Kavanaugh, Trump, and the White Male Supremacist Supporters: Unleashing Unbridled Misogyny Again

image is from Elle, here

I won't put the faces of virulent misogynists in this blog post. We all know what they look like.

What Brett Kavanaugh, Lindsay Graham, Trump and Comp are doing is showing us how blatant misogyny can be, acted out not timidly or shamefully. Unsurprisingly and predictably, this is not how the story is being told. Instead we are seeing it on cable and internet news with cynicism and sarcasm in public, or brought through testimony from private spaces, in bedrooms literally over women's bodies. The reign of white male supremacy has never gone away. From decade to decade it lives on, monstrous in its mutilated humanity.

This is what the man-infestation of its callousness feels like.

This is more than just a reaction to #MeToo, #SayHerName, and #TimesUp. This is on-going action, proactive, planned, well-executed. Any threat to white or men's power is too much. Any challenge, obscene. Any serious opponent to such aggrandizing and aggressive privilege and entitlement is mocked and ridiculed, if not also imprisoned or murdered.

When the oppressed get 'uppity' and organized there will be the white man-beast at the ready to tear them all apart.

More power to Anita Hill, Christine Blasey Ford, and all woman of all colors who are survivors of men's status quo atrocities.

RadFem. Check. LibTrans. Check. RadTrans? Checking.

The title of this post may be seen as mildly cheeky. But it is also deadly serious.

Life circumstances have kept me offline in the last while. A good friend died of metastatic uterine cancer. She was like a sister to me. And then there were other health issues in her family. The cancer and the treatment was brutal and she was increasingly brave with each passing month. The battle ended two and a half years after diagnosis. I know there are so many people fighting or coping with cancer in some regard. Most along with poverty and additional insults and insecurities of marginalisation and invisibility.

But I'm here today to speak to a few things that have been off my radar, more or less, during that period. For example, I have found that a lot more people across a much wider age bracket use the term 'radfem'.

Due partly to my age, I don't experience 'radfem' and 'radical feminist' as synonyms. I grew up before tweeting and texting when feminist terms being shortened was not usually a sign of respect. Such as when Women's Liberation was turned into Women's Lib.

So in my ancient mind, shortening means going from this: [Content Warning: the second image is stupidly sexist.]

women's liberation movement photo is from here

to this:

blatantly sexist visual is from here

So, no disrespect intended to anyone who identifies as radfem or who uses both terms. Lorde knows I'd have more time on my hands if I'd written radfem every time I wrote out the longer version.

Anyway, I realise that in the last couple of years, the shorter term has taken root more widely. And that's not all. What also seems to have amped up are distressing and awfully bitter battles over terrain and terms, land and language.

Whose land comprises the U.S. of Amerikkka? Will the Federal government or individual States or citizens ever hand back significant tracts and regions of Indigenous land, or does the government remain a land-hoarder and destroyer? Will whites ever concede, en masse, that the Confederate flag is a symbol of white supremacy? That people from Mexico aren't aliens. That Muslims aren't terrorists. Will the xenophobic CRAP that spills out of Dumpty Trumpty ever cease? Will Black Lives Matter?

Does it register that some of us don't have clean water to drink, or reliable access to water?

Will Bernie Sanders become the DNC candidate for president: how would he rule, and make reparations regarding government-stolen land and colonialist-dependent wealth? Will Hilary Clinton be the first white woman to be U.S. president?

Hey: If you want great political leadership in this country, I think Winona LaDuke and Alicia Garza are as good as you get. LaDuke/Garza 2020!!!

Winona, a revolutionary feminist, has pointed out how a curiosity, to me anyway, regarding Anglo uses of the term 'radical', relative to many Indigenist traditional values. That is, from an Indigenist point of view, one may see U.S. government policies as radical, extreme, militant, for decades, for centuries. Genocidal. Seen this way, we can concur that Indigenist feminism is deeply Conservative, but not using the term in at all the same way the U.S. Republicrats do. I read that perspective for the first time many years ago in Talking About a Revolution. We're still waiting for that and are literally dying for it to arrive. Too often, though, it is just liberal talk about terms. Here I go with that.

Digging down and scraping the bottom of the barrel of this blog's archives, from 2008, I found this:

What does 'Radical' mean here? It holds up for me.

What I bring with me as a way to understand any form of oppression are lessons taught to me by radical feminists across race, region, and ethnicity. There are many who deeply inform my thinking and feeling. Among the earliest and most significant are Audre Lorde and Andrea Dworkin. But there more contemporary voices of wisdom and radical knowledge on the scene.

I will bring radical feminist theory and agendas, of color and white, with me as I go, never settling into any perspective or practice with colonial patriarchal Certainty. Andrea Dworkin, for one, never advocated for theory being mistaken for truth. She knew theory could be made into reality--to look, feel, taste, sound, and smell like CRAP. And like everything. And like the core of who I am, which may be why so many people feel like CRAP. And the danger to us, in part, is not knowing whose theories we are living inside, which ones we benefit from and protect, and which we are under and must continue to rise up against.

The more liberal academic side of the sometimes-termed RadFem vs. LibTrans turf war is a contest over theory--issues of gender, essentialism, and privilege. But the social and legal side of it is about spaces of safety and struggle. As noted above, it is clear who is fighting for land and language. In some sense we all are. But not equally.

________________

When I approach any conversation about gender, I first center this question: Whose bodies are marked for terrorism and destruction? What I see is that the bodies, the souls, of those who are identified as female, Indigenous, Black, and Brown, especially, are being terrorised. As they have been for centuries, at least. More recently, it is also Black trans bodies that are marked and murdered.

Corporate media would rather tell us of these horrors as individual tragedies perpetrated by one, two, six, or a hundred 'bad men' or 'rogue cops'. Mainstream media will not report the violence as systematic: patriarchal, colonial. Most white people I know are willing to settle for dimensions of mass media's truth. As are most men. I wonder how many other excuses white folk can conjure to excuse a cop's murder of someone not threatening them. I wonder how many rapes have to occur before it is seen as something men do normally, whether or not most men normally do it. In some sense it should not be surprising that rape happens, even while it should always be understood as part of a complex, involving entitlement and the requirement patriarchies have for some people to be femaled, 24/7/365. It is, tragically, an arrogant and desperate need of too many people for access and accommodation; for violence as violation. For land and language.

