The Trump Effect

So now it looks like the down-ballot candidates are suffering, too. Republicans are shaking in their shoes that they will lose control of the House and the Senate, and it even looks like it could happen. As in most things, I'm not sure how I feel about this. I think that if there are two reasonable parties, willing to work together, having the President be of one party and the legislative branch of another is not really a bad things, since it adds another flavor note, so to speak, to the system of checks and balances. But in the case of Obama's administration, the check was more like a parking boot, it did absolutely nothing but impede forward progress while being extremely punitive. The failure to approve a Supreme Court justice, on the most flimsy of premises, is a case in point. My respect for John McCain vanished utterly when I read that he condoned approving a justice if (when) Hillary should win. There is no more flimsy pretext there, she will be the duly elected president of the United States (and probably by a popular and electoral landslide) and if you won't confirm her nominee, then you are acting worse than a six-year-old. Every single bit of respect accrued to him for being an American patriot (in a doubtful war, but whatever) and a POW--which was absolutely not his fault and he conducted himself impeccably--and a senator who seems to have ably served the country--that's gone. It only took a few sentences, John. Now, I can't do anything about him since I don't live in Arizona, and despite what Trump thinks, I can't illegally vote there, but I can withdraw my support in spirit. Starting last year, I was reminded over and over again of one morning when I lived in Germany. I stopped in at my best friend's house. She was an Englishwoman with two young sons, and that particular morning, the tone was more tea-party than the usual controlled chaos. I don't think I even said anything, but she said, "We've just had a really big shout. The kind where you're all very polite to each other afterwards." I keep thinking that the US needs a really big shout, from someone in charge. The kind where when Mom or Dad is yelling at one kid and the other one is smirking, well, it's not me, is it, the parent wheels around and says, "And you're no better, either!" and proceeds to dress that one down, too. (And no. That is not verbal abuse, so don't even start). I think Obama has started doing that a little bit, though he is necessarily partisan. It needs to be someone else, like maybe the Pope. Our own, home-grown religious leaders are useless here. The Catholics let far too much be done to young men without helping, they, sadly, have no moral authority to stand on, and the Protestants, at least the evangelical ones, are just weird. So that's out. So, yeah, no one is going to do that, but it's what we need. But it would be lovely if we were all on the same page and of course, I feel as though it would be lovely if we were on the page of acceptance and progressiveness, and not taking the country back 50 or so years. Illegal abortions. More than tacit acceptance of bigotry. Our police forces turning into militias themselves, to be fought by (white) citizens who feel as though they need to be militias, because some men in 1776 wrote a few lines about weapons. YES, black athletes should be able to sit out, or kneel for, the national anthem, if that's what they feel in their hearts. That's what having a truly free country looks like. I suppose, then, it's your right to punish them (a school has suspended its football season to punish the team for doing just that) but think for a minute how that makes you look. I love my country. I love my flag. I love(......d, because I'm being forced to rethink it) our national anthem, but I also love all those things enough to say that the reason I love them is because we don't compel anyone else to love them. As so many times in life--forcing the outward signs of love and respect isn't the same thing as earning love and respect. So, maybe, just like the women coming forward about their assaults, maybe this will make us think? Maybe we will learn to look at our fellow men and just that--fellow men and women, not strange, scary adversaries? Maybe once we get through this horrible, horrible, horrible election season, we can start to--not heal, but just do better. Look below the surface. Maybe look to the Bard, the words he put in Shylock's mouth. They are as applicable to any minority, in any country, at any time. "I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?" Of course, it goes on to speak of a Jew seeking revenge, because it is the "Christian" thing to do, but this is my blog and I get to cherry pick and I choose to end the quote here. It's what we need to think about when he look at each other. And I can hope that the Trump effect will, in the end, turn out to be that we all took a better look at each other, and even without a Big Shout, got very polite.

