winding road in urban area

another victory for free speech

LA MARQUE — Authorities have dropped a disorderly conduct charge filed against a woman who was handcuffed while being cited for using the F-word [Fuck] in a casual conversation at a Wal-Mart, the La Marque interim city manager said today.

City prosecutor Jay Brown dropped the charge recently after finding that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute Kathryn Fridge, 29, of La Marque, City Manager Eric Gage said. [Please call Jay Brown and ask him why he was absent during Constitutional Law when they covered the First Amendment 409-935-7564].

“Of course, we would have hoped to prevail in the case, but not if there’s not significant evidence,” Gage said.  [In other words, they couldn't seat a jury because everyone in the jury pool admitted in voir dire that they too had said "fuck" in a Wal-Mart but they could not spell it on the jury questionnaire.]

Fridge was not immediately available for comment. [But had she been, I am positive her comment would have been something like, "Fuck, yeah!"]

She was cited on Aug. 4 for using the F-word [Fuck] in a [private] conversation with her mother while shopping for batteries at the Wal-Mart at FM 1764 and Interstate 45 as a tropical storm menaced the Gulf Coast. La Marque is in Galveston County.

The shelf where she expected to find batteries was bare and Fridge expressed her frustration to her mother.

Her remarks were overheard by Capt. Alfred Decker, La Marque assistant fire marshal, who handcuffed her after she protested his decision to cite her for disorderly conduct.

Decker released her after issuing the citation.

If you want to congratulate Decker for keeping the peace in Wal-Mart during a hurricane he can be reached at1109 Bayou Rd # A La Marque, TX 77568 (409) 938-9260. 

breaking news: houston, texas has a whore house in it

Houston police, not having anything really important to do and needing to look busy, busy, busy, busted a prostitution ring today.  No release yet of the client list but their are rumors that doctors, lawyers, and athletes are on the list.

Local media, never one to miss a chance to snicker, kick people when they are down, and generally not question authority, covered it like it was at least as important as a Supreme Court ruling.

Big surprise. 

Why is this story important?  Why are the police making the effort to bust women who answered ads on Craig's List and the like to sell their bodies for sex to Houston men?  Well, it is tax free income, but that seems to be an issue for the IRS, not the local police.

There are illegal immigrant girls and women who publicly work as taxi dancers in Houston but who are actually sold into "white slavery" to pay off the men who brought them to the United States.  Heroin is big in the area high schools.  Carjacking and murder are significant problems in Houston.  People who know each other kill each other more often than not.  How much white collar crime occurs here?  Women are beaten, abused, run over in the streets and left for dead.  Kids can't walk to and from school without someone trying to harm them.  The District Attorney and the Sheriff were abusing their offices by paying their former lover almost $100,000 a year and using inmate labor.  Neither were indicted.  A person usually has to go to a third world country or at least Illinois to find that kind of corruption.

Harris County sends more people to Death Row than any other county in Texas and there is a high probability that some of those convicted of capital murder were in fact not guilty.  But that isn't nearly as important an issue as getting well educated men locked up for paying for sex  

But prostitutes are a high priority.  Evidently the City of Houston will collapse in shame if women profit from sex with a consenting doctor, lawyer, or athlete for money. Evidently this is the most important issue facing the streets of Houston, Texas in these modern times.  Why all authority and government will simply dissolve and there will be chaos if this prostitution circle remains unbroken. It gives the news people--of which the female of the species looks remarkably like a streetwalker when delivering this "news" to viewers who are no doubt shocked, shocked! to learn that Houston has a whore problem--something "dirty" to talk about.  They can shake their heads, shame the bad boys, and look like they could spank the bad boys at the same time.

Yes, yes, prostitution is naughty and not nice.  People will be embarrassed.  Marriages will break up when the list comes to light.  Women who were not the natural object of their husbands' bounty got money that should have gone to wives and children.  Perhaps drugs were involved.  But there has got to be more serious crimes being committed than prostitution between well to do people.