I am speaking of a need imposed on others, by human beings who are maled, who are always complex and nuanced in their hirstories and their lives, located in positions of privilege and marginalisation, as most of us are. But the color and sex of normal brutality must be noticed and named. I am mindful, heartful, of the violent disappearance of trans and nontrans Black women, murder after murder. And of the reality of rape culture, and how it is tethered both to patriarchy and to colonialism.

Within white spaces, also always complex and multifaceted, the only L  G  B  T movement I've ever seen as being radical was the L. I have looked to white Lesbian Feminist theorists for keen analysis of heteropatriarchy for over thirty years. Among my fav of those philosophers is Marilyn Frye. But there are many. My most fav, however, is not white. She is, as noted above, Audre Lorde.

The _GBT+ organisations and campaigns which are white-led or coloniser-centered, that claim to be radical, do not appear to me to be revolutionary in theory or practice. This has been brought to my attention in detail quite recently.

In some of the next posts, I will endeavor to carefully and respectfully identify what I find to be politically problematic with a facebook group I have been in as a commenter. It is called "The Conversations Project: Radically Inclusive Radical Feminism". It is welcoming and not supportive of flame wars--that alone is rare online. It has tolerated my very privileged presence for almost two weeks: we'll see who exhausts the other first. Hopefully amicable relationships will be nourished. But unowned intellectual liberalism is toxic to me. And denial of any form of privilege by anyone, as a way of life, is atrocity-supporting. When I see it, I endeavor to call it out, hopefully respectfully and with increasing sensitivity to how my own places of privilege effect the reception of the critique.

The two founders are well known in some progressive circles that contend with gender and privilege. Cristan Williams with Trans/Gender politics. John Stoltenberg with what used to be called Sexual Politics. With the doubly radical title as my guide, I presumed they are doing something radically feminist. In at least two senses, I believe they are using the term, well, liberally.

I have already written to them about my concerns, within the closed facebook group. Projects termed radical that are, in theory and reality, liberal, are nothing new. But the name of the project did direct me to a set of expectations and I was intrigued. I am attempting, in many ways wrongly, to hold them to my expectations. It's an unfair thing to do and I can be a pest about it. They have been kind, and I do well with kindness, so I'm working diligently at keeping my critiques clear of passive-aggression and void of shaming under- and over-tones. That in and of itself is good work for me to be doing in an online or offline community setting.

___________________

I will update you, here, on my own issues by noting that I've been continuing to search for terms to locate my sense of myself relative to gender. Given that I believe (I think in a radical feminist tradition) that the subjectivity of the oppressed matters more than the subjectivity of the oppressor, how women experience me is, first and foremost, what my gender is. That means I don't get to control it: the naming. The best I can do, subjectively, personally, non-essentially, while using the English language is "a maled adult". (And, being a good Amerikkkan, I only speak one language.) I'm a white maled adult, nonbinary, with more economic security than most people, which increasingly doesn't have to be a whole hell of a lot; but I have a kind of stability few people have: I can pay my bills on time and have no debt. And, while gay (in this case: maled, attracted to men--very few, but men), I do not engage in romantic or sexual relationships. That means the ways I can harm people interpersonally are dramatically reduced. And, yes, the ways I can be hurt and misunderstood: but that's what the internet is for. Or not.

If we're talking about dominant gender--CRAP-loaded gender--then using a term like 'anti-gender' works well for me. I have been identifying as 'intergender' but as a fierce white Feminist Lesbian called out, doing so locates me, affirmatively, between the poles of a gender binary that's also a hierarchy. That is, such a term, applied to me, reinforces the hierarchy linguistically (her point). I agree. It also pretends that by being 'in between', I may have less male privilege or sense of entitlement than others who ID as men. So, as either trans and cis, or neither trans and cis, and while I don't have heterosexual privilege, and while I'm not of Northern European gentile stock, I am afforded most male supremacist advantages and benefits. No doubt about it. No denial about it. Please.

I yearn for social spaces which share and practice community-enriching, humane values that I learned from radical feminism. Values like listening, self-awareness, accountability, mutuality, humor, and assertiveness. One especially important ethic is radical honesty: digging for the truth of one's feelings and experience, not settling for the views and interpretations of others just because they appear to be mandatory or popular. And not forgetting: we live inside the theories of others--most of whom are long gone, who may not ever have had any living creature's best interests at heart. I leave you for now, with this:

The purpose of theory is to clarify the world in which we live, how it works, why things happen as they do. The purpose of theory is understanding. Understanding is energizing. It energizes to action. When theory becomes an impediment to action, it is time to discard the theory and return naked, that is, without theory, to the world of reality. People become slaves to theory because people are used to meeting expectations they have not originated—to doing what they are told, to having everything mapped out, to having reality prepackaged. People can have an antiauthoritarian intention and yet function in a way totally consonant with the demands of authority. The deepest struggle is to root out of us and the institutions in which we participate the requirement that we slavishly conform. But an adherence to ideology, to any ideology, can give us the grand illusion of freedom when in fact we are being manipulated and used by those whom the theory serves. The struggle for freedom has to be a struggle toward integrity defined in every possible sphere of reality—sexual integrity, economic integrity, psychological integrity, integrity of expression, integrity of faith and loyalty and heart. Anything that shortcuts us away from viewing integrity as an essential goal or anything that diverts our attention from integrity as a revolutionary value serves only to reinforce the authoritarian values of the world in which we live.  —  Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, U.S. edition, pages 127-128

Bill O'Reilly and the Problem of CRAP-loaded Propaganda

The image of Bill O'Reilly is from here. 

[CRAP is an acronym standing for Corporate Racist Atrocious Patriarchy]

Bill O'Reilly wants your mind.

Here's a synopsis of what he wants everyone to believe, or at least tries to convince others of:

The poor are a threat to the rich, in that they allegedly exploit the rich to get things they don't deserve or aren't entitled to. Capitalism is good. Being a billionaire is enviable and desirable.

Undocumented workers, immigrants, and refugees, particularly if from Mexico or Syria--not of European descent--are a threat to the employment and rule of white/U.S./European working and middle class people, and to mythic ideas about such political/regional heritages. And, again, 'they' exploit the system to garner advantages they are supposedly not entitled to and that ruling classes supposedly do not have.

Black and Brown people allegedly threaten the relative well-being and entitlements of whites.

