Off To See...

I've got writing to work on. See you tomorrow.

The Guy Behind electoral-vote.com

Since I've been using it as my sounding board, here's the FAQ about the guy running electoral-vote.

Good luck, everybody.

via Simon

On Magical Negros, Helpful Slave Girls, & Other Fantastic White Creations

There's an interesting article up at Strange Horizons on the stereotype of the "Magical Negro" in fantasy fiction. Author Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu looks at this white-written type in the novels of Stephen King (Dick Hallorann in The Shining, Mother Abigail in The Stand, John Coffey in The Green Mile, etc). There's some discussion about the problems facing lily-white genre writers (such as myself) trying to write more protagonists of color without falling into such stereotypes over at Vandermeer's discussion board.

This is something that's been bugging me for a long time in my fiction, particularly after I started reading up on my core feminist books. That's about the time I started poking my head out of the sand and looking around at all of my assumptions. Trying to break them down, in real life and in fiction, has been one of the more difficult things I've ever tried to do (and I'm not so arrogant as to believe it will ever be done - I've been raised in and embedded with cultural symbols. I can be aware of my biases, and try and squash them, but they'll always be there. I'm not stupid enough to believe they'll go away if I just stop thinking about them).

Because I'm a white woman, I haven't been as aware of the Magical Negro stereotype as I have been of the Helpful Slave Girl type in all the Conan novels. As I've mentioned before, I'm a fan of the old Howard novels because I find them so incredibly non-PC that they become ridiculously funny. The sexism and racism are overt - there aren't even any Magical Negroes. There are only Primitive Black Beasts and/or Savage Natives. The Magical Negro stereotype hadn't come into fruition.

Interestingly, the Magical Negro type (as mentioned by someone at Vandeermeer's board) sounds like an evolution of the "Uncle Tom" character. Uncle Toms, ironically, were created by people like Beecher-Stowe - they were to be sympathetic characters to convince white voters (still all men at this time) of the evils of slavery. They were to show that having black skin meant just that - having black skin, and did not negate a person's humanity. When you're trying to talk to people who've been hammered with the thinking that personhood is based on color/blood, Uncle Tom was a way of a white writer trying to show a white audience that a person's color didn't make them Evil.

Following from that, the Magical Negro (I think) is a white writer's attempt at giving a character of color a viable place in the story - that of a character instead of a set peice. What Okorafor-Mbachu didn't mention about Hallorann in The Shining was perhaps the most startling part about the actions of his character - he saves the white woman and her child. The white husband dies. The black guy runs off with the white guy's wife and kid. After I read the end of The Shining, I actually flipped back to the front and looked at the publication date (1975). I was impressed that King had gotten away with doing that (especially in 1975). Sure, there's no romance between the Magical Negro and White Woman, but hot damn, the black guy saved the day! You'll note that in the Kubrick movie version, Hallorann dies and the white woman and the child go off on their own. A reading audience may have been ready for the leap of the black-man-saves-the-day, but not a movie audience. Unfortunately, creating a "type" of character - best intentioned as it may be - can backfire, particularly after everybody else starts picking it up and using it as shorthand.

Maureen McHugh mentioned that one of the reasons she chose a gay male protagonist in China Mountain Zhang was because she was tired of seeing the "Magical gay man" character who had to be sacrificed in order to save the protagonist. The old Conan novels do great things with the Helpful Slave Girl who Suddenly Appears before Conan, and is so irristitably attracted to him that she 1) doesn't serve him the poisoned wine her master wanted to give to him 2) gives him a key to get out of his prison 3) tells him vital information about how to get out of the palace/destroy the beast/find the power center of the evil lord/magician/etc. Then she 1) runs off and is never seen again 2) asks Conan to take her with him, which he does, though she's never again seen in other books.

The Helpful Slave Girl, like the Magical Negro and Self-Sacrificing Gay Man, is/was an easy shorthand. Writers are naturally lazy. If we can get away with shorthand, we likely will.

So, it's a problem.

