#Same as every other nation; religion; family; culture. Like everybody else they are as good or bad or interesting as imagination allows

[northwest-by-a-train]

Oh this is scathing

[arcticdementor]

When we hear the term “Deep State,” we tend to think of people staffing the federal bureaucracy. I want to suggest to you that that is an incomplete way to think about it. The Deep State in Western liberal democracies consist not only of government bureaucrats, but also of the leadership in major corporations, leading universities, top media, medicine and law, science, the military, and even sports. A more accurate way to think about what we are dealing with comes from the Neoreactionary term “the Cathedral,” which NRxers use in more or less the same way that 1950s Beats used the term “the Establishment.” I like the term “Cathedral” because it entails the religious commitment these elites have to their principles. You can no more debate these principles with them than you can debate with a religious fundamentalist. They adhere to them as if they were revealed truths.

Yet they still like to pretend that they are liberals — that they favor open, reasoned discourse. This is, in fact, a lie. It is a lie that they depend on to conceal the hegemonic intolerance that they wish to impose on everybody under their authority.

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It is true that no society can tolerate everything. What the Cathedral is now doing is radically limiting discourse, and demonizing as heretics all those within its purview who dissent, no matter how reasonable their objections. (And now Facebook is incentivizing some of its users to report their friends as potential “extremists.” Please get off Facebook now!) The Cathedral seeks to make all of society over in the mold of a college campus. The Cathedral is growing ever more radical. In recent months, we have seen the US military embrace wokeness (to use the slang term for the most vibrant and activist form of the Cathedral’s religion). You would think that it makes no sense for the leadership of a racially diverse armed forces to embrace and indoctrinate its officers in a neo-Marxist theory that causes everyone to see everyone else primarily in hostile racial terms, but that is exactly what has happened. In time — and not much time, either — we are going to see young people who were once from families and social classes that once were the most stalwart supporters of the military declining to join the armed forces in which they are taught that they are guilty by virtue of their skin color.

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That’s the Cathedral and its values. The Cathedral has also taken over corporate America, and the professions. I hardly need to elaborate on this further, not for regular readers of this blog. It was a hard knock this past week to see that the US Supreme Court, which some of us had thought would be the last line of defense for anybody traditional in this soft-totalitarian Cathedral theocracy, refused to take on the Gavin Grimm case, and the Barronelle Stutzman case. The Cathedral line in favor of privileging LGBTs over religious people and secular people who don’t accept the full LGBT gospel is hardening.

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I realized over the weekend why I have been so affected by the experience of being here in Hungary these past three months. It has clarified for me the nature of this conflict. First, take a look at this powerful piece by Angela Nagle, writing about the views of Irish intellectual and cultural critic Desmond Fennell. 

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What does this have to do with Hungary? Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his government have brought down the wrath of European Union leaders over Hungary’s recent law restricting sex education for children, and information about LGBT presented to children. The prime minister of the Netherlands, in extraordinarily bellicose language, threatened to “bring Hungary to its knees” over the law. I am reliably informed by an American source in a position to know that in Washington, even among conservative elites, Viktor Orban is seen as nothing but a fascist. I have been writing all summer about the radical disjunction between Hungary as it is, and Hungary as described by Western elite discourse (media and otherwise). This is by no means to say that Orban’s government is flawless — it certainly is not; corruption, for example, is a big deal here — but to say that there has to be some reason why Western elites of both the Left and the Right despise Hungary so intensely, and slander it so.

There’s a lesson in all this, I believe, for where conservatives and traditionalists in the West are, and where we are likely to go. I have come to believe that the standard left-liberal and right-liberal critiques of Orban — “Magyar Man Bad” — are just as shallow as the “Orange Man Bad” critique of Donald Trump. I say that as someone who was critical of Trump myself, though I credited him for smashing the complacent GOP establishment. I write this blog post in the spirit of Tucker Carlson’s excellent January 2016 Politico piece titled, “Donald Trump Is Shocking, Vulgar, and Right.”

I’ve been reading lately a 2019 book, The Light That Failed, by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes. Both men are liberal scholars who undertake to explain why liberalism failed in Central Europe and Russia after the fall of the Cold War. It’s a remarkably insightful book, one that any conservative with an interest in the problem should read, even though its authors are liberal democrats. They write:

A refusal to genuflect before the liberal West has become the hallmark of the illiberal counter-revolution throughout the post-communist world and beyond. Such a reaction cannot be casually dismissed with the trite observation that “blaming the West” is a cheap way for non-Western leaders to avoid taking responsibility for their own failed policies. The story is much more convoluted and compelling than that. It is a story, among other things, of liberalism abandoning pluralism for hegemony. [Emphasis mine — RD]

You would have thought that in any reasonable pluralistic polity, a sovereign nation choosing to restrict what its children can learn about human sexuality would be of little interest to other nations within that polity. After all, Hungary is not France any more than Estonia is England. There is an immense amount of diversity in Europe. But see, the Cathedral’s liberalism — whether in America or in the EU — is not pluralistic, but hegemonic.

Krastev and Holmes (henceforth, “the authors”) point out that after 1989, the West expected Central European countries to imitate them in every way. The authors — who, remember, are liberals — write:

Without pressing the analogy too far, it’s interesting to observe that the style of regime imitation that took hold after 1989 bears an eerie resemblance to Soviet-era elections where voters, overseen by Party officials, pretended to “choose” the only candidates who were running for office.

…

The authors explain that the reforms demanded by the West weren’t like “grafting a few foreign elements onto indigenous traditions,” but rather “put inherited identity at risk” and stoked “fears of cultural erasure.” From my perspective, this is what you see when you get over here and start looking more closely at what George Soros and people like him, both within and outside of government, did, and seek to do. And so, as the authors put it:

[P]opulism’s political rise cannot be explained without taking account of widespread resentment at the way (imposed) no-alternative Soviet communism, after 1989, was replaced by (invited) no-alternative Western liberalism.

Here’s something I bet you didn’t know about Viktor Orban. After the 2008 crash, Western governments bailed out banks left and right. When Orban came to power in 2010, he chose not to do that, instead taking the side of hard-pressed Hungarian homeowners who had been allowed to take out home loans in Swiss francs. He and his party passed a law to protect homeowners at the expense of the banks.

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Remember, they wrote this in 2019, but think of this principle applied to now. If you are Viktor Orban, and you look to the West in 2021, you see a United States that is destroying itself with Critical Race Theory wokeness, which is starting to come to Western Europe. You see the Left here in Hungary starting to embrace it (e.g., the Black Lives Matter statue the liberal Budapest city government erected earlier this year), and you know that it will be bad for your country if this poisonous ideology takes root. So you encourage Hungary’s national soccer team not to take the knee before matches.

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And so, the disintegrating West, headed towards shipwreck, is going to bring Hungary to its knees for trying to protect itself.

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The authors go on to say that what it means to be a good Western liberal is changing so fast that people in the East never know for sure what vision of society they are supposed to imitate. Think about what it was like for us Americans. I was born in 1967, and educated by schools, by the media, and by every aspect of culture to believe in Dr. Martin Luther King’s colorblind vision. I took it seriously, and I believed in it, and do believe in it. But now the same liberals who argued for that are now arguing that this vision was wrong — that to truly be against racism, you must train yourself to think in exactly the same categories that white segregationists used prior to the Civil Rights revolution. It makes no sense. You come to understand that you have been conned. Never, ever believe liberals: they will change the rules on you, and blame you for your own confusion.

The authors go on to say that sex education in the schools has been a huge flashpoint of conflict within Central and Eastern European societies. It has to do with parents losing the ability to transmit their values to their children. In the flush of post-1989 enthusiasm, young people didn’t so much rebel against their parents as to feel pity for them, and to stop listening to them. The young took their catechism from the Western cathedral. Sex ed was a neuralgic point of the overall struggle between Central European populists, who believed that the traditions and the national heritage of these countries were in danger of being wiped out by the West. Imagine, then, what Hungarian voters must think when they hear the Dutch prime minister threaten to bring their country to its knees because he knows better what they should be teaching their children than they do.

The authors tell a story about how Viktor Orban, at the time an up-and-coming liberal from the countryside, was publicly humiliated by a well-known liberal MP from Budapest’s urban intelligentsia, who adjusted Orban’s tie at a reception, as if doing a favor for a hick cousin.

They go on to explain Orban’s illiberalism by quoting his criticism that liberalism is “basically indifferent to the history and fate of the nation.” Liberal universalism “destroys solidarity,” Orban believes. (“If everybody is your brother, then you are an only child.”) Orban believes that liberal policies will lead to the dissolution of the Hungarian nation because liberals by nature think of the nation as an impediment to the realization of their ideals.

The authors go on to say that Orban has long campaigned on the abuse of the public patrimony by the regime that governed Hungary after 1989, when Communist insiders used their connections to plunder what was left of the public purse, and left the weak to fend for themselves. This attitude explains Orban’s hostility to the banks after the 2008 crash. “[I]n Central and Eastern Europe, defending private property and capitalism came to mean defending the privileges illicitly acquired by the old communist elites,” they write.

(Readers, did you know any of this context about Orban and other critics of liberalism from Central Europe? Doesn’t it make you wonder what more you’re not being told?)

…

What’s preposterous about it? I know these guys are liberals, but what Duda identifies is the difference between soft totalitarianism and hard totalitarianism. In both cases, the Poles don’t get to decide for themselves.

There’s more to the book, but I’ll stop here for today. You don’t have to believe that Viktor Orban or any of these other politicians are saints in order to understand why they believe what they believe — and why people vote for them. The Cathedral did the same thing to Trump and to Trump’s supporters. Yes, there were some Trump voters with disreputable motives, and in any case Trump was by and large not an effective president. But the anti-Trump opposition’s passionate belief in its own righteousness rendered it helpless to understand why so many people hated it, and do hate it still. Trump’s own incompetence made it harder to take that critique seriously.

Trump lost, and most everything he did was wiped away by his successor. Viktor Orban wins — and that is the unforgiveable sin in the eyes of the Cathedral.

Here is the radicalizing thing, though. As you will know if you’ve been reading this blog, Viktor Orban appears to be building a conservative deep state in Hungary. His government has transferred a fortune in public funds and authority over some universities to privately controlled institutions. It is difficult to accept this, at least for me. At the same time, it is impossible for me to look at what has happened in my own country, with the Cathedral now extending its control over every aspect of American life, and to criticize Orban for this. The alternative seems to be surrendering your country and its traditions to the Cathedral, which pretends to be liberal, but which is in fact growing even more authoritarian and intolerant than anything Orban and his party stand for.

It is becoming harder to think of liberalism in the sense we have known it as viable anymore. Me, I would actually prefer to live in a more or less liberal, pluralistic society, where California was free to be California, and Louisiana free to be Louisiana, and so forth. This is not the world we live in.

…

The controversy around Viktor Orban is not only about an obstreperous Hungarian politician who doesn’t play well with others. It’s about the future of the West.

UPDATE: To put it succinctly, we might need soft authoritarianism to save us from soft totalitarianism.

[engmjr419]

Skipping along the Surface: Exaggeration in the Antebellum Era

Illustrations from a collection of animal fables, The Public and Private lives of Animals from 1877. Source.

       In the early half of the 19th century, the cities were where you wanted to be. An unexpected number of young people were suddenly packing their humble, rural lives and going to the city in hopes of wealth, social life, and to join the tail end of the industrial revolution.

From the moment people set foot in these utopias of stone and iron, the culture around them shifted. These people were no longer in their small towns where everybody knew everybody else (think Huckleberry Finn) instead they were in large cities, with streets full of bustling strangers (who you could never know every single of as more arrived daily). This caused a massive cultural shift in how people interacted with each other (not unlike our technological age), where people feared each other, the unknown, the stranger.

An illustration of a New York Street from the book “Nooks and Crannys of Old New York” (1899). Source

Granted, a fear of strangers has always been present, however there is a stark difference between a single carpetbagger (a lovely word I know) entering your small farming town and an entire street being filled with faces you don’t know. This fear of being unable to discern who can be trusted and who cannot from face alone, caused people to turn to Advice manuals, psuedosciences, and become interested in the externality of the human form with daguerreotype (a form of early photography) galleries, the “art” of Minstrelsy, and what the surface of the form tells. This use of Exaggeration of the human form in the 19th century, from Literature to the pseudoscience of Physiognomy to Minstrelsy, served as the surface of underlining societal fears and beliefs.

The term “Exaggeration” typically simply means, as defined by Merriam – Webster “an act or instance of exaggerating something, overstatement of the truth.” However, I will be asking you to, well, exaggerate the meaning a bit, to include any act twists the truth, draw excessive notice to certain aspects to something, or overall, to make a situation seem comedically unrealistic.

Count Alfred D’Orsay’s 1843 Help Manual on Proper Etiquette, Howe’s 1856 Complete Ball-room Hand Book. Source / Source

        This mass migration of the youth to urban areas caused moralists to worry over how these young middle-class people separated from the “surveillance” of their families, towns, and churches would learn how to “properly” live life. Thus, this issue was solved by dozens of teachers, clergymen, and writers in the 1830s who published numerous manuals for living life, in an endless number of topics, like the ones pictured above. These manuals instructed young readers how to have proper manners, morals, appearance, good habits, along with more specific topics like proper dress, ball room dance, what to eat, when and whom to marry, among all other things (Haltunnen 1).

While some were simple etiquette books other manuals exaggerated the dangers of the city, likely only furthering this fear of strangers. While new arrivals were likely easy targets for what these authors describe as “Confidence Men” who preyed on trust, the descriptions of them and their influence was often fantastical. One manual stated, “The moment the inexperienced youth sets his foot on the sidewalk of the city, he is marked and watched by eyes that he never dreamed of” later on in the same passage, “There is she…who now makes war upon virtue and exults in being a successful recruiting-officer of hell.” (2)

These manuals would use words and phrases like “Seducer” and “Force of Evil” to describe the criminals in the cities, linking them to the devil and hell (as Christianity still held a firm grasp on people). Some even claiming the mere presence of these young people in the city can “corrupt them”:

“Feel as they may, contact with evil it is impossible to avoid. If they walk the streets of the city, or tread the floors of the hall, it is to see the sights, and hear sounds, and be subjected to influences, all of which, gradually and imperceptibly, but surely and permanently, are drawing the lines of deformity on their hearts” (5).

They would twist and exaggerate these conmen into masterful archetypal villains, cloaked in the shadows of the large city buildings. In the antebellum advice literature, the dramatic plot became an “inexperienced young man had just set foot in the city when he is approached by a confidence man seeking to dupe and destroy him” (3). This exaggeration of these conmen simply stood in because of people’s fears about strangers in this era (and their influence), along with the fears people had about being duped and deceptions.

The Norton Critical Edition Cover for The Confidence-Man. Source

      Herman Melville, famously known for Moby Dick, published a satirical book in 1857 about “Confidence Men” simply titled The Confidence-Man, commenting on people’s fears of these conmen and the general fear of “the other” people held. In this book, nearly every character is questionable regarding their motives, personality, and “truth” as it were, with very little description regarding them beyond appearance. Some characters only characteristic is their appearance, like “the man in the gray suit” who is a supposed charity man, making light of how people constantly questioned the people around them on surface level characteristics. The man in the grey suit makes a plea of charity, of confidence, to a rich man after explaining his dream of a “world-wide” charity fueled by the taxation of the entire globe:

"Eight hundred millions! More than that sum is yearly expended by mankind, not only in vanities, but miseries. Consider that bloody spendthrift, War. And are mankind so stupid, so wicked, that, upon the demonstration of these things they will not, amending their ways, devote their superfluities to blessing the world instead of cursing it? Eight hundred millions! They have not to make it, it is theirs already; they have but to direct it from ill to good.” (The Confidence Man, pg. 61)

The expanse and exaggeration of this scheme was obviously a prodding to the audience, as the man repeats the phrase “Eight Hundred Millions” to draw the listener back in time and time again as they get lost in his words. While this man is purposely left grey, he uses the language help manuals specified to “Confidence Man” later in the book egging a woman on by preying on her religion and morals. “"Entire stranger! …Ah, who would be a stranger? In vain, I wander; no one will have confidence in me… No one can befriend me, who has not confidence” He says, stretching a hand out to the woman in true or mock desperation, exaggerating his words so it seems he has no assistance in the world (despite the fact two other people gave money to him earlier in the book) (68). The book allows a fog to be cast over everybody, the conmen might be a singular conman in costumes, multiple conmen, or not conmen at all, it is up for the reader to decide after all.

Leonine specimens: Illustration in Giambattista della Porta’s De humana physiognomia (Naples, 1602). Source

      This fear of strangers pushed people to figure out methods of determining who is “malicious” and “conniving” in the streets. What better place to turn than a pseudoscience entirely focused on outer appearance? Physiognomy is a pseudoscience about determining people’s inner characteristics by their outer appearance. It focuses on how people’s heads, features, and sometimes limbs are shaped, sized, and compared with themselves and each other. It is readily apparent why people in the 19th century readily enveloped this, choosing to exaggerate people’s appearance for the sake of satisfaction.

Physiognomy have roots dating back to 500 BC, where “Aristotle wrote that large-headed people were mean, those with small faces were steadfast, broad faces reflected stupidity, and round faces signaled courage”. In the 1600s, the first book regarding Physiognomy was published by Giambattista della Porta, believed to be the “Father” of the psuedoscience. The above illustration is from that book, comparing humans to animals (that one being a rather odd-looking lion), implying shared personalities. He guessed that humans have a “pure essence”, suggesting “that one could deduce an individual’s character from empirical observation of his physical features” (Waldorf).

Various books were published regarding Physiognomy in the 19th century, including Comparative Physiognomy: or, Resemblances Between Men and Animals in 1852 and Portraits of Patients from Surrey County Asylum in 1855. We can see the fascination of Physiognomy continue into the 1900s with books such as Vaught's Practical Character Reader from 1902, and The Physiognomy of Hands from 1917.

An illustration from Comparative Physiognomy, comparing “Negreos” to the profile of a fish, pg. 171. Source.

     Comparative Physiognomy: or, Resemblances Between Men and Animals thus calls back to the first book of Physiognomy, comparing the human form to that of animals and implying shared traits with an emphasis on nationality. From simply reading the chapter list it becomes obvious there is some racial bias in play (Which comes all too easily to Physiognomy).  Germans, Englishmen, and Prussians are compared to animals representing strength and cunning like lions, bulls, and cats while “Negroes”, Jews, and “Chinamen” are compared to prey and service animals like fishes, goats, and hogs. The book states, “Are not those half-closed, drowsy eyes, as seen in the portrait on the following page, a striking element of Chinese beauty?”  and “The best point in the character of a hog is not a ravenous disposition, but simply a taste for anything and everything—an un-bounded appetite, perfect digestion, and great tendency to grow fat” (Redfield, 167-168).

An illustration from Comparative Physiognomy comparing a portrait of a woman to that of a hog, pg. 167. Source

In the chapter that compares Africans to the fishes along their coast, the author states an interesting argument:

Catching negroes is akin to fishing, and the caught are stowed away on board vessels like cod-fish and whale oil; and were it not that they resemble fishes, and that there is a feeling of this, and a dim perception of it, the business would be perfectly infernal. There is always something to relieve men from the charge of being devils incarnate, and to place them in a position in which their reformation is not to be despaired of  (81).

James W. Redfield, M.D. (the author of this strange fiction) implies, moreover states, that Physiognomy, the exaggerated dehumanization, enables them to conduct the act of slavery without being condemned in the eyes of god. By dehumanizing the people they are enslaving, comparing them to mere fish on a pole, it enables them to characterize the other. By exaggerating the African form, they enable themselves to follow the beliefs they hold, primarily the act of slavery.

It is curious then that Physiognomy manages to survive to our present day, from the stereotype of the “jewish” nose and exaggeration of African Americans lips, to my mother saying my hands are “piano players hands” to people being described as “mousey” to the term “stuck-up” which comes from Physiognomy thinking.

          Various works of the time touched on the topic of Physiognomy either by using the pseudo-science, either seriously or satirically, reversing it as means of discussion, or using it as a means to explore identity. We return to our friend Herman Melville, as he forces the reader to use Physiognomy to decern people, primarily a character called “Black Guinea”. “Black Guinea” is described as “cut down to the stature of a Newfoundland dog; his knotted black fleece and good-natured, honest black face rubbing against the upper part of people's thighs” he later is continually being described as having a “Newfoundland-dog face”. This use by Melville is both a racial and Physiognomy comment, as “Black Guinea” is first treated as if he literally were a dog and later he is considered a conmen, a white man in black makeup (Melville, 13-25).

Lydia Maria Child in her older years. Source.

Lydia Maria Child, known for her skills at letter-writing and endeavors for racial justice, fights this pseudoscience by stating the “incongruities” plain in life. Child writes to an unknown, probably nonexistent, recipient about a Scotsman she met:

“A regular Sawney, with tartan plaid and bag-pipe. And where do you guess he most frequently plies his poetic trade? Why, in the slaughter house!...There, if you are curious to witness congruities, you may almost any day see grunting pigs or bleating lambs, with throats cut to the tune of  Highland Mary, or Bonny Doon, or Lochaber No More.”

Alongside this, she talks about a sea captain, “Few have interested me more strongly than an old sea captain, who needed only sir Walter’s education…his familiarity with legendary lore, to make him, too, a poet and romancer” (Child, 58). By revealing these incongruities in life, she breaks this simplicity Physiognomy attempts to create, by showing a Scotsman playing beautifully in a place of slaughter, and a sea captain as a poet, a romancer of the masses (a slight jab at “Confidence  Men” as well).

Walt Whitman, a poet famously attributed as creating the modern poem, also comments on Physiognomy. In his poem Faces he has lines “Do you suppose I could be content with all if I thought them their own finalé (truth)?” and “This face is a dog’s snout sniffling for garbage. Snakes nest in that mouth, I fear the sibilant threat” And later in, a whole stanza criticizing judging people from the surface:

“I saw the face of the most smear’d and slobbering idiot they had at the asylum,

And I knew for my consolation what they knew not,

I knew of the agents that emptied and broke my brother,

The same wait to clear the rubbish from the fallen tenement,

And I shall look again in a score or two of ages,

And I shall meet the real landlord perfect and unharm’d,

Every inch as good as myself” (The Portable Walt Whitman, 103-105).

