belated

( ...originally typo-titled "bleated," which might be kinda appropriate too)

I was going to write about getting the vaccine when I got the second dose two weeks ago (Pfizer). I had imagined--based on my unexpected emotional reaction to the first dose--that I would have Feelings. First shot, we'd gotten a spot unexpectedly, because a coworker posted on Facebook that a nearby vaccine site was accepting appointments right now for educators and we jumped on that. After that jab, I realized how much stress I'd been under, and how even one shot made me feel like...not that things would return to normal, not that everything was okay now, but...like there had been a pressure, a discomfort to which I had become so accustomed I no longer noticed it, and now it was gone. I noticed the negative space of it, the place it had carved out in my psyche. I thought that the second shot would herald a return of that feeling, but it didn't. I was just relieved. 

That was two weeks ago. If there is such a thing as officially vaccinated, all the immunities as in place as they will be... we're there. Our region is coming out of restrictions, things are reopening, and great! But I am in no real hurry to go back to the restaurants I haven't been to in over a year. I've grown accustomed to the take-out sandwiches on Friday "date night." It feels weird to think about removing a mask in public. And eat in public? Egad. Visiting a zoo might be nice. Or a museum. Or a store that isn't faithful Trader Joe's. But be around people? No, thank you. My latent agoraphobia has taken root this last year, hard.

(I better get over that before classes start in the fall. Because barring a new pandemic, they will. We've been super lucky here--the UCs have shut the fuck down and stayed that way for in-person instruction. How delightful to have official policy dictated by science and public health, instead of political toadshit.)

And I wasn't going to write about any of this, sweartogod. I was going to write about The Patchwork Terror and how, in his quest to eat all of Tinycat's scarfed-and-barfed breakfast, he chewed a big chunk out of the first clapotis I ever knitted. And how I did not quite freak out because he's not Idris: he shreds and gnaws whatever he eats to tiny pieces, even wee bits of kibble-treats, so I was pretty sure he hadn't swallowed long strands. (He never did throw up a damn bit of it. Where has it gone? The obvious answer--through him--has not manifested. He either reduced that wool to tiny pieces and digested it along with his food or it's still sitting in his gut, making itself into the grandmother of hairballs.) 

But also, ferfuckssake, I was upset, too, at the destruction. The loss. That clapotis--hours and hours of knitting, out of a indie-dyed colorway--is irreparable and irreplaceable. Of course PT was, is, more important, and I would set fire to the clapotis myself to keep him safe, but he's also fine, and fortunately not inclined to chew on textiles unless someone has thrown up on them first. This is a one-time catastrophe. 

But then, as I began writing, I realized--the worry, the fear, the anger, the guilt about being angry over a ruined thing on which much work had been spent, the grief over what was destroyed--felt familiar. This was a fresh wave of it, sure, but that's why I noticed it, after so long being numb to it. It's what I felt last spring. 

Anger. Fear. Guilt. That sinking, sick feeling of knowing something is irreparably mangled, and there is nothing to be done for it except figure out a way to salvage what's left: make it, if not beautiful, at least defiantly functional. Somehow. Wabi sabi. (And even if it's not beautiful again, ever--the clapotis will be warm. It will be of use. And it will be a story). 

I wish I could say that I think the world, post-pandemic, post the 45th president, will be like this clapotis. I don't think it will, though. We can't wabi sabi what's happened. We won't be past BLM because we're not past white supremacy. We can't get past anti-science insurrectionists because they're still crawling all over the Capitol. We can't even get people to take the fucking vaccines. I don't know how that sort of damage becomes functional again, that it can be patched. I hope I'm wrong. I don't know what happens if I'm not.

In the meantime, I have a clapotis to mend. 

[insert a title here]

 ...or as my students might do, "a new post", because many of them think a title is the same thing as the name of the assignment/the prompt. And I get it. Titles are hard. How the Multiverse Got Its Revenge began as something else entirely, as did How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse. Only Enemy, Outlaw, and Ally kept their titles.  The manuscript currently on my editor's desk began as Tin Can Fun Fur, which my agent suggested, because it's a genre mash-up. We gave it a more sedate title for my editor, who may or may not like it; since she's the one who prodded us to come up with How the Multiverse Got Its Revenge, I am inclined to trust her instincts. 

