Palin’s Daughter Gives Birth to Son Named Tripp

Did her mother-in-law contribute to that name- you know, the one who was just arrested for narcotics?

An Israeli child lies in her bed in a bomb shelter at the Ashkelon Barzilai hospital in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, Sunday, Dec. 28. Wary of a missile strike from nearby Gaza, the largest hospital on Israel’s southern coast has moved into an underground bomb shelter.

This is the picture and caption of a lead story on MSNBC:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28413489

In the story, the White House blames Hamas for the Israeli offensive into Gaza. Hamas fired mortar and rockets into Israel, prompting an onslaught of Israeli force into Gaza, killing 360 Palestinians and injuring 1,400 others since Saturday. 17 Israelis have been killed since the January 2008. I’m not saying that the situation isn’t unacceptable for Israelis. I’m not saying that over at Al-Jazeera they’re not showing bodies of dead Palestinian babies. But shouldn’t US media be better than that? Don’t we have an obligation to be unbiased- challenge the norm?

In the article, the rationale behind blanket support of Israel is this: “Right now the people of southern Israel are not able to live in peace,” White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said in Crawford, Texas, where President George W. Bush is spending time at his ranch. “They have to live in bomb shelters a lot of the time. And that’s unacceptable.”

I am trying so hard not to get involved in this issue, because somehow Palestinian supporters are presumptively and erroneously labeled as pacifists or unpatriotic or (horror of all horrors) Muslim-lovers. But, anyone who can read past mainstream media coverage of the conflict would know that the Palestinians have been living under such an oppressive state for so long. There are laws mandating that they deserve less resources than Israeli citizens. We, ourselves, fought for equal protection under the law- that all men are created equal. Yet, I can’t help but see how we have relegated the Palestinian people to a subordinate status of mankind. We could create a ratio of worth- how many Palestinian children = one Israeli child. Why is outrage and mercy on the ready for the Israeli position, yet we have to scrape and clamor for such support for a Palestinian?

Guess what, folks. The Palestinians are themselves not a threat to the US. Yes, the Israelis have somehow become our strategic ally, but, ironically, that has made them our greatest threat to security. Allowing this constant abuse and oppression of the Palestinians is like giving arm to terrorists, or Islamic fundamentalists, who use the US’s blanket support of Israeli actions against the Palestinians, as fuel for the fire. Is it just? No Is it fair? No. But it’s the truth. This should have been our number one priority in “The War Against Terror.” This had the potential to silence so many whose focal point in their anti-American rhetoric is our treatment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Billions of dollar later. Thousands of lives lost. Are we more secure than after 9/11? Have we gained or lost allies? Have we increased or decreased the number of enemies we have worldwide? Change is in order.

And media outlets like MSNBC need to be more responsible in their coverage of international events. The public isn’t as naive as before to take the news that they proliferate as gospel.

I wrote this a while ago. It’s a true story. None of it James Frey-ed (though it’s totally G-rated). I think there’s a lot of truth to a girl going for the jerk. That’s why house, despite his limp, his wrinkles, and his bad hair is hot! As hard as I tried, I never liked a nice guy. And there are a lot of them. And many of them are good-looking, athletic, smart. But there’s something very unappealing about the guy who says and does all the right things. Case in point:

Case #1: Charlie

Sandy blonde hair, translucent eyes. Breaks multiple records in multiple sports. Intelligent and mature, despite the constant and unwilling companionship with “sportos,” whose only foray into literature is Sports Illustrated. At age 17, gives bone marrow to terminally ill younger sister.

Makes a date with 15-yr old girl for high school dance- agrees to pick her up at her house. She’s very pleased with her outfit: off the shoulder, quarter-sleeve, black stretch top, fuchsia bias cut skirt, variegated cotton scarf with metallic fuchsia threads used as waist sash, and black ballet flats.

Charlie brings her a corsage (she thinks it’s extraneous and tacky; the dance is not even a semi-formal!). He offers his arm and says something about a “chariot” and “awaiting her.”  As she steps through the black gate of her home made of white marbleized bricks, she stops abruptly upon viewing her chariot. It’s an aberration on an otherwise pristine canvas. It’s an early 1970’s green and white pick-up truck with what look like bullet holes splayed across the side, apparently where metal trim existed almost two decades earlier. Corroded metal frowns above each wheel.

