Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 171 of 447 · 20 per page

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  She dropped her eyes. “I’ve done something terrible. Jess, I was just trying to help. I let myself in next door and found the name of the company where you work on the check stubs you keep on the kitchen table. I thought if I called you in sick, you might be able to keep your job. I told them you got mugged and you’d be out for a week or two. Jess, I referred to you as she. I wasn’t thinking. They heard it. ’m so sorry. I know it means I lost that job for you.” 288 = Leslie Feinberg Ruth touched my face. “I know you must be really mad at me.” I shook my head. It was a mistake, that’s all. I thought about Duffy, the union organizer who'd done the same thing, and I forgave him in retrospect. I fluttered my hand to ask for something to write with. Ruth came back with a pen and paper. My right hand was stiff and sore, but the words I wrote were legible—the message life had given me another chance to deliver. Ruth read the words out loud: Thank _you for your love. And then we cried together. I visited the graphic arts employment agency in person and wrote down that I was looking for work. I started a new job the same night. That’s when I realized ’'d become a valuable typesetter. Christmas was a month and a half away and the third shift could hardly handle the volume of work the ad agencies were sending over. I took all the overtime they offered. I wanted a chunk of money, fast. At night I lived inside the coding strings, my face illuminated by the ghostly light of the terminal. The code phrases became my poetry. The curves of type against space sang to me: the melody meant everything, the words meant very little. At dawn I worked out at the gym, pausing only when the throbbing in my head frightened me. I moved my will to live down deeper into my body. Since my rage and frustration couldn’t escape through my clamped jaws, I screamed through my muscles. I thought I might explode with rage. At first working out at the gym reduced the pressure, but after a while the frenzied workouts became part of it. I was a time bomb, ticking, ticking, moments away from detonation. I didn’t sleep very much, just a few hours in the morning and late afternoon. I feared losing consciousness, afraid ’'d never find my way back. Ruth seemed worried about how much time I spent away from the apartment. I could tell by the relief on her face every day when I knocked on her door to check in with her. “Where do you go?” she’d sigh as she poured me a protein shake. I could tell she didn’t expect an answer.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  The next morning I called up all the butches from the plant so we could go to the meeting Tuesday night as a group. When I called Grant, she had big news. “The steel plant has to hire fifty women,” she told me. ““They’re accepting applications Wednesday morning. I don’t know about you, but I'll be camping out on the line Tuesday night. By late that night the line will stretch from Lackawanna to Tonawanda.” It was a slight exaggeration, but her point was well taken. I called Jan. “I don’t know,” she said. “What do you think we should do?” “T was kind of hoping you'd tell me what we should do,” I told her. I called Duffy on Tuesday afternoon. I told him all the butches wanted the chance to get into the steel plant. There was a long silence on the line. “It’s a mistake,” he said. “You don’t understand,” I shouted. “You don’t Stone Butch Blues 107 know what it means to us to get into a big plant like that.” He tried to argue with me. “If the vote passes, at least punch in Wednesday morning or else you'll be automatically fired.” He didn’t seem to realize I was already gone. “You don’t understand what it would mean to work in the steel mill, do your” He shouted back at me. “What the hell is this about, looking tough?”’ “Yeah,” I yelled, “in a way. But not like you’re saying it. All we got is the clothes we wear, the bikes we tide, and where we work, you know? You can ride a Honda and work in a bindery or you can ride a Harley and work at the steel plant. The other butches are gonna leave sooner or later, and I don’t want to get stuck in that sweatshop with that rinky-dink union.” I knew Id hurt him, but I couldn’t find a way to retreat. “If you don’t understand that, I can’t explain it to you,” I told him. “Well, I think it’s stupid.” He sounded like a kid. That’s when I knew I had really hurt him. “The company was ordered to hire fifty women, but they don’t have to keep them. If five of you last the ninety days to get into the union I’ll eat Jim Boney’s baseball mitt.” 108 = Leslie Feinberg I was riled. “It’s my baseball mitt,’ I reminded him and hung up the phone. Tuesday night was bitter cold. We huddled around the flames leaping out of metal barrels. It was a long, long night. My stomach tightened every time I thought about the contract ratification meeting. “You think we made a mistake?” Jan asked me. I didn’t answer. Fuck Duffy, | thought to myself. He doesnt understand us.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  129Lecture 13—The Enlightenment Quest for Reasonable Faith õThey demanded the right to question everything, even their society’s most sacred authorities, the crown and the church. Here’s how Diderot put it in his famous work, the Encyclopédie: “Facts may be distributed into three classes: the acts of divinity, the phenomena of nature, and the actions of men. The first belong to theology, the second to philosophy, and the last to history properly speaking. All are equally subject to criticism.” õThe French radicals believed the Church had kept Europe in chains. Its bishops had a long history of muzzling geniuses like Galileo and serving as willing pawns in the hands of power-hungry and bloodthirsty kings. õIt’s probably best to call Voltaire a Deist, but he was far more critical of Christianity than most English Deists were. He told Frederick the Great that it was “the most absurd and bloody religion which has ever infected this world.” He published The Bible Finally Explained in 1776, in which he argued scripture was irrational and cruel. The book hit a nerve. It went through nine editions in two years. A NEW MORAL FOUNDATION õThe radical philosophes devoted their careers to searching for alternatives to Christianity as a moral foundation for society. Some found solace in ancient philosophy and believed that the self-denying morality of Greek and Roman Stoicism held the key to peaceful society. õMany Enlightenment thinkers— from iconoclasts like Diderot and Rousseau to radicals like David Hume—also wrote reams and reams about the role of sympathy. Hume gave us a helpful definition of what they meant by sympathy: 130The History of Christianity II He said sympathy is “the propensity to ... receive by communication [the] inclinations and sentiments” of other people, “however different from, or even contrary to our own” those sentiments might be. õIn other words, Hume noted our remarkable ability to step into another person’s shoes, even if that person sees the world in a very different way, and to understand what they think and feel. This capacity, many philosophes believed, lays the groundwork for our moral imagination. Sympathy binds humans together and provides a non-theological basis for treating each other in ethical ways. SUGGESTED READING Pagden, The Enlightenment. Pincus, 1688. Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment. QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER äHow does national politics inf luence the work and attitudes of intellectuals? äWhy were so many theologians so keen to prove that Christianity is “reasonable”? äIs the philosophes’ notion of “sympathy” a viable substitute for the moral law of traditional religions?

