By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

“My son was murdered.
He was murdered.
He was murdered.
He was murdered.
My son was murdered!”

– Wanda Johnson, mother of Oscar J. Grant III, shooting victim

I thought it was my Taser, not my gun
not my gun
not my gun
not my gun
I thought it was my Taser, not my gun!

– A confused rapid transit police officer

We’d have decided the same for a black officer
a black officer
a black officer
a black officer
We’d have decided the same for a black officer!

– A jury with no blacks

It was just a mistake, but we’ll pay
but we’ll pay
but we’ll pay
but we’ll pay
It was just a mistake, but we’ll pay!

– A public agency facing a wrongful death suit

Oakland mayor asked the people for calm in the streets
calm in the streets
calm in the streets
calm in the streets
Oakland mayor asked the people for calm in the streets!

– A black man who knows the outrage of police behaving stupidly

“You shot me!”
“You shot me!”
“You shot me!”
“You shot me!”
“You shot me!”

– Oscar J. Grant III

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

This piece is crossposted at The Progressive Post.

On Tuesday’s election

We got so many calls from Steve Poizner [Republican gubernatorial candidate], I figured he was having an affair with someone in the house. But my husband said it wasn’t him.

The four San Diego County candidates who ran for judge because God told them to must have misinterpreted him — they all lost. It’s one of those Fundamentalists are from Mars, God is from Venus sort of things.

Over martinis: Don’t you know any single Marines? I need to be ravaged.

Mother: Last night, after eating pig snouts and sauerkraut, I watched a dwarf in a medieval costume hawk ale to the college students outside my hotel. Oddly cynical.
Daughter: That might be the creepiest thing I’ve ever heard.

Read more Fallbrookisms…

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

The volume of campaign collateral littering my mailbox confirms that Tuesday 08 June is indeed California’s primary election: I’m buried in the noxious stuff. So far, our mixed-party household has received fifty-eight pieces of propaganda from candidates, special-interest ballot measure sponsors and for-profit slate-mailing scoundrels who promote whichever campaigns are willing to pay (one of the truly heinous banes of democracy … as are many candidates). And every piece of the dogmatic toilet paper is urging us to vote as its propagators see fit.

For your disgus— ah, entertainment, I’ve selected a few choice examples.

Let’s start with Joel Anderson. A seated assemblyman, Joel wants to fill Fallbrook’s termed-out State Senator Dennis Hollingsworth’s homophobic shoes. The candidate sent us nine pieces of propaganda explaining why “Liberals Hate Joel Anderson.” He apparently considers this a stellar endorsement.

Yet, I’m a liberal and I don’t know enough about him to hate him. Yet.

I reviewed his pieces for some redeeming virtue and read that he “took the fight to terrorists.”

“Cool,” I thought, “he’s a vet, just like my dear husband!” But I searched and searched, and Joel reports neither military service nor battlefield contractor status, which means he in fact did not see the armed conflict most reasonable people would have interpreted his message as suggesting.

I feel jilted, Joel. You try to woo me to your camp and then you spurn me with deception. I hope no one who really did take the fight to the terrorists gets her or his battle-hardened hands within reach of your wannabe-warrior neck. But, because I’m not such a bad person for a liberal, I’ll help you out a little by hiding your misleading brochures from my infantryman husband. After that, you’re on your own, buster. Time to atone.

Oh — there is a clincher: Joel quotes Glen Beck, whom he mistakenly identifies as a talk show host, but who is actually an alien televangelist fleeing scandal in a galaxy far, far away. Glen says of Joel, “I wish there were more people like you. Thank you, sir, for getting it.” I wonder who got what from whom. …

As for us, we got plenty of propaganda from Proposition 16 sponsors — enough to paper the powder room. At first glance it seems an easy “Yes.” Who wouldn’t want to “Protect Our Right to Vote” — the propaganda’s claim?

The power industry, that’s who. The very manipulators who brought us the California energy crisis of 2000-2001, the perpetrators of ever-increasing utility rates exceeded only by their profits, want voters to believe that they are trying to help us.

But, if you read the teensy print — that plain-black stuff they bury at the bottom of their star-spangled propaganda so folks won’t notice it — you’ll see that Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) is financing Prop 16. This is because PG&E wants to prevent public utility providers (as in “nonprofits”) from competing with them (as in “profit pigs”).

What is most gross about Prop 16 is that PG&E is usurping our citizen ballot initiative process to protect their monopoly from public utilities. That is, this huge honking corporation is using the very tool the voters adopted in 1911 to stop big business from controlling our state, and PG&E’s Prop 16 would amend our California Constitution to require a two-thirds vote for public entities, such as municipalities, to become energy providers.

And there’s one more dirty trick PG&E pulled: They slapped a bunch of Democratic candidates’ mugs on a slate-mailer endorsing Prop 16, which the Democrats oppose. Although it happens every election cycle, this is really bad form, buckos. PG&E, you are dirty rotten mendacious bastards! And even I am surprised by who agrees with me — check out this list!

