching national-level journos become so enraged by others' approving of someone they hadn’t (or on whom they just had good dirt), put in perspective the satisfaction I feel in flinging the muddy truth on the Reagan hagiography never far from the bended GOP knee.

Basically, the media mic checked my friend’s funeral. Hard, and for a long time.

Self-destructive, brilliant-ass, never-knew-when-to-quit Christopher broke my heart when he was alive (am I really the only person who heard the Cowardly Lion’s ‘put em up!’ routine in their head when he was being particularly ridiculous?), so I thought his physical decline and medical torture would be the worst of it, but it wasn’t. That second death, that vivisection by a thousand cuts…well. It had to be done and I saw it through. He had it coming. The relish was a bit hard to take though; I couldn’t even get my Nietzsche on and trust that I had indeed been made somehow stronger once the man himself, from his deathbed, pronounced that nostrum a crock. So strong, I decided I could get away with not crying for Christopher; to even know of him was to know that this man would come to no good. Why cry for someone who always knew he was killing himself? Admire his bravado instead, his lovely light. Or so I told myself.

Lists are always a great distraction for the anal retentive, so I began several vengeful ones. First, of those who seemed only to feel a duty to set the record straight, then a much longer one of jealous poseurs writing that which they would not have dared had the man been around to call them out. The worst jackals were the coat tailers who lucked up on my boy at his worst and pimped him for the one story anyone will ever care to hear from them, rather like a hat check girl having happened upon a narcotized Marilyn Monroe in the ladies’ and rushing to sell the decade old story to the tabloids before the body cooled. But, in the end, I abandoned my enemies lists. Why bother (though it might be a hoot to see how many peddled their stories pre-mortem)? If you fail to find the members of each group readily identifiable, then you're in one of the latter two vulture flocks.

Still, the bitter exercise chewed up time and diverted my attention from the mourned to the newly hated; the more fiercely they gnawed on his bones, the easier it was not to be sad. Not living in DC anymore also helped. The only good thing about the media’s scavenger hunt for new Hitchens dirt was the unearthing of so many of his unknown (to me) essays and reportage. Truth to tell, I’d always skimmed, or skipped entirely, much of his foreign affairs work. His essays, books and book reviews however, I devour and did so with gusto in the days and weeks, now months, after his death. While this paleo-feminist hadn't known the full depth of his sins, I'm confident that having known of his every horrendous crusade would have still failed to turn me against him. No one’s politics are more hateful than that cave full of St. Louis based Neanderthals with whom I share DNA and you don’t see me cutting them off. (Frankly, it’s his willingness to involve his wife in the Blumenthal imbroglio I find quite cringeworthy. We never discussed it but jeez! What a need to win. We never discussed Iraq either. So sue me.)

Among all that Christopher was to me, he was my teacher and my boxing coach; he taught me how to take a punch, how to give one and how to be brave. It’s been my great good fortune to have had excellent mentors, supporters, and editors (remember those?) in my life, but it must be said that none of them ever really took the gloves off with me. They were and remain, well mannered unto near double-jointedness in finding ways to ‘constructively’ tell me something I’d said or written was hogwash. Hitchens would look me in the eye and bark, “Hogwash.” They’re Robert’s Rules. He was the Law of the Jungle. Thank god I’ve had both. It was because of Christopher that when a pinhead conservative radio host tried to censor me (he actually stopped the show to scold me for referring to Bush 43’s adventurism as ‘adventurism’ and forbade me to engage in further ‘spin’). So shocked I hissed, I rose from my kitchen chair while green stuff dried on my face, drew myself up to full height and put a curse on him: “With your gun to my head, with your knife at my throat and your boot pinning my face in the dirt, you will never control my speech.” Pure Hitchens.

