Category Archives: culture

a Harper’s Tuesday on Wednesday

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News bits from this week’s Harper’s Review to contemplate:

A security assessment found that just one third of Baghdad’s neighborhoods were under U.S. control, police recruits shot a “suspicious woman,” a Catholic priest was kidnapped along with five boys, and 27 corpses, each shot in the head and showing signs of torture, were recovered.

China was in the grip of “Web 2.0 madness.

Three adulterers were executed by firing squad in Khyber, Pakistan.

Hillary Clinton thanked God for helping her endure the sexual indiscretions of her husband.

Two John McCain campaign officials were fired for refusing to “rape and pillage” church directories for potential donors.

Students at Harvard University were scalping tickets to their own graduation, high school officials in Galesburg, Ohio, withheld the diplomas of five seniors after their friends and families cheered too loudly at the commencement, and three students were arrested in Aurora, Illinois, following a cafeteria food fight.

Forest guards in western India were using cell phone ring tones of cows mooing, goats bleating, and roosters crowing to lure hungry leopards away from human encampments.

In Bautzen, Germany, three teenagers were found not guilty of impairing the sex drive of an ostrich.

The Internet’s storehouse of wisdom, information, and pornographic images was determined to weigh 0.2 millionths of an ounce

For the originating links for these and other news bits to contemplate, go here.

MYRLN’S Monday Meme

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Ah….Paris Au Printemps!

Yes, Paris in the Spring…or the springing of Paris…or Paris reslammered.

Yeah…that Paris, the Hilton one, not the worthwhile one.

A friend of the lesser one points out, “It was so cruel what has happened to her. She wasn’t allowed to wax or use a moisturizer. Her skin is so dry right now!” My god, Paris with dry skin! Leg stubble! Returning bikini-line hair! How dreadful! “She’s had an awful five days,” the friend goes on. “She wants to see her friends and have fun. She’s been punished enough already.” Five days without a party? My god…cruel and unusual punishment! California’s Guantanamo!

And well-heeled, high-powered defense attorneys to a person cry out that she’s been singled out only because of her celebrity. Right. And those same attorneys say nothing about how their butter’s breaded by the rich and famous.

But you know what? What happens to Paris Heirhead is not the important story. What is of relevance is the national obsession with her and this event. Every t.v. station covers it incessantly, even cutting in for “breaking news” about it, lest they lose advertising revenue if they ignored it as they should. Newspapers are adorned with the story. They’ve reached tabloid heaven. And why is this obsession important? Because it shows us loud and clear and in no uncertain terms just how shallow America has become. Paris Hilton drives all else out of the news of the day! Paris Hilton!…who’s not worth a rat’s aspersion of our time or interest, yet here we are, dominated by her.

If we asked that friend of hers what the american military death toll is in Iraq, do you suppose we’d hear from the friend that it’s over 3500?

If we asked what help she and her friends have given to the poor, or homeless, or an ailing parent, think we’d hear about any meaningful humane efforts?

If we asked about what’s happening in Darfur, think we’d get a knowledgeable answer?

Of course not. Those events detract from party time. Please…all we’d get is more drivel about “poor Paris.” More petitions to “save her.” More websites crying out on her behalf. Or another fan yelling, “She’s America’s Princess Di!” (Another pitiful obsession inexplicably rampant.) All of it is hard evidence of precisely where we’ve arrived in this country: in the shallows of monumental stupidity.

Oui…pauvre Paris au printemps.

Et pauvre l’Amerique.

Skeleton 227

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They found her buried in the Steppes of Russia, a tall woman, leg bones bowed, probably from spending a lot a time on a horse. She was buried with her earrings and other gold adornments. And a mass of arrowheads. A Warrior Princess who lived 2500 years ago.

They had found other skeletons too, in other places. Tall women, with bowed legs, some positioned in the historically ancient pose of the warrior — one leg bent at the knee. Buried with arrowheads and swords. The DNA from one of these skeletons has been found in a young teenager currently living in a nomadic tribe in Mongolia.

The most famous Amazon warrior Penthesilia, Herodotus wrote, died at the hands of the greatest warrior of Greece, Achilles. Many think that the Amazons were a myth, but evidence is showing that such women probably did exist in various parts of Europe and Asia.

Archeologists are finding that there were others of these strong warrior women who, for generations, taught themselves and their daughters to hold their own in a world controlled by male aggression.
These women were as ruthless as the multitudes of men they fought and killed or enslaved.

