On Fallbrook’s medical community

Mother 1: The ob-gyn tried to deliver an anti-abortion lecture during my kid’s exam.
Mother 2: Maybe it was just business development.

At Café des Artistes — on Sofia Coppola’s film Marie Antoinette

Patron 1: Was Marie Antoinette bisexual in the movie? Did she go after the handmaidens?
Patron 2: Not in that movie.
Patron 1: She did in my movie.
Patron 2: The one in your head?

Read more Fallbrookisms…

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Damn it, enough already! I mean it! These idiots just don’t give up! When they learn to control their dicks, then, maybe then, is when they’ll have the moral authority to dictate to women. … Uh, nope, not even then. Besides, they’ll always be idiots. And we just passed one of them, lurking around, being an idiot.

We, my daughter and I, were stopped at the intersection of Craven and Twin Oaks Valley — heading to Cal State San Marcos and engaged in lofty didactic discourse, such as “Do you think the bathroom is near the parking lot?” and, peering into the vanity mirror, “I hate my life: Look at this menopausal zit!” — and there on the northwest corner stood yet another idiot, trying to impose his reproductive will on the world, poorly-penned signage and all. The only visible difference between this numskull and Rep. Bart Stupak — he’s the idiot who, with his idiot cohorts, would have flipped his well-manicured bird to the millions of uninsured men, women and children in the United States if he didn’t get to have his anti-abortion way with the healthcare bill. Anyway, the only difference between the street-corner idiot and the congressional idiot is that Stupak knows how to dress for a public appearance. The street-corner guy was wearing baggy-ass pants, skate shoes, and a T-shirt, a T-shirt imprinted with a full-color image of an aborted fetus.

They must be real high-demand items at all the best anti-abortion conventions — “Get yer mangled-fetus Ts right here! One for twelve dollars; two for twenty! Get ‘em while they last!” — yep, Ts and those little fetus dolls. Oh, and those bus-panel-sized posters the idiots park at high schools to convince teens not to have abortions.

What the idiots don’t understand about this particular tactic is that the squeamish kids see the posters and need comforting and comforting leads to close physical proximity and close physical proximity leads to sex and, given the messages from the anti-sex protesters who tell the kids their stuff down there will fall off if they have sex out of wedlock and all birth control fails so there’s no such thing as safe sex, given all that, the squeamish kids who are being comforted by the nonsqueamish kids — or the opportunistic kids — are probably being comforted sans benefit of prophylactics, which results in more abortions.

Yep, idiots. And when they’re not loitering on street corners or leching around public schools with their lewd posters, they’re prowling the prurient halls of the nation’s capitols, demanding one restriction or another on women’s access to abortion.

From whence do these anti-abortion idiots muster up the gonads to prance so profanely into the realm of women’s genitalia? And to what end?

When it comes right down to it, what we’re talking about here — but what nary an idiot will admit — is man’s dominion over woman. They just can’t hang, so to speak, with the thought of women flushing men’s biological imperative for progeny down the proverbial toilet.

Oh, sure, there are plenty of men out there who aren’t so neurotic, who’ve accepted women as their peers, who are not looking for a mommy-slut they can control, who’ve evolved into adulthood. Of course, they’re all gay.

Just kidding — some of my best friends are straight men.

But those who have failed to resolve their adjustment reactions to adulthood, well, women scare the skivvies off them, and the manly response is to grasp desperately, even violently, for control — over our education, our fashions, our medical care, our entertainment, our employment, our opinions, our faiths, our bodies. And that last one is the clincher: What greater power does woman have than to nurture new life within her? So what is the immature man’s sorriest, most juvenile goal? To control women’s reproductive organs. The idiots lust to master the ripe produce of our ovaries, the stroking cilia of our fallopian tubes, the dark, warm wetness of our wombs.

And if they can’t ride herd over their womanly chattel by virtue of betrothal and diamond rings, remodeled kitchens, a little strong-arming of the little woman; if they can’t actually crawl back into that safe, succulent place, they can at least leave their marks. And the “Kilroy was here” of the idiots’ sperm bears with it an obsessive, occasionally murderous, sense of ownership, much greater than initialing a flat of military supplies or a tank.

