Tillerania around the web

Some of the better or more informative things I've seen online this afternoon:

Tiller's family's statement about his murder. "We ask that he be remembered as a good husband, father and grandfather and a dedicated servant on behalf of the rights of women everywhere." Two of his daughters, btw, were also physicians.

One person's story of using Tiller's services. Btw, did you know that Tiller's clinic offered patients funeral services for their fetuses? I didn't.

Updates: Andrew Sullivan is doing a lot of blogging today. One of his links includes this moving story from an anti-abortion adoptive parent pointing out, with a fair bit of grace, the complexity and caring responsibility Tiller provided at his practice.

Kansas ABC channel site. Updated news, photos, video.

NOW's statement, which is the only place I've seen so far that recognizes that murdering abortion providers is terrorism.

People for the American Way points to a couple of tactless statements by anti-abortion leaders. I do want to say, however, that over on the #tiller feed on Twitter, most--not all--of the anti-abortion folks are not being assholes. Nonetheless, I think that when the leaders of a movement make statements that condone or deflect blame for violence, the movement deserves some blame for what happens.

More public statements by both pro-choice and anti-abortion organizations and public figures.

A statement by one of Tiller's former patients, that I posted on the blog ages ago.

Another old post about Tiller.

Feministe has a list of organizations one can donate to in Tiller's memory. I suggest Medical Students for Choice: one of the reasons Tiller was such a lightning rod was because there are very, very few doctors in the U.S. who do what he did. MSC works to train the students who will fill his shoes.

Update: A couple more stories about Tiller.

Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit

Some "pro-life" asshole* murdered George Tiller this morning. In church.

I just found out about it and already the cops have made an arrest. Doubtless the killer will get his day in court and the papers to brag about saving babies.

Thus ends years of persecution of a righteous man, including a murder attempt, a bombing, vandalism, bullshit legal cases, and harassment by the KS attorney general. Just last month his clinic was vandalized again.

R.I.P., Dr. Tiller. And thank you for dedicating, and sacrificing, your life for the women you helped.


Joan Walsh has some good links at Salon.

*Presumably. They've only just arrested someone and the motive hasn't been released yet, but come on.

Linkety link link, old school edition

1. And you thought the Ouja board was bad.

2. Remember when I used to be a real academic? I still know some people, and they write really interesting stuff, like this piece about Obama and Lincoln.

3. If I were still an academic, I'd be trying to track this down and read it.

4. And finally, while I don't miss being an academic that much, I do really miss my neighbors back in the town where I had a job. Check out this fb message he sent me:

i'm sure billy will be sad to hear luna's sick. for some reason, he liked her best of all my evil cat army of death. now all the cat army moved away, and the new cats don't like me.

Sniff.

to The Man: why the story matters

This is my parents' story:
One of my parents was an immigrant; my other parent grew up in a Compton project. One of my parents never earned a college degree and worked as a secretary her whole life; my other parent earned his college degree at night school while working in a warehouse and then earned his Masters at the same time i was entering college. Both of my parents were poor, abused, refused housing, worked blue collar jobs or civil servant jobs and yet still managed to buy a home, send two daughters to college and have a good life - all while living in south central L.A.

If we're honest, their stories weren't supposed to end this way. Their stories were supposed to end in the projects or somewhere back in the Philippines.

But their story becomes my story and follows me to grad school, corporate America and it's here with me now.

Why my story (and the story of Ursula Burns or Sonia Sotomayor or my parents) matters:
Because it gives the lie to the story that this world is only for powerful white men. It is a powerful middle finger to the socially constructed, and supported, narrative that women and people of color have a 'place' they need to stay in.

You can call us affirmative action babies; you can say that we aren't qualified or that we stole a job from some long-suffering, more qualified white dude, but who the fuck cares what you say?

(And this is why I love the 'cool' of President Obama. People call him an affirmative action baby? Were they the editor of the Yale law review? Are they the President of the United States? Didn't think so.)

We're going to keep fighting to be in your board rooms, your courtrooms, your senate floors and your offices. And who cares how you say we got there. We got there.

And once we're there, our presence will be a reminder that the story of our 'place' is a lie. It is a horrible, hateful, disgusting lie and we proved it's a lie. Those places you claim as your own will become our places, too. Maybe this is the idea you can't stand. Maybe this is the thing that makes your batshit crazy racist rhetoric so batshit crazy.

The old story of where people like me belong will eventually be chipped away, erased. And even if it won't disappear completely, if it takes another 400 years or so, what gurgling satisfaction there will be when one more of us with a story stands in a room we were never meant to enter.

Our stories don't matter to you?

Our stories aren't meant for you.

A Letter to the President

Please read Melissa's post at Shakesville about the new details that have emerged about the photographs of detainee abuse that the Obama administration is refusing to release, despite a court order requiring them to do so. I can not pledge to write a letter every day, but I can pledge to write at least one, which I have. Please contact the President about this issue. No more coverups. No more.
-------------------------------------------------------
Dear Mr. President:

I am an Arab-American civil rights lawyer living in Chicago who looks up to and respects you immensely. I have followed your story closely from the first day you arrived on the national scene, and have greeted each of your successes with a joy equal to the joy of my own accomplishments. I'm writing to plead with you to release the photos of detainee abuse that you declined to release earlier this month.

This morning, I read an article in the Telegraph describing the content of some of those photos, as described by Major General Taguba. I am sickened and, yes, shocked that the photos you claimed are "not particularly sensational" contain evidence of sexual assault. In fact, they sound much, much worse than the original set of photos from Abu Ghraib that caused so much heartache.

I can not stand by quietly while you and your administration continue to implicitly provide cover for those who commit atrocities in the name of American safety. It may be that those responsible have already been disciplined. It may be that releasing the photo can and, indeed, should inflame anti-American sentitments. Because as you acknowledged in your campaign--and I hope you still realize--widespread torture and abuse of detainees in Iraq is not merely a matter of individual responsibility on behalf of particular soldiers. It is not about a few bad apples.

This abuse and torture is the inevitable result of systemic policies put in place by the Bush administration. It is the natural consequence of the thorough dehumanization of Iraqis and Arabs as part of our rush to and justification for war.

Torture and abuse will not be stamped out by prosecuting a few GIs in military courts. It will not be stamped out by secrecy, and crippling fear of enduring painful consequences that we very much deserve. If you believe and hope for a better, more just world where pain and suffering are not meted out in the false name of peace, you must take bold action and stop covering up the truth.

Releasing the photos will not be easy, just like the rest of your job is not easy. But it is vital in the fight for justice. We can not stamp out the things that we do not know.

Please, I beg you, please do not continue to stand in the way of letting Americans have knowledge of this festering wound in our national integrity.

Sincerely,

[M. LeBlanc]

what are they thinking?

Those of you who are interested in Sotomayor's record as a judge can see here. Those interested in her reputation among lawyers, see here. Those who think that her opponents might have a little bit of a point where the Ricci case is concerned (the "reverse discrimination" case currently before the Supremes, about throwing out a firefighter promotion test because virtually all the people who scored well on it were white), should see here. (Short version: Sotomayor's ruling in that case was in line with two other judges and according to precedent; the exact opposite of radical, activist, personal-agenda-driven decision-making).

And on that note, those of you who are interested in the arguments about Sotomayor's confirmation, keep reading.

So the criticisms of Sotomayor are falling into two camps, basically.

1. She's a racist who favors Hispanics over white people. This would be the idiot argument, designed to appeal to "the base," i.e., to people who consciously or un- are genuinely afraid of change and fear that a black president or a Latina judge will discriminate against white men.

2. We have to make sure that Sotomayor's "feelings" and "personal preferences" don't affect the way she judges. This is the "respectable" argument, as dictated by today's Republican congressional talking points. (If you don't believe me, look at the link and notice how almost every republican uses those words.)

It really should go without saying that the concern over Sotomayor's possible failures of "objectivity" is a total code for "omg she's a woman (therefore emotional, not rational) and she's not white (so she'll rule for her homies).

It's interesting, then, to compare the "evidence" for Sotomayor's lack of objectivity--her Berkeley talk "a Latina Judge's Voice" with the recent New Yorker essay about Roberts, which does a bang-up job of demonstrating the way that *his* subject position--upper-middle class white guy--has informed his judicial philosophy. I think this is a much more interesting comparison than the one people keep making to Alito, because it shows why diversity matters, as opposed to showing that judges can talk about diversity without it affecting their actual decisions.

Roberts’s record is not that of a humble moderate but, rather, that of a doctrinaire conservative. The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.

The piece goes on to demonstrate how Roberts's personal background--"his father was an executive with a steel company and his mother a homemaker. . . . He was the classic well-rounded star student—valedictorian and captain of the football team"--sheds light on the apparent contrast between his hard-line conservatism and personal charm. He can be a "nice guy" (see the essay's title) and a hardass *because* he comes from a background of relatively easy privilege. The status quo works, and has worked, very well for him: it makes complete sense that he'd uphold it.

Now, my point isn't that this makes Roberts a bad guy. It's that this is why diversity is important. It *is* important to have people in positions of power who are able to make the case that the status quo works, who are conservative in the little-c sense, reluctant to rock the boat. Roberts, an incrementalist, doesn't really satisfy the radical big-C Conservatives, who wish he'd just sweep Roe v. Wade (for example) away; but there are others on the court (Alito, Scalia) who represent that point of view.

On the other hand, we have exactly one person on the court (Ginsburg) who is willing to argue for what is really a fairly mainstream point of view, that diversity is in and of itself important, because it affects outcomes. That might be a position that some people don't *agree* with, but it's not especially radical, and Sotomayor's main speech about the importance of representation isn't, either. Quite apart from the question of her gender and ethnicity, the reason that the Supreme Court has more than one person on it is because the legal system relies on a presumption that *different viewpoints should be heard*.

I, and those who agree that diversity is important, would argue that this fact makes the role of people who represent *and support* diversity doubly important on the court. But even for those who think that "fairness" means being "objective" (and that objectivity is possible), who find arguments like Sotomayor's bothersome, can't really argue very convincingly that that speech voices some shockingly radical viewpoint, or that it's going to be terribly dangerous to have two whole people out of nine that believe the law has an interest in diversity. They can't even argue it unconvincingly for very long without starting to sound kinda racist, especially not when the candidate in question is (as usually happens with "firsts") *more* qualified in terms of experience and background than most of her proposed peer group.

For instance, see this cogent piece about the difference between affirmative action, which "means casting a wide net in search of highly qualified candidates" and tokenism, which "means reaching for the nearest woman or person of color around, regardless of his or her qualifications." That's the difference between an argument for diversity and the argument that's being put forth against it. There are definitely decent arguments to be made against the representation = fairness concept: here's one (I think, for the record, that Coates's point is largely irrelevant--we're talking about white males on the supreme court, not Appalachian coal miners here--though obviously Roberts and Souter are not identical). But I haven't seen anyone quibbling about Sotomayor's appointment using decent arguments about that particular issue.

I don't know why not; after all, it's not as if there's anything wrong with saying, frankly, that one opposes such-and-such a nominee because one objects to his or her on ideological and political grounds. (It's interesting, actually, that Obama himself did just that. In fact, I'm certain that this sort of willingness to just freaking be honest about one's motivations is a big part of Obama's appeal.) I'm not sure what it means that Republicans and most conservatives* won't just come out and say they oppose her on partisan grounds and are preferring to talk about her "qualifications" or "personal preferences." God knows it's fucking stupid to use obviously coded language that raises red flags about possible sexism and/or racism when the alternative--"I want someone more conservative"--is perfectly valid. But in any case, it's pretty clear that Sotomayor isn't the issue here.


*I've spent at least half an hour searching for an editorial from a day or two ago by someone who used to work for the Reagan administration basically telling conservatives not to be idiots, but can't remember the author's name or what paper published it. The jist was that he (the author) doesn't wake up in the morning thinking about being a knee-jerk Republican, and that the party needs to stop being so batshit rigid. Anyone who knows which piece I'm thinking about, please remind me?

Say My Name

Via Matthew Yglesias' Twitter, I see this piece by Mark Krikorian at the National Review that really has to be read to be believed. What's he complaining about now? That people are pronouncing Sonia Sotomayor's name correctly.

