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annashipper · 6 years

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Anonymous Submission

Anon please - I really don’t understand why you think Ben’s predicament is funny. You laugh at him and mock him for failing to sell a disastrous relationship he never wanted but is stuck in nevertheless for reasons beyond our comprehension.

I’ve followed this sham from the beginning. Back in the day, we skeptics/truthers didn’t laugh at Ben. We may have laughed when he accidentally made Zero look stupid or when her feeble attempts to shine failed dismally but we never found his pain funny. Pap walks and red carpets weren’t hilarious outings we bought popcorn to enjoy - they were ordeals to get through - watching them through our fingers, flinching at his discomfort and misery. Sad, unwilling, miserable attempts to shill the kid/s made us shiver at his obvious discomfort and pain at having to comply.

Yet now Ben’s suddenly a great joke. A lumbering oaf to laugh at and entertain us. His shoehorning is suddenly hilarious - you revel in his pain and mock his unwilling attempts to sell the sham as if you think he’s a failure when he doesn’t do it well - why do you want him to sell this? If he did you’d call him fake, devious, two-faced, manipulative, etc. Suddenly whatever he does, it’s as if you think he deserves it. Why do you luxuriate in his misery? Do you now think this is all his fault? Do you want him to pay? To suffer? Do you think he deserves this? That he’s getting his just desserts?

I just don’t understand - Why has this disaster turned from something we watched - cringing along with him, into something we’re supposed to sadistically love, relish and enjoy. I for one feel none of your pleasure and enjoyment watching any of this and I don’t understand how any genuine skeptic could.

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Nonny, there are some points of your submission that are confusing to me. I could have answered you via private messages, but since another Nonny had similar qualms yesterday (LINK), I thought I’d answer your questions in public.

Apologies in advance for the rant.

We Skeptics never called ourselves “truthers”. That’s what the Nannies used to call us.

It was never Ben making Weirdo look stupid. In the early days of the showmance in particular, it was Weirdo and Harvey making him look like a schmuck. The lever of second-hand embarassment fans of his with half a brain have had to endure was (and still is) palpable.

Skeptics have been having gigglefests since before I ever joined the community back in January of 2015. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again for anyone who doesn’t remember those early days of Showmance From Hell(TM) documentation: if it weren’t for @benedicts-third-testicle and her snark, I never would have joined Tumblr in the first place.

Soooooo. Those who truly here back in 2014-5 remember how Ben transformed from a happy-go-lucky guy in 2014 to someone looking physically ill by the spring of 2015. We also remember the ridiculous polls, the even more ridiculous drinking games, the CumberPorn, the Showmance bingo (which @gatorfisch still plays from time to time and cracks me up), the DorkyBatch pic or gif of the day, the snarky questions and the even snarkier answers, the vigorous fact checking, the readers of Bally’s blog losing their glunch, the up/down bump compares, the submissions of crazy theories on what would happen next during those early days, how PR was basically answering Ms Bally’s concerns through weird handholding and bikini sneaky pap shots that were blurred, the press rundowns each and every day, that Ben should always strive to be a #supportivefruithusband to Weirdo whom fetch still eludes because she obviously never tried to follow Spinsie’s advice and take on mandarine juggling on London street corners, Ms Ballsy stocking up on Baileys, pop corn and Tim Tams in preparation for pap walks through airports (which at that time were a dime a dozen), everyone stocking up on the alcoholic beverage of their choice to watch the BAFTAs and Oscars that year, bingate, the showmance (which on Ballsy’s blog was called the shamwow) playlist, etc.

As far as I’m concerned, nothing’s changed since those days.

I was then and I still am a SkeptoNanny. I was and still am cringing whenever Ben looks pissy / sad / done standing or sitting next to Weirdo although he smiles standing or sitting around everyone else. I was and still am getting a sad every time I think of how much Ben’s demeanour has changed since 2014.

Something I’ve always been accused of by Skeptics who run their own blogs as well as Nonnies, is that I nanny Ben a little too much, and they’re all absolutely right. I always did go out of my way to find excuses for his behaviour, and it’s something I intend to keep doing, because for all of his idiocy, I’m still a fan of his work, and I truly believe he’s a nice guy whose one true error in judgement was agreeing to play along with the game Weirdo thought would be fun on the night of January 3rd, 2015 at PSIFF. The moment he agreed to keep baiting that first pregnancy for free publicity because Harvey had promised him an Oscar, he basically signed up for all of the craziness we’ve been witnessing (and alternating between groaning and giggling at) ever since.

At the same time, I always thought the awkward shoehorning was hilarious. I always laughed at the piss-poor attempts to disguise set-up pap walks as relentless hounding from the paparazzi. I always found Weirdo’s fetchlessness endlessly entertaining. I always assumed she would never get a voice in this showmance, and the past four years have not proved me wrong. I always got the giggles out of the weird handholding.