Indeed, the moment they dump their dose of symbiotic swimmers, the idiots think they own us — our wombs, our decision-making faculties, our subsequent nine months. And the most heinous, most malicious, most objectionable act a woman can perpetrate on idiot egos is to flush their foundling zygotes to oblivion.

Yowza, do they despise that! Hence, the idiots standing at street corners and lobbying elected idiots and peddling idiot bills each year to force women to full term.

Funny, though: If they put all that anti-abortion fervor, all the angst and prayers, all the dogma and money into safe, accessible birth control, they would have few abortions to rail about. But, of course, that’s anathema to their true, unspoken idiot agenda — to procreate, to perpetuate the species, to force women to have their babies.

It is no wonder, now, is it, that male idiots lead the ranks of anti-abortion advocacy, from Rep. Bart Stupak to Randall Terry of Insurrecta Nex, David N. O’Steen of National Right to Life, Troy Newman of Operation Rescue and Joe Scheidler of Pro-life Action League. No wonder at all.

But the other thing the idiots don’t understand is that they will never control reproduction, because there will always be women who refuse their fetters. Because there will always be women ready to whop the idiots upside the head and tell them to get over it. Because, you idiots, there will always be women who know how to put a bit of sterile tubing, some suction and a mayonnaise jar to good use.

Love,

K-B

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(Photo by Bruno Sanchez-Andrade via a Creative Commons license.)

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.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Outside your local grocery store, a fellow wearing a bedraggled Santa Claus hat stands by a folding table festooned with political slogans. As he fumbles five or six clipboards, you’re thinking you wouldn’t want him dating your daughter, and then he thrusts a clipboard into your path.

“Wanna sign this initiative petition to protect local voter control?” he asks. “Or how about stopping sexual predators? Or religious freedom — do you support religious freedom? Just sign here.”

Religious freedom is a little iffy these days, with all the folks who demand it for themselves while they condemn the rest of us to sizzle in hell in perpetuity. So you look a little closer and read that what the initiative would actually do is exempt Bible-based speech from California’s current hate speech restrictions. This means all those charmers from Kansas’ Westboro Baptist Church, who haunt military funerals and communities across the country with signs that read “Thank God for Dead Soldiers,” “God Hates Jews” and “God Hates Fags,” could incite violence in California with their epithets — sans repercussions.

“Well, now, that’s misleading,” you say, “and gross.” But the petitioner is busy pushing a clipboard at someone else.

So you take a look at the petition for stopping sexual predators. Those bastards sure need to be stopped — with extreme prejudice. Problem is, you start reading it and discover the sexual predator language is a front for the next in a long line of failed biennial attempts to force parental notification of abortion on pregnant teens and their healthcare providers.

“You know, you should be calling this what it is, a parental notification proposal.”

“Huh?” he replies dully.

You decide you wouldn’t even want him dating your worst enemy’s daughter. Nonetheless, you check out the local voter control initiative, because you suspect you and your fellow bucolic burg dwellers couldn’t do any worse than the state legislature. You ask the dullard how local control will be accomplished.

He says, “Uh, it’s complicated. Er, I don’t know, and I have to keep moving — I get paid by the signature.”

“If it’s such a good idea, can’t we get volunteers to collect signatures — Fallbrook volunteers from among Fallbrook voters?” you ask. “And how can you represent something you don’t understand?”

Now you’re a little suspicious, so you ask who’s paying him to gather signatures, who’s funding the campaigns, and he says, “They don’t tell us that stuff.”

“Well, I have a right to know, don’t I?” you mutter as he ignores you to body block the next shopper before he makes it to the grocery store door.

And this is much of what’s wrong with California’s initiative process.

The grassroots citizen initiative was adopted in 1911 in response to the common perception that rail and land barons controlled the state legislature, neglecting the needs and will of the citizenry. The California Constitution defines the electors’ right to propose and vote on constitutional amendments or statutes, bypassing the state legislature and going directly to a vote of the people. “Direct democracy” it’s called, and though it’s a highly valued concept, it has degenerated to a big business that caters to moneyed special- and single-interest groups (often from outside of California), whose proposals range from the cynically ridiculous to the ridiculously complex. In a recent interview, former State Senator Lucy Killea, who worked on an unsuccessful initiative reform effort while in office in the 1990s, explained why reform is so important.

