Heartache With Hard Work

I recently got one of the more bizarre promo e-mails I’ve ever seen. The whole thing was in mad-libs, for reasons completely unexplained. Fortunately, I managed to stem my befuddlement and listen to the songs because there’s nothing confusing about them, just a burst of rock and roll like I haven’t heard in ages.

The band is called Coffinberry, and you can talk about them with mad-libs, anagrams, whatever you like – just make sure you listen to this song:

Write This – Coffinberry

Actually, this song ain’t half bad either:

Earthworms In The Sun

I keep thinking Archers of Loaf, but you can pick the 80s and 90s indie rockers of your choice, and Coffinberry has probably got some of that going on. Call it derivative if you like. I’ll just call it rock and roll like it’s meant to be done. Remember when the Strokes were the next big thing? Well, Coffinberry kicks their asses.

The record is called God Dam Dogs.

It’s been a while since I’ve talked politics, so I’ll start with a smattering of thoughts on recent events before getting to the main discussion of voting rights.

First, let me direct your attention to a powerful post at Obsidian Wings about Mbaye Diagne and his role in personally saving hundreds of people during the Rwandan genocide 13 years ago. I’ve read a lot about Rwanda, but I had never heard this particular story. It made me cry, and also feel a fierce pride in the human race at the same time. It’s stories like this that remind me how important a single person can be.

Heroes – David Bowie
“And the guns, shot above our heads
And we kissed, as though nothing could fall
And the shame, was on the other side
Oh we can beat them, for ever and ever
Then we could be heroes, just for one day”

On the opposite side of the spectrum is global warming – a problem that is intensely communitarian and absolutely must be understood in that fashion. Climate change was the subject of one of my first politically oriented postings back in November, and I’m happy to report that a small, but meaningful, step has been taken to deal with the problem. Last week, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Mass v. EPA, siding with the states.

We spent the whole year arguing that Anthony Kennedy would be the crucial swing vote, and amazingly enough on the final day of the debate season, it turned out to be true. For the first time, the Court has recognized that litigants have legal standing on the issue of global warming, and it puts the burden on the executive branch to justify not regulating CO2 emissions. This administration seems unlikely to rise to the task, but it substantially strengthens the hand of whoever comes in on January 20, 2009.

Speaking of the election, what’s the latest in that neck of the woods?

First, statistics on first quarter fundraising have been released. The biggest story is Barack Obama raising nearly as much as as Hillary Clinton, and even beating her in terms of primary-money. Moreover, his funds came from 100,000 separate donors, which is a truly staggering number. We all knew this was going to be a record-breaking year in terms of the amount raised, but there is something special about raising $20 million from that many people. It means that a huge portion of Obama’s support came from ordinary people like me, donating the limited amount we can, rather than coming mostly from the super-rich.

My $50 doesn’t mean much on its own, but when combined with small amounts from thousands of others turns into something a little more profound. I like what it says about Obama’s campaign and about the level of political engagement from those hoping for a progressive change in the White House.

I will say, though, that at some level the amount of money being raised is depressing. We are talking about a billion dollars that will be spent by November, 2008. Imagine if that money went to something worthwhile.

Still, it’s nowhere close to how much the current administration has funneled into a war which has killed tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of people, or into tax cuts for the super-rich. A billion sounds like a lot but it still doesn’t really compare to what gets spent on making food with high fructose corn syrup or designer drugs for rich people or marketing the next terrible rock band. And if people are going to be spending tons of money on things that are existentially useless, I suppose politics isn’t the worst place for some of it to go. And if the end result can be a president with the desire and the mandate to make some serious changes, it will be money well spent in the end.

On the Republican side, Mitt Romney raised a ton of money but is still lagging far behind in every poll. Part of it may be due to distaste for his obvious pandering. In the most recent example, he recently claimed to have been a hunter for “pretty much [his] whole life” – by which he means he’s been hunting twice. I can’t decide whether it’s tragic or comic. That he feels the need to pander on the subject of guns is seriously depressing for what it says about the state of politics and personality, but it’s also just so ridiculous that I can’t help but laugh.

