Who Was Amos Vogel?

Over on Film Comment, Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Eugene Hernandez has a nice piece up about independent film vanguard Amos Vogel, who passed away today at the age of 91, and if you don’t know much about Vogel you should go read it. Eugene’s piece points to this excellent documentary about Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art, which you can watch in its entirety for free on Vimeo. It’s roughly 56 minutes long, and you’ll likely learn something about this amazing man to whom independent cinema owes a debt of eternal gratitude. Most of it is Vogel, just talking to the camera about his life and career. It’s pretty awesome. Check it out.

RIP, Amos Vogel.

Click here to view the video.

Catching Up

It’s been a busy couple weeks for me, with tech week for two casts of Grease gearing up for performances this past weekend (and one of my kids in each of the casts), watching a stack of screeners for the narratives jury for IFF Boston, and a busy trip down to Dallas to serve on the Texas Competition jury for the Dallas International Film Festival in the midst of that. So I’ve been a little swamped and thus not getting a whole lot else done around here.

So, Dallas. This year was the sixth year of this fest and the sixth I’ve trekked to Dallas to be there, and it’s always one of the most interesting and fun fests of the travel year for me. It feels a bit like going home since it’s so close to my hometown of Oklahoma City, and it certainly bears more in common with the Sooner state than it does with Seattle. I always pack much dressier for this trip, and even so I inevitably feel under-dressed at some point; this town dresses up for its events, whereas in Seattle “dressing up” mostly means, “I’m changing into my good/designer jeans and my spiffiest Chucks.”

One of the things I like most about hitting the regional fests is seeing how each of them painstakingly programs a schedule that covers an eclectic spectrum of what’s going around the fest circuit, drawing their particular audience in to see films they may have heard about, while also challenging them with films they otherwise wouldn’t get to see at all. James Faust and Sarah Harris do an exceptional job of knowing the Dallas audience their festival is there to serve, and I was impressed with the films we had to consider on the our jury. Ultimately, we gave a Special Jury Mention to David Zellner’s Kid-Thing and the Grand Jury Prize to Ya’Ke Smith’s Wolf, a searing portrait of the impact on a family when they learn their beloved and trusted pastor has been sexually abusing their teenage son for years. In certain ways, Wolf evoked Spike Lee’s Red Hook Summer, which I saw at Sundance this year, but Wolf is a much, much better film in pretty much every respect (sorry, ‘strue).
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Life in Time Lapse

God, I wish I’d done this with my kids. This guy took a video of his daughter every week from the time she was born until age 12 (with the rest of it to be continued, natch). The result is this awesome 2 minute 45 second time lapse video that captures the essence of what every parent knows: They grow up so damn fast. Enjoy.

Review: Goodbye First Love

Note: This review was originally published as a part of our TIFF 2011 coverage. I’m re-running to now in conjunction with the film’s opening this weekend. You should go see it.

With her latest film, Goodbye First Love, Mia Hansen-Løve handles her subject matter of adolescent love in a way that’s remarkably free of pretense and condescension, even as her youthful characters occasionally make choices that make you want to throttle them. The story is pretty simple: 15-year-old Camille (Lola Créton) and 18-year-old Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky) are in love. Madly, desperately, in love, with an exuberance declared in the italics with which adolescents abundantly litter their emotional lives.
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Okay, Who Let the Filmmakers Have a Rifle?

Well, this one creates an interesting ethical dilemma for Tribeca Film Festival attendees who are also animal lovers/vegans/card-carrying members of PETA. Apparently two deer were illegally shot (and skinned and cooked, although that bit probably wasn’t illegal once the deer were already dead) in the filming of Tribeca Film Fest entry First Winter, about a group of Brooklyn new-age hippies/hipsters stranded in a remote farmhouse in the dead of winter with the food supply running out. And by “shot” I don’t mean “filmed,” or even “inadvertently shot by some PA screwing around with a loaded rifle.” I mean “shot” as in, the script called for a real live deer to be really shot and killed and skinned and roasted. For authenticity, I guess.

I know what my veggie and vegan friends would have to say about that … what do you say? Killing a wild animal just so you can record the killing (and skinning and roasting) for your film: Okay? Not cool, but not necessarily morally wrong? Or just flat-out ewwww?

