Like an Anarchist Baker

I saw this really awesome post over at Sociological Images and I thought it was totally worth a post here. This is what Third Way says our tax dollars are going to:



Here in Republican Utah, there are few real issues that provoke more enthusiastic approval than condemnation of excessive government spending. In the spirit of the locale, I offer (off the top of my head) the tax receipt I'd rather be getting. It's a little like the "if I were to win the lottery" game, except that it's the "if I were to reform capitalism" game. Clearly one is far less likely than the other.


1) Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid: We can't say much for ourselves as a people if we fail to care for our ill and our elderly. If someone has a suggestion for a system that will genuinely do a better job, I'm all for it.

2) Interest on the National Debt: Obviously should be eliminated over time via management.

3) Combat Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, Military Personnel, and Veteran's Benefits: Cut it all, honoring current contracts until they run out, but using the labor to build infrastructure in the US instead of killing people.

4) National Parks: Hells yes.

5) Federal Highways: 50% should be put into Amtrak. Will the highways become overcrowded, ill-maintained, and impractical to use? Yes. Alternately, we could pay for all road maintenance out of fuel taxes. Sometimes it's better to make life worse sooner instead of later.

6) Health Care Research: Dunno enough about it.

7) Foreign Aid: Should go into sustainability R&D with open patent rights. If you weren't aware, currently it goes into propping up violent dictatorships in the name of "democracy."

8) Education for Low Income K-12: Of course. Also, radical school system reform.

9) Military Retirement: Pay out existing contracts, and then funds should be used to fund a new military system of mandatory-participation militias which engage in no conflicts off of American soil.

10) Pell Grants for Low Income College Students: See #8.

11) NASA: Yes, for aesthetic reasons.

12) IRS: You have to have some overhead and some tax collection if you're going to have a government at all. . .

13) Environmental Clean Up: Keep, and increase fines on polluters enough to a)give the EPA some teeth, and b)cover the increased operational costs of increased enforcement.

14) FBI: I'm proposing a society where everyone knows how to use an assault rifle, and there are no professional killers. Do you really think we'd still need it? Maybe keep half.

15) Head Start: After well over a decade, the gains made in head start still disappear by the end of elementary school. This money should go to adult literacy programs and educational resources for parents instead.

16) Public Housing: Don't know enough about it, but I want to drop it in favor of aggressive squatters rights.

17) Drug Enforcement Agency: No. All drugs should be legal. The taxes on said drugs should cover the cost of law enforcement, recreational substance education, healthcare, safe and clean public using houses, and all other costs to the public.

18) Amtrak: go trains!

19) The Smithsonian and Funding for the Arts: Keep, though it should be more democratically controlled.

20) Salaries and Benefits for Members of Congress: There are lots of different ways this could be done (all better than the current system), but off the top of my head here's one. We should create an aggressive definition of corruption and treat it as a criminal offense instead of a civil one. Then we should maintain a zero tolerance policy when enforcing it, and members of congress should have to live on the minimum wage bills they put through. We expect our school teachers to be volunteers, I don't see why we should treat politicians better.



Anyone else want to play?

failday

Today has been a weird sort of day. Things can seem to go so well, and then I randomly fall apart. Physical therapy was good; today, almost no pain--but then.

I find myself I find myself not eating; an egg, a small potato, a cup of cocoa, this is two meals. Lapses like this are accidental. I am so tired of food, it just means that whatever there is to cook feels like so much trouble, and I want to curl up and die. For most people it wouldn't matter, but I seem to be a two year old, insufferable if I miss my snack. No one wants to talk to me, I'm mad at myself for needing, and I find myself naked between smooth sheets, comforted by cotton weave against my warm skin, crying, sleeping.

Stress: they are having trouble paying me for my writing. Paperwork, an understandable mistake. I find paperwork overwhelming, like each sheet is a ream, and if I pick it up I'll drop it, they'll all fall across the floor. The bills are multiplying, I can't quite seem to keep track. Over and over I did the math, it should add up but no one wants to fix my roof, and then there's the cost of therapy I didn't factor in. My desk literally overflows, I wonder when I was supposed to have got the skills to manage this.

And doesn't everyone of our generation have baggage? Of course. I can't explain why mine is special, please don't ask. Please. Don't tell me I'm not worth it as a friend, or if you do, do it by not calling and never writing back. You are almost perfect, your geeky awkwardness and cerebral introspection and beautiful face and flattery and kindness. You are exactly my type and I am so, so tired of hurting people. Thinking of you makes my stomach hurt. I didn't mean to let you think it was a date.


But, today, no pain; it saves me. I can stand and breathe. Two pairs of fat wool socks, soft loose warm-ups, black cotton boat-neck and white lace. I go to the computer and write; this is what it is like when my day fails. And now I will go and fix it.

last night I read Mockingjay

You don't have to know me long to learn I'm obsessed with one theme in entertainment: women's competence with violence. This, and associated themes (women's safety, gender roles, competence with violence in general, whether competence in other things can ever consistently overcome violence, violence and gender identity, violence and any identity, etc.) dominate what I watch and read. This has now been true for over a decade. I watched Catwoman, Electra, Tomb Raider, and all of Dark Angel. My favorite escapism often comes from Kim Harrison and Laurell K Hamilton, and I read the entire Fearless series* as quickly as I could get my hands on it.

