Hooray! I are a poet!

Hey all,

In my free time when I'm not brooding on miserable, rotten things like hate and intolerance or getting all emo about personal identity, I occasionally write poetry.

If you'd like to see my meager talents in poetry in action, I have a poem posted on "Real Bloggers United" you can check out.  It's based on the healing of the blind man in Mark 8.

But, otherwise, I'd suggest checking out Real Bloggers United anyhow.  It's an interesting potpourri blog, run by real, honest-to-goodness personal bloggers and writers, not peddlers of junk.  And, it's just getting started!

Laughing at the Devil

SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING 
FOR THE EASILY DISGUSTED:

I am personally offended by my own post.  So proceed at your own risk.  :-)

So, in my last written post I shared with you a rather hilarious trend in Fred Phelps counter-protesting: silliness.  Irresponsibly, horrendously fun silliness.   From what I can tell, many protesters have realized that 1) Fred Phelps makes no sense, and 2) they like to protest because they just want the attention, so the counter-protests are making fun of these same two traits.  But if we compare these kinds of civil protest to operation "Angel Action,"  many of the counter-protests don't seem to have coherent message anymore. Others take the opportunity to undercut the power behind the one-two punch of hate that Fred Phelps dishes out by distorting his message, satirizing it to the point of absurdity.  You know, like these fellas.  (No points for originality there, fellas, but you get a B+ for style and an  A+ for chutzpah.) 

Part of me, I have to admit, absolutely loves this trend because it's so subversive.  Part of the power of hate is the ability to control somebody else's emotions or actions by making them feel small, or even worse, making them hate back.  That's the wonderful thing about satire: it breaks the blade of hate and sharpens the handle instead.  If nobody takes Fred Phelps seriously, if he has no emotional impact, then he doesn't have any power to hurt people anymore.  He just becomes the desperate, masturbatory attention slut he really has been the whole time. (Sorry for the language.  Just sayin'.)

On the other hand, I look at these protesters' refusal to take Phelps seriously, and I think that they don't understand how dangerous of a game they're playing.   Just pretending that a rattlesnake doesn't have fangs isn't going to keep people from getting bit.  The problem with Fred Phelps' rhetoric is that it leads to things with very real consequences: gay-targeted violence, intolerance, racism.  You can't make those real-world problems of evil go away by holding up a "FRED PHELPS IS GAY" placard in a protest.  To borrow a cliche from The Usual Suspects, the biggest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing people he didn't exist-- and convincing people that he's merely a buffoon isn't too far off.  Likewise, the worst thing that could possibly happen to social justice in this country is to convince the world that rhetoric like Phelps's doesn't matter.  It'd be too easy to ignore him, let this hate fester, and then when it breaks forth in a real way, wonder where it had come from.

For a different example: are you offended by "Emo Hitler?" Good-- he offends me, too.  That's why I put him in this post.  In some ways, pulling out Hitler as an exemplar in any debate feels like "jumping the shark," but that picture crystallizes so many of the ethical dilemmas of satirizing Phelps: how is the picture at left any different than what those two guys are doing to Phelps above, I have to wonder?  In a weird way, I kind of think they are equally dangerous-- and the humor in the satire undercuts the seriousness of the threat they pose. 

There's no good way to talk about the following subject without offending at least somebody, so I'll just let "Emo Hitler" and his Flock of Seagulls haircut ask the question for me: when is it okay to laugh at the devil? Or, do we have a moral imperative not to laugh, but to combat evil seriously, and head-on? That's what I'd like to explore today. 

Happy Easter from Jackrabbit

My goodness you should see the weather we're having here in Appalachia-- warm, bright and beautiful, not a cloud in the sky. And, to make things even better for the celebration of Easter, all the blossoms are coming out right on cue, as if the trees and plants themselves were running on liturgical time. I can't think of a better way to celebrate From Good Friday to Resurrection Sunday than with an entire world in rebirth.

So for your viewing enjoyment, here are some Passiontide treasures for you, most of which were snapped by yours truly on Maundy Thursday. Have a blessed Easter!

New Horizons in Intolerance Management

[Seeing as it's April Fool's Day, this seemed as appropriate place as any to run this post.  Enjoy the zaniness!]

So, way back when I first starting blogging (well, back in November anyway) I wanted to put some fancy bling and gadgets on my website to make it more exciting.  One of the things I added was this sweet little gadget you can see off to the right which displays photos from Flickr based on certain search terms.  (You can probably see it ticking away right now, just below and to the right of the top of the screen.)  Whatever robot it uses to crawl the pictures tends to find one particular photostream or group of recently uploaded pictures, so the photos run in common batches, switching out to something new every couple of weeks or so.  

I put in just the search term "Laramie" and let it run, and it started just the way I wanted-- with shots of sunsets, prairie, the college, homecoming parades, sports, family pictures and kids on bikes-- even these cool stereoscopic "crosseye" pictures one Laramie community member makes and posts online.  I've found that little gadget to be an interesting little waste of my time.

But something has changed in the last few weeks-- my picture gadget has gone rogue and started posting strange pictures-- of protests.  Actually, for a little while they have been almost exclusively pictures of different protests, sometimes of things that have nothing to do with Laramie or The Laramie Project whatsoever.  A lot of people (on Flickr, at least) seem to have associated Fred Phelps with Laramie itself, which I obviously have a problem with.  No doubt his nasty Matthew Shepard signs have something to do with that. But what these counter-protesters are doing, and why people are protesting Phelps, are absolutely strange! 

Most of these pictures I'm going to show you today come from Tabiii's Flickr Photostream, which were of a counter-protest in Dutchtown, LA against the Westboro Baptist Church.  They were protesting (you guessed it) a high school production of The Laramie Project.  She was a really good sport to let me use these pictures, and I appreciate it!

If you'd like to see all of Tabiii's photos from the Dutchtown protest, you can view them as a full slide show at this link.

Another great set is antelucandaisy's set for the same protest, which you can view as a full slide show here.

So, let me show you one little sample of some of these wild, zany crazy "Laramie" tagged protests, and an interesting new trend in counter-protesting, after the jump! 

A Day in the Life of an Straight, Conservative, Evangelical Fledgling LGBT Activist

Okay, so today the LGBTA had a fundraising bake sale to get funds to bring in a speaker to campus, and since I've been hanging out with them,  I said I'd help out.  (If you're new, I've talked about how I ended up in this situation before.  Jesus takes me strange places-- just run with it.)  I didn't have the time to sit at a table hocking homemade brownies, so I offered to make some stuff for them to sell. 

(Easter at Home, originally uploaded by jellybeanjill13.)

Anyhow, I make these awesome little cookies (or candies, actually) that sell really well-- you take a grid pretzel, stick a Rolo candy on top, and pop them in the oven at 250 for 4 minutes, just until the Rolo gets mooshy.  Then you slap a pecan half right on top of it and smash them together.  They're like little pecan turtles with a crunchy pretzel base, and they're amazing.  (Try making some and see for yourself.)  I made about eight dozen of them for the LGBTA bake sale the next day.

So, there I am, surrounded by cookie sheets of little candies, putting them in little baggies to sell the next day, and something about the whole situation just struck me as outrageously funny: I'm turning thirty in a month, I'm a hammer-headed evangelical Christian, and I'm baking cookies for 18 year old lesbians.  I turned to my husband, who was desperately trying to get a computer analysis program run for his dissertation research. 

"Um, Honey?"  I asked him.  His eyes drifted up to see me surrounded by little packages of baked goods. 
"What's up?"  He asked.  I held up a baggie full of cookies.
"Am I turning into a homosexual den mother?"  I asked him. 
Silence.  His eyes got a strange light in them. 
"Do you really want me to answer that, Jackrabbit?" He finally said with a grin. 

 "Nah," I decided,  "I guess not." 

"Revenge and Forgiveness in Laramie, Wyoming": Stephen Wang writes on TLP

How on earth does one person forgive another? And, in the face of terrible violence against the self, how does the individual (and a the community) find healing?  These are questions that lie at the heart of The Laramie Project, and questions that, apparently, at least one of the writers struggled with as they crafted their play. 

