How to Cope with the Modern Dating Debacle

The time has come. Trench warfare has gone on long enough. The Rules have been thrown out the window, the handbook burned, and the rape and pillage is far advanced. And stories like this one are no longer the exception, but the norm.

He sat down and asked what I was reading and did I have a boyfriend because he was asking me out. He smelled like incense and clean linen, and I was overwhelmingly and instantaneously smitten. Among other things, I liked his indifference, confidence and knowledge of foreign film directors. On our first date he explained his theory of exclusive relationships, which was that they shouldn’t exist. We talked about our (and all of our friends’) divorced parents, about how marriage was nothing but a pragmatic financial venture, and about the last time we cheated on someone. He said that his disregard for monogamy wasn’t a chauvinistic throwback, but quite the opposite: the ultimate nod to feminism.

All right, girls. This is how you cope.

First of all, the above 'feminist' speech by the above male is garbage. Garbage, garbage, garbage. It is most important that you all understand, in the core of your being, that it is so. It is crass, manipulative, pseudo-intellectual, selfish bullshit. It is a speech explicitly designed to deny your basic human need for trust, fidelity, and unconditional acceptance. It is intended to keep you disempowered, off-balance, insecure and out of touch with your own emotions. It is a blanket license for a man to behave in a completely selfish, untrustworthy, inconsiderate and irresponsible manner for as long as he knows you. Any man who showers you with this tripe, particularly in a charged 'dating' (Pretty Lady uses the term loosely in this context, for reasons which ought to be clear) scenario, may not ACTUALLY be a jackass, but he is certainly ACTING like one.

It is important that you thoroughly recognize the jackassery of this line of reasoning, because your future happiness and tranquility depend upon it. It does not matter if you are a feminist, progressive, intellectual, agnostic, atheist, or a conservative Christian virgin; it is enough that you are female. And as a female, you will be forced to address predatory tactics advanced by libidinous males, whatever sociocultural ideology you profess. This is a fact of life. You will not be able to form any sort of genuine connection with a male person until you get this clear.

So what do you do? You call him on his bullshit.

It is important that you do not get upset; this gives the male grounds to dismiss you as an insane, irrational, hysterical female. When confronted by crass, manipulative bullshit from a man whom one is dating, or considering dating, or mildly attracted to, or not unattracted to, or absolutely smitten with, your response should always be, "That's bullshit. It's shallow, immature, selfish reasoning. People need commitment and fidelity; it's a fact of life. Get used to it." Then you change the subject to something pleasantly trivial; soon after you make your excuses and depart. You do not contact him again.

One of two things will now happen.

If the fellow is, indeed, a selfish, manipulative loser, you will never hear from him again. It is important for you to understand that THIS IS A GOOD THING. The purpose of the Rules has never been to turn losers into winners by keeping them around; it is to get rid of them as quickly and efficiently as possible, before they do any serious damage. And it is crucial that you understand that losers do very serious damage.

Please trust Pretty Lady on this one.

However. If the fellow is NOT a jackass and a loser, and IF he genuinely likes you, and IF he has a fundamental instinct for decency which has been only temporarily occluded by immersion in modern society, he will be Brought Up Short. He will go into shock; he will be forced to think. It will take him a bit of time to think. This is one of the many reasons that you must not contact him; he needs to understand that you mean it, and that if he's ever going to see you again, he needs to reconsider his philosophy.

If you hear from him again, then, you may proceed to get to know him. You may ultimately decide to date him, sleep with him, marry him, or not; this is entirely up to your discretion. What you do NOT have to do is play a number of tedious, manipulative, exhausting games in order to get him to stick around. You do not have to pretend to agree with his 'progressive' attitude, all the while crossing your fingers that he doesn't go through with it. This is lethal.

Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!

Hooray! Woo hoo!

The Quiet Tragedy of Postmodern Education

Ah, you laugh. Some of you, yes. You do not take the current crisis in our educational system seriously; you do not yet believe that major damage is being done. Amidst your hyperbolic cries of 'censorship!', amidst your cogent and measured analyses of rhetorical excess, it is easy to lose sight of the sordid underbelly of academia. One forgets, all too often, to consider the inevitable--that one day, persons with Ph.D.s in postmodern literary study are bound to encounter someone with a BS detector.

And the results can be tragic.

Ms. Venkatesan lectured in freshman composition, intended to introduce undergraduates to the rigors of expository argument. "My students were very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful," she told Tyler Brace of the Dartmouth Review. "They'd argue with your ideas." This caused "subversiveness," a principle English professors usually favor.

Ms. Venkatesan's scholarly specialty is "science studies," which, as she wrote in a journal article last year, "teaches that scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth." She continues: "Scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct."

The agenda of Ms. Venkatesan's seminar, then, was to "problematize" technology and the life sciences. Students told me that most of the "problems" owed to her impenetrable lectures and various eruptions when students indicated skepticism of literary theory. She counters that such skepticism was "intolerant of ideas" and "questioned my knowledge in very inappropriate ways." Ms. Venkatesan, who is of South Asian descent, also alleges that critics were motivated by racism, though it is unclear why.

The horror of the Undergraduate Seminar is vile enough; one can scarce imagine the carnage that results when said Ph.D. attempts to inflict the rigors of her training, in strict accordance with its own principles, upon the practitioners of empirical scientific research.

According to Venkatesan, the entire lab was "hostile to (her) type of academic discourse" (that is, trying to incorporate literary criticism into molecular biology). She alleges that Christine Richardson, a research technician in the lab, treated her with absolute contempt, always responding to Venkatesan's requests for assistance with either dismissive gestures or complete silence.

Yes, it is all to easy to forget that once, postmodernist theorists were children. There was a time when they were capable of normal social relationships; when they communicated in sentences devoid of phrases like 'interrogates the teleological paradigm', and did not resort to paranoid accusations of racial and sexual discrimination when confronted with an interpersonal conflict.

Because, darlings, professors of postmodern theory are not born. They are made. We send our offspring off to university with the best will in the world, expecting that they will be instilled with the tools to navigate empirical reality, not inculcated with the compulsion to undermine it.

We mourn, all too often, for the destruction of the best minds of our generation; we forget to consider the perils of the mediocre ones. But it is fully possible that without her education, this unfortunate woman could have become a productive member of society. And now...

The waste. The tragic, tragic waste.

The Character Issue

Gracious! That last conversation will certainly go down in history as the one which evoked a spontaneous, heartfelt 'Holy Crap!' from Chris! So Pretty Lady will begin anew, at the top of the page.

My reading of your thoughts is that character and emotional stability trumps policy determinations (or how the policy is determined seems to be more important than what it is). This reminds me of those who voted for Bush over what was being presented as a Clinton I continuation through Gore, that Bush had better 'character'.

'Character', in quotation marks, indeed. Hmph.

What passes for 'character', in the case of Shrub, as I am sure you are ALL aware by now, perfectly illustrates the difference between appearances vs. substance, letter vs. spirit, and rigidity vs. fluidity, in our assessment of such. Our disesteemed (disapproval rating at 71% at this writing, as compared to 67% for Nixon at the time of his resignation) leader's 'character' was, it seems, entirely assessed on the basis of his late-life recognition of Jesus Christ as his personal savior, as well as a certain good-ol'-boy ingenuousness of manner. Pretty Lady cannot think of a single other factor in his favor.

Consider:

Obama: Taught constitutional law, effectively, it seems.

Bush: Decimated constitution.

Obama: Worked as a community organizer among the poor in Chicago.

Bush: Destroyed an oil business, without failing to scrape off a significant personal profit first.

Obama: Organized a campaign so efficient that it outperformed the Clinton machine, which is operating upon two decades of loyalties, organization and strong-arming.

Bush: Grossly mismanaged an illegitimate war, bankrupted the American economy, tore up the Geneva conventions, and destroyed America's international standing.

Obama: Surrounds himself with a cadre of advisors known for their expertise and upright character.

Bush: Surrounds himself with evil, incompetent lizard-brains who tell him convenient fictions which support his preconceived notions.

To answer your question, then: YES, genuine character not only trumps policy determinations, but leads to better ones. Because a CRUCIAL ELEMENT OF CHARACTER includes the WILLINGNESS TO ADMIT MISTAKES. Not adherence to dogma in the face of all conflicting factual evidence.

And finally, to address the accusations of Obama messianism which fly so cavalierly about these days, I refer you to an Andrew Sullivan reader:

Your old farts really do miss the point completely, don't they? These younger people were convinced that political involvement was useless because the the system was so broken. They came of age anywhere from the second Clinton term (Lewinsky) through the disaster of the Bush years. They have no reason to believe that politics can work, or that it is possible to effect any large scale change, so they work locally or just opt out.

This is what Obama has tapped into. The reason all those thousands of young Dems registered for the first time and voted in a primary was because he made them believe honorable politics was possible. And if someone like Obama gets chewed up by the system because the forces arrayed against him are too strong -- just look at the sworn enemies who are teaming up to bring him down, united by nothing more than a vested interest in the status quo -- then they will conclude that the system is as broken as they thought it was.

The mistake is reading this as an Obama personality cult, in which case "grow up" would be appropriate. But the Obamaniacs I meet are nothing like that...

they don't sing his praises, they sing their own. They are intoxicated by the idea of a politics where things they thought were not possible become possible, and people talk to each other like adults. They don't think he's going to fix things, they think they are.

What the old farts might want to consider is that these young people who have no particular vested interest in the current system might be seeing the rot much more clearly than the fogeys who have been entangled in it for decades. And the mature folk might want to accept that the burden of proof is on them to show why such a viscerally disgusting political game is worth playing.

Opting out of that is not immaturity, it's intelligence.

To borrow from Mr. Gandhi: Be the change you want to see in the world. This is what Obama asks of us; not that we believe in him, but that we believe in ourselves.

The Other Side of Empathy

Pretty Lady admits that she should have seen this coming. But, sadly, complete and utter cynicism continues to elude her, despite having had ample life opportunity to acquire it.

You see, Pretty Lady, like Mr. Obama, has a Fatal Weakness--that failure to expect the worst of people, to whom one has given one's best. One would assume, that when one has stood up for a person repeatedly, at some risk to oneself, that this loyalty would be reciprocated; one would, all too frequently, be wrong.

For when we empathize with others, and treat them with human decency accordingly, this does not automatically bestow that decency upon them. All too often, their bruised and tattered souls do not blossom in the warmth of our regard; instead, the jealous, treacherous Ego raises its head and hisses, "Suckaaaaaaaaaa!"

This is when we perform the honorable, respectful and surgical duty of calling them on their shit, and cutting the connection.

UPDATE: Right on.

I want to use this press conference to make people absolutely clear that obviously whatever relationship I had with Reverend Wright has changed, as a consequence of this. I don't think that he showed much concern for me. I don't -- more importantly -- I don't think he showed much concern for what we're trying to do in this campaign and what we're trying to do for the American people and with the American people And obviously, he's free to speak out on issues that are of concern to him and he can do it in any ways that he wants. But I feel very strongly that -- well, I want to make absolutely clear that I do not subscribe to the views that he expressed. I believe they are wrong. I think they are destructive. And to the extent that he continues to speak out, I do not expect those views to be attributed to me.

What a day for interviews!

Fox News actually did a splendid job of interviewing Mr. Obama. Thank you, Chris Wallace, for asking some real questions, and allowing them to be answered!

WALLACE: Senator, one of the central themes of your campaign is that you are a uniter, who will reach across the aisle and create a new kind of politics. Some of your detractors say that you are a paint by the numbers liberal and I’d like to explore this with you.

Over the years, John McCain has broken with his party and risked his career on a number of issues, campaign finance, immigration reform, banning torture. As a president, can you name a hot button issue where you would be willing to cross (ph) Democratic party line and say you know what, Republicans have a better idea here.

OBAMA: Well, I think there are a whole host of areas where Republicans in some cases may have a better idea.

WALLACE: Such as.

OBAMA: Well, on issues of regulation, I think that back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, a lot of the way we regulated industry was top down command and control. We’re going to tell businesses exactly how to do things.

And I think that the Republican party and people who thought about the margins (ph) came with the notion that you know what, if you simply set some guidelines, some rules and incentives for businesses, let them figure out how they’re going to for example reduce pollution. And a cap and trade system, for example, is a smarter way of doing it, controlling pollution, than dictating every single rule that a company has to abide by, which creates a lot of bureaucracy and red tape and oftentimes is less efficient.

I think that on issues of education, I have been very clear about the fact, and sometimes I have gotten in trouble with the teachers union on this, that we should be experimenting with charter schools. We should be experimenting with different ways of compensating teachers.

...

WALLACE: I want to ask you about presidents and listening to generals. Petraeus, I don’t have to tell you, is the architect of the troop surge, a strong advocate of our continued engagement in Iraq. If you become commander-in-chief and he says your plan to get out of Iraq is a mistake, will you replace him?

