Brett Stokes: The Last Picture Show
Home Birth, the Latest and Oldest in Healthcare Cost Cutting
By Kit-Bacon Gressitt
My daughter loves balloons. Me? I’m uncomfortable with the little bastards. They burst mid-blow, slap your lips with stinging rubber, startle the boogers out of you.
My kid, though, she loves them. How could she not?
The day my daughter was born, my best friend brought day-old, helium-filled birthday balloons — her husband’s — and she and my husband tied the flagging orbs to the ceiling fan above our bed.
Earlier in the evening, we had planned on a movie — I don’t recall which one. Beetlejuice, perhaps, Tim Burton’s image of death and a darkly disturbed daughter. He must not have yet had one. Or Bagdad Cafe, Percy Aldon’s story of luscious rebirth in a Southwestern desert. No matter: We didn’t make it. I left a trail of dribbles back to the car.
And settled at home, when we were all certain it had started, we lowered the lights. We played Mozart — or was it Brahms? Maybe some womanly Celtic stuff. It’s all a bit fuzzy.
I remember going to the kitchen, to make chamomile tea, to move, to breathe, to wonder what was coming next. She wanted to help, my friend, as did my husband, but I think I wasn’t ready for that. Our midwife knew better than to offer.
And then we waited, while I tried to imagine her an adult — I knew it was a girl, untested but certain. Would she be an artist? Would she be whole? Would she survive?
I went to make more chamomile tea, to move more intently, to breathe deeper, to get down on all fours and howl. I knew what was coming next.
The pain, the abstraction, the focus, the detachment, the pain again.
And in between, I thought of Mother, the four she birthed, the one she lost. She also had been born at home, in the safe comfort of loving hands that would swaddle a healthy babe and let loose those not ready to join the living. Did Mother remember, could she recall her sequence, the progression from water broken, the length of her labors, the moments the contractions gave way to release and bliss?
Why don’t we ask these things, ask before it’s too late for answers?
But no matter; we were done. My daughter lay on my chest, umbilical cord still pulsing. Her father glowing. Balloons fluttering between gently turning fan blades, too soft to lift drenched hair from my forehead.
And to this day, my daughter loves balloons. Me, I remain uncomfortable with the little bastards. Although if someone else inflates them, I admit they make me smile. And still, I try to imagine her, well into her adulthood. Will she be an artist? Will she be whole? Will she survive? I don’t know.
But I do know that home births are slightly more common today than in recent years past, as they should be, though not yet the norm they were before hospitals took over. And if Congress has the resolve to reduce the cost of healthcare, insurers will be required to cover them.
© 2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt
(Balloon photo by Aaron Hockley via a Creative Commons license.)
4 Comments
March 7th, 2010 in
Healthcare, Mothering | tags: healthcare insurance reform, Healthcare reform, home birth
National Women’s History Month
By Kit-Bacon Gressitt
National Women’s History Month is upon us. Again. Every March, it has been, since Congress made it so in 1987.
Frankly, I wish we were over and done with it. I wish I could be over and done with Women’s History Month, but I cannot. Because the women in my life — two-thirds of my siblings, half of my friends, all of my maternal unit and my most precious and only offspring — and all the women far beyond my life, exist in a world still dominated by male leaders whose decisions are, well, lacking to say the least. Even a superficial skim of the last decade — the last week! — reveals some stunningly low-hanging idiots.
From Osama Bin Laden’s schizophrenic decision to conquer the infidels by flying planes into symbolic buildings full of people to George W. Bush’s decision to punish Saddam Hussein for deciding to dis George’s daddy to the Taliban’s decision to maim and murder Afghan girls for attending school to presidential wannabe John Edwards’ decision to repeatedly lie to the entire world about his fruitful extramarital affair to Vladimir Putin’s decision to add his prime ministerial whine to Russian skater Yevgeny Plushenko’s ungracious failure to win Olympic gold to Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi’s decision to declare a jihad against Switzerland for banning the building of minarets to the primary advocates of the ban who decided a bigoted national ballot initiative would take care of scary Muslims to AIG CEO Robert Benmosche’s decision to let it slip to the Securities and Exchange Commission that AIG might need more bailout bucks; idiots, every single male one of them.
