Tag Archives: politics

Pat Day 2020

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Social distancing

Every year, well actually a lot more than that, I think of Pat, the champion mother and unsung iconoclast, not that one usually sings about iconoclasts. March 15, her birthday, she would have been 91, it’s a day I will always mark, a day I will hold in high regard.

This year, this crazy fucking year, I cannot not think of Pat. She would still be getting newspapers delivered, probably. But, she’d also subscribe to Apple News or something else. Not just surfing news websites, she’d be swimming in news sites. There would be too much news to risk missing it.

Her hatred of Donald Trump would be full of righteous rage. She wouldn’t stop pointing out all of the pasty smug faces of evangelists selling their souls within Trump’s orbit. The whitest of white, holier than holiest roller Pence, I think she’d just mock his weasel face and feel bad for his wife.

Pat would remind us all of the decades of Trump horribleness. She’d remember the ugly divorces in detail, and remind us all of the things that Marla and Ivana said back in the day.

Morons were never safe in her laser sights. But this, the president, I’m not sure there would be enough words in the language for her. In short, in one of her favorite words, she’d be livid.

All of the news and politics and questioning the sanity of the voting population and railing at the GOP aside, and the grumpy old men vying for the Democratic Party nomination also aside, there would be the pandemic. I really wish I could talk to Pat about COVID 19.

As a teacher, at various times with middle schoolers and little, little kids in elementary school, Pat was a hand washer extraordinaire. She packed hand sanitizer before it was ubiquitous and certainly before it became a target for price gouging.

Many of Pat’s extracurricular contributions to the classroom were straight up common sense with a soupçon of ancient crone wisdom. Some kids came to class without basic lessons like hand washing or shirt tucking, and Pat marched them to the sink and the mirror for lessons. She had tissues and wipes as her personal arsenal against kids who came to school sick.

Over the years, she had a lot of colds and at least one case of pinkeye. I’m certain she fought off mountains of contagions, though, more often than she succumbed. Sick days were for wimps.

But, what I truly miss from Pat’s not being here for all of the news headlines of today, the voice I would love to hear, the missing wry observations would be her total embrace (and she was not one for embracing), her enthusiasm for social distance.

I can hear inside my head that phone call. The glee in which she pointedly would tell me (and anyone else who called) to stay away. With books, crosswords, the TV and news, Pat would be just fine all alone, at least until the coffee ran out.

So, for Pat and to spite the president for whom she absolutely would not have voted, wash your GD hands. And stay home.

It ought to be a holiday

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Every year, well more frequently than that, I think about my mother. I think about her on the Ides of March, the portentous day in which Brutus stabbed Caesar and my mother was born. Not the same year, mind you, as I’m not tapping this out on my ancient Roman computer.

Actually, it was portent upon portent for old Pat. She was born on the Ides of March the year of the stock market crash for the Great Depression. She was meant for great things.

So, another anniversary rolls around.

I like to remember the ways in which Pat stood out from the crowd. Or in my warped and selfish and self-absorbed brain, the ways in which Pat affected me and stood out from the crowd.

Today’s memory is tied to the current season of my manual toil. OK, typing and sitting at a desk isn’t manual labor, but some days it grinds you just the same. I got callouses on my tappy type finger tips.

At work these days the pesky little papers (now computer files) that once a year worker drones planet-wide, or at least U.S.-wide, bemoan are due — the annual performance reviews. The neat little report where you and your boss get to write out how you’re “meeting expectations” and otherwise doing what a cog does when one is employed.

You say to yourself right about now, I can hear you breathing and thinking, you say, but how does that relate to Pat. Surely, she was not your boss, apart from the sense in which we are all subordinates to our mothers.

Well, here’s the thing. I might be one of the only people rambling around that has written their own performance “self reports” for the decades that I have been employed as a grown up adult, who got their start years before they were allowed to work.

Pat, enmeshed in some heavy duty politics and just short of Brutus-like backstabbing in my town’s school system, turned her typewriter over to her precocious daughter one fine day and asked for her help in word smithing her review. She had to describe her classroom contributions, and since she floated around helping learning disabled kids within other people’s classrooms, she had to talk about that too.

By nature, she was a mix of fierceness on some opinions and topics (ahem, Catholic molesters) and shy reticence on a whole lot more. She complained to those nearest and dearest, but she was way too polite to complain to anyone or anything with any authority, including a cashier at a convenient store. (Although, the school teacher might pop out at any time if said cashier couldn’t do the math to make simple change.)

Real humility, not the false stuff that often passes for humility, was part of her core, and she could not find any words at all to describe what she contributed. She knew what she did, but she couldn’t spin it to advertise her brand.

I could do that for her and with some nudging to not get carried away with florid prose extolling her greatness, together we spoke about her patience with kids in the classroom. Her vast experience. Her gentle but persistent nature. Her true and deep caring for children and learning and education. Her mastery of basic skills and pedagogies and learning methods. That she could set and meet goals until the sun rose and set a hundred years.

She was a champion to a whole lot of kids fumbling in classrooms with dyslexia, a host of other syndromes and disorders, and simply poor study skills.

Pat was also a drill sergeant. No misplaced modifiers, misspellings (which I incidentally just mistyped), prepositions dangling at a sentence’s end, no math not shown happened on her watch. For the stuff where there is a right and wrong way to do it, by god she was going to teach you the right way or die trying.

All of her skills, the ones that made strangers come up to me in high school and beyond and say they knew my mother and that she was great, they were in her heart effortlessly as a teacher.

But, she did suck at telling management what was up. I helped do that for her. I was a kid and it was a fun writing assignment and in truth I had no feel for the politics or fear of the consequences, so I could write without inhibition. She could not. It became an annual ritual in her later years of work.

Now, about a thousand years later, or maybe just shy of that, I have to do the same kind of reports for myself.

So, I sit at my desk and return to the game that I had done at my mother’s typewriter. I right fast and furiously, and I have learned how to advertise my own brand but temper it with a soupçon of self-reflection. I allow for the things I do not know, and I hammer out my strengths. I find the notes of self improvement that are surmountable and demonstrate my good attitude.

I try very hard not to by cynical. But, for that to happen, I do not dwell, I do not agonize. If I spend over 15 minutes on the thing, at about 10 minutes in, I walk away until my head is in the game and I give it only 5 minutes more.

It’s impossible to tell your boss that in addition to my 25-30 years of doing the things for myself, I might have done 10 years more. We breeze through the things, the virtual online handshake is done and another year will pass.

And my highest proof of mastery were the words of my attorney, the one I hired on account of my work at the time not really feeling the love, the labor lawyer who helped me out of a jam. That besuited gentleman pulled all of my Human Resources records out of the belly of the employment beast, and he went through each paper with the loving care that an hourly fee will get you.

Upon sage and learned analysis, he proclaimed that while many a person had come through his office doors with a sad story to tell about the workplace, almost all of them had some marks in their permanent records. But my file, the years of reviews and meetings, they were a pristine and glimmering example. He said in all his years of lawyering he had never seen such stellar performance reviews.

I don’t know who you are, but I just might hate you

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I got called out for not writing anything political in politically charged year, a politically charged month. Fair enough, I am mad as hell, and I know full well that I live in a bubble that shelters me from morons.

The obvious target of my hatred right now are the so-called undecided voters. But, like some of what is implied here in this article from The Week, I’m not sure that they exist. All of the focus groups and idiots getting their 15 seconds of fame on the news channels are probably just happy to wave at the cameras. Maybe a chunk of them won’t even bother to get off their fat asses and get to a polling place on Election Day, when they aren’t guaranteed any camera time.

Nope, I think my anger is mostly at the real, live, breathing, pearl-clutching, hyperventilating ladies of the GOP. I say “ladies,” because I hate that word and everything my women’s studies reading ever taught me about the coded meaning of it. Sit like a lady, act like a lady, be quiet like a lady, allow yourself to get stomped on like a lady. For a few women, the language sadly still fits.

Here’s the thing, my sisters, you folks out there rocking a cootch not a dick between your legs, this shit is real and Romney and Ryan do NOT have your back.

Abortion is a loaded term with all sorts of shit laid on it that has nothing to do with what it is. Normal women get abortions. In every layer of society, every historic period (and most certainly in prehistory), always and forever in mankind, just like there has always been sex and hookups, there have been unwanted pregnancies. Here’s some factual information from actual research: http://www.prochoice.org/about_abortion/facts/women_who.html.

By all means, be against it in your own life. Help yourself, help your family, help your friends, help anyone you can work out what is best for them. Always remember, always, that the only way to really be able to do the right thing and make the right choices for yourself, for your family, for your friends, for whoever matters to you, is in a society where you are goddamned allowed to make a choice. And, in a society that recognizes your rights and supports your choices.

When weasels like Paul Ryan are about your business, when they want to put their noses in your uterus, and they really do want that, you have lost that choice. Keep weasels out of your vaginas, my sisters. It’s the right thing to do.

Oh, and while I’m ranting about weasels like Ryan, if you are a woman or a human being who doesn’t despise women (or children for that matter), you really should look up the bill he supported, the Sanctity of Human Life Act.

If life starts the moment of fertilization, that warm little instance when the sheets are still damp or the petri dish is still in the scientists hands, and we have laws weighing in on that instance, a lot of crazy shit happens in our modern world. Tagg Romney gets locked up for the criminal he is for participating in in vitro fertilization. Yup, we got contraband grandkids for Mitt and Ann.

And, any of us who have messed in the voodoo that is birth control pills, even if you did it to control migraines, acne, anemia or all sorts of hormonal things, you be committing a crime. A lot of pills work by giving the fertilized egg no place to call home and settle.

A real life thing that happened to me, which made me realize there are folks out there who truly don’t see eye-to-eye on this one. In my world of earning a living, I have to answer a phone from our company website. Where I work is involved in some huge human issues, and one of them involves women and health. That phone number on our webpage is a honeypot for attracting people with time to talk about the one issue that blows their skirts up; my job is pretty much only to answer the phone with respect.

So, an older, female, not unkind voice greets me on the line. Dare I say, a voice past the childbearing years. I am informed that the owner of the voice has read our website with great interest and in depth. It’s wonderful that we are doing good works around the world and helping poor people. I hear it in her voice, the wind up, the setting a snare, baiting the trap, she’s made calls before. She is kindly setting me up for what her real agenda is. Did I know that where I work is helping to kill babies?

The upshot was, as I good-naturedly took the hits knowing that there could be no victory in arguing against someone so strong in her convictions, she truly and absolutely believed distributing contraception is baby killing. She explained to me in detail how some contraception is a form of abortion, and it needs to be stopped.

At the end of the day this woman, who know doubt has a life and smiles gently and laughs with family and friends over sweetened iced tea and a good Sunday dinner, probably is not a monster. She wants to help babies and the world. I’m sure she wants to do right and good.

However, the rhetoric has gotten out of hand. The heat, the lies from cynical bastards who don’t really care about people, who themselves quell their best “Christian” impulses with back room deals guaranteeing good money for their investments, have taken hold.

They don’t want to protect Catholic women working at a Catholic university, as they claim because her religion is being attacked. They want to fight universal health care, because it cuts into the profit margin of pharmaceutical and insurance companies.

They don’t hate the birth control pill, because they so love the potential souls that never become babies. They hate it, because free women, able to make their own decisions on family planning, are an economic force with a voice, who will shake their status quo.

If they really cared about babies, if they really cared about women, if they really wanted equality, if they really wanted to help women in any way, they would support universal health care. Instead of vitriolic protests with photos of fetuses, hyped rhetoric and downright lies, they would support daycare centers, good, practical sexual education, preventive health care, women’s shelters, stronger laws and prosecution against human trafficking, domestic violence and child abuse.

If they supported women, the GOP would shut up their own kind, people like Rush Limbaugh. They would make sure their daughters grow up more like Libby Dole, giving them education, support and strength. They’d help get the word out that there are so many more choices beyond 16 and Pregnant, Teen Momor Honey-fucking-Boo Boo.

If you are a woman, vote. Vote for the people who have your back. Vote for the people who think you can make decisions for yourselves, and don’t try to construct a world where forced counseling and vaginal ultrasounds are for your own good.

Vote for the people who just might make a difference with equal pay. Or don’t need binders to know that there are qualified women.

Obama/Biden, ladies. Obama/Biden.

Politicking on my couch

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Here’s my new routine, debate style. Fire up my computer, fire up the TV, Twitter, watch, watch CurrentTV, read political weblogs, watch videos on people’s weblogs and twitters, watch CNN, watch MSNBC, slip in Lehrer if M. leaves the room and remote, watch more, read more.

I’m on information overload. I even read Maureen Dowd today. I normally don’t dig her schtick much, but I think we all need to remember her closer, “True mavericks don’t brand themselves.”

Although, that might presuppose those guys using a dictionary. Amusingly, my latest read in the weblogosphere, because it’s going to be my hometown news, threw out this post and link. Apparently the actual Mavericks, the descendants, are going for Obama and hating on the misuse of the family legacy.

And, while the rhetorical overkill is bringing me down, reliable Donna Brazile provides a reminder of what’s important. Watch her closing at the New Yorker Festival.

Apart from the presidential thang, I’ll be keeping the uplift in mind while striking down California’s proposed gay marriage ban.

Vote. Everyone. Please.

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On HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” Andrew Sullivan, for whom normally I have no great love, at all, made a great point. We ALL every last one of us need to vote, and we HAVE TO CONVINCE five friends to also vote. We have to NOT LET THIS WOMAN BE VICE PRESIDENT.
palin fish

Pretty much my readership of three here features two voters and a foreigner. But, if there is anyone unsure, vote early and often against Sarah Palin. I won’t say you gotta vote Obama, but my womb, strangers’ wombs, polar bears, the Russians outside her kitchen window, and anyone ever who thought “What a fucking idiot” should all be considered, and the right thing must be done.

(Hbee, I’m looking in your direction. Put aside the retardation of DNC squabbling. Just say to yourself “President Sarah Fucking Palin.”)

Have we learned nothing from the Hey, he seems like a great guy that you could have a beer with school of political thinking?

She’s a neo-con, she’s a fucking Pentecostal, which even other Christians think can get pretty freakshow what with speaking in tongues, faith healing and charasmatic multi-day prayer fests (which I’m sure help you along to that “drunk with the spirit” state).

Politics aside, though, what irks me is she’s apparently a wiz at pop culture, ‘cuz that will really fucking help at state dinners, and worse she still is living in her high school yearbook.

Old Sarah and I are the same age. At 44 years young, she’s actually about two weeks older than me. You know how many people I still talk with from BHS class of 1981 at all, let alone with frequency? Two. (Not including my immediate family.) You know how many I would give cush, appointed government jobs without any relevant experience apart from a love of cows? Yeah.

I come from small-town, middle-class white America. (Although, my small town is ginormous compared to Wasilla, AK.) I’m pretty sure most of my high school graduating class have gone on to do a few other things. I’m certain not many of them are still boosting their championship ball handling over a quarter of a century ago as a resume highlight.

Fucking, GAH. Seriously. If you met someone at a party or cookout or bar or a prayer service or grocery store who was over 40 and talked about the lessons they learned as the “Barracuda” in the high school gym, you’d think “What a fucking loser,” and you’d move on. Hell, by college, I remember going on two dates with a guy who kept talking about his disappointment at prom (only a couple years before) and I thought it was a bad sign. Insert 20+ more years, and I’d be running to the door.

My resume goes back 10 years, because I’ve had, you know, jobs and experiences and shit in the last 27 years. My high school isn’t on it. (Maybe the discrepancy is I graduated in 1981, and she graduated in 1982. That could be the essential cutoff year.)

You know what a local, inexperienced, talkative, charasmatic hockey mom with a vague interest in politics and aspirations beyond her town would be great at? Community organizer.

What a day

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Man, oh fucking man. Today was one of those days when shit didn’t stop and a late start meant I wasn’t no never catching up.

My own damn fault on the late start, too. I woke up the same time as usual, but I had left my car at work and had to hoof it. A ten minute ride is a lot shorter than a 45 minute walk
The plus side (and it’s delusional) is I haven’t yet talked to anyone impressed by old Sarah Palin. The delusion part is due to my chunk of the United States being about non-wedge, non-swing as you can get. I’m pretty sure when the ballots are counted the Bay Area just might swing left.

We need a summer place in Toledo, so we could vote where it might matter.

We’re maybe kind of sort of closer to deciding whether to buy a house. We’re getting in real tight to the rental/mortgage break even point. Better yet, thanks to fucked up corporate greed and mismanagement in housing, the now government owned Fannie and Freddie, we’re looking at the possibility of a measly 5-6% interest rate.

Holy smokes. This might be the second time in my life I might ride the misery left behind in a Republican Bush presidency into personal success. Holy Fuck. I hope that does mean I have to join the GOP.

Been awhile

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After a week (or a tad less) back at work, and some much needed sleep, we’re almost back into our routine (i.e. boring) lives. Thank god.

The fun thing back at work was due to a leave that meant I hadn’t seen my boss since before Christmas, and left on vacation right before we would see each other again, a few official things were a tad delayed in our office. Among them was the official word on annual salaries. Right when I came back, voila, letter about my salary. It was good news all around and a bit surprising. (Well, not that surprising, since for a full year there’s been convos about how the work I was doing didn’t quite match the cash, since the position I was hired to had once been filled by someone half my age with no prior experience.)

Of course, because of past experiences with my so-called real jobs, I’m in a bit of neurotic zone. If past performance is an indicator of future success, then I have a couple more years of impressing the powers that be and taking on more responsibility so my value and earnings increase. Then, I will flame out in an amazing blaze of glory. I wonder how it will be this time.

On the political front, now that I am back in the U.S. of A., I’m in awe of how truly fucked up the Bill and Hill show has become. They were the ones with the campaign chops, the machine, the ultimate strategies. Now it’s a bit sad. Like a prize fighter staying in the ring that one last fight past his prime. Or some other hackneyed metaphor.

Once Obama seemed like the unlikely young also ran, now it seems like his game to lose. My feminist side does weep that Hillary was the best we could do at this historic moment.

Meanwhile, is anyone fucking surprised that McCain is cozy with lobbyists. I don’t believe the grumpy, old man nailed Vicki Iseman, mostly because she doesn’t look the sort who wants to wake up and wash the old man smell off herself.

What amazes me is the McCain hubris. Other politicians according to his world run the risk of being tainted with their associations with fundraisers, corporations, lobbyists and whatnot. But, not John, nope he’s impervious Apparently, all other pols are weak-willed and susceptible, but he has integrity.

I mean obviously, anyone who learned such a lesson in corruption by helping to fuck up the savings and loan industry would now be a pillar among men, right? Someone like that would never again associate with questionable characters and appear to peddle his influence. Oh wait, he would, but he’d no better and his new lobbying friends are the good guys.

Other than that, same old, same old, and I’m happy to be back in it. I also have photos up here: http://gallery.mac.com/dee_rob and here: http://dee-rob.com/zenphoto for different viewing experiences (and so as not to direct co-workers who asked for pics to this particular site of web ignominy).

M. particularly likes these shots.
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I can’t believe that his aunt asked if I wanted “black jelly,” and I said yes.

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