OBAMA: I will listen to General Petraeus, given the experience that he has accumulated over the last several years. It would be stupid of me to ignore what he has to say.

But it is my job as president, it would be my job as commander in chief to set the mission. To make the strategic decisions in light of the problems that we’re having in Afghanistan, in light of the problems that we are having in Pakistan, the fact that al Qaeda is strengthening as our National Intelligence Estimates have indicated since 2001.

And so we’ve got a whole host of tasks and I’ve also got to worry about the fact that the military has no strategic reserve right now. If we had an emergency in the Korean Peninsula, if we had an emergency elsewhere in the world, we don’t have the troops right now to deal with it. And that’s not my opinion, that’s –

WALLACE: So would you replace him or would you just say, I’m the commander-in-chief, here’s my order.

OBAMA: What I would do is say — what I will do is say we have a new mission. It is my strategic assessment that we have to provide a timetable to the Iraqi government. I want you to tell me how best to execute this new assignment and I am happy to listen to the tactical considerations and any ideas you have.

But what I will not do is continue to let the Iraqi government off the hook and allow them to put our foreign policy on ice while they dither about making decisions about how they are going to cooperate with each other.

...

WALLACE: Finally, and we have about a minute left, what have you learned in this campaign? And I don’t mean, gee, what a great country this is answer.

What mistakes have you made? What have you learned about running for president? What have you learned about yourself?

OBAMA: I’ve learned that I have what I believe is the right temperament for the presidency. Which is, I don’t get too high when I’m high and I don’t get too low when I’m low. And we’ve gone through all kinds of ups and downs.

People forget now that I had been written off last summer. People were writing many of the anguished articles that they’re not writing after our loss in Pennsylvania. On the other hand, after Iowa, when everybody was sure this was over, I think I was more measured and more cautious.

That I think is a temperamental strength.

In terms of what I’ve learned or mistakes that I’ve made, I’m making them all the time and usually it has to do with me talking too much instead of listening. And what I’ve also learned is how much I’ve missed my family and my kids and my wife and that’s been the biggest hardship of this campaign.

Well, finally

Kenny Wilber has given an interview to Salon! After all these years! Woo hoo!

So now you can all go over and find a nice, concise explanation of what Pretty Lady has been talking about, all this time.

You asked, "Do you believe in God?" In exoteric religion, it's a matter of belief. Do you believe in the kind of God who rewards and punishes and will sit with you in some eternal heaven? But in the esoteric form of religion, God is a direct experience. Most contemplatives would call it "godhead." It's so different from the mythic conceptions of God -- the old man in the sky with a gray beard. The word "God" is much more misleading than it is accurate. So there's a whole series of terms that are used instead by the esoteric traditions -- super consciousness, Big Mind, Big Self. This ultimate reality is a direct union that is felt or recognized in a state of enlightenment or liberation.

You see? Very simple.

Now, however, Pretty Lady must take Kenny to task for some basic irrationality.

What do you think of the New Age writers who see a link between mysticism and the weirdness of quantum physics? There have been popular books, like "The Tao of Physics" and "The Dancing Wu Li Masters," as well as the hit film "What the Bleep Do We Know." They point out that reality at the quantum level is inherently probabilistic. And they say that the act of observing a quantum phenomenon plays a critical role in actually creating that phenomenon. The lesson they draw is that consciousness itself can shape physical reality.

They are confused. Even people like Deepak Chopra say this. These are good people; I know them. But when they say consciousness can act to create matter, whose consciousness? Yours or mine? They never get to that. It's a very narcissistic view.

What do you mean, whose consciousness? The Big One! The one you were just talking about! The 'godhead' one! The one that 'creates reality', in all those mythic traditions! Duh. Since our consciousness is, at essence, one with the Big Mind, it is fair to say that we assist in creating this physical world. This is only because of What We Are, however, not anything we do. Usually when we apply our ego-minds to directing the creation of reality, we are more likely to get in the way, and mess things up for everyone.

So Pretty Lady must take these same New Age narcissists to task, anyhow, because they very often do confuse small ego-consciousness with the Big Mind, as Ken points out. They commit horrible acts of abuse with this presumption, forgetting that compassion is the very force that links the ego-mind with the Big Mind, and thus any viewpoint which lacks compassion is, by definition, unGodly.

