The Grief and Artifacts of Russian Interference (Or: What Did I Ever Do to You, Barbara Kingsolver?)

A few nights ago, I got to officially sign up for Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. (https://action.kamalaharris.org/signup/volunteer-website/?source=homepage) I’ve had her bumper sticker on my car for weeks (First primary sticker I’ve seen in my neighborhood!) and I feel so lucky and happy to have her as a choice, but before I can get truly excited about 2020 (Or even the awesome election work I have slated for 2019!) I need to process some stuff. My thanks if you’re kind enough to read it!

I hate to even type the name, but I really, really wish that Bernie Sanders were not in the primary race. Right after he joined, I could see that a few friends (Who I guess have less-curated feeds than I do) were already annoyed/beleaguered by Bernie Bro/Becky posts and comments. I felt the bullying fear and loss wash over me even as I declined to engage with those threads. After a few days of NOT TODAY, PUTIN-ing (https://www.vpr.org/post/how-russian-social-media-effort-boosted-bernie#stream/0) I broke down and cried. Suddenly, it felt like the Blue Wave was over, like the most diverse primary in U.S. history had been irrevocably colonized by Russian troll farms and a racist, dead-hearted, misogynist hate monger. And the worst thing about it is that that hatemonger is our own.

Even as I mourned the lost of that brief and wonderful Bernie-free race, I knew that friends and family members were getting excited about him (or that other, dreamier, but equally white guy), not even reading the women’s platforms. I knew that the quest not to engage about Bernie, not to explode about him at family gatherings, would be intense and long-lasting, and that the assumption of “reasonableness” would be placed only on the males in the conversation. I knew that the burden to “behave” and “be civil” would be on me, and that foreknowledge made me want to be preemptively shrill, unhinged, and hysterical. (I’m reclaiming all of those terms, thanks.) All of the 2016-to-present election PTSD made me feel crazy, trapped, and hopeless, even as I should still be enjoying the progress of the last three years and the promise of 2020.

The cult of Bernie Sanders has done unspeakable amounts of damage to America. This week, my feelings of fear and pain found a new level in, of all things, the new Barbara Kingsolver book. I HATE the practice of accusing powerful women of betraying women (while dudes get off scot free), but abandonment and betrayal are the emotions I feel. Until she hurt my heart in Unsheltered, I hadn’t realized she was one of my heroes, one of the brain-mentors out there in the world looking out for us, with her ecology and her love of nature. It stings that she turned on the kind of woman I am, so forcefully and blindly. Maybe she never would have thought of me as a worthy person, who knows?

(Before I get to my main point, I want to cover the fat-phobia in the book: Kingsolver indulges in the trope of using fatness as a symbol for hateful, brainwashed, selfish, Trumpish capitalism. She accuses fat passengers of “oozing” into a character’s airline seat and suggests that thin, small people are the next phase of human evolution because they fit more neatly into airline seats. All of that stung, but what she did historically and politically was way, WAY worse.)

Unsheltered is novel about climate change, late capitalism, frightened Americans’ eternal battle against science, and the erasure from history of a real-life female scientist. I like all of those themes, that’s why I finished the book even though it vilified my fat body and erased my own place in history.

The book is set in 2015-2016, and the rise of Trump (Whom she refers to as “The Bullhorn,” the use of which nickname seems like its own form of protest-shaming and civility-policing.) punctuates the story. We see hopeful, peaceloving Bernie supporters, whom Kingsolver calls simply “The Revolution.” (Relatedly, in the novel we see present day Cuba as a utopia, which I guess it might be, I’ve never been. Kingsolver apparently missed One Day at a Time episode that explained to white people why Cuban Americans don’t necessarily love seeing Che Guevara on a t-shirt. Here’s an old article that explains:  https://www.seattletimes.com/life/lifestyle/cubans-enraged-at-che-as-t-shirt-icon/)

What we DON’T see in the book is Hillary Clinton or her supporters. The closest Kingsolver comes to mentioning Hillary is when the protagonist sadly realizes that Trump “or someone like him” seemed bound to win the election.

I know it’s a novel and not a history book, but still. I knew that the erasing of women (particularly women of color, which many of Hillary’s supporters were/are) from history happened, but its horrifying to see it happen almost in real time! It is maddening and creepy to see Hillary and her supporters written out of this 2015-2016 story that I know so many people will read and love.

