My current boss is now ending the third week of a four week paternity leave. Just before he left, he dumped a couple of unfinished, deadline-sensitive projects on me. Even during his leave, he has been doing some work from home and periodically checking his e-mail. And because he left me with no information about anything he was working on other than the dumped projects, I have already tried to call him four times.

My sister gave birth to my niece five months ago.

And now she has a new profile picture on Facebook: Her glasses look exactly like my mother's, as does her hairstyle. The picture was taken in LA (where I was born). It's even got some sort of Instagram filter that makes it look like it was taken on a late 1970s Polaroid.

The baby looks nothing like me, at least. But otherwise, fuckin' uncanny.

The pain went away in full not long after my discharge, so I've been working full days all week--including conference travel over the last two days. I actually cut my attendance short to go back into the office tomorrow because of the voluminous shit-piles that have been accumulating in my absence.

In the evenings, I have been getting mysterious temperature rises. Though they are accompanied by no pain, and dissipate quickly with Tylenol and bedrest, they have been a cause of some concern.

And my mother called: My baby sister is in labor.

Yet the way I am unwinding from all the above is by listening to Aphex Twin's Druqks album, one of the longest, most discordant pieces of post-Minimalism avant-drum'n'bass ever committed to binary code. And I am seriously considering putting together a math-heavy blog post this weekend on how the new State tax policy proposed by a coalition of Maine "progressives" and "independents" is a vicious attack on local workers.

The boy ain't right.

(And this, folks, is why my LJ is still active. And pseudonymous.)

Even though I'm fiercely allergic to cats, I think I'll miss that cat more than I'll miss my father.

"Fantasy. Lunacy."
"All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities."

The above is from Cloud Atlas, published in 2004. In 2011, weeks before the resignation of Hosni Mubarak, I said almost exactly the same thing in a meeting in New York about ongoing events in the Arab world, thinking I was being terribly witty. It seems David Mitchell beat me to it by some seven years.

wouldprefernot2

pantryslut

"To play along, just answer the following three (3) questions:

• What are you currently reading?
• What did you recently finish reading?
• What do you think you’ll read next?"

My responses:

Currently reading: Complete Works of Nathanael West (fairly actively--currently on A Cool Million); Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften by Robert Musil (much more slowly).
Most recently finished reading: In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O'Brien.

Most likely to read next: Either Novel without a Name by Duong Thu Huong or some random book off the recent purchases shelf at my local library. (Depends on whether I finish the West before or after my next library trip.)

• Conservatives don't trust black or brown people, or the mentally ill (since these fall under the rubric of supposedly easily identifiable "bad guys"), or teachers presumably, since they don't seem to be good enough "guys"--heck, most of them aren't even guys.
• Liberals don't trust anyone who is not a uniformed soldier or police officer.
• And a lot of alleged radicals don't seem to trust anyone at all.

How many people are left who would sing unreservedly along with William Morris?

The presentation cites among others, Marx and Engels, Foucault, David Harvey, and Hardt and Negri. Each of those citations contains at least one misreading so tendentious that I can't help but think that the misunderstanding is willful.

So what I would like, nay, love to do, rather than write this damned report, is send her an e-mail in which I enumerate her errors and suggest that she spend a bit of time cuddled up with Volume III of Capital. That, however, would not be wise.