I don't blame my students, though. This quarter--which began in October--has seen a pandemic, fire, civil unrest and mass demonstrations, their first national election (and oh, what an election. Guns at polling stations. A president who won't concede and who continues being...I'd say a brat, but he's more dangerous than that. Astonishment at their relatives' voting choices, when it's so clear to them that this can't go on. I feel this last one, students, right there with ya.) And, now, another fucking fire in the area, here in December. 

More personally, I had How the Multiverse Got Its Revenge release in October, with attendant publicity posts (to follow in another post, once I've got 'em all collected), a reading an a panel at World Fantasy, and a merit review observation--which, oddly, is done on the quarter the review is due, which is not a quarter covered in the review. So the letter that recommends whether or not I should get a raise is based on different teaching than everything else in my file. It was also a) remote and b) a new course prep and c) a new curriculum for that course. 

I mean.

And through all that, incredible good fortune, to have a university employer that listens to science and prioritizes the health of students, faculty, and staff; and the ability to work from home; and our collective excellent health (except Murdercat, who has a cavity that must be removed next week, but who is otherwise 13 lbs of solid muscle fine). 

And my students, many of whom are in their first quarter of uni, having just seen their senior year meltdown, are reading, and writing, and showing up in synchronous classes and conferences despite less than ideal internet situations, or homes in which to get quiet time to attend class, or, in at least two cases, sixteen hours of time difference. They're pretty great. 

...this post ended up in a nicer place than I thought it would, so yay? Yay. And I better quit there, while I'm ahead. Besides. I made a pumpkin pie, and I think it's finally cool enough to eat, and I need something to put the whipped cream on.

this year exhausts me

 As I am sure it exhausts most of us. And I recognize that to be exhausted, rather than, oh, evicted, unemployed, evacuated, homeless, sick, or dead is a privilege. I am privileged. I acknowledge that. 

But fuckssake.

This week, the exhaustion has been more physically literal, because it's been stupidly, dangerously hot in my state (which is also on fire). I am not one of those folks who functions well in heat. I can handle it, insofar as I don't get immediate migraines or pass out or sweat excessively. I do get more anxious and more irritable. We are privileged to have A/C, which we try and limit our use of, because the power grid and rolling blackouts and all that. We can survive here on the coast without it (we did, in graduate student housing, which is literally across the street). We turned it on this week, set to 80, and it felt good. Cool.

Climate change, y'all. This isn't weather. The middle of the country blew away with the derecho. (My cousin lost her home.) People are dying of COVID all the fuck over, while other people whine about their masks and their rights and send kids back to school so that... yes, they can get sick and put hundreds into quarantine. The post office is being dismantled.  My state is burning up. People are losing everything. The sky is red. The air up north is black; here it's not so bad, most of the time. But I am aware, with every beautiful, lurid sunrise, that things are burning.

My fall class is about the zombie apocalypse, which seems more applicable this year than it has in a long time. I used to teach zombies because they were trendy. Now, though? It resonates. The end of the fucking world, indeed. We're remote, at least. This university has sense.

The DNC happened. I didn't watch. I mean, they could run a half-eaten sandwich and some moldy cottage cheese and I'd vote for them. I am fine with Biden. I am delighted with Harris (I wanted her for president, or as Warren's VP, so...). Now I fret about whether we will be allowed free elections (post office!) or if we do have them, and we win, someone won't vacate the office. Or, if we win, the people who really do want everything to burn take steps to make it happen. So yeah, I have some hope. But I'm not at all complacent. I think you can't be, if hope means anything. Hope is uncertain, by its nature.

I don't have more profundity than that. Tinycat is demanding her lunch, which she gets now in an effort to get her weight up (which is working, though I don't think we've cleared 7 lbs. Her highest ever was 8. I'd be happy with somewhere around 7.5). So I am going to feed a cat.

le petit chat noir

scattershot

Y'all, I am not a super fast writer of nonfiction, and sometimes I take a couple days to think about how I want to address a particular topic. Except the breakneck idiocy of ::waving hands:: all this is such that the topics pile up until I don't write at all because other more eloquent, and speedy, people already have.

But let us be clear:

Black Lives Matter. Transwomen are women and transmen are men. Science is real. Wear your fucking masks. And this Portland thing? Armed and unidentified federal troops grabbing people in "proactive" arrests? That's straight up authoritarian toadshit. Gods both small and large, vote in November.

...Thus has passed July.

I had a birthday early in the month, in which I turned a firm corner into my late 40s.  It was an odd birthday, in that we went nowhere and did nothing and I cooked (sure, Nous would've cooked for me, but I wanted chili verde and I like making chili verde and so). I even made my own cake, which actually a blueberry buckle (I didn't even know buckle was the legit name of a fruit-pastry thing, but it is). It was in fact a day like most other days around here, which have been divided into D&D night(s), and Borderlands 3 nights, depending on the number of participants.

