For the win

FDL has the best Franken/Coleman post.

Love and Chemistry

Like a hair floating in the rich broth of Dr Sybil Vane's satisfying post, S. Tsing Loh's article put me right off my feed. Could have been the chemicals, I guess. The chemicals in me, I mean, not the chemicals in Loh's article.
I've been taking on a lot of chemicals lately, lowering pails of compounds and distillates. The procedure is to take on chemicals for a few days. Then discharge chemicals for a few days.
Then, follows a period of reflection where I spend a few days reviewing my sins and thinking about naked women.
Then the cycle begins again.
There's a posset made from craisins and spent uranium fuel rods that is particulary ghastly.

There's another of ball bearings marinated in a sauce of potato squeezings and evaporated rocket fuel drained from Titan missles dismantled under the terms of the Salt II agreement, pureed and filtered through an old Robin Hood flour sack, boiled in a pot of radioactive algae, then forced through my kidney by a bicycle pump run by the power-take-off of a 1949 Model M Farmall tractor.
Tasty but it leaves a glick in the mouth. Jackets the tongue in fur. Or hair.
There are some other compotes brewed from the table of elements but they're all named for various Greek gods of sodomy and hair so we'll skip over them for now.
Hair is the hostage of these shocking cocktails. I buzzed mine off to spare all the shock of it falling out in hanks before the long bar of alchemy. A homlier sight you cannot imagine.
Naturally, this is a source of hilarity for my so-called friends and family. Poco claims he can see a likeness of some cartoon figure on the top of my pate. I would whip that child if I had the strength to chase him down. And get aholt of him. And whip him.
So, you will understand that I am sensitive on the topic of chemicals. And hair. Especially hair.

Side Note: I'm told the hair grows back differently after the chemical sluicing. Thicker. Different colors, even. My hair is (was) a salt and pepper hue. Mostly pepper.

OK, OK. Mostly salt. I've requested that it be restored in a chestnut or russet tint. Lots of waves. I'll let you know how that works out.

Which brings me back to Sandra Tsing Loh's article. And the chemicals of love.

She lists a taxonomy of types of attraction and their associated chemicals. You've read the article. I won't go over it here. I would only ask; what chemicals are being fed to the lads in the Loh circle? Cause they are not doing the trick. All the married men of her acquaintance have stopped making love to their wives. Or anybody, so far as can be known. I'd call that bad chemistry.
She concludes that domestication is the enemy of copulation and offers certain proposals, none of which I disagree with, for improving contemporary household arrangements. I especially endorse her tribal proposal for child-rearing; turning the kid over to a household of related women-folk. That's the scheme we've hit on here and it works pretty well, not only for the little kid but for me, too.

Suddenly, I feel a deep fatigue. And all this talk of chemicals is making my stomach lurch.

If you don't mind, I'm going to post what I have so far and take a nap. I know I should wait to post till I have this piece completed but, you know, life is uncertain.
I'll holler.

Infinite Fluff

1. I was just in the cafe downstairs getting breakfast. Usually I get a sandwich and take it to go, and eat it at my desk upstairs. But I decided to get an omelette, and since I idiosyncratically hate eating off plastic when the food in question requires a fork, I answered "for here" when the guy asked me "for here or to go?" Several minutes later, I noticed that he was prepping the to-go plate, probably because I always get my food "to go" and so he heard "to go" even though that's not what I said. Not wanting to embarrass the guy or express displeasure as it was a reasonable mistake, I said "actually, I'd like to get it "for here"--can I?" as if I'd changed my mind, though I'd wanted it that way all along. The guy said sure. The woman next to me, turned to me, smiled, and said in a conspiratorial tone: "You're a woman, you can change your mind." I looked at her quizzically, gave a fake half-hearted chuckle, and turned back toward the guy preparing my food. Not content with my brush-off, she repeated herself. "You know, you're a woman! You can change your mind!"

"Uh. Men can't?"
"Nope, only women!" (Laughs loudly)

What in the flying fuck, people? What on earth was this supposed to mean? Was I supposed to laugh at this mutual dig at our gender--oh, those women, so indecisive! Was it supposed to be some kind of shared joke pointing the finger at the invisible men who get irritated with indecisive women?

The cafe never fails to entertain.

2. I'm so in love with this video and I want you all to see it.



3. Last night I cleaned out my purse-messenger-bag-thingy in preparation for my trip today. It's this ritual I go through every time I travel--somehow, carrying around tons of random crap every single day for months while I'm at home in Chicago is just fine, but I have to pare down to the bare essentials the minute I leave the city. And lately, I've been obsessively writing lists. List of jobs, lists of things to do, lists of purchases I've made, lists of my favorite blogs, lists of items in my pantry (a post I never put up). And so I did a bag inventory, and it's a fascinating picture of the general discombobulation that my mostly professional exterior hides. I like looking over each item, examining it, sorting everything into three piles (essential--keep in bag; trash--throw away; important--put somewhere that's not in my bag), having memories. Even from the last two months. And so, without further ado, I bring you the most boring thing that has ever been published on this blog: these are the belongings I've been carrying every day, on my person, for the last several months since the last time I did this. Think of it as a companion piece to Sybil's meditation on place and home--this is a meditation on things.

1 black wallet
1 Canon A550 digital camera
1 Sony Digital Voice Recorder ¹
1 bottle allergy eye drops--generic ²
1 bottle generic ibuprofen--200 mg tablets
21 individual 200 mg ibuprofen pills, scattered in bottom of bag ³
4 tampax pearl regular tampons
3 generic walgreens-brand tampons
$2.87 in change
$1 in bills
1 sharpie; 1 yellow highlighter ⁴
1 lighter (purple)
1 doctor's referral to dermatologist ⁵
1 3-way Radioshack adapter
2 traffic citations, dated 4/11/09 (illegal u-turn; failure to produce insurance)⁶
1 parking ticket, dated 5/11/09 (expired plates) ⁷
1 notice from gas company ⁸
4 nametags bearing my name ⁹
1 business card from court reporter from deposition, 6/25/09
1 business card from veronica, "bra fit specialist"
1 yellow legal pad with 14 pages of notes from deposition, 6/25/09
5 plastic thermometer covers ¹⁰
1 Minneapolis bus schedule #540
1 bus ticket, Minneapolis to Chicago, 6/21/09
1 file folder with 2 federal complaints and 3 motions for class certification ¹¹
1 petition for a refund signed by 47 bus passengers ¹²
3 earrings (2 which match each other)
1 cherry chapstick
1 deconstructed red pen in 6 pieces
1 Tide stain remover pen (purchased 2007)
1 pair headphones
1 Washington Mutual checkbook with 10 checks and an empty ledger ¹³
2 dead batteries
Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor by Sudhir Venkatesh ¹⁴
The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon ¹⁵
1 6x9 spiral notebook in which I am writing this list
1 mini 3x4 notebook containing: various addresses in Dearborn, MI, to-do list dated 4/14/09, notes from Rogers Park town hall meeting.

¹ Which I have used only once since I bought it, but keep carrying in hopes that I will.

² The first eyedrops I have ever taken, purchased when I broke down after 5 days of cat-and-makeup induced puffy eyes. They work.

³ Spilled on approx. 5/10/09

⁴ Highlighter stuck in there to use highlighting those briefs that come later. Dunno what the Sharpie's for.

⁵ When will they stop insisting on biopsy-ing my fucking moles? I don't have cancer, yo.

⁶ Total fines: $135. Dignity loss: infinite.

⁷ Shit, I need to pay this. They got me while my car was in the O'Hare parking lot while I was on vacation.

⁸ See.

⁹ From various functions and conferences and receptions I am required to attend.

¹⁰ Came with the basal metabolic thermometer I purchased to attempt to track my ovulation. Did you know that BBT is remarkably consistently? Nearly every single morning at 6:00 am, my temperature is exactly 97.18 degrees. It's freakishly uncanny.

¹¹ Can you see what's missing? Yup, that's what I'm supposed to have been writing for the last 3 weeks or so. I keep planning on doing research on the train or at night when I can think. It keeps not happening.

¹² The bus must have been over 90 degrees. The air conditioning wasn't working. It was a warm day. There was no ventilation, you couldn't open the windows. It was one of the more hellish experiences of my life. I am not pleased with you, MegaBus. Not pleased at all. That shit was dangerous.

¹³ Does anyone write enough personal checks to even need to keep track of them anymore?

¹⁴ Book's a few years old, but goddamn is it good. It sounds like some very heavy sociological tome, but it's just a big book full of stories about the way people make a living, get by, forge alliances, and deal with the total abdication of responsibility by the government in a poor south side Chicago neighborhood.

¹⁵ Been carrying this in my bag for a month, just started reading a couple days ago. Not only do I have a massive crush on Hemon, but holy crap this is the perfect plane read book for someone who generally hates plane-reading books. Gripping, intelligent, artfully written without being too Eggers-y. Prediction: finished by 8 pm tonight.

Not with a bang but a wimper

Dear Universe -

Are you a regular reader here? I like to think so. If so, you should know, there went my house. It's not mine anymore. It belongs to some nice people who seem to do a lot of good deeds and who work for non-profits. I don't know if they recycle, but they seem decent. And eager.

Universe, I am exhausted. I can haz sleep now? For a month or more?

It's only been 4 years and change in this house. Not much in the scheme of, well, you. But it's my daughter's whole life. We made her in China, in the most clinical sense, but she made who she is here. She learned to talk and to walk and to annoy the ever-living shit out of me, as well as to make me giggle like a preschooler. And we made another life-potential here, but that one got stuck in a fallopian tube. I wrote a mediocre dissertation here. I fought with my husband and my parents and my girlfriends here. I loved all those people here. I made my friends play Wii games on New Year's Eve. I made them lots of chili and made them root for the Steelers. I watched Andre Agassi's last match. I made a lot of promises. I made disastrous carrot muffins once. I also made some Thanksgiving dinners and woke up to Christmas morning. I spent a lot of hours burning my crotch with a laptop, making internet friends. I made a lot of syllabi. I made travel plans. I made decisions. I made some bad decisions, but I made everything I recognize as my adult life right here.

I made, I made, I made.

But not 'I am.' If, Universe, you have some free energy, help me remember over the next few weeks that it's not that I am this space. I just made it something. And I can make the next one something. And I can let the next one make us into something a little older, maybe a little fatter, but still recognizable.

Now: do I dare to take a nap? Or do I have to start braving boxes again?

ding in the land of asshats

It has been a while, poppets. If you've been catching my apoplectic Tweets, you know I can't even get myself together enough to craft a fine piece of writing. Instead, I'm going to vent:

1. Our state legislature is a collection of ignorant, do-nothing boobs who'd rather protect their election prospects than actually get some work done. Unfair characterization? Perhaps. But when you have a budget crisis and only spend ONE frakking day during an emergency session at the capitol and you STILL haven't come to a resolution, then you're frakking useless and incompetent.

(I’m looking at y'all, Governor Quinn, Sspeaker Madigan, Leaders Cullerton, Radogno and Cross! Swear to god, you all deserve a flaming bag of poo.)

2. When they're tired, elected officials can be alarmingly candid. From a GOP legislator: 'Every organization in the state could call us but it still wouldn't matter. People who work in social services vote Democrat; people who use their services tend to vote Democrat. What's in it for us to go your way?' Niiiiice. Frakking useless.

3. The women I work with are awesome. For a month, I’ve been holed up in our 'situation' room, hammering out implementation strategies to save our agency with two other women who are, frankly, awesome. They're smart, feisty, no bullshit and when we disagree we always find a workable compromise. (I’m so angry I advocate more for the 'scorched earth' strategy and they're more for the 'let's work this out' strategy.)

