season of the bitch

Since I’ve been out pounding the streets and all, I haven’t been blogging and in my absence, a bunch of people said things I wanted to say, but said ‘em better anyway:

1. Bill Clinton can kiss my ass.
For real.

2. Barack is, well, badass.

3. I also missed Equal Pay Day.

4. About the Penn Primary: what he said. Except it was a 9-point win.

5. White priest defends Jeremiah Wright, makes FOX News look like assholes. Not that it’s hard. (htp BitchPhD)

6. This says it all, about feminisms, blinders, and unwillingness to listen.

7. Susie Bright gives some love to New Orleans.

Oh, and to the New York Times (I’m not linking ’cause I’m over it): Most of us have already realized that there are two reasons the Democratic race ain’t over yet: Obama’s black, and Hillary’s last name is Clinton.

And we fight on…

(Remind me to talk about Angela Davis’s talk about “Communities of Struggle” and the campaign trail when my brain doesn’t hurt.)

…when my parents are Republicans.

1. My parents. I know this may seem counterintuitive, but I never went through a serious rebellion against my parents that led me to the other side of the coin. Instead, I am a direct result of the values they instilled in me from the time I was little. They taught me to read when I was very young and they did all sorts of crazy things like have flash cards for all the countries in Africa and suchlike. They wanted a baby genius, I guess. What they got, 28 years later, is a sassy feminist politically active tattooed writertype. I think they’re mostly happy with it.

But seriously. They answered my questions honestly when I watched the news with them and wanted to know what was going on in some part of the world, or when I read about someone like Pol Pot and wanted to know who he was and why he was bad. My father would tell me, “He was a dictator that we basically supported for years while he killed his own people.” My mother explained that she left the Catholic church because she disagreed with its views on abortion and women. And they always told my sister and I that we didn’t need a man for anything, and explained sex to us and at least attempted to tell us that using protection was more important than some mythic virginity pledge.

2. My grandparents. My Jewish grandparents, who insisted that my sister and I go to Hebrew school and learn about our Jewish heritage. Being aware that you are part of a group that has seen such hate makes you more aware of the suffering of others, even though I certainly cannot claim to be marginalized as a Jew–I don’t think it’s ever been an issue, and I’ve blogged about it more than once. My grandparents took us to museums (and who I think voted Democrat) and when I was nine and had seen the musical Les Miserables for the first time (after begging my parents when my mother played the soundtrack over and over again), dared me to read the book. Which I did. Unabridged.

Which brings me to 3. Les Miserables.  Some people read Ayn Rand and became Republicans. I read Victor Hugo and fell in love with revolutionaries and poor people and prostitutes and such. In fact, I probably learned what a prostitute was from reading Les Mis. Which I have tried to read once a year since high school, since I always get something new out of it. I have probably mentioned that I tattooed a quote from it across my back, something to carry with me always. If you don’t understand, you probably haven’t read it. It’s the single most important clue to how I think about political issues.

4. Punk rock. I didn’t have that much of a rebellious phase, but when I did get into one, the music I found was expressly political and I had much to learn to catch up. Thanks, Jello Biafra.

5. The GSA in high school school. This happened almost by accident. I became friends with the people who ran the gay-straight alliance. I had probably not thought about it much, other than when I was the subject of one of those awful middle-school rumor campaigns that I was a lesbian, but I didn’t see why anyone would have a problem with gay people, so I joined up. The one detention I ever served in high school was for skipping math class to sit at the GSA table at lunchtime during awareness week. Which we technically had permission to do, but the school didn’t like. Wonder why…

6. Dr. Arrington. I took a class in Marxist theory freshman year at Tulane for the hell of it, because I was curious. I came out with a broadened viewpoint on social ills and a deep distaste for the kid in the class who kept finding ways to talk about his Porsche. Oh, I hate you, bourgeois college students.

7. Dr. McKay. Opened me up to feminism, which like gay rights I had never seen as much of an issue. Of course women could do anything men could, who’d ever said they couldn’t?  And the Wendy Kaminer essay I’ve already mentioned a million times.

8. Sara, my riot-grrrl roommate and goth-club buddy who made me think about women’s issues.

9. Khristina, my fabulous roommate. Khristina and I bonded during the aforementioned Marxist theory class, became roommates our sophomore year, and shaped our political consciousness together. We didn’t like the same music or the same boys, so what we had to talk about was school and politics and world affairs. A brilliant black woman, she made me think about race and racism directly rather than that same aforementioned attitude, “Of course I’m not racist.”

10. Religion. Though I went to Hebrew school, our family never went to religious services. I grew up with a deep curiosity about religion itself, what made people believe, practice, think about religion. Because I wasn’t really indoctrinated into any one faith, I explored many of them, learning and picking up bits and pieces of things that made sense to me in a way that I couldn’t have had I been raised and trained that one way was the only right way. Having one Jewish parent and one Catholic parent didn’t hurt, either–nor did the knowledge that my parents were forced to marry at City Hall because no church would accept their interfaith relationship. I identify as Jewish, but my Judaism is so much more than just that. (that Feminism and Theology class at Loyola was pretty rad, too.)

11. Chris. My high school sweetheart, my first love, the one that got away. No one understood why I couldn’t let go. Because that beautiful, loving, open-minded person, the one who had fierce pride in being Jewish and would knock you out if you said anything racist, the one who screwed up but never meant any harm and taught me to look at people who commit crimes not as Other but as very real people with very real problems that aren’t solved by jail, taught me more than I ever taught him about what kind of person I want to be. And he still does, though I almost never see him and we almost never speak.

12. New Orleans. If I can credit one place with truly shaping my adult self, it would be New Orleans. I grew up in liberal Massachusetts, but left it when I was 16. I lived in South Carolina but never really felt at home there, went to Denver after college, and now I’m in Philly. When people ask where I’m from I never really know what to say, but I should say New Orleans because without it I would not be who I was. I transferred from Tulane after two years because I hated it, but I ultimately could not leave that city and ended up just next door at Loyola (which I loved). New Orleans was a mix of black and white, very rich and very poor, and drag queens, strippers and transpeople were part of my everyday experience in the city. I befriended jazz musicians three times my age and went from their shows to a rockabilly band at the Dragon’s Den to hip-hop night at the long-lost Matador. Everything was acceptable, everything was cool, everything was beautiful–except, of course, the poverty.

It was in New Orleans that I first had a child fear me because I was white and was confronted with the hard facts of my own privilege, not in a classroom or in a text, but in the real world. It was in New Orleans that I went to a fund-raising party for a transwoman to get her surgery. It was in New Orleans that Khristina and I decided to support Ralph Nader because Al Gore wasn’t on the right side of any of the issues we really cared about (Oh, looking back…) And it was there that I really learned to see everyone as human.

Sorry if this isn’t the most organized. It was more of a therapy session for me, trying to tease out the reasons why I am who I am, why I think as I do, and why I’m so passionate about it that I will give up my free time trying to fix this screwed-up system.

Dreams turned to rubble in New Orleans

You can go to wikipedia or any number of other places to find out why formaldehyde is such nasty stuff. I’m not a chemist and I’m not going to pretend to be one. Suffice it to say that formaldehyde is “toxic, allergenic, and carcinogenic.”

FEMA has been denying since they started putting people in trailers (instead of those cheap Katrina Cottages that someone designed) that there was any problem with them. People were complaining of fun things like nosebleeds, trouble breathing,  and one man was found dead in his trailer after complaining of the fumes.

Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. It’s now 2008. The fact that people are still living in these trailers at all should be a national disgrace that should be shouted from the rooftops. The CDC’s testing of the trailers now and finding the formaldehyde levels out of control is worse. People have been complaining of this problem for over two years. The people who are still living in trailers are the ones least able to move out of them on their own. Suddenly FEMA cares about them and wants to “hurry them out of the trailers,” putting those who are sick on a “rush list” to get out.

