Friday, August 29, 2008
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Heal Yourselves!
Barack Obama and Talking Amongst Ourselves
Going into Easter Weekend, the current buzz about Barack Obama and his former guru brings to mind Jesus. You know the time he got fed up with the sick and the lame, always looking to him for a cure?
“Heal Yourselves!” the Savior finally screamed. This according to my CD of Jesus Christ Superstar, which, along with Handel’s Messiah and hanging plastic Easter eggs and small plush farm animals on the live tree that spends its winter months in my living room, comprises my observance of the holiday. I’ve signed on to visit my Jewish mother-in-law for the early dinner at her nursing home, and so will miss church.
Reverend Wright’s incendiary speeches and Obama’s defense of them showed that black people talk differently among themselves than they do among whites. I was glad to hear this, because white people do the same thing. Until Obama’s speech, people – O.K., I mean liberals, the conservatives don’t care about hurting anyone’s feelings -- were afraid the world would explode if we had an honest discussion about race.
I’ve made black people cringe with my unintentionally racist remarks. Once, by telling a colleague I had “slaved away” till eight o’clock the night before, once by cavalierely referring to a former residence as being in a “crack-head” neighborhood.
I didn’t get the black subtext till I saw their reactions. Actually, when I said I’d “slaved away” to an African American secretary, I didn’t get a cringe, I got the Look of Death. She didn’t have to say anything. Not only would I never again misuse that word in front of a black person, I would never use it that way at all. To slog, to drudge – these indicate long hours of tedious work. Slavery means being owned by another person and forced to labor.
And the crack-head I was thinking of in particular happened to be white. But my black friend is used to hearing the term used as a blanket racial slur. In any case, never again.
When Obamba said: “Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives …” Probably most white people nodded their heads in agreement, thinking he was paying them a compliment.
The subtext most white people don’t hear but most black people do is that qualifying phrase “as far as they’re concerned …” Because as far as black people are concerned, white immigrants like my grandparents came here to find a work slot ready made, in a country whose wealth of opportunities was only made possible by the unpaid labor of black slaves, whose descendents are still denied equal opportunities.
I’m lightly versed in black sociology, from living in New York for 20 years, from studying at City College, a predominantly non-white school. I caught the subtext. Most white people, though, won’t even hear that qualifier, “as far as they’re concerned.” They’re thinking, “Damn right no one did anything for us …” Thinking only that they were not among the ranks of Bushes and Kennedys, the kind of white people with monumental wealth, privilege and connections. If white people heard the missing text, about ancestral opportunities born of slave labor, some they might say, “Hmmm, I never thought of it that way.” Others might say, “Oh, come on, you’ve had a hundred years to catch up. Get over it!”
But Obama didn’t talk about slaves creating the wealth that gave white immigrants jobs. He went about as far as he could on that point, for now. But it’ll come up eventually. Because we need to have that discussion about a country built on the backs of slave labor. We need to have the discussion about reparations. At least the discussion. Is it financially feasible? Is there a wizard who can do the job? Wall Street cooks up an awful lot of investment vehicles – Hedge Funds come to mind -- that seem to conjure money out of nowhere. It may not be feasible, but let’s at least have the discussion.
We needed to hear this: “Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven't fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education.” But we also need to continue the discussion Obama started, to say the unsayable about Affirmative Action: “when they [whites] hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed … resentment builds”
Let’s have the conversation about how Affirmative Action never actually takes opportunities away from wealthy, well-connected whites, but from good students of all ethnicities from less well-off backgrounds who are not black or Native American.
I listened to a lot of people on NPR pour accolades on Mr. Obama for his speech. But it was only white callers who declared that he had the power to “heal America’s racial divide.”
We live in a very P.C. culture at the moment. Right after Sept. 11, if anyone said anything about Israel people got hysterical. They didn’t want to talk about our unswerving support of the Jewish state, and the Arab world’s unswerving resentment of it, as being a partial motivation for the attacks. But people did start talking and guess what, the discussion was heard, and aired and debated, and the U.S. is still unswervingly supporting Israel, with a nod to the Palestinians. We didn’t switch loyalties because someone had a conversation.
We have to have the discussion about race not just amongst ourselves, but with the other side. And we shouldn’t have to look to Obama to do it for us. He’s not the Messiah. We’re grown-ups, we ought to be able to heal ourselves
Going into Easter Weekend, the current buzz about Barack Obama and his former guru brings to mind Jesus. You know the time he got fed up with the sick and the lame, always looking to him for a cure?
“Heal Yourselves!” the Savior finally screamed. This according to my CD of Jesus Christ Superstar, which, along with Handel’s Messiah and hanging plastic Easter eggs and small plush farm animals on the live tree that spends its winter months in my living room, comprises my observance of the holiday. I’ve signed on to visit my Jewish mother-in-law for the early dinner at her nursing home, and so will miss church.
Reverend Wright’s incendiary speeches and Obama’s defense of them showed that black people talk differently among themselves than they do among whites. I was glad to hear this, because white people do the same thing. Until Obama’s speech, people – O.K., I mean liberals, the conservatives don’t care about hurting anyone’s feelings -- were afraid the world would explode if we had an honest discussion about race.
I’ve made black people cringe with my unintentionally racist remarks. Once, by telling a colleague I had “slaved away” till eight o’clock the night before, once by cavalierely referring to a former residence as being in a “crack-head” neighborhood.
I didn’t get the black subtext till I saw their reactions. Actually, when I said I’d “slaved away” to an African American secretary, I didn’t get a cringe, I got the Look of Death. She didn’t have to say anything. Not only would I never again misuse that word in front of a black person, I would never use it that way at all. To slog, to drudge – these indicate long hours of tedious work. Slavery means being owned by another person and forced to labor.
And the crack-head I was thinking of in particular happened to be white. But my black friend is used to hearing the term used as a blanket racial slur. In any case, never again.
When Obamba said: “Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives …” Probably most white people nodded their heads in agreement, thinking he was paying them a compliment.