So, how do white writers (like me) move outside the box? I'm aware of these stereotypes, and after reading the SH article, started ticking off my recent stories and novels in my head, trying to find evidence of my guilt.

I was doing OK for awhile: particularly with Jihad, where the token White Guy is actually the only one of the gang with magic powers, but he's just one of the cronies, not even a main character (I have effectively reversed this stereotype, though he won't be sacrificing himself for anybody, and he's not really all that magical. Well, Ok, he's a low-level magic-user, but he doesn't have any great Gandolph-like knowledge). Everybody else in the book is black and brown, and none of them is particularly gifted. It's Firefly in the desert, with Islam, racial tension (between black and brown, not non-white and white) and it just so happens that yes, there's a token whitey. My biggest worry is that I'm going to get offensive on the playing-with-Islam front.

I'm likely most guilty of the Magical Negro stereotype in the fantasy saga (To the Wall being book one), where Lilihin is a too-pale scullery drudge (everybody else in the country is tawny, and the country to the north is a mix of Greek/Arab culture shared by a race that's tall and black). Unfortunately, her mentor ends up being from the Greek/Arab culture, meaning she's nearly white, and he's black.

Criteria of the Magical Negro as outlined by Okorafor-Mbachu:

1).He or she is a person of color, typically black, often Native American, in a story about predominantly white characters.

Yep. Tiernan's black. But no, the story's main characters are 2/3 tawny.

2) He or she seems to have nothing better to do than help the white protagonist, who is often a stranger to the Magical Negro at first.

Uh-oh.

3) He or she disappears, dies, or sacrifices something of great value after or while helping the white protagonist.

No, I don't think this will happen, unless his time is counted as a great sacrifice. The idea is that *he* needs *her* for something, not the other way around, though he tries to frame it that he's in he best interests.

4) He or she is uneducated, mentally handicapped, at a low position in life, or all of the above.

Uh-oh. He's an outcast.

5) He or she is wise, patient, and spiritually in touch. Closer to the earth, one might say. He or she often literally has magical powers.

Another Uh-oh.

I probably have a Magical Negro on my hands.

But. This is where things get tricky.

I'm writing a fantasy world as a white woman living in a hetero-patriarchy. I'm writing about fantasy cultures with fantasy racial characteristics, which include skin color. I'm also writing about fantasy social and sexual arrangements, fantasy customs, and including some fantasy gestures. Because I'm tied to this world, they're all coming out of this world, being shaken and stirred, and vomited back out into something a little more different.

But I think they're still going to be white.

I've done a lot of traveling, and I've tried to pick up as much as I can, but I think if somebody in another country picked up my book, they'd be able to tell I was white and American (much like someone picking up a Michael Moorcock book or a Mieville book would likely be able to tell they were from England, and had great affection for London). I don't know that I have any solution to falling into stereotypes while writing, except that you need to be aware of them... and you need to start spending a lot more time with people who are very, very different from you.

Ideally, we wouldn't have to question a character's color, a character's sexuality, as being significant at all. Yea. Right. That would be great. But we're not there yet, and until then, we've got to look closely at our subtext. Whether or not I was consciously making Tiernan a Magical Negro, I'm more aware of how he could be cast that way, and I can take steps to alter him if necessary.

I've taken to interrogating many of my female characters as well, particularly after a reader said, "I thought the subtle misogyny in that story was interesting."

Holy crap, I thought. I totally didn't mean to do that. I was caught out again when I created a completely passive female lead for the fantasy saga, and had to go back and retool her. Again, when I first concieved the character I pictured writing her as very strong-willed. Instead, she came out like a rag doll. I'm working with pre-established notions about the way a certain "type" of person acts. Yes. Me. The crazy-wacky liberal feminist hippie. We all come from our own unique blend of cultural biases. We've all got embedded shit.

I was also caught out on a sudden short-hand assumption when a first reader asked me why, in the second section of my fantasy saga one of my characters had suddenly become "a slut." Oops. It happened to be a gay male character. I had been writing quickly (about 5K-10K words a day), and went against the actual person I'd created in the first 150 pages and started to write a shorthand stereotype instead. Needless to say, I went back and rewrote those sections.

We're going to approach projects with assumptions. I've been lucky in that I have really good first readers who tag me when I'm being lazy. I've started to learn how to interrogate what I'm writing a little bit better, and I'm hoping I won't trip up as much.

But I know I'll trip up. It's a constant process writing and rereading and trolling through subtext. I won't catch everything, but dammit, I'm trying.

Is that the best we can hope for?

Some Thoughts from Nicky

Great stuff from Nick:

What happened is that most Americans are utterly incapable of conceptualizing the United States as a nation on the defensive and losing the war on terror. Yes, people will acknowledge that terror is a tactic, and then cannot be warred upon any more effectively than, say, deep frying. Yes, people can point to the quagmire of Iraq. The US can be "betrayed" by internal enemies (Bush, "liberals", whatever). But the US cannot lose. The other side can't be fighting smarter or fighting better. On this, the mainstream of the right and left are agreed.

And they are wrong.

The same confidence in America's ability to "kick ass" that is giving Bush half the vote tomorrow -- and confidence is otherwise a rare commodity among the legions of Life's Little Losers who thump their chests and declare that only "Bush has the balls" to fight the saracens -- informs the widespread liberal belief that Bush could win the war on terror and bring in bin Laden, but that he perversely refuses to do so for whatever reason. This further leads to the delusional belief that the war in Iraq will reset if Kerry gets elected, and that the US will get a "second chance" to "fix" Iraq by bombing it into the modern age with the help of French weaponry. We can't lose!

The fact is, though, that Osama bin Laden has had the initiative for years; he is leading the pace of events, he is calling the shots, and he has a far superior strategic understanding of what is going on on the ground in Central Asia and the Middle East. So he's winning. As anyone who paid attention to how, say, the American Revolution played out knows, strategic understanding trumps technological advantage, body count, or even number of tactical victories when it comes to wars fought from across the sea. Nor is this news; Stratfor noted in late 2001 that the most likely motivation for the 9/11 attack was not to attack the symbols of American militarism or a "decadent" culture -- it was to lure forces into his backyard, which he would then wear down via attrition. And this is exactly what has happened, and what continues to happen. Ultimately, Iraq doesn't even matter; the same shit would have happened in Afghanistan.

Ah, and Afghanistan, there's a funny little country. And here's a funny little thought experiment. Imagine that you are Osama bin Laden. You get fingered on 9/12/01 as a) the mastermind of the previous day's attack and as b) Public Enemy #1. Further, the US ignores the Taliban's televised plea not to be turned into Uzbekistan's glass parking lot and announces it will attack Afghanistan, with the support of its new pal, Pakistan.

Again, you're Osama bin Laden. You also have plenty of pals in Pakistan. So, do you stay in Afghanistan, the country the US said it would bomb, or do you wander over into Pakistan, which the US said it would not bomb? Clearly, the latter.

But of course, having a poor strategic understanding of what is going on, right and left in the US joined together to insist, contra common sense, that Osama must have been dug into Afghanistan. Kerry insists that Osama was "cornered" in Tora Bora, a claim he bases on intelligence of the same caliber of that which showed that Iraq was a hotbed of WMD production.

(Continued)

Here Goes

http://www.electoral-vote4.com

The regular site electoralvote.com was down, electoral-vote2.com was "unavailable" but electoral-vote4 is up and running (he's got it running on 6 servers for just this reason).

If nothing else, Kerry winning means I get to stop bitching about politics until January. Let's make sure I can take a month-long politics-bitching hiatus, OK?

After that: inauguration time, baby. And the gloves'll come off.

Taking tomorrow off from my MA class so I can get back to my polling station and vote before 8pm.

See you all there.

