channonyarrow

Dear SJ crusaders:

Fuck off. Thanks!

See, here's the thing, and here's why you're really not getting the places you'd like to think you are, at least in my world.

1) You're making assumptions based on no evidence.
- I can, in fact, claim that something proves someone is a "real boy" without ever having in my thought process the contents of their pants. Because guess what, I don't care in the slightest what's in your pants. I can, in fact, be referring to Peter Pan, or to simply the humour found when someone who is godlike-pretty (Geeface, I heart you!) does something stereotypically "boy", or even using a sarcastic grammatical construct for humorous effect.

2) You're asking people to prove a negative.
- What would it take to prove that I'm not "a transphobic creep"? Do I need to get a letter signed by graeae's partner stating that I'm not? What about my friend J who's not on LJ? What about the coworker I had at my last job who was trans? What about the person I knew in college who was trans? Will it suffice if I contact everyone I've ever had any sort of social relationship with, ever, and get a sworn statement indicating whether I'm a good person or a bad person in their minds? Should I talk to a counsellor about the periods of gender dysphoria I have and get them to state that I don't hate myself, therefore I don't hate trans people? Basically, until and unless you catch me in my KKK robes, please refrain from making unfounded accusations, particularly since whatever provoked this person was not me saying "OMG THERE IS NOTHING BUT CIS EVERYTHING ELSE IS HORRIBLE AND AGAINST GOD." And I can say that with categorical certainty because I have never said or thought that.

Do gay people count to prove that I'm not an asshat? There's a reason that McArcus was my token straight minority for a while - how many gay people in my social circles prove that I'm not actually queer unfriendly? Or can I just state that I'm bi and canvas LJ for anyone who remembers my relationship with srichard for proof that this is true?

But there's the rub: there is no way whatsoever for me to prove that I don't think that thought, because ... you're firing from the hip without waiting to find out whether I'm actually sending out emails about the n****r in the White House to claim that I'm racist. You're not asking me about my stance on social issues - you are, instead, coming in with an accusation. And you don't know me.

3) There's a world of difference between "this bothers me" and "this is what you are".
- I made a comment a while back in theferrett's journal about how I frequently feel third-sexed because I don't behave like "a girl" but I don't feel like "a boy". roniliquidity pulled me up short by pointing out, politely, that doing that is a way of avoiding the issue of demonstrating that "femininity" is beyond simply what the religious right would have us believe, and she was right to do so. I haven't made that claim since.

Strangely, however, when someone takes the time to contact me off-thread and make accusations, I'm a lot less inclined to listen to your bullshit.

4) No one speaks for anyone else, even if you are a member of the group. Frequently, you are not.
- This was most pronounced with Racefail a few years back, where a bunch of white people critiqued other white people about not including characters of colour in their works (and yes, I am very well aware that there were participants in that who were not white; I'm only speaking of a section of the population that had that argument). I don't, actually, think that it's your business to come riding in and tell me that, as another white person, I'm using terms you, as a white person, don't like. Tough shit. I pick terms of respect with the best information I have, and I will alter them if I find that people in the group I'm speaking of don't like them, but I find it twee that you think I'm not being PC if I say, for example, that someone is black rather than someone is a person of colour. Are you, then, the sole arbiter of what people in that group prefer to be called? I should tell you right now that I utterly dislike being referred to as Caucasian, but have no problem with white, and think that, in my particularly mutt-genetics case, "Scandinavian-American" or "Italian-American" are misleading, particularly since they are the least true about my genome. "White American" makes me want to throw up a lot. So there you are, that's the term to use for everyone who shares my skin colour!

However, and this is key, I won't actually kill you if you call me Caucasian. I'll just point out that I don't like it, but I won't die, and nor will anyone else.

Because it is not possible to find out what every single person in the group being spoken of would prefer to be called, I find it utterly offensive that people try to define other people's language for them. This isn't so much the intention argument as it is the respect argument. Unless I start hauling off and calling trans people chicks with dicks or whatever the fuck the insulting group terms are (I literally have no idea and I cannot possibly be arsed to google for it) maybe you could do me a favour and step the fuck down until I do something that egregious? You're not going to get me to adopt your standard if you come at me with "OMG BIGOT" as your opening salvo, and personally, I don't think I or anyone else deserves it until and unless you have an actual pattern of behaviour to work with.

I am also fairly sure that the people who know me would, in fact, not hesitate to yank me up short if there was something I was saying or doing that gave the wrong impression of me, and from them, I'll listen to it, because they actually KNOW ME.