Houston simply does not have the number of police it should for the population.  The size of this bust, if it grows beyond the arrest of the pimps--a husband and wife team--and the man hours worked to make the case might be huge.  The public will enjoy discussing who's who on the list but they won't be getting their tax dollar's worth.  Chances are, the "johns" will do no jail time, simply pay a fine and go on with their lives.  The women involved will be punished more severely.  The pimps should owe some taxes, answer local charges and then perhaps some federal ones if they don't have the money to pay their taxes but it isn't going to stop someone else from using the Internets to find companionship.

And the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals says today that it is constitutionally kosher for Texas school children to have a moment of silence to do whatever they wish--pray, not pray, think of Zen koans, make an inventory of the desks, their souls, of the people they have wronged, make a mental note to meet their heroin connection, hope the police caught the rapist who attacked them on campus while the police failed to see it with the expensive surveillance equipment--because it doesn't, according to a three judge panel, advance religion.  Well, if it doesn't, then why all the wrangling to get a law passed to allow for a moment of silence?  It has got to be unconstitutional but as long as we are wondering about something as silly as prostitution on the news, there isn't time to consider the really important issues like how the rest of us live with government and the worship of authority.

everyone has an uninformed opinion about shelling until they have been shelled.

Israel is the only country I can think of that is expected to take shelling with a smile and not return fire with equal or superior force.  

I have broken my blood oath and read some ridiculous liberal bloggers who think that it is just inexplicable that Israel is using phosphorous based weapons against the poor, oppressed Palestinians in Gaza.  

Can we have a moment of sanity?

If Gaza had not been shelling Israel, perhaps Israel wouldn't feel the need to shell Gaza?  If Gaza didn't import every weapon it can get its hands on from other Israeli enemies across its border perhaps Israel wouldn't feel the need to control traffic across the border in much the same way that international borders are controlled everywhere.

If Mexico started shelling Houston, it is a safe bet that the United States would shell Mexico in return.  And if it didn't, quite a few Texans would get the weapons to shell Mexico on its own.  And the U.S. would use superior weapons to those possessed by Mexico.

Palestinians reported to Human Rights Watch, a group funded interestingly enough by money from the estates of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammet and yet supported by self loathing Jew Noam Chomsky that Israel was using the phosphorus based weapons which are not considered chemical weapons by international law.  The Palestinians have no reason to lie about Israel, do they?  According to spokesmen for the Israelis,  the IDF or Israeli Defense Forces do not use weapons that are banned by international law. 

If Palestinians are shelling Israel out of UN facilities, the Israeli forces have every right to shell the UN facilities which stopped being neutral when Palestinians fired rockets out of them.

A two state solution is the only solution.  But Israel has been out of Gaza for years and Gaza is supplied weapons across its borders that they fire at will across Israel's borders.  This must stop.  And children are always the innocent victims of war be they children in Gaza, children in Israel, children in Japan or Germany or Vietnam or Iraq.  Is Hamas using its own as shields and targets for Israeli defense forces and then crying foul when Israel kills them?  Is this the moral equivalent of human suicide bombers?

Many of you are too young to remember the days of dinner parties with Black Panthers and the radical chic of partying with bomb building anarchist and Weathermen (may be not that young since we have been revisiting the Weathermen of late) but this liberal support of Palestinians is beyond me.  I don't get it just as I don't understand the desire to party with terrorist, homegrown or foreign.  They cheered when the World Trade Center came down.   Academics love the anti-Semites. I do not love walking into the faculty lounge and seeing Al Jazeera on every computer screen.   

If the IDF has committed war crimes, they should be punished just as Americans who committed war crimes in Vietnam and most recently Iraq should be punished.  These things happen on every side in every conflict.  Will Hamas be punished?  Is it really acceptable to the American left who can't get George Bush and Dick Cheney punished by a Democratic Congress for their war crimes that Hamas get a a free pass too.We let George Bush take us to war on a lie and then let him return to Texas with our blessings.  We impeached a man for a sexual indiscretion but not for war crimes? And we feel comfortable in our own homes to criticize countries half way around the world that our own students cannot find with a map.  Will Hamas come to an international court of law and act like civilized countries act?  Or will they denounce international law, the rule of law, the community of nations as some "jewish trick?"  

really cranky

After three weeks of leave, I could seriously use three more weeks of leave.  How about three more years of leave.  I go back to work next week and I am not ready.  Today it took me four hours on the computer to futz around with things that should not have taken more than mere minutes.  Am I too old for this?

