Listen, I love to hate Amanda Palmer. She bugs the shit out of me, but I’m morbidly fascinated by her lunacy. I do enjoy a very small handful of her songs. (Mostly it’s all whiny political bullshit and hey abortion is self care so suck it, which is not OK with me.) I’ve used a lyric or two in a photo caption. I even shot a self portrait for the Three Women Project that was a reinterpretation of one of her photos, though it was meant to be humorous (and I kind of got in a dig in the description). Plus I like the occasional Neil Gaiman photos, because despite his loony politics, I’m still a fan of his work. But she puts herself out there, with what I feel like is an open invitation for people to criticize her. I genuinely think she feels like it’s a win when people attack her.

This is less an attack and more of a wildly incredulous WTF is wrong with you  people?

I’ve been thinking about this post for days and I’m still pissed off about it. I read it Saturday and immediately sent it to my Ali and ranted about it and ranted about this mindset and thought that my usual routine of sharing with my closest and ranting for a bit would get it out of my system. But it didn’t. I’m still utterly flabbergasted that this is the way her evening went down, if this is indeed a factual representation of events.

Done reading it yet? Great. Please tell me I’m wrong in thinking that …

THERE ARE SO MANY WAYS that this problem could have been solved that did not include “sit around and tweet my despair for six hours waiting for an ambulance to arrive in a major metropolitan city.”

For instance: Put her in a car and drive her to A&E yourselves. (That’s what they call the ER over there in the monarchy, but just always makes me think of the cable channel on which I used to watch City Confidential.) No car? Call a taxi. Tag an Uber or Lyft. Take a bus. (You moved her so she’d be more comfortable, so clearly you weren’t that concerned about damaging her further.)

Or how about this? You spend your entire career crowdsourcing everything from props to places to play to places to stay. Why not instead of tweeting your despair, tweet a request for an EMT? Surely someone who is qualified could have been found. Call a private ambulance service – you most certainly have the money for it.

Failing all of that, stick her in a bloody wagon and walk her to Emergency.

But you didn’t do any of those things.

Instead, you bragged about treating them to a lovely meal, you bragged about trying to keep her spirits up with song, you only went to bed when they insisted on it. And you all just sat around waiting for someone else to come along and solve your problem for you, while you blamed conservatives for your woes and managed to turn this into a metaphor for America. Bet you still think socialism is the tits though, don’t you? How long do you think you’d have to wait for an ambulance in the U.S.? (From my Googling, it looks like the national average is around 14 minutes. Granted that’s subject to vary depending on location. 14 minutes. Not 6 hours.) What if she were having a fucking heart attack? You’d just sit there and watch her die, I guess. Because Tories.

But this just exemplifies for me everything I hate about progressivism: You won’t get off your ass and fix the problem. You fully expect someone else to do it for you. Tory cuts? Where do you think the money comes from? It’s like Margaret Thatcher said – (and obviously I’m paraphrasing) eventually you’ll run out of other people’s money. There’s no excuse for making that poor woman wait 6 fucking hours for an ambulance. You should have acted.

OK, I’m done now. It just makes me so angry. “If you can, you must” my ass. You tell this big tale of woe to say that help is not on the way, and yet, you still did nothing to help. You could have been the help. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there’s more to the story that she didn’t share. I don’t know. I wasn’t there, obviously. I would never have been invited. I can only go on what she chose to share with the world. And what she chose to share with the world is absurd. It could have been a post to say “I realize I should have been the help. I wish I had acted in this way.” But it wasn’t. It was a post to say America is doomed. Because Tories. Because conservatives. Because someone should be solving these problems for us.

I have no patience for that.

Mr. Rogers said look to the helpers. How about you just be a helper?

Also? That’s not how you use excoriating. Just FYI.

I just this morning finished reading The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism, by Katie Roiphe. Some of what follows here is the review I posted on Goodreads. Goodreads lets you link your activity to Facebook, and I would very much have liked to do that in this instance. But working, as I do, at a university, particularly in the college that has hosted the women I mention below, I find myself in the unenviable position of having to censor myself daily.

