Ciruelo Cabral, "Cercamon"

The essays come first, followed by various barbs.

Love him or hate him, Robert Heinlein's impact on SF cannot be ignored. Anti-feminism, Militarism, and Manifest Destiny in Robert A. Heinlein's To Sail Beyond the Sunset, looks at the fundamental contradictions in Heinlein's views about things like nationalism, feminism, and related "isms."

Unsound in Body, Mind, and Institution is an essay on cultural ideas of insanity and how those ideas have shaped the unconscionable way crazy people have been and still are treated in this society.

A Lost Argument: Uncle Tom's Cabin in a Southern Racist Tradition looks at some of the less explored, and less savory, sources for Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novels.

Constance Coiner was the best professor I ever had. She died on TWA flight 800. I had lots of fun writing "Oh, Heathcliff, Tie Me Up!": Dominance-Submission Gentrified and Denaturalized in Giardina and Allison for her, a bit of "vulgar socialism" about class and sex in Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina and Denise Giardina's Storming Heaven.

Abused Children, Perfect homes, and the Devil is my master's thesis, looking at the early 90's hoopala about "satanic ritual abuse," and the parallel hoopala about "false memory syndrome". Read the abstract for more information, and take a look at my 2001 Afterthoughts on the thesis for recent developments and some things I didn't say but wish I had.

Many of the ideas in the paper on Gardina and Allison had their genesis about a year earlier in Childhood Sexuality in Bastard Out of Carolina.

Hysterical Bobbysoxers or Hideous Bitches: Ahistoricizing "Affliction" looks at the growth over time of the myth that the accusers in the Salem witch trials were "hysterical teenagers," and was the cognitive seed that later evolved into my master's thesis.

Election Lotteries
As anyone looking at the handpuppet ^H^H^H President Americans were given by their court system in 2000 can see, those who most want to be political leaders are by definition those least qualified to actually lead. This is an enourmous problem everywhere. In the US, there is the additional problem that political leaders are elected from a slate of candidates, and it takes over a year to generate that slate. Primaries, caucuses, and general stupidity all waste incredible amounts of time, money, and energy. By the end of the process, it's no wonder most voters stay home: they're all exhausted just watching the selection of candidates.

A Chaste Proposal
I was mercifully not in the US when the country of my birth put its chief executive on trial for allowing a willing female who was not his wife to perform fellatio on him. But even across an international border it wasn't possible to miss the media feeding frenzy short of crawling into a cave. I found myself thinking that this is going to happen again to each new U.S. president from now on -- even if the new president is the Virgin Mary herself -- in a huge game of political tit-for-tat. And I thought, "I'm sure Johnathan Swift could think of a better way to keep politicians from committing adultery."
I thought I was writing satire. Silly me. This fin-de-siècle, you don't need Marcel Duchamp to have surrealism, you just need to pick up the newspaper. My partner recently read in the National Post about a Nevada company which is marketing the "CB-2000" chastity belt to wives of frequently traveling businessmen. The article includes glowing comments from the businessmen about how grateful they are for the company's help in enabling them to remain faithful to their wives. Let us all pause to reflect on this.
[insert pause to reflect music here]
These must be people who have been so brainwashed by sociobiology that they think self-control is a new line of shampoo, or something.

Something that is completely obsolete
About the Y2K silliness and Christian Millennialism.