Next to PG&E’s cynicism, the slate of four Christian attorneys who want to be judges seems almost mainstream: Craig Candelore, Harold Coleman Jr., Larry “Jake” Kincaid and Bill Trask are on a mission from God to run for San Diego County Superior Court judgeships.

Under the red-white-and-blue banner of BetterCourtsNow.com, the four candidates seem, well, red-white-and-blue. What they fail to reveal to site visitors is that God told them to run. You’d think with an endorsement like that, they’d be blasting it to the heavens.

Could it be they are suffering a crisis of faith? But sins of omission are still sins, so we can only hope they let God out of the closet before Tuesday. Or maybe they’ll call on their backer, El Cajon Gun Exchange, to nudge voters out to the polls.

There are a couple other little agenda items they also fail to share on the website, including their ultimate goal of a Christian takeover of government at every level and their opposition to abortion rights and same-sex marriage.

That’s a hell of an agenda, boys, but I have to warn you: My invisible friend told me not to vote for you all.

We’ll have to wait until Tuesday night to see whose deity wins. In the meantime, I can at least be thankful for the free TP.

Love,
K-B

The League of Women Voters operates a great searchable source of nonpartisan candidate and ballot measure information: SmartVoter.org.

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

The Vampires and Demons Edition

Sookie Stackhouse Southern Vampire Series author Charlaine Harris on writing

Effortful – writing’s really hard. Read everything you can and then put your butt in the chair and write. That’s all there is to it, but that seems to be what most people can’t do.

The Demon Sheep of California

First, Carly Fiorina, the ousted Hewlett-Packard CEO who is trying to steer her parachute toward Barbara Boxer’s Senate seat, went after her Republican primary opponent with the demon sheep of Fiscal Conservative in Name Only?

Then the California Democratic Party decided to have their own bit of sheepish fun with Demon Sheep: Mutton on the Lamb.

I’m all for mutton madness — it’s a lot more fun that traditional mudslinging.

Read more Fallbrookisms…

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

A man with the body of a boy peddles up the pitted road. His wheels send small puffs of hopeful dust up to God and crush harvester ants that do not recognize the border between safety and peril.

He leans his rusted bike against the fence and rattles the gate with the tentative gesture of one who would ask for something. A woman comes out, just as tentatively.

“Please, lady, work for me?” he implores with head bowed, braced to sustain the blow of another no.

Awash in conflicting monolingual ignorance, basic questions and answers are elusive; subtleties seem impossible. The woman wonders: How did you come to be here; do you understand I have a child and a mortgage and hence no piles of money laying about; but do you camp in a barranca, under an oleander hedgerow, it’s toxic leaves for your pillow; do you endure usurious fees for sending meager earnings home to family; do you suffer here, yet remain?

“OK, Señor, trabajo para usted.” Giving him work is easier than not, easier in many ways.

She points to the neglected fruit trees, the tools. He understands the task. And she flees inside to avoid his simple poverty, her unsettling discomfort. But he soon follows her with a quiet knock on the door.

“Perdone, please, lady, sandwich for me?”

She puts out food and cash and flees even further — to spend four times the man’s pay on cheeses, meats, on produce marked up for the honor of being out of season, harvested by his compatriots on distant lands.

When she returns from the market, he is gone, his dishes stacked neatly, the napkin folded, and much more work completed than requested.

Embarrassed by her suspicions, she resists checking the jewelry box and instead puts away her bounty and forgets about the man.

Until another day.

He returns to rattle the gate and ask again for work. She points again to the trees, the tools, and goes in to cook for him while he toils.

“Señor,” she comes back out, “food — comida.”

“¿Es para mí?” He is surprised; he had not asked to be fed this day.

He looks into her eyes for the first, fleeting time, revealing his dark brown sadness and one opalescent orb that does not see the physical world around him. “Gracias,” he says. “Dios te bendiga.”

She wants to hug him, but the line between them is formidable. Instead, she touches his gnarled hand and carries his blessing inside, and she ponders what it is about him that frightens people into hate. Do we imagine this man with the body of a boy and an eye that cannot ogle our opulence becomes, in greater numbers, a ravenous beast, greedily consuming our rich resources, stealing our comforts, rending from us what is manifestly ours?

And what if he did not migrate across the border, if others did not follow him, even then, could we possibly believe our schools would suddenly be adequately funded; our healthcare system would tend to all our ills; our emergency rooms would no longer bear the brunt of ailing, child-bearing indigents; our jails would become under-populated; our social services would enjoy a surplus of unclaimed resources; the graffiti, the roadside litter, the illicit drugs, the sins ascribed to the unwanted would all be swept up and away in a wave of homogeneous consideration?

No, she imagines, in the immigrant’s absence, people still would complain about misspent funds, about inequity in the allocation of the nation’s resources, about things and people and motivations we don’t understand. Still we would bellow our fear, our frustration, our prejudice, drowning out his soft supplications for labor and a sandwich.

The man comes to the woman’s gate to work and to eat — and to hope — the same reason we all rattle the gate.

Love,
K-B

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(Photograph of migrant worker camp, 1939, courtesy of Library of Congress.)

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

Have you ever contemplated one of those modern paintings, the kind with an angry splotch of color in the middle of a stark canvas or a confusion of scrawls resembling either Einstein or a toddler’s doodles? You know, the type of art that elicits comments such as “Oh, the stunning textural voids!” or “What an explosive discharge of coloristic energy!” or “The work is imbued with such somber expressivity.” I always figured that sort of art must have some crucial message — if only I were sophisticated enough to receive it. But inevitably it leaves me mournfully resigned to “I don’t get it.”

I used to ponder such art when I’d cut school, escaping the bovine roadblocks surrounding Long Valley, New Jersey, and take the Erie Lackawanna into Manhattan to meet guys in museums. I’d sit there in my hiking boots, ankle-length skirt with appliquéd mirrors and Indian gauze blouse, trying to look somberly expressive and hoping some gorgeous man, preferably a starving artist from Greenwich Village — Hoboken, if all else failed — would notice that I appreciated the stuff.

Hours of wanton staring at Jackson Pollocks and Cy Twomblys left me with the same derelict of understanding — no epiphany for me — and produced not a hunk to seduce me into his garret and boxer shorts (briefs were of course déclassé). I invariably turned homeward to merely imagine the dramatic effect art’s message would have had on my suburban teenage life and the debauchery, on my burgeoning womanhood.

I finally gave up on modern art and tried the Metropolitan Museum. The pickings seemed better — more guys with accents. It was there that the unrequited itch of my museum window-shopping ended one bright afternoon while I was stoop-setting at the Met with a hot pretzel. I had decided to pose for likely prospects on the museum’s steps in hope of catching one’s glance on the way in. Instead, I caught a scoop of steamy pigeon poop on the shoulder of my Indian gauze blouse. It was the type of guano that results from supping on the rotting bowels of a city: an explosive discharge of coloristic caca. With tortured vanity, I cut a quick path to Penn Station, determined never to return to my truant haunts.

Funny, as it turned out, my youthful failure to fathom the essence of abstract expressionism did not after all leave a stunning void in my intimate affairs. I discovered other ways to meet men, indifference proving the most effective. It sent them into a frenzy from coast to coast.

In the mid80s, I had one such encounter with a victim of my nonchalance in front of a David Hockney in Los Angeles. Now, Hockney I can enjoy. For him a tree is a tree, albeit a bit surreal.

Well, I suppose I had lapsed into a mood of indifference, and the fellow was on the scent — like Jack Nicholson on a comely female. I could not shake the guy. He trailed me throughout the museum, the legs of his leather pants slapping with every step. Why anyone would wear leather during July in LA is one of those mysteries Woody Allen would have resolved with a good joke, had he not taken to boinking his stepdaughter. But then, he couldn’t be bothered with California.

I, in contrast, took California very seriously. It was a place to which I wanted to belong. I’d escaped my roots and a husband here. In California, I felt on the verge of titillating independence. No obligations or affiliations to define me. No significant other to say, “She’s with me.” Indeed, I could for once be with no one. I had only to figure out the place. I needed first, though, to get past the East Coast thing. It was like a scarlet letter emblazoned across my chest, an unyielding fetter restricting my words and deeds to those of my socio-geographic heritage. People at work would say, “You’re from the East Coast, right? Yeah, I can, like, tell.”

Tell what? I had no accent, no siblings named Muffy. When I got to town I bought an old VW. I learned to eat sushi without gagging. I gave up my seasonal wardrobe. I had a fling with a Westwood shrink and got a tan. I made friends with lesbians and drank bottled water. I bought expensive running shoes, though I’d deftly avoided running since junior high. I went to an acupuncturist, a black fellow from Newark who’d had no trouble finding his niche.

So why couldn’t I? Why couldn’t I grasp the rhythm and syntax of California? Here they “took” things that back East I convened. They “did” things I was used to eating. They ate things I expected to find in fiberboard! The natives were talking to me, but I just didn’t get it.

As I pondered my failure to acclimatize to my new homeland, the leather pants caught up with me. He wanted to talk Hockney with someone who truly appreciated the artist’s pathos. He could tell from my aura that he, Hockney and I were at one. If we could just join our collectiveness in a more personal space. Perhaps we could pursue our unity at his place?

“Come home with me. I’ve got a Hockney in my al fresco salon. We’ll do some sushi, some Pellegrino. Confab on his juxtaposition of photorealism and the surreal. Babe, I’m here now. No games. I want you. Let’s have sex. Then we can hot tub.”

Now the leather was a turnoff, and his lack of connectives made for disturbingly staccato conversation. But suddenly an ethereal connection arced between us. In a blast of regional enlightenment, I realized this guy was speaking Californian — and, and I could truly hear him! I finally got it! The stunning textural voids spoke to me. The explosive discharges of coloristic energy, the somber expressivity, they all made sense. Perfect sense!

The paintings? No, I’ll never understand them. But at that moment I realized I would surely make it in California, because at long last I knew its true essence: In California, hot tub is a verb.

Love,
K-B

©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 — 2,500 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.