The Tsunami

I hate to say that anything at all is encouraging about Donald Trump's campaign for president (if that's what it is, and I suppose that's what comes of having someone gaslight you for however many months he's been at this, you eventually have no idea which end is up) it must be that the tsunami of women coming forward with their sexual assault, etc stories seems to have no end. It's not so much a tsunami anymore, as the oceans rising with global warming. It can't be denied, it can't be ignored. And it's EVERYONE. It's basically everyone who was born with a vagina, or even people who look like they might have been born with a vagina. At first I felt validated, that my little (I thought it was little) experience of a boss telling me that he couldn't stop looking at my ass--and we worked in the same ROOM, so that was there, all the time--was borne out by so many other stories--so MANY other stories--but now I'm just sort of depressed. It really makes me wonder what men are really like. I sleep next to one, I love one, I am the daughter of one...do they ALL do that? I know that's not the case, I honestly do. My life has somehow worked out that I spent a lot of time with men, from really, the youngest age. When I was small, my father was in the Army. Soldiers don't faze me. They are my baseline normal, to me for years every man went to work in a uniform, and I thought for a long time that kernel corn (say it out loud) was a person. Then, some time later, after he retired, he was a carpenter and then he supervised a group of carpenters and I sat with them, listened to them talk and got taken around on jobs. (I will grant you I was the boss's daughter, so there may have been some self-censoring going on, but I also have ears like a lynx). When I was in college, I was the only girl in my boyfriend's boy-gang, for want of a better word. We ate together, drank together, had pizza together--and college boys, especially drunk ones, don't have very good filters, and while there were things said, it was never at the level of what we're hearing now. After the horrible job, I worked at an engineering company--the one with the looser company culture, for want of a better word. Between 50 and 75 people worked there, the majority of them men (this was the 80s, STEM wasn't a term and there was one woman engineer) and there was one man that I can think of who was a sexual predator, plus the vice president who liked to look at breasts, but other than that--to use a very antiquated term, they were gentlemen. They were normal men, and there was the normal amount of, um, hormonal activity let us say, but other than that one man, everyone knew what no meant. At least at work. Fast forward many, many years. It has come to pass, for various reasons, that I spend a decent amount of time at an auto repair shop. Again, men, men, men, men. Men working there, primarily male customers, and again, I have ears like a lynx. In the time I've been associated with the place, there have probably been at least 20 mechanics (mechanics tend to be a little nomadic). I have heard jokes, most of them aimed at the fact that I was there at all, but even though that was in bad taste (and it was one joke, repeated ad infinitum--and no, I don't want to explain this better) it was not a dirty joke per se and it was not even aimed specifically at me as a woman. I know that that's clear as mud. And out of those 20 men, one turned out to be, in fact, a sexual predator. He molested his step-daughter and went to prison for it. And the ranks closed against him. His name is barely mentioned. He became and remains a pariah. Now, there are pin-up calendars in the garage part, but no customers are supposed to be there anyway, and the rule that every woman is treated with courtesy and kindness is strictly enforced. Again--I have ears like a lynx. My point? That's a whole lot of men. A WHOLE lot of men, across every economic and educational section. And that isn't even adding in the men I eavesdropped on in restaurants, on trains, on buses (ears like a lynx again) and not only in English, but in German. And I know that they don't all act that way, even when they think no one is listening or looking. I KNOW that, and I also know how upset a man can get when someone impugns a woman he's with--and I also know that that isn't knee-jerk, she's my woman stuff, it's honest distress that someone would say that. So I know it's not true. But. There is the one man in the office. When he heard I was pregnant, he kissed me to congratulate me and stuck his tongue in my mouth. There's the wore me down boss. All the men I mentioned in the earlier post plus a few who I remembered since then who had really been consigned to the ash heap of memory. So it's GOOD that they're being talked about, that women are talking about this, that they are finally saying that it happened to them, to ALL of them. To all of us. But what is happening, I think, I guess, is this--the bad men, which sounds like something a five-year-old would say--are going around being bad men and for whatever reason, everyone else is turning a blind eye. The good men aren't saying anything for reasons I can only guess at, but not wanting to get punched in the face might top the list. Women aren't saying anything, and if they do...sadly, no one believes them, not even the good men, possibly because the good men ARE good and don't want to believe that someone could do the things that are being reported. Please tell me that's it. Please don't make me believe that the bad men do it and the good men want to but don't have the balls? Because that's the other reason, the only other reason I can think of. I don't like that one much, honestly. This is, as I have said, a bad time. To go back to the ocean analogies, it's like when there's a storm and all sorts of stuff gets washed up on the beach--specifically, in this case, pieces of old wrecks. But I firmly believe that when things get dragged out of the dark, they can start to heal. Again, I will say--my fervent hope for what comes of all of this is that this will cause such a national dialogue, such a debate, that not the women who have been assaulted, but the assaulters, will be driven underground. That the mere notion that you've considered treating a woman that way will inspire such contempt that you would never consider doing it. That you would become a pariah. I am 61 years old and I have never seen anything like this. I have never seen so many women speaking openly about this. I have never seen such a turn from victim blaming. And if this brings a change, then maybe being gaslighted by Trump for more than a year was worth it.

What got into everyone?

You really have to ask yourself that. You see the nonsense (toxic nonsense, but nonsense all the same) that is the Trump campaign and you have to ask--what got into everyone? I don't think that everyone in the middle of the country is a hick, or a redneck, or an imbecile, or even a bigot. For one thing, I'm too smart for that and for another, it never does to underestimate people. Part of my husband's family is from Kansas and Missouri, and you would think that they would be the most flagrant of all in their conservatism, but they're not. So don't judge. And it's not even the "Make America Great" again thing (but seriously, did they pick that slogan out of a hat?) but it's the complete and utter nonsense now that Trump is spewing. It's his Twitter rants. It's the LIES. Lies that can be disproven in the wink of an eye, the snap of a finger. What is WRONG with everyone? Not that there was much to choose from in the field of candidates, Republican edition, at the beginning, but they had to go for the fourth carbon of P.T. Barnum? Who was probably more truthful himself, even as he was pitching the circus. I am mortified for my country. I am so glad that I am not going to be abroad, specifically Germany, until after the election, because I have no desire to try to explain something I don't understand in German, slightly buzzed, in a place with very bad acoustics (a bar, a beer hall, you get the idea) to someone who wants to hold me personally responsible for Donald Trump. Hey, I'm a registered Democrat who didn't even vote in the primary because I truly couldn't decide between Bernie and Hillary. I have become an obsessive stalker of the Five-Thirty-Eight page, and I especially like the "who would win right now" part. I keep waiting for Trump to go below 10%. Doesn't look like it's going to happen, but I keep waiting. But he's like every bad thing about America rolled into one big orange package with a fright wig on top. I can't even list it all, but he's it. He's bombastic, germophobic (which must make him really great at pressing the flesh), greedy, poorly-informed, opinionated, xenophobic, has a tin ear for almost anything....it goes on and on. And of all the politicians in America, he's what the Republicans came up with to run for president. It boggles the mind. Hillary....well, it was certainly her moment to run. She's certainly got her faults, but I do not see them as grave as those of her opponent. Is she less than honest? Well, not really, according to the fact checkers, but I do think she has a tendency to at first prevaricate, which then looks bad. Her husband is certainly a philanderer....but that's not her fault and if she chooses to stay with him, that's her business. Is it for political gain? If it is, it's certainly no different than John Kennedy, who banged everything that walked and stayed with Jackie because he was smart enough to know that an upper-class wife who spoke perfect French and was endlessly chic and photogenic was an asset. But I digress. I don't even really have anything big to say tonight other than--you must be kidding. You're kidding, right? Jeb Bush is really the nominee, and you've been stringing us along all this time. Or someone! I'd take Marco Rubio at this point, even though I think he'd set women back a million years and other than that I don't agree with one thing he says. I hate this. I really hate this. I hate what my country has become. I hate that there is so much ugliness right below the surface and that honestly, it took so little to bring it out. I have always believed, truly, that America is great because she is good...but I'm really starting to wonder about the good.

Trump....I guess

The events of the last week or so have been very upsetting, as almost any woman can tell you. Some men would say that, too. Donald Trump has been openly exposed as a....what? Slimeball? Sleaze bag? Is there a more dignified term? I guess I'm looking for predator. More and more women are coming forward to add their stories to the voices of other women....on and on, a tsunami of women. The tsunami of women continues. It's not just women who were targeted by Trump, it's women who were sexually harassed, assaulted, abused, raped...on and on and on. It's a tsunami of women who have had their own bodies, their own sexuality, their own selves, their very self-worth, turned against them. On and on and on. It's depressing how common it was and is....but not, I'm afraid, shocking or surprising. We all have our stories. And the thing is, we don't just all have one story, we all have multiple stories. We have enough stories to fill Mitt Romney's binders full of women. He could have binders full of women's stories of assault, rape, harassment. How many stories would you like from me? Would you like the man who leered out of a car as I, maybe all of 12, walked down a street in Port Jervis, New York, and said, lasciviously, "Nice girl"? Will he do? Or let's go further back and you can have the truck driver at a rest stop when I was four or five, and away from my (vigilant) parents for a moment or two, and asked for a kiss? Or the ones you barely count or register, all the "you'd look so much better if you smiled, honey" men, all the catcalls, good or bad when passing construction sites. The African student when I studied in Germany who helped me carry my grocery bags home and then followed me into my room and kept putting his hand on my leg. I kept taking it off. I got rid of him by invoking my boyfriend. The subway humpers. The vice president who never, ever looked me in the eye. The men, who, when I was a secretary, would give me something to type and say, "Can you do this for me, sweetheart?" I am happy to report that I took the wind out of their sails by responding, "Certainly, darling, I'd be happy to," but fuck it all, why did I have to think that up in the first place? Why did I have to have a form of defense at the ready? How come? Huh? Or my boss, in a four-person office, who came on to me and came on to me and came on to me, and whom I resisted and resisted and resisted, even when he sneaked up on me when we were alone in the office and I was sending a telex (for those of you who don't know, a telex was a kind of teletype machine. It was loud and actually took a decent amount of strength to hit the keys and required concentration to get right, because it wasn't like a regular typewriter) and put his arms around me. I screamed, a real movie scream, but that didn't put him off. And finally...he wore me down. I acquiesced. Did I have a choice? Oh, why yes. I could have kept resisting. I could have looked for another job, but I was fairly specialized, I hadn't been there that long and I would have gotten funny looks from the woman at the employment agency....so I gave in. But, since I was over 21 and I said yes, I suppose it was consensual. Yeah, right. It was consensual. And there are parts of this story I'm not ready to write, even here, hiding behind my blog, but suffice it to say that the older woman, who was the other woman in the office, took to hissing at me when we were alone, "I know what you're doing. And if you acted like a lady, he would never have suggested it." So then there were two....him after me one way, her after me another. I started looking for another job when I started seriously considering drinking before I went to work in the morning, just a shot, just to take the edge off, so I could stand to work there one more day. I did quit the job, and he was angry at me for resigning...and last week, when all of this started surfacing, all the darkness tossed onto the shore by the tsunami, I googled him and I found out that he died four years ago. And I sat there, all grown up, married, children, grandchildren, a full and lovely life after I walked out of there the last time, and thought, he's dead. He's DEAD. He can't do anything anymore, not to me, not to anyone else. He's dead. The husband of a friend who told me he'd like to get his head between my legs. Who tried to hold hands with me when I was sitting between him and my husband on a couch. And when I told my husband this, he said, "Oh, you must have misunderstood what he was getting at." Again...yeah, right. So tell me again why women don't come forward? Tell me again why women keep all this bottled up inside of them for years, self-medicating with alcohol and food and drugs and shopping and even exercise and healthy eating. Tell me why no one, when something happens, goes to the authorities, speaks up, speaks out, makes a change. Why they don't quit those jobs that gradually become untenable. Why they keep resisting, or why they give in. Why we can't trust, why we're always guarded, why we have trouble forming good relationships with men, why we keep looking for the hidden depth charges. Or why we marry terrible men, even when we know they're terrible and why we stay. I am a very optimistic person. I try to see the happy outcome in all things. So I am hoping here that this will drag this topic out of the dark places its been hiding in, out of the corners and cellars and alleys offices late at night. It will drag it out, it will be discussed, and there will be a change. Men will know that we're on to them. Men will know that we are not putting up with this shit anymore. It will be like smoking, something that people will judge you badly for doing. There will be no acceptance, tacit or otherwise. Now, let me say, that after I left that horrible job, I found another in a much larger office. It was the 80's and all manner of things went on. It was the home of the VP who never got above a woman's chest. There was a lot of sexual innuendo and more there, and there were terrible men there too (but it was easier to avoid them because it was a bigger office). But even though it was very open sexually, there was a different tenor there. A lot was said and done, but it was different, so I can fairly say that I do understand the difference between sexual assault, predation, harassment, and normal, natural joking and flirting, because I experienced both. It's a lot like pornography--I can recognize it when I see it. But the bad parts, they cannot be acceptable. And if the good, fun parts have to go away so that the bad parts can go away, then so be it. As usual, a few (a lot of) bad apples ruined it for everyone. I will not vote for Trump and I do not thing Hillary is the devil incarnate, as her opponent has gone for far as to suggest. But maybe this will make a change in the public dialogue and in, to quote Alice Munro, the lives of girls and women.

This is a terrible time

This is a terrible time to be an American, as far as I can see. We all hate each other. My daughter told me that the country is more divided than any time since before the Civil War, and I believe it. Whatever else may be dead, tolerance is. No one likes anyone who doesn't personally subscribe to exactly the same set of values. Liberals don't like conservatives. Conservatives despise liberals. Women are seen as dangerous, sex-craving, baby-making machines, unless they're seen as vapid sex objects. But should they like sex? Sex is still an issue. (Not that I think we should believe, as the Europeans do, that it's all just good, clean fun, because that takes all the thrill out of it--but I don't think that we need to be 50 Shades of Grey-ing it up, either. Not that that was that much. But I digress). Abortions, aye or nay? Gun control? It would seem that there's absolutely nothing between Obama coming for all the guns (and every time they say that, I can see him, prim and stiff, knocking on doors, one by one, saying, "I've come for your guns") and everyone, and I mean everyone, open carrying. They used to just make fun of us for our gun fanaticism--and by them I mean the rest of the world--but now they think we're dangerous lunatics. And who can blame them? And it all seems to be so mutually exclusive! If Caitlyn Jenner is a hero (and may I add, I don't believe she called herself one, other people did that) that doesn't mean that someone else can't be. Soldiers. Kids with cancer. People who run marathons. They all get to be heroes, as far as I'm concerned. In fact, my main concern is, if we're all heroes, who are the regular people? It's like the Millenials--if we're all special, well, then, how can we tell? If you care that Cecil the Lion got shot, then you don't care about the abortion holocaust. (Not my term). If you care about this, you don't care about that. And if you're not black, then you surely hate black people. That's a given. Everyone assumes that! Other white people. Black people. Latino people? Or are they busy grinding their own axes? I don't mean to single out Latinos as axe grinders, because we're ALL grinding our own axes! There are more presidential candidates than I can keep track of. They come out of the friggin' woodwork. A lot of them actively frighten me, because I fear that they will in fact take away my freedoms. So where am I in all of this? Well, of course we should be kind to animals. Most of the domesticated ones we keep as pets love us. We shouldn't chain them up in the cold and the heat and we certainly shouldn't tape their muzzles shut or set off fireworks in their mouths, or purposely burn them, or....the list goes on. And it goes without saying that if we actually have few enough lions that we can name them, we shouldn't be shooting them. I feel like anyone can figure out that, yeah, we're killing off the exotic animals, let's stop doing that. Extinct is extinct. (Though....and I really don't know, this is a question--if we can bring back the wooly mammoth, which is apparently a thing, why are we not stashing DNA of endangered species? It makes sense, right? Just a thought and one I'm sure someone else has had). But back to the abused animals. I can't afford to pay for all their vet bills. Sorry. I got sucked in with Tiger Tim, and a few others, and now I'm done. Because, and maybe I'm just mean, when I was nursing Gracie, I didn't have my hand out for her. Not everyone is as lucky as I am, to be able to do that, but-- And health care! Contraception! How can the same people who are opposed to contraception be opposed to abortion? I know, we're all supposed to be abstaining. Right. I get it. And how well as that worked so far? Oh, and I have this to say about abortion. Opponents like to quote the horrific numbers of how many babies weren't born because of abortions. I understand that there is no way to find this number out, for various reasons, but I would like to know how many babies WERE born because of safe, legal abortions that preserved a woman's fertility, so that she was able to go on and have more children later on? Take one out, so to speak, but put in two. It happens. I also have this to say about abortion. When it was not legal in this country, do you think it stopped, or didn't exist? The hell you say, as my father used to say. Of course it didn't. It was hellishly expensive and hellishly dangerous, and just hellish--or more so--in general. And I have read that it is believed that one of the reasons that doctors are unwilling to learn how to do safe, legal abortions is because they never saw the consequences of illegal abortions. They don't know what happens when they're not doing it. I have always believed that a woman who is set on not having a baby is going to find a way to make that happen, even if she kills herself in the process. She's just as set on ending a pregnancy as a woman is set on preserving one she wants. So you may as well make them legal, and cheap, because as soon as something is illegal, there's someone making money off it. Which sort of brings me back to the animals. There are states making animal cruelty a felony. Okay. It might get a few future serial killers off the street. Where are we putting them? In with the three strikes and you're out drug criminals? Because prisons are full enough as it is. If you make it a felony and you send them to jail, they have to go somewhere. My husband once asked me if I thought I had negative space under the bed, because I wanted to put so much there, and it's sort of that way with jails and prisons. Do we think they're like black holes? They just suck it all in?