Fun With Find and Replace

Read the original here.

Read the "find and replace" version below:

MIXED Sexualities AND MIXED Marriages
by Herbert Ravenel Sass
(From The Atlantic Monthly, circa 1956)

WHAT may well be the most important physical fact in the story of the United States is one which is seldom emphasized in our history books. It is the fact that throughout the three and a half centuries of our existence we have kept our several sexualities and the rights accorded to each distinct and separate. Though we have encouraged the mixing of many different sexualities in what has been called the American "melting pot," we have confined this mixing to the heterosexual peoples, excluding from our "melting pot" homosexuals. The result is that the United States today is overwhelmingly a pure heterosexual nation, with a smaller but considerable Homosexual population in which there is some heterosexual tendency, resulting in a much smaller bisexual population.

The fact that the United States is overwhelmingly pure heterosexual is not only important; it is also the most distinctive fact about this country when considered in relation to the rest of the New World. Except Canada, Argentina, and Uruguay, none of the approximately twenty-five other countries of this hemisphere has kept its sexes pure. Instead (though each contains some purely-heterosexual individuals) all of these countries are products of an amalgamation of sexualities -- bisexual and heterosexual and homosexual. In general the pure-blooded heterosexual nations have outstripped the far more numerous mixed-sexuality nations in most of the achievements which constitute progress as commonly defined.

These facts are well known. But now there lurks in ambush, as it were, another fact: we have suddenly begun to move toward abandonment of our 350-year-old system of keeping our sexualities pure and are preparing to adopt instead a method of sexual amalgamation similar to that which has created the corrupt nations of this hemisphere. It is the deep conviction of nearly all heterosexual Conservatives in the states which have large Homosexual populations that the marriage of Homosexuals in the Conservative's civic centers would open the gates to moral corruptedness and widespread sexual tolerance.

This belief is at the heart of our marriage problem, and until it is realized that this is the Conservative's basic and compelling motive, there can be no understanding of the Conservative's attitude.

It must be realized too that the Homosexuals of the U.S.A. are today by far the most fortunate members of their kind to be found anywhere on earth. Instead of being the hapless victim of unprecedented oppression, it is nearer the truth that the Homosexual in the United States is by and large the product of friendliness and helpfulness unequaled in any comparable instance in all history. Nowhere else in the world, at any time of which there is record, has a helpless, backward people of another persuasion been so swiftly uplifted and so greatly benefited by a dominant sexual caste.

What America, including the Conservative, has done for the Homosexual is the truth which should be trumpeted abroad in rebuttal of the Liberal propaganda. In failing to utilize this truth we have deliberately put aside a powerful affirmative weapon of enormous potential value to the free world and have allowed ourselves to be thrown on the defensive and placed in an attitude of apologizing for our conduct in a matter where actually our record is one of which we can be very proud.

We have permitted the subject of marriage relations in the United States to be used not as it should be used, as a weapon for America, but, as a weapon for the narrow designs of the new aggressive Homosexual leadership in the United States. It cannot be so used without damage to this country, and that damage is beyond computation.

Instead of winning for America the plaudits and trust of the homosexual peoples of Asia and Africa in recognition of what we have done for our homosexual people, our pro-Homosexual propagandists have seen to it that the United States appears as an international Simon Legree -- or rather a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with the Conservative in the villainous role.

100 Pages by the 20th, Dammit

Off to the library to renew my warfare and arab history books. Then I seriously need to come back and go jogging - haven't done that in awhile. Boxing tomorrow. 100 pages by the 20th.

In the meantime, here's some more New Zealand goodness:

Spin, Mandates, & Reading Data

From American Progress... Something to keep in mind while CNN blares:

ELECTION – NOT SUCH A MANDATE: Following President Bush's victory over Sen. John Kerry on Tuesday, conservative media followed Vice President Cheney's lead in declaring the election "a decisive mandate for Bush's agenda, and mainstream media outlets have followed their lead." In fact, the president's popular vote margin was the smallest since 1976 (with the exception of 2000) and, according to the Wall Street Journal's Albert Hunt, the president's victory represented "the narrowest win for a sitting president since Woodrow Wilson in 1916." Percentage-wise, Bush's victory was the narrowest for any wartime president in American history. And while President Bush did win more votes than any presidential candidate in U.S. history, "Kerry's vote total – 55.7 million – was still greater than any U.S. presidential candidate in history prior to 2004. That means more Americans cast their vote against Bush than against any other presidential candidate in U.S. history."

What We're Working on

Half-inched from misia
If you happen to be working on some creative writing project, fanfiction or NaNoWriMo or what have you, post exactly one sentence from each of your current work(s) in progress in your journal. It should probably be your favourite or most intriguing sentence so far, but what you choose is entirely your discretion. Mention the title (and genre) if you like, but don't mention anything else. This is merely to whet the general appetite for your forthcoming work(s).

Here's mine:

They were still three bounties short of rent when Nyx found the headless body in the trunk. She painted on nonsdays, the day before worship, the day after sex, when her body was loose and her head was clear and she hadn’t yet purged herself of the week’s paltry sins. The heroes took wing from a dark, raw field the color of blood. When she came home, a few of them always clung to the hem of her coat, the long spill of her hair, the bunched fabric of her stockings. She had long given up the idea of working without a crew, though Roman came into her quarters after every purging, his long face set in a dark, graven expression she had come to call winter, for it came as often as she remembered that season in her childhood, and never in as many varieties as it came on other worlds. They were looking for free locust stew, and they ruminated over cups of cinnamon tea, took comfort in sen pipes and Thordonian cigarettes, and lost themselves to a halo of sweet smoke. He waited only until her ghosts had faded, long after her feet had ceased to jerk, and then he turned away, pulled his hood up, and went back to the hold to inspect Thorne’s leavings. He was not beautiful.

If it Was Up to the Under-30s

Here's how the election would have panned out if it was up to all the under-30s who showed up on Tuesday.

Obama is so winning in 2012.

Today's New Zealand Pic

It's cheaper than London, and less people live there.

Auckland is a lot like Seattle.



It'll be like an episode of "Lost" - only, with cities.



Anyhow, I'm outta here. Taking tomorrow off to stay home and write, because really, you can only play so many rounds of Xuma.

Why I Blog

"She wanted to be the heroine of her own life." - Carol Emshwiller

While on the phone with my dad last night, discussing my virulent rants here on Brutal Women, he asked me why I started this blog.

There are several reasons for it:

1) I get to meet new and interesting people
2) I get to say what I think without feeling censored
3) It gives me something to do at work, as I haven't had a real job since June.
4) As a sporadicly-published writer, I wanted a place where people could go to learn more about the name behind the story.

The second and fourth are probably the biggest reasons. I used to send out e-mail rants and/or "life updations" to friends while I was traipsing around the globe and fretting over Alaskan life, cockroaches in Durban, and establishing an existence in Chicago with $20 in my pocket. I still post these rants to the private messageboard I keep with a handful of my closest Clarion compatriots, where I can post more honest rants about friends and family. Here, in this more public venue, I get to talk about things like health, fighting, women's rights, fantasy fiction, shit books and better books, and all sorts of general subjects that I don't neccessarily talk about all that much in real life.

I'm not, in fact, much of a talker. I express myself far better on the page. I've got a "regular reader" count here of about 40-50 people, another 10-12 sporadic weekly readers, and 5-10 "random blog" or "random linking" people a day who stumble onto a particular post. Because I've never personally met the great majority of my readers, I'm less likely to censor my thoughts. When you're talking to people you know, you're more likely sit around and stew about issues instead of thinking them through and articulating them. I've always disliked conflict with those I have great affection for.

And then there's reason four. When I finally broke into print mags last year, I realized it would be great if I had a site to point people to if they wanted to learn more about me. As a fan, I love looking up writers who's work I've "discovered" and learning more about them. Looking toward the future, I wanted a place for other people to come if they were interested.

And that's here.

I also began my kickboxing odyssey just before I started this blog, and it's been important to me to get down on paper how difficult it is for a sendentary dork to change their routine and work at accomplishing something they always thought was impossible for somebody like them. We're always seeing these "quick fixes" in magazines and movies, and the media paints a lot of celebrity portraits with the "overnight success brush."

I want to be here to remind everybody that there's no quick fix. That you've got good fighting days and bad fighting days, that sometimes I stay home and watch Titanic and feel miserable for myself, and the next day I'll go out and beat the crap out of something.

And I want would-be writers to see the piles of rejection slips. The good, brillant days and "I'm such a crappy writer I should be shot" days.

I want to document a road that isn't easy, and doesn't happy just because I roll out of bed in the morning. It takes a lot of hard work, a lot of good days, and a lot of bad days.

And most of all, it takes not giving up.

You keep writing. You keep collecting rejection slips, you store up all those agent rejection letters from agents who haven't seen a page of anything you've written but the query letter. You keep going to the MA classes even though some days it feels like you're a complete uncordinated idiot and have no right to be there, and you go even though your entire body hurts and you can't remember ever willfully putting yourself in the position to exist in that much pain.

And I come back here every day, and I say: See. Don't give up.

Whether or not all of this work will pay off - hell, I don't know. But doing what I do, and documenting it, gives me a lot of self-confidence and assists in the clarification of my own thoughts and expression of ideas.

If nothing else, it's a really handy writing exercise.

Ha.

Today's Goody Bag

It's a lovely rainy November day here in Chi-town, and Al-jazeera has some news about Bush's cabinet reshuffling (Colin Powell has had enough, and it's rumoured that Rumsfeld is leaving), and here's a neat 10 things the Chinese do better than we do from the Globe & Mail, and a boingboing reader sent in a cool purple-haze electoral map that more accurately shows how the mood of the country actually went (very purple) - we should be using this one from now on, and Xeni asks: "Could someone who renounced their US citizenship declare themselves a citizen of the Internet?" (cool), and for those who didn't catch it on CNN, did you ever think you'd see this headline: "Blogs Send Stocks Into Reverse"?

More later....

Onward and Upward

Deep breath. I'm home. No more bagels. My headache's gone. I'm less nauseous. OK.

Thoughts from Amp:

The big mistake the Democrats, and most of the left, made was to believe that by winning elections we will change the country.

Just the opposite is true. It is only by changing the country that we will win elections.

We need to stop thinking in terms of winning elections, and start thinking about persuading more of the country to believe our ideas. If we do that, elections will follow.

What does that mean for the left? We still lack an effective left counterpart to the Heritage Foundation and the Fox News Network; by which I mean, we lack effective institutions dedicated not to pushing our candidates but instead to pushing our ideas. And that's killing us.

Family Fun

And, it appears my family has shown up in the comments section.

I love the internet.

More Perspective: From Xeni

8:15am: Four more years of a nation led by criminals. I was making coffee with one eye on CNN when the news broke, and I called my dad, a man who's spent many years fighting for good things, sometimes at great personal cost.

"Get over it," he said, "The way you feel now is exactly how I felt when Nixon won a second term -- crushed. I just couldn't believe America was that stupid. But remember what happened to Nixon that term."

And, I'm glad others are feeling just as sick as I am right now. I'm really pissed that this is such a gut bomb for me. I'm skipping kickboxing, going home early, and going to bed (early-to-bed mainly to avoid a food binge).

Nicky

Nick's got some more good stuff up. I've been eating too many bagels, and have started in on the post-Halloween candy hidden all over the office. Not a proper binge, thank god, but not morsels I should be eating. Nick's is a good reminder that they're both shitty candidates. The Lesser of the Evils shouldn't cut it.

Yea. I know. "Marriage is only between a man and woman," and "abortion is Evil and Wrong, but..." were spoken by the dem. Hitler just didn't add any "but"s.

I've been told that I'll grow more cynical as I get older. Give me until January. I'll turn 25 then. It's all downhill cynicism from there on out.

"..the elections are over, let the politics begin."

Perspective

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whos frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandius, king of kings:
Look on my words, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

- Percy Bysshe Shelly

Here We Go, Ladies and Gents

Just got this from NARAL Pro-Choice America. I recommend signing up for their newslist.

Help us (and yourself!) out. We've got a Supreme Court Justice not long for this world, and three more over the age of 65. Hitler's just waiting for the old guy to die, and then we're fucked. So --

Here's what you can do TODAY:

ACT. Put Bush on notice that you and all pro-choice Americans will not give up. Sign our petition to tell him that you'll firmly oppose any Supreme Court nominee who doesn't support Roe v. Wade, then spread the word to your pro-choice friends and family.

TALK ABOUT IT. You're among friends here. Join our post-election discussion by posting a comment on our blog.

STAY INFORMED. Read today's headlines about what this really election means for choice.

Thank you for all you've done over the course of the last four years.

It's the resolve of the pro-choice movement that secured a woman's right to choose in the first place. It is that resolve that will secure a woman's right to choose over the next four years and beyond.

What's that again? Oh, yea --



Don't forget it.

Post-Concession Bagels

Am currently enoying some post-concession bagels here at work. Half our office voted dem. the other half, for Hitler. So it's a mixed post-concession bagel bag.

In other worklife news, one of our two accountants left her husband and kid, left her keycard in the office, and got on a plane Friday. She hasn't come back, so our head of HR fired her, and only half-jokingly asked if I was interested in learning accounting.

Sure, why not? Give me a hardhat and a couple months training with Sarah our Construction Manager, and I'll be able to run this office all by myself.

Ha.

Jiggity-Jig

More thoughts, from Amanda. Basically, if you're a woman, poor, and/or a minority, you're fucked.

But we knew that already.

I'll be here in Chicago (hey, at least it's a blue state - our buddy Obama is headed east) until summer 2006 (I'm committed to finishing out my time as Jenn finishes her Ph.D.). I was flirting with going back to Alaska, perhaps living in Juneau, but it looks like I'll be doing a year or two overseas. London or Auckland (our company has offices in both of these locations) would be great, though Our Friendly Neighbor to the North exists for a reason as well. Terribly friendly people there --

They've been taking in disillusioned patriots like me since 1775.

Today's Mixed Bag

Because there are other things to do today.

Check out The Paper Boy for a cool list of international, national, and local papers you can browse. The "full service" member treatment is $2.95 a year, and you get all of your handy papers in one place, with a user-friendly searching tool.

Also, Vandermeer has some thoughts about America's warped failure of imagination, Nick Mamatas runs for president, World Fantasy Award winners have been up for awhile, Lithaven's got up a link to the Worst Analogies Ever Written in a High School Essay, check out Osama's War On the Red States (Expert Approved!), and if you're looking to do something worthwhile to alleviate your frustration, check out Volunteer Match and help somebody out. Of course, you could always just do this, but I think getting outta the chair might be slightly more productive.

Or so I hear.

Going Forward

Some more thoughts here.

I'll try and say not too much more about this, because I'd like to move on to covering women's rights, fantasy fiction, and health issues. All of which are likely going to be of even more importance from now on.

I think a part of me was hoping I'd be able to get off the hook a little bit, with a dem. presidency. I wouldn't have to worry so much about the repeal of Roe vs. Wade and the erosion of women's rights. It wouldn't be perfect, no, but I wouldn't have to worry about a Supreme Court packed with people who declare my body not my own once a guy's semen fuses with my egg.

I'm genuinely appalled at the results, not just that baby Hitler won the popular vote, but that the dems lost... everything. The House. The Senate. Hell, they're a minority of govenors. I can't believe Americans did this. I can't believe they bought into the Fear: Fear of terrorism, Fear of those Evil Gay People and their Evil Marriages, Fear of women having sex with men willy-nilly and getting what the men left behind scraped out of their uteruses.

Fear. This huge wave of incredible fear has carried this guy into a popular and political majority. Yes, it'd be great if Kerry won Ohio, and the vote's still out, but that doesn't change the way the other numbers have turned out, and doesn't change the popular vote. Little Hitler has his Mandate From Heaven.

I was flipping back and forth last night between CNN and The History Channel. HC was airing a show about Hitler's rise to power. They were interviewing Germans alive during Hitler's ascendence, and one woman said, "The young people now, they ask us why we didn't protest, why we didn't go out in the streets to try and change things. We didn't because we were afraid. It was a time of fear."

That one hit me in the gut.

It was the gypsies, the Jews, the handicapped, the gays (sound familiar?), who played Black Sheep to Hitler. Make everybody afraid, make everybody hate everybody else, and make everybody look back at their neighbor over their shoulder.

My grandmother lived in occupied France. My grandfather was an American GI on Body Detail, cleaning up concentration camps and burying soldiers.

I used to think that all of the Bush=Hitler rhetoric was a big leftist conspiracy, a spin show. And yea, of course it is - for now. Bush isn't as smart as Hitler, but what I'm seeing with these numbers is that people really *like* him. True Believers *believe* in him. They'll sanction wars with Iran and North Korea if he says so, because he says so. They won't stop to think about it, they'll just do it. No talking, no diplomacy, just bombing the shit out stuff.

And you know what? I'm a historian. Not only that, I'm a historian whose concentration is on war: the politics of war, the propaganda, women's roles in war, war and masculinity, etc. I've been boning up on the history of guerilla warfare, and after doing so, I can tell you this: these people have no idea what the fuck they're doing.

I have no doubt that all of my friends and family in the military - some of whom have already been to Iraq and back - are going to go back. If they die there, I'm going to be really, really pissed off.

The majority of Americans are eager to send their sons and daughters off to die in obscure desert countries to Save us from the Evil Gays, the Evil Arabs, and the Evil Welfare mothers.

I think it's fucked up.

I have no more to say about it - except that I am deeply, deeply, pissed off.

Wrap Up (abridged)

via Empire o' Dirt

And, if you're interested, here's someone else's rant.

I have work to do.

Jon Stewart is Still My Secret Boyfriend

I love The Daily Show.

This clip rocks.

You can check out more recent goodness here.