Happiness is a Warm Gun – The Beatles
“Lying with his eyes while his hands are busy working overtime”

The question I have for those who refuse to believe that one hunting trip when he was 15 makes him a bona fide hunter is whether they’re willing to extend the same logic to felons? After all, millions of felons are disenfranchised in this country, denied voting rights long after they have served their time in prison. According to this mentality: once a felon, always a felon; commit a felony at 18, and you still are denied the right to vote 50 years later. Apparently, to those in favor of disenfranchisement, a single action long in the past is enough to formulate one’s essential identity for the rest of their lives.

The issue is especially timely given that Florida governor Charlie Crist has put his substantial resources behind the effort to restore voting rights to felons in his state. To be sure, Crist’s revisions do not eliminate voting restrictions, but they do make the hoops far less burdensome to jump through, and will automatically restore rights to a substantial section of the population.

This is crucial. Although 48 states (excluding only Maine and Vermont who let anyone vote, even when they’re in prison) impose some restrictions on voting rights for felons, Florida’s rules were uniquely devastating, with a virtually absolute ban and a huge population making the state singlehandedly responsible for almost one-fifth of those disenfranchised nationwide by such restrictions. In their most recent elections, almost 1 million people in Florida were stripped of the right to vote. That is a staggering number, especially when you consider that over 200,000 of them are black men. That is almost ONE-THIRD of the black men in the state.

Mathematics – Mos Def
“And even if you get out of prison still livin’
join the other five million under state supervision
This is business, no faces just lines and statistics
from your phone, your zip code, to S-S-I digits”

And that is the crux of the matter. As offensive as the very notion of treating the right to participate in democratic politics as a legitimate punishment for a criminal violation may be, it is the obvious and disproportionate racial impact which makes felon disenfranchisement so far beyond the pale.

It should not be surprising that most felon voting laws were put into place during Reconstruction with the overt intention of limiting the democratic power of black communities. While states have been forced to re-tool their laws to remove the “intentional” discrimination, the effect remains exactly the same. The combined effect of racial bias in investigating and prosecuting criminal violations means that while the felon voting restrictions may be facially neutral, it is impossible to deny their intensely racialized effect.

These laws magnify the effect of a felony conviction, mark those who have committed a crime as a blight on the “just” community, flag them as dangerous to the very notion of politics, and in doing so reinforce the idea that there does (and ought to) exist a permanent underclass of those who have failed to meet our standards for political existence. The message from mainstream society is clear: “you are not a citizen and do not deserve the privileges which accompany citizenship.” This symbolic marginalization runs counter to every principle our country was founded on.

Moreover, felon disenfranchisement further disempowers those communities which already have the weakest voice by stealing millions of votes from communities who could use that leverage to make some small difference.

For a country that considers itself a democracy, that is beyond offensive.

So, for his efforts to lessen the damage of this policy, I commend Governor Crist for taking a political risk to do what is right.

I have to start out by saying this: I’ve always thought Jay Farrar was the better half of Uncle Tupelo, and apart from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot have found Son Volt to be the superior post-breakup band. Jeff Tweedy certainly has his thing going on, and I don’t begrudge anyone their excitement over the new Wilco record, but I have been far more expectant about The Search, Farrar’s follow-up to the good, but a little scattered Okemah And The Melody Of Riot. After hearing it, I am not in the least disappointed.

Farrar’s vocal range is as limited as ever, and his lyrics almost as cryptic, which is too be expected (and really, to be hoped for). But this is a more diverse collection of songs than most of his other work. At times more quick-paced and full (“The Picture” and the title track, for example), at others almost choral, he manages to extract more out of the alt-country genre than you might ever imagine was there. It’s not a radical change of sound, but it is a radical investigation of what goes into his sound. He takes it all apart piece by piece and reconstructs from the bottom up.

The melancholy butts heads with the exuberant, lost souls find themselves face to face with dead soldiers, autumn leaves fall gently around a couple holding hands on a park bench, you stare out the window as the country flies by and you wonder what lies just beyond the horizon – in the America that lives out of sight of the interstate highways. Ultimately, the details don’t mean much – the only truly important thing is to remember that there is always another hill to climb, another corner to turn. And that this is both a blessing and a curse.

The Picture

At its best, this produces songs as good as any Farrar has done. “The Picture” is the first single, and with its barrage of horns and jaunty beat, is one of the most exciting and breathless tracks I’ve heard in ages. Kicking off a string of killer songs to close out the disc, “Methamphetamine” features a guitar line to break your heart, which twines itself perfectly with plaintive vocals as good as you’ve heard since Trace. Shannon McNally stops by to harmonize on the drunken tear-jerker “Highways and Cigarettes.”

To be fair, this is not a perfect record. There are occasional missteps: the vague atmospheric-jangle of opener “Slow Hearse” doesn’t do a whole lot for me, and a few of the middle tracks could probably have been snipped without much harm. Still, part of the charm is the way Farrar dances lightly through a variety of tones and genres. And as great as “The Picture” is – the album is better for its depth of flavor.

It definitely falls into that category of records which sound far better when you listen the whole way through. Each song bleeds into the next and you begin to sense the underlying structure, the slow but subtle movement that guides each song inevitably into the next. It may be the most complete work Farrar has yet produced, which is really saying something.

Son Volt is playing in Boston on Sunday and assuming all goes as planned, I should be down there for the weekend and will hopefully get to see them.

Beautiful Life – Gui Boratto

It’s 8 1/2 minutes long, which feels like absolutely nothing, or maybe an eternity. Your whole body quickly falls into place – your heart beats with the song, you can feel it dancing on your skin, your muscles tense in time. You’re not listening to the song – you are become the song and it is you. Even more, you can’t really be sure there is anything other than the song, that there was ever a time before it, or could be one after. Before long, such questions themselves become meaningless as you start to truly grasp what is meant by infinity.

And then, it’s over, and you’re back outside wondering if it even happened at all, or if you’re now 510 seconds out of sync with the rest of the world.

You have a few seconds to ponder whether Gui Boratto is really a codename for some super-secret project delving into the deepest secrets of relativity, time dilation, and quantum mechanics before it starts over and you’re lost again.

I really do believe that if we ever do discover a way to build a Stargate, the only thing you’ll remember about traveling through these rifts in space-time will be the sound of “Beautiful Life.”

The album is Chromophobia, and if you ever find a way back to this plane of existence, you’ll want to get yourself a copy.

It’s difficult to write about The Radical Face because I feel an intense desire to compare them to about 100 different bands, but none of them seem quite right. It’s like when you meet a new person and they remind you in some indescribable way of every person you were friends with in high school.

At the risk of throwing you off track, here’s a quick list: Low, Sufjan Stevens, Bright Eyes, Ben Gibbard, and (despite my insistence last month that we really ought to stop saying that people sound like them) Arcade Fire. None of them is really an appropriate comparison. It’s more chamber-pop than Sufjan, less precious than Bright Eyes, more folky than Arcade Fire, and with an air that just doesn’t quite seem duplicable by anyone.

Instead of trying to draw difficult comparisons, let me recommend you simply listen for yourself:

Glory

The long, slow, Celtic-tinged and achingly beautiful introduction should be enough to make it clear that we are dealing with something special. Then the wordless chorus at about 2:30 makes your heart melt and you wonder where this song has been all your life. And I won’t even try to talk about what happens in the last minute. All in all, it’s epic in the most genuine sense of the word – it grows, expands, and transcends its own space and time. It is a song full of ambition that could easily have fallen flat but instead rises effortlessly to the heavens.

The record is called Ghost, and was released last month. “Glory” is the best song, but many of the others are nearly as good.

