Peripatetic

For months and more, I’ve been wavering about whether or not to just delete the whole blog, to leave it here for posterity (an addition to the world’s growing collection of ghost blogs), or to revive it. I’m still not sure what I’ll do, but since I am wandering again and living up to the name of the blog—and since I have a rare ambient wireless connection here at my dad’s apartment (he still has dial-up, so I have to count on grabbing an open signal from the air)—it seems like a good time to post.

Yep, I’ve uprooted myself and my life yet again. In a little more than two weeks, I’ll be a resident of West Orange, NJ, a place I had never even visited before renting a house there. (I was in East Orange back when Upsala College still existed, many years ago, at a record fair or something at WFMU radio, but that was the extent of my knowledge of the Oranges.) The spouse is still back in Missouri, trying to juggle his long workdays with getting work done on the house so that we can sell it. The cats are there too, though mercifully, they’ll join me when I move in to the house; Bill (and the dog) will follow when they can.

And I have to confess that this peripatetic stuff isn’t as easy as it used to be, or seemed to be once. There are so many weird and scary variables that weren’t there the last few times I uprooted: having to sell a house in a tough market (and it wouldn’t be an instant seller even in a good market), having to find a place where we can have cars and pets and space, having to worry about Bill finding a job when he gets here. And not having the cats with me has been truly traumatic; I’ve given serious thought to packing the whole thing in and going back home, resuming my old job and my old life, and I think most of those thoughts have been triggered by my missing the cats. Not all of them, but most. Is it pathetic that I can’t bear to be away from the kitties for more than a few days? I don’t know, but when you consider that their lifespan is only around fifteen years (if they’re lucky, and it makes me nervous even talking about it), three weeks is a long fucking time.

Last time I moved east, with my first husband, we sold our house at a garage sale (really—our next-door neighbors made us an offer while we were chatting during the sale), we had the promise of an apartment in a brownstone in Park Slope, owned by family friends of my ex, and I never had to leave the cats behind. And my ex’s salary in Minneapolis was so negligible that it didn’t matter that he took a job here that paid even less than the one he’d had in Mpls.; we were still able to get by. At my new job, I’m making far more money than I did the last time I moved here, but somehow, it still doesn’t seem like enough.

And then there’s the New Jersey thing. My job is in Newark, and for a variety of reasons, it seems to make the most sense to find a place in suburban Jersey rather than staying in NYC and commuting by train. The office is in a part of Newark that could be called “emerging,” I guess, and it’s not really that bad…but it’s iffy enough that I wouldn’t want to have to walk to the train station if I were working late; I’d rather be able to just go to the parking lot and get in my car. (Many of my co-workers commute from Manhattan and Brooklyn, though, so my thinking may be flawed there.) Living in Jersey will also allow us more space and a less frenetic pace, and, if I’m being honest, the easy access to familiar stores like Target that we love to patronize is enticing too. (And there’s a Trader Joe’s within easy driving distance, which I’m excited about. Trader Joe’s has snubbed our part of Missouri, apparently forever.)

So we’ll be Jerseyites, and I have mixed feelings about that. It’s not the stigma of living in “Joisey,” exactly; just because I grew up making fun of the state doesn’t mean that I fail to recognize that it has many lovely towns and places. It’s more that I’m worried that a suburban Jersey life won’t feel like I’m back in New York, back home again; it seems more likely to feel pretty much like our life in Missouri, only a lot more expensive. Is that the life I want? I’m just not sure. Of course, there’s no way I can be sure until I actually start living there, and we’re renting, so we won’t be tied to West Orange for more than a year if we don’t want to be. But it’s yet another thing that’s been keeping me up at night.

Geez, this is the whiniest post ever, isn’t it? On the plus side, I’ve already gotten to see one of my two wonderful nephews,* and the opportunity to see them a lot more often is very welcome. And being able to hop on a train or bus (not as easy from West Orange as from some of the neighboring, pricier towns, but still very doable) to check in on my dad and my brother will be great—I’m really looking forward to not having to get on a plane to see my family. I like my new job, and I get the sense that I’ll continue to like it—and if ever I don’t, I’ll have a lot more job possibilities here than I would have in Missouri. So there’s lots to be optimistic about, and I’m trying to focus on that. Not altogether successfully during these first two weeks, but I’ll keep trying.

But I really think I’m too old for this. I’m not making any more cross-country moves for a while, that’s for damn sure. Or at least I hope I won’t have to.

*My nephews, who are now 21 and 17, respectively, are a genuine source of joy in my life. They’ve both turned out to be such amazingly good kids, smart and kind and fun to be with. Not that I would have expected them to turn out any other way, but y’know, they’re kids, and they grew up in a well-heeled New York suburb, and they could just as easily have been brats or snobs or otherwise unpleasant, despite having good parents who raised them well. I know this because a lot of my college friends grew up in the same suburb, and some of them were kind of wrecks. But my nephews, bless them, turned out to be good people, and they make me proud.

