the way these women think is totally alien to any way that i've ever thought about life or my role in it or the role of men in it. unfortunately they embody the stereotypes of women that many men (in my experience) openly believe. just yesterday i saw a (distant) friend's facebook status say something like "... believes that all women are whores." i left a note indicating my displeasure with that statement and was unhappy to find that several of his male friends had left notes to the tune of "it took you this long to figure out?" etc. and these people are in their 20s! and then they bemoan how they can never get a girlfriend...well gee fellas, you think your total lack of ability to see women as individuals has something to do with it?

the point is, these ladies can do whatever they want with their lives. it's just a shame that it gets them a stupid lifestyle piece in the times and loads of attention of the "see i knew all women were like this" type. only when all women are no longer judged by the actions of a few women (put in whatever noun you want in there...black people, queer people, poor people, etc.) can we move beyond depressing relations between many men and women and the attitudes that poison them.

just thinking about how much money the government would have if it ended the wars in iraq and afghanistan and cut the defense budget in half (and then stopped all aid to israel when i'm being extra wishful)...then thinking about what would happen if our leaders had the will and chutzpah to do the right thing with the stimulus bill...basically it all makes me very sad.

it's really easy to see how this is going to turn out...gop waters the bill down, our idiots don't have the courage to make the best bill, the bill massively fails, the economy further implodes, gop political stock goes up. even my non-glenzilla bf pauly k. (i have two internet bf's...it's true) is getting depressed about the whole thing.

the only thing i can hope for is that mass public displeasure with this business will put some pressure on obama. my mother is such a savvy and informed citizen that she thought obama was a half-breed muslin for a while, but she told me last week "you know what the government should do when there's high unemployment? they give people a shovel and tell them to start digging." i think that most folks have a similar perspective and somehow the very un-sexy topic of infrastructure development is quite popular right now. so my tiny hope is with popular outrage...although we saw how well that worked out with the shoveling of money into the banks..

a tiny part of me hoped that with obama we'd at least have some courage going on and then i remembered that obama is part of the united states democratic party which roughly translates into other languages as "the opposite of an opposition party and rather akin to a rug in front of one's door."

why don't these people pay their taxes. people: pay your taxes. you work in the stupid government. Pay Your Taxes!

in the most specific sense, the cary tennis archive lives on and is strong. in fact i spent a couple days at work reading almost every piece that cary's ever written for salon and then i wrote a short piece about it for open salon and it got editor's pick :P small victories that disappear the next day (like daily editor's pick at open salon and a brief moment of inspiration) abound, but things stick.

and in the most macro sense, even incredibly documented and clear things that seemed like they were solidified into the "everyone agrees" brand of knowledge are still alive with people unable to make use of them. what of the experience in the US during the great depression and FDR's reforms...now it's all the vogue for a little under half of our national leadership to deny the whole thing. historians and economists have been in agreement over that issue since the 30s: millions of people were out of work, unemployment was 25%, and people were starving in a very real sense. government jobs put millions to work and vastly improved american infrastructure. yet serious people on the teevee and in the newspapers and even on the internets deny these pretty basic historical facts. other examples abound...i mean, evolution anyone?

so i guess my point is that the seemingly ephemeral has resonance and the seemingly codified is still up for debate (and perhaps will perpetually remain so).

and if you want to read my piece inspired by cary's collective archive at salon, you can see it here: http://open.salon.com/content.php?cid=68318

is anyone else starting to get really really depressed about this whole thing?

just sent this to my father who happened to be born and spend the majority of his life in the soviet union. i wonder if these people who are so scared of "socialism" (like my former boss who claimed that red dawn was his favorite movie) have any idea what it actually is or how it has existed historically. does anyone take them seriously? i think that mccain's massive failure can in part be credited to the fact that the "socialism" bogeyman really only works for crazy olds who haven't noticed that the red menace isn't exactly uhm around anymore...