Clocks and Spoons, Empty Rooms

Right Between the Eyes

Mini Golf Subway. Shoot the Moon.

After a great visit from old friend Susan and dinner out with the gang, followed by a restful four-day trip upstate with my friend Quinn, Miss O' returned to an office abuzz in deadlines, and a political landscape of unparalleled outrageousness. My head got noisy. All week, the noise. Now, quiet. Home. Stillness. Morning. To the (up) left of my green armchair where I sit and write, an artfully designed, smallish, handmade clock lightly ticks on a cheap Ikea bookshelf (the bookcase left behind by an old roommate), the shelf below the top one devoted to all books Irish (including Oscar Wilde), between art books that lean against speakers of my JVC stereo—the one stolen from my house in Virginia in the fall of '95, and returned by the police in the spring, so my brother Mike nicknamed it Persephone (thanks, Wiki links!)—and each time I look at that clock, I remember my old ex-friend Greg sitting in my living room way back then, staring intently at the clock. I finally asked him why. “I’m trying to figure out why the ticking sound doesn’t match the hand movements.” Should I tell him? I told him.

“Because the sound you hear isn’t coming from that clock,” I explained. “It’s from the big clock on the kitchen wall.” I pointed into the next room. There were two clocks, you see, but he hadn't asked.

I think today I am writing about human engagement and friendship. (I'm not sure yet.) See, back there, long ago, I had wondered whether or not to tell Greg about the clock sounds; and the very fact that I wondered whether or not to tell him something that trivial pretty much defined our friendship even then. Much as we should have been really sympatico, after years of friendship in high school, college, and life, we just never were really comfy with each other. That's okay, sometimes. Some relationships are really for mutual growth, and growing usually hurts more than a little. It's not as if we saw each other a lot by then, so what the hell? 

So what happens to a friendship? Life, mostly, is the easy answer. "People change and forget to tell each other," playwright Lillian Hellman said. But sometimes there never was a real friendship—a truth that becomes clear only much later, after it's ended. Some people (I've learned), when they see you, will mentally put up a screen where your face should be, turn on a projector, and start their own movie. When this happens, every word out of your mouth, every facial tic, the way you dress, your hair, your habits—when expressed naturally—can become mad-making to the friend/ director-of-this-movie-of-Not You. They project onto you how you should behave, who you should be. You listen. You try to "improve." Ahem. Over the years, I have made and shed friends, and they have made and shed me, and the killing moment for me has always been something along the lines of, “Lisa, is that language/ shot of whiskey/ loud laugh really necessary?”

And I'd think, freely and finally, "You're goddamned right it was necessary. Ass."

And, scene.

The kind of line I’m talking about isn't said from a place of concern, so much as a place of judgment. In such moments I learned that there were secret standards the friend had that I just didn’t meet, and rather than say honestly, “Lisa, I have to tell you, when you do that, I don’t like it,” they came in sideways, and hurtfully. As a result I didn’t get the chance to respond, maturely, lovingly, “Fuck you.” We had no chance to grow, is what I mean, mostly because the friend turned out to be, as my friend Jean so aptly described Scott Brown during this week’s debate with Elizabeth Warren, a dickface wearing an ass-hat.

I kid! (I mean, Miss O' is usually the ass wearing a dick in her hat. Or vice versa. With the hat and the ass there. Or the dick. In something.)

I don’t give up on a friendship in my heart at such moments, but something essential in the energy between me and this soon-to-be-former-friend shifts not so much to buzz kill as death knell. When you lose the love of what is essential to a person, well, it’s time to say bye. This is not necessarily a bad thing. “We had a good run.” Nothing wrong with that.

Friends who have tried to change me, you know, to make me more “wifey,” or into a Christian, or Communist, or Conservative, have done it in these sneaky ways (e.g., gently correcting my language and style of dress, or casually inviting me to church, or slipping me a Noam Chomsky tract, or suggesting I get an investment portfolio because preserving money is the most important work of all), because, as they would later confess at the last parting, “I’m afraid of you.” Huh. I find this odd, and yet I understand it. Often we don’t realize how long we’ve been walking on eggshells until we leave that old nest and fall the fuck out of the tree onto blessed, solid Earth.

My Facebook, Myself

A Facebook friend was recently unfriended for the first time. (What a verb! But that’s the fun of English.) She was truly thrown by it. I commented, “If I don’t lose at least one friend a month, I’m not trying.” When Miss O's students would get upset by an assignment or how demanding her standards were, using as their argument, “I don’t like you,” her standard response, delivered kindly and with a completely straight face, was, “I have friends.”

“O MY GAW MISS O’HAH, NO YOU DI-INT!”

“I have friends. I need you to learn and grow. It’s really okay if you don’t like me.”

Of the friends who have dropped me, in physical life or in cyberspace, I think, “It's okay if you don’t like me. We both need a change." As Lisa and Homer Simpson would say:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a41eQIO07R4

The oddest thing, I think, is that after years of friendships that ended one way or another, I’ve truly missed exactly one person, and after four years of therapy realized I’d been in an emotionally abusive relationship, a cycle born of ancestry, and that the only reason I’d latched onto him to begin with was that I recognized the pattern. He was the devil I knew.

Upbringing gives us our base knowledge, and then, if we're healthy, we can leave some of the big family teachings behind.

When my extremely difficult (but really interesting) Grandma O’Hara died back in 2000 at age 94, people were sort of stuck for what to say about her at the funeral, what to tell the priest, what to do as a eulogy. (When the novice priest began, “I understand that Fern could be a…difficult…woman,” and the whole church chuckled, he must have realized the O’Haras were not your average family.) For the eulogy, I told the cousin charged with talking exactly what to say: “You say that she was the mother of six great kids, stepmother to two great kids, and all these kids married great people, and they had great kids.” That was true. So she must have done something right, despite it all. My dad told me that in the car leaving the hospital the last time, my Aunt Mary (who’d borne the brunt of Grandma’s sharp tongue, her casual meanness) had said, crying, “I sure will miss Mother,” to which her husband, my Uncle Terry, said, “Well, when you’re used to getting punched in the face every day, you’re bound to miss it.” 

Everyone laughed. Ah, growth.

with Uncle Sam at the Magic Village

photo by Andrew Quinn 2012

At the Feet of Old Glory

I bring all this back to politics because, Facebook protests to the contrary, EVERYTHING is political. It is. It has to be. So with all this talk about abusive relationships and arguments, I guess what I’m trying to say today is that there is so much work to do in the world, that to see one entire American political party (not as if my own party is the poster party of success, mind you) trying to sabotage all the good we could do in terms of really important things is making Miss O' here a basket case: Real and mental movie projectors running false scenes, no honesty or trust, all fear all the time, missing the big picture. (Case in point: This argument-loop about "big government" vs. "small government" is stupid. Do you hear your Miss O'? It's STUPID. We must work for effective government. EFFECTIVE government. Do you hear the difference? Nothing like a specific adjective to reframe an argument.) So to return from a restful time and learn that Senate Republicans filibustered the Veterans’ Job Corps Bill and ran off to recess; to receive a snarky Facebook comment from a rightwing former student that my post on the disappearance of Arctic sea ice was, I gather, pointless, as global warming is a "hoax" (he provided a link about the increase of Antarctic ice, “so there!”—which subject had nothing to do with fact that the CO2 emissions in the Northern hemisphere are causing the fast loss of Arctic summer sea ice which helps deflect the sun’s  strong rays, thus causing a further increase in temperatures to record levels for three straight summers on Earth); to see women on my Facebook wall celebrate, even good-humoredly, a hope that the government will once again seize control of their, and their daughters', reproductive rights—well, I can only shake my head. And keep expressing myself. Maybe it's an Irish thing.

Watercolor/ink/rust-stained "cover" of the (stripped) Uris book painted by LO'H, ca. 1985

An Irish friend of mine, Maureen, said to me years ago (she'd warned me off the boyfriend I mentioned: "Lisa, you cannot be with a man who is afraid of you") that the cry of our people has ever been, “I’m as good a man as you.” Not better: as good. What I forget is that many people do not feel this way; I always have. Even as I pronounce my earthly concerns through the pixels of Facebook or over the screens of this blog, I do it confidently, because it’s all to express myself rather than to change others (but goddammit, how in the hell is ANYONE still voting ROMNEY?). I would not say of a friend—a true friend of the bosom, as Anne Shirley might say—“I could really love you if only you….” I think that’s not only foolish; it’s really the height of narcissism.

To you, for some reason, I might say, “You’re an asshole.” I might not. I do know that while I am not out to change you, I can’t help being the person who is forever pointing out that the ticking you hear may not match the hand movement of the clock you are looking at. There could be another clock, is what I'm saying, over there in the next room. I thought you might want to know.

Here's to clocks and spoons, empty rooms; and, at the end of the day, turning out the light. 

John Prine, “Clocks and Spoons” from Diamonds in the Rough

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ypn9O9g19w

Homeschooled

Etiquette Lesson

All images today from Google.

This morning, Miss O’ is enjoying the glories of the cold front blow-through, the blue skies and cool, dry air—that mother-loving cool, dry air breezing in the always-open windows, when an actual mother begins yelling out on the playground, “Charlie, stay here, I’m getting my ball…” and “Charlie, don’t…” and I hear tennis balls against the concrete wall. I don’t mind ball noises—it’s a purposeful sound, people out being physical, engaged in an act of concentrated effort (I'm still talking about tennis, for the love of Mike). Sure, the repetitive sounds get a little annoying, but I go with it. This community playground (which gets a lot of use by people of all ages, all day, every day) happens to abut where I live, and I knew that when I bought the place.

What I cannot abide—and this is partly because I’m highly auditory, a defect which makes every thrum and high pitch of machinery a misery to be around—is purposeless noise: car basses turned up just because the drivers are assholes; teen boys yelling, “Get it, nigger!” because they are fucking stupid; or, as was the case this morning, incessant kicking against or hitting of the chain link fence that stands against my building. I let it go for a minute, two minutes. That’s it.