Women are allegedly threat to men, sexually, economically, socially, and politically. What they threaten is the dominant standing of men and unbridled sexually violent, abusive, harassing, or coercive actions of men.

Islam is allegedly purportedly evil. There are variations on this theme. Muslims allegedly threaten the safety and well-being of non-Muslims, globally. Arab Muslims are allegedly aligned with extremist terrorist's ideologies and practices. The Koran allegedly only promotes violence, especially against the West.

LGBT people are presented, generally, as a joke or source of entertainment for het folks. The socially conservative anti-queer perspective is that we are also a threat to the alleged sanctity of dominant institutions, both religious and secular. Especially marriage. We also pose a risk of recruiting, sexually abusing, or morally corrupting youth.

The globe and all its life is not threatened by corporate environmental destruction.

Now, for some truths:

The rich don't work to increase their wealth. They invest. They don't work to maintain their lives; they hire people for that. The rich exploit corporate capitalism in every way conceivable, through tax loopholes, inheritance, off-shore bank accounts, shared awareness of how the system works, using social connections, arranged marriage, and inheritance laws to hoard wealth. The resources made available to some poor people are paltry and punishing, and are paid for by the labor of other poor people who support the economy rich people exploit. The rich do not generously fund a healthy economy. They greedily ruin it for everyone except themselves.

This economy always has been built on and rests heavily on the unpaid or exploitively paid labor of people who are not white. Work conditions for poorer people are intended to be brutal, exhausting, and dehumanizing. Nothing has changed. Black, Brown, and Indigenous people are under attack and continuously are threatened with genocide, which is on-going.

Men's wealth depends on white women's and women of color's unpaid or exploitively paid labor. Men's identities depend on sexual access to, and abuse of, women. Women of color

Islam is a rich complex religious and multi-cultural practice and system of belief rooted in history, like Christianity and Judaism.

LGBT people present alternatives to the dehumanizing reality of heterosexist existence. We are targeted for harassment and murder, particularly and disproportionately when Black and/or poor.

Corporate exploitation of the Earth is the practice of ecocide.

What this reveals to me is something far too many of us in the U.S. may already know: it perpetuates the most typical narratives of this dominant culture. But with particular focus on perpetuating and further entrenching xenophobia, racism, misogyny, and heterosexual normalcy.

Not only that, but such media outlets and popular spokespeople are engaged in very well-crafted propaganda techniques which include:
Panic mongering
Character assassination
Projection
Rewriting history and reinforcing false cultural myths
Scapegoating and 'othering'
Naming resistance to oppression as being dangerous violence or terrorism
Naming U.S. militarized foreign and domestic policy as necessary and peace-making
Bullying of anti-status quo truth-tellers and overt hostility to truths that undermine the status quo
An assault on higher education as a means of truth-gathering; a rejection of academic 'experts' as only biased by liberalism
Diversion and avoidance of substantive engaged subjective sharing of experience and theory-naming

For more on that, see here: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/1964:fourteen-propaganda-techniques-fox-news-uses-to-brainwash-americans

I conclude that Bill O'Reilly is thuggish and bullying propaganda-pusher, along with all Right-wing corporate media and extremist Christian and Jewish media and spokespeople. Their terrorism goes unnamed as such by their media, not surprisingly. They perpetrate all significant manifestations of Earthly evil.

April 9, 2014: The 9th Anniversary of Andrea Dworkin's Death

image is from here

It is good to see some of Andrea's work being regarded as important. It doesn't happen nearly enough.

It is 2014. A twelve-year-old boy rapes his 7-year-old sister after watching hardcore pornography. Should this be a feminist issue? Judging by the lack of any mainstream feminist response, no. Perhaps once it would have been, but not today. 

We’ve grown too worldly wise for moral panic. No longer are feminists shouty, sexless beings, piecing together a politics based on exception, exaggeration and fear. Terrible things happen to women and girls but when it comes to blame (such an awful word!) we are circumspect. Men rape women, boys rape girls, but it’s nothing to do with how we represent sex. It’s nothing to do with the stories we tell our children. Hatred of women just is.

For the rest of the article, please see here:

http://www.feministtimes.com/dworkin-right-about-porn/

I hope that Andrea's work continues to inspire radical activism against all forms of white male supremacy.

Catharine A. MacKinnon on "Lovelace", and the subject (not object) of the film, Linda Marchiano

All that follows is a cross-post from Harvard University Press Blog.

09 August 2013

Catharine MacKinnon on Lovelace

The pornographic film Deep Throat, released in 1972, was a cultural sensation whose star, “Linda Lovelace,” was said to put a girl-next-door face on the sexual revolution. But the actual life of Linda Boreman, as depicted in the new biopic Lovelace, was one of beatings, rape, and terror. Feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, author of such works as Toward a Feminist Theory of the State and Only Words, represented Boreman after she came forward with her story, and later, with Andrea Dworkin, pursued civil rights litigation as a means to fight pornography. We asked MacKinnon about Boreman, Lovelace, and the potential impact of the film.
-----
Q. You’ve noted that prior to the 1980 publication of Linda Lovelace’s Ordeal, you had no view of pornography one way or the other. For those unfamiliar with her story, who was Linda Lovelace?

“Linda Lovelace” was the fictional name of Linda Boreman, later Linda Marchiano, who was forced into captivity and made to perform fellatio and other sex acts by pimps, including organized crime, so that pornography, notably the notorious film Deep Throat, could be made of her. The film was instrumental in establishing pornography as culturally legitimate in the 1970s. After her escape, Linda’s valiant opposition to the sex industry included chronicling her abuse in Ordeal and extensive public testimony. Her revelations enabled a change in the way pornography was debated legally and socially, shifting the focus from morality to harm.

Q. This film comes decades after the landmark pornography civil rights hearings at which Marchiano testified, as documented in In Harm’s Way. Can you remind us what was at stake in those hearings?

The anti-pornography civil rights hearings collected in In Harm’s Way created a space for people victimized by pornography to speak about what had been done to them in its making or through its use.  Up to that point, the legal argument over pornography had essentially only considered the freedom of speech issues.

The hearings documented the inequality that is foundational to the industry: that the “speech” of the pornographers is the use and abuse of the bodies of mainly women, who were far from free and were not speaking for themselves. The consequences of the distribution and use of the materials was shown to be equally silencing and endangering to legions of women and children who are abused by its consumers.  Thus the sexual exploitation of women and children in making pornography is mass-produced through its consumers to become violation of other women and children.

