June 30, 2002

Shelley's tracking and I'm trying to figure out if I figured out the magic of it all. Did you get pinged, Shelley?

I've discovered some bloggers whom I've added to my roll because they are just such damned interesting people: Lorraine O'Connor (one of the older/wiser ones), eclectic Aussie Allan Moult, Mike Zellers (spacemonk), and Tom Bolton. I was particular impressed by Tom's piece that picked up the thread on gender started by Frank Paynter. So, check 'em all out.

I've been reading so much online about the current American travesties that I can't remember where I saw a list of criteria that are indicators of the imminent fall of an empire. If I remember correctly, my country is exhibiting all of them.

On top of that we have ravaging fires in drought-ridden parts of this country, heavy rains and flooding in areas already known to be sodden, horrific tales of pedophiliac priests rising out of the religious dark, and an increasing number of news stories of parents breaking apart their kids' bodies and spirits.

My son ruminates online about his painful alienation from his country of birth, and we all wait to see if something awful will happen on the day on which we celebrate the ideal that America was supposed to strive toward.

No wonder we're all depressed. There is hardly anything that is in our control anymore. It makes me wonder about what exactly IS still in our control.

Maybe all we have is all we really can expect to have as humans on this planet: the challenges of daily survival; of creating ways to connect with and love each other; of working toward and celebrating small successes because the large ones will always be out of our control; of learning how to share our successes with each other so that we can all hope beyond the daily.

Perhaps we humans have gotten too arrogant. We assume that we can control -- each other, the elements, the whims of the universe. The truth is, it seems to me, that the only thing that we each have control over is our own Self. And nowhere in our upbringings or educations are we taught to understand that and how to accomplish that with love, compassion, joy, and meaningful connection.

Maybe those of us who survive what comes next will be those of us who can hunker down, live small, stay connected with similar souls, wait for it all to blow over. If it doesn't blow us all up before we make it through.

Since I post about b!X so often, some might think that I have only one offspring with a presence on the web. Not so. My daughter -- aka 'cwyln' --(on the verge of popping out my grandson any day now) has a website here promoting her novel, which was supposed to be published by a small press that now claims to have been so badly affected by 9/11 that it has pretty much folded. So, does anyone know of an agent and/or publisher that might like to take on this one?

Not my actual offspring, but dearly loved and much appreciated, is my son-in-law -- aka 'schmev' -- who is an amazing illustrator with stuff on his website here. He has written and illustrated the most beautiful children's book about Esmeralda the honey bee, and that's looking for a publisher as well. Both sites are in my Familylinks.

I've posted about these two before, specifically about their wedding five years ago, which sported statues of Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia on their wedding cake (instead of the traditional bride and groom) and featured a life-sized Yoda cardboard figure presiding over the whole event.

We are quite a family, doncha think?

June 29, 2002

Sometimes things kinda settle into the back of your brain and you have no idea where they came from. Well, one of b!X (former?) friends gives that one true one credit for the 'heh' that I -- and she -- often use. Heh.

I hate patriarchy. But I like men who are not patriarchs. That makes sense, doesn't it?

I'm a feminist but I like being both female and feminine. That makes sense to me too, although I occasionally run into people -- mostly of my generation -- who find that confusing.

I think about these things today because Frank Paynter left me a compliment to my "femininity" under the photo I left on my old blog site. And believe, me, I am complimented. At my age, I'll take all those kinds of compliments I can get.

I remember my former boss (female, two years older than I) having a conversation about how different our attitudes are about accepting compliments from our male colleagues (i.e. "nice dress" or "hey, you got your hair cut; it looks great...") as we get older. Of course, our whole unit was relaxed and collegial, so we were as apt to compliment the guys' new ties or new hair cuts as well. But I know that in my younger, more radically feminist days, I was very sensitive to anything that smacked of condescension or trivialization -- that I interpreted as detracting from my professionalism. Heh. How times have changed.

