I got my first award yesterday, from Thistle over at Of Thistles and Maple Leaves. Since she writes one of the most consistently amusing and engrossing of blogs, I’m highly flattered. And she’s a West Coast woman (sigh), which we slugs in Upper Canada can only aspire to in another life.
Although I’ve been doing this fitfully since 2006, I’m still trying to find my blogging voice, so it warms the cockles of my heart to see Thistle comparing my blog to a Christmas Stocking – I was thinking “dog’s breakfast” might describe it. Thanks for the much-needed boost to my confidence, Thistle!
There are rules attached to this award, as follows:
List 6 things that make you happy.
Pass the award onto 6 Bloggers you consider to be Kreativ.
Link to the blogger who gave you the award.
Link to the blogs receiving the award.
Notify the recipients.
Six things that make me happy:
Spending time with #1 Son, who lives in Toronto. He’s so smart, funny, and au courant that I have never ceased being amazed at my good fortune in birthing him.
Lazy Friday nights with The First Husband, with sushi (blecchh) and red wine for him, smelly cheese from Quebec and white wine for me. During the summer, this ritual takes place on our sailboat; at other times of the year, in the sunroom (aka the Foredeck, because there is also a deck on the back of our house. Raccoons like to leave the evidence of their passage there, so it is known as the Poop Deck. We’s witty folks, us), with the oil lamp lit to remind us of the boat.
Long newsy phone calls with my sister in Ireland. She’s a retired farmer, and she and her husband divide their time between their farm, nestled in the Wicklow Hills, and a house they bought as a pile of stones and rebuilt, in the Spanish Pyrenees. She is the diametric opposite of me – cute, skinny, loves to dress up, lives to party, loves the rural life, even though we grew up in the suburbs – and she has a fantastic social life. Spent ten days on the farm last May, and could have done with a visit to Betty Ford on my return. Unfortunately, she doesn’t spend any time on the computer, so the telephone is our only line of communication.
My cat, Lucy. She’s fat, lazy, and supercilious, but she is also deliciously soft, purrs like a generator, and fills my empty nest.
Reading by the fire on a cold, snowy day, with said Lucy lying on my chest, purring like a well-oiled love machine.
Opera. When I was a kid, my father had a record player in his study, which poured forth a cornucopia of opera greats – Jussi Bjoerling, Maria Callas, Titto Gobbi, Guiseppe di Stefano. At the time, I hated it, because it drowned out my beloved Beatles. Then one evening, years later, I went out to dinner to an Italian restaurant in London, where they were playing opera in the background. I listened to an aria from La Boheme and it brought me to tears. I’m still not a huge opera buff, but a good tenor (NEVER Andrea Bocelli!) or a soprano singing anything from Puccini is a sublime experience. And Jussi Bjoerling and Maria Callas are now the cat’s pajamas for me.
List of bloggers to whom I would like to pass on the award? In no particular order,
I love going to Duchess Omnium and reading about her extraordinary life. And, every time I read about the horrific war raging in the DRC now, I think about her brave daughter, working with the VSO in South-western Uganda, right on the border with the Congo.
I thought I’d died and gone to heaven when I discovered Ruth Pennebaker and her sister over at The Fabulous Geezersisters. Up to that point, I felt like a complete dork, blogging at my age. But then I read Ruth’s funny and wise posts, and I thought maybe I am part of a great sisterhood of bloggers (yes, most of my favourite blogger-types, with the exception of luverly yumtious Stephen Fry are women).
Lucy Fishwife, over at Life happens between books makes me hoot. In many ways, her life reminds me of one of my past lives, when I resided in flats and bedsits in various parts of Britain (Would you believe Hull? Don’t ask!) and lived to spend time and money in bookshops. I lurk around her site, like the ghost of Christmas Future, but now I shall have to break cover, in accordance with the rules above. Hope I don’t scare her.
Brandy, at It’s like I’m … mmmagic! also makes me laugh out loud. But, while bubbly and effervescent, she’s also wise beyond her years and a wonderful teacher, inspired and energized by her students. This is one of the most creative and original sites I know. Downright Kreativ, in fact.
Marylou, at Tread Softly is new to blogging (at moi’s suggestion [preen]) and already she is just burning up the blogrolls. Such a talented and evocative writer – I’m confident we’ll see her writings between the covers of a best-selling book someday soon.
I found the most yummy blog at Karen Food. And I really do mean yummy – Karen has divine recipes and mouth-watering pictures of the results. I sent off an order for her Ras el Hanout spice medley, which arrived promptly and has more than lived up to expectations. It can turn boring old roasted chicken into something quite special!
This is a transcript of a powerful speech given by Stephen Lewis at SRI in the Rockies, a conference of socially responsible investors:
I live in a feminist family, I love it. I believe to the end of my days that the feminist analysis of the exercise of male power is probably the most insightful analysis to explain much of what is wrong with much of this difficult world. And I must say that the more I’ve had the privilege of working in the international community, the more I have come to the conclusion that the struggle for gender equality is the single most important struggle on the planet. You cannot continue to marginalize 52% of the world’s population and ever expect to achieve a degree of social justice and equity: it’s just not possible.
And when you look at the damage that is done to the women, particularly of the developing world, through so many perverse realities whether it’s international sexual trafficking or female genital mutilation or child brides or honor killings or an absence of inheritance rights or an absence of property rights or an absence or laws against rape and sexual violence or an absence of microcredit to give women some sense of economic autonomy or a lack of political representation – whatever the panoply of injustice, discrimination and stigma visited on women it seems to have no end, and it so profoundly compromises their existence.
And what has happened through the developing world latterly in many parts and which is so unsettling, unnerving, so profoundly compromising are the patterns of physical and sexual violence. The World Health Organization just did a quite astonishing study. It interviewed twenty-five thousand women in fourteen countries about physical and sexual violence. It found that the lowest levels of violence were in Japan at 14%, and the highest levels were in rural Ethiopia at 71%. And when they looked at the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada they found interim levels of 30-35%. So they saw that this was a pattern so deeply entrenched, whether it’s marital rape or sexual violence from intimate partners or domestic abuse, these patterns are overwhelmingly entrenched.
And then when you get destabilization in countries they are further accelerated. A country like South Africa is a good example, where you have 5,700,000 people living with HIV and AIDS in a population of somewhat over 40 million. Incredibly enough, South Africa is a country where eight hundred to a thousand people die every day of AIDS-related illnesses. And in the most recent year for which statistics are available, which is 2006, there were 52,000 reported rapes. And everyone knows that reflects only 5-10% of the actual number because women are so reluctant, for a whole range of reasons, to actually, formally, to report the rape and begin to engage in a police and judicial process.
And it gets worse still when there is conflict. When there is conflict it goes right out of control. I don’t understand what these berserk lunatic predatory male sexual behavior – how it happens under conflict – but it happens and it never seems to end. And it’s not merely on the continent of Africa which I admit is a continent I love, but throw your minds back to the rule of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The President of Indonesia just apologized to East Timor for the sexual violence that was unleashed by his forces when they tried to prevent the independence of East Timor. In the Balkans, I remind you a white, Western country, or countries, in the Balkans you have several military commanders who have come before the International Criminal Court charged with crimes against humanity rooted in sexual violence. The same is true for Colombia. There seems to be no part of the world which is exempt.
But in parts of Africa it really is astounding what is taking place. In the post-election violence in Kenya, suddenly more and more women were turning up at the hospitals, raped and subject to the most grotesque sexual violence. In Zimbabwe, an organization which I am involved with and to which I will refer at the end, AIDS-Free World, that Lisa mentioned in the introduction, I can’t go into details, which you will understand, but we have been over the last few weeks in an unnamed country in Africa, interviewing and taking affidavits under formal legal terms from the women who have been raped by Mugabe’s Youth Corps as Zimbabwe has ground down over the last several months. And Terror Camps were created –that’s what they’re called – to subject women associated in any way with the political opposition to insensate sexual violence.
And I was recently in Liberia, meeting with the President of Liberia and the Minister of Gender and the Unicef representative and they were telling me that the majority of rapes now in Liberia – after the civil war is over but the raping continues – the majority of rapes are committed against young girls between the ages of ten and fourteen. And everybody knows what’s happening in Darfur, that need not be explicated at length. For five years now the entire world has agreed that there is a genocide taking place and for whatever unconscionable reason we’ve never been able to bring it to an end. I mean, forgive me but this is not the Taliban in Darfur. These are Janjaweed militia commanders on horseback! And it is entirely possible to have subdued that and brought it to an end if the world cared a tinker’s dam for what was happening in that country.
And in the case of the Congo, you have a war on women. You know, if I may make a somewhat more intellectual observation, rape is no longer a weapon of war. Rape has become a strategy of war. You rape women in such numbers, so savagely that you humiliate entire communities through the women. The women hold the communities together. On the continent of Africa, nothing happens without the engagement of the women, particularly at the grassroots, particularly on the ground. And what happens is that the entire community is subdued, oppressed, overcome by these roving bands of marauding militias, who rape the women, move the community off the extractive resources, which is what they want, or turn the women into sex slaves and the men into the laborers who do extract the resources. And it’s hideous, the consequences, and it’s been going on since 1996. More than a quarter of a million women have been raped. And what is so unfathomable about it is everyone in a position of power knows, and it continues. I’ll never never comprehend.
In August of last year, Eve Ensler, the magnificent dramatist and writer of the Vagina Monologues went off to the Congo to see for herself what was happening and she spent a month or more and she came back and wrote an immensely powerful essay, the first words of which were, “I have just returned from Hell.” And I do not have the emotional equanimity to read to you the case histories that Eve set out. But after she came back suddenly the Undersecretary General of the United Nations, John Holmes, goes off to the Congo, comes back, writes an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times and calls it the worst place in the world for women. The Undersecretary General of the United Nations, who appears before the Security Counsel on a regular basis, and then suddenly there’s a front-page piece in the New York Times, and a front-page piece in the Washington Post, and a front-page piece in the Los Angeles Times, and Anderson Cooper of CNN does a twenty-minute segment on 60 Minutes, and everybody is caught up in the anxiety and urgency of what is being done to the women – it’s impossible to say in a way that can be absorbed what is happening to the women.
