kelpiewilson

An archive of articles and reports by the author of Primal Tears

This site is an archive of writing by Kelpie Wilson. You'll find dozens of magazine articles and news reports on the topics of energy, the environment, sustainable living, human evolution, eco-spirituality and women's rights.

For my blog on green technology, visit www.greenyourhead.com.

For the latest news, reviews, rants and raves about my novel Primal Tears and a preview of the graphic novel version, visit www.primaltears.com.

"PRIMAL TEARS is a novel of tremendous power. Passionate and erotic, at times tenderly lyrical, it confronts head-on, without flinching, brutal environmental and feminist politics. Its protagonist, Sage, is unique, magical, and haunting."
-- Kate Wilhelm, author of The Unbidden Truth, Clear and Convincing Proof, and Skeletons

“PRIMAL TEARS is a high-concept exciting adventure story... I liked it. It is well written... I am altogether impressed.”
-- R. Crumb, cartoonist

Tea Party 2.0 - Tax the Rich - up at Huffington Post

HuffPo published a version of my Tea Party 2.0 article that appeared on Truthout last week. http://bit.ly/d0y2fl. Lots of interesting comments there.

Tea Party 2.0 - No Representation Without Taxation

Friday 19 February 2010
by: Kelpie Wilson, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

If President Obama gets a new start on his presidency in 2010, then progressive, liberal Americans should also get a "do-over" on our activism in support of real change. We need to a chance to throw our own Tea Party. I'm calling it Tea Party 2.0 and I have a Facebook page!

First of all, let's be honest. We were all so exhausted after eight years of Bush and so impressed with ourselves that we elected the first African-American president, that we decided it was O.K. to take a nice long break early last year. I don't know how else to explain the fact that MoveOn didn't start a real push for the public option until Sarah Palin's Tea Party shouters had done shock and awe all over Democrats in the August town hall meetings and health care reform was on life support in the ER.

With Glenn Beck claiming to channel Tom Paine and all the rest of the conservative pantheon spouting nonstop, content-free rage, the Tea Party movement successfully tapped into the patriotic, righteous anger of a good chunk of middle-class America.

Middle-class America has a lot to be angry about. Unfortunately, the Tea Party is turning that anger against the wrong targets. They have one very abstract and very meaningless target: "big government spending"; and one very concrete, but blameless target: immigrants.

The pantheon knows that the Tea Party lacks substance and threatens to go off its nut and do something crazy like fly a plane into an IRS office. In his February 17 Talking Points Memo, Bill O'Reilly warned Tea Partiers about their nut job tendencies and reminded them to stay on message. He gave them their talking points one more time:

Join Tea Party 2.0

I just created a new Facebook Page:

Tea Party 2.0 - NO REPRESENTATION WITHOUT TAXATION

Please become a fan!

Tea Party 2.0 has three demands:

1. Tax the Rich. Obscene profits and corporate bonuses have no place in a democracy. Tax the rich and uplift the poor.

2. Abolish the US Senate. The Senate is undemocratic. Senators represent corporations, not you and me.

3. Medicare for all. We need to cut through the crap on health care. It's simple - Medicare for all. Tax the rich to pay for it.

Crumb and the Matriarchs

My review of Crumb's Genesis has been published on Reality Sandwich.

Genesis Gets the Crumb Treatment

published Sunday 25 October 2009
by: Kelpie Wilson, t r u t h o u t | Book Review



I confess that I am one of those feminists who finds a lot to like in the work of Robert Crumb. If his early work in the underground comics movement expressed a "sexual rage" as he calls it, well those were the times to get it all out of your system. Besides, how could I not love an artist so appreciative of the real bodies that women have - big butts, thunder thighs and all?

So, it came as a surprise to learn that this warrior of the id and defender of the flesh has produced an illustrated version of Genesis. That's right, the Bible. What would he do with it? Obviously, Crumb would portray the cruel and jealous God of the Old Testament as some version of the cynical, abusive Mr. Natural, holding secret orgies in Heaven with Devil Girl, and he would base his Abraham on Flakey Foont, Mr. Natural's pathetic sycophant.

But that's not how Crumb did it. On this one, he played it (mostly) straight. And why not? If you have never read Genesis from start to finish, you might not be aware that the stories are as full of sexual perversity and surreal plot points as any comic book. Genesis has lust, inebriation, nudity, polygamy, harlots, men pimping their wives, masturbation, penis cutting, sex with a 90-year-old woman who gives birth, sodomy, incest and a father who offers his virgin daughters up for strangers to rape.

That's a lot of great material for an artist like Crumb, and the genius of his Genesis is that he portrays it all - every word and every illustration is given equal weight. That's not how they taught it to us back in Sunday school. Our Bible coloring books had only selected scenes: Noah and his animals, but never Noah lying passed out drunk and naked in his tent. And even when we outgrew the Sunday school cookies and punch and graduated to wafers and wine, we still never heard about Abraham selling his wife Sarah to Pharaoh in exchange for cattle, gold and slaves. It was a kind of scam for the couple, and they did it more than once, targeting King Abimelech of Gerar next and getting cattle, sheep, slaves and land in return.

Thomas Paine Would Have Loved Van Jones

Thomas Paine Would Have Loved Van Jones
Monday 14 September 2009
by: Kelpie Wilson, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

It's been a nail-biting time for liberals, wondering if President Obama would have the strength to take on the right-wing bullies who ran amok in our public life throughout August's Congressional recess. It was a relief to hear the president in his health care address confront the lies directly and to hear him stand behind his preference for a public health care option. But Obama's failure to defend Van Jones, his green jobs adviser, is still a big disappointment and we need to understand why it happened.

Why was Glenn Beck able to drive Van Jones out of office? Jones did nothing that was illegal or immoral. Some of his views and opinions, now or in the past, are not popular with some people, but that doesn't make them "fringe" or "crazy" or "reprehensible," all epithets used to describe them. "Crazy" is more applicable to Beck, who seems to believe he is channeling the American revolutionary Thomas Paine: Beck titled his own book "Common Sense"; Beck produced a series of nutty videos where an actor portraying Tom Paine spouts angrily about taxes and illegal immigrants; Beck has Tea Party protest signs that say, "Tom Paine Rocks."

Let's take a look at the charges against Jones and try to understand why the president couldn't just ignore Glenn Beck. Then let's look at how we can reclaim the spirit of this country and make progress toward a more just, free and secure life, in accordance with the ideals of Thomas Paine.

A Stand for a Stand

Here's some more background on the logging protest from 1987 that resulted in a SLAPP suit:

A Stand for a Stand
by Kelpie Wilson
The Progressive
March 1994

One July morning in 1987, I found myself with five new friends at a logging site in Oregon’s Siskiyou National Forest. Valerie Wade, a college student, fifth generation Oregonian, and daughter of a logger, had climbed to the top of a ninety-foot yarder spar pole to hang a banner. Chained to the bottom of the yarder, which drags felled trees up steep slopes to waiting log trucks, were Karen Wood, a Eugene computer scientist; Michele Miller, an elementary school teacher from Chico, California; Kamala Redd, a college student from New York City; James Jackson, a surveyor from Texas, and myself, a new graduate with a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Chico State, about to head off to a career in alternative energy.

What Shelley Shannon and I Have in Common

I have this very weird connection with Shelley Shannon, the woman who tried to kill Dr. Tiller back in 1993. Now one of her comrades has succeeded in killing this brave man. Shannon is a member of the American Taliban, aka the Army of God.

Blockading Logging Companies and Abortion Clinics: What Shelley Shannon and I Have in Common
by Kelpie Wilson
The Portland Alliance
May 1994

Even though I am a a pro-choice environmentalist, I have a few things in common with Shelley Shannon. She’s the woman accused of shooting abortion doctor George Tiller in Kansas last August. Only a few things—still more that I would expect to share with someone whose values are 180 degrees apart from mine.

Shannon and I are the same age and we have homes about 35 miles apart in southern Oregon We both have brown hair and wear glasses. She has been sued for Operation Rescue protests while I have been sued for an Earth First! protest. The abortion clinic suing Shannon filed an amicus brief on behalf of the logging company suing me because they wanted to apply the precedent set by my case.

My case was decided last summer when the Oregon Supreme Court determined that to allow a logging company to sue me and five others for hanging a banner on their equipment would not violate the First Amendment. Both my lawyer and Shannon’s have argued that allowing punitive damage in cases of civil disobedience would let a jury determine the degree of punishment based on the content of protester’s beliefs—an infringement of First Amendment rights.

Pro-choice IS Pro-life

In Memorium: Dr. George Tiller.

Domestic fundamentalist terrorism has cut down another friend of women, Dr. George Tiller. I can't express the sadness that I feel about this. But I will say this: Dr. Tiller was pro-life. I am pro-life, and I believe that pro-life means being pro-choice, because the purpose of life is not to maximize our numbers but to live in balance and harmony with all the other life forms that support and sustain us.

Life only survives by being part of a community of life forms known collectively as "the environment." For a human embryo, its first environment is its mother. Mother makes up both the environment and the first human relationship for all of us. It is in her role as "environment" that a woman may sometimes have to end the relationship to her embryo or fetus. She may not have the capacity to welcome a child into the world.

This may seem harsh, but this is often Nature's way. Every year, millions of human neonates die from natural causes. Most abortions are natural miscarriages of genetically malformed embryos. Ironically, the abortion services that Dr. Tiller provided were mostly concerned with those rare cases where a malformed embryo has survived past the initial stages of pregnancy, not cases where a woman "chose" to end a pregnancy because she did not want a child. In most cases, Nature would have aborted such a fetus. Dr. Tiller was able to help those women who were subject to the cruel fate of bearing a deformed child. Dr. Tiller's work was less about "choice" as we have come to think of it, than about completing work that Nature had left undone.

Backyard Biochar

We have been having a lot of fun making charcoal. Checkout my slideshow: