I realize our blog was curiously silent when we were all thinking, “gay marriage–in your FACE bitches!” And, “isn’t it a good thing that not quite enough Supreme Court justices were swayed by a ludicrously weak argument first tendered in the spirit of ‘0bummercare’ on IIRC the Volokh Conspiracy; at the same time, wasn’t that scary? Still, in your FACES hypocritical Jesuitical bastards!” And, “oh Lord why in the church why? How did he steel himself to it after they welcomed him and he did bible study for an hour. An hour! What kind of mordant acid of racism could etch a stain so black on the filth-splattered escutcheon of Dixie?” And, “I love the president of the United States of America. I am crying watching YouTube. There is snot on my face.” And, “holy shit, people are giving a crap about the confederate flag?! Are you serious? No, really, what?” I’ll be honest as a girl born in Savannah “home of the official platinum-level flag of bigotry” GA; a girl whose step-father was Edmund Kirby-Smith (the fourth and only)—this last one has me reeling. Also, has me realizing that I wasn’t cool in the 90s when I used a metal Dukes of Hazzard lunchbox as a purse for like 3 years. I was a dick. Well, truth be told I was going to post about the evil of Tom Bombadil, but then I felt like I needed to explain myself, so I’ll just wait a short while (and don’t you steal my thunder!).
The thing was, we flew to my in-laws in Eugene, OR (via HK and SF) and then I found out I had to do something in Indonesia so I flew back another 24 hours maybe six days later, to Singapore and then Bali, and now I’ma sort this out, fly back to Singapore, fly HK to SF to Eugene, and then the next day fly from Eugene to SF to Newark New Jersey to Savannah, and then 6 days later to Dulles, then National, then Martha’s Vineyard? No, I must have to fly to Boston. Whyyywwyyyy? OK, some people have real problems that don’t involve them flying around the world to beautiful places, so I’ll stop moping and let’s join in a carefully composed round of huzzahs and somber reflection and sore winner uncharitable triumph, shall we? In short, America: F@#k Yeah.
{ 40 comments }
Austin Loomis 07.05.15 at 5:13 pm
“Now how’s this for an angle, B.J.? a real American stand . . Everything America ever stood for in any man’s dream America stands for now . . Everything this country could have been and wasn’t it will be now . . Every promise America ever made Ameria will redeem now . .”
— William S. Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded
Belle Waring 07.05.15 at 5:17 pm
The inclusion of “slavery–fuck yeah!” elevates the Team America song, in similar fashion.
oldster 07.05.15 at 6:59 pm
If you’d like more reason to feel good about the United States, read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new letter to his son:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/tanehisi-coates-between-the-world-and-me/397619/
Long, painful, brilliant. Happy Fourth.
F. Foundling 07.06.15 at 1:32 am
Fine, but I’m still unhappy about your conviction that your president should be able to torture and/or kill me by drone without having proved my guilt in court if he finds that course of action advisable. Even the prospect of being droned by a Black, gay-married, healthy president fails to console me. You don’t need to somberly reflect on that, though, I’m sure nothing good will come of it anyway.
oldster 07.06.15 at 1:43 am
He’s got you there, Belle. You really should stop going around saying,
“I’m *convinced* that my president should be able to torture and/or kill anonymous blog commenters without having to prove their guilt in court, if he finds that course of action advisable.”
I don’t know why you said it to begin with, or where for that matter, but I hope you’ll stop now.
Belle Waring 07.06.15 at 1:57 am
America’s foreign policy is immoral, but if you watched the president’s eulogy for Clementa Pinckney and you didn’t tear up a little, you are coooold inside. His neo-liberal squishdom has frozen you.
Upon hearing his name initially I had the idle but illuminating thought, I know a ton of Pinckneys! But they’re all white and rich–like damn, like schwaa rich. Mysterious how that could come about in the Lowcountry. But I think I’ve mentioned that when my brother went to USC and met his roommate for the first time, the guy was startled. “I thought you were a brother. All the Warings I’ve ever met were black!” I feel that would be an awkward conversation.
