Political Tuesdays: In Detention - No Yarn for You!

(Elementary school bus song, to the tune of Frere Jacques)

Marijuana, marijuana

LSD, LSD,

Mr. Murray makes it.

All the teachers take it.

Why can't we? Why can't we?

This piece of absolute ridiculous drivel has stayed alive in my brain for 40-some years, thanks to my phenomenal auditory memory that is both a gift and a curse. I never sang it, I was subjected to it in the echo chamber of Bus 19. Mr. Murray, the kindest and most tolerant of elementary school principals, to my knowledge never required the students who composed or sang it to serve detention, or perhaps he remained blissfully unaware of their disrespect. It was pretty rare for students to go to the principal's office; the girl who punched me in 4th grade did, but I always felt vaguely guilty about reporting her -- the unwritten culture code of the 70's in Northwest Ohio seemed to be that you just had to learn to be tough. I wasn't tough. I mostly liked school and wanted to please my teachers. I was always careful to follow the rules and was only really moved to anger when something seemed terribly unfair. Maybe this was why my parents moved me to Christian schools starting in 6th grade, for which I am forever grateful. 

Though I went to a small Christian college, the prevailing culture code in the late 80's was libertarian and quite tolerant of rebellion and dissent of all kinds, particularly in the English Literature faculty. I had two profs who were aging hippies, who specialized in saying edgy and suggestive things that would be guaranteed to make 18-year-old girls uncomfortable... what they call "triggering" today. One was Dr. Donnelly. One of the first things I ever learned about him was that he had a daughter who was in a lesbian motorcycle gang. I did not know what to make of him, but I owe a great deal of my writing ability to his classes.

Really, I was a good, shy, very mild-mannered person all through my schooling, and I was terrified of falling afoul of the Powers that Be by breaking any rule, so I had to really push myself to take risks.

Fast-forward to age 51, and I am now serving out my very first detention.

The knitting social network Ravelry has enacted a policy of zero toleration of support for Donald Trump. Ravelry's new policy, announced with no forewarning whatsoever Sunday, states "We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy. Support for the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy."

I reject that premise categorically. Political affiliation is far too complex an issue to boil down to such a childish standard. Calling anyone who supports the legally elected President of the U.S a white supremacist is deeply hateful and antithetical to the fundamental American value of fair play and free speech. 

I am no white supremacist. The suggestion that I am is a hateful slur. Nor am I a Trump supporter. You may, if you are inclined do some actual reading, trace my thoughts on the matter through several posts from 2016:

What I saw at the hostile takeover, Vote your conscience and other radical notions, The year we became tribal, Trump book reports, Nov. 9

Since the election I have been slightly reconciled to the fact that the political process is largely out of my hands, that Trump has not been the complete disaster he was predicted to be, and against all expectations I have even been pleased with his stance on the pro-life issue, which is the non-negotiable one for me. And it is my duty as a Christian and a citizen to support him in the sense that it is a sin and a crime to agitate for the violent overthrow of a legitimate head of state, and it is just plain bad manners and self-destructive to constantly be engaging in negative speech about anyone. 

I posted only once after Sunday's announcement, in the "Inclusive for all..." thread in the heretofore very quiet Conservative Knitters group. Conservative groups on Ravelry are quiet because there has been a purge at least once before, after the election of 2008. My post, objecting to the one-sided application of a policy restricting free speech, was deleted along with a large batch of other posts in one thread a few hours later, and I was notified that my account was "restricted" for thirty days for violating TOS or community standards. That means I can read forums, but at the bottom of every page "you are restricted from posting in this thread" appears and I can't even vote with the "disagree" or "agree" buttons. I can still access my queue, add patterns to it, and I can still buy and download patterns if I am so inclined. So all the essential features of Ravelry are still there... as long as I behave myself according to the standards of whoever decided to restrict me in the first place. I am not materially injured, but I am spitting mad. What worse insult is there to a writer than to delete her words and slander her with the "white supremacist" label with no ability to defend herself? 

But what did I say to deserve this? My best at reconstructing my post, since it was deleted without my consent, and in a sweep that indicated no one was really reading carefully - This will make an interesting SCOTUS case. (probably this was the trigger, if anything, but I don't see how it's outside of the TOS) I don't see how they can be inclusive by being exclusive. It's exactly the kind of thing that will help T* in 2020... not that I'm supporting that or anything! I may also have asked a hypothetical about whether Ravelry is a place of public accommodation... because any legal case would probably turn on it. And what I didn't say then, but wish I had, was "It's like algebra. Whatever you do to one side of the equals sign, you must do to the other side of the equals sign, or they aren't equal." 