I came late to the journalist's life and he was among the first to reach out to me. Were I now to criticize his critics for criticizing the dead, he'd find a way to return from the beyond, pause his cigarette mid-arc, swivel that always stubbled chin (drama queen he most certainly was) and pinion my eyes in disappointed surprise. He'd fall silent for a moment, verifying to himself that I was indeed daring to indulge in reaction and nostalgia in his presence, then say in that most recognizable of voices lowered to just above a wolf growl, "Debra [long theatrical pause]. Surely you're not [insert blistering takedown here].” Then the evil cat-about-to-swat-the-mouse smile. “Are you?" All the warmth and charm the shameless flirt had been flinging my way would evaporate with a sizzle until he’d decided that my hangdog expression was hangdog enough, then pour us both another and return to whatever fray he’d entered before I’d so disappointed him. If he ever cut anyone any slack, it wasn’t me and he liked me a lot. If he ever threw a rhetoric- or intellectual transgression in a lecturee’s face later, it wasn’t me and he told me off a lot. I learned this lesson the first night I met him at a DC online magazine launch in 1997 or so. A John Leo column came up and, when someone asked what it was about, a young journalist was quick to toss off, "Doesn't matter. They're all the same," the kind of line heard frequently from newbies at DC parties, accompanied by wan smiles and a polite lack of critique. With a quickness, Christopher roared, "Shame on you." (Only he could roar without the necessity of an exclamation point.). He went on to excoriate, briefly, witheringly, the reprobate’s cheap shot and spared not those of us who’d stood in complicitous silence while mere bitchery was substituted for careful analysis. A wet behind the ears journalist at 36, I’m looking at this dude and thinking: either avoid this psycho entirely or up your game and roll with him. I chose to roll. But yeah. He was psycho.

There's been little death in my life, so rather than count my blessings, I feel especially aggrieved when I lose a duckling, like him, like Marjorie Williams. I ran into Carol and Christopher (I never called him 'Hitch'. I loved his impish formality.) in the vestibule leaving her National Cathedral memorial. I’d left DC by then, so our elation at being reunited beyond email and phone quickly turned somber. Marjorie was so beloved. I remarked on the number of people who had died recently though I can’t remember now who they were. Christopher looked back into the sanctuary where she lay and said so sadly I had to hug him, “Yes. And all the wrong people.”

Grieved, but still an asshole.

I arrived to join the journo-social circuit just shortly before that magazine launch and was still awhirl from trying to figure out how to be a writer and from meeting all the luminaries I’d been following for so long. When the hostess took me aside to tell me that Christopher Hitchens (CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS!!!) wanted to meet me, I ‘bout had a conniption. Isn’t he the guy who rips people’s heads off and empties his ashtrays down their spinal columns for disagreeing with him? Or just because it was handy? The one who smokes even in the shower and dares the water to put his cigarette out? Wants to meet me? Once I was assured that she wasn’t joking, I was told to stay put and -- right hand to the Father -- she had to go get him and escort him over. Had he been worried I would say ‘hell to the no’ and actually used an intermediary rather than just barging up?’ CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS?

If I’m lying I’m flying: the man was blushing, counting floor tiles, shuffling his feet, and simply could not quiet his fluttering hands. Christopher Hitchens did not know what to say to little old, unknown me. She and I had to put him at ease. Cutest fucking thing I ever saw. I was his.

He regained his faculties (see the above takedown witnessed later that night) and began interrogating me, actually squinting with curiosity, given my having appeared out of the DC blue as I had (long story). With his last vestige of hesitance, he invited me to meet him the next day at that stinky, tourist free, dive he haunted on DuPont Circle. Freezing cold, I arrived in boots, gloves, hat, coat. He arrived in flip flops, a homeless guy’s trench coat flapping open in the wind, clothing so disheveled it could have easily come from Wardrobe and more razor stubble than could possibly have grown since just the night before.

“What?” he purred mischievously when my eyes asked WTF, “You’ve never seen a dandy before?” And so it began. As I headed home six hours later, I decided that the world could kiss my ass. Him drunk and wrong was a much better ride than most other folks sober and fact checked (I never saw him stumble). In fact, I suspect that may be why I forgive him everything; we were both supposed to be well behaved scholarship kids, grateful and pliant, and he’s the only one of us who said ‘fuck that’. This good girl enjoyed the chaos he caused and his refusal to apologize. So sue me.

So why mourn him now, when he’s been dead nearly two months and I’d so skillfully manipulated his enemies into insulating me from my grief? I’d inured myself to still seeing and hearing him on TV and the internet by intentionally booting him up some days, I clicked on links to him, knowing there’d be photos. Rather than him being cryogenically frozen, waiting for his cancer's cure, I froze him in the amber of history and visited him often. Why not? As thinkers go, he made history all the time. Given that, it really shouldn’t have sucker punched me the way it did when I bumped into him while weeding my Contacts a while back. The bastard sneaked up on me. He escaped from ‘the discourse’ straight back into my heart.

Dead, but still an asshole.

From Pink Ribbon to Black List: Latest Proof (did you really need it?) that Anti-Choice/Abortion Does Not Mean 'Pro-Life'

2012-02-02T19:40:19Z

Excellent reportage and analyses of the Susan G. Komen Foundation's glee in screwing poor women for political gain. The fascio-'Christian' wing of the GOP would actually prefer that poor women die of avoidable cancers than be in the same building were abortions are performed. This simply cannot be gainsaid. Here's one of the reasons I get all Hitchensian about god: he don't do near enough smitin'.

Nicholas Jackson's summary is top drawer while Jeffrey Goldberg has the latest on the unfolding story because this one isn't going away any time soon.

Crucial as reproductive freedom and, like, not dying are to women, the stakes are even higher than that. National (not just 'feminist') treasure Linda Hirshman makes the case:

"...recent American history contains a powerful warning against letting random legislators determine who gets cut off by their funders. Years ago, when Hollywood screenwriters invoked their constitutional right not to incriminate themselves in front of the red-hunting House Un-American Activities Committee, the private members of the Motion Picture Association put them on a blacklist, never to be employed again. In the years since the McCarthy fever abated, the blacklisting episode has come to be a symbol of political cowardice and wrongdoing. Komen does itself a disservice by replacing the pink ribbon with a black list."

Hear, hear.

What we really have here is a confluence of malignancies on the Taliban right:

1) hatred of the poor masquerading as tough love (why can't they just starve and die silently? After they've wiped my senile mother's behind for sub-minimum wage.)

2) fear of women re-engineered as hatred, such that they must be kept under control, their bodies being, as always, the best way to do so (no shortage of mind-controlled women in this category)

3) unexamined, Old Testament-level puritanism that must punish any evidence of sexuality not carefully confined to the marital bed, however freaky the puritans in their private lives. Mostly, this is because they resent their inability to get their public kink on while retaining their reputation for piety. Much of the opposition to abortion is utterly punitive rather than a reverence for life; you fucked the piper, now pay him. Whore.

4) class warfare; affluent women don't need Planned Parenthood for their cancer screenings and abortions so the fact that someone else does only proves their lack of personal responsibility and how fit the rich are to decide these most intimate of matters for them.

and least of all but not to be forgotten

5) the vicious ambitions of wannabe big ballers who'll do anything to feather a nest for themselves in a Romney White House; Karen Handel, who spent the last year rivening the foundation's board to bring about this coup, is a gubernatorial 'also ran' and clearly intends to claw her way to the big time.

Which brings me to the final point: what we also have here is the first major salvo of the 2012 election buzzsaw and all this tsuris gives me hope. I haven't seen the left/feminists/policy wonks this outraged in a coon's age.

How 'bout we stay that way through the first Tuesday in November?