A Kids’ Band Covering German Industrial Metal? Yes, Please.

Happy Saturday, folks! I’m on vacation in lovely Port Townsend with my pack of kids and some friends, but I came across this little bit of awesomeness this morning and knew you’d appreciate it as much as I did. This is Children Medieval Band – Stefan (10) on guitar, violin, harmonica and vocals, Olga (8) on keys, and Cornelia (5) rocking out the drums, performing a cover of Rammstein’s Sonne. Enjoy a little German industrial metal with your weekend brunch. More cuteness, less pyrotechnics than the original. 100% awesome.

Review: The Cabin in the Woods (Spoiler-Free)

All you need to know at this point is this: You should absolutely go see The Cabin in the Woods. Yes, it’s been hyped so much that you’re probably thinking, “Oh, there’s no way it’s THAT good.” Whether you end up thinking it is that good or not, to miss this film is to render yourself mute at watercooler conversations and happy hours for at least the next couple weeks. You’ll just have to stand there nodding your head and trying to pretend you know what you’re talking about every time someone says, “Oh my God, Cabin in the Woods, right?!” and you’ll say something stupid about the movie you didn’t go see, and everyone will stop talking and give you that look. You don’t want to be that guy.

This is the kind of film you could watch over and over again and still find something you missed on the previous viewings, but the first time, you really should see it knowing as little as possible. The bare bones, so to speak: We have our requisite five good-looking kids who vaguely remind you of the Scooby Gang (coin toss on which of them is Scooby): Our players are The Sporto (Chris Hemsworth), The Beauty/Slut (Anna Hutchison), The Stoner (Fran Kranz, who brilliantly manages to simultaneously evoke Shaggy and be way cooler than Shaggy), The Nice Girl/Kinda-Sorta-Almost Virgin (Kristen Connolly) and The Handsome, Nice and Brainy Guy (Jesse Williams). We have our beat-up RV standing in for the Mystery Machine, the Creepy Old Guy Who Warns Those Darn Kids to Stay Away from the Mysterious Cabin. And of course, we have the titular Cabin itself, which you have no doubt seen on the movie posters flying in the air and turning itself into some kind of puzzle box. That, my friends, is absolutely all you should know, except for this:
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In Defense of Stay-at-Home Moms. Even Ann Romney.

God knows, I don’t want to say anything that could ever be construed as supporting Mitt Romney’s candidacy for president. But this Gawker story about Mitt’s wife Ann joining Twitter to rebut CNN commentator Hilary Rosen, who said of Ms. Romney that the mother of five has “never worked a day in her life” has too much potential to backfire on the Dems to let it slide.

Ms. Romney (or, to be fair, perhaps it’s someone Tweeting on her behalf) tweet-tweet-tweeted in response:

“I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys. Believe me, it was hard work.”

and

“I’ll be with @marthamaccallum this morning at 10:40 discussing Hilary Rosen’s comments. All moms are entitled to choose their path.”

Well, on this issue at least, I have to agree with Ann Romney. As a mom of five myself who has both done time as a stay-at-home mom and balanced working with having a pack of kids, I fully support women who have kids in making the choice that’s right for them. The reality is, once you go down the pregnancy path there’s no going back, and if you are both a mom and a woman who loves her job, you’re screwed no matter which choice you make. Your choices pretty much boil down to:
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On the Loss of Childhood Freedom

I was having a conversation with another mom I don’t know too well when she said something that gave me pause. She was talking about this new family that had moved in on her street, and bemoaning that the parents let their kids “run wild” and that these new kids might be a bad influence on her own kids. Run wild? That sounded interesting. Were the kids committing acts of vandalism, bullying younger kids, terrorizing the neighborhood, running around naked with paintball guns? Nope. “Running wild” meant, to this woman, that these parents allowed their kids (all ages seven and older) to ride their bikes and scooters around the neighborhood, to play in their front yard, and — horror of horrors — to sometimes play outside wearing their pajamas and sneakers. For these transgressions, this woman was pondering calling CPS to report this family.

My mind was boggled.
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Trailering Goodbye First Love

Mia Hansen-Løve, introducing her latest film Goodbye First Love at TIFF last year, warned the audience that probably this film would not be what we expected it to be, that it was not sweet or soft or sentimental, but about the pain of learning that love doesn’t last. About that she was right … like her earlier film, Father of My Children, Goodbye First Love is often bleak and brooding and occasionally surprising; it’s also intimate and smart, honest and perceptive. The film opens April 20 in limited release, before becoming available nationwide through Sundance Selects VOD.

Here’s my review of the film from TIFF 2011.

And here’s the trailer.

Piracy, Again? Arrrrrggggh.

When is pirating movies not stealing something you didn’t pay for out of a misguided sense of self-entitlement? According to Mike D’Angelo, it’s not stealing if he does it, at least. Or it is stealing, but he’s entitled to steal it. Or at the very least, hey, stealing’s not bad if you’re only pirating movies you really, really want to watch on Blu-ray but don’t want to buy. Or if you delete it after you watch it, if you don’t like it, or add to your wish list to purchase for when you decide you can afford it. Got it?

D’Angelo wrote an earlier post a little over a month ago, confessing his movie piracy (and getting duly attacked on Twitter for it), and then yesterday wrote this follow-up piece for Indiewire, further attempting to explain what he really meant. Which apparently boils down to: Yes, he pirates movies, and no, he doesn’t feel bad about it. I’ve read both pieces, and all the comments on both, and D’Angelo’s response to pretty much every argument against pirating really boils down to, “Too bad. I want to see these movies on Blu-ray. I am entitled to see these movies, which I do not own and did not create, for free if I want to. I don’t want to pay to buy them, but I’m still entitled to illegally download and watch them, because — were you not paying attention the first ten times I said this? Did you not read my blog post? I really want to watch them, on Blu-ray, right now. Period, end of line.”

I’ve been accused at times of being too black-and-white in my own moralistic viewpoint on certain issues, but for me, the issue of piracy is just a no-brainer. If you don’t own it, you don’t have the right to set the terms under which you or anyone else gets to have it or watch it, period. I don’t care how hard or impossible it is to find pre-2000 movies for rental on Blu-ray. Big fucking deal. So you don’t get to rent Anatomy of a Murder on Blu-ray. Life’s hard. If you want it, you have to actually buy it. Cry me a river, dude. Get over your overblown sense of self-entitlement and find a real problem to deal with.

Reality check: People around the world are dealing with civil war and unrest, famine, joblessness, homelessness, no health care, terminal illness, people dying from diseases that no one in 2012 should have to worry about, crushing poverty and oppression by military dictatorships. The GOP is attacking women’s rights at every possible opportunity, trying to take control of abortion and birth control. There are people around the world — dare I say, a LOT of people — who don’t even have access to books or a basic education. For the much of the world, there are more pressing problems to deal with than whether one can afford to own a region-free DVD player or watch Anatomy of a Murder on Blu-ray. People are too busy figuring out how to keep food in their kids’ bellies, or schlepping five miles with a water jug on their heads to get access to something we can just turn on at a tap in our kitchens and bathrooms to worry about piddly shit like access to Blu-ray rentals. But hey. Being able to rent Blu-rays of every single movie you might want to see is a Really Pressing Fucking Issue that we should all take up arms and fight for. Give me a break. Talk about a First World “problem.”

We are at a period in our history where we are at the cusp of either uniting for a major revolution that will profoundly shift the way in which our societal structure is organized, or plummeting headfirst into a future where the Christian right controls our lives and sets the rules under which we live, or possibly just destroying our planet over religious differences, war and good old-fashioned avarice. And your biggest problem is whether you’re able to rent Anatomy of a Murder on freaking Blu-ray? For real? Look, for me, piracy is one of those issues in which there really is very little wiggle room or moralistically grey ground. Whatever justifications pirates come up for for their stealing, however intellectual they try to make their arguments sound, really it all comes down to, “But … I want what I want, when I want it and how I want it, so that makes it all okay.” Sorry, kids. It doesn’t.

You are absolutely free to make your own movie and put it out there freely accessible by all, as Nina Paley did with her film Sita Sings the Blues, which she, as the owner and creator, chose to make freely available for viewing and sharing under a Creative Commons License. The key words here are “owner and creator,” as in, she had the right to decide everyone can watch her movie for free. She, the owner. Not a film journalist who felt entitled to watch her work because he really, really wanted to watch it. So you can download and watch Sita Sings the Blues all day and night, without worrying about stealing what doesn’t belong to you. And there are probably plenty of indie filmmakers out there who would be happy to make their films freely available to you because they just care about someone, anyone who’s not their friends or family, seeing the work they created.

Unfortunately most movies are not freely available under Creative Commons or anything else. They are owned by companies, which either paid to make them or paid to buy them from the people who made them, who in turn had the right to sell their creation to the highest bidder. If it’s not easy to rent the Blu-ray version of a given film, well, too damn bad. You’re free to write the distributor and tell them you’d really like them to make this or that movie available for rental, on Blu-ray. You’re certainly free to come up with a solution yourself for how to offer such rentals to anyone else who might also have a pressing, urgent need to rent a Blu-ray of Anatomy of a Murder or Killer of Sheep right now. What you’re not free to do is blatantly steal what doesn’t belong to you, and then essentially brag about what you’re doing, thumbing your nose at the people who own what you’re stealing, and then wrap it all up in a pretty package of self-righteous indignation about how essential it is to your life and well-being that you be able to see whatever movies you want on Blu-ray, whenever you want to see them, without paying the owners of said property for that privilege.

Honestly. Reading the debate in the comments threads on both these posts is a lot like listening to a parent arguing with a two-year-old at playgroup:

PARENT: No honey, you can’t just take Tommy’s toy, it’s his.

2YO: But I WANT it! It’s mine!

PARENT: I’m sorry, you can’t have it. It doesn’t belong to you.

2YO: Why?

PARENT: Because it belongs to Tommy. It’s his. If he wants to let you play with it, he can, but you can’t just take it.

2YO: But I WANT it! It’s mine! I want it NOW! Wahhhh!

Exactly.

Racism: Alive and Well in America

SPOILER ALERT: Major spoiler for the film The Hunger Games contained herein. You have been duly warned, so no whining if you choose to read more.

News flash: Racism is alive and well in America.

Not that this is shocking news, I know. I may be a socialist liberal white girl living in Seattle, but I grew up in Oklahoma, where racism is much more out in the open than it is in these parts. Even here in Seattle, where we pride ourselves on our lauded diversity, we still tend to prefer most of our diversity to keep to its own neighborhoods. But hey, apparently there are people out there who are way more racist than that.

Take, for instance, this Jezebel story this morning about a Tumblr blog that’s collecting the stupid racist remarks people have been making about The Hunger Games. Specifically, apparently some people have their white sheets panties in a twist because they were shocked — in spite of it being very clear in the book that these characters have dark skin — that Rue and Thresh were, wait for it — Black. I’m not making this up: It is shocking – and offensive! – to these people that characters clearly described as dark skinned in the book would be cast with African-American actors. Or, maybe that there are any Black actors in the film at all, hard to say.
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Answers to Six Unanswered Questions About The Hunger Games

Over on Movies.com, John Gholson boldly admits to being wrong in underestimating the box office potential and audience hunger for the first installment of The Hunger Games, and has some lingering questions about the story. I’m kind of with you, John, in that I was a late arrival to The Hunger Games and underestimated its popularity for the longest time. I like to keep up with what my kids are into, and sometimes I find that I also like what they like. I read (and loved) the Harry Potter series. Read the Twilight series, and liked it well enough, for what it is. Even read the True Blood series while I was recovering from surgery, and got totally absorbed in it, although I’ve never watched an episode of the series. So, The Hunger Games, I figured I could take it or leave it … until it got closer to time for the movie to come out, and my daughters really got into the books. So I finally read the first book, making it maybe 2/3 through before we went to the midnight premiere on Thursday (I just started the second book this morning).

Gholson, who has not read the books, has some unanswered questions about The Hunger Games, and since I had some perspective on answers for (most of) them, I thought I’d kick my Monday off with a response. So here you go … with a warning that there are spoilers galore within this piece. So if you haven’t seen the movie or read the books, and don’t want to know anything, go away now and come back later. If you have a different take on answers to Gholson’s questions, feel free to chime on in down below.

