It’s Furious Balancing

I think I’ve found a cure for my seasonal depression — Anger.

It’s really more righteous indignation than anger, but if it’s enough to get me off my butt and write a post, I’ll take it.

There are two things that push my Anger Buttons:

• Intolerance in any form, from your garden-variety racism to intolerance based on a person’s sexual orientation, religion, social class, etc.
• Stomping on someone’s civil liberties.  I’m a proud, card-carrying member of the ACLU, and Teh Husband and I send in a monthly contribution via automatic withdrawals from our checking account.  I believe his main concern is privacy issues, while mine is the straightforward First Amendment stuff:  Freedom of speech and expression, freedom of religion, and freedom of the press.

If you’re paying any attention to current events in the United States you will know exactly what I’m talking about.  I’m not here to write a post discussing the issue in detail, I just need to say this:

If you’re wrapping yourself in the flag and claiming what a “real American” you are for opposing Park51, it’s painfully obvious that you have no concept of the principles set forth in the Bill of Rights.  None.  You are a “faux American.”   Pathetic.  My suggestion to you is to grab a Sharpie and write “IGNORANT BIGOT” on your forehead in really big letters.  That will save us the trouble of having to listen to you.

I was surfing the Innernets this morning, reading the news and minding my own business, when an article in Slate started an avalanche in my Wee Little Brain.  I don’t think I’m capable of crafting an honest-to-God blog post out of this yet, but I thought I could amuse someone out there with my notes on my train of thought.  My utterly derailed Train of Thought.

I did go back over this inchoate list of notes to make it look somewhat formatted, and I added in my links.  It’s not all off the cuff.  Hopefully, there is a gram of sense in it.  Somewhere.  All I know is that I need to go back to my World War II/German history books and do a lot of re-reading.

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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
– George Santayana

William L. Shirer made these words the epigraph for his Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1959).

Note that I should finish Rise and Fall, former bedtime reading, having only made it up to the Anschluss.  I would read two pages before falling asleep, worry of breaking nose from hardcover book.

Don’t Ignore the Tea Party’s Toxic Take on History, Slate article by Ron Rosenbaum.

Tea Party movement = Ignorance of History.  Ignorance of meaning of the words socialism, Nazism, Communism, etc.

Rosenbaum is the author of Explaining Hitler, which is not a Hitler apologia apologist (determine noun, an historical apologist writes what?  Apologies, certainly, but there must be a better word, based on root apolog-.) My reading of that and of personal narratives of German citizens during the Hitler years has been met with unspoken condescension — usually from people unable to cope with anything that actually requires them to think about what they read.

These books are not a glorification or a rationalization of Hitler or of Nazi Germany, but stem from a need to understand; and I read them due to my own German descent and my interest in the complicated nature of human evil and in the lack of black/white dichotomies.

My fascination with shades of gray in the human psyche, how easy it is to push someone from sanity/rationality over the edge.  Incremental and unnoticed for the most part.  Similar to ease of losing humanity under extreme duress [lack of food, example of Primo Levi (?) -- or was it Elie Weisel (?) --in Auschwitz listening to father's death rattle in hopes of getting his stuff.  Boots?  Blanket?]; or not [1950's or 1960's psychological research study at U.S. college of prisoners vs. wardens - find link The Stanford Prison Experiment, 1971].

If it is that simple — simple as in “not complicated,” not “easy” — to become inhuman to others, how simple is it to manipulate the narrative to merely plant the seeds of a social movement that takes us backwards towards intolerance, racism, xenophobia, and worse.  A spiral into madness.

Weimar Republic, social history.  Analogous to today?  Tea Party, by their inability to understand history, is becoming a tool to lead us into a repeat of that not-understood history.

Oh my name it is nothin’
My age it means less
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
I was taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And that land that I live in
Has God on its side.

I am distressed that this day has been designated “Patriot’s Day.”  I feel that today has very little to do with patriots.  Today is the anniversary of when the definition of patriotism changed.

Oh the history books tell it
They tell it so well
The cavalry charged
The Indians fell
The cavalry charged
The Indians died
Oh the country was young
With God on its side.

To be a patriot in the early years after 9-11 meant that you didn’t ask questions.  It meant that you didn’t search for the facts — let alone the truth — of what happened.  It meant that you never thought about why it happened.  It was far too complicated to look at the history of U.S. interference in the Middle East when you could be satisfied with  “They did it because they hate freedom.”