What I would urge you and everyone else who agrees with you on my stance to do would be to read through my blog and take what I have to say seriously, instead of assuming I’m always being snarky in my observations / answers to asks and submissions.

The way he keeps flogging this particular dead horse to receive free publicity, and the unfortunate way his quotes regarding his wife and children come at complete odds with his actions leave me speechless. Or they would leave me speechless if this showmance hadn’t been so very inconsistent since day one.

You ask why I “want him to sell this“. Well, I’m a firm believer in doing something right or not doing it at all. Since Ben doesn’t seem to be willing to end this showmance until “people who think his wife and child(ren) are a PR stunt” will shut up, he might as well do it properly and try to make the whole thing look realistic. This has nothing to do with the Skeptical community and everything to do with his public image.

Skeptics who run their own blogs and have not been commenting publicly on the showmance for ages are still paying attention. Closet Skeptics are still putting together the pieces to this ridiculous puzzle and laughing their heads off at the idiocy in my private messages. Regular Anons who don’t send me submissions anymore are still reading my blog and sending me private messages and/or e-mails. Newly formed Skeptics still emerge every time Ben decides to rock the proverbial boat by trotting Weirdo out.

Unfortately, having spent the past 4 years documenting those very inconsistencies has basically turned those of us who are truly paying attention to what’s being said versus what’s being done into human bullshit detectors, and just because Ben is alternating between trying to bore us to death and upping the stupidity level when he decides it’s time for free publicity for one of his projects is not going to drive anyone away.

The most depressing part of all is that the clickability of Skeptical blogs far surpasses the clickability of any other part of the fandom (be it Fan blogs, Nanny blogs, Anti blogs or just Ben’s official/unofficial web page).

So yeah. I’m gonna keep speaking my mind, and I’m far past sugarcoating my opinions. While I don’t expect anyone to agree with me, I am not going to treat a 42 year old successful man like a helpless toddler who doesn’t have the means and the opportunity to release himself from whatever Madame Fetchlessly Irrelevant is holding over his head.

That being said, I’m still going to keep making excuses for him when it makes sense to do so, and I’m still going to root for him to do well in all of his endeavours.

The fact that he’s painted himself into a ridiculous corner with this showmance doesn’t change the fact that I believe he has tremendous capacity for kindness and a raw talent that he’s able to hone into an impossibly sharp edge when he’s in front of a camera or an audience.

Just don’t ask him to do it when his wife is within a five foot radius. That seems to be his Achilles heel...

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doctortwhohiddles · 6 years

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Delusion and Entitlement

I think Annashipper and Fakerbatch have just given the best example of both. Anna got this ask:

Which led to this answer from Anna. I've edited it to keep the most relevant parts (comments in parenthesis) :

We Skeptics never called ourselves “truthers”. That’s what the Nannies used to call us. ●(And that's what they still are)

I have stated repeatedly that I believe Ben has had a firm grasp on the stirring wheel of this showmance since March of 2016, and I mean that. As such, it’s getting increasingly hard for me to keep making excuses for his poor choices to make this whole thing look realistic. The way he keeps flogging this particular dead horse to receive free publicity, and the unfortunate way his quotes regarding his wife and children come at complete odds with his actions leave me speechless. Or they would leave me speechless if this showmance hadn’t been so very inconsistent since day one. ●(What leaves me speechless is the sheer idiocy displayed by Anna)

Newly formed Skeptics still emerge every time Ben decides to rock the proverbial boat by trotting Weirdo out. ●( she means new sockpuppets)

That being said, I’m still going to keep making excuses for him when it makes sense to do so, and I’m still going to root for him to do well in all of his endeavours. The fact that he’s painted himself into a ridiculous corner with this showmance doesn’t change the fact that I believe he has tremendous capacity for kindness and a raw talent that he’s able to hone into an impossibly sharp edge when he’s in front of a camera or an audience. Just don’t ask him to do it when his wife is within a five foot radius. That seems to be his Achilles heel… ●(it's more the haters Achilles heel since they have to come up with reasons why Ben is still married).

But it doesn't end there, Fakerbatch had to throw in her 2 cents:

Does this moron genuinely think Ben wants advice from her?!? As if he would listen to a bunch of scary, delusional stalkers. Fucking hell, the haters are really slow on the uptake aren't they?

#haters #annashipper #fakerbatch #extreme derangement syndrom

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judedoyle · 7 years

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Magic and Mentions

Well: The baby and I survived our first run-in with the Chapos.

I kept my pregnancy secret from the Internet -- not a very well-guarded secret, granted; my friends knew, my co-workers knew, the people who attended the multiple readings and shows where I was hugely, visibly pregnant on stage knew; hell, I did things like Tweet about my iron-deficiency anemia and post “just wondering” polls about baby names, so I’m pretty sure a ton of my followers knew -- for several reasons.

