Dig for Fire

This came to my attention today by way of The Daily Beast, my favorite news-digest site since Chris Buckley (that’s William F. Buckley’s son, by the way) used it as a forum to endorse Barack Obama. Johnathan Martin of politico writes that conservative leaders are planning a top-secret evil genius meeting in Virginia for the day after the election. The topic of discussion? Not how to jettison their rigid, backwoods, xenophobic “base” like ballast from a sinking ship, but rather how to groom Sarah Palin* for leadership in 2012. Conservative think tank president Brent Bozell was quoted yesterday in the New York Times saying that Palin “has proven that she can electrify the grass roots like few people have in the last 20 years.” But hasn’t Palin, in fact, been surprisingly ineffective at doing the one thing she was brought in to do–solidify hardcore social conservatives behind John McCain? Despite Palin’s sincere efforts to appeal to the worst instincts of the voting public–insinuating, or saying outright, that Obama is a dangerous radical, a foreigner, and an anti-American terrorist sympathizer–McCain is losing in swing states like Pennsylvania and Virginia, where race and social conservatism should have given him an edge. Sean Quinn of fivethirtyeight.com, a polling analysis site, related a story shared with him by a door-to-door canvasser:

“So a canvasser goes to a woman’s door in Washington, Pennsylvania. Knocks. Woman answers. Knocker asks who she’s planning to vote for. She isn’t sure, has to ask her husband who she’s voting for. Husband is off in another room watching some game. Canvasser hears him yell back, ‘We’re votin’ for the n***er!’
Woman turns back to canvasser, and says brightly and matter of factly: ‘We’re voting for the n***er.’”

Maybe this recession is good for us after all–apparently economics now trump race. Not only does Palin represent a Republican party that intellectually serious conservatives (a string of whom have appeared recently on  “The Daily Show”)  no longer recognize, she’s doing it badly. As America pirhouettes on the brink of a recession, Pain (of the $150,000 shopping spree) is out of touch with the “Real Americans” she purports to represent. Her line doesn’t work anymore. The fact that some conservative leaders see her as the party’s future shows just how deep the GOP’s schizophrenic cracks run. The old-style prosperity republicans, the ones who just want to make a lot of money without the government interfering, are increasingly alienated by a party that seems more interested in telling everybody who to sleep with and how to pray. Funny how the likes of Sarah Palin can make simple greed seem so innocent.

*with this post, dig for fire firmly pledges not to target Sarah Palin again until after election day, no matter how tempting, fun, or downright easy it might be.

Sarah Palin tried to ban books because she is the Chupacabra.

In the acclaimed documentary 30 Days of Night, vampires cross the Bering Strait into Alaska to take advantage of the polar winter’s month of darkness. Some claim that this stirring portrayal of Josh Hartnett’s struggle to save his tiny town from blood-sucking bare-breasted cannibal women leaves key questions unanswered. Why wouldn’t the vampires just settle in Siberia, which is also dark during the winter months, and is much closer to whichever Slavic or Central Asian country they originated in, judging by their epicanthic folds and Klingon-like language of grunts? In fact, they would have had to pass through Siberia to get to Alaska…you’d think at least one of them would have said (lisping through his prominent teeth): “Let’th thtay here! Thereth plenty of fat Northernerth for uth to feed on!”

The answer, of course, is that Russia isn’t ruled by vampires. It’s ruled by werewolves. And, as everyone who saw the brilliant 2003 documentary Underworld knows, vampires and werewolves have been at war for millennia. So the vampires fled to Alaska, where Sarah Palin (or Mallorc LaBotnik, as she is known in the Old Language) had insinuated herself into the Mayoral office of a small town full of redneck drug addicts. She kept an eye on Russia from her house, sustaining herself on goats and chickens to avoid arousing suspicion, all while doing everything in her power to prepare Wasilla (thinly disguised as “Barrow” in the film, no doubt to protect the innocent) for the coming tide of loathsome reanimated corpses. Thus, the “rhetorical” book-banning conversation between Palin and the Wasilla Public Librarian:

Sarah Palin: Hey, Marian Librarian, nice frock. Can I ask you a completely hypothetical question? Suppose that a goat-killing vampire became the mayor of a small Alaskan town. Could that person then ban books relating to vampirism and witchcraft, in order to render the town defenseless when the undead invaded from Russia?

Marian Librarian: Well, no. That would be a gross abuse of power, and would violate the first amendment, and I would use all of my resources to resist any attempt at book banning.

SP: Resources? You mean like silver bullets and garlic?

ML: I mean like an injunction from the city council.

SP: Oh, right. Well, it’s been nice having this 100 % rhetorical conversation with you. By the way you’re fired.

ML: Why are you making gurgling noises in the back of your throat?

SP: It’s nothing.

