Mad Or Sad?

A recent study by Victoria Brescoll suggests that women in management might do better if they don't show anger. This is what she did in the study:

She conducted three tests in which men and women recruited randomly watched videos of a job interview and were asked to rate the applicant's status and assign them a salary.

The people in the job interview were either male or female but followed the same script. Each of them expressed either anger or sadness over losing an account due to a colleague being late for a meeting.






According to Brescoll, anger gave the men higher status and higher salary estimates. The reverse was true for women. It seems that it's better to be a sad CEO than a mad CEO if you are of the girly persuasion.

The usual popularized take on this study seems to be that anger helps men get ahead but keeps women back. Strictly speaking, this is not quite what the study found, as the study compared anger not to, say, general pleasantness, but to sadness as a possible reaction to one particular type of event (the loss of an account).

I couldn't get hold of the actual study which limits my ability to judge how reliable the findings are. As an example of the kind of data I'd love to see is the number of subjects who were asked to rate the videos. But supposing, for the time being, that there are no hidden bugs in the study, what do the results mean?

Brescoll herself says that angry women are seen as "out of control". This is fascinating, because the proper antonym for that in this context might not be "in control" but "under control". If anger is viewed as a legitimate reaction by someone who is entitled to dominate others (as the article from which I quote suggests), then those who are not seen as entitled to dominate others would indeed be "out of control" when expressing anger. This doesn't apply only to women who have traditionally not been allowed to show much anger, but to almost anyone in a subordinate position.

That sadness works better for women than anger fits into that framework pretty well. Besides, sadness is not directed to anyone outside the person. It is non-threatening. On the other hand, women are not supposed to be sad in public if they have power, because crying is seen as a sign of weakness. A Catch-22 indeed.

I was astonished by the salaries men and women were assigned in this study. Men were awarded much higher salaries than women (remember, the applicants were objectively identical), and the resulting differences are much larger than the actual average differences in full-time pay by gender. Both male and female reviewers assigned women lower earnings, and I have seen similar results from other studies.

One interpretation would be that the study subjects are trying to guess what a person with particular characteristics would earn in the real world, and assign sums accordingly, thus taking into account their knowledge that women, on average, earn less. Another one is that people in general are a lot more sexist than we perhaps have thought and rate and rank women lower than men on that basis.

On the Utah Mining Accident

May the six trapped miners be found soon and healthy or at least alive.

An earlier post I wrote after the Sago accident touches on some of the safety concerns which have cropped up in this case, too. Mining safety is too crucial to be left to the vagaries of the marketplace.

Blogging Advice

Jane Hamsher includes some in a recent post:

...you have to post regularly about the topics that news junkies are interested in and you have to find a way to write your issues into those. It is difficult to get people to care about pro-choice, my personal signature issue. I found a way to write it into the Alito story, the Joe Lieberman story, the NARAL story, in a way that the blogosphere got interested in because I took the time to figure out how things worked and how you could catch the wave. I also took a lot of time building relationships with other bloggers, reading what they had to say, linking back to them, going out of my way to meet them in person when I could (no matter how big or little the blog) and being in conversation with other bloggers rather than sitting there carping about how they never linked to me.

I thought about this a lot last night while brushing my fangs the required five minutes. Then I thought about it some more. The advice she gives is quite good, but I have not taken it. So I went through all those rounds in the spiral of thinking, from feeling annoyed at myself for not doing all those things that well, to feeling annoyed that such marketing acts (as I see them) are required to sell certain topics (often feminist ones) to a wider audience (consisting of what type of people?), then veering back into asking what all this means for the definition of blogging as an enterprise (a commercial one?) as compared to simple acts of writing or communication, and finally deciding that I will never arrive at some ice-clear conclusion on any of this. Better just write it all down.

So I did.

The Liberal Washington Post

Has hired Ramesh Ponnuru:

In 2006, National Review columnist Ramesh Ponnuru appeared on Fox News and claimed that the "journalistic elite was a functional ally of the party of death."

This week, Ponnuru officially joins the "party of death" himself, signing on with the "journalistic elites" at the Washington Post.

At the Post, he will lead a new Discussion Group on "the future of conservatism" entitled Right Matters. One of the issues Ponnuru will focus on is "the state's role in enforcing morality."

Where's my Discussion Group, by the way?

Doesn't that reference to "the state's role in enforcing morality" remind you of something? Like those Taliban police officers who checked that women's shoes didn't make a noise. Brothers under the skin and all that.