 Stephen Wang served as a draumaturge and writer for The Laramie Project in its various forms, and he has done some sophisticated thinking at a critical distance from the play about the nature of forgiveness.  This article appeared, along with three commentaries and a reply, in the journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues.  Looking at both the psychoanalytic tradition, the theatrical tradition, and even religious groundings for forgiveness, Wangh gives his readers a fascinating look inside The Laramie Project at the company's understanding of forgiveness and how that, in turn, crafted the play they all created.   What I really like about Wangh's approach is that he's extremely open about how Kaufman and the other writers approached their documentary material, and he's willing to be honest about where the members of Tectonic might respectfully disagree.  Definitely pick up this issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues if you're at all interested in the The Laramie Project, the writing process, or its social impact.  I will probably be coming back to these articles at a later date because I want to read Frommer and Sandage's critiques to see what other insight they might give us.

Sometimes a Fruit is Not Just a Fruit

It seems that my campus has been having some race-related issues recently, which came to a head last week when somebody chucked a banana at a group of visiting African American students and their parents.  I am absolutely steamed.  I found out about it from an e-mail sent out by our university chancellor a couple days ago.  Here's what I read in the Chancellor's own words:

We have had an increase in the number of reported incidents of actions and language that reflect bias on our campus. These actions include derogatory and racist language found in our dormitories. We also had an incident where someone threw a banana at visiting African American students, their parents and guidance counselors. This incident was witnessed by some of our own UT ambassadors.

I am saddened and outraged by this behavior because it does not reflect our campus values or the mission of this great university. We will not tolerate disrespect, racism or bias on our campus.

I have to admit, the more I think about this, the more outraged I get. 
Okay, so it's a college campus full of undergrads, and it is in fact a huge land-grant university in the American South; things can get crazy here. I know that.  I've seen things get crazy here before.  They'd get equally crazy at home, too.  I mean, I've had fruit thrown at me by stupid, hulking boys running on Wild Turkey, testosterone and instinct, too.  Heck, somebody even left a butchered elk leg on the Honors house's front lawn once.  But there's a huge difference in this case.  When a couple PKA frat boys threw that orange at me and the other honors students in Laramie, it was just an orange.  It was rotten and smelly, but just an orange.  When that jerk tossed that banana at a group of black students visiting the campus, it was a symbol-- and in this case, the symbol hit a lot harder than the object itself.   That symbol said, you are one step lower than a human.  It said, you don't belong here with rational creatures. GTFO. 

Right now, I just absolutely burn with shame for those kids and their parents, mostly because a sacred, long-standing illusion about college just got ripped away from them: they can't think of the campus as a safe haven anymore.  I went to high school in Wyoming, and when surrounded by the stupidity, racism, sexism and intolerance typical of your average group of sixteen year-olds, I'd say to myself, only two more years and I can get out.  I had seen friends harassed or pushed into fights, and I'd count down the months: just 18 more months to college...  then I went to college and somebody bludgeoned a gay student to death with a pistol two months later.  I never again had a feeling of having a safe haven at college.  Laramie was a battleground instead, and it wore me out.  Everyone has the right to a space where they can feel safe, don't they? 

I was talking about this incident with a co-worker, an undergraduate, the morning after the letter went out, and his frustration was palpable.  For him, that act shattered the illusion of safety for him, too. "Look," he told me, "I was one of, like, three black kids in my entire high school.  I always kept telling myself that things would be better once I got out of town, and I got to college.  You know, that not every place was like my high school."   He said that he wasn't angry so much as deeply disappointed.

Maybe we don't get to pretend this kind of ugliness in the world doesn't exist when we're on a college campus; maybe we don't get to be that naive, to live in our nice, cushy ivory tower and be more enlightened than everyone else.  But in the words of my co-worker, if you don't get to open up and feel free from that kind of humiliation and bigotry at a university... is any place safe?  Where can people just be ourselves? 

So, I would just like to say to the jerk who threw that banana: if I find you, I'm going to throw something at you, too, but it isn't going to be a piece of fruit.  It's going to be a copy of the student Honor Code.  Oh, and it's going to be wrapped around a dead skunk.  Read into the symbolism of that all you want, you bastard. 

---

PHOTO CREDIT:

"it is not a banana," by/from -eko-'s Flickr photostream:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ekosystem/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

"Keep the Dream Alive," by Drew Myers: