You may have seen this news floating around the internet lately:

Two bodies found wrapped in a poignant embrace in their final moments as they were covered beneath molten rock and layers of ash in the ancient city of Pompeii when Mount Vesuvius violently erupted in 79 A.D.

The bodies were dubbed “The Two Maidens” when they were first discovered but in a startling discovery this week scientists found the two bodies were actually male - raising speculation that they may have been gay lovers.

...

"We always imagined that it was an embrace between women. But a CAT scan and DNA have revealed that they are men. "You can’t say for sure that the two were lovers. But considering their position, you can make that hypothesis. It is difficult to say with certainty.”

It sounds pretty cool on the surface, right? But if you keep reading, if you’re sensitive to these things, one thing that jumped out at me was this:

“When this discovery was made, that they were not two young girls, some scholars suggested there could have been an emotional connection between the pair,” he said. “But we are talking about hypotheses that can never be verified.

So we have a situation where two bodies were found in what appears to be an embrace, preserved for centuries due to the ash of a volcano that hardened around them. It was assumed that they were two girls, but that there was no emotional connection between the pair?

Scientists performed CAT scans and DNA testing and found that the bodies were actually men, seemingly unrelated, about 18 and 20 years old. Why did it take the discovery that they were unrelated men to lead the scientists to hypothesize that there “could have been an emotional connection” involved? Wouldn’t that be something that could be safely hypothesized no matter the sex of the individuals?

Reading through some of the stories about it, I was becoming increasingly annoyed by the weird assumptions that had been at play pre- and post-DNA testing. But I think Alex Bollinger at LGBTQNation sums up my frustrations much better than I can:

But what’s interesting to me, though, is the possibility that it is exactly what it seems like: two men, not related, holding each other in an affectionate way. What about that leads people to say that they were “gay lovers”?

Professor Stefano Vanacore, head of the Pompeii research team, put it this way, “When this discovery was made, that they were not two young girls, some scholars suggested there could have been an emotional connection between the pair.” Two women can’t have an emotional connection? If “emotional” is meant more like “conjugal,” then why were these two people assumed to be in a platonic relationship when they were women but in a sexual relationship now that they are thought to be men?

Talk about viewing history through the lens of the today’s culture. One thing that modern, Western people take for granted is how much policing of male affection we live with. In the US, straight men (or gay and bi men in straight spaces) usually don’t touch each other more than a handshake or a pat on the back. In France, men kissing “hello” is OK, but not much more. In other parts of the world, including parts of Africa, straight men sometimes hold hands just out of platonic friendship.

…..

When what people see changes based on the assumed genders of these people – while their pose remains exactly the same –then the story is really about contemporary people’s gendered standards of behavior.

Nail, meet head.

Two things are at play here: one, the idea that men showing any affection towards each other must be gay. And then the assumption that the women had no “emotional” (and I agree with Bollinger that this is meant to read as “conjugal”) connection because…. they’re women? So it would just be natural for women to be in an embrace, but now that we know they are men, this rocks the scientific community?

There are other little things at play as, well, which isn’t really addressed in the article but that I’ve seen in some comments: there seems to be a healthy dose of surprise that there were gay people even back then, when we already know that homosexuality as been recorded throughout most of human history.

And then the idea that this makes that poignant embrace even more poignant, somehow. I admit to never really looking into what genders the two bodies were, or what type of relationship they had. For some reason it never crossed my mind to wonder. It’s a poignant image no matter what- father and son, mother and daughter, lovers or sisters, friends or cousins.

It is the image of two people in their final embrace, there is nothing more poignant than that, and I don’t think that knowing the genders or relationship of the people changes that poignancy. For all we know, they were two men fighting and happened to land like that when the volcano killed them. We don’t know. We only know that they were unrelated men. We know next to nothing else, least of all whether they were emotionally connected or gay. 

But the internet seems to be running with that conclusion, with very few examining all of the implications that come with that hypothesis.

Thank you! I will be ok now.

I love you all.

UPDATE: I just got a call and my aunt is in the hospital with liver failure. So I'm on my way to Seattle tonight even though I don't have the fucking money for it. Seattle Kossacks who have a place for me to crash, please send me a kosmail if you're so inclined.  

I am terrified.

And then, my personal bully friend Colorado is the Shiznit took action, and then so did all of you.

So…. weekends don’t mean a lot to me now, given that I’ve decided to temporarily do the stay-at-home wife thing for the summer. (It’s worked out better than I expected!!!)

