In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Month: December 2007

Benazir Bhutto assassinated

The first female leader of Pakistan was killed on Thursday. She was 54. More than a dozen bystanders were killed with her.

Bhutto was certainly a polarizing figure, but however justified criticisms of corruption, hypocrisy and politicking may be, the fact remains that Bhutto was a liberal, secular leader and a strong, intelligent and courageous woman who led her country two times and spoke out against the current regime. And it’s a shame she’s gone.

It remains to be seen how this will impact the future of Pakistan. I hope it serves as a wake-up call that lots of things need to change, but I suspect it will do just the opposite. As one commenter at Pakistaniat says:

As long as Pakistan can only have change brought about by individuals, Pakistan will not change. What we need are institutions – and the political parties should not be immune from this requirement. The parties need to be depositories of certain ideals and policies, that their elected leadership can sell to the nation and implement when they come to power.

Were that the case, there would be no need to “assassinate” individuals, since the party itself, and the ideals it represented, would be undamaged, with new leadership ready to step in.

Liza has more thoughts about Bhutto as a feminist icon for the developing world. Juan Cole has analysis of what this means for Pakistan and the United States. Both are well worth a read.

And I’ll echo Adil Najam’s sentiments: Today, in shock, I can think only of Benazir Bhutto the human being. Tomorrow, maybe, I will think of politics.

Can I have Frank’s job?

I harbor a not-so-secret love for Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni. I was thrilled when he reviewed Max Brenner’s, a ridiculous chain hell-hole that moved onto my street last year. But I think Bruni may have topped himself when he took on Cipriani, an insanely over-priced tourist trap that, in Bruni’s words, “exists to affirm its patrons’ ability to throw away money.” And yet they’re offensively cheap about it:

Even in an enclave this expensive, there are things seemingly done on the cheap. I can’t think of a credible motive other than cost saving for serving an appetizer of turkey tonnato in place of veal tonnato. That’s for $27.95.

Although steak Rossini typically involves foie gras, what Harry Cipriani puts on top of a gigantic (and, it should be noted, juicy) filet mignon are chicken livers, chalky when I had them. That’s for $55.95.

I’ve never eaten at Cipriani. I’ve never had any desire to eat there, and I’ve actually only ever known one person in New York who has ever been there, and I’m pretty sure he just had drinks. But I’m glad it exists, simply because there are few things more pleasurable than watching Bruni rip apart a restaurant this thoroughly:

But the people-watching is nonpareil. You rarely see blondness this improbable, cosmetology this transparent, wealth this flamboyantly misspent.

And while that isn’t cause enough to visit Harry Cipriani, it’s consolation if you must.

If you do happen to visit (or live in) New York and you’d rather avoid getting suckered by $40 overcooked spaghetti, check out Bruni’s list of some of the best, simple eats of the year. I will strongly second Momofuku (the Ssam bar and the noodle bar), and put in a great word for dell’Anima — I went there last week and it was incredible. Can I just drop out of law school and be Frank Bruni for a living?

The Longest Weekend of the Year

Brownfemipower has posted about her own personal relationship with Santa:

I just want the permission to sit and swear and throw chewed gum at all the happy people wearing bells and green and red sweaters. I want to laugh when my angel gets drunk and farts a wet drunk fart at all the shiny happy people when he bends over to pick up the chips I keep dropping on the floor. I want to flash my five foot long stretch mark infested pancake wanna be breasts at all the cute 20 year olds and scream at them THIS IS YOU IN FIVE YEARS BABY!!!!!!!! I want to sit in the dark corner with other outcasts and rejects and plot the overthrow of Christmas together. I want to be the obnoxiously loud group that everybody rolls their eyes at and wishes wasn’t there–because I’m in just that sort of mood.

Anytime, BFP. It’d be a lot more entertaining than, well, any version of A Christmas Carol that doesn’t star Patrick Stewart (why was he the only cast member with good teeth?).

It’s funny. I’ve never hated Christmas and I enjoyed this Christmas–which is why I decided to post over here instead–but I do usually feel like spending this time of year in bed. It’s not a dislike specific to Christmas so much as a sense that Christmas comes at an inconvenient time. My family seems to feel the same way: tired, chilly, overworked, often sick. So our Christmas tradition is to hole up at home for three or four days, eat a ton of sugar and milk fat, drink a lot of heavily spiked egg nog, and watch stupid–chiefly nondenominational–television until our brains leak out our ears. If we feel up to it, we go and see something awful at the multiplex.

Then, we’re ready to start again.

Merry Christmas!

