Standing Tall

16th December 2016

According to Confucius, hearing something a hundred times isn't better than seeing it once. So, take a good look at this picture of veteran Wes Clark kneeling before Lakota Chief Crow Dog at Standing Rock after the Dakota Access Pipeline had been stopped from crossing Lakota lands. The two thousand US veterans who joined Wes Clark to form a human chain around Standing Rock did not play an insignificant role in this victory.

In the picture, Wes Clark is dressed in the uniform worn during the American Indian Wars  and is kneeling not so very far away from Wounded Knee SD where in 1890 the American army went tipi to tipi massacring men, women and children, for which they were awarded more Medals of Honor than for any other military action in American history. Wes Clark  bowed his head symbolically before all of pre-Columbian tribes to ask forgiveness on behalf of the European invaders.   

It has taken almost the entire history of this country to come to this point. Some call this Wendigo psychosis. Others, Collective amnesia. America lives and has always lived in a state of denial about its origins and what it represents. This is the sick and psychotic America that sings its worn song of America's greatness, the same one that has just voted in a sick and psychotic leader. 

It is the nature of selective amnesia that it will not be resolved until it faces up to the things it chose to forget. Wes Clark kneeling before Chief  Crow Dog will go down in history as one of those   moments that spoke a thousand words because perhaps, just perhaps, it indicates that this country is beginning to wake up.  You never know - perhaps it will even do so before January 20th of next year.

  

Rooster Paradigm

9th December 2016

In her recent TED talk, Naomi McDougall Jones, referred to me, her mother, as a "rabid feminist."

https://youtu.be/Gj2pWl1vjCY

I would just like to take the opportunity here to clarify that statement. But first I want to dust off my medals and point out that all of my writing boasts complex female protagonists. My main point of contention with Christianity and other Abrahamic religions is that it has demeaned women. My beef with the academic establishment is that it has driven us out of our hearts, that particularly female organ of fire, into the dry logic of the brain. My greatest vision for humanity says that unless women take charge and soon, there isn't going to be any humanity left to discuss.

While enough praise cannot be heaped upon the first wave of feminism of the sixties and seventies, it's time for an amendment. The problem is that it rose up within the confines of a male model of power and it accepted that as the ground game. Rebecca Traister, young, hip and celebrated feminist that she is, doesn't seem to question this in her book All The Single Ladies: Money equals power, and if you're not out in the workplace competing with men and earning bundles of it, than you haven't got a leg to stand upon. The mantra of her mother and that generation of feminists still rings strong: never ever be financially dependent upon a man. (A corporation, yes; a boss that pays you 78 cents for every dollar a man earns, this is fine.)
So I think we need to drive the feminist argument a little deeper. Women regaining their power does not have to do with taking the next step in the male paradigm. The next big step is to reject that paradigm altogether. Money doesn't equal status or power in any real sense. In the matriarchies that existed on this continent before the whites moved in, men were given so called positions of power - strutting kinds of positions, the kind Donald Trump would be saitisfied with, but it was the women's circles of council that held the real power, that could remove that cockerel from its perch if they didn't like the tenor of its crowing.

This is what we lost when the Abrahamic religions came in and said that women should stay quiet and keep their heads covered. We lost the check and balance that this society of cocks needs. We ourselves don't need to be cockerels. The world has enough of them. We need to circle up and realise that real power has nothing to do with whether you stay at home with your kids or let a man bring in the daily bread. Real female power has yet to come into its own; we need a new psychological and emotional paradigm, and then the economic one will follow.

I hope that that young lady in the video above is successful in her push to have women better represented in the film industry. I hope she is rewarded with a house in the suburbs and enough money not to have to worry about paying bills. But more than that, I hope that my daughter represents a new and centered female consciousness that is free of outside parameters, whether they be provided by a decaying rooster hierarchy or even by the strictures of a past feminism.
So, in a way, I suppose I am a rabid feminist. Just as long as we are clear in what respect.

