Terrified and Official

I finally got off my ass and registered to vote in California.  This documentary, Jesus Camp, scared me into doing it.  The film looks at how evangelicals in America are training (that's my nice word-- "indoctrinating" is more accurate) their children with terrifying, dumbed down, black-and-white versions of political issues using war metaphors of all things.  

There's one scene that gets me.  At a family summer camp in North Dakota, boys are huddled in their bunks during a thunderstorm and making ghoul faces over the beams of their flashlights.  They're giggling and goofing around in that wonderful, completely un-self-conscious kid way, all big teeth and freckles, and one of them starts to tell a ghost story.  It's not a particularly good one, and much is lost in the boy's feverish rote recitation, but suddenly someone's dad throws open the door to the room and stands there in his slice of light and says, in a nerdy, pedantic dad-voice, "Boys, I'm not particularly fond of ghost stories, OK?  Do you think those honor God?  Hmmm?  Now I need everyone to get in their beds, 'kay?"

And then the whole rest of the movie, these same kids are subjected to daily prayers invoking the blood of Jesus to come down and cover their church seats and their dirty, dirty hands and wash everything clean.  On the first day of camp, the preacher, a big fat woman who looks like she's full of good intentions, brings all the kids to tears by sternly warning them that God doesn't want phonies in his army, meaning kids who think about swear words and aren't ready to give up their lives for Jesus.  Then a man shows up to pass out red plastic bracelets and teeny tiny plastic fetuses and tell the children, "one third of your friends would have been here with you today, but they couldn't make it because their mothers killed them in their wombs."  Later, the kids put together a solemn dance routine with rhythm sticks to Christian rock.  The boys are wearing fatigues and war paint; the girls are wearing black leotards with black lightning bolts painted on their faces and glitter in their hair.  None of them smile.  

I'm all for a parent's right to raise their children within whatever belief system they choose, but this struck me as a uniquely ironic way to introduce a child to Christian principles.

I was raised in a secular household.  By that I mean we were never regular attendees at a church, and for the most part, we didn't talk openly or often about God.  Both of my parents were raised with religion, but for whatever reason, they didn't baptize my brother and I-- we both chose this later in life, well into our twenties, at different times and for different reasons.  When I was a kid, I saw my parents' choice to abstain from church membership as yet another way they were conspiring to keep me separate from my wealthier, church-attending  classmates.  

After watching this movie, I think their choice makes a lot more sense to me.  Not that my folks would have gone in for terrorizing me with their politics, but Jesus Christ, whatever happened to letting a kid explore the world and form his own impressions?  What happened to modeling compassion, charity, and tolerance just because that's the way you should treat people?  I think what bothered me most of all was the insistent co-opting of war metaphors.  What place does a battlefield ideology have in a kid's life, where the stakes of someone agreeing with your own particular world view are life and death?

Over and over, the various adult figures in charge of the ministry in the movie talk in tones of awe about the children's faith.  What I couldn't help thinking, seeing interviews with each of these kids where they break down in tears and take their air in gulps in between phrases that sound like chants, like recitations more than individual thoughts, is that they look scared to death, like they've been told one whopper of a ghost story and no one ever turned on the lights.

Abby Takes Flight

There are so many complex situations my dog grasps intuitively ("Mom's low on Prozac" and "Pretend you don't get table scraps" are two), that it was hard for me last night to imagine that she wouldn't understand "Don't jump out of a moving pick-up."  After all, it must have seemed so simple and inviting, this idea that one could leap free of a moving object and continue on apace, that much closer to the goal of racing through sprinkler mist in a darkened city park.

Here's the set-up: I've developed this annoying habit of exercising indoors ever since I discovered I was developing smoker lungs by running outside.  All of the pain of the weekend warrior, none of the insouciant stage business and 1940's glamour of the smoker-- the cost-benefit equation wasn't working out.  So I started going to gym instead, which, sadly put my running partner out of a job and into a funk.  Since Pants is out of town for another three weeks and a day, I'm her only stimulus once she's done chasing the cat, so last night I felt I owed Abby a late evening walk.