Salon’s campaign coverage has been very disappointing lately; there’s been a strong undercurrent of Hillary-worship, a tendency to ignore everyone but Obama and Clinton (just like the mainstream media), and in the last week, a remarkably lame bit of bandwagon-shifting from “We <heart> Hillary” to “We loved Obama all along.” But this little snippet might just be the thing that makes me decide not to renew my subscription. Not just because I’m an Edwards supporter, but because I don’t need to pay money to read this kind of trivia-obsessed non-journalism. I have the entire rest of the fucking media for that.

http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2008/01/07/john_edwards/index.html

(Note the obligatory, oh-so-original comment about Edwards’s hair.) And seriously, did anyone fall for Hillary’s carefully constructed attempt to make herself look more human? The choked-back sob, the little catch in her voice—it was a fine performance, but nothing more. Not to mention that she’s said far, far worse about her opponents.

Addendum: I never write letters to the editor, but this piece made me so mad that I actually posted a comment—but it’s not the one signed by someone with my name and initial; I used an alias, as I always do nowadays whenever I post in public places.

…is nowhere near over; let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The Chimp-in-Chief still has two more years to wreak havoc on the republic and the world, after all. Still, things certainly look a little brighter, a little more hopeful, today. I was convinced that in spite of all the promising polls, the Repugs would manage to pull out all the big important wins anyway. I don’t think I’ve ever been quite so happy to be proven wrong.

And yeah, it’s at least a couple of years and many thousands of casualties too late for that evil bastard Rumsfeld to be gone, but at least he’s gone at last. It may not make an enormous difference in the long run, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still a very, very good thing. Good riddance, Rummy. Couldja take Cheney with you?

A great voice has gone silent. Ann Richards was an inspiration as well as a comic genius, and I will miss her wisdom, energy, and unflappable common sense.

From Salon:

10 reasons we already miss Ann Richards
Ann Richards, the famously silver-tongued and silver-haired former governor of Texas, died Wednesday from complications of esophageal cancer. She was 73. Here’s just some of what we’ll remember and miss about her:

1. Richards used her wit not only disarm her political opponents, but to encourage other women to get into politics: “Let me tell you, sisters, seeing dried egg on a plate in the morning is a lot dirtier than anything I’ve had to deal with in politics,” she said.

2. As a homemaker raising four kids, Richards became politically involved by volunteering on campaigns, including helping elect Sarah Weddington, the 25-year-old lawyer who had successfully argued “Roe v. Wade” before the Supreme Court, to the Texas House. Richards called Weddington the first “out-and-out feminist activist” she’d ever met, according to the Washington Post.

3. Two years after undergoing rehab for alcoholism in 1982, Richards was elected state treasurer, making her the first woman elected to a statewide post in Texas in 50 years. Of her return from addiction, she said: “I believe in recovery, and I believe that as a role model I have the responsibility to let young people know that you can make a mistake and come back from it.”

4. When Richards gave the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 1988 — where she zinged the elder George Bush — “Poor George. He can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth” — she also reminded the audience that she was only the second woman to give the keynote address at the convention in 160 years. The first was Barbara Jordan.

5. Richards may have lost her re-election bid to George W. Bush in 1994, but she beat another rich Texas oilman in her first governor’s race: Clayton “Claytie” Williams, who during the campaign compared rape to the weather: “As long as it’s inevitable, you might as well lie back and enjoy it.” That race was dubbed a match between “Claytie and the Lady,” in which “the Lady” prevailed by a narrow margin. 61 percent of women voters supported her, and she became the second woman ever to be governor of Texas.

6. As a feminist, Richards championed ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment in Texas. She led workshops for women campaign managers and political candidates, before being elected to office herself. When she became the first woman in half a century to serve as governor, she celebrated by holding up a T-shirt that showed the state Capitol and read: “A woman’s place is in the dome.”

7. As governor, Richards made it a priority to appoint more women, African-Americans and Hispanics to state boards than any previous Texas governor. Before she left office in 1995, she said: “I did not want my tombstone to read, ‘She kept a really clean house.’ I think I’d like them to remember me by saying, ‘She opened government to everyone.’” According to KWTX TV she appointed “the first black University of Texas regent; the first crime victim to join the state Criminal Justice Board; the first disabled person to serve on the human services board; and the first teacher to lead the State Board of Education.”

8. For her 60th birthday, Richards got a license to ride a motorcycle.

9. Late in life, Richards continued her advocacy for reproductive freedom. Appearing at a pro-choice rally in Austin in 2003, she denounced the influence of “a small group of religious right-wingers” on the Bush administration’s policies, and Texas’ abstinence-only sex education programs. One of her daughters, Cecile Richards, is now president of Planned Parenthood.