Whitman argues that the exaggeration and focus on the human outer form, does not truly state the complexities a human has reducing them to, as he says, a “smear’d and slobbering idiot”. He says you cannot be content if you simply took people at face value, quite literally in this context.

An advertisement for the Virginia Minstrels, a pioneer minstrel show company from 1843. Source.

       Finally, exaggeration of the human form in this era is blatantly seen in the tradition of Minstrel shows, otherwise called Minstrelsy. Minstrelsy in the basic sense was white men in blackface, performing the enslaved African Americans dances and songs in an exaggerated caricature. Popular performers of this style were Jim Crow and Tom Rice (jokes on African Americans skin color and occupations). Minstrel shows were popular from the early 19th century, reaching its high point in the years 1850 to 1870. The advertisement above is from one of the most popular and pioneer minstrel groups, the Virginia Minstrels (“Minstrel Show”). This tradition typically had the performers exaggerating their lips and nose, performing a form of theatrical physiognomy.

Again, we return to our friend “Black Guinea” from Melville’s Novel, The Confidence-Man. A part of “Black Guinea’s” implied con is that he is accused of being a white man in black face. “He's some white operator, betwisted and painted up for a decoy. He and his friends are all humbugs” states a man with a wooden leg (Melville, 18). Prior to this, “Black Guinea” is acting extremely exaggerated as these minstrels would be, stating he lives “On der floor of der good baker's oven, sar” then reveals that the baker is the sun, and crawling around like a dog as stated previously. Additionally, he performs a popular minstrel act that readers in the era would know,

“Still shuffling among the crowd, now and then he would pause, throwing back his head and, opening his mouth like an elephant for tossed apples at a menagerie; when, making a space before him, people would have a bout at a strange sort of pitch-penny game, the cripple's mouth being at once target and purse, and he hailing each expertly-caught copper with a cracked bravura from his tambourine” (15)

This exaggeration is used to further cloud what “Black Guinea” really is, is he a crippled black man exaggerating his identity for the sake of the white crowd, or is he a white man in black face performing the illusion of blackness in exaggeration? The book never tells for sure.

      Exaggeration in art has, is, and will always be a part of the process. As humans focus on certain aspects, those aspects get enlarged, spotlighted, exaggerated to the point their impossible to ignore. These exaggerations can reveal concerns and beliefs of that society, from the Antebellum help manuals fears of young getting conned, to Melville’s pessimistic satire on way people interacted, to cartoons depicting grown men as cowering children, to comparing humans to fish, to the overtly racist acts of Minstrel shows. These over-the-top, fantastical views of the world reveal to us, in the present, the society’s deepest beliefs and fears of the new age.

It is peculiar then how some of the Antebellum era manages to reflect our own, from the polarized political state, to the discussions of race as unanswered, silenced minorities seek a voice, to the new era of interaction we have over the metaphorical city of the internet.  I may be making yet another exaggeration to add on top of the ones I have already shown. What can I say but, it is just another skipping stone along the surface of our culture.

Works Cited

Child, Lydia Maria. “Letters from New-York”. 1841. Pg. 58.

Halttunen, Karen. “Confidence Men and Painted Women : A Study of Middle Class Culture in America, 1830-1870.” 1982, pg. 1-5.

Melville, Herman. “The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade.” 1857. Pgs. 13-25, 61, 68.

“Minstrel Show”. Encyclopædia Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, September 2nd, 2020. https://www.britannica.com/art/minstrel-show

Redfield, James W. M.D., “Comparative Physiognomy or Resemblances between Men and Animals.” 1852, pgs. 81, 167-168.

Waldorf, Sarah. “Physiognomy, The Beautiful Psuedoscience.” The Iris, October 8th, 2012. https://blogs.getty.edu/iris/physiognomy-the-beautiful-pseudoscience/

Whitman, Walt. “The Portable Walt Whitman.” Edited by Michael Warner, December 30th, 2003. Pgs. 103-105.

[gythrim-blog]

Challenging the system starts with your own head - What is Relationship Anarchy? A consideration under the aspects of constraint, hierarchy and freedom

What is anarchy? Why should we also talk about anarchy when talking about relationships?

As anarchists we already deny materialist assumptions claiming that the driving force behind social evolution -and by all means defining part of life- would be property, ownership of production goods or one’s working power. Instead of these marxist or capitalist assumptions we value and recognize individual freedom, equality, self-realization and respect for the opinion of others. After satiation of the most basic needs there really is only one goal everybody aims for: pursuit of happiness. We don’t believe in one solution to fit the needs of all even for a limited time frame. Instead we demand the possibility for people organizing in the way they want in autonomous groups/federations of any kind imaginable and work out their way of arranging their society. We’re aiming for a colorful world without borders in which many worlds fit without any kind of authority limiting your personal freedom or exploiting you.

So far so good. It ain’t hard to find consensus for that in the radical left, at least among anarchists of different schools of thought. But why should we stop at society? Shouldn’t we also - or *particularly* apply that approach to our inner values and beliefs of moral and social interactions? Since we’ve been all living in a world being influenced by hierarchy, patriarchy, a tradition of oppressing both people and their needs I say we gotta question the conventional relationship model in order to understand and seize the control of it.

The Problem

Not alone is our daily routine highly influenced by hierarchical structures and the subordination to people in charge telling us how to behave, when to get up, how long and where to work and what to buy, the truth is it doesn't stop at the doorstep of our home. Even our dealings with other people, friends, family, lovers is full of expectations and structures being forced upon us, telling us what is considered appropriate and what to expect from another. The problem is that we're often not aware of this kind of power structure and thus won't question it. We consider things to be normal, natural and without any alternative even though they aren't and other options are indeed possible. Accepting this situation and our own noncritical behavior as part of the problem makes us feel uncomfortable. But there is a way out: by examining existing relationship models we get to know why they exist, how they are enforced and thus become enabled to choose our way of tackling the problem.

The meaning of Relationship Anarchy

By accepting the canonical understanding of relationships between lovers without questioning them, we simultaneously getting urged to follow a certain set of rules that are being forced upon us by society. This means relationships have something to do with rules. But from an anarchist point of view, from this point onward, we aren’t in control anymore hence we got to face rules that we neither negotiated nor were part in their creation. It is like subjugating oneself under the rule of a sovereign. This status alone can cause discomfort, anxiety and feel like being obliged in a contract which challenges and sometimes conflicts personal freedom and the pursuit of self-fulfillment.

In our society relationships, and especially marriages, are being used to condition people to behave in a predictable way that is easy to monitor. By codification in law, society created an instrument of power for forcibly keeping partners together and preventing people from having a self-determined sex life. For example the German judicial system, just as many others, created rules that ban adultery (former §172 StGB), consensual homosexual sex (§175 StGB, but between men only), forbid citizens to allow two children of opposite sex and different families to sleep in the same room together (§§180,181 StGB, procuration) and many more. Even though most aren't being enforced anymore they nevertheless helped to form a restrictive mindset. Actually rules like that are still being used in other nations such as Iran, India and many others. Some even inflict the death penalty for engaging in homosexual actions. Of course there are countless other factors that helped creating this restrictive set of rules. The debate concerning the historical impact of patriarchal rule, religion, and a culture of misogynist exclusion among other things is still going and can be read in other interesting articles.

So what *is* a relationship in this traditional definition that helped forging the construct we call a 'normal relationship' ? I'd say it is an unwritten set of rules which defines what actions are being outlawed encouraged or tolerated between people who ideally feel attracted to each other (I don’t want to address the horrible arranged relationships in this essay). They are an often misogynous construct trying to create a feeling of security and authority by imposing rules so that one white cis man doesn’t have to fear his wife leaving him for somebody else. However should she dare to leave him, in former times, he could either threaten to punish her, have her jailed, make her become an outcast from society or simply confront her with the harsh reality that by leaving him she would be broke without the need for him to pay alimony. In short, those rules are the endeavor to bind people together not by emotions but by undesirable penalties if they fail to stay together. Restrictive top-down ordering at its finest without any room for individual needs or variation.

If you apply the same methods and proposed solutions of anarchism to relationships it leads to interesting insights and a more reflected understanding of yourself. Judging on the basis of a self-reflected perspective can and will help you understand what you really want, and will also help you come up with a personal solution of shaping interactions in a way that they accomplish both: suit your needs and dissolve structures of obligation in favor of voluntariness. This approach can be termed as 'Relationship Anarchy’. It doesn’t mean that there simply are no rules - you just set them yourself on a consensual basis!

You deny the claim of society to dictate rules and instead negotiate them yourself with your partner(s) on an equal, consensual level. Communication is everything. That way there is no need anymore to rely on labels, even untraditional ones like 'open relationship’ or 'friends with benefits’ since every kind of interaction will be unique - if not in the rule set than in the way of individual aspects, leading to the concrete design of your relationship. At any rate it will emancipate you from relying on a relationship model crafted by the society and enable you to actively construct, your own model based on understanding your needs and the ones of your partner(s) considering personal freedom. Even if you eventually come to the conclusion that a run-of-the-mill monogamous relationship without any special quirks would be the best model for your partner and yourself, the act of reflecting yourself, making your own rules and taking into account the views and aspects of both of you, will leave you in a better position since you did overcome the top-down dictation of a set of rules and replaced it with a self-imposed set. Considering and pondering your opinions and wishes also helps to prevent and fight sexism and misconceptions. That whole process is another necessary step of enlightenment - do not only break the chains forced on your mind, also free yourself from the shackles trying to control your social lives. Only you and the ones involved should be able to mutually work out the right model for you, and everybody else should respect your choices.

In the end I reckon personal freedom to be a wonderful thing and find it even more flattering when somebody who isn’t obliged to you by any crude moral contract still chooses to spent time with you. At the same time I consider it a great proof of affection, trust, empathy and kindness to grant somebody a generously portioned chunk of freedom.

It is a nice way of fighting the system and patriarchy in every day life just by the power of being yourself, self-reflection and creating your own rules. Go out there, question yourself, talk to each other, spread the love and make the world a more self-determined place!

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Culture Shock: When Moving From an Urban to a Rural Area

Provincial Real Estate is well known. Be that as it may, Think ahead and don't open yourself up for; Culture Shock; An Unnecessary Evil, when moving to a country region. Anybody CAN counteract a portion of the Culture Shock that may happen when they move to a provincial neighborhood!

Before you move to a provincial property - become acquainted with the people there and look to gain proficiency with the way of life of the region - the current culture - NOT the one you are familiar with and not the one you need to make it into.

Our organization just as of late sold one of the absolute best Homestead Properties I've at any point seen, at a low cost! Why? Since the new proprietor made himself so unwelcome in his new condition thus horribly distanced the neighbors that they in the end made him intolerably awkward. Along these lines, he never again needed to live there.

He is a discourteous tree hugger and chose to move from the city to a rustic network where huge numbers of the families return 400 years on a similar land. He was a city kid with a degree in ranger service, science and environment and had not a mind of individuals sense. His applied religion depended on viewing Walt Disney motion pictures; where the trees talk and man is abhorrent and creatures and plants are great  Maid Service Las Vegas

He didn't need his new neighbors to chase deer, to cultivate the fields promptly toward the beginning of the day, to utilize agrarian synthetic substances or counterfeit composts on the harvests. He didn't care for the planes that showered the executioner bugs promptly toward the beginning of the day. He didn't care for the smell of chicken and pig fertilizer spread on the fields either. He stood up always, boisterously and forcefully. He made adversaries of about the entirety of his neighbors. He's gone now and I trust the new buyer, additionally from the city, won't rehash his social mistakes.

The vast majority of the people that live here are extraordinary and acknowledge they are in another place and try to turn into a section and work inside our social, social and monetary structures. The vast majority of our fresh introductions are magnificent and we have numerous as the populace here in southern Delaware is multiplying about like clockwork!

There is a minor loud scat of individuals, just a small few, who come and detest it here. However they left where they were to come have a superior life around there. We see it constantly. Local people call them ecological whackos, tree huggers, bug kissers and much more regrettable. These are the individuals who have taken in about nature from Walt Disney, Nature Channel, Discovery Channel and Sierra magazine. What's more, yes they frequently have advanced educations. They don't know that the truth is not quite the same as their motion pictures, readings, classes and dreams. In this manner such a large number of them escape the city and afterward look to uphold their obliviousness and miseducation on those in the network they have joined. They attempt to menace others and attempt to get them to concur with the principles, guidelines, ideas and reasoning they deserted in the city. NOT a decent arrangement in the event that they need to have a lovely spot to live. Huge numbers of these people contemplate nature, trees, plants, creatures, the earth and everything else; than those whose families have lived in amicability with earth's life structures for a considerable length of time or even hundreds of years here. Ideally my coarse speech above has intrigued you to peruse and learn here, instead of at the in the end cruel hands of a provincial network in the event that you don't focus on what is here.

It is shrewd to visit the zone you intend to live a few times before you move there. Join the congregation, bolster the Volunteer Fire Department, purchase gas at the nearest service station, buy your lager or wine at the nearby alcohol store, become acquainted with each open territory and visit the public venues and humanitarian gatherings in the zone. Above all talk with people and disclose to them you are thinking about a move into the zone and approach them for counsel. Visit the Lions Club, Sertoma, Elks, Rotary, Red Men, and so forth., and look to learn as opposed to instructing. Tune in as opposed to talking. Ask, don't tell.

There is nearly nothing, on the off chance that anything, the newcomer can show local people nearby things. On the off chance that you should attempt to show local people something; in the event that you attempt to instruct them about your aptitude where you originated from, what you were paid to do previously, about the activity and territory you fled (on the off chance that you can discover any individual who cares) - you are on an off-base course and will shorely wreck.

Clearly, in the event that you are one of those individuals who left such urban stuff, you are one who doesn't generally think that its everything that important either. Else you ought to have remained there. What's more, you can wager that is actually what your neighbors will think in the event that you move into a rustic territory and take a smarty pants and I'm-so-a lot more brilliant on the grounds that I-originate from-the-city demeanor. They might be peaceful, or even pleasant in your quality for some time, however that kind of a frame of mind will cause just hostility in people around you. Also, they will discuss you, quickly to one another and your terrible mentality will go before you and be about difficult to address later.

Discover what the network needs and needs from new or imminent individuals, for example, yourself; truly discover, don't figure or accept and let pre-judgment well enough alone for the image. We've had various people who have moved here to showcase specialists or PR specialists or Graphic Design specialists. Not one of the few dozen I've met throughout the most recent 30 years is still in

business and none of them are even still here supposedly. The administration they were planning to charge large cash for was not needed at any cost, not by any means free.

One of my clients from somewhere in the range of a quarter century back - moved from San Francisco into a "little (pop. 800) pristine, provincial, interesting, beautiful town - populated with salt-of-the-earth and sensible people" as she discussed them from the outset. The couple I talk about had gelded their child, really they had a specialist do it, so his voice would not change with age - all so he could sing in a world acclaimed ensemble.

They needed to begin preparing local people to construct a "Kid's Choir". They were incensed that the neighborhood school region would not bolster a kid's ensemble that they were sure could be the jealousy of the world, in the event that they could simply tell everybody the best way to do everything. After a year they discussed "the awful little town brimming with dumb crabby uninformed good-for-nothings, shanties, shacks, old trucks, fat toothless men, red necks, gossipy ladies, uneducated Rubes and ingrained hicks whose thought of culture was a lager and burger in a pickup truck.". The San Franciscans are gone now as well. Their name only from time to time comes up, and when it does, it isn't in an amiableness or a decent vein.

I am in the matter of selling provincial land, backwoods and homes. I love the individuals who effectively live in the few zones where I work. I love the clients I work with. More often than not, the newcomers fit in well with the previous network. A few, not very many, of my clients move in and ruin the zone for themselves and for a brief period, for those effectively here. The main explanation is that they have not scholarly of the REALITY of provincial, nation life in the specific network before they buy there.

It is frequently, in actuality normally, unrealistic to lease before purchasing in a specific zone; so it is incredibly, insightful to look a long time before you jump into a rustic network on the off chance that you didn't grow up there. Regardless of whether you grew up in a provincial region and afterward didn't keep in contact with loved ones there since, you may discover you never again fit in. Be that as it may, you can relearn those traditions you abandoned, on the off chance that you truly need to "come back to your foundations". What's more, in the event that you've never lived in the territory, you can get familiar with the ethnicity, the traditions, and figure out how to be a decent neighbor.

In the event that you look to fit in and add to the network, as indicated by what IS truly required and needed in that specific network - you may well appreciate a kind of paradise on-earth in your new home.

One individual strikes a chord who came, adored and was all around cherished. He was a military radio master who had ventured to the far corners of the planet, profited, lived in DC and Northern Virginia for a considerable length of time. Gone to the best, quickest, and most costly capacities in the zone and after retirement chose to move to our provincial hotel zone. He moved here at the stature of the CB furor, when nearly everybody of the country people had a CB and needed it to work better or required one appropriately introduced in their home or vehicle. He did everything complimentary for any individual who inquired. He was after all resigned. Each time I visited him he'd load up my Wagoneer with eggs, products of the soil from the homesteads, plantations and nurseries of those he'd made a difference. I helped him with making the contacts he needed to make and with getting authorizations to private "angling gaps" away from everything. He was a trick and discharge angler and would in every case tidy up all waste around the angling opening, before he even began angling there.

One neighbor kept this present man of his word's grass cut and revealed to him he get a decent cussing in the event that he inefficiently purchased a lawnmower. Another neighbor wouldn't take a nickel for changing the brakes on his vehicle. Another neighbor fixed his rooftop for nothing. A few of the women in the area would prepare some additional supper for him, a few times each week, and bring it over. He was welcome to eat some place in the encompassing network consistently. Furthermore, he was requested accounts of his reality voyages and the extravagant gatherings he went to. He was fit, and quite affluent as he lived just, had been paid well and contributed well during his working years.

[networkingdefinition]

Tattoo Quotes

Official Website: Tattoo Quotes

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• 30 years ago in white supremacy, we had a strategy called leaderless resistance. The concept was: stop shaving our heads, stop getting tattoos and instead try to blend in as much as possible. It was a really concerted effort to try and tone down the rhetoric and make it a little more palatable to the mainstream. And it certainly has penetrated the mainstream now. We’re seeing people who were supportive of our cause back then also supportive of Donald Trump’s cause, certainly with the recent cabinet appointments. – Christian Picciolini • A cool tattoo design is any drawing that would also look good saggy. – Demetri Martin • A good tattoo always has a story that runs deeper than the skin, and Inked tells that story. – Tara Dakides • A label is a soul-tattoo that is ingrained deep in our hearts, so much so that it determines how we see ourselves, And how we see ourselves determines how we live… A destructive label leads to a destructive life. There is a soul thief, a dark enemy, who wants to nail ruinous labels to your heart so that he can steal your life. Jesus wants to give you life giving labels that release your potential for the good of the world. – Derwin L. Gray • A lot of my friends have tattoos; I realized that it’s not only just a part of pop culture, but a bit of a map on someone’s body, which says something about people. A part of their life, like an armor or a crest. – Christian Louboutin • A tattoo doesn’t make you look like an individual. – Tony Parsons • A tattoo is a true poetic creation, and is always more than meets the eye. As a tattoo is grounded on living skin, so its essence emotes a poignancy unique to the mortal human condition. – V. Vale • A tattoo is an affirmation: that this body is yours to have and to enjoy while you’re here. Nobody else can control what you do with it. – Don Ed Hardy • A tattoo is graffiti on the temple of the body. – Gordon B. Hinckley • A very common thing these days is people show up and they ask us in the band to sign with a Sharpie right on their skin and they go get it tattooed the next day. Then they’ll show up at another show and they’ll have their tattoo. – Jared Leto • After Cannes every year, I end up going to some foreign country I’ve never been to before and introducing myself to a new religion – I’ll go to Bali and research Hinduism, or I’ll go to Thailand and get another tattoo from Thai tattoo artist Ajarn Noo Kanpai. – Michelle Rodriguez • After searching for a space, I parked behind the tattoo parlor in front of a sign that said NO PARKING. Since it didn’t specify to whom it was referring, I figured it couldn’t possibly be talking to me. – Darynda Jones • Anyone who’s had a tattoo knows once you get your first one, as you’re walking out the door, you’re planning the next. – Chris Evans • Around the mid-’90s every hair guy who would have been in a hair-metal band got his tattoos and suddenly decided he was alternative. It just became like a thing. – Billy Corgan • As soon as I saw tattoos as a way to tell your story, I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I totally get it.’ So I got my first tattoo a couple of years ago, and it’s the word ‘hope’ on my left arm. It has a couple of dots at the end for each of my kids. – Kristian Bush • As soon as you tell me to do one thing, I do the opposite. As soon as someone tells me not to get any more tattoos, I have this intense fire burning inside me to cover myself with them. I don’t care if it’s self-destructive. I just have that need to rebel. – Megan Fox • At the end of the day, the Lord knows I have no malice in my heart. But I’ve got tattoos, and I still fornicate. – Pharrell Williams