The subtext most white people don’t hear but most black people do is that qualifying phrase “as far as they’re concerned …” Because as far as black people are concerned, white immigrants like my grandparents came here to find a work slot ready made, in a country whose wealth of opportunities was only made possible by the unpaid labor of black slaves, whose descendents are still denied equal opportunities.
I’m lightly versed in black sociology, from living in New York for 20 years, from studying at City College, a predominantly non-white school. I caught the subtext. Most white people, though, won’t even hear that qualifier, “as far as they’re concerned.” They’re thinking, “Damn right no one did anything for us …” Thinking only that they were not among the ranks of Bushes and Kennedys, the kind of white people with monumental wealth, privilege and connections. If white people heard the missing text, about ancestral opportunities born of slave labor, some they might say, “Hmmm, I never thought of it that way.” Others might say, “Oh, come on, you’ve had a hundred years to catch up. Get over it!”
But Obama didn’t talk about slaves creating the wealth that gave white immigrants jobs. He went about as far as he could on that point, for now. But it’ll come up eventually. Because we need to have that discussion about a country built on the backs of slave labor. We need to have the discussion about reparations. At least the discussion. Is it financially feasible? Is there a wizard who can do the job? Wall Street cooks up an awful lot of investment vehicles – Hedge Funds come to mind -- that seem to conjure money out of nowhere. It may not be feasible, but let’s at least have the discussion.
We needed to hear this: “Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven't fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education.” But we also need to continue the discussion Obama started, to say the unsayable about Affirmative Action: “when they [whites] hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed … resentment builds”
Let’s have the conversation about how Affirmative Action never actually takes opportunities away from wealthy, well-connected whites, but from good students of all ethnicities from less well-off backgrounds who are not black or Native American.
I listened to a lot of people on NPR pour accolades on Mr. Obama for his speech. But it was only white callers who declared that he had the power to “heal America’s racial divide.”
We live in a very P.C. culture at the moment. Right after Sept. 11, if anyone said anything about Israel people got hysterical. They didn’t want to talk about our unswerving support of the Jewish state, and the Arab world’s unswerving resentment of it, as being a partial motivation for the attacks. But people did start talking and guess what, the discussion was heard, and aired and debated, and the U.S. is still unswervingly supporting Israel, with a nod to the Palestinians. We didn’t switch loyalties because someone had a conversation.
We have to have the discussion about race not just amongst ourselves, but with the other side. And we shouldn’t have to look to Obama to do it for us. He’s not the Messiah. We’re grown-ups, we ought to be able to heal ourselves
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Even More Legal! Even Less Victims!
The Spitzer Mess: Legalize It?
1.) Is Prostitution a victimless crime? Not really, because it bleeds into the rest of life. When I worked on Wall Street in the 80s and early 90s, prostitution – and here I’m including strip clubs and “all-inclusive” massages, because there’s an awful lot of crossover – I wasn’t aware that prostitution actually WAS illegal. Not in the way, say, a lunchtime snort from the guy hovering in the alley next to Trinity Church was.
Men openly put massage parlors down on their expense accounts. I was included in the fun! (Actually, I was first taken to a strip club at 16 by a 17 year old boy. It was interesting. Once.) On Wall Street I could go to lunch with the gang at the Pink Pussycat, or stay in the office with my Rolodex. Did this affect my status, respect level, and interaction on the job? You bet. Making prostitution Even More Legal will make women who don’t play along look like even more uptight weirdos.
2.) Broadsheet (the women’s blog on Salon) and the feminist magazines Bitch and Bust love to wax eloquent about the empowerment of sex workers. Let me tell you the story of “Jer,” a man I worked with downtown. His daughter was a stripper, a smart, middle-class, suburban-raised feminist. She thought she was an artist, she thought she was Madonna. Then she got raped in the parking lot after a show by three audience members.
Jer’s daughter, let’s call her Rachel, was not breaking the law by dancing semi-clothed. She did not turn tricks on the job or after-hours. Being a self-confident college-educated middle class girl, she knew her rights, and reported the rape to the cops, who took it seriously and pursued a conviction. Rachel became an anti-strip club, anti-porn, anti-prostitution activist. According to Jer, it wasn’t the cops surprisingly respectful treatment that shocked her. It was getting gang-raped that did.
• Read about how legalized prostitution in Nevada has affected the rape rate and quality of life for women:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/sep/07/usa.gender
3.) Some years ago, a friend’s psychiatrist husband was drawn in by a “pro” he was treating. Drug-addicted and crazy, the patient stalked my friend – let’s call her Miriam -- and repeatedly threatened the lives of her two young children. The patient was legally employed as a stripper. The nature of her work, enticing men, was her one means of power in the world.
It was a horrible, horrible private and public trauma for Miriam and her entire family. Her husband had been devoted, hard-working, well educated and employed – there was nothing, absolutely nothing in their marriage or his history or psychological makeup – no drinking, no promiscuity, no other cheating – to indicate this. Hooking is sometimes the right word.
One man who counsels sex workers thinks they are deluded into thinking they have insight into ALL men. An interesting read, and site:
http://lettersfromjohns.blogspot.com/2008/01/im-not-john.html
4.) I met a young woman here in Rhode Island, 26. Her Dad died when she was a teenager, never got along with her Mom. With her small inheritance, she got fake boobs and lips. It made her feel better about herself, just as being 20 pounds underweight made me feel better about myself as a teenaged girl in the 70s.
We live in a state where there’s no work. Really. Except for house-building and landscaping. But there are about 60,000 strip clubs to serve these house-builders and landscapers. Because this girl has “the look,” she is constantly advised to strip for a living to clear her debts. This girl isn’t in a position to move to another town, go to school (already way in debt) and find a way out of her financial hole.
She is troubled, she is sensitive – not the type to take well to 200 pairs of leering or critical eyes on her. She didn’t get a job stripping, but she did move to New York, and started modeling. Guess what kind. One pair of leering eyes, not nearly as bad as 200. The empowerment of using your body to make money – sometimes a kind of gun-to-the-head kind of empowerment.
•
Confession time: When I was 18 and looking for a job, I drove down to, but did not enter the Holiday Inn in Bridgeport, where a man was interviewing for “escorts.” An ad was placed in the Bridgeport Post. This would have been 1978.
When I was 25, I used to be called “white whore” on the street in Brooklyn with great regularity, as I dashed from subway to apartment on the way to and from work. It wasn’t a nice feeling, and it took me years to staunch an automatic feeling of revulsion every time I heard a male Spanish accent. I don’t think making it legal would have been made that experience any nicer.
When I was 20, I worked in a London hostel, part of which degenerated into a sort of gay whorehouse. The young men involved were invariably drug addicts – I used to clean up their messes. Many of them were middle class white kids “working through something.” Since back then, government pocket-money in the form of dole handouts was still pretty universal, they weren’t turning tricks for room and board, but for heroin and the thrill of it all. There were also a few, a very few young women, chambermaids like me, on the game. I got into some sticky situations, trying to explain, when I entered a man’s room in the early morning hours, that I was a scullery maid, not working girl. None of this seemed terribly taboo or illegal – it never even occurred to me that it was.
Legalizing prostitution will help a few people – maybe protect prostitutes a little more. It will make cheating easier and more defensable for married men going through a dry spell – wife with a high-risk pregnancy or newly delivered, ill or out-of-the-mood from chemotherapy. It will make it even MORE acceptable in the business world as a legitimate office social activity – Christmas parties anyone? But it’s going to hurt a lot more people. It’s kind of like the Hedge Fund of Entertainment Options – a few get rich, in money or pleasure, but the innocent bystanders who don’t even understand the transaction get Tsunamied.
1.) Is Prostitution a victimless crime? Not really, because it bleeds into the rest of life. When I worked on Wall Street in the 80s and early 90s, prostitution – and here I’m including strip clubs and “all-inclusive” massages, because there’s an awful lot of crossover – I wasn’t aware that prostitution actually WAS illegal. Not in the way, say, a lunchtime snort from the guy hovering in the alley next to Trinity Church was.
Men openly put massage parlors down on their expense accounts. I was included in the fun! (Actually, I was first taken to a strip club at 16 by a 17 year old boy. It was interesting. Once.) On Wall Street I could go to lunch with the gang at the Pink Pussycat, or stay in the office with my Rolodex. Did this affect my status, respect level, and interaction on the job? You bet. Making prostitution Even More Legal will make women who don’t play along look like even more uptight weirdos.
2.) Broadsheet (the women’s blog on Salon) and the feminist magazines Bitch and Bust love to wax eloquent about the empowerment of sex workers. Let me tell you the story of “Jer,” a man I worked with downtown. His daughter was a stripper, a smart, middle-class, suburban-raised feminist. She thought she was an artist, she thought she was Madonna. Then she got raped in the parking lot after a show by three audience members.
Jer’s daughter, let’s call her Rachel, was not breaking the law by dancing semi-clothed. She did not turn tricks on the job or after-hours. Being a self-confident college-educated middle class girl, she knew her rights, and reported the rape to the cops, who took it seriously and pursued a conviction. Rachel became an anti-strip club, anti-porn, anti-prostitution activist. According to Jer, it wasn’t the cops surprisingly respectful treatment that shocked her. It was getting gang-raped that did.
• Read about how legalized prostitution in Nevada has affected the rape rate and quality of life for women:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/sep/07/usa.gender
3.) Some years ago, a friend’s psychiatrist husband was drawn in by a “pro” he was treating. Drug-addicted and crazy, the patient stalked my friend – let’s call her Miriam -- and repeatedly threatened the lives of her two young children. The patient was legally employed as a stripper. The nature of her work, enticing men, was her one means of power in the world.
It was a horrible, horrible private and public trauma for Miriam and her entire family. Her husband had been devoted, hard-working, well educated and employed – there was nothing, absolutely nothing in their marriage or his history or psychological makeup – no drinking, no promiscuity, no other cheating – to indicate this. Hooking is sometimes the right word.
One man who counsels sex workers thinks they are deluded into thinking they have insight into ALL men. An interesting read, and site:
http://lettersfromjohns.blogspot.com/2008/01/im-not-john.html
4.) I met a young woman here in Rhode Island, 26. Her Dad died when she was a teenager, never got along with her Mom. With her small inheritance, she got fake boobs and lips. It made her feel better about herself, just as being 20 pounds underweight made me feel better about myself as a teenaged girl in the 70s.
We live in a state where there’s no work. Really. Except for house-building and landscaping. But there are about 60,000 strip clubs to serve these house-builders and landscapers. Because this girl has “the look,” she is constantly advised to strip for a living to clear her debts. This girl isn’t in a position to move to another town, go to school (already way in debt) and find a way out of her financial hole.
She is troubled, she is sensitive – not the type to take well to 200 pairs of leering or critical eyes on her. She didn’t get a job stripping, but she did move to New York, and started modeling. Guess what kind. One pair of leering eyes, not nearly as bad as 200. The empowerment of using your body to make money – sometimes a kind of gun-to-the-head kind of empowerment.
•
Confession time: When I was 18 and looking for a job, I drove down to, but did not enter the Holiday Inn in Bridgeport, where a man was interviewing for “escorts.” An ad was placed in the Bridgeport Post. This would have been 1978.
When I was 25, I used to be called “white whore” on the street in Brooklyn with great regularity, as I dashed from subway to apartment on the way to and from work. It wasn’t a nice feeling, and it took me years to staunch an automatic feeling of revulsion every time I heard a male Spanish accent. I don’t think making it legal would have been made that experience any nicer.
When I was 20, I worked in a London hostel, part of which degenerated into a sort of gay whorehouse. The young men involved were invariably drug addicts – I used to clean up their messes. Many of them were middle class white kids “working through something.” Since back then, government pocket-money in the form of dole handouts was still pretty universal, they weren’t turning tricks for room and board, but for heroin and the thrill of it all. There were also a few, a very few young women, chambermaids like me, on the game. I got into some sticky situations, trying to explain, when I entered a man’s room in the early morning hours, that I was a scullery maid, not working girl. None of this seemed terribly taboo or illegal – it never even occurred to me that it was.