And they've changed not just for me as I move out of my prime (but, hey, there's still a dance it the ol' dame yet, don't forget). I get to know younger women like Halley and Jeneane and Shelley and Denise and Andrea and Anita (and lots of my other Blog Sisters) and see strong, sexy, confident, professional, savvy women who blend being feminine and feminist with ease and humor. As I still sometimes struggle to walk my fine line between feminine and feminist, I recognize that's it's a line drawn by the times and the situations that shaped my definition of who I am. (Just another example of why I was born too early.)

I also recognize that, in creating a blog-identity as a "crone," I conjured up an image of myself that's true only in spirit.

So, thanks, Frank. You made my day. Hell, you made my whole week!

June 28, 2002

This from b!X's site (who got the whole thing from here.) And if this just ain't the Supremist irony!

"How much do you actually know about where the Pledge came from?

A Christian socialist who turned his back on religion. That's the guy whose handiwork politicians of both parties and religious right leaders rushed to defend this past week.

Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister in upstate New York who sermonized against the materialism of the Gilded Age and who resigned from his church after businessmen cut off funding because of his socialist activities and lectures, wrote the Pledge of Allegiance in 1892. Now his words, composed for a magazine-sponsored school program celebrating the quadricentennial of Columbus Day, are treated as a sacred writ.

Originally, he was going to place the word 'equality' in there with I 'liberty' and 'justice' but realized he'd get resoundingly berated, since most people didn't at the time believe that blacks or women should be equal to white men."

If you don't check b!X's site every day, you're missing the best way to keep up with the ongoing sagas of our country's most current embarrassing ironies.

All of this blogging about the "pledge" and b!X's post about the time he refused to say it in high school reminds me of my checkered pledge past.

When I was a young student, we were a nation "indivisible" and not "under God." No problem there for me. By the time I was a teacher and had to stand up with my class to say the pledge, the "God" thing had been inserted; no one ever noticed that, while my lips were moving, I wasn't saying anything. Then came the Viet Nam war, and I was an Assistant 4-H Leader of a group of a half-dozen girls that included my daughter. I was protesting the war and refused to say the pledge. I'm probably the only 4-H leader that ever got fired for political insubordination. Heh.

Got this off Aussie Alan Moult's page. He got if off SatireWire. And it did make me laugh.

Exclusive: Band of roving Chief Executives spotted miles from Mexican border.

El Paso, Texas (SatireWire.com) — Unwilling to wait for their eventual indictments, the 10,000 remaining CEOs of public U.S. companies made a break for it yesterday, heading for the Mexican border, plundering towns and villages along the way, and writing the entire rampage off as a marketing expense.

CEOnista Martha Stewart (Martha Stewart Omnimedia) was one of the few executives captured. Her mask is made from recycled Christmas paper wrapping.

(I posted this on Blog Sisters, but if it's good enough for there, it's good enough for here):

Halley Suitt's candid and candied comments to probing interviewer Frank Paynter prove that she's anything but.

Paynter's latest interview of the blog's most fascinating women (heh -- that's my arrogant editorial sidebar, so don't attribute that to Frank) is a portrait of Halley that reveals her complex, creative, productive human mind, her wittingly raunchy female soul, and her attitude toward body that -- well, go and enjoy the view yourself. Move over ol' Madonna and Britney. We've got our own Madonna of the Blog.

Wow. It looks as though my new site, thanks to b!X's energy and creativity, is at this moment #26 on the Daypop 40. And I think that I also have to thank much-read Gary Turner for much of that, since it looks as though it is his announcment and link to me that is helping me to get all those hits. That's a first for me, so thanks to two of the really good guys!!

And while I giving thanks, thanks also to all of you who posted comments on complimenting this new design. Apparently it loads fast too, and that's surely a good thing. I'm also interested to know how the type size works. I had b!X make it larger than usual, since I know that I have a hard time reading small type. Like, I love Mike Golby's stuff, but boy is it hard on my eyes to read!

And, while b!X hasn't made the Daypop 40, he's poppin' as well, tuning up his own blog design. There must be something in the air.