F. Foundling 07.06.15 at 2:01 am
@oldster 07.06.15 at 1:43 am
Ha! You’ve got *me* there. I’d never realised this stuff wasn’t actually written anywhere in the post! I’ve no idea what on earth I might possibly have been thinking.
oldster 07.06.15 at 2:09 am
Oh, think nothing of it. It’s a mistake anyone could make.
F. Foundling 07.06.15 at 2:23 am
@Belle Waring 07.06.15 at 1:57 am
>America’s foreign policy is immoral, but if you watched the president’s eulogy for Clementa Pinckney and you didn’t tear up a little, you are coooold inside. His neo-liberal squishdom has frozen you.
If you say so. I have to admit that I didn’t watch it. Then again, I can’t help observing in that context that many non-American non-combatants have died in drone strikes ordered by this head of state and got no eulogies either. I guess what I’m saying is that the way the highly active U.S. foreign policy is ignored and all attention is occupied by the passions at home does get a bit irritating. Whatever, live well.
Marshall 07.06.15 at 2:31 am
Belle, no wonder you have headaches. And while in Eugene, remember it’s cool on the coast …
Bill Murray 07.06.15 at 4:12 am
“gay marriage—in your FACE bitches!â€
and Abby Wambach cements this by kissing her wife after winning the World Cup
Belle Waring 07.06.15 at 6:38 am
F. Foundling: I sincerely recommend that you watch it. It’s unquestionably the most moving speech I’ve heard uttered in my political lifetime.
Headaches, yeah, pretty stressed at the moment (as much as is possible in my private villa thing with tiny pool in Seminyak–more possible than one might imagine if you have to change every ticket ever for everyone and can’t figure out how to place international calls). But in general my headaches have improved a LOT in the last two months, so I feel OK. My mutated back hurts worse. I have a rare kind of spongiform myelopathy –my immune system ate the myelin sheath off my spinal cord, and also the discs are wack because of hypermobility. I was USING THAT MYELIN SHEATH, THANK YOU. STAND DOWN AND FIGHT DISEASES, YOU BASTARDS.
I sleep very well on the plane; I’m like “we’re in Seoul? Huh” while the girls are like, “I watched three movies. Then I realized we had three more hours till arrival. ^_^;” Singapore Airlines really is worth the premium. The KrisFlyer entertainment system has hundreds of movies, from classics like The Maltese Falcon to new releases, to TV shows, but most fun is movies from Japan, India, China, France and more. I like to watch Bollywood films, though I also get sucked in by Japanese flicks. But truly I’m asleep so long I don’t even watch many movies! It’s not great for my spine, but whatchagonnado? Business class really is a million dollars, yet almost worth it also. I made the mistake of flying business class with the girls when we got on the first flight out after hurricane Irene in NYC. We had been scheduled to depart the day it hit. They reminisce about it fondly. “Remember how the rolls were hot? And you could lie down all the way! Hint hint.” I honestly can’t imagine how the stewardesses could be nicer to you unless you also get foot massages in first class. They have individual cabins! I want to sleep in one so bad, but I also want to go into space and see the earth from orbit before I die, and as the cost is roughly the same I’ll keep my powder dry. That’s basically my life goal. There’s a picture of my brother in orbit on an experimental small-scale expandable space station module. (They are launched from earth and then expand once in space.) He spent a lot of time at Baikonur, which was cool but also boring, especially as their food consisted of varying shapes of meatballs. Some were rectangular oblongs! I figure when my great-grandchildren are on Triton they’ll pour out a 40 oz so it can shatter on the liquid nitrogen in his honor. My dad’s life goal for us was that we invent Waring Drive and take mankind to the stars; sometimes I feel like we let him down, but on the other hand one of his two kids did work for a private space exploration company, so that’s not bad odds. I’m going to go on the vomit comet when I’m am old lady. After I get spine surgery.
