On the only way to answer the crazazy (and also, Barack Obama causes the rain)

Okay, so conservative reactions at town hall meetings over the past couple of weeks have ranged from misled through disturbed to WTFOGMCNNBBQ?!!!1!!11! (occasionally sprinkled, like bursts of blue sky peeking through storm clouds or the last size-medium cashmere cardigan erroneously crammed among the maternity tops on the clearance rack, with reasonable and sincerely felt concerns). No surprise there. What is surprising, although not nearly surprising enough, is the number of speakers who actually respond to it, who take seriously inflammatory and/or misinformed and/or just plain crazy questions as if they aren't purely someone's opportunity to get on the teevee and spew some crazy.

Well, finally someone delivered the response that such questions should get, and that someone is Barney Frank.

For those of you who are audio-challenged and reading along at work:

Wackaloon: Why do you continue to support a Nazi policy, as Obama has expressly supported this policy? Why are you supporting it?
Frank: When you ask me that question, I am going to revert to my ethnic heritage and answer your question with a question. On what planet do you spend most of your time? ... Do you want me to answer the question? Yes. As you stand there with a picture of the president defaced to look like Hitler and compare the effort to increase health care to the Nazis, my answer to you is, as I said before, it is a tribute to the First Amendment that this kind of vile, contemptible nonsense is so freely propagated. Ma'am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table. I have no interest in doing it.

(Also note the shout of "Hitler didn't start with the Jews" somewhere in the background.)

Let future town hall speakers take that as a lesson: This is the way to deal with those people. Don't waste your time trying to reason with someone who's beyond reason. These people aren't trying to engage you in debate; they don't want their questions answered. They want to stand up and shout, be disruptive, propagate a myth, show off for their fellow wackaloons, maybe get on TV. And when you try to seriously address their questions, you only lend validity to an inflammatory statement that has none--and allow them to monopolize time that could go to someone with a realistic concern.

This is something that has pissed me off about the media for years now. In the interest of "fair and balanced" reporting, they think they're obliged to always give equal time to both sides of the story. Is this a good practice most of the time? Sure. But when one side is presenting a reasoned, reasonable argument and the other is coming from a place of fantasy and nonsense, giving time to that other side is a waste of time and makes something seem valid that clearly is not. If one side is saying, "We're 37th in the world for health care, nearly 47 million Americans are uninsured, and we see universal health care as the best way to address that problem for reasons A and B and C" and the other is saying, for instance, that Obama wants to send government agents into your home to brainwash your children, no. That other side does not deserve equal time. Nor does "Obama wants to kill your grandmother." Or "Obama is another Hitler."

By all means, if someone comes to you with a rational argument, talk with them. Engage in conversation. Give them a platform to make their point. Maybe you'll convince them. Hey, maybe they'll convince you. But when someone comes to you with "Obama is Hitler" or "Obama keeps an enemies list of anyone who logs on to a government Web site, and by the way, he's from Kenya," do not give them a sense of respectability by engaging. The only way to respond to them is the way Barney Frank did--that their baseless, inflammatory comment isn't worth your time or energy.

On rebranding (not the kind that involves actual fire, although sometimes it feels like it does)

Okay, so I am, of course, just a little bit of an advertising nut, and branding fascinates me. That's why I loved this link from @BirminghamWorks, where Fortune magazine looks back over a dozen old branding efforts and their updated looks. It follows Apple from its Isaac Newton logo through the rainbow-striped disco fruit to the current, sleek chrome apple and Starbucks from its naked siren to its more stylized, less-naked siren.

The piece also looks at questionable brand renovations. The new Kraft logo, note the writers, is kind of nebulous and devoid of real meaning and also resembles the Yoplait logo, which is a General Mills product. The new "smiley" Pepsi swoosh could be a loser, and the Tropicana glass of orange juice was such a loser that they changed everything back just two months after its debut. The biggest stinker, they seem to feel, is the new Blackwater logo--they say it looks kind of sinister and spy-ish. I guess I can see that a little, particularly if you know what Blackwater (now "Xe," pronounced "zee," which everyone's definitely going to figure out on the first try) does, but to me, it looks more like a computer company. My first instinct is to wonder if they offer netbooks. Blackwater has a lot of bad press to overcome, but I don't really know where they're trying to take the company now, and this logo certainly doesn't give any clue.

Mentioned not in that article but in one from the beginning of July is Sci Fi's rebranding effort into... ugh, "Syfy." When I first read the press release that announced the change, I thought it was a clever prank designed to horrify viewers and marketing professionals alike before coming clean and giving everyone a relieved chuckle (and maybe an affectionate, "Oh, you're so bad."). And yet no. Now known as "seefee" around my household, the network hasn't really changed its programming--just its name, really. It's still, for the most part, a mix of Science and Fiction. They've added shows like "Warehouse 13," which is "a human story--about relationships, about isolation" that is also about... a warehouse full of supernatural relics. And shows like "Caprica," which is... a futuristic other-planet prequel to space-wars show "Battlestar Galactica." "It isn't about abandoning our dedicated fanbase," says Chris Czarkowsi, ad and sales rep for Seefee. "It's about including all those people who don't realize Syfy has anything to offer them. The point at which we change identity is when people don't see us so narrowly."

And the answer is a new, weird-looking brand that still doesn't tell people what the network has to offer?

I'm not promising that the new brand won't work out; the article reports that Seefee has drawn 12 new advertisers in the first quarter and that the rebrand did well with focus groups. But the question remains: How well will the brand do at attracting the new viewers, the ones who don't self-identify as sci-fi fans, to their programming? My biggest concern is that "Syfy" doesn't mean anything. It doesn't tell me anything about the shows they offer, the fact that sci-fi has been going mainstream for quite some time (Transformers, The Matrix, etc.), the fact that many of its shows are just as character- and plot-driven as they are techy or fantastical. It's just... seefee.

My instinct would have been not to convince potential viewers that seefee is the kind of TV that they want to watch but to convince potential viewers that sci-fi is what they've been watching all along anyway. A marketing campaign could easily push the more human tilt of some of its more human-tilted shows (the kissy bits from "Battlestar Galactica," the teary bits from "Primeval," the bits from "Sanctuary" that--wait, no, best to leave out "Sanctuary") to demonstrate the more human tilt of the network without having to rebrand it entirely. But maybe my instinct is wrong. The answer will be borne out in future viewership and advertising figures. But I hate waiting.

In the meantime, I'm sticking to my guns: A good brand needs to give some indication of the nature of the product or service you're offering, because you won't always be around in person to decipher your new logo for confused customers. The UK's "Consignia" lasted all of 14 months before switching back to a far clearer "Royal Mail." Where did Cingular go? Back to AT&T Wireless. And what the hell is an Altria?

Hint: It may or may not be Phillip Morris's attempt to escape Congressional-hearing notoriety; it's almost certainly not a beaver-looking critter with the tail of a rat.

On contagious confidence and joie de vivre: still not enough to get you into magazines

Okay, so doesn't Kelly Clarkson look awesome? She's standing there, right over a headline about body confidence, and does she ever look confident. Of course, it's easy to be confident when you look a good as she does. And although she's been known for her curviness in the past, it looks like she's slimmed down a ton; maybe she used those tips for slimming down and losing eight pounds and being hot by Saturday. Whatever she did, she looks fantastic, and I'm sure her skinny-mininess has contributed to her looking so happy and--wait. Hold on.

Do what, now?



But I thought--



Who's that girl in the cover photo, then?

There's been a nasty rumor going around that Self magazine airbrushed the hell out of Clarkson to put her on the cover. Obviously, it's just that--a rumor--because what self-aware magazine would Photoshop off about 20 pounds before putting her next to a headline about "staying true to" herself? Thank goodness Self EIC Lucy Danzinger took to her blog to set things straight.

Last Friday, the Internet was abuzz with the fact that I answered the question, did you Photoshop the September issue cover photo of Kelly Clarkson? with the answer: Yes.

See? It was noth--wait a minute.

Kelly has this amazing spirit, the kind of joie de vivre that certain people possess that makes you want to stand closer to them, hoping that you can learn what they know. In this case, you get the feeling Kelly has not let fame spoil her, but also that she was just born confident, with a generosity of spirit that is all about others and rarely about herself. She is, like her music, giving and strong and confident and full of gusto. Did we alter her appearance? Only to make her look her personal best.

Her personal best? But--but that's not even her. Kelly Clarkson's chin isn't that pointed. Her arms aren't that skinny. If you watch the behind-the-scenes video Danzinger includes in her post, you can see exactly how much Clarkson isn't that waifish figure on the magazine cover. Not that she's not pretty--I think she's pretty and cute and looks really energetic and happy, and while I wish her usual stylist would help her pick costumes for her performances that don't look unflattering and uncomfortable and pinchy, her body is good and she's got so much personality. So you'd think that her personal best would be the best shot of her person. Not... well, some other person.

Danzinger first dismisses the claims by bringing up her own proclivity for throwing out any candid photos that aren't completely flattering and having the art department slim her down a bit before her picture goes into the magazine at any point. Then she dilutes her argument by adding that, also, too, retouching is a common practice with magazines to remove "any awkward wrinkles in the blouse, flyaway hair and other things that might detract from the beauty of the shot." Like, apparently, that stray 20 pounds. It's not until the very end of her blog post that Danzinger finally lets slip, probably inadvertently, that unaltered fatty-fat-fatties like the real Kelly Clarkson just don't sell magazines.

