the soap box

such a long time

writing practice.  needed.

today it's been rainy in vancouver.  here it has been dry, and sun/cloud mixed.  beautiful really.  mowed the front garden lawn, and took down the big patch of daisies.  they'll have another appearance in a while.  

what happened to all the poppies?

it's not very long before i pack up my kit bag and head off to camp for a couple weeks.  

[i think i can manage to write without elipsis, but it's hard to use capital letters.]

two projects to get in line with, writing needed for one.  perhaps this will be the key to make a post every other day at least.  make a new groove.

remembering to drink water persists in being a challenge.

"woman killed by ex-husband despite restraining order"

Published in the Vancouver Sun on Friday 30 May 2008 under headline:  What will it take to protect women?

I wrote this on the day an article was published about yet another bereaved family wanting to do something to protect women and their children from being murdered by their assailants, their 'controlling husbands,' their boyfriends, ex boyfriends, ex husbands, etc..  Karen Beck's family wants an inquest into her murder.  Sunny Park's family is dead, her husband having killed Sunny and her children and then himself.

What triggered my fury, for it was a furious letter, was the final paragraph of the article which quoted an RCMP officer as saying that since the RCMP was supposed to enforce criminal law not civil, they didn't often enforce restraining orders.  And it was ever thus!

if you're reading this blog, perhaps you have similar concerns to my own.  Write to the newspapers when they run stories about women and children murdered by husbands/fathers/boyfriends.  Please speak out for those whose voices have been silenced.

... you can’t really make this up.

"She was one of 16 children, and was predeceased by all but her surviving siblings."

I know it would hurt someone's feelings if they were to read this sentence and think to themselves, isn't that what i wrote in mom's obituary the other day?

I deeply hope that person does not read this blog.

A News Bulletin from the War Against Women and Girls

Last week, Bob Herbert, columnist for the New York Times, wrote about misogyny, the current campaigns for nominations for president, and the willingness to condone male violence against women and girls.

Male allies in defending women and girls are few and far between, although more visible to me now than 20 or 30 years ago. Read Herbert's column, and perhaps you too will feel there's a little more light on a cold winter's day.

A little ray of light?

Marilyn French used the metaphor to make a strong argument in her book The War Against Women in 1992.

There's plenty of room for another book which reminds us that little has changed in recent years in the lives of girls and women who are the targets of violent men and woman-hating cultures.

The War On Women, Brian Vallée, published this month by Key Porter in Canada.

This little crack in the facade of patriarchy will let some light get in [thank you Leonard Cohen].

Institutionalized patriarchy

http://thetyee.ca/Views/2007/10/29/MairCatholicism/

The Tyee is an online newspaper, and frequently a very good read.  I haven't been on that site in a while, and was reading this morning.  Rafe Mair, a well known writer and opinionated as the day is long, wrote a column a couple days ago which inspired this very satisfying morning rant, well, satisfying to me.  It's published as a comment on the site, signed by cypress. 

I've just read Mair's column on Catholicism. I have not read all the comments, and realize I might be taking up eye-time with points already made.

The Catholic Church is the oldest European institution, no? As such it is the repository of the oldest, and perhaps most outdated, ideological foundations among institutions, which have been spread all over the globe. Those ideological matters include the actual practices of the institution under examination. Mair points to a tiny fraction of the possible cases to be made for the hypocrisy, the cruelty, the woman hating, the violence promoting and sanctioning, child damaging, practices which might be enumerated if there were time enough and space to do so.

And in addition, Roman Catholicism promotes and supports and revivifies at every turn the ideology and practice of patriarchy - the sanctioning of the rule of the fathers over everyone and everything.

As such, in my view, there is every reason to celebrate each stone turned over to reveal the breadth and depth of the heinous treatment of human beings by this institution of Catholicism. Whether you agree with Mair is hardly the point. The point is that Catholicism, and those of its defenders and its practitioners who refuse to reject in a personal or public way the damage done in the last 1500 years or so [because it is the institutionalized Catholic Church - not only the beliefs of christians which is the problem] to millions of human beings, who condone the on-going contemporary practices of destruction and death which institutionalized Catholicism is.

How can any thinking person who has given even a moment's thought to the plight of the children of sub-Saharan Africa, the plight of their mothers, their fathers, their grandparents, refuse the practical, real need to combat both social resistance and viral success with latex? How do you rationalize such thinking? Have you no compassion?

How can anyone who's taken even a cursory look at the nearly successful annihilation of First Nations in Canada over the last 400 years think for a moment that the ideas and practices of institutionalized Catholicism didn't have a key part in that genocidal, greed driven history?

Do you get it that it hasn't been only boys who have been stolen from their childhood by sexual predators supported, protected and hidden by the institutionalized Catholic Church? Girls and their mothers, sisters, aunts and grandmothers have been the targets of sexual predators taken care of by the Catholic Church for millennia now.

Every word you write in defense of them, every word you speak in their favour adds to the burdens carried by the living and dead targets of the Catholic Church's institutionalized practices of greed, predation, and death.

Yes, this *is* going on.

This is a reason I read nytimes.com. 

The tiny weekly that's delivered to our mail box doesn't cover the rape and genocide in Congo, in Darfur.  The appalling daily newspapers in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia barely cover these matters of death for women and girls.  When they do deign to print in soy-based inks that women are being raped and murdered in Congo and Darfur, what they print seems usually to have been printed elsewhere some time before. 

It's dark, and late in the evening, on a Sunday night in October.  I'm thinking about what it means that these letters are being published in the United States newspaper of record at this time.  Writers have been calling out in the corridors of power for years, decades, centuries.  Women have stood  generation after generation to say the killings must stop.  

What is clear is this, the response is inadequate, insufficient to the challenge, not working.  There is nothing left to tune up. 

The Missing Women of Vancouver*, The Highway of Tears in northern British Columbia, the dowry burnings, the high death rate for girl babies in many countries, the huge numbers of women and children seeking refuge from violence, the ex-partners and children murdered by berserk men.

Women and girls live in an emergency all over the world, without enough food, with limited if any rights, and at risk of rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment, and murder.

* Sorry to use an RCMP link here, however, this poster with 69 women's names and faces tells so much of the story. The irony is that these are not the 'most wanted' as would usually appear on an RCMP poster.

if i was twisty faster -

I would have provided that sentence in the correct form:  "If I were Twisty Faster", then and so on.

I am not.  I did not take my camera with me to dinner tonight with my sweet mate, to celebrate her recently passed birthday.  The meal was both beautiful and tasty.  The wine spicy and dry.  The dessert sublime. 

There was a tiny black bunny in the parking area of the restaurant.  Seemed to be enjoying the grass and weeds which have sprung up in the warmth preceding and succeeding the recent rains.  Not torrential by any means, but thorough.  Our garden needs a lot of water.  Is growing grass and clover.  Has peonies opening and honeysuckle blooming in the arbutus tree, daisies everywhere.  Verbena pink.  Cherries on the cherry tree.  5 kinds of eating cherries on a single trunk, and each kind is bearing its first fruit. 

Yesterday afternoon I saw a wonderful rear view mirror supported pair of translucent red cherries on translucent green stems.  French manicure on the wildly gesticulating driver.  She was telling a store-eee.

a cause for celebration, balloons even

Jerry Fallwell is no longer among us. 

Hallelujah!  What's it to ya!  Hallelujah!  [thanks to Leonard Cohen for that fabulous rhyme]. 

What's it to me?  I'm a Twisty Faster fan, and a blamer of the patriarchy for the troubles of women and girls.   Jerry was trouble to us all.  Now out of the way, so for a moment anyway, there is less trouble.  Hallelujah!

Do you think that a campaign of some kind can be focussed at Viagra [registered trademark but i can't figure out how to put an r or a tm here with a circle around it.]?   The television ads are really getting out of hand and they are getting to me. 