Why We Occupy: Loony Newt's Loony SpokesIdiot on Maddow

2012-02-01T05:25:26Z

No matter how dishonest and racist, even delusional, you think the loony right GOP is, it's worse. Check out Rick Tyler -- Newt's former communications director and now head of his Super Pac - on Maddow. Wow. And oh boy but didn't Rev. Al take that clown to school! Must see.

I bet Laura Ingraham's regretting her advice for him (i.e. lots of GOP/conservatives) to appear on liberal/Dem shows since they would obviously win over any audience with their intelligence and warm regards for all. #FAIL

Code Pinker Handcuffs Herself 'To' Goldman Sachs, Goes Off in Ladylike Way: The Total Bad-Assery of the Average Occupier

2012-01-31T20:17:58Z

"January, 20, 2012, members of WomenOccupy meet with investors of Goldman Sachs in the financial district of San Francisco. This is how the meeting ended!"

This chick is wonderfully wacky as she goes about her DIY activism; I dig her more and more as the cops close in and she becomes increasingly surreal. My favorite part is where she scolds the rent-a-cop who's trying to eject her by schoolmarmishly pointing out, "I'm handcuffed here." How rude!

Lots of people sniff at such antics which is cool because I absolutely would have, too before the 1% made an increasingly anarchist (ever non-violent) believer out of me. What's left but anarchy and absurdist political theatre in a nation as increasingly Big Brotherish as ours; did you not watch the fascism on display in Oakland last night? If you can't beat them, make them look silly. Until you can beat them.

I joined Occupytheprimary in New Hampshire a few weeks ago (more on that later), and we made the candidates' lives hell; I will forever cherish the personal role I played in that. We never scrimped on the standard marching and sign waving but the 'bird dogging' -- wherein we follow them everywhere and torture them with both serious 'town hall' debate and tactics designed to humiliate and teach-- is a thing of beauty. If they'd let us speak, we would, but they won't, so we flip them off.

Dave Weigel, whose work I admire tremendously, tossed off that, "Presidential campaigns are serious things, and hecklers, like debate moderators, are unserious." Unserious? Really? A 52 year old black woman camping (you know we don't do that) with a bunch of homeless and noisy college kids? Hitching her way around the northeast to do anything possible to help the movement? Standing for over an hour like a sardine in a can so as to be near enough Mitt to drive him crazy, all while surrounded by his Nazi-like supporters and politically profiled off public premises? In the beginning, we'd been able to disrupt as a group with the safety of numbers, but eventually, they ejected all the folks whose white-boy dreadlocks and multiple piercings identified them occupiers, so we had to enter individually and stand alone, surrounded by people so entitled, one of them spit in the face of an 11 year old OccuKid. I kid you not. The cops, Mitt's staff and supporters became increasingly crazed as the days went on -- will they escort us out this time or will they get rough and arrest us? What if no one saw me get arrested? I occupy knowing how very effectively my ex-husband will use this against me as I fight to rescue my children (see: why I occupy).

Unserious?

Don't let the antics fool you; we couldn't be more serious. These OccupyWomen mic checking DSS could lose their benefits. I lost 13 pounds during the time I spent on the road 'sticking it to the man' in the only way I can right now (I'd be out there still if If I could have worked out the details). I slept on floors, I protested for hours with a blinding sinus headache and I shared a hotel room for two nights with a guy I'd just met at the Albany eviction so I could get to New Hampshire (he turned out to totally rock). Once there, I shared a floor with a guy weird enough that I never slept at all; next day I hooked up with non-creepy strangers from Wall Street and, between protests, lived with them in the New Hampshire boonies where no one would have ever found my body. Every time I wave a sign, or jab one fist and one peace sign in the air (you can have either, America), or the cops descend, I have to 'om, om, om' myself out of my terror that a tear gassing will trigger my asthma while I'm ziptied. Worst of all, is my nightmare that my glasses get broken in the melee and I spend days in jail unable to read. A van full of men I didn't recall meeting (being the only Negro in New Hampshire, everyone knew me) pulled up at the church which fed us from 2-5 everyday, screeched to a halt and yelled, "Hey, Vegas! Newt just changed his venue. Jump in." And I did.