A cover's job is to sell the magazine[...]

Which fat chicks apparently don't.

What gets me is that it's right there. It's right next to a quote about staying true to yourself and covering an article where Clarkson talks about accepting and loving herself exactly as she is. "When people talk about my weight, I'm like, 'You seem to have a problem with it; I don't. I'm fine!'," she says. Fine, and alone, probably, within the editorial staff of Self, because they definitely aren't fine with you.

"Did we alter her appearance? Only to make her look her personal best." Apparently, we're missing the personal from personal best, because, per the article, Clarkson already thinks she's at her best. Making her look her personal best would mean publishing a cover photo that was actually her. Danzinger & Co. made the choice to show her at their idea of her best, carving off 20 pounds of flyaway hairs and awkward wrinkles and covering her ass with a big yellow dot offering prizes-prizes-prizes.

And no, Luce, it's not the same as 'shopping out your own saddlebags or throwing away unflattering vacation pictures (although that seems like a great way to lose a lot of good vacation memories to me; sometimes the best memories also involve crappy hair or a sunburn). Those are things that you did voluntarily to emphasize your personal best. What you did was decide for Kelly what her personal best should look like, whether she's happy with her body as it is or not.

Danzinger closes:

Your job: Think about your photographs and what you want them to convey. And go ahead and be confident in every shot, in every moment.

But don't stop there, because confidence doesn't cover up the fact that you're an big old lardass who couldn't possibly sell a magazine as you are.

Because the truest beauty is the kind that comes from within.

And by "within," of course she means "but still close enough to the surface that it shows on the outside, too, because inner beauty doesn't make cover photos."

On good girls (talkin' bout the sad girls--wait, no, hold on)

Okay, so a friend hooked me up with a link to a recent Daily Beast article trumpeting the return of the "good girl." (Her comment: "I was a good girl before it was cool!" Being the Catholic daughter of an Italian-American cop in small-town Massachusetts will do that.) The article starts by mentioning some signs of the raunchification of modern society--cardio-striptease (ugh, so trendy), Heidi Pratt (ugh, so desperate), and Brazilian waxes (ugh--wait, no, ow, but I don't really see the harm with this one. Outside of the pain). And I will say that I've noticed an increase in raunchiness; very young girls are being exposed to blatant sexuality early on, and they're not getting the guidance they need to process it and understand it in the context of their own lives.

The much-welcomed antidote to the pole-spinning, nekkid-self-portrait-snapping Miley Cyruses of the world is, obviously, a young role model who is cool and fashionable and popular without acting sexual beyond her ken. And I'm all for that--not for keeping young girls young, but for allowing them to remain young. I think that Abigail Breslin is cool, Demi Lovato is cute as a two-week-old puppy, and Emma Watson is the kind of girl I'd like to hang out with myself, never mind handing them off to The Boy's nieces as a positive influence.

The thing is, these girls aren't just presented as good influences--they're presented as good girls, or, more specifically, "good girls." In practical terms, "good girls" are girls who live up to societal standards for "good"--they're virgins and they don't drink and they don't do drugs and they go to church. They don't smoke, they don't wear short skirts or a lot of makeup, they don't kiss with tongue--they don't do anything to rebel or threaten or even question the status quo. And maybe that makes them happy, and if it does, yay! It's good to be happy.

But what if that doesn't make them happy? I mean, there was a time in my life when I more or less did all of that, mostly for lack of opportunity more than anything else. I was miserable. It wasn't that any of the trappings of "good girl" directly made me unhappy; it was just that I wasn't happy doing it--none of it was really me. I was also unhappy being a 13-year-old; it's how it works. And now, as a drinking, makeup-wearing, tattooed, body-pierced, er... non-virgin (albeit still a churchgoing non-smoker), I'm ridiculously happy--correlation, sure, not causation, but it's there.

Goodness gracious

The question also arises as to whether one can be a good person without being a "good girl." If you spend your money on body art but make sure to save enough to pay your rent and your taxes? If you wear a lot of makeup but also read to your kids and help them with their homework and watch movies with them and explain the parts they don't understand? If you're a 16-year-old who sneaks cigarettes behind the gym and also gets good grades, acts in school plays, and volunteers at the animal shelter? Hell, if you spend your nights spinning around a pole and your days teaching illiterate adults how to read? The concept of a "good girl" creates a dichotomy where there might otherwise be a continuum.

I'm also kind of bothered by the fact that we tend to look at the "good girl" with an emphasis on girl. Of the 13 girls (women?) noted in the article's photo gallery, only one--Emma Watson--has followed the traditional transition to non-girlhood by going to college. And this is not to say that college is the only way to become an adult, but there has been a debate as to whether the professionally handled, fairly surreal life of a child star brings on adulthood early or actually prolongs childhood. Regardless, most of the others listed aren't old enough to vote, much less engage in any of the drinking and whoring around that generally characterizes a "bad girl"--they're still pretty much sheltered, parent-supervised, sometimes homeschooled, and it's easy to be a "good girl" when you're still a girl.

The article also presents to us Bella Swan, who is, above all, pretend, and it's easy to withstand the pressures of society when you're written that way. (That she's an example of a "good girl" who's also a "total asshole" goes unmentioned in the article.) But of course, we know how I feel about her.

Sweet Jesus

In writer Melissa Meltzer's favor, she acknowledges and even explores the effect "good girl" pressure can have on a girl who may be good but isn't, well, "good." She mentions Rachel Simmons, author of The Curse of the Good Girl, who points out that the archetypical "good girl" doesn't realistically exist in real life and that trying and failing to reach that particular star can drown a girl in a sense of failure and constant self-criticism. And then there's the legend that's graced many a t-shirt, bumper sticker, and embroidered throw pillow: "Well-behaved women seldom make history." As with many cliches, it carries a grain of truth; women who stick to the societally approved standard behavior and stifle any urge to step out and do what they feel needs doing generally reinforce, not challenge, the status quo.

The part of the article that really reached me, however, was the brief mention of Carlene Bauer's memoir Not That Kind of Girl. Bauer chronicles her journey from small-town fundamentalist evangelical Christian to New York pseudointellectual hipster to a self-possessed, self-aware, satisfied middle ground. The thing that complicates her journey--and makes it memoir-worthy--is that fact that, as a real person, she found it impossible to be comfortable shoehorned into any of the traditional archetypes. As a fundamentalist Christian, she still couldn't accept their vision of a touchy-feely Jesus over her own concept of a somewhat radical, shit-kicking Messiah. As a hipster Sylvia Plathodist, she felt the odd woman out trying to hang on to that relationship with God in that trendily agnostic environment. It was only when she became confident enough to break through the stereotypes and carve out her own personal niche--faithful if not religious, fun if not wild, rebellious within a reason of her own definition--that she found a comfortable place to land.

Of the book, Meltzer writes:

Her weekends as an undergrad might include hanging out at Tower Records (“Stone cold sober. Fully dressed”), attending a pro-choice march, and still making it to church on Sunday morning. Bauer was able to become the kind of girl who was both rebellious and pious, good and little bit bad. It’s the kind of life you can’t easily label, but hopefully one more girls will consider adopting.

Good.

Good grief.

Incidentally, the article defines modesty as the "antithesis of the thong." Not necessarily true. One can be perfectly modest on the outside whilst rocking lacy naughtiness underneath. The antithesis of the thong is bodily comfort in the buttular region.

On ACG, Devourer of Words

Okay, so I haven't posted in quite some time because a) work has been surprisingly worky, requiring me to do work during my valuable slacking-off time, and b) I've got another post in the chute that will rock. This. City. To its foundations. (Okay, not so much; as much effort as I've put into it, it'll probably end up being a royal disappointment. I've gotten used to such.)

But I didn't want to make the potentially okay the enemy of the mediocre, and Amanda at Pandagon (to whom I may start referring as "Amandagon," just to save space. And seeing it in print, it looks pretty cool) has a post up about her voracious reading habits as a tween and a new book, Shelf Discovery, that calls them to mind.

I’m sure that many of you out there reading shared my fate---nerdy, overimaginative children who read everything in sight, without the constraints of taste or discernment.

Cereal boxes. Yes.

The habit of devouring books is one that I’ve actually put to great use as an adult, and I owe YA authors a debt of gratitude for that. And while I opened this post with allusions to the trashiest of the milestone books of youth, Skurnick actually covers a diversity of books that mark up one’s preteen and early teen years as a undiscerning reader. And so it’s a real trip down nostalgia lane, and impossible to put down. Beverly Cleary, Madeleine L’engle, Judy Blume, Katherine Paterson, Paul Zindel---books that proliferated in the 50s through the 80s because of the popularity of cheap paperbacks. Some are genuinely great books, and others are unrepentant trash. Skurnick is determined to find redeeming values in all, though she’s hard-pressed to do so with the oeuvre of V.C. Andrews, she actually makes a case for Jean Auel. If you’ve read every single thing that Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote or had a habit of nicking books that had kserious-looking teenagers on the cover, you’ll love this. The only thing she missed was the Anne of Green Gables series, and so I’ll be forced to comb through the blog to see if she’s ever covered it.

