Category Archives: Zeitgeist

Sarah Palin comedy

September 4, 2008 TZT 1 Comment

So, the Internet is abuzz with responses to last night’s big speeches, which frankly, made me sad. Tons of personal and partisan attacks – even disparaging “community organizing” – a bedrock of our democracy? Ugh. I’m tired.

I take some shelter in funny. And some things are funny because they ring true.

From the Momosphere: No Minivan,

Accidentally funny: Peggy Noonan and Mike Murphy’s unintentional open mic conversation.

And, of course, perspective, courtesy of Jon Stewart:

Oh My Ohio, Zeitgeist

Palin in Comparison: This pander wasn’t for me

September 1, 2008 TZT 8 Comments

I watched Sarah Palin speak to the country for the first time on Friday and cringed. As she gave her shout-outs to Geraldine Ferraro and Hillary Clinton, it seemed like the most transparent, calculated pander in modern memory. And the very idea that the Republicans believe that Hillary supporters would be easily persuaded to vote for an anti-choice, anti-science, pro-gun, pro-fur, anti-polar bear candidate because they’re feeling shafted by the Democratic party made me think that the GOP’s gone completely nuts.

But then, not so much.

Politico Joe Trippi suggested (hat tip to Queen of Spain for the link on Twitter) that this isn’t as much about pandering to politically disenfranchised women as it originally appeared. I agree. What I believe it really could be about is disconcerting.

In the 2004 election, Ohio was so finely divided, the exit polls made it look like it was going to go blue. (Conspiracy theories about vote manipulation aside, I simply thought the whole thing was unjust. Having to wait more than two hours to vote on a workday in a culture that is still largely paid by the hour strikes me as utterly unconstitutional, but I digress.)

One thing that really brought the evangelicals of Ohio out to the polls that year was a proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage – they came out in those rural, red parts of the state where the voting experience is a breeze, unlike our congested blue cities. That law, incidentally, is essentially unenforceable, and has gone nowhere – making it seem, in hindsight, like a shallow yet cunning device, with its true purpose being solely to get that population out to the polls to push Bush over to a narrow victory.

Debates about experience issues aside, everything about Sarah Palin’s personal story, including today’s news about her daughter, makes me think me that she could be this election cycle’s gay marriage ban. She’s the anti-choice argument personified – someone that will bring evangelicals, who weren’t really feeling McCain fever, out to vote.

News sources say that McCain’s campaign already knew about Bristol Palin’s pregnancy and felt it shouldn’t effect her mother’s electability. Karl Rove’s general dispicable-ness in campaigning is what has made me jaded enough to believe this – but I’m starting to think that all of these complicated, personal factors that look crazy enough on the surface to be missteps of the vetting process are actually quite calculated. If that’s so – Republican strategists have sunk to new, grotesque levels, showing a willingness to subject the lives of a pregnant teen, her future child and a Down’s syndrome infant to the extremely harsh light of a presidential election just to get their guy elected. That possibility hurts my heart – the Christianity I was raised with was never so ruthless.

Please, convince me I’m crazy. No one, not even a Republican strategist, would sink that low, right?

Update, 9:41 pm: Lo and behold, here’s a story about evangelicals praising the Palins for their personification of “pro-life values.”

This post is part of the Momocrats‘ meme about Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin today.

Zeitgeist

Little known facts

August 29, 2008 TZT Leave a comment

Just as I was coming down from this week of emotional Democratic Convention watching, today’s crazy Republican V.P. choice was announced.

Little is known about Sarah Palin by most folks in the country. So microblogging platform Twitter has overflowed with a contagious case of “Little Known Facts” about her, a mini-meme that spiraling out of control. They are proliferating by the moment: check them out.

Notes of a She-Hack, Zeitgeist

The fideicommissum of my achoo

August 24, 2008 TZT 1 Comment

I’ve been prone since Friday afternoon, when a nasty summer cold walloped me into bed. I missed a birthday party, a couple of nice days and a dog festival, but I saw a lot of television. I watched Olympic synchronized swimming and the movie Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus. I think the synchronized swimming was the more surreal of the two.

Obama picking Joe Biden was slightly surreal, but only because I had a fever when I got the text message. In reality, I find this decision so logical it borders on Vulcan, and I say that with confidence now that I’m so well hydrated. And I’m not the only person who has thought about the virtuous connections between Obama and Spock.