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Tattoo', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_tattoo').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_tattoo img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • ‘Battlefield’ was one of those slow-building songs, the way ‘Tattoo’ was. It was kind of a word-of-mouth hit. The more people heard it, the more they started requesting it on the radio. – Jordin Sparks • Be a good-looking corpse. Leave a good-looking tattoo. – Ed Westwick • Bikers, in general, have just been so attractive to people. Photographers would follow them because there’s this weird warrior gravitas that comes with it. The bikes are loud, they have tattoos, they have artwork that they all wear on their jackets. – Ryan Hurst • But for me, to get the tattoo was part of moving into adulthood. Making a choice that is permanent and that I’ll have to stick with. – Francois Arnaud • But I understand now what Tori said about her tattoo representing a fear she overcame-a reminder of where she was, as well as a reminder of who she is now. Maybe there is a way to honor my old life as I embrace my new one. “yes,” I say. “Three of these flying birds.” I touch my collarbone, marking the path of their flight-toward my heart. One for each member of the family I left behind. – Veronica Roth • Don’t be dumb. (don’t get a tattoo) – Dallin H. Oaks • Don’t cut it,” he said gruffly. “But no one’ll see my tattoos if I don’t.” “Wear it up.” -Dimitri, Rose, Dimitri – Richelle Mead • Don’t let these tattoos fool you. I’m straight edge. I’m a man of great discipline; I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t do drugs… my addiction is wrestling – my obsession is competition. Discipline. My name is C…M…Punk. – CM Punk • Eddie waited ’til he finished high school, he went to Hollywood, got a tattoo. – Tom Petty • Enema of the State song is kind of like a tattoo, like a moment in time, but it aged well. It’s not like one that you’re looking at like, “Aw, God, I gotta get that s**t removed.” It’s something we’re proud of. – Travis Barker • Even though she saw tattoos everywhere, they continued to fascinate her. How bizarre to be branded like a box of cereal. Didn’t people mind being counted as just one more product on a shelf? There had to be more to a person than that. – Suzanne Weyn • Every rock’n’roll band I know, guys with long hair and tattoos, plays golf now. – Alice Cooper • Every time I get a tattoo, my parents say they’ll disown me. I have to get them airbrushed for Charmed. Witches don’t have tattoos, I guess. – Alyssa Milano • Everybody gets the tattoo they deserve. – David Duchovny • Everybody in America is a part of this big herd of cattle being led to the marketplace, not to be sold, which is usual with cattle, but to do the buying. And everyone is branded. You see the brands – Nike, Puma, Coke – all over their bodies. Pretty soon you’ll go to a family and say, “$100,000 if we can tattoo Pepsi on your child’s forehead, and we’ll have it removed when he’s twenty-one. A hundred grand.” – George Carlin • Everybody knows I have the ratchetest booty tattoo of an ex-boyfriend. – Adrienne Bailon • Everything is addictive to me but tattoos are addictive to all. – The Rev • Everything is always spur-of-the-moment. All of my tattoos I decide that second and do it. – Avril Lavigne • Failure is a bruise, not a tattoo. – John Sinclair • Footnote: 79) The anchor is gigantic and must weigh a hundred tons, and — delightfully — it really is anchor-shaped, i.e. the same shape as anchors in tattoos. – David Foster Wallace • For someone who likes tattoos, the most precious thing is bare skin. – Cher • Getting a tattoo should hurt. It’s a rite of passage. – Jenna Jameson • Getting a tattoo would probably make me cry. – Calvin Trillin • Giving birth was easier than having a tattoo. – Nicole Appleton • Hair is just one way of expressing ourselves. We express ourselves through how we dress or through tattoos or body art or piercings or cosmetic surgery. – Linda Evangelista • Having previously graduated from a 2-year commercial arts class, I thought that commercial illustration was the best way to make a living doing art. But the more tattoos that I did, the more I realized what artistic career potential tattooing had and I enjoyed it. – William Webb • Having the tattoo itself is not really for the end result for me. I like having them done. – Lena Headey • He and the girl had almost nothing to say to each other. One thing he did say was, ‘I ain’t got any tattoo on my back.’ ‘What you got on it?’ the girl said. ‘My shirt,’ Parker said. ‘Haw.’ ‘Haw, haw,’ the girl said politely. – Flannery O’Connor • He said, I’m better off without her, until I showed him my tattoo. – Tom Waits • I always look for a woman who has a tattoo. I see a woman with a tattoo, and I’m thinking, okay, here’s a gal who’s capable of making a decision she’ll regret in the future. – Richard Jeni • I always say your body is the temple of your spirit, why not decorate it? My kids say, no, no, your body is the temple of your spirit, keep it clean. I’m covered in tattoos and I get a tattoo every time I write a book. I get the tattoo from the book. – Bill Ayers • I am concerned about the environment. I love to wear black. I think government is best when it stays out of people’s lives and business as much as possible. I love punk rock. I believe in a strong national defense. I have a tattoo. I believe government should always be efficient and accountable. I have lots of gay friends. And yes, I am a Republican. – Meghan McCain • I am wearing a gray shirt, blue jeans, black shoes–new clothes, but beneath them, my Dauntless tattoos. It is impossible to erase my choices. Especially these. – Veronica Roth • I basically – I don’t like tattoos, unless you’re a firefighter who has a tattoo that has to do with that or a military guy. That’s – those are people who should have tattoos. – Denis Leary • I believe tattoos are a lifestyle not a fashion trend. – Machine Gun Kelly • I chose a sunflower because when darkness descends they close up to regenerate. But I really wish I’d never had the tattoo in the first place. Clean, clear skin is always better. – Halle Berry • I collect Wonder Woman – from comics to paraphernalia, and I even have a tattoo of her on my back. I’m a huge Wonder Woman fan! – Lights • I did a piece where I was talking about torture at Abu Ghraib, and I embroidered my hand with the image of the hooded Abu Ghraib prisoners who’d been tortured using a needle and thread. I know that meeting a Holocaust survivor when I was eight and seeing the tattoo on her arm from her time in the camps influenced my piece about Abu Ghraib. – Jill Soloway • I do have 14 tattoos, but I also do come home every single night and watch reality TV with my cat. – Lea Michele • I do have a few little tattoos, but they were mostly done to cover scars because I’m so fair. – Dolly Parton • I don’t care what color your hair is, if you’re pale or tan, if you have makeup on or just woke up all I care about is that when I look at you, you always look back and see me. You’re beautiful inside and out and if you wanted to tattoo all that pretty white skin from head to toe I would be honored to put it there for you but if not I’ll take you all smooth and milky white any chance I get. – Jay Crownover • I don’t have any tattoos – I live vicariously through my sister, Langley, who has many. If I can’t stick to one ensemble, I don’t think I could stick to one tattoo. – Dree Hemingway • I don’t have any tattoos but I’ve thought about getting Ernie, from Bert and Ernie, on my earlobe. He made a big impression on me as a kid. And I have pretty big earlobes. – J Mascis • I don’t think there are any songs that I’ve written in the past that I now disagree. It’s kind of like tattoos; I would never regret a tattoo, because it was how I felt at that time in my life. I don’t think I’ve ever said anything that I would take back. So far, so good! I would probably change the music, or change how I sing it, maybe do it a little bit cooler, or a bit more grown-up. But I don’t think that there are any lyrics that I regret. – Emeli Sande • I dropped my pants in a tattoo parlor in Amsterdam. I woke up in a waterbed with this funky-looking dragon with a blue tongue on my hip. I realized I made a mistake, so a few months later I got a cross to cover it. When my pants hang low, it looks like I’m wearing a dagger! – Angelina Jolie • I feel like the last tattoo you got is usually your favorite. – Nico Tortorella • I felt bad about myself because certain people were relentlessly attacking me and my reputation. My mom kept saying ‘Let it go, Lauren, It doesn’t matter’ … [I] realized I had to stop worrying about what other people think. The next day I got a tattoo on my lower back that says ‘sticks and stones’, because they may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. – Lauren Conrad • I got a little tattoo on my face, I’ll never be able to work another real job so I consider that to be kinda forcing myself to stick to music. – Benji Madden • I got more than a thing for you, tattoo wit a ink for you right over my heart girl, I’ll do the unthinkable. – Drake • I got my tattoo a year before the Olympic trials, so I kind of used it as motivation to make the Olympic team the following year. I look at it every time I dive and it’s kind of a little fun thing. – Tera Van Beilen • I got to actually tattoo one of the members of The Misfits. The very first tattoo I ever did was this Misfits skull. – Kat Von D • I had six silly tattoos done when I was young and I bitterly regret them. I’ve thought about laser surgery, but that leaves a scar, so I’m just leaving them. – Andre Benjamin • I have a handful of tattoos that I really want to put on people that I can’t find anyone to let me give them to. – Jemima Kirke • I have a maple leaf tattoo over my heart, quite literally, and my two favorite things on Earth are being in Canada and making movies. – Jay Baruchel • I have a swastika tattoo on my arm, but it’s just because I like right-hand turns. – Kyle Dunnigan • I have a tattoo on my foot that says ‘it’s a whale’ in Japanese, because Japanese people kill whales. My stuffed whale was like most children’s teddy bear. I took it with me everywhere. I slept with it. I couldn’t live without my whale. – Skylar Grey • I have Bob Dylan lyrics on my ribs. I’m a diehard Dylan fan, and my dad and I joke that if I ever met him, I’d have him sign his name right under my tattoo and then I’d run to the parlor to get his signature tattooed. – Carly Chaikin • I have no love for myself as a human being, but I have immense pride in the music I make, and I believe it has an important place. Others do, too, and the thousands of people with Morrissey tattoos certainly proves something. – Steven Morrissey • I have no real tattoos. I wear my bruises and tons of scars as my tattoos. – Kellan Lutz • I have no tattoos that I regret – I have had some that I have had changed according to how my life was. – Nas • I have no tattoos. There’s nothing I’ve even been that into to get a tattoo of it. – Eli Roth • I have this huge lion tattoo embossed on my arm. I was a little worried as to how we would cover it up. But my makeup man covered the tattoo with makeup. It took close to two hours. – Sanjay Dutt • I haven’t had a drink in thirteen years, but occasionally I’m tempted to have one beer. The problem is that if I have that one beer, I wake up in Tijuana four days later with a tattoo and a sore ass. – Craig Ferguson • I just feel like this skin is mine. It’s aging every day and the tattoos are aging with me. So, I’m going to be an old piece of paper one day with a lot of work on it. – Maria Dahvana Headley • I know people say ‘what about when you’re old and you’re covered in tattoos?’ – so what. Anyway, in time to come everyone will have them and it will be all the trend, won’t it? ‘Cuz you don’t know how the times are gonna change. – Cher Lloyd • I like the bad-boy types. Generally the guy I’m attracted to is the guy in the club with all the tattoos and nail polish. He’s usually the lead singer in a punk band and plays guitar. But my serious boyfriends are relatively clean-cut, nice guys. So it’s strange. – Megan Fox • I love math. I have little secret number tattoos everywhere. I design them. – Pauley Perrette • I love tattoos. And mine symbolise who I really am. I have a Samurai on my left arm. At a subconscious level, I connect to this warrior and model myself on his discipline, skills and honour. There is also a tribal tattoo and a Chinese symbol of faith. I have seen a lot of people getting tattoos just because it’s a trend. – Virat Kohli • I love Tinkerbell because she’s feisty and about it. She’s got swag! She’s going to do what she wants to do. I even have a Tinkerbell tattoo, and she is wearing Adidas flip-flops! – Kidada Jones • I love to make music, I love to get tattoos…That’s just what I love. If I wasn’t getting paid I’d still do it. – Kevin Gates • I need to know you believe me when I say I love you. That is all.” “I believe everything you say,” Tessa said with a smile, her hands creeping doen from his waist to his weapons belt. Her fingers closed on the hilt of the dagger, and she yanked it from the belt, smiling as he looked down at her in surprise. “After all,” she said, “you weren’t lying about the tattoo of the dragon of Wales, were you? – Cassandra Clare • I never had any desire to get a tattoo. If I was ever going to get one, I would get a plain anchor with a rope around it, the most unimaginative possible tattoo, like Popeye had. – John Waters • I never thought about getting any tattoos removed. – Henry Rollins • I never watched those Spice Girls. I didn’t enjoy that at all. So I didn’t know Victoria Beckham well. But she came out with this pretty boy, got married, and the boy got more tattoos and more tattoos. And then I met her a few times, and we started work, and something happened. You know, she wanted it. She loves what she’s doing. – Manolo Blahnik • I probably have the crappiest tattoo — not only in country music — but maybe the world. – Blake Shelton • I really think if you have a tattoo you have to wonder about what kind of future you have ahead of you. As an employer, I wouldn’t employ someone with tattoos as I would wonder what customers would think about them. For me, tattoos are just a way for people to find attention who haven’t found another way in their life to achieve it by conventional means. – Katie Hopkins • I removed the window [tattoo] because, while I used to spend all my time looking out through windows wishing to be outside, I now live there all the time. – Angelina Jolie • I sort of tend to equate tattoos with prisoners, punks or people with a high level of self-confidence. I don’t necessarily have a covered-in-tattoos personality. – Lena Dunham • I think I have enough tattoos for now. If I get any others, I’ll probably do my kids initials. – Niki Taylor • I think if you’re gonna get a tattoo, just get one: the words, ‘I’m dumb.’ That’s it. That way in 10 years, when you go, ‘Why did I get this?,’ you can be like, ‘Oh, I’m dumb!’ – Daniel Tosh • I think when tattoos are new and colorful, they look bad. But they look better the older and more bleached out they become. – Urs Fischer • I try to really capitalize off of what other rappers really can’t do. There are opportunities that rappers I love simply can’t get, because… you know… I don’t have the tattoos; I have a different image. – Drake • I used to have a sister, but I never got to meet her because she died after two days, I think. So if I got a tattoo, it would probably have to be something to do with my sister. – Chloe Grace Moretz • I want to get married but I look at husbands the same way I look at tattoos. I want one, but I can’t decide what I want, and I don’t want to be stuck with something I’d grow to hate and have surgically removed. – Margaret Cho • I wanted alot of tattoos but I never thought I was gonna be this rediculous. – Synyster Gates • I was a prefect at school, I never had a tattoo, got a detention or pierced my ears more than once. – Amanda Holden • I was just a big fan of tattoos always growing up, and I wanted something cool that symbolizes what I’ve been through in my life, and everything on my chest and my back is like a collage. – Kevin Durant • I went to this tattoo parlor in the East Village and I got an outline of a violin on my lower back. They call them tramp stamps now. – Katherine Moennig • If the body is a temple, then tattoos are its stained glass windows. – Sylvia Plath • I’ll never have a tattoo – I just don’t like them, and when you’re old they can look a disaster. As for piercings, I don’t like them on men. – Rafael Nadal • I’ll tell you this, lad: A tattoo says more of a fellow looking at it than it can do of the man who’s got it on his back. – Sarah Hall • I’m a big fan of zombies, and I have a zombie tattoo on my leg. – Tyler Posey • I’m a tearless clown. If I were to get a tattoo, it would be the two masks, and they would be both smiling. – Andy Samberg • I’m addicted to tattoos. I can’t stop; I love them. – Adrianne Palicki • I’m celebrating my love for you with a pint of beer and a new tattoo – Billy Bragg • I’m definitely in the market for being uncool. There was some funny stuff, like the thing about making sure I show people that I have tattoos and cigarettes so that they know I’m badass. But really, I do have tattoos! And I do smoke cigarettes sometimes, and I can’t change that. But I am not badass, by any means. I do some stuff that’s tongue-in-cheek, and some stuff that’s on the line. And it could be funny, it could be serious, and I never even know myself, because it could be funny that day, and the next day it’s totally embarrassing. – Ryan Adams • I’m not enthused by these rap dudes. All in they videos, posin’ half nude, with all of them tattoos, Til I blacken they eyes and have them lookin’ like raccoons. – Trife Diesel • I’m such a profound believer that timing is everything; I would tattoo that on my arm. – Drew Barrymore • I’m waiting to get old – I think old guys with tattoos look good.- Ryan Gosling • It wasn’t the tattoo that had changed her, had given her repossession of her body. It was her actions, her choices. It was finding the path when it looked like there weren’t any paths to be found. – Melissa Marr • It’s hard to say conversation has become a minimal thing, because look at the rise of mobile communications in the last 10 years. It used to be only the President had a mobile phone. Now everyone on earth, even if they have nothing else, they have a cell phone. It’s a larger anthropological shift in my mind than even the tattoo age in the United States. – Padgett Powell • Its interesting, the things you learn when youre 21. I learned never to get tattoos in the middle of shooting a movie. Because if youre not Angelina Jolie or Megan Fox, they will fire you. – Katee Sackhoff • It’s more likely I’ll dye my hair green, get a bunch of tattoos and go on tour with Amy Winehouse. – Mike Huckabee • I’ve always described parts as tattoos. For actors our tattoos are in the form of films. – Eric Bana • I’ve come to realize that Barack Obama is the tattoo president. Like a big tattoo, it seemed cool when you were young. But later on, that decision doesn’t look so good, and you wonder: what was I thinking? But the worst part is you’re still going to have to explain it to your kids. – Tim Pawlenty • I’ve got nothing against tattoos. I don’t have one myself. If I did, it would be right there next to my watch. It would say “Your wife’s birthday is August 2nd, your anniversary is September 18th, don’t let Ron White drive your car again.” – Jeff Foxworthy • Johnny Depp is like a brother to me. We have matching tattoos on our backs – Charles Baudelaire, the flowers of evil, this giant skeleton thing. It’s kind of a secret. People say to us, ‘Why did you get that?’ And we say, ‘No reason.’ – Marilyn Manson • Just saw a woman with a big tattoo of Jesus on her back. I guess it’s an ixnay on the oggy style-day. – Dana Gould • Man, I’m messed up right now. My best friend is my father? The man I idolized as a kid… whose tattoo is on my arm… And he’s younger than me. Yeah, I don’t think I can handle this. Mindwipe me, somebody… please! Where’s that dragon from Sanctuary? Simi, go get Max. I need him. – Sherrilyn Kenyon • Marriage is supposed to be permanent. It’s like a tattoo that yells at you. – Dov Davidoff • Maybe. Although I doubt most Shadowhunters get a tattoo of Donatello from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on their left shoulder. – Cassandra Clare • Mildred waves Carlos over. ‘Let me look at you.’ She eyes him up and down. ‘I saw you when you walked in. What’s with all those tattoos? Makes you look like a hooligan.’ ‘I suspect I am a hooligan,’ he says to her. ‘Whatever that means. – Simone Elkeles • My body is a journal in a way. It’s like what sailors used to do, where every tattoo meant something, a specific time in your life when you make a mark on yourself, whether you do it yourself with a knife or with a professional tattoo artist. – Johnny Depp • My body is my journal, and my tattoos are my story. – Johnny Depp • My favorite action movie growing up was ‘Supergirl.’ It wasn’t good by any stretch of the imagination, but it was my favorite because I wanted to be her. I have a Supergirl tattoo. – Adrianne Palicki • My favorite tattoo right now is the one on my lower stomach that reads “Almost Famous” because as my career grows I’m still humbled every morning when I look at that tattoo, and I’ll always remember how much it sucked to ALMOST be famous. – Machine Gun Kelly • My first tattoo is a full-on Sailor Jerry situation on my hip – it’s a swallow with big spread wings. When I got it I was 20 on St. Mark’s Place in New York; I just walked in in a frenzy. It’s still there 17 years later and it’s not a terrible thing to look at. – Maria Dahvana Headley • My friends are coming up – they run this tattoo parlour out there and they’re gonna ink me up with the tattoo I’ve been wanting since I was two, right here, upper arm. – Charlie Benante • My ideal guy is my future husband. Not sure who he is yet, but he’s out there. What impresses me in a gay guy? A warm smile, stubble, easy to talk to, thoughtful tattoos, kind eyes, wit, positivity, wanderlust, ambition, and a cute ass. – Tyler Oakley • My mom actually took me to get my first tattoo when I was 15. She highly regrets that choice now, as I have a lot more. – Nico Tortorella • My new one (tattoo) says ‘Never a failure, always a lesson’ and is kind of my mantra to life, just a reminder. My life is just a crazy rollercoaster every day and whenever I read that it just reassures me. – Rihanna • My new tattoo is Jesus being carried by three cherubs. Obviously the cherubs are my boys. At some point they are going to need to look after me. That’s what they’re doing in the picture. It means a lot. – David Beckham • My only advice is don’t tattoo some guy’s name on yourself. Ever. I’ve done it twice. Twice! I’m in the process of getting both removed. It’s the most painful thing imaginable. – Diora Baird • My tattoo is a phoenix. I got the first when I was 16. I hid it for years. – Ashley Scott • My tattoo is of a cannon in Vancouver that I got in a fleeting moment of stupidity maybe 14 years ago. A lot of people have really beautiful tattoos, and I get real tattoo envy. But then other people basically just treat them like bumper stickers for their bodies. – Ryan Reynolds • My tattoo is that I don’t have a tattoo. – Michael J. Fox • My tattoos are like a scrapbook of my life. Sometimes you don’t feel comfortable in your own skin, so covering it up with pictures helps – Frank Iero • My tattoos are reminders to hang in there when things get rough. – Demi Lovato • My whole thing was, just being me. Now, you look around the NBA and all of them have tattoos, guys wearing cornrows. Now you see the police officers with the cornrows. I took a beating for those types of things. – Allen Iverson • No one wants to see a tattoo on a stomach. – Lena Dunham • Not one great country can be named, from the polar regions in the north to New Zealand in the south, in which the aborigines do not tattoo themselves. – Charles Darwin • Nothing to show but this brand new tattoo. But it’s a real beauty, a Mexican cutie, how it got here I haven’t a clue. – Jimmy Buffett • One of the beauties of ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ is the very delicate and strange relationship between the two main characters. – Stellan Skarsgard • One of the series I like is D.M. Cornish’s ‘Monster Blood Tattoo,’ in which he creates a whole language. Kids who are reading that are building a language in their heads. There’s no real cognitive difference. I think kids are excited by language, and they’re not always given credit for that. – Matthew Tobin Anderson • One person’s tattoo is nobody else’s business – Don Ed Hardy • Painting and tattooing the body is a return to animalism. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe • Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality. – Salvador Dali • People are proud of their tattoos. It’s like a modern coat of arms. -Christian Louboutin • People have asked me, what about your tattoos when you’re ninety? Why would it bother me then? I would still want to get tattooed even when I’m a grandmother. – Nicole Miller • People like to come up to me and tell me that I’ve got nice ink. Except these tattoos aren’t just decorations. They are declarations. Every tattoo I have tells its own story about who I am. Drug-free. Honor. And a war against the system. – CM Punk • People who don’t like me talk about it as though I’m trash because I have tattoos. I find that insane because it’s 2008, not the 1950s. Tattoos aren’t limited to sailors. It’s a form of art I find beautiful. I love it. – Megan Fox • Previously unseen boo-boos come at you like tattoos on a teenage girl. – Robert Genn • Put tattoos all up and down our thighs, do anything our parents would despise. Take uppers, downers, blues, and reds and yellows, our brains are turning into jello. – Joan Baez • Quirky is sexy, like scars or chipped teeth. I also like tattoos they’re rebellious. – Jennifer Aniston • Right,” I scoffed, “Alpha Yam Ergo.” Adrian nodded solemnly. “A very old and prestigious society.” “I’ve never heard of them,” said the girl who’d claimed the first shirt. “They don’t let many people in,” he said. In white paint, he wrote his fake fraternity’s initials: AYE. “Isn’t that what pirates say?” asked one of the girls. “Well, the Alpha Yams have nautical origins,” he explained. To my horror he began painting a pirate skeleton riding a motorcycle. “Oh, no,” I groaned. “Not the tattoo.” “It’s our logo,” he said. – Richelle Mead • Say my shoe game nuts so I call em cashews Every other city it’s another Nicki tattoo – Nicki Minaj • Score a touchdown, kiss your tattoo. Kaepernicking! – Colin Kaepernick • She gets on you under your skin like a tattoo she’ll always be there! – Jason Aldean • She was clean”: no piercings, tattoos, or scarifications. All the kids were now. And who could blame them, Alex thought, after watching three generations of flaccid tattoos droop like moth-eaten upholstery over poorly stuffed biceps and saggy asses? – Jennifer Egan • She’s a classy girl though, at least all her tattoos are spelt right. – Chic Murray • Show me a man with a tattoo and I’ll show you a man with an interesting past. – Jack London • So that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again. – Virginia Woolf • Some people pay a thousand dollars for a tattoo. This scar cost me twenty grand. – Mat Hoffman • Some say his droppings have been found as far north as York, and that he has a full size tattoo of his face, on his face. All we know is he’s called the Stig. – Jeremy Clarkson • Sometimes I bust out and do things so permanent. Like tattoos and marriage. – Drew Barrymore • Tattoo on the lower back? Might as well be a bullseye. – Vince Vaughn • Tattoo. What a loaded word it is, rife with associations to goons, goofs, bikers, tribal warriors, carnival artists, drunken sailors and floozies. – Jon Anderson • Tattooing is my social life, too, so most of my time is taken up with that. People like Henry Lewis, Mike Davis at Everlasting Tattoo. – Margaret Cho • Tattoos are a right of passage. They’re a marker of bravery, of maturity, of cultural acceptance. The tattoo represents not only a willingness to accept pain – to endure it – but a need to actively embrace it. Because life is painful – beautiful but painful. – Nicola Barker • Tattoos are like stories – they’re symbolic of the important moments in your life. Sitting down, talking about where you got each tattoo and what it symbolizes, is really beautiful. – Pamela Anderson • Tattoos are my way of expressing myself without the need for words. – Jay Park • Tattoos are permanent and a lifelong commitment, the same as marriage. – Chester Bennington • Tattoos are so widespread, so ugly and so very, very permanent. You can, in theory, have them removed – but a large chunk of your living flesh will go with it. – Tony Parsons • Tattoos aren’t meant for everybody and they’re too goddamn good for some people. – Lyle Tuttle • Tattoos exude pain and pleasure all at the same time. – Chester Bennington • Tattoos tell stories of crime and passion, punishment and regret. They express an outlaw, antiauthoritarian point of view and communicate a romantic solidarity among society’s outcasts. – Douglas Kent Hall • The ‘black metallers’ will probably continue to ‘get loaded,’ ‘get high,’ and in all other manners too behave like the stereotypical Negro; they will probably continue to get foreign tribal tattoos, dress, walk, talk, look and act like homosexuals, and so forth. – Varg Vikernes • The ‘believe’ tattoo is because my mom always told me to believe. – Ashley Tisdale • The biggest misconception about me is the bad-boy image that everyone stuck me into due to my tattoos, drug days and the constant changes I make with my hair color. – A. J. McLean • The conservatism is extraordinary to me; just compare the way they dress to the way their parents dress. There are still no tattoos or piercings, which is interesting to me. Why does everyone who lives in one place dress alike, look alike, eat the same thing, and decorate the same way? – Tina Barney • The first five years of my career, I was Inmate #1, Bad Guy #1 and Mean Guy #1. I had a great career going, until somebody told me that I was typecast. I said, “Well, what’s typecast?” And they said, “Well, you’re always playing the mean Chicano dude with tattoos.” I thought about that and I said, “Wait a minute! I am the mean Chicano dude with tattoos, so somebody is getting it right.” – Danny Trejo • The first tattoo I got was when I was 17, and it’s a cross on my bicep with ‘Only God Can Judge Me’ underneath. – Trey Songz • The first time I showed the tattoo it was big news in the newspaper. ‘She has a tattoo with a snake.’ It’s not a snake! – Li Na • The funny thing is that my husband couldn’t be sweeter. He looks like this bad boy. He’s got tattoos and earrings and a mohawk, but when you talk to him and he’s around you, he’s such a gentleman. He holds doors for ladies. He pulls out chairs. He cooks. He cleans. – Malin Akerman • The funny thing is, when a Harley-Davidson guy full of tattoos comes out with a Maltese, they’re trying to soften themselves out. When a very soft, single lady with a tailored look comes out with a Rottweiler, she’s looking for protection, for strength. Society automatically views the guy as too strong so he brings a Maltese. It’s just a natural way to balance your situation. It really depends. – Cesar Millan • The justification for rap rock seems to be that if you take really bad rock and put really bad rap over it, the result is somehow good, provided the raps are barked by an overweight white guy with cropped hair and forearm tattoos. – John Jeremiah Sullivan • The muffled drum’s sad roll has beat; The soldier’s last tattoo; No more on Life’s parade shall meet; The brave and fallen few. On Fame’s eternal camping-ground; Their silent tents are spread, And Glory guards, with solemn round; The bivouac of the dead. – Theodore O’Hara • The one album I can’t live without is called ‘Cumbolo’ by a band called Culture. Every song on their album is deep, but there’s one in particular called ‘This Train.’ I have a tattoo of the lyrics on my left arm. – Idris Elba • The one in the movie is not real, but my Casper tattoo is real, and it is my only one. – Casper Van Dien • The other day, I got a henna tattoo that says “Forever.” – Zach Galifianakis • The tattoo can only exist as part of the skin, as a drawing always is an incision in the material and therefore cannot be parted from it. – Antoni Tapies • The tattoo has a profound meaning: the superficiality of modern man’s existence. – Anthony Daniels • The tattoo of the History is permanent; once a nation or a man is marked by this tattoo, erasing is impossible. – Mehmet Murat Ildan • The universality of tattooing is a curious subject for speculation. – James Cook • There is something in the act of having tattoos done that I love. It can be quite addictive. I’ve got a few on my back because my friend is an artist, and a few on my arms. Every time I pass a tattoo parlour, I think, ‘Maybe just a tiny one. – Lena Headey • There is something vulnerable about showing your tattoos to people, even while it gives you a feeling that you are wearing a sleeve when you are naked. – Lena Dunham • There’s never the right last moment. Even if you get to say good-bye, even if you get to say “I love you”, even if you jump off a plane and get a tattoo and hug everyone you’ve ever met right before you drift off with a smile, it is never the right last moment. There is always more to say, somewhere to go, something to remember. Another discussion, another fight. There is always supposed to be another day. – Pamela Ribon • This is so cool,” I said loudly as Dad walked away. “Have you met the tattoo artist? Is he hot?” “He’s a she,” Mom said. “Is she hot? Cause I’m still young, you know. My sexual identity isnt fully formed.” “Your father can’t hear you anymore, Maya.” Mom sighed. – Kelley Armstrong • This was a place where tattoos outnumbered teeth. – Harlan Coben • To many people, dramatic criticism must seem like an attempt to tattoo soap bubbles. – John Mason Brown • Usually all my tattoos came at good times. A tattoo is something permanent when you’ve made a self-discovery, or something you’ve come to a conclusion about. – Angelina Jolie • We all originally came from the woods! it is hard to eradicate from any of us the old taste for the tattoo and the war-paint; and the moment that money gets into our pockets, it somehow or another breaks out in ornaments on our person, without always giving refinement to our manners. – Edwin Percy Whipple • We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. • We have certain rules for traditional lyric poetry in Korea. I twist my body, confused by what to say and how to act, facing these rules. Confronting traditional lyricism, I speak with a bare body without the tattoos of culture on it. – Kim Hyesoon • Well, I love tattoos and have been drawing them on my binders in school since I was little. – Kimberly Caldwell • Well, these tattoos aren’t really rebellion. These tattoos are all tattoos I’ve had since I have been a pastor. – Jay Bakker • What we’ve said to the girls is: ‘If you guys ever decide that you’re going to get a tattoo, then mommy and me will get the exact same tattoo, in the same place.’ And we’ll go on YouTube and show it off as a family tattoo. – Barack Obama • When all the people covered in tattoos turn about 70 years old, they’re going to look like a strange race of melting clowns. – Dana Gould • When I came to New York and I opened the window of the thirty-fifth-floor apartment, there’s light pollution and fog, and I couldn’t see my star. So I drew it on my wrist with a pen, but it kept washing away. Then I went to a tattoo parlor on Second Avenue and had it done. – Gisele Bundchen • When I’m good, I’m very good. But when I’m bad I’m better. – Mae West • When you’re young, you’re stupid. You do silly things. I did it (the O-Z-Z-Y tattoo across his knuckles) when I was 14. I was in jail for something. I could have had it removed, but why? It’s my trademark. People stop me and say, ‘Let me have a look at your hand.’ – Ozzy Osbourne • White folks are not going to come to see a bunch of guys with tattoos, with cornrows. I’m sorry, but anyone who thinks different, they’re stupid. – Charles Barkley • You are such a chick.” I widened my eyes in mock surprise. “No way. Are you sure?” Sighing again, he rubbed at the tattoos on his wrist. “Mackenzie was right. You aren’t slayer material.” Before he had time to register my intentions, I threw a punch. My sore, swollen knuckles slammed into his cheekbone, thrusting his head to the side. Pain shot up my arm, but I bit my tongue to stop a moan. “You were saying?” He popped his jaw, rubbed at the reddening skin-and slowly grinned. “Okay, so now I understand why Cole likes you. You’re worse than Kat. – Gena Showalter • You can’t judge a book by its cover, though. People think I’m bad because I got tattoos or snort a little cocaine here and there. They think I’m a killer. But what if I wasn’t a killer? Then what? Don’t be tripping on me. I pay my damn taxes, OK? Chill.- Gunplay • You have to have your face in the food. These days people think a tattoo and a bottle of Sriracha equals success. – Bobby Flay • You have to think hard with a tattoo. ‘What will I love for the rest of my life?’ – Kate Upton • You may be right. I think it was round about Christmas when I got my Welsh dragon tattoo.” At that, Tessa had to try very hard not to blush. “How did that happen?” Will made an airy gesture with his hand. “I was drunk…” “Nonsense. You were never really drunk.” “On the contrary—in order to learn how to pretend to be inebriated, once must become inebriated at least once, as a reference point. Six-Fingered Nigel had been at the mulled cider—“ “You can’t mean there’s truly a Six-Fingered Nigel? – Cassandra Clare • Your tattoos are supposed to be some connection to your personality. That’s a lot more important than going in and just picking one off a wall. I’ve never understood why people get butterflies tattooed on their bottoms or whatever. That’s really weird. – Ville Valo • You’re like a philosopher with tattoos. – J.A. Redmerski