5) Whatever happened to living it?
- I cannot, literally, fathom the mindset that says "If I just yell loud enough, frequently enough, everyone will change their minds!" First: no, they won't. Second: if I really were shopping for a new thought system, what about yours is more compelling than anyone else's? I don't really like shouting at total randos about the impurity of their thoughts, and I also like having the asshats self-identify by continuing to espouse their anti-Semitic bullshit or whatever - I don't actually believe that anyone's going to change their mind if I just shout at them for a while, and certainly not if they're actually a bigot.

But here's the thing: you can do a LOT more to help your cause if you cultivate relationships with people first. Or if you just LIVE it - I've said for a long time that the one factor that makes me want to be Catholic is the priest that I had as a child at Catholic school. It certainly isn't the current Church leadership, and it certainly isn't the evangelicals - it's seeing that man live his faith, and I really mean live it. It was a far more compelling argument in favour of faith than, literally, anything I have seen before or since.

Coming around and levelling off-thread insults at me won't change my mind about anything (except that not only are you a crap writer, in my professional judgment, but you're also a crap human as well) and it certainly wouldn't make me change my mind if I really were a transphobic creep. Maybe my problem is that I don't have enough white guilt and whatever else guilt to care that everyone thinks and speaks exactly the same way I do?

WAIT. Maybe my problem is that I don't assume everyone else is a goddamn dick! Yes, I think that might be it!

No love whatsoever,
Cass

Okay.

This is something that has bugged me for-fucking-ever, and that most authors, I think, don't actually, consciously think about. Hell, I don't like to think about it, if only because anthropology as a discipline has gone so ass-over-teakettle about identifying potential ~influences on one's work that you practically can't get to the essay without reading about how the author was once bitten by a moose or some shit, so obviously that influences their understanding of the natives of Bongobongostan, who cover themselves in paint and feathers pretty much solely because they don't live in a place that moose find very congenial. Yadda yadda yadda, it's important that we know that EE Evans-Pritchard wasn't ACTUALLY living with the Nuer when he wrote his umpty jillion books about them, WHATEVER, DONE.

However, as we all know, the internet is srs fucking bzns. The internet may even be Sparta, for all I know.

So let's all take a deep breath and realise something.

You are reading this through Livejournal. I am writing this through Livejournal. We are communicating via the medium of the internet, and the internet is preeeeetty fucking stratified by class. (It's also stratified by age, but unless someone wants to introduce me to a granny slasher, I don't care about that.)

We are communicating about a subject that I think is pretty fucking firmly the purview of at least the middle class, whatever that means nowadays. The internet, in other words, has become our leisure time.

And this would lead to what logical conclusion?

That we all are at least middle class, relatively privileged people.

We have the education, the skills, and the time to learn to negotiate the internet and use it where past generations used visiting the sick. Fine, so far as it goes, but all of that is the setup for what I wish to bitch about today, so if you're not following, reread the above paragraph. We are all privileged fuckers here.

I'm having trouble with voice in this, actually - this could easily be a dear author: die rant, given how much time I had to spend making some works social-class appropriate. We're gonna go with the fannish context, but know that there is significant overlap with ~real authors here.

So. We're all privileged fuckers, so obviously we invest all our time in figuring out new ways to stick Tab A into Slot B and go UNF UNF UNF as we do it. We are not fighting off cholera, bandits, police repression, censorship, we are not concentrating solely on finding food, shelter, clothing, our missing loved ones, etc. When something is for porn, you know that that thing is about the most decadent of the cultural elaborations since the Kwakiutl were tossing shit off the side of a cliff as a potlatch. In fact, the internet could be considered the willful destruction OF a civilisation, since so few of society's mores actually apply to it.

Why, then, in our pursuit of porn, do we not consider class when we're writing porn? I am not asking this because I get off on fucking Marxist-Leninist theory, or because I want everyone to have pity on the working man (ha! see what I did thar?), I'm asking because it is a reasonable fucking question.

I think that the assignation of bandom-villain status is classist. Here's why.

The three most common villains I've run across, where there is some other information to suggest that, you know, that might possibly be the tiniest bit of a misclassification, are Bert, Gabe, and William. Bert's the skeevy weird dude who - put your tinhats on with me - broke up with Gerard, Gabe's got creepy eyes and an intense personality and seemingly takes nothing seriously, and William is occasionally overly friendly with dudes, so he's obviously a slut.

These are the gimmes of bandom, and I am up to here with them.

Let's take 'em one at a time, shall we. We shall, because I fucking say so.

Bert: Okay, seriously, I kind of want to give him cookies and a hug, but he'd totally get lost in my cleavage. Bear in mind, this is one of the biggest assholes in MCR-centric fandom. He and Gerard were REAL close on Warped 2005 - REAL CLOSE. His mom, I think it was, gave him a picture of the two of them. BEFFIES 4EVA, at the very least. He is little, he is dirty, he is an ex addict, he is possibly slightly crazy in ways out of the norm for bands, who tend to be more than a little off level as it is. His girlfriend died of an overdose while pregnant with their child, his parents threw him out when he was a teenager for not adhering to their faith (Mormonism, BE SURPRISED) and he panhandled and lived at, I think, Quinn's house when he wasn't being homeless as fuck. He is possibly semi-openly bi; I seem to recall this, at any rate, but it's Bert, so who knows. He's pretty fearless about - well, about everything, but about stuff like labelling based on sexual orientation he makes all of FBR look like the shyest straight boys to ever walk the earth. He loves puppies, and his friends, and small children, and he tends not to do the very Scandinavian NO TOUCHY thing. Obviously, Bert is a skeevy dude who broke Gee's heart and deserves to hang, because his other pastime is curbstomping puppies.

Gabe: Conflicted dude. Don't believe me? Go read the lyrics to Being From Jersey Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry and come back. Done that? Good. Gabe wrote that song, so far as anyone knows, and this is a theory that flies to me, as a goodbye to the Jersey hardcore scene when he started Cobra Starship - and the scene, like it or not, is not really a place to float major, groundbreaking work. This song, for example, would not fly in the scene. He takes EVERYTHING waaaay too seriously (almost as seriously as William, actually) but is better at pretending like it's all bullshit, life's a game, and he's throwing the party at the end of the world. He started a band to change the world, for fuck's sake, and he's not shy about saying that - but unlike MCR, who also started a band to change the world and are deadly earnest about it, he hides it by saying that he had a vision of a cobra, who told him that humanity was fucked, and in the time left to us Gabe had to start a band to teach emo kids not to be such pussies and hipsters not to take themselves so seriously. He's not in this to save your life - except he totally is, he's just not saying it the same way. Obviously, Gabe is a creepy rapist because he wrote a song called "It's Warmer In The Basement" and also "The Church Of Hot Addiction".

William: This dude is a hider. Seriously. Don't believe me? Watch TAITV - there are very few shots of William where he's not acting like he's completely and totally aware of the camera even though he's TRYING not to be. He has no ability at ALL to forget that there's a camera in the room, and he comes off super earnest when he talks to the camera. He's a smart dude - 4.0 all the way through high school - and he's eloquent (sometimes I wish he would stop, actually, because it makes me a little bit nuts). But he is, from all I can see, simultaneously a nice guy - no one has ever said he was a fucking dick and they're not shy about saying that about Mike Carden, his bandmate - and a very shy one. So when he opens up physically, it's with pretty much three people: Gabe, Travis McCoy, and Nick Scimeca, who is not in a band. He's not even particularly touchy-feely with his band - unlike with MCR, or Panic, or FOB, some members of whom cannot get through a very short interview without touching. William also left home as a high school senior to live with Mike Carden and play music because his family disagreed so intensely with his choice of music as a profession that they wanted him to stop. He was working part time at the Gap, playing music part time, and going to school full time - and still making straight As and, for all I know, still playing on the baseball team. Obviously, William is a slut and never has had a problem in his life that couldn't be resolved by, basically, being white and pretty.

Now that I've proved I can regurgitate sufficient portions of the work other people have done, there is a point to this. The backgrounds and the crimes have been listed. Bert: skeevy because he broke Gee's heart. Gabe: creepy rapist because he's got weird eyes (I am never making this up). William: slut because he's shy and takes comfort from three very specific people.

Let's toss a monkeywrench in there.

Brendon: I don't like Panic, not one tiny bit. I will never like Panic. There is literally nothing they could do to get me to be a fan of theirs. As such, I am a lot fuzzier on the timeline of events here, but you can't be in scene fandom and not pick up a few things, so I'm gonna go the fuck ahead and hope that I have gotten this right. Brendon was also kicked out of his house for being not-sufficiently-Mormon and wanting to play music instead of going on mission. Brendon also worked part time and went to school. Brendon and his parents have, evidently, reconciled since it became obvious that playing music was the right decision, though everything I've seen suggests that relationship is a touch bit strained (I also expect it to fly apart if Spencer does any more ground-laying work for Brendon to come out as bi or gay.) Personally, if it were me, they could crawl on fucking broken glass to grovel at my feet and I'd not have shit to do with them, but that's me.

Brendon, however, does not get a bad rap in fandom. Brendon's a spaz, he's a musical prodigy, he looks hot in girl jeans (he has, I think, actually SAID that he HAS to wear girl jeans because of his butt, which is, uh, womanly at best) and he's VERY pretty, if you're into that sort of thing. I will never not want to slap Brendon in the face with a haddock, so I won't judge you, but I also won't judge whether he's hot. I don't even care if he is. But he is not a rapist, a slut, or a generally-all-purpose bad guy; in fact, when Brendon is characterised as a slut, the times I've seen, it's entirely more positive than it is when it's William being labeled.

Normally, I would throw my hands up in the air and stomp off and say "FINE, FUCK YOU ALL, BE WRONG IF YOU WANT," because there is nothing I can do about it if someone is wrong on the internet, short of stalking them, caging them, and gradually brainwashing them into believing MY point of view, which is obviously correct. (Yours is wrong.) But! Two more MASSIVE points to introduce, in case you've lived through the wall of text so far!

The Gimme: A writing "technique" wherein nothing needs to be explained, it merely needs to be accepted.

Social class: Remember what I said above about the internet and its users? Yeah. We're all privileged, and presumably, in the sectors of fandom I've interacted with, we all have someone in our family who loves us without reservation and supports us. Few, if ANY, of us, have dealt with the things that Bert and William and Brendon have. Few of us have seemingly felt so strongly that we would be mocked for doing something that we felt was necessary that we had to hide why we were doing it, like Gabe.

Your social class informs your vision of the world. If you don't think that's true, let me rent you a $500/month apartment in South Park for a few weeks and we'll see how you function, living in Seattle's version of fairly extreme, ethnically-based poverty. I don't think that's gonna go well.

I think - and this is where I sound deadly earnest, PLEASE SHOOT ME - that because of social class there is very little credence given to Bert, Gabe, and William's situations. I think that they are very abstract at best to most writers, and completely alien at worst - so it's easy to demonise later actions rather than placing them truly into context. So WHAT if Bert and Gerard broke up? Isn't it possible that Gerard, whose life more closely mirrors the middle-class ideal, could have been the one to say "No, this isn't working"? The pretty one is not always dumped by the skeevy one, people! Isn't it POSSIBLE that Gabe isn't actually a creepy rapist, despite his eyes? That he actually DOES want to save your life and maybe his own as well, with his music, and that he DEFINITELY wants to see a fucking change in the world? Isn't it possible that William is so overwhelmed by the stardom that he also courts that he takes refuge in comfort with a very small group of people, yet is not, actually, fucking all of them, much less anyone else whose path he crosses?

Brendon didn't make a choice, true. But it's a lot easier to accept what's happened to him, and to empathise with it, because he did not go on to become a fucking junkie. Bandom is an amazingly virginal place, and I don't mean that physically; for all I know, everyone in bandom goes to an orgy every night of the week. But in terms of extrapolating from what is known to what could be, there is an AMAZING sympathy gap, and that gap happens the moment that someone exhibits behaviour that is difficult to reconcile. What would you like Bert to have done, while living on the streets? SHOULD Gabe never have formed Cobra? If William had a choice in the matter now, do you think he might choose to be a baseball player instead of a musician?

No. You think - you have decided, through your lens of privilege and comfort, that hard choices equal easy answers, and the answer for those three people is that they are demons, sometimes very, very fucking dangerous ones. But you have not faced the same choice. You can't extrapolate what YOU think should have happened into what IS because you don't know what happened, what the motives were - all you know is that Bert is not nearly as pretty as Gerard, and that Gabe can't take a reasonable picture to save his life and that William likes to very, very openly grab Travis or Gabe whenever they are performing together - and three quarters of the time, "grab" is the wrong fucking verb. The actions you judge are not placed into the context of where they came from; I think that's because, for much of bandom, where they came from is literally unthinkable, unsympathisable, and not understandable.

You have, through lack of empathy, turned these peoples' very real lives and choices into a fucking gimme.

Take off your fucking glasses the next time you decide who your villain is. Don't go with a fucking stock character just because you don't understand how they came to be where they are, and who they are. Find someone who's really a fucking villain and use them instead.

Don't let your privilege inform your work. Don't let your privilege keep you from trying to see and understand what might really be going on, rather than whatever the hell construct fandom is fucking playing with today.

I feel compelled to make this post a good 'un because I have new people on my flist who have evidently friended me because apiphile says I'm even angrier than she is. Also, I haven't said much about politics in a LONG while (here's how long: my real political posts are on my website, which I haven't updated in donkeys. Also, they're all bitching about GW.). So politics + anger should make for some fun times.

I am blatantly cribbing some of this from a conversation I had with graeae over the weekend, but since I have the memory span of a goldfish, it's possible that I will forget things. But some of the ideas come from that convo.

I was reading spam today, as one does, when one is unemployed and single and the apartment is already mostly clean and one's issues with contacting people are making getting a new job a bitch. I've had a few emails from some group called MomsRising.org; imagine my confusion when I realised that this was, actually, a forward from my semi-pro email account. Evidently, despite not being a mother, and not giving one tiny shit that 1.2 million children have now lost their health care, I signed up for this at some point. I guess.

The premise of the email is one I've seen several times, and this is where I start to lose my shit. Tell Congress to move quickly to make this promise a reality on Day One of the Obama Presidency by a quick and fully-funded reauthorization of SCHIP.

I've seen this elsewhere on the internet. Right now, Obama is supposed to save children, Gaza, and *insert your pet cause here* by, at the latest, Day 100 of his presidency. I have actually seen someone call Obama's presidency "failed" because he's not doing whatever the fuck they wanted him to do - I don't think that was in the context of Gaza, but it might have been. Or it might have been because, yanno, he wants Reverend Wright to do his thing at the Inauguration.

This is insane.

1) Obama is the President-elect. Not the president. As such, he cannot do these things prior to taking office. Even though, as Barney Frank said recently, saying that we have only one president at a time is overstating the case on how many presidents we have right now, he cannot do anything other than what a senator may do right now.

2) There are other problems in line before yours. The economy leaps to mind. The environment needs to get started on - I say this, by the way, from Seattle, where we are completely cut off from the rest of the United States: due to heavy snowfall and avalanche danger, both US 2 and I-90 across the mountains are closed, and I-5 has at least three feet of water over the roadway south of Chehalis; it's expected to hit ten feet, even with pumping and a manmade levee breach, before it crests. Getting some of the more pernicious acts of our previous "president" out of the way leaps to mind, as well - as graeae pointed out, Bush has made it, currently, so that the documents relevant to his presidency remain secret, not only in his lifetime but may be held as secret by his heirs. Emperor Bush indeed.

3) Just because, as good liberals, we've endured eight years of the worst presidency America has had, with empire-building, a failed war, massive executive power increase and the sort of vice-presidential powers that not even Henry Kissinger dreamed of, that does not mean that it's now OUR turn and we get to fucking have ponies on the day that Obama takes office. For Chrissake, let the man figure out how to turn the phones on.

Now. Just to clarify one point: I take Gaza very seriously. I am pro-Palestine, all the way, and I can fucking back that opinion up; I did my Master's on the subject. I take health care (for ALL people) very fucking seriously indeed; as the child of a nurse, it would be hard not to. As someone who's lived for an extended period in England, it would be impossible not to. As someone who stands for everything that Reverend Wright opposes, I don't like his selection, but I'm not gonna kill anyone over it. So now you know my biases.

I drank the Obama Kool-Aid, and I drank it early and often. I was never a supporter of Clinton; while I would not have cried tears of blood at voting for her, I felt - and still feel - that Obama is a uniter, and Clinton is a policy wonk. We don't need a policy wonk right now. We need someone who can pull the two sides of this country back together and make ALL of us realise that whatever else we are, we are all Americans, and that we don't have to annex part of the county to get along. I also think that Obama is a very, very smart man who likes more than a little bit of Machiavelli in his politics; Clinton is a deal-maker who'll bargain to get what she wants, but Obama will convince you, and will make the gestures needed to get his point across: he is the president for ALL of America, not just the evangelicals (as Bush was not) or for the tree-huggers, or for the minorities, or for whatever sub-group you'd like to ascribe to him.

And now I'm watching his approval rating - 75% - with a lot of trepidation. Not because I think that Obama will do something wrong with that, but because he could. That's higher than Bush came into office with; that's higher than Bush had at any point in his presidency other than during 9/11, when he polled 90% (and let's be honest: he didn't look presidential then; it could have been Bozo the Clown in office and he would've scored that high.). He tapped 75% again with the declaration of the war, and it's been downhill ever since for ol' Bush.

