the hyper-jealous spouse is the one that’s actually cheating.

I was reading this post on declining union membership at Sociological Images. I was struck by how rich people talk about working class people.

Let’s see, shall we, by taking some standard tropes about the poor.

1.They have numerous babies with multiple partners

A picture of Donald Trump making an angry face while standing next to his current wife. Mr. Trump has 5 children by 3 different women.

2. They use fraud to milk the system for money that doesn’t belong to them.

A picture of Bernie Ebbers, whose fraud cost MCI about 11 billion dollars and the jobs of about 20,000 people.

3. They’re hypersexed and lazy

Hugh Hefner in the ubiquitous robe. For the lazy part, you have to go google the stories about the baby oil anal sex for yourself. I feel gross just typing it.

I could go on, but the more I google the more skeeved I get.

The point is, what we believe are truths about the awful stereotypes of poor people are really deflections made by skeezy rich white dudes to draw attention away from themselves.

So I’ve heard a lot of middle/upper middle white people in Seattle talk about what an awesome public transportation system we have (cough, sputter, cough). I could pull out my pretentious traveler card and point out that most of Europe has cheaper, faster, cleaner transport. But fuck that.

Tomorrow I have to take a minimum of 3 buses and 1 hour 45 minutes to go to a housing interview (with Seattle Public Housing, who I’ve fought with in the past, and my stomach is turning at the thought, but that’s another story). Metro’s online trip planner is giving me a range of between $7 and $9 EACH way for bus fare. For just me. The Kid is another $3.75 each way. It would be slightly cheaper if I had a prepaid or bank funded Orca card, but the cards themselves cost $5.

It used to be that I could pay for our bus fare by scraping the loose change from my purse. Now you get super shitty treatment from the bus driver and passengers behind you if you use actual money. The price for riding the bus has so far outpaced inflation as to be comparable in increases to health care and higher education.

For the last 9 years, I have been a reasonably happy public transit rider. I gave up my car when we lived in the city because the cost was too high compared to the bus. But I lived walking distance to work, and for most of my employment I got discounted bus passes and everything I wanted to go to was within city limits, so I got the low one zone fares. The $20 I am spending tomorrow is way more than I would have spent in gas, insurance, etc, to drive a whole 15 miles and back. Not to mention the extra 2 hours of transit time that I would save.

Of course, if you work for somewhere like Microsoft (a big company that subsides bus passes and offers privately paid connector shuttles to eliminate the patchwork of city & county buses) then yes, the Metro system is a peach. If you are a poor person trying to get to poor places that are poorly served by public transit because poor people live there, then you’re fucked.

If I had to make this trip everyday, for work, it would kill me both financially and timewise. A 9 hour day (8 hours plus lunch) plus nearly 4 hours of commuting, plus 14 fucking dollars a day. At minimum wage, the first 2 hours of work I put in every day would go straight to bus fare. What a waste of fucking time.

Please forgive my absence – I’ve been dealing with way too much life crap of my own lately. But this called for a quick drive-by. Remember this? From Dangerous Liaisons?

Shame is most often the tool of the kyriarchy against uppity broads like us, and in some ways, I hesitate to apply it to Palin, since she’s getting criticized far more than the Glenn Beck/Rush Limbaugh sector of the right wing. But there’s no place for “blood libel” in public discourse from anyone decent. She and her big-money male supporters

there’s a story at the nytimes about Arizon’s new law prohibiting
classes in ethnic studies. to here the patriarchy apologists whinge
about how the chicano students became angry instead of staying docile
little mexicans after taking the class is funny. it also makes me
think of charlotte perkins gillman being locked in a yellow room with
no books because she might become agitated. if you don’t get pissed
off reading about milleniums of oppression, you’re probably an
oppressor.
but can we please get an oppression system to fight that has some new
tricks please? i mean, keeping the brown folk and the ladies
illiterate and ignorant is sooooo 19th century.

—
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

By now I am sure you all have heard the horrible news out of Arizona.

A 9 year old girl was murdered to make a political point. A judge was murdered to make a political point. A congress person was shot through the head to make a point. At least 5, possibly 6 people are dead because a terrorist couldn’t get his own way. (I’m working on sketchy internet access here, so apologies if I get some facts wrong- the sentiment is still the same).

We already know how this story is going to play out in the news. Rethuglikans and tea baggers will claim this was the act of a lone, disturbed man and has nothing to do with their rhetoric. Democrats will try to use this to guilt rethuglikans into bipartisanship (it won’t work). And Democratic politicians across the country will be even less likely to do anything but give into the right because of real fear of being killed for doing otherwise.

But Giffords is a moderate. She was already doing what she could to find common ground with people who will be gleeful that the bullet through her head gives them a chance to steal her seat. There is no middle ground to be found with them. There is no way to negotiate a fair deal with people who will happily load the gun that will be held to your head later. You don’t negotiate with terrorists because their end goal is your destruction, and there’s no middle ground between dead and alive.

There will be Democratic pundits and voters who will claim that this is what happens when you don’t vote blue. Actually, this is what happens when you do vote blue. As unhappy as we on the left were under Bush, nobody tried to shoot Tom Delay and the violent factions of our country were resolutely quiet for 8 years.

So this is the word we live in now. The political left pays ransoms to the political right in hopes of saving their own skin and the political right stokes the fires violence. 9 year old girls die in the crossfire.

