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.)

20 August 2009

From Café des Artistes

An insult attributed to John Bright: He is a self-made man and worships his creator.
Michael: That sounds like one of our regulars.

Customer 1: Hey, I saved this letter to the editor for you. It’ll make you angry.
Customer 2: Thanks? … Hmmm. … He writes, ”I don’t think for a minute that our law-abiding, tax-paying, home-owning population is responsible for the trash on the roads, shopping carts left all over our community, yard sales along Main Street or laundry drying on fences along Fallbrook Street. … I am not a bigot, but…” I guess he doesn’t know what that means.

Phone banking for healthcare insurance reform

Volunteer: Are you familiar with President Obama’s three core principles for reforming healthcare?
Fallbrook voter: What’s a core principle?

Read more Fallbrookisms…

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

This health-care insurance reform thing is confusing. Are you confused? I’m confused, oh yeah.

Of course, I don’t really have time to actually read anything about the House’s draft legislation. I mean, what do I know anyway, you know? So I could sure use some sage counsel on this from someone more knowledgeable than I, someone with a better-informed perspective of all the complexities of health care insurance policies and finance, reimbursement schemes, pre-existing condition stuff, policy cancellation terms, the whole shebang. Yeah, this requires a real brainiac, a Solomon, a, I don’t know, someone such as, hmmm, well, let’s take a look at who all is out there offering up their insightful opinions of this critical issue. … Could it be … Chuck Norris?

Naw, not the kung fu guy? Yes, indeedy, the kung fu guy. No kidding.

So, what does old Chucky have to say?

Welp, in his townhall.com column, “Dirty Secret No. 1 in Obamacare,” Chuck tells us that he “decided to research the reasons so many are opposed to Obamacare to separate the facts from the fantasy,” and in the course of his research he found some “dirty little secrets buried deep within the 1,000-plus page health care bill.”

Now first, I have to say, I am so impressed that the guy read the thing. Whooee! That’s a whole lot of time away from pounding on bad guys. Second, I am so grateful that he read it so I don’t have to! And I’m sure I can trust his interpretation because, well, you know, he’s like famous — and a good guy. And good guys don’t lie. Politicians lie, but not good guys, like movie star types.

So I want to know what secret he discovered about this critical health-care issue that the darn politicians tried to hide from us, buried in the 1,000 pages of that, um, well, it is a public document. But no matter. They must have known hardly anyone would read it. Thank God for Chucky!

And what exactly did he find? Well, get a load of this: The government wants to go into people’s homes and usurp their parental rights over their children’s care and development. Can you believe it? The dirty rotten scoundrels! Bastard’s all! And I do feel quite right using the male, non-inclusive nomenclature, because that’s what Chuck does — no pandering to political correctness there. So what if we have a few women in Congress.

Anyway, Chuck writes that in sections 440 and 1904 of the House bill (Page 838) — and I must say my hat is off to the guy for honing in on this specific issue, among the whole 1,000 pages, and for sourcing the references so helpfully — the bill describes a program for educating new parents about early childhood development. In the home, no less! That’s so intrusive, so darn presumptuous, as though parents don’t innately know what’s best for their own kids, like we aren’t born with a deep understanding of “age-appropriate child development in cognitive, language, social, emotional, and motor domains” and “skills to interact with their child to enhance age-appropriate development.”

Why, this is an outrage, a blight upon the very freedoms our forefathers fought and died for as they birthed our great nation! (There were no female forefathers, obviously, because the gals didn’t know nothing about birthing no nations). Bravo to Chucky for bringing this most dirty of secrets to our attention, because this sort of thing could lead to the downfall of our nation. It’s just a disgrace, an abomination, I say!

Oh, except, hmmm, in my conservative little town of Fallbrook, California, our conservative little school district, which continues to preach abstinence only, despite our burgeoning population of teen parents, offered a very similar parent-education program when my daughter was a toddler. In fact, we allowed one of those “government agents,“ as Chuck describes them, into our home, and we adored her. She taught us some wonderful techniques for encouraging Katie’s readiness for school. It was, well, it was a great program, and it was free and we were grateful for the experience.

Oh, Chucky, I’m so disappointed. You happened to pick on the one thing in the House bill that I actually know something about, and you are so, so wrong. Bummer, man!

Now what do I do? I sure can’t count on Sarah Palin, with her bogus caca about senior citizen death squads, taking out the disabled — or was it disabled death squads taking out the seniors? I don’t remember. I just know better than to trust that nitwit to explain anything. Besides, she’s pretending to be all scared about “health-care rationing,” as though she’s not aware as a former governor that we already have that in so many ways. Of course, she quit that job, which might explain her ineptitude on the health-care issue.

So, I guess what it comes down to is I have to read up on this stuff myself, so I can form my own darn opinion about health-care reform instead of relying on someone else with her or his own nincompoop agenda. Jeez, what a bitch.

At least President Obama understands that I have a life. He put up a handy-dandy website, healthreform.gov, where I can get some for-real information about what he has asked Congress to come up with and the progress being made. This, despite Republican efforts to shoot down reform in a blaze of failure — in hopes of keeping Obama from being reelected — and despite the railings of folks who are lucky enough to have good health insurance coverage, both of which groups really kind of suck, because they don’t give a good goddamn about the millions of people whose insurance companies dumped them when they got really sick, who were denied coverage for life-saving treatments, who are not insured, who went bankrupt trying to pay for their health care, who died for lack of treatment! That’s the real bummer.

