Other uses for those ribbon stickers

You've seen the Asylum Street Spankers' take on the ribbons, here's another.

"My name is SUE, How do you do?"

 The other other videos I posted earlier are the reasons everyone loves Johnny Cash, and they are excellent reasons. But here's why I love him - because he played these songs:

Kris Kristofferson has told the story about how Johnny Cash was warned not to use the word "stoned" when he performed Kristofferson's song "Sunday Morning Coming Down"  and didn't take kindly to the suggestion.

Denied!

A little music for our special friend His Lordship Conrad, Baron Black of Crossharbour

I love the smell of justice in the morning, it smell like...schadenfreude.

Our spiritual leader of the moment is the Man in Black

"Hi there, I'm Johnny Cash"

History always repeats itself, first as tragedy, 

then as farce

and then as tragedy again

A nice round number

What a long strange trip it's been and continues to be.

1,000 flips and 40,000 clicks ago, I laid down this riff - and stayed there.

Knock me your lobes one more time and I will hip you to the story of the Woodshed.

Believe it or not, the first two blogs I ever read were Powerline and Glen Reynolds. I'd read some piece of crap in Time about political blogs in the wake of the 2000 U.S. presidential fiasco that mentioned those two and went to take a look. Naturally, I was appalled after reading just a few posts. Heh, indeed.  Much like Todd Snider when he first saw Jerry Jeff Walker, I thought to myself "Well shit, I could do that" - so I looked around for a better example of what blogs should be and I found my blogdaddy, Atrios.  To paraphrase Lord Buckly, some fellas are Kos cats, some are Josh Marshal men, some dig on Tbogg, but me I started out as an Atriot. 

This blog started as a group forum for me to writing messages back and forth with the members of my tribe back home, but very quickly became a one-man show. Hanging out in the comment threads at Ecshaton in the 2004 campaign ("Mars, Bitches!") lit a fire under me to start writing my own screeds here and eventually I started copying stuff from work onto the blog and discovered the Canadian blogosphere and things got more and more fun and interesting as I looked around and found more and blogs and more and more material. 

I moved on from Eschaton and started commenting a lot on a variety of blogs, especially the Galloping Beaver and Axis of Evel Knievel, back before Dave Noon joined Lawyers, Guns and Money. 

I blogged my little blog and things chugged along at a steady dozen hits a day. And then The Asylum Street Spankers can to town. Wammo and his lovely wife Tracy bunked with us on their last night in Japan and when he was checking his email that night, he found out that the video for "Stick Magnetic Ribbons on Your SUV" was finally finished and had just been put online. Naturally I put it on the blog and did a little blogwhoring and the next thing I knew someone had put it on the Democratic Underground  site where it went viral. About half of the 40,000 visits this blog has received have been for that video, and three quarters of them came over a period of a couple of months.

Eventually, and only Cthulu knows why, probably a combination of pity on his part and persistant commenting on mine,  Admiral Dave asked me to help fill in at the Galloping Beaver while he was off at sea and so I got to hang out virtually with Alison, whose blog I already admired, and West End Bob (formerly know as West End Bound) and Laura and Boris and Dana while Dave and Cheryl were off catching salmon or something.  And by the time Dave and Cheryl got back I had infested the place like a bad smell you can't get rid of, and rather than fumigate, they let me stay. I like to think I contribute some small measure of leavening silliness and indignant moral outrage to the place, but it is Dave's place.

The Woodshed is mine and has been since before it was a blog, before it was even The Woodshed, in fact. Back in the days before teh intertoobz, when the closest I'd come to cyberspace was reading the science fiction readers group on the in-house IBM company email bulletin board as a lowly co-op student at the Don Mills Lab, I worked for a series of small community newspapers starting in Ingersoll, Ont. and progressing through Caledonia, Port Dover, Listowel, Napanee and finally Picton. The first place I worked still had typewriters and I even went door to door delivering copies one week in the middle of winter. All for wages that would have qualified me for welfare. I started writing a weekly column in Caledonia and hit my  stride on it in the Port Dover Maple Leaf. By the time we got to Listowel, it had been named the Woodshed and it was both the highlight and major stress point of my week to sit down and try to come up with an idea. I think of those as the precursor to this blog, although there was no such thing as blogs at the time.

