He arrives after morning service, having thanked God for another day in an upright position. He stops at the nurse’s station, not to check in, but rather to greet whomever is on duty by first name, applaud the glorious weather, ask about the family, chuckle over the latest joke and say something as sweet and charming as his tousled white hair and proper bow tie.

He makes his shuffling way through the unit to his loved one’s room, wishing a good day to those he passes. He arranges tidy, fresh flowers in the vase on the bedside stand, saving the day-old blossoms for the aide to give to someone who has been forgotten by family and friends. He pulls the chair closer, takes pale, curled fingers in his hand and tenderly kisses cool, brittle lips, his eyes closed and heart hopeful, remembering the day fifty years ago when they knelt before each other with open hearts, fearless of the future, kissing away each other’s tears.

He begins reading the news, his tremulous voice breaking at the headline that cuts to Social Security and Medicare are on the table, breaking at the ethos of national politics. He touches the still, cool hand for emphasis, editorializing on other issues, the fickle path of redistricting, the unyielding hope for a more considerate era. He poses encouraging questions, filling the silence with cheerful answers. After the paper is read, he rises to stretch and adjusts the blinds. He checks the nursing chart, which never varies, and says another prayer for recovery.

His lunch tray is delivered as he talks of the garden’s status, the latest goings on of the neighbors. He eats intermittently, distracted from the stillness by the rhythm of the respirator, the beeping pumps, the steady tempos that sustain life, their life. He closes his eyes, remembering the summer they danced so closely in the gazebo, swaying to whispered things not yet come to pass.

When the meal is finished and cleared, his voice resumes to fill the poignant voids with talk of moments that make his eyes moist. He asks if there’s anything he can do, and adjusts the pillows, fingers a tendril of gossamer hair.

He selects a book from those neatly stacked on the small shelf, settles into the chair and begins the afternoon reading. This day it is Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. He reads with the passion of the words on his tongue and strokes the vein on an unmoving arm as only a lover can. He reads until the dinner tray arrives and silence returns, the respirator and pumps carrying the conversation. After dinner, he touches a cheek, a thigh, a belly, absently tapping to the beat of the machines.

At 8:00 p.m., when visiting hours are over, he takes pale, curled fingers in his hand and tenderly kisses cool, brittle lips, his eyes closed and heart hopeful, remembering the chilly day, when they danced by the fireplace, grateful for the enduring joy of each other. Then he departs as he came, saying goodbye to the nurses and wishing them a peaceful night filled with sweet dreams.

And so he has done every day since the stroke, every day since a miracle interrupted death, every day. And so he will continue. He will continue to wait for an awakening, for his loved one to come back to him, to dance with him again, the moonlight glowing in gossamer hair and arms so light around him.

He doesn’t hear the doctors who say there’s little brain function, the chaplain who says it is not a sin to let go, the social worker who tells him to get on with his life. This is his life.

So he thanks God for Medicare, which pays to keep lungs breathing, hearts beating and food pumping through tubes, day after day.

Just as he thanks God for President Obama, whom he prays will have the wisdom to make the nation’s anguished decisions.

Just as he fears what those decisions might be.

Love,
K-B

Note: Previously published in a different form.

Crossposted at the Ocean Beach Rag, Progressive Post and San Diego Gay & Lesbian News.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

My mother tried to make a sandwich with the TV remote control.

It might seem sadly funny, but there was some context for her pursuit: She was watching a cooking show from her hospital bed. Watching and processing in her own inimitable style, and she just didn’t like the way the celebrity chef was doing it. She didn’t know where she was, but she knew she could do better.

“I need to put the bread on top,” she said with the slurred tongue of a stroke victim, pointing the remote in the television’s general direction.

“Yes, that would be good, but the remote won’t do that for you, Mother.”

She persisted, and my heart shrank into that tidily distant place that allows the practical to reign supreme, as I searched for unemotional words to explain to the hospital staff that Houston, we’ve had a problem; Houston, my mother is leaving us; Houston—

But then it occurred to me how glorious a response Mother’s was. How satisfying it would be to encounter idiocy, point the remote and press a button to fix it. I relished the thought as the chef smeared a heinous concoction on bread made from special grains probably harvested by child laborers in some far-off fascist stronghold.

Someplace like Libya or Saudi Arabia or Yemen, where people donate their lives for the hope of freedom; where women just want to be able to drive themselves to the market, unfettered by male watchdogs; where the innocent are splattered on city walls while power-seekers conduct pissing contests overhead with deadly weapons.

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to just push a button on the remote and fix it all?