It seems like ages since I’ve posted something twee. Fortunately, the debut LP from The SoftLightes, the appropriately named Say No to Being Cool – Say Yes to Being Happy is here to save the day. It’s full of gentle and sugary twee-pop with just a tinge of atmospherics, reminiscent of Stars, the Postal Service, or some of the more fey Sarah Records bands.

You do need to be in the right mood (and you need to like this type of music to start with) or it might get a little grating, but if you like things a little cute, you probably will be well served to check them out. There’s not a bad song on the record, although there are a number of moments that cross the line from cutesy to cringeworthy.

Time will tell whether this has the staying power to stay with me for a while, but if the worst you can say about a record is that it’s very pleasant and just a little innocuous, that’s not too bad.

If the World Had Cookies
Heart Made of Sound

Finally back in Hanover after a very long, stressful, occasionally exhilarating couple of weeks in Oklahoma and Texas. This was the end of the season for debate, with the two national tournaments. Dartmouth made it to the final round of the CEDA National tournament and to the octofinals of the National Debate Tournament, and was also ranked as the #4 team in the country going into the NDT. One of the people on the team who won that tournament was actually my friend Aimi, who has a very nice music blog of her own: the monsters under the bed are not real, which you should check out.

It’s always weird when this time of the year hits – everything that I’ve spent the last 8 months working on constantly suddenly fades into the background, everything that I had put so much emotional investment in is concluded one way or another. This year it’s especially strange since I still have no idea where my life is going, if there’s a chance that I’ll be doing something seriously different from now on, and because I really have no plans for what to do over the next few months. On the ride back home last night, one of my all-time favorite songs came on. And while it always gets to me, it felt amazingly appropriate at that moment, because I really do have a sense of the terror and excitement of being in free fall:

Free Fallin’ – Tom Petty

One thing I can say for sure is that I’ve heard a ton of great music in the last couple months that I haven’t had the chance to write about, so I should be pretty busy with a great slate of music this spring. If you got out of the habit of coming by here while I was gone, you can start checking the bookmark again. There should be new content here pretty much every day.

For today, I’ll just leave you with a bunch of songs I’ve (mostly) already posted on, which formed the playlist that was pretty much my constant soundtrack over these weeks.

1. Goodbye – Asobi Seksu
2. 2006 – Hello Saferide
3. Bonnie and Clyde – Vanessa Peters & Ice Cream On Mondays
4. Number One – Darla Rose
5. (Antichrist Television Blues) – Arcade Fire
6. Blueprint for Departure – Bedroom Eyes
7. Reinvent the Wheel – Bright Eyes
8. Rise Up In The Dirt – Voxtrot
9. Don’t Lose Yourself – Laura Veirs
10. Past Belief – Dan Bern
11. Commencement Day – Blue Scholars
12. I Can Get Us Out of Here Tonight – Lucero
13. Smother + Evil = Hurt – The Kissaway Trail
14. Chemicals Collide – Cloud Cult
15. Samson – Regina Spektor
16. Dead Fish on the Banks – The Goodnight Loving
17. Sons and Daughters – Decemberists
18. The Rabbit and the Rooster – Lawrence Arms
19. 23 – Blonde Redhead
20. Australia – The Shins

I’ll be writing more about a couple of these soon. The Laura Veirs and Cloud Cult records, in particular, are fantastic and deserve a lot of attention. Until then, let me just recommend these two songs as highly as possible.

The next two weeks are the busiest (and most important) time of the whole year for me, so don’t be surprised if you don’t see any updates. Anything I do post will likely to be very short and will simply represent a song I’m enjoying at a time when I have five minutes to spare.

Given that, I won’t be able to talk about the new Modest Mouse until April, though I’ve already had a couple people ask me what I think. Short version: it’s alright, but a pretty serious disappointment compared to their previous work. With only one exception (the execrable “Fly Trapped in a Jar” which I still have not managed to make it through without almost injuring myself by lunging to hit the “next” button and make the hurting stop), the songs are at least decent, and quite a few are solid. But there’s very little that excites me. I’ll continue to listen to it, and maybe it’ll grow on me and you’ll get a more positive review in a few weeks. But for now, I give is a solid, but not particularly impressive 7.1.

If you want to see something that is impressive, check out this goal by the oft-maligned Ukrainian Andriy Shevchenko…

Simply stunning.

Finally, while I’m at it, here’s my 5-words-or-less reviews of a couple other records that will get greater attention soon:
Laura Veirs – Saltbreakers : Major step forward; beautiful
Cloud Cult – The Meaning of 8 : Best album of 2007? Perhaps
Voxtrot – Voxtrot : Stick to EPs
Son Volt – The Search : Haven’t had time to open

or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love

Today, as the war in Iraq enters its fourth year, with no end in sight, I want to reflect on where we all were before it all began. To that end, here’s something I wrote in February of that year, as the country was girding itself for war and many of us were wondering why the whole world had gone so mad and why there didn’t seem to be anything that could be done to stop it…

* * *

“Where do you move when what you’re moving from is yourself?”
Never Ending Math Equation – Modest Mouse (Building Nothing Out of Something)

Floating in the ocean, staring up into the sky. The current carries me off; I am nearly asleep. No movement except the gentle paddling of me feet. Lying in bed in the early afternoon with her head resting on my arm, her hair laying across the pillow, her hand in mine, our fingers intermixed. I kiss the top of her head and she moves to look at me, smiling. The lights of the city are long behind me. I turn off the car and step out into the cold night, look up into the dark night, shiver. Thousands of stars have come out of hiding. The milky way stretches across the sky. My muscles are weak. I’m crying. Why am I crying?

Pitch black. No movement. Only sound, like a steady heartbeat. My toes feel the tension, and then relax as the music flows through my body, tantalizes, and stretches me far beyond my immediate environment. I can feel myself floating away…

What have I left behind? I have given up so much but it is so difficult to quantify or even be sure anything is gone. I am constantly astonished to discover that I have become someone very different from my old self. Still, I have not lost myself. I still feel like the same person at times. I have not lost myself. I am constantly in motion is all. Life is negotiation.

It does seem, however, that the give and take has, of late, meant more and more compromises. I would call myself a pacifist, but I am uncomfortable about the question of violence. I would declare myself an idealist, yet I am pragmatic to a fault. I ask myself, is there no choice but to become more conservative, more boring, more content as time carries me along?

Gloria Anzaldúa came to Whitman last year. At dinner, she asked a question: “what is the biggest current crisis in your life?” I had no answer. My life contains no crisis. But on reflection I realized that was my answer. No crisis? One is building. This will not be an apocalypse. This struggle is against ten thousand miles of green grass in every direction with one road etching its way into the horizon, completely straight. I am moving but…what is there to be found? My crisis is lack of crisis. My heart churns with the need to be directed at something, someone, somewhere, anywhere. I write to discover a new direction – to generate a crisis within myself.

* * *

“There are plenty of warriors I know and love, people far more valuable than myself, who go to war each day, knowing in advance that they will fail. True, they are less “successful” in the most vulgar sense of the word, but by no means less fulfilled.”
–Arundhati Roy, “The End of Imagination”

As I stare at my computer screen, I ponder the latest news on Iraq. Hans Blix has issued a deadline of March 1 to begin destruction of its weapons of mass destruction. Like all of the previous deadlines, this one will likely pass without significant event, but will draw the world ever closer to an outright war. My purpose in writing is not to talk about whether such a war is justified; I feel that it is not, but I am not writing a manifesto. Instead, I propose to write about myself, my life, and the beauty that surrounds me. I hope that by doing so I will communicate the value and importance I place on life of every kind, the great gift that we are all given. I hope that I can in some small way help myself come to terms with the horror, the disgust, the pain, and the violence. I write tonight because to not write would be to sacrifice the part of myself that still believes a world can be discovered that is less obsessed with violence, less reliant on dispossession of those who are different.

