Jill Rants and Raves

barack and the creaky wheels of the bandwagon

I'm disappointed in John Edwards' endorsement of Barack Obama mostly because Hillary Clinton makes a strong case that this battle between her and Barack deserves to go the distance. Is Edwards' endorsement of a candidate whom he does not appear to like very much, simply self-serving? Edwards wants to be a part of this 'change' which will sweep Cheney, Rove and Bush from the White House. On the other hand, this might be another sign of Edwards' commitment to winning the White House for Democrats, no matter who the candidate. Perhaps he worries that Barack does not have the muscle to win swing States in November. As November nears and the wheels begin to creak on the Barack 'Faith, Hope and Change' wagon, we may begin to wonder how the myth of Obama was created and why. And contemplate what might have been in an Edwards presidency.

Because Obama is just another politician whose ambitions have been achieved far sooner than his handlers ever imagined. And for me, the most insidious tool used by BO is the shameless, brash use of his 'faith', which we, to the left of centre, would condemn as a dangerous mix of religion and politics if a Republican were to employ the same tactics. Campaign flyers produced in states heavy with evangelicals show Barack at a pulpit with a massive cross behind him, with a 'praise the lord' text worthy of a tel-evangelist on a Sunday in Waco, Texas. Obama's flagrant appeal to faith based voters might play well in traditionally red states, but his volunteers will make sure those don't appear in New York, Florida or California.

Most of my friends are crazy in love with the guy. For some reason, smart articulate people are smitten. It looks like there will be a mass tilt to the Democrats in Congress as well as in the White House, but come 2010, and the mid terms, there will, once again, be a sense of under-accomplishment which will be laid at the door of the guy in the Big House. If Obama hasn't fulfilled one of his most prominent promises - to make a considerable dent in the US presence in Iraq within 16 months - calls for impeachment will fill the air and Cindy Sheehan's whiny voice will lead the chorus of disappointed fans who thought they could camp out in the Lincoln bedroom, but found out that Hamas had already booby-trapped it.

I felt, right at the beginning of this campaign that Obama would never be able to have a really 'clean' administration, that cronyism will emerge early in the Obama White House. And when he does not fit their ideal of what a 'black' president should be, his own pastors will take the pulpit away. Jeremiah Wright has already shown what will happen, when Obama tried to push him to the fringe of the campaign. Talk shows seem incredulous that race plays such a role in this campaign, and wonder if it can possibly be true that working class whites, especially in the South will not vote for a black president. What the freak is so surprising about that? What more 'uppity black' could you get than President? Is it really shocking that working class undereducated whites are afraid of empowering blacks? Geez, Amerika, where've you been all my life?

It is barely 50 years since lynchings after church on Sundays were routine, 40 years since the slaying of Martin Luther King Jr, 53 years since the brutality of the murder of Emmett Till; over 5000 lynchings reaching right up until 1968 tell the story of a country severely at odds with it's self image as a Christian nation. Let's never forget that in 1964 Democrats in the South were still saying stuff like this: "We will resist to the bitter end any measure or any movement which would have a tendency to bring about social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the races in our (Southern) states." Richard Russell (D-GA)

And the votes leading up to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were pretty clearly divided between North and South, not Republican and Democrat.

Enough already. I'll make myself crazy thinking about this stuff.

I just do not believe that Obama is the right man for the job. It isn't that I supported the woman in the race. I wanted John Edwards in the White House. It's that simple. And Johnny McCain? The Republicans are kicking themselves about this one. Maybe there'll be a a Jeb Bush write-in campaign yet! Whoo hoo!

 

Maisy - a short and beautiful life

On May 31st a couple of years ago I wrote a blog about what it was like inside the heart of an animal rescuer - that it isn't quite the same as 'loving animals'. There is an intensity of feeling, and at the same time an ability to disconnect from those we have 'rescued' so that we can move on to the next. Often the animals that are designated 'rescue only' at animal shelters show some small behaviour issue or have a minor medical condition and face euthanasia because cities prefer to spend their animal shelter dollars on enforcement of city leash laws rather than any preventive measures which might staunch this flow of innocent fur into the death houses.

In California shelters the little cage cards tell you what the 'disposition' of this beating heart will be - 'R24' means that the animal has a 24 hour window to get out alive. Maisy was one of those. A gorgeous red cattle dog sitting in her own urine and feces in a dark kennel building. I had seen her photo on Pet Harbour, the website which beams the images of thousands of unwanted and soon to die animals into the homes of animal lovers and rescuers everywhere.

I was driving to Stockton to collect other dogs for an agency who needed some transport for them - these lucky dogs were to come to San Francisco to find forever homes. While I was there, I asked a volunteer if she knew where this particular cattle dog was - all animals are given an 'A' number, which is their control number - but in the busy shelters animals get moved around from kennel to kennel as more arrive, while they are waiting for their dose of pink juice (that's animal control language for the euthanasia drug).

