VirusHead

I have something to say about the recent Supreme Court decision that upheld the ban on late-term abortions, whether or not the pregnancy endangers the woman’s life.

I’m a pragmatic contextual ethicist with a spiritual sensibility, and I cannot be silent. I cannot pretend that I don’t understand the next step in this game. If you stop for a moment to think about it, what will be required next is blindingly obvious.

A dead woman.

All you vultures will sit there and watch it happen. Obviously, a pregnant woman will not be able to bring a case where a pregnancy is endangering her life. The system just doesn’t move that fast. The situation is even worse than that. Not just any dead pregnant woman will do.

She has to be the right woman, doesn’t she?

I’m just cynical enough to realize that any number of women will die before anyone squeaks, before this debate will have a chance to heat up in America.

Don’t you understand that the simple death of a pregnant woman isn’t enough?

In this climate, the woman’s life will have to be perceived as “mattering” before anyone will risk the fight. She’ll have to be perceived as a true and noble victim, above reproach from any quarter. She won’t be a drug addict, and she won’t be poor. She’ll have to be married, I suppose, and maybe even a fundamentalist (that family will get the ultimate wake-up call!). She’ll be white… ya think?

Will the anti-choicers be so comfortable, even then, with the women-controlling agenda? Will they understand then the consequences of their ineffective abstinence-only pseudo-education, their hypocritical opposition to birth control and family planning, their avoidance of the contributing issues of poverty and ignorance and rape and domestic violence and drug addiction and all the rest?

Maybe it’s possible to oppose abortion in theory, because they haven’t thought it through to the moment when some “special circumstance” involves their kith and kin, when their daughter or sister or cousin or wife or mother or aunt or friend stares at death? Or will they be as fanatical as Jehovah’s Witnesses, who refuse blood transfusions even to save a life?

I hope you hold this fatal reality as a heavy, heavy burden upon you. In many places, abortion is already legal, safe, but unavailable even in the first two trimesters. Here in Georgia, a pregnant woman now has to look at an ultrasound first, as though she were unaware of the reality, as though she were a child in need of a lesson from her superiors. Now, even saving the life of the woman isn’t enough to satisfy their heartless cause? What’s next, stoning?

Will you ignore her pleas (and perhaps those of her partner) as her death approaches? Will you continue to prioritize the life of a fetus over the life of a grown woman then? When she is dead, will you offer to support the motherless babe – if it lives? Will you offer to shoulder the burdens of whatever medical or economic issues may arise?

The legal system has no right to override the choice of a woman or the advice of her medical team, but that hasn’t stopped them from sentencing some pregnant women to death with this ruling. The ones who swung the new and harsher Supreme Court were male, of course, but these days there are actually women who would have done it (more’s the pity).

One woman will be chosen to represent all those women who will die because of this unethical ruling. She won’t want to be chosen. She will not have chosen this destiny for herself. You will have chosen it for her by allowing this country (in this way as in so many other ways) to become what it is today.

She’ll be your corpse, and her blood will be on your heads.

You will have killed her by intervening in realms where you don’t belong: entering into the arena of an individual woman’s hard choices, disrupting her rightful ability to decide what is best in her own unique circumstances, overriding the medical expertise of her doctor and medical team, stepping between a woman and her God, and disregarding the support (one can hope that all women have some support) and advice and help of her friends and family. You may create a widower or an orphan. You may induce trauma in cases where the man, who was at least equally responsible for the pregnancy, may well feel responsible for her death as well. Or you may reward a rapist, who will walk away unscathed, triumphant.

You will have killed her with all your little misrepresenting slogans. You will have killed her by refusing to be accountable to reality, by making it impossible to talk about this issue in any realistic way, such as one that actually takes into account the wide range of circumstances that a pregnant woman may be facing. Roe v Wade was the attempt to find a solution, and you’re on your way to overturning it.

You will have killed her by refusing to face a set of controversial and difficult issues as responsible adults, citizens and leaders. This is bigger than your little power struggles. You should be listening to a wide range of women’s experiences, in order to put together an understanding of the different kinds of situations that women actually face – including their regrets and their gratitude. Choices are hard, and situations are complex. We should be teaching contextual ethics, not inhuman dogmas.

Heartless cads you are, on both sides of the debate, if you cannot step back into the complexity of reality and the range of what matters in human experience.

When you’ve killed this resonant symbol of a woman, you will not be able to say that you did not know what it is that you did.

You’ll refer to her by her first name when you use her and punditize her and sling her name around in your mouths – as if you knew her, as if you cared.

I hope she has the presence of mind to cry out “why have you forsaken me?” as she dies, and I hope her husband and family distribute the video all over the world. I hope her image becomes an ikon.

Keep on the lookout for her corpse. It may take a while for the acceptable sacrifice to appear, the one who will be pristine enough to satisfy all of your many requirements – and yet lack the resources to leave the country.

Sooner or later one will come who will reanimate this issue – with her death.

May her resurrection in the public sphere be powerful.

May it blast you like the proclamations of the ancient prophets.

Pass it on.

Evidently there is a new movie on the horizon called “The Golden Compass.” At the movie site, they are offering to ask you a few questions to establish your Daemon personality match.

My daemonic match is “Aeschylus” the butterfly: Modest, a leader, sociable, shy and fickle. Since my daemon is for some reason supposed to be the opposite gender, it is male (do they have it confused with anima/us? or perhaps a familiar? a totem?) I don’t think of Aeschylus and butterflies in the same visionary set myself.

He who learns must suffer, and, even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God. – Aeschylus

In war, truth is the first casualty. – Aeschylus

Death is better, a milder fate than tyranny. – Aeschylus, Agamemnon

For somehow this is tyranny’s disease, to trust no friends. – Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound

It is a profitable thing, if one is wise, to seem foolish. – Aeschylus

Hmmm. Well. If you like, you can affect the final result. My friends can decide if this is a representation of the “real me.” Changes will be allowed for 12 days. This display will update in response to differing assessments.

So, if you have a sense of me, go ahead and affect the results.

It should be interesting to hear more about the movie. Marketing by quiz results.

(thanks to Laureth and Prism)

I’ve been selected for the Thinking Blogger Award! Jolly Roger at Reconstitution was kind enough to name me as a Thinking Blogger.

VirusHead – Heidi is a recovered Jehova’s Witness and first rate progressive thinker. She covers everything from warm and personal to wretched and Presidential.

Thank you, JR! You’d have been on my picks, too, but I suppose that tagging you right back wouldn’t be in the spirit of the thing.

The Thinking Blogger award is actually a meme, but it’s a clever one because it challenges you to name – and describe – five more blogs that make you think. Surfing around in the list is very fun.

I’ve been swamped under a couple of freelance projects, but I’ve finally got a few minutes to participate. So….

5 Blogs That Make Me Think

1. Bitch Ph.D. – A kind of sister in spirit. Love the header image – cheers me up every time I see it. Edgy, witty, personal, professional, entertaining – it’s like reading my dream best friend’s diary. I was very upset to have missed her recent visit to Emory. John met her, but I would have appreciated it more. Bah!
2. Hail Dubyas (An Illustrated Guide to Mendacity and Folly in the Imperium Americanum) – A cunning combination of satirical cartoons and well-written commentary. About once a week, this makes me break from my zombie-like computer stare into a grin and giggle.
3. Pandagon – I know, but I was reading Pandagon and Shakespeare’s Sister++ before everybody else knew them because of the whole Edwards thing. Amanda’s Pandagon blog is a treasure to me. That’s all. Reading it is never a waste of my time. I love her thoughtful flippancy.
4. Theospora (Oh, God, Grow Up) – Stimulates chains of fractal reflections. We have some common ground, and the differences are always instructive and helpful.
5. Prose and Thorn (The Place for Pointed Prose) – Sometimes acerbic, always progressive essays. Beyond the content, I enjoy PB’s creative turns of phrase.

Congratulations, you won a Thinking Blogger Award!

Should you choose to participate, please make sure you pass this list of rules to the blogs you are tagging.

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme
3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote (there is an alternative silver version if gold doesn’t fit your blog).

++I’d name Shakespeare’s Sister too, but it’s now a big ole’ group blog at Shakesville. Check it out anyway.

Here at VirusHead, I have a different host than at work. If any of you use WordPress at Yahoo Small Business, this post will interest you. If not – really – skip it.

I had to spend almost two days addressing the problems of upgrading WordPress at Yahoo Small Business hosting. Even now, I can’t really update any of the plugins that came with the Yahoo installation because of some funky permissions thing they do.

The first time I tried to upgrade, I could no longer access the blog at all. All that came up was a blank screen in the browser. I couldn’t find a solution. I gave up. I backed up the database with MyPhpAdmin, and recreated the blog at Yahoo.

I was only able to upgrade thanks to the resources at the WordPress codex and users’ forum and some very helpful advice from the comment left here by Ray on the previous post,. WordPress has upgrading instructions here, with common installation problems here.