The Patchwork Terror, 1 year old

The Patchwork Terror also had a birthday. He is north of 12 lbs and still growing. He is as soft and plushy to touch as he looks, and also, that tail clearly belongs to a different cat.

I made yogurt for the first time, which was easy. I have acquired a very tiny ice cream maker, and made good matcha ice cream and fantastic strawberry frozen yogurt and an okay sorbet. Next up, coffee ice cream. I have not had this much full-fat dairy in my fridge in, like, ever. I don't care. I gave up beer except on D&D nights and I will have whipped cream and ice cream and full-fat yogurt if I want to.

I wrote the first fifty pages for one of the books we're going to pitch to my editor at DAW, and I think it's pretty good. We'll see if my agent agrees.

I resigned at the HS. I am sad as hell because I love those students, but I need more time to write. The pandemic has only reinforced my decision, because boy howdy, the reopening of schools is a scary prospect, and also, I cannot take another moment of Zoom.

I have a merit review file due right about the time school starts. Not difficult, but time intensive.

I have decided to teach the zombie apocalypse as my theme for the fall quarter, partly because it's relevant again, and partly because if I have to do a whole new syllabus and prep for a fully remote class, I might as well at least use texts I am familiar with, especially since I have that aforementioned merit review.

I refuse to start either of those last two things until August (although, truth, I have started them both. Just a little.)

Fuck Racism

That is all.

No. Wait. It's not.

Zack de la Rocha grew up in this little city, going to a school a couple blocks away (which is now a boarded up refuge for wildlife). Having lived here now for, oh, more than a decade, I get the origin of the rage. I see the machine.

Rage Against the Machine - "Killing in the Name"

upheaval

Right, so remember when I said I was restless because I was between writing projects and waiting for notes on edits? Haha, yes, the universe heard! And the universe did deliver unto us (she says, shifting into Bible-speak) a campus apartment, which is bigger than this one and actually less expensive, but which we need to take possession of... today. Literally, keys in hand today, appliances (hopefully) delivered tomorrow. (We knew about this apartment two weeks ago. It's not like they sprang it on us overnight, but we had, like, 48 hours to accept and get the paperwork in motion.) The truck to move the heavy things comes in a week and a half (because we are too old to haul shit up and down flights of stairs anymore. I mean, we could, but good lord, why?) ...other than all the things we will hand-move, like guitars and framed art and fragile objects and the plants and the entirety of the kitchen. Plenty to carry, yes, let someone else carry the couch and chairs.

So for the near future, I am grateful to circumstances that I don't have a writing deadline, other than those student-related, because this apartment is transmuting into cardboard boxes and chaos.

And lest y'all think I pay no attention to politics, today I have guarded hope, although I am bitter as week-old grounds that we didn't flip CA 45 blue.

i am fire, i am death

This is becoming a regular thing, isn't it, I write about the weather? Like there's nothing else going on. But since my nation's currently a dumpster fire, well... I am not happy that my state is also burning, burning. Again. Especially since the new horror of a tax bill will not allow deductions for fire-disaster expenses because it's a mean-spirited partisan piece of malice.

Anyway, wind, ash, dust, wind, more ash, smoke. I'd rather have an actual dragon burning shit up, with actual gold in a hoard somewhere, so that we could at least pay for the rebuilding afterwards.

And we can't say "climate change" because... because... I guess we don't do science anymore? Man, I don't get that. I don't get the social conservatism, either (oh, let's just call it bigotry), but that's all amygdala. But science?

A process of trying to understand the world's materialist function, from observation and experimentation and extrapolation from principles. A search for the fucking rules, which would seem to be right up some people's alley, and yet--isn't. Rules for society! But not rules for the planet.

But also...facts, I guess. People imagine science is facts, and sometimes it is, but more often it's an evolution of understanding. (Here I fall back on my Kuhn, and The Structure of Scientific Revolution). New data emerges, new theories float, new tests, new knowledge. I think it's kinda awesome.

And yet.

I was flipping through a Signals catalog the other day (paper. I KNOW.) and there's a whole page of astronomy-themed stuff, and there's this solar system bracelet with, yes, Pluto on it. And the ad copy made a big deal of that, like including Pluto was something subversive, a strike against The Man who wants to take away our ninth planet. My first thought was "pretty bracelet" and my second was, FFS, Pluto? Come on.