Of course, women make bad decisions, too. But wouldn’t it be interesting to see what errors women make were we to demand access to the same decision-making powers men have enjoyed since priestesses fell out of favor. But we don’t, and therein lies the problem.
In a nation where the published history of women is so sparse as to require special curricular materials and a designated month during which schools might choose to teach women’s accomplishments and influences, women are not up in arms en masse demanding equal anything. In fact, that women’s history is recognized with a token month is testament to the inclination of too many of us to quietly acquiesce to the token nature of the positions we hold in our textbooks, our politics, our boardrooms and our religions. Even in our families, where it is sometimes worse: I think of the men I know who treat women like nothing more than warm watermelons — and who have fathered daughters. What, oh what, are they teaching their girls? Can they possibly believe their daughters are not privy to the misogyny they spew into the world?
My own daughter is a multi-ethnic creature of olive skin, wildly spiraled hair and black eyes that shift from playful adoration to demonic fire in the flash of a mood swing. She is an amalgam of the women who came before her and those who influence her today. She is the unconventional grandmother wordsmith who deflects life’s frustrations with naughty limericks; the brilliant teacher cum older sister who reads a fabulous future in my daughter’s stars; the Puerto Rican abuela who wrapped fitful fingers around the heartbroken prayer beads of a forsaking God; the mother of ignorance who ignites at the sight of books she’s too frightened to read; the persistent smile of youth staring from obituaries and imagined in heaven taking a happy toke; the girlfriends who love her even when she first wakes up and when she’s down; the domineering Southern Baptist matriarch who went to her properly understated grave firing foreign epithets dredged from an exotic adolescence; the anxious mother who rails at the thought of her daughter thwarted for her gender, stymied by an idiot male-centric system simply by virtue of her body parts.
From these women, my daughter will glean all she is able, the vast and colorful textures of the women whose paths led to hers — and the men who’ve unselfishly loved her. And whom she ends up will perhaps be celebrated during National Women’s History Month in years to come, although that would indeed be sorrowful.
Far better that my daughter — our daughters — would be recognized year-round in standard issue textbooks.
©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt
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Fallbrookisms 25 February 2010
1. I dated this girl once. She said, “You’re an enigma: You waft between deep spirituality and potty humor.”
2. I wonder, did any of your parents’ children survive?
On writing
Natasha,
My courtship with writing has, alas, left her a spinster. Gone is the flower of her youth, barren is her womb. She longs for my attention, sighing as I whisk by, racing from one random pedestrian act to another. I look on her and see the unfulfilled dreams she, a virgin, has carried; the futile burden she has borne interrupted by only an occasional exercise of haiku, a silly trivial limerick, a more promising letter to a friend. Then a tortuous tease of real hope for her via the execution of a carefully crafted and poignant eulogy of a parent or friend causes her to pause, breathless, hoping for her lover to fully engage; knowing what promise lurks, what fecund riches hang nearing the angle of incidence … But alas, her lover, distracted by a trifle, abandons her again for another.
Scott
Russian border marker
At Major Market
Shopper 1: What brought you to Fallbrook?
Shopper 2, with a Lithuanian accent: The Communists.
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Are You Reading The Progressive Post?
If you ever feel marooned on a North County atoll of information atrophy, fret no more. There is an alternative source of San Diego North County news, commentary and community information — The Progressive Post — that fills the sometimes cavernous void between our typical daily and weekly offerings. The Progressive Post touts itself as a semi-monthly e-newsletter for progressives, but it is significantly more. As even local print papers continue to reduce local coverage, The Progressive Post is pedaling fast to help fill the growing gap. And regardless of political inclinations, The Post’s content is sure to spice up the life of any reader.
