Jill Rants and Raves

once an alcoholic.....

It's hard to imagine a president with a more 'personal' agenda than GW, a man whose own inner demons have driven him to 'prove' himself within his family at the expense of the country he professes to protect and love. From his own statements about his father squandering the military moment handed to him in Kuwait, to his obvious fraternal conflicts with Jeb, in his guilt driven efforts to distance himself from his alcohol fueled past.

Bottom line - George W. Bush is an addictive personality, an alcoholic and none too bright. And when an ambitious operative without a conscience, like Karl Rove, comes across a family eager to give their wayward son meaning in his life, the opportunity just opens up all sorts of fun and games. Maybe even Rove didn't realise that 50% of the American public would be willing to 'enable' a born again Christian addict in recovery.

And worse, that almost the entire legislative branch of government, including those representing the other 50%, would meekly go along. If I'm angry with anyone, it has to be the Democrats who didn't stand up for any kind of principle while the executive branch dismantled the independence of the judiciary, and who were given briefings on American torture policy and turned away in order to campaign for their next four years in public office.

How else to explain the crimes and misdemeanors of these last seven years, and the complicity of the Democrats? How to explain Pelosi's refusal to consider impeachment? Having achieved a 'first' as a woman Speaker of the House, did Nancy simply forget that her service is to the electorate, to the good of the country, and to the Constitution?

Scott McLellan, the former Bush Press Secretary whose new book slams his former employer, stops just short of calling him a liar, but does use the word 'deception' in the title of his book, will be an interesting sidebar in this years election, but my question is 'did you have to wait until the lucrative book contract Scotty, to tell any kind of truth about what happened?'

Bush and his handlers - Dicky, Condy, Donny and the many many others - have so decimated the executive and judicial components of government, I am almost tempted to wish the election of John McCain upon us, so that Barack Obama will not have to spend four years sweeping up glass from the splintered windows of the Oval Office. Or should I say two years cleaning up, and the remaining two years campaigning for re-election. Because GW has so thoroughly created a culture of campaigning rather than governing that I do not know whether it can be turned back so quickly.

Has there ever been a president so driven by personal flaws. He seems at once to be giving his father and his brother the finger while his mother berates the world for critiquing her favored son. For his part, he doesn't remember whether he snorted cocaine or not, explaining away those hazy days when he ran a baseball team as just a bunch of wild parties. The wildest party was yet to come - who needs white powder when you can play cowboy in the white house.

And every Democrat you vote for should be asked one question even as you hold your nose and put them back in office. 'When exactly are you going to put the principles you campaign on ahead of your job security?'

Sidney Pollack

I don't usually do obits - but yesterday one of my favorite actors and directors died of cancer at age 73, and I'm gonna rent every single thing he ever did over the next few weeks. He appeared in last years 'Michael Clayton' as the head of the corrupt law firm, but my favorite film appearance of his was in Woody Allen's 'Husbands and Wives' when he played a New York professional having a mid-life crisis who leaves his shrill wife (one of the very best screen performance by the amazing Judy Davis) for a new age massage therapist and becomes a bit of a buffoon in sweatpants before reconciling with his wife.

As a director, he created some of my best loved - 'Three Days Of The Condor', 'Tootsie', 'They Shoot Horses Don't They' and 'Absence of Malice'.

Tomorrow, I'll be back to my crusading about butch identity, animal rights, people who write to local newspapers suggesting we forcibly sterizile teenagers, and sundry other things, including my current addiction to playing Scrabulous on Facebook. Who knew.

blowing the lid off my own gender war # 1

Gender, sexuality, identity - it's what everyone is talking about, especially in light of new scientific developments which can astonishingly (and frighteningly?) delay the onset of puberty enabling deeply gender dysphoric children to make a 'decision' about gender before the onslaught of hormonal changes sweep doubt under the proverbial rug; before breasts grow and ache, blood seeps from between your legs, or your voice drops, hair starts sprouting on your chin and your family refuses to listen to your pleas to be heard, listened to. Hysterical right wingers raise the specter of a eugenics program to create a 'master race', others try to act liberally empathetic while tamping down their fears of how this might be used.

It has been the elephant in the room since the earliest days of gay rights, at the heart of our open quest for liberation, in the brutal repression of drag queens and queers at the Stonewall Bar, and in the conflicts between many feminists and queer activists. And it was at the stifling middle of my internal struggle when I came out to my mother at 15 in 1968. The tomboy was making a choice, but my intense emotional and physical entanglements with girl friends long before that were already telling me something about the way I wanted to be with girls, and it wasn't sharing make up and dressing dolls. My mum never forgave me for burying a doll which had been brought as a gift for me - I didn't even wait for the bearers of the gift to leave the house. As they sipped gin and tonic on the red tiled porch of our Kuala Lumpur home, I took the offending object to the garden in front of them, dug a hole and dropped it in. I was 6. Was I distraught that they had brought me a gift so at odds with my interior? Or maybe I was a just a rude kid.

And when, on the last occasion I saw my mother alive she said quite matter of factly 'Jill, you were never the girl I wanted' she was quite openly stating the obvious truth.

In the last few years clues have flooded my consciousness and as they do, the battle lines between the exterior and the interior have begun to recede, as well as the depression, which unsurprisingly has been fading at the same rate as my menstrual cycle. I am left with a question. Would I have taken the step in my twenties, had transition been possible the way it is today? I end up answering 'no' most of the time. I have never wanted to be a what is socially defined as a man. And I have never wanted the physical characteristics of maleness: the facial hair, the bulking up, or the different scent. The thought of having to use a men's urinal filled me with horror. I have always liked belonging to the womens' club. Being with women filled me with a sense of well-being. But I often felt as if I was an intruder and an outsider in some way, and the times in my life when I was forced, quite without malice by my family, to conform to a more acceptable regimen of 'girlness' - well, it is as I described to my therapist once, like being strapped in a chair which spins, and walls covered in razor blades are moving inexorably inwards towards me. I'm always uncomfortable when 'butches' say they can go 'either way', or when I watch a self identified butch put mascara on her eyes. I both envy and despise the concept that it is a 'choice'.

The fight that I mounted to stay true to myself  seems heroic to me now. But I don't remember ever looking down at my body and feeling that I was simply not at home in it, that is was the wrong one. In that sense I don't have the kind of gender dysphoria I associate with many of the transmen I have known. Until of course, the day that my mother took me to buy my first bra, and I knew suddenly that something was terribly, horribly wrong. When puberty hit me, it was too late to stop the assumptions assigned to my gender. I was no longer Peter Pan. I was filled with revulsion.

It wasn't until breast reduction surgery was offered to me by my health care provider, in my mid 40's, as a way to decrease my back pains, that my body began to look the way I had thought it always should. Even then, I took enormous pains to reassure anyone who showed the slightest interest, that it had nothing to do with a transition of gender. There's no doubt, my body is that of a woman, and that aside from always wanting to shed 10 or 15 pounds, I'm pretty comfortable with it. I haven't worn a bra for over ten years, and without the monthly reminder of my femaleness, there is a feeling of peacefulness I haven't felt since I was 12, and disgusted with the blood staining my clothes and leaving an indelible mark on the bench in the classroom.

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.