Once the vampires had safely made away with Wasilla (now nothing more than the smoking, charred, blood-spattered shell of a town, as 30 Days of Night so powerfully illustrates), Palin moved on to bigger things—the governorship, the republican nomination. We’ve seen this pattern before: I’m sure I don’t have to remind you which influential republican was governor of Texas when Quentin Tarantino filmed the tour-de-force documentary From Dusk Till Dawn. Why does Bush fake a Texan accent? Because his real voice sounds like Bela Lugosi.

Last night I went to a special live broadcast of Rachel Maddow’s Air America show at the State Theater, and it was grand. It was relaxing, just like listening to the radio, except we were treated to all the artless and fascinating gestures one never gets to see, like Maddow slipping her giant headphones on and off, or dancing to the cheesy interval music, or leaning back in her chair and clasping her hands behind her head as she listened to a radio host from Alaska reminisce about Sarah Palin’s days as his intern (when Maddow asked, with tension in her voice, if he thought she was smart, the answer was “I would say she was nice.”)

Of course, it was the liberal love-fest you might expect. She was just reading the news, but with people shouting responses and bursting into cacophonous applause every thirty seconds, it felt more like a rally. Maddow, a native of my own dear Gay Area, recently became the first out lesbian to host a primetime news show. According to the San Francisco Chronicle (local girl makes good!), Maddow treats her guests, even those with whom she disagrees, with respect, a refreshing break from typical talk show fare, where an opponent is brought on to demonstrate the host’s “open-mindedness” and then abused without relief until “that’s all we have time for.” Maddow is everything a pundit should be—saucy, well-informed, smart-as-a-whip. I used to catch her regular appearances on Keith Olbermann’s “The Countdown.” Olbermann’s Special Comments (direct, searing indictments of the administration and its media lackeys) have sustained me in this dark political winter, and I was saddened and amused to learn that MSNBC has replaced him as the host of this year’s election night coverage. According to the New York Times, the decision came down after a comment Olbermann made when the network aired the 9-11 tribute video shown at the Republican National Convention, calling it exploitation and apologizing to viewers for the content.

Maddow focused on the debate over Senator Obama’s campaign strategy—should he break out the trebuchet and start slinging mud or stay true to his message?—bringing up a rather sensitive point. While apparently 47 percent (as Gallup has it) of Americans are okay with Senator McCain’s notorious rage-aholism, they might not be able to handle an aggressive, outraged Obama. As reluctant as white America might be to vote for a black candidate, they’re really not gonna vote for an “angry black man,” and the last thing we need is McCain trying to paint Obama as some kind of embittered, fist-pumping reactionary, especially as the campaign wanes and the consequences lessen.

Maddow also touched on Governor Palin’s interview with Charlie Gibson. I think that at this point I would vote for anyone who couldn’t possibly die and leave that politically naïve, fanatically religious, backwards, book-banning hausfrau in charge. It was enough for me that she fired the Wasilla public librarian after a “rhetorical” conversation about book-banning, but it’s obvious that Palin has zero grasp of international relations. Every answer was an evasion. Gibson caught her out in total ignorance of NATO’s workings when she suggested that Ukraine and Georgia be allowed to join the organization. When Gibson pointed out that, under the terms of the treaty, we might be forced to go to war with Russia should it invade either country, she answered perkily, “perhaps so!”

I found myself cramming my knuckles into my mouth as I listened to some of the quotes Maddow played—Palin in her nice, hockey mom voice, admitting she’s hardly been out of the country and never met a foreign head of state, or trying to bullshit her way past the fact that she doesn’t know what the Bush doctrine is. I thought I could detect a vaguely embarrassed, patronizing note in Gibson’s voice as he tried to lead Palin through the question, like a math tutor in an after-school program with a kid who just doesn’t get it. It hurt way more than Misty-Eyed-Gate, or any of the political cartoons depicting Hillary with a big ass. If the McCain/Palin ticket wins this election, could it damage every future female candidate for the office? Perhaps so.

The Internet is amazing. I have discovered astonishing things. Were you aware that, in thirty-one films over the past twenty-five years, Tom Cruise has died only twice? Unless you count Interview with the Vampire, where he plays the living dead. And it’s not as if his characters take no physical risks. In Top Gun he’s a fighter pilot, in Days of Thunder a race-car driver. Sometimes, when I watch a Tom Cruise movie, I whisper to the screen: die, Tom Cruise. You have the power; you are most likely the producer of this film. It would be so easy: a fiery high-speed crash, a blackout at five Gs. But I (almost) never get my wish. This man—this super man—is invulnerable to alien invasion, pelting frog-rain, and murderous sex-cults. Has Scientology made him immortal? Do bullets practically bounce off him because his thetan levels are so low, or high, or whatever the fuck it is they believe?

People hate on T-Cruise for the wrong reasons. Instead of ridiculing his “religion,” or his insanity, or his asinine grin, shouldn’t we be holding him accountable for what he’s done to cinema? Let me explain: I love going to the movies. Movies seen in the theater have a raw edge of unpredictability and excitement. I first saw The Ring by myself at midnight in an empty theater. The closet shot nearly killed me. In a theater, the experience is bigger than the movie alone. Watching it with a bunch of strangers in a big public space enhances it; the nature of the event is that things can go wrong, or wrongly right. When I saw Be Kind, Rewind at Triphammer Mall, the film actually melted in the projector and burned out right at the moment in the movie when Jack Black’s magnetized head makes the TV screen go all wonky. The lights came up; many people left. It took a full ten minutes to get the thing synced back up again, and we were treated to the spectacle of the sweating, frantic projectionist running back and forth in the booth while we munched our popcorn and swilled rum from empty coca cola cups.

It’s just not the same when you pop in a rented DVD. Seeing the whole thing contained in its little plastic box brings home the fact that all of the “events” in the movie have already happened. Everything is decided. The packaging reminds you that it’s already been seen by a small army of marketers and manufacturers, not to mention the viewing public. Neatly sealed up and attractively, comfortingly varnished, it’s not alive or changeable anymore—it’s a corpse in a coffin. Movies seen in the theaters aren’t fully sanitized yet. Before the reviews and box office numbers start rolling in, you can’t be certain that the film you’re seeing isn’t the year’s filthiest, most unpalatable movie. There are still little wrinkles to iron out, things subject to change. For example, though I have absolutely no proof, I’m convinced that the cut of Disney’s Aladdin shown in theaters contained the lyric (in reference to Saudi Arabia), “where they chop off your ears if they do not like your face.” Either Disney was forced to change the song in the VHS version in reaction to a public outcry,* or I was a pretty disturbed little seven-year-old.

That sense of wild possibility is really dampened when the star has accumulated so much power and prestige that he literally can’t be killed. In the dark, between mouthfuls of raisinettes, you turn to your neighbor and whisper, “what do you think will happen?” And she whispers back, “well obviously he wins—it’s Tom Cruise!” It renders the supposedly “thrilling” action movies he makes totally boring and predictable. You already know how they’re going to end.

As a counter-example, take Leonardo DiCaprio, whose career, while much shorter than Tom Cruise’s, is relatively fraught with mortality. Out of nineteen films, DiCaprio buys the farm in five, a whopping twenty-five percent. When a director needs to cast someone who freezes to death in the middle of the North Atlantic, or gets shot in an abandoned tenement in Boston, or slowly bleeds out in the hills of South Africa, what makes him snap his fingers and say, “DiCaprio! DiCaprio’s the one!” I guess something about Leo just screams fallible human being.

I can’t help but think that Cruise’s inability to die is connected to the kind of roles that he plays—none of DiCaprio’s junkies and gay bohemian poets and tortured madmen. T-Cruise couldn’t play those roles, because the audience would see him and think of couches and Katie Holmes and black turtlenecks—not Howard Hughes or Arthur Rimbaud. Because he is so much in the public eye he naturally upstages his characters and can’t convincingly portray anything other than a well-intentioned, superficially-flawed generic protagonist. How boring! How sad! God shield our better actors from such fame.

*What—no Arabs in your focus groups, you racist sons of bitches?

Aren’t we all just a little sick, by now, of The Vagina Monologues? I’m old enough to remember when they first came out in 1996. I remember seeing pictures of Eve Ensler performing them, as the show first began to gain momentum and popularity. I was in awe of her—I thought she looked so beautiful and sophisticated and powerful with her severe bangs and black dress. I thought it was thrilling that she went around talking about vaginas, and I wanted to be like her—beautiful and unafraid.

I was ten in 1996; I’m twenty-two now. According to Ensler’s website, The Monologues have become the “bible” to a new generation of women. And that’s just it, isn’t it. No longer revolutionary or even shocking, The Vagina Monologues have become commonplace through repetition. The solution seems obvious: stop performing them. Move on to something more radical, more provoking, more fresh. But the institution of V-Day demands that, nightmarishly, we keep rehearsing the same drama over and over again. The rallying cry of V-Day is “until the violence stops.” Really? Are we really going to keep performing the vadge monologues indefinitely? I’m more than happy to chuck in my eight bucks to support the Advocacy Center, but can’t we see something new?

