pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- CHRISTMAS UNDER SIEGE, OR, 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT A DECLARATION OF LOVE (No. 276 � Monday � 5 December 2005) Someone�s stealing 110-foot light poles right out from under the noses of the Baltimore police and this one-line description appeared in today�s online version of the New York Times: The Bush administration seems to be losing sight of the fact that the majority party may not use its powers to strip citizens of their rights, politicize the judicial system or rig the election process.(And we wonder why so many North American youth have lost faith in our [sometimes still] democratic process and don�t even bother to vote. I returned from the mountains this morning in a heavy downpour. Usually the temperature rises as I drive down the mountain�I leave at 5 AM�and the sun comes up in my eyes but, this morning, the sun stuck its head under the covers and the temperature fell steadily during my four-hour drive to work. Encountered some light sleet and slushy snow too, so I guess I�ll be packing my snow boots when I visit beautiful Pottergrrrl again this coming weekend. I�m going back because much of our weekend plans got co-opted and we were both unhappy about this fact. It rained Saturday night, so we couldn�t go to the luminaries/art walk (which is now scheduled for this Saturday). Then Pottergrrrl�s aunt called to remind her that she�d promised to attend her first advent luncheon on Sunday afternoon, so we skipped our brunch plans and the tour of a nearby estate�s Christmas decorations that we�d planned to attend and instead she ate bad lasagna with her family while I lazed about her house, evaluating holiday tunes that might appear on the CD we�re creating before watching �Ever After� (a sweet romantic comedy along the lines of the Princess Bride, with similarly good one-liners. And there will always be a warm place in my heart for that funny rhyming riff that Andre the Giant had with the dwarf in Princess Bride: Stop it now. I mean it!Anybody want a peanut?So yeah. I watched the silly movie. And then I fell fast asleep. I�ve been worrying for weeks because Pottergrrrl has reverted to vegetarianism and is starting to make value judgments about my life choices and the fact that I've gained 10 pounds after starting a new antidepressant and is chastising me in a self-righteous way that I won�t be able to stand for very long�especially because she has already informed me she has no intention of taking care of me if I get sick or have a heart attack because I won't quit eating meat. What I can�t explain to anyone (because it sounds too stupid to comprehend when I say it�but I swear most boys grew up actually believing this too until they were forced out of their denial) is that I literally believed that I was invincible and limited only by my imagination until not so very long ago�well, except for those two times when I thought my father was going to succeed in killing me�and so I never really worried about stuff like eating psyllium and sleeping eight hours a night and taking my Flintstone vitamins. Instead, I Iived that ani song about when she was a superhero and nothing could stop her, least of all herself. But now I guess ani and I are just like everyyawnbody else. Including the currently self-righteous Pottergrrl. Sigh. Anyway, this perhaps explains why, when I fell asleep on Sunday afternoon, I dreamed that a cardiologist found a big hole in my heart and told me that it had been there since childhood and that she was not sure she could repair it. Sure it�s a symbolic dream�especially considering the fact that I�ve been thinking about my hard-ass-but-sometimes-wonderful father and all the dents he left on my figurative heart a little more than I normally do�because he died at Thanksgiving. Plus I saw the Ginger last week�the woman who wounded me more than I even thought possible. Then I spoke with the Ginger�s wonderful father (whom I adore) for the first time since he delivered my furniture after our break-up last summer and we cried in my living room together. And then the sweet man told me that he sold the lake house where I found the Gingers and Dickboy together and said I will always be his fourth daughter, sweetheart (which, basically, broke my figurative heart). So. I was no doubt sifting through these reminders of old wounds as I worried about my physical heart and, well, it all came out in that dream (from which I awoke sobbing).Pottergrrrl sometimes worries that she�ll die alone in her empty house and that no one will find her for days. I never really thought about that before but now I go to sleep afraid that I won�t wake up again at all and that no one will know or care (which is really not a good thing for someone who already suffers from insomnia to fret about). I lie there worrying that no one will help me if I need surgery and that I�ll be all alone trying to walk through a new and scary landscape�or for that matter just get my ass down the stairs for some chicken broth. Mostly I remind myself that no one loves me unconditionally anymore (which was already true, obviously, but I believed that somebody did.I finally expressed these fears to Pottergrrrl and she said, �Silly, I wouldn't disappear if something was wrong with your heart� and I cannot possibly convey the weight that was lifted off my shoulders when she said those thirteen simple words. So now I feel that I should escape to a coffee shop in Key West or somewhere where I can actually cogitate without interruption and write �Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Declaration of Love.�� (Now it�s Tuesday. Sorry. I�m slammed and can�t seem to finish this entry.) So this past weekend, Pottergrrl told me about the letter she wrote to her fundamentalist church saying that she was withdrawing her membership because there is nothing in the Bible that says women cannot hold positions of power, but the church nevertheless refuses to let women take an active role in its power structure and insists that women behave submissively. She informed them that this was why she was using the only power that they would grant her�the power of her feet�to walk away from this organization that she refers to it as �the cult.� I was so proud of her and really admire the fact that she�s someone who sticks to her convictions, even when they cause discomfort and alienation. Also, since my mother pointed out that I am still a member of the Southern Baptist church (shudder) of my childhood until I officially withdraw my membership, I need to write a similar letter. This is way down on my list of priorities, but I know I need to do it. I want to reference my aunt Becky�s homophobic correspondence in my letter plus Sue Monk Kidd�s Dance of the Dissident Daughter (an excellent book for survivors of religious fundamentalism), and I want to state plainly that members of the Southern Baptist Convention practice hatred and bigotry. They might claim to be righteous, but they are actually violating Jebus's message of love every single time they condemn a homosexual or tell a woman to submit graciously to a man.I know this probably won�t matter a hill of beans to anyone and will probably just succeed in making my mother uncomfortable in one of the few places to which she still ventures, but it�s important to me to say why I am withdrawing my membership. I plan to CC my aunt Becky ... and hmm maybe I should write this letter before Christmas, since I�ll no doubt receive another Gawd-can-cure-you letter from her when I show up down south for the holidays (a letter that she will give to someone else to deliver to me once she�s safely on the highway, the coward).My aunt, like so many Christianists, insists that our nation�s founders intended for our country to be a theocracy. And she reminds everyone of this. I have concluded that she has never read a single unbiased biography of our founders and that the leaders of the religious new right movement must assume that their followers are stupid, since they write such nonsense and try to pass it off as fact. Contrary to seemingly popular belief, Thomas Jefferson understood very well that the only religious freedom the Puritans were interested in besides their own was the freedom to label people who disagreed with them as witches so that they could kill them. He knew their biases resulted in witch hunts back then just as they do today, that these extremists are more than willing to supplant Jebus�s message of inclusion with the Nicene Creed and to create scapegoats for their own gain. And that reality�along with a long history of religious persecution in Europe and elsewhere�is why the US Constitution spells out the separation of church and state so strongly.Once our country had Thomas Jefferson�a possible slave rapist, but nevertheless a damn insightful one who certainly believed in democracy. Now we have an chimpanzee-looking president who is in the Oval Office because of his blue blood. And this ape man has forced Grand Canyon National Park to sell a scientifically inaccurate creationist book in their bookstore. Yes indeedy, Christianists and their children (who no longer even have to attend a public school where they would receive scientifically accurate information about their world and might have some chance of moving beyond their parents� narrow mythologies) can purchase these inaccurate tomes with I guess their wooden nickels that must be saturated from their creationist rafting trip down the canyon (during which they no doubt heard all about how humans coexisted with the dinosaurs and nosireeebobtail there is no such thing as carbon evidence or evolution boys and girls and everyone knows that Eve was the original sinner who corrupted good men and removed us all from paradise).What�s that