The civil rights ordinances the hearings debated were passed several times, then found to violate the First Amendment on the theory that the more harm the materials do, the more protected as speech they are–an incorrect, indeed reversed, view of First Amendment law. The ordinances could still be passed and found constitutional today.

Q. What was your involvement with the Lovelace film?

I represented Linda from 1980 until her death, was her friend, and continue to represent her Estate and her children. Lovelace is based in part on our life story rights. It shows Linda as human and credible, as she was not seen as being in life. All she ever wanted was to be believed and respected, to have people face what really happened and take steps to stop it. We see this film as a major step forward in that process. Apparently, when you make fact into fiction, people begin to believe it is true.

We participated in the making of the picture, are proud of it and the people who made it, and feel strongly that Linda would be proud of it.

Q. Gloria Steinem has said of the film that the true story is actually much more violent, but that the filmmakers “did the best they could.” To the extent that the trauma of Marchiano’s life had to be toned down to bring the film to a wide audience, why is that a compromise worth making?

The filmmakers had full creative control, which is as it should be. The film’s compromises with factual accuracy are not mine to defend. Artists operate on assumptions of what the experiences of audiences prepare them to see; sometimes audiences say they want to see pretty standard tropes when they go for entertainment.

Through a brilliant structure, Lovelace unmasks the myth that Linda was freely acting and shows her enduring coercion and terror, trapped by lack of support from her family and authorities. And it shows her victorious, getting free of what is increasingly understood as sex trafficking. It shows the core truth of her story and her triumph.

Q. The impact of the internet on the pornography industry has obviously been enormous, and this film depicts an era much different from that in which we now live. With that said, what would you hope that the Lovelace audience takes from the film?

Society is substantially more saturated with pornography than it was before, as Andrea Dworkin and I predicted in 1983 would happen if nothing was done to stop it. That means we need a law like the civil rights law we proposed even more now than we did then, because even more people are being violated as a result of the sex industry.

Linda had no rights over Deep Throat when it was made, and without the law we wrote for her and others, she would have no rights over it today. And she is not alone–far from it.
Once Linda is seen as a human being rather than a sex doll and sperm spittoon, a process Lovelace advances light years, we hope audiences will begin to consider that the pornography industry traffics in a form of sexual slavery that is neither protected speech nor free. Meantime, they will see an enlightening story as they enjoy a very smart, splendidly acted, and good movie.

Declaration by AWAN members Cherry Smiley and Fay Blaney at Women's Worlds, 6 July 2011 ECD

image is from here

Non-Profit Organization · Vancouver, BC, Coast Salish Territories

All that follows was found on Facebook. I post this in alliance with and support for AWAN, Cherry Smiley, and Fay Blaney. Thank you for all your hard work!

Declaration presented by AWAN Members Cherry Smiley & Fay Blaney at Women's Worlds 2011, July 6, 2011

by Aboriginal Women's Action Network on Wednesday, July 6, 2011 at 8:47pm

As Indigenous women living on occupied territories now known as Canada, who have survived over 500 years of attempted genocide, we declare:

1. We, Indigenous women, will not allow anyone or anything to break the ties that bind us. Despite the  impacts of colonialism - the racism, sexism, poverty and violence that pervade our lives and communities, working to divide us both inside and out - we are profoundly aware of our connected ness to each other as women, to our ancestors, and to our lands. No man, men, or external force will ever ultimately sever these ties.

2. Our analysis of prostitution as a form of violence against women and as a system of colonialism is the result of over five centuries of resistance stories, stories told to us by our Grandmothers, who have retold the stories of their Grandmothers, who have retold the stories of their Grandmothers. This analysis is based on our own life experiences, on the life experiences of our mothers, our sisters, and all our relations. It is based on theory and knowledge constructed collectively by Indigenous women.

3. Purposeful legal tolerance of prostitution and pornography, as with the Indian Act and the residential school system, was and is an external colonial system imposed on Indigenous women and girls in continued attempts to harm and destroy us.

4. We, Indigenous women, reject the racist assumption that prostitution was ever part of our traditional practices. We denounce the idea that we are objects to be bought and sold.

5. We, Indigenous women, reject the capitalism that has resulted in the theft and destruction of our homelands and our environment. We reject the International capitalism and greed that also drives the “sex industry”, an industry that regards Indigenous women and girls as objects to be sold at the highest price, should we survive the transaction. We reject the colonial terminology of “sex work”, as it hides the racist, sexist, and classist realities of prostitution. “Sex work” masks the violence that our sisters struggle against on a daily basis and repackages that violence as a form of freely chosen labour.

6. We, Indigenous women, reject the imposition of patriarchy, which has had devastating and deadly effects for Indigenous women and girls. We face male violence within our own families and communities, and often we are pushed out of these very communities seeking safety. We are forced to migrate into cities where we continue to face physical, emotional, and sexual violence at the hands of men, including at the hands of johns, pimps, brothel owners, and traffickers. We demand a return to our traditional values that place women and girls in high esteem.

7. The Nordic model of state policy will give Indigenous women and girls the best chance of not only survival, but life. This model includes law reform that criminalizes the male demand for paid sex and decriminalizes prostituted women, offers comprehensive social programs to all women and girls, and educates the public about prostitution as a form of male violence against women and girls.  We, Indigenous women, believe this model encourages true social change that works in our interest.

8. We, Indigenous women, reject the total decriminalization and/or legalization of prostitution as an acceptable solution to sexual violence. The total decriminalization and/or legalization of prostitution only encourages the racist and deadly male demand for access to the bodies of women and girls, with Indigenous women and girls being disproportionately targeted.

9. We, Indigenous women, reject the patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist male perception that our sole worth is as sexual objects. We recognize that prostitution and pornography, incest, physical and sexual assault, and murder exist on a continuum of male violence and hatred toward Indigenous women and girls. The tragic outcome of that hatred is the over 580 documented cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada.

10. We, Indigenous women and girls, have survived over 500 years of attacks on our cultures, our bodies, our lands, and our lives.  We refuse to abandon our future generations to the colonial sexist violence that is prostitution and we demand an immediate end to the male demand for paid sex.


