It’s more than just a word
I’ve been involved in a rather heated internet debate with some women I collaborate with on another website. We’ve been going back and forth, as part of a larger discussion, on the meaning of a loaded word. And I’d really like to know how it makes you feel, what it makes you think. I’m curious to know whether it’s use is horrendous and offensive enough to make you run away and never look back, or whether it’s just another word like any other that only has the power we give it. There is no judgement here. I am simply curious.
So. Readers. Tell me.
What does the word “cunt” mean to you?
Why the fuck not?
“After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.” -Wallace Stevens
Now. Onto the next submission. Who’s joining me?
And I finally weigh in on Anita Tedaldi
I’m late to the party but that’s because I’ve been mulling it over and doing a little background research.
Better late than never, though. So, I’ve begun over here.
There will be more.
Dumbing it down
This is the Old Cedar Mill in Cedarburg, Wisconsin, the quaint and charming town where my husband grew up. At Christmas time, the lone fire department plays classic carols through externally mounted speakers and the notes drift through the air and mix with the scent of sugar from the local candy store, creating a tearful nostalgia even for people who have never been there. It is a storybook. It is a Norman Rockwell painting.
Perhaps because of this, because it is so reminiscent of American lore, it is the place where John McCain and his running mate made their very first post-convention stop last September. On September 8, 2008 to be exact. For that occasion, Cedarburg High School shut down for the day. As in, closed it’s doors.
All the students and all the faculty and all the administrators were given time off to attend the rally. And the school band played in honor of the candidate. And this small town of roughly 11,000 people was billed more than $12,000 for additional police security. Imagine what $12,000 could do for a school…
Last week, the principal of Cedarburg High School sent an email to all of his staffers, informing them that it would be up to their discretion as to whether they wanted to show the twenty minute speech by the President of the United States of America, slated for today.
And that is where we are in America: A school cancels classes for one day and a town spends money for the appearance of a presidential candidate. And the same school later makes it optional as to whether impressionable children should be exposed to a speech by their country’s elected President.
This is no idealized painting. This is the schizophrenic lobbing off of an ear.
We live in dark days.
Dear Busybodies:
She is my own and I am her real mother
*********************************************
The first night we met Ruby, she pooped in Sam’s hand. It was 11 p.m. in a rented apartment in Chicago. We were exhausted from an entire day of travel, preceded by two sleepless nights spent absorbing the holy-shit-we-have-a-kid realization that most people have nine months to make. Just three days earlier, we were all, I know it’s late, but do you wanna go to the movies? and I think I’ll take a nap before dinner and Forget about dinner. We’re grown-ups! Let’s have martinis and ice cream! It was like we’d slipped through a wormhole and were suddenly wandering around in a parallel universe with zero resemblance to our previous life.
And now here we were, broiling in the oppressive summer heat, two fools crouched on the floor in our underwear, brought to our knees by an 8-day-old human. “How does the diaper work?” we asked each other. We were flailing. Badly.
That’s because we didn’t front load by consuming the What to Expect series like most anticipatory parents. Noooo. Instead, we took an intellectual approach and spent months educating ourselves about raising an adopted baby. An adopted black baby, to be exact. Swaddling’s for the birds, we thought. We will know how to discuss feelings of abandonment!
So we studied about loss, identity and connection, about transracial parenting, white privilege and black history. We took classes and watched documentaries. We learned about the racial hierarchy of adopted children and listened as black adult adoptees discussed the experience of being adopted outside their race. Determined to do right by our future child, we scoured the Internet for resources. And we sifted through reams upon reams dedicated to the importance and care of black hair. We had no clue what a receiving blanket was, but we were prepared for anything.
Except, of course, the need for receiving blankets. And, too, for what we’ve come to refer to as The Soft Serve Incident when—after having been parents for an entire three hours—Sam put his hand where the diaper should have been, in an effort to save the carpet.
After that, we jettisoned our course of study in favor of the less compelling but more pertinent 900-page User Manual. Still, as much as our kid just needed to be fed, clothed and cuddled, all of our diligent research came in handy when faced with every looky-loo and inquisitor who crossed our paths in Target. It was a prep course for something that one cannot prepare for. Truly.
Today, after four years of public parenting and being some sort of perceived expert on All Things Black for too many sheltered people, I admit, it can be tough to remain pleasant. I want to be an advocate for adoption, a staunch ally in the fight against racism and, mostly, to model the best possible responses for my child. But I sometimes struggle to find my balance between kindly addressing curiosity and lashing out at stupidity. I want to be approachable, but I also don’t want to indulge a never-ending cascade of questions from strangers while I’m in the pool helping my kid learn to use her big alligator arms. Not that alligators have big arms, but she doesn’t know that and the imagery is working.