And wonder of wonders, I still have a hard copies of a bunch of them that I found again only just a few weeks ago amid the paper-strewn chaos that is my desk. And this week I will be posting some of them, as soon as I get the dead-tree copy typed into the laptop.

I will also be reviving "the Rules" and "Kanadian Korner" a couple of series that started out strong, but eventually faded off my mental radar as shiny objects entered my field of vision.

As you can see I've done so renovating of the look of the place, and changes will continue for the next week or so. If you'd like to be on the blogroll, drop me a line at rev(dot)paperboy(at)gmail.com

Soon there will be swag and probably a lot more stuff at the emporium.

And there will be music -- once a few technical issues get sorted out, Radio Woodshed will take the internets airwaves with audio attitudes, platitudes and assorted dudes from a variety of latitudes to put a cut in your strut and glide in your stride...

until then, well,  I'll let Ms. Davis speak for me.

Post 999.9

Genties and ladlemen, we have a winner! Referred by the Gazetter, someone clicked through from Cranbrook, British Columbia at 9:33 a.m. local time for them on Feb. 28. If this sounds like you, and you know your own IP address,  drop me a note at rev(dot)paperboy(at)gmail.com  --- if you are willing to surrender a mailing address, there will be swag!

Stay tuned for the long awaited post 1,000.

Post 999

There will be no post 1,000 until the counter clicks over 40,000 visits. At which point the planets will align in harmonic convergence, peace will reign in the Mideast, cats and dogs will start living together, my boss will get goiters and I will remodel this joint. And there will be music and t-shirts and possibly a nice dry martini at the end of the day.

Until then......well, you know the line

Blog held hostage: Day 1

As the hits continue to trickle in, (just another 630 to go as of this writing) planning moves ahead for the renovation - any suggestions for additions to the blogroll will be welcomed, a s would any recommendations for podcasts. In the meantime, would someone please stuff Ralph Nader in the trunk of Ford Pinto and push it down a steep hill backwards? And while you're at it, you could point the thing at the campaign of Hillary Clinton. After all the (justified) complaints from her and Bill about the crap they had to put up with from the Drudge Report, it's a bit rich for her to have staff feeding ammo for the right wing wurlitzer to the same guy. And the lame spin attempts ("What? We probably didn't do it and even if we did why should Obama be embarrased by his African heritage?") are just embarrrasing. Hillary has shot herself in the foot with this one and with or without the Nader-filled Pinto-missile, her campaign is going to be a fiery wreck following the Texas and Ohio primaries next week.

Now, get those cops to move back and send in some pizzas, or else!

"Oh lawdy, do what he says, do what he says!"

Blog held hostage - Day 2

With the incipient arrival of Marshal Dave and the Galloping Beaver Posse (worst band name ever) the counter is down to 560 hits as of midnight (my midnight over here in the land of the Rising Sun, more like your noon or early morning over there Canuckistan and the Excited States) so while we fill water buckets, sandbag the windows and set the booby traps to buy time to finish planning the modest renovations and sort out the additions, let me give something to think about.

While I may be joking about this whole thing, some out there in wingnutland are seriously losing their shit. Like "Yankee Jim" a white supermacist blogger who strangled his wife before hanging himself recently. Or Sgt. Ronbo, another right-wing whackjob who self-destructed last week. This guy describes the whole thing as a tragedy, while omitting mention of Sgt. "I am not crazy, I am just like Hamlet" Ronbo's conviction for threatening to assassinate the Clintons, whom he claims were out get him and whom be holds responsible for his suicide.

Now, if I were a less charitable person I could say "good riddance to bad rubbish" and leave it at that, but to quote The Jefferson Airplane "No man is an island, he's a penninsula." Any death is sad, some are just a lot sadder than others. Even George Wallace changed his mind in the end, so you never know who's gonna find Jebus for real and realize what a shithead they've been.

My real concern here, boarded up inside this shack full of canned goods and ammunition, is that no one will answer for what has been done to these two and thousands like them who have been brainwashed by the Right Wing Noise Machine into homicidal maniacs. Forget the head of Jonah Goldberg -- he's a buffoon and almost amusing in a sick sort of way -- Bring me the head of Hal Turner, or least hand his ass over to the Secret Service. He's already successfully exhorted his mindless meat puppets to kill the family of a judge, but maybe goading the fruitcakes into trying to shoot Barack Obama doesn't count if you're an FBI spy. Should we just calling him Jack Ruby now or wait until one of his goon squad follows orders? And when that happens the blood won't just be on his hands --I'm looking at you Rush/Anne/Michele/KKKate!