The erasing of women’s work makes me apoplectic, whether it’s past, present, or future. Not only does Kingsolver (like everyone who equates Hillary to Trump) erase a former Secretary of State’s lifetime of service AND HER ACTUAL POLITICAL PLATFORM from the author’s version of history, she is erasing the majority of Americans as well. She is dismissing the women, people of color, LGBTQ folks, disabled people, and ALL of the other Americans who worked, sacrificed, fretted, and took near-constant online abuse from all sides in order to try and move America’s future leftward, heartward, equailityward.

Where is the payoff from erasing the majority of Americans from history? Is it worth this much disinformation to continue to convince herself she’s right, to continue hoping that all of us who don’t present as socialist enough will be headed for the firing squads, to keep propping up the white-supremacy-serving idea that “identity politics” (i.e. the concerns of every group that isn’t white, straight, cis, able-bodied men) should be silenced in public debate?

I’m supposed to be giving out more benefit-of-the-doubt this year, so maybe she made the book so lady-erasing on purpose. Maybe her characters were monstrous fat-phobes to show how bad that kind of prejudice is. But three years of election traumaand 30 years of regular PTSD means I know how to spot gaslighting when I see it. I’m almost certain that one of the authors I love can’t be trusted anymore. I hate when things get all Invasion of the Body Snatchers in my brain, but I think Bernie and the troll farms (NOT a good name for a band) only teased out a misogyny, a Stockholm Syndrome, a gentle white supremacy that was there in all of us. Still, it’s a loss. It hurts to unfriend and unfollow, but maybe this loss will free my eyeballs for more humane books.

Screaming at the Supreme Court: A Love Story (Part One)

If you're wondering how to manage/use/deploy your lady-rage (or even, dreamy guy allies, your on-behalf-of-ladies rage!) this book is one thousand therapy sessions. If you're in Philly, call the Big Blue Marble. https://www.bigbluemarblebooks.com/

It was a last-minute decision to go. On Friday night, October 5, Amy and I were watching Murphy Brown, newly rebooted and excoriating the fictional White House Press Corps. We were scrolling through our feeds and seething as the “on the fence” votes changed to Kavanaugh votes. I was double-seething because my “friends” on social media seemed to think that Susan Collins was the ONLY person to blame.

“I think we have to go,” I said, and I looked around on my facebook until I found the Flood the Capitol March, lead by the Women’s March and Planned Parenthood Action. I already had a sign I’d made for an anti-Kavanaugh rally we’d attended a few weeks before in Philly.

It didn’t feel like the other protests. As I cleaned the house, rearranged my Saturday plans, and went to bed early, I didn’t have as much power-to-the-people hopefulness buoying me up. Instead, I was SEETHING, so frustrated to still be doing this work, decades after my own rape experiences and millennia after women were enslaved. IT HAS NEVER NOT BEEN THIS.

Since I became politically active, this blog has often been about convincing people that protesting and other political work could be nice, friendly, loving, inclusive, and all of those things are true. But in the past few weeks, I have become less and less willing to perform polite, feminine, hopeful organizing and more willing to give voice to the feral fury that sometimes makes me feel out of control. Getting ready to Flood the Capitol, I felt almost none of my usual aren’t-humans-amazing feelings. It was more a feeling of “Survivors, let’s burn it down.”

For professional reasons, I’m hesitant to be honest about the fury. Because I work with children, it’s important for me to feel nurturing, loving, and safe. My clients and their families deserve a solid, peaceful presence in their lives, so I feel guilty to also be this raging, scary thing. But at the same time, it’s love, nurturing, and protectiveness—for myself (both adult and inner traumatized child), for my nieces and nephews, for the fear that my students, mostly children of color, will face in a future with Kavanaugh on the bench.

            As Amy and I drove Washingtonward at way-too-early-on-a-Saturday-o’clock, we decided: No getting arrested. The priority was to get safely back to the students, to not miss a single tutoring hour. As much as I admire those who get arrested (Later in the day I would sob watching a young woman have a panic attack as the handcuffs went on.) I knew my priorities were elsewhere. 

Monday Motivation: Barbara Ehrenreich Rules!

If you haven't read Living With a Wild God yet, put it on your reserved list. It's like an Ishmael for our time, such a gorgeous, grumpy journey from solipsism to justice-hearted animism.