Despite voting by Politico.com visitors that put Gulf Coast questions near or at the top of the list, the Presidential candidates were not asked about their plans for Katrina recovery.  But need I remind you that Hillary Clinton couldn’t even be bothered to visit New Orleans before the Louisiana primaries?
Screw this bullshit.

This should be a major issue for this entire country. Talking heads on the news like to attribute a renewed concern for poverty in America with Hurricane Katrina. But if we’re so damn concerned, why aren’t we talking about this?

No other place I’ve lived gives me that pain in my chest when I miss it, like a lost love.

I miss New Orleans today like I missed a certain boy last week, like waking up from a dream to find that I’m somewhere far away and alone. I was never much a fan of Mardi Gras but looking at a friend’s pictures just made me miss a city where grownups can wear costumes and kiss in the streets and you’re never too old to dance.

(and I’m still pissed that a certain presidential candidate couldn’t be bothered to make a stop there. I’ll remember that, and so will a lot of other people.)

Read it here.

Hillary Clinton has no plans to speak in New Orleans before the Louisiana Primary. Her ignoring the Gulf Coast should be a good enough reason for any friend of mine to vote against her.

New Orleans was my home for four very important years of my life. Regular readers of this blog will remember this. New Orleans is still not “fixed,” just because they’ve had Mardi Gras. The levees are not repaired and are certainly not built up to the standards they should’ve been built to in the first place. This is something our current President has ignored and our next President will have to deal with. And only one candidate thinks it’s worth a campaign stop.

Support New Orleans.

Who votes this weekend?

Louisiana.

Let’s hear those candidates hopefully talk about the wreckage of New Orleans and what they plan to do about it.

The good folks at Color of Change have pointed out that the Presidential candidates have hardly been asked about Hurricane Katrina recovery. I take this issue personally, as an ex-New Orleanian, and so I encourage everyone to go here and use their links to vote for the Katrina question to be asked at the next Presidential debate.

I mean, we’re all tired of hearing them bitch and snipe, right?

The link at Color of Change takes you right there and all you have to do is click.

First off, you should also read this post at Feministe, (different one than I linked before) if you haven’t already, about public housing in general.

The New Orleans projects that they want to bulldoze are not all falling apart. Some of them are, mind you, and a few of them have been empty since I moved away from the city, back in 2002. But some of them are just fine and in prime real estate–which of course is the real reason they want them gone (check out Greg Palast’s documentary on the subject if you want more proof of that).

I wrote an article recently on New Orleans musicians post-Katrina, and while researching I learned that the average price of a two-bedroom apartment is now nearly a thousand dollars a month, where before the storm it was only around $650. That’s still not a lot of money compared to most cities, I suppose, but for New Orleans it’s a lot. It’s a big hit to take.

If you didn’t own real estate, you probably didn’t have flood insurance (anyone you know actually buy renter’s insurance? thought not). so your shit’s gone and you’re shit outta luck.

or, what if your shit isn’t gone because your apartment didn’t flood, but the government won’t let you back in because now it’s got the chance it wanted to get rid of those eyesores, those concentrations of poor people.

it used to be a rumor that Master P’s mama still lived in the projects. I don’t know if that was true, but it says something about the culture there. Listen to a New Orleans hip-hop record and you’ll probably hear a housing project name-checked. The Calliope (pronounced call-ee-ope or call-ee-oh) or the Magnolia (see Juvenile songs) are the most popular.

The Magnolia projects were only a few blocks from my apartment, uptown. Sure, they weren’t pretty, but they were alive with people, people sitting outside chatting, kids playing, loud car stereos…

Now they want to tear them down.

And they were not destroyed by the hurricane.

Call your congresspeople and ask them why the hell the government hates poor people so much.

Good blog about it here at Feministe; I’ll write more later when I’ve got time.