Hey, did that shrub just move? Come and get me, coppers! You'll never take me alive!!!

Waitaminnit! You were going to at least try to take me alive, right? I mean those are the rules, right? aren't they?

uh-oh....

Blog held hostage day 3
Well, this is taking a lot less time that I expected. The various posses from The Galloping Beaver, Canadian Cynic, Unrepentant Old Hippie, the Vanity Press and JimDandy Goodness have driven the hit counter skyward lot less time than I anticipated, so fast that I can't keep up. I love you all and if it weren't for the fact that I don't have a uterus or anything, I'd want to bear your children!! But as a comic, in all seriousness, I better get cracking on the renovation and the big retrospective post.
While the hot oil wrestling match between Stephen "the hammer" Harper and Stockwell "Doris" Day promised by PSA isn't available at the moment, for now enjoy this hidden camera look at a group of Blogging Tories in Alberta holding forth in a political round table. I think the first guy you see is Dick Evans, and that could be Ezra Levant next to him.

Blog Held Hostage - Day Four

Free at last, thank gawd almighty, I'm free at last!

Okay, we, or rather I, surrender. I'm a bit awed by the response from all my favorite Canuck bloggers - I mean, I figured the gang at the Beaver could be counted on to help me out, but the rest - JJ, CC, PSA, Chet , David, RossK, Poons - who sent all their click monkeys my way-- well you have a special place in the woodshed from now on. And when we do finally have the big real-life meet up that will happen just as soon as I win the lottery, the drinks are on me.  In the meantime, virtual Bushmills&coffee and/or Grog all around.  And that goes for all of you who showed some love in the comments here and elsewhere, like Mike, LuLu, Red Tory, Frank Frink --even people who formerly were fairly pissed off at me, like Holly Stick and Skdadl.

I'm not sure how much of this to put down to people actually liking this blog and how much to Dave's natural authority born of the long habit of command, but I'll take the clicks. And before you scoff at that last bit, you should have look at the spike in the numbers that came when he started the first posse. As I've said at other times of Pete Seeger, I'm just glad he's on our side.

It's a free concert from now on! Just watch out for the brown acid.

Well, someone likes it

I'd like to thank the members of the Academy, my parents, my director, the guys twiddling the dials in the soundbooth, my personal stylist and the rest of my entourage for making this possible and, of course, a big shout out to Jebus, without who this all would have probably been a lot easier.

I'd also like to thank George W. Bush and Stephen Harper and a certain newspaper (you know who you are) for making this necessary.

Now, the rules say that I'm supposed to pass on the honor to ten other blogs on my blogroll. Since my blogroll is shortish and many, such as Jon Swift and Canadian Cynic, have already been awarded the Big E, I'll keep the list to five of my must-reads:

The Gazetteer

The Vanity Press

Unrepentant Old Hippie

Jesus' General (who is also the nicest guy in Second Life, despite his disturbing tendancy towards wearing assless chaps to parties)

The eternal Gaijin

How it is and how it should be

A few posts ago, commenter RossK aka the Gazeteer asked how good journalists stop the swiftboating of candidates.
It isn't just a matter of the work of a single journalist, in fact what passes for journalistic ethics can sometime perpetuate inaccurate information in the name of providing balance, reporting such stories as groups lying about John Kerry's war record or making spurious accusations about Obama's property dealings as a sort of "he said/she said" story in which no conclusion is drawn as the truth of the allegations or the credibility of the source.
This sort of reporting is, not to put too fine a point on it, horseshit. Only a buffoon or a Nazi propagandist would report a story dealing with say, Holocaust denial, by saying "Well, David Irving says the Holocaust never happened, but almost every other historian in the world says it did, so who knows what really happened?" and yet this is the way the original swiftboat accusations were reported. Even after the claims of the paid political group were thoroughly debunked they kept being repeated in the media. Proper reporting examines the souces and what they say instead of just parroting the content of the press release.

Thus, we present these examples:

The way it is done

Alcatraz O'Houlihan (perky young female CNN anchor of indeterminate ethnicity): Disturbing accusations are surfacing about Democratic Presidential hopeful Barack Obama today. Wulf Blitzkrieg has more. Wulf?
Wulf Blitzkrieg (steely-eyed, jut-jawed CNN reporter) Alcatraz, I'm here in Chicago speaking with Jon Galt, whose community group will soon be airing some public service announcements on television across the country that make some disturbing accusations about Barrack Obama. Jon, I understand that your Chicago-based group of concerned citizens claims that Obama once sold crack to children, is that right
"Jon Galt" (a well-groom, middle-aged white man in a nice brown suit) That's absolutely right Wulf. As you know "Barry" Hussien Obama brags in his book a that he smoked pot as a teenager. But if you thought that was disturbing, I'm here to tell you that he used to sell crack to schoolkids while disguised as a nun.
Wulf: That is indeed a disturbing accusation, that Obama sold crack to schoolkids while dressed as nun. Did you witness this yourself?
"Galt":Not exactly Wulf, but a member of our group - Chicagoans Organized Can Knowingly Sink Unethical Candidates with Knowledge Everytime, Regardless - heard it from a friend who knows the guy who cuts Obama's dogs' hair, so obviously the fact that Hussien Obama sold crack to schoolkids while dress as a nun is indisputable. And that is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to his criminiality.
Wulf: Well, that looks like pretty solid evidence to me, Mr. Galt, thank the good Lord for public watchdog groups like yours. There you have it Alcatraz, this group of citizens want people to know that Obama sold crack to schoolkids while dressed as a nun. It's pretty disturbing stuff.
Alcatraz: It certainly is Wulf. Has Obama's campaign responded to the news that he used to sell crack to schoolkids while dressed as a nun?
Wulf: Well, they said it was beneath comment, so obviously they are running scared about this relevation that Hussien Obama sold crack to schoolkids while dressed as a nun. In a related story, Bill O'Donahue of the Catholic Defensiveness League told CNN that if some pervert like Obama were to dress up as a nun to do something as evil as selling crack to schoolkid, it would be pretty bad and should disqualify them from being president.
Alcatraz: Well Wulf I'm sure we can count on you to keep us posted on these and other disturbing allegations about Obama's blasphemous cross-dressing and drug dealing. And now, back to our top story -- Seamus Sanchez, what is the latest in the Paris Hilton crisis? Does it look like her Chihuahua will survive?

The way it should be done

Greg Palast (Champion investigative reporter and new anchor of CNN after the company is bought by Al Gore and George Soros and set up as an independent non-profit foundation run by its staff-elected editorial board): Well, thanks for that story on the latest fundementalist church sex scandal, Anderson. Now, finally, before we go to sports, we have a sort of an odd story from Rev. Paperboy about a group of political activists making accusations about Presidental candidate Barack Obama.
Rev.Paperboy (Svelte, steely-eyed bon vivant, rancouteur and champion of truth, justice and good jazz): Well Greg, I'm here with a man who goes by the name "Jon Galt" who claims to have some disturbing information about Barak Obama. What is it your group is claiming Mr. "Galt"?
"Jon Galt" (a well-groomed, middle-aged white man in a nice brown suit): Well, sir, our group has it on good authority that Hussien Obama sold crack to schoolkids while dressed as a nun.
Rev. (beginning smile broadly) Oh, really? That's a pretty serious allegation Mr. "Galt". Can you back it up?
"Galt":Absolutely! A member of our group - Chicagoans Organized Can Knowingly Sink Unethical Candidates with Knowledge Everytime, Regardless - heard it from a friend who knows the guy who cuts Obama's dogs' hair, so obviously the fact that Hussien Obama sold crack to schoolkids while dress as a nun is...
Rev.: Total bullshit.
"Galt": I beg your pardon?
Rev.: C'mon, Mr. "Galt", this is obviously a trumped up charge put together by a bunch of partisan political character assassins organized by the Republican party, isn't it?
"Galt": But he sold crack! to schoolkids! I don't even know any republicans! He dressed up like a nun!
Rev.: Gimme a break, this isn't even your real hair. (yanks toupee off of "Galt's head) Your name isn't Jon Galt, you're Jeff Gannon aka Jim Guckert, the prostitute and right-wing shill that infiltrated the White House press corps a few years ago aren't you?
Gannon: Well, yes, that's true. But I'm outraged by this left-wing bias in the mainstream media! We are a group of concerned citizens with no ties to any political party that...
Rev.: Zip it, Rent Boy. Your "Chicagoans Organized Can Knowingly Sink Unethical Candidates with Knowledge Everytime, Regardless" is a tax-exempt 527 group set up by another group funded by the Republican party. Its memebership rolls consist entirely of the interns at the Heritage Institute and the board of directors includes Karl Rove and James Baker's personal assistants and Grover Nordquist's 102-year-old mother.
Gannon: That's outrageous! We are not! You can't prove that, we burned all the rec...
Rev.: (produces sheaf of singed papers) Nice try, Jimmy-Jeff. This is your membership roll, minutes of your board of directors' meetings and collection of cheque stubs from Ann Coulter, Rupert Murdoch, Richard Mellon Scaife and a group called "Republican Activists To Fight Undesirable Candidates with Knavery" -- we got them from your janitor. You really should have been nicer to Juan, before asking him to destroy evidence.
Gannon: But, but, but...aw crap! Okay, its a fair cop.
Rev.: And there you have it, Greg: Yet another inept attempt by the Republicans to smear the Democratic candidate. Back to you.
Palast: Jesus jumping Christ on a pogo stick Rev., how dumb do these prick think the American people are? It makes me sick some days. Now, on a brighter note, in our top story the World Court in the Hague has confirmed that they will waive their prohibition on the death sentence for the war crimes trial of Donald Rumsfeld...