Oh the First World War, boys
It closed out its fate
The reason for fighting
I never got straight
But I learned to accept it
Accept it with pride
For you don’t count the dead
When God’s on your side.

To be a New Patriot meant you thought the Geneva Conventions were optional.  To be a New Patriot meant you condoned the use of torture.

But now we got weapons
Of  chemical dust
If fire them we’re forced to
Then fire them we must
One push of the button
And a shot the world wide
And you never ask questions
When God’s on your side.

To be a New Patriot meant you believed that the erosion of civil liberties was acceptable.  To be a New Patriot meant you felt the slaughter of persons who had absolutely nothing to do with 9-11 was a point of pride.

In a many dark hour
I’ve been thinkin’ about this
That Jesus Christ
Was betrayed by a kiss
But I can’t think for you
You’ll have to decide
Whether Judas Iscariot
Had God on his side.

It disgusts me beyond measure that the 2,974 people who died on this day are “honored” with such an empty, hollow word.  We need to call today by a different name.

So, do I read Cheney’s memoir when it comes out?  I’m certain it will have me frothing at the mouth, yelling obscenities, flinging it against the wall, and stomping on it until the pages fall out.  Then again, that would be the most exercise I’d have gotten for quite some time.  Aerobic Righteous Indignation.

I thought it would be appropriate — considering my woeful grasp on U.S. history — to read the text of the Declaration of Independence.  Taking ten minutes, if not less, to read up on Why I’m Enjoying a Three-Day Weekend seemed like a good idea to me (and it’s helping me put off the housework that needs doing).

In any event, I drew some interesting parallels between Getting Rid of King George and Getting Rid of Dubya; and, yes, my emphasizing certain bits is my not-so-thinly-veiled attempt at editorializing.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world….

He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance….

He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil power….

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury;

For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses….

For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments;

For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever….

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.  A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Amen. Amen. Amen.  Enjoy your Independence Day, cats and kittens.

1.  From Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address

[W]e reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: Know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.

2.  From Artyarn, Silk Rhapsody, in a color I can only describe as Quicksilver:

I’m fighting off a cold, so that’s as in-depth as my blog posting is going to get for today.

Sleep well, cats and kittens.  Tomorrow is a brand new world.

I’m currently sitting in one of the common areas of the HI Chicago Hostel, pounding on the laptop. Yeah, I know I haven’t talked about either my Chicago trip or my shiny new Dell (running Ubuntu).  I’ve been remiss.  Bear with me.

This is the Knitters for Obama Inauguration Weekend.  Right after the election, we started chatting in the Ravelry forum about a meet up in Chicago.  About 2 to 3 dozen of us are coming into town, some for just the weekend (me) and some for all four days – culminating in watching the festivities on Tuesday morning.

This is the online crowd I’ve been hangin’ with since the primaries, watching the debates on one screen and typing in chat on another.  A very good bunch indeed.

I rolled into town around noon, checked into the hostel, and spent most of the afternoon at Loopy Yarns sitting in their classroom area with other KFO-ers, knitting, buying yarn, chitchatting, and putting tags on the charity knitting hats we’re donating to the University of Chicago Medical Center’s cancer care unit.

Blackbunny (Carol of Black Bunny Fibers) was there signing copies of her new book, Knitting Socks with Handpainted Yarn.  Franklin was there, too!  I’m hoping some of his pictures make it up on his blog, since I didn’t take very many myself. 

Yes, I did buy yarn, but it’s SOCK yarn, and I have it on good authority that sock yarn doesn’t count as stash.  There was a very expensive skein of a silk-mohair blend — which is NOT sock yarn — but  I can’t recall the name of it now (and it’s in my room).  It was silver.  And very pretty.  And up by the cash register.  I blame the yarn fumes.  The place was heady with them.

Tomorrow we’re getting together for some sight-seeing, locations to be determined when we get an idea of how many of us are venturing forth.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

–Laiane

FO as in “Finished Object.”  This is one truly finished object.

Way, way back in October, I was contemplating what to knit during the Vice Presidential debate.  A lot of of the Knitters for Obama would watch the debates on streaming online video, knit, and keep a running commentary in a forum thread on Ravelry. Well, I could do two activities at the same time, but not all three.  Multi-tasking is not my forte.

