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You and what army, Condi?

When I mentioned the other day that I wouldn’t want to see McCain choose Condoleeza Rice as as his running mate, it was because she says the kind of thing she’s been saying a lot since the Russians invaded Georgia. My initial reaction to all the the Secretary of State’s “Russia must withdraw from Georgia” pronouncements was that the Russians would respond, “You gonna make us? You and what army?” That’s why countries have big armies. The Romans knew that in the early days of their empire. So did the British and Americans in the early days of theirs and ours, respectively. All too many Americans, Dr. Rice among them, have forgotten this basic fact of political life. The Russians have not, as several scathing pieces about Rice in Pravda this week show. An August 18 Pravda article called “Is Condoleeza Rice stupid?” asks rhetorically,

Has the US Secretary of State got her cassette stuck? For a week now she has been reiterating the same phrase “Russian forces must leave Georgia now” and for a week now the world has been informed of Georgian war crimes against Russians in Ossetia. The war crimes happened, the Russians call the shots now, Ms. Rice. Like it or lump it.

This isn’t the first time Pravda has insulted Secretary Rice. A 2006 article in called “Condoleezza Rice’s anti-Russian stance based on sexual problems” quotes Vladimir Zhirinovsky as saying that Rice made anti-Russian statements

“because she is a single woman who has no children. She loses her reason because of her late single status.”

While I certainly do not agree with Zhirinovsky’s sexist and simplistic psychoanalysis of her, I have to say that there is one way in which having children might have helped Rice to understand the Russians better, and to realize that some people — like Russians and two-year-olds — see right through empty threats that aren’t backed up by swift and serious consequences. After we saw Will Farrell’s “Good Copy, Baby Cop” You Tube video, my husband and I started calling our daughter Tessie “The Lieutenant.” That kid was is a tough cookie. Some children are docile and agreeable. I was, according to my parents and all my relatives. My children aren’t. I have three (still too early to tell about the fourth) very strong-willed children. I suspect that Teddy “Speak softly and carry a big stick” Roosevelt may have had his political philosophy honed in the hard-knocks school of parenthood. TR is said to have said about his strong-willed daughter Alice, “I can be president of the United States or I can attend to Alice. I cannot possibly do both.”

Condoleeza Rice may not have had an Alice Roosevelt or a Theresa Russell to teach her that empty threats get you nowhere, but she could have learned the same lesson by reading Machiavelli or Sun Tzu. Either way, our nation’s highest diplomat ought to know better than to keep threatening loudly when all her sticks are busy in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Posted 21 August 2008 † Brigette Russell § Parenthood § Politics ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged: , , , , , , , ,

When voter apathy is a good thing

It has become a commonplace in American political discourse to lament the number of people who do not vote, and to see increased voter participation as a panacea for our political problems. I beg to differ. There are already enough ignorant, ill-informed people voting as it is. We need more like we need the proverbial hole in the head.

The front page of today’s Santa Fe New Mexican announces, “Disenchanted Dems to launch PAC for Lass,” referring to Rick Lass, Green Party candidate for Public Regulation Commission. Why are Democrats backing a Green instead of their own guy? Because their own guy is Jerome Block, Jr. The article quotes Santa Fe Democratic Party ward chairman Bernie Logue y Perea as saying,

“I’ve had people come up to me saying, ‘Hey Bernie, we’re pissed off because we voted for Jerome thinking it was the dad, and not the kid. The kid’s an idiot.’…When I saw Rick Lass was running, the thought of (Block Jr.) walking into a $90,000 a year job when he doesn’t deserve it just infuriated me.”

Maybe that’s how my home state of California got saddled with “Governor Moonbeam” back in the ’70s — people thought they were voting for Pat Brown (Edmund G. Brown, Sr.) instead of Jerry (Edmund G. Brown, Jr.)?

Personally, I think we have enough stupid people voting already. Okay, maybe not stupid, but at least uninformed, or simply too lazy to find out who is running for public office and what the qualifications and positions of the candidates are. I realize political literacy tests smack of elitism, and that they conjure up the specter of the old Jim Crow South, where such tests were used to keep blacks from exercising their constitutional rights. If such tests could be administered fairly, however, they might not be such a bad idea. In the case of the PRC race, it would have saved the Democrats from being saddled with a candidate whom Democrats themselves consider an idiot.

Posted 20 August 2008 † Brigette Russell § New Mexico § Politics ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged: , , ,

Sarah Palin for Vice President

Google “Sarah Palin Vice President” and you’ll be amazed at the number of links the search generates. Those of you who are hard-core political blog junkies already know this, but those of my readers who visit Moralia for my non-political posts may not know much about this young (for a politician) woman who is on John McCain’s short list of potential running mates.

Born in 1964, the same year I was, Sarah Palin is the Republican governor of Alaska, the youngest governor ever elected in that state. (She was 42 at the time.) She and her husband Todd Palin, a commercial fisherman, have five children, the eldest a son who enlisted in the U.S. Army at age 18 last year, the youngest a son born with Down Syndrome earlier this year, and three daughters in between. McCain also has a son serving in the military, and if he does choose Palin, the ticket will be the first in a very long time in which both candidates have sons who would be put in harm’s way as a result of U.S. military policies. Certainly a McCain-Palin administration could not be accused of unfeelingly sending other people’s sons off to fight their wars.

Pesonally, I would love to see McCain choose Palin, and not just because I’m a woman and want to see a woman as president or vice president. I wouldn’t have voted for Hillary if she’d won her party’s nomination, and I’d be disappointed if McCain chose Condoleeza Rice as his running mate, as some pundits have suggested. It’s because I think a McCain-Palin ticket would both energize the Republican base, and attract a lot of moderate and independent voters, particularly younger people and younger women especially.

To find out more about Sarah Palin, check out Adam Brickely’s blog Palin for VP, which has links to dozens of news stories and websites about the Alaska governor and her qualifications for national office.

Posted 19 August 2008 † Brigette Russell § Politics ‡ Comments (3) ° Tagged: , ,

Hate Kate

I was absolutely blown away by the number of hits this blog got after I posted my “Lazy shrew and breeder pig” post. I had no idea how many people Google the Duggars and the Gosselins. Especially the Gosselins. Especially Kate Gosselin, whom people (mainly women, from what I can see) apparently love to hate. The statistics program that tells me how people find my blog revealed a staggering number of searches for Kate+Gosselin+shrew, Kate+Gosselin+lazy, Kate+Gosselin+insane, and so forth.

Off-line, out in the real world, I got a visceral reaction to a casual remark about Kate Gosselin recently. I had taken my children to the park and there was a woman there who had twins somewhere between one and two years of age. We talked a bit, and I mentioned a friend of mine who had triplets a few years ago, and said something to the effect of, I know it must be incredibly hard, but just imagine what it’s like for those families with quadruplets or more, like the Gosselins with their twins and sextuplets. The woman at the park immediately retorted, “Those people are insane. No one should be having that many kids. I mean, it’s crazy. Don’t you think it’s crazy?” I didn’t say anything, because the only alternative to having triplets or sextuplets or whatever is to have selective reduction, and like Kate Gosselin, I wouldn’t have done it, would have taken my chances with the sextuplets despite medical advice to the contrary. From her reaction, I got the impression that perhaps this woman’s twins had started out as a larger set of multiples and she and her husband had decided (or their doctor had convinced them) to undergo selective reduction. My friend who had triplets was pressured by her doctor to reduce, and so was Kate Gosselin, as the Gosselins relate on their website. Another woman I know did undergo the procedure, allowing her doctor to abort two of her quadruplets so that she could carry twins to term. The twins were fine, but the mother later attempted suicide, and I cannot help but think that looking at her children and asking herself, “What if the needle had gotten this one?” might have contributed to the despair that drove her to try to take her life.

