Sherry Chandler

The Worst Offense Is Intelligence by Molly Ivors at Whiskey Fire:

Living here in upstate New York, we see a lot of Huck Fillary sorts of things from the bumper-sticker-and-bar-sign crowd. And it strikes me as weird, because she’s been an objectively good senator, domestically speaking. Aside from the war (which her haters around here generally support), she’s been right on a lot of things, or at least not more wrong than anyone else. And she’s brought the first jobs to come to this area in literally years. But the hatred continues.

It’s been especially perturbing to see the same lines of attack coming from the right and the left. One friend even said “Gee, I wonder if she really did kill Vince Foster?” in a bizarre recursion that proves that, if you dislike someone, no attack is off limits. I see sneering at those making less than $30K a year, at those without educations, even though they’re registered Dems voting in huge numbers in the primaries, because they happen to support the “wrong” candidate, for what must be the wrong reasons. I see regular abuse of women, particularly older women, from people who know better: sly comments about the “Menopause Caucus” and idle banter about “The Pantsuit Riots.” And I’m not getting into the accusations of racism, which started long before there was any actual evidence to support them. But then maybe I’ve been to too many rock shows to hear all those imaginary dog whistles.

I’m not a person who looks to be inspired or emotionally connect with a candidate: I want administrators, not heroes, running my government. (And no, I’m not using words like “cultists,” though I do think it’s a little weird that some Obama supporters cannot brook even the slightest bit of critique of their guy, whether from me or Paul Krugman.) I think there are genuine reasons to view Obama with caution, not least his cultivation of religious support which I, like anyone, would like to see on the side of progressive politics, but which all too often comes with the baggage of a Donnie McClurkin. And I want universal health care. And I don’t think one person should centralize all the fundraising for all the candidates on their side of the aisle through their personal campaign. It’s a bad precedent, even worse than the DLC, and yet no one wants to talk about this issue except to praise the amount of money being raised.

But even sensible caution about these issues is likely to get one tarred as a vaginista, and I admit, I’m becoming quite shy about sharing my primary support with those who don’t already know it, and that I’m genuinely surprised when people express a preference for Clinton out loud to me. It’s become like a secret vice, discussed on an as-needed basis, but otherwise not. And when we find each other, we all sigh in relief. Finally, we can talk about issues and not personalities.

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I’ll support Senator Obama when he becomes the candidate. I’ll do so more enthusiastically if his VP choice indicates that he understands the frustration of my various demographics: as a working woman in my forties, a mother and wife, two generations removed from Appalachia, one from the factory, with family in a wide range of blue-collar professions. I’ve seen all of these demographics trashed at various points in the last six months, because we tended to vote “wrong.”

Read all of this excellent long post, which I found by way of Suburban Guerrilla. I left out some really good parts.

And then there’s Anglachel:

In The Satanic Verses, Rushdie asks a question of the leaders of Iran’s Islamic revolution - what kind of idea are you when you win? It was a way to ask how a winning faction establishes and maintains legitimacy in an environment where they are not numerically dominant and may not even be a majority. The same question needs to be asked of the Obama campaign.

What kind of an idea, at this point, is Barack Obama?

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The way in which a candidate or faction handles a victory tells us important things about how they will govern. At present, the parallels between Obama’s claim of a nomination victory and George W. Bush’s claim of victory in Florida are shocking.

Here’s the thing. I’ve said it before. After 2000, it is exceedingly tone deaf for a Democratic candidate to even appear to seize the nomination through voter suppression and legalistic appeal to a stacked court, in short through a power grab.

And I say this not just as a Hillary Clinton supporter, but also as a Democrat. The Republicans are not going to let us forget that the DNC took delegates away from Hillary Clinton and gave them to Barack Obama. Look at this Chip Bok cartoon.

Kentucky poet and novelist, Wanda Campbell, has written to announce the publication of her science fiction novel, Dragon’s Heir.

Wanda has established a new web presence to celebrate this publication. She can now be found at Wanda Darlene Campbell

Wanda Darlene Campbell wrote her first story in the back of a Bible at the age of nine. “I thought the blank pages were for me to add my story,” she says.