We swing wildly from hope that all this work will bear fruit and we will successfully lobby our legislators to get off their asses to do the right thing to despair that everything we're doing still isn't enough to counteract the massive amount of apathy and partisan bullshit in Springfield. We are not pros at grassroots organizing but I find it amusing to see us suddenly adopting some of its practices.

Our COO worked on the Obama campaign and she comes into the situation room at least a couple of times a day to give us some coaching, some encouragement and tell us stories from the campaign to inspire us - and it works. She rocks. I've already told her, 'When I lose my job, I will need your advice on what to do next and how to get in someone's office.'

She said, 'When folks hear you're on the market, you won't need my help.'

If we're all laid off in the next week or so, we've all promised to convene regularly as Ladies of the Day - slightly bitter, exhausted, depressed, over-educated women who kick ass while being momentarily at loose ends.

4. The people who inhabit our political process are the worst things about it. This isn't some fake cynicism on display here. This is what I’ve honestly seen during the past few months. I used to love watching politics; I loved the drama, the snark, the 'gotcha'-ness. But it's only when you connect the dots, and see that what happens in the political arena actually trickles down and materially impacts a life (or hundreds of thousands of lives), that you realize the people we have elected have cheapened the whole process.

It's a wonderful thing when a farmer downstate can walk into his state rep's office and say his piece and that aide or rep will listen to him. This is the beauty of our state political process. It really is that down home. (By the way, how many of y'all have visited the district office of your local rep?)

But there's another side to it that infuriates me. In Illinois, at issue is a now $9.2 billion deficit budget that the general assembly has chosen not to address. Instead, at the end of the regular session it ignored its responsibility and chose to send a 50% lump sum budget to the governor that basically decimated all of human services. The budget solves nothing, except to put the governor in the uncomfortable position of signing a budget that will turn Illinois into Mississippi.

Here's the infuriating part: they know that.

They know the 50% lump sum budget is a bad idea. They know it doesn't solve the deficit; they know that without revenue, the deficit gets worse; they know the impact of a decimated human services sector on their districts. They know there are structural problems that need to be fixed in this budget and still no one makes a move. For some reason, they think the veto session will bring a magical Resolution Fairy and then they'll find the money to solve the problem.

What they're really doing is keeping their eyes on the 2010 elections and hoping to do nothing that will endanger their seats.

Ask each side what they're going to do about this crisis and they shrug and say the same thing. 'We have ideas,' they say. 'But the other guys don't want to hear them.'

They know the human collateral this budget will cause and they look at you without blinking and say, 'There's nothing i can do. You all will have to call my colleagues and convince them.'

At which point someone grabs my wrist and I clamp down on my tongue so i don't scream, 'Swinging your colleagues is YOUR FUCKING JOB! WHY CAN'T YOU DO YOUR FUCKING JOB?!'

This is an abdication of responsibility that is unacceptable. And I’m not just talking about the GOP here, either. It's the Dems, too. They act like giving a Yes vote was the height of their duty, like voting Yes was a shining gift to the people of Illinois.

Last week, Cynthia Soto, my rep, was in a budget briefing the governor's office had invited us to attend. She stood up and said, 'I voted yes to raise revenue! I did my part! Now do your homework - it's your turn to make those calls to the No votes and get this thing turned around!'

I turned to the woman standing next to me and whispered, ‘What bullshit. What the fuck does she think we've been doing for the past month? When is she going to get off her ass and do her fucking job?'

The woman whispered, 'Unbelievable, isn't it?'

You wanna give us a gift, elected officials of Illinois?

We, the people of Illinois, would love to see you take your jobs seriously and work as hard as we do. Really. We would. Earn your paycheck, you apathetic motherfuckers.

Don't Stop Till You Get Enough

My favorite Michael Jackson song.

Yours?

It's way more rambling than this inside my head

My co-Bitches have been doing such meaningful writing about foreign affairs, education, domestic politics, etc. As one would expect. I keep wanting to check in here with some updates about my own small life, which I actually have been trying to not think too much about, and then can't bring myself to bump a post on Iran. A few weeks ago, LeBlanc and I were talking about doing a series of 'Using up the Shit in our Pantries" recipe posts, and then the next time I look she's Christiane Amanpour. It's intimidating.

Anyway. Moving next week. Sold our house (2 contracts in under a month, in fact), about which we feel obviously fortunate and ambivalent. The 4 yrs we lived here is the longest I've lived anywhere and this is certainly the place where all the adult events of my life have been centered. But, as anyone who has moved knows, it's hard to even make space for the emotional challenges in the face of the logistical ones. I get swept up in emotion in off moments, when the packing tape roll runs out or some such. I've been trying to hold off packing any of the kid stuff so my daughter feels as little alienated as possible and, more importantly, so she has shit to play with while I ignore her all day long. A good idea, but at this point, it means her shit is pretty much the only non-boxed shit in the house which makes for a heinous adult living environment.

I know people for whom this is not the case, but for me and most of my close friends, graduate school was the period in which we undertook a series of canonically adult things - buying homes, getting married, having kids. My close friends and I have all been far from our families while at grad school, and I feel these friends as my family. It's very hard for me to believe that I am about to go and do something that is coded as the beginning of my adult career. I expect, in fact, the environment and challenges and responsibilities of this job at this school to be so widely different than the challenges and environment I dealt with in grad school, it feels more like a career change than anything else.

And that's to the extent that I even think about the job, which is rarely. Moving grown-up lives is so totalizing. It's that much more difficult to think about the realities of having this job when my closest friends are still interviewing for positions for the 2009-2010 year. Still. For mediocre jobs. That are temporary. The honesty and healthy cynicism with which they try reminds me not to be an asshole who dwells too much on imagining the philosophical challenges of her new role.

Still no job for Mr. V in the new town, so he'll be working in our current town M-Th every week. When I tell people about this arrangement, they all get a sort of awkward look on their faces, a mix of discomfort and pity. Im pretty sure they largely assume we are getting divorced - either that this is the initial stage of an acknowledged separation or that a scenario like this can only end in divorce. People seem sad for us. That response makes me sadder than the situation itself, which is hardly ideal but also not that heinous. I worry about it: I worry he will never find a job there, and that I will not like mine so much, and we'll end up bailing on the whole thing after a year. I worry that I don't have nearly the amount of patience required to take care of my daughter during the transition on my own for most of the week. I actually don't worry about divorce over this, and I'm not one of these people who has never thought about divorce. I've thought about it. But not about this. I don't see the physical distance as the kind of obstacle people seem to, whereas I think if Mr V had quit his job to go with, making our money really tight and making him antsy and restless and second-guessy, THAT, i think, in our particular marriage, could have been the death knell.

I have a funny story to tell about the woman working at my storage unit who, yesterday, after asking me how long I have been married, pitched me her book on spicing up the married sex life. I didn't look my best, obviously, as I was hauling things to and from a dusty storage unit, but I don't think I had my "I love the MIssionary Position" tshirt on. And yet. This storage unit professional is, as it turns out, an ex-lesbian. Having been "delivered from that sin by God," she now focuses her expertise and experience on saving and strengthening heterosexual marriage by providing tips about what women want. The premise seems to be that if you both have the equipment and have serviced similar equipment on another person, you are the most qualified to advise. I wanted to note that I feel like my own expertise about my own person seems like it should provide credibility enough for advising, but that was really the least of the problems.

Her credibility more exactly emerges from her former "specialty" as a lesbian (I love the way it was posited as a former career of sorts)" 'giving women 10 orgasms in an hour using penetration.' The penetration part seemed very important to her, as it demonstrated that hetero-sex was clearly the approved mode of engagement. Further, she noted that if men could last long enough, she could teach them to far exceed this benchmark. "The only reason," she told me, "I shot for an hour was because I couldn't stay up in there any longer"' This was cited as evidence that she was not, in her heart, a true lesbian. I wanted to ask her if she was into sucking cock for longer than an hour, but couldn't get the right break in conversation. As a person who has given both a good college try, my suspicion is that her problem was more the expectation about duration than the object in question. I mean, I would get tired of eating ice cream after an hour.

Anyway, she went on to explain that the book was "not at all vulgar." She cited as evidence the fact that many ministers have bought the book and shared with their wives (did I mention it is available on audio CD because "men don't like to read"?). In this way, my storage professional have saved many Godly marriages that might have otherwise caved to the temptation of the "dirty girls who come to church and sit in the front pew just to tempt the minister." With the help of this text, men the world over could teach their Madonnas to be whores in the bedroom (my language now), thus making the family the keystone of society and saving heterosexuality (her language).

She wanted to give me a free copy of the book/CD. So we could write a testimonial for her website. There were so many possible ways to respond really, but I was tired and hot and decided to just gently point out that people renting storage units and coming in to buy moving boxes are perhaps not the best test case for any instructional on hott sex. We wouldn't want to skew her results.

So that was the highlight of yesterday. That and the ice cream.

Bodies

There are a few stories I've read recently that have got me thinking about the way we use the bodies of less-privileged people for our own personal and political satisfaction. We use them as artifacts, we use them as objects, and we thoughtlessly invade them as if they were not truly human.

The most disturbing of these stories is well-covered Kate Harding at Salon, writing about why she doesn't want to watch the video of Iranian student Neda Soltani being shot in the chest and dying in the arms of her father, in the middle of the street. Kate captures what I think is a real problem with the assertion that it's somehow required revolutionary viewing to watch what is, essentially, a snuff film:

Watching a violent death caught on tape seems so ghoulish and exploitive to me; are people really watching to bear somber witness, or merely because it's so shocking -- perhaps even perversely thrilling, in a tiny, shameful way -- that we can watch? (Is it even possible to answer that question honestly?) My feeling yesterday, as it was in 2004, was that I could read the many graphic descriptions available and understand perfectly, painfully well what happened. What further purpose would watching the footage serve? Would I be honoring Neda, or just using her tragic death to feel better about myself for doing something a little more emotionally draining than putting a green overlay on my Twitter photo? Would it really teach me something important I wouldn't otherwise know?

Ever since the video came out, I've resisted watching it and have quickly clicked away even from posts that have the video embedded. Because I do not want to be witness to the very moment that a woman's life is leaving her body, quickly and unexpectedly. That is a private moment. Whatever the cause, when people die, they should be able to do it with dignity. The fact that the the Basiji who shot her (and the dictatorial government who gave the Basiji their guns) took away her dignity by shooting her in the street, does not mean that we can somehow give her back her dignity by watching it over and over again.

I think Megan makes a false analogy when she compares the Neda video to the photos of the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib. Witnessing those photos is important because it actually does serve a political purpose; like I argued in this post about torture, it serves to produce the emotional reaction that underlies our commitment to banning torture, and reaffirm that commitment.

There is no such necessity here. Our commitment that people should not be shot in cold blood in the middle of the street is not in need of affirmation. In contrast, the pictures and videos of torture aren't just emotional, they are educational, they do a better job than any description could of telling us what torture is. We all know what murder is. Most of the people on this earth have lost a loved one, and wrestling with our own mortality is perhaps the greatest philosophical-religious-artistic endeavor of the history of human culture. We understand the pain and suffering and existential angst that attends the fact that a living breathing human being could be there and, just moments later, not there.

To assert that watching the video of Neda Soltani, bleeding and perishing on the pavement, is going to somehow enlighten us about the plight of the oppressed, repressed, and politically disenfranchised people of Iran, is patently intellectually dishonest. No, as Harding says, we watch because we can. We watch for the same reasons we watched the video of Nick Berg's beheading and Saddam Hussein's hanging. We watched to gloat or to cry, to experience emotional release, epiphany, and to stroke the erections of our hatred of the violent other, while simultaneously experiencing a vicarious thrill at witnessing violence.

And it's just too much of a coincidence that the bodies that we use in this way happen so often to be female, brown, or both. As Tami at Racialicious said

We did not need to see bloodied bodies to understand the horror of Columbine. After the first live footage of people in the World Trade Center jumping to their deaths, those gruesome images disappeared. It was too much. We don’t need to see carnage to understand horror when the bodies involved are mostly white.

When it comes to white bodies, especially white male bodies, it seems to disrespect their dignity to broadcast the violence done to them. Recall that not only were networks not broadcasting the beheading video of Nicholas Berg, two DJs in Oregon were actually fired for playing just the audio.

Meanwhile, CNN links to the Neda video right from its website. Think about that.

A once and future teacher, and a heroine of the week

So I am going through boxes and boxes of paper in my study. Boxes of paper I've had for almost 20 years, some of them. Mostly stuff related to academe, and mostly mostly stuff related to teaching.

Two things.

(1) The small, easy one: if you are an academic sort, for god's sake and your own, MAKE TIME to go through and sort your papers AT LEAST every time you move. Because the temptation--and I know you do this--is to just dump everything into a big folder or box labelled "teaching materials" or maybe "English 101" or whatever, and then shove it into a filing cabinet or a corner or something. And if you do this every semester--and who wants to cap off a week or two of marathon grading with sorting paper for another couple days??--then after a few years all that awesome material that you xeroxed or typed up--handouts about how to write conclusions, or how to assess the merit of online materials, interesting assignments, good lectures--is buried somewhere in a dusty pile that you DON'T HAVE TIME to go through because you have to prep for class!

I swear to god that my teaching started getting worse when I took my first job and stuffed all the things I'd developed in seven years of graduate teaching into boxes. The up side is that now that I'm finally going through this stuff, I'm remembering what it's like to actually be prepared for, and hence good at, and hence enjoy, teaching. Which might spur me to Get a Real Job. You never know.

(2) The big universal lesson. So I took a break from dusty paper-sorting to read blogs, and found this piece on PostBourgie, and this must-read article about Khadijah Williams.

Khadijah just graduated high school and is on her way to Harvard. She has also been homeless since she was Pseudonymous Kid's age.

If you want to learn more about her, read the linked piece; most of what I have to say about her isn't about her, specifically. It's about the educational system, and whether or not we should be doing a better job of teaching her peers.

Now, along with sorting my papers, I'm also supervising PK, who is on summer break. Which means asking him for help, occasionally, around the house (which he's not too bad about); getting mad at him for making messes/destroying things (like, oh, say, TURNING OFF THE REFRIGERATOR last week); occasionally "going out" to the beach or a movie or the garden store or the library. Mostly, though, it involves neglecting him while he plays with legos (which he's doing right now) or reads comics in the hammock or makes things out of cardboard and duct tape.

Now, PK freaking loves summer vacation. Largely because, as he puts it, he is left alone to "do what he wants" and doesn't have to go to school, where other people tell him what to do all day. This is ironic, because his school is amazingly hands-off, as schools go: the sit-down-shut-up-and-do-this-worksheet stuff is minimized almost to the point of non-existence, and he has virtually no formal "homework"--and part of why he hates it is because he feels like he's not "learning" as much as he'd like to.

I worry a little bit about how to get him to be more academically challenged. But not much, because the facts are that his academic knowledge is completely on schedule for his age and in some areas way above grade level. Because, duh, his parents are hypereducated.

What I worry about more is that his damned independent streak and hatred of doing anything in a group is (going to be) a social and professional handicap. And I just don't know, really, where the line is on that front. There's plenty of research about the academic and work achievement of the kids of the educated umc to reassure me on the schooling front; less so on the "kids who actively resist being part of a group" front. Or at least, since I know more about education than I do about non-education-related childhood development, if such research exists I'm not familiar with it.

But I am pretty up-to-speed on education, both as a (former?) professional and as a research-minded educator parent. Hence, some thoughts about the linked essays above.

Going through my files is making me realize that one of the biggest factors in my own teaching success was having prep materials readily to hand. Once I’d moved offices often enough that my files were all dusty and disorganized and finding specific things was a pain in the ass, as I said, my teaching started to go downhill. But rediscovering all this old material and realizing that oh yeah, I *do* have lots of resources to teach a, b, and c is making me feel a lot better about maybe teaching again than I have in a long time.

I'm also realizing that getting paid 6 figures would make it a SHITLOAD easier to afford to buy the materials/afford the space for a decent filing system. Or to replace my dead laptop, which has a lot of old teaching materials on it that I can’t access. Or to even hire someone to file my shit for me. Plus subscriptions to teaching journals, buying teaching books, joining professional organizations and maybe going to conferences–all the stuff that costs money but also has a lot to do with not getting stale. While I was teaching, a lot of my crappy filing was about my own enormous anxiety and my sense that I should be Doing Things, not Wasting Time Shuffling Papers. (And yes, I realize that Doing Academic Things = shuffling papers. But as all anxious academics know, Important Papers involve Research, not Teaching.) But part of it was also about not being willing (or able) to spend money on keeping filing systems up to date, whether that means boxes, cabinets and storage or computers and hard drives. In restrospect, I could have--and should have--prioritized my time and money differently; but I also realize, now, that the credit crunch and money anxiety of having a family on $45k/year was extremely unconducive to thinking clearly enough to do so.

So yeah, I'm no Khadijah Williams. Getting past distractions, setbacks, bad habits, and poor filing to focus on high achievement is something I can only do up to a point. If I were a more remarable human being, I'd have developed better habits despite all the reasons not to. But I'm not. I am, I think, fairly typical in my tendency to undercut myself when I have a choice between the easier, unremarkable path (sloppy filing) and the harder, more impressive one (laser-like focus on a goal).

Which is why arguments about education frustrate me so much. Sure, there are great natural teachers who do amazing things despite mediocre salaries, piles of administrative trivia driven by legislatures and/or fears of litigation, and the broad popular belief that teaching is easy and that therefore everyone and their dog is entitled to second-guess what happens in the classroom. And sure, there are also brilliant, driven students who can get into Harvard despite a lifetime of homelessness.

But that's the exception, not the rule. Nor, I hasten to add, is the rule that most teachers are complete idiots who teach because they can't do anything else, or that most students are lazy morons with indifferent parents who we ought not waste resources on.

The rule is that, by and large, students and teachers (like parents) do the best they can. And that, given certain facts of human psychology--like our tendency to be more motivated by people right in front of us than by abstractions--the best they can is often, perhaps usually, better than one would predict. Most people, even the best of us, make parenting up as we go along. Because of this, most kids have things going on at home that distract from (at best) or damage (at worst) healthy intellectual (and psychological) development. Because of *this*, most teachers have stuff going on in the classroom that distracts from (at best) or counteracts (at worst) good teaching: kids whose parents are going through a divorce, kids who hate working in groups, kids who are more interested in looking out the window or going outside than finishing an assignment, kids who are gay, kids who the other kids make fun of for being or "acting" gay, kids whose hair or clothes or personal mannerisms are "weird," kids whose parents just got laid off or have drinking problems or are emotionally or physically abusive, and so on and so on. That shit is NORMAL.

So. Does the current state of affairs, in some places at least, need improvement? If you think that, given social realities, having most teachers doing the best they can for most of their students most of the time, is fine--and that it's okay that, by and large, "Them thats got shall get / Them thats not shall lose / The strong gets more /
While the weak ones fade / Empty pockets dont ever make the grade," then I guess the answer is no.

If, otoh, you think that the Billie Holiday tune, gorgeous though it is, describes things that you wish would change (and that, by the way, are at odds with most people's ideals of equality and justice), then let's talk about how to improve things. And like Billie suggests, a big, big part of the problem is money.

Not for the Khadijah Williamses. Young women (and men) like her will be fine no matter what. God bless them for it, and we should all honor them as well. I, personally, don't think that even the superstars should have to go through some of the things she's undoubtedly had to deal with during her short life, but clearly she's made it regardless. And I'm sure everyone reading this can think of at least one outstanding teacher whose success suggests that good teachers are born, not made.

But, exceptions aside, good teaching is something that people can be trained to do-–or at least trained to be better at. It *is* a profession, after all, much like medicine. And good students, too, can be trained: that's the entire fucking point of education, after all.

Now, that doesn’t mean that you can treat teachers like widgets and just “train” them in lieu of providing professional salaries. Or that any old teacher in front of any old student can do the kind of excellent job that we want every student to have access to. If you want people to adhere to professional standards, you need to pay them like professionals. And one important reason for that is that maintaining professional standards actually *does* cost money. Not just at the level of "the system," either.

If the job is easy enough that people who are half burned out and/or not really paying attention can “go through the motions” and do it “well enough,” then fine; pay $40k/year. Your employees will be average, won’t be able to pay for ongoing training, won’t be able to take vacations very often to recharge, and won’t be willing or able to take their work home to a reasonably-appointed office space, since they won’t be able to afford the childcare, rent, equipment, or mortgages that make working at home possible. They won’t be able to afford the “networking” opportunities that keep them in touch with other professionals, who can alert them to new and interesting developments in various fields that can be brought into the classroom as examples, opportunities, or curricula (including field trips). They won’t be able to afford to provide students with the things that rich parents can afford to provide their children: educational games, toys and software; the ability to “try out” new, unfamiliar hobbies; the ability to experiment (which sometimes involves breaking or wasting materials) without being punished. They won't be able to afford the "down time" that lets them come back every day and juggle not only the day's curriculum, but all the emotional and psychological events that come up in any group of 20-40 (or more) young people every single day.

And yes, if they are bright, ambitious, and creative enough to be able to command six-figure salaries in other professions, they are unlikely to stick around teaching for more than a couple years because (1) teaching well actually is really hard work; and (2) we do, as a society, measure status in large part by income and lifestyle, and few bright, ambitious people really are going to feel happy for long living and being treated “lower” than their intellectual peers.

If the job actually demands ongoing attention, engagement, and interest, then the individual has to foster and develop those things. Which costs money. Which is part of *why* the children of professional parents are--not always, obviously, and not inevitably, but on average, “brighter” and far, far more likely to become professionals themselves. Their parents can afford to provide them with things that other kids don’t get, things that develop the qualities that one needs for “professional success.” A broad knowledge of lots of things, willingness to experiment, a fairly wide range of acquaintance, money to “keep up” with new technologies and information (books, magazine subscriptions), time to do “wasteful” things like sit around and read, or play with legos, or build shit out of cardboard–rather than helping around the house because mom and dad can’t afford to pick up pizza or hire a cleaner or replace shit that gets worn out or broken. Opportunities for networking and learning like summer camp, or arts programs. A stable home with space to do homework. The ability to develop relationships with teachers, so that you can get good letters of recommendation.

Poor parents who are ambitious for their kids will manage to provide a lot of this stuff for their kids anyway. And many kids, even if their parents can't manage to provide material support, will do better than you might expect if their parents provide emotional support and encouragement. Most parents, simply by virtue of human nature, will do their best to support their kids, no matter what. Sometimes, "our best" is pretty shitty. Sometimes we might not even try. Some truly outstanding kids will be world-beaters even so.

But even for your average loving middle-class parent–-hell, even for upper-middle class parents, loving or not-–this stuff costs a lot of time and money. And if we want teachers to teach all kids the way that we hope to raise our own kids, then we need to be intellectually honest enough to admit that if parenting "well" costs time and money, then teaching *other* people's children well does, too.

Update: if you're really interested in this sort of topic, PB's book of the month is Whatever it Takes. (Not out yet in pb, but there's always the kindle option, if you have one, or an iphone/pod.) I've yet to actually engage in one of the book discussions over there, but I've read some great books on account of 'em.

By the Rivers of Babylon

What does the Iran election crisis mean for Iraq? Specifically, what does it mean for our people in Iraq? Specifically, our soldiers and marines and aircrew. Specifically, the 1/128th of the Wisconsin National Guard.

I'm asking. I really have no idea.

