Bucking The Trend-Making?

The New York Times deserves some credit for finally not only engaging in silly trend-making but also letting someone argue back. Remember the recent article about how women are no longer getting married? Well, there is a response to that one now:

THE news that 51 percent of all women live without a spouse might be enough to make you invest in cat futures.

But consider, too, the flip side: about half of all men find themselves in the same situation. As the number of people marrying has dropped off in the last 45 years, the marriage rate has declined equally for men and for women.

The stereotype has been cemented in the popular culture: the hard-charging career girl who gets her comeuppance, either violently or dying a slow death by late-night memo and Chinese takeout. Think Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction" and Sigourney Weaver in "Working Girl," two enduring icons. In last year's model, Meryl Streep in "The Devil Wears Prada" ends up single, if still singularly successful.

But when it comes to marriage, the two Americas aren't divided by gender. And it's not the career girls on the losing end. It's their less educated manicurists or housekeepers, women who might arguably be less able to live on their own.

The emerging gulf is instead one of class — what demographers, sociologists and those who study the often depressing statistics about the wedded state call a "marriage gap" between the well-off and the less so.

Statistics show that college educated women are more likely to marry than non-college educated women — although they marry, on average, two years later. The popular image might have been true even 20 years ago — though generally speaking, most women probably didn't boil the bunny rabbit the way Ms. Close's character did in 1987. In the past, less educated women often "married up." In "Working Girl," Melanie Griffith triumphs. Now, marriage has become more one of equals; when more highly educated men marry, it tends to be more highly educated women. Today, Harrison Ford and Sigourney Weaver would live happily ever after.

Ok. It might still be an exercise in trend-making, at least partly. More about that soon. But note the first two paragraphs: a nice correction of the previous piece's breathless focus on just women. A later paragraph in the article repeats the same correction:

According to the census, 55 percent of men are married, down from 69.3 percent in 1960, and 51.5 percent of women are, down from 65.9 percent in 1960.

This correction matters, because these articles appear to be written partly for pushing all sorts of invisible buttons. The initial marriage-is-dying article provoked a lot of concern about selfish women refusing to get married and then dying alone grieved only by their cats, and the assumption in all this was that the women could do this because they no longer need men to earn for them. The uppity woman problem, perhaps. Somehow there are no selfish men or marriage doesn't conflict with selfishness in that gender. Or perhaps I shouldn't try to use too much logic in analyzing all those hidden buttons.

In any case, the present article turns that idea upside down by pointing out that the more educated women are actually more likely to be married. The rest of the story is all about class:

The last 30 years have seen a huge shift in educated women's attitudes about divorce. Mr. Martin, who has written about women and divorce, said that three decades ago, about 30 percent of women who had graduated from college said it should be harder to get a divorce. Now, about 65 percent say so, he said.

But for less educated women and for men, the numbers have not changed; only 40 percent — a minority — say it should be harder to get a divorce.

"The way we used to look at marriage was that if women were highly educated, they had higher earning power, they were more culturally liberal and people might have predicted less marriage among them," Mr. Martin said. "What's becoming more powerful is the idea that economic resources are conducive to stable marriages. Women who have more money or the potential for more money are married to men who have more stable income."

Mmm. Economic resources are conducive to a lot of things. For example, they keep poverty out, they make life's shocks (illness, unemployment) less violent and destructive. Economic resources buffer all sorts storms that might tear apart the fragile bonds of love and affection. Maybe we should try to raise the economic resources of the less educated Americans?

Yet somehow the article doesn't seem to suggest that. What I think it suggests is that the values of the poor or the less educated are somehow wrong. But are they really "wrong" given the circumstances of their lives? In other words, take away the economic security of one of those educated marriages and watch what will happen. Do the "educated values" still work to keep the marriage going? I wonder.

More On Health Insurance

Bush's SOTU speech used the term "gold-plated" health insurance policies to denote policies which cost more than the deductible he advocated. These "gold-plated" policies would be taxed under his scheme, presumably to give the insured incentives to shop around and to buy a cheaper policy. But cheaper policies usually cover less and come with a higher deductible (the amount you have to pay out-of-pocket each year before the insurance kicks in). This means that cheaper policies make consumers less insured.

Now, conservatives see this mostly as a good thing. The idea is that if it is your very own money you are spending on that appendectomy you will be more careful to shop around. If you have too much health insurance you might just ask the health care system to do their utmost for you, because someone else is paying the bill in the immediate sense. In the longer-term sense, of course, the higher bill you are causing will make insurance in general more expensive and ultimately drive the policy premia up for everybody. Especially as the "you" in this would be every rationally thinking "you".

This isn't completely wrongheaded. It's pretty obvious that people with medical insurance are likely to use more health care services than people without medical insurance, and some form of cost control will be necessary in, say, a universal health insurance scheme. It could take the form of physician gatekeeping as in the United Kingdom or some form of cost regulation as in both the United Kingdom and Canada. It could take the form of defining which services are to be covered by a universal insurance scheme and which are not. Or it could take the form of letting those who can afford it get better care. Or a combination of all these rationing mechanisms (as they are called in economics) could be employed simultaneously.

But the pro-market view assumes that the consumers themselves can be given the task of cost-control. This doesn't really work, because the information necessary for these choices is not something most of us have at our fingertips, and at our fingertips we need it when illness strikes. And even if it did work (in the sense of keeping costs low) the health consequences would probably be bad.

Looks Like the NYT corp. Is Cannibalizing Yet Another Paper

Posted by olvlzl.
The night that the decision in Bush v. Gore was announced I was at my brother's house where my nephew was watching "Revenge of the Nerds", the movie made with the booty that Ted Field's got for selling the Chicago Sun Times to Rupert Murdoch. Somehow it seemed to be appropriate. Selling out to Murdoch, the owner of FOX - where Bush cousin John Ellis held up the declaration of Florida for Gore while on the phone with Jeb, the start of the putsch - .... selling the family paper to produce great works of art like the "Nerds" series, let's just say it was a night full of resonance.

The deaths of newspapers, especially great ones is never a good sign. Sometimes it's not even the actual death. The York County Coast Star was one of the best small weekly papers in the United States during the 1970s. Then it's publisher, it's heart and soul was forced to retire and sell out. Unfortunately having a reputation as a great small town paper, it was bought by the New York Times corp. They took the paper, which actually reported news on all of the communities it covered and changed it to a social column covering Poppy and Barbara Bush and their friends. A lot of us stopped reading the shadow of its former self.

When the NYT corp. bought the Boston Globe some of us were afraid that history would repeat itself. Looks like it has.

The New York Times believes that every city should have a great news paper. And it shouldn't be any paper but the New York Times. I wonder how much it would take Sulzy to sell out.

GRACIAS A MERCEDES SOSA

Posted by olvlzl
If you ever need your spirits lifted fast you could do worse than to play a copy of the CD "Mercedes Sosa in Argentina". While you do keep in mind this was recorded from return concerts after her exile during the dirty war, when the fascists killed 30,000 people. There is some evidence that she performed under the threat of assassination by the still active fascists who are always threatening to make a comeback of their own. You can understand why at the end of Hermanos when she sings that of all her family that the most beautiful one is named Liberty the house erupts in cheers.

Beginning with the famous Cuban lullaby Drume Negrita and going directly into Silvio Rodriguez' intricate anti-imperialism and the great poetry of Violeta Parra the disc is a demonstration not only that great art can be political but it is as often is not. It smashes the crock of 'art for art's sake quite definitively.

From all of the great songs sung by Mercedes Sosa I'll mention two in particular. Solo lo Pido a Dios by Leon Geico, sung with Charly Garcia, is a prayer to not fall into indifference. "The only thing I ask of God is that I not become indifferent to pain, that dry death not find me an empty solitude who didn't do what needed to be done. " The mix of Sosa's earthy artistry and Garcia's rock voice joined by the entire audience is anything but ironic or apathetic.

And there is also Maria Elena Walsh's La Cigarra, the cicada. "So many times I've been murdered, so many times I've died but I'm still here revived,". The audience wasn't in any doubt as to what that song meant.

Thinking about how Mercedes Sosa and so many other people in Latin America have endured and kept on through a lot worse than a lousy week of Supreme Court rulings and the media turning tricks for their pimps might not make me want to sing in the sun after a living death, but it pulls me out of myself long enough to stop being depressed.

