Public policy, social issues, gender politics, religion, civitas, and other taboo topics fall under the hammer of Shava's iconoclasmic force of natural philosophy.
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Spirited Away
Sunday, March 30, 2003
11:58 PM
[this is a review I wrote on 9/30/02, dug up for a friend now that the film's won a well-deserved Oscar]
Speak harshly to your little boy, and beat him when he sneezes!
He only does it to annoy, because he knows it teases!
,,,,,,,,,,,[Waaah! Waaah! Waaah!]
..................................... -- "lewis carroll" Alice in Wonderland
Isn't it a pity that many children will never be creeped out and really
fascinated and engaged in Alice in Wonderland, because they only ever saw
it on a screen?
I just returned from seeing Spirited Away (subtitled version) at the Loew's
Theatre in Times Square. From my hotel, if you cut through the McDonald's,
between the backdoor at 41st St and the front door at 42nd St, then wait
for the light at the crosswalk halfway down the block between Broadway and
"Fashion" Avenues, it's just about right there. I came 3000 miles today to
see this film, and had to commit to going on a four day insane business
trip to get to do it.
When we got a DVD player recently (finally), I asked Joseph what he wanted
the first DVD we bought to be, and he picked Princess Mononoke. Good
taste! There is real magick in Miyazaki's work, and when I heard that
Spirited Away (http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/sen/) had become the
highest grossing film in Japan ever, outstripping Titanic, I began to wait
with bated breath for the film to come to the states.
Living in Portland, Oregon, I might never see the subtitled version there,
though we'd likely get the dub. But as soon as I settled in at my hotel, I
got the first possible ticket.
I held my breath and crossed the bridge...
Miyazaki's film is more than breathtakingly beautiful -- that amazing
melange of focus that epitomizes anime, with the 2d figures passing in
front of landscapes and background elements that obviously outstrip the
foreground characters. This film creates a reality that is a welter of
fear, wonder, terror, love, beauty, devotion, callousness, and cuteness --
with an Alice-like sense of the absurd.
Here's the difference -- for those of you who are familiar with "hot and
cold media" in McLuhan, Alice's rabbit hole is "hot." Carroll shoves you
into loosely veiled absurdities that represent the realities of his Oxford
life, and with a Pythonesque (or is that backwards? ;) "wink wink nod nod,"
he makes you laugh at his silly translations.
Spirited Away is "cool." It presents you with action, and compels the
minds eye to create a completely novel reality around the scraps of
patterns of light, reflected on the floor, painting dragons in the motes of
dust in a sunbeam. It's mimetic jazz. I am swept up in that sense of
wonder I remember from childhood as I tried to figure out what all this
reality *was* flowing around me.
Alice, translated to film, loses content. Spirited Away creates content
within the viewer. Everything about it calls up half remembered things you
may never have seen before. In the spirit of the thing itself, I won't
review a bit of the movie itself -- the medium is the message.
Experience the medium. Go see this. In the subtitled version, if
possible, assuming the dub is as trashy as Mononoke's (sorry Billy Bob!).
May your dreams be rich!
The thin red, white and blue line
Tuesday, March 25, 2003
12:11 AM
In the late 1700's, a superpower in global trade was brought to failure by a small force of colonialists, under-armed and hardly trained, who had ideas. The power of these ideas were mostly about setting aside the conventional ideas of an old order. Some of these ideas were about freedom -- but some were about warfare.
Warfare in Europe was still run by the conventions that pre-dated the gun. The idea of the "thin red line" -- the broad advance of infantry, even into the face of artillery and small arms fire -- had never been completely overthrown in tactics. But the colonists had learned a new sort of warfare from the natives of the new world. They had learned guerilla warfare -- to hide in cover and fire from cover, to evade and run and then strike again. To know the territory better than the invader. To strike at ungentlemanly times, unannounced and in raids rather than battles.
There were many reasons for the defeat of the British -- long supply lines, instability at home, whatever -- but one of the major reasons for the high cost of the war to the British crown was the humiliating defeats suffered at the hands of inferior forces due to a new way of fighting a war.