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Dragon’s Heir was born as a result of a discussion started with a handful of students during an English lesson.

I first met Wanda at a Kentucky State Poetry Society meeting, where I got to hear her strong and moving poetic voice. It was a voice I could not forget. I’ve featured several of her poems here. Others can be found at The Other Voices International Project.

Later, we cemented our friendship when I sat in, the lone poet, on Lee Maynard’s most excellent fiction session at the Appalachian Writers Workshop at Hindman Settlement School. We’ve been friends ever since, and I am pleased as punch about this novel.

I am glad to see that Wanda’s poetry blog, Raven’s Shadow, will continue active. I’ll leave that link in my sidebar and update my link to Wanda’s web page on my Kentucky Writers page. I recommend you browse that list often.

I would like to take this announcement as an opportunity to do something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time, that is, to share with you Wanda’s prose poem from the Mexico in the Heartland issue of New Madrid. I’ve talked about that important publication here and here, and about Cincos Maestros Michoacános, the art exhibit that inspired the issue. It was also this issue that got me started on my months-long contemplation of the other, in my response to Fred de Rosset’s interview in the issue.

Wanda’s poem is called “The First Mexican Hillbilly,” and she has graciously given me permission to reprint it here.

People talk about how Mexico is infiltrating the south now but Mexico has been infiltrating my family for a hundred years, ever since my great-great-grandfather José Massinario Pablio turned up in Gradyville, Kentucky, at the age of thirteen. An old newspaper clipping says he came back with a preacher who had served during the Mexican-American War. My father says that he lived with the preacher until he was grown, making shoes and bowls to sell just like he had in his homeland. He married Black-Irish Nancy. All we know about her is that she had two brothers, Abdolonomous and Isaac. On his wedding day, José changed his name to Joseph M. Franklin and signed his marriage license with an “X.” The clerk wrote “White” in as his race, but filed the document under “Coloreds” in the local courthouse, where it is still located.

None of us ever knew why he came here, only that he did and that he brought Mexico with him, then handed it down for five generations. My grandfather’s sisters were named Viola and Suez, and his brothers, Jim Isaac and Junis, were as brown as the soil they tilled, with not a hair on their bodies to speak of. Great-Uncle Junis, who is now eighty-six, tells me that he is hairless because he is Indian. “Yeah, Grandpa came from Mexico,” he says, “but he was Indian.” I think about what Uncle Junis says, and I understand how so many have robbed Mexicans of their Indian heritage. I can’t imagine Mexico without Native American ties. I can’t imagine my family without Mexico. My daddy has never seen Mexico, yet it has been beating in his heart for sixty-seven years. Mexico set the tone for my grandfather’s life, for my father’s life, and ultimately, for mine.

For me it was a piece of treasured heritage. For my father, it was a stigma. He was brown at a time when everybody in the south was black, white or Cherokee. There weren’t any categories for Mexican Hillbillies in those days, so his family got the shaft, not being excluded as blacks were but not being included as whites either. They were always the hired hands, the servants, playing second fiddle. Daddy used to get spanked by his uncles if he said any “Mexican” words or did anything “Indian.” They were trying to eradicate the label from our family. When I got to be a teenager, I tried to stick it back on because I felt we were being robbed of our identity. Maybe I believed that because my great-great-grandfather had kept his mother’s maiden name, some part of him didn’t want to completely forget who he was or had been in his youth. Or maybe it was just that in a nation of mixed people, I needed to identify with a group. I needed to belong. As far as I know, there weren’t any other Mexicans in these parts back then, and maybe just maybe, my great-great-grandfather was the first Mexican in the state. At any rate, he was here, and because he was, I am too.

Three years ago, I went to Mexico and gave a speech at a church in Spanish. I told the people there the story of my great-great-grandfather, and of how without Mexico and all of its culture, my family would never have existed. I told them about the wildflowers of southeastern Kentucky that had sprung from one stray seed the wind blew our way. Now every time I see a Mexican man working in somebody’s field, I think of my great-great-grandfather and wonder if he was a prophet, a foreteller of what would one day be commonplace.