Jill Rants and Raves

If you can vote - don't waste it!

going country....

I'm heading off for a rainy weekend in Point Arena, leaving my home, the cats and the chihuahuas in Susie's capable hands. Jasper the cat with the broken jaw has been eating food on his own over the last few days and I can postpone the cost of more vet care for a few days, and Joey, my - dare I say it - favorite black cat came home the other night with a hole in his head. Seriously. He and I have been sitting on the bathroom floor with the peroxide, warm compresses, and antibiotic cream while he purrs like an engine and I clean pus and blood from his noggin. What an idiot. Some dogs, those with the ability to pee and poop outside (those screwy chihuahua's just don't get it!) are coming along for the ride and mud slides, rainy beach walks and the glistening leaves with drips cascading off them and the ticks beginning to emerge from the hibernation of summertime. Oh well. Countryside is countryside and I love it. There is a ready made pumpkin pie, some salad stuff and my fair trade coffee in the cooler and I am excited about being away for a day or two.

For those of you who care, it's obvious I haven't blogged for a while, didn't write impassioned dispatches from London, Berlin or Cornwall. Suffice it to say the delicious experiences, flavours and sights and sounds of those two weeks will burst out of my consciousness soon enough.

But today, I just happen to be in combat mode. Some people seem to think I am often - or even always - in that frame of being. Not true. There is a real difference between being hyper- aware and sensitive to even miniscule changes in the emotional temperature of people around you (that is the sad state of being what is broadly described by the psych profession as PTSD) and being a combative type. Contrary to popular belief I hate conflict. But, having said that, I rarely walk away from a fight about an issue I care about if it is offered up to me. The windmills to tilt at are reproducing faster than you can say bunny rabbits, it seems.

I could get agitated about any number of things happening in the world, happening in the US, California or my backyard of Berkeley. I am absolutely mystified that two former female CEO's of major corporations are in the running for the most significant political positions in California - Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina - for Governor and Senator respectively. Spending millions of their own money, proving that for some women the term 'glass ceiling' is what they see over their luxury penthouses, these job slashing, self satisfied executives don't have an original idea between them.

In Texas a first time political challenger, Republican Stephen Broden shocked a few people by saying that violent revolution was an option if the upcoming elections didn't bring a change in leadership in Washington. Oops. Students at Kent State were massacred by the National Guard for saying a helluva lot less than that. But the mania of the right wing media in the form of talk radio has produced this evangelical hyperbole and we barely blink. The obsession with returning to whatever the Framers and Founders may have thought in 1776 has created an originalist fervor in America that is bordering on the extremely dangerous. 'Taking our country back' is code for taking it backwards.

We would do well to look back to a 1920 poem by WB Yeats 'The Second Coming' and to some of the greatest lines of warning ever written in the English language:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

But I have digressed - far far away from my original(ist) intent in this blog. 

Back to more mundane things. Dogs and Cats. It is raining cats and dogs. 10 pups in a box on Telegraph Avenue, 14 pups just aborted from a dog living loose on the Albany Bulb, 57 dogs killed in one bloody day at the Martinez Animal Shelter (your tax dollars proudly at work), cats arriving in cages at the front door, and out the back to the euthanasia room and their paws don't even touch the floor, pitbulls and chihuahuas being bred in someone's garage and sold on Craigslist under the guise of 're-homing' fees, including the 8 week old 'border collie' for $250 (excuse me while I splutter at the sight of this little pitbull mix pup being masqueraded as a herding dog).

10 years ago California passed truly progressive legislation about animals in animal shelters - the Hayden Bill - which changed the way animal shelters do business in California. A decade later, the bill has almost entirely been abandoned, shiny new shelters have been built with reluctant taxpayer dollars which are busting at the seams with unwanted animals, non profits have become bloated 'rescuing' dogs and cats from 'high kill' shelters and yet we still have virtually no (truly) low cost pet care for those struggling in this economy and the numbers of animals remaining unspayed is rising, creating a crisis of unwanted animals all over again. Low cost is not a $50 spay for your dog. Low cost is not a $15 vaccine. Low cost is not a $50 vet exam the moment you step in the door. Low cost is when you can go to a wellness clinic seven days a week and have a vet look at your flea infested cat and give you the comforting flea medication for no charge. Low cost is when you can call a vet and say 'I don't want my dog to breed' and have them say 'we can help'.

We must, just must create a wellness system for pets - at least here in this one of the richest places on earth - based on the public health model for people. Because you know what, you cynics - everytime you help a domestic cat or dog (or rabbit, guinea pig, lizard, snake etc) you are assisting a human being. And from the other end I'm sick of the moralism pointed towards low income or homeless people when they have animals as companions and need help.

Okay, gotta get dressed, spend a moment at the demonstration at a vivisection lab here in Berkeley (yes) and pick up a dog that got fixed the other day by a fund I manage for a small non-profit, and drop it off at it's home and head north with my happy band...have a great weekend!

 

 

puppy love

There are photos of me as a small kid, sitting on the floor of our two story house on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, surrounded by pups, cats and Ben, my recently arrived younger brother. My mum used to joke that she had no idea whose piles of poops or pools of piss were whose. Chaos seemed perfectly normal. The verandah doors were flung open, the house filled with light, and the terracotta tile floors as easy clean as you could get. Only my Dad's precious Afghan rug truly suffered under the endless deposits upon it. I always wondered why, in later years, my mum used this beautiful and fading fast rug in her kitchen where any vestiges of pride it may have had were eradicated under the spillage from the pots and pans on the gas stove above. It probably wasn't hard for my dad to lose the rug in the divorce. He may have looked at it and seen the signs of abuse and shrugged 'Ah, yes - that was my life as a married man and father. Good riddance'.

But I digress. Of course. That would be me. Fast forward 50 years. Ouch. My small house is filled with light, I try to fulfil my yearning to have a home where indoors and outdoors are contiguous, and where animals scamper in a kind of aimless pursuit of joy, or lie in unexpected places trying to get some peace. I am often claustrophobic in other people's homes, and hotel rooms are like suffocation. I loved working in the theatre in the 70's, especially matinees, when the dark enveloping gloom was punctuated with brilliant exuberant light and sounds and then at the end of the show, after prepping the stage for the evening show, I would burst through the stage door into the light of the afternoon. Darkness is not me. Unless we are talking the darkness of my soul.

I was called 'one of the most polarising people I know ' by someone the other day. This description doesn't upset me now. Not like it used to. I have come to understand that polarisation is one of the most effective ways of exploding the status quo. And it isn't that I don't have a vision to go with the laser beam focus that I bring to the debate. Which brings me to puppies. Really.

One afternoon in late June I was standing around, like I do, at the animal shelter. A young guy, with bruising and cuts on his face walked in holding a dark red chihuahua which was convulsing, her legs and head twitching, she was panting, in obvious distress. The animal control officer began asking the usual questions: what is going on, is it your dog, where did you find her...and the young man got more tongue tied as the dog flailed in his arms. At first he said he'd found her on the freeway the night before, but couldn't remember the freeway or the city, then said he had been mugged and didn't remember much, then that he had been to a vet but couldn't afford the $300 the vet had wanted to charge him for treating the dog. The man was nervous, said he had no money and the vet had suggested he surrender the dog to a shelter.

But no-one asked him about the puppies. So I asked. 'Where are the pups?' The dogs breasts were hugely engorged and droplets of milk hung at the ends of them and dribbled over the man's fingers as he held her. He said in almost a whisper 'in my motel room', and I said 'so you didn't find her last night on the freeway'. He seemed in despair and the officer behind the desk said 'where's the motel' and after he said Richmond, the game was over. Because of the insanity of 'jurisdiction' and 'boundaries' one animal shelter won't officially take in a dog from another jurisdiction (though the end result is that on an almost daily basis people lie about where a dog or cat is from or stuff animals in the night boxes so as not to have to face the questions). I offered to take the dog and get her to a vet at my expense, but he had to agree to give me the pups which were two weeks old. He hesitated, he said he could raise them, and he and I went outside to work things out.

When we got outside I asked why he'd lied and he blurted out that he was afraid to get into trouble, that he watched Animal Planet and was afraid of the dog police, that the vet told him to come to Berkeley and not to go to the local shelter because they would probably have euthanised the dog. After much discussion, he agreed that he would have a hard time hand rearing the pups, he didn't realise for example that at that age the mother still expresses the piss and poop by licking the stomach and genital area to stimulate the bladder and bowel. We drove to my vet where the dog was immediately hooked up to IV fluids and calcium - her condition was diagnosed as eclampsia, a fairly common condition in nursing mothers who are simply unable to create enough milk for the pups and still retain enough calcium for herself. Poor diet is a primary cause and Chihuahuas it turns out are more prone to the condition than other breeds. The vet said she would have been dead within a few hours. Once the condition is corrected and the dog can receive proper food and calcium supplement, she usually recovers with no ill effects.

