Monday Reads: The Beat Goes On

Good Morning!

I’m going to continue with my own whims and fancies since this time of year always creates one big cultural, political, and historical vacuum.  I use my winter break to renew myself and to tickle my fancy.  The first man I really fell head over heels in love with introduced me to Jack Kerouac during my freshman year of university.  He broke my heart but Kerouac became a muse.  Then, came my husband who got me deep into Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Dizzy. I left him but that bebop jazz stayed right in my heart and under my fingers. The closer we got to those awful 80s, the more some of us craved that old time bohemian rebellion that started with the beat generation and lead to the hippies. I feel like that now.  Can we please get a new groovy, snap worthy, punk generation to rebel against the republican status quo so I don’t have to wax nostalgic?

I’m going to start off with this article from The Guardian: “Greenwich Village: what remains of New York’s beat generation haunts?” This culture made me want to drop everything and move to New York like my cousin.  Oh, Mary Bracken  I am so sorry I didn’t follow you there when you offered to get me situated after high school graduation  I could’ve lived the remnants of this as well as the birth of CBGB.

A few landmarks of those bygone bohemian days – most recently portrayed in the Coen brothers‘ film Inside Llewyn Davis, out on 24 January – still exist. The inspiration for the movie’s fictional anti-hero, Davis, was Brooklyn-born Dave Van Ronk, a real- life blues and folk singer with no small talent, who worked with performers such as Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan, but remained rooted in the village until he died in 2002, declining to leave it for any length of time and refusing to fly for many years. Van Ronk’s posthumously published memoir, the Mayor of MacDougal Street, takes its name from the street that was home to the Gaslight Cafe, and other early 60s folk clubs.

The Village stretches from the Hudson River Park east as far as Broadway, and from West Houston Street in the south up to West 14th Street.

Lots of folks want to save landmarks ethereal.  Every one needs a place to go to get away from the pressures and the ugliness of modern corporate instigated culture.  Why shouldn’t we save the places where elves and gnomes are said to live? Why shouldn’t we protect the “hidden folk” and their environs?

Elf advocates have joined forces with environmentalists to urge the Icelandic Road and Coastal Commission and local authorities to abandon a highway project building a direct route from the Alftanes peninsula, where the president has a home, to the Reykjavik suburb of Gardabaer. They fear disturbing elf habitat and claim the area is particularly important because it contains an elf church.

The project has been halted until the Supreme Court of Iceland rules on a case brought by a group known as Friends of Lava, who cite both the environmental and the cultural impact — including the impact on elves — of the road project. The group has regularly brought hundreds of people out to block the bulldozers.

And it’s not the first time issues about “Huldufolk,” Icelandic for “hidden folk,” have affected planning decisions.

They occur so often that the road and coastal administration has come up with a stock media response for elf inquiries, which states that “issues have been settled by delaying the construction project at a certain point while the elves living there have supposedly moved on.”

Scandinavian folklore is full of elves, trolls and other mythological characters. Most people in Norway, Denmark and Sweden haven’t taken them seriously since the 19th century, but elves are no joke to many in Iceland, population 320,000.

A survey conducted by the University of Iceland in 2007 found that 62 percent of the 1,000 respondents thought it was at least possible that elves exist.

Today’s world brings on so many things that make you want to shake your head and slap folks right in the face.  Why shouldn’t we indulge in a little fancy when these kinds of things pop up in today’s headlines?   Women are not be incubators. But yet, the state of Texas, says yes they are!

On Nov. 26, Erick Munoz woke to the sound of his year-old son crying and found his 14-weeks-pregnant wife, Marlise, lying on the kitchen floor, blue in the face and without a pulse. A firefighter and paramedic, Munoz called 911 and performed CPR, to no avail. When they arrived at the John Peter Smith Hospital (JPS) in Fort Worth, Texas, he thought he would have to make an agonizing decision: refuse life support even though that meant losing both his wife and his future child. Munoz said in a WFAA News report that four years ago, when Marlise’s brother was killed in an accident, she told him that she would never want to be on life support — something they had discussed many times since.

A month later, against his requests, she is still on a ventilator. Not only does Munoz want to honor his wife’s wishes, but also he believes that the fetus she is carrying has been seriously harmed. “I don’t know how long she was there prior to me finding her,” he said. Munoz, who could not be reached for comment, wrote on WFAA’s Facebook page, “All I know is that she was without oxygen long enough for her to have massive brain swelling. I unfortunately know what that type of damage could do to a child during crucial developmental time.” Doctors say it’s likely that Munoz’s wife suffered a pulmonary embolism, and no longer has brain activity.

When Munoz first arrived at the hospital, he discovered that, according to Texas law, life-sustaining procedures may not be withheld or withdrawn from a pregnant woman, — even if she has an advance health care directive (also called a living will) stipulating that she does not want to be kept alive on a machine. There are conflicting reports about whether Marlise Munoz had an official DNR (Do Not Resuscitate order), and the family could not be reached for comment. But according to them Center for Women Policy Studies, as of 2012, Texas and 11 other states have automatically invalidated pregnant women’s advance directives to refrain from using extraordinary measures to keep them alive, and others have slightly less restrictive but similar laws. A spokesperson from the hospital told Yahoo Shine, “Our responsibility is to be a good corporate citizen while also providing quality care for our patients. At all times, JPS will follow the law as it applies to healthcare in the state of Texas.”