When I was growing up, I learned that we had nine planets. Then, when I was an adult, I learned that the solar system was more complicated than that, and the ninth planet had been reclassified. And then the fight reignited about planetary classifications, and Pluto might be a planet again...along with 110 other bodies out there, This did not make me sad. Or upset. Or anything, except yay, science! A new thing has been learned about how solar systems form!

But people did get upset, as if Pluto's reclassification, as if this new knowledge, was some kind of personal assault on The Way Things Are.  No need to go relearning new things, why, we had nine planets when I was a kid, and nine planets are good enough now, too. And somehow the debate was evidence that those scientists are just silly, fighting over that stuff...all while insisting that Pluto was a planet because that was what they learned from a book when they were kids (which is, you know, pretty silly too).

I don't get it. I mean, I do--sometimes new data, new information, overturns something we found comforting or comfortable, and it sucks. But that's emotional reflex. Discomfort is part of growth and change, and change and growth are necessary and constant. Or they should be.

flashing back

Skugga and Louhi are havin' none of your toadshit

Leggings. Half-shirts. Shiny spandex worn in public. I mean, it's so totally the 80s, like, omg! I'm just waiting for the Aquanet hair sculptures to return.Except wait, that's right! Climate change. No more Aquanet.

I understand that folks sometimes get nostalgic for their high school years, and I say that in the same way I'd say 'I understand that some people like brussels sprouts.' I don't get it. It's a phenomena that just doesn't grab me. I occasionally substitute teach at a high school. They're great kids. Artsy and smart and engaged and all that. And I remember, being around them, what high school was like.

(No way in hell would I want to go back to that. No, no. Nonononono.)

I think part of the reason people feel nostalgic for those teenage years is everything seemed, oh, so new. Fresh. First love! First sex! No taxes! No mortgage! It's that teetering point of adulthood without all the adult responsibility (and I recognize here the privilege I assume, but I also don't think people pine for high school who weren't privileged). I met my best friend in high school. Played my first D&D. Still play with that same best friend every other week or so, 1200 miles from where we started. High school kinda marks out who we're going to become. Maybe who we don't want to be. I think there's comfort to be had in going back to that place: with music, with movies, whatever. (With clothes, too, evidently, but never mind that.)

And okay, fine. Look backwards, if that's your thing, and walk butt-first into the future.

But. (Butt! Okay, stop.) Here's the thing about high school. We can't be that person again. We can't go back there, and recreate who we were, and relive all that newness or whatever the hell it was. We can only remember, with all of the imperfection inherent in memories.

The people I do judge are the ones who try to recreate who they were. Like, jesus, just stop already. You can't roll back 25 years of living and reset How Things Were. You don't get a second chance to win the championship or ace the test or be popular or make everyone love you. Whatever anxiety you think being young again's going to solve--well, it's not. Listen to your Def Leppard and put the hair spray down and do not, repeat, not, start singing the school fight song.

I went to high school during Cold War. My dad was military. I spent chunks of my childhood on nuclear missile bases. My dad took my brownie troop on a tour of, among other things, a B-52 bomber. I knew that, should there be a launch, we'd die early. The bases were targets. My mother told me once that dying immediately would be better than surviving a nuclear winter. She meant, I think, to be comforting. She and my father also assured me, as I got old enough to start figuring out what was actually at stake in this nuclear stand-off between NATO and the USSR, that WWIII would be conventional. No way, they said, that the Soviets want to destroy the world. The US doesn't either.

That, too, was meant to be a comfort. It wasn't. I imagined international politics like a pair of cats circling each other, arched and fluffed and stiff-tailed and snarling. Mostly noise. Mostly posturing. But maybe not. There could be blood and fur left in swaths on the carpet. Upended furniture. Because who knows, with cats?

This morning, I got out Dream of the Blue Turtles and played "Russians" and "We Work the Black Seam." I felt that old anxiety again. I wondered what jacked-up memory someone must have to want to go back to that. Or what massive, gaping hole of anxiety would be filled by rebuilding a nuclear arsenal.

I watched my cats posture and fluff and circle each other.

And then something happened--some twitch, some signal to which I was not privy--and Louhi bolted. Skugga charged after her. Landed on her. There was rolling, and flying fur, and some snarling on Louhi's part. No blood. Skugga let her go, responding again to some cue or whim invisible to me.