“It’s become commercialized. You’re not getting people voting for an initiative because they want it or because they’re informed on the issue, but because there’s a young man at the grocery store with a whole list of things. Some of these people will have eight or nine different measures — some of them even opposing each other. It’s really too bad. It’s become a business for people; they treat it as a business. It’s the buying of votes.”

To Killea’s point, the examples reflected above are actual initiatives: the Local Voter Control and Government Accountability Act — enjoy reading its 10 pages of statutese; the Parental Notification, Child and Teen Safety, and Stop Predators Act, the introductory letter for which is signed by a John Smith without an address, a probable cover for Jim Holman, publisher of the San Diego Reader, who just can’t leave it alone; and the Religious Freedom Act, intended to “secure and perpetuate the blessings of Almighty God for the people of California.” You can read more about this initiative’s sponsors at YesJesusIsLord.org.

These initiatives are only three of a whopping 91 submitted to date to the California Attorney General’s Office for 2010 elections. Of the 91, four have qualified for the June or November 2010 ballots by acquiring the necessary number of valid signatures, four failed to qualify, three were withdrawn, 37 are in circulation, and the rest are pending.

In the meantime, those initiatives primarily funded by something other than grassroots supporters have incurred costs that are making money for members of the initiative campaign elite, commonly known as the “Initiative Industrial Complex” — political and campaign consultants, attorneys, list brokers, and firms that specialize in petition signature gathering, media, polling, public relations and direct mail. Most often, only those initiatives wrung through the complex actually make it to the ballot — the others don’t have the money to pay for such success.

But wouldn’t it be nice if success actually looked like volunteers — from California — who believe in the issues they’re promoting; independent judicial review of proposed initiatives — to weed out the idiotic, hateful and deceitful initiatives; online petition signing — to cut out at least some of the Initiative Industrial Complex money grubbers; and full disclosure of initiatives’ sponsors and contributors.

Until that vision is achieved, beware what you sign.

Although, as luck would have it, there is an initiative-reform initiative coming to your grocery store soon, the “Grass Roots Initiative Reform Act.” But if that one’s too esoteric for you, you could always consider the 2010 California Marriage Protection Act. It’s not another Prop. 8 diatribe against gay marriage; it is writer John Marcotte’s satirical response to the proposition. He has jumped into the “protect marriage” revival tent by proposing to “safeguard marriage from the evils of divorce.”

Marcotte’s campaign website is laugh-out-loud funny — but yet another scream for initiative reform.

Love,
K-B

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(Westboro Baptist Church image via a Creative Commons license. Marriage graphic courtesy of RescueMarriage.org.)

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

My kid hates her new cell phone. I know better than to suggest gratitude for having any phone at all: Life is different now — cell phones are a human right.

What my dear, darling daughter doesn’t know is that Verizon, our previous provider and purveyor of her preferred way-cool phone, is evil and Working Assets’ CREDO Mobile is not. I recently chose to pay for a minimally lesser phone and receive the benefits of a socially conscious corporation that gives to progressive nonprofits, rather than to make my monthly payments to a company that gives to political expediency. Verizon’s 2008 contributions list reads like a wingtipped lobbyist’s Blackberry address book. CREDO’s list reads like the bumper of a ’68 VW bus.

I like this; my kid will come to appreciate it; and, in the meantime, I can count on CREDO to march stalwartly at the forefront of issues near and dear to my heart. For example, Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T would never dare lead a campaign to send coat hangers to the 20 pro-choice Democrats who voted last week for Representative Bart Stupak’s anti-choice, anti-abortion amendment to the House of Representatives healthcare bill.

CREDO would and is — because the Stupak amendment would prohibit healthcare insurance companies that participate in the bill’s proposed insurance exchange from covering abortion services. This is a huge, honking, infuriating step back for women’s reproductive rights — and an unacceptable one. Nonetheless, the 20 purportedly pro-choice Democrats voted to attach the amendment to the bill.