This question of “what to knit?” was an important topic.  I knew I would be frothing at the mouth at the insipid and pathetic attempts of That Woman trying to sound even remotely intelligent for one millisecond distracted, so I didn’t want to work on a complicated pattern.  I knew I would be stressed and angry, and didn’t want to channel my bile into a sweet little catnip mouse project — sort of the flip side to the knitted Prayer Shawl concept.  So, I decided to knit a political effigy of Sarah Palin and burn it on Election Night.

Before you all start whining about how evil I am to do this to poor Sarah, I’m going to refer you to the centuries-old tradition of Guy Fawkes Night.  Bonfires.  Effigies of politicians and Popes.  Do some reading, please Sweet Jesus and All That is Holy, DO SOME #*%#&^  READING!

Ahem.

The choice of yarn for this was easy.  I’d inherited a ton of old acrylic yarn from my Gramma Fran’s knitting supplies/stash.  This yarn was at least 15 years old – minimum.  Old scratchy Kmart yarn.  My Gramma, a devout FDR Democrat  who once told me “Democrats care about people; Republicans care about rich people,” would not have been in the least bit offended.

So I cast on at the start of the debate, played Sarah Palin bingo, and made some progress:

This photo was picked up by The Huffington Post in an article showcasing Flickr photos from the campaign.  It’s about 40 pictures into the slideshow if you’re interested.

I worked on the Sarah Palin Political Effigy (SPPE) off and on leading up to the election. I finished her the day before.  Kissy isn’t too interested in her.

Project Notes:  Sarah Palin Political Effigy

Pattern: Bad Juju, by Zabet Stewart; The AntiCraft, Samhain 2005

Size: Bigger than Gov. Palin’s brain, which isn’t saying much.

Yarn: Very, very old 100% Acrylic Yarn of Unknown Origin – Ivory

Needles: U.S. Size 5

Mods/Notes: No mods, but I didn’t do all the embroidery called for in the pattern.  My embroidery skillz are not that great, and this Witch was Made for Burning, after all.

A group of us got together to drink, watch the Electoral College numbers come in and set the SPPE on fire.  I don’t think they use this old grill in their backyard anymore, so it was a perfect place to do the deed.

Photos by HunterXan’s Husband, maker of awesome frozen margaritas and professional journalist.  There’s no way I could take a picture this good.

This was sometime between 9:30 p.m. and 10:00 p.m., before the election was undisputedly in the bag for Sen. Obama.   Sometime soon afterwards, the neighbors started setting off fireworks, which gave the green light for our Husbands to start setting off fireworks and scare the Tibetan Mastiff under the porch.  In the word’s of HunterXan — “The neighbors totally started it.”

Let’s just say that acrylic yarn and polyester fiberfill burn quickly.  It was like watching the Wicked West of the West melt into a puddle at the end of The Wizard of Oz. Think on this whenever you feel the urge to knit with plastic yarn.

Rock on, cats and kittens.  Inauguaration Day is coming.

The Knitters for Obama group on Ravelry was a bright spot in all the pre-election craziness of 2008.  I found the group in March, long before the Democratic Party’s nomination of Obama, and I spent hours there hoping, commiserating, dreaming, bitching, watching the debates, planning, and, from time to time, actually knitting.

The official scoreboard for the KFO fundraiser came in at $32,717 with contributions coming in from over 600 donors.  Not bad for a bunch of little old ladies with pointy sticks, eh?

I did win a prize in the last and biggest raffle – the Knitters for Obama lap quilt.  MaryAlice, a KFO member in Birmingham, Alabama, made the prize I won in the second raffle — the Obama knitting bag.  I was so impressed by her handiwork that I put the lion’s share of my virtual raffle tickets on the quilt.

In any event, here are pictures of the quilt.  I have a set of them over on my Flickr photostream if you want a closer look.

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The quilt will be an heirloom of my house.  I intend to pass it on to my niece, Frances, when I’m older (i.e., older in this instance meaning dead).

Mary Alice shared the following with me:

The airport post office is no longer open on Sundays so I sent the quilt today, via Express Mail.  The clerk assured me it would be at your office by noon tomorrow.  She had to take a peek and then had to take it to the back to show her friends.

She always takes my packages when I send something to the grandbabies.  She and I are about the same age and were both around during the Civil Rights movement here in Birmingham 45 or so years ago.  She’s black and I’m white. We were both in tears today when we finished the transaction, just thinking and talking about how excited we both are to be voting for Barack tomorrow.