But I’m not that far removed from the days when Saturdays were the trophy of the week, so I appreciate the wonderfulness of this day even though it doesn’t apply to me at this moment.

I signed up to cover Saturday nights in the TC schedule so that others may enjoy their weekend unencumbered, but…..

Turns out, I have nothing to say. Except one thing that I’ll say next weekend, but I won’t say tonight because Mrs. BB is insisting that words that I say often (“that’s a good idea!*”) are actually a Deep State way of saying “you are right.”

And I can’t let that shit fly. ;>)

So without further ado, let us move on to Tops:

*Mrs. BB actually did give me a really cool idea for a diary topic, but I procrastinated for so long that I didn’t leave myself enough time to write about it in detail, so tune in next week when I (maybe, if I feel like it) write about the really good idea she had.

I hereby declare the thread open.

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Two things I’ve had since the day I was born: bad knees and dreams/nightmares that are far too real.

My nightmares have gotten less severe since I’ve gotten older. Used to be I’d have at least two soul-rattling nightmares a week, now it’s closer to twice a year. When I was a child they were even more frequent, and they were creepy enough that by age four, when I ran into my parents’ bedroom at night, mom quit telling me that talking about them would make them seem not so scary.

She couldn’t let me tell her about my nightmares anymore because they would either giver her nightmares, or chill her so much that she couldn’t get back to sleep.

In the morning she’d encouraged me to write about them instead, telling me that Stephen King did the same thing, and now he’s a rich and famous writer! I so feared what would happen to my family if I unleashed my nightmares on them that I refused to write about them. I did, however, take the advice to write away my anxiety, and that’s how, at age five, writing became part of my identity.

And bad knees? Well, who doesn’t have those? Mine are hereditary, passed on through my maternal family, generation after generation. Mine creak and crack and sound like they belong to an 80 year old, but are otherwise in pretty damn good shape compared to where the generation before me was at this age.

So, what do the two have in common? More on this in a minute but first! A word from our sponsors:

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Back in 1997, my grandma and I took a trip to Vegas for our birthdays- my 18th and her 61st. The dates were a mere three days apart and it was always a bond we had. The April girls, the diamond girls. 

For this reason, my grandma told me from a very young age that when she passed, all of her diamond jewelry would go to me, but until then she bought me diamond something on every important birthday. On my 18th birthday, I woke up in Vegas with a wrapped present that was clearly a ring.

It was a very pretty ring, gold with a medium-sized “diamond” on top, two smaller diamonds to the side. Yeah, I knew the larger diamond wasn’t real (“but it’s a real cubic zirconium” as my grandma sometimes said), but the authenticity of the ring didn’t matter. It was beautiful, and I had long ago lost the ring she bought me for my 13th birthday.

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I turned 38 this year, so the ring has been on my finger for twenty years now. My oldest niece was born in April, so I get to carry on the tradition with her: she knows it’s hers when I die, as is my grandma’s wedding ring (that I also wear along with my own).

(Besides the birthday ring on my right ring finger and the wedding rings on my left ring finger, the only other ring I wear is a stainless steel scarab, which is also from grandma because she said it brought it luck [it hasn’t], and when my youngest niece gets jealous that the oldest one gets my diamond rings, I remind her that she gets the bug ring, because she bugs she so much about it. Ba-dum-bump. Dad humor from the aunt.)

At some point last month I took a nap and woke up to something sharp digging into my skin. It was the ring, sans “diamond.”

OMG. What happened?

I was shaken up about it, obviously, but Mrs. BB calmed me down with promises that we’d take it to a jeweler and get a new diamond cut and reset it in it (I was told by a jeweler that I need to get the damn thing reset when I was shopping for the wedding rings, but I figured I’d get to it eventually…..)

I scoured every corner of every single room I had been in, and even a few that I hadn’t. No sign of it anywhere. I couldn’t wear the ring without it snagged on things, so I’ve felt completely naked and uncomfortable for over a month now.

And then yesterday my vacuum got clogged so I started taking it apart to unclog it, and BAM! The diamond fell out with a clump of dog hair. I picked it up and started crying, but in my excitement dropped the damn thing again and lost it. I prayed that Mrs. BB would be home late for work when I realized I had every lamp and light in the house on while I crawled around the floor with a flashlight, combing through every strand of carpet. Yes, honey, I’m carpet-surfing. No, it’s not for meth.

After about twenty minutes, SUCCESS! I popped the diamond back in the ring and am home again.

I still feel naked because I only wear the ring if I’m not doing anything besides sit on the couch, and I don’t do that often enough to wear it for any significant amount of time. But I, uh, probably need to get it reset before it goes back on my finger and stays there day in and day out.

