Category Archives: america fuck yeah

america fuck yeah, family, memoir, memories, mr. ben, the gays

Learning the Meaning of Christmas

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I didn’t have Christmas growing up, so I never got what was funny about leg lamps. I never sang “Jingle Bells” unironically or even saw It’s a Wonderful Life. Over the years, mostly from pop culture parodies, I’ve picked up the salient bits: small-town family, bad bankers, wise angels, rash decision reversed, and voila! Happily ever after. That understanding in no way prepared me for my first real Christmas, which I celebrated with my Russian-Jewish father-in-law, his Italian-American wife, her brother the priest, and the priest’s surprise.

As a child, I was an outsider when the whole country went Christmas crazy. I had only Hannukah, which is like a kid playing a kazoo on the sidelines while a marching band in full regalia, with cheerleaders and baton twirlers and gymnasts and everything, spends a month slowly parading by. Then, I got older, and the meaning of Christmas evolved—it became the time I got laid off. Twice, including once during the Great New York Transit Strike of 2005. Even for someone who doesn’t celebrate the baby Jesus, that’s pretty harsh.

My first real Christmas on the inside made all the difference. Suddenly I understood. We go nuts for four to six weeks in advance of this holiday because it’s terrifying. 24 hours with our families where we’re expected to be kinder, gentler, more charitable versions of our screwed up selves? Where we have to open boxes of things we never wanted in front of everyone and pretend to be excited, while nervously watching everyone else open the presents we got them to see if they’re sufficiently appreciative? Where we have several meals with extended family members and in-laws, who take a long looks at us and comment on whether we’re more or less skinny than before? Those stakes are high.

Mr. Ben, my husband, is also Jewish, but unlike me, he grew up with mistletoe and ornaments. His father brought the tradition over from Russia when he emigrated; there, under Communism, it was a Secular Mandatory Fun Day, with the part of Big Brother played by the ominous-sounding Father Snow. (Particularly ominous if you’ve read Game of Thrones.)

Once we were living together and engaged, Mr. Ben asked me to come to Christmas. For reasons of principle, I was hard to convince, but finally, like anyone who’s ever been in a lasting relationship, I caved. Mr. Ben’s dad’s second wife, Carla, was Italian and an excellent cook; she also had a reputation for giving such good presents that all the Hunger Games-level agony of Christmas shopping became retroactively worth it. Between a bounty of material goods and Martha Stewart-type treats, I figured the holiday would be painless, maybe even kind of fun.

Carla had invited her brother Ned, a 50-year-old Catholic priest, as well as their aged old-world Italian mother. Shortly before he arrived, Ned told Carla that he would be accompanied by his friend, Winston.

Ned went to seminary at 18. He had never so much had dated a girl; from childhood, his vocation was clear. That is partly why Ned’s mother, always so proud of her son the priest, looked confused to be introduced to Winston, a very nice middle-aged Asian-American man. Mr. Ben’s Russian grandmother sat next to her on the couch across from the fireplace, perhaps thinking that the fact that her own son had re-married a shiksa now seemed not so bad. Winston and Ned, oblivious, glowed happily next to each other on the piano bench.

Still: Christmas! A brightly-lit, colorfully-decorated tree presided over an avalanche of boxes and bags. Delicious smells wafted from the kitchen, where Carla, tongue-tied with awkwardness, had escaped to tend to the meal.

“Let’s play a duet!” Ned suggested.

“Great!” replied Winston.

Being that this was my first real Christmas, I had no idea whether any of this was normal. Maybe Catholic priests always used Christmas with their Russian-Jewish extended families to come out to their horrified, blindsided mothers, one piano duet at a time. Or maybe Winston was really just a friend and we were all over-reacting.

As we began to exchange presents en masse, that hope faded. “For you!” said Ned.

“Thank you!” cried Winston, opening a box of two button-down shirts: one bright purple, the other bright pink. “And that one’s for you.”

Ned picked up the flat package and ripped it open. “Oh my gosh!” he said. “You didn’t!”

Ned showed us the present he had just received, and I choked on my Diet Coke. It was a framed, signed poster of “Will and Grace.”

The only gayer present? Probably a butt plug. Probably.

