CAMILLE & LIBERTY SUE FOR RIGHTS

Originally published on October 29, 1996

Paglia, eh? Great. You're one up on me. I fondled a Paglia book in Border's once but it was an outrageously expensive hardcover I placed back on the shelves since I was already loaded for bear. Now I too admit to being only a snatch reader of her work, but she is certainly plugged into my short shorts of famous writers I still must exploit for my own terms on theirs by reading a fuller gist of her work.

You are validated indeed in pointing out what you read as gross generalizations on maleness presuming as we agree the topic IS her announced speciality, because most books I have read on race, gender, even pop ass religion & nuclear physics are written by acsendant experts guilty of the similar transgressions against such models of zero, not zero. But if her generalizations of "her men" are just that, aren't those of "her women" just as general?

And yet the defining factor of her work can be said to bestow truth to the fact that the man on the hip side of the manhood schematic is as driven to be a man by forces he struggles to control and improve against great odds of self-discernment as those which women bear inside themselves and which they from their own perspective conclude are just and feminine (but perhaps not righteous for all?), and since you are a woman, your subjectiveness will always remain the trait you can never escape regardless of race, gender, creed or dvisibility by zero...

I think that's what she is trying to say. If only because that's what I believe myself. True gender essence is a fiction, but factors forcing us into certain camps are just & natural all the same. While we may find it fascinating to sit under a banana shrub tree with a cool drink and wish for a formula that would equalize the world. Nothing is further from the true, and is simply a fuzzy concept developed to bring a better cohesion between differences in a crowd. While some political theories have tried to erase, other smudge the inherent differences between men and other men, women and other women, and alliances and enemies cross pollinating the lines, the best we can hope for is a little intelligence when thses sorts of topics are brought to the table.

If Johnny can't read. That's a problem Johnny has. If nobody in Johnny's class can read, maybe that's a class problem. Solving for a class problem is a one Johnny at a time scenario, no matter how many times Billy's, or Rachel's or Al-amid's class (who can all read by the way, but in emphatic degrees of speciality, one to another, and so we say there is no class problem, but an individual level of compliance to a standard which of course is in a state of flux, never at rest, but always evolving with new imput). And so it goes. Natural selection. Crowd warfare disguised as crowd fanfare. I'd like to know Lynn a few Paglia cliches you find utterly testing reality. It could prove an interesting exchange between us.

I hate being the traffic cop and lone cleanup crew around here, but I am a natural for the job. I live among two wouldbee slobs. Tim & Sue give a good bawdyhouse try at neatliness and order of the court, but they wear blinders as narrow as my hunt for the perfect job. They exercise generally weaker powers of observation, and ply a more sluggish recall hard drive. So I get to play the neatnik butch Gabriel who says, I'm running the show and I said THIS is how WE do it. After footing the bill Sue's a gem in saltwater taffy and puts up with it only because she understands the efforts I put in around here go a long way toward making the whole Dollhouse balancing act work.

While I'm still probably not back to fifty percent normal, the Dollhouse clutter piled up for days until I couldn't help myself but to storm around all day picking up in a slow painful hobble. Of course everyone including Lizbeth& Chris last weekend has predicted my left foot without a cast will heal to an ouchy mess, even though my choice to forego the cast was one of the doc's original options as he groped the swollen mob of purple toes and x-rays last week. So I'm taking my chances with Providence but haven't I always?

The body must go. Recycle this dirt is what I say. I feel alive only when co-opting language. One day I'll probably lose this damn limb to bad circulation, gout, diabetes, stroke, or what have I, so I guess I'll just have to find myself a woman who has a sick thang for amputees, hah hah. Sue only this morning after complimenting me for swallowing a couple ibuprofrin and I goo gooed in pointing out how tickled baby dance silly she gets when I'm popping pills, said back that she just wanted me to get better so I could stomp around again. Hmmm. Baby likes my stomping around better than my gimping around. That's normal, ME too, but it's always a fart when Sue dishes out a pill because she seems to have this weird buddy system relationship with pain pills.

She ain't no JUNKY by any stretch. We're just talking over the counter stuff, but she's really blows a goose whenever the pillbox is passed around. In my case, it's as if if she can just get me to pop a pill, she has performed a recognizable measure of social work in heading me in the right direction of the fit & well. But I DO have to give her credit for some fine sweet words of caring as she nagged me gaga about finally going to see Doctor Ford. Do it for MEEEE, she pleaded in the sweet sassy voice of communion she pulls out for these special darling occasions which kinda all blur together after a while and I guess that's what we for lack of a better word call love. And so I did.

And I am redeemed with honors (called GETTING THE CREDIT in Dollhouse parlance) for having been right as a pat hand of three aces and a greenhaired Jack in both diagnosing & proscribing a laissez faire attitude in the first place, but it was good to get pro confirmation. That's the best health care I can suffer. Emergency blockades. Damage control. Squeaky clean is somebody's else triumphant life. Blind faith in OVERCOMING the body in all the rest of my affairs is the method of least resistence I cling to, it's a motto, it's a white flag, black flag, label of a thousand warts...

GT