I have always thought that the measure of a person is not what they would kill for, but what they would die for*. If there is no amount of moderation that can save you from the bullet of a teabagger, then perhaps it’s time to give up the idea of bipartisanship. They will kill you anyways. Go down fighting, or let someone take your place who will.

(Isn’t it also funny that the people most likely to murder in these situations are white Christian dudes. I may be a godless atheist, but I’m pretty sure that the bible doesn’t say “Jesus killed for our sins”. What would Jesus do certainly never involved mass murder.)

but very few people admit it well.

So Roger Ebert, who is usually awesome, weighed in on the controversy about replacing the word n****r in Huck Finn with the word slave by tweeting that he’d rather be called a n****r than a slave. (sorry folk, rules of reclamation mean I won’t type the whole word).

When someone pointed out this little bit of privilege, he responded with “You know, this is very true. I’ll never be called a N***** *or* a Slave, so I should have shut the **** up,”

That’s how you apologize when privilege comes leaping out of your mouth or keyboard. Imagine a world where after any number of stupid things said by, oh say Keith Olberman, we got a “you’re right, I’m never going to be date raped in Sweden, so I should just shut the fuck up”.

Or the virtuous foodies “you’re right, I’m never going to have to choose between organic steel cut oats and paying the electric bill. I should just shut the fuck up,”

Or members of the political class “you’re right, when we say sacrifice we mean only for people who have less than us. We should just shut the fuck up”.

(I think I had a little wordgasm typing that last one).

As far as the actual controversy goes, I think Renee sums it up better than I can. But I will add one little thing, would it be so fucking hard to include books written by actual people of color when talking about race and or slavery?

Anyone else find it funny that all the dead animals are in predominantly Christian countries?

Oh please, oh please, oh please, the rapture can’t come soon enough for this non-believer.

So a few years ago, when we had a house of our own, I used to say that what I wanted more than anything was to live out of a suitcase and spend my time writing*. Well, the Kid and I have certainly done that for the last year or so, and lemme tell you, it’s way less romantic than I imagined.

I don’t believe in god or kharma or magical forces of any kind, but every now and then I have to look at the order of the universe and go “What the fuckity fuck kind of sick joke is this?”

*What I actually used to say is- I want to travel around the world, living out of a suitcase, and getting to yell at people for a living.

whew. what a morning it has been. today we went from short term
temporary housing to longer term temporary housing. we made it her
with exactly one dollar left (thank you soo much to all of you who
made it so that we didn’t spend december living in a tent) as you can
see, i am back to interneting on my phone. don’t know when that can be
fixed but forgive the typing please. it’s still a long, hard, scary
road ahead, but we are safe and there is a thin possibility of
something better to come. happy belated new year, i think that might
actually be true this year.

—
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

(FTR, the blog tittle should be sung to the Beattles’ Daytripper)

New Left has an interesting little blurb up about gatekeeping in regards to college educations. Go read, I’ll wait.

Gatekeeping serves a major purpose in entrenching the dominant paradigm and reinforcing cultural hegemony. If you can only get a a decent job through a college education, and you can only get a college education by subscribing to capitalism and free marketeering, then the only people who get good jobs are those who will support the current system. But that’s just a small gate, there are much bigger gates to be guarded. Another small gate, say you are a lefty poly sci student. You can be as progressive as you want, but if you want to get a paying job doing what you spent years in school studying, you have to shelve those alternative ideas. Maybe occasionally someone (Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader) gets to be king of the ideal left, but you should note that they are usually white dudes who get to betray their elite status with radical ideas. If you have any kind of oppression points at all, that won’t be possible.

Our election system is one grand example of gatekeeping. We only get 2 versions of what’s possible, and strangely both those versions are business friendly. They may bicker over talking points, but at the end of the day real change and reform just isn’t going to happen when both parties rely on massive corporate funding and the elimination of third parties. You can start out as Mr. Smith (or Mr. Alan Greyson) goes to Washington as you like, the reality is that you either work to keep the system intact or you get sent home.

But gatekeeping doesn’t just happen in politics. This is where I may get into some trouble, so forgive me in advance. Take a look at Oprah Winfrey, undisputed media queen of the world. Oh yes, she is a dark skinned black woman. She is one hell of a business woman and talented too. All of that is true. Yet she wouldn’t ever have gotten where she is today if she didn’t repeat the false American dream ideas over and over and over. Your failures are individual failures. She pulled herself up by the bootstraps and look where she is. Anyone can do it if she did. All it takes is education and drive and hard work. Except that’s not all it takes. It also takes a certain degree of luck and the willingness to ignore cognitive dissonance. Oprah works really hard everyday, but does she really work harder than a minimum wage hotel maid? If Oprah didn’t repeat that hard work equals success narrative, if she started questioning the economic system that has made her so much money, would she still make so much money? Would she have been allowed to have a television show on networks whose job it is to sell ad space to companies that want to sell us on the American dream? No. (See also the new OWN network, if Oprah suddenly got all progressive her network would fail because major corporations wouldn’t advertise with it).

That same thing works in small ways too. If the only employer in town is Walmart, you shut up about how Walmart closed down all the little stores and the factories that went overseas to make the products that Walmart sells. You shut up and hope that you can get a Walmart job. You spew the company line, because if you don’t subscribe to it, you don’t eat. You become the gatekeeper for mass consumerism.

But some of us can point out the gatekeeping. We can explain that freedom doesn’t mean the choice between donkey flavored coke and elephant flavored pepsi. we can remind them that progressive economics are water for those dying of economic thirst.