I am not Howard Stern." --Charlie Rose, in a post operative interview with Terry Gross, a preemptive strike indicating how much we all owe Howard Stern
As
my follower Jason Dorwart is aware, sexual pride is important in the
progressive disabled community. I’ve written about it in somewhat explicit
fashion in earlier years, nor am I the only formerly indoctrinated and
embittered outcast to be censored in search and have page views suppressed
because of it. Far more confident paraplegic females have had instructional
videos removed from You Tube by Google over the issue, and in extending an
olive branch to ableism, the dowager was sympathetic. Reading the narratives of
shared experience takes us only so far, and whereas sexual activity may leave
certain women ambivalent, others may be happy in pushing boundaries. Harassment
and hostile environment is the flip side of this coin, and having been through
these trials, my viewers may think I’d find the scoop by Irin
Carmon and Amy Brittain commendable. Eight testimonials illustrate a
pattern of conduct similar to those which besieged Cosby into an opaque court
case, and Rose, like other lesser PBS titans, stayed at the top of his game far
past Medicare eligibility. He was bound to be forced into retirement at some
point, given that his facial features in a live interview setting occasionally
cast a ghoulish aspect to his profile.
What
is seemingly intractable, however, is the incongruity of his cultural and
political excellence juxtaposed against behavior we more readily expect to emanate
out of the Playboy mansion. From my point of view, it is less about power,
in Rebecca Traister’s micro-post, and more about a legacy of excellence tarnished
less by the heinous aspects and more by the hideousness foisted on all of us by
entropy. Look at everything he has done to explore issues with his audience,
his lengthy segments taking psychiatric medical model treats seriously, even with
enthusiasm by his guests. Rose is a robust believer in cooperative treatment in
a way the spastic dowager is not, dissecting the clinical aspects of his heart
disease with more than one eminent cardiologist, in an envious lust to hang on
to the quality of his life. He channeled the outrage felt by the public over
the Iraq war to joust with Donald Rumsfeld over the destruction of a regime and
a society which later devolved under Obama into a puppet state. Judy Woodruff
commended him on his scoop with Assad when the Syrian theatre was hot. There
are too many probative conversations to list which amount to a daunting legacy. If it seems I am coming perilously close to advocating a grin and bear it approach, which is what my humiliation has amounted to since 1999-- no, not quite. I'm merely suggesting, much as with Roman Polanski, that being the best at something shouldn't be entirely forgotten, and though there is a rush to being a journalist on deadline which extended my lifeline to September 2017, I'm increasingly unhappy with The Washington Post anointing itself as the moral arbiter of feminine esteem. Would I have broken this story, unleashing the #MeToo fury in the public square? What I can say is this: I would have waited to give Rose the benefit of the doubt. We should rehabilitate and honor that ego, whether or not he considers his cardiac issues debilitating, or merely chronic.
Beneath the surface of both, liberal and libertarian exhaustion, The Washington Post seems to have gone into hysteria mode, and I am bemused, partly incredulous, but bemused, all the same. Jeff Bezos doesn't run the editorial staff, or so I imagine. This is not All The President's Men, just a wealthy New York shyster implementing a Gilded Age, the likes of which we've never seen, and yet, it seems Amazon's might and power have taken the reigns, trying to curb the living embodiment of a dismantling: the dignity of presidential sovereignty has melted in the span of a week, and I am in a mild case of hysteria myself, desisted from tweeting to Potus that his thumb and forefinger movements suggest he's over-skilled in the art of penile stimulation-- yet, libertarians aren't incorrect. How can I possibly say that when my life is in jeopardy? Because the entitlement system is a strangulation. I've lived it nearly all my life and all the sudden, the telescope sharpens focus, and I'm in my fifty fifth year of life, nearly insane with misery. A young Southerner graduate I met at LOTR last summer said he hoped Trump would bring down the government, and we seem to be already there, whether Article 25 is invoked or for some reason, Ryan is compelled to impeach. I do not see that happening, but my country feels doomed, and I'm going straight to hell with it. I never liked Trump, ever, never followed his damn show, yet we voted for an antithesis of liberty, not an actualization of it. We're finished, and the young woman I once was, who I used to be, has a broken heart. I'll come back at this later. I had a horrible two weeks. I am sick of being a welfare pigsty, and running, abandoning what little I have, will certainly shake a loose tooth out of my gums.
Mr. Zakaria, I offer my regrets that your children were harassed over the telephone after your column about self-destructive whites who support Trump was spoofed. Aside from the fact that I've traipsed on the hem of the fourth estate long enough to know that energy flags even with a deadline approaching, and aside from the fact that I've had more articles fall apart than I've had published, you wrote a bad column about a statistical analysis of white suicides for those in my age group, suggesting in your last line that people like me take a reality check, and that "Trump can't fix it, no one can." Exactly what kind of observation is that, even with the acknowledgement that Wapo needs to resolve its revenue generation issues just like the rest of us?
That Donald Trump is where he is at the moment in the run for the White House is a testament to more than a few failures of the previous and current administrations. Afghanistan hasn't been a viable nation state for more than 30 years. Bush and cabal didn't resolve that issue, destroyed Iraq as a buffer zone, and Obama subsequently offers seven years of apologias. Usually, national policy has little effect on my stagnant paralysis as a disabled woman, but the ACA is apparently deciding what kind of healthcare I need for itself without my participation, a cripple who's tragedy amounts to the realization that liberal academics who believed her intelligence would be her economic security were wrong. My career in Philadelphia, brief as it was under vocational interference and afterwards, was basically segregated within the public welfare system. Now it is worse than it was in my twenties, for reasons which have run the gamut through this account purportedly about disability in entertainment, which for the most part it is. The social media mockery to which you were subjected probably has its roots in the fact that your ability to brand your writing is too diaphanous, and yet, like many of your colleagues, you're unionized, salaried, to dish up milkweed as some sort of castigation, then the fact that you were trolled becomes its own establishment media item. That is the nature of the business; readers, however, even if they aren't over-educated with the debt to show for it, know when they're having their chain yanked; if they reacted before thinking it through the behavior was inappropriate, but the sensationalism whose maw you feed rather ineptly at times, puts the blame partly at your door.
I'm going to be blunt: I look like shit, and the last time I had a decent repast twice in the same day is beginning to fade from my memory, and I haven't taken the risk to use my aging bath chair since the building manager telephoned Health and Human Services agents to humiliate me last April, so my personal hygiene is under challenge, and if I am more than likely going to go the same way most section 202 housing residents go I've resolved to take my own life, and I am having a harder time than usual this month. I wanted to, determined to, keep my Amazon Prime membership. Why? Burnished comfort of vanity beyond my means? In a few hours I shall with embarrassment drive to Trader Joe's for a loaf of bread on my laundry money, good as my word when it comes to my visceral hatred of entitlements for what I'm subjecting myself to. I wouldn't have the slightest compunction about becoming a domestic militant, if I could, against housing authorities who've treated me like chunnel since I was a graduate student, and intake systems whose use of assurances rapidly germinate their own criminal liability, but even radical libertarian ranchers occupying federal lands in Oregon relegate morbidly angry quadriplegics to entities like Bellevue, particularly if they're now too old to ride stallions on their own as a good method of leg stretching. Most woman of my age probably swooned over Daniel J. Travanti in his heyday, with his cultured moderated pragmatism. I know I did, fantasized over the man as the perfect televised version of my father whom I'd never marry. Progressive multiculturalism destroyed even the humane standard of decency he represented. If you were as astute an analyst as you should be, allegations of fraudulence wouldn't continue to hound you as they do.
The Norwegian adaptation of Christensen's novel is kinetic enough, and I certainly appreciated the dripping excrement in the boys shared bedroom during episode four. Our European counterparts are always braver, and it signifies that this was the best shit scene I've ever seen on video. It beats Death at a Funeral, and Styron's 98 Shadrach, which was less about the might of grand nigger burden and more about family clasping hold, even if we're invariably eclipsed in that battle against the dark, so spastic has to eat soap. It is a relevant series, the Half-Brother, pity the post war working class doomed to their station.
Speaking of which, my reactionary pain shall not gravitate to Donald Trump, but that very same reactionism supports his right to be ugly, all the same. If the angry Caucasian working class want their spleen with the casino realtor mogul, they have a right to it. Wapo's contributors have been all over the map on this, offering cautious respect, and alternately comparing him to Putin, and yesterday, to Hitler. There are times it is useful to ignore established news content, and this is one of them. On the off chance that Trump can beat Clinton, his term in office would be paralyzed by SCOTUS litigation, and he would wind up impeached, and the federal government would cease to function. Yours truly would wind up a hate crime, barring some cleverness, as in spinning my drying vagina around a libertarian erection.
