On The Road

I've been wanting to write and I've had things to say but life has been frenetic. Lot's of good things, some confusing and of course there was that crazy election. When the race was called for Obama I wasn't able to accept it. I was so braced for failure. After a few more states, the concession speech and the acceptance speech I started to calm down.
So ... I'm going to visit Mom for three months. I'll have limited internet access. I may try to pick out a post on my phone just to see if I can but who knows if I'll pull that off.
Months go by all the time and I don't write.
Now.
Because I can't.
I really want to.
Heh.

Binders, Big Bird and The Actors studio. Oh My.

So I guess James Lipton wrote something or said something and now he has a role as a political pundit. It's amusing I suppose but it's also disturbing. I know that politics is also theater. He's an interesting man. I just struggle with how much focus is put on the appearance of it all.
For a long time the campaigns weren't making much real news and so every gaffe and silly story was banged on all day long. Not useful. I'm always wanting talk about issues. Of course in the first debate when President Obama tried to explain things he was called out for being too wonky and Romney was declared the winner, not just by the right wing media but the left (such as it is) leaning media as well. It felt to me like the MSNBC people in particular seemed to spasm. They'd listened to Romney lie and lie and lie and they all wanted to fact check him, which they did but they were so angry. Biden was more confrontational ( malarkey) ( my new favorite word) and he was declared the winner. I don't even get how you declare a winner.
These debates go by so quickly there's no time to make a substantive point. I didn't even hear the now infamous binder remark because I was processing what had already been said. I started seeing all these Twitter and Facebook things about about binders and had no idea why. And again. Amusing. Charming. I love the fact that the Internet can spawn a meme so quickly but it takes over. There is good information coming out of it. But it's like grabbing a bad articulation and beating it into the ground.
And Big Bird. Again. Funny. Spawned many great Internet thing-a-ma-jigs. I'm not really that critical. I'm just frustrated. It's all so frenetic and I'm too afraid. Intellectually I know my reactions are disproportionate but I'm wound up. I rely on John Stewart to talk me off the ledge. Somehow he manages to embed serious and precise criticism in jokes. Masterful.
I think I may put too much faith in conversation. It doesn't always solve things.
I went looking for a clip from the West Wing in which there is argument about whether Bartlett should use the word torpor in a speech. Some of his staff thought the word was obscure and would make him sound like a professor, which he was. I think there's a monologue about engaging a great conversation in the country. I couldn't find it but I did find this and it is remarkably apt.  

I started writing this a week ago. Someone called and I never got back to it. The weekend came and went. I watched One Bright Shining Moment, which came from Netflix ironically the same weekend McGovern passed away. I enjoyed the film. I was reminded that eighteen year-olds got the right to vote in seventy one. I was seventeen at the time. McGovern  lost his bid for the presidency in seventy-two. I'm pretty sure he was the first candidate for whom I voted. And his loss was the beginning of my frustration with Beltway politics. 

And then there was the last and final debate. On foreign policy. Not my favorite. I'm not that happy with our foreign policy. The left leaning media pundits say Romney "hugged" the president because he has no policy of his own and he didn't want to damage his campaign. Maybe. For me it was just a demonstration of fear driven chest thumping post 9/11 foreign policy from both parties. 

So two more weeks. I guess we'll see. Judging by the news of the day I don't see things getting more dignified, or serious. I listened to a debate between the third party candidates. Interesting. I don't find any of them compelling but they're talking about things that get no coverage. Climate change. Legalization of marijuana. They don't disagree on much. Still. Interesting. And no mention of Muppets.    

Social Media Me

I was fooling around with Klout. It's another social network thing that a friend asked me to join awhile ago. I did and then forgot about it. I'm not sure what made me think about it but I checked and noticed that it hadn't updated since August. I wrote to let them know and got an email response that reflected no actual reading of what I'd written and lots of excuses. I wrote back and clarified (restated) the issue and got another response that didn't really respond. What. Ever.
I'm always ambivalent about all these social internet things but I pretty much always join when friend's ask me. I remembered Orkut and was surprised that I was logged on because it's been years. I guess that's a Google thing. I was never enthusiastic about My Space but I can't seem to get to my old stuff, not that there was anything important there. I know some friends who were very into it. I made a bit of effort to reconnect. Couldn't do it. I'm on Google + but I never spend any time there. I wonder why and how people use these things.
I don't really get Twitter. But I have enjoyed it during the Democratic Convention and the debate. It was full of jokes and links and just fun.
Facebook ends up being the one I don't ignore. I can, have and will complain about it but I'm on it all day. I have finally quit playing most of the games. I still help friends when they ask and I have Scrabble, Words with Friends and Draw Something on my phone, which I mostly play in the evening. And Bejeweled Blitz. But all the ville games are too demanding and obsessive. I get burnt out.
A month or so ago I noticed a friend had posted on a mutual friend's wall. It was a very lovely post but I wondered if I was missing a birthday or something. I checked and discovered the mutual friend had fallen and was in a coma. She passed a few days later. She lived in NC and I was looking forward to visiting her there in a month. Imagine that. Facebook is where I learn about babies and graduations and weddings and funerals. It's also where I see endless cat pictures and dog pictures and political posts. I'm really wary of political conversations on Facebook. Text is too flat. Meaning is too shifty. But there is a town square feeling sometimes.
A friend posted something on Facebook that had some fat meanness, mostly in comments and not at all aimed at me. I was in a mood. I posted something to establish that I saw it and was hurt and angry and got some comments of my own. The next day I noticed that my friend was no longer on Facebook. I don't know if it had anything to do with me and I felt a little bad that I'd been so indirect. It may have been that my eaves dropping on her and her eaves dropping on me ended our friendship. I wish I knew what happened. I also kind of don't care. I mean really. If that's all it takes. I mean. Seriously?
When your social world is so Internet saturated things can become distorted. But here are also moments of shimmering realness.
Ah.
Well.