Jimmy Carter Got Off A Great Line Yesterday

Posted by olvlzl.
In response to the efforts to have him debate Dershowitz, the former president said to loud applause: "I didn't think Brandeis needed a Harvard professor to come" and tell them how to think.

Who says Carter is without guile?

Now Watch This Because It Isn't Going to Happen Very Often.

Posted by olvlzl*
But here's a link to Boston Globe ex-society reporter and Frippery Fellow, Alex Beam on just how much the voices of NPR are paid.

But I did find those NPR newsreader salaries. Nothing terribly shocking there. Renee Montaigne made $308,000; Steve Inskeep , $301,000, and Robert Siegel $288,000. Those aren't shocking numbers. NBC's Brian Williams fixes his hair, stares into a teleprompter , and makes about 20 times that amount.

Sometimes the typing chimp does come up with something.

This puts all three of these news readers at the falsely named National Public Radio firmly in the top 1%, personal income group. I don't remember who said it but it is a mighty rare person who isn't changed by an income over a quarter of a million dollars a year. A sort of aristocratic amnesia sets in, forgetting what it was like to get by on the less than a tenth of that amount, what most Americans have to live on.

It's no surprise that these people are mouthpieces of the establishment. Why would they want to change a system that has provided them with so much?

* When a minor Greek goddess asks you to post something, you post it.

Second Comment on the SOTU

My eyes are still going crooked and my thinking is a little bit eggy. But this is mostly fun. In any case, here is some more of the president's speech, this time on the war against terrorism:

This war is more than a clash of arms — it is a decisive ideological struggle, and the security of our Nation is in the balance. To prevail, we must remove the conditions that inspire blind hatred, and drove 19 men to get onto airplanes and come to kill us. What every terrorist fears most is human freedom — societies where men and women make their own choices, answer to their own conscience, and live by their hopes instead of their resentments. Free people are not drawn to violent and malignant ideologies — and most will choose a better way when they are given a chance. So we advance our own security interests by helping moderates, reformers, and brave voices for democracy. The great question of our day is whether America will help men and women in the Middle East to build free societies and share in the rights of all humanity. And I say, for the sake of our own security … we must.

I guess George Bush doesn't coordinate opinions with Dinesh D'Souza who just wrote that it is the freedom we must get rid of over here so that the terrorists will leave us alone. I also guess that we are not supposed to mention the nationalities of those nineteen men, or to point out that Iraq is not where they grew up. But notice the freedom theme returning. I thought we were down to the flytrap theory of terrorism as the reason for the Iraq occupation.

The speech continues:

In the last 2 years, we have seen the desire for liberty in the broader Middle East — and we have been sobered by the enemy's fierce reaction. In 2005, the world watched as the citizens of Lebanon raised the banner of the Cedar Revolution … drove out the Syrian occupiers … and chose new leaders in free elections. In 2005, the people of Afghanistan defied the terrorists and elected a democratic legislature. And in 2005, the Iraqi people held three national elections — choosing a transitional government … adopting the most progressive, democratic constitution in the Arab world … and then electing a government under that constitution. Despite endless threats from the killers in their midst, nearly 12 million Iraqi citizens came out to vote in a show of hope and solidarity we should never forget.

A thinking enemy watched all of these scenes, adjusted their tactics, and in 2006 they struck back. In Lebanon, assassins took the life of Pierre Gemayel, a prominent participant in the Cedar Revolution. And Hezbollah terrorists, with support from Syria and Iran, sowed conflict in the region and are seeking to undermine Lebanon's legitimately elected government. In Afghanistan, Taliban and al Qaeda fighters tried to regain power by regrouping and engaging Afghan and NATO forces. In Iraq, al Qaeda and other Sunni extremists blew up one of the most sacred places in Shia Islam — the Golden Mosque of Samarra. This atrocity, directed at a Muslim house of prayer, was designed to provoke retaliation from Iraqi Shia — and it succeeded. Radical Shia elements, some of whom receive support from Iran, formed death squads. The result was a tragic escalation of sectarian rage and reprisal that continues to this day.

This is not the fight we entered in Iraq, but it is the fight we are in. Every one of us wishes that this war were over and won. Yet it would not be like us to leave our promises unkept, our friends abandoned, and our own security at risk. Ladies and gentlemen: On this day, at this hour, it is still within our power to shape the outcome of this battle. So let us find our resolve, and turn events toward victory.

Isn't it odd how based on this speech the United States has had nothing to do with any of this? Except observing, watching and finding shocking developments? And isn't it odd how all sorts of quite disparate groups have now become one evil Enemy?

First Comment on the SOTU

We'll see how this writing business goes all sick. Perhaps the topic of health insurance is an apt one to choose. This is what the president proposed:

Tonight, I propose two new initiatives to help more Americans afford their own insurance. First, I propose a standard tax deduction for health insurance that will be like the standard tax deduction for dependents. Families with health insurance will pay no income or payroll taxes on $15,000 of their income. Single Americans with health insurance will pay no income or payroll taxes on $7,500 of their income. With this reform, more than 100 million men, women, and children who are now covered by employer-provided insurance will benefit from lower tax bills.

At the same time, this reform will level the playing field for those who do not get health insurance through their job. For Americans who now purchase health insurance on their own, my proposal would mean a substantial tax savings — $4,500 for a family of four making $60,000 a year. And for the millions of other Americans who have no health insurance at all, this deduction would help put a basic private health insurance plan within their reach. Changing the tax code is a vital and necessary step to making health care affordable for more Americans.

Let's clarify what this proposal (dead on arrival, by the way, given the new Democratic majority in the Congress) would do. First, it would make health insurance offered by your employer part of your taxable income. Right now health insurance comes out of pre-tax dollars. Then it would give you a deduction for the health insurance part, but the deduction would be a fixed sum. So if you happened to spend exactly one of those stated quantities, depending on your family status, the proposal would have no impact on you at all. Now, if your policy is valued at less than those quantities you would save on taxes. On the other hand, if you are currently getting a policy worth more than the given amounts you would have to pay tax on the difference.

The idea here is to make people buy cheaper policies. But cheaper policies often cover fewer things and have larger deductibles (the amount you have to pay before the insurance kicks in). Which means that a cheaper policy might make you more like those who have no insurance at all. It could also be the case that cheaper policies are just more efficient and therefore cost less. But health care markets suffer from that pesky problem of incomplete information and difficulty in measuring quality, and most health insurance packets which cost less do so because they ultimately offer either less coverage (cut out mental health care, for example), refuse high-risk consumers (such as the chronically ill) or have much higher deductibles.

So much for the case of those already covered. What if your employer doesn't offer health insurance at all? Here the proposal could make a difference, because a poor worker could now buy health insurance and get a nice deduction, right? Except for two problems: First, many poor workers either pay no federal income tax or very low income taxes. The value of the tax deductible for them is close to zero. Second, the individual policies available for purchase outside employer-based group plans are much more expensive, and most poor wage-earners can't afford the kind of policy that would cover their family needs.

The whole proposal stinks, pretty much. As another complication, consider what happens when the average health insurance price tag keeps on rising at the rapid rate it has recently. Unless these tax deductible limits are raised as frequently, more and more people will find themselves paying a higher price on their insurance policies in the sense of higher taxes.

SOTU

Here is the transcript for the speech. I missed it due to a twenty-four hour bout of food poisoning, and I actually think the speech would have been a better way to spend that day.

Why I Am Pro-Choice

So many different levels on which this one could be answered. There is the little girl who heard a story about her grandmother's best friend, a long time ago, a friend who aborted her pre-wedding pregnancy with some implement found on the farm, because getting pregnant before marriage made a woman into a whore and a slut and she would be ostracized for the rest of her life. Instead, she was buried in her wedding dress before the scheduled wedding date. The story was told to the little girl for a different reason, perhaps, but what she took away from it was the idea that a world that puts such pressure on women is horribly wrong. And she wondered why there was no pressure to ostracize the man. - There might be a lesson here about how feminists are created, too.

Then there is the teenager who read a book where doctors let a pregnant woman with cancer die without painkillers, because those painkillers might have hurt the fetus. And the same teenager went out to parties and realized that in a slightly different world, with those stern pro-fetus values, she herself might get raped and then made to be pregnant for nine months and to give birth, too. And she might die because of this and have no legal defense.