My anger at Charlie Sheen's cover-up is germane, and if it is an outcry against a certain fundamental unfairness, so be it. 10 million may not be what it once was against the backdrop of Google Apple Silicon uber wealth, but it is still an astounding amount of money for a performer to engage in a desperate evasion; alternately, the sexual partners purportedly suing him have no real standing to claim personal injury. If they fucked him consensually, that is simply a fact of life, the kind of promiscuity Salon enjoys quantifying as liberating, positive-- not that I haven't weighed a submission to the publication.
I am scrambling to create employment, dared to contact the National Review with a slightly antiseptic tone, as they produced David Brooks, not my favorite analyst.
I signed up for trove.com and my brief struggle to understand has once again led to a critique about relevance. I quit.
I give up, and I'm throwing in the towel, because I don't even know what lack of relevance means when all I am doing is archiving articles. I'm going to surrender my rights next week, and let the state do what it wants with my wrenched frame. See you. (And no, I don't know if I'm sulking or serious, but canceled both my free trove account and my digital subscription to Wapo. I am a bit burned out and tired of the growing power of affirmative homosexuality, and whatever its divergence of viewpoints, Wapo's correspondents just gurgle with affirmative gay identity, which turns me purple because of my subordination to my former supervisor, so I have veered off of my push back against this tidal wave for the time being.)
I do not have healthy sexual fantasies anymore, but heavily redacted discussing this in detail because whatever the subversive nature of that lifelong masochism can be as droll as terrorism, which already has its own syntax in satirical diatribes.
Karina and I are both indecisive, despite the age difference, and now she is considering attendant care as a profession, and I keep telephoning her. She reminds me of Maureen, little hat tricks of resistance, am I really going to reapply for the Medicaid Waiver over this fractious dilettantism? Not yet. but I rescheduled the Christ is the real God Christian for next week, again, budgeting her in to retrace her steps, probably in vain. The Post does not have arguments with me. But I certainly argue with it, with its hagiographic legacy-- the only media outlet that toppled a presidency without giving much rift to counter arguments that maybe Nixon was not angling to be dictator for life-- with its pro gay stance-- with its minority reporters, and even with its hagiography on broken body heroics.
Oh, Holley writes a fine article, and the unfortunate young man wanted to live and beat PVS. Comparatively, I've never had it that tough, but comparatively doesn't matter, My father says go to Inglis or stay where I am; his sister screams at me to stay where I am, but I cannot. I can't.
I can't even carry what I have to carry with the institutional abuse, the domestic abuse, I cannot resign myself to staying with Riverside Presbyterian watching a transsexual freak degrade into minimal awareness, letting urban disability centers get away with their cavalier cruelty. I can't. I fucking cannot. I let Presby off the legal hook when the Phillips boy hurt me, and Presby has done nothing but threaten me since. I do not know what kind of justice that is. I cannot do it, complying and drugging myself happy to forget a savage medical model life. Acceptance?
I'll show this city acceptance before it does me in.
"The old ram stands down looking over rockslides, stupidly."-- John Gardner, Grendel, p2
What Jennifer argues in her latest Right Turn entry, whose headline was changed, I believe, from the more inflammatory "France goes to war," to the lower decibel of "fallout," since Hollande is a Socialist in the tradition of Mitterrand, and no doubt had the Foreign Secretary call the Grahams who remain on staff with a scold, is that the neocon response to bin Laden's "great blow" was the right tack, despite the fact that thirteen years in Kabul seems to have simply degraded the Taliban into more traditional narco terrorists with whom the CIA loves to waltz, which is not very hawkish. I do not necessarily disagree with Jennifer or The Post on Obama's retrenchment after Bush Administration debacles. My argument is that delicacy to Islamic sensitivity, and Western effeminate dress after centuries of civilizing the natives at the point of a bayonet, is not going to pacify hardliners who supersede Hammurabi, who purportedly was source text for Mosaic law.
