Looks like it’s about time for one of these.
Sunday Morning Garden Chat: Cordial
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In celebration of the ABL/CWG2012 DNC Road Trip, from faithful commentor Marvel:
May the harvest be upon you! It sure is harvest-y here in the Pacific Northwest!
We make a lovely liquor out of these tart, blue plums.
I like how the liquid (which starts out looking like sea critters submerged in weak coffee) turns a beautiful ruby color.
Plum Cordial-In-Waiting — Ingredients (in descending order) damson plums, vodka, sugar, brandy, water, whole cloves, whole allspice, star anise. Store in a cool dark spot for 3-4 months. Decant into festive vessels. Drink up.
[These snapshots are from last year (9/5/11) …we’ll be trudging out with ladder & pails and starting the process all over again tomorrow — sending these 2011 photos ‘cuz I’m up to my ears canning beans (etc.) today and it promises to get plenty non-stop busy hereabouts.]
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As the official harvest season kicks off, what’s happening in your gardens this week?
#AngryBlackLadyCrankyWhiteGuy2012: It Begins
Open Thread: The GOP Time Machine & Their Would-Be First Ladies
Rebecca Traister, at Salon, says “Republicans aren’t just nostalgic for 1950s-style social barriers. They want to rebuild them“:
… None of the stories of ye olde American achievement actually jibed with the convention’s “We Built It” theme. The tales were of white men whose class mobility and moon-walks were boosted by G.I. Bills, state-school educations, government-funded space programs and unions. These guys and their unconditionally loving wives were part of a white American middle class that was able to expand thanks to the kinds of post-Depression financial regulations and government-goosed infrastructure and housing programs that modern Republicans are keen to obliterate.
But the incoherence of message didn’t matter, because what all these stories were really flicking at wasn’t the size of the government, but the whiteness and the maleness of those who were helped along with their businesses and wealth and broods of straight-parented families. Just listen to Romney’s assertions about this “nation of immigrants” who came here seeking freedom, a sentiment that is both disingenuous from someone who wants this nation’s current immigrant population to self-deport, and that does not even bother to acknowledge those Americans whose forebears were brought here against their will in an exercise of freedom’s opposite. Romney didn’t include those people because they don’t exist — in a meaningful, threatening way — in the America Romney and his party are trying to bring back.
The keening desire to be back there, to be back then, was responsible for the presence of Clint Eastwood, an actor who came to prominence as a star of the cowboy show “Rawhide,” which aired from 1959 to 1965. People may disagree about whether Eastwood’s vertiginously awful appearance at the RNC on Thursday was intentionally aggressive or just loopy, but there’s no question that his creepy intonation of the phrase “We own this country” came off like a segregationist-era, George Wallace-inspired catchphrase – one the crowd went wild for….
Meanwhile, as Republicans vehemently affirmed their love for women – see Ann Romney’s enigmatic proclamation, “I love you, women!” – they presented a version of femininity mostly recognizable to contemporary eyes by its dental records…
Which reminded me: There was an audience-reaction shot during Eastwood’s performance, and I got a weird flash of deja vu. Janna Ryan looked like the photo-negative version of Marilyn Quayle at the 1988 RNC — an icy blond in a white-trimmed black outfit echoing an icy brunette in a black-trimmed white suit, both with the same dead eyes & piranha smiles. And she’s got the background to match, as another fiercely ambitious lawyer from a ‘good family’ embracing a 1950s-era public image as the Happy Homemaker. (One important factor that’s not parallel: Paul Ryan got a big jump on his career ambitions when he married the multi-millionaire daughter of a state-level powerful political family. Forty years ago, Marilyn Quayle was the hypergamist, marrying the good-looking but unambitious son of a very rich & ambitiously powerful family.)