Writing Disorder

2nd December 2016

Time passes.
For the writers and readers of my book out there, I feel I should get back on topic and share a little about what is going on with my book series. As we all know, movement in the publishing industry is glacial, but I finally heard back from my agent to whom I had submitted my last book in the Veil Of Time series. The good news is that he liked the book very much. I believe he used the word "fantastic." Yeah!

The bad news is that he is asking for a re-write.

Between these two pictures is where most of my life resides. You'd think over the years I would have learned, but, no, once I have submitted my work, I sort of go off the reality radar into the belief that the UPS man is going to arrive on my doorstep soon with an enormous bunch of flowers with balloons and a note saying CONGRATULATIONS!! So, when I get my work back and the line, "I love it" is followed by the word "but," I end up for the next week, as I did over Thanksgiving, down in the dumps.

But a new day inevitably dawns. You go back to the lines from your agent after the "but" and you read more carefully. Well, those changes won't take so much time, after all. It's just a matter of a little tweaking. You open up your file and start making the changes. Hey, what do you know? This revision makes my book even better! You write to your agent and thank him for pushing you. Life is good. Yeah!

People might be forgiven for thinking these swings between mania and depression look awfully like  bi-polar disorder. It is an affliction, I'll agree to that. But its name is simply The Writing Life.

A Man's Woman

During the recent presidential race, when it seemed to be apparent that women were going to be voting Trump out of the equation, some female Trump supporters were petitioning to have women's  voting rights rescinded. Susan B. Anthony and Mrs. Pankhurst must have been rolling in their graves.

Stockholm Syndrome describes a phenomenon where captives begin to identify with their captors, what must be an inbuilt survival technique. Something close to this syndrome kept the lower classes of Britain for centuries voting in the very right-wing feudal governments that kept the masses low and lowly. Something close to this is how the Old Boys' hierarchy operates, designed as it is to keep those below it thinking of themselves as inept and dependent.  Any defectors are regarded as  treasonous rabble rousers. The Pankhursts and the Steinems and the Traisters were and are seen as aberrations, treasonous to the system and patently unfeminine.
It is no wonder so many female authors have over the years felt obliged to take on men's names: Charlotte Bronte (Currer Bell), Emily Bronte (Ellis Bell), Anne Bronte (Acton Bell), Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot), Louisa May Alcott (A.M. Bernard), Amantine Dupin (George Sand), Violet Paget (Vernon Lee). Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen.) More recently, think JK Rowling (she doesn't actually have a "K" initial in her name,  AL Kennedy.

The Old Boy's Club house rules say that if by some rough chance a woman does end up in a position of power, she had better look and act like a man. Pant suits, asexual clothing, thank you very much. Either get back in your box, or if you can't do that, then be as much like a box-keeper as you can.  Imagine if during the campaign Hillary Clinton had taken to wearing clothing that expressed her femininity, her sense of who she is.  But then, she learned early on how to play the man game: many historians attribute her husband's loss of the governorship of Arkansas in 1980 to the fact that she hadn't change her name from Rodham to Clinton.

I think what felt to so many women like a kick in the gut when Trump won the election, the reason that within days a million-woman march on Washington had been arranged, is that we thought that the wave of history should have taken us past all that. Donald Trump personifies in his very orange body the disenfranchisement of women, the blatant reduction of their humanity to a paltry sex-appeal scale of 1-10. The women he surrounds himself with are almost uniformly blond, trying in their Stockholm derangement to conform to his captor view of how a woman should be.
In 2016, I thought we could do better than that. Many, many women thought so, too. I suppose that is what hurts the most.