You know what would be really cool? It would be really cool if Chuck Norris and Sarah Palin and all the other naysayers would actually take a look at the president’s website and let us know if they agree or disagree with his goals:

• Reduce long-term growth of health care costs for businesses and government

• Protect families from bankruptcy or debt because of health care costs

• Guarantee choice of doctors and health plans

• Invest in prevention and wellness

• Improve patient safety and quality of care

• Assure affordable, quality health coverage for all Americans

• Maintain coverage when you change or lose your job

• End barriers to coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions

Declaring their support or opposition would put their opinions in an interesting perspective, because, if they agree, then they should be helping make reform a reality instead of trying to undermine it. And if they disagree, then isn’t that telling!

Yeah, that would be way cool.

Love,
K-B

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(Note: Chuck Norris photo from raindog808 via a Creative Commons license.)

06 August 2009

A not-so friendly debate from Fallbrook the Friendly Village on President Obama’s healthcare insurance reform effort

From: usocialist@live.com
To: Undisclosed group of Fallbrook healthcare reform activists from Organizing for America
Subject: Obama whores. “yes master”
Message: blank

From: One of the healthcare reform activists
To: usocialist@live.com
Subject: Re: Obama whores. “yes master”
Message: I realize you are unable to consider an opinion different from your own, but please respect me enough to delete me from your email list. I am not a whore.

From: usocialist@live.com
To: One of the healthcare reform activists
Subject: Re: Re: Obama whores. “yes master”
Message: You are projecting yourself onto me by saying that I do not consider different opinions. I have considered the truth and the truth is you are wrong. History proves it. Obama is wrong also, but you do not care because he is your master. Do some research and you will see. But you will not.

Editorial note: Huh?

Read more Fallbrookisms…

A Story by Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Through heavy brown air, the sun is hot enough to stew the tar, bubbling from a terminally neglected street. Mingled with impotent wafts of twice-smoked cigarettes and desiccated human excrement, the sizzling urban exhaust sticks in my throat, leaving me gasping for breath. So I pause, as usual, to yearn for the cool mist that hovers just above the waterfalls in the torn cigarette poster taped to the back of the cash register.

Here, each morning, the besotted buy their 99-proof and I, in my tidy little pumps and ambitious suit, buy my unbranded bottle of water. But the falls are only paper, and the stagnant stench of the city invariably jerks my violated senses back to rank reality and the daily rhythm.

“Hola, chica. Seventy-nine cents. ¿Hace calor, eh?”

“Si, Señor, really hot. Muchas gracias. Bye-bye.”

“De nada, Señorita. Hasta mañana.”

Still, the street offers an odd and occasional respite from the snot-green walls of the snake pit I call work, one of the many private hostelries crafted decades ago by Ronald Reagan’s gubernatorial cost-cutting and civil rights for the tormented gone awry.

Inside, the howls of the chronically terrified and forgotten echo through the veins of sixty-seven clients, ages twenty-two to a shrunken unknown. Their shrieks bounce off the frames of denuded sofas and urine-sopped cushions littering the hallways. Their fears bind them to horrid things others cannot see. And their lucidity, resurrected with decreasing frequency, is inevitably felled by the ferocious thwacks life deals them.

Once a month, they are lined up for their hallucinations to bounce off the chill steel wall of the visiting Medi-Cal shrink. Their torments dribble into puddles of quivering pleas for help on the institutional-linoleum floor, while he preens over his designer prescription pad and coffee.

Today, the good doctor is too busy flirting with his new answering service operator to approve hospitalizing the suicidal Chinese empress for a medication adjustment. The teeth marks with which she has tattooed her arms are not enough to get his attention; neither are the razor blades we’ve indelicately manhandled from her. Not even my suggestion that he stick his Moroccan leather pad someplace scatological elicits anything more than a snickering invitation to join him for an adult beverage after work and help him perform that enticing activity.

So I take an angry hike for the great outdoors to vent my self-righteous rage.

With my tasteful pumps, I stomp over the bodies of addicts, stoned near to death by failed choices. I storm around the cardboard condominiums filled with humans as hungry and parasite-wracked as their dogs. I fling myself away from it all into a futile rant.

Halfway around the decomposing block I’m stopped by a sweaty, unwashed kid with a knife.

“Whaddaya got, lady?” he snarls, oblivious to my good intentions, my hopeful aspirations.

Confronted by this little shit blocking my path and threatening me with a sharp object, I wish for a split second that I have a gun.

Now, it isn’t as though I would propel society’s paranoia into the chest of a beloved security guard at a museum intent on just saying no to hate. It is nowhere near the realm of the playful five year old who crashes her own birthday party with the disregard of her grandfather’s unsecured .22. And it’s a far cry from the family whose domesticity is discharged with abusive daddy’s death by gunshot.

Nonetheless, if I had a gun, I would aim it right at the kid’s pubescent face, the pimple on his nose for a target. I would pump him full of seething rage at a system that rejects the humanity of the recipients of its stingy offerings. In the stormy flush of utter frustration, I’d splatter his youthful flesh across a cityscape that would simply add his shredded carrion to its endless pit of stinking detritus. I would blow away that scrawny sack of symptoms of poverty, inequity and corruption. Yes, I would do to him what the psycho Med-Cal prick does to my clients.

If I had a gun.

But I don’t.

And I am too busy picking at my fiery ire to respond to the boy’s unseemly overture with appropriate fear. Instead, I hiss at him through gnashing teeth to get the hell out of my way or I’ll hurt him — fuck him up, in fact.

“OK, lady, OK, lady,” he backs away, pocketing his weapon.

I watch him retreat.

Distracted by a neglected adolescent with a rusty, broken steak knife, I head back toward the mayhem of a system that has abandoned its victims to hell, and I wonder, “Hmm, who in her right mind would wear pumps on this street?”

Love,
K-B

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(Photo by John Anderson via a Creative Commons License.)