Autobiographies by 3 women: Kathy Griffin, Megyn Kelley, & Omarosa Manigault Newman

Where I live, we have ‘Little Libraries” all over my community, and I found all three books in these free book bins. I am always looking for nonfiction books to send to Africa.  That’s one reason I picked up these three books.

All three women are celebrities for various reasons. Kathy Griffin is an entertainer, Megyn Kelly is a journalist, and Omarosa is… a political operative. She actually worked for Al Gore when he was vice president before she was on Donald Trump’s Apprentice, and she’s intelligent. Fact is. all these women are intelligent.  All three have something to say, but I don’t know that it would be worth it to send their books to Africa.  Why?  although we do want girls to read what strong women have to say, what these women have written about is somewhat difficult to understand from a cultural point of view….but I’m still thinking about it.

Kathy Griffin is a comedienne and actress.   Her book is, “Official Book Club Selection:  a Memoir According to Kathy Griffin” (2009)  A Catholic girl. She started out in the western suburbs of Chicago, and her family ended up moving to the Los Angeles area so Kathy could pursue her dream of getting into show business.  By this time, her father was retired…and Kathy says she lived ‘at home’ until she was 28.  She joined the  Groundlings comedy troupe and honed her craft, and continued to go to auditions and do odd jobs.  She did stand up comedy. Then she got work acting as a ‘sidekick’ on Brooke Shield’s TV show, Suddenly Susan,  and she was off and running.

Kathy is a very good writer (or she had an amazing editor), and is very candid about what worked and didn’t work for her.  She talks about her plastic surgeries, and how painful they were…and about her marriage.  I could really relate to her experience of marriage.  This book would really be a good gift for any girl who wants to go into performing.

Megyn Kelly is someone many of us know from Fox News.   She’s gorgeous.  Her father was a college professor who died at a young age. She was also raised Catholic, in Albany, New York.  Her childhood, aside from the sudden death of her father, sounds idyllic. She was interested in journalism and concentrated on that, but ended up going to law school and got a  job in corporate law quickly.  I was married to a law student and had to read law in graduate school myself.  You really have to concentrate and then turn what you’ve read into plain English. She made a boatload of money and was married to a medical student for a  while, but it seemed their lifestyles/hours conflicted too much, and after several years, divorced.  Not so unusual.  She was also getting tired of corporate law, and by chance, met someone who  got her an interview for a broadcast journalism job.    She did have to start at ‘the bottom’ with early morning time slots but worked her way up the corporate ladder. Along the way, she found a new husband and had three kids.

As I said, she’s gorgeous.  Very photogenic/telegenic.  And Donald Trump singled her out for harassment as soon as he found a need for her. He was friends with Roger Ailes, who ran Fox News.  It takes her to the end of the book to get to the part where Ailes is charged with sexual harassment by Gretchen Carlson.  If you haven’t seen the movie “Bombshell,”  it’s the story of Ailes sexually harassing young women, and nobody talking about it until Gretchen files her lawsuit.  THEN, Megyn Kelly addresses that she was also harassed by Ailes, but—-and this is what I think many women can relate to—- she tried  to ignore or deflect his comments and advances. We all did.  I remember  in the 1970’s another  dog groomer telling me, “Vern’s the type who will call you  honey, babe, and doll, and put his arm around you, but he doesn’t mean it.”  Riiiight.  They never mean it if you just ignore them and get away. But some girls don’t get away. In any case, it takes her to the very end of “Settle for More” (2016) for her to break down and tell the Fox lawyers he did the same thing to her.  It’s not worth sending a whole book just for this chapter.  As for how much time she spends on Trump, we all know he’s a slime.