*All Indigenous Women - First Nations, Inuit, Metis - who are in agreement with this Declaration are invited to sign on as individual endorsers or organizations.  You can contact us at awan.bc@gmail.com to do so.*


**Update: Due to demand we are compiling a solidarity list for non native women and orgs to sign in support of the declaration**

The WHM Supremacist Celebration of the Decade: The Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate: husband and woman, not man and wife

image of Britain's Kate Middleton and Prince William is from here

 

This post has been revised with portions and a link added, on 29 April 2011, prior to the wedding ceremony.

With a tad under ninety years left to this century, I think it's rather presumptuous, and totally in service to corporate media ratings, to term this event the "wedding of the century". What about the weddings of Kate and William's culturally hoped-for and presumably heterosexual children and their children in turn? Those next two generations of royal weddings will all likely happen before 2100 ECD. So, for now, I'll call this the media wedding of the decade. And that's with nine years to go. I fully accept this is likely to be a "where were you when" non-tragic event remembered and reflected on many times over the next couple of decades. After that, corporate media--if it still exists--will need something else to make money off of.

What does that media tell me I am supposed to feel about the upcoming wedding of Prince William to Kate (Catherine) Middleton? Given the ubiquitous hype, at a fever pitch this week especially, I know for sure that I am supposed to feel happy for them, excited about the event, eager to watch the excessive coverage, and hope the day goes well and that they live happily ever after.

I'd have to say all of that is true. That is how I feel. (And some say media has no effect on people: where else would I have learned not only of the event, but how to feel about it?)

I will be among the billions watching very early Friday morning. Almost thirty years ago, I got up early to watch the wedding of Prince Charles to Diana Spencer, who would become the parents of two sons: William and Harry.

What I am most happy about is that Kate and William are friends, took time to get to know each other, have a solid foundation under them for a partnership, and seem to genuinely love each other. Charles was only really ever in love with Camilla, his current wife. And it is sad and ageist that the Royal Family would not have welcomed Charles to marry Camilla to begin with, instead picking some teenager he didn't love to call his wife. (Diana was all of sixteen when they met and was only weeks out of her teens when they wed.)

I feel sorry for what Diana had to endure being married to him, even with all the privileges afforded her. By most accounts it was a very unhappy life for her, in so many regards. And an obviously tragic and terribly premature death.

It is said their may be rain over London on Friday. I hope not. I want it to be sunny and not too hot or too cold. I want things to go well. I am also not supposed to think much about anything else--certainly not any other dimensions of the human event other than the fashion, perhaps.

Somewhere in my brain and body are buried the anti-woman lessons of fairy tales, which told me that heterosexist romance among white people was to be held as an ideal, and which resulted in plenty of self-loathing, shame, and disgust for being gay. They also taught me a lot about over-valuing non-Jewish European cultures, including some of the British Isles. I was not taught to admire and respect the traditions of any of the thousands of cultures of Africa, Asia, and Indigenous people. I was not taught that gayness and lesbianism exists. I was not taught that women do not have to exist in relation to men. I was not taught about the dangers of het romance as the West promotes and protects it.

There are obviously many issues available to be analysed here. This is, after all, presumed to become the largest viewed electronically broadcast event in human history: the Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

Piers Morgan is the sleazy, pasty, physically unmemorable middle-aged white het man with short brown hair who has a nightly chat show on CNN. Formerly one of three judges on America's Got Talent, he revealed himself, along with the far more sexist and sleazy David Hasselhoff, to be a big fan of young white women who strip on stage. Today he called the British monarchy "sexier" than the elected politicians in the US.

A recently added co-anchor on Entertainment Tonight, a very Aryan-looking thin, young-looking white woman named Nancy O'Dell, with long, flowy straight blond hair, made a remark I'll closely paraphrase shortly. She was reviewing the footage of the last 24 hours: the rehearsal of the royal cavalry's street route in London to and from Westminster Abbey and to Buckingham Palace: "And look at the bayonets on the ends of the rifles of the soldiers. Pretty sharp!" She unquestionably meant the men who comprise the cavalry, who she thought looked good in uniform with weaponry.

Why does the glimmering blade of an implement intended to stab people to death become a glamourising and sexualising accessory of men already trained to kill offensively as well as defensively? Is the cavalry's gun and knife the "sexy" equivalent of the female citizen's hat and shoes? Are women allowed to carry such weapons (not hats and shoes) and use them against men who attempt to assault them and have that violence be considered "sexy" and attractive? These bayonets are not symbols of pacifistic regal "British tradition". They really do get bloody from time to time. Not with blue blood, either.

image is from here

I will continue to discuss several of them following this very pertinent commentary by blogger Celie's Revenge:

Please correct me if I’m wrong but aren’t “The Royal Family”
the DIRECT DESCENDANTS of the British imperialists who
colonized Africa, Asia, & the Caribbean? Aren’t these
the people who raped, robbed, enslaved, and converted the
so-called natives? Aren’t they of the blood line of folks
who are proud because the sun never sets on the British
Empire? Doesn’t their wealth come from white supremacy
and theft? Isn’t all the pomp and pageantry surrounding
the wedding about European superiority backed by its
domination of black and brown and even Irish folk?

And weren’t there royal families in Africa? Where are
those royal families now? Weren’t they made slaves and
subjects of the crown?

And if I’m correct why should I care about a royal
wedding? Does might make right all of a sudden? I mean,
dumb question, of course it does but I’m just trying to
get to the facts, the truth even if those things are
meaningless and powerless to the seductions of
domination: aren’t Prince William & Kate the direct
descendants of the Imperialists?

I must admit I enjoy British accents, humor, and I love
British rock and pop bands (and lately their Hip Hop too)
but I’ve never bothered to take the royal family
seriously. The time when monarchs mattered was a time
that should bring Brits collective and national shame
not pride! Blood defining ones destiny as either
colonizer or colonized, master or slave, royalty or
commoner, is hardly something we should circulate
globally as in our symbols of love and beauty. If you
are white like Kate at least you can escape one’s
class/stock and marry into a superior one. So maybe
that’s what the common working class white Brits holds
onto. But what of black Brits? All of whom are British
because at some point they belonged to a nationality
that made them colonial subjects of the British Crown.

Of course this all makes me very sad personally because
unfortunately I know that even those who share my rage
and confusion at how fucked and dangerous this
celebration of domination under a cloud of
heterosexual romance and European aesthetics of beauty
still refuse to get how a whole lot of other things we
applaud are just as harmful and fucked.