I seriously put some thought into an intercom system for the front porch and side gate.  We have been building our own gates since Hurricane Ike took our fences and the new gates have no handles.  They are smooth and modern and I don't want to put big honking handles on the gates.  The electric company has to get in the backyard to read the meter, but I often notice him or her in the neighborhood before he or she gets to the side yard.  Our doorbell has always been difficult to hear from the back of the house so an intercom at the front door and the side gate would be really better.  But I had second thoughts as I read my email friend's column at Slackjaw.  We have never been formally introduced.  I haven't taken the man's hand in friendship, but he is a terrific writer with an admirable sense of humor.  He was writing about apartment buzzers in his latest column and I hadn't checked it before I went on line to look for intercoms. 

I too would rather be left alone.  But packages come to our house almost daily.  Books from Amazon or small out of print stores or another attempt at a handbag that works for me comes via UPS.  Our meter must be read.  We have a glass "screen" door which keeps the dogs from darting into the yard over the delivery person but an intercom that I could hear would keep me from actually answering the door when I am not really expecting someone.  I don't like to wake from a nap and hear the gardener in the backyard.  I would rather he announce himself and asked to be allowed into the backyard.  In our part of town, kick in burglaries are getting more common although driveway robberies are more common still.  We simply don't answer the door if we aren't expecting someone.  If I don't know the person on the other side of the peep hole, I don't unlock the door.

Caller ID for the door. 

Speaking of being old enough to be left alone:  I have a friend or I should say had a friend.  I can't say that we will be speaking again.  I did the childish thing and hung up the phone before I could say something else insulting to her.  This person is very well educated.  A writer.  But she insists on telling me about how "incompetent" her household help is. She hires women who are seriously mentally ill to work for her because "they need the money."  Yet she criticizes them to the point that I want to cry listening to her tell me how terrible they are. She then says things about their ethnicity and "hard-headedness."  Her doctors and lawyers must be of a particular ethnicity or religion. If someone has an Irish name, they are drunks.  She actually gives a damn about someone's country of origin.  I mean, after a generation or two, aren't we just Americans? She refuses to learn any language that might facilitate her demands or make errands easier.  She was shocked when another writer friend of hers told her she was a bigot.  I told her she was a bigot.  She said she wasn't because she wished no ill toward these groups.  I told her she should think of people as individuals not stereotypical groups.  She complains about poor people in emergency rooms using "our" resources.  That the "Mexicans" are "taking over".  She cares deeply about where people are born, what color their skin is.  I told her that there were simply three expressions of racial types--Caucasians, Africans, and Asian-Pacific people and she went ballistic.  It is simply beyond her that Native American Indians can be Siberians.

Every time I talk to her she gets on this topic.  How poor her housekeepers are, how minorities are running the world, and how things used to be so much better.

If you are one of the tens of tens that actually read this blog then you know that my work concerns government, politics, and media.  I have been paid to do all three.  My friend started our last conversation with her usual nonsense and then got on the media.  She said media used to be better than today's television reporters and how journalism departments require students to take philosophy.  I said, no they don't and the pressure on today's journalist to make a paper or a news broadcast profitable was just as intense when Edward R. Murrow was on the air.  She was horrified when I insisted that Dan Rather was a good guy from East Texas and no intellectual or scholarly training, that Peter Jennings didn't graduate from high school and his tour of the Middle East and his father's connections at the BBC were more helpful to him than a graduate degree in journalism.  Which really teaches where a comma is placed, not what to ponder when reporting a news story.  She kept telling me I was wrong.

I am not wrong.  I don't have to listen to a bigot tell me I am wrong.  I hung up the phone.  She called back.  I didn't answer the call.  I just can't.  I can't go through it anymore.  I wasn't right about anything when I lived with my father.  I don't need this nonsense on my own telephone.  She can't accept that things were not any better in her day than they are now.  Politicians were not great men then, they were human beings.  Reporters made mistakes, networks were idiots then, too.  Romantic notions of the past are for fascists.  The world is more complicated than it appears to be and dumbing it down to bite sized chunks of digestible falsehoods doesn't make it any better. 

