Secondhand Sun

Here is a must-read from Echidne at Echidne of the Snakes, who kept a notebook to track how women and girls were covered in the news.

When I leafed through the diary a year later I was shocked by what I found, and especially shocked because I only really followed the fairly liberal or neutral sources of news. I expected the news coverage to be neutral, on average. Instead, everything, every single thing about women was negative. Women or working women or mothers or girls had problems, were a problem, and even good news were presented as "good news but..."

Read the whole thing here.

Sad, but not surprising - it's always us women who are The Problem. Always.

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It was Armitage.

Wow, yeah, man, that totally happens to me all the time. I'll just be bullshitting with Bob Novak or Bob Woodward, and then I'll let something slip to BOTH of them in TWO separate conversations, but completely by accident, about this completely innocent scrap of information that just happens to be a result of a dirt-digging character-assassination mission out of the White House, and then it ends up in the paper and there's this huge stink about it, and then months later I'm like "Wow, wait a second, did he get that from ME? Man, I never meant for there to be such a big deal over this."

Totally plausible. Totally.

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DCenters, the DC United blog, calls it "Operation Deflower," while We Call it Soccer prefers the "Free Beer Movement." The idea is that we soccer nuts should buy a game ticket for someone who has never seen an MLS game live, ply them with their beverage of choice, and thus set them on the road to becoming lifelong soccer fans, too. At least in principle. Neither name for this event/movement/thingy is really appropriate for the purposes of this blog post, since my target just turned five years old a few weeks ago.

Nevertheless, Anna enjoyed the game very much. It was the first professional sporting event of any kind she'd attended, and she was absolutely delighted about it from the moment I got her parents' permission for her to accompany me. "I love you," she told me giddily at least seven times in the 24 hours or so immediately leading up to the game. I have to say that it feels good to be adored so intensely, and in this case it only cost $16. (Plus $30 for the shirt, but that was just icing - I think I could have got by with just the ticket itself.)

When we were inside the stadium, a shirt for Anna was the first order of business. There were kids' t-shirts, black ones, in imitation of the uniforms. You could get Moreno's name on the back, or nobody's. (They were out of Adu shirts.) "Sometimes the girls like the pink, instead," the nice lady at the counter told us, pointing to a shirt that was, well, a lot like the black DC United t-shirt, but... pink. Pink? It was definitely pink. I asked Anna which she wanted. "I want the black one," she declared. As we walked away, I explained to her who Jaime Moreno was, and then launched into a monologue about various other players. Anna frowned. "Are there any girls on the team?" I explained that there were not, but there were lots of other teams with women on them. I'll have to take her to a women's game sometime soon. Thank goodness for local colleges.

But, the game! For those who, like me, are not parents and not well versed in the art of Keeping Kids Entertained While You Are Trying To Watch The #&$% Game, the key is to sit next to some other kids. We attended the DC United-Colorado Rapids match which was an afternoon game and not terribly crowded. I bought the cheapest tickets, and we wound up in the corner section behind La Norte. Anna immediately made friends with the girl sitting next to her. The seats we were actually assigned to sucked, though - right against the fence, which meant a partly blocked view. So after a short time, I convinced Anna that the drums the La Norte guys were playing were so cool we ought to move closer. They were cool, but not that cool, apparently; and anyway there were no kids near our "new" seats so a tantrum was narrowly averted by a third move, to a row behind two couples and four kids ranging in age from about six to about twelve. That was enough to placate Anna, and it was a great spot from which to see the game, especially while United was attacking the goal at our end: each time, we stood up (Anna standing on her seat, so that she could see), clutched each other, and yelled our heads off. And then, DC scored.

The crowd went wild! Anna went nuts! and with that, I think, she was hooked: every time the drumbeat began, she clapped, in rhythm, and cheered. BOOM, BOOM, BOOM-BOOM-BOOM! "DC UNITED!" It didn't take her long to get the idea, and she took to it with a vengeance.