Legalizing prostitution will help a few people – maybe protect prostitutes a little more. It will make cheating easier and more defensable for married men going through a dry spell – wife with a high-risk pregnancy or newly delivered, ill or out-of-the-mood from chemotherapy. It will make it even MORE acceptable in the business world as a legitimate office social activity – Christmas parties anyone? But it’s going to hurt a lot more people. It’s kind of like the Hedge Fund of Entertainment Options – a few get rich, in money or pleasure, but the innocent bystanders who don’t even understand the transaction get Tsunamied.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Breaking Up is Easy to Do
This Valentine’s Day I broke up with my hairdresser. Because I’m going to be a Hillary supporter. Or Obama, whoever the Democrats put up.
I love Obama, but if he’s elected, I’ll have to watch this young, good-looking man age in office. It wasn’t pretty with Bill. Hillary’s already 60. And she has piano legs, which I love. She’s a tank, Mme. Thatcher, but liberal. And like Thatcher, not “likeable.” W was likeable.
Two great candidates. So why will I vote for Hillary in the primary? Because she’s firm on universal health care. Obama says he’ll make health care affordable “for all those who want it.” Not good enough. I’m one of those people who fell off the face of the health care map when I came down with a permanent illness. Too sick to work full time, too strapped to buy good health care. I know middle class people will put their kids' college education before their own health premiums.
I’ve worked, both full time and as a consultant, for insurance companies -- investment/annuities, life and property insurance. Some were ethical, some were questionable. A Wall Street Journal wag called one of my former multinational insurance conglomerate employers The Gallo Wine of property/casualty:"We Shall Pay No Claim Before Its Time." I have never worked in the medical insurance sector, but a close friend has. It was completely off my reference scale, in terms of waste, corruption (soon exposed in a public scandal) and layers and layers of overpaid upper management. Only a government reality check will clean up the medical insurers' acts. Don’t think you can let them lead the process; it’ll be business as usual. If you haven't already, Netflix Michael Moore's Sicko.
What does this have to do with Joleen, my ex-hairdresser? She is conservative. She says, “I want to control my own money.” Meaning eliminate taxes, have an unregulated economy. I tell her I worked on Wall Street, and know a few regulations are needed. Deregulation caused the crash of ’87, the S&L crisis of the early 90s, Enron, today’s mortgage/hedge fund debacles. Deregulation is making a couple of guys at the top rich, hurting everyone else.
But you can’t tell that to someone who doesn’t read the paper.
Joleen hates Hillary. “No one asked for her!” She thinks Africans are genetically programmed for violence. When the War broke out, I unintentionally offended her, when I aswered her rhetorical question, “Wasn’t it terrible what the French did?” with:
“Well, when you’ve lived in European countries, you see their point of view...”
Joleen hates Europe. She vacations at Disney, the Grand Canyon, on cruise ships.
When I told her I was traveling to Russia, she was so repulsed her hands reflexively retracted from my hair.
I couldn’t stand her. I couldn’t stand her touching me. But I put up with her because she was cheap. A third the cost of my former NY salon. I told myself, I’m getting a taste of small-town life, I’m learning about America. Toxic overload is the price I must pay.
I knew I had to quit Joleen. But not at Christmas. She’d been wailing about one of her daughters needing a heart operation; insurance wouldn’t pay. I gave her a $100 tip. Despite the fact that she failed to see that the Democrats she so loathed wanted to fix the health care system, to help people like her.
The insurance eventually came through. She was back to gloating about her children. (I once thought I could have a two-way conversation with Joleen, but I can’t, I don’t have kids.)
I called the salon on her day off, said I must reschedule. I never did. I went to a place where it would have cost 150% more if I’d let them do everything Joleen did for free – deep condition and style, as well as cut and color. I left with wet hair. But the girl was nice. We talked Broadway plays. She didn’t talk about her kids, didn't ask me if I had any. Nor did we talk politics. It felt wonderful.
Better to spend more, and preserve mental health. Like it’s better to spend the $4.40 for that Latte Grande. You might meet your next boss at Starbucks, or boyfriend. If Candace Bushnell had been frugal, do you think she’d have lived the high life that led her to her Mr. Big, a daily newspaper column and media mega-deals? My guess is she ran up a few credit card bills along the way.
Last fall I bought a nice handbag I didn’t need, and it was admired in the style-free zone where I live by a fabulous woman at my Y. Turns out she was one of those people with a house overlooking the ocean here, and one overlooking the Hudson in Manhattan. We hit it off. She lent me her fabulous apartment. My $25 bag saved me $1,000 in NY hotels during the holiday high season. Sometimes Suze Orman is just plain wrong.
I love Obama, but if he’s elected, I’ll have to watch this young, good-looking man age in office. It wasn’t pretty with Bill. Hillary’s already 60. And she has piano legs, which I love. She’s a tank, Mme. Thatcher, but liberal. And like Thatcher, not “likeable.” W was likeable.
Two great candidates. So why will I vote for Hillary in the primary? Because she’s firm on universal health care. Obama says he’ll make health care affordable “for all those who want it.” Not good enough. I’m one of those people who fell off the face of the health care map when I came down with a permanent illness. Too sick to work full time, too strapped to buy good health care. I know middle class people will put their kids' college education before their own health premiums.
I’ve worked, both full time and as a consultant, for insurance companies -- investment/annuities, life and property insurance. Some were ethical, some were questionable. A Wall Street Journal wag called one of my former multinational insurance conglomerate employers The Gallo Wine of property/casualty:"We Shall Pay No Claim Before Its Time." I have never worked in the medical insurance sector, but a close friend has. It was completely off my reference scale, in terms of waste, corruption (soon exposed in a public scandal) and layers and layers of overpaid upper management. Only a government reality check will clean up the medical insurers' acts. Don’t think you can let them lead the process; it’ll be business as usual. If you haven't already, Netflix Michael Moore's Sicko.