In the 1998 print edition of The Vagina Monologues, Ensler writes: “some of the monologues are close to verbatim interviews, some are composite interviews, and with some I just began with the seed of an interview and had a good time.” That means that she purposefully crafted the performance from the raw material of her interviews; she chose the words, phrasing, and pace, presumably based on what she thought would sound good, be poetic, be moving, be funny. The Monologues, therefore, is a work of art—yet it’s rarely criticized on that basis. The Monologues have created a humorless following of vagina cultists that never question the merits of the piece—as a tool in women’s activism, as a piece of art, as a worthy use of ninety minutes. For these believers, Ensler’s message and the supposed value of the piece as an instrument of change are substitutes enough for having a good time when you go to the theater. Lauding The Monologues for its content alone is a dangerously utilitarian approach to art; more akin to Soviet socialist propaganda posters than to anything “liberated.”

Personally, I can’t stand The Monologues. Each one has a similarly sentimental, poetic quality that I can only cast as Ensler’s voice, despite wildly varying origins (Bosnia, Brooklyn, the deep South). The prose is fraught with clichéd metaphors (flower, house, cellar, sacred vessel) and references to “discovery” and “exploration.” Culturally chauvinistic vagina “facts” about female genital cutting are coupled with frankly ridiculous assertions, such as “it’s not so easy to even find your vagina.” Not only is this insulting and stupid, it plays into self-excusing male pleas of ignorance on the subject, like “well, yuk yuk, it’s all just so complicated down there,” and contributes to the notion that the clitoris is a bizarre and possibly imaginary Avalon, stumbled upon by feckless travelers every couple of centuries. A shrieking letter-by-letter “reclamation” of the word “cunt” is absolutely, eye-wideningly, mortifying (incidentally, I don’t want cunt reclaimed—I want to be able to call someone a hateful cunt and have it pack the same gut-punch as calling them a fucking prick). The jokes, probably because they mainly relate to the supposed inaccessibility of the vagina, mostly fall flat. Most of all, it’s the overt emotionality of The Monologues that I find embarrassing—it’s too share-y, too like a group therapy session. It’s self-centered and self-indulgent, not like a thick slice of cake but like a two-hour whining jag.

Vagina Fact: I would see a sexist Greek tragedy, or a rapper whose lyrics champion violence against women, or a Shakespeare play with no significant female characters, over The Vagina Monologues any day. Until we start taking feminist art seriously and criticizing it on its artistic merits, we’ll never produce a feminist Sophocles or a Shakespeare. The example of rap is an interesting one—female, woman-positive emcees hold their own against their male counterparts, probably because the music industry is so unforgiving. M.I.A., Missy Elliot, Jane Doe—these women are at the top of their game; people don’t listen to Missy Elliot because she’s a woman, they listen because her music is sick. She got where she is by being excellent, as good as or better than the male rappers. And yes, that’s a lot of pressure, but we don’t have a choice. That’s not to say that we can’t address tender, emotional subjects, but can we please do it with a little more self-consciousness, a little art, a little humor? Can’t we dress it up a bit more? Turn up the volume? Otherwise it’s not art—it’s confession.

As much as I find The Vagina Monologues boring, sappy, and outdated, I’m even more skeptical that they have any real utility beyond their capacity to generate large crowds and raise funds for organizations that support victims of violence. The idea that talking about vaginas will stop violence against women reflects the conceit that uneducated, “unliberated” women are more likely to be violated. There’s a tendency among smirky upper middle-class feminists to patronize lower-class women—it’s a Streetcar Named Desire mentality, as if low-income women are somehow more masochistic or more drawn to violent, abusive men then their wealthy, educated counterparts. When wealthy women come forward with rape or domestic violence accusations, the media goes wild, while lower-income women suffer invisibly because we expect then to be raped and brutalized. All the money, smarts, and vagina-talk in the world can’t shield women from male violence, because women are raped by their fathers, husbands, brothers, teachers, priests, uncles, cousins, and best friends, and every woman has fathers, husbands, brothers, teachers, priests, uncles, cousins and best friends. I’m not even sure that being a powerful vag-loving feminist helps women deal with trauma after the fact—body-positive rhetoric seems pretty hollow in the face of the violation of that body. If less educated women are more vulnerable in any respect it’s in the system’s response to acts of violence—there are fewer resources (community centers, therapists and support groups, day-cares, rich relatives, trusted doctors, hotshot lawyers) available to low-income, uneducated women who’ve been battered and raped. It’s this end of the inequality that we can certainly address. We can replace our winking, nudging attitude towards rape with a real culture of intolerance. Nowhere does this need more work than on college campuses—see Fraternity Gang Rape by Peggy Reeves Sanday.