the other F word





a hat tip to Cowboys for Social Responsibility

Swiftboating Obama
And so, predictably, it begins. Oddly enough, in a British newspaper, but this is the template you're going to see the election run on as the Republicans try to cling to the levers of power.

"Grover Norquist, an influential conservative tax reform lobbyist, said: “Barack Obama has been able to create his own image and introduce himself to voters, but the swing voters in a general election are not paying attention yet. He is open to being defined as a leftwing, corrupt Chicago politician.” "

It is interesting to see the Times describe Norquist as a "conservative tax reform lobbyist" when in reality he is a quasi-libertarian anti-government activist, character assassin and neo-con operative who once claimed he'd like to see government become "small enough to drown in a bathtub." Norquist is part of the movement in conservative/libertarian circles that champion supply-side "trickle down" economics, elimination of minimum wage laws, elimination of workplace and product safety laws, a so-called flat tax or elimination of income tax in favor of consumption tax and the elimination of capital-gains and inheritance taxes. Such people will claim that such measures are all about fairness or "freeing business from bureaucratic red tape" or "stimulating the economy" but what they are really all about is making sure the rich get richer and the poor stay poor and scared of getting poorer. Of course, anyone in politics or the media who points this out is immediately accused of waging "class warfare" in a nation which delusionally claims not to have a class system. To people like Norquist anyone to the left of the Rockerfellers, Morgans, Mellons and the rest of the original robber baron-class is a socialist.
Norquist and his masters believe that government is simply an often unavoidable impediment to them making money. To be asked to hand over a portion of their money to help other people smacks of communism to them.

As Bill Maher likes to say: Conservatives like to claim that government doesn't work, that it can't help people, that it can't solve the country's problems. Then they get elected and prove it. The more I read and research and examine the events of the last seven years, the more I have moved from thinking the neo-cons are stupid and inept, to believing they are both evil and very crafty. They have appointed incompetents to vital positions to ensure that the government departments involved fail when called upon ("Heckuva job Brownie"). This helps undermine people's faith in government and provides ammunition to show that the work of government should be privatized. Think about the arguments for school vouchers, or look at the "shock doctrine" privatization of things like water systems, power grids and transportation systems around the world, and it becomes clear the motives are to make a profit for corporations and their wealthy shareholders and to ensure that none of the that profit is ever handed back to help those who are not wealthy.

The sad thing is that Norquist is probably correct when he says that a well-funded 527 group attack on Obama could work. There will be a chain of deniablity between the Republican Party and this year's model of "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" but the money will still flow in from the usual sources and we will see Antoin Rezko, a dodgy property developer, inflated into a criminal mastermind on par with Al Capone and be told that because he gave Obama a sweetheart deal on some property, the senator is his amoral meat puppet. We will hear endlessly all about how William Ayers, a domestic terrorist and member of the sinister hippy-communist-veteran hating Weather Underground -- the largest domestic terrorist group EVER ! They bombed the Pentagon before Al-Quaida!-- who has become a sissified America-hating academic "intellectual" (just like Ward Churchill) is practically Obama's foster father. And we will heard how Obama didn't grow up in America and is probably a secret muslim, has fangs, a third eye, eats babies and HAS THE SAME NAMES AS AMERICA'S ENEMIES!!!!

