Category Archives: Social Science

Speak! Speak!

My friend Tiffany sent a url to an up-and-coming site. I visited, and an issue regarding censorship caught my attention. From the site:

PBS has announced that it will censor two HBO movies in order to avoid the FCCÂ’s wrath, according to a report in Variety.

Sex scenes? Nope. Get a load of this.

The two films in question are “Dirty War,” about a hypothetical dirty bomb attack, and “Sometimes in April,” a film about the Rwandan Genocide.

As a result of PBSÂ’ self-censorship, “Dirty War” will be cleansed of a scene in which a (naked) woman is decontaminated in a shower. (Think “Silkwood,” only post-9/11.)

And the best part – “Sometimes in April” will be stripped of an F-word. No, the curse in question doesnÂ’t come from an angry Rwandan genocide victim. According to Variety, this F-bomb comes from a bit of dialogue on the Senate floor. The scene is the one where Vice President Dick Cheney famously gives Senator Patrick Leahy a friendly suggestion that starts with “go” and ends with “yourself.”

Fearing a backlash from conservative activists, PBS has chosen to censor these scenes. PBS executive Jacoba Atlas is worried that cash-strapped PBS affiliates could be sunk by FCC/right-wing action.

Concerned? Click the link to Speakspeak.org to learn how you can fight censorship. What’s next? Cutting footage in PBS programs of Holocaust victims in the camps because they’re naked? Hmm. The ultra-conservatives would avoid encountering life on its own terms — good, bad, and ugly. Fine — for them. If you don’t like what’s on television, turn it off. But I want to choose for myself, and my taxes support public television programming too. I urge you to write. I intend to.

Another Dose of Dooce

Surprisingly, we were able to finish our lunch before disaster struck, before Izzie noticed that I had handed Leta one of her toys, before Izzie could DASH across the room with the speed of a cheetah and yank the toy from LetaÂ’s unsuspecting grip. Thus commenced the Silent Scream of Death, the scream so high and silent in pitch that only souls in Hell can hear its demon din, the scream that sucks all the air out of the room and sets the world into slow motion.

She may not be able to crawl, no, but people, that kid can alter the space-time continuum WITH HER MOUTH.
—Dooce

Warning: Sexist Humor

My father-in-law-to-be and I share a passion: dark chocolate. When I was visiting I made sure to keep him supplied with a steady dose. He sends me humorous email on the topic, and I found this one quite funny.

The Hormone Hostage knows that there are days in the month when all a man has to do is open his mouth and he takes his very life into his own hands.

DANGEROUS: WhatÂ’s for dinner?
SAFER: Can I help you with dinner?
SAFEST: Where would you like to go for dinner?
ULTRA SAFE: Here, have some chocolate.

DANGEROUS: Are you wearing that?
SAFER: Gee, you look good in brown.
SAFEST: WOW! Look at you!
ULTRA SAFE: Here, have some chocolate.

DANGEROUS: What are you so worked up about?
SAFER: Could we be overreacting?
SAFEST: HereÂ’s fifty dollars. Why donÂ’t you go shopping.
ULTRA SAFE: Here, have some chocolate.

DANGEROUS: Should you be eating that?
SAFER: You know, there are a lot of apples left.
SAFEST: Can I get you a glass of white wine with that?
ULTRA SAFE: Here, have some chocolate.

DANGEROUS: What did you do all day?
SAFER: I hope you didnÂ’t overdo it today.
SAFEST: IÂ’ve always loved you in that robe.
ULTRA SAFE: Here, have some chocolate.

Upset with my choice of humor? Here, have some chocolate.

Chew Your Food

Remember how your parents or other adults would admonish you as a child? Close your mouth when you eat. Chew your food!

How many of us grew up with an evening ritual of sitting down together, at one table, for a meal? In my family, this was a daily event. Dinner (or supper) typically happened at 5:30 to 6:00. My father was not fond of later dinners. Each of us had specific seats. Being a schoolteacher in the 60s and 70s, we as a family of six ate out only on special occasions. And a trip to Burger King, McDonalds, or Carrolls (remember them?) was a special outing. I grew up in the kitchen. My mother was comfortable allowing us to experiment and make messes. I learned to enjoy cooking, though as years pass I’ve moved away from it.

Then these corporations began metastasizing, and we became a nation of gobblers on the run. Many families stopped having a regular meal together. Women worked more outside the home at jobs, so packaged food became more popular. So many of us ate without tasting, gulping food in minutes flat…and getting indigestion.

There is a social movement afoot that attempts to reverse this trend. It’s known as the Slow Food movement. A number of countries also have organized around this, such as Germany, Italy (of course!), and the U.S.. The U.S. site states, Recognizing that the enjoyment of wholesome food is essential to the pursuit of happiness, Slow Food U.S.A. is an educational organization dedicated to stewardship of the land and ecologically sound food production; to the revival of the kitchen and the table as centers of pleasure, culture, and community; to the invigoration and proliferation of regional, seasonal culinary traditions; and to living a slower and more harmonious rhythm of life.

This week, take time to learn about the Slow Food movement.

  • Experiment with culinary traditions in your family or locale, or new ones you’d like to try.
  • Do a little research on organic food production, and how people are learning to manage the land for the benefit of all.
  • Compare the cost/benefit (not just financial) of taking time to cook and prepare things from fresh ingredients in relation to using fast food, prepackaged items, or eating out.
  • Think back to your upbringing and family traditions. Write about what food meant to your family, the role it plays now.
  • Are you a party-thrower? Do you go all-out, have caterers? Or do you prefer potlucks? Have a potluck with a few friends.
  • When you cook, slow down and experience the texture and color of the ingredients and utensils. Browse some recipes. Set the table nicely. Eat at a leisurely pace, allowing your tastebuds to fully connect with the essences of the food.

Whatever you explore, be sure to write about your findings, thoughts, feelings, in any form–a story, report, poem, list. It’s all good.

Hey, You. Yes, You!

You Reading This, Be Ready

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shinging floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life–

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

–William Stafford

Who?

who is this existence
who puts sadness
in your heart

who is this soul
who sweetens your grief
as soon as you crawl

the one who first frightens you
with deadly snakes
before opening the treasure vault

who changes a monster
to an angel
a sorrow to happiness

who gives the blind
wisdom and
inner sight

who changes darkness
to light
thistles to flowers

who sheds the sins
of the sinful like
autumn leaves

and puts guilt
in the heart of
its own enemies

who makes them
repent and in silence
says amen and
whose amen brings
inner happiness
and soulful delight

who changes bitter thoughts
to lightness and
joyous zeal

bestows fire
and makes you leap
with unknown joy

the fire that can
make a hero
from a desperate heart

who is this existence
who is this
tell me who

— Translation by Nader Khalili
Ghazal (Ode) number 528, from Rumi’s Diwan-e Shams,
“Rumi, Fountain of Fire” Burning Gate Press, Los Angeles, 1994

I Laughed My Derriere Off

Ah, Bill Bryson. He knows how to tickle the funny bone.

I drove on to Grand Teton National Park. And there’s another arresting name for you. Tetons means tits in French. That’s an interesting fact — a topographical tit-bit, so to speak — that Miss Mucous, my junior-high-school geography teacher, failed to share with us in eight grade. Why do they always keep the most interesting stuff from you in school? If I’d known in high school that Thomas Jefferson kept a black slave to help him deal with sexual tension or that Ulysses S. Grant was a hopeless drunk who couldn’t button his own fly without falling over, I would have shown a livelier interest in my lessons, I can assure you.

At any rate, the first French explorers who passed through northwestern Wyoming took one look at the mountains and said, “Zut alors! Hey, Jacques, clock those mountains. They look just like my wife’s tetons.” Isn’t it typical of the French to reduce everything to a level of sexual vulgarity? Thank goodness they didn’t discover the Grand Canyon, that’s all I can say. And the remarkable thing is that the Tetons look about as much like tits as… well, as a frying pan or a pair of hiking boots. In a word, they don’t look like tits at all, excpet perhaps to desperately lonely men who have been away from home for a very long time. They looked a little bit like tits to me.

—The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America

Just Some Thoughts

I’ve been thinking…

We live in time
bound by history
confined by illusion
hampered by ignorance
and arrogance.

We seek meaning
in knowledge or dogma
forgetting that meaning
is ours to create
or change or destroy.

We encounter life
through our senses
dealing with what is
just in front of us
since nothing else is real.

Lately I have been struggling with sadness, a pervasive heaviness weighing down my spirit and my body. In particular I am struggling with compromised wishes and dreams, and the grief arising from the fact that the life I would like is not to be had in the current circumstances. Additionally I feel a tinge of shame, or guilt, for being sad over things as ephemeral as ritual (my wedding, and how circumstances are forcing its occurrence) while half a world away, people are grieving the loss of life, of loved ones, of the world they knew. At the same time, I try to create within myself a safe place to allow and accept myself in all my humanity. Because while some of my concerns and feelings arise from ego-driven, petty ideas, they are part of my life, my experience. This is what is real to me at the moment. Bill Bryson captured this in his book about America. He was driving through Toiyabe National Forest, which at the time of his journey was a wasteland of ash and charred stumps. He wrote:

I had never seen such devastation — miles and miles of it — and yet I had no recollection of having read about it. That’s the thing about America. It’s so big that it just absorbs disasters, muffles them with its vastness. Time and again on this trip I had seen news stories that would elsewhere have been treated as colossal tragedies — a dozen people killed by floods in the South, ten crushed when a store roof collapsed in Texas, twenty-two dead in a snowstorm in the East — and each of them treated as a brief and not terribly consequential diversion between ads for hemorrhoid unguents and cottage cheese. Partly it is a consequence of that inane breeziness common to local TV newscasters in America, but mostly it is just the scale of the country. A disaster in Florida is regarded in California in the same way that a disaster in Italy is regarded in Britain — as something briefly and morbidly diverting, but too far away to be tragic in any personal sense.

If you’re feeling blue, remember we are in the darkest days of the year, and we have just come off a holiday season. You may be experiencing sadness because you had a wonderful time and now it’s “back to the grind,” or you might be sad because you had a terrible holiday season. Either way, you feel what you feel. Something I learned at the Centre is how much “comparison grief shopping” we do, and how destructive it is. Just because someone else’s pain may seem more tragic does not mean yours is unjustified. Grief is its own experience. Each person experiences it uniquely; comparison and the subsequent judgments we make (of ourselves or others) is useless. Even destructive.

So, I permit myself to feel sad that I cannot have life as I want. I feel sad that my future father-in-law is terminally ill — the implications of this are multi-faceted. I feel grief for those in Asia who have suffered horrendously. Even if my grief is abstract — not deeply, personally, rivetingly felt — it is genuine.

I realize that I touched on this in the post from the other day. Obviously I am working through something. Themes ebb and flow in our lives.

Using One’s Energy

There is another most excellent blogger, also named Kat (all these wonderful Kat-people!), who wrote the following reflection:

The images of the people and animals whose lives have been tossed around by the tsunami and its aftershocks continues to drift through my heart and mind. I know that feeling of utter hopelessness when everything you know is suddenly gone, but not in any degree comparable to what hundreds of thousands are going through right now. Nothing that I can do but send money and well wishes through the energy lines.

You can do that, too. When the situation arises in your mind, rather than go to the horror of it, the fear, opt out of sending out those emotions and instead send them good will and messages of: hang in there, help is on the way, you’ll make it through this, you are not alone.

We are all connected by these cords of energy that link everything and everyone. You can use those cords to help those in crisis to move away from the fear and into that place of quiet joy that is always with us, no matter what is occurring.

It’s so easy to get caught up in how we all want more, how so many of the things we want elude us. But we all live lives of unbelievable luxury, where a hot shower is a faucet turn away, and a dry night’s sleep is right there under the covers.

Tonight is a good night to feel the gratefulness for all that Life brings, to send out: thank you Life for always taking such good care of us, for always bringing us exactly what we need, and thank you for the things that you take away, even as we usually don’t understand the whys and what fors, and especially, thank you for our lives . . . thank you for our lives . . .

—Dating God

Indeed.

The Point

I grew up with a saying I thought was just oh-so-sarcastic and funny. When someone was beating a dead horse, so to speak, I would concede: “Yes, you do have a point. And if you comb your hair right and wear a hat, it won’t show!” This was always followed by a bit of chortling — by and large my own.

As I was catching up on my favorite blogs today, I saw that Kat and her boyfriend were pondering The Big Question: What is The Point? She wrote:

And then he asked me what I thought the point was. I was feeling gentle when I told him that life is short. I believe that we are given opportunities all over the place and we meander through them picking and choosing what seems best at that moment. But mainly we’re here to enjoy life. It’s amazing. It’s beautiful. We’re here to have relationships with others, small and large. Small moments and life-long attachments. The stuff that ends up being the most meaningful is the little stuff that we so often take for granted. I told him not to worry so much, that everything would be ok. And it was another one of those moments when what I told him was what I so often need to hear myself.

Well put, dear Kat. I raise my mug of tea to you. I needed to hear this as well. And by all means, leave your hair mussed and uncovered — I think this is a point worth seeing.