Respecting Your Elders, Part II

I have knitterly things to discuss, but for now, a quick story:

Last Saturday I went to the post office to mail wedding invitations and got in line behind a gentleman who appeared to be in his 60s. He turned to me and, without provocation, said, "Do you know what the problem with the younger generation is?"

I looked at him.

"The problem with the younger generation is," he told me, "they don't want to work."

Really? "I hold multiple jobs," I told him.

"Well then, you're the exception," he said. "Young people don't like working."

There are other days when I would have been nicer, when I would have humored his dumb-old-fart routine. Not that day, not after a week of all my friends either getting laid off or being overworked as a result of other people getting laid off or working their rear ends off because of a fear of getting laid off or generally just working their rear ends off because the price of things is soooo much high than when Mr. Baby Boomer turned 30 years old.

Not that day.

"I don't want to talk about this," I told him. "Go have that conversation with someone else."

And the crazy thing? He kept talking! It took a few more sentences of him talking about the younger generation without me answering before he got the point that I wasn't going to participate.

Seriously, Boomers. Can you please just stop?

When They Called It for Obama

On CNN, they said that around the world, everyone will remember where they were when they heard Obama had won the 2008 election.

I don't think that's true. Don't get me wrong: It's amazing! I'm thrilled! It's such a relief that today I felt like I was breathing a different kind of oxygen. It's just, everybody basically has the same answer: "I was watching TV." We were all already waiting to see whether or not it would happen.

For the knitters amongst us, I have a better question: What were you knitting when you heard Obama had won the 2008 election?

(You'll have to reward yourselves this time. Someday, there will be a proper contest on this blog, when I have a working camera and am not in the middle of moving to a new apartment and have no clue what stash is where.)

I was knitting this:

It's the Storm Water Scarf, obviously unblocked, made out of Sea Silk. I knit two rows, and then they called Pennsylvania. I dropped the knitting and howled for joy. I knit one and half more rows and was very distracted, and then they called Ohio. I jumped up and down on the fella's couch (much to his dismay; it's a nice couch).

I knit three more stitches over the next hour or so. When they called California, that was it. No more knitting last night!

We watched the beautiful acceptance speech. We joined the spontaneous street party at 6th and Brazos last night. We are very tired today.

But we are hopeful.

Let's see what's next.

What I Liked

From Barack Obama's acceptance speech, courtesy of the transcript on the New York Times website:

Democrats, as well as Republicans, will need to cast off the worn-out ideas and politics of the past, for part of what has been lost these past eight years can't just be measured by lost wages or bigger trade deficits. What has also been lost is our sense of common purpose, and that's what we have to restore.

We may not agree on abortion, but surely we can agree on reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies in this country.

The -- the reality of gun ownership may be different for hunters in rural Ohio than they are for those plagued by gang violence in Cleveland, but don't tell me we can't uphold the Second Amendment while keeping AK-47s out of the hands of criminals.

I know there are differences on same-sex marriage, but surely we can agree that our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters deserve to visit the person they love in a hospital and to live lives free of discrimination.

You know, passions may fly on immigration, but I don't know anyone who benefits when a mother is separated from her infant child or an employer undercuts American wages by hiring illegal workers.

Rhetorically, the man just rose above every wedge issue the Republicans have tried to drum up over the last twenty years. Now let's see if he -- we? -- can get people to listen and think.

In other (knitting) news... one more FO! And still no working camera. It's turning comical, this sudden flood of FOs with no means of documentation (or really, showing off). We will have daily FO posts once this dilemma of mine is solved and $200 for a new camera magically lands on my doorstop from the digital camera fairy. I hear she makes house calls?

Economic Stimulus 2008

If anyone has been paying attention to economic news in the U.S., she will know that a vast swath of the tax-paying population (including me) are receiving $600 "economic stimulus checks," designed to save the economy from recession.

Heh. No, really, guys. Come on. There is nobody in this country for whom $600 is enough to serve as a life preserver. If you need a life preserver, you're likely looking for something on the order of $20,000 or more.

The whole "stimulus plan" seems to me like Congress and our president stayed up late one night, and in a fit of trying to sympathize with actual, struggling Americans, tossed this idea out in a grand "Let them eat cake!" moment, without thinking through the rest.

