The Man Who Wasn’t There- the Disappearance of Michael Jackson

The last few days it’s become apparent that I’ll never get tired of replaying Michael Jackson’s Will you be There? The orchestral, gospel swell in this hymn of heartbreak and hope has long made it one of my favourites. But the number of times I’ve blasted it in the five days since MJ died borders on obsession. Maybe it’s the voice over that makes it feel like he is right here, talking with me- “In my darkest hour, in my deepest despair, will you still care? Will you be there?”

This underrated song showcases some Michael’s strongest vocals ever, building into full throttle, when he belts in scorching anguish, “Lift me up, lift me up…I get lonely sometimes, I get lonely…” The biggest celebrity in all of history was quite possibly the loneliest person who ever lived, an irony we will never wrap our heads around.

“I’m so confused, will you show to me you’ll be there for me?”

Most stars will be fucked up in ways that we will not, just as our peculiar neuroses will unlikely be the worries of Madonna. Child stars have their own little-girl-lost syndromes that few seem able to escape, even if their star was fleeting before the crash. Those who have gone on to become the biggest stars in the constellation of popdom live in a bizarre prison of abject isolation. Even as they are constantly surrounded with masses and outpourings of love and celebration, they have nothing of their own concrete, discreet identity on which to draw the strength to be taken from, watched, idolized, scrutinized.

For Michael, there was never anywhere to hide- since he could talk, he was charming the world with his cherub’s face, seducing the world with love songs and disco. In the man’s own words, he was a veteran by the time he hit puberty.

If you thought about it, you’d probably observe that your most lonely times aren’t when you are, in fact, alone, but when you feel misunderstood by your spouse, adrift from your friends. True or false, when you perceive they don’t want you or see what you are about, if you don’t feel their unconditional love, it doesn’t matter if the whole damn family is right beside you at dinner. It doesn’t matter if you have fifteen men asking you to marry them. My favourite spiritual writer and my teacher Thomas Moore wrote, “We may think we’re lonely because we have no friends, when the fact is we have no relationship to ourselves.”

This man from whom so much was taken, so much demanded, never turned on his fans. He always expressed his love for us, so long as we were outpouring love and not spewing hate. He loved us back until he cracked, and started to unpeel. Quite literally, as his featherweight body took up barely any space on this planet. The real Michael’s face was also disappearing. Everyone has always said it was about him not wanting to be black, or not wanting to be a man. Give me a break- Michael had no problem with being black. Saying, for the record, that he was proud, wasn’t just lip service. Many of his idols were black. The bleaching of the skin business was about far more than blackness, it was way more than skin deep. Seriously, what Oreo or drag queen ever tried to look like that?

What he experienced was way beyond racism, self-directed or otherwise. It was the feeling that he was a ghost, the feeling that he didn’t even fucking exist. One of the most eccentric people of all time, he became another iconic irony- for most eccentrics are not tortured, tormented people. They are totally content with themselves, indeed, so strong in their identity, that they truly don’t give a flying fig if their unusual habits aren’t socially sanctioned, or whether or not anyone sees them. There’s no need for validation.

Eccentricities that torment or haunt a person, that interfere with their functioning, may appear similar on the surface, yet their repercussions to the individual are very different. These we blanket as “mental illness” and no one would argue whether Michael Jackson was mentally ill. Michael Jackson was both- both eccentric and insane. It wasn’t owning a bunch of llamas or a bag of bones that made him mentally ill. It was his falling apart, coming undone, his fifty years of disappearing even as he was the most looked at, talked about man of this century, maybe ever.

No, this was another kind of plastic surgery sickness, a man whose mangled, artificial, paranoid, melting, self-destructing, disappearing insides were matched by his wrapping. This wasn’t just a simple drama of gay or straight. Or even, as one friend suggested, a woman who thought she was born into the wrong body. It’s not about black or white. It’s about a man perhaps more missing, more absent than anyone has ever been, and absent in public for all to see. For who is Michael Jackson? His guess is as good as mine.

Yet here’s a man who never stopped giving. He gave so much, he gave it all away. He performed with everything he had. He gave his money to make others happy or healthy. He did nothing on a small scale. Though his perceptions were absurd, and he had no idea about anything normal, he gave from a place of bewildered and devoted innocence. A vast naivety. He was totally clueless of the real world. He did not have adult emotions. His friendships were extremely eccentric, yet fiercely loyal.

“In my darkest hour, will you be there?” Two years after Dangerous was released, the first accusations of child molesting shocked the planet. By 2005, Michael was a character in science fiction. He wasn’t even real. Traipsing around the planet in a burka and Mardi Gras masks, hoping to be invisible, he shielded himself, too, with any drug that could numb the pain. I don’t think that the public persecution he endured, naked, exposed, terrified, in front of the whole damn world, was fair.

Even if he was guilty, I don’t think it was fair, not nearly. Grisly, extravagant serial killers are given far more discretion and dignity, even as they sit on the electric chair. We gleefully crucified this man, and that is sick whether he was as innocent as Jesus or not.

Michael just wanted to Heal the World, make it a better place, for you, for me, for the entire human race. He promised I’ll Be There. He said I Just Can’t Stop Loving You. He sang with pure and honest conviction, You Are Not Alone. (Another day has gone, I’m still all alone…) He encouraged us to Keep the Faith, don’t let nobody bring you down- you can climb the highest mountain…all you need is the will to want it and a little self esteem… He dedicated an album to his young friend, yes, one of the children, who was stabbed to death because he was black. He gave so much, and the nature of the beast meant we wanted more. And that’s completely normal, we tear down our idols in order to divide them into relics we can all have a piece of, there is simply not enough to go around, and yet after death, there is- like the old days of human sacrifice, the victim, sometimes complicit victim, becomes a god. He transcends his body through his memory, through her imagery, art, music.

But no celebrity or public figure was ever put on the trial of the century in this way, and nor were any criminals. In comparison, Karla Homolka was handled with fucking kid gloves by the court and the media, too, even though she appeared on video in full regalia of guilt. Though she murdered several young women and raped more, she now walks the streets somewhere, disguised and protected, with children of her own. What the fuck?

Nobody likes a child molester. But like vultures, we descended on a defenseless man. He begged us, “Please keep an open mind and let me have my day in court.” He wasn’t asking much of us. An alleged victim said, after reaching adulthood, that persecuting Michael Jackson ruined his life. He never said anything about the trauma of being raped ruining his life. He had to be cajoled, drugged, forced by his father before he finally mumbled that something untoward had taken place. Makes me think it never happened Yet Michael was forever after guilty in our eyes.

After all, he paid the family out, probably thinking it would make things easiest on the child. The kid was, after all, was being subjected to a public circus Michael knew all too well. Mikey wasn’t mature or sophisticated to see what repercussions this would have, WHAT IT WOULD LOOK LIKE. And so it was, that the public- the only thing that Michael Jackson ever had, turned on him.

No wonder the man who wasn’t there developed a persecution complex, became increasingly suspicious, paranoid, fearful, insane. He became a parody of himself.

The point is, no scandal has ever assassinated a celebrity the way this pedophile witch- hunt did. Britney Spears held her kid hostage for hours in the bathroom while she had a psychotic break, and it happened before our very eyes. Yet who wasn’t rooting for her after, for Britney to get better? To get the help she needed?

Some Michael fans made it very clear they believed he was innocent. Some turned away and let him have the privacy he needed. Some deferred judgement. But overwhelmingly, we turned on him. We shouted out “pedophile” instead of praying that he’d get help. We tirelessly ridiculed and derided him in popular culture at every possible chance we had. At some points he was as unpopular as he had been popular.

After the 1993 payoff incident, we somehow hoped every consecutive creation he’d make would suck. And sometimes we said it did, even if it didn’t. Some of us started to say ridiculous things like he had never really did anything for music, anyways. That we had never liked him. And so an endless barrage of greatest hits and number one albums flooded forth, with Michael desperately trying to remind us that we loved him, right, we loved him, remember?

In the public’s endless hunt for the ‘real Michael’ it was easy to forget the obvious- artists communicate through their work. He’d been telling us from the beginning. It was there all the time. From the very first solo album, Off the Wall, full of shiny disco, came the first revelations: It’s too high to get over, too low to get under, you’re stuck in the middle, and the pain is thunder, you’re a vegetable, and they hate you, you’re just a buffet, and they eat off you…

And of course, we meet Billie Jean again on Thriller- “the kid is not my son.” Michael has endless songs about the voracious maw of woman, the backstabbing bitch out to get him- Billie Jean, Dirty Diana, again on Blood on the Dance Floor, where Susie has literally tried to kill him. But these songs are no vindication of women- they are personifications of the violence he felt, the vulnerability and exposure.

And also Stranger in Moscow: How does it feel, how does it feel, when you’re alone, when you’re cold inside?

And Who Is It? “I am the damned, I am the dead, I am the agony inside the dying head, this is injustice, woe unto thee, I pray this punishment would have mercy on me…I can’t take it ‘cause I’m lonely…”

Or Morphine: “This won’t hurt you, before I put it in, close your eyes and count to ten…close your eyes and drift away…put all your trust in me…morphine …Demerol, oh God, he’s taking Demerol… “

They Don’t Really Care About Us: “I’m tired of bein’ the victim of hate, you’re raping me of my pride…all I wanna say is they don’t really care about us…”

His final solo studio album showed him at his most vulnerable and tragically desperate. In my mind, this album was way underrated, mainly because of the Jackson Freak Show that was overriding his work, but the lyrics were indeed, “full of grandiose desperation. It’s an excruciatingly self-referential place, worsened further by its namesake’s unmatched controversies and weirdnesses.” (Rolling Stone).

Where are the people who accused me? The ones who beat me down and bruised me? (Unbreakable)

And the very strange Thriller-esque lyrics to Threatened, featuring Rod Serling! This is judgement night, execution, slaughter, the devil, ghosts, this monster is torture, You can be sure of one thing, that’s fate, a human presence that you feel is strange, a monster that you can see disappear, a monster, the worst thing to fear.

During the struggle, they will pull us down, please, please, let’s use this chance to turn things around…together we’re invincible…(Invincible)

Lyrics from Privacy were loud and clear: Stop maliciously attacking my integrity. Ain’t the pictures enough, why do you go through so much, To get the story you need, so you can bury me? You’ve got the people confused, you tell the stories you choose, you try to get me to lose the man I really am…

Some of us might ask, well, then, why the hell wouldn’t a person so traumatized get out of the public eye? Britney, Michael, can’t they afford a private island? Must they court the paparazzi? Even Diana has been accused of masterfully manipulating them, getting high off of their presence. The answer is, perhaps. Maybe. But what if that is all someone has known? We stay in our shitty jobs. We stay with men who beat us. We keep smoking cigarettes or worse habits. We live in the town we were born in. We keep our religion of birth, most of the time. There was never a moment that Michael Jackson was anyone or anything else but ours, ours to worship or to humiliate as we chose.

In Marilyn Monroe’s words, “I knew I belonged to the public, because I had never belonged to anyone or anything else.”

The excesses of drugs and surgeries and exercise couldn’t fix anything, couldn’t mask a man becoming invisible in the most visible ways. On the eve of another comeback, a
comeback that acted as a plea for us to forgive him, him who may well have done nothing at all, the exhausted, emotionally bankrupt, mentally and physically ill Michael Jackson died. Whether it was drugs or anorexia or his heart that killed him, no matter- it was part of a longer process.

I find it all fucking heartbreaking. And though Princess Diana died because the driver had been drinking, we felt forever as if we had hounded her to death. But we didn’t learn. Because it’s okay to hound a child molester to death, to torment and torture a freak of nature, eyes without a face. He became hardly human. We drove Michael deeper and deeper into himself, but there wasn’t anyone there so there was nowhere to go. And so, he disappeared.

by Lorette C. Luzajic

www.thegirlcanwrite.net

The King is Dead: June 26, 2009

The King is Dead: June 26, 2009

by Lorette C. Luzajic

It doesn’t feel real. I can’t stop crying.

Few in my generation can imagine life without Michael Jackson, no matter what we thought of him. Now we will have to: the King of Pop was not invincible after all. I’d never ever thought about Michael Jackson dying, except for a panic that he might commit suicide during the infamous trials. Not long after hearing the news, I realize I am woefully unprepared for this. It doesn’t matter that I’ve never even met the man: I am experiencing intense grief, and I will go through a full-fledged mourning process, along with millions of others. I’m barely over Princess Di’s departure, for crying out loud- just so not ready for this

Michael Jackson was a tragedy and a comedy played out before our eyes, laid out before us in sacrificial theatre that for him was all too real. He was one of the first child stars, one of the first megastars, and as a megastar the King of Pop has no peers but the King. Rivals Britney, Madonna are really his heirs- as is hip-hop, and an endless array of other entertainment and creativity.

MJ is an enigma we will never know and always try to: he is one of the most eccentric figures of all time. While the celebrity world is not exactly devoid of anorexia or plastic surgery or sexual ambiguity, the extremism of Michael’s bizarre obsessions will forever remain puzzling. That he transformed himself from a lithe, feline, hot as hell black man into a horror-film configuration showed just how much difficulty he had being human.

He’s black, he’s white, he’s human, he’s alien, he’s gay, he’s straight, he’s bisexual, he’s asexual, he’s male, he’s female- Michael’s extremist disconnection to every aspect of his body was peculiar, considering how pivotal it was in his entertainment. The dancer’s impossible choreography became the foundation for everything after in pop video and beyond. Could anyone even dance if he hadn’t shown us how? And yet the power that changed the world was clearly something he was dissociated from. He literally melted before our eyes, tore himself into alien angles with an angry scalpel, while hiding behind ma Queen Elizabeth’s skirts. At first we wondered if the surgeon had been an unfortunate choice, but as the years went by, we realized that he obviously wanted to look like a fucking freak. We were embarrassed for him, repulsed. And yet, many of us could never hate him. I always loved him, and I’m so not alone. I just can’t stop loving you- even as you unravel.

From his days as a child entertainer, the pressures that surrounded Michael were extraordinary- and he has in common with other child megastars some of the crushing fragility and inabilities to become wholly realized adults. His idol poor Judy Garland was hooked on speed by the time she was ten- thanks to Mommie Dearest who wanted to assure Judy could don’t-stop-til-they-got-enough without getting tired. Later, Brit-Brit would crash and burn and take her children hostage more or less on national television, her identity both validated and vanishing before a thousand cameras. There is no end to the desperate neediness, vanity, the excess, the addiction, the cheap shots at love that cyclone through Hollywood and her cousins.

But only one celebrity ever made it into the furthest wing of Neverland’s lunatic asylum, where he’s roamed the grounds in his bizarre military getup and bandages, accompanied by man’s best friends- his llamas and his monkeys. Here, in this out-of-this-world world that no one else resided in, he was a strange disciplinarian who denied his body proper nourishment his whole life, at first covering his asceticism by the usual guise: vegetarian apologetics. Light as a feather, the bag of bones grilled himself through endless routines and repetitions, working harder than anyone in showbiz, except perhaps, Madonna, who eats. And though he denied his flesh its most basic necessities, he lavished luxurious longevity fantasies on himself with weird oxygen machines and reported cryogenics.

In this storybook nightmare world of roller coasters and purged peas, he could never have a regular stab at family life.During the umpteen trials, courts heard tapes of Michael discussing how he was a virgin until 32 years old. Instead, he briefly married Elvis’s daughter and fathered three children with an ordinary woman and an unknown one, none of whom are in the picture. The King named them all Prince Michael, except the daughter, Paris Michael.

Despite the increasing disappearance of his face and body, Michael’s massive entertainment persona still meant millions of women throwing themselves at his feet. And millions of gay men had helped make him a superstar, sprinkling Michael’s fairy dust, glittering magazine pages and runways and stages the world over. Michael could have had anyone he wanted- and some say he did.

I’ve always been Team Innocent simply because it’s obvious Michael’s an easy target for every scam artist alive. He had no defenses, his money was a joke, he had no idea what the fuck was going on and very little ability to function in the real world. His detractors always mumble “crazy” “freak” “nut job” “insane” and all I can say is “exactly.”

A fragile recluse, totally delusional- I mean, freaks come out tonight. You may as well just step up and ask him for a few million and save your kiddies having to remember their speeches in court. Indeed, the first time around, kid’s dad was famed for his promises to get a few million out of Michael, who had turned down some of his entertainment ideas.

I do know that anyone at all could be a child molester, and yet I’ve always thought it’s way too easy to blame Weird Michael than to blame the much more likely unsuspected man in bed beside you.

Michael’s fumbling adolescent sexuality and helpless self-hatred didn’t make him a poster child for pederasty in my eyes, not nearly as much as those secretive, angry men who were never a hit with the ladies, men with a sense of entitlement, men with too much testosterone spilling in every direction. Yet regardless of what will come out of this closet postmortem, anyone can see that Mikey was weirdly obsessed with his missing childhood, trying desperately to fix for every other kid what he himself lacked. Heroically or otherwise, to go along with all those cheeseball Heal the World and Have You Seen My Childhood lyrics, MJ’s philanthropy to kiddie cancer wards and other children’s charity is unsurpassed. Though most of his life he refused interviews altogether, letting scandal ooze up every which way through the cracks in his fragile psyche, he spoke loud and clear to his accusers in a 2003 interview with Ed Bradley.

“It’s people with a dirty mind that think like that. I don’t think that way. That’s not me,” he said. “I wanted to have a place that I could create everything that I never had as a child. So you see rides, you see animals, there’s a movie theater. I was always on tour traveling, you know, and I never got a chance to do those things. So I compensated for the loss… we have busloads of kids who don’t get to see those kids, they come up, sick children, and enjoy it.”

It may have been Mikey’s razor sharp lawyers who got him acquitted over and over. But then again, on dozens of charges, verdicts of innocent, innocent, innocent, innocent, innocent, innocent- I started to see a pattern. All I could see was flimsy evidence. There was the unquestionably inappropriate practice of slumber parties, yes, with a gaggle of underage boys. But it’s also probably true that Michael himself was sexually underage, despite his dog years, and absolutely clueless about decorum. I confess that I camp out by the fireplace with my nephews and niece at holiday time, and if anyone thought Auntsie Ret was up to no good, I would think they were truly disturbed. But there’s nothing for greedy parents to cling to with me- what, sue me for a bunch of used books and a few rhinestone belts?

Some things, by the way, were skimmed over by the bloodthirsty press- the maid who saw him showering with young boys admitted she’d been paid to say so- and the first child to accuse him steadfastly refused to do so until his parents drugged him with a powerful hypnotic drug. This case may have paved the way for later accusations, seeing ‘easy money’ written all over a dead man walking.

Interestingly, Jordy Chandler allegedly sued his own father a few years ago for physical and psychological abuse. Now in his late 20s, accusing MJ on Dad’s greedy behalf has ruined his life.

(Mary A. Fisher’s in-depth GQ Magazine story in 1994, Was Michael Jackson Framed? was sadly glossed over, yet remains a luminary piece of reporting. It’s reprinted here: http://www.allmichaeljackson.com/wasmichaeljacksonframed.html)

Though thousands of child molesters will never be brought to justice, there are also countless cases of false accusations and fake recovered memories that have ruined the lives of innocent men. Many have been driven to suicide. It may well be that our relentless thirst for blood, flogging this fragile entertainer endlessly over the years, was the final nail in his coffin. It may not be guilt that drove him to sleeping pill and narcotics addiction, to increasingly weird ailments and appearances, to more dramatic starvation, to delusions and further slicings and dicings. It takes an incredibly strong man to deal with even a small community’s condemnation of kiddie diddling. But this man, not a strong one, was known as a child molester in front of the whole wide world. His semblance of reality was so frail, in fact, that he wore his pajamas to court during his 2005 trial, and performed outside of the courthouse for the masses, dancing atop of his car.

And then, the final indignity- on the eve of MJ’s giant, sold-out, megatriumph show-you-all comeback, he dies instead, leaving some speechless and others, like me and Madonna, sobbing. He’s dead, and my childhood is flashing before my eyes. Japey and I listening to Thriller in the laundry room where my parents couldn’t hear us (in our fundie family we couldn’t listen to rock’n’roll.) And year after year, no matter how far Billie Jean faded into the past, it was the one song that could get everyone onto the dance floor, a DJs standard lure if the crowd was unresponsive.

Then there were those underrated moments, sadly lost in the pathetically simpering lyrics of a defenseless child defending himself- too many songs about them not caring, I’m invincible, you can’t get to me, they destroyed me- moments no one noticed amid the trial hysteria, moments buried in Invincible- where silky R and B made luminous his gorgeous falsetto. We’ll always love the disco, and we’ll always love Beat It and now the motorcycle jacket from the video will go for zillions on eBay and I’ll kick myself for losing mine in the early ‘90s.

But somehow most of the world missed out on one of his most brilliant moments, a surprisingly mature and dark Give In To Me. And the sick, sweaty sex in the Billie Jean mash-up with Biggie- that Billie Jean rhythm layered behind “Fingers in your mouth, open up your blouse, pull your g-string down south, wow,” can’t help getting me all hot and bothered, bringing MJ into adulthood for a brief moment, even though Biggie’s light has also gone out. And the unparalleled gospel anthem Man in the Mirror would be perfect for the Mississippi Mass Choir- or the Soweto choir, maybe, to perform at his funeral. And as if Adam Lambert stealing the Rolling Stone cover from the actual idol winner Kris Allen weren’t enough, his cover of Black or White I predict will be a megaseller.

But then there were those other moments of music, like In The Closet, where it seemed MJ had no idea of the double entendre that had been the story of his life- and so he played the fool for us yet again.

The media circus was unleashed yesterday, and I’m a part of it, too. We all are- it is the age we live in. It’s not all bad, either- it allows us to mourn together, and to celebrate lavishly the larger than life life of one of the greatest entertainers of all time, now and forever. Once again, the day after, his albums are again in the top spots of the charts. We will be fortunate enough to share in the memorials, too, and to hear unreleased songs, to find out what Britney and Simon Cowell have to say, and hopefully even Obama- who could play Thriller-era Michael in a movie. His music will blast from every store and many churches and from music television and iTunes, surrounding the world with We Are the World. Shrines will spring up in every nook and cranny of the planet.

But the media will also, as always, dance with the devil, who writes her paycheque- and that devil is us. Michael Jackson has joined Marilyn and Kurt and Judy and Jim and Diana in a vast pantheon of human sacrifice. Was he sick? Did Michael overdose? Was he a drug addict? Did he die of a broken heart? Was it heart failure? Did he starve to death? Did we do it? Did he do it to himself? Was it suicide? And the answer is one we all know: yes.

Camille Paglia at ROM- Religion in Hollywood

Camille Paglia is exhausting. Whether running to and fro from the dictionary or simply trying to keep up with her passion, she’ll wipe you out. In all my years of university, lectures, courses, conversations, and time spent hobnobbing in various book circles and coffeehouses, no one and nothing has taught me to think vigorously the way this woman has.

Paglia rose to infamy with her shocking treatise on Western culture, Sexual Personae, way back in 1990. The sweeping history of art, sex, biology, religion, and paganism offended just about everyone, but two decades later, feminism is slowly conceding that Camille’s been right all along: sex is dangerous, dirty, and dark, and extremely hot. A woman’s best shot isn’t prudery and naivety, but an arsenal of historical knowledge about archetypes, war, prostitution and art. Camille said out loud what the simpering victim mythos of the men suck feminist brigade  knew but couldn’t face: that history is what it is, that biology is what it is, whether or not we like it or think it’s pleasant. Our only hope for personal and political empowerment is to face reality.

Last night the guerrilla scholar left a sold-out audience at the Royal Ontario Museum half mesmerized and she did try our patience- lecturing for two solid hours. The topic was religion in old Hollywood, merging two of Camille’s favourite subjects, and we got a jam-packed history of Christian paganism from dawn’s early light through until  20th century cinema.

She’s the feminist who loves sex, the lesbian who loves men- but this lady doesn’t swing either to the left or to the right- she’s carved out a roost for herself quite apart from the masses. She harshly critiques the left for their artless, sexless humanism- man cannot live by bread alone, after all. She critiques the right for any notions of theocracy- the separation of church and state is vital for an evolved civilization. She’s an atheist who vigorously defends religion- how can we interpret culture if we don’t understand culture? Stories from religion are culture’s fabric- the journey, the hero, the dark night of the soul.

It was fascinating stuff. Twenty-four hours later I’m still taking it all in. My admiration for Ms. Paglia knows no bounds, and I’ve studied all of her books carefully. I confess she stretches the limits of my neural plasticity- intellectually, I’m afraid I’m something of a lightweight. But there’s nothing wrong with growing new brain cells, and I’ve underlined umpteen copies of Sexual Personae to death. I’ve read every poem she has referred to and tried to understand it if I didn’t. Or just to feel it- Paglia knows for sure the cerebral is not always as valuable as the sensual.

I’m indebted to Camille as a writer. Many of my approaches to popular culture as mirroring archetypes of the pagan pantheon are clearly influenced by her thinking. She’s not the only one to put this together- Christians have been burning art, music, literature for two millennia for the same reason. But that flexibility she gives us to escape elitism and leave the classroom to experience life in the body, below, with the masses, is utterly liberating. She exalts the popular and participates in its rituals. I’ve come to see so much of history, ironically, by being so present.

Now, many argue with Ms. Paglia and I would contend that there’s no point because she will out-shrill you with bigger words, more obscure quotes from yet another thing you’ve meant to read but never have. It’ll just be embarrassing. In my humble opinion, those who object are just making fools of themselves. So instead, just keep an open mind even when she gets your ire up. Agree to disagree, and be open to learn.

The first time I got this impression was way back in a Playboy interview. It was the mid-90s and I was all in a dither over the more controversial portions of some of her essays. Those were the days when I thought shaving my legs was oppression. Riled up. Who did this lady think she was, saying women weren’t artists because they couldn’t ejaculate? I was infuriated. I knew the true reason women weren’t artists or inventors or doctors or anything else was because they were stuck with the bloody babies.

Camille had said some stuff about obsessive behaviour breeding both the great art and the most troubling serial killers. We didn’t have a lady Mozart because we didn’t have a lady Jack the Ripper. And I was outraged along with most everyone else. I couldn’t for the life of me understand what she was talking about.

But I came around, all right. I mean, what’s not to get? The moment of revelation for me was reading her comments on Germaine Greer’s idea that you don’t get great women artists very often because “you don’t get great art from mutilated egos.” And then Camille said that actually, you ONLY get great art from mutilated egos. And it was so obvious. How could Germaine Greer possibly think that- when every artist is a total whack job, ever, especially the best? As an artist myself, I know that in the gut. I know it my bones, in the dark nights of my deepest obsessions and turmoil, in my most sexual and alive and dark parts.

Clearly, Camille was going to hit us over the head with the obvious for years to come.

And since then, I’ve dreamed of meeting her face to face, but as Playboy said, she is harder to get a hold of than the President. I’d been at a lecture once before, but last night I was determined to deliver copies of my books to her. I was second in line at the signing. I didn’t know what to expect, but as Camille signed my book, I handed her my present. She was gracious but aloof, racing with adrenaline from the lecture, petite and charming and volcanic. Her handwriting was large, with flourish, as I suspected it might be. Thank you, my mistress, for teaching me how to think. I have a long way to go, but we’ve come a long way, baby.

If you like art, literature, madness and interesting people, you’ll love Lorette C. Luzajic’s books. Her first book is “The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos.” Her second is “Weird Monologues for a Rainy Life (Irreverent Ramblings from the End of the World.)” Her poetry and her collected blogs, musings, reviews, memoirs, notes, eulogies, requiems, interviews, profiles and more are both devastating and hilarious romps through one woman’s wild mood swings. Lorette proves that there’s life after death, even for manic-depressives. “Think Courtney Love meets Margaret Atwood,” says Donnarama, Toronto’s premiere performance artist.

Visit the author’s link at Amazon to order your copies today!

Self Indulgent Hogwash

Weird Monologues for a Rainy Life (irreverent ramblings from the end of the world)
Lorette C. Luzajic’s new book launches this month

Do-it-yourself diva Lorette C. Luzajic launches her second book, Weird Monologues for a Rainy Life (irreverent ramblings from the end of the world.)  It’s a book about everything- a compendium of 390 pages of reviews, manifestos, requiems, opinion columns, tributes, gossip, and even some academia. And this is part one- the sequel, Dendrite Pandemonium: Hits, Misses, and Random B-Sides will follow later this year.

Lorette’s a journalism graduate who found more success being herself as a freelancer, and she writes seven columns and various news stories or profile pieces through her market base, www.thegirlcanwrite.net. A quick google will get you enough reading for the rest of your life, and some artwork, too.

Lorette’s fans are as diverse as her work. “Think Courtney Love meets Margaret Atwood,” says Toronto’s premier female impersonator Donnarama. Meanwhile, bestselling author of Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore, finds her “imaginative, witty, blessedly free of normal logic, surprising, profound.” Then again, she’s got plenty of detractors, like financial consultant Clarens M, who called her work “self indulgent hogwash.”

Lorette joined forces with designer Gonzalo de Cardenas to create an unusual book, illustrated by Caroline Bacher with cover art by Iaian Greenson. The result is a stand-out product that looks pretty cool on your coffee table- or, as Lorette suggests, the back of your loo.  “The whole idea of this book was to combine a range of my stories, blogs, musings, reviews, and so on, from all over the map, in a way that spanned my wild mood swings, the ups and downs, the embarrassing and the brilliant.” she says. “The extremes of the things I’ve been through touch chords with the life experiences of my readers- I tend to laugh and cry a lot. That I often feel vulnerable, naked, over-revealed kept me from writing down the bones for too long- there’s always an element of self-censorship and it just doesn’t get to the heart. The minute I stopped fearing this exposure was the moment I started to grow as a writer. Symbolically, this is me naked, messy, crazy, everybody’s sister.”

Indeed, Lorette writes candidly about the stuff we all wrestle with but don’t want to admit- grief, addiction, madness, spiritual uncertainty, the creative struggle, self doubt, health. Titles include Headbanging on Ketamine, The Perpetuation of Human Sacrifice Traditions in Popular Culture, For Women Who Love Men Who Love Men and the Women Who Love Them, and The Million Dollar Maybe. With trademark twisted humour and an insistence on reading signs into every possible aspect of human life, Lorette C. Luzajic pulls some skeletons out of the closet and polishes them up for public display.

Handymaiden Editions, 2009
http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books&field-author=Lorette%20C.%20Luzajic&page=1

The Miracle Whipped Trickster: Eminem coming May 19

The Miracle Whipped Trickster: Eminem coming May 19

I’m sorry that Bobby won’t be with me to usher in the new Eminem CD next Tuesday. We had so much fun cranking King Mathers’ tongue-twisting lexicon while vacuuming or making pancakes (among other things.)

I hadn’t really given Marshall a fair chance until then- I was just never dude enough to swallow the pejorative bitter brew. But then fate brought me an even hotter mess than me, with biceps and abs I’ll never ever forget, and suddenly the white hip hop look was fever pitch in my mind, as  Bobby bopped through the house drumming Em’s beat with two wooden spoons against his knees.

Needless to say, it wasn’t long before I saw what I’d been missing, and dissing. Eminem made my manic periods look like Snow White’s long slumber- and he was comedic, pure genius. The stories were intricate, detailed, fuelled by the most satisfying and sometimes shocking rhymes, clicking into place like puzzle pieces, a Rubik’s cube. He rhymes sounds and syllables and similars and words he makes up as he goes along. He’s quick on his feet, that’s for sure. The man has a way with words.

This was circa Curtain Call, and I refused to believe the curtain had been called. I didn’t think he would stay behind the scenes, though he said he was through. As much painful energy as centre stage might take, I knew he’d heal from grief, madness, rehab, whatever and the rhymes would start spinning right round baby. As an artist, one of the world’s most brilliant, he’d be driven to work again, and not just in production. The scars of stardom, childhood, poverty, riches, white trashiness, divorcing Kim twice- shit, it’s a lot… the kid worked his ass off through it all. Then it was white heat rocket into superstardom. The greatest rapper in the world, period. That’s what everyone was saying. How do climb out of that? Where do you go from there?

Even while tragedy is tearing apart the average family with none of the pressures of Detroit and superstardom, people are whispering about Eminem’s recent opening up about his drug addictions. Okay, let me get this straight- people are SURPRISED?  You didn’t figure this out for yourself before? There’s no way a man could talk that fast unless his mind raced a thousand times faster than yours or mine. And that would drive you crazy. And crazy people take drugs. And so do normal people. And people who lose their closest beloveds to suicides and murders and drugs take drugs.  And crazy people who also happen to be rock star and genius and white trash and rapper, a rapper who sings about drugs on a regular basis- what, none of this gave it away?

“I was born with a tick in my brain, yeah fucked in the head- is he nuts? No, he’s insane.” It won’t get any more clear than this- but I’m afraid Em’s audience is even dumber than he already thinks.

Well, Bobby didn’t make it, and that is a hole in my heart that will never heal over. But Eminem did make it, and I’ve got my tacky-ass faux-diamond big backward E around my neck, in case anybody was unsure I’m a fan, but also just to decorate a memory of a tragic but stunning love. Not everyone can make it through this life alive, but Bobby got me hooked on Eminem and I’m ready to shake my booty in his memory to the badass beats as soon as they hit the airwaves.

Now everyone knows Eminem couldn’t get famous until he spewed out on purpose the shadiest shit he could think of, which says way more about his audience than it did about him. He called that alter ego Slim Shady, the persona of an insane white man who was bad, mad and dangerous to know, to quote Lord Byron’s lover.

So what’s with Nick Cannon getting his panties in a bunch because Marshall raps about Mariah? I know, I know, it’s not all that nice to call someone a whore, it isn’t. But in rap’s theatre of the absurd, is Eminem supposed to be the only player who doesn’t use foul language about bitches and hos? Every celeb who has ever made the tabloids is fair game in these rap attacks. Now, if Nick had just said “Yo, pipe down on my woman,” fine.

But he wrote this:

“A mediocre (at best) Eminem record that sounds like it was written in 2001,” Cannon blogged. “At first, I thought it was old material that had been dug up from when dude ‘fantasized’ about having a pretend fling with Mariah. … But all of a sudden I hear my name in the verse! My first reaction was like, ‘This is his new shit? Wow, that’s too bad.’

Okay, thing is Nick, I didn’t even know you were a rapper until this hit my Perez-radar. So thanks to Em for putting you on the map for me.  I thought you were Mariah’s boy toy, and wondered why a rich babe like her couldn’t choose someone hotter.

Then I looked you up on Wikipedia and found out you had a #46 hit. And you sang something about being a new cat on the block, being bigger then Elvis. I listened to two numbers on iTunes and thought it must be 1982- no, I’m serious…and what’s this Nickleodeon business? The Pops don’t like me number was kind of cute, I confess, but nowhere near the mastery of tongue twisting rhyme, or the depth and breadth of mister white bread emmie.

It’s fine to stand up for your wife- but it’s just not entirely wise for a not so big shot producer to talk down about the work of a serious big shot rapper/singer/songwriter/producer. You know, the cunning linguist who has won more than 100 prestigious awards for his music, including an Oscar.

Anyhow, while I was on Limewire I thought I’d see if I could get lucky and find the verboten Mariah number. It was just my luck that the net was leaky at that moment and soon I was blasting one of Eminem’s nastiest and best vernacular jungle gyms. On top of the witty explosion of rhymes matched perfectly to the beat, the backdrop to this mad rap is bagpipes, and some kind of Mirwais-y production noise that moves your feet against your will.  This number’s a mind-bending bundle of tumbling rhyme, maybe one of his best…sorry, “illest.”

I don’t know about the rest of the album, but Bagpipes is a long way from Nick L. Odeon’s kiddie-cinema-popcorn heap.

“Locked in Mariah’s wine cellar… all I had for lunch… was red wine more red wine and Captain Crunch… red wine for breakfast and for brunch… ms. hello kitty satin bedspread with satin funk… You can be a permanent fixture …in my lyrical mixture…I’m the miracle-whipped trickster…”

Oh, dear, and then darling Nikki  started babbling on about how dissing the Butterfly Effect was racist, ‘cause Mariah is the same racial mixture as our President Barack Obama, you see.  It’s just…arrogant….to pull the racism card for the little skinny white boy from Detroit who braved the mean streets with nothing but his quicksilver wit and then won the respect of the biggest and best black men in rap and hip hop music because, in their words, not mine, he is the best there.