It isn't as if I hadn't told her that I don't want to be corrected in law, government, and media.  I have a terrific set of degrees from fine schools.  I read a lot now.  I don't tell her where to put the comma in her poetry.  I have asked her not to ask me about politics and history if she doesn't want to hear complicated stories.  She wants to make school children salute the flag every morning, I don't see how the Republic is going to collapse if they don't. I don't believe in compulsory patriotism, she doesn't see the harm in it because that is what they did every morning in Missouri.

I am disappointed because "educated people" means that we have open minds, not a dependency on the past, especially when that past was about conformity, uniformity, comfortable bigotry, and mindlessness.  I can feel sorry for her, but I suppose I am as guilty as she is for not calling her back.  But can I compromise my values to tolerate hers?

enough already

Finally the media, the criminal justice system, and popular culture have acknowledged that children are not "making it up," when they tell an adult that another adult sexually assaulted them. People are paying attention.  Although registering sex offenders usually focuses attention on a certain group of offenders and takes attention away from the more common offender.  Children are assaulted by someone they know and sometimes some one in their family.  It isn't the convicted felon down the street with the ugly yard, the drawn curtains, the huge sign in the yard.

This year, why not recognize that sexual assault and abuse happens when a person is forced into sexual activity?  And sexual assault happens to someone in this nation every 2 minutes.  Every two minutes, a person is sexually assaulted.  

Look at the math:

 

That means inappropriate touching, penetration or the labia, vagina, anus, or mouth by the perpetrator's fingers, penis, tongue or with an object.  So that means when a young woman walks down the hall at school and she is purposefully touched on her breast, between her legs, on her rear-end, she has been sexually assaulted.  It might mean that a couple is engaged in sexual activity, she says "stop" and he doesn't stop.  Sexual assault can be verbal, visual, or anything that forces a person to join in unwanted sexual contract or attention.  And it can happen in different situations and settings in a crowded hallway, a classroom, an isolated place, on a date, in the home, with a stranger or more likely with someone a person knows. 

For many, even those who gather statistics, rape is the focus.  But it isn't the only type of sexual assault.  But consider these statistics: 

1 out of every 6 American women have been the victims of an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime (14.8% completed rape; 2.8% attempted rape).

17.7 million American women have been victims of attempted or completed rape.

15% of sexual assault and rape victims are under age 12.

• 29% are age 12-17.
• 44% are under age 18.
• 80% are under age 30.
• 12-34 are the highest risk years.
• Girls ages 16-19 are 4 times more likely than the general population to be victims of rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault.

7% of girls in grades 5-8 and 12% of girls in grades 9-12 said they had been sexually abused.

• 3% of boys grades 5-8 and 5% of boys in grades 9-12 said they had been sexually abused.

In 1995, local child protection service agencies identified 126,000 children who were victims of either substantiated or indicated sexual abuse.

• Of these, 75% were girls.
• Nearly 30% of child victims were between the age of 4 and 7.

93% of juvenile sexual assault victims know their attacker.

• 34.2% of attackers were family members.
• 58.7% were acquaintances.
• Only 7% of the perpetrators were strangers to the victim.

Those persons who are convicted of sexual assault in a court of law have to register with a sex offender data base.  But what about those who don't get to court.  What would happen if a woman was touched in that school hallway, dropped her books on the floor and screamed, "Don't touch me!"  What if she slapped him?  Would that be assault and battery?  Perhaps but she acted in self-defense.  What if women learned to use self defense and not live like victims?

Child molesters get the public loathing they deserve.  But those who commit sexual assault who are classmates or peers are dismissed as "just being kids."  Women who are victimized by sexual violence are dismissed as being hysterical, over-reactors, some how seeking sexual contact--a.k.a. "asking for it."  

In comedy films, sexual assault is depicted as felonious frat boys being regular guys when in fact they are voyeurs and child molesters.  Count the sexual assaults in Animal House.  Looking in windows, at women under bleachers, sexual intercourse with a 13 year old.  How is this entertainment?

