Why The Blogs of the Left Seem To Be So Depressed [Anthony McCarthy]

Because we are.

This commentary by Stephen Crockett at Buzz Flash says it better than I can, even if you don’t read the rest of this, do yourself the favor of reading it.

Barack Obama’s administration is failing because he turns out to be a received elite consensus zombie. He has shown no unconventional courage in any of the major issues that face his administration, the two wars, the horrible economy, health care, the environment, energy, ... you name it, he’s either caved or betrayed the position of his base supporters. He’s screwed his base so often you have to conclude he enjoys doing it. If he had more to show for it than he’s gotten, it might be forgivable that he has betrayed us on occasion, but what he’s gotten is awful*.

The health care bill that he signed is such pathetically weak and delayed relief to the uninsured and the victims of outright theft by the insurance industry that it will not be popular. If, as I’m increasingly worried, the Republicans take the government again, they will destroy even that and suffer very little for it. Those same Republicans who Barack Obama wooed and flattered and courted when he could have enforced party discipline and produced a real bill. The sell outs in the Democratic caucus in the Senate saw Obama’s weakness with the Republicans and they played it on behalf of their backers in the insurance and health care industry. And the results were not only an emboldened Republican machine but a wounded and dispirited Democratic base. The strategy that led to Baucus gutting health care in the Senate was devised by the Obama administration, when it became apparent that Kennedy wasn’t going to be there, they were incredibly stupid to not change it. That is if the predictable result wasn’t the one they wanted.

I’ve given my theory that Obama’s transformation from a community organizer to an organization man happened at Harvard Law. I’m sure that once he became a star there he didn’t want to risk that status by violating the core principles of the elite that raised him up. That’s how they do it, with a sandbag made of velvet. I think it’s that elite that he sees as his real audience, the paying customers who he needs to please. I’m now almost certain that he sees the rest of us as having no choice.

Well, we don’t have a choice for the next two years as far as he goes. We have fixed terms and he has two more years. I’m afraid that this year the Democrats in the House and Senate will suffer, some who deserve to be dumped due to their duplicity, many who don’t nearly as much. And that will do nothing to strengthen Obama. With his record, it will provide him with an excuse for further sell outs. That’s the way he played the veto proof majority in the Senate.

Do we have a choice in 2012? The Republicans will certainly put up someone worse and the choice will be between Obama and whoever that is. Obama and his inner circle are counting on the Democratic base and progressive independents having no choice but to vote for him again. They are depending on the marginally better being the more rational choice. They shouldn’t count on it. They should remember what happened to Jimmy Carter in 1980, if they haven’t already. He didn’t sell out the base of his support nearly as cynically and completely as Barack Obama, he hadn’t shown himself to be as weak a president and the base failed to return him to office in the face of Ronald Reagan winning the election.

A Democratic president doesn’t only serve as the Executive of the government, he is also the head of the Democratic Party. Barack Obama led the Democrats into the greatest majority that any party has held in a long time and he has botched and squandered it into the ground. Largely with no excuse. I do blame his Chief of Staff for a lot of that, Rahm Emanuel has been the lead sell out of this administration and nothing will improve as long as he’s a part of the administration. He has seldom passed up an opportunity to gratuitously flip the bird at the progressives in the Democratic Party. But Obama shows no signs of facing up to that. The rest of his staff seem to be pretty near useless for governing or for politics. That is one thing you couldn’t say about the Bush II thugs, they were good at politics.

But that conventional analysis is, of course wrong. The Voters are the ultimate authority in any legitimate government. It didn’t start with Obama. It was was the horror of the Democratic base and many independents at the Bush II regime, at the prospect of eight more years of a McCain-Palin horror, at the determination to get a better government in, that led to Obama winning. It was us, not him. We are the ones who put him over the line. He didn’t pull us over it. He is the one who owes us and that account isn’t settled up. He owes us.

In 2008 I put all of my credibility into Barack Obama’s victory in the general election, into the victory of the Democrats in the House and Senate. A lot of us did, a lot of us worked as hard on that election as we have on any. The House under Nancy Pelosi has kept faith the best. I can hardly imagine how dispirited and angry she must feel with all of those bills she got passed in the house awaiting action in the Senate, without much visible effort to push them through by Barack Obama. My own representative, Chellie Pingree, has also kept faith as well as a freshman representative could. I will support her with everything I’ve got.

He’s got less than a year to do something I could support him with and I’m not seeing any signs of that happening. Even if I vote for him in 2012, I’m not going to humiliate myself for someone who seems to enjoy shafting us.

* I won’t even begin on the BP oil gusher and the incredibly impotent response by the macho Obama Administration to BP. That would take thousands of words.

Friday critter blogging (by Suzie)

This is Pudge, balls to the couch. I asked his mistress, Mary, why she hadn't gotten him fixed. She replied: Because I would have had to take his master's before I could take Pudge's.

I know other men who won't de-ball their dogs, but I've yet to encounter a woman who feels that spaying a female would diminish the dog or reflect on her own femininity.

(I'm not counting people who don't fix their dogs because of health concerns or because they plan to breed them.)

Want, want, want (by Suzie)

The car belongs to a friend of a friend. My only hesitation would be the harassment. I don't always want to advertise my political beliefs. Do you put your beliefs on your back end?

Copulatory Vocalizations

I never thought I'd write those two little words. But a new study (yeah) has looked at heterosexual women's copulatory vocalizations and concluded that they are sham. Yes, sham! Hetero women scream and egg men on to get it all over and done with. It's manipulative, my sweeties:

More detailed examination of responses during intercourse revealed that, while female orgasms were most commonly experienced during foreplay, copulatory vocalizations were reported to be made most often before and simultaneously with male ejaculation. These data together clearly demonstrate a dissociation of the timing of women experiencing orgasm and making copulatory vocalizations and indicate that there is at least an element of these responses that are under conscious control, providing women with an opportunity to manipulate male behavior to their advantage.

It could be that "manipulate" is a scientific term here, something that even male subjects might stoop to. But then perhaps not, because of that "to their advantage" tail to the sentence. It's impossible for the researchers to imagine that some women might vocalize for reasons of love or for reasons of increasing the pleasure of their male partners. Just to offer other explanations than manipulation. (Or if they suddenly remembered that they left the soup boiling on the stove.)

I think that these results are based on questionnaires that women were asked to fill in later, not during the sex. If there are copulatory vocalizations which are involuntary consequences of the female orgasms or their approach, those vocalizations might not be remembered by the woman at all, what with her having fainted from pure bliss, say.

Weird Humored

Did you know that they actually sell electric nose-hair clippers? Can you get them monogrammed? For Father's Day, I mean.

The picture I stuck here is awe-inspiring. Imagine having to eat your soup through a straw. And what happens when it's windy? Will you get self-inflicted wounds in your face?

I like it. Bravery is always charming

Bad Humored

Is what I am, these days. Too much crap like this happening in the world:

The 130-page Amnesty report, As if Hell Fell on Me, was based on nearly 300 interviews with residents of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) and the surrounding areas.

"Nearly four million people are effectively living under the Taliban in north-west Pakistan without rule of law and effectively abandoned by the Pakistani government," said Claudio Cordone, Amnesty's interim secretary-general.
Map

A teacher quoted in the report, who fled the Swat valley with his family in March 2009, described how the Taliban operated.

"[The Taliban] took over my school and started to teach children about how to fight in Afghanistan. They kicked out the girls from school, told the men to grow their beards, threatened anybody they didn't like."

The teacher said the government failed to protect them.

"What's the point of having this huge army if it can't even protect us against a group of brutal fanatics?"

Indeed. And why can't we get rid of the rotting system the Taliban wishes to impose on its innocent victims? South Africa finally got rid of Apartheid. What's the difference?

I feel for all the Pakistanis who suffer under the Taliban and for the poor who suffer even without the Taliban. But what they do to the girls and boys is almost irreversible. It destroys lives. It warps them, in the case of the boys and it stunts them, in the case of the girls.

If there is a god she won't like that. Not at all.

Demoralized

Liberals and progressives are pretty demoralized, based on my informal and sloppy research. It's like an infected boil and needs to be lanced. But I'm not sure how to achieve that.

In fact, we have material for a horror movie: We had an election which took an astonishing feat of getting so many new people to the polls, enormous grass-root work, enormous expenditure of money by those who don't have that much of it, because the alternative was so frightening. We were tied to the seats of a bus driven by a brainless cowboy straight into the Grand Canyon, and we had to find the brake pedal, had to!

Then the high point of the story: Election victory! Or at least a disaster averted! Time to rest, to relax, to do laundry, right? Except that the movie didn't end. The music turned slower, more French and suddenly you weren't quite certain what was being said. Who was the audience now? Why didn't you count as the audience?

And the plot was changed mid-movie. Suddenly the election was a victory for semi-wingnuttery! It was the semi-wingnuts who pounded the pavement and knocked on the doors and spent money on the Democrats' election campaigns.

And we were told to hold hands across the political aisle, while those on the other side keep smashing our outstretched fingers with their made-in-Murka (not) baseball bats, cheerfully continuing Liberal bashing on every television channel. I'm not sure about this administration but that kind of hand-holding used to be called violence or at least dysfunctional behavior.

Then the oil pipe burst and will not stop spewing oil and we are all helpless, waiting to find out what British Petroleum will do to save the world it apparently owns. It sounds almost a metaphor for that demoralized feeling, causing instant mental paralysis and a desire to live under the bed. And even when we are angry we are paralyzed, at most managing a few petty spats with others who agree with us.

The movie I'm sketching out is still less frightening than the alternative (about a wingnut administration). But getting the movie changed cost us a tremendous amount. Yet we appear not to count among the desired market segments for this movie. So we feel blue and paralyzed.

The Florida Shootings

Trigger Warning.

A man in Florida went on a killing spree, targeting only women:

A gunman shot and killed his wife outside a South Florida restaurant where she worked, then targeted women inside and killed three others before committing suicide, police said yesterday.

Three women were hospitalized in critical condition, Hialeah police Detective Eddie Rodriguez said. "He went straight for the women,'' Rodriguez said.

And:

Regalado seemed to have targeted his victims. All were women. Only one was not an employee of the popular restaurant, 495 E. 49th St., on one of the busiest corners in Hialeah.

He deliberately walked in the kitchen, started shooting quickly, at close range, police said.

``He looked at me, went right by me but didn't shoot me,'' an unidentified male employee said.

The murdered women were Liazan Molina, 24, the estranged wife of the killer, Maysel Figueroa, 32, Lavina M. Fonseca, 47 and Zaida Castillo, 56. Those in critical condition are Yasmin Dominguez, 38, Ivet Coronado Fernandez and Mayra de la Caridad Lopez, 55.

It is to the credit of these news sources that they point out the gender-specific victim selection. But none of them moves to the obvious next point: Why did this murderer choose to kill women? What is the motive behind that?

When it comes to his possible motives, we get this:

Regalado, whose estranged wife, Liazan Molina, worked at the restaurant, had apparently been trying to reconcile the relationship in the days leading up to the Sunday massacre.

Molina, 24, had moved out of the couple's home. Police said when Regalado's attempts to get her back failed, he lost it.

And this:

The couple's relationship began in Havana when she was 18 and he was in his early 30s. Regalado told neighbors he had paid to bring Molina to America. Records show she received a Social Security card in 2007, the same year they married.

They had lived together for about four months in a small home in the 100 block of Northwest 48th Court off Flagler Street, neighbors said.

Regalado, who had been unemployed for several months, raised pigeons. The couple had two dogs.

But something happened to sever their relation. Facebook postings offer the best clue.

Regalado made numerous postings in an apparent attempt to win her back. She never responded.

Several weeks ago, she moved in with Dominguez, her cousin, neighbors said.

Neighbors said they had witnessed Regalado's deterioration since Molina moved out. He stopped eating, going from 240 pounds to 205.

``He told me he was going to move out of the apartment, that he was very sad,'' said neighbor Damaris Santana.

``He said he couldn't stand to be in the house alone.''

But Regalado would not reveal to his neighbors why the couple broke up.

``He told us it was over typical marital problems,'' Santana said.

So he just lost it? Could happen to anyone, I guess, when a relationship goes sour, especially as he had tried to get her back and had lost weight and felt sad and everything, right?

But he didn't just kill his estranged wife. He killed women as a category. Surely there's more to be said about that? What made him decide to act as a public executioner of women?

I don't know. Perhaps I'm being unfair to the media here, but it seems really obvious that one doesn't just go "poor guy, he lost weight and just lost it so obviously he went out and killed four women, that's what one does when a relationship goes sour." Even if you admit that he went nuts why didn't he go nuts in a gender-neutral fashion?

Sounds like he was a misogynist.

Today's Practice Post

1. Vampires suck. And no, I didn't invent that. I'd invent something better than that. Vampires swallow, too, and that will be the connection in your head from now to eternity.

2. I'm ready to hand this world over to the cockroaches. But they don't have arms. In either senses of the term.

3. Important question of the day: Who needs nature? Compare Shanghai ten years ago (above) to Shanghai now (below). Then sniff at those capitalistic skies.

Apply A Medical Approach To That Gushing Wound of Oil

Probably not worth even pointing out. But if our seas were a patient lying there while rapidly bleeding to death you would know the steps to take. First, stop the bleeding. Second, stabilize the patient and take care of all the harm that has already been done. Third, the major job of a very slow recovery.

Fourth, and that's the important bit, find out what caused the problem and make sure it will not happen again. That means looking into the power structures, the regulations, the incentive structures and so on. It also means reminding the corporations that they don't own this earth just because they think so. It means that people must wake up to their responsibilities as citizens.

Because the seas are not quite like a human patient bleeding to death and because we are not the physicians we should start on all those numbered steps at the same time. We should also ask whether BP has the best surgeons for this particular case and we should also ask, in a loud voice, why a corporation appears to be treated as if it is the most powerful entity in the area, and if it indeed is that, how did we let it happen.

Economics! Makes You Go Nuts!

When Atrios linked to this piece about studying economics making people more Republican I had to run out and find an old and very bad poem of mine. To see its relevance, here's a snippet from James Kwak:

Patrick McGeehan at the New York Times recently wrote about a New York Fed study finding that studying economics makes you a Republican. The headline conclusion is that the more economics classes you take, the more likely you are to be a Republican. Majoring in economics or business is also more likely to make you a Republican. (See Table 2 in the original paper.) The study is based on thousands of observations of undergraduates at four large universities over three decades, so it is focused on undergraduate-level economics.

My own impression is slightly different: People already tending toward Republicanism take more economics courses, because they hope to hear what they hope to hear.

But I'm sure both explanations can work at the same time. The reason why undergraduate economics might cause Republicanism is that the study starts with those simple models where the markets work beautifully. It's only later that you learn why reality isn't like that. Another reason might be more Republican professors in economics than in many other fields, though that's pure guessing from my part.

And here's the pome I wrote on Economics 101. It is deliciously bad:

Economics is a poisoned arrow
that stands out from my shoulders,
lodged there since the Introduction To.

It slowly leaks its palest poison
into my brain
until I grow selfish, sure and sane
until my life is rational and narrow
until my poetry no longer smolders
until I forget I once knew who
first replaced my rites with reason.

I took the simplest graphs sketched
on the board for the living flesh
and saw it wretched.

But this, of course, was the price fetched
by those who would see young minds stretched.


It has a point, of course! The arrow's point.

The most economics I ever knew was after the first semester. I remember going home for Christmas and lecturing everyone on every single economic matter, both micro and macro, until my sister yelled at me to shut up.

In hindsight it was probably a bit like what evo psychos feel. Here's this incredibly simple no-work-needed understanding of everything!

The rest of all those years of study was to make me normal again and to make everything about economics much, much more complicated. Because the world indeed IS complicated.

But the introductory courses really should try to vaccinate students against that poisoning.

Sex And The City 2

I haven't seen it. Confession time: I have never seen a single episode of the series or the previous movie, either.

But this review made me want to see it:

What have you heard about Sex and the City 2? That it's bad? Let me tell you: this may be the most radical, challenging film ever made.

It is also deeply conservative. That combination has the capacity to blow minds. People will stagger out of cinemas in Tennessee and Arkansas, bug-eyed and dribbling. This could also happen in places where they weren't bug-eyed and dribbling on the way in.

The first oddness of the film comes from the fact that the creators of the TV series were evidently kidnapped, bound and hidden in a cupboard while the entire project was taken over by the hardline, religious right.

Do you agree? And what skilled and mean writing! Somehow I don't think you'd get away with that in the American press.

A Good Idea

That would be contraception as a basic health benefit in the new system:

Federal officials drafting guidelines to implement health care reform should include contraception among the basic set of preventive services for women that private insurance plans must cover without cost sharing, concludes a new Guttmacher Institute analysis.

The so-called Mikulski amendment in the health care reform law enacted in March stipulates that preventive care and screenings for women are to be covered free of any cost sharing. However, while lawmakers who sponsored the amendment made clear their intent that contraceptive services be covered, the legislation leaves it up to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) to develop new evidence-based guidelines that would define which services to include. It is not yet clear whether DHHS will draft the guidelines internally or commission an outside panel to do so.

Despite it being a good idea, for reasons which have to do with the costs and problems avoided if contraception indeed were a basic benefit, we are not going to get it. That's my prediction, and the reasons are twofold:

First, it would be an expensive program in terms of the immediate spending. That's what is visible to people, not the later consequences of unwanted pregnancies and so on.

Second, the proposal feeds straight into the Womb Wars: Who owns them and what they are for.

Genealogy and Female Ancestors

Digging up your family roots. Trying to find the baron which old family stories tell about. That kind of stuff.

I've been doing some looking up for a friend, and what strikes me most about the whole adventure is how it truly is HIS story. Women disappear into the mists of time.

The obvious reason for that is the shifting last name, the disappearing last name, the pointlessness of giving the last name of a woman who no longer has it, being now married. The baptismal records state the birth of Maria Elizabetha, parents Johan Wilbert Cachelhooper and wife. If you are really lucky, they state the birth of Maria Elizabetha, parents Johan Wilbert Cachelhooper, and wife Anna Elizabetha!

Now, keeping your last name in marriage may not be justified so that future genealogists wouldn't have such a hard time, especially if you realize that finding the maiden name of Anna Elizabetha just tells you what her dad was called. But that disappearing last name is not a mere fluke. It's a sign of the way people viewed family as the family of men. That's why the women had to lose their last name and that's why all those genealogy sites give us family trees which start from Johan Wilbert Cachelhooper.

The descendants of Johan Wilbert Cachelhooper! Do you descend from him?

That Johan Wilbert Cachelhooper didn't make children all on his own gets forgotten. In fact, we could as well call the whole thing the family tree of Anna Elizabetha. Do you descend from her?

But we don't call it that, even if Anna Elizabetha's maiden name happens to be known.

All this is not just because of women taking their husbands' names. There is a real feeling on those genealogy sites that everyone is looking for their eight times removed grandfathers! It doesn't occur to anyone that if his wife cuckolded him he may not be your 8Xgrandfather, after all.

Then I got to the really fun stuff: Pioneers! Finding the arrival times in America of various European-born ancestors. Oddly enough, those pioneers were all men, and no, they mostly did not marry Indian women! Only men arrived on ship Darling Nancy in 1736! Only men entered the untouched wilderness (except for the Indians) to start farming and building houses!

Even here I found a sort-of reason: Most ship lists only recorded men over sixteen years of age. But how odd that the invisible women stay invisible, even today! Because they really were pioneers, too, and arrived on those same ships. They are even ancestors who could have their own family trees.

The reason I'm writing about this is not because of a particular story of particular immigrants to America (all invented here, by the way), but because it is such an excellent metaphor for what happens to women in history even more generally. Women disappear. It's both because at some point those who write down history decide on rules which make women less visible and also because women did not act in ways which history would notice. Having fifteen children without medical attention and running a farm without any labor-saving conveniences in the backwoods (with bears and wolves at the door) of the eighteenth century America did not give you a mention in history books. It still will not give you a mention anywhere.

But if you lead those women into those backwoods you get to be famous! You also get to decide on rules which mean that women will remain invisible. And most of that goes under our radar. I see some of it happening even today.

----
This post ties in with the old question I remember reading in a feminist novel:

How many generations back can you go in your female line of ancestries? Most people can't make it past three generations at most, even if they can do better than that in the male line.

The Neo-Hooverism

It's not about all of us starting to vacuum again like mad (that joke may be lost on American readers). It's about the idea that this is the time to tighten up the belts a notch or two, to cut back government spending on the developmentally handicapped or on the elderly or the poor. To cut the fat off the government body, so that we only get the skeleton left over.

Digby wrote about that over the weekend, and about the way this is the time for Disaster Capitalism to strike. Even though the problems we have are caused by a just slightly milder version of the same Disaster Capitalism: that of allowing the boyz-n-galz to play ball in unregulated markets all over the world. For some people the obvious answer is more of the same!

Or what took place in Chile when the Shock Doctrine was first used. You should read Naomi Klein's books if you have not read it yet. She may exaggerate but the events she described did take place, most recently in New Orleans where the hurricane Katrina was used to a) get rid of most of the poor people and b) turn the school system into a right-wingish dream.

I'm not a fan of needless suffering. One needs to be that to support the silly ideas so many economists have these days.

But neither am I a fan of some sort of manna-from-heaven world. Everything has its price and people do need to work for their living. Systems which don't work well must be fixed, regulation must work properly and bad incentives must be weeded out.

I don't see that happening. Even in the U.S. our ability to get proper regulation of the financial markets seems limited, and the reason is that those who were in power are still in power, pretty much. The same is true in Europe, I suspect.

That means the cost will be taken out of the hides of those who never were in power in the first place. So sad. And they still won't hire me to fix it all.

Carla Bley

Can't Get My Motor To Start

The You Tube says this is a Nick Mason song but Carla Bley wrote the song, obviously did large parts of the arrangement, her big band of the time had most of the musicians in it and she co-produced the album.

I heard a live performance in Boston at a Jazz Festival during the same period and this recording can only give hint at the wonderful anarchy of that event. [Anthony McCarthy]

Heartbreakingly Beautiful

Carla Bley

Utviklingssang

Carla Bley piano
Steve Swallow bass

We're having storms here and my power keeps going off. [Anthony McCarthy]

The Irrationalities and Contradictions of the Mythic Construct, Individualism [Anthony McCarthy]

Claude Fischer, in today’s paper, does a little looking around that very odd self-attribution common in American life, rugged individualism. It’s long been my experience that the strongest and most aggressive claimants to individualism, are, inevitably, the most conformist of all. In the past, here, we’ve listed jocks, bikers, cowboys, .... macho guys in general, as about the most violently conforming identifiable personas there are. Yet all of these are commonly identified as being “rugged individualists”. Which says more about the phoniness of identities than it does about any people adopting those set models. In his article Fisher says:

American individualism is far more complex than our national myths, or the soap-box rhetoric of right and left, would have it. It is not individualism in the libertarian sense, the idea that the individual comes before any group and that personal freedom comes before any allegiance to authority. Research suggests that Americans do adhere to a particular strain of liberty - one that emerged in the New World - in which freedom to choose your allegiance is tempered by the expectation that you won't stray from the values of the group you choose. In a political climate where "liberty" is frequently wielded as a rhetorical weapon but rarely discussed in a more serious way, grasping the limits of our notion of liberty might guide us to building America's future on a different philosophical foundation.

Which is about the first time I’ve ever seen any kind of official explanation of that obvious phenomenon. You’re allegedly free to choose what rigid role model you adopt but once inside of that role, you’re expected to meet expectations. Though I doubt anyone chooses to be a biker or Rexall ranger without living up to other peoples coercive expectations.

As a New Englander, hearing people from conservative states and areas identifying themselves as rugged individualists has always seemed absurd, but no more absurd than my own state and region also saying the same thing people here. I don’t think that people in Maine are notably less conformist than those in Kentucky, the last state I remember being identified with “rugged individualism” on the radio. I'm certain New Hampshire isn't. There isn’t a state or region that doesn’t claim itself to be the home of “rugged individualism”. It’s an idea that people seem to like to please themselves with. Never mentioned is that the idea of collective individualism, as seen above, being a non sequitur if ever there was one. That the “individuals” so mentioned all seem to conform to a type doesn’t register either.

I don’t think that Americans really tend to think for themselves and act out of principle divorced from social expectation much more than most other people do. The pose of doing so, I think, masks a deeper conformity. For what it’s worth:

But in modern America, when you look at real issues where individual rights conflict with group interests, Americans don't appear to see things this way at all. Over the last few decades, scholars around the world have collaborated to mount surveys of representative samples of people from different countries. The International Social Survey Programme, or ISSP, and the World Value Surveys, or WVS, are probably the longest-running, most reliable such projects. Starting with just a handful of countries, both now pose the same questions to respondents from dozens of nations.

Their findings suggest that in several major areas, Americans are clearly less individualistic than western Europeans. One topic pits individual conscience against the demands of the state. In 2006, the ISSP asked the question "In general, would you say that people should obey the law without exception, or are there exceptional occasions on which people should follow their consciences even if it means breaking the law?" At 45 percent, Americans were the least likely out of nine nationalities to say that people should at least on occasion follow their consciences - far fewer than, for example, the Swedes (70 percent) and the French (78 percent). Similarly, in 2003, Americans turned out to be the most likely to embrace the statement "People should support their country even if the country is in the wrong."

I’ll leave aside any skepticism I’ve got about the whole idea of measuring something like that to go on.

Fisher also points out:

This quality in the American character struck observers from overseas, including Alexis de Tocqueville, who in his 1830s book, "Democracy in America," famously tied the relatively new word "individualism" to what seemed so refreshingly new about the Americans. Popular culture today reinforces this image by making heroes of men (it's almost always men) who put principle above everything else, even if - perhaps especially if - that makes them loners.

He began by mentioning Clint Eastwood, or rather, the various roles Eastwood has played. He’s the rugged individual following only the imperatives of his will, living his life for his own reasons and to his own ends. Then he mentions the public persona of Frank Sinatra But those roles as individualism is a bunch of hooey, it’s all about the set expectations of machismo in the end.

While, sometimes, Eastwood’s characters have a touch of self-sacrifice to them, the good of other people was seldom presented in a way that would escape cynical self-interest. The code that he was presented as following was hardly one of daily self sacrifice for people unconnected with him. Which wouldn’t have made a tidy commercial movie. There was generally, something grudging about any effort made on behalf of other people. And it then had to be de-sissified by a component of violence. Frank Sinatra’s known association with organized crime, not known as a bunch of free spirits, would make him an even odder role model of “rugged individualism”. You go individualist on those guys in an important way, you were likely to find it not too healthy for you.

I’ve run into the imperative to conform to expectations a lot, writing for this blog and commenting at other blogs. People are always complaining that you hold ideas that you shouldn’t based on your identity or, often, the pigeon hole they’ve put you in. Liberals aren’t supposed to vary from the dogma of free speech absolutism, leftists aren’t supposed to believe in the supernatural, neither are those who accept science, etc. etc. etc.

I hope I’ve never adopted an idea or a behavior on any other basis than that it makes sense, that the evidence available and reason leads in that direction. I hope I haven’t. That other people might have the same idea, even people I disagree with about other things, really can’t overrule evidence and reason. Individuals exist in the universe, they don’t escape its requirements and the limits imposed by it.

The important consideration in adopting an idea or a course of action isn’t if it is conformist or not, it’s why you’re doing it and to what end. Our lives are generally dictated by necessities, not elective choices. It isn’t conformist to eat an adequate diet to maintain life. Eating an eccentric diet that causes malnutrition isn’t rugged individualism, it’s irrational. Dressing in ways that will expose you to the cold and wet could kill you even faster – as any worried relative to fashion conforming teenagers will know.

An even more exigent restriction on individual will than that is the demand of morality that my rights don’t override the rights of other people and living beings to their lives and their rights. Rights and the people who hold them aren’t single entities, they exist in tension with others. Ignoring that doesn’t make you more individual, it makes you more of a selfish jerk.

The necessities of living in a society forces a level of conformity. Dirty Harry was a rogue cop, one who managed to keep his job through a couple of sequels, as I recall. He was in the business of enforcing conformity to the law, while breaking it as he saw fit. In at least one of his other movies he enforced frontier law even as he saw it was unjust. Though if I try to parse out all of the conflicting possible analyses of his movies, more so than the writers and directors seemed to, it would take books, not a blog post.

Igor Stravinsky once said that the more restrictive he made the parameters from which he chose to make a composition the freer he was to write the piece. Arnold Schoenberg famously came up with his method which seemed terribly restrictive to many. That both of them wrote some of the most extraordinary music produced since Beethoven while their detractors didn’t, would seem to indicate that they might have been on to something.

The obsession with individualism is understandable, given the consequences of nervous conformity and the irrational and often immoral strictures placed on us by society and government. But, as becomes clear when you think about it, what we call individualism is sometimes an even worse form of conformity. Maybe the entire concept is flawed and we should develop new ways to think about these issues. One that doesn’t present a false dichotomy of the kind that philosophy and formal study create for their convenience which only becomes increasingly removed from reality as they pursue it. If you’ve got to set up a bifurcated system of looking at it, generosity verses selfishness or irrationality verses rationality would be far more useful than individualist verses conformist. Which means little to nothing, when you look at it closely.

I Recommend Suzie's Friday Posts [Anthony McCarthy]

I'll post something later today. Until then, Suzie's posts on Friday are terrific.

Old Photo Posting

Left-click on the pics to make them bigger.







Summer type things. Later I will post the swimming pictures if I find them. Because of the costumes!

Buffy Sainte-Marie

God is Alive Magic is Afoot 1967

Buffy Sainte-Marie Music
Leonard Cohen Words

Buffy Sainte-Marie was an innovator in the use of electronics in her music, one of the most creative and original. I seem to remember the lyrics are from Cohen's novel Beautiful Losers.

Sex & power in Guyville (by Suzie)

Last week, Anthony mentioned the recent rerelease of "Exile on Main St.," and I got thinking of my love for the Rolling Stones. In junior high, I remember sitting at the little table in our trailer, playing "Angie" over and over so that I could copy down the lyrics. I wrote (really bad) poetry then, and I was on a mission to prove that rock 'n roll lyrics could be poetry, too.

I've written before about my trip from Little Rock to New Orleans to hear the Stones. What I didn't mention was my crush on an older copy editor who finally agreed to have sex with me if I stopped acting so obsequious. Cat hair covered his place, and I'm allergic to cats. The first time, I was delirious with lust and allergens. I told him I'd do anything to have him again. (All he wanted was for me to calm down.)

I was in my early 20s, and sex was intoxicating. Later, I felt the power that I could have over (some) men with my sexuality. I knew that power was evanescent, but at times, I still thought of myself as bad Little Suzie, the Queen of the Underground (from the Stones song above, covered by the Cowboy Junkies. I love Margo Timmins' voice.), except that Little Suzie doesn't come off so well in the song; I didn't do drugs; and I always associated it with Queen of the Underworld, even though I know the meanings for underground. Oh, well, it's better than guys singing "Susie Q" or "Wake up, Little Susie" to me.

On my 31st birthday, in Athens, the man I lived with had my present in his pocket. I thought it might be a ring, but no, it was tickets to the Stones. That decade I decided that, as a feminist, I could not love some Stones songs while ignoring ones like "Under My Thumb" or "Some Girls."

In 1993, Liz Phair came out with "Exile in Guyville," her response to the Stones' "Exile on Main St." as well as the male-dominated indie crowd in Chicago. She wrote the songs when she was 21-23, according to IMDB. I was older. I wasn't in that place anymore. But I loved her attitude. The album became a classic for me in a way that the Stones could never be. A sample from her "Help me, Mary":

I lock my door at night
I keep my mouth shut tight
I practice all my moves
I memorize their stupid rules

I make myself their friend
I'll show them just how far I can bend
As they egg me on and keep me mad
They play me like a pit bull in a basement, and for that...

I'm asking you, Mary, please
Temper my hatred with peace
Weave my disgust into fame
And watch how fast they run to the flame

ATO reissued "Guyville" in 2008, along with a video that interviews men from the Chicago music scene -- Guyville in the flesh. It reminds me of Phair's "Never Said," whose silly video I've included below.

Phair has done stuff that I dislike, but I agree with S.M. Berg, who wrote a great piece on her in 2005. It concludes:

I believe that Phair, like many women, cut the best deal with patriarchy a talented, attractive woman can make, and she shouldn't be cast off as a sexed-up sellout any more than other women forced to navigate the choppy, pornified currents of our time.

In an interview in Women's Health, Phair talked of being a feminist.

I'm known for being annoyingly gender-focused. It's always been my platform. I can't quite get over it. In my teens and even younger I felt like a sexual object. That was upsetting. In my 20s I said, "I'm going to take control of this. I'm going to define my own sexuality and push it on everyone else." That lasted until I became more mature and stopped needing to do that. I've done plenty of stuff that people wouldn't call feminist. I've used my sexuality to get what I wanted. But there's no reason to incriminate or attack. Women's bodies are used to sell anything and everything because it works, it grabs people's attention, and advertisers aren't going to stop using something that works. I just try to think about it, to realize when it's happening around me and when I'm involved in it myself.

The rescue of Mi Hija (by Suzie)

The first photo is from August 2008, when Bonnie Blossom rescued the puppy. By December, Mi Hija had grown into quite the lap dog. On her blog, Bonnie tells how she lost her dog Punkie but gained another: She was driving across the state when she stopped at a convenience store. She saw a dead dog in the road and a group of men standing around a pickup.

"The clerk explained that the guys were selling fighting dogs, and the one in the road was the mother that had jumped out of the truck the day before and gotten hit. On the way back to my car, I looked in the truck." She saw Mi Hija. "Shivering, covered in chicken shit and God knows what else, the little one obviously wasn't one of the fighters--she was a bait dog. You know, the ones they 'use' to teach the fighters how to tear something up."

Bonnie told the men that she wouldn't call the police if they gave her the puppy, and they did. (And she called Animal Services after she had driven away.)

"I picked her up--chicken shit and all--and the first thing she did was snuggle into my chest and start sucking on the pendant with Punkie's ashes in it. I looked up at the sky, whispered, "you win," and packed her off. How could I leave her there?"

Thursday Echidne News

I must remember to write about beauty and the glass-clear pure joy life sometimes pours on us, even if it is as temporary as summer rain. My tai chi class yesterday morning was like that. It was held out in the open, in a park full of ancient beech trees reaching to heavens, standing there like sentinels from some mysterious realm, in a wide ring, as if inviting us to dance with them. To dance with them the dance of energy which we share with all living creatures.

The sun filtered through their branches, the city noises lost themselves in their canopies and the wind passing through their leaves felt like a gentle touch on my skin.

So we danced, the trees and the humans, and for one hour the world was perfect.

Even The Queen. And Other Stories.

Moonbootica linked to this informative and fun video about female writers of science fiction and fantasy:





It doesn't cover all the famous women of those genres but it's a start for those of you who want to escape without doing Sex And The City II (or the latest Kill All The Bad Guys And Rule The World movie).

The video mentions Connie Willis and her short story "Even The Queen" which has been seen as an anti-feminist riff or a feminist riff or both. The story takes place in a world where women don't menstruate because of scientific advances, except those women who want to make a radical statement about the society which forces male patterns of existence on them.

I have read the story a few times. It would be interesting to learn what others think about it. My very first reaction was a silly one: I thought the story was not science fiction in the sense that women don't have to menstruate today if they don't want to. And neither did they have to in the 1980s.

My second reaction was dislike. Not because Willis makes fun of various groups of feminists (a lot of that is very funny) but because she makes no shots at the reasons why feminism exist in the first place. It's like a story about the labor movement without any capitalists where one laughs at the silly extremes the workers go to. If only they had had robots for work like we do!

I'm not sure what the interpretations of "Even The Queens" are though I know they exist. Perhaps some reviewers find the very idea of a short story on menstruation inappropriate, something that should not exist in the lofty annals of science fiction which is supposed to be all about spaceships and AI? Or the fact that the characters in the story are almost all uppity professional women?

By they way, some good news on the latest of those great books or great authors lists: The New York Times list of younger authors to watch is fairly evenly split by gender.

Two Useful Questions

Always ask yourself when you read some new research results or social commentary is this:

How do they know?

I've found it's a short-cut straight through most of the crap that is out there.

The second useful question for all feminists is this:

What happens if I switch the genders in this story?

It's astonishing how often that simple exercise shows you what caused that odd nagging feeling when reading or hearing or seeing something. Because bias can be quite subtle.

The third useful question might be:

Why am I giving away all my useful knowledge?

A Baby In The Box

While rehanging the windows this weekend (they've got new ropes now!) I thought about chores around the house and how much easier it would have been to make a phone call and have new windows delivered! When you people start paying me my proper worth (nope, it's not zero bucks) I will!

A natural step from that was to think about the way human beings acquire children. Set aside for a while all the good emotional stuff about children, all the urges and desires and such. Think of babies as durable consumption goods!

Like refrigerators or washing machines. Something you purchase in one largish lump but which offers you services for a long time. Children offer the enjoyment of their company, the promise of immortality through one's offspring and in some cultures old age security.

But the way children are acquired is very different for men and women in the traditional thinking: It's as if men can buy a baby in a box but women need to make it from scratch. This might be very expensive for men, depending on the culture and other circumstances (such as social class). Those expenses can be paid with money, however. Women, instead, are expected to knit the children out of their bodies and blood, not only in the obvious sense but in the sense of a twenty year commitment of permanent supervision, responsibility and caring. And note that the purchase price of the baby in the box is not set openly. It can be as little as he gets away with or as much as she manages to squeeze out of him.

No wonder if a person having these traditional views regards uppity career women with great anger and contempt. Who's knitting the children,hmh? And no wonder that many experts, though no longer willing to say aloud that women should be making the children by hand, still argue that having two parents working is like both of them trying to buy the baby in the box. Who's making it? Some inferior stranger, probably.

Guys can buy a baby in a box, however, though that is usually not said aloud. If the baby turns out not so great, it's not his fault. Even if he reneged on the price.

The story isn't this simple, of course. People like making babies from scratch ( the pun intended). But it might be one way to make the traditional societal assumptions clearer, to show how the Catch-22 works for women: If you don't knit all of your child yourself you are going to produce a lower-quality child. But if you do knit your child full time, you will be economically trapped if anything goes wrong.

Today's Teh Funny

From the Guardian (prepare for this):

Seemingly aware of its rock-bottom public image, BP this week hired Anne Womack-Kolton, once press secretary to the former vice-president Dick Cheney, to bolster its public relations effort in the US. A CBS poll found that 70% of Americans disapprove of the way BP has handled the oil spill.

So utterly hilarious. Tragic, too, naturally, but to hire the PR person of the politician whose likability ratings always hovered just below those of rabid alligator is funny. Really.

It's also disappointing that the industry still believes in the effect of babble-speak over facts. Just put some makeup on the corpse sort of thing.

Today's Not-So-Deep Thoughts

Newspaper articles about teenagers are always full of worry, full of the "what's the world coming to" feeling. I remember reading about the awful next generation from the old Roman era and I once read a piece from the early 1950s which described teens as unhappy and wild because their stay-at-home moms went to too many charity meetings.

So you have to take the gloom-and-doom pieces with a big pinch of salt without of course discounting the possibility that problems are real.

Now, the oil, that IS a real problem. But instead of writing about it I stick my head under the covers. There's nothing I can do at this very moment to stop the oil from gushing (it's Poseidon's job but you can understand why he is too pissed off, having to clean his beard from oil all the time).

All I can do is to keep on mumbling in this little corner of the blogosphere.

Marriage...

It's one of those topics that I have scribbled in the list on my fridge door. You know, the red-flag-in-front-of-a-bull topics of feminism and the topics which lead to arguments going around in a never-ending circle. Topics which I don't exactly avoid but which I only tackle after a good night's sleep, some extra fruit and veggies and lots of rehearsing in front of the mirror.

Heterosexual marriage belongs on that list because it provokes that whole wide range of extremely firmly held views: "Marriage is patriarchy's name for prisons for women." "Marriage is life-long prostitution." "Egalitarian marriage is possible." "Marriage can't be rehabilitated." "My marriage is feminist!" And so on and on and on.

There are good reasons for the debate. Most of them hide behind the traditional facts and traditional myths associated with that bridal veil:

The utter imbalance of the conventional marriage bargain (he's an employer, she an employee) , the Victorian idea of marriage as the way in which otherwise useless women civilize men and stop them from becoming marauding Visigoths, the fact that marriage for a long time was the easiest way for a woman to eat enough and have a roof over her head, whatever it otherwise implied, and of course the old laws of coverture which made a married woman nonexistent in law except when the law wanted to hang her or put her in prison.

The above paragraph isn't even safely inside the covers of history books. Women in many countries still have to rely on marriage for mere survival and laws sometimes fail to give wives and husbands the same rights. For example, when only men have the right to take several spouses, women's rights are limited to one husband or some fraction of one husband.

None of this implies that marriage was a strawberry patch for all men, either. But ultimately the question for young men of the past was whether they could afford a wife and the children that might mean, whereas young women had to decide whether they could afford NOT to get married.

No wonder that feminists debate the whole societal institution of marriage. You have all this to contend with and then the white veil ads run! The bridal showers must be arranged! The tiara must be purchased, bridesmaids must be lined up and dressed (in awful colors) to be the ladies of the court for the Princess Of The Day!

Then the big day arrives and costs the bridal couple more than a house (or costs the bride's father a house if you go the whole patriarchal hog) and it's lovelovelove and the wedding day is the one day in your life when nobody calls you selfish for wanting all the limelight and you will live happily forever after and a day. While bearing his ring and his last name, natch.

But it is love, indeed. It is. That's the hard combination.

If our various and contradictory societal concepts of marriage were all inside the head of only one person we'd all agree on that person's severe mental imbalance and would promptly have him or her treated. But because the mess is general, almost universal, we regard it as normal. An alien from outer space would certainly have difficulty understanding the princess outfit on adult women, the gigantic wedding party and then the far-too-frequent divorce not that much later.

But that alien might also notice that perhaps we live in the twilight of the traditional marriage, in a time when the old conventions have only recently started looking somewhat odd, given that the truly patriarchal marriage arrangement is fading away. It was, after all, that unbalanced arrangement which made the wedding day what it still resembles today: The last hooray of the woman who on that day stopped existing as a separate individual.

What will the future marriage look like if it exists? I suspect that it will exist, in some form, because human beings want to make longer term bonds with each other. But perhaps it won't be as discriminatory towards gays and lesbians or as oppressive to women (and yes, even to men) as the traditional marriage could be. Perhaps we will differentiate parenting contracts from partnering contracts one day and perhaps the latter will be regarded as renegotiable and not necessarily related to sexuality at all.

And then perhaps pigs will learn to fly, too.

When Gossip Is Not Called Gossip

Digby writes about the media reaction (yes, there actually IS a reaction) to the news that Al and Tipper Gore are separating:

Matthews: Lois [Romano, Washington Post] did this surprise you? Was this something out of nowhere?

Romano: It totally surprised me because they bought a nine million dollar house just last month for a winter vacation home. It shocked even their closest friends ...

Matthews: Where did they buy the house?

Romano: California Montecito. It's a five bedroom ocean front house. So ...

Matthews: wow. Well they're loaded right now, they're doing very well.

Romano: And they celebrated their 40th anniversary two weeks ago so no one knows where this came from.

This is gossiping, of course. But it's not called that when powerful people on television do it.

Added later: Hecate (who blogs here) just noticed something really priceless in that gossip:

Romano: You know one thing Chris to think about is that there have been two distinct phases in Al Gore's life. The first 30 years with Tipper they had a common goal, it might not have been her goal, but it was a common goal nonetheless and it was fight for the presidency.

Wonderfully funny! And really the definition of a marriage in a polite patriarchy.

'Consummating unions' (by Suzie)

The NYT had a good and necessary story yesterday about child brides in Afghanistan. The story says two girls complained that their elderly husbands "beat them when they tried to resist consummating the unions." Why didn't the writers (or their editors) use the word "rape"? Even "sex" would be better than the ponderous "consummating the unions."

The story talks a lot about beatings and child marriage, but readers are left to assume that men also raped these teens.

In the U.S., journalists hesitate to say someone raped someone, unless a court has convicted the rapist of rape. Journalists are trying to be fair to the accused, but mainly, their bosses don't want to get sued if the guy is found not guilty. It's unlikely, however, that Afghan villagers are going to sue the Times.

Did the reporters not use "rape" because the girls didn't use that term? Did they not use "rape" because the husbands and other villagers would not consider it rape? I don't know, but here's my theory: Lots of people are still uncomfortable using the term "rape" to describe forced sex within marriage and other relationships or when the coercion is implicit but does not fit their idea of what rape looks like.

Honoring The War Dead

Atrios linked to this column by E.J. Dionne:

Why is it that every Memorial Day, we note that a holiday set aside for honoring our war dead has become instead an occasion for beach-going, barbecues and baseball?

The problem arises because war-fighting has become less a common endeavor than a specialty engaged in by a relatively small subset of our population. True, some people slipped out of their obligations in the past, and military service was largely, though never exclusively, the preserve of men. The steady growth of opportunities for women in the armed forces is a positive development. I say this proudly as someone whose sister is a veteran of the Navy Judge Advocate General's Corps, as is her husband.

Can we ever return to a time when we pay proper homage to the service of our warriors, living and dead?

Was there ever such a time? A time when proper homage was paid to the service of our warriors, living and dead? And what was that homage? What should it consist of? The danger is that it will glorify war instead of glorifying the warriors.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall (depicted above) is a beautiful way of remembering those who died in that war. So is the Tomb of The Unknown Soldier. But most public statues paying homage to warriors depict the leaders, the powers of the war, or give us that stereotyped image of the valiant soldier defending the woman cowering behind him with several children hanging on to her hems and a few in her arms. If we use the latter frame for honoring the war dead we are also demanding a certain interpretation of wars: They are there to protect women and children.

Which isn't the case, in terms of the motivations of most wars (which are about access to resources and power) or in terms of whom to blame for wars.

Yet of course warriors have traditionally protected their own women and children, though not the ones belonging to the enemy. They have also protected other men, including older men. But the story is always crystallized as the protection of women and children.

Perhaps wars like the war in Congo remind us that the role of women in wars is often horrible: To serve as the tools of war and its collateral victims. We don't have a public holiday for the victims of wars, I notice.

All that is a long way to explain why honoring the war dead is not as simple as E.J. Dionne insists. Certainly the sacrifices of those who died in wars should be remembered and respected, and their names said out aloud. Certainly the veterans should be treated better in this country. But there is a difference between honoring warriors and honoring war and also a difference between honoring all who died in wars and only those named as its warriors.

And not all the war dead died in the war. This is an essay I wrote some time ago, based on a family story:


He loved horses. When the enemy approached and the village had to be evacuated it made sense that he would go with the horses. Someone had to, and most of the adult men were already fighting the war. He was fifteen, old enough to go alone. And the horses needed someone with them in the train carriages, someone they knew, someone they trusted, someone who could stroke them gently when the bombs went off, someone who could stop them from shivering. Later that time meant for him the frightened eyes of the young colt, the foam around its mouth, the long dark carriage without food for animals or for people. The sound of the engine and the song of the weapons.

He loved horses. The following year he was old enough to go to war, a man now, all of sixteen. He was good with horses, so they made him a messenger boy between the artillery units. He would ride the horses with another boy, someone he made friends with. It was almost a summer camp for them, a lark. They were heroes! They were men now! Until the day when a hand grenade exploded under what only a moment earlier had been his friend on a horse. Red. So much redness. More redness in the world than he could imagine.

After that day he grew used to the redness and the war. He did what he was told to do and he survived the war. Peace broke out, and his life was suddenly there, all open, for him to step into. Life. Light and silence or only ordinary noises. He could learn to like it. The war was over. He got a job, a wife, children. The war was over.

Then came the nightmares. They would gallop across his sleeping mind, hooves red with blood, gallop and gallop in a war that never ended. Sometimes he would drink until the galloping stopped. Sometimes he would look into the mirror and see a young man, intact, and then he would think the nightmares were just dreams. Sometimes he would look into the mirror and see himself filled with blood, all blood, ready to explode.

Nightmares cannot be stroked, cannot be made to stop shivering. But he grew used to them. He learned how to live around them, how to forget the war when he was awake. How to be on guard. He never knew what might explode, who might turn into an enemy. He had to be on guard, had to have rage, had to ride it like a horse, towards some invisible goal of safety. Had to ride roughshod sometimes, over people, not around them. Had to. Had to teach the children so that they wouldn't be shocked by the redness or the blood or the trains coming and going. Better they know when they are little. That way nothing can hurt them later, nothing. And had to teach them not to care about the horses or other living things. Too much blood. Too much to care about, too much to leave behind.

He used to love horses.

It's My Party [Anthony McCarthy]

And I want to continue the Carla Bley series

Escalator Over The Hill is usually called an opera but it's not your typical opera. Some say it was Carla Bley's response to Sgt. Pepper's, she thought a theme album could do more and she did it.

I'd never known of Erika Stucky who sang the role of Ginger in this 2009 production, what a performer. I've been watching more of her on YouTube. Carla Bley conducts a fine ensemble.

Why

Over Her Head

I would love to have a DVD of this production. Maybe next year?

T H I S N E W S J U S T I N [Anthony McCarthy]

Catering to their customer base.

My brother just showed me something he noticed last week. Without any question, and by a very, very wide margin, FOX news has the s-l-o-w-e-s-t bottom of the screen headline crawl of any of the stations he showed me. Even much, much slower than the sports stations.

Shanasia Bennett, You Are My Heroine Of The Day [Anthony McCarthy]

I had, thankfully, not known about “daggering” before I read about it in the paper this morning. For anyone who has been similarly fortunate, daggering is a popular dance craze originating in Jamaica, which very graphically simulates very, very violent heterosexual sex, sometimes violently enough to cause serious injury, I would imagine usually injury to women. The “dagger” in question is, to put it plainly, the penis, which is “used like a dagger”* in the “dance”.

Daggering involves exaggerated grinding movements done by a man to a woman, usually front to back, often to a song providing lyrical instructions. Acrobatic forms of daggering add an element of physical danger, such as diving from a foot ladder onto a woman who is splayed on the ground. Daggering isn't suggestive. It's rough, artless, simulated sex on a dance floor.

"Daggering is almost a movement now,'' explained Shanasia Bennett, a senior at the Edward M. Kennedy Academy for Health Careers in the Fenway. "If you're not doing it, you're lame.'' Bennett, wisely, would rather appear lame than allow herself to be debased.

In an increasingly disgusted reading in preparation of this post, I’ve come across a pile of crap defending this promotion of violence against women on grounds of “free expression” and in a twisted, inverted and oddly inconsistent defense of the poor against “middle class morality”, generally, though not exclusively, said by men. Of course, a lot of the crap comes from middle class culture vultures who are in the business of trying to be up to date on pop culture.

"Jamaican society is extremely stratified, and people at the bottom are the core participants of dancehall culture," says Annie Paul, a Kingston-Jamaica based pop culture critic and blogger. "It is one of the few spaces and phenomenon they have control over." It's this lower class that's more likely to die from random violence or police brutality, she says, and the brutal day-to-day conditions of lower class life might make such a physical, carnal form of self-expression appealing, and the risk of injury on a Saturday night at the clubs pales in comparison to the rest of the week.

Is crackdown on daggering music and dancehall culture-like other pop culture panics of the past-nothing more than middle-class moralizing? Paul notes that Carnival, an almost two-month long bacchanal festival, largely for and by the middle- and upper- class of Jamaicans, includes a dance called "wining" full of suggestive gyrations. "There's a hypocritical side," says Paul. "Poor people don't see the difference between that and daggering."

Heartwarming, isn’t it, to see Newsweek suddenly taking on the role of defenders of the rights of the underclass. You wonder why they don’t seem to do that when it’s a question of economics instead of simulated sexual violence. That the defended underclass in question consists, about half, of women who would be the victims of the violence, thus promoted, apparently counts for nothing. As poor women have always accounted for nothing to the elites that begin with underclass men who lord it over them.

As an uncle of young nieces and a disgusted witness to the war on women, I am entirely in favor of the forceful suppression of this kind of thing. If some civil liberties type tells me that making war against popular culture that has declared war on young women is a violation of the sacred rights of free speech, I might decide to let them try their luck with a little simulated violence in which they get to play the “female” role. If you think I am joking, I’m not.

If it takes women retaliating against those who come up with this kind of misogynist propaganda, yes, really retaliating against them with promotion of violent retribution against womens’ would be victimizers, I would encourage the effort.

When the Rolling Stones album “Black and Blue” came out about 34 years ago, with ads that promoted bondage and violence against women, a friend of mine wrote a song contemplating violence against Mick Jagger. I don’t know if she would still have the song, we’ve lost contact, but as Exile on Main Street is rerelased as if it was some important cultural milestone instead of just pop music, it’s clear that daggering is one stop on that road. It's Men's Street, any woman who happens to be there will be far more than just exiled.

If men were suddenly the focus of retaliatory “culture” of that kind and in the same volume as pop culture’s war against women, I am entirely confident that the reaction in the organs of popular and even higher culture would be far, far less indulgent. I'll bet the reaction in the newsweeklies would be swift and decidedly not in its defense.

* Will someone remind me why all right thinking folks are supposed to think that Catharine MacKinnon and the late Andrea Dworkin were being hysterical fanatics when they described how males are taught to view women in the media and in “art”? The evidence that they were on to something couldn’t be clearer, the penis as dagger, sexual intercourse as stabbing. It’s freely expressed by misogynists, in their own words.

What If We Dodge the Bullet? [Anthony McCarthy]

Note: It's my birthday and yesterday was kind of a rough one so I am getting a late start, or maybe a non-start. We'll see. The Obama administration is turning out to be inadequate to the challenges it was elected to face, not least of which because Barack Obama is proving himself to be a conventional product of Harvard Law School, without the ability to imagine going past the inadequate doctrines and ideas that are taught in places like that.

Well, Mr. Obama, every single major issue is proving that your education isn't up to the challenges you face. You would think that the fact that the conventional thinking is what got us here to begin with would have more than adequately proven that. The sad fact is, that your kind of folks, the product of our most elite educational system, were there paving the road to disaster every step of the way. The best and the brightest have only been good at learning the rote lines and regurgitating them for the approval of each other.

Here is something from June 14, 2006 that isn't an elite view of things. I present it as an open letter to the president.

What if they lose? What if the congress investigates the crimes of the Bush regime and those are stopped? What if things go back to normal? After what we've seen the past forty years, if things can go back to normal it won't be a blessed relief, it will be a disaster. Our recent history proves that we have fatal problems in the foundation of the American government.

Our elections have to be fixed, not just returned to c. 1965. We have to secure the vote, from before it is cast to counting to reporting the results to their fulfillment. No elections official, secretary of state, or judge can ever be allowed to prevent another legal ballot being cast or counted or made to count. The sleazy behavior we've seen from every level from elections clerk to Supreme Court and the Executive wouldn't be tolerated in a real democracy. A democracy needs it to be an impeachable crime for a Supreme Court Justice to say that a Citizen of the United States does not have a right to vote. That is a fundamental contradiction of the role of the court in a democracy. Anyone who believes that has no place on our court or in our government.

The media, and today that means the electronic media, have to have their self-interested biases exposed and it's pollution scrubbed out of our politics. They have to be forced to perform the public service they promised, including standards of fairness. Broadcast stations must provide real news, including local news, which has to be unbiased and fair. And as a comment here yesterday said, without diverse ownership of the media, they won't serve the entire public.

The cable "news" channels have betrayed the public's trust even more flagrantly than broadcast, spreading lies effective enough to start the most idiotic and dangerous war of our history. We will pay the cost of their lies for decades, in blood as well as money.

They also aided the Bush putsch of 2000 and the earlier scheme to remove a genuinely elected President on trumped up charges and lies. Pretending that a rogue cable industry isn't a danger to freedom has to stop. Anyone who defends them on their crimes against democracy is a dupe or a profiteer. Put them under the same public service requirements as broadcast media. Media passes itself off as the voice of the people, then let them show it by putting the public before their investors and owners.

Recent history proves that self-government can't depend on leaving it to chance. Laissez faire democracy dies and the death is never a natural one. It lets the powerful and wealthy swamp the Peoples's voice almost all of the time. In the same comments mentioned above, it was pointed out that the Supreme Court rulings making corporations artificial people made that all the more true.

Our government is always presented as having three branches, those are where almost all of the pitiful efforts at reform are concentrated. And that hasn't worked, we have the most dishonest government of our lifetimes. Putting patches on the process to make it a level field is unrealistic to the level of willful blindness. Powerful interests have power. They will always win when they have equal access to the process and own the media. The handful of examples where individuals or small groups win over the big guy make for sentimental TV movies, using them as proof that the system works is calculated dishonesty.

If the People are neglected then it all goes wrong. They won't even show up to vote. That step isn't a naive social studies lesson that you stop thinking about after the test in fourth grade. You don't go on to the higher study of civics and leave it behind. There is nothing higher in a democracy that the People, there is no act of government more important than their Vote. Abraham Lincoln, one of the real founders of the country we live in today, gave the formula for it. You know it by heart. He didn't mention the congress, the executive or the high church of the judiciary. He said that the enormous sacrifice of the American People in the Civil War was so that government of the People, by the People, and for the People shall not perish from the earth.

Any aftermath of the Bush II disaster that doesn't include changes to these laws will be just the beginning of the next time. Not securing the Vote, the will of the People; and forcing their own chosen responsibilities on the media, the only guarantee of an informed and realistic Vote, is a welcome mat for the next would-be dictator. Any liberal, leftist, Democrat, independent, even "moderate" Republican who lets two years go by without enacting real electoral and media reform had better beware. It's just a matter of waiting before the same coalition of corporate interests, bigots, oligarches and haters tries again. They might be as slow and stealthy as they were this time, buying up media, using it to spread lies that "more speech" can't drown out, but they'll make a come back.

P.S. After having seen your Justice Department in action, or maybe I should say inaction, I have no faith in the Attorney General to change things. I have every fear that department will be just a part of the legal enabling of the oligarchs.