It can sometimes be painful, or embarrassing, or painfully embarrassing to look back on those stories that occupied our time in those early-teen years of self-discovery (in the non-uberpersonal sense of the term). I've done it a couple of times here, revisiting the Sweet Valley High series in some detail and The Baby-sitters Club in more; I'd say I read those consistently up through about #54 and then sporadically up through #70. I also hit up the first seventy-some-odd Saddle Club books, up until I started riding more myself and discovering exactly how much Bonnie Bryant (and her ghostwriting crew) didn't know. Disappointing, that, too a 14-year-old. One of the commenters at Pandagon mentioned Lurleen McDaniel and her One Last Wish series, where tragic young girls find first love for just a moment before dying beautifully of cancer or diabetes or whatever, and I picked through a few of those before leaving off in search of something a little less depressing.

But my young-young-adult reading list wasn't entirely tween pulp. I mean, plenty of it was, but I read a lot. I was the only kid I knew whose parents had to tell her to stop reading. And it wasn't any attempt to censor my reading choices, just to guarantee my bedtime - my parents would have to do bed checks to make sure I wasn't reading under the covers with a flashlight until early hours. But I blame them completely; they were the ones who started reading to/with us every night. Favorites included The Berenstein Bears, which poor Mom was always begged to "read funny," requiring a nightly improv routine that would have made Eddie Izzard bow and step back. My first chapter book (that I remember) was Anne of Green Gables, followed by Anne of Avonlea and part of Anne of the Island before I started to really get kind of sick of Anne and her e and her neuroses. As soon as we were able to appreciate it (well, Doug was; I think I was a bit young yet), we had weekly reading nights where Dad would read to us aloud from books of Mark Twain and Sherlock Holmes. Books were pretty much the environment when I was growing up. Which is good, because I was kind of an obnoxious kid and needed distracting.

Other high points: all of Beverly Cleary's Ramona books, The Secret Garden, Little Women, a little bit of Judy Blume (there wasn't much she could teach me that my parents hadn't already given me the benefit of the doubt and discussed with me), Piers Anthony (I read about two books into his Mode series; yeah, the cover had a horse on it), The Black Stallion (and successors), a little bit of Nancy Drew, The Chronic(what?)cles of Narnia. Never really a fan of V.C Andrews (ew, creepy) or Christopher Pike (pretty much pr0n for teens + supernatural thrill). That was also the time I started stretching a bit, trying at 1,001 Arabian Nights and some Poe and not really understanding it at the time but doing better on later reads.

Amanda mentions being a re-reader as a kid, but not now. I hate to admit that I'm hardly a reader at all at the moment; by the time I get home from the office, I hardly make it a priority to read still more words, although it's something I intend to work at. But as a tween, I was definitely a re-reader. Some books I read and put down - some I even read and gave away (although I was almost as much of a book-hoarder as I was a book-reader, a habit I haven't been able to kick) - but some just called out for a second (and third, and seventh) visit. Among them:

- The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster. Fantastic escapist fun for a kid who was as frankly pedantic as I was. Puns! Grammar! Math! Oh, the geekish joy.
- A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle (and A Wind in the Door and A Swiftly Tilting Planet, although Wrinkle was the one I hit up over and over). Again, lovely escapism, this time starring a brilliant, antisocial girl who saves the world through brainpower. No idea why that would appeal.
- From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, by E.L. Konigsburg. A wonderful puzzle book.
- The Westing Game, by Ellen Raskin. Another wonderful puzzle book. Never saw the movie; couldn't bear to.
- Matilda, by Roald Dahl. A clever, bookish girl is underappreciated by the world around her. Detecting a pattern? Incidentally, my mom loved this one, too. (I also loved The Witches and The BFG. The man knew his stuff.)

What I love about a lot of those books is how many of them I've re-read as an adult. The plots still hold up, the suspense is still suspenseful, and the mysteries still seem mysterious. And looking back, they tell me a little about me as a child. Namely, that I was a pitiful little geek who never felt that she fit in after someone dragged her away from all of her friends at a difficult age, Mom and Dad. But I had Milo, and Meg, and Claudia, and Turtle, and Matilda. And that was... not nearly enough to grow as a well-rounded and balanced young adult. But that came later.

What books kept you up with a flashlight all night as a kid? Any I should look for now?

On understanding true love: second of two - spoileriffic

Okay, so yesterday, I started my commentary on the terrible awfulness of Twilight. My objections, vis a vis that post, were largely to the crappy writing style and the wading-pool depth of character in the protagonist. Today I'll look somewhat beyond that, to the people with whom Bella Swan (ack. Still ack when I type that) surrounds herself - and to the scary things we learn as a result.

There are, in fact, other characters than Bella (to the extent that she can really be described as a "character"). There's Jessica, who prattles; we know this because all of her dialogue is tagged, "she prattled." She doesn't have a lot of dialogue, because whenever she starts prattling, her good friend Bella tunes her out to think about Edward. We do get to hear her prattling whenever it pertains to... Edward. There's also Angela, who, in contrast to Jessica, is sweet and shy; we know this because all of her dialogue is tagged, "she murmured shyly." There's also Lauren, who is blonde and a bitch and says bitchy things.

Then there are the guys. Mike is spiky-haired and has a crush on Bella, much to the consternation of Jessica, who has a prattling crush on him. Eric has a crush on Bella and sees Mike as a rival. Tyler has a crush on Bella, much to the consternation of Lauren, who has a crush on him. Jacob has a crush on Bella and is Native American. That's it. That's what we know about Bella's only friends in this podunk town, because she cuts out on them completely as soon as she makes contact with...

... Edward Cullen, local hottie and vampire babe. Edward has a crush on Bella and is a vampire. In the interest of character depth and future plot conflict, Stephenie Meyer has made him perfect. He's gorgeous - "like a Greek god" - perfect face, alabaster skin, rock-solid body, eyes that are black when he's mad and gold when he's happy, "unusual" reddish hair. He's smart - the only student, perhaps the only person in town, as smart as Bella. He's super-strong and super-fast and drives a reliable Swedish-made sex machine. Though a vampire, he doesn't even eat people; he's so ridiculously virtuous that he's a "vegetarian," which means he eats meat that isn't people. He doesn't have fangs, sleep in a coffin, or burst into flames when he comes out in the daytime, all of which would be major turnoffs. He maintains excellent dental hygiene. And he sparkles - literally fucking sparkles in the sun "like thousands of tiny diamonds were embedded in the surface" of his skin. But he has flaws! He's very flawed! He wants desperately to drink Bella's blood, but he can't stay away. And he drives too fast.

Oh, he also stalks her and has been coming into her house and watching her sleep every night since she moved to Forks, which would seem like a flaw, but it's actually romantic, because... something. It's romantic. Don't question, accept.

I do not like it. I do not like it, Sam I Am. I don't like the idea that impressionable teenagers are internalizing this deeply creepy concept of stalking-and-possessiveness as love. Because it isn't, and there aren't enough Lifetime movies in the world to deprogram a girl once she's decided that he only hits her because he loves her so much.

That danger is inherent to the nature of the supernatural love story - the danger of the beast and the fantasy that my love, my love can be the one to tame it. And with that concept of true love as a shield, the scarier he gets, the more appealing he becomes - in that scene in the meadow, where he demonstrates precisely how he could lure her and chase her and trap her and beat the crap out of her, Bella exposits that he has become even more beautiful when he's vicious and potentially life-threatening. We all know that girl.

And after said display, it was all, "I'm sorry I scared you. I just love you so much, sometimes I can't control myself." We all know that guy, too.

And that's where the scary comes in. The scary in these books isn't the day-walking, "vegetarian" virtuous vampires - it's the real-life men these girls are going to someday encounter and the real-life women these girls are going to someday be.

Let me tell you a little love story. It's about a girl - depressingly servile but still fairly competent, self-sacrificing but still fairly sharp and clever - who moves to a small town and meets a boy. He's dark, broody, and mysterious, showing affection but always with an undertone of danger. He warns her that he has a violent streak that comes out whenever she's near - but he won't leave her alone. He loves her so much that he can barely control himself when she's around, so she'll have to do it instead.

Over time, she begins to isolate herself from her friends and family because they wouldn't understand. She lies to them about where she'll be. She skips school and school events if he won't be there. She folds to his will at the merest dazzling glance. He watches her constantly, all around school, at her house in the middle of the night. She tries her hardest to learn what sets him off - she learns not to move when he kisses her so as not to provoke him. And still, he constantly warns her that she isn't safe around him - that she'd do well to be afraid of him, that she should avoid him for her own safety, that she is putting herself in danger by being around him. And in the end, she's begging him to kill her to remove the temptation.

"I love you - now stay away from me, I'm dangerous." "Look at the way I hurt you. I love you so much, I can't help it - you should stay away from me." Putting all of the onus on her to stay away from him for her own safety, absolving him of the need to exert self-control. Making her change her behavior so as not to provoke him. Take away the supernatural vampirity of it all, and it becomes pretty clear - "Every time I'm near you, I want to beat you beyond recognition, I love you so much. You should stay away from me, despite the fact that I'm constantly following you around." But fill in the blanks with a venomous monster and a lemon-fresh circulatory system, and suddenly it's a romance for the ages.

I feel like these books need to come with a big, red sticker on the title page - "Disclaimer: Obsession isn't love. Possession isn't love. Wanting to hurt someone isn't love." If you're lying to your friends about where you're going just in case he happens to kill you while you're there, that's a bad sign. If you aren't allowed to move when a guy kisses you because he might snap and kill you, that's a bad sign. If you find yourself begging him to kill you so you'll never have to be apart, that's a bad sign.

And what's really scary about it is the responses from fans - "It's just a story. Vampires aren't real. We don't think it's real; we just read it for the love story." That misses the point that it's not a love story. It's a story of dominance, submission, control, and manipulation. And if that's what teenage girls are reading as a love story, if that's the Edward they're holding their hearts for, we're failing them. And if that's the romance that grown women are idealizing, we've done a lot of failing already.

On understanding true love: first of two - spoileriffic

Okay, so some of you who read my recent rant about crappy writing may have figured out precisely to which author I was referring and down which book I planned on taking. And I did; I read it. It took me probably six hours over the course of three days, but I read all the way through Twilight and can say, without reservation, that I will never get those six hours back.

Why did I subject myself to this? Many reasons. For one, I wanted to know what all the fuss was about. For another, I'd read so many deliciously brutal takedowns that I just had to, in my masochistic way, sit through it and share in their glorious pain.

The main reason, though, was a comment The Boy got from one of "the girls" at his dance school. (These "girls" were his fellow instructors, which puts them all in the late-thirties-to-early-forties range.) They had been going on and on and on and on about how wonderful the books were and how wonderful the movie was and how they were just going to have to read the books all over again after watching the movie to remind themselves of the wonderful. And then The Boy had to step in and wonder, in his Boy fashion, precisely what was so romantic about dating a guy who is constantly on the very cusp of murdering you and drinking your blood.

That's when he was informed that he just doesn't understand true love.

I tried not to take offense when I heard that. In fact, I took it to heart: If he didn't understand true love, that must mean that our love isn't true, in which case the obvious solution is to read the book and try to true things up a bit. So I did. And now I have. And if I now really do understand it, may I die lonely and unloved.

It's not just that the books are poorly written - and oh, they are. I mentioned Stephenie Meyer's addiction to fancy adverbs and dialogue tags and her allergy to the word "said." I could add to that the fact that everything we know about Meyer's entire universe can be - and trust me, has been - exposited by our protagonist, whose name is - wait for it - Isabella Swan. (I spent ten minutes trying to come up with something worse than Isabella Swan to put down as a snarky alternative, and I could find none. Well played, Meyer.) Bella (as she keeps insisting that people call her, because they just won't learn) saves readers the trouble of inferring context and backstory from the plot by just telling us flat-out in the first person.

What else do we know about Bella? We know that she's clumsy. Sooo clumsy. Clummy-clum-clumsy. You can hear "Yakety Sax" faintly in the background throughout the book. She falls down in the woods. She trips over her own feet at the beach. She trips over her own feet in class. She drops her books. She thwacks her classmates in the head with a volleyball. She thwacks herself in the head with a badminton racquet. She gets paper cuts. At one point, Meyer specifically describes her eating a bowl of cereal, "chewing each bite with care," as if a Lucky Charms-Mama Cass moment is an ever-looming threat. And in case you weren't able to pick up on it yourself, Bella is kind enough to tell you herself.

I'm absolutely ordinary - well, except for bad things like all the near-death experiences and being so clumsy that I'm almost disabled.

Oh, are you clumsy? I totes hadn't noticed.

Our love interest Edward also is unafraid of reminding Bella (and, by extension, us) of exactly how close she is to unintentionally self-inflicted death all the time, which is why he bodily carries her practically everywhere she goes (unless his brother, mother, or little sister is taking care of it). I have actually seen that once in real life. The kid was eight, and it got him an extreme home makeover from Ty Pennington. If there's one thing that Meyer will not let us forget about Bella, it's that she's fucking clumsy.

We also know that she's very plain - pale and brunette - but that, having gone from her fancy-pants big-city school in bustling metropolitan Phoenix to a podunk one-horser in Washington, she's somehow become the hot fish in the ugly pond (outside of the reigning hot blonde who is, conveniently, a bitch). We also know that she's super-duper smart - everything they're doing now she's already done back at her school in bustling metropolitan Phoenix, so she's deigning to do it all again just to have something to do. And she reads Jane Austen novels and Wuthering Heights for fun, but the Forks library is so shitty she has to travel all the way to Seattle for decent reading material. And she listens to Chopin and Debussy and nearly pisses herself in shock when someone else listens to it too. She's kind enough to correct the stupidity and unworldliness of the local doofi somehow without coming across as a total snatch. To them, I mean.

We also know that she hate-hate-hates rainy weather, because she won't fucking shut up about it.

We also know that her earlobes taste like Doritos and she lactates beer. Or something like that, because she is a scrawny, clumsy, whiny, pseudointellectual Gisele Bundchen to the boys at Forks High School for the Petulant and Stupid. They are all over her shit. She is beating them off with a stick, actually arranging relationships for them with other girls in school to turn them away from her honey-scented awesomeness. The only boy in the whole region - including the Indian reservation - who is actively hostile to her is Edward Cullen, but we later learn that his hostility is just a shield to hide the fact that, yeah, he's hot for that, because she smells like truffle oil and a child's happy tears, and not just a natural side-effect of her being completely obnoxious.

Now, some might speculate that this Bella Swan is merely a Mary Sue, that Meyer is living out her own bizarre vampire-love-story teenage fantasies through this girl. But, see, that can't possibly be, because traditionally, a Mary Sue is without flaws, and Bella Swan has flaws like whoa. Did you catch that? She's introverted! And plain! And what else... ooh, clumsy! And whatever, but she's totally not a cipher for Meyer's vampire romance fantasy fulfilment or, ultimately, a victim of a significantly twisted concept of drama and romance.

And yet dear Bella, despite all her flaws, still manages to be horny-teenager Spanish fly, the normal girl who, for no other apparent reason than that he's pretty and she smells like warm toffee and the meadow after a rain, finds true love with the beautiful creature of the night who must constantly refrain from killing her whenever she's around.

One sympathizes.

Think I'm done? I'm just getting warmed up. Tune in tomorrow (or whenever I get around to posting again) to hear more about Stephenie Meyer's "characters" and learn why I think this book is not only flat mediocre but a potentially dangerous read for 14-year-old girls and grown women disinclined to read critically.

On what not to say

Or, That's What She Proclaimed
Or, That's Easy for You to Announce

Okay, so I know I haven't been too terribly shy in voicing my opinions on some of my pet peeves. (It helps, in all of the cases, that I'm unarguably right.) But I'm gonna have to out with another one, and this one's for any of my reader who has fantasies of and/or aspirations to a career in fiction.

I'm in the process of reading a book that I won't name right now, as I'm saving it for a brutal critique - er, a firm but gentle review - in a future post. And I've been trying to read it objectively. But one thing that keeps bugging the crap out of me - and pulling me entirely out of the story over and over again - is the fact that none of the characters ever says anything.

Which isn't to say there isn't dialogue. There's plenty. Characters lie, they insist, they urge, they announce, and prompt, and admit, and mumble, and that's just in the first chapter. But they don't say anything. The S section of the author's thesaurus must be dog-eared, pencil-marked, highlighted, and crinkled all to hell, because the one word she apparently can't bring herself to use is "said." And even when she does, it's always done gruffly, gently, formally, harshly, tenderly, or slowly.

Just say "said" already.

Seriously. Just go ahead and write "said." You know it's already there in your head; you've spent the past seven or eight minutes trying to come up with a word to say other than "said." Stop. Writing isn't supposed to be that hard, and your writing is going to be a hell of a lot better if you relax a little, let it flow, and stop anguishing over whether your character just murmured or muttered.

We have been subject to bad, bad advice in our creative writing classes. To make our writing more colorful, we're supposed to use more vividly descriptive words - we don't need to walk when we can stomp or stride or lope - and plenty of adjectives and adverbs. Especially adverbs. Especially adverbs modifying adjectives modifying nouns. And in some cases, it makes sense; whether a character walks or lumbers or whether the sun is shining dimly or brightly can really set the mood of a scene.

But when it comes to dialogue, you need to come to a full stop and examine your motives before your characters start affirming and opining and pronouncing and asserting and responding and reporting and, Jesus, God, disclosing. Is it really so important that we know she's confessing something rather than just saying it? Or is there any way you could show through context clues - her body language, her facial expression, maybe someone else's reaction to what she says and how she says it - that whatever she's saying is tearing her up just a bit? Is there any chance at all that you're uncertain about your own writing talents and feel the need to compensate with a thesaurusful of fancy words so people won't think you're dumb?