In the workplace, when comments are made, women must have the courage to say, "that is verbal sexual assault," or "that is harassment," or "please, don't subject me to those comments."  Write it down in front of the perp.  Tell their supervisor.  Go above them if they don't care.  And warn other women who must deal with this dangerous person.  Unfortunately the situation may be such that you must continue to work there, work around them, but you don't have to absorb the violence alone.

This year, we should say, enough. Sexual assault should get the public attention that child molestation has recently received.   

forgive me, it has been nearly a month since my last post

Exhausting, ennui, angst, blowout, burnout, fatigue, call it whatever you will, I haven't been the same since the funeral of my dear friend.  Another friend called a few nights ago to complain about her job search and I commented that our friends were dying and the new people in our world hardly knew the dead or cared.  We can drop names with the best of them but our list of living friends who can help us get a job when we need one is shorter and not as well connected as it used to be.

It hardly matters to me if Caroline Kennedy gets the appointment to represent New York in the U.S. Senate. We are going to have our own hell of a Senate race in Texas in a few months.  Everyone including those whose platform includes synchronizing the street lights on Houston streets and either flat-heads or Phillip's head screwdrivers but not both are going to run.  

I don't know if Ms. Kennedy is any more or less qualified to be a Senator than Hillary Clinton was when she earned voters' confidence and won the seat.  If her brother were alive, the buzz would be for him.  If her mother were alive the buzz would be for her.  Ms. Kennedy isn't any more or less qualified to serve than President Obama was when he became Senator from Illinois.  Or President of the these United States after a mere two years in the U.S. Senate.  Gore Vidal famously wrote in his seminal play, The Best Man, that a criticism of a candidate is usually something like, "never met a payroll," or some such nonsense.  Vidal's in-law, John Kennedy, who had the benefit of becoming a war hero when the Japanese sank his PT boat under him, said, if you are in the race, you are qualified to be there.  Winning is what mattered.

John Kennedy seemed older then at 43 than his daughter seems now at 50.  He had been elected more than a few times to the House and Senate.  And he had a fine mind and a love of learning and books.  Ms. Kennedy does, too.  She has done considerable fund-raising and yet like her Uncle Teddy really doesn't have an answer to questions on the issues.  Ted Kennedy couldn't tell Roger Mudd why he wanted to be president.  Kerry Kennedy tried to say that her cousin Caroline, author of two books on the Constitution, hadn't divulged her stance on abortion in one of the more high profile Catholic family gatherings.  I don't believe her.  I believe Ms. Kennedy has a stance on abortion and either it isn't the party line or they haven't gaged the reaction of the Church to her stance on abortion.  How do we expect voters to react to a pro choice Catholic Kennedy?  The Kennedys have visited more popes than most members of the Senate have.

How about thinking about voters like complicated adults.  Many Catholics support abortion and the Church dares voters not to support them.  Does she really have to prove her worth as a pro-choice Catholic?  Her father just had to prove his worth as a Catholic.  

What a tiresome, pseudo-problem.  Look the camera in its unblinking eye and answer the question.  Don't be shy.  Be smart.  She is a grown woman who has seen considerable death in her 50 years and has three teenage children.  She is concerned about contraception and the alleged contradiction.  

Andrew Cuomo, Caroline's ex-in law, would like to go to the U.S. Senate.  He has been elected attorney general of the state of New York.  He is divorced from Kerry Kennedy and they have three daughters.  He was in the Clinton Cabinet.  Cuomo's father was governor of New York, could have been president or on the Supreme Court or both.  

The plot is now thick.  And Governor Patterson is really not going to make anyone happy.  His best solution is to select either a New York City police officer or transit worker to be the next Senator from New York. An out of work auto worker would be an excellent choice.  May be he will pick himself.   Perhaps an immigrant cab driver from India since they are happy to tell you what is wrong with politics and have an opinion or two about the intersection of politics and religion and of course nuclear weapons..

Jim Mattox, 1943-2008

Jim Mattox died last week in his sleep of a massive heart attack.  He was 65 years old.  We will join his wife, son and daughter, and sister and brother and literally hundreds of friends to bury him in the Texas State Cemetery tomorrow. My husband knew him for at least 30 years, I knew him for 20 years.  He was my mentor, my boss, my friend.  He was larger than life and yet he knew how difficult life is for many, many people. 