This may seem like carping, but it's not. Part of our success in assimilation has been to leave whole areas of culture up to the individual, so that newcomers have whatever cuisine or religion or so on they want, limiting the demand for conformity to a smaller field than most other places would. But one of the areas where conformity is appropriate is how your new countrymen say your name, since that's not something the rest of us can just ignore, unlike what church you go to or what you eat for lunch. And there are basically two options — the newcomer adapts to us, or we adapt to him. And multiculturalism means there's a lot more of the latter going on than there should be.

The idea that your name is somehow the property or the business of others, and that not only should they not be required to pronounce it correctly, they should purposely pronounce it incorrectly is one of the more brow-furrowing and staggering assertions I've heard come out of a conservative in months. It would be one thing if Krikorian was complaining about people getting lambasted for pronouncing it incorrectly, but he's not. What he's saying is that, despite knowing how to pronounce it correctly, people should nevertheless say it in a way that sounds wrong to the bearer of the name because to pronounce it correctly would be displaying too much "adapting to the newcomer."

What about American Spanish-speakers for whom an incorrect pronunciation would actually take effort, rather than the correct pronunciation which would come naturally? Should we say "Obama" in a manner that rhymes with "Alabama" because that's the American way, and to pronounce his name the way he says it is just kowtowing to the all-consuming influence of Kenyan hegemony? This is the most baseless Sotomayor-related gripe I've heard so far. The lines he draws about where we should make efforts to address people correctly are bizarre:

And should we put Asian surnames first in English just because that's the way they do it in Asia? When speaking of people in Asia, okay, but not people of Asian origin here, where Mao Tse-tung would properly have been changed to Tse-tung Mao.

So what do we do about people from Asia who are visiting the United States? When the famed North Korean leader finally comes over for a diplomatic visit, shall we call him Jong-Il Kim in all the papers?

I understand that some people make concessions to the American inability to deal with "different" names. Some people don't or won't. And I'm cool with that. Both a good friend of mine and my roommate, who are from South Korea and Japan, respectively, have "American" nicknames that they go by. I don't fault them for doing it, but I wouldn't fault them for not doing it either. I try whenever I can to pronounce people's names correctly, but apparently this is because I am a pinko liberal commie. I also like how Krikorian, who's apparently of Armenian extraction, uses the word "multiculturalism" like it's pretty clearly a bad thing. It would be funny, except it's not. You might try and rail against multiculturalism, but given the vast variety of cultures that are represented in the United States, you've pretty much lost the battle at this point.

I think the "conformity" that's required is not getting overly irritated at people who can't seem to say your name correctly, because they can't or because they're too racist to try. I barely even notice when people mispronounce my [real] name (although it does irritate me that my own brother pronounces his name slightly incorrectly as a concession to the mispronouncers, but I let it go). But to suggest that people are somehow awful for trying to pronounce a name the way a bearer prefers, or the way that's correct in the language from which the bearer's name originates, is the height of lunacy.

I know I'm wasting space on an absolutely idiotic piece, but it was too ridiculous to let pass without comment. Shorter Mark Krikorian: if those uppity Hispanics get themselves into a post of importance, we must stubbornly refuse to acknowledge their origins by being American Asshole.

it's not your fault

I have a go-to youtube video for when I really need some cheering. I've watched it 3 times in the last 30 minutes and would like to embed it but youtube has disabled, so I'm just linking. Matt Damn and Ben Affleck winning as Oscar for Good Will Hunting. Firstly, I love Matt Damon. Secondly, this was before Ben Affleck became so annoying. Thirdly, they are so young and cute. And so clearly overwhelmed. I like the shot of their moms, I like the fact that I get to see Jack Lemon and Walter Matthau at the beginning. I like what an unimpressed bitch Minnie Driver looks like when you see her in the audience. I love when Affleck's voice cracks. And Good Will Hunting and Milk are the only Gus Van Sant movise I can stand.

Anyway. In what is surely karmic retribution for our pulling out on the tunnel house (ha! pulling out and tunnels!), our buyers terminated the contract on our current home this morning. They were spooked by some inspection things that are totally not worth being spooked about. They are not, for example, fucking tunnels. This after we settled on another house, one that is way at the top of our price range but that we felt we could manage because we wouldn't have to float two mortgages for any months.

This whole process has been way more rollercoaster than I expected. I thought nothing would be more up and down than the job market. This is, probably predictably, way more heinous. I have to work on a way to not invest so much emotional capital in the home sale, I suppose. We have an offer out on another house in the new town, a house that is gorgeous and impressive and is a little hard to picture my family in because it is just that impressive. Mr. V doesn't have any trouble picturing us there; he thinks we are more impressive as a family unit than I do, perhaps.

I just cannot believe this is what people regularly do all over the world. Fucking buy and sell homes at the same times and change jobs and have a commuting partner and BLAH. Which is to say, that all of you have this kind of shit and even more stressful shit going on all the time. I hope you get a silly little boost from that video. Let it go, it's not your fault.

And in other big news today

I think Kotsko gets it about right on the gay marriage thing. I don't know if that's despite or because he's all godly and shit.

On Douthat's column

I really don't have much to say that hasn't already been said about the Douthat column about how we need more "sexual stigma" so women can be happier. But I did want to note that despite the fact that Douthat only has to write one column a week, he still can't come up with his own damn hook.

The first paragraph of the study he's riffing on:

By many measures the progress of women over recent decades has been extraordinary: the gender wage gap has partly closed; educational attainment has risen and is now surpassing that of men; women have gained an unprecedented level of control over fertility; technological change in the form of new domestic appliances has freed women from domestic drudgery; and women’s freedoms within both the family and market sphere have expanded.

Douthat's first paragraph:

American women are wealthier, healthier and better educated than they were 30 years ago. They’re more likely to work outside the home, and more likely to earn salaries comparable to men’s when they do. They can leave abusive marriages and sue sexist employers. They enjoy unprecedented control over their own fertility. On some fronts — graduation rates, life expectancy and even job security — men look increasingly like the second sex.

I guess his hook comes later, with the radical revelation that men and women do similar amounts of housework, and that are no penalties for politicians who hire prostitutes (although it is true that there's no penalty if you're a Republican, as commenter "seeker0769" at Pandagon points out).

Sotomayor

I hope to do an actual substantive post later today about Sotomayor, but I want to take a moment first to note my initial idiosyncratic reaction to the nomination of a Newyoriqueña to the U.S. Supreme Court.

See, my bestest girlfriend from the age of 14 is a Newyoriqueña. In fact, she went and wrote an award-winning book about immigration patterns between Chicago and Puerto Rico and did some postdoc work at Hunter College's Centro for Estudios Puertoriqueños. I'm dying to find out what she has to say about Sotomayor's nomination, and if I can pin her down sometime for an "interview" I'll post some of her responses here.

In the meantime, my friendship with Dr. Perez has really helped me pay a little attention, over the years, to "the" Puerto Rican experience in the U.S. And just, like, wow. We'll hear a lot about Sotomayor being the first Hispanic nominee, and it's certainly a deal that the first Latino nominee happens to be a Latina. But if you don't know, Puerto Ricans are sort of on the bottom of the Latino hierarchy; sort of like how the Bronx (where Sotomayor's from) is at the bottom of the New York boroughs, or how (in my own personal history) being from the CA central valley is at the bottom of the California place hierarchy. (Okay, maybe it's more crappy to be from, like, Needles, but seriously: in graduate school one of my CA-born students was super-impressed by my street cred when he found out where I'd grown up. And yes, that's hilarious, but it does sort of illustrate the point).

So I'm a little more inclined than your average white girl, probably, to feel sisterhood with Puerto Rican women, maybe. And if I'm at all "down with the brown," as someone once said in a comment thread, that's a big part of why. And yeah, because of that this nomination feels a little more personal, a little more moving, than it otherwise might.

You know that all the Republican talk is already about how Sotomayor is "only" the nominee because of her ethnicity, and how she's not going to be properly "objective" as a judge because she'll favor people like her, and that this woman who graduated summa cum laude from Princeton and then went to Yale Law is not all that smart, and other racially-coded panic talk. And there will be a lot of pointing to her professional record as a response (like I just did, noting her Ivy League pedigree). So I wanna say something right here at the outset of her confirmation process:

Fuck yes I'm glad she's the nominee BECAUSE she's a Puerto Rican woman from the Bronx. Fuck yes.

That shit is the entire fucking point of America. At least, it is to the 70s-era "Free to Be, You and Me," bicentennial, Sesame Street generation I belong to. When the President, a Hawaiian-born black man from a broken home, nominates a Bronx-born Puerto Rican woman to the Supreme Court, you can't help but feel like maybe the Constitution and the Separation of Powers and Equality Under the Law and We the People and all that stuff really, actually, might be true.

I hope that when we argue for Sotomayor's "qualifications," we don't forget that hell yes her ethnicity and gender are part of that package. Hell yes her ability to "empathize," as Obama put it, with people who have historically "not counted" as "real Americans" is a big part of why she belongs on the court--not least because real Americans can empathize with her. She reminds a lot of us of our sisters, our aunties, our mamas, our best friends.

And that recognition, that sense of belonging, is the foundation of the American ideal of equality. Which is the entire point of the Supreme Court.

Dog Soldiers

The Sunset River rises in boreal bogs about 100 miles to the northeast. The marshy headwaters foregather in the Lake of Turtles and Rice to spill into a glacial crevice of the Wisconsin crust, hurdling a series of low head dams and fanning out in dark flowages behind brooding hydroelectric barriers.

The Sunset shakes off its last restraint here in Hardscrabble. Rocketing out the turbine house of the Dairyland Dam, it hustles 50 miles downhill to join the River of Cession.

East of town, the river strikes an underground granite spar and scribes a wide arc of semicircumnavigation. The river bank rises sharply all along this great oxbow, forming a conical hill on which are pitched the graves of the town. My Pop's ashes are interred there. They overlook the river and a house on the opposite bank where he lived with my mother for thirty years.

Early Saturday morning, I crossed the river by canoe to visit my Pop's grave and make sure it was tidied up for the Memorial Day weekend. I had a pot of Rocky Mountain Red geraniums and a small Stars and Stripes to set on his stone. I also had light spinning tackle and a couple rapala lures I planned to drag behind the canoe in hopes of snagging the luncheon walleye.

From the put in point, I could see a line of uniformed figures, a troop of boy scouts, ascending the cemetery slope, hunched over as if receiving fire.

In their wake was a spreading panoply of flags; waves of small American flags to dress the grave of each veteran.

At the entrance of the cemetery were flags of them who'd fought for and and fought over the land. The Stars and Stripes. Fleur-de-lis on a white field. The Union Jack. Flags of Wisconsin regiments. Flags flying the totems of the Ojibwe nation.

All the banners of the Dog Soldiers.

I refuse to blog about

1. The 66-yo woman who's pregnant. Why the fuck is it anyone's business but hers?

2. What Nancy Pelosi knew and when she knew it. Look, either torture is a big fat fucking deal, in which case we should go after EVERYONE, including Pelosi but really she's pretty small potatoes as compared to everyone in the last administration, or else waterboarding isn't torture at all, in which case stfu already, mkay?

3. Maureen Dowd, George Will, et al. Yes, their columns all suck. Which is why I don't read 'em.

4. The American Idol whatever it is. Three words, people: GET A LIFE.

5. The Star Trek movie. Haven't seen it, don't care.

This completes your Saturday quickie post. I may or may not have time to write one of the posts I *do* want to write later today.

Jesus fucking christ

You know, honestly. I have long loathed Bill Donohue. But I truly never imagined that even he was capable of this level of offensiveness:

Reuters is reporting that “Irish Priests Beat, Raped Children,” yet the report does not justify this wild and irresponsible claim. . . . The Irish report suffers from conflating minor instances of abuse with serious ones, thus demeaning the latter. When most people hear of the term abuse, they do not think about being slapped, being chilly, being ignored or, for that matter, having someone stare at you in the shower. They think about rape.

By cheapening rape, the report demeans the big victims. But, of course, there is a huge market for such distortions, especially when the accused is the Catholic Church.

