Some Thoughts About Misogyny

Misogyny, like in the hatred of women. This term always seemed inadequate to me, as there's considerably more contempt of women in the air than actual hatred, though the latter can be found, too, especially on the net, and there is also something close to fear of women. We need a word that encompasses all of these, or words to reflect the different types and intensities of feeling.

I believe that misogyny has always existed. I also believe that the majority of men, or the majority of people in general, are not misogynistic, but there is a sizable chorus of hateful voices, and these voices are always humming in the background. The effect this has is to make us almost oblivious to mild hatred of women: it's just how things are. This happens to me a lot. I read an article or see a cartoon or overhear a conversation, and I'm left with an odd displaced feeling which is not quite fear or disappointment but something similar, a feeling of something being wrong or missing, like looking at a group photograph where one person has been whitened out, yet nobody notices. Then later my overworked brain puts the pieces together and I realize that the point of the story was something negative about women or that the cartoon was only funny if you think that women are stupid/greedy/indolent/overemotional, or the overheard conversation expressed an anger at some woman by smearing her for being a woman.

David Gilmore, an anthropologist at New York University at Stony Brook, wrote a book titled Misogyny some years ago. In it he gives us hundreds of pages of evidence on the existence of fear and hatred of women in primitive societies, in so-called advanced societies and in all types of intermediate societies. He also almost delights in showing us the extent of misogyny in many religious writings, in literature and in the visual arts. Any reader brave enough to read him should prepare by downing a stiff drink of nectar or two.

Just about the only people not committing misogyny in Gilmore's book are women. My suspicion is that this omission is a direct result of Gilmore's mild misogyny: that women don't exist except as objects of men's hatred and/or veneration. But this omission is a serious one. Misogyny is not uncommon among women. Misogynist women give us advice in radio call-in shows and political advice as television commentators. They are hired by some religious extremists and politicians to justify largely anti-woman practices. They write articles and books telling women how to live and then blaming them for the negative consequences of these 'choices'. Some of them probably even live in your neighborhood.

True, there are many more misogynistic men than women, but the ignorance of the fact that women, too, can be infected by misogyny casts doubt on Gilmore's theories about the causes of woman-hating. These rely largely on psychological and genetic explanations stressing men's experiences and emotions about women, in particular about women as mothers or as sex objects. Since Gilmore specifically argues that women's experiences and emotions are different from those of men's, his explanations can't cover generalized misogyny.

Which is sort of disappointing, as he provides the reader with a multitude of possible theories. In fact, almost anything seems a likely cause, which doesn't bode well for women, or the reader who might reach for another strengthening sip of nectar. Still, there are a few dim rays of hope for us equalists: Studies suggest that misogyny decreases when men take a more active role in child-rearing and when the sexes work together. Maybe it's just a case of increasing the general understanding between the sexes? I don't know. Disappointingly, Gilmore ends his book by appealing to men to fight their incipient misogyny by noticing how gentle and kind creatures women really are. He obviously never met me.

Whatever the other reasons for misogyny might be, I believe that one reason for its endurance is that people bash women because they can. Women have traditionally not been able to fight back very effectively, and have thereby become a safe target for the general venting of spleen, diffuse rage and other sinister emotions. Obnoxious children torture flies, not bears or lions or tigers. It doesn't matter to these children that the flies might be wholly innocent of any wrong-doing.

So one solution to misogyny and similar maladies might be to fight back: Be a bear or lion! Roar! Or if you prefer to be a fly, at least crap on the misogynists' dinner plates.

One More Bad Poem

Hillary

I met her in the swimming pool
I cannot stand the crowd
But Hillary was different
and seemed to say so, loud.

Her skin was silvery and cool
Her swimming like a dream
Her crawling style was ancient
but made the waters stream.

Her eyes were deep and green as sea
I never saw them blink
Yes, Hillary was different
but how, I could not think.

Until at last it came to me
and I saw what I had missed:
These facts made it evident
That Hillary was a fish.


This is actually an ode for Hillary Clinton which went bad as usual with my poetry

Spring Vacations in the Liberal Coalition, Part I

These are my tips for a weekend getaway from the gray everyday world. Though only the trip is included in the price, these are good deal, given that the price is just one click away!

For a holiday with some nice liberal anger on the administration and the media, I recommend the following:
- Lambert on Corrente takes down Jodi Wilgoren a peg or two (or a whole ladder);a lovely, biting article
- dohiyimir scolds Karen Hughes on her Kerry-comments; another acerbic break
- Rook rants about how the British press beats ours in proper aggression towards the powers-that-be
- Jeff on Speedkill looks at the religious right-wing and how to do this objectively.

If you prefer something more ruminative on politics and the society, you'll lurve
- Rivka of the respectful otters on pro-choice attitudes by age groups; she shows us why the polls must be interpreted carefully
- Trish Wilson on the real-world horrors in the life of one of the little girls that acted in the Little House on the Prairie
-iddybud on what the media attention on Pat Tillman's death tells about Americans
-And Then... on the teddy bears we have given to Iraqi children in hospitals and what's wrong with them (and there is something wrong with them, believe me).

None of these quite fits the bill? Don't despair, here are a few additional suggestions about politics: all hit the point
- Gotham City 13 shows a picture of a coathanger (trigger-warning, but it's impressive)
- Andante tells what terrible crime made the police in Texas handcuff a 97-year old woman
- David on blogamy gives us more funny bushisms
- while T. Rex shows a bunch of meaningless classroom polls on voting intentions which are nevertheless pretty interesting to interpret

Don't want to read about politics as such? Not to worry, here are other interesting suggestions
- Pen-Elayne got a raise and is moving house
- Steve Gilliard tells us what to keep in the kitchen and the pantry cupboards
- Mustang Bobby has an interesting series on writing (he 'sees' things!)
- and the Fulcrum has a most beautiful picture of a spring meadow: a sea of blue

More suggestions in the near future. And no, I have not trackbacked any of these, given that doing the work Haloscan requires for that would make me too unwell to travel anywhere in the next forty years myself. Sorry.

Why, Despite Everything, Humans Should be Given a Second Chance

This is meant to be a happy post, to keep my dear readers reading rather than running away in disgust at the gloom and doom I usually radiate. So here is my list of wonderful things that humans have created:

1. Chocolate. True, the ingredients are from nature, but people invented the formula for chocolate. It is food for goddesses and anyone else sane. It is said to contain chemical ingredients similar to those that are unleashed when one falls in love. It should be called 'the little orgasm', and it should be declared the national food of all countries. Eating chocolate is good for you, researchers have established (too lazy to find the link now but this is true). The only bad thing about chocolate is something called 'white chocolate'. It is an imposter and should be shunned. The best, absolutely the best chocolate is a home-made truffle. I make a mean chocolate truffle.

2. Buttons, zippers and safety pins; all things to hold us together. Nothing else has come close to these nifty inventions, not therapies or antidepressants, not even velcro (which sticks too much). Where would we be without these helpers? Imagine Bush trying to march looking militant while his toga disintegrates all around him. Sorry, maybe you don't want to imagine that.

3. Vermeer's paintings, especially his blue tones. They are a good substitute for illegal drugs.

4. Dickinson's poetry; so innocent that it covers the most obscene with equal surety.

5. Taj Mahal. Though I've never been there, so this is provisional. But based on the pictures I've seen it is an eternal ode to love.

6. The ancient South American feather murals. I want one!

7. A little medieval wooden head of Christ in a tiny rural church somewhere in Scandinavia.

8. Physicians Without Borders.

9. Blogs.

10. Emergency Rooms, for reasons that to me are obvious.

11. Pesto, another food for goddesses, and freezable!

12. French kissing, though only by people who know what they're doing.

13. Siberian throat-singing, because it is so inexplicable, and sounds to me like an attempt to French-kiss oneself.

The Tendrils of Talibanization

In Afghanistan,

Female performers in an Afghan province have been banned from performing on television and radio. According to Reuters, female entertainers have been declared un-Islamic in the Southeastern province. The provincial government, according to Radio Free Europe, ordered state-run television in Jalalabad to stop broadcasting singer's performances.

I thought that they could sing if they didn't "move their bodies"? They are very protective of their audiences, these Afghan authorities. Who knew that women's voices are that powerful? They don't seem to have that much impact when used in speech. Maybe all women should communicate by singing?

In the United States,

Bush Administration officials rescinded funding for an international health conference because Republican staff members and right-wing groups such as the Traditional Values Coalition complained that the conference promotes abortion.

According to the Washington Post, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) withdrew funding for the Global Health Council's conference entitled "Youth and Health: Generation on the Edge." House Republican aides sent an email to anti-choice groups stating that they found the conference to be "outrageous" because they believe one of the groups speaking at the conference, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), "performs abortions" and helps "the communist Chinese force them on women." These accusations were proven false by the Bush Administration's own experts who investigated and cleared the UNFPA of abuses in its programs in China.

Ok, maybe the two are not comparable, but remember that we're at different stages in the Talibanization process. The conference is to discuss issues such as sexual health, nutrition and the spread of SARS. Well, aren't we all glad that our tax money isn't spent on such an evil idea!

Widows, Merry or Not

Widowhood is a sorry state. Just think of expressions like "the widow's weeds" (clothes for the mourning period) and "the widow's mite". At least in our cultural heritage a widow is someone to be pitied; poor thing, she has lost the mainstay and love of her life. This is of course often true, but why is my image of widows also tinged with poverty? Why do I instantly think of begging and of women perpetually dressed in faded black?

In other cultures widows wear white. In India, laws banned sati, or the self-immolation of widows, in 1829, and other laws in the nineteenth century gave widows the legal right to remarry and to inherit. Yet, Indian widows are still often expected not to marry or to demand any inheritance. When this is combined with child marriages for girls, frequently to a much older men, it is possible to have very young widows with no employment skills and nobody willing to take care of them. Add to this the fear of widows by the rest of the society:

After the death of a husband, a woman is shorn of her bridal ornamentation; her head is shaved by the local barber and her body is wrapped in a stark white sari so she may not arouse carnal pleasures in other men.
The bright red sindoor, the red smear that a married woman wears in the parting of her hairline, is substituted by a vertical ash smear from the top of her forehead to the top of her nose. Her very presence is considered so inauspicious that even her shadow may not fall on a married woman lest her terrible fate befall the other woman.

and it's not surprising that most of these unfortunate women survive as beggars near religious shines:

When they arrive at Vrindavan and Varanasi, the widows find shelters that were built almost a century ago for local ashrams or religious institutions. Today, the cramped, leaky spaces--administered by local government officials--accommodate about three women each, who sleep on torn sacks.
They receive meager rations of rice and lentils only if they spend six hours singing devotional songs at the ashram. Young widows are often lured into sex in exchange for more food or money.

The future looks a little brighter for these women, as several organizations and the Indian government have started paying attention to their plight.

But what is it about widows that would have caused such ill-treatment of them to begin with? And not only in India; the widow's lot has not been much happier in many other countries. Is there something about widows that reminds us of death, that ever-present silent menace always there, always waiting for the smallest amount of carelessness that will allow it to swoop and catch us? If there is, isn't the same threat equally hovering around the shoulders of widowers? Yet no culture that I know of treats the widowers with such harshness as widows have traditionally provoked. No, this explanation doesn't suffice.

I find a more promising one in economics or, perhaps, in simple human greed, combined with sexism. If a wife is regarded as a belonging of the husband, something that he is responsible for and alone can use, then his dying first is comparable to someone leaving all their property littered around for another person to pick up and care for. What is to be done about the poor widow? How can the other heirs get their maximal inheritance while also somehow escaping the stigma associated with someone who mistreats widows and fatherless children? Or, to put this less cynically, how can widows be provided without destroying the value of the estate for the later generations?

One solution is to provide for her legally, and this is the most common traditional solution. Widows in the twelfth century Sienna were entitled to their dowries and any 'morgengabes' their husband had given them, and in most of medieval Europe a widow had some legal claim to her late husband's property, though the widow's inheritance share was often rather small.* This is all on paper, of course. It is much harder to find out how widows were actually treated, though some at least must have been lucky or successful, given the frequent medieval image of widowhood as a happy time of life for independent-minded women (for the first time, these women were free of male guidance). Still, having to support the widow reduced the available inheritance for other heirs and must have caused pressures to leave her as little as possible, especially if she had no adult sons to fight for her share.

In some African societies, a man's inheritance went to his brothers. This included his widow. Thus, she was taken care of by being married to one of her erstwhile brother-in-laws, though I doubt that her opinion on the desirability of this match was an important consideration to anybody.

Another solution already referred to is to remove the stigma attached to any mistreatment of the widow. When this is successful (as it was in the sati-tradition), the remaining heirs can divide the whole pot. I'm not discounting the other reasons for sati, including religious fervour and true devotion on the widow's part, but neither am I convinced by their sufficiency, given that widowers were not expected to reach the same peaks of religiousness and love.

None of these solutions are very good from the widow's point of view, and ultimately they fail even the other heirs who are made to act in all sorts of unbecoming ways. Much better to circumvent the whole problem by declaring women and wives and widows as full human beings, by training girls in trades and occupations and by allowing for the sorrow that the loss of a spouse can cause in both widows and widowers without making either one into some everlasting symbol of grief.


-----------
*See The Marriage Bargain. Women and Dowries in European History, by Marion A. Kaplan, pp. 69-73.

Media Coverage of Yesterday's March

What a wonderful occasion the march was! Democracy in action. And it was even covered by many of the mainstream media. But how exactly was it covered?

The short answer is: neutrally. For the mainstream media this translates into giving the two sides equal time. As one side consists of hundreds of thousands and the other of a few hundreds, the final effect is to give the pro-life people much more coverage per person. In fact, the march was a real bonanza for them: they got half the publicity with zero organizing costs. Even the Bush administration got free coverage this way. Here's Karen Hughes on the real meaning of the march:

Karen Hughes, an adviser to President Bush, appeared on CNN today to provide a counterpoint to the anti-Bush sentiment on the Mall. She praised the president on his "very strong record for women," saying he has employed more women in senior-level staff positions than any other presidential administration.
She also said that abortion-rights activists were moving against what she said was popular momentum, particularly since the terrorist attacks of 2001, in favor of anti-abortion policies.
"I think that after September 11, the American people are valuing life more and we need policies to value the dignity and worth of every life," she said. "President Bush has worked to say, let's be reasonable, let's work to value life, let's reduce the number of abortions, let's increase adoptions. And I think those are the kinds of policies the American people can support, particularly at a time when we're facing an enemy and, really, the fundamental issue between us and the terror network we fight is that we value every life."

We are at war, she reminds us, and the difference between Us and Them is that we value life and freedom and they don't. Therefore, the multitudes marching yesterday were obviously terrorists. The ones heckling them along the route (one with a placard saying "God Hates You") are the Real Americans, the ones that are reasonable. And valuing lives is something that covers the period from conception to birth for everybody, but thereafter becomes very selective as to status of motherhood, occupation, religion and country of citizenship. Shame on you, Karen. If president Bush has actually said "let's be reasonable", he has done so somewhere outside the reach of microphones and cameras.

In a bizarre way the media's neutral coverage is exactly the opposite of neutrality. Here is this gigantic event expressing a political opinion, and the media interpretation of it is trying to nullify what happened by reintroducing the same old parameters of debate. As if nothing has changed. As if suddenly it isn't quite clear that young women indeed are concerned about their right to their own bodies, as if they didn't march yesterday in their hundreds of thousands. No, the television and papers tell us; nothing has changed, this is all old hat and will have no effect on elections this year.

Let's prove them wrong.


___________
If you want to hear more personal opinions of the march, click here, or here.

A Sunday Post

The "s" in my keyboard is sticking due to a tiny accident with yogurt (pear-flavored). I have to avoid it if I can, hence problems with sstyle.

Did you march for freedom and women's lives? I hope that you did.

I didn't. Because I was in Novocaine-induced sleep for the last 24 hours, and my hand is very much improved by it.

What happened was this: I was meditating, as usual in a dark room. I had been standing motionless for a couple of hours, when I got the brilliant idea of becoming a whirling dervish. No brilliant idea should be wasted; so I immediately started whirling. The stars were whirling, the room was whirling, the emptiness was whirling. And the Last Final Question suddenly appeared at the end of a long tunnel of light! Yes! I screamed, Yes! I whispered, I'm coming! The Consciousness looked down and spotted me...

AND WHAM. The answer to the Last Final Question: the final communion of my right hand and the corner of some very sharp window glass. I think that Rumi would have laughed at this. I certainly did, despite also feeling slightly queazy when I turned on the lights and saw what the room looked like. I couldn't stem the bleeding so off to the emergency room I went.

Emergency rooms are weird places at four a.m.. The television is on at full blast: you can learn how to lose twenty pounds in one day, though they don't mean by bleeding to death. Maintenance people hover around, not maintaining much except the vending machines for fifty-year old coffee. And on the benches lie pain, curled up, vomiting, hoping for some answers. As I wasn't very high in the pecking order of horrors I had time to listen and observe. One woman had a headache that never went away. She had been installing wall-to-wall carpeting for years, and feared that the glues she had used had caused this ache in her head. Her employer had fired her for taking too many days off from work. She had finally too much pain this Saturday morning at four o'clock, and she was waiting for some relief. I so hope she found it.

Another woman had brought a toddler in, because he had fallen on some toy the previous night and was now bleeding in the mouth. Except that the bleeding had stopped, and the toddler was happily making the rounds in the waiting room. His mother tried to jump the queue by appealing to higher powers: that she was a patient of someone important in the hospital, that she (unlike the rest of us dregs of humanity waiting there) actually paid for health insurance, that the people coming in on stretchers from traffic accidents surely shouldn't be admitted before her toddler and so on. I understand the fear of a parent with a small child that might be badly hurt, but it was not nice to observe this human pecking order instinct at full swing in an emergency room. After all, some people there were very ill indeed.

Anyway, finally I was admitted and had my finger nicely stitched. Though I suggested to the physician that he should take a course in embroidery. He wanted to know all about the blanket stitch, but I couldn't show him with one hand. He couldn't understand why I felt no pain, and I didn't really want to explain about the goddess thing; my explanation about the meditation and so on was already what they were all talking about, inbetween giggles. I do think that I gave them all a small moment of joy in that place, though maybe at some cost to my reputation as a sane and responsible member of the community. I was also wearing my "Bitch" t-shirt...