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  225Lecture 23—Fundamentalism and Pentecostalism FUNDAMENTALIST OPPOSITION õToday, Pentecostalism is a thriving international branch of Christianity. A 2011 Pew study estimated that more than 580 million people worldwide practice Pentecostal Christianity or its cousin, Charismatic Christianity. õBut 100 years ago, most Christians found Pentecostal beliefs and practices totally outrageous. Much anti-Pentecostal backlash came from the diverse subculture of conservative Protestants who were, by the turn of the 20 th century, beginning to think of themselves as fundamentalists. They believed they were the only Christians left who really stood by the fundamentals of the faith. õThis conf lict between fundamentalists and modernists hinged on the question of how Western Protestants ought to respond to the big changes of the 19 th century. Such changes include intellectual developments like the theory of evolution, but also social and economic changes too: the growth of noisy, smelly cities; the inf lux of immigrants, many of whom were not Protestant or even Christian; and the rise of first-wave feminism. õThe fundamentalists were those Protestants who strongly opposed these developments and fought against efforts to back away from a literal reading of, for example, Genesis. They fought against the drive to embrace modern scholarly methods and even to entertain the thought that other religions might be valid ways to know the divine. õFundamentalists found all that outrageous, and they fought hard to keep control of their churches, seminaries, and missions organizations between roughly 1900 and 1930. In most cases, they lost. Many—although not all—of them broke away to found their own denominations. õThe fundamentalists’ exact beliefs varied between Baptist fundamentalists, Presbyterians, or Mennonite fundamentalists. But in general, they shared some basic things with the Pentecostals. 226The History of Christianity II They believed that the Bible was wholly free of error. They believed that modern scholarship usually couldn’t be trusted. They believed God was all-powerful. And many of them believed that the world was ending soon. õBelow is a list of five key fundamentalist doctrines, though it is not an exhaustive list of fundamentalist beliefs: 1. The miracles in the Bible really did happen. They were not optical illusions, or myths, as renegade modernist scholars in Germany and elsewhere had argued. 2. Jesus died on the cross for our sins. 3. Jesus experienced bodily resurrection after crucifixion. 4. Jesus came from a virgin birth. 5. The Bible is completely without error, even when it comes to historical fact.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  I was wearing nothing but a T-shirt and sweatpants. We walked to the Eden Park police station, over a kilometer away. My mom marched us in, and there were two cops on duty at the front desk. “I’m here to lay a charge,” she said. “What are you here to lay a charge about?” “I’m here to lay a charge against the man who hit me.” To this day I’ll never forget the patronizing, condescending way they spoke to her. “Calm down, lady. Calm down. Who hit you?” “My husband.” “Your husband? What did you do? Did you make him angry?” “Did I...what? No. He hit me. I’m here to lay a charge against—” “No, no. Ma’am. Why do you wanna make a case, eh? You sure you want to do this? Go home and talk to your husband. You do know once you lay charges you can’t take them back? He’ll have a criminal record. His life will never be the same. Do you really want your husband going to jail?” My mom kept insisting that they take a statement and open a case, and they actually refused—they refused to write up a charge sheet. “This is a family thing,” they said. “You don’t want to involve the police. Maybe you want to think it over and come back in the morning.” Mom started yelling at them, demanding to see the station commander, and right then Abel walked into the station. He’d driven down. He’d sobered up a bit, but he was still drunk, driving into a police station. That didn’t matter. He walked over to the cops, and the station turned into a boys’ club. Like they were a bunch of old pals. “Hey, guys,” he said. “You know how it is. You know how women can be. I just got a little angry, that’s all.” “It’s okay, man. We know. It happens. Don’t worry.” I had never seen anything like it. I was nine years old, and I still thought of the police as the good guys. You get in trouble, you call the police, and those flashing red-and-blue lights are going to come and save you. But I remember standing there watching my mom, flabbergasted, horrified that these cops wouldn’t help her. That’s when I realized the police were not who I thought they were. They were men first, and police second. We left the station. My mother took me and Andrew, and we went out to stay with my grandmother in Soweto for a while. A few weeks later, Abel drove over and apologized. Abel was always sincere and heartfelt with his apologies: He didn’t mean it. He knows he was wrong. He’ll never do it again. My grandmother convinced my mom that she should give Abel a second chance. Her argument was basically, “All men do it.” My grandfather, Temperance, had hit her. Leaving Abel was no guarantee it wouldn’t happen again, and at least Abel was willing to apologize.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  It was like he’d been holding it together the whole morning and then everything broke loose at once and he lost it. I ran to him and hugged him and he cried and cried. His cry was different from mine, though. My cry was one of pain and anger. His cry was one of helplessness. I turned and ran into the emergency room. My mom was there in triage on a gurney. The doctors were stabilizing her. Her whole body was soaked in blood. There was a hole in her face, a gaping wound above her lip, part of her nose gone. She was as calm and serene as I’d ever seen her. She could still open one eye, and she turned and looked up at me and saw the look of horror on my face. “It’s okay, baby,” she whispered, barely able to speak with the blood in her throat. “It’s not okay.” “No, no, I’m okay, I’m okay. Where’s Andrew? Where’s your brother?” “He’s outside.” “Go to Andrew.” “But Mom—” “Shh. It’s okay, baby. I’m fine.” “You’re not fine, you’re—” “Shhhhhh. I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine. Go to your brother. Your brother