We will hear all that crap and more from the right wing noise machine for the next ten months. No one will believe it, but after ten months of it being repeated again and again and again on CNN and FOX and MSNBC it will enter the collective consciousness. And even if Obama wins anyways, the first time he tries to reach across the aisle to get something done, the Republicans will gnaw his hand off and in the finest tradition of Newt Gingrich, do everything they can to make sure the government's business screeches to halt so that when the midterms come around they can claim that the Democrats can't get anything done.

Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose, or as the Talking Heads put it "Same as it ever was"

Happy "Make-the-unattached-even-more-miserable" Day

pardon the cheesy cellphone datestamp, but here's a photo recipe for a good Valentine's Day. And if you are unattached, take heart from this man's story. He may not be conventionally attractive, but he was married to a famous movie star who most people consider a great beauty (though I think she looks somewhat duck-like) - sometime you have to make a little noise to get noticed. ("Make that a cheeseburger") but the results may surprise you. They certainly surprised me in the best possible way.

Where else would you expect to find a Spider but on the Web?
I am, as the man himself would say, "as happy as a pig in Parliament" to find that Spider Robinson, creator of Callahan's Place (the fictional bar that launched a million online communities) and rancouter extraordinaire has a PODCAST. While a blog by Spider would have been cause for celebration, one can hardly expect somebody who make a living by his pen to start giving it away for free. In fact, the podcast is a better forum for him because Spider is the kind of storyteller who predates the written word. He has a natural flair for spinning a yarn and the timing, expression and voice of a born radio host. Somebody get the brass at CBC onto this, because with the right producers you could have the second coming of Peter Gzowski or Garrison Keillor, or at the very least a seasonal fill-in for Stuart McLean.

And if that weren't enough, finding his podcast lead to his website which lead me in turn to one of the coolest things ever. Way back when, Spider and his wife, dancer and choreographer Jeanne wrote a little book called "Stardance" about inventing zero-gravity dance and using it to communicate with aliens. The book, which spawned a couple of sequels to form the inevitable trilogy, won just about every award there is in science fiction and with good reason. Now, a few decades later, Jeanne is getting a chance to try out the whole idea in real life. Go. Watch. Marvel. The future has arrived.

from the "What will they think of next were they thinking?" Dept.
Somehow I can't see that there would really be that much demand for this, since there is no way in hell a canned cheese burger looks anything like the photo. I've done my share of canoe trips and eaten some pretty exotic campfire fare (Pie, pizza, cornbread or escargot cooked on a campfire anyone? how about a full Thanksgiving turkey dinner cooked in a woodstove? ) but cheeseburger-in-a-can?.....Really?

(and feel free to make gratutious LOLcat jokes in the comments)

"I haz cheezeburger! I need borrow ur can-opener!"

upchuckdate: thanks to the eagle eyes of commenter Steve at the Galloping Beaver, and the cast iron stomach of a man named Honk, we have PICTURES of the foodcrime via (appropriately enough) Something Awful, just scroll down and keep scrolling, if you dare.

Woolworths proves the value of studying literature

Just what every little girl dreams of, a bedroom set named after the most famous pedophila victim in the history of Western literature.

C'mon, even Sting has heard of "that book by Nabakov", but staff at Woolworths U.K. and their suppliers are apparently so culturally illiterate that they haven't seen either of the movies, read the book, or been exposed to the name's widespread use in connection with really skeevy porn.

I suppose it's a lost cause to try to get them to stop selling "Dirty Sanchez Refried Beans"

stairway to yeah yeah yeah

Okay PSA and CC, I'll see your classical Japanese Smoke on the Water (see last post) and raise you this:

Musical madness

Once again I am in awe at the nature of the universe. 

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro
Sportswriter seeks 300 pound Samoan attorney. Must provide own ether. Total coverage, final wisdom.

The obligatory abortion post

The Toronto Star's Antonia Zerbisias - whose Broadsides will be added to the blogroll when I get around to it - is asking Canadian bloggers to blog about reproductive rights on Jan. 28 - a week after the U.S. blogosphere's Blog for Choice Day.
The U.S. day produced a number of excellent posts - I particularly liked Tbogg's take on things and that of the folks at Lawyers, Guns and Money.

I've rewritten this a couple of times now due to the vagueries of blogger and the desire to get it right.