The bravery of the unbelievably stupid young adults is breathtaking. It requires a post all its own.

Unserious?

Wacky though she seems, we don't know what would happen to Code Pink lady when the video ended and neither did she when she handcuffed herself to the 1%. Unserious?

Having put our lives on hold, our bodies on the line and volunteered to live like bums, we have to be among the most serious people on earth (I include protesters all around the world). We're brave and getting braver all the time because we have to (Romney's supporters frighten me still) and we keep our spirits up with the absurdity of it all. I doubt I laughed ten times in the last decade; I laugh my ass off with my new OccuFamily. Actual ROTFLing as we tried to figure out just how we were going to stash our signs and stuff on our persons to sneak them into a Romney event (you have us to thank for his campaign having outlawed signs indoors).

You gotta laugh because America has been absurd and surreal for some time now, we're just the only ones awake enough to notice. What was it Ghandi said.....

Expect us.

The Moral, Successful Version of Don't Ask Don't Tell

2012-01-30T22:02:26Z

Subjecting my hippie, commie Occupy friends to war stories the other night at my welcome home party (long story), I sorta embellished one about hitting on a gorgeous pilot so incessantly, he came out to me just to make me go away, thereby risking his career. That led to stories about being the beard for my gay friends on active duty. As I thought back over all the gays I'd known, or knew of, on active duty, it occurred to me that the only place Don't Ask Don't Tell was both moral and successful was among and between GIs, not GIs viz the brass or GIs viz civilians.

Perhaps the main argument against the prohibition on gays serving was the obvious fact that they always had and always would. But here's what I've yet to see pointed out: unless I had a singularly gay military experience, they did serve openly. Moreover, they were protected by their fellow soldiers. When you think about it, it's pretty obvious, given GI culture; 'as long as you do your job and take the mission seriously - not that we wouldn't rather you weren't all gay and stuff -- you're one of us'. Pensions, in particular, are sacrosanct, and if anyone's was in danger, everyone's was, just like doctors, cops and teachers; nobody wanted to be the 'career-busting' narc. Bad juju. There's also the fact that 'a gay in the military' is a very different thing from 'that gay in the military who is the best F16 mechanic I've ever seen.' People, not politics, serve together and people learn to co-exist.

I've been out longer now than I was in, but I can easily recall at least ten times I encountered openly serving, active duty gays, all of whom were as deeply ensconced in their units as any straight GI. I graduated from Basic training April 1980. June 1980, a young Army private and I were assigned to the same year-long training school; gay as the day is long. Your blind grandmother would have known she was a 'mo, a Home Depot lesbian before the company was ever thought of. Within a few months, she married an equally gay Navy guy. Wonder why. The rest of us would watch them, ambling listlessly around hand in hand every so often, smirk at each other and say nothing. We spent eight hours a day together for a year and partied together off duty; we never met the guy. Without ever agreeing to, we didn't even tease her about him lest an unfriendly overhear. Looking back, it's remarkable how not a big deal it was, especially since most of us were still pretty homophobic. I know I was. Gays might be bad but Pat? She was cool.

Fast forward to my last year of service, 1992, at the Pentagon: I went to meet up with a friend and waited in her admin area rather than run the security gauntlet. By the time she joined me, my eyes were round as saucers and my jaw was slack as I watched her admin chief flounce around, doing his job. Sorry, I behaved badly but I was just so shocked; I'd never seen one so out on duty and that was dangerous for everyone because no one wants to be called to testify at a court martial.

When I tried to ask if, perchance, she had noticed anything at all unusual about him, Mary brusquely said: "Shut the fuck up." Really. Shut the fuck up. She was a lover of profanity at the best of times so you have to factor that in, but the message was clear: he may be a faggot but he's our faggot. I pulled it together and that was that.

