Listics

Odd juxtaposition of events in our family tonight.

Beth went to the Wisconsin Women in Government dinner to hear Mary Matalin make an ass of herself defaming muslims. Beth of course simply shared some impressions when she got home. Any wicked spin you might perceive here is all mine….

The anorexic max-botoxed Republican freak strategist led off with an anecdote about someone who approached her just before the event who said he or she was attending just to see if Mary was as much of a bitch in real life as she is on TV. I gather nothing was said during the keynote that would have contradicted this. Matalin comes from Chicago, but now she carries the alien aura of an inside the beltway Bush flying monkey freakazoid, a banished servant of the Crawford Crusader… only room for one set of outsized ears in that White house. Weirdness triumphed. People were as polite as they could be for ten or twenty minutes of the embarassingly long and dismal speech, but in the end this is not really a town that you would expect an inside-the-beltway republidroid like Matalin - especially someone as rancorous and obnoxious as Matalin - to find congenial.

While Beth’s attention wandered from Carville’s old lady flapping her gums at the sit down dinner for 1200, I was at the Olbrich Botanical Gardens where the Madison Social Justice Center was celebrating its fourth birthday. Bob Kimbrough, my old undergrad Shakespeare teacher, University faculty and staff labor organizer, literary genius, socialist and comrade received the legacy award. I sat with friends David and Barbara Houghton, and Gene and Linda Farley.

At the next table sat Vicki Elkin, now of Gathering Waters and earlier the key staffer on our township’s Land Trust Commission, her husband writer Mike Ivey, Midge Miller, Dunn Planning Commission chair Steve Grebs and his partner Julie Andersen (another honoree at the event).

Julie Andersen and Kabzuag Vaj received Visionary Awards, Julie for her peace activism and Vaj for her work against domestic violence. Julie’s acceptance speech included that quote from Marianne Wilson (or Nelson Mandela?)…

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. Your playing small does not serve the world…. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.