10. In her later years, Richards established the Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders, which will open in 2007. Her family requests that memorial gifts be made to the school, through the Austin Community Foundation.

There’ll never be another Ann Richards, but here’s hoping her school graduates generations of her successors.

– Katharine Mieszkowski

(Er, not that I’m calling anyone who’s reading this stupid, you understand.)

Paul Krugman, writing in today’s New York Times:

“More broadly, right-wing commentators would like you to believe that the economyâ??s winners are a large group, like college graduates or people with agreeable personalities. But the winnersâ?? circle is actually very small. Even households at the 95th percentile—that is, households richer than 19 out of 20 Americans—have seen their real income rise less than 1 percent a year since the late 1970â??s. But the income of the richest 1 percent has roughly doubled, and the income of the top 0.01 percent—people with incomes of more than $5 million in 2004 â?? has risen by a factor of 5.”

And again, I am forced to wonder why Americans aren’t rioting in the streets every single day.

Like everyone else in the reality-based community, I’m in complete awe of Keith Olbermann’s response to Rumsfeld’s McCarthyesque speech yesterday comparing those of us who oppose the war—that is, a significant part of the US public—to Nazi appeasers. Read the transcript or watch the video here.

If only someone, anyone, from the Democratic Party would speak out with similar eloquence and purpose. A girl can dream, I guess.

I’ve been struggling with the issue of tolerance lately. Tolerance is an absolutely essential part of my personal moral code; I was raised to be tolerant and to value tolerance, and I consider it a necessary part of being a decent human being. But I have to admit that I am not very tolerant of…well, you know. The extreme right wing, the fundies, the wingnuts. (Let’s just refer to them as “those people,” to turn one of their nasty little code-word phrases back on them.) It’s a passive sort of intolerance, which is the only kind I’m capable of, really: I’m just not interested in a two-sided conversation with them, I don’t want to hear their opinions, and I wish they would all just go away and take a few US states with them.

Oh, on a one-on-one level, I’m as tolerant as I have to be, of course; with my fundie co-workers at my last job, for example, I just avoided all topics that might cause controversy, and as a result, we all got along fine and I knew them to be essentially decent people, just horribly misguided in some of their beliefs. But on a broader scale, I am not tolerant of those people, and I don’t feel as bad about it as I maybe should. After all, if tolerance is so important to me, shouldn’t I take a live-and-let-live attitude toward them instead of wanting to put them all on a boat that sails around the world for all eternity? And if I don’t take that attitude, then aren’t I guilty of the same sort of intolerance as they are, just with a smaller target zone?

Yet I can’t seem to make myself feel any more tolerant of them than I already don’t (to use one of my husband’s cleverly twisted locutions). So when I read this in Salon this morning, I felt both better and worse about the subject: better, because it’s hard to feel terribly guilty about loathing someone who can publicly express such an abhorrent sentiment, and worse, because the quote makes me feel even more intolerant (though I can honestly say that I stop short of being able to apply that same abhorrent sentiment to, y’know, those people).

…who needs Republicans? (Okay, that doeesn’t quite work, because really, who needs Republicans anyway? Nonetheless…)

Courtesy of Salon. a sampling of reasons provided by Senate “Democrats” on why they wouldn’t support a filibuster on the Alito nomination:

Tim Johnson, D-SD: “I am troubled by Judge Alito’s apparent views on matters such as executive power, his past opposition to the principle of one person, one vote, and his narrow interpretation of certain civil rights laws. Even so, I cannot accept an argument that his views are so radical that the Senate is justified in denying his confirmation.” (Okay, so he’s an extremist, but not enough of an extremist?)

Mary Landrieu, D-LA: “It is imperative that we remain focused on creating the tools New Orleans, Louisiana and the Gulf Coast will need to rebuild … We simply cannot afford to bring the Senate to a halt at a time when we need its action the most.” (Right…let’s not keep an eye on the big picture or focus on the future or anything; instead, let’s doom entire generations to a radical right-wing Supreme Court, because that will clearly help the people affected by Hurricane Katrina.)

Joe Biden, D-DE: “I see no reasonable prospect that a filibuster would work.” (Now there’s a self-fulfilling prophecy for you…it won’t work, so I’ll help make absolutely certain that it won’t work. Good reasoning there, Senator.)

Honestly, if the Dems bend backwards any farther to appease the Bushies, they’re going to turn themselves inside out. I guess that would result in their becoming Repugs, which they basically have anyway. I can’t believe I gave the DNC money last year. That won’t be happening again, I tell you what. Not until and unless they suddenly grow a collective spine.