He saved an innocent man from execution.  Death row inmate Henry Lee Lucas was not guilty of capital murder and Mattox investigated the situation. His report on the Lucas matter was merciless.  Mattox and investigators revealed that the so called serial killer did not kill the victim for which he was scheduled to die.  He went to the Board of Pardons and Paroles and asked that Lucas' sentence be commuted to life. Governor George W. Bush took the Board's recommendation and did not execute Lucas. 

Lucas died in his sleep in general population in Huntsville, Texas.  He was 64.  My husband and I attended his funeral there on the prison grounds. 

Lucas came to our attention because my husband's employer, McLennan County District Attorney Vic Feazell, discovered that Lucas' confession spree was nothing more than a fraud.   Mattox noted that the "Lucas Task Force" headed by the Texas Rangers had participated in a "hoax." Lucas could not have killed between 350 and 600 people without leaving any physical evidence.  His confession in his death row case claimed that he raped and murdered the unknown woman and left her in a drainage ditch.  The rape kit performed in her autopsy showed no signs of rape or sexual abuse.

When we told 60 Minutes the truth about the Lucas matter, Jim Mattox was on camera supporting us.  When the FBI and the Texas Rangers wiretapped our phones, Jim Mattox called me and told me we were being "trapped and traced."  He was almost gleeful that his phone number would be included. 

Jim Mattox gave me my first job in state government.  He gave me my first job on a statewide political campaign.  He ate at my dining table in my home, played with our dog, regularly bought my lunch at a cafeteria in Austin and ate off my plate.  He had me research speeches, rewrite speeches, and listen to him complain.  We talked about politics, life, hard childhoods, law school, his beloved children and his wife. 

He fought for Texas consumers, Texas children, and he worked tirelessly to make Texas better.  He was never harder on anyone than he was on himself.  His grasp of public policy and the political system was phenomenal.  He didn't go a long to get a long and he wasn't interested in making friends but he was loved across the state of Texas by every person who was in need of Jim Mattox in their corner.  I could count on him for anything.  And I watched him give his everything to his employees, his constituents, his family, friends, and his state.  My life is better for knowing him and your life is better because of his devotion to the underdog, the unloved.  He comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable.  And even if it was a lost cause, he never backed away from a fight.  He took on the fight sometimes simply because no one else would.

When the Texas Legislature gave his office the responsibility of pursuing child support collections, they did it with the hope that he would fail.  His abrasive nature, his inability to court the Establishment, the fact that his home phone number was in the Austin phone book and he believed it was an honor to serve the people and not serve corporations made him a lone figure in the legislature.  But he was not really alone.

Even some of the so called liberal journalist--the two or three in the entire state--did not like Mattox because he didn't drink with them, didn't have their birthright, didn't think he was entitled.  He was no elitist.  He had callouses on his hands and knew what it was to go without limousine liberals generosity.  His charity did not come with tuxedos and taffeta.  Poverty was not an abstract concept to him.  It wasn't something to fight at charity balls.

He listened to people.  He didn't listen to critics.  He was nearly Rooseveltian in his philosophy about measuring himself by the enemies he made. He believed in a Great Society. Texas certainly did not.  The Democratic Party changed.  The conservative Democrats became conservative Republicans and the poor, the middle class found a meaner colder Texas.  Jim Mattox's liberalism died with the death of the Texas Democratic Party after George W. Bush and Karl Rove reinvented Texas politics.  But the people they used and abused were the same ones that conservative Democrats had used, too.  Democrats couldn't compete with Republicans in the polarized "liberal" verses "conservative" depiction of Texas. 

Most Democrats in Texas were conservative and didn't really care so much about the people Jim Mattox served.  After all those people suffered under Democratic administrations for years and Jim Mattox suffered at the hands of a press that championed the Democratic Establishment.  Hell, the press was the Democratic Establishment.  The Houston Post was owned by Lt. Governor William Hobby.  The Dallas Morning News was a reactionary paper that long endorsed Democratic candidates when their was no real Republican Party in Texas until the election of Republican Senator John Tower.   For eight years in the mid 1980s every statewide official was a Democrat--but what kind of Democrat?  None were liberal Democrats like Jim Mattox.

really, couldn't we do something about Golda's clothes?