The monologues themselves encourage a radical degree of objectification and identification—in “Because He Liked to Look at It,” vagina-lover Bob says to his partner, “I need to see you,” by which he means, of course, “I need to see your vagina.” In “I was There in the Room,” a monologue based on Ensler’s experience of the birth of her granddaughter, she compares the birthing woman’s vagina to a heart. Doesn’t this amount to an objectification—picking a part of a woman’s body and equating her whole self with it? How is that different from the distortions that inspire restaurants like Hooters, where walking pairs of boobs offer you spicy buffalo wings? The same degree of what I’ll call genital identification in men inspires groans at best and horror at worst. What do we think of men who say they “think with their dicks” or, when charged with rape, assert that they can’t help themselves because it’s in their nature? When we identify primarily with our sexuality, we lose distance from it and the ability to control it. Sexuality is no longer something that a woman has power over, and can shape according to her personality. It is her personality, her core.

I wonder how male-to-female transsexuals feel watching The V. Monologues¸ which so clearly assert that womanhood is conferred by certain anatomical characteristics. The existence of such surgeries as vaginoplasty, where surgeons can actually construct or re-construct “functional” vaginas that allow intercourse and in some cases even vaginal childbirth, suggests that there must be a “textbook vagina” that surgeons refer to. I find it pretty horrifying to imagine the distortions that become possible—are plastic surgeons crafting Stepford vaginas that conform to heterosexual male notions of size, texture, color, etc? Since, as Ensler rightly points out, we rarely talk about it, how are we to know what these ideal parameters might be, or how unrealistic they are? It’s terrifying to think that vaginas might be subject to an aesthetic doctrine that we don’t even know about, that only becomes apparent when, for one reason or another, we must go under the knife. The very notion that vaginas require repair or cosmetic refurbishment reflects functional and aesthetic notions of what vaginas should be—vaginas are for a certain purpose, and should look a certain way. These parameters are bound to reflect heterosexual male preoccupations—how could they not, when hetero male doctors write the textbooks and perform the surgeries?

Maybe we could celebrate a more generalized “victory week” next year, one that didn’t exclude our trans-sisters, who are also disproportionately victims of sexual violence. In place of The Monologues, I’d love to see radical gender-fucker and badass emcee Peaches invited to perform, or a reading of Homebody/Kabul, or a screening of Shortbus. “Until the violence stops” is a long time—we’d better start lining up the entertainment.

This is the stuff that Joyce Carol Oates’ stories are made on: your son visits the zoo and a tiger rips his throat out. In case you somehow missed the media frenzy, this past Christmas day a 250-pound Siberian tiger (regally named “Tatiana”) leaped the 12-foot wall of her enclosure at the San Francisco Zoo and attacked17-year-old Carlos Sousa Jr. and his two friends, killing Carlos and wounding the others before the police arrived and shot her to death with their handguns. The incident was all the more disturbing to Bay Area residents because at first, no one had any idea how Tatiana got out of her enclosure, or even if the three young men were her only victims. That night, firefighters on ladders combed the treetops with high-powered flashlights, looking for more corpses and more escaped animals. In the panic and confusion of the moment, it must have seemed like the city was about to be overrun.

And while, for me, there is a certain eerie fascination in imagining Tatiana loose from her cage, prowling the asphalt paths and gardens, the most bizarre part of the whole adventure is the way that San Franciscans reacted to the killing. If readers’ responses to tiger coverage on the San Francisco Chronicle’s website are any barometer of public opinion, many San Franciscans seem to be rooting for the tiger. One poster suggested that the two survivors be thrown into the pit along with their lawyers. While a few expressed their sympathy for Sousa’s family, it was the tiger that most posters seemed to be grieving, writing “R.I.P. Tatiana.” Locals even held a vigil on Ocean Beach.

An astonishing amount of police-work and reporting went into assigning blame to the two surviving victims, brothers Paul and Kulbir Dhaliwal. Zoo officials insisted that Tatiana wouldn’t have attacked the boys if she hadn’t been provoked, despite the fact that the same tiger mauled a zoo keeper last year at the same time. I wonder: is Christmas an especially stressful time for tigers? Do they pick up on the ambient psychosis that is the Christmas season, and just freak out? There’s a Macy’s in San Francisco’s Union Square where every year the magic of Christmas is celebrated by unscrewing the glass dome on top of the building and lowering in a fifty-foot tall evergreen ripped out of some forest. Maybe Tatiana saw the helicopters drawing the massive uprooted tree through the air and lost it. Who are these people? What kind of place is this? I have to get out of here.

The Dhaliwals didn’t necessarily help themselves by making a “pact of silence” in the ambulance, or hiring the attorney who defended wife-killer Scott Peterson. It also probably doesn’t help that they are young men of color with criminal records, and that the police allegedly found vodka and pot in the backseat of their bimmer. San Franciscans like this poster, identified as “eyeofthetiger,” have used the incident as an opportunity to vent class frustrations: “The [Dhaliwals] represent to me every loser thug I’ve seen on MUNI or screwing around in public, loud, obnoxious, dangerous. And the idea that they will somehow profit monetarily from this tragedy just makes me crazy.” More than a few speculated about how the Dhaliwals could possibly afford such a nice car, or such an expensive brand of vodka (Grey Goose). Though no one went so far as to say that the dead boy deserved what he got, the fury unleashed on the two who happened to live suggests that it’s only grudging respect for the fact that he bled to death on the sidewalk that’s keeping these bilious bloggers in check.