Happy Weekend

Blaine reappeared and dropped me off at the train station on his way to his lake house, Jenn is out of town for some much-deserved Halloween debauchery in Las Vegas, and after much perusal of theatre offerings, jazz nights, comedy stuff at Second City, and a good, hard, look at my bank account, I've decided I'd rather spend my holiday weekend at home, watching unlimited rentals from the Blockbuster across the street and doing line edits.

In all fairness, I do plan to have a more exciting life again when I'm thirty.

I think South Africa just really burned me out.

Anyway, for your further amusement, I will leave you with Anne McCaffrey's WTF moment:

"It's a proven fact that a single anal sex experience causes one to be homosexual. The hormones released by a sexual situation involving the anus being broached, are the same hormones found in large quantities in effeminate homosexual males. For example, when I was much younger I knew a young man who was for all intents and purposes, heterosexual. He was mugged, and involved in a rape situation involving a tent peg. This one event was enough to have him start on a road that eventually led to him becoming effeminate and gay."

I think she's upset because this guy wouldn't date her. Do I really need to comment? Nah. Nick's readers do it for me.

Randomage

Check out Retro vs. Metro.org


"We've established a clear link."

Boo.

This year's scariest holloween costumes.

Oh yes. They did.

via roxpopuli

More Reasons to Like My Boss

Well, besides the fact that he's out traveling 2-3 weeks every month, has been known to bring me coffee, never hangs over my shoulder, and takes great stock in my perceived intelligence in matters of reading, research, computer knowledge, and grammer... and seems to assume that I'm psychic....

Blaine burst into the office this morning and began downloading, printing, filing, and requesting help to do said tasks. Big meetings going on today, and he was about to fly out (our office is about 5 min from the airport).

He briefed me in his best abbreviated style about sending out an SOQ (Statement of Qualifications) for a new firm we're talking up. I was also put on research duty, as nobody's all that familiar with them.

"Work with Ned on this," Blaine said. "And tell him to stop procrastinating."

Ned: Regional VP mucky-muck.

Me: Lowly admin. who, until just now, had never heard of an SOQ.

"If you have any questions," Blaine told the secretary, Cyllia, who was making folders for Blaine's files, "just ask Kameron. She knows all about what I'm working on."

This was news to me.

I had printed out some RFPs. I hadn't had time to read any of them. I had no idea where he was flying out to, or why, though I suspected it involved one of our partner firms, as I worked on a powerpoint presentation with Rhea yesterday.

Oh well.

Let him think I'm a scary genius who knows what the hell a "microwave backhaul project" is... after all, due to great things like the internet, it never takes me long to catch up.

KJ Bishop's Latest & Greatest

Vandermeer has an interview up with KJ Bishop, who's book The Etched City, I recently finished re-reading. Great stuff.

Why should readers pick up your book as opposed to, say, just about anybody else's book?
K. J. Bishop: Readers should pick up my book and someone else's. Readers: buy a book instead of a pizza, or half a pizza, or whatever fraction of a pizza you can get for a few bucks these days. It's a diet that works.

Yea. That's why there's 1377 books in our house, and no food in the fridge.

Breathing Space

Back to work. I'm so behind. My first drafts are always such crap.

Mixed Bag

Over at bluesmama, check out the lyrics for her "Blues for J." You may also be interested in checking out the President uncensored (via boingboing).

Also, Amanda's got some links up about voter fraud and directs us to Voter Video, in which those with video cameras are urged to catch Republicans challenging others' rights to vote at polling stations. She's also got up some thoughts on women, food, and anxiety, as does Hugo. I might post later about this one.

I also recommend: In My Arms, a web gallery of pulp magazine covers/comics, video clips, et al of men, monsters, and robots carrying women (there's even a shot of supergirl carrying a woman). A fascinating cultural image.

And here's a very good article about Bush's bizarre Dred Scott statement in the Kerry/Bush debates. Yea, it was code for Roe vs. Wade (Bush intends to erode it), but if you take the pres. at his word, that the judges in the Dred Scott case were acting on matters of "personal opinion" and weren't "strict constructionists" - you'd be wrong. The Constitution of the United States of America allows slavery. Slaves weren't real people. These guys were about as strict on the constructionism as they could be. Check it out.