It has been a depressing montage of groupthink and echo chambers in the knitting world, as one after another, people in the knitting and yarn industry announce their support of Ravelry "against hate." Ravelry has "othered" me. Where do I go to get my reputation back? 

"Our radical Democrat opponents are driven by hatred, prejudice and rage... They would shut down your free speech, use the power of the law to punish their opponents..." I would mock this campaign speech by President Trump as overblown rhetoric, but now I'm not so sure. 

I understand that in managing a big platform like Ravelry, there are provocative and downright offensive projects and posts that need to be moderated. That is not the issue here, and I have to wonder if the unilateral actions taken in the last two days were really thought through in advance. Open invitation to Casey, owner of Ravelry: give me my voice and equality back, and I will have a civil discussion with you in the forum of your choice. I am always civil and usually pretty patient. I have four children and taught middle school for 16 years. I also helped build and promote Ravelry in the early days and would like to be able to enjoy and promote it many years from now.

Raveler since October 5, 2007

Raveler #19244

I do not stand with Ravelry if it means suppression of the free expression of any of its members.

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty, than those attending too small a degree of it. - Thomas Jefferson

Political Tuesdays - The Year We Became Tribal

Trigger warning: I will be talking about 2016 politics in this post. I will not use foul language myself but I link to videos where Democratic operatives do. And I'm distressed enough about the election that I'm rambling a bit, so this is long and snarky. 

This past week I was finally driven to Twitter. I must admit, it's perky on the dark side, like a vast amphitheater classroom of ADHD students lobbing one-liners to celebrate the downfall of civilization. I felt quite at home, especially after adding RogueClassicist, MobyDick and Shakespeare to my feed. It's a better way of keeping up with the multiplex of October surprises than CNN or Facebook, and probably more accurate. For example, I found the epic Tweetstorm of Marybeth Glenn within my first day on Twitter, and found myself wishing I had written it.

Free the Delegates is actively pursuing parliamentarian efforts to remove Trump as nominee:

Yes, the RNC can replace Trump with 3 weeks left (even with printed ballots and early voting) https://t.co/o8ZRkeSIui#dumptrump pic.twitter.com/gSr6Gg0KKD

— Free the Delegates (@FreeDelegates) October 13, 2016

I know and respect Thomas Balch, and signed the petition without hesitation.

And today, links to the undercover videos of Democratic operatives engaging in dirty politics and of course, dirty language.  and video 2

All of this is fascinating but not exactly relaxing. I think the whole nation is suffering from election fatigue, and both parties have such execrable candidates that we are looking at both of them, deciding that they do not "spark joy," and trying to figure out what third world country we can donate them to. (Strange analogy? You try organizing your wardrobe this year without thinking wistfully of using the same techniques to dispose of unwanted politicians!) Failing that, I'm afraid we're stuck with Hillary. Trump was never going to win. I am more and more convinced he was the ultimate sock puppet candidate, either manipulated into running or intentionally running as a spoiler to ensure Hillary's election. Hillary has always had deep ties to special interests, especially fronts for the corrupt Chinese government. Trump seems to have a similar relationship with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. If either one is elected, American independence suffers.

I've worked on losing campaigns before, but never when there was the added element of shaming via social media. It adds a bit of tribal warfare to dirty-politics-as-usual, and I can't help feeling that the American people are the losers. I don't see anyone emerging as a strong leader in this election cycle. Maybe that's a good thing, and maybe we need to be able to mock our Presidents rather than worship them. But I'm genuinely fearful that the next President will face challenges of a WWIII kind, and I don't see Clinton as wise and decent enough to handle them. And certainly, the American people are so fragmented over whatever slogan the most recent mob has whipped up that we have lost the ability to unite when unity is needed.

Also in the never-before category: I have a fairly simple, ethical rubric for choosing candidates, although up until this year it was pretty rudimentary. I voted for the pro-life candidate, which was almost always the Republican. (Pro-life Democrats went extinct at the national level in approximately 1988). If the candidate was, as I occasionally suspected, not terribly pro-life, I still voted Republican as the best way of bundling my vote's power with a larger group. I may not have supported the eventual nominee of my party in the primaries, but by the convention I was always convinced that this was a man who at least loved America and was committed to doing his best to govern in a wise way. But this year, I can't trust the nominee of my own party to be decent and sane... let alone keep his word about appointing pro-life judges. It's never happened before, but I have a very bad feeling about this... as if Trump is the Death Star of the Republican party... and there has never been a moment when I've felt the least bit that I could overcome that to vote for him. Sure, I sympathize with my fellow party members who feel differently, and I respect their right to vote their conscience, as all of us must do. I think it's a little as described in this essay. I do not blame anyone for following his or her conscience. But if it's truly a choice between two evils, say Tiberius or Nero, which is worse? In this election, I honestly can't tell... competent but utterly corrupt and cruel, or insanely narcissistic, given to bullying and sexual harassment and uninterested in anything but self? I choose neither, with the slim and vanishing hope that the GOP might replace Trump and lose with  honor rather than dishonor, or that Evan McMullin might force the election to the House. It's sad... like this parable.

