tag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:256424Random Acts of ObservationNotes from a visitor to the planetmorgan_dhu2009-05-27T21:17:08Ztag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:256424:52424So G.W.Bush really thought he was on a mission from God...2009-05-27T21:15:33Z2009-05-27T21:17:08Zpublic0<br>... and thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, have died because of his religious mania. <br /><br />I always suspected <a href="http://www.alternet.org/politics/140221/bush%27s_shocking_biblical_prophecy_emerges:_god_wants_to_%22erase%22_mid-east_enemies_%22before_a_new_age_begins%22/">this</a> was what was really going on in his mind - after all, Bush had some pretty close ties with all sorts of millenialist evangelicals - but I simply am boggled by the fact that he came out and told world leaders that they should join in the invasion of Iraq because he was on a mission from God.[1] <br /><br />Some exerpts from the article: <blockquote>In 2003 while lobbying leaders to put together the Coalition of the Willing, President Bush spoke to France's President Jacques Chirac. Bush wove a story about how the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and how they must be defeated.<br /><br />...<br /><br />The story has now been confirmed by Chirac himself in a new book, published in France in March, by journalist Jean Claude Maurice. Chirac is said to have been stupefied and disturbed by Bush's invocation of Biblical prophesy to justify the war in Iraq and "wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs".<br /><br />In the same year he spoke to Chirac, Bush had reportedly said to the Palestinian foreign minister that he was on "a mission from God" in launching the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and was receiving commands from the Lord.</blockquote>You know, this is almost enough to make one think that prospective heads of governemnt should be required to affirm, with their hand on a copy of Darwin's <i>Origin of Species</i>, that they will not in any way allow public policy to be influenced by their personal religious beliefs before being allowed to take office. <br /><br /><br /><small>[1]And yes, I am totally trying to keep myself from seeing GWB in my mind's eye wearing dark sunglasses and an ill-fitting black suit, singing the Blues while Ackroyd plays harmonica and Belushi does backflips, because that would not only be wrong, but also so disresepctful to the people who have suffered from this man's delusions of divine inspiration.</small><br /><br><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=morgan_dhu&ditemid=52424" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:256424:52162There's just no end to the cultural genocide2009-05-23T22:30:43Z2009-05-23T22:30:43Zpublic3<br><br /><blockquote><a href="http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2009/05/21/thunder-bay-hair.html">A Thunder Bay woman is demanding an explanation after a teacher's aide at her son's school cut his long hair — an action her lawyer says is clearly assault while the Crown insists there are no grounds for charges....<br /><br />The seven-year-old boy had chin-length hair before the incident last month. His mother said staff at McKellar Park Central Public School were aware her son was letting his hair grow so that he could take part in traditional First Nations dancing.</a></blockquote><br /><br />I've heard more detail on this in TV reports. The boy reported that the teacher's aide took hold of him bodily, placed him on a stool, cut off his bangs, then took him down and made him walk to a mirror and look at what she had done. In what world is that not a physical assault - to say nothing of an act powerfully and revoltingly evocative of the way that Aboriginal children were shorn of their hair when they were taken to residential schools.<br /><br />Oh, I forgot - the boy is First Nations, and that means it's just fine for a fucking teacher's aide to grab him and do anything he/she wants to him to make him look "acceptable" to white eyes.<br /><br />TV reports are also saying that the same person has done this before, cutting the hair of an older First Nations boy becasue his hair was too "feminine."<br /><br />Gah. Not just physical assault, but continuation of cultural genocide - imposing white North American cultural assumptions and standards on Aboriginal people. Forced assimilation all over again.<br /><br />And all the school had to say was that it was a "regrettable incident." And the Crown says this isn't assault.<br /><br />Fuck that. I hope the family's lawyer takes this as far as they have to, to get recognition of just what was done to both of these boys (and I wonder how many others at this school, and others, have been treated the same way).<br /><br><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=morgan_dhu&ditemid=52162" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:256424:51526She said WHAT? ::head explodes::2009-05-11T02:34:29Z2009-05-11T02:34:29Zpublic1<br>In the comments on the <a href="http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=26059">Tor.com post</a> in which Patricia Wrede's book, <i>The Thirteenth Child</i>, is being discussed, Tor user Alo, in comment 196, quotes from a rec.arts.sf.composition <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.sf.composition/msg/6c3699f30a22dc08?pli=1">post</a> by Ms Wrede, discussion her own (then) work-in-progress:<blockquote>The *plan* is for it to be a "settling the frontier" book, only without Indians (because I really hate both the older Indians-as-savages viewpoint that was common in that sort of book, *and* the modern Indians-as-gentle-ecologists viewpoint that seems to be so popular lately, and this seems the best way of eliminating the problem, plus it'll let me play with all sorts of cool megafauna). I'm not looking for wildly divergent history, because if it goes too far afield I won't get the right feel. Not that it'll be all that similar anyway; no writing plan survives contact with the characters, and it's already starting to morph.</blockquote><br /><br />I repeat my subject line:<br /><br />She said WHAT?<br /><br />::head explodes::<br /><br />It seems that, according to Ms. Wrede, at least on the occasion of the quote:<br /><br />1. The best way to eliminate sterotypes of marginalised people in writing is to eliminate the marginalised people from one's writing?<br /><br />2. Eliminating whole nations of people with thousands of years of history and rich, diverse cultures when writing alternative history isn't "widely divergent history"?<br /><br />I know something about being erased from cultural representations of both history and modern society, and about people who are in certain ways like me being presented as often profoundly insulting and disturbing stereotypes when they do appear in cultural narratives - after all, I'm a woman, a queer person, a person with multiple disabilities, both visible and invisible. <br /><br />And this just makes me sick at heart.<br /><br />This isn't even a case of someone not thinking about the implications of making such a decision in developing her created world. No, she actually thought about ways in which the indigenous peoples of North America have been portrayed in settler literature, identified what she saw as problems, and deliberately decided to make the indigneous people vanish so she wouldn't have to apply herself to trying to do a better job of representing indigenous peoples that the problematic literature she identifies as the genre she's working in.<br /><br />I say again:<br /><br />She said WHAT?<br /><br />::head explodes::<br /><br><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=morgan_dhu&ditemid=51526" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments