Goddammit to fucking hell I can't write. But I can't sleep either. I've had this idea roiling in the back of my mind this past week and I realize at least one of the reasons why I feel like I can't write is because I would have to write some things that ain't purty.
Something has been going around the blog-wheel this week. And I don't think it's just me.
Maybe because so many of my blogspot confreres are beginning to post more on photoblogs, I've noticed that some people (I don't mean you) insist on telling the camera how to see them.
Maybe it was the third message I got that day that began with either 'party people' or 'freak'. As if those are the only possible names for any coalition I would belong in.
That isn't my problem though. I'm sick, literally surfeited, on the consumption of empty images.
Item One - Cheney was always just a bad bullshitter , "Why Cheney's Hunting Accident Matters" from GNN in which someone has the balls to say we want to see Darth Vader out of this hollow, pampered, psychotically deluded and pathetically paranoid poser who is less
a shootist and more a fat boy who dances when the House of Saud shoots at our feet.
"However pathological the macho death-cult of guns is in this country, the people who have taken the trouble to learn anything about firearms at all now know that Cheney is what my dad used to call a pig-hunter and a fool that traipsed around after his “one beer” lunch on the quail preserve with his finger on the trigger. He’s no more a hunter than Bush is a cowboy.
He’s just another stupid, pampered, autocratic narcissist like Bush—bullshitting his way through high office—and leaving bodies in his wake with as little concern for them as he does for 70 pheasants. In the age of postmodern politics, when the impression is sovereign, the gendered spell is broken for a moment when the costume slips".
Amen. Despite my 'freak' image, even if you do an interest search on my profile, you wouldn't guess that I'm familiar with gun safety. And even a nearsighted vegetarian treehugger like me knows the first fucking law of firearms is don't point the goddamed gun at anything you don't want to kill.
The second rule is taking responsibility.
More on the Quail Slaughter as Metaphor for the Iraq Fuckaround , from Tom Englehardt, Truthout.
See, we want easy images. "I always wanted to pretend to be an architect" said George on that pre-Internet classic series Seinfeld. If Jerry and the gang were around today, they'd be on MySpace fronting like whatever they wanted, and discussing politics with other 'freaks' and 'party people' preselected from their own self-flattering profile descriptions.
Which is the other thing I saw happening this week - We are noticing the blogs we're reading.
And we are asking, who isn't writing and why not.
Sometimes it becomes very difficult for me to politely point out why I don't want to join yet another group politcal blog.
The phrase 'we shot a bear' comes to mind.
Steve Galliard who is like an angry little canary in the salt mine of my soul, says it perfectly , in this pull-quote from "Us Coloreds Don't Be Bloggin'-
"The Greens were a bunch of college educated progressives who simply talk amongst themselves in the language that hardcore political junkies understood -- but nobody else could understand.
The Green Party was hardcore for the hardcore. It was where political junkies -- who lived and breathed politics -- went because they weren't satisfied with their other options. The Democrats sold out too much, so the Greens fled and started their own party because they just couldn't stand talking to anybody else.
There are many similarities to the problem of the Greens and the problem that the blogosphere faces. Let's face it, political blogs are for political junkies; it's hardcore for the hardcore.
You try telling a friend of yours who isn't as much of a political junkie as you are -- black, white, asian, hispanic, polkadotted, it doesn't matter -- try telling them to read your blog. They'll probably be like.. Yeah, sure, uh huh. Right. They might hit up your blog, or other popular blogs, a time or two, but that's it. Blogs don't speak to people who aren't political junkies.
Saying that blacks are "apathetic" is a racist cop out that shouldn't be tolerated. If bloggers expect our little universe to become more diverse, we're going to have to learn how to talk to people other than ourselves. Otherwise, "netroots" and the Green Party will share a common fate."
So what am I to do? I'm too busy with my own life for a change to read blogs, let alone write mine. And I'm becoming less and less careful about hiding my dismay at the creeping narcissism and exclusion of the groups aligned against Bush.
So I rented a movie.
RENT.
Oh my freaking god I want to wring my hands and weep at how short this movie fell from what it could have said! But let me say only - I was moved.
A real artist (as opposed to the obnoxious, emotionally retarded, self-indulgent, untalented and Yoko Ono-esque faux bohemian posers in the script) recognizes truth and art wherever she sees it. I didn't expect the Tragic Yet Sassy Gay stock character to move me, and she did.
The Doomed Queen not only was the one true life character, she was the only one with a real claim to revolutionary behavior. She took in a brother artist when he was wounded, Christ's own definition of charity. And she had the most high-profile eccentricity (hello, Hispanic drag queen) but also the only one with the coalition-builiding ability to co-exist. "Today 4 You, Tomorrow 4 Me" was not only the one listenable song on the soundtrack. It is also the most valid revolutionary creed proven in the past century.
The Farm Midwives didn't throw fetuses at pregnant teenagers looking for abortion. They taught themselves humane childbirth and abortion-repair tecniques. They offered to deliver babies for free, take care of them until the mother wanted them back, and then return them. They revolutionized health care in Tennessee and later the whole country.
The Veterans Against Involvement in Vietnam didn't spit on folks with a dog in the military fight like a son's death, to make them favor the war. They drew up visiting schedules to go see even the most depressing mental cases forgotten in VA hospitals, and they forged alliances that changed our foreign policy, and the military.
My son got into this site yesterday to which I can only say, now you're talking.
And, before it closed down, there was a cosmically diverting site up of Israeli cartoonists outdoing each other with sacreligious comix.
I send candy to women soldiers and write postcards to prisoners in Guantanamo. I interview veterans for the Veteran's History Project. I try to co-exist.
It's not much, but for now, it's easier than writing.
I'm not going to be around like I was. I'm not going to do it for you anymore.
There is no such thing as a 'party person'.
And 'freak' doesn't mean 'other people'.
This is still a democracy.
Someone is YOU.
Now go talk to someone who's never heard of the Coen Brothers.