With the mother dog lying weak and thin hooked up to IV's, I followed the young man and his friends in a van with out of state plates to a motel in Richmond and with a moment of nervousness creeping in, called the animal shelter and told them to call the police if I didn't check in in an hour!

 

In a warm motel room, with bags, clothes and video games everywhere, 5 little pups huddled in a corner. I loaded them into a cardboard box and within 10 minutes I was racing back to the vet for them to be checked out. That night, in contrast to everything I have ever said about having pups in my home, I had a momma chihuahua and her five pups in a puppy pen within 5 feet of my bed, so I could respond to any emergency.

That was 7 weeks ago. I haven't slept through the night since the pups arrived, I have spent a ton of money on the initial life saving emergency vet visit for Frida the mom (which was heavily discounted by the vet), good dog food (and thanks also to my small local pet store which routinely gives me discounts), milk replacement formula to supplement both the pups and mama's food, wet dog food, high end puppy kibble, fecal sample tests, de-wormings, flea treatments, and am grateful, so incredibly grateful that the vet has let me come in every week to weigh the pups, trim their nails and check them out when I have been worried, and that the Berkeley animal shelter has given vaccines for free to help me out.

But more than that - I have learned more than I ever thought I could about dogs and pups. And even as I have fallen in love with each and every one, and have now started adopting them out to wonderful homes I am more convinced than ever that they should never have been born. For me - these beautiful, magnificent individual and unique lives are my poster pups for spay and neuter.

stella gets her head bumped

The day appears to be ending on an up note. I have decided not to take Stella, one of the 8 week old chihuahua mixes to the emergency vet in order to pay $75 to be told that she needs to rest and to watch out for any worsening of her injury. The injury. Ah, yes. I was getting their food ready, and that in itself is a bloody drama in my household because as I yank the pull can lid off the canned food which I add to their dry kibble, the entire household converges on the kitchen and begins to jostle for position. So I was getting the puppies food ready, and that also poses some problems as Dolly is one of those picky eaters who grabs one kibble and takes it to her room (metaphorically speaking) for half an hour while she chews 150 times as instructed to do in the Holistic Dog magazine she subscribes to, and the others are either not happy with seeing their reflection in the metal shiny bowls, or are freaked out by the white porcelain of the other plates, so you get the idea that mealtime is dreaded by me even though I get entirely neurotic if I think they aren't eating enough kibble and putting on the requisite ounces every week when  they go to get weighed at the vet. On Thursdays. I am nothing if not a protective Jewish butch.

So, I'm grappling with the can and I lose my grip on the remarkably heavy teaspoon I am holding and I watch it freefall through the air towards the pups, lying happily in their dog bed. It was one of those slow motion moments as the inevitable happens and the next thing I know is that Stella starts screaming, running for the door and tripping down the stairs into the garden, howling in pain as a bump starts poking up through that black furrowed brow over the cute little tan eyebrow. The others start howling in sympathy, the mother dog bites my ankle, Riley hides in horror, Allie makes a beeline for the injured pup, Roo starts yelling epithets at me and Target never takes her eye off the kitchen counter and the teetering can of food....it was not one of my best moments in my five weeks of caring for these miraculous survivors of human neglect.

Finally I managed to lift her from the gravel in the yard, she was shaking like a chihuahua on ice, and I felt like a total and complete bastard. This on top of the fact that they had their first vaccine on Thursday, the first invasive assault on their perfect little bodies. But Stella, even with the ugly lump on her head, wagged her tail at me while I hand fed her and then went and bit Vincent in the gut.

After walking my dogs in the park, I came home to find Stella a little lethargic - not surprising, she has a freakin' bump on her head. I called the emergency vet hoping for some 'take two aspirin and call me in the morning' type of advice but of course was told I had to rush there immediately. Which I won't do. I will probably be up every two hours to shake her awake which is what you are supposed to do to people with possible concussion. As it is, I slept on the leather couch in my office last night (there were two many damn dogs on my bed and no I couldn't kick them off), and tonite I may well find myself curled up on the kitchen floor staring at her till daybreak.