I am not even kidding here: the man is saying, in so many words, that children who are, as a matter of routine:

- beaten
- forced to stay up all night with farm animals they were afraid of--in winter, without extra clothing for warmth
- kept on the brink of starvation, so that they regularly fought over bad food, or so that girls put in charge of infants would steal milk from the babies in order to feed themselves
- not provided with soap, toothbrushes, sanitary napkins or tampons
- forced to perform unpaid hard labor beginning as early as the age of five (including handwashing the nuns' sanitary cloths in cold water with bare hands)
- forced to work instead of learn

are somehow "demeaned" by the report because they weren't actually raped. Donohue thinks that this kind of treatment is "hardly draconian," and anyway, "most of [the children were] delinquents." So what--probably they deserved to be beaten, starved, and treated as domestic slaves?

Moreover. The "delinquents" who Donohue thinks deserved to be beaten--after all, nothing short of rape really counts--included:

- illegitimate children, who were often transferred to these homes as soon as their mothers were released from the mother and baby homes where they gave birth.
- foster children, whose parents were unemployed, neglectful, alcoholics, abusive, etc.
- children whose mothers or fathers had died or abandoned the family.

Children admitted because of delinquency?

One hundred and eleven (111) witnesses (14%), 107 male and four female, reported that their conviction for criminal offences was the major factor leading to their admission to a School. The nature of the offences mainly involved theft of food, fuel, bicycles, clothing or money. There were eight reports from male witnesses of admission as a result of charges for more serious offences such as ‘breaking and entering’ and ‘attacks on the person’.

Eight. Out of 791.

According to Donohue, it's "wild and irresponsible" to say priests raped children if only 12% of priests did so, but if 14% of kids steal food, or eight children out of 791 are guilty of breaking and entering or assault, that makes the entire group "most[ly] delinquents."

It gets even worse.

Rape, on the other hand, constituted 12 percent of the cases. As for the charge that “Irish Priests” were responsible, some of the abuse was carried out by lay persons, much of it was done by Brothers, and about 12 percent of the abusers were priests (most of whom were not rapists).

Only 12% of the kids were raped! And only 12% of the people who raped and beat children were priests! Clearly the title of the report is "wild and irresponsible" and grossly unfair to the poor, poor Catholic church.

Note that the abuses I described above are listed in the report under "everyday life." The things listed under *abuses*--not including rape--well, let's quote the report here:

witnesses at times described daily, casual and random physical abuse as normal and wished to report only the times when the frequency and severity of the abuse was such that they were injured or in fear for their lives.

Donohue deliberately misrepresents (or excuses?) children being injured or in fear for their lives as

Not nice, to be sure, but hardly draconian, especially given the time line. . . . quite frankly, corporal punishment was not exactly unknown in many homes during these times.

Abuses that Donohue apprently considers normal include being forced to eat vomit (eight separate people reported this); being stripped naked, held down, and beaten in front of witnesses; being beaten to the point of having their earlobes severed or bones broken.

And it's not as if Donohue didn't look at the details. He's obviously read the report, because he quotes a section describing some of the sexual abuses perpetrated. But he takes the quotes--"kissing" and "inappropriate sexual contact" out of context, deliberately citing the least shocking offense and using a phrase without giving details about what it means. Here is the complete passage, which gives a better sense of the kind of "inappropriate sexual contact" we're talking about:

Witnesses reported sexual assaults in the forms of vaginal and anal rape, oral/genital contact, digital penetration, penetration by an object, masturbation and other forms of inappropriate contact, including molestation and kissing. Witnesses also reported several forms of non-contact sexual abuse including indecent exposure, inappropriate sexual talk, voyeurism and forced public nudity.

I kinda doubt that the "kissing" here is of the benign, affectionate sort.

To be fair, Donohue concedes that "none of this is defensible"--before immediately going on to defend it. He egregiously sums up what the report details as "oral/genital contact, digital penetration, penetration by an object, [and] masturbation" as, in Donohue's words, "e.g. . . . inappropriate sexual talk," and then goes on to the idea that nothing short of rape really counts.

Let's quote the conclusion of his statement again.

. . . none of it qualifies as rape. . . . The Irish report suffers from conflating minor instances of abuse with serious ones, thus demeaning the latter. When most people hear of the term abuse, they do not think about being slapped, being chilly, being ignored or, for that matter, having someone stare at you in the shower. They think about rape.

When people hear abuse they don't generally think of being fingered by a nun, either. That's because such things are, to those who haven't experienced them or read the report, unthinkable. Donohue has read the report. He knows, as I do, that it clearly separates corporal punishments and forced labor (still unacceptable, and described in chapters describing "Everyday Life") from outrageous abuse (in chapters describing "Abuses"). He, not it, is the one conflating minor instances of abuse, like "inappropriate sexual talk" with serious ones, like digital penetration.

Let's sum up.

Bill Donohue is defending a powerful institution, the Catholic Church, by minimizing and excusing the abuse and neglect of children, including deliberately overlooking oral rape, digital rape, rape with objects, or forced masturbation.

Bill Donohue claims to defend "Catholic interests" and to represent Catholics.

If Donohue is as representative of Catholicism as he claims, then he has just proved that Catholics and the Catholic Church do indeed defend and excuse nuns and priests who abuse children. At least, as long as they don't actually rape them.

I pray to the blessed virgin that Donohue is not representative of most Catholics. He sure as shit doesn't represent me.

Telephone

(After Alice, who has really perfected this genre.)



I have had the kind of week during which it becomes clear that no one hears what I am actually saying; each person hears some garbled version of what I say, influenced by what she/he wants me to be saying. A sampling, from the very special people in my life:

My daughter:
I think I say: Your toast isn’t ready.
I must actually say: Your toast will never be ready unless you keep asking about it. It is your asking about it that actually cooks the toast. Please, continue.

I think I say: I am bringing forbidden fast food for my lunch when I attend your hippie preschool’s parent-kid picnic this week, just to give myself a chuckle.
I must actually say: I am bringing you chicken nuggets. They are all yours. I actually prefer applesauce and carrot sticks.

I think I say: We can’t make popcorn right now because we have people coming to look at the house in 6 minutes and popcorn leaves a lot of smell.
I must actually say: Please take a giant shit in the bathroom as I am turning on all the lights.

My husband:
I think I say: I have to get off the phone. See you when you get home.
I must actually say: Tell me more about your meetings. More more more. I can’t get enough. MORE.

I think I say: Let’s try to calm down, it’s only $2000
I must actually say: I really encourage you to cathect all the feelings of out-of-control-ness that you have about this move onto our home sale, especially with respect to whether or not we should get our home under contract by conceding another $2000. Surely doing so will mean we are weak and unable to negotiate this move with aplomb.

I think I say: I don’t want to talk about the actual negotiation anymore, I want to talk about why you are freaking out so much.
I must actually say: Let’s hash out the individual steps again, dwelling on what went wrong at each step. We can change the past if just review it meticulously enough.

I think I say: I don’t want to buy a house that big/new/far out/sterile/ugly.
I must actually say: On account of my making you move and commute and unsettling your life generally, I want to buy whatever you want to. Don’t even worry about my well-established preferences, they have probably evaporated.

My buying agent:
I think I say: I am really nervous about a structurally unsound garage with damaged asbestos shingles.
I must actually say: I really want to live in an old neighborhood and I love home with quirks, preferably environmentally hazardous quirks!!!!

I think I say: I am really not sure about a network of intricate tunnels under the house; strikes me as, if not a structural problem, at least a resale problem.
I must actually say: I see potential for a tourist attraction here!! Let’s print leaflets!!!!


My selling agent:
I think I say: We want to hold firm with this price.
I must actually say: We are $2000 too rich.

Cover Thursdays [Ouija Board Edition]

I can keep up a weekly feature for at least one week, guys. We'll see how next week goes. But this is already proving to be a good idea, if not for the readers that have to listen to the songs, then for me. Because in practicing over the last week, I have already started to again develop the callouses that were long gone from not playing more than a few times a year. And I even managed to figure out the chords to a song, as opposed to looking them up on the intertubes (I tried--they were nowhere to be found).

This is "True Believer" off Aimee Mann's latest album, @#%&*! Smilers. As before, there are mistakes, and headphones are strongly recommended.

Is nothing sacred?

Via Sarah Haskins' Twitter comes this shocking news: apparently Hasbro needed to create a special Ouija board for girls. I'll give you one guess as to what color it is.

What's more, it comes with suggested questions! Because, obviously, girls can't come up with their own questions to ask the dead and the demons. "Should I do Atkins or South Beach?" "Am I a major slut?"

I'm forever amazed at the shockingly little amount of credit people who want to sell shit to women and girls actually give women and girls. Using the Ouija board was a favorite pastime with a few friends of mine for several summers. Part of the reason it was appealing was because it was creepy. And serious. Things emblazoned in pepto-bismol pink are not creepy, at least, not in the way I mean. It was adult. It was not meant for us. It was other.

I did not use the Ouija board to find out "who will text me next?" No, my use of the Ouija board was serious business, with such exploits as 1) attempting to contact my dead mother; 2) attempting to determine whether or not there was a God and, if so, which religion was his True Religion; 3) attempting to determine whether I would live into adulthood; 4) contacting spirits of other dead relatives; and 5) trying to determine whether said dead relatives and/or my dead mother were displeased with my sinning ways.

I was 10. Okay, maybe I was a fucked-up, morbid child. But I don't remember my friends being significantly different from me. What did y'all ask the Ouija?

(Upon review of the comments, I see that I am not the only one whose first thought was "Is nothing sacred?" Do not fuck with the Ouija Board, companies. Jesus.)

Also, the funny thing about the Product Description, "now it's just for you, girl," is that the Ouija board has always been for girls. Not that there's anything wrong with boys using it, I just didn't know any who were into that kinda weird, slightly creepy, occult, navel-gazing crap when we were kids. Boys were way too cool to wonder about their purpose in the universe.

I still think Ann Coulter is a cunt, but by god that doesn't make it okay to psychologically abuse children

Sigh. So apparently the shrinks of America are still arguing about whether LGBT people are, by definition, crazy.

Now, look, full confession here: while on the one hand I have known for a while that One Does Not Question the Sanity of people whose identities confuse one--blah blah, don't speak to what you don't know, etc.--I admit that for a long time I sorta thought that maybe people who had issues with their socially-assigned gender did so because they had other, "deeper" issues with their identities full stop. For whatever reason. This was partly because a couple of my acquaintances who switched gender pronouns at some point during my acquaintance with them also seemed, to me, to have other problems.

Then again, even back then I figured well, duh, it's sort of like the "gay people are often maladjusted" meme, which I know to be stupid. First of all, doi, if you're gay or transgendered in a society where that's Not Okay, the likelihood of having problems with, say, depression or anxiety may well be quite a bit higher than it is for people who "fit in." Second, I'm a depressive myself, so, you know, like not inclined to view mental illness as ipso facto evidence of Some Larger Problem.

Then again, as I got older, I met people who I later found out were transgendered who seemed to be not crazy at all. So I became more agnostic about the What Causes It question and more firmly convinced of the Hey It's Not My Business and It's Only Polite to Refer to People as they Wish You To position. But I still didn't really "get" it in the sense that I felt like there was a What Causes It question to be answered in the first place, if that makes sense. I mean, I don't feel that it's necessary to have an explanation for what causes, say, me to be The Way I Am (at least, not in that sense).

Bizarrely, I would say (and I am well aware that there are a lot of people who are just waiting to tell me that I am full of it) that I finally "got it" or at least started to, by reading a book that focuses in large part on what causes people to be transgendered. Upshot: DUH PEOPLE VARIATION IN NATURE IS NOT THAT UNCOMMON. And since gender is a pretty complicated mix of hormones and socialization and genetics and god knows what else, it really shouldn't be a big fucking surprise that plenty of individuals in a large enough population would find that mix not falling into a simple binary. If anything, the surprise is that it doesn't happen more often.

(I will claim credit that, in explaining transgenderism to PK many years ago, before reading that book, I basically said that some people feel like their gender isn't what other people expect it to be for a whole lot of reasons and that no, I don't know what all of them are, but just like he's a boy even if everyone thinks he should be a girl b/c of his long hair, I'm sure it's very frustrating for those people to have everyone tell them they're something that they know they're not etc etc.)

I dunno why that duh moment sort of made me get to the point where the question of causality became irrelevant. It kind of bugs me that, while on the one hand I am perfectly aware that the discourse of the "natural" is a constructed discourse, I still find myself thinking in those terms a lot.* Still, though, somehow having an explanation that *felt* obvious for something that I *knew* but only apprehended intellectually made a big difference. I suspect it's like this for a lot of people grappling with things outside their realm of experience: you can learn something with your brain, but you need an explanation that accords with your own experience or intellectual preferences to really internalize it. (This belief in the distinction between knowing and feeling something is a big part of why I think anecdote is hugely important to learning, btw.)

Anyway. All that by way of saying duh, APA. Even if you guys don't really Get it, it should be obvious to you on basic clinical grounds that the Zucker idea that "parents and clinicians should work to socialize very young children who behave in ways discordant with their physical gender so that they come to identify with it" would tend to seriously fuck people up. Treat your kids as though something about them is unacceptable? That's some Grade A parenting, that is! But hey, if they insist on continuing to defy the wishes of the people whose approval and love they absolutely depend on for survival until they're capable of surviving on their own--that is, " teens who have not done so should be helped to adjust to their discordant gender identity"--then hey, we'll throw them a bone and say "okay, we were only kidding. We really *do* love you just the way you are."

I mean, christ. It doesn't take a professionally trained psychologist to realize that this is a prescription for neurosis. God knows that raising kids is difficult, and the line between socializing them properly and implying that there's something fundamentally wrong with them is a lot blurrier than I would like it to be. But every parent knows that gender identity is huge to little kids, and whether you believe that that's an innate drive or the result of intense social pressure or both, it's gotta be obvious that kids who resist their assigned gender identity need empathy, not pressure. Even if you think that their doing so is a sign of something that needs to be fixed, it's complete idiocy to think that refusing to let your child play with girls is in any way healthy, that stressing your kid out over stupid shit like color isn't cruel, or that a kid whose anxiety *increases* as the result of his "therapy" is being well served.

And I knew that shit as a parent even back when I still thought that transgender people were a little queer.




*Which does not mean that I'm suspicious of the idea that biology has causative properties. I like biology. But in terms of human society, or even societies of social animals more generally, you know, there is such a thing as learning.

Public Transportation Improves Quality of Life

After this column, I see no reason why George Will should ever get paid to write something again. First off, as Matthew Yglesias points out, he says something that's just patently false. Will: "Does [Ray LaHood] think 0.01 percent of Americans will ever regularly bike to work?" Yglesias: "Will claims to find it unbelievable that as many as 0.01 percent of Americans would ever bike to work regularly. But rather than tossing off ridicule, he might have looked up the Census Bureau’s statistics on commuting patterns and seen that right now 0.4 percent of commuters normally get to work on bicycles. Now that’s a small percentage. But it’s forty times larger than a percentage that Will deems unrealistically utopian. This would be like saying Dwight Howard is 2 feet tall."

But it gets worse. Not only does George Will hate any kind of change, he also believes that change is impossible. Change doesn't happen, you guys!

Does LaHood really think Americans were not avid drivers before a government highway program "promoted" driving?

You know, it's possible that something could be popular, and nevertheless, due to government action or whatever, become more popular. I know it sounds crazy, but bear with me.

Will thinks that liberals are promoting public transportation and cycling because they hate cars:

And long before climate change became another excuse for disparaging America's "automobile culture," many liberal intellectuals were bothered by the automobile. It subverted their agenda of expanding government—meaning their—supervision of other people's lives. Drivers moving around where and when they please? Without government supervision? Depriving themselves and others of communitarian moments on mass transit? No good could come of this.

Based on this, I can only assume that Will hasn't ever used a decent public transportation system. Because even in a city like Chicago, whose public transportation system is not even close to one of the world's best, public transit gives you significant advantages over driving. Rather than limit one's freedom, it increases it.

I have a car. But most of the time, I don't drive it. And I like driving. I like it a lot—I bought a car even though I didn't really need one. But the fact is that much of the time public transportation is a significantly better option. Riding public transportation means I can read the news while riding to work, thus increasingly the likelihood that I'll actually start working when I arrive, rather than spending an hour surfing the internet. Riding public transportation means I don't have to deal with the stress of driving around and around looking for a parking spot. Riding public transportation means I won't get into an accident. It means I can safely make phone calls during my commute. It means that if I get drunk, I can get home without putting myself and other drivers in danger. It means I don't have to worry about gas, or maintenance, or what the hell is that sound coming from the back wheel? Riding public transportation means I save money.

Even if you're a driver who hates public transit, you should support public transportation initiatives. Why? Because public transit reduces congestion, and gets people like me off the roads, making more room for you. The only conclusion I can draw from Will's position is that he actually likes sitting in traffic.

Will also has an awfully bizarre idea about what the government does:

Today's far-seeing and fastidious government, not content with designing the cars Americans drive to their homes and the lightbulbs they use in their homes (do you know that, come 2014, the incandescent lightbulb will be illegal?), wants to say where their homes can be.

Since when did the government design cars or lightbulbs? Nevermind the fact that getting pissed off about banning the incandescent lightbulb is the most idiotic thing I can think of, since the compact fluorescent is superior to the incandescent in every single way.

At least George Will got one thing right:

But LaHood is a Republican, for Pete's sake, the party (before it lost its bearings) of "No, we can't"

The fact that he says that like it's a good thing tells you everything you need to know about the Republicans.

I'll stop now, because I couldn't possibly do as great a takedown as Amanda Marcotte. The comments to her post are also great, this one in particular, from "Lexie":

I come from the (Peoria-like) midwest. I am blind and don’t drive. In the midwest, to be blind often means to be on SSI, sitting around doing nothing all day. (And this goes for many other nondrivers with disabilities, too.)

I moved to Portland specifically because of its transit and walkability. I live in the suburbs, but I live 1/4 mile from a Max stop, blocks from 2 buses, a few MAX stops away from the commuter train, and I can walk to grocery stores, the gym, my UU church, and many other daily necessities. Good public transportation takes disabled people (and poorer people who can’t afford cars) out of the unemployment line and puts them to work. It makes us independent and able to live normal lives. When anyone starts knocking public transit, it not only means they don’t give a crap about the earth, it means they are really giving a big fuck off to the disabled, the elderly and the poor.

Amen to that.

Falling on Swords

The nice thing about being a Chicago politician is that you can always find someone who'll fall on a sword for you, if you're anybody who's anybody. Just a few days ago, I posted about the Bridgeport mural that was brownwashed at the request of 11th Ward Alderman Bacer? It turns out it wasn't Bacer's fault, even though when asked about the incident, he said: "Yeah, I'm the alderman here. I was told about it and I okay'd it and I stand by it." Told about it? He's the one who requested it. Whoever's idea it was, he said he stands by it.

Correction: stood by it right up until someone with a brain told him this was getting him some seriously bad publicity. Now comes the Department of Streets and Sanitation, with a statement taking responsibility for the ordeal, saying it was the result of "miscommunication" between the Alderman's office and Streets&San. There's no indication about what the miscommunication supposedly was, but I don't see one. The Alderman called in complaining about the mural, Streets&San destroyed it.

What's more, "The representative of the Department of Streets and Sanitation received disciplinary action." It's amazing how when people in power order those who they wield power over to do despicable or illegal things, then talk about how it was that person who fucked up, dontcha know?

And then wouldn't you know that Mayor Daley himself comes right along with the "someone made a mistake" line. In fact, he uses the word mistake a lot (I made a transcript). Sorry, it's only the Mayor's answers; the reporter's questions are inaudible.

It's just one mistake. It's just one mistake. It's a mistake! I'm sorry, this is not the end of the world, with people getting laid off, and people getting killed and shot and hit. This is just a mistake. We take things off of building all the.. it was just a mistake! It's just a mistake, I'm telling you. Did they do it intentionally, they didn't do it mean, there was no meanness on this thing, it was a mistake. People do.. we'll just find out. It's a mistake, we'll find out, it's not that serious. No one was killed. I get children killing out here. I mean, really, I mean fine, there was a mistake. We take...(inaudible) They're always trying to clean up communities, it was a mistake...I think, fine. I don't know but I'll find out. Remember, I got children getting killed out here, they don't get as much publicity as the mural. Please, put everything in perspective.

Hmm, kids getting killed. You mean like Aaron Harrison? Or Jonathan Pinkerton and Luis Colon? Or maybe 8-year old Gregory Jones?

Oh no, you mean the other kids. Oops!

Grow old along with me

Omg, I have discovered the best-ever time waster. At least for people like me, who are in the middle of moving/redecorating/renovating/whatever-the-hell-I'm-doing.

Combine this with either Flickr or with google image search.

Some favs for today, when I am trying to pick colors for to dye a torn-up sheet with which I wish to make a rag rug:

From an image of a coral reef.

From an image of a poppy field.

From another coral reef image.

There's also this site, which is a little more straightforward, and has the advantage of letting you try different variations on the same basic color scheme. In this case, "accented analgic," "tetrad," and "triad" schemes all based on the main color orange.

Precious Real Estate

An incredibly effective way to score a seat on the train.

Scene: Chicago Red Line, 9:00 am

M. LeBlanc: [sitting on the outer of two seats, quietly reading The Ethical Slut]
Dude: Hey there sweetie, can you scoot over so I can sit down?
M. LeBlanc: [rolls eyes, scoots, keeps eyes on the book]
Dude: [sits] I just wanted to sit next to you, you know, with you looking so luscious and beautiful.
M. LeBlanc: [looks up, gives raised-eyebrow glare]
Dude: [looks her up and down, with purpose] Is that okay if I sit here, do you mind, beautiful?
M. Leblanc: If that's how you're gonna be, yeah, I do. [gets up]
Dude: Oh, ok, now my friend can sit down!
[dude scoots over, dude's friend sits down]
M. LeBlanc: Good strategy, man, good strategy.
Dude: Thankyou.

(exeunt)

something new

I have a new 25 Things post almost ready to go but I’m going to delay it to gaze at my navel a little bit.

In 2nd grade I had a massive crush on Ivan E., a blond Egyptian kid with long surfer hair whose father was a professor at USC.
In 3rd grade I crushed out on Stephen T., a Teutonic youth, who shared my table and encouraged me to sneak books under the table during our math lesson.
In 6th grade, I returned to my crush on Ivan E., who was then a minor god at our school.
In 7th, 8th and 9th grade, Bobby B. became my obsession.
In high school, my crushes were several: John M. (the quarterback), Dana J. (the tennis star), as well as Andrew, the punk rocker, whose parents taught at UCLA (and who once asked me out but I totally thought he was joking.)

I didn't care they didn't know about me - weird looking, chubby and with the kind of eyebrows only a Russian dictator would love. It was enough that they simply walked the playgrounds or the quad. I was glad to peer at them from behind a book in the library, from behind a shelf, from under a bleacher or perhaps through a crack in our shared school counselor's door.

Ah, shadowy, nerdy, and unrequited love. The journals from that period still make me cringe.

You'd think I would have outgrown this, but then, you'd be dead wrong. In grad school, my virginal infatuations were longer lived and became a team endeavor. I enlisted spies of my own who kept me apprised of teaching schedules, office hours, gym visits as well as important sartorial changes. (If you haven't fallen into limerance with a creamy-skinned white guy in a kilt then you haven't lived, my friends.) These journal entries are, in the rereading, comic and farcical.

What ties all these objects of my affection together, from elementary to grad school, is the process by which I fell for them and then began to hate them.

Stage 1: The Thunderbolt. It usually happened at the beginning of the semester, during roll call or picking squads for PE. Or the first day of new TA orientation or perhaps while impatiently showing him how to use the copier and you happen to glance up. That first choking gasp. The dazed stare. The flush at first sight of The Beloved. It's devastating, isn't it? I have made elaborate mental meals of reliving the first moments of charged non-contact.

(And before you all start thinking I'm some delusional psychopath, I knew this was wholly one-sided. It was delicious anyway.)

Stage 2: The Thread. In Jane Eyre, which I love, Rochester says to Jane they are connected by a string, one that binds them across distance, mental illness, locked up wives and Britain's social crevasses. Such was my feeling. In this stage, I'd connect everything about them to me, until our 'relationship' map resembled a nutty god's-eye. 'Ivan likes OP shorts! Me, too!' 'Bobby is in my creative writing class! We're perfect!' (Though he wasn't very good at all.) 'Knightley reads Neruda! See??!!'

The Thread was enduring and, depending on the enabling antics of friends, could last for at least a year or two. But one can't really sustain that kind of one-sided intensity without some strain.

Stage 3: Threats. Oh, not verbal threats from me to my Object of Affection, but external threats to the infatuation I had built up. In other words, Reality. Friends, tired of being on stakeout, would slowly begin to sabotage the fantasy. One friend put it to me bluntly: "He is a tool. An Irish sweater-wearing tool who fakes a Scottish accent. You are being ridiculous." Or, as a result of friends' machinations, one realizes their Beloved can only clap on the 1-3 instead of the 2-4. Such knowledge is a killer.

(Of course, the rumor that the Beloved already has an out of state girlfriend as well as a girlfriend in another department is just another rotten cherry on my sundae of disappointment.)

Stage 4: Disdain. Where once I listed their virtues I now canvassed every one of their shortcomings. 'He's not in AP English.' 'His Spanish pronunciation is so gringo.' 'He has no rhythm.' 'Gymnastics is stupid.' 'He's sort of a paranoid freak, isn't he?' 'Only retirees wear cable knit sweaters!' Love, or limerance, is on the wane. Where once my Beloved walked with a golden nimbus of divinity, now he is a duffer who won't dare to eat a peach and wears his trouser bottoms rolled.

...

So in this Richter scale of infatuation, where am I with NewGuy? Am I in the Thunderbolt stage? Am I frantically weaving threads to tie us to one another, no matter how fragile? Or is the golden halo already growing dim?

I don't know. It's an odd feeling, being requited.

If desire is lack, then what is it when you already feel full?

(Consider this your space to wax poetic about first loves, falling in love, the problems of love, the glories of love, or the crazy things we've - uh, you've - done for it. Not that I know anything about that.)

The Downfall of Civilization

It's got to be exhausting, coming up with these kind of gems. So, you know, I'd like to be understanding. But I've heard enough plagiarism stories to know what a bogus one smells like. Fail.

one difference between marriage and civil unions

A nice NPR piece by blog buddy Nancy Goldstein about the financial penalty gay couples suffer because the feds don't recognize gay marriage.

It reminds me of a panel I was on many moons ago for the women's caucus of my former professional organization. We were discussing institutional barriers to women's advancement, and I forget what I said that prompted this comment, but someone in the audience stood up and pointed out that I hadn't even mentioned the financial challenge to lesbian academics, even at gay-friendly insitutions, because of the kind of thing Nancy's talking about in that piece. It's the type of problem that even the best-intentioned and informed of us don't generally think of if we're not members of the relevant group; why would we?

City Goons Deface Private Property and Public Art

This story's got me so mad my blood's boiling. So, Bridgeport, a south-side neighborhood of Chicago that Mayor Daley happens to be from, has an up-and-coming art scene that's really quite interesting. Between all the galleries and experimental cultural centers like the Co-Prosperity Sphere, there's a lot of fairly edgy art dialogue going on down there.

One Bridgeport artist is Gabriel Villa, who was asked to paint a mural on the side of a building at 31st and Morgan. You can see it above. It's gorgeous, and provocative without being too abstract, a perfect subject for a publicly-viewable mural— something Chicago has far too few of. For those of you not from Chicago, the mural depicts three police camera, emblazoned with the Chicago Police Department logo. The police camera are subject to a fair bit of controversy, as they are in areas that have been dubbed "blue-light districts" where people already feel they are under heavy police surveillance. The cameras in Villa's mural are adorned with a skull, a deer head, and Jesus on a cross.

This is the kind of thing that I would be thrilled about if it went up in my neighborhood. Murals are awesome, particularly ones that are socially and culturally interesting (but even ones that aren't). But apparently the people who run the show in Bridgeport, namely 11th Ward Alderman Bacer, didn't like it.

Here's what the mural looks like now. Despite the fact that the mural was on private property (the side wall of a local business), and the art was permitted, nay, requested by the property's owner, the Alderman ordered city personnel, and used city funds, to destroy it. Even the City's own lawyers say that there's no permit necessary for a mural on the side of a private building as long as it's not an advertisement and as long as the property owner has given their permission.

It makes me so angry that people in power simply can't tolerate dissent, even oblique, abstract, aesthetically pleasing dissent in their little fiefdoms. This artist's work was destroyed—work that was not on city property and that I'm sure had significant value not only to him, but to the property owner whose wall it was painted on. I see no reason why Villa and the property owner shouldn't file a suit against the city for destruction of property and violation of their protected speech rights.

That, and another business owner should invite Villa to re-do the mural, or one with a similar theme, on another wall. Make the city keep brown-washing Villa's work until their cowardly authoritarianism is fully exposed.

If Villa went tomorrow and started painting again on the same wall, I'd bet $50 someone would show up to arrest him. Because that's the kind of people we're talking about.

UPDATE: Also, Alderman Balcer is a dishonest idiot. From the WBEZ piece:

BALCER: You know I don't know if there was hidden gang meaning behind it with the cross, with the skull, with the deer, with the police camera's (sic). Was there something anti-police about it? I don't know what's in his mind. That's how I viewed it.

You know how you find out if there's "hidden gang meaning" behind it? Talk to anyone who knows anything about gangs. Like, for example, the cops that are so bonnet-bugged about it. They'll tell you what gang signs look like. Never mind the fact that you would have to have literally lived in a hole to not know the difference between public art and gang graffiti. This is just dishonest crap. For example, this is the gang graffiti that's been on the side of my building for weeks, and no one's bothered to hustle out and get rid of it.

Good work, Chicago.

(everything via Chicagoist.)

This one's for Taddy [Cover Thursdays: Acid Tongue]

Sometimes I think it'd be really nice to get paid for blogging. I like writing, and I get more satisfaction out of the good posts I write than from all but the very best days at my job. But one nice thing about not getting paid for blogging is that I get to do whatever the hell I want, subject, of course, to the will of the blog collective, whose attitude is basically "sure, whatever." I like it. So I need a project. I'm feeling antsy and bored. And tonight, I saw this post at the personal blog of Megan Carpentier (of Jezebel), which contains a video of a Jenny Lewis song that I had never heard. I was instantly smitten, and because the chords are shockingly easy, I knew I'd be able to play it with my limited guitar skills (did I mention extremely limited?) before I even googled "acid tongue jenny lewis tab." Now it's 3:00 am and I've just spent the most fun time alone I've had in months. So, until further notice, I'll be doing a cover every week. I don't care if there are mistakes and the guitar sounds like shit (maybe I should pay money for actual software...).

I don't really know shit about mixing, but I know that this sounds way better on headphones, so I advise you to listen using those. I made this using a PC, my Ovation Celebrity Acoustic/Electric Guitar, the M-Audio FastTrack I bought from Best Buy, a cheap mic also from Best Buy. Recorded and "mixed" (i.e. fucking with the levels) using Audacity, a free audio-editing program. Oh, and my lungs.

Linda Hirshman: Misogyny pays her bills

There's a particular fight that my boyfriend and I often get into. He claims that I am extremely loath to admit when I'm wrong. And I'll cop to it. I'm stubborn. I dig my heels in. I view conceding facts or lines of argument as weak. I'll reframe and rephrase and issue caveats so that I'm still right. And then I'll argue about whether or not I'm willing to admit I'm wrong. It's a funny cycle.

That personal failing notwithstanding, I have admitted I was wrong several times on the blog. Of course, I usually admit I'm wrong when there's no one actively arguing with me. I was wrong about websites that take non-pornographic pictures and post them for others' sexual gratification. And, more recently, I was wrong about prosecuting the torturers.

I'm about to do it again. Way back in 2005, Linda Hirshman wrote an article for The American Prospect arguing that women should stay at work for the benefit of all women. Despite claims by many that Hirshman was expressing her disdain for women and that she was unreasonably holding individual women and their choices as responsible for the downfall of feminism and women's equality, I defended her passionately. I was in law school at the time, and looking forward to a great career. I was appalled by a few of my classmates who explicitly said they only planned to practice for a few years, then get married, have kids, and drop out of the workforce. I fervently argued that Hirshman was right.

But I was wrong about Hirshman. She's a misogynist through and through, and I don't know which women she thinks she's fighting for. She's made it abundantly clear what she thinks of women, and particularly young women, in her inaugural piece for Slate's new women's magazine, Double X, titled "The Trouble With Jezebel." She's talking, of course, about Jezebel.com, the popular website that's aimed at women and is part of the Gawker media empire. When I read the first line of the piece, I had a sinking feeling that she was going to be talking about the infamous "Thinking and Drinking" debacle, and I wasn't disappointed. I wrote about it last year.

Hirshman's criticism of Moe and Tracie for being insufficiently good role models for all women gives way to a more insidious, nastier kind of criticism. To wit:

But unregulated sexual life also exposes women to the strong men around them, and here, the most visible of the Jezebel writers reflect the risks of liberation. Even if the girls gone wild stories are substantially overstated, the emergence of Tkacik and Egan as brand emissaries of Jezebel, and its attendant increase in popularity—as well as the responsive posts from the community of commenters, who call themselves “Jezzies” or “Jezebelles”—forces feminism to confront their public sexual narrative. How can women supposedly acting freely and powerfully keep turning up tales of vulnerability—repulsive sexual partners, pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, even rape?

Shorter Hirshman: when bad things happen to you, it's punishment for being such a slut.

I don't know how one of the more famous feminists in the world can write that paragraph without a chilling, sick sense of how much she's actively engaging in slut-shaming. This is virtually indistinguishable from the garden-variety slut-shaming we get from the religious right. Since she's willfully not getting it, I'm going to explain it. How can women "supposedly acting freely" have all these things happen to them? Because these things happen to all kinds of women. Staying "chaste" until marriage isn't going to prevent you from getting raped. Having sex with only one partner isn't going to ensure that you never get an STI. And keeping your legs closed will certainly, certainly not ensure that you won't end up with a "repulsive partner."

The "regulation" of sexual life that Hirshman alludes to (i.e. not being such a slut) has done and will do nothing to protect women from violence, pregnancy, and disease. And her "supposedly" is offensive—she implies that women who have multiple sexual partners aren't doing so because they want to, but because they're capitulating to men. In the previous paragraph, she said "Liberation always included an element of sexual libertinism. It’s one of the few things that made it so appealing to men: easy sexual access to women’s bodies." According to Hirshman, the only true way to be a proper feminist is deny men access to our bodies, and deny ourselves sexual pleasure. Because we will be exposed to the "stronger men" by going outside the house, and of course no "stronger men" will be around if you stay a virgin.

But it gets worse. Not only are women to blame when they get raped, hurt, or abused, they're also to blame for the rapes of other women when they decide not to report rape. Hirshman's referring, of course, to Megan's piece about why she didn't report her rape. The money quote:

Given the high level of risk the Jezebel life involves, it is surprising that the offense that arouses the liberated Jezebels to real political fury is the suggestion that women like them might be made responsible for the consequences of their own acts, or that there might be general standards that define basic feminist behavior. Suggest that women report the men who rape them for the sake of future victims, say, or that women should be asked why they stay with the men who abuse them, or urged to leave them, and the Jezebels go ballistic. Judgmental, judgmental!

The "consequences" that Hirshman refers to are the bad acts themselves. Other women being raped is a "consequence" of Megan not reporting her rape. Your physical abuse is a "consequence" of not leaving the asshole who's beating you.

Men are absent from all this. Nowhere in the piece does Hirshman remember that it is men who are doing these things. No, women are responsible for policing men's behavior, for denying their own sexuality, for bearing the incredible hardship of dealing with the criminal justice system and accepting their own re-victimization by it, for bearing the responsibility for their own abuse.

Hirshman doesn't understand what "the personal is the political" means. She thinks it means that your personal choices, difficult ones, affect your right to have political opinions. For example:

How can writers who justify not reporting rape criticize the military for not controlling…rape?

Because choosing not to report your rape when you're 17 in a foreign country is exactly the same as the military's efforts to cover up and excuse the violence against women within their ranks? Hirshman's the one who's incoherent, not Megan. She's also suffering from some reading comprehension problems. Take this:

Doing what feels good to you is the only standard that is allowed. The problem is that no one really wants to admit that some things feel bad, because that admission would threaten the whole system of unlimited individual action.

Women choose not to report rape not because they're not acknowledging that rape "feel[s] bad," they choose not to report because they realize that engaging with the criminal justice system can cause them as much or more pain than the rape itself. And young feminists have a lot of serious dialogue about what is the right, ethical thing to do in any given situation, while simultaneously acknowledging that it's not fair to say that women have to suffer for the uncertain benefit of other women. No one has to be a self-chosen martyr for the cause.