Omarosa (Unhinged)  Manigault-Newman grew up in the projects.  Her father was killed in a fight, but she had a very large but close-knit family. She took advantage of every opportunity to move herself forward.  She entered beauty contests. She got a master’s degree from Howard University & used her contacts there.  She worked in the Clinton White House for Al Gore, and started working for a Political Action Committee to pave the way for Hilary Clinton…but when Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy for president, her team ignored the PAC—& all the work the minorities on the PAC had done in advance and didn’t fold these people into the campaign. ,  Omarosa had trouble with  Hillary forgiving Bill, but she considers herself a liberal and wanted to move the agenda forward. Yet by this time, she had been on the Apprentice, and although she didn’t win (she knew she was a token), she added drama to the show, and Trump liked her for it, and they stayed in touch.  Like Kelly, she ignored Trump’s bad behavior. She felt it was just for show, and he was ignorant (although she did say his behavior towards his daughter Ivanka gave her the creeps).  She was surprised Trump won, but she was on the  minority outreach team, and it wasn’t until after the election that she learned that Trump took advice on cabinet appointments from an evangelist—and she is not one. I guess  I don’t understand  the nuances.  Omarosa is an ordained minister, a ‘missionary Baptist’ but not an evangelist.  I thought they were all evangelists. No matter.  In any case, she learned just after the election how poorly prepared Trump was to be president…from not having someone in charge of hiring personnel to not understanding briefings, to, apparently, getting all his information from random tweets.  She stayed on to try to mitigate the damage Trump was doing, but she was totally shocked that he appointed the swamp dwellers he had promised to get rid of.  She had known him for almost 20 years, and she felt, from conversations with him, that he clearly is unfocused and has some sort of neurological issue.  She writes that she was going to quit after her push for money for Historically Black Colleges  & Universities was funded, but Gen. Kelly fired her first.  As an insight into how government ‘works’ and protects very bad elected officials (and the jobs of those hired by those officials—a ‘wag the dog’ scenario’—this book is excellent.  If you can find a copy, it’s worth the read.  This book i will send to Africa. it’s a good history  of America from an African-American woman’s point of view.

 

 

Covid 19 & Climate Change

Well well well. I’ll just jump right in. It was probably around 1968 when I started becoming an environmentalist. The Viet Nam War was raging It was the hippie era. I wast 15-years-old and just getting a consciousness. I was questioning whether we were fighting communists in Viet Nam, why educational (& other infrastructure) services were so noticeably poorer in minority communities, and I was noticing how much packaging there is that gets thrown away. So we celebrated Earth Day with a small march and a gathering. Then, we got the EPA, and some environmental laws that slowly helped the environment heal, and things got better….slowly..

Except for being frugal and mindful, I didn’t do anything. I left my parents home a month after I turned 18, at the end of 1971. I learned to be an adult. I got a job and supported myself.

My parents were horrified that I didn’t go to college and that I learned to groom dogs, but my dream was to someday own a small boarding kennel where I could live, raise dogs, show dogs, and  hold small events like racing or performance matches. Nobody was recycling anything. In the industry I worked in, pet services (dog grooming, mostly), the most environmentally unaware people were running the businesses. Water running all day, lights on in rooms with enough ambient light for a dog (they aren’t reading, for crying out loud—& they remain calmer in low light!). Worse—-working with idiots who would never READ THE INSTRUCTIONS!!!!!. Why are you not diluting shampoo? Why are you not keeping an eye on that dog with a dryer on him? Why are you dumping dog hair on the floor when the trash bin is right here? Why sweep it up twice? Dog hair could be composted…so can dog shit, but in many cases, it doesn’t even go into the sewer system (where it belongs) but into a trash bin…and landfilled.

What happened was…. a friend asked me if I’d be on the board of a recycling station. It was a new idea. As my father said, “A cute hippie idea,” discounting the importance of actually doing something that needed to be done. But that’s how it was, around 1985. My friend, Judy Freeman, did a lot of work rounding up disparate people(I mean it: people who worked for religious-based non-profits, people from the Cambodian, Viet Namese, and Laotian communities). the Redemptorist Fathers gave us a grant, Ken Dunn, the father of recyclinh gave us the means to start out: he’d sell what we collected. We got a diversion credit for diverting cubic tons of waste from landfills. This–I might add, was part of the visionary thinking of those of us who wanted to move recycling forward: a city employee, and the members of the Chicago Recycling Coalition during the Harold Washington Administration in 1987.

I was on the board for several years, and several board members decided they wanted to remake the board, so, for various reasons, several of us were asked to resign and the project, Uptown Recycling Station, stayed in existence until about 2010. They had a good run. The fact of the matter is, that the city pretty much handed over the contract for recycling (mandated by EPA rules that we have some sort of program in place) to Waste Management. Yeah, we still recycle in Chicago…not even a ton of all the waste (‘comingled’) collected.

In the intervening years, I decided to attend college. I was over 30, and I wanted to return to Africa, and Africa certainly didn’t need dog groomers. I took CLEP exams and got 2 years of college credit, and ended up majoring in anthropology (African and international studies) with a minor in environmental studies. For what it’s worth. i ultimately got a master’s in urban planning, with a concentration in land use.

What you learn when you start studying environmental science is that there are laws of nature, and one of them is the concept of population crash. That is, when too many people live in a location (in this case, it is turning out to be highly urbanized areas), if a disease or other environmental disaster strikes….people will die. They will keep dying until nature strikes a balance. And, since humans will absolutely not rein un their consumption and be mindful of their impact on their own environment (lest the next guy gets MORE), here we are, with a pandemic.

It is actually too late. Why would I be so pessimistic? Small businesses are the backbone of American communities. Yet, so many can’t go two weeks without an income stream. They are going to go under. I know a lot of dog groomers will not survive…but where will they go if the whole service industry is in a state of collapse & can’t recover? All those people: Our neighbors, friends, co-workers, who allow life to just happen to them, or think that if God gave them 4+ kids, that God will prevail…good luck to us all.

All my older friends, who partied and drank their lives away, where will they go? The government can just print money and find housing for them, but the government will bail out industries—like the airlines this time, and banks again before they help you or me. Don’t forget that Trump has run up a huge debt to finance his golf junkets.  We still have a chance to elect Bernie Sanders, but that’ s not gonna happen. We’re going to elect Joe Biden, because he’s not too radical…as though his plan will actually help us out of this economic hole.

The Christians are getting what they wanted: the end of days. I am so glad it will take a bunch of them to the rapture. Because these people felt abortion was murder, but would not commit to caring for those unborn that get born—they don’t adopt kids en masse (they just have a philosophically held belief), and if we need more stuff, we’ll go get more stuff, no matter who owns it or how taking it affects them.

We certainly won’t pay teachers of science more, and attract more people who might want to teach science. We don’t trust them! We apparently trust ignorant politicians.

We will never get out of this hole of ignorance. there will be no resources to pay for the damage giant storms do—like flooding, or drought and wildfires, because we don’t believe in science, and not taking more than we can put back in.  this is what climate change looks like.  Very sad.

 

 

An Emotional Support Animal is NOT A Service Dog

Dazzle, JC (Dazzle) Saluki, on the left, Bebop Whippet, on the right. Bred by hobby breeders for the betterment of their breeds.Not emotional support animals, but keep me mentally stable.

I just had a big ‘tif’ on a grooming related FB site. Someone new posted a photo of a poodle mix she thinks is a purebred dog (it’s merle–no way can the dog be purebred—the coloring has never appeared in the breed), but THEN she says she got the dog to be a SERVICE ANIMAL! When I asked what service the dog is trained to perform, others on the site got angry & said I had no right to ask. But by law, I DO. Turns out the dog is an ’emotional support animal’. Not a service dog. So if any of you are seeing a therapist who panders to the self-indulgent neurotics who want to manipulate the rest of us into indulging them, you might want to rethink how valuable the therapy you are getting really is. I know what it is to be mentally ill, but I also know what integrity is.

‘Emotional Support Animals’ are a new construct. They didn’t exist even 10 years ago. However, because psychologists are giving people permission to have them—a walking security blanket—now they are a thing. Based on a letter the ‘patient’ carries around, the ‘patient’ feels entitled to take a(usually untrained) dog anywhere most dogs are not allowed….unless they are bona fide TRAINED service dogs.

As a dog lover, and as someone who has been afflicted with mental illness (I may still be…who knows? You have to talk to me…but I digress…), it really irks me when I am out with my two trained dogs, and someone with an out of control dog allows that dog to harass my dogs. I also don’t like being molested by untrained dogs. I spend more time intimately involved with dogs than a lot of people ( hey—I shave a lot of penises), and I can usually control most dogs in my own environment. When a dog is in his own environment, the dynamic changes. Passing off untrained dogs as service animals is dangerous and unethical. We’re not talking PTSD, we’re talking entitled.

But there’s another problem: psychologists who know nothing about dogs, and don’t really care, are pandering. It used to be you’d go for therapy, and if you didn’t feel emotionally stronger in a few weeks, you’d change therapists. You would not ask for permission to indulge yourself. Psychologists are not medical doctors. They can’t prescribe drugs. They essentially use talk therapy and behavior modification and may consult with a psychiatrist, to help their clients achieve mental stability. They don’t prescribe security blankets. Why would they think a pet will automatically make you feel more emotionally…stable? Will it? What it does is forestall dealing with issues. The irony is that if these emotionally unstable people actually trained the dog they have…actually spent time getting used to being in charge and confident, not only would they have a stable, well-behaved dog, they’d be more confident, and their emotional issues may dissipate—- but the psychologists  can’t have that happen, can they?

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