Fast forward to the young feminist who read lots of legal books on abortion, lots of arguments against and for, lots of impassioned pleas on both sides, scientific evidence and quasi-scientific evidence. What she saw was that some anti-choice people were sincere in their belief that a person is created at the point of conception. But she also saw that many of those who expressed this belief also liked the idea of killing people just fine, provided that they were out of the womb and that the killing was done by men in power. And there were many in that camp who really liked the idea of taking the power over fertility away from women as a group, and there were those who also liked the side-effect of removing most freedoms from women's lives by banning contraception. Kinder, Kirche und Kuchen people.

Closer to the present time. Add color to the film at this point. The goddess in the chrysalis stage realized the immense problems that would be created by the decision of the anti-choice crowd that persons are created at conception. Think of those Russian dolls where there is always another doll inside the one you open. Well, this is what this decision would do to women who are pregnant or able to become pregnant. We would all become potential containers for Real People, and our every step would have to be monitored to defend the unborn and the yet-to-become-unborn. We would have to eat raw oats and sit with our ankles crossed while Beethoven is played in the calm room with integral signs painted on the walls. Because if we don't do these things we are guilty of endangering the Real Person. The decision how we are going to deliver a child could become one over which we can go to prison. Someone else might have to decide for us because of the Real Person inside us.

Note that this is not just about abortion. It is about all fertility, about pregnancy and about delivery. Once someone makes the decision that the embryo is at least as important as the woman with the uterus, well, we are going to build the adversarial approach between the two, and doctors, lawyers and politicians will all walk into our uteri, with little suitcases full of rulebooks.

This may sound exaggerated to you, and it is, in the sense that I've taken the anti-choice position to its logical endpoint, the point it would reach without any resistance from the rest of us. We see the beginnings of this in those court cases where women are imprisoned or restrained for using illegal drugs or for refusing the recommendations of the medical profession as to the preferred form of giving birth. These decisions are based on the adversarial assumption and they exist to protect the fetus, not the woman. She is seen as a criminal, not someone who needs help herself or perhaps better information. That many of these cases fly below our radar screen is because the women involved are poor and/or illegal drug-users and often belong to a racial or ethnic minority. But the same principles would one day be applied to a white woman who doesn't want to undergo a Caesarian section. Our race or our class would not save us from this destiny.

In short, I think that most of this debate is about the control of fertility, about the control of the size and the makeup of the next generation, and different women face different types of pressure in this. Some women, white ones in this country, are urged to have more children. Other women, minorities in this country, are urged to have fewer or at different times in their lives. But all women will see their own say over their lives reduced by the anti-choice forces should they ever come to power.

Being pro-choice is not just being pro-abortion if the woman wants it. It is also treating a pregnant woman as a full human being and not letting her body or her decision-making be possessed by those she doesn't want to allow in. This does not mean that no other considerations ever prevail, but the principle of the woman's full personhood must not be violated. So I think.

I chose to treat this assigned essay question for today's anniversary of Roe v. Wade from a personal angle. But on most days I don't think about it this way. I see the larger and larger contexts in which all this would play out in our lives. Practically all levels of equality of the sexes require that women can control their own fertility. If that is taken away from us we can never be truly equal in anything else.

My Mom?

In this fairly interesting article on "rescuing" ( warning! Luntzspeak) the Social Security system, Grover Norquist gives me a little grist for my feminist mill:

It is, in short, a polarized debate, and likely to become all the more so as the parties head into the 2008 election. On left and right, advocacy groups are watching for any signs of a flinch. Grover Norquist, the antitax conservative, said he was vocally making a pre-emptive case against any payroll tax increase, although he had been assured by the president in December that he would hold the line.

Still, Mr. Norquist added, it is simply too dangerous to walk into negotiations with the Democrats without explicitly ruling out tax increases. "Mom didn't want you to have girls at the house after 10, not because she didn't trust you, but because she thought it was unwise," he said.

Bolded it for your amusement.

It's not a biggie, but a good example of the many, many examples I've been given to elucidate various concepts in economics and statistics and politics. Examples which assume I'm a heterosexual man (or a lesbian but that is not the assumption here).

Blaming The Dog

I do this sometimes when I can't find my carkeys; mostly because the dogs don't mind. But it would be a very poor excuse for these goings-on.

Remember the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq that was leaked to the New York Times last fall? Well, it was an old one and a new one is the one the dog ate. Or perhaps not the dog, but the excuses are no more believable:

The situation came to a head last week, during a closed-door session of the Senate Armed Services Committee. This committee expected to be briefed on the long-awaited NIE by an official from the National Intelligence Council (NIC), which coordinates NIEs by gathering input from all of the nation's various intelligence agencies. But the NIC official turned up empty-handed and told the committee that the intelligence community hadn't been able to complete the NIE because it had been dealing with the many demands placed upon it by the Bush Administration to help prepare the new military strategy on Iraq. He then said that not all of the relevant agencies had contributed to the NIE, which has made it impossible to put together a finished product.

After All, Look At What Happened in The West

Within living memory.

LONDON -- She's 72 and a great-grandmother, but she still remembers how her classmates labeled her "witch-spawn" and "evil eye" -- because her grandmother was one of the last people jailed in Britain on witchcraft charges.

An Important Article About "Honor" Murders in Turkey

Posted by olvlzl.
The killing of women and girls by male relatives who think the females have brought shame upon the family's honor is an atrocity that has plagued Turkey and other Islamic countries for generations. Thousands of women have died in so-called honor killings.

In Turkey, the government has taken action. Under pressure from an invigorated women's movement and eager to win approval from the European Union, the government has launched a major campaign against honor killings, at a level and breadth virtually unheard of in the Islamic world.

As discouraging as the article is, this actually is progress.

Turkish imams have joined pop music stars and soccer celebrities to produce TV spots and billboard ads condemning all forms of violence against women. Broaching a topic that remains largely taboo in many conservative societies, the nation's top Islamic authority has declared honor killing a sin.

This movement will take a lot longer to win and it needs encouragement.

Blogger Seems To Be Back

Had a bit of trouble with blogger this afternoon but it's back up now. I hope. Also, for the first time in weeks, my own blog appeared on the dashboard so who knows?

Sorry for the pause.

You’re Right, This Weekend Hasn't Been A Barrel of Monkeys

But as George W. Bush ended his proclamation:
"I call upon all Americans to recognize this day with appropriate ceremonies and to underscore our commitment to respecting and protecting the life and dignity of every human being,".

I hope you find this weekend's postings appropriate for “National Sanctity of Human Life Day2007(?)”.

Our Towns

or Your Skin and Your Teeth.

Posted by olvlzl.
Local government is generally pretty corrupt. Just like in “The Cradle Will Rock” everyone knows someone who can benefit from contracts being given out or lax enforcement* or some other official act of town government being tweaked or twisted to favor those with connections. The newspaper publisher, if the town is lucky to get news coverage of any kind, is part of the establishment so residents aren’t informed until that can’t be avoided. Since community service is no longer required of radio and TV stations they don’t even enter into the picture anymore. Residents are generally kept ignorant or presented with details in a town report that are hard to follow or sketchy and which come far too late for them to do much about it. Think of the often gaudy corruption of a big city government only spread out over a larger area. That is minus the media coverage.

What happens when the residents become aware of something shady in their town government can be interesting. My brother gave me a piece that was in the November 23rd, 2006 edition of the Norway (Maine) Advertiser Democrat in the column Not So Good Old Days. The un-attributed column mostly quotes from a letter written by Mrs. Cora M. W. Greenleaf, printed in the paper June 30, 1911.

“The Case of Mrs Hefferin” concerned the semi-covert plans of the town council to sell the body of a well-beloved lady of the town. After a life of generosity and doing for others, Mrs. Lucy J. Hefferin fell on hard times in her advanced old age. In her last illness some neighbors took her in but needed help paying for expenses of nursing and other things. The town granted them two dollars a week until, poor Mrs. Hefferin being entirely dependent by that time, her nursing care required four dollars a week. When the woman died the town fathers, as they were most paternalistically called back then, got together and decided that someone good should come out of it. As the letter put it, towns in Maine could “legally sell the bodies of their pauper dead, through the efforts of the town where the above had a residence and dispose of the body to some institution for dissection”.

