I trekked to the big city last weekend to see a rock show, Geri X and the geriatric, Ronny Elliott, a longtime Florida favorite. Ronny’s songs are full of luscious imagery, but too many are about whores who just want sex and won’t give him any love. I had trouble mustering compassion. Geri X, with her long green hair and skinny tattooed arms, is a walking luscious image herself. But this has nothing to do with my point.
During the break between bands, a young woman stood up to make a plea for Impact Florida, a marriage equality organization. “We need straight people,” she said, “Oh God, we need straight people to join us.”
How sad, I thought, that they need straight people to validate their right to love. But oh so true. Being straightish, or at least relatively sure of my place on that famed Kinsey continuum, I took a card and signed up at www.impact-florida.com.
My capacity to remain stunned at people’s limited notions of family is itself limitless. Getting married is about starting the basic family unit: 1+1=2. The equation is infinitely repeatable. It’s about love, nurture, and got your back. It has nothing to do with hetero-normative pair bonding, and who’s doing what to whom using which orifice and which phallus. The only time I care about that is when my own orifices and phalluses are involved, or when someone else invites me to watch.
I grew up with a great family, a huge extended, “it takes a village” family. The only damage inflicted upon me came through socially reinforced hetero-normative pair bonding. My home was “broken,” folks said. We needed a man to “fix” it. Every man that came through left it in further disrepair.
Let me just say for the record that I don’t hate men. One of my best friends is one.
Back to broken homes. You read about Grendel in “Motherless Child.” He really did leave things broken – doors, hearts, limbs. Before him came Frankenstein – the one who said I needed to have a normal childhood experience and thus took me to Disney World. He drank, gambled away our money at the dog track, and came back to our hotel room ranting and slinging luggage about. Sympathetic staff snuck mother and me to the airport, where sympathetic flight attendants smuggled us on to the plane while keeping the monster at bay. (These were the pre-9/11 days, when security was a lot less strict. This was actually difficult. He worked for the Feds and had the right I.D.) If this is how you define “normal childhood experience,” then you can keep it. I’ve hated dog tracks, airplanes, and Disney World ever since.
Finally there was the Wolfman, filthy rich and egomaniacal, who believed personal hygiene was for the proletariat. After the usual rounds of emotional, verbal, and physical abuse, he moved on to break up my uncle’s family by moving in with his wife, while my uncle was recovering from open-heart surgery. At least there was some broken home payback. Said uncle once pistol-whipped the Wolfman after he got too violent with a female family member. Wolfman lost a couple of teeth in the bargain. Kept them lost too. Dentists were for the proletariat as well.
That same uncle, now deceased – a saint then and now – set the family tone when another relative was the first to come out. “I love her,” he said, “and I love the woman she loves. End of conversation.”
Family, again, means love, nurture and got your back. After every man-monster who was supposed to fix my broken home passed through, a motley assemblage of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and neighbors came in to pick up the pieces. Bandaids, blankets, bread, buckshot, beds, boards, beer: whatever my mother and I needed to heal, retreat to, defend ourselves, or repair the damage got produced like magic. Some of these folks came in hetero-pairs. Some came in singles. Some of them, I later figured out, were closeted queers. They all kept me as safe as they could, given the circumstances. And none of them – none – ever let me stray from the path of righteousness. Believe me, I tried.
A woman from an "intact" family once asked me, “Didn’t you feel incomplete growing up without a father?” I looked at her like she was a three-eyed cat. No, to be honest, sometimes I felt too full. I’ll take the motley village that raised me over a man-monster any day.
Her question begs a question of its own: where was my bio-dad has been during these fiascos? But that’s a story for another time. For now let’s say that if Impact Florida needs straight people, I’m there. Love is about a whole lot more than orifices and phalluses. I urge all you other straight folks out there to join them and say the same.
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Look Away, Dixie Land
Look Away, Dixie Land
January 20, 2009
In honor of Barack Obama, a change I’d like to call for is the removal of those Confederate mega-flags along I-75. Yes, I know they’re on private property, considered acts of free speech, and all that. But a girl can dream, can’t she?
The Sons of Confederate Veterans who put them up say they represent “heritage,” not “hate.” But whose heritage? Not mine! I’m as Southern as you get. My family goes back as long as there were white people in Florida, and before that they were in Georgia. (Before that, I don’t know, probably fleeing something they ought not to have done in the British Isles.) When I see that flag, here’s what comes to mind:
A conspiracy of rich white planters who enslaved African Americans and sent my people to war in order to preserve someone else’s “way of life.” When the going got tough, they retreated to their town houses and black market goods while poor country people starved.
The same conspiracy pitted poor whites against African Americans after the war to keep power dynamics in check. When the Sons of Confederate Veterans celebrate the Civil War hero’s bravery, they conveniently leave out the history of Jim Crow’s jihad against blacks. The flag flew over both those terrorist groups.
Again, rich whites used poor ones to do their dirty work during the key moments of the civil rights struggle. One sees it in pictures again and again. Courageous black people integrating schools and lunch counters, behind yahoos wielding Confederate flags and weapons, looking like evil incarnate.
So when I see that flag, I don’t just see hate. I see my ancestors being played for fools. Over and over again. Doing violence against black people. Doing violence against their country. Just so rich white people could hold on to power. Sucker punched in the name of heritage. Over and over again.
“Here, Cletus, I got a job for you.” And poor dumb broke Cletus, who’s willing to carry the gun, hold the rope, swing the bat, but not smart enough to think about the implications of his actions, takes all the blame.
I’m not arguing that Cletus doesn’t deserve some of it. The hit man needs to do time, but so does the person who put out the contract. I’m just saying those Confederate mega-flags insult everyone, even the people who put them up. Bless their hearts, they’re too dumb to know it.
January 20, 2009
In honor of Barack Obama, a change I’d like to call for is the removal of those Confederate mega-flags along I-75. Yes, I know they’re on private property, considered acts of free speech, and all that. But a girl can dream, can’t she?
The Sons of Confederate Veterans who put them up say they represent “heritage,” not “hate.” But whose heritage? Not mine! I’m as Southern as you get. My family goes back as long as there were white people in Florida, and before that they were in Georgia. (Before that, I don’t know, probably fleeing something they ought not to have done in the British Isles.) When I see that flag, here’s what comes to mind:
A conspiracy of rich white planters who enslaved African Americans and sent my people to war in order to preserve someone else’s “way of life.” When the going got tough, they retreated to their town houses and black market goods while poor country people starved.
The same conspiracy pitted poor whites against African Americans after the war to keep power dynamics in check. When the Sons of Confederate Veterans celebrate the Civil War hero’s bravery, they conveniently leave out the history of Jim Crow’s jihad against blacks. The flag flew over both those terrorist groups.
Again, rich whites used poor ones to do their dirty work during the key moments of the civil rights struggle. One sees it in pictures again and again. Courageous black people integrating schools and lunch counters, behind yahoos wielding Confederate flags and weapons, looking like evil incarnate.
So when I see that flag, I don’t just see hate. I see my ancestors being played for fools. Over and over again. Doing violence against black people. Doing violence against their country. Just so rich white people could hold on to power. Sucker punched in the name of heritage. Over and over again.
“Here, Cletus, I got a job for you.” And poor dumb broke Cletus, who’s willing to carry the gun, hold the rope, swing the bat, but not smart enough to think about the implications of his actions, takes all the blame.
I’m not arguing that Cletus doesn’t deserve some of it. The hit man needs to do time, but so does the person who put out the contract. I’m just saying those Confederate mega-flags insult everyone, even the people who put them up. Bless their hearts, they’re too dumb to know it.
Motherless Child
Motherless Child
January 5, 2009
My mother died again over the holidays. Not physically this time. No death is ever permanent in our ancestor-haunted family. This one, a mental fall over a metaphorical cliff from which she will never recover, has been officially diagnosed by a man she calls “The Judge” as late-onset bipolar disorder and early-stage dementia.
By some folks’ testimony, Mother was normal on Thanksgiving: smoking, gossiping, cutting up, foregoing vegetables for sweet potato pie, and begging rides to the corner store for scratch-off lottery tickets. By Christmas, she was in the geriatric psych ward.
During “good” times, this is a marvelous garden, where she picks imaginary strawberries and tomatoes off vines that grow before her. It’s a circus (well, that much is true), with clowns and funny animals prancing about. It is home, where my grandmother, dead over a decade, tries on fanciful hats.
During “bad” times, she’s in jail, held prisoner against her will, forced to be a prostitute, beaten, and raped. I’m colluding with The Judge to keep her there because I’m a terrible daughter, always have been, she tells me over and over again. She bites and hits the nurses. She bangs against her geri-chair, a metal recliner with locking tray that keeps patients considered “flight risks” confined.
Part of me admires her volatile moments. Who among us – if we believed ourselves unjustly held prisoner – would not similarly rail against The Judge, bite his minions’ hands, and rattle the bars of our cages? “Attica! Attica!” I want to chant along with her. But this is my mother, not a movie.
If her last few years were filmed as montage, she would be shuffling toward that cliff on her walker, her body bent almost double and twisted with scoliosis. Granny and other dead relatives have been socializing with her for years. She supplements her retirement income with scratch-offs and cash advances from whatever credit cards come in the mail. She lives off sugar: diet drinks, cookies, and cereal. (Internet searches taught me that delusions, out-of-control financial judgment, and excessive sweet tooth are hallmarks of her disease.) She has a rock star’s drug resume: including Paxil and Xanax for mental health, and a variety of muscle relaxers and Oxycontin – “hillbilly heroin” – for the back pain. If the drugs didn’t do her in, her past would have caught up with her one day. My mother has already died many times before.
The first time happened when I was about ten. Ovarian cancer. I don’t remember much. People speaking in hushed tones around me. A mommy who went away and came back, much later, with the hair missing from all over her body. Then, a miracle! No one defeated ovarian cancer back then, but my mother was apparently tougher than anyone suspected. She went on to live through breast cancer, colon disease, high blood pressure, scoliosis, and multiple nervous breakdowns. Illness took some of the fight out of her. Still, she survived.
Only to face death disguised as a man. Grendel, high school friends and I called him, after the monster in Beowulf. Grendel did a lot of drinking, name-calling, hitting, and breaking. The worst time was when he busted down our front door, dead-bolt lock and all, and pointed a loaded pistol at my mother’s face. While I stood there, butcher knife twitching in my hand, weighing the pros and cons of stabbing Grendel, he clicked the gun slowly, multiple times before I realized it wasn’t loaded. He just wanted to prove a point. He was angry that my mom had borrowed money from the judge she worked for and accused her of sleeping with him.
Ironic how the people we call crazy often speak a twisted truth. There my mother sits, confined to her geri-chair, imprisoned by her past, searching for what bell hooks calls “homeplace.” Beside her, a helpless, hapless Beo-Woolf stands with pen in hand instead of butcher knife. I take notes furiously as The Judge fires terms at me like “Baker Act” and “state mental hospital” if Mother doesn’t stop biting and hitting. I, too, want to bit and hit, but whom? To what end?
January 5, 2009
My mother died again over the holidays. Not physically this time. No death is ever permanent in our ancestor-haunted family. This one, a mental fall over a metaphorical cliff from which she will never recover, has been officially diagnosed by a man she calls “The Judge” as late-onset bipolar disorder and early-stage dementia.
By some folks’ testimony, Mother was normal on Thanksgiving: smoking, gossiping, cutting up, foregoing vegetables for sweet potato pie, and begging rides to the corner store for scratch-off lottery tickets. By Christmas, she was in the geriatric psych ward.
