The Scales of Justice

Here's an interesting legal case for your consideration:

A 30-year old man, one John Smith, had a son with incurable leukemia. Medical tests determined that the only suitable bone marrow donor for this child was his father. John Smith refused to donate any of his marrow; he said that he was scared of the medical procedure that would have been used. So not very fatherly, our John. But this is unsurprising; it was known that he had suffered from mental health problems most of his life, he took recreational drugs and otherwise acted in ways that proper people frown on. As a result of John's refusal, his son died. Should we now accuse him of murder?

Now change the sex of the person in question, make her name Melissa Ann Rowland, and her age 28 years, and change the circumstances into one where the mother refused a Caesarian section that might have saved her son's life. The son died here, too. Should we accuse her of murder?

What if both John and Melissa can be regarded as vain, narcissistic individuals who refused a little bit of surgery for purely trivial reasons? What if both John and Melissa were mentally ill drug-abusers living on social welfare? Though I have made the case of John Smith up, there is not much doubt in my mind that most legal commentators would not regard John as a murderer. On the other hand, Melissa really exists and the prosecutors in Salt Lake City are charging her with criminal homicide.

Try asking one of those people who voted in the msnbc poll in support of Melissa's murder charges whether John also should be tried for murder; not whether his act was morally reprehensible but whether he should be legally charged. It will be interesting to hear what they might say. I suspect that they see a clear difference between the two cases, though there is no factual difference.

Mothers are held to higher standards than fathers, and mothers of fetuses even more so. In fact, it's beginning to seem as if the only time a child's rights to life are really going to be guaranteed is before she or he has drawn one single breath. After birth, well, you're on your own, kid. And if you happen to be a girl, one day your rights to refuse surgery will not be awarded the same protection as they would if you had been born a boy.
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An excellent discussion on this topic is on Body and Soul.

Flotsam and Jetsam

Some funny things end up stranded in my e-mail box. It's most likely a variation of this resume (thanks to Scout for the information). Interesting.



RESUME

GEORGE W. BUSH
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20520

EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE:

Law Enforcement:
I was arrested in Kennebunkport, Maine, in 1976 for driving under the influence of alcohol. I pled guilty, paid a fine, and had my driver's license suspended for 30 days. My Texas driving record has been "lost" and is not available.

Military:
I joined the Texas Air National Guard and the last year of my service is unaccounted for. I refused to take a drug test or answer any questions about my drug use. By joining the Texas Air National Guard, I was able to avoid combat duty in Vietnam.

College:
I graduated from Yale University with a low C average. I was a cheerleader.

PAST WORK EXPERIENCE:

• I ran for U.S. Congress and lost. I began my career in the oil business in Midland,Texas, in 1975.
  
• I bought an oil company, but couldn't find any oil inTexas. The company went bankrupt shortly after I sold all my stock.
• I bought the Texas Rangers baseball team in a sweetheart deal that took land using taxpayer money.
  
• With the help of my father and our friends in the oil industry (including Enron CEO Ken Lay), I was elected governor of Texas.
  

ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS GOVERNOR OF TEXAS:

• I changed Texas pollution laws to favor power and oil companies, making Texas the most polluted state in the Union. During my tenure, Houston replaced Los Angeles as the most smog-ridden city in America.
  
• I cut taxes and bankrupted the Texas treasury to the tune of billions in borrowed money.
  
• I set the record for the most executions by any governor in American history.
  
• With the help of my brother, the governor of Florida, and my father's appointments to the Supreme Court, I became President after losing by over 500,000 votes.
  

ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS PRESIDENT:

• I am the first President in U.S. history to enter office with a criminal record.
  
• I invaded and occupied two countries at a continuing cost of over one billion dollars per week.
  
• I spent the U.S. surplus and effectively bankrupted the U.S. Treasury.
  
• I shattered the record for the largest annual deficit in U.S. history.
  
• I set an economic record for most private bankruptcies filed in any 12-month period.
  
• I set the all-time record for most foreclosures in a 12-month period.
  
• I set the all-time record for the biggest drop in the history of the U.S. stock market. In my first year in office, over 2 million Americans lost their jobs and that trend continues every month.
  
• I'm proud that the members of my cabinet are the richest of any administration in U.S. history. My "poorest millionaire," Condoleeza Rice, has a Chevron oil tanker named after her.
  
• I set the record for most campaign fund-raising trips by a U.S. President.
  
• I am the all-time U.S. and world record-holder for receiving the most corporate campaign donations.
  
• My largest lifetime campaign contributor, and one of my best friends, Kenneth Lay, presided over the largest corporate bankruptcy fraud in U.S. History, Enron.
  
• My political party used Enron private jets and corporate attorneys to assure my success with the U.S. Supreme Court during my election decision.
  
• I have protected my friends at Enron and Halliburton against investigation or prosecution. More time and money was spent investigating the Monica Lewinsky affair than has been spent investigating one of the biggest corporate rip-offs in history.
  
• I presided over the biggest energy crisis in U.S. history and refused to intervene when corruption involving the oil industry was revealed. I presided over the highest gasoline prices in U.S. history.
  
• I changed the U.S. policy to allow convicted criminals to be awarded government contracts.
  
• I appointed more convicted criminals to administration than any President in U.S. history.
  
• I created the Ministry of Homeland Security, the largest bureaucracy in the history of the United States government.
  
• I've broken more international treaties than any President in U.S. history.
  
• I am the first President in U.S. history to have the United Nations remove the U.S. from the Human Rights Commission.
  
• I withdrew the U.S. from the World Court of Law.
  
• I refused to allow inspector's access to U.S. "prisoners of war" detainees and thereby have refused to abide by the Geneva Convention.
  
• I am the first President in history to refuse United Nations election inspectors (during the 2002 U.S. election).
  
• I set the record for fewest numbers of press conferences of any President since the advent of television.
  
• I set the all-time record for most days on vacation in any one-year period. After taking off the entire month of August, I presided over the worst security failure in U.S. history.
  
• I garnered the most sympathy for the U.S. after the World Trade Center attacks and less than a year later made the U.S. the most hated country in the world, the largest failure of diplomacy in world history.
  
• I have set the all-time record for most people worldwide to simultaneously protest me in public venues (15 million people), shattering the record for protests against any person in the history of mankind.
  
• I am the first President in U.S. history to order an unprovoked, pre-emptive attack and the military occupation of a sovereign nation. I did so against the will of the United Nations, the majority of U.S. citizens, and the world community.
  
• I have cut health care benefits for war veterans and support a cut in duty benefits for active duty troops and their families -- in wartime.
  
• In my State of the Union Address, I lied about our reasons for attacking Iraq and then blamed the lies on our British friends.
  
• I am the first President in history to have a majority of Europeans (71%) view my presidency as the biggest threat to world peace and security.
  
• I am supporting development of a nuclear "Tactical Bunker Buster," a WMD.
  
• I have so far failed to fulfill my pledge to bring Osama Bin Laden to justice.
  

RECORDS AND REFERENCES:

• All records of my tenure as governor of Texas are now in my father's library, sealed and unavailable for public view.
  
• All records of SEC investigations into my insider trading and my bankrupt companies are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public view.
  
• All records or minutes from meetings that I, or my Vice-President, attended regarding public energy policy are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public review.
  

Please consider this resume in voting for the president of the United States in 2004

Bad Poetry

There's a lot to be said for bad poetry, especially as it's the only type I create. The poetry market suffers from a terrible imbalance: many are able to write bad poetry, but only a few wish to read it. The only solution is to force-feed bad poetry to the masses, and I'm doing it here first!

Do not soak your silverware
You cannot go from here to there
The warning signs are everywhere
Do not soak your silverware.

The die is cast, and cast aside
My pain is gaping, gaping wide
And everywhere the other side
seeks for me, I cannot hide.

Do not soak your silverware
If you do, you do not care
and everybody over there
will know you soaked your silverware.

What do you think? On second thoughts, I don't think I want to know... Feel free to use the comments thread for more bad poetry.

This should be silence

There are some things that I can't write about, not really; yet I can't stay quiet about them either. Blogs are not the places to discuss bottomless despair and unbounded grief, but somehow to ignore them seems wrong, too. At least 190 human beings lost their lives yesterday in Spain, people who were traveling to work, to do the shopping, to school. People with spouses and friends, children and jobs; people who were thinking what to make for supper that night, who were checking the soccer scores, who were taking one more quick nap before the day's activities really started. People who loved and feared, hated and adored, felt bored and laughed at silly jokes. People who are now dead, ultimately to be remembered mostly as numbers in the political struggles for power by others.

For those who loved them today is the first day of the After: a horrible time, a time that nobody wants to live through, a time that doesn't seem possible to live through, yet something that must be lived through. There is no other way out but through the necessary suffering. My heart breaks for them, or would break for them if it would do any good at all. But only time, the horrible time, will do any good, and even that will be limited. The lives of the survivors will continue, yes, and slowly they will be patched together again, but they will never be the same: the scars will fade, but they will not stop aching, one will get used to the sudden gaping holes in ones heart, but the holes will not close.

This is what death does. And there are no words vile enough to describe those who use it like a chainsaw in their fanatically orchestrated plans for supremacy.
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Postscript: If this sounds familiar, it is. As familiar as the violence that caused it.

The New John Kerry: A Rant

I stole this quote from corrente:

"[KERRY:]George Bush is running on the same old Republican tactics of fear — and they're already getting tired," he said. "It's clear that this president will fight like hell to keep his own job, but he won't lift a finger to help Americans keep theirs."

How do you feel reading it? This is what I felt: A warm wave of recognition and joy spread through my body, an impish delight at righteous anger played out tickled my laughing nerves and I found myself shouting "YES! YES!" at the startled snakes still half-asleep. Am I proud of these reactions? Well, yes, but then I'm not bound by the Christian rule of having to keep on turning the other cheek.

Republicans have been hammering away at us poor liberals for over a decade, and we've met this with self-examination and conscience raising sessions and carefully reasoned attempts at compromises. More hammering away, more attempts to remain cordial and polite and so on. The end result: "liberal" is now such a dirty word that it will no doubt soon be banned from all airwaves in this country, civil rights have become "special privileges", anyone daring to speak out for the poor or the oppressed is ridiculed as politically incorrect, and the people on welfare are called piglets at the nipples of the government sow while the Enron crooks gently slide into obscurity. Any war is pre-emptive self-defense, and the country is in furor over "death taxes" which affected less than one percent of all estates. We have given away much of our rights to privacy in exchange for security, but instead of security we get...more fear.

It would be nice to run politics as a civilized form of cooperation and compromise, but such endeavors take at least two willing participants. The Republicans have not been willing participants in anything for donkey's years (or rather, elephant's years) and ultimately even a kind, sensitive liberal runs out of cheeks to turn. Then the rabbit roars ( to really mix my animal metaphors).

And what will the Republicans say about all this? Let me guess, without even looking for a link to prove it. They will accuse Kerry of negative campaigning and the Democrats of nasty language and Hitleresque demagogy. They will raise their innocent eyebrows and shrug their innocent shoulders, as if to suggest that the sudden liberal anger is inexplicable, uncouth, nay, even un-American. Why do they hate America so?

Then they will point out that what we should really be concerned at is the fear that's lurking in the shadows, the fear that's made us silent and cooperative so far, the fear that can only be defeated by going on as we've done so far. What they don't tell us is that it's perfectly ok to change direction when you are heading straight down the cliff, it's even perfectly ok to change drivers of a vehicle that's careening out of control.

I've had it with fear, and I hope that John Kerry has had it with courtesy and manners until a little bit later in the election battles. First he needs to light the lanterns, only then can the light that they spread be celebrated.

Rara Avis VI: George and the Girls

Another Rara Avis, I'm afraid. This time I have dared to raise my gaze upwards, far far into the upper stratospheres. There, in his solitary royal thoughts, flies the King Of All Birds, the most powerful bird of all. The bird that we have raised above the rest, the one who is to protect the free world and the free markets. It's almost a sacrilege to view him as a mere avian among many, and perhaps even greater sacrilege to ask what this great solemn leader with so many real cares on his weary wings might think about women. But that's my topic for today.:

The International Women's Day was a good time to meditate on George Walker Bush and women. Not that there's much in this exercize for us prurient minds. George is either very good or very careful, or his minders even more so. Instead, I'm going to look at his attitudes towards women more generally, as human beings, as the objects of his policies and as voters.

To find out about these attitudes, it's necessary to examine not only what George has achieved in his four-year realm, but also what he has tried to achieve. Not all his brilliant goals have been met. Yet. That's why he wants another four years.

It's easy to decide that George has done very well indeed abroad. One of his very first acts as a president was the reinstatement of the Global Gag Rule: no U.S. funding will be given to health care providers in developing countries who as much as whisper about the rumors that abortions are available somewhere. Providers could then decide between receiving American money for things such as condoms or counseling and screening for STDs and HIV/AIDS, and having the freedom to include the abortion as an option in their reproductive counseling. Many opted for the latter.

The Christian right is very pleased with this policy and its international success, especially as they have been less successful in their domestic efforts to illegalize abortion and to demonize birth control as well. Though it's early days still, and the next four years of George would most likely see a spread of these policies at home, too. The effects are hard to predict or measure, but many argue that these international policies have caused an increase in both abortions and maternal mortality rates:

What is known as the "global gag rule" is having a devastating impact on women and families in the developing world. Without U.S. assistance, health clinics have closed in Nepal, Zambia, Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda. The loss of USAID funding has forced others around the world to cut staff and services, including for HIV screening, voluntary counseling and education. At a time when the spread of HIV-AIDS has dramatically elevated the demand for condoms, USAID has stopped shipment of condoms to 16 countries because the sole recipients – local family planning organizations – have refused to sign on to the gag rule.

George's second foreign success must be the canceling of $34 million in funding to the United Nation's Family Planning Fund (UNFPA). This fund provides hundreds of thousands of women in 140 countries with family planning and maternal health programs. But the Bush administration decided that UNFPA had been engaging in coercive abortions in China, and the funds were cut. Four fact-finding missions and Colin Powell failed to find evidence for such Chinese coercion. But we all know that faith is stronger than facts.

I see George's third international success in the way he has shifted the U.S. diplomatic voice from the chorus of demons preaching for birth control and female empowerment to the higher registry of the angels singing for God and the religious traditions. No longer is the U.S. supporting "the right of couples and individuals to determine freely the number and spacing of their children and to have the information and means to do so." No longer is the U.S. supporting "reproductive health services and education" for teenagers, and no longer is the U.S. affirming the Beijing platform of gender equality, as somewhere within these there must lurk the devil of abortion. We now vote in bloc with Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia on most matters pertaining to women.

These are the real, intended successes of George's policy in regard to women, and they should be used as the main criteria in judging how well he is doing, especially by those women who have a vote in the United States. But many women are too lenient: recently, a group of women's organizations in the U.S. rated the Bush administration on its foreign policy with respect to women, and this rating didn't even mention the great intended successes. Instead, they focused on several policies which had nothing to do with women's affairs in their initial intentions: the liberation of Afghanistan, the occupation of Iraq and the AIDS crisis in Africa.

Keep in mind that George believed the Taliban to be a rock band only four years ago. That the war in Afghanistan destroyed the Taliban, at least temporarily, was a nice bonus of the campaign but not what we went to war for. The women's lot under the Taliban didn't perhaps look that unsuitable to some in George's base, and in any case the world was fully aware of the situation for several years, yet nothing was being done. No, I can't assign George any credit for wanting to liberate the Afghani women, and the lot of Iraqi women looks more precarious now than it did under the Saddam regime, as cruel as that was. The AIDS funding would help women as it would help men, too, if only the funding was forthcoming.

These women's organizations were wussy, I think, in handling George with kid gloves. Even so, he rated two "Ds" and one "Incomplete" in their final evaluation. Then again, you might argue that "Ds" from lefty women's organizations equal "As" from George's religious base. Maybe he's on the Dean's list, after all.

George's domestic successes are far fewer. True, he managed to close down the White House Office for Women's Initiatives and Outreach and he also ended the Labor Departmen't "Equal Pay Matters" iniative. Equal pay doesn't matter anymore, you see, because women are choosing to have less pay quite freely, and to have an office for women's initiatives and outreach would give women 'special rights'. He filled 26% of the vacant positions in government with female appointees, a respectable drop from Clinton's 37%, but he failed in his attempt to close the regional offices of the Women's Bureau in the Department of Labor.

His new budget will do away with programs that advocate gender equality in education. and John Ashcroft has been an excellent hitman in the area of Civil Rights enforcement, gradually turning it into the area of Special Rights Abatement. As an example:

when the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the Federal Communications Commission's equal employment opportunity rules—which, according to the Washington Post, represented "the most inoffensive corner of affirmative action," because they only required broadcasters to make an effort to inform women and minorities about job openings and encourage them to apply—Ashcroft's department filed a brief urging the Supreme Court not to review that regressive decision

George failed in his first attempt to do away with the 'special rights' that Title IX in education gives female athletes, but this was only the first battle of the war, and he has since regathered his troops to attack from a different angle: that of reintroducing gender segregation into the public schools without worrying too much about whether 'separate' can ever mean 'equal'. This may not hurt girls, of course, but if it doesn't it's quite likely to hurt boys. Given George's attitudes (as reflected in his other policies), I'd bet for the hurting of the girls here.

Actually, I can do better than just try to surmise George's attitudes from his policies. I can quote Condie Rice as his spokeswoman on this International Women's Day:

As President Bush has said, "No society can succeed and prosper while denying basic rights and opportunities to the women of their country."

Women should not be denied basic rights and opportunities, ok. But what about equal rights and opportunities? Here's Ari Fleischer, another spokesman for George:

At a recent press conference, George W. Bush indicated through White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer that he does not consider discrimination against women to be an offense as serious as racial or ethnic discrimination. According to Fleischer, membership in a group that excludes women is not "a disqualifying factor" for candidates to Cabinet posts. However, when prodded, Fleischer stated that racial or ethnic discrimination is a "very different category for the President."Sources: PR Newswire, "Press Briefing by Ari Fleischer," Dec. 11, 2002; Federal Document Clearing House, "Ari Fleischer Holds White House Briefing," Dec. 9, 2002

All is clear now. I think George doesn't believe that women's issues are as serious as racial or ethnic issues, and though women should be provided some basic rights and opportunities, it is not necessary to worry one's head too much over equality. If God had wanted equality of the sexes, He would have told George about it, I presume. You know, when He told him to attack Iraq and stuff.

I think that I can place George now. He's in the same category of birds as the late Ayatollah Khomeini, who appointed his daughter to run all women's affairs in Iran. Given this, it's interesting whom George selected as the representatives of the United States in this week's UN conference about gender equality:

President Bush's sister and Vice President Dick Cheney's daughter will be delegates to a U.N. women's conference next week aimed at promoting equality of the sexes, a U.S. official said.
More than a dozen ministers are expected at the annual meeting of the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women, which starts Monday, but the presence of Dorothy "Doro" Bush Koch and Liz Cheney in the U.S. delegation is likely to give the gathering a higher profile.
Koch, the president's youngest sibling and only sister, has recently been campaigning for his re-election. Cheney, a lawyer and deputy assistant secretary of state who focuses on Mideast issues, joined her parents last month at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and Italy.
"These women leaders represent the best in America and are asked to serve as public delegates to this important U.N. conference," Richard Grenell, a spokesman for U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte, said Friday.

This was an easy one!

Now I know what George thinks about the girls. What do the girls think about George? Most women I have asked this question give me unprintable answers, but clearly there were many who voted for George in the first place, and there must be some who still like him. Or maybe not. All through writing this, I had that silly old nursery rhyme jingling in my head, and I think it's trying to tell something about George and the voting girls:

Georgie, Porgie, pudding and pie;
Kissed the girls and made them cry...

Don't let him make you cry again!

The International Women's Day

Today is the International Women's Day, though you might not notice it very much if you live in the United States. If I recall correctly, last year's IWD-related programming from my local public radio station consisted solely of a humorous debate about whether the Hooters restaurant chain should take over managing the Amtrak trains in order to increase male passengership. As the NPR is supposed to stand for the extreme liberal media, I was quite disappointed. The right wing mainstream media is more understandably silent about the IWD, given that it has its roots in the women of the American Socialist Party who arranged large demonstrations in 1908 to call for the vote and for political and economic rights to women. The day became an international one in 1910 in the second International Conference of Socialist Women.

From the beginning there was some disagreement about the meaning of the IWD. Should it be a time for celebrating women's progress, for taking stock of what has been achieved or for demanding remedies to problems that have not been solved? My review of this year's news from all over the world proves that the same disagreement still prevails. Some stories take on a festive air of celebration, others lay out starkly the immense problems that women in many parts of the world face. I also found some new interpretations of the meaning of the IWD: it might be a good time to promise Chinese women that a woman, some day, though not yet, might be, perhaps, selected to be a taikonaut in the Chinese space program, or that the women in Brunei have their rights, as defined by others, of course, extremely well guaranteed. And the Iraqi Governing Council chose to move the IWD in Iraq from March 8 to August 18, the date of birth of the prophet Mohammed's daughter, thus connecting women's issues to religion.

I'm sure that the original founders of the IWD would be very pleased to see the progress that has taken place in the last near-century, and celebration is the correct response to this. Women now can vote in the majority of countries in the world. The recent Constitutional Loya Jirga in Afghanistan produced a constitution for the country which safeguards the rights of women as equal to those of men (though with the usual caveat of possible limits to this dictated by Islam), and in Rwanda women won 49% of the seats in Parliament. Even in Iraq women might be guaranteed a quarter of the parliamentary seats. Looks very good from where I'm sitting, in the U.S.A where women's share of seats in the House and Senate hovers around a little more than one in ten...

The 1908 socialists would also rejoice in seeing how women can work in almost any field of their choice today (with the exception, as usual, of many religious fields), and though their pay on average is not equal to men's, the ratio is considerably better than it was a century ago. Women have gained access to education in many countries of the world, to a point where they now outnumber men in higher education in countries as diverse as the United States, Colombia and Iran. ( That this trend is an international one casts serious doubt, by the way, on the argument popular in the U.S. that the greater number of women in higher education is due to an Evil Feminist Plot, unless these evil feminists somehow got their fingers into the pie in Iran as well.)

There is, indeed, much to celebrate. At the same time, much more remains to be done for the girls and women of this world. The education for girls is a pressing need that has not been met in many Asian and African countries, and customs and laws concerning marriage are still nowhere near fair and equal for the majority of world's women. And I'd like to see more women in positions of political power everywhere, not just in places like Scandinavia. It would be good for the world.

The most widely reported themes for this year's IWD are violence and the AIDS epidemic, especially in Africa. Noeleen Heyzer, the Executive Director of UNIFEM has this to say about women and AIDS:

Ten years ago, women worldwide made up 38 per cent of people infected with the disease. Today they make up 50 per cent. In some regions this ratio has tilted further towards women: in the Caribbean it is 52 per cent, in Africa, 58 percent. Ten years ago, women were at the periphery of the epidemic. Today, they are at its epicentre. For young women the situation is particularly alarming. Young women in the developing world outnumber young men among newly infected 15-24 year olds by two to one. The social impact of HIV/AIDS on women and girls is greater - they are the ones who assume the burden of care when family members are affected by the disease, putting severe constraints on their access to education, employment, food cultivation, and often treatment. Violence against women, both a cause and a consequence of the epidemic, adds another major risk factor for transmission. Rape, sexual violence and women's inability to refuse unwanted sex or to demand safe sex are serious factors in the spread of the epidemic. (bolds mine)

Violence against women is the Amnesty International's topic for the IWD:

In poor and war-torn countries women suffer some of the worst abuse, Amnesty's figures show. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, some 40 women a day are raped, and many are unable to get medical treatment or report the crimes to the authorities.
In Somalia, more than 90 per cent of women are subjected to genital mutilation.
In Pakistan, a recent survey showed 90 per cent of married women have been abused by their male partners.
But in industrialized countries like Russia, where the Soviet constitution has proclaimed women's equality for more than 70 years, they are still socially and legally disadvantaged.
Some 14,000 Russian women each year are killed by partners or relatives, but there is no law addressing domestic violence.
In strict Islamic countries, women fare badly, regardless of their economic background.
"Fifty schoolgirls were burned to death and dozens of others were injured in a fire at their school in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, on March 11, 2002," the report says. "Religious police prevented the girls from leaving the building because they were not wearing headscarves, and had no male relatives there to receive them. They also reportedly prevented rescuers who were men from entering the premises."
However, wealthy Western countries are far from immune from violence against women.
In Canada, government statistics show 50 per cent of women are victims of at least one act of physical or sexual violence after they turn 16.
In France, 25,000 women are raped each year, and in Ireland 20 per cent of adult women have reported a sexual attack. In Iceland only 21 per cent of reported rapes end in a conviction for the accused attacker.

Violence doesn't necessarily discriminate on the basis of gender, of course. But women face the threat of specific acts of violence solely due to them being women, and the legal and law enforcement systems of many countries lag behind in acknowledging the seriousness of these acts. It is sad that the sexual violence against African women has become truly newsworthy only when it can be shown to affect the spread of the AIDS epidemic.

This International Women's Day I'm going to raise a toast for those socialist women of 1908. Bless their hearts. I'm going to feel proud and happy about all the progress that has been made, and I'm going to be a Fierce Goddess in Her Wrath about the dreadful scourges that still remain. After all that, I'm going to write a second post about George W. Bush and the International Women's Day.

And the Moral of the Story Was?

This is a true story. A couple I know own a summerhouse with an old-fashioned outhouse. Every spring they clean out the base of the outhouse. This year some (misinformed) gardener asked them for the stuff to use as compost, and the couple (also unaware that human waste is not recommended for composting) agreed to save it for this gardener who lives in the same city as they do. They packed 'the compost' neatly into a black garbage bag, and then put the garbage bag inside a large corrugated cardboard box on the back of their truck. On their return trip to the city they stopped at a 7/11 for something to drink. When they got back to their truck, the cardboard box had disappeared. The box had a large picture of an expensive television set on the outside...