So here's my analogy. I'm boiling mad at the inept leadership of the RNC that Reince Priebus has given. There were any number of chances to stop Trump: best would have been at the very beginning: "Sorry, Mr. Trump, but you haven't agreed to release your tax forms and agree to an investigation into your past to see if there are any scandals lurking there. You also don't agree with the Republican platform on a minimum of 75% of the published platform. You can't run as a Republican." Or at the convention: "Yes, grassroots Republicans DO have a say in the process, and we would never dream of shutting them out in the hopes of presenting a false front of lockstep unity behind this candidate that two thirds of the party can't stand." Now that those who have been #neverTrump all along have many occasions to say "I told you so" (but Priebus is still not listening), I feel like a door-to-door salesman (Trump oil?) has barged into my house and is now insisting he owns the place. Would you not be willing to fight tooth and nail against such an incursion? I've imagined it with other institutions I care about and helped to build up... the school I taught at for 16 years... say Kim Kardashian barged in and declared herself headmistress? Or my small OPC church... say the Hari Krishnas from down the street moved in and declared themselves the legal residents and owners. I can't imagine anyone involved in leadership at any institution just rolling over and playing dead in similar circumstances. If the GOP goes down in disgrace, Trump just goes back to living in a tower with his name on it, and the alt-right, which I'd never even heard of before this spring, becomes the dominant faction in what's left of the party. I want Priebus to own his failure to protect us all from the Trump Trainwreck.

No bellyaching about dirty tricks and rigged elections. You gave them the advantage by not protecting your grassroots. They would have steered you better. Indeed, they tried and you ignored them.

"Vote Your Conscience" and other Radical Notions

"Vote your conscience" is now, apparently, the most radical and un-American thing a Republican can say; at least according to the Trumpists who are hoppin' mad about the speech truthtellin' Ted Cruz gave last night. It's also precisely the reason I've supported Republicans for the last forty years. I wasn't old enough to vote in the '76 election, but rooted for Ford, then Reagan and every Republican nominee for president since him, until this year. And the reason was conscience: specifically, the Republican Party offered a home for those opposed, by conscience, to killing unborn babies (how can that even be a controversial position, I always wonder), and continues to do so while they are frozen out of the Democratic party.  I'm still a functional Republican, I suppose, until a viable option for conservatives materializes, and will support Republicans in local and statewide races; my party has just been hijacked by forces beyond my control, and they've sold my email address. I have been obligated to report as spam the fundraising appeals that have started to come in from Donald Trump and Ivanka Trump. So first off, let's get rid of the "no true Republican" fallacy and the "either-or" fallacy that are being thrown around so much. Forty years is twice as long as Donald Trump has been a Republican, and almost three times as long as the longest of his three marriages. And Hillary Clinton has already won the election, barring a completely unforeseen twist between now and November: she won when Trump won the nomination, and I don't think there's anything I can do about it, except vote my conscience. Certainly, she'll win in Washington State, where I didn't even have the option of voting for anyone in the primary who hadn't already dropped out of the race.

I've never been the biggest supporter of Ted Cruz: he strikes me as a little too divisive and a bit fakey in his speaking style, and I still don't think he could really unite the country enough to win the actual presidency. All of that is exponentially more true of my concerns about Trump. But in any case, Cruz gave a principled speech, locked into the convention corner as he was, and it didn't deserve boos. Not in America, where we know about conscience. Not from Republicans, who have defended conscience rights from the beginning. Here's the text of that speech. And indications are that Trump orchestrated the response just from spite and narcissism, when a truly gracious winner would have ignored it and accepted the decent spirit behind it. After tonight, the controlled environment of the RNC convention is gone, and any chance for Trump to unite the party along with it. What does it say that Trump never attempted to mend fences with John Kasich, the governor of the state hosting his convention? What does it say that Bob Dole (election cycle of 1996, 20 years ago) is the only living Republican presidential nominee to support Trump? To me, it says that most party leadership is going through the motions, doing the decent thing as they see it, knowing they've already lost. It also doesn't lay to rest the nagging worry that Trump is fundamentally a liberal saboteur whose intent is to hand the election to Hillary. It's probably not true, but can we trust him?

I have a great deal of respect for Mike Pence, and I think he was a good choice for VP. If the ticket was Pence/Trump instead of the other way around, I think I could vote for him, As it is, I doubt Trump would be a micro-managing president if elected, and I can't fault people who vote for the ticket in hopes that he would delegate the real policy work to decent people. But more likely, I think Pence will be the scapegoat who gets the blame when the Trump campaign goes down in flames. I've seen that before, too.

It comes down to another c-word, character. Bill Clinton was president for 8 years, and we objected to his character then. But he at least was ashamed of his lapses. Trump has bragged about his indiscretions, and never apologizes for anything. The never-Trump movement still has a point. More so now, as people become more informed about his foreign policy, which strikes me as truly disturbing.

As I've been musing about the election cycle and the lack of good candidates, I keep coming back to the thought that, even as I feel disenfranchised and shut out of the process, historically, you had to live with the king or emperor you had for life. We have a system that limits the damage even a terrible president can do: four years, maybe eight, and two other branches of government leaning on you the whole time. And we have a choice. We can vote our conscience. We can take character into account. It's America. We can vote for whoever we want.

Political Tuesdays: What I Saw at the Hostile Takeover

2016 may be the year I become apolitical.  But first, I have to blog this out of my system and close all those open windows in my browser.

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to dissolve the bands of loyalty which had previously connected us to a grand political party, and to assume, among the Pokemon Go players of the earth, a relatively blissful ignorance and apathy about the downfall of civilization as we know it, a decent respect for the dozen or so readers of this blog requires that we declare the causes which impel us to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that the Republican Party has been hijacked by the overweening narcissism of one man; that Donald Trump does not represent the values and ideals associated with the Republican Party or with conservatism as a political philosophy; and that, being endowed with the rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, no free and independent American may be forced to blindly support the presumptive nominee of the Party to the detriment of her own conscience.

I realize that people of good conscience can and do disagree about where to proceed from this point. Personally, I still hold a flickering candle of hope that some of the Never Trump delegates I sent to the state convention will go on to Cleveland and be part of a peaceful counter-insurgency that will appoint an actual Republican candidate who stands a chance in the fall election. Otherwise, my vote is completely wasted, as is usual in Washington State. But I realize this is a very faint hope indeed.

Some will vote for Trump while holding their nose, because they fear Hillary more; some wholeheartedly support him because they actually believe he's serious about saving them from illegal immigrants or bad trade deals, or whatever it is they fear. I will try not to judge, if they will respect my freedom of conscience here. Simply put, I can't support any candidate who endorses abortion; that clearly eliminates Hillary, and Trump is equally clearly not credible on this issue. That leaves me a much sadder person, but it's oddly freeing at the same time.

In a more selfish vein, I am simply not able to take the constant anxiety. I don't see either candidate as fit for office, but I'm used to being the party out of power; the shame of being associated with such an unstable and self-centered candidate as the Donald, even if there is no chance of his winning, is enough to make me withdraw from politics altogether. Wherever I turn for amusement or distraction, I see a caricature of this buffoon: he's Nick Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream ("Methought I was enamored of an ass!") He's Anger in Inside Out, complete with orange hair:

He's evil rich Biff in Back to the Future II. The list goes on: if we don't want America to turn into Trumpville, we need Jimmy Stewart to turn things around and filibuster until people come to their senses and do the right thing like they never did in the primary. I realize I'm mixing my metaphors, but I was a literature major and there's a lot more where that came from.

Now, here's where I clear my browser, and believe me, it needs it:

• a new center of gravity for the Republican Party
• America has never been so ripe for tyranny
• even Democrats think Trump might be a Clinton plant
• My vote doesn't matter, my conscience does
• this holdout is thankful for the National Review
• David French, the candidate who might have been
• Donald Trump's missing intellectuals
• Why Hillary would be better than Trump
• P.J. O'Rourke's rousing endorsement of Hillary (if you read nothing else, read this; I aspire to mix as many metaphors myself someday)
• #exGOP
• if only he would listen to reason, this might work
• Stockholm syndrome in the Republican party
• excuse the language, but Hell No
• not voting for Hillary, either
• nope, definitely not
• hereby I announce my refusal to vote for a Baby Boomer for president. You had your chances (over and over and over again) and you keep coming back. I want a Gen. X president, someone of my generation, and I'll write one in this time if I have to. It's not all about you, Boomers, and it's time you accepted it.