I'm feeling much better now, thank you all well-wishers, and the "S" seems to be working better, too. And I only got six stitches, though they're all on one finger. What does that count in bragging rights?

Things Not To Do

Bet your parents never warned you not to meditate in a dark room at night, or not to read Rumi right before. This combination might make you curious about the effect twirling rapidly could have on your meditation. Well, they should have warned you, especially if there's some window glass around.

I'll have an interesting post later on about emergency rooms in early morning, about how total lunatics are viewed there and about writing blog posts with one hand. When the novocaine wears off.

March for Women's Lives

Tomorrow, in Washington D.C.. Important!

Friday Bitch Blogging

That's what I am, after all, Henrietta the Hound, the Queen of all dogs and definitely a female. Today I want to talk about us other animals. You humans are treating this earth like one big concentration camp for us, and the only reservations you have about this is whether it might harm you in the end. Of course it will harm you, you stupid leg-lacking idiots!

You believe that your god has made us so that you have convenient non-perishable stores of food and entertainment, and now your mad Doktor Mengeles are recreating new species by combining genes from different animals. Why? To make pigs that crap less! To make goats and cows whose milk is like human milk! To make pet fishes that glow pink in the dark! And all this is quite safe, of course, as long as the fishes don't escape or goats start working on the computers.

Well, how does it feel to play god? Come to think of it, don't tell me. I don't want to know. In any case, what the Doctor Mengeles say is that it's all for the benefit of humankind (not for the benefits of bitches or dogs, naturally), and that humans have always been tinkering with nature, or that humans are just following the lead of Mother Nature here. Right! The 'tinkering' humans have done with dogs has given us dogs so small that they can't give birth naturally, dogs so large that they die at the ripe age of six and dogs with such large heads and short noses that they die of respiratory problems. And humans follow in the footsteps of Mother Nature as a dingleberry follows the butt of Hank the Lab.

Ok, now that I've gotten this off my chest (and what a handsome and deep chest it is!), I admit that the readers of the snake goddess aren't that bad, that calling researchers Mengeles is a tad exaggerated, and that I probably should rave and rant elsewhere. But the Little Green Footballs banned me and Instapundit can't be broken in, and the mainstream media completely ignores me. Even the goddess threatens me with exclusion from this silly blog if I don't try to write more sunny.

Sunny: It was sunny yesterday. It rained today, and I was soaked through this morning, though I scared a respectable number of squirrels and rooks. Is that sunny enough for you?

Henrietta the Hound

The American Spirit of Entrepreneurship

Listen to this:

Clothes can make a statement. Urban-bag designer Tom Bihn has discovered that labels can, too.
Bihn's sales have doubled since a French-language presidential insult mysteriously made its way onto the bilingual washing instructions for hundreds of his laptop bags and backpacks.
The labels read: "Nous sommes desoles que notre president soit un idiot. Nous n'avons pas vote pour lui."
Translated into English: "We are sorry that our president is an idiot. We didn't vote for him."

Bihn says that he doesn't know who put this message in the labels, but he's not trying to find which of his ten employees might be the culprit:

"We're not really looking real hard because it's been really good for business," Bihn said. "If somebody admits to doing it we'll give 'em a raise."

Michigan...

For some odd reason I thought that Michigan is a state full of apple trees and sane farmers. Shows how much I know about American geography and politics. In actuality Michigan appears to be another base camp for the Great Religious War. Its Republican dominated House just passed a"bill to provide standards for personnel policies to protect the right of conscience of health care providers who conscientiously object to providing or participating in certain health care services under certain circumstances; to provide for protection from certain liability; and to provide for penalties and remedies." In translation to ordinary English, this means that the Michigan Catholic Conference has pushed a bill through which will allow Catholic health care workers to refuse to participate in abortions or to dispense morning-after pills. The bill is expected to pass the Republican-controlled Senate, but the Democratic governor might veto it.

However, as it's still not quite legal to pass bills explicitly phrazed to cover only certain reasons for conscientious objection, the bill is actually very vague and fuzzy in its coverage: any religious, moral or ethical reason is covered. This has made some suggest that the bill could be used to deny treatment of injuries or diseases that stem from a lifestyle the health care practitioner opposes. This could endanger the health care of not only pregnant women (the intended group) but also gays, lesbians, alcoholics, snake goddesses and so on. Though emergency health care cannot be denied, the proposed bill could have serious repercussions in rural areas with very few health care providers, especially as everybody knows everybody else's business in small villages.

The whole package of bills also proposes that people who hold such moral, religious or ethical qualms cannot be denied access to medical education on this basis, and that they cannot be sued for malpractise either. Perhaps they will also be released from the Hippocratic Oath* or its equivalents?

The crafters of the bill cleverly excluded the dispensing of contraceptives from its coverage. The intention is, of course, not to anger the vast majority of Michigans (some of whom must be sane and even apple farmers). It's the sort of stealth tactic that I despise: after all, the Catholic church doesn't like contraception, yet any pangs of bad conscience here are not supposed to be worthy of lawmaking. The real reason is naturally to add contraceptives later on when we have become lulled to the soft baby tendrils of Talibanization.

I'm seeing all sorts of interesting ways to use the same 'Conscientious Objector' concept in other fields: teachers who refuse to teach political or economic ideas they find ethically repulsive, stores which refuse to sell clothing to people they think would make their clothes look aesthetically unpleasing, journalists who refuse to report both sides of a story (though this is common enough already). Even bakers could refuse to sell croissants to obese people. What an interesting world we would create!


*The classical version (no longer in use) begins so very promisingly:

I swear by Apollo Physician and Asclepius and Hygieia and Panaceia and all the gods and goddesses, making them my witnesses, that I will fulfil according to my ability and judgment this oath and this covenant:(Bolds mine)

but it deteriorates pretty quickly thereafter. The modern version is a bit less controversial.

Carmen's play and Some News About Garden Rage

Carmen is an important voice in the comments sections here. She also has a blog called Mostly Normal, and on this blog she has a wonderful play relating to the topic I blogged about recently: The Catholic Church's views on women. I thought her play is really good.

In other news, garden rage is rearing its ugly head in the U.S.:

The wife of Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., was accused on Wednesday of hitting a woman in a dispute over mulch at a garden center, police said.

If there's anything worth fighting over, it's mulch. Good mulch is hard to get hold of, as most mulch is contaminated by herbicides and other nasty critters, so I felt quite sympathetic to Wanda Baucus when I saw the title of the article. But it turns out that she wasn't angry about losing the best mulch in the place; she was furious because the other woman was served before she was. So it was just the usual human hierarchy stuff, and illogical as also is the custom: She should have hit whoever was doing the serving, not the other customer.

On Books

Books are an absolutely necessary part of survival, for me anyway. I love books; the way they feel and smell, the sound of the pages turning, their titles and covers and everything. I read books from cover to cover, including all the stuff about what the printface is called. The only problem with books is the space they take. I will have to move soon, unless I can think of a way to store more books in the existing house. I'm already shelving them three-books-deep, and I have installed shelves in the basement and the garage, even though this ruins the books (you can still read them). I have books in every room of the house except for the bathroom (this is because too many fell in the tub).

I haven't written about books very much here, and the reason is probably that writing about any one writer singles that one out and seems to suggest that the others are not as wonderful, and I love them all too much to do this. But I've figured out a way to write about books without making such gross judgments: I'm going to use categories!

The first one is: Books that I can see from where I'm sitting. This includes a book about how to use your tablesaw (it's fabulous!), Octavia Butler's The Dawn (not as good as some of the others), The Annotated Journals of Sylvia Plath (no comment), The Art of Lacemaking(not as hard as I thought), Anna Paword's The Tulip(interesting, but too expensive), Vogue Sewing, The Bible of Karate, The Midnight Sun, the Tzar and the Nihilist (a weird nineteenth century book about a Brit visiting Russia), Patriarchy by Phyllis Chesler and Binmore and Dasgupta's Economic Organizations as Games.
I picked one random book from each group of shelves dedicated to a particular topic, though there are some shelves behind my back, so what's on those will remain a secret.

The second category: Books that are very big or very small. The smallest book I own is called The Little Book of Candy-Making, printed in 1911. The largest book is probably one of the encyclopedias, though I also own an enormous Collected Works by Rabelais.

The third category: Books that are hard. This is easy: Karl Marx's Das Kapital, The Tibetan Book of the Dead and all my books on topology. Also Wittgenstein.

The fourth category: Foreign books that I especially like. Well, almost all books are by foreigners from my standpoint, but I love Dostoyevsky, Turgenev and Austen. I think I hate Kafka, though I read him a lot. He appeals to my sick side too much, and the same is true of Proust. I also dig Marguerite Durand.

The fifth category: Hateful books that I own. Not many, as I tend to stomp on them and then tear them to pieces. But I still own Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate. I hate it for quite complicated reasons.

The sixth and final category: Interesting and weird books. I have an autographed Agatha Christie, several hand-written and hand-illustrated books and a book of poetry by someone called Veranda Porch. Veranda Porch!

Right now I'm reading Rumi. Good stuff, though from the male angle as usual. And what are you reading?

More Bad Poetry

Yes, I know I promised that there would be no more. But where else can I force people to read these? And these are really very good bad poems.


1. A bad poem is good to write,
wholesome to read.
It is as fresh as a sharp bite
in an ocean of mead.




2. The paisley pattern in my tights
reminds me of sperms in flight
seeking hidden ovaries
or contemplating suicide.

Poor things,
they're taken for a ride.
The losers have nowhere to hide.
The winner, taken to one side
becomes the goal of spermicide.

Their life is short and hidden.
To name them is forbidden
in all-mixed company.
You have to stay calm and firm
if you are to be a sperm.
It helps to trust
in life after lust.

About the Kerry Campaign so far

I fear that Kerry is a coward. This is the last thing needed right now, and I hope that I will be proven wrong soon. But there are some uncomfortable signs of Kerry trying to look like some sort of a mild Republican. Nobody in this country votes for mild Republicans: there are two camps of voters now, and they're far removed from each other. I blame the right-wing media for this split and the turning of the Republican party into a homecoming party for Attila the Hun spliced with Savonarola. Not a party to which I'd be invited, except perhaps as an interesting savory course.

So I'd like Kerry to show a bit more guts and courage; those old-fashioned values which suit both men and women equally well. Besides, we all know what Bush is like, and there's no way Kerry could run successfully as a whey-faced imitation. People either want the real thing (poor misguided souls) or absolutely detest it (the rest of us), and if Kerry acts too moderate and tame too soon, the latter group will give up and start planning their emigration even sooner.

I'm not alone with these thoughts. Roger K. Smith's article on this topic is well worth reading. Here's a snippet from it to whet your appetites:

In recent days, Senator Kerry has repeatedly emphasized his centrist credentials. At a top-dollar fundraiser, he assured well-heeled New Yorkers that he was "not a redistribution Democrat." He has already begun retracting his own proposals for new spending programs, signaling Wall Street that paying down Dubya's deficit will trump his domestic agenda. He swiftly approved of Bush's craven concessions to Ariel Sharon -- concessions that sound the death knell for Middle East peace negotiations -- for fear of showing insufficient fealty to the Israeli right.
This all surely placates the DLC mandarins, but it must be recognized that these are perilous tactics. The more daylight he darkens between himself and Bush/Cheney, the more he legitimates their policies and alienates those left-liberals who ought to be his most fervent supporters.

Are you reading, Mr. Kerry?

A Few Classical Blog Posts

These are a few of the posts I have marked as worth reading even years later, and if you can do so under a nice, shady tree that's even better:
-Ampersand's Pure Merit, Pure as Driven Snow, an excellent discourse on independence and merit
-Ms. Lauren's For Teachers and Educational Critics Alike, an expert treatise on education
-Jeanne d'Arc's Easy Evil, a story about the coarsening effects of war on families

More of my recommendations will follow whenever I can't think of anything fun to write!

Very Fast News for Those in A Hurry

1. Bush Names U.N. Ambassador as Envoy to Iraq

This is John Negroponte. His appointment means that Colin Powell is on the rise, as the two are pals. Negroponte is famous for his stint as the U.S. ambassador to Honduras where some argue that he engaged in the abuse of human rights via the U.S. funded death squad which worked for the right-wing contras. President Bush thinks his approach is the right one:

"John Negroponte is a man of enormous experience and skill" and "has done a really good job of speaking for the United States to the world about our intentions to spread freedom and peace," said Bush.

2. Powell Says More Countries May Follow Spain in Leaving Coalition

Honduras just decided to do so. Powell is quite heart-broken over these desertions.

3. Hormel to Raise Prices on Spam, Dinty Moore and Other Products

That's the other kind of spam. Spam and Dinty Moore are those ethnic foods that must be explained to non-Americans, but I'm not brave enough to try to do so. Anyway, they now cost more.

None of these news will affect Bush's polling figures downwards. Nothing seems to affect those figures downwards, probably because they're propped up on top of a very large number of millions of dollars.

Define "A Successful Woman"

Please. I think that this phraze is an oxymoron: there is no such thing as a successful woman, or at least no generally agreed-upon definition of one. If a woman has had a life of fame, if she has been a famous writer or painter or scientist, there's bound to be books written about how unhappy she was in her private life: either she didn't have a partner or she didn't have children or if she had both of these, well, the partner and the children must have been very deprived and unhappy. If a woman led a private life, doing things for her family and local community, she was just doing what was expected of women in general: to be the basis on which other things can thrive without getting any fame or reputation from it. She didn't DO anything, you know, she didn't lead armies or invent the theory of relativity.

Yet the fact is that men who we universally regard as successful have equal 'gaps' in their lives, but we don't decide that this would stop them from being successful. Einstein was a terrible father and husband if the existing accounts are to be believed. Can you imagine how this would be portrayed if he had been female? Her theory of relativity would get quite a new meaning.

Of course any person, man or woman, is successful in a sense if he or she satisfies all important private goals for life. Perhaps being content is a sign of success. But the world at large doesn't define success this way, and we do get rewarded on the basis of the world's definitions, and these definitions make it essentially impossible to be a conventionally successful woman. Then some 'genius' writes another book wondering why women still have trouble getting to the top...

You may have guessed that I have been reading stuff that gives me indigestion. It started with two excellent post about the oh-so-wearing mummy wars at ms. musings (The other one is just above the one I linked to). I'm so very tired with this attempt to pull and yank every woman until they fit into the same standard pattern, and what's more, a pattern that is not humanly/humanely possible to fit. Then I read in a comments thread of another blog about what's wrong with Republican women: the ones who are well known are 'cold ice-maidens' that no man would want or 'too busy and career-ambitious to have had children' if some man did choose them. Come on, give us a break. If the 'cold ice-maiden' had three small children at home, she'd be blamed for neglecting them or she would never have been promoted to her current position of power. You can't win if you're a woman, it seems.

Freedom from Religion

Freedom of religion is a fine thing. Freedom from other people's religion would be equally wonderful, but I don't know any country in this world that constitutionally guarantees this important right. Even the Christians who were eaten by the lions in the Roman amphitheater would agree with me on this one. So would anyone who has had a Jehova's witness tell her that she is a whore because all women are (this happened to me) or a Christian children's book seller tell him that his children are going to hell if he won't dole out some cash for the books (this happened to a friend of mine), or anyone who works with one of those religious missionaries, always trying to convert anything that moves (this happens to everybody).

More importantly, many if not most world religions have unfriendly words to say on the topic of women, and fundamentalists who take the two-thousand old writings as literal divine truth can really make women's lives horrible, whether these women belong to the same religion or not. We all know what went on in Afghanistan, and there's probably a plan for a 'kinder, gentler' Taliban somewhere in John Ashcroft's private papers. He'll get to it some time in the next four years if he's not stopped. His right to be a Pentecostal is guaranteed in this country, but my right not to be treated like his religion believes women should be treated is not. A big problem.

Here, my dear reader, you might wonder why I'm worried about all this, given that I'm a goddess myself, and can easily smite anyone who irritates me. The answer is that I'm a Fair and Righteous Goddess, and I do not like injustice. Besides, I'm half a woman and half a snake, and you can guess what Ashcroft would think of this. So I want to stop him.

I'd also like to stop all the other religious fanatics who want to wage war and kill people through vile and despicable acts of terrorism and state terrorism. Most real people are inbetween these terrible armies, and it's these real people that largely get killed in this religious war. Because of someone else's religion or someone else's interpretation of religion. What would Jesus say about this? God? Allah? Unfortunately, the ancient texts contain whatever you're looking for in them, having been compiled over periods of some hundreds of years by people with varying political opinions. We need a revelation, desperately. If none of the Big Guys speak up soon, I need to organize something that might look like a real revelation.

In the meantime, I worry. See what president Bush just contributed towards the idea of a holy war:

Yet Bush, by embracing Sharon's own unilateralism, was in effect throwing sand in Muslim faces worldwide. Other than the invasion of Iraq, there's hardly anything Bush could have done to muster even greater support for the worldwide jihad.

What is Bush thinking? There are clues in statements from his press conference. "Now is the time, and Iraq is the place, in which the enemies of the civilized world are testing the will of the civilized world. We must not waver," the president said. Later, he added, "I also have this belief, strong belief, that freedom is not this country's gift to the world. Freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world. And as the greatest power on the face of the earth, we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom."
Bush came pretty close to proclaiming the fight against radical Islam the divine mission of the United States. He may not have meant that, but you can rest assured that is just how much of the Islamic world will view his comments, especially in light of his actions the next day on behalf of Israel. You can also bet it will be read that way by the American religious right, which sees in defending Israel a way to bring about Armageddon and the second coming of Christ.
We can't know Bush's motives, but it's not difficult to read the effects, and they risk being catastrophic. There are pragmatic reasons why some of what Bush gave Israel Tuesday will be part of a final agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. But it should have come about through negotiations. The way Bush has chosen to do it is essentially saying, again, to radical Islam, "Bring it on."

Reassuring? Not really, unless you belong to one of the two armies who claim to fight for God. If you don't, you better start lobbying for the right of freedom from religion. Other people's religion, that is.