I finally found her - 9 months old, timid in the back of the kennel, snapping at my hands while I slowly approached her in the gloom, the barking in the building echoing off the walls, there were no windows and no way for her to see real light. As I slipped a leash around her neck, she starting spinning and I had to pull her from the kennel. As we emerged from the kennels into the bright hot May gleam of a Central Valley day, she shut her eyes in reaction.

And then as I coaxed, she began to let her tail swing gently from side to side and I started to run slowly with her by my side, just to see if she would resist or come along. Within an hour, Maisy, as she would later be called, was jumping into my car. The other dogs I was picking up were all in crates for the ride, but Maisy sat atop the crates, her head pointed in my direction, her eyes never leaving the back of my head.

But Maisy was not for me. Neither was she an incidental 'rescue'. I had recently found a red cattle dog dead on the freeway and I had stopped to pick her up just in case someone was looking for her at a shelter. And Aida had been talking for so long about finding a red ACD (Australian Cattle Dog) to keep her blue cattle dog Zelda company. So, when I had called her from the shelter, with Maisy, staring at me, she had said 'Bring her'. 6 hours after I got Maisy from Stockton, Maisy was on her way to a beautiful life with Aida and Zelda.

What I wrote in May 2006 was:

"Yesterday, as if in honour of the little red cattle dog dead on the 205, I 'rescued' another little red cattle dog from an animal shelter in the Valley whose date with death was imminent. The building in which this dog was housed - with up to 100 other dogs waiting for what is euphemistically known as the 'due out day' - has no windows and no air, the lights are dim and oftentimes the animals are barely visible in the concrete bunkers. Urine swims in the kennels, and feces grips the pads of the dogs' feet as they run backwards and forwards. There are no descriptions, no names just numbers.

I'm proud to feel this deep, primal sense of responsibility and love. And I love those who feel the same way. What piece are we missing? Or is that we in this subculture, are the ones who have been endowed with an extra gift - a gift of unconditional love."

Maisy became a wonderful and incredible dog. A few months ago, circumstances changed, and Aida found another wonderful home for Maisy. With a family who adored her. But life has a way of bringing us to our knees, and when Aida called me yesterday wailing and in agony to tell me that Maisy had been hit by a car and killed, I found comfort only in the knowledge that unlike the dead dog on the freeway, Maisy was with those who loved her. My wounded heart will recover. Probably sooner than I think.

 

with apologies to ee cummings

I'm feeling morose and ill at ease. I can't tell whether it's all that is happening at the Albany Bulb, whether it is, that over the last two days, Oscar doesn't seem to want to run, or even walk up the few steps to my front door, or whether it is that my best friend has been out of town for more than a week and I miss her, or that my intimate life seems uncomfortably jagged right now or whether the political mood I sense wafting around is more like the anticipation of a Roman Coliseum confrontation than the election process of a civilized land. I have started blog after blog and not completed any. So I thought today - in my disjointed state, I would remind myself of simple truth -

maggy and jilly and molly and may
went down to the beach (to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles, and

jilly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles: and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea

ee cummings

and though ee wrote milly and I wrote jilly
the thought is the same just a different name: and

the beach is the place where we see
no people to block the view to me

and clearly i am no poet, but
it is my blog so I'm allowed to do it.

Albany Bulb Photos

http://jillposener.blogs.com/photos/albany_bulb/

This is an album I put together hurriedly today - it gives a small sampling of the thousands of images I have of this place. But it only represents the photos I've taken since I gave in to digital (now of course I realise I might have had a far more glittering career had digital photography been available to me 30 years ago...)

But it'll take me a lot longer to scan and upload some of the earlier photos on negative and slide film.

But I was thinking today how much of my life over the last ten years has been informed by both the mundane and the special experiences this land has brought into my life. The wild dog Willa who raced through the bushes to bite me squarely on the butt when I lifted her pups out of the immaculate den she had made for them in the deepest undergrowth on the Bulb, the hundreds of cats and dogs whom I helped re-home after the eviction on the homeless encampment in 1999 - 2000, some of whom still curl up on my bed every night, the people I met during that time - Granma Linda Dunnigan, Animal and Sarah, Jimbo the poet, Rabbit whose guided tour of the landfill is immortalised in the movie 'Bum's Paradise', ex Albany Police Chief Greg Bone who frankly didn't like the job it was incumbent on him to carry out, Osha Neumann, one of my heroes, an artist and attorney whose gifts could have tempted him towards a thriving law practice but whose philosophy brought him clients who could never pay him except in their gratitude, JP who lived and died on the landfill. Is it the art, which was deemed 'unsuitable' for a 'family park' because of it's irreverence and crude, carnal, and gory depictions in wild imaginative scenes of lust and horror, or the artists themselves who came every Saturday with their own kids and dogs and attracted an ever growing fan club. Is it the sense of discovery which hearkened back to my childhood when I wanted so badly to be an archaeologist, or the intense pleasure I get at seeing 'nature' reclaim what we have taken from her, the plant, bird and animal life overtaking the ugliness of a man made dump.

