On Engagement Rings and Loans For Weddings

How much should an engagement ring cost? Three times the man's monthly salary? Ten times? What is the reason behind a very expensive engagement ring? Why not put a down payment on a house instead?

I have been looking at the way the wedding industry has changed this one rite-of-passage into something that costs more than your average university education, and even quite poor families are expected to come up with that sort of money. And the work that goes into the planning! At least a year's worth of invitation cards and guest presents and arguments about the bridesmaids' dresses!

Ok. I'm a curmudgeony and non-romantic goddess, probably. But I think this whole wedding bidness has gone haywire. Do your parents really have to use their retirement savings for your wedding to prove that they love you? Because that is what I have seen happen in some families. The wedding fever looks like a disease: previously quite sane women suddenly demand ten wedding showers, with the same aluminum pots appearing as presents in each of them. They also demand a set of twelve little engraved glass dishes for the sugared almonds that they will never serve later on. And the cost of those wedding dresses! A family of four could camp for a year with the price.

Oh my, how sourpuss that all sounds. Let's try something more understanding. There is a romance in a lovely wedding, and for many this is the one time when women can star in a major role. It's also fun to have big bash to celebrate the love and the promise to stay together, and perhaps an expensive engagement ring does signal love very well, given that to buy it the man must abstain from other forms of consumption. A trial of the will, in some ways, but I still think it is a cruel custom, on the whole. And yes, you could put a down payment on a house with the cost of the average wedding in this country.

Does the wedding fever have something to do with the pretty high likelihood that the marriage will end in a divorce? Is it like a form of magic which should make the ties bind for good? I'm not sure. I have a feeling that I miss on some fundamental appeal of the expensive wedding. If so, I'm sure that you will let me know in the comments.

Many of the current wedding customs are traces of the old ones, of course. The shower gifts, for instance, used to consist of various household linens that the friends of the bride made for her, because she would have no time for that later on, what with the children and the cows and the sheep and all the other chores of a farm wife. Likewise, the gifts at the wedding were to equip the young couple for their future lives together. Maybe some of them were a type of dowry, something to give the bride who would from the wedding day onwards work for room and board in the groom's family. It was the wealth that she was bringing in.

Weddings have also always been a way of advertising wealth, and this is probably one of the reasons for the current lavish weddings. Nothing wrong with that, for those who can easily afford such weddings, but there is real hardship for those parents who don't actually have the money.

What is the feminist angle to the booming wedding industry? Is there one? Well, many of the old traditions are based on patriarchal norms. Even the assumption that it is the bride's parents who pay for everything has its roots in the kind of world where a very young girl is married off from her parents' house. She has had no time to accumulate money herself, and her work in the future will accrue value to the groom and his family. It would make sense, then, for her parents to equip her as best they can.

But this custom looks odd when the bride is, say, thirty, and has been working for years and when the parents are nearing their own retirement and have already paid for her college education. Even the custom of the groom buying the wedding ring looks a little odd, given the current society. Of course old customs can be nice and quaint, but some of them do look a little silly to me.

It isn't really the hullabaloo around a wedding that I'm criticizing here, but the idea that the value of wedding is directly related to how much it costs. Love need not be all about money.

And Even More on Ledbetter

The bill passed in the House. Next is Senate. And then Bush will veto it, because women, minorities, the disabled and so on do not deserve equal treatment in the labor markets.

Laura Ingraham Gets Media Attention

Via Atrios, I learn that:

Conservative radio host Laura Ingraham revealed on her nationally syndicated radio program that CNN has offered her a one-week guest-host gig for the 8pm ET slot.

Laura Ingraham has the honor of writing the worst book I've ever read. It's about Hillary Clinton, and there is a chapter on New Age spirituality which starts by Ingraham saying that if Clinton was a New Age spiritualist this is what would be wrong with it and then just goes on pretending that Clinton is one. The whole books is like that. I couldn't believe my snake-eyes, but then it was all quite cheering, because it can't be too hard to get into print in this country. So there's hope for me and my book about cannibal neocons on a weird planet. Isn't there?

Bill O'Reilly's Wars

He is a weird one, even for a wingnut pundit. His most recent venture is to "destroy" the Daily Kos website by urging firms not to support the Yearly Kos conference and by sending stern letters to Democratic politicians who plan to participate in the Yearly Kos. You must admit that this is an odd thing for someone who runs a television show to do. He sounds a little obsessive-compulsive to me.

O'Reilly has accused the Daily Kos of being a hate site and really left wing. I wonder what O'Reilly would do should he ever meet a real live communist? There are not many of those in this country, and much of what goes under the title of "the left" here would be regarded as moderately conservative in most European countries. Maybe this is why I find O'Reilly's campaign a little hilarious.

Another reason for that is the very tame nature of most commentary on Daily Kos. Most Kossacks sound to me like movement Democrats, and there's a fairly large handful of somewhat conservative people there, too. Not to mention anti-feminists and also the usual number of crazy trolls. Sure, something stupid can certainly be found on a website that gets like a zillion visits a week. But O'Reilly's own website gives a good share of hateful comments, too.

And More on Ledbetter

The bill will be voted on tonight. What bill? The one trying to correct the Ledbetter case which this conservative Supreme Court decided to mean that nobody can sue for wage discrimination after a few short months. From an e-mail from ACLU:

H.R. 2831 would fix the Supreme Court's decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear, in which they ruled that workers have only 180 days from the initial discriminatory pay decision to file a wage discrimination claim. This bill, which addresses wage disparity based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, and disability, clarifies that such discrimination is not a one-time occurrence that starts and ends with a pay decision, but that each paycheck represents a continuing violation by the employer.

You could call your representatives to shore up support for the bill. Though Bush has already promised to veto it. Because W stands for women?

The Dangers of Opinionating

Are there any? I'm thinking of the concrete dangers here, such as becoming disrespected as an authority if you get something badly wrong. Or losing your well-paying perch at some major news organization because you were talking out of your ass. Or at least not getting invited back to the O'Reilly Show or Hardball because you got your facts wrong. Do such frightening consequences exist?

I doubt it. The blogger Culture of Truth posted some pundit quotes about the Iraq war last night on Eschaton threads, and I looked for some more, to see what happens to people who get something very, very wrong. My conclusion is that they get rewarded for it.

FAIR has a long list of quotes which should make the people who made them blush a little, at a minimum. For instance, here is Christopher Hitchens in 2003 on the idea of invading Iraq:

"This will be no war -- there will be a fairly brief and ruthless military intervention.... The president will give an order. [The attack] will be rapid, accurate and dazzling.... It will be greeted by the majority of the Iraqi people as an emancipation. And I say, bring it on."

And here is David Carr in the New York Times also in 2003:

"This has been a tough war for commentators on the American left. To hope for defeat meant cheering for Saddam Hussein. To hope for victory meant cheering for President Bush. The toppling of Mr. Hussein, or at least a statue of him, has made their arguments even harder to defend. Liberal writers for ideologically driven magazines like The Nation and for less overtly political ones like The New Yorker did not predict a defeat, but the terrible consequences many warned of have not happened. Now liberal commentators must address the victory at hand and confront an ascendant conservative juggernaut that asserts United States might can set the world right."

I'm imagining all the statements we ever make dangling behind us on long strings ending in little cartoonish thought bubbles. As we move along the path of life some bubbles get loose and float off like balloons, never to be seen again, but other bubbles stick to us as if glued. To us ordinary folks, at least.

But I think pundits own Magic Scissors which they use to cut off those threads so that nothing they ever said in the past really matters for their present credibility. That's the joy of punditry, really: It's all about being outrageously original, and this is a bit easier if you can be outrageously wrong at the same time.

On Ledbetter

Remember that case in the Supreme Court? The one where they decided that you only have a few months to sue for wage discrimination? The House is debating a bill to make the period during which you can sue longer. Will see what the Republicans do with that. Vote should be tonight.

Back in the U.S...., Back in the U.S...., Back in the U.S.S.R.

That is about all I have to say on this bit of news:

A surgeon general's report in 2006 that called on Americans to help tackle global health problems has been kept from the public by a Bush political appointee without any background or expertise in medicine or public health, chiefly because the report did not promote the administration's policy accomplishments, according to current and former public health officials.

