Moody Post-Election News

I had no idea that wikipedia was brought to us by a nonprofit organization. Turns out that they're called wikimedia and have other charitable wiki projects out there running on their open source wiki software. This is the kind of thing that helps cheer me up after the passage of Prop 8 here in California and all the other appallingly discriminatory propositions passed in other states this month.

Of course, knowing that wikipedia has a lot of good will for society behind it isn't quite as encouraging on the human rights front as the Florida court decision earlier this week. It really shouldn't be such a relief to hear this type of rational statement in a court of (supposedly separated from any church's pulpit) law:

“It is clear that sexual orientation is not a predictor of a person’s ability to parent.” --Judge Cindy S. Lederman, Miami-Dade Circuit Court

Sadly, the Flordia law banning homosexual couples or individuals from adopting children has been on the books for 30 years and the state will appeal the decision in the Florida Supreme Court. The idea of the state making a case that people like me have a "higher incidence of drug and alcohol abuse among same-sex couples, that their relationships are less stable than those of heterosexuals, and that their children suffer a societal stigma" (NYTimes article above), is chillingly reminiscent of 20th Century arguments made about the intelligence of black people and women based on cranial size. Using pseudo-scientific studies to justify racist/sexist/homophobic beliefs is the pathetic flail of the ruling class as they feel their means of oppressing the rest of us slip through their fingers. It's disgusting, but it's also extremely revealing of the unfair bias of the claim. Accepted scientific inquiries have that inconvenient attribute of objectivity and are not touted as facts but rather theories that are not only provable but also disprovable. Science allows itself to change and reminds its community to keep an open mind, to consider all possibilities, to think outside the given box. In this case, the sweeping, scientific-sounding claims made by the state's "experts" were refuted by studies of individual families showing "that children raised by gay parents fare just as well or better than children raised by straight parents” (same article). I don't know how much the experts vs. studies argument will bear on the Florida Supreme Court's decision when they are eventually obliged to hear this case, but it's good to see signs that the quality of life is improving and will continue to improve for unconventional families in this country. Just as the ability to score well on an IQ test will go up when one is no longer forced into manual labor or domestic servitude, the ability to create a safe, stable family life will increase when one is ALLOWED to have a family. Makes sense to me.

The scales are tilted and we all need to pull our weight in balancing them. The news that wikipedia's mission to allow free access to the sum of human knowledge to all and sundry is a hefty addition to the underserved side of the scales. They are running on donations and are about half way to their 2009 goals now. Maybe my money would be better spent by supporting literacy programs or by helping more poor people & communities gain access to computers, but wikimedia does a lot of good and every little bit of good helps.

Home is Where Your Car is

Yesterday, was the day that I did the Dance of Unfettered Joy all the way up the street, eight-count triple-stepping past the guards at the Federal Mint, and moved my car on up. Yes, after 4 years of living in the city, having a car off and on again and never once coming at all close to have a garage or parking space...*rolls the drum*....I finally got my residential parking permit! The dieties behind the double-paned bullet proof glass at the Department of Parking & Transit have finally deigned to grant me the chance of finding viable parking near my home. It's been a long wait. So, when the shiny blue sticker came in the mail, I ripped it open and shamelessly tore out of the house to move my car into the open space right outside my front door! Yes, I practically skipped the last few steps to my car singing, "Home at last, thank god almighty, Home at last."

That was Wednesday, and you'll note in the photo that street sweeping won't happen again until NEXT WEDNESDAY at 8:00am. Which means that I can fly away to Boise and come back Tuesday evening with plenty of time to move my car. And if I can't find a space, no sweat--literally. I can roll out of bed at 7:50 on Wednesday morning throw on some shoes and slouch down stairs to clear out before the sweepers come by. That's my apartment, just to the right of the tree. So, no jogging frantically up several blocks only to find that they came a little early and I owe another $50.00 to The Man.

Oh, how I have seriously paid my dues during my time here! Not only have I spent hundreds of dollars on parking tickets, for everything from the classics--street sweeping and over-extending the time limit--to the occasional emergency indiscretions--expired meter, parking in a loading zone, parking in a tow-away zone. In my defense, the last one was only a tow-away zone during certain rush hour times of the day and I got there to move only 5 minutes late. That ticket was seriously $60.00 and it was on Halloween (a holiday for which most San Franciscans get in a festive mood), but the woman was writing the ticket as I ran up and absolutely refused to stop. Anyway, I've done quite a bit of community service to pay down some of the debts that I haven't had the cash to cover.

So, why didn't I just get a permit right away? This is a simple question with a very complicated answer that has changed depending on whatever situation I have found myself in during my time here. What it comes down to is that, even though San Francisco is the place in which I have felt the most comfortable and found the most kindred spirits, it hasn't been until just this year that I have finally found myself truly at home.

