Is (at least the Southern bloc) of the Republican Party Institutionally Racist?

Well god dammit I just don't know how to respond to what it is that I'm seeing here. Is there any remote possibility that the GOP's blanket disapproval of nearly every aspect of our President's domestic and foreign agenda is even the weeniest bit tinged with elitist white resentment?



Oooh! Oooh! Does it have anything to with L.L. Bean, camping, or Old Navy? Those are some pretty white kinds of things I suppose. What about Dungeons and Dragons, or the death metal scene? Birdwatching? Sweaters of any kind? I don't think that Mr. Beck is quite going there, though.



whoa, whoa, hold on a minute there. This is exactly why I prefer to differentiate myself from mainstream "white" America. This wink-and-nod "white Christian male power structure that we have" is not something in which I have ever participated in as a predominantly Irish-Italian American, or can reasonably say unfairly benefited my ancestors in America. I cannot identify with this notion of "whiteness" that McCain and O'Reilly are tacitly referring to, and are apparently the arbiters and paragons of themselves.

Let it be here known that I would henceforth prefer to be referred to as a "person of pallor" and not as a "White person." So Bill O'Reilly and John McCain have chosen to become WASP'S*, that's their problem, but as far as I'm concerned they are hereby disowned from the any previous association with the mighty Gaelic nations of either Ireland or Scotland, though they be flung all about the earth by famine and Anglo-Saxon tyranny, the hard heel of which has been felt by nearly every great people of the world at one point or another. And as for O'Reilly, may a cat eat your heart and the devil eat the cat.



Well fuck it, it looks like it's not quite the isolated minority I was hoping.

*WhiteAngloSaxonProtestant

Input Upon Being Prompted to Give Reason for Deleting My Youtube Account

relieving a bit of online "clutter" attached to email accounts, usernames, etc. that I either no longer use or no longer have access to. I fully intend on opening a new account and maintaining it because I love youtube and have never experienced dissatisfaction of any sort from this site. What y'all do that not everyone appreciates is provide a reasonably secure, incredibly accessible, and surprisingly broad stream of user generated content that in effect helps to "flatten," along with Wikipedia, Digg, Blogger, etc.; the informational and intellectual discourse of this and increasingly many other countries as well. What this does is blur and challenge artificial institutional barriers designed and put in place specifically to limit and disempower the public by narrowing the streams of media through which "sanctioned" or "appropriate/accepted" newsmaking, reporting, commentary, may be consumed. One effect of Youtube is to degrade the monopolist hold of standard television and printed news media, which in turn reinvigorates our democracy. Thank you so much for making the first ten years of the millennium the most retroactively hilarious since the Prohibition Era.
Sincerely,
Bette

a word with y'all out there

It has come to my attention that upwards of 90% of my relatively miniscule readership comes to me from Linux servers. This would seem to indicate that this blog is mostly accessible to the technorati, most of whom ate probably judging me very personally for this weak sauce template. Humblest apologies.

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Obligatory Thanksgiving post

Let me say from the very outset that I believe Tganksgiving is a stupid and distasteful holiday and if you celebrate in the manner of most Americans you should be at least a little ashamed of yourself for being part of a concerted whitewashing of the Peqoet Indian Massacre for which William Bradford, then governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, inaguarated the very first such Thanksgiving feast. Settlers repeated the practice of offering public thanks to god for the slaughter of their pagan neighbors until eventually Abraham Lincoln institutionalized the national legal holiday before marching on the starving Sioux. Feel free to investigate the history yourselves and point out any factual errors in my arid anti-Puritan rant. In your own gluttonies today, dear reader, please pray to the Divinity of your liking that when humanity does make its first mass contact with intelligent life of greater technical acuity that we all be prepared:
For the Intergalactic Mother-fucking British. I've been saying it for years. Pray as well that these imminent conquistadors are kinder to humanity than Europe to its precious neighbors. I will be working today, serving people who for whatever reason are not eating at home today. I will be praying that your collective guilt feeds right into my pockets as I create the pleasant illusion of a giant-ass country Thanksgiving Extravaganza without all of the bullshit. Thank you.

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First Impression: RuPaul's Drag U

I'll admit, I've always loved drag queens. It may be the least "high-minded" and stuffy-nosed of performance art, but at least it's goddamned entertaining. I can't remember any significant period of my life when I wasn't enchanted and delighted by these trampy-campy gender clowns (to tap another branch of popular performance art oft afforded about as much respect as drag queens).

All the same, I love very few things more than to grab a few drinks at Godfrey's in Richmond and watch the girls rock it pretty hard for an ordinary Wednesday evening. It relieves a pretty and intelligent little working girl like me, constantly bitten and hounded by the tacit social demand to apply a full face of whore paint every morning to serve pancakes to a horde of usually jovial rednecks, to see the mask of adornment that defines classic "femininity" taken up by men in masquerade. It reminds me what is costume and what is play.

