By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Heat roils across my hill as I step into the dog days of summer, plunge into the pool and surface into a shimmer of my youth. The hours barely passed then, as we sought the morning’s flickering shade, splayed under the swaying arms of weeping willows. The grass cooled and tickled, and when the breeze stilled, when dew abandoned the ground and bedecked our brows, when boredom prevailed, we scooted on elbow, heel and ass to peek up just past the edge of the willow, to spy pictures in the sky, to find fancy piled upon fancy in shades of white and blue and wonder. Drifty, dreamy images fluttered by on tendrils of hot air and moisture, visions of summers to come. Now, they are visions of summers past. Vague recollections entice others, memories evoke memories, and I succumb to the warm wave of reminiscence. …

At Tydings-on-the-Bay, the family seeks respite from Baltimore’s stinking markets and steamy Southern Baptist socials. The season’s heaven is as hot as hell, so my father’s mother swims in the early morning sun, the rising light, the silence of sleeping progeny. Her ears fill with the water of two hundred fifty years of fishermen’s traps, floating battles of wits and finance, sunken souls. Framed by dusty lace and handprints, she returns from the edge of land, ankle-deep in the pine needles of last season’s hopes and sighs. She pulls back moth-wing coverlets to wake us for breakfast and draws us from bed with the scent of frying scrapple, grits and green tomatoes. We pray for her watermelon rind pickle as she repositions the tortoiseshell combs that hold her endless hair in place and her world together. …

Harmony buzzes — a chorus of lawn mowers, insects and low flying planes. The grass is yet moist with tears of another day’s passing, another day closer to replacing steamed crabs and corn on the cob with brown bag lunches at the big kids’ school. But for now, summer flowers play pub to bees and lipstick to girls who yearn to be women. We dress in fairy gowns of weeping willow and woven clover, with tomato breasts and berry-stained nails, and we smoke cornhusks when no one watches from the kitchen window. We hide along a stream’s bank, escaping plebeian Cheerios, taunting big brothers, demands to be something other than our dreams. We imagine gossamer barges and honeyed rosebuds, the grace and wisdom that will one day be ours. …

Inner tubes with six-pack anchors voyage across a watering hole. Once boys and girls, now barely adults, we plot the world’s salvation: Love and revolution are the answer — or is it revolutionary love? This is our wholesome debate as cows bellow to the music of a generation wading through sparkling ripples of change. We feast on homemade cheese, the sprouts of provocative vision, the final summer of our youth. We dive to the murky bottom one last time and surface with the muck from which our species first emerged. It oozes between our fingers and we know the very world is in our hands. …

Wafts of ocean breath curl round limbs entwined in sweltry sand. We draw long strokes of air and each other, tremble at the touch of fingertips, the sun, the lees of a million million waves, the ebb and flow of unanimity. Tears mingle and meander the joy and sorrow between us. Romance has blown in before a ferry of tourists, binoculars perched on the ship’s rail searching for secrets, cameras poised to frame history — but will we have one? Passion crosses over them like an angel over blood-marked doors and alights dangerously in our lovers’ arms as we crest with the waves. And by summer’s end, all evidence, save the love, of a couple walking hand-in-hand is shifted by the tides to someone else’s strand. …

We watch the glue of an inflamed mob bubbling beneath the sky-high images of Hitler and Obama and Lenin. The three are falsely strung together by practiced loathing, the vitriol of glib puppets who toss the masses bonbons of fear like cheap Mardi Gras beads — in hope of bare-breasted adulation. The mob feasts on the ephemera their idols spew with such self-serving vengeance — dark accusations that evaporate in the sun but linger in unquestioning minds, calls to arms amputated by ignorance, dried tea leaves that swirl out of reach on the hot air of hate. …

And I look back to earth. The quest for grace, the harmony of hopeful discourse, the rhythmic balance of unsullied tides, the common embrace of responsibility for our future — are they such arcane notions? I finger the ancient tortoiseshell combs and wonder if in this time they can hold the world together.

Love,
K-B

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Billboard photo courtesy of Bob Fisher, KRIB.

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

Fallbrookian 1: Have you heard the latest about Sarah Palin? She’s building a taller fence around her property so the journalist renting next door can’t spy on her.
Fallbrookian 2: But then she won’t be able to see Russia anymore, and there goes her foreign policy expertise!

Liberal Fallbrookian: I’m so surprised no one has left a bag of burning shit on our doorstep yet.
Conservative Fallbrookian: Only a damn liberal would think that’s an adequate response. I say shoot them all.

From Telling Our Tales writing workshop

Talking is my thinking, and sometimes that’ll get you in trouble.

Writing is like making salsa: You just start cutting up vegetables and adding things and then people say, “Oh, this is wonderful. How do you make it?” But I don’t know how I make it. I just write it.

Read more Fallbrookisms…

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

During the 2008 presidential campaign, a dear former colleague railed at me in rather frothy email verbiage when I took a written poke at Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Although he eventually calmed enough to offer a sort of apology, I never heard from him again. If he’d just given me an opportunity to explain, I could have, well, I don’t know, explained — explained the humor to him. Ye gods, the thing was titled “You Can Put Lipstick on a Fib”! You’d think that would be a dead giveaway to take what follows with a grain of giggle. Jeez!

What can I say? We Gressitts are prone to humor; it’s a powerful coping mechanism — the darker the better. When Mother was still driving, she joked about keeping Father’s ashes in the trunk in case she needed extra traction to get up her hill in the winter. It took the sting off her sorrow. Years ago, when I joked with the ER doc suturing my battered face (I suggested a bribe of homemade shortbread in exchange for his working some magic to prevent scarring), he joked right back. The levity got me through the procedure without grabbing a scalpel and preventing my now-former husband’s dick from having any more fun with jane. Although I have to admit, after recovering from the assault, I found the doc’s response really depressing and I was pissed with both of us — and I never made him that damn shortbread. We need to train ER staff not to enable victimhood. Right after we train women to duck faster.

See what I mean? It is unrelenting.

Just the other day, a friendly reader questioned the sincerity of true feminists joking about breast cancer. She was gracious, and her comment made me wonder how many folks might have taken offense at the joke I had published. But if you’ve never been close to cancer, you might not understand how fabulous a death-defying tool laughter can be — even a wise-ass smirk can prove useful. And I find California senatorial candidate Carly Fiorina (the subject of the joke) and her politicking in the realm of breast cancer as worthy of a one-liner or two as is staving off the angst of alien-possessed boobs. A breast cancer survivor herself, Fiorina used the Susan G. Komen for the Cure fund-raising page to make a pitch for her campaign for U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer’s seat (watch the video):

Cancer strengthened my faith. Cancer strengthened my family. And I come through all of this battle, not only with it behind me, but with a renewed determination to make the most of my life. And for me, now, that means to try and make a difference for the people of California, in Washington, D.C. My doctors have given me a clean bill of health. They’re actually extremely excited that I’m running for the Senate. I feel great. I’m raring to go. And the good news is, after chemotherapy, Barbara Boxer isn’t very scary anymore.

How deliciously crass! My feminist friend’s response to Fiorina’s play of the breast cancer card? “Maybe Barbara Boxer could have an iffy mammogram.” Spoken like the funny breast cancer survivor she is.

Albeit only one tool, humor can help sustain us through the most atrocious assaults on our sensibilities; for example, Arizona’s continuing effort to incarcerate, forcibly repatriate or otherwise excoriate anyone who isn’t, well, you know — sshhhh — one of us white folk.

Leaders of the erstwhile Barry Goldwater, Sr. state are afraid that public schools are vulnerable to the ravages of ethnic solidarity among the dark hordes — why, those heathens could rise up and vote them right out of power! But traditional social studies curricula were cleverly crafted to induct our young ones into the still-pervasive doctrine of Manifest Destiny, to keep white folk on top, literally and figuratively. Hence, alternate curricula — any study of perspectives other than that of the white landed gentry — threaten the status quo and, consequently, comprise what Arizona’s good old boys and gals fear: “courses or classes that either promote the overthrow of the United States government or promote resentment toward a race or class of people.” Bear in mind that Arizona’s legislators had to strike “Caucasian” from an earlier version of that statement — at least in their minds, if not in print. That’s ethnic cleansing Arizona style.

And Arizona’s recent purge of teachers with heavy accents or bad English grammar strikes another blow, but to an unexpected target — the South. Those damn Yankees are at it again! This prejudicial policy renders teaching positions in Arizona unattainable to any progeny of my paternal ancestral home, Gressitt, Virginia. In this kudzu-creeping hamlet of clamdiggers, crabbers and valiant volunteer firefighters, one might hear the likes of, “Aah juss mahoov mah deeah suhee mama eeanduh reeuhl naahs dubahwahd.” For those unschooled in Virginia Backwaterese, that translates as “I just moved my dear, sweet mama into a real nice doublewide.”

After a good laugh, I’ll shed a tear for Arizona’s lost opportunity for cultural exchange with the unabashed South and hope that the state’s educators are devious enough to do some fast “Find and Replace” in their curricular materials, to pacify the ethnic-phobic.

Thank the goddess there is enough idiocy out there to keep us endlessly entertained, which is a nice segue to Sarah Palin.

She’s ever rich fodder for comedy, but I’m not sure who is more laughable — Palin, for assuming the title of feminist at an anti-abortion gathering, or the feminists who jumped through various and contorted rationales to lend it to her. God forbid they should deny the nomenclature to a powerful woman and thereby risk their own standing in the Sisterhood! What they fail to recognize is that power, position and number of Facebook fans do not a true feminist make, any more than poofy sleeves, a calico Bible cover and “God Hates Fags” signs stacked in the garage make you a true Christian.

Now, what Palin doesn’t understand is that no feminist would advocate putting women’s reproductive decision-making in anyone’s hands but the women’s. We’re good with our hands; we don’t need any help down there from no guhmint.

Yeayah. … That doesn’t really translate.

Love,
K-B

Want to learn more about immigration?

Read “The Devil’s Highway” by Luis Alberto Urrea (2004, Little Brown and Company) and watch “Lone Star,” written and directed by John Sayles and featuring Chris Cooper and Elizabeth Peña.

— My thanks to Professor Silverio Haro, CalState San Marcos and Palomar College, for the great recommendations.

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

The book was a struggle, but I felt duty bound to stay put in my yard chair and honor the author’s effort to finish the thing. Consequently, even a trail of ants, Fallbrook’s ever-present organic waste abatement crews, distracted me from the chore of reading. I watched the good little refuse engineers tidily toting to their nest the remnants of a mourning dove egg, probably dropped from its cedar nest by a murderous Blue Jay. I’d heard a ruckus the day before and ducked inside to avoid its calamitous end. But damn if fate didn’t catch up with me! At least the ants were swift and effective. Perhaps too effective.

I remembered the gift my father sent to my kiddo when she was small enough to still handle insects as though they were playthings. It had been a surprise, a special grandfatherly treat. And, according to the accompanying literature, we all — yes, children and adults alike — were in for hours of entomological fun as we played audience to the life’s work of the inhabitants of Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm.

Actually, said inhabitants of the green petrochemical-based farm were shipped separately, which meant a wait for all that fun we knew was coming our way. In the meantime, we filled the bottom couple inches of the farm with the lily-white synthetic sand provided, and eagerly anticipated the ants’ Herculean feats, their mind-bending commitment to earthmoving, their fastidious exercise of home economics — all the requisite behaviors of a proper ant.

The estimated day of arrival drew near, and we tacked the ant poster that came with the farm to my daughter’s wall. Together, we reviewed Milton’s ageless discourse on the wondrous world of ants. With a couple of honored bugologists in the family, I thought this might prove a prophetic science experience for the kid, soon to graduate from daycare to real school.

At long last, our ants arrived — as expected, only soldier-workers of ambiguous gender. Queens were prohibited from travel. In we poured our new housemates to their escape-proof quarters, while I considered the years of effort I’d previously expended to keep the little bastards out of our home. Nonetheless, gave them a welcoming honey-water spritz and set them in a place of honor at the dining room table.

