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Bye, bye Donald!

OK, I'm with the Democrats now. WHOO HOO!!!

This is one big step for humankind. Let's hope there'll be more.

I only wish there wasn't a niggle of fear that Bush is trying to get his guy in before the Democratic Congress sits down to stop him. And the "old family friend" part of his description makes me nervous too. Haven't we had enough of Bush cronies?

Nancy Pelosi

Pelosi is using words like "ethical, honest, open, integrity."

God, I hope she means it. It's such a refreshing change, and I'm feeling hope for the first time in two years.

Change in DC?

I'm watching the election coverage on CNN, and I find myself a little disappointed at the whooping I'm seeing from the Democrats.

New House Leader Nancy Pelosi gave a great speech about running the most honest Congress ever. Let's hope she makes it stick.

But to hear the cheering and hoopling? *shakes head*

I must say I am deeply, deeply relieved that President George Bush has lost control of the House, and my fingers are crossed that the Senate goes blue too. But what I feel like doing isn't cheering, it's deep-sighing and getting to work.

I don't think this was a "victory" for the Democrats, in terms of fighting for something important and winning! I think it was a charge, a responsibility. The people have sent D.C. a plea: "Help us!" Sent it specifically to the Democrats with the added comment "because the President isn't listening."

I think the most appropriate response for "victorious" campaigners is to square their shoulders, step up to the microphone and say in a somber tone (like when you make a covenant), "American people, we have heard your plea and accept the responsibility to make the U.S. a place to be proud of again."

Thanks to syntheticmuse for the image.

Read this, an open letter to Laura Bush from poet Sharon Olds, declining the First Lady's invitation to read at the National Book Festival. Make sure you get to the bottom. The last two lines are a kicker.

Among other things, Olds said, "So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire."

That's me. A formerly proud American who feels anguish and shame. Even worse, I'm a registered Republican who had never voted anything but Republican in a presidential election before Bush took us into Iraq.

But I voted Democrat in 2004, and I will again in 2008.

(Thanks, Sarah's Books - Used & Rare for the link.)

Bush

War in Iran?

Is President Bush planning war in Iran? Read this and this. Then come back. We'll talk.

Dismantling the Constitution

I am appalled at Congress' recent action to uphold Mr. Bush's desire to torture anybody he wants--oops, I meant political prisoners. No, that's not it. Prisoners of War, yeah, that's it.

Sigh.

I'm especially disappointed that John McCain supported the move. I thought he would be the lone voice of reason in the Republican Party. I can't help but feel McCain sold out his personal history and experience to stay in the running for the presidency. "To Thine Own Party Be True," I guess.

What I cannot understand is why we are not talking about impeaching Mr. Bush. He is systematically dismantling the Constitution.

First, he voided the Constitutional Rights of American citizen with illegal wiretaps. Can you say, "Nixon," boys and girls?

Now he's gotten Congress to "clarify" the Constitution so that it says he can do what he's been doing for several years. But the Supreme Court is the branch of government given the task of interpreting the Constitution. And given that he seems to hold this legislature by the warm fuzzies, it appears the Executive Branch is the only functioning body in Washington (the other Washington) these days.

If that doesn't frighten you, you clearly haven't studied history and don't understand the "checks and balances" our Founding Fathers tried to build into our government.

Jim McDonald, over at Making Light, has posted a call to U.S. troops to disobey illegal orders: those that go againsts their oath to support the Constitution. I'm afraid I can't imagine many soldiers doing it; someday I'll write about the experience that convinced me the military breeds out individual responsibility and integrity in favor of obeying orders. But I love that McDonald's put into such lyrical and empassioned language the need to remember that Mr. Bush' and Congress' actions are illegal.

Hell, let's impeach the lot of them and start over.

Bush
impeach

Scared

I can't keep quiet anymore. I've tried to avoid political topics on my regular blog (at least mostly) because it has a specific purpose, and I don't think politics would help it. But I have to express this, so I'm saying it here in this forgotten corner of the blogosphere, just to get it out.