The townspeople caught wind when the town officials “entered on negotiations for a more profitable disposal of the body,” than a pauper’s grave. Mentioning another local case in which a medical student was shocked to find that he knew the cadaver he’d been assigned to dissect, his college had bought it from a neighboring town for $36, the writer goes right to the heart of the matter,

Now what was done with that money? Who got it? I’ve never known of any mention being made of it in any town report, is it a perquisite of the selectmen’s, one of the ‘pickings’ that go with the office?”

A good question. I wonder if anyone answered it. Questions like that to town officials generally go unanswered, in my experience. It’s too hard to force an answer. They can count on that. From a lifetime of seeing how this kind of thing works, the reason for money’s absence from the town’s annual report probably was along the lines alluded to.

Mrs. Greenleaf, no doubt answering a point of the kind often made to change the subject in those fabled town meetings, asks why the town officials don’t benefit society by selling their own corpses and those of their loved ones if it’s such a good idea. I think I’d have liked her.

The romantic view of local government and small business is part of the mythology of conservatives. They are always gassing on about the virtues of both. Anyone with a passing knowledge of either knows it's just gas. There are virtuous town officials, I’ve known several, and there are honest small businessmen but generally it’s a pretty dismal matter of petty corruption and nonfeasance.

In a lot of places during the recent real estate mania the corruption has been awful. Even relatively small developers have financial resources that make countering their ability to get around rules almost impossible in most cases. I’ve always wished someone would study the per capita occurrence of corruption in the various levels of government, not in actual dollar amounts but in just the number of crimes. If anyone knows about a study like that, please let us know.

If you think that there isn’t a modern equivalent of the story from 1911 you are wrong. Georgia, New Hampshire, New York City, now-a- days it is as likely to be local officials looking the other way when a crematorium or mortician goes bad. Is it any wonder that after writing “Our Town” Thornton Wilder might have felt it necessary to write “By the Skin of Our Teeth,” as a corrective?

What happened to poor Mrs. Hefferin’s body? The people in the town took out a subscription to pay for a funeral and a grave. It isn’t mentioned if any of the selectmen contributed.

* Lax enforcement of zoning and land use laws is epidemic in small towns and big ones. The zoning boards and other officials are often either business partners of local developers or attached in some other way. Similar things can often be said of other parts of local governments and school systems. The things that developers get away with under the law is nothing less than legalized theft. In discussing this with several people who are active in local affairs, none of us could come up with a town without something that looked shady going on.

Having sat through them for many years I’m sorry to have to report to you that, due to ignorance, non-participation and outright rigging, Town Meeting is another part of the romantic myth.

We Should Be Haunted

Posted by olvlzl.
A while back, on the program Nova, there was a program about the excavation of the mummified remains of children who had been sacrificed in pre-invasion Peru. It’s was disturbing for a number of reasons, the greatest being the fact that a society could allow children to be murdered by priests in a religio-political act. This theme was also brought back to me by another television program last fall, the one in which Michael Tilson Thomas analyzed pieces of music. The piece in question was The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky, in which a virgin is chosen as a sacrifice and then dances herself to death.

The program was pretty well done, I would recommend it to anyone if it is rebroadcast. Thomas goes through the piece concentrating on the instrumentation of the orchestra but also goes into the actual substance of the music. In the course of the program scenes of Thomas and the orchestra players discussing the piece are intercut with scenes as the ballet is danced. Watching the dance scenes it came to me that in the four decades I’ve been listening to the music I’d never actually seen it danced. Watching even those brief scenes brought the faces of the murdered, mummified children to mind, a disturbing experience. Those corpses weren’t the imagination of a composer, those children were deliberately murdered in officially sanctioned rites.

Human sacrifice is something that the three “religions of the book” pride themselves on having abandoned. The story of Abraham’s nearly sacrificing Isaac only to have an angel stop him is the beginning of the tradition those religions share. But that’s only the official story. Human sacrifice on a much wider scale has been practiced by all these and all other societies throughout history. To admit that isn’t to play down the priestly horrors of the past, it’s to try to point out that we are no better. Having a wider knowledge of history, science and current events our society, letting blood at a rate that could keep Mel Gibson in business for eternity, we are more barbaric than all the ignorant homicidal theocratic systems of the past put together. And it’s all done, in the end, for the greater glory of wealth and personal pride. The ideology is just an excuse for that. Their bodies are buried in a conscious act by the governments and media who are in on the act. They are covered with layers of trivia and distraction but they should haunt us, they are killed in our name.

Why Impeachment Has To Be An Option

Posted by olvlzl.
We have to be able to remove a sitting President and Vice President from office because having them in power for a guaranteed, fixed-term is just too dangerous.

As it is the sections of the constitution that deal with impeachment of a president are a myth. It's never happened in the past and that is certainly not because it hasn't been known that presidents have committed high crimes. Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, and now Bush II have all been highly impeachable by their actions. Cheney too.

If you want evidence of why this is true, read this report about the plans for a third Bush War with Iran.

Our constitution as it is now isn't just dangerous, it's unsafe at any speed.

Here is more about the Bush junta's planning for war with Iran. Keeping another generation of Americans ignorant of the real history of the expanding war in Indochina is also dangerous.

The Scientific Explaination For It Is Sick As a Friggin' Dog

Posted by olvlzl.
It's going to be light posting today. The long, complicated, controversial post I was plannin will have to wait. Bet you can't wait, can you.

Until then, Listening to Deepak Chopra on the radio flogging his most recent book in which he discusses the implications he sees in quantum physics for survival after death, I was reminded to ask.

Those of us who do not have enough math and physics to understand quantum physics, how do we know what to think about such assertions? They could be brilliant insights or they could be synthetic flannel. Unless we take the sensible route of agnosticism, how can we have an informed opinion on the matter? I mean, Chopra really gets up a lot of our noses, and it isn't just the pop Vedanta stuff, it's the whole promotional package. But what are we supposed to make of these quantum assertions short of going back to master the science and math necessary?

Here is the outline of a piece I began on a similar topic a couple of months back and never finished.


This I Bel.... But why in the world would you care about that?

Posted by olvlzl.
The revival of This I Believe on NPR has been mostly pretty tame, the tinkly piano with NPR’s typical, annoying, repetitive intro music followed by a series of mildly platitudinous statements of belief by a variety of people, all withing the acceptable and inoffensive norm. A few have been mildly challenging, though I’d be hard put to say which ones from memory. I do remember that Penn Jillette’s was about the least obnoxious thing he’s done in years, even that self-promoted iconoclast got into the tepid spirit of the thing. About the most interesting thing about it is that they call the person running it a “curator”. Curator? Isn’t that someone who collects objects and puts them on display where they get dusted on schedule but aren’t used for anything?
You would think someone among those ponderous people at NPR wouldn’t have realized this begs the question, isn’t there already too much of that in our media?

I believe that what people believe is not important to other people. To start with beliefs that can be stated are open to any level of self deception and conscious dishonesty. They are open to any levels of what a quainter age called the Super Ego* clouding reality with guilt and the desire to fulfill societal or family expectations. In my culture, that of liberal New England, getting too far into someone’s beliefs is a violation of privacy. Talking too much about it makes us feel uneasy. It also can arouse suspicions that the person who starts going on about it in public is up to something dishonest.

The Dharmapada, the most famous of the Buddhist catechisms, begins with the statement that our minds are comprised of and controlled by our thoughts, they are mastered by our thoughts. That is so important that it is stated twice in the first two paired verses. Those continue by stating that if we act or speak from either an evil or a good thought that pain or repose would follow as a result. Jesus was saying something similar when he said that by the fruit of peoples’ actions you would know them. The beliefs as stated might be spot on or they might be inaccurate, the actions and their results are there for objective analysis.

For a religious believer to hold that beliefs aren’t particularly important throws some people. While it flummoxes “professors of religion” it really gets some atheists. The believers, those who profess belief in Jesus at any rate, can’t well argue with his statement that actions are better signs of belief than words**. Atheists, I guess, are just assuming that you care what they don’t believe as their reflex response to the many religious busy bodies who go around checking to see that everyone is on program.

It's better to try to look at what happens, what people do and what the results of that action are. If they cause pain to people or animals or the environment then I know that the person who did it is either ignorant of the results of their action or they are evil. If someone consciously does good then that is a pretty good indication that they’re a good person. If people do good out of habit, then that’s good too.

Who really knows what they believe? If they just tried harder to not be jerks the world would be immeasurably improved.


* The Freudian trinity is a good example of faith in things unseen in the officially scientific atheist.

* St. Francis famously said that it was necessary to constantly preach the Gospel and that words should even be resorted to if necessary. This is excellent advice for the religious. The least the rest of us can do is to look at what they do and ignore what they say.

Also When I Sleep In

and since I was exposed to him on PBS, The McLaughlin Group* last night

Why Aren’t Conservatives Being Required to Condemn Buchanan?

Posted by olvlzl.
When Louis Farrakhan made some anti-Semitic remarks years back it was required of just about everyone who was black that they answer for it in some way. Many, many people of African ancestry who were interviewed in the following months were required to condemn or defend him, no matter if they had never met him, spoken about him or even acknowledged his existence before. The same thing has happened when other black leaders said things that were able to be construed as bigoted. Even years after, those are the rules for black people.

Pat Buchanan is a racist of decades long standing who has continually said vicious things about many different races and nationalities. Bigotry is his mother tongue. For the entire time he has made racist and veiled anti-Semitic remarks he has been a fixture in the media, in Republican and right wing politics and, for Pete’s sake, a member of Republican administrations. Louis Farrakhan was never any of those things, he has never been a part of a party establishment, the corporate media or an actual, governing, adminstration, for Pete’s sake. His campaign manager, proxy representative and sister doesn’t get to gas on about national and international issues at CNN every afternoon.

Why isn’t Bay Buchanan required to distance herself from her brother, her one-time candidate for President of the United States when he continues to gush racism? Why isn't she forced to defend his racism? Why isn’t St. Martin’s Press- Thomas Dunne Books, his publisher, made to answer for publishing it and various media outlets for airing it? Why aren’t the members of the Republican establishment who have hired him and made common cause with him required to condemn him whenever they appear on PBS or NPR or any other alleged news venue? Why isn’t every Republican or conservative or, for that matter, white person required to deal with this fountain of fascism in their bosom? His position in the media and in politics makes him much more of an issue than the never more than fringe character, Louis Farrakhan.

The continual absence of condemnation for Pat Buchanan’s racism on at least the same level as that meted out to black people who have said evil or even just plain stupid things on only ONE occasion constitutes more than acceptance of Buchanan’s racism. We have every reason to see it as an endorsement of it. His racism isn't a one or even two time thing, it's been going on for decades.

Yes, I do mean those nice media people are panderers for racism. They are the genteel face of Buchananism.

* Hardly ever listen to it, just didn't get to the remote fast enough.

First posted on olvlzl September 01, 2006

Evidence of Deductive Reasoning In The Mourning Dove

Posted by olvlzl.
It only happens when I oversleep and don’t feed them in the morning, this mourning dove on the porch rail, looking reproachfully at me through the window.

The squirrel that did it last month must be busy.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell

I bought this book recently for comfort reading on the basis of many recommendations from people whose taste in books I like. It is a fantasy about an alternative early nineteenth-century England, a fantasy in which magic exists and affects history. The plot revolves around two magicians, Mr. Norrell -- who believes that magic should be brought back from being an arid theoretical exercise, but only if he is the only magician allowed to practise it -- and Jonathan Strange who begins as Mr. Norrell's pupil and ends up as a rival magician believing that magic should be available to all who wish to use it. An interesting setup for a leisurely afternoon of fun reading and as both magicians see magic as a political tool, perhaps a useful one for a would-be political blogger. Heh.

The book is the right thickness, too, ginormous. My plan was to combine it with chocolates for those times when a retreat from the real world was imperative. Perhaps not the noblest of reasons for reading but not as bad as some other alternative escapes.

Where was I? I'm turning as long-winded as the author of this book, Susanna Clarke. It takes about three hundred pages before much anything happens in the book, and I kept plodding along, getting heartburn from my chocolates, calling those knowledgeable friends with whiny demands about wanting to know when something would happen, should something ever happen except that I shall grow old and wear my trousers rolled.

At some point the book finally grabbed my interest and I finished it fairly quickly. Then I looked up some reviews of it, from the time when it was first published in hardcover, to see if my ideas were in accord with those of the Enlightened Ones.

I didn't find my main idea in the reviews I checked, but I'm sure it is out there, somewhere. Most ideas are. What struck me most after reading the book was the feeling that Clarke wanted to give us a book which moves from the writing style of Jane Austen's England, with its enlightenment-based dry-rational quips, to the pallid-moon-hovering-over-the-deserted-moors style of the Bronte sisters and the romanticism in general. I thought Clarke succeeded in this extremely well, but perhaps that wasn't the idea at all, given that so many reviews disliked the change in style and pace so intensely.

It's a flawed book in many small ways but that is not a bad price to pay for something so huge and expansive in ambitions.

By the way, the book is pretty much about men and their doings, so it is not a good choice for living vicariously through strong women's deeds. But I do agree with Belle Waring that the narrator of the book is a woman magician. The reason has to do with what the footnotes (used extensively to make up a history of magic in England) reveal to a careful reader. Several of them show that the narrator knows at least as much magic as the two male magicians described and a few of them describe events from a woman's point of view (about wearing best gowns and how hot they were, for example).

From My Mailbox

1. The new Ms. Magazine is out. Always worth a read. I have a post in my head about the need not to see political magazines as products like mascara and why it is important to support them even if they don't fill every need a particular reader might have. The short conclusion is that you should subscribe to Bitch and Bust and Ms. Magazine and Off Our Backs and all the others that are out there if you can afford them, because no subscribers will mean no alternative magazines. But I can see an interesting argument over this developing, too.

2. Oprah has talked about her pregnancy as a child. Teenwire has much information on teen pregnancies.

3. The new NARAL Pro-Choice America edition of Who Decides? The Status of Women's Reproductive Rights in the United States has been released. You can learn more about where choice still exists by going here.

Three Cheers

To the new Congress. It is an avocational disease of political bloggers to focus on the bad things, but once in a while it is also very important to celebrate the good things. Today is one such day.

Have you noticed all the things that the new Congress has already achieved? The new federal minimum wage? The adult and serious inquiry into domestic wiretapping? And then overhauling the congressional pages program! And the ethics rules!! And the rolling back of subsidies to the oil industry!!!

These matter in at least two ways. One is their obvious importance as changes in policies, even if the changes sometimes aren't that large. The other one is their emotional, moral and ethical importance in stating that this country is not going to continue being run as nothing but a fundamentalist corporatist haven. Or so I hope.

An STD Vaccine For All Girls

The headline of a story about the new vaccinations against the human papillomavirus. I actually think that boys should be vaccinated, too, at least if a way to make the vaccine cheaper could be found. The reason has to do with the resistance that some parents feel about having their daughters vaccinated, of seeing the vaccination as a green light for premarital sex which their daughters would never consider. The idea is to pass the daughter still wrapped to the waiting arms of the husband. But what if the husband carries the virus? Is it ok then for these daughters to get cervical cancer?

Sex Education Revisited

Courtney Martin has written an interesting article on the possible connections between date rape, abstinence education and the need for sex education of a slightly different sort from the one teenagers are traditionally given at schools:

Every two and half minutes someone is sexually assaulted in America. Many of these assaults take place on college campuses; 80 percent of rape victims are under age 30. Two-thirds of all rapes are committed by someone who is known to the victim, not a stranger in a dark alley. (Though rape statistics are notoriously inaccurate, we can assume that these, from the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN) are at least close to the truth, as they are derived from a survey of multiple studies, including the National Crime Victimization Survey from 2005.)

The lack of public, comprehensive, and complex sex education in this country contributes to this toxic sexual culture on most college campuses. The abstinence-only sex education that most young men and women receive does not teach them how to articulate their own sexual needs and respect those articulated by their partners. Teens who are merely told "Just don't do it" are lacking more than an anatomy lesson or information on contraceptive choices. They are also missing out on essential communication skills and life-saving knowledge about sex and power. Which is bad news for teenagers in our paradoxically hyper-sexual and hyper-conservative contemporary America who are in desperate need of wise mentorship.

I think the focus on abstinence education is too new to explain most of these problems, but it certainly doesn't help in teaching students how to negotiate a relationship safely, given that it assumes there will be no relationship until the wedding night and then a wedding fairy appears and miraculously tells what to put where.

This whole topic just screams with feminist implications, but I'm going to be ornery, and address something not especially linked to feminism: the need for generally agreed on language and terms about sexual activities. This is a boggy ground to put my dainty goddess foot on, given that it is so often trampled by wingnuts and anti-feminists, but I think you will find my take on it slightly different. For much better and more feminist interpretations of the article and the issues it provokes, see the links at the end of this post.

To return to the communication question: I remember moving to the U.K. and being invited for coffee fairly late at night by a guy. All my internal alarm clocks went off at the same time and I said no, because I wasn't certain if "coffee" meant "sex" in that culture or not and I didn't want sex with him. To this day I have no idea if I lost a possibly good friend that night, but I was only carrying out the proper task for women and girls: Traditionally we have been taught all the various codewords which really mean sex (want to see my etchings?) and it has been our responsibility to shy away from anything associated with those codewords. If we failed to catch one of those coded expressions, well, we said yes, didn't we?

This was not a good system of communication. More like a system where it was up to some men to invent more and more codewords and for their prey to try to figure them out. Now, the wingnut cadre believes that such a system would work fine, with the dainty little women as the gatekeepers of morality. But it never worked fine. It hardly worked at all, and it left the women fairly silent about their desires as well as responsible for all the refusing.

None of this means that we don't need a generally accepted set of rules about how to communicate sexual desires and sexual refusals, rather the reverse. We need to have a discussion about what such rules are and we need to disseminate them widely so that everybody knows how to play by the same rules.

This wouldn't solve problems such as date rape but it might make date rape less common.
----
For more takes on the Martin article, see Campus Progress, Mamacita (with a very useful link to a Guttmacher study about why Europeans do better here), Pinko Feminist Hellcat, Feministe, and feminist law professors. Also Shakes and punkassblog and the reclusive leftist. And tikvahgirl.

Who Should Pay For Upwards Mobility? And How?

I wrote this post for the American Prospect blog and thought that it might be of interest here, too.

A question that occurred to me when I read about the halving of student loan interest on some types of loans:

With fanfare and substantial bipartisan support, the House delivered Wednesday on the fifth of six bills Democrats had vowed to quickly pass, voting overwhelmingly to cut the interest rate on some college student loans.

The bill, however, was much scaled back from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's campaign promise to cut all student loans in half.

Instead, the House measure, passed 356-71, applies to the 5.5 million subsidized Stafford loans for students whose families earn between $26,000 and $68,000 a year, but would not increase Pell Grants or student tax credits, as originally considered. The bill sets a five-year phase-in of the interest rate reduction from 6.8 percent to 3.4 percent, but then, after six months at 3.4 percent, returns the rate to the original percentage.

House Democrats called it a "first step" on delivering some relief to students and their parents as college costs have skyrocketed 41 percent in public universities and 17 percent in private ones, and after college debt doubled between 1993 and 2004, according to the independent U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

"This is only the beginning," said Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee. "This is a down payment."

The bill faces an uncertain future.

The bill also faces the usual types of criticisms: it's too little, it's too much, it provides the wrong incentives and it is paid by the wrong people (or so the lenders and the Republicans complain).

Yet education is one of the best engines for upwards mobility and poor students cannot afford to pay for higher education on their own. Their families don't have the physical collateral to borrow money in the private financial markets nor the savings to pay for the tuition outright. Financial markets are incomplete in the sense that a student cannot acquire a loan against the collateral of future earnings powers (except with the help of the government and the rules and regulations to ensure such a help). Hence, poor students need either loans guaranteed and/or subsidized by someone or grants and scholarships.

Now, the "rugged individual" would naturally just saddle the horse, ride off to college and work full-time through his or her college (most likely a very long and often interrupted) career but such rugged individuals are few, jobs paying enough for this are even fewer and the whole setup would cause a lot of these individuals to become rather ragged. Not exactly the best case to guarantee upwards mobility.

But assuming that upwards mobility is desirable in a society, who should pay for it? People with degrees earn more, on average, than those without them. It would seem sensible to have the students themselves pay back most of their financial aid as happens in a loan-based system.

On the other hand, the wealthier students often get their educational expenses completely funded by their families. It is as if we gave the wealthier students grants and the poorer students loans. But if we gave poorer students mostly grant-based aid we'd be asking for the rest of the society to subsidize those who are one day going to be wealthier than the average citizen. Two different concepts of fairness or equality are at play here and I'm not sure if both of them could be achieved at the same time.

Some Silly Fun

Via truthdig.com:

Announcements

When you e-mail me, please make the heading something that doesn't look like an ad for Viagra. For obvious reasons I tend not to read those.

I'm now also blogging on the weblog of the American Prospect magazine, under a different name. I'm excited to be invited to that blog which is full of really smart and good writers. We will see if my voice there will be any different.

The Left Hand Of Darkness

Ursula le Guin's science-fiction novel about a world where people are not women and men except for the short time period of getting into a sexual heat and the consequent pregnancy should the heat take that form. It is an astonishing book in so many ways, because I think we are almost inherently incapable of building or understanding such a genderless world in a way to make it comprehensible, and she succeeds better than any other writer I've read.

Better than any other writer I've read, but not necessarily terribly well, simply because it is so very hard to see the invisible web that connects sex to all the other human constructs and then to cut those threads. Le Guin's genderless world still has power hierarchies, poverty and inequality, and I believe that she is correct in creating them. But I'm not sure they ring true to me in the absence of gender-related hierarchies and ownership rules. That is most likely not her fault but a flaw in my own imaginary capacities. Still, at the end of the book I had gained a distance to our own societal structures and a small amount of new insights into the role of sex roles.

If you haven't read the book do read it. It is well worth the initial effort required.

The reason I'm writing about The Left Hand Of Darkness is that I visited le Guin's website where she gives the rejection letter she received for the book:

Dear Miss Kidd,

Ursula K. Le Guin writes extremely well, but I'm sorry to have to say that on the basis of that one highly distinguishing quality alone I cannot make you an offer for the novel. The book is so endlessly complicated by details of reference and information, the interim legends become so much of a nuisance despite their relevance, that the very action of the story seems to be to become hopelessly bogged down and the book, eventually, unreadable. The whole is so dry and airless, so lacking in pace, that whatever drama and excitement the novel might have had is entirely dissipated by what does seem, a great deal of the time, to be extraneous material. My thanks nonetheless for having thought of us. The manuscript of The Left Hand of Darkness is returned herewith. Yours sincerely,

The Editor

21 June, 1968

Now imagine if she had given up at that point.

Added later: I'm not sure if my impression is the correct one, but I think that these sorts of books in science-fiction are mainly written by women? By "these sorts" I mean books which study gender roles in the context of fantasy, not books which tell the story about the lone guy being dropped on the planet of sex-hungry heterosexual amazons who nevertheless live without men.

A Great Leap Backwards For Feminism

This is how the White House spokesman Tony Snow characterized the exchange between Barbara Boxer and Condoleezza Rice:

However one interprets Sen. Barbara Boxer (news, bio, voting record)'s remark last week to Condoleezza Rice that the secretary of state, single and childless, doesn't have a "personal price" to pay in Iraq, the brief exchange still has people debating.

And for some women, it highlights a larger question: Just how do you define "personal price" when talking about your country's war?

Boxer's comment came during a contentious Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing last week, as Rice was grilled on Iraq by mostly skeptical senators. "Who pays the price?" asked Boxer, a California Democrat. "I'm not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old and my grandchild is too young. You're not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families."

The reference to Rice's personal status was an instant catalyst for vigorous chatter on blogs, TV and talk radio, ranging from the conservative Rush Limbaugh (Boxer hit "below the ovaries") to the liberal Joy Behar on ABC's "The View" (Rice "deserved it.")

As for Rice, who assured Boxer she understood the sacrifice of military families, she later had a more pointed response, telling Fox News: "Gee, I thought single women had come further than that." On the same network, White House spokesman Tony Snow called Boxer's remark "a great leap backward for feminism."

Not to the country's most prominent feminist, Gloria Steinem, who said Snow's remark "takes your breath away."

"It had nothing to do with feminism," Steinem told The Associated Press. "It was perfectly reasonable, and it could have come from anyone — a grandfather as well as a grandmother. Sen. Boxer was trying to draw a parallel" between herself and the secretary.

This is a very odd story in the sense that a similar conversation between two men in power can't even be imagined to take place. Just try to imagine someone accusing Barney Frank (who, as far as I know, has no children) of not being affected by the war effort to the same extent as George Bush, with two daughters. It just wouldn't happen, because it is only the women who are supposed to turn into completely different creatures based on their motherhood status.

So was Boxer's remark sexist or derogatory of single women? Or derogatory of people without children? The article I quote makes a point of following the idea that people with children and grandchildren might actually feel more concerned about the killing power of war because they have a more personal stake in the outcome. This would assume that human beings can't feel worried about the survival of other people's children, though. And notice how the interviewed people are selected to be women, not men.

I think the real sexism is not so much in Boxer's comment, though perhaps she could have thought it out more carefully, but in the whole idea that this is something to do with the rights of women to talk about the war and to care about it. George Washington had no children, you know.

It seems that I forgot to agree with Gloria Steinem on this issue. Oops. Must hand in my feminist membership card.

But I do find disagreement with this comment, too:

For Christina Hoff Sommers, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Boxer's comments were not so much a "leap backward" as merely "mean-spirited and thoughtless," not to mention "sexist and politically absurd."

"She seems to be saying that an unmarried, childless woman should not be involved in decisions that affect traditional families," Sommers said. "By that standard, Susan B. Anthony would be disqualified. And how about Elizabeth I?"

"But I don't expect to hear much protest (from feminists)," said Sommers, "because their left-wing politics always trump their commitment to the cause of women."

Christina Hoff Sommers is a good example of a person who chooses to call herself a women's advocate while hacking away at all rights for women. Her whole career consists of trying to get less for her sisters, and this is established right-wing politics. Which might just explain why feminists tend to support what Sommers calls left-wing politics.

From "Teh Funny " Files

Comes this comment by the wingnut talk-show host Michael Savage:

From the January 15 edition of Talk Radio Network's The Savage Nation:

SAVAGE: But basically, if you're talking about a day like today, Martin Luther King Junior Day, and you're gonna understand what civil rights has become, the con it's become in this country. It's a whole industry; it's a racket. It's a racket that is used to exploit primarily heterosexual, Christian, white males' birthright and steal from them what is their birthright and give it to people who didn't qualify for it.

Take a guess out of whose hide all of these rights are coming. They're not coming out of women's hides. Are they? No, there's only one group that's targeted, and that group are white, heterosexual males. They are the new witches being hunted by the illiberal left using the guise of civil rights and fairness to women and whatnot.

Lip-smacking delicious. Note how the good things are the birthright of Christian, heterosexual, white males but that others must "qualify" for them?

I think Savage's subconsciousness grabbed the mike here.

Does The Conscience Clause Cover Laughter?

Perhaps the pharmacist didn't really laugh, of course. But that's what Tashina Byrd reported:

A woman has complained to the governor and an abortion-rights group about Wal-Mart workers who wouldn't give her morning-after contraceptive pills that don't require a prescription.

Tashina Byrd, 23, of Springfield, said the pharmacist "shook his head and laughed" when a pharmacy attendant asked this month about giving the woman and her boyfriend Plan B. The hormone pills can help prevent pregnancy if taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex.

The attendant told Byrd and her boyfriend, Brian O'Neill, 37, of Columbus, that the store stocked Plan B but nobody would give it to them, the couple told The Columbus Dispatch.

Imagine the opportunities for laughter in all types of customer-service jobs.
----
Via Nocapital.

Must Be Unwrapped

The funny thing about beauty contests is that the women participating must be very sexy and beautiful in a sensual way. Think of the bikini round: bikini, makeup and high heels. It is a way of seeing an almost naked body. Yet the rules of the competition aim at excluding any of the behaviors that might be associated with such sexiness.

Hence the contestants can't be pregnant or go out partying or even be married (I think). They must be pristinely unused, like a brand new gift in a cellophane wrap with a big bow on it.

No More Mrs?

Did you know that marriage is dying because women desire to be independent and to have fun? It's true. The New York Times says so:

For what experts say is probably the first time, more American women are living without a husband than with one, according to a New York Times analysis of census results.

In 2005, 51 percent of women said they were living without a spouse, up from 35 percent in 1950 and 49 percent in 2000.

Coupled with the fact that in 2005 married couples became a minority of all American households for the first time, the trend could ultimately shape social and workplace policies, including the ways government and employers distribute benefits.

Several factors are driving the statistical shift. At one end of the age spectrum, women are marrying later or living with unmarried partners more often and for longer periods. At the other end, women are living longer as widows and, after a divorce, are more likely than men to delay remarriage, sometimes delighting in their newfound freedom.

Read the whole article. It contains lots of interviews with women who are really happy not to be married. But it contains no chew-worthy evidence on the benefits and costs of marriage to women AND men, and it really contains nothing about men at all, except for this short paragraph:

Over all, a larger share of men are married and living with their spouse — about 53 percent compared with 49 percent among women.

So we have a four percent difference in the marriage rates, almost all of this (I speculate) explained by the fact that women live longer and are more likely to become widows? And this is written up as a large shift for women but no shift at all for men?

Ok. It isn't quite as one-sided as I made it to be, but it's a pretty poor article unless we think of it as the making of one of those faux trends. You know, the ones some people love to make up so as to have us all at each others' throats, fighting over the meaning of a trend that doesn't exist.

What is the real point of the article? I'd be willing to wager that it is to point out that marriage should mean something absolutely wonderful for women, it should be the goal of every little girl, and for some reason that doesn't seem to match reality. Men, well, men are not supposed to think about marriage at all. It's a maintenance part of their vigorous public lives. But women are supposed to dream about the dowry and the veil and the ring.

Let Us Praise Ourselves

Zuzu on feministe suggests an interesting topic for discussions on feminist blogs: The difficulty we have of stating our good points. The "we" here is most likely feminist women, but all sorts of people have trouble with this. Just imagine yourself standing in front of some small group of quite friendly people and being asked to list at least five things about yourself that you really like. Gulp.

This post is one of those "do I dare to eat a peach" posts for me. It rings all sorts of alarm bells about not being arrogant, not focusing on the self, not focusing on trivial aspects of the body, not bragging (never bragging). And even deeper alarm bells start booming in the background: Are we being led by the nose to talk about our values still within the patriarchal system of tits and hips and legs and asses and sexual appeal in general? Isn't pointing out how well we do on those measures still a reinforcement of those measures themselves? But on the other hand isn't the old maxim "know thyself" a good one, too? And doesn't knowing yourself mean being aware of both the bad and the good and even the indifferent aspects of you?

So clearly it is a topic worth airing here. When I started to make my list of nice things about myself I realized that I was immediately veering towards the sorts of things I'd get societal approval for, such as being charitable and giving money to all sorts of valuable purposes. This exercise is really very interesting. It reminds me a little of the exercise we once did in martial arts training where you had to let yourself fall from some height and just trust the other people to catch you before the concrete floor. Now that was hard.

This is hard in a different way, but it's ultimately the idea that you might not be caught before your head hits the concrete. Because we, and especially we the women, are not supposed to blow our own trumpets. Do try making such a list of at least five things you like about yourself, whether they are about your body, your personality, your skills or what you have done in your life. Then look again: Did you add something to belittle yourself? Did you hedge and prevaricate? Did you add something trivial and silly just to show that you are not, after all, taking yourself too seriously? I bet you did.

Part of the problem I had was in desperately trying to avoid any kind of implication that I'm somehow better than other people. Dingdingding go the internal bells all the time. Zuzu, I think I hate you for giving us this exercise.

Here is my miserable attempt to praise to myself:

1. I have one small opening to the large universe of creativity, and when the door opens, if I'm there and awake, then I write fairly well and clearly, too.

2. I have the gift of conciseness.

3. My eyes are a nice shade of green.

4. I can do lots of pushups without resting, and ten one-armed pushups, too.

5. I'm much nicer and nastier than I used to be, more three-dimensional, and it took a lot of work of which I am very proud.


Now it is your turn. Remember the rules: No belittling, no hedging.

Martin Luther King Jr. On Silence

Olvlzl wrote an excellent post for this day. Read it.