My doctor told me I can’t jump into the water. What in the goddamn hell is the point of being on a floating dock in S.C. if you can’t jump off the pilings, I’d like to know? Again, these are awesome problems to have when so many people in the world are struggling. When I stayed in the hospital with Violet for a week when she had a norovirus and was puking/shitting every 45 minutes, with a raging fever, I was holding her little body on the cooling pad they put under her, and gently cleaning up every time (with amazing help from the nurses at KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital). I cried a lot because I thought of all the mothers just like me, as real as me, and with no IV drip to keep their children alive. She trusts me to take care of her–what if there were no care I could take?
Now you know every single stray thought I have had, you’re…welcome?
JPL 07.06.15 at 8:41 am
Bill Murray @ 11, you kind of beat me to it, but I just wanted to add to the “America: F@#k Yeah” congratulations to all the athletes on USA’s women’s football team on their World Cup championship. Carli Lloyd was playing out of her mind!
I would also like to emphatically second the notion that everyone should, if they haven’t already, listen to Barack Obama’s eulogy in Charleston. It was unbelievably awesome to finally hear the President of the US say, “but the cause for which they fought was wrong”.
parse 07.06.15 at 12:38 pm
I was in Birmingham, Alabama for a funeral and was a little surprised that a fairly constant refrain among Southern friends and relatives who are happy to see the Confederate flag come down was, “It’s a pity that it was co-opted by a hate group,” referring to the Klan doing so much to make the Stars and Bars a symbol of racism in the 60s. When I put forward the argument that the flag originated as the symbol of a hate group–the Confederate States of America–they all allowed that yes, that was true but they hadn’t really though of it that way.
oldster 07.06.15 at 1:26 pm
“It’s a pity that it was co-opted by a hate group,â€
The funny thing is that this would be a perfectly legitimate comment to make about the swastika, which lived for thousands of years as a good luck symbol in buddhism, hinduism and lots of other ancient cultures, before being co-opted by a recent hate group.
But the Confederate flag has no history that predates its association with treason, terrorism, and white supremacy.
Still, comments like this show that the neo-Confederates are slowly going through the five stages of grief, and it’s good to see progress.
Lee A. Arnold 07.06.15 at 3:11 pm
Belle your comments column is telling undersubscribed here, despite its primary importance. Because a very interesting thing happened in human history. Almost just the other day, as these things go…
Pure idealism was inculcated into the fabric of the general society that was birthed from the time of the French Revolution and the founding of the US, up through the founding of the EU — and was copied into various other agreements and constitutions within this era. To be sure, at the beginnings of each effort were class interests and the contingencies of historical individuals, and these factors still persist. But they are not that important.
What is more important indeed crucial is that the idealistic psychological project of All Living Together in Peace is slightly STRONGER in the individual mind than the competing psychologies of money, race, wars of conquest, organized religion, and sexual orientation.
In fact the last four have been declared obsolete. Most people in the developed world claim that race, wars of conquest, organized religion, and sexual orientation are distinctions of the past. They will not be tolerated any more, and good riddance to them, and good riddance to people who hide behind the claims of “liberty” to continue to propagate them.
Money however is a particularly obdurate inertial force. This is now the crux, and the cross we all bear. And it’s going to be a little while longer. People barely know how to think about it. Money is simply accepted because it had been a necessary technology for the complexification of society since the early ancient empires. Much later, market economics (born right round the time of our new idealism), which is a theory that depends upon money of course, held out the promise of letting everyone get skin in the game.
Well it doesn’t happen quite that way, of course. The market economy did let more people in, but not all of them, and now it appears that it begins to push people back out again.
I won’t rehearse the arguments from Left and Right about the whys and wherefores. The superficial reasons are multifarious. The fact that the Greeks won’t reduce high pensions and the Germans are indignant are only symptoms. I just want to point out that the arguments even from the Left accept the existence of money as an indelible feature. In this sense, money is just like race, wars of conquest, organized religion, and sexual orientation — all were indelible theses of social thought in their own days.
Now we’re being forced, in a collective focus, to think outside this final lock-box, money.
What is happening to both sides in every system and subsystem is a new conflict with the overwhelming idealist psychology that was recently programmed into us all. We each arrive from our own vantage at the edge of thinking outside this box. We just don’t know how to go further.