Put the Hummer in the garage, Ms. McCompensatey. Swallow your pride and work to improve your writing instead of your vocabulary. Work to thoroughly and vividly develop your characters, establish setting and context, and write realistic dialogue. Hell, maybe take a leap and leave out dialogue tags entirely (ooooh...). Be a better writer and your readers will be so engaged in what your characters are saying that they won't even care if maybe one of them should have just "quipped" instead. And if, after due consideration, you decide that maybe a character did actually sigh or laugh or cough a line of dialogue, it'll make your writing more colorful rather than more cumbersome. Remember that writing is about the story, not the words, and it's hard to get through a story if the writer keeps pimp-slapping you with a thesaurus.

Charles Dickens's characters say things. Elmore Leonard's characters say things. Alexandre Dumas's characters say things in French. In 1984, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Harry Potter, the characters all say things. If "said" was good enough for them, it takes some balls to think it's not good enough for you, Steph - er, writer who shall remain nameless.

On headache and heartache - spoileriffic

Okay, so "heartache" might be a bit dramatic. But disappointment is definitely there. I saw Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen Thursday at the McWane Center in staggering IMAX. And I suppose I should see it again in standard theatreview before I make a judgment, since I only really caught the center third of the movie and had to crane my neck to see any action to the sides. But a few things, a few chunks of plot - or lack thereof - still came through, and... ugh.

Ten reasons the best part of "Beer, Barbecue, and Autobots" was the beer and barbecue:

HERE THERE BE SPOILERS

1. The lurrrv. Did anyone particularly care about the romantic subplot? I sure didn't. It seemed kind of shoehorned in there, almost as a salute to the first movie but without any purpose of its own in the sequel. The relationship itself was one of those that seemed to be based on shared dramatic circumstances with no other real foundation than a mutual love of cars. So when they're worrying about maintaining a cross-continent relationship in the beginning, I didn't particularly care if it was going to work out; I was more affected by Sam's tender breakup scene with Bumblebee. And then he's getting the eye from the blonde chick at the party, which didn't, to me, represent any kind of legitimate threat to his existing relationship because obviously a chick like that would have no interest in a guy like him without some kind of ulterior motive. And then Mikaela flies over - announced - and wigs out when she finds him getting sexually assaulted by an alien robot in his dorm room, completely ignoring the glaring facts that a) knowing that his girlfriend is going to show up any second, he's probably not going to choose that moment to initiate a makeout session with some other girl, and b) as mentioned above, a chick like that is almost certainly not into him for the smoothness with which he dramatically flipped out in astronomy class. And then, even after the true circumstances behind the assault are made strikingly clear, she continues to bitch at him about it.

And then, of course, we come to the scene where as he lies at or near death in the sands of Egypt, she finally realizes what she's lost and utters those three words she's been holding back for so long. Because without him, something would be missing from her life, and that something is... something. It's left to our imagination. Twoo wuv. Four years of Web chats. Long-distance jealousy and mistrust. I commended the first film for its avoidance of the hackneyed pause-to-kiss-in-the-midst-of-battle, but Michael Bay made up for it in this one with the hackneyed dead-guy-revived-by-the-power-of-love (and, to some extent, the power of ancient alien robots).

Verdict? An aside stapled into the movie to entertain the girlfriends while their guys ooh over the explosions and oogle a sweaty and dirty Mikaela. Thanks, Michael Bay.

2. The family subplot. Again, it felt like something shoehorned in to add depth to the movie but ultimately just added... stuff. Sam's mom spends the first half-hour of the movie hysterically weepy (when she isn't stoned) about him leaving, while his dad has a single not-quite teary quasi-moving moment in the front yard of their house. We don't see them again until they're kidnapped halfway through the movie, and then Bumblebee rescues them, and then Sam is comforting his dad and telling him he has to let go, and his mom is the voice of reason, like Pop is the one who's been clinging and peeing himself over Sam's departure all this time. Plot continuity, thy name is someone else.

3. The characters. Was anyone able to find any? You'd think that, having had to lay down a lot of groundwork in the first movie, the filmmakers would have capitalized on that, made the most of familiar characters, and explored a little bit of backstory and motivation. Yeah, I know, I'm an idealist. Instead, we get the standard introduction of tons of new characters in the interest of tons of new merchandise. Optimus Prime and Bumblebee had to return, of course, but O.P. gets whacked early on and Bumblebee hardly makes an appearance - especially in robot mode - after getting dumped at the beginning. Jazz was, of course, whacked in the first movie, so he wasn't coming back, but Ratchet returns to deliver, what, all of one line? And apparently, Ironhide is in it, but I had no idea. I don't remember seeing him at all.

Instead, we get a cast of underdeveloped, unknown Autobots who apparently only show up for battle scenes and dramatic establishing group shots. We get Sideswipe, who rollerblades, and Jolt, who does something with whips. We also get Jetfire, a geriatric, crotchety, British-accented SR-71 Blackbird who grew on me and actually brings a lot of the funny before it becomes apparent that he was brought in purely to die and provide spare parts for Optimus Prime's dramatic resurrection.

Who do we get a lot of? Mudflap and Skids, two characters that start out as a single pink and white multiple-personality ice cream truck and turn into two cars to deliver a dose of the funny as the Black Gay Stereotype Comic Duo. For all values of "funny" equal to "Jar-Jar Binks." These two bumbling boobs are, inexplicably, given the responsibility of protecting Sam and his horndog college roommate, for lots of excruciating screen time. Lots. A lot.

4. The shard. Why does Sam get whammied by the shard of the Allspark? He carried the entire mysteriously lightweight cube through the second half of the first movie and bodily shoved it into Megatron's chest without going nuts, but suddenly a little-ittle sliver of it is enough to stuff him with alien brilliance and send him into Einsteinian micro-machine mode in the middle of class.

5. The chick robot. Pardon me for my obligatory feminist rant, but the character of Arcee confuses me. When I was little, of course, an awesome (albeit pink) sports car-spaceship thing that transformed into a chick robot with mad skillz was the coolest thing. But as I got older, I started to wonder - if we can assume that robots don't reproduce sexually, why would they have different genders? And why pink? And, for that matter, why was Hot Rod the only robot who got a girlfriend? That's why I was kind of impressed that the first movie (2007, not 1986) didn't include her as an attempted bone tossed to the feminists. But they dragged her out for the sequel, giving her about seven seconds of screen time and one line, which I don't remember, before she goes the way of that silver car and that other one.

And not that the audience has time to notice, but now Arcee conveniently transforms into three motorcycles, for three times the shelf space at Toys R Us.

6. Devastator's nuts. I know, I know, it was the funny, and it got a chuckle, but the single reason for their inclusion was for John Turturro to look up and comment on them. Cheap.

7. Magic. I know it sounds silly to start talking about realism in a movie about invading alien robots, but the cool thing about the first movie is that it managed to justify just about every sci-fi move made, to the point where suspending disbelief wasn't really a challenge. The sequel brought that, and then it brought in visions of ancient robots that bring Sam back from the dead and a mystical "Matrix of Leadership" (gag) that, through the magic of Sam's theretofore undisplayed greatness, reforms from charcoal dust to form a Klingon K-bar capable of bringing Optimus Prime back from the scrap heap. Come on. Y'all took the time to design robots that, when transforming, managed to account for every single panel and gear of the original form, but when it came to reviving Prime, you resorted to robot pixie dust? Give me a Peterbilt-sized break.

8. The headache. This is one gripe that may be mitigated by a viewing in a standard movie theatre, but by the end of the IMAX version, girlfriend needed a Motrin and a liedown. There was the constant on-screen chaos - "Michael Bay has never met an explosion he didn't like," Doug said - and the robot carnage and the noise-noise-noise-noise. It became so tedious and uninterrupted - not to mention lengthy - that I actually started drifting off during some of the action scenes.

9. The length. They could have cut it by 45 minutes and I still would have been... pretty bored.

10. The beefcake. Couldn't we have stood a little more contribution from Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson? Preferably sweaty and dirty. Okay, so yeah, I'd appreciate a little something for the ladies. Hey, I have a heart. And loins.

So dinner was great. And hanging out at the McWane Center is always really cool, because there are all these exhibits that you can play with, like physics stuff and one of those frozen-image walls and this cool video game that's the size of a dance floor and you play it with your feet. And when Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen comes to your local second-run dollar theatre, I fully recommend that you see it and get a big bag of popcorn. And if you decide to shell out ten bucks and two and a half hours to see it right now... well, that's your call.

On restaurant music

Or, HAAAAAATE.

Okay, so when I start my band, I'm going to call it I Hate Restaurant Music. And we're going to play at bars and clubs and music venues, and it'll be cool. And we'll never play in restaurants, not at any time of day, and that'll limit our exposure somewhat, and our rise to rock n' roll greatness will be somewhat less meteoric than we'd prefer, but that's the price we'll have to pay for not annoying the everliving shit out of people.

I'm sorry, restaurant bands, but it's time to knock it the hell off. I know it's hard to get exposure in an industry saturated with indie acts all searching for a record deal. I know that there are only so many slots at open mic night, and I know that many cities limit or outright ban busking. Getting your name out is both essential and challenging. But trying to get your name out whilst I'm trying to enjoy my southwest quesadilla and conversation with the people immediately to the front and sides of me is a one-way ticket to the border of Putting My Foot Through Your Guitarsville, and I can't guarantee I won't be tempted to go exploring.