Damn them, bastards all — and I don’t refer to their parentage but, rather, to their appendages: Every one of those mothers has a penis, and every one of them needs his head examined. Just look at them, starting with California Representative Joe Baca. He received a 100 percent pro-choice rating from Planned Parenthood, yet he voted for Stupak’s assault on women’s rights. Is he nuts?

So now what do we do?

Well, I like CREDO’s approach:

In a backroom deal brokered to get the votes necessary to pass the House health care bill, one amendment was allowed an up-or-down vote on the floor. That amendment, the Stupak amendment — which passed on a vote of 240 to 194 — is the most serious assault on abortion rights in a generation.

What’s more, according to FiveThirtyEight.com, 20 of the 64 Democrats who joined Republicans to pass the measure are nominally pro-choice. …

Why did pro-choice Democrats vote to approve the Stupak amendment? We’re telling these 20 Democrats — all men — to reconsider their vote and urge Congressional leadership to do everything they can to ensure the health care bill that comes out of committee does not take us back to an era of coat hangers and back alley abortions.

Sign our petition and we’ll send a coat hanger to the 20 formerly pro-choice Democrats who voted to take away women’s rights. …

These 20 formerly pro-choice Democrats need to hear that it is NOT ok to throw women under the bus when it comes to passing health care.

My kid is too young to truly understand all it has taken to win and protect reproductive rights; sadly, she is now poised to learn — and to live with the specter of self-administered, coat-hanger abortions. So my thanks to CREDO for its bold response to the House of Representatives’ disregard for women, a response that will surely elicit some attacks.

In the meantime, I’m going to entertain my own little malevolent thoughts about the turncoat 20: Having their heads examined is too kind. A good head shrinking is more like it — and National Geographic has just the thing!

Love,
K-B

Rep. Joe Baca’s shrunken head — best viewed with your audio on

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Summertime once meant slow, sultry days; the lazy drone of locusts, lulling us into a doze beneath weeping willows; finding faces in the clouds or taking lady bugs for walks from fingertip to fingertip; lolling and waiting … waiting for someone to spur the sweltering group to action.

And then the herd of kids would up and move — to the road’s edge to pop tar bubbles, coating toes and infuriating mothers at bath time. To the garden to make rose petal lipstick, blackberry war paint, and perform vignettes of classic tales. Under the fence to steal neglected rhubarb from the wild patch next door and run from the crotchety old lady who rightly treasured every wilting stalk and weed. To the rubbish heap to see who could pee the farthest, disregarding gender. Down by the train tracks to flatten pennies and marvel at the loss of Lincoln’s features. Over to the abandoned chicken coop to practice burping on demand and talk of things unspoken by parents.

Whatever we did, we did it together; it never occurred to us there was another way. Our parents had varied incomes and faiths, disparate origins and pursuits, but their distinctions were lost on us, the children of our block. We had a community of kindred souls, a cohesive force that wound us inextricably together in those days of one-car families and parents unconcerned about tossing their kids out into the world. We’d fend for each other and show up at one home or another only when hunger forced us. In those days, everyone could come out to play, and summer’s freedom was our endless stage, our indivisible barefoot pursuit, despite our differences. In those days, we could imagine no boundaries.

But today, as summer swiftly approaches, boundaries run rampant — and deadly in word and deed.

Anti-legal abortion fervor erupts in murder, as Scott P. Roeder crosses the threshold of Reformation Lutheran Church — crossing from advocating for life to destroying it — and shoots dead a physician who crossed picket lines to treat patients with disastrous pregnancies. And the cooks who help whip up that fervor, Randall Terry, Operation Rescue founder, and Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly among them, chalk up Dr. Tiller’s murder to his comeuppance for being a “baby killer.”

G. Gordon Liddy, of Watergate fame, whose radio show is not extolled for its level headedness, takes a header from the fringes into the absurdly vulgar, fretting about what might happen when President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor is menstruating. And it is not an ill-conceived joke.

James W. von Braun enters the U.S. Holocaust Museum — an institution dedicated to confronting hatred, preventing genocide, promoting human dignity and strengthening democracy — and draws a bloody line between free speech and murderous demonstration, leaving hateful destruction on both sides of his path, the indignity of a victim sprawled in death. And pundits argue whether blame falls to the left or the right.