One was pure superstition. Thirty-four is relatively late in the game for a surprise pregnancy. Her father and I weren’t exactly trying to avoid a baby, but I figured that at my age, we’d actually have to plan one. Instead, we followed time-honored Irish Catholic tradition, in that we got married and I was somehow knocked up within five minutes of leaving the reception hall. For Lulu to just happen, after all this time, and for her to be healthy on top of everything else, felt unreal. Every time we went to get an ultrasound, I’d be possessed by this sudden, irrational fear that the doctors wouldn’t find anything. They’d have to tell me it was all a misunderstanding, I wasn’t actually pregnant, the previous tests were all false positives, this almost never happens, it really did look like a baby last time we did this, so sorry for the mistake. I mean, I was worried about that in the third trimester, when I could feel her skinny little back thumping against my abdomen every time I moved. Lulu felt like magic to me, and magic is delicate. So I didn’t brag about my pregnancy. I didn’t want her to turn back into a pumpkin when I wasn’t looking.

But the other reason to stay quiet, the more practical reason, is just that I attract a whole lot of Internet creeps, and I’ve attracted a record number of them in the past two years.

It’s not a unique problem. Any vocally feminist woman on the Internet gets her fair share of Internet creeps, especially if men get in trouble as the result of things she’s written; my Creeps largely come from a few disgruntled “comedians” I wrote up in the Rape Joke Wars of ‘13, plus a couple of Bernie Sanders fan podcasts. Which, since one of the Sanders fan podcasts is run by one of the rape-joke comedians -- and the other is run by that comedian’s roommates -- is a group with more overlap than you’d think.

I wanted to wait the creepage out. I had hoped that by the time Lulu was born, people would have worn themselves out on having the exact same Sanders/Clinton fight over and over. And yet, they evidently haven’t, so a large percentage of my Internet Creeps are still obsessed with “punishing” me for... something. Disagreeing with them on the Internet, I suppose. Not subscribing to their podcasts. Talking. Breathing. The kid was, inevitably, going to be drawn in to that, for the same reason that my hospitalization for an illness that nearly killed me got drawn in; it’s a vulnerable spot, an easy way to hurt me. These people tend to get so excited about the prospect of hurting me that they rarely pause to consider how they might hurt someone else.

This time last year, when I was getting married, it was not uncommon to go in on my husband. He’s never gotten involved in the Sanders/Clinton debates -- being both very well-adjusted and very unlike me, he believes arguing about politics on the Internet to be stupid -- but they’d still send him the same “funny” threats they sent me, or screencap and send around his Facebook posts to fuel drama, or post thinly veiled anti-Asian stereotypes about how emasculated and “timid” and submissive and unmanly he must be to put up with a big hairy feminazi like yours truly. (The anti-Asian stereotypes, of course, also had the benefit of being anti-feminist stereotypes about how I must be a castrating shrew and needed A Real Man to dominate me and Put Me In My Place. Hurrah for intersectionality!) Or, you know, they’d just call him a ch*nk. It wasn’t because of anything objectionable my husband did or said. He literally didn’t do or say anything. My husband’s first post explicitly acknowledging the harassment campaign was in December 2016, and he acknowledged it only because he was posting to warn our shared social circles not to engage with Jeff Kunzler (Jeevesmeister), a former friend who had been part of the campaign and was facing rape allegations. My husband didn’t bring this on himself or pick a fight or post a “bad take” or whatever excuse these people use to justify targeting someone; he just loved me, so they tried to hurt him.

None of that really got under his skin -- like I say, he’s a stoic kind of guy -- but it got under mine, the same way it got to me when people would be harassed just for being friends of mine, or RT’ing me too often, or whatever. And I was going to be an especially soft touch due to the pregnancy hormones -- at a Trainwreck reading in Portland, I spent the entire day crying because I’d lost touch with a college friend who moved to Portland -- so I decided I would keep my magic baby to myself. Every day I spent growing Lulu, I’d actually be thinking about Lulu, and not about what some toxic sinkhole of a human being said about Lulu on Twitter. They wouldn’t be able to insult her, or threaten her, because they wouldn’t know she existed.

It worked for nine months. But I couldn’t go through life with a secret child. I mean, I seriously considered it. But what was I going to do, teach her to flee from the sight of iPhones? Lock her in the attic like the first Mrs. Rochester? I had to let people know about her eventually. I had to let the world in, for better or for worse.

The first e-mail telling me Lulu would be mentally disabled and ugly and that she should be taken away from me by Child Services came within 48 hours of the birth announcement.

I have to let the world in. But I have to raise her in a world that has evil in it, and I’m still trying to find some way to accept that.

