I heard this on the radio this morning, Bush says there will be “no graceful exit from Iraq.”
What kind of fucking idiot doesn’t understand that the opposite of graceful is graceless, awkward, and clumsy? What braindead dickweed actually wants to assure the American people that he leads just such a graceless, clumsy Presidency.
Why, our braindead fucking dickweed idiot, of course!
Stagecoach (1939) 10/10
A stagecoach trip is complicated by the escape of Geronimo, who is raiding in the region. The motley assortment of passengers each have their reasons for wanting to go ahead anyway, and with last minute additions including the Ringo Kid (John Wayne in his breakout role), they proceed despite the danger.
On the surface, Stagecoach is a straight forward road-trip adventure with an interesting assortment of characters. One could look at it through the eyes of a film historian, and note how unusual such an assortment was, with complex morality and motivations instead of straight-ahead black hat/white hat stuff. From a modern perspective, you might not notice this, as it has become commonplace in films since.
Certainly, it’s fine as a roadtrip with adventures and surprises. Excellent, in fact. But there’s a complex and interesting subtext, about social mores and about sexuality, that I find absolutely fascinating.
Stagecoach was made in 1939, a historic year for film, often thought of as the greatest year cinema ever had. I am struck by Claire Trevor‘s whore-with-a-heart-of-gold role, and by the parallel goldhearted whore in Gone With the Wind (also 1939).
Dallas (Trevor) is being run out of town by the “Decency League,” along with Doc Boone (Thomas Mitchell, in an Academy Award winning performance), the town drunk. Although the word “whore” is never used (hey! 1939!), there is no attempt to hang any window dressing on her; she isn’t a “dance hall girl” or a “singer” or a “flower girl” or someone who “dates a lot.” There is no doubt she is a whore, and now she’s going back to the brothel she came from.
The same is true of Gone With the Wind‘s Belle Watling; there is no doubt who and what she is. It’s so interesting the way this is presented. In GWTW, Belle is meant to parallel Scarlett; she is a mirror held up to Scarlett. Scarlett, by being a businesswoman and socially aggressive, skirts on the edge of violating Southern mores. Belle is specifically compared to her, as both are businesswomen. The contrasting woman is Melanie, delicate, frail, prone to fainting and tenderly, dangerously pregnant in a key scene, Melanie is what a woman is “supposed” to be, but Scarlett rejects that.
The contrasting women to Dallas is Lucy (Louise Platt); married, fiercely loyal, assiduous about propriety, she is a Southern belle who is delicate, frail, and tenderly, dangerously pregnant in a key scene.
(We can’t be meant to miss this! Whores get men but only good women get babies! And strong women are whores or close to it.)
Lucy is so very, very delicate that her pregnancy is invisible. My hand to God, I thought the secret reveal about her illness was going to be TB, and she was going to die in a key scene. I mean, not even an extra-full skirt! Just a sudden need for “lots and lots” of boiled water, and whammo! Baby!
In Stagecoach, all social values are shown to be hypocritical, and all the “bad” people are good. I don’t mean anti-heroes; this isn’t High Sierra; I mean that Dallas, Doc Boone, and Ringo (who has just broken out of jail to kill the man who shot his father in the back) are the people who are compassionate, hard-working, polite, and forgiving, while the banker is an embezzler, the “Decency League” drives good people out of town, the belle is a bitch, and the Southern gentleman is a thief. All of which is really quite a lot of fun and not nearly as heavy-handed as it sounds, mostly because there’s a light touch and interesting characters.
One thing that is absolutely fascinating to observers of gender is the way the romance between Ringo and Dallas is handled. In a significant little conversation, Doc Boone, concerned about the way Ringo is taken with Dallas, asks him how old he was when he was sent to jail. “Seventeen,” Ringo answers. Aha! Too young to know the ways of women, he can’t tell that this is a whore and not a lady. How odd and wonderful that the virgin male is considered the appropriate match for the prostitute. Ultimately, he sees her for who she is and loves her anyway, showing his true decency immediately after killing three men. This is great stuff, kind of thrilling, in the way it takes what we think of as 1939 values and turns them on their head. Whoopeeee!
After waiting nine years, after the government refused to allow a soldier killed in Afghanistan to be buried with the symbol of his religion, with 1800 Wiccans on active duty in the military, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State has finally filed suit against the Deptartment of Veterans Affairs.
“I honestly think there must be some people who don’t want to acknowledge that the Wiccan religion should be entitled to the same rights as other religions,” said Selena Fox, who is senior minister of the Wiccan Circle Sanctuary in Barneveld, Wisconsin.
I don’t know if Selena is being disingenuous, because, like, of course some people don’t want us to have our rights. Of course “freedom of religion” only means “my religion and those very similar to mine and not those that make me uncomfortable.” I mean, read the Constitution, duh.
CNN has a poll up. Go vote. And while you’re at it, consider contributing to Americans United. This is work done for all of us.
Yesterday, my office had ethnic food day. In our office of about 40 people, we have at least* eleven countries of birth represented. There was biryani, chicken tikki, raita, and a few other Indian and Pakistani dishes, there was baked ziti, chicken Kiev, macaroni and cheese (representing the all-American contingent), edamame, fried tofu, red caviar, and brisket, among other things. We were all stuffed.
I’ve posted before about the true joys of pluralism. What we tend to forget, when working towards a better and more pluralistic society, is how much fun it is. When my sisters married African-American guys, my reaction was, Whoa, there’s a lot more dancing at black weddings. Cool! Then my brother married a Chinese woman and they had a Chinese opera company perform at the wedding (as well as a band playing Ha Va Nagilla) and that, too, was cool. And the food!
The ability to share our cultures, our fun things, our food and dance and jokes and fashion, is dependent upon feeling safe and accepted. So if you’re a bigot and you’re forcing people to fit in or get out, your palate is both literally and figuratively more bland. You’re not just a bigot, you’re also missing the party.
*I know that the employees from the former Soviet Union come from at least Russia and Ukraine, but there may be other countries represented. The countries I counted were U.S.A., Russia, Jamaica, Ukraine, Israel, Peru, India, Bangladesh, Egypt, The Phillipines, and China. Among the U.S.-born employees we enjoyed Jewish and Italian dishes, as well as the aforementioned macs & cheese.
I’ve noticed many of my favorite blogs are posting less than usual. I suspect we are just taking a post-election breather. Wake up, look around, yes, Democrats still won both houses, no, not a dream. Go to bed. Wake up, yes…
Anyway, I wanted to remark on the issue of feminist rants. My review yesterday of Something’s Gotta Give was much on my mind when I decided not to make feminist rants a weekly feature. Not that I’d written it yet, but I was sort of formulating it.
And while formulating, I realized that feminism is something that happens for me in looking at the world. In looking at movies and politics and religion and family life. So to confine the idea of “ranting” to its own category isn’t true for me. It’s there in the movie reviews, there in the politics, there everywhere.
And of course I will continue to share it with you.
A lot of us feel like Tom Tomorrow:
It’s as if the biopsy results just came back and you don’t have cancer after all. You’re not giddy, exactly, but you can finally take a deep breath and maybe let some of the tension drain out of your shoulders. The future remains uncertain but you can begin to imagine it as something other than relentlessly bleak.
This feeling of relief also came up in comments at Tom’s place, and I said:
I realized this morning, I brace myself every day for what I’m going to be angry about. And today I didn’t have to.
You know, it feels good. And it’s not that I think that rose petals are now going to be coming out of Harry Reid’s ass. Back to Tom Tomorrow:
As a general rule, I don’t have much faith in Democrats, having not fallen off the turnip truck within recent memory
Not so much. But I feel I can make a difference now. Because I’ve been calling Senators Clinton and Schumer, and my representative here in NY 17, Eliot Engel. But sometimes I haven’t been, because what can they do, really? Whatever heinous compromises they made, have been the compromises of people who are fundamentally powerless in a Republican-rigged system. The majority party has been steadily stripping the rights of the minority party, until our Democratic representatives could do little more than speech-giving and fundraising.
Now they can do more. Now I can, when they behave like assholes, make phone calls and feel that someone might listen. And oh, my, does that ever feel good.
I am not one of those Pagans under the illusion that all Pagans are liberals. We are, perhaps, more liberal as a demographic than the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, but there are still plenty of conservatives and libertarians in Massachusetts. I have met numerous Pagans who are libertarians or strong fiscal conservatives. Nonetheless, here’s where this is a victory for Pagans:
The first Muslim has been elected to the U.S. Congress. Hailing from a Paganistan district, Keith Ellison increases religious diversity in Congress, moving us an inch further from the Christians-rule-the-U.S. paradigm.
In eight states, an anti-gay marriage amendment was on the ballot. In seven states, it passed, but not in Arizona. For the first time, an anti-gay marriage initiative failed. Gay rights is one issue, along with religious freedom, that I think is unequivocally Pagan. As Pagan priestesses and priests, many of us perform gay marriage or handfasting ceremonies that are not currently acknowledged by law (except you-know-where). We Pagans do not want rule of law based on a Bible we do not use.
The new Democratic Congress will (at last!) exercise the oversight that the Republican Congress has willfully and malignantly neglected. I think that oversight itself, built into our Constitution, is a Pagan principal. We believe in policing ourselves. A traditional coven is ruled by a High Priestess in partnership with a High Priest; I have long described it as a consensus dictatorship; I can only rule when I am fair, because the minute I am unfair, my people will refuse to be ruled. The American people can learn a lot from that model! Other Pagan groups use more deliberately open models; ruled democratically or by consensus or by rotation.
Oversight means that someone is paying attention, not passively accepting, and when something is wrong, it is brought to light. Pagans, who rule themselves quite badly much of the time, rely heavily on this. The gossip that plagues the Pagan community also serves an oversight function; if someone is harmful, word gets around.
So, this week has brought the U.S. Pagan community a government with greater religious diversity, more oversight, and less willingness to opress gay people. Rah cheer!
Bob Harris has a really good look at what this historic victory means. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but here’s the part that really got me between the eyes:
If the numbers stay as they are (pending recounts, etc.), here’s the final scoreboard, assuming I haven’t missed something:
Not one Democratic incumbent lost in the Senate.
Not one Democratic incumbent lost in the House of Representatives.
Not one Democratic incumbent lost in any state Governorship.All told, 504 major offices were at stake tonight.
Not one changed hands going Democrat to Republican.
Wow.
I just watched some of the press conference. David Gregory asked if the election was a referendum on the war. Bush said, yes, the war, but other things as well. He said people want their representatives to be “honest and ethical.”
Whoa Nelly. Isn’t that like, admitting the Republican Congress was dishonest and unethical?
Why, yes, I think it was.