Here’s the thing: Sometimes I just want to hurl my fantasy responses at the too-many nosey barkers of the universe.
I understand, Woman at the Zoo, that your brother’s wife’s uncle’s third cousin’s step-daughter is thinking of adopting if she can’t get pregnant with her second baby. Nevertheless, I will not tell you how much our adoption cost. Incidentally, did you crap yourself in the delivery room? Did you have an episiotomy or did you tear? Do tell!
I know that Ruby and I don’t look alike and that to some folks, this has all the excitement of a 12-car pile-up behind a jack-knifed big rig. But do you really need to know whether I like the color of her skin? Because I’ll tell you right now, Lady at Home Depot, I’m not so much digging the pasty look of yours. Also, you have a booger hanging out of your right nostril, which I would discreetly mention, but I’m not going to, since now you need to know whether I intend to tell my child she was adopted. My answer is: Un-unh. Shhhhh! It’s a secret between you and me!
I, too, learned that black absorbs heat while white reflects it. That doesn’t mean black people get hotter when out in the sun. Last I checked, 98.6 degrees is the normal temperature of a human being who isn’t fighting an infection or in the throes of a new love affair. And to the Woman Who Just Couldn’t Drop It, UVA and UVB rays cause cancer. Sunscreen is for everybody! Oh, and I promise you, there were actual black people living in England in 1968. Don’t argue, there were. They just didn’t live in your neighborhood.
No, I’m not babysitting. No, I’m not “just like Angelina!” And, no, you may not stroke her hair in wide-eyed wonder (though, had you asked first, the answer might have been different). And not that it’s any of your business, Mrs. Electric-Scooter-Rider at Henry’s, she’s not a crack baby; nor does she have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. By the way, are you riding in that thing because you’re fat or because you’re lazy? I mean, in my opinion, you really could stand to do a little walking.
Look. I know you have questions about why my family looks the way it does. But if your question has to be prefaced with “I don’t want this to come out wrong…” or if you feel a little skeevy before you ask, it’s probably best to simply go on wondering. And if you can’t bear the not knowing, I suggest you jot a note to consult Google when you get home, and let me be just another mom parenting her child.
(As published today in San Diego CityBeat.)
While complete tools, they’re not the *sharpest* tools in the conservative shed. And on that note, happy Friday!
H/T Nick Stoffel, baby lover extraordinaire, KPBS producer and my friend. Yes, I’m name dropping because I’m just a star fucker at heart.
And with this thought, happy weekend
“[S]omething is wrong when a black man can be arrested for disorderly conduct because he yelled at a cop on his own porch, but a mob of white, teabagging sheeple can disrupt town hall meetings with heckling, violence and threats, and THAT is considered protected free speech. Black professor = threat to the public. White mob = 1st Amendment heroes. People who think that’s perfectly fine = idiots.” -Tim Wise
Oh, barf!
“This was a whole lot more than a simple affair, this was a love story. A forbidden one, a tragic one, but a love story at the end of the day.” -The self-absorbed asshat, in light of his other dalliances that didn’t cross “the ultimate line,” which I can only presume—given the Governor’s record on social policy—is anal sex.
How many more crocodile-tearful press conferences, do you think?
Nuthin’ lahk beein’ wun with naychur…
How do you solve a problem like Maria? Governor Sanford does it by writing her emails, like this one in which he bloviates on becoming one with the earth and imagines what it must be like to be a man who works with his hands:
“…I went out and ran the excavator with lights until the sun came up. To me, and I suspect no one else on earth, there is something wonderful about listening to country music playing in the cab, air conditioner running, the hum of a huge diesel engine in the back ground, the tranquillity that comes with being in a virtual wilderness of trees and marsh, the day breaking and vibrant pink coming alive in the morning clouds – and getting to build something with each scoop of dirt.”
Stand up: Hold the racist’s feet to the fire
Certain things frighten me to such a magnitude that they disrupt the normal motility of my colon. Reality television, Mustangs, mullets, self-inflicted penile injuries and the county fair all make the list. There’s vomit, Smucker’s Goober PB&J, The Jonas Brothers, suburbia and Dora the Explorer. Victoria Beckham’s boobs, pickled herring and the fact that a book in which the Pope fathers a love child spends years on the New York Times Bestseller list all blow the springs right off my We-Are-So-Completely-Fucked-O-Meter.
Add to this horror show Crocs, Mickey Rourke’s new face and 8-percent pay cuts at UCSD and I’m throwing back shots of Benefiber like Patron Gold on May 5. I’ll go ahead and add terrorism and global warming to the above list just to be PC, but in all honesty, I’m way less scared by all those things combined than I am by racist dipshits. Hands down, it’s hate that makes me think I’m staring into the abyss of End Times.
Last week, two GOP semi-nobodies put on a comedy show for their fellow Americans. Rusty DePass, fundraiser and former chair of South Carolina’s state election commission, used his Facebook page as a platform from which to compare our First Lady to a gorilla. Not one day later, an administrative assistant to Tennessee state Sen. Diane Black was outed for having sent a photo of all 44 U.S. Presidents to some friends via e-mail. In place of Obama’s image was black space with two white googley eyes peering out. The photo was titled “Spook.”
Both of these individuals offered tepid apologies that betrayed their true beliefs: DePass laughed off his gag as “clearly in jest”—clearly—and then went on to blame the victim (“The comment was hers, not mine”). The senatorial staffer, Sherri Goforth—who sent her missive using a computer at the office of an elected official during business hours—was even more impressive when she claimed regret for having sent the image to the wrong group of people. Presumably, the right group of people never would have forwarded the funny to the wrong group of people, and then Goforth wouldn’t be in this conundrum of feeling “very sick” about not being able to take it back. I wonder if her faux pas caused her tummy to hurt like mine does.
Everybody—but especially Republicans who shouted for eight years about the treasonous act of criticizing a president during wartime—should be denouncing DePass and Goforth. Yet, beyond the wink-and-nod wrist slapping, things are fairly crickety over there on the right. DePass has pretty much gotten a pass, and despite demands, Goforth has not been fired. As of this writing, there has been no response—shocker—to a letter I sent to Black’s office and the office of Tennessee Gov. Phil Breseden.
More disturbing than what either of these people did or said individually, though, is the collective hurrah from woodwork-dwelling, racist whack-a-doos who live among those of us who yearn for a true post-racial America.
Comments left on the Free Republic last week reflected a disagreement with DePass’ armchair genealogy: Michelle Obama didn’t resemble a gorilla, they said, but, rather, a howler monkey, a mandrill, a baboon. It was suggested by one person that an apology to gorillas everywhere be forthcoming.
Another bigot, hiding behind the screen name Thor, posted a response on a comment I left at Newscoma, pointing out that I must not “know the White race has been targeted for extermination, and if nothing changes, the last White person is predicted to be born in Iceland in the year 2,200.” He makes such an extinction sound downright Utopian.
“Why didn’t you adopt a baby from a White girl who was about to have an abortion you frickin idiot?” he continued. “You think you are a good person because you went along with the plan to destroy your culture?” Umm—if you represent my culture, then, yes!
But I don’t need to rely on cyber-strangers to say such vile things. While in a heated e-mail exchange recently with another local writer—and I use that term lightly when referring to him—he suggested I try finding out “why black kids sit in cars, with their stereos blasting, as if they think everyone else wants to hear 50 Cent. Or, why they sit in movie theatres making noise, talking on cell phones or at the screen, as if they are Chris Rock.” Never mind that it was largely white middle-class teens who made rap mainstream. This guy can scribble the dots, but he can’t connect them. “I’m sure you’ll get to deal with all that fun,” he wrote, “when your little one grows up.”
People like Thor are the extremists. His is the irrational vitriol of an angry and somehow marginalized white man. He is the dangerous, terrifying—probably mullet-wearing—person I hope never to run in to. He’s the one you can’t reason with because his frontal lobe has atrophied from lack of use. To be sure, he is in the minority.
More ubiquitous are the fly-under-the-radar bigots like DePass, Goforth and the writer. They’re the ones who run in the some-of-my-best-friends-are-black crowd, who know their attitudes are wrong and who bank on never getting called out when they’re caught expressing them.
Pete Kotz, a writer for the Nashville Scene, argues that firing Goforth “only picks off a middle-aged lady,” a low-level pencil pusher in a cabal of unscrupulous policy-making bigots. “It does nothing to heal the greater wound, which is composed by the creeps, racists, half-wits and professional victims who make up the Tennessee legislature. They’re the real affront here, the wound that will become terminal if left unchecked.”
He makes a point, but only to a point. I say: Change happens from the bottom up. So why not start with the lowest common denominator and some Metamucil on the side?