You know why there is no war on women in their minds? Because there are no women. Women don’t exist as actual human beings. If somebody tried to make the war on cockroaches or the war on dust mites into a centerpiece of a political campaign, I would also be quite annoyed. “Come on,” I’d say. “Don’t we have more important issues at stake than the reproductive rights of cockroaches?” And I’d feel completely justified in my opinions, too.

The reason why I care about abortion rights is not because I want to get an abortion. I never have and I don’t want to start now. It’s because I don’t think I’m a cockroach. I have this annoying tendency to see myself as a valid human being. How totally silly of me, right?

Will stated on ABC’s This Week that “professional women with college degrees” resent the “condescension of the Obama campaign, which says” to women: “don’t you trouble your pretty little heads about these men’s issues like unemployment and all the rest, worry about contraception, which has been a constitutional right for 47 years.” Will continued: “It’s a distraction. The entire war on women trope, and I think professional, educated women find it offensive.”

What this professional educated woman finds offensive is the existence of stupid creatures like this Will fellow who dare to open their idiotic mouths to take her name in vain.

Go stick your opinions about what women want up your ugly ass, Will. “Unemployment and all the rest” of economic issues for women, you stupid, stupid idiot, begin precisely when women cannot control their own reproductive systems.

Fucking idiot.

I’ve been so busy that words fail me when I try to describe everything I’ve been doing these days. This is why I’m kind of out the loop about this hurricane that is supposing to be on its way. But now that people I haven’t talked to in years are calling to ask if I’m all right, I have started to worry.

Does anybody know if the St. Louis area is in the path of the hurricane? Could you look it up for me, please? Should I be worried?

Stay safe, folks!

Captain Capitalism who is a very intelligent and kind person and who always promotes me on his massively popular blog sent in the following question:

If the Soviet Union was so bad, then why didn’t people flee?

I ask because (in the case of a Vietnamese friend) the North Vietnamese “said” they would allow anybody who wanted to, to leave.  Well, that ended up not being true.  North Korea people can’t “just leave” but it’s on a peninsula and with mountains so the passes can be guarded.

But the Soviet Union just seems so big and so vast with sparsely populated areas, I can’t see how the government could effectively stop somebody who was determined from fleeing.

Additionally, couldn’t you, say, fly to Finland, then to the UK and then declare you were defecting?

I know this sounds stupid, but I would love to post your answer on my blog because it would be of interest to my readers.

The question doesn’t sound in the least stupid to me. The Soviet reality is so different from anything people have experienced or can imagine in other countries that it is, indeed, very difficult to comprehend it.

Leaving the USSR was next to impossible. People who applied for visas (mostly the Jews who had relatives outside of the country) were persecuted, sometimes imprisoned, and sometimes placed in psychiatric wards. The idea behind this was that anybody who wanted to leave the Soviet paradise had to, of necessity, be insane. Such people would be put on massive amounts of powerful psychotropic drugs with the goal of “curing” them of their desire to emigrate.

The only people who could leave the country for a short visit overseas were the ones who were considered “reliable” by the regime. You had to be an artist going on a tour or a very famous scientist traveling to a conference with a group of other Soviet people, many of whom were KGB informants and were following your every move. Of course, if you were a Jew, you wouldn’t be able to travel at all because Jews were considered unreliable by default.

All of this vigilance didn’t always work and some of the artists or scientists did end up asking for refuge in the countries they visited. This meant that they would never see their families again and could not even hope to get in touch with their relatives back in the USSR. People were never allowed to travel with their families, and who could face losing everybody you know and love for good? Single people were not allowed to travel precisely for this reason. If you wanted to work as a diplomat, for example, you had to get married because only then could the government keep your wife and children as hostages whenever it liked to do so.

In Captain Capitalism’s reality, people can just get on a plane and fly to Finland. This is a great, beautiful reality, and I really love it that there are people in the world who think in these terms. A Soviet person, however, could not have imagined such a possibility. Even traveling by train from one city to another in the USSR was very problematic. You needed to be prepared to show paperwork explaining why you needed to travel just to buy a ticket. Getting on a train or a plane to travel within the country was extraordinarily difficult. And when I imagine a poor Soviet citizen approaching the ticket counter at a Soviet airport and asking for a ticket to Finland (Bulgaria, Poland, etc.), I feel bad for that hypothetical Soviet traveler already. This person would have ended up at the police station and then the psychiatric hospital within minutes.

Gosh, folks, you couldn’t even make a phone call to another country. Talking to a foreign tourist in the street would put you in jail. We were completely isolated from the world because the Soviet government knew that the only way to keep people from running away in droves was to lock them down.

It’s true that Siberia is vast and sparsely populated. Obviously, nobody could guard the entire expanse of the border perfectly. However, you have to possess very special training to survive the climatic conditions. Besides, you need to know where exactly to go to have a chance to cross the border. Remember that one thing that you could never ever hope to purchase in the USSR was a map. Of anything. All maps were top secret. Also, a person who tried fleeing the country in that way – even if s/he were successful – was destroying the lives of every family member for generations to come as a result of the flight. How many people can face something like this?

I hate the Soviet Union.

Spain-splaining is a term a fellow Hispanist has come up with. I have been on the receiving end of the phenomenon quite a few times, so I know what this blogger is talking about.

Once, an acquaintance from Spain decided to prove to me that my Spanish could not possibly be as great as I thought it was.

“Let’s see if you know these very difficult words in Spanish,” he said and proceeded to list them.

The words he thought had to be impossibly complicated for me were: urbanización, existencialismo, colonización, internacionalización, and other similar words.

The poor guy was crushed when he discovered I knew what they meant. He was even more shocked to find out that these words sounded almost exactly the same in English, Russian, and French.