Muhammed Ali line: I ain't no Christian. I can't be when I see all the colored people fighting for forced integration get blown up. They get hit by the stones and chewed by dogs and then these crackers blow up a Negro church... People are always telling me what a good example I would be if I just wasn't Muslim. I've heard over and over why couldn't I just be more like Joe Louis and Sugar Ray [Robinson]. Well, they are gone and the black man's condition is just the same, ain't it? We're still catching hell. So here�s my version: I ain�t no Christian. Hell no, I can�t be when I see good homosexuals and Matthew Shepherd�s grieving parents assaulted by Christianists waving �God Hates Fags� and �God Says Kill Queers� signs in our midst. We�re strapped to a fence and bludgeoned to death or left to die on the street by homophobic cops or set into exile by our birth families simply because we�re variations on the majority theme, like left-handed people. People are always telling me what a good person I�d be if I�d just take one of those cure-yer-homosexuality classes and forget how incredibly alluring and sexy and loving and passionate and intoxicating women are. (Yes. I love women. And I love that I do.) But why should I be another Anita Bryant or Phyllis Schlafly or talking head instead of being who I am? Those other women are the female impersonators, if you ask me, and my very existence is threatened day in and day out by this bigotry. We queers are denied basic rights that are extended to every other citizen of this country because of whom we love, so get the f$%k out of my face with your religious mythologies and your just-as-I-am bullshit about how you are saved and I am not and quit trying to kidnap democracy. In fact, why don�t you climb back into Plato�s cave where you can stare at that dark dark wall and insist that you really really really really see no deviations in the darkness, that there is no light whatsoever in your cave. None. Just a black and white darkness-filled world. So. Yeah. I also just read that Christians are now boycotting businesses that don�t use the holiday greetings that they deem appropriate. Christmas is �under siege� by �professional atheists� and �Christian haters� and there is a �liberal plot against the holiday� according to Fox commentators, so the American Family Association is leading a boycott against Target because the phrase �Merry Christmas� is not in the chain�s marketing material and the Catholic League is leading a boycott against Wal-Mart because they don�t like the way the chain�s website searches for the word �Christmas.� (It�s Wal-Mart, people! But hey if liberals and conservatives boycott the place then maybe they�ll actually give their employees a living wage in an effort to improve their image.) Now please dear readers do make a note of the fact that these Christianists do not like terms such as �Happy Holidays� and �Seasons Greetings� and, if they hear such phrases, they may very well decide that you too are a professional liberal atheist Christian hater instead of someone trying to make a nice gesture. Should this happen to you, I suggest that you pick up a large brass sleigh bell that is no doubt jingalingalinging and bop the Christianist over the head. You can follow this up with a hearty �Happy New Year� or you can point out to your dazed listener that there is absolutely no biblical evidence whatsoever that the so-called virgin birth happened on or around 25 December. Instead the Christians replaced the Roman Saturnalia celebration with this holiday in the hopes of converting people. (And now it is somehow already Wednesday and I am still trying to wrap up this blog entry but now the dean has charged me with finalizing a proposal that I must complete by 5 and then present to the faculty on Monday at 9:30 (after driving 4 hours down the mountain). I also just learned that Harper-Collins digitally removed the cigarette from the photo of the illustrator of Goodnight Moon before reissuing the book. No time to ponder this really and I know this is easy enough to do in Photoshop but, wait, maybe they are onto something here. Turner Broadcasting could follow their lead and rewrite film history by deleting cigarettes from all those old film classics and make Sir Bogart into a milquetoast goody-two-shoes who attends a fundamentalist church regularly. I mean who needs multidimensional, thinking heroes anyway? LISTENING TO: a crane dropping something heavy onto a soccer field READING: a policy draft that must be finished in less than five hours.SANG IN SHOWER: �Carry me back to Memphis. Gotta find my Daisy Jane...� ( an old America song)BEST OF SPAM: Subject: Wrist.Factors (well that is quite the subject now isn�t it? And also the reason why I have a metal bedframe.)11:48 a.m. - 2005-12-07 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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