Flight Papers

“Your mother passed away this morning.”

“What? Mom, are you—?”

“No, my mother. I’m sorry. She didn’t get to see you before she died. When will you be here?”

“I’m getting on the plane now.”

I enjoy flying quite a lot. I enjoy the parts of it that most people hate. The scuttling, the shuffling—print boarding pass, go to security, shoes off, purse in one tray, backpack in another, x-ray on, thanks ma’am you can go through, x-ray off, backpack on, purse on, shoes on, go to the gate, wait, board. I’ve loved it since I was a little girl, the ritual of travel, the anticipation of change.

This is always better when leaving. Going somewhere new. Returning home has never lifted my heart in the same way.

That night, my backpack felt heavy, my back ached, my purse didn’t sit right. I smoked before going in the terminal, and immediately kicked myself—I wouldn’t have a way to shower before seeing my mother. The residue seemed to cling to everything, my hair, my skin, my lungs, the terminal walls. It was choking—in my mind, it smelled of sandalwood.

The ritual felt like a funeral procession. I suppose it was.

I love taking off, tearing away from the earth.

I like landing, returning to the ground someplace new.

The parts in-between, I could do without.

Whatever your level of excitement, at some point it becomes evident that you are in a metal tube with five hundred other people, and you will be in this tube, hearing every cough, every sneeze, every god-help-you baby’s cry, for the next several hours. Eleven, in this case.

I usually try to sleep, forgetting whatever sleep schedule I had and forcing my body to shut down. I can’t usually read, and for the same reason, I can’t usually write. On a more recent flight, I actually talked to my seatmate. We groused about the movie and talked about our respective significant others. She was in a long-distance relationship with her boyfriend—they had sex maybe once a month. I had just been away from my girlfriend for all of a week, and that by itself was difficult. Then we sneaked into the lavatory and I went down on her as she tried not to scream into a regulation blue airline pillow, until the Fasten Seat Belt sign pinged on and an elderly flight attendant tapped on the door and politely asked us to return to our seats, where we groused further about the movie.

On this flight, though, I didn’t feel like talking, and even thoughts of the previous night were tinged with an ineffable grief. For eleven hours, my night, I tried to sleep, and could not.

I arrive in Bangalore. The airport is dirty, though there are a few people cleaning it somewhat forlornly. I wonder how much they are paid. I wonder if they are paid, and if they will ever in their lives be able to take for granted the experience I just did.

Thanks to the miracle and horror of time zones, it’s now nearing mid-day. Through the windows, the sun is obscenely bright. The sky looks perpetually over-exposed.

My family will be waiting for me outside the security area. The security area, in this instance, feels safe. Secure. It feels like the last such place that will ever be.

I contemplate, seriously, finding another flight and getting on it, possibly without a ticket. I contemplate begging, pleading. I contemplate stealing a boarding pass. I contemplate spending the last of my own money. I don’t.

I go into the bathroom and begin to change.

I enter a stall and pull off my t-shirt, smudging some makeup onto it in the process. I take off my bra. From my backpack, from the very bottom, I pull out an ace bandage and some small clips (sometimes, they won’t let you through security with safety pins). The bandage does not match my skin. I wrap the bandage slowly, tightly, starting mid-way up my ribs. It’s uncomfortable. I pull it tighter, until my tits are jammed tight, nearly flat against my ribcage. It’s tight, tight enough, tight enough to hurt, but not tight enough to account for the tears streaking down my face. I clip it securely.

I find another shirt, looser and less revealing than the previous, and I go out to the mirrors. I brush my teeth, getting rid of as much of the smoke taste as I can. I brush dry shampoo into my hair. I carefully reapply my makeup, wiping away smudges and tapping on concealer and finishing powder until my skin is smooth again. I wipe off all the makeup around my eyes. My reflection looks nearly dead. I chide myself for thinking so, then add a bit of lightening concealer beneath my eyes. I don’t wear lipstick, but I wipe off the remnants of my slightly tinted, slightly shiny chap stick, and resolve to buy a new, clear tube.

Thus changed, I go to meet my family.

London whips by in a blur.

We go to Westminster Abbey, and fail to see the changing of the guard. We fly the London Eye once, the world opening up at its apogee as if offered to us by Satan on a silver platter. Camden town brings us cute clothes, Oxford—a day trip—brings me a somewhat novel desire to go to graduate school.

We sleep in our hostel, on a raver’s floor, on trains and buses. We don’t speak for a day—not for any particular reason, only because it had become tiring and unnecessary. We twine our fingers hourly, even then.

Today is our last day in London. It’s our last day together, for a small eternity, at least. We flew the Eye again, earlier, and the whole flight felt less a temptation and more an extended goodbye to my friend, who I love, and this city, which I have also come to.

We tumble through the streets and circles and alleys, still dizzy from the Eye’s height or something else. We end up in Leicester square, curled on a bench in the gardens. These are old gardens. Old buildings. Old homes.

“Let’s stay another night.”

Katie looks at me, hugs me close, closer. She speaks softly: “Come on.”