The National Organization for Marriage, sponsor of the Gathering Storm ad, steps yet again from advocating against same-sex marriage to divisive propaganda: “Same-sex marriage isn’t just about two people living as they please, but about whether a large majority of Americans are going to be marginalized as bigots by a group of elites determined to force their new vision of marriage on the entire nation.” And the fearful fail to ask what actual harm same-sex marriage will to do their heterosexual marriages, their children, their nation.

Today, it is not the hopping anticipation of barefoot pleasures that makes the days seem so long, but the disingenuous and deadly discourse of social debate gone awry, the replacement of news with uncivil commentary, the marketing of anger and derision as information.

But it seems a futile complaint, when audiences blindly accept the “either or,” the “us or them” as absolute; when people continue to watch and listen and absorb the fear and hate. How many reactionary murderers until they question; how many vulgar and dishonest statements until they refuse to listen?

Just what would it take for them to instead seek the satisfying smell of tar, the joyful tang of rhubarb, the forthright competition of unashamed peeing, the camaraderie of unbiased children, now bigger, but still in full knowledge of how to play well with others — despite their differences?

Love,
K-B

© 2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

“Am I weird?” the teenager asked, balancing an old Ann Coulter book on her head, amid the bookstore’s discount stacks.

“You ask that as though ‘weird’ were a pejorative,” her mother said. “You don’t want to be normal, do you? Do you want to be like everyone else?”

“I know what ‘pejorative’ means, and, as for being normal, which that word is not, I think I’d just like to fly under the radar.” She shrugged and Godless slipped from her head, landing face up on the industrial carpeting.

“Yikes!” her mother stepped back. “Now, that woman is truly weird. The wrong kind of weird, the kind that verges on evil.” She looked almost serious.

“Hey, why would she wear low-cut stuff with a cross?” The girl picked up Coulter and traced her plunging neckline and the cross pointing into her cleavage. “She hardly has breasts, anyway. So, like, is she really evil?”

“She doesn’t deserve breasts, and she’s the closest thing to evil there is because she pretends to believe the outrageously divisive things she says for the purpose of inciting fearful people to reject the unfamiliar — people who are different, opposing ideas, whatever — and to look to her for bullshit passing as comforting fact.” The mother took a deep breath.

“Huh? What are you talking about? Why do you always talk like that?” The girl balanced another book on her head while exploring Coulter’s character in her book jacket.

“OK. She’s not really evil, but … let’s just say she’s full of shit. She’s full of shit because she tells fearful people outrageous shit, knowing it’s shit, and manipulating them into buying her shit.”

“We just learned about that, that thing you just did.” The girl flipped through the Coulter book, looking for more inappropriate pictures. “It’s called circular reasoning.”

“Well, Coulter has mastered it, that and the absurdly profane. After President Obama spoke at Notre Dame University’s commencement, urging pro-choice and anti-abortion folks to make nice, Coulter suggested that next year Notre Dame have an abortion performed live on stage, and that the “president throw out the ceremonial first fetus, like on opening day in baseball.’”

“Yuck! She’s gross!” The girl dropped Coulter on what she figured was her pulpy little ass. “Hey! If you look at it from this angle, the title looks like ‘Goddess.’ Do you think that’s intentional?”

“I wouldn’t put it past her,” her mother snickered. “Once you’ve contracted a severe case of superiority complex, you’re much more susceptible to delusional omniscience.”

“Really, do you have to talk like that?” The girl looked at her mother through the 3-D glasses she’d found in the book now perched on her head. “Don’t you want people to understand you?”

“Not always, but I’m OK with my kind of weird. Coulter has never written about a substantive issue she didn’t slander with superficiality.”

The girl continued to ogle the downed idol at her feet. “Well, I don’t know who she frickin is, but she looks like she’s trying to sell a book about religion with, like, sex. Not that she looks so sexy. Actually, she looks kind of bitchy. Why don’t you just say she’s a bitch? People would get that.”

“One can only hope they do,” her mother said.

“But do you think there are people who are really evil?” The girl looked around, still sporting the 3-D glasses.