The new nation of the United States reaped the whirlwind in less than a century in their own civil war.
But today, the US is facing an inferior power. Like George III (no, not W, third after his father and Washington, but the King of England) we are laughing at the prospects of this under-equipped lesser force resisting us.
But like the British Crown, we may be falsely underestimating a canny foe.
We've advanced to Baghdad. Tonight I hear we are 80 clicks from the city.
Saddam is a clever man, and ruthless. He sounds confident. He has allowed the coalition forces to over-run his homeland. How could he expect to succeed?
There are, I believe, only two things that could allow him to win. One is controlling the sympathy of the largest possible sphere of influence. The other is to lean on the terrorism we accuse him of fostering, the weapons of mass destruction.
What if the new detente is that we must abandon Iraq or face the release of WMD on our own cities? We've already proven that we can not totally secure our borders. What if we can't find Saddam's weapons of mass destruction -- because they are here?
So, what happens then? We advance on Baghdad. We cause enough damage against the Iraqis' minor -- but brave -- resistance so as to garner sympathy for the Iraqis in the Arab world, in the middle east and central Asia, in all the places where Americans are less well loved such as Malaysia or perhaps any of the dozens of other countries we've bombed in the last century...
And Saddam tells us that if we go any further, he releases another whirlwind on us. How would we test it? How would we disprove it? How, strategically, or tactically, could we possibly react?
If we destroy Baghdad, we don't disarm the weapons in our own cities. If we withdraw, at what consequence to international politics? To me, this seems like the hugest problem to speculate on. What would we do? What are the contingencies? How likely is this nightmare scenario?
We say that after 9/11, everything changed, and yet we are heading into war with the same old strategy and tactics. Why could Saddam be so confident, and why might he not be a fool?
He would be insane to try this -- but what else could he realistically do, to fend us off? We've already called him a dictator, a madman, and a terrorist. What has he to lose? And how could anyone really, really blame him? To threaten us with harm to our far away noncoms, when he faces us down in his capital full of civilians?
In another recent essay (not published here) I described the necessaries of maintaining civil society:
o everyone must have something to gain
o everyone must have something to lose
o there must be reliable mechanisms which at least appear to support this economy of gains and losses
The threat of American Hegemony appears to destabilize this equation. If we believe that today's world is truly a global society, then to survive it must be a truly global civil society, or we all stand to lose.
We call it the War on Terrorism, yet we may not be fully embracing the risks.
What to do?
Tuesday, March 18, 2003
7:54 AM
I couldn't say it better myself. There really is no reason being given to the free people of the world. There are no checks and balances. I hope enough people strike and resign to put Blair out of business. But what can we do in the US?
Thoughts about posting "Just shoot him!"
Friday, March 14, 2003
12:35 AM
Someone reading a humor piece where I advocate shooting men who leave their wives and kids might think I was some kind of fringe radical feminist yahoo who hated men. Or at least, some fed-up old prune who had given up on them.
Mind you, I am not against men. In fact, I rather like rubbing up against one now and again, and it's been a long drought... Most of the real friends I've had in my life have been men. I find men more honest and reliable (at the same time) than women, in general.
Women are very good at finding reasons to cut you, and they are much more competitive with other women -- which, alas, they identify me as freely. And I am not a woman who respects, blindly, the feminine institutions. I have a pretty face and good skin, so when I am not trying to broadcast "trust signals" to a corporate sort or I am not playing with image (going out and being a chameleon at some music club), I won't wear makeup. I don't think about clothes the way most women do, because I see clothes as a symbolic vocabulary. I clean up well, but none of these things matter to me *existentially*.
This makes me a pariah to much of female company, even at 44... The stylish ones can't believe I don't take it seriously, and the geeky ones can't believe I'd cave into the patriarchal or uncomfortable mainstream. So with so many women, I am doomed.
Most men, I explain this and they say, "Well, ok. Cool." Regardless of their opinion of fashion.
So, to me, men seem to have, if not more *sense*, at least more ability to let me be who I am, so long as I don't ask much.
So I am not against men at all. I like men.
I am against faithless men. I am not jealous, and I am not particularly monogamous by nature, but I do abide by the covenants of a relationship, and I am fiercely loyal. And beyond all rational likelihood, my last two husbands have left me for:
younger women
named Melissa
from North Carolina (tho one was *living* in Portland at the time)
called "Missy" as children
magnolias
predatory
My life is, in fact, stranger than fiction. Shortly after we moved to Portland from Eugene (so visitation could be even slightly sane), we were at a potluck. Joseph had found a woman who really new how to deal with smart kids on a respectful, fun, and engaging level. After a bit, he asked her, "What's your name, anyway?" She said, "My name is Melissa."
Joseph was sitting back-to-back with me on a bench. I could feel him slump. He apologized, "I'm sorry, I don't think I can be friends with you. My mother has bad luck with Melissas."
I grew up in a culture where the woman should be ashamed to be left on her own with the children, regardless of the blame. It's sometimes very hard for me. But I am determined that the next committed relationship I get into -- if ever -- will be with a man who understands loyalty.
Unfortunately, in addition, he has to be able to put up with me, and have a very high level of ch'i, brilliant, socially conscious, liberal but not empty headed, spiritual and mystical but not new agey, non-puritanical, intellectual, internationally minded, and be single and within a decade-ish in age. But alas, I think I am looking to find a chimera.
I suspect advocating shooting the guy who's going to leave me doesn't increase my prospects. But, I am a slave to the muse...;)
Just shoot him! (a modest proposal)
Thursday, March 13, 2003
11:43 PM
Folks who know me know that I am as sweet and nonviolent a person as could be in real life. My father once described himself as a Militant Pacifist: “People who believe in solving problems with guns,” he declared, “should be shot. And if it would solve the paradox, I’d volunteer to be the first one.”
I’m not quite that self-sacrificing, but I’m not one to advocate violence outside of extreme circumstances.
That said, let me send this message to American women facing single parenthood: JUST SHOOT HIM.
Better yet, be clever and get someone else to do it for you, such that it will never be traced.
You see, there are so many problems with having an ex-husband. They tend to have less scruples with their lawyers. They tend to pay child support late, when they pay at all. If, gods help you, you end up on welfare, you’ll be punished by the harshest public policy outside the prison system in order to pay your rent and feed your kids.
If your man has been a wastrel, no good job history, paid under the table – you may be out of luck.
But by all means, if he’s a decent hardworking soul, and a productive and faithful member of capitalist American society -- just shoot him.
You see, getting child support and custody is a terrible hassle. And you haven’t faced hell until you’ve been thrown into the safety net, such as it is.
But widows are sealed and approved by the US government as virtuous women. If he dies, you get support for you and your kids until the kids are twenty. No questions asked (unless you get caught on murder charges).
It’s obvious where the public policy morality falls on this one – a woman on welfare is a whore. God alone knows what she did to deserve being thrown on public support. Maybe (and this was me a few years back) her husband was the only person in the family with a job currently, and he’s found another woman to run off with two weeks before rent’s due, and leaves her with half a month of rent in the bank. Maybe he’s just disappeared. Maybe she’s taken the children and fled to a new location because of abuse.
Regardless, it’s generally not the man who is punished. Charges of adultery? Unlikely. Chase him down for child support? It’s amazing how indigent some men can look on paper. It’s truly amazing what threats of legal (or illegal) action can intimidate a woman in an uncertain situation.
Just shoot him. Heck, even if you shoot him in bed with his mistress, you’ll get off scot free in most states. And then, you’ll get social security survivor benefits for a long time, and never have to deal with his sorry face again.
All right, this is an immodest proposal. I don’t mean it for a second that a woman should consider shooting her to-be-ex. In fact, I still consider my recent ex to be a fine human being – and I hope, a friend, even after he reads this!
Public policy still stands – a widow deserves support for herself and her children. A woman scorned deserves scorn. There’s no other way to explain the public policy we’ve got.
We made divorce simple and easy, forgetting that barriers to divorce also protect the family, even though bad marriages hurt it. Ugly divorce courts never came between a man and his passions. The less he cares about his kids, the easier it is to consider divorce, and the harsher the tactics. But the ease of marriage probably dissolves some unions that could have been made solid, with a bit more patience and incentive to avoid the judgement of the courts.
Now, I’m not proposing that we cut off the widows. That would be a pity and a shame, and against the Masonic principles of our Founding Fathers. Like all political pundits, I channel the will of the FFs directly, so you can take it from me.
But perhaps, Mr. Bush, as you consider protecting families through making welfare more onerous, before encouraging marriage by giving women the option of marrying to get off welfare in a hurry (I can see that now – MSW’s as yentas -- “Six weeks, guaranteed, we find you a husband, or your money back. Of course, we cut of benefits at eight weeks, and we can’t promise he’ll be any better than the last one…”), maybe you should consider the inequities to the mothers (and it is mostly mothers) who head up 30% of the households with children today in this country...
Can we get a Republican administration to give single mothers and their children a break?
On second thought, just shoot him.
civic boddhisattvas
Wednesday, March 12, 2003
10:19 AM
What this country needs is a whole set of civic boddhisattvas -- people who put the enlightenment of their community ahead of personal material goals. I really enjoyed Mark Morford's article on sfgate today. Bush says to be patriotic we must consume. Morford says to be patriotic (or, at least, to discombobulate the greyface right) we must live deeply and exercise kindness (boddhicitta!).
Far out, Mark! ;)
Buddy can you spare...
Saturday, March 08, 2003
12:31 AM
The Guardian is speculating that the federal funds rate may be taken down to one percent in the light of our recent miserable employment numbers here in the states. And that number seemed so dramatic, so I decided to dig a bit.
The Federal Reserve Board only has historical numbers for the federal funds and prime rates going back to the middle fifties, which I find questionable. But it's been since the middle 50's that either rate has been so low.
This isn't looking like the time back in the 70's when those numbers were high, even in the midst of recession. Perhaps I'm looking at the wrong trend.
The last time the prime rate passed 4.25 on the way down was in 1929. Wonder why I have to go to some random page at the FRB in St. Louis to go that far back?
I'm feeling down along with the economy. Maybe singing a bit of white blues will make me feel better...
They used to tell me I was building a dream
And so I followed the mob.
When there was a dot to com or chips to make,
I was always there right on the job.
They used to tell me I was building a dream
With peace and glory and tech.
Why should I be standing in line
Just waiting for a check?
Once I built out fiber, made my mark,
Paid my payroll on time.
Once I built out fiber, now it's dark.
Brother, can you spare a dime?
Once we had two towers up to the sun,
Steel and glass in its prime.
Once we built two towers, now they're gone.
Brother, can you spare a dime?
Soon in khaki suits, gee we'll look swell,
Full of that Yankee-Doodly-dumb.
Ninety-five billion bucks shot to hell,
And I was the kid with the drum.
Say, don't you remember, they called me "Al"
It was "Al" all the time.
Why don't you remember, I'm your pal?
Say buddy, can you spare a dime?
Or, maybe not..
Let sleeping dogs (and fox news) lie!
Friday, March 07, 2003
11:30 PM
Referring to this article.
At 07:07 PM 3/6/2003, another friend wrote:
The ruling basically declares it is technically not against any
law, rule, or regulation to deliberately lie or distort the news on a
television broadcast.
Thank god it's not criminal for the media to lie.
It never has been, except when the lying is damaging to the reputation of persons. (libel, slander)
There are two issues here, one is ethical and one is legal.
Ethically, it is against all the professional codes of journalistic conduct for a journalist to deliberately lie (including editors and publishers instructing their journalists to lie).
You can check out the US journalistic professional ethics that the plaintiffs kept to, and their management did not. And here's an index to international standards.