During “good” times, this is a marvelous garden, where she picks imaginary strawberries and tomatoes off vines that grow before her. It’s a circus (well, that much is true), with clowns and funny animals prancing about. It is home, where my grandmother, dead over a decade, tries on fanciful hats.
During “bad” times, she’s in jail, held prisoner against her will, forced to be a prostitute, beaten, and raped. I’m colluding with The Judge to keep her there because I’m a terrible daughter, always have been, she tells me over and over again. She bites and hits the nurses. She bangs against her geri-chair, a metal recliner with locking tray that keeps patients considered “flight risks” confined.
Part of me admires her volatile moments. Who among us – if we believed ourselves unjustly held prisoner – would not similarly rail against The Judge, bite his minions’ hands, and rattle the bars of our cages? “Attica! Attica!” I want to chant along with her. But this is my mother, not a movie.
If her last few years were filmed as montage, she would be shuffling toward that cliff on her walker, her body bent almost double and twisted with scoliosis. Granny and other dead relatives have been socializing with her for years. She supplements her retirement income with scratch-offs and cash advances from whatever credit cards come in the mail. She lives off sugar: diet drinks, cookies, and cereal. (Internet searches taught me that delusions, out-of-control financial judgment, and excessive sweet tooth are hallmarks of her disease.) She has a rock star’s drug resume: including Paxil and Xanax for mental health, and a variety of muscle relaxers and Oxycontin – “hillbilly heroin” – for the back pain. If the drugs didn’t do her in, her past would have caught up with her one day. My mother has already died many times before.
The first time happened when I was about ten. Ovarian cancer. I don’t remember much. People speaking in hushed tones around me. A mommy who went away and came back, much later, with the hair missing from all over her body. Then, a miracle! No one defeated ovarian cancer back then, but my mother was apparently tougher than anyone suspected. She went on to live through breast cancer, colon disease, high blood pressure, scoliosis, and multiple nervous breakdowns. Illness took some of the fight out of her. Still, she survived.
Only to face death disguised as a man. Grendel, high school friends and I called him, after the monster in Beowulf. Grendel did a lot of drinking, name-calling, hitting, and breaking. The worst time was when he busted down our front door, dead-bolt lock and all, and pointed a loaded pistol at my mother’s face. While I stood there, butcher knife twitching in my hand, weighing the pros and cons of stabbing Grendel, he clicked the gun slowly, multiple times before I realized it wasn’t loaded. He just wanted to prove a point. He was angry that my mom had borrowed money from the judge she worked for and accused her of sleeping with him.
Ironic how the people we call crazy often speak a twisted truth. There my mother sits, confined to her geri-chair, imprisoned by her past, searching for what bell hooks calls “homeplace.” Beside her, a helpless, hapless Beo-Woolf stands with pen in hand instead of butcher knife. I take notes furiously as The Judge fires terms at me like “Baker Act” and “state mental hospital” if Mother doesn’t stop biting and hitting. I, too, want to bit and hit, but whom? To what end?
Friday, August 22, 2008
Taking A Blog Break
Freddie apologizes profusely for her blog break. She has a monkey wrenching project in the works that needs her full attention. Look for her after the winter solstice 2008!
Friday, August 1, 2008
¡Lo Hicemos! A Fairy Tale
Once upon a time, six beautiful princesses ruled a magical kingdom. They were some real tyrant-ass bitches. Vain about their looks, and paranoid about their power. Their names were Snow White, Jasmine, Cinderella, Belle, Aurora, and Ariel.
They used to rule separate kingdoms but one day got the idea of consolidating their power into one continuum, known as Princess, in order to rule the world. Merging their identities into one was not really a problem since they did not have fully articulated selves to begin with. To paraphrase Courtney Love, whom the Princess Continuum has classified among the Axis of Evil: they look the same, they act the same, they even fuck the same.
To wit: all Princesses have the same basic fairy tale story. Once upon a time, a beautiful girl was beset in some form or another (household drudgery, poison apple, various and sundry spells) by ugliness personified – often in the form of an older woman (stepmother, stepsister, witch, etc.) – who prevented her in some way from hooking up with the man of her dreams. Eventually, however, the girl’s beauty triumphed. She and the man were said to have lived happily ever after in hetero-normative pair-bonded bliss. The moral of the story, girls: don’t be smart, be pretty, and you too can catch a prince.
And yet: these men have not been heard from again since the formation of the Princess Continuum. But that does not mean the Magic Kingdom under Princess domination is some kind of feminist utopia. The Princess has instituted groupthink, groupspeak, and groupdress for girls. Mandatory pinks and purples, big hair and pastel eye shadow, sparkly shoes and tiaras, love of cupcakes and fear of dirt. All girls between the ages of four and six must go to Princess school, learn Princess history, play Princess games, sing Princess songs with an optional My Pretty Pony repertoire. At the Continuum’s formation, the Princess decided that in the Magic Kingdom, girls will rule and boys, well, they just drool. (Until they are called upon to be Princes and engage in the happily ever after rituals.) The problem is that the Princess allows only one definition of girl, and that definition is Princess.
Back to the issue of paranoia and the Axis of Evil thing. The Princess would not have to institute rules if it did not fear rule breakers. Way out on the Magic Kingdom’s margins lived a trio of girls who decided not to join the Princess Continuum. Tough, smart, dark-skinned girls who lived off their wits and thought there might be more to life than hooking up with some guy. Their names were Mulan, Pocahantas, and Dora.
It was Mulan who had the idea first, for she was a Warrior at heart. Pocahantas was happy just hanging out in the Everglades with the Seminoles. She knew the Princess would never go that far south – it was full of alligators, panthers, and snakes. Oh my!
“Pocahantas! Get off your ass and stop singing that damn song about painting with the colors of the wind!” Mulan yelled, banging on the side of her friend’s chickee one day. “It sounds like the Princess has gotten to you already.”
