Hi Joe,
I read your column ("How much freedom can one man stand?") today and you mentioned two women bloggers that are looked upon as irrelevant. You couldn't find two irrelevant male bloggers? One, even? Do you make the mistake of when thinking about irrelevance, you automatically think of women? That's not very fair minded, you know.
I don't think that dude at Daily Kos is all that great. Of course he thinks women are irrelevant, too. I don't go there anymore. He got snookered into backing Obama with all the Hope and Yes, We Can bull pucky. I certainly don't want to hear him whine now.
Government ain't the enemy, the corporations are. And those Media Corporations really want men to hate women. Watching all that degrading porn will do that to a fella. I'd think you'd know that and try to be 'aware' of not falling into that trap.
Now I bet if you think real hard you can come up with a male blogger as irrelevant as Arianna and Jane. Arianna is an intelligent women who had a good idea to bring writers together and let people read it or not. Jane produced some horrid flick in Hollywood.
Nice chatting with you,
Paula
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Paula,
Oh, I couldn't agree with you more. Certainly the weird guy at Daily Kos, who holds court when he is not playing the recluse, is among the irrelevant. In fact, he was the first one I thought of. But he isn't "so damned non-threatening middle of the road safe" as the other two. He's too weird and too non-white for the talk show circuit, which is what I was referring to.
RE: "when thinking about irrelevance, do you automatically think of women?"
Actually, no. I think of the entire nation. I never try to make what I write gender correct. I never try to be politically correct. (I don't even correct my spelling fer crap sake!) Whatever is on tap is what the reader gets any particular day, hop sediment and all. Some days it's muddled, some days it's clear as a bell, some days it's horny, some days it's blind, but every day it's as honest as I can make it.
But if you must have a list of men I find irrelevant to the real world: Jon Stewart, Tim Geithner, Al Gore, Mike Reagan, Mitt Romney, Stephen Colbert, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama. Most men in positions of authority or celebrity, really. But then I could say that for most women in those positions too.
On the other hand, the list of people I truly admire -- mainly people most Americans never heard of, such as Bettina Apthecker, Betty Kilby Fisher, Carolyn Chute, Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, Ina May Gaskin -- is top heavy with women. But it also includes Helen Caldicott, Amy Goodman and Naomi Klein.
As for people like Arianna, for me, it's really cut and dried and in black and white. And it has nothing to do with her gender. I simply don't like the rich. Period. I don't even like the so-called middle class very much. The day they distribute their wealth among the poor is the day I will start listening to something they have to say. It's easy to blather about the criminality of corporations and administrations when you are rich. Or even relatively secure, as Americans think of security. Which is rich by most of the world's measure.
Come to think of it, I don't even like most Americans, mostly because of our mass delusion. Which makes us as dangerous as the Third Reich -- only in a different way.
If being an equal opportunity malcontent makes me a sexist, then so be it. I've been worse.
In art and labor,
Joe