Almost exclusively, I go to restaurants with friends - if I'm alone, I'm probably just going to pick something up and take it back to my apartment/office - and it's to enjoy not only tasty sustenance but also engaging conversation. Maybe it's lunch with coworkers, and we're talking about funny things that happened at work. Maybe it's brunch with family, and we're talking about family stuff. Maybe it's coffee with girlfriends, and we're talking about how great/awful guys can be. Or maybe it's dinner at Rojo with the kickball league, and we're not talking about a damn thing, because the Indigo Girls Plus Deodorant are up there singing their pretty hearts out to the exclusion of all other sounds.

I'm not even asking that you not play. Many restaurants are playing canned music anyway; there's no reason that they shouldn't have a live performer with a new sound instead of the old stuff they get on CD from corporate once a month. But that amp you have there has a knob that goes all the way from 10 (or 11, as applicable) down to 0, and all but the deafest of old people will be able to hear you even on the lower end of that scale. When you've got your sound guy wandering around the back of the room giving you unnecessarily earnest thumbs up and down as he listens to your levels, there's no reason he can't try to exchange pleasantries with the patrons around him. If he can still hear himself think, you're good to go.

And for the love of Jeff, don't glare at me if I'm still trying to carry on a conversation during your set. It's not a pointed insult at you; it's a pointed attempt to do what I was already doing when you pulled out your guitar and started wailing away. I am at a place where eating and talking are the norm. If you want people to not eat and talk while you're playing, try performing at a place where listening to music is the norm and eating and talking are aberrant behaviors. Like, for instance, clubs. And designated music venues.

Restaurant musicians, do your thing - quietly, please. Restauranteurs, go ahead and book those musicians, but keep them to a reasonable level. And if you're out there, label reps, come to restaurants when bands are playing, sit close enough to the stage that you can hear the band without being distracted by nearby conversation, and sign that band just as quick as you can so they can play at big venues where I am not trying to talk to a person. Because this quesadilla looks too big for me to finish, and I'd hate to see that last triangle end up somewhere we'd all regret.

On letting Neda be Neda

Okay, so on Saturday, Neda Agha-Soltan was shot by a sniper on the edge of a demonstration in Tehran. Almost immediately, camera-phone footage of her death was on Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook in an impressive display of citizen journalism in the face of the Iranian government's media restrictions. And almost immediately, a cry went up - "We're Neda! I'm Neda! We're all Neda!"

I'm not.

Doug identified the beginning of the "We Are All..." meme as the aftermath to the September 11 attacks. "We are all Americans," Europe said - because in a way, they were. They had experienced terrorism, they understood the culture in which it was happening, and it was something that could easily have happened to them. Their solidarity and understanding made our tragedy easier to face.

Since then, "We Are All..." has gone from an expression of empathy and support to an opportunity for self-aggrandizement. We show solidarity in meaningless ways with causes we can't possibly identify with. We paint our thumbs purple in support of people who dodge bullets and stand in line for hours for the privilege of voting, trying to borrow their courage and make their moment our moment. We color our Facebook profiles green in support of men and women who are risking their lives to stand against their government, just to touch their moment in history; we equate their blogs and tweets to those of "oppressed" House Republicans who had to tweet with the lights off. We live, collectively, a privileged life in relative comfort and safety, and so if we want struggle and heroism, we have to borrow theirs. And it's easy. So this time, We Are All Neda, because it's easy to be Neda when you don't have to be the one bleeding in the street.

No one even really knows why she was there. One account says she was there with a few friends to add her voice to demands for a recount. Another account says she had gone with her father just to watch the protests. Yet another says she had been on her way back from a voice lesson with her music teacher, who was with her as she died. But does it matter, in the end, whether she was a freedom fighter, willing to take a bullet for the cause of fairness and democracy, or a young woman on the way back from a voice lesson? Would that make her parents mourn her loss any less? Would the man who was with her in the end - her father? Her music teacher? - remember any less vividly holding her as she died?

It matters to us, though. We need her to be a hero. We need a face to attach to the cause - an innocent, young, Western-pretty face to give us a reason to care. Most importantly, we need a face without a history, an easily blankened slate onto which we can project our own ideals, our own reasons, our own hero fantasies. We need someone we can de-person and make her us.

That's not the same as us being her.

Posters and banners and avatars have been made of her bloody face, her face at the moment of her death with one eye glazed and staring and the other covered in her blood. The very moment of her death has been turned into political iconography, a crucifix for us to gaze on and pretend that she died for us all.

"We are indeed all Neda," one commenter writes at weareallneda.com. "What they have done to Neda, they have done to us all." Except they haven't. What they did to Neda was hide on a rooftop and put a bullet through her heart. What they've done to us is give us a perfect, pure cipher for our own purposes.

And with those purposes, a sad story becomes steeped in irony when we look back on past years and months, McCain singing cheerily, "Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran," suggestions that we bomb them back into the stone age or turn them into a parking lot and to hell with the thousands of Nedas who would die in the process. She's always kind of been nothing, a non-person, in that respect; that makes it much easier to put her on when it's expedient.

Maybe she was the hero who said, so presciently, "Don't worry. It's just one bullet and it's over." Maybe she's the woman described by her fiance as a student of philosophy, music, and tourism - "not political" - the woman who was just hot and thirsty and got out of her car. Maybe - probably - everyone who promises to keep her voice alive has no idea of what she'd actually want to say. We know for sure only what she said in the video - "I'm burning, I'm burning." Anything else is our words, not hers.

One commenter did seem to have some perspective on it: "We don’t know if this is what you wanted your death to mean," she says, "and we hope you don’t mind."

On hiding and being hidden

Okay, so right now, the French legislature is discussing a law that would ban burqas outright in France. Their opinion is that the burqa is degrading and a "prison" for women. And since the burqa is, within Islamic cultures, a way for men to oppress the women under their authority, they're right. Right? As a feminist, I completely support the law, right?

Not so much, in fact.

A comment on costuming and choice: I have several times remarked on the traditional intra-feminism debate about makeup, high heels, and other "costumes of the patriarchy." My feeling is that if I allow someone else to influence my choices, I’m doin it rong. If I wear makeup purely because patriarchal beauty standards demand it, I’m giving up my choice. If I go without makeup purely as a middle finger to the patriarchy and their oppressive beauty standards, I’m still letting them dictate the way I dress. The only way to really embrace choice is to just wear what makes me comfortable.

Now, burqas are obviously oppressive as hell. They're based in several fairly reprehensible concepts, one being that a woman's body is inherently sexualized and tempting and thus must be covered head to toe in yards and yards of fabric (the legislature refers to the burqa, but comments from French president Nicholas Sarkozy indicate that he has in mind the chadri, which has netting over the eyes) to spare men from the temptation of looking at them. The oppression is both societal and physical, because damn, that's a lot of fabric.

But strange as it sounds, none of that means that wearing the burqa can't be a choice. There are women - and I don't know the percentage relative to the entire burqa-wearing population - who wear it voluntarily. Some wear it as a way to avoid the male gaze; some of them wear it as a voluntary expression of or devotion to their faith. My feeling is that a faith that requires a woman to completely hide her entire body is oppressive in and of itself, at least in that respect, but the problem there is with the religion and not with the women who choose to follow it.

The reasoning - the purported reasoning - behind the ban is that if women aren't allowed to go outside in the burqa, they'll just go outside without the burqa instead. But I'm trying to figure out how many times that will happen. If the U.S. were to ban shirts on women, would the streets immediately be filled with newly liberated tatas? Sure, some. I myself might be tempted to go out once or twice just for the novelty factor. But I know a lot of people of varying levels of religious or cultural modesty or just poor body image who would rather stay home than expose their bodies publicly. Now imagine that my husband or father wouldn't allow me to leave the house without a shirt, law or no law. That would leave me trapped in the house, unable to leave without choosing between an oppressive culture and an oppressive law - a law that would take away my freedom and my choice.

There seems to be this assumption that a husband is going to read about the new law in the paper and say, “Huh. Burqas are out. Hey, honey! Go put on your PJs; we’re going to the mall and getting you a minidress.” Or, for that matter, that a woman is going to read the paper and say, “Hey! Burqas are out! I suddenly feel empowered to go buy hotpants. There certainly won’t be any consequences to that from my father.”

The burqa isn't the problem - the burqa is a symptom of the problem, which is a culture in which a woman's body is considered shameful and a man has the power to dictate what she wears and does. The burqa actually enables her to make the choice between staying behind doors or obeying her husband/brother/father and going out with a burqa on. It's a choice between two really crappy options, but it's a choice.

The way to address the problem of oppressive religions and cultures isn’t to ban the things that can, in some cases, give some women some semblance of freedom. It’s to influence the culture itself - educate the oppressors and offer support and help to the oppressed. Punishing the oppressed by replacing their oppressors’ demands with our own isn’t going to make anything better. This law imposes a penalty on a woman for wearing a burqa; it doesn’t relieve the penalty she may suffer within her household for not wearing one. Don’t pretend to solve the problem by keeping women from wearing burqas if they want to. Solve the problem by protecting women from a culture that makes them wear burqas when they don’t want to.