What does this have to do with Joleen, my ex-hairdresser? She is conservative. She says, “I want to control my own money.” Meaning eliminate taxes, have an unregulated economy. I tell her I worked on Wall Street, and know a few regulations are needed. Deregulation caused the crash of ’87, the S&L crisis of the early 90s, Enron, today’s mortgage/hedge fund debacles. Deregulation is making a couple of guys at the top rich, hurting everyone else.
But you can’t tell that to someone who doesn’t read the paper.
Joleen hates Hillary. “No one asked for her!” She thinks Africans are genetically programmed for violence. When the War broke out, I unintentionally offended her, when I aswered her rhetorical question, “Wasn’t it terrible what the French did?” with:
“Well, when you’ve lived in European countries, you see their point of view...”
Joleen hates Europe. She vacations at Disney, the Grand Canyon, on cruise ships.
When I told her I was traveling to Russia, she was so repulsed her hands reflexively retracted from my hair.
I couldn’t stand her. I couldn’t stand her touching me. But I put up with her because she was cheap. A third the cost of my former NY salon. I told myself, I’m getting a taste of small-town life, I’m learning about America. Toxic overload is the price I must pay.
I knew I had to quit Joleen. But not at Christmas. She’d been wailing about one of her daughters needing a heart operation; insurance wouldn’t pay. I gave her a $100 tip. Despite the fact that she failed to see that the Democrats she so loathed wanted to fix the health care system, to help people like her.
The insurance eventually came through. She was back to gloating about her children. (I once thought I could have a two-way conversation with Joleen, but I can’t, I don’t have kids.)
I called the salon on her day off, said I must reschedule. I never did. I went to a place where it would have cost 150% more if I’d let them do everything Joleen did for free – deep condition and style, as well as cut and color. I left with wet hair. But the girl was nice. We talked Broadway plays. She didn’t talk about her kids, didn't ask me if I had any. Nor did we talk politics. It felt wonderful.
Better to spend more, and preserve mental health. Like it’s better to spend the $4.40 for that Latte Grande. You might meet your next boss at Starbucks, or boyfriend. If Candace Bushnell had been frugal, do you think she’d have lived the high life that led her to her Mr. Big, a daily newspaper column and media mega-deals? My guess is she ran up a few credit card bills along the way.
Last fall I bought a nice handbag I didn’t need, and it was admired in the style-free zone where I live by a fabulous woman at my Y. Turns out she was one of those people with a house overlooking the ocean here, and one overlooking the Hudson in Manhattan. We hit it off. She lent me her fabulous apartment. My $25 bag saved me $1,000 in NY hotels during the holiday high season. Sometimes Suze Orman is just plain wrong.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Outsourced Wombs
New York Times Op-Ed columnist Judith Warner raises objections to Americans hiring impoverished Indian women as cut-rate surrogate mothers. Her article and and my response can be read at:
http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/outsourced-wombs/
My take:
• Judith Warner launches a long overdue discussion about the fertility industry and adoption complex.
Neither worked out for me, so I am qualified to speak out from first-hand experience. After twenty years of struggling with this issue, I’m finally accepting of my life situation. Unfortunately, society isn’t accepting of me.
When celebrities are showcased having babies in their forties, then fifties, society gradually sees this as normal, even desirable. Slowly, those of us who can’t have children easily and naturally feel pressured into the outer limits.
The business world, education system, dating conventions and even family pecking order rely heavily on the idea that the fertility industry is a safety net. The perception of the rest of the players needed to make the village that nurtures the child is at least as important as that of the young women trying to have families themselves.
Several responders here suggested people like me just get on with our lives, and I am. But when every female newscaster touts her children on air, every 47-year old actress is having twins, every movie story line winds up with the birth of a child — it leaves those for whom the baby story didn’t come true feeling like we’ve done something wrong to wind up as we are.
We can’t do this all on our own. Right now, parenthood is the only game in town. There are absolutely no role models, no stories, no articles on childlessness —except on how to change that state. Nothing protects us from public approbation, like the bombardment of suggestions to take in one of the world’s needy, regardless of our own confidence in our ability to do so.
Link to the Newsweek article: http://www.newsweek.com/id/74385/page/2 and read the long, long list of comments from parents whose foster/foreign kids suffered from Attachment Disorder. Under anonymity, many adoptive parents tell how this makes their lives a misery, and say they wish they’d never done it.
A few years ago I read a story about then-54 year old, former Good Morning America host Joan Lunden, whose husband had surrogate twins, using the egg from a third woman. Lunden declared, “I want readers to know this is absolutely O.K. If they’re not her eggs, they’re not her baby.”
I’m not a celebrity, I don’t have a platform like Joan Lunden, but I’d like to float the message somehow that It’s Absolutely O.K. not to do a third world adoption, Foster Care, or a fertility treatment that seems wrong for you on a gut level.
But society, and the media especially, needs to start getting the message across that adults without children are O.K. just as they are.
— Posted by Christina Gombar
http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/outsourced-wombs/
My take:
• Judith Warner launches a long overdue discussion about the fertility industry and adoption complex.
Neither worked out for me, so I am qualified to speak out from first-hand experience. After twenty years of struggling with this issue, I’m finally accepting of my life situation. Unfortunately, society isn’t accepting of me.
When celebrities are showcased having babies in their forties, then fifties, society gradually sees this as normal, even desirable. Slowly, those of us who can’t have children easily and naturally feel pressured into the outer limits.
The business world, education system, dating conventions and even family pecking order rely heavily on the idea that the fertility industry is a safety net. The perception of the rest of the players needed to make the village that nurtures the child is at least as important as that of the young women trying to have families themselves.
Several responders here suggested people like me just get on with our lives, and I am. But when every female newscaster touts her children on air, every 47-year old actress is having twins, every movie story line winds up with the birth of a child — it leaves those for whom the baby story didn’t come true feeling like we’ve done something wrong to wind up as we are.