In February of this year, I moved into my girlfriend's two bedroom apartment right in the middle of the city--not in the downtown part, but right in the geographical center of San Francisco. I really did not want to move into this neighborhood after living in a quieter one for the last year. Also, I had serious doubts about moving in with a Significant Other after past experiences that ended in metaphorical flames. But before agreeing on the move, we worked really hard to establish the ground rules and workshop the fears and possible icky scenarios, so that when I came, we shook up the space really well and served the re-furnished, re-painted, re-vitalized rooms up with a dash of her taste and twist of mine. It worked really well. In fact, people who have known her during her entire 5 year stint in this apartment have commented on the fact that they not only like what I've brought to the place, but that they feel for the first time that this HER space, too. Her past series of roommates all had a temporary or utilitarian way of living in the apartment, but she and I have managed to build a little nest that is comfortable and welcoming and just the right amount of wacky.

It's been a great few months. Not completely conflict-free, but the way that we've worked through the few confrontations that we've had has been reassuring. As with all matters of the heart, there is a possibility that flames will end this, too; but, if so, I think that they will be the cleansing kind that remove all the impurities and leave the true core of you shining solidly among the ashes.

So, now that my home-life has been registered and validated by the parking gods, one of the complications was that I was asked to go work in Idaho for several weeks straight. I found myself unable to accept the full teaching run, despite the intense need to get away from the painfully paradoxical job situation. Since last October, I have been spending 40 hours a week in a somewhat isolated office at odd times in the day doing mostly solitary work. And the business that has cloistered me: TOURISM! Yes, it's a perfect example of the doctor's sick wife or the cobbler's barefoot son. Anyway, I had started craving the dynamic social atmosphere of the classroom almost immediately after signing on with the company a year ago and, after watching almost every other co-worker go off on long extended backpacking trips to other continents, I've just needed to get out of there. Nevertheless, my heart is now in San Francisco, so I instead took the option of commuting via air once a week until the middle of December. It's the best of both worlds: I'm traveling, teaching, seeing a new place, and on Tuesdays I get to come back home to my books, my kitchen, my couch, my collection of tacky knick-knacks, and my insightful, passionate, solidly grounded sweetheart.

Doris Lessing Won the Nobel Today!

After being on the short list for 40 years, Doris Lessing was finally awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for being an “epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny.” Though I still haven't read The Golden Notebook, her most well-known and important feminist work, I'm delighted to see that the Academy are willing to recognize someone with (gasp) science fiction as part of her repertoire! By the way (of using gendered pronouns), the NY Times reports that Lessing is the 11th woman to win the prize. That's right, only the 11th!! It's appalling, considering that the award has been given out almost every year since 1900! Yep, out of a total of 103 awards, just 11 women. I'm finding it difficult to let that really sink in.

You can see pictures of all literature prize laureates on the Nobel Prize site here, with head shots of each author and the summary of what merited their award. These are the 11 women:
2007-Doris Lessing, American
2004-Elfriede Jelinek, Austrian
1996-Wislawa Szymborska, Polish
1993-Toni Morrison, American
1991-Nadine Gordimer, South African
1966-Nelly Sachs (1/2 prize), Swedish
1945-Gabriela Mistral, Spanish
1938-Pearl Buck, American
1928-Sigrid Undset, Norwegian
1926-Grazia Deledda, Italian
1909-Selma Lagerlof, Swedish

Such a strange demographic: more Americans than any other country; a few men-only decades--1980s, 1970s, 1950s, and 1910s. What does this say Sweden's academic climate and world view? Since half of them were given in the past 20 years, maybe the efforts of de-canonization in literature course curriculum has paid off? Maybe those second wave feminists have finally gotten old enough to gain some recognition at having withstood the test of time? Maybe. The results are still disturbing.

One common retort to the protest of traditionally male-dominated book awards is that there just aren't as many woman writers as there are men. This, gentle reader, amounts to nothing more than a pile of ill-informed bull-honky. Despite having odds stacked against them due to second-class citizenship, disenfranchisement, relegation to the domestic sphere, and intensely gendered upbringings, women have been finding ways to write throughout history. They have been published under male pseudonyms, as mere women's writing, stuck in genre ghettos, looked down upon as being of lesser value, edged out of public discourse, but they've been there nevertheless and are there, whether we see them in Norton's anthology or not, like ghosts wandering the corridors of Hemingway Hall, looking for A Room of One's Own, or screeching what sounds like hysterical nonsense to the Academy like the Madwoman in the Attic.

After all that, I must say that touting Doris Lessing as a feminist or really even as a science fiction writer are dubious claims at best. Although Lessing has openly admired sf and has attended a con or two as guest of honor, she called her sf pieces, like Canopus, "space fiction," which gives you an idea of the goings on in the books. More importantly, Lessing herself has denied affiliation with the term "feminist," being from an older generation than the second wavers. From the scathing review that Ursula LeGuin (all hail the mistress of fem/sf) gave Lessing's last novel, The Cleft, it seems that the simple presence of strong, realistic female characters, which was the major element that made Lessing's early work so revolutionary, has been overshadowed by a third wave feminist expectation of deeper philosophical human equality regardless of gender. Still, I need to scold myself one more time in this entry for never having read The Golden Notebook.