And let's not forget to mention this Nazi crap the
younger prince pulled off:http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article101247.ece 

It is Yom HaShoah, beginning on Sunday night at sundown. So for me it is an appropriate time to ask: what WAS Harry thinking? How funny is it to dress up as a Nazi when you, yourself, are a very public member of a family of racist colonisers and genocidalists? I mean it's one thing for Mel Brooks to attempt it, as a Jew of European descent trying to poke fun at something he knows damn well was an atrocity against his people. But when someone dresses up in a Nazi uniform who is not Jewish, is not of color, and is a royal white heir to fortunes made on the lives and labor of Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian people, that's something else entirely.

Let's not forget Harry and William have both been trained as a soldier in the British military, and have each been taught to value and practice the acts which result in the mass murder of people of color in many parts of the world. You will not likely ever hear either fellow speak against a British war against various regions of Asia, or anywhere else. What follows is partially from Wikipedia:

He was commissioned as a second lieutenant into the Blues and Royals of the Household Cavalry Regiment — serving temporarily with his brother — and completed his training as a tank commander. He served for 77 days on the front line in the ceaseless white man's war on Afghanistan, although he was pulled out following publication of the story in an Australian magazine.

As for William, we have this from Wikipedia:

Prince William of Wales KG FRS (born William Arthur Philip Louis on 21 June 1982) is the elder son of Charles, Prince of Wales, and Diana, Princess of Wales, and third eldest grandchild of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. He is second in the line of succession, behind his father, to the thrones of 16 independent states, while he resides mostly in, and is more directly involved with, the United Kingdom, the oldest of these realms.

He was educated at four schools in the United Kingdom and obtained a degree from the University of St Andrews. He spent parts of a gap year in Chile, Belize, and countries in Africa. He was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Blues and Royals regiment of the Household Cavalry—serving with his brother Prince Harry and, two years later, earned his wings by completing pilot training at Royal Air Force College Cranwell. In 2009, the Prince transferred to the Royal Air Force, was promoted to flight lieutenant and underwent helicopter flying training in order to become a full time pilot with the Search and Rescue Force. In Autumn 2010, he completed his generic and special-to-type helicopter training and he is now at RAF Valley on No. 22 Squadron performing co-pilot duties on the Sea King search and rescue helicopter. On 16 November 2010 it was announced by Clarence House that Prince William and his long-term girlfriend Kate Middleton are going to marry, and it was subsequently confirmed that the wedding ceremony would take place at 11 am on 29 April 2011 in Westminster Abbey, London.

Guards, police, and the armed forces; imperialism, colonialism, and militarism; white Christian, het, and male supremacy. How these are part of one another is not something dominant media will discuss. Each, instead, will be glorified more or less separately. But glorious or inglorious, these are the themes of the wedding days and of the British Royal Family. And the lives of royals exude the power and privilege they are born into.

William is royal patron of an animal preserve and conservation project in sub-Saharan Africa, it is a recipient of his charitable help. Charity is the publicly "good" side of colonialism. The U.S. can be "charitable" to Haitians, for example. Or wealthy whites can be charitable to Black people living (and dying) in poverty in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina. It's a way to promote the non-existent overall goodness of the ruling classes.

"Charity" implies one has economic and political power over the group or individuals being "helped". For much more on how this racist idea expresses itself in contexts of allegedly pro-feminist discussions, please see *here*. William's role maintains a colonial and imperial position over part of the African continent. He also proposed to Kate in Kenya, as "Africa" is very special to him. How does a continent get to be special to someone who only sees it in terms of being an over-privileged and tremendously entitled visitor and heir of  the wealth acquired by pillaging so many regions of the world? This reminds me of how whites in the U.S. speak of the Caribbean, which is promoted only as a destination location for vacations, or as a place for very wealthy white people to purchase islands. Rendered invisible in all of this are the many people who live there, who are not white, whose ancestors were slaves, many of whom remain imprisoned in paradise by economic poverty made probable by the World Bank and IMF's policies and practices which are fully supported by the US and the UK.

This is the "sharp" militarised force of patriarchal, imperialistic, and racist Nation-States and of this British Empire in particular. This is what Nancy O'Dell and corporate media generally is sexualising, romanticising, and covering for profit. This is a central part of the history and function of England as an oppressively racist ruling G8 nation-state in the world; this must be centrally celebrated on Friday. If the Brits weren't involved in military actions designed to murder people of color as I type this, there would be less of a need to celebrate British militarism as a way of promoting social denial about what the military is for and what it exists to do. It would still be "tradition" if Britain were not at war. But we must always ask, as Celie's Revenge does above, what "traditions" are being honored and celebrated?

These officers and soldiers are the people who keep "order", meaning WHM supremacist order. Meaning: white, het, men ruling and determining the degrees to which they will exploit and loot the lives, cultures, and nations of everyone else.

For more, please see this post from Censored News:
Royal family's wealth is from the blood and genocide of Indigenous Peoples

Another obvious theme I'll focus more on is the not-so-covertly celebrated misogynist heterosexism of Friday morning's event. And the celebration of an institution--heterosexual marriage. This institution has been the political site and source of untold atrocities against women and girls for centuries, with the social, cultural, religious, and legal support of the nation-states in which the marriages have been occurring often due to the compulsory and coercive nature of both patriarchal heterosexuality and het marriage.

Women, until relatively recently, were considered the chattel property of their husband-owners, and this remains the case in some countries. Children who are born into such unions, if any, are "his" not "theirs". His rape of her is legally impossible, because he is said to have rights of access to her body, with our without her will and welcoming. Rape cannot happen, within this (un)ethical framework. What can happen is him having what he is awfully lallowed to have: full control and possession of her. The celebration of heterosexual marriage is a celebration of misogynist atrocity and het male domination. The making of het marriage into a fairy tale fantasy is steeped in male supremacist traditions, not ever equality or mutuality between women and men. I am grateful that Kate refuses to say she'll "obey" William. His mum Diana started the pro-woman change in Royal Wedding tradition. I'm glad Kate and William are continuing it.

Girls, not women, are still chattel brides of men, not boys. Internationally, white men from North America and Europe procure trafficked girls and women to be their brides, wives, and "lovers": which too often means men's objects of gross sexual exploitation, and slaves for rape and labor.

