Have gun, will travel to a war zone to do the job y'all hired me to do in the first place

One of the reasons I love watching "Mad Men" is because it concerns the communications/marketing field several decades before I entered that field myself. It's amusing to me that at one point (not that long ago, either) women weren't considered capable of handling this work, only to go to any conference on PR/marketing/design, etc., and see that three-quarters of the professionals there are women.

That what this makes me think of. An advisory group has recommended that women in the armed forces be allowed to serve in combat roles (currently they're only allowed in "support" functions). Duh. Should've happened years ago. Why on earth would we not let people who are willing to serve on the front lines do so?

Oh, it's our good friend "unit cohesion"! "Unit cohesion" is what people say when they're too chicken to come right out and say what they mean. "Unit cohesion" was the reason that African American soldiers were once segregated, and one of the stated reasons for keeping DADT around. It's this deeply offensive idea that professional soldiers can't do their jobs unless they're serving with people who are exactly like themselves.

To me, that's terribly insulting to the people who have volunteered to protect our country. In any other job on the planet, you will have to work alongside people of the other gender, gay people, people with different religions than yours and people with different political opinions than yours. Are the "unit cohesion" people seriously suggesting that soldiers, sailors, coasties, airmen and marines are less capable of this than somebody who works at McDonald's? Damn, that's condescending.

No shit there are women who couldn't handle combat (me, for one). There are millions of men in this country who can't do it either, which is why they do not voluntarily accept a job where shooting is one of the required duties. But it's ridiculous to me that, when our country is fighting two wars, you're going to tell 14 percent of our fighting force that they can't help fight.

Two minutes, 29 seconds

Is exactly how long I made it into this...



...before I remembered how the sound of Keith Olbermann's voice makes me want to punch a kitten.

You're Howard Beale, seriously? In your wildest wet dream, asshole. Go the hell away now, please.

"Black Swan" helps me finally like Natalie Portman

I finally saw "Black Swan" yesterday, a day after Natalie Portman won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama and revealed to the world her goofy laugh and the fact that her husband-to-be really does want to f*ck her - hence the maternity gown. (One thing I like about Portman is that she is kind of a geek, which I think is pretty cool.)

The thing is, I've never been a huge fan of hers. I've seen her on film and I've seen her on stage, and I never really connected with her emotionally. Which is why a) her role in "Black Swan" is so perfect for her, and b) Natalie Portman's acting - and believe me, I never thought I'd say this - made a movie more enjoyable for me than it would've been without her.

Portman plays Nina, a ballerina in a New York company who's so driven to succeed that she's focused her entire life on dancing to the exclusion of experiences or relationships with anyone other than her all-kinds-of-up-in-her-shit mother. As with any great story, what the protagonist thinks she has to do to reach her goal is the very thing holding her back. In Nina's case, her self-imposed asceticism has left her woefully unprepared to play what she thinks of as the role of a lifetime: the Swan Queen in "Swan Lake." Nina nails Odette, the virginal White Swan, but struggles to play Odile, her sensual and seductive evil twin - the Black Swan. The pressure gets to her... seriously.

Every time the company director (Vincent Cassel, who's sex on a stick) told Nina that he worries she's too cold and detached for the Black Swan, I had flashbacks to the seemingly endless conversations I've had over the years (mostly with dudes) about why Natalie Portman never seemed believable to me. I always thought she was - well, cold and detached. She never showed me anything that wasn't on the page. But in "Black Swan," I believed her.

It isn't easy for an actor to play a character as passive and fragile as Nina. Any actor can scream and cry, but those quiet moments are tricky. I thought Portman nailed Nina's repressed inner life without resorting to those twitchy actor tics that I hate. A day later, the moment that I remember best is a scene where Nina's mysterious fellow dancer (Mila Kunis - also sex on a stick) finally gets her to go out for drinks, and two guys attempt to pick them up. They are politely interested in the women's jobs, probably thinking about how flexible they are, and Nina (bless her heart) starts talking to them about how cool ballet is. You can tell that she's torn between wanting to talk about the Bolshois and instinctively knowing that it's probably not the best bar-talk. And I flashed back to every party I went to in college.

It wasn't on the page, but I saw it. And that's why Portman will earn every award she's going to get for this movie.

But still, in the back of my mind, I was wondering - how much of Nina's mechanical style was Portman, and how much a deliberate character choice? The last 15 or so minutes of the movie removed all my doubt. Frankly, she scared the shit out of me. I haven't wanted to run out of a movie theatre so bad since "Saving Private Ryan."

As for the movie itself? Good, but I could've waited for it to come out on DVD. The cinematography is amazing, especially during the dance scenes. It's more on the literal side than I prefer - oh, look! Everything in this room is black and white! It's almost as if there's some duality going on here! - and I was expecting the ending to be more catastrophic, given the build-up...

***HERE BE SPOILERS*** *** HERE BE SPOILERS***

... like, she actually kills somebody instead of just fantasizing about it. (Although I'm still not sure about Winona...)

***END SPOILERS***

... But I did enjoy the movie. The acting was wonderful. I love Barbara Hershey, and she's great as Nina's boundary issues-having mother. And I say again, Portman was the best I've ever seen her. I really hope this is a breakthrough for her and she can loosen the hell up from now on. (Her next movie looks promising.) 'Cause I really want to like her, I do.

Be like Easter

I learned of last Saturday's shooting in Tucson, Ariz., in an intensive care waiting room in a hospital in Chattanooga when I got a text news alert while I was writing a draft of my grandmother's obituary on my laptop. A few hours later, we took my grandmother off life support, and she passed not long after.

I should be grateful to Grandma Easter that her last gift to my family was that we had other things on our mind this week than the storm of blame that followed the shooting, where one apparent nutcase killed six people and wounded another dozen, including a U.S. Congresswoman. I say it's a gift because, while the shooting was a tragedy, the blame-storm is a unpleasant, ugly mess, and I'm glad that I missed it. Because - and I say this in honor of one of the biggest "Gone With the Wind" fans on the planet - frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

The people whom we actually elect to govern our country, including members of Congress and President Obama, have issued public statements that pay tribute to the victims while condemning the violence. It's the non-elected people who've been flapping their jaws, pretty much only because their jobs require them to fill airtime with opinions, well-informed or not. And I really don't give a purple shit what any of them have to say, so I'm not going to argue with any of them here.

Because they're missing the point. If my grandmother were the one in that hospital waiting room watching CNN, she wouldn't have asked to what party the targeted Congresswoman belonged. It wouldn't have mattered to her. This was a woman who, at the time of her death, had an autographed copy of Decision Points on her bookshelf and a signed photo of herself with Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter on a table five feet away.

I don't mean to suggest that Easter was a saint; she was a human being who not infrequently got pissed off at other people - but most importantly, she made the deliberate choice to approach the world with joy in her heart. There were people that Easter didn't care for, and they probably have no idea who they are, because she didn't treat them any differently than her friends. She understood that, not only is it more fun to live your life that way, it's easier, too.

Easter's obituary ran in the Polk County News this Wednesday in the same edition that has a front page story on readers' suggestions for what to use when you don't have a sled and a page two report on all the calls that the Sheriff's Office received that week. It was a blessing for me to be reminded of the things that are really important to people living their lives outside the "news" zone. When you see the screaming heads and the political bloggers and the attention-hag former office-holders flinging poo at one another, please remember one thing: that is not America.

America is a little town in southeast Tennessee where a deputy will still come help you light your furnace, and where the local paper will report on it. America is people like Grandma Easter, who volunteer on 911 boards and at their churches because they know how much their communities depend on them, and who will literally give you the cash out of their wallets if you need it, regardless of your superficial differences. We may snipe at one another over petty things, but what makes America special is that - when the chips are down - we believe in the best of one another.

I'd rather be like Easter. I'd rather fight for people who can't speak up for themselves, and I'd rather have trust and love in my heart over suspicion and hate. I'd rather not ask "what's in it for me?" when someone asks for my help. I'd rather turn off the noise and go bake a cake.

Red velvet. I have her recipe.

This is a tough one

Hmmm... Salon's Tracy Clark-Flory has an interesting piece up examining Naomi Wolf's argument in the U.K. Guardian that rape victims shouldn't be anonymous in media reports. (And now, a reaction to a reaction of the source document. Ah, the Internet.) It's standard journalistic practice not to print the names of alleged rape victims (though it's ignored plenty of times), and Wolf thinks this is a vestige of a time when rape victims had to be protected because they'd be considered "damaged goods."

First of all, I'd be a lot more inclined to hear Wolf out if she'd published this six months ago. But today, her opinion can't be divorced from her earlier published opinion that Julian Assange's two accusers are lying about him raping them. Is she really struggling over the ethics of this, or is she just trying to justify her own reaction to the Assange case?

Second, it's true that rape is treated differently from any other crime ---- usually to the detriment of the accusers, though. Mugging victims aren't asked what they were wearing, for instance. Someone whose car radio gets stolen isn't blamed for parking on the street in a bad neighborhood. It seems kind of BS to expect rape and sexual assault victims to bear the burden of unpacking all the puritanical baggage surrounding this crime.

This is a tough one for me, as a feminist who fully understands the patriarchal dimensions of rape culture, as a rape survivor and as someone who's had more than one male acquaintance falsely accused of rape or abuse. Is it fair for a man charged with rape to have his name, address and occupation reported in screaming headlines, even though he may be perfectly innocent? Even when and if he's exonerated, his life will never be the same.

At the same time, I can assure you from personal experience that I would've been less likely to report what happened to me if I'd known that my name might've been made public. (But only if the Commonwealth Attorney had deigned to bring charges. Ha. I should've known better.) It didn't help that the guy was a literal Big Man on Campus, or that his family are minor deities in the jurisdiction where the crime occured and in his father's professional field. I've worked with the media long enough to know just how big THAT story would've gotten, believe me.

And, with everything else I was going through, just trying to function on a daily basis, I'm not sure I would've reported it if I knew I'd see my name in the paper. Or that all my co-workers, people I see three times a year volunteering for something or people I meet professionally years later will know every detail of what happened.

Is it crazy to suggest that the names of both the accuser and accused be kept private until a rape case goes to trial (which they almost never do anyway)? Is that even possible with our legal system? I don't know. But I do know that you shouldn't throw out all the rules because of one instance (ahem, Naomi). RAINN estimates that someone is sexually assaulted every two minutes in the U.S. None of them by Julian Assange.