If “momism” hadn’t been claimed already by Philip Wylie, I’d gladly snap it up for this modern cult of the mom. As I insufficiently described in IID’s first post, mom is rising up to replace wife as the default identity of women after feminism gouged away at the latter. This isn’t a critique of motherhood, or even of the slang term “mom” — but I’ve certainly noticed that being a mom implies far more in terms of lifestyle than old-fashioned motherhood.

Here, we see an ideal personification of the Mom — pregnant, young, white, chic yet modest, but with a sufficient dollop of pretended grrl power to keep one’s mom from crying in shame. “No men allowed” in this context doesn’t offer a safe space for women to be women — a goal I wholeheartedly support — but instead a way for women to cooperate in reinforcing their essential separation from but dependence on manhood.

For what it’s worth, this isn’t a comment on “CafeMom” or its members. I toil myself in the abattoir called marketing, and I’m keenly aware of the levels of separation involved. A cursory search of the site yields content ranging from the worst neo-momist trash to simple venting to enlightened commentary on identity on motherhood. I’ll end by linking this thread, which beautifully serves to demonstrate the worst in both male and female socialization — man as a domestically helpless penis-worm, and woman as a long-suffering eunuch for Christ. In this world, man is always doomed to be the pursuer, and woman the pursued; man fucks, and woman is fucked. There’s no place for men (straight, gay, or in between) who want to be fucked, or women (likewise) who want to fuck. As a man who sometimes struggles to keep up with the sexual demands of his partner, I am feminized; as a woman sometimes driven to fits of rage by a bout of abstinence, she is masculinized.

Sorry for the long delay in posting. I’ve a post on pie-throwing in the queue, and I hope to deliver it in a timely manner.

If the Pope wants to keep up his entire European Christian conservative routine, a good start would be excommunicating Clarence Thomas for blessing the death penalty in the face of its cruelty. His understanding of the law might require him to do so, but that does not abrogate his higher moral responsibility.

The sad truth, unfortunately, is that holding your breath waiting for large churches to get noisy about prominent conservatives like they do, and less appropriately, about prominent liberals (it’s not Kerry’s job to rule on the justice of abortion, for instance) is a pretty reliable way to choke to death. But it doesn’t mean we can’t ask why it isn’t happening.

:.

On the other hand, it’s much more difficult to call Bill Kristol’s surreal take on one of his ostensible religion’s more important holidays sacrilege. After all, it might strike a Conservative, Orthodox, Reform, or For-Jesus Jew as inappropriate, maybe even insane, to associate the Biblical narrative of God’s deliverance from persecution with a military campaign against international terrorism. In fact, were Kristol any of those, that point would be easy to make; but the statement is much more consistent for his personal creed, in which the role of protector and jealous shepherd of the Chosen People - traditionally associated with the all-knowing, all-present one who is called I Am - is actually an official function of the U.S. Secretary of Defense. Other traditions of Neoconservative Judaism you might be unfamiliar with: acting out blood libels out of sheer cussedness and contempt for their coreligionists; insisting the prophet Elijah was actually a time-travelling Barry Goldwater; quietly worshipping Jesus, our Lord who is Christ; greedily devouring bacon cheeseburgers every Saturday, then hectoring Liberal children for being atheist queers on their way home from temple.

Timmy is a nine-year-old boy. His father died when he was young, and his mother remarried recently. He and his stepfather get along OK, but they’ve still got a lot of getting to know each other to do. One evening, he wakes up and wants to get himself some Oreos, so he goes over to his mom’s room to ask her if he can open them.

What should he see when he opens the door than his mother and his stepfather banging away. She yells loudly, and he looks back and - continuing to go about his business - grins, snickers a little, gives the kid a big thumbs-up, and tells him to shoo.

His stepfather and his mother laugh it off and keep going, and long story short, he wakes up the next morning feeling refreshed and happy, because good sex will do that for you. Thinking that (as he enjoys doing) he’ll make his wife breakfast before she comes to, he throws on his bathrobe and trots down the stairs.

When he rounds the corner, he sees Timmy with his grandmother spread-eagled on the table, banging the old gray mare. He screams like a little girl. ‘Jesus Christ, Timmy! Oh God - what in the hell is this? You need help!’

Timmy, grinning, laughs: ‘Not so funny when it’s your mom, is it.’

(My dad is really good at what he does - to wit, medicine, engineering, and plumbing the depths of human depravity. That is what you have to thank for today’s inspiring little parable.)