This is how I visualize their planning process:



This is the first glove, up to the pinky, of a pair I'm knitting for my fellah from Ann Budd's patterns. As yet, it covers the least useful finger of them all, and the rest are left to figure something out for themselves. Fortunately, I have skills, but how many people don't?

My stimulus check came a couple weeks ago. I donated a little to Doctors Without Borders:



I donated a little to the Nature Conservancy, to support their efforts in Costa Rica, chiefly rain forest conservation.

The rest I'm packing away in various schemes designed to (a) take advantage of a plunging stock market and (b) dodge this crazy inflation rate. We'll see how many more fingers I can cover before I run out of yarn and the hard winter comes.

Let's Not Go Without Mentioning

Read this article, regarding Clinton's exit of the primary:

In a culture that’s reached such a level of ostensible enlightenment as ours, calling a powerful woman “castrating” – however you choose to put it – ought to be seen as just as offensive as rubbing your fingers together to convey a love of gold coinage when you talk about a Jew. It’s nothing other than an expression of woman-hate — and the degree to which such expressions have flourished, in the mainstream media and in the loonier reaches of cyberspace this year, has added up to be a real national shame.

I'm not upset that Obama has taken the nomination, but I wish more people, both men and women, would take note of what raging sexism has limned this campaign from the day Hillary said, "Me, too." Sexism - linguistic, professional, casual, automatic - is so accepted in the culture today that a person is often shamed into silence when sexist jokes are told, when bowling shirts with nudie girls on them are ordered, when a woman is assumed to be dependent rather than independent, when her opinions are simply not considered.

Not long after the Ohio primary, which Hillary won, a male sort-of-friend in Ohio wrote me in a fit of rage. He said something to the effect that "These women want to eat men alive and see us all dead." That is as close to the original as I can recall, since I deleted his email, but come on, folks. Get with it.

From where does this irrational male terror arise? Can you please tell me when the last time was that a man was scared to walk to his car alone after midnight because he might be assaulted and raped by a gang of hormonal women? What made the male employees of the theater where I saw Sex and the City on opening night stare at all of us with eyes widened in shock and fear, when we were just hanging out together and having a good time?

Get. Over. It.

Later in the same article, writer Judith Warner criticizes the recent Sex and the City movie for disallowing women to be dumpy or bitchy, from what I can gather. It's a shame she disses what was an imperfect film but an excellent event. Her critique is a throwback to earlier feminism that rejected anything traditional (crafters, speak up!). It's ignorant to insist that a feminist can't also choose to dress fasionably or be open about her sex drive. And as to the insistence that no real, working woman over 35 can be slender... come off it. You get no prizes for not taking care of yourself, no matter how busy you are or how many demands are placed on your time.

Read the rest of the piece - just disregard the SATC bits.

Guess who somebody else saw just yesterday?

I went to a party last night given by some fellow theater people. We started on the topic of the primaries. A fellow playwright said that he had voted for Obama earlier that day during Early Voting. Then he attended the Obama rally downtown in the evening. However, his roommate had topped that. On Friday afternoon, he'd seen Barack Obama on the Town Lake Hike and Bike Trail.

So says the playwright:

The roommate, who is a dope-smokin', long-haired, insuranceless hippy kid, was riding his bicycle for fun along Austin's hike and bike trail. First he noticed some police officers walking down the path. Then he saw some men in dark suits. Then, a few moments later, around a bend, he saw Barack Obama strolling along, enjoying the beautiful weather and nice scenery.

"Was he alone?"

"Yeah, except for the Secret Service."

"What was he doing?" someone asked the playwright.

"Just looking at plants and stuff."

It's good to matter in the primaries.

Guess who I saw last weekend?

They say Bill Clinton is never on time.

Last Saturday, the fellah and I headed down to Hillary headquarters in Austin for their opening ceremonies (only about a year later than the Obama people). We arrived in time to get a spot inside, where it was hot and stuffy. One after another, semi-relevant local politicians took the mic to talk about their support for Hillary. The crowd was patient but growing restless; one woman passed out and had to be taken away by EMS.

It was not unlike Rock the Bells, a documentary the fellah and I saw last summer about a hip-hop festival in California. The headliners were the reunited Wu-Tang Clan. By the end of the night, the crowds were near rioting, and the promoter kept sending out more and more opening acts to keep the crowd calm as they searched high and low for Ol' Dirty Bastard, the since-deceased and most difficult of the very errant Clan members. People were passing out right and left, and the situation was becoming dangerous.

And to think: in both situations, we were kept waiting for an old, dirty b*****d.

This one also happens to have been a major world leader for eight years.

He spoke briefly and eloquently. He raised some good points and refrained from being negative.

For my part, I learned the limitations of my camera's zoom function, and like my camera, I never did get that close to greatness.

Still, it was an interesting evening in which Austin was permitted to see the Clinton establishment doing the equivalent of running to catch the bus in their bathrobes. The most powerful family in Democratic politics is a mess right now. I hope in these final days before the next primaries they will pull themselves together enough to let Hillary's very sound case be heard.

Something Else Is Going On

Those who know me know I vote Democrat almost every time. I believe in what the party stands for, even when its leaders take a seat. Like other Democrats, I'm quite pleased to have not one but two extremely strong candidates duking it out for the nomination.

Some readers might vote differently. I happen to think you're sorely misguided and perhaps not paying enough attention to things like, oh say, the weather. But that's not what this post is about.

I've been leaning in the direction of Obama, because I feel that he strikes a similar chord as JFK, because he seems poised to unify people and reach past differences. Only some of that has to do with his qualifications, which are many. Much of it has to do with image, and all that that implies.

Then I read this post.

I don't know the author personally, but he is a friend of a friend, and he is by all accounts a smart, articulate, thoughtful, interesting, and open-minded person. In no way am I trying to castigate the writer of that blog personally. I've also communicated my objections to him personally, so this isn't a sideswipe.

As you can see if you read the comment I left, however, I am very bothered by his sexist metaphor, which implies that standing up for what one believes in is an inherently masculine trait. Oddly enough, hope itself seems to have been appropriated by male language: "Hope Has a Pair," and Hillary's "castration" as a result of not standing firm to her positions.

It echoes the goofy machismo promoted by Bush and his cronies, the "let's done a flight suit and declare a war over!" mentality, the notion that once on a course one should never turn back.

It isn't so much this writer's particular post that gets me. (And I encourage you to read more of his posts, to give the guy a chance.) This is merely one example of something I'm beginning to notice much more often in the Obama camp.

What truly, deeply bothers me is that even here on the left, where I fall into the complacent illusion that people look past the limits of gender, race, physical ability, etc., the assumptions of male dominance are still present. They are a security blanket to so many-- both male and female, but mostly male. These assumptions are so natural that the writer likely didn't even consider what he was doing as the least bit offensive when he wrote it. (Still waiting to hear from him on that.) Promotions, assertions, legislations and more can't seem to shake so many men free from the notion that they are somehow, inherently, indefinably better. It isn't something they'll assert publicly; it's simply a belief they hold so automatically that it comes as a surprise when anyone raises a hand in protest.

(Yes, we all know wonderful men who are exceptions to that rule (Hi, Dad!), but that isn't the point right now.)

I don't want to vote for Hillary because she's a woman anymore than I want to vote for Obama because his father was black. Yet I find myself looking to Hillary much more now, because in the Obama camp I see snags here and there where people vote not out of hope but of fear and distaste.

How often do we fail to hear what she says, because we're unnerved by the fact that a woman is saying it? And how much is that reaction so natural that we fail to recognize it as such?

"I think it's time we had a really tough broad in charge," my father said when we were discussing the candidates over the holidays. At the time, I shrugged and thought, maybe not this tough broad.

Now I am reconsidering. Let Hillary ruffle feathers. Let her infuriate the right, and the left, and the centrists who are made to feel uneasy. I'm abandoning my argument that it's time for a new generation to take the helm of this nation, because now it's time for a brave woman -- yes, both of those words together -- to run the place.

This begs the questions, of course: what part of female anatomy shall stand for chutzpah? Anyone?