life and politics -- i am doing my best

[rm]

Sometimes, in the fact of the current election, it is hard for me to think, or to function. The entire situation makes me nearly apoplectic, on a nearly constant basis.

I do not, for the record, think Bush is Satan, which is of course what those who are planning to vote for Kerry are generally accused of. Nor do I think Kerry is the answer to all of our woes, and I think I've talked about that enough to not go into it here.

What I'm realizing is some people I know are going to vote for Bush. And when it's people on my friends list who live far away who I don't really know and that I've had intelligent conversations with, I feel okay about that, and I feel okay with feeling okay about that.

What I'm realizing though is that when it's people I know face to face, I feel betrayed and threatened on a nearly illogically visceral level.

Except, when I think back to certain events in my life, I realize it's not that illogical, even if it's not entirely rational.

I've talked a great deal about my political involvements in university, and many of you know the far longer version of the story I am about to tell.

In my freshman year, I had a horribly stormy relationship with my roommate, and eventually moved out. When I wound up dating a woman, I then received threats of rape on the phone, and to my face, from her friends who were College Republicans and members of Young Americans for Freedom, and in the course of these threats invoked campus and national politics, and attempted to pin some of the threats on the president of the College Democrats. Aside from having guards psoted outside my dorm door and losing my scholarship (which led to a debacle of proportions I don't care to go into with my family and finances), I was also the subject of an editorial debate in the school papers.

It was, in short, extraordinarily awful.

As a fan of small goverment and social freedoms, and without a personal adhearance to a Judeo-Christian faith or many of its accompanying moralities, voting always puts me in a difficult place. I am much less liberal than many of my friends on many issues and much more so on many others. And while I believe that 99% of anyone who thinks they understand economics without being an economist is a complete jackass, I'm certainly more informed, if not more comprehending than most.

Certainly, I know that many of my friends face the constantly annoying choice as to whether to vote on money or social issues. I'm just always surprised when they choose money.

To me, money is always something that can be sorted out. I've always found a way to scrape, struggle or survive. I've been fucked by tax policies from both sides, and I've been both wealthy and dirt poor. But, as hysterical and emotional as it makes me, at the end of the day, money is just money, and maybe I feel that way because I'm a woman. I may be a tom boy, but more than anything girls always know about plan B. Hell, it may be because I don't have a family, but truthfully, I don't really think so. I vote on the social issues because money I can sort out, I can finagle, I can solve. And even in some very black moments, several of them this year, money is never what's keeping me alive and will never be what kills me.

So I vote on stuff like civil liberties, abortion and gay rights, effectiveness on the war on terror and just a general sense of whether a candidate seems to think America is for all Americans or just the ones that agree with them. I know that a lot of people may think this childish, or naive, and I suppose my only defense is to tell you that it is neither of those things... just womanly instead.

And it is womanly not because I am weak, or a single issue voter or ignorant of finances. Rather it is womanly because one of those shits I went to college with is a senate aide now. And he raped a friend of mine, and he broke her collar bone doing it.

I don't think anything dumb like Republicans or Democrats are rapists, or that our leaders would condone the sort of behavior I both witnessed and was subjected to (a list which is far longer than anything I've written here). But my experiences stay with me, and my sense from my university experience, or just watching Dan Quayle on TV all those years ago is that the Republican party doesn't want me -- in their big tent, or in my country.

Because I'm a woman. Because I am queer. Because I've had an abortion. Because I am from the Northeast. Because I am from New York. Because I am educated. Because I am a Jew, and even less white than that in small measure besides.

Somewhere along the line I learned that your government holds your life in its hands. I don't know when I learned it. I don't know if I learned when I had my Soviet penpal who was never able to write me, or when I wrote for a history class a diary of a woman living in Chile under Pinochet (a project that probably sounds absurd now, but it got me into advanced creative writing classes at Yale as a 15-year-old). Maybe I learned it when I did clinic defense and women prayed for me before spitting on me. Some stuck pins into my legs. Maybe I learned it in Act-Up protests or lying on a bed in a hospital hallway in DC, when there wasn't anywhere to put a girl with a kidney infection because of all the people coming in with gunshot wounds (you see that, and you don't have problems, and fast). Maybe I learned it when the nurse with a pentacle necklace shushed me when I recognized it, or when the head of Women's Issues Now at University had "kyke" scrawled on her living room window. Maybe I learned it in rape threats or abortion or in walking seventeen miles through Washington DC with a friend of mine who served eight fucking years in Vietnam and had never gone to the wall until he went there with me.

It doesn't matter where I learned it, I only know the experiences I learned it in, all strike me as horribly ordinary and that the knowledge sits with me as utter unshakeable truth. And while I would never attempt to compare my patriotism to anyone's because I think it crass, I do love this place and believe in it both as practical fact and idealistic concept, which I should damn well hope is evidenced by a good chunk of my writing about all of this.

But to get back to the point -- while I've always been a little uncomfortable when my friends vote Republican (even when I've toyed with the idea more than once), it's a little different now. And I'm sorry. I want to be a bigger person about it. I want to be able to say what I feel when I hear Barak Obama talk about one America.

But I can't. Because I'm scared. Because to me, all elections, and specifically this election, is about my life -- not the quality of it, but its mere existence. So when people I know vote for the other guy -- I don't think they are evil, or stupid or anything dumb like that. They're being Americans -- Hell, at least they are voting, that's awesome! But it's very hard for me not to think of them as self-interested, and even harder for me not to think of them as unsafe for me to be around. Certainly, it's nearly impossible for me to consider that they could view me as their equal, and it presents without a doubt a fairly plausible barrier to friendship, as I'm not real down with people who think it's cool or comfortable to hang out with or play with the marginalized groups, but aren't real comfortable with the marginalized groups not wanting to be marginalized (this goes for people that want "crazy creative bi-chicks" to date but not marry, as well as fandom people who write slash and don't support gay rights, and white people who want hip hop played at their parties as long as the crowd isn't "urban" -- to list just a few trite and hideous examples of which I've seen a bit too much).

I don't know if it's insanely rude to write this, but it seemed more decent to, than not to, because I don't want people I know to feel guilty or weird, and I don't want them to think I'm an asshole either. I just kinda want them to know why this election is making me so nuts, and what this body means to me and to understand that a lot of us who are crazed about this election aren't apoplectic because we've been ingesting dogma or like being contrary or aren't patriots or whatever -- it's just for some of us... it's more personal, and less abstract. Rightly or wrongly.

So I'm trying, okay?

Comments

[timiathan.livejournal.com]

What upsets me about the Democratic Party now is that all we hear about are Iraq, Jobs, and VietnamVietnamVietnamVietnam. Three issues that are very low on my political totem pole.

The reason why I think Bush is Satan (which I don't, really, btw, but whatever) is because of his domestic policies -- the Christian revival, the way religious ideology is seeping into political policy everywhere you look. It's not just gay marriage or abortion or stem cell research. It's every damn thing.

This idea that a bunch of 'renegade judges' are 'hijacking the courts' is just ludicrous -- we have a system of checks and balances for a reason; it was a bunch of renegade judges that dismantled desegregation 50 years ago despite popular opinion.

Everyone on the Right cares so much about money, and one of the main things that's made our country so strong financially is scientific advancement. We've always been on the cutting edge, exporting new technologies and ideas abroad, and then buying back the same product 10 years later at a fraction of the cost. If we ignore a potentially huge advancement in medicine we'll be on the opposite side of that equation: not only will lives be lost that could have been saved, but we'll lose money! Whichever you care about, at least care about one.

Sorry, I don't mean to babble on and on in a stranger's journal, but your sentiment that the goverment doesn't want people like us around anymore -- God knows I've heard "Move to Canada!" shouted out car windows enough in the last 3 years -- it really struck a chord. Thank you for taking the time to post it; and thanks to whoever's journal linked you (I don't remember at this point).

Do you mind if I add you? Not only do you have a calm, rational voice, but I think you probably know a lot more about macro-economics than I do, and I wouldn't mind pulling up a stump.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Feel free (actually I've already added you back). In all fairness though, while I do know a ton of crap about macroeconomics, I don't tend to talk about it unless provoked. So other than politics and economics, mostly what you'll be seeing here is stuff about my acting career, stuff about Australia and stuff about whatever my current thing of the moment is (which seems to be horses).

[timiathan.livejournal.com]

Oh that's fine. Good people tend to be good no matter what they're talking about. Acting, Australia, and horses seem like interesting enough topics to me. I spend way to much time online -- I get desperate for insight into anything after awhile.

Thanks for adding me back. You won't be seeing much of me except for writing pieces, mostly poems. I'm not much of a journaller. Don't feel obligated to read; I realize less than 10% of the population likes poetry; I've accepted that:) I think I am myself in comments, though, so it's not like I'm hiding.

[rm.livejournal.com]

But you know the otherhalf of that statistic right? That 90% of us write the stuff... which means we're all either self-absorbed and don't want ot read other people's poetry, or that most poetry is self-absorbed dreck, so who would want to read it?

Anyway, published poet here... so quite alright.

If you like reading as well as writing poetry, if you don't know the work of Lucie Brock-Broido you should check her out.

[timiathan.livejournal.com]

Don't get me started! I was avoiding that half of the coin for a reason; I could rant and rave about this all day long. I'm the assistant poetry editor for one of the largest poetry journals in the country, RATTLE. Our print run is a whopping 6,000, which puts us around half of what POETRY prints, and then just behind a few others (I'm not sure what the numbers are exactly, but FENCE, FIELD, PLOUGHSHARES, etc are at the same level as us.) Of the 6,000 copies we print, about 4,000 get sold, 1,000 are warehoused at the office, and 1,000 are burned (yep, burned) by our distributor (Ingram) because it's not worth the cost of shipping them back to us.

So the point is, we sell 4000 copies of our mag. We get about 10,000 submissions a year. That's 10,000 poets, not 10,000 poems. More than twice the people are trying to write for us than are reading us. Poetry is an industry that just eats it's own leg. And then you go check out the poetry section at Barnes&Noble, and the only thing you find is that one massive doorstop James Merrill Collected Poems, and then shelf after shelf of Shakespeare and Keats and Longfellow -- the stuff that's old enough to have entered public domain, so costs nothing for property rights.

The only people who read contemporary poets are the contemporary poets. And then everyone and their sister sits in the bathtub writing about roses and slit wrists, not even realize what good poetry can be. I read about 20 submssions a day, and you wouldn't believe the kind of things people are submitting -- it's like they've never even opened a book.

And now I'm not even getting into the dollars and cents of it, how we only have three employees, but if it weren't for Alan Fox (one of those upper 2% people everyone's in a tizzy about above) we wouldn't be able to afford any of our salaries; we're happy if we break even with production and advertizing costs.

Incidentally, that's why I hold my tongue in discussions about 'the rich.' I have a little of that proletariat resentment, but I've seen good rich people and what they can do for everyone around them as well. Alan works so hard for his money, built a huge enterprise out of nothing, and is now using that wealth to spread the gift of something he loves. It's not all money-grubbing Enron CEOs at the top -- anger at the rich simply for being rich is very misplaced.

Now there is one thing, though, that we tend to forget, and that's our collectivity as a society, that no one would be rich if it weren't for consumers buying the shit companies crank out. We're one massive organism that everyone's a part of, and often individuals chose to completely ignore that -- both the rich and the poor.

Gah, see what you've made me do? I should be reading a love sonnet dedicated to "Chi-Chi my pet Chinchila" right now.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Do people really send stuff that awful -- I mean you see the same sort of delusional freaks in acting (i.e., the chick who sends a snapshot with a resume on blue and white cloud pattern paper, talking about how she's been int he business twnety years and hasn't stopped dreaming!), but I just thought with poetry, well -- people would read the publication at Barnes & Nobles and know if their effort had any relevance whatsoever.

[timiathan.livejournal.com]

They really do. I think it'd be bad karma, let alone unprofessional to type them out, so I won't. But "Chi-Chi My Pet Chinchila" really was the title of a poem we got last week. And it's funny you mention blue and white cloud pattern paper, because I JUST GOT ONE OF THOSE TODAY! Good times. Fancy fonts, every poem in a different one. The woman is really nervous about submitting her work and 'offending protocol' so I'm going to write her a little note telling her relax. The nice thing about RATTLE is that the other two editors have established a reputation for being very friendly, personal, and warm. It's a nice path to follow. It's baffling sometimes, though, where these people come up with this stuff. If I was a betting man, I'd say most of the time it's just that they never really learned the skills to recognize literary quality. (We're not very acadamic though so...) Some of the times, like with Chi-Chi, you can't help but wonder if someone with a sense of humor is laughing at you.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Oh man! I've a friend who collects bad poetry (just from the web, there is certainly enough of it) who would love all this.

The blue cloud pattern paper seems to be everywhere! I even remember seeing a resume on it when I was doing the whole Internet bubble thing.

While you're telling that woman to relax, do tell her that presentation counts?