She lasted until about the 80th minute. Then she got thirsty. And her Jaime Moreno shirt, newly purchased and not washed before she put it on, had begun to shed lint on her skin, a development of which Anna emphatically did NOT approve. However, 80 minutes of game time without (much) complaining, I'll take, from a five-year-old. We remedied both her problems in the ladies' room after the game, and headed on home.

And when we got home? She taught the DC United cheer she had learned to her younger sister. Every time I mention the team in their hearing now, they start dashing in circles around the house yelling, "DC UNITED! DC UNITED!"

I am so proud.

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Best GOTV signs ever.

Initial results look good but the CT Senate primary is turning into a nail biter. I've put down my wineglass and am now holding my breath.

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Via Waldo Jaquith we have this magnificent list of facts about Creigh Deeds, the Democratic candidate for attorney general who lost by only a handful of votes in 2005. Those not familiar with Virginia politics or with Creigh Deeds may not understand all the references, which is unfortunate, because this is the best list of facts about _____ ever. A sampling:

After Creigh Deeds was elected to the Senate, the spirit of FDR edited his famous quote to read “The only thing we have to fear is the Senator from Bath himself.”

Creigh Deeds didn’t run against Bob McDonnell for the attorney general’s race in 2005. He coughed. But the awesome spew of legislative speak that emerged from his mouth nearly got him elected anyway.

Creigh Deeds can tame Tim Kaine's eyebrow.

Creigh Deeds will build the Metro tunnel under Tyson's, using only the teeth of Mark Warner.

Creigh Deeds headbutted Zinedine Zidane, shattering him instantly.

Creigh Deeds let the dogs out.

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One: From the Washington Post, Kayt Sukel writes about her experience delivering a premature baby in a German hospital and being unable to communicate effectively with the staff about her son's condition, and about the nurse who stepped forward to help her. Sukel's husband has served in Iraq and probably will again; the nurse is Iraqi. The article is a good read; I encourage you to check out the whole thing.

One day, after a visit from my husband in uniform, Sylvia came in to check on my son.

"Your husband," she asked as she tested the baby's reflexes, "will he go to Iraq?"

It's a common enough question these days, but my husband's job and the war were among the few things that Sylvia and I had not talked about. I replied that he had just returned from deployment in Baghdad and probably would go back eventually.

"Ah," she said. "I am Iraqi, you know."

I did not know. Though Sylvia's dark hair and eyes didn't match the blond, blue-eyed stereotype of old, I had been in Germany long enough to see that Germans come in all shades and ethnicities. That she was of another nationality simply hadn't occurred to me.

As I listened to Sylvia speak of her homeland, I desperately wanted to ask her view of the war. Did she find America's actions in Iraq justified? Or did she condemn the fight, vilifying the policies executed by soldiers like my husband? I wanted to inquire, to start a dialogue, yet once again I could not find the words.

Two: From Jesus' General, a brief photo essay.

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Via World Cup Blog, Horatio Elizondo, the referee who sent Zidane off in the World Cup final, has gifted the red card he used to Argentine president Nestor Kirchner. That's got to be one of the odder gifts I've heard about, although I suppose if you are summoned before your country's president to be congratulated, and you want to mark the occasion with a gift, you've got to come up with something good in order to impress. I'm a little bit uncomfortable with the idea of send-off related memorabilia, but... well. I can see why someone might want that particular card, and it seems to have pleased Kirchner.

Another interesting thing is that if you look at the comments to that post on the World Cup Blog, you notice that a number of people still aren't finished arguing about The Headbutt. A lot of the discussion died off after the FIFA disciplinary committee released its decision about the incident, but the amount and intensity of the discussion through most of July and the fact that it's so easily set off again says that The Headbutt, for whatever reasons, resonated with a lot of people. I know it resonated with me. But that will have to be left for another post.

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Ronald Reagan was the first president whose term of office I remember. My parents didn’t like him, so I didn’t like him either. John Hinckley’s attempt on Reagan’s life is one of my earliest memories – I was barely two years old, and until I was several years older I was unable to understand why my mother was crying for a president she didn’t like and hadn’t voted for. After all, if the president dies, you get a new president!