Or how about someplace like Uganda or Afghanistan or Colombia, where ignorance and hate might try again to decree death on homosexuals; where girls and women are tortured for trying to learn; where Chiquita swapped lives for bananas.

Hit the button and — zap! — all the bad guys are gone.

Or even someplace like the United States, where people I love are not allowed to marry or to be themselves without institutionalized condemnation; where women’s wombs are purchased with the campaign contributions of ideologues and theocrats; where free speech has descended to profanity; where voters cast their lots for their wallets and politicians run on egos — not ideals.

Zap, zap, zap, zap — all better!

Yes, Mother’s new world seemed a more satisfying — a healthier — place to be. Just point, press and be done with the horror. Except—

“This is frustrating,” she slurred through the neural fog, thrusting the remote at the chef with quixotic determination, pressing random buttons to no avail.

“Here,” I took the remote, “let me help you with that.” I held the thing with both hands, aimed at the bastard chef and fired with rage. “Bull’s eye — got the sucker! He didn’t know how to make a sandwich, anyway. And look: It’s one of your judge shows.”

She relaxed into the pillows, half a whispered smile on her peaceful face.

Love,
K-B

Crossposted at Ocean Beach Rag, The Progressive Post and  San Diego Gay and Lesbian News.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

I voted for President Barack Obama, and I don’t care what anyone says, I still like him. And you know why?

#1

I still like Obama because he is not any of the other parties’ alternatives who vied for voter approval in 2008. He is not Senator John McCain or former Governor Mike Huckabee or former Governor and perpetually-tanned Mitt Romney or Congressman Ron Paul or former Senator Fred Thompson or former Congressman Duncan Hunter or former Mayor Rudy Giuliani or perpetual candidate Alan Keyes or Senator and Governor-elect Sam Brownback or former Governor Jim Gilmore or former Congressman Tom Tancredo or former Governor Tommy Thompson — or Prohibition Party Candidate Gene Amundson. (Yes, the Prohibition Party is still on the books, but it has really petered out. Kind of like an opened beer you find beside the Naugahyde recliner after a night of debauchery.)

With the exception of Gene Amundson, who died seven months into Obama’s presidency, imagine what any of these candidates would have done to stem the economic greed bleed created under President George W. Bush’s watch: Any one of them would have given obsequious tax breaks to corporations and the wealthiest two percent of folks, tossed two aspirins to the rest of us, and obstructed an unemployment insurance extension in the morning. The hypocrisy of it is not entertaining: Congressional Republicans disdain unemployment extensions “because they increase the deficit,” but they are infatuated with extending Bush-era tax gifts for the rich — even though they increase the deficit. Consequently…

#2

I still like Obama because, contrary to the pundits who have to say pesky things to sell ads and contrary to the congressional Democrats who are now pandering to the progressives they abandoned in the healthcare insurance reform debate, I think President Bill Clinton is correct: President Obama negotiated the best deal possible on the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act. And if the Dems hold it up until January, when the House shifts to a Republican majority, any semblance of a balanced compromise is unlikely.

#3

I still like Obama because some imperfect healthcare insurance reform is better than no healthcare insurance reform — in a life or death sort of way. So far, the reform bill has stopped insurance companies from denying coverage to our kids because they have pre-existing conditions. Insurance companies can no longer impose lifetime caps, which is critically important to those of us with chronic illnesses. Our young adult offspring can now stay on our policies until they turn 26. Standard preventive services are now free for people in new plans. And the list goes on — as long as Congress doesn’t screw it up. Of course, the list would have gone on a lot longer than that, had congressional Democrats stood by their president and voted for the reforms he requested rather than backpedaling in hope of surviving midterm elections, a disloyal tactic that — gosh, what a surprise! — didn’t work out for many of them. Had the Dems accepted their economy-driven fate and voted with some compassion, we could have had an absolutely fabulous reform bill. Nincompoops.

#4

I still like Obama because, true to the historical sequence of suffrage, we had to elect an African American man to the presidency before we could elect a woman. Obama’s presidency means women are up next. Damn time.

#5

I still like Obama because unlike Clinton or George W., Obama will make sure Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) goes away, the military survives, and all those fearful heterosexuals can continue to self-perpetuate. And he’s aligned with a majority of the public, who poll consistently at almost 60 percent in favor of allowing gays to serve openly. (I wonder which polls McCain is reading.) Also, although DADT wasn’t the first thing on Obama’s agenda and he is too conservative on same-sex marriage, unlike the trepidatious men I know, Obama gives full-frontal same-sex hugs. And if that doesn’t do it for you, think about those 2008 candidates. Can you picture any of them posting a video message to gay kids to tell them “It Gets Better”? Nope, not one of them did, but Obama did, and I’d give him a full-frontal hug for that.