In the days leading up to Lulu’s birth, I started letting myself tune out bad news. I didn’t want to know anything about Trumpcare, for example. Nothing about NICU babies or pregnancy as a pre-existing condition or lifetime caps that made babies lose their coverage before they were a week old, nothing about what could or might or would go wrong. The murder of Charleena Lyles shot across my social feed. I picked up the key words -- pregnant, mother, mentally ill -- and put the story to the side, telling myself it would be all right to read it when every word in that constellation wasn’t viscerally terrifying.

The urge was at least partly white fragility -- I am not Charleena Lyles, I do not face the same injustices or dangers Charleena Lyles did, it is undeniably selfish of me to process Lyles’ story in terms of its impact on me -- but the pain and fear were real. Whatever challenges I face with my mental health, or with sexism, I also have substantial privilege. Women who get sick without the safety net of whiteness don’t end up with platforms to combat stigma or fight back against misrepresentations of their health. They don’t wind up like me. They wind up, an awful lot of the time, like Charleena Lyles.

And Lulu will not have white privilege. I mean: She won’t be a black woman in America, either. Neither of us can appropriate Lyles’ story. But Lulu, unlike me, will face racism. When she meets her first bully, when she comes home from school crying for the first time, I don’t know what she’ll be crying about; I don’t know whether it’ll be something I’ve experienced and can talk her through, or some form of cruelty that is new to me. Or, worse, whether it will be something I’m implicated in as a white woman -- something I do, or have done, without realizing it. Something I can’t even try to fix without making the situation worse.

This train of thought is not exactly linear. But in the days leading up to Lulu’s birth, when I was getting hit with huge surges of hormones every few hours, I wasn’t thinking in linear terms. I felt half human at best. I kept remembering the pregnant barn cats I used to see out on my cousins’ farm, frantic and raw and instinctively, protectively vicious; I remembered them pacing, hissing any time one of us got too close, shredding cardboard, hiding under the porch, and I wanted to do any or all of those things, all the time. Any piece of bad news would spiral out of its proper context and into the terror of Something Happening To The Baby, get swallowed up by that weird animal frenzy of impending labor. And I just couldn’t handle it, hearing about the horrible things the world does to its girls. I couldn’t stomach the thought of sending my baby out there, with a mind at least partly like mine, and none of the safeguards I took for granted.

Yet I can’t tune it out forever. It’s my job to keep track of terrible things being done to women -- a job I’m working my way back up to now, even as I find that my beat increasingly looks like a list of horrible things that could happen to my daughter: ‘90s celebrity found running sex cult for underage girls. President Trump. Newspapers leak nude photos of actress to punish her for taking a traditionally male role. President Trump. Man with several dozen rape allegations not convicted at his rape trial. Beloved progressive journalist repeatedly tried to force female coworkers to give him oral sex because “it’s funny.” President Trump.

President Trump.

The horror is less the violence itself than how the world keeps rolling on regardless. If we really felt what the world is doing to its girls, we would be in the streets, howling at the sky. We couldn’t parse a single one of these headlines as anything other than an atrocity. But we live in this world, where most of these incidents don’t even alter the course of conversation. We live in a world with evil in it, and most of us are used to it by now.

So I spend a lot of time thinking about him, that first bully. Or her. Whoever the first person to make my daughter cry will be. I spend a lot of time worrying about how I can be ready for the attack -- how I can anticipate all the angles, unlearn all my blind spots, have a good defense ready, without being some clueless overcompensating white mom. It’s what I do, instead of howling at the sky. I get ready.

Because every little girl gets bullied, sooner or later. Every little girl is a light the world tries to put out; to make smaller, meeker, quieter, less alive, less assured. What matters is who you come home to. Whether they find a way to protect the light in you or just quietly let you know that it would be a lot less trouble, for you and everyone else, if you let yourself go dark.

There’s another level to all this. I didn’t come into the world under ideal circumstances. I’ve talked about it and written about it; I honestly thought that I was over it. Then I got pregnant, and it all came back to life.

I don’t think I’ll ever fully understand my father’s violence, but I know it started when I was born. He didn’t like having children. He didn’t like how it took my mother’s focus off him; “he wanted,” my mother says, “to be the baby of the family.” I can’t imagine that the actual work of a child -- the diapers, the crying, the feeding, the constant need to keep hands or eyes on them; having to re-train your reflexes so that you can force yourself to get out of bed instead of grabbing five more minutes of sleep, having to keep your voice and your gestures calm and sweet when they’ve been fussing for hours and you want to jump out a window -- made things easier. It was just a big dose of adulthood, all at once, and he couldn’t take it. So while my mother cared for their newborn daughter, my father got into bed for a few months, didn’t get up except to grab himself more beer when he needed it, and then, when he felt properly rejuvenated, expended all that newfound energy on doing a bunch of cocaine and beating up my mother. He got better. She got pregnant again. He got worse. We had to leave the house before he killed us.

So that’s it, my origin story -- one that has probably been told, at this point, only slightly less often than Spider-Man’s. I came into this world having to fend off the temper tantrums of a self-absorbed, abusively entitled baby-man, and thirty-five years later, I have not run out of baby-men yet. It has occurred to me, more than once, that I started dealing with men’s bullshit the day I was born, and that I will probably be dealing with it on the day I die. I’ll be in the nursing home, stroking out, hearing some male nurse scream about what a bitch I am for not listening to his podcast. It is my calling.

But you can’t fight fate. You can only make them sorry they didn’t manage to kill you the first time around. Which, for the most part, is what I do. Or did, until I was pregnant. At which point, everything scared me. I was scared that my husband would leave, hate me, hate the baby, lose his mind. Or that I’d get drunk once the baby was born, drop her, forget her, sleep through her crying. Or we would have to leave, the baby and I, we’d have to live with my mother -- that’s what we had to do, when my mother left my father; we lived with her parents -- and there would be no money, just like there was no money back then, it would never stop, we would never have enough, we would always be in the act of losing everything, running in the night and in fear to a cold, strange place where we were poor.

They say one of the strangest things about trauma is how it creates an eternal present. The traumatic event never gets entirely integrated into the narrative of your life, never becomes something that happened. Instead it gets stuck in the present tense; the traumatic event is always still happening, somewhere in your brain. You just have to avoid that part of your brain. I didn’t fully understand this, until I was walking around with my conscious mind in 21st-century Brooklyn and the rest of me stuck in Mississippi in 1985.

We live in a world with evil in it. A world where people hurt each other for no reason and to no great end, where people hurt the most harmless people they can find, or the people they’ve sworn to love and protect; a world where men hurt women for power, for attention, for control, for assurance that they are the most important person in the room. I know that; I’ve always known it. It was probably the first thing I ever saw.

The challenge, for me, is not believing in the existence of evil. It’s believing in anything else. It’s letting myself think that my trauma ends with me. That my daughter will be allowed to have a different story.

Which brings us, I suppose, to the past few weeks.

The actual particulars of the latest Chapo pile-on are pretty banal. One of the hosts went off on some ridiculous supervillain monologue about how, in order for the Democratic primary rifts to heal, all Democrats must kneel, KNEEL BEFORE CHAPO; the supervillain monologue was quoted in a magazine article, the magazine article was screencapped in a Tweet, and the Tweet then floated through my social-media feed, at which point I made a blowjob joke, because men really shouldn’t yell into microphones about how badly they want people to get on their knees if they’re not prepared for someone to make the association.

Anyway, they took it about as well as fearless free-speech warriors usually take any mild joke at their expense; thus, I’ve spent the past few weeks hearing about how I am a wicked identitarian feminazi who makes False Rape Allegations, and also a rape apologist who makes Rape Jokes, and also, of course, fielding hilarious jokes and/or serious suggestions to the effect that I, myself, ought to be raped and/or murdered for my lack of proper reverence to their podcast.

I stand by my joke, for what it’s worth; it didn’t posit rape as fun or trivial, it didn’t posit being a rape victim as shameful, it wasn’t even necessarily about rape so much as it was about some dude being unattractive. It did, admittedly and intentionally, posit “being a dude who demands other people get on their knees for you” as shameful, which it is, which is why the Chapos were upset. But, more importantly, I doubt it’s worthwhile to debate the finer points of tasteful and appropriate humor with folks who not only explicitly defend their friends’ rape jokes, but have mocked actual rape survivors for talking about their rapes online.

I mean: Everyone knows Chapo turns people’s lives upside-down for criticizing them, and at this point, everyone knows what the victims usually look like, too. Parker Molloy gets told that she should have her skull crushed by a Nazi. Alana Massey gets called a geriatric bipolar stripper. Arthur Chu gets doxed because people find his divorce funny. I get accused of making False Rape Allegations. (I’m a survivor, by the way. Life is not kind, and the story that started with my father didn’t stop with him.) Everyone who pays attention to Chapo knows this; the only real question is whether they think it’s a bad thing. Because it’s pretty impossible to keep insisting that it’s an accident or a coincidence, when it’s happened this many times.

So the point is not what I said; the point is not even, really, what they said in response. The point was forcing me to deal with them once again. Anyone who obsessively scans and screencaps my feed like the Chapo crowd does would have known that I’d just given birth. They probably would have known that I’d had a complicated labor that required some pretty major surgery, that I was still in a lot of pain, that I was sleep-deprived, and -- given their obsessive focus on my mental health history -- that I was at relatively high risk for post-partum depression. “the craziest shit is she literally had a baby last week,” one of them posted in a forum during the pile-on. The others then began digging for nasty things to say about the baby. The most common line, so far, is that I don’t love her. Lulu is “the baby [Sady] openly resents for having caused her physical pain with its birth.” Another gentleman concludes that “[Sady] may not actually hate her baby, but she sure as shit wrote a lot of words” denying it. After I posted an old death threat aimed at my potential future children, one dude chimed in to say that he’d combed all the articles I wrote, and had found one article in 2010 that made it seem like I didn’t want children; “if you think the person who wrote that piece liked kids and wanted one, you're deluded,” he chided my followers.