Because who knows, with cats?

this teaching thing is dangerous

So another school shooting. That special epidemic we have here in the US. That totally unpreventable epidemic which we cannot discuss because REASONS. My least favorite proposed solution to gun violence is the one that says arm everyone! Especially on campus! Because a NO GUN campus means only the bad guys will have guns! (and the cops, presumably)

Let us consider this. A little thought experiment. Students can be armed (concealed carry, open carry). Teachers can be armed (again, concealed or open carry). If we see guns, then everyone knows who's got them and who doesn't. Imagine being an unarmed professor and seeing your students--one, two, five, whatever--openly carrying weapons in class. Imagine looking out at those students and having your own firearm within reach.

Tell me how the fuck learning happens in an environment where we're all measuring the size of each other's weapons. Tell me how I make anyone care about Aristotelian ethics when we're adhering to Strength Is All That Matters. Tell me how we do calculus or chemistry with the knowledge that some of us have the power to kill others of us right now.

And say shooting starts... what to do? Run out and find the shooter and shoot him? Or, if it's in my classroom, shall I duck behind the podium and open fire? Will I be able to tell which student started it? And if we're all shooting at the bad guy--assuming we can tell who he is!--what will the cops do when they arrive? Are we all armed and dangerous? Will we good guys drop our weapons on command, and allow Mr. Bad to keep firing? If my black students are armed, will the cops shoot them? What about my Muslim students? My Latinos? What about me?

I've worked on campuses since the 90s. I am a writing teacher now on a rather large campus. I do not want to be armed in the classroom. I teach. I do not enforce. Seeing my students as potential adversaries whom I am prepared to kill (because you don't draw a weapon unless you plan to use it, and while wounding shots are all well and good, only the very very skilled can do that reliably. The rest of us shoot to stop, and dead is the most stopped there is) will seriously fuck up my teaching mojo. I could not do my job. My students cannot be a learning community (and we writing classes are little intimate things) if they're afraid of each other, or sizing each other up as potential threats.

You want to solve this problem, folks, more guns on campus ain't the answer. Making us our own enforcers doesn't fix the problem. Making the prof into a cop is not a solution.

I lost a friend back when Columbine happened. She was mad at me for saying guns themselves are tools; it's the wielder who's the problem. I still believe that. But at some point, we need to consider why a particular tool lends itself so well to bad behavior, and take steps to remove its temptation from people who want to behave badly. More regulation? Okay. Licensing? Okay. Banning? Not as okay with that.

I'm no pacifist. I own a firearm. I don't have any bullets in the house. Our home defense will be bladed, and possibly my knitting needles. Don't laugh. Those fuckers are sharp.

breaking character

I've been a long time defender and fan of Pitch Black. I loved it when I first saw it, which, admittedly, was because Claudia Black was a cast member. I remember looking at the Riddick dude and thinking whoa, who is that guy? Dayum. It took me a while to connect Vin Diesel to Caparzo from Saving Private Ryan. Anyway, this is not a post about Vin Diesel and gibbering fangirlishness, mostly because a) I don't gibber and b) I left that fandom a long time ago because of Reasons, mostly involving the mental breakdown of several people because the Jack character was recast in Chronicles of Riddick.

There are spoilers. Just so you know.

What I liked, and still like, about Pitch Black was its ensemble nature. The characters--even the ones who die early--have arcs. Small moments--a line of dialog, a single action--serve to define personalities and motivations, which are then complicated and layered through other actions. There are some brilliant moments of cinematography, mirroring between Riddick and the monsters, that explore the liminality of what we define as monster. Of course, the worst monsters in Pitch Black are the two-legged human kind, and at the end, when one of those monsters survives, the viewer is left with the discomfort of our affinity for him. No matter how cool Riddick is, he's...well, not a nice guy.

But here's one thing he isn't: a sexist. He kills. He torments. He abandons. But he doesn't treat women as if they are, as a class, lesser than he is. He does not spare them, but neither does he single them out for predatory behavior; he goes for the weak. He just doesn't assume women equals weak by default. He also doesn't make the sexist cracks about women as fuckable objects, or threaten to rape, or boast about his own sexual prowess. That trait marks him as different from some of the male characters around him. In Chronicles, his pitiless egalitarianism continued. Weakness--which he would attempt to exploit, like any good predator--is a matter of character, not gender.