I will not be taking part in blogging about abortion on Monday.

Why?

Because I am not a pregnant woman or a pregnant woman's doctor and therefore abortion is not any of my goddamn business. Or yours. Or anyone else's. To paraphrase: "the state has no business in the bed or wombs of the nation."

Now as to blogging about what Antonia was actually asking us to blog about, why we vote pro-choice--well, see above.

If you think the state has a right to tell women what to do with their bodies or whether they can or cannot or must have children, you are just plain wrong. Now, I know if you oppose abortion for others you probably think you have good ethical moral reasons. I'm sure you point to passages in the Bible and quote your pastor or the pope or someone to try to back up your position, but you're still just plain wrong. As with suicide, eating pork, growing a beard or getting a tattoo -- the only person whose opinion ultimately matters when it comes right down to it is the person doing it.

Personally, I'd like abortion to be very rare. That's because I think all children should be wanted by both their parents and all pregnancies should be planned by both parents and all kids should be raised in a loving, stable, happy family. I'd also like a flying pony, a bottomless tub of chocolate ice cream that makes you skinny and a chance to kick George W. Bush in the 'nads. Since I'm not a complete moron, I know none of this is going to happen, ever. People will have sex without birth control and there will be unplanned pregnancies. Trust me, I know it happens. And what happens next should not be decided by a bunch of screaming, sign waving religious fanatics or moral scolds with 20/20 hindsight.

I'd like chemotherapy to rare too, and for the same reason. I'd like people not to need it. But since I'm not a fundamentalist whackjob who thinks teenagers and other people who may not be well suited to raise children together won't have sex if we all just pray hard enough and scare them sufficiently, it behooves me to have a more realistic position.

As I said, I'd like all kids to be planned, but neither of mine were, and they are no less loved for it. But I recognize how incredibly lucky I am to have impregnated my soulmate before we knew we were soulmates. If the divorce stats are anything to go by, most people are not that lucky.

We had our kids when we were married and earning enough to keep a roof over our heads, not everyone is that lucky. And I don't mean to begrudge single parents the opportunity to raise their kids, lots of single parents raise amazing kids and lots of married parents raise dysfunctional monsters. I don't think marital status has much to do with it, provided the parents or step-parents involved are committed, responsible and loving. I'd rather see a kid raised by a single mom or two daddies or a separated couple who have new partners than a couple who insist on using their kids as pawns in their insane marital chess game or who are abusive or disappear as convenient to their whims or addictions. I have little time for parents who abandon their kids, whatever the circumstances, though I'll concede that kids with abusive parents are probably better off wondering why they left than wondering why they keep getting hit or worse.

Abortion wasn't something that really entered our minds, but I'll be the first to say that others in similar circumstances might have reacted differently and that doing so would not have made them bad people. If you are childless and intend to remain so, use birth control. Not just most of the time, but all the time.

When a pregnancy happens, what happens next will and must be decided by the pregnant woman. She either will or won't have the child. She has always,ultimately, had the power to decide what happens next, it is just that our society has for the moment at least made it easier for her to make her decision without fear. Previously we, as a society, have been obsessed with trying to make that decision for her, either by outlawing certain options or pushing hard toward other options through conditioning, social pressure and shame. Women have always had abortions -- society has at times decided to make it very difficult and therefore very dangerous to do so, but abortions have always been part of human culture. So let's make sure they stay legal and safe and keep working on the rare part.

An abortion is not a haircut, and I don't expect that most women getting one consider to be such, but it certainly isn't murder either. Most women going to a family planning clinic to get information about an abortion or to actually have the procedure performed don't think they are there for a haircut, so even if you wouldn't have one yourself, just shut the fuck up and leave them alone to follow the dictates of their own conscience. No one put a gun to your head to make you have a baby, so why do you want some one else to be force to have kids? And if you are a man who thinks you have a right to voice your opinion in whether someone else has a baby or not, let me be as polite as I can and just suggest that you have a nice hot cup of STFU and cultivate another hobby.

Milton Wolff RIP
Milton Wolff should have been a lot more famous than he was, but he lived a life worth living.
He was the last commander of the American volunteers who fought against the fascists Spain. He served in the SOE and later the OSS arming resistance groups in Europe and Burma during World War Two. He fought for civil rights, sent ambulances to Nicaragua, and stole Ernest Hemmingway's mistress.