Furthermore, when a small ego-mind transcends itself to directly perceive unity with God, the concerns of that small ego-mind aren't so very prepossessing anymore. Thus the trivial matter of whether the illness goes away or not, whether Great Wealth manifests or not, becomes completely irrelevant. Thus a person who fails to manifest a Complete Recovery, or a mansion in the hills, is not necessarily a failure in a spiritual sense. Anyone who thinks they are is indeed a narcissistic idiot.

The Definition of Ego

The key truth about the Clintons is that they are strongest when being attacked. It was Gingrich that gave Clinton purpose and direction in the mid-1990s; and it was Ken Starr who gave them a life-line in the late 1990s. They are geniuses at pivoting off those who attack them. So the real answer to the Clintons is to let them collapse on their own terms, to watch them fail to get the necessary votes and delegates to win and desperately try to leverage the constructive forces of their opponent to gain back the White House.

Every push against them only strengthens them more. Obama needs to restate his core positive message, reach out to independents, Republicans, Hispanics, blacks and the young, and get out of the Clintons' sociopathic path. You only get bloodied if you fight them. And watching them self-destruct, slowly and by their own efforts, is the only way they will not turn defeat into some kind of Pyrrhic victory.

--Andrew Sullivan

Darlings, this is what Pretty Lady has been saying, and saying and saying. This is the nature of the Vicious Cycle; this is the Harbinger of Apocalpyse within the mind. It is the attack thoughts of the ego.

The ego thrives upon attack; attack defines its entire existence. As long as it is fighting, it clings to the illusion of its own reality. Suffering makes it real; death makes it real. Thus the ego is irrevocably committed to death, and only to death.

(On a more pragmatic note--this is precisely the sort of mentality we do NOT need, at the helm of a major government, in a world filled with strife and unrest. Regardless of the specific policies advocated by that mentality.)

The World is Full of Magic, and We Are All Zombies

Pretty Lady is not at all suprised by this story of the virtuoso at the train station:

In the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run -- for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look.

No, Mr. Slatkin, there was never a crowd, not even for a second.

It was all videotaped by a hidden camera. You can play the recording once or 15 times, and it never gets any easier to watch. Try speeding it up, and it becomes one of those herky-jerky World War I-era silent newsreels. The people scurry by in comical little hops and starts, cups of coffee in their hands, cellphones at their ears, ID tags slapping at their bellies, a grim danse macabre to indifference, inertia and the dingy, gray rush of modernity.

Pretty Lady herself has been Openly Mocked, here in New York, for glorying in the daily miracles which surround her--the afternoon sunlight cascading across an ancient stone high-rise, fluted with mythic carvings; the jazz saxophone echoing off the urban canyons at dusk; the layers of intricate graffiti peeling in rusty tatters on an ancient fence; the riotous umbrellas of extravagantly pink flowers, mimosa and cherry and dogwood and tulip magnolia, improbably festooning the Brooklyn avenues in April. There have been times when she was innocently sitting on a train, and a young Opera Singer strode magnificently onto her car and treated her to an aria. There have been days when she nearly gave herself heart failure, dancing on the sidewalk to the pipings of Peruvian musicians. She has nearly been run over, pausing on the street to gape at a particularly expressive gargoyle. Heady perfumes of bakeries and crysanthemums and sugar-roasted nuts and Chinese laundries all mixed have nearly sent her swooning. She deliberately walks through sprinklers and loose fire hydrants in midsummer, and will gladly bicycle seven miles so that she might jump into the ocean at Brighton Beach and cycle back, cool and sunburnt and salty.

These myriad miracles are everywhere, darlings, and most of them are absolutely free. Although the opera singer and the violinist could use your tip.

With all of this tragic oblivion in the mass of humanity, is it any wonder that artists nearly starve? Pretty Lady used to sell her work on the street, and she can tell you that this is not a way to make a living. Art is the one commodity where the law of Supply and Demand has no bearing, as Supply is nearly infinite, and Demand is entirely determined by Context. She once had a gentleman stop at her table in Soho and declare, "look, Margie, these are just as good as the ones we saw in that gallery over there, for four thousand dollars."

Pretty Lady replied, "Indeed they are, and you may purchase them for forty!"

The fellow laughed and walked away.