“I don’t know,” her mother said. “Even the most horrible people always seem to have at least a hint of humanity. I’m sure even George Bush loves his kids.”

“Jeez. Bush isn’t evil.” The girl squinted at Coulter’s image to see if the 3-D glasses would make her breasts any bigger. “He was just too stupid to be president.”

“OK, just kidding about Bush. Dick Cheney’s actually the almost-evil one, with his fear-mongering crappola.”

“So, you’re saying, like, even Hitler must have done something good at some point in his life?” The girl stuck the 3-D glasses in a copy of Why Do Men Fall Asleep After Sex, which seemed funny, but she wasn’t sure why, so she didn’t mention it.

“Well, yes, probably, although it pains me to say so. Maybe Hitler once helped an elderly woman across the street or wiped his pee off the toilet seat.” She picked Coulter up from the floor. “So even this nitwit could have the capacity for truth and love,” the mother said unconvincingly, returning the book to the discount stack.

“Well, anyway, so am I weird or what?” the teenager asked, balancing A Thousand Splendid Suns on her head.

“You’re my favorite kind of weird, Sweetie; you’re wonderful.”

Love,
K-B

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(Editor’s Note: This piece is cross-posted with www.ivorytowerz.com.)

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Yesterday morning, I sat at my desk, committed to adding 2,000 words to my mediocre American novel manuscript, but I just wanted to clear out my emails before getting started.

The first one asked me to save newborn buffalo, but I didn’t want to think about their wobbly little legs, shattered in a stampeding frenzy.

Then Amazon suggested, based on my previous purchases, that I might like to order John Stossel’s “Politically Incorrect Guide to Politics,” except what Amazon doesn’t know is that Stossel kind of gives me the creeps.

I could have read a joke about $7 sex, and my husband has been traveling a lot lately, so I did, and then I thought maybe I shouldn’t have, but it was too late.

I could also have read an analysis of the poll to which 66 percent of women responded that being a mother is women’s most important role, but it smacked of some sort of confused misogyny.

Facebook sent me a birthday notice for someone I don’t know but whom I mistakenly approved as a friend before I figured out Facebook, but Facebook annoys me, so I deleted it.

I could have looked at what Verizon is charging to my credit card, but the purpose of automatic payments is to avoid acknowledging how much all this great technology costs.

The definition and etymology of “dissimulate” was enticing, and because I love words, I opened it, and now I fully intend to use “dissimulate” in my 2,000 words. I am not dissimulating.

There was another Facebook request, from another stranger who wanted to be my friend, but I’ve learned that lesson well.

Salon.com sent an article about the state politics of stem cell research, but I figure with Barack Obama in the presidency, and my cells in California, I don’t have to worry about it.

Someone forwarded a poem called “Crowning,” published in The New Yorker, and, because it was a poem and in The New Yorker, I read it and it was lovely, and then I was surprised that I was surprised it was by a male poet. I’m a pig.

The Publishers Marketplace wanted to report all the new book deals this week, but I didn’t get a deal, so I didn’t open it, although I’ll try to be pleased for the writers who did. Bastards.

Composer and violinist Mark O’Connor wanted me to buy his Americana Symphony CD but, although I love his work, the economy is “not getting worse as quickly,” so I didn’t.

Message!Products was pitching a sale — 25 percent off — but I just replenished my pro-choice checks, so I didn’t bite, but I did wonder why they always announce a sale just after I’ve received my order.

I didn’t want to plod through a Human Security News report because I didn’t want to know about the dozens killed in Mogadishu, the 700 militants killed in Pakistan, the 106 children who died in shelling in Sri Lanka, the 50 people hospitalized after a girls’ school poisoning in Afghanistan, the 49 killed in Sudanese tribal violence, or the political prisoners suffering ill health in Myanmar (it’s really Burma), presumably including Nobel Peace Prize recipient Aung San Suu Kyi. OK, I peeked, and it was exactly the agonizing news I expected.

I blew my nose and considered activating my life by buying active wear shoes from zappos.com, but I have a pair of sneakers that has lasted seven years because I am not an active person.

