Author: janpriddyoregon

HIM

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I have avoided saying his name or typing it, but it’s really getting out of hand now. I am sorry if you disagree. (Trump supporters had best avert their eyes. I am not likely to devote another post to this particular issue. It will be safe to return.)

Recent events and words are beyond offensive. They seem to me insane. And much of the medical community and even the more circumspect political analysts are speaking out. This is not my rant, but another’s. Follow the link and read the whole thing.

from James Fallows in The Atlantic, “If Trump Were an Airline Pilot”:

“But now we’ve had something we didn’t see so clearly during the campaign. These are episodes of what would be called outright lunacy, if they occurred in any other setting: An actually consequential rift with a small but important NATO ally, arising from the idea that the U.S. would “buy Greenland.” Trump’s self-description as “the Chosen One,” and his embrace of a supporter’s description of him as the “second coming of God” and “King of the Jews.” His logorrhea, drift, and fantastical claims in public rallies, and his flares of belligerence at the slightest challenge in question sessions on the White House lawn. His utter lack of affect or empathy when personally meeting the most recent shooting victims, in Dayton and El Paso. His reduction of any event, whatsoever, into what people are saying about him.

“Obviously I have no standing to say what medical pattern we are seeing, and where exactly it might lead. But just from life I know this:

  • If an airline learned that a pilot was talking publicly about being “the Chosen One” or “King of the Jews” (or Baptists or whatever), the airline would be looking carefully into whether this person should be in the cockpit.
  • If a hospital had a senior surgeon behaving as Trump now does, other doctors and nurses would be talking with administrators and lawyers before giving that surgeon the scalpel again.
  • If a public company knew that a CEO was making costly strategic decisions on personal impulse or from personal vanity or slight, and was doing so more and more frequently, the board would be starting to act. (See: Uber, management history of.)
  • If a university, museum, or other public institution had a leader who routinely insulted large parts of its constituency—racial or religious minorities, immigrants or international allies, women—the board would be starting to act.
  • If the U.S. Navy knew that one of its commanders was routinely lying about important operational details, plus flaring up under criticism, plus talking in “Chosen One” terms, the Navy would not want that person in charge of, say, a nuclear-missile submarine. (See: The Queeg saga in The Caine Mutiny, which would make ideal late-summer reading or viewing for members of the White House staff.)

“Yet now such a  person is in charge not of one nuclear-missile submarine but all of them—and the bombers and ICBMs, and diplomatic military agreements, and the countless other ramifications of executive power.

“If Donald Trump were in virtually any other position of responsibility, action would already be under way to remove him from that role. The board at a public company would have replaced him outright or arranged a discreet shift out of power. (Of course, he would never have gotten this far in a large public corporation.) The chain-of-command in the Navy or at an airline or in the hospital would at least call a time-out, and check his fitness, before putting him back on the bridge, or in the cockpit, or in the operating room. (Of course, he would never have gotten this far as a military officer, or a pilot, or a doctor.)

“There are two exceptions. One is a purely family-run business, like the firm in which Trump spent his entire previous career. And the other is the U.S. presidency, where he will remain, despite more and more-manifest Queeg-like  unfitness, as long as the GOP Senate stands with him.

“(Why the Senate? Because the two constitutional means for removing a president, impeachment and the 25th Amendment, both ultimately require two thirds support from the Senate. Under the 25th Amendment, a majority of the Cabinet can remove a president—but if the president disagrees, he can retain the office unless two thirds of both the House and Senate vote against him, an even tougher standard than with impeachment. Once again it all comes back to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.)

“Donald Trump is who we knew him to be. But now he’s worse. The GOP Senate continues to show us what it is.”

HERE WE ARE

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Rabbits ate my new roses. Bother [both] of them. Every leaf. But the stubborn plants refused to die. They pushed out new leaves. One of them blooms. Last year a visitor asked my husband why he’d hauled a twisty drift-root up from the beach. “What are you going to do with it?”

This.

REPRESENTATION?