I wish i had the facility of my favourite bloggers with the sustained witty repartee ... i'm cheering for you.  loving your radicalfeminist selves.

ok, that'll teach me!

in the post immediately below this one i aver that i have not seen the interview between a dizzy man and catharine a. mackinnon before having bumped into it on a blog on the day of writing.

had i but checked my own blog.  in april of last year i read the review and noted it here.

not even a year, and i'd forgotten.  ok this is the part of being 60 i don't like.

Are Women Human?

She does it again.   Catharine A. MacKinnon gave this interview to a dizzy man in april 2006.  i haven't seen it before bumping into it on a radical feminist blog today.

nose to the grindstone doesn't apparently leave time for noticing one's heros have new books.  this must be rectified.

another of my heroes is proposing a collective reread and discussion of Shulamith Firestone's remarkable book the dialectic of sex.  i'm really looking forward to that. 

maybe she just had enough

hmmm, she grabbed her 'trainer' twice and pulled him underwater, keeping him there for around a minute at a time.  he's been diving into the water from her for a long time.  that's the story today.

and this is the last paragraph of the story as presented by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation [CBC] here

In 2001, Kasatka became the first killer whale to successfully give birth in captivity after being artificially inseminated.

Seems to me like Kasatka might have just gotten sufficiently fed up with how she's been treated, and she wasn't going to take it any more.  She's 30.  Maybe it's her saturn return [no ABS, no AWD]. 

I wonder from which family of orca she was stolen.  Which pod is missing one of its grandmothers, mothers,  aunties, sisters?

Red Poppies and remembering

Eating my dinner tonight, listening to the CBC World at Six, the news, and heard a story I could hardly stand.  Apparently someone's started a white poppy campaign in Edmonton and there's a fuss.  The white poppy is meant, the folks say, to be a call for peace.  seems ok, even good, doesn't it?

But no, there's a problem.  The Canadian Legion, who sells poppies say the image of the red poppy is a trademark and that the white poppy campaign is an infringement of their right to sell and distribute their trademarked red poppies. 

So I came to this blog, found the post I'd written in 2004 in November, when Darfur was in the news.  Remember Darfur?  I wanted the photo of the button I wear every year at this time, which you see just up there.  Women understand this button, and often comment on it.  Men don't say anything. 

More than 25 years ago, when I was a volunteer at a rape crisis centre here we went to the Remembrance Day service at the Cenotaph downtown, and after it was all over, and the television cables were being rolled up, and all the elderly soldiers and nurses and others who had come to the ceremony were long gone, we stepped up to the cenotaph and had our own remembrance of all the women who have been raped in every war.  A local news reporter, who's still working in television to this day, ran a story that evening in which she, or her editors, had put the footage of our ceremony of remembering into the middle of the footage of the one minute silence.   

Those of you who are Canadian will understand the gravity of this  manipulation of our event.  As my wife said to me last night, Canada takes November 11th very seriously, not like the USA. 

The next day, at the rape crisis centre, we struggled to deal with the nearly 100 telephone calls we got from people who were outraged that we'd disrupted the minute of silence, and accused their sons and husbands of rape.  That was one of the  more difficult days of my life.  The consequences of the reporter's misrepresentation, or acquiescence to misrepresentation kept on coming up for that rape crisis centre for years afterwards.  They may still.

All because we said we wore a red poppy for the women who were raped in every war, historical and contemporary.  All because we remembered them. 

My button, ‘For Every Woman Raped In Every War’ was made by hand by Bern Mable sometime in the early 80s. She died some years ago. I wear it in her memory, and in the memory of all the women, all the girls, raped in every war.

oh for heaven's sake!

Twisty at I Blame the Patriarchy poked at Bust in a recent post, and Salon has published a response, a comment, a what?  I don't know what to call it. 

Page's concluding paragraph:

The bummer about debates like these is they often end up with feminists taking aim at each other rather than taking aim at oppression and double standards (this is particularly evident in the comments below Twisty's post). I'm all for openminded discussion of what a feminist is or whether pink is evil, but I wish we could reserve the heavy artillery for the political action itself.

Uh, hello, Page.  Your artillery is focused, where?  You've taken aim at oppression, how?