Thankfully, Uncle Milton had adequately forewarned us, so we were not surprised when a few ants died the first day or two. This was to be expected. What was a bit disconcerting was the ants’ method of disposing of their dead: They broke down their brethren and, piece by piece, added their teeny black body parts to the white synthetic hills. And, to my maternal dismay, the ants continued dropping like, well, flies. Every day, we awoke to a grislier scene of death and dismemberment as the lily mounds became speckled with the black grains of dissected ant bodies.

In fear for my daughter’s psyche, and not a little grossed out, I poured through Uncle Milton’s brochure, a desperate review in search of advice I might have missed, critical guidance for keeping ants alive and well, but to no avail. The ants continued their unthinking hill building and their dying, only to be recycled as pepper to the sand’s salt by their surviving peers.

As the ant population rapidly dwindled and the hills darkened, I wondered about the significance of the ants’ unnatural existence on my table. Even when confronted with increasing mortality, the soldiers just plodded along, following the mandate of their biology — until the sad day when but one ant remained alive.

A lousy way to start the morning, I groped my way to the kitchen for day-old coffee and the eye dropper of honey-water, and returned to find the sole survivor atop the tallest hill peering skyward. I was grateful that the poor thing was too brainless to experience the bitter isolation of such utter aloneness, too rudimentary to beseech some great ant god in the artificial green sky to end this brutal abandonment. Unwilling to expose my daughter to such angst, I shattered the plastic and dumped the last ant outside in the garbage — to eat himself to a happy end.

I was certain then, as I am now, that we are not intended to keep ant farms on our dining room tables. Any more than we are intended to live in petrochemical plastic and perpetuate our soulless behaviors into our own extinction — our reckless Wall Street finanigans, our natural resource guzzling, our political demolition derbies, our hate-mortared border walls.

But, hey, it was just a bunch of ants, you might say? Yes, and if we don’t do any better than Uncle Milton’s ants, the species in my yard is likely to outlast us all, tidily toting our remnants back to their nests.

Love,
K-B

©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…

If you ever feel marooned on a North County atoll of information atrophy, fret no more. There is an alternative source of San Diego North County news, commentary and community information — The Progressive Post — that fills the sometimes cavernous void between our typical daily and weekly offerings. The Progressive Post touts itself as a semi-monthly e-newsletter for progressives, but it is significantly more. As even local print papers continue to reduce local coverage, The Progressive Post is pedaling fast to help fill the growing gap. And regardless of political inclinations, The Post’s content is sure to spice up the life of any reader.

The all-volunteer publication is edited by Fallbrook’s very own Joe Crews, president of the Fallbrook Democratic Club. Joe explained what brought him to town: “I was bred and schooled in the deep Southern culture of Mississippi and immersed in the Southern Baptist Church. But with the enlightenment that came with my self-awareness as a gay man, I recognized that culture’s incompatibility with liberal and progressive ideas.  Southern California is not exactly a liberal’s paradise, however, and often I encounter much of the same racism, xenophobia and misunderstandings as in the South. … But, with the death of my longtime companion and end of my 27-year career at Pan Am, I actively searched where I wanted to live the rest of my life, and found Fallbrook. I love Fallbrook, and The Progressive Post is a work of love.”

Publisher of The Post, Rick Hall, said, “I am awfully lucky Joe agreed to [serve as volunteer editor]. Without Joe, there would be no Progressive Post.” In lieu of subscription fees, Rick suggested the best contribution is original content from local writers about progressive topics, local events, arts and culture, etc. To submit an article, media release or story idea, visit The Progressive Post.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Super Bowl’s Slippery Slope

Oh ye gods! A Focus on the Family advertisement spurning abortion — during the Super Bowl? What is CBS thinking in allowing such an ad during the preeminent U.S. televised sporting event? This is no time for polemics! There are beers to drink, chips to dip, high fives to slap, manly sideways hugs to share. What has the Super Bowl come to?!

Nothing much more than it’s been since Super Bowl I in 1967.

The Super Bowl is a dandy marketing machine for the National Football League and its advertisers. The machine works because 100 million folks are willing to devote a Sunday afternoon to balls, boobs, and clever, sexist and crude ads — a list to which we can now add “dogmatic,” thanks to the abortion ad — all to the tune of $2.5 to $2.8 million for a 30-second spot.

So?

So of course CBS would run Focus on the Family’s ad regardless of its advocacy content. Of course the media corporation would make a decision based on profit. Of course, if you think political propaganda an inappropriate diversion from men hurling their hulking bodies into one another and scantly-clad gals shaking those things they shake so well, you could spurn the ad and instead follow the crowd to the kitchen for more brew, hit the head to tinkle — or write a check to National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) so they can buy their own ad next year.

Ah, what CBS has started!

Carly Fiorina for Shepherdess?

Carly Fiorina is running for something in California, but suddenly the seat to which she aspires is not quite clear.

The former Hewlett-Packard chair and CEO was booted out by her board in 2005 and trotted off with a $21.4 million payout for her failed strategy that included laying off more than 17,000 workers. Her golden parachute eventually landed her a role as financial advisor to Senator John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, which touted putting an end to multimillion-dollar payouts to failed CEOs. Oops.

Then, last November, Firorina announced her candidacy for the U.S. Senate, hoping to oust California’s incumbent Senator Barbara Boxer. Fiorina did make a wee bit of a public confession in her announcement: She hadn’t bothered to visit her polling place much, believing her vote wouldn’t make any difference. Oops.

Now, Fiorina has launched a campaign advertisement (view it below) that reveals several things voters might find interesting about her and her campaign. Read no further, however, if you are weak of heart, as some of the revelations are shocking — shocking, I say!

• Fiorina’s rival in the Republican primary election, former California Congressman Tom Campbell, is either a devil-eyed wolf in sheep’s clothing or the Fiorina team has an unnatural preoccupation with Bo Peep’s sheep.

• Fiorina categorizes California’s male fiscal conservative leadership as a flock of sheep. One wonders how that flock — the one she’ll rely on for help if she aces the primary — feels about her depiction of them.

• Fiorina finds “purity,” “piety,” “wholesome,” “honorable” and “true believers” worthy of some rather dark sarcasm. A bemusing tactic, given her desired conservative voting base.

• And that pedestal — the one from which the devil sheep is toppled — it looks like, well, something unmentionable in pure and pious company.

Perhaps Fiorina and her team have smoked too many of those greenbacks she snagged from Hewlett-Packard’s stockholders. Or it could be that Fiorina’s true calling is not the U.S. Senate but YouTube — as a producer of political satire. How refreshing, if we’ve actually found a public figure who can laugh at herself.

And that is a far, far better thing to imagine than the prospect of a campaign season befouled by bizarre mudslinging from Fiorina.

Save the Pigs

U.S. Senator Richard Shelby (R–Ala.) pulled a fast procedural maneuver on Thursday, putting a blanket hold on all presidential nominees (70 or more) — until he gets the billions of dollars he believes are his state’s due. His ploy has been lambasted as a self-serving, obstructionist pork hunt, particularly for the delay it will cause in Department of Defense appointments.

It is a rather blatant display of chutzpah, conspicuous amid a pomposity of politicians. But Shelby has never been coy: He’s the fickle Democrat who leaped to the other side of the aisle the day after Republicans gained House and Senate majorities in 1994. This time, however, he has outdone both himself and precedent.

The combination of Shelby’s elevated pork lust, Fiorina’s sheep obsession and CBS’ evangelists touting life over abortion amidst men battling to feminize each other in opposing end zones, brings to mind Cicero’s commentary, “Any man may err, only a fool persists in error.”

Let’s see which, if any of the three, self-defines according to Cicero.

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

* For a fabulous collection of terms of venery, read An Exaltation of Larks, by James Lipton.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Huh?” he replies dully.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until that vision is achieved, beware what you sign.

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

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

Love,
K-B

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

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

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

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

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

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

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

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

So now what do we do?

Well, I like CREDO’s approach:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love,
K-B

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