1. If the games come every year, why don’t all the districts prepare for them?

My read on this from the book is that only the richer districts (particularly Districts 1 and 2) select their most capable young athletes and train them to compete in the Games, and that in these districts being chosen for the games really is considered an “honor,” as opposed to the more superficial acceptance of the designation of “honor” that the poorer districts display. I’d equate this to, say, the way that the US Olympic teams in the more expensive sports (skiing and snowboarding, for example) tend to be weighted with kids who grew up in families that had the money to take kids skiing from the time they can walk. Naturally if your family lives has the resources to afford vacations like ski trips, you have a greater likelihood of becoming a champion skier. In a poor coal mining community in Appalachia (where District 12 is), people are barely scraping by a hand-to-mouth existence to just keep alive. Katniss and Gale hunt illegally to keep their families fed, and in the book it refers to it being rather commonplace for residents of District 12 to starve to death. They don’t have the resources to spend on training kids for a once-a-year competition; in District 12 the citizenry is so beaten down that they’ve come to accept that the Reaping is a mandatory sacrifice, not something that will lead to victory for the children whose names are drawn.

2. If you can volunteer for the games, as Katniss does, why wouldn’t a district have their very best competitors offer themselves up?

It’s established in the book that it’s allowable for someone to volunteer, but it’s also established that when Katniss steps up for Prim, it’s the first time in the history of the games that this has happened in District 12. The idea of sacrificing yourself to certain death isn’t a part of the moral code of the poorer districts, and there’s no competitive code either, because they expect their Tributes to lose, period. This is further established in the book in an aside about Rue, when Katniss sees this tiny girl who reminds her so of her own sister, and mourns that no one stepped up to volunteer in Rue’s place. When Katniss steps up, she’s stepping up to her own death, not to the expectation that she stands a chance of winning.

Further, while the movie makes this fairly evident, the book does make more clear the extent to which the Capitol uses the Games to punish the Districts, not only by killing two of their young people each year, but by making it mandatory that everyone watch it happen, and then rubbing salt into the wound by forcing the Districts to celebrate the slaughter of their children by honoring the winner on the Victory Tour, which always takes place at the midpoint between games. It’s part of how the government keeps its boot heel on the citizenry, and it’s also how they’ve been punishing the Districts for seven decades for the last major act of rebellion, the result of which was the complete obliteration of District 13 the establishment of the Games as both punishment and reminder of the cost of rebelling.

3. In the book, are the odds ever against Katniss?

Gholson argues that in the film, it’s made too clear that Katniss will ultimately be victorious. I could argue that this is pretty obvious at this point anyhow given that we know the book is a trilogy, but taken purely from a plot standpoint in evaluating this first film, I disagree that it’s patently obvious to either the audience or the other competitors that Katniss will be victorious. If anything, Katniss being rated an 11 by the Gamemakers – especially after the opening ceremony when all eyes were on the Girl on Fire – puts a target squarely on her, especially from the perspective of the better-trained Tributes who always expect to come in as the favorites. She knows they will be coming after her full force. Further, because Haymitch so strongly advises her to ignore the cornucopia and get away as fast as she can when the Games start, Katniss has to abandon hope of getting her hands on the bow and arrow that are her best shot at survival. She nearly perishes of dehydration before she finds water, and the Gamemaker forces her closer to her competitors by flushing her out with the fire. She does take out a few competitors with the wasp nest, but that’s clearly shown as Rue’s idea. It’s not really until Rue dies that Katniss feels angry enough to really fight hard to win, and that she accepts that she might be able win.

4. At the end of the game, what would’ve happened if Peeta and Katniss did nothing at all?

The book might do a better job of establishing this, but it’s actually Peeta, early on, who says to Katniss that there has to be a way to hold on to something of who you really are, who you were before, even in the midst of horror. He doesn’t articulate it perfectly, but what he’s getting at is the idea that true honor means knowing when to stand up and say, “No, I won’t” rather than just acquiesing. Katniss and Peeta’s clear willingness to eat the berries and die rather than killing each other is a major act of rebellion. It takes control of the game out of the hands of the Gamemaker and government, because they know the populace loves Katniss and Peeta and the first romance to have ever emerged from the Games. This poses a serious problem for the government; they don’t really want Katniss and Peeta to resonate too much with the citizenry, because they sense that popularity carries the seed of rebellion. The last thing they want or need is to create two martyrs and have no winner to parade around to the Districts. If Katniss and Peeta had just done nothing, the Gamemaker would have kept throwing things at them until one of them finally died.

There are other elements that foreshadow rebellion hinging around Katniss. The mockingjay pin she wears is a clear slap in the face of the government that Katniss gets away with only because they have to let her bring one symbolic thing from home to the Games. Katniss further rebels against the norm by singing Rue to “sleep,” by covering her body with flowers, and most of all, by acknowledging her death to the people of Rue’s district, District 11, when she gives the three fingered salute to them over the cameras she knows are on her, knowing the government will not turn the cameras away from a moment of death. The people returning this salute to Katniss further foreshadows that Katniss is the emotional center of a coming rebellion. The berries are just the final rebellion that Katniss acts out during the games. It’s her “screw you” to the government that would force her to kill her friend, this boy who loves her, for the sake of their entertainment and oppression.

5. Why are only youth selected for the games?

The book makes it clearer that the Games are set up to lottery draw from the Districts’ population of children because there’s nothing worse you could possibly do to a parent than force them to give up their child to death without a fight. What better way to oppress your citizenry and show them they have no control over their lives than this? Kind of like how slave masters in the old South would callously sell of the children of their slaves, and there was nothing the parents could do about it. In the book, it’s also more clearly posited that the Games are about showing the citizens that the government controls, and always will control, your life, your death, and your future. Life, such as it is, is a gift from your beneficent government; your death, or your children’s deaths, is also controlled by their whim.

6. What’s the deal with the dogs that materialize out of nowhere?

I’m kind of with Gholson on this, as it was one of the weaker points of the book for me as well. In the book, the dogs, called “mutt-ants,” are actually mutations bearing the characteristics of the dead Tributes. There’s a Glimmer dog, a Foxface dog, even a Rue dog, all coming after Katniss, Peeta and Cato. They are created for the game, and like the fireballs they send after Katniss that burn her leg badly early on, the damage they create is very real. In the book, by the bye, Cato’s death is a much longer, more drawn-out and gory affair that goes on all night before Katniss finally ends it. By far the weakest point of both the book and the movie for me.

Review: The Hunger Games

Fans of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy should be absolutely thrilled with this faithful adaptation of the first book of the series, directed by multiple Oscar-nominee Gary Ross and starring Jennifer Lawrence — in a role that is, in many ways, not terribly far removed from her role as Ree in Winter’s Bone, for which she garnered an Oscar nom for best actress. In both stories, we have a young girl who’s been forced by life circumstance to grow up too soon, with the responsibility of keeping a younger sibling alive thrust upon her by a weak, incompetent parent. And in both stories, we have a strong female lead who has no choice but to go on a dangerous journey, a daunting mission at which she stands little chance of succeeding, while having to outsmart ruthless people who would hurt or kill her. It’s a hero story, a journey story, a coming-of-age story, all wrapped up in a political and social allegory that’s, sadly, very relevant for the times in which we find ourselves living. And as executed here, it’s completely riveting and engaging.

The Hunger Games is set in a post-apocalyptic America, reinvented out of the ashes of devastation as Panem. There is a benevolent-but-also-evil dictatorship, a “Dear Leader” of sorts in the form of Donald Sutherland as President Snow, and a Capitol that controls everything (and whose citizens revel in a life of luxury, fine foods and fashion courtesy of the work of the citizens of the outlying Districts). There are 12 Districts, each of which is responsible for producing goods for a singular area. You’ve got your districts for Agriculture, Luxury Items, Fishing, Technology … and then there’s District 12, Coal, the poorest and most remote of the districts (its geographical area is somewhere in Appalachia). At some point, we learn through some relatively brief exposition, there was rebellion amongst the districts, a little class warfare, as it were. One might even say, an uprising of the 99% of this fictitious world; but that uprising was shot down when the Capitol ruthlessly brought the 12 districts in line, and completely obliterated the 13th along with all its citizenry, as an example of what happens when you rebel against Donald Sutherland.

But people are slow to learn and quick to forget, and so the Capitol came up with this fabulous idea to keep the boot-heel of the Capitol firmly on the throats of its citizenry: The Hunger Games, a yearly ritual in which each district, in a Lottery-inspired ceremony called The Reaping, must offer up one boy and one girl between the ages of 12-18 as “Tributes,” who are then forced to battle to the death until only one is left. It’s quite an honor. To make things even more sadistic, young people are “allowed” to put their name in the lottery draw more times in exchange for a year’s supply of grain and oil for themselves and family members. It’s a gamble: a year’s supply of grain to keep you from starving to death, in exchange for an increased possibility of almost certain death in the Hunger Games arena. And of course, it’s the poorer segments of the populace who must put themselves at greater risk by signing up for this little bonus, and the children of the Capitol are immune from the Reaping and see it all as a fun game (you know, kind of like how almost no one in Congress actually has children of their own fighting in the wars that they like to declare on other countries).
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Dear RNC: Please Stay Out of My Ladyparts. Thanks.

I’ve been talking to various friends over the last few weeks, trying to figure out exactly when and where this apparent Republican war on women has its roots. This has to have been going on for a while, in subtler ways, even though it feels very much like it sprung out of nowhere in full bloom. I don’t think more than a day has gone by lately that there haven’t been at least a couple posts in my Twitter and Facebook feeds about a Republican politician saying something that’s blatantly misogynistic, or yet another bullshit piece of legislation aimed at controlling women and their ladyparts. It would almost be funny if it wasn’t so goddamned serious. I, for one, am getting awfully tired of old Republican men crawling all up in my vagina. If I didn’t invite you there, you don’t belong there.

My home state of Oklahoma passed a version of personhood legislation, which officially makes the Oklahoma legislature more stupid than …. well, than all the states that have shot down this legislation. If you are a liberal, a feminist, a supporter of the right of women to control their own bodies and their own lives, the personhood movement should scare the shit out of you. So should every single item on MoveOn’s list of Top Ten Republican Attacks on Women.

It baffles me that any woman would be a member of the Republican party at this particularly dark point in its history. I don’t care what your fiscal politics are, or if you think Obama care is Socialism (it is, but that’s not a bad thing to everyone, kids). If you are a woman and you are a Republican, if you are out there supporting Santorum or Romney or Gingrich, and most especially if you are, God forbid, a female politician drafting or supporting or voting in favor of anti-woman legislation, it is time for the rest of us to stand up and say: You are being a traitor and a disgrace to your gender. Period. We’re just past the point where we can be nice about it.

Look, I get the emotion behind the anti-abortion stance. There was a time in my life when I, raised Catholic as I was, aligned myself with the pro-life movement. When I was in the Oklahoma Intercollegiate Legislature in college, believe it or not, I authored and supported pro-life legislation. But sometime in the years right after college, around the time I got divorced and left Oklahoma, my views underwent a major shift. I’m not sure I can pinpoint what caused that shift, but certainly many of the conversations and debates I had over abortion legislation with liberal friends back in those college days had an influence. My personal views on abortion didn’t change; it would still take something really extreme for me to consider having one myself. But what I came to realize is that I can hold that value for myself, but that I can’t make that decision for another woman. And I don’t want anyone else making it for me.

To control the access of women to abortion and birth control is to reduce the worth of women to nothing more than incubators. It’s more than just a slippery slope, it’s an avalanche. You know how you stay in power when you’re afraid of a large chunk of society opposing your views? You dehumanize them, you legislate away their self worth. In Nazi Germany, they did this by chipping away at the rights of Jews a drip, drip, drip at a time — a curfew here, a law about who could sell to a Jew or buy from a Jew there, a gold star here, taking away property rights there, a ghetto here, a train to Auschwitz there. Those Nazis sure knew how to dehumanize an entire race of people, but more importantly, they knew how to numb the populace to the horrors they were perpetrating: by committing those horrors a bit at a time, and then by fear.

We’ve been sitting back, jaws agape, while Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and Rachel Maddow express our outrage. But where is our collective outrage? Where is the outrage that drove the suffragists, who fought for the right we have to vote these assholes out of power? Where is the outrage that drove our mothers and grandmothers to burn their bras, to march for equal rights and equal pay (which, AHEM, we still do not have)? Women need to be uniting here. Organizing marches. Protesting. Occupying, even. If we don’t all stand together to protect the rights of women in this country, if we allow the Republican party to control this conversation and pass laws that shackle over half our population, we really are headed to hell in a handbasket.