When I was thinking of something to write on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday this year two topics danced tango in my head, one being the whole interesting question of why we are given holidays for certain men and not for other men and never for named human women, and the other being the little ping I got from each mention of the word "silence" in King's sayings, such as these:

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

The first topic is too large to tackle with such a short notice, but I think the two are linked in something more than an Argentinian tango inside my skull. Power might be the music we are listening to, and silence is the wrong step to take in this dance. It is frightening to speak up, though, especially if you are one of the powerless. But what are the rewards of silence?

Before Tomorrow

Posted by olvlzl.
Since the struggle for equal education has played such a big part in the modern Civil Rights movement it has always seemed ironic that schools are closed on Martin Luther King Day. Wouldn’t it be better to have them open and to celebrate equality and freedom and the lives of those committed to the struggle?

Another thing, put aside the March on Washington speech for a few years. It is a perfectly good speech but it wasn’t the only one he ever gave. His last speech, the Mountain Top speech, was one of the most astonishing pieces of music of the past century, if only John Coltrane had used the inflections of that one in a piece. The Massey Lectures are others that should be better known, his entire line of speeches against the Vietnam War have been effectively suppressed.

And while we’re at it, more should be said about King’s astonishing act of hiring Bayard Rustin, one of the few out-of-the-closet gay men of the pre-stonewall period. It is hard to imagine how controversial hiring him to organize the enormously important March on Washington was in the macho Kennedy era. Hiring a radical, gay man who had been jailed, both for draft resistance during WWII and on morals charges, hired BY AN ORDAINED BAPTIST MINISTER, no less, was an act of public courage that is hard to imagine today. You wonder why that fact isn’t brought up whenever conservatives try to use Martin Luther King against efforts for gay rights. Sadly, some of them are members of King’s own family.

Washington Phillips and the Harps of Gold

Posted by olvlzl.
Washington Phillips was one of the obscure gospel singers recorded on a set of CDs put out by the JPS label*, the same set mentioned in the post about Arizona Dranes from last month. Unlike the energetic Arizona Dranes, Washington Phillips’ singing is very soft, softer than that of the WWI victim of mustard gas “Whispering Jack Smith” who recorded pop music during the same period. Phillips almost seems too shy to be performing and recording music, even the gentle sounds of his accompaniment wouldn’t require such soft singing. Maybe he was like one of those reluctant prophets who felt driven to testify against his will.

Phillips accompanied himself on an instrument listed on the original recordings as a dolceola, a kind of tiny piano zither manufactured and sold for a very short time in the early decades of the last century. Given the gentle sounds of the music, it seems odd that a controversy of sorts exists about that obscure point. One of the few pictures of Washington Phillips show him holding an amazing double zither, half of melody strings, the other half arranged in groups of strings, probably tuned in chords. Some think that it’s Phillip’s own invention and almost certainly unique. Whatever it is, his playing is very confident and sophisticated, a real contrast to his gentle, unassuming voice. The technique is very advanced and also seems to be the invention of the player. You can find MP3s of Washington Phillips many places if you are interested in hearing him and his music is available on the two CDs mentioned below.

Here are some fun pages I found while looking for information on the rather mysterious Washington Phillips. They have information, pictures and sound clips of different types of zithers being manufactured in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Just the names of the instruments, Dolceola, Marxophone (and what leftist doesn’t notice that name), Bosstone ukelin, Celestaphone, etc. conjure thoughts of irregular and rare sounds, obscure instruments played in obscure corners of life by people who wouldn’t ever make the big time. I just know somewhere there was a self taught virtuoso of the Marx Guitarchimes known only to her family and friends. And then there are the pictures of them. If you like the unusual in folk music, you will want to see and hear them. These are instruments to excite the imagination.

Here is the record of an exhibit of some of them, The Harps of Gold Exhibit


Here is a modern clip of a dolceola playing The Cue Ball Blues. And here are some short excerpts of a dolceola playing with Leadbelly. I recall reading that these are the only verified, recorded use of the instrument in music of the period.

One of the great things about the internet is that it can show you entire worlds of activity and interest that you wouldn’t have known existed. The people who devote themselves to documenting, recording and reconstructing this music don’t do it out of the expectation of getting rich. But you could do worse things with your time than restoring and playing these wonderful contraptions.

* Key to the Kingdom :Yazoo #2073
Spreading The Word, Early Gospel Recordings JPS7733

For Martin Luther King Day

Posted by olvlzl.
Any method of scholarship has the potential to distort what is being studied. The necessity of abstraction and reliance on schematics in order to analyze and publish have the inherent danger to force things that are only similar in some way to be put into the same category and treated as roughly equivalent, for example. The practice of doing this starts in necessity, becomes the required methodology, turns into an academic virtue and ends in becoming a bad habit. Rarely does the system acknowledge the distortions it creates*.

Unfortunately, a similar habit of distortion has caught on among the general public in ways that have real world consequences, though these days it’s the practices of the media that instilled the corruption. For too long the supporters of George Bush were able to relegate those of us who opposed his crimes and idiocy to the bin marked “anti-American”. That was the label assigned by the media and the scribblers and alleged thinkers who feed that machine. And too many voters fell for that line of tripe. It’s an old one, going back to the beginnings of the country but its use as a means of political control seems to have ripened in the past sixty years.

There is a review of a book defining different anti-Americanisms in the paper today. Making the word a plural is certainly a step up from the typical use of the term. The review says that the authors have identified different aspects of American life that receive different receptions among different people in other countries. Some people who love one aspect of America hate another aspect of it. It’s a good beginning at getting a better handle on anti-Americanism.

But it works the other way round too. I’m struck at how the business practices are most admired in countries which don’t seem to be on the verge of real democracy, some of which don’t seem in much danger of gender, racial or religious equality. Please put me in the box assigned to one particular anti-Americanism, our economic system stinks and it distorts our politics. Americans don’t have to like everything about their own country. Not liking everything is a birth right of every person, everywhere.

Another thing in the review that was interesting is that it could seem remarkable to anyone that people resent an enormously powerful country imposing its will on other people. That is something that people in the United States don’t understand? That is our founding story, it should be entirely understandable to everyone who is a citizen of the country. It’s clear, our own history has been suppressed in the name of Americanism.

The great virtues of the United States don’t lie in its wealth and power, they lie in the evolving attempts to put into effect the Bill of Rights, the Civil Rights amendments. The assertions of equality are the quest we were set on, perhaps accidentally**, by the words of our founding documents.

Whatever greatness we manage to achieve doesn’t reside in the flawed theories of the balance of powers and the dangerous fixed terms and federalism of the constitution. They don’t reside in the various doctrines of contracts and business. The promises of equality of opportunity and equality of freedom are not dependent on the “founding fathers”. They practiced slavery, subjugation of women, class inequality and numerous other evils while and after they were writing the words of the founding documents. The economic elites have always tried to enforce inequality in its own interest. An effective majority of the “free press”, owned by those elites have fought every aspect of equality that would threaten the elites.

The promises of equality and freedom have and are becoming gradually true, always, in every single case, due to the actions of The People. Not the people united, The People oppressed who refused to remain oppressed. They are the ones who did the decades of work to convince the unconvinced to join them, who took opportunities to advance their cause and who kept on when the inevitable reaction and setbacks came. Presidents and Court Justices hardly ever got on board until they had little choice. It has been The People in the minority struggling to advance our best intentions who have done the real work to oppose various American ways and to replace them with new ways that delivered the unfulfilled promises that had been made. In every single case they opposed entrenched aspects of “Americanism”, habits and practices and entire codes of law. Every single time they were accused of disloyalty and subversion and called the entire catalog of invective. Their flaws were magnified and flaws they didn’t have were assigned to them.

And what is true of American reformers is also true of those who oppose American imperialism abroad. The United States is only as great as it is good and it has a long way to go towards greatness.

* Spending a lot of time last year arguing with people who couldn’t seem to accept that people don’t have to be either scientists or religious beievers but that many people proved that they could be both, helped clarify this. Behavioral scientists seem to be among the most immune to this kind of objective self-observation. The author of the review, not withstanding.

** Hearing some idiot scholar gassing on about the conflict between equality and freedom and how it’s more “American” to favor freedom over equality has put me in a bad mood this week. The history of the United States is a demonstration that freedom only comes with equality, they are inseparable.