Source.

Obama could use that approval rating to do anything. Anything at all. Keep the changes in executive power over the last presidency? You can have them! Refuse to reverse some of the policy decisions made by the Bush administration, such as family planning overseas? Go for it!* Want to nuke Pakistan? Knock yourself out!

I believe - because of the Kool-Aid - that Obama will do the right things with that rating, things that I approve of and can get behind. I also think that this addresses why he selected Wright for the Inauguration - if he'd not reached out to the conservatives who believe that his election mean that they're gonna get witch-hunted for not being pagan queers, he'd get nowhere. Whether liberals like it or not, there are fundamentalist conservatives in this country. And they're not going away.

But do you really think that Obama can fix everything on the first day? He's just gonna sign a bunch of legislation and that's it, we can all have a beer for the next four years? No. We did not get into these problems overnight. We're not getting out of them overnight, either. And the economy is the 800lb gorilla.

This is why all these calls for Obama to fix this on the first day/first 100 days drive me bananas. They don't recognise a basic fact. The man may be able to walk on water, without even having Air Jesus shoes, but he can't do everything. And - quite frankly - he would be fucking insane to try. Not merely because it can't be done but because he needs to do two things first: fix the economy, and unite the country.

There is no possibility that we could have a president left-wing enough for me. I am so far left I verge on communism, frankly. Perhaps that gives me some of the necessary distance here, but this pet cause business drives me nuts because it doesn't recognise reality. You are not the most special snowflake in the room. And expecting Obama to fix, in the first three months of his administration, all the things that Bush fucked up is unrealistic.

Anyway, if you didn't like it, why did you let Bush get away with it?

This is from the Declaration of Independence. Read it very fucking closely.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

The consent of the governed. It is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government.

This means that we have the right to overthrow the government if we don't like it. If it fails to provide for our unalienable rights - and certainly, I would argue that the Constitution and Bill of Rights, both of which have been thoroughly skullfucked in the last few years, posit an entire constellation of unalienable rights - then we have the right, even the obligation, to overthrow the government and try something new.

The 33% approval rating that Bush polled in May of 2006 would argue that two thirds of the American people agree that Bush was a shitty president.

Why was there no revolution?

Why did no one choose to take power back, take it away from the hands of the madmen we've allowed to run the country (into the ground) for the last four years?

I didn't, I know that. No one else did, either, though. No one figured out that we had the power, and we had the right and organised around that. Instead, we sent petitions and marched in demonstrations and protested quietly and bore witness - in a media state that did its damnedest to hide the numbers of those protesting, marching, angry. Hell, that tried to hide that such things - such dissent - was occurring.

There is a reason that we have the right to bear arms, by the way. I would argue that Bush, Cheney, et al are not necessary to the security of the state. They seem to be doing too good a job, even now, fucking us all over.

And there's the answer. Obama can't fix everything in the first day or first hundred days, or even first term, because none of us said, in any effective way, that enough was enough. None of us demanded loudly enough that our government be accountable to us again. None of us exercised our rights - so the mess got worse.

The mess, in fact, became almost im-fucking-possible to see through.

And now, armed only with the joy of some portion of the country at the fact that we have gone against type and elected a smart, competent man as president, Obama is supposed to fix this? Right now?

Are people actually out of their minds?

Evidently so.

Do not come to me with a demand for what Obama "should" do on the first day in office. Do not outline for me a plan of what you think Obama should do in his first hundred days. Do not tell me that everything will be better now.

Let's borrow a business maxim. You can do it fast, cheap, or well, and you have to pick two out of three. My corollary is that generally, fast and cheap go together. Well is the redheaded step child in this.

I'd rather he did it well. I'd rather that he, and his team, and Congress, thought about things before rushing right into the briar patch. I'd rather that you and I and everyone have to deal with the consequences of our own fucking inaction for a while longer.

Because maybe that will remind us next time: we are not obligated to sit still for a president like Bush.


* I have to note here, I don't necessarily think Bush did a bad thing with that, frankly. I am pro-choice - but I also live in a society where the value of a fetus is not, generally speaking, determined by whether or not it's male or female. In countries where that is the context, the statement of "Pro-choice means no choice" is accurate. Otherwise, female babies are aborted in vastly disproportionate numbers. Just something to think about, there.