However, the moment the law enters into deciding the truth in journalism, you are sunk. You may as well say goodbye to freedom of the press. It should absolutely not be illegal for media to lie, even if you don't like the case in point.
What would happen in the courts if every time a journalist reported that global warming was effecting climate, that the oil companies could take them to court for distorting the news? That would only be civil damages. What if every time a journalist said Ashcroft's policies were leading us into a loss of personal freedoms -- s/he could be put in jail?
If you think journalists shouldn't be allowed to lie -- who gets to decide, in court, what is the truth?
This is a terrible slippery slope issue, and the courts were perfectly justified.
What scares me is Fox saying that the court ruling "totally vindicated" them. If the woman's allegations were correct, then they were guilty of egregious misconduct according to journalistic ethics, and should be smacked by every other press outlet in the country.
But they won't be, because then there would be this huge pissing war, and the media companies don't want to get into which ones of them is less close to the code of ethics...
Personally, I expect that the reporter at the Sierra Times was thinking, "Shocked! I am shocked I tell you, to find ethical breaches among journalists!" Like the gendarme in Casablanca. Yah.
Speaking of journalistic standards, the Sierra Times isn't the height of journalism, and I have doubts about a journalist who can't spell Rupert Murdoch's name right in a story that is about Fox News...???
The backgrounder for the original story is here. I trust this more, and it links to source documents.
By my reading, the original trial was not a criminal trial, but a civil suit for wrongful termination, with a jury awarding damages. Akre was awarded $425K+ for her wrongful termination, and the verdict was overturned on appeal on the basis that Akre had gotten damages under the whistle blower's clause, which can be invoked when an employee blows the whistle on an employer for illegal conduct. Lying to the public, as a news organization, is not illegal.
Although there is an FCC policy against distorting the news and such, it has to do with the broadcast license renewal process. This is to say, it is the policy of the FCC to not renew the broadcast license of a media entity using the common airways *if* complaints are entered by the public when the license comes up for renewal.
That means that it isn't *illegal* for Fox to lie, but it does mean that the station could get their license yanked later on. That is the recourse via the FCC for individuals if they find that media is lying to them.
The error was on the part of Akre's representation, who should not have muddied the waters by bringing in the whistle-blower's clause. As it is, if the award was made on invalid terms in any part, the judge is justified in overturning the entire decision and award.
This is why you hire a good lawyer.
It's also why you should read the news critically...;)
I'm a sociological entrepreneur!
Tuesday, March 04, 2003
11:52 PM
Tonight I was delighted to go to a presentation of a taped lecture by Lester Thurow, who addressed the MIT Enterprise Forum on "Entrepreneurship in a Global Economy." http://web.mit.edu/entforum/www/SBS/18thurow.htm
He gave me this great tool to describe what we're doing. Entrepreneurship only arises in times of disequilibrium (chaos/opportunity). In times of stability, the big company just always wins. He presented a taxonomy of entrepreneurs for three kinds of disequilibrium:
Technology entrepreneurs (the obvious default)
Geographical entrepreneurs
Take a process and move it from California to Taiwan,
from Taiwan to the PRC, gain economies, make a mint.
Sociological entrepreneurs
Identify or create a sociological demand, exploit it
This last is who I am. Prof. Thurow's example was Starbucks.
What eMarket does is we've more identified than created a demand. Pop culture is our new mythology. It's the teaching story, the heroics, the myth cycle of modernism. What we do, at root, is we sell the material culture of modernism.
It's not about geeky fans. It's about affinity groups, deep cultural symbols, fashion, and self-expression.
You see a slip of a girl in a hiphop club in a black babydoll t-shirt with a supergirl logo on it, framed in tattoo/bodyart style flames. http://www.emerchandise.com/product/TSSUG0004/
Chances are she doesn't read comic books.
You see a husky guy strutting down the street in Kuala Lampur wearing a t-shirt with a raging Tazmanian Devil doing martial arts, flanked with dragons.
http://www.emerchandise.com/product/TSLOO0169/
Chances are he doesn't spend his Saturday mornings watching cartoons.