Was it that it reminded me of squatting Victorian cottages in London in the 70's while 'progressives' including the Labour Party were pushing for high density housing, and high rises over low scale communities. Is it that I was reminded of the occupied army base in Copenhagen, or of the many other moments where the unregulated and the unsanctioned momentarily held sway. Is it that in a world of hypocrisy and cant, of political machinations and ever increasing societal control, I among many others, could pretend, as we ambled along an unkempt trail a mile into the Bay, that we were still living free.

It is all of the above and much more.

the albany bulb RIP

Deb from Minnesota, who reads my blog (thank you Deb!) and often comments, noted that my description of what is happening at the Albany section of the much hyped Eastshore State Park seems so at odds with the official version. Now there's a shock. It's almost impossible to describe what the old Albany Landfill (aka The Bulb) feels like, unless you have been there - but when you have, and especially when you have allowed yourself to go there with one of the many self appointed 'tour-guides', the question you will ask is 'Why don't they just leave it alone?".

It's absolutely true that were it not for the preservationists of the 60,s, 70's and 80's - early visionaries in this area who wanted to slow or stop the rampant commercial and business park development along the Bay shoreline - this expanse of former landfill would already be lost as open space. I'm not arguing that.

The filling and polluting of the Bay is one of the terrible consequences of the rush to build postwar suburbia. And the same profiteering now fuels the development of tract housing and gated communities on what used to be farmland and open space less than a generation ago, so that even a simple task like shopping for bread and milk requires you drive your massive SUV to a store in a developed mall a few miles away.

But the good intentions of those activists have become the proscriptive doctrines of those who build and run parks. The big lie is that the park system will give greater access to more of the 'stakeholders'. These days, a Bay Area politician without a 'endorsed by the Sierra Club' stamp on their election door hanger means virtual banishment from the corridors of power. But the reality is that doctrinaire environmentalists have the politicians by the throat and support in the next election depends upon their buying into the creation of so called 'natural habitats' and 'resource protection areas' where humans are shut out and made into observers of nature instead of participants.

This is the backdrop to what has happened with the Eastshore State Park.

But it is at the Albany piece that an almost epic battle has been waged. And while I could try (and probably fail) to describe the evolution of the battle and as importantly the battleground, I'm just going to say that the place has become a jewel - simply by being ignored by the authorities. For years, it was allowed essentially to self regulate, plants grew without being tended, animals and birds arrived, reptiles and rodents emerged, rose bushes bloomed hidden between concrete slabs dumped 40 years ago, artists came and left a treasure trove of outsider art, the homeless moved in for over 10 years. It was a dump for chrissakes. Everything that grew and breathed there came because it could, because it bubbled organically into a cauldron of life and eruptions of leaves and berries and trees.

The remnants of the dumped concrete and rebar plunges from the earth in sculpture of its' own making. As my friend Osha Neumann (one of the artists and one of the few civil rights attorneys to represent the homeless when they tried to resist eviction) says, "It is a place of wild imagination".

And now, they have started the process of destroying that imagination, to replace it with something that can be controlled, contained and coerced into compliance with a 'park plan'.

It is breaking my heart. As much as any love affair gone wrong. And in a few years all that will left of this imagination will be a few 'interpretive' signs. I will not soon get over this heartache. I once said to a good friend that when the Landfill is taken by the forces of conformity, I would leave this area. Native plants (what exactly is native to a landfill) are meant to replace the palms, the roses, the vines, the fruit trees and the lone eucalypt on the Bulb, the art has long been deemed 'unsuitable for a family park' and the dogs - like the art - will be leashed, forever.

This photo taken today:

All photos by Jill Posener © All Rights Reserved

f'OWL play

Look , I don't hate burrowing owls. I like 'em. I love birds of all kinds, and owls have a special place in my heart because as a small child I found a young owl inside a paper bag stashed into a garbage can in Kuala Lumpur. Does that sound like a far fetched story? Like so many in my strange and wonderful life, it is 100% true. My brother and I carried the owl home and my Mum drove us to a wildlife centre where they were enthralled at our find. I was pretty in love with the owl till I saw them feed live mice to it. When I met, much later, an animal rescuer called Ronnie who had liberated hundreds of mice from a vile research lab in England, I wondered whether he had released them in fields (where presumably they became prey for, among other things, owls) before he was arrested. I didn't ask. Ronnie served 7 years in jail for the act of placing animal life above the corporate greed and scientific stupidity of human beings.

So, don't accuse me of not caring about the wild, of not being sensitive enough to 'habitat preservation', or 'resource protection' or whatever fancy phrase some khaki pants and button down shirt 'park planner' wants to come up with.

The story involves the worst kind of political back room wrangling, park planning decisions, state parks vs local people, soccer mom playing field advocates, corporate boardrooms and environmentalist dealmakers and a population who seems to have come to believe that if the Sierra Club says 'jump' all we do is say 'which cliff shall we go off?'

The end result is that as part of the 'creation' of the Eastshore State Park, which made a homogenised whole of a set of unique and unusual ecological, cultural and functional open spaces, the meadow at the old Albany Landfill was designated as a burrowing owl habitat. Not that there ever was a burrowing owl there; not that the owl which supposedly lived where now the water guzzling, electricity hungry, environmentally wasteful Tom Bates Regional Sports Complex sits was ever actually seen; not that there has ever been (according to a naturalist employed by the parks system) a successful burrowing owl transplant in this area - but never mind reality and truth in political machinations - the fencing and the earth moving machines tell the story.

"You stupid people of this area" (the khaki 'Dockers' might say) "who thought that the vibrant plant and animal life, co-existing as it did with human and canine activity, must have been nuts to think that we could just let this organic urban wildness continue. Where would we put all of our chain link fence if not around your park? What would we do with all of the money we seem to have burning holes in our pockets? Why would we do a better job of maintaining our current parks if we can 'build' a new one, especially if it brings us Sierra Club support next time we want to fleece the voters for new bond money? Why let it just be when we can screw it up?"

The Albany Landfill - it's hard to explain what it's like. I have been walking there with my dogs and on my own for almost ten years and almost every day of those years photographing every nook, every cranny. Every day, I discover something new. Maybe one day I'll discover a burrowing owl. Chances are he'll be outside the fence, and if I ask him 'dude, whatcha doing outside the habitat area? Are you crazy?', he'll probably answer 'hey, all the mice left when we moved in and I'm tired of waiting for some animal liberationist to bring food'.

Or he might respond 'The really tasty gophers moved once there were no dogs to tease'.

Or 'hey Jill, you have to do what the environmentalists tell you to do. We don't'. Whoo hoo.

But he'd probably say 'hey I burrowed, Ok? I burrowed, and all I found was some garbage left here by humans in the 50's. You think I wanna live like that? Do you? Would you? Would you?'

scaife loves hillary

The conservative movement is so unhappy with the Republican presidential nominee they've decided to flirt with Hillary in a big way. But making out with Clinton in the back room is merely the latest deliberate attempt by the Right to subvert the election process with money, with lies and with that familiar locker room style they do so damn well.

Richard Mellon Scaife, best known outside of the billionaire's club as the man who funded each and every scandal and dirty trick against Bill Clinton, is at it again in his endorsement of Hillary. Dubbed the 'Funding Father Of The Right', Scaife openly admitted that his intent was to engineer Gore's ascendancy to the Presidency, thereby galvanising the right wing and creating a backlash against progressive policies.

Rush Limbaugh, arguably the most influentual conservative radio voice in America, is giggling his way through his self aggrandizing comedy show 'Operation Chaos' in which he has been curdling the milk in Pennsylvania and Indiana by encouraging registered Rep's to switch parties in order to vote in Dem primaries and pushing Hillary to an artificial win. At the very least, these boys who act like jocks, hope to extend the Democratic internal battle until neither candidate looks electable in November.

That's how bad John McCain is. And that is how good the Democratic chances are (or were) to win the White House come the fall. Except.

The two candidates on the right, but left side, haven't yet formulated a 'Bash McCain' strategy, but appear to be content throwing barbs (that's putting it kindly) at one another.

Rachel Maddow (d'yall listen to talk radio as much as I do? No? Good for you) who has a steaming butter type of voice and is a dyke, said yesterday that she thought that at this point, McCain looked to be the winner in November. Unless, she added, Barack and Hillary finally make this about winning in November instead of counting super-delegates on an abacus over their oatmeal every morning. Hillary supporters are banking on Puerto Rico coming out strongly for her. Are they all nuts?

Who is to blame for Amerika's electoral shambles? I'll get back to you on that. Meanwhile, I think this will be an election spoken of in 100 years (just as the last troops are getting back from Iraq) as the election which finally brought a glimmer of understanding about the need for campaign and election finance reform.

bob barr, polygamists, bitter and angry urbanites

I've been tweaking about loads of stuff this week: Obama's 'small town bitter and angry' comments, blown out of all proportion by none other than his fellow democrats. I guess those of us who are bitter and angry in the cities are clinging to our soy mocha lattes and pilates classes. And if any of the negative ads are to be believed, neither candidate is good enough to win the nomination. So why would we vote for them in a general election?

I'm tweaking about the fact that it isn't just that we (the people) don't trust our government, it's that our government doesn't trust us (the people). Do you think Texas Child Protective Services is going to do a better job with the four hundred kids they just snatched out of their communal home? How about if the men responsible for the alleged abuses were snatched instead? Huh? How about that for a concept. Taking the abusers out of the log cabins instead of the children who are now being scattered around the Texas foster care system. Oh yeah, that's a good move.

Perhaps the best way to stop the spread of polygamist sects is to print a poster like the ones we use for promoting spay and neuter in cats - just look at the numbers. At the top of of the poster the question 'How many children can one polygamist crazy breed in ten years?' and then list how many generations it takes to reach a million. Anyone wanna come and screen print with me?

And I'm tweaking about the fact that they (whoever they is) have started the cleansing of the Albany Landfill from an organic place of wild imagination to the sign-posted, interpreted, non-native plant cleansed, super-park which we can all look at from manicured trails but which will be protected (from us who have been stewards of this magnificent self regulated urban wildness). There will not be another place like it in this area and we are the worse off because of it. Soon, it will be a place we can look at with our binoculars from a viewing ledge (these always remind me of the platforms built for western diplomats to stand on while staring over at East Berlin beyond the Wall). We'll be able to read off of a sign which birds we are meant to be able to see, instead of being able to sit quietly in swaying grasses at dusk enjoying the swallows and hummingbirds, the finches and hawks and the redwinged blackbirds as they share this place which thrived under official neglect.

And I'm tweaking about liberal talk show host Tom Hartmann describing Bob Barr as 'a great man'. Just a gentle reminder to the rest of you that  though Barr recently adopted the religion of libertarianism and got a little antsy about Bush's asssaults on privacy and civil liberties, he was widely considered among the most hard right conservatives as a three time Georgia congressman. Among Barr's proudest moments -

Barr was a strong supporter of the War On Drugs and adamantly opposed legalization of medical marijuana. He successfully inserted an amendment in a funding bill that blocked the implementation of a medical marijuana initiative saying it "has no place in medicine, no place in pain relief".
He's changed his tune since becoming a libertarian. Mmm.

He voted for The Patriot Act. He now publicly regrets his Patriot Act Vote. No shit.

Barr authored and sponsored the Defense Of Marriage Act. He hasn't had the guts yet to flip flop on that one.

But perhaps, as Tom Hartmann says he has written 7 books on ADD, he can be forgiven for this lapse of attention to the details of Barr's impact on our everyday lives. A man renowned for lifestyle legislation becomes a libertarian...and wonders whether we might be depriving the American  people of their civil liberties...yeah, too little too late Mr Barr.

 

blousy bountiful beautiful candye kane

© photo Jill Posener. All Rights Reserved

The news from Candye Kane Central is that the lady is doing as well as can be expected after 8 hour surgery to remove a pancreatic tumor. If you have never seen Candye perform or haven't listened to her music, go treat yourself. Check out 'Toughest Girl Alive' on her myspace page and you'll get a sense of why she decided, when she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer to go out there and show the disease just how tough it would be dealing with the indomitable Candye. Great to know that she is on the road to recovery.

The gracious Candye Kane

Photo: Jill Posener © All Rights Reserved

My friend Candye, who I've had the honour of photographing, and who is one of the gutsiest and warmest women I know, had cancer surgery today and I've been passing a few hours listening to Candye's  thumping rousing funny and sexy woman identified blues, and looking through the pictures I took of her. I went to a club in San Francisco, Bicuits and Blues, a couple of years ago to listen to her band and I'd been struck, again, by just how freaking beautiful she is, but it's when I look at my own pictures of her that I get the biggest smile, because Candye being one of the most gracious women you'd ever meet put up with a sort of date with me - 12 years ago - when to be quite honest, I just flunked. I mean, what would you do, if you're a half way decent butch, given the chance to take the delicious Ms Kane on any date you chose?

We went to dinner, that was a good start. I watched her eat seafood with her hands and spill juices down her chin. She grinned, she laughed. And then I blurted out that I wanted to take her somewhere special. We got in my car, and drove through the foggy evening towards the Golden Gate Bridge. Sounds OK so far, right? But I wasn't taking Candye for a sentimental view of the City from the Marin headlands. I turned off the main road and drove through the silent Presidio until we sat, on a quiet unused roadway underneath the massive pillars of the freeway leading to the Bridge. The moon was bright, the air cool and Candye must have wondered what the fuck I was doing.

I opened the door, and beckoned her to follow me across the street. And there I introduced Candye Kane to the small, old pet cemetery created by servicemen living on the Presidio military base. It's an astonishing place and Candye and I wandered around looking at the makeshift memorials to pets belonging to men and women who had returned from war or might yet die on foreign soil. It's an emotional place. But possibly not the best choice for a 'date'.