There is something empowering to know that we can be as ruthless as the most ruthless men. There is something even more empowering to believe that we have the moral courage to choose not to.

I watch the new television series Commander-in-Chief and an reminded that there are many ways to be a strong leader — some more ruthless than others.

Bush is a failure as a leader. (Type in “failure” in a Google search and then click on “I’m Feeling Lucky.” Heh.)

A woman wouldn’t necessarily be a better leader. After all, there was the woman who is now Skeleton 227.

But there have to be individuals who could lead this nation with true commitment to all of its people, to the spirit of its Constitution, and to its responsibility to demonstrate how to make decisions based on ethics as well as necessity. I hope they’re watching Commander-in-Chief for some tips.

Some Dissident Praise for Kalilily

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The following is why blogging keeps me blogging.

I got an email today from a Dr. Lilian Friedberg which said:

Hello Elaine,
I recently discovered your website, and was so delighted (and sincerely impressed with very good content) that I mention it in my most recent column, “Voices of the Peoples” at the ClarkPost. Here is the URL, this month’s column is called and includes a paragraph or two about your site: The Death of Democracy in America: The Foundering Fathers and the White Roots of Peace

I do hope you’ll understand my discussion of your site in the appreciative and playful spirit it is intended. It is a wonderful place to visit.

Another dissenting Crone,
Lilian Friedberg, PhD
Cognitive Dissident

Dr. Friedberg’s piece is long but worth reading for the well-researched perspective she gives not only on the death of democracy in America, but also on its origins and the misconceptions most people have about its development.

Of course, to me, the best parts are what she says about Kalilily, which I post here with a big dissident smile on my face:

To my cognitively dissonant delight—one ray of inspiration did appear on an otherwise dim string of search results which led me to the weblog of Elaine of Kalilily, Self-Proclaimed Resident Crone of Blogdom, who also describes herself as a “True Blue American,” and whose blog entry for November 5, 2004, “My Blue America,” glimmers with subtly placed signs of hope. The real gems are buried in the links she supplies: truths debunking myths of Puritans fleeing religious persecution only to export it to the colonies in the form of domestic tyranny abroad, truths about witch-burnings, and about the foundational principle of genocide underlying the birth of this nation—on a link that’s worth singling out here, since it’s rather cleverly cached behind a hyperlinked reference to the military that benignly obscures the page’s content.
Genocide and The American Indian Peoples

Nor did I leave Kalilily’s site without finding the scoop I was looking for on the founding fathers, in particular as they relate to the third part of this essay, The White Roots of Peace—but we’ll return to that in a moment.

Emoticons cannot express my response to the quality and truth content of these treasures on a site that looked, at first blue blush, to be an exercise in kitsch- and cupcake-artistry. Just goes to show, never judge a blog by its clip art.
About the time I hit the genocide link, I went back and, with a quizzed “who-the-hell-is-this-person” look, and clicked on the “ABOUT ME” link. Voila!: My faith in the American people restored. At the risk of offending the self-proclaimed Crone of blogdom, I must admit what first came to mind: “Well, I’ll be damned,” I thought, “it’s just a little old retired grandma sitting there raising hell at the keyboard!” (That wouldn’t be an altogether fair assessment of a rather accomplished career woman and crafty writer who truly has earned her Crone-Coronation, so I invite the reader read site the rest of the story, which includes a great pic of the author.
Rest of the Story

And it was on Elaine of Kalilily’s site that I found one of the spokes in the wheel I was hoping to “uninvent.”

The people of the Six Nations, also known by the French term, Iroquois Confederacy, call themselves the Hau de no sau nee (ho dee noe sho nee) meaning People Building a Long House. Located in the northeastern region of North America, originally the Six Nations was five and included the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas. The sixth nation, the Tuscaroras, migrated into Iroquois country in the early eighteenth century. Together these peoples comprise the oldest living participatory democracy on earth. Their story, and governance truly based on the consent of the governed, contains a great deal of life-promoting intelligence for those of us not familiar with this area of American history. The original United States representative democracy, fashioned by such central authors as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, drew much inspiration from this confederacy of nations. In our present day, we can benefit immensely, in our quest to establish anew a government truly dedicated to all life’s liberty and happiness much as has been practiced by the Six Nations for over 800 hundred years.
The Six Nations and the Oldest Living Participatory Democracy on Earth.