Really, yay for Joe Biden. For at least two years, he’s been one of the only politicians I could listen to talk about Iraq without pulling my hair out. And I’m an Ohio voter who went for Hillary (head vote) over Obama (heart vote) in the primary. Put that one on your cafeteria lunch tray, punditface.

Today I’m dry coughing so horribly, I think tumbleweeds might come shooting out of my mouth. And my son just told me that he wants to be the solar system for Halloween, which means I probably need to take a sewing class or three.

This week I have a couple of little deadlines, but right now, most of my job involves looking for more work, which always feels like a lot more work than working does. I should be more unnerved about this than I am. I have a couple of prospects out there that feel like long shots, and yet, I feel like Tony from West Side Story singing “Something’s Coming.” I think I know better than to let Riff and Bernardo fight at the rumble, but I guess there’s no guarantee I won’t be shot down on the tennis court.

Phew. I’ll leave you with this parting thought:

“Your love is like 1000 caucasian carnivores playing mumblety peg with an eggplant. ”

Courtesy of the Surrealist Compliment Generator , which I have been drawn back to every seven months since I first found it in 1997 or so. It restores my sense of balance.

Zeitgeist

Stephen Colbert called, my husband had already answered

August 7, 2008 TZT 1 Comment

Last week, Stephen Colbert asked Crosby, Stills & Nash why they couldn’t write a “more positive” political song, called something like, say…. “The Surge Is Working.”

In fact, Dan wrote a song by just that title earlier this year. He and his Wahoo bandmates recorded it this weekend. Enjoy:

I Enjoy Being a Girl, Notes of a She-Hack, Oh My Ohio, Zeitgeist

Great Google-y moogly: An alternative “about me”

July 18, 2008 TZT 6 Comments

So, she recommended that whether we’re headed for BlogHer or not, women bloggers consider introducing themselves to the wider community by posting about the perverse-sounding act of Googling ourselves.

This isn’t, by any means, my first time at this. As a freelance writer, it’s something you do semi-regularly to find out who might be republishing your work without permission. The biggest offenders are music fan sites, and sometimes the musician’s site itself, although it’s hard to be offended when someone has taken the trouble to translate your review of Cher’s farewell tour into Spanish. And it’s a little confusing when Josh Groban fans reproduce your concert review and flank it with little flashing tulips, in spite of the fact that you refer to their vanilla heartthrob as “Donny Osmond Giovanni.” But this is the kind of stuff that happens.

Nowadays, the first thing that appears (beyond the links to that you can already find in the margins of this page) is a piece of my past persona as an alternative weekly staff writer, including the listing of an award I won with my colleagues for best local political story many years ago. We addressed the rise of hate groups in Ohio. My piece was an interview with Floyd Cochran, an ex-Aryan Nations recruiter who turned his life around to become a vocal advocate of social justice. This was a shining moment in my 20s, as the story was reprinted in alternative weeklies in Detroit, Los Angeles and many smaller cities in between. It was also picked up by PBS’s Not in Our Town campaign against American hate crimes and included in their education materials for years.

I wasn’t a journalism major in college. In fact, I went to a college that had “concentrations,” not majors, and mine was an amalgam of American history, American literature and creative writing. My work study job was student activist. I fell into journalism because I always knew that first and foremost, I wanted to write, and the close second was that I wanted to make a difference. So these pages of links, this life happened (at least a little) by accident.

Once upon a time, I went to a mall and asked a bunch of teenage girls what they thought feminism was. (I miss doing stories like this.) The article I wrote, “Feminism by Osmosis,” has been used in custom published women’s studies courses for several years since. No matter how much I have written in between, this is one of those pieces that keeps coming back high up in my Google image.

Another bit of feminist history that has followed me online (I think because I reprinted one on my first web site back in 1997) were two stories I wrote about the first woman to run for president, Victoria Woodhull – who was all the rage in historical non-fiction a few years ago.

I know more about Columbus, Ohio than you do. I spent two years as the senior editor of columbus.citysearch.com, therefore I wrote or edited a kabillion restaurant, hotel, attraction, bar, club, retail store, gallery, coffee shop, movie theater, park, weekend destination and other miscellaneous screen-length profiles that still live online.

Strangely, the work I’ve been doing as a Storyteller for the KnowledgeWorks Foundation for the past four years doesn’t appear until the bottom of the third page of my Google results.

There are also an endless number of artists’ web sites that list my stories about them on their resumés. You might already know who some of them are.

I am linked to a piece of my husband’s ignominious past by some obsessive Judge Judy fan site that tracked down a bunch of info about him after his appearance on that completely absurd show. (I didn’t go on the set with him. I knew he was going to lose. Declan — who wasn’t yet six months old — and I spent the day wandering around Hollywood instead. )

Without the Zollinger, my name is pretty common. Common enough that I was once in a video store and someone yelled for me from the front desk saying I had a phone call, and when I answered, the woman on the other line said “you’re not my sister-in-law.” I handed the phone back to the clerk, who then yelled: “Is there another Tracy Turner here?”

It’s almost enough to make me want to change my name to my husband’s.

I am routinely asked about business stories I have not written for the Columbus Dispatch, because another Tracy Turner wrote them.

Googling my shorthand name reveals that I also share it with an established artist, a BMW salesperson, a Texan OB/GYN, someone who takes still photos on horror movie sets and a guy from Kentucky who wrote a book of railroad tales and a biography of his brother, who died in a tragic car crash.

What happens when you Google you?

Oh My Ohio, Zeitgeist

Ohio’s secret desire

July 13, 2008 tinymantras Leave a comment

This is a random piece of word art generated from my blog using Wordle.
It suggests a cosmic conspiracy, perpetuated by my home state.
Look out Universe!

Keen Insights Into the Obvious, Oh My Ohio, Zeitgeist

Good neighbors embrace road rage

July 8, 2008 tinymantras 4 Comments

My mother, brother and I moved to Columbus in the summer just before I started fourth grade. Ohio was home to us long before then – a place with the most magnificent banister you could ever hope to slide down, cousins to play with and cavernous rooms to hide out in while anticipating the arrival of Santa Claus.

One of the first, most noticeable differences in my education on the East coast versus my education in Ohio was simply this: No one ever required me to learn a song about New Jersey, and I think it’s unlikely that anyone would have had I stayed. But literally within my first few weeks as a student in the Buckeye state, I was taught the Ohio State fight song, Carmen Ohio, a musical rendition of the riddle “What’s round on the ends and hi(gh) in the middle?” and the state rock song “Hang On, Sloopy.”

Somewhere around sixth grade, I was exposed to new Ohio rituals and traditions. There was one where one boy goes home for lunch the day before the OSU-Michigan football game and returns to school dressed in maize and blue (one of the colors in Big 10 sport teams has to have a Tweeds catalog-like name, so that no one mistakes it for a more ordinary shade). All of the scarlet and gray-wearing boys then dogpile on him, mock-beat him and strip him of his colors before math class. Then there are the bonfires with the marching bands, during which everyone sings all of the Ohio songs they had to learn in school. It a rivalry so fraught with insanity, HBO made a documentary about it.

As a non-sports fan with a son, I’m apprehensive about the day that Declan asks me for, say, maize and blue clothes so he can offer himself up to his classmates for mock sacrifice. Or worse – a day where the outcome of any particular game visibly dampens his mood (his dad – a big sports fan – is actually pretty good at shaking off this kind of disappointment). When I lived near the OSU campus, where I had to pay attention to the football schedule as a practical measure to keep my car from getting towed, you could sense the manic glee after a victory and the angry frustration after a defeat. (There didn’t have to be a riot happening to sense it.)

True sportsmanship, after all, is about common respect, no matter how hard the game is fought. Everybody shakes hands and moves on after the game. Or so I thought. But this billboard, which has been all over town for several months, doesn’t strike me as very sportsman-like:

And like a good neighbor, State Farm says it’s okie–dokie to hit one with your car.

Where do you draw the line between healthy competition/rivalry and insanity?

Motherhood, Zeitgeist

And the ones that mother gives you don’t do anything at all

May 27, 2008 TZT 7 Comments

Declan scraped his leg and foot about three different times on Saturday, while trying to keep up with his turbo-cleaning parents. When he does something like bonk himself on the elbow, he’ll run to me, say “smooch it!” and go on about the day. But when blood is involved, he bites his lip and runs away, not wanting me to touch it, let alone clean or bandage it.

I struggled to get him into the bathtub that evening, a place he’s usually happy to visit. He gazed at the water lovingly, but resisted. “I don’t want a bath,” he told me repeatedly. After a while, he confessed the reason: “My foot still hurts.”

Looking at the small mix of blood and mud on his leg, I knew I had to get him into the tub.

“A bath can make your foot feel so much better,” I told him. It might sting a little bit when you get in, but in a few minutes, it won’t hurt as much.”

After more negotiation and a bit of pleading on my part, he opted to take my word for it. He stepped in, blinked his eyes a couple of times, then proceeded to enjoy his bath, as usual.

When I asked him how his scrapes felt a few minutes later, he surprised me with “you told the truth, mommy. You said it would sting a little bit and then it would feel better.”

“Is that what happened?” I asked him.

He nodded. “It feels better.”

I believe in the power of telling kids the truth. Not everyone agrees with me.

In a few days, a placebo pill for children will be available online. Named “Obecalp” (get it?), it’s apparently “designed to have the texture and taste of actual medicine so it will trick kids into thinking that they’re taking something.”

The product strikes me as insane. I know a few too many people who have looked at pills as a pat solution to ailments, and that approach only mired them in deeper problems. No matter how miraculous the cure that some pills offer may feel, pills are scientific, not magical things that you consume blindly. And outside of an infection or certain other temporary conditions, they shouldn’t be seen as a solitary answer to any condition. In my perfect world, there would be nutritional advice with every diagnosis, as well as advice on fitness, or any other relevant lifestyle habit. In my mind, a child with hypochondria probably has deeper emotional needs or problems (or is scarred by parents who choose to do things like LIE TO THEM ABOUT PILLS).

Granted, I am a person who could barely sit through the movie Life is Beautiful because the premise that the loving thing to do for a Jewish child in Nazi Germany was to lie about what’s really happening positively drove me up the wall. I don’t think lying is part and parcel of parenting. There are truths I have definitely sidestepped with Declan because I don’t think it’s necessary or wise to impart life’s harsh realities to a toddler, but I can’t imagine calculating the best way to lie to him convincingly. Besides, once they’re old enough to realize that they don’t actually disappear when they cover their own face with a blanket, children aren’t so easily duped.

What’s your take on this? Am I overlooking an instance where a placebo could be ethically used to help a child?

P.S. There was a good commentary on NPR by a doctor who is opposed to the product.

Notes of a She-Hack, Zeitgeist

Robert Rauschenberg, R.I.P.

May 14, 2008 TZT Leave a comment

Almost precisely eight years ago, I lugged a large canvas bag stocked with a notebook, a tape recorder and microphone up a couple of downtown escalators. My destination was a hotel lounge overlooking the statehouse, where I was able to sit down with artist Robert Rauschenberg for better than a half an hour. He was in town to accept the Wexner Prize, so the topic of conversation was broad and about his remarkable career.

One of the most affable people I’ve ever interviewed, he made me laugh a lot. And every time that I laughed, it seemed to fuel him to make me laugh more. That made editing the tape for the public radio segment I was producing about him a challenge, but it did not detract from the serious passion that he had, particularly when it came to shining a light on art’s relationship — or really art’s necessity — to politics and to science.

Beyond his obvious contributions to American art that many better informed individuals will eulogize this week, it was his philanthropic work – helping to advance humanitarian causes and education through art, as well as creating support for artists — that he expressed particular pride in during our conversation. The chance to talk to him face-to-face ranks among the most special privileges I’ve had in my career as a journalist.

He had been working on his Apogamy Pods, and explained what he was doing in a way that was profoundly (and simultaneously) scientific, spiritual, gentle and challenging. It occurs to me, thinking about him, that some of my best preparation for having a child that is so deeply interested in science has come from years of covering visual art. My son is impressed that I once spoke with one of the first and only artists in a mini-museum that was smuggled to the moon in 1969.

I was saddened to hear of Rauschenberg’s passing on Monday night. What a big life he led, what an immense personality he had, and what a legacy he has left.

Tiny Mantras