#6

I still like Obama because, after the battering midterm elections and in the throes of a lame duck session, he isn’t hunkered down licking his wounds, trying to stay out of the line of fire, deflecting his frustration to the hostility of Call of Duty: Black Ops or some equally bloody war-making game. No, he is out in the field, trying to get things done despite the opposition, such things as the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which should have been as easy “Yes” for the Senate; he is calling the Republicans and the Democrats on their fruitless behavior; he is leading, not posing for reality television with the sickening satisfaction of a recreational hunter, à la Sarah Palin.

#7

I still like Obama because he understands we are a nation that cares. We don’t always show it, but in a crisis of need you can count on us to give our money, to give our time, to clear out our closets and donate all those treasures we really will never use to those who will, to show we care. That’s why the DREAM Act (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act) is such a great piece of legislation for us: It addresses a long-term and tortured problem, fraught with border-skulking secret agent-wannabes, prejudice and ignorance, and it offers the nation an opportunity to turn all that compassion inward. The DREAM Act provides for the offspring of illegal immigrants, raised but not born in the United States, to become citizens via successful college or military service. The DREAM Act is one of the few wise responses to the great immigration debate to emerge in far too many moons: It tells these kids we care about them, and they need that. Quelle idée!

#8

I still like President Obama because he is not any of the overly-coiffed egos vying for a Republican nod in 2012. He is not Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour or still-tanned Mitt Romney or South Dakota Senator John Thune or outgoing Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty or Mike Huckabee or former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum or former House Speaker Newt Gingrich or former Sarah Palin, who has become a mockery of herself — and she was a distinctly undistinguished public figure to begin with.

#9

And, I still like President Obama because, well, okay, I admit it! I like President Obama because he is African American — and I am an anti-racist pig. Slave owners five or six generations ago, my family celebrated his success and wept at the terrible and wonderful significance of his election. The African American rental car worker at the airport the next morning celebrated and wept with me. My friends and I celebrated and wept while watching the inauguration. And still I celebrate and weep for my president. This is an unappreciative country he leads. Oh, Obama is not liberal enough for me — no one who can be elected president would be — and I could join the fray and rail endlessly about the things I don’t like, but he is making progress on many of the issues that are important to me. He is making as much progress as Congress, his own party and politics allow. And for that I like him, still.

Love,
K-B

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Crossposted at the OB Rag.

– At least I’ve got my health.
– Not much longer, not with Obamacare.

Note: Consider forsaking soundbites for a moment and taking a wee look at what healthcare reform is actually doing for us at HealthCare.gov.

On the media

– There’s no difference between any of the news stations.
– Yes there is. CNN fired Rick Sanchez for his bigoted rant. Fox News hired Glenn Beck for his.
– You forget, Beck came from CNN Headline News.
– Oh. Never mind. … But Fox’ll probably go after Sanchez now.

Read more Fallbrookisms…

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

There is a practice in some countries in the Middle East, Africa and Asia in which girls, typically between infancy and adolescence, are subject to the removal of some or all of their external genitalia. This is done with a knife or scissors or a piece of broken glass or, you know, whatever the ritual performers have at hand.

Some folks refer to this cultural tradition as female circumcision, which is a questionable reference, but, if they like to compare things to penises, I can go with that.

In circumcision, some or all of the penis foreskin is removed, leaving the rest of the penis intact. However, this practice is under increasing scrutiny, because it is not actually medically necessary, although it can reduce the likelihood of infection. (For you nasty boys, let me just point out that infection is something a little soap and water — and maybe some fun — can prevent.)

Anyway, the folks who liken the female practice to circumcision are, I suspect, desperately attempting to dismiss it as, oh, inconsequential to our spiffy culture. (A culture that assures I can amble into the local grocery store and purchase twenty-seven different sizes and styles of menstrual cycle absorbent thingies, four distinct brands of end-o female odor products and seven brands of cramp-, bloat- and get-away-from-me-you-irritating-bastard pills.) What these folks fail to comprehend, though, is that what is being done to female genitalia is not comparable to male circumcision.

What’s being done to females is more like lopping off the penis.

Imagine that — and I am serious. Imagine a young boy held down by a group of adults, his legs forcibly spread, as his penis is cut off. The skin is pulled from either side of the boy’s wound and stitched together with thorns or who knows what, leaving just enough of a hole for urination.

Now, if we hold true to the comparison, the range of excising done on females — from part or all of the clitoris, to clitoris and labia, to sewing the whole thing shut — means it’s possible the hypothetical male ritual might demand only half of the boy’s penis or maybe a quarter. But I think that’s still gotta really hurt — in more ways than one.