The all-volunteer publication is edited by Fallbrook’s very own Joe Crews, president of the Fallbrook Democratic Club. Joe explained what brought him to town: “I was bred and schooled in the deep Southern culture of Mississippi and immersed in the Southern Baptist Church. But with the enlightenment that came with my self-awareness as a gay man, I recognized that culture’s incompatibility with liberal and progressive ideas. Southern California is not exactly a liberal’s paradise, however, and often I encounter much of the same racism, xenophobia and misunderstandings as in the South. … But, with the death of my longtime companion and end of my 27-year career at Pan Am, I actively searched where I wanted to live the rest of my life, and found Fallbrook. I love Fallbrook, and The Progressive Post is a work of love.”
Publisher of The Post, Rick Hall, said, “I am awfully lucky Joe agreed to [serve as volunteer editor]. Without Joe, there would be no Progressive Post.” In lieu of subscription fees, Rick suggested the best contribution is original content from local writers about progressive topics, local events, arts and culture, etc. To submit an article, media release or story idea, visit The Progressive Post.
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Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Tell, Don’t Ask
By Kit-Bacon Gressitt
Many moons ago, I was the token feminist columnist for what was essentially a libertarian newspaper, and the boys were pretty accommodating. They let me serve on their editorial board, write their editorials, even edit their editorial page — sans title, of course, because I was, after all, a damn liberal. And a damn willful girl. Their fessing up to the job I was doing — despite its being only until they could find another nice boy who’d work for bad 
coffee and book review copies (Smoking, Drinking & Screwing was one of my favorite acquisitions) — wouldn’t have been good for the paper’s conservative image or for all the publisher’s boy-centric golf outings and cocktail hours in local sports team owners’ boxes.
Regardless, I had a hell of a good time: Some readers loved me, some hated me, some wanted me dead. Most interesting, though, of all the reactions I received was the rumor that wended its way to the newsroom one sizzling summer day as I was bemoaning a divorce — that I had left a “perfectly good little husband” to become a lesbian.
Not the stuff of front page news, but this tidbit did explain a lot at the time: the men who scurried away from my provocative path; the puffy-sleeved, calico-covered Bible-toting women who shrinkingly avoided eye contact, apparently for fear of exposure to the abject horror of pure female sexuality.
Nonetheless, I considered that homosexuality might become me, and I wrote about the rumor in a column, rolling this new persona around my mind’s tongue and relishing the unique flavors it might lend my life.
No longer would my social flirtations be perceived as platonic banter with the strong women who intrigued me. Instead, they would be known as the front they were for my lust for female flesh. I could graduate from the Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays contingent to join the Dykes on Bikes at the next Gay Pride Parade.
I wrote of the supposed need to pin a warning to my chest when visiting my daughter’s elementary school — Mind Your Children — because hearsay dictated my primary purpose in life would be to convert them all to the homosexual lifestyle, my own daughter, the first protégé on my list.
Of course those readers who had previously informed me of the vigils they held, praying to their loving God to forgive me the error of my liberal ways and redirect me to a heavenly path, would instead shun me for the abomination I surely had become in the eyes of that very same God. (Amazing how a little shift in orientation can affect the Almighty. Kind of fickle for a deity though, eh?)
Despite my pending condemnation to Hell’s fires for the sexually perverse, this new role did bear with it some unexpected pleasures, not the least of which was the power to cast fear in the hearts of entrenched conservative homophobes. I anticipated the delicious moment when I would lean in just a little too close to tell my tight-sphinctered Assemblymember that I thought I might like to put my lips on women’s lips, if you know what I mean. Thank you for that image, Sweet Baby Jeeeesus!
All told, I was pleased with the possibilities this intended slur brought me, although I refused to declare affiliation with any orientation. Still, I embraced the suggestion proudly and lovingly — along with all the guys and gals it included as targets of its assault. Because, as my mother taught me, it’s better to be looked over than overlooked — no matter if it’s with loathing. But even more interesting than the rumor itself was that the topic of my sexual orientation didn’t end there, oh no.
It’s human nature, I suppose. People hear what they want to hear, read what they want to read, and when the writer offers ambiguity — for the sake of a lesson, in hope of enlightenment emerging from confusion — many a reader is adamant in his or her certainty that a thing is, in fact, so or not so.