Obviously, there are a lot more people who hate Kate Gosselin than there are women who have undergone selective reduction of multiple pregnancies. Much of the antipathy stems from other causes: Kate’s a TV star and those women aren’t; Kate makes a lot of money off her kids and other women either think it’s exploitative, or wish they could make some cash from the kids themselves; Kate got a free tummy tuck as a result of the TV show, and the rest of us are just living with the ravages of childbirth; Kate gets testy and loses her temper on camera, and since nobody’s filming the rest of us, we can be sanctimonious and pretend we never do asinine things ourselves.

Posted 14 August 2008 † Brigette Russell § Parenthood § The Culture Wars ‡ Comments (2) ° Tagged: , , , , ,

Definitely not good eats

Last week’s installment of Tantri Wija’s weekly column in the food section of the New Mexican, “Bacon is the New Black,” was particularly clever, skewering the food-trendiness of recent decades “with chefs stacking tiny little squares of shaved daikon radish and beef carpaccio atop one another in artistic towers that look like hats from Fellini movies.” A food trend Wija likes (and so do I) is the return of bacon from its exile during the health-crazed late seventies. I love bacon, and eat it happily with eggs and pancakes, in salads and sandwiches, in potato gratins and whatever else it seems to go with. But not with chocolate.

Yes, I said chocolate. According to our local food critic, our local Whole Foods Market sells a concoction called “Mo’s bacon bar” which contains applewood-smoked bacon. Being a food writer and obviously a good sport, Ms. Wija bought the thing and tried it.

It was amazing. It made me kind of nauseous, but it was amazing. The bacon fat married in a deeply disturbing way with the chocolate to create the culinary equivalent of sex with your boyfriend’s best friend.

I was half hoping she was pulling our leg about the whole thing, so just to make sure I googled “chocolate+bacon” and sure enough, confirmation was forthcoming. Not only can you buy chocolate bars with bacon in them, but there’s even a store that sells whole slices of bacon dipped in chocolate.

Now, I’ve always been a fairly adventurous eater. I’ve tried snails, frogs’ legs, kangaroo (yes, really — and in Paris, even). I’ll try just about anything once that doesn’t contain insects. But I have no plans to head off to Whole Foods and pay $8 for a candy bar with pork in it. As I might have said four decades ago, “I would not, could not, Sam-I-am.” As I would have said three decades ago, “Eeew, gross!” Now I’ll just borrow a phrase from my favorite TV cook, the science-geek culinary genius Alton Brown, and say, “Definitely not good eats.”

Posted 13 August 2008 † Brigette Russell § Food ‡ Comments (2) ° Tagged: , , , ,

Green elephants on parade

Swing State of Mind (I love that name) linked to my post endorsing Rick Lass for PRC, with a cute green elephant graphic. Honestly, I am still reeling from the insufferable pomposity of Jerome Block’s refusal to debate Lass. I’ve commented on this before, but re-reading Block’s priggish, elitist response to Lass on Steve Terrell’s blog gets my blood boiling all over again. Block writes:

You and your supporters tout you as the “qualified candidate”. While there is nothing wrong with your real life experiences and employment as a pizza delivery person and a food market clerk, I do not feel it qualifies you to be a PRC commissioner. You mention, repeatedly, your advocacy for voting initiatives. Perhaps you are not aware that the PRC does not deal with voting issues. Perhaps you would consider applying your self-professed talents to running for county clerk in 2012.

My dad was a food market clerk. One of my dearest friends worked as a food market clerk very recently. Both are very smart, very well read, self-educated people. Maybe their daddies weren’t well-connected politicos like Block’s (or Ben Ray Lujan’s, for that matter) but they’re a hell of a lot smarter (and certainly nicer) than I get the impression Jerome Block is.

Grocery store clerks and other workng people of New Mexico, unite! Lass for PRC Commissioner!

Posted 12 August 2008 † Brigette Russell § New Mexico § Politics ‡ Comments (6) ° Tagged: , , ,

Imperfect Parent blogger of the week

Imperfect Parenting has named my humble little Moralia their parenting blog of the week. Toward the end of August the site will having voting for blogger of the month, and I’ll be in the running. Stay tuned.

Posted 10 August 2008 † Brigette Russell § Parenthood ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

Post-partum politics and more

Not one post for over a week, then I finally resurface for a catty two-paragraph fluff piece about a sex scandal. Where is the substantive piece I wanted to write? Maybe something about the always entertaining Jerome Block, whose opponent Rick Lass I met last week. Lass seems like a nice fellow, and though Republicans and Greens are usually on opposite sides, I’m supporting him on the Machiavellian “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” principle. But no. I didn’t write it. And what’s my excuse?

My excuse will be one month old tomorrow, and she never stops eating, especially at night. She’s growing like a weed, and no wonder, with all that formula she’s putting away. Yes, I said formula. I’m one of those awful mothers who doesn’t breastfeed her children. Go ahead, call CPS. But if my husband wasn’t doing some of the night feedings, I think I’d have had a nervous collapse by now. As it is, I’m tired enough, and my ability to focus on serious issues is suffering. Fortunately, I’ve been through this three times before, so I know it will pass. With my first and third daughters, it passed when they started sleeping through the night at around two months of age. My second daughter woke up hungry in the middle of the night until she was a year and a half old, and I was seven months pregnant with my third. God help me if this child does the same.

Today I can’t write anything substantive because I have a Barbie cake to make. I made one for my 7-year-old’s party last month, so naturally my 5-year-old insisted on one for her party tomorrow. Making something that labor-intensive was a foolish precedent to set. Plus I got sloppy and didn’t level the tops of the layers carefully enough, so poor half-dressed Barbie is listing dangerously to starboard at this point.

Speaking of foolish, I also agreed to host a political fundraiser in two weeks for our district’s candidate for Congress. My husband and I have attended our share of these things, but this is our first time hosting one. Timing could have been better than six weeks post-partum, but the election is fast approaching, and this time around it looks like our heavily Democrat district might actually have a fighting chance of electing a Republican, in part because there are five candidates running, three of whom are likely to take votes away from the Democrat. In addition, Dan East, Republican candidate for New Mexico’s third congressional district, is a strong candidate who, besides having solid conservative credentials, is personable and makes a very favorable impression that may well sway independents and undecided voters.

Okay, time to go check on Barbie in the fridge and the meatloaf in the oven. Hopefully Portia will start sleeping through the night soon and I’ll be back in full blog swing again. In the meantime, I’m keeping my head above water with the help of the most wonderful plant in the world. Yes, my dear readers, my taste for black coffee returned the day after I gave birth. I have no explanation, either for the pregnancy-induced aversion or for its abrupt disappearance, but I am a very happy woman because of it. The Lord is, indeed, kind and merciful.

Posted 09 August 2008 † Brigette Russell § New Mexico § Parenthood § Personal § Politics ‡ Comments (7) ° Tagged: , , , , , ,

That’s the best John Edwards could do?

Normally, I moralize. I am filled with righteous indignation about this, that and everything. But today my shallow side has won out, and I find myself staring, aghast, at the skanky blonde who is pretty boy John Edwards’s undoing, and asking myself, “For heaven’s sake, couldn’t he do better than that?”

Yes, yes, I feel sorry for Mrs. Edwards and her children. Yes, yes, I know he shouldn’t have been sowing his wild oats with anyone. Marriage is a sacrament. Adultery is wrong. I believe all that. I really, truly do. But for heaven’s sake, let’s talk real world for a minute: he’s a really handsome guy who was this close to the presidency. Couldn’t he do any better than that?

I’m not just talking about her looks. I saw her interviewed on CNN today, and…well, to be honest, she sounded as dumb as a post. And the You Tube videos he paid her a hundred grand plus to make for his website? Well, they’re downright embarrassing. I hope she was worth it, um, elsehwere, Mr. Edwards. She must have been, because otherwise…well, good Lord, Mr. Edwards, what were you thinking??????

Posted 09 August 2008 † Brigette Russell § Politics ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged: , ,

The lazy shrew and the breeder pig

Last year there was a discussion on an e-mail list I’m on about the Duggars, the notoriously large family of 17 (soon to be 18) children. There were comments about how that was too many children to give individual attention to each, a snide comment or two about Mrs. Duggar’s hairstyle, and the general consensus seemed to be that the Gosselins were a more “real” family to whom my list-mates could relate because the Duggars seemed too scarily perfect in a Stepford sort of way.

At the time, I had heard of the Duggars but not the Gosselins, but hadn’t seen either family on TV. Curious, I searched the TV listings, found the Gosselins’ show John & Kate Plus 8 (a regular series) along with a show about the Duggars (who do not have a regular series; I know of only two documentary-type shows featuring the family). I watched the Duggar documentaries and a couple of episodes of John & Kate, and did some online reading that revealed some of the similarities and differences between the two families.

Differences: John and Kate Gosselin only (did I say only????) have 8 children, a set of twins and a set of sextuplets, while Jim-Bob and Michelle Duggar have more than twice as many, with two sets of twins but the rst single births. The Duggars homeschool their children, while the Gosselins do not. The Duggar children behave so well and their parents are always so calm and relaxed (at least in the two documentaries) that it’s enough to give most normal parents an inferiority complex, while the Gosselin kids often run their parents ragged.

Similarities: There are a lot of people out there who really, really, REALLY hate these people. A lot of people have spent a lot of time online venting their spleen against these two families, and in particularly against these two mothers. The “lazy shrew” part of this post title refers a blog characterization of Kate Gosselin, while the “breeder pig” part refers one of the many vile epithets about Michelle Duggar that pollute the internet.

Let’s take the lazy shrew first. There is a blog called Gosselins Without Pity in which fans (if people who watch a show obsessively and then complain about it can be called fans) of the show post their comments, which frequently take the form of long, detailed explanations of what Kate Gosselin did wrong, why she’s (a) a control freak, (b) lazy, (c) mean to her husband, (d) mean to her kids, (e) all of the above. Jon gets either sympathy for being henpecked, or contempt for not setting his carping shrew of a wife straight.

I have to be honest and say that I simply haven’t watched the show often enough to know whether these criticisms are justified or not. I am too busy taking care of my own four children to watch any non-news TV regularly. In the two episodes I did see, Kate did nothing especially reprehensible. And if she gets testy sometimes, well, I can see how that might happen when you have two 7-year-olds and six 3-year-olds in the house. My one 3-year-old alone is enough to drive anyone to distraction.

In addition to the Gosselin-specific blogs (there are more than just the one I mentioned) there is much discussion of Jon’s and Kate’s (but especially Kate’s) shortcomings elsewhere on the web. This post at imperfectparent.com from last October has garnered well over 13,000 comments so far. A more recent article from a few months ago has 3,500-plus comments and they’re still pouring in.

Now for the breeder pig. Online haters of Kate Gosselin have nothing on the crowd that picks on Michelle Duggar. Adlyn Morrison posted on her blog last month a collection of particularly vile comments posted at You Tube after the Duggars announced they were expecting their 18th child.

One comments, “Nice f***ing hair, breeder pig.” Another writes, “oh god…twisted fundamentalist midwestern Christians…bah all the girls have those ugly long hair styles and they’re all wearing dresses…”cough…these people must really hate gay people..” [sic; all capitalization and punctuation errors in original] How wearing dresses and having long hair signify hatred of homosexuals is beyond me. A third opines, “This family disgusts me. I’m surprised this woman’s uterus hasn’t fallen out while walking down the street.” [Misplaced modifier alert: the uterus isn’t walking down the street; the woman is.]

Personally, I think the state of Mrs. Duggar’s reproductive organs is her own business, and far too private a matter for internet speculation, but alas, all too many people don’t agree. A particularly offensive photo crops up frequently on websites and blogs discussing the Duggars. It is a formal studio portrait of the Duggar family, on which some devilishly clever and classy person has added the caption, “VAGINA: It’s not a clown car.” The photo appears, for example, here, where still more people are spouting off with great wit and verve about Mrs. Duggar’s reproductive organs and hair (one comment eloquently opines that Mrs. D’s hair is “f***ed up”).

Earlier this month, there was a discussion on the Pregnancy and Parenting bulletin board about the Duggars, and while many of the comments were either supportive of the Duggars or expressing the view that it’s no one else’s business how many children the Duggars have, there were a few making comments like this one from Kathy on July 11: “Personally, I think that BOTH Michelle and her husband, Jim Bob, need to be rounded up and FORCIBLY STERILIZED!!…Can you imagine the ABSOLUTE DRAIN on the environment that this ONE FAMILY creates???…No wonder that the environment is in such terrible shape and Global warming is increasing with SELFISH people like Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar (doesn’t that name just SCREAM hilbilly hick??) draining the Earth’s natural resources with their endless brood!” [ellipses mine; original post was longer] The “kids are bad for the environment” argument is something I’ve posted about before. This is strictly an affluent Westerner’s line of thinking, the sort of reasoning you get from the kind of people lampooned on StuffWhitePeopleLike.com.

While one does find defenses of big families online, one finds far more of the obnoxious and insulting attacks, like the question posted on Live Journal asking, “do you think the duggars are batshit insane?” Needless to say, many respondents did.

By allowing TV cameras into their homes, the Gosselins and Duggars have opened themselves up to this sort of thing, just as I have opened myself up to it by starting a blog. I now receive insulting comments (mainly on my political posts) but that’s the price of being in the public eye. The negative comments people make in cyberspace about Kate Gosselin are sometimes mean, but they focus primarily on her parenting style, whereas the comments about Michelle Duggar are often truly beyond the pale.

Posted 31 July 2008 † Brigette Russell § Parenthood § Religion § The Culture Wars ‡ Comments (10) ° Tagged: , , , , , ,

Jerome Block represents the working man’s party?