Regardless, if the child survives the shock and pain, the inevitable infections and all the other dire and truly fanny-puckering consequences, he grows into adulthood with his manhood mutilated.

And if this were actually happening to boys in Egypt or Indonesia or Ethiopia or Iraq, we’d be horrified, right? And what if people wanted to do it here, in the United States? No way, right?

Thankfully, boys are not mutilated in this way, and the United States has made the practice on females illegal, regardless of their families’ cultural traditions. In fact, just about every single mainstream U.S. and international medical organization involved in girls’ or women’s health is adamantly opposed to the practice in any of its forms and they call it like it is — female genital mutilation.

Except the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). AAP called it female genital mutilation (FGM) in their 1998 policy statement on the practice. But then its Committee on Bioethics released an updated FGM policy in April that declared “female genital cutting” is really a much nicer term for this thing adults do with sharp objects to girls genitalia. “Mutilation,” the Committee on Bioethics determined, is an inflammatory word, and we surely don’t want anyone swelling up in offence.

Now, I have to bring us back to the penis scenario for just a moment, because I believe most reasonable folks would agree that, if the practice were perpetrated on boys’ penises, they wouldn’t hesitate to call it mutilation. This makes me wonder why the committee — or anyone else — would shrink from accuracy when the female clitoris is being butchered? “Female genital cutting” is just another coddling euphemism for what’s actually going on.

The AAP’s Committee on Bioethics dropped another bomb in its updated policy: The committee suggested that U.S. law prohibiting FGM might be changed to allow U.S. physicians to demonstrate their great capacity for cultural sensitivity by performing a “minor” form of the practice. The committee’s recommended alternative procedure was a ritual “pricking or incising [of] the clitoral skin.” They opined that this would accommodate cultural requirements for a girl’s initiation into her ethnic community while serving as a deterrent to immigrant parents who might otherwise ship their girls back home to give up the whole shebang down there.

After an onslaught of letters from peers and laypeople, the policy was rather swiftly retracted and a “rewrite” is in the works. But consider for a moment the committee’s originally proposed accommodation of this particular immigrant cultural tradition. It is akin to suggesting that we be sensitive to the cultural tradition of stoning women for adultery by allowing the offended man to throw, say, only one medium-size rock at his wife’s or daughter’s head. And I suppose we could consider whacking a fingertip off a thief, instead of a whole hand. That might be a nice culturally sensitive compromise. Now, what sort of sensitivity might we demonstrate toward the cultural tradition of murdering the victims of rape?

OK, OK, ridiculous considerations, all. And it is tempting to urge the members of the AAP Committee on Bioethics and its liaisons, consultant and staff to be the first to spread their legs for some culturally sensitive ritual nicks.

But at the core of this controversy, it is much more frightening than it is ridiculous.

In the United States of America in 2010, we have a group of esteemed, medical professional men and women who talked themselves into believing that it might be OK to cut girls’ genitalia a little as a demonstration of cultural sensitivity and a deterrent to cutting girls’ genitalia a lot.

We can only hope this is not indicative of females’ standing in our culture.

Except, gee, this happened here.

Love,
K-B

NOTE: The Girls Protection Act of 2010, HR 5137, sponsored by Reps. Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.) and Mary Bono Mack (R-Calif.), would make it illegal to transport minors out of the United States for purposes of female genital mutilation. You might like to write a letter of support to your elected representatives.

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

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

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.)

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

On Main Street

Shopper 1: How’s the new farmer’s market
Shopper 2: Plenty of tchotchkes, but the farmer’s failed to show.

Desperately seeking translation of the Village News

Throughout the interrogations, [Sheriff’s Deputy] Lauhon noted that the individuals involved in the [rage party] ring all had an “anti-rich people” attitude.    —article excerpt

Both British and Dutch socialized healthcare plans provide methods of eliminating Grandpa and Grandma and one provision in Obama’s healthcare plan gives that kind of power to government appointees.                —Archie McPhee

The commercialization of medicine is a worldwide opportunity for America’s taxpayers to reduce their costs for and access to cutting-edge technologies through profits derived from foreign sales.    —Tom Casey

Frustration the key to business success     —headline

Read more Fallbrookisms…

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Typical August morning.

The alarm yells at me. I take a poke at it. Knock it off the packing crate nightstand cornered by piles of books, but not enough to keep the damn clock from hitting the Saltillo tile floor, chipping off yet another piece of the crappy plastic that defines it. At least the alarm stops when the batteries burst out and roll into the catacombs that harbor every imaginable beastie under my bed.