I am always against bad process, and the invasion of Iraq in 2003 should have led to George W Bush's impeachment, regardless of how well or how badly the Pentagon handled the draw down under our sadly failed Harvard Law president. We cannot occupy multiple fronts indefinitely, even if we are the strongest nuclear power. Americans were once and briefly united after the 9/11 attacks, and if you want tradition, well, successful war presidents unite the country. Congress should have declared war on Al Qaeda. The UN Security Council should have made a deal with the major powers, dissolved Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan, Yemen, Somalia. set up zones of occupation, and if those with the tactical force had the guts to do that, whatever the price of going that route, we would not be watching North Africa and the Far East join the long standing enemies of Israel in an implosion.
This all started in 79 with Khomeini and his Iranian revolution. The Ayatollah broadcast his Persian call to arms from Paris, and world leaders held their dicks in their hands, to channel old man Morgan, while the fanatical Imam toppled the Shah. Jimmy might have saved the fellow citizens he served some dignity by exporting Billy Carter as an American radical. The Saudis did the same thing prior to Osama's rise in prominence and bear some of the blame for contemporary tremors.
Jennifer cites John Yoo, attempting to rehabilitate a rationalizing legal hardliner, by having him universalize NATO's Article 5. I doubt this makes Hollande happy. I watched extensive press coverage of the neutralization of the Kouachi brothers and their associate, and then Hollande's entry and subsequent gathering of ministers in the Presidential Palace. The informality of the European bureaucrat anesthetizes sensibility, and briefly entertained the idea of sending Marine Le Pen my resume. Perhaps I should do it on a lark. Why didn't Turkish authorities detain Boumeddiene? The corruption of ionized interests will always be with us, but this too, smells of bad faith.
In essence, Jennifer's urgency for the Obama Administration to reignite Bush's battle lines is misguided, because war takes commitment, national unity. We lost that after Truman fired MacArthur.
In response to Wemple's post on Buzz Feed's dismissal of Benny Johnson, I commented thus, and raise an interesting issue on ownership of what we voice to our favorite editorial staff, as I am re-appropriating my own content:
Erik, I have a question to which I do not expect an answer, and it is: Does excoriating Johnson serve any reader's interest, including a disability journalist on the skids? You feel rushed; I am rushed barely hanging on by my fingernails, and I am not sure, at the end of the day, what the point is. I've skimmed BuzzFeed, briefly thought of presenting myself as a humble fact checker, decided against, and the lack of trust the public feels in the fourth estate is only confirmed by the seismic upheaval of social media on the traditional beat reporter, who, by not being allowed to show bias, lies anyway. In my view, plagiarism is a manufactured form of criminal conduct except in extreme cases, but that's me. Aggregating content exhibits this tension, as it is summarily copying, then gets slammed by Google for thinness of content, and then the people doing it are encouraged to be real journalists for commissions worth peanuts. Your flag waving heartens me with the reassurance that Wapo stands firm making the trains run on time.
I think I have a few concerns here more or less over money and ethics as much as we all worry about the practice of bad attribution. Erik's column-- Wapo doesn't need to game a hipness its Graham family accouterments deny it by calling some of its staff bloggers and others opinion writers when it is simply an overdone bifurcation -- is aesthetically displeasing, one, and two, we demonize Johnson by keeping the issue afloat, raising the question as to whether media sensationalism is more ethical than Johnson's practices. I have used Wikipedia without attribution, but I have never cited an entry verbatim, and always considered Wiki open source, as any of us can, and have, edited entries.
Erik did respond to my critique indirectly by publishing about digital plagiarism the next day. The actual impetus driving all of us batty is economic amoralism. Within my memorandums, I've written I want to end my career as an investigative journalist. This is not to convey bullshit for a paycheck doesn't rankle. I am not finished with this issue; it is beginning to annoy me.
"You guys lucked out. I normally hate everything, but like the Rosenbach."
I have to charge for a few hours before I can begin to labor frantically. Tuesday offered a transitional thunderstorm and a power outage disrupted my plans to circumvent, or mitigate, the exterminator’s morning censure. HUD’s mandatory extermination polices have inadvertently (or perhaps by design), been the source of much duress in my lifelong conflict with the public housing methodology of Presby, and I knew uncoupling my work relationship with Tim would lead me down this path, but things have to come to an end, and by degrees, a compliant pack mule grew tired of harnessing a manufactured Jezebel; it lasted seven years. I cannot ride it farther, and only repressed my frustration with his flower child mind for as long as I did because it was worse on the grid, and sometimes he and I managed well enough.