needs you.” The doctors kept working, and there was nothing I could do to help her. I went back outside to be with Andrew. We sat down together, and he told me the story. They were coming home from church, a big group, my mom and Andrew and Isaac, her new husband and his children and a whole bunch of his extended family, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews. They had just pulled into the driveway when Abel pulled up and got out of his car. He had his gun. He looked right at my mother. “You’ve stolen my life,” he said. “You’ve taken everything away from me. Now I’m going to kill all of you.” Andrew stepped in front of his father. He stepped right in front of the gun. “Don’t do this, Dad, please. You’re drunk. Just put the gun away.” Abel looked down at his son. “No,” he said. “I’m killing everybody, and if you don’t walk away I will shoot you first.” Andrew stepped aside. “His eyes were not lying,” he told me. “He had the eyes of the Devil. In that moment I could tell my father was gone.” For all the pain I felt that day, in hindsight, I have to imagine that Andrew’s pain was far greater than mine. My mom had been shot by a man I despised. If anything, I felt vindicated; I’d been right about Abel all along. I could direct my anger and hatred toward him with no shame or guilt whatsoever. But Andrew’s mother had been shot by Andrew’s father, a father he loved. How does he reconcile his love with that situation?

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  On the contrary, The Philosopher (Ethic. iv, 5) quotes the saying that anger is “Sweet to the soul as honey to the taste” (Iliad, xviii, 109 [trl. Pope]). I answer that, As the Philosopher says (Ethic. vii, 14), pleasures, chiefly sensible and bodily pleasures, are remedies against sorrow: and therefore the greater the sorrow or anxiety, the more sensible are we to the pleasure which heals it, as is evident in the case of thirst which increases the pleasure of drink. Now it is clear from what has been said ([1431]Q[47], AA[1],3), that the movement of anger arises from a wrong done that causes sorrow, for which sorrow vengeance is sought as a remedy. Consequently as soon as vengeance is present, pleasure ensues, and so much the greater according as the sorrow was greater. Therefore if vengeance be really present, perfect pleasure ensues, entirely excluding sorrow, so that the movement of anger ceases. But before vengeance is really present, it becomes present to the angry man in two ways: in one way, by hope; because none is angry except he hopes for vengeance, as stated above ([1432]Q[46], A[1]); in another way, by thinking of it continually, for to everyone that desires a thing it is pleasant to dwell on the thought of what he desires; wherefore the imaginings of dreams are pleasant. Accordingly an angry man takes pleasure in thinking much about vengeance. This pleasure, however, is not perfect, so as to banish sorrow and consequently anger. Reply to Objection 1: The angry man does not grieve and rejoice at the same thing; he grieves for the wrong done, while he takes pleasure in the thought and hope of vengeance. Consequently sorrow is to anger as its beginning; while pleasure is the effect or terminus of anger. Reply to Objection 2: This argument holds in regard to pleasure caused by the real presence of vengeance, which banishes anger altogether. Reply to Objection 3: Pleasure that precedes hinders sorrow from ensuing, and consequently is a hindrance to anger. But pleasure felt in taking vengeance follows from anger. Whether anger above all causes fervor in the heart?Objection 1: It would seem that heat is not above all the effect of anger. For fervor, as stated above ([1433]Q[28], A[5];[1434] Q[37], A[2]), belongs to love. But love, as above stated, is the beginning and cause of all the passions. Since then the cause is more powerful than its effect, it seems that anger is not the chief cause of fervor. Objection 2: Further, those things which, of themselves, arouse fervor, increase as time goes on; thus love grows stronger the longer it lasts. But in course of time anger grows weaker; for the Philosopher says (Rhet. ii, 3) that “time puts an end to anger.” Therefore fervor is not the proper effect of anger.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  He sighed. “So I'd be willing to file a grievance to get you or any of the other women a Grade Five job. Just not that job.” I wanted to punch him out. “Why the fuck not, Duffy?” He put his arm lightly on my shoulder. I shook it off. My fists were balled up at my sides. “Listen, Goldberg, Jack and Boney are setting you up.” I was confused. “What’s Jim Boney got to do with this? Duffy pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered me one. I took it. “You know Leroy? Well, he’s a Grade Four. Most of the time they have him sweeping up.” I exhaled slowly. “Shit, I didn’t know that.” Duffy nodded. “He’s been bidding for the Grade Five job now for more than a year. When Freddie got drafted last month, Leroy told Jack he wanted the job. Jack kept stalling him. Leroy finally came to me and asked me to help him fight for the job, so we filed a grievance.” The picture was coming into focus. “Jack is using you. Boney’s a union man, but he’s such a fucking racist he’d rather block with Jack than work with the Black guy. Leroy deserves that job,” Duffy added. “Well, so do I,” I argued, but I said it without much steam. Duffy could see me wrestling with what he said. “Yeah, you do. And [ll help you push to get a higher grade job if you want to fight for it, just not this job. Stick with me on this one, Goldberg. It’s really important for the union right now.” “Why now?” I asked. “Our contract’s up at the end of October. The company will do anything to split us up right now to make it harder for us to strike if we have to. We need to stick together.” I sulked. “Look, Duffy, ?'m for the union, you know that. But butches can’t even come to union meetings.” Duffy looked confused. I explained to him that we were allowed to drink downstairs at the union hall, but we weren’t allowed to go upstairs to the meeting. Stone Butch Blues 81 “Who says?” he wanted to know. “That’s the way it is. That’s the way it’s always been, as far as I’ve heard.” Duffy put his arm around my shoulder. “Look, help Leroy win this one. As soon as the strike’s over, you get the butches together, and I’ll get as many of the stewards as possible, and we’ll all go into the ratification meeting as a group and insist on your right to be there.” It sounded like change. “I guess,” I told him. “But how come we have to wait till after the strike?” He knitted his eyebrows. “Well, we don’t. It’s just that there’s gonna be an explosion about Leroy, one way ot the other. ’m trying to hold things together this summer, so that we’re strong if we need to strike, you know?”

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Whatever progress it seemed like we were making during the Obama era has retracted sharply, painfully. We live in a very fractured time, one where difference has become weaponized, demonized, and where discourse demands allegiance to extremes instead of nuanced points of view. We live in a time where the president of the United States flouts all conventions of the office, decorum, and decency. Police brutality persists, unabated. Women share their experiences with sexual harassment or violence but rarely receive any kind of justice. It seems like things have only gotten worse since the height of Lorde’s career when she was writing about the very things we continue to deal with—the place of women and, more specifically, black women in the world, what it means to raise black girls and boys in a world that will not welcome them, what it means to live in a world so harshly stratified by class, what it means to live in a vulnerable body, what it means to live. There are very few voices for women and even fewer voices for black women, speaking from the center of consciousness, from the I am out to the we are , but Lorde was, throughout her storied career, one such voice . In her poem “Power,” Lorde wrote about a white police officer who murdered a ten-year-old black boy and was acquitted by a jury of eleven of his peers and one black woman who succumbed to the will of those peers. She captured the rage of such injustice and how futile it feels to try and fight such injustice, but she also demonstrated that even in the face of futility, silence is never an option. A great deal of Lorde’s writing was committed to articulating her worldview in service of the greater good. She crafted lyrical manifestos. The essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” made the case for the importance of poetry, arguing that poetry “is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.” In “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” Lorde examines women using their erotic power to benefit themselves instead of benefiting men. She notes that women are often vilified for their erotic power and treated as inferior. She suggests that we can rethink and reframe this paradigm. This is what is so remarkable about Lorde’s writing—how she encourages women to understand weaknesses as strengths. She writes, “As women, we need to examine the ways in which our world can be truly different. I am speaking here of the necessity for reassessing the quality of all aspects of our lives and our work, and how we move toward and through them.” In this, she offers an expansive definition of the erotic, one that goes well beyond the carnal to encompass a wide range of sensate experiences.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  One tool of the Great-American-Double-Think is to blame the victim for victimization: Black people are said to invite lynching by not knowing our place; Black women are said to invite rape and murder and abuse by not being submissive enough, or by being too seductive, or too . . . Staples’ “fact” that Black women get their sense of fulfillment from having children is only a fact when stated out of the mouths of Black men, and any Black person in this country, even a “happily married” woman who has “no pent-up frustrations that need release” (!) is either a fool or insane. This smacks of the oldest sexist canard of all time, that all a woman needs to “keep her quiet” is a “good man.” File that one alongside “Some of my best friends are . . .” Instead of beginning the much-needed dialogue between Black men and Black women, Staples retreats to a defensive stance reminiscent of white liberals of the 60s, many of whom saw any statement of Black pride and self-assertion as an automatic threat to their own identity and an attempt to wipe them out. Here we have an intelligent Black man believing—or at least saying—that any call to Black women to love ourselves (and no one said only ) is a denial of, or threat to, his Black male identity! In this country, Black women traditionally have had compassion for everybody else except ourselves. We have cared for whites because we had to for pay or survival; we have cared for our children and our fathers and our brothers and our lovers. History and popular culture, as well as our personal lives, are full of tales of Black women who had “compassion for misguided black men.” Our scarred, broken, battered and dead daughters and sisters are a mute testament to that reality. We need to learn to have care and compassion for ourselves, also. In the light of what Black women often willingly sacrifice for our children and our men, this is a much needed exhortation, no matter what illegitimate use the white media makes of it. This call for self-value and self-love is quite different from narcissism, as Staples must certainly realize. Narcissism comes not out of self-love but out of self-hatred. The lack of a reasonable and articulate Black male viewpoint on these questions is not the responsibility of Black women. We have too often been expected to be all things to all people and speak everyone else’s position but our very own. Black men are not so passive that they must have Black women speak for them. Even my fourteen-year-old son knows that. Black men themselves must examine and articulate their own desires and positions and stand by the conclusions thereof. No point is served by a Black male professional who merely whines at the absence of his viewpoint in Black women’s work.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  I visited less and less. Then I popped by one afternoon and the house was in chaos, police cars out front, the aftermath of another fight. He’d hit her with a bicycle. Abel had been berating one of his workers in the yard, and my mom had tried to get between them. Abel was furious that she’d contradicted him in front of an employee, so he picked up Andrew’s bike and he beat her with it. Again she called the police, and the cops who showed up this time actually knew Abel. He’d fixed their cars. They were pals. No charges were filed. Nothing happened. That time I confronted him. I was big enough now. “You can’t keep doing this,” I said. “This is not right.” He was apologetic. He always was. He didn’t puff out his chest and get defensive or anything like that. “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. I don’t like doing these things, but you know how your mom is. She can talk a lot and she doesn’t listen. I feel like your mom doesn’t respect me sometimes. She came and disrespected me in front of my workers. I can’t have these other men looking at me like I don’t know how to control my wife.” After the bicycle, my mom hired contractors she knew through the real-estate business to build her a separate house in the backyard, like a little servants’ quarters, and she moved in there with Isaac. “This is the most insane thing I’ve ever seen,” I told her. “This is all I can do,” she said. “The police won’t help me. The government won’t protect me. Only my God can protect me. But what I can do is use against him the one thing that he cherishes, and that is his pride. By me living outside in a shack, everyone is going to ask him, ‘Why does your wife live in a shack outside your house?’ He’s going to have to answer that question, and no matter what he says, everyone will know that something is wrong with him. He loves to live for the world. Let the world see him for who he is. He’s a saint in the streets. He’s a devil in this house. Let him be seen for who he is.” When my mom had decided to keep Isaac, I was so close to writing her off. I couldn’t stand the pain anymore. But seeing her hit with a bicycle, living like a prisoner in her own backyard, that was the final straw for me. I was a broken person. I was done. “This thing?” I told her. “This dysfunctional thing? I won’t be a part of it. I can’t live this life with you. I refuse. You’ve made your decision. Good luck with your life. I’m going to live mine.” She understood.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  In the US., the media works around the clock to “justify” covert and overt wars for economic and geo-strategic advantage—from threatening “regime change” through fomenting and arming reaction and counter-revolution, lynching leaders of other countries, psychological operations, overwhelming military force, troop occupations, formations of mercenary armies, and emboldening fascist forces. LESSONS OF THE PINK TRIANGLE As a white, working-class, Jewish, transgender lesbian revolutionary, I too have studied the historical lessons of the rise of fascism in Germany, Italy and Spain— attempts to save capitalism for the 1%. These lessons inform my life’s direct action. ... I see that the Kolektiv Queer Beograd, the Belgrade Pride organizers, and “Antifa in Action” are 345 Stone Butch Blues showing great bravery and steadfastness in the face of attacks and threats from fascist forces, with reported state and police collusion. FIGHTING RACISM, FASCISM & WAR FROM INSIDE THE USS. Domestically in the U.S.—during this period of capitalist economic crisis—apartheid passbook laws are being written into law; undocumented workers are being rounded up, detained and face mass deportations; Muslims are targets of this state “war of terror’; and white supremacist, fascist shock troops are receiving arms and funding. Racist, fascist massacres targeted Black people in Tulsa, Oklahama—the second anti-Black massacre in the city’s history—and took the lives of Sikhs at a temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Police gun down people of color with virtual legal impunity. Youth of color in the U.S. are facing no jobs, no recreation centers, no education or massive student debt, police “stop and frisk” actions, racist passbook laws, the school-to-prison pipeline, homelessness, lack of health care, no place to gather, and curtailed freedom of travel due to curfews—official and unofficial. 346 = Leslie Feinberg The rise of fascist bullying has led many opptessed youths to end their own lives. Others are organizing, and winning activist support from all generations, to fight back! ‘FREE CECE NOW? A war against transwomen—particularly women of color—is claiming lives from Oakland, California; to Chicago, Illinois; to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. But CeCe McDonald survived! CeCe McDonald, a young Black (trans)woman, and her friends were violently attacked by a group of whites who identified themselves as fascist by their actions, slurs, and swastika tattoo. CeCe was badly cut at the onset of the attack, in which one fascist died. Today, CeCe is in prison, and her friends have reported ongoing racist, fascist harassment. CeCe McDonald’s courage and tenacity has inspired liberationist currents in the U.S. political struggle, and in countries around the world. I took direct action on June 4, 2012—on the one-year anniversary of the attack, and the day CeCe McDonald was sentenced to prison. I wrote the peoples’ verdict on the jailhouse wall: “FREE CECE NOW!” As a journalist, author and proud member of the National Writers Union/UAW Local 1981—I’m most proud of writing those three words.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  267Lecture 27—Rebellion and Reform in Latin America õAfter the Mexican Revolution—essentially, a civil war between 1910 and 1920—the liberals emerged victorious and revised the constitution to impose more rules on the Catholic Church. The new constitution banned religious schools to make all education secular. õPublic religious celebrations could only happen under close government supervision, and any religious school or newly built church became government property. Churches couldn’t run public charities, and clergy couldn’t run for public office. The government set a quota on how many clergy could serve any region of the country, so every priest had to register with the state. THE CRISTERO REBELLION õIn 1926, tension between the church and the liberal regime came to a head. The Archbishop of Mexico, José Mora y del Río, announced that all good Catholics ought to reject the Constitution. The liberal president, General Plutarco Elías Calles, retaliated by closing religious houses and schools, banning public religious celebrations, and booting any foreign priests out of the country. õThe archbishop told the priests of Mexico City to go on strike—no public masses, marriages, or baptisms. This strike lasted for three years. Some priests called for laypeople to rise up in violent rebellion. õRebels answered this call and became known as Cristeros. Soon, there were tens of thousands of them, including at least 25,000 women. They operated through guerrilla warfare and terrorism: blowing up trains, murdering teachers at government schools, and setting fire to government buildings. President Calles told his supporters to murder a priest in revenge for every state employee killed. õThe violence went on until 1929. More than 30,000 rebels and about 57,000 federal soldiers died in the fighting. Finally, the two sides arrived at a compromise that restored some rights to the church. 268The History of Christianity II They were allowed to resume teaching religious ideas, although not in schools. Confiscated property stayed in government hands. The bishops decided to accept this and call off the strike, but some of the restrictions on religious freedom persisted into the 1990s. THE ARGENTINIAN CHURCH õThis violent tangle between the Catholic Church and the state was not unique to Mexico. An example is how the 20 th century played out in Argentina. The story of the Argentinian priest Jorge Bergoglio, who eventually became Pope Francis, illustrates this.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  As a factory-worker’s daughter, I did not know that the wealthy rulers of my country were enraged by the loss of China as—from their point of view—a colonial treasure to exploit mercilessly. But I felt the impact in my own life of the domestic reactionary political crusade that this ruling class embarked on within the United States as a result of their rage about the Chinese Revolution. Progressive people feared losing their jobs and being driven out of their towns. In those early years of my childhood, anti-Asian racism—especially against Japanese, Chinese and Korean people—was rampant. And anti-Semitism dangerously deepened. When I was a child, the post-WWII job categories for women wete restricted to “homemaker” and Stone Butch Blues 339 “mother.” This period of extreme sexual reaction had a tremendous impact on my growing up as a masculine girl child. But one of the prominent features of this domestic witch-hunt was the hounding of lesbian and gay people. Extortion of people accused of being gay—whether or not they were—was commonplace, as I am painfully aware happens today in Tatwan. It was because of the exacerbation of repression during the 1950s that mass social movements arose to challenge the worst features of oppression in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. Movements for Civil Rights, the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords Party, the American Indian Movement and the movements for women’s and gay liberation arose as a response to iton-fisted reaction. I came of age and consciousness during these movements that were fighting for profound social change. They shaped me. As a result, I have devoted my life, together with my fellow travelers, in trying to weed out every seedpod of bigotry and discrimination that is rooted in the very unjust and unequal social and economic system in which we live in the US. I am also fully aware that those who rule from the citadel of wealth and power in my country—like those in the palaces and mansions in Britatn—have 340 Leslie Feinberg carried out terrible crimes against the peoples of Asia in order to squeeze out every drop of profit. So I take seriously my own responsibility to you to conduct the battle here, in the belly of the US. beast, to defend the right of self-determination and sovereignty of all the peoples of Asia. Revolutionaries—like revolutions—seek to unweave all the threads of prejudice from the tapestry of their thought. That is not an easy task to accomplish given the crushing weight of media and education that reinforce the messages of the dominant elite, on top of repression. Of course if education were all that was required, we could write many books and repair and uplift human thinking. But trying to combat the governing ideas of the master class with education alone is like trying to put out a forest fire with teacups of water!

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  Ive written the following regarding author’s rights and requests, in as clear a way as I can, to answer the questions I am asked most frequently in individual inquiries. I give this novel back to the workers and oppressed of the world. The revolutionary and anti-capitalist movements for social and economic justice have given me so much in life. I give this novel back, as a tiny hand- made gift, flaws and all, to the workers and oppressed of the world. I have retained full Author Copyright to Szone Butch Blues, rather than license this 20th Anniversary Edition through Creative Commons. The reason is not out of a fetish for ownership of property but rather to protect my work from being exploited commercially by corporations. Marxism has never been opposed to private ownership of personal property or products of one’s own labor—and, in fact, holds that everyone should be able to have these things. Instead, Marxists say that the 1% banks and corporations have seized the giant worker-built apparatus of production and the distribution of production as their own—they claim they own it all. As a communist, I am for abolishing ownership by the 1% of the socially-built apparatus of production. Workers and oppressed people—already doing the work of the world every day—can run that productive apparatus to make historically overdue reparations and to meet the needs and wants of the 99%. While Stone Butch Blues is fiction, it speaks truth. But the capitalist deeds of ownership that say the 1% owns everything that has been produced by collective labor, both enslaved and waged—those deeds are fiction and should be torn up. And on the day those paper deeds of ownership are torn up, it won’t matter about protecting Szone Butch Blues anymore from commercial exploitation. Hurry that day! The law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose off the common But leaves the greater villain loose Who steals the common from the goose. The law demands that we atone When we take things we do not own But leaves the lords and ladies fine Who take things that are yours and mine. The law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common And geese will still a common lack Till they go and steal it back. Stone Butch Blues 353 From the 1600s through the early 1700s, this was a popular protest rhyme against English capitalist-class foreclosure of commontly-held land. AUTHOR RIGHTS In the meantime, here I assert my author rights to Stone Butch Blues in this 20th Anniversary Edition: No permissions, no contracts, no commercial use, no derivative use, no digital rights. No derivative uses No adaptations: Don’t tell me you’re honoring me by saying you can tell this story better than I did. No movie version:

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  She sang a song in a voice so satiny smooth that I trusted the sound and followed it right into sleep. Edwin brought over my blue suit coat. She found the matching trousers in a pile by my bathroom door and took them both to the dry cleaners for me. When I didn’t show up at the Malibou the next Friday, Ed and Georgetta and Peaches came by and picked me up. Cookie threw me a towel when I arrived and told me to start waiting on tables. I moved in numbness for several weeks, unable to feel the sensation of temperature, hot or cold. The world seemed distant. One night at work a guy beckoned me over to his table and told me to take the french fries back to the kitchen. He said they were cold. I took them to Cookie, but she said she was too busy. I brought the french fries back to the guy and apologized. He picked up a class of water and poured its contents all over the french fries. ““They’re cold,” he said. He opened a traveling case, pulled out a huge snake, and coiled it around his neck. And then he bit off a chunk of the water glass and chewed it. “The french fries are cold,” he repeated. “Cookie,” I yelled as I skidded into the kitchen. “Give me some hot french fries, and I mean now!” She started to protest. “Now, goddamn it. I want them now!” The guy left me a great tip. “You didn’t know who that guy was?” Booker doubled over laughing, Everyone chuckled. “That was Razor Man. He performs at a club near here.” I threw down my towel. “This job is fucked up,” I protested, but even I started to smile. “What’s so funny?” Toni said behind me. I turned around to explain but her face was all twisted up in anger. “I said, what’s so goddamn funny?” she demanded. One of the butches tried to pull her back, “Come on, Toni, blow it off.” She yanked free and staggered toward me. “You think you’re funny?” “What the hell, Toni,” I said, flustered. A group of pros came in the door and I started to walk over to say hello, but Toni spun me around. “You think I don’t know what’s going on with you and my femme?” Everyone sucked in their breath. I felt stunned. “Toni, what the hell are you talking about?” “You think I don’t know, don’t your” Betty started toward Toni, but Angie, one of the pros who had just walked in, held her back. “Step outside, you chickenshit bastard.” Toni spat on the floor. I sure as hell didn’t want to fight Toni, so I went Stone Butch Blues 69 outside to talk to her. Everyone followed me out to listen. “Toni,” I appealed to het. “Shut up and fight, you fuckin’ bastard. Come on, you chickenshit son-of-a-bitch.”

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Accordingly in the first way, anger is not a general passion but is condivided with the other passions, as stated above ([1415]Q[23], A[4]). In like manner, neither is it in the second way: since it is not a cause of the other passions. But in this way, love may be called a general passion, as Augustine declares (De Civ. Dei xiv, 7,9), because love is the primary root of all the other passions, as stated above ([1416]Q[27], A[4] ). But, in a third way, anger may be called a general passion, inasmuch as it is caused by a concurrence of several passions. Because the movement of anger does not arise save on account of some pain inflicted, and unless there be desire and hope of revenge: for, as the Philosopher says (Rhet. ii, 2), “the angry man hopes to punish; since he craves for revenge as being possible.” Consequently if the person, who inflicted the injury, excel very much, anger does not ensue, but only sorrow, as Avicenna states (De Anima iv, 6). Reply to Objection 1: The irascible power takes its name from “ira” [anger], not because every movement of that power is one of anger; but because all its movements terminate in anger; and because, of all these movements, anger is the most patent. Reply to Objection 2: From the very fact that anger is caused by contrary passions, i.e. by hope, which is of good, and by sorrow, which is of evil, it includes in itself contrariety: and consequently it has no contrary outside itself. Thus also in mixed colors there is no contrariety, except that of the simple colors from which they are made. Reply to Objection 3: Anger includes several passions, not indeed as a genus includes several species; but rather according to the inclusion of cause and effect. Whether the object of anger is good or evil?Objection 1: It would seem that the object of anger is evil. For Gregory of Nyssa says [*Nemesius, De Nat. Hom. xxi.] that anger is “the sword-bearer of desire,” inasmuch, to wit, as it assails whatever obstacle stands in the way of desire. But an obstacle has the character of evil. Therefore anger regards evil as its object. Objection 2: Further, anger and hatred agree in their effect, since each seeks to inflict harm on another. But hatred regards evil as its object, as stated above ([1417]Q[29], A[1]). Therefore anger does also. Objection 3: Further, anger arises from sorrow; wherefore the Philosopher says (Ethic. viii, 6) that “anger acts with sorrow.” But evil is the object of sorrow. Therefore it is also the object of anger. On the contrary, Augustine says (Confess. ii, 6) that “anger craves for revenge.” But the desire for revenge is a desire for something good: since revenge belongs to justice. Therefore the object of anger is good.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  “So you’re going to have this child with this man? You’re going to stay with this man another eighteen years? Are you crazy?” “God spoke to me, Trevor. He told me, ‘Patricia, I don’t do anything by mistake. There is nothing I give you that you cannot handle.’ I’m pregnant for a reason. I know what kind of kids I can make. I know what kind of sons I can raise. I can raise this child. I will raise this child.” Nine months later Isaac was born. She called him Isaac because in the Bible Sarah gets pregnant when she’s like a hundred years old and she’s not supposed to be having children and that’s what she names her son. Isaac’s birth pushed me even further away. I visited less and less. Then I popped by one afternoon and the house was in chaos, police cars out front, the aftermath of another fight. He’d hit her with a bicycle. Abel had been berating one of his workers in the yard, and my mom had tried to get between them. Abel was furious that she’d contradicted him in front of an employee, so he picked up Andrew’s bike and he beat her with it. Again she called the police, and the cops who showed up this time actually knew Abel. He’d fixed their cars. They were pals. No charges were filed. Nothing happened. That time I confronted him. I was big enough now. “You can’t keep doing this,” I said. “This is not right.” He was apologetic. He always was. He didn’t puff out his chest and get defensive or anything like that. “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. I don’t like doing these things, but you know how your mom is. She can talk a lot and she doesn’t listen. I feel like your mom doesn’t respect me sometimes. She came and disrespected me in front of my workers. I can’t have these other men looking at me like I don’t know how to control my wife.” After the bicycle, my mom hired contractors she knew through the real-estate business to build her a separate house in the backyard, like a little servants’ quarters, and she moved in there with Isaac. “This is the most insane thing I’ve ever seen,” I told her.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  So ready to do things for you—almost like a faithful dog. And then cunning enough, once he had gained your favor, to make you humor his little whims. Withal extremely intelligent. The sly intelligence of a fox and—the utter heartlessness of a jackal. It wasn’t at all surprising to me, consequently, to learn that afternoon that he had been tinkering with Valeska. After Valeska he tackled the cousin who had already been deflowered and who was in need of some male whom she could rely upon. And from her finally to the midget who had made herself a pretty little nest at Valeska’s. The midget interested him because she had a perfectly normal cunt. He hadn’t intended to do anything with her because, as he said, she was a repulsive little Lesbian, but one day he happened to walk in on her as she was taking a bath, and that started things off. It was getting to be too much for him, he confessed, because the three of them were hot on his trail. He liked the cousin best because she had some dough and she wasn’t reluctant to part with it. Valeska was too cagey, and besides she smelled a little too strong. In fact, he was getting sick of women. He said it was his Aunt Sophie’s fault. She gave him a bad start. While relating this he busies himself going through the bureau drawers. The father is a mean son of a bitch who ought to be hanged, he says, not finding anything immediately. He shows me a revolver with a pearl handle . . . what would it fetch? A gun was too good to use on the old man . . . he’d like to dynamite him. Trying to find out why he hated the old man so, it developed that the kid was really stuck on his mother. He couldn’t bear the thought of the old man going to bed with her. You don’t mean to say that you’re jealous of your old man, I ask. Yes, he’s jealous. If I wanted to know the truth it’s that he wouldn’t mind sleeping with his mother. Why not? That’s why he had permitted his Aunt Sophie to seduce him . . . he was thinking of his mother all the time. But don’t you feel bad when you go through her pocketbook, I asked. He laughed. It’s not her money, he said, it’s his. And what have they done for me? They were always farming me out. The first thing they taught me was how to cheat people.

• From Best Erotic Romance

  He could call the police. They rarely showed up in this neck of the woods and would hardly bother for a minor neighborly row, not unless there were firearms involved—and John didn’t have any on hand. Probably a good thing, overall. Downstairs, the music paused. John took a deep breath. Silence crept into his ears like an old friend. And then it was the Moaning Young Men, as John referred to them in his head. The song was called “Last Night Love.” Or if you looked at it another way, the very last fucking straw, and the thing that was enough to make a usually calm and placid man roll out of bed and land on the floor with a resounding thud that would have alarmed an average human being but made no difference whatsoever to the noise freak below him. Insouciant, juvenile guitar riffs accompanied John as he pulled up his loose-fit pajama bottoms and made for the door. Outside, the sound echoed tinnily in the stairwell, and John, shrinking under the fluorescent tube lights, cursed the fact he’d so far failed to make it out of the ghetto and anywhere near the hillside monastic retreat wreathed in majestic clouds that he so often dreamed of. Or the suburbs, even. The concrete steps were cold underfoot, but he hardly noticed. He was trying not to listen to the voice in his head that had started its familiar old chant—the litany of injustices and everyday atrocities that had appalled him from his earliest awareness, through an offhand adolescence and his silent, thoroughly desperate early adulthood. The music grew in volume as John’s ego raved and ranted, taunting him with visions of the sleep-deprived misery he’d have to face the next day, so that by the time he arrived at the downstairs flat’s door, he was ready to curl up his fist and pummel his future into submission. What would he do? Could he overcome his habitual kindness and tendency to gracious politesse and make some pithy, outraged statement? He might swear at her. Yes, he might. John knocked, hard. Four minutes later, he knocked again. After a quarter of an hour freezing his feet outside a blank, unresponsive door, John climbed the stairs with the Moaning Young Men chasing after, mocking his hunched back. There were dark stars in his eyes now, the marks of growing rage of a man who, since he’d left the womb, had spent his life trying to recreate that sense of perfect, balanced stasis. Back in his flat, he wanted to tear the place apart. But he lacked furniture to deconstruct. He looked at the window and thought about smashing it. Throwing the unwatched TV through it and watching it shatter over the rusting old fire escape. A thought appeared in his mind, simple and frighteningly tempting.