The people who may die in a war have nothing to do with me, except…they do. They are being and will continue to be killed in my name, as a tax-paying citizen of the United States of America, a voter in the land of the free. The threat posed to national security, to my security, has been leveraged to create this war. If I am to come to terms with myself, then I must come to terms war—not just this particular war, but all wars. It is the attitude of war, the ubiquity of militarism, that concerns me.

The sticking point for me is not the horror of war – anyone who has read All Quiet on the Western Front, watched footage of Vietnam, or talked to anyone who was actually on the front line is fully aware of its terrible reality. However, what constantly eludes me (and I think most people) is the utter stupidity, the banality of war. The carnage on the ground is real, so real that it becomes hard to look out without wincing, without shuddering. The reasons for war, however, are obscured behind layers and layers of diplomacy, of hidden agendas, of mistaken assumptions. The question I want answered is this: How can we fight wars when we all know how terrible they are? How can we not have come up with a better way to resolve disputes?

Perhaps I have a responsibility to finding a better way. If nothing else, I believe I have a responsibility to speak out, to formulate my objections. I was at home last weekend as the protests occurred across the country. I considered attending, but several things prevented it. Most importantly, I was hours away from the nearest location in Seattle – to attend would have meant not seeing my family on one of the few days I have had a chance to see them this year. I asked myself what protest would have been meant to accomplish. I would not have been going with the belief that my presence would result in a monumental political change; I would have been going because events such as these force me to remember why life itself is so very important. I would be attending as a show of solidarity, to demonstrate my own emotions, to try and come to terms with my role as a citizen of a state that kills.

I was unconvinced that a protest would help me with those goals. I decided that the best way I could respond to life being taken from people in Iraq would be to pay very careful attention to my own life and remember the beauty I encounter every day, to reflect on the wonder of the world that no amount of violence can ever truly kill, to sit with my family and talk about the war, but also to sit with my family and talk about our own lives. I feel the same way tonight as I write. Because on a day when the very existence of many human beings is threatened, on a day when thousands around the world are dying, on a day that is really no different than any other day in that it contains the most astounding instances of beauty as well waves of misery and pain, on such a day I will not let myself be made numb, I will not let my voice be confined to a single form of resistance accepted by the state, I will say what I have to say and smile like I’ve never smiled before and cry like it was the world’s last day.

Because it is the last day for so many, as well as the first day for many others. I can never forget this, for it is this cycle of renewal that enables me to remain sane. The things that are most beautiful are those that can hurt us the most. Life itself is the most profound and wonderful thing in the world. In it is contained every twinkling star in the sky, every smile, every kiss, every heartbeat, every mother and every father. A universe in which none of these things mattered is almost beyond my comprehension.

Still, I do not mean to imply that those who go to protests are in any way wasting their time or that my choice to stay and write and talk is somehow superior. It is the choice that made sense for me, and the choice that made sense for them. For all of us, I hope that our choices help us become better people. Will I indeed become a better person? It depends. The chances of me consistently acting in ways that are beneficial to myself and my ideals are small. Fortunately, such a measurement is not necessary. I try, and that is not enough, but it is something. No matter what I do, no matter what happens, I have give myself over to believing in belief itself.

* * *

“I was thinking about how everyone is dying
And maybe it’s time to live”
P.S. You Rock My World – Eels (Electro-Shock Blues)

I do not propose that we ignore terrible things in our lives and just hope they disappear. Indeed, such an approach is exactly the problem. People who live their lives on Novocain may be free from pain but they are barely alive. Life hurts sometimes; this is an unfortunate reality. Or maybe not so unfortunate. I am not sure I want life if it doesn’t include hope, love, and beauty, and inextricably tied to all these things are risk and the potential for monumental pain. If all I have to look forward to is the opportunity to survive until the next day, I cannot say that I am really alive. Instead, I will seek out beauty every place I can, I will hope beyond all reasonable expectations, I will believe that even the worst people and the worst things can be made right once again.

This is difficult because I do not believe any of us are entirely free from evil. I discriminate unconsciously, sometimes even consciously. I am not proud, but it is difficult to stop. I feel fear and mobilize that fear toward violence. I search myself and discover that there is nothing about George Bush that intrinsically separates him from me. Given certain circumstances, I might be capable of ordering violence. I can sense the persuasive appeal of his arguments, even. Saddam Hussein is not a very nice person – I must admit that if something could be done to end the threats posed by him to the world, to his own citizens, I would be amenable. The line between “doing something” and “going to war” is wide, but not impassable.

But the opposite is also true: I do not believe the capacity for goodness can be completely stamped out. I will not let it happen. You cannot give it to me. We, like most everything else in this crazy world are a mixture of colors, emotions, dreams, desires, hopes, hatreds, and compassions. If no firewall exists between “doing something” and “going to war,” then the true battle is whether we can teach ourselves to occupy a non-violent space. I am perpetually struggling to free myself from struggle. I am fighting to end the need to fight. This battle, however, defies my imagination, defies my ability to graph and chart, to plan and organize. There is no opposing army, no Nazi Germany to attack within the confines of my own soul. Every time I try to identify evil, I am left wondering what I am even thinking about, where in myself I can find the characteristics that I want to call evil. It is too conceptually elusive for my mind to comfortably understand.

Ultimately, I believe that evil is not the real problem. The primary enemy is simple ignorance. Hatred is very rarely driven from the core of one’s being. Most often, it is simply a matter of being afraid of that which we don’t understand, that which is different from us. We see murderers and want to demonstrate how far beyond the pale their crime is in comparison to the terrible things we all do in our own lives. This black man killed a white woman? Death to him. My company dumps nuclear waste on Indian reservations…that’s just life.

So really, my hope is that on nights like these I can think just a little about the piece of a murderer that exists within me and realize all the reasons why that part of me has not taken over. Instead of fearing difference, I have tried (not necessarily succeeded) in seeing difference as beauty. I stand outside looking at the stars and the moon. There is something that almost transcends beauty about the night sky on a peaceful night. It is because I can remember things like this that I am able to face the everyday horrors that life inflicts on us. Tonight I am thinking about civilians in Iraq but I am also thinking about music that makes my hands shake and my muscles tingle. I doing so I discover that we solitary idealists may indeed have something to contribute. Perhaps it is simply our capacity to care, to struggle against all odds with no belief that struggle will result in change. We struggle simply because to be human is to struggle. To be human is to find something worth caring about and to live it out as best we can.

* * *

“Love is free, free is love
Love is living, living love
Love is needing to be loved”
Love – John Lennon (Plastic Ono Band)

What do I care about? In some sense, it is far beyond the scope of words to describe—it seems almost offensive to confine it with language, to force a structure on a concept that surpasses structure. Still, it deserves to be exhumed and be given a moment in the sunlight. In one word, I would simply name it love. Call me a hippy if you like, but I have found no concept better suited for explaining my existence. My experiences on this earth, every person I have known, every time I have cared, every time I have cried, all of these things and infinitely more have contributed to me. The beauty of this world can only be explained once I realize that it is only beautiful because I can see it as such.

Love is anger, but love is not hatred. Love is the way I can hate being hurt and hurting, the way I can hate the whiteness of my skin and the way I can hate that I am a man. Love encompasses hate; it supercedes it and makes it into something new. My hatred grows and is nurtured. It emerges as a butterfly stripped of its violence.

Love is embarrassment. Love is feeling like a fool for hoping. Love is the realization that I will not find a person who is perfectly matched with me. Love is the knowledge that we will get into fights and we will bicker and argue and we will sometimes not want to talk to each other. Love is knowing that all of this simply means that beauty is real and not a myth, not a plastic creation. If love were perfect and easy, it wouldn’t be love; it would be an advertisement. When it is painful and hard and scary, it is life.