For Anonymous

In comments on my last post Anonymous asks to hear my thoughts on this post. The post is about the video of the Wisconsin news anchor Jennifer Livingston's response to an email saying she is not a good role model because she's fat. I dropped a link to it my last post because it was all over the Internet the day I wrote and in some ways spoke to my topic. My focus was on the casual use of fat jokes on television, which seem to be everywhere all the time. I had a mixed and fairly ambivalent reaction to the video because it was really about bullying. Not fat politics.
Apparently October is anti bullying month. OK. I'm in complete support of anti bullying campaigns even when they are syntactically problematic in terms of the lives of fat people. Complete support includes criticism. In my post I mentioned wanting some push back against the assumptions about fatness and Jennifer Livingston does not push back. She says she knows she's fat. When asked about her feelings about her weight she says she's struggled with her weight since the birth of her first child and she has three. That's a fairly common experience for women. She says she is not ashamed.
That articulation always makes me cringe. Struggle with weight. Fought with weight. Battled with weight. Perhaps the first step in getting clear about being fat is to give up on struggling, fighting and battling.
So. The post. The post is written by a gentleman who has lost weight and written a book and is now an expert. What. Ever. There are people in the size acceptance community who feel like he is the enemy. I am not one of them. I just don't find him interesting.
He says the guy who wrote the email does not seem like a nice guy and may have body issues of his own. Could be. Not my concern. He quotes a fat acceptance blogger but I'm not sure why. He follows the quote with:      
Though the movement has lots of good things to say, it glosses over what for me was a basic fact of my years of fatitude: Fatness is not good. That is *not* the same as saying that fat people are not good. My point is that the experience of being fat is not good. I hated being fat. 
Well ...sorry dude. Sorry being fat was such a drag. Please don't state your experience in a way that implies a universal truth. But I get it. You hated being fat and you did what ever you did to lose weight and now you're an expert.
This gets hard for me because I really, really, truly, deeply support people's right to make choices about their own bodies. That's what I'm asking for so that's what I aspire to give. But it does irk me when people who have lost weight seem to feel stronger/smarter/braver/truer. Makes me cranky.
To be fair he makes an effort to couch what he says in "his experience" but he is too privileged by the culture of fat hatred in which he writes. When he says "fatness is not good" he's going to get agreement. I suspect Jennifer Livingston would agree. I get that his experience was not good.  And he writes about food addiction, which I take seriously and know is a problem for many people. But not all fat people hate the experience and not all fat people are food addicted.  
He saw size acceptance in "Jennifer Livingston's retort". I did not. I'd like to claim her as an icon for my revolution. She has a seemingly successful career, a husband who loves and supports her, three kids. I think she's quite attractive and well spoken. She seems reasonable and grounded. But I don't see her wanting to be an icon for my revolution. She's talking about bullying. I'm talking about a radical shift in how we experience being fat and talk about fat bodies. I'm talking about it because it impacts jobs, housing, safety in and access to public spaces. I'm talking about it because fat kids are being told they have a disease. I'm being told I have a disease. Not at all useful and absolutely harmful. But Jennifer Livingston isn't talking about that. In fact she wasn't even going to talk about the email at all until her husband posted it and she was moved by the response. She's getting support for calling out an asshat and good on her for doing so but she isn't talking about fat revolution.
I may sound angry about this and I may be. I long for higher level of conversation about fatness. I get tired of the same old same old. I don't find the post particularly egregiousness. I just don't find it interesting. It's always the same. Fat people shouldn't be bullied. BUT. They should lose weight. I get tired of responding to the brain numbingly same ol shitness of it all.    