I'm wearing my Central Perk "No More Decaf!" shirt in line at the supermarket. A woman does a double take. She hesitates. Then she *has* to come up to me, and ask, "That's not a real coffee shop is it? I mean, that's the coffee shop from Friends right?"
http://www.emerchandise.com/product/TSFRI0028/
In a world where no one talks to strangers, I've made an instant friend, if I want to pursue it.
We're selling affinity, fashion, self-identification, style-tribes, insider jokes, self-expression.
Right now, we get more of our money by serving the pent up demand of folks who go to http://www.hbo.com/, and didn't know that there was all this cool stuff to be had for The Sopranos at http://store.hbo.com/hbo_sopranos/ -- and so on for a couple dozen other sites.
But eventually, as this stuff becomes more and more recognized as pop culture fashion casual, we'll be the Starbucks of pop culture swag.
We sell the altar furnishings of the post-modern home. We sell the saint's medallions of pop culture. We transcend national and language boundaries.
My main ethical goal is to start serving all the pop culture diasporas (bollywood, Mexican soaps, europop, anime/manga, chop socky HK/PRC cinema,...) so that the various cultures' pop vocabulary and iconography get equal time.
http://store.viz.com/ -- here's the first step.
On the other hand, I often wonder why the *HELL* I'm spending my time selling t-shirts. My hope is that eventually, I'll make enough money that I can be independently modest, so that I can risk trying to get paid to write.
My croft homes
2:17 AM
Scottish land reform -- truth is, in fact, stranger than fiction.
ADHD
1:12 AM
[a woman on a board asks if anyone has experience with children diagnosed with ADHD -- her daughter's just been diagnosed]
About four years ago, a young friend of ours who we met when she was recommended as a babysitter, came over to cover my son for the evening, and she was nearly in tears.
I asked Jasmine what was wrong, and she said, basically, that she was diagnosed with ADHD, and that her mother said her brain was broken, and *damned* if her daughter was going on drugs, and just ranted and raved.
My first thought -- well, maybe my second -- was, "She can't have ADHD. She reminds me of me when I was a kid."
Now, Jasmine didn't have any other learning disorders. She was bright, personable, responsible in her own way. But she couldn't concentrate and learn things unless she liked them. She couldn't for her life live by a clock. And she was bored so easily, that it was just hard to stay still, or remain engaged, at the rate school fed her experiences.
As I said, just like me in high school.
So I went to a psychologist, and asked her, "Do I have this thing?" After many questions and some discussion, her reaction was, "Well, you fit every criteria except for one thing."
"What's that?" I asked.
"It's not a disorder unless it's disturbing and negatively impacting your life. Look, you seem to have every sign of this, but you have an amazing set of coping skills. You've managed to avoid most situations where ADHD would be a great detriment, and you've turned some of the aspects into assets."
To make a long story short, I read a great deal on the topic (I recommend Thom Hartmann's stuff highly -- it's a good starting place, from my point of view). And when I'd finished the reading, I started working a lot with parents with kids with ADHD.
Much of your experience, depending on the multiple diagnoses, will depend on your attitude about what this means.
American schools don't deal with kids with ADHD well at all. This is not to say your child is uneducable, or dumb, but she may not learn in a class of 30-40 kids where everyone is supposed to sit down and shut up for 45 minutes at a time.
As a result, it can be hard to retain the self-esteem to believe that you will be ok, in that situation. She'll need a lot of support, and although quality time is good, attitude is crucial.
I'd encourage you to check into neurofeedback therapy. Most people with ADHD exhibit the kinds of brainwaves as a dominant pattern that most "normal" folks only would experience in dreaming. We are creative, but spacey [I'll address this more in another post later on...]
But when we are engaged in something we love, we are creative and more intense than any normal person can manage to be at all! Turn this into an asset for your daughter if you can!
A child with ADHD may not have an easy time in life, but she might accomplish great things. Here's my resume. I've been nominated by Portland Business Journal as a candidate for Woman Entrepreneur of the Year. I write an average of perhaps 2000-3000 words per day, often in addition to my demanding work, and I do a reasonably good job as a single mother. This is one picture of an adult (probably) with ADHD.
