Does Anyone Know...

...how to harvest my blog posts without a lot of tedious cut and paste?

Lev Davidovitch

Don't read history to find heroes. Any good history (or biography) is going to show feet of clay...
We are all only human, filled with spite and self-justification and blind spots. Gandhi didn't get on with his children and Martin Luther King, Jr., slept around.
In my continued reading about the Russian Revolution and Soviet Union, I know I will get round to Trotsky soon. I already know enough to say that he is no hero. He may have had fewer people killed than Lenin (although I don't know how we'd count the victims fo the Red Army) and certainly fewer than Stalin ("Uncle Joe" had long years in power, besides being much more of a son-of-a-bitch) but his hands are still red. (Pun not intended but accepted?) And when I consider that he jumped from the Mencheviks to the Bolzoviks in 1917, and already by 1920 and the end of the Civil War was being marginalized by Lenin, I want to ask if the moral association with that group of thugs was worth those brief years. But he jumped because he wanted power. And the Bolshoviks where the ones who were going to get it, because they were a group of thugs, because they were willing to do whatever it took in the way of murder and betrayal to get power.
But I feel a little wistful for my imagined image of Trotsky. The firey orator, the thinker, the writer, the slut, the fighter for truth and justice... So, there's a list of some of my values. Never a bad thing to have. But no shelter from what I know to be the truth, when I start learning about his life, I will learn of repugnant things.

And the reason why I prefer him over Lenin and Stalin...
Lenin got his name from his writing. He moved from psuedonym to pseudonym, re-arranging the letters in his last name to create new names at need. Lenin is the one that stuck, or that made him famous. Stalin, ah yes, literally the man of steel. So telling. Trotsky? He took the name from the warden of a prison he escaped. That's a nice bit of surrealistic play.

Bwahahahaah!

www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi

The Flipside.

Yesterday someone told me "You're too young to be in a wheelchair. I think this is so sad." I offered up "It's better than the alternative, which was death." The third person in the elevator made agreement noises.
"No, I'm sad for you. It's Christmas and you're in a chair and it's sad."
Luckily we got to the BART station about then and I was able to escape.
I don't want people to look at me and get sad.
It really is better than the alternative.
It makes me so fucking angry. I must have talked myself out of it yesterday, but I feel it now.
THIS is the flipside of being an "inspiration".
FUCK YOU RANDOM STRANGER WITH YOUR CLOYING PITY! I AM A REAL PERSON, NOT SOME SORT OF TINY TIM MEANT TO CARRY A CHRISTMAS MESSAGE!

Eulogy

Micheal Steffy, jarjar as we knew him, was a caring man, a courageous man, and, of course, an asshole.
His courage is perhaps the easiest attribute to illustrate. He had the courage to be a marine, to go to war. And he had the courage to face a decades-long painful decline, ending in his death last July. When you are in chronic pain, when your life is a constant experience of everyday having less power than the day before, self-pity and anger can become your entire character. jarjar didn't let it.
Those of us lucky enough to be his friends, know of his warm heart. We remember how he took care of that Alaskan village every winter, making sure some of us would send staples to the natives. We remember how he talked of his family, the love that showed through when he did. I remember how he reached out to me after my accident, and how he worked at that friendship. We met once, in Sacramento. He was visiting his family and I came up by train. We didn't do much, hung out in a (formica and pic, not espresso and biscotti) coffee shop and went thrifting. It was a nice, quiet, comfortable sort of day, and I treasure it.
And, yes, asshole. He'd never pull his punches. He protected his own, backed us up in fights on-line. If he didn't like you he told you to your face. But maybe that's back to courage again.
Goodbye, jarjar. Much love

My Heart Breaks for T.

I don't want to watch another woman go through widowhood. I will. I mean I want to in the sense that I value her and want to make this as painless as possible. But, it's such a hard road. I know, death is what gives us life. It's part of the bargain that if we live long enough, we outlive some of our loved ones. And it will always hurt...

Love you, T.

A Renegade History of the United States

This weekend I finished A Renegade History of the United States, which was an interesting book. However, parts of it were not really fleshed out. With these sorts of books, I can't help but wonder if the idea is a gimmick or if there's an agenda involved. The first two parts--about the how the founding fathers tried to force new citizens into good ideas of citizenship to compensate for the loss of a king to provide order, and about how successive waves of immigrants in the 19th century at first identified with african americans but later but were later seen as white, both by themselves and people at large--were the most interesting, and well-argued. The chapter on the freedom of slavery is interesting, and given the longevity of the institution and how many people were involved it has to have a very complicated mess. So, some of that should go back into our understanding of the experience, but I have to question the idea that slaves were such valuable property that masters wouldn't punish them hard. I mean, think of the shit that people do to their children, and tell me that "value" whether commercial or emotional is a sure deterrent. Also the sources he uses (the WPA interviews and runaway slave advertisements) are very open to interpretation. I kept thinking of that slave cemetery that was excavated in New York City, and how the skeletons showed the result of hard work from a very young age. I know, physical evidence is also subject to interpretation, but I think exploration of more lines of evidence would have probably changed the analysis.
Some of the stuff was pretty poorly explored. For instance, the contention that we owe a debt to mobsters for providing gay bars, is a little bit of an eye roll for me. Yeah, I get it, there were no other available public spaces, but these bars were run exploitatively, (from what I've read) and I think that takes some of the bloom off that rose.
Still, it's worth reading for the different perspective it offers.

Ten Years Ago, This Evening...

...I met Scott.

Missing him...

There is a Thing About Women with Bad Childhoods...

...and who didn't fit in socially, and then they get married--and have kids. And suddenly, they fit into the slots of "normal" and more than normal because they are doing what is considered woman's natural "thing". And they can turn their backs on what it was that was rough about their childhood and their adolescent/early adulthood friends, who also didn't fit in, and they can be normal.

I get left behind.

Now, I don't mind them getting married (after all, I was married) and I don't mind them having kids (that's more complicated, because it's absolutely true that having kids is a wonderful fulfilling thing to do and I think kids deserve a happy childhood with attentive aware parents and allo-parents, but it's also true that it's an environmental disaster; I do my best to hold both those truths in my heart) but there is this thing that happens.

I become the personification of the rejected Jungian shadow and they treat me like dirt.

*yawn*