Jokes

I've been watching the new shows and new seasons of shows to see if there'a anything I want to watch. You would not think it would surprise me to see fat jokes but it seems like there are more than ever. It's not like there are lots more fat characters. Just the jokes.
For example, The New Normal is really good. The little girl does a Grey Gardens impression (a bit of which can be seen here) that is off the hook. The other character in that scene makes quite a few comments about not wanting to be fat or not wanting a fat baby. He's actually kind of cool in many respects but the fat thing wears on me a bit. It's not exactly mean. It's not even direct. It just pops up again and again.
New Girl has the same kind of not exactly mean but surprisingly frequent fat joke. One character wears a fat suit from time to time because he was formally fat. I really like the show. I like the wacky rhythm of the dialog. In the season opener one character tells the other to stop looking at her like she's a fat kid on a bicycle.
Um.
Huh?
I mean really, what does that mean? Is it like fat kids should do more exercise but they look stupid on a bike? I just don't get it.
From time to time I watch a few minutes of Mike and Molly, which is still full of mean humor fat and otherwise.
Glee has a new fat character. She is the mother of a new show choir member so not a central character and to be fair the fat jokes get pushed back on.I often have mixed feelings about how fat gets represented on Glee. The daughter responds to the fat jokes by saying you don't know her. You don't know about her life.
That. That is exactly what I'm always trying to say. So that was cool.
There's a video going around the web today. It's cool enough. There was post on Jezebel ( I think) (can't find it now) which got a similar amount of attention in which the writer also acknowledges she is fat with a nod to the idea that it's a bad thing. Smacking down bullying is great. But hey. How about some push back on the idea that fat is something that draws bullying. I mean it's obviously something that happens. But why?
Someday I'd like a fat joke to fall on the floor not because there shouldn't be fat jokes but because the fat joke just doesn't make sense to anyone. Instead there are these passive assumption laden snippets.
Good thing I like to read.  

Feed the Fish. Report the Cat.

I wrote a post earlier this month in which I talked about the feed-a-man-a-fish thing. It may have been mildly presentient because Ryan used it the other day when responding to a woman who said she couldn't get off welfare. He concluded by saying, "don't feed fish."
Um.
My title for the last post was intended to suggest that the news might outta report the cat who didn't get stuck in the tree. We need good news. And the book is replete with stories about stimulus success stories that were either unreported or misreported when in fact there were successes.
The NBC Education Nation stuff has been rather scatter shot and not much on the shows I watch during the week. I listen to more radio during the week. I did hear an interview with President Obama in which he said things that pissed me off and things that sounded right. In the book there is a short section on the states doing back flips to get stimulus money for their schools. I feel a little frustrated. I don't feel like I have a lot of answers. I'm not even sure I know what questions to ask.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how we talk. I'm interested in the things that are implied. I'm interested in the way things are framed. This political season is becoming tiresome. Full of bad faith. So I feel like I'm sifting and sorting and trying to simplify my own terms.
It takes all the running I can do to stay in one place.
Heh.
 

The Cat Who Didn't Get Stuck In The Tree

I've been reading The New New Deal. Chris Hayes had the author on his show and said the book was full of things he didn't know,which is weird since he makes a living knowing about such stuff. The book is one long tick toc of the Obama administration with lots about the good, bad and ugly of the stimulus. My criticism of the book is that Grunwald obviously did tons of research and seems to have not wanted to leave anything out. Not. One. Thing. That said, the book is full of things I knew and things I didn't know and lays things out in a way that makes sense of what happened, when and why.
One of the things that I can't stop thinking about is a story in which Biden is visiting a bridge in Pennsylvania to see where some stimulus money will be headed and the bridge really needs the work. It turns out that a school crosses the bridge with bus fulls of students everyday so the work will be delayed until school is over. There are two things the administration wanted. They wanted the money to be spent successfully (as in fix stuff and create jobs) and they wanted it to be spent quickly so they can demonstrate that it worked. Political work is crazy like that. Tom Ammiano used to say that when good political negotiation is successful no one is happy. I'm paraphrasing but I understood him to mean that when you're trying to solve problems in which there are many stake holders compromise is essential and usually feels like nobody wins.
The book also documents the virulent Republican obstructionism but there were some Blue Dogs helping out. Inside the beltway is nasty. And then there's the media and what does and doesn't get covered. Most of his successes have not been covered. Someone, I think Tom Brokaw, said something like, "we don't cover the cats who don't get stuck in the tree."
Hmmm.
I've been listening to MSNBC's education nation stuff all day, which isn't wildly different than any other Sunday because it started on MHP and I always watch her. She spent most of her show giving voice to students, which was great. Then there was an hour with teachers and the last hour was about the movie Won't Back Down.
Educational policy is one area of Obama land where I step off. In the book it says he got some of how he feels when working in Chicago and seeing burnt out teachers in the inner city. I'm sure there are burnt out teachers. But I think trying to test them out of a job is mean. I'm not against having a way to assess the job they're doing. All jobs have that. I'm not against them being fired if they're not doing a good job. People who aren't doing their jobs lose their jobs. But first we need to ask if people have what they need to do their jobs. Teachers have been spending their own money on supplies for so long now it's become a norm. Teachers in the inner city may have students who can't see the board because they've never been to an eye doctor and couldn't afford glasses. Students who may come to school hungry. Students who live with violence.
It's a complicated conversation but money is always in the mix. Them what has some and them what doesn't.
It bothers me that so much of the conversation focuses on bad teachers. It bothers me that union is villanized.  The privatize everything crowd has too much too say.
Lot's of stakeholders. Nobody happy. And students pay the price. Politics is nasty.
And yet, there were great moments on the shows today. Students are fierce and teachers are fierce. On MLP one of the Little Rock Nine was in the house. So moving.
Sometime we hear about the cat who didn't get stuck in the tree.