The next morning, Ned’s mother and Carla appeared dressed and ready for church. Ned and Winston came out of the guest room dressed and ready to go antiquing. It was at this point that Ned’s mother’s heart fell to the hardwood floor like a big red shiny ornament and smashed into a million pieces. We could all hear it except for Ned, who, with Winston, went on his merry way. And at last, Christmas was over.

Ned and Winston now live together in a wonderful old house in Amish country with two pianos and lots of knickknacks. Ned is no longer a priest. I don’t know if he ever officially came out to the family or whether he figures that, after the “Will and Grace” poster, it would be redundant, but he has reconciled with his mother, who is very fond of Winston. And I have learned that while Thanksgiving may be a big deal for drama, Christmas totally takes the (fruit)cake.

america fuck yeah, squee

The end of men?

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FORTY-SOMETHING AWESOME DUDE WITH AN EARRING and I are standing in the elevator. He surveys me.

FSAD: Boy!

Me: Actually, it’s supposed to be a girl.

FSAD: Hmmm. You’re carrying in front and kind of away from you …  I think it’s a boy.

Me: Well, maybe! But the sonogram did say girl.

FSAD: Eh, who knows what they miss on those things? Besides, your husband must want a boy.

Me: He says he’s excited–

FSAD: Ha! Yeah: [mocking voice] “As long as it’s healthy,” right? That’s what they say. 

Me: OK! Good night!

america fuck yeah, writing

That Kind of Day

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Today I appeared on Geraldo Rivera. That’s a sentence I never expected to utter. A producer approached me by email yesterday and the radio show featuring me — or rather, “Ester Bloom from the Huffington Post” — aired this morning.

The whole thing happened fast enough that my head is still spinning. Part of me keeps thinking in quips, like “I knew I had a face for radio!” Another part of me wishes my dad had lived long enough to hear me interviewed about “Mommy Porn” on a daytime talk show, even though I know full well he wouldn’t have been able to listen to the segment. I used the words “butt plug” after all. That’s more or less the only part of the conversation I remember.

A far less racy piece went up on the Billfold, a fun conversation between my friend Adam and me about the film “Five-Year Engagement.” Movie reviews in g-chat form that tell you, ultimately, how much you should pay to see a particular film (if anything). We’ve done two of them so far and I’m excited for the next. It’s slated to be a pretty regular feature, which works for me. I haven’t gotten to write about movies consistently since college.

THEN I got an exciting email from Creative Non-Fiction magazine that said that, if all goes well, a piece of mine will appear in their summer issue.

Perhaps this is what my horoscope meant?

Over all, your career will make much more progress than you’ve seen anytime until now. Mars, the ruler of your house of fame, has been retrograde (January 23 to April 13) and now is gathering steam. When a planet like active Mars goes retrograde, he does not move from 0 to 200 miles an hour instantly. Mars needs time to ramp up, and he won’t be back to full speed until early August. No matter – each day Mars gets stronger, and besides, anything is better than what you’ve experienced so far this year. You must have felt like you were walking through glue. You will like the change.

So far, I do like the change, but I remain vigilant — things have gone well before going badly before. I take nothing for granted.

 

ETA: Here’s the link to the podcast: http://wabcradio.com/sectional.asp?id=41488, from the 5/9 show whose blurb reads, “Mommy porn has become all rage across the country! For those who do not know what that is…Geraldo tells all. The book Fifty Shades of Gray is leading this phenomenon in this country. Geraldo talks to Huffington Post writer Ester Bloom about this.” I’m on from roughly minute :30 to :40.

america fuck yeah, bad writing, mizoginy, sexism, wymyn

A Closer Look at “Mommy Porn”

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Currently, Fifty Shades of Grey—an Australian e-book by an unknown female author with no marketing budget—is fourth on USA Today’s Best-Selling Books list, behind only the “Hunger Games” trilogy. Grey’s two sequels, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Free, have also climbed into the Top 20. And panic is gripping the nation, because these books, which are being enjoyed by The Ladies, are about The Sex.

In the past few weeks, several news pieces have addressed the issue of women getting off on these books and what that means. “Will Fifty Shades Of Grey Make ‘Mommy Porn’ The Next Big Thing?” asks Forbes. “Fifty Shades of Grey has America’s national thong in a twist,” declares USA Today, adding, “However you categorize it—mommy porn, erotic fiction, Twilight fan fiction gone rogue, a symbol of moral decay—British writer E.L. James’ NC-17 bondage trilogy has gone from e-book cult favorite to publishing phenomenon.” “Everyone from so-called “mommy bloggers” to hardcore feminists is hailing the tome as a triumph for women, in spite of the book’s strong themes of female submission at the hands of a high-powered man,” says FoxNews.com. The article also goes on to use the now-inescapable phrase “mommy porn.”

Captain Obvious would point out that there is no such thing as “daddy porn,” presumably because dads remain men, even after procreating. Once they give birth, women apparently morph into “mommies,” neutered creatures who may be venerated but don’t need to be taken seriously. Hence their easily-dismissed “mommy blogs” and now their “mommy porn.”

The phrase, even more than the phenomenon of married ladies reading smut on their Kindles, raises all sorts of interesting questions about how women’s sexuality is viewed by society at large. By modifying the highly-charged word “porn,” are we diminishing its power because we remain deeply uncomfortable with the idea of even adult, married women having erotic needs? According to the breathless news coverage, the answer seems to be, “Kind of, yeah!”

There is a long and storied history of women reading to build up, and blow off, steam. I first learned that “romance” was merely a polite literary euphemism for “porn” when, on a sleepover in sixth grade, a friend showed me her secret stash of paperback Harlequins, over which we stayed up for hours, wide-eyed and red-faced. In seventh grade, I found out that “historical fiction” could be another, more high-brow mask for “porn” when I stumbled on Jean M. Auel’s Earth Children series. (Plot synopsis: pre-historic hottie Ayla, raised among Neanderthals, meets sensitive Cromagnon Jondalar. Pausing only to invent throwing spears, awls, and probably an early version of the iPad, Ayla hanky-panks with Jonadalar across early Europe.) Auel’s books have sold over 45 million copies worldwide. Harlequin is one of the most profitable publishing companies anywhere; according to the New York Times, they make hundreds of millions of dollars in sales every year.

That sex sells, even to women, should not, in 2012, come as a surprise. Yet something about this publishing phenomenon seems to have gotten under our culture’s skin. What’s different about Fifty Shades of Grey? It’s kinky.

The sex in Harlequin romances tends to be extremely tame. The rugged, beefy, All-American men bursting out of their shirts on the covers of the paperbacks telegraph to the reader all she or he needs to know about what’s going to happen in the bedroom (or on the grass, or aboard the pirate ship): straight-up, classical seduction. Jondalar, who is, coincidentally, described to look like a dead-ringer for Fabio, never expresses a desire more risqué than giving Ayla pleasure. Even Sex and the City, which expanded our society’s understanding of women’s ability to both enjoy, and speak freely, about sex, portrayed women who were pretty traditional in terms of what turned them on. No main character had a hidden fetish or a desire to dominate or be dominated. In Grey, a young woman signs a contract giving an older man control over her life. The readers in Grey’s universe are not in the Kansas of Harlequin novels anymore, or even the sanitized New York City of SATC; they’ve crossed over into the darker, edgier world of the 2002 indie/cult-favorite Secretary. Except that, for the first time, their support has helped something marginal cross over into the mainstream.

Grey’s success has communicated to the news media that some women’s taste runs to BDSM and power play—enough women, in fact, to get the attention of the Gray Lady herself. To some degree, this is old news. Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight, both bona fide phenomena, spawned reams of fan fiction by drawing on similar themes (especially Buffy’s Season 6, which you can hardly watch without overheating); the original draft of Grey was, in fact, Twilight fan fiction. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series leans heavily on explicit sex scenes that are anything but square. And for power play, it’s hard to beat the unorthodox use of cigars in the Starr Report, now fifteen years old. Ultimately, the BDSM buzz around Grey seems like a red herring. What shocks the media is not that women are paying to read about a naïve college student submitting to a relative stranger; it’s that women—even adult, married women with children—are jonesing to read about sex at all.

As a society, we tend to ignore Harlequin’s massive success, or treat it as some kind of anomaly; and we seem more comfortable with the long-running joke that Porn for Women is men doing housework than the idea that women also like their raunch, including material that’s less-vanilla and more Karamel Sutra. Porn is porn! Lots of people consume it and, as with sexism, we know it when we see it. Most importantly, moms don’t hang up their gonads after their kids are born; they remain sexual beings. Ye gods! Where do you think babies continue to come from? If you really don’t know, I have a book or two I could recommend.