So that’s what it’ll be. It’s an entirely logical sequel to Castrating Shrew Sady and her Submissive, Henpecked Asian Husband -- Selfish Career Woman Sady and her Neglected, Resented Baby. (Or the more virulent version of the same story, Devouring Monster Sady and her Abused Baby That Someone Should Take Away From Her, who shows up in my e-mail from time to time.) Both are stories about how I’m not woman enough to love somebody; both, just under the surface, are stories about how love for women means being dominated, about how women who refuse to be subjugated or erased by their family responsibilities are refusing their proper place in the world, and passing up their only chance at happiness. The tropes being deployed are classically sexist, like something you’d see in a shitty alarmist magazine piece from 1980 or 1960 about “working women” -- something you’d see, to be quite honest, on Breitbart today. But they’re also describing me, a real person, and my relationship with the baby I longed to protect so much that I refused to speak her name, lest the wrong person repeat it.

It’s evil. What makes it more evil, somehow, is that it is so, so pointless -- it’s not police racism, it’s not the rise of fascism, it’s not my father beating his pregnant wife. It’s just small, useless, playground-bully evil, trying to convince the world that a mother doesn’t love her children because she made fun of your favorite podcast. Frankly, it’s the same stupid, petty, pointless bullying many of us heard in that “bend the knee” monologue -- the assumption that you should run the show, that everyone should do as you tell them, and that if they don’t, you are entitled to do or say absolutely anything you can think of, in order to shut them down or intimidate them into compliance.

It’s not the worst thing in the world. It’s silly to even get upset by it; for the most part, it’s background noise, wasps swarming in a pale ugly nest in your backyard. You walk around the nest. You put it out of mind. You hope not to get stung. It’s been going on so long that I more or less take it for granted. But it matters right now, just as a reminder of what I’ve been dreading: No matter what, the world will always have bullies. And despite what we tell our children, those bullies don’t necessarily go away or get better once they’re all grown up.

Lulu knows nothing about the evil in this world. She knows very little. She gets the boob, and she gets a nap, and she gets to wake up when it’s time for the boob again; she likes it best when the cycle is continuous, where she can just fall asleep on my chest while she’s eating and let me know she’s woken up by opening her mouth again. So we do that for most of the morning, me holding her curled up on a little breastfeeding pillow and reading from an iPad I’ve propped up on the arm of the chair. I’m trying to learn to type with one hand, so I can take advantage of the down time. I’m okay at it. Not great. Let this post bear witness to my progress on that front.

She also spends more and more time awake without being hungry, these days. So we read to her -- you have to read to them from the time they’re newborns, it creates a positive association with books; so far, she’s read Everywhere Babies and Green Eggs and Ham and some back issues of n+1 her father meant to get through before she was born -- and we do Tummy Time on a little orange mat we inherited from our friends. There’s a bunny-shaped rattle attached to the end of the mat, to give her something to work for as she learns to crawl, so I sit there and watch her push her little legs around, and Mr. Bunny dances and delivers his various encouraging monologues about how Baby is made of desserts. (”Mommy had a raspberry ice cream, and a rose-flavored ice cream, and a macaron, and another macaron. And the doctor said, stop! You have to make that baby out of healthy foods! And then Mommy had fifty almond croissants. Lulu is a sweet little almond croissant baby...”) She’s very strong for a baby her age, apparently. She flipped herself over on her first try. Which they shouldn’t be able to do for a few months, so we have to check on her in her crib periodically to make sure she hasn’t done it in her sleep.

The thing about babies flipping themselves over is that they can get stuck that way, like a turtle. They can flip from back to belly and forget how to reverse it, choke to death on their own bedsheets. There are just so, so many things to be afraid of, with a baby. Loving someone this much, when they’re this helpless, is just one long exercise in fear.

I don’t know who will make her cry for the first time. Some bully at school, someone on whatever terrifying version of social media her generation winds up using, or one of us -- her father or I, losing patience, saying something she won’t forget. So I sit over my baby and applaud her as she works her arms and legs. So strong, so strong, mommy has such a strong girl, I say, in my happiest voice. And I don’t say the other thing. That she may actually be too strong; that being this strong might kill her. She’ll figure that out on her own time. Girls always do.

And I look at the news. All the terror, all the bullies, all the men harming women to convince themselves they’re the most important guy in the room. It happened the day I was born, it will be happening on the day I die. I left my father. But somehow, as I’m sure any decent therapist would tell me, I chose a career and a way of life that guaranteed I would always be screamed at by some emotionally catastrophic man-baby who behaved just like my father. I left him without leaving him. As long as these guys are calling me an ugly castrating bitch with a fucked-up nose whom no-one could ever love, the experience of living with my Dad is still very much ongoing.