The ability to get along with others has been significantly eroded, but what I confessed to the archive librarian Tuesday morning in the rain was more true than she could probably contextualize in processing my anti-social behavior. Her little preserve of a Jewish bookseller as an historic artifact still holds its charms, whereas what my years under Rick’s well meaning authority revealed to me about human suffering, its clinical, stigmatizing, and so often utterly incompetent aspects, destroyed my aspirations, even my quest for transcendence, when coming to terms with my place in humanity, and humanity’s place for itself.
I do not care to relive my Matrix years all that often. My essay about my time at the Institute took me three years of walking on hot coals, and it wound up in my erstwhile lesbian traitor’s chapbook outlet, my own draft still on my hard drive, but the advocate who interviewed me with Dan decided he wanted to kill himself approximately 48 hours after I was hired in their weird Alden Park offices, and he insisted on resigning, which left me in a situation where I never would have accepted the position. I engaged in subterfuge, begged my former CSPPPD supervisor to take me back. She refused because of Cassie, and in trying to do the right thing, keeping myself employed with them, my own health was subsequently destroyed, upon which Liberty made its own substantial contributions after I forced my resignation.
In the abstract, Rick’s proposal made sense: hire people on the entitlement rolls to counsel other beneficiaries off of those same rolls back toward matriculation, or supported employment. In practice, as Samuelson of Wapo has noted, the disincentives for those with mental illness were too great. Lawyers waged great battles to say that most disenfranchised Americans became disabled, and real cripples like myself end up all the more victimized, because I do not want to ride with the herd, case managed into oblivion, but here we are, with a broken welfare state that cannot, in point of fact, sustain Romney’s 47 percent.
"Contact the police ma'am," Tim Keller, coordinating
Watergate was the singular political crisis of my formative years. Despite Woodward and Bernstein, despite the court battle over Nixon's tapes, despite John Dean, despite Liddy, despite the Gerald Ford pardon "for the sake of the country," despite the film, the narrative arc of Nixon's paranoia is not entirely cogent. I lived it, and after the JFK/RFK/MLK assassinations, the notion of a conspiracy nation came of age, despite the fact that McGovern was a political neuter, the dust of history hasn't made my grappling with the high crime of the break in any easier, and corruption has since grown quieter, more systemic.
The more I learn about the staff of politicians, the more I am tempted to go "suck up power in the streets," to channel Patrick Stewart playing Lenin (bad casting choice but who cares, I can imagine a hard driving and virile Stewart to the point that he can slice ham for money at his discretion; I know he has children and is a divorced knight of the Commonwealth and the only way I'd ever set eyes on him is if Yahoo News gave me a terminal disease story and the old man sighed and said "jolly good, I will do the bloody dying cripple bucket list, but I get a Tonight slot for it!")
This is the carcinoma that drives independent living center exploitation of the most vulnerable populations in this country: the corruption of the Medicaid dollar. Policy regulators know it, so does the coordinating staff here. And the police have better things to do than to freeze disability center accounts simply due to the fact that I can get investigators to the cadavers, even if I do not know the exact location of the graves.
I do not want to alienate Sims; he is my state legislator and has a civil rights background, and I have been through some significant, sometimes even heavy duress. Maybe he can assist me in unraveling some of that damage despite the fact that I have chilled my heels on gay equality. Ditto for my other representatives, especially Toomey. If Toomey's aids have checked out my online footprint, they might conclude my liabilities outweigh any asset I may pose to them, but damage due to continuous trauma does not mean that I am wrong: Consumers are made expendable by IL policy and governance all the time, maybe made worse in the rust belt than elsewhere, although CA may be just as bad. I am the real thing, and if I am the real thing, this gives Toomey the cover he needs to roll back on some of the corruption that is to some degree insulated by the threat of litigation due to that favorite GOP buzz saw: the federal mandate.
I cannot say I became loyal to WaPo because of their seminal exposure of a national disgrace, but like Woodward once was before he turned himself into a presidential portraitist, I am hungry. Whatever its problems, and it has them, the Post whets this appetite. Journalists make excellent sociopaths, excusing Kathleen Parker's aptitude for fuzzy wuzzy was a bear. National mainstream media needs that type of voice, one which doesn't command respect. Keeps power players off their guard.
As to representative metastasis, WaPo's Anne Hull profiles a case in point. Whatever else it gets wrong in terms of political spin, this paper knows how to investigate the American sclerosis. This girl is young, able, and I don't doubt the reality of her plight for a second. I'm starting to feel astronomical.