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Yesterday there was a march and protest in Portland. Our younger son and his wife work in the theater, which means that they are nearly always downtown on Saturdays. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is on stage at the Keller. The A.P. reported: “Flag-waving members of the Proud Boys and Three Percenters militia group began gathering late in the morning, some wearing body armor and helmets.” Proud Boys are designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The white nationalist American Guard also said it would have members in Portland. Local news reported, “Steven Howard, a Vancouver resident who was the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi, told KOIN 6 News he will attend the protest on Saturday.”

The tweeter-in-chief: “ ‘Major consideration is being given to naming ANTIFA an ‘ORGANIZATION OF TERROR’, the president wrote from his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey on Saturday morning. ‘Portland is being watched very closely. Hopefully the Mayor will be able to properly do his job!’ ” The actual marchers—such as Proud Boys, self-described as the all-male western chauvinists—are bigots, but the president didn’t say a word against them.

Portland mayor Ted Wheeler said of Trump’s tweet: “Frankly, it’s not helpful. This is a potentially dangerous and volatile situation, and adding to that noise doesn’t do anything to support or help the efforts that are going on here in Portland.”

The president expressed concern only about those protesting the protesters, Antifa, but it is the Proud Boys who threaten to return to Portland streets every month: “Sooner or later, [Portland mayor Ted Wheeler] will run out of money and his counterparts in government will no longer take him seriously. The path forward for Mayor Wheeler is simple, free your city from the grip of Antifa, take direct and meaningful action.”

In the mean time, police seized weapons from and arrested thirteen participants. None of these people represent Portland’s community. Only four minor injuries were treated and reported by medics on the scene, but it was a tough day for police officers.

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“We receive criticism no matter what. It’s either too much, not enough, you arrested this group and not this group,” Portland Police Bureau spokeswoman Tina Jones said. “It seems like some people are keeping score, and that’s not what it’s about on the law enforcement side. One hundred percent, it’s about public safety.”

My husband and I worried about the police presence and their safety, ordinary shoppers and shop-keepers, working people, and the safety of our family. We worry because Trump has taken sides and fanned the flames of violence. Again.

We don’t think any of these extreme groups are representative of our nation.

An Op-Ed in The Washington Post reveals how a fake article by a fake “real live worker” calling himself Archie Carter, not only outwitted (biased) fact checkers to find publication but “sheds light on the way right-leaning commentators depend on the voice of an imagined white working class to legitimize and advance their own viewpoints — viewpoints that are often opposed to those of the real working class.”

Before the gunman killed 22 people, authorities believe he wrote, “I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.”

This polity — white working class, racist, xenophobic, misogynist, homophobic — is just as imaginary as Archie Carter.

We are better than that. A lot better. Most all of us descend from or are immigrants in the United States. We get it. The right, especially the reactionary extreme right we are seeing in Congress and in the White House and all over certain media outlets, is wrong about who Americans are and what we believe.

Working class people overwhelmingly voted for Hillary Rodham Clinton by a 10 point spread. “Reagan actually lost union and low-income households to Jimmy Carter.” Working people, actual middle class and working class people are not so racist, xenophobic, misogynist, and homophobic as the Right likes to believe.

Most Americans do not share these vile views. Most Americans find the Proud Boys Western Chauvinists, Patriot Prayer, KKK, and Antifa, who protested in Portland to be despicable. (We might even call them “deplorable.”) Most Americans are opposed to the hate speech we hear coming from the White House. Most Americans did not vote for him and continue to oppose him.

Yet, he still lies: “I got it approved. Veterans Choice,” Trump has claimed more than eighty times, of the program signed into law by Obama in 2014. Thousands of lies, lies every day, every time he tweets or talks. Such bizarre things come from him that it’s hard to joke about what he might do. Nothing is too outrageous. He would like to buy Greenland. Yes, really.

Political satire begins to sound reasonable. The Borowitz Report suggests that Denmark might offer to purchase the United States. Perhaps we could benefit from national health care, education, and reasonable compromise in pursuit of common goals? Heck, let’s give ourselves away. Isn’t that what we are doing already?

Denmark, come and get us!

 

 

STEP 7: Choice

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Making choices is exhausting. It is rewarding. It is power but also wearing. Like many things that matter, the creative process pays and pains.

Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me contains an essay about Virginia Woolf and uncertainty. The truth about wandering in the dark. In a journal entry of 1915 Woolf wrote: “The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.” Certainty belongs to the past (and is not so very fixed there), but hope is what drives us toward the future. Solnit writes: “To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and unimaginable transpire quite regularly.”

My friend Madora Lawson is a creative person, as are many of my friends. Madora is my friend who made a career of her creativity as an interior designer. She emailed to tell me that a post where I revealed that I rarely used a pattern prompted her to knit without a pattern. See what she made!

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She cannot even remember how she made that dragon’s legs.

It works like that sometimes. We create something, make a series of choices in color and stitch and a dragon has toes!

The toes up top are from an aging walking group who took a weekend and learned to knit slippers from Madora. Each person had plenty of colors to choose from, stitches to try, closures. Being clever takes energy and courage. The reward is something fun lovely grand and strange.

Painting walls builder’s beige or gray is easy. Following decorator’s advice, copying a style. Even when it works, looks appealing and safe. Where’s the fun in that?

Creativity demands the courage to make another choice. The bright textile on the wall, the yellow button on a turquoise strap, the zig-zag dorsal fin, the peculiar combination of orange and electric blue mohair. It’s coming.

Who knows where one choice might lead? Solnit joined anti-nuclear activists in the late 1980s. They “did not exactly shut down the Nevada Test Site, our most overt goal, but inspired the people of Kazakhstan to shut down the Soviet Test Site in 1990. Totally unforeseen, totally unforeseeable.” It might argue for a certain recklessness, a measure of faith in accident and free choice.

In the mean time, I finished the central panel of BlueToo.

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Fifty-some batik fabrics, five hundred pieces, and going-on two thousand yards of thread. So far.

LOLITA

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Literary Hub has an article up: “The 50 Best One-Star Reviews of Lolita.” The first time I tried to read Lolita, I did not get past in the first pages. I went to Amazon and read all 147 reviews, which gives you an idea of how long ago that was. I found they fell into three general camps: people who objected to the immorality of the story, people who loved the writing, and pedophiles. Reviews were not reviewed as they are now. Men wrote how much the novel reassured them that they were not alone in their sexual relationships with children. “Man-Child Love” advocates and rapists rationalized their behavior through literature. You can see it in responses to the one-star reviews.*

That name Hummer Humbert gave Delores, a 12-year-old raped child, has found it’s way into general usage as the name, Lolita, for sexually aggressive young women is perhaps ironic. It is also a horrible abuse of power.

Some argue that Nabokov wanted to see just how detestable he could make a character and still find readers, but ultimately, there are many things we can do but should not do. There is such a thing as judgement.

Here are a few of the reviews and comments on Amazon:

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*Have a look at Edward S. just above. As a reader are you supposed to support HH’s obsession, or see past it as monstrous? I would like to think Nabakov was toying with his readers in much the same way that HH does with a child. It would be something if readers picked up on that, if they recognized how convincing evil can be. Well, friends, there are plenty of readers who fail to see beyond HH’s tale to feel shock that they have even temporarily sided with him.

Pedophiles inevitably find confirmation. They do not find HH monstrous, they find a kindred spirit. They can easily explain HH’s behavior. They are, after all, on his side.

STEP 6: Accident

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Above are a few of the forty-nine pieced square blocks laid out on the floor. The photo distorts them; they are each 8.5″ and carefully squared. So far I’ve used over sixty batik fabrics and cut over five hundred pieces of fabric. And this is only the center panel They will make a center panel 56″ x 56″ once they are stitched together, of an eighty-inch square quilt.

The second blue quilt was meant to be simple. I set specific, easy guidelines in order to piece it quickly and with a minimum of fuss. It’s that staring process, the decision-making at every cut and sewn seam. This color or that one, this way or that, rearrange and rethink the border? It was meant to be almost thoughtless but then the inevitable accidents. Most blocks were planned to be too large and I shave a quarter inch or as little as a sixteenth off the edges. A block might also too small or too dark or pushy or bland. I add another stripe or one going the wrong way, choose a different color or move the whole block to the other side of the quilt. Accident forces me to make decisions I might otherwise avoid, but accident has always served me as an artist. The writer Ron Carlson argues for something similar in writing fiction. Don’t allow serendipity to be cleaned out of writing. Let it flow. It is random chance that often hands us our finest work.

Decades ago, as a Metal Arts major, I was careless firing a base coat of enamel on square of copper sheet. The glass enamel color was called “Pigeon” a pale, perfectly transparent blue-gray. Fired over scrubbed copper it took on a lavender glow. Stenciled on copper, leaving some of the metal bare and then overfired to nearly 1700°F, the copper turned gunmetal-black, the enamel went palest blue-violet. The accidental firescale could be scrubbed off, leaving a line of black firescale on the edges of the enamel. I used that. Later, after deliberately overfiring sample tiles, I began using larger areas of firescale, enameling over the top and producing a unique metallic gleam. It was accident at first, and then a signature effect. It started by mistake.

Mistakes take time. Few are really useful. They are frustrating and not easily corrected. I have picked out stitches plenty of times making this quilt. Changed my mind in an instant. I could follow a quilt pattern or use a kit. There are plenty around that prescribe specific patterns and fabrics. I would not be constantly making choices, and choice is the hard work. But without choice, where’s the fun? I’m only barely interested in covering a bed. I am making art.

Mistakes push me, force me to reconsider, to change direction, to accept what happens sometimes and other times to fix it.

Mistake was at the first and will be at the last, so long as we don’t give up.

“The most important thing a writer can do after writing a sentence is to stay in the room. The great temptation is to leave the room to celebrate the completion of the sentence or to go out in the den where the television lies like a dormant monster and rest up for a few days for the next sentence or to go wander the seductive possibilities of the kitchen. But. It’s this simple. The writer is the person who stays in the room. The writer wants to read what she is in the process of creating with such passion and devotion that she will not leave the room. The writer understands that to stand up from the desk is to fail, and to leave the room is so radical and thorough a failure as to not be reversible. Who is not in the room writing? Everybody. Is it difficult to stay in the room, especially if you are not sure of what you’re doing, where you’re going? Yes. It’s impossible. Who can do it? The writer.”—Ron Carlson, from Ron Carlson Writes a Story

PANTS IN THE FAMILY

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In their official First Lady portraits “20th-century predecessors show a parade of cream-colored gowns, strings of pearls and periwinkle skirts. Clinton rocked a pantsuit in midnight black.”

As first lady, she chaired the Task Force on National Health Care Reform, pushing a proposed healthcare system some in the media dubbed “Hillarycare.” That failed, but she found more success with 1997’s State Children’s Health Insurance Program, and then the Adoption and Safe Families Act, and the Foster Care Independence Act.

She worked with the National Institutes of Health to ensure more funding for asthma and prostate cancer. She did not, in short, stay home and bake cookies. Evidence of her own career is visible within the official portrait itself: Her book, “It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us,” lies on the table beside her.

I remember having scabbed knees almost continuously as a schoolgirl. I was not allowed to wear pants to school, and my dresses were usually torn open under their short sleeves. I played horses and ran around during recess. My mother liked to say I was hard on my clothes  I liked designing clothes for dolls but not actually playing with them.

It was my mother’s idea to get me a Barbie. I thought the doll’s tiny feet made to wear high heels, blue eye shadow, and bright red lips were stupid. Her hairstyle too. 

In the mean time, I had my Aunt Marcia, who lived in the Bay Area—Berkeley and later San Francisco. She was married to my Uncle Harry, but then lived alone. She was the model I wanted when I was a girl. Not Barbie, but an independent individual. Aunt Marcia made the single life an option, something possible and even elegant. She had affairs and a dog and she taught college Sociology. She empowered my daydreams of a single life as a person in my own right.

Hillary Rodham Clinton would have been a good model. Though I’m sorry for her philandering husband, I might like her better for forgiving her husband and supporting him than my aunt who was the one philandering. She was pilloried for saying: “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession.” She was a lawyer and she took her turn supporting her family. I did that too, taking turns with my husband as the primary breadwinner. I admire what HRC accomplished, both what she did and what she tried to do.

Who wears the pants in the family? Everyone. There are plenty of women  who still believe that men should rule their households. My parents did not subscribe to that division of power. My husband and I do not either.

A family should not be ruled. A family should work together toward shared goals. It should be loving and caring and productive, not a dictatorship.

STEP 5: doubt

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Here are the first two lines of seven. Maybe a little bland so far? Not quite what I had in mind? Once the squares are pieced and sewn, the effort in the first two rows is inevitably tame, inevitably distant from my vision. I began sewing the paler squares, the ones I like least. sigh

I fret and then will rush on to complete the more dramatic rows. I work vertically instead of horizontally, light into the dark. Maybe then I can find the stronger yellow-to-blue tension.

The inner wide border was to be two yellow or orange stripes on each pale blue bordering square (that’s the uncut band just in front of my feet). Now I think maybe dark blue stripes on the pale. Maybe three? Maybe even four? Maybe a narrow orange frame?

The narrower outer border? Four inches wide or thereabout. What do do about that? Color? Stripes? Once I have pieced all these squares, I might be stuck and will soon return to Blue Ladders, the other blue quilt.

More excitement from rentals. A neighbor filed a complaint about the people who pissed on our path, for the cars parked everywhere. This morning there are cars parked all over for another house, which would prevent a UPS truck passing. Not to mention a firetruck or Medic. Apparently there are rules about rentals and parked cars. Our neighbor will likely complain about this rental as well. People always assume it is me, but I have no idea where he is lodging his complaints.

Fireworks (illegal and all summer long) and people pissing in public . . . police and emergency vehicles will come if a life is endangered and that is reassuring. If only they can get here past the parking situation.

 

EMAIL

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It’s a jellyfish, which is neither jelly nor fish, but common names are often like that. It’s actually a colony living together to make a shape. My dad warned against these orangey ones. They sting, even “dead” on the sand like this one.

I received a bulk email from a neighbor. He neglected to use the blind feature (Bcc) so better than three dozen people who apparently do not know one another except through him now have one another’s emails. (I should tell him my story about the Bonsai Kittens—a hoax my then-adolescent niece believed and sent out to well over a hundred people, outing their email addresses at a time people were particularly sensitive to junk email.) The original email promotes Biden as the best bet to defeat Trump. We do not all seem to be on board with that. I have disliked the man for decades and nothing he’s done recently restores any faith in his capacity for making wise choices or any vision.

A Canadian weighed in warning about the radical left. I wish he had been this Canadian:

My 91 year old father in law has been diagnosed as having a terminal illness.  He has lost the use of his legs and has a large cancerous mass in his lungs which cannot be treated due to his advanced age and fragile health.  We are having a lift installed to transfer him from bed to chair and back again.  He will receive 4 times a day care from nurses and aides and housekeeping services for him and my mother in law.  There are no charges for this, NOTHING, no deductibles, no co-pays, and no limit.  There will be no charges for his 3 weeks of hospitalisation either.  Sounds good?  Well, this is Canada, and this is how we treat people.  No one dies from lack of health care at any age, and no one ever goes bankrupt from medical expenses.  We all pay, and we all receive.

This person wrote in response to an article in The Washington Post about the murder-suicide of the elderly couple in Washington State. They explained they were overwhelmed by medical bills. Someone assured readers that they should have planned better in order to have better insurance.

It does not seem like a radical notion to provide health care for people in the richest nation on earth. I will also say that I had a medical emergency in Canada a long time ago. I was in terrible pain and a doctor came in to his office on his day off, took good care of me, and did not charge me a dime. Maybe he was just a nice guy. What a concept.

Before we go dismissing the “far left” for their crazy-impractical-radical notions, we might consider that most of, no, nearly all of the first world is already doing those things. Reducing greenhouse gases, cutting out unnecessary use of plastics, preserving parks and forests, healthcare for everyone, affordable public education right through college, better maternal and infant care, a rising life expectancy—we actually can afford it all and most of the world (well, not third world countries) does.

We are a rich country, but many poor countries take better care of their ill and elderly, care better for the environment, and have lower taxes. It’s amazing what a nation can afford when it does not spend more than the next ten wealthiest countries combined on military spending. Military bases in hundreds of foreign countries (would we pursue or even allow this in the United States?) cost enough to pay for the best medical care in the world for everyone, not merely the wealthy. New paint job for the President’s jets or healthcare? Do I have to choose?