Final example (we're leaving out the regular gaydar pings as random GIs passed by) happened in Turkey. I'd deployed to augment a unit from the states; five women and three hundred men. All the women who weren't me were involved long term with men in the unit who had also deployed; that made them not safe, but as safe as they could be in the situation. Much safer than me. Given that all there was to do was drink and work, work and drink, it was simply a dangerous place for an unaccompanied woman and I never let myself forget it for a minute. Worse of all, that wasn't the kind of thing that could be discussed ("not a team player" my next evaluation would read) but my problem was solved when I met my deputy. Totally gay. Extra gay. Gay for no reason at all. We never discussed it. We also never discussed his accompanying me everywhere I went and I do mean everywhere. Eventually, grudgingly, the men accepted it, with varying degrees of civility. There was no getting me alone so say what you had to say, do what you had to do, in front of my boy. The men muttered bored insults at him all the time as we moved about, things like "here comes the Captain's puppy," or "why don't you just carry her purse for her". But never "faggot". If he heard them, he gave no mind. In fact, I think he was only insulted that way because they knew he'd blow them off, no offense taken. He wasn't stoic, he was family. And if I knew it, there were at least six to ten senior officers in his chain of command who knew it, too.

There was whole scale collusion to protect gays in the military that simply could not have functioned without the brass's tacit approval.

(I'm leaving out the role that so many women besides myself must have played during Don't Ask: the beard. Big difference between a fag hag and a beard, though you could be both. But that's another post.)

Evil in the Crosshairs: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in US History

2012-01-30T19:39:49Z

Excerpts from Chris Kyle USN Ret.'s memoir: [It's 2003 and this SEAL sniper is on a rooftop providing cover for an approaching Marine patrol in Iraq; kills a woman, with a child, who set a grenade in their path]

"It was the first time I'd killed anyone while I was on the sniper rifle. And the first time in Iraq--and the only time--I killed anyone other than a male combatant.

...It was clear that not only did she want to kill [the Marines], but she didn't care about anybody else nearby who would have been blown up by the grenade or killed in the firefight. Children on the street, people in the houses, maybe her child...

She was too blinded by evil to consider them. She just wanted Americans dead, no matter what.

My shots saved several Americans, whose lives were clearly worth more than that woman's twisted soul. ...I truly, deeply hated the evil that woman possessed. ...

Savage, despicable evil. That's what we were fighting in Iraq. That's why a lot of people, myself included, called the enemy "savages." There really was no other way to describe what we encountered there.

...The number [of his kills] is not important to me. I only wish I had killed more. Not for bragging rights, but because I believe the world is a better place without savages out there taking American lives. ...

I had a job to do as a SEAL. I killed the enemy--an enemy I saw day in and day out plotting to kill my fellow Americans. I'm haunted by the enemy's successes. They were few, but even a single American life is one too many lost."

The Invisible War: Documentary on Sexual Assault in the Military Wins at Sundance

2012-01-30T19:11:44Z

The Invisible War, a documentary to which I contributed, won the Audience Award, Documentaries at Sundance on Friday. The producers were amazing to work with and, despite the grim subject matter, I can't wait to see the final product (check out the trailer, a review, and, apparently, view the entire film here.). The prevalence, and disregard of, sexual assault in the military is a national disgrace, or would be if anyone gave a damn (to give a damn, go to the site). But the movie seems to be resonating, so much so that Mary J. Blige invited herself to the Sundance showing and is writing a song for the movie.

Harrowing, but necessary.

Anything you say can, and will, be used against you: Our leaders' hypocrisy

2011-10-15T16:39:14Z

Watch this video if you support #OWS and especially if you don't.

The Most Powerful #OccupyWallStreet Clip You Will See This Month

Found on Bigsteelguy4′s YouTube channel. Originally submitted by Ann B.

Great Art from Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-01T03:45:41Z

I'd huge-ify this. If I knew how.

If you want a cheap chuckle...

2011-09-15T04:41:03Z

It took me a minute last night to figure out this was a spoof. (Forgive me, it was 2 am).

TIP OF THE WEEK Irradiated meat is just as healthy, if not healthier than organic meat -- radiation kills bacteria just as effectively as it does people, and saves billions of dollars that would otherwise have to go toward producing cleaner meat and maintaining the health of livestock.

You have to admire the persistence of those who put so much effort into unpaid labor like this. Or, maybe, they're just long term unemployed like me and have all but given up. Still, I'm much too lazy for so much 'pro bono' effort.

Check it out; it'll make you snicker.

Dude: Divorce your Alzheimer's wife and "start over"

2011-09-15T04:24:52Z

Pat Robertson, still with the hypocrisy and the crazy.

Funny how he splits the difference between the twin abominations of fornication and divorce. Correct answer: "you can't, so sucks to be you right now."

His advice could only be the old "God doesn't give you anymore than you can stand" fail-safe for horrible situations, "but, dude, no tomcattin', no masturbatin' and no divorce. Man, I hate this job sometimes." (Robertson's anguish for the man seemed genuine.)

His sidekick actually tried gently to point out the hypocrisy and cruelty of this (so what if she doesn't know. Where does the Bible, or his typical sermon, say you can divorce a spouse with dementia or in a coma?) but Robertson basically cut her mic off.

The video ends abruptly, so perhaps Robertson found his way back to his fire and brimstone. Be better for us all if he found his way to Dan Savage.

Once More, With Feeling

2011-09-12T02:46:20Z

To my surprise, I've gotten emails about my ChipIn thingee having expired, so I resumed it.

Unfortunately, I've spent more than a week on the post I want to go with it because my writing has become lugubrious, clunky and annoying. It chases its own tail. Takes me eight paragraphs of self-conscious, passive-aggressive double speak to say 'good morning' and even then it's all impenetrable, multi-footnoted and semi-coloned bombast. My writing these days can best be described as downright jungle-y; to go the distance with it, you'd have to hack through quite a bit of underbrush and overwrought clauses springing out at you from nowhere. Not to mention the pointlessly arcane words buzzing around your face like bottom heavy tsetse flies. I can't stop thinking about my personal drama, so I can't stop over thinking my writing, the thing that has always flowed so magically from me onto the page. (See? There's not anything that certain parties can't take from me.)

Also, the dilemma of deciding whether to take half an hour -- that invariably becomes two for the lugubrious among us -- from job searching to post can make you hyperventilate. What if posting keeps me from doing a better job applying for a position I might have gotten. Since no one ever tells you anything about an application that doesn't get you an interview, this is an extremely good way to get more and more of us to just give up.

I need a program that gives me a few warning bells then automatically prevents me from further editing - that's where the pettifoggery slips in - and posts the post. That'd teach me.

So, when I can stop writing like a Marxist blowhard, I have lots of brilliant stories to tell about we 'new' poor, we Family Court victims, and life during a recession so well entrenched that the unemployed have been all but written off.

Difficult as it is, I'll stop before I rewrite this into 4,000 words.

And I Thought I Had It Bad

2011-05-08T22:14:00Z

This mom lost custody of her kids because she's unemployed (which was fine when she was a housewife). But mostly because she has cancer. So, now she gets to die alone in Durham while her kids move to Chicago.

Apparently, a psychiatrist's opinion carried the day.

When I've gotten some of my strength back, I'll be telling you all about just how unbelievably dangerous, unaccountable and incompetent the mental health community is when it comes to divorce.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Manipulation

2011-05-08T18:18:00Z

It's Mother's Day and I've lost my kids to Family Court.

Still trolling for donations.

On This Mother's Day, I am a Mother No More

Bad stuff needs to stop happening to me on major holidays.

It was at least a decade before Christmas stopped being the commemoration of “The Day I Was Raped By a Fellow Soldier and the Military Punished Me" and went back to being just good old Christmas. I almost never think about it anymore. But I suspect that I will take more than a decade to stop experiencing Mother’s Day as one of heartbreak, mourning and bitterness because it’s now “The Day I Lost My Kids”.

They’ll be with my ex-husband even though I have sole legal and physical custody. Insert bitter bark-laugh here. Those meaningless sheets of paper matter about as much as the Restraining Orders found on women murdered by the former lovers determined to make them mind; absolutely nothing, to a certain kind of ex. Family Court orders just provide the ammo for a war of attrition that certain kind of ex has all the time in the world to wage because defeating you, making you mind, has their complete, all-day-and-all-night-long, obsessive-compulsive attention. They have all the time in the world, they make all the time in the world, to keep you on the defensive and in court forever. Or until you give up.

Court. Disneyland for sociopaths. The only place you can’t refuse to see them. The only place where they can torture you and watch you suffer with their own eyes. In real time.

Read the rest at Slate's DoubleXX.

Scenes from Family Court: A Very Early Meeting in the Ladies' Room

2011-05-05T16:33:00Z

Five year "marriage". Seven years now, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, in Family Court. Me, end of rope.

Very early on, my ex's first (of six? now) attorney(s) entered the Ladies' as I was drying my hands and preparing to leave.

Our eyes met in the mirror and we both froze. In a flash, she regrouped and marched on into a stall, face once again serene. Presumably, years of doing what she does for money gives one nerves of steel. I don't imagine I could successfully pee, let alone drop my drawers, in the presence of one of my...whatever I am to her. But then. That's me. Perhaps that's why she's not all but homeless and I am.

Anyway.

I debated my options -- this being a woman I'd actually dreamed of slowly beating to death with a nail-studded baseball bat -- then just finished drying my hands. If you learn nothing else in Family Court, it's that anything you do, besides abject surrender, will only makes things worse. So I just dry my hands.

Almost immediately a Law Guardian -- they're court appointed to represent litigants' kids -- follows her in. Quite clearly, she'd seen "Susie" enter and followed her in specifically to catch up with her. Only a few seconds have gone by, pregnant as they were.

This is what the sworn protector and defender of helpless children caught up in their parents' Family Court battles followed "Susie" to ask. This is how attorneys -- ok some attorneys-- who make their living in Family Court greet each other, verbatim:

"So Susie! Ya makin' lotsa money!?"

I think it was the 'you go girl!" fan-girl adulation in her voice that stopped me short. And that it wasn't really a question. It was a girlfriend's request for a vicarious thrill: oh how she clearly wished she had the gumption to make 'real' money in private practice, rather than just staring at the clock til retirement and doing nothing to protect her charges.

Now, I've no doubt redecorated this in my mind, but I experienced her voice as a gun moll's from a 20's gangster movie. Imagine Leslie Anne Warren in Victor, Victoria.

As I fight to keep a roof over our heads, I hear her in my mind all the time:

Ya makin' lotsa money!?

Again, all this takes place in seconds.

I hear "Susie's" indrawn, 'oh shit' breath from the stall. Ah. So not completely devoid of human emotion after all. Also, there was that time she looked a tad uncomfortable accusing my mother of being insane. When my mother was in the court room. Not that it stopped her.

But I digress.

I only have a split second to decide. I decide to go for it. It's not as if Susie could work any harder to destroy me, right?:

Is that...woman "makin lotsa money!?"

"Yeah," I say. "And all of it offa me."

And then I left them to whatever conversations girlfriends such as they have in the Ladies'.

My Latest Post at Slate's DoubleX

2011-04-29T10:48:00Z

It's about deadbeat parents.

Still Trolling for Donations, y'all

2011-04-26T12:59:00Z

You can help a sister out right here. Thanks!