And, so, it turns out there were those who read my column and celebrated my coming out as though that made me more of a sister to them. There were those who demanded clarification of my ambiguity, praying for affirmation of the worst so they could put stamps on their appropriately outraged letters to the editor. And there were those who jumped right in and reviled me for revealing such a despicable, profane intimacy in a “family” newspaper, from which, by the way, I should be promptly fired — for being openly gay.
It was quite an array of interpretations, yet I was adamant that one’s sexual orientation didn’t matter, at least until foreplay reared its head. But lo those many moons ago, the message that reverberated back to me was that it still did: They asked, I refused to tell, and they were pissed. They wanted to know, straights and gays alike. It was a good lesson, for me at least.
Today, the reaction would likely be different; actually, I suspect the rumor would never get started. And that’s progress, albeit inadequate progress, because still we allow sexual orientation to define and divide us, and I wonder when we will live in a world in which parents of gays and lesbians do not have to group together for support or offer that support to young people whose own parents have rejected them. I wonder when we will live in a world where mothers and fathers are regarded for their ability to nurture, no matter their sexuality. A world where homosexuals approach the altar just as straight couples, still gnashing their teeth over seating charts and with legal marriage licenses in figurative hand. A world where politicians accept and salute the gays in our military — serving with honor, distinction and dedication — and acknowledge they have the right to do so honestly.
As for me, though, I’m still not telling — and I won’t until we’ve learned to stop asking. I’m willful like that.
©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt
Writers
Want to submit your work to Excuse Me, I’m Writing for the sheer joy of having an audience? Email your original fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry — 2,000 words maximum — in an MS Word document or in RTF to kb@kbgressitt.com. If we publish your work, you hold all rights, including bragging.
8 Comments
February 21st, 2010 in
Civil rights, Culture, Feminism, Homosexuality, Military, Same sex marriage, Writing | tags: Don't Ask Don't Tell, Drinking Smoking & Screwing, PFLAG
Fallbrookisms 18 February 2010
At Café des Artistes
Over a large, luscious slice of tiramisu cake:
Mother: I understand, Sweetie, you want to be appreciated for your full worth.
Daughter: Yes, and for my full girth.
T. Jefferson Parker at the recent reading for his new novel Iron River:
I’ve had a lot of editors, but none I’ve wanted to run away from.
In response to “What do you think of J.D. Salinger?” I like him. I wish there were more of him to like.
[Literature] forces you to ask a clear question and then shut up and listen.
I’m a writer because my second grade report card said, “Doesn’t work well with others.”
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When the Cat Woman Barfs
By Kit-Bacon Gressitt
I’m at a writers conference, waiting to meet with a literary agent to hear her opinion of my gifts or lack thereof, and I’m actually feeling pretty good about my prospects: I have the dandy genes my parents gave me (although I’d love to be able to throw a couple back into the pool), I’m in full possession of the ability to stick a few words together effectively, and I have the skin of a middle-aged feminist — thickened right along with my ankles — and the determination to spend the latter half of my life writing about the entertaining outrages of the first.
So I’m clearing out my email inbox as I wait and gearing up to have a good time, tout my stuff, and attribute any rejection to the agent’s inadequacies, not my own — because I am ready to take to print and pound the persistent inequities of our society with the power of words. Yep, I am feeling good!
With the junk mail deleted, I smile at the young woman waiting next to me, thinking we’ll pass the time with a little chat about writing. But she looks as though she might barf.
“I hope it’s good,” she quivers.
“What have you written?” I try to distract her from her inner turmoil.
“It’s about my cat, a book about my cat. Henry. I love him so much — he’s such a special cat — and my friends say it’s really, really good. Henry, he’s so sweet he’s easy to write about, you know? He’s just like a person in so many ways, really, the way he rubs against me and curls into my lap and then he looks up, like he’s making eye contact on purpose, and he licks me — right on the lips. Henry’s such a lover boy. … What will he think if it’s not good enough?”