But the day is really ending on an up note. I am not telling you any of the nasty death and destruction tales that have tormented me this past week (but tomorrow is another day, another blog), and Susie just called excitedly from her job to tell me she got hit on by a very attractive younger woman.

a funny thing happened on the way to...

Not all that funny really. I just liked the idea of starting a blog that way. And as I sat on a dusty, barely paved road near the railtracks in Berkeley late yesterday afternoon, trying to coax a small injured starving chihuahua from her hiding place behind a chain link fence, I couldn't help but laugh at the visual image of my personal connection with this 8 pound creature. An open can of puppy food, a snappy snare, a couple of leashes and a swiss army knife; and me with food smeared on my jeans on my knees peering at this dog with one rear leg bloodied and swollen to twice the size of the other one with the fur torn back across the skin. I'll be 57 years old in two weeks for fucks sake.

And there are 5 chihuahua puppies in a puppy pen at my house, with the mother bored out of her mind with them, pleading with me to let them loose on the street. And she, Frida, the mom (formerly called 'hash', yeah that's right), unaware that neither she nor these 5 will spend too much time longer at my place. But her journey from the side of the freeway in San Bernardino County (if young Brandon who gave her to me can be believed) to a motel room in Richmond where she gave birth and then quickly collapsed with a calcium deficiency and almost died, to my newly painted bedroom where she and her brood have taken over - her journey is also one where the intersection of her life with mine reminds me of the story where thousands of starfish have become stranded on the shore and a young boy picks one up and carefully restores it to the watery depths. An adult man asks the child why he bothers. After all, he points out the obvious, there are thousands, what does it matter? The child doesn't hesitate: it matters to this one, he says, entirely clear on the concept that is eluding the cynical and jaded older man.

I think that even in this my 58th year, that little boy shines a light onto and into me that is the kernel of truth in the morass of political and moral engagement that has characterised my life from the earliest. I never was that good at playing with others, even when the room was crowded and the room filled with friends. Social but terrified, surrounded but isolated, charming but entirely ready for battle at any moment, I have either missed out on or avoided (depending on your viewpoint) some common human interactions. Though I shared 12 years with a woman I loved, I feared the intimacy beyond the companionship, though I had the opportunity when I was in my twenties, to become pregnant and have a child like many of my radical lesbian friends (with radical gay men as the sperm suppliers), in order to raise a new generation of feminist imbued youngsters, though I have been loved well by many and devotedly by some, though I can boast of friendships across continents and across generations which remain intense and joyous across time and space, and even though I have come close to the kind of professional success I see certain others in my circle rightfully enjoy - I have remained apart, distant and surrounded by a darkness from which my soul may never be released completely.

The battle began so early. Was it the day when I was 5 or 6 when I buried a doll I had just been given right in front of the guests who had given it to me? Was it the day I menstruated for the first time, at 12? Was it the day my breasts began to show through my dirt specked T shirt? My mum would dismiss my anguish with the familiar refrain about my just being a tomboy. But I was not a tomboy. Neither was I a boy. And didn't like the way boys behaved most of the time. My older brother Alan who I tried to tag along with would always push me away as I followed he and friends down the driveway as they left on some boys adventure. By the time I was 10 and wearing my fathers shirts with a schmeer of Brylcreem in my hair, the torment was complete, and the battle raging. By the time I found what I thought would be the liberation of feminism, the war was already lost, with my reluctant acceptance of my femaleness but my tortured desire to be among women not as one of them but as lover of them. If lesbianism seems the answer to that, you are following along nicely.

But lesbian feminism brought - instead of liberation - a proscriptive and angry set of behaviour modifications for a boy like me. And so the fear and loathing set in. At nearly 57, as the anger has subsided for the first time in my life I get a chance however late, to live true to a principle so simple it makes me smile in almost childlike exuberance. Gender, my gender, my torment, my inner torture means absolutely fuck all to the terrified dog behind the fence. Animal rescue, while heavily populated by middle class and middle aged women, is a gender free zone in the mind of the animal, the one to whom it matters whether they get left on the beach to suffocate with the thousands of others or whether that intersection with my life brings them to safety.