In fact, both Anne Romney and Janna Ryan seem like weirdly blurred imitations of Barbara Bush and Mrs. Quayle. The thing is, while the originals were rather defiantly promoted as ‘old-fashioned’ back in the 1980s, today’s versions just seem grotesquely out of date. When Barbara Bush dropped out of college to marry her boyfriend-from-a-good-family and follow him around the country running a household totally dedicated to supporting his career, that was very much the norm… not least since Bar’s career options would have been both severely restricted and underpaid. But by the time Anne Romney was “welcomed” to the Romney compound in the 1970s, normal young women (even those who inherited and/or married wealth) were expected to show some kind of interest in being sufficiently credentialed, or experienced, to support themselves. Marilyn Quayle was a proudly vocal standard-bearer in the Schafly-era “feminist backlash”, when rightwing women made a point of “renouncing” their own hard-earned achievements (Quayle bragged that she’d had her first child induced early so she’d be able to take the bar exam on schedule) because being a wife, a mom, and a homemaker were more important, to her fundamentalist God as well as her husband’s political ambitions. It’s early days, but while there’s been a certain amount of style-section hoopla about how Janna knows “being with her children while they’re young is just too precious to waste”, even the lady-gushers acknowledge that she had a real-world career before those babies emerged, and she’ll have an active membership in the tax bar association once the kids are no longer adorable full-time props.
It’s one more facet of this year’s angry, off-putting Repub messaging — Gordon Gekko as Miss Havisham.
Open Thread: The GOP Time Machine & Their Would-Be First LadiesPost + Comments (59)
The Eagle Has Landed
For an Angry Black Lady, she sure smiles and laughs a lot:
I’ve been informed that I am cranky.
About “The Legitimate Children of Rape”
I agree with Kathleen Geier at the Washington Monthly — this is a must read, but probably not in public if you’re easily upset. Andrew Solomon, in the New Yorker, on the pregnancies, and children, resulting from rape:
Writing in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Dr. Felicia H. Stewart and Dr. James Trussell have estimated that there are twenty-five thousand rape-related pregnancies each year in the United States. While these numbers make up only a small part of this country’s annual three million unwanted pregnancies, the numbers are still extremely high…
I have been researching a book, “Far from the Tree,” that deals in part with women raising children conceived in rape, and have therefore met the living reproof to Akin’s remark. Life for these children may be extremely difficult. One of the few groups founded to address this population, Stigma Inc., took as its motto, “Rape survivors are the victims … their children are the forgotten victims.”…
For several of the women I interviewed, the crisis was exacerbated by the question of what rape means, by the idea that some rape is not forcible or legitimate. Men who have gotten away with rape seldom retreat in shame or repentance; they often play out their ghoulish exuberance by claiming their reproductive successes. Among the women I interviewed, such men’s bids for custody or visitation rights felt far more like acts of further aggression than expressions of care. Nevertheless, in instances where rape cannot be proven or charges were never filed, the threat of joint custody is real. Many women who cannot cope with prosecuting their assailant are then left without any proof of assault. In a time when DNA evidence can establish biological ties scientifically, this lack of evidence as to the social circumstances of conception can be a serious problem…
The aftermath of rape is always complicated. Many victims are simply in denial that they are pregnant in the first place: a full third of the pregnancies resulting from rape are not discovered until the second trimester. Any delay in detection reduces women’s options, especially outside major urban centers, but many women struggle with the speed of the decision; they are still recovering from being raped when they are called on to make up their minds about an abortion. The decision of whether or not to carry through with such a pregnancy is nearly always an ordeal that can lead, no matter which choice is ultimately made, to depression, anxiety, insomnia, and P.T.S.D. Rape is a permanent damage; it leaves not scars, but open wounds. As one woman I saw said, “You can abort the child, but not the experience.”…
There can be no question that, for some women, an abortion would be far more traumatic than having a rape-conceived child… But ready access to a safe abortion facility allows a woman who keeps a child conceived in rape to feel that she is making a conscious decision, while having the baby because she has no choice perpetuates the trauma and is bad for the child. Rape is, above all other things, non-volitional for the victim, and the first thing to provide a victim is control. Raped women require unfettered choice in this arena: to abort or to carry to term, and, if they do carry to term, to keep the children so conceived or to give them up for adoption. These women, like the parents of disabled children, are choosing the child over the challenging identity attached to that child. The key word in that sentence is “choosing.”…
Seriously: You should read the whole thing. And then maybe forward or facebook or otherwise bring it to the attenton of the Todd Akin defenders among your acquaintance.
Open Thread
Miss Peggy Lee for an open thread, via Dennis SGMM.