That said, I hope you understand what I find most interesting about Hunger Games. First, whatever I was looking for when watching Catwoman and reading Anita Blake, Hunger Games--the first book--satisfied it completely. I didn't realize that was possible. Second, it didn't occur to me that the first book was a story about violence until some time after I'd finished reading. Despite that, this is the most bitter, broken, angry story about violence and womanhood that I've ever encountered. I think it is also somewhat true.

Much is made, in these stories, of rebellion--the defiant, reluctant, catastrophic or resigned. I see rebellion embodied in Katniss Everdeen's approach to violence. To start with, Katniss is extremely good at it, and we are not made to hate her for this fact. Opposite of almost every other story about women and violence, Katniss Everdeen's violence is squarely separate from her sexuality. In fact, though gender does play a role, her world is almost hypnotically asexual. Our heroine is tough and scarred and bitter, and believably so. And though she is feminine and pure, Katniss is not innocent, nor a victim. I wonder if such complexity is too much for this culture to process, and that's why the sexuality is withheld. An asexual Katniss harkens to Artemis. This is safer, and still unbearably refreshing.

Katniss is thin and beautiful, but these are not the things she considers to be important about herself. At certain moments, she's very comfortably feminine, but she has things to take care of that rank far higher on her own agenda than beauty or romance. Her appearance--with its surface level indicators of sexuality that don't always run deeper--is mostly of interest to those who wish to use her. Stylists are all-important, and cameras are omnipresent. Cameras make Katniss valuable. This relatively benign form of manipulation, widely accepted in our current society, is crucial to the story and has a dark underside. From the start, as she participates in the first spectacle of Hunger Games, it is her association with the cameras that forces Katniss into violence against other human beings. As the story progresses, it is ultimately the fallout of her un-sought pr power that escalates her violence and her exposure to the violence of others. . . an escalation that is paralleled by an increase in the importance of her appearance on camera.

Katniss is traumatized by her own violence, but not until the uncontrollable gore of the final story is she ashamed of it. Above all, and rightly, she rails instead against those who placed her in situations where she was forced to use it. She never stops hating it, never stops mourning it, and never stops being harmed by it, but she also never hesitates to do whatever it is that needs to be done. It isn't her only virtue, but the driving force in her life is an absolute willingness to do whatever it takes, including sacrificing her own life, to protect the people she loves. This, for once, doesn't bother me. Like her family, Gail and Peeta show us what Katniss can't have. At home in the story, they demonstrate what violence, trauma, and the experience of being constantly manipulated take even from the most capable and resilient survivors. Sometimes it can't be returned.




*young adult cookie-cutter novels. The protagonist is a beautiful but sloppy, depressed, and unfeminine-feeling girl. She has an inability to feel fear, coupled with nearly super-human fighting skills, and somehow has a reason to beat someone up about once every six seconds.

Objectification is really interesting.

In the embarrassingly recent past, I came to the realization that, in my dating life, I was not in the habit of regarding men as people. As conditioned, I saw them as fundamentally different from me, in a way that should have made them magically able (and willing?) to fix everything, have all the answers, and have much greater control of their lives than I could have of mine. Because husbands and fathers are supposed to be in charge, and you're supposed to be able to trust them with that, right?

So that's how I objectified my romantic partners, seeing only a certain role, instead of whole human beings. It can be an amazing struggle to remember just let people be what they are (which is to say, people, with doubts and struggles and just as many imperfections as you), but ultimately I find I'm way more stable when I don't go into relationships expecting other human beings to be magical.

I'm fine with some objectification, because I see some objectification as being inherent in physical sexuality. To have physical sex, it seems like, to some degree, you have to experience bodies as objects. Even if the psychological aspects are terribly important to you, there will be some moments when you're far more immediately concerned with your partner's body than with their mind, and I don't see anything wrong with that. This places me at odds with the feminists who say objectification of female bodies is always misogynistic, and I wish someone would explain their point of view to me in a way that makes sense.

Objectification is a problem when the main story a culture tells about some group describes them primarily as objects, rather than as complex, rounded, people--when it fails to say they have complex desires and preferences which ought to be respected. As a crash course, the main story most cultures tell about women is centered around the Madonna/whore dichotomy. In one way or another, this turns women into sexual objects--not sexual human beings. Unlike Madonnas and whores, sexual human beings sometimes want to have sex and sometimes don't, a concept that's proven remarkably difficult to take mainstream. Perhaps even more importantly, sexual human beings have other facets (an intellect, relationships, creativity, career, etc.) which will sometimes be more important to them than sex.

The main story US culture tells about men is about competence, success, and power. Men have a serious cultural advantage over women because this narrative includes a lot more aspects of a human being than just sexuality and care-taking. On the other hand, this advantage is not unlimited. A lot of men who want to engage in relationships as human beings (they may or may not have decided that they also want relationships with human beings) find that they are expected, among other things, to be endlessly, inhumanly competent.*



*Edward, I'm talking 'bout YOU.

Dear man in the hat,

I love you. Marry me?


Love,

Day