Pocahantas agreed that the Princess Continuum had grabbed too many girls and eaten up too much land. And why was no one asking questions about water in the Magic Kingdom? Its many lakes were dyed in Easter Egg blues.
“You’re absolutely right, Mulan. Those are not the colors of the wind! We must fight! We have to call Dora!” The two marched forth to their friend’s home.
“Wake up Shawtie!” Mulan and Pocahantas cried when they reached their friend’s hacienda. “We need the backpack!”
Dora agreed that the Princess Continuum had grabbed too many girls and eaten up too much land. And why was no one asking questions about the lack of real animals in the Magic Kingdom? There was only a scary presence of people in animal suits.
“You’re absolutely right, Mulan and Pocahantas. We must figure out how to get there and bring down the Princess Continuum. Let’s see what’s in the backpack! Look! A GPS and some weapons of mass destruction!”
So the three tough, smart, dark-skinned girls who lived off their wits and thought there might be more to life than hooking up with some guy divided up the weapons of mass destruction equally among themselves because they believed in the value of sharing. Then they turned over the GPS duties to Dora because she was the one with the best Explorer skills, and they set off for the Magic Kingdom.
The non-abridged version of this fairy tale details their brave exploits. Suffice to say, they made it to the Magic Kingdom safe and sound only to find that they did not have the ticket price to get in. They were momentarily flummoxed until Dora had an idea.
“Let’s look in the backpack!” she said. And sure enough, she found inside the $150 plus tax that they needed for entry.
“Yay!” all the brave girls cried, but soon their happiness dissolved into tears, for they saw that Dora’s backpack would be searched. The Princess Continuum’s security would find their weapons of mass destruction! What to do?
They were momentarily flummoxed until Mulan and Pocahantas simultaneously had an idea. They were older than Dora and knew about tampons.
“We shall hide them in our orifices!” they whispered, and indeed they did, backpack included. The girls walked in with their motives, and their weapons, undetected.
“Yay!” the brave girls cried, dancing about and squealing in high-pitched voices in order to look like all the girls who visit the Magic Kingdom. Now it was time to steal upon the castle.
The non-abridged version of this fairy tale details their brave exploits. Suffice to say, they made it to the castle safely, spirited over the moat with a rope-bridge from Dora’s backpack (removed carefully and sanitarily from Mulan’s orifices), and dynamited open the door (with ordnance removed carefully and sanitarily from the orifice of Pocahantas).
“Ka-Pow!” went the dynamite. When all was said and done, the two girl teams confronted each other, with the Princess Continuum headed up by Jasmine.
“What the fuck?” said Jasmine. The Princess Continuum stood behind her, either smiling or baring their teeth – with Princesses, especially the blonde ones, it’s sometimes hard to tell.
“What the fuck?” said Mulan and Pocahantas. Dora was too young to say “fuck,” so she hung back.
“How’d a dark-skinned girl get to be a Princess?” Mulan asked.
“They let in a Muslim too?” Pocahantas wanted to know.
“Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.” Jasmine said in a robot-like voice.
Dora sensed the presence of real evil. Not the devil kind of evil, but the banal kind the Hannah Arendt described. She held her backpack close and tiptoed behind the ruins of the castle door. She did not see everything that went on, but she heard the scuffling, biting, scratching, hair-pulling, and meowing. Her brave warrior friends Mulan and Pocahantas were losing the battle!
Dora opened her backpack. All the weapons of mass destruction were inside! What to do? She could blow up the Magic Kingdom, but everyone would die. Even her friends! Even Dora herself!
But wait? What was that? Dora heard a small voice, coming from a spider web by what was left of the door. “Help me!” it cried. It had wings and a human head. Was it a fly? A person? No! It was a fairy! Tinkerbell! Dora lifted her tiny new friend from the wreckage.
“I thought you were one of them,” she asked.
“No,” Tinkerbell said. “I wasn’t good enough for their Princess mythology, descending from both fairy and commoner lineage. You can look up my history on Wikipedia. Let’s bring ‘em down!”
Dora looked over to where the battle continued. Her brave warrior friends lay at the bottom of a Princess pile, being slowly transmogrified into plastic. There was no choice. She left her backpack with its weapons of mass destruction in the corner, and Tinkerbell lifted her up into the air. After they rose above the castle, the fairy sprinkled her pixie dust onto the backpack, making it explode into the biggest fireworks display that the Magic Kingdom’s visitors had ever seen. All of Florida’s I-4 corridor cheered, not realizing what was going on.
And yet: the Princess Continuum was not destroyed, for it was indeed made of ultra-durable plastic that endures both in reality and in the hearts and minds of girls everywhere. Any girl between the age of four and six is liable to fall victim to its groupthink, groupspeak, and groupdress. What Jasmine said to Mulan and Pocahantas is partially true. Resistance is somewhat futile, and you may indeed be assimilated. Poor Mulan and Pocahantas – once brave warriors – are now Princesses. And a new black girl, Tiana, is slated for assimilation in 2009. You can look all this up on Wikipedia.
The non-abridged version of this fairy tale could continue. Suffice to say, there is still hope in the form of Dora and even little Tinkerbell. The smart girls and the ones who’ll never quite fit the mold. The ones who always seem, paraphrasing Audre Lorde – another member of the Princess’s Axis of Evil – to have the right tool in their backpack for bringing down the master’s house. And the ones who wind up working within the system to subvert it in a different way, with a bit of poison pixie dust perhaps.
Parents, teach your children. Girls, keep your backpacks ready. Boys, stop drooling so much.
They used to rule separate kingdoms but one day got the idea of consolidating their power into one continuum, known as Princess, in order to rule the world. Merging their identities into one was not really a problem since they did not have fully articulated selves to begin with. To paraphrase Courtney Love, whom the Princess Continuum has classified among the Axis of Evil: they look the same, they act the same, they even fuck the same.
To wit: all Princesses have the same basic fairy tale story. Once upon a time, a beautiful girl was beset in some form or another (household drudgery, poison apple, various and sundry spells) by ugliness personified – often in the form of an older woman (stepmother, stepsister, witch, etc.) – who prevented her in some way from hooking up with the man of her dreams. Eventually, however, the girl’s beauty triumphed. She and the man were said to have lived happily ever after in hetero-normative pair-bonded bliss. The moral of the story, girls: don’t be smart, be pretty, and you too can catch a prince.
And yet: these men have not been heard from again since the formation of the Princess Continuum. But that does not mean the Magic Kingdom under Princess domination is some kind of feminist utopia. The Princess has instituted groupthink, groupspeak, and groupdress for girls. Mandatory pinks and purples, big hair and pastel eye shadow, sparkly shoes and tiaras, love of cupcakes and fear of dirt. All girls between the ages of four and six must go to Princess school, learn Princess history, play Princess games, sing Princess songs with an optional My Pretty Pony repertoire. At the Continuum’s formation, the Princess decided that in the Magic Kingdom, girls will rule and boys, well, they just drool. (Until they are called upon to be Princes and engage in the happily ever after rituals.) The problem is that the Princess allows only one definition of girl, and that definition is Princess.
Back to the issue of paranoia and the Axis of Evil thing. The Princess would not have to institute rules if it did not fear rule breakers. Way out on the Magic Kingdom’s margins lived a trio of girls who decided not to join the Princess Continuum. Tough, smart, dark-skinned girls who lived off their wits and thought there might be more to life than hooking up with some guy. Their names were Mulan, Pocahantas, and Dora.
It was Mulan who had the idea first, for she was a Warrior at heart. Pocahantas was happy just hanging out in the Everglades with the Seminoles. She knew the Princess would never go that far south – it was full of alligators, panthers, and snakes. Oh my!
“Pocahantas! Get off your ass and stop singing that damn song about painting with the colors of the wind!” Mulan yelled, banging on the side of her friend’s chickee one day. “It sounds like the Princess has gotten to you already.”
Pocahantas agreed that the Princess Continuum had grabbed too many girls and eaten up too much land. And why was no one asking questions about water in the Magic Kingdom? Its many lakes were dyed in Easter Egg blues.
“You’re absolutely right, Mulan. Those are not the colors of the wind! We must fight! We have to call Dora!” The two marched forth to their friend’s home.
“Wake up Shawtie!” Mulan and Pocahantas cried when they reached their friend’s hacienda. “We need the backpack!”
Dora agreed that the Princess Continuum had grabbed too many girls and eaten up too much land. And why was no one asking questions about the lack of real animals in the Magic Kingdom? There was only a scary presence of people in animal suits.
“You’re absolutely right, Mulan and Pocahantas. We must figure out how to get there and bring down the Princess Continuum. Let’s see what’s in the backpack! Look! A GPS and some weapons of mass destruction!”
So the three tough, smart, dark-skinned girls who lived off their wits and thought there might be more to life than hooking up with some guy divided up the weapons of mass destruction equally among themselves because they believed in the value of sharing. Then they turned over the GPS duties to Dora because she was the one with the best Explorer skills, and they set off for the Magic Kingdom.
The non-abridged version of this fairy tale details their brave exploits. Suffice to say, they made it to the Magic Kingdom safe and sound only to find that they did not have the ticket price to get in. They were momentarily flummoxed until Dora had an idea.
“Let’s look in the backpack!” she said. And sure enough, she found inside the $150 plus tax that they needed for entry.
“Yay!” all the brave girls cried, but soon their happiness dissolved into tears, for they saw that Dora’s backpack would be searched. The Princess Continuum’s security would find their weapons of mass destruction! What to do?
They were momentarily flummoxed until Mulan and Pocahantas simultaneously had an idea. They were older than Dora and knew about tampons.
“We shall hide them in our orifices!” they whispered, and indeed they did, backpack included. The girls walked in with their motives, and their weapons, undetected.
“Yay!” the brave girls cried, dancing about and squealing in high-pitched voices in order to look like all the girls who visit the Magic Kingdom. Now it was time to steal upon the castle.
The non-abridged version of this fairy tale details their brave exploits. Suffice to say, they made it to the castle safely, spirited over the moat with a rope-bridge from Dora’s backpack (removed carefully and sanitarily from Mulan’s orifices), and dynamited open the door (with ordnance removed carefully and sanitarily from the orifice of Pocahantas).
“Ka-Pow!” went the dynamite. When all was said and done, the two girl teams confronted each other, with the Princess Continuum headed up by Jasmine.
“What the fuck?” said Jasmine. The Princess Continuum stood behind her, either smiling or baring their teeth – with Princesses, especially the blonde ones, it’s sometimes hard to tell.
“What the fuck?” said Mulan and Pocahantas. Dora was too young to say “fuck,” so she hung back.
“How’d a dark-skinned girl get to be a Princess?” Mulan asked.
“They let in a Muslim too?” Pocahantas wanted to know.
“Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.” Jasmine said in a robot-like voice.
Dora sensed the presence of real evil. Not the devil kind of evil, but the banal kind the Hannah Arendt described. She held her backpack close and tiptoed behind the ruins of the castle door. She did not see everything that went on, but she heard the scuffling, biting, scratching, hair-pulling, and meowing. Her brave warrior friends Mulan and Pocahantas were losing the battle!
Dora opened her backpack. All the weapons of mass destruction were inside! What to do? She could blow up the Magic Kingdom, but everyone would die. Even her friends! Even Dora herself!
But wait? What was that? Dora heard a small voice, coming from a spider web by what was left of the door. “Help me!” it cried. It had wings and a human head. Was it a fly? A person? No! It was a fairy! Tinkerbell! Dora lifted her tiny new friend from the wreckage.
“I thought you were one of them,” she asked.
“No,” Tinkerbell said. “I wasn’t good enough for their Princess mythology, descending from both fairy and commoner lineage. You can look up my history on Wikipedia. Let’s bring ‘em down!”