June 27, 2002

An article in the current Free Inquiry magazine to which I subscribe has some very good articles on what they call "secular" vs "religious" humanism. I bill myself as a "spiritual seeker" and I have called myself an "irreverent non-believer." While that sounds contradictory, it really isn't because I do have a sense of the spiritual in humanity. This article articulated what is pretty much my strange magical non-belief -- as follows:

Some among the ancient Gnostics, those great spinners of mystical, allegorical mythologies, had a name for the Ultimate Godhead. They called it "Man" (Anthropos, human being). This is a very old idea, rooted in the Upanishads where the world springs into being from the self-sacrifice of the Primal Man, Purusha, whose name is also one of the words for "soul." What a breathtaking myth! What a powerful image! Let me suggest that the Gnostic myth implies something about what distinguishes religious from secular humanism, namely, a belief in the divinity of human nature. Such belief may not be a necessary condition for religious humanism, but it seems to me a sufficient one. That is, if you believe human nature deserves the epithet "divine," you qualify as other (or, if you prefer, more) than a secular humanist.

I think of Ludwig Feuerbach and his relentless hermeneutic of suspicion. Feuerbach held that theologians are correct when they say we can discern the divine attributes. They are right to believe in such things as divine love, justice, mercy, sagacity—even in eternal life and omniscience. Theologians are merely wrong in ascribing these to some divine person beyond humanity. On this argument the grandeur of human nature, of the human race collectively, truly is divine. It is also a terrific burden to bear. Our problem is that we shirk the burden of our own divine greatness. We create the devil as the scapegoat for the evil that we do, both trivial and titanic; and we create God as a paradoxical scapegoat to take the burden of our righteousness—we don't want responsibility for either! Feuerbach said he knew his readers would consider him an atheist for denying the existence of God, but he riposted that he was the genuine believer, because he revered true divinity where it was really to be found—in the human breast, or in humanity as a whole. Feuerbach thought that conventional theists, by contrast, were unbelievers or idolaters, erecting for themselves a false God instead of the real divinity within them.

So, pardon me while I blame religious patriarchies for erecting these false gods. (Heh. I blame patriarchal structures for just about all the ills of humankind. Not men as individuals, but rather the constructs that some men have devised to keep other men and women "in their place." I know that I'm pushing buttons here. I mean to. And I don't mean to imply that matriarchy is the answer either.)

And so I don't really want to be called a "religious humanist." But I think that I strive to be a "spiritual humanist." A spiritual humanist who's really pissed off at patriarchy in all of its forms. So, there you have it.

And, hopefully, if wouldn't happen in a truly egalitarian society, either.

The following is from a two part piece in salon.com: Part 1 and Part II. Thanks to b!X for emailing me the link.

Pending lawsuits allege that U.S. military contractors on duty in Bosnia bought and "owned" young women. But the accused men have never been -- and will never be -- brought to justice.

"[IPTF] officers and ... [overseas] contractors share one major characteristic: impunity," Martina Vandenberg, a women's rights researcher for Human Rights Watch told a House International Relations Subcommittee in April.

A never-until-now published interview with Chris Locke about his book Gonzo Marketing appeared on George Partington's web site today.

As usual, he says things that deserve repeating, such as:

There are multinational corporations that could adopt an entire city and say, “We are going to put your kids through school. Nike in Southeast Asia could change the conditions of the people who are making its shoes. It would cost them a few points off their profitability, but they could win hearts and minds in exact counterproportion to the hearts and minds that they are losing by running sweatshops, which are being documented on the Web in a detail that those companies wouldn’t have believed a few years ago was possible....

Well, we know that he must be reading lots of our weblogs, because Chris Locke took current blog conversations to the broadcast airwaves in his interview on NPR's Morning Report today. You can hear what he has to say by going here and scrolling down to "twenty-seven" and then fast forwarding to just before the middle of the recorded program. That's where his interview begins.

June 26, 2002

First he got me surfing. Then he got me blogging. Now he's designed me this new blog site on MT, and got me my own domain. It's all a part of his Spartaneity Project, which he is developing to incorporate the Cluetrain theses and to reflect his "less is more/form follows function" approach to web site design.

Kalilily.net had been a gleam in b!X's eye for months. Then I did the Solstice and new moon ritual and, lo and behold, my new blog design appeared. And this is just the beginning. Eventually my site will have additional components that b!X will set up for me, since I'm still not a techie and probably never will be.

So, what do you think? (I'm still working on my blogrolling thing, and a few other details.)