I’m thinking it’s time for a new bumper sticker: “I’m anti-Alito, and I vote.” I just wish I lived in a state where I could vote one of these feeble excuses for Democrats out of office. That would at least go some tiny way toward assuaging the growing sense of political powerlessness that I feel. Not that I’ve ever felt politically powerful, of course, but there was a time, not that long ago, where I could still feel that a majority of Dems stood for the same things I did, or gave lip service to standing for those things. More and more, though, they stand for not ruffling feathers, not making themselves fodder for the wingnut talk-show hosts, and most of all, not risking anything that will engender accusations that they’re liberals. It’s a game that they can’t win, but they’re pretty much all desperate to play it anyway.

More than ever, I miss Paul Wellstone.

…to Russ Feingold for his success in Congress today. Good news out of Washington has become so infrequent that I was slightly stunned—happily so, but stunned nonetheless—that Bill the Cat Killer Frist and friends weren’t able to block the threatened filibuster on the Patriot Act (or as I like to call it, the “Real Patriots Don’t Care about Civil Liberties” Act). This means that the sun will, fortunately, set on some of the more odious provisions of the act, including the library provisions that are, of course, the ones that I have paid the most attention to.

It’s just a small toast, because I’m not an unequivocal fan of Feingold.* I was, early in his career, when he seemed like an almost miraculous combination of sincerely held lib-dem views and genuine willingness to work with the opposition on issues of bipartisan concern, without compromising his beliefs. But some peculiar—and distasteful—positions he’s taken, such as his enthusiastic endorsement of John “Spawn of Satan” Ashcroft for Attorney General, his vote to impeach Clinton, and his rather zealous support of John Roberts for Chief Justice, have put me off him in a big way. On this issue, though, he was outspoken (and many of his fellow Dems, including some who would likely place themselves to the left of Feingold on the political spectrum, should be ashamed that they didn’t join him, the wimps) and unwavering in his opposition to the most invasive provisions of the act. (It’s also worth remembering that he was the only United States senator to vote against the Patriot Act in the first place). And for that, he has my gratitude. He probably won’t have my vote, should he decide to run in the Dem primaries in ‘08, though then again I don’t know that the weakass, hapless Dems are going to put up anyone I’d be more inclined to vote for. But he does have my gratitude, and, I hope, the gratitude of everyone who is horrified by the steady, stealthy erosion of our civil liberties at the hands of the Bushies…which should include pretty much everyone in the US.

(And yeah, I’ll grudingly also give credit to the few Repubs who were brave enough to cross the aisle on this issue, notably Larry Craig of Idaho, about whom I admit I know nothing, but also Chuck Hagel and Ben Nelson, both of whom are slowly earning my…not admiration, I can’t admire Repubs under any circumstances, really, but something close to it, for their willingness to break ranks. I would like to reiterate, however, that this credit is given grudgingly. I wasn’t raised to give credit to Republicans for anything, and it makes my teeth hurt a little to do so.)

And related to that, as if those of us who fear that our civil liberties are being steadily taken away needed any more evidence that this is true, I hope everyone saw today’s New York Times article revealing that the Bushies quietly—and illegally—allowed the NSA to spy on “hundreds, perhaps thousands” of people within the United States, without first obtaining the court orders required to do so. (The fact that the Times apparently sat on the story for something like a year is another matter, and a question that needs to be answered quickly, because it’s tied to the fundamental question of whether we can even claim to have a free press anymore.) It’s sort of horrifying that I’m not even really shocked by this latest demonstration of the arrogance, cynicism, and basic disregard for anything resembling democracy exhibited by this administration, but I don’t know if anything they do can shock me anymore. (Though every time I say that, they turn around and do something even worse. Did anyone hear Rumsfeld being interviewed by Melissa Block on “All Things Considered” this evening? And if you did, can you believe the tone that bastard took? There really is no end to their lies, self-justifications, lies, flagrant cynicism, and lies.)

*I will say, though, that I sort of get a kick out of the fact that the junior senator from Wisconsin, that rolling green (and blonde) emblem of goyishness, is Jewish. Yeah, I know, Madison and Milwaukee have reasonably large Jewish populations. But still.

I don’t generally like Slate, for various reasons, but this article on the “re-proletarianization” of the American worker, is well worth your time:

And just to throw some music content in: a discussion about Sebadoh on Postcard today led me to listen to “Bakesale” (which is, unaccountably, the only Sebadoh record I have on my iPod) straight through twice. God, that’s a great record. Then I switched back over to shuffle, and the first three songs it threw at me were:

“Live Free”—Son Volt
“Pop Art Poem”—The Jam (I still have the original flexidisc of that somewhere, I bet)
“Waltzing’s for Dreamers”—Richard Thompson

I love my iPod. And it loves me.