Sherry Chandler

1915

I’VE watched the Seasons passing slow, so slow,
In the fields between La Bassée and Bethune;
Primroses and the first warm day of Spring,
Red poppy floods of June,
August, and yellowing Autumn, so
To Winter nights knee-deep in mud or snow,
And you’ve been everything.

Dear, you’ve been everything that I most lack
In these soul-deadening trenches—pictures, books,
Music, the quiet of an English wood,
Beautiful comrade-looks,
The narrow, bouldered mountain-track,
The broad, full-bosomed ocean, green and black,
And Peace, and all that’s good.

— Robert Graves. Fairies and Fusiliers. (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1918; Bartleby.com, 1999.)

Founder and President of Emily’s List, Ellen R. Malcolm says Quitters Never Win:

When I was growing up in the 1960s, I wanted to play basketball. In those days, the rules said girls could dribble only three steps and then had to pass the ball. To make sure we didn’t overexert ourselves, we weren’t allowed to cross the half-court line. It’s a wonder our fans (our mothers) could stay awake when a typical game’s final score was 14-10.

It’s remarkable that my generation of women entered the workforce and began to compete in business, politics and the hurly-burly of life outside the home. How did we ever learn to locate, much less channel, our competitive instincts in a world that made us play half-court and assumed that we would be content staying home to iron the shirts? It’s a tremendous tribute to women of my generation that we sucked it up and learned to compete in the toughest environments.

Which brings us to Hillary Clinton running for president. This brilliant woman believes that she can compete for the most powerful office in the world. She believes that she can do a better job than any of the men running to lead our country through these challenging times. And millions of Americans, women and men, believe that she is correct.

Yet over and over again the media and her opponents have claimed that she is defeated — it’s over, she can’t win, she’s a loser. And over and over again — in New Hampshire, on Super Tuesday, in Texas and Ohio, in Pennsylvania last month, and in Indiana this week — female voters poured out of their homes to cast their ballots for her. They know that women can compete, and they want to make sure that women, especially this woman, can win.

Read the rest.

Link from Jeralyn.

Because I spent Mother’s Day afternoon with my own mother, I’m a bit late getting to this Save The Children report on best and worst places to be a mother:

Westport, Conn. (May 6, 2008) — Save the Children, a U.S.-based independent global humanitarian organization, today released its ninth annual Mothers’ Index that ranks the best — and worst — places to be a mother and a child. The Mother’s Index, highlighted in the organization’s State of the World’s Mothers 2008 report, compares the well-being of mothers and children in 146 countries, more than in any previous year.

Nordic countries sweep the top rankings of the best places to be a mother, while countries in sub-Saharan Africa dominate the bottom tier. Sweden tops the list, while Niger ranks last among countries surveyed. The United States places 27th this year, one slot down from last year’s ranking.

Read this whole report, which I found compliments of FrenchDoc posting at Corrente, and view the multimedia presentation. It will break your heart.

As for me, I have one question. If the people who want to do away with abortion rights, the ones whose travelling exhibits show screaming fetuses to college students, the ones who think a drip of sperm on a man’s leg is a pre-born baby, if those people really think every fetus is sacred, why is the United States 27^th on this list? And trending down?

Why, if every fetus is sacred, does the Bush administration cut off funding U.N. women’s health initiatives just to keep women from getting abortions? Why is this sort of thing tolerable:

…in Niger, a typical woman has less than three years of education and the life expectancy of a girl born today is only 45. Only 4 percent of Nigerian women use modern contraception, and 1 child in 4 never sees a fifth birthday. At this rate, every mother is likely to suffer the loss of a child during her lifetime.

Look at that. One child in 4, 25% of children, die before age 5. Life expectancy for women is 45.

from Songs for My Mother

Her Hands

MY mother’s hands are cool and fair,
They can do anything.
Delicate mercies hide them there
Like flowers in the spring.

When I was small and could not sleep,
She used to come to me,
And with my cheek upon her hand
How sure my rest would be.

For everything she ever touched
Of beautiful or fine,
Their memories living in her hands
Would warm that sleep of mine.

Her hands remember how they played
One time in meadow streams,—
And all the flickering song and shade
Of water took my dreams.

Swift through her haunted fingers pass
Memories of garden things;—
I dipped my face in flowers and grass
And sounds of hidden wings.

One time she touched the cloud that kissed
Brown pastures bleak and far;—
I leaned my cheek into a mist
And thought I was a star.

All this was very long ago
And I am grown; but yet
The hand that lured my slumber so
I never can forget.

For still when drowsiness comes on
It seems so soft and cool,
Shaped happily beneath my cheek,
Hollow and beautiful.

— Anna Hampstead Branch, from Rittenhouse, Jessie B., ed. The Little Book of Modern Verse. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917; New York: Bartleby.com, 2002).

The Player Queen

(Song from an Unfinished Play)

MY mother dandled me and sang,
‘How young it is, how young!’
And made a golden cradle
That on a willow swung.

‘He went away,’ my mother sang,
‘When I was brought to bed,’
And all the while her needle pulled
The gold and silver thread.

She pulled the thread and bit the thread
And made a golden gown,
And wept because she had dreamt that I
Was born to wear a crown.

‘When she was got,’ my mother sang,
‘I heard a sea-mew cry,
And saw a flake of the yellow foam
That dropped upon my thigh.’

How therefore could she help but braid
The gold into my hair,
And dream that I should carry
The golden top of care?

— W. B. Yeats, from Responsibilities and Other Poems (New York: The Macmillan company, 1916; Bartleby.com, 1999.)

…God is the gun with which we shoot our enemy…

—Alicia Ostriker, from American Poetry Review for July/August 2002

Oh, maaaan! I am always on the shadow side of everything. I’m not just woman. I’m an old woman. I’m a Southerner who, if not working class, certainly has working class roots. And I love a forest. This love seems to run contrary to the path of civilization, which contains its roots in the word city.

In his discussion of Robert Pogue Harrison’s Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Univ Chicago Press, 1992), Matthew Battles of Britannica Blog says:

In Forests, Harrison shows how deforestation is written into the DNA of civilization. Gilgamesh, the first hero in world literature, embarks on a quest to kill Humbaba, the demon of the forest, who lives in the mountainside cedar groves harvested to the last by the ancient Sumerians. (It’s telling that Humbaba offers to become Gilgamesh’s slave if he will spare his life.) Actaeon and Artemis; Romulus and Remus; Hansel and Gretel’s sylvan witch–our oldest stories stir with the antipathy between town and timber. And as the ancient forests fell, so did those civilizations that both feared and depended upon them. The Mediterranean basin is sunstruck and bereft of shade today because of the deforestation wrought by the Mesopotamians, Greeks, and Romans–in the process bringing about climate change that did as much as barbarian hordes and new religions to unwork civilization. And of course, those episodes of deforestation took place over thousands of years; our heaviest clearcutting is a matter of decades.

If the fate of civilization lies in forests, perhaps its preservation does as well. As atmospheric scientist Kevin Gurney testified in an Earth Day meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, existing forests soak up as much as one-third of our carbon dioxide emissions, providing a brake on climate change we can’t afford to do without. An associate director of the Purdue Climate Change Research Center, Gurney proposed a policy by which developing countries could help stave off climate change by preserving their forestlands–in return receiving credits, which they could sell to pollution-spewing developed nations trying to lower their carbon footprints.

In their different ways, Harrison and Gurney agree: not only our fate, but our freedom may be found in forests. The Magna Carta, after all, came into being in part to preserve equal access to the food and fuel of England’s woodlands. The woods have long offered refuge to freedom fighters, to outcasts. And these incubators of sylvan biodiversity offer freedom from illness, too, in their vast and as yet mostly untapped pharmacoepia. But as Harrison’s Forests so elegantly demonstrates, the woods of the world are safeguards of enchantment as well.

More and more reasons to heed Dave Bonta’s plea to leave the trees the hell alone.

P.S. I walked over to the university library today bent upon checking out this book so I could check it out (so to speak) but, wouldn’t you know it?, the book was not on the shelf where it was supposed to be. It’s been that kind of day.

I had to fill out a search card, but I am not optimistic. Haven’t had much luck with searches in the past.

Watch at YouTube

Standing Women will stand again on May 11, 2008, 1 pm local time.
Last May hundreds of thousands of women and girls, along with the men and boys they love, in 75 countries and on all continents of the world stood together in parks, on beaches, in churches, at graduation ceremonies, in their backyards and at school yards or anyplace they could find to stand in a global wave of humanity in support of a better world for our children.

We invite women and their families everywhere to take this “stand” with us again, on May 11 at 1 p.m. local time for just 5 minutes, to rekindle the world with our common vision.

We stand for the world’s children and grandchildren, and for the seven generations beyond them. We dream of a world where all of our children have safe drinking water, clean air to breathe, and enough food to eat. A world where they have access to a basic education to develop their minds and healthcare to nurture their growing bodies. A world where they have a warm, safe and loving place to call home. A world where they don’t live in fear of violence-in their home, in their neighborhood, in their school or in their world. This is the world of which we dream. This is the cause for which we stand.

To learn more and register your standing, go to the Standing Women website at www.standingwomen.org

When I visited Wallens Ridge in the spring of 1999, it was new and as yet unoccupied. It felt like a house on moving day, all echoes and loneliness. What I found there was the perfectly evolved American prison. It was both lavishly expensive and needlessly remote, built not because it was needed but because it was wanted by politicians who thought it would bring them votes.
–Joseph T. Hallinan Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation, 2001

The use of American correction executives with abuse accusations in their past to oversee American-run prisons in Iraq is prompting concerns in Congress. Mr. Armstrong, assistant director of operations in American prisons in Iraq…resigned last year after Connecticut settled lawsuits…with the families of two Connecticut inmates who died after being sent…to Wallens Ridge, a super-maximum security prison in Virginia.
–New York Times, May 21, 2004

One consequence of the U.S.’s becoming a prison nation is that prisons have become a growth industry. One outcome of growth (and rightwing idealogues) is that prisons have been privatized. And one outcome of a privatized prison industry has been the building of prisons in job-hungry areas that might at first seem unlikely, like Eastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia. One unintended consequence of that has been the “forced” mingling of two marginalized populations, urban black and Appalachian hillbilly.

This photo from the Thousand Kites web page seems to indicate that, along with Wal-Marts, prison installations may be one use for all that nifty flat space created by moutain-top removal mining:

I mentioned this trend here here almost two years ago when the Appalshop started their Holler to the Hood project:

Holler to the Hood is a multi-media human rights project designed to foster collaboration and communication between urban and rural communities. The project was initiated by Appalshop artists in response to the growing prison boom in the economically distressed central Appalachian coalfields. We believe in the power of art to speak boldly for human rights and positive social change in our communities.

Holler to the Hood has now launched a Thousand Kites:

What would you do if you learned human rights violations were occurring right in your own community?
In 1998, when Nick [Szuberla, media producer] and Amelia [Kirby, media producer] were volunteer DJs at WMMT, a community radio station in Whitesburg, KY, we received hundreds of letters describing human rights violations in newly-opened local prisons. We responded with an art project called “Holler to the Hood,” addressing human rights abuses in the U.S. criminal justice system.

One of the first things we did was produce a radio program bringing the voices of prisoners’ families to the airwaves. Broadcasting stories and messages from families and loved ones helped everyone understand who was in our region’s prisons. The show is now broadcast weekly (click the button on the left to listen now). A special annual holiday broadcast airs on more than 120 stations around the country. We also brought hip-hop together with mountain music (hill-hop), organized story circles, and produced cultural events inviting people to share their experience with the criminal justice system.

Building on these projects, we began working with other artists and community activists around the country to create Thousand Kites.

Thousand Kites is involved in the documentary file Writ Writer that will air on PBS stations in June:

WRIT WRITER tells the story of Fred Cruz, an ordinary Texas prison inmate who became an extraordinary leader of the prisoners’ rights movement in the 1960s.

During the 1940s and 50’s, Cruz grew up in a drug-saturated, racially-segregated San Antonio, Texas. At 21, he found himself without the funds to hire a lawyer. Cruz began studying law in hopes of appealing his conviction.

WRIT WRITER shows us how Cruz’s self-guided studies inspired him to work toward establishing prisoners’ human rights. Law became his passion, and his writs of habeas corpus –submitted to the courts on behalf of a other of prisoners– infuriated prison officials, who punished him repeatedly.

When Cruz sought help beyond the prison walls from the memorable “lady” lawyer Frances Jalet, and others, prison officials learned that they had met their match.

Thousand Kites has also produced the documentary film Up the Ridge:

…though the lens of Wallens Ridge State Prison, the program offers viewers an in-depth look at the United States prison industry and the social impact of moving hundreds of thousands of inner-city minority offenders to distant rural outposts. The film explores competing political agendas that align government policy with human rights violations, and political expediencies that bring communities into racial and cultural conflict with tragic consequences. Connections exist, in both practice and ideology, between human rights violations in Abu Ghraib and physical and sexual abuse recorded in American prisons.

Yesterday, I spent time reading around in the few Clinton-leaning or Clinton-neutral weblogs I know of. Many lefty blogs are downright abusive of Clinton and others are quick to assign the worst motives to her actions. But that’s another story. My point here is that I was reading around in the comments from angry, outraged, and disillusioned Clinton supporters and I found quite a few who were vowing to give up politics as a way to accomplish the social goals they value. These people wanted to find other grass-roots ways to be activists. Thousand Kites, it seems to me, presents such an outlet:

Thousand Kites is a national dialogue project addressing the criminal justice system. By being involved with Kites you will become part of a national movement to use the power of art to reform our criminal justice system and to talk about human rights in the United States. Using video, theater, radio, and the web as tools, you can bring people together to support organizing efforts and share experiences with the criminal justice system.

There are many ways to get involved. For instance, you can hold a Kites film screening and panel discussion, or use our play to start a good conversation around restorative justice. Individuals and groups at the local, state, and national level are finding Kites a powerful way to work for positive social change.

Thousand Kites has a YouTube channel and a Flickr page.

from Echidne, A Wolff In The Land Of Dry Pussies

Michael Wolff has written an interesting meditation on the difficulties of being a middle-aged man in the United States. Suddenly, in the midst of life, he walks into a dark forest of despair and depression, and why? Not because of those cholesterol values or that mortgage payment or all those youthful plans he once had, plans, which are now as dry as the dandruff on his stooped hard-working family-man shoulders, no. It’s because he can’t get wet and gushy pussy anymore, young and bouncy and eager pussy.

from Digby, Sexual Politics (cherrypicking my clip here in a way that is totally unfair):

Now, I don’t know about you, but among my friends, this just doesn’t come up.

And the incomparable Lance:

I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead since by now a mob of “the post-sexual set” has probably dragged him from his office in the Conde Nast building and hauled him uptown to Central Park where they’ve hung him up by his genetalia from Cleopatra’s Needle…

I promise to clean up my language here in a day or two. I’ve sort of been on a roll lately.

On a more serious note, there’s this from commenter Lost in Space at Corrente Some one like me doesn’t fit in much:

A PoC who has much trouble supporting Obama’s candidacy, surrounded by PoC who either actively or casually support him. The PoC I talk to are not as rabid as the Blogger Boiz, and most never knew of Obama’s actual positions - or lack thereof - nor his history when I talked with them. Many either still don’t know - or don’t care about this.

However, there is another issue at work here: I have noticed that the tenor of the online backlash of Obama and his candidacy has started to spread as a backlash against African-Americans as a whole. Not so much here [at Corrente], but I’ve seen this acrimony grow on many other Clinton-leaning sites - and now, like a cancer, may be on the verge of metastasizing.

This is a dangerous proposition. Should Obama get the nomination - and get bounced by McCain (which is most likely going to happen) - the blame will most likely be placed on the shoulders of African-Americans for the crime of voting for someone who happens to look much like them (let’s remember that America -in general - regards people with even as much as a drop of African ancestry as “Black”); speaks like them (sometimes); and comes across as someone who has been through the same struggles of life in America as they have (even though he has not). I don’t hear as much vitriol about the Leisure class sect that flooded the caucuses to pad Obama’s early totals - and this saddens me. Also, there is not alot of discussion of the SCLM complicity in both Obama’s ascension and H. Clinton’s denigration these days - sadly, there is almost no online discussions regarding the SCLM at all (save Somerby’s great analyses at Dailyhowler.com). Nor does there seem to be much discussion on the political games by Dean and Pelosi.

Actually, I figured any blame for any failure of Democrats this election would be placed on Hillary Clinton’s shoulders, but I want to make it abundantly clear that most of my rants about racism and sexism on this blog have to do with the collusion between Obama and the media, planned or unplanned, to demonize Hillary Clinton and her supporters.

Nor do I think that the African American community has turned against Hillary and Bill Clinton as vehemently as Obama’s white supporters and the pundits on the news media.

Update: Indiana’s new voter ID law proved itself yesterday. It turned away a clatch of rogue nuns. Retired:

WASHINGTON — At least 10 retired nuns in South Bend, Ind., were barred from voting in Tuesday’s Indiana Democratic primary election because they lacked photo IDs required under a state law that the Supreme Court upheld last week.

John Borkowski, a South Bend lawyer volunteering as an election watchdog for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said several of the retired nuns had been voting all of their lives but were told they lacked the required identification cards and could only file provisional ballots.

Since 2005, Indiana’s toughest-in-the-nation law requires every voter to produce a state or federal photo ID card. The Supreme Court, after weighing scores of legal briefs from conservatives who backed the statute and liberals who opposed it, upheld the law by a 6-3 vote, saying there was little evidence that it was unduly burdensome for voters.

Borkowski said Sister Julie McGuire, one of several nuns on poll duty, wasn’t pleased to turn away the nuns, some of whom were in their 80s and 90s and no longer had driver’s licenses.

“Here’s the supreme irony,” Borkowski said. “This law was passed supposedly to prevent and deter voter fraud, even though there was no real record of serious voter fraud in Indiana. Here you have a bunch of nuns whose votes can’t be accepted by a bunch of nuns … who live with them in the polling place in their convent because they don’t have an ID.”

Should I put nuns on the same page with all this language?