Abstinence Policy: Take Two

The Bush administration is very keen on sexual abstinence, but it really has very few tools to fight the war against demon sexuality. I have a proposal which could pave my way to the inner circle of the government, and perhaps make me the Secretary of Sin, Smut and Salvation. Besides, my proposal would amass the government millions of dollars in revenue, it would increase employment, at least somewhere in the world, and so it would have the backing of both the Neocons and the Theocons!

Here's the proposal: Equip all Americans with chastity belts.

These would be sold at motor vehicle registration sites, football and basketball games and Nascar rallies. A percentage of the selling price would go to the Department of Sin, Smut and Salvation to finance its operations, and all the keys would go there as well (or rather, to me). Any American could then apply for the key to her or his device by filling in a few easy-to-understand forms about why the key should be released. Valid reasons would be being married with less than seven children or belonging to the Roman Catholic clergy. Also being near death.

The belts would be made of excellent stainless steel and destroying them would be a Federal felony. I haven't yet figured out how to cope with airport checkpoints and such, but maybe people don't want to travel very much once chastity is guaranteed.

I do realize the public image problems my proposal has. Chastity belts have a bad reputation, especially among women, as we have been taught that they were used in the middle ages by the Crusaders to guarantee their wives' fidelity during the men's long absences. This turns out to be mostly fable, as the first real evidence of chastity belts only surfaces during the Renaissance. Historians now think that their use was always quite rare, though a female skeleton from the sixteenth century was found still in the belt.

Chastity belts may have been used in oppressive ways in the past, of course, but this doesn't have to be the case in my proposal. The belt could even empower its wearer. For example, some historians argue that there were women who used the chastity belt to protect themselves against rape, and from the nineteenth century onwards men could also have their own chastity belts to defend the wearer against "self abuse", "nocturnal emissions" and "insanity, imbecility and feeblemindedness". You might be surprised to learn that anywhere from 75 to 90% of current chastity belt wearers are men.

I firmly believe that chastity belts could be promoted as an egalitarian support in the struggle against sin. What a coup for the Bush administration in the culture wars! Something to appeal to its fundamentalist base, something to bring in lots of tax money, new jobs would be created in the steel industry and also in the fashion industry. Crime and sexually transmitted diseases would plummet, and peace and quiet would descend over this land.
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If you are curious about what these devices might look like, check here. My first post on the current administration's abstinence policy can be found here.

The Liberal Coalition: What to Read this Weekend

So much to choose from as usual. You could begin by finding out some of the things that the Bush administration has been working on: T.Rex has a whole series of short posts on bad news about the economy, and Steve Gilliard (welcome back!) wonders if outsourcing might reduce terrorism abroad but increase crime and jobless gangs at home. Elayne Riggs tells us that now editing manuscripts from Iran might be seen as helping the enemy, and the Invisible Library talks about the Al-Qaeda that you might not know yet.

A natural next step would be for you to find out about the next elections. Steve Bates has a sobering tale about the Sierra Club to warn us that democracy is no good if people refuse to participate in it, and Corrente recounts how Bush is asking for money to prepare his team for the time after re-election...Charles2 has a frightening post on why Bush shouldn't be re-elected. Definitely worth a read. Words on a Page explains why independents should not vote for Bush and Scout gives information on how to give your tax refunds to various democratic causes.

If you're hungry for more political and social commentary, I can recommend BlogAmy's long and interesting post on the gradual chipping away of Roe v. Wade, and upyernoz's good article on Haiti, or edwardpig on times when spying is just okey-dokey. The New World Blogger has a touching post about the homeless in New York, and also wonderful pictures.

The hot political topic is same-sex marriage, and several bloggers have interesting information on it. Rivka discusses a fascinating study about what makes homophobic men sexually excited, and Mustang Bobby has a very good article on the whole same-sex marriage question. Speedkill also criticizes the arguments against same-sex marriage and Trish Wilson gives a good critique of Wade Horn's pro-marriage arguments. ( As I don't like Horn's politics, I was very pleased to read that.) Bryant addresses states' rights in this context and Archy the question when breaking a law is seen as acceptable by the right v. the left. Ntodd writes about the right-wing's arguments and delightfully manages to bring Jeremy Bentham into it.

Henrietta the Hound insisted that I add a special note about wonderful dog pictures on Clonecone, Chris Brown and MercuryX23. Iddybud has a funny picture of the Oscar George W. Bush might be qualified to win, and Gotham City 13 shows a series of adaptations of Transformer comic books to the current U.S. administration. Very funny. So is the picture on Collective Sigh about a cowbrain sandwich, but I'd recommend delaying looking at it until a few hours has passed since your last meal.

Suppose...

Public schools are about to get broad new freedom to teach blacks and whites separately, perhaps the biggest shakeup to integrated classrooms in three decades.
The Education Department plans to change its enforcement of Title IX, the landmark anti-discrimination law, to make it easier for districts to create single-race classes and schools. The move would give local school leaders discretion to expand choices for parents, whether that means a math class, a grade level or an entire school designed for one race.
...
"We are not advocating single-race schools, and we are not advocating single-race classrooms," said Ken Marcus, who oversees civil rights for the department. "We understand that integration remains the norm in American public education, and will continue to be the norm. We are simply trying to ensure that educators have flexibility to provide options."
...
Schools would have to treat whites and blacks equally in determining what courses to offer. And single-race enrollment must be voluntary.
If a school creates a single-race class in a subject, it would not be required to offer the other race its own similar class, but it would have to offer an integrated version of it.
The department's plan would also make it easier to create entire single-race schools.
Current rules allow those schools, but only when a district creates a comparable single-race school for the other race. That restriction would disappear. Instead, districts would have the option of demonstrating that their integrated schools provide "substantially equal" benefits to the excluded race.
...
In Greensboro, N.C., up to 100 black high-school students who struggled with their academic and social skills recently got their own public school on the Bennett College campus. They feel more free to discuss their problems and are less distracted by white mainstream values, history teacher Shawn Watlington said.
"Whites in high school have different needs more organizational problems while blacks have problems with confidence," she said. "As a teacher, I would have to split myself and deal with both issues, so I had less time to go more in depth."

Of course this is not real. The actual story, which I ruthlessly altered here, talks about single-sex schools, the newest hobbyhorse of the Bush administration. I think they haven't gone far enough, actually. As men are from Mars and women from Venus, we need to build these sex-segregated schools on those planets. Maybe that's why the president wanted us to go to Mars? You know, to scout for the best place to build the boys' dormitories.
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Thanks to Jim Kutz for the link.

David Brooks on Poverty

David Brooks, the New York Times conservative columnist with the eager-little-boy face, wrote an opinion column on poverty some weeks ago. I set it aside to ripen a bit and then forgot it completely. It cropped up today and as it's a nice, sunny day, talking about the sunny boy of the conservatives, the one whom all liberals struggle not to like, seems apt. Brooks is so very pleasant that it's difficult to stay on ones guard as one really should. Some of my snakes are just the same. Artful Asp, for example, is the cutest little snake you ever saw, and artistic to boot. But turn your back to her, and you'll find her fangs in your backside. Just a reminder for those who like eager little boys.

Here's what David has to say about poverty. He begins by telling the readers what's wrong with John Edward's 'Two Americas' speeches:

Edwards talks about poverty in economic terms. He vows to bring jobs back to poor areas and restrict trade to protect industries. He suggests that if we could take money from the rich and special interests, there'd be more for the underprivileged.
This kind of talk is descended from Marxist theory, which holds that we live in the thrall of economic conditions. What the poor primarily need is more money, the theory goes.

Well, I wouldn't call that a theory. It's a fact that if you give a poor person one billion dollars, she or he is no longer poor. Presto! And it's also a fact that if you take money away from the rich and the special interests (I wonder who they are in David's mind) and give it to the poor the latter will have more and the former will have less. As we define 'poor' and 'rich' by the amounts of money the person has, this seems to me quite logical.

But not to David:

Conservatives, on the other hand, believe that liberals have it backward. In reality, culture shapes economics. A person's behavior determines his or her economic destiny. If people live in an environment that fosters industriousness, sobriety, fidelity, punctuality and dependability, they will thrive. But the Great Society welfare system encouraged or enabled bad behavior, and popular culture glamorizes irresponsibility.
We've now had a 40-year experiment to determine which side is right, and while both arguments have merit, it's clear the conservatives have a more accurate view of poverty.

In other words, the more accurate view is that the poor are poor because they are lazy, drunk and unable to control their sexuality. This is the conservative theory on poverty: anybody can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and if they fail in this, well, the bootstraps will make a handy noose.