Classism and status of royalty is another theme: Kate arrives in a car as "a commoner" and returns in a carriage as a member of the Royal Family. He status is forever changed. She gets a title. She rises in importance and prominence as a role model and figurehead, as a setter of fashion trends, only because she is the spouse of the future King of England. She ceases to be her own person separate from him. This is what they mean when they say "man and wife": she exists as a thing who is gendered relative to him, a full human person whose own gender is assumed to be synonymous with humanity (mankind, or Man).

The heterosexism, racism, and classism combines to reinforce and romanticise both white male hetness, Christian white families, and white wealth: cornerstone values and ideals in the contemporary U.S. Empire.

The bride and groom will be socially required to kiss--wait and see--in front of millions or perhaps billions of people watching them greet the public at Buckingham Palace. They must prove they are heterosexually involved and active. When will a lesbian or gay couple's newlywed kiss be this demanded by the media and public as a source of celebration among millions or billions watching? When will lesbian romantic love or gay romantic love be this joyfully observed and validated with this much media and pageantry?

I'll leave you with this, to underscore the political parameters of the marriage: Can Kate or William object to British involvement in military wars? Can she or he call for an end to discrimination against lesbian women and gay men? Can she or he promote feminist causes? Can they adopt a child rather than bearing one or more from their own genes? I suspect she has already been carefully coercively "coached" not to speak out against any of the political matters discussed in this post. As, of course, has he. Her refusal to say "obey" will be about as feminist a statement as she'll be allowed to make, and that will be an act of omission.

Now, let's all wait and get a look at that dress! I am genuinely curious to know what she will wear. If you've been following the media hype, you already know what the groom will wear: his military uniform.

Adolph Hitler's lover, Eva Braun, dressed up as a Jewish white man dressed up as a non-Jewish Black man...

photo of A. Hitler and E. Braun is from here

The photograph above is not the one making the news. It appears to be a moment where ol' Adolph is catching a few zzzz's while not attending to his genocidal agenda to wipe Jews from Europe and beyond--if only there had been no Resistance. Who knew Adolph and Eva also had fun with anti-Black racist drag?

Quiz: How many forms of gross exploitation, sexual, ethnic, and racist insensitivity and inhumanity, and genocidal heinousness are wrapped up in this smallish news story?

Please click on the title below to link back.

Photo of Adolf Hitler's lover Eva Braun dressed as black man emerges

Published: Friday, Mar 11, 2011, 14:23 IST
Place: London | Agency: ANI

A collection of photographs of Adolf Hitler's lover Eva Braun has surfaced, and in one of them she is featured with black make-up and dressed like a man.

The picture had been taken in 1937 when Braun was 25, and she had captioned the image "Me as Al Jolson". Jolson was a Jewish American star, the Sun reported.

The images had been found in 1945 at Hitler's Bavarian mountain retreat, the Berghof, but they lay forgotten in US archives until this week.

Other snaps show Hitler playing with the young daughter of one of Braun's pals, and messing about with her pet dogs.

Please Assist Phylicia Barnes In Her Safe Return to her Family and Friends

Missing: Phylicia Simone Barnes

It goes without say, doesn't it?, that were Phylicia Simone Barnes white and blonde, her face would be familiar to anyone with a television set. As it is, national and dominant corporate media--run by white men--are slow to still when it comes to reporting on missing persons. Particularly and especially when they are Black, Brown, Indigenous, or Asian; or poor, homeless, in prostitution, and female. If you're not young, thin, blonde, female, middle class or wealthier, and what the corporate media considers "pretty", you can expect media to ignore your disappearance. That's not just tragic, it's ethically bankrupt and racist, heterosexist, classist, and misogynistic as hell. Please support the efforts to reunite Phylicia Barnes with her family and friends.

Everything that follows, and the photo above, is from radioamber.net. Please click on the title below to link back. A video about Phylicia's disappearance appears at the end of the post. So too does information on how to help. And please pray for her safety and well-being.

Did Phylicia Barnes Just Disappear – Police Baffled

Jan 20th, 2011 | By Paul P | Category: Alert Follow Up News

Eight days from today will be a month since the disappearance of now 17 year old Phylicia Barnes on Dec 28th 2010. Her 17th birthday came and went January 12th and she remained missing. Her mother has vowed to celebrate the event upon her return and remains hopeful that will be soon.

Police have had few leads in the case. Of those leads none were found to be helpful. They reportedly have called it one of the strangest and most vexing missing persons cases they’ve ever investigated.

After a public outcry about fairness because Phylicia is black, there has been some national media coverage including the NBC Nightly News featuring the case of Phylicia Barnes last night. Many feel it was to little to late because coverage came weeks after her abduction.

Auhorities remain baffled saying it’s one of the strangest missing persons cases they’ve ever investigated. They believe she may have been kidnapped and taken out of the state without leaving behind any evidence of the abduction. Despite FBI involvement the case seems to be at a stand still with no new information coming forth.

There is a $10,000.00 reward for information leading to the whereabouts of Phylicia Barnes.

Anyone with any information on Phylicia’s disappearance, no matter how small, is urged to contact the Baltimore police at             855-223-0033    .

Radio Amber Alert Video

Related: Phylicia Barnes Still Missing Despite Efforts Use our search to find more stories on this case, type in search box Phylicia Barnes.

(e)gods, ego(d)s, e-gods, egads! A tale about how to dye cloth

image is from here

There once was a woman who lived in a small but traveled village. Most of the travelers were missionaries. They brought the word of their god to the disbelievers. They never spoke directly to her, at her, for they saw that she was a lost cause. What person of great spirit would spend her days dying cloth blue, in such a fashion as to only produce a few finished items across a long season? They knew of her output because villagers would tell them about her if asked, but only with praise for her work. Nevertheless, the god-fearing missionaries scoffed at her methods and thought her either evil or insane. After all, she lived and worked alone. She never married any man nor bore any children. Aside from feeding her animals and tending to her vegetables, she worked only to dye cloth blue. She spoke up when she had to but wasn't known for being a conversationalist. The missionaries fed off village gossip as they made their way out of one and into another, and so took the villagers' regard for her and her general silence as signs of condescension or impudence.

When she collected the cloth initially it was more or less white. The blue dye was the most beautiful rich blue you can imagine or have ever seen. Her process for transforming the cloth, however, was ridiculed by many passers-by. They mocked her because they saw a bit of her process, and they thought it, and her, utterly crazy, ludicrous. They felt she was engaging in activity, every day, that was preposterous and an absurd waste of time, if she wanted "success". It's not that her cloth wasn't, when finished, blue. It's that the process took so long they felt she'd never earn enough to make a living. So although they mocked her, on some level they wished her to be well.

The villagers being busy with their own chores and tasks, never have the time to watch her for more than a few minutes, and they knew from experience that her blue cloth was the best in the village--they had no reason to deride her for any reason. Though they didn't understand her process, they respected it for what it produced. And throughout the village many of them saved their earnings to purchase blue cloth from her. Even some of the travelers had a sense about her product. And some of them, too, bought her cloth, even while they may have muttered something unkind under their breath about her being crazy.

Her process was as follows:

She prepared a pot of very hot water by adding a certain number of handfuls of blue dye which she kept in a bin quite nearby. With a clean branch she stirred until the water was evenly blue--deep, rich, dark blue. To look into the pot, even at noon, was like looking into the depths of night with no moon. She immersed the white cloth fully and let it soak a while, simmering. She then slowly lifted it out with the stick, let it drip over the pot and cool down, and then took it into her hands and wound it tight, rinsing out all excess liquid directly over the pot so all the extra dye-water fell back into the pot for the next immersion of cloth. She wasted nothing.

Once wrung out she shook open the cloth and placed it nearby on a very large round stone, expansive and curved, so that the cloth directly faced the sun as it journeyed across the hot sky.

On the already warm stone, the cloth dried quickly. Was it time to re-soak the cloth? She could get in several dunkings in an hour or two, depending on the intensity of the sun. But for her, no. She left the cloth on that stone for most of the afternoon. Finally she'd take it up and bring it inside at the end of the workday. Any morning she began to work she repeated that process. Back onto the large sunned stone the same soaked, simmered, cooled, and wrung out cloth would go. What the missionaries who passed through her village whispered to one another as they saw the dye in the pot and the cloth on the stone is this, "Doesn't she know that the sun BLEACHES any color at all OUT of the cloth?!?"

She heard them often--some of them wanted her to hear them. Some travelers were so rude as to say it loudly, as if intending to make her feel like a fool. She had little interest in considering the validity of their insults. There was nothing any missionary said that she hadn't heard many times before.

Day after day, travelers passed and whispered or made a point not to whisper, calling her names, calling her dying process crazy.

But back to the cloth. Each day, apparently, the cloth went from wet and blue-ish, to dry and bleached back to white. From day to day there was no noticeable change. She also saw no change, but this didn't stop her for she knew how things worked. For days, weeks, the same cloth went into the pot, was wrung out, and was placed flat on the warm stone to dry, and, it seemed, to be sun-bleached.

From the beginning of one lunar cycle to another, something did change, however. Imperceptibly, the cloth began to hold more of its dye. Incrementally. Over a long period, it shifted from white, to a very pale light blue, to a clearer blue, through the middle hues, and finally ended up a deep rich blue, even at the end of that last days time in the blazing sun. And when that day's work was done, the cloth was no longer white-turning blue. It was, through and through, a blue cloth. You could dig into any fiber and no whiteness would be found. And no amount of sun could bring it back. It was different now than it once was. It has become something new. Blue.

This is a story about radical personal-political-spiritual transformation through practice. The individual practice, let's say if daily, shows no demonstrable change. But over time transformation happens, as long as the actions are repeated in accordance with how one is taught. There isn't one way. I have told you of one way that worked for her. But there are other ways to make something change even in a context where ones ways are mocked and ridiculed.
 
I am contemplating the relationship between ego and the gods of human imagination. And the relationship between men's egos and men's gods. And what, if any, relationship they have to G-ddess, aka She Who Is All.

I am realising from recent conversation with a friend, how the male god sneaks in when one is least inviting him in as a male-specific god. I have watched for a long while how the Male God/Ego is meant to be worshiped, with all other matters placed subordinate to that prime commandment.

A beloved white woman, a lesbian feminist friend I once knew who has since passed on, believed in the power of language-in-life. She grew up with a white male god image and with white male god-language, and chose later to change that to a female G-d/dess in her own imagination but not from her ego. She conjured this G-ddess, who had many faces and many colors from stories of Her from the past. And, also, she grew to make contact with this G-ddess who was revealed to my friend. This felt artificial initially, in the ways, I think, that learning a new language can feel utterly strange and impossible to feel at home in--as if it will never be and can never be a mother tongue. But over time, sure enough, She was realised/experienced by my friend as surely as the old male god once was.

My friend gained strength in this G-ddess, a kind of strength the male god, the only-white god, had not ever provided. The old god took from her and also repeatedly asked a lot of her. He asked her to be submissive to Him, always. To do otherwise, so it was said by the men who worshiped Him, was a sin against Him. She did not believe in anyone being submissive. Nor in a kind of dominance that was practiced in society by white people and by men, throughout the time in which she lived. And she lived through the Civil Rights Movement and the Women's Movement in the U.S., so she saw hate in the faces of many whites and many men who felt threatened by Black men, Black women, and by white women too who wanted justice, not subordination. She noticed how such people, herself included, were called "uppity", as if to strive to reach a level of human stature and standing in a white male supremacist society--a level that white men took for granted and felt fully entitled to, was way to ask for too much to ask for, as well as unnatural and against the white man's god's will.

Her G-ddess did not ask for her to practice either submission or dominance, only to be true to herself by listening deeply to herself, beyond the seemingly ceaseless echos of men's voices. In the depths of her own being was the G-ddess's being and becoming. In the depths of everyone's being, the G-ddess assured her, was the power of the G-ddess of Joy, Love, Wisdom, Peace, and Joy. Also of Rage, Action, Perseverance, and Justice.

The white and male supremacist dualisms taught to her--that to feel rage against injustice is somehow not peace-seeking and joy-bringing, or is and must be some kind of condescension or hatred for whites or for men, was revealed to her as untrue. Most of that only-white male god's knowledge wasn't from any G-d/dess at all. These truths were written in hand by men. Only men, some of whom later became white and pretended their new god always was white. They spoke their truths and put them down as G-d's truth, believing that what their egos conceived and apprehended must be As It Is and As It Should Be. Their egos got in the way of apprehending and appreciating the wisdom of G-d/dess.

Beware the voice of any god that comes in the words written only by men in ancient texts or on Internet web pages, especially ones that proclaim with certainty that lightness is holy and darkness is evil. And remember that in practice, with perseverance, white cloth can be made blue, and can remain blue no matter how long it bakes in the sun.