Fragile Industries

Happy Solstice

 

Longest Night, Here in My Little Town: Sunrise, 6:59 am, Sunset, 4:51 pm.  With my SADD, I should be terminally sad (read photon-deprived depressed) but life is good.  The nightime low here is 42 degrees, and I'm bearing up wearing flannel pajamas so I can leave the window open as I sleep and hear the waves.  Tomorrow will be sunny, even if shortest day of the year, with a 50 something high.

So, of course, like a fool, I am going to spend 12/23-1/2 in SW Minnesota, where prevailing temps are below zero.  I am told that there will be a warm spell on my arrival, a daily high (projected) of 12 degrees.  Woooh.  Break out the aloha shirts and shorts.  I'm a California girl.  Even in cold damp SF, it never got below freezing.  This is terrifically exotic.  I'm spending the ten days with one of my favorite couples: art professors part time, artists and farmers full time.  I will learn to milk a cow (machine assisted, thank God), feed chickens, make cheese, and lost-wax casting.  I will teach my hosts the mysteries of hand bookbinding.  They have entrusted me with expensive large photo prints of their work for binding.  It is a true collaboration -- my host is going to hand-cast embellishments for the metal posts used in binding.  I've let go of results and plan to have fun.  Because I am a single-warrior army who travels on her stomach, I've already ordered and sent vast packages from Dean & Delucca of more specialized French cheeses, crabcakes, lobster bisque, maple syrup, and some vinegars they may find amusing.  Also some packages from Napa holding some great reds and bubbly.  And a few packages not to be opened until the 25th that should spread additional cheer.

I've also bound a special book for my hosts that I will carry next to my heart as I travel.  By the way, I cashed in Frequent Flyer miles for this, and had (poor me) to go first class to make it work.

My first first-class flight.  My first white Christmas.  In a drafty 1903 farmhouse.  I'm counting the minutes.

From here on out, guys, there will be more light.  Let's pray that isn't simply literal.  Happy Solstice, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Christmas, Boxing Day, New Year's, etc.  I wish a year of love and joyous service for us all.

Jerry Brown, Hero

Jerry Brown today declared before the California Supreme Court that Prop. 8 is indefensible.

Now, for the non-legal-wonks among us, let me explain: Jerry Brown currently serves as the Attorney General for the State of California.  In this post, his job is to defend the validly-enacted bills, laws, etc. against challenges.  He's the Great Big Daddy, as elected, of The Status Quo.  He's the Lawyer for the State.

This is also, we must remember, the man who is the son of a Great Big Daddy of California gubernatorial history, Pat Brown, Democrat governor of California in the '60's.  In My Home Town (also home of the American Nazi Party, where every property deed carried a racially restrictive covenant and all the "colored" housekeepers had to get home before nightfall) I remember lawn signs that read (and I apologize for the toilet humor) "If it's Brown, Flush It Down."  Pat Brown was hardly a fringe progressive; he was a standard-bearer for the standard Democrat Party.  A few years later, in 1974, if I recall, his son Jerry succeeded him for Governor.  It was the first election where I could cast a ballot.

Jerry was further left than his dad and the papers called him "Governor Moonbeam."  He was seen as a hopeless idealist hippie wannabe, rejected the governor's manse for a monastic apartment, rejected the gas-guzzling governor's limo for an economy car.  Now it all makes sense, but 30+ years ago, this was dangerous extremism.  After the Reagan Revolution, Jerry packed his bags for years in the wilderness, more recently served some very common-sense years doing great things as mayor of Oakland, and now is in the position of Attorney General for the state, a sort of elder statesman with a conscience.

And God bless him, he has one.  I thought it richly ironic that he would have to defend a hateful, bigoted enactment, given his sensibilities.  I never thought that he would pursue the higher road that is theoretically available to him as the highest lawyer (if not law) in the state.  Prosecutors have this out in criminal trials, too.  They speak for the State -- supposedly the voice for truth and justice, not a conviction at any cost, but rarely is that moral imperative placed higher than the batting average of convictions.

Here's what he had to say about Prop. 8: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/12/19/MN6514RNVU.DTL&type=politics&tsp=1

Who knew that the first vote I ever cast, in 1974, would be so richly rewarded?  Good for you, Jerry.

RIP: Bettie Page, 1923-2008

 

A goddess has fallen.  Good night, sweet princess.

My latest Prop. 8 Rants

Two domestically-committed lesbians, residents of Pasadena, CA, are walking to San Francisco to protest the passage of Prop. 8 and urge its repeal.  Their website is here:

http://www.revoke8.com/

They tell their story, day by day, with little miracles of support, press coverage, offers of shelter, foot rubs, here:

http://www.revoke8.blogspot.com/

Paget and Jones invite, on their website, personal messages to be delivered to the CA Supremes upon their arrival at the State Building in SF.  I know, from having worked for that institution in that building, that my message, in the majesty of THE LAW, is just the sound of flies buzzing at the window screen, irrelevant, unheard.  It holds no weight.

Nonetheless, I drafted my own message/vote for support of Paget and Jones and their cause, and played the "I-used-to-work-for-you" card.  In addition, it is the shorthand version of what I hope they hear from their more credentialed sources.  Here's my message:

To the Chief Justice and Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the State of California:

 

In 1835, Alexis de Toqueville warned that the primary danger of the electoral process in the United States was what he presciently termed, "the tyranny of the majority": those occasions when the majority might use its strength in government to ride roughshod over the rights of minorities. Such a tyranny seemed to Tocqueville the most likely to occur and thus the greatest danger of the untrammeled power of the electorate.

In this last election in California, we observed this very process at work.  A bare majority of the populace, inflamed by misleading advertising bought by out-of-state religious interests, voted to overturn a right found by this court to be irrefutable, an element of basic human dignity -- the right to join in matrimony with the person one loves.  In this recent election, Proposition 8 sought to change the basic framework of California's legal process, its Constitution, in a way to disenfranchise a minority.

 

The process of democracy in this state and this country has not depended on the endorsement of a slim majority to recognize the rights of those who historically have been denied rights.  The advancement of this country has in fact been based on those who give voice to the oppressed, even when that voice could have been drowned out by louder, more strident repression.  It is respectfully submitted to the Court that its recognition of a basic human right of marriage was one of those historical voices, and the attempt to drown out that decision should not be the last voice heard.

 

When it comes to the precious freedoms enshrined in the California Constitution, long respected as the broadest and most inclusive charter in this nation, a bare majority of an artificially-influenced electorate should not be determinative of minority rights.  This is not a mere procedural amendment, but an attempt to silence the still small voice of decency, of basic human dignity.  This, I submit, is a wholesale overhaul of this state's processes, which if allowed, could lead to unimaginable abuses.

 

I speak as one affected, with a small voice.  I speak as a former worker from among your ranks.  I speak as one who wishes, with all her heart, that this state's historical record of the protection of the minority, will continue in this and other instances of the tyranny of the majority.

 

Respectfully submitted,

[Fragile Industries' Real Name]

Former Senior Research Attorney, Civil Central Staff, California Supreme Court