[nota bene: This is a series of personal recollections. My memory is horrible and I vouch for no specific facts or dates; any event I describe occurring I do vouch for, although the specifics of it and when it happened are up in the air.]

Picture the sort of person who will make a weekly habit of beating off to clips of Winston Churchill saying famous things, demonstrating what his admirers mistake for resolve. Put a khaki shirt on him - a paramilitary affiliation, appropriate enough for this Little League fascist. Keep this image in mind. You’ll need it later.

The Boy Scouts were set up out of a megachurch, called - simply enough - Central Christian Church. The Boy Scouts have various classist and authoritarian instincts built into their organizational structure; they are centralized under a single leader, the Scoutmaster, answerable to nobody, and surrounded by lackeys with positions of responsibility unaccompanied by authority. It is the perfect way to teach boys - and their fathers, for that matter - that life, and especially adulthood, is a succession of increasingly burdensome obligations to authority without any personal autonomy; the only possible reward is a larger number of bulliable subordinates. And like good evangelicals, their contempt for women was boundless. The Promise Keepers were in vogue at the time, and their vague, self-congratulatory vows not to beat women for being filthy, stupid animals seemed to stop well short of letting women do anything constructive.

My mother was a cub scout leader, see. My father got involved when he could, but he completely lacked the time - had a busy schedule. And my mother wanted us to have something like the Cub Scouts - complete with camping, useful skills, and opportunity to socialize - in our lives. She ran the den out of our house most of the time, and all concerned were very pleased with themselves.

A succession of moves lead us to a number of boy scout troops. The megachurch one lasted us the longest; it was the one that, as the homophobia rocked the organization (and my parents, who respected Gore a great deal, were bombarded continuously with Bushie urban legends, shitty jokes, and other bullshit spam), drove first me and later the rest of my family out of the Amerikaner Hitlerjugend. (That and I was never particularly good at the bondage stuff.) Read more »

One of my favorite little hobbies is language usage as a sociological instrument, especially political. The topic of dog whistles is especially amusing and diverting to me - but not exactly what I primarily like to look at.

Some words, or some usages of words, are so unusual outside of the context of a political fringe that using them almost immediately identifies you as a member of it, or at least someone who spends time primarily around members of it. This occurs by one of two ways: either it is from popular literature in a certain circle or it is based on a shared ideology that doesn’t really exist outside of that circle. The closer one is to the fringe when learning English (be it as a child or, more prominently, in ESL), the more identifiable one’s politics are this way.

There are a few favorite examples of mine, and I’ll leave aside the growing collection of hobby-horses ridden by over-enthusiastic Slavic neoliberals (’communistic’ and such dated usages clearly denoting a steady diet of Voice of America) for now. My single favorite is the equation to suicide - it’s not a single usage so much as a chain of them (’philosophy/culture/etc. of self-destruction/suicide/etc.’), and it’s very popular among Randroids because Rand herself used it. One of her pithier little bits of nonsense attempts to prove it, and Rand being who she was, you know exactly how this ‘proof’ reads: written with the formal structure and pompous tone of the ancient Greeks the Randies love so much, intending an aura of intellect by cribbing obsessively from these gayest of history’s men and instead falling into ridicule.

To cut it short, she calls capitalism the stuff of man’s nature (invoking Darwin - albeit, and you’ve got to love these people’s relationship with ‘reason’, in a pretty confrontational tenor), considers self-interest vital to survival, and then poses that altruism is self-negation, ergo death.

There is a gaping hole in this argument so simple that only someone with a sexual fetish for the pretenses - that is, that capitalism is reasonable and reasonable self-interest is the only way to survive - could ignore or attempt to work around it. That is: everyone dies. Everyone. Carnegie? Dead, sure. But J.P. Morgan? Also dead. Rockefeller? Dead. The women who made his morning coffee? Dead, and probably later. Bill Gates? Not gonna see 2050.

If you’re religious, and also you have a really warped concept of righteousness, I guess there’s a way around that. But ‘rational’ argument, without recourse to an invisible man who loves the wealthy, fails decisively on this point. If they are cornered with it, they’ll generally gamely struggle for a few minutes before calling everyone else in the room a bunch of suicidal Marxists. And speaking of -ists, there’s another uniquely ideological usage: Day By Day’s brilliant ‘Kantian nihilism’, a phrase that would make any student of philosophy past his sophomore year laugh and which makes no sense outside of the deliciously absurd world of the Randroids - where Kant and nihilists, being mutual enemies of the purely rational St. Ayn, were clearly cut from the same collectivist cloth. (And don’t even get me started on Ayn Rand’s enemies. I’ve got a lot to disagree with Kant about, but her puerile squabble with his legacy over ontology is amazing in its brazen illiteracy - only a peasant who had by some cruelty of fate acquired letters would devote serious energy to slapping at Kant’s nebulous-where-not-banal ontological ramblings, and in doing so think she had given herself the air of a thinker.)

