Happy Mother’s Day! That's me and my mama ;c)
I must really love my mother because I went to Anderson and shopped on Mother’s Day Weekend. Good thing I didn’t pack my automatic weapon in my hand bag or several people would have been hurt. I got her a mix of the traditional (lavender smellies and assorted candle smellies), the untraditional (cruelty-free tea-tree smellies) and the really untraditional (freezable beer mugs). This morning we met the grandparents and ate at L’hôpital, saw GG at the home for a little while (we played toss with the beach ball and lubed her up with lotion), and then sat through 2.5 hours of classical music (it was actually very good, but I enjoy complaining). Nicholas was good...I could sort of see him up there. Then, because I must recover from these things, I went home and took a nap in which I dreamed about being inside a Bruegel painting....the peasant wedding one.
I was sad today. I guess I am still sad, but I’m going to go watch Tsotsi so that I can feel okay about crying my eyes out.
Salman Rushdie was on Colbert this week, the same program where Jane Fonda gave Stephen a lap dance...to die for. Which brings me to another goal I have set for myself. I really shouldn’t be getting all of my news and political/cultural analysis from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Though as my father said, it is a sad sad day when the most hard-hitting, significant interviews being performed on this administration and the thinkers (or non-thinkers, as it may be) around it are on Comedy Central. I know about the power of Satire (think Voltaire and Jonathan Swift) but this is a bit ridiculous. (Speaking of Voltaire, I’d really like to reread The Baron in the Trees if I find it in the piles of books upstairs.)
Mostly I’ve just a little disappointed in myself when thinking how participatory I used to be when it came to political issues, how hungry I was for knowledge and alternative perspectives. I guess growing up in the reddest county corner of SC gave me a bit of eat or be eaten mentality and so I was really proactive in my political engagement. Then I went to Bard where all of a sudden I am surrounded by people who make ME feel conservative.
I kept up my activist inclinations for my first year (long enough to be spotted on national television at the WTO protest by my super conservative Christian cousin...something they will never forget) and noticed that nothing I was doing, nothing I was reading, nothing I was feeling had any impact at all on the downward spiral of the world as a whole. My idiotic fellow American’s re-electing that bumbling fuck-wad didn’t help. I also think part of it had to do with a seriously depressing course on the Modern Middle East which chronicled the region from the 1790s to the present and everything seemed so hopeless and my teacher, Nerina, basically said that it WAS hopeless. It was about this time that I started focusing my energies elsewhere. I became somewhat of a British Colonialism scholar. Instead of focusing on the quagmire in my own country, I began looking at the messes of the 19th and early 20th centuries in India, Kenya, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Australia, Indonesia, New Zealand (New Zealand in particular, actually), etc.
I also did some really in-depth work on internal American imperialism. I’m trying to read A People’s History of the US start to finish (my education so far has been smattered with excerpts) and I’ve just finished a chapter where Zinn basically says that the American Revolution was less about sawing off the yoke of Britain and more about getting their silly laws and treaties out of our way so that we could start kicking up the dust and pave the road out west with our own reign of terror. And the eventual development of the Constitution served to bring economic and political injustice into law from its premodern place as a practice of brutish force. So then I became a bit of an expert on frontierism with a primary interest in nuclear colonialism of the native southwest.
Anyway, I traded in my sorrows. And I’ve really enjoyed it and plan to keep enjoying it, but I do feel rather guilty. I never thought I’d be the one to succumb to political apathy. And I haven’t...not really. Apathy is a bad word. I do care...more than care. I guess I’m more politically disillusioned. The articles and interviews and protests and letter writing that I used to thrive on have lost their enchantment. I’m trying to rekindle the flame. I guess the easiest way to do that is to start reading again.