The injured chihuahua peered through the fence as I cracked open the can, and as she began to feast on the wet food on my fingers and allowed me to slowly touch her face and her back, and to slip a leash around her neck, she understood the difference between fear and trust. It took just half an hour. She is at the vet now, and will go to the shelter later today. And probably next week, or tomorrow another funny thing will happen on the way.....

just an average guy

That is the description given by a neighbor of the man arrested for a horrifying number of killings of black prostitutes in the LA area. Lonnie Franklin Jr had a habit of taking hardcore photos of the prostitutes he had sex with in his van, and then showing the images to neighbors with a bit of ribald boy to boy 'I had her last night', as if the 'conquest' of a woman you have to pay to have sex with you is somehow an accomplishment.

If Lonnie Franklin Jr is an 'average guy' this could explain why the central tenets of feminist thought - which include that women are not sexual objects, that they are equal to men, that they have a right not to be sexually exploited - have not really taken hold in our society.

There was a time when I honestly believed that the emancipation of women from brutal sexualization was simply a matter of educating men, creating an equal playing field for girls and empowering them to say 'no'. Excuse me while I laugh.

Franklin has been arrested for 10 murders committed over a 22 year span by a killer dubbed the Grim Sleeper (how droll is that?). And after shooting or strangling his victims (who may well have been average women with young children needing new shoes and elderly parents needing care) this average guy discarded their bodies in trash bins or dumped them in alleys and covered them in debris. It is because we are so accepting of that kind of 'average guy' behaviour that a man like Franklin could go for over two decades without so much as a sideways glance from authorities. He was finally identified when DNA taken from a survivor of one of his assaults closely matched Franklin's son who had been in jail and had to provide DNA. When it was obvious that the son was not old enough to have committed the murders, the police were able to grab some DNA from a half eaten pizza pie left behind at a restaurant by his dad.

Al Seib, Getty Images

Franklin, 57, appeared in court and did not enter a plea.

I don't think the number of his victims will stop at ten. There are probably many more women, living as so many millions of women do, on the edge of our society making a paltry living as hookers in the seamier parts of our urban nightmares, who went missing and who were never sufficiently loved or missed. It would be tempting to say this human monster is hardly average, but regrettably he is more so than we like to admit. And the next Mr Average is already cruising the streets.

June - the month of being 'other'

This week in June has become, over the last three decades - the holiest grail for those of us who are not heterosexual. And before any of you start splurting that I'm somehow asserting differences over similarities, let me say it for you. And nowhere is this difference more pronounced and more jubilantly assertive than in my adopted home town of San Francisco, in the half gloom of the Castro Theatre during the Frameline Film Festival. It is a holy place. A cathedral. While the world swirls around outside, those of us fortunate enough to see one of the many groundbreaking documentaries in that place - about a sliver of our lives, a moment in our times, a crisis in our midst, or a hero in our making (I admit that for me only a few of the feature films I've seen match the potency of a mist clearing documentary) - the sharing of those moments with strangers sobbing beside us or laughing in uproarious recognition - are the moments when being gay, being lesbian, bisexual, queer, transgender, being other, feels like the conquering of Everest, the discovery of penicillin and a first kiss all at the same time.

And when that documentary is about an era and an enemy almost foreign to us now, just 30 years after it began to destroy the fabric and the lives of the generation which saw Harvey Milk elected as Supervisor from within their own ranks, the shock is like a cannon burst of freezing water followed by electric shock.

'We Were Here' previewed at the Castro Theatre Sunday afternoon to an audience most of whom knew at least some of the over 18,000 dead in San Francisco from AIDS during the years of the epidemic. And there were also many there for whom AIDS is just a history lesson. What shook me, as everyone silenced their cell phones and the light of the screens shooting text messages back and forth went dark, was that this community has emerged so strengthened from the epidemic and because of the epidemic, that it behooves us to see the dead as martyrs, reluctant and even ignorant of their martyrdom. Not just to a disease that confounded the medical world, a pandemic that remained ignored politically for years because the epicentre was among the hated, but because they died without knowing that by the time the disease was waning, the community would have recomposed itself, reinvented itself and reinforced itself as one of the most powerful, most organised, mobilised and well-crafted alliances, unthought of in the early days of the 70's and even the 80's as gay men and lesbians lived close by but rarely broke bread together.

I am one of those lesbians who, having come from a history of radical lesbian feminism, could not make the leap to comprehension or love until I came to San Francisco in 1987 and by then it was too late in many cases to soothe the conflicts with my gay friends in London who were beginning to die as I left the place of my political formation and sought liberation anew in gay America.

My first gay compadre to die violently, died not from AIDS, though he might have had he lived. Drew Griffiths, the founder of Gay Sweatshop Theatre Company - on the left in the photo with fellow founder Philip Howell - died in his own apartment in 1984 at the hands of a homophobic hater who, unless fate has taken karmic justice, still walks the streets a free and unknown killer. Drew was 36. By the time an early member of Gay Sweatshop, director Gerald Chapman died of AIDS at the age of 38 in 1987 and I began to see the cumulative effects of the disease in my own community, I had left London for San Francisco, leaving behind a certain detritus of failed relationships, disappointed friends, and political wreckage in the conflict between gay liberation, radical feminism and separatist lesbianism.

On one of my first visits back to London after settling in to my Bernal Heights flat with my co-worker Susie Bright and two cats, I saw across the room at the London Lesbian and Gay Centre a man who had been crucial to my emergence into theatre after I left school. Michael Richmond, a director and actor was the first openly gay man I met as I started my tentative career in stage management at the fledgling Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond early in 1972 when I was 18. Before I ever went to LAMDA (London Academy of Music And Dramatic Art) and trained in light and sound, before I ever wrote my first play in 1974, before I even knew how to hang a fresnel or cross fade a sound cue, Michael took me under his wing and gave me my first lessons in just how dependent the theatre was and is upon the gay community. 

He sat at one of the round white tables at the Centre and as I rushed to greet him, he put one hand over his mouth and pushed me away with the other. 'I have AIDS' he whispered and refused to let me touch him, even putting his hand over his mug of tea as if the steam from the liquid could somehow transfer this terrible disease to me. I hugged him over his strong objections, he turned his face from me, and we talked for a few minutes before I went to meet the friend I had arranged to see. It is never meant to be that way, but of course I never saw Michael again before his death.

So, my time alone but not alone, in the Castro Theatre on Sunday afternoon brought on a mood of contemplation and appreciation. As the list of corporate sponsors and major donors fills the screen - a reminder of the co-option of this community into the mainstream that is one of the legacies of the AIDS era - the uncomfortable thought occurs that the epidemic focused this community in a way no other enemy could. And that no enemy will ever bring us that close to destruction, to defeat, to self immolation as that one did. The modern gay community owes every bit as much to the martyrs of the AIDS years as to the heroes of Stonewall, the Mattachine Society, and Harvey Milk. The moment gay men and lesbians took to the streets and were seen to fight for life and not just lifestyle was the moment we took our rightful and long overdue place at the table. That there are many who are still trying to rip the chairs from under us on our way to that table, trying to bar us from the place we hold at the table, trying to take away what so rightly belongs to all of us is just so much more inspiration for our future generations.

As the decision nears about Prop 8 in California it is a reminder that among all the demons we have fought and will fight in the future - individual violence towards us leaving a man like Drew Griffiths slaughtered in his own home, or leaves a student like Matthew Shepard hung like a trophy on a Wyoming range, or the mob mentality which preys on the fears of many and tries to deprive us of simple basic rights - the words of abolitionist Wendell Phillips are as true today as they ever were: Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

The price of the privilege of being 'other' is that we may never truly stop being vigilant.

Helen Thomas tells her truth....

Helen Thomas has been a Washington institution since the later years of the Eisenhower administration. Her place in the Press Room at the White House is iconic at the very least. Her role as the grande dame of question time will never be reprised. She has shredded glass ceilings for women journalists and has become a celebrity in her own right as she grilled Presidents over the decades.

But no-one should be fooled by the appearance of an 89 year old woman receiving cupcakes from Prez Barack Obama.

Thomas grew up in Kentucky, where the original residents probably weren't of Lebanese descent as Thomas's parents were. Presumably they arrived in a welcoming Amerika after the red faces were already assigned to the trash heap of reservations and shallow graves.

Her comments recently that Jews should get out of Palestine were a careless spillover during a casual and unguarded moment. But when asked where should they go Thomas says as if it were so simple "they should go home." When asked for just a tad of clarification she explains: "To Germany, to Poland, to America. Wherever". If she had left it with the 'American' Jews it might have been a little more agreeable. After all, few US Jews fled from an oppressive regime such as the Soviet or Fascist systems. But Helen, perhaps now might be a good time to buy that apartment building in Tripoli (it's about as muggy as DC) and leave Washington. To the Redskins.

Al and Tipper ... Congratulations!

You'd think the world had ended. You would think that the institution of marriage had been dealt a blow from which it will not easily recover ( I am rooting for that one), you'd think they had personally snubbed their collective thumbs at the rest of us, betrayed their children, lied to us for years, cheated and tricked us. Columnists are on the verge of tears, mystified by the idea that after 40 years, these two couldn't just have limped across the finish line - FOR US godammit if not for themselves. And a few have allowed themselves the naughty expression of 'How did the Clintons stay together and not the Gores?' There is talk of the 'failure' of this marriage, questions of 'what went wrong?', is there an affair in the shadows, a bad habit that Tipper finally had enough of, was she sick of sharing him with an increasingly obsessive lover called Mother Earth?

This was by ANY standards and by any measurement a phenomenally successful marriage, of two people who appeared to meet the needs of the other through some fairly major challenges - including the battles of his political life, the near death of their son after being hit by a car, and Tipper's efforts to forge an independent identity separate from her husband. They raised children, they are grandparents, they have lives still to live at 60 plus. But to hear the outrage, it is as if the 40 years are not a success but simply the prelude to failure.

I have never been much of an Al Gore fan. Doesn't matter. I have always liked Tipper's photography. She was far more interesting to me than he was. Though I was disappointed in her formation of the Parents Music Resource Center in the mid 80's when she is quoted as saying  "the change in rock music was attributable to the decay of the nuclear family in America".

Perhaps the real answer to why Tipper and Al decided to part amicably after 40 years is that simple. She started listening to all the rock music she didn't allow her kids to hear....

Bottom line - they had a phenomenal run and showed in many ways exactly what a 'successful' marriage could be. And at least, unlike most politicians, they decided to separate BEFORE having sex with someone else. Tipper and Al - I for one, salute you!

Here There and Knitting

 

A series of 8 foot high metal letters spelling out HERE on the Berkeley side of the border and THERE on the Oakland side, commissioned in 2005 as part of Berkeley’s mandated ‘public art’ component in or around eligible public building projects, has been creating a bit of a stir ever since it was erected. Even though there has been no official Oakland reaction to being the ‘THERE’ side of the boundary instead of the ‘HERE’, there’s a nagging feeling that Berkeley’s innate superiority, reflected in being ‘HERE’, is a snub to the slightly ragged more ethnically diverse Oakland.

The original call for artwork submissions, on the City’s website states:

 “In order to create a definitive entrance to the City of Berkeley, this project will utilize public art to give the City's borders a recognizable entry on the south side of Berkeley. This project will help distinguish Berkeley from neighboring cities by serving as a transition from one vicinity to the next. Artwork that is reflective of and/or involves the community and its history is encouraged. It is highly suggested that the word "Berkeley" be incorporated into the artwork. This public art project aspires to create a welcoming sense of entrance into the City of Berkeley by serving as a friendly monument to both motorists and pedestrians.”

Not sure I think the winning project met that criteria but who cares once the city’s officials could describe it as a whimsical piece with literary connotations like the Poetry Walkway downtown. Gertrude Stein, whose misused quote about Oakland ‘there is no there there’ is hinted at in this sculpture never actually disparaged her hometown but meant that she could no longer go home after discovering that her childhood home had been torn down.

Ironically, the HERE THERE sculpture is far more pleasing than the ‘official’ There! sculpture in Jack London Square by artist Roslyn Mazzili.

But finally, after years of feeling that Oakland was being insulted, Berkeley’s own version of the Tea Party decided to knit a woolen cozy to slip over the T as a protest against the sculpture. Now, Berkeley officials have decided to show their worst and most humorless face by demanding the knitters remove their woolly sheath and are threatening unspeakable acts against these domestic terror-knitters.

Personally, I think it’s another storm in a Berkeley teacup and the re-facement of the sculpture adds character at the very least to the dull original. Oakland can just sit back and laugh at their smaller northern neighbor and marvel at the amount of spare time the city has to waste.

And as for me - I would always rather be somewhere other than here….