Yesterday was a wonderful day, is what I’m saying.

So without further ado, on to Tops!

Top Comments:

white blitz nominated this awesome comment about optimism by GoodNewsRoundup in GNR’s diary.

From your humble host:

This comment from sfbob in Tevye’s diary about organ donation was a welcome bit of wonderful news.

Top Mojo:

1)  It happens. My husband is the grandson of a poor … by catwho +170

2)  I’d almost forgotten what a President is suppose … by Chitown Kev +158

3)  How frustrating it must be for him to keep havin … by GrowingMindsInSC +141

4)  I adore you. Thanks for the work you do and for  … by LaPinturaBella +128

4)  Fight to get them more, better, and cheaper educ … by progressive2016 +128

6)  Private schools “succeed” because they are exclu … by WestCoastFranky +129

7)  Bernie Sanders and his staff deserve a lot of cr … by First Amendment +127

8)  “Starting”? If Corker can find one Trump intervi … by Mother Mags +124

9)  Oh, well, the motherfucker won’t be missed. by Chitown Kev +115

10) Eats shoots and leaves. … by dbcoe +113

11) Scaramucci, Scaramucci will you do a press brief … by Mark Sumner +112

12) So not only did Republican senators find out McC … by HeartCooksBrain +109

13) The 24-7 AntiObama cult finds itself adrift in t … by McGovern78 +106

14) It’s not just a generational shift. I grew up in … by Geonomist +96

15) The bigots came out in force. Fox and GOP have b … by Maltie +93

16) It was nice to hear him speak again. And be able … by bluva06 +89

17) Private schools can also exclude students for an … by Pale Jenova +84

18) I can’t wait until Scaramucci’s skeletons start  … by David54 +82

19) What’s Melissa McCarthy gonna do for work? by radv005 +81

20) After 30 years he's where he never wanted to be, … by Shippo1776 +80

21) [image] by cblodg +78

22) You know it’s bad sign when your press secretary … by jwinIL14 +77

22) Those small minds have been carefully brainwashe … by slouching +77

22) Poor, poor Mitch McTurtle. … by karmsy +77

25) Any institution that stands in their way of powe … by dcg2 +76

25) [image] by freewayblogger +76

27) Emperor Devin Nunes has no fucking clothes on. … by sunbro +75

28) Yup. by IndieGuy +74

29) You say: … by anjaspapa +73

29) Five bucks worth of crap in a thousand dollar su … by Snud +73

Top Pictures:

I’ve written about my BFF before here, but definitely not at the length that she deserves.

We’ve been friends since grade school and are more like sisters than friends. But even “sisters” isn’t a good description. We met, we melted into each other, and we’ve been psychically connected since 1990.

When I was twelve and my parents divorced, she was there.

When I was thirteen and lived in poverty and none of our friends wanted to be seen near our apartment complex, she was there.

When I was fourteen and we didn’t have enough money to keep our phone connected, she’d make up random times to call a payphone near our house. I’d be boarding the school bus and she’d yell at me “7:23 PM!”

I’d walk down to the phone booth and, sure enough, right at 7:23PM the phone would ring.

She was there at 15, when there was nowhere except her house to be safe.

She was there at 16 when my mom decided we were moving to Boise. She cried, but thought I’d have a better life there and supported me.

At 17, she almost killed the guy who had me trapped in an abusive relationship. Visiting her was the worst thing he ever did, and she walked like a rooster around me, ready to peck the dude’s eyeballs out at the slightest provocation.

At 18, she rearranged her entire day and missed some finals so that she could be there for me when my grandpa got a very bad diagnosis, and at 19, she sat next me while I wailed on her family room floor about losing my grandpa.

At 20, when I had a nearly successful suicide attempt, she quit speaking to everyone who treated it as a juicy bit of gossip, and she has not spoken to them since.

At 21, 22, 23, all the way up to where we are now, she has been there, a fucking rock that I can’t live without.

And here we are, at 38, where she tells me that she found a lump in her breast so she made an appointment with her OB-GYN, and they felt the lump and immediately sent her to get an ultrasound and they immediately sent her to get a biopsy and oh, by the way, your blood cell count doesn’t look good.

So she texts me and asks if I have a minute, and I say of course!

And she tells me all of this and I can’t breathe.

I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, but I know that if the shoe was on the other foot, she would.

In the early aughts, a friend of mine worked for the local alternative paper and got press passes to a Tom Petty concert. He had been one of those shows that I thought, eh, I’d really like to see him but I can’t afford the tickets, so when my friend brought tickets to my house for me and my then-girlfriend, I was pretty stoked. I’d actually get to see Tom Petty live!

I didn’t have any real expectations for the show. I was used to smaller indie bands, where the music is much better and more passionate live than on an album. Tom Petty just seemed like the kind of dude where what you see is what you get, and at the show that night he was basically what I expected. Not a rock star (even though he was) just a guy up on stage playing songs for a crowd. Totally unpretentious, personable, professional, and clearly enjoying himself. The ultimate rock star was the anti-rock star.

There were two really memorable moments for me that night. The first was that he played a song that had not yet been recorded, but he told us would probably be on his upcoming album. He said it was written about a friend who was in NYC on 9/11. I remember listening to it and thinking it was beautiful, and being kind of awed that I got to hear a Tom Petty song before the masses did.

The second one is what happened when he played You Don’t Know How it Feels.

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D’oh! It’s been one of those days!

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Next month it will be ten years since I joined this site. It hasn't always been easy-going: there have been ups and downs, long hiatuses, serious fights, and long-held grudges, among other things. 

But one thing that’s always struck me is how many friends I’ve made here. Most of them are almost strictly online, but a lot of them have become real life friendships as well.

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Do you ever find yourself saying the same thing frequently throughout the day? A word or phrase that you can’t seem to quit using?

In my house, that word is “goddamnit” but it’s almost always either before or after the name of one of our dogs. We joke that Annie’s last name is “Goddamnit” because we use it so often. “Annie Goddamnit!” But her first name is Happy, because she’s the happiest dog that ever dogged, so her full name is Happy Annie Goddamnit.

Annie’s transgressions are minor. She’s indecisive and she always wants permission for everything. That’s okay, but for example if I’m laying on the couch and she wants to lay with me, she tap dances around the couch or starts to get up and then backs away, then starts and backs away. I won’t even notice because it’s so routine, but once I notice I tell her it’s okay.

Then she starts to get up on the couch, checks with me, gets further up the couch, checks with me…“Annie, Goddamnit, just get on the couch.” And then she gets on the couch.

She pulls the same stunt with nearly everything. Indecisive and in need of permission (which she doesn’t actually need- we gave up on keeping the dogs off the couch a long time ago), and then waiting for us to as soon as we get exasperated, she feels confident that all is right with the world.

More on this in a moment, but first a word from our sponsors, goddamnit!

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I don’t have a lot to say about this, except for what the title says.

Uma Thurman was recently asked if she had anything to say about the recent revelations that Hollywood is pretty much a cesspool of sexual assault/harrassment/worse. She replied with  contained anger, using her words carefully and with measure.

But most people can recognize a woman about to explode, and Uma seems as though she will soon in a magnificent way. She is right that when we say things while angry, we don’t always express ourselves in the best way.

Which makes me look forward to the day when she’s just angry enough to address the issue, because she clearly has something important to say.

And she followed up on Thanksgiving with this:

H A P P Y  T H A N K S G I V I N G

I am grateful today, to be alive, for all those I love, and for all those who have the courage to stand up for others.
I said I was angry recently, and I have a few reasons, #metoo, in case you couldn’t tell by the look on my face.
I feel it’s important to take your time, be fair, be exact, so... Happy Thanksgiving Everyone! (Except you Harvey, and all your wicked conspirators - I’m glad it’s going slowly - you don’t deserve a bullet) -stay tuned

I, for one, look forward to when she speaks. I’ve seen anger like that before and I can’t wait for her to say what she’s thinking.

Now, on to tops!

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“I used the word ‘anger’ but I was more worried about crying, to tell you the truth. I was not a groundbreaker on a story I knew to be true. So what you really saw was a person buying time.”

-Uma Thurman

Back in November, Uma Thurman was asked about the many breaking stories about sexual harassment. She was clearly upset, but said she would not speak until she was able to “be fair, be exact.”

Well, she’s finally told her story, and it’s as ugly as expected.

There are a few different angles to this story and it’s hard to condense into a single post, but of course, it involves Harvey Weinstien.

Thurman says she was able to overlook many warning signs as she first got to know Weinstein because “he used to spend hours talking to me about material and complimenting my mind and validating me.” It wasn’t until a meeting in Paris when her blinders started to come off.

They were arguing about a script when the bathrobe came out.

“I didn’t feel threatened,” she recalls. “I thought he was being super idiosyncratic, like this was your kooky, eccentric uncle.”

He told her to follow him down a hall — there were always, she says, “vestibules within corridors within chambers”— so they could keep talking. “Then I followed him through a door and it was a steam room. And I was standing there in my full black leather outfit — boots, pants, jacket. And it was so hot and I said, ‘This is ridiculous, what are you doing?’ And he was getting very flustered and mad and he jumped up and ran out.”

Not long after, he physically attacked her at a hotel in London:

“It was such a bat to the head. He pushed me down. He tried to shove himself on me. He tried to expose himself. He did all kinds of unpleasant things. But he didn’t actually put his back into it and force me. You’re like an animal wriggling away, like a lizard. I was doing anything I could to get the train back on the track. My track. Not his track.”

The next day, he sent her a bouquet of flowers with a note that read “you have great instincts.”

Let’s pause here to collectively shudder.

Thurman confronted Weinstein about the incident, threatening to expose him and ruin his career. But she left the meeting rattled and feeling angrier, considering him her enemy from that point forward.

When it was time to begin work on Kill Bill, Director Quentin Tarantino noticed that Thurman seemed “skitttish” around Weinstein. Thurman reminded him of what Weinstein had done to her, but she says he seemed to dismiss. Later, however, Weinstein approached Thurman and gave her a “half-assed apology.”

And here’s where the story takes a strange turn.

In the famous scene where she’s driving the blue convertible to kill Bill — the same one she put on Instagram on Thanksgiving — she was asked to do the driving herself.

Thurman objected to this, asking for her stunt double to do the driving instead. Tarantino got angry and insisted she did the driving herself, saying he couldn’t get the shot he needed with a double. He told her it was a straight road and the car was safe.

She had been told by another crew member that car was not, in fact, safe, but bowed to the pressure that Tarantino put on her.

In reality, the road was sandy and not straight, and the drivers seat was not properly bolted down. Thurman lost control of the car and wrecked, suffering injuries that still affect her to this day.

Shortly after the crash, Thurman wanted to see the car and the footage of the wreck, but Miramax said they would release it to her only if she signed a document releasing them of any consequences, which she refused to sign. It was only recently, with Weinstein’s history of abuse being reported that Thurman was able to put more pressure on Tarantino to release the footage.

(The NYT story includes the footage from the crash, which shows the road is sandy and not straight, and the drivers seat does indeed appear to have not been properly secured.)

The pressure to do the driving herself wasn’t the only act of dehumanization by Tarantino; he also spat on her for one scene and choked her in another, even though other actors were who were in the scenes with her were scripted to do so. Also, the NYT adds this paragraph parenthetically:

(Tarantino aficionados spy an echo of Thurman’s crash in his 2007 movie, “Death Proof,” produced by Weinstein and starring Thurman’s stunt double, Zoë Bell. Young women, including a blond Rose McGowan, die in myriad ways, including by slamming into a windshield.)

The thing that always strikes me about stories like this is how blatant the behavior is, and how nonchalantly it’s often handled by other men. Whether Tarantino turned on Thurman in order to continue working with Weinstein or not, the fact is that he knew what Weinstein had done and yet continued to work with him.

This happened industry-wide, and it’s not just Hollywood where this is a problem, it’s virtually every industry.

Weinstein’s rep did respond to the story and actually acknowledged and apologized for more than he has in the past, while still denying quite a bit of it. But the response also included several pictures of Thurman and Weinstein together at events after the reported incidents.

I think we’ve seen those pictures in nearly every high profile case, the obvious suggestion being that if the woman still acknowledges the man in any way she must obviously be lying. Her smile proves that she’s not uncomfortable, therefore a liar.

Will this defense of Weinstein, who has essentially zero defenders at this point, finally make people reconsider that as a defense in general? I’d really like to hope so, but can’t bring myself to believe it quite yet.

For most of my life, I’ve had a problem with sticking my foot in my mouth. I’ve gotten better about this over the years, as I seem to get more and more introverted every year, but it still happens too often for my comfort.

I’m happy to report that I still haven’t topped the absolute worst instance of this, which happened about 25 years ago when I was a teenager. My mom and stepdad had gone out of town for the weekend and I had the house to myself so, naturally, I threw a party. It wasn’t a big bash, more of a small gathering of about ten friends. We had beer and pot, but no one was really wasted. It was pretty mellow.

I knew everyone there pretty well. There were three girls besides me, and they were all my closest friends, and there were four or five guys, and they were all pretty close to our group except for one guy. He was casual friends with the guys, but none of us girls had ever met him. I’ll call him Mark, but I honestly don’t remember his name.