It’s hard not to wonder how different the public reaction would have been if the victims had been white kids from Mill Valley, just as likely, if not more, to get baked and go to the zoo. Would the police have treated the big cat exhibit as a crime scene? Would they have fought tirelessly for access to the brothers’ car and cell phones? Tatiana was well-known and loved in San Francisco—these boys represent (though who knows who they really are) a far more dangerous and out-of-control element. And by being attacked, they had the temerity to remind San Franciscans that Tatiana was a tiger, not the city’s own personal pet.

In Western literature, tigers embody pure, undiluted malice. Blake’s Tyger is a form of evil entirely outside divine creation: “When the stars threw down their spears/ And water’d heaven with their tears:/ Did he smile his work to see?/ Did he who made the lamb make thee?” Blake’s tiger is reincarnated in Kipling’s The Jungle Book as the vicious Sher Khan, the limping man-eater who will stop at nothing to be king of the jungle. Actually, I was treated recently to a musical adaptation of “The Tyger” at an outdoor festival on New Year’s Eve (you know, one of those “we can have good sober fun” affairs) The band was a neo-celtic outfit, dressed to the nines in tartans, lace-up leather boots and long cloaks. The bagpipe player had a knife belted to his side, which I thought was a little pretentious—was he planning to skin a deer in the middle of the set? But maybe I was being unjust; perhaps the knife was for self-defense. I certainly felt like murdering him after the show.

Why tigers are so vilified, as opposed to, say, lions, is hard to pin down…lions seem lazy, lying about in the sun all day. They attack from the open grasslands, while tigers sneak around in the thicket. Tigers have a reputation for being “man-eaters;” it’s believed they can “acquire” a taste for human flesh. And of course, the devilish markings in orange and black.

In a zoo, you can get astonishingly close to a tiger and, theoretically, nothing will happen to you. Look, here is wild, terrifying nature, and look, with our superior ingenuity we can utterly pacify and control it. Sousa and the Dhaliwal brothers spoiled it for everyone. To the extent that they “caused” the attack, they also plunged San Francisco into the uncanniness of imagining an escaped animal roaming at will through the city streets, a horrifically un-kosher mixing of civilization and sylvan chaos. What was thought tame was revealed to be wild still; what was beautiful became hideous; what was contained got loose. It’s much less disturbing to place all the blame on the Dhaliwals than it is to consider that the captive animals we admire, and perhaps imagine that we connect with, are just waiting to get out and murder us. No matter how many gorillas learn sign language, no matter how many chimps look up Jane Goodall’s shirt, animals don’t think human life is special or worth protecting. Most don’t even think it’s interesting.

There are details we can only imagine. How did the other animals react when Tatiana strode by their enclosures? Did the gibbons holler in terror? Did the incontinent lorikeets hurl themselves against the bars of their cage? And what was Tatiana thinking as she advanced towards the whirling red lights of the SFPD patrol cars? Was she preparing to take them all on?

Tatiana died well for a tiger. She didn’t see it coming, and probably didn’t feel much. She didn’t whither away in captivity, she wasn’t ground up into medicine, and she won’t adorn anyone’s wall. Carlos did not die well, and his family will have to live with it for the rest of their lives. Every time a stranger asks his mother how many children she has, she will mentally subtract one, for poor mangled Carlos.

Carlos and Tatiana; together, the names have a poetic quality, like Romeo and Juliet, as if they were ill-fated lovers who could only be united in death. Humankind’s relationship with tigers is Shakespearean in its tragic impossibility. Where one of us lives, the other can’t. We’re encroaching more and more on the few places where they still live in the wild, and this incident illustrates powerfully that we can’t bring them to live with us. The price of not keeping them locked up like criminals or banished like outcasts is human lives—mothers getting bizarre and unbearable phone calls. As the parties with the higher cognition, it’s our duty to figure this out; not to devise cleverer ways of keeping them contained or more efficient methods of destroying their habitats. In the meantime, I hold Carlos and Tatiana in my mind. I imagine them regarding each other from the opposite sides of a great wide field.

In a forum like this, there’s a certain pressure to be current. I should be obsessively analyzing the latest round of primaries, or yucking it up over Super Bowl ads. But I just don’t think it’s fair that the accident of my birth should prevent me from responding to something that has deeply irritated me. So this week in Dig for Fire: a response to John Updike’s “The Disposable Rocket,” fourteen years too late. It first appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review and was anthologized in Tracy Kidder’s Best American Essays in 1994. It was in such an anthology that I recently encountered the offending prose. To avoid the horror of anachronism, I invite you, the reader, to take a little trip back in time.* Close your eyes and have someone else read the following text aloud in a spooky voice: it is the year 1994. Lorena Bobbitt cuts her husband’s pecker off and walks away a free woman. Kurt Cobain is dead. The Lion King rules the box office, and Finland is the newest member of the European Union (go Finland!). Most relevantly, the song “detachable penis” which might have inspired Updike’s title, is only two years old. If you’re in a 1994 frame of mind, open your eyes and keep reading.

“The Disposable Rocket” dilates on the physical differences between men and women. Rather than enumerating particulars, Updike celebrates the relationship between body and boy. “[A man’s] body is, like a delivery rocket that falls away in space, a disposable means. Men put their bodies at risk to experience the release from gravity.” For a space, the essay is intensely personal: Updike meditating on Updike.

Then, this: “Any accounting of male-female differences” –we’re inwardly cringing already– “must include the male’s superior recklessness, a drive not, I think, toward death, as the darker feminist cosmogonies would have it, but to test the limits, to see what the traffic will bear…” (Who are these dark feminists? Pro-choice necromancers?) I had an encounter, once, with the male’s superior recklessness. My brother and I were driving on a highway in Umbria. We had been hiking for hours in the hot sun, through golden hillsides crowned with toothy Etruscan ruins. My exhausted brother pulled over to take a nap and drove our rental car right into a ditch. When we got out, the car was pitched almost ninety degrees against the ground, with two wheels in the air. We made the call and waited in the shade for help to arrive.

It did arrive. Immediately. I don’t know if it’s because we were obviously foreigners, or if this is standard roadside courtesy in Italy, but within five minutes there were at least fifteen Italian men in a tight circle around my brother, gesturing at the car and yelling. One fetched a stout rope from the trunk of his SUV and explained to my brother, in broken English, how he would tie one end to our bumper and the other to his—an improvised towline—while my brother drove the almost-upended car out of the ditch. The seat-belts, maybe because of the weird angle, had stopped working. It was at this point that I tried to intervene. “Really, guys, we’ve already called the tow-truck. We’ll be fine. You can go.” Naturally, they ignored me. My brother hesitated, inly deliberating. Fifteen Italians waited expectantly for him to do the manly thing. I also deliberated—it probably wasn’t all that risky. It would probably be fine. But I couldn’t quell the rising mix of dread, panic and rage, or shake the image of the car flipping over and my brother’s brains dashed against the roof, or his neck crushed against the door. As my brother turned halting footsteps toward the car, I did what I thought I had to do. I bent over double and started to scream.

I knew that forcing my brother to listen to me would emasculate him in front of the Italians. I was over-reacting, and the incident would always be remembered as the day when I, like a girl, had a fit in Italy. But I couldn’t stop thinking about how I would feel if something really did go wrong, and I hadn’t tried to stop it. My brother turned pale and sat down again in the shade. I apologized a dozen times. Four hours later, Enzo, the hero-mechanic, showed up with a real tow-truck and drove us back to our agriturismo, where we toasted him with red wine.

I don’t know who was more reckless—my brother for trying to get into an upended car, or me for having a voluntary seizure in front of a bunch of strangers—but after reading “The Disposable Rocket,” I think I’ll just let my brother drive out of the ditch next time, lest I be seduced to the dark side of feminism.

Updike doesn’t go on to explain why we should reckon up “male-female differences” (ie: why anyone should read his essay) but he has plenty more to say about them. He hints, without elaborating, at biological determinism, with oblique references to “post-simian, East African days,” as if everything that follows is genetically inevitable, the result of a long and undeviating evolutionary process. When he writes, “we were made for combat,” we picture him shrugging helplessly, as if to say, “men are just naturally more violent—what can I tell ya?”

He praises female interior space as being “active, interesting, and significant.” He goes on to propose that men, having relatively impoverished inner spaces, can only content themselves with such tedious outer happenings as “the jet fighter like a scarcely visible pinpoint nozzle laying down its vapor trail at forty thousand feet, the gazelle haunch flickering just beyond arrow-reach, the uncountable stars sprinkled on their great black wheel, the horizon, the mountaintop, the quasar…” This is a backhanded compliment, a polite way of saying that women aren’t just risk-averse, we’re less ambitious. Apparently, our uteri are so endlessly fascinating that we have no need of such trivial externalities as jet fighters, wild animals, or the cosmos. On a personal note, my uterus is so captivating that I’m planning to move into it permanently. It’s affordable, well-heated, stylishly upholstered in red, and it’s the perfect place to hide from the dangerous world that I’m biologically fated to be too bashful to explore.

Maybe John Updike would find my response hilariously jejune. Maybe he loves the idea of feminists getting their panties all-in-a-twist over his essay. Or maybe I’m being too hard on him; maybe it’s impossible to celebrate “what men are” without talking implicitly about what women aren’t. When you say that men are ambitious, are you also automatically saying that women are passive? Can you say that mothers are nurturing without also saying that fathers are indifferent?

It’s a risky proposition, but I’ll take a stab. If a man’s body is like a “disposable rocket,” then a woman’s body is like a disposable pocket—a convenient place to store contraband until customs catches on, at which point illegal items can be safely jettisoned in the nearest loo. To paraphrase Mark Twain: outside a uterus, a book is a girl’s best friend. Inside a uterus, it’s too dark to read.

*Disclaimer: time travel is dangerous and theoretically impossible. Dig for Fire will not be held responsible for lost or stolen items, personal injury or death, or the universe collapsing on itself.

(a.k.a. Why Rowling’s “Outing” is a Literary Crime.)

Umberto Eco wrote that authors should die when their novels are complete, so as not to “trouble the path of the text”—advice Harry Potter’s J.K. Rowling has clearly chosen to ignore. Not only has she thus far refused to die, but last October she stirred the cauldron of Potter fandom with the revelation that kindly old Dumbledore is gay as a fruitbasket (old hat, I know, but indulge me). Everyone forgot about the war for a while and tongues wagged excitedly on both sides of the Atlantic. The religious right was uncharacteristically silent, having already written Harry Potter off on account of the big W, but hearty applause was heard from some quarters of the left and the queer community, and a thoughtful New York Times piece by Edward Rothstein commented on the radical heroism of Rowling’s outcasts.

Dumbledore (art by Sadie Smith)

No one, however, seemed disturbed by the literary implications of Ms. Rowling’s remarks. I’m troubled by the idea that Ms. Rowling thinks she can still control her characters, though the final book has already been written. If Vladimir Nabokov called a press conference from beyond the grave to announce that Lolita is a closeted lesbian who seduces Humbert in order to repress her deep Sapphic desires, would we take his word for it? I think we wouldn’t, so I’m puzzled that we seem willing to cede that much authority to a second-tier fantasy writer (here comes the hate mail).

Inside the wholly imaginary experience of her book, an author has a certain amount of power; she gets to select the information that the reader will be interpreting. But outside the book, the author’s opinion carries no more weight than that of any ordinary schmuck who happens to read it. If I decide that Dumbledore’s “deviance” includes nightly rendezvous with a unicorn in the Forbidden Forest, then Ms. Rowling has no special right to contradict me, other than to point out, as anyone can, that the text doesn’t support such an interpretation. As I understand it—and right here, right now, I own up to never having read a word of any Harry Potter book after the first one—there’s a bit about a wand and some kind of orgasmic spewing of white handkerchiefs, and generally some pretty suggestive language to the effect that Dumbledore…plays Quidditch for the other team? If he’s gay, or straight, or bestial, it’s because it’s in the text, not because Ms. Rowling said so at Carnegie Hall. This is the real world, Ms. Rowling. You have no power here. Now begone, before somebody drops a house on you!

Ms. Rowling may well be a victim of her own success. Perhaps she has come to think that her characters are as real as the action figures that so ubiquitously represent them. With a series as ruthlessly merchandized as the Potter books, it’s hard to say where the world of the book ends. Characters, places and props have intruded on the physical world as human actors, stripy scarves, and fish-flavored jellybeans. Perhaps a less successful series would end and that would be that, but with two movies left to go and untold adventures in commodification still ahead, Rowling may be having trouble separating Harry Potter from reality. Dumbledore is gay? No; Dumbledore is imaginary.

And another thing: why should we have to out essentially asexual characters? Why was everyone so damn surprised? Try this, as an intellectual exercise: the next time you read a book, if a character isn’t obviously heterosexual, just assume that he’s gay. Allow yourself to imagine him strolling along to a midnight showing of The Celluloid Closet at the Castro Theater, dressed, if you like, in lederhosen. It’s hard work, and it all seems a little ridiculous. And yet we thoughtlessly fabricate heterosexual backgrounds for people, real or fictional, all the time, when we have no reason to do so, other than a deeply ingrained belief in the normalcy of heterosexuality and the aberrant nature of homosexuality. I need hardly say this, but if Rowling had announced that Dumbledore was straight and had witch-lovers, she would have merely confirmed what most readers were comfortable assuming to begin with.

Wizards, being enlightened beings, have of course realized that sexuality is a fluid continuum. At their meetings, which take place in an alternate dimension where imaginary characters gather (where Bert and Ernie still live together and Tinky-Winky powders his nose), they sit around and make fun of our normative muggle labeling. Lord, what fools these mortals be.