“I thought that was our, y’know.” I stop for a beat and consider. “Our goodbye.”

“No.” She runs her fingers down my face. “No. No. No.” With a timing possible only in movies and life, the phone in my purse starts to hum distantly.

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For the first hour we were in London, I felt like little pieces of me were being dragged across the Atlantic, waiting to catch up. That was the first hour. Then my soul snapped back, and I discovered that London felt more like home than any place I’d been.

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Today, Ali Khamenei has ordered the killing of protesters. There are tanks rolling into Tehran right now.

Today, my aunt has decided to die.

I understand my aunt’s decision. I understand that she can’t keep fighting. I understand that the story of a survivor, a strong woman, a loved woman, beating the odds—I understand that was a fairy tale.

I will never understand the thing that makes soldiers hear an order to kill people who are speaking their hearts, and do so. I will never understand what keeps them fighting. I will never understand why those Iranian freedom fighters had to die. Why women and men asking for something as tiny as a vote had to die for it. This is a thing I cannot understand.

But they will overcome. They will win, and they will make better.

This isn’t a fairy tale. This is truth. This is inevitable. This is necessary.

There are things you—we—can do.

At the protests today in Denver, in solidarity with the protesters in Iran, a woman said that the organization, the access to information, it’s making all the difference. It’s letting Iranian activists know they aren’t alone. It’s helping them communicate and coordinate.

It is why this will succeed. It is why this is different. Information is the foundation of the revolution, she said.

Of course, that is a terrible thing, and it must be stopped. The Khamenei regime has tightened Iran’s firewalls—second only to China’s—in an attempt to prevent protest, organization, dissent, collaboration, rebuilding.

You can do something. For once, the Internet actually can actually fucking help.

I’ve set up a proxy server to run about the supreme leader’s firewalls. You can, too. You should. Here are the windows instructions. If you’re using Linux, apt-get squid and edit /etc/squid/squid.conf as the instructions say. Also add 208.116.53.210/32 and 208.116.53.211/32 to the ACLs so @austinheap can verify your server.

It’s a small thing. It can help.

Find out where there’s a protest near you.

It’s a small thing. It can help.

And maybe there’s more. More small things, that can help. More large things, that can help. More things that can keep more women, more activists, more people, from getting slaughtered.

Tell me.

1. I am still here.
2. I have, however, been quite busy.
   1. …but that’s a bit of a cop-out. It may be more accurate to say that I’ve focusing on meatspace concerns, relationships, and processing. (Lesbians love processing.)
3. But I have been writing! You lovely lot have just not been privy to it, but I’ve been convinced to remedy that. I have posted the first part of a semi-fictional travelogue. I’ll be posting short story updates Monday, Friday, and if I’m feeling impatient, anxious, or unproductive, Wednesday. Comments encouraged.
4. Ann and I are planning a lovely radical non-monogamous heart-twining ceremony. This is 99% amazing, 1% terrifying, with those figures varying slightly depending on the day.
5. After that, we’re going to Portland! Not permanently. Just for a bit. Just for a taste. If there’s anything we absolutely must do there, you should tell me. If you know any awesome radical Portlanders (Portlandites?), or indeed, if you are yourself a radical Portlandian, we would love to meet you and say hi while we’re out there. Which will be, incidentally, the 19th through the 24th of July.

There’s something almost pathologically beautiful about the New York subways. Why, for one thing, are the cars fitted with windows? It makes little sense, from a practical standpoint—either the trains will be in motion through dark tunnels, or they will be at a station, and their doors will open. Yet, I’m truly grateful to whoever decided they needed windows, because the twisting curves of light as our train makes its turns are hauntingly lovely. On the straightaways, if you stare out into the tubes for long enough, your eyes will start to adjust to the movement of shadows in the tunnels. You can see the disused train platforms flicker by, other passages splitting off from your own track at strange angles. People live there. Other things, too. Giant alligators and other monsters, assuredly. There are meant to be miles of tunnels—some with tracks, others not—that simply sit under the city, not used for anything anymore. Just waiting.

Katie tells me later that there’s a whole community of “sewerers”–people who go spelunking in sewers and abandoned buildings. It isn’t exactly safe, obviously, but I’m fascinated, partially by her magnificent prescience.

And then she asks me, in almost the same breath, why I am going to India by way of half the cities in the continent.

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Would that be a Google Ads fail, or win?

(Content soon. Promises.)

I have once again been demonstrating enormous lackadaisicality in keeping up with my writing. In penance, I’m taking advantage of the Creative Commons license on the recently released final chapter of Ben Goldcare’s book.

It’s a horrifying look at the ways in which a kind of eco-romanticism—properly blended with colonial and racial privilege—can end up supporting oppression. He touches on the ways in which we westerners export not just suffering and death, but also denialist modes that just cut genuine activism, and, briefly, kill millions of people. After all, it’s easy to demonize Thabo Mbeki, a man who saw millions of people in his country dying of AIDS and encouraged them to eat more potatoes. It’s harder to see the western denialists standing behind him; harder still to look at the hundreds of thousands of prostitutes killed not just by AIDS or by men but by health policies and social structures that marginalize them, sometimes very, very literally.