Bastards. I’ll fetch them later. After I lie here for just a minute or two. Maybe thirty. Whatever.

The French doors, left open the night before in desperate hope of cooling the uninsulated bedroom, now give entrée to variegated light, conniving through palm fronds and eucalyptus leaves to poke at my lids like those aggravating Mervyn’s commercials — open, open, open! — an ad campaign as bankrupt as the business.

I throw the crook of my arm over my eyes to stave off the morning, but it’s already hot. In just seconds, sweat is following the path between my cheek and arm and filling the creases in the old lady neck that snuck in and possessed my own.

In resentful acquiescence, I open my eyes to another day. A day that stands ready to bust my ovaries with distractions from the task at hand: the final ten or twelve pages of my mediocre American novel.

Will the summer’s heat lure me away from them, into a lazing bath in cool waters? Or is the pool still home to the gallons of pee left by the last group of kids to swim in it?

Will grassroots gadflies demand my time for a cause, presuming my fealty to one phone bank or another? Hello, I’m just calling today to disabuse you of the bullshit lies racist swine and Glennbeckians are routing up to scare you off healthcare insurance reform. Or, hello, I’d like to talk with you about why you’re so terrified of same sex marriage. Are you some sort of self-loathing closet freak or what? Or, hello, I see here you’re eighty-eight, just a little past your joyful child-bearing years, and, given your precinct number, I’m guessing you’re living on Social Security, while it lasts. Nonetheless, I have to ask if there’s any chance in hell I could snag some of your grocery money to help defend women’s access to abortion from Randall Terry-type lunatics who think stabbing a baby doll outside a healthcare forum is going to change the law.

Oh well, maybe the distraction will be of my own making. I give nod to a few seconds of sphincter twisting fear that I won’t get this sucker published. Screw it. The fear, that is.

The dog hears my frustrated growl, rustles outside the bedroom door, eager for her morning whiz. But age demands I get mine first, so I’m up and over to the bathroom. With one well-rehearsed move, I turn on the radio, lift the lid and plop down to begin my morning ablutions.

President Obama and Senator Kennedy

The gal at NPR is talking about Ted Kennedy, the U.S. senator who defied his Machiavellian daddy’s schemes, assassin’s bullets and his own abject failures, to give the nation a Grand Old Kennedy, one of our most successful statesmen. The aged, imperfect champion of Justice for All, with the heart of a life surely less blueblood than his own. Dedicated to serving those who would be denied their rightful votes, those facing the next immoral war, those whose lives are torn by the barbs of a deadly borderline, those who die at the hands of a Denial of Coverage letter.

Then it sinks in: She’s talking about Teddy in the past tense.

I sit there, my middle-aged thighs overwhelming the toilet seat as the news overwhelms me. Damn it. Goddamn cancer. Damn! I bawl my eyes out. A 1963 redux.

Then I wonder how the other end of the spectrum is reacting. So I relieve the dog, watch the cat dance to the avian chorus for a moment, and then pop by Sarah Palin’s Facebook page.

Her tribute is short and kindly sweet:

I would like to extend our sympathies to the Kennedy family as we hear word about the passing of Senator Ted Kennedy. He believed in our country and fought passionately for his convictions.

But her tribe is on the warpath:

Jim Coffey: Best Thing He ever did for the country!!

Kenny Rogers: He is with the Lord. What a blessing!

Edward Przydzial: teddy kennedy was trash, good riddance.

Daniel Marciante: Ding Dong, the Liberal’s dead. He was very gifted with spending other people’s money. So nice of him to pass the torch on down to Obama to continue that crusade. And why do we allow people at 77 year of age to continue working in the public sector???

David Kremer: Obama called Kennedy the Greatest Senator of Our Time…is he really? … Another comparison…Kennedy and OJ Simpson

Cosmo Grassano: Unfortunately his convictions were totally backwards. I have NO sympathy for that murderer who should of been sent to prison for killing his pregnant girlfriend and dumping her and the car in the river. I guess money can buy you anything. For him, freedom to destroy our Republic. He was a traitor that’s why they didn’t blow his head away as they did his brothers. Sorry Sarah, on this we disagree totally. May he burn in the hell that he and his family came from.

Wayne Stewart: hope he burns in hell and his butt-buddy barney frank soon follows! …then nancy p., harry reid, obamanation..etc…

Larry Fisher: Im glad the sucker is gone

Anne Gilbert: The man was a traitor lets not forget. He tried to sabotage the Reganadministration by feeding intel to communist Russia. May he rest in pieces in a VW driven off a bridge.

This is why I prefer fiction. It’s nicer.

Love,
K-B

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(Official White House Photo by Pete Souza.)