Jerome Block, candidate for the Public Regulation Commision, is a Democrat, and Democrats generally claim that theirs is the party that represents the working man, the common man. They cast the GOP as the party of rich fat cats and spoiled second-generation politicians born with silver spoons in their mouths — like George W. Bush (but not Al Gore, naturally).

But now we have Jerome H. Block, Jr., Democrat, son of a prominent New Mexico politician, dismissing his Green Party opponent Rick Lass in a way that sounds, well, not very democratic (in the small-d sense). An article in today’s New Mexican, “Block brushes off debate challenge,” quotes Block as saying, “I do not intend my campaign schedule to be influenced by a minor party candidate who had to be ‘drafted to run.’ ” The Green Party may indeed by a “minor party” but considering that Lass is Block’s only challenger in the race, it seems rather arrogant to refuse to allow his campaign schedule to be influenced by him. What campaign schedule does he need, anyway, if he considers his only opponent beneath consideration, and himself in effect unopposed?

But it gets even better. “”You and your supporters tout you as the ‘qualified candidate,’ ” Block writes in a letter to Lass, “While there is nothing wrong with your real life experiences and employment as a pizza delivery person and a food market clerk, I do not feel it qualifies you to be a PRC commissioner.” Ouch.

Now there’s a good Democrat, a representative of the ordinary working stiff, looking down his patrician nose at an opponent who has had to work at working-class jobs for a living, but who as far as we know, has been a law-abiding citizen — unlike some Democrats we know.

Posted 30 July 2008 † Brigette Russell § New Mexico § Politics ‡ Comments (7) ° Tagged: , ,

Santa Fe spin on senate race

With a new baby in the house, I haven’t been keeping up with the newspaper as well as I usually do, so I missed the Santa Fe New Mexican’s AP story last Wednesday, July 23, about Tom Udall’s call for debates in his U.S. Senate race against Steve Pearce. In the print version of the paper, the headline read, “Udall wants TV showdowns with Pearce.” Online the story is titled “Udall wants TV debates in senate race.” Either way, the headline implies that Udall, the Democrat, is the one pushing for debates in the race, when in fact Republican Pearce has been calling for debates for weeks, with Udall declining to commit until last week. The text of the story includes this fact, but a lot more people glance at headlines than read full stories, and in this case the headline gives a very misleading impression. A more honest headline would have read something like, “Udall finally agrees to debates,” or “Udall joins Pearce in calling for debates.”

Shame on both the Associated Press and the Santa Fe New Mexican for running this story with its disingenuous headline.

Posted 30 July 2008 † Brigette Russell § New Mexico § Politics ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , ,

Parents is the craziest peoples!

Since I’ve started blogging about parenting issues, my friends have started sending me URL links to whatever loony parent stories they read online.

Martha Brozyna, the nation’s foremost expert on sexual deviancy in medieval Poland, one of probably about twelve people in America besides me and Victor Davis Hanson who have PhDs in history and are not leftists, and a stock trading guru, is always a wonderful source of bizarre news items. The latest from her is this little gem about a New Zealand couple who named their daughter Talula Does The Hula. And I thought Gwyneth Paltrow was a nut job for naming her daughter Apple. Makes me feel sort of silly for worrying that I had given my daughter Portia a name that was too unusual. Even Itzel and Meadow aren’t sounding too bad after hearing about Talula Does The Hula. Poor kid was so embarrassed she wouldn’t tell her friends her real name and asked everyone to call her K. The article doesn’t tell how the case came to court, but does say that the judge made 9-year-old Talula Does The Hula a ward of the court, and ordered her name to be changed. The new name was not revealed so as not to embarrass the girl. You have to wonder what her parents were thinking. Were they on drugs? Mentally ill? Or just plain sadistic?

Another crazy parenting story was sent to me by the lovely and charming Kathryn Rubenacker, a fellow alumna of Culver City High and the wife of my husband’s best friend. This one is about parents who can’t bear to send their kids off to summer camp the old fashioned way. Most camps don’t allow the campers to have cell phones, so some parents are sending their kids off to camp with two cell phones, one to turn over to camp counselors as required, and another to stash away so they can text Mommy and Daddy on the sly. Kathryn observes that much of the fun she had at summer camp as a child would now be fodder for lawsuits. I didn’t go away to summer camp as a child, but I did have a lot more freedom of movement than kids do these days. When I was fairly young I’d be out playing with the other kids on our street, free to go where I liked between within certain limits, and by the time I was 12 or 13 I was riding my bike or the bus all over the west side of Los Angeles while my mom was at work, with no cell phone to let her know where I was or what I was doing. As much as I enjoyed having that freedom when I was young, and as much as I want my children to be resilient and independent, I also don’t want to be that one mom in a million who ends up sobbing on the eleven o’clock news when something awful happens to one of my children. As I’ve said before, I strive for moderation in all things, and will have to find a happy medium between the moms who hide cell phones in their little campers’ backpacks and the laid-back moms of the 60s and 70s who made my generation’s childhood so much fun.

BTW, if you know what this post title paraphrases, you’re probably at least as old as I am and spent your childhood Saturday mornings the same way I did — and had a lot more adventures as a kid than your own kids are having now.

Posted 28 July 2008 † Brigette Russell § Parenthood ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged: , ,

Bouncing back after baby

British mother of 13 (soon to be 14) Joanne Watson was featured in a Daily Mail story the other day. One photo in the story shows the 37-year-old blonde Mrs. Watson with her blond husband and baker’s dozen of mostly blond and beautiful children. The other photo is a full-length shot of an amazingly slim Mrs. W a mere five days after giving birth to her thirteenth child. The article informs us that this paragon of fertility wears a size zero — without dieting, no less. She explains:

I don’t put on much weight during each pregnancy as I don’t have a huge appetite and afterwards the excess goes very quickly.

I suppose I’m running around a lot after the children, taking them to school, making their meals and taking them shopping or for walks in the park so they keep me pretty fit.

I can imagine the eye-rolling and under-the-breath cursing this may elicit from some mothers who labor nearly as hard taking off the baby weight as they do pushing out the baby.

While I don’t have quite as easy a time of it as Mrs. Watson, I can say that having four children hasn’t left me any heavier than before my first was born. Or having three didn’t, anyway. I’m only 12 days postpartum at the moment, and weigh 15 lb. more than I did when I got pregnant this last time, but that’s a manageable amount to lose, and some of it is probably still retained fluids and will come off on its own. Like Joanne Watson, I have found that running around after my children does keep me busy and active enough that I don’t have a lot of trouble with my weight. I actually had to work harder at staying slim before I had children than after. The only physical downside has been the result of having them by c-section, which means your lower abdomen is never really the same again without a tummy tuck, something I used to think wistfully about but at the moment, still having pain from the c-section, the idea of voluntarily undergoing another abdominal surgery does not appeal in the least. Besides, as I’ve mentioned in the past, taking the plastic surgery route to middle-aged Barbiedom isn’t a road I want to travel.