First Peoples

November 11th 2016

There's a strange irony here, an odd juxtaposition of events, as the debacle of the American general election plays out against the backdrop of the Standing Rock protests. In the general election, big business won out "bigly" as our president-to-be ungrammatically intones. Let's hope things go differently for the Native Americans at Standing Rock.
When the white man came to this continent, he brought untold chaos. If you don't believe me, then know that only 5% of the native population survived this holocaust. In spite of the head-in-the-sand Thanksgiving mythology that grew up around the pilgrims and their Native American "hosts," the net contribution of western culture to this continent has not been favourable.  But this is the story of imperialism in general - shock and awe is the method, and the white man is still doing just that: push that oil pipeline through Indian territory and under their river. Who cares? It wasn't until 1948  that all Native Americans were given the right to vote. If the black population was thought of until very recently (and still by some on their way to the White House cabinet) as 3/5th human, Native Americans were counted as even less.  They were heathens in need of gentrifying.

Nothing has really changed. Native Americans are still not entitled to own land, which is why white man's oil companies can run roughshod through their sacred sites and claim it all for "progress." God save us from the white man's progress. The clown soon to occupy the white house is the logical conclusion of generations of bigotry, suppressed for a little while perhaps, but not very deeply, because the profoundly unhappy human being that the white man embodies always needs someone to blame.

All we can do is hope history is on our side. All we can do is believe in the Gia principle which says that the earth, a living organism in itself, will rally its own forces. I hold onto the thought that the Trump administration is up against holy Gaia, a woman if ever there was one. 

Aum

11th November 2016

Auuummmm. Here's my go-to mantra: Everything at this moment is exactly as it should be. I have been up nights refining my conspiracy theory about Russian involvement in Tuesday's election. I still think it might be true, if unprovable, but the high ground here is a place of trust. Some may call it denial, and perhaps they're right. I am not going to be militant on this. Tuesday sort of sucker-punched all that out of me. But it's a clump of grass to get hold off on our way out of this mire. Here it is: chaos comes before creation. Sometimes everything has to dissolve into a state of Nothingness before it can coalesce and become Something.

The fastest way to accepting this is to try prying your hands off the wheel. Just for a moment, step back and let the vehicle drive itself. It might seem like a scary thing to do, but my image for this is a car on a track: we think we're directing it by keeping our white-knuckled hands on that wheel, but in actual fact, the car is going to go where the track takes it, so you might as well sit back and enjoy the scenery.

I know that sounds rather deterministic, as though we have no power to direct ourselves. But life just is this tight-rope walk between destiny and choice. We have to put it down to paradox, as so much of life seems to be. We just might be living through one of the greatest paradoxes of all time. Have faith. It's all that's left us. 

The Flailing Tail

4th November 2016

Four days out from the election of the century, and I am closing my eyes, curling into a fetal position and just like the rest of America, praying for it to be over. I have always thought of the American political system as a circus, and this election cycle has left no doubt about that. We've had the high flyers, the bullshit ringmasters, the poodles dancing on their hind legs, the blond contortionists, the elephants in ballet tutus - and that's just the Republican side of the equation. 

So, moving right along... A long, long time ago, I was born at the time on the pagan calendar of  Samhain (pronounced Sa-vhoon.)  This is the start of the dark half of the year which ends on another pagan festival, Mayday (or Beltaine.) I am she who ushers in the dark days. 

And dark days we are in, not because, as Trump forecasts, everything is going down the tubes, but because we are in the last days and hours of what Michael Moore refers to as a ten-thousand year run of the male hierarchy. Women are voting for Hillary, men are voting for Trump. I grew up in a country where the overlords put down the lifeblood of the people by making everything to do with them illegal - in the old days, uprisings in Scotland were punishable by death, in the not-so-old days, speaking the indigenous language was punishable by your classroom teacher. Well, the classroom teacher, in the shape of Comey, just put Hillary Clinton in the corner for having the audacity to think she could become the leader of the "free world." It is the last flail of the male tail.

For the astrologists among us, the dark era of Pices is on its way out, the fish has outstayed its welcome. The new age of Aquarius is being ushered in by whatever winds of history are made of,  and I have to believe they have at least something to do with balance and the urge towards the light.  

Whether or not Hillary wins the presidency, the days of the old boys club are over. No wonder they're running around, brandishing their sticks and singing their laments of the sinking ship.