The report described the link between poverty and poor health, urged the U.S. government to help combat widespread diseases as a key aim of its foreign policy, and called on corporations to help improve health conditions in the countries where they operate. A copy of the report was obtained by The Washington Post.

Three people directly involved in its preparation said its publication was blocked by William R. Steiger, a specialist in education and a scholar of Latin American history whose family has long ties to President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Since 2001, Steiger has run the Office of Global Health Affairs in the Department of Health and Human Services.

Well, I do have a little bit more to say about this. One important role for the government is the provision of accurate, helpful information of the kinds that the market has no incentive to produce. Even conservative scholars agree on this role. But the Bush administration does not.

A Garden Story

Bleeding Hearts

The white form of dicentra spectabilis, the common bleeding heart, is a lesson in pure elegance. It grows happily in quite deep shade which it relieves with the fresh green of its filigreed leaves and the heart-shaped ivory pendants of its inflorescences. Combined with hostas and pulmonarias, it offers just the right touch of lightness, like the finely wrought lace on the otherwise stern dress of an Elizabethan gentleman.

Gardeners love the bleeding heart for its kind-natured temperament. It is easy to grow (although the white form somewhat less so than its pink sibling), starts flowering early enough to be used with tulips in the same colors for an unbeatable combination, yet continues, at least in northern gardens, for several more weeks after the tulips have packed it in. Its only character flaw is its penchant for early dormancy. In my garden it goes underground by the end of July, leaving its absence as notable as its presence was earlier.

This can be avoided by choosing some other form of dicentra, such as dicentra eximia. But the romantic in me prefers the common bleeding heart. The Finns call it the broken heart, and this is how I always think of the plant; a sufferer from unrequited love, true, but one which valiantly tries to go on, producing love offering after love offering in the shape of small hearts for all to admire. Yet each and every one of them emerges broken.

At last it simply can't tolerate this any longer. Like so many unhappy young lovers in books, plays and operas, it chooses an early death over a loveless existence.

So sad, don't you think? But also so right, somehow, if we wish our gardens to reflect all life, not just its happy hours.

The Deaths Not Noticed

An article in the Editor&Publisher mentions the topic of suicides among the U.S. military in Iraq:

One of the least covered aspects of the fallout from the Iraq war is the rising toll of suicides, both near the battlefield and back home.

Latest official figures released by the Pentagon reveal at least 116 self-inflicted fatalities in Iraq. But this does not include several dozen still under investigation, nor any of the many cases back in the U.S.

A death is a death is a death, you might say. But surely some of these suicides were preventable? And surely their number prepares the administration for the onslaught of many more depressed returning veterans who might also be suicidal? Surely we will now see a large increase in the budget for mental health care services for the veterans? Surely, please!

The human costs of war are many. Some can be counted in immediate or near-immediate deaths. For some, the death takes a little longer to achieve. And then there are the costs of pain and suffering, limbs and eyesight lost, families torn apart. And even later, the children of damaged veterans will suffer.

For all these reasons those who decide that wars are the answer should be taught what it is that they are unleashing. The hounds of war don't go home when sated on the battle fields.

A New York Times Headline Today

New Heart Device Installed in Cheney


Let's hope it works this time.

On Cleavage

I didn't chime in when the question of Hillary Clinton's cleavage was analyzed, because I'm more interested in analyzing cleavage such as shown in the above photo.

Just kidding, though not quite. If you were lucky enough to miss the cleavage story, it was based on an article Robin Givhans wrote in the Washington Post. She tried to determine if Clinton was now choosing to show more cleavage and decided that it was a half-hearted attempt:

Not so long ago, Jacqui Smith, the new British home secretary, spoke before the House of Commons showing far more cleavage than Clinton. If Clinton's was a teasing display, then Smith's was a full-fledged come-on. But somehow it wasn't as unnerving. Perhaps that's because Smith's cleavage seemed to be presented so forthrightly. Smith's fitted jacket and her dramatic necklace combined to draw the eye directly to her bosom. There they were . . . all part of a bold, confident style package.

With Clinton, there was the sense that you were catching a surreptitious glimpse at something private. You were intruding -- being a voyeur. Showing cleavage is a request to be engaged in a particular way. It doesn't necessarily mean that a woman is asking to be objectified, but it does suggest a certain confidence and physical ease. It means that a woman is content being perceived as a sexual person in addition to being seen as someone who is intelligent, authoritative, witty and whatever else might define her personality. It also means that she feels that all those other characteristics are so apparent and undeniable, that they will not be overshadowed.

You can see the cleavage picture at the link. I wouldn't call that cleavage, and neither did Ruth Marcus who said:

Might I suggest that sometimes a V-neck top is only a V-neck top? As a person of cleavage, I'd guess that Clinton's low-cut shirt simply reflected a few centimeters of sartorial miscalculation, not a deliberate fashion statement.

I didn't write about this topic earlier. Partly that was because I saw it as yet another way of singling women out in politics and of focusing on the fairly narrow feminist questions that singling out elicits, and I sensed a dangerous trend in all this.

The trends goes like this: First someone writes something silly on a female politician, something that would never be written about a male politician. Then the focus automatically turns to a thorough debate about women, not about politics. Then any female opinionator who dares to chime in will be seen as a silly one, because she is writing about boobs and not about the Iraq war. And if that female opinionator does not chime in she will be accused of ignoring the plight of her feminazi sisters. It's a lose-lose situation.

A more fertile approach might be to ask why women on television news nowadays must show both cleavage and "leggage." The Fox News is particularly bad in this respect. It's possible that having ample and visible cleavage is an important job requirement for some of the jobs in the very same field which criticizes Clinton's imaginary cleaveage: journalism. And journalism is not the only field where professional expectations on women's dress are somewhat confused these days. It doesn't really make sense to analyze Hillary Clinton's dress as if she just suddenly decided, for no reason at all, to show some cleavage, and now all thinking people must try to understand this odd behavior.

A Lack of Patience

There are days when I want to tear out my hair and scales reading about some of the debates going on in American politics. I truly don't care how many angels can dance on the head of the pin and I have no interest in learning the answer, either.

Likewise, I don't want to pretend that a partisan attack is not a partisan attack, and I don't want to write a piece which highlights only the good sides of some policy prescription or only its bad sides, just because that would be good for the side I'm mostly with. Don't. Want. To.

I'm also not interested in writing gossip about politicians and so much of what goes on under the label of "political punditry" is all about gossip and stuff like the hairstyles or clothing choices or avancularity of politicians. All that makes me gag.

In fact, the majority of political writing would be called gossip if it was largely us women who did it. It's all about celebrities, the politicians, and their doings and sayings. That is gossip.

The natural conclusion to draw is that I don't seem to like political writing, and that is probably somewhat true if the definitions are drawn tightly enough. But I see politics as a much wider thing, alive and teeming with both beautiful and ghastly things and ultimately of importance to the ordinary lives of ordinary people, and I think that there is some space for writing like that to be included in political writing.

Ok. I come across as an insufferable prig in this post. So be it.

A Rebel Without Cause

That would be Senator Arlen Specter, a Republican from Pennsylvania. His modus operandi is to make a rather big noise about something he doesn't like in the wingnut plans for this country, but he never ever follows up on the noise he makes. It's pretty funny to watch once you get the shtick. Senator Specter's role is to make it look like the Republicans aren't goose-stepping behind the president when in fact they are.

The most recent volley from Specter is this:

According to a pool report of the encounter, Mr. Specter expressed anew his criticism of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales but said he saw no signs that Mr. Gonzales would be forced to resign. Mr. Specter attributed Mr. Gonzales's job security to Mr. Bush's "personal loyalty" to him.

Mr. Specter spoke derisively of Mr. Gonzales's appearance Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he faced accusations that he misled Congress last year when he said there had been no disagreement within the administration over the National Security Administration's domestic surveillance program.

"Our hearing two days ago was devastating," Mr. Specter said. "But so was the hearing before that, and so was the hearing before that."

Mr. Specter also waded into another uncomfortable subject, the Congressional demands for testimony from Karl Rove, the presidential adviser, and Harriet E. Miers, the former White House counsel, among others.

He said that while he hoped "to reach an accommodation" with the White House, "I don't see it now."