Photo: Jill Posener © All Rights Reserved

Soon after, I drove Candye back to her hotel. She's always been very gracious about my awkwardness that evening. So today, as she is  facing  pain and fear and a new beginning, I'm looking back and smiling.

sex lies and tapioca

I can't help it, I'm back on this prostitution thing. I think men who go to prostitutes are doing the right thing. And I think most women whose men do go to hookers know full well it is happening, and would rather their guys have safe sex with a packaged bimbo of their choice than be giving furtive gifts to a woman they are having an affair with and who is hoping the guy is gonna leave his wife as he keeps promising to do. Ok, ok. I know that not all hookers have myspace pages, belong to an exclusive 'escort agency' and have their 'dates' in slick DC area hotels. I also know that millions of girls and women and sold into sexual slavery every year in this fucked up world of ours where females (and many boys also) are traded like chattel, oxen and mutual funds. The two things are very different. Unlike the hypocrisy which permeates the dominant culture about sex.

I think it's a damn shame that Spitzer had to resign over his youthful myspace whore, and it's an even bigger shame when his successor, David Paterson admitted he had cheated on his wife with a number of women, but perhaps as he is considered 'legally blind', he just didn't notice that they weren't the woman he was married to.

Makes you wonder though, doesn't it? What were the real motives behind 'getting' Spitzer, at that particular moment in time, just as Bear Stearns was collapsing and the US taxpayer was gonna have to bail out another corrupt financial institution. Yup, you can always get a guy by the balls. Literally.

My checkered past includes the fact that I once threw a garbage can filled with rotting fruit and meat through the plate glass window of a London porn store, and was one of 16 women arrested during a Reclaim The Night march when the police came bearing down on us, batons and boots raised. My hardline feminist perspective gave no quarter and took no prisoners. But I've learned a lot in the last 30 years, and I've come to appreciate that when actor Hugh Grant was found entertaining a paid for blow job in his car, he was doing the 'responsible' thing. Imagine how many women throw themselves at him, how many would like to boast about their one night with a star. And he, knowing how messy that could become, opts to jerk off in the mouth of someone who does it for a living. Personally, I'm OK with that.

So, just had to get that out of the way. I'm also in a froth about how many lies are told to get the sex people wanna have, and how many lies are told to get out of the sex they don't want no mo'. I'm in a mood actually, all around.

Funny thought for the day. Condoleeza Rice as VP. I'm sorry - this is the woman who is famous for the phrase 'Mission Accomplished' and who is responsible in large part for a bunch of failed policies in the Middle East. We've already worked out that just because Hillary is a woman doesn't make her the right woman for the White House, and that just because he is black doesn't make Obama the right man for the White House, so along come the Republicans and say 'hey, we got it. Black and a woman. Bingo'.

I've found the perfect dessert - butterscotch tapioca. Need some.

free trade is neither

I wanted to buy a pretty simple product - a portable, collapsible water bowl to take out on my dog hikes. You know, they are made of fabric with a waterproof lining, and are made by companies with cute names like Ruff Wear and Outward Hound. They are really useful. Those of you without pets - well, I don't think anyone reading my blog is petless - but even those of you with animal companions may not be as endlessly fixated on how vast a business the 'pet industry' is, as I am.

Americans spend over 30 billion dollars a year on their pets - that includes the big ticket items like vet care, grooming, boarding, training. But there is a rapidly growing market for 'designer' products - including organic and 'raw' foods, personalized leashes, $100 collars, hemp clothing, bejewelled name tags and associated services like dog walking, doggy day care and 'in home' visits for the pets of busy professionals who wanna make sure Max and Sophie don't become raging freaks being left home alone all day.

I watch all of this with a sort of wistful 'what if'. What if I had seen this fad coming a decade ago? What if I really could get my vision of a gallery of amazing - and it goes without saying, high quality - animal art off my imaginary back burner and out onto main street, what if I had thought of designing a collapsible water bowl, you know....

So I go to buy one of these things and they are reasonably cheap so I end up buying two of them. I'm particulary incensed by the one I bought at trendy REI, a store populated by global warming fixated, environment protection obsessed, adoring Berkeleyites who think that when they put on a pair of hiking boots they just saved the planet. Groovy pricey REI. This bowl is made by a company, Bison Designs, whose website homepage features a staff photo with everyone in front of a massive American flag and all are wearing a white T shirt sporting a Stars and Stripes. But the products of course are....errr....well....made in ....China. And I aint talking Chinatown in Atlanta, Georgia. The other bowl from Outward Hound, a company based in Orange County, California is also made in China. I'm not a protectionist. I believe in FAIR TRADE.

Didn't a container ship carrying goods manufactured in China destined for the shelves of environmentally fascistic Berkeley just dump a vast amount of oil in San Francisco Bay, despoiling our coastline and killing thousands of birds and marine mammals? What the freak is wrong with this picture? One helluva lot.