In general, my philosophy of life is an Aristotelian “moderation in all things.” I deplore our society’s sexualization of everything, including mothers. The images of madonna and whore, once polarized in the Victorian male imagination, have become fused. Where once there was the madonna on her pedestal and the whore in her boudoir, we now have the madonna as whore. The most vivid icon of this new ideal was the August 1991 Vanity Fair cover on which Demi Moore posed nude and seven months pregnant. Not long after, the most daring mothers-to-be were posing for artsy (and not-so-artsy) photos as nude and pregnant as Demi, though without the benefit of professional airbrushing. I learned of this when I was pregnant with my second child and on an e-mail list with other expectant mothers who were all due the same month I was. One of the women on the list posted very casually that she’d had some photos taken, and sent the link for the rest of us to see a number of nude photographs of herself in the late stage of pregnancy, accompanied in some by her two-year-old daughter. From what I have been able to gather since, this practice has not become mainstream, but neither is it as rare as some might think. Some expectant mothers who are not ready for the full monty settle for “belly pics” with shirts lifted to expose their future progeny but nothing more. I personally have known a number of mothers to exchange these with their girlfriends by e-mail or on internet discussion lists, and I’ve seen them hanging on the walls of people’s homes. The latest maternity fashions include pants and skirts that rest below the belly worn with cropped tops that leave the protruding middle exposed. Even full-coverage maternity clothes tend to be increasingly form-fitting (I noticed the change over the course of my successive pregnancies) and the maternity shops in the malls sell thong underwear.

In The Girlfriends’ Guide to Pregnancy, Vicki Iovine says the bounce-back time for her and her girlfriends to get their figures back was generally around ten months (“ten months on, ten months off”). As if to prove the rule, Demi Moore was back on the cover of Vanity Fair a year after her nude and pregnant cover, buck naked again but this time adorned with a “suit” painted on her slim, ten months postpartum body. Not only are women supposed to be sexy while they’re pregnant, but they were supposed to be sexy again almost immediately after having the baby. In addition to a slew of vapid magazine articles, a number of books have hit the shelves giving new moms their marching orders: Hot Mamma: How to Have a Babe and Be a Babe (2003), Sexy Mamas: Keeping Your Sex Life Alive While Raising Kids (2004), The Hot Mom’s Handbook (2006), I’m Too Sexy for My Volvo: A Mom’s Guide to Staying Fabulous! (2006) and across the Atlantic British mums are instructed how to be The Yummy Mummy (2007).

Not every woman swallows whole the pop culture mantra that we all ought to look and act like the Sex and the City gals even with two toddlers and a newborn at home. Some women make a conscious decision to reject the ideal of the pregnant pin-up girl and the post-partum sexpot in favor of what I call an “Earth Mother” ideology. This ideology rejects the mainstream cultural ideal of thin, youthful feminine beauty, celebrating instead the female body as the site of childbirth, lactation and maternal nurture. It views breasts as beautiful not because they are firm and shapely, but because they provide the only natural source of sustenance for babies. The ideology accepts and indeed embraces those physical consequences of childbirth and lactation that the mainstream culture stigmatizes: weight gain, sagging breasts, stretch marks and all the rest. A woman I knew from an e-mail list (not the woman with the nude photos), used to end all her e-mails with the same signature line, one that included a mini-manifesto on maternal beauty that began with something to the effect of, “The beauty of my body lies not in the slimness of my thighs or the firmness of my breasts, but in . . . ” I cannot recall the exact wording, but it continued in the same vein, waxing poetic about the deeper meaning of her stretch marks, broad hips and breasts that sagged because they had fed four children over the course of many years. The image those lines always evoked in my mind was of the so-called Venus of Willendorf, a prehistoric stone figurine with enormous breasts, thick thighs and a more than ample midsection. This figure is interpreted by some as a sacred image of the Mother Goddess, the nurturing deity some people (mainly women, and not academic historians) believe was worshipped in an idyllic past before the harsh rule of God the Father subordinated women to his patriarchal rule.

No doubt there are any number of husbands who cherish their wives’ “beautiful because they give and sustain life” bodies, men who don’t mind having the baby and/or toddler sleeping in bed with them (or with their wives if they themselves have retreated to the guest room), who accept leaking milk as a natural part of foreplay for years on end, but I suspect a lot of them aren’t quite as enthusiastic about the Earth Mother mystique as their wives. Some of these are good sports about it, especially if they’re only planning on a few children and they can see a light at the end of the tunnel, but for others the challenge of living in a society as sexualized as ours must be difficult for a man whose wife is unwilling to make any effort to conform to society’s standards of feminine beauty.

Somewhere there is a happy medium between the expectation that mothers should all look like Joanne Watson five days after bearing a 13th child, and the defiant refusal of the Earth Mothers to make even the slightest effort to keep up their figures.

Posted 23 July 2008 † Brigette Russell § Parenthood ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged: , , , , , , , , , ,

Which circle of hell for pornographers?

When I set up this blog, I wanted to make it easy for people to post comments, but alas, the spam-pornographers are making this increasingly difficult. Since yesterday, I have had hundreds of spam comments and trackbacks added to almost every post on this blog. I just set up a new spam-blocking program (I already had one running that was catching the standard sales stuff, but the porn purveyors were able to bypass it) and in the first twenty minutes it caught 245 spam comments, every single one of them pornographic.

How many times since my constitutional law class as an undergrad 20-plus years ago have I heard the argument that however repugnant pornography is, we must tolerate it in the name of free speech? That we must allow these debauchers of young women, these corruptors of children, these abusers of animials (you can’t begin to imagine the amount of bestiality in the spam I just deleted) to make their money by polluting our society. Sorry, but I don’t buy it. No one with half a brain in his head believes that Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison or any other Founding Father intended that the First Amendment to the Constitution should protect the right to sell DVDs of a Tiajuana donkey show on Amazon.com. The First Amendment was intended to protect political speech, and despite all their huffing about in righteous indignation, even lowlifes like Larry Flynt know it, and have a good laugh at the saps at the ACLU who buy their bogus argument and help them sell their porn.

It sickens me that pornography has gone mainstream in this country, that a major Hollywood film glamorized the life of Larry Flynt a few years ago, and that Geraldo Rivera was chatting amiably on his Fox News show a few days ago with Girls Gone Wild mogul Joseph Francis, providing a sympathetic ear as Francis defended himself against a charge that one of the drunk young women he filmed was under 18. Whether the slut in question had passed her 18th birthday interests me far less than the mainstreaming of pornography that Francis and his GGW franchise represents. The young women featured in those videos aren’t prostitutes or professional actresses in the porn industry. They’re college girls, the daughters of doctors, lawyers, plumbers, electricians and salesmen who shell out tens of thousands of dollars a year so their daughters can go to college, get drunk, flash their breasts and freak dance for a pimp like Joe Francis. If someone like Francis had tried that back when I was in college, I suspect a a few furious fathers might have taken a page from the script of those old Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson vigilante movies and given the cocky young pornographer some rather hard knocks. Now the dads just shake their heads and say, oh well, what can you do?

As a Christian, I’m supposed to hate the sin but love the sinner. That’s a hard command to follow in the case of pornographers, since they are (or seem to be) so utterly without shame, so lacking in remorse. Instead of admitting that theirs is a filthy business but they’re filling a niche in the market that someone else would fill if they didn’t, they brazen it out with high-minded talk about the First Amendment, corrupting and polluting the Constitution even as they corrupt and pollute college freshmen. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying the girls are blameless. God forbid they should exercise some moderation in their alcohol consumption and keep their clothes on. But there’s a vast moral chasm between the weak-willed who allow themselves to be led astray, and the coldly calculating predator who leads them.