The National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) asked me to contribute to its effort to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Souter with a pro-choice nominee, but President Obama’s head is screwed on straight and NARAL is just trying to keep up with the anti-choice opposition to a pro-choice nominee. Of course the complacency of majority is ill advised, so I reconsidered briefly, until I remembered the economy.

I could have read STRATFOR’s editorial on The Strategic Debate Over Afghanistan, but I’d had enough frustrating news for one day, so I didn’t, although I did feel a little guilty about that one, which resurrected the threat to the baby buffalo and their wobbly little legs, and then I was swamped by a swell of guilt.

So, I rescued the National Resources Defense Council email from death by deletion, clicked to save the newborn bison and read all about their terrible plight, and I wondered if I could work baby bison into my 2,000 pages.

But then I got another email, asking me to ask President Obama to put an end to the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy for gays in the military, a policy akin to sanctioned lying, so I had to respond to that one, and then — oops, another email.

Love,
K-B

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(Editor’s Note: This piece is cross-posted with www.ivorytowerz.com.)

(Photo by Jim Bowen via a Creative Commons License.)

Warm, woolen wrappings hung from the coat racks in the church of my youth. In the hallway, outside the room where families gathered to praise God and pass an abundance of homemade delicacies on wintry Sunday evenings, I would play a game. Escaping from the big people whose hands I had to shake firmly because my mother said so, I would hide among the weighty coats, weaving between the tweeds, the camel hairs, the felted cloaks, exploring hidden treasures in pockets, breathing the scent of sheep’s wool damp with winter rain, the huge leather gloves, rabbit-soft on the inside. I would settle on the warmest coat with the best smell and reach up into it. Then God would wrap her arms around me, and there we would whisper secrets to each other until one or another of my siblings tracked us down to fetch us for the meal.

It was a church I knew as well as my own bedroom: a place to run and play and sing, a place where I knew the love of God, a place where I could always find her when I needed her.

Then we moved to a new state and a new church, and God of course moved with us. She made herself at home in the larger sanctuary, the lighter pews, the heavenly choir loft and the organ’s pipes that gave reed to seemly Southern Baptist hymns. Together we sang words of joy and adoration for each other.

And then one day, as my aunt circled the church looking for a parking space, she asked Sweet Baby Jesus to find us one. I wondered at the request, sure there were more important prayers for him to answer.

And then on a runaway adventure to the West, my brother reported finding Jesus. Unaware he’d been lost, I was grateful that all was well, but unhappy to be informed that I was going to hell because I had not also found Jesus, because I’d not invited him into my heart. I questioned the accuracy of my bother’s prophecy, though, because God and I were already in each other’s hearts — and why would Jesus relegate me to eternal and fiery damnation simply for failing to put him on an invitation list?

And then, when I carried my child in one arm and in the other a sign that said to keep abortion safe and legal, women clutching Bibles to their breasts screamed foul things, calling me an evil baby killer, shrieking that God knew I was an unfit mother. I cradled my child and whispered gentle secrets to her, that different people understand God in different ways, but that God does not scream at people, that she loves all of us — even the women who were so unloving.

And then Pat Robertson proclaimed that God belonged not only in our hearts and in our churches, but also in the White House. I suspected it was up to the president to decide when to have God over to help and when to do the best he could with the gifts she gave him. The president agreed.

But then the next president claimed God was indeed in the White House, and dropped her name every chance he got. Except, I couldn’t find her face among the mostly white men who proclaimed God’s co-sponsorship of their bills and battles. Although they intoned her name, she did not attend their ritual signings, nor lend her name to their memos endorsing torturous retribution. No, she was not there.

And then I realized how much I missed the church of my youth, the believers who carried their politics to the polls and God’s love in their hearts. I wanted to find them again, and I searched. But at the first church and the second and the third, the cars bore bumper stickers that did not speak of God, but of the foolishness of saving God’s trees and animals, the treason of those who prayed for peace, the stupidity of reproductive rights, the abomination of the wrong kind of marriage, the condemnation of all but the passengers in those vehicles on that parking lot of that creed. There was no parking there for me.

So now it is no surprise that the percentage of people who disclaim religion has increased from 8.2 percent in 1990 to 15 percent in 2008 (see the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey, released last week).