This is Golda Mier, the Mother of Israel.  She is not wearing expensive clothes.  I think if anyone said she looked like she was wearing a bedspread, the ground would open up and swallow them and rightfully so.   As a matter of fact, newspapers and television reporters did not discuss her clothing.  They discussed her politics.  Reporters did not have huge clothing allowances from networks.  Campaigns did not hire consultants to dress candidates in "earth tones."  They did not worry about such things.  Jack Kennedy bought his clothes at Brooks Brothers.  They looked great on television then and they would today.  But it wasn't an issue.  Mrs. Kennedy liked clothes.  Who the hell doesn't?  If Mrs. Mier wasn't busy holding Israel on the map, she might have shopped at Neiman's.  But she was thinking about things like national security.  She didn't treat people like they were stupid.  But our campaigns know that people are stupid and they play it to their advantage.  Two weeks to go and we are discussing clothes. 

If anyone thinks that the Obama's haven't been groomed, they are naive at best and just idiotic at worse.  Nancy Reagan was criticized for her clothes.  Nixon bragged of his wife's good "cloth Republican coat" giving good and hard to Mrs. Roosevelt who had just accepted a fur coat.  Mrs. Lincoln spent a considerable sum on her clothes.

Now, damn it, there are important things to talk about and clothes are not important.  Especially when the Obama campaign releases press statements and the press reports those statements as if they were getting them from a burning bush.  Why are we discussing clothes?  Because it is better than talking about issues.  Better for the candidates than for us.

I am voting for Obama/Biden.  Hairplugs and veneers and expensive suits and all.  I voted for Hillary and handmade silk pants suits.  I don't give a good damn about their clothes, jewelry or make up.  I care about issues.  Palin's clothes are not news.  How much Cindy McCain spends on clothes is not news.  What is news is whether or not I am going to have any retirement to live on when I am too old to leave the house and fight the damn traffic to get to work to teach students who cannot read and can't possibly learn to read when they are burying their bullet hole ridden boyfriends and helping their raped daughters get through the school year.

a clean house is a waste of a perfectly good life

"Some people think I'm saying, 'Women of the world unite — you have nothing to lose but your men,' " [Betty Friedan] told Life magazine in 1963. "It's not true. You have nothing to lose but your vacuum cleaners."

Betty Friedan's book, The Feminine Mystique told women that if they wanted to be happy they should get out in the world, use their educations, and get a job.  That would mean that they would have another job, cleaning the house, raising the children, doing the shopping, driving the children to this play date and that baseball/football/ballet/piano lesson/school, and working outside the home usually for men who devalued their work in the workplace or sexually harassed them.

Ms. Friedan didn't tackle equal pay for equal work with equal qualifications although the Kennedy Administration did pass such legislation the year Ms. Friedan's book appeared.  Her book did not talk about how to raise sons to clean up, cook, respect women and themselves.  It just said get a job, use your brain, be happier.  If you can live without your vacuum cleaner you are truly liberated from the cultural mindset of "Cleanliness is next to Godliness."  I think however, that "Cleanliness is next to Impossible."

I bought myself a Serenity Prayer plaque.  It looks like someone threw it hard against the wall or floor.  It looks cracked and re-glued together.  As imperfect as my world.  In No Country for Old Men, Sheriff Bell's Uncle Ellis told him that it was vanity to think that anyone can personally make a difference.  I can't change the world, I can only change the way I relate to it.  And the way I relate to it is giving me ulcers and shingles.

Has it occurred to anyone that if raising children and cleaning house were the most important jobs on earth, that men would think that they should do those things and leave women to do the lesser jobs?  Well, of course not.  Babies come out of our bodies, like urine, feces, spit, and blood and therefore keeping those filthy issues at bay belong to women.  But if women can potty train their sons they can sure as hell teach them to pick up their socks and do their own laundry.

In Fur:  An Imaginary Biography of Diane Arbus her husband whines he can't run the business and raise the children and be the tooth fairy, too.  I don't know why the hell not, she can. He wants her to stop all this personal development and run an orderly house and be his assistant.  She falls in love with Lionel Sweeney because he doesn't ask her to keep house.  He ask her to reveal her mind and use her creativity.  And not pick up his socks.  He plays with the children, reads to them, and opens Diane to herself.  And she sees the world and herself differently.  No longer just her husband's wife, her children's mother, the parents' daughter, she is a fully realized woman, artist, force, who accepts her talent as she accepts her photographic subjects.  As they are, not as what they are trying to hide.

Well, I hired a handyman to help me with the yard, the household things that constantly need repair.  I am interviewing housekeepers, I am about to end my credit card debt, I am hiring a friend who needs the money to tutor me for the Bar--she is licensed in Texas and New York and said hands down the Texas Bar is the worst--I am sitting for the February Bar.  Roofers have been secured, a fence builder has been asked for estimates.

My ulcer/shingles demand it. New meds, appointments for eye exams, cardiologist, dermatologists, have been made. I have, however,  a disease that has no name, as Friedan would say. A personal doubt that I can't shake, a situation that I cannot master and conduct a normal life.   I can't get no satisfaction until I get my law license and get it back from the frame shop.  But I can't work my day job, which I must, keep the house, the yard, repair the flotsam and jetsam, cook, wash the dishes, the laundry and study for the Bar.  It must be Bar, Exercise for health and fight stress, and Work.  And what keeps me from it?  I keep myself from it by trying to serve too many masters.  We can have it all.  Just not all at once.  And some of it isn't worth it.   All labor has dignity and I shouldn't feel bad about paying a housekeeper. 

And feeling bad is the trained response.  Am I less than Wonder Woman because I don't clean my own house?  And it is that thinking that must be overcome.  Because that is the tug of a conventional, safe, life void of creativity, energy, and vitality. 

the angry, the missing and the dead

Today in open court from the stand, Timothy Shepard's neighbor said he loaned Mr. Shepard his smoker and yet Mr. Shepard wouldn't share any of the "meat" he was preparing for a wedding.

Some wedding feast.  It may have been the body of his dead girlfriend Mr. Shepard was smoking and grilling.

Cadaver dogs hit hot spots today on Boliver Peninsula which probably means that there are dead Crystal Beach residents buried under debris and sand.  Three hundred fifty Texans are missing from Galveston and Boliver, many will never be found, dragged back out to sea when the tide receded.

They could not evacuate for one reason or another.  They didn't want to sit for hours in their poorly running cars on Texas highways like Rita evacuees did a few years ago.  Perhaps with kids and pets in the car, health conditions, running out of gas and money.  They didn't think the storm would be that bad.  They had no families to run to, no money for hotels.  And they would have nothing to come home to if the storm took it.  They lost hope, they ran out of time, their fear turned to stubborn resolve. 

Some situations look better from the outside than from within it.

Many people I know went back to work on Monday after the storm, flying out to tropical Asian ports of call to work on computer problems at corporate headquarters while their spouses wrote checks to the gardeners who removed fallen trees.  They put in fall flowers, swept, raked, cleaned.  Some check on oil wells in East Texas. 

One friend continued to order her El Salvadorian illegal immigrant maid around her house, complaining to me that the maid expected a noon time meal.  "She has brought all five of her children up here by being very pushy," my suddenly passive 75 year old retired Texas school teacher said, "I am supposed to feed her and give her whatever she wants from my closets."  I don't understand her anger at being asked feed someone less fortunate than her or her inability to say that she doesn't think she wants to feed and cloth her.  I am conflicted.  If it isn't a problem for my friend to feed and cloth her why is she so angry?  Why not get an area graduate student to help her with her house and shopping?

Either it was a virus or food poisoning, but I had it and it caused me some real discomfort last week.  I vomited usually after I talked to my older woman friend.  Today I thought I had completely recovered.  I was watching the news about the trial, the dead on the island, and talking to my friend on the phone.  My husband came home with dinner and found me in the bathroom with my head in my sink.