On, Wisconsin!

For Wisconsin: In the Beauty of the Day

As we come marching, marching in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing: "Bread and roses! Bread and roses!"
As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women's children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!

As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient cry for bread.
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.
Yes, it is bread we fight for -- but we fight for roses, too!

As we come marching, marching, we bring the greater days.
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more the drudge and idler -- ten that toil where one reposes,
But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and roses! Bread and roses!

Not That Complicated

hat tip: stoat

Not Complicated

Can, we, however, please quit calling them the Bush "tax cuts" and call them what they really are: "The Bush Welfare for Paris Hilton Program"?

Wrapped in the Flag and Carrying a Cross

Sinclair Lewis is supposed to have said that:

When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.

He left out the parts about racism/sexism/homophobia and an incredibly odd corporatism that has, through advertising, merged, in the minds of lots of Americans, with national identity. (Extra weird in these days of trans-national corporations.) But he got it basically right.

Yesterday, I had to work downtown in my shining city in a swamp, the one full of marble monuments to great ideals that inspire me every day and full of words carved over doors that still reduce me to proud, hopeful, valiant, humble tears and remind me just how very much I adore the Goddess Columbia's sacred lands. I made the mistake of leaving the office to drive home just as the crowd from the Glenn Beck rally was heading back to D.C.'s West End. Granted, these were likely some of the more affluent members of the crowd; the hotels in West End are pricey. I'm not sure that made a difference.

I've come to realize that, Pisces that I am, I have pretty porous borders and tend to pick up people's emotions and motivations when others might not. A big crowd feels to me as if it creates its own fog in the air, a fog that I can't help but know and feel, as it carries the emotions of the crowd deep into my own awareness. And I have never, ever, in my life, been as terrified by what I felt as I was by what I felt from that crowd. I've been in demonstrations where the police hated us, where the right-wing showed up to counter protest, where a phalanx of priests showed up to project what I can only call hatred at the marchers in the Million Woman March. I get into conflicts for a living. I've been in rooms full of angry witches, pissed-off lawyers, furious teen-agers. And those were nothing compared to what I felt yesterday. I rolled up my windows, turned on Handel (never failed me, yet) full-blast, and drove (fast) the entire way home, yelling, over and over, the Litany Against Fear. Literally lying on the ground in my own garden and grounding finally returned me to "mere" shakiness and fear.

There's been a lot of derision from Left Blogistan directed at Beck and his minions. Quite a bit of it has been tinged with size-ism, ageism, and class warfare. Fair enough, sometimes, pace audre, the master's tools can be quite effective against the master. Ridicule can be as effective a weapon as exists. And, Goddess knows, much of what went on there was, in fact, ridiculous (1540s, from L. ridiculosus "laughable," from ridiculus "that which excites laughter," from ridere "to laugh.") in the one-may-as-well-ridere-as-cry sense. I imagine (and since Beck has broken Godwin's law, I feel little constraint in this invocation) that many educated Germans ridiculed that moron Hitler and his followers, as well. I have a vision of educated, ancient Priestesses assuring each other that dirty horsemen from Kurga would never overtake their lovely villages and temples. Some Fist Peoples assumed that the funny people trading beads and other trinkets would get on their ships and go home after a Winter or two.

I don't think ridicule and ignoring the stupidity is going to work, this time.

Along these lines, I had an interesting discussion this morning over at Eschaton about the fact that the Right has people who are good at engaging the angels of people's darker natures. The Left (and yes, it's handicapped by not getting the corporate sponsorship that the right gets, but that's ultimately irrelevant to the outcome) does a piss-poor job of engaging the angels of people's better natures. Sadly, Obama, who appeared to have an amazing gift for energizing people to work for good changes in society, got elected and decided to play it safe, always capitulate to Wall Street, and seek "cred" by "punching hippies." Many of the young people (and others ) who, immediately following his election, were thirsty for the chance to work for "Hope" and "Change" have concluded, perhaps, sadly, for the rest of their lives, that politics is just a game for suckers. Too many on "our" side are not good at, in W's words, "catapulting the propaganda," are terrified of being seen as "too radical," and begin by conceding that the other side has most of the good points going for it. Paul Krugman's brilliant, but he's never going to rouse crowds the way the Martin Luther King did, the way that Joan Baez could do singing "We Shall Overcome," the way that any half-decent union leader could do talking workers into going on strike.

People are, perhaps sadly, complicated. I've never known anyone who wasn't a walking contradiction of both good and evil, generosity and venality, prejudice and great openness. And many of the same people energized by Beck could be energized by a liberal leader who inspired them to greater things, instead of appealing to their natural prejudice against "the other." I've known people who would enjoy lynching an uppity [insert name of "the other" here], but who would also show up when their neighbor "other's" home burned down or spouse was lost or child was sick and pretty much give the shirt off their back. Odd, how personalizing emergencies can bring out the angels of everyone's better nature.

The planet's dying. No one can find a job. The planet's dying. We're firing teachers and firemen so fast we can't comprehend it, while we pour more and more money into the failed wars of a failed empire. The planet's dying. And we're ignoring those who, wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross, are going to completely ruin us.

More here.

I'm an old woman. I've lived a privileged, amazing life. I like to pretend that I'm pretty brave, but yesterday scared me to my core. But even shaking, shitting, and puking in fear, I can go to the pyre that crowd would howlingly enjoy building for witches and uppity women and it will all still be ok.

But I have a Son, a DiL, and, I have a G/Son.

Picture found here

Bring It On

My New Name For A Blog

What Ruth Said. Go read the whole thing. Then, check Ruth out daily, as she always posts insightful, well-reasoned, important stuff.

One out of every 10 homeless vets under the age of 45 is now a woman, the statistics show.

And unlike their male counterparts, many have the added burden of being single parents. ...

Overall, female veterans are now between two and four times more likely to end up homeless than their civilian counterparts, according to the VA, most as a result of the same factors that contribute to homelessness among male veterans: mental trauma related to their military service and difficulty transitioning into the civilian economy.

But while veterans’ services have been successfully reaching out to male veterans through shelters and intervention programs, women are more likely to fall through the cracks.

Fucking war. Fucking sexist society.

Poster found here.

My New Name For A Blog

What Susie Said

IOKIYAR

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the kind of wall-to-wall screaming coverage that we would have had for WEEKS if Theresa Heinz Kerry had blithely announced on television that "The only way to get around is by private plane, so I just went out and bought a plane!"

My New Name For A Blog

What Suzie Said.

There is something to it being class based, as I’ve discussed before and will continue to evaluate – a smug sense that somehow prejudice against [the] lower class . . . is justified, and thus you shouldn’t defend those kinds of people. It’s also not a mistake that the bulk of the people gulping this sewage are white and male. It would appear that the upper class white males of the Democratic Party have more in common with the upper class white male Republicans than they care to admit. It is not a mistake, I think, that the people on the left who responded best to the anti-Clinton spew of this round are socio-economically similar to those on the Right who share their taste in Drudge and sludge.

Support The Troops. Send Them To College!

Like my good friend watertiger, I, too, had a dad who served in World War II (he joined up right out of high school and spent the war in the Pacific) and then came back to take advantage of the original GI Bill. He was the first in his family of English/Welsh immigrants to go to college and, even with the GI Bill, he worked his way through college, cooking breakfast, as his store of hysterical stories assured that I'd remember, for a women's dorm. My dad was a journalism major, back in the days before spellcheck, and I still remember him telling me how the dean called him in and told him that he was going to have to learn to spell if he wanted a journalism degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He must have learned, somehow, because he fed a family of five kids on nothing but his writing, sent all of us to college, left money for my mom to live on after he died, and left me enough inheritance for a lovely diamond dragonfly brooch.

My Democratic Senator, Jim Webb, has proposed that America, again, begin awarding our soldiers a full GI Bill. After dad's first-ever-in-his-family college degree, I stumbled my way into a masters degree and a juris doctor degree, largely still running on the strength of the impetus from Dad's GI Bill's push forward. Son, whose granddad helped move him into Princeton, earned degrees from that school and a law degree. We've paid commensurate taxes ever since. Goddess knows what G/Son will do. It was a good investment that America made in the late 1940s. It would be a good investment here at the end of aughts. Course, as watertiger notes, Republicans like Five-Deferments-Dick and John Sideny McCain are opposed to that expense. Fuckers. Why do Republicans hate the troops.