We can’t do this all on our own. Right now, parenthood is the only game in town. There are absolutely no role models, no stories, no articles on childlessness —except on how to change that state. Nothing protects us from public approbation, like the bombardment of suggestions to take in one of the world’s needy, regardless of our own confidence in our ability to do so.
Link to the Newsweek article: http://www.newsweek.com/id/74385/page/2 and read the long, long list of comments from parents whose foster/foreign kids suffered from Attachment Disorder. Under anonymity, many adoptive parents tell how this makes their lives a misery, and say they wish they’d never done it.
A few years ago I read a story about then-54 year old, former Good Morning America host Joan Lunden, whose husband had surrogate twins, using the egg from a third woman. Lunden declared, “I want readers to know this is absolutely O.K. If they’re not her eggs, they’re not her baby.”
I’m not a celebrity, I don’t have a platform like Joan Lunden, but I’d like to float the message somehow that It’s Absolutely O.K. not to do a third world adoption, Foster Care, or a fertility treatment that seems wrong for you on a gut level.
But society, and the media especially, needs to start getting the message across that adults without children are O.K. just as they are.
— Posted by Christina Gombar
Sisterly Sniping
Honk if You Love Hitler
I turn to literature for the last leg of my flu. What could have induced me to indulge in the 800-pager, “The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters”? I am implicitly against inherited wealth and privilege, fascists, communists, classist snobs etc., represented in spades among this group of last century British Lady Legends, born between 1905 and 1920.
Well, I love the witty work of eldest Nancy (who comes in for a bashing over the course of this book), in the family-biographical novels The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, which lampoons her own upper classes. “I think I may say we put India on the map,” a pompous colonial diplomat’s wife declares, “Hardly any of one’s friends had ever heard of India before we went there.”
Nancy’s skill of telling made this rarified world seem not only comprehensive, but inclusive when I first read the books while working as a janitress in London’s back streets during my own version of the Grand European Tour, double digit inflation early-80s student style.
The sisters are magic at nicknames. The Queen Mother is forever dubbed “Cake,” for her wild exclamation at sight of said sweet at a social function. The sister Pamela is called Woman, for embodying the arch-typical female qualities of steadfastness, soberness, and virtue, as personified in some medieval pageant. Boud, Birdie and Bobo for Hitler acolyte Unity (as if her given name and politics weren’t enough); Honks for ethereally beautiful Diana, another Friend Of Adolph. (Another sister, Jessica, became a Communist, eloped with her cousin, and emigrated to America to become a left-wing crank.)
I expected to skim this tome, confronted with the hard reality behind the delectable confection of Nancy’s gossipy novels, which left out the Hitler connection. But I was drawn in by the letters, touched by the mutual support as the sisters (well, most of them) rushed to the deranged Unity’s aid when she fired a bullet in her brain the day England and Germany declared war. She was 22 and lived another eleven years, brain damage having the beneficent effect of shifting her fanatical devotion from fascism to Christian Science.
As the sisters aged and one by one dropped their perches, the sea of letters, 60,000 in all, kept flowing. What devotion, what family feeling, I thought, as Woman nurses Nancy through her four years’ battle with the cancer that ended her life at 66. “Love, darling,” ninety-something Honks signs every letter to Deborah (AKA “Nine” for her reputed mental age). Compliments spurt forth regarding each others’ loving kindness.
But the knives came out when it comes to the subject of maternity. Nancy’s “Waspishness” is attributed to her thwarting – she suffered miscarriages and a fertility-ending operation in her late thirties, at which time she divorced, moved to Paris, and became a fabulous success as a writer, fashionista and socialite. Debo dismisses this: “She didn’t have a real husband and children, just the writing, an empty sort of reward.”
Only after her death did the others learn that during World War II, Nancy informed on Honks, AKA Lady Diana Moseley, wife of Sir Oswald Moseley, founder of the British Union of Fascists. Thanks to Nancy’s testimony, the two were imprisoned during the Second War. Diana chose separation from her four young sons (one eleven-weeks old) rather than denounce Hitler. Which I guess tells you who really suffered thwarted maternity.
Likewise, the married and childless-by-choice Woman, (Pam), took in two of Diana’s sons when their mother was in the lock-up. What thanks does she get? Honks attributes a completely unrelated perceived insensitivity (Pam “had no idea how ghastly prison really was, the lav, etc.”) to her lack of children. Diana sued Her Majesty's Government for lack of heat, and with proceeds bought a mink coat to wear in jail.
Nancy comes in for the worst scalding. While I noted the novelist’s enthusiastic interest in her sisters’ offspring -- full of praise, never jealous, sad or lamenting her own fate – the mothers cannot refrain from attributing her character flaws to barrenness. If she was difficult, my guess it was not due to Terminal Childlessness, but Oldest Girl Syndrome.
First-born barrier-breaker in the upending twenties, Nancy was followed by a bevy of sisters, one more beautiful than the previous, which did not cease till was fifteen. She set the joking tone, originated the family wit; they all traded on Nancy’s ground-breaking success as a writer.
In the last batch of letters, Debo and Honks buck each other up, saying that they have their children, grandchildren and “greats” as comforts in old age. No doubt these offspring meant a great deal to the sisters at the end of their lives -- they don’t get much mention earlier.
But Nancy left behind something to benefit the rest of the world -- satire that transcends poisonous politics and laughs at her own snobbishness. Something, I’d venture, that continues to comfort quite a few other people in their old age. ~~~
I turn to literature for the last leg of my flu. What could have induced me to indulge in the 800-pager, “The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters”? I am implicitly against inherited wealth and privilege, fascists, communists, classist snobs etc., represented in spades among this group of last century British Lady Legends, born between 1905 and 1920.
Well, I love the witty work of eldest Nancy (who comes in for a bashing over the course of this book), in the family-biographical novels The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, which lampoons her own upper classes. “I think I may say we put India on the map,” a pompous colonial diplomat’s wife declares, “Hardly any of one’s friends had ever heard of India before we went there.”