An interesting factoid I didn't know until today is that Lessing was raised in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). This is one of those weird synchronicity things that seems to happen whenever I learn something new. Just two weeks ago I learned about Rhodesia for the very first time when I picked up a book called Don't Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller. This skillfully written autobiography describes Fuller's life growing up in Rhodesia. It's just the way of the ether that a defunct country name will continue to pop up in random places for the rest of the month now that it is in my consciousness. Or maybe it's just another kind of voodoo since it turns out that though Fuller was raised in Rhodesia, she is white, British by birth, and now lives in America--just like Doris Lessing! (That calls for queuing the Kids: "Don't Tell Me That!!")

Gays in the Military?

I came across this hilarious video on Brave New Films after watching 5 minutes of the Republican presidential candidate debate, in which the panel of 10 white men, including Giuliani & McCain, attempted to individually avoid the question of whether gays and lesbians should be allowed to serve openly in the military until finally the CNN questioner (Scott Spradling?) asked for anyone on the panel to take the floor if they thought that the ban should be lifted and the seconds tick by in silence. So, after that depressing moment, I found this video to cheer me up and ended up writing such a long comment, that I thought I'd repost it here:



Besides the Republican line of the hour, "Lifting the ban is a social experiment that would be irresponsibly dangerous to indulge in at this critical time of war," what is Mark Smith trying to convey here?

First, he wants to make it clear that Mark Smith (or insert other generic white male name here) has a rampant heterosexuality that is uncontrollable to the extent that he cannot even focus on his own impending death when there are women in short shorts around. The female body as an unfailingly sexy object of desire is also important to protect the macho image of the virile male. If he can't get it up for a couple of Hooter's girls having a pillow fight on the front line of combat, he is probably not good for anything.

By the same coin, the ultimate macho man ends up taking the place of the Hooter's waitress when he is the sex object for the gay soldier. Thrown into a troop of (scantily clad?) Mark Smiths, the gay serviceman must be helplessly drawn to Mark Smiths unquestionable manliness. He MUST! If he doesn't, well that must mean that there is something wrong with Mark Smith's pristine masculinity! Yikes! How can Mark Smith even think of subjecting the troops to that kind of identity crisis, especially when we're in the middle of waging an ideological war?!

Furthermore, if Mark Smith can't face the fact that every gay male on the planet would not fall for him immediately, regardless of what he might actually be doing on the ground in Iraq (i.e. dressed from head to toe in camo, carrying upwards of 50 pounds of gear not including firearms, fighting for his life, trying to communicate with desperate people who speak another language, surviving attacks and dust storms, or other NON-SEXY things), then our manly troops couldn't handle it either.

What the Republican party in general is saying with this line (see the above-mentioned GOP debate for multiple repetitions of said line) is that they need to protect the masculine ego of a uniformly hetero, male military.

But wait a second... What about all those women we've allowed into the ranks? Aren't the good old boys going crazy trying to keep in line when bananas appear in their pockets every time G.I. Jane marches next to them? Oh, well, maybe it's just understood that the women in the military are those "rough" "tomboy" types anyway. So, the GOP would be okay with assuming they are all lesbians, as long as they keep their mouths shut about it and, indeed, about anything else other than patriotic sloganage.

This is a tough topic. Like many other political debates, I find myself torn by the disconnect between conceptual perspectives and practical realities. I'm hesitant to shout, "Gays in the Military!" at a protest rally, because I don't believe that war should be waged at all. I am a pacifist and cannot see any war as justifiable. Having complete peace imposed on the warmongers--THAT would be the real social experiment, and that is probably not possible right now, if it ever will be. Furthermore, our government's treatment of the troops is morally questionable and fiscally irresponsible. (See Aztlan y Vietnam for accounts of racist & classist draft practices during the 1960s. See Fahrenheit 9/11 for documentation on military recruiters in action.) Why would I want to fight a political battle so that my queer family can go and fight wars that only serve to keep old white men in power? Those are my main objections. That said, the reality is that there are queer people who want and are able to serve in the military, but are disallowed or fired for being honest.

Unequivocally, I feel that the government should not be charged with policing self-image and identity. Those are personal things that should not concern public policy. What the goverment should be doing is supporting those people who are strong enough to choose this violent, traumatizing way of giving back to their communities. The government should be serving those people to the best of their ability, not forcing them to subscribe to a certain perspective on sexuality, or to lie about who they are to the people they work with. This policy does nothing but demean the professionalism of all troops, gay or straight, and results in the thinning of their ranks with intent only to punish the existence of human diversity. It's reprehensible and should be stopped.

Go to Lift The Ban for more info on what can be done.