Where the White Boys Are

That's pretty much the summary of this Washington Post article by Jose Antonio Vargas, about the lack of diversity at the Yearly Kos conference which has just ended in Chicago. I wasn't able to make the conference this year, but the absence of one snake goddess is not what Vargas bemoans:

It's Sunday, day 4 of Yearly Kos, the major conference for progressive bloggers, and Gina Cooper, the confab's organizer-in-chief, surveys the ballroom of the massive McCormick Place Convention Center. A few hundred remaining conventioneers are having brunch, dining on eggs, bagels and sausage.

Seven of the eight Democratic presidential candidates have paid their respects this weekend, and some 200 members of the credentialed press have filed their stories. A mere curiosity just two years ago, the progressive blogosphere has gone mainstream. But Cooper sees a problem.
"It's mostly white. More male than female," says the former high school math and science teacher turned activist. "It's not very diverse."

There goes the open secret of the netroots, or those who make up the community of the Internet grass-roots movement.

For all the talk about the increasing influence of this growing group -- "We are a community . . . a movement . . . an institution," Cooper said in a speech Saturday night -- what gets scant attention is its demography. While the Huffington Post and Fire Dog Lake, both founded by women, are two of the most widely read blogs, the rock stars are mostly men, and many women bloggers complain of sexism and harassment in the blogosphere.

Walking around McCormick Place during the weekend, it became clear that only a handful of the 1,500 conventioneers -- bloggers, policy experts, party activists -- are African American, Latino or Asian. Of about 100 scheduled panels and workshops, less than a half-dozen dealt directly with women or minority issues.

Sigh. Diversity. You know, I have never really liked that term. It was snuck in at some time in the eighties or nineties to make fairness more palatable to those who don't think there is anything unfair in the good-ole-boy networks. "Diversity" sounds like face paint to me, even though I know that it's not intended that way. And somehow it's a lot easier to ignore demands for diversity than it is to point out that white guys don't always bring up exactly the same issues as black guys or brown guys or gals of all colors or that a grass-root movement of nothing but white guys isn't exactly grass-root. That would be green guys, I guess.

That's not the only reason I'm sighing here. Some of you may have read me long enough to know that the "where are the women?" topic crops up all the time in the blogosphere and I'm tired of writing the same observations each time.

So instead of doing that, let me just summarize: Those who see no problems argue that nobody on the Internet knows if you are a dog (just don't call yourself Spotty), that the system is gender-blind and color-blind and the result therefore either optimal or at least not amenable to any easy change. Those who see problems argue that "birds of a feather fly together", that guy bloggers link to guy bloggers, that certain topics are viewed as important and others as "identity politics" and divisive, and that institutional support is most likely to accrue to those whose views are seen as not being all about "identity politics." Yet for most practical purposes the lives of women and minorities might evolve around the very topics which are labeled as divisive.

Sigh, one more time. What is the solution, then, for increasing diversity at conferences such as the Yearly Kos? Note that the diversity of bloggers themselves is much greater, it seems to me, and even if it is not a real rainbow of views and individuals it is slowly turning towards that direction. The real question the article poses for me is how to get the money and support for all the different types of bloggers to attend these conferences and how to get them on the panels, too. Once there, the bloggers can speak for themselves. This problem seems quite amenable to a financial solution and some logical outreach efforts, don't you think?

Today's Deep Thought

From a piece by Robert Dallek in the Washington Post:

Polls showing President Bush's approval ratings in the 20s and 30s and a New York Times survey last month reporting that people across the country are eager for an end to the current administration suggest that this nation has a problem it's going to have to live with for the next 17 months -- a failed presidency that won't reestablish its credibility with a national majority.

The political argument against Bush's continuing tenure is not frivolous. There are good reasons to see him as a failed president whose remaining time in office will be unproductive at best and destructive to the country's well-being at worst. But given the constitutional rules by which the presidency operates, there is no serious prospect of removing him from office.

Some Suggested Voices To Use When Reading Harry Potter Aloud.

Posted by olvlzl

Well, it’s done. I’ve read the entire series to by nieces, some of the books more than twice. If you should ever be in a position to have to read them aloud, and are living in North America without the right accents, here are a few ideas for voices that I’ve used.

Draco Malfoy: Byron York
Lucius Malfoy: Wm. F.Buckley
Snape: the late Jeanne Kirkpatrick
Prof. Lockheart: Steven Pinker
Hagrid: Onslow, you know, Hyacinth’s brother in law.
Prof. Umbridge: James Sensenbrenner
Uncle Vernon: who else, Rush Limbaugh. Though Tim Russert might do.
Petunia: Phyllis Schalfly
Dudley: Chris Matthews
Belatrix: Ann Coulter
Voldermort: George Gilder through a helium balloon.