Ah, I could go on about Randroids all day, but that’s not what Djur is paying me for. (Evidently, he is paying me to fight high-powered insiders like Barack Obama and his discouraging lack of a tough foreign policy to fight our homeland’s enemies - probably why I haven’t gotten a check yet.) Allow me to share with you one of my favorite odd usages of the political right: ‘pimp’.

There’s no one specialized form of this, but - true to their hideous nature - the most common one one encounters from wingnuts is ‘welfare pimp’. (I guess some stereotypes die really hard - for instance, all of them if you’re a bigot.) This, which seems to be the horrible, racist ur-form, implies that any politically prominent member of the black community is simply finagling welfare payments for them to ride their lazy race’s decadent, leeching satiation to office. Never mind that in a literal reading of this the only person who could possibly be tarred as a welfare pimp would be history’s most crooked Welfare bureaucrat, for legislators have fairly limited street-level visibility and almost no power over the comings and goings of their local constituency. (Besides the power to get pork funneled - but pork typically being white as the driven snow, you never hear about pork pimps.) This term, which only really makes sense in the first place if one’s definition of ‘pimp’ is ‘cunning and/or exploitative black man’, slowly generalized to imply anyone in the black community doing anything (one heard of ‘disaster pimps’ after Katrina), and later to more general, less specifically racist ends.

I can get behind the usage of ‘pimp’ in a manner so as to imply the pimp to be an exploitative, destructive asshole. And in the Candyland the Republicans inhabit - where you can live like a king on less than $10,000 in a big city, tax cuts increase government revenue, and Party can always find you - anyone basing their political appeal on welfare could indeed be classified as that. But the more general use of the verb to imply any kind of exploitation has to keep in mind that it’s attached to a very, very ugly reality for men, women, and other; black, white, and Jewish; young, old, and fat alike.

You have to be inundated in a world where ‘pimp’ refers to uppity serviles using their limited resources in a shady, devious way to worm their way to the top for the word to completely lose its meaning. It is actively disgusting to refer to a woman pimping her own daughter, and all the more so because the image fixed in many people’s minds of the now-adult Chelsea Clinton is the gangly young girl noted pill enthusiast Rush Limbaugh referred to as a dog. (I remain convinced Oxy is the sort of drug you pop before a high school policy debate in eager anticipation of calling your opponent a statist for refusing to admit ’separation of church and state’ doesn’t appear in the Constitution, but I digress.)

David Shuster is not just an asshole. He’s a crazy, illiterate asshole who let his attachment to the worst political scene in the 20th century override his common sense. Only in the fevered imagination of such a cretin could the standard relationship between a 28-year-old woman and her politically ruthless presidential candidate mother be described using the word ‘pimp’.

Then again, only in that same imagination could the aforementioned mother be considered the same threat to the conservative order of things that the people 'welfare pimp' was shot at represented. I don't know if anyone is ever going to make the vapid beltway heads eat the shit they've been giving rave reviews of for the last eight years, but the optimist in me says they will. I like to think that the plain wrongness of everything they've had to say will eventually bite them in the ass - but then again, I always was a shameless reality pimp.

Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee sweep the Iowa caucuses. Exit polls cite the primary motivator as a desire for “change,” further cementing the nation’s awful stereotype of Iowans as easily-led hayseeds. Next up is New Hampshire, a state so blessedly deranged that John fucking McCain is the man to beat. Dodd and Biden have both apparently dropped out, feeling the change in the wind — no more is it the day of the merely bland honky with suspicious hair.

There’s going to be some entertainment in watching the bloody fight within the Republican party over “conservative” priorities. Obviously, they’d prefer a candidate who slashes taxes as readily as he kills Haji and praises Jesus, but what can be sacrificed? Will the squat little psychopath Giuliani’s white-hot desire to exterminate the Saracen be enough to make up for his crippling association with Jew York? Can a Smithite queer-lover like Romney adequately defend America from the looming threat of dhimmitude, even if his economic record in fell Taxachusetts is admirable? Could Thompson perhaps fit every Arab in the entire world into his baggy, Aqua Velva-scented jowls?