Nancy’s skill of telling made this rarified world seem not only comprehensive, but inclusive when I first read the books while working as a janitress in London’s back streets during my own version of the Grand European Tour, double digit inflation early-80s student style.
The sisters are magic at nicknames. The Queen Mother is forever dubbed “Cake,” for her wild exclamation at sight of said sweet at a social function. The sister Pamela is called Woman, for embodying the arch-typical female qualities of steadfastness, soberness, and virtue, as personified in some medieval pageant. Boud, Birdie and Bobo for Hitler acolyte Unity (as if her given name and politics weren’t enough); Honks for ethereally beautiful Diana, another Friend Of Adolph. (Another sister, Jessica, became a Communist, eloped with her cousin, and emigrated to America to become a left-wing crank.)
I expected to skim this tome, confronted with the hard reality behind the delectable confection of Nancy’s gossipy novels, which left out the Hitler connection. But I was drawn in by the letters, touched by the mutual support as the sisters (well, most of them) rushed to the deranged Unity’s aid when she fired a bullet in her brain the day England and Germany declared war. She was 22 and lived another eleven years, brain damage having the beneficent effect of shifting her fanatical devotion from fascism to Christian Science.
As the sisters aged and one by one dropped their perches, the sea of letters, 60,000 in all, kept flowing. What devotion, what family feeling, I thought, as Woman nurses Nancy through her four years’ battle with the cancer that ended her life at 66. “Love, darling,” ninety-something Honks signs every letter to Deborah (AKA “Nine” for her reputed mental age). Compliments spurt forth regarding each others’ loving kindness.
But the knives came out when it comes to the subject of maternity. Nancy’s “Waspishness” is attributed to her thwarting – she suffered miscarriages and a fertility-ending operation in her late thirties, at which time she divorced, moved to Paris, and became a fabulous success as a writer, fashionista and socialite. Debo dismisses this: “She didn’t have a real husband and children, just the writing, an empty sort of reward.”
Only after her death did the others learn that during World War II, Nancy informed on Honks, AKA Lady Diana Moseley, wife of Sir Oswald Moseley, founder of the British Union of Fascists. Thanks to Nancy’s testimony, the two were imprisoned during the Second War. Diana chose separation from her four young sons (one eleven-weeks old) rather than denounce Hitler. Which I guess tells you who really suffered thwarted maternity.
Likewise, the married and childless-by-choice Woman, (Pam), took in two of Diana’s sons when their mother was in the lock-up. What thanks does she get? Honks attributes a completely unrelated perceived insensitivity (Pam “had no idea how ghastly prison really was, the lav, etc.”) to her lack of children. Diana sued Her Majesty's Government for lack of heat, and with proceeds bought a mink coat to wear in jail.
Nancy comes in for the worst scalding. While I noted the novelist’s enthusiastic interest in her sisters’ offspring -- full of praise, never jealous, sad or lamenting her own fate – the mothers cannot refrain from attributing her character flaws to barrenness. If she was difficult, my guess it was not due to Terminal Childlessness, but Oldest Girl Syndrome.
First-born barrier-breaker in the upending twenties, Nancy was followed by a bevy of sisters, one more beautiful than the previous, which did not cease till was fifteen. She set the joking tone, originated the family wit; they all traded on Nancy’s ground-breaking success as a writer.
In the last batch of letters, Debo and Honks buck each other up, saying that they have their children, grandchildren and “greats” as comforts in old age. No doubt these offspring meant a great deal to the sisters at the end of their lives -- they don’t get much mention earlier.
But Nancy left behind something to benefit the rest of the world -- satire that transcends poisonous politics and laughs at her own snobbishness. Something, I’d venture, that continues to comfort quite a few other people in their old age. ~~~
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
The End of Entertainment
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
Succumbing to the flu between Christmas and New Year’s, my therapeutic T.V. was ruined by Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. Now I was endowed with Parody Perception: current events sledge-hammered through dialogue: “It’s the sixties! People don’t just want music, they want a message!” Exaggerated effect: oldsters calling a harmless love ballad “devil music.” The drug/rehab/redemption story arc: star repeatedly warned-off /roped in by drug-doing band-mate happened upon indulging behind closed door. Parental estrangement: future star accidentally kills brother, father never misses an opportunity to declare “The wrong kid died!”
I sat down to a sick-night’s viewing of Shine, the story of schizophrenic concert pianist David Helfgott. I remember being impressed when it came out in ’96, but now its hackneyed soul was laid bare. Several Cox clichés appear virtually intact: crazy artist frolicking on trampoline (Look! I’m a free spirit!) inspiring love in all whose path he crosses, despite leaving bath tub running over hostess’s parquet floors;tearful reunion with Orthodox Jewish Holocaust Survivor Dad, whose movie-long mantra had been “I Don’t Have a Son!”
Painful and embarrassing to witness Sir John Gielgud exclaim, “The Rach III! [Rachmaninoff piano concerto] The Rach III has killed people!” And of course, the bio-picee’s sweat-drenched public nervous breakdown, depicted as he plays said concerto onstage in crucial competition. We are never told whether he won – it’s the Anguish that counts.
Jeffrey Rush won an Oscar for his gimicky Rain Man-derived performance, though through most of the film Helfgott was played by the fine young Australian actor Noah Taylor. As Kate Winslet declared on the comedy series Extras: “Best way to win an Oscar – play a Mental!”
Next my remote landed on Backbeat, the 1994 biopic of the “Fifth Beatle” Stuart Sutcliffe, who left the band in pre-mega Hamburg days for an art school scholarship and a girl named Astrid (typical dialogue: “Cynthia [Lennon] vants babies. John vants de vorld.”) SS repeatedly tears apart rooms, immaculately replicated in Dewey Cox’s penchant for ripping sinks from walls whenever he has a tiff with his wife-of-the-moment. (Porcelain is color-coded to indicate decade -- orange for seventies, purple for eighties). Here bio-picee collapses with fatal brain hemorrhage, just as his genius as a painter is being discovered.
The only thing in this film that survived Parody Perception is the fact that Astrid was responsible for the Beatle mop-top comb-down. I know someone who at a cocktail party met someone who invented the hand-held hair dryer – a General Electric engineer accidentally reversed the vacuum engine in an industrial suction tube. Amazing how major world events come about.
On to Dreamgirls, which I only caught part of, but enough to see Eddie Murphy drop trou onstage and die an untimely death (Rick James, Marvin Gaye). Even my viewing of The Queen was affected: Tony Blair to Cherie, “This country will never be a Republic. The people wont' stand for it!”
If you want to steer clear of the clichés, Netflix Control, the recent bio-pic of Joy Division’s lead singer/songwriter Ian Curtis, who, yes, committed suicide in 1980 just as the band was breaking worldwide. Based on an unsentimental memoir by his wife Deborah (who in a sole instance of Parody Pic story line, burdens young genius with baby.) True, an epileptic fit aborts a stage appearance, but the camera stresses less the spastic tremors than another band member’s deadpan reaction: bassist Peter Hook reaches into the convulsing man’s pocket to retrieve his cigarettes, lights up, waits for the fit to pass.
In Backbeat, the bio-picee suffers a jealousy-inspired paint-splattering rage just before death. But he and Astrid get to make the nice and are cooing lovingly again just before he grabs his temples and crashes to the floor forever.
But in Control, we witness the misogynistic blast of Ian Curtis’s final temper tantrum as his panicked wife did, and are left not with the mythologized genius of musical history, but the ill and crazed man she was trying to divorce.
No redemptive, forgiving narrative arc here, just the cruelty of a wife finding her husband hanging from a kitchen wash line. And afterward, nary a platitude from his shocked and angry band mates. (Who in case you didn’t know, went on to form megaband New Order.) ~~~
Succumbing to the flu between Christmas and New Year’s, my therapeutic T.V. was ruined by Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. Now I was endowed with Parody Perception: current events sledge-hammered through dialogue: “It’s the sixties! People don’t just want music, they want a message!” Exaggerated effect: oldsters calling a harmless love ballad “devil music.” The drug/rehab/redemption story arc: star repeatedly warned-off /roped in by drug-doing band-mate happened upon indulging behind closed door. Parental estrangement: future star accidentally kills brother, father never misses an opportunity to declare “The wrong kid died!”
I sat down to a sick-night’s viewing of Shine, the story of schizophrenic concert pianist David Helfgott. I remember being impressed when it came out in ’96, but now its hackneyed soul was laid bare. Several Cox clichés appear virtually intact: crazy artist frolicking on trampoline (Look! I’m a free spirit!) inspiring love in all whose path he crosses, despite leaving bath tub running over hostess’s parquet floors;tearful reunion with Orthodox Jewish Holocaust Survivor Dad, whose movie-long mantra had been “I Don’t Have a Son!”
Painful and embarrassing to witness Sir John Gielgud exclaim, “The Rach III! [Rachmaninoff piano concerto] The Rach III has killed people!” And of course, the bio-picee’s sweat-drenched public nervous breakdown, depicted as he plays said concerto onstage in crucial competition. We are never told whether he won – it’s the Anguish that counts.
Jeffrey Rush won an Oscar for his gimicky Rain Man-derived performance, though through most of the film Helfgott was played by the fine young Australian actor Noah Taylor. As Kate Winslet declared on the comedy series Extras: “Best way to win an Oscar – play a Mental!”
Next my remote landed on Backbeat, the 1994 biopic of the “Fifth Beatle” Stuart Sutcliffe, who left the band in pre-mega Hamburg days for an art school scholarship and a girl named Astrid (typical dialogue: “Cynthia [Lennon] vants babies. John vants de vorld.”) SS repeatedly tears apart rooms, immaculately replicated in Dewey Cox’s penchant for ripping sinks from walls whenever he has a tiff with his wife-of-the-moment. (Porcelain is color-coded to indicate decade -- orange for seventies, purple for eighties). Here bio-picee collapses with fatal brain hemorrhage, just as his genius as a painter is being discovered.
The only thing in this film that survived Parody Perception is the fact that Astrid was responsible for the Beatle mop-top comb-down. I know someone who at a cocktail party met someone who invented the hand-held hair dryer – a General Electric engineer accidentally reversed the vacuum engine in an industrial suction tube. Amazing how major world events come about.
On to Dreamgirls, which I only caught part of, but enough to see Eddie Murphy drop trou onstage and die an untimely death (Rick James, Marvin Gaye). Even my viewing of The Queen was affected: Tony Blair to Cherie, “This country will never be a Republic. The people wont' stand for it!”
If you want to steer clear of the clichés, Netflix Control, the recent bio-pic of Joy Division’s lead singer/songwriter Ian Curtis, who, yes, committed suicide in 1980 just as the band was breaking worldwide. Based on an unsentimental memoir by his wife Deborah (who in a sole instance of Parody Pic story line, burdens young genius with baby.) True, an epileptic fit aborts a stage appearance, but the camera stresses less the spastic tremors than another band member’s deadpan reaction: bassist Peter Hook reaches into the convulsing man’s pocket to retrieve his cigarettes, lights up, waits for the fit to pass.
In Backbeat, the bio-picee suffers a jealousy-inspired paint-splattering rage just before death. But he and Astrid get to make the nice and are cooing lovingly again just before he grabs his temples and crashes to the floor forever.
But in Control, we witness the misogynistic blast of Ian Curtis’s final temper tantrum as his panicked wife did, and are left not with the mythologized genius of musical history, but the ill and crazed man she was trying to divorce.
No redemptive, forgiving narrative arc here, just the cruelty of a wife finding her husband hanging from a kitchen wash line. And afterward, nary a platitude from his shocked and angry band mates. (Who in case you didn’t know, went on to form megaband New Order.) ~~~
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