In Dante’s Inferno, the upper circles of hell are inhabited by those whose sins are relatively innocuous, and as the circles descend to the ninth and most horrific, the sins of their inhabitants grow ever more vile. Those overcome by lust occupy Dante’s second circle, while gluttons (among whom drunkards would be included) occupy the third. The drunken co-eds who simulate fellatio for the camera would thus belong in one of these two upper circles in Dante’s scheme. Deeper, far deeper, lie the horrors of the eighth circle, to which those guilty of deliberate, knowing evil are consigned. Among them are the pimps, panderers and seducers, those who steal the innocence of others and lead them down the path of iniquity.

Dante was a Christian too, and I’m sure he too tried to hate the sin and love the sinner, to pray for the repentance and redemption of the wicked. But the advice he gave those who did not repent he inscribed, in the Inferno, on the gate of hell: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

Posted 23 July 2008 † Brigette Russell § The Culture Wars ‡ Comments (3) ° Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,

To boldly go…

As I was reading Maureen Dowd’s cleverly titled column “Ich Bin Ein Jet-Setter” about Barack Obama’s world tour, the phrase “he will have to successfully complete a number of tasks” jumped out at me: yet another split infinitive appearing in what is arguably our nation’s most illustrious newspaper, The New York Times, written by one of the nation’s top columnists. I don’t mean to pick on Ms. Dowd; everybody — and I do mean everybody — does it these days. Splits their infinitives, that is. You know, as in Star Trek’s “To boldly go,” which ought in proper English to be “To go boldly.” Somehow the correct form just doesn’t have the panache of the incorrect, though it may just seem so to me since the incorrect one is the one I’m used to.

That last line was incorrect too, by the way. One isn’t supposed to end sentences with prepositions, as I just did — on purpose, may I add, to make a point. I ought to have written, “the one to which I’m used,” but who on earth talks like that? “The one to which I’m accustomed” sounds better, and for writing it’s fine, but in conversation it sounds pretentious. Same with who and whom: those of us who know the difference will in most cases write “Whom did you see?” but in conversation say “Who did you see?” Of course, which to choose, the correct but pretentious-sounding or the incorrect but normal-sounding, depends upon who you’re speaking to (which should read “to whom you are speaking”).

I realize I fixate on grammar more than the average (or ought I to say normal?) person, but my recent hospital stay kept grammatical errors in the forefront of my mind. Just about every nurse in that hospital told me to “lay down” or “lay still” or “just lay there,” when in fact each of those verbs should have been lie rather than lay. I have no idea why, but this is the error that irritates me more than any other. I have said “lie down” to my children from birth, but they all say “lay down” since everyone else they hear, including the teachers and aides at preschool, says lay rather than lie. Now that we are homeschooling (i.e., not paying other people to teach our children to use incorrect grammar in place of the correct grammar they learn at home) perhaps that will change.

A grammatical error that bothers a lot of people oddly enough doesn’t bother me: can vs. may. I know the difference of course, but grew up in a family that used can (be able) instead of may (be permitted), but that’s no excuse, since my mother says lay instead of lie and I broke that habit. I’m not entirely sure, but I think I say may sometimes and can sometimes, but I know my children always say “can,” except Cordelia, who says “may” a lot but misuses it, asking, “May you…?” instead of “Will you…?” I’ve explained a thousand times that “may” is for “May I…?” but she does right on saying “May you…?” and “Can I…?”

In her controversial book The Nurture Assumption, Judith Rich Harris made the point that children speak like their peers, not like their parents, which is why children of immigrants speak perfectly unaccented English and when they do speak their parents’ native tongue, they never reach the level of proficiency they have in English, and English is the language in which they dream. This is true of class-based accents as well; the example Harris gives is Margaret Thatcher, who came from a working-class family but spoke with the upper-class accent of her classmates at the elite school she attended on scholarship. The linguistic arguments aren’t the controversial part of the book, by the way. The uproar over the book was because Harris argued that it was peers rather than parents who were responsible for shaping not just language and accent, but personality and behavior as well. The book sparked reviews with titles like “Do Parents Matter?” and much passionate insistence that in fact they do. I finally got around to reading the book only recently, and it’s worth it’s own blog post, so I’ll say no more about the socialization debate here, and say only that I think she’s dead right as far as language is concerned.

Nevertheless, I will not take my children’s poor grammar lying (not laying) down, and will continue to go boldly (not to boldly go) on trying to fight the good fight as well as I can (not may).

Posted 21 July 2008 † Brigette Russell § Culture § Language § Parenthood § Personal § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (2) ° Tagged: , , , , ,

C-section moms to the back of the bus

For years I’ve been reading about how there are too many cesarean deliveries performed in this country, that vain celebrity moms choose c-sections to have smaller babies and preserve their figures or suit the convenience of their schedules or avoid some of the potential after-effects of vaginal birth. We hear repeatedly from natural childbirth advocates that birth should be a natural rather than a medical event, that doctors and hospitals cover themselves against insurance risks by performing excessive and intrusive procedures that make surgical deliveries more likely, and so forth. We hear the laments of women who took their natural childbirth classes, did their breathing exercises, and went to the hopsital with a detailed written “birth plan” that called for no drugs, no IV, no fetal monitoring, delivery by a midwife rather than a doctor, lots of walking around and calming music, delivering in a squatting rather than prone position, maybe even in a bathtub, and hubby there all the while with video camera in hand to capture the magic moment when mom brought forth new life through her own valiant labor, a creative force of nature rather than a patient surrendering her maternal power to medical practitioners — only to have things go terribly wrong and end up drugged and catheterized on an operating table as doctors sliced open their bellies and removed their babies, robbing them of the earth mother fantasy that had been playing itself out in their heads for months.

When I was pregnant with my firstborn, I had none of those dreams of heroic labor. I was in my late thirties, had had trouble conceiving, had repeated miscarriages, and was afraid I’d missed the boat and would never have a child. Under those circumstances, I saw birth as a means to an end, and didn’t much care how I delivered. The doctor could take the baby out my left ear for all I cared, as long as the child was healthy and safe. So when I’d been in labor all day and things didn’t progress as they should have, I wasn’t upset when the doctor said he needed to perform an emergency cesarean. The recovery was painful, but it is after any abdominal surgery, and after a few days of bad pain and a few weeks of limited activity, I was as good as new. I experienced none of the guilt or depression I’ve heard about so many other c-section mothers having. The idea of feeling guilty because I had somehow “failed” at the test of true womanhood strikes me as ludicrous, and yet I’ve read a fair bit about it, and even heard it from women I know personally. I’ve also read that postpartum depression is more common after surgical delivery, but I was lucky enough not to have it, and I know a number of women who delivered vaginally — some completely unmedicated — who had postpartum depression anyway. I’m no expert on this subject, but it seems to me that if the incidence of depression is higher after surgical delivery, part of it stems not from the surgeries themselves but from people making c-section moms feel bad (intentionally or not) for failing to live up to society’s ideals about childbirth.