In the next stage of events like this nothing happens. Senator Specter quiets down until his plain-speaking is required once more. Instead, he quietly follows George Bush.

It's always possible that this time Specter really means to rebel. It's also possible that the lemmings have learned the U-turn from the brink. Nah.

Wolf Whistles

This post by Mo Rocca is all about construction walkers no longer whistling at women in New York city, according to Rocca. The post asks whether women miss those wolf whistles.

Read the comments. Whenever people tell me that this culture is all feminized and that feminazis are in power I take a look at some place like those comments. What you might notice from them is that the discussion proceeds mostly on the terms the initial post set out, terms which specify the attention the construction workers give women as wholly innocent, admiring and complimentary. If women don't like this attention they are either hairy-legged feminazis who wouldn't get wolf whistles in the first place or past their sell-by-date.

I'm exaggerating slightly, because that's the only way to point out what the post does. For instance, Rocca sets the scene by defining construction worker attention as something deeply historic, as a lovely little aspect of our culture which is fast fading away and is it not a pity? There is no attempt to distinguish nice attention from not-so-nice attention, no attempt to ask who has the power of initiative in these little incidents, no questions about the times when a woman might not want the attention of men she doesn't even know. And naturally nothing about that idea that the men feel entitled to publicly comment on women's bodies, because that's how it is.

Well, as a woman who has experienced these historical customs, let me say that it can be fucking annoying. When I go out to get a tooth filled I don't really want to worry about the fact that the dentist's office is right next to a construction site, a site from which men yelled at my friend jogging: "Look at those tits bouncing!" Knowing this means either walking the long way around or bracing oneself for the unwelcome attention.

I walked by the site because I was late for the appointment. I got the attention I feared and then got aggressive attention because "I didn't smile." An "arrogant bitch" I was. So not only did the workers feel entitled to comment on my body, even my response to that comment was predefined.

That was an example of the kind of attention that is annoying and irritating. There is also attention that is quite nice, but that's usually just a pleasant smile or something similar. Then there is the "attention" which consists of walking past a group of men on an otherwise deserted street. Many women feel fear at that "attention".

I wish Rocca had paid a little more attention on the nuances of wolf whistles or even just the meaning of such whistles or their more common verbal alternatives. Is it that the construction workers admire the woman? Or is it that they are dissecting her body parts and expect to be applauded for it?

On David Palmer

He is president Bush's nominee to serve on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It would be quite difficult to find a person less suited for that position, but that is the way things usually go with the Bush administration. Mr. Palmer's qualifications for the job are these:

President Bush's nominee to serve on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was himself the subject of at least one complaint of employee abuse in his supervisory role at the Justice Department, eight former department civil rights employees charged Monday.

In a letter asking key senators to block the nomination, the former employees also charged that David Palmer's work in the department's employment litigation section was of poor quality and that he was reprimanded for one performance lapse.

The former employees, including three ex-deputy chiefs of the section, charged that Palmer's "work performance was well below the high standards expected of Department of Justice attorneys."

They said that, as section chief since 2002, Palmer undermined the unit's mission of securing the employment rights of women and minorities in the public sector, while defending employers' rights to discriminate based on religion.

Did you know that the EEOC panel has only one Democrat left?

All this is the old "fox to guard the chicken coop" strategy, but I think most Americans don't know the level of contempt this administration has for their rights.

On Impeachment

I don't think that I have written a post on the impeachment of George Bush yet. The reasons for that are not just my usual excuses. I'm also not sure if a Greek goddess should address the issue, and there are the practical difficulties of getting the needed numbers in the Congress. These practical difficulties might mean that an attempt to impeach would be a failed attempt to impeach, and the consequences of a failed attempt might not be pretty. On the other hand, what is going on right now isn't terribly pretty, either.

Josh Marshall has written a post about all this today. He begins by stating that he is still opposed to impeachment for practical reasons. But his feelings about the alternatives to impeachment have changed:

Without going into all the specifics, I think we are now moving into a situation where the White House, on various fronts, is openly ignoring the constitution, acting as though not just the law but the constitution itself, which is the fundamental law from which all the statutes gain their force and legitimacy, doesn't apply to them.

If that is allowed to continue, the defiance will congeal into precedent. And the whole structure of our system of government will be permanently changed.

Whether because of prudence and pragmatism or mere intellectual inertia, I still have the same opinion on the big question: impeachment. But I think we're moving on to dangerous ground right now, more so than some of us realize. And I'm less sure now under these circumstances that operating by rules of 'normal politics' is justifiable or acquits us of our duty to our country.

And what is the new system of government that this precedent would create? What would it be called?

Garden Story

Plant and People Advertising

The "Lonely Hearts" columns in magazines and newspapers always leave me wondering why all these gorgeous, professionally successful people, who also love walks on moonlit beaches and holding hands, could ever have survived so long without having been snapped up by the rest of us. It seems to me that if I were lonesome for good company, any of these awesome creatures would suffice. Or all of them!

Not being lonesome, I focus my acquisitive greed on plant catalogs instead. The plants they list are all also gorgeous, vivaceous and splendidly healthy, no work is involved in their cultivation, and each and every one of them blooms "all summer" and, if perennial, comes back "stronger and bloomier" every year.

Everybody knows, of course, that personal columns and plant catalogs are full of exaggerations, omissions and marketing conventions. Lies, in fact. It doesn't make them any less titillating, for the reader wants to know how large the lies might be, and, if she or he is an optimist, might even risk a closer contact.

I have done so repeatedly with plants, although I should know better. It helps to know the translations of some of the most common euphemisms. "Blooms nonstop until frost" does not mean that you can "cut armfuls of flowers for the house" from May to November. It may mean that after an initial (and often totally satisfying) spurt of flowering the plant puts out one or two small flowers the rest of the growing season, so that, strictly speaking, it is never flowerless although that's what it looks like. Or it may indeed "flower its head off", but only if you are up at dawn every day with your magnifying glass and tweezers to deadhead all those minute flower heads one by one. Also, plants which can be kept at the brink of an extended climax using such artificial means tend to die out over the next winter (from sexual frustration, presumably).

"Just plant, water and sit back to enjoy gorgeous midsummer blooms" in a delphinium ad is only true if you like to look at flower heads lying down in the mud. Some plants, like some people, never stand on their own feet, but need support, which you, of course, are to provide.

"No need to transplant" about a plant with no growing zone indication (in a catalog where it is the only plant without such an indication) means that as it can't take winters colder than zone eight, it will be dead by next summer in your zone four garden, and the only transplanting needed is to the compost tip.

"Vigorous" plants take over the whole garden, your house, and drive your car to hiphop concerts every night. Ditto for "energetic", "healthy" and "easy care".

I am not blaming the catalogs or the personal columns for using such half-truths. After all, their business is selling, not giving psychologically or horticulturally correct information. It is the prospective buyers who must stay on guard and informed. Still, I have wondered if a more honest approach wouldn't pay in the form of more repeat customers (for plant catalogs, at least!). There are some honest catalogs, and I like to order from them.

But I also order from the more hyperbolic ones, because however exaggerated their claims, it remains true that the plants they sell are mostly good plants, not just quite as wonderful as they lead us to expect. The same is likely to be true about the people advertising for someone to date. These "good enough" people and plants are more interesting anyway, for what could a preternaturally perfect person or plant want with my pretty mediocre life or garden?

Summer Rerun posted by olvlzl

Restoring Virility With Goat Glands Selling Nazis Air Time

“Dr.” John Brinkley A Father of Conservative Talk Radio

John Richard (nee Romulus) Brinkley (1885-1941) was a Kansas based quack with an operation to sell. For $750 he restored a man’s virility by surgically implanting goat "glands" in his scrotum. Though you might have your legs tightly crossed as you read this, many men who found that they couldn’t rise to the occasion eagerly opened themselves up to “Dr.” Brinkley’s helping hands. Selling the promise of sexual potency to our forefathers, he made a very large fortune. There seems to have been a lot of that wrong with Kansas.

Flush with the kind of respectability that much money buys, Dr. Brinkley took a trip to the west coast and received the praise of the LA Times . While there he got a look at the paper's radio operation and saw its potential for his sort of business, stupid he wasn’t. Back home in Kansas he set himself up with a transmitter. Soon Dr. Brinkley had a path breaking medicine show promoting his practice complete with gospel tinged country music* and helpful advice to listeners who wrote in. His advice came in the form of drugs identified by number and bought from a chain of mail order drug stores linked to Dr. Brinkley.