My favorite part, though, is this quote:

"The great, unforgivable crime of the monotheistic religions has been to encourage the conflation of authority and benevolence, of hierarchy and justice. When the pious bow down before the powerful or, in our own time, the megachurches celebrate wealth and its owners, the "good" and perfect God is just doing his job of legitimizing human elites."--Barbara Ehrenreich

Yeah!!

Love Letter to Another Bookstore

Today, a team of corporate folks and bookstore pals are helping my BFF/ex-wife pack up what’s left of the Rosemont College Bookstore so the company that took it over can move in. That doesn’t sound like a situation that should feel personal, wrenching, and melancholy/beautiful, but it is.

Three summers ago, when Amy was offered the job and it turned out she needed an assistant, I was recovering from Philadelphia School District induced Acute Stress Disorder and panicking  my way through a fun but demanding summer camp job, realizing that I wouldn’t be equipped to handle long, loud days with kids any time soon. I knew the assistant job was for me, so I expressed my regrets to the camp and took what turned out to be one of the most happy-making jobs I’ve ever had.

I worried that it was CRAZY to work with my ex-wife, even though we’d already morphed into being best friends. I dreamed we were stuck on the Lost island together, bought myself a necklace with a little airplane charm so I knew I could escape. I worried that proximity to the snack section would make me fatter, and it totally did, but who cares?

Even though it was a corporate bookstore, letting me use all of the deliciously tedious and emotionally neutral skills I’d gained in twelve years of day-jobbing at different colleges, the Rosemont store meant so much more that that. The time spent grumbling about politics with my best friend, the time we helped register young voters during the 2016 election, all of the deep conversations in the back room, (okay, and also at the register, when I couldn’t help myself) it all reminded me of the old-fashioned Seventies feminist term consciousness-raising. Amy, with her bajillion years as a philosophy major, is much more equipped to handle disagreement, so she was able to form an even deeper bond with our brilliant student employees, almost all of them young women poised to take over the world in their own precious, unique ways. I learned so much from those young women,and will continue to treasure them as beacons of hope in my social feeds.

I love the way feminism and politics merged with pop culture joy at our store. I love the way we were able to revel in the brilliance of Hamilton ( R.I.P. Hamilton Wednesdays, which really were to sweary for work…) and also talk about what a rapey colonizer Thomas Jefferson was. I love that I know everybody’s Harry Potter house and that they’re who I was with when I took the Pottermore quiz and finally admitted I’m a Griffindor. It sounds braggy, I know, but the quiz said! I loved fangirling my way to the Gilmore Girls reboot and disagreeing with a favorite customer whether Jess was trash or not. (They all are. Glad that (spoiler alert) Rory’s true love was her writing.)

I loved parking my little red Yaris next to Amy’s (formerly our) little blue Yaris, with our matching rainbow Hillary stickers. I loved making us coffee maybe too many times a day. I loved our matching purple Rosemont travel mugs, which I hope we’ll use for road trips. I loved when, because a mean lady made fun of the Matthew Shepherd Foundation charity bracelets, Amy and I immediately bought ourselves matching ones. I loved watching each year as the campus’s flock of baby Canada geese waddled their way fuzzily to adulthood.

I loved having Pheobe Robinson’s You Can’t Touch My Hair and Other Things I Still Have to Explain at the register, giving me an excuse to lecture snide undergrad guys about consent. I love the day I convinced a curious young woman to buy Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump's America (Which I just discovered you can get for $2.25! OMG! )https://www.barnesandnoble.com/p/nasty-women-samhita-mukhopadhyay/1125780108/2679971094578?st=PLA&sid=BNB_DRS_Core+Catch-All,+Low_00000000&2sid=Google_&sourceId=PLGoP212586&gclid=Cj0KCQjwjtLZBRDLARIsAKT6fXxXhlKJgubXV_KosqoiJ-jtT9de69XyUct_4KTwFifgFOv198sfJE0aAnPkEALw_wcB)

On the day I was banned from campus, (A Nasty Woman story in itself, which I will someday have the strength to put into words even though it is the stupidest thing that ever happened to me. I’m assured it’s not why our contract wasn’t renewed…) we had a Student Walkout poster on the door, and I feel grateful to have made such a small gesture in support of students who wanted to walk out. (You can read about my own Walkout experience here: http://theserotoninfactory.blogspot.com/2018/04/activist-kids-rule.html)

Not long after I was banned, I found out the store was changing companies, and I feel really sad that I won’t be calling Amy at that store anymore, that I won’t hear the voices of those wonderful coworkers in the background. But I’ve realized something about happiness, about college bookstores. Although, like all institutions, colleges can be very stupid and sometimes terrifying, I need the combination of exquisite boredom, mundane-to-miraculous chitchat, and walks past lovely architecture that college bookstores can provide. My new bookstore home doesn’t have an intersectional feminist book section, but it does have heart, and beauty, and the lively workout of carrying heavy books. This line of work is one of the great loves of my life, and I am so grateful.

Woke Misogyny Is Hard to Write About

Trigger Warning: Sexual assault, online violence

***PLEASE NOTE: I’m writing as a white cisgendered women, and every oppression that happens to me happens so much more often to women of color, trans people, disabled people, etc. My point of view is extraordinarily privileged in so many ways. As I write about the ways in which misogyny and rape-victim-blaming can intersect with the callout culture approach to social justice work, it’s likely it will seem like I’m forgetting that privilege. I am not. I’m interested here in what the identity of rape survivor really feels like in a body, and how misogyny and victim-blaming still exists even in the most well-intentioned circles. A disclaimer can’t assure that I won’t get it wrong, but this is the space where I get to get it wrong so I can learn. ***

A few weeks ago, I read the wonderful, wonderful, WONDERFUL book The Body Is Not an Apology (https://thebodyisnotanapology.com/) by Sonya Renee Taylor. The book came into my life at a time when I was feeling stuck, and it felt like a lifeboat. The theme of the book, to wildly over-simplify, is that radical self-love is a starting point for making the world a less-terrorized place for bodies. Not just an I-love-my-curves kind of love, well that too but also a deeper love that celebrates even the difficult, ESPECIALLY the difficult, parts of the process each of us is going through. The book gave me space to truly love myself, even to forgive myself, and I felt ready to grow and serve the world better.

I LOVED The Body Is Not an Apology, I still do. I evangelized it all over town, I couldn’t help myself. My neighborhood even has a body-positive book club, and I joined even though I am super wary of groups. The problem is, Sonya Renee Taylor is a friend of some former friends of mine, and the IRL side of the life-saving book knocked me off of my radical-self-love square almost as soon as I got on there. The world, like depression-brain, will always find a way to remind me to live in self-criticism, to remind me that nothing I ever do will be good enough. The depression-brain part is on me, but I didn’t get this way in a vacuum.

While I was going on a kickass self-love adventure with TBINAA, the book club’s Facilitator was having a spoken word journey. This is where things went awry. A few days before the group was meeting for the second time, Facilitator posted a video of a poem to her facebook group. Not Sonya, that would have been lovely, but Mean “Body Positive” White Lady. M “BP” WL was a sort-of-friend of mine until she wrote a blustery post attacking Hillary voters (There may come a day when I’m over the 2016 primary, but this is not that day.) and, when I pushed back, called me a “vagina voter.” How can you call yourself body positive if my anatomy rules out my enfranchisement? Anyway, the usual things happened after that, some people pressed like, some people collected cultural capital by piling on and saying GOD KNOWS WHAT, I blocked the thread and moved on. Mean “Body Positive” White Lady, through very little fault of her own, became a figure of fear in the trauma-soup that is my once-beloved National Poetry Slam community.

For almost a decade, the thing that has made it hardest for me to hear and be heard in online interactions with the NPS community is the pile-on. In fairness, in about 2010 when I secondhand-witnessed my first NPS pile-on, social networking was fairly new. Troll farms, 4chan, revenge porn, etc, weren’t part of the public lexicon, and there wasn’t as deep an understanding of the violence that the online world can perpetrate on women, particularly queer women and women of color. Because of my magic/annoying PTSD brain, the mob-mentality aspect of the pile-on jumped right out at me.

The First Big Pile-On (meaning, the FBPO that entered my consciousness, not the first they had) didn’t happen to me, but also it sort of feels like it did. The details are fuzzy to me, but I’ll do my best. A White Lady Slam Leader was sort of live-facebooking the finals of a national slam competition in…2010? She was making the point that the options for how to be a woman and get slam points are very limited, and in making that point, she said something racist—NOT OKAY. I’m glad people spoke up about her misstep, but the response was wildly disproportionate, with everyone weighing in, comment after comment. To her credit, WLSL saw the whole thing as a learning opportunity, and I learned a lot too, but alongside our progress toward awakening came a clear message: You don’t get to comment on poetry culture, and if you do, you are eligible to be ripped to shreds. At the same time that the mass-pushback was helping us make progress and learn, at the same time that it was helping marginalized voices be heard, it was also sending women a clear message to stay in our place, to keep ourselves small and stop trying to comment on the culture as a whole.