The Fighting Life

I've been kinda off this week. Maybe because I spent too much downtime this weekend - I should have gone jogging or gone for a bike ride or something.

After this week's Monday class, I found myself too exhausted, hungry, and shaky to go to my now-usual Tuesday class. Instead, I made sure to eat well and sleep a lot to prep for tyhe Wednesday class. But last night, I arrived to class and found myself feeling weak and shaky and uncoordinated again. I slowed down, took several water breaks, and had that fleeting, "Oh screw it, I'm not going to finish this damn class tonight" thought.

We broke up into teams, and one of the warm-up exercises was running up and back down the back stairs of the building. It's only five or six flights, but I was seriously dying. I was the last person back to class; I had to slow down my descent because they're metal stairs, and I was really dizzy. I could easily imagine slipping up and cracking open my head.

Not sure what's up with this - if it means I'm working too hard or not hard enough. What it probably means is I need to up my calorie count. Weather permitting, I'll be going bike riding this weekend.

The good news is that I'm doing pretty well with my 30lb free weights in the morning, and I've been able to add another rep to each set this week. I've also discovered that my abs (though one cannot see them) are my speciality. Wednesday ends with partnered sit-ups while passing medicine balls from 4-12lbs in weight. This is tough for a lot of people, and not everybody gets through it without a break. But I've been doing abs every morning since I was fourteen. I think that at one point, in high school, I was doing 500 a day. I've settled into a comfortable morning routine of four different sets of 40, for some variety.

Hey. I gotta be good at *something*.

Where I Get My Games

Meetings, meetings, everywhere, but I'm not a part of them.

So, here's where I get the games I play at work: http://popcap.com

I recommend Zuma and Bookworm.

Also, I am quite partial to Mah Jong, but that's just me.

Free Speech, Howard Stern, FCC & Etc.

Here's another guy who I personally can no longer listen to, but whom I respect for Fighting the Fight.

Howard Stern set out from loserville nothing with a driving passion to be the highest rated radio talkshow host ever.

It's good to have goals. You might get somewhere.

I listened to Stern for about 2 months with I was 19, fascinated at the idea that women were so eager to hop around naked on his show and have him and his gang decide what size their breasts needed to be. All the women sounded like little girls. It really started to get to bug me, so I stopped listening.

Note that: I didn't petition the FCC. I didn't flip out and start campaigning against his objectification of women who had (as far as I could tell) willingly agreed to be on his show. If they didn't like it, they could leave (I could go on about socialized patriarchy, but I won't, cause I'm preaching Free Speech here).

As many have heard, Stern is moving to satellite radio after the latest huge fine from the FCC about his radio programming. Stern caught the commissioner of the FCC on a radio show, and - being Howard Stern - called in to confront him. Stern rightly points out that if he's been fired for talking about sexual function on the air, then Oprah should be getting fined too (her case is currently pending - Stern didn't even get to take his to court). Check out the side-by-side transcripts of both snippets in question at Stern's site (it's the usual - oral and anal sex, and blah-de-blah-blah-blah).

Personally, *I* find these sorts of radio and tv segments really educational. I mean, I like to know the current lingo: I'd heard of tossing salad, but a rainbow? This is useful information. I'm going to be able to understand more jokes. It helps me become a well-rounded American.

And you know what: being an American consumer, if I *don't* want to know these interesting tidbits, I'll turn off the radio. Or turn off the tv. There's shit on the air all the time that I find offensive and just plain stupid - I don't watch it. I don't ask that it be taken off the air, because it's not stirring up hate against other people (so far as I know), and it's entertaining somebody out there.

It's like abortion. If you don't believe in abortion - don't have one.

It's that simple.