I don’t want to be judgmental, but I’m kind of grossed out; still I struggle to find something supportive to say, except now the gal clearly is going to barf and she’s running off to the women’s room, which makes me think of Marilyn French’s book of the same name, published back when we were called “ladies” (unless we were deemed unworthy) and it was called the “Ladies Room” and women were fomenting for freedom from the discrimination ascribed to our other-than-male body parts. I worry that the cat lover has not been liberated from things even more onerous than sexism. Although it occurs to me none of us has been liberated, not really. Misogyny and sexism persist to this day in ways subtle and overt, yet both so damnably dismissed. Toss us the bone of birth control (and crummy options at that!) and a few token CEO slots, and we’re supposed to withdraw into hushed compliance at eighty percent of men’s pay. What we really need to do is nudge our daughters to take up the feminist mantle and return to the battle with them at the fore. Yep, I’m ready — I still have my old Equal Rights Amendment banners!
And suddenly it hits me with the shock of a construction worker’s whistle despite my spreading hips: I have nothing new to say.
I know this because I’ve just googled the sentence “I have nothing new to say.” In a dismayingly swift 0.24 second, the search engine produces a whopping 108 million hits.
Jeezy weezy.
But wait, I think, they’re not exact matches. My fingers dash to the advanced search option, and I am promptly tossed on my annoyingly sagging fanny. (Now, fanny, that’s a word one ought not say in Britain: There it means, well, crotch, and you can just imagine the stiff upper lips curling into horror upon hearing that some classless Yank fell on her crotch!) The advanced search isn’t much better. It delivers 30.5 million hits in 0.34 second, which makes me feel no less mundane — certainly not 77.5 million hits less.
Hells bells.
Hmmm, my father used to say that, hells bells. He lives on, well beyond the grave, through his many and often charming idiosyncrasies we, his offspring, have adopted to varying degrees, rarely as charmingly as the originator.
I wonder what Father, the Scientist-Artist, would have thought of the Internet. I recall his delighted chuckle when he first encountered a personal computer — back when Bell Labs was the telecommunications cat’s meow. With the vision of an engineer, he was predisposed to purr over the now wildly outmoded capabilities — a poor choice of words given my recent feline-ish encounter.
But the Internet? I don’t know. Perhaps, if he could, Father would rise from his grave in aesthetic indignation, righteously enraged by the lack of reason, the abandonment of art, the sludge of philistine claptrap he’d have to welter through to find the pearls of content. Or perhaps I’m projecting. Actually, if I’m going to be truly honest with myself, I’d have to say I’m compensating, because I’m a regular contributor of said sludge. But the workshop I just attended taught me that a writer must — must! — become evermore an online presence. Guess I have to re-establish my Twitter account. Shit.
The gong sounds, refocussing me. It’s my turn with the agent. I gird my loins and try not to think about the cat woman barfing.
©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt
(Photo by Đànẵng Monkey courtesy of a Creative Commons license.
Writers
Want to submit your work to Excuse Me, I’m Writing for the sheer joy of having an audience? Email your original fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry — 2,000 words maximum — in an MS Word document or in RTF to kb@kbgressitt.com. If we publish your work, you keep all rights, including bragging.
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Marine Corps-isms 11 February 2010
The Wisdom of Staff Officers
Recently resurrected by the local USMC humor circuit. … Not that Marines understand humor.