I bet, though, if we could find the right coat rack, God — who would not favor one nation over another, one political party over another, one gender or race or orientation or faith over another — would join those of us who don’t have a place in the parking lot, and she would embrace us in the warm, woolen wrappings of my youth.

Love,
K-B

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(Photo of Hilltop Church, Mendham, N.J., the church of my youth, from the Library of Congress’ Historical American Buildings Survey.)

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Recently deluged with the contrivances of marketed romance — faux velvet cards blaring fuzzy renditions of maudlin love songs, sugar and flower hearts with machine-pressed demands for intimacy — my persnickety reaction was to hate everyone. Or, at least, consider that option for a delicious moment or two — until I was dutifully grounded in guilt with the thought of my dear, darling Mother of Pearl’s oft-repeated words, “Love the unlovely.”

I used to think she was referring to physically unattractive people, which meant hatred of my younger-but-cuter sister was not a violation of Mother’s nurturing-but-lofty rule.

This worked until I encountered acne. Its superficial devastation caused me to reconsider Mother’s guidance: Perhaps she intended greater depth in its applications. While I contemplated that, inner beauty — or the lack thereof — gained compelling importance as my criterion for love began its awkward ascent from the pockmarks of adolescence.

Next came an attempt at communal living. The proper thing to do was to forsake discernment and freely love everyone, regardless of inner or outer accoutrements. This did have its moments, but the communers kept leaving my perfectly seasoned cast iron skillets rusting in the kitchen sink. I’d come home from a hard night of “being here now” and exploring my innate tribalism to the rhythms of the local jukebox, and find strangers building their communities in my bed. Instead of loving my brothers and sisters, I came to despise them all and their crummy collective ways. I opted to pursue love on a more solitary path.

In my subsequent post-adolescent phase, I tried loving a tormented artist of deep and constant inner affliction. He lived quite alone in a blustery garret with very public plumbing. Alas, my hope to serve as his muse, to dazzle him with inspiration, went as dull as my enthusiasm for moving my bowels without benefit of four walls. He was so unlovely, so devastatingly impaired by his inward and outward malaise — as were his teeth — that I realized I’d gone a wee bit too far afield. A more thoughtful consideration of Mother’s advice seemed quite in order.

Just what was it she had meant the countless times she had wrapped me in her comforting bosom as I wept at childish cruelties and imbecilic adults who plagued my early years and evoked my youthful loathing?

What had been her intent as I floundered my way into the world, railing at Nixonian deception and arrogance, false prophets true only to their homicidal cocktails, caustic corporations drowning third-world villages in deadly fog?

And as my path became more sure, what was it Mother meant for me to see as I blindly raged at the brutal parents who beat my students into inhumanity, at the perpetrators of social injustices that beleaguered my mental health clients’ already devastated existence, at the prideful politicians who let it all happen with utter disregard?

Ye gods, are we suppose to love all those unlovelies? Are we to love the likes of family planning clinic stalkers who advocate for life with deadly aim, the saintly souls who solicit prayerful contributions on cable TV while entertaining under their desks, the leaders who dump our nation at the edge of moral abyss and skate off to sing their own praises, the chosen ungodly few who dine on caviar and our bailout dollars, the dogmatically debating politicians who’ve no inkling of life in the real lane or the price of veggies?

Well, according to Mother, yes. We are supposed to do the wise and high-minded thing: love them all, find the human in the most reprehensible beasts, toss tender tokens to the last folks on Earth you would want to wrap your arms around and rock into sweet dreams.

The thing is, I’m just not as good as Mother. My preference would be to throttle the living daylights out of every one of those buggers. Seriously! In lieu of prison, however, I suppose I could muster a modicum of effort, for Mother’s sake. So here goes: To all you unlovely ones, a belated Happy Valentine’s Day — with buckets-o-love.

OK, it’s commercial, trite, superficial, on a par with the heart- and glitter-riddled swill over at Hallmark; but, nonetheless, it is a start. Maybe next year, we’ll go for some hugs, you dirty rotten bastards.

Love,
K-B

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(Prang’s Valentine Cards courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress.)