I have a friend who, like me, has four children. Our firstborns were actually born on the same day of the same year; our seconds were born in the same month, my third a few months before her third, and her fourth a few months before my fourth. Both of us labored with our first and had emergency c-sections. Both of us had the choice of scheduling a c-section for the second or trying for a VBAC (vaginal birth after cesarean). I opted for a second c-section because the admittedly slight risk of uterine rupture in that procedure scared me. My friend, who was pressured by family members to try for a “real” birth (her sister-in-law came right out and said that she wasn’t a “real woman” if she couldn’t deliver her babies vaginally) tried for the VBAC, went through a horrendously long labor but was still unable to deliver, and ended up having another c-section after all. My recovery from a scheduled section was fairly easy, while hers after a traumatic labor followed by surgery was difficult.

I freely admit that often VBACs are successful. I know a lot of women personally who have had them, and were thrilled at being able to deliver naturally after a previous surgical delivery. I’m happy for them, and I agree that the choice ought to be the mother’s. But in all too many cases the choice means pressure to make the right choice: to choose the kind of delivery that will validate your credentials as a real woman, much as the choice of feeding by breast or bottle means that making the wrong choice marks you as a substandard mother.

As I wrote before, my first three c-sections were performed at a hospital in California where a nursery was available. Most of the mothers who delivered vaginally there kept their babies in their hospital rooms with them, and after the first 24 hours after surgery, I kept my baby with me most of the time too, except when I wanted to sleep or shower. But for that first day after surgery, I really could not take care of a baby on my own, and because there was no nursery staff to help, what that really meant was that for c-section moms, the hospital policy was BYOBN: bring your own baby nurse. Pretty neat racket for the hospital, which doesn’t have to pay a nursery staff, and for the insurance companies, which have to pay out less for each hospital stay since c-section moms are eager to get the heck out of the hospital and go home. I stayed four nights after each surgery in California, but only three this time, because what was the point of staying in the hospital when I couldn’t rest? I had to have someone stay with me every night I was there, my aunt the first and third nights, and a good friend (and Portia’s godmother) the second night. The logistics of the BYOBN policy bring me to yet another way this hospital made me, as a c-section patient, feel like a second-class citizen.

St. Vincent’s hospital has two types of rooms in the maternity ward, one for mothers delivering vaginally, and another for patients recovering from c-sections. Because a woman delivering vaginally remains in the same room for her labor, delivery, and recovery, the rooms are large and spacious. They have a table and chairs in addition to the bed, plenty of room for walking around, wood (or what looked like wood) floors, big windows with nice views, and big flat-screen TVs on the walls. The rooms for c-section recovery patients are about a fourth (that’s being generous; it might even be closer to a fifth) of the size of the nice rooms the real mothers get. The window in my room looked out onto the machinery on the roof of a lower level of the hospital, the old TV had a remote that didn’t work (eventually they managed to find one that did), and the baby nurse I was expected to provide for myself had to sleep on a small chair that pulled out into a very uncomfortable and undersized facsimile of a bed. When this “bed” was pulled out, there was barely enough room to get around, and we had to keep moving the baby’s bassinet in order for my aunt (the BYOBN) and the hospital nurses to get to my bed. I was still hooked up to the IV and other unmentionable attachments so wasn’t doing any walking around myself. On the second evening they let me move to a regular two-bed room in the pediatric ward next door (no way they were letting me into one of those posh rooms saved for the real mothers) and the rest of my stay was more comfortable.

In her book about motherhood, actress and c-section mom Patricia Heaton called the cesarean “the kindest cut of all” (for those of you who think I named my baby after a car, that’s a play on a line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar — Caesar, cesarean, get it?). After my California deliveries, I agreed with her completely. If enough hospitals go the way of St. Vincent’s here in Santa Fe, I’m afraid we’ll have to put the “un-” back in that line.

Posted 16 July 2008 † Brigette Russell § Parenthood ‡ Comments (7) ° Tagged: , , , , , , , ,

Portia Louise, home at last

PortiaPortia Louise Russell and her exhausted but deliriously happy mother came home from the hospital on Sunday, and it’s taken this long for me to get around to writing about it.

First, the name. Portia is the name we had in mind when I wrote my earlier post about baby names, but I was keeping it quiet just in case we chickened out and named her something more conventional. We had considered Portia for our third daughter, but ended up naming her Theresa after my mother-in-law instead. I’m glad we did, both because Terry (MIL) was so pleased, and because the name seems to suit Tessie (our daughter) so well. Several of our relatives aren’t mad about Portia’s name, but not everyone liked Cordelia’s (our second daughter) either, and they’ve all changed their minds and love it now, so we’re hoping for the same result this time. Reactions from hospital staff who asked the baby’s name really ran the gamut. It was immediately obvious which ones had heard the name before, and which upon hearing Portia (which is pronounced POR-sha, as some people pronounce the name of the car Porsche) clearly showed by their dumbfounded expressions that they thought I had named my baby after a sports car. One nurse actually laughed. To her credit, she tried to stifle the laugh, but it was too late and she didn’t quite manage. It reminded me of the scene in that 1980s comedy film, A Fish Called Wanda, in which Jamie Lee Curtis and John Cleese are having a laugh at the expense of Kevin Kline’s character after Curtis tells Cleese that Kline is so stupid that he thinks Cleese’s daughter Portia was named after a car. I was surprised by how many people had never heard the name Cordelia either, but at least it can’t be confused with a car. I really hope I haven’t done something awful to the poor child by giving her such an unusual name. To me, it was just mainstream enough, but to the vast swath of humanity who hasn’t read much (any?) Shakespeare, it obviously isn’t.

Second, the delivery. Like all the others, it was by cesarean section, and recovery this fourth time around has been slow going. The hospital stay was not as restful as the ones I had in California, where there was a nursery available, and I had some bad reactions to the pain medication. Having experienced this, it makes me shudder in dumbfounded wonder that anyone would want to take narcotic drugs for recreational purposes. Bad enough when you have to take them for pain, and can call the doctor when bad things start to happen. The idea of doing it just for fun, and not being able to call a doctor if something goes wrong…well, it just boggles my mind. I’ll have more to say on this delivery in particular, and c-sections in general, tomorrow or the next day. Right now I just want to get this post up.

Finally, the baby herself. She was 7 lb., 4 oz., and 21 inches long. She has dark blue eyes and an abundance of jet black hair, as all my babies have. The other three all have different hair and eye color now, so it’s anyone’s guess how Portia’s will end up. As a c-section baby, she has perfect features undamaged by a traumatic trip through the birth canal, and to my maternal eyes she’s the most beautiful creature in the world. Not that I’m biased or anything.

They say babies don’t make eye contact until they’re a week or so old, and my second and third daughters didn’t. My firstborn Elizabeth did, however, and so did Portia. I cannot even begin to describe the effect that had on me, having my newborn child look right into my eyes within an hour of delivery, and knowing (I don’t care what anyone says; I’ll always believe it) that she wasn’t just looking, but was really seeing me, and perhaps even recognizing me as the owner of the voice and heartbeat she’s been hearing muffled by amniotic fluid all these long months.

Welcome home, my Portia. Welcome to your family.

Posted 15 July 2008 † Brigette Russell § Parenthood § Personal ‡ Comments (12) ° Tagged: , , ,

Off to the hospital

I’m off to the hospital (the one without the nursery) for my c-section in the morning, so there won’t be any posts for at least two days. Hopefully day three will find Baby Sis and me back home again, and if I feel up to it, back at the computer.

Please say a prayer for us, if you’re the praying kind.

Posted 10 July 2008 † Brigette Russell § Personal ‡ Comments (5) ° Tagged:

Jerome Block, Jr.: booze, bushes and a bad memory

Last month Jerome Block, Jr., won the Democratic primary election for a seat on the PRC (that’s Public Regulation Commission, not People’s Republic of China; I was a bit perplexed when I first moved to Santa Fe and started seeing PRC referred to without explanation in the newspaper). Since no Republicans even bothered to run, this meant that the position was pretty much his. Since then, a Green Party candidate has joined the race, but when was the last time a Green beat a Democrat for anything?

The reason some might regret Block’s victory is that since the election it has come out that he was cited by police twice in the space of just a few months, and lied about it during the campaign. He admitted to being charged with DWI ten years ago, when he was 21. Okay, fair enough. A DWI at 21 shouldn’t disqualify a 31-year-old for a career in politics. But a couple of months after the DWI, Block was cited nabbed by police again, this time for disorderly conduct (specifically, relieving himself in public). He was never convicted on either charge; both were dropped. Hmm, I wonder why? Could it be because Jerome Jr. was the son of Jerome Sr., once a PRC commisioner himself, and not without influence in New Mexico politics?

Block Sr. wrote sarcastically to New Mexico political blogger Mario Burgos to chide him for spending his time reporting “extensively about the grave crime of peeing in the bushes,” but the issue isn’t peeing in the bushes; it’s lying about having been charged with it. Block Jr. claims to have no recollection of being charged with disorderly conduct. I can easily believe that he was too drunk to remember urinating in public (who, after all, does that when they’re sober?) but I have a hard time believing he cannot remember having to deal with the legal aftermath, a point that Steve Terrell also makes. Surely he had to do something to make the citation go away, as it so conveniently did.

Young Mr. Block’s lies are too ham-handed even to earn the backhanded compliment of being called Clintonesque. More like Sandy Bergeresque.

Of course, the most ludicrous part of this whole story is how the Republicans so completely dropped the ball and didn’t even bother to run a candidate in the primary. On the other hand, what would have been the difference? Two years ago after Jeff Armijo, Democratic candidate for State Treasurer, became a political laughingstock for sexual harassment so buffoonish it made Bob Packwood look suave, the GOP candidate appeared a shoe-in. The very liberal Santa Fe New Mexican even endorsed him! But the Democrats got another candidate in to replace Armijo in time, and their guy won.

New Mexico politics — you gotta love it.

Posted 09 July 2008 † Brigette Russell § New Mexico § Politics ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged: , , , , , ,

Cup o’ Job

For many years I’ve given regular thanks to God for creating coffee. I’ve loved coffee since I was a teenager. I drank it black and doing so may well have saved me from obesity. I love food, and the battle between my appetite and my vanity would have been a pretty evenly matched one, had not vanity the invincible Black Knight on her side. When I wanted something to satisfy a vague but unspecified taste craving, black coffee could almost always do the trick.

But not anymore. Three times I was pregnant, lost the taste for coffee in the nausea-wracked first trimester, but was back in black again by month four. (Before anyone sends me “you’re such a bad mother” e-mails or comments, yes, yes, YES already, I kept my consumption moderate while pregnant, and all my babies were perfectly fine.)

Then came this pregnancy, and I’m full term and still can’t stand the taste of black coffee. Oh, I like it just fine with lots of whole milk and vanilla-flavored sweetener, but if the situation persists, that’s not going to help get the baby weight off. Why, oh, why?

Alas, I suppose it is not for me to reason why. Was I there when God created the heavenly bean? The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. I’m just hoping that in this admittedly rather trivial case he taketh pity and giveth back.

Posted 08 July 2008 † Brigette Russell § Personal ‡ Comments (2) ° Tagged: ,

Look who’s reading

When you blog, you never know who’s reading, unless they comment, and most don’t, since the number of comments on my site is a microscopic fraction of the number of hits I get each day. A friend from an e-mail list mentioned today that she knew how I felt about car DVD players since she’d read my blog post about it, and last night my dad (who refuses to use a computer) told me that he’d heard that I wrote about his voting in 1980 because my uncle reads my blog regularly and told him. I had no idea my uncle was reading, since he’s never commented, and he lives in a different state and we haven’t seen each other in years. Sort of makes me wonder who else I may know might be reading, and keeping up with what I’m doing and thinking when I don’t have a clue what they’re doing and thinking.

I never realized how reticent people are about commenting publicly on blogs, because I’ve always been comfortable doing it. Then again, anyone who is comfortable enough writing a blog in the first place is obviously not the kind of person who’s reluctant to speak up publicly. I’ve heard from several people (and indirectly from a couple of others by way of third parties) things like, “I was going to comment on your post about _______, but…” and then offer a reason like they didn’t want to me or any of my readers to be offended. I wouldn’t (can’t speak for the readers) because if I’m going to write a blog and make my opinions part of the public discourse on the internet, then I had better be prepared for people to disagree with them.

Posted 05 July 2008 † Brigette Russell § History § Personal ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged: ,

Fourth of July miscellany

Glorieta Gettysburg of the WestWe’ve driven past the Glorieta, NM, battlefield memorial scores (if not hundreds) of times, but today we finally stopped. It’s a makeshift memorial, on private property and maintained by the owner, who has been kind enough to put in nice, flat trails and even to make little makeshift concrete seats and benches under some of the trees. With my baby due in six days, I can’t stand and walk with ease for long stretches, so I really appreciated those. Someday I’ll read one of the several books on the battle (we have this one at home, but I just haven’t gotten around to it), and someday I’ll take the children to see one of the re-enactments of the battle (I don’t think it’s done every year, but I know there’s been at least one since I’ve lived here).

I’ve been meaning to write a political post for days (those are the ones my husband likes) but I spent the day yesterday making seven dinners, one for last night and six for the freezer. With Baby Sis coming home to disrupt our domestic routines next week, I think it was the wiser choice. But now to politics.

With the primary won and his eyes on November, Mr. Obama is making right turns left and right (ugh, sorry): praising the Supreme Court’s ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller and angering his leftist base by supporting the FISA bill. Naturally, I agree with his positions on both issues, but somehow I doubt he’d have taken either if he was still battling Mrs. Clinton rather than Mr. McCain. McCain, unlike most Republican presidential candidates, has not made any left turns since clinching the nomination, since he was already about as far left as a Republican could get, and if anything has had to edge rightward (e.g., support for offshore drilling).

Speaking of left and right, the far-right former senator that the left loved best to hate has just died. Jesse Helms, who represented North Carolina in the Senate for three decades, has died on the Fourth of July (just like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson). In light of the nasty comments made about the late Charlton Heston after his recent death, I will be checking the lefty blogs and websites to see just how nasty they get in speaking ill of the much-detested dead this time. Now don’t get me wrong; I know there are those on the right who do that sort of thing, but the guys at FreeRepublic.com still don’t seem to reach the same depths of ad hominem vitriol toward the ill and the dead as the crowd at MoveOn.org.

Posted 04 July 2008 † Brigette Russell § History §