On Gardening

Gardening is one of those things that old ladies with needlepoint bags are supposed to do. Old ladies with needlepoint bags are very wise: gardening is a wonderful activity. I spent an hour outside today, enjoying the spring sunshine and the lovely new baby greens on the trees. It's very good for the soul (if such a thing exists), and if you grab a spade and a rake, it's also very good for the love handles.

You can commune with nature, as they say, or wonder about the deep philosophical questions of life (Why do I feel like eating the shiny and plump worms that appear from the earth as I shovel? Is old dog poop that has gone white and light still good to dig near the peony roots? Could the problems in Iraq be solved by giving every terrorist and soldier a nice little plot to dig in?) And being so close to nature gives a renewed interest in all sorts of botanical and zoological questions: Why do the squirrels replant my tulips every year into one tiny circle, with the tallest ones on the edges? Why are most of the really interesting plants poisonous (mandrake root, foxgloves, lilies of the valley)? What makes dogs want to lie down on the most fragile tips of lilies? Did I really once see an enormous black-and-yellow striped worm appear from the ground after rain, or was this a nightmare caused by excess red wine and cheese feasting the previous night?

I'm planning a Garden of Hate this year. It's going to have a path covered with sharp gravel (shoes are to be left at the gate). Color will come from bright orange marigolds, form from yew trees tortured into the shape of bloated elephants, and scent from skunk cabbages. The path will end at a viewing seat in full sun, made from unplaned rough wood set insecurely on wobbly stones and surrounded by giant Scottish thistles.

I already have the Mars and Venus gardens, you know, one for men and one for women. The Mars garden has stuffed mooseheads suspended from manly trees with narely a leaf and a waterfall made out of beer cans. The planting is mainly of arums (click here if you want to know why). The Venus garden is all pink and frilly without a single straight line, and each flower bed is in the form of a teddy bear. Nobody likes these gardens, which was a great disappointment for me as the books about men being from Mars and women from Venus were so popular. What people like is my sex garden, but I'm not going to write about that one.

Even if you don't have a garden, you should go out and commune with nature once and a while. It reminds us about an important fact of life: it is this earth that our life depends on.


----------
PS: This is for Daniel: You can build a miniature railway track outside and plant it with tiny plants that look like trees and shrubs from a distance! There's even a nursery that specializes in providing them.

Deep Thought for the Day

If the Rapture comes before November 2004, may I have the White House?

Grading Time

It's final examinations time for a lot of students, and I think that we should have examinations for the politicians and the media, too. An article on president Bush's policy towards Afghanistan and Iraq in the late fall and early winter of 2001 states this:

Following an important meeting on Iraq war planning in late 2001, President Bush told the public that the discussions were about Afghanistan. He made no mention afterward about Iraq even though that was the real focus of the session at his ranch.
"I'm right now focused on the military operations in Afghanistan," Bush told reporters after talks on Dec. 28, 2001, with top aides and generals.
A "war update" was the White House description of the news conference Bush held with Gen. Tommy Franks, who was in charge of the Afghan war as head of U.S. Central Command.
Details of the meeting's focus on Iraq have since emerged in a recent speech by Franks, who now is retired, and in a new book by Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward.

Now, many of us knew this, of course. It was impossible not to see that the Iraq war plans had been hatched years before the government's initial propaganda campaign on them. But I at least didn't know that Bush was fibbing about what was going on to his employers; and make no mistake about it: the voters are the employers here. What would you do to an employee who isn't working on the project he says he's working on? Or a student who's not answering the question the examination has set? What grade should Bush get here?

And what about the media, the watchdogs of democracy? Do they still deserve that name, or should they be renamed something more suitable, say, the guarddogs of the government. It doesn't matter that we don't have to rely on one state-run information channel when all the different channels that we do have act as if they've been employed to uncritically report on the government's views.

Consider this commentary on the recent press conference president Bush gave:

But no one followed up on Bush's admission that even if he had known Saddam didn't have WMD stockpiles, he still would have pushed the Iraq War! And no one had the courage to challenge the President on his intimidation tactic in response to the first question, which was about the Vietnam comparison. Bush said, "That analogy sends the wrong message to our troops, and sends the wrong message to the enemy." Instead of pointing out how chilling Bush's statement was, the reporters focused on the personal. Five times, they asked him variations of the question: Was he going to apologize, or take responsibility, for any mistakes he might have made? Once would have been enough. This should not have been a personal morality play. It should have been about the fundamental policies of the U.S. government, which right now are jeopardizing the lives of U.S. troops, and, in a profound way, the lives of Americans everywhere. Bush has given only three prime-time news conferences in his Presidency, and reporters lost one of their few opportunities to hold him accountable.

What grade should the journalists get? How well are they informing us about the goings-on in the government? Is democracy kept transparent and safe by the media? Or are all the media outlets nowadays as 'fair and balanced' as the famous Faux News Channel?

I'm angry, as you may have noticed. We demand that ordinary workers work hard and act ethically, we demand that students work hard and don't cheat, but what do we demand of those who really have the power to influence things?Whatever we might demand, what we get is mostly bread and circus. Remember last time that was a governmental policy, in ancient Rome, and what happened next?

A Test to Take - Haven't Had One for Some Time

This is a pretty interesting one, too. It will tell you where you fall within a two-dimensional graph of left-right and authoritarian-libertarian ideas. You can also find out what famous person (read: famous man or Margaret Thatcher) you most resemble. I'm a lot like Gandhi. Again. Well, I look a lot better.

Here's the link.

Thanks are due to lucia in the comments-thread of Alas, a Blog.

The Little Blog That Could?

Blogs are wonderful things to have, but sometimes I wonder what they're good for. Like today. It's a beautiful day, and here I'm sitting in the darkness, with just one drowsy snake around my throat, typing away. I should be outside, causing mischief if nothing else. Instead, I'm talking to emptiness, hoping that something exists out there and will hear and even answer back one day. It's a little bit like spirituality, don't you think? Do you exist? Do I exist? Does it matter if we don't?

Some blogs are gigantic business enterprises, run by a proper Organizational Structure. Some blogs have Experts, and several interesting bloggers. But most blogs are these little amateur affairs: a solitary lunatic typing, typing away, hoping to catch some other eccentric person somewhere. Is there life on earth?

So what are blogs for? Other than providing an outlet for all those extraneous thoughts that don't neatly fit into the daily lives of most of us? I'm not sure. Are the blogs taking over important tasks from the mainstream media by providing alternative sources of news and their interpretations? Definitely, and that's probably all positive, especially if you believe in some free competition in the world of ideas. But most blogs aren't trying to take over the newsdesks of New York Times or similar media sources. Most blogs are just voices in the wilderness, attempts to connect to something or someone, or perhaps just a way to hear your own voice echoing back.

My blog is a very little blog, run by one minor goddess, and in that it shares a sisterhood/brotherhood with the majority of blogs. It's not a nice purebred political blogsite with plenty of venom and outrage (though I do my best), and neither is it really a very good feminist blog. I'm too much of a mongrel for keeping my writing clean enough for any one purpose, and I think that many of us bloggers are like that: neither one thing nor the other. But this makes it hard to define blogs or to put them into tidy boxes, and it also makes for difficulties in competitions for honors such as "The Best New Political Blog of the Year".

Though of course everything has politics in it, and politics has all sorts of other things in it. Maybe this is what the little blogs can do? To point out when our love of taxonomies is not at all helpful, to widen the lens a bit in our views of this world? The little blogs certainly help in letting us hear more voices, and often these are voices which are silenced in the mainstream media. Goddesses, for example.

I'm going out now to listen to some nice Blues. Now, Blues are very political. If you read about the history of this branch of music you get quite a good education on the race relationships of the 20th century USA, as well as an interesting example of the way some women performers were made invisible later on. Writing about this clearly would fall under politics and feminism, but it also would fall under the category 'human activity', and that's the category that the little blogs are really good at.

Enjoy the weekend!

Sean P. O'Malley and the Winds of Change in the Catholic Church

He is the new archbishop of the Catholics in Boston. He was picked for the job after all the sexual molestation trouble the church had had. He's the Clean-up Man, and he has started cleaning. What he is vacuuming away are individualism, materialism and the culture of death. Culture of death is Catholic-speak for being pro-choice.

He also doesn't like the baby boomer generation, those born between 1946 and 1966. Maybe they will be sucked up next into the church's big dustbag? This is what he said about this lost generation:

"The most educated and affluent group in US history," he said, "are heirs to Woodstock, the drug culture, the sexual revolution, feminism, the breakdown of authority, and divorce. Typically, they are religious illiterates, but they are interested. Not big on dogmas. My karma ran over my dogma could be their motto."(Bolds mine.)

Feminism is listed together with all sorts interesting things, drug culture and the breakdown of authority and divorce. The archbishop thinks that equality of the sexes is a bad thing, I gather. And a whole generation of 'the most educated' Americans are religious illiterates. But he didn't say a single word about the sexual abuse of minors.

Elsewhere, rumors are rife that the Vatican is going to limit the use of altar girls. Too many girls want to serve, and not enough boys. To correct this gender imbalance, quotas are going to be put on the girls. See, the church IS interested in gender equity, after all, though of course it has its own ideas of what equity should look like. I wonder what the Virgin would do? Hmmm.

Is this a wind of change blowing? Or the same old northwind that has spread out the churchmen's dresses for centuries?

Friday Canine Blogging

Hail, all fellow canines!
This is Henrietta the Hound, the intelligent feline in this madhouse. The other one hardly bears mentioning among the noble breed of dogs, being a mere Labrador. Everybody knows Labradors are really Laboratory dogs, and the development was never finished. Anyway, she brought home a Bug. From the mud in which she pretends to swim. And gave it to me.

After watching her gorge and vomit, gorge and vomit, I succumbed to the same condition. There's no justice in this world.
I read only the classics, I refuse to obey the lowly humans, I bite butt most efficiently, and what do I get for all this? The same humiliating bug.

But I've nearly finished with the vomiting, and even managed to nibble on a small piece of French toast. This was after an exhausting day of chasing away a woman who pretended to want to change the gas meter, and also successfully chasing away some man in a telephone repair truck. He was yelling about mad dogs as he run away. And then the thankless cur of a goddess threw things at me while screeching something about the telephone lines having been down for days.

Well, nobody told me. All she had to do was a little groveling, and they came back and fixed it all. Luckily I didn't have to go the veterinarian, so it's all the same to me.

The spring is here, which means much more interesting smells. Have you noticed this? Even humans, the poor smell-challenged creatures, seem to sniff more these days. Not that they catch all the intriguing stuff that's going on. I even smell something from the distant Washington D.C.: a whiff of desperation, the bitter smell of scared armpits. Could it be that the right-wing political march is out of lockstep? I would be surprised if the humans got it right this year. They hardly ever do.

Take Clinton. Who should have replaced him? Me, that's who! I'm extremely good-looking and charismatic, I'm very dominant, and I mount all dogs irrespective of sex or which end of the dog it happens to be. If I had been selected, none of the humans' current problems would have existed. And there would have been no Labrador retrievers.

Yours, in solidarity,
Henrietta the Hound, CEO of Snakepit Inc, PhD, DPhil etc.


Postscript: Hah hah ha! I snuck in when she wasn't watching. That's me Hank the Labrador! And I gave her the bug on purpose. She is one of the libural elites, and she should puke! Me, I'm really good again, and yesterday I almost caught a squirrel. It was probably a terrorist or a communist. I'm shedding now! See me shake!
Smooches to everybody!
hANK

Is the Nightmare Over?

As my computer was down I had time to engage in that antiquated activity: reading stuff on paper pages. I re-read the Onion satire from 2000 on the Bush presidency ("Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity Is Finally Over'"), and as others have said, what is scary about this satire is that it turned out not to be a satire at all, but a very good forecast of what has actually taken place.

If you don't believe me, read for yourself:

"Bush swore to do "everything in [his] power" to undo the damage wrought by Clinton's two terms in office, including selling off the national parks to developers, going into massive debt to develop expensive and impractical weapons technologies, and passing sweeping budget cuts that drive the mentally ill out of the hospitals and onto the street."

If this is satire, it's very weak. Now consider these more detailed predictions:

"During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years."

"On the economic side, Bush vowed to bring back economic stagnation by implementing substantial tax cuts, which would lead to a recession, which would necessitate a tax hike, which would lead to a drop in consumer spending, which would lead to layoffs, which would deepen the recession even further."

Both of these predictions have turned out to be true, though Bush is having the tax hikes done through the state taxes rather than the federal ones. I also found this prediction very relevant:

"Bush had equally high praise for Attorney General nominee John Ashcroft, whom he praised as "a tireless champion in the battle to protect a woman's right to give birth"."

Once again, not satire at all. That's the problem with our current administration: it's pretty much impossible to satirize them by using exaggeration. It just won't work. I know this from personal experience: I once tried writing a satire entitled "The American Right's Advice to Mothers". What I came up with would have been regarded as a serious academic treatise by a very large number of right-wingers. This is most depressing, and yet another reason to vote in a Democratic administration come November.

Computer Trouble

I'm having it. Plus tax trouble. Plus the telephone lines to Snakepit Inc. are down. If you call the repair number, you get connected to number inquiries... And Henrietta the Hound is vomiting all over the property. If you call the veterinarian, you get connected to the local bakery.

For all these reasons I'm now A Goddess In Her Wrath and not very good company. All should be fine tomorrow, though, and I should then be back to my usual wordiness. Happy Tax Day to all my American readers!

On Chairs, Spoons and Toasters, OR: What I Saw in A Dream

How do you write a letter to someone who doesn't want to read it? Doesn't want to read it not because you are an enemy, a nuisance or a guilty reminder but because you are a complete nonentity, a thoroughly uninteresting everyday object, a piece of the background against which heroes do their stuff.

How do you write to people who don't plan to pay any attention? How do you get their attention? Should we cry? 'Look, guys, a chair just walked in and cried!' Should our words be weapons? 'Hey man, that toaster just tried to cut my throat!' Should our sentences plead? 'Gee, I could've sworn that spoon just begged me for understanding.'

No. All it would achieve is a small surprise, the astonishment that an inanimate thing suddenly acts and feels. This would be added to the list of supernormal events. It wouldn't make us seem any less of a chair, toaster or spoon; only an uncommon kind, a weird chair, toaster or spoon. Something that, for one fleeting second, might deserve curiosity. But not for long.

How do you touch someone who doesn't believe in your existence? Can it be done?

And if not, is it enough to talk to the other chairs, toasters and spoons? To write 'chair books', 'toaster stories', to be exhibited with the works of other spoons? Is this of value?

Perhaps. If you know that at night the chairs dance, beautifully, on one leg, twirling around the kitchen, leaping over the toasters which tell stories about their lost loves and vanished hopes, while the spoons drum a rhythm from misty worlds full of desperate questions and complicated answers. Perhaps . Isn't this life, too? Isn't this a sort of heroism, a type of victory in the war against dying? Isn't this human, too?

So why bother trying to reach the others? Because they are the sitters on the chairs, the eaters of the toast, the stirrers of the spoons. Because theirs is the kitchen in which we dance, whisper stories, sigh and cry. And because when they see us and say 'Such a comfortable chair, such an efficient toaster, such an elegant spoon. What would we do without you?' they turn away without expecting an answer, without hearing us scream.

Foot Washing in Atlanta

This has to do with Christian traditions. The Holy Thursday foot-washing ritual commemorates the biblical story of Jesus washing his disciples' feet. Archbishop John Donoghue doesn't like to wash women's feet in this ritual:

A Catholic archbishop has banned women from participating in Holy Thursday foot-washing rituals in Roman Catholic churches in Atlanta.
Archbishop John Donoghue of Atlanta issued a letter to all of his parishes stating that only 12 men at each parish should be selected for the ritual, The Associated Press reported.
The ritual represents Jesus washing the feet of his disciples at the Last Supper and is offered to girls, women, and men in most archdioceses or dioceses around the states. This is the second time, however, that Archbishop Donoghue has banned women from the ritual, issuing a similar ban in Charlotte, N.C. 15 years ago.

This exclusion of women is no longer customary in Catholic churches, but maybe Archbishop Donoghue finds women's feet too stinky? Or maybe including women would deviate too much from the 'religious correctness' required in the event? In that case why not exclude all men of non-Semitic or Roman origin, too?

I think John has got it completely backwards (I can call him John, can't I? Calling him my father would be a lot more insulting for him.). The point in the story about Jesus washing his disciples' feet was a reversal: a teacher much above his disciples is doing a very menial task, a task associated with humility. Why exclude anyone then? Unless, of course, John believes that women are much superior to men...

GDP for Econophobes: Fun and Sexy!

I swear. Once you've read this post you can go out and radiate the dangerously sexy aura of someone who knows about economic acronyms. It's a real guy or gal magnet, at least in my experience.

GDP is short for Gross Domestic Product. "Gross" doesn't refer to the ugliness of the term, but to the opposite of "Net", meaning that we don't subtract certain things when arriving at this measure. What these things are will become clear later. "Domestic" means that we will ignore stuff that's produced abroad. Sort of. And Product is a term meaning all the stuff we produce within a year: cars and haircuts, psychiatric visits and cups of coffee. Sort of. For the United States, say, GDP then tries to measure the total amount of goods (physical things) and services that are produced within the United States (whether by foreigners or natives) within one year.

The larger the GDP number, the more is being produced. This has made GDP into one measure of economic well-being, with the idea that a larger GDP means we are better off. But there are also problems with this interpretation: First, the GDP doesn't tell us how many people were involved in producing it. If two countries had the same GDP figures, but one had to support twice as many people than the other, the larger country would clearly be worse off. This problem can be solved by dividing the GDP with the population size of a country to arrive at an average or per capita GDP.

This doesn't solve all the problems yet. Another sticky one has to do with the way we add up the amounts of goods and services produced. How do you add up, say, 20,000 Fords and 1,000,000 bagels? The GDP does this using money: the value of the 20,000 Fords is their price multiplied by 20,000, and the value of the million bagels is the price of one bagel multiplied by a million. Ok. But prices change over time. If bagels or Fords double in price, but we still make the same amounts of them as in the past, the GDP figures would tell us that we now produce more even though that's not true. To solve this problem, GDP is often given in real rather than in nominal terms. This means that the prices used in multiplying the quantity items are standardized to some specific year in the past. For example, we could use 1994 prices of bagels and Fords to multiply the quantities produced both in 1994 and in 2004. Then any difference between the two total GDPs would show if we are indeed producing more today. This works some of the time, but we get into some iffy areas when the products produced today didn't even exist in 1994, so they couldn't have any prices then. There are ways around this problem, too, such as using chain-linked indexes for the prices, but the point is to remember that we value the stuff we produce with its prices, and prices may not always reflect what we want them to. Another example of this is when the prices of some product are severely distorted by a monopoly which charges much more than a competitive industry would. The GDP would record these 'too high' prices as an increase in the GDP.

A third problem with the GDP as a measure of economic well-being is in its gross nature. We produce a lot of stuff just to replace the bits that are worn out. I just made a shower curtain to replace a really old moldy one. How much did my personal economic well-being increase? Well, some, as the new curtain is nicer, but on the whole the change wasn't very large. If we really wanted to use the GDP to measure changes in economic well-being we should adjust it by subtracting all the production that goes to replacing worn-out items. But then we'd have Net Domestic Product, and as economists can't agree on the way to measure wear-out, we don't want to have one of those. Still, keep in mind the gross nature of the figure.

And now we come to the really serious problems with the GDP as a measure of economic well-being.* The first of these is that the GDP ignores the negative effects of economic activity on the environment. If I first produce coal and a lot of pollution, the value of the coal increases the GDP, but the negative value of the pollution is not included. If I then start a company to reduce the pollution I caused, the value of this activity increases the GDP! Say the value of my coal in the market is 1,000,000 dollars, and the extent of my pro-environment activity earns me 500,000 dollars, but the environmental degradation I caused would have a value of minus 3,000,000. The GDP gives my contribution as 1,500,000 dollars whereas it really should be -1,500,000. Of course it's really hard to put a dollar value on the environmental effects, and that's one of the reasons why they are ignored.

This omission of environmental consequences is a serious problem with the GDP. Another equally serious one has to do with the omission of nonmarket output in the GDP calculations. By 'nonmarket output' we mean goods and services which are produced but which are not sold and bought in the markets so that they have no easy prices to use in the calculations. Almost all production at home falls into this category: the production of home-cooked meals, childcare of one's own children, cleaning, laundry and yard-work. If I and my neighbor both do this work for ourselves, none of its value will be entered in the GDP figures. If, on the other hand, I hire my neighbor to do my chores, and he hires me, suddenly both of our outputs are entered in the GDP, which now shows an increase in production, even though no increase actually happened.

Our omission of nonmarket outputs in the GDP figures means that it's very hard to compare two countries by using their GDPs if they have very different patterns of market and nonmarket work. Also, the GDP underestimates women's production drastically, as the majority of household work is done by women. Estimates of the omitted value of nonmarket production vary, but most of them suggest that as much as one half of the total GDP may be omitted in omitting this part of the production.

Ok. Given all these omissions and problems, what is included in the GDP? How do we get the actual figures? To understand the procedure, note that we don't have any readily available measures of production, so we need to sort of deduce the production values from other stuff. Something that is produced today in the United States must go to one of the following uses:
-It's consumed by someone in the U.S. ( either because the person consumes it in a private act of consumption or because the person consumes it as part of government-provided consumption (use of roads, say)).

-It's not consumed right away, but it will provide goods or services that can be consumed in the future (this category includes durable consumer goods such as washing machines and also all investment). Some of this investment goes to replacing worn out equipment.

-It's consumed by someone abroad. This is counted as U.S. exports. But note that U.S. citizens can also consume things made abroad, and we don't want to include this in Domestic Product. What we need to do, then, is to add the value of exports to the GDP, and then subtract the value of imports from it.

So if we can add up the values of current and future consumption and correct this for the foreign influences, we should get a measure of GDP (though with all the problems I talked about earlier). By now you are up to reading the following summary of the included items, I hope:

It is common to see the following equation in economics textbooks:
GDP = C + I + G + NX

Consumption spending (C) consists of consumer spending on goods and services. It is often divided into spending on durable goods, non-durable goods and services. These purchases accounted for 68 percent of GDP in the first quarter.
Durable goods are items such as cars, furniture, and appliances, which are used for several years. (10%)
Non-durable goods are items such as food, clothing, and disposable products, which are used for only a short time period. (20%)
Services include rent paid on apartments (or estimated values for owner occupied housing), airplane tickets, legal and medical advice or treatment, electricity and other utilities. (38%) Services are the fastest growing part or consumption spending.
Investment spending (I) consists of nonresidential fixed investment, residential investment, and inventory changes. Investment spending accounts for 19 percent of GDP, but varies significantly from year to year.
Nonresidential fixed investment is the creation of tools and equipment to use in the production of other goods and services. Examples are the building of factories, the production of new machines, and the manufacturing of computers for business use (15%).
Residential investment is the building of a new homes or apartments. (4%)
Inventory changes consist of changes in the level of stocks of goods necessary for production and finished goods ready to be sold. (Less than 1%)
Government spending (G) consists of federal, state, and local government spending on goods and services such as research, roads, defense, schools, and police and fire departments. This spending does not include transfer payments such as Social Security, unemployment compensation, and welfare payments, which do not represent production of goods and services. (17%)
Net Exports (NX) is equal to exports minus imports. Exports are items produced in the US and purchased by foreigners (12%). Imports are items produced by foreigners and purchased by US consumers. (16%). Currently, the US imports more than it exports so that net exports are negative, about -4% of the GDP.

Got it? The total value of what is produced domestically goes either into what people consume (the first item), or into future consumption (investment, the second item) or into what the government consumes (the third item). In addition to that, we consume some things which are produced abroad (imports) and we produce some things which are consumed abroad (exports). The difference: exports-imports adjusts the other three groups for this, so that we are not omitting production that was consumed elsewhere or including consumption that was produced elsewhere.

Pretty simple, isn't it? Well, I hope so anyway.
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*I'm not covering all the serious problems with the use of GDP as a welfare indicator. See this link for more information.

A Sunday Post

In other words, something light and frothy is called for. Perhaps interior decoration? Tassels, bows and dried flower arrangements? I hate them all.

The problem is that I love to make awful items for interior decoration, yet I can't bear the sight of them. Giving them out as gifts works, but it tends to severely reduce my population of friends. So most of these creations are hidden in the basement where they make a good surface for spider eggs to rest (see post below on spider eggs). I just finished a homemade lamp shade. It has a long fringe and it's bedecked with blue-centered daisies made out of fabric! It was such fun to make, and now I have to hide the thing before breakfast or I lose my appetite. I also have a mini skirt in the basement, made by tearing up several silk shirts and by sewing the fragments on a canvas base. Also several 'ancestor' portraits made out of stuffed fabric shapes, flea market jewelry and so on. They are ancestor portraits for people who don't have ancestors, as well as for goddesses like me who just always existed. The idea is to hang them around the dining room, in massive, dark frames.

That's enough of light and frothy. In reality, I like my buildings stark, with marble and big open fireplaces. If there has to be furniture, it better be as simple as possible, and the only portraits allowed are of my favorite snakes and lovers.

But then I want to make something, and it always involves tassels, gilding and everything I can find at the local flea markets. Do you think I would benefit from some new age therapy? Or would that be too risky, given that seeing a real live goddess might make some therapists cross the border between sanity and insanity? In the wrong direction, I mean, though maybe the opposite is equally likely, and in that case I'd be a benefactress by resorting to medical help.

In the meantime, I have to decide what to do with all my frothy and light art creations when the basement overflows.
How about a lottery for some nice charity? And the winner would get his or her pick of my goodies! Would you buy a ticket for a good cause, say a rest-home for retired goddesses?

Killer Moms

I didn't want to write another feminist rant, but what can you do when the world offers you a topic like this on a salver?
The first two news stories that I saw on the AP Breaking News were about killer moms, with titles like these:

Florida Woman Charged in Death of Her Infant Son; Husband Sought for Questioning

Illinois Woman Convicted of Killing Son in 1989 Now Wants to Raise Her Second Child

The impression one gets from these headlines is pretty obvious: women murdering their children. However, the actual stories are a tiny bit more complicated. Take the Florida story. Here's an excerpt from the body of the article:

A woman has been charged in the death of her infant son, who had burns, bruises and broken bones when he was brought to the hospital unconscious, police said.
Lakyna Anderson, 26, was charged Friday with aggravated manslaughter in the death of 9-month-old Jamarion. She told investigators her husband was responsible for the boy's injuries and that he was watching Jamarion the day he died, according to an arrest report.
Nicklous Anderson, 23, had been found by the state to have abused one of her children previously, although he was not listed as a suspect in the death Thursday of 9-month-old Jamarion, according to Diane Carhart, a spokeswoman for the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office. Police were searching for him Saturday for questioning, Carhart said.

And here's an excerpt from the Illinois story:

A woman convicted of killing her 2-year-old son is now fighting the state of Illinois to be allowed to raise her second child.
In 1989, Sheryl Hardy - then Sheryl McGee Coe - smoked a cigarette while her husband at the time punished her son for soiling his pants by lifting him by his ankles and repeatedly dunking him in the toilet. The boy, Bradley McGee, died the next day of head injuries.

In other words, neither woman was necessarily the murderer of the child in question, and in both cases the women's roles look more like those of someone assisting and abetting a crime, or at least not stopping a crime, than those of the killer, though the Florida case is too open for final judgment. But you'd never get this from the headlines.

And just in case the reader misses the main point: that mothers are held to higher standards than fathers, both articles include a quote from someone making it explicit. In the Florida case:

Authorities said Lakyna Anderson was charged because she left the baby with a man who had a previous history of abuse.

Very bad if she did, but not the same as killing the child. Or it wouldn't be regarded the same if Lakyna was the child's father, I bet.

In the Illinois case we get an even more explicit example of different standards for mothers:

"They tortured this child," said Kip Liles, an emergency shelter parent who cared for Bradley McGee temporarily before his death. "Any mother who sits back and lets her child get abused and does nothing about is just as guilty. People like that should never get a second chance."

There you are. Mothers are held to higher standards.

What Conservative Blogs Say

Or a few of them. I did a tour of this odd land tonight, and decided to pick one topic likely to be on all conservative political blogs to study their approaches. Condoleezza Rice's testimony seemed a topic that would be covered. Here is what three popular conservative blogs say about her testimony:

1. Instapundit:

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Missy Nelson wonders if Time pulled an OJ and darkened Condi's skin for this It looks like they've cranked the contrast up in order to produce an unflattering photograph, but beyond that, who knows? They've certainly demonstrated in the past that they're not above this sort of thing.

Deconstruct that!

2. Andrew Sullivan:

CONDI: What is there to say? We have a frigging war on and the major networks all run this? I have nothing to add. Except to say: we have a war on. We used to win them before we engaged in elaborate blame-games as to who was asleep at the wheel when they broke out.

Deconstruct that!

3. The Volokh Conspiracy:

Hardball" Bingo: Condoleezza Rice is going to testify tomorrow. Many people (myself included) will be interested in what she has to say and have not already made up their minds about her and her testimony. But many others have made up their minds -- notably, the partisan talking heads who populate shows like "Hardball." They already have their talking points in their heads, I'd bet. Moreover, they have better reason than usual to write their scripts in advance: My guess is that there will be few, if any, surprises tomorrow. The short format (ten questioners dividing up 2 hours and 30 minutes) doesn't allow for any person to pursue one line of questioning at length, and Rice is too well-prepared and too poised to say something really stupid.

There was no follow-up by today's date. Deconstruct that!

I'd say that these bloggers didn't think Condi did very well. If Andrew Sullivan believes that Iraq would be a more favorable topic for the current administration, things must be a lot worse for Bush people than I thought from my admittedly much more lefty angle.

Speaking of my lefty angle, I'm not a real lefty (like in communist, for example), or even a born-again one. I'm the balancer of scales: if this country ever turns to the extreme left, expect me screeching and shouting arm-in-arm with Rush and Ann! No, cancel that. There are limits to everything in this world.

Some News from Pakistan

About honor killings:

A young woman from the Sindh Province of Pakistan has appealed to Pakistan's President Musharraf for protection from being killed in the name of "honor." According to IRIN News, Rozina Ujjar was divorced by her husband for standing outside of her house at the same time that a 15-year-old boy passed by. After her husband divorced her a local assembly of tribal leaders declared that the woman was "kari" (subject to honor killing).

The only way I have ever been able to understand the logic of honor killings is to think of someone I once knew whose whole self-esteem was tied with his cars. The cars had to be new and expensive. If they got as much as scratched in the parking lot, he'd sell them off immediately and buy a new one. He saw his own value in the value of his cars. Perhaps the honor killing system works the same way: the reputation of the family is based on the sexual purity of its women. When this purity is suspect, so is the family's honor, and the solution is to get rid of the offending female member. Of course this logic means that women are seen as property, but that view has a lot of historical precedence in most countries of the world.

Pakistan may be trying to do something about honor killings:

A bill specific to honor killings is supposed to be introduced to Parliament that will amend the current Criminal Procedure Code and Pakistan's Penal Code. However, according to the Daily Times of Pakistan, last week women members of Parliament protested against the assemblies for not allowing a debate on the bill.

How to Paint Snake Eggs

You don't, actually. Snake eggs are soft and look more like pebbles or shopping bags than bird eggs. Baby snakes are born with a special tooth for cutting their way out of the egg, and they are very good at self-defense from the moment of birth, so if you plan to go looking for some snake eggs to paint this Easter, plan again. In any case, most snakes in colder climates give birth to live babies.

But you can paint bird eggs, and almost anything will work on this media, even a pencil if you have nothing better. The simplest way to color eggs is to boil them in water with some onion skins added. You get lovely brown eggs that way. But water colors or acrylics work nicely, too, and you can even gild an egg. If you plan to eat the eggs, boil them before painting them. If you don't care about eating them, the eggs stay nicer if you empty them first. Make a hole in each narrow end of the egg, one very small, the other just slightly bigger, and blow in through the smaller hole. The theory is that the white and yolk will come out of the bigger hole. Sometimes this even works. You can then use these holes to put a string through the egg. Then you can hang the egg on a tree branch in your front yard. Or even several eggs.

You could even write important political slogans on the eggs and hang them somewhere where they would annoy politicians and other people your slogans attack.

I'm not going to paint any eggs this spring, but I do have lots of spider eggs in the basement, carefully guarded against the snakes. The baby spiders will be born any day now! I give them names when they are born, and then send them off to fight the good fight in the garden. Some types of spiders carry their eggs with them. They always remind me of harassed shoppers, desperately looking for one more thing while dragging all the other parcel with them. I wonder what happens to them in the winter, the spiders I mean. I suspect that the mother spider dies (having probably eaten the father spider after some satisfactory sex), and that leaves the eggs in charge of my basement. Nature can be very cruel, too.

But that's hard to remember in the spring.

On Iraq

I have not written much about the war and occupation of Iraq, and I'm not going to begin now, but I'd like to explain (if only to myself) why it's a topic I don't address very much.

The main reason for my silence is that there's very little that's funny about wars, and I want to write about funny things. Only twisted and sick humor thrives in the conditions of war, and I find that I can't laught while reading about dead people, people who are now legless and armless, people who are now homeless. War is about death, death of people and animals, of ideas and of places.

Sometimes there's no alternative for wars, or the alternatives are worse than the wars. But I never believed this to be the case in Iraq, and I found the U.S. administration unable to make a good case for this particular war at this particular time. This war was perhaps planned for a long time by the people now ruling the U.S., but if so, the planning appears to have been extremely poor. Iraq is not being 'pacified' or 'made safe for democracy'. It is a chaotic place where the most violent and desperate will win unless the U.S. troop strength is considerably increased, and even then any solution we impose is just that, an imposed solution which will not live once left to its own resources. Maybe the U.S. intentions were not all about oil or world dominance. I don't know. But democracy can't be imposed from above, and trying to do so while killing lots of people isn't exactly endearing the locals to Western ideals.

My second reason for relative silence is in the extreme sadness I feel whenever I try to think about the future for Iraq. The only realistic scenarios I can imagine are Iraq as an American colony and Iraq as a radical fundamentalist country. Neither scenario is one that I'd like to live under, and I doubt that the colony model would win out in the long run. Thus, by intervening in Iraq we have pretty much guaranteed another place like Afghanistan under Taliban, some time in the future, and I don't like such a society at all; if for no other reason than that I believe men and women are of equal worth and should have the same rights. I can't envisage a secular democracy in a country as religious as Iraq, especially given the number of people who are armed and the total historic lack of any real practise in democracy. Even countries with much less challenging problems than the ones Iraqis face have great difficulty with democracy. Just think of Russia. Or even the U.S...

Finally, my fear is that the net effect of the war and occupation in Iraq is to increase the forces of international terrorists, not to somehow make the world safer. Maybe the terrorists are right now concentrating on Iraq, but new ones are being created by the news from there, and the terror will inevitably spread out over time.

There you have it: my excuses for not commenting much on these historic events. I sincerely and desperately wish that my predictions and views are all wrong. I'd like nothing better than to be proved completely mistaken here, and to find, soon, a democratic and peaceful Iraq, with thriving institutions and civil society. But then I'd like the tooth-fairy to exist, too.

Miscellania

My muse has gone cavorting elsewhere. He got some new tattoos, that's why. But this leaves me without anything interesting to write about; only little beginnings of ideas. Here they are, in lieu of anything better:

1. An interesting article on Saudi women here. It seems that many Saudi women would like to work, drive cars and go out without a man's permission. A lively debate has ensued in the Saudi press. I want similar lively debates in other countries: should Republicans be allowed to drive if they refuse to have taxes for roads, should people who fraud corporations be allowed to go for walks without their victims' permission and so on. At least these debates are about something substantial, not about the humanity of some humans.

2. This is a very good site for checking on any lies in the presidential election campaigns. They seem quite impartial.

3. It's spring, and the symbol for all the glory of the spring is the egg. The egg is a perfect thing, without a single seam.
The only way to improve it is to fill it with chocolate. And the most beautiful color in the world is robin egg's blue. However hard artists may try, nature beats them easily. Except perhaps in the chocolate media.