I’m honored that you’ll pass the quilt on to your niece. Please make a note to tell her how much making the quilt meant to me as a white Southerner who has lived thru this momentous change. I’ve always been a Democrat and I’m especially proud to be one now.

I’m especially proud to be a Democrat right now, too,

I found this essay in the early hours this Sunday morning  — those pre-dawn hours when the world seems sane and clear.  This is from Tim Wise, an anti-racist writer and activist.

For those who have seen the ugliness and heard the vitriol emanating from the mouths of persons attending McCain/Palin rallies this past week–what with their demands to kill Barack Obama, slurs that he is a terrorist and a traitor, and paranoid delusions about his crypto-Muslim designs on America–please know this: This is how fascism comes to an ostensible democracy.

If it comes–and if those whose poisonous, unhinged verbiage has been so ubiquitous this week have any say over it, it surely will–this is how it will happen: not with tanks and jackbooted storm troopers, but carried in the hearts of men and women dressed in comfortable shoes, with baseball caps, and What Would Jesus Do? wristbands.

—

If fascism comes, it will spring from the soil of middle America, from people known as values voters but whose values are toxic, from simple folk whose simplicity, far from being admirable, is better labeled ignorance, from “all-American” types whose patriotism is a dagger pointed at the very heart of the national interest, for it so forsakes all the best principles upon which the republic was founded, choosing instead to elevate and ratify the narrow-mindedness, the bigotry, and the intolerance that also marked our country’s origins.

—

If fascism comes it will be welcomed, lock stock and barrel by persons who pray at every meal to a God they visualize as white, whose son they also think was white, and who they believe is going to rapture them all into the sky upon the blowing of some heavenly trumpet, after which point all those who don’t think as they think will be burned in an eternal lake of fire. Their vision and version of God is itself fascistic–to love a God who would do such a thing is to love an abusive, sadistic and evil deity after all–so it should come as little surprise that their conception of the state would be equally authoritarian or worse.

If fascism comes it will be at the behest of those who hold a contempt for what they call “book learnin,” who prefer Presidents who mispronounce basic words because they make them feel smarter, and who are looking for nothing so much as a commander-in-chief with whom they would enjoy having a beer, or two, or twelve at some backyard barbecue.

—

If fascism comes it will come because a lot of people who aren’t like the folks I’m talking about here, won’t stand up to the ones who are. Because we’re too busy, don’t want to make waves, don’t want to lose friends, or alienate family. It will come, in other words, because those who know better are cowards, more concerned with getting along, making nice, and being liked than with telling the truth, calling out evil and saving their country.

—

If fascism comes it will come because those liberals thought voting for Barack Obama was all they needed to do; it will come because they allowed themselves to believe that politics is what a person does every four years, but not at work, and not in the neighborhood, and not at the dinner table. Meanwhile, know-nothings filled with hate, nurtured on racial and religious bigotry and who have overdosed on the kind of hypernationalism that has always proved fatal to those places foolish or craven enough to allow it a foothold, talk of their visions for America at every opportunity. They raise their kids on that sickness, they build churches whose very foundation is rooted in that cancerous rot, and they will think nothing of steamrolling those who get in their way.

So when, exactly, do we fight back? When do we say enough?

The entire essay is here.  Pass it on, cats and kittens; please read it all and pass it on.

Well, to tell the truth, it’s not so much writer’s block as it is paying far too much attention to the Presidential Election.  I’ve been hanging out in the Knitters for Obama Ravelry discussion forum, obsessively checking the polls, and generally reading all the political news articles and watching all the political videos — satirical and otherwise –  I’m able to find online.

I’ve been busy, in other words.

I’ve already decided to take the day off from work on Wednesday, November 5th.  I plan on being up for most of the night on the 4th.  I won’t be able to sleep until Obama gives his “thank you” speech.

I do have some Election 2008 knitting projects in the works, but I’m not posting them until they’re done.  You’ll just have to wait until then.  In the meantime, here’s another finished object for your knitting consideration:  Jen’s Chica Scarf.

PROJECT NOTES

Made for: Jen, my manicurist of many years.  Jen’s much more of a friend then a “manicurist.”  I’ve been seeing her a few times a month for the past seven or eight years.  After He Who Buys Large Diamonds and I were engaged, I wanted my hands to look nicer so I could show off The Rock.  Jen is also The Husband’s hair stylist. 