What voices do you hear when you read them?

Diversity As A Disaster? This is something we need to start working on now.

Posted by olvlzl

In the Boston Globe’s Idea section today is an article about some seemingly disturbing and discouraging findings from extensive studies of cities with diverse and less diverse populations. The upshot is that the study done by Robert Putnam (author of “Bowling Alone”) shows that cities with greater diversity have less community involvement by individuals, more suspicion of their neighbors and even lower voting rates.

You just know that this study, done by a pretty solid liberal, is sweet to the ears of conservatives, from the near right to David Duke. Duke is already featuring the study on his website, to Putnam's distress. Before long it will be making its way into the writings of pop-social science writers and from there the call for , in effect, segregation will become mainstream in what passes as the liberal media from the NYT to The News Hour.

Some conservatives are snorting and huffing because Putnam thinks this is something that we should be looking at in terms of cause and remedy

"You're just supposed to tell your peers what you found," says John Leo, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. "I don't expect academics to fret about these matters."

Conservatives apparently value civic well-being less than they do having the political issue of ethnic resentment and division. Are they are looking at how to use this study to promote the closed boarder policy that seems their great white hope in the coming election? I suspect that so. This is the "Southern strategy" with kid gloves.

Since we are a diverse country and every indication seems to show that we are going to become more so, a reputable study showing that:

"People living in ethnically diverse settings appear to 'hunker down' -- that is, to pull in like a turtle," (Putnam)

... is pretty alarming. Anyone interested in having a civil civic life should be looking for ways to promote social and community life across ethnic barriers.

Odd, in the article, that the role of TV as a possible factor in this situation isn’t mentioned. Considering Putnam’s most famous work to date, that seems doubly odd. The role of TV in setting the national attitudes about ethnicity, risk from diversity, the climate of danger and similar vectors that would certainly impinge on the habit of fearful cocooning is, I believe, more pervasive than education or personal experience. The image of non-whites on TV has certainly been studied and been found to promote negative stereotypes. The amount of time Americans watch and absorb the messages of TV has to make it one of the most influential teaching methods today. To ignore the role played by it, and, perhaps, to some extent, radio, in an article like this is a fatal flaw to understanding the full range of explanations.

TV is mentioned once but as the end of the problem, not a source of it:

"distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television."

People more interested in livable cities than promoting racial strife for political gain had better take the role of the mass media into account.

Perhaps it would be good to have some replication of Putnam’s study, though in a sample of the size he took it’s likely to be a long time coming. Until it is, possibly, discounted I’m afraid that the “disaster of diversity” is likely to be the predominant line in any discussion. The conservative-Republican bias of the media almost assures us it will remain in currency for many years to come. But anyone who is more interested in civic peace than in radio-talk show division will have to take seriously the need to pressure the electronic media to stop promoting racism through fear.

Irresponsible Corporate Media Makes Responsible Government Impossible

Posted by olvlzl

Note: I was going to write a followup to this piece in light of this weeks bridge disaster and the soon to be laid aside interest in bridge inspection and repair. However, that wasn't possible. The reason the matter, clearly a matter of saving lives this week, will be laid aside is due to the collusion of conservative politicians and the media which supports them. It is the "tax and spend" chanters who have brought us to this. While it is profitable for their campaign supporters to build an enormous and complex infrastructure, it costs money to do do it right in the first place and to maintain and eventually replace a superannuated structure. That's when the howls of the right wing begin and responsible voices are silenced.

The Boston Globe had a column by David Luberoff last year which clearly explains the origins of the emerging Big Dig disaster. He points out that the project, originally funded through the federal highway system, lost a lot of its federal support half-way through. Instead of facing that reality, the politicians in Massachusetts didn't make up the difference with state and local taxes and tolls. One of the truest things in life is that while you often don't get what you pay for, you never get what you don't pay for. You know that's true when you are dealing with a large corporation like Bechtel with armies of bean counters making sure that they get maximum profits from their projects.

What went wrong in the face of warnings by people who knew what they were talking about - Massachusetts has probably the highest percentage of those on the continent- is just beginning to be studied. While they are looking at that I hope someone will look into the more general political atmosphere that led to the bad decisions. I don't only mean the steady stream of Republican governors during most of the Big Dig.

Given their refusal to monitor themselves for accuracy and responsibility, we won't get the media's role in promoting gross irresponsibility in politicians. At least not from them. But it really does largely fall on the media. Through call-in shows, wise-guy on-air personalities, connected owners and those who have created today's media sewer, anyone who steps up and tells the truth, "You want this done, you are going to have to pay for it," gets their head handed to them. They make lying and dereliction of duty requirements for retaining a political office or civil service job. Reporting with enough time or column space to really explain an issue costs more while the truths uncovered are insufficiently entertaining to maximize profits. And some of those truths might be most unwelcome at the club.