He notices her dismay; he’s sweating like he’s just run one of his record-breaking dashes. She feels bad for him, and tries to rise above her affectations, by waxing poetic about the “character” of his vehicle.

He gallantly opens the door for her, ensuring that her skirt is not marred by the heavy door as he squeaks it shut. She’s not sure where to rest her hands. She doesn’t want to touch the sides of the door, with its gnarled, soiled vinyl. But, if she doesn’t anchor herself, she’ll slide right over the sun-sweating vinyl into his sweaty lap!

She risks neither, tightly clasping her hands in her lap and lowering the center of her gravity, negotiating turns with premeditated hip swivels. Right turn at stop light, left turn of hips.

He’s such a swell guy… chivalrous and well-mannered. Yet, she finds herself repulsed by the predictability of his etiquette- oozing compliments and gracious hand gestures. She feels like his mobile Price is Right stage. But, she’s at a school dance WITH him, and everyone knows it. The teachers at the door are so thrilled that two nice, decent kids have coupled up. The fast dances are breakaways, where she can shimmy over to her girlfriends. The slow dances are torturous. He kisses her, and she HAS to kiss back to avoid embarrassing him by shunning his advances- it would make the night so much more uncomfortable if BOTH of them were unhappy. After all, he has less bone marrow now!

At the end of the date, he has opened no less than 30 doors for her, gestured for her to go first at least 28 times, and told her she is beautiful more than 5 times.

He tells her what a wonderful time he has had. He kisses her good-night.  He says he’ll talk to her at school, walk her to her first class. Then, of course, he holds the door open for her, as she walks into the house.

She winces when she hears the squeak of his truck door shut, the sickly engine coughing its way over the sloping driveway. Then, she vows that she will never speak to him again.

BBC’s latest on the war in Gaza:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7802851.stm

So… it’s easy to see and read that there are abundant opinions on this subject. Round and round and round the subject goes. But after a while you realize that you’re wasting your breath. Doesn’t matter what you think. Doesn’t matter who you think has a better argument for violence (how insane). We cannot change the agenda of politicians and world leaders, as much as we’d love to believe we can.

After 9/11 I got two responses. One was from a general pacifist. She was so stricken with sadness at the loss of human life. And then she said something I had never heard before. She said, “I’m just trying to figure out what kind of life you must be living, how desperate you must be to allow yourself to recede into such evil thought.” My other friend (we’re actually not friends anymore) sent out a mass email that we should bomb Palestine and not leave a single human being alive (she was reacting to footage showing Palestinians celebrating). Both are extreme positions. I could react to both and break down their arguments. Again… waste of relatively decent brain cells.

Some arguments on the subject become really venomous and uncouth.  Point is— I’m going to try and disengage. Even the experts can’t agree on how to solve the problem. And I’m not talking about politicians. They’re not experts. And the “experts” they choose aren’t experts either because they’re hired to tow the political line with “expert” credentials. I think the greatest minds, the only ones who may be able to solve the Palestinian/Israeli issue without engaging in subjective banter are the historians and academicians who have the knowledge to understand the intricacies of the situation (and this is about as intricate as it gets!). Otherwise, it’s a foolish and bloody stalemate, folks.

Federal agents. They both lied to me. The man was playing the hardass- “we know what you did. Your friend Lacey told us everything. How you all got together on the night of ________ at this address and did LSD. Isn’t that right?”

Bullshit!

I nodded my head in defeat, wondering what the hell they had done to Lacey to have made her confess. Wondering how I could possibly let her take the fall for something that I had also done. I thought it was such an act of cowardice to save my own ass.

Bullshit!

Lacey hadn’t spoken to anyone. The female agent feigned sympathy. “I’ll make a note that it was your first time and that you are being so cooperative. I’m sure they’ll go easy on you. They may not even take any action against you, seeing how it was your first and only time.”

Bullshit! Bullshit! And a little more bullshit!

.

My oldest sister is 9 years older than me. When I was a teenager, growing up in a small Midwestern town (where I could hear the mooing cows across the pasture), she had just graduated summa cum laude from an Ivy League school on the East Coast. When she decided to take a year off after college, my parents seized up in fury and fear. But to the young girl surreptitiously listening in on the phone conversation, a year off in New York City was an adventure of a lifetime. She was a goddess to me.

Once or twice a year she would drive down from New York, bringing her vintage clothes and her vinyl records for a week. She was the urban rebel that I wanted to be. The Beatles, The Who, Led Zeppelin, Dylan, Joplin, the music of Motown. But one record I just couldn’t get enough of. I played it over and over again. I memorized the words that were written on the record sleeve. Perhaps it was the new wave cover, red and yellow, with the crazy pony-tailed rocker in the middle of it. When Friday Night Videos came on in the 80s, my brother and I would stay up late and watch, at all costs. The song “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” played for months. I didn’t recognize the singer. But I should have. How can you NOT recognize Cyndi Lauper.

But her early band, Blue Angel, swept me off my feet. Made me feel like I wasn’t struggling through my teenage years, worrying about whether or not I’d make captain of the cheerleading squad or if Alex REALLY liked me.

I wish I could find more of Blue Angel’s songs online— but here’s one of them. All hail to the New Wave queen: Cyndi Lauper.

From Wikipedia:

Blue Angel was the band that featured Cyndi Lauper before her rise to fame as a solo singer. The lineup also included John Turi on keyboard instrument and saxophone, Arthur “Rockin’ A” Neilson (guitar), Lee Brovitz (bass guitar) and Johnny Morelli (drums). The sound engineer’s name is Patrick P. Norton. Lauper and Turi wrote the bulk of their material, and the group also covered pop standards, such as Mann/Weil’s “I’m Gonna Be Strong” (which Lauper covered again in a 1994 album). Blue Angel was briefly popular on the New York club scene, playing a kind of retro-rockabilly that was then hip (see X, some early The B-52’s and The Cramps), but was far more accessible and romantic than many practitioners of the period.

Their only album, the self-titled Blue Angel, was released in 1980 to critical acclaim and moderate sales. It featured a sparse punk rock and New Wave-styled cover in primary red and floating band member photos.

I love, love, love this excerpt. Is it optimistic? I guess it depends on what happens in the end. It kind of reminds me of the Bush Administration. The “brilliance and salvation are all handed over to a moron—” it rings some bells.  It’s not an uplifting bit of post-Christmas prose, but I think it’s brilliant.

The Tragedy of Life

Excerpted from Memento Mori by Jonathan Nolan

Here’s the truth: People, even regular people, are never just any one person with one set of attributes. It’s not that simple. We’re all at the mercy of the limbic system, clouds of electricity drifting through the brain. Every man is broken into twenty-four-hour fractions, and then again within those twenty-four hours. It’s a daily pantomime, one man yielding control to the next: a backstage crowded with old hacks clamoring for their turn in the spotlight. Every week, every day. The angry man hands the baton over to the sulking man, and in turn to the sex addict, the introvert, the conversationalist. Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots.

This is the tragedy of life. Because for a few minutes of every day, every man becomes a genius. Moments of clarity, insight, whatever you want to call them. The clouds part, the planets get in a neat little line, and everything becomes obvious. I should quit smoking, maybe, or here’s how I could make a fast million, or such and such is the key to eternal happiness. That’s the miserable truth. For a few moments, the secrets of the universe are opened to us. Life is a cheap parlor trick.

But then the genius, the savant, has to hand over the controls to the next guy down the pike, most likely the guy who just wants to eat potato chips, and insight and brilliance and salvation are all entrusted to a moron or a hedonist or a narcoleptic.

The only way out of this mess, of course, if to take steps to ensure that you control the idiots that you become.

This is for my father, who is probably sitting in front of the television alone on this day. My mother is on-call at the hospital, much like my sister who is some 3,000 miles away. I’m with my husband and children, somewhere in the middle. But, when the six of us are together (my mother, father, two sisters, and one brother), my dad is the happiest DJ on earth. My mother doesn’t know a thing about his music. But with a little bit of Chivas, she becomes a dancing machine. Though Nat King Cole is his perennial favorite, Bing Crosby emerges at Christmastime. And then I feel like a little girl again. And there’s a warmth of heart that can only be felt at these particular moments of time. And then… it’s gone a few hours later, when my parents have retired to their rooms to watch their Asian movies and the kids are in the family room watching DVDs from Blockbuster. My oldest sister is punching the bottoms of the chocolate, leaving all the fruit-filled confections, and snapping up all the chocolates with nuts.

Christmas for our family was never a religious holiday. But… I’m thinking family can be a religious experience. Love you guys…

I had underestimated how much luggage space I would need for the culmination of four years’ living. It was a four-day weekend, and half of my peers were already gone. I had piled my belongings in a corner. There were too many bags to count. I sat on the edge of the bed looking at my things. Almost all of them were blue, with that all too familiar golden crest, mocking me with its ostensible grandeur. I felt irreconcilable sadness and anger. All of my things stained by the hypocrisy of those dirty blue Academy bags, the same Academy that I had hoped to love, aimed to please, and ultimately failed. All of my things that had belonged here for so long…

As I rolled the luggage cart out of the room, the plebe on duty sprang to attention. “Good afternoon, ma’am!”

“Hey Mr. H___,” I said. “Take care, be good, and good luck.”

“Thank you, ma’am. You too.”

He carried on, patrolling the hallways in his white security belt, a piece of adjustable corded cotton, with a silver buckle, passed on from patrolman to patrolman. He was shorter than me, skinnier than me, and less imposing than me, which isn’t saying much. I had trained him his first semester, and wondered how a young man with a squeaky voice and a penchant for classical music had ended up at the Academy. I suppose we’ve all got a story. He was later killed in Iraq in 2003.

“Go navy, sir! Beat army, sir!” I heard behind me.

I turned around. Three of my plebes stood before me.

“Ma’am,” one of them said, apparently the spokesperson. “We’re sorry about what happened, and we wanted to say good luck.”

One of the plebes wiped her eyes. Tears began forming, and with restraint they merely blurred my vision, without going anywhere, perennial tears lodged in my eyes.

“Thanks you guys,” I said. “I appreciate it. No matter what happens, just try not to give up,” I said. They all nodded their heads like they knew what I was talking about. “It really is worth it if you can get to the end.”

“Yes, ma’am,” they all said in unison.

“Okay, take care,” I said.

“Oh… and by the way,” I said as I turned around, only to find that they hadn’t moved yet, “call me Anne.”

We shared a smile, I slid into my jacket, and for the last time, walked out of the hallowed halls of Bancroft Hall.

LSD, was first synthesized in a laboratory in 1938, by Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman. First introduced for medicinal purposes (aren’t they all), its “extra-curricular” use got it quickly banned as an illegal substance.

The first time I was introduced to LSD was when my brother called home from a Rolling Stones concert. I was 15. He was 16.  He had gone away to an elite boarding school on the east coast. My parents sent him there for the education- and he got one. It was a very bizarre event.

My brother calls.

“Where’s mom. Dude! Where’s mom? I’m trippin’ on acid and I don’t know what to do.”

My mother gets on the phone.

“Jaaaake. Yeah, what’s wrong? Whaaat? (Even-toned voice). Okay, calm down. Jake, just go home and rest. You’ll be okay. You have someone drive you? (She’s Asian, with a fairly strong accent and hard to miss grammatical mistakes). Okay. Jake? Are you listening to me? How much did you take? Okay, then. Oh Jake, you stupid boy. Go home. Go home! Go sleep! Okay then, okay. Bye”

My mother puts the phone down. She doesn’t talk to me, but I can hear her relating the entire episode to my father in their native language. Then, they both shake their heads in disbelief or disgust or disappointment, and resume watching their rented foreign video tapes.

I can’t believe it. I can’t believe what just happened. The only explanation I can come up with is that because they are both doctors, they are so desensitized to medication and drugs that they just treat him like a patient. Detach themselves from his diagnosis.

Maybe this made it easier for me to throw away years of hard work for one drop of acid in the summer of 19__.