This is an extract from
BAD SCIENCE by Ben Goldacre
Published by Harper Perennial 2009.

You are free to copy it, paste it, bake it, reprint it, read it aloud, as long as you don’t change it – including this bit – so that people know that they can find more ideas for free at www.badscience.net

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The Doctor Will Sue You Now

This chapter did not appear in the original edition of this book, because for fifteen months leading up to September 2008 the vitamin-pill entrepreneur Matthias Rath was suing me personally, and the Guardian, for libel. This strategy brought only mixed success. For all that nutritionists may fantasise in public that any critic is somehow a pawn of big pharma, in private they would do well to remember that, like many my age who work in the public sector, I don’t own a flat. The Guardian generously paid for the lawyers, and in September 2008 Rath dropped his case, which had cost in excess of £500,000 to defend. Rath has paid £220,000 already, and the rest will hopefully follow. Nobody will ever repay me for the endless meetings, the time off work, or the days spent poring over tables filled with endlessly cross-referenced court documents.

On this last point there is, however, one small consolation, and I will spell it out as a cautionary tale: I now know more about Matthias Rath than almost any other person alive. My notes, references and witness statements, boxed up in the room where I am sitting right now, make a pile as tall as the man himself, and what I will write here is only a tiny fraction of the fuller story that is waiting to be told about him. This chapter, I should also mention, is available free online for anyone who wishes to see it.

Matthias Rath takes us rudely outside the contained, almost academic distance of this book. For the most part we’ve been interested in the intellectual and cultural consequences of bad science, the made-up facts in national newspapers, dubious academic practices in universities, some foolish pill-peddling, and so on. But what happens if we take these sleights of hand, these pill-marketing techniques, and transplant them out of our decadent Western context into a situation where things really matter?

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I don’t know anything about Ethan Zuckerman, really, but I’m happy to have stumbled across an old post of his on the importance of pointing, rather than speaking, in activist works.

That is, don’t tell us, in Zuckerman’s case, about the plight of a detained Chinese blogger—carry his words, and his family’s words, far and wide. Don’t, yourself, speak out about sexism in Indian culture—work with Indian women, supporting them and their words.

Don’t, in short, center your words, actions, desires, and experiences. This isn’t about you.

This is the core of media justice: Everyone has a story. We are obligated to make the world such that everyone can speak them.

This applies to more than activist work; this applies to all storytelling. Over here, talking about narrative appropriation, I said,

But I think they first have to love both the stories and the people. They need to know them. And the stories, even and especially in a white storyteller’s mouth, need to writhe and dance and move towards liberation as we would expect and hope them to.

That is, specifically, you can’t tell a story like it’s the story of those quaint primitive people over there who wear funny hats. You can’t, equally, tell this story as if it were your own, as if you knew it from when you were a child. You have to tell it as it is, breathing the air that it breathes, loved by the people who love it, rooted in the earth it came from. You, the storyteller, have to point.

That’s not just the nature of being a good ally. That’s the nature of being a good storyteller.

When you think of volunteerism, what do you think of? What image springs into your head?

Actually, there are lots of answers to that, and they’re probably informed by your own experiences, and that’s wonderful. What I ought to ask is: what do TV writers evidently think of when they think of volunteerism? What cultural image embodies that concept?

Soup. Ladling soup. Some white kid with their heart in the right place, ladling soup out to the homeless.

There’s a lot to do at a soup kitchen. Someone has to acquire raw ingredients. Someone has to prep those ingredients; someone has to cook them. Someone has to clean the place, near-constantly. And that’s just the soup. Someone has to acquire and maintain the space; someone has to advertise; someone has to coordinate with other social services. Depending on how you do it, you can skip some of these things—the Food Not Bombs chapters in my area just go serve food in the park and rely on word of mouth, but even they have to forage for ingredients, maintain their cooking spaces, and so forth.

On TV, all of this is reduced to one white kid, ladling out soup. Which is telling. Seeing that image, I wonder: why is she even there? I mean, there’s the soup, there’s a ladle, and there’s a pile of bowls. People—even homeless people—can generally ladle soup without assistance. The ladler, in this scene, isn’t giving out food—she’s portioning out food: this much for you, this much for you, this much for you….

I think that image and its connotations, more than any reality, damages the notion of “volunteerism”. I don’t want soup ladlers. I don’t want people to “help” me. I don’t want to “help” people. Volunteerism, in short, isn’t activism. Volunteerism is me giving you food. Activism is us, cooking. The government isn’t going to encourage activism, because activism, at its best, is dangerous—not violent, but not helpful, and certainly not safe.

[ Of course, TV has an image of activism, too. That would be (a) white college kids protesting something, or (b) passionate brown people working to “bring down” televangelists whose refineries are giving cancer to children (the passionate brown people, obviously, exist only for as long as they are useful to the main cast). ]