This is when I discovered that in an endorphin haze from my earlier gym trip, I'd left the headlights on in our rickety old blue pick-up, Babe the Blue Ox.  Babe coughed hesitantly to life, but I decided I needed to drive around a bit and recharge her battery.  Rather than disappoint Abby, I figured I'd combine tasks and drive her around town and then to her favorite park where we'd throw the frisbee a while and call it a night, Babe charged up, Abby and I charged down.

Abby's experience with riding in pick-ups has been limited to those with campers and those with sufficiently crappy upholstery to let her ride shotgun.  She has never tasted the delicious open air, and initially it seemed the potent elixir of night air and exhaust was just what she needed.  She skittered from rail to rail, hanging her head over the side and panting in a wide, maniacal smile.  Then she figured out she could prop herself up on the wheel wells and lean ever so slightly into the wind, and this was ecstasy.  Soon she was making a circuit of the truck bed and squeezing all four feet onto the wheel well and then--oh, then!-- she figured out she could stand with her hind feet on the wheel well and put her front feet on the rails and ride like a majestic ship's prow, chest out-thrust and taking in the wind in great, greedy gulps!

By this point I am frantically hammering on the back window and shouting "Uh-uh!  Bad!  Bad dog!  Get down!" with my windows rolled down so she can hear me, and people at red lights are looking at me and laughing.  When I am truly frantic, my accent veers sharply Texan, and it must have confirmed a whole slew of stereotypes to see a wild-haired sweaty girl in a beat-up pick-up yelling "Dammit dog, you git down!"  Did I mention Babe is a standard with a tricky third gear?  So I also managed to kill the engine a couple of times in all of this.

Abby declined to git down, and we were a block from the park, just passing Starbucks' eery evening glow when she decided to take flight.  We were going about 25 miles an hour (I was jiggling the stick searching for third gear), and my last frantic glance caught her back feet gripping the upper rail right behind the cab window and pushing off.  The fear was sickening.  At once, my mind screamed "STOP" and "Don't stop-- you might catch her under the back wheels!"  I coasted slowly to the curb and thanked god that we had just left the main road and there was no one behind us.

For a moment, Abby failed to appear.  I called her twice, three times-- there are no street lights on this stretch-- and finally she came trotting over from the other side of the road, head low.  I scooped her up onto the passenger's seat of the truck and examined her under the dome light.  She was bleeding from several places and shaking, and a piercing odor of poop came from her-- the fall had scared the shit out of her.  She licked my face and hands and I could see blood on them, but not where it was coming from.

I drove her slowly back home and tried my most soothing voice, saying over and over, "It's OK, Sweetie, it's OK" and this did a little to convince me that it could be.  At home, I had her walk back and forth a little in front of the house and noticed a little limp but good mobility overall so we moved onto the kitchen floor where I got out alcohol and cotton balls and took inventory of about six cuts-- three on her front paw, one on her back ankle, one on her back hip, and one larger one, more like a road rash, covering one side of her nose and going down to the tip of her chin.  I dabbed carefully at everything and most of the bleeding stopped and then I checked her teeth for chips or damage-- they seemed all right.  Abby's an Australian Shepherd mix, and her coat is blue merle, which is a lovely mottled mix of white, black, grey, and few caramel patches, but this made distinguishing between natural darkness and swatches of road grime difficult.

Sitting there in the cold kitchen light with her bright pink and red cuts, her road-grimed fur, her pink bandanna all scuffed up and askew, and her eyes wide and ears flattened, she looked more pitiful than I've ever seen her.  She needed tenderness.  She needed her dignity recovered.  She also needed a more thorough assessment of possible swelling or fractures, so we headed for the bathroom and I ran her a shallow, warm bath.  I rinsed her cuts again and massaged her fur and shampooed out the grit, and for the first time, she quit being Super Action Dog and laid down in the tub and let herself be soothed.

Once the bath was over and she was all puffy and damp, I gave her a rawhide bone and she seemed much restored, even insisting in her usual throaty whine that we go outside and toss the ball around a little.  This morning she was a little stiff, but her cuts looked all right and she was tending to them with thoughtful licks.