It starts with us. If anyone can point me in the direction of a collapsible water bowl made in America, by a company employing union labor and providing a living for working people right here, I'll buy it. No, I'll buy two of them. Meanwhile, I'm taking at least one of these bowls back to the store for a refund which I'm going to donate to an organisation which is trying to prevent the growing trade in animal parts from China, including bear paws which are becoming a delicacy in soup.

life, near death and the changing of the seasons

Roo Surrounded By Friends, Point Arena, March 23rd, 2008 © Jill Posener

It was easter Sunday two years ago, here in the beautiful woods among the redwoods and madrones, amid the yellow soil and the bluejays, and the house on the ridge that I love so much, that I lost sight of Roo for a moment. And then in an instant her cries pierced a foggy morning, a misty, cold lonely morning, as Mamma, a feral dog I had known and loved for years, grabbed Roo by the throat and carried her into the woods beyond my reach. Roo's small frame hung from the large jaw and her eyes were empty with terror. I felt a searing horror, and a pleading longing 'no' burst out of me with such volume that birds fluttered from trees and my border collie Frank rushed from the house and on a pursuit of Mamma, though he did not know why.

In those few minutes when I thought I had killed Roo with my carelessness, I watched helplessly, racing through underbrush, and over embankments, sliding down the rain slicked trails as the larger dog would stop ahead of me and drop Roo, only to gnaw at her legs or stomach and then pick her up and run some more, Roo's limbs drooping by her sides. She made no more sounds.

Frank kept me on the right track. Suddenly we emerged into a clearing, Mamma looked back at me almost adoringly, as if to say, 'look, look what I did'. I ran harder then and screaming at her to back off kicked her in the side just as she bent over to retrieve her prey once more. I reached for Roo and without thinking tried to pick her up. Her eyes flashed fear and her jaw snapped open and shut on my hands puncturing them over and over. I took off my sweater and wrapped her, lifting her to me, as her head dropped to one side. I flailed then, sobbing and saying her name again and again.

I was alone, it was easter Sunday and the blood from my tiny dog spread over a grey sweatshirt on which I can still see, after dozens of washings, the palest of brown as a reminder of her agony, and mine.

It was the kindness of people whom I didn't know well, that saved Roo's life. The woman who was able to reach the vet during his easter family dinner, the vet who did what he could but who warned me that she might not survive, that she must go to an emergency vet in Santa Rosa, a two hour drive down the fog draped coastal road, and the emergency staff who took her from me when we arrived, leaving me with blood seeping through clothes and empty arms, Roo already in a state of disengagement from the world, and me.

I left Roo there and drove back to the house on the ridge in the woods and to the rest of my pack and looked at Mamma and her mate Yogi, now back in their locked enclosure and decided they had to die. Not out of vengeance, but because I could not ever let them run free again after this attack. Roo survived. The two dogs died.

Today, sitting at the same computer I had sat at starting that dark day, the world could not be a more different place. That day a melancholy settled into my brain and leaked into my soul and it has taken almost two years to exorcise it. I, who am filled with the sheer joy of living, exuberant in the way the days begin with light, enamored of the visions I see dancing around in my head, and excited by the way in which simple things exalt the art of living - I was lost in a tunnel. No air, or light and no sure knowledge of it ever coming to an end.

I'm not sure what brought me to the door through which I was able to burst out of the tunnel - the zone, I describe it to the therapist I have depended on for two years. I remember the night of the day I had the two dogs killed, I called Jody and a dear friend Sarah, and they both called me back hourly until I was able to fall asleep, exhausted by my horror and self loathing. That was a night so black, so dense, I knew it was the beginning of a terrible journey.

Today, the fog sits somewhere across the ridge, Roo is lying on a chair with sun streaming in through a window, glistening in her rich thick coat of fur. She never seems to look at me or this place, even the spot on the trail where her blood mingled with dirt and leaves, with anything but a grin of life affirming pleasure.
Depression is, I'm glad to say, a companion whose claws left scars. The memory of that journey makes me even more alert to life and it's unexpected joys.

spitzer, moralism and mandatory neutering

I keep starting to write blogs about other things, for instance I am eager to let off steam about the proposed  state law in California mandating spay and neuter - Assembly Bill 1634, laughingly called The Healthy Pets Law. This is bad law people and I oppose it. Shitfuckgoddamm, are you sure Jill?????? Yes, I am, and when I have a few minutes not absorbed by stupid heterosexuals getting all riled up about a bit of prostitution, I'll get to it...

I've also started writing a blog about being proud to be a lesbian chauvinist, but the hypocritical, hysterical reaction to Elliot Spitzer just sweeps away cute little topics like that. You'd think all these talking heads have never heard of such a thing. Huh, a powerful white man liked to spill his semen all over the place in a fancy hotel room with a very attractive woman whom he had to pay for. This is what a guy resigns over??? Not going to war, or stealing from the American working class, or taking bribes, or being in bed with lobbyists. If only all politicians relieved their stress that way, we'd have fewer stuffed endangered species in hunting lodges.