I’m not sure I would recommend that you even try to upgrade unless you’re really comfortable with the things on the following list. Yes, it’s very much out of date, and so are the plugins. It might make more sense just to have more people giving Yahoo some feedback on servicing their WordPress client offer. Believe me, I would rather have done a one-click update like I do on my own host!

I’ve documented all the bits and pieces. In case you really need to do this, here’s how.

• First, update your plug-ins (Akismet will update itself in the upgrade).
• Use the WordPress backup plugin to do a backup of your WordPress directory. Download it for safekeeping. You can also use your friendly ftp program to download the entire WordPress directory onto your hard drive, too. You’ll need this if – after all – you change your mind about upgrading.
• Use MyPHPAdmin to export a back up your WordPress SQL database, too. Make several versions if you are unfamiliar with this. Make sure that use the right character set for export. If the upgrade fails, you’ll need this.
• Go to the WordPress dashboard and disable all your plugins.
• VERY IMPORTANT: From your WordPress backup on the hard drive, open the current wp-config.php file in the main directory. Delete the line “Define(’WP_CACHE’, true); //Added by WP-Cache Manager” and then save the file. Also save a copy of it under another name, like wp-configorig.php. You’ll need this file later.
• Edit wp-config.php file in the main Wordpress directory that you downloaded and change DB_USER and DB_PASSWORD with your yroot user and yroot password (the username and password you set up to administrate your databases. Ftp the new wp-config file.
• Now run upgrade.php by browsing to http://YOURSITE.com/YOURBLOG/wp-admin/upgrade.php. It should succeed, in theory.
• However, before you go any further, look at your blog and make sure it’s there. If you get a blank page, then you’ve put the wrong yroot user and password in the config file. Make sure it’s right and try again.
• You may have to play with the permissions settings in MyPhpAdmin. Make sure that you have any needed permissions. Customer Care can help you with this part if you run into trouble.
• If none of this is working for you, you’ll have to download the latest version of WordPress, ftp it up, and then run upgrade again.
• Assuming that your blog is up, check to make sure that your category links and other links are displaying. If you see an error like [Unknown column 'link_count' in 'where clause'], you’ve got to detour at this point (a web search on the exact phrase of that error will give you a sense of how many blogs are affected). If you’re upgrading from the version at Yahoo, there has been a major change in the way categories are indexed. I haven’t been able to find the perfect fix for this if the upgrade doesn’t do it, but there are two suggestions. The first didn’t work for me in MyPhpAdmin on Yahoo – perhaps because of yet more permissions issues, or maybe an older version of MySql – but you could try it because it’s probably the better fix:
  Run this SQL query:
ALTER TABLE --database--.wp_categories ADD COLUMN link_count BIGINT(20) NOT NULL DEFAULT 0 AFTER category_count,
ADD COLUMN posts_private TINYINT(1) NOT NULL DEFAULT 0 AFTER link_count,
ADD COLUMN links_private TINYINT(1) NOT NULL DEFAULT 0 AFTER posts_private;

• The second suggestion did work on Yahoo, but I hope it doesn’t mess anything up:
  First, save your home copy of wp-admin/upgrade-functions.php under another name, like you did with the wp-config file. Then, edit the original file and delete where it says
  // We are up-to-date. Nothing to do.
if ( $wp_db_version == $wp_current_db_version )
return;
  Ftp it up and run upgrade.php again. Then upload the original version of the file to restore it.
• Now, go get the wp-configorigin.php you saved earlier. Rename it back to wp-config.php and ftp it up.
• In your blog template, replace the current call for your blogroll with < ?php wp_list_bookmarks('title_after=&title_before='); ?>. Some of the older tags have been depreciated.
• Enable your plug-ins one by one to make sure they are compatible. If something breaks the blog, use ftp or the online file management at Yahoo to delete the applicable folder from the wp-content/plugins.

Another problem that surfaced: The bottom navigation on the index page disappeared. Some think that it has to do with plugins as well. I’m not running a “sticky post” plugin, which seems to be the primary problem for others. There is also a thought that there might be an incompatibility between the upgraded Akismet plugin and the Yahoo hosting. In my case, I finally figured out that I needed to remove a hand-coded call to the FAlbum plugin (which isn’t enabled) on the Index page.

I still have minor problems. Do not attempt to use the newer version of the WP Cache plugin or the Yahoo version of the Customizable Permalinks Plugin! Keep them disabled or they will break the blog, and you’ll have to go back and do a lot of this again. You’re pretty much stuck with the versions of third-party plugins that Yahoo gave you. If they included them, it’s probably because they have set it up in some special way – if you update the plugin, it probably won’t work anymore. If you know workarounds, please comment.