I came across Roiphe’s book excerpted in an article, which I can no longer recall. Something in Reason, maybe? That seems likely. First published in 1994, it was referenced in response to the recent barrage of reporting on campus rape, and the backlash of what have turned out to be numerous false accusations and outright fabrications, all in the name of “shedding light” on the campus rape epidemic. An epidemic, one could, and should, reasonably argue, is in the imaginations of the new feminists. The problems with perpetuating this mythical epidemic, lie not only in the way in which studies are conducted on the alleged instances, but on the very definitions of rape and sexual assualt. Roiphe addresses these issues, among others, in her book.

Roiphe’s biting analysis of the feminist mindset could just as easily have been written today as 20 years ago, from the persistence of the so-called “rape culture” to the very statistics being paraded around as “evidence” of a sexual assault “epidemic”. Working on a university campus, I can attest to the perpetuation of this clinging to victimhood, only now it has been ingrained in young women from birth by their mothers, the young women at Roiphe’s Take Back the Night rallies and Sports Illustrated protests.

The new feminists are determined to not only be treated as equals to men, but demand to be elevated to a higher status, a status that is somehow more delicate and sacred than men. Women want it both ways and decry the patriarchy when they are denied. Women today bemoan the alleged war on women while single mindedly waging a war on men. The self inflicted dichotomy of the victimized feminist is tragic, disappointing, and off putting. This is not the feminism I was raised to believe in. My brand of feminism – the ideal that I can do whatever I want so long as I have determination and a work ethic – is now considered the “wrong” feminism.

My outlook on the world is branded as anti-feminist. The message I get every single day, is that unless I toe the new feminist line, I am not a real woman; I am self hating; I am delusional; I am unable to think for myself (by which it is meant that I should let the new feminists think for me); I am brainwashed; I am oppressed by the patriarchy.

Camille Paglia put it best, I think, when she said “Feminism is dead. The movement is absolutely dead. The women’s movement tried to suppress dissident voices for way too long. There’s no room for dissent. Feminist ideology is like a new religion for a lot of neurotic women. You can’t talk to them about anything.”

I wish this book was required reading at our university, particularly in a time when we are bringing women – Anita Hill, Soraya Chemaly, etc. – to our campus to speak to our young women on these very topics, (from a decidedly and determinedly one sided ideological position.) The new feminists are right. I am oppressed. But they are my oppressors.

(quote circa may 2010, the bunny)

I’m a huge fan of the band the National.  I have gone entire days where the only thing I’ve listened to is Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers or High Violet.  I’ve never had the good fortune to see them live, but it’s on my concert wish list.  I happened to land on their site today, purely accidentally.  I followed a link from a link.  I don’t know.  I didn’t purposely go there.  But I was there so I clicked on the shop link out of curiosity and boredom and saw this. (Edit – Feb. 2018: This was originally a link to a tee featuring a photo of Obama that appears to no longer be available.)  And then I just got annoyed.  And a little disappointed.  And then I said a bunch of shit in my head.  And then I thought, “This seems to happen a lot.”

And by “this” I mean being suddenly severely disappointed by someone I had previously very much enjoyed.

The chorus of the song used on the shirt goes like so:
I won’t fuck us over, I’m Mr. November.
I’m Mr. November, I won’t fuck us over.

I’m sorry, but isn’t that precisely what that bastard did?  Didn’t he completely fuck all of us over?  Go ahead, call me a racist.  I’ve gotten used to it.  But take a really good look at where this country is today as opposed to where it was before “Mr. November” took office.  Gas costs twice as much.  We’re trillions more in debt with absolutely NOTHING to show for it, except oh, look!  GM is still in business.  So we got that going for us or something.  We have Obama Care.  Oh yay.  My insurance premiums have already gone up 40 dollars every two weeks since that passed, and I expect them to go up more.  We’re in yet another war.  We have the National Defense Authorization Act, which effectively strips each and every single one of us of our Constitutional rights on the whim of any asshole with some power.

This is Mr. November?  You can keep him.

But this all got me to thinking this, and this is really the real point of this post – I kind of hate knowing what my favorite musicians’ or celebrities’ political ideologies are.  On the one hand, I love knowing that Adam Baldwin, whom I adore, is a great big wing nut, but even he’s a little too right for me.  Sure, it’s comforting to know that there are some people out there who are well known Hollywood types who aren’t all progressive, nanny state, government is good loonies.   But it’s so disappointing when you find out for sure that some of your favorites are.

I’ll still listen to the National.  No question.  But now every time I hear Mr. November, I’m going to picture POTUS’s stupid face, and be disappointed all over again.