At this Command, we have written in large, black letters: DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) on the back of our security badges. – MAJ (CENTCOM)
“Leaning forward” is really just the first phase of “falling on your ass.” – MARINE COL (MARFOREUR)
I am so far down the food chain that I’ve got plankton bites on my butt. – LTC (ARCENT)
None of us is as dumb as all of us. – Excerpted from a brief (EUCOM)
We’re from the nuke shop, sir. We’re the crazy aunt in the closet that nobody likes to talk about. – LTC (EUCOM)
Things are looking up for us here. In fact, Papua-New Guinea is thinking of offering two platoons: one of Infantry (headhunters) and one of engineers (hut builders). They want to eat any Iraqis they kill. We’ve got no issues with that, but State is being anal about it. – LTC (JS) on OIF coalition building
The chance of success in these talks is the same as the number of R’s in “fat chance.” – GS-15 (SHAPE)
His knowledge on that topic is only power point deep. – MAJ (JS)
Ya’ll know, in this Command, if the world were supposed to end tomorrow, the sh** would still happen behind schedule. – CWO4 (EUCOM)
We are condemned men who are chained and will row in place until we rot. – LTC (CENTCOM)
Right now we’re pretty much the ham in a bad ham sandwich. – GO/FO (EUCOM)
If we wait until the last minute to do it, it’ll only take a minute. – MAJ (EUCOM)
The only reason that anything ever gets done is because there are pockets of competence in every command. The key is to find them … and then exploit the hell out of ‘em. – CDR (CENTCOM)
I may be slow, but I do poor work. – MAJ (USAREUR)
Cynicism is the smoke that rises from the ashes of burned out dreams. – MAJ (CENTCOM)
We are the reason that Rumsfeld hates us. – LTC (EUCOM)
Working with Hungary is like watching a bad comedy set on auto
repeat. – LCDR (EUCOM)
I finally figured out that when a Turkish officer tells you, It’s no
problem, he means, for him. – MAJ (EUCOM)
Never in the history of the US Armed Forces have so many done so much for so few. – MAJ on the Free Iraqi Forces (FIF) Training Program
Our days are spent trying to get some poor, unsuspecting third world country to pony up to spending a year in a sweltering desert, full of pissed off Arabs who would rather shave the back of their legs with a cheese grater than submit to foreign occupation by a country for whom they have nothing but contempt. – LTC (JS)
I guess the next thing they’ll ask for is 300 US citizens with Hungarian last names to send to Iraq. – MAJ (JS) on Phase IV of Iraqi coalition building
Between us girls, would it help to clarify the issue if you knew that Hungary is land-locked? – CDR to MAJ (EUCOM) on why a deployment from Hungary is likely to proceed by air vice sea
I’ll be right back. I have to go pound my nuts flat. – LTC (EUCOM)
I guess this is the wrong power cord for the computer, huh? – LTC USMC
(EUCOM) after the smoke cleared from plugging his 110V computer into a
220V outlet
OK, this is too stupid for words. – LTC (JS)
When you get right up to the line that you’re not supposed to cross, the only person in front of you will be me! – CDR (CENTCOM) on political correctness in the military
There’s nothing wrong with crossing that line a little bit, it’s jumping over it buck naked that will probably get you in trouble. – LTC (EUCOM) responding to the above
Never pet a burning dog. – LTC
Ah, the joys of Paris: a unique chance to swill warm wine and be mesmerized by the dank ambrosia of unkempt armpits. – LCDR (NAVEUR)
We are now past the good idea cutoff point. – MAJ (JS)
Nobody ever said you had to be smart to make 0-6. – COL (EUCOM)
I seem to be rapidly approaching the apex of my mediocre career. – MAJ (JS)
It’s not a lot of work unless you have to do it. – LTC (EUCOM)
Creating smoking holes (with bombs) gives our lives meaning and enhances our manliness. – LTC (EUCOM)
Once you accept that a dog is a dog, you can’t get upset when it barks. – LTC (USSOCOM)
That guy just won’t take “yes” for an answer. – MAJ (EUCOM)
Let’s just call Lessons Learned what they really are: institutionalized scab picking. – LTGEN (9th AF)
I can describe what it feels like being a Staff Officer in two words: distilled pain. – CDR (NAVEUR)
When all else fails, simply revel in the absurdity of it all. – LCDR (CENTCOM)
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February 11th, 2010 in
Military
An Instigation of Idiocies*
By Kit-Bacon Gressitt
Super Bowl’s Slippery Slope
Oh ye gods! A Focus on the Family advertisement spurning abortion — during the Super Bowl? What is CBS thinking in allowing such an ad during the preeminent U.S. televised sporting event? This is no time for polemics! There are beers to drink, chips to dip, high fives to slap, manly sideways hugs to share. What has the Super Bowl come to?!
Nothing much more than it’s been since Super Bowl I in 1967.
The Super Bowl is a dandy marketing machine for the National Football League and its advertisers. The machine works because 100 million folks are willing to devote a Sunday afternoon to balls, boobs, and clever, sexist and crude ads — a list to which we can now add “dogmatic,” thanks to the abortion ad — all to the tune of $2.5 to $2.8 million for a 30-second spot.
So?
So of course CBS would run Focus on the Family’s ad regardless of its advocacy content. Of course the media corporation would make a decision based on profit. Of course, if you think political propaganda an inappropriate diversion from men hurling their hulking bodies into one another and scantly-clad gals shaking those things they shake so well, you could spurn the ad and instead follow the crowd to the kitchen for more brew, hit the head to tinkle — or write a check to National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) so they can buy their own ad next year.
Ah, what CBS has started!
Carly Fiorina for Shepherdess?
Carly Fiorina is running for something in California, but suddenly the seat to which she aspires is not quite clear.
The former Hewlett-Packard chair and CEO was booted out by her board in 2005 and trotted off with a $21.4 million payout for her failed strategy that included laying off more than 17,000 workers. Her golden parachute eventually landed her a role as financial advisor to Senator John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, which touted putting an end to multimillion-dollar payouts to failed CEOs. Oops.
Then, last November, Firorina announced her candidacy for the U.S. Senate, hoping to oust California’s incumbent Senator Barbara Boxer. Fiorina did make a wee bit of a public confession in her announcement: She hadn’t bothered to visit her polling place much, believing her vote wouldn’t make any difference. Oops.
Now, Fiorina has launched a campaign advertisement (view it below) that reveals several things voters might find interesting about her and her campaign. Read no further, however, if you are weak of heart, as some of the revelations are shocking — shocking, I say!
• Fiorina’s rival in the Republican primary election, former California Congressman Tom Campbell, is either a devil-eyed wolf in sheep’s clothing or the Fiorina team has an unnatural preoccupation with Bo Peep’s sheep.
• Fiorina categorizes California’s male fiscal conservative leadership as a flock of sheep. One wonders how that flock — the one she’ll rely on for help if she aces the primary — feels about her depiction of them.
• Fiorina finds “purity,” “piety,” “wholesome,” “honorable” and “true believers” worthy of some rather dark sarcasm. A bemusing tactic, given her desired conservative voting base.
• And that pedestal — the one from which the devil sheep is toppled — it looks like, well, something unmentionable in pure and pious company.
Perhaps Fiorina and her team have smoked too many of those greenbacks she snagged from Hewlett-Packard’s stockholders. Or it could be that Fiorina’s true calling is not the U.S. Senate but YouTube — as a producer of political satire. How refreshing, if we’ve actually found a public figure who can laugh at herself.
And that is a far, far better thing to imagine than the prospect of a campaign season befouled by bizarre mudslinging from Fiorina.
Save the Pigs
U.S. Senator Richard Shelby (R–Ala.) pulled a fast procedural maneuver on Thursday, putting a blanket hold on all presidential nominees (70 or more) — until he gets the billions of dollars he believes are his state’s due. His ploy has been lambasted as a self-serving, obstructionist pork hunt, particularly for the delay it will cause in Department of Defense appointments.
It is a rather blatant display of chutzpah, conspicuous amid a pomposity of politicians. But Shelby has never been coy: He’s the fickle Democrat who leaped to the other side of the aisle the day after Republicans gained House and Senate majorities in 1994. This time, however, he has outdone both himself and precedent.
The combination of Shelby’s elevated pork lust, Fiorina’s sheep obsession and CBS’ evangelists touting life over abortion amidst men battling to feminize each other in opposing end zones, brings to mind Cicero’s commentary, “Any man may err, only a fool persists in error.”
Let’s see which, if any of the three, self-defines according to Cicero.
©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt
* For a fabulous collection of terms of venery, read An Exaltation of Larks, by James Lipton.
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February 7th, 2010 in
2010 Campaign, Abortion, California, Politics, Sports | tags: An Exaltation of Larks, Carly Fiorina, Focus on the Family, Sen. Richard Shelby, Super Bowl
Fallbrookisms 04 February 2010
Jeopardy! Wednesday night
Category: Food Festivals
Holy guacamole. Visit Fallbrook for a festival celebrating this fruit.
And the question is…
Bumper stickers
Save a horse. Ride a cowboy.
Don’t believe everything you think.
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Cocktail Hour at Clete and Juanita’s
By Dan McClenaghan
September heat drove the drinking out onto the patio, Ruth and Juanita at the picnic table with the pitcher of margaritas, Ellis and Clete on folding chairs at the edge of the lawn with their beers and Clete’s surreptitious little bottle of whiskey. The guys got loud first, but the ladies weren’t too far behind, and then Clete made a crude remark about Megan, Juanita’s niece, who had been living with them for the last year. The gist of Clete’s comment was that Megan was something of a tart.
Juanita glowered and told Clete to shut his mouth. The whiskey made Clete tell Juanita that if she didn’t like what he said she could just do something about it.
She burst from her chair with the intention of stalking over and strangling him, but he was saved by the fortuitous arrival of a meteor that blazed in out of the black sky and blasted down on the lawn behind the drinking party with a concussive burst that bounced the foursome back against the stucco wall and gouged a swimming pool-sized crater into Clete and Juanita’s back lawn.
“Oh my,” said Juanita, suddenly sober, from her new seat on the cement.
“I’ll be go to hell,” Clete added.
Ellis got up, drained the beer he hadn’t spilt a drop of, rubbed the stubble on his jaw and tossed the empty can into the crater where it levitated like something let loose by the astronauts.
“Holy Christ alive,” said Ruth, as Ellis reached over the void to retrieve the can, teetered a bit too far and fell into a puzzling disobedience of gravity, where he floated, flapped his arms like a butterfly improbably massive, and grinned like a goofball, then farted, jet propelling himself to the crater’s edge and back down to Earth.
The party took on a new dimension then, and might have — had the foursome been younger — evolved into nakedness and zero G sex. Instead the beered-up guys got their kicks by peeing, propelling themselves backward like airborne squid over the hole in the ground, disgusting the women and leaving yellow peppercorn-sized urine globules hovering around their playground.
Ellis left his flip-flops out there, twisting and tumbling in gentle slow motion over the crater. And when niece Megan, the alleged tart, came home with an unsavory man — slipping in the side gate to sneak through the sliding glass door to her bedroom — and they saw what was happening over the new hole in the lawn with those rubber sandals, that’s when the low gravity sex got rolling.
©2010 Dan McClenaghan
About the author: Dan McClenaghan is an award winning fiction writer. His short stories have been published by Pearl, Wormwood Review, The Bridge, New York Quarterly, Tidepools and Turbula.net.
Note: Photo by Sara Collaton via a Creative Commons license.
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January 31st, 2010 in
Fiction
Fallbrook’s Writers Read Presents
An Evening With Bestselling Author T. Jefferson Parker
Thursday 11 February, 5:30 p.m.
Café des Artistes
103 S. Main Street, Fallbrook, CA
5:30 Doors open, supper menu available
6:00 to 7:30 T. Jefferson Parker reading, Q&A and book signing
In T. Jefferson Parker’s new novel, Iron River, detective Charlie Hood is running the California-Mexico border with the ATF, searching for the iron river — the massive and illegal flow of handguns and automatic weapons that fuels the bloody cartel wars south of the border. Gunrunners by nature aren’t exactly ethical, but the lengths they’ll go to, and the innocent lives they’ll risk, are shocking even to Hood. Most shocking of all is the close personal connection Hood finds wrapped up in events south of the border — a connection that shakes him to his core!
Parker immerses Hood in the very real, dangerous and lawless place along the U.S.-Mexican border, giving us a window into the current problems law enforcement from San Diego to Corpus Christi face everyday.
Join Parker and his Southern California fans for an evening of reading and discussion with the author. Iron River will be available for purchase and signing.
For more information, contact Kit-Bacon at kb@kbgressitt.com or 760-522-1064.
Our special thanks to Mysterious Galaxy Books for providing T. Jefferson Parker’s books for sale and signing at the reading — or order your copies in advance for delivery at the reading. Click here to order in advance and be sure to order only those books identified as ON OUR SHELVES NOW. You can reach Mysterious Galaxy at 858-268-4747.