The mirror image of this theory is the real reason why it is so appealing to people like David: If the poor are that way because they largely deserve to be poor, then it follows that the rich are also that way because they deserve all the goodies they have amassed. They have been industrious, always on time, teetotallers and sexual abstainers. They have earned their bright eyes and eager smiles and all the shares and bonds in their portfolios.

But the most cursory inspection shows that many of the rich do not deserve to be rich based on these rules. Quite a lot of them just happened to be born into a rich family. Some of them are, to be honest, lazy, rude, unpunctual and practitioners of all sorts of fornication. Yet they stay rich nevertheless.

If so many of the rich don't truly deserve to be rich, it must follow that the same will apply to the poor. There are poor people who work hard in two or three jobs, who are always on time and who are parsimonious in their sex lives. There are poor people who are poor because their health failed them or because they lost a close family member to death or divorce or because they simply lost their jobs. There are poor people who are that way because they never had access to good schools or proper health care or psychological counseling.

Of course it helps to work hard, to be punctual and to plan carefully when children can best be fitted in. All these things are useful in fighting poverty, but they don't guarantee success in life. And David is also wrong in the implicit assumption that the poor who don't have these traits could simply switch them on and thereby join the happy rich. It's not that simple.

I once knew a woman who seemed to embody all the undesirable characteristics of the poor. She had no job, her three children ate fast food and ran around dirty and uncared for, her husband had just left her for another woman whom he had made pregnant. This woman shared a household with a sister and the sister's husband, both on disability insurance.

The family income was completely made out of various government assistance programs, yet there never was enough money. When kind neighbors gave them a few hundred dollars before Christmas, she spent it all on the same day on expensive things for children that were advertized on television, and no money was left for the actual Christmas celebrations.

A perfect example for Brooks' arguments, you might think. And in some ways she was. She was certainly not looking for a job or even taking very good care of her family. She seemed to spend most her days moping around.

But then I found out that she had been her father's sexual slave for twelve years, had been labeled as unteachable at school due to chronic stuttering and suffered from severe, mostly untreated epilepsy. Her sister's disability was caused by the same father's sexual abuse. Neither woman had any self-esteem or even, as far as I could tell, any ability to dream about things being better. How does one use the bootstraps in cases like these? What would David recommend?

One could say that this woman made a lot of bad choices, beginning with her selection of a husband who wouldn't stay faithful. But exactly when was she supposed to have developed the keen perception and self-worth that are needed for making good choices? And how, if money is not the answer, would the necessary services have been made available to her? I can't see my way to blaming her very much. Even if I could, it would be impossible to extend this blame to her children. Perhaps that's why I'm just a lily-livered liberal who gets all muddled and confused when poverty is being discussed. Thank goddess for that.

This should be silence

There are some things that I can't write about, not really; yet I can't stay quiet about them either. Blogs are not the places to discuss bottomless despair and unbounded grief, but somehow to ignore them seems wrong, too. At least 143 human beings lost their lives in the last two days in Iraq, people who had gone out to commune with their God. People with spouses and friends, children and jobs; people who were thinking what to make for supper that night, who were worrying about their creaking knees when they knelt down, people who were newly born or near the end of their paths. People who loved and feared, hated and adored, felt bored and laughed at silly jokes. People who are now dead, ultimately to be remembered mostly as numbers in the political struggles for power by others.

For those who loved them today is the first day of the After: a horrible time, a time that nobody wants to live through, a time that doesn't seem possible to live through, yet something that must be lived through. There is no other way out but through the necessary suffering. My heart breaks for them, or would break for them if it would do any good at all. But only time, the horrible time, will do any good, and even that will be limited. The lives of the survivors will continue, yes, and slowly they will be patched together again, but they will never be the same: the scars will fade, but they will not stop aching, one will get used to the sudden gaping holes in ones heart, but the holes will not close.

This is what death does. And there are no words vile enough to describe those who use it like a scalpel in their carefully orchestrated plans for supremacy.

On the Mommy Myths

It's very hard to be a good mother. In fact, it's impossible, because a good mother is defined as some sort of an unattainable combination of a PhD psychologist, the Virgin Mary, Buddha and a child-centered automaton. This is the reason why all mothers are bent over under a terrible burden of guilt and why the so-called mummy wars rage unabated. Mothering is the only human task that I know of which is defined as well done only when performed by saints.

If we used the same rigor and strictness in our demands for performance from politicians, athletes, entertainers and ordinary workers, everybody in this country would down antidepressants by the fistful. But luckily for most of us, it's only the mothers that are held to such impossible standards. This is very convenient as there is always someone to blame when things go wrong: the Mother, who was either too absent and selfish or too clinging and demanding, who fed you the wrong things or didn't take you to the right enriching hobbies, who went out to work or who never got a life and therefore burdened you with guilt. No need to blame the fates or destiny: there is a real live scapegoat for all of our sins.

Even the praise mothers get is a back-handed compliment: a Mother's Day card with verses about the perfect ever-sacrificing mother, a creature of no known resemblance in the real world, can only fan the flames of mother-guilt. And though it's wonderful to be congratulated on ones child having turned out a success, who really believes that any one human being could so totally mold another one? Besides, what does this say about all the people who didn't turn out so very adorable? That they had bad mothers, that's what.

The reason for this rant is a really good post on the mommy myths I just read on One Good Thing. Do read it if you think that my view is biased by the divine angle.

Today's Drudgery

This pearl is from Matt Drudge, the fair and balanced newsprovider to the so-called liberal mainstream:

Democrat frontrunner John Kerry is not sure God is on America's side in the war terrorism. Kerry made the startling comments during Sunday's Democrat presidential debate in New York City.

Elizabeth Bumiller of the NEW YORK TIMES asked Kerry: "President Bush has said that freedom and fear have always been at war, and God is not neutral between them. He's made quite clear in his speeches that he feels God is on America's side.

"Is God on America's side?"

KERRY: Well, God will -- look, I think -- I believe in God, but I don't believe, the way President Bush does, in invoking it all the time in that way. I think it is -- we pray that God is on our side, and we pray hard. And God has been on our side through most of our existence.

Tut, tut John! Everybody knows that God always roots for the right side, and that's Americans. In fact, God has season tickets as one of the major fans of the U.S. Patriots. God doesn't care about the other teams at all. That's how it works, as everybody knows. At least in the simplest of theologies.

Will You Marry Me?

Happy Leap Year's Day! An old tradition, recorded in law in Scotland and many other European countries decreed that in leap years, and later only on the 29 of February women could propose marriage and men couldn't just say no:

In 1288, Queen Margaret of Scotland decreed that on Leap Year's Day, a woman could propose. It was beholden on the man to accept, unless he was already married or betrothed, or pay a "swingeing £1 fine".

Other stories indicate that a man could also refuse by buying his suitor a pair of gloves or a silk dress. I heard that enough linen to make a dress was also satisfactory in many parts of Europe.

A curious custom, this one. A marriage was a contract, after all, that a woman couldn't legally enter into until quite recently. It was a contract between her father and the suitor or his father, and the role of the woman was largely to be the object over which the contract was written. So why give women the right to instigate such a contract, even if only one day every four years, and why make the consequences of refusing so expensive for the man? A one pound fine in 1288 was an enormous one, and enough material for a dress wasn't meaningless either in an era when most women owned about two dresses. I haven't been able to find out the reasons anywhere. Maybe historians amongst my readers could tell us the secret behind the Leap Year's Day marriages?

Until then, it's nice to speculate. Think of the close-knit villages of old Europe, where everybody knew everybody else's business. Couldn't the custom have originated in the desire to make men who fathered children outside marriage responsible for them more directly? The village scrutiny might have kept women from using the right to propose frivolously against men who were innocent of any hanky-panky, and the financial consequences of refusal might have provided some child maintenance even from men who refused the marriage itself.

Or maybe it was something completely different, as has also been speculated: a way for unattractive women to get hitched. But what about the unattractive men? It's unlikely that they would have been snapped up on the 29 of February. Should I now feel sorry for all these poor men, eternally doomed to solitude? Probably not. As we know, marriage contracts didn't value male charms equally with female charms which, in the paradoxical ways of this world, means that men had the upper edge here. On the other hand, a poor man was deemed an unattractive one.

So the still eligible men on February 29 would have been poor and possibly quite dishy. Not too bad for all those unattractive spinsters, is it?

Still, I think that my first conjecture sounds more promising. Queen Margaret would then have been a pathbreaking ruler in making the institution of marriage more just. What would she think of the FMA initiative, I wonder?

Why Do They Hate U.S.?

We are not exactly the flavor of the month in most countries abroad. In fact, we haven't been that popular for a long time, but recently the hatred of the United States as a country has reached a new peak. A survey last spring showed a further decline in the American reputation:

[In 1999-2000], in a State Department survey, 78% of Germans said they had a favorable view of the U.S. That fell to 61% in our 2002 poll – and to 45% in the survey conducted this spring. Opinion of the U.S. in France has followed a similar track: 62% positive in 1999-2000, 63% last year and 43% in the most recent survey.

What is most striking, however, is how anti-Americanism has spread. It is not just limited to Western Europe or the Muslim world. In Brazil, 52% expressed a favorable opinion of the U.S. in 2002; this year, that number dropped to 34%. And in Russia, there has been a 25-point decline in positive opinions of the U.S. over the past year (61% to 36%).

If anything, fear and loathing of the U.S. has intensified in recent months. A Eurobarometer survey conducted among European Union countries in October found that as many people rate the U.S. as a threat to world peace as say that about Iran. Even in the United Kingdom, the United States' most trusted European ally, 55% see the U.S. as a threat to global peace. And in four countries – Greece, Spain, Finland and Sweden – the United States is viewed as the greatest threat to peace, more menacing than Iran or North Korea.

The U.S. image in the Middle East has been dismal for some time. State Department surveys show that, four years ago, just 23% of Jordanians expressed a favorable view of the U.S. What has changed is that these sentiments have now spread to predominantly Muslim countries far outside of the region. Just 15% of Indonesian Muslims look favorably at the U.S. – down from 61% in 2002, there is considerable evidence that the opinion many Muslims have of the United States has gone beyond mere loathing. In this year's Pew survey, majorities in seven of eight predominantly Muslims nations believe the U.S. may someday threaten their country -- including 71% in Turkey and 58% in Lebanon. And Muslims are increasingly hostile to Americans as well as America; in the past, as the 1983 Newsweek survey showed, people did not let their distaste for U.S. policies affect their view of the American people.

Whether this trend is worrying depends on whom one asks. The American neoconservatives don't care, of course: the Empire is strong enough without a single ally, they think, and 'power is to be exercised -never negotiated'. But Americans answering a recent poll about the importance of foreign opinions beg to differ. Three quarters of the respondents felt that the poor American reputation in other countries is a problem, especially in the war against terrorism. I think that it might also prove uncomfortable in many other international fields such as the containment of infectious diseases, environmental protection and global trade, not to mention the unpleasantness it causes the average American tourist abroad. Some signs of these more general problems are already visible:

The Bush administration has suffered a significant loss of leadership already as a result of snubbing its nose at diplomatic relations. Treated as children by clumsy and arrogant U.S. diplomats..., many nations are rebelling with angry rhetoric and contrary policies.
International trade meetings reflect this defiance. The failure of the World Trade Organization talks in Cancun, the implosion of the FTAA in Miami, and the lack of results at the Special Summit of the Americas in Monterrey are evidence of the mounting resistance to U.S.-tailored economic integration. They also reflect a widespread and deepening rejection of the "our way or the highway" diplomacy of the Bush administration.

The causes of American unpopularity elsewhere are many and some of them are likely to be present for a long time. The United States is the only remaining superpower and as such will stay an object of envy and fear for that reason alone. Its general policies affect other countries in ways which are not always taken into account by those who make the policy, and this causes understandable resentment in the affected countries when the results are negative. There will always be a dislike of the U.S. as so much wealthier than the majority of the world, and disagreement about its proper role in the development of the poor countries. American values differ considerably from those in Western Europe; Americans are more religious than any other developed country, most favor capital punishment, and the U.S. currently votes on social issues in the United Nations in a block with Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan. The military might of the U.S. makes the military budgets of other countries look ridiculous. And the U.S. Middle East policy has been a cause for anger in the Arab world for a long time.

But the current administration has certainly made things much worse than they needed to be. It is Bush that most foreigners fear and loathe, not the American people. He has succeeded in focusing so many negative emotions on one man by acting as an international bully boy. The Europeans, in particular, hate his unilateral policies and the withdrawal of the U.S. from environmental treaties or the attempt to build a global legal court. And the concept of 'pre-emptive defense' causes people sleepless nights all over the world. If Bush intends to globally advertize the neoconservative policy of 'might makes right', he is doing a great job. He recently boasted about being a 'war president' as part of the 2004 election campaign. But how will this boast sound abroad?

Given that the United States is not currently involved in a formal war, the president's bellicose language--"I make decisions here in the Oval Office in foreign policy matters with war on my mind"--has set other nations, allies and foes alike, on edge. Around the world, the administration's approach to international affairs has governments and their citizens feeling alienated and apprehensive.

It's all very unfair to all decent and nice Americans who know that they are not the sort of war-hungry, dollar-grasping monsters that the foreigners fear and loathe, and who might not have even voted for Bush in the first place. And now they can't even be sure of a friendly reception on their next vacation trip to somewhere exotic. Most unfair. No wonder that the Bush administration is trying to mend matters by various advertizing campaigns and by attacking those foreign news organizations that portray the most anti-American messages.

But these are vain attempts, because the reason for the anti-American sentiment are largely not in biased reporting or ignorance about what America stands for. Consider this parable to the current U.S. situation:

A small village somewhere has a varied population. Most inhabitants are quite poor, a small number (the minister, the lawyer, the teacher and so on) are relatively well-off, and one family, those who live in the big manor house, are rich. Traditionally, the village has pulled together in solving the common problems of fighting crime, maintaining the roads and caring for the environment, though the shares of each inhabitant in the total costs of these activities have disproportionately fallen to the more affluent.

Then the manor house is sold to a new owner. The village organizes a welcoming party in the village hall and hangs up banners to greet the new owners of the manor. But the new owners refuse to attend the party; instead they inform the rest of the village that they will no longer participate in the maintenance of roads or the prevention of pollution or the police activities. When they are asked about the wisdom of this choice, they point out that they can afford to hire their own defense forces and to maintain adequate nature in their own park. They don't need roads as they commute by private helicopters.

Things go on like that for a time. Then there is a break-in at the manor house: a criminal gang kills some of the owners' family members and burns down part of the building. The village acts as one, sending food and cards and asking how they can help. The owners of the manor house tell the whole village to go out to apprehend the killer, the house is turned into a fortress, and the owners still stay away from all village parties. Slowly the roads fall into disrepair and pollution levels rise. The police force (consisting of one officer) is overstretched by the need to keep looking for the criminal gang that attacked the manor house, and everyday tasks remain undone. Then the manor owners suddenly decide that it might be useful to open the house and garden for a day so that the general riff-raff could see how kind and generous the new owners are. Nobody turns up.

This is very much like the U.S. world standing right now. Unfair? For ordinary Americans, very much so. That's why it is so urgent for all of them to vote in the next elections.

On Chicken Litter and Mushrooms

What do these two have in common? Probably nothing except for the fact that they will both perform in this post, one about the wonders of politics and policies. First this piece of very good news:

The US Food and Drug Administration recently announced that the following things can no longer be fed to cows: cow blood, poultry litter (consisting of bedding, spilled feed, feathers and fecal matter), and restaurant wastes. I don't know whether to feel relieved that they've been removed from the list or shocked that they were ever on it to begin with. And I shudder to think what's still on the list.

If a human who likes to snack on other humans is called a cannibal, what is a cow who drinks cow blood called? At least the humans had some choice in developing their weird culinary tastes. Got milk?

Next, something that has to do with mushrooms:

...the Arizona state legislature is led by the draconian speaker Jake Flake. When one moderate Republican representative voted for the governor's program for basic children's services, he was stripped of his committee chairmanship. The conservatives at the statehouse are known as the "Kool-Aid Drinkers", after the religious cultists who committed mass suicide, while the few remaining moderate Republicans call themselves the "Mushroom Coalition" - kept in the dark and covered with excrement.

I love mushrooms. Too bad that from now on I'll be thinking it's moderate Republicans that are sliding down my throat with a bit of garlic butter as an accompaniment.

The U.S.A as a Smorgasbord

The following are my musings on recent political events here, from the AWOL debate about the president to the proposal of a constitutional amendment to 'defend' marriage.

The United States of America is not a melting pot, or even a tossed salad of different ingredients. If it resembles any culinary treat at all, it resembles the smorgasbord: an offering of many separate dishes together; some cold, some hot, some savory, some sweet. It encourages greed and gorging, and the outcome of this is indigestion when the warring ingredients meet each other in the stomach. Indigestion and possibly ulcers.

But also an exquisite sensory experience, a cookbook full of flavors. Whatever one wishes to eat, the smorgasbord provides it: old, familiar dishes in abundance, novel experiments from every culinary culture ever invented. Still, too much variety in food causes increased appetite which causes obesity, an engorgement of everything from myths and religion to body sizes. We dinner guests at this table are obese in such a way, full of grandiose dreams and stomach aches, conflicting desires and violent rage, beautiful principles and the intent to be good. But to feel this maelstrom in ones stomach is hard, so hard and painful. It would be a relief to simplify the menu, limit it to wholesome myths and stories, lofty principles, easy ideas.

No dinner guest can agree about which these might be, of course, so the menu can be changed only with force, ruthlessness, aggression, which are then met with force, ruthlessness and aggression. For how could it be otherwise when ones favorite dishes are threatened, those on which everything depends? And threatened by someone who is not the same, is different, is The Other (who shouldn't have been allowed in the room in the first place, should be booted out now, or at least made to respect this religion, this ideology, this language, this dish.).

There is a violence in this country, in its dining-room, which differs from the violence of guns and knives. This is violence as a basic push-and-shove in how to run a country, a kitchen or a world, open and in-your-face kind of violence. If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. If you're not for us you're against us. America: love it or leave it.

But what do you expect, no mere mortal can survive serenely the overabundance, the glut of aromas, tastes, philosophies which attack each other, and the diners, at this table of choices. No mere mortal in some other countries even needs to try, for smorgasbords are rare, and many nations have long ago agreed on a menu of just a few dishes. Boring, perhaps, or, as many believe, a sign of government oppression on freedom of choice. But not always; in some cases the choice of dishes is limited because that is what the diners wish, having come to their preference along the same shared road of a shared past. This may have once contained a smorgasbord, too, but the battles it caused, if any, are now faded into a shared mythology.

But the United States of America is a teenager, as countries go, and its repast is freshly laid. The ingredients are appetizing: freedom, faith, justice, equality of opportunity, but the final dishes can't satisfy everybody: private property, religious orthodoxy, free markets, democracy, equality. Which would you like to sample? How about intolerance, fanaticism and aggression? No? But these, too, are on offer. And so are caring, neighborliness, kindness.

So the dinner guests pick and choose, watching other diners with wary suspicion, urging them to try a different dish, and when this fails, forcing them to do so. Or they taste every dish on the table, hoping that the hot balances the cold, the savory neutralizes the sweet. No wonder that it sometimes seems better if someone else plans the menu: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Ayn Rand, Rupert Murdoch, or perhaps even a divine power or a president. But this would never satisfy the majority of the diners.

Blog Maintenance and Quarter- Anniversary

I now have trackback, so ping to your heart's content. The other blog maintenance is of the sort that most of my housekeeping tasks tend to be: on the eternal to-do list. I plan to reorganize the links and add to them considerably when I get a round tuit.

And this is not really maintenance, but my blogging career is now three months old, and I wish to thank all of you who read here for that. I have met many wonderful people here, I have learned a lot and I have had great fun. I hope you haven't been bored to death, either. In any case, I plan for another three months.

The Presidential Prayer Team

Do you belong to it? Is it real or a joke? I'm still not sure, but this article about the presidential prayer team is excellent. A short excerpt:

I was praying in private until someone got the bright idea of starting a Presidential Prayer Team. If you sign up on the Internet--no fee required--you get a sticker that shows George Washington genuflecting, his head bowed, his hat in hand. Each week members receive an e-mail detailing the difficulties the President must deal with that week so that they can pray for heavenly guidance. After all, scientific studies have shown that prayer helps those who are ill to heal even when they don’t know that people are praying for them! (What kind of a control group did they use for this study, I wonder?)

So I signed up and the e-mails started coming. They asked for God’s blessings on Bush and various members of Congress. (Heaven knows they need our prayers: 435 people who can’t agree on what to put on a pizza are making decisions for our whole country!) They prayed for the debut of Mel Gibson’s controversial film on Jesus Christ, and for the end of "unlawful unions" taking place between same-sex couples in San Francisco, though I can’t imagine what either of those issues have to do with the presidency. They offer weekly prayers for the members of the president’s cabinet and the Supreme Court. So I looked again: All of the names mentioned are _Republican_ members of the government. How odd. If I were a conservative, I think I’d be praying to change some liberal minds.

What America do the founders of the Presidential Prayer Team live in? It doesn’t look like my America. Where I live, there are people living on the streets. In winter, they are forced by the cold into emergency shelters. There are more food banks than ever and greater contributions than in the past but they still run short. Seniors buy their drugs from Canada; they used to buy them from Mexico before the U.S. government forbade us to buy them there. So much for NAFTA. Women on welfare have no childcare and few choices. I’ve never seen them mentioned as recipients of the Presidential Prayer Team rogations.

Do read the whole thing.

Rara Avis, Part V: The Life and Times of Caitlin Flanagan

She's the newest staff writer of the venerable New Yorker, one of such literary talents that her fuzzy thinking and careless ways with evidence are quite forgiven by the East Coast Literary Establishment. What would they not forgive for a brilliant writer who is a woman (a definite boost for the affirmative action lefties) and a feminist-basher (an equal bonus for the life-is-a-jungle-and-home-its-refuge righties)? Now the intelligentsia can have their very own Dr. Laura, a woman who tells how it is, puts the blame squarely where it belongs, and suffers no emotional nonsense. Flanagan sees her role at the New Yorker as the insightful critic of the modern family life, a sort of hybrid of Mary McCarthy and Erma Bombeck. That this family life will only belong to the upper classes and that the insightfully critical eye will only focus on the women in these families goes without saying, at least to anyone who has read her columns during the last two years in the Atlantic Monthly.

Which I have done, one of those small things that I like to do to make a life worth living for others. Just as Flanagan believes in the importance of using real napkins as opposed to paper tissues at home dinners, I believe that her writing deserves real scrutiny rather than merely superficial murmurs of "You go, girl."

Her Atlantic Monthly columns, all book reviews, are wonderful little mini sermons on the importance of being a housewife and on the nastiness of educated career-minded women, and I'm using the word 'housewife' quite advisedly here. Flanagan doesn't like stay-at-home-mothers; she likes women who revel in ironing their husband's shirts, planning dust ruffles, darning socks and telling their children to get out of their hair. You might think that she'd therefore be very fond of me, for example, as I'm excellent at all those tasks. You would be wrong. I'm one of the nasties in her books as I'm also highly educated and career-minded. Women must be one-or-the-other in Flanagan's world, and one side must wear the white hats (the good), the other one the black hats (the bad).

I was initially quite shocked to find how deeply Flanagan hates the uppity women of our times. To explain what I mean, here are some examples of her opinions on them:*

"De-cluttering a household is a task that appeals strongly to today's professional woman. It's different from actual housework, because it doesn't have to be done every day...Scrubbing the toilet bowl is a bit of nastiness that can be fobbed off on anyone poor and luckless enough to qualify for no better employment..." (March 2002)

"...this is a book from the perspective of "high-achieving women", and the main impression we get of the type is that they are going to get exactly what they want, and damn the expense or the human toll. These are women who have roared through the highest echelons of the country's blue-chip law firms, investment banks, and high tech companies....

Hewlett does her best to make us sympathetic toward such fiercely driven women, but the comments of a young male New Yorker—meant to reveal what cads high-achieving single men can be—backfire on her. He observes, "There's a whole bunch of them where I work. They're armed to the teeth with degrees—MBAs and the like—they're real aggressive, they love to take control, and they have this fierce hunger for success and for stuff. Everything they do and everything they want is expensive.""(June 2002)

"the hotshot career women who can't manage to coax eligible men into the honeymoon suite."(November 2002)

Take that, you selfish investment bankers, physicians, lawyers, scientists and - dare I even say this? - journalists. You must choose: either stay on the course, and you will be punished with eternal singlehood or a loveless, sexless marriage in a messy, uninviting house, or repent and join the new Future Housewives of America with Caitlin Flanagan. If you do the latter, your life will be good, she vows:

What's missing from so many affluent American households is the one thing you can't buy—the presence of someone who cares deeply and principally about that home and the people who live in it; who is willing to spend a significant portion of each day thinking about what those people are going to eat and what clothes they will need for which occasions; who knows when it's time to turn the mattresses and when the baby needs to be taken out for a bit of fresh air and sunshine. Because I have no desire to be burned in effigy by the National Organization for Women, I am impelled to say that this is work Mom or Dad could do, but in my experience women seem more willing to do it. Feminists are dogged in their belief that liberated, right-on men will gladly share equally in domestic concerns, but legions of eligible men who enjoy nothing more than an industrious morning spent tidying the living room and laundering the dust ruffle have yet to materialize. (March 2002)

It turns out that the "traditional" marriage, which we've all been so happy to annihilate, had some pretty good provisions for many of today's most stubborn marital problems, such as how to combine work and parenthood, and how to keep the springs of the marriage bed in good working order. What's interesting about the sex advice given to married women of earlier generations is that it proceeds from the assumption that in a marriage a happy sex life depends upon orderly and successful housekeeping. (Jan/Feb 2003)

Of course, you might not agree with Flanagan that it is pointless to expect men to carry out any household chores or childrearing, or that sex indeed is a wifely duty (as she argues in the column from which the second quote is taken). If these trouble you or if you wonder what evidence she might have for the argument that people in traditional marriages had better sex, well, then you're probably one of the black hats and not intended to read the Atlantic Monthly or the New Yorker in the first place. You are not in their desired readership profile.

Flanagan is a stubbornly dualistic thinker. That housewives equal 'good' and professional women equal 'bad' is only one example of this pattern. Another one is her habit of seeing the world as consisting of only two classes: the upper class where women have nannies for their children and the class of the poor immigrants from which these nannies come. There is something innocently childlike about this vision of the world, as there is also in her fictional dream of a housewife's life, but the truth is that her treatment totally omits all the women whose lives fit none of these descriptions, and these women are numerically the majority.

And what about men in Flanagan's writings? Here are some of her views on the male sex:

The national Boy Project may have taught America's young men to treat women with new respect in the classroom and the boardroom, and it has certainly prepared them for an unprecedented amount of no-strings nooky; what it has not impelled them to do is to make a bride of every hard-charging woman who suddenly—and fleetingly—wants to play fifties girl with a diamond solitaire and a box full of Tiffany invitations. (December 2002)

What we've learned during this thirty-year grand experiment is that men can be cajoled into doing all sorts of household tasks, but they will not do them the way a woman would. They will bathe the children, but they will not straighten the bath mat and wring out the washcloths; they will drop a toddler off at nursery school, but they won't spend ten minutes chatting with the teacher and collecting the art projects. They will, in other words, do what men have always done: reduce a job to its simplest essentials and utterly ignore the fillips and niceties that women tend to regard as equally essential. And a lot of women feel cheated and angry and even—bless their hearts—surprised about this. In the old days, of course, men's inability to perform women's work competently was a source of satisfaction and pride to countless housewives. A reliable sitcom premise involved Father's staying home for a day while Mother handled things at his office; chastened and newly admiring of the other's abilities, each ran gratefully back to familiar terrain.
...
Under these conditions, pity the poor married man hoping to get a bit of comfort from the wife at day's end. He must somehow seduce a woman who is economically independent of him, bone tired, philosophically disinclined to have sex unless she is jolly well in the mood, numbingly familiar with his every sexual maneuver, and still doing a slow burn over his failure to wipe down the countertops and fold the dish towel after cooking the kids' dinner. He can hardly be blamed for opting instead to check his e-mail, catch a few minutes of SportsCenter, and call it a night . (Jan/Feb 2003)

.

The Between Boyfriends Book describes men in a manner so dismissive and callous that had a man written such a book about women, the cries of misogyny would be deafening. But upper-middle-class women hold a lot of power in our culture these days. Still, though, there's one bit of power women will never wrest from men: the decision to deem one group of women candidates for marriage and another group candidates for quick and quasi-anonymous sex. (December 2003)

It's a long time since I last read something similar to these ideas. In fact, it was in the 1950's. Flanagan's men are 1950's men, unchanged and unchangeable. Do they wear white or black hats in her tales about life? This is difficult to decide: on the one hand men are given the freedom and liberty not to have any nonfinancial responsibilities towards their wives and children, on the other hand men are treated as genetically incapable of learning the simplest household chore if it hasn't always been labeled a guys' job.

Given Flanagan's tendency towards rigid, dualistic thinking, there must be one Wicked Witch orchestrating all these breakdowns in the family lives of the comfortable classes. And there is! It's feminism, as is pretty evident from the quotes I have included here. Feminism is all wrong, thinks Flanagan, because men will always be 1950's men and women will always have higher housekeeping standards than men. For Caitlin Flanagan feminism was and is nothing but an upper class white woman's ego trip. Her view of feminism pays no attention to feminist-sponsored legislation that now guarantees equal treatment of women and men at work or in education or to the feminist-initiated changes in societal views on rape and domestic violence. That it might actually be a good thing for the society to have women who are physicians or lawyers or politicians or managers or even journalists doesn't seem to occur to her either. Instead, her latest book review takes a step even further and accuses feminism (i.e. uppity women's ego trips) of surviving only due to serfdom (i.e. the use of nannies from poor, developing countries). In fact, it's titled "How Serfdom Saved the Women's Movement".

This article contains revelations about Flanagan's own life that stunned me. It turns out that she hired a nanny to help her in the house while she was trying to be a good housewife, and it turns out that neither she nor her husband have ever changed the sheets in their beds. Either they have the filthiest house imaginable, or - is this too mean to say? - a form of serfdom must be taking place in their household: someone else is changing the sheets.

It is now very hard for me to take anything she writes seriously. Yet she does talk about topics which are important, and she does have a point, though not the one she thinks she has. If she could only drop her obsession about the uppity feminists, she might notice that what she's really writing about is class, and class is one of the few things that are non-mentionable in the mainstream media. That's why it is quite acceptable to blame professional women who employ nannies under poor working conditions, as this is a problem caused by selfish, ambitious women (and the job of child-rearing, in any case, is seen as not a job at all, but something women are supposed to do for nothing), but not acceptable to ask about the wages and benefits of the person who bags your groceries at the supermarket or cleans your windshield at the gas station or vacuums and dusts your office at work.

She also has a second unintended point, and that is the tremendous demands of work that are now seen as expected. Most professionals think nothing about sixty hour workweeks, and much longer weeks than that are not unheard of. What is homelife like for someone with such hours? Never mind if the worker is male or female, there is something deeply disturbing in expecting someone to work so hard that no meaningful time can be spared for ones nearest and dearest. And Flanagan is right to state that those in the upper classes can refuse such hours; it doesn't make them or their families starve. Indeed, I'd like to see a major strike amongst the well-heeled, with a general renewed emphasis on the goal of an eight-hour day for all workers, and Barbara Ehrenreich, at least, agrees with me.

Flanagan is even partly right in goading feminists to work harder on behalf of the poorest women, though her total refusal to acknowledge that any such work is already being done makes it tricky to find the arguments where her accusations are valid.

I suspect that Caitlin Flanagan will not try to adjust her writing so as to properly address these issues. Why not continue with the recipe that has proven so successful: the general bashing of uppity women? In this she's not really a rare bird, of course, but rather a participant in a female growth industry with such luminosities as Camilla Paglia, Ann Coulter, Wendy McElroy and Laura Schlessinger: the anti-feminist movement. The more I think about this series, the more convinced I become that I'm a poor human-watcher, that my copybook is full of jottings about the most ordinary of all sparrows: people in the service of the prevailing powers.

Now, if I could find the male equivalent of Caitlin Flanagan, a man who consistently and mercilessly bashes other men as men rather than as individuals, now that would be a find! A true rara avis for my collections. Can anybody help me here?
---------------------
*You can link to the articles from which these quotes were taken by going to the back issues of the Atlantic Monthly . They are ordered by year and month, and Flanagan is always under the Book Reviews in the lists of contents.

Random Rants

1. "Girls having sex with snakes" shouldn't bring up my blog. Do you hear me, Google?

2. Listen to old Herodotus:

When Heracles reached the country which is now Scythia, the weather was bad and it was bitterly cold, so he drew his lion's skin over him and went to sleep. While he slept, the horses which he had unharnessed from his chariot and turned loose to graze mysteriously disappeared. As soon as he awoke Heracles began to look for them, and roamed all over the country until he came at last to a place called Hylaea, or the Woodland, where in a cave he found a viper-maiden - a creature which from the buttocks upwards was a woman, but below them was a snake.

Can you guess who he is talking about here?

For a moment he looked at her in astonishment; then asked if she had seen his mares straying around. She replied that they were in her own keeping, and promised to return them to him on condition that he lay with her.

Utter rubbish. I didn't have to use any extortion methods whatsoever!

Heracles complied. The viper-woman, however, did not at once give him back the mares, but put off the fulfilment of her bargain in order to keep Heracles as long as possible for her lover, though all he wanted himself was to get the horses and go.

All he wanted was to get the horses and go. Right! And pigs do fly. Herodotos got it all wrong, and it gets even worse after this bit. Lies, all lies. Why Herodotos calls his book The Histories is one of those eternal mysteries, in the same class as the Fox News' slogan "Fair and Balanced". Come to think of it, the two sources have a lot in common, though Herodotos is considerably more entertaining.

Another Invalid Quiz

This is about medieval personalities and the current corporate world. It's about as predictive as tea leaves or the entrails of an ant, but if the only task you have awaiting you today is doing the laundry or vacuuming the floors, I strongly recommend this as a valid delay tactic.

To find out your medieval personality, click here.

I am the Minstrel/Dreamer. Last time I did this (also on a laundry day), I was a King. Some personal growth has taken place in the meantime!