I’m back in beautiful Seattle for the first time in a year, and it feels good. Last night my mom, sister and I went downtown to look at the lights and window-shop, then came home with all intentions of going to Church but ended up cooking (crab cakes and coconut-curry mussels) and then watching Act I of “When the Levees Broke” (see it if you haven’t). Today we’re doing the usual slow Christmas breakfast followed by presents, and my auntie is coming over for a dinner that my little sister will be cooking. I asked for some furniture for my apartment for Christmas, so I suspect that I have mostly socks and maybe a new toothbrush under the tree, and I’ll have to wait for my return to New York for UPS-Santa to deliver the goods. But it’s nice being at home with my sister (who is the funniest and most entertaining person I know) and my mom — who has been bending over backwards to make our time home absolutely perfect, from baking fresh bread for us when we walk in the door to stocking the fridge with all of our favorite foods to even getting the dog a new Christmas scarf with a jingle bell so that he’ll look cute.

Of course, it is Christmas with the family, so within an hour there should be lots of red wine flowing, and pretty soon I’m sure we’ll all start hearing about my aunt’s crazy times in the Air Force, her stint as a professional hippie in San Francisco (stories which inevitably end with, “…and boy was that a lost weekend”), and her animals (somewhere around 10 cats — a number that is in a constant state of flux and that she can’t even keep track of — a crow, and a raccoon that just had babies).

It’s so good it almost makes up for my mom’s incredibly slow dial-up.

Now, time for goat cheese omelets and coffee. What are you doing for the holidays? Or, if you aren’t celebrating, how are you spending your day?

The best present ever

This news that made me happylakotanation.jpg.
Another story that has been posted all over, so here are the links you should check out for the best coverage:
Nezua

Lakota Secede from United States of America

I GUESS THIS MEANS the Presidential Candidates don’t need to do quite as much campaigning in the Northern plains area of the US?

The Lakota Indians, who gave the world legendary warriors Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, have withdrawn from treaties with the United States, leaders said Wednesday.

“We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us,” long-time Indian rights activist Russell Means told a handful of reporters and a delegation from the Bolivian embassy, gathered in a church in a run-down neighborhood of Washington for a news conference.

A delegation of Lakota leaders delivered a message to the State Department on Monday, announcing they were unilaterally withdrawing from treaties they signed with the federal government of the United States, some of them more than 150 years old.

They also visited the Bolivian, Chilean, South African and Venezuelan embassies, and will continue on their diplomatic mission and take it overseas in the coming weeks and months, they told the news conference.

Lakota country includes parts of the states of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming.

Lakota Freedom Delegation
Kai
No Snow Here
Lucky White Girl

Drummer girls and plastic pedals

“Drummer girls are hot.” It should almost be cliche now, or one would hope. There have been quite a few female drummer role models around for years now: Kate Shellenbach, Meg White, Claudia Gonson and the 9-year old Rachel Trachtenburg all spring to mind, not to mention the classic heartthrob that made me gasp “whoa…. she is sooooo coool” when I was 11:

I’d like to assume that the macho rock days are mostly gone, but it wasn’t too long ago that a percussion-pounding lady I used to date would constantly get stopped at the door because bouncers on the Lower East Side didn’t believe she was the drummer in a band with four guys. Sadly, I’m sure those attitudes still persist in some circles. So… I actually don’t have any exciting media links to share with you about women being stereotyped as bass players or otherwise dismissed in the music industry. I mostly wanted to talk about Rock Band, the fantasy make-believe land where I’ve been playing a lot of drums lately, and generally pretending to be Watts. (I looked it up, and Watts has no first name! Nice.)

Read More…Read More…

To all my sisters on welfare*

*Edited to add this observation from Shannon:

A long time ago, a rabbi said that those who are last will be first. I think he meant those who are last in your hearts will be first in heaven. The single mother who buys hot chips for her kids with food stamps, the illegal immigrant who processed your christmas turkey, and all whose brave faces have collapsed from the strains of modern life.

The last will be first unconditionally- there will not be a case worker determining eligibility for grace. Your old junker won’t count against you- your waning and waxing energy won’t be the reason why you do not receive grace.

In heaven, there’s no court of the worthier than you to judge if your place should go to those who deserve it more. In heaven, there’s no deserve. When you’re at the end of your rope, heaven throws you one without giving you an audit of whether you measure up.

The truth is that heaven can be earth if we love the neighbors we have and who they are today. No one can deserve the mercy and grace of others- they are only to be given freely.

I dedicate this song. To my sisters who had to buy cheap toys at the dollar store, the kind that will be broken by New Year’s. To all my sisters who stood in indifferent lines to get Toys for Tots, who sold plasma to buy a meager Christmas meal, to my sister who can’t afford a tree or ornaments. This song is for you.

The Twelve Days of Welfare

On the first day of welfare
the system gave to me
A worker that never did work

On the second day of welfare
the system gave to me…
No food stamps and
A worker that never did work

On the third day of welfare
the system gave to me…
No call back
No food stamps and
A worker that never did work

On the fourth day of welfare
the system gave to me…
A five hour wait
no call back
no fo-od stamps and
A worker that never did work

On the fifth day of welfare
the system gave to me…
No ben-e-fits
A five hour wait
No call back
No food stamps and
A worker that never did work

On the sixth day of welfare
the system gave to me…
One termination
No ben-e-fits
A five hour wait
No call back
No fo-od stamps and
A worker that never did work

On the seventh day of welfare
the system gave to me…
Maximus* and Workfare
One termination
No ben-e-fits
A five hour wait
No call back
No fo-od stamps and
A worker that never did work

On the eighth day of welfare
the system gave to me…
Phony baloney job search
Maximus and Workfair
One termination
No ben-e-fits
A five hour wait
No call back
No food stamps and
A worker that never did work

On the ninth day of welfare
the system gave to me…
“Motivation” meetings
Phony baloney job search
Maximus and Workfare
One termination
No ben-e-fits
A five hour wait
No call back
No-o food stamps and
A worker that never did work

On the tenth day of welfare
the system gave to me…
Ten angry talk shows
“Motivation” meetings
Phony baloney job search
Maximus and Workfare
One termination
No ben-e-fits
A five hour wait
No call back
No-o food stamps and
A worker that never did work

On the eleventh day of welfare
the system gave to me
A notice of decision
Ten angry talk shows
“Motivation” meetings
Phony Baloney job search
Maximus and Workfare
One termination
No ben-e-fits
A five hour wait
No call back
No food stamps and
A worker that never did work

On the twelfth day of welfare
the system gave to me…
No child care service
A notice of decision
Ten angry talk shows
“Motivation” meetings
Phony Baloney job search
Maximus and Workfare
One termination
No ben-e-fits
A five hour wait
No call back
No food stamps and
A worker that never did work

Written by the amazing moms at Welfare Warriors.

*Maximus is just one of the private, wealthy corporations that now runs welfare in Milwaukee.
crossposted at Super Babymama

Someone needs to go back and read his Dr. Seuss

Another soldier in the War on Christmas misses the point.

Anybody still believing that Father Christmas is a pseudonym for Santa has not yet experienced a close holiday encounter with Mr. Butler and his nonsecular montage here on East Main Street. In Patchogue and, yes, throughout the Town of Brookhaven, whose Town Council authorized a $500 donation to Mr. Butler’s Christmas ’n’ Patchogue committee, he has made a name (and a few enemies) as a senior citizen/activist bent on recreating a very specific sort of Christmas.

Mr. Butler has made his presence felt by persuading the local Chamber of Commerce to rechristen its year-end boat parade the Christmas Boat Parade; planting the word “Christmas” in the name of the garden club’s holiday house tour; spurning the village’s ecumenical tree-and-menorah display at the North Fork Bank Plaza and transforming a vacant lot into a Christmas tribute this year.

“There had to be a Nativity scene,” he said, so he located a hand-carved, life-size, 13-piece Nativity scene for $5,000 and paid for it from his own pocket. There is no Santa: that would send too commercial a message. “The tree may be pushing the envelope, but since it was already there, decorating it felt right,” he said. Decorating the 40-foot tree took two tries, and required assistance from the fire department’s cherry picker.

As for Father Christmas’s helpers, those would be the Knights of Columbus: they pitched in $3,000 for the 800 lights illuminating the fir on Walter Roe’s property that was the village’s official tree until the plaza site took precedence. (Mr. Roe, an insurance broker, supports all holiday displays.) A sound system was installed for weekend caroling. Five hundred people showed up for the opening ceremony on Nov. 24, complete with fireworks — an inauthentic touch, but being a Grucci in-law has its temptations.

Mr. Butler has a word for those townspeople — his roster includes the president of the Chamber of Commerce — who failed to support his take on what constitutes a genuinely merry Christmas: Grinches one and all.

Isn’t it funny how those who fight the phony War on Christmas and are so quick to label those who aren’t slavishly following them “Grinches” seem to miss the bit about how the Whos managed to have Christmas despite the theft of their presents and decorations, because for them, it wasn’t about the trappings.

Just a thought, people: if you need to have the 15-foot-high Nativity scene on municipal property to feel your faith is validated because THEN EVERYONE CAN SEE HOW GODLY YOU ARE, and if you feel that an inclusive “Happy Holidays!” is an affront, then maybe you need to page through the ending of How The Grinch Stole Christmas now and again.