In the city of Bukavu in the Eastern region of the Congo there’s a little hospital called the Panzi Hospital where a lovely group of surgeons attempt desperately to repair the reproductive tracts of the women. This is rape that isn’t merely the gang-raping of eighty-year-olds and eight year olds, although that takes place. It’s rape with mutilation and amputation and guns and knives. Guns shot into the vaginas of women. I’m speaking to a sophisticated audience that cares about human issues – there is a medical term in the Panzi Hospital in Bukavu which I never in my adult life expected to encounter: it’s called “vaginal destruction.” And Eve Ensler has appeared before the Security Counsel, and we had an ostensible peace agreement, part of which peace agreement provided an amnesty for the militias that were doing the raping. And the war never ended. And the raping continues. And the war is now resuscitated. And so bad have things become that Condoleeza Rice, on June 19th, at the Security Council, introduced a resolution branding sexual violence as a matter of international peace and security. That had never happened before. And we have seventeen thousand United Nations peacekeepers in the Congo, the biggest peacekeeping mission in the world, and we cannot protect the women. And everyone knows its happening. And everybody knows that if we increase the numbers of peacekeepers, or the United Nations agencies did their job on the ground, or we confronted the government of the Congo in a way that no-one has had the courage to confront, we could perhaps abate the violence. But I have to tell you it’s so monstrous, and it’s so rooted in gender inequality, that it makes one feel not just tormented but dismal about the prospects for human behavior.
“Vaginal destruction” Now there’s a phrase that should ring down through the ages in infamy.
I really don’t understand why this man has not received the Nobel Peace Prize. While the prize itself has been tarnished by some of the Laureates chosen over the years (Yasser Arafat? Menachem Begin?), I’ve no doubt the money would be put to good use.
The website for the Stephen Lewis Foundation can be found here.
Israel’s Supreme Court ruled in favor of the destruction of parts of an ancient Muslim cemetery, where some of Saladin’s warriors are buried, to make way for a new Frank Gehry-designed $250 million Museum of Tolerance. (emphasis mine)
Canadian memorial, The Brooding Soldier, at St Julien, Belgium. This column marks the battlefield where 18,0000 Canadians on the British left withstood the first German gas attacks, the 22nd-24th of April 1915. 2,000 fell and here lied buried.
On the day TFH and I visited, a coach-load of British secondary school kids were picnicking in the little park beside the cemetery. At first, it was jarring to see the boys, teenagers like most of the soldiers being commemorated here, laughing and flirting with their female schoolmates. But then I realized, this is how life should be, not the pointless sacrifice of young lives that took place here. (Post edited later for clarity)
The gorgeous, feisty, wonderful South African lady, Miriam Makeba, has died at age 76. See her obituary in the NYT here. I remember watching this glorious black woman singing on television, when I was about 16 years of age, many, many moons ago, and turning to my mother to say, “gosh, she’s beautiful.” Her response? “But, she’s black. How can you think she’s beautiful?”
Interesting story from Talking Points Memorandum today.
I know that Obama has spoken many times about a bipartisan effort being needed to get the US out of the mess Dubya and his pals created. And bygones should be bygones, yadda yadda.
But Joe Lieberman is another stinking kettle of fish altogether. He not only championed McCain and Missus Palin, he gave rabble rousing speeches to crowds of redneck bigots about Obama being anti-Israel, and willing to lose a war in order to win an election, and he backed Missus Palin’s meandering about Obama hobnobbing with turrists.
There is absolutely no way that he should be allowed to keep his position as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. This is not about payback. If he sincerely believed all the drivel he spouted on the McCain campaign trail, a fear monger like Lieberman should not be allowed within a donkey’s roar of any committee to do with any kind of security. If it’s important to keep him in caucus, put him in charge of the committee to count paper clips, and make sure he will never have a say in security matters again.
This story from MSNBC, about a quiet little $140 billion tax gimme to US banks, speaks to an issue that has been worrying me for a few days.
While so much attention is being paid to Barack Obama’s wonderful victory, while Bush is making kissy faces with the Obama family, and commentators are preoccupied with what went wrong/right, where the votes were, what kind of dog for the Obama kids, who’s being mean to Missus Palin, etc. etc. etc., is anybody keeping an eye on Cheney and his minions? Who is checking to make sure they’re not slipping some nefarious stuff under the radar?
For example, they have just over two months to make sure their pals in the oil industry are compensated for being thrust into the wilderness for (let us hope) at least eight years to come. And I’m sure the fundamentalist Christian base will receive some goodies to make up for losing its place next to the seat of power.
If you think I’m being paranoid, check out that link to the MSNBC story. The Bush White House had no compunction about taking advantage of the turmoil over the bailout package to slip in a change to two decades of tax policy while no-one was looking. And this is their last chance.