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Tattoo Quotes

Official Website: Tattoo Quotes

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• 30 years ago in white supremacy, we had a strategy called leaderless resistance. The concept was: stop shaving our heads, stop getting tattoos and instead try to blend in as much as possible. It was a really concerted effort to try and tone down the rhetoric and make it a little more palatable to the mainstream. And it certainly has penetrated the mainstream now. We’re seeing people who were supportive of our cause back then also supportive of Donald Trump’s cause, certainly with the recent cabinet appointments. – Christian Picciolini • A cool tattoo design is any drawing that would also look good saggy. – Demetri Martin • A good tattoo always has a story that runs deeper than the skin, and Inked tells that story. – Tara Dakides • A label is a soul-tattoo that is ingrained deep in our hearts, so much so that it determines how we see ourselves, And how we see ourselves determines how we live… A destructive label leads to a destructive life. There is a soul thief, a dark enemy, who wants to nail ruinous labels to your heart so that he can steal your life. Jesus wants to give you life giving labels that release your potential for the good of the world. – Derwin L. Gray • A lot of my friends have tattoos; I realized that it’s not only just a part of pop culture, but a bit of a map on someone’s body, which says something about people. A part of their life, like an armor or a crest. – Christian Louboutin • A tattoo doesn’t make you look like an individual. – Tony Parsons • A tattoo is a true poetic creation, and is always more than meets the eye. As a tattoo is grounded on living skin, so its essence emotes a poignancy unique to the mortal human condition. – V. Vale • A tattoo is an affirmation: that this body is yours to have and to enjoy while you’re here. Nobody else can control what you do with it. – Don Ed Hardy • A tattoo is graffiti on the temple of the body. – Gordon B. Hinckley • A very common thing these days is people show up and they ask us in the band to sign with a Sharpie right on their skin and they go get it tattooed the next day. Then they’ll show up at another show and they’ll have their tattoo. – Jared Leto • After Cannes every year, I end up going to some foreign country I’ve never been to before and introducing myself to a new religion – I’ll go to Bali and research Hinduism, or I’ll go to Thailand and get another tattoo from Thai tattoo artist Ajarn Noo Kanpai. – Michelle Rodriguez • After searching for a space, I parked behind the tattoo parlor in front of a sign that said NO PARKING. Since it didn’t specify to whom it was referring, I figured it couldn’t possibly be talking to me. – Darynda Jones • Anyone who’s had a tattoo knows once you get your first one, as you’re walking out the door, you’re planning the next. – Chris Evans • Around the mid-’90s every hair guy who would have been in a hair-metal band got his tattoos and suddenly decided he was alternative. It just became like a thing. – Billy Corgan • As soon as I saw tattoos as a way to tell your story, I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I totally get it.’ So I got my first tattoo a couple of years ago, and it’s the word ‘hope’ on my left arm. It has a couple of dots at the end for each of my kids. – Kristian Bush • As soon as you tell me to do one thing, I do the opposite. As soon as someone tells me not to get any more tattoos, I have this intense fire burning inside me to cover myself with them. I don’t care if it’s self-destructive. I just have that need to rebel. – Megan Fox • At the end of the day, the Lord knows I have no malice in my heart. But I’ve got tattoos, and I still fornicate. – Pharrell Williams

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Tattoo', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_tattoo').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_tattoo img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • ‘Battlefield’ was one of those slow-building songs, the way ‘Tattoo’ was. It was kind of a word-of-mouth hit. The more people heard it, the more they started requesting it on the radio. – Jordin Sparks • Be a good-looking corpse. Leave a good-looking tattoo. – Ed Westwick • Bikers, in general, have just been so attractive to people. Photographers would follow them because there’s this weird warrior gravitas that comes with it. The bikes are loud, they have tattoos, they have artwork that they all wear on their jackets. – Ryan Hurst • But for me, to get the tattoo was part of moving into adulthood. Making a choice that is permanent and that I’ll have to stick with. – Francois Arnaud • But I understand now what Tori said about her tattoo representing a fear she overcame-a reminder of where she was, as well as a reminder of who she is now. Maybe there is a way to honor my old life as I embrace my new one. “yes,” I say. “Three of these flying birds.” I touch my collarbone, marking the path of their flight-toward my heart. One for each member of the family I left behind. – Veronica Roth • Don’t be dumb. (don’t get a tattoo) – Dallin H. Oaks • Don’t cut it,” he said gruffly. “But no one’ll see my tattoos if I don’t.” “Wear it up.” -Dimitri, Rose, Dimitri – Richelle Mead • Don’t let these tattoos fool you. I’m straight edge. I’m a man of great discipline; I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t do drugs… my addiction is wrestling – my obsession is competition. Discipline. My name is C…M…Punk. – CM Punk • Eddie waited ’til he finished high school, he went to Hollywood, got a tattoo. – Tom Petty • Enema of the State song is kind of like a tattoo, like a moment in time, but it aged well. It’s not like one that you’re looking at like, “Aw, God, I gotta get that s**t removed.” It’s something we’re proud of. – Travis Barker • Even though she saw tattoos everywhere, they continued to fascinate her. How bizarre to be branded like a box of cereal. Didn’t people mind being counted as just one more product on a shelf? There had to be more to a person than that. – Suzanne Weyn • Every rock’n’roll band I know, guys with long hair and tattoos, plays golf now. – Alice Cooper • Every time I get a tattoo, my parents say they’ll disown me. I have to get them airbrushed for Charmed. Witches don’t have tattoos, I guess. – Alyssa Milano • Everybody gets the tattoo they deserve. – David Duchovny • Everybody in America is a part of this big herd of cattle being led to the marketplace, not to be sold, which is usual with cattle, but to do the buying. And everyone is branded. You see the brands – Nike, Puma, Coke – all over their bodies. Pretty soon you’ll go to a family and say, “$100,000 if we can tattoo Pepsi on your child’s forehead, and we’ll have it removed when he’s twenty-one. A hundred grand.” – George Carlin • Everybody knows I have the ratchetest booty tattoo of an ex-boyfriend. – Adrienne Bailon • Everything is addictive to me but tattoos are addictive to all. – The Rev • Everything is always spur-of-the-moment. All of my tattoos I decide that second and do it. – Avril Lavigne • Failure is a bruise, not a tattoo. – John Sinclair • Footnote: 79) The anchor is gigantic and must weigh a hundred tons, and — delightfully — it really is anchor-shaped, i.e. the same shape as anchors in tattoos. – David Foster Wallace • For someone who likes tattoos, the most precious thing is bare skin. – Cher • Getting a tattoo should hurt. It’s a rite of passage. – Jenna Jameson • Getting a tattoo would probably make me cry. – Calvin Trillin • Giving birth was easier than having a tattoo. – Nicole Appleton • Hair is just one way of expressing ourselves. We express ourselves through how we dress or through tattoos or body art or piercings or cosmetic surgery. – Linda Evangelista • Having previously graduated from a 2-year commercial arts class, I thought that commercial illustration was the best way to make a living doing art. But the more tattoos that I did, the more I realized what artistic career potential tattooing had and I enjoyed it. – William Webb • Having the tattoo itself is not really for the end result for me. I like having them done. – Lena Headey • He and the girl had almost nothing to say to each other. One thing he did say was, ‘I ain’t got any tattoo on my back.’ ‘What you got on it?’ the girl said. ‘My shirt,’ Parker said. ‘Haw.’ ‘Haw, haw,’ the girl said politely. – Flannery O’Connor • He said, I’m better off without her, until I showed him my tattoo. – Tom Waits • I always look for a woman who has a tattoo. I see a woman with a tattoo, and I’m thinking, okay, here’s a gal who’s capable of making a decision she’ll regret in the future. – Richard Jeni • I always say your body is the temple of your spirit, why not decorate it? My kids say, no, no, your body is the temple of your spirit, keep it clean. I’m covered in tattoos and I get a tattoo every time I write a book. I get the tattoo from the book. – Bill Ayers • I am concerned about the environment. I love to wear black. I think government is best when it stays out of people’s lives and business as much as possible. I love punk rock. I believe in a strong national defense. I have a tattoo. I believe government should always be efficient and accountable. I have lots of gay friends. And yes, I am a Republican. – Meghan McCain • I am wearing a gray shirt, blue jeans, black shoes–new clothes, but beneath them, my Dauntless tattoos. It is impossible to erase my choices. Especially these. – Veronica Roth • I basically – I don’t like tattoos, unless you’re a firefighter who has a tattoo that has to do with that or a military guy. That’s – those are people who should have tattoos. – Denis Leary • I believe tattoos are a lifestyle not a fashion trend. – Machine Gun Kelly • I chose a sunflower because when darkness descends they close up to regenerate. But I really wish I’d never had the tattoo in the first place. Clean, clear skin is always better. – Halle Berry • I collect Wonder Woman – from comics to paraphernalia, and I even have a tattoo of her on my back. I’m a huge Wonder Woman fan! – Lights • I did a piece where I was talking about torture at Abu Ghraib, and I embroidered my hand with the image of the hooded Abu Ghraib prisoners who’d been tortured using a needle and thread. I know that meeting a Holocaust survivor when I was eight and seeing the tattoo on her arm from her time in the camps influenced my piece about Abu Ghraib. – Jill Soloway • I do have 14 tattoos, but I also do come home every single night and watch reality TV with my cat. – Lea Michele • I do have a few little tattoos, but they were mostly done to cover scars because I’m so fair. – Dolly Parton • I don’t care what color your hair is, if you’re pale or tan, if you have makeup on or just woke up all I care about is that when I look at you, you always look back and see me. You’re beautiful inside and out and if you wanted to tattoo all that pretty white skin from head to toe I would be honored to put it there for you but if not I’ll take you all smooth and milky white any chance I get. – Jay Crownover • I don’t have any tattoos – I live vicariously through my sister, Langley, who has many. If I can’t stick to one ensemble, I don’t think I could stick to one tattoo. – Dree Hemingway • I don’t have any tattoos but I’ve thought about getting Ernie, from Bert and Ernie, on my earlobe. He made a big impression on me as a kid. And I have pretty big earlobes. – J Mascis • I don’t think there are any songs that I’ve written in the past that I now disagree. It’s kind of like tattoos; I would never regret a tattoo, because it was how I felt at that time in my life. I don’t think I’ve ever said anything that I would take back. So far, so good! I would probably change the music, or change how I sing it, maybe do it a little bit cooler, or a bit more grown-up. But I don’t think that there are any lyrics that I regret. – Emeli Sande • I dropped my pants in a tattoo parlor in Amsterdam. I woke up in a waterbed with this funky-looking dragon with a blue tongue on my hip. I realized I made a mistake, so a few months later I got a cross to cover it. When my pants hang low, it looks like I’m wearing a dagger! – Angelina Jolie • I feel like the last tattoo you got is usually your favorite. – Nico Tortorella • I felt bad about myself because certain people were relentlessly attacking me and my reputation. My mom kept saying ‘Let it go, Lauren, It doesn’t matter’ … [I] realized I had to stop worrying about what other people think. The next day I got a tattoo on my lower back that says ‘sticks and stones’, because they may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. – Lauren Conrad • I got a little tattoo on my face, I’ll never be able to work another real job so I consider that to be kinda forcing myself to stick to music. – Benji Madden • I got more than a thing for you, tattoo wit a ink for you right over my heart girl, I’ll do the unthinkable. – Drake • I got my tattoo a year before the Olympic trials, so I kind of used it as motivation to make the Olympic team the following year. I look at it every time I dive and it’s kind of a little fun thing. – Tera Van Beilen • I got to actually tattoo one of the members of The Misfits. The very first tattoo I ever did was this Misfits skull. – Kat Von D • I had six silly tattoos done when I was young and I bitterly regret them. I’ve thought about laser surgery, but that leaves a scar, so I’m just leaving them. – Andre Benjamin • I have a handful of tattoos that I really want to put on people that I can’t find anyone to let me give them to. – Jemima Kirke • I have a maple leaf tattoo over my heart, quite literally, and my two favorite things on Earth are being in Canada and making movies. – Jay Baruchel • I have a swastika tattoo on my arm, but it’s just because I like right-hand turns. – Kyle Dunnigan • I have a tattoo on my foot that says ‘it’s a whale’ in Japanese, because Japanese people kill whales. My stuffed whale was like most children’s teddy bear. I took it with me everywhere. I slept with it. I couldn’t live without my whale. – Skylar Grey • I have Bob Dylan lyrics on my ribs. I’m a diehard Dylan fan, and my dad and I joke that if I ever met him, I’d have him sign his name right under my tattoo and then I’d run to the parlor to get his signature tattooed. – Carly Chaikin • I have no love for myself as a human being, but I have immense pride in the music I make, and I believe it has an important place. Others do, too, and the thousands of people with Morrissey tattoos certainly proves something. – Steven Morrissey • I have no real tattoos. I wear my bruises and tons of scars as my tattoos. – Kellan Lutz • I have no tattoos that I regret – I have had some that I have had changed according to how my life was. – Nas • I have no tattoos. There’s nothing I’ve even been that into to get a tattoo of it. – Eli Roth • I have this huge lion tattoo embossed on my arm. I was a little worried as to how we would cover it up. But my makeup man covered the tattoo with makeup. It took close to two hours. – Sanjay Dutt • I haven’t had a drink in thirteen years, but occasionally I’m tempted to have one beer. The problem is that if I have that one beer, I wake up in Tijuana four days later with a tattoo and a sore ass. – Craig Ferguson • I just feel like this skin is mine. It’s aging every day and the tattoos are aging with me. So, I’m going to be an old piece of paper one day with a lot of work on it. – Maria Dahvana Headley • I know people say ‘what about when you’re old and you’re covered in tattoos?’ – so what. Anyway, in time to come everyone will have them and it will be all the trend, won’t it? ‘Cuz you don’t know how the times are gonna change. – Cher Lloyd • I like the bad-boy types. Generally the guy I’m attracted to is the guy in the club with all the tattoos and nail polish. He’s usually the lead singer in a punk band and plays guitar. But my serious boyfriends are relatively clean-cut, nice guys. So it’s strange. – Megan Fox • I love math. I have little secret number tattoos everywhere. I design them. – Pauley Perrette • I love tattoos. And mine symbolise who I really am. I have a Samurai on my left arm. At a subconscious level, I connect to this warrior and model myself on his discipline, skills and honour. There is also a tribal tattoo and a Chinese symbol of faith. I have seen a lot of people getting tattoos just because it’s a trend. – Virat Kohli • I love Tinkerbell because she’s feisty and about it. She’s got swag! She’s going to do what she wants to do. I even have a Tinkerbell tattoo, and she is wearing Adidas flip-flops! – Kidada Jones • I love to make music, I love to get tattoos…That’s just what I love. If I wasn’t getting paid I’d still do it. – Kevin Gates • I need to know you believe me when I say I love you. That is all.” “I believe everything you say,” Tessa said with a smile, her hands creeping doen from his waist to his weapons belt. Her fingers closed on the hilt of the dagger, and she yanked it from the belt, smiling as he looked down at her in surprise. “After all,” she said, “you weren’t lying about the tattoo of the dragon of Wales, were you? – Cassandra Clare • I never had any desire to get a tattoo. If I was ever going to get one, I would get a plain anchor with a rope around it, the most unimaginative possible tattoo, like Popeye had. – John Waters • I never thought about getting any tattoos removed. – Henry Rollins • I never watched those Spice Girls. I didn’t enjoy that at all. So I didn’t know Victoria Beckham well. But she came out with this pretty boy, got married, and the boy got more tattoos and more tattoos. And then I met her a few times, and we started work, and something happened. You know, she wanted it. She loves what she’s doing. – Manolo Blahnik • I probably have the crappiest tattoo — not only in country music — but maybe the world. – Blake Shelton • I really think if you have a tattoo you have to wonder about what kind of future you have ahead of you. As an employer, I wouldn’t employ someone with tattoos as I would wonder what customers would think about them. For me, tattoos are just a way for people to find attention who haven’t found another way in their life to achieve it by conventional means. – Katie Hopkins • I removed the window [tattoo] because, while I used to spend all my time looking out through windows wishing to be outside, I now live there all the time. – Angelina Jolie • I sort of tend to equate tattoos with prisoners, punks or people with a high level of self-confidence. I don’t necessarily have a covered-in-tattoos personality. – Lena Dunham • I think I have enough tattoos for now. If I get any others, I’ll probably do my kids initials. – Niki Taylor • I think if you’re gonna get a tattoo, just get one: the words, ‘I’m dumb.’ That’s it. That way in 10 years, when you go, ‘Why did I get this?,’ you can be like, ‘Oh, I’m dumb!’ – Daniel Tosh • I think when tattoos are new and colorful, they look bad. But they look better the older and more bleached out they become. – Urs Fischer • I try to really capitalize off of what other rappers really can’t do. There are opportunities that rappers I love simply can’t get, because… you know… I don’t have the tattoos; I have a different image. – Drake • I used to have a sister, but I never got to meet her because she died after two days, I think. So if I got a tattoo, it would probably have to be something to do with my sister. – Chloe Grace Moretz • I want to get married but I look at husbands the same way I look at tattoos. I want one, but I can’t decide what I want, and I don’t want to be stuck with something I’d grow to hate and have surgically removed. – Margaret Cho • I wanted alot of tattoos but I never thought I was gonna be this rediculous. – Synyster Gates • I was a prefect at school, I never had a tattoo, got a detention or pierced my ears more than once. – Amanda Holden • I was just a big fan of tattoos always growing up, and I wanted something cool that symbolizes what I’ve been through in my life, and everything on my chest and my back is like a collage. – Kevin Durant • I went to this tattoo parlor in the East Village and I got an outline of a violin on my lower back. They call them tramp stamps now. – Katherine Moennig • If the body is a temple, then tattoos are its stained glass windows. – Sylvia Plath • I’ll never have a tattoo – I just don’t like them, and when you’re old they can look a disaster. As for piercings, I don’t like them on men. – Rafael Nadal • I’ll tell you this, lad: A tattoo says more of a fellow looking at it than it can do of the man who’s got it on his back. – Sarah Hall • I’m a big fan of zombies, and I have a zombie tattoo on my leg. – Tyler Posey • I’m a tearless clown. If I were to get a tattoo, it would be the two masks, and they would be both smiling. – Andy Samberg • I’m addicted to tattoos. I can’t stop; I love them. – Adrianne Palicki • I’m celebrating my love for you with a pint of beer and a new tattoo – Billy Bragg • I’m definitely in the market for being uncool. There was some funny stuff, like the thing about making sure I show people that I have tattoos and cigarettes so that they know I’m badass. But really, I do have tattoos! And I do smoke cigarettes sometimes, and I can’t change that. But I am not badass, by any means. I do some stuff that’s tongue-in-cheek, and some stuff that’s on the line. And it could be funny, it could be serious, and I never even know myself, because it could be funny that day, and the next day it’s totally embarrassing. – Ryan Adams • I’m not enthused by these rap dudes. All in they videos, posin’ half nude, with all of them tattoos, Til I blacken they eyes and have them lookin’ like raccoons. – Trife Diesel • I’m such a profound believer that timing is everything; I would tattoo that on my arm. – Drew Barrymore • I’m waiting to get old – I think old guys with tattoos look good.- Ryan Gosling • It wasn’t the tattoo that had changed her, had given her repossession of her body. It was her actions, her choices. It was finding the path when it looked like there weren’t any paths to be found. – Melissa Marr • It’s hard to say conversation has become a minimal thing, because look at the rise of mobile communications in the last 10 years. It used to be only the President had a mobile phone. Now everyone on earth, even if they have nothing else, they have a cell phone. It’s a larger anthropological shift in my mind than even the tattoo age in the United States. – Padgett Powell • Its interesting, the things you learn when youre 21. I learned never to get tattoos in the middle of shooting a movie. Because if youre not Angelina Jolie or Megan Fox, they will fire you. – Katee Sackhoff • It’s more likely I’ll dye my hair green, get a bunch of tattoos and go on tour with Amy Winehouse. – Mike Huckabee • I’ve always described parts as tattoos. For actors our tattoos are in the form of films. – Eric Bana • I’ve come to realize that Barack Obama is the tattoo president. Like a big tattoo, it seemed cool when you were young. But later on, that decision doesn’t look so good, and you wonder: what was I thinking? But the worst part is you’re still going to have to explain it to your kids. – Tim Pawlenty • I’ve got nothing against tattoos. I don’t have one myself. If I did, it would be right there next to my watch. It would say “Your wife’s birthday is August 2nd, your anniversary is September 18th, don’t let Ron White drive your car again.” – Jeff Foxworthy • Johnny Depp is like a brother to me. We have matching tattoos on our backs – Charles Baudelaire, the flowers of evil, this giant skeleton thing. It’s kind of a secret. People say to us, ‘Why did you get that?’ And we say, ‘No reason.’ – Marilyn Manson • Just saw a woman with a big tattoo of Jesus on her back. I guess it’s an ixnay on the oggy style-day. – Dana Gould • Man, I’m messed up right now. My best friend is my father? The man I idolized as a kid… whose tattoo is on my arm… And he’s younger than me. Yeah, I don’t think I can handle this. Mindwipe me, somebody… please! Where’s that dragon from Sanctuary? Simi, go get Max. I need him. – Sherrilyn Kenyon • Marriage is supposed to be permanent. It’s like a tattoo that yells at you. – Dov Davidoff • Maybe. Although I doubt most Shadowhunters get a tattoo of Donatello from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on their left shoulder. – Cassandra Clare • Mildred waves Carlos over. ‘Let me look at you.’ She eyes him up and down. ‘I saw you when you walked in. What’s with all those tattoos? Makes you look like a hooligan.’ ‘I suspect I am a hooligan,’ he says to her. ‘Whatever that means. – Simone Elkeles • My body is a journal in a way. It’s like what sailors used to do, where every tattoo meant something, a specific time in your life when you make a mark on yourself, whether you do it yourself with a knife or with a professional tattoo artist. – Johnny Depp • My body is my journal, and my tattoos are my story. – Johnny Depp • My favorite action movie growing up was ‘Supergirl.’ It wasn’t good by any stretch of the imagination, but it was my favorite because I wanted to be her. I have a Supergirl tattoo. – Adrianne Palicki • My favorite tattoo right now is the one on my lower stomach that reads “Almost Famous” because as my career grows I’m still humbled every morning when I look at that tattoo, and I’ll always remember how much it sucked to ALMOST be famous. – Machine Gun Kelly • My first tattoo is a full-on Sailor Jerry situation on my hip – it’s a swallow with big spread wings. When I got it I was 20 on St. Mark’s Place in New York; I just walked in in a frenzy. It’s still there 17 years later and it’s not a terrible thing to look at. – Maria Dahvana Headley • My friends are coming up – they run this tattoo parlour out there and they’re gonna ink me up with the tattoo I’ve been wanting since I was two, right here, upper arm. – Charlie Benante • My ideal guy is my future husband. Not sure who he is yet, but he’s out there. What impresses me in a gay guy? A warm smile, stubble, easy to talk to, thoughtful tattoos, kind eyes, wit, positivity, wanderlust, ambition, and a cute ass. – Tyler Oakley • My mom actually took me to get my first tattoo when I was 15. She highly regrets that choice now, as I have a lot more. – Nico Tortorella • My new one (tattoo) says ‘Never a failure, always a lesson’ and is kind of my mantra to life, just a reminder. My life is just a crazy rollercoaster every day and whenever I read that it just reassures me. – Rihanna • My new tattoo is Jesus being carried by three cherubs. Obviously the cherubs are my boys. At some point they are going to need to look after me. That’s what they’re doing in the picture. It means a lot. – David Beckham • My only advice is don’t tattoo some guy’s name on yourself. Ever. I’ve done it twice. Twice! I’m in the process of getting both removed. It’s the most painful thing imaginable. – Diora Baird • My tattoo is a phoenix. I got the first when I was 16. I hid it for years. – Ashley Scott • My tattoo is of a cannon in Vancouver that I got in a fleeting moment of stupidity maybe 14 years ago. A lot of people have really beautiful tattoos, and I get real tattoo envy. But then other people basically just treat them like bumper stickers for their bodies. – Ryan Reynolds • My tattoo is that I don’t have a tattoo. – Michael J. Fox • My tattoos are like a scrapbook of my life. Sometimes you don’t feel comfortable in your own skin, so covering it up with pictures helps – Frank Iero • My tattoos are reminders to hang in there when things get rough. – Demi Lovato • My whole thing was, just being me. Now, you look around the NBA and all of them have tattoos, guys wearing cornrows. Now you see the police officers with the cornrows. I took a beating for those types of things. – Allen Iverson • No one wants to see a tattoo on a stomach. – Lena Dunham • Not one great country can be named, from the polar regions in the north to New Zealand in the south, in which the aborigines do not tattoo themselves. – Charles Darwin • Nothing to show but this brand new tattoo. But it’s a real beauty, a Mexican cutie, how it got here I haven’t a clue. – Jimmy Buffett • One of the beauties of ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ is the very delicate and strange relationship between the two main characters. – Stellan Skarsgard • One of the series I like is D.M. Cornish’s ‘Monster Blood Tattoo,’ in which he creates a whole language. Kids who are reading that are building a language in their heads. There’s no real cognitive difference. I think kids are excited by language, and they’re not always given credit for that. – Matthew Tobin Anderson • One person’s tattoo is nobody else’s business – Don Ed Hardy • Painting and tattooing the body is a return to animalism. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe • Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality. – Salvador Dali • People are proud of their tattoos. It’s like a modern coat of arms. -Christian Louboutin • People have asked me, what about your tattoos when you’re ninety? Why would it bother me then? I would still want to get tattooed even when I’m a grandmother. – Nicole Miller • People like to come up to me and tell me that I’ve got nice ink. Except these tattoos aren’t just decorations. They are declarations. Every tattoo I have tells its own story about who I am. Drug-free. Honor. And a war against the system. – CM Punk • People who don’t like me talk about it as though I’m trash because I have tattoos. I find that insane because it’s 2008, not the 1950s. Tattoos aren’t limited to sailors. It’s a form of art I find beautiful. I love it. – Megan Fox • Previously unseen boo-boos come at you like tattoos on a teenage girl. – Robert Genn • Put tattoos all up and down our thighs, do anything our parents would despise. Take uppers, downers, blues, and reds and yellows, our brains are turning into jello. – Joan Baez • Quirky is sexy, like scars or chipped teeth. I also like tattoos they’re rebellious. – Jennifer Aniston • Right,” I scoffed, “Alpha Yam Ergo.” Adrian nodded solemnly. “A very old and prestigious society.” “I’ve never heard of them,” said the girl who’d claimed the first shirt. “They don’t let many people in,” he said. In white paint, he wrote his fake fraternity’s initials: AYE. “Isn’t that what pirates say?” asked one of the girls. “Well, the Alpha Yams have nautical origins,” he explained. To my horror he began painting a pirate skeleton riding a motorcycle. “Oh, no,” I groaned. “Not the tattoo.” “It’s our logo,” he said. – Richelle Mead • Say my shoe game nuts so I call em cashews Every other city it’s another Nicki tattoo – Nicki Minaj • Score a touchdown, kiss your tattoo. Kaepernicking! – Colin Kaepernick • She gets on you under your skin like a tattoo she’ll always be there! – Jason Aldean • She was clean”: no piercings, tattoos, or scarifications. All the kids were now. And who could blame them, Alex thought, after watching three generations of flaccid tattoos droop like moth-eaten upholstery over poorly stuffed biceps and saggy asses? – Jennifer Egan • She’s a classy girl though, at least all her tattoos are spelt right. – Chic Murray • Show me a man with a tattoo and I’ll show you a man with an interesting past. – Jack London • So that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again. – Virginia Woolf • Some people pay a thousand dollars for a tattoo. This scar cost me twenty grand. – Mat Hoffman • Some say his droppings have been found as far north as York, and that he has a full size tattoo of his face, on his face. All we know is he’s called the Stig. – Jeremy Clarkson • Sometimes I bust out and do things so permanent. Like tattoos and marriage. – Drew Barrymore • Tattoo on the lower back? Might as well be a bullseye. – Vince Vaughn • Tattoo. What a loaded word it is, rife with associations to goons, goofs, bikers, tribal warriors, carnival artists, drunken sailors and floozies. – Jon Anderson • Tattooing is my social life, too, so most of my time is taken up with that. People like Henry Lewis, Mike Davis at Everlasting Tattoo. – Margaret Cho • Tattoos are a right of passage. They’re a marker of bravery, of maturity, of cultural acceptance. The tattoo represents not only a willingness to accept pain – to endure it – but a need to actively embrace it. Because life is painful – beautiful but painful. – Nicola Barker • Tattoos are like stories – they’re symbolic of the important moments in your life. Sitting down, talking about where you got each tattoo and what it symbolizes, is really beautiful. – Pamela Anderson • Tattoos are my way of expressing myself without the need for words. – Jay Park • Tattoos are permanent and a lifelong commitment, the same as marriage. – Chester Bennington • Tattoos are so widespread, so ugly and so very, very permanent. You can, in theory, have them removed – but a large chunk of your living flesh will go with it. – Tony Parsons • Tattoos aren’t meant for everybody and they’re too goddamn good for some people. – Lyle Tuttle • Tattoos exude pain and pleasure all at the same time. – Chester Bennington • Tattoos tell stories of crime and passion, punishment and regret. They express an outlaw, antiauthoritarian point of view and communicate a romantic solidarity among society’s outcasts. – Douglas Kent Hall • The ‘black metallers’ will probably continue to ‘get loaded,’ ‘get high,’ and in all other manners too behave like the stereotypical Negro; they will probably continue to get foreign tribal tattoos, dress, walk, talk, look and act like homosexuals, and so forth. – Varg Vikernes • The ‘believe’ tattoo is because my mom always told me to believe. – Ashley Tisdale • The biggest misconception about me is the bad-boy image that everyone stuck me into due to my tattoos, drug days and the constant changes I make with my hair color. – A. J. McLean • The conservatism is extraordinary to me; just compare the way they dress to the way their parents dress. There are still no tattoos or piercings, which is interesting to me. Why does everyone who lives in one place dress alike, look alike, eat the same thing, and decorate the same way? – Tina Barney • The first five years of my career, I was Inmate #1, Bad Guy #1 and Mean Guy #1. I had a great career going, until somebody told me that I was typecast. I said, “Well, what’s typecast?” And they said, “Well, you’re always playing the mean Chicano dude with tattoos.” I thought about that and I said, “Wait a minute! I am the mean Chicano dude with tattoos, so somebody is getting it right.” – Danny Trejo • The first tattoo I got was when I was 17, and it’s a cross on my bicep with ‘Only God Can Judge Me’ underneath. – Trey Songz • The first time I showed the tattoo it was big news in the newspaper. ‘She has a tattoo with a snake.’ It’s not a snake! – Li Na • The funny thing is that my husband couldn’t be sweeter. He looks like this bad boy. He’s got tattoos and earrings and a mohawk, but when you talk to him and he’s around you, he’s such a gentleman. He holds doors for ladies. He pulls out chairs. He cooks. He cleans. – Malin Akerman • The funny thing is, when a Harley-Davidson guy full of tattoos comes out with a Maltese, they’re trying to soften themselves out. When a very soft, single lady with a tailored look comes out with a Rottweiler, she’s looking for protection, for strength. Society automatically views the guy as too strong so he brings a Maltese. It’s just a natural way to balance your situation. It really depends. – Cesar Millan • The justification for rap rock seems to be that if you take really bad rock and put really bad rap over it, the result is somehow good, provided the raps are barked by an overweight white guy with cropped hair and forearm tattoos. – John Jeremiah Sullivan • The muffled drum’s sad roll has beat; The soldier’s last tattoo; No more on Life’s parade shall meet; The brave and fallen few. On Fame’s eternal camping-ground; Their silent tents are spread, And Glory guards, with solemn round; The bivouac of the dead. – Theodore O’Hara • The one album I can’t live without is called ‘Cumbolo’ by a band called Culture. Every song on their album is deep, but there’s one in particular called ‘This Train.’ I have a tattoo of the lyrics on my left arm. – Idris Elba • The one in the movie is not real, but my Casper tattoo is real, and it is my only one. – Casper Van Dien • The other day, I got a henna tattoo that says “Forever.” – Zach Galifianakis • The tattoo can only exist as part of the skin, as a drawing always is an incision in the material and therefore cannot be parted from it. – Antoni Tapies • The tattoo has a profound meaning: the superficiality of modern man’s existence. – Anthony Daniels • The tattoo of the History is permanent; once a nation or a man is marked by this tattoo, erasing is impossible. – Mehmet Murat Ildan • The universality of tattooing is a curious subject for speculation. – James Cook • There is something in the act of having tattoos done that I love. It can be quite addictive. I’ve got a few on my back because my friend is an artist, and a few on my arms. Every time I pass a tattoo parlour, I think, ‘Maybe just a tiny one. – Lena Headey • There is something vulnerable about showing your tattoos to people, even while it gives you a feeling that you are wearing a sleeve when you are naked. – Lena Dunham • There’s never the right last moment. Even if you get to say good-bye, even if you get to say “I love you”, even if you jump off a plane and get a tattoo and hug everyone you’ve ever met right before you drift off with a smile, it is never the right last moment. There is always more to say, somewhere to go, something to remember. Another discussion, another fight. There is always supposed to be another day. – Pamela Ribon • This is so cool,” I said loudly as Dad walked away. “Have you met the tattoo artist? Is he hot?” “He’s a she,” Mom said. “Is she hot? Cause I’m still young, you know. My sexual identity isnt fully formed.” “Your father can’t hear you anymore, Maya.” Mom sighed. – Kelley Armstrong • This was a place where tattoos outnumbered teeth. – Harlan Coben • To many people, dramatic criticism must seem like an attempt to tattoo soap bubbles. – John Mason Brown • Usually all my tattoos came at good times. A tattoo is something permanent when you’ve made a self-discovery, or something you’ve come to a conclusion about. – Angelina Jolie • We all originally came from the woods! it is hard to eradicate from any of us the old taste for the tattoo and the war-paint; and the moment that money gets into our pockets, it somehow or another breaks out in ornaments on our person, without always giving refinement to our manners. – Edwin Percy Whipple • We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. • We have certain rules for traditional lyric poetry in Korea. I twist my body, confused by what to say and how to act, facing these rules. Confronting traditional lyricism, I speak with a bare body without the tattoos of culture on it. – Kim Hyesoon • Well, I love tattoos and have been drawing them on my binders in school since I was little. – Kimberly Caldwell • Well, these tattoos aren’t really rebellion. These tattoos are all tattoos I’ve had since I have been a pastor. – Jay Bakker • What we’ve said to the girls is: ‘If you guys ever decide that you’re going to get a tattoo, then mommy and me will get the exact same tattoo, in the same place.’ And we’ll go on YouTube and show it off as a family tattoo. – Barack Obama • When all the people covered in tattoos turn about 70 years old, they’re going to look like a strange race of melting clowns. – Dana Gould • When I came to New York and I opened the window of the thirty-fifth-floor apartment, there’s light pollution and fog, and I couldn’t see my star. So I drew it on my wrist with a pen, but it kept washing away. Then I went to a tattoo parlor on Second Avenue and had it done. – Gisele Bundchen • When I’m good, I’m very good. But when I’m bad I’m better. – Mae West • When you’re young, you’re stupid. You do silly things. I did it (the O-Z-Z-Y tattoo across his knuckles) when I was 14. I was in jail for something. I could have had it removed, but why? It’s my trademark. People stop me and say, ‘Let me have a look at your hand.’ – Ozzy Osbourne • White folks are not going to come to see a bunch of guys with tattoos, with cornrows. I’m sorry, but anyone who thinks different, they’re stupid. – Charles Barkley • You are such a chick.” I widened my eyes in mock surprise. “No way. Are you sure?” Sighing again, he rubbed at the tattoos on his wrist. “Mackenzie was right. You aren’t slayer material.” Before he had time to register my intentions, I threw a punch. My sore, swollen knuckles slammed into his cheekbone, thrusting his head to the side. Pain shot up my arm, but I bit my tongue to stop a moan. “You were saying?” He popped his jaw, rubbed at the reddening skin-and slowly grinned. “Okay, so now I understand why Cole likes you. You’re worse than Kat. – Gena Showalter • You can’t judge a book by its cover, though. People think I’m bad because I got tattoos or snort a little cocaine here and there. They think I’m a killer. But what if I wasn’t a killer? Then what? Don’t be tripping on me. I pay my damn taxes, OK? Chill.- Gunplay • You have to have your face in the food. These days people think a tattoo and a bottle of Sriracha equals success. – Bobby Flay • You have to think hard with a tattoo. ‘What will I love for the rest of my life?’ – Kate Upton • You may be right. I think it was round about Christmas when I got my Welsh dragon tattoo.” At that, Tessa had to try very hard not to blush. “How did that happen?” Will made an airy gesture with his hand. “I was drunk…” “Nonsense. You were never really drunk.” “On the contrary—in order to learn how to pretend to be inebriated, once must become inebriated at least once, as a reference point. Six-Fingered Nigel had been at the mulled cider—“ “You can’t mean there’s truly a Six-Fingered Nigel? – Cassandra Clare • Your tattoos are supposed to be some connection to your personality. That’s a lot more important than going in and just picking one off a wall. I’ve never understood why people get butterflies tattooed on their bottoms or whatever. That’s really weird. – Ville Valo • You’re like a philosopher with tattoos. – J.A. Redmerski

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[vidhi-fate]

Do we really need “culture”?

Let me clarify what I mean when I say culture. I come from a land steeped in heritage and culture - India. We tend to glorify our past and ignore our follies. Our past has given us and the world amazing inventions, concepts, people, etc. We are proud of our culture and Indians the world over try to hang on to notions of the past and dreams of the future.

Our culture also has unpleasant things, which we hang on to refusing to let these practices go. What unpleasant things? The list can vary from person to person. For me though, the two things that I really wish we let go of and look beyond are (a) the caste system, and (b) toxic patriarchy.

These concepts worked in the past for historical reasons, and were rigidly enforced to keep people in check. It was perhaps felt that for a population comprising millions of people, society needed to find a place for everyone and define roles. Seems logical enough. Where the system breaks down is when people don’t want to be defined by those rules anymore and want to change. Then society steps in to either “discipline” these individuals or ostracize them altogether. No free will here.

Let’s take the caste system first. It is a logical construct, an ancient division of labour, if you will. Roles are dished out to different communities about what is expected of them and how they are to behave. The system enabled vast volumes of knowledge to be passed down from one generation to the next. A plethora of ideas, concepts and inventions. Universities that were known the world over in ancient times and attracted one and all as beacons of light. Even though these universities were destroyed, a lot of the knowledge survived through the people. I am not saying that this is because of the caste system, only that perhaps it was one plus side of the system of knowledge transfer that happened within castes.

Unfortunately, people are people and instead of looking at the castes as guidelines, and allowing people to move within caste due to merit rather than birth, people abused it for their own personal gains. Caste fiefdoms were formed and continue to this day. These are not only “upper caste” fiefdoms, but each caste has their own set of organisations, committees, lobbies which fight for their own personal gain. It builds and fosters a sense of mistrust, entitlement, and violence, the likes of which puts even animals to shame. Mob lynching, rape, discrimination, opportunism - everything we see in the news - are a symptom of a deeper rot. A rot which is well known and exploited by nefarious elements which exist in all strata of society. Why blame just politicians, or cops, or administration? They come from among us. The rot exists in the common man too. The famed common man who is often shown as a hapless pawn in the hands of the corrupt. The common man who sits silently when a woman is being eve teased; who sits silently when people suffering from mental health issues are labeled “mad”; who knowingly attends weddings where dowry exchanges hands; who cuts people from inter-caste marriages out from society; who blames the victims rather than the oppressors. We, the commoners, are all responsible for this rot. And we do nothing about it. No one wants to rock the boat. Everyone wants to move in a herd mentality. Because of our silence and cowardice, our society has cases of child abuse, the Muzzaffar Nagar abuse racket, violence on helpless citizens who just want to express an opinion, and so on. Why go out? Look at domestic violence and abuse in our own homes. 

The next is toxic patriarchy, and in the same breath toxic matriarchy too. For both concepts attempt to subjugate one at the expense of another. Men don’t cry, mard ko dard nahi hota (a man doesn’t feel pain), men must not show weakness, men must bottle up all emotions except aggression (that one can be on free display; the more aggressive the more “manly” one is), men must provide, men must fight, the list is endless! Women must not wear this or that, they must protect their socially defined “modesty”, must not go out late at night, must not trust boys, must not be aggressive or ambitious, must cook, must take care of the house, it’s a pretty demanding list too. And now with the MeToo movement, ironically we can’t even object for fear of having our careers torpedoed. Men and women are both trapped in this vicious cycle of hate and deprivation. We receive it and hence dish it out with equal fervour. We become vanguards of the very system that represses us. For what? To score imaginary brownie points with the culture police? With our own society? With our own family? To show we stick to the line and will also enforce it? Why can’t we respect people for who they are rather than who society wants them to be?

Scores of reformists in the past attempted to change this mindset. They made significant headway for their times. Unfortunately, somewhere in the rush of making money and earning our daily bread, we forget that this fight must go on. The fight to remove this plague from our society, not just some isolated sections of society, but every town, every village, every home, every person. We forgot that while India has existed for hundreds of years, still it is but a 70-odd year young country united under one banner for the first time in history. We were a collection of kingdoms, each subject to the personality of its monarch. If the monarch was good and progressive, the people prospered. If not, the people suffered. They were divided and hence open to constant invasions. No one spoke in one voice, and hence we were ruled by many outsiders over our history.

For the first time, we are united under one banner - India, or perhaps a more apt description would be United India. For the first time, our diverse populace is all in it together. What affects one, affects the other too. For the first time, we have a collective voice as one nation. Unity in diversity, as we were taught in school and a lesson I kept close to my heart ever since. 

We must remind ourselves that we are a young old nation. Old enough to have a memory, but young enough to know that there is a lot of work ahead of us and a lot we must do. We need to clear our house of the scourge of the past and move forward to a new country. Unfortunately, it isn’t only economic growth we must focus on, but social growth and unity as well. That isn’t going to happen if fringe elements with violent dispositions start taking the centre stage and hijacking the narrative. Misguided and outdated custodians of “culture” cannot make us feel unsafe in our own country and tell us how to think. Our “culture” has always been open minded and open to interpretation. Each person’s side has been demonstrated in epics such as the Ramayan and Mahabharat, and no one is spared the rod of Karma. Jaisi karni, waisi bharni (you reap what you sow). 

It is time that people stood in support of sense rather than mindless violence. In support of ambiguity rather than absolute autocracy. In support of many truths rather than one absolute truth. We are, after all, the land of 33 million gods; a fact that stuns foreigners, but as Indians we know that it stands of freedom of faith for each individual. Each individual has always had the freedom, as enshrined in our “culture”, to debate and come to their own conclusion. As long as our faith harms no one else. We will continue to believe and not try to change others to our way. That freedom is what constitutes culture, in my opinion. The freedom to see perspectives of both Ram, and Ravan, and understand that the truth perhaps lies with neither one but with both, or somewhere in between. 

So do we really need “culture”? No, definitely not some archaic, one-sided version of what someone thinks our “culture” was, is and should be. 

What we need is perhaps a new shape of culture, free to take the good from the past and let go of things that divide us. Free to craft a new version of the future to build a pluralistic and humanitarian society where every job is respected and every person is important. Not every community or caste, but each individual person on a very personal level. Just like the human body with its various organs which all look different, and serve different functions but at the end are united in one body. Every organ can’t be the lung, neither the toe. We need each disparate part to make a whole. Everybody need not have the same religion or eating habits or worship the same god or even the same method of worship, but we all come together under one body of United India. With one goal - a pluralistic society that lives in peace with one another and its neighbours. India has the amazing opportunity to be a beacon, perhaps once again, for the rest of the world to achieve this dream given the sheer scale of our country. And for that we don’t need outdated definitions of culture, but new ones.

[miles06mcpherson-blog]

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A man who presents a lady income for a partnership, which often consists of sexual intercourse no far more dominates her than a male who pays a mechanic to resolve his auto. When I just take my car in to get it set I do not feel like I have electrical power more than the mechanic simply because I'm supplying him cash. He has electricity in excess of me simply because I require my auto fastened. There are lots of prudes from Christians to Feminists who want the government to intrude into your private sexual intercourse daily life in get to convince themselves they are morally exceptional. Assistance people who brazenly resist government controlled intercourse. Lastly, wives worry whores simply because they are "opposition". If your partner is unfaithful, you need to have to repair your partnership and offer with why he needs to be unfaithful. Whores don't lead to the problem. I would level out that if your spouse is currently being unfaithful that he is better off carrying out it with an escort than his secretary or someone who is really competition. So I say to the wives who are studying this, male midlife crisis is true. It really is normally temporary. It truly is anything you can operate through. And it truly is no reason to get divorced or break up your loved ones. If you catch your spouse with an escort, talk to him, function it out, and do not break up your household over it. There is certainly no stage in offering everything you personal to a few of greedy attorneys over a sexual indiscretion that is fixable. Divorce laws in the United States are very hostile in the direction of marriage and family members. As prolonged as we let our courts to be utilized by crooked attorneys as instruments to steal every thing you have, the use of escort services will proceed to increase. The courts in the United States and other nations are very hostile towards the standard family. There are way too numerous individuals creating way too a lot money by destroying the lives of you and your youngsters. When a particular person has been via a nasty divorce they are significantly significantly less likely to chance getting into a traditional partnership a next time. We permit attorneys to profit way too considerably at the expenditure of the community and the federal government has become a predator enabling crooked lawyers to flourish at the expense of the family and the people who the courts are intended to provide. If there is a ethical problem surrounding escort providers, it truly is that the penalty for getting a excellent father and a excellent partner is much more serious than getting caught with a hooker. When so known as "proper conduct" is punished, people will s

[arcticdementor]

To be sure, this is a man speaking. But the fundamental quality of this kind of approach to art, culture, the public square, and the rest of it, is evidence of a disordered and out of control femininity. And an equally dysfunctional and abdicating masculinity. A comment left by Youngamconreader on another thread got me thinking about this. I think there is a direct connection between the sexual orientation and gender identity and "alternative family" topics that this blog often discusses, and what's going on in a story like this one, here. I think we are collectively experiencing a massive breakdown/derangement of sex, of masculinity and femininity, and the damage is felt in every single corner of our society and our politics. The "pink police state" (Poulos--check him out) that is coming into being is the product of a miserable and frustrated femininity, which holds the field almost without opposition due to the near-complete abdication of men, who are, sometimes I think almost "to a man," in today's society, nihilistic and disengaged. For those who would say Trump proves that this is not true, I would say look at how he stands alone--at least in America and indeed in the Anglosphere. Everybody agrees that he is sui generis; all of the establishment of his own party just wants things to go back to the way they were; there is nobody who even remotely resembles something like a successor. Also, it is telling that one of the major reasons he won is because he is an online troll, but rich and famous enough to do it under his own name; he is the stand-in for huge numbers of men who have nothing but contempt for today's world but who only reveal their views and feelings anonymously. In large measure, men are opting out. Our bourgeois and hugely wealthy and powerful nation is decadent and its people are soft and domesticated; and, what is worse, the men of sensitivity and intelligence, of taste and discernment, are disgusted by what they see -- a rotten culture of placelessness, hideous architecture and built environments, unbelievably bad art and culture, degenerate music, films made for lowest-common-denominator global audiences, films that are so much more hideous than what was being done for decades, even as early as the 1930s, that it boggles the mind (every single person involved in CGI production should be lined up and shot), universities that have destroyed their own liberal arts programs -- OK, I need to stop myself, but you get the point, they are disgusted by what they see -- primarily they are disgusted by the *domestication* of the people they are supposed to look up to and/or emulate -- and they withdraw. We know about the video game and pornography addicts, the shut-ins, the "incels," but there is very much more to it all even than that. In the meantime, there is relentless, endless, earnest propaganda directed at women like a fire hose, constantly telling them that the essence of their own womanhood is bound up with their bourgeois career success. Nonstop messages received during their schooling, on TV and the movies and the internet, from bougie parents, tell them that they should reach for the stars (by *working*, always by working) and never to settle for just being a mother or just a wife. This has been going on for a long time, and many Boomers are certainly true believers in it -- my Boomer mother certainly believes it like a religion, God bless her -- and it is certainly true that if you have no training or career you are going to be more financially dependent and/or more financially precarious, and the Boomers, who divorce at the drop of a hat, greatly fear that. But my generation and the generations after (I was born in the early/mid 80s) have been taught constantly and relentlessly that work/career is identity, is the *point* of life, and quite frankly women got it MUCH more than men did, since the idea was to correct or change the unfairnesses/biases/power imbalances of the past. And it has resulted in a huge number of women who are unhappy and unfulfilled. It turns out that a life of making PowerPoints or pushing papers or running workplace conflict-resolution trainings or whatever do not really fulfill people; those women who substitute career for family entirely, or who find themselves torn between the two and not very sure they are finding a balance that they will ultimately be very happy about when they look back on their life, know that something is not right. I think we all used to have a much saner approach back in the day, before "career" was a word much used, and before resume/CV culture was so widespread; people may have been a lot poorer, but at least they understood that a job was about doing something that somebody or other had to do, and putting food on the table and a roof over the head of their kids; at least people weren't being sold a bill of goods by their parents, their teachers, authority figures, and the culture as a whole about what the point of being human and living life really is. I don't blame women for being unhappy -- I think the way our culture *relentlessly* propagandizes women that their very femininity and their very identity is bound up in bourgeois career success is one of the very cruelest aspects of life in "late capitalism." It is worse for them than for us men. It is not just that there is nothing wrong with having and raising children -- an incredibly difficult and honorable job. It is that the vast majority of people are not going to find true purpose and meaning in a consumer capitalist society (or probably any other society) just via their work alone. Selling phones or cutting hair or writing ad copy or processing loan applications or playing the Pachabel Canon for the three billionth time at weddings might not be so bad, you might even like it OK most of the time, but it is not the same thing as, say, raising your child, at least not for most people, and certainly bourgeois career success should not be so incredibly inappropriately stressed in our society to the point where increasing numbers of women -- women who want kids! -- are waiting until they are 37 to start families and freezing their eggs and the rest of it. It is just cruel and it alone by itself is enough to make me strongly dislike this consumer capitalist system we live in. Women are unhappy and are sort of flailing about projecting their unmet needs and frustrated desires in numerous directions. They are frustrated with the aforementioned nihilistic and disengaged men, they are pissed that they work outside the home and inside it too and they still struggle to make ends meet and especially to find the time they need, they lose out because a consumer capitalist society constantly f***s them over by creating an arms-race situation for intrasexual competition. In a more conservative and traditional society, say a society that frowns on makeup, women do not have to compete in that sphere. But in a society like ours, if certain women have the money and time to do a lot with makeup, then suddenly large numbers of women have to spend the time and money on it too just to compete or keep up. This does not make women better off. A consumer capitalist society squeezes them constantly. A society in which the health-care system is a disaster -- and I don't care if you hold the typical liberal views about why it's a disaster or the typical conservative views about why it's a disaster -- hurts women more because they rely on it more for basic biological reasons. Woman carry a human being inside them for a significant period of time (if they have kids) -- nothing men have to deal with ever compares to that health/biological-wise. All that said, women today -- who are not being well served by our current economic/cultural/social orthodoxy, at all -- are playing a major/primary role in this disordered and I think semiapocalyptic woke politics. Chesterton was not afraid to write, and did write, about why he opposed women's suffrage, and he said that in human history, women *have* been queens (including some very good ones), have been monarchs, have certainly wielded power -- but it is precisely in the context of *democracy* that they have not had the vote, not in human history or at least Western history. And, indeed, as he put it, women have/had not been given the vote precisely because they are in some sense too powerful, they are absolute rulers in their bones in a way that men are not. There is something to this, even if in our age we cannot tolerate or hear it. One of the things that amuses me is the way -- and they used to do it more often than they do now, but perhaps you know what I mean -- conservatives often lament or attack depictions, in TV or movies, of the married couple where the man is a stupid shlub while the woman is the smart, knowing, sensitive, and competent one. I agree with the conservatives who see this as anti-male---sure. But to me, it really means something else. The reason we see men depicted this way and women depicted that way is because men tolerate it and women would not tolerate the reverse. What it means is that men give in, don't want to deal with it, don't want to fight, while women will NOT let it go, will do what it takes to make the man understand that it is NOT worth his time and energy to go there, to do X annoying or undesired thing, etc. So, we have men depicted as losers, and women depicted as anything but. There is a lesson here. This is *exactly* the same dynamic that we see with conservatives and liberals, with the Republican and Democratic parties! If, for example, Roe v. Wade was overturned, there would be an efficient, effective, organized, identify-every-single-pressure-point-and-*squeeze* response from upper middle class women that would bring the entire Republican Party to its knees within days. It would be a massacre the likes of which you have never seen. Every single HR and public relations department of every single company on the Fortune 500 list would tell the wholly owned and wholly craven Republican Party exactly what to do--stand now right now-- and that would be that. I don't mean to say that conservatives are all men and liberals are all women, but the conservative "spirit" of the current moment is very male (the natural law arguments! Good Lord!) and the liberal "spirit" of the moment is very female. And it is no contest, at all. Women understand that men are less socially adept (quick: what is the ratio of male autists to female autists?) and that men, while unquestionably stronger physically, are more conflict-averse and more predictable (as everybody knows, men want certain things and it's pretty easy to know exactly what they are and to use that information to one's advantage; whereas, as Freud so perfectly distilled, the question of what women want is itself so difficult to answer as to be a kind of female superpower) -- and women use this for everything it's worth. And today, in our democracy, we see the consequences, as a kind of feminine disordered or frustrated impulse holds the field basically unopposed. This idea that this mural -- to get back to the topic of the original post! -- needs to be torn down because "it makes the children feel unsafe" -- here we see a feminine sensibility both disordered and displaced but winning the field because there's hardly anything else with the will to stand up to it. The masculine counterpoint to this smothering mother has withdrawn -- perhaps to 4chan, perhaps to Pr0ntube. Conservatives used to love pointing out that in the inner city, the family had completely broken down to the point where the matriarch/mother was the only influence in childrens' lives and husbands and fathers had ceased to exist. Well, we see that now in our society/culture as a whole. Somehow, the mother alone, the feminine quality alone, does not yield great results, when not counterbalanced with the masculine.* Things become disordered and even monstrous. I am a gay man, and I can't help but think that, when I do this, when I write about this stuff, Camille Paglia (PBUH) should be my model and my inspiration, because she saw so clearly, and so strikingly, from the outside, so to speak, the great and immortal interplay and relationship between male and female that produces *all* of us, and that is essential to -- not only beauty and art, but order, form, and *lastingness*, things that do not die. We all and every one of us need a society in which the male and the female are counterbalanced and juxtaposed and brought together in a great tension and a great union. The disordered and indeed cataclysmic collapse of the male and female counterbalance is impacting us everywhere, and in ways we do not even realize -- I firmly believe that. There must be a return and rediscovery of the masculine force and the masculine will -- to connect this to the posts about open borders, to a masculine will that says "no, I am drawing a line" -- how many of you have read Sexual Personae, and the CENTRAL role that the idea of "drawing the line" plays in that book? Men "draw the line," which is why men have dominated almost beyond measure the realm of visual art in human history. There must be a return to this, or the nation will dissolve into the primordial swamp that Paglia says represents--not the feminine, but the feminine when outside of civilization, the feminine in a state of nature and crude and unformed.

Matt in VA

[clubofinfo]

Expert: Every artist, every scientist, must decide now where he stands. He has no alternative. There is no standing above the conflict on Olympian heights. There are no impartial observers. Through the destruction, in certain countries, of the greatest of man’s literary heritage, through the propagation of false ideas of racial and national superiority, the artist, the scientist, the writer is challenged. The struggle invades the formerly cloistered halls of our universities and other seats of learning. The battlefront is everywhere. There is no sheltered rear. — Paul Robeson, Here I Stand, p. 52. The struggle for us common folk daily is a battle on many fronts, with the sirocco of plague-coal gritty winds chasing us into poverty, into incarceration, into structural violence and penury with the jaws of the dogs of usury rabidly biting at our young and old. There is no dignity in the grapes of wrath and no heaven inside the gates of religion. When we end up working for the poverty pimps, social services, in the public sector, or those non-profits and NGOs, or for those purveyors of a fake capitalist green environmentalism, or in the same league of neoliberals or even patsy identity politics liberals, our stories end up frayed and sent into the abyss in a culture that kneels at the altar of celebrity-wealth-military might-superficiality. Most of us can’t get the gumption up to face down power, even in this junk society where our collective powerlessness could be vital to standing down this tragedy called Americanism, Consumerism, Militarism, Capitalism. Some of us are tilting at windmills and screaming, I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out, and yell, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ — Howard Beale, Network More poignant in Peter Finch’s portrayal of a disenchanted newscaster is his call to our humanity: Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get MAD! I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot — I don’t want you to write to your congressman, because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad. [shouting] You’ve got to say: ‘I’m a human being, god-dammit! My life has value!’ So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell: I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE! It’s an easy life gig, really, showing, being, acting mad as hell, and standing down in that glorious moment of realizing that the powers that be, the fascists in boardrooms, the militant bankers and financial devils, all those militarists and digital demigods, the lot of them, are only in the driver’s seat because the consumer half-citizens we have become in the US of A have not taken the first two steps – being mad as hell and not taking it anymore. I mean really, not some deplorable bullshit under the mantel of the madman Trump, or the faux anger of the liberals and Hillary lovers, none of that is even in the same league as true anger and standing down. Enough of us in the USA are done with this experiment, but not enough of us have the balls or ovaries to stand down and make a bolt away from their prisons, both symbolic ones and those literals ones. Bolt and stop taking it. Engage in real dirt-smeared arguments, debates, and stop letting the purveyors of neutering and spaying control our lives. If it’s one poor sop doing it, then that’s one poor schmuck left to hang and dry. In so many ways, my life has been my soul and my intellect splayed by the legions of small men and small women, Little Eichmanns and Compliancy Bureaucrats, Admin Class, Deanlets, Chair Persons, HR Midgets, Diversity Officers, Punishment Officers, Pay Masters, Incrementalists, and Violators of All Good Things About Creativity. Splayed in the sense that it’s easy to sack people who go against the grain, against the vanguard, against the status quo. Each and every time I have been sacked, it seems like the first time, and my own naïve exasperation is almost overcoming, but in the end, my stands are more than righteous. They are demonstrative, chillingly expressive, and others in my circle can judge and pooh-pooh, and point to my spiraling out of any power or fame or thumbs near or on the levers of power. In the end, you can die on your principles and feel the incredible lightness of being a human being, and feel emancipated even near the gates of endless poverty, waning sanity and extreme disenfranchisement from this capitalist franchise called America. I’ve cataloged here and other places my struggle with/in/because of the “work place” in America – it started with newspapers where I had drag-out fights with editors about my attitude – going too strong against the powers, in several cases, the policing agencies I was reporting on. Sacked. Struggle as a union organizer a decade ago fighting the middle of the road bosses who thought compliancy and lock-step (to the Democratic Party) were necessary formulations for working there. Sacked. Fighting for part-time faculty and for students at several community colleges . . . terminated. Working with homeless and drug-addicted adults as a social worker . . . encouraged to resign. Unbelievable that it may seem, but some of us can be up against the vast majority, and be right most of the time, and the fact that the majority can be wrong almost one hundred percent of the time when it comes to false beliefs in patriotism, loyalty, god-country-hierarchy. So many people I have come across in my 60 years, a good 45 of which involved work and work places, have only been able to go-think-believe-philosophize-contemplate-act so far. Halfway is half-assed, and going nine-tenths of the way is still an incomplete journey, flawed, dangerous and retrograde. Fired for fighting administrators and college-university presidents. Fired for writing too loudly. Hell, I even went up against the ameliorators in so-called progressive alternative radio and newspaper circles for being too radical, too left, too outspoken, too in your face. Perception is not reality, but their reality is not mine. Now this fleeting battle line as I am hitting my Sixties is taking even more bizarre turns with my most recent end of the line work in social services. Sort of takes on an entire multi-layered Orwellian, Kafkaesque, Brave New World ugliness only capitalism can refine to a really disturbing level. Fired because three insignificant trainers and two of their supervisors in a Planned Parenthood two-day class determined after eight hours that my simple and non-disruptive questioning of Planned Parenthood’s policy of believing — one hundred percent — the efficacy of everything Western medicine shoves down our throats and my doubting some of the mumbo-jumbo propaganda of Big Pharma would somehow weigh negatively on my work at a completely unrelated-to-Planned Parenthood non-profit as a non-medical social worker with my foster youth clients. Imagine — in a training, with that progressive blathering of “this is a safe space” and “anything said here stays here” — and my livelihood is ripped from me by three narc trainers who outright lied about me being a disruptive element. Imagine the level of punk in these people, these urbanites, these Seattlites, these people who are working in the shadow of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which is shoving Big Pharma and Big GMO and Big Contraception and Big Sterilization and Big Family Planning and Big Vaccinations and Big Agra down the throats of the so-called developing world. I questioned one vaccine, tied to the human papilloma virus. Planned Parenthood gets tens of millions from Big Pharma and Big Philanthropy. This shit brings tears of absurdity to a grown adult’s eyes. These people, these Little Eichmann’s working for Seattle’s Planned Parenthood, with a flick of their wrists, and a punch of their index fingers on their smart phones sending messages to my boss that I was somehow a disruption to the training. Read here part of my story and my lightly political question about Gardasil-Merck. In their world, they believe they hold the power ingrained in their Hillary Clinton stupidity and Uber Alles Planned Parenthood. These people determined from a really light-hearted and anonymous forum that I would be a chigger in their sides for a second day of training. Really, so, this “ich liebe dich Planned Parenthood uber alles in der Welt … I love you Planned Parenthood above anything else in the world” bullshit went as far as influencing my former employer – a social services non-profit in Portland for more than 45 years – to put me on paid leave and then processed through the ringer of an unfair and incomplete investigation that ended with my termination. Talking to these people in the non-profit sector is like talking to emptied-out moth chrysalises. This mostly female-run and female-staffed organization had the gall to not talk to my two co-workers who were at the training. They had the gall to pointedly show me that I was being investigated and then canned for barely challenging Planned Parenthood’s take on Gardasil, the Bill Gates/Genetically-Engineered/CDC Fast-tracked Approved/Massive PR campaign vaccine for the sexually transmitted virus, HPV. In the echo chamber of these female-run/female-staffed social services agencies, the people do not resist the malfeasance and poor treatment. The people do not speak out as if social justice is the key to assisting people as social workers and mental health practitioners. These people do not want any rocking of the boat. These female-staffed/managed outfits want to embrace the superficiality of LGBTQ-ism and faux multiculturalism, yet, when push comes to shove, they are middling humans, who have reached their own ceilings of compassion/knowledge/ radical social work that pale in comparison to the real work that has to be done. Every step of my administrative leave and then bullshit investigation and then dismissal reeks of unethical and wrongful termination. This non-profit, Lifeworks Northwest, is colluding with Planned Parenthood, because tens of thousands of dollars comes from PP’s coffers, and that grant money is really taxpayers’ money. The power of my simple anonymous comments on unsigned notepaper got my ass hung out to dry, and the bitterness is magnified since I had youth on my caseload in major iterations of crisis, and because I had no opportunity to challenge my accusers, and because I wasn’t able to cut through stupidity and illogical thinking. Simple stuff, a social worker anticipating what my young clients might also ask: “IS the Gardasil HPV vaccine safe since when I go onto the Internet and Google ‘Gardasil Dangers’ or put in ‘Is the HPV virus safe?’ I get all sorts of incriminating information about the dangers herein.” Or, I could have posited at the training something more concrete: “I get all sorts of stories from parents and young women who are outraged by the dangers of the vaccine, and I see many documentaries cataloging the dangers and the chronic pain and deaths attributed to the Merck-made Gardasil, and I can download all these scientific journal articles and browse all these advocacy blogs and web sites that point-blank catalog all the issues tied to the three-shot vaccine”: Here! The highly controversial HPV vaccine “Gardasil,” given to young girls to defend against early onset of the only form of contagious cancer, has been responsible for over thirty deaths (from blood clots in the heart and lungs) and more than 10,000 adverse events (anaphylactic shock, loss of muscle use, and seizures) being reported. Certain forms of HPV are known to cause cervical cancer by fueling the development of precancerous lesions in epithelial tissues of the vagina, vulva, oropharynx, anus and cervix. Most infections however, are benign and cleared rapidly by the human immune system, and never progress to cervical cancer. A valid reason for giving CHILDREN the HPV vaccine has NEVER been established. Plus, the supposed “benefits” of the two known HPV vaccines, Gardasil (made by Merck) and Cervarix (made by GSK-GlaxoSmithKline), wear off after a few years, meaning that even if they do work, the cancer only lasts a few years anyway before a normal immune system beats it, so why bother with the vaccines, which are known to be loaded with neurotoxins, carcinogens, synthetic emulsifyers and genetically modified organisms.  Worst yet, there are at least 120 known human papillomaviruses, so, worse than the flu shot, the HPV vaccine is a complete “shot in the dark.” On top of that, only a third of those viruses are the ones typically transmitted through sexual contact. At least 15 types of HPV are CARCINOGENIC. Just days after given the intramuscular injection Cervarix, Stacey Jones, 17 (at the time), suffered her FIRST EVER SEIZURE and was left brain-damaged from it. The Cervarix inoculation contains recombinant proteins and for those unfamiliar, recombinant means DNA molecules are brought together from multiple sources in a laboratory to create genetic material with DNA sequences that would NOT OTHERWISE EXIST in the genome. That means the culture is chemically altered and then mixed with sodium chloride and “residual” amounts of insect cells. If that itself is not bad enough, according to the Rx list itself, the “tip caps” may contain rubber latex. By the way, sodium chloride when injected raises blood pressure and inhibits muscle contraction and growth. All of this sends the immune system into hyper-panic mode when injected, and explains the seizures and anaphylactic shock these girls are experiencing just hours or days after the HPV jab. In the case of Stacey Jones, her parents said that during the few weeks after her getting the cervical jab, Stacey had MORE fits, causing such severe swelling in the brain and brain injury that Stacey had to go to a rehabilitation unit to relearn simple tasks. GSK called it all a coincidence. Eleven deaths occurred less than one week after receiving the vaccine, seven of which died in less than two days. Three of the deaths were boys. Guess what the most common diagnosis was for the CAUSE of DEATH–BLOOD CLOTTING. Where is the CDC in all of this? One of the girls died within 3 hours of getting the jab. Her echocardiogram revealed a blood clot within the right atrium and the right ventricle. Other reports include girls coming down with the sudden onset of Guillain-Barre syndrome, where the immune system attacks itself. With Rick Perry as a sponsor, Merck’s Gardasil was causing permanent injuries and death all in the name of Rick Perry’s political need for monetary backing. Judicial Watch public interest group investigated this government level corruption and released a report based on FDA documents about adverse reactions to the vaccine and found over 100 DEATHS and spontaneous abortions CAUSED BY GARDASIL. Even JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) went so far as to publish over 12,000 reports of vaccine injury. You see, when I work with youth, and talk about student debt, about drone murders by the USA, or about Trump’s felonious business deals, or talk about the power of media to manufacture consent, or what the real history of the United States is about, or how we bombed the hell out of Korea in the 1950s and Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, or when I talk about what the real Thanksgiving means, the real Israel means, the real NATO means I expect my youth to go on their own Smart (sic) phones and start double checking my facts and theses. So, what are these people thinking, sacking me, because I shaped a question around maybe Planned Parenthood anticipating some resistance from some percentage of our youth on all our caseloads, and resistance from their foster and biological parents, or their siblings and friends about this unproven vaccine? Clenched-teeth trainers, and this room of 40 women and three men, and I was the only one raising what some portion of all of our client loads might ask – is this shot safe? I raised the eyebrows of the Planned Parenthood trainers when I supposed that maybe practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine, naturopathic treatments, shamanism, Native American healing, and other non-Western Medical beliefs should also be included in their amazing rainbow flag of diversity. These people are lock-step, neo-fascists, for sure, of the liberal kind, and I was not prepared for the absolute party-line around Gardasil. It took very little to time to research how Planned Parenthood gets massive funding from Big Pharma and Big Industrial Medicine . . . that Planned Parenthood is part of the big PR push to get as many young women and boys globally vaccinated with this toxic brew. Right now, over 270 million doses have been distributed. Mark that as $30 billion or more for Merk. Yet, these Uber Alles Planned Parenthood punks and then my own former employers – punks with master’s degrees in social work and taught in reduced harm techniques and trauma informed care  – find it impossible for me to continue taking a mandatory class and then I get my ass unfairly and wrongfully sacked? I am in the process of writing Part Three to the series I was asked to work on over at Hormones Matter (and here at DV it’s here and here and here). This entire episode dealing with the cahoots of Planned Parenthood and the drug makers, including the Gardasil manufacturer, Merck, and my own puny job and possibly my future in social services – oh, my next interviews for new jobs will most certainly involve HR folk Googling me and Googling my writings, and, bam, another illicit and unethical determination of my qualities based on my writing – stinks of what’s really rotten to the core in America: the careerism and the death of a real liberal class, and this entitled stupidity and perceived aggrieved neoliberal class. The formula is clear – if you are a scientist or researcher or expert or legitimate journalist questioning your government, your paymaster, your employer, your school, your non-profit, your NGO, your media, your Fortune 1000 companies, your millionaire and billionaire miscreants, you get harassed, de-funded, shunted into a corner, threatened with lawsuits, threatened with termination, sacked, and in some cases, murdered by these economic and patriotic hit men and hit women. Chris Hedges on careerism! The greatest crimes of human history are made possible by the most colorless human beings. They are the careerists. The bureaucrats. The cynics. They do the little chores that make vast, complicated systems of exploitation and death a reality. They collect and read the personal data gathered on tens of millions of us by the security and surveillance state. They keep the accounts of ExxonMobil, BP and Goldman Sachs. They build or pilot aerial drones. They work in corporate advertising and public relations. They issue the forms. They process the papers. They deny food stamps to some and unemployment benefits or medical coverage to others. They enforce the laws and the regulations. And they do not ask questions. These systems managers believe nothing. They have no loyalty. They are rootless. They do not think beyond their tiny, insignificant roles. They are blind and deaf. They are, at least regarding the great ideas and patterns of human civilization and history, utterly illiterate. And we churn them out of universities. Lawyers. Technocrats. Business majors. Financial managers. IT specialists. Consultants. Petroleum engineers. “Positive Psychologists.” Communications majors. Cadets. Sales representatives. Computer programmers. Men and women who know no history, know no ideas. They live and think in an intellectual vacuum, a world of stultifying minutia. They are T.S. Eliot’s “the hollow men,” “the stuffed men.” “Shape without form, shade without colour,” the poet wrote. “Paralysed force, gesture without motion.” Even the HR people at that non-profit wouldn’t get it right about why I was terminated, and the little letter I received from Oregon Employment Department belies the non-profit’s absurdity and confusion: You ARE allowed benefits on this claim . . . . Findings: You were employed by Lifeworks NW until Oct. 26, 2017 when you were fired because you received too many complaints about being unprofessional, confrontational and argumentative. This was not a willful or wantonly negligent disregard of the employer’s interest because there was no policy or rule violation. You deny the accusations of being a disruption to a training that occurred on October 16, 2017. Employer failed to respond to additional attempts to retrieve information. Legal Conclusion: You were fired but not for misconduct connected with work. This short piece can end with those concepts, these people Chris Hedges likens to docile and compliant followers who obey for whatever prestige they can garner. Notice my former employers use words like “unprofessional” and “confrontational” and “argumentative.” This is how these people running social services agencies work the mental muscles in their heads. My entire work with foster youth, connected to the department of human services case managers and foster parents and a plethora of agencies and businesses, was deemed both “professional” and wise and compassionate. I have written testaments to that fact. What does it mean to have this pejorative thrown at me after the fact, stated to the unemployment adjudicator without my ability to answer this lie? This is a case of so called social services providers putting in the dull knife in my already opened torso. Then, this all-female staff and supervisory and management team throw out the term, “confrontational,” in the double-speak of these fake positive psychological beratings. What in the world does this mean, “confrontational”? I did confront abusive parents, abusive bureaucrats, abusive psychologists and employers and teachers, and a few case workers. That was my job to be advocate and mentor for 16-to-21-year-old youth – foster youth. I confronted abuse and lies and mismanagement and maligning and prejudice and pre-judgments and structural violence. I confronted the school to prison pipeline mentality of officials and confronted the lackadaisical attitudes about my youth becoming homeless. Finally, “argumentative”? You know, I got along with everyone, except a couple of officials at public gatherings who made fun of addiction, who made fun of youth caught by cops for pot smoking or carrying booze in the car. I argued with people who laughed at mental challenges, and who somehow thought addiction was just a fad, a choice. I fought prejudice and stupidity, and did it with aplomb and respect. I never was “argumentative” with supervisors or co-workers, yet, these women social workers dare tell a state official – unemployment adjudicator – that the reason for my termination is my “argumentative” disposition? As if I am getting graded as a third grader for my class demeanor, decorum, participation and citizenship? This is the coda of our social services gone amok and awry, and with these fake diversity-chanting female workers and these social workers who fall over themselves to help gay young men and women, while arguing their point that anyone else who is not a pushover or who is defiant, or who disagrees with their spin on the world, well, even a 60-year-old seasoned teacher with training, skills, experiences and education they could only read about or dream about, is deemed “argumentative” and “confrontational.” This syllogistic thinking (non-thinking) then puts an icing on their canards with the terminology, “unprofessional.” We are not in good hands, fellow readers. We have a society that is far removed from the reality of being one emergency room visit from the poor house or one paycheck away from being homeless. This is a society that fines homeless people for loitering, that fines panhandling for a meal or a beer, that fines people camping in alleys or kipping in their perfectly legal and running vans and motor homes. This is the society of people who lets the world know how “powerful” they are – proof is in the gouged-out cultures and ecosystems, perpetual war, the illegalities of every ounce of investment, retirement, consumption schemed up in America, and endorsed by twenty or thirty percent of the population. This is a country that has no history because it forgets and forestalls and fabricates. This is a country of teary-eyed infants, raised on Marvel Comics’ narratives and Disneyland philosophy and computer mush and Hallmark moments, and violence and junk goo for the brain and junk food for the soul. These people, who are tied to the lies of the most powerful collective organization on earth – Big Pharma (twice the lobbying bucks paid to politicians than even the militarists) – and they give shit about the lives of young women and men forcefully vaccinated. These are the crimes of the weak, the so-called do-gooders. And their crimes go unchallenged, unnoticed, and under-discussed. Because this country is one giant criminal project — Continuing Criminal Enterprise. These armies of bureaucrats serve a corporate system that will quite literally kill us. They are as cold and disconnected as Mengele. They carry out minute tasks. They are docile. Compliant. They obey. They find their self-worth in the prestige and power of the corporation, in the status of their positions and in their career promotions. They assure themselves of their own goodness through their private acts as husbands, wives, mothers and fathers. They sit on school boards. They go to Rotary. They attend church. It is moral schizophrenia. They erect walls to create an isolated consciousness. They make the lethal goals of ExxonMobil or Goldman Sachs or Raytheon or insurance companies possible. They destroy the ecosystem, the economy and the body politic and turn workingmen and -women into impoverished serfs. They feel nothing. Metaphysical naiveté always ends in murder. It fragments the world. Little acts of kindness and charity mask the monstrous evil they abet. And the system rolls forward. The polar ice caps melt. The droughts rage over cropland. The drones deliver death from the sky. The state moves inexorably forward to place us in chains. The sick die. The poor starve. The prisons fill. And the careerist, plodding forward, does his or her job. — Chris Hedges http://clubof.info/

[chris-barbecho-blog]

Escape from Home to A Better Place

Introduction

           Immigrants, they come from their home country to find a better home here in the United States. Back in history people use to come to the United States and think that the streets were paved in gold and that everywhere that they turn they would just see riches.  Whether the reason that they come for is for a better life for themselves or their family, they come here to accomplish something big and be part of something. Some come to the United States hoping to become a millionaire and become successful in anyway possible. The main idea behind this research is to see what is the main cause that causes people to migrate to the United States, because everyone that comes to the United States doesn’t come for the same reasons. This is going to be my main topic for this research due to the fact that since immigrants don’t have a huge voice in the world, I feel that since they won’t be able to get their story out, I should be able to help them tell their story and their struggles. This is relevant due to the fact that now with the huge conflict with immigrants and how our now so called president is abusing his power and not letting the immigrants stand up for themselves. We should come together as a nation and stand up for each other instead of letting our people get pushed back down and not be allowed to accomplish their goals that they set for themselves and the dreams that they try to achieve. All of us should have the same opportunities; it shouldn’t matter where we come from.

           Assumptions & Early Hypothesis

                       Going into this research of immigrants and their stories, I felt like it would help me understand and see the stories of many people on how they thought America would treat them and I feel like it would give me a better understanding of what my parents went through when they first came to the United States. Most things that I expect to here from doing my research and interviewing my father would be just hearing the same story which would be coming to the United States to find a better life and to get a better job since probably the jobs that were available at their home country wasn’t paying enough or there wasn’t enough work. I also assume to hear that it was very difficult to adapt to the United States culture due to the fact that many immigrants come from countries where English isn’t the main language, the language barrier would be a huge obstacle that they would have to overcome when it comes to adapting an American culture. An article written on November 17, 2006 entitled Why Do Immigrants come to the United Stated written by Elizabeth Arizaga states “Immigrants chose to come for various reasons, such as to live in freedom, to practice their religion freely, to escape poverty or oppression, and to make better lives for themselves and their children”. This is the main cause for immigrants to the United States just the hope of creating a better life for themselves and their family. The research that I found was very similar to the assumptions that I made about the push and pull effect of why most immigrants come to the United States for a better life and don’t stay in their own country. An immigrant from Mexico stated that the main reason for his long journey to the United States was to start a better life for his family and give them the life that they deserve, the life that he didn’t have when he was a kid. He wanted to make sure that his kids would be provided with the best education possible and be able to become somebody in this world. Sometimes the immigrants that we though that immigrated here the most aren’t actually the number one origin of immigrants entering the United States. Turns out an article states, “In 2015, 1.38 million foreign-born individuals moved to the United States, a 2 percent increase from 1.36 million in 2014. India was the leading country of origin for recent immigrants, with 179,800 arriving in 2015, followed by 143,200 from China, 139,400 from Mexico, 47,500 from the Philippines, and 46,800 from Canada. In 2013, India and China overtook Mexico as the top origin countries for recent arrivals”. Most people thought that the immigrants that mostly from the south but it turns out Indian immigrants actually migrate here more than any other country. They migrate mostly to escape the pressures of their country and try to have a nice calm one here in the United States. As states in another article “Immigrants in the U.S., however, are more likely to define the American dream as the pursuit of opportunity, a good job, owning a home and in many cases, safety from war or persecution”. The American dream is what most of us try to achieve and that is what immigrants try to achieve when they come to the United States, doesn’t matter what their definition of that dream is, all that matters is that they come here to the United States to achieve it.  

Methodology

           The methods that I took to make sure that everything went into my favor is that I made sure that my work schedule was able to match the same work schedule that my father had. Over the past couple of days I would ask my father a series of questions to see what information I would be able to gather on the background story that I never heard of before, this story unfolded to me piece by piece everyday that I spoke to him. I didn’t want to ask him all of my questions in one day due to the fact that I felt that the story that he was going to tell me was going to have a huge effect on the emotions that he would have for the rest of the day. I would make observations by asking him the questions about his journey to the United States and see how he reacted to every single question, and I tried to see if with each response, he would actually answer with a different type of emotion. I would just go to my house and to the park because that is where my father would like to spend most of his free time, if it was a long day at work, he would just got straight home and relax for the rest of the day. If it wasn’t that bad then he would travel to our local park which is 4 blocks away and just watch all of the kids and then men play volleyball since that was always considered his favorite sport. During the interview I didn’t take any photographs do to the fact that these photographs that would be taken during the interview wouldn’t benefit me in any way possible. Instead for the photographs I included pictures of him when he used to live in Ecuador before he actually crossed the border. I felt that with these photographs, it can tell his story and the family that he left behind to pursue a better life. To answer my questions I decided to interview my father based on the fact that he was an illegal immigrant that crossed the United States border. The reason I decided to interview him was because it always interested me to know the back-story to how my father came to this country.

Data Analysis

           Based on the data that was collected during the interview with my father, I realized that the main reasons that my father decided to leave his home country and come to the United States was the reason as anybody else would, he came for a better life for himself and for his family to come. Turns out he came to this country because he wanted a better life for himself, my mother which he was married to at the time, and for my siblings which both of them were born during the time of his crossing. The research actually helped me to get a better understanding of why immigrants in general come to the United States for a better life and why they actually decided to come here instead of any other part of the world. It actually helped me to understand the hardships of what immigrants had to go through just to get a better life, meanwhile some of us here take advantage of the things that we have here. People in other countries would travel and pay thousands of dollars to come to the United States and get a better education that they aren’t able to get in their own country, but others here take school as a joke, by not even showing up to class at all. They are aligned to my research due to the fact that they mostly tie together with the same main points of why they actually came to the United States in the first place. What mostly surprised me was that Indian immigrants are the immigrants that mostly migrate to the United States and the thing that really shocked me was when I was actually trying to choose a topic to write about. The reason that choosing my topic shocked me was because I was thinking about doing immigrants that crossed the border for a better life but couldn’t think of anyone that I was going to be able to interview because I didn’t think I knew somebody who was an illegal immigrant. When my father told me that he was actually an illegal immigrant that crossed the border, it shocked me because I didn’t know.

Conclusion

           Throughout my research my findings were pretty clear to me, they gave me a better understanding of what immigrant had to go through to come to this country, it helped me to open my eyes onto a more giant scale. Especially hearing it come from a person that I thought I knew so well, but I didn’t. We put immigrants throughout such hell on a daily basis, whether it be discriminating them or just being mean towards them since they are “taking away jobs” but all they want is a better life for themselves and the people that mean the world to them. Everybody in their position would do the same thing to benefit him or herself. Instead of putting them in their own “section”, we should try to understand them and actually help them achieve whatever it is that is trying to be achieved. Life is hard especially if you have people that are trying to go against you and tell you that you won’t be able to accomplish anything positive in this world, which is why we shouldn’t separate ourselves form them, we should come together as one nation under God and help each other out. Especially since America is basically made up of immigrants, legal or not this is was makes America great then anywhere else, here you can see a huge diversity of people and they can tell you stories that had happened to them while they were back in their own home country. Here everyone should be considered the same and nobody should be considered left out just because they can be seen as different then anybody else, we shouldn’t even be calling ourselves full on America since all of our ancestors have migrated to the United States from some different part of the world, I would say that the only people who have the right to call themselves full on American would be those who were here before us which are the native Americans. I would have improved on this interview by asking more questions with more meaning behind them.

   Citations  

1.     Arizaga, Elizabeth. "Why Do Immigrants Come to United States of America?" The Gramblinite. N.p., 17 Nov. 2006. Web. 05 Apr. 2017.

2.     Zong, Jie. "Frequently Requested Statistics on Immigrants and Immigration in the United States." Migrationpolicy.org. N.p., 21 Mar. 2017. Web. 06 Apr. 2017.

3.     Writer, Leaf Group. "Meaning of the American Dream for Immigrants." Synonym. Synonym, 10 Nov. 2013. Web. 06 Apr. 2017.

[tragicbooks]

What it's like to be black when your state is 94% white.

<br>

When Cherie Buckner-Webb was 5 or 6 years old, someone burned a cross in the front yard of her Boise home.

Buckner-Webb and her family had every reason to leave the neighborhood, or even Idaho, after that. Instead, her mother turned an act of bigotry into a powerful teachable moment.

"My father would've liked to taken it and hidden it away," Buckner-Webb says, "and my mom was saying 'Put it on the front porch. We've been living here a year in this neighborhood, and they are late.'"

Boise in the spring. Photo by iStock.

Buckner-Webb is a black face in a white space. And like her mother before her, she's not going anywhere.

She is a fifth generation black Idahoan, and her family has deep roots in the state. One of her great-grandfathers even founded and built the first black church in the Boise area. Her parents were active in the community, with the NAACP chapter and other local initiatives.

But numbers don't lie: less than 1% of Idaho residents — about 13,250 people — identify as black or African-American, and Buckner-Webb recalls a childhood tinted with the hypervisibility that comes with being the only black face in the group.

"I was very well-behaved and probably because there was a small number of us," she says. "I tell the same thing to my children, 'Nobody will notice anybody that you're with, but they'll notice the one black kid in the group.'"

Image via iStock.

Buckner-Webb credits her mother for telling her the honest truth about the "the way things were."

"It was really important to her that her children had an awareness and understanding of what it is to be black and walk in the world." Buckner-Webb says. "I realized quickly that our way of being was different and unique to the kids I went to school with."

She made connections and built a lot of her community at church.

"It seemed like almost everybody black in Idaho, whether it was for the National Guard or whatever, we all met up [in church]," she says. "It had a lot to do with religion, but it had a lot to do with a place you saw people who look like you, a gathering place."

Image by iStock.

Across the country, Curtiss Reed is working on building community and gathering places for all Vermonters, but especially people of color.

Reed was living in St. Louis but working on a consulting project in Washington, D.C., when a friend invited him up to Vermont for a ski weekend in 1978.

"I found it picture postcard perfect," he says. "And six months later, I moved — relocated to Vermont."

Reed lived and worked in the Green Mountain State for five years, then spent nearly two decades traveling and working abroad. He lived and worked in France, Tunisia, Burundi, and more. But when it was time to return to the states in 2001, there was only one place Reed wanted to be: Vermont.

Vermont in the fall. Photo by iStock.

"When I was overseas, I voted absentee ballot, got the newspapers three or four weeks after the fact, paid my taxes, etc. This has always been home," he says.

But much like in Idaho, Vermont's black population is staggeringly small. There are approximately 8,100 black people (1.3% of the population) in the entire state. That's about .84 of a black person per square mile. To put it in perspective, there are approximately 52 black people per square mile in Florida. States like Vermont are blinding whiteness, and black people in these regions are truly few and far between.

Today, Reed lives in Brattleboro and is executive director of the Vermont Partnership for Fairness and Diversity.

"We are the organization people turn to when they want to address issues of equity in the public sphere," he says. Recruiting employees and visitors of color is more than a "nice-to-have." For Vermont, it's now or never.

The state's low-birth rate and large percentage of people over 65 (17.6%) means Vermont is in desperate need of more people. Not just skilled workers to replenish the work force, but visitors to keep the state's thriving outdoor tourism industry afloat.

"Vermont's future is inextricably tied to it's ability for the state to be an attractive destination for folks of color," Reed says.

It's a snowy day in Burlington, Vermont. Photo by Jordan Silverman/Getty Images.

To build community and foster new relationships, both Buckner-Webb and Reed have tapped into local black history.

Buckner-Webb is on the board of the Idaho Black History Museum. Housed in the church founded by her great-grandfather, the building was lifted off its foundation and moved to a local park. Since 1995, guests have enjoyed exhibits, guest lectures, musical performances, and community programs.

"It's possibly the first black history museum in the Pacific Northwest," she says.

Reed partnered with the Department of Tourism to develop the Vermont African-American Heritage Trail. The route takes visitors of all ages to 20 different museums and cultural and historic sites throughout the state. The governor of Vermont even named February 2017 Vermont African-American Heritage Trail Month. After all, "Black history is Vermont history," Reed says.

A marker outside the Old Constitution House, one of many historic sites on the Vermont African-American Heritage Trail. Photo by Doug Kerr/Flickr.

For Buckner-Webb and Reed, their love for their state is more than hometown pride — it's a calling.

In 2010, after being asked off and on for more than 25 years, Buckner-Webb decided to run for state office. She didn't know if she'd have the patience to make it happen, but a friend ultimately convinced her.

"[She told me] you have some work to do. One woman can make a difference," Buckner-Webb recalls.

She filed the next day.

Buckner-Webb was elected to the Idaho House of Representatives that year and to the State Senate in 2012, 2014, and 2016. A Democrat in a conservative stronghold, she is used to standing up to adversity. And she's had decades of practice.

The Idaho Capitol. Photo by iStock.

"I'm a super-minority in a super-minority party in Idaho, so I have a lot of experience that way," she says.

Buckner-Webb is the first and only black person to be elected to the state legislature in Idaho, and she currently serves as assistant minority leader. While Buckner-Webb is used to sticking out, she'd rather have some company in the state house.

"One of my legacies I hope to leave is that there will be many more after me — or right now would be fine. With me, with me," she says with a laugh.

The amazing Senator Cherie Buckner-Webb. #WomensMarch Idaho http://pic.twitter.com/2LGDncoNGK

— LBLogic (@BostapLisa) January 21, 2017

Meanwhile, Reed travels almost every day across Vermont, reaching out to employers, community leaders, and more about the importance of recruiting, hiring, and building community for people of color.

From signal boosting resources and personal stories and planning an annual conference for leaders of color and executive and legislative leadership, to talking with police departments and local municipalities about implicit bias, Reed's work is never done.

"We spend a considerable amount of time building community by example," he says.

Being a black face in a white space is a universally specific experience that's neither all good nor bad.

I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, a college town less than three hours from Chicago and 78% white. Since college, I've lived in Tennessee, Florida, Missouri, and now Portland, Oregon. In every stop, save for my brief stint in Jacksonville, Florida, I felt out of place as a black woman. I was both hypervisible and invisible simultaneously. I'd go from being followed around a department store to being brushed off and ignored by waitstaff at dinner.

Image by iStock.

That notion of hypervisibility and invisibility are themes I noticed in both Buckner-Webb's and Reed's experiences. But like them, I also have a sense of pride and passion for the place I grew up. Madison is, for better or worse, my hometown.

For black Americans, home is not limited to certain zip codes, cities, states, or regions of the country. Though black people in majority white spaces face the additional challenge of lacking critical mass, our lived experiences aren't any less valid or "black" than anyone else's. (Did you hear that, Donald Trump?)

In fact, both Reed and Buckner-Webb said their smaller communities have their own advantages.

"My husband is from Atlanta, Georgia, and I think the opportunities to succeed might be a little bit easier [here]," Buckner-Webb says. "Probably because there's not a critical mass here to scare people. People are not comfortable with people that don't look like them, you know what I mean? It is a relatively welcoming place. There are opportunities to make your way here."

Boise, Idaho in the fall. Photo by iStock.

For Reed, Vermont's small towns foster community and collaboration in a way other regions simply can't.

"We have 251 towns in the state. They're small. On a day like today — it looks like we have about two feet of snow — you need your neighbor to help shovel, or plow, or move your car out of a ditch. I think in that case, the weather, geography, living in smaller communities really focuses people on what it means to be neighborly."

Horses dine in Putney, Vermont. Photo by iStock.

Black people helped lay the foundation for this country, and today, we are everywhere.

Whether home is Boise, Brattleboro, Portland, Chicago, or Atlanta, black people are building communities, fostering relationships, and making a difference from coast to coast. Whether invisible or hypervisible, we are here. And we will continue to live, love, and contribute to our communities for generations to come.

<br>

[nathanjhill]

Good News, Not Fake News

Scripture: Ephesians 2:11-22

Recently, there has been this term that has captured my interest - “fake news”.

Yes, over this past year and even these past few weeks, rumors, accusations, and stories about candidates, leaders, businesses, nations, and neighbors have assaulted us from every direction. We can thank social media for this wondrous gift. With a click of a button, any of us can share sketchy information, ranging from breaking political drama to celebrity deaths to free money that millionaires are giving away if we spam everybody in our friends’ list.

The Verge highlighted some of the top “fake news” stories in 2016 - and only a few are appropriate for a Sunday morning sermon:

"Obama Signs Executive Order Banning The Pledge Of Allegiance In Schools Nationwide"

"Woman arrested for (using her) boss’ desk as a toilet after winning the lottery"

"Trump Offering Free One-Way Tickets to Africa & Mexico for Those Who Wanna Leave America"

In a lot of ways, this “fake news” is nothing new - but it’s the internet that has made it so much easier to share.

With a click of a button or a touch of our phones, any of us can participate in the vast sharing of this “fake news” to the world, obscuring and diluting truth along the way.

And, yes, even your pastor has been duped by those stories floating around out there. I am still waiting for my free $1 million dollars.

But deeper than all of those Facebook stories, our world is saturated with an even more sinister “fake news”, a message of evil and sin, false narratives that have twisted us up and added to our separation and brokenness.

The fake news of violence - that might makes right and the way to win is to be the last man standing.

The fake news of wealth - that more is always better.

The fake news of racism - that people who happen to have a certain lighter skin tone are better and smarter and more worthy than everybody else.

The fake news of ideology - that our way of thinking, be it politics or theology or way of life, will solve all the world’s problems.

The fake news of powerlessness - that our voice doesn’t matter, things don’t change, so we might as well never get involved.

I could go on and on.

This “fake news” of our world turns us against each other, pits neighbor against neighbor, keeps us segregated and mistrustful. This “fake news” desires for us to be enemies, to spend our precious energy exploiting and tearing down one another. This era of “fake news” promises more division, not less. And friends, that is not “good news”.

I cannot for a second imagine that God is pleased with the state of our world - with the way we so often treat one another - the constructs that we have built in our society to tear us apart and encourage violence.

No, friends, God has a better way.

In our series, this month, “Love Across Borders”, we grapple with that great call by Christ to his disciples to love their neighbors, including their enemies. In a time when we are divided in countless ways, from race to immigration status to politics to theological questions to sports teams, we look to God for a way to overcome those barriers that separate us.

Our scripture this morning from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians wrestles first and foremost with the way God through Christ tears down those walls that divide us.

The church at Ephesus knew division. In verses 11 & 12, Paul describes those differences. There were those who were Jewish Christians, faithful Jews who followed the traditional laws of their people but saw Jesus as their long awaited messiah, and there were those who were Gentile Christians, who only recently came to know God through the good news of Jesus Christ. Normally, these two groups would have been separated by culture and religion and politics - but through “the blood of Christ”, they have been brought together.

In verse 14, Paul announces the good news:

For Christ is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.

For Jewish Christians, the wall that Jesus breaks down might remind them of the dividing curtain that separated the holiest of holies in the temple, the place where they believed the presence of God dwelt. In Jesus, that curtain was torn asunder - so that the people and God were no longer separated.

For Gentile Christians, the wall that Jesus breaks down might have had them think of the temple in Jerusalem, where outer walls prevented non-Jews from entering the temple and worshipping with others. Through Jesus, even Gentiles could now draw close and worship their Creator.

But the wall itself also represented all of those false narratives of culture and power that had come to divide, even in the church, those who professed Jesus Christ. The “fake news” in the time of the early church accosted Christians as rabble rousers, rebels, and atheists, people who threatened to tear apart the social fabric and upend the values of the Roman Empire.

Why? Because in the church, enemies worshipped together. Enemies prayed together. Enemies ate together. The rich and the poor shared. The young and the old were respected. The servant and the master saw each other as brothers and sisters.

The “fake news” of the violent, power hungry empire was being drowned out by the “good news” of reconciliation and hope in Jesus Christ.

Paul reminds the Ephesians that in God the Jews and Gentiles become one body, one church, one family. With that gift comes a new identity as citizens and members of God’s household. The promise here is that God would use this early church to do something new - to build a new holy temple for God. Not a temple of bricks and mortar - a spiritual dwelling of faithful followers, proclaiming peace in a divided world.

The early church, like our own time, faced real challenges. They had enemies. There were painful barriers and distractions. The pressure to conform to the ways of their culture weighted them down - and no doubt, the fact that Paul was writing this letter and others to this community of Christians reminds us that they needed coaching, they needed encouragement, they needed reminding of what Christ was doing in them.

This past week, Emily and I went to the University of Maryland women’s basketball game, which was a lot of fun. The game was great - but it’s also fun to watch the coaches for the teams. They get hot - they shout - they get in their own players’ faces when something isn’t going right. I told my daughter, “You know why they do that? Because they demand more out of their players - they know their players are capable of more.”

In a time of “fake news”, we Christians are being called by God to do more.

To be a spiritual dwelling suggests our foundation is not grounded in the ocean of swirling information, opinion, and hyperbole. We stand upon God’s sure and firm foundation.

To be a proclaimer of peace means that we understand that the cross of Christ is no respecter of any of the world’s walls and divisions. No one, no elected leader, no perceived enemy, is out of the reach of God’s incredible love.

The “good news” is our gift that God has charged us, the church, to proclaim - truth in the midst of a fractured planet. Are we prepared to share it?

Friends, this past week, the white supremacist, Dylan Roof, was sentenced to death for killing members of Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church engaged in bible study and prayer, including their pastor, Rev. Clementa Pinckney. Will Willimon, a retired Methodist bishop, recounts a conversation with another local pastor, in the aftermath and grief of that deep tragedy, when he asked his church:

“How come our Bible studies in this church have not been truthful enough, intense enough, for anybody to want to kill us? Church, we need to figure out how to be so faithful in our life together that the world can look at us and see something that it is not. Our little congregation is called to be a showcase of what a living God can do!”

Today, as we celebrate the legacy and witness of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I am thankful for his life and witness - for he was just a human being like us - but his words and his life proclaimed the “good news” of God’s justice and love in the face of the “fake news” of segregation and racism. He reminds us that we are all capable of more.

In his sermon, “a tough mind and a tender heart”, he says:

“The greatness of our God lies in the fact that God is both tough-minded and tender-hearted.”

“God has two outstretched arms. One is strong enough to surround us with justice, and one is gentle enough to embrace us with grace.”

This is, in Dr. King’s eyes, an image of the cross, a cross that can break the walls that divide all of us from God and each other. (Point to the wall in front of the communion table.)

A God who is tough-minded is unassailed by public opinion and swirling bouts of “fake news”, determined and fierce to call all of us to account for our sins - and yet the same God is also ever tender-hearted, never pausing to draw in the weary sinner and hopeless soul close.

Your challenge this week - can you share the good news with one person?

This morning, each day, each week, I am grateful for the “good news” of Jesus Christ, because it offers me a reminder that I am capable of more. You are capable of more. The church, we, are capable of more.

Thank God, that’s good news, not fake news.