War fatigue

It's spring. The moon is full and high in the sky on the vernal equinox. Tomorrow an orchestra of birds will greet the sun and the tulips will continue to unfurl out of the thawed soil.

And the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq slipped quietly by, pushed aside by coverage of the recession and the race for the democratic nomination.

About a 1,000 people (which is a police estimate, so who knows) attended a protest in DC. Some stopped traffic, threw paint, and got arrested. A thousand.

That's really pathetic. Really, really pathetic. Particularly considering the majority of Americans are now against the war. Maybe people are just waiting until November, and a democrat to save us.

But who am I to talk? I wasn't in DC either. I've been to enough big demonstrations to know that they can be incredible shows of mass sentiment and citizenship, and also huge exercises in resource-sucking self-congratulation. I want to find other nonviolent ways to resist the war, but am a little strapped for ideas.

I have been thinking, at the risk of being cliché and obvious, that the war in Iraq is my generation's Viet Nam. Only with one exception: no draft. People don't live in fear of being called up. Unless you yourself are enlisted, or you love someone who is enlisted, I think the experience of this war is very different. I am not advocating a draft, but I think it would be a huge motivator for mass resistance. Now the war is fought largely by people not privileged by our society: people of color, the working class, young people. Imagine if the middle class college graduates started receiving draft papers?

I also think media coverage is vastly different now than it was during Viet Nam (or during the Civil Rights Movement), and I would lift up the argument that experiences of the media then, of little kids on fire with napalm, dead American soldiers, or teenagers being water cannoned, taught the media all it needed to know about how to filter the news. We don't see nearly enough footage of bodies, of flag draped coffins, of civilian casualties. That sounds morose (and naive – some of those images are closely controlled), and I have respect for the dead. But war is somehow less real when you're not reminded that it involves people dying.

People I hang out with talk about it, sometimes with sadness or deep senses of frustration, but more often with an exasperated, dismissive snort in George Bush's direction. This is not really helpful.

I’m aware in all this of my own perspective, so I’ll take responsibility: It amazes me that I can live a full day and not think about how my country is at war, not think of myself as someone who lives in a country at war with pieces of another country. That is a tremendously priviledged and myopic place to stand. I am not alone in standing here, but I still feel a deep sense of shame about it.

How do you make a war personal to people who have the option to ignore it?

Bungee Barbie

I had this great International Women's Day post all planned, with little mini-bios of some of my favorite real life heroines and where I would seat them at a fantasy dinner party at my house (inspired by that Judy Chicago piece that I will some day see in person). That post went the way of several other well intentioned posts: draft limbo.

So instead let's talk about Barbie.

She just had her 49th birthday last week, and NPR did an In Character piece on her on Sunday that included an interview with Peggy Ornstein, who's done research into the phenomenon of little girls tutoring their Barbie dolls.

I thought I was the only one, but apparently its really common for little girls to torture their Barbie dolls (Orenstein quoted a percentage that I didn't catch it, and also described a little girl lining up all her Barbies in the driveway and getting her mother to drive over them).

Personally, I would wrap Barbie up in rubber bands, attach her to a bungee cord, and throw her off the porch. My dad called it "Bungee Barbie" and thought it was pretty funny. "Bondage Barbie" might be similarly apt.

Orenstein had some good explanations for the torture, but I liked Todd Hayne's (who made a movie solely with Barbie dolls) explanation better: girls are acting out their unconscious resentment and dubiousness towards Barbie's feminine ideals. I think that was probably what was going on with me.

But I also wonder how much of it is little girls acting out internalized misogyny. Can you have internalized misogyny at age 8? I kind of think so. I think it might be that pervasive in society.

It's also interesting that the little girl in the driveway and I both had the support of a parent. I think that's more a sign of a parent being an ally in dubiousness about Barbie's feminine ideas than an ally in misogyny, though.

So did you torture your Barbie dolls, or somebody else's Barbie dolls? If so, how?

Warm Spell

A warm spell here in Philadelphia and suddenly everything looks different. People getting on the trolley could be people in any city I don’t know, where I am a visitor boarding a transit system that isn’t daily and usual like water. Bums on the street are suddenly not the bums I recognize – Cathy who rides the 34 to hang out around 12th and Market, the man in the wheel chair under the overhang of Filbert – but are new people, part of a tide of strangers liberated from their winter shuffling and bundling of layers.

The warming is welcome – but global climate change is strange, is personal. We’ve had one significant snow here this winter, and it’s like some climatic boundary has shifted north, to the counties above Philadelphia, so that the city proper is suddenly, truly, part of the south. Pretend-winter has been one long, semi-cold barren stretch. And as beautiful as the silhouetted trees are against the sky, I don’t like it. It’s like being a kid at the Jersey Shore riding a particularly powerful wave, wondering whether the momentum is going to fall out beneath me or if I’ll skin my knees on the sand first.

What comes next, or what will stop coming next, and how sad I will be to see it go?