ETA: This piece also appears on the Huffington Post! Read it here. 

america fuck yeah, books, brooklyn, funny, politix

Close Encounters

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Yesterday, at a party my boss took me to for work, an older gentleman used shaking my hand as an excuse to fondle my wrist. As his index finger caressed my skin and I tried not to barf, I reflected on how many odd face-to-face interactions I have had with people in the last month.

Most recently, I attended the Brooklyn Book Festival, an annual gala where writers and thinkers get to sit in close proximity with the only people who still buy novels. Even when less than scintillating, the panels always give you something to mull over, like when Sigrid Nunez, there to discuss the writing of her new memoir about her relationship with Susan Sontag, said that she doesn’t like to write about people she knows, but if one musts, the trick is to “be harder on yourself than you are on them.”

David Rakoff, also on the panel, said that he avoids writing about people he knows altogether — except his parents. And they, he feels, are fair game.

Jonathan Franzen’s advice on the same topic was to write about whomever you want but mention of any male character that he has distressingly small genitalia. Then no one will admit — or want to believe — that you’ve written about him.

All of that aside, the best panel over the weekend was about contemporary parenthood and featured Alice Bradley, an old favorite of mine from her blog Finslippy, who has co-written the funny/scathing Let’s Panic About Babies!; Ta-Nehisi Coates, one of my favorite bloggers and America’s best public intellectuals; and Adam Mansbach, the surprisingly smart & substantial author of Go the Fuck To Sleep. I had gone in with no expectations at all and really enjoyed hearing them all make jokes about children and about trying hard to be both a parent and a recognizable human being.

The panel I was most excited about, by contrast, featured the almighty Fran Lebowitz, the “Inconceivable!” Wallace Shawn, and author-of-my-favorite-short-story (“Days”) Deborah Eisenberg.

Photo via ElectricLiterature.com

The best thing about it was the location (all those Jews in a church on Sunday!). Otherwise, it fell kind of flat. You can always count on Lebowitz to say something hilarious, and she was exactly as sharp as you would hope she would be. “In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country, capitalism triumphed over democracy,” she said, all but pounding the podium. Later, she had acidic words for America post-NAFTA: “What has replaced factories in the Midwest? Meth labs and mega churches. It goes New York–>meth labs and mega churches–>LA.”

Sadly, Shawn and Eisenberg had only standard leftist Ivory Tower talking points to contribute, and as Lebowitz wandered into the well-worn territory of carping about Kids These Days, the event became steadily less interesting. No one addressed either of the two fundamental questions I have about contemporary political life:

1) In a post-socialism world–which is to say, a world in which the left has no ideological counterpoint to capitalism to offer–what idea should we be rallying around? Less unfair democracy? More restrained capitalism? As Aaron Sorkin might say, I can’t believe no one ever wrote a folk song about that.

2) Bearing in mind that the last progressive US president to get elected to a second term was Franklin Roosevelt, how is Obama supposed to win in 2012, especially without pissing off the left? Clinton sold out to the Republicans with free trade and welfare reform; that’s a large part of why he was popular enough to compete, and even then he got a strong assist from the 3rd-party candidacy of wacko Texan Ross Perot.

So I left a bit disappointed with everyone involved. Unlike the many other people who potentially felt the same way, however, I got to express my feelings (!!) because later that afternoon, as I headed to Trader Joe’s, I passed the three panelists and a fourth individual on the street. There they were, just hanging out, Lebowitz smoking of course. (She’s the only smoker I love and almost certainly the only one I respect.)

Hitching up my resolve, I walked right to her and said, “Can I shake your hand?”

Lebowitz took her cigarette out of her mouth, held it with the fingers of her left hand, and shook my hand with her right.

“You were brilliant up there today,” I said, looking all of them in the eye one by one. “But you were wrong.”

Shawn and Eisenberg looked startled and confused, as though a waiter in a restaurant had lifted the cover off a dish to reveal a live kitten. Lebowitz merely put her cigarette back in her mouth and gave a half-shrug, half-smirk that made me want to make out with her, even though she would taste like an ashtray. Instead, I smiled once more at all of them and kept walking.

VICTORY IS MINE, SAYETH THE LORD. Or perhaps he didn’t, but he should have.