It got to be the worst it’s ever been, right before I had this little girl. In the Hero’s Journey, Joseph Campbell says, the midpoint of the story is always the most dangerous moment. The hero has been called into another world, tasked with finding something so wonderful it passes comprehension -- something that could change the world, or save it. But he must earn it. He must undergo a form of suffering precisely as terrible as his reward is wonderful. So, at the very midpoint of the story, his worst fear, or his oldest enemy, rises up and nearly kills him. Sometimes, it actually does kill him, and he has to find a way to resurrect himself in order to proceed. He has to pass this test, walk through the underworld unarmed, before he can get his reward and go home.

So that’s what I do. I sit here, looking out at the world, the evil in it; podcast hosts and Presidents and whoever will use the information here to send me some horrifically personal string of insults through my Squarespace page. I look into the eyes of my hundred-headed father; my original death, which I escaped without escaping. And I say the only three words that matter.

You missed, asshole.

Because he did. Because they always do. Because I’m still here, and I will be here until their aim gets better, and I do not plan to shut up or become more convenient or submissive until that day. For now, it’s enough to meet the demon on the threshold and keep walking. And so I take my reward, my magic baby, who will grow up with a whole new story about how the world treats girls, and she and I go home.

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politicaltheatre · 5 years

Text

The Competition

Donald Trump just made history. On the face of it, it would appear to be the good kind for a change. Of course, in politics taking things at face value is never a good idea.

Time will tell whether Trump's footsteps into North Korea prove to be the first in a journey to end decades of war, hot then cold, and suffering in the Korean peninsula or just a momentary distraction from the Democratic debates a few days ago.

Odds are, Trump got played, again, by North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un. With that first step Trump legitimized the totalitarian North Korean regime without getting a single concession beyond the flattering of his ego.

Yes, the Kim family has ruled North Korea for over 70 years and needs no actually international recognition to make that a fact, but their treatment of their own people, of their South Korean cousins, and their increasing nuclear threats to the rest of the world have attained legitimacy.

That's some kind of achievement, one that no United States president since the 1953 cease fire has been willing to offer. Some have called Trump's succession of tactics "bold", but the only way anyone but Kim Jong-Un gets something out of this is if Kim Jong-Un stops acting like a self-important, authoritarian dictator and makes a legitimate concession of his own.

That won't be the only concession Trump made that won't last the flight home as good news. The deal he made with China to ease tariffs in general and limits on the technology company Huawei in particular generated a speculative bump on the stock market, but don't be shocked if the profit-taking begins as early as this week as the reality of what he gave away and to whom sets in.

Huawei, as we all know, has been accused of aiding China in its data gathering and espionage. Even if that were not to be true, it's exceedingly hard to prove a negative where espionage is concerned, and heading into another election cycle Trump has just hung that risk around the neck of every congressional Republican. Even normally submissive members of his own party have criticized it.

Well, it least it was a good day for the Trump fam-…What's that? Junior retweeted a racist, birther-ist attack on California Senator Kamala Harris? Apples, trees, we all saw this one coming.

The immediate why is just as obvious. Harris scored some serious points in the Democratic debate Thursday night, including but not limited to her demolition of front runner Joe Biden. In the politics as bloodsport coverage so attractive to our short attention span world, Harris excelled, and in doing so has opened the floodgates for her competitors to take Biden down for good before the first ballots are even cast.

Her takedown was made easier by fellow senator Cory Booker's earlier attacks on Biden's compliments of openly racist former senators (and, of course, Biden himself for saying it), and it all certainly made the later line of attack on Biden's 2002 Iraq War vote easier to land and more successful. In doing so, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, and others helped themselves but also reinforced her attack, giving her the greatest momentum coming out of the debates.

Which is why Donald Trump Jr. and other right wing attack dogs took it upon themselves to launch attacks on Harris, using what can't even be described as a dog whistle anymore. Suggesting that someone of a darker complexion wasn't born in the United States is nothing but racist, plain and simple, as is the naked appeal to other racists. We can thank Donald Trump Sr. for that. He brought that particular brand of racism mainstream.

That all of Harris’ Democratic competition, including Joe Biden, quickly condemned Trump Jr.’s racism for what it was speaks very well of them. That we are so cynical in our politics that we are capable of seeing that condemnation as a necessary political tactic speaks ill of us, however much it speaks well of a party that believes that outrage over racism is necessary.

That cynicism isn’t anything new, not to politics. We rightly doubt a dictator’s sincerity when he promises to compromise. We rightly doubt apologies that include an excuse. And we rightly doubt anyone running for office who offers easy answers to difficult problems.

Or, we should.