This made me think about bike accidents I had as a kid, and how even though everything felt awful and I was rattled and sore, having my mom go through the ritual of hydrogen peroxide and Neosporin and band-aids was so soothing and important and for a time afterwards, it was like we shared this special thing, this awareness of my vulnerability and her ability to tend to it.  Abby and I have been having trouble lately with her pooping in the living room when I'm gone at work all day, even though this hasn't ever been a problem before, and until she threw herself out of a moving vehicle last night, most of our interactions had been of the "Godammit, bad dog!" variety.  But then she was hurt, and it could have been so much worse, and making her better and being thankful for her safety occupied my whole world.

It's sad, I guess, that it takes a near miss to snap me out of my occupations with missing Pants and running the household to really notice how much I depend on Abby, and how lost I'd be if anything happened to her.  But in another way it's helped me to remember that she needs a little extra effort on my part, a little extra companionship to make up for the guy she's missing too.  Also, a few more trips to the park-- walking-- would help, so that the idea of it isn't so maddeningly rare that she'll jump out of a truck for it.

NBC (No Business Competition)

There's nothing like righteous indignation and profound disappointment to get a recalcitrant blogger back into writing after a month-long hiatus.  After a morning spent downloading all kinds of mysterious and obnoxiously named applications to my computer, a virtual fit of file sharing promiscuity and jargon-heavy forum trolling, I find I cannot watch time delayed coverage of the Olympic Games on my computer.  I simply have the wrong type of computer, and the brand new beta-version program I need, which is only available from one place, will not run on it.  As I have no television channels (seriously, none), and my ancient TV set needs a good five minutes of slapping to hold its picture steady for DVDs, I am now shit out of luck for ways to feed my Olympic jones in the comfort of my home.

I blame not my Mac PowerPC, nor even my slap-it-like-a-soap-star TV; I blame NBC.

NBC, in a fit of selfish muscle flexing, drew a big fat line around the United States and declared itself sole owner of online video rights for the Olympic games, thus blocking YouTube, whose user-friendly, democratic coverage has virtually defined all things internet video-related for years now, from showing any Olympic footage in this country.  Ironically, YouTube is going to have an Olympic Channel, but only for viewers in certain countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East:

"For countries like the U.S., where exclusive rights to content have been bought, YouTube will use geo-blocking, based on a user's IP address, to prevent access to the channel.  However, NBC will also be broadcasting the Olympics on the Web, with more than 2,000 hours of live content available on its Olympics site.  NBC paired with Microsoft in its effort to broadcast videos into homes across the U.S., although some of the most popular sporting events will not be streamed live." [emphasis mine]

--CNET news article

Huh.  Microsoft, eh?  So these two teamed up and now I've got to be a Moroccan citizen to see what's supposed to be an international sporting event, a symbol of global athletic collegiality and friendly, level-field competition.  Interesting.

In a country where we've long been clucking our tongues at China's state-sponsored media restrictions, it certainly is ironic that NBC's footage is so hard to come by, and so very exclusively guarded, not to mentioned partnered with a company who's constantly fielding monopoly lawsuits and trying to buy out its competition.  

But maybe I should just get cable?  Probably this online video hand-wringing isn't an issue for most Americans, who've long ago taken the plunge and invested in hefty satellite cable offerings and can scroll through hundreds of channels with relative ease.  But I'm foolishly holding out for an a la carte cable system, one where I don't have to subsidize hundreds of channels I never watch just to access the few that I do.  I don't believe in channel packaging.  I think it's a tyranny of excess, yet another way Americans are encouraged to over-consume on the assumption that we aren't smart enough to choose our own services.

I've heard the argument that a la carte cable would mean less funding for smaller market channels, like PBS or BET, but in a market where The World Fishing Network, "the only 24/7 fishing channel," exists, I find it hard to believe niche market channels would struggle.  After all, isn't the free market economy one of the tenets of this democracy we've been force feeding the rest of the world?  

It's one of the bitterest ironies, but in way we're just as limited and silenced by our media system, which seeks to bombard us with tidal waves of unfiltered information as the poor, poor Chinese, whose government instead of its corporations calls the shots in media content.

My plan is to resort to bribing my friends with beer so I can wear out my welcome on their couches, and thus I hope to find some TV channel other than stupid NBC showing the games.