Pattern: Chicabean Scarf by the Kelly Green Rogue.

Size: After blocking – 60 inches by 8 inches.

Yarn: Paton’s Classic Wool Merino in Paprika (approx. 350 yards)

Needles: US size 8, Pony Pearl 20″ circulars

Mods: None.

Challenges: There wasn’t a chart for this pattern, so it went slowly for me.  I’m not an absolute beginner with cables and lace, and I prefer charts over line-by-line instructions.  There are a few spots in the scarf where I fudged some missing or some extra stitches, but the pattern’s complex enough to cover it.  I hope.  Jen, thankfully, doesn’t expect perfection.  She’s known me too long.

I’ve created two new pages for the third Ravelry Knitters for Obama Raffle taking place from September 20, 2008 through October 31, 2008.  Information and rules are here, and the list of prizes is here.  You can find these in the “Pages” list to this blog, but I want to be blatantly obvious.

No, that isn’t my Thomas in the picture.  Thomas is a Cranky Old Man Cat and I suspect he may be leaning towards McCain.

I’ve been avoiding the blog, and it’s not because I’m knee-deep in yarn from the Shop Hop last weekend.   Well, I am knee-deep in yarn, but the Blogging Avoidance is because I’m utterly speechless at the galloping stupidity from the so-called, oxymoronic “liberal media”  and the Repugnant Cretins Republicans, who, for the purposes of this entry, I’m defining as “people who are daft enough to support the presidential and vice-presidential candidates their party has thrown up — and I do mean vomited in this instance — for the 2008 general election.”

I can’t even write one paragraph — albeit a very wordy one — without my jaw clenching.  I think if I were to enumerate all the ways Caribou Barbie Sarah Palin is not qualified to be anything more than a small town mayor, if that, I would break my teeth.

I surf the Innernets a great deal.  I read blogs and opinion pieces from the (minority) Liberal Media.  There’s a lot of anti-McCain/anti-Palin writing out there, but the one that gave me pause this morning was Judith Warner’s column/blog post in the online version of The New York Times. She cites an interview with Jonathan Haidt, an associate professor of moral psychology at the University of Virginia.

Haidt has conducted research in which liberals and conservatives were asked to project themselves into the minds of their opponents and answer questions about their moral reasoning. Conservatives, he said, prove quite adept at thinking like liberals, but liberals are consistently incapable of understanding the conservative point of view.  Liberals feel contempt for the conservative moral view, and that is very, very angering. Republicans are good at exploiting that anger,” he told me in a phone interview.

I rattle on about the stupidity of the Repugs, but Haidt argues that it is the Liberals who are damaged by their own blindness.  How, he posits, “can Democrats learn to see — let alone respect — a moral order they regard as narrow-minded, racist, and dumb?”

Haidt’s article, What Makes People Vote Republican?, is worth the time to read and worth the time it took for me to go to the dictionary to refresh my memory on the definitions of anomie and heuristic.   I easily can place myself in two of the five moral foundations he sets forth to define overall morality — harm/care and fairness/reciprocity — but I measure up on the low-end of the scale for the other three — ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity.  I’m a selfish, godless, insubordinate malcontent as far as the conservatives are concerned.

Because I love graphs and charts, here’s my test results from the Moral Foundations Questionnaire at www.YourMorals.org (registration required).  You need to click the image to see it properly; my blog post formatting skillz aren’t on today.  My score is green, self-identified liberals are blue, and self-identified conservatives are red.

I would suggest taking the test before reading Haidt’s article; it could skew your results.

Being the open-minded Liberal that I am, thinking about “How the Conservatives Think” gives me a lot of food for thought about my own definitions of morality.  I can attempt to stand in the shoes of a conservative and see how he/she defines morality, too.

My knee-jerk disgust at the conservatives, however, makes me think that they themselves are incapable of exploring their own relationship with morality.  Sorry, cats and kittens, but I have issues with people who live their lives with the Orwellian concept of “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,” or, as the Yarn Harlot posted recently:

It is the interpretation of those [basic rules that almost all faiths and all good people have in common] that defeats me.  Stuff like “Thou shalt not kill” or “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” being interpreted as “Thou shalt not kill unless you happen to think that the other person isn’t really a person because of your own rules” or “do unto others as you would have them do unto you unless you think that simply being a human isn’t a good enough reason to receive human rights” is a problem for me.

Yeah, that’s a problem for me, too.  /sigh