At this point, I’m just half-heartedly pulling for anyone who won’t bomb Iran, which in this post-NIE environment appears to be anyone but Clinton and the Republican war party. A federal subsidy for Oregon hops growers would probably buy my vote, or else I’ll have to switch to Budweiser.

Sorry for the lack of posting recently. I’ve been alternately busy, drunk, and unwell, and Alec has been fucking bears. I hope to get back to a more normal schedule shortly.

1. Isolate uses of ‘freedom’ or any form of it (’free’, ‘freed’) and any cognate of it (’liberated’, ‘liberty’, ‘liberal’ if and only if as part of ‘liberal democracy’ or maybe in the economic sense, ‘franchise’ for voting but not for beef (nor ‘frank’ or ‘France’), use your head here) in any right-wing, neoliberal, or drink-soaked former Trotskyist opinion writing or speech.

2. Replace it as grammatically and elocutionally appropriate with ‘free Willy’.

From the recent attempt by the miserable failure George W. Bush to Google-bomb Ozzie b.L, MoveOn, and Code Pink:

BEFORE:
I appreciate all you’ve done and I really want to thank Heritage. One of the interesting things about the Heritage legacy is that the folks here have been tireless advocates, tireless champions of liberty, and free enterprise, and democracy and religious freedom.

AFTER:

I appreciate all you’ve done and I really want to thank Heritage. One of the interesting things about the Heritage legacy is that the folks here have been tireless advocates, tireless champions of liberal Willy, and free-Willy- enterprise, and democracy and religious freedom of Willy.

Try it for yourself!

http://www.jewsonfirst.org/delaware_schools.php

As they say, Jesus Christ.

I’d like to show this to all those pig-fuckers pretending that the oppressive Christian dominioninism of the modern American discourse is just fine for religious minorities - especially those goddamned fools who play the Christian right’s little brown dancing monkeys, Dershowitz and Podhoretz and Prager and especially that cunt Horowitz - and ask them how they like their blue-eyed baby boy now.

Then I remember that they read stories about Israeli villages getting struck by missiles and pop a little boner, and I want to cry.

I’m glad I get to be Irish and a secular humanist (the real kind, not the dog-whistle-for-hebe kind) when people aren’t basing religion exclusively on whether or not one has what one of my exes once called a ‘Jewy nose’. This is terrifying on so many levels, and if I ever do have to move to Sweden I’m including this in my application for asylum.

Djur was originally going to help me with this one, but when I told him I was writing in favor of more active far-left, beyond-the-base campaigning, he accused me of formenting partisan rancor and class warfare and urged that I refuse to vote for an ‘extremist’ like Clinton. So I’ll be doing this one alone, folks.

There’s a very interesting thesis put forward by libertarian (read: corporatist republican) think-tankers and activists, the Overton Window . Stop right now and read that link; it should be required reading for anyone who cares for the Republic and its future. Come back only once you’re done.

Good stuff, eh? I’m very sorry I had to resort to a link to Daily Kos - or, as some wits would have it, Dago Cossack Queeratorium - but there you go. The right and the left have, since Reagan, been pursuing different political models, and the results of that are pretty much self-evident. As I explored in my last post, there’s a definite influence by the President and how the people treat him, along with any other major political figures. But the wider strategy is still extremely important.
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This is an article from MTV.com, inadvertently noticed when chortling at the buffoon from Death Cab For Cutie who claims he’s being persecuted by the Man. It’s not as if I expected insightful and penetrating journalism from the online arm of that great engine of juvenile vapidity, but this is technical idiocy on a par with “They’re stealing the Internet!” Alec was going to write about this, but he determined that it would interfere with the necessary triangulation of the interests of large and small businesses to more fully enhance the moderating power of the vital center. You know, I’m getting worried about him — in the posting queue here at It Is *Dancing*, he has a ten-page article that consists entirely of the words “Thanks, Ralph.”

BitTorrent To Serve Up Fall Out Boy, ‘Harry Potter’ Legally

Imagine if, back in the day, record labels had said to Napster, “Sure, take our stuff,” instead of bringing down the big legal hammer and crushing the pioneering peer-to-peer service. Times have certainly changed.

It truly is a brave new world, in which media companies have recognized that distributing promotional material for free can increase their profits. Such an unprecedented revolution of media distribution is certainly worthy of note, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that BitTorrent, Inc. has a partnership itself with MTV. Why, that piece of information would suggest that the media business is an incestuous, oligopolic orgy of “co-opetition”. In fact, it’d suggest that the media industry is a sort of sodomistic Ouroboros, where titanic media conglomerates slurp each other off into increasingly staggering levels of profit.

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