[UPDATE: After contemplating the Dr.’s reference to “cupcake artistry,” I decided to clean up my kitsch and make my site look more the way it did when I started — not so clip-arty. Less is more, right?]
———————
And so, on this second day of a new year, with a week facing me probably filled with rounds of doctor’s visits trying to figure out what’s going on with my mom’s swollen lips and with trying to get ready to go out and stay with my daughter later in the month while she recuperates from some surgery (now, that I don’t mind doing because I get to be with my toddler grandson) — as I sit here feeling sorry for myself for missing what’s supposed to be my Golden Years — I get the message. Thank you, Dr. Friedberg.
Blogging keeps me going. Keeps me golden. At least it keeps my brain from getting too tarnished.
Much of my original interest in the the legacies left to this country by the Six Nations was stirred up while I worked in the New York State Museum, where the histories of the Hau de no sau nee are preserved and revered. It was there I learned about the status and influence that women, especially older women, held in those Native American communities. Among all of the important democractic legacies of the Six Nations that our American system has discarded is the fundamental role of the Clan Mother, the Crone. Dr. Friedberg explores those legacies in her “Death of Democracy” article.
If you want to read more of what Dr. Friedberg, my newly discovered “sister-in-croney-dissidence.” writes, check out the following:
Election Results Challenge Our Faith in America and Its People
An Open Letter to the NYT (and by Implication) the Rest of the US Media Who Are Trying to Whitewash the Election Scandal
Worse than Watergate? Yep. Worse Yet. Worse than Hitler
I Love the Smell of Cold Turkey in the Morning: A Week in the Life of
America
God Bless America! Letters from the Heartland: Open Letters to George W. Bush October 14 – Nov 3, 2004
———————
And, speaking of “golden,” I thought these were supposed to be my Golden Years. Right.
Great op ed piece in my local paper today by Silvio Laccetti, a professor who wrote the piece for the Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service. I can’t seem to find it anywhere else on the web, at least not yet.
Here are just some excerpts from “A Sandwich Generation Reaches Its Golden Years:”
We are the smallest generation. Once called the silent generation, we are the pivotal generation of the last 60 years. We are the rock ‘n’ roll generation, born from 1940 through 1945. My generation. This New Year, 2005, the first of our number arrives at the golden age of 65.
Sandwiched between the greatest generation and the baby boomers, we occupy our own high place in America’s social history. We have served as foundation builders in key areas of American life, and we have cemented the social structure of the last 35 years. Our generation is recognized by many names.
Of course, as the rock ‘n’ roll generation, we discovered and popularized the music that radically changed popular culture. In the early ’50s, proto-rock ‘n’ rollers found the moondog music of black artists on obscure R&B stations. “Rock” became a cultural attitude, infusing the arts, theater and even politics. We were the first modern generation of rebels, albeit rebels without a cause. We said rock ‘n’ roll would never die and, for better or worse, it hasn’t.
Clearly, my generation is also the atomic generation, closely identified with the 1950s and their epochal changes. Domestic joy and tranquillity contrasted with apocalyptic visions of annihilation.
[snip]
Because we passed through so many mini-revolutions, we were also the cement that binds much of our society together. We went from the 78 rpm record to the DVD recorder disc, from the typewriter to the Palm Pilot.
[snip]
Forty years later, it’s 2005 and most of us are staying alive (oops). Thanks to new attitudes toward seniors and second careers, and with continued help from medical advances, we remain an undeniable part of America’s future. As veterans of four decades of change in which America became the sole world superpower we still have much to contribute. We will not fade away.
Yup. There’s a dance in the ol’ dame yet.

Floating on the Fringes of the Spiral

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The World Wide Web is usually visualized like a spider web. I experience it as a whirlpool, an eddy, a vortex that spirals me into it. I ride on the fringes of the spiral, a mere droplet among the rushing currents. But I hold on, managing just enough surface tension to keep connected. But never part of the major flow.

For example, there’s this new “friends network” that one of my blogger friends sent me an invitation to join. Wotthehell. I did. But I was curious to see how he got connected to it and who his other “friends” were. And, as the strands of the spiral wound farther and farther outward, I saw the names of other bloggers I know who are also connected in that strand that must have started somewhere, with someone. The first cause, so to speak. After spiraling out about as far as I could go, I’ve decided it might well have been Joi Ito, whose session I attended at the “free” day of BloggerCon held at Harvard last fall, and who has established himself as a consummate virtual community builder.

I don’t know what I think I’m doing eddying around with techies who are way out of my league. But, again. Wotthehell. I’ve got nothing to lose.