Brushing Shoulders with the Big Leagues

Pretty Lady is delighted to report that her most respected colleague, James Kalm, has been featured in the LA Times! Moreover, the article is quite congenial in tone:

Koons set the tone for most of the press' questioning with his serious comments about the theory behind his art. Then Kalm lifted his camera above a cluster of journalists and said rather loudly: "Would you comment for the Kalm Report, sir?" Noting that a Koons piece had sold for $23.6 million at Sotheby's last November, a record auction price for a work by a living artist, Kalm asked whether people "are too obsessed by the art market now?"

"I didn't sell the work. A collector sold the work," Koons replied, smiling politely. "I think about the production of work, I think about the opportunity for the work. But I really don't get involved with the art market."

"You don't get involved with the art market?" Kalm repeated, his incredulity registering.

"When I say involved with it -- I'm not preoccupied with it," Koons responded.

It's a moment that won't be captured elsewhere.

The Koons video

The Blogger Show video (Pretty Lady is in this!)

James Kalm YouTube Page

The Therapeutic Discourse

Darlings, do not panic. Everything is going to be okay. Pretty Lady promises you.

This blanket truth holds up, darlings, whatever the specifics of your agitation; whether you are mourning the results of the Pennsylvania Primary, tracking the Harbingers of the Apocalypse, or predicting the collapse of Western Civilization, whatever you conceive it to be. Indeed, the apparent source of your concern is immaterial; for the purposes of this discussion, we will regard all stressors as equally disturbing to your peace of mind.

The fact is, Pretty Lady more than suspects that, as a society, we Americans are well on our way toward hitting Rock Bottom, if we are not already there. The facts are too well known to require much comment; our government at its highest echelons freely authorizes and encourages torture, in violation of both the Geneva Conventions and basic decency; our currency is headed the way of Argentina's; our citizens are being forced from their homes, denied adequate medical attention, 'educated' in cattle pens and brothels, and our children are ripped from their homes by a precipitous and indifferent State.

Meanwhile, to all appearances, our Presidential elections are being decided on such issues as a candidate's taste in collar jewelry. Truly, can tumbrils and guillotines be far behind?

And yet Pretty Lady tells you: Have no fear. This is a Holy Moment.

For when there is overwhelming toxicity in any body, whether it be public or private, that poison must be Purged. This is a law of Nature, as surely as night follows day. The process of Purging is not an enjoyable one, nor a quick one; it proceeds in slow, painful and recognizable stages. And one of these stages is the Healing Crisis.

This is the moment when symptoms suddenly become much, much worse. This is when the patient folds acutely, and bolts for the lavatory. The fever spikes, the spasms worsen, peristalsis goes haywire. There seems to be no Stable Ground to be found in any reality; the psyche roils in hallucinatory delirium. And George Stephanopolos continues asking impossibly inane questions with a shit-eating smirk upon his face.

As any person who has survived open-heart surgery, anaphylactic shock, or cognitive behavioral therapy will tell you, the Healing Process is not for wimps. One's world literally crumbles, and must be reassembled from the ashes. One cannot build on false foundations; these foundations must be razed before a single solid stone may be erected.

False foundations have their tenacity, however. They are only removed with much Resistance, much Denial, much raging against the dying of the light.

Fear not. Integrity will emerge from this turmoil; the calm, the clearheaded, the competent and sane will eventually prevail. Pain has its integral purpose. All is, and ever shall be, well.

Fiscal Responsibility

Be aware, Pretty Lady is not entirely a Pollyanna when it comes to the cold hard facts of Economics. She is aware that what is bought, must eventually be paid for; she is aware that however much we cleverly strive to create Wealth out of airy machinations, eventually these proceedings must manifest something tangible and grounded, or we shall crash to earth most painfully.

But she would just like to draw your attention to this:

Mrs. Clinton, of New York, currently has $10.3 million in outstanding primary debts but only $9.5 million available to cover them, leaving an $800,000 shortfall at the end of March. In February, the Clinton campaign had unpaid bills of $8.7 million and $11.7 million in cash.

By comparison, Mr. Obama of Illinois, who raised $42 million in March, had $43 million in cash for the coming primaries and a campaign debt of less than $660,000 at the end of March. Mr. Obama is spending 75 cents for every dollar he is taking in; Mrs. Clinton is spending $1.10.

Now back to our regularly scheduled discussion.

Gracious, how very very sane

Pretty Lady hesitates to touch Controversial Issues, particularly when tempers are high, the election season being what it is. But she was much struck by the sense of this:

...the so-called 95-10 legislation. This idea satisfies neither side of an absolutist clash completely - how could it and still be common ground? - yet it strives for a 95% reduction in abortion over 10 years, not by legal mandate that would contradict the Senator's belief that this decision must remain that of the mother, but instead by ensuring that no woman faces such decision without having already had the benefit of responsible information about abstinence and contraception. In the event of a pregnancy, the proposal would supply objective information about fetal development, the proper guidance of a parent if the prospective mother is a minor, and the public's assurance of necessary economic support to carry the pregnancy to term, and if it be the mother's informed choice, the adoption of her child.

If Pretty Lady may get personal for a moment--she has lately had cause to observe that Nature is a Wastrel. Life, in the churning workings of unbridled Nature, is not a rare, precious thing, carefully and thriftily meted out in measured doses to earnestly tilled and deserving soil, but rather an overflowing mass of roiling abundance, hurled to the four winds in gargantuan fistfuls, to thrive or wither where it may fall.

(In other words, Spring has come to Pretty Lady's neighborhood, and it is making her a bit heady. She does apologize.)

Thus, it seems to her that carefully tilling of Life is up to the measured consciousness of those that possess such consciousness, not to those forces that manifestly Could Care Less. In plain terms--when coping with issues that involve the nurturing of Life, it seems best to use a bit of Common Sense. And the abovementioned suggestions seem to her to be eminently sensible.

On Decency

Finally, I want to say a word about the basic decency I have seen in Mr. Obama. Mrs. Clinton continues to throw the Rev. Wright up in his face as part of her mission to keep stoking the fears of White America. Every time she does this I shout at the TV, “Say it, Obama! Say that when she and her husband were having marital difficulties regarding Monica Lewinsky, who did she and Bill bring to the White House for ’spiritual counseling?’ THE REVEREND JEREMIAH WRIGHT!”

But no, Obama won’t throw that at her. It wouldn’t be right. It wouldn’t be decent. She’s been through enough hurt. And so he remains silent and takes the mud she throws in his face.

--Michael Moore, of all people

Darlings, Pretty Lady is well aware how shamefully she's been neglecting you. Truthfully, there are many days these days when she wonders if she's said all there is to say; there are days, many of them, when she would rather sit in silence.

Because sometimes, the decent thing to say is nothing at all. Especially when people are flinging mud in one's face.

Not that Pretty Lady has sustained such a great deal of such flinging. Most of her dear readers are generally quite civil. But now and then, a feuding acquaintance of hers will so far forget him or herself as to launch a fusillade of ad feminam remarks as would make her grandmother's ears blister. It is at such times that she wonders--not if she ought to respond in kind, but--did this person, this vulgar mud-slinger, ever have a grandmother of his or her own?

Because Pretty Lady learned, from the cradle on up, that there are certain things that Are Not Said. We do not say these things because we are thinking them so loudly that we are momentarily deafened to all incoming traffic; we do not say them because they are so hugely, tragically obvious; we do not say them out of sheer human compassion. And if we are pressed so hard that compassion vanishes, there is still Basic Decency to restrain us.

The irony of such decency is that it largely comes into play when dealing with persons who are a stranger to the notion. Civilization is not for the weak, nor for the faint of heart; it was designed to combat the juvenile tantrums of those whose passions are stronger than either their character or their intellect. For there to be any hope of carving a bit of peace and harmony out of chaos, those who understand what it is to be civilized must do their very best to be so. Even under Extreme Provocation.

So if you are, perchance, wondering why Pretty Lady does not respond in kind, when those people say those things, when she very easily could, you must know it is because she won't. Period.

Balance

From the comments section in the New York Times:

For the conservative supporters, from McCain to Hillary, who thought last night went well, let me propose some topics for McCain v Obama in the GE:

Do you repudiate yor wife for her thievery of medications in 1989?

Explain your role in the Keating Five.

Discuss your decision to leave your first wife after having an affair with your current wife.

How do you respond to your fellow GOP colleagues who say your temperment is unfit to be Commander in Chief?

What type of psychological scars has your experience with torture left on you?

How often do you attend church and why did you switch religions as an adult?

Might these kinds of questions upset right wing America? If so, then last night’s debate should disgust you as well.

— Posted by Truth teller

Pennsylvanians, on the other hand, think we're smarter than that

From the Philadelphia Daily News:

A candidate's campaign may be the best indicator of how she or he will govern. If so, an Obama administration would be well-managed, inclusive and astonishingly broad-based. It would make good use of technology and communicate a message of unity and, yes, hope.

It would not be content with eking out slim victories by playing to the narrow interests of the swing voters of the moment while leaving the rest of the country as deeply divided as ever. Instead, an Obama administration would seek to expand the number of Americans who believe that they have a personal stake in our collective future - and that they have the power to change things.

It would motivate them to hold their representatives accountable for making it happen. That is, after all, the only way to get us out of Iraq, to address global warming, to make us energy-independent. It's the only way to resist the forces arrayed against providing universal health care, rebuilding our infrastructure and returning our schools to world-class status. It's the only way to give our children the means to compete with children in other parts of the world who are healthier, better-educated and have more opportunities than many of our own.

An Obama administration would be freer of the the corrupting influence of big-money donors and corporate interests. Obama has raised $240 million overall, with half coming in contributions of less than $200. People who contribute to political campaigns can feel they "own" a candidate and so Obama would owe allegiance to the wide swath of America that has financed his campaign.

Based on his experience in running a quarter-billion-dollar enterprise with thousands upon thousands of volunteers, we could expect an Obama administration to be well-managed and cost-effective, with the president choosing forward-thinking advisers committed to his program, demanding that they work as a team and pay attention to details.

He would be steady and calm, given neither to irrational exuberance or outbursts of anger. He would make mistakes, that's for sure, but he could be expected to recognize them, adjust, and move forward.

He would adjust his views to reality rather than trying to adjust reality to his views.

Memo to ABC News--You Must Think We're Stupid

Dear ABC News,

Thank you for the circus. You forgot the bread.

Faith, Rigidity and Recklessness

Darling Mr. Sullivan shares Pretty Lady's tendency to reckless blogging:

I think what Obama probably meant by it is a certain kind of religion, a neurotic, rigid variety that is often - but not always - part of the fundamentalist psyche. Many atheists and fundamentalists believe that there is only one valid form of religion: fundamentalism. And so you can see why they would intrepret Obama's off-hand remark the way they have - as a denigration of all faith. But those of us in grayer areas and those of us who believe Obama's own protestations of faith see something more complicated. What we see - and what history has sometimes shown - is that economic, political and cultural frustration can indeed be expressed by the rise a certain kind of religious belief. And that correlation - between the disorienting transitions of globalization and the rise of religious fundamentalism - is real (see The Conservative Soul). When the world disappoints or disorients, the appeal of a more absolute and unquestioning faith as a rock in a storm is powerful. The key factors are not just economic stagnation but cultural loss and a lack of faith in the responsiveness of the relevant political institutions.

I certainly find it hard to understand the rise of Islamism without understanding the abject political and economic failure of many Arab states to respond to the genuine desires and needs of their citizens. In fact, I thought this link between the bitterness created by unrepresentative political institutions, economic failure and Islamism was a core feature of neoconservative thought.

Pretty Lady herself has always been torn upon the issue of Rigidity in Religion. On the one hand, she sees a rigid adherence to the superficial forms of one's faith, coupled with aggressive evangelism, to be one of the primary offending factors of religious zealotry. In Pretty Lady's life, her faith is her most central, private, and deeply personal element of self, as well as the means through which she connects with others; therefore, those who ambush her with religious conversation and then proceed to flog her with a fundamentalist stick are engaging in the most egregious violation of her boundaries possible. To say nothing of those rude suicide bombers.

On the other hand, however, persons who are swamped in chaos, moral or otherwise, need an exceptionally strong stick to grasp, in order to anchor themselves. Thus as much as she deplores the more aggressive elements of fundamentalism, the essential certitude it offers to distressed minds may provide an invaluable and irreplaceable element of spiritual guidance. Far be it for her to deny suffering persons their major source of comfort.

This is why Pretty Lady subscribes to M. Scott Peck's notion that we are not all in the same place, spiritually. This would appear to be a no-brainer, but it seems to her that a great number of conflicts, both personal and global, are predicated upon a wilful denial of this obvious fact. In Pretty Lady's view, it is perfectly possible to ground one's faith in an absolute truth without imposing control upon others; the very term 'grounding' implies that faith is a vertical construct, not necessarily a lateral one. Therefore the fact that one's neighbor does not believe the same things, in the same way, as oneself, provides no obstacle whatsoever to loving them.