The right wing sees everything as competition, a contest in which there can ever be only one winner. This underscores their view of accountability: I am accountable to no one, but everyone must be accountable to me. In that context, racism is simply a means to an end, an exploitation of a weakness - in this case, skin color that renders the opponent different - to undermine the opponent.

This is no different than gerrymandering election districts to maintain disproportionate representation or attacking US soccer star Megan Rapinoe for being lesbian. In the pursuit of acquiring and maintaining power, the right wing sees these as acceptable tactics. To see the world this way, all is fair - in love, war, politics, economics - because all is war.

The pity of it is that this is exactly why debates are a good thing. A debate tests candidates in ways they aren't tested the rest of a campaign. They're literally under the lights, exposed, vulnerable. They are at the mercy of competitors and moderators who will throw even the best prepared off balance, intentionally or unintentionally.

Only a true sociopath actually thrives in those conditions, so trusting authenticity in this situation isn't going to lead to any truth, it's just going to tell you who's good at appearing authentic. The trick is that someone who does not want to lie will appear inauthentic, which is not the same as "canned". Not wanting to lie, they feel shame, which is an ability you actually want in a leader. This, again, is why taking things at face value is a mistake.

Most answers, like the questions from the moderators and interjections from candidates supposed to be waiting their turn, are largely canned. Understanding that is a little useful. If the canned answers are coherent, we know that the candidate knows how to prepare; if not, we should reasonably doubt whether or not that person can handle the rigors of heading a government armed with nuclear weapons.

If the candidate chooses not to answer the question, that's even more useful. It's there that we should be asking questions: Did they have an answer? If so, was it going to be a bad one? Did they pivot to give another canned answer for an entirely different question? If so, was it because they didn't get a chance to answer it when it was first asked or because they just didn't have an answer?

Maybe they just thought it was a stupid question. Bernie Sanders, in what may have been his most Bernie Sanders moment of the entire debate, actually called out NBC's Chuck Todd for asking a stupid question. It was one of Todd's "one word answer" questions, in this case on the greatest existential threat to the United States. Sanders lives in a complicated world, one in which threats are many and often connected, such as income inequality and healthcare, which are also connected to pollution and through it climate change.

Sanders rightly called out the stupidity of "one word answer" questions. They help the audience in the sense of gauging the preparedness and focus of the candidates, but they do nothing for understanding what those candidates would do once in office, let alone the complexities of the threats, how they relate to each other, and what the average voter might do to help end that threat.

Debates, like photo ops at the G20 summit and the Korean DMZ, end up being about short term gains. That's as true for the networks hosting them as anything. We can criticize Chuck Todd for asking stupid questions or talking too much, but he wasn't alone.

All four of his co-moderators we just as guilty, each of them asking shallow questions looking for shallow answers, and at least one of them, Lester Holt, attempting to shut candidates up when they tried to give the answers they wanted (basically, Marianne Williamson every time she tried to speak).

Did it feel like the candidates with higher polling numbers coming in were asked more questions and given more time to answer? Well, yes, you're right. Every time one of the moderators warned that not everyone would get to answer every question, they meant not everyone not standing center stage.

Critics may have complained about New Mayor Bill de Blasio and New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand hijacking speaking opportunities as rude and off-putting, but they understood that meekly waiting to be called upon (Washington Governor Jay Inslee) or whining about not being called upon (Maryland Representative John Delaney).

Their tactic of interruption and interjection meant that both de Blasio and Gillibrand got press and gave voters an idea of what their positions are, likely extending their campaigns into the autumn. Neither the Inslee nor Delaney campaigns will likely last long enough to see the leaves turn.

We shouldn't give NBC or their moderators too much credit for what their choices in questioning revealed about these low-polling candidates. Their choices had far more to do with their own competition, the one for ratings that drives all of their decision making.

Their competitors - CBS, ABC, CNN, Fox News, Twitter - mean a lot more to them than edifying potential voters about all of the candidates. They believe their audience wants to see and hear from the front runners - note the placement of the candidates on the stage - and have placed their thumb on the scales to make that happen. It's not exactly democratic, is it?

So, debates reveal even more than we might think. They reveal all of the flaws in our democracy, all of the flaws we should notice and could if only we would look past the spectacle and the bloodletting.

Look past shallow, self-serving questions and answers and you may just end up with a president ashamed of telling lies, capable of not dictating foreign policy by ego, and then reaping in the long term rewards of what such a president can and will do, such as appointing Supreme Court justices who will recognize gerrymandering as a violation of at least two constitutional amendments.

To achieve this, we must fight and defeat our own worst, competing impulses. We must ask questions and keep asking questions. We must not be satisfied with canned answers, ones that are just good enough to allow us to stop asking questions. We must ask why a moderator would ever shut up a candidate giving an honest answer. And, most importantly, we must ask what qualities and abilities we actually want in a president.

Ask more questions, get more answers. Politics really isn't so complicated.

- Daniel Ward

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