Have hope, understand that the quality of you child's character doesn't come out of either a diagnostic model, nor out of a pill bottle.
My mother is asian...
12:36 AM
Richard Nisbett was on NPR's Talk of the Nation this morning, and I didn't hear much of his chat on his new book, on the gross differences between eastern and western mindsets, but I was struck by an example he used.
He said that a mother in the West will show a truck to a child and say, "Look at the truck! It's a red truck. Look at the wheels?" The focus is on the object.
Where the mother in the East will say, "Vroom! Vroom! Here you go!" [hands baby the truck] "You're welcome! Could I have the truck now? Oh, thank you!"
He commented on how the mother might even take the child's focus away from the object so that the child could see the mother's reaction to it, and so that she could exclaim over it and focus on their interaction over it.
I don't think of my mother as asian, but that is certainly how she taught me, and how I've taught my son. Won't the nouns come automatically? They're just the variable in the verbs.
I think I am a verb... Vroom! Vrooom!
On writing
Monday, March 03, 2003
11:09 PM
At 09:06 PM 3/3/2003, a new friend wrote:
Shava:
Why do I hear the voice of John Ruskin? And perhaps
Eric Hoffer? Heavy reading there; I'll get back to
you in a couple of days. - N
And you can't even see me blush on the other end of all this ether...;)
I'm not much used to people comparing me to such luminaries! I am flattered and a bit abashed. My father was really fond of Hoffer, and I became familiar with Ruskin through my love of the pre-raphaelites (in my youth, my hair looked something like Persephone's). I imagine as we speak of the renaissance man, Hoffer was the Victorian man.
When I was a ten year old, a woman came to dinner, to visit my father. He was the Unitarian Universalist minister in Montpelier. Montpelier is the capital of Vermont but only about 8,000 people.
We'd recently moved there and this woman -- I think she might have been the chair of the church board -- was obviously someone my parents wanted to impress. My father was late with some church business, and my mother was busy in the kitchen, so this woman was set with me to entertain her in the living room.
I remember her smiling at me and asking me, formulaically, "So, what do you want to be when you grow up?"
"When I grow up, I will be a renaissance woman." I replied.
At that age, I didn't understand why we continued to sit on the couch in silence. I could tell that she was suddenly uncomfortable with me, but at that age, I wasn't much adept at starting smalltalk. My reaction to her silence was to respect it with my own.
Today, I think she was actually frightened at my intensity, and the certainty with which I answered. All through dinner, she behaved as though I were not even at the table.
Some days, I find myself with the same attitude toward myself as that woman had. What in the world am I thinking, to be writing at all? Who am I to believe that I have anything to say? What am I -- except compelled to write?
I have two quotes above my writing desk. One is the Marianne Williamson bit quoted by Mandela at his inauguration:
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
The other is Hoffer's, a probably less well-known affirmation:
There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day: we have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life. Moreover, when we have an alibi for not writing a book, painting a picture, and so on, we have an alibi for not writing the greatest book and not painting the greatest picture. Small wonder that the effort expended and the punishment endured in obtaining a good alibi often exceed the effort and grief requisite for the attainment of a most marked achievement.
As a single mother, as a single mother with an executive job, as a single mother executive with health problems, as... Well, the alibis come easy. The lack of confidence in my writing sometimes makes me brittle and arrogant and blustery.
But I really do try to only remember that if the message I have to communicate seems larger than me, and I don't have to be large enough to carry it, but only to describe it.
Time for articles of impeachment
Saturday, March 01, 2003
11:09 PM
Mr. Bush has set the NSA to wiretap the UN Security Council at their homes and offices. It's in the Guardian's 3/2/03 edition.
The man has completely undermined the diplomatic process at the UN. Does this call for articles of impeachment yet?
I didn't think I could be so shocked and ashamed anymore. I am nearly in tears.
This is a very sad event in American history. I suppose it could be a false report -- but I don't suppose it is.
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