Let me say it plain: Women are not to blame when pain and violence are inflicted upon them by others. No matter how much they drink, no matter what they wear or what pictures they post of themselves on the internet, no matter how many sexual partners they've had before, no matter how late at night they're walking home. Women are not to blame for the rape of other women because they didn't report a rape. Women are not to blame, and they bear no responsibility for their own rapes or the rapes of others.

Anyone who thinks otherwise is a misogynist who believes that violence and pain are what women deserve for the crime of choosing to live their lives in any way other than in constant fear. And Linda Hirshman has definitively revealed herself to be in their ranks.

For further reading: See Jill at Feministe, Jessica at Feministing, and Megan's response at Jezebel.

Also: Spencer Ackerman at FDL has a great post about this. "You just put those tits out there, whore, so how can you blame the poor guy for grabbing."

Stand and Deliver

The antidemocratic, anti-Constitutional, forces that tried torturing captives into confessing Sadaam ordered them to carry out the September 11 attacks (see Senate Armed Services Committee Report) are now trying to torture the Speaker of the House of Representatives of the United States into confessing she shares their guilt. This is consistent with the purposes of torture; coercion and blackmail.

They failed to extract Sadaam's imaginary orders to the jihadi animals because they did not exist. They will fail to blackmail the Speaker because a) the disinformation report used to blackmail the Speaker has itself been subverted by the Director of Central Intelligence and, more importantly, b) we don't give a shit.

If speaker Pelosi shares guilt with the dubya criminals, and that's a big IF, than she must share their punishment. What is more likely is that she and other Congressional leaders were snared by the dubya regime's briefings as part of a GOP protection racket; nice little political career you got here - be a shame if anything happened to it.

I don't doubt that leaders of the Opposition were cowed into submission to the dubya torture program. That only proves that torture works - not to protect the country from our enemies but to protect the regime from the People.

The President has tried to play nice with the torturers. He's tried a policy of letting bygones be bygones. He's tried to tell us to look to the future and not worry about the past. Now we see why that won't work. It only emboldens them, to borrow a pet phrase from the Party of Torture.

If we take bin Laden alive, I won't object if the torturers peel the flesh from his living body with super-heated vice grips. Just for the fun of it. Hell, put the whole auto-da-fe on Pay-per-View as the opener for the next All Star Pro Wrassling card. Use the revenue to pay the next round of AIG's unearned bonuses. I don't give a fuck.

But now that the torturers are turning their instruments of coercion and blackmail on our elected leaders, I say enough is enough. Investigate em. Charge em. Try em. Convict em.

All of em.

Exactly

"The very idea that our soldiers should not be quite capable of subordinating their personal beliefs to the needs of their unit is as insulting. The idea that if some of them can't, we should fire the people they object to rather than the ones who cannot be counted on to put their jobs first, is just bizarre."

Via Hilzoy, who also has a good post about Hirshman's idiotic piece at Slate. Which I am not even going to fucking engage, except to say that there's a difference between voicing hard truths undiplomatically, which is fine, and pretending that people are ideologically-driven brains on sticks without feelings or individuality, which is both heinous and stupid.

I don't like Mondays

Especially not yesterday's version. Wanna shoot the whole day down.

Everything that's going on with me is totally banal and normal and average, but it all has me feeling upside down.

In the last 4 days, I've: completed and submitted all my grades for my last classes at my PhD institution, which including failing my first student; put my house on the market, a move attended by ceaseless cleaning and packing and storing; attended the graduation of a very close friend, which had me as emotionally overwrought as if it were my own again; photographed and listed a ton of things on craigslist; taken my baby to the beach; slapdash prepared the house for 5 showings the first 3 days it was on the market; looked at 8-10 homes in new town, made offer on 1, had it accepted; made eleventy phone calls about new home insurance policies and financing. And I've cooked some meals in there as well. And re-read M. Butterfly, which was even more amazing than I remembered.

And in short, I am tired. [and hear the mermaids singing, each to each]

It's been a mixed bag, overall. We love the new house, love the neighborhood. I feel enormously relieved to have that taken care of. I feel less relieved at the thought of 2 mortgages (we didn't make a contingent-on-our-home-selling offer). When I told my mom we made this offer she couldn't even muster anything that sounded like excitement, so great was her shock. Friends and neighbors here are more positive about it, but those conversations are all tinged with sadness about our leaving, some more overtly than others, and they feel heavy and tiring to me. We are spending money left and right, between the eating out and travel and the storage unit and the earnest money and the person coming to clean my house today (which is a first for me and I feel completely strange about it. I have nearly cancelled 4 times).

The new parenting and partnering challenges are what really preoccupies me, though. I had a series of mommy blunders over the last few days tat have wiped me out. I forgot my daughter's bag with her favorite toys and blanket in the new house town. When I realized and told her, her face crumpled for a second, then she said, "It's ok mom, that was just a mistake." And I nearly begged her to cry, because the 3 yr old stoicism was so heartbreaking.

Then yesterday. We had a showing of the house in the evening, so we picked up and went next door to the neighbors. They have 2 girls, 5 and 7, with whom mine runs around all the time. In my frenetic getting-us-out-of-the-house mode, I didn't tell my kid why, I don't think, we were leaving; just said we were hanging out next door. The neighbors were playing in the front yard, so I dropped my own kid with them and went in their house to kvetch with their mom. After a few minutes, we realized we couldn't hear the kids anymore, which is an impossibility if they were in a yard anywhere on the street - these are loud girls. We went outside and started calling, no response. I will admit to feeling total panic after 3 minutes of calling and looking confirmed they weren't hiding from us. Then suddenly I hear the door to my house swing shut and I see the oldest girl come running out. I also see a strange vehicle in the driveway, meaning their are strangers in the house looking at it.

I started yelling at my neighbor, "No, no, you can't be over here right now! What are you thinking? Go home!" I ran in the house and found the other 2 girl on the couch playing with a bunch of shit they had dumped out, oblivious to the fact that 3 strangers were opening closets and measuring walls. I yanked them both up by their fat little arms and dragged them outside, growling at them the whole way. My tension and volume were way up because I hadn't known what happened to them, and yet all I could yell at them about was how they weren't allowed to be in the house. I was yelling at my 3 yr old about how she was supposed to know that she wasn't allowed to be in her house. Which I hadn't even told her.

She was hysterical for a few minutes, but calmed down quickly when I did and as I explained to her that I was really upset because she is supposed to tell me if she is leaving the area (which she wasn't really, but I needed to hang on to something). I did a lot of apologizing about not having explained things to her. I had a much harder time settling down the 7 yr old, who spent the next hour locked in her room. She finally let me in to talk to her and explained that she felt really embarrassed. I made no attempt to maintain a position of authority or of having been at all in the right. I spent 20 minutes explaining that we were scared but only because I assumed they knew something (we can't go in Sybil's house) that they couldn't know. I talked about how adults get distracted and are caught up in things that make them forget what they've said and what they haven't, and that in truth it is a product of my trusting her so much that I forget what needs to be spelled out. The poor thing is already emotionally fragile about our moving, she has been having spontaneous cry fits about it. And then she gets berated for behaving as though we still live there, not knowing the rules have started to change.

So all that was exhausting and because I was an emotional wasteland thereafter, Mr. Vane and I found a way to start a fight within 3 minutes of his getting home. Which we conducted in front of our daughter, yelling at each other even as she is saying, "Daddy, don't forget to take care of mommy." "Mommy, why won't you stop crying?" God, it was like some shitty movie with Judith Light in it.

So I am trying to have a slower, more careful Tuesday. And to explain that I feel badly about never blogging about things that matter out there in the world, like this, but am stuck in my own space. And I will probably be carving some time out of every day to take my kid for ice cream. And working on my next self-involved post about how I am doing a shit job taking care of my husband as well.

God bless the child that's got his own

So I spent today basically restocking the china cabinets. Late in the afternoon, Pseudonymous Kid found himself "bored" and was unable to get the kids down the street to come out and play. He was likewise unable to get *me* to come out and play, because I was busy restocking the china cabinets.

So I said--thinking this was going to be one of those parental moments where you deliberately say irritating things to children--"if you're bored, you can help me restock the china cabinets." And lo and behold, he really was bored enough that that sounded like a good idea, and he went to work wiping down each. individual. piece. of. china. so that I could arrange them in the cabinets that I had earlier vacuumed, then cleaned with murphy's oil soap and glass cleaner. Because goddammit if I am going to have an anal-retentive living room filled with eight thousand pieces of crystal, glass, and china, I am going to do it right.

(count them: three china cabinets)

As we performed our fussbudget task, Pseudonymous Kid started thinking. "Mama," he said, "We have waaaaaay too much china."

"Yes we do," I replied.

"Mama, please don't let me inherit all this stuff from you like you did from your grandma," he joke-begged.

"Well, actually, PK, what I should really do with some of this stuff is sell it."*

"Like in a yard sale?"

"Well, no. . . I mean, yard sales are a good way to sell things, but some of this stuff is actually worth a fair bit of money, I think. I'd make more if I sold it online; there's this site called ebay where you can sell things and people all over the world can bid on them, like in an auction."

"Oh! Because in a yard sale, you just sell to people who walk by, and they want everything to be cheap. . ."

". . . but in an auction, people who really want something will be more willing to pay what it's worth, exactly."

Pseudonymous Kid was excited. "Hey, Mama! You know all that stuff in the back room?" (The back room is actually a converted uninsulated porch, which connects to PK's room by a window; we're gonna put a ladder in so he can climb out the window and down to the porch, which will be his playroom.) "If I go through that and find things that I don't really want any more, do you think I could sell it on ebay?"

"Sure," I answer, thinking of this purely in terms of getting the kid to winnow down his stuff, and not quite realizing what I'm about to get into.

"And will you show me how ebay works and help me? And can I keep any money I get? I mean, to put it in my bank account."

"Absolutely, PK. I think that's a great idea, and very responsible of you."

Only, see, the kid immediately heads off, visions of millions floating in his head. This is going to be like so many of his ideas: more freaking work to actually implement than I imagined when I first assented. Usually I turn into flaky mom and nothing comes of his ideas, and then weeks or months later he complains or cries about our lack of follow through. But since this tendency makes me feel guilty as hell--I'm turning PK into a procrastinator with no kind of work ethic just like me, oh noes!--and, perhaps more importantly, because (1) I really do want him to get rid of about half his freaking toys; (2) I think it would be awesome to get him to start learning a little bit about handling money; and (3) I really do need to get rid of about half this freaking china; I'm going to try to put this plan of his into practice.

I'm not sure, though, if I should discourage him from listing items like "a handful of broken magnets" or if I should let him learn a little bit about the resale value of stuff through trial and error.



*When this stuff was first unpacked, like three months ago, Mr. B.'s suggestion was that I take individual photos of it all and have a "who wants this piece of crap?" contest on the blog. But fuck you people: you can bid for it on ebay like everyone else.

If you listen, you can hear the sea

This is part of what I've done with my morning; as a mother's day present, Mr. B. really went to town on the living room yesterday, finishing up all the holes along the walls where the two china cabinets and sideboard go, so that we were able to push them back against said walls and out of the center of the damn room. The big central shell belonged to my aunt, who is now in a nursing home with MS; the cowrie and other larger shells are PK's, but the sand dollars and smaller ones--tiny, perfect urchins and abalone and periwinkle and whelks--are mostly from a prize my sister and I won when I was something like ten, in a sandcastle building contest somewhere along the Oregon coast. I've had them each wrapped individually in bubble wrap for probably twenty years, waiting to be somewhere permanent enough to finally unpack them.

Which means that, since today was ostensibly the court date for the dead cat people but--b/c the process server has yet to serve the fuckers--we showed up, thinking we were only going to ask the judge for (another) extension, only to find that we weren't on the docket (at which point we went down the hall to the small claims window and got a new court date); since, I say, today was ostensibly the court date, I had already begged off helping in PK's class this morning. So I decided to take advantage of having the morning free and stay home and play housekeeper. I swear this is the only kind of cleaning I really like: dusting and cleaning glass and organizing stuff so it looks nice and fiddly, anal-retentive stuff like that. Not that I do it very often, because usually the kind of cleaning I hate (picking shit up, washing dishes) gets in the way. If I'm going to clean at all.

ANYWAY. All that is by way of a VERY LONG prologue to the real point of this post, which is this:



It has begun: an entire population is having to relocate because of global warming.

The Carteret Islanders live what seems from here an idyllic existence (and yes, I realize, I'm engaging in a bit of postcolonial "noble savage" nonsense here, but bear with me): they farm and fish on a small group of coral islands in the South Pacific. Doubtless if I really had to live without electricity or running fresh water or fussy antique furniture or decadent cupcakes for breakfast or hot showers I would actually bitch and moan ceaselessly, but as I gaze upon my pretty little shell collection or watch the video above, it's easy to imagine living on a tropical beach as absolute heaven.

Not that my life is the point here; the point is that an entire population are basically losing *their* homes and way of life. Bougainville Island, where they're relocating, is an interesting place dealing with ongoing problems stemming from the Papua New Guinean government's desire to exploit its copper resources and (from what I gather), the Bougainville islanders' desire to be basically left the hell alone.

So, quite a shock: lose your homeland, move someplace with a denser population and ongoing political/economic/environmental issues of its own. Adjust. Watch your home sink into the sea.

Maybe the Carteret Islanders will be able to bring along some shells to display in their new homes. Pretty knick-knacks, memories of beaches that they won't be able to return to with their own little PKs.



Via Hilzoy, who got it from Drum somewhere; the linked story in Hilzoy's post isn't working for some reason, but you can read more about it here, and there's an interesting footnote about the language of the Carteret Islanders here.

Happy birthday, bitch

Today is LeBlanc's birthday. Almost missed it, but not quite!

Not that she's reading this post, since she's visiting her bf. Probably they're doing something "fun" like "going out together" or "having sex" or something like that.

Happy motherfucking mother's day

When I say to Pseudonymous Kid that I would like him to do something other than play video games for a while, please, I don't mean that I want him to move over to his computer and listen to reviews of video games.

This post brought to you courtesy of my having somehow reached the end of my rope about the state of our cute new house construction project. I can't stand the mess! But I can't do anything about it because the cabinets are all in the middle of the living room and there is plaster and tools everywhere and AAAAH!

Feel free to kvetch about your own children, or whatever, in the comments.

The wild west

The main building at the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden burned down. I bought one of my gardening books there last summer, and was hoping to go pick up some plants there soon!

Presumably the gardens themselves--which are awesome; different areas focus on different ecosystems all over CA--didn't do to well either. :(

If I'm not mistaken, the in-laws of one of my grad student friends live on a street where at least two houses burned, as well. I hope that their place (and, of course they, though I assume they've evacuated) are okay.

Oh, and in other news we had an earthquake earlier today.

H/t Chris Clarke for the sad news. Oh, and those of you who, like us, love the western landscape (fires, earthquakes and all) can go here real quick to try to convince the Bureau of Land Management to prevent a bunch of off-roaders from tearing up a protected area in Utah tomorrow as a form of "protest" against preservation laws.

Go read someone else

I realize, of course, that Bitch. Ph.D. is the only blog worth reading. But just for the sake of variety, I do occasionally read other blogs. I even occasionally see the other bitches commenting elsewhere, doubtless merely for the sake of spreading the bitch gospel far and wide. Doubtless you ingrates readers, too, have been forced on rare occasion to read something someone else wrote, if only because of a slow posting day here.

Okay, but seriously. I have guilt. Guilt! About all the really brilliant things that I don't blog about on the grounds that "everyone" has blogged it already. I sort of realized how dumb this is when y'all started asking questions about the police beating video in this post. Duh, as I tell students: the stuff that's in your mind seems obvious *to you*, but that's because it's in *your* mind; the point of writing is to explain it to others.

Of course, we are usually best at teaching the things that we're most conscious of being not-so-good at ourselves, since those are the things we've had to deliberately think about improving, and this was one of my problems as an academic, too (and is a larger problem of mine in general): the assumption that if I know something, everyone else in the universe does, too, and that therefore there's no point in doing more than making, at best, a passing reference to whatever-it-is. That said, I am and will doubtless remain exceedingly lazy. So in lieu of actual work, I thought the least I could do would be link to a few of the blogs that I think are doing the best job these days of talking about the stuff I wish I were talking about, but don't because all I'd do is say "yeah, what she/he said."

ObWi has been doing a particularly awesome job of blogging Specter's shift to the Dems lately. This on top of Hilzoy's ongoing attention to the torture and rendition issues, which she's been doing so well for so long that I fear I've grown to take it for granted. If, however, for some reason you don't read ObWi every day, you really really should.

Along similar lines, I kind of assume that everyone reads Glenn Greenwald. Yes, I too find the one-note tendency of his blog (okay, two notes: torture and free speech) kind of, well, one-note. And yes, he tends towards wordy self-righteousness. But the fact is, he *is* right about this stuff, and he pays close enough attention to really provide detailed, fact-checked examples, ripe for the publicity machine. It's a real shame that his stuff pretty much only gets linked to in the liberal political blogosphere (that I know of); shit like Harman's hilarious hubris really needs to be all over the net and the cable news cycle, imho.

EotAW, like Bitch, is a mixed cornucopia of various tacks on a hodgepodge of multiple varied topics. But if you are at all interested in the economic recovery, you really should be checking in on Eric Rauchway's New Deal Denialist Truth Squadding posts, in which he takes on the "legitimate" authors who deal in teabag-style nuttery about history and economic policy. In fact, even if you think you're not interested in the economic recovery, you ought to read those posts. Those who don't know history are doomed to sound like fucking morons in public (and, more insidiously, possibly doomed to force the rest of us to deal with the consequences of their ignorance).

So that's a taste of my "if we had a blogroll" list. It's mostly politics focused, I guess, b/c that's the stuff I have the most guilt about not covering often enough these days (given all the interesting stuff happening). And it's short, b/c if we ever *do* have a blogroll again, I'm determined to keep it short--long, long blogrolls are pretty useless (and hard to maintain).

Nominations from cobloggers? Readers? (Please provide "why" explanations.)

Quit Dieting

My butt, circa 2007

Today is International No Diet Day. I know I'm opening up a giant can of worms on this blog by stating my belief that dieting does more harm than good, but I don't care, because this is important. For all of you still lingering in the land of hating your body and trying in vain to change it, today's a great day to start stopping dieting, because...

drum roll...

Blogular blog-crush Kate Harding and her fellow fat-acceptance blogger Marianne Kirby Wrote A Book.

I'll be putting up a review once I get through it, but you really don't need to read my review to know that it's going to be awesome. A few reasons:
1) Kate and Marianne are funny as hell and write very well. Plus, they swear a lot .(bonus!)
2) The central principle of the book is unassailable: Stop Dieting. Stop waiting to be thin to live your life. Focus on "health at every size," that is, eating nutritious foods and getting great exercise, while abandoning the notion that your body is not ok the way it is. Smash the notion that healthy=thin. Buy clothes that make you look great the way you are, not clothes for the thinner version of yourself you wish you were. If you're fat, own it--fat isn't an insult, it's a descriptor like "blonde" or "short" or "lanky."
3) I guarantee you, even if you don't fully embrace fat acceptance, something in this book will resonate with you, because you can't possibly be a woman in this society without having absorbed all kinds of negative messages about women's bodies and your body in particular. You need this book, and your body needs it more.

Buy it here.

Freudian Specter

In Deborah Solomon's Questions for Arlen Specter, we find this gem:

Many women can never forgive you for your aggressive questioning of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. Do you regret your behavior?
No. When a serious charge is made like sexual harassment, the subject is entitled to question the accuser and find out the facts, and that’s what I did.

If you'll recall, the "subject" of the accusations was Clarence Thomas, not Arlen Specter. But I believe that it felt like he was being accused, because the concept of sexual harassment threatens the entire patriarchal order, particularly when it almost prevents someone from becoming a supreme court justice.

Oops!

Critical Reporting

Via Matthew Yglesias, I am incensed by this Jeffrey Rosen piece in The New Republic about Sonia Sotomayor. Rosen's point is as follows: he talked to some people, none of whom he names as sources, and he doesn't know much and didn't talk to enough people, he admits, but yet he feels qualified to opine that Sonia Sotomayor Is Kinda Dumb.

I don't know who this article is directed at, but as a lawyer who knows at least a little bit about judges, this rankled me so hard:

The most consistent concern was that Sotomayor, although an able lawyer, was "not that smart and kind of a bully on the bench," as one former Second Circuit clerk for another judge put it. "She has an inflated opinion of herself, and is domineering during oral arguments, but her questions aren't penetrating and don't get to the heart of the issue." (During one argument, an elderly judicial colleague is said to have leaned over and said, "Will you please stop talking and let them talk?")

This is a perfect example of why we need more women and especially feminists in the media. If someone said this to me, I would not uncritically report it in a national magazine as if this were an unproblematic assertion.

Seriously? A bully on the bench? If you've been to almost any oral argument anywhere ever, you know that this is nearly impossible under the standards that most judgess set by their behavior. The point of oral argument is for judges to ask you questions, not for you to stand and make a speech. Furthermore, the assertion that she's not that smart and is a "bully on the bench" hoists a giant sexism flag, to me. Take, for example, one of the judges I've seen in action multiple times: Richard Posner. He's on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Richard Posner is a complete asshole on the bench. He interrupts, he opines, he's dismissive. But do people write articles in the New Republic saying he's not qualified to be a Supreme Court Justice because he's a "bully on the bench"? No, he's hailed as a genius. In fact, he's probably the most famous federal judge there is. And as to "don't get to the heart of the issue," well, judges of all kinds are notorious for getting hung up on tangential questions. That's why they have the phrase "finer points of law."

I'm not trying to say Posner isn't smart. He is. My point is that even if they are right that Sotomayor asks a ton of questions from the bench, that makes her no different from hundreds of male judges who do exactly the same. If anything, it makes her different from the rest of the female judges who are less aggressive (though Ginsburg is no shrinking violet).

And her colleague who leaned over and told her to shut up? That's evidence of nothing except that her colleague is an uncollegial asshole. You just don't do that to a fellow judge. Assuming the anecdote is true, and the fact that the colleague is described as an "elderly" judge, I smell sexism all over it. But does Rosen consider that? That Sotomayor might have been unfairly regarded by the other judges and those judges' clerks (who were undoubtedly influenced by the judges they worked for), who were prejudiced against Sotomayor because how could a woman—a Puerto Rican, for god's sake!—think she could have as much right to speak and to question and to dominate as they do? But let's move on, shall we? Rosen continues:

This provoked Judge Cabranes, a fellow Clinton appointee, to object to the panel's opinion that contained "no reference whatsoever to the constitutional issues at the core of this case." (The extent of Sotomayor's involvement in the opinion itself is not publicly known.)

Let me get this straight. One liberal judge criticized the opinion written by a panel that contained another liberal judge. We don't know whether she wrote the opinion. And judges criticize opinions written by other judges all the time. As it turns out, that's what appellate courts are for. But yet, this is evidence that Sotomayor is a big dummy!

Also, the "no reference whatsoever" comment was in a dissent. This would hardly be the first time that a dissenting justice criticized an opinion that they were, you know, dissenting from.

To assert that she doesn't have the "intellectual firepower" to be a Supreme Court Justice, especially with no evidence other than some questionable assertions like "she talks too much" and "other justices have criticized opinions that she may or may not have written" smacks of sexism and racism. Because it just so happens that you never hear these assertions about a white man being considered for the bench. You hear that his philosophy is too liberal, too conservative, too activist, too constructionist, too this or that. You hear that he's an unknown quantity, which could be good or bad depending on context. You hear that he may not have enough experience. But you never, ever hear that hey, he just doesn't have the innate intellectual ability.

But I don't think Jeffrey Rosen ever even considered that his so-called sources' opinions of Sotomayor might be colored by their own sexism and racism, or by the sexism and racism of the judges they worked for, who their perceptions were being filtered through. I'm just a lowly blogger, but isn't evaluating the credibility of your sources one of the primary things you're supposed to do, as a journalist?

I have one final point. What earthly reason is there to quote anonymous sources here? Sources don't get to be anonymous just because they want to baselessly trash someone else's reputation and not have to answer for it. They don't get to be anonymous just because they want to. This article contains an example of a situation where unnamed sources are necessary:

"Sometimes the only way to get a story is to promise confidentiality," says Lucy Dalglish, executive director of The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press advocacy group. Ms. Dalglish, a former reporter in Minnesota, remembers relying on anonymous sources to expose the illegal dumping of toxic waste in a pond. "Those folks were never going to come forth and admit to doing what they did if I identified them," she says. "They were afraid they'd be arrested, intimidated or sued. The important thing is that the place got cleaned up."

See any parallel between that situation and Rosen's article? I didn't think so.

Quick Hit: Popular Discourse Trends that Bug the Shit out of Me

Update: because of a persistent spammy troll, I've hidden comments on this post. Sorry. - B Ph.D.

I truly hate pieces like the one at the front page of Salon.com today: Stop Worrying about Your Children! It's an interview with Lenore Skenazy about her book Free Range Kids, the premise of which is that kids are no more in danger than they were 50 years ago and that all this frenetic worrying about safety and health and la-di-da is a bit overdone. Which, in principle, totally fine. I'm not a very worried mom when it comes to things that are trendy to worry about (e.g. vaccines, chemicals in foods/home environment, predators in public spaces, excessive TV) and am generally happy to be told that I am doing a bang up job despite being lackadaisical.

But. My sense is that our general and recent enthusiasm for this kind of discourse is yes, partly about some hysteria about parenting choices (I'm looking at you, Jenny McCarthy), but is also very deeply about our desire to judge other people's parenting and much more exactly their mothering. The helicopter mom may be a real person but I don't actually know her and I am suspicious of articles that want me to judge her.

My point, partly, is that there are a lot of really great books lately about how mothering is cathected with these expectations of perfection, moreso now than ever before, and how that is damaging. It's not that I think these books are wrong: I feel cultural pressure to be a perfect mother and I certainly feel like I am failing at least once a day, on a good day. And yes, let's do be talking about it so as to demystify the mystique. But pieces like the Salon one seem to me less invested in that than they are invested in inviting us to laugh at helicopter moms. And while I know people who are more protective of their kids than I am, while I go to preschool events and sometimes see people chasing kids with hand sanitizer, I honestly see way less actual helicopter parenting than I see media stories about the ubiquity of helicopter parenting.

Yesterday we went to a preschool function and kids were running around pell-mell having a good time. I tried to be aware of whether my own kid was in my sightline, or the sightline of one of my friends, at most times, but that was about all the parenting I did. The adults around me seemed to be operating on the same principle. Except - except for the grandparents present. Those families who had grandparents in attendance, those were the ones, from what I could tell, who had people hovering over their kids. Grandparents chased after them, shoo-ed them away from concrete, took leaves out of their mouths. Parents stood nearby having beers and chatting.

This is exactly how it would have gone if Nonny and Pappy Vane were in attendance. They are always washing my daughter's hands, standing behind her fretting as she climbs, following her from room to room as she terrorizes the house. I know this is partly because of infrequency of exposure - one gets more lax the more hours one logs with a kid who doesn't impale herself. But I actually do think some of it is generational. They worry about different things than I do, and I think that on the whole they worried about more things than I do. It has to be true, for example, that parents of my generation worry less about gender norming than parents of a previous generation did, for example. My sense of the moms around me is that we are all ridiculously busy and don't have the time for the generalized worrying I read so much about. And yet no one - NO ONE - misses an opportunity to criticize moms, whether it is for being too lax, or for being too protective.

This wasn't as quick a hit as I imagined.

Pseudonymous Kid is getting to be that age

Suddenly I find myself having Talks with PK about Becoming an Adult. Not discussions about sex, which have been part of our relationship pretty much since he was old enough to speak. I mean discussions about the social trials and tribulations of pubescence. Which are kind of interesting to have with him, because so many of them are about gender roles in some kind of fucked-up ways, and it requires some thought to walk that feminist line with a male child. But I"m doing my best.

Part of why these convos are happening now may be because his school goes K-8, so he actually knows a number of middle-school kids, and because of the social norms of this school, the older kids have kind of a tolerant and sometimes indulgent attitude towards the younger ones. Which is, I think, as it should be; I'm happy about this aspect of his school. He's got the funny little kid thing going, where he'll occasionally say "teeangers are so weird, I'll *never* think that dressing like that/smoking/that kind of music" is cool--but at the same time, he sort of looks up to the older kids.

But I suspect the convos would be happening anyway as he's getting older, because he has a pretty adolescent sensibility already. He's not steeped in the elementary-boy culture of superheros! and guns! and dudeness! nearly as much as a lot of his peers, but his peers *are* that way. Plus he admires badass contrarianism as a general concept (which helps him negotiate the not-being-steeped-in-dudeness thing while still being cool enough for school, thankfully): his favorite pop culture icons these days are "Yahtzee," whose video game reviews absolutely crack him up, and Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which we're watching with him these days (he's seen everything through season five, and I'm sort of not pushing to move on to the next season b/c I'm not sure he's ready to deal with the Spike/Buffy s&m thing or the extreme misogyny of the villiain in season seven).

(Given those particular pop culture favs, I'm half-amused and half-embarrassed to report that he's totally affecting working-class Britishisms: so-and-so is "just thick," and the other day he called out to our 80-something neighbor, "oi, Mrs. Graves!" Hilarious, but I really hope he grows out of this before high school or his ability to negotiate mainstream American boy culture is going to decline steeply. Plus he'll be insufferable.)

A couple of days ago he and I were waiting for takeaway in a Thai restaurant, and they had the television above the bar tuned to some CSI or other kind of cop/law show, I dunno what all those shows are on tv these days. (And get offa my lawn.) PK's watching it, and of course he has questions.

"Mama, is it really legal to interrogate someone?"
"Well, yes, but look PK, here's the deal. You are absolutely not required to answer questions from the police, ever. So yes, they can arrest people and ask them questions, but the people don't have to answer, and in fact it is generally a good idea not to answer questions from the police without a lawyer."
"Unless you're innocent."
"Well, no. Even if you're innocent, sometimes people say things that make the police think they're guilty. The best thing to do, innocent or not, is to say that you won't answer any questions without talking to a lawyer first."

While I'm saying this I'm thinking, wow, how weird is it that I'm advising my eight-year old about the importance of lawyering up rather than taking the "police are here to help us" angle? But the fact is that PK is a boy, and a mouthy, contrarian one to boot, even though at the same time he's quite cognizant of rules and authority and I can all too easily see him both mouthing off to and being intimidated by cops.

So I say to him. "Look. Obviously if you see something bad happen, like that time we saw a bad car accident, it's okay to answer the questions the police ask about what happened. People who know something about a crime should help the police solve it."

PK: "Unless the person who did the crime says they'll, like, kill you if you answer questions." Me: "Well, in that case the police need to be able to promise to keep you safe, but no, you should still tell them, although of course you want to make sure they're guaranteeing to protect you beforehand.

"But here's the deal, kiddo: a lot of times, cops don't really like teenagers much, and you'll be a teenager someday, and you need to know how to deal with the police if you ever get into trouble."

"Why don't the police like teeangers?"

"Well, teenagers can be kind of smartassed. You're already kind of smartassed, right? And you know how sometimes it pisses grownups off. You're a little kid now, and most grownups will sort of let you get away with a certain amount of that b/c you're a little kid and they figure you don't know any better, but as you get older people start expecting you to know better, like is already happening.

"Plus some grownups, frankly, are just bullies and jerks. And it's sad, but sometimes people who sort of like pushing other people around take jobs where they have authority, like cops--heck, so far all your teachers are really good, but once in a while even teachers are bullies b/c they like pushing kids around. Or coaches."

"Or even some parents."

"Yes, exactly. Plus the police often have to deal with people who are trying to get away with things, and that can make you really pretty impatient and suspicious of people generally. So even cops who aren't bullies and jerks often don't really want to put up with a lot of backtalk or whatever.

"So the thing is, you are not legally required to answer their questions. And they can't legally search your house or your car without either a warrant, which they have to get from a judge, or a reasonable suspicion that there's something happening right now that's an emergency."

"Like, if they think someone is about to be killed in your house, they can go in without a warrant, but basically they have to have a good reason."

"Right. But even though you don't have to let them do stuff, you also should always be respectful about it because even if they aren't legally entitled to make you do stuff, they might try anyway. And if push comes to shove, you might be right, but they still have a gun and a badge and a club, and you really don't want to piss them off even if you're right."

"Mama, did you ever get bullied by the cops?"

"Well, there was this one time." [I'm not going to bother to write it down; it's a boring story. - ed.] "But generally, and I know this sucks, but I'm a girl. And most police officers are men, and a lot of them can be a little bit sexist. So there's this thing that I call the 'pretty girl discount,' which means basically that if you are a pretty girl--and I'm lucky enough that for most of my life I've been pretty enough to get away with this--you can get away with things if you are respectful and cute and act nicey-nice. So like sometimes I've been pulled over for speeding, and I'm all 'oh, I'm so sorry officer!' and he'll go 'that's okay, I'll just give you a warning," and I haven't gotten a ticket."

"I can't decide if that's totally unfair or if it's kind of cool."

"It is totally unfair. But I admit it's kind of cool if you can take advantage of it. But you, PK, are not a pretty girl, and because many cops are kind of sexist, if anything they're going to be more likely to be jerky with you because you're a boy and they might want to be kind of macho and push you around like they're competing with you. So like I say, as you get older, you need to know your rights, but you also need to know how not to get yourself in trouble."

Then I went on to tell him about this incident.

On the Other Hand

A couple of nights ago I answer the phone. PK hears me saying "oh yuck!" and asks what the call's about.

"Actually, I need to talk to you about this anyway. So that was one of those recorded calls from the school district saying that there's some guy who's been hanging out as kids walk to and from school, and he's like opening his pants or something to show middle-school girls his penis." My tone here is more eye-rolling 'ew, how gross' than worried mama, so as not to freak PK out.

"Ew! How gross!" says PK.

"Yeah, totally. Anyway, so look, if you happen to see someone hanging out around the school in a silver car or a black SUV--and I know that everyone drives black SUVs, so this hardly narrows anything down--but if you happen to see someone, you know, acting weird, or you think something looks funny, then you should tell the teachers, okay? And I know you're not quite middle-school age yet, but you know, just in case. Plus of course you don't want him bugging the other kids."

"Plus I'm not a girl."

"Well, but a stranger just seeing you walk by on the street might not know that."

"Good point."

As long as my son's answer to "you look like a girl" is calm acknowledgement rather than a huge freakout, I feel like I'm doing something right.

why i love alfre woodard: a mother's day preview

This is from an Onion A/V interview with the badass Alfre Woodard about getting moms wrong onscreen:

Americans have a hard time writing moms. I’ll get a script and everything’s really great, everything’s well-drawn, but the mom is like this character, like stock footage, they go and get that out. They plug it in, this idea of “mother.” You could lift moms out of any script, no matter what the culture, what the neighborhood, what the economic status, even if it’s a period mom, and you could switch them around, and they’d be the same person. I think it’s because most people don’t really have a human idea, a specific life that they attach to who their mother was. Their mother was there for them, so it either gets deified, or the opposite. That Mommie Dearest kind of thing. We love them or we don’t, or we rebel, but we can’t see who they are. That they are a person in life with taste, with sexuality, with opinions, who is pissy also, who has a right to not be the big tit for you every time you want something. And then we leave, and we go off to college or off into the world to work—you really appreciate your mom then. But there’s that big chunk when you don’t know your mom’s faults, desires, wishes, distastes.

My very favorite part: That they are a person in life with taste, with sexuality, with opinions, who is pissy also, who has a right to not be the big tit for you every time you want something.

In an old post on my other blog ChurchGal (currently on hiatus) I wrote that I thought my mom was happier when she went back to work and had come to this realization while watching her during work parties (she'd take us with her because there was no babysitter and dad worked the nightshift.) I saw a different Mom at those parties. Well, some commenter went batshit, offended that I could say my mother had an interior life that held more than caregiving.

If anyone responds to this post, I don't want this thread to turn into a 'good mommy' v. 'bad mommy' thing; I want us to start seeing motherhood, and sharing stories about motherhood, in all its multiplicity and complexity.

And this, from a woman who will never be a mother.

PS: Dear film people - give Woodard more play!