Dora looked over to where the battle continued. Her brave warrior friends lay at the bottom of a Princess pile, being slowly transmogrified into plastic. There was no choice. She left her backpack with its weapons of mass destruction in the corner, and Tinkerbell lifted her up into the air. After they rose above the castle, the fairy sprinkled her pixie dust onto the backpack, making it explode into the biggest fireworks display that the Magic Kingdom’s visitors had ever seen. All of Florida’s I-4 corridor cheered, not realizing what was going on.
And yet: the Princess Continuum was not destroyed, for it was indeed made of ultra-durable plastic that endures both in reality and in the hearts and minds of girls everywhere. Any girl between the age of four and six is liable to fall victim to its groupthink, groupspeak, and groupdress. What Jasmine said to Mulan and Pocahantas is partially true. Resistance is somewhat futile, and you may indeed be assimilated. Poor Mulan and Pocahantas – once brave warriors – are now Princesses. And a new black girl, Tiana, is slated for assimilation in 2009. You can look all this up on Wikipedia.
The non-abridged version of this fairy tale could continue. Suffice to say, there is still hope in the form of Dora and even little Tinkerbell. The smart girls and the ones who’ll never quite fit the mold. The ones who always seem, paraphrasing Audre Lorde – another member of the Princess’s Axis of Evil – to have the right tool in their backpack for bringing down the master’s house. And the ones who wind up working within the system to subvert it in a different way, with a bit of poison pixie dust perhaps.
Parents, teach your children. Girls, keep your backpacks ready. Boys, stop drooling so much.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
The Devil Went Down to Georgia
Fredonia Woolf went on the rare road trip this past weekend. I try not to leave the swamp, much less the state, but my friend The Women’s Studies Professor did something too painfully strange to be believed, so I tagged along. Each year since 2006, the Georgia Association of Black Elected Officials (GABEO for short) has hosted a reenactment of the 1946 lynchings at Moore’s Ford Bridge, near Monroe, a small town in between Atlanta and Athens.
Seriously. Black people pretend to be the four victims: Roger and Dorothy Malcolm, and George and Mae Murray Dorsey. White people pretend to be the mob members. Spectators gather at the bridge to watch the Malcolms and Dorseys get pulled from a car, dragged to the riverside, shot multiple times, and then worse: a mob member cuts open Dorothy Malcolm’s pregnant belly and pulls out her seven month fetus (in this case, a black baby doll).
The point is to mourn communally and to call for justice. No one was ever prosecuted, despite an FBI investigation. A $35,000 reward remains active for information that will lead to arrest and conviction of the killers. The reenactment is filmed and posted on YouTube (search for “Massacre at Moore’s Ford”) to assist in the effort.
The reenactment, the only one of its kind in the country, is controversial. The Moore’s Ford Memorial Committee, an interracial group that was instrumental in starting the dialogue about the case, plays no official role even though some of its members take part individually. Other members find the reenactment distasteful. Many local whites wonder why anyone wants to bring up a history that they think is better off buried in the first place. Laura Wexler’s book about the lynchings, Fire in a Canebreak, says the part about Dorothy Malcolm being pregnant is not true. The Professor thinks that the memory of what happened at Moore’s Ford might have gotten folded into the memory of another terrible story, the 1918 lynching of Mary Turner, who was eight months pregnant when she was killed near Valdosta.
The people in South Georgia still don’t talk about what happened in 1918. Most of them probably don’t even know, even though somewhere between eleven and eighteen African Americans died including Mary Turner. The Professor says that the incident shows up in all kinds of art and literature, and even folks in Brooks and Lowndes remember it in weird ways. A few years back, some boys painted a bunch of Barbie dolls back and hung them from nooses in the trees at a local high school. And almost stranger than that, as The Professor and I drove up I-75, she pointed out to me a billboard at the very spot where Mary Turner was lynched and her fetus was ripped out. It was one of those right-to-life affairs picturing a giant baby in the womb. “Heartbeat Begins at 18 Days,” it said. Kind of made we want to get up there with a can of spray paint and add, “And Ends at 8 Months.”
The people in North Georgia had the decency to put up a historical marker. Even if some people don’t agree with the reenactment, it beats the ways that memories eek their way out circuitously the way they do in South Georgia. Juvenile delinquents lynching Barbie! What will they think of next! Memory always finds a way out, especially bad memory, so my vote goes with the folks who find a way to acknowledge it.
It’s like evil spirits. You can pretend they don’t exist until one gets into your house. But by then you’re cooked. The furniture’s all tumbled up, drawers pulled out of chests, plates broken, flour and corn meal strewn all over the kitchen, pets cowering out back with their tails between their hind legs. Better off to just go ahead and put up some bottle trees by your doors to catch the spirits before they get in. That bottle tree says, “Hello, Evil Spirit, I know you exist, but this is as far as you can go. You have to stay in this blue bottle here and not go into my house.” And that is actually a good thing, because evil spirits prefer blue bottles to your house. That’s why they mess up your house when they get inside – it’s not a blue bottle.
All this talk of blue brings me back to Blue Spring. My weird rash still has not completely healed. Some wounds, I think, never do. But I’m getting away from my point – or am I? Georgia has certainly not cornered the market on stories of racial violence. And in Florida’s book of myths where certain names do not appear, what evil spirits are not getting acknowledged? The Professor tells me that only Rosewood has an organized group devoted to remembering lynching in Florida, even though the state ranked seventh in the nation in total numbers.
We can choose to be like the folks in North Georgia, or we can choose to be like the folks in South Georgia. The question is, do we want to acknowledge the devil’s presence up front or just wait for him to catch us unaware? As for me, I’m making some bottle trees.
Seriously. Black people pretend to be the four victims: Roger and Dorothy Malcolm, and George and Mae Murray Dorsey. White people pretend to be the mob members. Spectators gather at the bridge to watch the Malcolms and Dorseys get pulled from a car, dragged to the riverside, shot multiple times, and then worse: a mob member cuts open Dorothy Malcolm’s pregnant belly and pulls out her seven month fetus (in this case, a black baby doll).
The point is to mourn communally and to call for justice. No one was ever prosecuted, despite an FBI investigation. A $35,000 reward remains active for information that will lead to arrest and conviction of the killers. The reenactment is filmed and posted on YouTube (search for “Massacre at Moore’s Ford”) to assist in the effort.
The reenactment, the only one of its kind in the country, is controversial. The Moore’s Ford Memorial Committee, an interracial group that was instrumental in starting the dialogue about the case, plays no official role even though some of its members take part individually. Other members find the reenactment distasteful. Many local whites wonder why anyone wants to bring up a history that they think is better off buried in the first place. Laura Wexler’s book about the lynchings, Fire in a Canebreak, says the part about Dorothy Malcolm being pregnant is not true. The Professor thinks that the memory of what happened at Moore’s Ford might have gotten folded into the memory of another terrible story, the 1918 lynching of Mary Turner, who was eight months pregnant when she was killed near Valdosta.
The people in South Georgia still don’t talk about what happened in 1918. Most of them probably don’t even know, even though somewhere between eleven and eighteen African Americans died including Mary Turner. The Professor says that the incident shows up in all kinds of art and literature, and even folks in Brooks and Lowndes remember it in weird ways. A few years back, some boys painted a bunch of Barbie dolls back and hung them from nooses in the trees at a local high school. And almost stranger than that, as The Professor and I drove up I-75, she pointed out to me a billboard at the very spot where Mary Turner was lynched and her fetus was ripped out. It was one of those right-to-life affairs picturing a giant baby in the womb. “Heartbeat Begins at 18 Days,” it said. Kind of made we want to get up there with a can of spray paint and add, “And Ends at 8 Months.”
The people in North Georgia had the decency to put up a historical marker. Even if some people don’t agree with the reenactment, it beats the ways that memories eek their way out circuitously the way they do in South Georgia. Juvenile delinquents lynching Barbie! What will they think of next! Memory always finds a way out, especially bad memory, so my vote goes with the folks who find a way to acknowledge it.
It’s like evil spirits. You can pretend they don’t exist until one gets into your house. But by then you’re cooked. The furniture’s all tumbled up, drawers pulled out of chests, plates broken, flour and corn meal strewn all over the kitchen, pets cowering out back with their tails between their hind legs. Better off to just go ahead and put up some bottle trees by your doors to catch the spirits before they get in. That bottle tree says, “Hello, Evil Spirit, I know you exist, but this is as far as you can go. You have to stay in this blue bottle here and not go into my house.” And that is actually a good thing, because evil spirits prefer blue bottles to your house. That’s why they mess up your house when they get inside – it’s not a blue bottle.
All this talk of blue brings me back to Blue Spring. My weird rash still has not completely healed. Some wounds, I think, never do. But I’m getting away from my point – or am I? Georgia has certainly not cornered the market on stories of racial violence. And in Florida’s book of myths where certain names do not appear, what evil spirits are not getting acknowledged? The Professor tells me that only Rosewood has an organized group devoted to remembering lynching in Florida, even though the state ranked seventh in the nation in total numbers.
We can choose to be like the folks in North Georgia, or we can choose to be like the folks in South Georgia. The question is, do we want to acknowledge the devil’s presence up front or just wait for him to catch us unaware? As for me, I’m making some bottle trees.
Monday, July 21, 2008
White-Haired Man Speak With Forked Tongue
Florida’s governor, Charlie Christ, is a good environmentalist. He cares about manatees, and he has recently helped broker a deal to sell U.S. Sugar’s lands south of Lake Okeechobee to the state. This major accomplishment will not exactly restore the Everglades to their former capabilities, but it will go a long way.
For those who don’t know how the ‘Glades work, pull out a map of Florida and look for the huge blue bowl in the state’s southern third. That’s Lake Okeechobee. A low lip on the lake’s bottom end used to spill out into what guardian angel Marjory Stoneman Douglas called “the river of grass.” Not exactly a river, the nearly coast-to-coast flush once made Florida Bay one of the most productive ecosystems in the world. Let’s just say that a lot still flushes from the Everglades, and that the past century’s mega-development, corporate farming, and attempts to re-engineer the area have done some serious, almost irreversible damage. A rhetorical question: how healthy would you be if Florida’s washouts were spiffed up by transfusions through your life-blood?
With U.S. Sugar, a major polluter, soon to be out of the picture, I imagine that Saint Marjory is doing a spiral dance of joy to all the goddesses from her grave.
Meanwhile, a few doors down those gold-paved streets in Heaven, another Marjorie (Carr) is freaking out, having tuned in to MSNBC.
“Archie, Archie, wake up!” She runs over to her husband, a famous environmentalist himself, who is dozing in the hammock dreaming about the mysteries of Kemp’s Ridley Turtle and sloths in the trees of Nicaraguan parks.
“The sea turtles are in danger off Florida’s west coast,” Marjorie cries, dumping Archie out of his hammock. “Charlie Crist has reversed his position on offshore drilling! We have to get busy”!
“Jeezus H. Christ!” the notoriously potty-mouthed Archie yells. “Oh, shit, not you, Lord. That was just an apostrophe. Marjory S.D. Quit your dancing. These ghosts have some haunting to do!”
And so a holy trinity of Florida environmentalists gets busy doing what they do best. The trouble is, they can do only so much from behind the Pearly Gated Community, which keeps folks in as often as it keeps them out. As usual, however, they know before everyone else the wages of environmental sin.
Are we going to do what we did before, and ignore them as strange voices crying in the wilderness until we realize that we’ve gone way past FUBAR?
Florida’s governor, Charlie Crist, is a good environmentalist, who loves manatees and brokered a deal to sell U.S. Sugar lands to the state. What’s that? A small voice in my head – where could that be coming from? – tells me that U.S. Sugar was in a pinch because Earth Justice held South Florida’s Water Management District’s feet to the fire, resulting in a successful lawsuit that was about to send the polluter to the poorhouse. What’s that? The voice tells me that they had to unload that property or else they’d be in a real fix. So Governor Crist really did something that was good for business, and the environment was just sauce on the gravy.
Florida’s governor, Charlie Crist, is a good environmentalist, who loves manatees and brokered a deal to sell U.S. Sugar lands to the state. He would not steer us wrong on this offshore drilling thing. Our nation is in an oil crisis. Our boys and girls are dying in Iraq. No more blood for oil. What’s that? A small voice in my head – where could that be coming from? (o.k., maybe that one is “welling up” from deep inside me) – tells me that our boys and girls should not be fighting a bogus oil war in Iraq to begin with. And Americans should stop driving those gas sucking pigs of vehicles. And wasting energy in hundreds of ways big and small. No more blood for oil is absolutely right, just not in the way that most people mean it. Have you ever seen what offshore drilling looks like, the voice in my head continues. It is ugly business that will destroy some of the last vestiges of beauty that Florida has. It is one thing to take Florida’s washouts through your lifeblood, but damned if I want to take oil washups on my coasts.
But Florida’s governor, Charlie Crist, is a good environmentalist, who loves manatees and brokered a deal to sell U.S. Sugar lands to the state. He would not steer us wrong. And don’t forget, the voice nudges in again, he’s completely and utterly heterosexual. He recently became engaged to the lovely Carole Rome. And certainly, the voice gets in one last dig, no self-respecting queer would purchase his beloved’s ring at strip mall (Eegad, does that not defy everything we have learned from “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”? Where is Carson when we need him?).
The ghosts will continue to keep watch over Forked Tongued Charlie from their live MSNBC feeds to Heaven.
For those who don’t know how the ‘Glades work, pull out a map of Florida and look for the huge blue bowl in the state’s southern third. That’s Lake Okeechobee. A low lip on the lake’s bottom end used to spill out into what guardian angel Marjory Stoneman Douglas called “the river of grass.” Not exactly a river, the nearly coast-to-coast flush once made Florida Bay one of the most productive ecosystems in the world. Let’s just say that a lot still flushes from the Everglades, and that the past century’s mega-development, corporate farming, and attempts to re-engineer the area have done some serious, almost irreversible damage. A rhetorical question: how healthy would you be if Florida’s washouts were spiffed up by transfusions through your life-blood?
With U.S. Sugar, a major polluter, soon to be out of the picture, I imagine that Saint Marjory is doing a spiral dance of joy to all the goddesses from her grave.
Meanwhile, a few doors down those gold-paved streets in Heaven, another Marjorie (Carr) is freaking out, having tuned in to MSNBC.
“Archie, Archie, wake up!” She runs over to her husband, a famous environmentalist himself, who is dozing in the hammock dreaming about the mysteries of Kemp’s Ridley Turtle and sloths in the trees of Nicaraguan parks.
“The sea turtles are in danger off Florida’s west coast,” Marjorie cries, dumping Archie out of his hammock. “Charlie Crist has reversed his position on offshore drilling! We have to get busy”!
“Jeezus H. Christ!” the notoriously potty-mouthed Archie yells. “Oh, shit, not you, Lord. That was just an apostrophe. Marjory S.D. Quit your dancing. These ghosts have some haunting to do!”
And so a holy trinity of Florida environmentalists gets busy doing what they do best. The trouble is, they can do only so much from behind the Pearly Gated Community, which keeps folks in as often as it keeps them out. As usual, however, they know before everyone else the wages of environmental sin.
Are we going to do what we did before, and ignore them as strange voices crying in the wilderness until we realize that we’ve gone way past FUBAR?
Florida’s governor, Charlie Crist, is a good environmentalist, who loves manatees and brokered a deal to sell U.S. Sugar lands to the state. What’s that? A small voice in my head – where could that be coming from? – tells me that U.S. Sugar was in a pinch because Earth Justice held South Florida’s Water Management District’s feet to the fire, resulting in a successful lawsuit that was about to send the polluter to the poorhouse. What’s that? The voice tells me that they had to unload that property or else they’d be in a real fix. So Governor Crist really did something that was good for business, and the environment was just sauce on the gravy.
Florida’s governor, Charlie Crist, is a good environmentalist, who loves manatees and brokered a deal to sell U.S. Sugar lands to the state. He would not steer us wrong on this offshore drilling thing. Our nation is in an oil crisis. Our boys and girls are dying in Iraq. No more blood for oil. What’s that? A small voice in my head – where could that be coming from? (o.k., maybe that one is “welling up” from deep inside me) – tells me that our boys and girls should not be fighting a bogus oil war in Iraq to begin with. And Americans should stop driving those gas sucking pigs of vehicles. And wasting energy in hundreds of ways big and small. No more blood for oil is absolutely right, just not in the way that most people mean it. Have you ever seen what offshore drilling looks like, the voice in my head continues. It is ugly business that will destroy some of the last vestiges of beauty that Florida has. It is one thing to take Florida’s washouts through your lifeblood, but damned if I want to take oil washups on my coasts.
But Florida’s governor, Charlie Crist, is a good environmentalist, who loves manatees and brokered a deal to sell U.S. Sugar lands to the state. He would not steer us wrong. And don’t forget, the voice nudges in again, he’s completely and utterly heterosexual. He recently became engaged to the lovely Carole Rome. And certainly, the voice gets in one last dig, no self-respecting queer would purchase his beloved’s ring at strip mall (Eegad, does that not defy everything we have learned from “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”? Where is Carson when we need him?).
The ghosts will continue to keep watch over Forked Tongued Charlie from their live MSNBC feeds to Heaven.
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