Not too long after that, my own work with the Philadelphia Poetry Slam started to feel like I was being used and like my work (We’d call it emotional labor now—YAY TERMS!) was being taken for granted, for only-sort-of-related reasons. For good and ill, the NPS community stayed with me through my friend feeds. That’s how, in that benighted spring of 2016, I got tangled in the tail-end of a much more upsetting pile-on.

A queer white woman had written a performance poem about her rape. Some of the language in the poem implied that her rapist was Mexican, when he was, in fact, white. THAT’S BAD! It’s upsetting and definitely a problem but also IT’S A POEM SHE WROTE ABOUT HER OWN RAPE. Even though she was a very privileged rape survivor, she was still a rape survivor, and I felt like a PUBLIC PILE-ON was maybe not the best way to address it. I’m a super-lucky rape survivor too, but I don’t think I could’ve made it through the NATIONAL TRIAL BY FACEBOOK that this woman survived. I’m sorry, but no one deserves that.

Like the WLSL, this poet was willing to learn from her mistake. The Woman Who’d Written Her Rape Poem Wrong wrote a public apology on facebook, including an apology for taking private time to heal. By now you’re yelling JANE! DON’T COMMENT ON THAT THREAD! Because I never learn, I commented. I told her she’s still a person, still entitled to self-care, and that taking time for herself was not going to make there be more racism. Then I blocked the thread, vaguebooked about how the NPS community can be shitty and misogynist and went to bed.

What I didn’t know was that the Queen Bully of Poetry Land, who used to be a friend of mine, was at the center of this pile-on. My phone buzzed around 3 AM, QBPL letting me know she thinks I’m as racist as Susan B. Anthony (There’s a certain line of thinking that suggests feminism can never be a thing because of Susan B. Anthony’s poor choices. If this same standard were applied to men, there would NEVER BE ANYTHING EVER.) She told me that I had failed at teaching not because I’d lacked self-care, but because of my own weakness and entitlement. Accurate, but not helpful. After I blocked her and went back to sleep, she texted my ex-wife/BFF to yell at her for having #blacklivesmatter on her facebook page, since clearly we both must be unredeemably racist for thinking a white rape victim is still a person.

No matter how much I distance myself from that NPS scene in my heart and mind and feeds, it still hangs like a tattooed ghost over my creative life. I was surprised when my jangledness about those years-ago pile-ons knocked me out of The Body Is Not an Apology Book Club, but I’m glad to give the Facilitator the chance to go on her spoken word journey without worrying about my weird residual triggers. Today, for me, radical self-love means admitting that this stuff still matters, that there’s still so much fear and un-worked-out pain, so much letting go of the ten-to-twenty-years-ago NPS community that still sometimes knocks me off balance. Mostly, that off-balance is good. Mostly, I’m getting somewhere.

Books I Liked This Year: Kind of a Gift Guide

Here are some book gift ideas:

If they like music and mysteries:
The Nobodies Album by Carolyn Parkhurst. I was riveted, and I still wonder what really happened...

For someone who needs a practical Cheer-Up:
The Happiness Project, by Gretchen Rubin.
Bright Sided by Barbara Ehrenreich

Funny books about religious questioning:

The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance by Elna Baker
I'm Perfect, You're Doomed, by Kyria Abrahams

For anyone who likes funny ladies:

The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee, by Sarah Silverman
How Did You Get This Number?, by Sloane Crossley
I Don't Care About Your Band, by Julie Klausner

For pop culture depressives:

The Big Rewind, by Nathan Rabin
Generation A, by Douglas Coupland
Juliet, Naked, by Nick Hornby

Smart-chick lit (also with music):

Last Night at Chateau Marmont, by Lauren Weisberger

Guiltiest of guilty pleasures:

Mini-Shopaholic, by Sophie Kinsella

Fun With bad grammar:

Teh Itteh Bitteh Book of Kittehs

Fun with etiquette:

Gunn's Golden Rules: Life's Little Lessons for Making It Work, by Tim Gunn

For sensitive surrealists:

The Peculiar Sadness of Lemon Cake, by Aimee Bender

For people who enjoy (non-sappy) spiritual poetry:

Love Letters from God, translated by Daniel Ladinsky