REPOST: The Convention Made Me Do It

photo courtesy of Business Insider

Apparently, just about two years ago today, I published this post as my "end of hiatus" triumphant return to blogging.  Well, "yay" for that.  
But what's disturbing is that, looking about at the discussions going on today, the "dialogue" on race hasn't progressed.  As in: at all.
Yet we continue to feign surprise and haven't let up the speed in which we produce these precious, precious "teachable moments."

photo: Christian Science Monitor

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The hiatus is officially ended.

The spell, somehow, broke around 10 pm last evening, during a ventriloquist failure at the Republican Convention, as a broken and weird-haired Clint Eastwood opened network coverage of the circus, basically introducing former Governor Mitt Romney with a routine that I'd bet a bazillion dollars wasn't... vetted.

So much of our troubles are due to this vetting obsession, so much of the loss of our fun.  What should have been the guiding light of my life is this seussian bit of wisdom:  “If you never did you should. These things are fun and fun is good.”

And then there is the iconic Seuss, meant for my gravestone:  “Being crazy isn't enough.” 

Back to vetting, the idea that we can know it all by what all we can dig up in the peaty dirt, the dirt old enough to get peaty rich, that old, old dirt.  Like an imaginary President Obama perched on what looked to me to be an insultingly uncomfortable folding chair, mouthing off at Clint with a big old "Go fuck yourself." 

Presumably, Obama was pretty lit, having had to be forcibly removed from Boehner's bar.

Yes, I suspected that the Republican Convention would end my blogging hiatus.

The balance, the scale, isn't just the symbol of justice, blind.  Balance and scale are needed to make it safely head-to-pillow each and every day -- provided head-to-pillow denotes, for you, day's end.  What people consistently fail to point out is the grin on Lady Justice's pocked and bruised face.  And she's not *blind*, people, she's blind-folded.  Big difference.  I think she peeks.  And I think she joneses for Seuss as much as I do.

She-Hulk #1

“I know, up on top you are seeing great sights, but down here at the bottom we, too, should have rights.” 
― Dr. Seuss, Yertle the Turtle and Gertrude McFuzz

“The words in this book are all phooey. When you say them, your lips will make slips and back flips and your tongue may end up in Saint Looey!” 

― Dr. Seuss

In addition to vetting, I propose ciphering, or coded words, as enemies to my political fun, at least. I would like "Chicago" to reference a city in Illinois and not become the millionth Other Word to mean "a gathering of people of color," "black," or "African American."  What was so wrong with "urban"?

The day has come, O Jehovah, in which I quote with approbation the inimitable Michelle Malkin, from her half-assed researched and cent pour cent aware articlette, entitled "The Condensed Liberal Handbook Of Racial Code Words."  Oh, and it was published in the... Patriot Post.  Quick!  If you are a J. K. Rowling fan, eat chocolate!  If not, if you're the lazy sort:  "You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes." 

As Malkin slipslides her way down, she writes this graffito in the slime accumulated on her ill-kept rodent burrow, and it *is* a good one:

--Kitchen cabinet. Radio talk-show host Mark Thompson jumped on Romney for using this phrase -- coined to describe Andrew Jackson's administration in the 1800s -- at the NAACP convention in July. Romney was referring to a close member of his staff during his tenure as Massachusetts governor. 

"To talk about being in the kitchen and not talk about an African-American actually being in your cabinet is really not a good metaphor to use with African-Americans," Thompson blasted. Is it racist to ask: Huh?

I'm so fully aware of racist speech and racist code words in political speech, in particular, that I've developed linguistic bulimia, polysemic purging.  As Lee Atwater, Malkin's godfather put it:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968, you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."[9][10]

You all know that I am an expert in everything, being something of a specialist in 16th century French Literature, although, through circumstances completely out of my control, I ended up writing a thesis concentrated on the eighteenth -- which explains my real and actual fascination with the relationship between word and image, the whole ut pictura poesis thang.  If you're with me, then you'll understand that simply seeing a fleeting image of Jan Brewer is cathartic for someone with my predilections.  She simply makes me spew -- and go into a five-minute routine of poking people with a witchy index finger.

Thank goodness there are not too many occasions for using that old chestnut of a phrase, "blah people." 

from Crooks and Liars

"We're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers." asserted Neil Newhouse.

Now, there you go!  It's not exactly MY take on the Good Seussian Life, but I can stomach such an open-armed hug to fun... I mean, it's not quite ipecac, and that's progress.  So thank you, Neil Newhouse!  I'm laughing and so far, lunch is staying down.

The lower you go, reading-wise, down, down, where the hard work, the hard digging is done, the more ano-friendly the texts.  There are no codes in use.  The First Lady is called a "fat black cow."  This same author pondered summore and came up with:  "id like to take obamas big fat black lips and make them kiss his own buttox." 

One of my favorite writers on the interwebs is a frequent tweeter of Our President and his First Family, excitedly anticipating their love of a spicy African soup, and frequently deciding that Michelle Obama must be pregnant.  She's a fan of those who are fans of her, and so I pray and frequently beg my friend, The President, to send her a letter full of praise of some of her original ideas -- you know, how sex is solely intended for those intending procreation, and acknowledging the incredible guilt of newborns, in general, and in specifics -- from unemployment to shady welfare suck-ups.

I HAD to come out of sabbatical.  The world was going to Hell and being led there by people blaming climate change on Hell itself.

Captain Haddock may, however, need to extend my FMLA job-protected and unpaid loafing, that invitation to sloth so obligingly enacted by that impeached bum Bill Clinton, who stole it from the blessed founding father of the free lands west of the Lone Alp, now known as the Tête de Hergé.

There You Go!

Man, I've had it.  There is this crazy woman in Dallas who is a Dr. Phil fanatic, and apparently, delusional as all get out.

She tweets nonstop about her need for a brain-to-ass makeover, including cosmetic dentistry (but never, you will notice, for the psychiatric services she needs most), all the while denigrating people who make sensible use of the entitlement systems that are in place for... you know, people who need those services!  No... she would rather tweet the cast of the Dr. Phil Show, any partial blood relative of his, any entertainment spinoffs, like The Doctors.

She tells these poor people about her "10/10" pain in her ribs, how she thinks she is on the verge of actual, physical death.  In a tweet.

Never mind that a 10/10 pain wouldn't allow for the formulation  of one tweet, much less the million she can produce over a single somatic symptom.

Never mind the complete assification exhibited by using Twitter as your private 911 line.

Never mind that you become a fascinating creature to watch, in terms of all sorts of anthropological data collection.

But recently, she began to sound a little...  grounded.  She was tossing around terms like "responsibility," and this morning, even compared herself to Thoreau.  I had a ridiculous moment of hope on her behalf.  Stupid me, I thought, "Hey, she's finally hit on the miracle of self-reliance!" [Yes, I often confuse Emerson for Thoreau.]

Intransigeant, ridiculously rigid , yes, I can see the reasoning in her referencing Thoreau.

Aw hell.  You know what she tweets about as much as anything else?  Her personal Paradise Lost.  Her rape.  The battering that caused the dental problems she now wants a celebrity to fix, for free.  The same dozen memories, from something she thinks people said at one of her failed childhood birthday celebrations to  verbatim quotes from 1996, when one doctor decided not to take her as a patient because she did not have health insurance.

She reminds me, God damn it all, of my Father.

Not that my father would ever tweet, I mean, at all.  Much less, tweet his personal problems in the hopes that a male power figure would swoop down into his life and alleviate all need for force of will.  No, how they are alike is in this scary affinity for backhanded "Nyah, nyah, I told you so"s.

Once, when my brother Grader Boob was all of 16, he had a rare emotional meltdown that resulted, if memory serves me correctly, from having had the distance between the end of his sideburns and the tip of his ear lobe measured with a ruler.  In order to understand this scenario, I guess you either have to be from a military family (of a certain era) or you had to be there.  Let's just say that the teenager felt oppressed, judged, harassed.  It was late in the evening, too, so add "tired."

And out of his teen-aged mouth came this:  "I wish you would stay out of my life."

My father could not quote this son, verbatim or even approaching such accuracy, on any topic of import to that son.  No knowledge of his core beliefs, no knowledge of his heartbreaks, not an inkling of how generous and kind a child he'd produced.  But -- should anyone ever suggest, say, that he throw the kid a life preserver, as he appeared to be drowning in the deep end of the pool, my Dad, without fail, would say, "You know, on X day in 1970-something, Grader Boob told me to stay out of his life. And I have, and I will continue to do so."

I can't reproduce the tone.  The tone is the clincher.  You'll just have to use your imagination.

Anyway, this Dr. Phil-crazed woman is the same way.  Someone, somewhere does something once within her sphere of knowing, and it is as if all of humanity acted in tandem, and not for an instant, but for a really boring eternity.

But like I said, I saw signs of hope.  She paid for a checkup, for example.  That may sound weird, but that was a huge step.  She needed a checkup.  She spent, I dunno, about 16 years needing one.  When she got "connected" to the world through computers, she started a campaign to guilt-out Nice People Of Means into providing her with what she wanted and needed.  All of that intelligence and creativity, wasted in needling, wheedling, whining -- like an overgrown, over-the-hill Shirley Temple, dressed all in crinoline that barely covered her ass, graying hair in shellacked ringlets.

And yes, damn it., I know perfectly well that the adult Ambassador Shirley Temple Black was a woman to be admired.

That's the only teeth-grinding allusion that will come to mind, somehow.

Hope, I was talking about hope.

Out of the blue, this woman began to say stuff about how maybe it is a good thing to do things for one's self... and we here at Marlinspike Hall burst into fits of cheering and expectations of feats of derring-do.  Not that we are a completely independent people, no, far from it.  In fact, we are about as intertwined and joined at the hip as it gets.  But should there be a pressing need for X in our world?  We get X.  We buy it, rent it, borrow it.  We finance it, we replicate it, we steal it.

Just checking to see if you're paying attention.  No, we don't steal X!  C'mon!  Captain Haddock would make of us a finely minced tartare...

This morning, I made my once a week perusal of the Dr. Phil Crazy Lady tweets -- and saw that she was back to her old habits and, well, I lost it.  I tweeted her a link to PCIP -- one of the wonderful provisions created in the Affordable Care Act.  It is the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Program., and if you read this blog regularly, you know that it has probably saved my life.  It still is too much of a secret, so I try to spread the word however I can.

Admittedly, suggesting to someone living in Fantasy Land that she be proactive and use some of the money she spends on television and computing to buy herself some health insurance was not my most reasoned thought of late.  Particularly when she assumes that people who contact her via Twitter -- but whom she is not "following" -- are HACKING into her account!

I'd roll my eyes but I have a headache.

Basically, if I write anything at Dr. Phil's website (which usually results in a nasty, itchy, red contact dermatitis) or on Twitter, she considers herself hacked.

I imagine that if you look at her sideways, she screams that you're inflicting a bloody murder upon her person.
I've seen her be ingratiatingly cruel to people she considers beneath her -- moments when your own quick intake of breath registers the real mettle of a person.

She does not respect women, though she'd go all purple in contradiction.  She doesn't respect herself.  That's what needs to change.  There's no need to whitewash or otherwise disguise the violent episodes of her life, but there is no need to continue to proffer them as the only real examples of having lived.

Okay.  She's a lot like me, in some ways.  I know that my days would be much happier if, every time I felt the urge to launch into a litany of woes through the vehicle of an anecdote, I would stop... just stop... and explore how saying nothing feels.

The armchair psychologist in me wants to diagnose rampant anxiety as the stultifying culprit in such matters --when we with ourselves too much discuss.  But clearly there is also PTSD, and that needs treating, too.

I was at the Pain Management Dude's Place this morning, being "pharmacologically managed." In my curly head, on the way, I regaled Fred with all the witty things I planned to say to the PA -- most all of which stemmed from the fact that they failed to help me and Go-To-Guy in an hour of true need.

She came in the exam room, smiled, and said, "It's been a while.  Where have you been?"

Well, that took a while to answer.  The last time we'd communicated, she'd emailed me that Go-To-Guy should manage the Baclofen issues, and that I needed to make an appointment and come in if I needed further help.  Of course, within 48 hours, we had called 911 ("Tante Louise!") twice and I ended up in ICU, making my surgeon stomp his little foot and yell, "You almost died!"

By the time I got to signing out AMA from the LTAC, and the details about the second surgery, and the wound vac...  her brown eyes were bugging out.

I was -- and this is the absolute truth -- restrained in the manner of my telling.  Instead of making a single insinuation of dissatisfaction over their response to the whole spaz-spaz-spaz crisis?  I stated, simply, that their  failure to respond in a meaningful or helpful way had shaken my faith in them.

Her response was not what I expected.

She said, "What email?  What are you talking about?"

Oh the blows to ego!  Aren't they wonderful?  It's like someone pushing your reset button.

In the moment, I knew I could either go ballistic, as in "What the hell do you mean, 'What email?' The one where I begged you to help us find a way to treat the dystonia without overdosing on Baclofen!" -- or, I could do what I did, which was to laugh, look her in the eye, and say:

"Well.  There you go!"

It's an improvement for me, I think, don't you?

A laugh.
A look in the eye.
"Well.  There you go!" (with a lilt, mind you)

Best of luck to you, crazy Dr. Phil Lady!  There you go!