I open my kitchen door to the porch—a wooden deck built over the trash alley, which affords me outdoor space—and I step up on a chair and look over the deck wall through the chain link. I see no adult, other than a man playing tennis. I can’t see a mom, but finally I spot the source of the noise down below.

“Hon, could you stop doing that please?” I am looking down onto two kids, dark bowl haircuts, arms swinging. They are about three years old, holding little tennis rackets they are using as noisemakers, a movement that bespeaks not experiment so much as boredom. Finally I see their mom, who is almost out of sight to the right, and she says nothing. The pounding continues—it’s unbelievably loud. “Kids?” I say, as kindly but firmly as I can without being a dick (they are only babies), “I’m up here. Look up.” They do, even as they keep hitting the fence. “Could you stop making that noise? Thank you." I say it again. Again. The mother, fiddling around in a bag, says nothing. Their father (I realize) sees me but keeps playing tennis. “It’s very loud in here,” I explain. Finally, they toddle over to their mom. "Thank you," I say again. I hear her say in baby talk, “That lady said...too loud….” She never acknowledged my presence.

This reminds me of a time many years ago at Staples, in the week before school started. Miss O’ was in the pen aisle selecting her ink colors for the grading year, when a young rascal around age five was running, yelling, and being a boisterous boy. He careened into my cart, shoving me into the stacks, and his mother, who saw this, said nothing. She continued shopping. The boy had run himself into a post and was heading back my way, and I announced to him loudly and firmly, “You need to stop.”

He stopped. He looked at me. His mother said, “Hey, what gives you the right to speak to my son like that?”

Oh, friends of Miss O’, you can only imagine this moment, the flash of my eyes, the hardness of my voice.

“I’ll tell you what gives me the right,” I intoned, huskily. “In about ten years, he will be in my English class, and he will be my problem. I will not put up with this.” I pointed to my tipped cart, my scraped arm.

She grabbed her son’s hand and left the aisle. I have no idea if she learned a damned thing. I suspect he did, though.

Lest anyone reading this thinks I want to fix your children’s behavior, I think The Onion has expressed my pain best of all. What I love is that EVERYONE is taken to task in this little op-ed:

Is Anyone On This Bus Interested In Disciplining My Son?

http://www.theonion.com/articles/is-anyone-on-this-bus-interested-in-disciplining-m,11236/

No sensible person has too a hard time when kids—on a subway, at the store, or on the playground—cry out the cranky because they are tired, or hungry, or restless. Sure it's annoying, but that's life with kids. What people do have a hard time with are parents who, when their kids are doing deliberate acts against others that can be stopped, choose to pretend their kids aren’t bothering anyone, when clearly their kids are bothering people. Do you follow me?

So what did I expect from the mom and dad this morning? “Charlie, [girl child], come over here, please.” I expected the mom to look up and say, “Sorry if they bothered you,” which opening would have allowed me to say, “Thank you for understanding. Have a fun day.” As it was, I left shaking my head as one child continued to hit the fence, and the mom sounded unmoved.

All the teacher in me can think of is just what I said to that mom at Staples back there: In a few years, your kids are going to be someone else’s problem. Why couldn’t they be someone else’s JOY instead?

At Home

I read an article the other week, which I can’t find now, about a study that found that kids who misbehaved at home were actually well behaved at school. The logic was that kids who were allowed to express their anger or moods at home, and were disciplined or got to talk about it, didn’t feel the need to act out in class.

The O’Children could have been the subjects of this study. You never in your life saw kids hit, kick, scream, or play cruel practical jokes on each other the way the O’Hara kids did. Oh, the belts that flew! The “go to your rooms” that were screamed! And school year after school year, report card after report card, our parents were astonished to find that not only were their kids among the best behaved, we were often real role models for other kids.

Crazy.

I will tell you this: If I had EVER careened into someone’s cart, I would have heard my parents profusely apologize and been hauled out of the store by one arm. If I’d been making disturbing noises out in the neighborhood (and I’m sure I did), and someone complained, I would have been told to stop. Then I would have heard my parents apologize, and afterward heard them ask after the kids (or garden or pets) of the offended party.

That’s how I was brought up. I kind of remember all my friends being brought up this way. I’m sure I was wrong. You know why? The study also found that children who behave well at home are often hellions out in public. And who among us doesn't remember all those repressed, super-religious kids who went nuts for drinking and sex in college? Hell, high school. Sixth grade...

When School is Home

Miss O’ wants to explore the merits and downsides of home schooling versus public schooling. (I won’t talk about private school, for simplicity’s sake.) It’s a subject that has come up for me as a result of Facebook posts about home schooling, and in light of the U.S. political conventions of the past two weeks. This probably doesn’t seem connected, but it is. I just have to get there. God knows how I’ll do it.

I’ve known and continue to know parents who home school their kids. There are a number of reasons parents might choose to do this. Three of the reasons have merit.

In one case, parents see a real opportunity. I have a friend, Molly, whose husband was an airline pilot, and so members of his family could fly anywhere for free, on standby—including on international flights, where there were often open seats. Molly had met her husband at a reunion of Peace Corps volunteers, and so between them they had any number of friends who lived all over the world. Look at this combo! Molly realized that with her degrees in engineering and history, she was capable of teaching her kids at home, AND that she and her kids could study ancient Rome and then, you know, fly there. For free. And stay with friends. For free. And then they could return the favor and have the friends visit them, so Molly could take her kids sightseeing right along with the guests. And that is exactly what she did. Her older child, a daughter, was really social, so Molly became a Girl Scout leader, and her son became a Boy Scout. They also had music lessons, dance lessons, that sort of thing. They did this until the daughter was high school age, and her brother was ready for middle school. And by all accounts, they got this fabulous global education and adjusted to public school classrooms just fine.

In a second case, a relative of mine, who lives in a really poor community with a poor school district, had a son who just was falling through the cracks. While her other kids did fine in school, this one was only getting into trouble, struggling in all subjects, and private school or tutoring was just out of the question financially. So his mom found out how to home school him and did it. She spent four years being his high school teacher for every subject, having to learn it all herself in order to do it. At one point, she re-enrolled him, but it was no good—he just fell into all his old habits. Back to home school! And together, they got him to graduation.

In a third case, the child in question is ill. There’s no more to be said about that—it has to be done because of circumstances beyond anyone’s control. There may be additional concerns, too. My friend Susan said to me:

I can add one more reason to homeschool, and that is learning disabilities. Not always, of course, because sometimes the school system is fabulous. But I run a Twice-Exceptional group in Denver for parents of kids who are both highly gifted and learning disabled, and the conversations always touch on schools that can't provide adequate help with the dyslexia or dyspraxia or whatever the issue is. When I ran a homeschooling group, a large percentage of the boys had ADD. By being homeschooled, they had short classes, with lots and lots of activity breaks throughout the day.

In all of these cases, home schooling makes complete sense to me. Sometimes it's a really useful, even necessary, option.

Now to where it really bothers me. It’s a personal prejudice of mine, which I freely admit, but I have to explore it nonetheless, maybe even more so because of that.

It’s on Facebook that I see the posts: Parents who home school their kids, who boast of the wonderful quality family time, how wonderful their kids are, how smart, how much they are learning together. These parents are Christian, invariably, as they also post about Sunday school attendance and evangelical principles. They are also conservative politically, proudly announcing how their 10-year-old daughters support Paul Ryan because he is Pro Life and would never kill a fetus.

And that, for me, is where I move from suspicious of all this wonderfulness to plain old disgusted that a 10-year-old is weighing in on a complex personal and sexual issue that rests with an anonymous woman, her doctor, and her god.

"It says here, Kitten, that a fetus..." 

(I'm trying to imagine what would happen if I taught such things in my public school classroom.)

A Little Story

So years ago I got a kid in my sophomore Humanities (enriched English) class who had been home schooled all his life up to that point. His guidance counselor had sent a note around to let all his teachers know that he might need a little extra support. (Now keep in mind that he is one of about 140 or so students I will have that year, all of whom have stories and needs, while I teach my three preps of, say, Humanities 10, English 9, and Theater Production, and direct three plays for the drama club of 150 or so additional students.)

The kid, whom I’ll call Paul, was as sweet a kid as you can imagine. He had this real calm about him, and an almost total lack of anxiety or, for that matter, intellectual curiosity. When he didn’t turn in his first assignment, I asked him about it as I returned papers. He seemed lost. “What assignment?” and then “Oh, I guess I didn’t feel like doing it.” He was very pleasant about it. So Miss O’ had to take him aside and explain, kindly but firmly, that it just didn’t work like that. “Well, I’ll turn it in tomorrow,” he offered. And Miss O’ had to explain that it just didn’t work like that, either, as she was the hard ass teacher who never accepted late work. However, Miss O’ not being a douche, she made an exception because all of this was new to Paul.

By the middle of the second quarter, it was clear that this whole “structured school” business was not working out for Paul. He had a D in my class, and probably every class, but his contributions to discussions on stories were superb. He was insightful and assured. And while he couldn’t always manage to turn in written work, he was really trying. One day I got a glimpse into his backpack as he was “filing” one of his rare returned papers, and there was the messiest mound of cast-off loose leaf you ever saw, shoved above and between notebooks and textbooks. I made him an offer.

So later that week, Paul came to the auditorium after school, where Mrs. Williams and I were directing the fall play. I found a folding table in the back, set it up, and told Paul, “We have to get you organized.” As the drama club rehearsed, I had Paul take out all his papers and organize them by subject. I told him to get me when he finished. Then I told him to organize each of the piles by date, either oldest to most recent,  or the other way around, whichever made sense to him. He did.

“Do you have a notebook or folder for each subject?” He did not. I had brought in extras (rescued from locker cleanouts the year before—I’m resourceful that way, and was given this tip by lots of other teachers. One of our end-of-year duties was to help clean out lockers). I told him to pick one notebook for each subject. I had a marker and labels, and we labeled each notebook. We wrote the class period on them, too. “You know how I have a folder for each class’s returned work on the wall?” He nodded. “And you’ve seen how I have a matching folder for each class’s work they have just turned in?” I saw the light bulb go off! I showed him how he could use colored post-its to make tabs to divide each notebook into areas for notes, returned work, and homework pending. He looked astonished. I actually think he teared up at one point.

“I, uh, I never had to do this before,” he said.

“Of course you didn’t,” I said. “You should have seen me falling apart when I was first teaching." All this packed up, I added, "Now you know how to do it, but it takes practice to keep up with it. Just make sure you catch up on it every week. Stay with us after school here whenever you want, if it will help.” And he did. He even started doing tech work for the drama club.

All the time he was struggling, his teachers would call home, or request a conference through Guidance, and to no avail. His mother would always say,  very sweetly, “I’ll speak to him, but this is your problem,” and what could you do?

During an international folktale unit toward the end of the year, I had the kids write a story from their life experience (something they had learned a lesson from) and fictionalize it in the form of a folktale. Paul wrote an astonishing story called, simply, “Fat,” about a woman who was too fat to leave her home, and how the world had to come to her. I found myself weeping as I finished it. When I returned the tale to him, I asked, quietly, “Am I supposed to read into this what I read into this?” And he nodded.

And that’s why Paul had been home schooled.

Why Going Public Matters

So, as I have learned, people may home school their children for any number of reasons. Being a parent is hard, and parents have to decide what's best for their kids. It’s a free country. I get it. And still I have to express this: If you are home schooling your kids because you want to protect them, hold them close, and filter everything they watch, experience, learn, encounter—in the form of texts, subjects, people, ideas—you are doing your child not only a tremendous disservice, but you are also robbing society of a possibly astonishing point of view: your children’s. Only by rubbing up against opinions and ideas we have never imagined can we really know what we think or how we feel. Only by witnessing actions we ourselves would not think to take, do we know what we might do. And your kids' participation in a class could offer unique insights to others. 

In addition, when deciding to home school, you are making a choice to limit your kids' exposure to texts, concepts, skill sets, and ideas to your own (limited) knowledge of texts, concepts, skill sets, and ideas. However much you work to become a good teacher, you are only ever you. (Even the formidable Miss O' would not wish herself to be anyone's sole instructor for a decade.) And there is an emotional attachment, you see, that can blind  even the most observant parents to some of their children's needs and failings, things that a trained, more disinterested teacher might see readily. (This includes an understanding of learning disabilities such as dyslexia, which was left undiagnosed for all 12 years of homeschooling for one kid I know. When he went to take a college placement test, it turns out he actually couldn't read. Apparently his mom had been reading his tests, and the texts, to him.) 

It is as an educator, then, that I am responding to a recent spate of anti-politics Facebook posts, all of which are from politically conservative people: The posts scream out for all of us to “get along” or else “stop posting politics!” all but admitting that they themselves are going to vote for the Conservative ticket this November.

It’s a hallmark of these conservative, home schooling parents that they cannot see the irony of their call: Even as they just want everyone to play nice, they don’t really want to engage. They hide their kids from the public world as much as possible, shuttling them between home and church and theme parks—places protected from reality; more than that: places where “reality” is proclaimed not to exist at all. 

And in November, they will slip out of their home cocoons and head to the public polls to vote Republican, never to be heard from until it's time to vote Republican again.

See, I was raised to engage, to talk it out, read up on it, take it on, see what I can do to help the other fellow. I have had countless, fact-filled, example-laden arguments with my parents over gay rights, with my father over abortion rights, with my brothers over who ate all of the pie. Dammit! So, while I am very much an "in your face" and "won't back down when I'm righteous" sort,  I freely admit that I have loads to learn, can change my mind on things, all that; so I am totally baffled by citizens who don't want to engage. We all can't "get along" when a large portion of the national population is in denial of the ideals of a good-sized other portion of the national population. It's incumbent upon ALL of us to read up on ALL of it. It's why I don't "Unfriend" or "Unsubscribe" (the latter I have had to do only once--abusive stuff) on Facebook. Or proclaim how "sick" I am of reading other people's views. (Or seeing their dinners. Or their play by play football analyses...)

In his speech to the Democratic National Convention, President Bill Clinton defined the choice in November:

 “My fellow Americans, you have to decide what kind of country you want to live in. If you want a you’re-on-your-own, winner-take-all society you should support the Republican ticket. If you want a country of shared opportunities and shared responsibilities – a we’re-all-in-it-together society, you should vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden.”

That line wasn’t just a line: It’s the definition of what the conservative and liberal parties, as they exist in America in 2012, stand for. As for some of my conservative Facebook friends–some of whom are home schoolers–I do not see how they can usefully participate in a society that they fear, are "sick" of, and therefore remain ignorant of.

It is through CHILDREN that so many of us grow and learn, through their adventures out in the world, their run-ins with kids and adults, the moments when they have to face the consequences of their own choices and behaviors, without you, the parent, there to forever tell them how wonderful (or how awful) they are, and without you indoctrinating them into your system of beliefs.

As Miss O’ has said a hundred times, if you cannot accept anyone challenging your belief system, you don’t have a belief system. You only have fear.

And as another fine liberal president said, “The only thing we have to fear is, fear itself.”

Another name for fear is willful ignorance, which often manifests itself by banging a verbal tennis racket against your neighbor’s chain link fence. And I'm back to where I came in: No sensible person minds noise when it’s purposeful. Telling someone to stop banging should be the start of a conversation: “It’s making a lot of noise in here, and I can’t work.”

Now let’s say hello, and solve it.

Lay Lady Lay: The Woman Blog

All art today by the incomparable Anne Taintor

Taintor, Paint Her! Sold Her? *Sigh*

Today’s Huff Post headlines...all-male  roll call! Jobs, Romney, Obama, Bernanke, and...Limbaugh rejoicing at a Romney birther joke (ha, ha, what larks!); and as for the women: “Jennifer Greene Brings Back The Slit” and “Jennifer Lopez Goes Strapless.”

Yes, you guessed it: Uber-Feminist and Unapologetic Drinker Miss O’ is going to talk about rape, vaginas, and other girly concerns today. But first she wants to celebrate artist Anne Taintor.

http://annetaintor.com/ati/about/

Anne Taintor, Self Portrait

Anne Taintor is a visual artist who, beginning in 1985—using the magazine advertising models of the 1940s, '50s, and '60s as inspiration and material—made collage art commentary on what it is to be a woman in Capitalist America. Using fresh-faced advertising images and pasted strips of ransom-note styled words, she appropriated mid-twentieth century proto-woman sensibility and turned it on its costume jewelry earring. She became a commercial sensation. I am using her Googled art today to assist me in this foray into feminism, to serve as surrogate for Miss O’s sense of humor. Because Miss O' is fucking pissed off today.  

Just Like a Woman

Last weekend Miss O’ attended a wedding, an actually cool wedding, in a 3^rd Floor photography studio in a fabulous old building on 18^th Street and Broadway, near Union Square. Tall windows, wood floors, white walls, candles resting atop sunflowers inside glass globe holders, all designed by the artist bride, who was 52. She herself wore on her tall, fit but womanly frame a form-fitting gown of ruched silk with cap sleeves and low neck, the silk of a color like champagne tinted with bronze. To this she had added a white hydrangea boa she had made herself. Her face glowed in simple makeup, set off by exotic dangly earrings, the front strands of her long, reddish tresses, pulled back from her face and gathered lightly at the top of her head.

As readers know from previous posts, for all her own clothing simplicity, Miss O’ loves clothes, the artsy quality of them, yes, but really the fabrics. I love to see how creatively people can put together colors, textures, and patterns, accessorize and adorn them, and stride out into the subway world as walking art. I'm not all books and blogs, is what I'm saying.

I myself had never met the bride; I was the date of the man officiating the ceremony. He introduced us beforehand (it was a great open reception to be interrupted briefly for a heartfelt ceremony, followed by dancing and more divine catered nosh), and I gushed (as Miss O’ does), “So nice to meet you, and may I say you look gorgeous!” I looked her up and down. “The silk, the boa!” And she thanked me. Later, my date said, “Oh, I’m so glad you said something. All week her sisters have been telling her they hate the dress, she should wear white, all that, be more traditional.” (This was her first marriage; her groom had been a high school chum, now a globetrotting diplomat, and this was one of those great reconnections. To complete this picture, he wore a French blue and white striped shirt, a blue-based floral tie, and a cream suit in another pattern altogether, windowpane, I think—I adored this groom on sight.)

Later, when I met the bride’s gorgeous mother (wearing tasteful yet glamorous black), I remarked how stunning her daughter looked. Her mom considered me for a moment. “Yes, well, she can get away with it.”

That phrase, “She can get away with it,” uttered cooly by one woman to another woman, and about another woman, too—her own daughter, even—really sticks in Miss O’s feminist craw.

Earlier that evening, just as I had arrived, I had been introduced to another of my date’s friends, a woman he had worked with (now, like him, retired), and I saw her looking at my necklace. I’d chosen a crafted necklace, a small, brown clay face on a thickish cord, which my date had given to me years before (he’d bought it from an artist just because he liked it). I said, “Did you see?” and he said, “I saw!”

The woman looked perturbed. “Well,” she said, “I guess you can get away with it.”

Ain’t I a Woman?

You see it, you hear it, this sort of thing, and far too often, woman to woman: "She can get away with it, I guess." Out of what Miss O’ suspects is a combination of sexual jealousy and personal limitation, remarks like this are foisted upon creative women, unusual women, well, women, by all types of other women every day. It’s not even a backhanded compliment, but more like a mitigated insult, a less direct hit.

As Miss O' has meditated on often in past blogs, since the story of Adam and Eve, women have been blamed for everything that goes wrong in the world:  Eve’s apple munch brought about the fall of man. So powerful was her choice to bite in that even God Himself could no longer see Man on Earth: “Adam, where are you?” They’s some chompers on that girl! And ever since, Woman's wet, yummy pussy—signaled to exist, why, not only via the sway of an ample rump, nay, but also from the lights of her very eyes—drives men to rape and to war. Helen’s was the, er, face that launched a thousand ships, wasn't it?

In the thousands of years since man figured out that the woman goddess did not become pregnant divinely, but rather as a result of ejaculation out of his own hard pisser into her hairy, wet (or even dry) hole, men as a species, rather than honor women for their sacrifice, have chosen instead to subjugate women by using rape and the threat of pregnancy as weapons against them. Over the past two centuries many women have formally voiced outrage against this treatment; in the Western world the watershed may have been Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) where she argued that the only real difference between men and women was access to a good education. (She was the mother of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein.) A movement was launched!

That we women, after 220 years, are but in the middle of the movement, not the end, is MADDENING to Miss O’.

And that this is as much the fault of other women as of narrow-minded men, if not more, maddens Miss O’ beyond the capacity of any asylum to hold her.

Evolved heterosexual men, such as President Obama and my father, Bernie the retired meat cutter from Iowa, are married to smart, strong women who freely share opinions and ideas along with the child-rearing and chore-doing. And there are a lot of good, honest laughs each day because like my mom and dad, Michelle and Barack Obama clearly love and enjoy and respect each other as humans. You would think that the Obama marriage would be the standard against which all others are judged.

But no. I keep forgetting they are black. In America.

“Mrs. Obama should not bare her arms in public.” Do you remember this outcry from GOP women and men in 2009? No? That’s because Michelle Obama knew these comments came from Conservative, Taliban-esque village idiots—the president joked that year at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner: “Michelle has the right to bare arms,” as she pumped her unclad biceps—thereby declaring she would not flinch at the sleeveless dress or top. No one mentions it now.

And yet still we hear any number of female voices oppressing other females, aside from the otherwise excellent Ariana Huffington's tabloid take on women on her Home Page…

“Well, she can get away with it.”

“No woman should get an abortion! I vote Pro-Life!”

“That little Gold Medalist Gabby Douglas really needs to do something about her hair.”

“Oh, lookee! Spikey-high-heeled shoes that will prevent me from running from an attacker!”

“10 Things Men Can’t Stand About You!”

“Did I scream at you lately that I vote Pro-Life????”

“Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.”

“One can never be too rich or too thin.”

“Thirty Days to a Bikini Body!”

“Jessica’s Dress Is a Red Carpet FAIL!”

“Please, let a politician in Washington, D.C., take away my legal right to my own body! It’s too hot for me to handle by myself!”

The messages all amount to the same thing: If society keeps a woman distracted—by insecurity in her own looks, the inadequacy of her own body for sexual allure, her sense of being too dumb, too powerless—or guilty, using religious winches to pull her head up inside her own womb, or that woman's, over there—then men in power can play money sports all day, whether it’s high-stakes Wall Street gambling or campaigning to take society’s taxes to spend on cronies through a democratic, corporate-run, “free” election. That is the game. And, Ladies, it is a game.

The truth is, too many women do not realize their own power. Years ago, I was playing touch football at a drama picnic when I was a teacher, and I was "covering" the QB, who happened to be the actual QB on the varsity team. He paused. "Miss O', I am genuinely afraid of you." I looked at him, as only Miss O' can, and said, "Because you have no idea what I'm gonna do." And he nodded. Physically, I was no match for him. But it didn't matter.

I really do contend that there is nothing more frightening to a power-hungry, money-lovin’ man than a smart woman who is paying attention, knows her own strength, and, as Churchill might say, past whom nothing gets. So Strategy Number 1 for Men Who Desire Money and Power: Keep the Fillies Down. That's more than half the population, after all. And that works for a while, what with the whole rape and pregnancy threat. (One of these days, we women will engineer a way for men to get pregnant when anally raped by other, larger men, and a new day will dawn.)

Pardon me while I repeat:

Akin for a Fight

Republican Rep. and Missouri senatorial candidate Todd Akin, I am not going down your road today. We’ve spent the past week saying everything that needs saying about your asinine, but wholly honest, comments with regard to women and their inability to govern their own bodies, including understanding when a so-called “rape” has occurred. The Christian Republican truth, like the Taliban truth, is that “rape” could only exist if a woman had a right to her own body. She does not.

Here’s a quick visual aide: http://www.happyplace.com/17543/introducing-the-todd-akin-legitimate-rape-kit

Because it just makes so much sense!

Say You, Say Me

What Miss O’ is closing with today is a phenomenon known as Stockholm Syndrome. I think this nation is in the throes of a terrible case of it. Here’s a definition from the Wiki:

Stockholm syndrome, or capture-bonding, is a psychological phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and have positive feelings towards their captors, sometimes to the point of defending them. These feelings are generally considered irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims, who essentially mistake a lack of abuse from their captors for an act of kindness.[1][2] The FBI’s Hostage Barricade Database System shows that roughly 27% of victims show evidence of Stockholm Syndrome.[3]

Stockholm syndrome can be seen as a form of traumatic bonding, which does not necessarily require a hostage scenario, but which describes "strong emotional ties that develop between two persons where one person intermittently harasses, beats, threatens, abuses, or intimidates the other."[4]

Battered-wife syndrome is an example of activating the capture-bonding psychological mechanism, as are military basic training, fraternity bonding by hazing, and sex practices such as sadism/masochism or bondage/discipline.[5][6][7][8]

Here's how I came by my theory: At the time of World War II, America did not have a Military Industrial Complex, as Eisenhower would come to call it (and warn against it in 1960). America, being huge and surrounded not only by two oceans, but by peaceable Mexico and Canada to south and north, respectively, was politically isolationist. Except in our (quiet, here) rape and pillage of the natural resources of less affluent nations, we kept to ourselves as much as possible. Then with WWII came victory through the atom bomb, and U.S.A #1 began its insistent drumbeat.  Just as those global humans who were oppressed by the U.S. would go on to oppress themselves by donning Western suits, tee shirts, or blue jeans—all while drinking stomach-destroying, refreshing Coca Cola as we missioned our Puritan Christian Capitalist ethos through the "good works" of our most pious disciples—we, too, began to identify with ideologies that we sought to snuff out.

This could be great—and, really, it's too bad we didn’t identify with the Native Americans more, for example—but somehow it’s the power-hungry evildoers who draw us in and spark our imaginations, hence a whole syndrome devoted to it. To cite one example: When it comes to women and their rights (to bare arms, to contraception, to legally own their own bodies), Republicans have begun turning into the very Taliban they purport to want to get rid of. How does the oppressor-identification take hold?

However divergent their political espousals, what the Big Three Oppressive Ideologies—Fascism, Communism, and Theocracy—have in common is that in order to take and remain in power, they must do two things: 1) Silence Dissent; and 2) Scapegoat the “Other.” To effect number 1, they must silence first the women, then the writers, then the teachers and artists and thinkers and scientists. To effect number 2, they must scapegoat first the women, then the immigrants, then the Jews (there’s some kind of global law, apparently), then the gays, and, throughout the purges, the schools.

They use myriad tactics. Whether the oppressive regimes buy the media to put out their propaganda, or use military force, or go door to door preaching damnation, the endgame is the same: They have money and power, and education, and you do not.

A final "tactic" is really a psychological accident. With Stockholm Syndrome, the Oppressed come to identify with, and even revere, their Oppressors. That is, the Oppressor manages to convince the Oppressed, "We are more deserving of life than you are; it's our planet. (Feigning pity) Well, maybe we will let you live. You might work for us. If you're lucky."

Hence the current poll numbers indicating that at least half of the citizens of the United States of America, poor and rich, old and young, sick and well, women and men, are seriously considering electing Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan to the White House. How else to explain the success of these candidates if not Stockholm Syndrome? Their party of Republicans employs the usual arsenal of tactics, short only of military force (so far), to assume control: They play fluffer to the masses, riling up racist, anti-immigrant Americans against the black president with the African father, by cracking birther jokes; they promise to cut taxes for the rich while raising taxes on the middle class (to cheers!), putting even more of the nation's private wealth into offshore tax havens; promise to send even more jobs overseas; declare they will cut all social programs, and end any kind of national health care for all citizens, including Medicare and the defunding of the single most important source for preventing unwanted pregnancies through education, Planned Parenthood; deregulate Wall Street; and slash (er, "privatize") Social Security—and the oppressed followers bend over and thank them for the abuse of all their rights, as the oppressors-in-chief-to-be take all their money. All of this sounds like an article in The Onion: Most every news story and headline now causes Miss O' to shake her head: "How can anyone be this stupid?"

Just so, otherwise intelligent women become self-defeating abusers of other women, following the example of these men, whether putting down successful female athletes, artists, thinkers, writers, scientists, and politicians for their looks (Hillary’s hair!), or indulging in the extreme of insisting that no woman should have a legal right to her own body. Such self-hating women have even been indoctrinated into the “Pro-Life” movement, which is nothing less than an “Anti-Woman” movement. You cannot tell these women that their views are not merely uneducated, but also sick and self-destructive, so sure are they, so true is their faith in the egg-sperm conjunction trumping all other aspects of female human life. Well done, Male-Dominated Catholic Church, well-bowled Male-Run Corporate America. While those little Life-Loving fillies are out oppressing other fillies and voting for you, you can take their money. And maybe their jobs. And then, voila!, you have their independence. Here, too, The Onion has too much competition from real life. "Women should not have choices in their lives" is the message, and as Miss O' sees women nodding in agreement, she can only marvel, "How can any woman be this stupid?"

Keep the condescension on "high," and they won’t know what hit ’em. We're goin' to Stockholm!

And thanks to the corporate-owned Media Machine, the would-be oppressors say what they'll do and how they will work to enact it (actual quote from PA Republican House Majority Leader Mike Turzai: "Voter ID is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania. Done."), all in full view of the country and the rest of the planet, interrupted only by commercials urging us to buy stuff we cannot afford. 

Even the act of voting has been made suspect.

Legitimate rape, indeed. Only if we let them get away with it.