Marlise Munoz’s mother and father say they support their son-in-law’s request to take their daughter off life support. “She absolutely DID NOT EVER want to be connected to Life Support,” her mother, Lynne Machado, wrote on WFAA’s Facebook page. “This issue is not about Pro Choice/Pro Life. Our intent is purely one of education about how this [statute] null and voids any woman’s DNR [if she is] pregnant. We know our daughter well enough, after numerous discussions about DNR, that she would NEVER EVER consent to being hooked up to Life Support.” While the family’s tragic situation hits a nerve in a state where abortion debates rage, Munoz also said he doesn’t want to participate in arguments

over right-to-life verses pro-choice issues, but instead wishes to honor his wife and inform the public about a little-known law. Marlise Munoz, at approximately 18 weeks pregnant, remains unresponsive and her husband describes her as “simply a shell.” Doctors check the fetal heartbeat daily, but Munoz doesn’t think the testing is sufficient to measure the fetus’s viability. “Its hard to reach the point where you would wish your wife’s body would stop,” he said.

Yes, there are many things that horrify about the way the right wing and religionists treats women.  

We’ve compiled a few of the worst things said about women by TEApublicans in 2013 in the list below:

Rape exceptions for abortions aren’t necessary because pregnancies resulting from rape are rare.

Arizona GOP Rep. Trent Franks was the “brains” behind what was probably the most high-profile abortion restriction this year: a bill to ban all abortions in the U.S. at 20 weeks after conception. “The incidence of pregnancy resulting from rape are very low,” he claimed.

The ‘masturbating fetus.’

Yes, this really happened. While defending Franks’ 20-week abortion ban, Texas GOP-er Michael Burgess used a rather bizarre argument to claim that fetuses could feel pain at 20 weeks after conception, despite medical evidence to the contrary. “Watch a sonogram of a 15-week baby, and they have movements that are purposeful,” he said. “They stroke their face. If they’re a male baby, they may have their hand between their legs. They feel pleasure. Why is it so hard to think that they could feel pain?”

Having an abortion after rape is tampering with criminal evidence.

New Mexico GOP Rep. Cathrynn Brown caused a stir when she introduced a bill that defined aborting a pregnancy that resulted from rape as criminal evidence tampering — that should result in a 3-year prison sentence. The bill said that “procuring or facilitating an abortion, or compelling or coercing another to obtain an abortion, of a fetus that is the result of criminal sexual penetration or incest with the intent to destroy evidence of the crime.”

Rape of an underage victim is understandable if a woman seems more mature than her age.

Montana Judge G. Todd Baugh received a huge backlash when he sentenced 54 year-old teacher Stacey Rambold to only 30 days in prison — after he was convicted of raping his 14-year-old student, Cherise Moralez. Justifying his sentence, Baugh said that the victim was “as much in control of the situation” because she was “older than her chronological age.” Moralez committed suicide during Rambold’s trial.

Transvaginal ultrasounds before abortions are a good idea.

Anti-abortion politicians in the Indiana Legislature pushed a bill that would force women who wanted to use an abortion pill to undergo two medically unnecessary ultrasounds — one before taking the pill, and one after. Responding to the backlash, Indiana Right to Life’s Sue Swayze said, “I got pregnant vaginally. Something else could come in my vagina for a medical test that wouldn’t be that intrusive to me. So I find that argument a little ridiculous.”

One disgusting term: Rape insurance.

We saw a lot of bills that banned Obamacare from covering abortions this year. Nearly half of all statehouses pushed through some type of measure forcing women to purchase abortion coverage as a separate abortion-only policy, called a “rider.” Some of these laws did not include exceptions allowing insurance to cover abortions in the cases of rape or incest. Michigan’s Right to Life’s Barbara Listing didn’t see any problem with this: “It’s simply, like, nobody plans to have an accident in a car accident, nobody plans to have their homes flooded. You have to buy extra insurance for those.”

It’s easier to believe in elves than to believe most of the things spewed by republicans and their right wing base. Still the media villagers take them seriously and report their lies as just another opinion.

Of all the falsehoods told about PresidentBarack Obama, the biggest whopper is the one about his reckless spending spree.

As would-be president Mitt Romney tells it: “I will lead us out of this debt and spending inferno.”

Almost everyone believes that Obama has presided over a massive increase in federal spending, an “inferno” of spending that threatens our jobs, our businesses and our children’s future. Even Democrats seem to think it’s true.

Government spending under Obama, including his signature stimulus bill, is rising at a 1.4% annualized pace — slower than at any time in nearly 60 years.

But it didn’t happen. Although there was a big stimulus bill under Obama, federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end in the 1950s.

Even hapless Herbert Hoover managed to increase spending more than Obama has.

Here are the facts, according to the official government statistics:

• In the 2009 fiscal year — the last of George W. Bush’s presidency — federal spending rose by 17.9% from $2.98 trillion to $3.52 trillion. Check the official numbers at the Office of Management and Budget.

• In fiscal 2010 — the first budget under Obama — spending fell 1.8% to $3.46 trillion.

• In fiscal 2011, spending rose 4.3% to $3.60 trillion.

• In fiscal 2012, spending is set to rise 0.7% to $3.63 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of the budget that was agreed to last August.

• Finally in fiscal 2013 — the final budget of Obama’s term — spending is scheduled to fall 1.3% to $3.58 trillion.

So, my winter break starts and I want  to celebrate rebellion, creativity, and wanton.  I can’t wait for 12th night because that signals the end of Crass Consumerism and the pleasure of hedonism and the carnival season.  I just want to give up all this sit com fantasy and grab on to something real for a change.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?