Actually hanging around even on the fringes gives me a certain credibility in this blog world. The other day, at the suggestion of Blog Sister Jeneane, I was interviewed by someone developing an article on women and blogging that she hopes to sell to a magazine. I found myself explaining things to her that I never even realized I knew about how these spiraling connections work; I had just absorbed them from all of the stuff washing around me as I hang on for dear life in this wordy whirlpool.

And in the process, I bump up against cool people, like Adam Lasnik, a techie and a Lindy Hopper. (Ah, if only I were thirty years younger and lived on the West Coast; hey, I’m might be aging, but I’m not dead yet!)

No Flash in the Pan.

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I sat down this afternoon and finished “The Adventures of Flash Jackson.” (See previous post.) I couldn’t put it down.

As the story pointed toward its closing, an older woman/mentor (Miz Powell) gives spunky, sassy, wild girl/woman Haley (AKA Flash Jackson) some advice that I just can’t help sharing here:

“Don’t be afraid to be all the things that a woman can be…. [snip]“You can be a mother and still be Haley,” she said. “You can cook dinner for your family and still be free. I’m not saying your life is going to be independent of the people involved in it. You have to make the right decision. But you can have a baby and still be yourself. You can fulfill traditional roles if you want to, without letting them define you. Who you are will change when you have childen, of course, but you could let it be an improvement, not a detraction.”

“I don’t mean to be rude, but how do you know all this? I [Haley] said. “You never did any of those things.”

“No,” she said. “What I have done is be a woman, with all my feminine qualities intact, in a world that was run completely by men. And you know something? They appreciated it. They didn’t exactly move over and make room for me –I had to carve out my own space among them, but that was nothing different than any of them had had to do. That’s something some women don’t seem to understand. Nobody is accepted right away. Everyone has to prove themselves. The world will never make room for you– you have to make it yourself. You have to make your own place, and stick to it. And there’s nothing weak whatever about those same feminine qualities, Haley. That’s what I want you to recognize. They are not a liability. They are a strength.”

One would think that this novel was written by a woman, given the right-on Croney point of view, but it wasn’t. And adding to my delight in the book, the author, William Kowalski, brings my favorite myth, Lilith, into Haley’s final learning curve as the girl confronts her fear of snakes.

“The snake, she’d [Miz Powell] explained, is the oldest symbol of feminine power in the world. It’s not a FEMALE power — it’s a FEMININE power. Miz Powell was very clear on this point, because men and women alike have feminine energies within them — as well as masculine ones. People were too obsessed with gender these days, she said. Really, there weren’t nearly as many differences between us as we like to pretend.”

Who was this Lilith anyway? Miz Powell, ever the walking mythological dictionary, was only too happy to explain…..
[snip]
“Lilith has been many things, my dear,” said Miz Powell. “There are goddesses similar to her in Hindu culture. The Israelites knew about her even when they were nothing more than a bunch of simple nomads, thousands of years ago. She is everywhere. She has a JOB.”

“Which is?”

“She is that which does not surrender,” said Miz Powell. “She is indomitable.”
“In other words,” I thought, “she is Flash Jackson.”

Lilith and Kali. Miz Powell and Haley. And aspiring Crones. In Haley’s own terminology: LEGITHATA (ladies extremely gifted in the healing and telepathic arts).

Why not?

The Crone Evolution.

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2grandmas2.jpg
These are my two grandmothers in the mid-1940s, when they were a few years younger than I am now.

That’s my mother’s mother on the left — the small, straight-backed, serious woman — the one who saved my life with her Old World medicine magic (see poem below).

My father’s mother is bigger, softer-looking, but was no less strong. She remembered growing up in Sklody, Poland, admiring her third cousin, who became the famous Madame Marie Curie. Strong women, all.

But how old they look to me now, even though, today, I am older than they are in that photo. Life was hard for them — very serious business, with five kids each and hard-working blue-collared husbands. They cooked well, cleaned well, and passed along to me their matriarchal genes — the blessings and curse of my crone heritage.

On this day of memory, I remember my grandmothers.

HEART OF ROM
Cyganka! My grandmother shouted
as I bounded off the front stoop
onto the wet city street,
propelled by the promise of stolen kisses
and the musky taste of Tangee
still slick on my lips.