Photo: ©Jill Posener, London 1982, All Rights Reserved

Can you believe the response to this thing? I am mad as hell. And you know where this is going to end, dontcha? It's gonna end up being his wife Silda's fault for being an uptight frigid ungiving wife with her twinset, pearls and silk scarf. So Elliot didn't get his rocks off with Silda. So freakin' what?

What exactly is everyone upset about? That he 'cheated' on his wife while being a hardass moralist? That he liked unprotected sex with his prostitutes? That he has three teenage daughters who are going to be 'ruined' by this? That he has 'issues'? That his wife has 'issues'? That sex has brought another political career to it's knees - forgive the sexual pun. What exactly are people surprised at? That a politician used hookers? That they were pretty pricey?

But back to mandatory neutering. You know where I'm going with this, right? So, I won't.

stolen - generations and elections

My Australian buddy Suzy - who shows me up by writing so beautifully and she is a visual artist of enormous talent, and she's a great parent of four-legged and two-legged beings, and she manages to make a longterm relationship work, and she's politically more correct than me, and she has always supported amazing self- empowerment efforts among indigenous and native peoples, and she has a mom who is about the best cook I ever had the pleasure of staying with, her dad and her sister are freakin' cool, and on top of that she introduced me to Bonzo, the first dog I fell in love with as an adult .... oh my god .... I hate her.

Melbourne, 1985 © Jill Posener. All Rights Reserved, 2008

Anyway, that Suzy wrote a comment on my blog about Kevin Rudd, the Australian Prime Minister making a long overdue official apology to indigenous people for the laws and policies of past Australian governments which robbed native people of their land and rights as human beings. Rudd refers specifically to the 'stolen generations', the thousands of children who were removed from their families and tribal lands and placed in 'orphanages', one of the most blatant and cruel attempts at eliminating a whole culture and people. Most Americans know of this terror via the movie Rabbit Proof Fence. This moment in history is an important one - will the Australian government be able to fulfil promises of change and create real practical solutions beyond the words?

Americans could look to Australia for guidance about how to run elections. The political parties choose a leader from within the legislative arena and the electorate votes the party's platform in the general election. There is  mandated public funding of elections, no complex caucus and primary system, no open primaries where Republicans are able to swing a vote in favour of one Democrat candidate in order to skew the process. America lives in an Oz dreamland where it is assumed that the primary system empowers we the people to be the decision makers. Splat.....oh dear I just spilt coffee on my new keyboard I laughed so hard...there are so many problems with Amerika's primary system it is hard to know where to start the surgery.

Take just two of the stranger anomalies - Florida and Pennsylvania. Florida is used to being disenfranchised so it doesn't really matter. Even though this state carries a large number of delegates, the vote didn't count. Why? Because of a power struggle between the Democratic National Commitee and the local state party over the timing of the primary. The fact that caucuses and primaries are spread out over 4 months is of itself absolutely nutty. So poor Pennsylvania, which doesn't vote till April doesn't count because Obama already has enough delegates. So how do you feel if you're a voter in the city of the birth of American democracy and hey, your vote don't count dude.

One of the reasons given is that if primaries were held on one day (like a general election), the candidates wouldn't have a chance to campaign in all the states. No shit, Sherlock! But public funding of elections would mean each candidate or party has equal media time and televised debates were shown on every channel including cable channels. You wouldn't need a massive on the ground campaign. You wouldn't need to make political consultants rich. And how about the fact that Kucinich was left out of Democratic candidate debates because MSNBC decided he wasn't a viable candidate? Is this working for you?

How do you feel about the 30 - 50 million dollars being raised every month by candidates in a PRIMARY campaign goddammit? Do you have a better idea of how that money could be spent?

The $100 you sent - how about funding a homeless shelter bed for 2 nights? 3 months of care for an oiled bird after an oil spill? Or paying for a senior citizen to be able to get vet care for her cat? Or organising a clean up of a local park? Maybe help pay for a returning army veteran to go on vacation? Or help with funeral costs for the woman shot to death in my Berkeley neighbourhood.

This blog is getting too long - this is important stuff people. You know what? The Australian Labour Party internally elected a leader (who wasn't everybody's first choice don't get me wrong), but who managed to lead the Party to victory over the Bush lover John Howard, and then within 6 months of taking power, issues a profound statement of regret for the policies of his beloved and dare I say it magnificent country. No primaries, no half a billion dollar campaigns, no lobbyists, no corporate financing of elections....start dreaming Amerika. What passes for public empowerment here is a popularity contest where the winners are the mainstream media, global corporations, consultants and lawyers and the men and women who are already among the richest in the world.