Not liking Reagan marked my family as different from most other families in our small Louisiana town, and not in a good way. It isolated us, so much so that as a child, with my confidence and my sense of who I was less than fully formed, I found it easy to fall into the trap of wondering if it was really okay to hold a political opinion different from the prevailing norm. I grew up as part of a political minority, but outside my home I rarely felt that I was part of anything. Among my schoolmates and friends, I was completely alone.

The presidential election of 1984 was the first in which I was aware enough to know what was going on. My second grade class held a mock election. We were told about it a day or two ahead of time so that we could talk with our classmates about who we were voting for and why. I supported Mondale, naturally, because my parents did. But then some miniature Karl Rove among us spread the rumor that a classmate’s Evil Liberal Democrat parents had tried to rig the election by threatening to take all her toys away if she voted for Reagan. All of us were incensed when we heard that – it was a grave offense against our sense of fair play. And so Reagan carried my second grade class, thirty-something votes to one. No, the dissenting vote was not mine. I have always regretted it.

The near-deification of Reagan that occurred everywhere, from the news media to backyard fence and playground conversations, was something it never occurred to me to dissect or examine. It was simply a part of the landscape. In early 1989, shortly after George H. W. Bush took office, the local newspaper ran a feature story about a girl a few years older than me who so idolized Ronald Reagan that she kept scrapbooks with newspaper clippings – any and every article she could find that mentioned him, she lovingly clipped and saved and enshrined in her books. I read the article about this girl and her scrapbook collection, and I completely missed the point; I thought it was totally cool in a Guinness Book of World Records sort of way: “Most Ronald Reagan Newspaper Clippings Pasted Into Scrapbooks.” I started a George H.W. Bush scrapbook, but it only lasted a few months before I realized that he was boring and I hated his politics anyway. I was in 6th grade.

I didn’t understand what that newspaper article was really about until I was much older and the newspapers were covering the drive to slap Ronald Reagan’s name all over everything – before he’d even died. I was living in Washington, DC when Congressman Bob Barr threatened to take federal funding from the transit authority if they didn’t change the name of the National Airport metro stop to “Ronald Reagan-Washington National Airport” so it would match the airport’s new name. It didn’t seem to matter that under the transit authority’s policy, station names were only changed if the local government (in this case, Arlington County, Virginia) requested it. And it didn’t matter that it cost several hundred thousand dollars to change all the signs throughout the Metro system. All this only underscored my determination never to use That Name for the airport. It’s DCA or it’s National, and nobody has any trouble telling which airport I’m talking about.

When Ronald Reagan finally died in the summer of 2004, I felt a sense of resignation: now, finally, it wasn’t in quite such horrendously bad taste to name everything after him, and I expected that we would see even more of it. But what Reagan-this and Reagan-that has meant to me most of all is growing up frustrated, with political opinions and a worldview that were anathema to almost everyone around me – opinions that I couldn’t express without drawing insults and starting arguments. This caused me difficulty because I had always been taught that starting arguments was rude.

Maybe my Ronald Reagan experience explains why it took me so long to find my political voice and to be willing to use it. I was twenty-six years old before I found the confidence to get involved in politics. Yet even now, despite that Reagan represented almost everything that I abhor in politics and government, I flinch at the idea of attacking his memory. It seems as fruitless as chipping away at the stone of any one of the many buildings that bear his name. It doesn’t much matter if your side loses thirty-something to one, or thirty-something to two. Or does it? I grew up feeling like Winston Smith, a minority of one – I had to work so hard to convince myself I wasn’t completely mad, and even when I made progress, someone clever with words could push me right back to the edge.

Over time I have grown both more and less confident in the rightness of what I know and believe. I no longer see the world in black and white, as a child does, but I’ve gained confidence in my own judgment. I have put more distance between myself and the world in which I cast my mock-election vote for Ronald Reagan because I let myself be convinced in the face of overwhelming opposition that what I believed couldn’t possibly be right. Maybe one day if I have to be a minority of one, I’ll have the courage not to yield. Then I’ll have finally overcome my Ronald Reagan experience.

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