And if, as some insist, no woman would ever voluntarily wear a burqa, then there won’t be women in burqas anymore.

(h/t Feministe)

On true Scotsmen

Or, Won't Someone Rid Me of This Meddlesome President?

Okay, so I realize that we're riding on a truly rough economy and that the elections and subsequent reactions in Iran have given the media a lot of other things to focus on right now. But I do find it curious that so little attention has been paid to the fact that former Southern Baptist Convention officer Wiley Drake told Alan Colmes - on video - that he prays for President Obama to die.

"Imprecatory prayer is agreeing with God, and if people don’t like that, they need to talk to God," Drake told syndicated talk-show host Alan Colmes. "God said it, I didn’t. I was just agreeing with God."

Asked if there are others for whom Drake is praying "imprecatory prayer," Drake hesitated before answering that there are several.

"The usurper that is in the White House is one, B. Hussein Obama," he said.

Later in the interview, Colmes returned to Drake’s answer to make sure he heard him right.

"Are you praying for his death?" Colmes asked.

"Yes," Drake replied.

"So you’re praying for the death of the president of the United States?"

"Yes."

..."You would like for the president of the United States to die?" Colmes asked once more.

"If he does not turn to God and does not turn his life around, I am asking God to enforce imprecatory prayers that are throughout the Scripture that would cause him death, that’s correct." (emphasis mine)

As Pam points out, if it had been a Muslim cleric saying it, the entire country would be outraged and right-wing bloggers would be lighting up the Internet - and that's a best-case scenario, where a worst-case scenario would involve waterboarding and a handcuffed, blindfolded trip overseas.

And now I want you to look me in the eye and tell me sincerely that the Department of Homeland Security was entirely off base in warning of a rise in "rightwing extremist activity."

All 'wingers? Not at all. There are plenty of conservatives who are very passionate about their causes and yet remain unthreatening to the security of those around them. The word extremist in the report indicates that these are people with extreme views on the extreme edge of the spectrum, for whom the "current economic and political climate" might fuel a "resurgence in radicalization and recruitment."

Well, yeah.

I asserted a few weeks ago that the radical anti-choice movement had a lot to answer for in the murder of Dr. George Tiller. While the blame lies purely on and on no one but Scott Roeder for pulling the trigger, he did so as part of a culture that whips followers into a fervor beyond reason, unwittingly - or even fully wittingly - creating a zealous environment where even the most reprehensible of actions begin to look reasonable. As people are starting to realize, that environment is the same that, when it's overseas and the faithful are a little more tan, we call fundamentalist terrorism.

And now, in the wake of Dr. Tiller's murder - which, the alleged murderer says, is just a portent of more such violence to come - and the murder of a security guard at the Holocaust Museum by white supremacist James von Brunn (not to mention last year's shooting up of a Unitarian church because of the "liberals in general as well as gays"), we have a minister with strong ties to the Southern Baptist Convention praying for the death of the president. And that's okay. For some reason.

It's okay, of course, because none of those acts are connected. None of them are true Christians/anti-choicers/conservatives/what-have-you, and we know they aren't, because a true Christian/anti/conservative/whatever wouldn't act that way.

Drake himself said, in the aforementioned interview, that he didn't think Roeder's killer was really an anti-choice Christian.

Drake said he did not believe Tiller's accused killer is a pro-life Christian.

"I'm of the opinion -- and now everybody's going to say 'There goes Wiley down the conspiracy-theory road,' I'm of the opinion that somebody in the Obama camp had this guy killed."

I mean, no real anti would do something like that, right? (For a laugh, read down that article until you find the commenters claiming that Drake isn't a real Christian. It just keeps going.) And James von Brunn wasn't really a 'winger nutball, but wouldn't the liberals love it if that were the case.

I'll bring it back: If the U.S. experienced a similar string of violence from fundamentalist Muslims, the right would be the first people to raise a cry to deport Muslims and wiretap mosques and pull women in hijabs off the street for waterboarding. And Muslim communities would say no, no, we're not all like that, those are extremists, fundamentalists, and we condemn their horrendous actions. And the righties would say well, if you're not a terrorist, you probably shouldn't keep hanging around with all those Muslims.

Know what?

All Muslims aren't terrorists. Islam is not the religion of terror.

Know what else?

All conservatives aren't terrorists. Conservatism is not the political affiliation of terror.

But sweet Jesus in a speedboat, there is a growing trend toward extremism in the right wing, and it has resulted in what can only be described as domestic terrorism. Gawker reminds us that we've got a new president - a liberal president - a black president - a secretly Muslim president, and that not only the right-wing media but quasi-respected personalities like Dick Cheney are saying that a terrorist has stolen the White House. If you are predisposed to violent extremism already, as most of these terrorists are, that constant drumming of danger danger danger is enough to turn anyone into a hero, saving unborn babies and following the will of Jesus.

So I'm sorry, 'wingers, but they're yours. As much as any terrorist organization belongs to the group on which they fringe, they're yours. That doesn't mean that you as individuals or even a movement are responsible for their actions, but it does mean that when you're throwing around words like "murderer" and "baby-killer" and "usurper" and "terrorist," you may want to give a thought to who might be listening. There are ways to make your point and support your movement without the kind of inflammatory language that can whip people into a frenzy, because whether you want it or not, whether it's fair or not, there are terrorists among you, and they are doing it in your name.

On new technology and old jokes

Okay, so this is just flabbergasting on a number of levels. The fact that he said it. The fact that he said it on the Internet. The fact that he thought it was okay to say it on the Internet. The fact that he thought it in the first place (although that's not quite as flabbergasting as I wish it were). But some people will always, always be cruel enough and dumb enough to out themselves as cruel and dumb:

SC: Republican activist calls escaped gorilla an “ancestor” to Michelle Obama on Facebook

A prominent S.C. Republican Party activist is in hot water after describing an escaped gorilla at a South Carolina zoo as an “ancestor” of First Lady Michelle Obama.

The exchange occurred after Trey Walker, an advisor to S.C. Attorney General Henry McMaster, posted an innocuous Facebook update about this morning’s escape of a Western Lowlands Gorilla from Columbia’s Riverbanks Zoo.

Walker’s harmless update, however was followed by a highly-questionable comment from longtime SCGOP activist and former State Senate candidate, Rusty DePass.

“I’m sure it’s just one of Michelle’s ancestors — probably harmless,” DePass wrote.

Now, everyone who thinks this is okay on any level, I want you to find a course on remedial U.S. history at your local community college, audit it, and close this window, because what follows will make no sense to you. To the rest of you: What. The. Fuck?! This is a man old enough to have seen the civil-rights movement firsthand, and he's (ostensibly) worldly enough to know why it's completely inappropriate and wholly racist. And everyone who disagrees with that can also close this window, because no amount of conversation in comments will ever turn me to your side of the argument.

And of course, DePass followed up his initial inexcusable comment with a half-assed apology:

Busted by South Carolina political blogger Will Folks on his FITNEWS blog, DePass told WIS-TV in Columbia, “I am as sorry as I can be if I offended anyone. The comment was clearly in jest.”

"I'm sorry if I offended offended" is, of course, a perfectly distinction to make in a world where many people would love to be compared to an ape, black people in particular. And the fact that it was "clearly in jest," meaning that Michelle Obama isn't actually part gorilla, excuses him saying that she's part gorilla.

His "apology" was, of course, then followed by an attempt at justifying his actions:

Then he added, “The comment was hers, not mine,” claiming Michelle Obama made a recent remark about humans descending from apes. The Daily News could find no such comment.

Ohhh, right. It was totally a Darwin thing, and we just weren't bright enough to pick up on it. Silly us.

This is just another knot in a growing string of racist slurs against the Obamas. We've seen, of course, the famous Obama food stamps ("[The ribs, watermelon, and fried chicken were] just food to me. It didn't mean anything else," she says), the Obama sock monkey (created with the intent of “transcend[ing] still existing racial biases,” and the "White House" buttons at the Texas national convention. But we're talking about people with some influence in the GOP sphere here. We're talking about the GOP operative who wrote an oh-so-clever tweet about Aspirin and the GOP staffer who deeply regretted sending her funny-funny racist e-mail to the wrong list. And now it's this asshole.

But maybe we're making too much of this.

Eric Davis, the current chairman of the Richland County Republicans, said his predecessor should get a pass. "Everyone says stupid things they regret later. I think the world should move on," he said.

You know what? No. Why should we move on? What about this makes it a "move on" kind of offense? Whoops-I-tapped-your-bumper-get-it-fixed-on-my-insurance is a "move on" offense. I-completely-forgot-we-were-supposed-to-get-together-this-weekend-I-owe-you-a-drink is a "move on" offense. Implying that the first lady is a gorilla, on Facebook, thinking it's okay to say that kind of thing publicly, is not a "move on" offense.

As a matter of fact, I think that, particularly in light of the aforementioned displays of racism that preceded this event, it's the diametrical opposite of a "move on" offense. It's the kind of offense that we need to pick over and dissect and look at the history and figure out why people don't realize how wrong this is (if they don't know) and why people say it anyway (if they do).

And not that it's the greatest thing to have such things in your head in the first place, at least have the sense to recognize how horrible they are and not say them out loud. I wrote sometime back - here, I think - about a time in my life when people would have the sense not to say such things out loud. They still thought them, which is bad, but they at least had the sense to know that they shouldn't be thinking them and thus kept them to themselves. Apparently, that time is over, because people like Rudy DePass are not only saying them but saying them on Facebook for the world to see.

And a note to GOPpers of an older generation who are fairly new to digital technology and social media - what you say on the Internet lives there forever. E-mails get forwarded, blog posts end up in the wayback machine, and Facebook posts and tweets are going to get screen-capped and sent to everyone at the speed of light. Enable your privacy settings, avoid the "reply all" button, wait ten minutes before hitting "send," but most importantly, have some shame. Pay attention to the world around you and figure out what's not okay to say. Maybe eventually, you'll learn not to think it either.

On a lighter note

Okay, so this is the best wedding invitation evar. But then, they've had plenty of time to work on it.

(h/t @WadeOnTweets)

On power to the people and power to the state

Okay, so read this. All of it.

On putting on your big-girl panties and taking the hit

Okay, so it kind of rocks one's world to find out that one has actually had one's political affiliations all wrong for all of one's life. I myself have been lucky enough to be enlightened by Don Surber, who informs me that the party of patriarchy and misogyny is not, in fact, the one that's trying to control my uterus and keep me in the kitchen where I belong. I had no idea that the left is the side that hates women; it's a wonder they've been letting me hang around with them for so long.

Too many American liberals cannot handle a strong, good-looking, intelligent, independent woman who disagrees with them — and so they make the crude, cruel and sexist remarks — including those about raping them or their 14-year-old daughters.

These five women [Katharine Harris, Carrie Prejean, Sarah Palin, Michelle Malkin, and Michele Bachmann] are are not the only ones that American liberals ridicule without fear. They are like little boys who cannot handle a strong woman. These women dare challenge them intellectually, and so we get crude counterattacks.

Thaaat's right. The men on the left can't handle the sauciness of Michelle Malkin or the intellectual stimulation of Carrie Prejean, and so they're reduced to insults or mocking for lack of any thoughtful response. And as a feminist on the left, I'm merely going along to get along, "standing by [my] menfolk" for some reason, which he doesn't really explain, because to stay with a guy who's so horrible to women indicates that there's some other benefit in it for me, but really the only benefit I could get from these guys would be something that would benefit women, but they're mean to women, so... Ugh. The cognitive dissonance, it burns.

(And a note: Letterman's remarks were crass, inappropriate, and just plain unfunny. He claims that he thought Bristol, not Willow, Palin was at the game with Sarah, but even if it had been the of-age, already-knocked-up daughter, it wouldn't have made the joke any more appropriate. Or any funnier, for that matter.)

It's easy to look at Surber's list of women and the left's response to them and say, "Wow, the left really does hate women!" It's also easy to yank on the beard of a Hell's Angel, get the shit stomped out of you, and then say, "He hates me because I'm left-handed!" You can line up the ten shortest guys at your local federal penitentiary and claim they were all incarcerated because they're under 5'5", or you can look at their criminal records and see that it's because they all committed felonies.

Call me a Kool-Aid-drinking, sister-f***ing, brainwashed liberal, but when I looked at that lineup, gender wasn't the first thing that jumped out at me. Crass did, in a lot of cases, and crazy, and sometimes ignorant. But as someone who has looked at these women with a critical eye for some years now, I know exactly why they're oft excoriated by the left, and it ain't because of their sass and intellect.

Don't hate Katherine Harris because she's a woman; hate her because she's an aggressive, unscrupulous power-grabber. Harris gained notoriety during the 2000 presidential elections when, as the Florida secretary of state (and former co-chair of Bush's Florida election campaign), she purged nearly 58,000 (largely black and Hispanic) voters from the roll for being ex-cons (90 percent weren't) and halted recounts of electoral votes, with Florida (and the presidency) ultimately going to Bush. In 2002, she was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, and in 2004, she took campaign money from Duke Cunningham's defense-contractor buddies. It's no surprise that Republicans promptly started avoiding her like the dentist's house on Halloween, and I'm kind of confused as to why Surber included her in this list, because I can't remember anyone actually mentioning her name in years. I guess he just needed to round out the five. I probably would have gone with Ann Coulter.

Don't hate Carrie Prejean because she's a woman; hate her because she, well, she said that. I mean, there it is. She was on TV when she said it. Much of the response to her answer was over the top (I know you felt passionately about it, Perez, but "dumb bitch" doesn't help anyone), and it's all been much for expressing what was, in the end, an opinion. But she went on TV and made the choice to say that, in that way, and alienate a lot of people during a really sensitive time. The blacklash that resulted had nothing to do with the fact that she's a woman and everything to do with the thing that she said. (Incidentally, if you're reading this, Car-Bear, we don't live in "a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage." Only people in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Iowa do.) Okay, we're done now; let's leave Carrie alone. There really wasn't any reason to hate her anyway.

Don't hate Sarah Palin because she's a woman; hate her because of her political career. That's about it. Bridges to nowhere, shooting wolves from helicopters, the imminent Russian threat, paying for clothes with campaign funds, flying your kids everywhere at the expense of the state, opposing women's right to bodily autonomy, but mostly for just not being a good enough candidate to be a candidate. I'm sorry, but at no point during the campaign did she prove herself astute, aware, informed, or motivated enough to be the runner-up to the presidency. There's a reason SNL was able to parody her using an exact transcript of her Katie Couric interview. The only intellectual challenge there was to decode her linguistically garbled speeches. She seems nice enough as a person, but a candidate - male or female - needs a lot more than that to be a good vice president. Maverick.

Don't hate Michelle Malkin because she's a woman; hate her because of everything she is and everything she does and everything she believes in and everything she stands for. Hate her for stalking a seven-year-old for speaking about children's health insurance. Hate her for speaking out in favor of racial profiling (not to mention Japanese internment in World War II). Hate her for whatever that dumb thing was that she did in a cheerleader outfit and pigtails. Hate her for shitting herself over what Rachel Ray wore in a Dunkin Donuts commercial. Hate her for her Junior-Spies-in-1984 Brown Neighbor Surveillance Club. Hate her for questioning donations to Bill Clinton's campaign fund from donors in Brooklyn, Chinatown, and elsewhere who were "limited income, limited English-proficient, and smellier than stinky tofu." Hate her for defending torture. Just about everything she does gives you a chance to hate her. Even if her woman-ness had a place on the list of reasons to hate her, it would be so far down said list that we'd still be working on it when Sasha Obama announced her presidential bid.

Don't hate Michele Bachmann because she's a woman. Hate her because she is full-on, raving, tinfoil-hat-wearing, foaming-at-the-mouth, crackhouse-rats-cross-the-street-when-they-see-her crazazy. As a member of Congress, has she opposed everything from increased Pell Grants to fluorescent lightbulbs. She ranted about Obama creating "politically correct re-education camps for young people" and wanted to launch a McCarthy-esque investigation to find out if members of Congress are "pro-America or anti-America." She made the treasury secretary promise that we're not going to abandon the dollar in favor of a global currency (and while you're over there, behold her staggering ignorance of Schoolhouse Rock-level civics). Actually, I'm going to take it back - Michele Bachmann has been a fantastic addition to the House of Representatives, if only for the entertainment value.

These are the outspoken conservative women who intellectually challenge us, to whom we have no response.They are the ones we hate for their boldness and ballsiness, the ones we wish would get back in the kitchen where they belong. Because we hate outspoken women; Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Madeleine Albright, Nancy Keenan, Ellen Malcom, Arianna Huffington, Ann Richards (God rest her) are all reticent little flowers afraid to say anything to disturb the menfolk hard at work. (Or maybe the problem is that our women just aren't hot enough to be of note to the right.) It has nothing to do with corruption, greed, bigotry, ignorance - it's an F on a birth certificate and a pretty face.

No, Don Surber, criticizing a political figure, even if she's a woman, when she's doing something worthy of criticism isn't unsulting. Treating a woman in the public sphere just as you'd treat a man, looking at her statements and actions with a critical eye, isn't insulting. You want insulting? Here's what's insulting: dragging an underqualified candidate into the ring and expecting women to be so overwhelmed with her female-ness that we won't notice her incompetence. Trying to screw women over and expecting us to support you because of your X chromosomes. Dressing up hateful rhetoric in a cute smile and a miniskirt and expecting it all just to breeze on by.

Yes, there have been horribly sexist - and racist, and all kinds of other -ist - things said about women on both sides of the aisle (Palin and Malkin have gotten it more than just about anyone I can think of). And ideally, attention would be focused entirely on the quality of a political figure's ideas and not on the amount of pancake she trowelled onto her face when she got up in the morning. But if you're going to say that, if you're going to ask people to really examine the content of your argument, you have to be able to produce quality content. It's not enough to pile on the same old dreck, the same old talking points, the same old racist drivel (ahremMichelleMalkinahrem) and expect no one to notice that it's hollow because you're just so darn cute. And when people do, inevitably, notice, don't go crying "They hate me because I'm a woman!" We hate you because you're a dumbass.