Gypsy! Even the word
brought blood rushing
to the pit of my stomach.
How I wished for the wild hair,
dark eyes, skin like old copper,
for the freedom to gleam
like crystal when I walk,
for a wisdom ancient as the land,
as the sweep of continents,
the shriek of willful wind
through openings in stones.

Cyganka! She hurled it
like an epithet,
but I role it like a broom
over landscapes grown deaf to her fears.

She named me true, my Polish grandmother
— a small strong-handed woman
with gypsy fire in her voice
and a back turned straight
against truths too bold to hold.

Yet, they tell me once,
as I lay young and dying
lungs rattling with rifts of air,
fever lighting my face to flame,
(the doctor came and went,
scowling at the earth) —
in the draped and stifling room,
she unfolded her family secrets:
holy candles, crystal cups,
vials of spirits, leeches, as
my mother watched from shadow,
willing demons away with her eyes.

They tell me when the priest arrived,
surprised to find the child alive,
he never commended on the faint red circles
following the tender length of spine,
or the sprinkling of blood marks
along the back, like the bites
of mythic bats or the denounced
touches of wizened old wives.

And so I keep signs
of these grandmothers, still
–in fragrant herbs sprinkled in tea,
in shells and stones arranged on shelves,
in faint red circles, drawn in firelight.

Cyganka! I call to my daughter,
offering gifts of crystals
that fire the sky
where she walks.
(copyright EF 1980)

Whose Truth?

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The other evening I went to an event held to give some visibility to the Glass Lake Studio (Expressive Arts Therapy Program) and to bid farewell to its founder and his wife, who are moving to Canada to join a community led by “guru” John de Ruiter.

According to de Ruiter’s site,
Canadian born John de Ruiter responds to invitations World-wide, addressing audiences from “core splitting honesty” and his unconditional way of absolute surrender and servitude to Truth.

Because I steer clear of anyone who spells Truth with a capital “T” (and run fast in the other direction from concepts like “surrender” and “servitude”), I am always a little taken aback when people who have been among my circle of friends go off to embrace such Truth so blissfully and assuredly. With the de Ruiter Truth, it’s not just the couple to whom I recently wished “safe journey.” Another couple I know — both well-trained psychologists with successful practices — have already moved, at least temporarily, north to de Ruiter’s Canadian enclave.

Without a doubt, truth is very important. Look at the mess the world is in because so many of our leaders have forgotten how to tell it. It’s interesting that de Ruiter’s wife recently left him because he is sleeping with two of his lovely blonde followers. I think that he has some sort of rationalization of the difference between his own “personal truth” (small “t”) and Ultimate Truth (capital “T”).

Heh.

It all makes me stop to think about how many ways of defining “truth” there are out there. There’s scientific truth, historical truth, personal truth, mythic truth. And then there’s the capital “T” Truth, the idea of which always seems so compelling. It also tends to be the idea behind many of the most gruesome murdering sprees of mankind, from the Crusades to the war on terrorism.

Scientific truths change and evolve as new information is added to the mix. Historical truths often are a combination of actual facts colored by personal truths. It’s all so messy, so chaotic, so lacking in surety — kind of like life. To believe or not to believe. We make our choices and we take our chances.
Personally, my choice for truth usually is to try to match up my personal truths with the kinds of mythic ones that Joseph Campbell so eloquently and artfully described and analyzed in his too-soon-forgotten series of PBS programs and books. I guess it’s my way of integrating the big picture with the little picture, the personal with the planetary. Because, for me, it’s the only way for me to arrive at truths that I can count on, that provides the loom on which I can weave that chaos of science and history and personalities into the fabric of a life that I can wrap around myself for safety and sustenance.

All the rest is someone else’s truth. Someone else’s Truth.

That’s why the current American intrusion into the Middle East is so confusing to most people. (Makes you want to run way and hide in the bosom of de Ruiter Truth, doesn’t it?)
To help you get at some of the truths about Middle East Truths, you might want to link over to Bob Harris’ post on here , which begins:
It may be anything from a play for leverage in Iraq to the opening drumbeat for another war, but the White House, Rumsfeld, and Blair have all gotten on Iran’s case for allegedly harboring Al-Qaeda suspects, which supposedly even led to this week’s increased terror warning.
Iran denies the charge.
Who’s telling the truth? I don’t know. But keep reading.

It’s well-worth reading.

And to get a better fix on the continuing un-truths being thrown at us by the Bushies, check out Peter Beinart’s article in The New Republic Online that spells out “the record over the last eight months.”

Whose truth. Yes, indeed.