I'm scared. Bush seems to be making plans to invade Iran--not that he's planning to invade Iran, mind you, he's just making plans, just in case, while pursuding diplomatic solutions. Yeah. Kind of like when he made plans to invade Iraq.

I never understood the Iraqi invasion, and I suspect the pundits have it right who say he's just finishing up the Bush Legacy. I understood Afghanistan, and I supported it. But he invaded Iraq when Afghanistan was still unfinished.

And why Iraq? If we wanted to invade a Middle East country in the name of 9-11, most of those terrorists were Saudi Arabian, and we've seen since that the Saudi royal family are probably supporting terrorism against the U.S.

But no, Bush wanted to go riding into Iraq (despite the entire world's protest, sans a loyal Tony Blair), so he did. And now we're embroiled in this ugly affair we can't seem to get out of.

And I'm lying awake at night wondering how well my basement would work as a bomb shelter.

Bush

Where to read me

I am not keeping this blog updated. You can read my current entries at LiveJournal.

Literary Movements of the 20th and 21st Centuries

The new Time magazine (the one with Dixie Chicks on the cover, but that's another entry) has a brief little blurb about baby names.

Apparently the most popular choices for newborn boys last year were biblical names; girl's names leaned toward nontraditional and "spiritual-sounding," names like Destiny (#32) and Neveah (#70, "heaven" spelled backward).

The change is markedly post 9/11, and stems from a "dual drive for meaning and individuality," according to baby-name-book author Pamela Redmond Satran.

Which has me thinking about Literary Movements. Wait, wait! Honest, it's not a non sequitur! Let me explain.

You are probably aware that literature tends to be described in movements, that literature of a time period tends to be distinguishable from that of other times. People who study literature give the different groups names, to help distinguish them.

The 20th Century started toward the tail end of the Realism Movement in American literature. The Realistic writers wrote...well, realistically. They didn't use flowery metaphors (compared to the Victorians and Romantics, anyway), and they didn't write about Greek Gods. They mostly described the real world, the way it really was (Naturalism was an offshoot of Realism that focused on Nature and man's natural place in it as yet another animal).

World War I, the Great War, ushered in the Modernism Movement. Before Modernism, most literature was faith-based or classical, but the Modernists chose to turn their backs on religion and tradition in favor of science. God was outdated, and scientific man would now solve all our problems. So Modernism builds on Realism but praises intelligence and research. It was a new era: we had left our history of tilling the soil and built instead towering cities of steel and factories to produce commercial goods quickly and cheaply, and our literature needed to be equally orderly and manufactured.

But World War II, the war after the "War to End All Wars," popped the bubble of faith in science, and Post-Modernism was the result. People realized that science could solve a lot of problems (cue penicillin), but the people problems, the underlying reasons we go to war, were still an issue. So, left without faith in God OR science, literature lost heart. Postmodern literature tends to be very dark and rarely has a happy ending. Characters are lost, seeking unsuccessfully to find a purpose for their lives. And if there's no purpose for life, there's little purpose for literature. Hence a lot of literature of the absurd (I think of Sissy Hankshaw's huge thumb in Tom Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get the Blues).

A lot of people say we are still in the Post-Modern movement. But I think not. One of my literature professors said 10 years ago that he believed we were already into the next literary movement. He said the new movement shares a lack of faith in both science and religion with the Postmoderns, but their bleakness is replaced by a sweetness, an affirmation of life as it is: crazy and messy and difficult (I wrote about this in my review of Raising Hope by Katie Willard). I call this movement Forwardism, just to distinguish that we, as a people, have decided to move forward and choose to be moral and find joy even if there is nothing bigger than ourselves.

OK, enough professorizing. Let's get back to baby names and the Times article. Back to the statement that the change in baby names is directly traceable to 9/11. I connected it to the inexplicable (to my mind) rise of Inspirational Fiction. And how many books are on the bestseller lists (fiction and nonfiction) right now that are directly related to Jesus Christ? I know, I know, people say they all sprang from the incredible success of The Da Vinci Code. But a single novel (especially one that wasn't written all that well) cannot become a phenonemon unless it strikes something that already exists in the general population.

Here's my point: I think we moved past Forwardism on 9/11. I think history will show that we are now in a new movement altogether. I believe we, as a people, have determined it's just too frightening to believe there's nothing bigger than us (now that we see just how very small we can be). Therefore we choose to believe in a Deity we do not think exists. Many of these new believers (not fully converted, mind) don't want to follow a rigid code; as the article stated, we still want to keep our individuality. But we also want the purpose and deeper meaning to life that our great-grandparents got from religion. So we choose faith again, timidly, against our logic (what we know), but eagerly nonetheless. A paradigm shift from the nonbelievers we were before 9/11.

But what to call it? Post-Post-Post Modernism definitely doesn't work.

I think I'll call it Singular Senteniism, from the Latin singularis (individual, singular; unique, extraordinary) and sententia (meaning or purpose).

Note: These are extremely simplistic descriptions of the movements, based solely on what I remember from long ago college courses. Oh, and yes, I do know I've fractured the Latin.

People's (and Character's) Motivations

Elizabeth George says you cannot fully understand a person (or a character) unless you understand his/her "core need."

Core needs are automatic motivators, subconscious longings that drive an individual's choices (often subconsciously). I believe my core need is to be recognized (and respected!) for my writing, but it's probably something more neurotic like a desperate need for huge amounts of attention. This is, after all, mostly subconscious.

More interesting, however, is the psychopathology that results from a unmet core need. If a need for attention isn't met, an individual becomes exhibitionistic (is that a word?). If a need for power isn't met, a person might become controlling, maybe even to the point of abuse. A need for love and belonging might result in clinging dependence (the sort that drives people away, thus making the unmet need even greater).

My new novel, East of Jesus, has a sidekick character that is addicted to fun. I'd call "fun" her core need, and the resulting pathology, a debilitating irresponsibility (she's 32). But Mars (my husband) says "fun" cannot be a core need. (I say this reveals more about my All-Work-And-No-Play husband than anything else, but he insists he's right, and he usually is right about facts, at least trivial ones.)

I had a vague memory that Glasser included "fun" as one of mankind's basic drives. Glasser was a behavioral scientist who said all people are driven by one of a handful of primary needs. He applied this theory to the classroom, saying if a teacher simply met the students' primary needs, there would be no behavior problems (yes, the italics are an editorial comment on my part).

I taught at a high school whose administration loved Glasser. In fact, I think the administrators would happily have sold their bodies and souls to the man for pennies, they loved him so much. Probably even married him: all of them at once. Perhaps that sounds pathological, but you see, I suspect there was some pathology at play. Because these learnéd men blamed teachers any time a student misbehaved.

Like when a student pulled a knife on me (I guess I was inhibiting his sense of Power). And when some graduating seniors smeared fishheads in the school on Friday evening, and by Tuesday morning (it was a long weekend, and very hot), they were rotting, and the smell was sucked into the heating system and spread throughout the school and enhanced by the smell of umpteen students upchucking and...oh, sorry I got distracted. Wandering through memory lane.

Anyway, I had a vague memory that one of Glasser's primary needs was fun. I remember this because I taught an Earth Science class that included a senior we'll call Nadine (who had a GPA of 4.54 out of 4.0 and who was taking double science courses to bulk up her premed application at Harvard) and a boy we'll call Jack. The problem is: Nadine's primary need was the Power & Recognition that would come from learning lots of science and taking it all to Harvard to learn more. Jack's primary need? Fun. Teach that, Dr. Glasser!

I Googled Glasser so I could say Neener, neener, neener! to Mars (I rarely get the chance) and found this great website. Turns out I was right; Glasser says all humans are driven by either: Survival, Love & Belonging, Power & Recognition, Freedom, or Fun.

But even cooler, I found a list of many, many core needs (Murray's Needs), most more specific and some very interesting. The first one on the list, for instance, is "abasement: To surrender and submit to others, accept blame and punishment. To enjoy pain and misfortune. " Yikes!

Both pages are from changingminds.org, which apparently exists to teach people (salesmen perhaps?) how to change the minds of other people. Rather interesting to browse through--and worth bookmarking if you write fiction.

Old Entries

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