1. Guns are Bad
   This is often coupled with a queasy, pornographic fascination with images of the device used in the shootings, the Bushmaster 225. As a resident of a heavily rural state where many people get a significant portion of their annual protein intake from hunting, it doesn't look particularly remarkable to me. I may very well have seen someone in camo and an orange flak jacket walking along a public highway with one of those a few weeks ago, during deer season. I note also that the people who say this rarely go so far as to say that guns are bad in the hands of police officers (who kill far more people in the U.S. than mass shooters) or soldiers (who call far more people in Afghanistan each year than are killed by anyone with a gun in the U.S.), so what they are really saying is that "guns ought to be the monopoly of the state, which I trust, either because I am naive, or because I feel reasonably confident that it will never turn its guns against people about whom I care." For those few consistent pacifists who would say that all guns should be turned into ploughshares, they at least have the virtue of consistency, if not the power of an actionable plan.
2. Guns may or may not be bad, or I may just not want to say that they're bad for fear of jeopardizing the Democrats' chances in the next election cycle, but they ought to be a bit better regulated.
   The shooter in this case had access to the gun from his own household. Either the gun was legal (as was first reported), or it was not (as some reports are now suggesting). Either way, this does not speak much to the efficacy of state regulation of firearms as a means of preventing massacres. If it was legal, then the owner (who ended up being one of the victims) had to traverse the existing set of regulatory measures in order to purchase it. If she did not, and it was illegal (at least in her home state) then the existing regulatory measures were ineffective at preventing her from obtaining it. The only way for gun regulations to attain such a level of efficacy would, it seems, be to verge on outright prohibition. Which returns us to the "guns are bad" position.
3. Watch out for the crazy people!
   This is basically a variation on the previous one. And I already ranted about it after the last mass shooting. Don't make me repeat myself.
4. An Armed Society Is a Polite Society (or some variant thereof)
   I am not the most well-traveled person in the world, but I've been a few places outside the borders of the U.S. The most polite place I've ever been was Toronto, where I am fairly sure guns are not widespread. When I lived in New York City, I often got into public scrapes with people whom I perceived as acting like colossal assholes. (Some of those incidents have been chronicled in this LJ.) In many cases, they were acting like colossal assholes, as many New Yorkers are wont to do. In many cases, I was also acting like a colossal asshole, in retrospect, but the worst kind, the kind with an offended sense of righteousness. At times, people who cared about me (friends, relatives, [spouse], therapists) tried to get me to ease off such encounters by saying after the fact, "What if that guy had a gun?" The warning did nothing positive. It just added to the general atmospheric anxiety that made me predisposed to such collisions. (Which have become notably more rare, and of much lower intensity when they do happen, here in Maine.) An armed society is not a polite society, it is a fearful society. A polite society is a polite society, i.e., one in which people are predisposed to regard one another as deserving respect and consideration. And anyone who thinks it's a good idea for classroom teachers to be armed must be smoking crack. (Yes, I know that wasn't very polite. I'm still basically a New Yorker.)
5. Guns Don't Kill People, People Kill People (or some variant thereof)
   One way that this argument has been made has been to opportunistically point to the epidemic of school stabbings in China, some of which have been as deadly as school shootings in the U.S. I was first aware of those stabbings years ago: They struck me, much as the school shootings do, as symptomatic of a society in which some people are driven to such an edge of despondency, with so little hope of redress, that they do something sickly deranged. If defense of your political position requires you to compare the U.S. to China--with its one-party dictatorship, bloated security apparatus, miserable sweatshops, etc.--then your political position is only weakly defensible. And if this was your first reflex after the shootings, then you are, fundamentally, an asshole.
6. Hug Your Children Tonight
   Oh, yes, as if parents everywhere were neglecting to show their children even the most basic signs of affection, and needed some horrific event to happen to other people's children to remind them of its importance. This is the sort of meaningless drivel that people come up with when they're trying not to be "political".
7. We should be talking about the highly mediated, incredibly complicated set of social, cultural, economic, psychological and public health factors that lead to such events even happening (and, in some variants, ultimately pin the blame on capitalism/patriarchy/phallogocentrism, etc.)
   Absolutely. We should. But do you propose to do it in a series of 420-character Facebook status updates or 140-character tweets, perhaps with a infographic or meme pic or two? No, you do not. (Or if you do, then you are a charlatan.) First of all, not everyone reading your statement to this effect will be ready to engage this discussion. Some may, for example, be trying to imagine the terror of those five and six-year-old children in that room. (Or trying and failing not to imagine it.) And second of all, your medium doesn't fit your message. Sometimes, it is better to follow the maxims of Wittgenstein: "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen." Which was a hella deep, very polite, philosophical way of saying in German, "Shut the fuck up, already!"
8. Where was Obama's sadness about the 150 children killed by drone strikes? (or some variant thereof)
   This needed to be said--after Obama gave his obligatory, sanctimonious speech. But some people made a point of being the very first to say it, and of this being the very first thing they said publicly, even before the president had said a thing. Those people need to look into the coal-black remnants in their chests where a heart ought to be and re-examine what motivates them in their passionate desire to overturn the system. Hell, even Che Guevara managed to come up with something about revolutionaries being motivated by deep feelings of love, and he was a racist, Stalinist schmuck. Until then, I'm not sure that your revolution is the same one I want.
9. Quoting Fred Rogers about "Remember the Helpers"
   This is actually the only one of these responses that I can get behind at all, which goes to show that Fred Rogers was awesome, and if more people managed to remember as adults the things that he told them when they were children, perhaps the U.S. would not be quite as deranged as it often seems to be. But like most things Mr. Rogers said, it only goes so far.

So what do I have to say about this? A few things, but let me begin with this: Imagine the teacher of that classroom, i.e., the mother of the shooter and the one whose gun he was using. Imagine that the last thing you see before you die is evidence, in the form of your son shooting your students, that in the last twenty years of your life as a parent you have fucked things up in a manner so horrifying no one, least of all you, could possibly have imagined this as an outcome. Until you can emphathetically recreate what was in her mind in those last moments (if those last moments lasted long enough for much of anything to run through her mind) and the various images and flashbacks that this instant in her life and her child's could call to mind as leading, somehow, to this confrontation, then you have no answers, only questions. I am trying to get to that point, but I am not there yet.

pseydtonne

[sister-in-law]: Made stylish pillows for my window seating area yesterday, baked a cranberry crumble today, and a chocolate treat is on the agenda for tomorrow. This housewife's on a roll!

[spouse], [sister] and 8 others [all women] like this.

[sister]: Making me look bad over here!

[sister-in-law]: Sorry [sister]! I posted the recipe in pintrest. It is gluten, dairy, and egg free and surprisingly tasty. Check it out.

[mother]: Are you bored? I could use a hand here.

[sister-in-law's mother]: Thats right!!! Your husband will look forward to coming home from work, thats the way I was taught!!!

The comment I restrained myself from making: Next time we're all together in person, can y'all try not to talk like this when [daughter] is around? I'd like her to grow up to be a feminist.

1. Post a Facebook update blaming your 83-year-old father-in-law, who is about to go into surgery to repair a broken femur, for forcing you to spend a Sunday afternoon in a hospital.
2. When your son--who logged onto Facebook hoping to find useful information about his grandfather's condition, and found this instead--replies, "Dad--You're an asshole," reply to him, "It takes one to know one. Go fuck yourself."
3. Then unfriend your son on Facebook so that he does not see this response--but finds out about it the next night from his wife, whom you still have friended.

Yes, the protagonist of the above actions is my father. If I wrote a memoir about my family people editors would accuse me of fabulation, and if I wrote fiction based on them, they would find it implausible.

So naturally I replied, "Spoken at a time when most black people didn't have the legal right to vote." Given that several members of her Floridian claque of middle-aged, middle-class Jewish ladies had already liked the entry, I figured that would spark a debate. Pointing out that a "progressive" icon like FDR based all four of his presidential election victories on Jim Crow hegemony would surely offend someone, right?

Except that when I logged back in a couple hours later, the comment had disappeared. So commented again: "Did you delete my comment? That was cowardly."

I'm not sure what to resent more:

• my job for being so boring that I have nothing more interesting to do than trolling my mother?
• Facebook for making it possible for me to troll my mother?
• my mother, for doing a better job of raising me to think critically than developing the capacity in herself?

• My shrink was the first person to say "Happy Birthday" to me today.
• Not only did I go to work, I stayed there an hour late.

You know what: I'm glad that my father thinks that rape is a serious matter--too many men think it's joke fodder. I'm glad he sees abortion rights as an important issue.

But I also can't help but remember the time when my mother got a broken rib, and her alternation of silence and contradictory stories about how she got it told me exactly where she got it. I can't help but remember every time a beer commercial came on during some half-time break, and he would proclaim in full earshot of his (flat-chested) wife, young daughter, and confused sons growing into men, "WOW, look at those tits!" I remember all the times when, angry at my mother or at some other woman, he reached immediately into his limited grab-bag of English and Greek insults: bitch/dyke/putanna/sekoliara.

Much has been said about how online slacktivism reduces the impetus to do anything substantive about political issues. But also: It reduces the overhead costs involved in posturing as an ally of the oppressed, while remaining, in one's day-to-day life, an agent and beneficiary of oppression.

This is an insight that is far more generally applicable than to my father--and hits closer to home as well.

• It goes much faster when cutting soft grass, as opposed to the crab grass that is the only kind to thrive in the sandy soil and subtropical climate down there.
• It's also much more comfortable when the temperature is 72 Fahrenheit with low humidity.
• Best of all is not having to do it with a black eye and broken nose the day after my father punched me in the face, having my neighbors look away and pretend it was none of their business.