The Republican Party, who used to pride themselves on responsibility, now specialize in this kind of winning through lying. With the media fully in support they tell lies designed to win elections. Most people have a weakness for believing what they want to hear. The busy public, without the technical knowledge or time to look at the details buys the lies until reality strikes and they can't ignore it any longer. How else do you think Bush I lost to Bill Clinton despite the insane press adulation following Bush War I and the war they waged against Clinton as soon as it was clear he had a chance to win?

But if you want good government, safe and effective civil engineering projects, the rest of the benefits that only government can deliver, then we can't wait for the disaster to deliver the real news. The cost in lives, time and remedial action are multiplied many times by the lies and propaganda spread by the media.

The often repeated line, "Good, fast or cheap. Pick two." sums up the current political climate that this irresponsibility has produced. But as the Big Dig is beginning to prove, good is the only way to get faster and cheaper. Maybe the same applies to news media getting it right. But getting it right isn't what today's profit-driven and cynically self-interested media is all about.

The Globe had an article in which Michael Dukakis defends his administration's role in the Big Dig. Having read about the project from its beginning, he makes a good case. But Dukakis is just a boring detail guy the press rejected two decades ago.

On the Duggars

I happened to come across a piece which celebrates the birth of the seventeenth child into the Duggars family. Now, the number of children this family wants to have may be their own business (though that could be debated from an environmental angle, say, and also if they cannot afford to feed all of those children), but the announcement made me think how differently the choice to have lots of children is viewed from the choice to have a few children and work outside the home.

The latter choice is viewed as wrong by a sizeable number of Americans, though naturally only in the case of mothers who are employed. Fathers are quite free to be employed, never mind how many children they have. But mothers who have jobs outside the home are suspected of child neglect or even worse. Yet having seventeen children is not treated in a similar manner. But think about it: How could Michelle Duggars possibly spend the amount of attention on each and every one of them that many of those motherhood experts specify? (Jim Bob, the father is obviously not expected to spend time with the children.)

My guess is that it is the older siblings who pretty much bring up the younger ones. This may not be bad, but surely it would be regarded as horrible if it was a consequence of the mother having a job and therefore delegating child-minding to someone else.

Or think about how this case is viewed in comparison, say, to all those stories about welfare queens who have more children supposedly only because it gives them more money. The Duggars are not criticized for having more children than they can afford to support properly.

What is the difference in these kinds of comparisons? The Duggars tell a story which both shocks us (seventeen children!) and also supports very old patriarchal norms about what a good mother is. She stays at home and has lots of children, basically. That this might not be good for the children is ignored, because the other myth is more powerful.

Friday Cat Blogging

This is fourlegs' Maddie. Fourlegs takes great kitten pictures.

What is the point of sudden photographs of animals on political blogs? I think they are an important change of pace and a reminder to be in touch with all things which fundamentally matter: the trees, the animals the rocks, the rain, the sun. We are animals ourselves, whatever the wingnuts wish for, and we need to stay grounded. Besides, the pictures are calming and cheering and often funny. And a way to signal that the weekend is coming.

Speaking about the weekend, this weekend I'm going to post a couple of things sent in by some of you lovely and talented readers. If there is interest in doing more of these kinds of posts we may continue doing it during the times when I need to participate in such divine acts as sleep.

The Yearly Kos

I'm not in attendance at that conference, myself, and if you are not there, either, you can follow several of the events electronically (though right now they are off the air). I've heard that there are even events in the Second Life game. Or you can read what bloggers such as Atrios or the people at TAPPED say about the conference speeches and events. Or of course go to the Daily Kos and follow links from there.

On Minimum Wage and Kama Sutra Chocolates

I have written a longer piece on how the recent federal raise was passed. I meant to write a piece on the theories behind the minimum wage but my dog got sick and making economic theory into luscious tidbits of sheer funniness took more than I had to give.

If you are not too keen on that topic, how about chocolates shaped like acts of love? Trish Wilson shows you a picture of one. I think these could turn out to be very popular.

Preventing Disasters

The Minnesota bridge collapse may have absolutely nothing to do with the topic of this post but it made me think again about the particular problems the political system creates in attempts to prevent similar disasters. For example, consider an elected politician who notices that the area's infrastructure is in poor shape and who works to repair it. These repairs require higher taxes, let's say. Suppose that the roads and bridges are then all fixed and new elections come around.

What do you think this politician's competition will run on? Probably on how the government has been spending too much and taxing too high, and how it is time for a lean-and-mean new government (which, of course, doesn't need to fix the infrastructure now, either). And these arguments might very well win the day.

Now suppose the initial politician in my story had instead neglected the infrastructure problems until some major accident occurred in which people died. Suppose that only then would this person rise up and start fixing bridges and roads everywhere, while also turning up at every patriotic rally. All this patching up could cost more than a thorough maintenance program might have cost. But the politician is now a hero, and in a much better position to get re-elected.

When is a leader a good leader? The first type appears preferable on logical grounds, but the second one is more likely to be viewed as a good leader. Yet people had to die for change to come about. Well, in my story at least.
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Cross-posted on TAPPED.

Off Tune

President Bush was not the great communicator today when addressing the Minnesota bridge collapse:

THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. I just finished a Cabinet meeting. One of the things we discussed was the terrible situation there in Minneapolis. We talked about the fact that the bridge collapsed, and that we in the federal government must respond and respond robustly to help the people there not only recover, but to make sure that lifeline of activity, that bridge, gets rebuilt as quickly as possible.

To that end, Secretary Peters is in Minneapolis, as well as Federal Highway Administrator Capka. I spoke to Governor Pawlenty and Mayor Rybak this morning. I told them that the Secretary would be there. I told them we would help with rescue efforts, but I also told them how much we are in prayer for those who suffered. And I thank my fellow citizens for holding up those who are suffering right now in prayer.

We also talked about -- in the Cabinet meeting talked about the status of important pieces of legislation before the Congress. We spent a fair amount of time talking about the fact that how disappointed we are that Congress hasn't sent any spending bills to my desk. By the end of this week, members are going to be leaving for their month-long August recess. And by the time they will return, there will be less than a month before the end of the fiscal year on September the 30th, and yet they haven't passed one of the 12 spending bills that they're required to pass. If Congress doesn't pass the spending bills by the end of the fiscal year, Cabinet Secretaries report that their departments may be unable to move forward with urgent priorities for our country.

This doesn't have to be this way. The Democrats won last year's election fair and square, and now they control the calendar for bringing up bills in Congress. They need to pass each of these spending bills individually, on time, and in a fiscally responsible way.

The first two paragraphs were tagged on and the transition is very bumpy.
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Via Best of Both Worlds.

Just Say No

President Bush is planning to do lots of vetoing in the near future. He has threatened to veto the long-awaited legislation to shore up hurricane protection along the Gulf coast. And he has threatened to veto the Lilly Ledbetter legislation which would extend the time frame for employees to sue a firm on the basis of wage discrimination. And he has also threatened to veto legislation to broaden the State Children's Health Insurance Program so that it would cover the health insurance needs of more children. So it goes.


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Cross-posted on Eschaton

Some YouTube Fun

It's not really the Republican presidential candidates talking about their stance on abortion but it could be.

Meanwhile, in Ohio

The patriarchs of the far right have proposed a bill which would make it compulsory for the "father of the fetus" (should be embryo) to give permission for a woman's abortion. If he doesn't give permission she can't have an abortion. The only cases where a woman is left in complete authority over her own body are when the pregnancy was caused by rape or incest, as documented by the police (or by DNA test in the case of incest) and when the woman's health or life is at risk.

What is the point of this proposed bill? It is obviously an anti-abortion bill and perhaps a fathers' right bill, too. But it doesn't work for many fathers' rights people who actually would like to see the reverse put into a bill, i.e., a requirement that a woman can't give birth without the prospective father's approval. That has to do with child maintenance payments.

I got the link through feministing.com and the discussion there has veered to a debate over the rights of men not to become fathers. This bill is all about the right of men to become fathers even if it means that the woman is forced into motherhood. A different thing altogether. I have written about this dilemma earlier, and in general I think neither men nor women have the "right" to become parents (because such a "right" would ultimately imply forcing someone else to be the other parent), but that both women and men should have the right not to become parents.

What complicates that argument in a way which makes full equality tricky is that pregnancy takes place in the woman's body. If we had fetal incubators I'd be happy to argue that both the woman who gave her egg and the man who gave his sperm should have equal rights to decide on the pregnancy. But as long as the pregnancy takes place in the woman's body it is she who should have the final say on whether to continue it or not. This does mean that a man doesn't have the same rights to decide on the termination or the continuance of a pregnancy as a woman does. Until those fetal incubators step out of the science-fiction novels we need better contraceptives for men and better education for boys so that they understand the inherent risks in every act of intercourse. Girls are taught that fairly well in many families, though not all.

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.