Note that the processes of overcoming race, wars of conquest, organized religion, and sexual orientation have all been different, all difficult, affected different parts of the psyche and occurred at different rates.
I think that at this moment, this final focus necessitated by the Enlightenment project, and the possible source of new lessons to learn about the money-box and thus all our futures, has shifted to Europe, obviously, but also to social relations inside China. The US will have another significant role to play but not until the future.
Still, President Obama’s speech was a remarkable document of how far the US has come, and a comprehensive emotional view of where it must go. Because, to metamorphose Sun Ra, “Grace is the place.” Also rhetorically brilliant. He’s another astonishing human being straight out of no-where, and the US, a system to allow such people, is lucky to have him. So America, F@#k Yeah
Dave Maier 07.06.15 at 3:17 pm
Wait, Tom Bombadil is evil?
MPAVictoria 07.06.15 at 3:25 pm
Christ Belle. All I can say is that I am glad I found your writing and I still await your novel.
JanieM 07.06.15 at 5:56 pm
An amazing piece altogether, but this is above and beyond even the usual Belle standard:
What kind of mordant acid of racism could etch a stain so black on the filth-splattered escutcheon of Dixie?
*****
Also, what Dave Maier said.
Also, safe travels.
Suzanne 07.06.15 at 6:27 pm
@16: “He’s another astonishing human being straight out of no-where, and the US, a system to allow such people, is lucky to have him.”
The President would agree with you. (Many times, he has appeared to be chiding an ungrateful electorate. ) It may well be true that under the current system he’s the best we can do.
It is good that now he no longer has to worry about the next election he speaks more freely about racial injustice and is taking active steps to do more about it while he still can.
William Berry 07.06.15 at 7:25 pm
@Dave Maier and JanieM:
Tom Bombabil is one of the ancient Maia (grandchildren of Iluvatar?). He has godlike power; if he chose to do so, he could eradicate all evil and set the world right. Yet he is careless, insouciant, forgetful (Gandalf observes that the ring would not be safe with him: he would forget it and lose it), happy to sequester himself and Marygold in his own little magical realm of the Old Forest.
Gandalf, of the same or a similar order (?) as Tom, engages evil wherever he finds it.
I am not sure if this makes Tom evil, per se, but his inaction results in great evil, and that might amount to the same thing.
Don’t know if this is what Belle is hinting at, but anyway, my (maybe <) two cents worth.
Dave Maier 07.06.15 at 7:52 pm
Nah, it’s that everything he says has that same weird rhythm: “Tom’s in a hurry now, [and] Goldberry is waiting” and so forth. Evil!
JanieM 07.06.15 at 8:05 pm
@William B: It’s Goldberry, not Marygold. One of your relatives, perhaps……. ;-)
I know all those facts about Bombadil, but I wouldn’t frame them that way. My key objection would be about the extent to which he had or made a choice. An eagle can’t swim, a dolphin can’t soar above the trees. No more can Tom be Gandalf or v.v.
But hey, I’m not a philosopher, and I await Belle’s elaboration with curiosity. Whatever else it turns out to be, I’m sure it will be provocative and entertaining.
William Berry 07.06.15 at 8:06 pm
Well, yeah, an altogether annoying character. The whole Tom/ Goldberry (not “Marygold”; sorry) bit has a creepy feel to it.
William Berry 07.06.15 at 8:09 pm
“Marygold” = tiny, bright yellow flowers my mother used to grow, like fifty+ years ago.
Bloix 07.06.15 at 8:14 pm
Tom Bombadil is the most annoying character JRR ever created. Worse than Sam Gamgee. Worse than Radagast the Brown, even.
I used to have a client that required a lot of travel and would pay business class for overnight flights. This costs as much as a car! I said to a colleague. They’re not gonna buy you a car, so enjoy the flight, he said.
Barry Freed 07.06.15 at 8:59 pm
This is the internet ur-text for the Tom Bombadil is evil theory.
http://km-515.livejournal.com/1042.html
Bill Benzon 07.06.15 at 11:01 pm
Sorry to interrupt, Belle. But there’s big news and there’s Apocalypse running on all four horses.
Tom Bombadil, nothing! Uncle Tom, nothing! Tom Thumb, nothing! But there’s another Tom, the most important Tom of all. And I don’t mean Tom Foolery or Tom Cat. Or even Tom Tom.
First the Confederate flag falls in South Carolina, and now this. I was standing in the check-out counter at Shop Rite and glaced at the headlines on the tabloids. What did I see on the cover of The Star? Tom “Risky Business” Cruise is leaving Scientology “for Suri,” his daughter. What I want to know is how this is going to affect Grexit and the future of the EU.
Dave Maier 07.07.15 at 12:17 am
Uh-oh, now Belle’s gonna be mad at us for stealing her thunder [re: Tom B.]. Sorry Belle!
re: Tom Cruise: you’d be surprised what you can learn in the checkout line at the supermarket. Apparently the First Marriage is on the rocks, with Michelle about to file for divorce! I guess Barack’s gay lover was the last straw.
Alan White 07.07.15 at 1:50 am
Belle, honestly, just take all your blog-posts, paste them together, and we’ll have a 21st century Ulysses. After all, it also appeared serialized first. BTW first-person rules; I wouldn’t write any other way; even if you fictionalize, just substitute yourself salva veritate.
Belle Waring 07.07.15 at 4:35 am
BARRY FREED DID I SAY, “BY ALL MEANS, STEAL MY THUNDER!” I DID NOT.
Belle Waring 07.07.15 at 4:43 am
Thank you Alan White, that is very flattering. I often feel that my inclined-to-be stream of consciousness posts are probably incomprehensible and disorganized. But I don’t know another way to write, really, so there you are. Well, I can write academic papers, too, but the appeal for them in the form of blogging is decidedly low.
Have you all seen the Venus/Jupiter conjunction? The sky is clear here in Bali, and even though the moon has been spectacularly bright, the stars have also been lovely. I love to see the Southern Cross; that, along with the calls to prayer from a mosque are the things that give me most the feeling I am truly in a foreign place. As a child I always wanted to travel and when I listen to the beautiful hymn from the minarets I am satisfied with my success, and bewitched by a series of thoughts imprinted on my at a young age my Sax Rohmer.
Bloix 07.07.15 at 1:14 pm
Puh-lease, cut the humblebragging. You’re totes aware that the oh-so-deliberate disorganization is part of the appeal.
“thoughts imprinted on my at a young age my Sax Rohmer.”
See? Even the proof-reading errors are charming.
Although I freely admit that I thought for a moment that Sax Rohmer was a musical instrument. Belle played sax? How interesting.
Belle Waring 07.07.15 at 2:03 pm
LOL. Me and by, obviously…
mdc 07.07.15 at 2:28 pm
Yes! Jupiter-Venus conjunction! Planets are the greatest: light-on, not light-through.
geo 07.07.15 at 5:23 pm
Lee@16: Most people in the developed world claim that race, wars of conquest, organized religion, and sexual orientation are distinctions of the past. They will not be tolerated any more, and good riddance to them
Which way to the developed world?
Belle Waring 07.07.15 at 5:26 pm
It’s in the Hollow Earth? Powered by vril, prolly?
Barry Freed 07.07.15 at 9:02 pm
I humbly beg forgiveness Belle but that piece was so good and I just couldn’t help myself.
Alan White 07.08.15 at 1:15 am
Thanks for the thanks Belle. I’ve written some fiction, even published some poems here and there, and gotten into some ok journals professionally. But no one at CT has a voice so winningly distinctive as yours.
And I’m an amateur astronomer to boot. Here’s a photo from a week ago of the conjunction:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/129932173@N06/19322141068/
Luckily I caught all 4 Galilean satellites spread out against the sky, although the far right one is a bit dim.
JAFD 07.09.15 at 6:33 pm
I moved to Newark last year. A much much better, safer, more interesting city than I’d been led to believe.
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