This American Ira

The night before, some friends and I hit up the Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival at the Bell House, where we got up and close and personal with more celebrities: Ira Glass, John Hodgman, and special guest star Rachel Maddow. Maddow told adorable, endearing stories about how she was hired by a woman to do yard work and ended up doing another kind of maintenance altogether, if you know what I mean. (In fulfilling that fantasy, for both parties, by the way, she probably deserves some sort of lesbian Medal of Honor.) Hodgman held his own, hilariously straight-faced as always, but Mirman, who I’ve also seen knock over grown people with laughter, was underutilized by the hosts, Elna and Kevin of “The Talent Show,” who seemed much more focused on making sure Ira Glass puked onstage.

They nearly got their wish, too. By midway through, Glass was so sloppily happy that he kept popping up from his chair and beaming at the audience, like a tall hipster prairie dog. Elna and Kevin kept telling him to take shots and, as Mr. Ben pointed out later, it was like improv — he couldn’t say no. By night’s end, we watched a great wave of nausea nearly topple him. His cheeks puffed out; his eyes sunk; and his wife managed to lead him offstage before he blew his cookies in front of everyone.

Also one of the comedians nearly got into a fight with some hecklers from the audience and had to be restrained. In general it was not the best show I’ve seen there but, still, watching Ira Glass turn sea-green was pretty memorable.

More to come! I swear. I have great Montana stories and at some point I’ll get to tell them.

america fuck yeah, faux gender theory, mizoginy, morals, movies

“Oh, loverboy!”

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This is not a good time to be asking people for money and, um, that’s my job. Earlier this week, a woman flat-out laughed at me. I imagined her with a scotch in one hand and a gun in the other.

So I think it’s a good week to do things other than work. Like think about the fantastic Dirty Dancing, which I just saw for the first time in a theater as part of a Jezebel / Abortion Access Fund event. The screenwriter-producer Eleanor Bergstein came to encourage us all to take risks, as people and as artists, and, when we put controversial events in our commercial movies, to make them impossible to remove.

“I’m so sorry,” Lipman told the acne cream company that was willing to sponsor Dirty Dancing, as long as the illegal abortion — which, in the film, has near-tragic repercussions — was removed. “It’s the linchpin of the story. Nothing would make any sense if it were removed.” The acne cream bowed out, the film was released regardless, and it became an international success.

“Always make it the linchpin,” she instructed us. “That way you can’t cave to pressure even if part of you wants to out of fear.”

Fun facts about Dirty Dancing:

* Like Wet Hot American Summer, this is a movie about Jews that never explicitly says it’s about Jews.

* During filming, the seasons changed, so the crew had to spray-paint the leaves on the trees green.

* Jennifer Grey was 27 during filming and Patrick Swayze was 35.

* The crawling-on-the-floor dance scene was improvised

* Sarah Jessica Parker and Val Kilmer were considered for the lead roles

* It won an Oscar (Best Song)

* There are like 15 plotlines going on. That’s pretty ambitious for a movie about school kids on vacation with their family.

* Some folks don’t like this movie. (I know, right?)

* I didn’t see it all the way through until I was 27 myself because my proto-feminist high school self caught a glimpse of it on TV and was insulted by the fact that the main female character was called “Baby.” Little did I realize that that was intentional — that the film was about the infantilization of women. Her liberal, well-meaning parents named her Frances after the first woman in the cabinet but then called her Baby! What could be a better example of the mixed messages affluent white girls received in the mid-20th century? Go to college but then marry some Ivy Leaguer and be content raising his children. Read and think, but not too much or no one will want you. And so on.

* Of course, the movie is also about class, back-alley abortions, and how people in 1963 would look if they had 1980s hair and dressed like they were on their way to a Jane Fonda aerobics class. (See above re: plotlines.)

It’s too bad Eleanor Bergstein didn’t write more movies because this one really is near perfect for what it is. Why would anyone try to remake it? What could they possibly add?

america fuck yeah, mizoginy, rantage, religion, sexism, wymyn

Gallup is Perplexed. Let Me Help.

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“It’s not clear why Americans would overwhelmingly prefer boys.”

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It’s not clear why? BECAUSE THIS IS A PATRIARCHY, you twits. Land of the free! Home of the brave! Here we worship winners, cowboys, soldiers, tough guys, Don Draper and Tony Soprano, John Wayne and Gary Cooper. We hate femininity. We hate it so much we stamp it out in boys wherever it pops up.

Here men head the household because of some misguided Catholic/Christian notion that that’s the way God wants it. (The way he wanted it several thousand years ago, anyway, when last he bothered to weigh in.) Here be Mormons.

Why wouldn’t you want a child more likely to earn more, to be judged by something other than looks, to be able to have a child himself eventually — on his schedule, no pressure — and let someone else deal with the drudgery of raising it (and cleaning up after it)?

Yes, being a real man is expensive, and it certainly can be stressful and time-consuming. It’s still better than the alternative.

Some of my best friends are ladies and good lord, even *I* want to be reincarnated as a Dutch or Scandinavian man.

america fuck yeah, books, life in new york, rolling of eyes

Reading Papa on Trains

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My new thing: Inadvertently picking up boys by reading Hemingway in a public place.

SCENE: Uptown 1 train during rush hour

CHARACTERS: A whole train full of them, leaving only scattered seats available for our heroine, ESTER, who carries a purse, a tote bag, and a paperback copy of The Sun Also Rises. She navigates her way towards an empty spot next to a young white male HIPSTER, with unwashed hair and metal stuff in his face, who is sprawled casually across several seats. His feet rest against the pole.

HIPSTER: That’s a good book.

ESTER: [smiles politely, like she always does when strange men speak to her uninvited.]

HIPSTER: [louder] That’s a good book!

ESTER: Uh huh! [unspoken: Actually, I’m finding it pretty boring, but I’d like to keep reading, so if you –]

HIPSTER: I love Hemingway. He’s so great.

ESTER: Yeah! Well, except, his voice does seem pretty similar book to book. I just read A Moveable Feast and —

HIPSTER: A Moveable what?

ESTER: Uh, A Moveable Feast.

HIPSTER: I don’t know it.

ESTER: It’s his memoir of life in Paris. You should read it — it has F. Scott Fitzgerald in it.*

HIPSTER: [blank stare]

ESTER: Anyway, it strikes me as funny that the narrator there is essentially exactly the same as the narrator in this one — and this one’s supposed to be fiction.

HIPSTER: But that’s the thing! It’s all HIM. It’s so real.

The man himself

ESTER: Sure! And he seems so happy, drinking, living in Europe, meeting women …

[HIPSTER smiles suggestively. He is good-looking, although not as good-looking as he thinks he is, and his feet are still on the pole. He is taking up enough space for at least three people.]

HIPSTER: Yeah. He had the life!

ESTER: Yeah! The details are so strange, though. He’s totally into cataloging exactly what he ate, what he drank, and then the streets he took to get home to his apartment in Paris, but then his wife has a baby and you don’t hear anything about that til the kid is 6 weeks old. I guess it’s no surprise he got divorced. … And then he killed himself.

HIPSTER: Yeah! What’s up with that? Isn’t that weird?

ESTER: Seriously. To go all around the world, sleep with everyone, be a writer, eat and drink and have a great time, and then blow your head off in Idaho. … Here’s my stop! Have a nice day.

 

* The best part of that entire book is a conversation between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway in a cafe where Fitzgerald confesses that Zelda told him his penis is too small to give a woman pleasure and he is now terminally insecure about it. Hemingway takes him into the bathroom to see, tells him it’s fine, and then takes him to the Louvre to look at naked statues. Even that doesn’t alleviate poor Fitzgerald’s concern. But you have to admit, Papa was a good friend.

america fuck yeah, heroes, history, lefties, obaaaama

Bad Motherfucka

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“Go in that bag and find my wallet. It’s the one that says ‘Bad Muthafucka’ on it.”

— Pulp Fiction

From whiplash (Osama’s dead!) to backlash (How dare you celebrate?), I counted about 30 seconds. It’s a bit exhausting. Sure, the jingoistic “America, fuck yeah!” nonsense is annoying, but so is people being pious about how all murder is always bad. I’m a vegetarian who doesn’t support the death penalty. That doesn’t mean I’m going to pause and mourn the end of a killer.

Maybe I’ve just been watching too many action movies, or maybe it’s all the Game of Thrones I’ve been reading (I’m on Book 3 and I’ve counted about 2,300 corpses and 657 rapes). Maybe I’m desensitized.  Or maybe, as the Onion puts it:

I’m going to devote my energy to wondering how this will affect Barry O, newly President Bad Motherfucka.

Blue state boyfriend Nate Silver addresses the issue here.

Seems to me it helps Obama that Osama wasn’t captured and brought to trial: that helps him break out of the detached intellectual stereotype. I mean, even Rush Limbaugh took five seconds off today from his usual habit offending all decent people to say, “Thank God for President Obama.”

This makes me think I’m not alone in admiring the way Obama made this happen. There was good intelligence and more good intelligence; there was thinking and planning and THEN targeted, specific, successful action. If our wars had been considered along those lines, they would be going a hell of a lot better than they are now — or, even better, they would never have been embarked on at all.

My brother points out that, in an ideal world, perhaps this raid would have happened in October 2012. You know Karl Rove would have arranged that if he could. But one can’t have everything.

{Hilarious gifs and images compiled by the folks at Ranker.}

america fuck yeah, crazies

The Southern Legal Resource Center

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When Mr. Ben and I were in Asheville, we took a detour to the quaint town of Black Mountain, which sounds like a cursed kingdom straight out of Game of Thrones but was in actuality sunny and pleasant, with studios for both yoga and pilates, and lots of inoffensive artists.

The town’s Tomahawk Lake was also much more suburban-seeming than it sounds. (How about some truth in advertising, North Carolina?)

We were headed down Church Street to Main Street for some window shopping when I noticed a shingle outside a building. “Look, Mr. Ben!” said I. “It’s the Southern Legal Resource Center!”

“Aw, great!” he said. For a few days by that point, we had been enjoying the area’s 75 degree weather, blue sky, green grass, clean air, and slutty trees, busting out with flowers. We began to envision, in unison, a life in which we lived in some adorable Asheville bungalow — hopefully next to the creative folks who decorate their yards like so:

Mr. Ben would ply his attorney’s trade as a partner at the Southern Legal Resource Center, no doubt defending low-income, persecuted defendants, like those represented by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the ACLU. I’d write. We’d grow vegetables in our yard, and raise some of the wild-and-free, life-lovin’, plump, glossy chickens we saw people raising, and hang out in the anarchist cooperative bookstore-event-space-and-vegan-cafe in town, and play Dance Central, skee ball, and Tetris at Arcade, and drink $8 flights of artisinal beer at the Thirsty Monk, and generally have a grand old time.

Stars firmly in place in our eyes, we walked up the stairs to meet Mr. Ben’s future partner. Why not? It was a Monday; odds are he’d be hard at work defending the depressed and dejected. Indeed, there he was in his adorable old-timey office under a ceiling fan, a stout, older white gentleman with a handlebar mustache.

He greeted us effusively, shook hands, and began describing his practice. Turns out we weren’t too far off in our guesses of what he did: his focus was in First Amendment law.

Specifically, the First Amendment right to display the Confederate Flag.

Our jaws dropped, and before we could reach down and dust them off, he had asked us cheerfully where we were from.

“New York,” we chorused.

Where specifically?

“Brooklyn Heights.”

Ah! That’s where his regiment landed [something something] Hessians [something something].

Mr. Ben shot me a puzzled look and mouthed, “Regiment?,” as the lawyer began searching through the piles of debris on his floor. At last, he stood up again, triumphant, holding a conical helmet that reminded me of the hat the Pope wears, only bronze.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “just to be clear: Are you a re-enactor?”

“Yup!” he said proudly. “Used to do Civ War, but now I do Rev War. My dad did it too.”

Across the hall, he showed us one of his “Rev War” get ups, which he kept next to an overflowing bookcase full of Confederate history books. I kept scanning them as he spoke, in animated language, about how important free expression was, and how the North, ironically, gets it more than the South does (Southern high schools being a bit touchy about displays of Dixie). Mr. Ben and I did a lot of smiling and nodding, and then we had a nice discussion of pivotal 1st Amendment cases like Tinker and “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” and “I [heart] Boobies.” Finally, it was time to go.

Mr. Ben picked up a “Sons of Confederate Veterans” newsletter on our way out the door, and we made it back to the street before I burst out laughing. I do love my crazy country, I do indeed.