More on this in a moment, but first a word from our always well-spoken sponsors:

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This will be fairly short since I am posting from my phone, but The New Yorker is reporting on several women coming forward against Eric Schneiderman, all claiming physical abuse. 

Now Schneiderman is facing a reckoning of his own. As his prominence as a voice against sexual misconduct has risen, so, too, has the distress of four women with whom he has had romantic relationships or encounters. They accuse Schneiderman of having subjected them to nonconsensual physical violence. All have been reluctant to speak out, fearing reprisal. But two of the women, Michelle Manning Barish and Tanya Selvaratnam, have talked to The New Yorker on the record, because they feel that doing so could protect other women. They allege that he repeatedly hit them, often after drinking, frequently in bed and never with their consent. Manning Barish and Selvaratnam categorize the abuse he inflicted on them as “assault.” 

The accounts are consistent and seem credible, with corroboration. 

Ugh. I can't manage any commentary. I'm so sick of this shit. 

I'll update as I'm able to. 

__________

A few more snippets of the report:

About four weeks after they became physically involved, she says, Schneiderman grew violent. One night, they were in the bedroom of his Upper West Side apartment, still clothed but getting ready for bed, and lightly baiting each other. As she recalls it, he called her “a whore,” and she talked back. They had both been drinking, and her recollection of their conversation is blurry, but what happened next remains vivid. Schneiderman, she says, backed her up to the edge of his bed. “All of a sudden, he just slapped me, open-handed and with great force, across the face, landing the blow directly onto my ear,” Manning Barish says. “It was horrendous. It just came out of nowhere. My ear was ringing. I lost my balance and fell backward onto the bed. I sprang up, but at this point there was very little room between the bed and him. I got up to try to shove him back, or take a swing, and he pushed me back down. He then used his body weight to hold me down, and he began to choke me. The choking was very hard. It was really bad. I kicked. In every fibre, I felt I was being beaten by a man.”

[She] and Schneiderman began making out, but he said things that repelled her. He told the woman, a divorced mother, that professional women with big jobs and children had so many decisions to make that, when it came to sex, they secretly wanted men to take charge. She recalls him saying, “Yeah, you act a certain way and look a certain way, but I know that at heart you are a dirty little slut. You want to be my whore.” He became more sexually aggressive, but she was repulsed by his talk, and pulled away from him. She says that “suddenly—at least, in my mind’s eye—he drew back, and there was a moment where I was, like, ‘What’s happening?’” Then, she recalls, “He slapped me across the face hard, twice,” adding, “I was stunned.”

Schneiderman hit her so hard, she says, that the blow left a red handprint. “What the fuck did you just do?” she screamed, and started to sob. “I couldn’t believe it,” she recalls. “For a split second, I was scared.” She notes that, in all her years of dating, she has never been in a situation like the one with Schneiderman. “He just really smacked me,” she says.

There's a lot more at the link, you should read the whole thing. 

_________

Wow, that was fast, apparently he's already resigned. 

_______

For those of you worried/wondering about who will take his place, please see this comment by Vecellio. 

For those of you worried about the implications for the trump investigation, SDNY is Federal, not state. 

So, due to an injury, using a laptop has been unwieldy/uncomfortable for the last month. Because of this, I haven't been able to write as much as I'd like to and am limited to mobile internet use. 

It's been frustrating because my creative juices have been flowing lately and I have a LOT to write about. Recently I was able to spend an hour or so a day on the laptop and started taking notes on all the drafts I have in my brain. 

I'm sure you can see where this is going. More on this in a moment but first! A word from our perfectly functioning sponsors:

Good evening and welcome to Top Comments!

I had a funny story to tell for tonight but…. Ooops! The time got away from me.

My best friend and her daughters visited over the weekend, and shortly after they left my nephew showed up to spend some time here for a few days.

We’ve been sitting on the patio catching up and I realized I was waaayyyyyy behind schedule to get anything substantial written so here it is: my Mea Culpa.

Ooops!

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There were no submissions for Top Comments tonight. Please remember to PM or email the Top Comments group when you see an interesting, thoughtful, smart, or funny comment. You know you see them often!

Top Mojo:

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2)  Dear lord…… by Sarkazein +185

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13) Yes We Can, Did And Will Again! by rebel ga +102

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18) I agree that this is a great topic, and a very g … by lemay50 +91

19) If anybody wants to know, here’s today’s Tromp t … by northleft +86

20) It’s always about money with Tromp. … by northleft +83

20) News Corpse, exactly. The thing is IMHO he actua … by txdoubledd +83

20) Pence and the Russian Orthodox Church: The axis  … by kurious +83

20) The time for Sulzberger to wake up was back in 2 … by anastasia p +83

20) Thank you, Justice Ginsburg. You just made me fe … by LaPinturaBella +83

25) I have an idea. Since he’s so terrified by “ille … by filkertom +82

26) Trump is the enemy of the Constitution, a docume … by Baileywick +81

27) It’s a sick, abusive relationship that the media … by FishOutofWater +80

27) My husband and I were in the audience that night … by davidkc +80

27) Oh my. … by northleft +80

30) Oh, I’ll never forget him or McConnell refusing  … by Onomastic +77

Picture Quilt:

I wish this was a metaphorical title, but no….

Tonight I will be under siege by angry hornets, and I am resolved to kill every last one of them.

More on this in a minute, but first a word from our sponsors:

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I feel like my tenure at this fine group that we call Top Comments could be described in one word: procrastination.

More on this in a moment, but a first a word from our always timely sponsors:

Here at Top Comments we welcome longtime as well as brand new Daily Kos readers to join us at 10pm Eastern. We strive to nourish community by rounding up some of the site's best, funniest, most mojo'd & most informative commentary, and we depend on your help!! If you see a comment by another Kossack that deserves wider recognition, please send it either to topcomments at gmail or to the Top Comments group mailbox by 9:30pm Eastern. Please please please include a few words about why you sent it in as well as your user name (even if you think we know it already :-)), so we can credit you with the find!

I was fortunate enough to change before my first election, but I could have easily become a trump supporter. I was raised in a conservative household in a conservative town, so it made sense that when I was young, I was quite conservative. I would have been furious if you had called me racist but looking back on myself I cringe because I was. A stereotypical white person who ranted against welfare even though my family was a recipient of it because I was convinced that “lazy” people took advantage of it and, if not for them, we’d be able to get more to help us get on our feet.

I am horrified by this, but when I was 17 Donald Trump was once again running his yap about running for president and I thought that was an awesome idea. What this country needed. No more politicians! There is no coherent reason for this, just a vague sense that everything sucked and no one in Washington cared. That was 1996, and I’m horrified to admit this as well but later that year I was rooting for Bob Dole because fuck Bill Clinton. Why? No reason. I mean, it’s Bill Clinton. Everyone hates him!

I did have some moderating influences in my life in the form of my maternal grandparents who were very active Democrats (my grandpa boycotted radio stations that played Rush Limbaugh; my grandma thought Limbaugh should be charged with treason). They were working class folks, grandpa worked at the plant, grandma was a nurse, they were both proud union members. Neither had a high school degree but both were intelligent and thoughtful. They made a good life for themselves on those union wages. Bought a house on some land to raise their kids in the country, took vacations often, didn’t have a lot of debt and lived quite comfortably.

Irony of ironies, I figured that’s why they were Democrats. They could afford to be. Of course, the reality is that they couldn’t have afforded NOT to be.

This is not to say that I viewed myself as a republican, either. My dad was a staunch republican and I thought he was a selfish asshole, therefore all republicans are selfish assholes. At least on this point, I haven’t changed my mind all that much with the passage of time (though I do have a softer view on my dad now that I’m an adult).

The 17 year old me would have rejected this analysis out of hand, but the only reason I believed what I believed, incoherent as it was, was because of the culture I grew up in.  It was full of “of course I’m not racist but….” remarks, war is patriotic, peace is for sissies, welfare is for the “lazy” people who are also somehow stealing our jobs. A consensus had been reached, and this was just the way it was. It was obvious, and everyone knows it.

Here’s the part where it might get frustrating for my audience: if you were hoping for some insight into how a person like that can drastically change, there is none here. It’s too specific to apply almost anywhere else except for one universally understood motive: I was selfish.

At 17 I wasn’t very religious, but I was fire and fucking brimstone about abortion... until a pregnancy scare right around my 18th birthday. Then overnight I was thinking “y’know maybe it’s not murder so much as a reasonable choice to make in certain circumstances.”

So I budged quite a bit on that issue and started to listen to what other people had to say about it rather than dismiss their arguments out of hand. I realized that maybe things aren’t as black and white as I wanted to believe.

But also around the same time as my pregnancy scare, I was struggling with an even larger issue: that I absolutely adored the man who got me pregnant but I was not and never would be in love with him.

It would be a couple more years before I came out of the closet, but in the interim I heard a LOT of republicans making horrific comments about the gay community and that was enough to make me decide I would never, ever vote for one of them. They had lost me forever.

This still didn’t mean I was a Democrat, I simply saw them as the lesser of two evils and I still wasn’t registered to vote. I didn’t plan on ever doing that as I just didn’t see the point. Then this happened:

I was, very fittingly, 19 years old when I read that book [Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony] and, put very simply, it radicalized me. The person who turned the first page of that book was a shifty, directionless, disaffected, and hopeless young lady. The person who clung to very last word of the very last page was a focused, passionate, dedicated woman.

Reading about the women’s suffrage movement influenced me more than anything else had at that point. There was no way in hell that I could justify not voting after realizing how hard my foremothers fought to give me that right.

So I made my journey from likely trump voter to Yellow Dog Democrat, but the scary thing is that had I not had a pregnancy scare, or had I gotten pregnant and wanted to be a mother, AND if I wasn’t gay, I don’t think I would have made that journey. I don’t think I would have gotten there without both of those things being true.

Because despite my suspicion that everything was rigged and the whole system sucked, I was comfortable. You couldn’t have told me that at seventeen or eighteen, but the reality is that I was. It was always easy for me to get a job. It was always easy for me to get promoted. Of course I never thought I made as much as I should have, but everyone thinks that (and that IS usually true).

And as much as I cringe to admit this, I know that trump would have spoken to me. I know that I would have rejected the idea that my bigotry was a motivator, but that would have been true. The seventeen year old me was threatened by the idea that whites could become a minority. Of course I couldn’t articulate why at the time but it’s obvious to me now. And before my pregnancy scare, I was less concerned about “baby killing” and more concerned with how irresponsible women were. Sluts should have consequences for being sluts.

The underlying theme being so clear now: I was the only person who ever suffered for MY mistakes but no one else did. I saw myself as a victim and trump would have spoken to that.

Of course, it’s always possible that I could have changed between now and then in some other way, but if I had followed a traditional path there would have been no reason for me to. Because, again, despite feeling like a victim of something I couldn’t name I would have been comfortable. Even after my supposed awakening I rejected feminism for years, and during all of my twenties and up until several years ago I would have completely rejected the idea that I had any privilege whatsoever.

I’ve always realized that had I been born straight I probably would have never been a voter or, if I had become a voter, I would have voted for republicans. But after 2016 I realized that it would have been worse than that.

One night in late 2016 I was wrapping up an evening shift at work and listening to the Rachel Maddow podcast. It had been rumored that trump was going to soften his immigration stances and he was expected to make a speech about it that night. Of course, no such softening happened. trump railed harder and more explicitly than he ever had before, and he’d already been openly hateful and racist.

Maddow played a fairly long clip from that rally on her show that night and it filled me with absolute dread. First, because it was terrifying that this sort of rhetoric was in any way acceptable for a major party candidate. But what chilled me even more- what made me cry on the walk home- was the way the crowd went absolutely crazy for it. I knew at that moment that trump was going to win. Because the people cheering cared a lot more about cruelty towards brown people than other people cared about making sure that could never happen here.

And I shuddered at the thought that I could have been one of those people. Not just conservative, not just reliably republican, but outright racist and proud of it, yet offended when someone calls me racist. Easy to be swayed by a demagogue, easy to manipulate, easy to make any excuse in the book for supporting someone so obviously reprehensible, unstable, and unintelligent. The sad fact is, it would have been easy; much easier than the journey I took away from that.

 I’m not going to end this with advice on how to handle trump supporters because I don’t have any, but I will take a slight detour here to wrap things up. 

Midway through September I had nearly forgotten about my revelation earlier that month, that trump was going to win. I told myself- and I truly believed- that Americans would not accept the idea of a trump presidency. Right up until the night of November 8th, 2016, I believed we would reject trump and his demagoguery and even up until midnight of that night I could not believe what was happening.

And for many months after he took office and implemented one cruel policy after another I would tell myself “this isn’t America.”

Earlier this year I had a lightbulb moment that should have come a lot sooner: this actually IS America, just the one I’ve never had to see because even today, despite being gay and being a woman, I am comfortable. Just as I never had to really accept my own racism until my mid-thirties, I never had to accept the racism so prevalent in so many others. I didn’t want to believe that it was true of us as society, so I didn’t.

And sometime a couple of weeks ago when the NYT published yet another story trying to explain trump voters to the rest of us, I thought yep, this is America. The explanation is staring you right in the face but you don’t want to accept that, so you’ll continue to search for a reason that’s more comfortable for all of us.