I expect it makes things more dangerous for our people because it makes the situation more complicated. I would guess the decisive influence of Iran in Iraq means the Iran election crisis will also be a crisis for Iraq.
The GOP, laughably, is trying to take credit for democratic ferment in Iran. Of course, these people cannot be taken seriously on any subject, particularly events in Southwest Asia.

Someone I do take seriously about events in the region is my nephew. He's a member of the 1/128. We've exchanged e-mails the last couple days and he's had some interesting things to report.

He's very guarded. Won't say where he is or what he's doing.
South of Baghdad, he says. Driving people around, he says . That's about it.

Mufti is the uniform of the day, he says. Has been for a couple weeks. He doesn't think that has anything to do with the Iran election crisis. Its just kind of odd.

The Revolutionary Guard have disappeared from the area, he says. He thinks that may have something to do with the election crisis.
They recruit in the area. They collect taxes in the area. They operate schools and dormitories and a clinic in the area. They have a couple big office buildings in the area.

The Guard stand out in the Iraqi communities where they operate, he says. They are much better dressed than the average Iraqi and travel about in Mercedes 350GX SUV's. They don't bother Americans and my nephew thinks they are actually beneficial to keeping order in the area of his unit's operation. He doesn't really like the Iraqi's and refers to them in the most contemptuous terms.
In the last several days, he reports, the Guard has vanished. I asked if they could have submerged themselves in the local population but my nephew thinks not. As I said, he doesn't think much of Iraqis and doesn't think the Guard does either. Consequently, he doesn't believe they could hide among the locals as the local militia fighters do.
What will happen now? As of this posting, it appears today's demonstrations are called off to forestall further attacks from the regime's storm troopers. Whether the drive to recast the election will succumb to the storm troopers remains to be see:15n.
Whatever the outcome, my nephew hopes it will permit the return of the Revolutionary Guard to Iraq South of Baghdad. He thinks they are necessary to keep the local militia/gangs in check.
Keeping the local militia in check is the only way he sees that US forces can exit and a speedy exit from Iraq is what he devoutly wishes.

Narcissism [Iran]

Here's Ledeen at The Corner:

[Obama], [y]ou're going to be accused of meddling anyway, since out there in the real world you are believed to be the leader of the forces of freedom and democracy. So stop pretending to be a sweet innocent, and get in there and fight for people who are dying in the name of our values, and who want to be part of our world.

Dear Michael Ledeen:

It's not all about you, and it's not all about us. The people in Iran are not fighting for "our" values. We do not own freedom, we do not own democracy, we do not own freedom of the press and freedom of association and fairness and honesty in elections. Ahmadinejad, Khomeini, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard are not accusing the Americans of meddling because Obama is the "leader of the forces of freedom and democracy," and Iranians are fighting for freedom and democracy, therefore Obama must be leading them. They are accusing Obama and the Americans of meddling because they want to discredit the opposition. For better or worse, saying that a movement is backed by the Americans is pretty much a death sentence for that movement. Not to mention that individuals whose power was encouraged or increased by the meddling of Americans {cough cough) can come to be truly hated.

This is why I'm contemptuous of conservatives' supposed concern for human rights in Iran. Because they show almost every time they open their mouths that they are patronizing and ignorant. The reason that thousands of young people are risking their lives to protest in the streets is because they "want to be part of our world"? First of all, what world is that? They already are part of "our world," insofar as the word "world" has any meaning. Second of all, you're completely ignorant about what they're fighting for. I know it must be fun to think that what they're agitating for is American-style democracy, but it isn't.

Don't flatter yourself. It's not about us, except in the very limited sense that the opposition supports a more normalized relationship with the United States. But they also, like most Iranians, support Iran's development of nuclear energy and the development of nuclear weapons.

We support them because we support fairness, not because they want to join "our world." Christ.

[Via Spencer Ackerman at FDL]

Process and Speech [Iran]

One thing that I, and many other people who are riveted by what's going on in Iran, have been truly heartened by is the extent to which global information sharing means that authoritarian governments and dictatorships can't exercise nearly as much power as they once did. Because of the existence of a [mostly] free press in places like Britain and the United States, and mobile phone technology and the internet, activists and protesters in Iran have been able to get their information out of the country where not only the rest of the world can see it, but other people in Iran can as well. The regime has shut down Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo, access to news sites, and more, but they can't shut down everything. People are still sending pictures and video to the BBC, and Twitter, a home-grown American service, has been indispensable for the resistance.

Here's some good reporting on the censorship and supression of information that has taken place, not just of individuals trying to communicate, but of newspapers, foreign journalists, and even the state's own sources ["Even governmental news sources have been targeted in the crackdown. Four interior ministry officials have been arrested for given results that were different from those announced by Ahmadinejad’s allies."]

The regime is trying to combat the flow of information from the protestors with its own flow of information. Unfortunately, they're making some of it up. Here's just one example, an explanation of how the state-run newspaper photoshopped images of a pro-Ahmadinejad rally to make it appear larger.

But the story's not over. I can't claim to know when or how this will die down, but a lot of people seem to think that Ahmadinejad will be president. The question is--how will the regime deal with dissent? So far, it's not looking good. Young people who have tried to access or send information to outside sources have been threatened:

"Anonymous" from Norway emailed to say a friend in Iran had rung BBC Persian, without getting through.

"Now she has received a message on her answering machine from Sepah [Revolutionary Guards] saying they know she has been involved in criminal activity - and now she has to report to the police."

Fahimeh emailed BBC Persian TV from Shiraz, dismissing such warnings as random scare tactics.

The words she described finding on her answerphone: "We know you went to the rally on Monday, if you repeat that again, we will deal with you" match those described in an email by Parinaz.

Here's some reporting from an Australian journalist who's defying the government ban on foreign media. He says "You've got to realise that what's happening at the moment is that the actual authorities are losing control of what's happening on the streets and that's very dangerous and damaging to them." He also has some interesting information about the security forces becoming more sympathetic to Mousavi supporters--read the whole thing, as they say.

The point of all this is that it matters when people have a right to speak, a right to dissent, a right to access information. People have misinterpreted my and other liberals' anger about what is happening as support for Mousavi. I actually don't know much about him or his platform. No one has any illusions that he would suddenly change the course of Iranian foreign policy to make everything all better. The problem is that it may have been the will of the Iranian people that he be elected president. And if that will was defied, if the election results were fabricated, rigged, inflated, or otherwise doctored, that is a miscarriage of justice. Perhaps Ahmadinejad did win. But it's rather likely that if he did win, he won by a much smaller margin, or won without obtaining a majority of the votes, which would have forced a runoff.

The regime didn't want a runoff. They didn't want a win by Ahmadinejad with 52%. Because with a small margin, they'd have deal with accusations of irregularites. Unfortunately, it seems that they seriously miscalculated the reaction they'd get by rigging the entire thing.

Some Links:

Robert Dreyfuss has some great insight about the kinds of people who are against Ahmadinejad:

The anti-Ahmadinejad coalition is deep and broad. It includes conservative, Old Guard founders of the Islamic Republic, who view Ahmadinejad with disdain and who resent the coming to power of his coterie of Revolutionary Guard commanders; the large and growing majority of Iranian clerics and senior ayatollahs, many of whom have long viewed the Leader, Ayatatollah Ali Khamenei, as an upstart and usurper since he was elevated to his position 20 years ago; nearly the entirety of Iran's business class, especially those involved in high-tech, aviation, oil and gas, and heavy industry, who blame Ahmadinejad for his catastrophic mismanagement of the economy and for the crippling economic sanctions; the entire class of Iranian reformists, from more liberal-minded clerics like former President Khatami to more centrist ex-officials such as former Prime Minister Mousavi, the presidential candidate; a large contingent of Iranian women, energized by the role of Zahra Rahnavard, Mousavi's wife, who I met in Tehran, who campaigned vigorously for her husband and for women's rights; and of course, the educated elite of Iran, including students, artists, filmmakers, intellectuals, writers, and musicians.

Today's NYT reporting of events in the last 24 hours, including threats of execution by a government lawyer:

Reuters reported that Mohammadreza Habibi, the senior prosecutor in the central province of Isfahan, had warned demonstrators that they could be executed under Islamic law.

“We warn the few elements controlled by foreigners who try to disrupt domestic security by inciting individuals to destroy and to commit arson that the Islamic penal code for such individuals waging war against God is execution,” Mr. Habibi said, according to the Fars news agency. It was not clear if his warning applied only to Isfahan or the country as a whole, Reuters said.

More Robert Dreyfuss on the the effect of American rhetoric about Iran:

Right-wingers in the United States are already comparing the Iranian unrest to Hungary, 1956, and calling on the United States to give its full support to the Green Wave. Nothing could be stupider. What they miss is that President Obama's outreach to Iran, including his Cairo speech — which got a word-by-word exegesis prepared for Khamenei and was widely viewed by many Iranians — is in part responsible for the sudden upsurge of support for Mousavi. And it happened not because Obama called for military action in Iran, and not because Obama backed Mousavi, but precisely because he didn't.

Here's Dan Rather (I know!) with a surprisingly good piece about the importance of a free press:

It is too soon to know or to say how the situation in Iran will turn out, but there are lessons in this for our own country, for a democratic system more fragile than we at times like to believe. One of these lessons is the centrality of freedom of the press to the entire enterprise of democratic government: You cannot have the latter without the former. And the other is the lesson that citizen journalism is a way for the people to hold on to freedom of the press, even in times of oppression. In a turn of phrase that seems to be cropping up everywhere, the revolution may not be televised…but it very well could be Twittered.

UPDATE: Here's Ken Ballen reiterating that even Ahmadinejad supporters support a free press and free elections:

Put all together, our polling shows that Ahmadinejad, running a competent campaign, may have had enough support three weeks before the vote to possibly win the election under the electoral rules as they stood. With Ahmadinejad's early lead, it is possible that the vote reported did actually reflect the will of the Iranian people, though now, it is impossible to know...

Yet the government's actions since the election may have changed the debate in Iran from being about candidates to being about democracy. While we do not know whether the election results were rigged, the government's handling of the election itself runs counter to principles of democracy, free press and free elections -- goals our polling shows almost all Iranians, whether or not they support Ahmadinejad, strongly support.

UPDATE II: Here's Yglesias with an excellent point about Obama's role in the Iranian election crisis:

Something I think people don’t always get is that the President is not the columnist-in-chief or the National Blogger.

On those Republican calls for Obama to support Moussavi

Attackerman brings us this succinct commentary from NIAC (National Iranian-American Council) head Trita Parsi:

"[N]o serious human rights actvist has gone out and supported making the U.S. the issue in the election," since real human rights activists support "condemning the use of violence" by the regime. "What these conservatives are saying -- they've got no track record of supporting real human rights in Iran, and are only seeking to advance their own agenda" by making "the U.S. part of the issue," Parsi said. "They pretend to speak in favor of the protesters without ever considering what the Iranian people want. And the people who brought us the Iraq war don't have a leg to stand on on this issue."

It's amazing that Republicans consistently don't give a shit about human rights until they get a whiff of something that makes them think that braying about human rights will give them a good excuse to shoot, bomb, and kill people.

A brief moment of happiness

I hope LeBlanc keeps up the Iranblogging, but couldn't resist interrupting briefly to post this from ObWi.

"After almost eight years of captivity, each step of Khelil Mamut's [right] freedom is a little overwhelming.

The ocean, which he could hear only on windy days when the waves crashed beyond Guantanamo's razor wire rimmed fence, is now something he can wade into.

People call him by his name, not 278, his internee serial number.

Then there was the horse he saw while walking one of the island trails on Thursday, the day he and three other Chinese citizens of the Muslim Uighur minority arrived in Bermuda. The animal made him stop suddenly, just to stare.

"How can I express it," he said yesterday, describing the new tropical home where he now lives with the three other former Guantanamo detainees. "It is so great, so beautiful."

"This may be a small island," added Abdullah Abdulqadir [not pictured]. "But it has a big heart.""

Click over for full credits.

What the Riots Tell Us [Iran]

The New York Times has an excellent editorial out today that succinctly lays out the case that the election was rigged, and hits the all the right notes with respect to Western negotiations with Iran. I want to draw your attention to a point they make rather quickly, and that I think needs more attention:

If the election were truly “real and free” as Mr. Ahmadinejad insisted, the results would be accepted by the voters and the government would not have to resort to such repression.

If you have a free, fair, and legitimate election where the incumbent wins with 62% of the vote, a truly decisive and staggering victory, there are no riots. There is no blood in the streets. There are no rallies with tens of thousands of angry people. There is no tear gas, there are no raids on University dormitories (warning: graphic photos in that last link). There are no motorcyles on fire. There are no beatings. The government does not need to shut off text messaging services to prevent people from communicating.

A candidate who gets only 32% of the vote is not a candidate with enough support to generate the kind of energy and willingness to face violence that Mousavi's supporters have shown. And an incumbent who wins with 62% of the vote does not need to arrest, beat, and detain the opposition.

Here are some examples of basically fair elections where the incumbent won with 60% or more:
The 1972 US election, where Nixon won with a landslide victory of 60%.
The 2002 run-off election in France, where Jacques Chirac won by 82%.
The 2006 Venezuelan elections of incumbent Hugo Chavez with 62%.
The 2004 re-election of Vladimir Putin in Russia with 71% of the vote.

And here are some examples of not-fair elections where there were riots:
The riots after the 2007 Kenyan election of Mwai Kibaki, where the margin of victory was less than half a million votes.
The 1969 Malaysian election.

Add more in comments.

UPDATE! Side-note to the Twitter-haters of the world: How do you like them apples?

UPDATE 2: An awesome aggregator of images from Iran coming real-time through Twitter. Also see some analysis and background at the NYT about Ahmadinejad's rise to power and what this means for his regime. Money quote:

When he was first elected president in 2005, Mr. Ahmadinejad showed his fealty to the leader, gently bending over and kissing his hand.

On Saturday, the leader demonstrated his own enthusiasm for the re-elected president, hailing the outcome as “a divine blessing” even before the official three-day challenge period had passed.

Iran Links

I'm increasingly distressed over what's going on in Iran. If you've been living under a rock for the last 48 hours, here's the deal: There was an election on Friday. This go-around, many international observers and people within Iran thought that Mousavi, a moderate challenger to Ahmadinejad's hardline presidency, had a decent shot at winning. At the very least, it was going to be a close race, and many seemed to think there was a not-insubstantial chance he would actually win. Iran's economy is not doing well, just like economies all over the world, and as everyone knows, the incumbent doesn't tend to fare well in an economic crisis. I've seen many people cite the figure that inflation in Iran has gone from 10.7% four years ago to 25% today. That's just one index of the effects of the recession that are affecting people every day.

According to several reports, the Ministry of the Interior, who is responsible for running the elections, called Mousavi on Friday Night soon after the polls closed and told him he had won the election. Which is weird, since we're talking about 45 million votes which have to be hand-counted. So Mousavi claims victory. But by the next morning, now Ahmadinejad is claiming victory with 62% of the vote total. Which, again, I don't know how on earth even a substantial portion of the ballots could have been counted by then. Not only does the Ministry of the Interior claim that Ahmadinejad has won, but it's by a huge margin, and he is even claimed to have won Mousavi's hometown by 60%. Can you imagine if, in the 2004 Election, Bush won by 62% and won Massachusetts with 60%? Right.

Meanwhile, SMS (text messages) were shut off for the entire country. Facebook and Twitter were blocked. Cell phone service were down. Reports emerge that Mousavi has been placed under house arrest. And people are rioting in the streets.

It's not looking good.

Here are some links to stuff I've found helpful.

-Juan Cole with a list of facts suggesting that the results were rigged.

5. Ahmadinejad's numbers were fairly standard across Iran's provinces. In past elections there have been substantial ethnic and provincial variations.

6. The Electoral Commission is supposed to wait three days before certifying the results of the election, at which point they are to inform Khamenei of the results, and he signs off on the process. The three-day delay is intended to allow charges of irregularities to be adjudicated. In this case, Khamenei immediately approved the alleged results.

-Gary Sick has some great analysis, including some thoughts about implications for the US:

3. With regard to the United States and the West, nothing would prevent them in principle from dealing with an illegitimate authoritarian government. We do it every day, and have done so for years (the Soviet Union comes to mind). But this election is an extraordinary gift to those who have been most skeptical about President Obama's plan to conduct negotiations with Iran. Former Bush official Elliott Abrams was quick off the mark, commenting that it is "likely that the engagement strategy has been dealt a very heavy blow." Two senior Israeli officials quickly urged the world not to engage in negotiations with Iran. Neoconservatives who had already expressed their support for an Ahmadinejad victory now have every reason to be satisfied. Opposition forces, previously on the defensive, now have a perfect opportunity to mount a political attack that will make it even more difficult for President Obama to proceed with his plan.

-Laura Rozen at Foreign Policy has a roundup of updates on Sunday happenings.

-The Twitter feed of a student holed up at a University in Tehran.

-A blog tracking the events in pictures and video, Iran 101.

-The Daily Kos diary of Electronic Maji, who is communicating with sources inside Iran:

Every single agency, in and outside of Iran, and practically everyone who knows anything about the nation has declared this thing a Sham. The vote wasn't stolen, the vote wasn't EVEN COUNTED. It was invented. This coup has been bought around by the guard, and supported by the Ayatollah. The actions take are indefensible, and a group of hardline radicals are ignoring the will of the Iranian people.

-This Huffington Post blogger has up to the minute updates, video, and breaking news. Right now, the top story in the post is that a member of the German media trying to report on the election is missing and/or arrested.

-Also at that HuffPO link, apparently Ahmadinejad got on tv and stated that Iran is "the most stable country in the world." Yeah, tell that to the people who have already died and those who are getting the shit beat out of them:

The situation in the country is in a very good condition. Iran is the most stable country in the world, and there's the rule of law in this country, and all the people are equal before the law. And the presidential election has witnessed people's massive turnout. As I said, even in a soccer match, people may become excited and that may lead to a confrontation between them and the police force. This is something natural. A person coming out of a stadium may violate the traffic regulations. He wil be fined by the police no matter who he is, an ordinary person or even a minister.

-An interview with the former foreign minister of Iran, talking about some other very suspicious events, like the fact that they didn't release vote totals from specific districts and forbade Mousavi's supporters from serving as pollwatchers.

-The blog niacINsight has some great coverage of the events. I see there that apparently western media outlets have had their cameras confiscated and have been ordered out of the country.

-Now comes the NYT with confirmation that members of the opposition have been detained and beaten:

He opened his shirt to show long, red welts on his chest where a Basij militia member had whipped him with a chain. Next to him, a female friend dressed in a black chador stood with a bloody scar on her forehead; she said she had been attacked by the police.

I'll be updating tomorrow with more links to good coverage.

guess where i am?

I know you're tired of hearing it (or reading my Tweets about it,) but I'm at WORK right now.

One would get the impression, reading my blog, that my career is Very Important to me and that I am a Career Woman. One would be partially correct.

Indeed, I enjoy earning my keep and I love doing something at which I excel and which contributes to the general Good. But I do not like having stomach aches, stress headaches, heart palpitations and general feelings of free-floating panic and fear.

I also do not like having to deal with the prospect of updating my resume and finding another job at which I excel, will pay me enough, allow contributions to my savings, and which would also contribute to Goodness - all in an economic environment where barista jobs have become highly coveted.

You know??
(Not that there's anything wrong with being a barista - I'm just not very service oriented and, in general, am not made for jobs that require touching food or money.)

I also do not like not having seen NewGuy for more than two days in the past 2.5 weeks and this is...different. LTF could've incinerated himself in his own apartment and I wouldn't have noticed for weeks.

(I'm sure these comparisons between NewGuy and LTF are boring but it's an interesting exercise for me.)

This week was so bad at work I'd wake up in the middle of the night with my heart pounding and stomach cramps. The only way I could get to sleep was to imagine NewGuy hogging the comforter and snoring next to me.

Huh. I just made myself uncomfortable admitting that.

*shaking it off*

Bleak House

Good news: Today was the court date for the dead cat people! Hurrah! Finally!

Bad news: Nope, not finally at all.

Good news: They didn't show up, which I was certain would mean it would be a gimme.

Bad news: Turns out that because they live out of state, they have to be served twenty, not fifteen, days before the court date. AND that, because Mr. Dead Cat wasn't home at the time and the process server gave the papers to his wife, HE was "substitute served," which means an extra ten days on top of that for him.

So we have another court date. At the end of frikkin' August.

Friday Cat Blogging

Pussy don't play.

infinite summer

So totally doing this.

Post about health care coming up soon, I hope. Short preview: now would be the time to call your members of congress and make some noise about the importance of a true public option.

First they came for the abortion providers

Update: Michael points out that there's a fourth recent terrorist incident that most of us have forgotten about.

Then the Army recruiting centers, and now the Jews. Or at least those who are interested in Jewish history.

Gosh, it looks like Dick Cheney was right. There *are* more terrorist attacks occuring. Guess that torturing and humilating prisoners worked. Or that we need to waterboard right-wing extremists. Or seriously investigate whether or not shooters are "lone gunmen" or not.

We report, you decide. The quiz below and "lone gunman" question immediately above are both taken from the first linked article:

"This is in line with ___(1)____'s goals," says Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, vice president of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and author of [a book]. "But in the US there ___(2)____
been a great deal of true ___(3)___ operatives, so I ____(4)____ something like this."

Still, ___(5)___ often promote the idea ___(6)___ in their instructional material.

"___(7)___ [says] that ___(8)___ ... but should appear to be ___(9)," says [one man]. "That kind of a strike will appear to be that of a lone wolf, but it's actually someone keyed in, not organizationally, but ideologically."

Authorities point to ___(10)___ in the US since 2005....

(1) a. Al Qaeda
b. Operation Rescue
c. people who think affirmative action has gone too far, especially when it comes to the courts

(2) a. has
b. has not

(3) a. Al Qaeda
b. Operation Rescue
c. anti-affirmative-action

(4) a. would personally be shocked if they'd waste an operative on
b. would personally not be surprised if they had operatives available for

(5) a. global terror groups
b. anti-abortion groups
c. Fox News
d. right-wing bloggers

(6) a. of lone jihadis
b. that abortion must be stopped by any means necessary
c. that white men are being discriminated against, and oh by the way the nation's economic difficulties are all the fault of "elites"

(7) a. Al Qaeda
b. anti-abortion organizations
c. Fox News
d. right-wing bloggers

(8) a. jihadis should not associate with other Muslims
b. killing abortion providers is not justified
c. liberals should be shot/beaten/"taught a lesson"

(9) a. a secular American
b. concerned about women's health
c. "fair and balanced"
d. "real Americans"

(10) a. nearly a dozen "lone jihadist" attacks
b. dozens of attempts to sabotage or vandalize women's health clinics
c. hundreds of anti-affirmative action lawsuits; anti-affirmative action legislation; anti-semitic acts of vandalism or violence; and/or tirades about how our economic difficulties are being made worse by Obama, who by the way is black, elite, and a socialist.

not letting it go

So Women's Health Care Services is closing for good. Here is a listing of other late-term abortion providers. Note that each clinic listing tells you how late they will perform abortions. Note that there are now two clinics in the nation that provide services to women who need abortions late in pregnancy. One's in LA. I'm wondering if I might have the energy to commute and work as a clinic escort there.

Those of you, like me, who are finding Tiller's murder a wakeup call might be interested in perusing the National Network of Abortion Funds site. I've linked to the "get involved" page just to make things easier.

More hard numbers: Fewer than 2200/year or 0.2% of the 1.3 million abortions performed yearly are past 24 weeks. Based on this abstract, let's say there are 6.7 million pregnancies per year in the U.S. Of those, it isn't difficult at all to imagine that 2200 major health emergencies crop up in the third trimester: stuff that in the face of all the asshole men with no research skills who feel free to opine on their right to make moral decisions for other people.

A moving tribute site to Tiller.

A really creative essay about the impact of anti-abortion terrorism that, among other things, makes a clear case for *why* harassment (and murder) of abortion providers is, in fact, terrorism--of us all. The essay is lyrical rather than argumentative; I highly recommend reading it.

Speaking of moving stories, Amanda Marcotte responds, in an unnecessarily-self-indicting way, to my earlier post asking why the kinds of stories and statistics that we're seeing now haven't been part of the national discussion of (late-term) abortion all along. She's right that "the" preferred narrative has always been to emphasize "average" rather than "exceptional" abortions: even when one talks about late-term abortions now, one will get comments to the effect that such discussions make people "uncomfortable" because they implicitly suggest that some abortions are more justified than others. Douthat, who is always looking for a reason to argue that his profundity is superior to the moral judgment of your average pregnant woman, is making that claim in the piece linked above under (appropriately) "asshole men."

I think that's bullshit, though, because more and more I'm becoming convinced that the distinction between moral judgment and legal compulsion is *the* important one to make clear. Of *course* other people make moral judgments that we disagree with. And of course we, in the process of forming our own moral judgment, will discuss and debate the moral judgments of others. That's all fine and hunky-dory.

What's a problem is when you ::cough::Douthat::cough:: don't trust women to make moral decisions for themselves. (I was proud to find out, in the coverage of Tiller's murder, that he felt the same way about the "trust women" bottom line as I do.) *If* you believe that abortion is a moral issue--which is the entire basis of any argument against it, from criminalization to simply trying to convince an individual to think the way you do--then what you are arguing for, if you support criminalization, is making it illegal for pregnant women to make moral decisions about their own pregnancies. If your argument is that women who have abortions are "victims" of the doctors that perform them (which is a pretty common point of view), then you're arguing (at best) that women are incapable of moral decision-making or (at worst) that they can go ahead and make moral decisions as long as they're willing to die for the privilege.

And I think we need to keep emphasizing that point, which isn't at all incompatible with talking about the reasons individual women choose abortions. On the contrary, the two are mutually self-reinforcing.

Which leads to my own mea culpa. One reason I've talked less about this kind of stuff lately than I used to is that I don't like to repeat myself, and with my best (imho) abortion pieces right over there in the sidebar, I've figured that anyone who wants to know what I think can find out pretty easily. But, sadly, that's not good enough: public opinion is a push medium, really, as much as (or more than) a pull one, and if you want to inform people you need to tell them and tell them and tell them yet again. There are always new readers, and few writers go searching for old links when they're researching a topic.

And, as I said before, research is needed. Late-term abortions *are* rare (and again, illegal unless they're medically indicated), and when most people talk about moral decision-making we tend to talk about it in pretty personal terms. We rely on what we've experienced, what we've seen others experience, what we've imagined, and what we've heard. For most women, what we've experienced, seen, or imagined, abortion-wise, is first-trimester abortions: the unwanted pregnancy. Given that we tend not to talk about our own experiences or imaginings in the course of everyday conversation ("abortion" gets talked about a lot; "my abortion," a lot less), most men are limited to what they can imagine, unless they've had a partner with whom they've made a decision to abort.

If we haven't seen other people's experiences, or heard their stories, our imaginations are pretty damn limited--so people come up with wacked-out ideas like the "aborting to fit into a prom dress" meme or claims that "some people just don't want to live with a child with disabilities" (you know, like "some people" prefer not to own dogs). If we want to be informed--and want others to be informed--about what abortion is really about, we need to seek out other people's stories, not just rely on our own half-assed imaginings.

Some media outlets have started doing that. (I can't help noticing that Sullivan's abortion blogging--which has been very good, don't get me wrong--gets praised as "brave and brilliant." Penis privilege, anyone?) Some people have been doing this sort of thing regularly and steadily for a while now. I'd like to do the same.

So, if you're willing to share, leave a comment. If you're willing to let me post your story on the front page, email me. All posts will be attributed to "a reader," unless you request otherwise.

woof

SICK AS A DOG

Though unlike Taddy I am not actually *so* sick as to disappear, or manly enough to be in any way publicly stoic about it. FEEL SORRY FOR ME, PEOPLE. I have some flu-like bug. Marvel at my fabulous symptoms:

- sore throat
- post-nasal drip
- cough (from irritation of post nasal-drip)
- terrible snoring at night (reported by Mr. B.)
- my skin hurts
- my entire body, in fact, hurts. I feel like I've been beaten up.
- yesterday's temperature high reached 100.5°
- mild nausea
- as of today, actual vomiting!

In short, someone please fucking mercy kill me, like, now.

WHY MUST I CHASE THE CAT

And yet, inasmuch as I am Mama to a boy and two cats, I don't get to die. Instead, I have to give Luna, the big cat, her post-surgery antibiotics twice a day (she recently had a biopsy, but has no cancer, hurrah). Medusa, the little cat, is OBSESSED with Luna's food plate, however, EVEN THOUGH SHE HAS HER OWN GODDAMN PLATE. Seriously, she will make a beeline for Luna's (very expensive prescription non-allergenic) food and snarf it down while I am running to scoop her up and scold her. Last night we locked her in PK's room at bedtime and she snuck out four times and RAN for the food bowl. She has now eaten four doses of antib's, and I am about ready to fucking kill her.

So there I was last night, chasing her down to the basement and behind the washing machine, banging on the machine yelling GET THE HELL OUT OF THERE, scooping her up and giving her a swat on the flank and shouting STOP EATING THE BIG CAT'S FOOD, DAMMIT. (At this point, Mr. B. softened on his "no cat sand upstairs" rule, and we put a cat box up in the kitchen and locked the kitten in the basement for the night.)

GOOD DOG

This was after spending yesterday helping PK with his animal project for school. Because, see, this is the last week (in fact, today and tomorrow are the last real "school" days: Weds is a beach field trip and Thursday they get out at like 11:30 or something). And there was no real deadline on this thing, so of course we didn't do it until now. HOWEVER it is now done, and like his project from last week, it is actually amazingly good and contains Real Research, because my kid doesn't settle for the kind of basic nonsense you can find on Wikipedia.

No, he's going to explain to his 2nd/3rd grade class the anatomy of the horseshoe crab's brain, the fact that it's about 400 million years old, how many pairs of legs it has (do you know? The answer is six), the distinct function of each leg pair, AND the fact that the horseshoe crab's blood, as it happens, is widely used in medicine, to ensure that pharmaceuticals aren't contaminated.

Still, though, he's little enough that he was genuinely worried about his Mama being so sick yesterday. Up side: lots of "thank you so much, Mama" for my help and "I'm so, so sorry Mama" for my whining. Down side: so worried that he kept emerging from his room after bedtime, thereby freeing the GODDAMN KITTEN (after which he would apologize up and down). I finally had to go sit at the foot of his bed to assuage his anxiety so that he could conk out.

Sweetheart that he is, he agreed to ride his bike home from school today all by himself (it's about a mile) for the first time so I wouldn't have to come collect him. Mr. B. went in late so as to take him to school and me to the doctor (verdict: not swine flu), then printed out a map and delivered it and PK's bike to the school. If he's not home in half an hour or so I get to start freaking out.

Cover Saturday [Breakup Edition]

Don't worry, there's no breakup going on. I just happened to notice that the songs I decided to cover this week are...shall we say...a little on the somber side. I fell a bit behind on my cover-recording, but since I went two weeks without posting something, this week I give you two! That's how much I care, readers. The first is "Not Your Lover" from Blitzen Trapper's Furr, an album I don't even own but am obsessed with. The second is "In spite of all the Damage" from The Be Good Tanyas' Chinatown.

As before, songs are recording using a PC, my Ovation Celebrity Acoustic/Electric Guitar, the M-Audio FastTrack, and a crappy mic I bought for $20. Recorded and "mixed" (i.e. fucking with the levels) using Audacity, a free audio-editing program. I do think I'm actually getting a bit better at the recording/mixing part.

As always, headphones are strongly recommended.






[Earlier: Acid Tongue]
[Earlier: True Believer]

e Pluribus Unum Health Plan-Um

Besides Bob Herbert and Paul Krugman, what are the good reasons for reading the New York Times? I know, I know, don't get you started.

Have they fired Bill Kristol yet?

Anyway, Paul Krugman's column today shows why its still a good idea to read the New York Times.

As far as a national health insurance plan, what are the reasons for not extending Medicare as the so-called public option? Its already in place, it already has a revenue source, it controls costs, insurance is available to cover what it doesn't, its overhead is 10% that of for-profit health insurance providers.

I understand the forces arrayed against any public option, much less Medicare. But are there any good reasons for not deploying Medicare coverage across all age groups, instead of just retirees, that don't have to do with buttressing the profit position of Aetna, Prudential, and etc.?

Reasons

Because I am a nervous flyer, I have been preoccupied with the Air France 447 disaster, although one clearly doesn't need to be a nervous flyer to be unnerved by such a weird and tragic event. But I just read this HuffPo piece about people who missed the flight for whatever reason (traffic, overbooked, etc) and it gave me a new paradigm in which to understand my preoccupation.

In 2004, Mr Vane and I were in Phuket during the tsunami, staying in a beach front hotel. We were in our ground floor hotel room when the water started coming in, and only because on that section of the beach strip, "beach front" meant across a small road of shops, we were able to get up to the 2 story hotel roof before the water filled our room. Stuck in Phuket for the next week, we were always fine and always scared. We sustained only the most minor injuries.

Our plan had not been to be in our room that morning, but to be on a tiny little fishing boat out near Koh Phi Phi. I had terrible indigestion though, so we cancelled, rescheduled for the next morning. We almost certainly would have died if we were out on the boat. But we weren't and people kept wanting to talk about that. How lucky that we weren't on that boat. Yes. Everything happens for a reason. People kept saying that.

What a horrifying thing to think.

I mean, yes, everything does. I had to go to the bathroom constantly because I was 3 weeks pregnant and eating foreign food. I was on the toilet because of bad menu choices and a fetus, a fetus I wasn't sure I wanted and was supposed to be making a decision about during a holiday in Thailand. Being there and being fine and hearing family and friends insist that we must have missed that boat ride for a reason made me feel like I was supposed to think, the fetus is the reason! I have to keep the pregnancy because the fetus saved my life! And the grossness of that, and of the notion that there was a reason that we missed the boat ride but others didn't, and that grossly unfair reason was a person I was supposed to love, was just unbearable. I did keep the pregnancy, a decision that was neither right nor wrong but was mine and because of which I have a life that makes me happy in a particular way. But whatever reasons there were for that were mine, and there was no "reason" for our being in our hotel that day. (The discussion earlier this week had me thinking about the phrase and how often people have said it to me when discussing my 2 unplanned pregnancies; the gesture of externalizing the "reasons," the agency surrounding pregnancy is so loathsome to me. The reasons surrounding reproductive choices are my own.)

The HuffPo article is very careful not to suggest, or to quote people suggesting, that they missed the flight for some divine or universal reason. 'Everything happens for a reason' is the sort of thing you say only when you don't realize the horrific stakes of it's being true. When you've accidentally survived something, the notion of a reason becomes more of a burden than the tragedy itself.

this time last year...

This time last year, I was in Italy, drinking cheap farmer's wine on the patio of some villa, giggling with my girlfriends that we were in Italy drinking cheap farmer's wine on the patio of some villa.

This time last year, from Italy, I was watching Obama become the nominee; this time last year, I was happily uncoupled, living with my best Roomie in the world, and eating way too much cheese.

This time, now?
Because of the imminent collapse of Illinois' fiscal infrastructure, I'm redoing my resume because the center is not going to hold very long in the non profit human services sector. (Hey, anyone need a cracker jack government relations/communications gal who can sell just about anything?)

I'm happily, yet a little warily, coupled. Ding, the queen of the long time running, regularly scheduled, 'Last Tango in Paris'-type frolic is going steady with a NewGuy who has no college degree. (Hey. I'm bougie. It matters.)

I'm living in a cute, vintage apartment by myself now and Italy is a really far off place. I've cut down on the cheese, I'm exercising, I'm no longer out of breath, I'm down a size or two in my clothes - but what I wouldn't give right now to be at some roadside tavern, drinking cheap wine and eating some sacred fat (i.e., lardo di colonnata.)

So. This time last year: where were you and where are you now?

Friday Sports

Big sports weekend coming up if you share the Vane sensibilities. I should first note that I have no interest in Kobe or the NBA playoffs. None. So that’s not part of the sensibility.

1. Stanley Cup – Games 5 and 6 of the finals between Pittsburgh’s Penguins and Detroit’s Rediwngs (not even a whole animal, I can’t help noting). A rematch of last year’s finals, which the Redwings won, and which, based on games 1 and 2, I assumed they would win again. But the Penguins looked great for the last 2 games – really fast and really young.* Highlights from Game 3 (starting with some glorious pre-game fuss over the great Mario Lemieux) below. By all accounts, Game 4 was more exciting, Staal, and Malkin and Crosby were just dominant, but I can’t find a good highlight reel yet.



The fact that I am rooting for the Pens should be clear enough, but I will say that I don’t begrudge Detroit a championship (the way I would begrudge, say, a New England city). This Onion piece really captured it for me, especially after the first 2 games.


2. The finals at the French Open, Roland Garros, my second favorite of the major tennis opens. Time for our annual French Open finals breakfast party. This year is especially exciting because Federer, who has never won the French, should almost certainly see it through. Not, of course, because he looks infallible this year (although he does look strong and oddly slight as well), but because Nadal, Djokovic, Murray, and Roddick all lost [strictly speaking, Roddick was not a threat to Federer - at all - but I love him and want to note his absence). People get bored with the Federer empire, but I like him, like his sportsmanship and how beautiful his game is. Nadal, the reining clay court champ, his dumb shorts, and his hulking muscling of the game bother me. So I feel excited for that victory (hope I’m not jinxing it).

On the women’s side, we have Safina vs Kuznetsova. I think it will be a good final, but I really miss having Serena Williams there. Safina is the big favorite, but both women have had a few surprising ups and downs during this tournament. Nevertheless, I think Safina will take it in straight sets and will be a good champion. She’s firery and wicked strong and I like watching her take center stage away from her big brother Marat Safin who, by most accounts is a nice enough guy despite on court tantrum throwing, but who skeeves me out with those ubiquitous gold chains and his sort of nightclub predator look.


* I should note that my impression of the last 2 NHL games comes only from highlight reels as the school night games are being broadcast on fucking Versus and we canceled our cable. Which means I spent last night following the progress of the game via twitter (can’t really deal with hockey on the radio) and watching The Hand the Rocks the Cradle. I couldn’t turn it off, and boy howdy what a misogyny fest that is.

Make yourself comfortable

If you didn't watch Obama's speech in Cairo yet--and if, like me, you sort of feel like you "should," but omg it's so long and it'll probably be dry and can't I just catch someone's 200-word summary somewhere, please?--well, no. You really want to see this speech. Not just read it, either.

Seriously, it's that good.

Linkfest: Tiller, Sotomayor

1. Here's an awesome memorial to George Tiller: the George Tiller Memorial Abortion fund.

The George Tiller Memorial Abortion Fund will provide assistance to the same women Dr. Tiller served: women seeking abortions in their second-trimesters, women facing extreme obstacles to abortion, and women who often must travel from their homes to obtain the abortion care they need. The Fund will assist with the cost of the procedures as well as the costs of travel and lodging. Notably, this Fund will be available to patients of the late Dr. Tiller's clinic, Women's Health Care Services in Wichita, at such time when the clinic is able to regroup and reopen.

You can donate at the link.

2. Dana at EotAW breaks down some stats on third-trimester abortions. Be sure and read the comment thread, too, where North breaks them down even further and offers an anecdote that demonstrates how really, really difficult it can be to obtain a needed late abortion. (Illustrating, I hope, why the fund linked above is so important.)

3. Interesting essay about the science of life and how it helps redefine the abortion debate. I really like the conclusion, that

If the social and political arrangement of a group puts stress on the autonomy of its individual responsible members (which ours does, and I like it that way), deciding what the criteria are for being judged an “individual responsible member” is of primary importance. Who gets to vote? Who gets to drive a car? Who decides when to unplug the respirator? Who is of “sound mind”? Who is a person?

and I think it's a challenging question for feminists and progressives of a certain stripe (including me) who do, actually, think that we overemphasize autonomy in some arenas.

4. I missed this piece at TAPPED last week, about the conservative case for Affirmative Action. Really well put.

The conservative freakout over Sotomayor's remarks, as opposed to the way Alito's were marketed as a selling point for him as a judge, makes a remarkably salient case for why we still need affirmative action. Two judges made similar points--one was an Italian American man, the other was a Latino woman, both accomplished on the bench--but what was sold as a strength for Alito makes Sotomayor a racist. Taylor and Buchanan, while attacking Sotomayor, have inadvertently made the case for a policy they'd like to see eliminated, by proving that all things being equal, a minority woman is held to a different standard than the white man of similar background and experience.

5. Another jaw-dropping statement that belies conservative squawking about the racism of noticing race. Yes, I know these are a dime-a-dozen, but this one is a real doozy: according to Manny Miranda, Hispanics think just like everyone else. We’re not like African-Americans. We think just like everybody else. Via Pandagon.

6. After reading all that, how about a little dessert?

Happy World Fist Bump Day

In celebration, check out Ta-Nehisi Coates's essay from last year about Obama's blackness. Written before the dap seen round the world, it's fascinating in how it foreshadows some of the aspects of Obama's blackness--the fist pound, the way he greeted Hugo Chavez--that scandalized the old white guy pundits, and demonstrates the magnitude of Not Getting It that's at the root of those reactions. Really lovely piece, written (as Coates does so well) in a way that simultaneously assumes the "normalcy" of blackness and explains it to outsiders.

I'm Worried Now - But I Won't be Worried Long

A couple things:
Thanks to all who have written to wish me well and inquire about what's happening with me. Actually, that's everybody who's written to me. No one has written to me to wish me ill.
I apologize for tardy replies and grouchy replies and no replies. I'm not really myself lately and, for the time being, beg your indulgence. I was raised better and my Mama expects better and, as soon as I can, I'll do better.
Here's where I'm at: a few weeks ago a small tumor was removed from my bladder. It turned out to be cancerous at a very high grade.
The bad news is that the whole vessel will have to be removed along with a couple other items. The good news is that I'm an excellent candidate for what's called the neo-bladder option meaning I will have a new vessel formed from pieces of my gut.
Except for the cancer, my health is excellent so the regime of chemotherapy that precedes the surgery will be abbreviated. I'll have to have a couple more doses of the vile stuff but that's it. If post surgery evaluation calls for more, I can do it then without messing anything up.
The good news is that I'm back in my little mountain home, in the bosom of my family, and wish never to leave again. I'll return to Wisconsin for the actual surgery and convalescence but once all that is done, I will retreat to my croft and never stir from my front door again. Never. Ever. Except for brief sallies to visit my mother.
The final bit of good news is the wholly unexpected effect this ghastly episode has had on the local womenfolk. I admit that my first thought on being told what steps would have to be taken was, Now I'll never get a girlfriend.
But you know, I don't think that's going to be a problem.

The reason is so that I could write this blog post

So Sybil's been tweeting, in her twit-like way, the claim that there is no single phrase that's more annoying than "everything happens for a reason."

And being the contrarian asshole that I am, I can't resist the implied challenge. I personally find it more annoying when people bless me, as the clerk at the pharmacy did today while I was buying antacid medication for my cat. Not kidding. About the cat medication or the blessing. "God bless you," he said as he handed me my receipt. Making it even weirder was the fact that he was about sixteen. And no, I hadn't sneezed. It was clearly a religions blessing. Creepy.

Other candidates?

What Tiller's murder tells us about the state of U.S. reporting

A few days after his murder, people are finally starting to say smart things and do some actual, you know, reporting. Like this fabulous piece, which does an awesome job of refuting the first video in this post--not only the overt claim that Tiller's clinic was indifferent to the women it served, but the implied claim that late-term abortions provided to very young women are purely elective, as opposed to being--by law--medically indicated for, among other things, mental health reasons. Which, however dismissive O'Reilly or John McCain want to be about "women's health," I'm sorry, but a suicidal teenager is a serious thing, not an excuse to "kill babies" for fun.

But why wasn't something like that published when that O'Reilly video originally aired? Or rather, since I'm sure some blogger somewhere wrote something along those lines, why wasn't something like that published in a major media outlet?

Then there's this and this, two pieces by former anti-abortion protesters (one of whom, Frank Schaeffer, made an anti-abortion film that, by his account, he and later Surgeon General Koop shopped around to Fallwell and Reagan to convince them to oppose legal abortion. These two pieces alone are exponentially more valuable than all the "well, I guess if you really oppose abortion, it makes sense to kill someone" theorizing or debating whether or not "the right" or "the pro-life leadership" are "responsible."* Those two people have been there. They know that the movement deliberately uses apocalyptic and violent rhetoric, and that they do so, not to entertain, but deliberately to whip people up. Of course some people are going to get whipped up to murder.

And on that subject, I also found the NYT's piece about the shooter's background thought-provoking. Surely there is some research somewhere about the mental state of political paranoids--people who think that license plates are government oppression, that taxes are unconstitutional,** that Obama is a socialist. (I mean the people who really believe this shit, not the irresponsible blowhards that say it on the news in order to whip up the base.) There's some new talk about the DHS report warning of potential right-wing terrorism, now that Tiller's been shot, but where are the pieces--now, or then--countering the shrieks about how unfair this is with actual reporting about right-wing extremists? Not just what they do (remember all the reports about the Montana Freemen after the Okalahoma City Bombing?) but also any evidence or studies--not just wild speculation or implied condemnation like Blumenthal's video about gun shows, but actual research--about whether there's any correlation between political paranoia (as opposed to political hyperbole) and an actual propensity to violence?

I suppose I could do the research myself, but really, shouldn't someone at the Times or CBS or some other big organization--you know, the kind with money and trained reporters--be doing this shit instead of, oh, the kind of some say x, some say y "reporting" that I can do in my goddamn pajamas?

And finally, all of a sudden people are linking to or telling stories about the kind of abortions Tiller performed. Which is awesome. But those stories have been there all along, both on the feminist blogs and on memorial sites like the one linked at the beginning of this paragraph. They pop up occasionally in the big news outlets when there's a bill to outlaw intact dilation and extraction. But for the most part, it's easy for people like the woman telling that story to have "no idea that this happened to people," despite the efforts of organizations like Planned Parenthood and NARAL, because the big media can't be bothered to report them. Instead we get stories, week after week, about Modern Love or what's happening "On the Runway" or new trends like teenagers hugging or expensive remodelling projects.

I'm serious about this. "Style" sections are supposed to be soft news, for women, right? Why the hell *aren't* columns like "Modern Love" sometimes about late-term abortions? That's a women's issue. Everyone and their dog has an opinion about abortion; it's not as if people wouldn't read those stories. And publishing them might help people like Andrew Sullivan, who are intellectually honest but think they "cannot . . . support" late-term abortion, to "reassess" their "certainties and beliefs"--beliefs formed in the abstract, rather than after actually learning facts about the issue.

It would be really nice if Tiller's murder led some reporters to find some of the stories and sites where this kind of information is available, or to go out and put together information that isn't yet available. I don't think there's any chance of a major change, but god I hope that maybe half-a-dozen journalists are a little bit more aware that there are real news stories to be written on the subject, not just lazy-ass opinion pieces.



* In saying that, though, I think about the arguments in favor of banning, say, video games that crop up whenever there's a school shooting.

** I actually know and admire someone who assures me that legally one doesn't have to pay taxes--although he does, he says, because even though the law's on your side, the system isn't and you'll go to jail anyway. And I don't think this person is crazy or unstable in any way, just like I don't think that anti-vaccination people are crazy or unstable. It's possible to be entirely sane and be convinced of misinformation. But people who seem to structure their lives around a conspiracy theory, or who seem to collect such theories, are surely a little nuts.

Please, Librul Doodz

Shut up. Two things this morning have my hide rather chapped.

1. Will Saletan. Just read Jill at Feministe. You know what makes me "want to puke"? Everything you've written even tangentially related to abortion, ever.

2. That liberal men have such a contemptuous attitude toward women they disagree with. The extreme case: Playboy's "conservative women I'd like to hate-fuck" article (the article seems to be no longer accessible; see Megan at Jezebel). Today's minor case: a twitter-fight between Kos and Meghan McCain. Let me give you its anatomy.


-Washington Monthy posts an article which starts out "It was pretty meaningless to hear Meghan McCain urge her Republican Party to come around on gay marriage." The rest of the article talks about how Dick Cheney said "freedom means freedom for everyone." The dig at McCain was pretty uncalled-for, especially since the piece wasn't even about her. Sure, she's not as powerful as Cheney, but she is getting a lot of attention and I guarantee you her position is resonating with a lot of young Republicans.

-McCain links to the WaMo article on her Twitter, saying, "Hey Washington Monthly, so it's only important to speak out for marriage equality if your [sic] an old man?" She follows it up with "so I guess young women should just stfu and be seen and not heard Washington Monthly....? Only Dick Cheney should speak out...?" and "I guarantee you if one of my brothers were doing what I am doing right now the Washington Monthly would think it had meaning." Which are all rather valid points, especially that last one. People would not be dismissing her so easily if she were a man. Being a pretty young woman means it's nearly impossible for her to be taken seriously.

-Kos posts "RT @JC_Christian: Stop whining @McCainBlogette the only reason you get any attention is because your last name is McCain."

-McCain says "@markosm jealous?" (Which, admittedly, is a juvenile response, but so is "Stop whining."

-Kos responds "And speaking of "jealous", I'm not the one whining that the Washington Monthly ignored me." He follows it up with "Who would ever think that @mccainblogette, random daughter of unpopular former Prez candidate, means less to GOP faithful than VP Cheney?" and "She is meaningless. Her party hates her." and "What movement is @mccainblogette part of? She's just a last name."

-Enter Glenn Greenwald, who I generally like, with "RT @McCainBlogette: @markosm jealous?" - Perfect example of legacy/nepotism beneficiaries thinking they've earned what they have on "merit."

Jesus Christ, dudes. Protest a little too much, why don't you? McCain was flippantly dissed in an article that wasn't even about her, for supporting a cause that liberals such as you guys overwhelmingly support, and you jump all over her for daring to call them out? Seriously, what the fuck. I like Gleen Greenwald a lot. But I don't see anywhere where she's saying she "earned what she has on merit." Nice way to simultaneously dismiss her as meaningless, then say she earned "what she has" (which, if she's meaningless, is what, exactly?) just by being who she is. It's this Hillary Clinton shit all over again. Yes, Clinton and Meghan McCain might not be known to any of us if it weren't for their husband and father, respectively. But that doesn't mean it's the only reason people pay attention to them.

McCain is smart. She's been extremely savvy in a way that basically no one else in her party has done (significant online presence, branding, actually having a personality, being pro-gay marriage). I really can't understand why liberal men are so, so eager to dismiss her, especially given that if Republican leaders paid attention to her and/or she became more powerful, it would be very good for our side.

The only explanation is sexism-based contempt.

knowing what you're talking about: priceless

God, so "respectable" bloggers are rationalizing murder. Yeah, it's wrong, but if you see abortion--especially late-term abortion--as murder, then it sort of makes sense to kill people like George Tiller. Even Ta-Nehisi Coates gets sucked into this way of thinking.

I don't even have to get into why this is a fucked-up rationalization,* because guess what?

THIRD TRIMESTER ABORTIONS HAVE TO BE MEDICALLY INDICATED.

Women can't get abortions past 24 weeks--i.e., post-viability (and for god's sake, 24 weeks is damn early, even so) unless there's a fucking medical reason for them to do so. Like, oh, say, a dead or non-viable fetus. Or the woman herself is developing a major medical problem. Or like she's a kid who's been raped, for fuck's sake, and it's taken this long for her to access an abortion or even to realize she's fucking pregnant.

Even second-trimester abortions, almost half of them occur because pregnant women have difficulty *getting* an abortion earlier (because of restrictive laws or lack of access to a provider).

Let me reiterate:

Think that third-trimester abortions are murder? You're wrong. Either the fetus is dead, dying, or non-viable (i.e., NOT MURDER), the mother is ill or would have her health damaged by continuing the pregnancy (SELF-DEFENSE), or she was a rape victim.

Think second-trimester abortions are murder? Then work to help women get access to abortion earlier.

Want to pontificate about abortion? Try doing some fucking research. I found the two links below in less than ten minutes.



See this report from the Guttmacher Institute, esp. p. 17, which has statistics about why women get late-term abortions; or the video below, which addresses most of the fallacies about late abortion and deserves to be spread around. Again.

RH Reality Check: Late Term Abortions from RH Reality Check on Vimeo.

*But for Ta-Nehisi's sake, because I think he's an upright guy and a good thinker, I will. Even if you think *all* abortion is murder, that doesn't make murdering doctors justifiable. I think the death penalty is murder: that doesn't make it okay for me to murder judges who impose it, or guards who impose it, or politicians who support it. I think war is murder: that doesn't make it okay for me to murder soldiers.

Abortion is Murder: Why the right is responsible for domestic terrorism

As you've all surely heard by now, Dr. George Tiller, a physician who provided health care to women, including abortion services, was shot and killed yesterday morning. The post below contains a lot of great links; you should read them all. Though I usually prefer to keep mum on topics that I sense are being widely and thoroughly covered, I feel that there's a hole in the analysis so far: why is it, specifically, that the anti-abortion right is morally—if not legally—responsible for heinous acts of domestic terrorism such as this one?

Several people have put forth facts and explanations that get close to why the right is responsible. But none quite get it. I have seen several people point to the Twitter feeds of people gleefully celebrating Tiller's murder and characterizing it as just. But that's a symptom, rather than the cause. I dismiss those comments because I hate to give any microphone to Assholes On The Internet, of which there will always be plenty. Anytime anyone whose life can be characterized as "left" or "right" wing dies, there are people willing to take to the internet and spout off disgusting tripe about how He Deserved it or It's Karma. Always. So I don't take the fact that there are people cheering Tiller's death to be worth much.

Bitch said yesterday:

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.

I think it's much worse than that, and I think the blame that the movement bears for Tiller's assassination and other acts of terrorism runs much deeper than their lukewarm condemnation.

In order to understand why the anti-abortion right is responsible for terrorism, even when the organizations that comprise the movement do not organize, sponsor, or pay for the violent acts themselves, we have to dissect the case against abortion.

Turn the clock back to a video that made waves a few years ago. In the video, abortion protesters in Libertyville are asked how much time they think women who receive abortions should spend in jail (were abortion to be made illegal, as they all so fervently desire). The responses were shocking, given the protesters' militance: none wanted to name a number. "It's between them and god." Some weren't even sure that women should actually go to prison for getting an illegal abortion.

Watch the video. As Bitch said way back then, "[E]ven the seeming extremists who stand out on street corners with signs...are less extreme than we think they are: they dislike abortion and want to protest it as an act, but they don't, when push comes to shove, think it should be criminalized."

The political right needs the abortion debate like a fish needs water. Without it, their power is greatly diminished. Proclaiming one's opposition to abortion is an easy way to get support from people who very well might not otherwise pay attention to you, because it stands in for so many things. It stands in for religious fervor (no one cared that John McCain wasn't particularly religious, because he was pro-life). It's stands in for sexism. It stands in for moral disapprobation for women who happen to believe that they have the right to have sex and control their own reproduction. The abortion debate is the Right's morality play, and the fight against it is their Jihad.

But it's a fight they're losing. Abortion is legal, and has been for almost forty years now. Public opinion has drastically shifted against them. More and more people have shifted to intellectually and morally incoherent positions on abortion, like "it's okay if the woman was raped" or "as long as it's not used as birth control."

So they needed to ramp up the emotion on the abortion debate, because without a whole mess of people inconsolably angry that women have the right to control their own reproduction, the Right is totally screwed.

Enter "Abortion is Murder." It's plain as day to me that the vast majority of people who are pro-life don't actually believe that abortion is murder. If abortion were murder, it would not be okay in the case of rape. If abortion were murder, it would not be okay for moms with too many mouths to feed, but forbidden to 19-year-old sluts. If abortion were murder, you would not find people on the street waffling about whether women who obtain abortions should receive jail time. If abortion were murder, it would not be okay in "some" circumstances.

There are, of course, a small minority of people who actually believe that abortion is murder. These are the people who also oppose the death penalty and are anti-war; they are a very small group of people indeed within the American Right, and they tend to be Catholic. But they are not among the vast majority of the people who are militant in their opposition to abortion rights, and there are nearly none counted among their leaders. What their leaders, Protestants and Evangelicals almost all, did is take the position of the small group of Catholic, anti-death-in-all-circumstances people, and adopt it as if it were their own.

They did this to mask the truth about the anti-abortion movement: it is not about whether a fetus is a life. It is about controlling women. It is about heaping "consequences" on women who dare to live their lives as full, autonomous human beings who are not beholden to the male patriarchs and the male god who demand women serve as reproductive vessels fully under their control. It is about judgment, and it is about punishment.

But the leaders realized that this justification for their opposition to abortion was becoming less and less palatable to all but the most virulent misogynists. So, they adopted "Abortion is Murder," which is a philosophy that any old conservative can get behind, at least for show. "Abortion is murder" is brilliant because it shifts the focus to the fetuses, rather than where it actually belongs, which is on the women who are the real targets of anti-abortion policies and politics. Everyone can get behind not killing babies, right? Because babies are cute and fuzzy! Without "Abortion is Murder," you do not have people out on the streets protesting. You do not have people championing candidates for political office merely because those candidates oppose abortion. You do not have rivers of money flowing into the Republican party. You do not have any stand-in for moral disapprobation of sexually autonomous women.

But what you also do not have, is domestic terrorism against abortion providers. You do not have intimidation, threats, blocked access, actual murder.

The right chose "Abortion is Murder" as its rhetorical firecracker, because it gets them the fervor they need to remain politically relevant and politically powerful. But it also begets terrorism, because who doesn't want to be the righteous martyr that takes out the mass-murderer? Without the right's re-framing of the debate to co-opt the Catholic position, the vast majority of their supporters would never have been singing "Abortion is Murder" in the first place. Because they don't really believe it.

When they chose "Abortion is Murder," they chose this.