Oh, of course, I realize it's NOT that simple. When South Africa was drawing up its new media regulations post 1990, they very nearly let it run without an "obscenity" clause. Women's groups got worried about violent acts against women being aired right alongside sesame street. Now, you can get all sorts of goodies after 10pm (like naked guys in Cape Town - yes, I mean all-over naked), and swearing (there are 11 official languages in South Africa), but the soap-opera that depicted a rape scene got a lot of flack (one in three women in South Africa will be raped in her lifetime). Obscenity had less to do with showing beautiful body parts and more to do with banning depictions of overt sexualized violence.

I don't know how promoting fear and disgust of the human body is helping anybody in this country.

One thing that Jenn thought was interesting about the Stern discussion: Stern asked why the FCC didn't fine Janet Jackson for bearing her breast on television, but fined the station instead.

Jenn retorted, "Why are they blaming Janet Jackson?"

After all, it was Justin who ripped off her top.

Funny how people forget that.

Evil sexual woman.

To Vote Or Not To Vote?

It must suck to live in a swing state right about now.

There are, in fact, people in this country who exercise their right to choose NOT to vote. My mother is one of them. It drives me batty that she doesn't, but she chooses not to encourage the system. Small form of personal protest, and all that. There are indeed people who protest the system by not being a part of it - or, at least, by not engaging in the voting part. There are other excuses, "my vote is just one vote, so it won't make any difference," and "they're all the same candidate anyway - bunch of lying bastards."

These are all somewhat true things.

The system sucks. I hate it. I want a variety of candidates. I'm tired of having to choose between rich white Old Boys, because that's not much of a choice at all.

What's not often known is that there were at least two major camps of suffragists coming out of 1848 and moving into 1920. There were the radicals like Elizabeth Cady Stanton who were talking about universal childcare, free love, critizing the system of marriage (when she got married, she insisted that the word "obey" be dropped from the vows), and even created a "Woman's Bible".

Then there were the conservatives: the Susan B. Anthony type (which is why you hear more about Susan B. than Elizabeth - she and Sue were best friends, but Susan had to basically banish Liz from the movement because she was seen as being a "divider." Her later-year treatise about revolutionizing motherhood and womanhood were freaking out women who were quite proud and happy to stay at home and mind their husbands as per the men's version of the Bible, thank you very much). Sue ended up being more focused than Liz: in the end, she put all of her eggs in the voting basket, and campaigned for that as Liz got increasingly unpopular among conservative women.

Revolutionizing the system would have meant that radical, liberal, and conservative women would all have needed to come together and fight for a revolution: instead, the only thing the bulk of women could agree on was that if "ignorant black men" had the right to vote, *they* should have the vote too (oh yea. It was totally couched in racist language - likely because Sue was pissed at the audacity of those organizing for black men's suffrage continuing to exclude women's suffrage from the fight. As I recall, Sue and some of her more conservative contemporaries were also incredibly leery about allowing *black women* to join the women's suffrage movement; which is a great fuckup, and assists in making sense of the race division of the women's movement today).

And, of course, there was the upheaval in the 1930s caused by the Great Depression, which was likely the time in our history when the US has come the closest to switching over to socialism or marxism. The depression was seen as the "death throes of capitalism," and if Roosevelt hadn't coaxed America through it, I might have free healthcare right now. I wouldn't be making as much money (it'd all be taxed), but the public restrooms would be clean and there wouldn't be as many people hacking their lungs out on the train (this isn't an anti-Roosevelt rant. I have a deep respect for any guy that gets elected to three terms and whose character and presidency were so well liked that we had to pass the 22nd amendment to limit a president to 2 terms; he also managed to keep his country intact and running when the whole world was going to hell. I have a deep respect for Castro for similiar reasons). Instead of bloody revolution, we got more public works projects; a lot of dams, clean-up of some really backwards poor places, and - as I recall - some better railroads. We also got Timberline Lodge. How cool is that?

But we kept our electoral college. And as elections moved into the television age, it became increasingly important to be a rich, telegenic candidate (Roosevelt was no pauper, of course, but he also spent most of his time in a wheelchair - I don't know how that'd go over in the 80s).

In any case, our presidential voting system has more-or-less operated the same way for 200 years (election law changed in 1800 - electors were supposed to cast votes for both president and vice president, without saying which was which, so the person with the most votes was president, and the second most votes was VP. Jefferson and Burr were... tied). There have been some twitches (there's the potential for "rogue" electors, too), but we've stuck with the "may the richest man win" philosophy, and unlike the French, we don't change our constitution every five minutes, so we've become a conservative morass of pointing fingers that seems to be more interested in barring same-sex couples from signing legal agreements and penalizing women for allowing themselves to get pregnant (as women are wont to do).

Knowing all this stuff, I understand why people exercise their right not to vote. I can see all the bloody frustration, the being-pissed-off at a system that doesn't include you and doesn't want to talk to you. Not voting is the anarchist's "fuck you" to American government.

And it really makes conservatives happy.

My big question is this: should Liz have just withdrawn from politics all together? Knowing she was being shunned by conservative women, knowing it was a far stretch of the imagination to get all women on board to revamp divorce and marriage laws and put domestic abuse laws into place for women, should she just have stopped talking? Why fight for the vote when you're not going to revolutionize the system?

Perhaps it was best said by one of the suffragists who campaigned in the years leading up to the 1920 vote. She said something to this effect, "We were so excited to get the vote. We really thought it was going to change everything. Everything was going to be different.... but, really, it didn't change things as much as we hoped."

I have a vote. Have I changed the system with it?

There are some things I can help change, sure. I can vote democrat and protect abortion rights and protest against warmongering. On a purely selfish note, I'd like to be able to travel overseas again without knowing I've got a president who's a fucking idiot acting as the Face of America.

But the really big stuff? The universal health care? The civil rights? That stuff has to be done from the ground, because the Old Boys aren't listening. A president's going to lead from the middle. It takes a strong backbone to pull a Lyndon Johnson, who said, after he'd signed The Civil Rights Act, Johnson said "I think we’ve delivered the South to the Republican party for your lifetime and mine."

And he signed the damned thing anyway (I could add other reasons Johnson signed this bill that have nothing to do with taking a moral stand [particularly his personal campaign against the KKK, which he believed was beginning to threaten the US government] but I'm going to go with the really nice moral integrity idea, because it's just so pretty. Let me have some hope for good in the world).

To vote or not to vote.

That is the question.

My personal mantra?

When in doubt: vote.

You can always piss on a politician later.

Mosh

Eminem has a new song out, Mosh. And you can view the video here. I'll be the first to say it's not a "great" song, but it's angry and pissed-off, and it's one of the best "go-vote" videos I've ever seen put before the Eminem target audience. It's really pretty.

And very, very angry.

I love it.

I do want to say something about Eminem - believe it or not, I'm a big fan. Yea, he's got a lot of misogyny in his songs. Lots of rage and anger, particularly directed at his mother and the mother of his daughter. There's at least one song on the three CDs of his that I have that's so incredibly woman-hating that I have trouble listening to it.

But.

Eminem speaks to something right in my gut. That passionate anger against a society that wasn't made for me. He's trailer trash. White, yes, but no son of money. He's pissed off at everybody and doesn't know who to rail against. And he speaks right from his gut. With anger. And you can hear it in his voice.

I have respect for people who do what others believe they can't do, and do it because they love it - and use those powers for "good." Usually.

The video's a great build-up of rage against Bush, and Eminem fuels it right into the best weapon we've got next week.

Today's Alaska Pic

I'm behind on my new novel draft. Need to finish ch. 1 today. 100 pages by the 20th.

More later...

Today's Alaska Pic

I'm behind on my new novel draft. Need to finish ch. 1 today. 100 pages by the 20th.

More later...

Myst IV

Myst IV is out! Myst IV is out!

Need I say more?

I have very fond memories of lying on my mattress on the floor in my cockroach invested flat in Durban, eating brown rice w/peri-peri sauce and playing Myst III: Exile.

Those were the days.