Love is magic. Love is waking up from a dream and not knowing which is real. Love is a smile. I can lose myself forever in some people’s smiles. Love is tears. Love is tears. I cry and the world washes away. Love is not being afraid to cry because it makes me look weak. Love is not having to cry because I don’t need to be strong. Love is a world at peace. Love is imagination. Love is finding someone who sees me as something beautiful. Love is knowing that I am beautiful. Love is becoming beautiful because someone believes that I am.

Love is separation. Love is knowing that I am a white heterosexual male, aged 17-65. Love is opening myself to pain and suffering because in that opening lies the possibility that those who don’t have the choice to shut out their otherness can find me and I can find them. Love is the fear that in doing this I am only re-asserting my power. Love is the terror that I am doing harm to others. Love is the terror…the terror of not knowing. Love is finding a part of me that no one has ever seen and showing it to the world, even though the world doesn’t care and doesn’t want to know. Love is fear. Fear of atomic bombs and mushroom clouds, of environmental destruction and gun shots, of burning swastikas and hateful stares. Love is a hug that can make all of this go away. Love is a hug that can’t make any of it go away but can create something beautiful to struggle against it. Love is my desire. Love is overcoming fear. Love is affirmation. Love is life. Life is forever.

I speak a word and the world changes. I write to re-discover the part of myself that feels this way. The words convey something profound, not because of how they are framed or my technique. Their profundity arises from their simplicity. I love you.

This is seriously unacceptable:

BECK: I don’t want to sound like the old ball-and-chain guy, but Hillary Clinton cannot be elected president because — am I wrong in feeling, am I the only one in America that feels this way? — that there’s something about her vocal range. There’s something about her voice that just drives me — it’s not what she says, it’s how she says it. She is like the stereotypical — excuse the expression, but this is the way to — she’s the stereotypical bitch, you know what I mean? She’s that stereotypical, nagging, [unintelligible], you know what I mean? And she doesn’t have to be saying — she could be saying happy things, but after four years, don’t you think every man in America will go insane? Is it just me? I mean, I know this is horrible to say, but I mean it not — I would say this if she were Condi Rice and she sounded like that. Condi Rice doesn’t have that grate to her voice. You know what I need to do? I need to talk to a vocal expert, because there is a range in women’s voices that experts say is just the chalk, I mean, the fingernails on the blackboard. And I don’t know if she’s using that range or what it is, but I’ve heard her in speeches where I can’t take it. […]

BECK: Am I alone? Dan [Andros, producer]? Have you noticed that about her?

ANDROS: Oh my gosh, she could be talking about how she’s giving every American a million dollars, and I’m hearing, “Could you take out the garbage now, please?”

I strongly agree with Garance Franke-Ruta at TAPPED who notes that: “When Ann Coulter called heterosexual John Edwards a “faggot,” the blogs erupted. But when someone calls the Democratic front-runner, who is female, a “bitch,” we get total radio silence.” This is just as offensive, just as revealing of a bigoted attitude toward women, probably even moreso. It is a clear attempt to imply that it’s perfectly normal and justifiable to think that women have no place in politics because any time they grow powerful enough to be threatening, they must ipso facto be a stereotypical “bitch.”

That such misogyny can come out of the mouth of a prominent political commentator with no apparent consequences is, frankly, disgusting.

You may not like Hillary Clinton’s politics much, but if you let them get away with smearing her because she sounds threatening to their masculinity, you are doing a huge disservice to Democrats, progressives, women, and men. We may criticize Hillary and we may or may not decide to nominate her, but she is part of our family, part of our society, a long-time and dedicated public servant, and an important example that women are powerful and meaningful political agents on their own terms. And we will absolutely not stand to have her slandered like this.

The Bitch Has Done It Again – The Stomps