There are no character arcs in Riddick, although Riddick himself has indeed changed. He's become just like every other idealized male badass-hero. The writers attempted to undo some of the stupidity of Chronicles and get back to the gritty, dirty, ungrandiose world of Pitch Black. They failed. I won't discuss the rambling plot, or the predictability, or that the movie attempts to be the unholy lovechild of  Dancing with Wolves and Pitch Black. I could've overlooked all that, if Riddick had still been Riddick. Okay, fine! Have a pet. But don't be a big-mouthed, arrogant, boasting sexist whose major distinction from The Bad Guys is that he will wait to go "balls deep" in the only named female character (a lesbian) until she "asks him all sweet-like," instead of trying to rape her and getting his ass kicked. Riddick waits until she asks. That's how we know he's the good guy.

And here we have the problem. Dahl's a lesbian, and by the end, she's screwing Riddick (we presume). I've heard cries of homophobia. I think yeah, but only because the movie's so sexist it can't conceive of a lesbian. Most of the dialog around Dahl is riddled with crude comments about her sexual availability, including one outright assault. She's a merc, but she's clearly not in the same class as the men. Part of that dialog is used to mark the Bad Guys, because Bad Guys are assholes and sexist behavior is one of those easy markers...except Riddick gets into the game, too, and the only men who don't talk to Dahl like she's an inflatable doll are her boss (who ends up being the coolest character in the film) and the young guy whose bizarre devotion to God seems at odds with his professional choices.

Riddick is a movie for males stuck perpetually at 15, where a) tough women must be lesbians, and b) all lesbians can be cured of that particular problem with a good helping of manly member, because c) there really is no room for a world in which a woman isn't just a walking fuckhole, no matter her skills or capabilities. The trait that made Riddick unique, as a character, was his alienation from society, where that alienation served as a means of critique of how uncivil we really are to each other.  At one point in the movie, Riddick wonders what's happened to him, how he's lost his edge, is it because he's gotten civilized.

Yeah, Riddick. I think so. Now you're the same sexist asshole as everyone else.

in honor of your demise...

...I will bake caramel rolls.

Shrivel and die, DOMA.

And you too, Prop 8.

Oddly enough, my heteronormative marriage does not feel at all threatened by these events.

WoW. No. Not a Game.

I was initially reluctant to use the term War on Women. It sounded too much like a political catch-phrase, meant to drum up emotions and suppress logic. Also, it shorthands to WoW, which means something entirely different to me.

But then.

So by now you probably heard/read Rep. Todd Akin's comments about "legitimate rape." Now his fellow Republican conservative, Rep. Steve King (no relation to Stephen King, although the man speaks horror) claims that he's never heard of pregnancy resulting from incest or statutory rape, but he's willing to discuss it.

Funny. A bunch of OBGYNs did a study back in the 90s that showed "significant" numbers of women get pregnant from rape every year. Of course that looks suspiciously like science, so chances are Akin and King didn't bother to read--wait. Akin's on the House Science Committee. And last year he and King tried to define "forcible rape" for a bill. It's becoming clear that unless you fight like hell when someone rapes you, and come off bruised and bloody and maybe badly wounded, these assbags are not going to believe you were "legitimate." And maybe not even then, if you're one of that significant number who ends up pregnant, because your magic lady-bits didn't prevent the Hate Sperm from conception.

This isn't a war. It's a regression to the fucking Middle Ages.  

Maybe that makes it a little more World of Warcraft after all. Maybe those of us who didn't luck out on the lowest difficulty setting (thank you, John Scalzi) need to hurry up and level up. The Horde is on the way.

and the death count rises

So the terrorist in Norway was a home-grown, right-wing, conservative Christian fundamentalist. He's blown up buildings and killed close to 100 people, many of them teenagers and affiliated with the liberal party in Norway. A political act of terrorism, in one of the most peaceful, open societies in Europe, one of our NATO allies. The attacks are symptomatic of a rise in extreme right-wing crap in Europe, and that should worry us. It should worry us even more that we have our own right-wing conservative fascist element. Our Christian white-boy terrorists generally confine themselves to bombing women's clinics and murdering doctors, but they have occasionally gone after buildings full of government workers and their children. When they do, we execute them and dismiss them as extremists. Norway won't kill their terrorist, having evolved beyond government-sanctioned vengeance killing capital punishment at the turn of the last century. But they might have a backlash against the kind of xenophobic thinking that produced him.

In an ideal world, or even a self-aware one, the rest of us might be looking at Norway and grieving with them, and thinking that we should be that much more vigilant against the kind of thinking that produces home-grown terrorism and right-wing extremism. 

Instead, most of my fucking f-list in varying social media is on about Amy Winehouse.