And now for the show. As far as daytime dribble makeover/amateur sing-and-dance bits go, this is exquisitely fuck-the-important-novel-I-was-reading-glued-to-the-couch-trash entertainment. The show centers around Ru Paul, the "academic dean," so to speak, of Drag U, and some choice picks from the two seasons of Ru Paul's Drag Race. Fans will remember Raven (personal favorite), Jujubee, Pandora Boxx, Morgan MacMichaels, Ongina, and that Flores fellow. She's a fellow of Drag U, right? Each episode the reigning queens compete to affect the most dramatic transformation in some dour hetero-female hausfrau, motorcycle enthusiast, grad student, whatever. A very distinct melange of superb bitchiness ensues.

So whether you skim by on youtube and resolve quickly never to watch an entire episode or fall in love with the wide-eyed and rhythymless pupils of Drag U, I leave you with this to ponder: If you're going to watch trash T. V. at all, why not pull out all the stops?

On the Baring of Breasts

It's time that my society decriminalized the female body, namely titties. Everything about the current legal double standards seems to violate my fundamental rights and the integrity with which I exercise sovereignty over my body. If I'm going to be inundated with photoshopped images of other women reduced to discrete portions of carnal stimulation wherever I go, why can't I take my own godamned shirt off and go to the beach like my male friends? I can't even do so in most households where I am known and trusted. Believe me, nothing about the baring of my breasts in public in any way resembles indecency or child abuse. And am I really supposed to be excited about a few token women in power, half of whom are plain stupid, when a seemingly indestructible Iron Curtain still falls over my exquisite boobs? Enough for now.

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Why I am DONE with you, Charlaine Harris!!!

Now, this post may upset a small, probably air-headed portion of TrueBlood fans, and I don't give a damn. I admit, I read the first six installments of the Sookie Stackhouse series. I now wash my hands of it, adrift again in my search for compelling, contemporary, literary vampire fiction. But back again to my title:
1. A little too quaint for comfort
Look, I get it, the ambience of the books is very much that of a voluptuous, nostaligic, and romanticized Deep South. Still and all, I've always toyed with the idea of asking Charlaine herself, given the oppurtunity, what she meant in her particular description of a character as "some racial blend that had turned out very well," and further ask her to offer up an example of what sort of blend that might be. Are there any particular, peculiar racial blends which you wouldn't, perhaps, say work out as well, Ms. Harris? This is to say nothing of the oddball Hotshot community, a motley bunch of incestuous, patriarchial, drug-peddling, barbaric, hillbilly-fied shapeshifters. Somewhere between Sookies "brutal honesty" and her epic stupidity, authenticity suffers. Some may find that a harsh criticism of a fantasy story, but Sookie is the series' grounding influence, so if I can't believe her, what point is the rest of it?
2. Sex doesn't make sense in Charlaine's world.
So...just a few quick questions...
Vampires are not "alive" in the sense that humans and other animals are, they are essentially bags of blood directed by an ever-developing superhuman phantom of their human selves. They are animated by the vital energy contained in human blood and physicially sustained by artificially manufactured TrueBlood.
I presume this would mean that male vampires either do not ejaculate, or merely ejaculate blood. This is intriguing, because the sharing of blood entails a magic psycho-sexual bond in the Sookie Stackhouse universe. I would prefer to assume that they don't release fluid when they come, because it arouses a similarly messy question about female vampires. Be fucking honest, Charlaine, do vamp broads begin to secrete blood when they're feeling frisky? I feel as though I would have noticed this in the course of the books and episodes, but nothing. Please, let me know if I missed something. It certainly wouldn't be too gross to mention, the author felt no need to spare us Bill's voracious glare upon noticing (by smell) that Sookie had entered her menstrual period.
By contrast we also have the shifters, particularly the bitten, half-human, hybrid ones. A little more mechanics of how these things worked instead of incest drama {OVERDONE} would have been lovely. I see, however sadly, that this isn't the route you've chosen to take. That is one of many reasons that Alan Ball has been so instrumental in making TrueBlood a watchable, sexy, drama instead of the drab trash that is your entire literary career.
3. The Growing Absurdity of it All
Believe me, I really, really wanted to like these novels and every little thing to do with TrueBlood for a while now, but I've become involuntarily bored, annoyed, and disdainful simultaneously as I read on. Why is it that a)almost every single character has to have something weird, mythological, psychic, or whatever cut-and-paste collective narratives you can stitch hastily together and b)your lack of originality becomes almost a trademark, a certain way if rebranding cliche storylines so we can rush it all up to your insipid and nonsensical sex scenes. Alas, farewell Charlaine, you otherwise remind me of a grinning toad, and that will always and forever make me smile fondly in remembrance of you.