Hearing a recording of his voice on a Public Radio International program recently, it was entirely familiar. The phrasing, pitch, accent and content reminds you of most of the right-wing pitch men you’ve ever heard. Paul Harvey could have been his son.

Now, even if the authorities might cast a mild eye on someone with the sort of trade he engaged in, there was one thing that went beyond endurance in that more innocent age, he advertised. “Dr.” Brinkley ran afoul of the AMA in the form of Dr. Morris Fishbein who got his license to practice in Kansas revoked. The Federal Radio Commission revoking his broadcast license was probably even more of a blow. Not being willing to take it lying down, he ran an lost two campaigns for governor in an attempt to change the licensing board but fled for the more fertile opportunities that Texas promised.

Eventually even Texas was forced to discourage Dr. Brinkley’s stabile medicine show. But he was far from over. He saw that Mexico, furious with the transmission policies of the U.S. government, might allow him to set up an enormous broadcast facility pointed North. Have I mentioned that he wasn’t stupid? Unregulated, clear channel, boarder, radio was born in all its gaudy, dishonest and bizarre corruption. This is where he sold radio time to Nazis, forcing the U.S. government to finally negotiate better transmission agreements with the Mexican government to get them to shut down the Nazi loving radio Doctor.

Modern, unregulated cable TV, which will sell anything, not having been born yet, “Dr” Brinkley ended badly in lawsuits, other legal trouble, bankruptcy and death.

So, we have it. A huckster with dodgy credentials selling a bogus sex operation to ignorant people through pop music, attempting political manipulation to allow him to further swindle people and renting himself out for the promotion of Nazis. The model of conservative talk radio.

* A song played on the PRI program praising the sexual habits of buck goats apparently figured heavily in the repertoire of his house band. Being a farm boy myself and having once kept goats, including a breeding buck, I’ve got to tell you that while indeed sexually relentless, they are about the stupidest, smelliest and most obnoxious animals in the barnyard. If Dr. Brinkley’s customers were familiar with buck goats their willingness to have the operation says something far more than I care to think about in detail.

First posted last August

Meanwhile, in India

The newly elected president is a woman. What does this mean?

I'm very lucky in that I don't have to try to decipher its deeper meaning for India or Indian women. Instead, I can read someone who actually knows this stuff cold: Ammu Joseph. You can, too.

And if that post wetted your appetite for more of Joseph's trenchant comments, check out how the American primary coverage comes across to her.

Guest post by Kay Olson: Veterans sue U.S. government

On Monday, two veterans' organizations filed a nationwide class-action suit against the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) for failure to help thousands of post-9/11 war veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.

... Of the 1,400 VA hospitals and clinics scattered across the United States, only 27 have inpatient programmes for PTSD. This despite the fact that an estimated 38 percent of soldiers and 50 percent of National Guard who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan report mental health issues ranging from post-combat stress to brain injuries.

The VA also has a backlog of over 600,000 disability claims, and the average Iraq war veteran who files for disability must wait six months for an answer. If he or she files an appeal, it could take up to three years.

In the late '80s, I recall that homeless men in American cities were so often mentally ill Vietnam vets that it was practically an urban cliché. It seems we're heading down that same road again:

In their lawsuit, the veterans groups ask the federal courts to force the VA to clear the backlog of disability claims and make sure returning veterans receive immediate medical and psychological help. They also want the judge to force the VA to screen all vets returning from combat to identify those at greatest risk for PTSD and suicide.

An estimated 400,000 veterans sleep homeless on the streets of the United States. The VA estimates 1,000 former servicemembers under its care commit suicide every year.

Cross-posted at The Gimp Parade

For Grace Who Is Still Alive And Living On The Street

Posted by olvlzl.
In Sunday’s Boston Globe, Louise Kennedy wrote an important article about the difference between the dramatic and literary depiction of severe mental illness with the reality as experienced by the family and friends of severely mentally ill people.

Most of the article deals with the romantic view of mental illness in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Two of these tales are onstage now in the Berkshires: "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" at the Berkshire Theatre Festival and "Blue/Orange" at Shakespeare & Company. Each production is strong and interesting in its own way. Seeing them on successive nights, however, left me repeating an old lament: If only mental illness were as fascinating, artful, and life-enhancing as it sometimes looks onstage.

Those of us who have endured the disability of a beloved relative know better. We know that while people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or severe depression may have flashes of creative genius and almost spooky moments of intellectual and emotional insight, the facts of their illness are scary, repetitive, and debilitating. In the long run, it doesn't lift you up to be crazy; it wears you down. And so, try as we might to surrender to the power of psychosis as a symbol, we just can't stop noticing the difference between reality and fantasy.

Kennedy talks about her experience with her severely ill mother and the effect that her illness had on her mother and those who loved her. For those of us who have experienced the loss of a close family member to severe mental illness the false picture presented by fiction and drama is quite often cruelly unrealistic.

I’ve often wondered if the popularity of the book and then the movie of Cuckoo’s Nest didn’t aid the cost-saving effort to dump even the most severely impaired people out of the hospitals and onto the street. The policy was presented as a civil rights issue, it was supposed to give them a better life than they would have in an institution. But it didn’t work that way. Treatment of severely mentally ill people is often just not provided, they are simply dumped on the street where they are particularly vulnerable to a large list of horrors.

Families that try to care for severely mentally ill people get little help in most states. If they aren’t wealthy they will find the situation almost impossible, in the case of the most severely ill, it is almost always impossible. The institutions of the past were certainly not worthy of replication but what we have now is worse. A member of my family who was schizophrenic gave us an enormous education in the buck passing, let’s pretend world of the mental health establishment we have today. The private clinic 28 day miracle treatment curiously coinciding with the length of time the insurance company would pay, the ineffective even dangerous administration of drugs coupled with inadequate counseling, the refusal to call a schizophrenic a schizophrenic because it might require the system to spend money, we saw it all. Not even the most obvious self-destructive behavior would move the system to require hospitalization. The one and only time her mother got her into the state hospital, before she reached the age of 18, she improved greatly. But as her pediatrician told us, once she reaches 18 you are not going to be able to do anything.

Our experience is that even as the self-destructive behavior leads to death, the system won’t do anything that would require them to hospitalize an entirely irrational person who is clearly unable to make rational decisions for themselves. We know this is true because after 16 years of dealing with the mental health system, years of deterioration and self-destruction the member of my family finally died. It wasn’t suicide, she wanted to live but she couldn’t stop destroying herself. The system we have doesn’t work, its only accomplishment is in coming up with words that excuse their inadequacies in a clear abuse of the language of civil rights. When someone is unable to think rationally, certainly their first civil right is to being protected.

I’d like to know how other people who have experienced the reality of trying to help or save a severely mentally ill person from their irrationality see Cuckoo’s Nest and other romanticized pictures of mental illness. I'd like to hear your experiences with the mental health establishment in your state.

On The Democratic Debate

Crooks&Liars has one clip at least. Could be that they get more as the night goes on.

And here is the transcript of the debate.

Guest post by Skylanda: A long story leading to a rat's ass

If you visit eBay on any given day, you can pay a couple grand and buy yourselves an ultrasound machine, the kind they use in hospitals to look at gallbladders and heart function and little babies in their respective uteri. Someone teaches you the basics of looking at a fetus through the snowfield of an ultrasound screen and you find out that wow, it's not that hard. After all, Tom Cruise could do it, so can you. And if you're slightly more web savvy that me, you can get yourself a website where you advertise your services. Pay rent at some storefront, set yourself up in business. List your name in the phone book. Maybe take out a slightly larger ad next to the one-liner, with a stylized icon of a woman and a heart. Something like that.

Unbiased pregnancy information, you can tout. You provide counseling and options. You give yourself a nice neutral name. You keep your affiliations and your agenda on the back page and the back burner. You're not an activist organization per se, you're just out there to lend a hand to pregnant women. You don't say you're a medical provider, but you don't say you're not. You just say: if you're pregnant, come to us, we can help.

So women open up the phone book, or type "pregnancy care + Any City, USA" in a browser and they find you. They can make an appointment...but you're real convenient too, you don't even require appointments and you can see women the very same day for a pregnancy test and an initial visit. Your place looks like a doctor's office, and wow, you even have an ultrasound machine. You slap that probe on a woman's belly, and see that fluttery little disc that means that baby's heart is beating. So early! You can see that already, even just a few weeks along? Wow! You smile at the woman and coo over the darling little baby in her belly, which to her still looks like a field of snow on a TV screen without an antenna, but even she can see that little fluttery beat.

She's not so sure she wants to see all that though; she's not sure she wants to be pregnant at all. In fact, maybe she's terrified of being pregnant. Maybe she's not eighteen yet, wants to graduate from high school first. Maybe her boyfriend is beating the hell out of her and her mom would never take her back home with a baby. Maybe she doesn't have a boyfriend, just had too much to drink at a party one night, never had sex before that night at all, has no memory of what happened, just knows she should have had a period by now. Maybe she's thirty and thought her birth control pills were enough to keep her from having a fourth because she and her husband are happy with three and really don't want and can't afford another, not right now, probably not ever. Maybe she even wants the baby and just found you by accident. But that's not important. Because your job is to make sure that she sees the little flutter and understands that this is not a field of snow on an ultrasound screen she is looking at, this is her baby. Her flesh, her child. A beating heart. A beating heart that will stop dead if she aborts the pregnancy.

You are, of course, a crisis pregnancy center, a pro-life outfit. Years ago you realized that plastering your rhetoric on your forehead did no good, so you've co-opted the rhetoric of the pro-choice crowd, and you use words like "unbiased" and "supportive" in your mission statement. You bury your affiliations three pages deep into your website where only the nosiest will think to look, under sub-headings like "Requirements for Volunteers." You don't mention one little fact:

That you are not a medical provider.

And this is the crux of the issue. Because we all know about the emotional manipulation - this is not news. We all know about the guilt trips and the pictures of aborted fetuses. Most of us on the pro-choice side have probably even heard stories about the false pregnancies tests - telling pregnant girls and women that they are not so that they do not seek care until it is too late to abort, and telling non-pregnant girls and women that they are so that they can be brought into the fold whereas there would be no reason for them to return to the clinic otherwise.

But there's more. All is not inevitably well when you stick a probe onto a pregnant belly. Sometimes there is major malformation - a missing limb, a missing skull. Sometimes there is not baby but tumor - tumor that secretes hormones that will make pregnancy tests turn positive. Sometimes there is baby but no heartbeat, an intrauterine fetal demise. Some of these things are very obvious to even a loosely trained ultrasound reader; some of them are not. What draws all of these scenarios frighteningly together is that by tacitly passing themselves off as medical providers without ever saying so or explicitly disclosing that they are not so, crisis pregnancy centers pose a double danger: providing comfort that a pregnancy is normal when it is not (by making women think they have undergone a standard dating and diagnostic ultrasound) on one hand; and on the other hand raising unnecessary fear and worry when a seemingly abnormal finding arises that is no more than the result of an untrained and inexpert hand at the helm of the machine. (This, incidentally, is the same criticism that has been leveled against mall-front ultrasound baby pic outlets - though to be fair, those places usually declaim their lack of diagnostic prowess up front; in the case of crisis pregnancy centers, it would belie the deception for them to freely advertise their total lack of medical training.)

Other times, women will come to you because they know that something is wrong. Bleeding, a cramping hurt that won't go away, a fever or vomiting that won't quit. They might pick you out of the phone book or off the internet because they have something that seems urgent, and these are likely to be the most vulnerable - the young, the uninsured, the scared - because they're the ones who don't have formal resources or the means to access them. They think you're a doctor because, really, who else would advertise pregnancy care? But you, you're not trained to know what a septic abortion looks like. You don't have a blood pressure cuff in the office because you're not a medical provider, so you won't see the frightening highs of pre-eclampsia or the ominous lows of a bleeding-out tubal pregnancy. You've never seen an eclamptic seizure - they're rare but not unheard of in first-world nations these days - and you don't have a stock of IV meds (or IVs) in a back closet to stop them if they occur, nor would you know one if it happened in front of you. No lab is on sight to check serial hematocrits, and you don't know the rule-of-thumb cutoff for how much blood is ok to pass during a miscarriage and how much needs to send a woman packing to the emergency room in a hurry. Because you aren't trained to know these things and you aren't required to be. You don't do the routine urinalyses that every prenatal provider performs to detect asympotmatic bacteria in the urine because it's been shown that this can lead to higher rates of first trimester pregnancy loss. Because you aren't a medical provider. You just conveniently forgot to advertise that. You just have the office, the equipment, the receptionist, the fancy name, the business cards, the works. All your missing is the training, the competence, the actual medicine.

There's a phrase for this. Some people like to call it "practicing medicine without a license." I have a different word for it. I like to call it "fraud." Because crisis pregnancy centers are not regulated by any practicing board, you do not have to have a physician present or even employed there. You don't have to disclose that fact to your clientele. You just get yourself one of those fancy machines and go to it. You just hope that you don't have ever have to answer hard questions, because that's the kind of people you are: starry-eyed, pragmatic in your one goal of stopping abortions. Nothing else matters.

I know, third-hand, of a young woman, some time ago (almost a year now), in another city far from my own. She was happily pregnant and luckily insured, but a little broke as twenty-somethings often are. Knew she needed prenatal care but wasn't sure how to get to an obstetrician covered by her insurer any time soon. She opened the phone book. She saw an ad, she called a number. They saw her that day. Her pregnancy test was predictably positive, she was roundly congratulated. An easy catch - she wanted the baby, too far along to abort anyhow. It was near the end of the office day and their usual ultrasound tech (and I use that term loosely, because US techs are highly trained technicians, and I do not vouch for that particular person's skills and certification) was already home, so another staff member agreed to a quick scan. She put the probe onto the swelling belly. She looked for a heartbeat. She looked some more. She scanned for some time and found nothing. She put away the machine and told the young woman to go to the emergency room, post-haste.

The story is open-ended. I never found out if her scare was real - and that this clinic just dumped her into the several-hour queue at the crowded ER with a dead baby in her belly and tears streaming down her face - or if it was merely a case of epically untrained reading on the part of the clinic staff, causing untold quantities of temporary (but happily resolved) heartbreak.

What I do know is that this behavior defies every tenet of professionalism ever committed to the human canon of such things. And that if it is not criminal in its encroachment on medical practice without training or licensure, it damn well should be. But most of all, it points yet again to what we all know about the pro-life drive: babies first. Women last. Babies first at the expense of women. Babies first even if it means lying to women. Babies first even if it means interfering with the sane and safe medical evaluation and treatment of pregnancies both normal and hazardous.

Babies first.

Women?

Who gives a rat's ass about them.

Kind of sums up the whole movement in one neat little package.

Cross-posted at my home blog, Loose Chicks Sink Ships.

A Housekeeping Announcement

Not that I keep house very much. But I'm going to have visitors ('dite might turn up) until Wednesday evening and so the posting here will be slightly spotty from me. Or might be. I'm not sure yet how it will work out. I also hope that some of my beloved guest bloggers will send in a snippet or two. Or I guess I could put up open threads and old bad poetry and garden stories.

Harry Potter Day

Not here at the Snakepit Inc., though I will most likely read the last Potter book one day. I bought the others in 2005 and ended reading them all within two weeks or so. That made the experience a slightly indigestible lump, but I'm still going to say a few things about the appeal of the books in general.

The level of the Potter-mania today has to do with the odd sociological or psychological phenomenon of "fads". When people write about fads they usually explain why fads come and go but rarely explain WHY something becomes a fad. Or at least I don't find the explanations satisfactory. Once the marketing engines get clacking a fad is strengthened, naturally, and the more people know about it the more positive reinforcing one is likely to find. But the initial question of why certain ideas or products become fads and others do not is not well understood, in my not-so-humble opinion.

Back to Potter-mania. I wrote a post about this earlier where I suggested that there would have been no comparable mania if the books were about Harriet Potter. Boys don't want to read about girl heroines. Girls are fairly used to reading about boy heros and on the whole don't seem to mind it as much. I'm pretty sure that this difference is not an innate one but has to do with the fact that being a boy is still a better thing than being a girl. A tomboy girl is not really ridiculous, because she is seen as striving upwards in the society. A sissy boy is very ridiculous indeed, because he is going down on the ladder of esteem. But even a tomboy girl is not a good role model for boys who are already a rung or two higher on the ladder.

So much for some of the feminist thoughts the books evoked in me. There is much more grist for my psycho-babble mill in the books. For instance, Rowling understands the importance of getting rid of the good parents by making them dead at the beginning of the first book. That way parents won't censor the books and the children who read them can allow themselves to read about evil adults without any guilt. The boarding school links to that hidden desire of most children, too: to be free of that pesky family, to be found to be a changeling, a prince or a princess meant for better things. Note that I don't mean that children would just think evil thoughts about their families. Mostly they don't, but those angry thoughts are part of real life and here is a book which almost celebrates them.

The trick is an old one. Fairy tales use that by having evil stepmothers in place of the biological mother. If we remember that families are the strongest limits children experience, in most cases, it makes excellent sense to get rid of the good aspects of families at the very beginning. This lets freedom in and imagination needs that.

Getting rid of the parents is the first step. The second step is the Cinderella story. Harry Potter is a male Cinderella, with special talents and a great destiny, but he is held in contempt by his uncle, aunt and especially by his horrible cousin whom the uncle and aunt love best. Lots of children have suspicions that their siblings are more loved than they are, so this setup allows those feelings a safe outlet.

Just as the real Cinderella, Harry gets to his ball and it lasts for years. That would be the boarding school where the magically talented go.

That some people are magically talented and the rest are Muggles allows children to feel that in-group thing without the guilt that usually goes with it in reality. Yet the distinction is not that different from the British class structure or from the way some people think about other races or about women. Rowling later addresses this whole issue in a more nuanced and realistic way, but I'm pretty sure that a part of the attraction of the book is in that common human desire to be found to be "special", better than others, a little closer to gods.

Add to this the fun of magic and imaginary creatures and horrible battles where children are taken seriously, and it looks like a winner. Which the books are, of course. They are also fun and interesting to read, and I feel like a traitor to write any of what I wrote above. Still, I've read better fantasy books, and that is what makes me ask the questions about the success of the Potter series. I think that the real secret may be in Rowling's skill to weave the fantasy just close enough to reality to make the transitions credible.

Romneyfied

Quote:

TMZ obtained photos of presidential candidate Mitt Romney trying to win over grammatically challenged South Carolinians Thursday by holding a sign that said, "No to Obama, Osama and Chelsea's Moma."

You can see the photos at the link.

Saturday Night Fun

By Max Blumenthal.

Editorializing in the Washington Post

This editorial on what the Congress is doing about the Iraq strategy is being torn to shreds all over the liberal/progressive blogs, and for good reasons:

The decision of Democrats led by Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) to deny rather than nourish a bipartisan agreement is, of course, irresponsible. But so was Mr. Reid's answer when he was asked by the Los Angeles Times how the United States should manage the explosion of violence that the U.S. intelligence community agrees would follow a rapid pullout. "That's a hypothetical. I'm not going to get into it," the paper quoted the Democratic leader as saying.

...

There's no guarantee that Mr. Bush can agree with Congress on those points or that he will make the effort to do so. But a Democratic strategy of trying to use Iraq as a polarizing campaign issue and as a club against moderate Republicans who are up for reelection will certainly have the effect of making consensus impossible -- and deepening the trouble for Iraq and for American security.

It causes the rage to rise, doesn't it? As tboggs put it, the argument seems to be that Reid is responsible for the lack of an exit strategy in the Iraq debacle.

And note that bit about "there being no guarantee that Mr. Bush can agree" on anything whatsoever. He is released from all responsibility for this horrible mess we find ourselves in, even though he has gritted his teeth, decided on his destiny in private conversations between his god and himself, and continues to ride into the solitary and bloody sunset on the Horse of History. Nope. It's not George Bush and the neocons that are to blame for the problems in Iraq; it's Harry Reid.

But when I write all that I'm doing exactly what the Washington Post people want me to. I'm giving them clicks and that gives them advertising revenue. To some extent the editorials are often nothing more than places where somebody can say the most shocking thing imaginable so that others get angry enough to read them, too. Or places where the government supporters can insert their propaganda. They can also be places where interesting arguments are presented, true, but this seems to be less true now that the newspapers in general are in financial trouble. (Why go there when you can read me for zilch?)

Meanwhile, in Birmingham

At a clinic which also performs abortions:

On-the-Ground Report from Birmingham.

By Rev. Katherine Ragsdale

You might have heard about what's going on in Alabama, but the media coverage has been largely biased, if there's any at all, and I want to make sure that our story is told.

Can you imagine going to your doctor's office and navigating through a crowd of 150 protesters screaming at you? Let's mix in the shouts of "baby killer" and other verbal attacks with the amplification of bagpipes playing.

What if the doctor's office had volunteers using umbrellas to shield patients from the mob scene and shouting as they traveled to and from their cars?

That's what is happening outside the New Women All Women Health Clinic, where I arrived yesterday as a representative for the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. "Operations Save America" is targeting this clinic and another one in Alabama as part of its ongoing intimidation and violence campaign against a woman's right to choose.

The clinic in Birmingham holds a harrowing place in the history of violence against women's clinics. It was the site of a bombing in 1998 by convicted felon Eric Rudolph that killed a security guard and maimed Emily Lyons, a clinic nurse.

Read the whole post.

Phila's Friday Hope Blogging

It's important to look at the bright side, too. And Phila does the hard work in putting uplifting and optimistic stories together.

Nothing To Fear But Fear Itself?

Suppose that you get up in the morning, see the wonderful sunrise and amble downstairs to the kitchen for your first cup of hot coffee. You sit down at the kitchen table and start reading the newspaper, and this is what you read:

Nearly six years after the United States set out to crush Al Qaeda, the terrorist network has "regenerated key elements" of its ability to attack targets in America, and is intensifying its efforts to put operatives inside the country, according to a sobering new report released today from U.S. intelligence agencies.

The document warns that the United States is "in a heightened threat environment" because Osama bin Laden and other senior leaders of Al Qaeda have taken advantage of a more secure environment in their hiding places in remote Pakistan to reestablish their leadership of the far-flung network and refocus its energies on striking the United States.

The report also concludes that Al Qaeda "will probably seek to leverage the contacts and capabilities" of its violent offshoot organization in Iraq, where the war has given a new generation of operatives lethal experience and helped the broader organization raise money and recruit.

What emotions would all that elicit in you? My guess is that the average reader (not a political geek) would feel fear laced with some anger. A 2005 article by Paul Vallely, written after the London bombings, addresses the psychology of terrorism and especially the reactions it hopes to elicit in the real objects of the attacks: the survivors:

Terrorism works not just by instilling fear in us, but by inducing a sense of helplessness. That is why its violence is random. Indeed, the more indiscriminate it is in selecting its defenceless victims, the better it suits the terrorists' purpose.

Outrages take us into mental territory which is beyond our normal comprehension. And the sheer irrationality of this psychology of fear makes it hard for us to construe what is happening around us.

...

Psychologists talk here of the "anticipatory anxiety" as the population waits for the next bomb to go off. They add in the notion of the "learned helplessness" as we come to terms with the fact that there is nothing or very little we can do to stop it. A profound sense of loss of control results. And control, according to Joanna Bourke, is a key ingredient in combating fear.

...

Intriguingly, what in the United States came to be called 11 September syndrome was not something which affected those directly involved in the trauma. Rather it affected people across America, in epidemic numbers, and was most prevalent among those who had remained transfixed to their television sets for hours, watching the towers crash over and over again. If the propaganda value of 9/11 was immense, the response of a TV-addicted nation made it even more so. "If there were no television the terrorists wouldn't bother," ventures Dr Reddy. Terrorists want a lot of people watching, more than a lot of people dead.

Helplessness, anticipatory anxiety, the role of the television in spreading what I think amounts to a national post-traumatic stress disorder. Hmm. Is the U.S. media perhaps doing the work for the terrorists here, quite without intending to do so? And what is the role of the Bush administration in reducing the fear that terrorists wish us to feel?

This may be a good place for that old quote by Franklin D. Roosevelt about fear, especially as the above psychological musings set it into sharp contrast with the way we are reacting today:

This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

------
Cross-posted on the TAPPED blog.

How Nasty Is Iran?

Matthew Yglesias writes a post with that title on the way Iran is treated these days in much of the American media:

For example, Iran is often characterized in the American press as a "totalitarian" regime, by both conservative and liberal hawks. Leading Democratic Party political operatives like Ken Baer will call you an apologist for the Iranian regime if you dispute this "totalitarian" concept. Thus "you" may well think that Iran is, in fact, a totalitarian society.

Which it isn't. The Iranian regime, though harsh on political dissidents, isn't Stalin's Russia or China during the Cultural Revolution. Crucially, it's not more repressive in any clear way than lots of countries -- China, Saudi Arabia, etc. -- we have perfectly normal diplomatic relations with. One of the reasons Hirsch probably overstated the case somewhat is that so many people -- powerful people -- seem invested in overstating things on the other side.

Nothing wrong with that, as far as I can see. But then the post is accompanied by this photograph of young Iranian women:





One picture is worth a thousand words, right? And what does the picture tell us? That Iranian women dress pretty much like their Western counterparts? That the rules about dress don't seem that strict at all? That's the quick message the picture seems to give me.

Of course it's impossible to tell how common the pictured dress is in Iran or how well the relaxed dress code of these young women reflects better women's rights in general.

I'm all for not bombing Iran under the pretense that this would be good for its human rights record. It wouldn't work that way at all, partly, because dead relatives tend to make people sort of angry at everything the killer represents, including things such as supposedly Western feminism. But I'm also not comfortable with the idea that the problems women and many other groups suffer in Iran should not be discussed because it might give warhawks more material. That sounds too much like the old idea of women's issues never being important enough to discuss until things somehow settle down. Which they never do.

The Lessons Not Learned

If you follow political punditry you must have come across several pieces which argue that talking about who was against the Iraq occupation before it started is a pointless exercise and that all we should focus on right now is how to win the "war" or how to get out with faces saved so that we still come across as the longest in war inches. Let's not blame each other and let's not point fingers at each other and so on. Instead, let's discuss how many months we are willing to give the Bush administration to prove that the surge works.

But what this argument completely misses is that there was a lesson to be learned from the events preceding the Iraq occupation, and unless that lesson is learned we will enter into a similar poorly planned war in no time at all.

The lesson is to use the expertise presidents have at hand, to talk to all sorts of people and not just to those who have a knife to hone for their own causes. The lesson is not to ignore history and culture and the experiences of other countries before diving headlong into a war without any plans on how to climb out of it later on.

I see no evidence that the lesson has been learned.

A Literary Appetite

I found this old stump for an essay on books and food, and it seemed relevant for the current discussion about the Harry Potter books and whether they are any good at all as a first course in a literary feast that will last a lifetime:

What snack goes best with Walt Whitman's poetry? There is no etiquette about food and books (unless the book belongs to someone else than the diner), perhaps because books are supposed to be food themselves, food for thought.

But many types of books can make the reader literally hungry. If one is careful and the book isn't borrowed, why not satisfy this hunger?

In my case it all began with Enid Blyton's children's books, full of picnics and cream teas. In those days I had little control of my snack times, and Blyton's books made me both ravenous and enraged. To read about thick slabs of chocolate cake and then to be told that dinner wouldn't be for hours makes a girl mad.

Later on I had more freedom to respond to my urges. Dostoyevsky, one of the heroes of my teenage years, seemed to insist on rye bread and pickles. Lots and lots of both; otherwise the misery of it all was simply too much. Jane Austen's elegant irony might have evoked the desire for cucumber sandwiches in more refined readers. It made me ache for hot, greasy French fries straight out of the carton, perhaps to keep the world balanced.

Philosophy, physics and mathematics beg for sinfully rich chocolate truffles to refuel the reader's brain after the needed mental gymnastics. This was one of the reasons I didn't major in any of these fields in college: chocolate truffles were beyond a student's budget.

As I grew up, I realized that almost all genres of books taste better with food. Science fiction often describes an unreal, cold world of outer space. Everything happens in the artificial surroundings of spaceships. The food these books require is fruit: fuzzy, perfumed peaches with their juices running down the pages, purple grapes with slimy seeds, translucent pears which melt in the mouth and leave the page-turning fingers sticky. This grounds the stories in real planetary nature.

Detective stories go with nuts. Nuts to crack? The best nuts are unshelled, but this makes an unpleasant mess after a couple of hundred pages. For the trickiest plots nothing beats salted cashews and smoked almonds with their complicated flavors. Unless, of course, the murderer used nuts to do the dastardly deed.

Travel books need portable snacks: finger food. Stuffed olives and chunks of hard exotic cheeses go nicely with tours of France and Italy, crumbly halva is ideal for any trip through Turkey and boiled sweets tucked in the cheek go well with almost all other travels. The one exception is stories about deserts. They must be accompanied with ice cream, preferably vanilla or mint-flavored and in a half-melted state.

I can only think of one type of books which can't be made more enjoyable by eating along. This is cook books. I used to read them while having dinner during the poor periods of my life, hoping to deceive my palate into believing that it wasn't tasting plain boiled spaghetti but duck with oranges, not cold baked beans straight out of the can but risotto with porcini mushrooms. This doesn't work. It makes all appetite go away.

Neither does it help to eat the dish actually described in the book. It never tastes as mysteriously delicious as it reads.

The correct way to read cook books is before dinner, best prepared by someone else. But other than cook books, almost any book can be improved by enjoying it with suitable food. What that might be depends on the reader. Caviar with Tolstoy? Mint humbugs with Dickens? Perhaps. But I am still not sure what would go with Whitman.

It doesn't really work with the Harry Potter topic, which is all about how the Potter books are not good literature and how people should read something more uplifting instead. Or the other Harry Potter topic which is the argument that those books are from the devil and will consign the reader to hell, too. At least the barbecues should be good down there.

An Off-Day

Nothing makes my creative juices flow today. Even that sentence brings only thoughts of stomach acids and how they feel when overly active.

Mysterious are the ways of both creativity and the stomach. Why is it that certain topics go "ping" inside my guts and then I want to write about them, whereas reading about some other topics makes me want to gouge out my eyeballs and unlearn the English language altogether? It's not just that I pretend to know some topics better than others and that this would cause the pings. The areas of my greatest expertise are the ones I will not touch with a six-foot pole, unless lots of money is offered, of course.

So. This is an off-day and all the blather above is from my morning random-writing exercises. I edited it by removing all the swear words and moans and my personal monster references. And the description of the sun dress I bought for five bucks at the charity shop.

Pole Dancing as Feminism

Jennifer Pozner likes this spoof on the Colbert show on pole dancing as a form of feminism. What do you think?

The Neocon Cruise

Johann Hari has written up his adventures while participating on a wingnut cruise. These cruises are a popular way for opinion magazines to make some money, and also a way for party faithfuls to get within spitting distance of their political and media idols. Reading the story is sort of fun for a middle-of-the-road goddess such as me, but it should be taken with a biiig pinch of salt before it is used to characterize all conservatives.

The reasons for this are obvious: People who go on these types of cruises are a self-selected lot. They are likely to have more extreme beliefs than your average conservative and they are also likely to have more disposable income and time. So what you have here is a narrow group of the true believers, and Hari discusses their beliefs using the anecdotal method. That is also a little dangerous, because given an hour or two I could probably find someone to spout almost any weird arguments for your entertainment.

Still, what I do find disconcerting about the stories Hari tells is the extent to which the individuals he interviews appear to live with a totally different set of not just values but "facts" about the world. Europe, for instance, has already been lost to the Muslim hordes and so on. This is one of the reasons why reading only sources which agree with our own views is not a good idea, even for those of us who are not wingnuts.

How It Is Done

For a fantastic example of photoshopping replacing reality, check out this post by Jezebel. And this one. Via Pandagon.

The Vicious, Venomous Womenfolk

The Prince of Darkness a.k.a Robert Novak, a wingnut columnist, is not happy with the fairer and gentler sex, especially the Bush-haters among us:

Novak: I hate to say it, but I think the hatred toward George W. Bush is just mad. I listen to, sometimes in the car radio, on talk shows, and the venom that comes out of the mouths of some of these women, particularly, I'm not trying to be sexist, but they're so vicious toward him. And I don't think that really contributes. And also, the bloggers, I don't read the bloggers very much, but it is really, it's really vicious.

O-oh. Are there no vicious or venomous men, other than perhaps among bloggers? I doubt that very much. Bob is just one of those guys who has put women up on a pedestal (in order to stop them from moving about? to peek up their skirts? sorry).

But even if it were true that it is somehow mostly the women who are angry at this administration, well, George Bush's war against women might be enough of a reason for that.

Today's Scary Thought

From a Guardian article on Monday:

A well-placed source in Washington said: "Bush is not going to leave office with Iran still in limbo."

I Smell A Rat

With this popularization piece in the New York Times "If You're So Rich, Why Aren't You Tall?", but I'm too pressed for time to do research in it. The gist of the piece is this:

From the days of the founding fathers right on through the industrial revolution and two world wars, Americans towered over other nations. In a land of boundless open spaces and limitless natural abundance, the young nation transformed its increasing wealth into human growth.

But just as it has in so many other arenas, America's predominance in height has faded. Americans reached a height plateau after World War II, gradually falling behind the rest of the world as it continued growing taller.

By the time the baby boomers reached adulthood in the 1960s, most northern and western European countries had caught up with and surpassed the United States. Young adults in Japan and other prosperous Asian countries now stand nearly as tall as Americans do.

Even residents of the formerly communist East Germany are taller than Americans today. In Holland, the tallest country in the world, the typical man now measures 6 feet, a good two inches more than his average American counterpart.

Compare that to 1850, when the situation was reversed. Not just the Dutch but all the nations of western Europe stood 2 1/2 inches shorter than their American brethren.

Does it really matter? Does being taller give the Dutch any advantage over say, the Chinese (men 5 feet, 4.9 inches; women 5 feet, 0.8 inches) or the Brazilians (men 5 feet, 6.5 inches; women 5 feet, 3 inches)?

Many economists would argue that it does matter, because height is correlated with numerous measures of a population's well-being. Tall people are healthier, wealthier and live longer than short people. Some researchers have even suggested that tall people are more intelligent.

The article goes on to argue that all races have the same potential to be tall. It then states that something is happening in the United States which is making people shorter and this "something" is bad:

In another recent paper, Komlos and Lauderdale also found height inequality between American urbanites and residents of suburbs and rural areas. In Kansas, for example, white males are about as tall as their European peers; it's big cities like New York, where men are about 1.75 inches shorter than that, that drag America's average down.

Now Komlos has started comparing the heights of children to determine at what age Americans begin falling behind their peers across the Atlantic. Not surprisingly, he sees a difference from birth, an observation that suggests prenatal care may be significant contributor factor to the height gap.

All those sweeping and simple-minded theories make me suspicious. For instance, why doesn't the piece point out that the racial mix of people is pretty different in the rural Midwest from New York city and that New York city has many more immigrants than the rural Midwest, immigrants who may have grown up in poor areas with diminished nutrition? Or is Komlos only comparing white or Anglo males to each other?

I'm also not so sure about that argument that all races have about the same likelihood of growing tall and that good nutrition and so on will help you to get there. What research is that based on?

If that is true we should observe the ruling classes of the past in countries such as China to have been six feet tall while the ordinary people were quite short. Is that the case? I would have thought that some history book would have discussed this astonishing finding.

The piece also confuses the use of relative height as a health indicator within a community and the use of height as some kind of a general measure of excellence. The former can be useful, the latter not so much. Taken to its absurd extreme the latter idea means that we are supposed to find a twelve foot tall person the very picture of good health, never mind all the health problems that person would have.

Who knows what the research really says, of course. But I don't think the world is as simple as this story and other similar stories suggest.

On Troy Davis

He has been sentenced to death for killing a police officer. But since his trial new evidence has surfaced. As Scott Lemieux says, for very stupid reasons this new evidence cannot be heard and Troy will executed, perhaps as soon as today:

I recently posited elsewhere that the exceptionally odious Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act was the worst legislation signed by Bill Clinton, although there are many more candidates for the title than a Democratic President should allow. At any rate, a man who is very likely innocent is about to be railroaded to the death chamber because he's now statutorily barred from presenting evidence that 7 out of the 9 witnesses -- essentially the entire case against him -- have recanted, a tragic absurdity that underscores the appalling nature of the habeas corpus restrictions Clinton signed. Amazingly, this case has attracted relatively little attention from people making (stupid and offensive) analogies between the Duke lacrosse players and the Scottsboro Boys, although this case is rather more analogous.

Washington Post discusses the case today, too.

It doesn't actually matter to me whether Davis is guilty or not. It's important for the new evidence to be considered. A rule which makes that impossible is ultimately going to cause the executions of innocents, and Davis might very well be one of those.

You can go to this site to protest on Davis' behalf.

The Invisible Saudi Terrorists

These guys truly tend to be invisible in the U.S. public debates about terrorism, and the main reason for that seems to be the Bush administration's desire to keep them out of the limelight. For reasons of oil, naturally.

But still. There is something odd about a country which sees a terrorist attack (9/11) where the majority of the terrorists come from Saudi Arabia and which appears to choose to do nothing about that fact, even though the president of the attacked country gives a speech in which he argues that countries who harbor terrorists are themselves terrorists.

Then you get news like this:

Although Bush administration officials have frequently lashed out at Syria and Iran, accusing it of helping insurgents and militias here, the largest number of foreign fighters and suicide bombers in Iraq come from a third neighbor, Saudi Arabia, according to a senior U.S. military officer and Iraqi lawmakers.

About 45% of all foreign militants targeting U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians and security forces are from Saudi Arabia; 15% are from Syria and Lebanon; and 10% are from North Africa, according to official U.S. military figures made available to The Times by the senior officer. Nearly half of the 135 foreigners in U.S. detention facilities in Iraq are Saudis, he said.

Fighters from Saudi Arabia are thought to have carried out more suicide bombings than those of any other nationality, said the senior U.S. officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the subject's sensitivity. It is apparently the first time a U.S. official has given such a breakdown on the role played by Saudi nationals in Iraq's Sunni Arab insurgency.

He said 50% of all Saudi fighters in Iraq come here as suicide bombers. In the last six months, such bombings have killed or injured 4,000 Iraqis.

The situation has left the U.S. military in the awkward position of battling an enemy whose top source of foreign fighters is a key ally that at best has not been able to prevent its citizens from undertaking bloody attacks in Iraq, and at worst shares complicity in sending extremists to commit attacks against U.S. forces, Iraqi civilians and the Shiite-led government in Baghdad.

Read the whole article. It tells you how this particular characteristic of terrorism is kept on the sidelines in this country.

Another reason why we might expect more discussion of the role of Saudi Arabia in radical Islamic terrorism is that Saudi Arabia is the home of Wahhabism, a rigid, fundamentalist form of Islam, and Saudi Arabia uses its enormous wealth to export Wahhabism to countries all over the world.

A Mistake

I realized I made a mistake on that Sunday's post, because I suggested that the comments thread could be used as a depository for the eggs of your great wisdom. It was a mistake, and I apologize for it.

It was a mistake, because I have noticed that many people don't think their opinions are great eggs of wisdom (even when they are). Women are especially prone to this belief.

Why do I think so? Mostly because of the experiences I have had over my life and also in cyberspace. It's not that all women would be modest about their ideas or worried about coming across as foolish, or that all men would be certain of the brilliance of what they say. But I definitely get less self-promotion mail from women than from men and the mail I get from women includes many more hedges and apologies. There are exceptions, naturally, in both directions. Still, there is something about the opening I used which might bias the selections. And of course what I really meant was for everybody to say whatever they wanted in the comments thread.

This topic may have a link to that age-old question why political opinion columnists tend to be men. That may be changing now that goddesses can go and bloviate, but as Digby said in her speech at the Take Back America conference, all that you need to opionionate is to have an opinion. Really. Just see what Bill Kristol gets away with and he is on television all the time.

Sunday Snake Blogging

Courtesy of JohnJS:





You could regard this as an open thread wherein you can deposit the snake eggs of your great wisdom.