Sexist, no doubt about it, but not racist. Shit, how about: what a clever, awesome song, but my wife’s not a whore. Even Elton John is man enough to take a diss but not me, so can you rewrite that totally-ill-Grammy-written –all-over-it number without my wife’s number?

I had wondered if the climate toward the new album would mix near-religious devotion with snide and fickle snickering about the washed up addict man, with no regard for the man behind the mask’s private pain and right to recluse. Because people are quick to fickleness, screaming sell-out even if their shopping bags are stuffed with chart toppers.

But now I predict something different entirely: what will happen next is Bagpipes from Baghdad will go onto  become one of Eminem’s most massive hits, pervading the airwaves until kingdom come,  in no small part to Mariah’s jealous two-“hit” wonder.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

Botero’s Beautiful Horses: a few notes on Jan Conn’s new collection of poetry

Jan Conn, poet, biologist.

It is Jan’s biography, I believe, that makes her work completely different from anyone else’s, that gives layers to her words that we can unravel. She writes with the vivid imagery of Latin America fuels Isabel Allende’s genius, yet the fact that she is a scientist drives all of the mysteries within her words. These mysteries meld ancestral spirits into the cells and veins and wings of vines and birds and dust. Conn is a nouveau alchemist of sorts, knowing transformation is indeed the stuff of cellular biology, the very thing that will save ecology if we can. As a scientist, she spends her time chasing mosquitoes, and it is this attention to the smallest of things that brings ours to the big ones. Conn does sweat the small stuff, for it is the very stuff of life.

And if life is made up of atoms and of cells and molecules, literature is made of up of alphabets and words, funny black marks on a page or stone tablet that magically record the way we see the sky, the way we feel anger, the way we make love or go mad. Conn takes us to “the fable of pink, the agony of yellow.” We visit rooms “crammed with blue statuettes of the dead.” We are transported to a world with guavas and saffron and copper-winged chameleons and antelopes and alligator skulls.

“The Henry Moore bronze/resembles a reclining chacmool/ on whose chest fresh hearts were laid.”

The ancient mythology of the Americas, all fury and magic and hotheaded passion and sacrifice, and she brings these potions and powders and temples and mermaids and warriors and virgins and volcanoes into the unruffled cool of Canada. It is strange and sublime to hear a scientist tell us with conviction that the gods are alive.

Jan Conn
Botero’s Beautiful Horses
Brick Books
www.brickbooks.ca

Lorette C. Luzajic is the author of poetry collection The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos, and of Weird Monologues for a Rainy Life (Irreverent Ramblings from the End of the World). Both are available through amazon, or through her site, www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

U2’s No Line on the Horizon

I’m tired of this art school music these past few years. Nothing against the hipsters but I want some music with blood and guts again. I’ve hummed along at The Social to all these bland generic bands with men in guyliner and skinny jeans. I’ve thumbs-upped the new new waves’ creativity though sometimes I longed for a simple melody instead.

Of course, all great music is built on the music of the past, so the tragically hep who never check out Bach or Loretta Lynn or Bob Seger oughtta be shot. But there’s a time for this new electro-gloom; there’s also a supershiny glow I get from the more buoyant fare on the airwaves. Hell, I’ve really been enjoying the Britney Circus, and I count a total of one in my circle who thought Paris Hilton’s Stars are Blind was really rather sweet and inventive.

But I’m sick of all this emptiness, too, this cutesy opera to madness chic. Or to the endless malaise of being born filthy rich. I’m looking for more than a melody, even as I insist on one. I’m looking for meat, for an album that has some weight in my hands. I want poetry, though, not nonsense syllables layered in sync with synth, words that make me feel something spiritual. There will be more time for more disco more pop more more more bubbles in life but right now I need music with real claws, not Lee press-on nails.

I suppose all of this is why I’m so excited about the new U2. I’d never quite relegated them to shark jumpers, and doubtless there were many fans of their last years. But I admit I can’t name their last four albums and don’t own any of them. I have a few songs on iTunes.

But this year is different. No Line on the Horizon is moody, both dark and glorious, with occasional waves of beauty and ecstasy flooding you. There are stories here embedded right into the very notes of the music, into the flawless ultrasleek production of the sound.

Thing is, I think, back when Bono was a young idealist, an offbeat imp, seesawing under spiritual crisis and the cursed caul that turns a man into a poet, we were all drawn into his seductive intensity. Then I kind of lost his beat ‘cause he was too mature, too stable, too smarmy. He had my respect, of course. But all this time I’ve been a hot mess and he’s been changing the world, and I just couldn’t sit still through it all.

There’s more than a glimmer here again, within the soaring melodies and swooping vocals, of faith with torment, a stirring of raw lust just just just underneath, there’s the feeling I should be reading Wilde and Sartre both, at a café watching sad and crazy people go by.

With U2’s newest inspiration, they rock, they roll, they belt out soul, and it’s slick and. thick and rich and never gooey. But there’s a rawness and desolation that’s been missing from their gracious goodwill these past years. It’s the kind of  album that goes well with wine, and lots of it.

Yes, yes, give me wine, I’m tired of measuring wine these days, give me one two three four glasses, five, no eight, give me pale Mozart tapestries on beautiful Laura, give me guitar beside Trout Lake, or better yet, the Mississippi where vampires played with an old mojo man on saxophone. Oh, give me the days when I made love behind dumpsters and pierced my lips and nose, oh, give me neural plasticity, give me back the kind of girl who could drive a stick shift through the desert.

I’m tired of measuring dollars, carbs, of doing everything in my power to be more my age. Oh give me those sunny mojito days laying in the bruising sun atop the boat with Al and the girls, give me endless sunrise serotonin, oh, bring me back from the dead into danger, let me fall in love or feel sick with lust and fear. What has become of me, in early on a Saturday night, drinking tea and watching my cat eat ham?

This new album gives me optimism that the best is yet to come and the stretch ahead is paved with subtle pleasures if not wild ones. It’s sort of a relief, to be honest. But it also feels like a funeral, a tribute album for just how well-adjusted I’ve become. It’s exhausting, careening heedlessly into middle of the road.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

Incandescent Transcendence

Incandescent Transcendence

I hope you will all forgive the hopelessly flawed and erratic schedule of my columns. When I tell you that my infrequent and distracted postings are due to cataclysmic creativity, I trust you will understand. I must follow the muse elsewhere when she calls. This absolute inspiration surging through me, plus the busy reality of writing six various columns, has lately meant less attention to this one.

It has also meant some deep happiness, a rare treat. Happiness usually shows up for me in fleeting, elusive snippets, bright shiny fireworks that snap, crackle, and pop, gone by morning.

It also visits by knocking frequently on tiny and profound windows- black current in a favourite teapot, the man with the long eyelashes and gorgeous rippling biceps at the gym, a special poem in my email from Tara, the sliver of moon cutting through the navy expanse of spring dark.

But when I’m in the zone, really in the zone, for long and productive stretches, where brainstorming and output and focus share centre stage, I’m deeply, truly happy. It’s the most profound happiness I know.

In this period of my life I have been trying to transform the compulsion I have for over stimulation, as an exercise in coping with anxiety. I’m reaching for the kind of confidence I need to produce my truest work instead of giving all of my time and heart to other people’s projects, or to jobs I hate.

I’m reaching for peace, and for space, and I’m praying for time alone and time to heal from battle scars and the courage to think positively. I’m weeding out, breathing slower, letting go, moving on. And I’m making every effort to fill the hours with my art and not get lost in my unpredictable impulses and their consequences.

I’m fencing up my heart to say no more strays, not now, even though Timothy Findley once wrote, the “lost are so beautiful” and when you grow up in a labyrinth of madness, you see the beauty in Suzanne’s seaweed, too. But sometimes you get strangled in it, you drown. I’m practicing boundaries, I’ve promised to triple guess my heart, to look both ways before I cross the street.

It’s all about freeing up space. Mental and spiritual space. Space is scary. There’s too much of yourself in space, not enough noise, not enough distraction. The claustrophobia is deafening. Just you and your grief. You and the truth. You have to face what you don’t want to face, make peace with things you cannot change, come to terms with the dead because you yourself are not dead.

It’s about freeing up time. Taking the extraneous, unnecessary things away, so that a new gift of time and space emerges. Letting fall away the ones who didn’t really understand or love, the ones in whom you invested too much for nothing, and stop chasing after them, and stop giving time to the hurt that ripped you up, because you’re toughening up because you’re finally calling spades spades- (whenever you can see them and you’re not particularly deluded.)

Those parts always spent in upheaval and upset, in exhaustive depletion, too sensitive, too abandoned, too isolated, too surrounded- now they are free space for the people and things who have bolstered me, taught me, cushioned my falls, saw me, knew me- held me, not held me hostage. And more time for even more of my work. Less time chasing pavement? Not filling time with filler.

And here in all of this empty space, space that is lonely and unfamiliar, you know no one can rescue you after all, and you’ve been wrong to think it every time. But here you are. Life is a mystery, everyone must stand alone.

And I have left that space wide open for the Muse and reading and creating voraciously, both written and visual work. I get sketchy now if I don’t get enough hours out of the day to put down the words I have in my head. I am calm and focused and resolved. I’m researching and writing all the time about fascinating people, finding out how other intense, disturbed, and serious artists function(ed). My novel is rapidly taking form, work I’m proud of so far and hope you will see one day and agree. I’m learning so much about wildly disparate topics- spices, the dudes who wrote the Bible, intersexuality, and the hard-drinking and serious writing life of Carson McCullers. And I’ve found fresh inspirations for painting, realized that my painting and writing are really interwoven, interdependent, fuelled one by the other.

Last year I was so supremely depressed I wondered how I could go on, and no doubt I will feel that way again, maybe tomorrow.

But today I can’t imagine how I could have been so pathetically sentimental, crying over spilled milk.

Happiness is not about the presence of an emotion or a distraction from hurt, and nor is it the absence of sorrow. It’s about investing all of your energy into renewable resources, if you can. Working hard at whatever you’re doing, and doing your best at it. About making time for silence and for art. It’s about letting nothing stand in the way of your calling. Nothing. That means not stopping even if it doesn’t work out financially. It might never. You do it because you can think of nothing else. You tap into flow, into the most alive parts of the universe and you don’t ever run empty.

You don’t run empty because you are no longer giving to distractions, the past, or to toxic people, the space and time that you are now giving to the muse. You have invited her to live with you, to sleep with you, to be with you forever. You have invited her in to stay, not just to come and go whenever you’re not busy.

There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.
Leonard Cohen

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net. You can find her books at www.amazon.com.

quote of the day

“Look at that sea, girls–all silver and shadow and vision of things not seen. We couldn’t enjoy its loveliness any more if we had millions of dollars and ropes of diamonds.”

Lucy Maud Montgomery

Babykiller Obama Saves Lives of Millions

I have never felt a need to be embroiled with the emotional debate over abortion. I always felt it was a private issue of great solemnity and really wasn’t aware of the circus made of it by many right-to-life advocates until Obama’s wise move to resume sending aid to third world countries. That’s when I found out that this ‘babykilling money’ wasn’t anything of the sort. The right wing can’t think straight, it seems, more often than not. It was sheer lunacy to withhold women’s health aid. The reason? Those aids MIGHT counsel abortion. It’s obvious to me straight off the bat that most third world countries are Catholic and Muslim, and abortion is not handed out like candy- only in sickness or threat to life. Withholding birth control is one of the greatest shames of the church. It’s sick prudery has meant millions of lives suffering, in slavery, in child prostitution, starving, sick….sick, sick, sick, shame, shame, shame.

But my opinion on the facts- and the facts are that this ‘babykilling agenda’ will save babies, PREVENT abortion, and save moms- is just my opinion. So I wanted to share the facts so you can share them with the pro-life lunacy faction which is actually celebrating death and suffering. And why? Because heathens don’t matter, and people who have sex don’t matter. That’s what it boils down to. Those ungodly people are poor because they are heathens, not because of natural disasters (oh, God again) or colonization’s greed.

Paul Tobin gathered these facts in The Rejection of Pascal’s Wager site:
http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/ambush.html#8

“Culture of Life”:
The Deadly AmBush on Third World Women
The most apt, and appalling, example of the unholy alliance of the Catholic Church and fundamentalists Christians is in the anti-abortion policies of the current US administration of George W. Bush. Both groups of Christians were major factors in helping George W. win his reelection campaign of 2004. [1]

Ever since he took over the presidency in 2001, Bush has been doing everything he can to push family planning back into the dark ages. Keen to please his religious conservative base, on the first day of his first term as president, George W. reinstated the global “gag rule”. The “gag rule”, first introduced by President Ronald Reagan in the mid-1980’s, calls for the with-holding of U.S. financial aid to any foreign non-governmental organization (NGO) that even mentions the word “abortion” in their provision of health services to pregnant women. Thus even if a woman’s life is in danger from her pregnancy, any mention of “abortion” would mean that the NGO would lose all its funding from the U.S. [2]

One casualty of this gag rule is the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF). The IPPF provides reproductive health information and services to women in third world countries. These include providing information about, diagnosis and treatment sexually transmitted diseases (including HIV/AIDS), gynecological care, post and prenatal care for mother and child. Providing information on abortion and its availability, if necessary, is a fundamental part of the IPPF goals for reproductive health. As a result of this its funding of around US$20 from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was terminated.

Considering the fact that 80,000 women die every year - one every seven minutes – due to unsafe abortions, IPPF’s provision of abortion services is a crucial life saving campaign. It’s provision of contraceptives, such as condoms, also help prevent unwanted pregnancies and the spread of HIV/AIDS. Hilary Fyfe, of the Family Life Movement in Zambia commented that the with-holding of funds is akin to murder: “I think they are killing these women, just as if they are pointing a gun a shooting. There is no difference.” [3]

Not to be outdone by this early success, President Bush in 2002 withheld US$34 million of contribution, approved by both houses of Congress, to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). The fund, active in 144 countries, provides contraception, family planning, and gynecological health services to women in third world countries. It also works against the spread of HIV/AIDS and against the practice of female genital manipulation. The withheld funds would have made up a substantial (more than 10%) portion of the UNFPA annual budget.

What did the UNFPA do to deserve the funds being withheld from them? According to the Bush administration, the funds were withheld due to allegations about their activities in China which supposedly involved coercion of abortion and forced sterilizations among rural inhabitants in China. The charge, made by the right-wing anti-family planning, anti-abortion, “Population Research Institute” (PRI), [a] , was used by Bush as an excuse to withhold this fund. We know that it is an excuse because in May 2002 Bush sent a fact finding team which reported that the UNFPA was not involved in any coercion programs. Before the American mission, a British delegation did the same investigation and also confirmed that there was no evidence whatsoever of any forced abortions. In September 2003, a group of U.S. (non-fundamentalist) religious leaders went to China and returned with the same conclusion. Other independent investigations have also cast serious doubts on the veracity of the claims made by PRI. [4]

Upon the announcement in 2002 of the withholding of funds, fundamentalists and Catholic “pro-life” movements were ecstatic. The Roman Catholic Church, whose irrational views on abortion are well known, must have felt its prayers were finally answered. Deal Hudson, editor of the catholic magazine Crisis gladly proclaimed that it is “good news” and that his sources told him the funds will be “permanently withheld”. [5]

Indeed Hudson’s sources were correct, since 2002, the Bush administration had withheld the payment to the UNFPA for the last three years – all the while using the same discredit reason of “coercive” abortion practices in China. [6] The real reason for with-holding the funds is transparently clear: the fundamentalist and Catholic supporters of the Bush administration are against any form of abortion – whether it is coerced or not is beside the point.

Indeed the excuse is even more blatantly clear when we consider the whole picture. Of its US$300 million annual budget, the UNFPA only spends US$3.5 million (around 1.2%) on China. The bulk of the funds from UNFPA goes to other third world countries in Africa, Asia and the Americas and much of it would have been for family planning and health care – not abortions. The money would have been used to help reduce the childbirth mortality in countries such as Burkina Faso, Zambia and East Timor where the mortality rate ranges from 500 to 5,000 (in East Timor) per 100,000 births. Some of the money would have been used to train midwives. In Chad, for instance, the whole country of nine million only has fifteen obstetricians. It was reported that two untrained midwives there tried to deal with a breech delivery (where the baby’s head is facing the wrong direction) by holding the pregnant woman upside down and shaking her to try and get the fetus in the “right” position! [7]

Thus the “China card” is just that: a ruse for the Roman Catholic Church and their fundamentalist allies to continue their anti-abortion crusade. And like all wars – there are casualties: the innocent pregnant women of poor countries around the world who depend on the UNFPA to safe their lives. The UNFPA estimates that the withheld fund annually would have prevented up to 2 million pregnancies, nearly 800,000 abortions, 77,000 infant and child deaths and 4,700 maternal deaths. That’s a lot of blood on the hands of these “right to lifers”. [8]

Asking how these numbers arise from provides us with a picture of the cruelty of the horribly misnamed “pro-life” movement. Sometimes deaths can be due simply to the lack of cheap surgical procedures. One condition that would have been easily treatable by inexpensive surgery – the type provided by the UNFPA – is called obstretic fistula. It happens when the pregnant woman is either too malnourished or too small to deliver the baby. Without medical help, “the baby’s head rips a hole clear through her bladder or rectum”. It has been estimated that more than 2 million women in Africa and South Asia suffers from such a condition. The baby usually dies and the mother becomes incontinent for life. [9]

Othertimes the deaths can be due to the lack of simple hospital supplies such as an oxygen. Below is a collection of two such tales in Chad as told by reporter Nicholas Kristof:

Zara Fatima, a 15-year-old girl, was in labor for four days before her family loaded her onto public transportation – the back of a truck – and took her to the dilapidated National General Reference Hospital here on Tuesday. Her blood pressure was high, 170/80, and she soon lapsed into a coma. The baby arrived stillborn. Zara needed oxygen, but the hospital had none to spare. …Zara died…

Fatima Adoum, a pregnant 15-year-old, lies unconscious on a hospital bed, gasping for breath, convulsing and slobbering. Her arm has a two-inch suppurating burn wound, and the doctors point to it grimly as a home remedy against sorcery. The delay in getting her to a doctor has hurt her, and now she needs oxygen, but it is unavailable…Fatima’s prospects are still uncertain. [10]

Thanks to the “pro-life” policies of George W. Bush, where the fertilized egg is more important than the lives of thousands of pregnant women in third world countries, these sad stories look set to multiply in the near future. [b]

Abortion is not the moral equivalent of murder, but what would one call letting thousands of women needlessly die each year when one has the power to prevent it?

Update: January 23, 2009
On January 23rd 2009, the new American president, Barack Obama, overturned the Bush policy. The move will, as a statement from Population Action International noted, “save women’s lives around the world.” Sanity has returned to American politics.

Paul’s references are below.

The truth is, any thinking person, for or against abortion morally, can clearly reason that the above facts weigh in pro life either way. Women are not the murderers of their children that these sick sadists make them out to be:  blood is on the hands of the church- again, as always, what a surprise- and the government- oh, same thing these days….

You know I’ve always been a very religious, very spiritual, Christian person who expected others to be thinking, reasoning people- after all God gave us brains. This has not been the case, and the disgusting hatred of heathens, of women, and of gays- science, history, reality be damned- has propelled me like a cannonball from ‘faith.’ At first I feared I was becoming an atheist because of the haters. Now I know I’m deprogramming from mind control that I thought I’d long shaken off.

I’m converting to reason.

Notes
a. According to UNFPA officials the tactics used by the PRI to spread their false charges involves planting unfounded allegations in the local newspapers of third world countries. Once “in print” – these stories take up an air of credibility. Subsequently they are picked up by the international press, allowing world wide dissemination of clearly made up stories.
b. Throwing up our arms won’t do. We can all do our part to help. Please donate to the The 34 Millions Friends of UNFPA.
References
1. Alan Cooperman and Thomas B. Edsall, “Evangelicals say they led charge for the GOP”, The Washington Post, November 8, 2004
2. Molly Ivins, “Another Slap against Women: Getting around Bush’s cheap move”, Chicago Tribune, October 22, 2002
3. “Report: Global Gag Rule Spurring Deaths, Disease,: Women’s eNews, September 25, 2003
Bert Wilkinson, “Report from the Field: Gag Rule’s Impact”, Population Connection, February 1, 2001
IPPF Abortion: advocating for the right to safe abortion services
4. Greg Barrow, “Abortion row threatens UN funds”, BBC News February 27, 2002.
“US to Withhold $34M in UN Funds”, Associated Press, July 22, 2002
Diane Carman, “How to Undo a Travesty of Politics”, Denver Post, June 27, 2004
Knight Ridder, “Small Advocacy Group Influences American Policy”, Jodi Enda, September 22, 2002
5. “US to Withhold $34M in UN Funds”, Associated Press, July 22, 2002
6. “Birth Control; Help the UN Fund (Editorial)”, Charleston Gazette, September 14, 2004.
David Gollust, “US Cuts Funds to UN Population Fund Agency Over ‘Coercive’ Policy by China”, Epoch Times, July 17, 2004
Christopher Marquis, “U.S. Cuts Off Financing of U.N. Unit for 3rd Year”, New York Times, July 17, 2004
7. Nicholas Kristoff, “Terror of Childbirth”, Op-Ed Column, New York Times, March 20, 2004
Ian Black, “EU Replaces Cash Denied to UN Family Planning by the US”, Guardian of London, July 24, 2004
8. Molly Ivins, “Another Slap against Women: Getting around Bush’s cheap move”, Chicago Tribune, October 22, 2002
9. “No headline could sum up how sad this is”, Jane Magazine March, 2004.
10. Nicholas Kristoff, “Terror of Childbirth”, Op-Ed Column, New York Times, March 20, 2004
11. Obama reverses abortion-funding policy, CNN, January 25th, 2009

Thank you Paul.